Hmm ... National Socialism ... didn't some country try that in the 1930s? Germany, wasn't it?
Click here for Robert Reich's Substack article for July 15, 2026, entitled "Trump's National Socialism." It tells how Trump has been coercing companies to grant the U.S. government shares in the company in return for needed federal grants -- the federal government is now Intel's largest single shareholder.
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's Substack entry for July 1, 2026. It reports on Trump's corrupt receipt of the $400 million jet from Qatar; the $500 million no-bid contract for Trump's ballroom; Trump and Howard Lutnick's deal for securing from the president of Kazakhstan access to one of the largest untapped reserves of tungsten in the world for an obscure U.S. company, Kaz Resources, and the involvement of "an investment firm partly owned by Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric
took a 20% stake in a corporate entity related to the project, and the
investment firm run by Lutnick’s sons Brandon and Kyle, Cantor
Fitzgerald, helped to raise $210 million for a related entity, likely
pocketing millions in fees."
She reports that there are "at least fourteen companies with ties to the Trumps and Lutnicks
that are working with the federal government on mining deals for
materials on which the U.S. depends. The administration has either
provided or is considering providing more than $8.9 billion in taxpayer
money to those companies."Trump has done pretty well in cryptocurrency since his election:
Yesterday a federal filing showed that Trump took in about $1.4
billion from cryptocurrency ventures last year. Bernard Condon of the
Associated Press reports that Trump made more than $500 million from the
World Liberty Financial venture with his sons and Zach Witkoff, who is
the venture’s chief executive officer and the son of Trump’s special
envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. Much of that money came when an
investment fund associated with the leadership of the United Arab
Emirates bought almost half of World Liberty Financial.
Trump also made more than $600 million from meme coins stamped with his face.
In office, Trump has pushed policies that help the cryptocurrency industry and avoid regulations.
How about insider trading on the stock market?
Donald Shaw of Sludge, an
outlet dedicated to examining special interest spending in politics,
reported today that the day before Trump paused his tariffs for 90 days,
his investment accounts took advantage of the market lows caused by the
tariffs to buy as much as $12.8 million worth of stocks. His
announcement of the pause caused a huge spike in stock values, with the
S&P jumping nearly 10%, one of the biggest gains in the history of
that index. Trump neglected to report the transactions for almost a year
past the required deadline, but the penalty for a late filing, Shaw
notes, is only $200.
Journalist White notes that
Trump is “essentially day trading,” including in companies operating in
sectors where “the Trump administration is actively focused on setting
policy.” She notes that Trump owns between $12.5 million and $58 million
in NVIDIA and between $9.5 million and $46.5 million in Amazon, both
companies “whose fortunes rise and fall based on decisions made in the
White House.”
She reports that the Trumps have taken about $2.3 billion in income from crypto ventures since the beginning of Trump's second presidency, while investors in those ventures have lost about the same amount. She says "the Trump family structured its crypto ventures so Trump made
money on the front end, taking hundreds of millions of dollars in
transaction fees, for example. Then, when his coins plummeted in value,
the investors who were left holding the bag suffered vast losses."
Click here for Paul Krugman's Substack entry for June 10, entitled "Breaking the Heart of the Heartland," in which Krugman tells how the rural vote has shifted against Trump.
In 2024 Donald Trump narrowly won the popular vote, with only a 1.5 percentage point margin. But he won rural areas by 30 points.
Trump
won rural areas by such a large margin because farmers were wildly
optimistic about what he would do for them. The Purdue/CME Ag Economy
Barometer, which is basically an index of farmers’ economic sentiment,
surged with Trump’s victory:
Today,
the rural Trump bump is nowhere to be seen. In fact, white rural
voters’ views about Trump’s economic policy have turned astonishingly
negative. Normally, partisanship strongly colors economic perceptions.
According to a recent Fox News poll, only 29% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 71% disapprove. Yet 60% of Republicans still approve.
Remarkably,
however, rural white voters are no longer behaving like non-rural
Republican voters. They are almost as negative on the economy as the
population as a whole, with only 32% of rural whites approving of
Trump’s handling of the economy, and 68% disapproving. Trump has made
the rural economy so bad that reality has overridden Trump voters’ usual
tendency to make excuses for him.
Farmers, who are highly dependent on imported inputs -- farm machinery, chemicals, fertilizer -- have been hit hard by Trump's tariffs and trade war; rival agricultural exporters like Brazil (soybeans) have taken over market share. In 2025 there was a 46% rise in farm bankruptcies; Krugman says it looks worse in 2026, especially with the Iran war raising the price of gas, diesel, and fertilizer in particular.
Recent polls
show that the Senate race in Iowa, which Trump won by 13 points in
2024, is now effectively a tossup. The heartland may be awakening to
reality, with immense political consequences.
Click here for Robert Reich's substack entry for June 10 entitled "The Senate Should NOT Confirm This Person" -- Todd Blanche, for attorney general.
Let me get right to the point. The Senate should not confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general.
Blanche,
who used to be Trump’s private lawyer, has treated the Justice
Department as Trump’s private law firm. He still believes that Trump —
rather than the United States — is his client.
At the very least,
the Senate should insist, as a condition of confirming Blanche, that the
May 19 deal Blanche devised to immunize Trump and his family from all
future prosecutions — which Blanche alone signed — be nullified.
The
purpose of that immunity deal — which resulted from Trump’s own bizarre
lawsuit against the IRS — should by now be clear. It’s to prevent any
future government inquiry into the corrupt dealings of Trump and his
family.
The breadth of the so-called “settlement” agreement between Trump and, well, Trump is staggering. Take a look at it, here.
Here's Reich's list of salient points:
Trump is the most corrupt president in American history. Since
being in office for a second time, he’s so far increased his wealth by
an estimated $4 billion, and his sons’ and daughters’ wealth by billions more. Some examples:
Trump
and his family have created multiple crypto businesses — World Liberty
Financial and the $TRUMP meme coin — that have received favorable
deregulatory treatment and reportedly generated at least $2.3 billion in income for Trump and his family since he won the presidency.
Six
days after a company backed by Eric and Donald Jr. took a 20 percent
stake in an American mining group, the group’s parent company received
$1.6 billion in federal financing. That’s because the president of
Kazakhstan granted the company the right to mine the world’s largest
known undeveloped deposit of tungsten, an element used in
semiconductors, lightbulbs, and warheads.
In late
2025, Don Jr.’s firm 1789 Capital acquired an equity stake in critical
minerals company Vulcan Elements. Shortly after, the White House and the
Pentagon awarded Vulcan a $620 million federal loan without competitive procurement or independent technical review.
Eric and Don Jr. have conducted numerous undisclosed meetings with foreign government officials
(including representatives from Hungary, the UK, Vietnam, and Qatar)
while simultaneously negotiating global real estate deals for the Trump
Organization.
Don Jr. serves as a strategic advisor or investor in prediction market firms Kalshi and Polymarket, which have received favorable, deregulatory treatment from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
Don Jr. is on the board of prescription drug platform BlinkRX, which will benefit from the administration’s promotion of direct-to-patient medicine sales.
Presumably, someone has made a fortune trading stocks and bonds on the basis of insider knowledge
of decisions that Trump would announce — about tariffs, his war in
Iran, and other news that moved stock and bond markets. The trades
occurred just before the announcements.
In May,
Trump disclosed that his trust was actively trading individual stocks,
an unprecedented practice for a sitting U.S. president in the modern
era.
Trump has pardoned some of the most brazen
financial criminals in American history, and one can only wonder what he
received in return. They include Philip Esformes, convicted in what Trump’s own Department of Justice described as the “largest health care fraud scheme ever charged”; Joseph Schwartz, convicted for a $38 million fraud scheme; and reality stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, convicted for multimillion-dollar bank fraud. He’s granted clemency to Lawrence Duran after a $205 million fraud conviction. He commuted Jason Galanis’s sentence and pardoned Devon Archer, both tied to tens of millions in fraud.
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's Substack diary entry for May 22, 2026. On that date in 1964, Johnson gave a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, and spoke of how his administration would “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.
Interesting reading. Its idealism is a far cry from the cynicism and corruption of the Trump administration.
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's Substack entry in her diary, Letters from an American, for May 16.
Seventy-two years ago tomorrow, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court unanimously decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools
unconstitutional because segregated schools denied Black children “the
equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
She goes on to talk about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957; the murder of the three voting rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in "Freedom Summer," 1964, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery and the violence when state troopers attacked the marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge (fracturing the skull of John Lewis). The vote in the Senate was 77-19; in the House, 333-85.
Recalling “the outrage of Selma,” Johnson said: “This right to vote is
the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives
people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.”
She concludes:
And yet, on April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court gutted the protections
for the Black-majority districts Congress provided for in the Voting
Rights Act after years of weakening the law in other ways. In its wake,
Republican-dominated southern state legislatures are rushing to redraw
their district lines to dilute the votes of Black Democrats.
Today,
thousands of Americans, including eighteen members of Congress,
traveled to Selma and Mongomery to call Americans to action to protect
voting rights. Pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow told Joseph D. Bryant of
Alabama news site AL, “This moment is bigger than Democrats or
Republicans. This is about democracy itself. This is about whether Black
communities, poor communities, rural communities, formerly incarcerated
people, and marginalized voices will continue to have representation
and political power in America.”
Speakers united around the theme that those trying to gerrymander
their way into control of Congress in defiance of voters had reawakened a
movement. “They think they can draw us out of power,” Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told an audience in Montgomery.
“They
do not know the sleeping giant that they just awakened. Because it is
not a coincidence, and our whole country must understand, that it was
not until voting rights were ratified in this country that we got the
Great Society. Because when Black Americans have the right to vote and
that vote is protected, our schools get funded. When voting rights are
protected, healthcare gets expanded. When voted rights are protected,
our country moves forward. And Montgomery, that’s what they’re actually
afraid of. They’re afraid of us coming together. They’re afraid of us
protecting one another.”
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry for May 13, 2026, which describes how Southern Republicans are reacting to Louisian v. Callais: "We are watching, in real time, the creation of a one-party state in the American South."
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's diary entry on Substack for May 11, 2026.
The Trump Mobile scam, launched last June; Trumps fake dominance throughout his career, shielded from his own incompetence in his first term by "Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who filtered the options Trump received; chief of staff General John Kelly, who made a pact with Mattis that one of them would always stay in the country to stand in the way of Trump’s impulses; and National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, who stopped Trump from signing disastrous executive orders, sometimes going so far as to steal them off his desk"; his out-of-control rants on Truth Social, including raking criticism of his own Supreme Court appointments and threatening them over the birthright citizenship case; "a long screed about the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 agreement between Iran and the U.S., United Kingdom, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the European Union to limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from sanctions. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and this weekend Trump rehashed false right-wing talking points about the deal to claim that former president Barack Obama was “a weak and stupid American President” who worked for Iran"; and much more.
Click here for Steven Beschloss's Substack article from April 18 entitled "Can America Learn from Hungary?"
The autocratic Viktor Orban was soundly defeated a few days ago in Hungary's national election. Despite Orban's control of the media -- the new prime minister, Peter Magyar, was not allowed to make an appearance on national TV while he was trying to campaign -- the vote was nearly 70:30 in favor of Magyar's party, Tisza.
Magyar moved immediately to start ridding Hungary of the worst aspects of Orban's autocratic regime.
Magyar appeared on M1, the state television channel, which as
an opposition leader he had not been permitted to visit for years. In a
live interview, he spoke directly about his plans. “We will suspend this
channel’s news service,” Magyar said. “This isn’t about me; I’m not seeking revenge. Our people deserve journalism that reflects the truth.”
He
promised to end “the factory of lies” and create “independent,
impartial” news operations “together with the other parliamentary
parties and professional organizations.” He continued, “We know there is
no perfect media, but what has gone on here since 2010 [when Orban took
power] would have Goebbels or the North Korean dictator lick their
lips.” (An estimated 80 percent of the country’s media has been controlled by Orbán and his goverment.)
In
his live appearance, Magyar mentioned lies told about him there. When
the host cut in, he said, “No host in this studio ever dared to
interrupt Hungary’s most corrupt and lying prime minister.” When
questioned about the legality of shutting down the channel, Magyar said,
“For someone on this channel to accuse me of breaking the law looks
like a thief accusing the police.”
Magyar promised "to rebuild Hungary’s relationship with the European Union, nationalize
assets corruptly handed over to business interests, confront the
country’s deep poverty and demand the resignation of officials leading
the country’s two highest courts, its chief prosecutor and president—all
described as 'puppets' of the Orbán regime."
Magyar met with Hungary's president, Tamás Sulyok, posed for a picture with him -- and then promptly told him he must leave office "voluntarily" or else he would be removed.
The day after the M1 appearance, the new prime minister also
promised to pursue those who had “plundered, looted, betrayed, indebted
and ruined” the country. This is no easy task, of course. “Since taking
power in 2010,” noted The Guardian
this week, “Orbán and his party have stacked the Hungarian state, media
and judiciary with loyalists, and it remains unclear how they will
react to changes made by a Tisza-led government.”
Magyar's rapid moves to rid Hungary of Orban's dominance could be a model for the U.S. to use once Trump is finally removed in disgrace.
Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's April 15 Substack entry. It describes Lincoln's last evening, when he was shot to death in Ford's Theater by John Wilkes Booth.
How did Americans react after Lincoln's assassination, an attack on the American government itself?
At first, Americans wanted revenge against the men who had slain their
president. After a two-week investigation in which they questioned
hundreds of people, investigators identified ten people they believed
responsible for Lincoln’s death. Booth himself had been killed on April
26 as officers tried to take him into custody. Another conspirator had
fled the country. The other eight stood trial for seven weeks before a
military commission in May and June 1865. Four were sentenced to death
by hanging; four were imprisoned.
Remind you of anything? After the January 6 attack on Congress, when 140 Capitol policemen were injured in an attempt to prevent the certification of the 2020 election of Joe Biden as president -- an election in which Biden won a 7 million majority of the popular vote -- the condemnation of Trump and the rioters was pretty much universal, just like the reaction to Lincoln's death. But what happened next?
But while Americans mourned Lincoln, the new president, Andrew
Johnson, restored the political power of Confederates. On May 28, he
issued a blanket pardon for most former Confederates except certain
leaders and wealthy southern planters. Those he said could apply to him
directly for a presidential pardon, which he promised would be
“liberally extended.” They were. By December 1865 he had pardoned all
but about 1,500 former Confederate leaders.
At the same time,
Johnson either looked the other way or cheered as southern state
legislatures passed Black Codes, laws that worked to push Black
Americans back into subservience. Congress had adjourned in March 1865,
the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, and Johnson refused to call it
back into emergency session after Lincoln’s death. When it convened in
December, Johnson told the congressmen that Reconstruction was over.
Northern congressmen simply had to seat newly elected southern
congressmen—some of whom had led the Confederacy less than a year
before—to end the unpleasantness of the war years.
As it turned out, the views of the Confederate leaders were not repudiated; rather, their treason was largely swept under the rug, supposedly in the interest of reconciliation and healing.
By the 1870s, after the establishment of the Department of Justice
meant that discrimination based on race could result in federal charges,
former Confederates switched their rhetoric from race to economics.
Because most Black men were impoverished, their votes for roads and
schools and hospitals translated into tax levies on white men with
property. Former Confederates argued that Black voting was just a
redistribution of wealth from white taxpayers to Black Americans, a form
of socialism.
That rhetoric appealed to northern Americans who
worried about immigrants voting in cities. Increasingly, they listened
as former Confederates began to argue that their fight had not been to
spread human enslavement—despite their many declarations saying exactly
that—but to preserve individualism from a grasping federal government.
By
the 1890s, towns not only across the South but also in the North and
West were putting up statues of Confederate soldiers as symbols of true
America.
FDR's New Deal programs were universally popular in an economically devastated South. But racist ideas were kick-started back to the mainstream when Truman ordered the integration of the U.S. military in 1948, and were juiced further in 1954 with a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education.
The idea that those embracing the iconography of the Confederacy were
simply defending individual liberty against an overreaching government
became an article of faith among the radical right, especially as the
Republican Party complained that the taxes necessary to run a modern
government that included everyone were promoting socialism.
In 2009, Elmer Rhodes started the "Oath Keepers," which HCR describes as "a right-wing gang." They joined the Proud boys in planning and executing the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Rhodes was convicted of seditions conspiracy; "Juries found at least a dozen other Oath Keepers guilty of seditious conspiracy or other serious crimes."
As soon as he retook office in 2025, Trump issued a sweeping pardon
to the participants in the January 6 attack who had been convicted of
crimes, including the crimes of using a deadly weapon and causing
serious bodily injury to an officer, removing accountability for their
attempt to overturn the nation’s democratic process and releasing them
back into the streets. At the time, he commuted the sentence of fourteen
of the leading Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, ending prison sentences
that had been as long as 22 years.
Because he did not pardon those
leaders, but commuted their sentences, their cases continued to work
their way through the appeals court. Yesterday the Department of Justice
moved to wipe out the seditious conspiracy convictions altogether. “The
United States has determined in its prosecutorial discretion that
dismissal of this criminal case is in the interests of justice,”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Lenerz of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in
Washington, D.C., wrote.
Like Andrew Johnson in 1865, Trump whitewashed the behavior of insurrectionists. (A big difference between the two: Unlike Trump, Johnson did not actually take part in the traitorous plot.)
