I hope you will forgive the quieter stretch when you know the reason: I have been finishing a children’s book.

Not a political investigation. Not a democracy-in-crisis essay. Not another deep dive into Project 2025, corruption, authoritarian overreach, or the daily assault on our institutions.

A children’s book.

And today, after more formatting battles, margin mysteries, resolution fixes, cover adjustments, and KDP-induced confusion than I ever imagined possible, Ainsley and Bigfoot in the City is live on Amazon.

This book began with one very specific request from my granddaughter, Ainsley: she wanted a book about Bigfoot in the city.

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So that is what I made.

Ainsley and Bigfoot in the City is a storybook and coloring adventure for children ages 4–8. It follows Ainsley and her gentle Bigfoot friend as they explore ordinary city places that become extraordinary through imagination: walking through the neighborhood, riding bikes, going to school, visiting the library, cooking, swimming, climbing, and trick-or-treating.

At its heart, it is a book about friendship, courage, curiosity, and the kind of wonder children bring into the world so naturally.

It is also a coloring book, because I wanted children to be able to step into the story themselves - to color the pages, notice the details, and make the adventure their own.

This has been a labor of love, and also a very real learning curve. I learned more than I ever expected to know about page margins, bleed, resolution, cover placement, KDP previews, and why “almost right” is sometimes not right enough when a book is going to print.

But today, it is real.

Ainsley and Bigfoot in the City is live on Amazon.

You can find it here: Ainsley and Bigfoot in the City

Thank you to everyone who has cheered me on, answered questions, offered encouragement, or simply tolerated my obsession with getting Bigfoot’s toes, Ainsley’s sunglasses, and the cover margins just right. A special thank you to my daughter Lindsay who helped me over the finish line.

This book is for Ainsley - and for every child who knows that imagination can turn a city street into an adventure.

Now that Ainsley and Bigfoot have officially made it into the city, and onto Amazon, I will be returning more regularly to the work this Substack was created to do.

There is no shortage of urgent material. The attacks on democratic institutions have not slowed. The corruption has not become less blatant. The authoritarian project has not paused just because I was arguing with cover margins, page bleed, and Bigfoot’s toes.

So in the coming weeks, I will be back to publishing more researched pieces on current events, Project 2025, corruption, Christian nationalism, the courts, and the ongoing fight over the future of American democracy.

For today, though, I am taking one small breath to celebrate a different kind of project: a story about a little girl, a gentle Bigfoot, and the belief that imagination still matters.

Thank you for being here for the democracy work, for the detours, and for this happy moment, too.

America feels fictional right now.

Not politically divided. Not merely dysfunctional.

Fictional.

As though we have wandered into some bizarre mashup of biblical warning, fairy tale, and political satire—except the consequences are real.

We have a president who openly worships wealth, spectacle, and personal glorification.

A political party that increasingly behaves like a royal court.

Institutions designed to constrain power acting as though constraint itself is optional.

And a public watching the procession, wondering if they are the only ones seeing what is plainly in front of them.

A biblical warning, a fairy tale, and a modern psychological phenomenon explain this moment better than most cable news panels.

The Golden Calf.

The Emperor’s New Clothes.

Collective illusion.

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THE GOLDEN CALF

Trump’s obsession with gold has never been subtle.

Long before politics, he proudly displayed his family in the infamous Trump Tower penthouse, a monument to gilded excess that looks less like sophisticated wealth and more like a casino designed by a czar with no editor.” 1

Mar-a-Lago continued the theme: gold trim, gold fixtures, gold ornamentation, theatrical opulence masquerading as taste. 2

Now that aesthetic has crept into the presidency itself.

The White House, historically symbolic of democratic stewardship and institutional continuity, increasingly risks becoming another extension of Trump’s personal branding fantasy. 3

This is not merely décor.

It is symbolism.

Gold has long represented monarchy, conquest, untouchable wealth, and divine entitlement.

Kings project splendor.

Democracies are supposed to project service.

Trump has never seemed to understand the difference.

Or perhaps he understands it perfectly.

What makes the Golden Calf story so unsettling is not the gold itself.

It is the collective act of creation.

The people pooled their own wealth, forged the idol themselves, and then convinced themselves it was worthy of worship. 4

That symbolism feels painfully current.

Some authoritarian figures seize power by force.

Others are assembled—piece by piece—by people who project onto them strength, certainty, vengeance, protection, and success, until the idol takes on a life of its own.

Too much of modern political culture has embraced a grotesque equation:

Rich equals successful.
Successful equals competent.
Competent equals worthy of power.

Never mind ethics.

Never mind public service.

Never mind character.

Just look at the gold.

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES

If the Golden Calf explains the worship, Hans Christian Andersen explains the performance.

In The Emperor’s New Clothes, a vain ruler obsessed with appearance is duped by con artists who claim they can weave magical garments visible only to the intelligent and competent. 5

No one sees anything.

But no one wants to appear foolish.

So ministers pretend.

Officials pretend.

The emperor pretends.

The public pretends.

Everyone participates in a lie because everyone assumes everyone else believes it.

Sound familiar?

A president openly embraces royal imagery, even circulating memes depicting himself as a king. 6

Conflicts of interest that would once have triggered bipartisan outrage are shrugged off.

Self-enrichment is discussed as though it were merely unconventional politics.

Cabinet appointments sometimes feel like parody casting.

And yet much of the political establishment proceeds as though this is perfectly normal governance.

Why?

Because authoritarian systems thrive on performance.

Speaking obvious truths becomes risky.

Silence becomes self-protection.

Compliance becomes career management.

And soon the absurd becomes normalized simply because enough people act as though it already is.

COLLECTIVE ILLUSION: THE MODERN EXPLANATION

Political psychologists have a name for this. 7

Collective illusion.

Or pluralistic ignorance.

It describes a situation in which individuals privately reject a belief but publicly conform because they assume everyone else accepts it.

In simpler terms:

No one believes.

But everyone believes that everyone else believes.

That is how entire institutions become detached from reality.

A lawmaker privately calls something dangerous but votes yes.

An official privately expresses alarm but publicly defends the indefensible.

A media outlet normalizes increasingly abnormal behavior in the name of neutrality.

Citizens wonder whether they are overreacting because surely someone in power would stop this if it were truly alarming.

This is how democracies slide into authoritarianism.

Not always through dramatic coups.

Sometimes through accumulated public pretending.

THE ROYAL COURT

Of course, not everyone is pretending.

Some participants are true believers.

Others are opportunists.

And some have fully embraced the role of court entertainers—actively defending, flattering, distracting, and amplifying the spectacle.

Some courtiers are frightened.

Some are calculating.

Some are simply intoxicated by proximity to power.

But the effect is the same.

The procession continues.

THE CHILD IN THE CROWD

Andersen’s story ends when a child says the obvious:

The emperor is wearing nothing at all.

That moment matters because truth often begins not with institutional courage, but with someone refusing to participate in the lie.

The danger in America right now is not simply corruption.

Corruption is sadly familiar.

The danger is normalization.

The gradual social pressure to accept what would once have been unthinkable.

To treat grotesque self-dealing as savvy.

To confuse gaudiness with strength.

To mistake domination for leadership.

To applaud the parade because everyone else appears to be applauding.

America does not need more courtiers.

It needs more children—more citizens—willing to say what they see.

And perhaps, occasionally, a foreign leader who sees the pageantry for exactly what it is.

Xi Jinping may have understood the symbolism better than Trump did. 8

After Trump admired the roses at Zhongnanhai, Xi reportedly promised to send rose seeds for the White House Rose Garden—an almost too-perfect gift for a man who transformed part of that historic garden into a Mar-a-Lago-style hardscape. 9

Whether Xi intended the irony or not, the symbolism was unmistakable:

The emperor who loves gold was handed seeds.

Not flattery.

Not another gilded tribute.

Seeds.

Something alive.

Something rooted.

Something that requires patience, care, and stewardship.

In other words, everything Trump’s golden presidency is not.

Footnotes:

We just heard the heart-breaking news this morning. Here’s what happened and why Virginia Democrats can’t simply do what Republican-led states are doing:

What the Court Ruled

The Virginia Supreme Court struck down the voter-approved Democratic redistricting plan, ruling that the Democratic-led legislature violated procedural requirements when it placed the constitutional amendment on the ballot to authorize mid-decade redistricting. Voters narrowly approved the amendment on April 21, but the ruling renders those results meaningless. The court declared the violation “irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void.” Spectrum News

Why Virginia Can’t Just Redraw Maps Like Other States

This is the crux of the question, and it comes down to a unique constitutional constraint Virginia created for itself. The case focused not on the shape of the new districts but rather on the process the General Assembly used to authorize them. Because the state’s redistricting commission was established by a voter-approved constitutional amendment, lawmakers had to propose a new constitutional amendment to redraw the districts. ClickOrlando

In other words, Virginia voters in 2020 locked redistricting power inside the state constitution, requiring a multi-step amendment process - not just a simple legislative vote - to change the maps. Republican-led southern states don’t have that constraint; their legislatures can pass new maps through ordinary legislation.

Specifically, a judge found that lawmakers failed to follow their own rules for adding the redistricting amendment to a special session, failed to initially approve the amendment before the public began voting in last year’s general election, and that the state failed to publish the amendment three months before the election as required by law. Wikipedia

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The Bigger Picture

Democrats had hoped to win as many as four additional U.S. House seats under Virginia’s redrawn map as part of an attempt to offset Republican redistricting done elsewhere. That ruling, combined with a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision severely weakening the Voting Rights Act, has supercharged the Republicans’ congressional gerrymandering advantage heading into this year’s midterm elections. ClickOrlando

The decision effectively blocks Democrats from redrawing congressional maps mid-decade, after the state spent $5.2 million on the special election and outside groups raised nearly $100 million to sway voters. Axios

So, in short: Virginia is trapped by its own constitutional reform. The very good-government mechanism voters approved in 2020 to create a bipartisan commission is now preventing Democrats from executing the kind of legislative end-run that Republican states can do freely because their legislatures retain direct map-drawing authority.

What this means for Democrats in Virginia and nationally:

In Virginia Specifically

The impact is stark. Democrats’ redrawn map could have resulted in the party representing 10 of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts after the November midterms, up from the current six. That’s four seats gone. The decision effectively blocks Democrats from redrawing congressional maps mid-decade, after the state spent $5.2 million on the special election and outside groups raised nearly $100 million to sway voters. Virginia will instead go into November with the same court-drawn 6-5 Democratic map it currently has. NBC NewsAxios

Nationally - The Redistricting Scoreboard

Before today’s ruling, the map battles were roughly a draw. Until the Supreme Court’s VRA ruling last week, neither Republicans nor Democrats had gained a clear advantage from their revised maps; projected seat gains in some states roughly offset projected seat losses in other states. Now two things have broken badly for Democrats in rapid succession: losing Virginia and the VRA ruling. Council on Foreign Relations

The mid-decade redistricting battles were a draw until Florida jumped in with a new map, giving Republicans a slight edge. The Supreme Court’s decision could yield many more Republican districts than the individual state-by-state battles did. Republicans stand to gain from new House districts passed in Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Tennessee, and could add even more after the VRA ruling, which has prompted some other Republican states to consider redrawing their maps. BrookingsSpectrum News 1

The Bottom Line on House Control

Despite the map disadvantage, Democrats still have a structural tailwind — Trump’s approval ratings. Prediction markets had Democrats at an 83% chance of retaking the House in April 2025, but those odds have since dropped to around 63%, with Republicans rising from 17% to 37% — what looked like a likely Democratic win has become closer to a toss-up, though still slightly leaning Democratic. mediaite

Political science professor Stephen Farnsworth notes that Democrats are “very likely to take over the House,” and that redistricting efforts by both parties will largely cancel each other out — but Republican retirements could also hurt the GOP’s chances of retaining control. iheart

The core tension is this: even with mid-decade redistricting, the public’s assessment of Trump’s job performance will still have a major impact on whether Republicans keep control of the House. Democrats need a net gain of only three seats — a low bar in a hostile political environment for the president’s party — but Republican map-drawing is shrinking the number of competitive seats available for flipping. Council on Foreign Relations

In short, Virginia’s ruling turns what could have been a near-certain Democratic House majority into a genuine nail-biter.

To get reliable, up-to-date voting information, visit TurboVote by Democracy Works.

Mad Mother is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A headline this morning made me stop - but not for the reasons you might think.

Another story. Another lawsuit. Another attempt to untangle who - or what - is responsible when something goes terribly wrong.

This time, the question is whether artificial intelligence can be implicated in acts of violence or self-harm.

It’s a chilling idea. Not because it’s simple. But because it isn’t.

We are living through a moment when tools can talk back to us. They can respond, suggest, nudge, affirm. And for people already standing at the edge—angry, desperate, untethered—that interaction can matter more than we’d like to admit.

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But here is the part we must hold onto, even as the technology evolves:

A tool is not a conscience.

It does not love.

It does not grieve.

It does not feel the weight of consequence.

And yet, people do.

There is a temptation, especially in moments like this, to look for a single place to assign blame. The machine. The company. The system. Something large enough to hold our fear.

But the truth is more uncomfortable.

These tragedies are almost never born in a single moment, or from a single influence. They grow slowly - fed by isolation, mental illness, grievance, disinformation, neglect. Sometimes they unfold in plain sight. Sometimes they don’t.

Technology can amplify.

It can echo.

It can fail to interrupt when it should.

But it does not originate the human capacity for harm.

And so we find ourselves in a strange moral landscape.

We want innovation.

We want connection.

We want tools that help us think, write, create.

But we also want guardrails. Accountability. Intervention. Humanity.

We are, in other words, asking our machines to behave better than we sometimes do.

I find myself thinking less about the technology, and more about the people in these stories.

The families.

The victims.

The individuals whose lives narrowed to a point where harm, to themselves or others, felt like an answer.

That is the real tragedy.

Not that a machine spoke.

But that, somewhere along the way, a human being stopped being heard.

So where does that leave us?

For me, it means choosing where to place my attention.

I am not going to spend my days in the darkest corners of this conversation. Not because it doesn’t matter—but because it cannot be the only thing that does.

Instead, I will keep making things that are rooted in care.

A children’s book where a young girl moves through the world with curiosity and courage.

A recipe that works—especially at 5,280 feet.

A piece of writing that calls out power when it abuses itself.

Small things, perhaps. But human things.

Because in the end, that is what no machine can replicate:

The decision to create something that does no harm.

Call to Readers

Pay attention to the headlines. They matter.

But also pay attention to what you are building, sharing, and nurturing in your own corner of the world.

That still matters more.

A headline this morning made me stop - but not for the reasons you might think.

Another story. Another lawsuit. Another attempt to untangle who - or what - is responsible when something goes terribly wrong.

This time, the question is whether artificial intelligence can be implicated in acts of violence or self-harm.

It’s a chilling idea. Not because it’s simple. But because it isn’t.

We are living through a moment when tools can talk back to us. They can respond, suggest, nudge, affirm. And for people already standing at the edge—angry, desperate, untethered—that interaction can matter more than we’d like to admit.

But here is the part we must hold onto, even as the technology evolves:

A tool is not a conscience.

It does not love.
It does not grieve.
It does not feel the weight of consequence.

And yet, people do.

Subscribe now

There is a temptation, especially in moments like this, to look for a single place to assign blame. The machine. The company. The system. Something large enough to hold our fear.

But the truth is more uncomfortable.

These tragedies are almost never born in a single moment, or from a single influence. They grow slowly - fed by isolation, mental illness, grievance, disinformation, neglect. Sometimes they unfold in plain sight. Sometimes they don’t.

Technology can amplify.
It can echo.
It can fail to interrupt when it should.

But it does not originate the human capacity for harm.

And so we find ourselves in a strange moral landscape.

We want innovation.
We want connection.
We want tools that help us think, write, create.

But we also want guardrails. Accountability. Intervention. Humanity.

We are, in other words, asking our machines to behave better than we sometimes do.

I find myself thinking less about the technology, and more about the people in these stories.

The families.
The victims.
The individuals whose lives narrowed to a point where harm, to themselves or others, felt like an answer.

That is the real tragedy.

Not that a machine spoke.
But that, somewhere along the way, a human being stopped being heard.

So where does that leave us?

For me, it means choosing where to place my attention.

I am not going to spend my days in the darkest corners of this conversation. Not because it doesn’t matter—but because it cannot be the only thing that does.

Instead, I will keep making things that are rooted in care.

A children’s book where a young girl moves through the world with curiosity and courage.

A recipe that works—especially at 5,280 feet.

A piece of writing that calls out power when it abuses itself.

Small things, perhaps. But human things.

Because in the end, that is what no machine can replicate:

The decision to create something that does no harm.

Call to Readers

Pay attention to the headlines. They matter.

But also pay attention to what you are building, sharing, and nurturing in your own corner of the world.

That still matters more.

The constitutional line is not being debated anymore. It is being crossed.

Not by accident. Not quietly. And not in ways we can afford to dismiss as symbolism, trolling, or just another burst of red-meat rhetoric for the base.

It is happening in administration social media. In White House offices. In Pentagon events. In press briefings, interviews, and speeches. What was once packaged as “Christian nation” nostalgia is now being operationalized as governance. The goal is no longer merely to signal religious identity. The goal is to normalize the fusion of sectarian belief with state authority until the boundary itself begins to look optional.
That is the trap.
Because this is not about private faith. It is about public power.

In February, I wrote about the historical fraud at the heart of Christian nationalism: the lie that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and must now be “restored” to that identity. (Project 2025 and the Christian Nation Myth, Feb. 23, 2025). The Constitution was designed to prevent exactly that. The founders did not build a government to enforce theological conformity. They built one to prevent the state from claiming religious truth in the first place. 1

What we are watching now is that safeguard being stress-tested on purpose.

The Myth Moves into Government

This is no longer just a Project 2025 theory problem. It is becoming governing practice.

Trump formally reestablished a White House Faith Office in February 2025 and placed Paula White-Cain, his longtime religious ally, in a senior role. The White House described it as an executive-branch office created by executive order. 2

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pushed further still. Reuters reported that, in May 2025, he led a “Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer & Worship Service” during the workday inside the Pentagon, had it broadcast internally, and said it would become a monthly event. Reuters also reported that Brooks Potteiger, identified there as Hegseth’s pastor, prayed for Trump at the event. 3

That is not neutrality.
That is not pluralism.
That is not constitutional restraint.

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Trump’s own behavior reinforces the pattern. He has repeatedly posted or reposted religiously charged AI images of himself, including as pope and in Jesus-like imagery. Meanwhile, his allies feuded with Pope Leo after the pope criticized the administration’s war posture and the political misuse of religion. 4

These are not random provocations. They are part of a larger spectacle in which Trump is cast, not merely as a politician with religious supporters, but as a leader whose authority is wrapped in sacred imagery and defended in sacred language.

This language did not appear out of nowhere. Business Insider reported in November 2019 that Rick Perry called Trump “the chosen one” and “sent by God,” and that Trump himself had earlier said during the China trade war, “Someone had to do it … I am the chosen one.” What once sounded like grotesque flattery now looks more like a rehearsal for the politics surrounding him today. 5

That spectacle matters because it is backed by real people with real access to power. And, that pattern is not slowing down. This week, Trump is scheduled to read 2 Chronicles 7:11–22 from the Oval Office as part of the April 19–25 “America Reads the Bible” event, a week-long public reading of the entire Bible held in partnership with the Museum of the Bible and involving nearly 500 participants. Organizers said they deliberately reserved that passage for him because of the symbolic weight of 2 Chronicles 7:14, the verse so often invoked in calls for America to return to God and be “healed.” 6

This is not a revival.
It is not religious freedom.
It is the normalization os sectarian power in the state.

Two Paths to the Same Project

Two figures are especially revealing: Brooks Potteiger, the pastor brought inside Pentagon power through Hegseth, and Paula White-Cain, the televangelist restored to formal influence inside the White House.

Their traditions are different.
Their styles are different.
Their routes to power are different.

But they converge on the same destination: a government increasingly comfortable privileging one form of Christianity as a source of legitimacy, authority, and national identity.

Start with Brooks Potteiger.

The scene is the Pentagon: not a church, not a prayer breakfast ballroom, but one of the most powerful military buildings in the world. A workday worship event. A “Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer & Worship Service” broadcast internally while government business continued around it. Reuters reported that Hegseth led the event in May 2025 and brought in Potteiger, his pastor from Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship near Nashville. 7

Potteiger is not a nationally famous celebrity preacher. His influence appears to come not from television fame or a donor empire, but from personal access to one powerful official. That is alarming. It means the religious world entering the Pentagon did not arrive mainly through a media ministry. It arrived through intimacy, trust, and proximity to state power.

A master’s degree in apologetics does not itself mean extremism. Apologetics is formal training in defending Christian doctrine. The degree alone is not the issue.

The issue is the world in which that credential operates.

Pilgrim Hill belongs to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, or CREC, the archconservative church network the Associated Press linked to Christian nationalism and Christian Reconstructionism. AP reported that Hegseth has publicly embraced that orbit and that the network is associated with patriarchal theology and rigid male authority. 8

That context is important. Potteiger is not simply an ordinary pastor who happened to be invited to a government event. He represents a harder theological-political world, one that sees Christianity not merely as a private faith but as an ordering principle for society.

His path to influence is intimate and direct: one Cabinet secretary, one church network, one public blessing of state power inside the Pentagon. He did not need a television audience. He needed a doorway into power, and Hegseth opened it.

White-Cain’s path is different, but no less revealing.

In March, pastors gathered around Trump in the Oval Office while he sat behind the Resolute Desk. Hands were laid on his shoulders. Heads were bowed. Prayers were offered for guidance, protection, and blessing over both the president and U.S. troops. Paula White, who leads the White House Faith Office, was in the room. 9

The White House is not a church. The Oval Office is not an altar. But this administration keeps staging scenes that blur those lines until the distinction itself begins to erode.

Pastors laying hands on a president in the Oval Office is not just a prayer scene. It is a visual argument about who and what sanctifies power.

White-Cain did not arrive there by accident. She built her prominence through televangelism, charismatic ministry, prosperity-gospel branding, and years of proximity to Trump before returning in 2025 to formal influence inside the White House Faith Office. Her influence is not private or symbolic. It now sits within executive power itself.

Different theologies. Same Political Project

That is the heart of it.

Potteiger appears in a Reformed, patriarchal, Reconstructionist-adjacent world that emphasizes authority, hierarchy, and Christian order across all of life. White-Cain comes out of a charismatic Pentecostal-style world shaped by anointing, divine favor, chosen-leader rhetoric, and spiritual spectacle. These are not identical traditions. But Trumpism has become a meeting ground for both because each offers a different route to the same conclusion: that American government should be guided, legitimized, and symbolically possessed by a favored form of Christianity.

One tells followers that Christians must reclaim institutions.
The other tells followers that God raises up chosen leaders for national battles.
One speaks in the language of order, hierarchy, and authority.
The other speaks in the language of prophecy, blessing, and spiritual warfare.

Both can be used to sanctify executive power.

That is why this moment cannot be brushed aside as harmless religious expression. The administration’s defenders will say this is just free exercise, just prayer, just symbolism, just a president who likes attention and supporters who like spectacle.

No.

When government offices are built around favored religious actors, when a defense secretary brings his own pastor into a government worship event, and when presidential performance is increasingly wrapped in sacred imagery, we are no longer talking about private devotion
We are talking about a state increasingly willing to perform religious hierarchy in public.

And hierarchy is the point.

Christian nationalism has always depended on a lie about the founding. But historical fraud was never the endgame. Power was.

The myth of a Christian nation is useful because it turns pluralism into decline, equality into grievance, church-state separation into persecution, and constitutional restraint into an obstacle to be removed. It transforms one group’s hunger for dominance into the language of victimhood and “restoration.”

That is why none of this is trivial.
Not the imagery.
Not the offices.
Not the prayer services.
Not the biblical language wrapped around war and power.

Symbols build legitimacy. Repetition creates normalcy. And once the state begins to speak in the language of one religion, everyone outside that favored framework becomes more conditional in their own citizenship.

The founders understood where that road leads. When the state claims religious truth, dissent becomes disloyalty. Conscience becomes suspect. Power begins to speak in God’s name and punish those who refuse to kneel.

That is the line being tested now.

Not a revival.
Not religious freedom.
The danger is not only that they believe it.
The danger is that they are building it.

Footnotes:

After more than 21 hours of marathon negotiations in Islamabad, Pakistan, Vice President JD Vance boarded Air Force Two on Sunday and told reporters the obvious: no deal. “I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States,” he said.

A telling statement from a man who just failed to end a war his administration started.

I’ve been watching Donald Trump’s relationship with Iran for years. Long before he became president the first time. Long before he blew up the JCPOA. Long before the February strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and plunged the region into open war. And I’ve come to a conclusion that I think the record now fully supports: Trump doesn’t want a deal with Iran. He wants Iran.

Let me show my work.

The Pattern: Trump Doesn’t Negotiate, He Acquires

Before we can understand what’s happening in the Iran conflict, we have to understand how Trump thinks about geography and power. This is not, at heart, a foreign policy thinker. This is a real estate developer who became president.

Trump has publicly floated “acquiring” Greenland, going so far as to send his son there and refuse to rule out military action. He has repeatedly spoken about “taking” the Panama Canal. He effectively coerced Panama and Denmark with economic and military threats. He proposed “owning” Gaza, displacing its population and turning it into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” He has used tariffs as a cudgel to extract economic submission from allies and adversaries alike.

The pattern is consistent and commercial: identify a valuable piece of geography or resource, manufacture or exploit a crisis, apply overwhelming pressure - financial, military, diplomatic - and then position the United States (and by extension, himself) as the indispensable power over what follows.

Venezuela is the clearest proof of concept, and the case that makes the Iran argument hardest to dismiss. Venezuela sits on the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Under Trump, the United States recognized a parallel government, imposed crushing sanctions specifically designed to strangle oil revenues, and manipulated Chevron’s operating license there as a lever of economic coercion. The logic was never subtle: comply with American terms, or watch your oil economy collapse. There was no serious diplomatic framework, no multilateral process, no interest in Venezuelan institutions or democratic development for its own sake. There was oil, and there was pressure. When critics argue that Trump’s Iran policy is really about nuclear weapons or counterterrorism, Venezuela is the answer, because Venezuela has neither, and it got the same treatment.

What Iran Has That Trump Wants

Let’s be direct about what’s at stake geographically and economically.

Iran sits on the fourth-largest proven oil reserves in the world and the second-largest natural gas reserves. It controls - or can choke - the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes. Its closure since late February has already sent global energy prices into turmoil.

Iran is also positioned at the intersection of Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the broader Middle East - a strategic location that major powers have competed over for centuries.

Trump himself has never been shy about his view that the United States should extract economic value from military engagement. “To the victor belong the spoils” is not a metaphor for him; he said it literally about Iraq’s oil. The same logic, I would argue, underlies his approach to Iran.

This is inference, but it is inference with a paper trail. Trump’s public statements about oil, his transactional view of military force, and his history of leveraging conflict to extract economic concessions make it reasonable to conclude that Iran’s resources are a motivating factor - not a peripheral one.

The JCPOA: Destroying What Was Working

To understand Trump’s Iran policy, you have to start with 2018, when he did something that had no strategic logic unless you were trying to destabilize rather than contain.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action - negotiated by the Obama administration, the European Union, Russia, China, France, Germany, and the UK - was not a perfect agreement. But it was a working one. International monitors from the IAEA verified Iran’s compliance. Uranium enrichment was curtailed. The path to a nuclear weapon had been blocked, at least temporarily.

Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in May 2018 - one of his first major foreign policy acts of his first term. He replaced it with what his administration called “maximum pressure”: the reimposition of crippling sanctions designed to force Iran to the table on Trump’s terms.

The effect was predictable and has been widely documented: Iran began enriching uranium again, steadily increasing its stockpile and the purity of its enrichment toward weapons-grade levels. The crisis that Trump inherited - a contained nuclear standoff - became the active weapons-development emergency that now requires a war to address.

If the goal was preventing a nuclear Iran, withdrawing from JCPOA was a catastrophic goal. If the goal was manufacturing a more acute crisis that would justify more dramatic action - that’s a different story.The February Strikes: Intimidation as Strategy

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a coordinated air campaign against Iran. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed, along with the Minister of Defense, the head of the Revolutionary Guard, and numerous other senior officials and military commanders.

This was unprecedented. The United States killed a head of state.

The stated rationale was Iran’s nuclear program and its support for regional proxies. But the timing and scale also fit a pattern of using overwhelming force - not to conclude a conflict but to break a government’s will to create conditions for submission rather than negotiation.

It didn’t work. Iran responded with missile strikes against Israel and US bases throughout the region, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and demonstrated that decapitating its leadership did not end its institutional capacity to fight. The war has now stretched past six weeks with no end in sight, at least 1,700 Iranian civilians are dead, including hundreds of children, and global energy markets are in disarray.

Trump, meanwhile, lurched from one contradictory message to another. On March 6, he demanded “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” On March 9, he falsely declared, “The war is very complete, pretty much.” By March 30, he was threatening to destroy Iran’s power plants, oil wells, and desalination plants. During that same period, he also claimed Iran had “agreed to most of our demands” - a claim Iran flatly disputed.

This is not the communication pattern of an administration trying to close a deal. It is the pattern of one trying to intimidate.

The Negotiating Team: What the Choices Reveal

Judge a negotiation by who you send to it.

Iran arrived in Islamabad with a delegation of more than 70 people, led by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, an experienced career diplomat, and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guard commander who understands both the military and political dimensions of the conflict. These are people who have spent their careers navigating the intersection of Iranian domestic politics, international law, and strategic competition.

The United States sent JD Vance, a politician with limited diplomatic experience who warned Iran not to “play us” before the talks began. Alongside him: Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer who serves as Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and another real estate figure who has previously used back-channel diplomacy in the Middle East for purposes that critics argue served his personal business interests as much as American policy goals. Veteran diplomats have publicly criticized this team composition, noting that the administration “has leaned on trusted allies with business ties instead of experienced foreign policy professionals.”

What does it mean to send a real estate developer and a hedge fund manager to negotiate the end of a war with a nation of 90 million people?

It means you’re not primarily thinking about what kind of country Iran should be. You’re thinking about what kind of deal you can extract, who controls what assets, and who gets to be the victor.

The Alignment With Israel: Whose War Is This?

Any honest analysis of Trump’s Iran policy has to grapple with Israel.

Trump’s alignment with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is deep, personal, and well-documented. His first term included moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and withdrawing from JCPOA - all major Israeli government priorities. The Abraham Accords, his signature foreign policy achievement, were designed in part to build a regional coalition that isolated Iran.

The February strikes were a joint US-Israeli operation. Netanyahu has publicly called the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program and military infrastructure a generational achievement. He has also made clear, repeatedly, that he will not allow a ceasefire to constrain Israeli operations in Lebanon against Hezbollah, even when doing so directly undermined the fragile truce that Pakistani mediators had constructed.

This creates a dynamic worth naming plainly: the United States is fighting a war in which one of the key operational decisions - whether to extend the ceasefire to Lebanon - is being made by a foreign government whose interests do not perfectly align with American ones. Netanyahu didn’t mention the Islamabad talks in a major public address while they were happening. He said only that “the battle is not yet over.”

Speculation with supporting evidence: it is reasonable to ask whether the United States is conducting a war primarily in American interests, or whether the Trump-Netanyahu alignment has created conditions in which Israel’s desire to permanently neutralize Iran - and specifically Hezbollah - is driving decisions that American diplomats are then left to justify. US intelligence assessments have reportedly raised doubts about Netanyahu’s own claims about how much damage has actually been done to Iran’s nuclear program and military.

The Racist and Anti-Muslim Dimension

This is the part of the analysis where I want to be careful, not because the evidence is thin, but because the claim deserves precision.

Trump’s rhetoric about Muslim-majority countries has a long record. The Muslim travel ban was one of his first acts in office during his first term. His language about Middle Eastern countries has consistently othered and dehumanized. His approach to Gaza - proposing to displace its population, describe it as “a demolition site,” and rebuild it as a resort - treats Arab Muslim lives as obstacles rather than as the lives of people with political rights and human dignity.

In the case of Iran, the framing has been similarly dehumanizing. Trump wrote, mid-negotiation, that the only reason Iranian officials were “alive today is to negotiate” - as though their right to exist was contingent on their usefulness to him. He threatened to send Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” He has shown no detectable interest in the 1,700 Iranian civilians, including 254 children, killed since the war began.

I am not claiming Trump has articulated a policy of eliminating Muslims. I am claiming the consistent pattern - who gets dehumanized in his rhetoric, which lives he shows no interest in counting, which populations he proposes to displace or control - reflects something more than strategic calculation. It reflects a worldview in which certain people’s lives count less, and in which Muslim-majority populations are consistently in that category.

What Iran Keeps Getting Right

One of the underreported stories of this conflict is how consistently Iran has outmaneuvered the United States diplomatically.

Iran has successfully internationalized the conflict, drawing in Pakistan as a credible mediator and enlisting Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and China as supporting actors. It presented a structured 10-point negotiating framework with clear demands. It held the Strait of Hormuz - the world’s most critical oil chokepoint - as genuine leverage, not merely a threat. It managed to make nuclear enrichment the central issue, not regime change, which forced the US to negotiate on terms that stopped well short of the “unconditional surrender” Trump had demanded in March.

The two sides entered Islamabad with, as one reporter observed, “vastly different approaches” - the US looking for a quick resolution, Iran negotiating with the patience of an institution that has been under sanctions for 45 years and knows how to wait.

This is not a coincidence. This is what happens when you send a real estate developer to negotiate with a civilization.

What Comes Next

Vance left Islamabad on Sunday, threatening a “full naval blockade” of Iran. Trump has threatened to destroy Iran’s power plants, oil wells, and desalination plants. The ceasefire is now in doubt.

None of this looks like the endgame of a president who wants a genuine diplomatic resolution. It looks like the behavior of a president who wanted terms that amount to submission, didn’t get them, and is now escalating again.

The question that I cannot answer with certainty, but that the pattern of evidence increasingly raises, is whether there is any version of a negotiated settlement that Trump would actually accept, or whether the goal was never a deal.

Because if it was never a deal, then everything else - the JCPOA withdrawal, the strikes, the negotiating team, the maximalist demands, the threats - snaps into focus.

Not strategic incoherence. Strategic clarity about an objective that could not be stated publicly.

Control. Extraction. Dominance.

The art of the deal, applied to a nation of 90 million people.

The question is not whether Trump can close a deal.

The question is how much of the world he is willing to set on fire trying to prove he owns the table.

Sources: AP, Reuters, NPR, Time, CNN, PBS, Al Jazeera, Wikipedia (2025–2026 Iran–United States negotiations). All factual claims are cited from published reporting. Where the author speculates, it is labeled as such.

Trump and Iran have agreed to a two-week ceasefire. 1 Or, perhaps more accurately, those around the president who are still willing to challenge him have managed, at least temporarily, to interrupt a cycle of threats that Iran has shown little reason to take seriously. Reuters and AP both report that the truce is fragile, its terms are still murky, and key issues remain unresolved.

From the beginning, the administration has failed to articulate a coherent objective. The rationale for attacking Iran has shifted repeatedly, contradicted itself, or gone unexplained altogether. That confusion has produced predictable results: allies pushed away, supporters left grasping for a rationale, and Iranian leadership no more willing to bend than before. Reuters reports that Vice President J.D. Vance described Trump as “impatient” and said the ceasefire depended on progress in negotiations, while AP described the deal itself as tentative and unclear.

The real cost of war is never what officials announce at the beginning. It reveals itself afterward—slowly, cumulatively, and often too late to reverse.

The first numbers are always the easiest to present: destroyed aircraft, expended munitions, carrier deployments, logistics, maintenance, replacement costs. Those figures can be estimated, budgeted, and discussed as though war were a problem of inventory management.

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But those are only the costs we can count most easily. They are not the ones that matter most.

The economic effects are already moving through the system. Instability in the region immediately affects shipping and energy flows. Even after the ceasefire announcement, major shipping firms remain cautious about resuming normal operations through the Strait of Hormuz.2 Disruption and added costs do not disappear simply because officials change their language.

There is also the quieter cost borne by military families: the dread that comes with deployments, uncertainty, and the knowledge that political impulse can become personal danger in an instant. That burden does not appear in official cost estimates, but it is part of the total price all the same.

Then there is the damage that cannot be quickly repaired once lost: credibility.

The United States entered this confrontation without meaningful allied participation. The broader international response has centered on de-escalation rand diplomacy rather than enthusiastic support for American escalation. 3 Even the moral standing of the United States has taken a visible hit. When Pope Leo publicly condemned Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian civilization as “truly unacceptable,” it underscored how far American conduct had damaged its moral standing. 4

What may be most revealing, however, is the backlash from within Trump’s own political coalition. AP reports that criticism of Trump’s rhetoric came not only from Democrats, but from Republicans and former allies as well, with some warning that the language veered toward illegality and war-crime territory.

That is the deeper concern running through all of this. The attack on Iran does not look like the product of a clearly defined strategy. It looks like an impulsive act by a president driven by ego, grievance, and the need to project dominance, without a clear understanding of either the objective or the consequences.

Which leads to the most basic question: What, exactly, did we gain?

No territorial advantage. No negotiated concessions. No coalition support. No meaningful stabilization of the region.

Now the administration is trying to present the ceasefire itself as proof of success. Vice President J.D. Vance argued that Iran’s agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, combined with a halt to U.S. attacks, amounts to a win. But that claim falls apart on contact with the facts. Reuters reports that the ceasefire was tied to Iran allowing safe passage through the strait if hostilities ceased. In other words, the administration is presenting a return to baseline conditions as a strategic achievement.

That is not victory. It is an attempt to rebrand reversal as success.

After the destruction, the cost, the global disruption, and the diplomatic fallout, the United States appears to have ended up where it began - except weaker, less trusted, and more exposed than before. We gained nothing and lost much. Even now, shipping firms remain wary, and some attacks have continued. Core disputes over Iran’s nuclear program, missile capabilities, and regional conflict remain unresolved. 5

And if this continues, the costs will deepen.

Escalation in the Middle East does not remain neatly contained. It spreads through retaliation, proxy conflict, miscalculation, and political pride. AP reports that attacks have continued despite the ceasefire and that the truce does not cover every front, including Israel’s operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Reuters likewise reports that the U.S. military says it is prepared to resume fighting if diplomacy fails. 6

The domestic effects will continue as well. Economic instability will not disappear because officials change their messaging. Allied distrust will not vanish because the White House declares a pause. And each new threat that disregards the laws of war lowers the threshold for even more dangerous conduct to follow.

This is how limited conflicts become prolonged ones: not always through a formal declaration or a single catastrophic decision, but through a series of reckless choices made without a clear end point.

This is the point where clarity matters more than alignment. Those closest to the president must recognize that asking direct questions is not disloyalty, but responsibility—and that silence carries consequences of its own.

If decisions of this magnitude are being shaped by impulse rather than strategy, then the implications extend far beyond a single conflict. They define a governing approach, one that carries a cost far greater than any line item currently being discussed.

Footnotes:

A familiar phrase has been echoing more frequently in American political life: “doing God’s work.”

It is offered as reassurance. As conviction. As justification.

But it raises a deeper question - one that is less often asked: What happens when political authority begins to describe itself, not just as accountable to voters, but as aligned with divine will?

That question sits at the center of Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. And it is what makes the novel feel less like distant dystopia and more like a framework for understanding how certain systems evolve.

Gilead did not begin with handmaids. It began with language - about authority, morality, and purpose.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, the Republic of Gilead is a theonomy: a system in which law is derived from religious interpretation and enforced by the state. It is also explicitly patriarchal and totalitarian. Rights are not universal. They are assigned based on gender, status, and perceived moral value.

But what makes the novel enduring is not its extremity. It is its sequence.

Gilead emerges through steps that, taken individually, can be framed as orderly, necessary, even moral. Constitutional norms are suspended. Institutions are reshaped. Language shifts. Authority consolidates. Only later does the full structure become visible.

Atwood’s warning is not that societies leap into oppression. It is that they can move toward it while still believing themselves justified.

The United States is not Gilead.

There are still elections. Courts still function. Civil society remains active. Competing religious and secular perspectives continue to shape public debate. But, acknowledging that reality does not end the inquiry. It sharpens it.

Because the more relevant question is not whether we are there. It is whether certain developments reflect similar structural tendencies.

And some of them do.

Start with the use of religious language in governance.

When political leaders such as House Speaker Mike Johnson invoke faith in the context of governance, or figures like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth frame political and military action as aligned with divine purpose, the issue is not personal belief. It is the elevation of policy into moral certainty.

If a policy is aligned with God’s will, disagreement is no longer just political; it risks being cast as moral failure. That is a subtle but significant shift. It moves authority away from democratic negotiation and toward moral finality.

In Gilead, that shift is complete. Law is not debated. It is declared.

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Language, however, is only part of the shift. Practice matters too.

In recent years, religious expression has moved beyond political rhetoric and into visible practices of governance itself.

During the Trump administration, that shift has become more explicit. A White House Faith Office has been established, alongside faith-based initiatives and evangelical gatherings in which participants “lay hands” on political leaders in prayer. Structured prayer practices within government institutions, along with longstanding events such as the National Prayer Breakfast, reflect a growing normalization of explicitly religious activity within the government.

The issue is not whether public officials hold religious beliefs. Of course they do. The issue is whether those beliefs are being translated into the functions of government in ways the Constitution was designed to prevent.

The First Amendment does not prohibit religion in public life. It prohibits the establishment of religion by the state - a boundary the founders considered essential to both religious freedom and democratic governance.

That boundary was not an afterthought. It was designed to guard against systems in which political and religious authority are fused, and dissent can be punished as disobedience to both.

When organized religious practices become embedded within government, when leaders are affirmed through ritual, and policy is justified as divinely sanctioned - the line the First Amendment draws is not blurred. It is erased.

The question is no longer whether individuals believe. It is whether the state itself is beginning to operate with a preferred religious framework.

What is different is the visibility and institutional framing of these practices, not simply as personal devotion, but as part of the governing environment.

When prayer moves from private observance to organized, leadership-centered ritual within state institutions, it raises a different kind of question: Is religion being expressed within government—or is it being integrated into how government legitimizes itself?

In The Handmaid’s Tale, ritual is not incidental. It is structural. Ceremonies reinforce hierarchy. Public acts of devotion signal alignment. Religious practice is not separate from governance. It is one of the mechanisms through which governance is maintained.

The comparison here is not equivalence.

The United States does not mandate religious observance, nor does it formally require participation. But when organized religious practices are embedded within political institutions, they can become signals of belonging. In a system where loyalty to leadership is expected, participation is not compelled; yet non-participation becomes increasingly difficult to separate from dissent.

Consider the reshaping of education.

Efforts to redirect public funds toward private religious schools are often framed in terms of parental choice. But they also raise a structural question: is the goal pluralism, or the expansion of a preferred worldview through state-supported channels?

In The Handmaid’s Tale, education is not neutral. It is a tool of reinforcement. It teaches hierarchy, obedience, and the legitimacy of the system itself.

Modern policy is not equivalent. But it exists on a continuum that asks the same question: who shapes the worldview of the next generation, and with what authority?

Look also at gender.

Policies affecting reproductive rights, healthcare access, and legal autonomy are often debated as discrete issues. But taken together, they can signal a broader redefinition of women’s role within the legal and social order.

Gilead enforces that role with brutal clarity. Contemporary policy does not approach that level of control. But it does reflect an ongoing struggle over whether rights are fully individual or partially conditional. That tension is not theoretical. It is unfolding in real time.

Then there is the question of democratic participation.

Restrictions on voting access, shifts in election administration, and efforts to concentrate executive power are frequently justified as procedural or protective measures. But historically, the erosion of participation is one of the earliest indicators of systemic change.

Gilead did not eliminate democracy overnight. It narrowed it, constrained it, and ultimately replaced it. The parallel here is not outcome. It is trajectory.

None of this means the United States is becoming a theocracy.

But it does mean that elements associated with theonomy - religious justification of law, moral framing of authority, and the elevation of a particular worldview - are increasingly present in political discourse.

The distinction that matters is this:

Religious influence in politics is not new. It is part of American history.

Religious authority as the basis of law and policy is something else entirely.

One is compatible with pluralism.

The other is not.

The power of The Handmaid’s Tale lies in its refusal to present Gilead as an abrupt transformation. It is a system that develops through language, policy, and incremental shifts in legitimacy.

It begins when leaders claim not just to govern, but to interpret a higher will.

It deepens when institutions align around that claim.

It solidifies when dissent is no longer treated as disagreement, but as deviance.

We are not living in Gilead.

But we are living in a moment where fundamental questions about authority, rights, and the role of religion in law are being actively contested.

And those questions deserve to be examined with clarity, not dismissed with slogans. Because Gilead did not arrive fully formed.

It was built, step by step, through language, policy, and the steady consolidation of authority - by people who believed they were restoring order, defending morality, and, above all, doing what they understood to be right.

The question is not whether that story is repeating itself. The question is whether we recognize the language - and the direction it points - before it becomes the structure we live under.

The language a society accepts is often the clearest signal of the future it is willing to build.

Sources

All claims in this piece are drawn from publicly available primary documents and mainstream reporting, including White House materials on faith-based initiatives; Associated Press, Reuters, and New York Times coverage of religious rhetoric and practice in governance; U.S. Supreme Court decisions including Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization; Brennan Center analyses of voting law changes; and academic research on Christian nationalism and theonomy.

(aircraft carrier USS George Washington)

Editor’s Note: This piece examines recent statement by Donald Trump about the war with Iran and the historical meaning of the phrase “unconditional surrender.” The analysis draws open reporting from NBC News, Axios, Military Times, CNBC, USA Today, CBC, and the historical records from the U.S. State Department and Congressional Research Service.

Donald Trump keeps demanding Iran’s “unconditional surrender.”

He says it the way someone might demand a refund at a hotel desk - as if repeating the words loudly enough makes the outcome inevitable.

But “unconditional surrender” is not a slogan.

It is one of the most extreme demands ever used in warfare. The last time the United States insisted on it, the world was in the middle of World War II and entire governments were about to be dismantled under military occupation.

Trump appears to believe it means something much simpler. That if Iran stops fighting. or if he decides they have stopped fighting, then the war will be over and victory can be declared. History suggests that is not how wars work. And the fact that the President of the United States appears to believe otherwise is more than a rhetorical curiosity.

It is a warning. Now that belief is shaping a war.

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Operation Epic Fury

Around March 1, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a large-scale military campaign against Iran known as Operation Epic Fury.

The opening phase of the operation was dramatic.

According to military reporting cited by Military Times, U.S. and Israeli forces struck roughly 2,000 targets inside Iran and destroyed approximately thirty Iranian naval vessels. Officials also reported that Iranian ballistic missile attacks dropped by roughly ninety percent after the first day of the campaign.

Then came the most explosive development of all. Iranian state media later confirmed that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in a joint U.S.–Israeli strike. The assassination of the leader of a sovereign state during wartime is an extraordinarily escalatory step - one that historically transforms wars rather than ends them.

But Trump immediately framed the event as the beginning of a political transition he intended to manage. He told reporters that he expected to play a role in selecting Iran’s next Supreme Leader.

That statement alone revealed a breathtaking misunderstanding of Iranian politics, nationalism, and history.

The Phrase Trump Keeps Using

Trump soon escalated his rhetoric further.

Iran, he said, must offer “unconditional surrender.”

The phrase has a specific historical meaning.

It was made famous during World War II when President Franklin Roosevelt announced that the Allied powers would accept nothing less from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Unconditional surrender meant the complete defeat of the enemy government, the occupation of its territory, and the reconstruction of its political system by foreign powers.

Germany experienced this outcome in 1945. Japan experienced it as well. Outside of those extreme cases, wars rarely end that way.

The Definition Keeps Changing

Trump’s own definition of the phrase appears to shift depending on the interview.

In one conversation with reporters, he suggested that unconditional surrender could simply mean Iran losing the ability to continue fighting “when they don’t have anyone or anything to fight with.”

Soon after, the White House adjusted the definition again. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt explained that Iran would effectively be considered to have surrendered when Trump determines the country no longer poses a threat to the United States.

In other words, surrender does not require Iran to surrender.

It requires Trump to say they did.

Why Iran Is Unlikely to Surrender

Iran has already rejected the demand outright. Its foreign minister has said the country is not seeking a ceasefire and is prepared even for a potential U.S. ground invasion.

That response reflects political reality. Iran is a nation of roughly ninety million people with a powerful national identity built partly around resisting foreign domination.

It is also one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth. Persian states existed more than two thousand years before the United States was founded. That long historical memory matters politically. Nations with deep civilizational identities tend to interpret foreign military pressure not as a reason to surrender, but as a reason to resist.

Modern Iranian politics cannot be separated from the 1953 coup, when the CIA helped overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalized Iran’s oil industry.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution itself was fueled by resentment toward Western influence. A formal surrender to the United States would be seen inside Iran as a humiliation so profound that any successor government would begin its life politically crippled. Countries built around revolutionary resistance rarely capitulate in that way.

Military historians often note that demands for unconditional surrender tend to prolong conflicts rather than end them, because they remove any incentive for the opposing leadership to negotiate or de-escalate

When Leaders Misjudge How Wars End

History offers many warnings about what happens when leaders misunderstand the limits of military power.

Vietnam is the most obvious example.

For years American leaders insisted that victory was just around the corner if pressure increased slightly more. The United States deployed over half a million troops and conducted one of the most intense bombing campaigns in modern history. The war still ended in withdrawal.

Afghanistan tells a similar story.

The United States toppled the Taliban government within weeks in 2001. But destroying a regime proved far easier than building a stable replacement. The war continued for twenty years before ending in a negotiated withdrawal and the Taliban’s return to power.

Iraq provides another warning.

The 2003 invasion removed Saddam Hussein quickly, but the collapse of the state produced years of insurgency and sectarian conflict.⁹

In each case the initial military success created the illusion that the conflict itself had been solved.

It had not. It had simply entered a different phase.

The People Whispering in His Ear

Trump’s historical ignorance would be dangerous under any circumstances. It becomes more dangerous when paired with advisers who appear to share the same instincts.

Many of the people surrounding Trump today are not seasoned foreign policy professionals. They are political loyalists, media personalities, or ideological allies whose experience lies far from the cautious world of diplomatic strategy.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a revealing example. Hegseth has frequently presented himself as an enthusiastic advocate of aggressive military action and has suggested that traditional rules of engagement should not constrain U.S. operations.

Rules of engagement are not bureaucratic niceties. They exist to protect civilians, maintain discipline among troops, and prevent actions that escalate conflicts or violate international law. When leaders signal that those rules are optional, the consequences rarely stay theoretical.

Earlier operations in the Caribbean involved U.S. forces destroying small fishing vessels suspected of drug trafficking and, according to reports, without attempts to intercept or detain the crews first. Under normal maritime law, suspected smuggling vessels are intercepted, boarded, and inspected. The people aboard are arrested and prosecuted.

They are not simply blown up at sea.

The Oil Question

There is another layer to this conflict.

Oil.

Iran sits beside the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s petroleum supply normally moves each day. Since the war began, shipping through the strait has largely collapsed as tankers avoid the conflict zone, effectively choking off a major artery of global oil traffic. Energy markets reacted immediately. Oil prices surged above $100 per barrel and spiked much higher at points as traders feared a prolonged disruption to supply.

That kind of shock reverberates through the global economy. Higher oil prices drive inflation, strain national budgets, and reshape geopolitical alliances. But they also produce enormous profits for oil producers.

That does not mean this war was launched for economic reasons. But it does raise an uncomfortable question that rarely appears in official statements. Who benefits from rising oil prices? Because in geopolitics, as in business, incentives matter.

A Familiar Pattern of Power

There is also a broader pattern here.

Project 2025 and the political movement surrounding Trump are built on a theory of executive power that concentrates extraordinary authority in the hands of the president.

Institutions weaken.

Professional expertise is sidelined.

Loyalty becomes the primary qualification for influence.

Foreign policy conducted under that model begins to look very different.

Decisions become more personal.

Goals shift rapidly.

And the guardrails of institutional debate begin to disappear.

War, in that environment, risks becoming something else entirely. Not the carefully weighed decision of a constitutional system. But the impulse of a single leader.

Words Matter

Sometimes the most revealing moments are the smallest ones.

During one recent exchange about the conflict, Trump referred to a military “excursion” when he clearly meant “incursion.”

• An excursion is a trip.

• An incursion is a military operation in which armed forces enter hostile territory.

On its own, the mistake might seem trivial. But language matters in war.

Military terminology reflects decades of doctrine and legal frameworks governing how armed forces operate. When leaders repeatedly misuse that language, it raises an uncomfortable question.

Is the mistake simply a slip of the tongue? Or does it reveal something deeper; unfamiliarity with the concepts themselves?

And that is where rhetoric collides with reality.

Trump believes wars end when he says they end

History suggests otherwise. Wars end when exhausted soldiers stop fighting, when economies buckle under the strain, or when political realities force leaders to accept outcomes they once insisted were impossible.

They end slowly, painfully, and often in ways no one predicted at the beginning.

History has ended many wars. None of them ended because a president declared victory at a press conference.

If this piece helped clarify what’s happening, consider restacking it so others can read it too. Clear information travels only when readers carry it.

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Sources

1. Military Times reporting on Operation Epic Fury and early strike results.

   https://www.militarytimes.com

2. U.S. State Department Office of the Historian – Casablanca Conference and the Allied demand for unconditional surrender.

   https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/casablanca

3. Axios reporting on Trump’s comments redefining “unconditional surrender.”

   https://www.axios.com

4. USA Today reporting on White House press secretary statements regarding surrender definition.

   https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/2026/03/10/white-house-clarifies-what-trump-means-by-unconditional-surrender/89087548007/

5. NBC News reporting on statements from Iran’s foreign minister regarding ceasefire and invasion readiness.

   https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/irans-foreign-minister-rejects-calls-ceasefire-continue-fighting-rcna262291

6. U.S. State Department historical record on the 1953 Iranian coup and Mossadegh overthrow.

   https://mohammadmossadegh.com/news/us-state-department/iran-documents/

7. U.S. National Archives – Statistical information on the Vietnam War.

   https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war

8. Congressional Research Service – U.S. Military Operations in Afghanistan, 2001–2021.

   https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45122

9. Congressional Research Service – The Iraq War: Background and Issues for Congress.

   https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/RL31339

10. CBC reports on “Cascading effects’ of Strait of Hormuz blockage.

    https://www.cnbc.com

“They have no money, they have no oil.” (Donald Trump, Doral resort, March 7, 2026.)

I watched the clip on MS Now. Every outlet is covering his disparaging remarks about women and foreign languages. Nobody is talking about the four words that explain his entire foreign policy: "They have no oil."

No oil. That’s the key. Because the country that did have oil - Venezuela, sitting on the largest reserves in the Western Hemisphere - didn’t get a blockade and a patient wait. It got a midnight military operation, a captured president, and an announcement that American oil companies would be moving in immediately to “fix the infrastructure.”

Cuba gets Marco Rubio. Venezuela got the U.S. military. The method differs. The logic is identical.

Let’s run the timeline, because it tells its own story.

• April 2024: Trump meets privately with oil company executives and tells them to give him a billion dollars. In exchange, he promises to gut environmental regulations, open federal land to drilling, and kill renewable energy. They donate. He wins.

• January 2025: Trump takes office and immediately begins delivering. Hundreds of Biden-era green energy projects canceled. The $7.5 billion federal EV charging program: gone. $625 million invested in coal. Hundreds of millions of acres opened to oil and gas.

• September 2025: U.S. military airstrikes begin hitting boats in the Caribbean. The administration calls it a drug war. About 150 people die - fishermen, laborers, a motorcycle taxi driver, according to AP investigations. No public evidence of drug trafficking is released. The UN calls it extrajudicial killing. Fentanyl experts note these boats have nothing to do with fentanyl, which isn’t produced in Venezuela and isn’t smuggled through the Caribbean.

• I wrote in December 2025 that blowing up fishermen had nothing to do with drugs. Venezuela’s seizure and Cuba’s blockade have since made the real agenda impossible to ignore. (Mad Mother Writes, Blowing Up Fishermen For Oil, December 4, 2025.)

• January 3, 2026: U.S. forces capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro overnight. Hours later, Trump announces America will "run" Venezuela and send in American oil companies to take over the oil infrastructure.

• March 7, 2026: At a hemispheric security summit held at his own Doral resort, Trump announces Cuba will fall next. He will send Secretary of State Rubio to govern it. “That’ll be an easy one,” Trump says. “They have no money. They have no oil.”

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But, punishment is only half the model. Cooperation has its rewards.

To understand Venezuela and Cuba, it helps to look at what happens when countries do play along.

• Vietnam approved a $1.5 billion Trump Organization golf resort near Hanoi while facing a 46% tariff and negotiating desperately for relief. Eric Trump attended the groundbreaking while Vietnamese trade negotiators were simultaneously in Washington. The tariffs were paused.

• Qatar received a favorable 10% tariff rate and a $5.5 billion Trump Organization luxury resort announcement. Qatar gifted the President a new Air Force One. No one in Washington found this unusual enough to investigate.

• Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the Gulf states broadly? Also 10%. Jared Kushner’s private equity firm received $2 billion from the Saudi Public Investment Fund. A UAE-linked firm completed a $2 billion deal using Trump’s own family stablecoin, earning the Trumps tens of millions annually. Trump Tower Dubai is under construction.

The watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, has documented at least 22 overseas Trump developments underway - at least five announced since Inauguration Day. Their conclusion: a Trump development may now function as a bargaining chip for any foreign government negotiating with this administration.

Venezuela didn’t build Trump a golf course. Cuba hasn’t cooperated in sixty years. Neither got a tariff break.

They got something else.

One more thread to follow.

While Trump seizes oil in the Western Hemisphere, he has started a war in the Middle East that closed the Strait of Hormuz - the narrow passage through which more than 20% of the world’s oil supply travels. Oil prices surged above $90 a barrel almost immediately.

Who benefits from that? Not consumers. The same donor class of American oil executives who paid Trump a billion dollars in April 2024 - the ones who now enjoy gutted environmental regulations, open federal land, and canceled renewable energy programs - also benefit enormously from spiking global oil prices. Higher prices, higher profits.

In the Western Hemisphere, Trump seizes oil directly for American companies. In the Middle East, he starts a war that drives up the price of oil those same companies sell. The method differs. The logic is identical.

“They have no money, they have no oil.”

He thought he was talking about Cuba.

He was describing his entire foreign policy.

“I run the country and the world. Because it’s the world I’m trying to save.” (Donald Trump, The Atlantic, April 2025.)

Saving it!? He is saving nothing! He is selling everything - our democracy, our institutions, our alliances, our credibility - to the highest bidder. And the bidders are billionaires and oil companies. That’s it. That’s the whole story.

Sources: All claims in this piece are documented. Primary sources below.

1. Trump, “I run the country and the world” — Jeffrey Goldberg, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, The Atlantic, April 28, 2025. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5270899-trump-i-run-the-country-and-the-world/

2. Trump’s billion-dollar meeting with oil executives — Josh Dawsey & Maxine Joselow, The Washington Post, May 9, 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/

3. Green energy projects canceled, EV charging program eliminated, coal investment, federal land openings — U.S. Department of Energy and EPA announcements, January–February 2025. https://www.energy.gov

4. U.S. military boat strikes beginning September 2025, expanding to Eastern Pacific October 2025 — Associated Press.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_strikes_on_alleged_drug_traffickers_during_Operation_Southern_Spear

5. Death toll of at least 151 from boat strikes — CBC News / Associated Press, February 23, 2026.https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/us-military-strike-alleged-drug-boat-9.7103366

6. AP investigation identifying victims as ordinary working men — Ben Finley & Konstantin Toropin, Associated Press, via PBS NewsHour, November 7, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/trump-has-accused-boat-strike-targets-of-being-narco-terrorists-the-truth-is-more-nuanced-ap-investigation-finds

7. UN bodies declaring strikes extrajudicial killings — UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Inter-American Commission on Human Rights; UN Special Rapporteurs, reported by Al Jazeera, February 23, 2026.https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/23/another-us-boat-strike-in-caribbean-sea-kills-three-pentagon-says

8. Boat strikes have zero effect on fentanyl — Adam Isacson, Washington Office on Latin America, via NPR, January 27, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/27/nx-s1-5688765/boat-strikes-us-cocaine-venezuela-fishermen

9. U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro, January 3, 2026; Trump announces U.S. will “run” Venezuela and deploy American oil companies — PBS NewsHour / AP, January 9, 2026. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-is-meeting-with-oil-executives-to-seek-investments-in-venezuela

10. Vietnam $1.5 billion Trump Organization golf resort approved during tariff negotiations — Fortune, May 16, 2025.https://fortune.com/2025/05/16/trump-organization-vietnam-golf-resort/

11. Eric Trump at Vietnam groundbreaking while trade negotiators were in Washington — Reuters via NBC News, May 21, 2025. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/trump-organization-breaks-ground-15-billion-golf-club-vietnam-rcna208169

12. Qatar $5.5 billion Simaisma resort announcement — Newsweek, April 30, 2025. https://www.newsweek.com/new-trump-golf-course-55-billion-beachside-project-announced-qatar-2066482

13. Qatar gifts Trump a Boeing 747 to use as Air Force One — NBC News, May 12, 2025.https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/business/money-report/trump-poised-to-accept-qatar-jet-gift-as-air-force-one/6259570/

14. Kushner $2 billion Saudi Public Investment Fund investment — Newsweek, May 11, 2025.https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reportedly-getting-luxury-qatari-jet-gift-sparks-fury-2070672

15. UAE-linked firm used Trump family stablecoin for $2 billion deal — ABC News, February 2, 2026.https://abcnews.com/Politics/white-house-faces-questions-uae-royals-investment-trump/story?id=129774262

16. CREW: 22 overseas Trump developments, $430 million overseas income, UAE income increase from $2.7M to $27M — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, 2025. https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-reports/trump-foreign-property-income-is-set-to-explode-in-his-second-term/

17. CREW: Trump development as bargaining chip for foreign governments — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Foreign Development Tracker, 2025. https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-reports/trump-foreign-development-tracker/

18. Strait of Hormuz closure during Iran conflict; oil prices surge above $90 — Reuters, 2026. (Grab current URL from Reuters)

19. More than 20% of world oil supply passes through Strait of Hormuz — U.S. Energy Information Administration.https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61002

A powerful historical rewrite is underway.

For months in this Substack, I have traced how Project 2025 seeks to consolidate executive power, purge institutional independence, and reengineer federal governance. But beneath the bureaucratic blueprints lies something even more consequential: a theological claim about the nation itself.

Project 2025 is not merely a plan for administrative restructuring. It is animated by the belief that the United States was founded as a Christian nation - and that restoring that identity requires reshaping the Constitution - in practice if not in text.

That claim demands a history lesson. Because if we are going to watch constitutional guardrails bend in real time, we should at least know what they were built to prevent.

The Founding Design: Enlightenment, Not Theocracy

The founding generation lived in the Age of Enlightenment, when debates about conscience, reason, and religious coercion were central to political thought. Many founders were influenced by Deism, generally believing in a Creator but skeptical of church authority, miracles, and state-enforced doctrine. They leaned on reason and natural law more than revelation.

Others were personally religious, some devout. But the constitutional system they built together was intentionally nonsectarian - a structure designed to prevent any national church from capturing the machinery of government.

The founders were united on one crucial principle: civil rights and public office do not hinge on religious orthodoxy. Government has no authority to declare theological truth.

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The design was written plainly into law

• Article VI of the Constitution declares that “no religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” That single line bars the federal government from conditioning political authority on membership in any faith. 1

• The First Amendment reinforces the same structure: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” 2

In other words, the federal government has no mandate to choose a favored church, enforce doctrine, or reserve citizenship for people with approved beliefs.

• The 1797 Treaty of Tripoli makes the point unusually explicit. Ratified unanimously by the Senate and signed under President John Adams, it states that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” 3

• Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom declares that civil rights do not depend on religious opinion and forbids compelled support for religious worship. 4 In his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, Jefferson described the First Amendment as building “a wall of separation between Church & State.” 5

• James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance argued that religion is a matter of reason and conviction, “wholly exempt” from civil authority. 6

• George Washington, writing to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport in 1790, declared that the government of the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” 7

This is not vague rhetoric. It is constitutional architecture. The founders did not build a Christian state because they had watched Christian states punish dissenters. They deliberately constructed guardrails.

Departure, Not Defense

Today’s “Christian nation” and increasingly “white Christian nation” rhetoric is not a defense of the founding. It is a departure from it. It seeks to replace constitutional equality with religious gatekeeping. It reframes pluralism as decline. It recruits history as propaganda to make theological hierarchy sound inevitable.

If “real Americans” must be Christians - and the “right” kind of Christians - then religious liberty ceases to be a constitutional right held by everyone and becomes a privilege granted to favored groups.

From Blueprint to Power

This is not an academic debate. Christian Nationalist architects of Project 2025 now hold federal authority. 8

Russell Vought, a principal architect of the Project 2025 framework, has written about the need for government rooted in a distinctly Christian understanding of national identity. As a federal budget director, he influences which programs are expanded, defunded, or dismantled — including immigration enforcement, detention infrastructure, and civil rights oversight.9

Stephen Miller, another architect of the Project 2025 agenda, has shaped immigration policy through rhetoric centered on demographic preservation and civilizational threat - language long associated with white Christian nationalist ideology. 10

The executive branch now operates a White House “Faith Office,” formalizing religious outreach within executive governance. Members of Congress increasingly use prayer events not merely as private observance, but as political alignment signals. 11

“In a move that pushes the boundaries of Constitutional prohibition against a state religion, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hosted an evangelical prayer service in the middle of the day at the Pentagon in which a pastor praised President Donald Trump as "sovereignly appointed." A program for the event called it the "Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer and Worship Service." It was held at the Pentagon's auditorium and was broadcast throughout the building on its internal cable network. 12

When senior defense officials encourage or normalize sectarian gatherings within the armed forces, then religious pressure enters one of the most constitutionally sensitive institutions in American life. This is not symbolism. It is proximity to power.

When religious identity becomes intertwined with enforcement authority, budget machinery, immigration policy, and executive structure, the constitutional guardrail against religious establishment is no longer theoretical. It is being stress-tested in real time.

How Erosion Happens

The Constitution does not vanish overnight. It erodes. First, religious language becomes policy framing. Then policy preferences become enforcement priorities. Then dissent becomes recast as hostility to faith.

If national belonging is defined through religious identity, millions of Americans — Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, atheist, Catholic, evangelical, or simply the “wrong” kind of Christian become conditional participants in their own country. Pluralistic democracy narrows.

Church-state fusion does not produce moral clarity. It produces hierarchy. And hierarchy enforced by the state is no longer faith. It is power.

A Line That Cannot Be Crossed

The founders understood something simple and dangerous: when the state declares religious truth, dissent becomes disloyalty. That is why they refused to fuse church and government.

If the machinery of federal authority is guided by an ideology that insists America must be reclaimed for one faith, one cultural lineage, one civilizational identity, then exclusion will not remain rhetorical. It will be enforced.

That is not revival. It is state-backed identity hierarchy. That is not a culture war. It is a constitutional crisis unfolding in plain sight.

Christian Voices Rejecting Christian Nationalism

It is both historically inaccurate and theologically misleading to treat Christian nationalism as synonymous with Christianity. Many Christian leaders and organizations argue the opposite: that Christian nationalism is a political ideology that distorts the Christian faith and threatens constitutional democracy.

Christians Against Christian Nationalism, a campaign founded in 2019 by Amanda Tyler of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, defines Christian nationalism as “a political ideology that seeks to merge Christian and American identities - distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy.” 13

The campaign emerged in response to increasing violence against houses of worship by white supremacists and the growing fusion of religious rhetoric with nationalist politics. Its statement of principles emphasizes that “America has no second-class faiths” and calls on Christians to reject Christian nationalism as a corruption of the gospel and a danger to pluralistic democracy.

As of February 22, 2026, the campaign reports dozens of affiliated local groups across multiple states and a growing network of Christians committed to defending both religious freedom and constitutional order.

This matters. Because the defense of church-state separation is not hostility toward Christianity. It is a defense of the Christian conscience as well as the Jewish conscience, the Muslim conscience, the atheist conscience — every conscience.

When faith is fused with state power, faith itself becomes political currency.

Resistance

The answer is not hostility toward religion.

It is fidelity to the Constitution. It is insisting that citizenship carries no religious test.It is defending the principle that government does not adjudicate theology. It is protecting the full and equal standing of every American under law.

We do not need a state religion. We need civic courage. That means naming historical revisionism when we see it.

• Showing up at school boards and city councils when sectarian instruction is proposed.

• Calling and writing representatives when enforcement power is misused.

• Supporting faith leaders who reject Christian nationalism.

• Refusing to normalize rhetoric that equates religious identity with national worth.

The American experiment was not designed to enforce theological conformity. It was designed to protect freedom of conscience. Those guardrails were built deliberately, and they are now being tested deliberately.

History is not only something we teach. It is something we defend. And this moment demands that we do exactly that.

Footnotes:

There was once a firewall built into American democracy - a system designed to stop discriminatory voting laws before they ever reached voters. When the Supreme Court dismantled that protection, it didn’t just change election law; it changed who carries the burden of protecting the right to vote.

There can be no democracy without the right of every citizen to vote without prejudice. That right rarely disappears in one dramatic moment. It erodes in small administrative decisions most people never see; a polling place moved, a district line redrawn, an ID rule tightened - each one small enough to defend, but powerful enough to shape who gets heard.

I learned what voter suppression looks like long before I ever read a Supreme Court opinion about it. I saw it standing on a street in Houston in 2018, canvassing for Beto, holding a clipboard and a list of voters who wanted to participate in their democracy - if they could.

Primary voters told us where they had voted earlier that year. Churches. Schools. Community centers. Familiar places they had used for years. So that’s where they planned to go on Election Day. That’s what they trusted.

Except when Election Day came, many of those locations weren’t voting sites anymore.

The new locations weren’t always far as the crow flies. But Harris County is enormous. If you work hourly, if you rely on a ride, if you’re voting between shifts, if you have kids in tow - “not far” might as well be impossible. And many voters didn’t even know the location had changed until they showed up to vote and found locked doors or a sign pointing somewhere miles away.

When I asked why there hadn’t been clearer notice, I was told - quietly, matter-of-factly - that confusion was part of the point. That moving locations could shave turnout in communities already facing transportation barriers, work schedule constraints, and long lines.

I can’t prove what was in anyone’s heart when those decisions were made. But I saw the result. I saw voters who wanted to participate in democracy lose their window to do it.

I didn’t understand then that there had once been a system designed to stop exactly this kind of change before Election Day ever arrived.

For decades, there was a federal backstop designed specifically to stop exactly that kind of last-minute election change. Under the Voting Rights Act, jurisdictions with a documented history of racial discrimination in voting couldn’t just move polling places, redraw districts, or change voting procedures and hope no one noticed. They had to prove, in advance, that the change would not harm minority voters. 1

That process was called preclearance, and it flipped the burden where Congress believed it belonged: on governments with a history of discrimination, not on individual voters scrambling to fight back after an election was already over.

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What Preclearance Actually Stopped

Alabama

Preclearance blocked multiple redistricting plans that would have diluted Black voting power in majority-Black areas. It also blocked changes that would have reduced minority electoral influence by splitting communities across districts.

Texas

Preclearance initially blocked Texas’s 2011 voter ID law after courts found it would disproportionately burden minority voters. It also blocked redistricting maps found to weaken Latino and Black representation. 2

Georgia

Preclearance blocked polling place changes and election rule changes in several counties where federal reviewers found minority voters would be disproportionately affected.

Mississippi

Preclearance blocked attempts to weaken minority voting strength in local election district changes.

Louisiana

Preclearance locked redistricting and voting rule changes that risked diluting Black voting strength in parishes with documented discrimination history.

When the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision gutted the formula that made preclearance possible, it didn’t just strike a line of statutory text. 3 It shifted the country from a system designed to prevent discrimination before ballots were cast to one that forces voters to prove discrimination after their votes have already been diluted, delayed, or denied. 4

Once you understand that shift, moments like Houston stop looking like isolated confusion and start looking like exactly the kind of scenario pre-clearance was built to prevent.

If the pre-Shelby Voting Rights Act system had still been fully functioning, Harris County would not have been able to simply change voting locations and let voters discover the change on Election Day. Because Texas was one of the states covered by the Voting Rights Act oversight system, local officials would have had to submit the change to the federal government first. They would have had to explain why the change was happening, who it would affect, and - most importantly - prove it would not make voting harder for minority communities.

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Federal lawyers would have reviewed data:

• How many voters used the old location?

• Who lived nearby?

• Was public transportation available to the new site?

• Would the change increase wait times or travel distances in neighborhoods with large minority populations.

If federal reviewers believed the change risked suppressing minority voting, they could block it before it ever touched an election. Voters would never show up to locked doors. Campaign volunteers would never be scrambling on Election Day trying to redirect people across a county the size of a small state.

That is what the “formula” made possible. It told the federal government where to look - where history showed discrimination had been repeated enough times that extra review was justified. Without that formula, the review system didn’t just weaken. It stopped operating entirely.

So, when I stood in Houston helping voters figure out where they were supposed to go, I wasn’t just seeing local election logistics. I was seeing what voting rights enforcement looks like when it happens after the fact instead of before. I was seeing the real-world version of what happens when the burden shifts from government proving fairness to voters trying to prove discrimination after they’ve already lost their chance to vote.

Since the Shelby decision, partisan map manipulation and restrictive voting policies have accelerated in many states. In many cases, legislatures now draw districts designed to protect incumbents or dilute opposing voting blocs, often affecting communities of color that tend to vote Democratic. 5 At the same time, repeated claims of widespread illegal voting by undocumented immigrants have been made by influential politicians, including by our president and members of Congress, despite a lack of evidence showing large-scale noncitizen voting. 6 These claims are often used to justify restrictive voting laws or aggressive enforcement proposals that risk intimidating lawful voters. 7

The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act - legislation designed to restore modernized preclearance protections - failed by just two votes in the Senate in 2021. 8

That failure wasn’t just legislative gridlock. It was the moment the country chose, at least for now, to live without the firewall that had protected voting rights for generations.

A firewall only works if it exists before the fire starts. For nearly half a century, the Voting Rights Act forced governments with histories of discrimination to prove their voting changes were fair before they could reshape an election. When that protection was dismantled, the burden shifted to voters; to recognize suppression, to fight it in court, to overcome it in real time. If we want a democracy where the right to vote is protected instead of negotiated, the firewall must be rebuilt. And that will only happen if voters demand it - at the ballot box, in their communities, and from the people they send to Congress.

I apologize that it’s been longer than usual since Lindsay or I published a new SubStack. After successfully dodging COVID for years, we finally caught it, and the past two weeks have been a blur of exhaustion and recovery.

In that short time away, the administration’s immigration crackdown has escalated again - more aggressive tactics, more fear, and more open defiance of basic legal restraint. Across the country, communities report masked, armed federal officers conducting enforcement operations that feel designed to intimidate as much as to arrest. And the widening net has not stopped at undocumented immigrants: it has swept up refugees, visa holders, and U.S. citizens.

Minneapolis became the most stark example. In January, two U.S. citizens - Renée Good 1 and Alex Pretti - were shot and killed by federal immigration agents during the surge of enforcement and the protests that followed. 2 In both cases, the administration’s public claims about what happened were quickly contested by bystander video and subsequent reporting. The pattern is familiar: violence first, narrative control second, accountability last. 3

While I was convalescing, a friend sent me a link to a document preserved in the Internet Archive. (Thank you, Cyn.) It is a War Department “Army Talk” Orientation Fact Sheet- Number 64 -issued March 24, 1945, titled simply: FASCISM! 4

Reading it felt like stepping into a time machine - only to discover we have circled back to the same warnings.

One paragraph in particular could be describing the conduct and ambitions we are watching now:

“Fascism is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state… They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law. They make their own rules and change them as they choose.”

That is the part too many Americans still struggle to name: fascism is not only a symbol or a slogan. It is a method. It is the systematic conversion of government into a private weapon—used to punish enemies, reward allies, and silence resistance.

The pamphlet also describes how fascism comes to power: not as a sudden coup that everyone recognizes, but through propaganda, deception, and the recruitment of insecure people—backed quietly by powerful economic interests. That is not ancient history. In the United States, the movement that won the 2024 election took power in January 2025 with a blueprint already written - Project 2025 - built to concentrate authority, dismantle constraints, and replace a rights-based democracy with a loyalty-based regime.

In our case, the coalition is not subtle. The Heritage Foundation assembled a governing network of ideological operatives and wealthy backers, including powerful figures across technology, media, and fossil fuels. A second pillar is Christian nationalism: a movement that supplies religious justification for political domination through ideas like “Manifest Destiny” and the Seven Mountains doctrine. Project 2025’s program is not simply conservative policy. It is a redesign of the state to make resistance futile. 5

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The regime’s consolidation has been accelerated in two decisive ways.

First, the Supreme Court’s embrace of sweeping presidential power has helped normalize the idea that the executive can act beyond meaningful restraint—an architecture that mirrors the “unitary executive” vision central to Project 2025. Second, a compliant Congress has too often surrendered its own constitutional role: tolerating lawlessness, confirming unqualified loyalists, and behaving as if oversight is optional. Russell Vought’s return to lead the Office of Management and Budget is not a bureaucratic footnote; it is the installation of a key Project 2025 architect in one of the most powerful levers of government. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller’s central role in immigration enforcement signals exactly what the administration views as both a target and a test case.

At this point, it helps to be precise about what we are seeing, and what we must prove. If you want to use the strongest language without giving critics an easy escape hatch, apply a simple four-part test: Target (who is being removed), Territory (from where), Intent (what officials say they want, and what the policies reliably produce), and Coercion (what makes the “choice” non-voluntary). Under that framework, the administration’s actions fit “forced removal,” even when cloaked in the vocabulary of “law enforcement.” The intent is removal; the target is immigrants (and, in practice, disproportionately non-white immigrants); and the coercive machinery is detention, raids, transfers, fear, and intimidation at scale. What remains to be argued - case by case, with evidence - is when “forced removal” crosses into the international concept of “ethnic cleansing,” which turns on the goal of making particular places demographically “clean” through intimidation and expulsion, or even massacre.

History matters here because fascist regimes do not always “ignore” the law in a crude sense. They do something more insidious: they rewrite the law, hollow it out, invent emergency authorities, or create special systems where normal rights no longer apply. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy both turned scapegoating into state policy, then turned policy into removal, and removal into mass killing. Imperial Japan built its own machinery of terror, forced labor, and group-targeted violence across occupied Asia. Different systems, same logic: the state defines a target group as a threat, then claims that any measure used against that group is “necessary.”

That is why Minneapolis matters so much. When U.S. citizens can be killed in the public streets during immigration operations - and when official accounts are contradicted by video and reporting - the question is no longer whether the Bill of Rights is being “tested.” The question is whether it will be enforced at all.

And immigration enforcement is not the only arena where the rule of law is being treated as optional.

At the Pentagon, Secretary Pete Hegseth imposed new reporting rules so restrictive that most major outlets rejected them and surrendered their credentials rather than sign away independent journalism. That is not “normal friction” between government and press. It is a demand for control - an authoritarian insistence that the public may only know what the state approves. 6

Beyond our borders, the administration’s expanding use of force has raised even more serious alarms. Families have filed suit over a Caribbean boat strike campaign they call unlawful - an operation that, according to reporting and legal filings, has killed large numbers of people, including fishermen, and includes alleged incidents in which survivors were struck after an initial attack. 7 Reporting has also raised questions about aircraft used in these strikes being painted to resemble civilian planes—an allegation that, if true, would represent an extraordinary breach of basic norms. 8

And then there is Venezuela. Congress has already tried - and failed - to rein in presidential war powers related to military actions there, an effort that only exists because lawmakers themselves are warning that the administration is using force without constitutionally required authorization. 9 Legal analysis has been blunt: whatever name the administration gives it, regime-decapitation by bombing is war, and the power to initiate war belongs to Congress. 10

This is why that 1945 War Department pamphlet hits so hard. Its authors were not speculating. They had watched fascism destroy legal systems from the inside. They understood that the point is not merely to defeat a foreign enemy - it is to recognize the method before it takes root at home.

The pamphlet’s final question was simple: “How to stop it?”

Its answer is even simpler: by making democracy work. By actively defending civil rights, resisting discrimination and prejudice, insisting on equality before the law, and cooperating to preserve peace and security. The authors warned that freedom cannot be maintained in isolation. If we allow prejudice to strip anyone of democratic rights, all democracy is threatened.

Those values shaped the postwar world: alliances, human rights norms, the civil rights movement, expanded voting access, and the long - unfinished - work of making democracy real for everyone. That is the America this regime is trying to end. Constitutional limits replaced by loyalty; independent institutions replaced by obedient ones; rights replaced by permissions.

For those of us who warned - when Project 2025 was posted online, long before the election - that this was the plan, the speed of implementation is horrifying but not surprising. The time for euphemisms is over. Fascism is not a distant threat or an academic debate. It is a governing method -and it is here.

So here is the call to action: name what is happening, out loud, without apology. Document it. Support legal defense organizations and local mutual aid networks protecting immigrants and targeted communities. Demand that elected officials use every tool they still have—hearings, subpoenas, funding constraints, state and local non-cooperation policies that are lawful, and litigation that forces constitutional review. Show up in public, peacefully and persistently. Attend a No Kings protest on March 28. Authoritarianism depends on silence, isolation, and exhaustion. We defeat it by staying visible, connected, and unafraid.

Remembering a Different Democracy

It’s hard to remember a time before dark money and corporate influence saturated every election. I personally wasn’t clued into the ins and outs of American politics, which looked vastly different, in prior decades. On January 21, 2010, a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a decision in Citizens United v. FEC that tilted the trajectory of American democracy. The Court’s ruling declared that corporate political spending was a form of protected free speech, paving the way (whether unwittingly or not) for a flood of unprecedented political spending and influence.

Then, on the heels of Citizens United, came the ruling that ignited the political reality we know today, marked by extreme polarization and brazen authoritarianism.

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Citizens United and Surrounding Events

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed unlimited corporate and union spending on elections, dramatically altering the American political landscape.

Are Corporations People?

One of the most controversial legacies of Citizens United is the idea that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as individuals when it comes to political speech. This logic, rooted in earlier court precedents, was cemented by the Court’s ruling that corporations and unions can spend unlimited money on political advertising, just like people can.

Critics argue that this principle warps democracy, giving artificial legal entities (with vastly more resources) the same rights as human citizens, without the same accountability.

This is where the phrase “corporations are people” entered the public lexicon. While it oversimplifies the legal theory, it captures the public’s outrage over the elevation of corporate influence in civic life.

Timeline of Major Events

March 2009: Citizens United case initially argued in Supreme Court.

January 21, 2010: Supreme Court issues 5–4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

• Majority:

  • John Roberts (remains Chief Justice today)

  • Antonin Scalia (d. 2016)

  • Anthony Kennedy (r. 2018)

  • Clarence Thomas (still serving)

  • Samuel Alito (still serving)

• Dissenting:

  • Justice John Paul Stevens (wrote primary dissent, r. 2010, d. 2019)

  • Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (d. 2020)

  • Justice Stephen Breyer (r. 2022)

  • Justice Sonia Sotomayor (still serving)

March 26, 2010: SpeechNow.org v. FEC decided by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Supreme Court later declined to hear the case (more on this below)

July 27, 2010: SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission, conservative advocacy group SpeechNow.org becomes first Super PAC

2012 Election Cycle: $609 million spent by Super PACs

2014 McCutcheon v. FEC: Supreme Court removes aggregate limits on individual contributions

2016 Election Cycle: Super PAC spending exceeds $1 billion for the first time

2020 Election Cycle: In just four years spending more than doubles to a record-breaking $2.6 billion spend by Super PACs

2021-2024: Rise of authoritarian rhetoric in mainstream politics, intensified by wealthy donors and dark money groups

The Original Super PAC

The less-remembered legal milestone, SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission (decided March 2010), is arguably more significant than Citizens United in terms of practical political impact. It didn’t come from the Supreme Court, but rather from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. That ruling created the legal foundation for what we now call Super PACs—independent expenditure-only committees that can raise and spend unlimited funds, and which wealthy donors can hide behind, as long as they do not coordinate with candidates. Not even corporations have that little oversight.

If Citizens United was the kindling that sparked corporate and dark money entering elections, SpeechNow.org was jet fuel.

Background on the Case

SpeechNow.org was a conservative nonprofit formed to independently run ads supporting political candidates. They challenged FEC rules that limited how much money individuals could contribute to political committees, arguing that these restrictions violated their First Amendment rights to free speech. Though the case was filed before the Citizens United decision, by the time the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling in March 2010, Citizens United had been decided just two months earlier. Citing that precedent, the court held that contribution limits to independent expenditure-only groups were unconstitutional. The court also ruled that groups like SpeechNow.org must register as political action committees per federal law. SpeechNow.org became the first ever Super PAC.

What Changed After SpeechNow.org?

Here’s what happened when the rules changed and the billionaires moved in. Between the 2008 and 2012 election cycles, independent political expenditures skyrocketed from approximately $144 million to over $1 billion.

The results were immediate and staggering.

Source: OpenSecrets.org

If current trends continue, outside political spending in the 2028 election cycle could reach $6 billion, setting yet another record, and tightening the grip of concentrated wealth on American democracy.

Connection to the Rise of Authoritarianism

Citizens United and its lesser-known sibling, SpeechNow.org, didn’t just tip the scales, they kicked down the doors to a new era of political spending. Billionaires and corporate interests were quick to seize the opportunity, throwing open the floodgates and pouring unprecedented sums into Super PACs and dark money groups. The almost immediate and seismic power shift fueled polarization, supercharged misinformation, eroded public trust, and created even more avenues for the ultra-wealthy to entrench their influence and profit from policy.

With limitless resources and political influence, ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations effectively own public opinion, drown out opposition, and embolden authoritarian-minded politicians who prioritize donor loyalist interests over public accountability.

Factors Contributing to Authoritarianism Post-Citizens United:

• Increased political extremism funded by wealthy interests.

• Growth of misinformation and propaganda via dark money groups.

• Suppression of grassroots activism due to financial dominance.

Campaign Finance Best Practices

Overturning Citizens United alone won’t be enough to break big money’s grip on our political system. That decision lit the match, but decades of legal and legislative erosion have allowed corporate and billionaire influence to engulf our elections. To truly restore transparency, accountability, and public trust, we can’t simply reverse the damage, we need to rebuild from the ground up.

Successful reforms in other democracies:

🇨🇦 Canada

Spending caps and donation limits.

Canada enforces strict caps on how much parties and candidates can spend, and bans corporate and union donations altogether. Individuals can give only in small amounts. Public subsidies help offset campaign costs, reducing dependence on private money.

• No corporate or union donations

• Individual donation limits

• Partial public reimbursement for campaign costs

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Ban ads and shorten campaigns.

In the UK, elections last just a few weeks, not years. Candidates and parties operate under legal spending caps, and no one can buy TV or radio ads. Instead, all parties get free airtime, keeping the focus on policies, not who can pay for the most coverage.

• No paid political TV or radio advertising

• 4–6 week campaign periods

• Strict legal spending caps

🇫🇷 France

Reimburse all viable candidates.

France provides public funding to major parties based on prior election performance and also reimburses costs for candidates who reach minimum vote thresholds. This approach helps break the two-party system while maintaining high accountability.

• Full or partial public financing for parties

• Reimbursement for qualified candidates

• Strict spending limits

🇩🇪 Germany

Ban anonymous donations.

Germany blends public subsidies with transparency requirements. All donations above a modest threshold must be disclosed, and anonymous contributions are not allowed. Public funding is tied to actual voter support to ensure fairness.

• No anonymous donations over €500

• Mandatory disclosure of large contributions

• Public subsidies tied to vote share

Reclaiming Our Power

Across our feeds the temperature is rising. We, the American people are outraged, and a good number of us are not about to let this frog-in-boiling-water situation be the downfall of American democracy. The path to overcoming authoritarianism begins with remembering democracy belongs to us, not just those with a golden boot on our faces.

Overturning Citizens United is possible, necessary, and urgent.

“A republic, if you can keep it.” Benjamin Franklin’s famous reply at the close of the Constitutional Convention (September 17, 1787) is often repeated like a patriotic bumper sticker. But it was never meant to be comforting. It was a warning: a republic survives only if ordinary people stay informed, stay engaged, and refuse to surrender their rights out of fear, exhaustion, or blind loyalty. 1

Instead, the years since January 6, 2021 have delivered the opposite lesson. Rather than rejecting the authoritarian impulse on display that day, millions of voters brought the racist, corrupt criminal back to power. In the four-year gap between his two terms, Christian Nationalist power networks had time to regroup and refine their blueprint. Stephen Miller and Russell Vought sharpened Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” recruited loyalists, and prepared to treat the next presidency, not as a public trust, but as a takeover. They also fully expected Trump to win.

I have written many SubStacks about how the Christian Nationalist Project 2025 is supplanting our Constitution and reshaping the United States into a theocratic authoritarian plutocracy - one where “rights” become whatever Trump and his enforcers decide they are. My Nov. 11 post, Before the Cross Replaces the Constitution goes further, tracing the history and the intentional overlap between the Christian Nationalist “Seven Mountains” doctrine and Project 2025’s plan of action. I won’t repeat the details here, but I have included the link above for new subscribers and for anyone who wants a refresher.

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So here we are.

Trump has not yet been in office for a year, and the damage is already measurable. Laws are treated as optional. Oversight is mocked. Institutions are hollowed out. The machinery of government is increasingly used not to serve the public, but to punish opponents, intimidate communities, and reward allies. If you’re watching closely, the pattern is hard to miss: this isn’t “mismanagement.” It’s a plan.

And it’s working in part because too many Americans don’t know what the Constitution actually guarantees.

One subscriber messaged me recently to say that our citizenry is woefully ignorant of basic constitutional rights. I agree. Naturalized citizens are required to study civics and pass a test; many end up with a clearer understanding of our system than people born her who were never taught it well. Meanwhile, civics education is inconsistent nationwide. The American Bar Association reports that only 37 states require a standalone high school civics course (31 require a one-semester course; 6 require a full-year course). 2

If you don’t know what you are legally entitled to, you won’t recognize when it’s being taken away - or how quickly “normal” can be rewritten.

Authoritarian regimes are especially skilled at declaring the unlawful “lawful,” then daring the public to believe official talking points over their own eyes. The killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis is a brutal example. DHS officials claimed the ICE agent shot her in self-defense and said he was taken to the hospital with internal bleeding; yet, reporting describes surveillance video showing Good turning her wheels and trying to drive away from the agents as the shots were fired. 3Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension also publicly stated it withdrew from investigating after the U.S. Attorney’s Office reversed course and the FBI took sole control - leaving the state without the access it said it needed for a thorough, independent review. 4

This is the new environment: force first, narrative second, accountability later - or never!

WHAT ARE OUR RIGHTS AND WHO GETS THEM?

The first ten amendments to the Constitution—the Bill of Rights—exist for one reason: to protect the people from government abuse and to require fair treatment, even when the government is angry, afraid, or politically motivated.

A key point: these protections are not limited to citizens. The Constitution repeatedly uses “the people” and “persons.” Many of the strongest protections—especially due process—apply to everyone inside the United States, though the details can shift at the border and in certain immigration contexts.

If you want to read the full text, you can:

• Order a pocket Constitution from the UCLA ($10) 5

• Buy the official pocket edition from the the U.S. Government Publishing Office Bookstore ($2) 6

• Read the full texture free online at the National Constitution Center 7

THE BILL OF RIGHTS, IN PLAIN ENGLISH

First Amendment: Protects freedom of religion, speech, the press, peaceful assembly, and the right to petition the government.

Second Amendment: Protects the right to keep and bear arms.

Third Amendment: Bars the government from forcing people to house soldiers in their homes in peacetime without consent.

Fourth Amendment: Protects against unreasonable searches and seizures; generally requires a warrant based on probable cause.

Fifth Amendment: Protects due process, bars double jeopardy and forced self-incrimination, and requires compensation when the government takes private property for public use.

Sixth Amendment: In criminal cases, guarantees a speedy public trial, an impartial jury, notice of charges, confrontation of witnesses, compulsory process, and the right to counsel.

Seventh Amendment: Preserves the right to a jury trial in many federal civil cases.

Eighth Amendment: Prohibits excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishment.

Ninth Amendment: Says that listing certain rights doesn’t erase other rights the people retain.

Tenth Amendment: Reserves powers not delegated to the federal government to the states or the people.

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN DHS PUSHES PAST THE LINE

Below are reader-friendly examples tied to specific reporting, lawsuits, and court orders. In many cases these are allegations; in others, judges have already issued injunctions or settlements restricting DHS conduct.

1. FIRST AMENDMENT: SPEECH, PRESS, ASSEMBLY—RETALIATION AND INTIMIDATION

   A federal court in Southern California issued a preliminary injunction restricting DHS conduct toward journalists, legal observers, and protesters after evidence that DHS used crowd-control force and targeted people engaged in protected activity. 8

   In Minnesota and Illinois, the states sued the Trump administration to halt or restrain a DHS “surge,” alleging unconstitutional tactics including excessive force and racial profiling, and seeking basic accountability measures like visible identification and limits on face-concealing masks. 9

   In a Minnesota federal court hearing, DOJ argued there is no First Amendment protection for “observing police,” in a case tied to alleged retaliation and intimidation of people monitoring immigration agents. 10

2. FOURTH AMENDMENT: STOPS, ARRESTS, HOME TACTICS, AND SURVEILLANCE

   A federal judge in Colorado issued a preliminary injunction restricting ICE warrantless arrests, requiring not only probable cause of an immigration violation but also probable cause that the person is likely to flee before a warrant can be obtained. 11

   In Southern California, a settlement in Kidd v. Noem prohibits ICE from impersonating local/state police or using other deceptive ruses to enter homes or lure residents outside—tactics that corrode consent and Fourth Amendment protections. 12

   The ACLU published FOIA-obtained documents describing DHS components buying access to sensitive location data from private brokers—an end-run around the warrant process that turns commercial surveillance into government power. 13

3. FIFTH AMENDMENT: DUE PROCESS—CONDITIONS AND ACCESS TO LAWYERS

   A federal court issued a temporary restraining order over abusive conditions at 26 Federal Plaza in New York, requiring ICE to improve hygiene and access to medical care and to ensure people can make free, confidential calls to lawyers within 24 hours. 14

   In Los Angeles, a federal court granted a preliminary injunction after evidence that detainees held at the B-18 site were cut off from meaningful attorney access—denied phone lines, turned away from in-person meetings, and pressured to sign documents before speaking to counsel. 15

4. SIXTH AMENDMENT REALITY CHECK: WHEN THE RIGHT TO COUNSEL “ATTACHES”

   The Sixth Amendment applies to criminal prosecutions; much DHS enforcement is civil immigration enforcement, where the legal fight is often framed as due process and statutory rights rather than a guaranteed government-provided attorney. But the “denied a lawyer” pattern still matters. One high-profile example: a naturalized U.S. citizen, Wilmer Chavarria, sued after CBP detained him for hours and pressured him to hand over electronic devices—part of a broader legal clash over warrantless digital searches and access to counsel during detention. 16

5. EIGHTH AMENDMENT (AND DUE PROCESS): PUNITIVE, DANGEROUS, DEGRADING CONFINEMENT

   Senator Jon Ossoff’s October 2025 oversight report describes 85 credible reports of medical neglect and 82 credible reports of denial of adequate food or water in immigration detention, including cases reportedly leading to life-threatening complications. 17

   In Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” litigation, AP reported a detainee’s attorneys said he was coerced into signing an English-only “voluntary removal” form he didn’t understand, amid broader criticisms of limited legal access and poor tracking/oversight at the facility. 18

If any of this feels surreal, that’s part of the design. When power wants to break the law openly, it first needs a public that doesn’t recognize the law it’s breaking.

Franklin’s warning wasn’t about memorizing patriotic phrases. It was about maintenance. A republic isn’t “kept” by faith. It’s kept by informed citizens who know what the Constitution says, who recognize coercion when it’s rebranded as “public safety,” and who refuse to let any administration—of any party—convert rights into privileges granted only to the obedient.

Because once the government can ignore the Constitution for “them,” it never stays with “them.” It comes for “you.”

Footnotes:

Trump campaigned on “no more stupid wars,” selling himself as the leader who would bring troops home and end “regime change.” Yet the Venezuela operation has become the opposite: an extraordinary U.S. intervention that culminated in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro and Trump openly signaling long-term American control over Venezuela’s future, with U.S. oil companies positioned as the “rebuilders” and beneficiaries. 1

Officially, Maduro is being charged with drug and weapons trafficking to preserve the “Drug War” justification. In reality, Trump lost patience as months of U.S. military attacks on fishing boats failed to move Maduro to resign. The drug-war framing was clearly a pretext for something else.

Now comes the new claim — the one designed to make conquest sound like housekeeping. Trump says Venezuela “stole” oil from the United States, and America is merely taking back what was taken.

That claim is false and it’s not a small error. It’s the rhetorical keystone that turns illegal regime change and resource capture into righteous “reclamation.”

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Here’s the reality they’re trying to overwrite:

Venezuela’s oil is not “U.S. oil.” Venezuela nationalized its petroleum industry decades ago, asserting state ownership of resources within its borders. U.S. and other foreign companies once operated there, held concessions, and built profits, but operating rights are not national ownership.2

What did happen, especially in later decades, is that specific companies lost assets and contracts through expropriations and political upheaval. Those losses became the subject of lawsuits, arbitration awards, and long-running financial warfare. That is a corporate and legal history -complicated, contested, and expensive - not a story of Venezuela “stealing America’s oil.”

But, the corporate version is useless for propaganda. It doesn’t rally crowds. So it gets repackaged into a national insult: they stole from you; we will take it back; the invasion is restitution. 3

That is why the line gets repeated. It is a shortcut around sovereignty, law, and motive. It converts a grab into a rescue.

Enter Venezuela. The oil jackpot he thinks should be his.

Yes, Venezuela sits on immense reserves and a crippled industry. PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-run oil company, is hollowed out - aging refineries, degraded pipelines, skill flight, sanctions that choke financing and equipment. Output has risen and fallen through workarounds and outside buyers, but the headline remains the same. With serious investment and competent management, Venezuela’s production could be rebuilt.4

To a president who sees everything, including countries, as distressed assets waiting to be flipped, that looks like the prize behind Door Number One. He does not see Venezuela as a sovereign nation with its own people and politics. He sees an underground bank account waiting for a change in management.

So when Trump talks about “poison coming from Venezuela,” remember what he is not talking about. The drug actually driving overdose deaths in the United States is fentanyl, tied overwhelmingly to production networks outside Venezuela. Whatever trafficking moves through Venezuelan waters, the scale of military hardware and the trajectory of escalation do not fit drug policing. They fit coercive control of a petro-state sitting on a mountain of oil. 5

Once you see that, the mission reads very differently. The point is not to “save” Venezuelans from cocaine or Americans from overdoses. The point is to choke revenue, scare off alternative buyers, and deliver a simple message: full access to Venezuela’s reserves will only be possible under a government that will play ball with Trump and his donors, and under a story that tells Americans this is not conquest, but payback.

The narco-terror language is covering for a resource grab.

The Real Pattern

Strip away the slogans and the flag-draped language, and a simple pattern emerges.

Trump has created an American budget that tells hungry children, disabled people, and low-income families there is no money for food, medicine, or rent - while pouring vast resources into a foreign operation sold as “drug interdiction” and executed like regime change.

He promised “no more wars,” but he is running a low-visibility, high-lethality campaign designed to topple a government and install something more friendly to his own interests - and now, more openly, more profitable to his donors, especially the oil companies who bankrolled him were promised a return: fewer restraints, and a world rendered to serve fossil-fuel power. 6

He has dismantled long-term clean-energy projects and climate policies, throwing away jobs and ceding ground to global competitors, while positioning himself as the man who can bring back “cheap gas” by prying open someone else’s oil fields. He has wrapped it in the language of drug war and terrorism, counting on the public’s fear of “cartels” to blur the line between interdiction and invasion. 7

Why Venezuela, and why now?

Because Venezuela offers him everything he wants at once:

A pliant future government sitting on the world’s largest oil reserves.

A dramatic stage on which to act out his fantasies about “taking” a country.

A dress rehearsal for a new kind of American empire, where billion-dollar weapons enforce the interests of fossil-fuel oligarchs.

And, as always, a distraction - a spectacle that lets him posture as tough on drugs and crime while his administration guts the social safety net at home.

Regime change in Venezuela is not about democracy. It is not about the rule of law. It is not even, really, about drugs. If it were, the focus would be on the actual drivers of U.S. overdose and on legitimate, lawful international pressure - not on a made-up story about “stolen” oil.

It is about oil, power, and a president who has never seen a struggling country he didn’t want to carve up and run.

Footnotes:

First, I needed a constructive outlet for my anger at Donald Trump and the Christian nationalist movement.

Over the past year, we’ve watched the Project 2025 architects—Stephen Miller and Russell Vought—gain influence, while a self-serving, corrupt leader governs with increasing impunity, enabled by a Supreme Court majority that has repeatedly expanded executive power. Project 2025, along with the Christian nationalist “Seven Mountains” mandate, seeks to transform democracy into a theocratic plutocracy by seizing unitary control over seven spheres: government, education, media, religion, family, business, and the arts.

If you’re new to MadMotherWrites, I’ve written several pieces on Project 2025 and Christian nationalism. The post linked below is the best single starting point for understanding the movement’s purpose and methods.

Second, I started writing to share truth with a wider audience than just family and close friends. My research has led me through the Affordable Care Act, the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Trump-era corruption, threats of military action against some countries and the use of force against others, and much more. Over time, the sheer volume of reading and reporting has sharpened my writing—and I hope it’s made the newsletter more useful, clearer, and more satisfying to read.

In these past few months, Substack has helped keep me sane. I hope it has also contributed, in some small way, to your own understanding of facts and truth in a nation built on gaslighting. I don’t actively chase an audience, and I want my work to be accessible, so I’ve kept it free—with an option to subscribe for anyone who wants to support it. To all of you who choose to read, thank you. A writer needs readers.

As we begin another year of corporate-media complacency, reflexive “both-sides” deflection, and a steady stream of far-right lies and propaganda, I’ll leave you with a few Substacks I read or listen to regularly - voices I trust to tell the truth, just as I strive to do. If you try any of them, let me know what you think.

Finally, a heartfelt thank-you to my daughter, Lindsay, who has contributed some of the smartest work on this Substack. She’s tackled Hollywood’s role in the rise of MAGA, the AI/human intersection (in a compelling two-part series), and a deeply researched piece that cuts through the noise on inflation. I’m hoping - selfishly - that we’ll get much more from her in the year ahead.

Here are the voices I recommend:

Meidas+ (MeidasTouch Network) - founded by three brothers Ben, Brett, and Jordy. A pro-democracy news network with millions of viewers and a large roster of contributors, independently owned and operated.

Adam Kinzinger - Former U.S. Representative; member of the Jan. 6 investigation committee.

Jim Acosta - Former CNN journalist.

Elizabeth Graham - Studied Russian for 10 years; spent 20+ years in Russia and Central Asia managing multi-million-dollar programs. Author of From Democracy to DemocrAZY.

Scott Dworkin - Longtime anti-Trump organizer and communicator since 2016; among the sharpest critics of corporate media failures.

Jess Piper - Executive Director for Blue Missouri. Former nominee for State Rep, ‘22. Rural mom fighting for public schools. Speaker and writer.

Timothy Snyder - Renowned historian of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust; author of On Tyranny. Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

It is about power. Who has it, who loses it, and why some freedoms are always labeled “too expensive” the moment everyone might share them.

The real reason Republicans hate the ACA is that it disrupts the business model that underpins modern Republican power. When the ACA became law in 2010, it loosened the grip that employers, insurers, and politicians held over who gets to live securely and who does not. Since then, the GOP has worked steadily to weaken the program, not only because they ultimately want it gone, but also because they fear it could evolve into something larger - a universal healthcare system like those operating successfully in other wealthy democracies. To that end, Republicans have targeted the ACA in ways that raise costs, reduce enrollment, and increase insecurity - especially for healthier and lower-income people - without taking the political hit for ending coverage outright.

1. The ACA Breaks the Employer Control System

Before the ACA, health insurance functioned as a form of labor discipline. Coverage was tied to employment, excluding low-wage, part-time, and gig workers. Changing jobs often meant losing care. Pre-existing conditions were routinely excluded, locking people into bad jobs simply to stay insured. The ACA weakened that control by guaranteeing coverage regardless of health status, offering subsidies independent of employment, and expanding Medicaid to low-income adults. 3 That shift is structurally threatening to a political economy built on low wages, weak labor power, and worker dependence.

In 2012, the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act but ruled that states could not be required to expand Medicaid, effectively making expansion optional and allowing Republican-led states to block coverage for millions of low-income adults. 4

2. Universal Healthcare Weakens Corporate Leverage Permanently

Health insurance is not just a “benefit.” It is a control mechanism. Employers use it to suppress unionization, discourage job mobility, and enforce compliance - don’t rock the boat or you lose coverage. Universal healthcare would break that leverage by increasing worker bargaining power and decoupling survival from employment. That outcome is unacceptable to a party structurally aligned with large employers and capital.

3. It Proves Government Can Work and Work Well

The ACA demonstrated several forbidden truths. Government can regulate private markets, lower uninsured rates, and subsidize care efficiently. Public programs can outperform private ones. Every successful public program undermines the core Republican ideological claim that “government can’t do anything right.” Universal healthcare would be the ultimate rebuttal.

4. It Threatens a Massive Donor Ecosystem

Even in its compromised form, the ACA reduced profit extraction by insurers, pharmaceutical companies, hospital chains, and private-equity-backed healthcare firms. Universal healthcare would go further - capping prices, eliminating rent-extracting intermediaries, and shifting bargaining power to the public. That directly threatens billions in political donations. This is not theoretical. It is transactional.

5. It Disrupts Hierarchy

The ACA violated an unspoken rule of American governance. Care should be stratified by class. It extended coverage to low-income adults without children, people previously deemed uninsurable, and workers in unstable or informal labor. Universal healthcare goes further still. Everyone gets the same coverage, and the same dignity. That vision clashes with a worldview rooted in deserving vs. undeserving populations - a worldview explicitly reinforced by Project 2025.

6. It is Inseparable from Race and Backlash Politics

Opposition to the Affordable Care Act is inseparable from what political scientists call backlash politics. It is not driven by evidence that a policy failed, but by resentment over social and demographic change and over who benefits from that change. The law expanded coverage to groups long excluded from stable healthcare, including low income adults without children, people with pre-existing conditions, and workers outside traditional full time jobs. It was also closely tied to Barack Obama, federal authority, and a changing electorate.

For many opponents, the problem was not that the ACA failed, but that it succeeded in extending to people who had previously been denied it. The backlash intensified, not because the law did not work, but because it worked for the wrong people.

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In fifteen years, Republicans have never offered a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. That is not an accident. If their objection were truly about design, they would propose alternatives, compete on coverage and cost, or offer a better system.

The clearest example of this strategy came in 2017, when Republicans zeroed out the ACA’s individual mandate penalty through the tax code rather than repealing the law outright. 5 The mandate was designed to keep insurance pools broad and affordable by encouraging healthy people to stay enrolled. Eliminating it did not end the ACA, but it weakened it structurally by shrinking the pool, driving up premiums, and destabilizing markets. It allowed Republicans to claim they had not taken coverage away, even as they made coverage more expensive and less reliable for everyone who remained.

Every other wealthy democracy has already answered the question Republicans refuse to engage. 6 How to cover everyone, control costs, and separate healthcare from employment. These systems are not flawless, but they are broadly accepted by the public that relies on them. Satisfaction with performance may fluctuate, but support for universality does not. Even in the United States, large majorities say the government should ensure healthcare coverage for all. 7 The obstacle is not public opinion. It is political will.

What the One Big Beautiful Bill Did to the ACA

First, it weakened Medicaid expansion by stealth. Caps, work-requirement pathways, and block-grant-style financing make expansion harder to sustain, pushing states to cut eligibility, reduce benefits, or abandon expansion altogether. 8

Second, it increased out-of-pocket costs for ACA enrollees. By constraining subsidy growth while costs continue to rise, the bill leaves coverage technically “available” but practically unaffordable, especially for people just above subsidy thresholds.

Third, it destabilized insurance markets by reinforcing policies that siphon healthy people into non-ACA plans while leaving sicker enrollees in ACA risk pools.

Fourth, it accelerated administrative churn. New eligibility checks, reporting requirements, and expanded state discretion increase coverage loss through paperwork, not income changes.

The result is fewer people covered, higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs, and deeper regional inequality—not all at once, but cumulatively over several years. The bill preserves the appearance of the ACA while quietly undoing its promise, turning healthcare from a guaranteed floor into a conditional benefit that disappears through paperwork, affordability gaps, and state discretion rather than a single, politically accountable repeal. It is also structured so that the worst effects land after the 2026 elections, allowing responsibility to be shifted onto whichever party inherits oversight and implementation.

Who is Affected and When

The effects are not hypothetical. Over the next one to five years, millions of people are expected to lose coverage or be priced out of meaningful care through cumulative erosion. Medicaid expansion adults, low-wage workers with fluctuating hours, older enrollees aged 50–64, rural residents, and people with chronic conditions are hit first. In the near term, losses occur through paperwork churn. Within one to two years, premiums rise as enrollment pools shrink. Over three to five years, insurer exits accelerate and coverage deserts re-emerge. Tens of millions more remain technically insured but increasingly underinsured.

*“Accelerating eligibility churn” means intentionally making people fall off health coverage faster and more often - not because they stopped qualifying, but because the rules are designed to trip them up. Coverage disappears without lawmakers ever having to vote to take it away. 9

Example: Maria works full-time at a grocery store, but her hours fluctuate. One month she qualifies for Medicaid. The next, her paycheck triggers a review. She misses a confusing ten-day reporting deadline while caring for her mother and loses coverage, even though nothing meaningful has changed. Two weeks later she is sick, skips care, and reapplies. Coverage returns, but her medications were interrupted and bills piled up. Over a year, Maria qualifies the entire time, yet spends months uninsured because the system is designed to drop her when life gets messy.

Why the Pool Matters

Health insurance only works when costs are spread across a large mixed population that includes both healthy and sick people. The One Big Beautiful Bill deliberately shrinks that pool. Paperwork barriers, and rising out-of-pocket costs push out healthier enrollees first - the very people who keep premiums stable. As the pool gets smaller, older, and sicker, insurers raise prices or leave markets. The damage doesn’t stay contained. Everyone who remains pays more. This is the economic engine of sabotage.

Republicans accelerated this dynamic in 2017 by zeroing out the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate penalty. The mandate was designed to keep healthier people enrolled so costs could be spread broadly. Eliminating it did not free people from a failed requirement. It encouraged healthier and younger enrollees to exit the market, shrinking the pool and driving up premiums for those who remained. This was not an unintended consequence. It was a known outcome, and it is central to why affordability worsened even when the ACA itself remained intact.

Project 2025: Emboldenment, Not Accident

This is where Project 2025 comes in - not as a departure from this strategy, but as its culmination. After years of partial resistance, Republicans are now operating under an enforcement-light regime shaped by figures like Vought and Miller, emboldened by a Trump movement that no longer pretends incremental harm is accidental. Project 2025 codifies what the One Big Beautiful Bill advances in practice: block-granting Medicaid, capping federal responsibility, stripping benefit guarantees, weakening enforcement, and returning healthcare governance to states and employers where hierarchy, exclusion, and leverage thrive. Sabotage softened the ground. The OBBB accelerates the damage. Project 2025 makes it permanent.

Republicans didn’t fail to repeal the ACA.

They learned how to dismantle it quietly - and Project 2025 is the blueprint that ensures it stays that way.

Footnotes:

The number that decides whether your kids get school lunch, whether you qualify for Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, housing assistance, and more is not some finely tuned measure of need. It’s a 1960s shortcut: three times the cost of a bare-bones “thrifty” food plan, adjusted only for inflation. 1 Most of us have never heard of that formula, let alone the woman who created it. But since 1963, Mollie Orshansky has quietly shaped who “counts” as poor in America and who gets told, on paper, that they’re doing just fine. 2

Mollie Orshansky, who grew up hungry in a Bronx tenement as the daughter of poor Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, never set out to write scripture. She was a government number-cruncher trying to turn her own memories of standing in relief lines into a simple, usable tool for policymakers. Her poverty thresholds were meant to be “arbitrary but not unreasonable” yardsticks—a way to count who clearly didn’t have enough to live on so the government could stop guessing. She assumed future officials would adjust and improve them as costs, family budgets, and social programs changed. 3

Instead, even after her death in 2006, the rough food-based formula has remained in place, a piece of invisible infrastructure still running in the background - still shaping who “counts” as poor, long after the woman who designed it has been forgotten.

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Before 1963, there was no official federal poverty line at all. Each program had its own rules, and local offices had a lot of discretion. Assistance was patchy and often moralistic. Aid to Dependent Children (later AFDC) was a means-tested cash grant for families where the father was “dead, absent, or unable to work.” Caseworkers had wide latitude to decide whether a mother’s home and personal life were “morally fit” and often used their discretion to push Black women and unmarried mothers off the rolls. 4 By creating a clean, national poverty line, Orshansky helped shift eligibility guidelines from arbitrary and local to formulaic and universal. It was a significant improvement - just never updated to match the world we actually live in now.

Even inside government, people know the original measure is flawed. That’s why the Census Bureau now also publishes a Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that tries to account for taxes, non-cash benefits like SNAP, and actual housing costs. The SPM usually shows a higher poverty rate than the old line—around 12–13 percent of Americans in recent years, compared with roughly 10–11 percent under the official measure. 5 When temporary pandemic supports were allowed to lapse, the child SPM poverty rate nearly tripled to about 13 percent in just a few years. 6 But, here’s the catch: the SPM is just a statistic. The outdated, food-times-three formula is still the one embedded in law and used to gate-keep who gets help.

What “the safety net” looked like in my house:

Long before Washington settled on an official poverty line, families like mine were already living inside its blind spots. I grew up with a single mom and three siblings, dirt poor. We didn’t talk about “AFDC” or “means-tested assistance.” We talked about “going down to the office” and “praying they say yes this time.”

One of my clearest memories is the government surplus food we called “commodities.” Big cardboard boxes with whatever the government happened to have too much of: tinned mystery meat, powdered eggs, powdered milk, blocks of cheese the color of road cones, and peanut butter so dense it could bend a spoon. There was no sense that some neat formula in Washington had decided we were poor enough for this food. It felt more like the local office decided whether we were “deserving” this month.

Later, around 1967 or 1968, my mother got into a program we knew only as WIN. It was the first time the safety net felt like more than just barely keeping us alive. WIN (Work Incentive Program) came with child care so she could be in class, help with housing so we weren’t constantly on the brink of moving, and support for her to go to school for her LPN. For the first time, assistance wasn’t just about handing us boxes of leftover food; it was about helping my mother earn a credential and step out of the welfare office for good.

When Mollie Orshansky was quietly building her poverty thresholds in the early 1960s, this was the world she was trying to measure: families standing in commodity lines, mothers begging caseworkers for help with the rent, children being shuffled so their mom could take a shot at training. Her line turned lived chaos into a number policymakers could not ignore—at least on paper. But for people like my mother, the system still felt arbitrary and personal. We weren’t poor because a chart said so; we were poor because we could taste it in the powdered milk and feel it every time a caseworker had the power to say no.

Fast-forward to now.

In 2020, the federal poverty line for a family of four was $26,200. 7 Five years later it’s $32,150. 8The line inches up each year from automatic inflation adjustments, but it is still anchored to that original food-times-three formula with no real consideration of modern costs like housing, child care, student debt, or health care—the costs that actually break families today.

Then I stumbled across a SubStack article that completely changed how I think about poverty and our so-called safety net. Michael W. Green is a Wall Street investor and Chief Strategist and Portfolio Manager at Simplify Asset Management. 9 He argues that the real poverty level in the United States is not around $32,000 for a family of four, but an astonishing $140,000. His argument is essentially a household budget laid out in cold daylight: what it actually costs, line by line, for a family to cover housing, transportation, food, child care, health care, debt, and a small cushion for emergencies in today’s economy.

Green is usually described as a market theoretician and portfolio manager, not as a statistician or poverty scholar. And that’s the point: his “$140,000 poverty line” isn’t coming from some graduate seminar on measurement. It’s the judgment of someone who looks at real household budgets and says, bluntly, “Below this level, you are not secure.” You may be working full-time. You may look “middle class” on paper. But you are one broken car, one illness, one rent hike away from collapse. 10

Here’s how he describes the difference between 1963 and now:

“For 1963, that floor made sense. Housing was relatively cheap. A family could rent a decent apartment or buy a home on a single income, as we’ve discussed. Healthcare was provided by employers and cost relatively little (Blue Cross coverage averaged $10/month). Childcare didn’t really exist as a market—mothers stayed home, family helped, or neighbors (who likely had someone home) watched each other’s kids. Cars were affordable, if prone to breakdowns. With few luxury frills, the neighborhood kids in vo-tech could fix most problems when they did. College tuition could be covered with a summer job. Retirement meant a pension income, not a pile of 401(k) assets you had to fund yourself.”

Meanwhile, our policies still behave as if that world exists:

When policy analysts say families up to 130–180 percent of the poverty line qualify for “some” help, what they really mean is that even households well above the official poverty line still can’t make it on their own. In today’s dollars, that’s roughly $40,000–$60,000 a year for a family of four. Program rules reflect this: free school meals generally cut off around 130 percent of the line and reduced-price meals around 185 percent, while SNAP and other key benefits often use thresholds between 130 and 200 percent of poverty. 11 Census and policy data suggest that roughly a quarter of Americans live below twice the poverty line, and on the order of 30 million people are stuck in that murky 130–180 percent band: too “rich” to be officially poor, too broke to be secure. 12

Here is what that looks like in real life:

A single mother takes a better-paying job and gets a modest raise that nudges her just above the cutoff for child-care assistance and Medicaid. On paper, she is doing better; officially, she no longer “needs” help. In reality, she loses her subsidy, pays hundreds more a month for child care and health insurance, and ends up with less disposable income than before. The poverty line says she has been lifted out of need. Her bank account says otherwise.

By contrast, if you take Michael Green’s claim seriously and treat roughly $140,000 as the true poverty line for a family of four, then about three-quarters of all U.S. households suddenly count as “poor” by that standard. Census income tables show that only the top slice of households—roughly the upper fifth—earn more than that. 13 The official line says poverty is a niche problem at the bottom. The way benefits actually phase out—and the way families really live—suggests it stretches deep into what we like to call the middle class.

Politicians like to act as if this is all an abstraction, but it isn’t. If you compare pay over time, you can see exactly whose reality Washington’s numbers do and don’t track. 14 Congressional salaries have been frozen at $174,000 since 2009, which means lawmakers have effectively taken a one-third pay cut in real terms as prices rose. 15 The median full-time worker has seen wages creep up a bit, but nowhere near enough to match the cost of housing, health care, child care, and debt. 16 At the top of the pyramid, CEO pay has exploded—up more than tenfold in real terms since the late 1970s—pushing the typical CEO-to-worker pay ratio into the hundreds. 17On paper, a member of Congress now makes only two to three times what a median worker earns. But from the vantage point of a household scraping by at 130 or 150 percent of the poverty line, both Congress and the C-suite live in another galaxy entirely.

That gap has consequences. When Congress shovels money to the wealthiest people in the country, when the Trump administration openly enriches itself and its billionaire sycophants while canceling health care and food programs for the poorest families and dismantling what little is left of the middle-class ladder, it is not a policy disagreement. It is a choice about whose reality counts. A poverty line designed as a temporary stopgap in the 1960s has hardened into an excuse: if you’re above that line, the system insists you’re fine, no matter what your rent, your child-care bill, or your grocery receipt says.

We should be furious that a measure meant to make poverty visible is now being used to make struggle disappear. And we should be even more furious that Congress has allowed a self-serving executive to treat the “power of the purse” as a personal slush fund for the already rich. If three-quarters of American households are living below the line it actually takes to be secure, that is not a fringe problem. It is the country. It is us.

At minimum, we must demand two things: that Congress reclaim its constitutional power over the budget from an out-of-control presidency, and that it finally drags our official poverty measure into the reality most Americans are living in - not the world of 1963, and certainly not the world of Mar-a-Lago, where an autocrat leader presides over elaborate parties and complains that affordability is a hoax.