<[Event "21st World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1993.07.04"]
[EventDate "1993"]
[Round "6"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Krant, Roman"]
[Black "Baumbach, Fritz"]
[ECO "A07"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<Over forty years after its release, Bruce Springsteen’s seminal 1982 album “Nebraska” continues to feel prescient and powerful. Long beloved by music critics and Springsteen devotees, the record has seen a resurgence with director Scott Cooper’s recent biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,” which explores the singer’s spiritual pain and struggle with depression while he was making “Nebraska.”

With stark songs about a mournful and lost working class serving a broken American dream accompanied by despair and violence, “Nebraska” could serve as a soundtrack to our age of Trump — and to the country’s long-unresolved demons that brought the American people to this great nadir.

Like the desperate characters that populate “Nebraska,” tens of millions of Americans are being told, once again, that their hunger is a private failure, not a public betrayal. The scene is starkly similar to what Springsteen wrote about in one of the album’s most powerful songs — where children play outside “steel gates that completely surround, sir / the mansion on the hill.”

Over the weekend, more than 42 million Americans did not receive their Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Tens of millions of children, the elderly, disabled and other vulnerable people now face a brutal fact: They don’t have enough to eat.

The death of the American Dream birthed Trumpism

With the lapse in funding pending on Friday, two federal judges in Massachusetts and Rhode Island had quickly ruled that halting SNAP benefits was illegal and ordered the Trump administration to resume payments. In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration would not appeal the ruling, noting that benefits could be restored as early as Wednesday.

“If we are given the appropriate legal direction by the Court, it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding, just like I did with Military and Law Enforcement Pay,” President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post.

Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr., who had issued the Rhode Island decision, praised Trump for appearing to act swiftly: “The Court greatly appreciates the President’s quick and definitive response to this Court’s Order and his desire to provide the necessary SNAP funding.”

On Monday, though, the administration revealed in court filings that it would only be sending partial payments to SNAP recipients. According to the New York Times, it wasn’t evident when families and individuals would receive the funds. I wonder if Judge McConnell will be very happy with the president by the end of this week.

“Food insecurity” is the sterile term used by policy experts to describe hunger in America. In truth, it means fear, pain and not knowing where the next meal will come from.

“Food insecurity” is the sterile term used by policy experts to describe hunger in America. In truth, it means fear, pain and not knowing where the next meal will come from. It means a scene like the one I witnessed last week in a Chicago supermarket.

An elderly woman handed her SNAP card to the cashier to pay for a small amount of food — no more than a dozen items. She laughed and said, “I’d better use what little money I have left before it runs out on Saturday.”

Gallows humor; the fear showed in her voice. The cashier, who in all likelihood does not make a living wage working at this supermarket, took the SNAP card and smiled. Then she too let out a small laugh. I imagine this young woman was also scared. Because like millions of other supermarket employees across the country, she knew she wouldn’t be receiving her benefits either. Two Black women, trauma bonding across the generations, because they wouldn’t be able to buy food in a few days.

Poverty and hunger are forms of structural violence that stunt lives, limit upward social mobility and raise the odds that a hungry child will one day end up in prison. They cause a range of physical, emotional and psychological harm, including shortened lives and death.

Poverty is a public policy choice. As sociologist Matthew Desmond said in a 2023 interview with Ezra Klein of the New York Times, “[P]overty is not just a line. It’s not just an income level. Poverty is often pain and sickness.”

What was most powerful about Desmond’s description of endemic poverty is the specific language, images and emotions he used to conjure it. “It’s living in degraded housing. It’s the fear of eviction. It is eviction and the homelessness. It’s getting roughed up by the police sometimes. It’s schools that are just bursting at the seams. It’s neighborhoods where everyone around you is also struggling.”....>

<....Then he got especially real. “It’s death,” he said. “It’s this tight knot of agonies, and humiliations, and social problems, and this is experienced by millions of us in the richest country in the history of the world.”

By Desmond’s estimate, it would take only $177 billion a year – less than one percent of the GDP – to functionally eliminate poverty in America. By comparison, America’s official national defense budget is more than a trillion dollars a year.

Beneath the fact of poverty in America lies something even more ominous: the ideology of necropolitics.

In necropolitics, governance is primarily viewed through a Social Darwinist lens of survival of the fittest, violence and social control, where certain populations and groups are deemed disposable by the punitive and punishing state.

The attempts to cut off SNAP benefits and other assistance for marginalized and vulnerable people, along with an historic government shutdown that is causing economic misery for millions, reinforce how necropolitics is the dominant strain of Trump’s political ideology.

The evidence is painfully, abundantly clear. Public health experts estimate that Trump and his Republican Party’s “Big Vile Bill” will cause at least 50,000 unnecessary deaths in the United States each year. Research published in prestigious health and medical journals, such as the JAMA Internal Medicine and The Lancet, have estimated that policies supported and enacted by Republicans have shortened the lives of the American people; a 2022 study conclusively showed that these policies cost more than 200,000 lives each year in the United States. By comparison, policies supported by Democrats would save almost the same number of lives.

Necropolitics is a unifying theme throughout the right’s messaging, symbolism and propaganda as shown by their threats against “the enemy within,” the “poison” in the “blood of the nation,” and online images and videos where Trump, for example, has been depicted as a Dark Jedi from “Star Wars,” a mafia boss and a vanquishing God-king.

Along with traditional conservatives, Democrats — and more broadly, the left — often have a difficult time understanding, nevermind accepting, that MAGA is animated by necropolitics and a general disregard for the common good and universal human rights that are foundational for democracy and a humane society.

But this is the bleak reality of the Trumpian Gilded Age, in which the Agriculture Department’s website for information about SNAP benefits announces “the well has run dry.” But it hasn’t.

Springsteen saw this 40 years ago. The well, he knew, was overflowing, just as it has always been for America’s most rich and the powerful.>

<MAGA did not follow Donald Trump’s lead in remaining silent about the passing of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Per statutory law, White House flags were lowered to half-staff on Nov. 4 when the news broke, but the president chose not to publicly reflect on the father of his political opponent.

Instead, supporters of the MAGA leader turned the heat on Cheney’s daughter, former Republican Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney.

Cheney served two terms in office with President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009. He succumbed to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease on Nov. 3. He was 84 years old.

Instead of putting political differences aside, Trump supporters resorted to spreading messages riddled with vitriol and scrutiny of the polarizing neo-conservative and his complicated political legacy instead of expressing support to Cheney’s loved ones.

His daughter, in particular, has taken a public lashing from critics.

One X user tweeted, “Dick is dead. Cheney, the war hawk and Kamala supporter leaves behind a legacy of disgrace.” A second user wrote, “Dick Cheney passed away. While a smart tactician, he spawned Liz Cheney and for that we know who will wait for him,” with a gif of the devil.

“Dick Cheney just died. Good riddance. He could have joined Liz Cheney and pressured George W. Bush to condemn Trump. He is useless,” read a third reaction on the social app.

Liz Cheney, one of Dick Cheney’s two daughters, was particularly critical of Trump. During the 2024 presidential race, she endorsed Kamala Harris. Recalling the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, she said that Trump “could never be trusted with power again.”

She continued, “There is not an ounce…of compassion in Donald Trump. He is petty. He is vindictive. And he is cruel.” Liz voted to impeach him in connection with the attempted coup in Washington, D.C.

Her father issued blistering words about his party member in a 2022 ad supporting her congressional re-election in a race she lost to a candidate put forward by the Trump machine. The former VP called Trump a threat to the republic who tried to steal the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden. “He’s a coward,” said Dick. Like his daughter, he publicly endorsed Harris for president.

“Trump hasn’t even said anything lm*ao,” wrote one X user, to which another replied, “He’ll probably just tweet something about liz cheney being sad in a couple hours, then deny a state funeral.”

The MAGA uproar was met with backlash, including from those who did not support Dick Cheney’s policy positions as an architect of the Iraq War and that era’s “war on terror” overreaches. “I disagreed with many things Dick Cheney stood for, but I stand in sympathy for his family,” wrote a commenter on The Daily Beast site.

Another individual echoed, “This MAGA hatred is totally unacceptable and dangerous. Shame on those rejoicing over the [passing] of anyone.”

“MAGA reaffirms its toxic roots, representing the dregs of society and everything wrong with it,” said one person on IG Threads.

Among the discourse was a comment that read, “What about Charlie Kirk? Didn’t they all call us monsters for not caring????? these people are so inconsistent and full of fake outrage.”

A third individual joked, “Trump is jealous of Dick Cheney getting more press than him this morning.”

In the end, the reaction to Dick Cheney’s passing exposed just how fractured and vindictive MAGA politics have become. Instead of empathy, many doubled down on hate, proving that loyalty now trumps decency — and compassion has no place in the movement’s playbook.>

<With an approval rating under 40%, Trump spent the day panic-tweeting to suggest the elections are “rigged,” just as he did in 2020. He posted that should New York City voters choose Democrat Zohran Mamdani as mayor, “[i]t is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home.”

California voters were considering Proposition 50, which would redistrict the state to add five more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 to counteract Texas’s unusual mid-cycle redistricting that adds additional Republican-dominated districts. Although Trump pushed Texas’s initiation of this partisan redistricting, he seemed surprised that Democrats were retaliating. Today he posted: “The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED. All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED.”

Mail-in voting does not shut out Republicans. It makes voting accessible. Asked about Trump’s statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters today: “It’s absolutely true that…there’s fraud in California’s elections. It’s just a fact.” The fact is, there is no evidence of any such thing, but Republicans are so eager to stop the measure that one right-wing donor alone spent more than $30 million on the effort.

It seems likely that the administration was preparing to declare a vote in favor of Proposition 50 fraudulent.

Tonight the results came in. American voters have spoken.

Democrat Abigail Spanberger won the governorship of Virginia by 15 points, becoming Virginia’s first female governor. Every single county in Virginia moved toward the Democrats, who appear to have picked up at least 12 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the governorship of New Jersey by more than ten points (the vote counts are still coming in as I write this).

Pennsylvania voted to retain three state supreme court justices, preserving a 5–2 liberal majority on the court. Democrats in Georgia flipped two statewide seats for public service commissioners by double digits. Mississippi broke the Republican supermajority in the state senate.

Maine voters rejected an attempt to restrict mail-in voting; Colorado voters chose to raise taxes on households with incomes over $300,000 to pay for meals for public school students.

California voters approved Proposition 50 by a margin of about 2 to 1, making it hard for Trump to maintain the vote was illegitimate.

And in New York City, voters elected Zohran Mamdani mayor.

Tonight, legal scholar John Pfaff wrote: “Every race. It’s basically been every race. Governors. Mayors. Long-held [Republican] dog-catchers. School boards. Water boards. Flipped a dungeon master in a rural Iowa D&D club. State senators. State reps. A janitor in Duluth. State justices. Three [Republican] Uber drivers. Just everything.”

Trump posted on social media: “‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters.”

<Appearing unmoved by voters’ message and showing no sign of changing course, President Donald Trump brushed off Democrats’ sweeping wins in Tuesday’s elections during a Wednesday White House breakfast for Republican senators, where he compared Democrats to World War II Japanese suicide bombers.

“I heard it after ‘Kings,’ you know, they said I was a king, and I heard it after ‘Kings,'” he said, referring to last month’s highly attended nationwide “No Kings” rallies and protests. “I heard it after a couple of other moments in time. And I said, ‘No, I don’t believe so.’ And now I heard it after the election. Don’t believe so.”

“I think they will, I think they’re kamikaze pilots,” Trump continued. “I just got back from Japan. I talked about the kamikaze pilots. I think these guys are kamikazes. They’ll take down the country if they have to.”

The President, his tone weary, repeated his pre-election call to end the Senate filibuster.

“It’s time for Republicans to do what they have to do, and that’s terminate the filibuster,” Trump told the Republican senators, who did not appear to react. “The only way you can do it.”

“And if you don’t terminate the filibuster, you’ll be in bad shape,” he warned, appearing concerned about the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election.

“We won’t pass any legislation. There’ll be no legislation passed for three and a quarter — we have three and a quarter years, so that’s a long time.”

The President urged Republicans, who hold majorities in both the House and the Senate to “do our own bills. We should get out, we should do our own bills.”

“Should open up” the country, he said, of ending the shutdown, now the longest in U.S. history. “We should start tonight with ‘the country’s open. Congratulations.’ Then we should pass voter ID. We should pass no mail-in voting. We should pass all the things that we wanted to pass, make our elections secure and safe, because California is a disaster. Many of the states are disasters.”

“But can you imagine,” he asked, “when they vote almost unanimously against voter ID?” he said of the Democrats.

“All we want is voter ID. You go to a grocery store, you have to give ID. You go to a gas station, you give ID,” he said, incorrectly.

“But for voting, they want no voter IDs. So, for one reason, because they cheat. We would pass that in 15 minutes. If you don’t get it, you’ll never pass that. You’ll never talk about mail-in ballots. Mail-in ballots make it automatically corrupt,” he alleged, a statement contradicted by numerous studies showing minimal fraud.

Trump again stressed the importance of killing the filibuster, telling Republicans that Democrats are going to “pack” the Supreme Court, “they’re going to make D.C. a state and they’re gonna make Puerto Rico a state. So now they pick up two states, they pick up four senators.”

“They’re gonna pick up electoral votes. It’s gonna be a very, very bad situation.”

But, he said, “if we do what I’m saying,” Democrats will “most likely never obtain power.”

Trump did acknowledge that the federal government shutdown was a factor in Tuesday’s elections — while claiming because he wasn’t on the ballot, Republicans lost.

“I thought we’d have a discussion after the press leaves about what last night represented,” he said. “And what we should do about it, and also about the shutdown, how that relates to last night. I think if you read the pollsters, the shutdown was a big factor, negative for the Republicans. And that was a big factor, and they say that I wasn’t on the ballot, was the biggest factor. But I don’t know about that, but I was honored that they said that.”>

This heah boy is f***ing delusional.

<The most important takeaway from Tuesday night’s elections — the one that has real implications for 2026 and 2028 — is that Democrats won everywhere, in many cases improving their 2024 performance by striking margins.

Democratic candidates didn’t just win the highest-profile races in Virginia, New Jersey and New York, but they also won judicial retention elections in Pennsylvania and a variety of down-ballot races. They even picked up seats in the Mississippi Legislature — which cost Republicans their supermajority — and ousted two Republican incumbents on the Georgia commission that regulates utilities.

More moderate Democrats, more progressive Democrats, Democrats who were well-known and Democrats who weren’t, Democrats who ran explicitly against Donald Trump and those who barely mentioned him — they all did great.

Nonetheless, Speaker Mike Johnson insisted Wednesday that the GOP couldn’t be healthier. “I don’t think the loss last night was any reflection about Republicans at all,” he said. Johnson couldn’t be more wrong, not only because in today’s GOP where loyalty to Trump is absolute, every Republican everywhere is an avatar for the president — which is not something candidates want to be right now — but because of the overwhelming power of opposition to the status quo.

When we see a string of wins like the one Democrats put together Tuesday, we can’t attribute it to clever strategy, blistering attack ads or even attribute it to the skills of the candidates they nominated — but to widespread opposition to the party in charge of the country.

Look at the two governor’s races. It appeared that the race in New Jersey was much closer than the one in Virginia, and many people who thought it was closer believed that Democrats had a much stronger candidate in Virginia than New Jersey and that Republicans had a much stronger candidate in New Jersey than they did in Virginia. The thinking was that Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger was more appealing than the more low-key Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, while Republican Winsome Earle-Sears was more polarizing than her New Jersey counterpart Jack Ciattarelli.

But in the end, the results were almost identical: Spanberger won with 57% of the vote, and Sherrill won with 56%. Such a uniform outcome suggests deep factors at work that transcended individual candidates.

The first factor, of course, is Donald Trump. Off-year elections favor the opposition party, largely because those who are angry at the president are more likely to turn out as a way to express their displeasure, and anger is the most powerful motivator in politics.

When Trump is in office, the anger gets cranked up as far as it can go. The first year of his second term has been chaos, with his army of thugs terrorizing people in cities, erratic tariffs dragging down the economy, brutal cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and the evisceration of the federal government. Every Democrat benefited from the displeasure Trump produced, whether they campaigned on opposing him or not.

Even more fundamentally, there is a profound dissatisfaction blanketing the country. Trump may have made it worse, but it was there before he came along — and it’s exactly why he became president twice.

In 2024, “inflation” was the name we put to that dissatisfaction, even though the inflation that peaked in 2022 had largely subsided. Now we refer to “cost of living” or “affordability,” which are very real problems, but only part of a bigger picture.

People still say their groceries are too expensive, housing is unaffordable for all but the wealthy in much of the country and many young people see home ownership as unattainable. Health insurance costs are rising.

But the dissatisfaction is still bigger than that. We’ve seen a decadeslong decline in trust in institutions, internet-driven social fragmentation, the failure of neoliberal economics to satisfy people’s material needs and a calcified legislative system that is perpetually unable to solve problems. The result is an electorate perpetually eager to get rid of whoever is in office in favor of anyone who promises something different.

It’s been this way for a while. There have been five presidential elections and five midterm elections over the past two decades. And in nine of those 10 elections (2012 was the exception), voters chose to throw the bums out, giving either the White House or one or both houses of Congress to the opposition party. We are in an era in which every election is a change election, and the party that represents change is probably going to win....>

<....That’s why it’s so wrong-headed to assume that what happens in one election represents any kind of lasting reconfiguration of the electorate. How many think pieces did we read a year ago about how Trump had fundamentally remade the GOP coalition, in part by convincing Latinos to become Republican? No one is saying that after Tuesday. Consider, for example, New Jersey’s Passaic County, which is 45% Latino. In 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump there by 16.5 points. But then it swung dramatically to the right in 2024, with Trump beating Kamala Harris by 3 points.

On Tuesday, the Democrat Sherrill beat the Republican Ciattarelli in Passaic by 15 points, reverting it back almost exactly to where it was five years ago.

It would be foolish in the extreme to believe that voters were responding to subtle alterations in policy platforms or the success of one government program or another. But that doesn’t mean that elections are predetermined. Zohran Mamdani, who was elected mayor of New York City on Tuesday, may have been fighting a mostly intraparty battle, but his relentless focus on affordability and his infectious enthusiasm placed him in a position to overcome a corrupt establishment. If voters are unhappy — and they almost always are — showing that you understand their displeasure and offering the possibility of something better can make the difference, especially when races are close.

The big picture is this: Candidates can ride the tide, try to swim against it, or just lay there and hope it carries them in. But the tide matters more than anything. Next year and in 2028, Democrats will have the tide on their side.

As for Republicans, as long as they’re in power, they’re trapped — by the unpopularity of the president they slavishly serve and the limited appeal of their program. The country is not clamoring for more upper-end tax cuts and restrictions on abortion rights, and the GOP can’t pretend to be rebels fighting the power.

Voter anger put them in charge, and it will probably yank them right out again.>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j14...

<Federal workers recently scored a win in court over President Donald Trump's administration over political language inserted in their email auto-responses without their consent.

Politico reported Friday that U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper (an appointee of former President Barack Obama) ruled in favor of a union representing federal workers to strike what he called "partisan messages" from Department of Education (Ed) employees' out-of-office messages. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) successfully argued that the messages violated workers' First Amendment rights.

"The Trump-Vance administration’s use of official government resources to spread partisan messaging using employees’ email was an unprecedented violation of the First Amendment, and the court’s ruling makes clear that even this administration is not above the law," AFGE national president Everett Kelley stated after the decision was handed down.

In his 36-page ruling, Cooper ruled that the messages that were inserted into Ed employees' auto-replies — which explicitly blamed Democrats for the ongoing government shutdown — were illegal.

"Nonpartisanship is the bedrock of the federal civil service; it ensures that career government employees serve the public, not the politicians," Cooper wrote. "But by commandeering its employees’ e-mail accounts to broadcast partisan messages, the Department chisels away at that foundation."

"Political officials are free to blame whomever they wish for the shutdown, but they cannot use rank-and-file civil servants as their unwilling spokespeople," he added. "The First Amendment stands in their way. The Department’s conduct therefore must cease."

According to the AFGE's lawsuit, Ed workers had initially provided anodyne out-of-office messages ahead of the shutdown, which were soon replaced with Trump administration's talking points: "Unfortunately, Democrat Senators are blocking passage of H.R. 5371 in the Senate which has led to a lapse in appropriations."

"None of us consented to this. And it’s written in the first-person, as if I’m the one conveying this message, and I’m not," one worker told NBC at the time. "I don’t agree with it. I don’t think it’s ethical or legal. I think it violates the Hatch Act.">

<When corruption becomes endemic, democracy dies from the inside out. The Trump family’s grift is teaching America’s elites that power can be bought, just as it is in Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary, and it’s already distorting our economy.

When I was working for an international relief agency in the early 1980s, I went to Uganda during the war and famine that began when Tanzanian troops invaded to throw out Idi Amin. To get there, I had to pay a $50 bribe to the Ugandan official at their embassy in Nairobi to get my visa.

When I was leaving through the half-destroyed Entebbe airport, three soldiers pointed their automatic weapons at my face and demanded “half” of whatever money I had left before letting me through to the boarding area.

In Haiti, a cabinet-level official tried to solicit a $15,000 bribe from me in exchange for our agency getting permission to operate there (I turned it down). In a remote part of Mexico on a business trip, a police officer drove me off the road to demand $100 or else I’d “spend the night in jail.”

They were all quick, unforgettable lessons in how corruption works: when it becomes the default operating system of a country, it drains not only cash and makes it tough for honest businesspeople to earn a living, but — far more importantly — destroys democracy itself.

That same poison is now spreading here.

The corruption of Donald Trump and his children — the open solicitation of bribes disguised as “investments,” the jet plane, the crypto windfalls, the foreign hotel projects and “licensing fees,” the “donations” and “gifts” that appear tied to pardons, tariffs or regulatory relief — have begun to teach America’s morbidly rich and business leaders that access to our government is now a purchasable commodity.

Remember:

When Apple’s Tim Cook brought a chunk of 24-karat gold to gift Trump, apparently hoping for tariff exceptions?

The long list of corporations that are paying for the Epstein Ballroom, presumably in expectation of better treatment from the Trump regime?

The billions the UAE gave Trump’s kids just before Trump gave them chips they weren’t supposed to have because of national security?

Border czar Tom Homan taking $50,000 in a paper bag from an FBI agent and Trump, Bondi, and Noem laughing it off?

Or headlines like “Close Friend of JD Vance Skirts Normal Channels to Take Over Key Health Research” and “$130M Pentagon Donor Has Ties to Jeffrey Epstein.”

Once that expectation of corruption takes hold, it reshapes an entire economy. It tells corporations, billionaires, and foreign governments alike that the fastest way to win contracts or avoid tariffs and other regulations isn’t through innovation or competition but through flattery, payment, or tribute to Donald, his wife, or his children.

This is exactly what happened in Trump’s role models of Russia and Hungary.

In Russia, researchers estimate roughly 15 to 20 percent of the nation’s entire GDP vanishes each year into the pockets of Vladimir Putin, his oligarchs, and loyal politicians; some analysts put it even higher, approaching a quarter of the economy when you include the broader shadow sector.

In Hungary, corruption is smaller in absolute size but just as corrosive: public contracts are routinely overpriced by 20 percent or more, and a fifth of companies operate not on market principles but on loyalty to Viktor Orbán. The result is predictable: stagnant productivity, collapsing services, and a hollowed-out middle class as the Orbán family becomes fabulously rich.

Corruption functions like a tax, but one that never funds schools or bridges. It rewards obedience and punishes competence. Once leaders and their families start selling favors, the smart business move isn’t to innovate but to curry favor; the fastest path to profit is proximity to power.

Small businesses get crushed because they can’t afford the “entry fee.” Big ones stagnate because every decision runs through political connections. Ordinary people watch their roads crumble, their wages flatten, and their faith in fairness evaporate. The economy quietly re-optimizes itself around bribery instead of merit, and everyone — except the oligarchs — pays.

That’s where America is today. Trump has already normalized the spectacle of CEOs and foreign leaders making pilgrimages to the White House or Mar-a-Lago with million-dollar checks or lavish gifts. His family’s private ventures, from crypto to foreign hotels to golf resorts, are magnets for anyone seeking goodwill from the man with the power to sign their contracts or reduce their tariffs.

And with five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court having legalized unlimited political bribery of themselves and politicians through Buckley v. Valeo, First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, and Citizens United v. FEC, there’s barely a law left to stop it....>

<....We’ve seen this movie before. In every kleptocracy, every dictatorship throughout history, the leader’s personal enrichment becomes national policy. Regulators are neutered, watchdogs are fired, and the press is bullied into silence through lawsuits, regulation, and oligarchic purchase.

Then come the strong-arm tactics: the intimidation of lawyers, journalists, and opponents under the guise of “law and order.” It’s what Putin did when Alexei Navalny exposed Gazprom’s graft and paid with his life; it’s what Orbán did when he had critics of his corruption prosecuted and bankrupted.

And now, here, attorneys defending protesters are being detained at airports while Trump suspends enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act so he, his billionaire buddies, and his family members can profit from foreign deals.

Corruption doesn’t just rot morality; it wrecks economies. When a nation’s leadership is for sale, domestic and foreign corporations start bidding instead of building.

Economists call it “state capture”: private interests rewriting the rules for their own benefit. Studies from the IMF and World Bank show that captured states lose growth, investment, and trust, while inequality soars. In Russia’s case, that loss adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars every year. In Hungary’s, GDP per capita has fallen far behind its once-equal neighbors.

The same dynamic is taking shape here as tax breaks, tariffs, and deregulation are auctioned off to the highest bidders.

For most Americans, this translates into worse schools, fewer jobs, and higher prices. Every time a corporation pays a bribe to secure a contract, it folds that “cost of doing business” into what you and I pay at the store or in taxes. Every time a billionaire buys a loophole or a pardon, the rest of us pick up the tab.

Meanwhile, the honest business owner who refuses to play along loses bids, the worker loses bargaining power, and democracy itself loses credibility. The economy becomes a closed club, guarded by money, loyalty, and fear.

Recovering from this kind of rot isn’t easy, but history shows it can be done.

Countries that have clawed their way back from systemic corruption did it by prosecuting openly corrupt leaders while making the sale of influence difficult and dangerous: forcing transparency in contracts, requiring officials to divest from private holdings, empowering independent prosecutors, protecting whistleblowers, and putting every government transaction online where citizens can see it.

The sunlight approach works because it raises the cost of corruption higher than its payoff.

That’s the crossroads we face now. We can follow Russia and Hungary down the path where 15 to 20 percent of national wealth disappears into private hands each year, or we can defend the idea that government exists to serve the public, not enrich the Trump dynasty.

If we fail, America will cease to be a democracy in any meaningful sense. We’ll become a market; one where laws, tariffs, and justice are just products to be bought and sold by those with the closest access to Trump or his family members.

I’ve seen what that world looks like up close, staring down the barrel of a soldier’s rifle at Entebbe Airport. The stakes aren’t abstract. Corruption is the moment when fear replaces fairness, when power replaces principle, and when Americans become “customers” of their own government instead of citizens.

If we let Trump and his circle finish that transformation, America won’t just resemble Putin’s Russia, it will have become just another tinpot dictatorship with a fabulously rich “royal” entourage and a vast class of the struggling, working poor who can’t afford to spiff the First Family.>

<There’s a narrative that Democrats are adrift or, at the very minimum, bereft of obvious leaders. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries aren’t very popular, and none of the 2028 contenders seem, outside of redistricting brawler Gavin Newsom, to stir the blood all that much. Yet after Tuesday night, there’s much for Democrats to celebrate. Virtually every election result, from New Jersey to Virginia to Georgia to California, was exceedingly good for them. Every faction of the party could exult in the outcomes: Leftists got their new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and moderates spiked the football over the ascensions of Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger. Virtually all Democrats were thrilled that Proposition 50 passed in California, allowing Newsom to oversee a Democratic gerrymander that can counter the Texas GOP’s. There are plenty of similarities between 2025 and 2017, another strong off-year for Democrats that foreshadowed the blue wave of 2018.

The greater reality, which even chest-thumping Democrats may not want to acknowledge just yet, is that MAGA is in twilight. In the days before his inauguration, Donald Trump was actually liked by a majority of Americans. He had won a popular-vote election, and voters were largely disillusioned with all the Democrats had to offer, whether it was Joe Biden slipping into senility or milquetoast Kamala Harris. While MAGA will never quite believe it, they will probably never have it as good again as they did in January 2025. Americans had given Trump a second chance. Enough of them earnestly believed he was going to address the cost-of-living crisis and begin to make their lives better.

As disorienting and terrifying and overwhelming as second term Trump has been, the elections on Tuesday demonstrated the fundamental — and likely unfixable — flaw of the entire MAGA movement. It revolves fully around Trump and can only thrive if he sits at the top of the ticket. And since it is so deeply tied to one man, his failures undercut whatever populist realignment they believed was possible at the close of 2024. Today, Trump is unpopular, with most polls showing a significant dip since the start of the year. During his first term as president, and again as a candidate over the last several years, he was a trusted voice on the economy because he was a businessman who once presided, through luck, over an era of low inflation. That economic edge is now gone. The tariff regime is alienating, housing and grocery prices remain stubbornly high, and Trump has given little indication he cares about — or can focus on — this affordability problem. Americans wanted a tighter border, not marauding, maniacal ICE agents in their streets, and almost no one asked for DOGE, National Guard invasions, or furious crackdowns on free speech. Again and again, Trump and his most vicious cronies, including Stephen Miller, have tried to manufacture crises to justify all of this gross federal overreach....>

<....It’s obvious enough that most Americans aren’t buying it. They’re sick of Trump and weary of what MAGA stands for. And for the many rank-and-file Republicans who have hitched their wagons to Trump over the last decade, a new reality is settling in: Trump, in fact, isn’t eternal. It’s always possible that Trump, in his 80s, decides to violate the Constitution and seek a third term, but that seems to be growing more unlikely, if Trump’s own public pronouncements are to be believed. For younger Republicans, there is very much life after Trump, and they’re going to have to start contemplating it — especially as the Supreme Court readies to potentially invalidate his tariffs and the odds of Democrats storming to a House majority in 2027 keep increasing. Republicans are still favored to hold the Senate, and Trump will be the most powerful man in the world for another three years. But no matter who his successor is — J.D. Vance is most likely, followed by Marco Rubio — none of them are him. Trump’s charisma fused the disparate factions of MAGA and kept a great deal of peace within the Republican tent. When he exits the scene, there will be a bloody contest for the future of the movement and the Republican Party itself.

Still in full control of the federal government for at least another year, Trump and his MAGA allies can exert themselves plenty. They can keep bullying Democrat-run cities, harassing college students, and terrorizing immigrants. They can indulge their autocratic fantasies. What they can’t do is force Americans to like any of it. The old fascist regimes, or even the Bush-Cheney post-9/11 regency, had — at least in the beginning — a great deal of popular buy-in. The masses collectively yearned for that style of punishing leadership. Trump won a popular vote by less than two points and has governed like he was delivered a far greater mandate. He squandered whatever goodwill he had with the public, and MAGA’s future is now much murkier than it was a year ago.

The final dark question is how Trump will exit the scene. Scenarios of an illegal presidential run or an attempted seizure of power must be entertained, as well as the possibility of Vance, or another Republican, trying to steal an election in the event of a loss. As unlikely as it is, Trump could try to declare martial law and somehow cancel elections. With him, everything is on the table. The saving grace, in the end, might be federalism — it’s the states and counties that control election apparatuses, not the president — and MAGA’s deficit of competence. Full-blown autocracy is very hard to implement. As the days tick down in 2025, Trump may be finally understanding this.>