What we are learning

 I detest Trump  and everything he does or says. Ditto his despicable aides and Cabinet members, his unprincipled sycophants and suck-ups.

But it’s possible that someday we’ll look back on this horrendous era and say we needed Trump. We needed to see how horrible it could get before America was able to revive its ideals. 

Please hear me out. Robert Rech. 

Even before Trump, we were barreling down the wrong road. Inequalities of income, wealth, and opportunity were worsening. Legalized bribery was soaring in the form of mounting campaign contributions from big corporations and the wealthy. Workers were getting shafted. On Wall Street and in C-suites, fealty to the rule of law was giving way to “greed is good” selfishness. Giant corporations were monopolizing ever more of the economy. America was losing its moral authority in the world (think Abu Ghraib and the torture memo).

We couldn’t have remained on that road. Even if we didn’t know it then, most of us understand that now. Trump has opened our eyes to the consequences of extreme greed, corruption, cruelty, and utter disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law. His brazenness and shamelessness have awakened us to much that we took for granted.

He and his regime are still dangerous as hell, of course. But the American public is catching on. His polls are in the cellar; they continue to fall. 

It’s as if the nation has been through basic training in democracy, a stress test in civics, a crash course in the importance of having a decent and good government.

Before Trump, how many Americans understood the importance of “checks and balances” among the three branches of government, as envisioned by the Founders? 

Now nearly everyone knows, because we’ve seen what happens when the head of the executive branch usurps the power of Congress and defies the federal courts.

How many of us really knew what “due process” meant when it came to giving people accused by the government an opportunity to defend themselves?

By now most of us have seen videos of people dragged out of their homes in the dead of night by masked agents of the U.S. government and thrown into detention camps without so much as a hearing. And we’ve seen government agents murder American citizens in cold blood on the streets of our cities. 

Did we understand the meaning of corruption, bribes, self-dealing, and pay-to-play before Trump extorted corporations and billionaires to contribute millions to his campaign, his PAC, his inauguration, his ballroom, and his 250th birthday party? Now, we surely do.

Did we really know the importance of professional civil servants before Trump fired tens of thousands of them and substituted brainless loyalists? Before he got rid of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because it published truthful jobs data he didn’t like?

Did we understand the importance of expertise before Trump turned his back on career diplomats at the State Department, doctors and epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control, and experienced lawyers at the Justice Department and replaced them with loyalist hacks?

Or the meaning of “equal justice under the law” before Trump turned the Justice Department into his own private law firm to prosecute political enemies and pardon supporters?

Did we comprehend the true meaning of freedom of speech and expression before Trump attacked our universities for allowing demonstrations he disliked? Before he got CBS to fire Stephen Colbert for satirizing him and muzzle “60 Minutes” for criticizing him? 

The Judge That Shook the MAGA Tree

 https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/a-truly-amazing-exercise-of-justice?

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/a-truly-amazing-exercise-of-justice

Some good news for you, today– It was just on Thursday that we filed to block any funds being paid out from Donald Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” – aka, the “slush fund.” Well, it didn’t even take 24 hours – in fact, barely more than 12 – for a federal court to take action in our case: The Trump-Vance administration is barred from taking any more action on their slush fund. That means Trump and his allies can’t take any further action related to the fund, including transferring money to it, considering submitted claims, or disbursing taxpayer dollars. The next step is our hearing planned for June 12th. This is a huge win for the American people and taxpayers across the country, especially because there had already been a filing to request nearly $3 million from that fund. Now, a federal court has put the brakes on everything – and that’s because of your support of this work. Thanks – and have a great weekend. We sure will. Democracy Forward

Media dominance

 First, some background. Twenty years ago, the best way to communicate with voters was through TV, radio, and newspapers, and Democrats were pretty good at it. 

But today, everything has changed. A majority of swing voters now get their news from social media, podcasts, and YouTube.

And on these platforms, Democrats are getting absolutely steamrolled.

Four of the top ten news podcasts on Spotify right now are hosted by right-wing extremists, like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. The White House’s rapid response Twitter/X account is five times bigger than the DNC’s. Of the 100 largest political YouTube channels, 64 of them are conservative.

On Facebook, Twitter/X, TikTok, you name it … Republicans are running circles around Democrats, and that could cost us the entire midterm election.

Robert Reich, 

Trump Wants Taxpayers to Give Him $10 Billion

 Trump has sued the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion. 

In the suit, filed in Miami federal court on Thursday, Trump alleges that the IRS was responsible for the leak of some of Trump’s tax documents to press in September 2020. The leak occurred by an IRS contractor. 

The leaked tax documents revealed that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he first won the presidency, and paid no taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years.

The lawsuit claims that the leak caused Trump and his family “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump.”

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/donald-trump-vs-donald-trump?

Robert Reich.

Shut Down - Show Down

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/this-shutdown-is-different?

A Slide into a Police State

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/sunday-thought-a-national-reckoning?

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Trump's Assault on Higher Education :Robert Reich

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/what-i-told-the-ed-school-graduates?

Yesterday, Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, notified Harvard University that “effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked.” 

Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students. Existing foreign students must transfer to another university or lose their legal status. This could affect more than a quarter of Harvard’s student body. 

Noem said she did this because of the university’s “failure to comply with simple reporting requirements.” 

Rubbish. There was nothing simple about the trove of information Noem demanded from Harvard — including the coursework of every international student and information on any student visa holder who had been involved in “illegal” activity — information beyond what Harvard is legally allowed to share with the government. 

We are in deep authoritarian fascist territory, friends. 

Trump is escalating his war against American higher education and against the rest of the world. 

We will be the worse for this. 

To Trump, the only useful non-Americans are those who invest in his crypto schemes and global resorts or gift him jumbo “palace in the sky” aircraft. 

Yet global brains have been crucial sources of our scientific and economic advances. Since the end of World War II in particular, we have benefited enormously from talented students and faculty drawn here from all over the planet to learn, study, research, and innovate. 

Once again, it will be up to the federal courts to stop this idiocy. The rest of us must speak out loudly and clearly against what is being done. 

Here’s what I told the graduates from U. Cal. Berkeley’s School of Education at their commencement ceremony earlier this week (before I learned of the Trump regime’s latest move): 

Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Putin and Xi censor the media.

Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.

America’s founders knew this. They saw how easily emperors and kings could mislead uneducated publics. The survival of the new nation required a public wise enough to keep power within bounds. People imbued, in the language of the time, with civic virtue.

Jefferson assured Americans that if they could “enlighten the people generally … tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”

So America became the cradle of free, universal, public education.

I don’t have any easy answers to the many challenges we’re experiencing today in classrooms across the land, but we must never give up on these three basic educational ideals: free, universal, and public.

If we stop thinking about education solely as a private investment on the way to a good-paying job and see it as a public good, we’d give every child an understanding of the Constitution, the meaning and importance of the rule of law, and why no one should be above it.

This is, after all, what we demand of people who want to become naturalized citizens: They have to pass a civics test covering the organization of the U.S. government and the Constitution. 

Civic education should instill in young people a passion for truth — enabling them to think critically, be skeptical (but not cynical) about what they hear and read, find reliable sources of information, apply basic logic and analysis, and know enough about history and the physical world to differentiate fact from fiction.

Such an education would also urge young people to communicate with others. With people of different races, classes, creeds, nationalities. 

Teach them how to listen, to open their minds to the possibility their own views and preconceptions may be wrong, to discover why people with opposing views believe what they do.

Yet the current president of the United States does not appear to have learned any of this.

On the campaign trail, he vowed to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.” 

He has canceled federal exams that measure student progress and ordered his wrestling executive-turned-Education Secretary to shut most of her department.

He is attacking the freedom of speech of university students and professors, trying to deport international students and faculty solely because of what they say or write, and threatening to halt federal funds to universities that practice DEI.

He has gutted the funding of the National Institutes of Health, which provides a large portion of biomedical research, and the National Science Foundation, responsible for much of America’s engineering and computer research.

Along with certain governors, he is attacking the teaching in our schools of America’s shameful histories of slavery and Native American genocide.

He has cut funding for libraries around the country — which will jeopardize literacy development and reading programs, and reliable internet access for those without it at home.

I keep hearing that all this amounts to an “attack on the liberal state” or “the culmination of our culture wars.”

No. What’s really occurring is an attack on the American mind.

You who are soon to graduate from this wonderful school of education have chosen instead to enhance the American mind, to broaden it, to enlighten our young people, to expose them to a world of possibility. 

May you educate like democracy depends on it. 

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The Trump Insurrection of Jan.6.

Monday, Jan. 6, 2025,  marks the fourth anniversary of Donald Trump's deadly January 6 insurrection.

And Donald Trump—who pledged to pardon the insurrectionists on his "first day"—is just days away from taking office.¹

Robert Reich, 

The man who instigated a riot at the U.S. Capitol four years ago tomorrow to stop the certification of Joe Biden as president will be certified president.

The peaceful transfer of power lies at the heart of American democracy, but Trump sought to overturn the result of the 2020 election and has not been held accountable.

We must never forget his treachery. 

When Vice President Mike Pence walked into the Capitol four years ago tomorrow, on January 6, 2021, he faced a withering pressure campaign by Trump, who had already twisted the arms of governors and election officials around the country to change the result of the election in his favor. 

Pence was about to throw out the slates of false electors that Trump and his henchmen had hyped for weeks — coaxing loyalists in five swing states to submit signed certificates falsely claiming they were “duly elected and qualified” members of the Electoral College.

But as Pence began the electoral vote count, thousands of Trump supporters, many of them armed, stormed the Capitol. Some chanted they wanted to “hang Mike Pence” for refusing to block the certification. 

They came directly from a rally Trump held on the Ellipse, in which Trump repeated his false claim that the election had been stolen and told the crowd, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” 

According to the indictment from the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith, Trump directed those supporters to the Capitol “to obstruct the certification proceeding and exert pressure” on Pence. The indictment further states: 

“After it became public on the afternoon of January 6 that the Vice President would not fraudulently alter the election results, a large and angry crowd — including many individuals whom the Defendant had deceived into believing the Vice President could and might change the election results — violently attacked the Capitol and halted the proceeding.”

The FBI estimates that between 2,000 and 2,500 people entered the Capitol Building during the attack, some of whom participated in vandalism and looting, including of the offices of members of Congress. Rioters also assaulted Capitol Police officers. They occupied the empty Senate chamber while federal law enforcement officers defended the evacuated House floor. 

Within 36 hours, five people had died. One was shot by Capitol Police; another died of a drug overdose; and three died of heart attacks or strokes, including a police officer who died the day after being assaulted by rioters. Many were injured, including 174 police officers. Four other officers who responded to the attack died by suicide within seven months.

“President Trump was wrong,” Pence said subsequently. “I had no right to overturn the election. And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

But Trump has not been held accountable. 

A week after the attack, the House of Representatives impeached Trump for incitement of insurrection. In February 2021, after he had left office, the Senate voted 57–43 in favor of conviction but fell short of the required two-thirds majority, resulting in his acquittal.

Senate Republicans then blocked a bill to create a bipartisan independent commission to investigate the attack, leaving the House to organize its own select committee.

After an 18-month investigation including more than 1,000 witnesses and nine televised public hearings, the House’s select committee identified Trump as the “central cause” of the Capitol attack by the pro-Trump mob. 

The panel, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, voted unanimously to recommend charges to the Justice Department to prosecute Trump for seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election. 

Following a special counsel investigation by the Justice Department, Trump was indicted on four charges in August 2023. 

But after Trump’s reelection to the presidency, all charges were dismissed.

Of the 1,424 people charged with federal crimes relating to the riot, 1,010 pled guilty,and 1,060 have been sentenced. Enrique Tarrio, then the chairman of the Proud Boys, received the longest sentence, a 22-year prison term.

***

Trump and his lackeys in the Republican Party have since promoted a revisionist history of the event — downplaying the severity of the violence, spreading conspiracy theories, and portraying those charged with crimes as hostages and martyrs.

Trump has tried to recast the violent events as a “day of love.” He has promised that in the first day of his new administration he would consider pardons for those who have been prosecuted for their roles on January 6.

On December 8, 2024, in his first broadcast news interview since the 2024 election, Trump said members of the House committee that investigated the riot “should go to jail.”

***

That Donald J. Trump — the same person who instigated a coup four years ago tomorrow, when Congress last gathered to certify an election — will become president on January 20 is an assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our democracy. 

We must never forget. January 6, 2021, should live in infamy, as should Trump. 

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How Trump Inverted the Violent History of Jan. 6

The president-elect and his allies have spent four years reinventing the Capitol attack — spreading conspiracy theories and weaving a tale of martyrdom to their ultimate political gain.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/05/us/politics/january-6-capitol-riot-trump.html