‘No Kings’ Unveils a Big New Trump Protest, and the Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher

“No Kings” rallies spanned the country in communities big and small earlier this year. (photo: Salwan Georges/WP)

Only known solution to creeping authoritarianism is broad-based, peaceful, geographically dispersed mass engagement by every day Americans.

Tim Dickinson / Rolling Stone  

10 september 25 

America’s pro-democracy movement is gearing up for what may be its biggest mass-demonstration yet against the increasingly militaristic Trump administration — which has sent armed troops to occupy the nation’s capital and is threatening to do the same in large cities from Chicago to New Orleans.

Popular resistance in Trump’s second term has snowballed, in an organic fashion, from a large President’s Day protest in February, through mass demonstrations in April, to the first “No Kings” protest on Trump’s birthday in June — which drew millions to counter the president’s tin-pot military birthday parade.

After a series of smaller summer protests, the movement will be back in the streets and squares and center cities of America, en masse, in October for No Kings 2 — a sequel organizers are expecting to outshine the original, amid revulsion to Trump’s brutal campaign of mass deportation led by masked agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and an increasingly lawless president who claims “a lot” of Americans would “like a dictator.”

No Kings 2 is being organized by a big tent of grassroots and advocacy organizations. One of the most prominent players is Invisible, the activist group that sprang to life in the early days of the first Trump administration, and which now counts 2,500 distributed, local chapters nationwide.

Rolling Stone spoke to Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin last week, in advance of No Kings 2 unveiling on Monday. The protest is planned for October 18 — in the aftermath of an unpredictable showdown over government funding that could lead to a partial government shutdown by the end of the month.

Levin says the stakes of the protests have never been more urgent, and that organizers are expecting record numbers of protesters to raise their voices for democracy and against the threats of dictatorship.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s the organizing principle of No Kings 2?

The only known solution to creeping authoritarianism is broad-based, peaceful, geographically dispersed mass engagement by everyday Americans. That’s it. That’s what works. We’ve been building the movement to bring in more people, to build a sense that in America, we don’t do kings.

This movement has turned out giant protests, as well as some smaller outcroppings, most recently on Labor Day. What’s your hope for No Kings 2?

I expect No Kings 2 to be the largest protest of the year. We had 5 to 6 million people across 2,169 communities turn out for No Kings 1. It was wildly successful. People who might have been on the sidelines for No Kings 1 probably had some FOMO. And the good news is: We’re doing it again. We’re going to pull out even more people.

Why are mass protests important to blocking Trump’s strongman ambitions?

Experts in authoritarianism tell us, based on research, that you need 3.5 percent of the population engaged, in a sustained way, to successfully push back against an authoritarian regime. In the American context, that’s about 11 or 12 million people. For No Kings 1, we got about halfway there. And we have funneled a lot of those people into our trainings around strategic non-cooperation. But we need to come together again.

Trump has now passed his bill that provides $171 billion for a secret police force and a support structure for that force. And he’s occupying American cities. First it was L.A., then it was D.C. Now we see saber-rattling at Chicago, and he’s threatening other cities. It’s what you would expect to have from an authoritarian. 

The question is: Do we stand up and fight back like [Illinois Governor] J.B. Pritzker is doing, or do we welcome the occupiers like [mayor] Muriel Bowser is doing in D.C.?

I hope to see these protests explode on the national scene — and demonstrate that the public is not with this regime, that the public wants free-and-fair elections, that the public wants the overreach of the federal government out of their cities, and that they don’t support terrorizing forces in their communities. It’s not rocket science.

Looking back to No Kings 1, the national situation has become more dire — we’ve gone from a military parade in June to troops in the streets today. We’ve reached the armed occupation phase of Trump’s authoritarian project. Top governors are warning we may find ourselves in a situation where Trump is invoking emergency powers to disrupt state and federal elections.

The first No Kings was scheduled because Trump was staging this military birthday parade, a ridiculous celebration that smacked of authoritarianism. It did not feel like an American event. It felt like something you would see in a dictatorship. We wanted a demonstration to show him that he could have his pathetic parade — but that we would be everywhere else. And we succeeded.

No Kings 2 is responding to the escalation from the regime. You don’t throw a military parade just because you want a military parade. You don’t occupy cities just because it’s fun. This is all ratcheting up. Ultimately, the goal is to concentrate power in Trump’s hands — maybe not to end elections entirely, but to make elections functionally meaningless.

It’s not that military occupations, or secret police on their own are the end of American democracy. But if you wanted to prevent the public from expressing its views and exercising its constitutional rights through elections, this is how you would set up the fight for next year. By sending the military to blue states and places that are going to have competitive elections, you are setting up the dominoes to fall come election day.

This is why I have such a negative response to politicians who say, “Yeah, this is really bad. That’s why we’ve got to go vote next year.” My response is, “That is 15 months away. If you wait that long to get politically engaged it might be too late. You’ve got to stand up and fight right now!”

This is why it’s important for No Kings 2 to show up. Because if you don’t do that, you might not be able to push back come next November.

The Pritzker example is illuminating. Last week he called for his constituents to “be loud” and he’s even rattled his saber back at Trump and red state governors who might think of invading Illinois. We have seen times where Trump gets punched in the nose, he thinks about a different plan. Suddenly he’s musing about sending National Guard to New Orleans instead of Chicago.

Exactly. We say courage is contagious. Trump is a bully, and bullies often change direction if you stand up to them. And look: The attacks coming from this regime don’t come from a place of strength. Trump does not have popular support for occupying American cities. He doesn’t have popular support for secret police.

Even the issues where he traditionally has the most popular support — immigration and crime and the economy — he’s underwater on all of those issues now. There were very quote, unquote, “smart” Democratic politicians, at the beginning of this year, that said, Well, we shouldn’t talk about immigration; we shouldn’t talk about ICE; we shouldn’t talk about Abrego Garcia or the El Salvadorian gulag. We should just focus on Medicaid. We should just focus on inflation every day. 

That is misguided. It’s politics taken from a different era. Trump might maintain some of the same policies, but he isn’t running politics the same way Ronald Reagan or Newt Gingrich or George W Bush did. It’s an entirely different ecosystem. And Pritzker’s recommendation — get loud — there’s nothing more American than that. It’s baked into our democracy that the population gets loud in response to authoritarian overreach.

Credit to Pritzker. He’s been on the right track since the election. He didn’t wait to join the fight-back faction of the Democratic Party. It’s been inspiring. I would give credit to somebody like [California governor] Gavin Newsom, who has woken up, and is now a leader in the fight, with redistricting. We should be welcoming in politicians who weren’t with us at the beginning, but now are fighting the good fight.

But there’s another category of politician. They woke up to the fact that their constituency wants to see a fight — so they engage in the aesthetics of opposition, but they don’t actually follow through with real action. We saw Adam Schiff the other day posting that Donald Trump is taking billions in crypto money that appear to be bribes. But he is complaining about this a couple months after he voted for a crypto bill that allowed Donald Trump to take in bribes. Or Cory Booker gives a brilliant, inspiring speech on the Senate floor — and then turns around and votes for Trump nominees.

No Kings has never been an arm of the Democratic Party. We expect our leaders to lead. We expect Democrats to be part of the fight-back faction. And I hope one of the outcomes of No Kings is that we send a clear message that there is political opportunity to show up and fight back.

The federal government can’t be everywhere. Trump has to go after specific hot spots and then rely on the media to amplify that into a national story. I saw this in Portland in 2020. We’ve seen it now in L.A. and D.C. and maybe Chicago is next. Can you just talk about the value of Inpisible’s distributed model of organizing — of people showing not just in big cities, but out in the sticks — as a counter to that?

The regime wants you to believe that you are alone, powerless. They do that by puffing out their chest, picking these indivdual, localized fights, and then using their vast media and propaganda operation to nationalize it, and make you feel like their power is overwhelming.

But what they were doing in L.A., what they’ve done in D.C. is relatively small and minuscule in comparison to the opposition that you can build up in those places.

This hits at the soul of how Invisible started. Under representative democracy, we parcel out power geographically. Cities and counties and congressional districts and states have little parcels of power. You as an individual have very little power on your own. 

But you, combined with a lot of folks in your community, can actually move mountains if you do your part. And if folks in rural communities do their part. And if folks in the suburbs do their part. If we all organize the mass of pro-democracy Americans, it’s very difficult for the regime to maintain control.

Fundamentally that means: If you are not physically joining together with other people in your community — in large rooms or on street corners — you’re not doing the real work. This is why we are a group-based movement. We are made up of 2,500 local, Indivisible groups.

The No Kings 2 events will not just be in the deep-blue areas of the country, but also rural and red areas. Tiny, little towns as well as big cities. It sends a strong message to the regime that this is something big — and not limited to traditional hot spots of activism.

I would highly recommend to folks looking to participate in No Kings: Don’t travel more than an hour. If you’re having to travel more than an hour to get to your local No Kings protest, start your own.

This summer you guys organized a series of activist trainings. Can you talk about how that process is working?

Our democracy is not just made up of Congress and the courts, it’s also made up of institutions that either can support — or decline to support — democratic norms. These are big institutions like the media or universities or law firms or businesses.

If those institutions push back against authoritarian overreach, the authoritarian regime has a hard time implementing its policies and concentrating power. The point is to have our movement push those pillars to stand strong.

We’re currently running a campaign to push Avelo Airlines to stop working with ICE. Businesses are not used to this kind of organized public pressure.

We’re also working with groups to build community-level pushback against ICE. You can do that by working with local businesses to make clear that ICE is not welcome, but that immigrants are welcome. The idea is to make people who aren’t watching politics every day aware there is a fight going on, that there is growing opposition, and that other people share their concerns about members of their community being disappeared.

Part of the challenge of leading a mass movement is just capturing and channeling its energy. Can you talk about how ideas are bubbling up from the grassroots?

We are encouraging Inpisible groups to experiment — try new advocacy, protest, and organizing tactics, and see what catches fire. A lot of the best ideas are going to come from local folks. In fact, “No Kings” itself is a great example of that. We didn’t dream up the No Kings slogan. We saw it on signs, in the streets, in the early part of the year. And we thought: “That is really smart. That is a great, simple message that everybody can get around. That should be the banner.”

This protest is more than a month away. Do you have thoughts about the political context you’ll be engaging in?

One reason No Kings Day 2 is in October is because we know that there’s going to be a big funding fight this month. Back in March, the Democrats completely caved to the Republicans on their funding bill. The Republicans were threatening to shut down the government, and Chuck Schumer led a sufficient number of Democrats to surrender on it, and there was no shutdown. That was a six-month funding bill, and that ends at the end of this month.

The last funding battle added definition to the struggle within the party, between Democrats that were treating this as a politics-as-usual moment and those looking to fight back. The backlash after Democrats caved was massive. It significantly drove down the approval ratings of Democrats who led that surrender.

Democrats are in the minority, and there aren’t a lot of opportunities where they have real leverage. So it’s often hard to identify who is really fighting — and who is just giving speeches. This new funding fight is a rare, big opportunity for them to actually use the power that they’ve got — because Democratic votes are going to be necessary to keep the government running.

I don’t know how the Democrats are going to fight. They currently are talking a big game, but they did that last time as well. It’s conceivable that the Republicans will shut down the government and No Kings 2 will happen in the middle of that.

That probably means that the Democrats are unified in opposition, and what they will see are millions of people coming out in historic protests. And a big flavor of that protest is going to be: “Hell yeah. Keep fighting. We’re with you.”

It’s also conceivable that Democrats will cave and No Kings 2 will happen in the wake of that surrender — and there will be a lot of negative political ramifications for those Democrats who did. Either way, the people coming out to No Kings 2 will not be there to cheer-lead Democrats because they’re not Donald Trump, or because they say mean things about Donald Trump. They will be showing up because they want to find leaders who are going to fight back.

Time for all of us to turn out.  All of us, including you!

 

Look on My Works, Ye Mighty: Labors of Destruction and Creation

   

American historian Timothy Snyder. (photo: Ukrainian World Congress)

"Trump and Vance brag about destroying what others have created."

Timothy Snyder / Substack 01 September 25 

ALSO SEE: Timothy Snyder: Thinking About (Substack)

 

Labors of Destruction and Creation

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

No thing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Labor Day. I thought of these lines, from Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”, as I contemplated the poster of Donald Trump that now decorate the Department of Labor in Washington, DC. I thought of labors of creation, and of destruction.

To a historian of the twentieth century, such banners recall similar representations of Department of Labor. His kind of politics only destroys institutions. He can take a day off for Labor Day. But he would never have created a holiday for those who labor.

Ozymandias was the Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II. And in fairness to Ramses II, we should recall that he won battles, built temples, and ruled for decades. He led a state that lasted for millennia, of such fame that Percy Shelley and his friends could write poems about it millennia after its end.

Shelley reminds us that even the mightiest of rulers and of states come to an end, and that this final, unavoidable reality is what makes vanity of every boast.

That wisdom is the beginning of the understanding of our predicament. Americans are facing a more extreme situation. We are living through a regime in which there is no creativity between the boasting and the vanity. It is not that Trump is building great things and boasting about them, and that only time will reveal the inherent tragedy of human achievement. He is bragging about destroying what others have created.

Trump and Vance seem to believe that the United States will go on forever, regardless of what they do. But no political order is eternal. It is one thing to build things and imagine that all must bow before them indefinitely – the mistake of the poetical Oyzmandias. But it is a less forgivable mistake to believe the destruction can go on forever.

My worry is about the integrity of the United States as such. It is not arrived at lightly, or expressed hastily.

For the last couple of decades I have been thinking and writing about the alternatives to democracy, the failures of democracy, about where modern politics can take us and where it might yet take us. On Freedom was about other, better futures, ones that can be possible if we understand liberty in the right way and build the right kind of institutions around it. It is a philosophy book but also a book about America, and so it assumes the continued existence of the United States.

In the present circumstances, the future of the United States cannot be taken for granted. The negative scenario in On Tyranny, and I think the negative scenario most often imagined, is that the entirety of the United States will undergo a regime change towards an authoritarian order, without the rule of law, without checks and balances, with permanent repression of dissidents, with informational control via technology, with programmed ignorance through decimated and humbled schools and universities, with an economy controlled such that social advancement is impossible and wealth remains with the regime-friendly oligarchs. That is the goal of those in power, and we are right to fear it, and right to work against it – more right, I think, than we realize.

We use the phrase “regime change” too often. That idea imagines that the land, the people, the institutions do not matter much, and that all that matters is what happens at the top. One kind of regime goes, another comes, and the country remains. 

But that is not what history teaches. Attempts to change the form of government at the center can lead to dissent in the center, stress on the periphery, and change calculations about the sense of the entire endeavor. This is always true, regardless of what kind of alteration in the center we are talking about, or what country we have in mind. The integrity of a political system rests on certain foundations, and an attempt to change everything from the center, especially a heedless, ignorant attempt, can undermine those foundations.

Trump takes his example from Orbán in Hungary and Putin in Russia. But Hungary is a small country with an economy about a third the size of that of Boston, Massachusetts. Russia is a large country, but its power base rests in two cities and in control of the hydrocarbon industry. 

Both of these countries are very poor compared to the United States, and neither of them has a meaningful tradition of federalism, neither of them has any decentralization of wealth and power. 

The Putin regime survives on endless war, the Orbán regime on EU transfers of money. The memes used and the tricks played in Budapest and Moscow have a certain utility in the United States, and they are all the more tempting for an American president who wants to be able to do what Hungarian and Russian leaders have done: redirect flows of wealth to himself and his immediate environment. But those regimes will not last forever. And the attempt to imitate them in the United States is not only authoritarian but destructive.

What holds the United States together? Let me hold back for a moment on the loftier ideas of the Constitution and the history for a moment, and stay focused on those flows of wealth. It is the money, as transferred by institutions, as justified by political convictions.

The blue states pay taxes to the federal government, which redirects them to the red states. Voters in red states take advantage of this redistribution, while claiming (in their majority, not the whole population, of course) both that they are against such a redistribution and that they are being cheated because they do not get enough. 

Governors of red states (not all, but several) push the logic of the federal system to the limit, treating themselves (not the Constitution or the law and certainly not the taxpayers in blue states) as the final arbiter of what can be done with taxes. This is an arrangement, when looked at from the outside with a cold eye, can hardly be seen as natural and sustainable. 

It only works because of certain assumptions about the nature of the federal government as a whole, assumptions that are now being challenged. It depends on blue state politicians and voters acting in the name of something beyond narrow self-interest.

It is one thing, as a blue state voter, to know that your taxes are being spent elsewhere in the country. But it is quite another to worry that they will simply disappear into a sinkhole of corruption, such as that which is now being created in the White House. 

It is one thing to believe that federal taxes are worthwhile because they are being spent to redress inequalities in health care or education. It is another to watch the federal government spread disease and ignorance. It is one thing to pay taxes every year, in the knowledge that eventually the power in the White House will change every four or eight. It is another to be confronted with a president who talks about third terms. 

It is one thing to believe that the Constitution will ultimately preserve the country. It is another to recognize that those in power scorn it.

Trump and Vance can destroy what others have built. They can push the Constitutional regime of the United States past the breaking point. But they lack an alternative to replace it. They want fascism, and they don’t mind death of others, but they do not want to take responsibility for the death. 

To get what they want, on the fascist model, they will have to, at some point, fight a major foreign war in which they manage to send off young people who oppose them to die, or they will have to use government forces to kill Americans. I don’t think that either of these will actually work; Vietnam and the Kent State shootings had the opposite effect.

I also don’t think, though I could be wrong, that Trump and Vance would try this; since they themselves believe in nothing, it will be hard for them to take that next step of direct killing to generate political meaning. Historical fascists believed that their nations should be subjected to a bloody competition for world superiority. Trump and Vance just think that Americans are idiots. That is not the same thing. It is also not clear that the armed forces would go along with such a major undertaking: think of the military parade.

The death that Trump and Vance prefer, and cause, and need is indirect and passive-aggressive: by destroying government functionality, they generate unnecessary suffering, which they then blame on migrants and African Americans. They have funded ICE and deployed the National Guard to deter those of us who see the logic. That is their sadopopulism, their safe space.

This can work for a while, but can it work forever? One of the reasons for concern about the future of the country is that Trump and Vance seem to believe that it can.

If you are a successful grifter, you do not really see beyond the boundaries of the grift. Why would Trump think that he needs to do anything besides grift on indefinitely? He has parlayed a set of entertainment skills into the presidency. 

Why would Vance think that he needs to go beyond grift? He rose to his easy life as angry-straight-rich-white-male-almost-in-chief thanks to a book which women of color helped him to write, and thanks to political donations from a gay billionaire. No wonder he thinks that we can be fooled endlessly.

But at the bottom of apparently bottomless cynicism always rests a certain naiveté. Grifts can only work by consuming resources that are created from outside the grift. The better the grift works, the fewer resources remain. 

The United States exists thanks to material exchanges grounded in institutional arrangements based in political faith. Trump and Vance create none of this; their grifts consume it all. But from inside the grift they cannot see this. And so they will push on, with ever greater boastfulness and vanity, until they get to the end.

Every country can come to an end. The 250 years of the American Republic, for which Trump takes credit on those banners, is an impressive figure, longer than most states, no doubt. But it is a far cry from forever, and believing in forever, acting is if forever belongs to you, is a certain way to summon doom. Trump and Vance will not learn from Ozymandias or from history.

But for the rest of us there are two important lessons.

One is that resistance is patriotic. Everything that we do to oppose American authoritarianism we do not just in the name of defending freedom, but in the name of preserving America as such. In the swirl of destruction that is underway, it is impossible to know what will crack first, and how the collapse will begin. But what we do know is that the thing that comes next, the better America, can rest only on the labor that we perform now, on the good that we do now.

The other lesson is that resistance is constructive. It can seem difficult to resist merchants of calamity such as Trump and Vance. No one action seems to stop them. But every act of resistance creates the possibility that the country itself can survive, and every moment of hope creates the foundation for a better republic. The actions we take have to be actions against, against what is being done to us now. But by their nature every strike, every protest, every act of organization, every act of kindness and solidarity are also actions for, for a future in which the United States continues to exist, and in which the learning from resistance becomes the politics of freedom.

Best way to score a job with Trump? Be a racist internet troll.

President Donald Trump gives his best "poor me" WTF gesture as he speaks with reporters before boarding Air Force One in Pennsylvania on Aug. 3.

"Foursome from hell" latest to ride Donnie's Clown bus - and the joke is on us

 

by Lisa Needham

Daily Kos Staff

Tuesday, August 19, 2025 at 6:01:04p MDT

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog 

Did you hear about the guy who had a racist and conspiracy-ridden online life before joining the Trump administration? No, not that guy. The other guy. No, the other, other one.

You’re forgiven for being confused about which Trump administration hire we’re talking about, given that Monday saw two separate stories break about their repulsive online presences. 

From the news outlet NOTUS, let’s learn all about Eric Lendrum, a speechwriter for the Department of Homeland Security. Before Lendrum apparently started penning propaganda for Secretary Kristi Noem, he had a rich, grievance-filled online life. NOTUS unearthed a December 2021 piece attributed to Lendrum where he moped extravagantly about Trump supporters’ Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and how:

American conservatives are, right now, on course for being every bit as ostracized and alienated from broader society as Jews were in the years leading up to Nazi Germany. Children are actively indoctrinated in our education system to turn against their own parents, Soviet-style, if they feel their parents’ views are outdated or backwards.

Buddy, your kid having to learn about the mere existence of transgender people or perhaps that slavery was less than great is not the same as being rounded up and put in camps, but sure. 

What Lendrum really grooves on, like so much of this administration, is watching people in pain from Trump’s actions. Hence, his incredibly low-rated podcast lovingly dwelling on how much he loved watching members of Congress running for their lives while his cult leader’s followers overran the seat of American government. So fun! He also had the obligatory endorsement of the racist “great replacement theory”—which claims there is an ongoing effort to use immigration to “replace” white Americans—and equated asylum-seekers with “scum.” 

When asked for comment by The Independent, DHS shared a link to the First Amendment. Huh. Neat that they occasionally remembered that it exists, what with the Trump administration regularly trying to jail and deport students for the content of their speech. 

Also on Monday, Wired reported about a now-deleted Twitter account linked to E.J. Antoni, whom Trump nominated to cook the books at the Bureau of Labor Statistics ever since the job numbers made him sad. It was already known that Antoni was also an insurrection enthusiast.

The deleted account that Wired uncovered is a neatly comprehensive list of conservative fixations: COVID-19 denialism, hating Black Lives Matter, retweeting conspiracy crank Jack Posobiec—you get the picture. Also neat: joshing about how cool it would be to drop a nuclear bomb on China if conspiracy nuts “determined” China “created” COVID:

Antoni’s social media presence was wide-ranging. Think of a renaissance man if “renaissance” means “spewing Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories, misogyny about Kamala Harris, and violent rhetoric about the 2020 election”:

Of course, both of these accounts fit right in with other high-level Trump administration employees. Perhaps Lendrum and Antoni can get together with Paul Ingrassia, whom Trump nominated to run the Office of Special Counsel after a rich career as a far-right podcaster and fanboy of white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Heck, call Darren Beattie—expelled for being too racist for the first Trump administration but now running the U.S. Institute of Peace—and make it the foursome from hell. 

Trump's despicable appointees continue to do their business on America.

"DISGUSTING": Trump shows the world that war crimes pay

   

Collage of Putin and Trump walking on a red carpet amid the corpses of civilians killed by Russian troops in the Ukrainian city of Bucha in 2022. Shared by Bucha’s mayor Anatolii Fedoruk in response to the Putin-Trump meeting

Putin left Alaska knowing genocide is rewarded. Every dictator was watching.  

 

Euromaidan

Fedoruk in response to the Putin-Trump meeting 

17 August 25 

Disgusting.

That’s the word watching American soldiers drop to their knees, unrolling a red carpet for the man who killed Ukrainian children yesterday and will kill more tomorrow.

While Putin posed for photos in Alaska, Ukrainian parents were pulling their kids from rubble.

While he grinned in Trump’s limousine, Ukrainian mothers were digging graves.

While an Orthodox bishop exchanged gifts with a war criminal, 19,000 stolen Ukrainian children remained in Russian camps.

What really happened Friday: America told the world that genocide pays. War crimes get you red carpet treatment. Russia’s Foreign Minister showed up wearing a USSR sweatshirt. Russian state media served “chicken Kyiv” on Putin’s plane while actual Kyiv burns nightly from Russia’s drones.

The message was clear: We own you now.

The truth Trump abandoned

Putin didn’t just get legitimacy in Alaska; he got proof that the West has abandoned truth itself.

Genocide became “diplomacy.”

War crimes became “peace talks.”

Child killers become “partners.”

Here are the truths they’ve abandoned:

Truth 1: Peoples have the right to exist. They call this a “territorial dispute” when Russian officials openly admit genocidal intent.

Putin isn’t after land—he’s after eliminating Ukraine itself. But reality doesn’t bend to political convenience. Our right to exist isn’t negotiable.

This is bigger than Ukraine. Russia is fighting against existence itself—the principle that different peoples should exist, should grow, should contribute their own gifts to the world. Every time a people is erased, the world becomes smaller, darker, less human.

While America rolled out the red carpet for our destroyer, Ukraine stood up for the right of all peoples to flourish in this world. Because when the powerful are allowed to erase the weak, you’ve destroyed the only thing standing between civilization and chaos.

Once might makes right, there’s always someone mightier.

Truth 2: Truth and justice make civilizations great, not strongmen. Trump thinks Putin is powerful. He said Russian troops “retreated” from Kyiv because they got stuck in the mud, not because Ukrainians stood and fought.  He looks past Zelenskyy, thinking Ukraine doesn’t have the cards.

But he has it backwards.

Ukraine’s strength doesn’t come from tanks. It comes from standing for truth and justice—the very foundations that once made the West great.

Trump promised to “Make America Great Again.” He could have done exactly that by supporting the nation fighting for the very things that make America great. Instead, he chose a perpetrator of genocide.

Truth 3: Unconfronted evil grows. Politicians say: “This war needs to end, it’s cost thousands of lives.”

The lie is that giving Putin what he wants will make him stop. It won’t.

Putin didn’t stop after Georgia or Crimea, and he won’t stop after Donetsk. Evil doesn’t get satisfied when fed. It gets hungrier.

The choice before us

This is the West’s war being fought with Ukrainian blood. Putin isn’t just trying to erase Ukraine—he’s testing whether democratic civilization will defend itself. Friday gave him his answer.

The West can abandon Ukraine today and face Putin’s tanks in Warsaw tomorrow. America can sell us out now and watch its own children conscripted later.

What must happen now

Friday was America’s test. America failed.

But Ukrainians are still fighting. Still dying for the principles democratic civilization claims to believe in. Still holding the line that Western leaders are too weak to defend.

The West has one chance left:

• Send every weapon Ukraine needs. Now.
• Freeze every Russian asset. Today.
• Cut every pipeline, every bank, every trade deal that feeds Russian aggression.

Ukraine still fights for existence itself. The only question is whether the West will fight for its own.

If what we witnessed in Alaska isn't enough to arouse every American to stand up and be counted, then shame on us.  If you as an individual are not personally involved in this battle, then shame on you.

New York governor ramps up fight with Texas gerrymandering 'renegades'

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul

As we all must, Gov. Hochul takes a stand

By Walter Einenkel 

Daily Kos Staff 

August 08, 2025 at 2:00:11p MDT

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul held a press conference Monday to respond to ongoing GOP efforts to disproportionately increase Republican representation in Congress. She discussed potential Democratic strategies to combat Texas’ gerrymandering scam, including redrawing New York state’s congressional maps to offset the loss of Democratic seats.  

"If that's what's called for, I will put saving democracy as my top priority at any cost, because it is under siege,” Hochul told reporters. “Just like those who put on a uniform to fight in battles across the ages. For centuries we've stood up and fought. Blood has been shed. This is our moment in 2025 to stand up for all that we hold dear and not let it be destroyed by a bunch of renegades in a place called Texas.”

Hochul joins Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has also pledged to counter Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s machinations to sabotage democracy by redrawing California’s congressional maps.

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Related | California Democrats have a new plan to combat GOP in the next election

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Texas Democrats have been preparing for this fight. On Sunday, most Democratic state legislators left the state, denying Republicans the quorum needed to pass any legislation. Texas Democratic state Rep. James Talarico accused the GOP of “trying to rig the midterm elections right before our eyes.”

Abbott has since threatened to replace Democratic representatives and charge them with “bribery.” 

Join Gov. Hochul - stand up to Trump.

Trump Destroys Our Source of Information About Jobs. This Is Beyond Irresponsible.

 

He hates facts. He rejects truth. He doesn’t want the public to know what’s really happening. 

 

Robert Reich / Robert Reich's Substack

 

Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)

05 August 25

Sorry to intrude again on your day, but this is urgent.

I spent much of the 1990s as secretary of labor. One unit of the Labor Department is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I was instructed by my predecessors as well as by the White House, and by every labor economist and statistician I came in contact with, that one of my cardinal responsibilities was to guard the independence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Otherwise, this crown jewel of knowledge about jobs and the economy would be compromised. If politicized, it would no longer be trusted as a source of information.

So what does Trump do? In one fell swoop on Friday he essentially destroyed the credibility of the BLS.

Trump didn’t like the fact that the BLS revised downward its jobs reports for April and May.

Well, that’s too bad. Revisions in monthly jobs reports are nothing new. They’re made when the bureau gets more or better information over time, which it often does.

Yet with no basis in fact, Trump charged that Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, “rigged” the data “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” Then he ordered her fired and replaced with someone else — presumably someone whose data Trump will approve of.

How can anyone in the future trust the information that emerges from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer: They cannot.

Trump has destroyed the credibility of this extraordinarily important source of information.

When Trump doesn’t like the message, he shoots the messenger and replaces them with someone who will come up with messages he approves of. So we’re left without credible sources of information about what is really occurring.

Trump is in the process of trying to do the same with the Federal Reserve — demanding that Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair, cut interest rates. Trump is even threatening Powell with a Trumped-up expose of Powell’s supposed extravagance in refurbishing the Fed as a means of forcing Powell to do his bidding or resign.

What happens to the Fed’s credibility if Powell gives in to Trump? It evaporates.

In the future, we wouldn’t have confidence that the Fed is fighting inflation as rigorously as it should. And without that confidence, longer-term interest rates will spike, because investors will assume that there’s no inflation cop on the beat and therefore will demand a higher risk premium.

Trump hates facts that he disagrees with. That’s why he’s dismembering the Environmental Protection Agency, which has repeatedly shown that climate change isn’t a “hoax,” as Trump claims, but more like a national emergency.

It’s why Trump is attacking American universities, whose scientists are developing wind and solar energy and whose historians have revealed America’s tragic history of racism and genocide of indigenous people.

He is killing off the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, which are showing the sources of sickness and disease and how we can guard against them.

This is a man and a regime that doesn’t want the public to know the truth. He is turning America into George Orwell’s dystopian 1984.

The Trumping of America is happening so fast and in so many places that it’s hard to see the whole. Which partly explains why he doesn’t want the facts out. He doesn’t want us to know how bad it really is.

Help spread the truth. Help organize and mobilize against this calamity.

Will Trump one day adorn Ghislaine's neck with the medal of honor?  If she agrees to cover for him, you can bet on it.

We Must Not Comply: How Do We Disrupt the Momentum of Trump’s Cruelty?

  

Non-compliance is art, as art is meant to defy the status quo, question the givens, expand the boundaries of knowing and freedom.’ (photo: Olga Fedorov/EPA)

"They’re trying to replace what was with  minority rule by the disgustingly wealthy humans."

V (formerly Eve Ensler) / Guardian UK 27 July 25

(V is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls.) 

 

  

The exterminating force of Project 2025 is plowing through the culture, the government and people’s hearts and bodies like a drunk on a violent tear. 

We wake each morning, holding our breath to bear witness to the new devastation: PBS and NPR defunded, cuts to the fight against human trafficking, Medicaid gone for millions, Ice working to surveil critics, tons of food for the poor ordered burned and wasted.

The momentum of cruelty always feels inevitable. Cruelty is by definition “a callous indifference to or pleasure in causing pain”. For those of us who have suffered physical, political, racial and emotional abuse, it feels like a familiar steamroller of violence. 

We only have to witness the cries of parents being separated from their children, men screaming out for “libertad” from cages in an Everglades detention center (AKA Alligator Alcatraz), non-violent protesters beaten for trying to stop a genocide, to be frozen in that same incapacitating dread and fear.

What is the antidote to this destructive environment of mendacity possessing us now with fear, ennui and self-mutilating rage?

Ash-lee Woodard Henderson, a powerhouse activist and brilliant organizer, told me: “It’s not decided where we go yet. Which is why it feels tense. What we know is that there’s no going back to an old normal because our economic system has failed us and our governmental structure is being destroyed. 

They’re trying to replace what was with this minority rule of disgustingly wealthy humans dictating what can happen, not only in this country but globally.

“We’ve have to block and build at the same time. That means confronting both elected officials and the corporations that are lifting them up. We need to make sure that we are gumming up their ability to successfully implement any sort of action, whether it’s policy or otherwise, that takes more power and rights and access to life-saving resources away from our communities.”

So how do we gum up their momentum; how do we become refusers, artists of disruption, interrupters of their hateful and life-destroying trajectory? How do we clear the noise and fear in our heads so that we are able to hear the call of our inner morality?

“The thing that I love about being non-cooperative and non-compliant with the Trump administration,” Ash-Lee told me, “is its accessibility: people have all sorts of abilities, all sorts of means, regardless of class, regardless of identity, to find a tactic that fits for them. 

What keeps you up at night enough to make you active? Trump says we shouldn’t ask people for warrants. We demand warrants. When a business puts a ’No Kings’ sign up or a ’No Ice’ sign in their window, they’re not complying. And we need more people to do that wherever they are,” she said, “whether it’s a general saying, ’I’m not gonna command my troops to do this,’ whether it’s troops becoming conscientious objectors, whether it’s us boycotting Target and T-Mobile.”

This tyrannical white supremacist landscape is erasing our sense of existence and meaning. Daily forms of rebellion birth us back into our bodies and our purpose. 

Non-compliance is art, as art is meant to defy the status quo, question the givens, expand the boundaries of knowing and freedom. And as you courageously make your mark of refusal, you carve a path for others to be brave. Non-compliance is praxis, stretching and transforming the muscles of our discontent into impactful and embodied action.

There are a multitude of ways that we can make their lives miserable by taking small risks and huge ones. Like folks in California sitting in their cars outside the hotels where the Ice agents are and just lying on their horn for hours. Or people towing Ice vans away that are parked illegally. Or the Harlem baseball coach who knew all his kids were American-born. When Ice invaded the field, he told his kids to get inside the batting cage and stay silent. He said he was willing to die for his kids to get home.

“And non-complying is also filling in the gaps of resources and care that they are taking away. They’re already closing rural hospitals where we live because our governor didn’t expand Medicaid,” Ash-Lee told me. “So residents must build an alternative like country people and black folks across the country have been doing on their own accord for decades, if not centuries, creating community spaces where we can both line dance, do some boots-on-the-ground organizing, get your blood pressure checked, get your mammogram in the mobile unit, get your teeth cleaned, whatever. All of those things are not complying.”

I think of the man who suggested we all dress in Ice suits with masks and Oakley sunglasses and enter detention centers and free immigrants. Or my white British friend who was in a store in Nevada when Ice invaded and they started harassing Latinos for their identification. He stepped up and calmly asked why they weren’t asking for his ID. He asked simply without hostility. He asked it three times. 

Even though they continued, he momentarily disrupted the trajectory of cruelty and forced them to bring consciousness to what they were doing. Or the Rev Mariann Budde’s staring down Trump and his billionaire cronies in the first row of a Washington church in January, calmly and fearlessly demanding compassion for immigrants, refugees and LGBTQ+ communities.

And this is the time for artists to speak out, to disembed themselves from a fascist system, to place principles over profit and self-advancement. To be what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “disagreeable”. Yes, of course there are risks. But at this moment, with the jackboots in the streets and at our door, when each hour another liberty is being erased, and those who speak truth to power are being removed from TV, from universities, from cultural centers, when the cultural platforms are being removed themselves, speaking out is not just an obligation, it’s survival.

And there are artists beginning to organize. The poet Michael Klein is creating a new podcast calling writers “to take our language back in writing a way through the various veils of deceit–an act, which in itself, has always been a form of resistance”. Meena Jagannath, a movement lawyer, is gathering artists and activists in salons to deepen our collective investigation and imaginative co-creation. She told me: “Our charge in these times is to support each other in building protagonism – a sense that we have agency to contest fascist narratives about how the world is and should be. It needs to be a collective, creative and responsive process that takes in what’s going out there and alchemizes it into a more expansive imagination of what could and should be.”

So in a nod to the late great Mary Oliver, I ask you, what is the one precious, wild creative act you are doing to impede this nightmare?

Trump Is Teeing Up a Pardon of Epstein Accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell

 Think he wouldn’t do it? Really? Did you also think he wouldn’t pardon the January 6 insurrectionists? 

 

Michael Tomasky / The New Republic

 26 July 25

 

So Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime abettor of dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, is meeting Friday for a second time with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. OK, first of all, let’s just stop right there. Why Blanche? Well, gosh, you say, he’s a deputy A.G.; seems legit. 

Actually, no, not by a long shot. Blanche was Trump’s personal defense attorney—on a sex case. (Technically, it was a hush-money case—the one involving adult film actress Stormy Daniels, which Blanche and Trump lost—but it was really about sex, in this case between consenting adults.)

So, no—Blanche, whose actual job entails the day-to-day running of the department, is absolutely not the appropriate person for this task. Wait—let’s stop right there again. 

Is this “task” even legitimate? Under certain circumstances, it might be. Let’s say a mobster is in the can for some felony. Prosecutors believe he has information about a different crime. So they go to him to see if he’ll talk, and they offer him a deal.

If that’s what’s going on here, maybe it’s OK—although alas, we stop again to ponder the morality of offering a deal to a child sex trafficker (hey, right wing, I thought this was a moral line in the sand for you?). 

This is not a mobster rat whose information could bring down another made man or even a whole family. This is a woman who was convicted of conspiring to groom minors for Epstein’s pleasure and who, according to at least one witness at her trial, participated in the sex.

So the whole thing shouldn’t even be happening. She was tried, she was convicted, and that’s that. 

But: If it had to happen; if we are to concede that questioning her at this point is a legitimate enterprise, shouldn’t it be done by a line attorney who is familiar with the details of the case? Of course it should. Someone like, oh, Maurene Comey. Oh. Wait. They fired her last week.

I hope you’re putting these puzzle pieces together with me as we go. The bottom line here is obvious. Donald Trump, I believe, wants to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for her silence. Note I said wants to. He might not. A pardon would rip his base in two. He may grasp that and not do it.

But I say there can be little question that he’s thinking about it. In fact, on the White House lawn Friday morning, a couple hours after I wrote this column, he was asked about a possible Maxwell pardon, and he said: “I’m allowed to do it.”

I’m not the only one who smelled this possibility coming. Dave Aronberg, who worked as the Florida drug czar under U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi when she was the state attorney general, made some interesting comments on CNN the other day.

First, he observed how weird it was that Blanche was conducting these interviews: “I can’t overstate it, Brianna [Keilar]. It’s as if the number two executive at CNN was conducting this interview with me instead of you. Like, what? It never happens.”

Then he connected the political dots: “But there are others who could do this, which makes me believe this is a lot about perhaps some politics involved, like maybe to protect the president, to get a deal with Ghislaine Maxwell that she would get some immunity now and maybe a hidden pardon in the future, some sort of implication that she would be pardoned in the future if she comes out and says that the president was exonerated, not involved in any criminal activity.”

Of course, we do not know whether Trump committed these heinous crimes. Like any American, he is entitled to the presumption of innocence. But the mere fact of these interviews being conducted the way they are raises certain obvious suspicions.

Maxwell and her lawyers surely know all this. She has a lot of incentive, in other words, to say what Trump and Blanche want her to say. Oh, and by the way, let’s stop here again. 

Why should we believe a word she says? There is much-documented evidence of Maxwell showing a “significant pattern of dishonest conduct,” as Merrick Garland’s Justice Department put it in 2022. They spared her (and themselves, and their finite resources) a perjury trial because she’d already been convicted of the big stuff.

Even assuming Trump is personally innocent, he still has a motive to cut a deal with Maxwell that leads to an eventual pardon. She might name prominent Democrats or other people to whom Trump is hostile. Her “pattern” suggests she’ll say anything Trump wants her to say.

If you think Trump wouldn’t do this, that pardoning a child sex trafficker is a bridge too far even for Trump … honestly, wake up. I bet you also thought he’d never pardon 1,200 anti-American insurrectionists.

If Trump is innocent, there’s one simple thing he should do. Order the release of all the Epstein files. Ah, but now we know that his name appears in them “multiple” times and that he lied earlier this month when asked about it. (The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Bondi told him about the multiple mentions of his name back in May.)

would MAGA world receive a possible pardon by their hero of a woman who did the things Maxwell did? Some percentage, maybe even a substantial percentage, would throw in the towel, finally. But I doubt a majority. 

 

They’ll find an excuse. Child rape is bad, sure, but it’s really only bad when Democrats do it. Trump was sent by Jesus, after all, and Jesus teaches us to forgive, so Trump’s joined-at-the-hip, 15-year friendship with Epstein was about as Jesus-like as you can get, right? The sad thing about that joke is that, if it’s ever revealed that Trump did unspeakable things, one of those sick “Christian” preachers will probably say this in all seriousness.

The administration’s handling of the Epstein scandal and the likely coming indictment of Barack Obama, which I’ll write about next Monday, take us to depths we never, ever imagined we could reach in this country. 

Trump is the law, the law is Trump. I’ve always thought that, as horrible as everything is, if there’s an election in 2028 and the Democrat wins, we can get back to normal fairly quickly. 

As of this week, I’m not so sure.