Ask any of the thousands of visitors who have come to the U.S. to see a World Cup game. Ask any of the millions watching the international games at home, in taverns, pubs or theaters. They’ll say that, despite all claims of exceptionalism, the U.S. is screwed-up for two reasons: Trump is president again and we have way too many guns.

Before Trump was elected in 2016, guns were the No. 1 subject raised by visitors when we compared notes on life in our respective countries: Why do we have so many guns? Why don’t we do something about all the mass shootings and daily killings? How can such an advanced country be so unwilling to deal with an obvious problem?

I always give the same response: The firearms industry, with the help of Republicans and the Supreme Court, have won the battle over gun regulation. Gun owners apparently believe that thousands of firearms deaths a year constitute the price we must pay for a free, gun-toting society.

In 2024, some 77 million Americans decided it would be a good idea to have Trump as president again — a felon, sexual predator and the self-proclaimed “best friend gun owners have ever had in the White House.”

Now, in his second term, Trump is rolling back further regulation of firearms, making it harder to revoke the licences of dealers who break the law, and making it easier for people, including those with mental illness, to access guns.

Under Trump, the U.S. Postal Service has proposed allowing handguns to be shipped through the mail, breaking a longstanding prohibition of the practice.

What I report next is the reality of American life, and it probably won’t surprise you. It will likely just depress you further — the full knowledge that the country that defeated the Nazis, produced a cure for polio and put man on the moon is unable (or unwilling) to cure the contagion of gun violence.

Drawing on data from the CDC in 2024 — the last year before the Trump administration started messing with that organization — researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health came up with these facts:

• There were nearly 45,000 firearm deaths in the U.S. in 2024. Someone was killed by a gun every 12 minutes.

• Firearm homicides declined nearly 16% from 2023, but firearm suicides reached a record high, with 27,593.

• In 2024, someone died of gun suicide every 19 minutes

• Firearms remained the leading cause of death for children and teens ages 1–17.

• There were sharp increases in firearm homicide and suicide rates among some demographic groups, particularly Black females.

The annual report comes from the Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. You can read the full report here. I think I’ve read it every year for as long as it has been produced. The center always offers some practical ideas for reducing gun violence, and you’d think elected officials would take heed. But, under Trump, the federal government has little interest in saving lives by regulating guns or even discouraging their use. In fact, last year, under crackpot secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services abruptly pulled funding for gun violence prevention programs. Over the Fourth of July weekend, the nation’s 250th anniversary, another 43 people were killed and many wounded in shootings across the country. The Gun Violence Archive showed 224 mass shootings as of the holiday weekend. The whole world is watching, and the world thinks we’ve lost our minds.

The most disturbing public address of the July Fourth holiday was not the one Trump gave but a brief, recorded declaration of stupidity by the nation’s energy secretary Chris Wright.

Appearing downright gleeful in an official video, Wright said he was “thrilled to report that, after about 35 years, we will end the subsidies for wind and solar.”

Imagine being “thrilled” that your country has bowed out of the important effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by generating electricity from renewable sources. Imagine being “thrilled” that you’re leading the retreat from energy security through sustainable, domestic power generation.

China’s economy continues to grow, and it has harnessed wind and sun to add hundreds of thousands of gigawatts of electric capacity — 445 gw in 2024 and another 434 in 2025 — while the U.S. officially walks away from clean energy.

“This is suicide by stupid,” says Fred Wellman, a veteran who is running for Congress in Missouri’s Second District.

You’d think Chris Wright would be a little less “thrilled” about sounding a retreat, given climate change and given his personal circumstance — married with children. But, like Trump, Wright downplays global warming, promotes “drill, baby, drill” foolishness and rejects renewables.

“Wind and solar take a lot of land, 100 times more land for a similar amount of energy,” Wright said in his holiday video. “They take an enormous amount of materials, energy intensive materials like steel and cement and polysilicon. They take an enormous amount of additional transmission lines … . And what we get for all that is a relatively small amount of low value energy. It’s low value because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine.”

Here’s another Trump lackey — this one with an engineering degree from MIT — who apparently doesn’t believe in batteries.

While Wright claims that renewables “increase Americans’ electricity prices,” the end of subsidies is far more likely to do that. The Trump regime declared July Fourth the cutoff for valuable tax credits for the development of wind and solar systems. Those subsidies can be worth up to 30% of development costs.

The federal cutoff doesn’t mean that developers will withdraw from new projects. In fact, there are still many in the pipeline and climate activists and market analysts believe future demand for electricity — for data centers, for instance — will make investment in renewables profitable.

Keep in mind: Despite what Wright says, solar and onshore wind are the cheapest ways to generate energy as demand for electricity grows. And while Trump thinks wind turbines cause cancer and fat foxes, climate activists keep making progress in the states and private equity expresses love for renewables over fossil fuels. The Motley Fool recently mentioned three renewable stocks worth a look: NextEra Energy, Brookfield Renewable and Bloom Energy.

Wall Street still loves oil producers, but investors have clearly come to view renewables as a big part of the energy future — another reason why it’s stupid for the U.S. to cut subsidies.

It’s impossible to believe that Trump received a thoughtful assessment and objective conclusion that renewable tax credits were not a good taxpayer investment.

Like most everything else — tearing up Obama’s deal with Iran to end nuclear development, for instance — his regressive actions seem spiteful and petty, conceived to “own the libs.”

Trump pushes oil and coal. He hates wind turbines because they’re not pretty, but also because their existence confirms the existence of climate change. Same with solar. It’s not hard to see what motivated him to end the subsidies.

Unless they suffer from the same intractable conditions that afflict Trump — cynicism, narcissism, denialism, nihilism — the people who agreed to work for this ignorant man will one day realize they made a bad decision. Not just for their careers. But for the country, for their own families and for the future.

At the outset of his confirmation hearing last year as Trump’s nominee for energy secretary, Chris Wright took a moment to recognize his mother, his sister, his wife, his daughter and her husband, his grandson, his son and the son’s fiancé, extended family and friends. That was a nice gesture.

But it’s impossible to see how a man who cares about his family — and presumably, the quality of life of future generations — can say in full conscience that he’s “thrilled” to serve Donald Trump’s agenda, especially on the climate front. Especially there.

The white supremacists who took part in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 learned the hard way about having their white faces wholly exposed to cameras: You can lose your job (or your standing with the National Guard) if the boss finds out you’re part of a racist mob.

Same thing with the Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: Masks would have made it harder for the FBI to identify and charge those who attacked police and vandalized the halls of Congress.

So, the half-adults who marched as members of the Patriot Front in the nation’s capital on July Fourth covered their faces with balaclavas or neck gaiters and sunglasses. It’s part of the uniform. Anonymity helps the Patriot Front recruit new members; it’s part of the group’s appeal: No one has to know you’re a white supremacist — not your boss, not your neighbors, not even your significant other, assuming you have one.

The face coverings put the Patriot Front boys in historic company with KKK members, bank robbers and international terrorists.

We call them cowards because of the masks; it means they’re unwilling to be fully identified with what they believe, to publicly take a stand. According to the long and overwrought Patriot Front manifesto, they believe America should only be inhabited by descendants of certain white Europeans, and that democracy is tyranny. It’s a lot of gibberish, with prose that beats around the bush and acts as a kind of mask over the true purpose of the Patriot Front. The manifesto never clearly says: Racists are us.

So, yeah, a bunch of cowards, but also, I suspect, white men in protracted adolescence.

I referred to “half-adults” in the third paragraph. That’s not my term; it came from the late poet, author and philosopher Robert Bly and his book from the 1990s, “The Sibling Society.” I’ve referenced Bly’s treatise several times over the years because I believe he identified something seldom discussed in public places — a lack of maturity in political and cultural leadership that left many young Americans begging for moral direction.

Bly believed ours had become “an adolescent society” in which there are no real grownups, and where, in classic adolescent behavior, a majority of adults care little about the children growing up behind them. Bly feared that America had too many “half-adults,” women and men stuck in adolescence, obsessed with personal pleasures and mindless entertainments, neglecting the next generation and the greater good.

That might sound like cranky old-guy stuff, but ask yourself: How many times, during this tragic Trump era, have we heard someone complain about the lack of “adults in the room”?

Trump is the embodiment of what Bly saw: Wholly self-centered, immature, ignorant and willfully disregarding the next generation (except for maybe his own children).

In an adolescent culture, Bly said, empathy for children and respect for elders disappear. Political leaders take knives to the social safety net. They strive not to be good or great, but to be famous. The young are told that nothing works, that our great institutions, the pillars of a free and just society, are flawed. Politics becomes a toxic mix of partisan sniping, petty jealousies and crippling cynicism. Young people, who search instinctively for role models, cannot locate enough genuine grownups — all to the detriment of American society.

Bly’s take came to mind again when I saw the Patriot Front on the march during our national holiday. It all looks and sounds adolescent to me — weird fixations and selfish behaviors of people who have not grown up.

Bly wanted to blame baby boomers for leaving a generation vulnerable to hate mongers and crackpots.

But I only buy some of that because, no matter how you were raised, there’s no excuse for willfully ignoring human decency, the lessons of history and the responsibilities of being a thinking adult in American democracy.

Fortunately, despite all, this nation is full of young people — the children and grandchildren of boomers — who managed to grow up without joining the paramilitary fringe. They do not embrace white supremacy, they do not endorse violence; they see Trump for what he is, a hideous con man. And when they march and demonstrate, when they protest, they do not wear masks.

On its 250th anniversary, the United States of America has hit bottom.

That should be clear to all but the most devout members of the Trump cult.

Contrary to what MAGA Republicans say, we are not enjoying a “golden age.” It might be golden for some — millionaires, billionaires and corporations that enjoy tax cuts, less regulation or shady deals with the Trump family.

But I’m talking about something else — not so much the balance of our bank accounts, but the feelings in our bones, the state of the American soul.

We are walking in spiritual darkness, a time of foreboding, confusion and national embarrassment.

• The president of the United States is a vulgar, racist and openly corrupt man empowered by a politicized Supreme Court and supported by a cabinet and congressional Republicans unwilling to challenge his impulsive actions or call out his lies.

• He has tried to subvert the integrity of our elections and continues to do so as the mid-terms approach.

• Immigrants live in fear of his fascist police force.

• Our allies consider Trump ignorant, untrustworthy, gullible and dangerous.

As a result of all that and more, feelings of national pride are muted when they should be in peak form at our Bicentennial-plus-50.

The latest polls have Trump’s approval rating around 37%. Rational Americans find that inexplicably high. I explain it with one of three factors, or, more likely, some combination:

• Trump’s staying power as a cult leader;

• the unshakable racial prejudice among the kindred spirits who follow him;

• the effectiveness of the right-wing propaganda machine.

The good news: About 60% of Americans disapprove of Trump. Some have despised him all along; they voted against him three times. Others have changed their minds over time; they now acknowledge his mendacity, his self-dealing and the stupidity of his costly war with Iran. They also see his cruelty — for instance, the great lie that his mass deportation effort would focus on the “worst of the worst” immigrants and not, say, a nun walking to church or a man with a rake in his hands.

The polls reveal that a growing number of independent voters are jumping off the Trump train.

That’s good. It supports what I see in the American body politic: Resistance is turning into fierce backlash, like one we have never before seen.

Just as Trump’s election in 2016 was seen as backlash — white voters in battleground states rejecting a Black man as president along with the prospect of a strong woman following him into the Oval Office — so, too, will we see a backlash to Trumpism.

In fact, it’s been underway for more than a year, with “No Kings” demonstrations across the country. Data show that anti-Trump protests during the first year of his second term have been four times more common than they were at the same point in his first term.

Trumpism will not survive Trump. It ends with him.

Once he’s gone, some normalcy might return to the Republican Party. Even so, the party will have nothing new to offer voters, and there will be considerable in-fighting to see who emerges in leadership.

But the coming backlash will not be built on the mere absence of Trump or chaos within the GOP.

It will be built on something far more powerful and permanent — the burning realization among mainstream voters that Trump, the GOP and billionaires took us to the bottom and the only way out of this mess is with Democrats and a big, bold progressive agenda.

Maybe it’s not a backlash as much of a bounce-up.

It’s the realization that, as low as we’ve fallen, we could yet have the country we always wanted — the one that’s been held back since the Reagan Revolution, with trickle-down Republicans cutting taxes, pushing for less government and engaging in culture wars while Democrats compromised and tried to govern from the center. The only major victory in the last 40 years was the Affordable Care Act of 2010 — without a single Republican in support — and that still did not get health insurance for every American. We need to do more.

There’s a coalition building organically day by day — mainstream Democrats, independents, progressives and young people who see Trump as a hideous grifter indifferent to their future. He walked away from climate change and denigrated science. He extorted millions from universities. He turned the Department of Justice into the Department of Retribution. He brought crackpots into his cabinet and allowed Stephen Miller to carry out a cruel immigrant purge.

More and more people are seeing this now, and they are sick of it.

• Sick of international humiliation.

• Sick of a president who kisses up to dictators while criticizing our allies.

• Sick of the Trump family’s open corruption.

• Sick of tax cuts for the rich and super-rich while the basic needs of struggling Americans are not met.

• Sick of an expensive health care system when we could have Medicare for all.

• Sick of politicians who denigrate government and public service instead of inspiring young Americans to step up and serve.

• Sick of anti-science crackpots held as policy experts.

• Sick of constant false claims of election fraud and, more generally, cynical politicians who propose solutions to problems that don’t exist (birth tourism, undocumented migrants voting, etc.).

What’s brewing is a backlash that comes with big demands — that we stop settling for mediocrity and build a better country, that we imagine again a common good and work toward it.

• No one goes hungry.

• No one dies because they can’t afford a doctor.

• We resume robust research on cancer.

• We work again toward clean energy and slowing climate change.

• We find solutions to big problems — mass shootings, drug addiction, untreated mental illness, homelessness.

• We celebrate diversity again. We claw back the billions that went to ICE, then offer amnesty to undocumented immigrants and a path to citizenship.

• We expand the Supreme Court to 13 and promulgate term limits and ethics codes for justices.

• We grant statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

• We help Ukraine defeat Russia.

• We restore the U.S. Agency for International Development and start again saving lives in the world’s poorest countries.

• We rebuild the East Wing of the White House and replant the rose garden.

• We strive to be an economically powerful nation while also being a decent and humane one.

With the right messaging, Democrats will be shocked to learn how much of this agenda appeals to the same people who once decided Trump was their best option.

I know: It’s a big ask. But there’s a lot of good that has been reversed or delayed since Reagan and especially during Trump, while our democracy has been at risk. It’s time to bounce up from the bottom. It’s time for a big, beautiful backlash — a long, robust, audacious backlash.

If, as Justice Samuel Alito stated, racism is not Trump’s prime motivation in ending the TPS program for thousands of Haitians living in the United States, then what’s the reason? Why the big effort to have these people deported? Why would Stephen Miller, Trump’s top aide on immigration, call the Supreme Court’s ruling last week “a victory 10 years in the making”?

Is it because of the word “temporary” in Temporary Protected Status, and the Trump regime believes righteously in following the letter of the law?

That can’t be it.

So what’s this all about, if not race?

If Haitians with TPS are living here, working and contributing to their communities — if they keep from becoming felons like Trump — why are we bothering them? Are they taking up too much space? Making too much noise? Is Haiti now the land of pleasant living?

Alito and the other Republicans on the Roberts Court apparently believe we have arrived at post-racial America, and they are blatantly dishonest about Trump’s racism, giving him the benefit of doubt, especially with respect to Haiti. Last week, the court’s conservative majority ruled that Trump could lift TPS for some 350,000 Haitians and send them packing.

In so doing, the court further empowered a racist to continue to purge the country of Black people who were not born here. It’s disgusting, and one of the cruelest Supreme Court rulings in history.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said there was plenty of evidence of Trump’s ugly motivation in statements he had made: Haitians were “eating the pets”and “probably have AIDS.” Haiti is a “shithole country” and Haitians are “poisoning the blood” of our nation. “The references — of filth, disease and primitiveness — are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes,” Kagan wrote.

But the court’s conservatives were not interested in that argument, revealing their partisanship or willful ignorance, or both.

Now Stephen Miller must find orgasmic the opportunity to put ICE operations into high gear, to grab more Black people off the streets and get them in line for deportation.

But, while he and Trump might see the Supreme Court ruling on TPS as a big win, scaling up ICE operations will likely make Trump even less popular.

Mark my words and remember the polling on this subject: Americans support deporting “the worst of the worst,” not immigrants who work and stay out of trouble. Trump has lost big ground with voters on immigration because of the aggressive ICE tactics. You’d think he would have backed off by now. But his racism is so strong — and Miller such a persuasive Rasputin — that we are bound to see more ICE arrests on our streets.

The Supreme Court ruling on TPS comes at an interesting time.

Since the departure of Kristi Noem as secretary of homeland security, DHS and ICE have scaled back their plans to convert large warehouses into detention centers for immigrants. Reportedly, those agencies plan to jettison seven of the 11 warehouses Noemi agreed to purchase; they’ll either be sold — probably at a loss to taxpayers — or passed off to other federal departments.

However, given the Roberts Court ruling on TPS, you have to wonder if DHS and ICE will rethink those plans.

One massive warehouse still in line to become a detention center is in the western stretch of Maryland, near Hagerstown. But it’s facing robust resistance. Organizers of the protest say more than 3,000 people have voiced their opposition to the detention center during a public comment period that was to end July 1.

Republican politicians in Washington County endorsed the plan to turn a sprawling warehouse into a 1,500-bed facility operated by the Department of Homeland Security.

But citizens have been loud and persistent in their opposition, supported by Gov. Wes Moore, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown and other Democrats.

The fight centers on the environmental impact of such a large facility, with a citizens group called Hagerstown Rapid Response arguing that the detention center would heavily tax the local water and waste-water infrastructure and possibly harm creeks that flow to the Potomac River.

That’s a good argument, and one that hopefully will prevail. (In April, a federal judge said DHS’s attempt to avoid an environmental assessment of the project did not “even pass the laugh test.”)

Public sentiment locally — as in Washington County, Maryland — and nationally has turned against the Trump regime’s purge of immigrants. It has gone too far and been too aggressive and violent.

But, given the Supreme Court ruling on TPS, there’s no telling how far a newly empowered Trump regime will go to put deportations into high gear, especially as Trump continues to lose popularity and power. As noted in previous columns, the more his approval rating drops, the worse Trump behaves. And the racism is very strong with him.

As the U.S. approaches the 250th anniversary of the revolution that led to the establishment of our democratic republic, we salute the thousands of Albanians who have taken to the streets, day after day, to stop the huge Kushner-Trump luxury resort project and to overthrow the government that would make it possible. As a sign at one of the protests declared: “Silence Has No Place in Democracy.”

The “Flamingo Revolution” was sparked by the start of construction of the exclusive resort Trump’s daughter and her husband plan to build on nature reserves on the coast of Albania. The protests are driven by environmentalists as well as citizens who suspect corruption in the multi-billion-dollar deal Kushner’s Saudi-backed investment group made with the Albanian government. The protests also reflect Europe’s opposition to anything Trump or Trump-related and, more broadly, the growing global resentment of concentrated wealth, its political influence and exploitative nature.

In 2024, the Albanian parliament, led by Prime Minister Edi Rama of the center-left Socialist Party, changed conservation laws to allow the construction of five-star hotels in protected areas. Albanians knew about this at the time, and they were aware of the deal when Rama’s government won re-election against fractured opposition in 2025.

But, in May of this year, heavy construction equipment appeared on one of Albania’s most treasured natural coastlines, an area known for flamingos and other migratory birds. And that set off the massive protests, with calls for a reversal of the law that would make the resort possible and for Rama’s resignation.

Pushteti popullit! Power to the people!

More Agolli photographs and a fresh report on the protests from Mother Jones.

Subscribe now

You have probably noticed that certain people freak out whenever socialism emerges as a thing in American politics.

There’s a lot of that going around right now, following the recent primaries. It’s both amusing and tiresome. Tiresome because we’ve heard all the hysterical warnings before: Socialism will destroy the country; the government will seize private property; capital will flee for other coasts; the deep state will get even deeper, more Americans will land in the safety net and become lazy; bread shelves will soon be empty, and cats will sleep with dogs.

Republicans, the servants of the corporate class, always respond this way. They use “socialism” interchangeably with “Marxism” and “communism.” Mike Johnson, the weaselly Speaker of the House, claimed on Thursday that communism is now “on our own shores” and apparently — quoting Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper here — threatening our precious bodily fluids.

“It is a very serious time,” Johnson said at a news conference Wednesday. “Every American needs to wake up and understand the threat. The Marxists have nominated some of the most radical candidates to ever run for office, and they’re running for Congress. The insurgent left is on the rise.”

You see what’s going on here?

Johnson and other bearers of the corporate torch — FOX News hosts prominently — need to scare the base that socialism would somehow be worse than our present system of low-or-no taxes for billionaires and financial struggles for everyone else.

We are one of the richest countries in the world and yet Republicans refuse to finance a system that raises the quality of life for all, not just their billionaire benefactors. It’s always been so.

Throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st, Republicans have opposed just about every government program that would make life better for Americans. They opposed much of President Roosevelt’s New Deal and the establishment of the Social Security system. They opposed Medicare and Medicaid. In 2010, not a single Republican voted for the Affordable Care Act, then they tried (and, fortunately, failed) to repeal Obamacare dozens of times. (Several Republican governors and legislatures still refuse to accept the Medicaid expansion provisions of the ACA.)

Democrats are not blameless for the state of affairs but at least they made attempts over time to improve their quality of life for the 99% of us who live well outside the ultra-wealth bubble.

The winds are finally shifting. More Americans have grown keenly aware of what 40 years of Reaganomics — trickle-down tax cuts for the rich and corporations, less regulation of industries, union busting and stagnant wage growth — hath wrought: A new gilded age, worse than the last one. Billionaires — Musk, Bezos, et al — have gone high profile in the Trump era, making vivid the nation’s wide disparity in income and wealth. And there’s little evidence of noblesse oblige among the Trump class of billionaires and multimillionaires — no sense of obligation to the common good, the greater society. And there’s Trump, the central figure, talking about building a ballroom, gilding the Oval Office, playing golf — 116 days out of 523 days since returning to office, as of this date — and dismissing “affordability” as an issue.

And so resentment builds, and it spreads far beyond the Never Trumpers. It has started to reach the MAGA crowd.

Mike Johnson is correct: Every American needs to wake up. But they already have. We are “woke,” and this time “woke” means acute awareness of what Republicans, the billionaires and a corrupt president have wrought: An American oligarchy — a group of uber-wealthy elites and corporate interests holding disproportionate political power.

The people have had enough of that, and the signals are stronger than ever.

So look, don’t let the hysterical voices on the extreme right scare you.

Socialism means ending the oligarchy’s ramp-up to ultimate power. It means, as a fundamental principle, that the super-rich should pay more in taxes so that fewer Americans go without food, without doctor and dental appointments, without the education and skills training they need, without family leave and child care. It means we follow Bernie Sanders’ prescription for keeping the Social Security system sound and for guaranteeing health care for everyone. It means, ultimately, a higher quality of life, less stress, and maybe even more vacation time. The rich will still be rich. But we’ll have a better country.

Alan Greenspan, who died this week at age 100, revealed an inconvenient truth to anti-immigrant Republicans and racists elsewhere: Immigrants, including those undocumented, contribute mightily to the American economy, the federal budget and the Social Security system.

Testifying before Congress as Fed chair 25 years ago, Greenspan estimated that undocumented immigrants paid about $70 billion annually in taxes and received about $43 billion in government services, smashing one of the common nativistic myths about immigrants being a drain on American taxpayers.

Greenspan also pointed public attention toward the Social Security system and the vital contributions that immigrants had made there.

Subscribe now

In 2005, The New York Times reported that undocumented workers had contributed about $7 billion to the Social Security Administration. This happened because those immigrants had obtained an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) from the Internal Revenue Service.

ITINs have been available, in lieu of Social Security numbers, since the 1990s. With them, undocumented workers pay billions into the SSA and Medicare systems — and they do this despite the fact that many workers who leave the country, of their own will or via deportation, never will collect retirement or health benefits.

This point was affirmed when Stephen Goss, the SSA’s chief actuary, said that, by 2007, the Social Security trust fund had received a net benefit of, at minimum, $120 billion and as much as $240 billion from unauthorized immigrants.

That represented somewhere between 5.4 percent to 10.7 percent of the trust fund’s total assets at the time.

“The cumulative contribution is surely higher now,” wrote Edward Schumacher-Matos in The Washington Post in 2010. “The Social Security trust fund faces a solvency crisis that would be even more pressing were it not for these payments. ‘If, for example, we had not had other-than-legal immigrants in the country,’ Goss said, ‘then these numbers suggest that we would have entered persistent shortfall of tax revenue to cover payouts starting in 2009, or six years earlier than estimated under the 2010 Trustees Report.’”

In 2009, Greenspan warned Congress that steady immigration was necessary for U.S. economic growth.

“There is little doubt,” he said, “that unauthorized immigration has made a significant contribution to the growth of our economy. Between 2000 and 2007, for example, it accounted for more than a sixth of the increase in our total civilian labor force. Unauthorized immigrants serve as a flexible component of our workforce, often a safety valve when demand is pressing and among the first to be discharged when the economy falters.”

Greenspan acknowledged the time-worn complaint that the presence of unskilled, undocumented immigrants suppresses the wages of low-skilled, native-born Americans and imposes significant costs on state and local governments.

“However,” Greenspan said, “the estimated wage suppression and fiscal costs are relatively small, and economists generally view the overall economic benefits of this workforce as significantly outweighing the costs.”

But, two decades later, we have an aggressive, nationwide effort to purge the country of people who have made significant contributions to the economy and the nation’s safety net.

It’s not only cruel. It’s stupid.

Cruel plus stupid equals Trump.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated last year that annual average surges of 200,000 immigrants, both documented and undocumented, would boost GDP by $8.9 trillion during the decade ending in 2034. And the trend Greenspan reported back in 2001 — immigrant contributions to the federal coffers versus costs in government services — continues to hold: We reap far more in revenue from immigrants than they cost us.

While a columnist there, I used to hear frequently from certain Baltimore Sun readers who believed the IRS, SSA and state tax collectors had no business taking revenue from “illegal immigrants” who shouldn’t be in the country to begin with.

It should be illegal to collect taxes from illegals!

But, of course, not one was agreeable to paying more in taxes to make up for the shortfall that would occur if undocumented workers did not exist.

Such is one of the great hypocrisies of the MAGA Americans who favor mass deportation and who oppose any kind of benefits to the undocumented.

Greenspan’s advisories to Congress included a call to expand our reach to highly educated and skilled immigrants.

“Our primary and secondary school systems are increasingly failing to produce the skilled workers needed to fully utilize our evermore sophisticated and complex stock of intellectual and physical capital,” Greenspan said. “This capital stock has been the critical input for our rising productivity and standards of living and can be expected to continue to be essential for our future prosperity. The consequence of our educational shortfall is that a highly disproportionate number of our exceptionally skilled workers are foreign-born. . . . The quantity of temporary H-1B visas issued each year is far too small to meet the need, especially in the near future as the economy copes with the forthcoming retirement wave of skilled baby boomers.”

The number of H-1B visas increased dramatically in the years since then, but Trump and Stephen Miller, architect of the immigrant purge, have made it much tougher — and far more expensive — to get one.

More stupidity: The Trump regime cuts funding for higher learning and dismantles the Department of Education while cracking down on visas for well-educated, foreign-born workers to fill the gaps in our skilled workforce.

When Democrats return to power: Real immigration reform must be a priority: Secure the border and make immigration orderly, but also offer an amnesty program and a path to citizenship to any undocumented immigrants who remain after the Trump purge. We need to end the cruelty, claw back the billions that Republicans have authorized for ICE and make a whole new promise to the world — that the United States is still be a wealthy and powerful nation, but we will again be a decent and humane one.

A year ago this month, a Reagan-appointed federal judge in Boston handed Trump one of his many courtroom defeats — with a stunning slap at the regime’s obsession with race and gender in medical research.

Calling cuts to National Institutes of Health funding “arbitrary and capricious,” U.S. District Judge William G. Young ordered the restoration of grants the regime had banned. The ban included any grants that mentioned “diversity, equity and inclusion” with a focus on why some populations — including women and any sexual, racial or ethnic minorities — are more at risk of certain disorders or diseases.

Young, a senior judge, had sharp words for the funding cuts.

“I have never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” he said. “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years, and I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this, and I confine my remarks to this record, to health care. …

“It is palpably clear,” Young added, “these directives and the set of terminated grants also are designed to frustrate, to stop research that may bear on the health of Americans, of our LGBTQ community. That’s appalling.”

If you thought that rebuke would put an end to the regime’s efforts to purge “wokeness” from research grants, you would be wrong.

Trump gave a Christian Nationalist zealot the keys to the Office of Management and Budget, and that fellow is not backing off.

Russell Vought, a believer in the “post-Constitutional presidency,” with power concentrated in the hands of the executive, wants to have the final say on funding for scientific research. New federal rules have been proposed to give political appointees — Vought and others in the regime — control of grants.

So hacks and science skeptics — not expert review panels of government and non-government scientists — would have control over federal dollars.

And in Vought’s case, we are talking about a guy with weird personal obsessions. He cut the budget of the Office of Civil Rights by $49 million, or 35%, to remove OCR’s “ability to push DEI programs and promote radical transgender ideology.”

Vought’s fixation on “trans ideology” led to $18 billion in cuts to stop the NIH from “[promoting] radical gender ideology to the detriment of America’s youth.”

He almost single-handedly brought federal funding of climate science to a halt.

He’s a servant of the Heritage Foundation and the corporate class, a supporter of Trump’s revenge ethic, empowered to act on some juvenile scorn for all the smart kids.

Vought now wants to have the final say on future research grants —a political appointee and far-right extremist deciding what gets funded, rather than having grants based on their scientific merit.

Stand Up For Science, an advocacy group, estimates that nearly 5,000 clinical trials, including more than 1,000 cancer treatment tests, could stop under the new regulations that Vought proposed.

To come up with that estimate, Stand Up for Science applied the proposed new rules to some 10,000 current clinical trials funded through NIH. About half could be scrubbed because they in some way address the “wokeness” that zealots like Vought despise.

Scientific American quoted scientists who believe the Stand Up estimate is too high. But Elizabeth Ginexi, a former NIH program officer, said she expects “mass grant cancellations” at NIH if Vought gets his way. “It will be very ugly,” Ginexi said.

Separately, in an interview with NPR, Ginexi said: “When we’re designing a study [for] a new cancer therapeutic, do you want Russell Vought — who is not a scientist — to determine which immunotherapy is ready to go into a phase three trial?”

I would bet most Americans, except for those in the extremist MAGA class, would say no.

And yet Vought already wields tremendous power of the purse and, if the rules are approved, he’ll have more.

In addition, the new rules call for “an America First approach to public health” that would broadly prohibit grant recipients from international scientific collaborations.

The saboteurs think of everything, don’t they?

In a June 8 statement, the Trump regime singled out the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) for having issued assessments of cancer risks that “can create unnecessary public confusion, undermine confidence in everyday products and industries, and lead to policy outcomes that are disconnected from actual exposure and modern scientific standards.”

That statement was issued jointly by the State Department and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services. It offered no supporting evidence in arguing for a divorce from the IARC.

But, who needs evidence, when you can just make assertions and insinuations? When you despise science, you dismiss science — even at the expense of public health.

Among all the things that are outrageous about the Trump regime, its willingness to risk the nation’s health — to roll back progress in medicine and stifle research — is the worst, a self-inflicted wound. And for what? To exact revenge from all the smart kids?

Through decades of debate with disagreeable people, I have never told any of them that they should leave the country. I can’t imagine it. In fact, I regard as un-American (and pretty much fascist) the idea that, if you criticize the president and the national government, you should find another place to live. Back in the time of the Vietnam War, protesters were considered unpatriotic and admonished with six words: “America, love it or leave it.” We heard a similar sentiment during the Gulf Wars, and there have been Christian/patriotic echoes of it during the Trump nightmare.

But I can’t imagine telling anyone who takes a view contrary to mine that they should find another country — in essence, that they should self-deport for ideological reasons.

However, I make an exception for Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and Trump’s Rasputin, architect of the ongoing immigrant purge.

It isn’t that I find Miller’s ideas cruel and repulsive. It’s more than that: I don’t understand why he wants to live in the United States. His ideas are so contrary to fundamental American principles that I question why he didn’t move to another country where he would be more comfortable as a citizen. At 40, he’s young enough to establish a new life in a nation where power is concentrated in the hands of an executive and where neither judges nor lawmakers can check him. Besides, it’s not like Miller will leave a lot of friends behind, and much of his family already has disowned him.

Until now, I just thought of Miller as an ambitious racist enabled by a racist president to carry out an aggressive and highly visible purge of brown and black people who might, or might not, be undocumented immigrants. Miller is one of several people in the Trump regime who appear to believe in a “post-Constitutional presidency” (Russell Vought’s term) where the executive willfully exceeds his authority (see Trump’s war with Iran) and makes random decisions reserved by statute for Congress (refusing to release funds, renaming of the Kennedy Center).

None of that improves our constitutional democracy.

In fact, it looks like sabotage.

And, it turns out, the push to have an all-powerful executive is not popular.

Most of the country disapproves of Trump’s presidency, and not just because of the price of gasoline and hamburger. Americans also have turned against Trump because of the immigrant purge he has allowed Miller to carry out. It’s not popular at all. Americans wanted immigrants who commit crimes deported, not those who mulch flower beds or care for children and the elderly.

So this gets me to the suggestion that Miller self-deport. He obviously can’t stand America as we know it: Too many restraints on presidential power.

According to reporting by Haberman and Swan of The New York Times, Miller sees a basic legal principle, the writ of habeas corpus, as an obstacle to his desire to deport immigrants without due process. That Miller suggested suspending habeas corpus so that he could keep the machine of deportation running tells me that the guy should just take his act somewhere else.

Russia is an option. So is Saudi Arabia. In those countries, Miller could probably thrive as an apparatchik. In Moscow, he could serve a dictator and enjoy suppression of political opposition and control of the media. In Saudi Arabia, he would probably be well paid as a servant of a rich monarchy that does whatever it wishes — without political opposition, legal obstacles or citizen dissent.

If Miller would be uncomfortable with a murderous regime, there are other countries with authoritarian leaders who have so far not poisoned or decapitated opponents; they would welcome him and his hard line on immigrants.

Of course, what I say about Miller — that he obviously favors an authoritarian government over our 250-year-old nuisance of a democracy, with its checks and balances — I could say about a lot of the people Trump brought to Washington. But I start with Miller because he’s such a misfit, a native-born American who obviously does not understand or respect the country’s founding principles. Instead of fighting a losing battle to turn the presidency into a dictatorship, he should do what he demands of immigrants who, ironically, appreciate America more than he does: He should self-deport. To paraphrase Groucho: “Go, and never darken our democracy again.”

Want a laugh? According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a family of four is considered poor if its 2026 income will be no more than $33,000. A single person is considered poor if her annual income will be $15,960 or less.

Howls of derisive laughter!

Please, try to compose yourself.

The Federal Poverty Level (FPL) has always been laughably low, but it’s no joke because it forms the baseline for eligibility for government benefits — Head Start, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), the National School Lunch Program, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Over the years, Congress has made adjustments in maximum income levels to allow more people to be eligible for some government assistance, most notably the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

But anyone who lives in the real world — anyone who shops for food, pumps their own gas, pays for child care or tries to keep up with rent — would agree that the FPL, the starting point for the government’s accounting of poor households, is ridiculously low.

Addressing this reality gap, United Way undertook a national effort to come up with what you might call The Actual Cost of Living — a better understanding of where financial hardship really lives.

And researchers found a lot more of it than SNAP-cutting, Medicaid-cutting Republicans would ever acknowledge.

For some 17 years, and in a growing number of states, United Way has been looking at the lives of the “working poor,” people who are employed, but who still do not earn enough to support their families. United Way calls such households ALICE households. That stands for “Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.”

United Way data-divers consider the minimum costs of housing, child care, food, transportation, technology and health care in each state — down to the county level — to establish the “ALICE Household Survival Budget.” The costs are then compared to household incomes in each of 41 states and the District of Columbia.

United Way just updated its ALICE report with what it found in 2024, the latest year of study. The result was what you might expect: More than 41 percent of households were living below the ALICE threshold for their respective states.

North Dakota was best, with 31% below ALICE, while Louisiana was worst, with 49% in real hardship.

Democrats should be using ALICE data in messaging for the mid-term elections.

Some random findings from the updated report:

• About 43% of households in Marquette County, Michigan did not bring in enough money to cover their basic needs.

• In Sullivan County, Tennessee, nearly 40% of households were under the ALICE threshold.

• In Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, 11% of households lived in poverty, but another 27%, or 129,135 households, fell under the ALICE threshold.

• In Maryland, one of the wealthiest states in the nation, 39% of all households fell below the ALICE threshold. “In 2024, a family of four in Maryland needed $108,192 just to cover the essentials Even with both parents working full time in two of the state’s most common jobs — a cook and a teller — a family’s combined income would fall short of the cost of basics by $33,063.”

• A family of four must earn an average of $106,000 a year to afford basic needs across the greater Tampa Bay region, exceeding the average Florida survival budget of $91,000.

• More than 40 percent of Oregon households face persistent financial hardship.

Between 2010 and 2024, the number of ALICE households grew by 23 percent, according to United Way.

Keep in mind: These findings are from the year Trump was re-elected. So the ALICE report does not reflect what Trump hath wrought since taking office again — his stupid tariffs and trade war; his stupid war with Iran and the ensuing escalation in the cost of energy. The year-over-year inflation rate hit 4.2 percent in May.

Meanwhile, Republicans continue to cut taxes for the rich and benefits for the working poor, the country’s ALICE households; the billionaire class continues to grow, and Elon Musk is supposedly the world’s first trillionaire; Trump obsesses about building a ballroom and an arch. Little wonder that so many people say they have lost faith in the nation’s promise and find it harder to achieve the American Dream now than a generation ago. It will take big, bold progressive leadership to pull us out of this ditch.

The Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match on the South Lawn of the White House — for Trump’s 80th birthday — brings to mind Hunter Thompson’s take, 55 years ago, on a grotesquely tacky, circus-themed casino in Las Vegas: It’s “what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won.”

“^{Fear and loathing in Las Vegas: A savage journey to the heart of the American dream,” by Hunter S. Thompson, 1971, Rolling Stone; published as a book by Random House, 1972; produced as a film in 1998, directed by Terry Gilliam, starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro.}

Subscribe now

As we suspected, Ivanka Trump inherited her father’s gift for the con. But, unlike the old man, she has apparently learned to bathe flim-flam in soft soap.

“It’s not even a business for me, despite the scale of it,” she says of her obnoxious plans to turn an uninhabited, nature-rich Albanian island into a vast resort for multi-millionaires and billionaires. “It feels like … the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live, how I think people increasingly are wanting to live, and trying to really build something that’s a tangible manifestation of that.”

Can you relate?

Imagine seeing the culmination of your privileged 21st Century life as a widely-despised resort for some of the world’s richest people on the coast of one of Europe’s poorest countries.

Ivanka Trump’s and Jared Kushner’s plans to “transform” parts of Sazan, the Albanian island in the Adriatic Sea, into a luxury resort has sparked mass protests. The protests are driven by environmentalists as well as citizens who suspect corruption in the multibillion-dollar deal Kushner’s Saudi-backed investment group made with the Albanian government. The protests also reflect Europe’s opposition to anything Trump or Trump-related and, more broadly, the growing global resentment of concentrated wealth and its political influence.

It’s impossible to listen to Ivanka Trump speak of the Sazan project without cringing: “We swam to the island [from a friend’s yacht]. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated. We developed the opportunity to help realize its potential and transform it.”

She’s a chip off the old blockhead, isn’t she?

Imagine, if possible, regarding an uninhabited island not as a wondrous natural spectacle — a unique refuge for birds and other wildlife — but as a series of empty hectares begging to be “transformed” by you and your husband. One imagines the barefoot contessa reaching a high point on Sazan, looking out on the Adriatic and announcing that she wants the island, and Kushner obliging with a deal the Albanians couldn’t refuse.

Hubby probably believed the government of Edi Rama, the prime minister, was primed to oblige him, being the son-in-law of the current White House occupant. And Kushner was right. In 2024, the Albanian leadership changed conservation laws to allow the construction of five-star hotels in protected areas.

So plans for Sazan — as well as a $4 billion luxury project in the protected Vjosa-Narta Lagoon on the Albanian coast — proceeded. But protests erupted, and I’m sure Kushner’s investment group never saw them coming. They must be baffled by the opposition. Certainly the struggling citizens of Albania — $12,493 per capita GDP, according to the IMF — would welcome any development anywhere. After all, development means construction jobs and permanent service jobs.

But that’s conventional conservative thinking that ignores the ferocity of resentment that has developed among younger citizens (Generation Z, particularly) after a long period of global wealth inequality.

The latest report from Thomas Piketty, the prominent French economist, shows that fewer than 60,000 multi-millionaires own three times more wealth than the entire bottom half of the global population. In almost every region of the world, the top 1% alone hold more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.

Here’s another Piketty finding that relates to the Trump-Kushner plans to “transform” Sazan and make it a destination for the rich: “Wealthy individuals fuel the climate crisis through their investments, even more than their consumption and lifestyles. The poorest half of the global population accounts for only 3% of carbon emissions associated with private capital ownership, while the top 10% account for 77% of emissions.”

The Albanian protests are extraordinary, especially seen from America, a nation with a long history of wealthy developers getting their way to build whatever they want almost anywhere.

We send hearty praise to the protesters.

And a note to tone-deaf Ivanka: Albania, like the U.S., has a severe shortage of affordable housing. Maybe, instead of building second or third luxury vacation homes for the rich, you should build primary homes for people yearning to own or rent. That would be a far more significant “culmination” of your privileged life.

Longtime journalist and author Arnold “Skip” Isaacs has some advice for Kristen Welker when (or if) she gets another opportunity to interview Trump. Many people have said Welker did a great job in her Meet The Press interview, and while I give her points for challenging Trump on his stale lies about election fraud, I think she should have avoided what turned into bickering, taken a breath, faced a CBS camera and, as Skip suggests in this letter to Welker, made the facts clear to the audience.

Dear Kristen Welker:

If you have another chance to question President Trump about his allegation that the 2020 election was fraudulent, I hope you will not just ask for his evidence but will also remind your viewers — and keep reminding them in the coming weeks and months — of the overwhelming body of evidence against that claim. I urge you to mention the relevant facts: Trump supporters failed to substantiate the “rigged election” argument in a single one of 64 court cases -- not one out of 64! -- or in any recount or official investigation. Also, Trump’s claim that he won the 2020 election was emphatically refuted by his own vice president, Mike Pence, and attorney general, Bill Barr, both of whom publicly broke with the president, strongly denied his allegations and unequivocally recognized that Joe Biden was legitimately elected.

You might also mention that that record is fully documented in a 2022 report, “Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case That Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Election,” by a panel including two former Republican senators and six other prominent conservatives. After an exhaustive review of every judicial proceeding and post-election probe in six states where election fraud was alleged, the authors concluded that “Donald Trump and his supporters . . . failed to produce substantive evidence to make their case.” Their final verdict: “There is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct.”

Journalists should make every possible effort to inform their audience about these facts in the months leading up to the midterm elections. Clearly, Trump is laying the groundwork to claim election fraud rather than concede results he doesn’t like. There’s no way to know if this reflects delusion or deliberate dishonesty -- probably some of both -- but, either way, it will dangerously undermine public trust in the democratic process. Instead of conventional he-said-she-said reporting, reporters should explain (and keep on explaining) why his allegations are not credible.

I wrote a longer piece on this subject a couple of months ago, which you can read if you’re interested. It also appears on The Nation site: To My Fellow Journalists: We Need to Do Better

Many thanks for reading this, and for questioning Mr. Trump’s dangerous falsehoods...

Sincerely

Arnold (Skip) Isaacs

The New York Times reviewed more than a dozen hours of cabinet meeting footage to analyze how his administration spoke to him. On average, at least one of every six sentences either flattered Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents.

Click here to read the story.

Photos like this one — and there have been several — represent what anyone can see in the Trump presidency: Not that he’s old or sleep-deprived from nights spent posting ignorant comments and lies, but that he cares not a lick about governing and has invited a confederacy of crackpots, poseurs and saboteurs to inflict pain on the nation. He plays president as if he’s playing king, allowed to sleep in his throne whenever sleep comes. Courtiers dare not disturb him.

Trump performs presidential only at moments — mainly, when the press surrounds him — and the rest of the time he watches television, reacts to what he sees there, gets quickly bored from any discussion of “policy,” and worries never about the often severe consequences of his actions. He is awake long enough to throw impulsive commands at his acting Attorney General and Defense Secretary, resulting in vengeful investigations and ill-advised war against Iran. He’s the laziest president in history, and lies at every opportunity because he is so practiced in that art and because he hasn’t bothered to book up on anything. Maybe some of the regime’s exhausting and outrageous ideas come from the ruling vulgarian, but, for the most part, he lets his budget director and cabinet secretaries carry out the instructions of Project 2025 while he coasts through the presidency, his near-80-year-old hands moving easily from Big Mac to TV remote to 7-iron.

Note: The photo I intended for this post is the one at the top, from May 11. A sleeping Trump photo posted earlier was from April and apparently doctored in some way. I apologize for the error, but, as you know, there are numerous photos on the Internet of Trump nodding off or fully asleep at various times. There are also way too many AI-generated images.

Among the purges that have been underway since Trump took office again — the purging of immigrants, the purging of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s imprint on the National Institutes of Health, the purging of information about convictions of January 6 rioters — is the regime’s attack on climate change.

The thoroughness of the attack would be impressive if the consequences were not so tragic — and if we could believe the purge was based on science rather than climate-denying ignorance.

As you’ll see from just a few examples, the prose used in support of the purge gives away the troglodyte extremism.

The purge’s big hit, of course, was the Environmental Protection Agency’s revocation of the important 2009 scientific finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare; it was the foundation of the federal government’s ability to fight global warming. It’s dead.

Subscribe now

Trump, who called climate change a hoax, accomplished this by bringing like-minded extremists into the government to champion fossil fuels and purge any trace of “climate alarmism” from the books. One of them claimed climate science was a “Leninistic” plot to control the economy.

The purge has reached deep into the federal budget to remove any trace of funding for “the globalist climate agenda,” whatever that is. There’s a whole section of White House narrative called “Ending The New Green Scam,” mocking the Green New Deal proposed seven years ago by progressive Democrats who wanted the nation to address climate change, economic inequality and social injustice.

Republicans, defenders of corporations and billionaires, have done nothing but mock the Green New Deal since its inception. And, though hardly anyone speaks of it anymore, the Trump regime condemns the whole thing as a “scam” without ever providing evidence of one. (A scam, according to Webster, is “a fraudulent or deceptive act.”)

The prose in the White House budget narrative is remarkable. It is infested with unsubstantiated claims of fraud and cronyism in federal agencies that, with congressional approval, have been preparing the nation for a smarter, less harmful energy future.

• The Trump regime has defunded any program designed to inform children about climate change. In cutting funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the White House asserted that “NOAA’s educational grant programs have consistently funded efforts to radicalize students against markets and spread environmental alarmism.”

• Trumpists found and defunded NOAA-sponsored webinars that used an unidentified children’s book “designed to foster conversations about climate anxiety.”

• Trumpist asserted that NOAA “prioritized DEI-focused meaningful watershed education experiences about climate change with the goal of embedding this into elementary school curricula.” (They somehow missed an opportunity to use a fashionable right-wing word, indoctrination, there.)

• Trumpists claim that “NOAA scammed taxpayers” by funding “environmental literacy.”

• Trumpist trogs have convinced Republicans to cancel more than $15 billion for “unreliable renewable energy … and other costly technologies that burden ratepayers and consumers.”

And on the matter of environmental justice — ensuring, for instance, that no community is disproportionately harmed by environmental threats — the trogs are roundly dismissive. As always, the prose gives away the extremism:

• “The Budget eliminates funding for research grants to radical NGOs that focused on woke environmental justice work and radical climate change research.”

• “The Budget saves taxpayers by eliminating the environmental justice program that enabled a witch hunt against private industry. The environmental justice program gave taxpayer dollars to political cronies who exploited the program’s racial preferencing policies to advance an anti-oil and gas crusade.”

Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee have accepted all these unsubstantiated claims and assertions.

In the meantime, the clock continues to click on climate change, and we’ve moved further away from the goal of 100% clean energy and net-zero carbon emissions. The changing climate was, and is, our incentive to change our wasteful ways.

But twice now — Trump’s first term, and now the second, even more tragic one — our efforts to slow the effects of climate change have been set back by extremist deniers and fools who serve the fossil fuel industry. Some of these Trumpists have children and grandchildren, but apparently care little about the world they’ll inherit.

If it was possible to believe Trump was a great humanitarian — that he had not allowed Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, to suddenly cut off food and medical assistance to the poorest people in the world, or that the Trump regime was not engaged in a racist and cruel immigrant purge at home — then it might be possible to understand the current pressure campaign against Cuba.

If, in light of the Iran War fiasco, it was possible to believe Trump’s foreign policy was rational — and not made up on a midnight whim — then we might have some faith that the oil blockade of Cuba might achieve regime change in Havana.

If it was possible to believe in Trump altruism — as opposed to his record of greed, dishonesty and lust for revenge — then we might trust that he cares about human rights and wants the Cuban people to have a better life.

But, of course, none of those positive conditions exist, leading reasonable Americans to ask: Why are we messing with Cuba? What’s the point of making the people there suffer?

And why are we forcing people in other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean to go without the medical care they have been receiving from Cuba for decades?

If you’re not aware of that last thing, you’re not alone. There has been limited news coverage of this aspect of Trump cruelty.

Here’s what has been reported (via The Guardian and NPR, both deserving of your attention — and your financial donations, if you can manage it):

• For more than 60 years, Cuban doctors and medical personnel have been dispatched to poor, rural parts of countries that have a shortage of medical professionals in those areas.

• “The programme emerged in 1960, when a medical brigade was sent to Chile to help treat victims of an earthquake,” reports The Guardian. “Since then, more than 600,000 Cuban doctors, nurses and health technicians have been deployed to more than 160 countries. … Estimates suggest there are now more than 20,000 doctors across about 50 countries, with [specializations] ranging from obstetrics and pediatrics to surgery and oncology.”

• The medical assistance is not free; the countries that host the Cubans pay to have them there.

• The Trump administration doesn’t like this arrangement (as if it’s any of our business).

• So the Trump regime has pressured the host countries to send the Cubans home, arguing that the program constitutes “forced labor” and that the doctors and nurses are not adequately paid. (Who knew the Trump regime cared about doctor and nurse pay here, there or anywhere?)

• The Trump regime further argues that the money the program makes is used to prop up the communist government in Havana.

• The Trump pressure campaign includes cancelling the visas of government officials who have had any connection to the Cuban doctors program.

• So some countries have already acquiesced.

“Among the nations yielding to [Trump] pressure are Guatemala, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Paraguay and Honduras,” NPR reports. “They’re phasing out the programs, reevaluating the payment model and sometimes canceling altogether.”

Sending the Cuban doctors away has created sudden gaps in the medical systems of each of those countries. More countries engaged with Cuba might succumb to pressure from Washington.

If you’re having a hard time understanding why we would do this — bullying small, poor countries to stop paying Cuba for the doctors they supply, therefore depriving more of the world’s poor of medical care — then you’re not alone. This is not simply a head-scratcher. It’s a disgust-inducer — not on the level of Musk’s destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development, but fueled by the same spiteful cruelty.

Here’s a Reuters photograph of Cuban doctors preparing to leave Guatemala:

For decades, American conservatives have seen Cuba as a problem rather than an opportunity. As a result, the Big Chill from the Cold War went on way too long and made life harder than it had to be for millions of people. Most Americans lost track of our reasons for the Big Chill with Cuba years ago. President Obama opened the door to diplomatic relations with Havana in 2014 with these words: “Neither the American nor Cuban people are well served by a rigid policy that’s rooted in events that took place before most of us were born.”

I don’t see how making life miserable for the Cuban people — and for people in other countries now deprived of medical assistance — makes life better for Americans. How is it in our interest? The hope is regime change, but who on Earth trusts that the Trump administration has thought all this out and that such a thing would happen?

What happened to diplomacy? What happened to the possibility of trade with Cuba? It’s 90 miles from Florida. If the Cuban economy could grow and create a middle class, Cubans could buy cars, refrigerators and other products and devices from us — assuming they don’t buy them directly from China first.

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, calls Cuba a national security threat without presenting evidence of that. Trump talks about invading. Meanwhile, Cubans struggle with shortages of food, fuel and medicine.

Maintaining this adversarial approach and making Cubans miserable is not only cruel, it’s foolishly short-sighted. American companies want to do business there. Americans want to take vacations there. I want to go fishing there. Instead, Trump does all he can, with blustery threats, to make or maintain enemies anywhere he can.

On this Memorial Day weekend, if you’re inclined, as I am, to reflect a bit on our history — see my Baltimore column — then reflect on this: Thousands of immigrants helped save the Union and American democracy during the Civil War.

It’s important history, worth highlighting amidst Trump’s aggressive round-up and deportation of immigrants. The latest cruelty: The regime is now demanding that a million green card applicants, who have been living and working here, leave the country to re-apply for that valuable upgrade in status. The green card process has been in place for six decades; the sudden change in procedure is intended to make it harder to get a green card, confirming — if confirmation was needed — that Trump’s immigration policy is an immigrant purge.

It’s an appalling turn against our history.

Subscribe now

Approximately 25 percent of the men who served in the Union Army and Navy during the Civil War were foreign born, according to the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, Pa. Another 18 percent were children of immigrants.

“The two largest groups of men to serve in the U.S. military were from Germany and Ireland,” according to the museum. “In total, approximately 500,000 soldiers were born overseas, including 175,000 men from Germany and 150,000 of Irish descent.”

A 2024 book on Lincoln and immigration, Brought Forth on this Continent, quotes an Irish-born Union colonel, Michael Corcoran:

“One half of my heart is Erin’s, and the other half is America’s. God Bless America, and ever preserve her as the asylum of all the oppressed of the earth.”

That sentiment motivated immigrants to offer their loyalty and service during the war. They had had enough of ruling elites and saw in Southern slaveholders a stark similarity to the European aristocracies they had come to loathe and ultimately escape. Nineteenth Century America might have been infested with nativists, but the Constitution put power in the hands of the people and promised abundant freedom; it was worth fighting and even dying for.

“Their republic stood as the only hope for democracy in a western world that had fallen more deeply into the stifling embrace of oligarchy since the failed European revolutions of the 1840s,” wrote historian Gary Gallagher in a 2011 book, The Union War.

With blatant racism, Trump has thoroughly demeaned the ideal of America as the great melting pot, a nation of immigrants. The deployment of ICE goons, the purging of DEI efforts in public and private institutions large and small, the regime’s efforts to erase references to slavery in official history — that’s all a combination of fear-mongering and cultural propaganda to keep MAGA cultists confident in their prejudices and loyal to Trump.

In the face of all that, the rest of us must take stock and remember. And, should the occasion arise to educate a fellow citizen, please offer some of our root history. A long-gone generation of men and women, immigrants and descendants of immigrants, fought to save the Union and end slavery because they believed in the promise of America; they believed in democracy. They wanted the states united — E pluribus unum — a land of freedom for all, immigrants welcome, no tyrants allowed.