As noted in Part I, Michael worked with me at our Democracy Project and then went on to become President Clinton’s chief of speechwriting; he’s the author of eight public policy books including POTUS Speaks and a more recent volume on the Roberts Court, called Supermajority

In 2008 he was among 60 national progressive leaders in a book that I oversaw for the next President Elect called Changing America, which we gave to Barack Obama and which provided the title for this very podcast. He wrote the chapter on democracy. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Welcome back Michael.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Mark Green: The Cook Report has just concluded that not only the House but the U.S. Senate too would likely have democratic majorities after the upcoming midterm elections.

So if a Democratic House Speaker in 2027 and a Democratic President [in 2029] invites you to propose progressive ideas to enact what would you suggest? Let’s start with ethics.

Michael Waldman: It’s utterly vital that, when given a chance, we focus on ethics, on corruption, on strengthening democracy. Over and over again, people who wanna weaken democracy, as soon as they get a pinky on a lever of power, try to tilt the playing field – they rig the rules.

And Democrats, liberals, when they get into office, say, “Oh, you know, I’m not sure people care about this, it’s not a “kitchen table issue.” This year, it’s quite clear people are angry at government. They think that big money has corrupted the political process, that the government is not working for them, it’s working for a handful of insiders.

So in terms of ethics, for example, we’ve put out a series called Solutions for a Stronger Democracy.

And encouragingly, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, a few weeks ago introduced legislation that was very similar to what we had put out. He actually in his bill would fold the Federal Election Commission as well as other government ethics agencies into one powerful agency, recognizing that the FEC just doesn’t work.

There needs to be a top-to-bottom accountability. I’m taken with a phrase from the new Hungarian president, Peter Magyar, who beat [Viktor] Orbán, this Trump-like authoritarian who was in office for 16 years. Magyar said Hungary can no longer be a “country without consequences.”

That’s the spirit that we need to really clean house after Trump.

Mark Green: There’s an argument whether conflict laws do apply to a president, the only person we elect nationally. Is there any way to at least bring a case to enforce the Emolument clauses?

Trump is obviously profiting off his presidency, Or is that just off the legal table?

Michael Waldman: We actually think that the current ethics laws don’t apply to the president, and they should. The Constitution is very clear. As you said, the Emoluments Clause prevents presidents from taking domestic or foreign gifts.

In the first Trump term, there was litigation around things like his hotels and the courts basically never ruled on it and sort of threw the cases out, said the people bringing them did not have standing. Well, now in this second Trump term, we see an extraordinary frenzy of corruption, much more open than in the first term.

Trump has increased his net worth, I believe, something like $2 billion in a year and a half based on government decisions, people wanting to curry favor with the government. That was even before he started selling access to his social media posts for insider trading. I understand pretty much nobody has signed up for that because it’s illegal.

Mark Green: You also have proposals on the Supreme Court. You, Michael, were among the few dozen progressive experts, scholars appointed to a Joe Biden commission to look into changes at the Supreme Court given how imbalanced it’s become. What were those proposals? Why did Biden do nothing? And what would you try to do on a new round?

Michael Waldman: The Supreme Court has vast power and minimal accountability. It has become not a co-equal branch of government but a super legislature over the rest of government. It has been captured by a faction of a faction. It now has a very conservative six-vote super majority. Biden, when he was running for president and did not want to do anything about the Supreme Court, said, “Well, I’ll appoint a commission.”

And so when he became president, he did. I was privileged to be one of the members. He literally instructed us not to reach conclusions. But what was very interesting is we had hearings.

We heard from dozens of public witnesses from left and right, there is a broad public consensus for an 18-year term limit for justices of the Supreme Court. It reflects the very basic idea that nobody should have too much power for too long. It’s pretty much what George Washington taught us when he limited himself to two terms.

The most recent Fox News poll showed 79% support for Supreme Court term limits. It can be done, of course, by amending the Constitution. We believe it can be done statutorily by an act of Congress as well, and we’ve been urging Congress to take this step.

In recent days, Hakeem Jeffries has said that what he calls “dramatic Supreme Court reform” has to be at the center of the agenda for the Democrats if they get power.

That would help drain a lot of the partisan poison out of the confirmation process. You know, near the end of his term in office, Joe Biden endorsed term limits. We’re hoping the next president does it on the first day.

Mark Green: A third huge issue from the beginning of your career to now is campaign finance reform.

Remind everybody what you did in writing Bill Clinton’s proposal to the House in ‘93 – when you had a majority for campaign finance reform– why it was delayed, and what you would do now in a new era after Citizens United and Elon Musk.

Michael Waldman: When Clinton came in, one of the first things he did was to propose a reform bill that would have brought public financing of campaigns to congressional campaigns.

What happened is the liberal Democrats killed it. In public, they were demanding action. The door would close, and they would say in effect, “Are you crazy?” They were thinking as incumbents rather than as ideologues or idealists. So the Democrats missed their opportunity.

What has happened since then is Mitch McConnell, who was an ardent, zealous opponent of doing anything on campaign finance, among other things, helped stack the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court has made things much worse. But it’s still possible to take significant action. I do think there ought to be small donor public financing, voluntary, of campaigns at the federal level, like we see in New York City and New York state.

Which means that if you give a small amount to a candidate, that is matched maybe at a multiple level by the public funds, and it really increases the voice of ordinary people in the political system.

We need much stronger enforcement. And I do think we need a constitutional amendment to overturn not just Citizens United, but an earlier case, Buckley v. Valeo, bad Supreme Court rulings that have basically made it impossible to have a working democracy in our country because of the way they treat campaign finance law.

Mark Green: By the way, there’s a huge majority in favor of overturning Citizens United so that if it goes from Congress to the states, it’s not a foregone conclusion that it can’t be enacted.

Let me move on… Should Democrats take the Congress and the presidency, how do you deal with a criminal regime that governed America at least for four years, if not eight? There will likely be a lot of moderate Democrats and Independents who’ll say, “Ah, kumbaya, put everything behind us. Let’s just look ahead.”

Others will say, “Like hell.“ Unless we hold them accountable for their consequences, the next Trump wannabe will say, “Okay, I’m building on what Donald did, and now I’m going further.”

So in my view we’ll need a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” looking at prosecution at the state level or for the non-pardoned and for officially exposing obvious Big Lies – like tariffs affecting only foreign countries. This would be a more holistic attack Post-Trump.

Michael Waldman: I understand the dilemma because you wanna be forward-looking…you don’t wanna look like you’re just waging a vendetta against the previous administration. Having said that, I think it is really important to build support for future change that people understand what has happened before. It’s corrupt thieving by well-connected, wealthy, interested individuals.

But there’s lots of other stuff government could do. It has the ability to claw back money through corrupt or illegal deals with foreign countries, with individuals, with business people. If you look at effective history -- Franklin Roosevelt, yes, he was building the New Deal, but they also went after the swindlers who had a lot to do with the stock market crash.

I think a lot of the people who were part of the Obama administration say, as Rahm Emanuel did, that it was a mistake not to prosecute some of the bankers who were behind the mortgage fraud that helped bring down the economy. They thought, well, gee, things are so fragile, but actually it would’ve helped give the public a different idea of who was benefiting from all the various bailouts.

Ronald Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter for everything that happened for his eight years. Democrats need to not be afraid to do that if they get in office. We need to make sure this doesn’t happen again. It turns out that a lot of the stuff that we assumed were protections were just habits, tradition and not things with the force of law.

We assumed that the Justice Department was functionally independent of the White House, for example. Now clearly there need to be protections written in.

The last time we had that in a meaningful way was in the 1970s, as you know, after Watergate, where there was a serious effort to constrain the illicit power of the imperial presidency. Everything from the War Powers Act, to the Budget Act, to the campaign finance laws. We are well overdue for such a reckoning today.

Mark Green: Michael, thank you for reminding us that the new Hungarian president is an exhilarating model given how Trump has plummeted in popularity.

He’s not running but his ideas are running. And thank you for embracing, in effect, our favorite quote - Norman Cousins in the 1950s wrote, “No one’s smart enough to be a pessimist.” Thanks for the optimism of your Substack, The Briefing with Michael Waldman.

I recommend people go to it. And keep coming back to Changing America where we don’t simply look down to the mud of Trump but look up to the horizon of what’s possible. Thanks, Michael.

Michael Waldman: Thank you, Mark.

We’re now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Instagram, and YouTube! Make sure to subscribe to follow along with new Changing America episodes and all other updates from The Inflection Zone.

I’m a friend and admirer of and think it’s ok to talk to leaders of the other party, especially when asked by an emissary from a President… and since it was a reflection of political weakness for this president to even allow his son-in-law’s outreach.

At the same time, there should be a near zero percent chance that the Democratic Leader – as he knows better than anyone – would trust anything from Team Trump when it’s run by a bad-faith bully openly plotting to sabotage the Midterms, as Tuesday’s Substack explained.

Must Dems wait two months and then two years until the next national elections before deploying their offensive weapons? Here’s one way that later this year they can start to dominate the national narrative even while lacking de jure Congressional and Presidential authority.

Presidents usually out-arm wrestle Congress because, among other levers of power, the former speaks with one voice and the latter with many. The existential threat of MAGA and Trump, however, should generate a ballsy response to a brazen POTUS. Viz, imagine that the following machers (or some combination) issue a joint statement should Democrats win majorities in both chambers in December – Newsom, Harris, Buttigieg, AOC, Raskin, Whitehouse, Warren, Pelosi, Jeffries, Jack Smith – to collectively announce a new BIG DEAL when it comes to corruption, law and war:

“While there will soon be many specific proposals, hearings and debates about America’s next decades, we will today explain our foundational premise to end the era of despotism over democracy and to replace the dangerous extremism that has defined the Party of Trump.

Whether by civil or criminal process, we will hold those in office accountable if facts emerge that they corruptly used law enforcement to prosecute political enemies or to financially enrich themselves and also to correct repeated Big Lies before they harden into history.”

This is not retribution but justice. If we have anything to say about it – and we intend to – future MAGA aspirants should know that the 48th President and 120th Congress will hold them personally responsible for any attempts to confuse piracy with patriotism…not individual voters but accomplices to a conspiracy of illegality and lies, as Lincoln forgave Confederate soldiers but not Confederate generals.

This will help all MAGA Republicans better balance their fear of a nasty Trump tweet versus being named in courts if not the court of public opinion. They should appreciate that while Trump won’t be on any future ballot, they will.

It’s past time to end their attempts to erase the past century of progress and their imitation of a South American dictator who said, “to my enemies the law, to my friends, facilities.”

So no more two-tiered justice based on Red and Blue nor pardons for the powerful. No more coaxing and condoning insurrectionists, fake indictments of AGs and Senators, suppression of minority voters in the name of "voter integrity," banning books and the speech of critics, firings of career civil servants based on partisan retribution, free out-of-jail cards to family & friends, wars without congressional approval, tariffs as shakedown schemes, political destruction of law firms and universities, unqualified toadies as cabinet secretaries and judges who don’t know who won the 2020 presidential election. Enough!

Those who hoped to continue to escape accountability for their corruption will now face it.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Best,

A New Generation of Leaders

The New York Times on Sunday listed 134 examples of Trump’s steady march to autocracy (aka, “Fascism”). However, if the public doesn’t perceive a muted menace, the risk rises that it might succeed…think no Paul Revere in 1775.

Such one-sidedness by the MSM should be inexcusable given warnings from advocates and journos: Ralph Nader, The Washington Spectator, anything , and produce, especially her influential Hiding in Plain Sight.

They and others have blown-the-whistle on Trump’s in-progress maneuvers – fewer drop boxes/polling places, armed ICE agents in November, election deniers in key state offices, the Postal Service rejecting mail-in ballots (which SCOTUS yesterday temporarily allowed), Speaker Johnson’s refusal to swear in Democratic winners next January based on some hyperbolic “National Emergency” (people saying that China may invade San Francisco? An outbreak of Ebola in southern Italy,? a surge in red-light tickets?)...plus who knows what other conspiracies are in Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller’s heads?

These and other WTF ploys may be one Shadow Docket “decision” away from the Thomas 6.

Fanciful? Remember that Trump for six years has insisted that Biden lost an election he won by 7 million votes and that 60 courts confirmed the latter’s Electoral College majority was NOT tainted by voter fraud. If he’s still pathologically delusional about that, is any “October Surprise” really beyond his piratical imagination?

See PART II later week on how Democrats can better flex their potential muscle to counter Trump’s great but diminishing power to cheat to win.

Mark Green: Hi, Mark Green here with our Inflection Zone podcast we call Changing America, which looks at Trump now and post-Trump. Last week we had a good friend of mine, Ralph Nader, as the guest…this week he’s been profiled Tuesday on the front page of The New York Times.

Today joining our podcast is another long-time colleague and friend, Michael Waldman, who is generationally different from Ralph but in the same line of work.

Michael Waldman has for 20 years been president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, which he attended. Previously, we co-authored in 1984 the fourth edition of the best-selling Who Runs Congress?, after which he worked on my U.S. Senate campaign in 1986. He then shrewdly ended up with an even more successful politician and went on to join the Clinton White House, ultimately becoming the president’s chief of speech writing, which included overseeing his inaugural address, four States of the Union, and 2,000 speeches in all.

And he’s the author or co-author of eight books, including POTUS Speaks and a major volume on the Supreme Court called Supermajority. Well, here we go again, Michael. Thanks for joining us.

Michael Waldman: Great to be with you, Mark. As you know, I learned a large share of what I’ve been able to do in my whole career from those years working with you.

Mark Green : Michael, because of your rich history and present role, we anticipate breaking this conversation into two separate podcasts as we look back on Trump and to the horizon of a better America. First, after you worked on my Senate campaign, – and I couldn’t have lost without you really – you shrewdly hooked up with Bill Clinton, as mentioned. Looking back, [I’m sure] you learned a million things, but what big lessons did you take away from Clinton’s assets or weaknesses?

Michael Waldman: It’s a great question. The most significant thing I took away from working with Bill Clinton is, yes, charisma matters, yes, retail political skills matter, and of course, he has those in freakishly copious degrees.

But policy matters, ideas matter. He ran in 1992 forging a somewhat new approach to what Democrats ought to do – that combined elements of left and center in the party and, as he said at that time, he was running against the brain-dead policies of both parties.

Mark Green: Michael, I glanced before this conversation at the 2024 American Political Science Association ranking of all the presidents. The top three are Lincoln, FDR, and Washington. Hard to disagree with that. Are you surprised that Obama was Number 7 of all the presidents? JFK Number 10, Clinton Number 12, Reagan Number 16.

Having written the book POTUS Speaks, how would you contrast in that context Clinton and Obama?

Michael Waldman: I think it’s a little early, frankly, for either of them. Obama, on the one hand, was president during some very consequential times. He came in, of course, in the aftermath of the financial collapse, and that was an extraordinary opportunity to do things.

I think in some respects he didn’t actually make the most of that opportunity. Clinton got a lot done, but as he would often bemoan, did not have crises to deal with. And very soon into his presidency, the Democratic control over Congress ended, but he was hamstrung in that way. I think what he would say, and I certainly felt this way, was that he was engaged in a project of reconstruction of liberalism so that it could be something people could run on again.

One time in the residence of the White House, he said to me and a few other people, “you know, FDR saved capitalism from itself.” That’s not an original insight. But [Clinton continued] “Our mission is to save government from its own excesses so people will see it as a progressive force again.” I think without Clinton, you wouldn’t have had Obama.

In a variety of ways, he saw himself as a liberal president governing a conservative country.

Mark Green : Other than perhaps Justice [William J.] Brennan, no one is more a founding father of that institution than you. Going from a budget of about 4 million or so 20 years ago, to nearly 70 million now – a widely quoted, highly regarded, leader of the progressive law movement, what do you attribute that phenomenal growth to?

Michael Waldman: I would say that the issues of democracy of the Constitution, which we have been saying are central and under assault, are more and more evidently the case to more and more people. So we’ve grown to scale with the challenges that we all face.

I think it’s also the case – and Mark, this is something you taught me when we worked together in a think tank called The Democracy Project, which was two people – that ideas matter and that the right wing has been very successful building up institutions like The Heritage Foundation, like AEI, like the Federalist Society. That is what we have tried to do at the Brennan Center.

Mark Green : In that context, looking back, what have been some of your most influential and important accomplishments?

Michael Waldman: I would say we have been the Paul Revere, crying out that there were attempts being made to suppress the vote, going back 10, 15 years, and really connecting the dots in a way that others had not done before.

Now with Donald Trump as president saying it out loud every five minutes, (laughs) it’s a lot easier to make that case. But what I am most proud of in a lot of ways are the affirmative reforms that we worked to develop that have taken hold in states across the country and have become central to the progressive agenda in the United States.

The legislation called the Freedom to Vote Act, which you remember, H.R.1, S.1, came really close to being enacted in the Congress in 2022. It passed the House, had a majority in the Senate, only Senators Sinema and Manchin would not change the filibuster rule so it could pass. Much of that bill was based on proposals we had developed at the Brennan Center.

Small donor public financing as a national reform, like we have in New York City, automatic voter registration and numerous other things. We really are determined to see these things become the law of the land.

Mark Green: Chief Justice Roberts, profiled this week in The New Yorker, famously insisted that he just calls balls and strikes, not politics in his rulings.

In my last Substack, I called BS on that, noting four calamitous decisions that lurched not merely to the far right, but the farthest right. Without going into the weeds, can we get your view on these four amazingly important cases? He wrote the decision in Citizens United [vs. Federal Election Commission] that continued the fiction that campaign money is speech, and it wouldn’t lead - he predicted - to substantial changes in how campaigns are financed.

Michael Waldman: Citizens United was extraordinarily destructive of our democracy. That case – and then lower court rulings implementing it – fully deregulated money in American politics back to where it was in the Gilded Age. Increasingly it is dominated by a few very wealthy billionaires, who give a substantial share of the money.

Yes, there’s more money given by small donors, but they are being outpaced by ideological big donors, and they’re often people who keep their money hidden. And they have had a tremendous impact. Citizens United, you’re right, said “Oh, it’s all okay because this is all gonna be disclosed.” It’s not. “Also, it’s all gonna be independent of the candidates.” Who are you kidding? Those of us who care about campaign finance have to be very self-aware that whatever rules are on the books right now, they really don’t exist, and we need to start over. And part of that is a different approach from the Supreme Court.

Mark Green : Michael, the Shelby County [vs. Holder] case a decade ago dismissed the problem of racially [based voter] suppression and seriously sabotaged, by all accounts, the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And it wouldn’t have happened without Roberts, who’d been lobbying for just such a thing since he was a young lawyer in the Reagan White House. And now here he is 40 years later – Chief Justice! Your analysis to the people about the Shelby County case?

Michael Waldman: For all of [Robert’s] very effective spin of just being a Midwestern Republican calling balls-and-strikes at the country club, he’s been a very active, indeed zealous, judicial activist when it comes to the law of democracy. The last time the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was reauthorized by Congress, it passed the Senate in 2006 by 98 to nothing!

In other words, this was recent and this was a consensus. What Shelby County did was basically said, “Well, that was then, this is now. The South isn’t racist anymore, you know. Black voting turnout and white voting turnout rates are, you know, much closer together.” This was right after Obama had run. “And therefore you don’t need the Voting Rights Act.” And this was a case in which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg memorably wrote in her dissent, “That’s like standing in a rainstorm holding an umbrella and not getting wet, and deciding therefore that you don’t need an umbrella because you’re not wet.”

Mark Green: That was almost as good a metaphor as [Roberts] just calling “balls-and-strikes.” Both were memorable, but only one is true! (laughs)

Michael Waldman: And within hours of that ruling, [Ginsburg’s] predictions started to come true as states across the country began to pass new voter restriction rules. Some of them, as the federal appeals court in North Carolina put it, “surgically” targeted at Black voters.

Mark Green: Have you ever heard Roberts directly or indirectly admit, “Hmm, my predictions on money not mattering after Citizens United, my predictions on race not mattering after Shelby County didn’t exactly prove out”?

Michael Waldman. No. And we’ve done the math on this. We have a billion voter records at the Brennan Center in a genuine supercomputer here. The racial turnout gap, which was the thing Roberts pointed to in that egregious decision, started growing all over the country after 2013, after the year of the Shelby County decision. But in the states that used to be covered by the strong Voting Rights Act, the part of the Voting Rights Act that was destroyed in that decision, Section Five, in those states the gap grew at twice the rate of the rest of the country.

It’s empirically the case that that ruling has made it harder or impossible for hundreds of thousands of people to vote.

Mark Green: This Court and Congress seem dedicated to erasing 150 years of progressive laws and rulings.

In a third opinion by Robert’s 6-3 decision, he found something that had never been referred to before in the Constitution in 250 years of rulings – “presidential criminal immunity” for whatever a president says or does, if it’s within his “core functions.”

By the way, after his last State of the Union, Trump was seen mouthing to Roberts, who was in front of him, “Thanks so much. Thank you so much. I will never forget that.”

Michael Waldman: That decision, Trump v. US, is one of the worst in American history. I really would put it up there with the Dred Scott ruling and a handful of others.

The Constitution explicitly talks about presidents being able to be prosecuted after they leave office in the discussion of impeachment. There was an outlandish hypothetical that was used in the court, which is if a president ordered Seal Team Six to assassinate his political opponents – would that be an official act?

And the court basically said, “Yes!” You know who would be really rolling over in his grave - looking up or down at this - is Richard Nixon. What Richard Nixon was driven from office for doing would have been immune from investigation, let alone prosecution, under this ruling. It’s really bad, and every time you read it, it gets worse.

Mark Green : What Roberts et al. did was, in effect, raise a hypothetical fear, “Oh, presidents could be criminally hounded after they left office” versus the actual reality [of repeated presidential illegality by Trump].

A fourth decision that bothers me almost as much as the immunity decision apparently bothers you was the recent FTC Slaughter [Trump vs. Slaughter] case allowing a president to unilaterally remove commissioners at so-called independent regulatory agencies.

Trump fired a Democratic regulator at the FTC. Couldn’t that lead not so far off to a President Trump firing every Democratic commissioner at every regulatory agency and becoming, in effect, a dictator? The FCC, CPSC, SEC, FTC, et cetera, or am I being alarmist?

Michael Waldman: Well, you know, we haven’t seen all the litigation around all these other agencies, and there are some arguments to be made that they’re different from the FTC.

But as you know, we have a modern, civilized society in part because we built up over more than a century these expert agencies, sometimes insulated by Congress from political pressure in the way they were set up to do things like regulate air safety, auto safety, the markets, policing against white-collar crime and securities fraud.

We already know that some of these agencies can be dominated by a president. We’re looking at the Federal Communications Commission, which keeps doing all these things, absurd and illegal things, on Trump’s behalf. But yes, it’s a vast expansion of personal executive power over these parts of the government.

If presidents can fire the heads of se agencies or commissioners of these agencies “at will,” no matter what the law says – well, the Federal Reserve is an independent agency. And, you know, there’s a lot of people who care from a conservative and business-oriented perspective about the economy who think it’s pretty good to have an independent central bank.

So what the FED [and the Court] said was, “Well, then there’s the Federal Reserve. Some people note that’s also an independent agency. Well, it’s just different. It just is. Why Alexander Hamilton, he once had a bank and he was a founder…and so it’s different.” I’m not parodying that. That is basically what it said. So what’s the difference between the FTC and the FED? Well, the Chamber of Commerce loves the FED and hates the FTC.

Mark Green: Look, all, all these, in a sense, are the result of conservative doctrines from Scalia to Alito called Originalism and Unified Government, which cleverly require the High Court to lock its rulings into the mores, the rules, the laws of the 18th century.

That’s pretty clever if you’re a conservative wanting to go back to then. Is this gonna be an intellectual straitjacket for years to come, or are we gonna get over this eventually?

Michael Waldman: They apply originalism, the idea that the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution is to ask what it meant at the time it was ratified, which in most cases is 1787. But there’s no other country that says the only way to decide what kind of society we have right now is to look back at what the social mores and values of 1787, of property-owning white men in 1787 was. You know, in Great Britain, when someone has an idea for a policy, they don’t say, “Oh, you know, that’s a pretty interesting idea, but the really important question we have to ask is, what did King George III think about it?” But we say, “Well, what, what unpublished notes from James Madison would illuminate what, what we should be ruling on now?”

I think you can’t beat something with nothing, and so one of the things we at the Brennan Center are doing is working with other lawyers, other scholars, people in advocacy groups and elsewhere to develop some arguments about the Constitution as a pro-democracy document that isn’t just saying, “No, no, no, we don’t like Originalism,” but this is actually the way you should look at the Constitution.”

Mark Green: Michael, that was great, but now we’ll pause our conversation to prepare a Part Two, which will be our Substack in about a couple of weeks.

In that spirit, we hope to develop a practical, progressive vision over the next 30 months of this administration that would both help erase Trumpian pathologies and erect a stronger democracy - however long that takes.

Please suggest to friends and allies to follow us at our occasional Changing America podcasts from the distortion field we call Trump’s Inflection Zone.

We’re now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Instagram, and YouTube! Make sure to subscribe to follow along with new Changing America episodes and all other updates from The Inflection Zone.

See you soon for Part II!

Since our founding in 1789, the public and courts have necessarily presumed good faith on the part of presidents as the only person (with the VP) elected nationwide. But should today’s SCOTUS super-majority continue that convenient assumption with a POTUS who can’t stop lying about almost everything – saying this week that the U.S. controls the Strait of Hormuz, inflation is down and his polls way up, it’s ok to indict public officials based only on spite…and when a third of judges reversing unlawful orders assert that federal prosecutors misled them?

As Trump treats the Shadow Docket as his personal valet, will the conservative justices approve a White House billion dollar “Ballroom” never approved by Congress and give him “emergency powers” to oversee elections that the Constitution expressly gives to States?

For now, the frightening answer is ”maybe”...which is a very big deal since the Justices may be the last chance to stop Trump’s second coup attempt to turn our Democratic Republic into a Monied Monarchy.

To contextualize such a High Noon at the High Court, let’s compare two fabulist presidents with entertainment backgrounds to anticipate whether this reactionary panel will blithely assume that this president has the integrity of the first one.

* * *

I’ve spent years studying and writing about Lyin’ Kings in the Oval Office. Sure, all politicians at some time will be hyperbolic – or tell “stretchers”, to quote Mark Twain – or even flat-out lie for political gain. My core concern was best expressed by Sissela Bok in her wise book Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life: “Imagine a society where word and deed could never be counted on. Questions asked, answers given, information exchanged – all would be worthless.”

In 1983 and 1987, I co-authored two editions of Reagan’s Reign of Error, each with several hundred falsehoods told by a thespian with a great bedside manner and after-dinner charm.

You may remember some, like ICBMs were recallable, one welfare queen represented all poor families, corporate tax cuts generated enough added tax revenue to pay for them and that quality-of-life fell in the preceding Carter term.

One nearly got him impeached – by denying that he illegally organized an arms-for-hostages deal between Iran and Nicaragua – when documents proved that was precisely what he had done. Reagan supporters sought forgiveness for a confused elderly POTUS which – along with his overall personal popularity – allowed him to escape, narrowly.

Donald Trump, however, is in an entirely different dimension when it comes to acting in good or bad faith. Having studied the veracity of both men in several books, in my view Trump is the Mt. Everest of bad faith versus Nob Hill in Reagan’s home state of California.

Dutch Reagan’s history as a Hollywood Actor in 53 feature films surely shaped his fluency with falsehoods. But other than some absurd whoppers as noted, most involved rehearsed story-telling rather than repeated lies on major issues contradicted by hard evidence.

This is not to buy into the dismissive notion that he was merely an actor – he was much more, as his thoughtful personal diaries revealed. And to his credit, he once admitted, “I don’t know how you can do this job without being an actor.” Plus, he may have shown signs of Alzheimer’s late in his second term, which was conclusively diagnosed in 1994.

Now, however, comes Donald Trump who was also an entertaining performer but more as a lounge act rather than as a trained actor.

Nor does he appear to have an obvious pathology, though numerous psychologists believe otherwise. Instead, Trump is voluminous and malicious in how he repeats obvious deceptions for political or financial gain.

Since Trump’s Big Lies can be numbing and we’re quickly approaching November when a jury of voters will hold GOP-ers accountable, here’s a quick reminder of just eight out of thousands of assertions that serve as cornerstones for MAGA believers.

It is NOT true that Barack Obama was born abroad, that infinitesimal voter fraud rigged the 2020 election, that the 2026 economy is the “best ever,” that “Russia, Russia, Russia” didn’t interfere in the 2020 election, that the Biden DOJ routinely “weaponized” law enforcement against Trumpers, that Climate Violence is a “hoax,” that Ukraine provoked the war with Russia, that per capita crime by migrants exceeds crime by citizens and that he had to start a war with Iran because it imminently would build and deliver a nuclear weapon.

Given this ledger of Big Lies, it would be willful blindness for the Court’s super-majority to keep ruling in its biggest decisions that whatever is Far-Right is right.

Unless Justices Roberts and Coney Barrett, especially, acknowledge that courts cannot take Trump Administration submissions at face value, they will forever be regarded as Roger Taney-level apologists, not for slavery in Dred Scott but by defending despotism in the name of democracy.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr put it best in his seminal 1881 book, The Common Law: “The life of the law is not logic…but experience.”

P.S. Are John and Amy aware that the Board of the Kennedy Center – stacked with Trump appointees, including him – just voted to put his name back on its facade despite a judicial ruling that was unlawful. Will the Court really assume “Regularity” for a con artist? Really elevate the hypothetical over the actual?

We know who triumphed in our American Revolution, Civil War and McCarthyism. But when the history is written on who tried to overthrow FDR’s America in favor of Putin’s America in the 2020s, there will likely be at least 12 henchmen who were notorious accomplices and at least 20 heroes who are proving to be this era’s Margaret Chase Smith and Joseph Welch.

HENCHMEN: Stephen Miller, Todd Blanche, Pete Hegseth, Russell Vought, Mitch McConnell, Mike Johnson, Lindsay Graham, Sean Hannity, Justices Thomas/Alito, Judge Aileen Cannon, Elon Musk, and Rupert Murdoch.

Trump couldn’t have become such an effective miscreant without them. So whatever their titles, prestige and wealth, they deserve to be forever regarded as a confederacy of treason, little better than modern Benedict Arnolds.

HEROES: Jamie Raskin, Ro Khanna, Sheldon Whitehouse, Jack Smith, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, lawyers Marc Elias and Norman Eisen, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, Andrew Weissman, Jon Ossoff, Robert Reich, Maggie Haberman, Stephen Colbert, Daniel Dale, Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg who were the lead organizers of No Kings Day, and the millions who marched on No Kings Day.

These are our modern Horatios at the Bridge.

FYI, two other bold-faced Democrats – Hakeem Jeffries and Abdul El-Sayed – may join this list depending on Nov. 3, 2026.

As of now, Team Oligarchy (“rule of the few”) has had the advantages of a very loud White House MAGA-phone, control of U.S. military and ICE, incitement of armed fanatics who threaten Democratic leaders, ownership of most mainstream media, special interest money in elections…and the superpower of gaslighting without flinching.

Team Democracy (“rule by the many”) has had the advantages of majority popular support, legal precedents of equal-justice-under-law, judges who take oaths to “faithfully execute the laws,“ tradition of mutuality and community, and fidelity for facts over fascism.

These two vying groups are now engaged in a sustained tug-of-war for the highest stakes. The daily wins-or-losses for each will culminate in the 2026 and 2028 national elections when History tallies the initial score.

Irrespective of your personal preference, who do you think will prevail in those contests – Team Oligarchy or Team Democracy – and why?

This is Mark Green from the current Inflection Zone.

Mark Green: Mark Green here, and welcome to the second of our new podcast, Changing America. This offshoot of The Inflection Zone will be about still exposing and deposing Trump but with a focus on proposing the best new suggestions, for America post-Trump. It’s based on the observation of Norman Cousins who sagely wrote that “No one’s smart enough to be a pessimist.”

With the possible exception of MLK, I've regarded our guest today as the most important private citizen since Benjamin Franklin.

His biggest selling novel Unsafe at Any Speed was one of the 100 most significant books published in America in the past century, concluded Time Magazine. He ranks among the 100 Most Influential People in American history, according to The Atlantic. In a public life so far spanning 64 years, he’s written 2,000 articles and comments, spoken at over 2,000 universities, written or sponsored 75 books, and enacted two dozen consumer and environmental laws.

But that’s just dry data. At the human level, after he persuaded the House and Senate to unanimously pass his Auto Safety Act and Agency, 4.2 million Americans have not died because of that safety agency and rules based on data of deaths per-mile driven.

Maybe YOU are one of them.

Archival Footage from 1966 Congressional Testimony

Ralph Nader: …I don't want to have a climate in this country where one has to have an ascetic existence and steely determinations in order to speak truthfully and candidly and critically of American industry.

General Motors President James Roche:  I want to apologize here and now to the members of this subcommittee and Mr. Nader. I sincerely hope that these apologies will be accepted.

Mark Green: And we’ve worked on-and-off together for a mere 58 years. Phew, even saying it gets me tired. Ralph, welcome.

Ralph Nader : Thank you, Mark.

Mark Green: Oh, I left out something. In 1977, you were a host of Saturday Night Live on a program with a new comedian named Bill Murray.

On the subject of new ideas for a post-Trump America, you’ve consistently suggested transforming Labor Day so it’s not just an anachronism but an active part of the labor and political worlds.

How would that work?

Ralph Nader : Well, Labor Day is supposed to highlight workers – instead, it highlights commercial sales of cars and furniture. We want to bring it back to engaging workers. The idea is to have events focusing on something as simple as a “Compact” for American workers to integrate higher minimum wages, universal health care, cracking down on corporate crime and tax reform…not just clambakes but civic events where organizers also engage like-minded citizen groups to invite candidates, local, state, and national, running for office.

Mark Green: What kind of response have you gotten, if any, from individual unions or the AFL?

Ralph Nader : Two years ago we got Liz Shuler, head of the AFL-CIO, very excited. Everything was in place. Rolling it out to the national unions, like the flight attendants, postal workers and the United Auto Workers, and then down to the local level. But what I didn’t know was the AFL-CIO ran these proposals by the Democratic National Committee, and they nixed it.

They turned it down. And so we’re trying again, for this coming Labor Day. We’re not involving the AFL.

Mark Green: Even though Labor, of course, has shrunk as a percentage of the organizable workforce, it’s still among the two or three cornerstones of the Democratic Party.

Speaking of which, you yourself are not a registered Democrat – indeed you ran four times for president as an Independent… and, pending recounts, were not yet elected. You’ve been very critical of House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries for not doing more to hold a malicious president accountable for his crimes and damage.

Ralph, since he has to keep the House caucus together – from Henry Cuellar to AOC – what do you suggest he can or should also be doing?

Ralph Nader: One thing is leading the fight to impeach Trump in the House and send it to the Senate, regardless of the prospects of the vote. It would be an important organizing tool all over the country.

Almost 90% of the Democratic voters want Trump out of there. “You’re fired,” to use one of his favorite expressions. Jeffries doesn’t agree with that.

Mark Green: Might that be his position right now, probably waiting until he is in the majority before proposing something that he then has the power to act on. Do you think that’s likely or enough?

Ralph Nader : I don’t think it’s likely at all. I think if he becomes Speaker he’ll say, “We’re not looking back, we’re looking forward.”

You have a massively criminal president surrounded by massively criminal sycophants heading cabinet positions and agency positions, and every day people out there are suffering. Some are dying, some are getting sick, some can’t get Medicaid, some can’t get food stamps. We’re talking tens of millions of people.

They’re wrecking Head Start. They’re wrecking AmeriCorps -- they’ve frozen the health and safety regulatory agencies that save lives and advance health – EPA, OSHA, NHTSA. He’s not listening to his Democratic voters. He said to a reporter who asked him about impeachment in April, “I’m not I’m not gonna get ahead of that discussion.”

What? Get ahead of the discussion of almost 90% of your voters? We’ve had two symposiums on impeachment. At one of them was Celinda Lake, who showed us all the polls saying that organizing an impeachment drive is good politics. It gets people excited, it answers the question – what does the Democratic Party stand for? – and it helps get out the vote.

Mark Green: If someone says to you, “Oh, come on, it’s unlikely to impossible he’d ever reach the 67 votes necessary to convict and expel in the Senate.” What’s your counter-argument argument – “if you don’t swing, you don’t hit”?

Ralph Nader: Well said. Two responses. One is they said all that about Nixon – you have to take him out of the White House feet first; he’ll never leave. Well, he won 49 out of 50 states in 1972, got over 60% and within a year or two he was out. Why? Because Republicans saw themselves sinking in the ‘74 election, and he was the reason they were sinking.

So Senators Howard Baker and Senator Barry Goldwater went to the White House and basically said, “Mr. President, your time is up.” And he resigned, saying he lost his base in Congress. You’re not gonna get two-thirds next year if you don’t start this year laying the basis and making the Republicans realize that Trump is a tremendous handicap come November

Mark Green: Ralph, you’ve been operational for one-fourth of America’s entire history. You’ve dealt with an awful lot of members over that time. Looking back, who were among the two or three greatest senators, house members, that you worked with and why?

Ralph Nader: Well, Senator Warren Magnuson was a power in the Senate. He was originally known as the go-to person for big business, and then he hired a couple great chiefs of staff – like Mike Pertschuk – who educated him…and he became the greatest consumer champion of legislation in Senate history. Senator Gaylord Nelson, tremendous progressive from Wisconsin, authored the Tire Safety Act and many other measures [such as launching the very first Earth Day in 1970.]

In the House, the towering figure was John Moss, the father of the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 and the critical amendments of 1974.

Mark Green: You remember when we two met personally with a 92-year-old Jeannette Rankin in 1972. She was the first woman ever elected to the House of Representatives back in 1916 but was then defeated in the next election due to her vote against our entry into World War I.

Ralph Nader : I sure do. She’s the greatest woman in politics in American history in my book.

She wasn’t just for women’s rights. She was for labor rights. She was for peace. She put her life on the line for Montana. That’s why Montanans have picked her to represent them in the Hall of Statues in the Congress, Jeannette Rankin.

Well, I get a call from her in the middle of a hot summer when we had hundreds of student volunteers doing profiles of nearly every Member of Congress. I said, “What a pleasure.” And she said, “I’m gonna fly in because I want to talk to you and your people about ‘single member districts,’ which I’ve been advocating for decades.” The one thing I remember she conveyed to the students was, “You gotta have stamina, patience, and long-term determination.”

That was a great scene. I wish it had been videotaped.

Mark Green: Talking about stamina, after she was voted out in 1918 as a pacifist against WWI, 22 years later she ran for her old seat, won, in time to be the only member to vote against our entry into World War II, for which – surprise! – she was then again voted out of office.

When I asked her, “How the hell did you continue to have this drive and idealism after losing political power and then coming back…to lose again?” She replied, “You can’t lose if you never give up. You can’t lose if you never give up.”

Ralph Nader : Great phrase.

Mark Green: Ralph, you had another seminal moment last year on the 60th anniversary of Unsafe, when you published a response to a major critique written by Lewis Powell, who later of course became a Supreme Court justice.

What was his critique, and how did your lengthy response anticipate the Slaughter decision earlier this year which overturned a century of precedent to allow a president to fire all commissioners of the other party so he becomes a dictator over so-called “independent” regulatory agencies?

Ralph Nader : Lewis Powell’s complaint against the consumer, environmental and labor movements sound quaint now.

He wrote how the universities were alive with protests against corporate power, which influenced Congress. They passed bills to regulate the auto industry, to regulate polluters, to hold these companies accountable. So Powell urged big corporations to wake up – they need to expand their core of lobbyists in Washington and their influence over universities and over the media. He wrote this extensive memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and they sort of followed his script.

At the time, I said, “What’s the big deal? All, all these groups, they just want corporations to stop stealing, to stop cheating, to stop polluting, to start obeying the laws. Now how radical is that?” Well, he named me as the leading antagonist of American business. I tried to ignore it. But 54 years later, I figured I’d use it as a yardstick to show how massively more powerful corporations have become in every sphere of life.

I explained that political action committees are staggeringly bigger. They secretly buy and rent politicians, as you’ve written about so much.

Mark Green: And now?

Ralph Nader: The net result is the citizenry is not organized in proportion to the crushing attack on them.

Instead, we have Trump, who to use the title of our book is Wrecking America. So he is teaching us a lot about the weakness of both our democratic institutions and our own role as citizens.

I don’t think most people understand the extent of the damage he’s inflicting. Because when you’re willing to lie yourself through the day, he’s a chronic liar, a fantasist, a broken-promise leader with his base — and you’re willing to violate all the laws and the Constitution day after day — you can create a spectacular amount of damage to our country.

We’re not prepared for pandemics, we’re not prepared for climate violence, we’re not prepared to deal with the wildfires since wants to cut the budget for FEMA. He’s put big business in charge. He’s eliminating all kinds of criminal prosecutions that he inherited from the Biden administration and the Justice Department and the Securities Exchange Commission.

He’s corrupted himself and his family to such staggering levels that even experts describe it all. The great thing about Trump is that he boasts about his impeachable offenses without saying “impeachable offenses.” He boasts about violating the laws and doing whatever he wants, destroying whatever he wants.

Mark Green: I’m not unbiased about this. Lewis Powell’s the extremist here. What you’re now and doing now is reflective of what Abraham Lincoln famously said in 1854, even before he became president, which, to paraphrase, is the purpose of government is so we all can do together what we know needs to be done, but we cannot in our individual capacities do them.

Ralph, on a personal note, I recall when a new president invited you to his home to play softball – that’s a tip-off – and to talk policy. Of course, I’m referring to Jimmy Carter in 1977. If the 48th president asked you to dinner (forget the softball) what are the two or three most significant policy suggestions you’d implore him or her to pursue, assuming that the Congress goes Democratic?

Ralph Nader : Well, one is pretty far off the screen here.

It’s to generate civic education in all our schools – civic education, civic experience, civic skills – instead of just having students stare at their screens and become computer programmers. We’re feeling the penalties of generations of youngsters going through elementary school and high school with no civic understanding whatsoever. That’s the kind of constituency that elects Trump, who then manipulates them and finds scapegoats.

Second is campaign finance reform. Get big get money out of politics, as you’ve written so frequently, and have public campaigns funded with public money, just the way public parks, public forests, public drinking water systems are funded with public money. The third is immediate universal healthcare insurance and quality healthcare as well as significant tax reform so taxes are equitably collected and the money goes back to where the people live, work, and raise their family.

That’s why there’s been so little tax revolt over the decades in Western Europe. A lot of it went back to the people, in the form of universal health insurance, great pensions and mass transit and many, many other important social benefits like paid family care, childcare, maternal care, all the things the richest country in the world has denied its population because its governments have been for sale or rent.

Mark Green: During Trump’s first term- I was walking my dog here in Manhattan and passed a woman walking her dog. We got to talking. She was an Australian woman, and I asked her, “What do your fellow citizens think of Donald Trump?” She immediately shot back, “We cannot understand how the greatest country in the world has chosen the worst person in the world to be its leader.”

If I had to explain to her Aussie pals and to my own grandchildren when they grow up – what’s your best answer to her question?

Ralph Nader: Well, two layers. One is it all comes back to the citizenry. If they’re passive, uninformed, can’t be bothered with politics, you get very bad politics. That’s the lesson of history.

And the second is the Democratic Party, which was severely criticized by John Kenneth Galbraith, basically a very loyal Democrat professor at Harvard who co-founded the ADA in 1948 [Americans for Democratic Action] in Harper’s Magazine, in 1970 or so. He warned the Democrats they were straying from their mission and spending too much time coddling corporations.

Add Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, to that school of analysis. He wrote an op-ed in The Post a couple decades ago saying the Democratic Party’s big problem was that they wrote off half the country. They’re the creators of the red-blue divide. They stopped competing completely in states like Texas and the mountain states -- and Mississippi and Alabama. We shouldn’t be surprised that reactionaries now control Florida.

Then look at the constituencies sitting on the sidelines.

Four ex-presidents are largely silent as Trump dumps on them all the time with little response. There’s also the retired military who hate Trump and Hegseth…national security advisors like generals Mattis and Kelly. And then how about our profession, the legal profession? Other than the Bar of the City of New York, which came out with two white papers denouncing Trump’s executive violations urging “his immediate impeachment.” Nor have I heard from the medical profession or the political science profession, demanding accountability for Trump.

There’s the contented classes. That’s my favorite. They haven’t been harmed very much so far by Trump because they’ve got their tax breaks, they’ve got deregulation, and they don’t have mortgages to worry about. They enjoy health insurance, they own their own homes, and they’re sitting on the sidelines.

Mark Green: Well, at the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, I and most of our viewers and readers agree with all that. But on the other hand – as we were trained to say at our law school – the most recent off-year elections have shown an average swing against the GOP of 10 to 12 points because of the backlash to Trump.

Of course, his polling went from 49% of the actual vote on election day in November, 2024 to 32 to 34% in the most recent major polls, an historic fall.

Ralph Nader: It’ll be interesting to see how contagious recent bread-and-butter progressive winners – like Mamdani and El-Sayed – will prove to be…not only in their superior messaging but also their deployment of an armada of volunteers who spread the word even if major media don’t, helped by social media communication.

Such stalwarts – like those who march on No Kings Days – show the strength of numbers of average people who keep up to date, are powered by passion and focus on the decisional arena to accomplish big change. If only one percent of the adult public made Congress their hobby – that’s 2 ½ million people – it would test my theory how the impossible could become the inevitable. Neither AIPAC nor big corporations could stop the momentum of change for good in a self-governing democracy.

We regulated the auto industry, saving many millions of lives, with no more than a thousand people around the country.

Mark Green. Thanks Ralph for your time, wisdom and, as always, your example. And listeners and viewers who want to read his column free electronically every week, they can go to nader.org to become more informed, agitated and activated.

Ralph Nader: Thank you Mark for your Substack, new podcast and life of advocacy.

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*Reflecting Pool. When it turned green with algae, Trump declared that some “left-wing vandals” had ripped it and then US Atty Pirro indicted Olympian David Hearn because “we have tremendous evidence”...except photos show he simply pulled a piece of floating liner out of the pool and Pirro was forced to drop the indictment a few weeks later since Trump’s sole-source contractor “botched the job.”

#47 denounced her…although prosecuting Hearn would have been a crime itself and based on an obvious lie.

*Iran War. With testosterone Pete pounding his chest over his military victories – and Trump daily alternating between bombing or negotiating to stop its nuclearization – two facts haven’t changed: Trump tore up Obama’s JCPOA deal widely seen as working and Iran didn’t appear to be in any rush to accommodate the man who killed their Supreme Leader’s family since it controlled shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

When it comes to a casus belli, Trump’s rationale is 10x worse than “Remember the Maine!” and “The Gulf of Tonkin” incident.

*Subpoenaing Reporters. When a @NYTimes front page expose documented that the so-called Qatari gift of a $400 luxury 787 had cost hundreds of millions to retrofit to be safe as Air Force One – and had to be taken out of service as still too dangerous – Trump was furious. He ordered Blanche to issue subpoenas to the reporters to discover their confidential source within the government. Except long-accepted First Amendment law did not permit them to do so, and – under pressure from a district court judge – ordered the subpoenas quashed.

*Paul Weiss. The Times has a 4000-word investigative piece on how TeamTrump maneuvered the prominent Democratic law firm of Paul Weiss into surrendering its speech and independence by threatening (probably illegally) to pull its federal contracts. This was a first in the halls of bullying. “No one can believe it,” said a triumphal Trump. But as he had admitted to author Bob Woodward previously, when it comes to coercion, “fear” works

*Fauci. “Fear” also played a decisive role for Dr. Anthony Fauci. Obsessed with notoriety and successes over decades, Senator Rand Paul and DHS Secretary RFK Jr. spent considerable effort to force the retired 85 year-old to plead the Fifth Amendment 111 times at a Senate hearing since Trump’s Department of Retribution had been indicting “ham sandwiches” (Comey, James, Brennan, NYT reporters).

A vilified Fauci was smartly advised to plead – as TeamTrump enjoyed citing Fauci’s legal right as evidence of guilt, although none chose to mention Trump’s 440 invocations in an earlier civil case brought by NYS Attorney General Letitia James. (When the Annenberg Survey polled who the public trusts more on medical matters, 57 percent said Fauci and 39% chose RFK.)

When it comes to coverups and lyin’ kings, who do you trust more – Trump or Putin?

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A final note: if you haven’t already done so, be sure to check out the new Inflection Zone podcast, Changing America, which focuses on how America bounces back after Trump.

History will judge whether a president’s tenure overall improved lives (FDR, LBJ) or barely moved the needle (Ford, Bush 41). But Trump has created a whole new category. Since he’s motivated by self service, not public service, his policies aren’t merely failing but boomeranging and shrinking his popularity...and his boisterous insistence on always “doubling down” to show strength only accelerates his decline.

Has he entered a loop of failure?

Remember “Wrong Way Riegels” who in the 1929 Rose Bowl famously ran 65 yards untouched to cross the goal line… except it was his own? Consider just seven out of Trump’s scores of failures:

1. IRAN WAR. His repeated justification is he only wants them to swear off a deliverable nuclear weapon. In isolation, that may sound appealing to low-attention voters. But it was also Obama’s aim and achievement when the U.S. & Iran agreed in 2016 without a shot being fired and when the Strait of Hormuz was open.

*Boomerang: Iran now, however, is predictably more motivated to go nuclear after Trump ripped-up Obama’s JCPOA and later actually gloated that he killed the current Supreme Leader’s father, wife, daughter and scores of top officials. No one can be surprised by Iran’s refusal to bend their knee to an enemy who staggers and swaggers between the impossible choice of slaughter or surrender. Predictably, leading polling firms like Pew/WaPo/Gallup show 2-1 opposition to his war of aggression.

2. TARIFFS. Despite a decisive SCOTUS ruling that his political tariffs were unconstitutional -- requiring the Administration to start rebating billions to Americans -- this week he’s pretending that didn’t happen, as he now tries to reimpose them under some different emergency law. Mulligans may be allowed in golf, but rarely constitutional law.

*Boomerang: As voters continue to blame him for rising inflation, consumers are coming to understand what all economists know…that tariffs are a tax on them, not exporters. An “affordability agenda” cannot credibly include tariffs, especially when compared to the “bad optics” of his self-indulgent Ballroom, Arc de Trump, Reflecting Pool and other flashy emoluments.

3. ISRAEL. Aligning with an insistent Netanyahu, Trump seemed to think he would easily burnish his pro-Israel popularity. But he is painfully finding out that starting asymmetrical wars is easier than ending them.

*Boomerang: For the first time since Israel’s establishment in 1948, support for a Jewish homeland born from the Holocaust is collapsing in the U. S. Trump’s go-to talking point that he has a Jewish son-in-law and daughter is now small potatoes compared to how Trump has brilliantly turned the heroic Israel of the movie Exodus into a near pariah state.

4. FRAUD. No one is pro-waste/fraud/abuse, obviously ... especially since Reagan’s composite “welfare queen” enabled people to be racist without saying so. So Trump’s DOGE under Musk and now The Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, run by VP Vance, could be considered in the tradition of earlier efforts like Reagan’s Grace Commission and Al Gore’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government.

*Boomerang: The problem, however, is not the abstraction of “fraud” but how it’s laughably lacking in credibility in the hands of a catch-me-if-you-can con-artist and the only president ever serially convicted of “fraud.” Then there’s Musk promising $2 trillion in savings which ended up achieving only one to three percent of that touted total and Vance using Secret Service helicopters to take his children to golf lessons…not to mention that Trumpers most frequent use of the word “fraud” is to an election Biden didn’t steal in 2020.

5. VOTER INTEGRITY. Again, can’t object to that framing…except by all objective accounts a) American elections -- run by states and counties, not Washington -- have proven very secure and accurate and b) the actual number of illegal immigrants who vote is .00001% …really, who would risk deportation or jail to add one vote to millions?

*Boomerang: People of Color across the country understand that “Voter Integrity” is just a new name for decades-old voter suppression schemes, like the Black Codes of Reconstruction and Jim Crow laws of the 1950s. Trump’s anti-voting strategy is now more likely to spur than suppress annoyed minority voters in this year’s Midterms. But that assumes this Supreme Court rejects Trump’s Executive Order to effectively ban voting by mail, which HE and most Americans now use.

6. IMMIGRATION. While Trump’s border policies have been narrowly popular due to a huge reduction in migrant crossings, it’s now no better than a jump ball among voters.

*Boomerang. Why? Weekly scenes of brown people being assaulted by ICE have contributed to a sharp decline in GOP support among Latinos. Stephen Miller’s overt racism may excite the racially intolerant one-fourth of Americans, but it’s on the wrong side of the “affordability” issue when farms lack workers to harvest crops…and failed farms do little to help Republican prospects even in Red rural areas.

7. VACCINES & BIG GOVERNMENT. Despite pride in what he calls his “Warp Speed” program of Covid vaccines that blunted the death rates of those infected, I remember the moment that Trump at a 2024 rally actually got booed when he mentioned it. Once MAGA politics drowned out concerns over MAGA health, Trump abruptly stopped any mention of vaccines. The movement that RFK Jr. helped ignite has now come home to roost as measles cases have reached a 35 year high (285 in 2024, 2289 in 2025, 2300 so far in 2026).

When it comes to policy, Trump embodies Reverse Darwinism.

If my wonderful dog Pepper had been president the past 18 months – doing nothing but poop and eat, like now – she would have done better than Trump’s costly scandals and counter-productive blunders. As Rachel Maddow put it yesterday, polemically appealing deportations and bombs may seem glorious at first but not “when the bill comes due.” Or as Gen. Colin Powell put it during the Iraq War, “you break it, you bought it.”

Viktor Orbán, former Prime Minister of Hungary was even further down the road to fascism when he stacked the courts, media and legislatures over 16 years in power. Yet he lost in a 2026 landslide when voters finally got a chance to shout “BASTA!”

The bills are also coming due for Trump’s MAGA party in 2026 and 2028.

Stay tuned.

In our maiden episode of Changing America, a podcast all about how America can survive and thrive after Trump’s exit - if not exile - historian Jonathan Alter looks ahead to discuss Iran, ICE, a Wealth Tax, constitutional amendments on campaign finance and pardons...plus comparisons between Trump and Caesar since Jonathan is finishing a biography of the Roman dictator in 2027.

Let’s look up to the horizon of hope and not merely wrestle in the mud with MAGA.

Episode Transcript:

Mark Green: I’m Mark Green, pleased to announce today a new recurring element of our Inflection Zone Substack

It’s a podcast called Changing America, named after two large citizen transition books written by progressive experts, agency by agency, that I organized for the presidents-elect, first in 1992 and then again in 2008. Of course, Clinton and then Obama. Now, in 2026, I’ll be interviewing leading public advocates about how to further expose Trump and MAGAism with a special focus on how the next administration can end his corrupt despotism and establish an even better democracy.

I’m happy to inaugurate this positive podcast with my longtime friend, and among the leading journalists and biographers in the country, Jonathan Alter. His books on FDR and Carter, and others, plus deeply informed columns and many cable appearances, have helped educate Americans for decades. He’s now completing a biography of Julius Caesar.

Welcome, Jonathan.

Jonathan Alter: Thanks, Mark. Glad to be here. Thanks for the kind words.

Mark Green: Speaking of Caesar, I’ve been fascinated with him because of a shared date. He, of course, was famously assassinated, March 15th, 44 BC. I, less famously, was born on March 15th, 1945, separated by a mere 2090 years.

So beyond that small coincidence, why Caesar?

Jonathan Alter: Caesar was involved, not solely responsible, but involved in the demise of the Roman Republic. He didn’t live during the Roman Empire. He came at the end of more than 450 years of a republic in Rome. So I think you can understand why the collapse of the Roman Republic is of real interest right now, and it’s a complicated, rich, and I found fascinating story, and Julius Caesar was an utterly fascinating and brilliant individual.

Mark Green: So your comment invites this question – I glibly referred to Trump as an American Caesar in 2017 when he first came on the scene presidentially. Was I just being quick, or is that a useful comparison in your view?

Jonathan Alter: I think it’s useful to the extent that the word Caesar, after his death, 11 emperors had Caesar as part of their name, and then Kaiser is Caesar in German, and Tsar is Caesar in Russian.

And so he came to represent autocracy in the world of the last 2,000 years. So to that extent, I think it’s a valid comparison. But the two individuals had a few things in common, but not a lot, and basically Trump is not worthy of holding Julius Caesar’s toga. I like to say, some of you might remember the beverage that was made of orange juice and milk and can still be consumed in a different form at Dairy Queen called an Orange Julius.

And I would just say that Donald Trump is no Orange Julius.

Mark Green: (laughs) You lucked out on that one! A couple of Substacks ago, I wrote that Trump’s legacy is largely set in stone because millions of us separately cannot unlearn all his lies, distortions, arrogance, ignorance and crimes.

Of course, he has (presumably) 18 months to go. But do you think, however much he may talk about his legacy, it’s pretty fixed by this point?

Jonathan Alter: Oh yeah, it’s fixed. I mean he will be seen as the worst president in American history, and it’s not a close contest. And, you know, historians during and after his first term considered him the worst president in American history, and that judgment has been confirmed.

But, unfortunately, he’s not gonna be that easy to expunge. You know, I had thought when I wrote a book – called American Reckoning that came out in 2024 – I had some lines from Ozymandias in that book ‘cause I thought there was a chance that there would be nothing left of him. That he wouldn’t be remembered at all if Kamala Harris won the election, that he would just be this really unfortunate blip – you know, he’d quickly enter Millard Fillmore territory.

But that is not gonna be the case now. He will be remembered. This era will be, for better and much more often for worse, known as the Trump era. It’s not gonna be the Trump-Biden era. It’s gonna be the Trump era with everything that comes with that. A lot of what he did will be taken down.

But some of it can’t be taken down. So if he manages to get an arch built, it’s gonna be kind of hard to take that down. I think he’s a hugely memorable president. In terms of him being a hugely consequential president…now that we’re getting into some irreversible things going on with Iran, he may well be seen as an enormously consequential president.

In that sense, he can be like more odious, more menacing Nixon. So Gerald Ford becomes president and he brings in a new attorney general, former University of Chicago president named Edward Levi, and it takes Levi about 18 months to restore the integrity and credibility of the Department of Justice with the help of some new laws, and we will need some new laws.

We’ll need to not just reverse these executive orders, but actually codify [changes]. The way he becomes an enormously consequential president, Mark, is if J.D. Vance or even Marco Rubio gets elected in 2028. Then we’re truly living in a different country because a lot of this terrible stuff that he’s done will become entrenched and very hard to reverse

Mark Green: You just mentioned Iran. The President and Pentagon are right now deciding between two very unenviable options from his point of view - and for America. Either we’ll massively bomb, which he loves threatening to do, or TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) again, again, again, saying, “Oh, we’re gonna have a ceasefire ‘cause they wanna negotiate.” What do you think he’ll do and why?

Jonathan Alter: Well, I think that he will do what he always does, which is one thing on Monday, another thing on Tuesday, a third thing on Wednesday, and you’ll just see this intermittent bombing and then, “No, now we’re gonna negotiate.” Maybe they’ll come back to the table, sign another ceasefire, then they’ll have another bombing and, you know, somebody’ll violate the ceasefire and it’ll just be this for a long time.

So it’s already, according to Paul Krugman, close to or already too late for him to get gas prices down before the midterms. The whole world now rightly believes that the Iranians are holding him hostage the way they arguably held Jimmy Carter hostage, as I wrote about in my biography of Carter and that they basically won this war.

They’re much more clever negotiators and they have a lot of leverage.

Mark Green: I have a question internationally - especially after he humiliated himself after the World Cup. Do you think the world or our allies will ever again trust an American president or America, given how often Trump has been contemptuous of truth and [existing treaties]

Jonathan Alter: I don’t believe in that word “ever.” I’ve been around long enough to know. So you get a new American president and a new generation of European leaders, and they develop new relationships. And the other thing to understand is that international relations are not built on trust.

Trust is very helpful to coming to agreement. But basically, international relations are more along the line of what Reagan said about dealing with Russia, “Trust but verify,” right? So will you have more skepticism? Yes, but what are they motivated by? Are they motivated by trust, or are they motivated by their interests? If it’s in their interest to deal with the United States, to sign a deal with them on this or that, they will do so, Trump notwithstanding.

If it’s not in their interest, they won’t.

Mark Green: Let me move on looking ahead, if I can optimistically. This is called Changing America. How can America change? For example, the likely Maine Democratic Senate nominee, after Plattner withdrew, is proposing that we abolish ICE because it’s become almost a personal Gestapo for Trump.

[Give it] maybe a new name, slash it three-fourths, with the savings going to a childcare tax credit. Is this a good idea for a candidate to propose and a good idea for the next president to accept?

Jonathan Alter: I think it’s a good idea if you’re running in the Democratic primary, but it’s not a great general election issue ‘cause it’s too easily twisted into a variation on “Defund the Police.”

Well, border security is very popular, and to say, “in the future, we’ll create a new border agency” is not very smart. So I think it’s much better to say, “We are going to dramatically overhaul ICE. We’re gonna ban the use of masks. We are going to cut its budget because it’s way, way overfunded, and use some of those savings, and we are going to improve eligibility standards.”

Mark Green: But as a leading idea, for the next president?

Jonathan Alter: Yeah, I think if after he’s elected, [it would be good] to say, “You know, the name ICE has so many negative connotations that I’m gonna do what many presidents have done,” starting with Franklin Roosevelt, who was always opening and then shutting and reopening agencies with different names.

And there will be a real opportunity for a new Democratic president to have very aggressive ethics legislation. Some of it should include building support for a constitutional amendment on campaign finance, since the Supreme Court’s not gonna help. But campaign finance, it’s, it’s actually pretty popular.

Mark Green: Okay. In that spirit, how about an amendment on not making the pardon power unaccountable and unlimited, which I assume, like campaign finance abuse, is very popular.

Jonathan Alter: Yes. I think it should be like the post-Civil War era where they put in three constitutional amendments. And I’m not sure exactly what the three should be, but I think three or even four [can] pass quickly, they just require a majority vote in the Congress; then send them to the states and start the process of selling it in state capitals

And a lot of these are not, they’re not partisan. I mean, limiting the pardoning power is something that a lot of Republicans could get behind if it, especially if there’s a Democratic president. I also think some of it should be just very rough hard-ass politics that can be done on a straight party vote that don’t require a constitutional amendment.

One of those is statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and they should just push it through because we now have a very unrepresentative Senate. Look at the Dakotas. By the way, the Republicans did this in the 19th century. I think they created five new states.

Mark Green: Do you have any economic proposals? Economic populism is across the board pretty popular.

Jonathan Alter: So personally, I favor a wealth tax, and I think it’s doable for a variety of reasons. Elizabeth Warren’s [proposal] is a good one. The problem is this Court would unquestionably declare it unconstitutional.

The question is, is it worth the effort? And I’ve been convinced recently that it’s not worth the effort because it’d just get struck down. So we should go for a very sharp increase in the income tax. We should get rid of the 25% capital gains tax. Mark, you’ve written wonderful stuff on this. It shifted from being based on labor to finance.

We gotta shift that back so all of your income is taxable at the same top rate, 65%. They definitely have to lift the cap on Social Security to fund Social Security.

Mark Green: Let’s agree about – a wealth tax, let’s put that in the next president’s quiver. So if and when there’s Supreme Court reform, and/or a very conservative justice retires or leaves, there’s a change in the Court when a wealth tax might be smart to propose.

Jonathan Alter, are you allowed to tell me when you might publish Julius Caesar?

Jonathan Alter: Well, I was hoping it would come out on the Ides of March next year, but it’s gonna be later than that, sometime probably in the second half of next year.

Mark Green: Alright, well come back, as they love to say on MS NOW, Please come back!”

I wanna thank Jonathan for his time and deep expertise, though not as a campaign consultant, Frankly. the country is better off that you went all-in on writing and not pontificating

Jonathan Alter: (laughs)

Mark Green: Well, if you found our maiden podcast useful, if not informative, remember to check out Jonathan’s forthcoming biography next year called The Dictator. And before then, check out his Old Goats Substack, a tongue-in-cheeky title that I think refers to chats with people of my vintage.

To all Inflection Zone followers, please watch for future Substacks and Changing America podcasts where we aim to look up to the horizon of hope and not merely down in the mud with MAGA and Trump.

Also, of course, let your friends and family know how to subscribe and follow us. This is Mark Green. Thank you.

From 1932 to 1980 – FDR to Carter – all men elected President had significant military experience. No surprise that a defining event like WWII produced a new generation of leaders from both parties – JFK and Nixon, for example, both came from the House Class of 1946.

It appears that a different defining development named Donald Trump will generate another big recoil…i.e., truth-telling young turks who speak fluently, intelligently, eloquently, and honestly.

There are now at least four Democrats in their 30s and 40s who meet that new standard — Jon Ossoff, Pete Buttigieg, James Talarico and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — here speaking in that order.

All would be younger than the youngest President ever by the next presidential election if they ran. (FYI, none have yet committed to doing so… and while NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is already at a Kennedy/Obama level of charisma, he cannot run for president since he was born abroad.)

They are all strikingly well-spoken, attract large audiences and generate big numbers on both traditional and social media - which can translate into huge electoral war chests.

When I first sought state-wide public office 40 years ago, the state Democratic Party chairman early in our initial meeting asked, “where’s your first $5 million?” (“Uh oh, it appears that I misplaced it en route!”) Today, candidates would be asked whether they possessed a huge inheritance, over a million social media followers or a billionaire financing a Super PAC (as two Democrats did in their expensive congressional primary in Manhattan’s 12th Congressional District). And as of now, the RNC has 7x the amount of cash-on-hand as the DNC.

This cohort of young eloquence above may be an understandable reaction to current public objection after two 80 year-olds in the Oval Office. It appears that a history of presidents producing their opposite may again hold.

Recall that a stolid free-market Hoover was followed by the dynamic Keynesian FDR. A heroic but stammering older Ike was succeeded by a very vigorous JFK. After Nixon’s Watergate whoppers, a pious Carter promised that he “wouldn’t tell a lie” (and didn’t according to his biographers). And then when Jimmy didn’t seem big enough for the role, Ronald Reagan – a John Wayne by comparison – swaggered into the White House.

Beyond Ossoff/Buttigieg/Talarico/AOC are another half dozen Democrats in their 40s and 50s who also excel at connecting with the media and various voting blocks…like Newsom, Booker, Moore, Murphy, Khanna. Democrats also have in their stable brilliant congressional veterans like Elizabeth Warren, Jamie Raskin and Adam Schiff – all skilled at being convincing without lying and humiliating right-wing witnesses before their committees.

Are there many - or any - Republicans as youthful, dynamic, or well- spoken? Perhaps the literate 41-year-old hillbilly J.D. Vance…but only if you ignore his periodic cringe-worthy content like “all American Wars were won by negotiation” (Hiroshima?) and the Pope should “stick to matters of morality.”

Tectonic plates are shifting due to Trump’s volcanic lava of lies. Churchill followed Chamberlain at a time when standing up to Nazism was the only test. Charismatic Democrats are now similarly rising, not because they have “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but because it’s Trump who’s deranged.

What else can you call an incumbent who ignores his inflation, endless war and flat manufacturing sector while whining about windmills and being cheated out of an election he lost by over 7 million votes?

Has there ever been a President who so glorifies violence as Donald Trump?

We’ve of course had famous generals as president – from Washington to Jackson to Grant to Eisenhower - but none of these proven warriors routinely used fear and loathing as Trump does daily.

In case you’ve been away, he and Testosterone Pete changed the name of the Department of Defense – when exactly no one urged them – to the Department of War.

Trump, a bone-spur veteran and graduate of the New York Military Academy in high school, began his presidential career targeting migrants for prosecution and imprisonment…threated to personally beat up protestors…suggested that his supporters might use “their second amendment rights” to deal with Hillary Clinton…attacked many political opponents for treason, if not execution…hosted a UFC fight on the White House lawn because how better to celebrate “freedom” on our 250th birthday?…used dehumanizing insults of judges and Democrats that triggered hundreds of death threats against them. Indeed, as Senator Mitt Romney admitted, these dissuaded some colleagues against convicting him on Articles of Impeachment.

Other than right before the Civil War, have such threats ever previously been a part of a White House congressional strategy? I can’t think of any – the only parallel that comes to mind are mob bosses keeping made-men in line.

Abroad, his excitement over violence has gone beyond merely rhetorical. His Pentagon has ordered the killing of over 200 people in small crafts on international waters for alleged drug smuggling, offering no justifying evidence. He kidnapped Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the U.S. to stand trial. He lavished praise on his pal Putin during his war on Ukraine by refusing for months to arm that embattled democracy with defensive weapons to stop supersonic missiles killing civilians.

And now of course he’s launched a war of choice and aggression against Iran that he promised would take 4-6 weeks...which just entered week 19.

Like some 19th century French Opéra Bouffe, he now zig-zags weekly between claiming great progress on peace talks with smart Iranians and threatening to genocidally destroy a country run by “lunatics.”

Heckuva job, Donnie.

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And now he’s brought his zest for violence stateside by creating his own S.S. in ICE – with an additional $70 billion for its annual budget which is larger than the total military budgets of either Canada or Spain.

It has been rounding up and incarcerating tens of thousands of brown people, many of whom are naturalized citizens and killing four innocent Americans...two over the past two weeks alone. Then, a one-day pause on vehicle stops was quickly reversed by the Commander-in-Chief.

If any missed the point, he’s chosen a scowling face in official portraits and in the Mussolini-like huge banners he’s hanging off government buildings. And he’s plunging ahead to build a huge Arc de Trump next to the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery which will be far larger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, commissioned by Napoleon in 1806. Of course, the only war Trump’s won has been avoiding any military service himself. Talk about “stolen valor!”

To his credit, there’s a method to his badness – it’s to instill FEAR in people, as he admitted to author Bob Woodward in a giddy moment. Because “fear” compels people to pre-obey without exertion.

His theory of menace HAS worked to corral congressional members to follow his orders, with few exceptions. The problem, however, is that it’s failing to get much done to help voters where they live. As devastating polls confirm, many people are catching on.

Since he doesn’t believe in using the government to help people, he’s instead deploying the trick of distraction – of focusing attention on some hobgoblin to divert people unhappy with gas prices, Blanche, the Qatari Air Force One and Epstein.

So Team Trump is trying to build up excitement for a prime-time address tonight that’ll - for the 83d time - argue that he won an election he lost by over 7 million votes. To do that, however, he needs to do two things.

First, get his new DNI head to cherry-pick and hand him a few pieces of intelligence to indicate that there may have been some voter fraud or foreign interference in 2020 that rigged that election, which 60 courts and AG Bill Barr refuted.

So he’ll resort to the razzle dazzle of highlighting a Black Swan, like me “proving” I’m a better basketball player than Michael Jordan by showing a reel of the two 25 foot shots I sank in high school basketball compared to the 8 times that Jordan actually failed to hit last second game-winners. SEE!

And second, it requires that major TV networks ignore what they know and instead amplify his stump speech of lies and grievances. He pulled this off for five years with his birtherism BS – can he do it again for one night?

This will be a very public stress test for CBS, NBC, ABC, Sinclair -- private companies which have their own free speech rights to decide what to cover or not. Will fear again overwhelm facts? Will networks treat his bad-faith litany of lies with their own bad-faith coverage for a format previously reserved for the Cuban Missile Crisis and aftermath of 9/11? Will Trump’s big bet allowing Paramount and the Ellisons to acquire CBS pay off as they imitate “useful idiots,” in Kremlinology?

If you can stomach it, tune in tonight to get the answer. What’s your bet -- will they buckle to bad-faith or report the truth?

No one should still be shocked by Trump’s self-reverential comparisons to Washington and Lincoln…nor by the fact that the 156 member American Association of Political Scientists ranks him as the worst American president.

This brick-and-mortar guy hopes that if he attaches his name on lots of stuff, his legacy will be assured. – hence, Trump Battleships, Trump Bonds, Trump Ballroom, his picture on passports, coinage, currency, the new Donald J. Trump Int’l Airport (replacing the Weest Palm Airport), perhaps a new DC football stadium, the Trump-Kennedy Center and of course a Nobel Peace Prize. (To the contrary, see Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias on the vanishing power of monuments: “…look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”)

But due to his unparalled notoriety, a large majority of Americans have already arrived at a firm conclusion that neither Truth Social nor Karoline Leavitt can do much to alter. For his legacy is largely set in stone, not in the stone of buildings but in the minds of hundreds of millions of people who will not unlearn what they see and know.

* * * *

Trump doesn’t seem to care much about two of the three tenses that shape our thoughts: first, he hardly ever uses The Past Tense…or invokes history or a history book. True, he can’t stop repeating Reagan’s slogan to “Make America Great Again,” although he shrewdly never says when that was.

And there are occasional trite references, as if lifted from a book called a History for Dummies – like being awed by the chronicle of Al Capone’s crimes & the one film he says he loved, the Hollywood classic, Sunset Boulevard.

Otherwise, he’s uncurious about the previous two million years of the human species since in his solipsistic mind nothing much happened until he came along and invented the word “Groceries.” Psychologists agree this is, beyond argument, malignant narcissism.

Second, neither does he much concern himself with The Present Tense, other than this obsessive vanity, as if he’s a Mussolini walking around with his own balcony (credit to Jimmy Breslin).

But third, Trump IS acutely interested in The Future Tense – especially the fame and fortune he wants to leave behind. If Pyramids were still fashionable, imagine how big his would be. Like 3 ballrooms and 2 reflecting pools big!

Indeed, based on his own financial disclosures, he made over two billion dollars from Crypto and other investments in Term II that ballooned in value after he pushed policies and programs to boost them, including hundreds of insider trades.

And according to a detailed accounting by The Atlantic, his overall net worth jumped over $4 billion while president – a multiple of what all prior presidents combined pocketed in the prior two and a half centuries and notwithstanding two constitutional prohibitions against such “emoluments”.

This treasure chest came not because of business skills to build companies or products but, in the useful insight of biographer David Cay Johnston, because he is a brilliant “cash extractor” siphoning profits based on what others create.

This is a level of self-enrichment that, like a skunk’s odor, you can’t wipe off or ignore.

Obviously a lot will happen in Trump’s final 917 days in office (if he and we last that long) – his war on Iran could end badly or terribly; gas prices may ebb up or down; a Democratic House in 2027 may impeach him for dozens of catch-me-if-you-can crimes and unconstitutional acts. But the die is largely cast since the vast majority of Americans understand that legacy ultimately turns on CHARACTER.

Different people may define it differently but there’s a consensus independent of ideology: Did a president and his party bring out the best in America or promote the worst? Did they stick to principle or mere power? Of course presidents will make and regret many mistakes in “the arena.” But the core test is: did they, however imperfectly, at least try to uphold the verities exalted on July 4th – the rule of law, equal justice, separation of powers, free speech, free and fair elections, courage, honesty, democracy and their oath of office?

Of the 15 presidents from both parties between 1933 and now – some great, some not so great – 13 could objectively be judged as people of character. (FDR, Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, Obama, and Biden.) Not that all 13 were “Profiles in Courage” but – other than Nixon and Trump – none routinely were lying felons, racial arsonists or selfish broligarchs. None were like the slimy character in the film Titanic who jumped in a lifeboat adhering to the creed of “babies and women last.”

Despite his performative nonchalant overconfidence, Trump surely knows that living presidents will not be attending his funeral, what has been a nonpartisan custom – as to display the essential decency of the American people. Instead, his lifetime of arrogance, ignorance, incompetence, violence, racism and recidivism — plus a near genetic inability to admit much less learn from his unrelenting mistakes – have cemented a legacy as someone of uniquely low character.

He’s a cross between a buffoon, braggart and bully. (Just today he announced that “no one deserves the Nobel Peace Prize more than me,” notwithstanding that winners have included Mandela and MLK and that he can’t end a current war that he started unprovoked.)

And surely he knows deep down that successor administrations will try to claw back his illegal profits and prosecute his — and his appointees’ —corruption at the federal or state levels.

A reckoning is coming. As it did for another politician, Joe McCarthy, who identically dominated headlines with electrifying lies and also peaked once at exactly 50 percent national popularity, then plummeted to 34 percent after being formally Censured by the Senate and died in disgrace as an entry in dictionaries standing for “McCarthyism, a contemptible smear-and-fear artist.” (Despite many similarities, there’s one big difference between them — alcoholism…since McCarthy died from it while Trump is a teetotaler, addicted only to himself.)

It’s not hard to guess what the word “trumped” will mean post-Donald: as an Australian woman in 2025 told me as we were each walking our dogs and I asked what her family thought of Donald. “What we cannot understand is how the greatest country in the world could end up with the worst person in the world as its president.”

Anyone have a tight answer to that?

When your party’s political message is short on facts, laws and popular policies, fear-mongering may appear to be a viable last ditch strategy.

With few measurable successes to brag about – not Iran, not inflation, not the Dow, which usually creeps up and has risen less than under Obama – – Trump’s recently been reduced to grading himself an A+ for making America the “hottest country in the world”. (To be fair, it was literally accurate when it came to the temperature on July 3rd and 4th.)

But his larger assertion is belied by his record low polls in the States and by rising hatred of America among the populations of our ex-allies.

Lacking such standard threats to the Homeland as Yellow Peril, caravans of “illegals” approaching the border, a pandemic and easy use of the “N” word, olympic haters like Trump and Miller have had to invent a new one.

Primary congressional victories of two self-proclaimed Democratic Socialists in NYC – out of 535 federal seats in all – might first appear to be slim pickings. But it will have to do: So the new Freddy on Halloween will be COMMUNISM, which Trump mentioned some 20 times in his two speeches over the past holiday weekend:

Here’s Trump speaking at Mt. Rushmore Friday night…

and then in D.C. before the fireworks Saturday night…

(Doesn’t this remind you of the classic joke about the old-timer sweeping furiously around a statue in a park. “Why are you doing that?”, he was asked. “To keep the elephants away.” “But there are no elephants here” came the rejoinder. “See!” said the proud geezer.)

Well, it’s worked before, right? The 2020s, however, is a whole lot different than the 1950s.

Back then, there were at least two major communist dictatorships menacing America and criminal convictions of the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss gave credence to the fear. And while McCarthy surely dominated headlines, his eventual censure and infamy appear to be a very bad model 70 years later.

Also, data today show far more political violence coming from Far-Right extremists than the Antifa-left…in fact, “Antifa” doesn’t exist as a group or a threat at all. Nor are courts engaged in prosecutions of actual Communists – indeed, of cases that reached judgments, 85 percent of them ruled in favor of plaintiffs and against the Trump Department of Retribution.

Not to mention that Russia and China are today headed by two dictators whom Trump claims to admire and trust. So those communists are ok?

Of course, slogans need not win in courts of law or science in order to be effective if they conjure up long-held prejudices. Admittedly, there was no serious “missile gap,” as Senator Kennedy called it in 1960…no evidence that Obama was born abroad and no invasion of immigrant “rapists” as Trump claimed in 2016.

He of course resents any invocation of Hitler as he flies around the country in effect calling Democrats, in Tail Gunner Joe’s memorable phrase, “the Party of Treason.” But recall that it was J.D. Vance who invoked the Führer against Donald, who had a book of Hitler speeches by his bed and who told Chief-of-Staff John Kelly that “Hitler did some good things.”

We can now expect that a #47 on a losing streak to resort to his embrace of Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels whose strategy famously was that if you repeat a big lie often enough, you can make it appear to be true.

So now, in the sixth year of a presidency that keeps rotating familiar falsehoods, will the American media continue to repeat his inflammatory and untrue attacks on a non-existent threat…or will they again be “useful idiots”? And how many Independent or Democratic voters will fall for accusations that half of America – their neighbors, relatives, co-workers – are anti-American radicals?

I doubt many or any will. Actual swing voters are NOT as dumb as Trump believes or hopes and will care far more about losing their health care and quality of life than about an invisible Red Menace.

Do you agree with Trump-Goebbels or me?

This is Mark Green, from the Inflection Zone.

For those worried that the most powerful person and the richest man in the world each needed more, SCOTUS this week again came to the aid of both Trump and Musk in their insatiable pursuit of power and money.

But this time, the High Court’s “neutral” jurisprudence was exposed as a modern ends-justify-the-means narrative favored by monarchs throughout history. In their cocoon of groupthink, however, the right-wing justices presumably don’t yet realize their self-immolation.

1. Regulatory Commissioners. Of the dozen big decisions handed down over the past 10 days, Trump v. Slaughter drew nearly the least attention despite having about the biggest impact.

Health and Safety regulations from the ‘30s to the ‘60s were society’s major responses to the downstream predations of laissez faire Capitalism. From FDR to Ralph Nader to Elizabeth Warren, public figures convinced lawmakers that pollution, fraud and dangerous products were not the price of progress.

Yet six justices found ways this week to overturn a century of successful regulatory laws by deciding that hundreds of judges and Members had misunderstood The Declaration and The Constitution when it came to executive authority. So now, instead of independent agencies like the FTC, EPA, SEC and CPSC having no more than a majority of congressional-confirmed commissioners, a President could fire any of them for any reason without any showing of “cause.” That is, an “at-will employee.”

In lay terms, that means that tomorrow, President Trump could release a list on Truth Social –- the new Federal Code and Federal Register – firing the remaining Democratic commissioners government-wide who previously put up guard-rails to protect consumers, workers and investors.

So no more William O. Douglases at the SEC or Lina Kahns at the FTC for now…instead, only corporatists and Ayn Rand devotees (who never got over Atlas Shrugged as teenagers) would decide the rules of the marketplace and workplace. (Showing their relentless bias agasinst government consumer regulation and for Wall Street interests, the six justices simply made an exception at the FED when they disallowed Trump’s attempt to fire Biden-nominated Lisa Cook. Wrote Roberts, that would violate the “separation of powers” intended by the Constitution…so why not for consumer protection agencies also?

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There’s no mystery why Justice Sotomayor predicted “chaos” from overruling the Humphrey’s Executor decision of 1935. While Gorsuch et. al. love cooking up law-exam-like hypothetical horribles to rule against health/safety laws. it’s now now not merely theoretical that TeamTrump engages in a mass firing. What’s to stop him – sympathy for the victims of mercury poisoning or salmonella?

Then what’s to stop Trump from treating his new-found leverage over regulators like countries he would try to extort with huge tariffs: “That’s a very nice prestigious office you hold, Ms. Smith – now how will you vote on the proposed rule to reduce toxic chemicals that’d hurt my big donors at Dow Chemical?”

But if Trump can do that, why couldn’t, say, President Gavin Newsom fire all Republican commissioners at 12:01 pm on January 20, 2029 to be replaced by the children of Nader’s Raiders? Big business which desires certainty for long-term investments won’t be happy with that, right?

2. National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission. Ever since Buckley v. Valeo in 1976 decided, in effect, that money-is-speech (fyi, it’s not) – leading to the Citizens United debacle of 2013 – tsunamis of money have been drowning democratic elections.

For example, after Citizens, its author John Roberts blithely predicted that approval of secret super PACs giving unlimited contributions would not significantly alter the role of money. But that crystal ball has been proven laughably wrong – since corporate PAC giving has risen 10-fold since then – and he’s never acknowledged how wrong he was, made clear by his similar reasoning in the FEC decision this week.

But there’s a monumental difference between One Person-One Vote and One Person- $10 million from one corporation chartered for other purposes.

President Trump rightly called this decision “a big Republican win” now that, and for the first time, super-wealthy individuals and Super PACs can donate any amount to political parties which can then coordinate their spending directly with their chosen candidates. This move enables GM and Elon Musk to use their money to have even more sway and lowest-cost rates.

What’s to stop Musk now from flouting his Trillionaire status by, for example, donating $50 million to each of 30 red-leaning/purple states’ Republican committees IF they agreed to nominate more white supremists/corporatists? Could Musk afford to spend 1.5 percent of his net wealth to do to Democracy what his DOGE strategy did to the health of lower-income Americans and African countries? Is it cynical to think that he would or naive to think he wouldn’t?

Boss Tweed was bad. Boss Trump-Musk a different order of MAGA-tude.

3. Birthright Citizenship. If anyone is still wondering how right-wing today’s SCOTUS is, consider that four GOP justices didn’t understand – as any 5th grader would – what this phrase in the 14th Amendment meant: “All persons born or naturalized in the U.S., and subject to the jurisdiction, are citizens of the U.S.”

Yet they refused to uphold a century-and-a-half of Court rulings because of their personal opinion that pregnant foreigners (aka, “birthright tourists”) might sneak into the United States. That’s certainly possible. But according to the scholarship of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the post-Civil War Congress explicitly decided that the universalist appeal of “All persons” – not all enslaved women – would be a major unifying principle defining the UNITED States.

Here is what Justice Jackson orally said from the bench from her concurreence about Thomas’s perversion of the 14^th Amendment, followed by audio from Isabel Wilkerson about Jackson’s use of her book Caste:

Messrs Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch decided that their definition of “All” means more than that of Congress. Yet at the same time, they also pose as Originalists, Strict Constructionists and hostile to “judicial activism” when they insist on sticking to what delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Conventionpeople were presumably thinking when they enacted the clumsily worded 2d Amendment.

• * * *

It’s breathtaking that just as America got its first admitted wanna-be corporate dictator, the current Court came up with the bright idea of establishing presidential immunity for “core” powers and a possible monopoly over “independent” regulatory experts…notwithstanding the Civil War, Great Depression, crib deaths and auto fatalities.

IMHO politically and legally, their perverse rulings won’t last much longer than their reputations.

On the other hand, this week made it more likely that a Blue Backlash would include Supreme Court reform following the intellectual corruption of the sitting revanchist jurists. Do you agree or are you more downbeat after this Court term?

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It seems like progressive patriots are still stuck in the rut of responding 1x1 to Trump’s daily outrages – from a failed war to a botched pool renovation – even as he tries to kidnap this week’s Semiquincentiennal. Yet there’s no modern Tom Paine – at least not until presidential aspirants speak up post-Fall – with a unifying theory-of-the-case to renew an unpopular Democratic party. Not for enactment now but in case a Blue Backlash provides it with a working majority.

Here’s one possible framework…in case:

• * * *

The best way to end Trump’s ongoing Ice Age is a strategy of victories with vision in 2026 and 2028.

Over the next two years, Democrats should be explaining the difference between Democracy and Piracy and then pioneering better policies for all our families and not just Trump’s.

I. CORRUPTION vs COMMUNITY

Calling Trump “corrupt” is true but trivialized. We need almost a new language to describe how one person and one party are openly exploiting public office for private profit while blaming woke, workers, minorities…or some hated “Other.”

But to be fair, let’s credit TeamTrump with a sense of humor by running against “woke” when their guy can’t stay awake in meetings. And two cheers to J.D. Vance for inadvertently admitting that his administration has produced so much scandal fatigue that the crime of Watergate today would be a one day story.

To the contrary, Jon Ossoff’s phrase “The Epstein Class” IS a memorable new formulation to describe a privileged elite who care far more about their gilded ballrooms, gluttonous tax breaks, predatory coverups, special interest superpacs, emolumental self-dealing and eagerness to plaster POTUS’s name on buildings, passports, even currency. When “the buck stops,” Truman’s adage may have Trump’s face on it.

Presumably, public disgust with smug greed will rise alongside rising gas and grocery prices…and as TeamTrump morphs into a giant Trojan Horse painted red, white & blue on the outside while inside are trillions in cash at their disposal.

That betrays our exceptional history. The Declaration’s revolutionary premise of treating people as citizens not subjects – which we rightly celebrate this year – continues to inspire us and people around the world. Not the Law of the Jungle but the Rule-of-Law since America is built on the big idea that all-of-us-know-more-than-any-of-us.

Yet now comes a dangerous extremism that tries to turn virtues like empathy, equality, compassion, fairness, justice, even government itself into four-letter words. These reactionary radicals fail to understand Bill Clinton’s axiom that “you can’t love your country but hate her government” and that real patriotism means progress for all, not piracy for a few.

Let’s at least use their very expensive stress test to detect and repair the cracks in our constitutional democracy to return to the very purpose of self-government, which Lincoln best defined as early as 1854: “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community whatever they need to have…but cannot do in their separate and individual capacities.”

By that standard, it’s Democrats who embody the “Party of Lincoln,” not Republicans who keep trying to divide us by race, region, religion and gender. When did “Loathe Thy Neighbor” become a Christian value?

II. THE CORNERSTONES OF TRUTH & TRUST

America believes not in strongmen but a strong democracy built on truth and trust.

First, Democracy assumes clashing opinions but consensus on basic facts – like hotter temperatures melting glaciers and now baking Europe – in order to enact the best laws. Second, we’re connected by a web of

mutual obligations, as Dr. King put it, that assume faith in each other – so that I pay my taxes knowing that you pay yours.

True, politicians of all stripes can overstate, mislead, tell white lies or even big ones to win power. And no, Democrats are far from perfect. But we’re in an entirely different dimension when Washington Post fact-checkers documented over 30,000 lies and falsehoods told by Trump in only his first term.

Averaging 22 falsehoods a day is a level of bad faith similar to the worst dictators in history. Since he cheats in golf, business, marriage and math, only a credulous cult can take anything he says at face value.

Compare that to when ex-Secretary of State Dean Acheson went to Paris to brief President DeGaulle on Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba. As he took out documents to make that case, DeGaulle waved him off, “The word of the President is enough,” he said.

Is there a foreign leader who’d say that now about our chief executive – a human monkey wrench daily throwing himself at some perceived enemy?

This level of dishonesty and distrust would be awful in a family member, neighbor or co-worker but is a calamity in a head of state who also embraces authoritarian rule. Author Sisella Bok explained why some commentators refer to our country as “post-truth”: “Imagine a society where no word or gesture could ever be counted on. Questions asked, answers given, information exchanged – all would be worthless.”

Everyone understands the cliche: “A fish rots from the head down.” Serial corruption – combined with malevolence, incompetence and arrogance – add up to a five-alarm National Emergency.

III. WHEN LAWMAKERS ARE LAWBREAKERS

When it comes to federal law enforcement, prior administrations would ask – what does a law require and is there probable cause to believe it’s been violated? Anyone surprised that a twice-impeached and convicted felon instead embraces two different tests – what can I get away with and how can I screw Democrats and enrich Republicans?

Dictator Don treats justice as a joke. But it’s not funny when cases against big corporate donors are dropped or pardoned. It’s not funny when prosecutions are fabricated to “name and shame” rivals, in the actual words of one top DOJ official. It’s not funny when you shout “Law & Order” while trying to create a police state suppressing 1st amendment rights. (When it comes to censorship and suppression, it’s hard to top Trump quoting Stalin when he calls The Media “enemies of the people.”)

Fortunately, we have an independent judiciary — Judge Aileen Cannon and the Thomas 6 occasionally to the contrary — that still largely refuses to enable their corruption. For in a record number of reversals, scores of federal judges – Democrat and Republican alike – have said “ENOUGH!”... stopping the desecration of the Kennedy Center, ending deportations without due process, shutting down Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz, rejecting efforts to throw out timely state mail-in ballots and not allowing this blond monarch to steal Congress’s power-of-the-purse. As Reagan-appointed Federal Judge Mark Wolf (District Court, Boston) put it shortly after his retirement, reflecting the scathing words of many peers, “What Nixon did occasionally and covertly, knowing it was illegal or improper, Trump now does routinely and overtly.”

Recent journalists and scholars - like Andrew Weissman, Carol Loennig, Barbara McQuade, Melissa Murray and Haberman/Swan – reveal an Administration resembling a crime syndicate run by a mob boss.

IV. LOST OPPORTUNITIES & DISASTROUS IMPACTS

By squandering time and effort on his obsessions with Greenland, windmills, showerheads and the Reflecting Pool – plus manic 40 tweet nights – Trump lacks enough hours in a day to fulfill his actual oath to “faithfully execute the law” and, worse, has no sense of consequence about the lethal impacts he daily inflicts.

*The head of his own Covid Task Force estimated that 300,000 to 700,000 Americans needlessly died due to #47’s pronouncement that it would miraculously “just disappear.”

*Musk’s chain-saw cuts to USAID, according to Lancet, will cause up to 2 million infant deaths in Africa and is now hampering our response to a dire outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

*Then there’s the voluminous incompetence, from an Education Secretary referring to A. I. as “A1” (like the steak sauce) to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turning algae green after a no-bid contract was given to a big donor to a war he lied himself into and is now trying to lie himself out of.

Voters want affordable health care and housing far more than bread and circuses on the White House lawn. Or to quote philosopher John McEnroe, “You Cannot be Serious!”

Opposing parties and candidates naturally end up considering each other awful. Ok. But America has never previously seen a POTUS called the “worst president” by an association of political scientists…and “mentally disturbed” in a public letter by 200 mental health experts due to their “duty to inform”... “the most flawed person” I ever met by Gen. John Kelly, his own chief-of-staff…and “fascist to the core” by his Joint Chiefs Chairman, Gen. Mark Milley.

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V. PRESCRIPTIONS FOR PROGRESS: Looking Up not Back

Yet the core strategy in the upcoming national elections is not merely Trump as an GOP albatross but especially the North Star of Progress -- that “no one’s smart enough to be a pessimist.”

That’s how the party of FDR, JFK, LBJ, Clinton, Obama were able to create Social Security, Unemployment Compensation, Medicare and Medicaid, the G.I. bill, Wagner Act, civil rights laws, cleaner air and water, safer workplaces, a two-thirds reduction in auto deaths per mile driven, the Americans with Disabilities Act and Freedom of Information Act.

So Democrats should again “throw our hat over the wall of space,” in President Kennedy’s metaphor, because real patriotism is not framed by stale Left-Right arguments but the difference between focusing on the past or the future.

Consider three big initial goals: Affordability & Economy, War & Diplomacy, Democracy & Law

*Affordability & Economy. The populist movement of the late 1890s was about “liberty and groceries.” Here we go again.

Republicans can pretend that reciting the word “deregulation” is a serious economic approach and that denying price hikes will fool people who shop…as declining Trump polls and GOP prospects.show.

It should surprise no one that Broligarchs were awarded the best seats at Trump’s indoor Inauguration since they bought his re-election fair-and square. But while Trumponomics is designed by fossil fools who focus on protecting the remaining 70,000 jobs in coal production (less than work nationwide for McDonalds), rival China is investing heavily in solar and last year installed more robots than the rest of the world combined.

Based on FDR’s classic insight in 1944 that “individual freedom cannot exist without economic security,” the next Administration and Congress should:

Increase both the federal minimum wage (static for 17 years) and Social Security payments to get closer to a living wage; restore Obamacare subsidies so millions don’t lose their health insurance; aggressively enforce antitrust law to outlaw monopolies; invest heavily in human capital in the dramatically shifting world economy; shrink gross income and wealth inequalities by enacting a tax code at least as progressive as the ones under Reagan and Obama, as well as by a small national billionaires net wealth tax.

Remember that the economy Biden turned over to Trump was “the envy of the world,” according to The Economist. Now it’s the worst of crony corporatism when three men have as much wealth as half of all American workers. Time to produce fewer trillionaires and more thousandaires.

*War & Diplomacy. The failure of Peace-through-Strength sloganeering is demonstrated by the tragic waste in Iran of at least $132 billion, according to Moody’s Analytics. It’s hard to see how energetic diplomacy could do worse. Obama certainly understood Churchill’s preference for “jaw jaw, not war war” when he negotiated his successful Iranian nuclear deal without killing 170 schoolchildren.

Instead, by announcing that he makes major foreign policy decisions “based on my gut” – perhaps like his tweet on Easter Sunday 2026, “Open the fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards!” – Trump has isolated America in an interconnected world where it’s good to have friends dealing with cross-border crises like wars, climate violence, unregulated AI and unstable world markets. Nor does it help to achieve peaceful results when the Department of State loses thousands of diplomats at the same time as failing to fill a third of ambassadorial posts.

And while we narrowly avoided Trump’s blood-thirsty threat of “civilizational annihilation,” that very utterance in an instant irreparably diminished respect for an America throughout the world built up over two centuries of good will as a “City on a Hill.”

Trump is increasingly resembling Orson Wells, embittered and alone in his palatial Xanadu at the end of Citizen Kane.

*Democracy & Law. Some political consultants have fretted that talking about how to repair our broken Democracy is too esoteric to sway voters. But that accepts the autocratic arrogance that they’re too stupid to ever see through Trump’s incessant gaslighting and lying.

Democrats instead believe that majority rule based on fair elections is the best path to better health, lower prices, less economic inequality and a cleaner climate. But that can’t happen with Citizens United legalizing bribery, gerry-mandering assuring minority rule, Pardons based on money not mercy, a weaponized DOJ run by AG Donald Trump, an Electoral College converting losers into winners and a reactionary SCOTUS inventing precedents like a Unitary Presidency and Originalism to return us to the 1700s monarchy we defeated.

(Indeed, It’s the excesses of today’s SCOTUS that require consideration even of term-limits or new justices to re-balance the Court so that a recidivist like Trump doesn’t corrupt it for another half century.)

Smart leaders understand the seminal issue for the next two years and two decades is not Capitalism or Democracy – free markets or state-run socialism – but that capitalism and democracy are two sides of the same coin of America. Each needs and reinforces the other. Capitalism without rules is theft and democracy without markets can be impoverishing.

* * *

The enduring obstacles above will require new long-term laws if not constitutional amendments to change, for good. Those in turn require not only new leaders but citizen activists like the heroes of Minneapolis and No Kings Days, as earlier labor, environmental and civil rights laws emerged from civic action. But there are two short-term exigencies that must be quickly dealt with by the 120th Congress and 48th President:

^first, defuse Trumpian time bombs set to go off, like prohibiting tax audits on the First Family for past tax transgressions, unloading the pharaonic Qatari ‘Air Force One’, clawing back billions in ill-begotten gains from Oval Office corruption. stopping or tearing down his monumental white elephants and evicting regulatory commissioners who are dismantling the very health/safety agencies they sit on.

^second, arrive at a unifying theme after the divide-and-conquer approach of Trumpism. “Progress” is one. Another was suggested by columnist Tom Friedman when he elevated the concept of “Brotherhood” as used in “America the Beautiful”… that is, an update of E Pluribus Unum.

^third, create a nonpartisan equivalent of Nelson Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to demand accountability for the damage done. MAGA liars who thought they could merely become the loyal opposition will have to learn that their disloyalty to our fundamental principles have disqualified them from assuming the comity of prior eras.

Such a Presidentially created entity would both plan how to prosecute or exile Trumpers who exonerated themselves and renounce obvious historical lies so that later administrations don’t use them to justify a repeat performance. In a spirit not of vengeance but justice, Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon need not apply. One slow-motion fascist coup in our last century is plenty.

No one is omniscient enough to know whether this clean-up and renewal will take years or even decades. But it has to start this Fall when millions of voters have the clearest choice in history — between Heritage Americans and Horizon Americans. Either we:

^endure more lying, hyperbole, corruption, racism, misogyny, homophobia, indecency, intolerance, political violence, death threats to judges…as well as purchased politicians, nasty narcissists, xenophobic nativists, science- and climate-denying theologians, and blood-and-soil authoritarians; or

^embrace the pursuit of a “more perfect union,” which is our foundational creed.

Happy Birthday America. The choice is ours.

# # #

This is Mark Green from our judicial Inflection Zone.

This past week’s Supreme Court decisions are a brutal reminder that America now is in the grip of two ironies that super-size each other.

One is an obsessed autocrat trying to overturn our Democracy on its 250th birthday. That’s alarming enough. The other is a High Court majority bent on issuing hyper-technical opinions to ignore lower courts and precedent to ratify a regime little better than the one we declared our independence from in 1776.

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How did we wind up for now with a progressive public majority in polls alongside a Court that might not uphold Brown v. Board if it re-appeared on its (Shadow) Docket?

The very unsatisying answer is -- Bad Luck.

So how do we escape it? It’ll take years of civic actions and elections to overturn the historic anomaly of MAGAats romping in the extreme, not the mainstream:

First, a stroll down memory lane and then tomorrow the horizon of a better future.

Looking back three decades, there were five moments in hindsight that together created a Thomas 6-3 Court rather than a Kagan 6-3 Court:

I. When Justice Thurgood Marshall was forced by illness to retire in June 1991, Bush41 was able to nominate and confirm Clarence Thomas…only seven months before Democrat Bill Clinton was sworn in as president. However, late allegations of sexual misconduct by Anita Hill, an assistant to Chairman Thomas at the EEOC, led Senate Judiciary Chairman Joe Biden to re-open hearings, a first since 1925.

But pressured by Republicans forcing a vote, Biden flinched, cutting short the few days needed for several witnesses to corroborate Hill. Thomas was confirmed 52-48.

2. In 2005, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor resigned her seat to take care of her ailing husband. That unexpected opening allowed Bush43 to name Samuel Alito.

3. In late October 2016, House Republicans demanded that FBI Director James Comey reopen a completed criminal probe of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over use of her husband’s email server.

When the new information proved inconsequential, Comey reiterated his exoneration two weeks later, just days before the November election.

According to NYTimes pollster Nate Silver, however, that delay allowed the issue of “but-her-emails” to dominate the closing week of the election and likely made the difference despite Clinton’s plurality of 2 percent or 2.9 million votes.

That of course allowed President Trump to later nominate Brett Kavanaugh 2018. But credible testimony by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford that he had sexually assaulted her while in college prompted the FBI to investigate the charge. Just a week later however and before many witnesses could testify, the Bureau – under instructions from the Trump White House – quickly cut the probe short. Kavanaugh was confirmed 50-48.

4. When Ruth Bader Ginsberg died in September 2020, most observers thought that Majority Leader McConnell couldn’t rush through Trump’s choice of Amy Comey Barrett in the weeks remaining of Bush’s term after refusing to even hold a confirmation hearing for eight months for Merrick Garland in Obama’s last year in office.

Obviously, the death or resignation of a justice can occur randomly. But the odds of ALL these developments -- Anita Hill, O’Connor, Christine Ford, Merrick Garland, RBG-Barrett -- all breaking in favor of the GOP was probably closer to 50-1.

Imagine flipping a coin, and six times in a row it came up heads.

Call it luck or politics, but it appears we’re now stuck with the most far-right Court since the late 1930s, if not the 1850s...one that said Black people couldn’t vote because of white supremacy.

Short of a nearly inconceivable impeachment of justices who obviously lied when testifying that Roe v. Wade was “settled law,” it appears likely that at least two of the six seats would have to become open in the next term or two, and under a Democratic President, to rebalance the Court.

Until then, this week’s Roberts Court was able to simply ignore the repeated racially hostile comments by Trump to pretend that his immigration decisions were not tainted by racism. (Speculation: anyone doubt that if Trump were recorded saying the “N-word”, Alito would have brushed that aside as, say, “locker room talk”?)

What do you think? Is this analysis merely ideological hindsight or is “luck” an infuriating though accurate conclusion? Are Democrats ready for the long haul of either Court reform or a changed lineup?

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Doesn’t JD Vance seem snake-bit this week and year?

His coverage and polls negative…perhaps because of his eyeliner/wobbly walk/smug persona? Or – to be blunt – his anti-immigrant-minority stance while being married to one?

It’s never easy being VP to a strong POTUS (see JFK-LBJ or LBJ-Humphrey). But being controlled by a pathological semi-human like Trump is a different dimension.

This week alone, Vance was exposed in the forthcoming Haberman/Swan book Regime Change as being on the losing side internally when he urged that all the Epstein files be released in one dump…that ICE invade Minneapolis under the Insurrection Act (for political and probably Impeachable reasons)…that the U.S. should not go to war against Iran.

All may have been the best policy conclusions in the long run but could expose him as a RINO in MAG-landia for ‘26 and ‘28.

Also, not a good look at all debating morality with Pope Leo the month his book on converting to Catholicism came out – Communion…or being permanently associated with the U.S. surrender to Iran when he runs for president.

FYI, here’s the NYTimes David Sanger on what J.D. has to publicly say as he tries to explain the on-again/off-again “deal” with Iran.

But then the Vice President said something that really did astonish me. He claimed that the ending of the Iranian nuclear program — all of this — has already been accomplished. In reality, none of it has been accomplished. The deal has fourteen paragraphs, and only one of them addresses the nuclear program. It covers just one of the four major nuclear issues. Further enrichment isn’t discussed, closing nuclear facilities isn’t discussed, and inspections isn’t discussed.

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Of course, LBJ’s years of misery changed in an instant on that November day in 1963.

So as for now, Trump obviously dominates the relationship but Vance has one big chip of leverage. While The Donald says he’s legally immune given “Article II” and the Supreme Court decision a year ago in Trump v. United States giving him presidential immunity for “core acts,” he will also want to pardon himself to be sure before departing.

For it’s probably 50-50 whether even this Supreme Court would allow such a self-dealing and unprecedented constitutional maneuver – also, it could narrowly define “core acts” as not including, say, tax fraud and incitement to an illegal Insurrection.

For all his humiliation so far, there are many more months to go before Vance settles on a persona for good…or bad. Most critics have remarked on his clumsy shape-shifting from a kid from Appalachia in his breakout book Hillbilly Elegy to calling Trump a “Hitler” to becoming a protege to the far-right hedge-fund billionaire and BFF to European neo-nazi groups.

Trump, of course, is definitely not a shape-shifter but a consistent though cunning blowhard when it comes to self-protection.…and won’t be able to ignore Vance’s potential power to possibly affect the last lap of his presidential Rollerball.

In this game of craps, he might want to place his chips on a January, 2029 resignation to allow for the gambit that Vance-Trump becomes a 21st Century version of Ford-Nixon so he spends his golden years in Mar-A-Lago and not a small prison cell.

Quien sabe? Fasten your seat-belts for the coming crash.

This is Mark Green from a very weird episode of The Inflection Zone.

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Remember Trump’s long-promised release of his “GREAT” health care plan, Melania’s immigration records and his tax returns? We’re still waiting, though few recall.

And remember when the late Robert Mueller sent his Special Counsel report on Russian election interference to then-Attorney General Bill Barr, as the law required, and Barr kept it hidden for a week while he monopolized spinning it into an exoneration of Trump-Russia coordination?

Well, he’s indulging he declaration of a “mission accomplished” while refusing to release details in the 60-Day Truce.

If a tennis player always hits a cross-court backhand when his rival is at the net, at some point the opponent will start cheating to his backhand side anticipating what’s coming.

But apparently, the national media feel obligated to act surprised every time Trump atatempts a backhand passing shot… or when he reaches into his bag of repeated rhetoric to win the point. Among other trick:

*he tosses up a big lie and then repeats it shamelessly;

*he cherry-picks one alleged Democratic example to prove they’re hypocrites… which may or may not be true but changes the subject;

*he distorts math or the path of a hurricane, to escape his weak position;

*he starts shouting insults at the opponent to throw off his concentration.

Well, there he goes again in the 6th year of his two presidential terms to evade admitting how he lost his war of aggression against Iran:

So this week, after 40 times announcing that he had won this war or a ceasefire was imminent, he announced one (didn’t we already have one?) that he’ll shortly release after he tries to monopolize the media about what’s supposedly in it.

Specifically, this week’s razzle-dazzle includes asserting that he never promised regime change when launching his war last February (he did)…repeatedly calling Iranians "lunatics" yet now says they were "nice...reasonable" after signing the MOU…and bragging that his unreleased deal was better than the one Obama obtained which the IAEA said was working to stop Iran’s nuclear program because independent monitors could engage in unannounced inspections.

Yet his 60-day agreement – or outline of the concepts of an agreement – includes no inspections, leaves its nuclear material in place as we pledge to pay Iran 10 times more than Obama did and does nothing ab out its nuclear program other than to announce that would be negotiated at a later date.

This is not Nobel Prize material. Or as SNL’s Emily Litella would say in the day, “Nev-er mind.”

MSNOW hosts and individual commentators like Tom Nichols and Ben Rhodes have done side-by-side comparisons of the two deals, but has any major network done that? Perhaps they’re too busy awaiting Melania’s papers, Donald’s Taxes or his great replacement for Obamacare.

Of course, yours truly cannot express to be shocked in a Substack called the “Inflection Zone” where, to quote the famous Rod Serling, “things are not what they appear to be.”

But even if a reporter has access to #47 to expose his double talk, The Donald quickly shouts “you’re stupid or corrupt” before launching into a soliloquy about windmills or his golf trophies.

To date, the only journalists who have picked his lock were Kristen Welker last Sunday on Meet the Press and occasionally CNN ‘s Kaitlin Collins or authors of books that defrock him, like best-sellers by Andrew Weissman, Carol Loennig, Barbara McQuade, Melissa Murray and shortly by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swain.

But have any of the major TV networks? And how many have clearly pointed out why it’s ridiculous to believe him this time?

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But let’s be fair. It’s not easy to accurately cover a predatory President when your job is to report what he says and does.

So do any of you have concrete suggestions on how the Mainstream Media could plausibly report and expose a pathological denier and liar… in a world where doing so risks violence from infuriated, armed Truers and prosecution from a DOJ engaged in vengeance not justice?

One idea could be for journalists to cover him every seven days and then simply repeat what he’s said before since his formula is so predictable. Ok, that’s unserious… but does anyone have a real suggestion how to deal with a distortion machine if, say, you owned ABC, AP or The New York Times?

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All readers (except for a few villagers in Peru) know about the historic Knick comeback this week in Game Four to beat the Spurs. Not all, however, will recall that Mike Bloomberg is now reprising his favored tactic of financing an advertising blitz to make sure his ex-aide, Assemblyman Micah Lasher, wins the Democratic primary to succeed retiring Jerry Nadler.

I rarely mention Bloomberg’s $74-to-$100-million war chest as a reason for his 50-48% win in our mayoral contest in 2001 since that’d be unsportsmanlike (and everyone else does).

But because the ex-mayor just put a second $5m into a super PAC to help Lasher prevail, allow me to admit that the imminent June 23 primary has become an itch that needs scratching.

• * * *

Jack Schlossberg, JFK’s only grandson and a social media phenomenon, narrowly led early polls in what became a three-person race — including him, Lasher and Assemblyman Alex Bores, an A.I. expert.

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After slightly leading in early polls, however, Schlossberg fell into third place for a couple of reasons: a chunk of Democrats and commentators resented a 33 year-old Kennedy competing against two local electeds (as Massachusetts voters questioned an even younger Ted Kennedy when he won a special election in 1962 to fill his brother’s Senate seat). And a devastating front page NYTimes article last month focused on his supposed goofiness as a social media influencer lacking candidate discipline.

Since that day, Schlossberg has fallen precipitously… to only 11% in the most recent poll against the two rivals in the low 20%s. This week, however, he’s attempting a comeback, deciding to spend some of his family inheritance to amplify his sunny charm and theme of “No-PAC-Jack.”

Is it too late or still possible to pull off a fourth quarter Brunson-OG comeback in the knick-of time?

Until the Miracle of 34th Street Wednesday night, teams ahead by 15 points or more in the last quarter of an NBA finals game won 93 straight times. Make that 93-1 now.

I can only think of one parallel in U.S. Senate history. In 2004, two Wisconsin Democrats with big name recognition and money were far ahead with two weeks to go... tied at about 40% against a lesser known state senator at just 10%. But when Russ Feingold played up his progressive chops, independence, funny ads and debating skills, he ended up winning with 70% of the vote. (Not a typo.)

Can the brainy, idealistic scion replicate that? Depends on three variables:

*first, can he display the content and energy of his most recent debate on NY1 to dominate the final ones?

*second, will voters be resentful when Bloomberg again spends an astonishing amount but this time to help purchase a seat for someone else, risking an insider-outsider divide in a year of public antipathy to politics-as-usual?

*third, will the bellwether NYTimes -- both located within the district and universally read there — continue to disparage or ignore the big name contender? (Recall its obsession with “but-her-emails” in 2016 and focus on Biden’s age and performance in 2024. Or will they now do even-handed analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of the top candidates?

Voters in the lower 49 should care about this one in a county with about the most educated and wealthy electorate in the U.S., home to major media empires, law firms and financial giants. Will Democrats be swayed by the traditional playbook of “Money Shouts!” or elevate the candidate with the potential to be a major national voice for the post-Trump America?

Past-Future? The NYTimes or Instagram? Bloomberg-Feingold? Let’s humbly appreciate that the finl lap in manyelections is like Olympic speed skating – for seven turns the field seems stuck in place…and then, with a last frantic sprint, some contenders fall, others get elbowed out as one lunges to win by .01 seconds.

As a lifelong New Yorker and recovering politician, I urge all our readers and viewers in the 12th Congressional Distric to turn out to vote for our shared City, Country and Future.

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