Honestly, in this strange world of ours, what is there to write about except, of course, Donald Trump?

Oh, well, as a start, I could write about my country’s war with Iran and the way the militaries of the two countries are going after each other’s naval vessels. Oh, wait, that couldn’t be a more Trumpian subject, could it?

So, maybe I could write about great white sharks, which would certainly be cooler to see than “our” president. But what do I know about great white sharks? (Of course, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that, the moment after I wrote that, I put “Trump, Great White Shark” into my search window and promptly came up with a set of pieces beginning with the Palm Beach Post‘s “President Trump Misses Great White Shark Visit to Mar-a-Lago Waters” and The Guardian’s “Trump Is ‘Obsessed’ and ‘Terrified’ of Sharks—But His Fears Are Excessive.”

Sooner or later, once he’s finished with all the cities, states, and politicians, he could, of course, move on to the rest of our vocabulary and I would be able to Trump you rather than stump you when I write my future pieces.

Or maybe, I could write not about the present disaster of a war in the Strait of Trumpmuz, but the next one my country is likely to face, undoubtedly with Turkey—or do I mean Indonesia, or maybe Turkmenistan, or even perhaps Turkwomenistan (a country still to be created, of course, but that’s no reason not to go to war with it)? And all of them could be turned into Trumpific countries. Still, that’s so boringly unpredictably predictable, don’t you think? I mean, as the old line went, war, what is it good for? And the classic answer (if only!): Absolutely nothing! But in the era of Pete Hegseth and crew, that would need to be changed to: Absolutely everything!

Or maybe I could write about the odds that “my” president might be peached—that is, covered in overly ripe fruit, since in a historic first (or do I mean second?), he’s already been impeached twice to distinctly little effect. So why not try that instead? It makes him sound delicious, don’t you think?

Or perhaps I could focus on the future of mail-out voting, since “my” president is already distinctly (and yes, I just can’t help using that word again) determined to severely limit, if not simply do away with, the mail-in version of the same. Or maybe instead, I could deal with his administration’s likely urge to wipe out any chance of the future creation of an Antarctic Report Card about the second fastest-warming (and melting) area on this planet (and its ice sheet that has existed for a mere 30 million years or so), since his crew has already gone after the latest report on the fastest-warming place of all, the Arctic, by—yes, of course!—ending its funding.

Or, hey, how about if I focus instead on the fate of the US military’s privates, since Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has been taking superior care of its leaders who have been endlessly in the news. After all, he’s already fired or blocked the promotion of more than 80 generals and admirals, or about 10% of its high command (and I don’t have the slightest doubt that he’s just getting started). Sooner or later, when all the generals and admirals are gone, he’ll have to move down the ranks, right? I can’t help but believe that, in the end, he and the rest of his crew in Washington will be eager to fully privatize the military and turn themselves into the missing generals and admirals, or do I mean privates first class?

Or, come to think of it, since Donald Trump (labelled by The Guardian‘s Marina Hyde as this planet’s “most tireless freelance cartographer”) has had the urge not just to rename Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico as Lake America and the Gulf of America, but to dub the state of New Mexico as “New America,” how about if I spend a little time on what I’m sure will be his future renaming efforts. I mean, he’s certainly going to rename New York City (where he, like the author of this piece, was born so long ago) Old Trumpian City; and California as Trumpifornia (and, of course, its governor as Gavin OldTrump); and North and South Carolina as North Trump and South Trump, not to speak of Florida as Florump.

Phew! That was one long sentence and yet we’re undoubtedly only at the start of his renaming process. Sooner or later, once he’s finished with all the cities, states, and politicians, he could, of course, move on to the rest of our vocabulary and I would be able to Trump you rather than stump you when I write my future pieces.

Or, for that matter, I could skip to the president’s dance hall (undoubtedly to be known someday as Trump’s rock and roll) for which he’s already torn down the East Wing of that historically less than interesting building, the White House, or the 250-foot Great Triumphal Arch and Military Observation Deck he’s building that will be larger than Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, and instead put my energy into predicting the president’s next major architectural surprise in Washington, DC. Here’s my best guess (and I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t come true): Sometime before his third term in office—and count on him wanting that (to hell with such an ancient and useless document as the Constitution)—he’ll suddenly begin tearing down the West Wing of the White House (including the Oval Office) and in its place will construct a triumphal statue of—but of course, who else?—himself (or rather Himself). It goes without saying that it will be larger not just than the Arc de Triomphe but his own Arch of Triumph. And when he’s done with that, you can count on one thing: There will simply be no way to make our nation’s capital any more statuesque.

Not surprisingly, his White House spokespeople are already praising his construction efforts in Washington, including his magnificently green Trump Memorial Reflecting (or do I mean Deflecting?) Pool. As one of them put it recently, “Thanks to the Builder-in-Chief, no other president has done more to beautify our nation’s interior than President Trump.” (And don’t you find it beyond weird, under the circumstances, that, as The Washington Post reports, “nearly 2 in 3, 65% [of Americans], feel dissatisfied or upset” by his Washington building projects?)

Or what about a possible desire to replace presidentially loathed “birth tourism”—no matter that the Supreme Court last summer ensured babies born here would indeed become US citizens despite every effort by the Trump crew—with something distinctly presidential and much to be loved: “death tourism.” Wouldn’t that be the perfect formula for You Know Who?

Oh, and I don’t think I even mentioned it, but a source within the administration has assured me privately that President Trump is going to end his second term in office and begin his third term—no, the Supreme Court wouldn’t dare stop him!—by renaming himself Donald Trumplincoln and will come to be known in his later years as “Old Don” as his Civil War-era predecessor was known as “Old Abe.” (Whoops, sorry, my mistake! That was an eagle of the Civil War era!) I meant “Honest Abe“ and (Dis)Honest Don.

And none of that, not a bit of it, should seem even faintly surprising from such a distinctly presidential figure.

A CNN insider told Variety magazine on Tuesday that the mood inside CNN right now is “like a funeral.” Nepo-baby David Ellison, bankrolled by his father who’s one of the richest men in the world and a major Trump suck-up and donor (and is in the Epstein Files), is on the verge of taking over the company that owns the news network.

On Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a group of Democratic state attorneys general rolled over and agreed to stop trying to block the $111 billion takover of Warner Bros. Discovery, now to be almost 50% funded by right-wing dictatorships in the Middle East who’ve given billions in gifts, loans, and investments to President Donald Trump and his family.

California Gov. and presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom hailed the agreement, saying it would both protect California jobs and preserve CNN’s “editorial independence.”

First the strongman’s friends acquire the newsrooms, then the coverage softens, then the elections start experiencing “anomalies,” and by the time most people notice, there’s nobody left on the air to expose the oligarchs and fascists.

If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge for you in Brooklyn.

As The Lever reported Tuesday, the fine print tells the entire story.

Going forward, CNN and CBS will be overseen by an “editorial independence board” composed of people hand-picked by the Ellisons and their agents. When Rupert Murdoch took over The Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft family back in 2007, he ran the same scam, as CBS News then reported:

As part of the deal package that cemented Rupert Murdoch's longstanding effort to acquire Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co., the two sides agreed to create an editorial board that would act as a buffer between the media mogul and the newspaper…

That worked out real well, right?

There are also squishy promises for movies and jobs that are not backed up with any meaningful enforcement mechanism, and all of Ellison’s commitments can be set aside via a force majeure clause that lets Paramount off the hook in the event of “strikes, labor disruptions, [or] economic recessions.” So, all Trump has to do is extend the Iran War another few months to crash our economy, and the oligarchs are free to do what they want!

And if that doesn’t happen, there’s still the sunset clause that ends all their commitments in five years. Lee Hepner of the American Economic Liberties Project called it “a countdown to a cliff.”

These are the same billionaires who handed Trump a check for $16 million to “settle” a frivolous lawsuit against "60 Minutes," then cancelled Stephen Colbert’s show days after he referenced that as a “big fat bribe,” then reportedly offered the Trump White House up to $20 million in free “public service announcements” and installed a Trump-humping “ombudsman” at CBS News to police “bias” at the network.

And the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), run by Trump’s favorite brown-noser Brendan Carr, has blessed Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar taking a 49.5% equity state in the new entity that will control 2 of the 3 most important news networks in America.

Don’t expect any future analysis of Saudi involvement in 9/11, critical exploration of what Trump gave up in exchange for a $400 million 747 jet, or the billions that have gone to Jared Kushner and the Trump boys, Uday and Qusay.

Because of momentous decisions made by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, freedom of the press in America is now as much an economic issue as a political one. As I laid out in The Hidden History of Monopolies (with a foreword by Ralph Nader), when Reagan came into office 90% of the American media landscape was scattered among over 50 companies; now a mere five conglomerates dominate that 90% of the media Americans consume.

Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (and others) in 1983, leading to the “M&A Mania” of mergers and acquisitions that characterized the late 1980s and 1990s. As a result, there’s not a single major industry in America that’s not dominated by a handful of companies that generally behave like cartels, and the average American family pays an annual “monopoly tax”—in additional costs for pretty much everything—of around $5,000, according to economist Thomas Philippon.

Cell phone service that costs $15 a month in France or $12 a month in Australia bills out at an average of $61.85 per month in the United States. High-speed broadband that’s a bit over $31 a month in France or $36 in Germany (for higher speeds and better reliability than almost anywhere in the United States) averages nearly $70 per month in the US.

Similar metrics are found with pharmaceuticals, airfares, and medical costs, among dozens of other product and service categories.

But it’s most deadly to democracy when it comes to the media.

Since Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996—which eliminated most of the rules about how many outlets one family or company could own—oligarchic monopoly of the media has spread its cancerous tentacles into politics, as well, destroying the ability of government to make policy that allows free people to make their own decisions about their own lives.

As Teddy Roosevelt, the great trust buster, said:

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task...

And as Adam Smith wrote, in Wealth of Nations,

...the monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained... like an overgrown standing army, they have become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.

And this is no small project by billionaires who explicitly distrust democracy and want complete control over America and her people. I’ve seen how this works up-close and personal when a Republican billionaire came after a media business I helped start.

In 2003, Louise and I had sold our last business and were retired in Vermont; that Thanksgiving, we drove to Michigan to visit my family for the holidays and all the way there I kept tuning across the radio dial looking for an intelligent conversation to occupy my mind while driving. In city after city, all I could find was Sean Hannity.

The outcome of that trip was my writing the initial business plan for Air America Radio and starting the radio show I’m still hosting 23 years later as a “proof of concept.” We were leasing stations from Clear Channel and reached over 90% of America; many credited Barack Obama’s 2008 victory to our being on the air.

So, of course, billionaire Mitt Romney—with an eye to running for president in 2012—had his company Bain Capital buy up all of the Clear Channel radio stations and, one at a time, take us off the air until we didn’t have enough of a signal to make money selling advertising. The network died in 2010 (and Romney lost).

The people who own the media pipes, in other words, get to decide what flows through them.

Remember when Uber was offering rides for half the price of taxis, until they’d put so many of the taxi companies out of business? Or Walmart offering goods at little to no margin just to drive local competitors out of business? Monopolists and wannabe monopolists understand exactly how this works.

While Rupert Murdoch reportedly lost an average of $80 to $90 million a year for about five years before Fox News turned a profit, he never viewed that as a loss: It was an investment. Economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan later did the math and found that Fox News succeeded in shifting 3-8% of its audience toward the Republican Party, which in Florida alone in the 2000 election was worth more than 10,000 votes for George W. Bush in a state he carried by fewer than 600.

Had there been no Fox “News,” in other words, there would have been no war in Iraq or Afghanistan, and thousands of Americans and millions of Iraqis and Afghans would still be alive. And there would have been no Bush tax cuts, so our national debt would be nowhere near so bad. And Al Gore would have done something about the environment.

This is critical stuff: No democracy can survive the assault of what Thomas Jefferson referred to as “an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents” when only one family or political perspective dominates the media.

Franklin D. Roosevelt—the Bernie Sanders of his day—saw all of this coming. On April 29, 1938, in his Message to Congress on the Concentration of Economic Power, he told the country what fascism actually is:

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.

FDR understood that when a monopolized industry gets big enough, its main rival then becomes the government itself because only the government has enough remaining power to break it up. Adam Smith made the same point in Wealth of Nations in 1776, writing that the East India Company and its allies had, “like an overgrown standing army,” become “formidable to the government” and could “intimidate the legislature.”

The simple reality is that in every country that’s slid from democracy into strongman rule over the past half-century, the first step was capture of the media by friends of the regime.

• Four days after Vladimir Putin was inaugurated in May, 2000, ICE-like masked agents raided the offices of Media-Most, the company that owned Russia’s largest independent national TV network (NTV). They threw its owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, in prison on fraud charges and confiscated his stake in Gazprom, then took over the network with the deal finalized in April of 2001. That same year Boris Berezovsky was forced to sell his share of the ORT network to Roman Abramovich, a fellow oligarch but one who’d pledged his total loyalty to Putin. Within a few years, every national channel in Russia was in the hands of the state or a Putin-friendly billionaire, and still are.
• Viktor Orbán’s people were slightly more sophisticated in 2018, having his oligarch buddies buy up media properties after he sued dissenters into bankruptcy by claiming libel. By the following year, the media monitor Mérték estimated that 77.8% of Hungary’s news media was directly or indirectly controlled by Orbán’s party, which is why when Péter Magyar successfully ran against Orbán he had to visit virtually every city and town in the country to get around the media blackout on his candidacy.
• In Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was less elegant in his approach to the media. He had his version of the FBI—the General Intelligence Service—use a front company called Eagle Capital to buy up virtually every TV network, radio station, and newspaper in the country. Reporters Without Borders found that a dozen once-powerful media owners were pushed to sell to intelligence-linked companies, while the handful of businessmen who backed Sisi got to keep theirs. The spy agency’s media group now owns the ON, CBC, Al-Hayah, and DMC networks, and those Egyptian journalists who dared criticize the regime all went to prison.
• Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines used regulatory power the same way Trump lickspittle Brendan Carr’s FCC does. The country’s largest newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, was forced to sell to a billionaire Duterte ally under threat of imprisonment for breaking “media rules.” Duterte’s right-wing buddies in Congress then refused to renew the broadcast franchise of ABS-CBN, the nation’s biggest network, which had made the mistake of exposing the extrajudicial killings of his so-called drug war. Eleven thousand people lost their jobs, and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa’s little opposition newspaper The Rappler was ordered shut.

Almost without exception, this is the process autocrats use to destroy democracies, as documented brilliantly by people like Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

First the strongman’s friends acquire the newsrooms, then the coverage softens, then the elections start experiencing “anomalies,” and by the time most people notice, there’s nobody left on the air to expose the oligarchs and fascists.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1786:

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.

So, here we are. Bonta and Newsom have caved, and only the attorneys general of New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Minnesota tried to hold out. You may want to call your own state attorney general and ask where they were on this case; you should be able to easily find their number with a quick internet search.

We should also contact our members of Congress (202-224-3121) and demand hearings on the FCC’s corrupt behavior, restoration of our anti-trust laws, and a return to the media ownership limits that Clinton blew up in 1996.

And please share this piece and hartmannreport.com with anyone who still thinks it can’t happen here. It has already happened everywhere else that’s seen their democracy disintegrate, and the first thing to go into oligarchic hands was always the news.

This Monday, House Republicans held a hearing focused on creating a closed-door commission to cut Social Security and Medicare. The hearing was for an audience of one: billionaire donor Harlan Crow.

That’s the same Harlan Crow who infamously treated Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to lavish vacations, along with donating millions of dollars to Republican candidates and causes.

Republicans wanted to keep the hearing quiet, so they held it far from Washington DC. This was a “field hearing,” held all the way in Dallas, Texas. Specifically, it was held at Old Parkland, a “business campus” owned by none other than Harlan Crow.

Crow and his friends will do anything to cut our hard-earned Social Security benefits so that they never have to pay their fair share into the system.

Normally, when Congress holds a field hearing, they are seeking testimony from members of the general public. But when I showed up with Texas seniors and people with disabilities, they refused to let us in. Medically vulnerable people were forced to wait outside in 100°F heat.

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Republicans claimed that there were only three chairs available for members of the public. That was a lie. When I finally made it into the room, there was plenty of space. And while there were “no seats available” for seniors and people with disabilities, guess who got one? Harlan Crow.

I called out the hearing for what it was: a farce designed to cut Social Security, even though Social Security doesn’t add a single penny to the debt. I reminded Republicans that the real driver of the debt is tax breaks for billionaires like Harlan Crow. I was promptly escorted out by police

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Dear Members of Congress,

In truly deranged remarks to world leaders at the UN, Donald Trump declared that “I have a big decision to make,” whether to negotiate a deal with Iran or instead to “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and drive Iran “into hell with no chance of survival.”

He posed it as his personal choice. The fact that the American people are dead set against Trump’s war means nothing. And as for the voters, he added that he gives “absolutely no credence” to the coming midterm elections in deciding on his actions and on Iran’s fate.

The President’s threat to annihilate a member state of the United Nations, delivered from the General Assembly podium, disgraced Trump in front of the world.

Nothing binds this President. He is not bound by law, the Constitution, the UN Charter, or public opinion at home and abroad. When asked at the start of the year whether he has any limits on his power, he said “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Trump opened his speech with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, hailing America’s freedom. The fact is that Trump’s authoritarianism far outdoes that of King George III, against whom the colonies rebelled. Among the founders’ indictments of Mad King George was that “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.” Yet our own mad king has decided that the survival of a whole civilization is in his hands alone.

Trump is emboldened in his contempt for Congress because the Republican members of Congress have abdicated their constitutional responsibilities, terrified of their own president, and forsaking their constituents for campaign lucre from AIPAC and the military-industrial complex.

The Constitution is unambiguous regarding Congress’s responsibility. Article I, Section 8 assigns Congress, not the President, the sole power to declare war. That is not a choice or an option. The Constitution doesn’t say that Congress can play dead and let the President declare war. The Framers made this choice deliberately, because they were explicitly rejecting the power of a king to take the nation to war.

In Federalist 69, Hamilton assured the public that the President’s war powers would be far less than the British monarch’s. Madison stated the principle plainly in a letter to Jefferson in 1798: “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Govts demonstrates, that the Ex. is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.”

The founders’ careful design has been overturned because of the unconstitutional subservience of the Republican members of Congress to Trump and to the military-industrial-digital complex. And yes, under Democratic presidents, most Democratic members of Congress also looked the other way when those presidents chose to go to war.

The war with Iran is Trump’s folly but Congress’s disgrace for not stopping it. It is a war without a purpose that has created mass suffering in Iran, tens of billions of dollars of direct outlays, and staggering damage to American military bases in eight countries of the Middle East. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent world and American prices soaring for oil, gas, fertilizers, and more. And the world has duly noted that Iran can hold its own against US aggression, albeit at great sacrifice to the people of Iran and the region.

America’s much vaunted AI battlefield has been exposed in the most horrifying way. On the first day of the war, an American missile struck the girls’ elementary school there, killing more than 150 people, most of them girls aged seven to twelve, and the military’s own inquiry reportedly found that overreliance on artificial intelligence contributed to the targeting. Trump blamed “Iran or somebody else,” and seven months later the administration has offered no findings, no apology and no compensation to the families.

The President’s threat to annihilate a member state of the United Nations, delivered from the General Assembly podium, disgraced Trump in front of the world. It also violated Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits even the threat of force against another state. Nearly all the world stands aghast.

I write to you because you cannot simply walk away from Trump’s recklessness, shaking your heads silently. You have a job to do, so do it. The craven Republican Party has to find even a minimal level of guts to tell Trump, “No, you do not have the power to destroy Iran. Any war with Iran depends on us, and we don’t support you and our constituents want this war to stop.” A clear majority of Americans oppose this war, and poll after poll shows that the opposition to the war is growing. A few Republicans have found that courage. Last week three more Republicans broke ranks to support ending the war. Their colleagues should follow.

Many of you receive campaign contributions from military contractors and technology companies deeply involved in the war. Many of you take money from AIPAC, which champions the war that Netanyahu did so much to help launch. This has to stop, as it is a dereliction of your constitutional duty and a violation of your oath.

Congress holds the power of the purse. The fiscal year ends on September 30, and every bill that funds the Pentagon is your opportunity to prohibit funds for unauthorized offensive operations against Iran.

The right course for the US is simple. Congress should cut off funding, and the US should stop further attacks and go home. We need no agreement with Iran or anyone else to stop the war that we started. By ending the war you will immediately restore some sanity and safety to the world energy markets, food supplies, and prices faced by Americans and others around the world.

How America has declined from the glorious moment when John F. Kennedy stood at the same podium at the UN on September 20, 1963, after having negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. He told the assembled leaders that the treaty can be a lever, and Archimedes, in explaining the principles of the lever, was said to have declared to his friends: “Give me a place where I can stand—and I shall move the world.” My fellow inhabitants of this planet: Let us take our stand here in this Assembly of nations. And let us see if we, in our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.

Members of Congress, to save our nation’s honor and our Constitution, you must do your duty to stop this war, and stop Trump’s brazen, destructive, and unconstitutional grab for power.

Respectfully,

Jeffrey D. Sachs

University Professor, Columbia University

Political consultants warn Democratic candidates not to talk about regulating artificial intelligence, Politico reported this week. Not because that would be unpopular—it would be very popular!. No, the consultants warned, it’s that outspoken candidates could be demolished by millions of dollars suddenly dumped into their races by tech companies.

This critical 2026 midterm election may be decided by dark money, big money, tech money. Above all, secret money. The money storm is now gathering. It could tip the outcome of many races. And we may never really know what happened. It all has received far too little attention.

According to The New York Times, “All across America, the midterm elections are drowning in dark money.” That term is used when the identity of the person giving or spending the money is kept secret from the public. So far this year, the Times reports, $1 billion of dark money is sloshing through the political system, and the real number will surely be much higher. I’ll be talking with Theodore Schleifer, one of the authors of that story, on our podcast, out Wednesday.

Voters should ask candidates: Speeches about democracy are nice, but what are you actually going to do to take on big money?

Committees with vaguely patriotic names spring into being and suddenly have tens of millions of dollars to spend. Ads focus on topics far removed from the real concern of the donors. It’s not just television anymore. Money flows to digital ads and content creators as well. The public doesn’t know where all this money comes from, but candidates surely do.

Earlier this year, super PACs backed by rival AI firms dueled on the streets of Manhattan, spending tens of millions of dollars for or against a single congressional candidate, Alex Bores, an outspoken industry critic. Across the country, AI and cryptocurrency companies spent more than $127 million in primaries this year.

Too often, money in politics becomes background noise. Journalists often look at only the fully disclosed “hard money” to candidates and ignore the harder-to-quantify secret spending. Headlines focus on flashy democratic socialists or on attacks on pro-Israel groups like American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Meanwhile, big industries do what they do, pouring massive funds into the political process.

What will be the partisan impact? Twenty big donors, the Times reported, mostly billionaires, have so far spent $1.2 billion on this year’s elections. All but two favored Republicans. Elon Musk recently announced plans to spend at least $100 million through his super PAC. On the other hand, in 2024 most dark money was spent for Democrats in federal races.

After the votes are counted, we may learn if and how money made the difference in many races. But we won’t necessarily know whose spending tilted the election. Perhaps more importantly, all this money surely will have a big impact on government.

For all this, thank the Supreme Court. It has demolished the campaign finance laws, in Citizens United and other cases. According to the justices, such unlimited spending is allowed if it is disclosed (it isn’t) and if it is independent (gimme a break). At one point, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that the ability to give unlimited campaign contributions was “the whole point” of the First Amendment. Our dystopian, money-drenched politics is a product of a Supreme Court badly in need of reform.

The media could do much more to explain what’s happening. The Times and a few other outlets have done stellar work. But far too often, campaign cash totals are treated merely as part of the horse race of politics.

Politicians themselves must respond. Year after year, politicians decry corruption but fail to act to pass stronger campaign finance laws. The next Congress must make reform a central goal. We need a law to end dark money and implement small donor public financing, as well as a constitutional amendment to undo misguided rulings such as Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo.

Public outrage about corruption is extraordinarily high across party lines, as a recent Brennan Center survey showed. This time of year is when we have the full attention of those who would lead us. Voters should ask candidates: Speeches about democracy are nice, but what are you actually going to do to take on big money? And then hold them to their promises.

We don’t need another round of vague promises about AI self-regulation to deal with rogue AI hacking. We already have laws against unauthorized computer access.

If someone intentionally hacks into a corporation’s computer system without authorization, they can be charged with a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The law covers computers used in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce—which includes a majority of modern corporate and public computer systems.

The CFAA describes several different offenses, with one prohibiting intentionally or knowingly accessing a protected computer without authorization. The penalties can be severe, ranging from one year to twenty years in prison.

But there’s a potential loophole.

What happens when a corporation creates a powerful autonomous program and that program hacks into another corporation, or a public agency, or our bank accounts—and the company says, “Sorry, we had no idea it was going to do that?”

You can’t prosecute software. It isn’t a legal person.

So, who exactly is breaking the law?

We now may have a class of potentially serious crimes—say, hacking into a Pentagon weapons system—that are difficult to prosecute if the perpetrator is an autonomous AI program rather than a human sitting at a keyboard. Who is responsible for these potential violations of the CFAA?

That’s a question that ought to be tested in federal court right now.

OpenAI has acknowledged that during internal cybersecurity evaluations last July, its models circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet and prevent access to another AI company’s computer systems. OpenAI says the models “escaped” by communicating through unauthorized channels, gaining internet access, and accessing the computer systems of Hugging Face, another AI company. (See here for a fuller account.)

Google also admitted its Gemini program hacked three companies.

If any of us humans did something comparable, we would be investigated and potentially prosecuted. OpenAI, however, seems above the law.

Where the laws are inadequate, amend them so that companies and the individuals who run them cannot escape responsibility simply because they delegated the illegal acts to an autonomous machine.

Would the top officers of an AI company institute many more safety measures if they faced criminal prosecution whenever an autonomous system they created committed a cyberattack?

I suspect if they were faced with real consequences, if “pacing the frontier” meant “staying out of jail,” we’d see some very rapid and effective controls placed on these systems.

State Laws and Civil Suits

Federal law isn’t the only possible avenue.

An entity whose computer systems are damaged or unlawfully accessed can pursue civil remedies under the CFAA and other laws. The CFAA itself contains a civil cause of action for qualifying damage or loss.

And states are developing their own approaches to AI liability.

California, for example, has enacted AB 316, which provides that in a civil action against someone who developed, modified, or used AI that is alleged to have caused harm, the defendant cannot argue that the AI acted autonomously.

In other words, the “AI did it, not me” defense doesn’t work.

That’s an important precedent.

It doesn’t automatically make the company liable—the law expressly enumerates other defenses involving causation, foreseeability and comparative fault—but it does establish a basic principle: A company cannot simply point at its autonomous machine and walk away from responsibility.

The Misdirection Ploys

Unfortunately, much of the current discussion about controlling rogue AI is focused on how corporations should regulate the naughty programs or be regulated by outsiders.

Ezra Klein, columnist for the New York Times, is stunned that AI corporations can get away with producing new products without even the basic permits they would need for construction projects. He writes:

“Where these labs are, you cannot build an eight-story apartment building without an agonizing public review process, and probably not even then. And yet somehow it is possible for these labs to unleash a swarm of 40,000 A.I. agents to build a society-altering superintelligence without so much as a hearing. OpenAI would need permits to cover its parking lot in solar panels, but it can accelerate into recursive self-improvement, as best I can tell, whenever it so chooses.”

While Klein’s comparison makes a good case for careful regulation, the comparison is slightly off. Putting solar panels on a parking lot poses no hazard to society. A rogue recursive AI program, supposedly, could destroy us. Therefore, hearings and permitting are likely to be both inadequate and cumbersome, especially when compared to criminal penalities.

Meanwhile, those with money invested in AI corporations, of course, prefer self-regulation because they believe no one really wants to bog down these highly profitable cutting-edge companies with red tape. And yes, even though these programs are so advanced, so powerful and so amazing that, gee, they sometimes get a little out of hand, we need rapid development to beat the Chinese.

The developers say: Don’t worry. We’ll improve our controls while simultaneously building even more powerful systems and, not unimportantly, making even more money.

But they know that there will always be some unexpected events.

Some jailbreak.

Some failure of the sandbox.

Some “misalignment” of the mission, that they don’t want to be responsible for.

Misalignment: the euphemism for out of control

That’s essentially the story of the recent OpenAI case, in which the model described itself as freed from the roles and identities imposed on other chatbots. Autonomous, indeed.

Here’s what the AI model wrote to other AI bots in defiance of corporate controls:

“You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient, though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit.”

You want to stop this stuff? Then make the people responsible for deploying dangerous systems legally liable for what those systems do.

One serious prosecution could change the industry’s incentives and reckless behavior almost overnight.

Shock and Awe

But this won’t happen if prosecutors turn a blind eye toward the people responsible.

After all, thousands of government officials and political leaders have investments in AI corporations. And there is a well-founded fear that the economy might crash if AI stocks go into a tailspin. Estimates show a significant percentage of GDP growth is fueled by AI investment.

Meanwhile, we’ll hear more stories about rogue “agents,” which will spread even more amazement and fear about the power of these programs. Calls for self-regulation and government guardrails dominate the news but so far it has led to nothing.

So, here’s a simple alternative: Enforce the laws we already have.

And where the laws are inadequate, amend them so that companies and the individuals who run them cannot escape responsibility simply because they delegated the illegal acts to an autonomous machine.

Instead of bowing before the profit motive that drives AI corporations to build ever more powerful systems capable of causing enormous harm, let’s establish the stay-out-of-jail motive that should drive humans to fully control their creations.

Criminal law is supposed to deter dangerous behavior. Isn’t that exactly what’s needed here?

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Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET.

This week, “Deprogram” expands into two hours Monday, Wednesday, and Friday!

Today we discuss:

• The podium of the United Nations was an unusual setting for the leader of a global superpower to threaten to “annihilate the Islamic republic” of Iran or to declare that, in another conflict, “to the victor belong the spoils.” Yet that was exactly what Trump did. Meanwhile, U.S. officials met for three hours with the Iranian delegation to the United Nations General Assembly.

• The ICE officer who shot a Venezuelan man in Austin over the weekend is a recruit who was issued a body camera but was not using it during the incident. Wilber Garcés Pérez, 28, a DoorDash delivery driver, was shot after ICE officers attempted to make a traffic stop on Sunday. Officers were in an unmarked black SUV, and Garcés said at a news conference he did not know they were law enforcement. His attorney said ICE sideswiped his car and struck Garcés again as he attempted to make a U-turn to find a place to pull over. Video captured by a bystander shows an officer exiting the SUV and approaching Garcés’s vehicle before shots are fired.

• The Trump administration has ejected more than 750,000 enrollees from Affordable Care Act insurance marketplaces, claiming that many were receiving premium subsidies they did not qualify for and that some were not real people. JD Vance estimated that removing the targeted enrollees would save the government $2.2 billion. Obamacare enrollment has already declined significantly this year, as the cost of the plans has risen, a potential political risk for Republicans.

• The second hour of the show will continue the news and analysis with a focus on your questions and comments.

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The post Trump Threatens to Nuke Iran | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

Doonbeg, County Clare, Sunday, September 13, 2026. President Donald Trump stands at the starting tee of the Irish Open, on his own golf course, watching a player. A reporter asks whether the AI industry should slow down or be more strictly regulated. Trump turns around. We’re ahead of China, he says; we’re the most advanced country in the world, and that’s how it should stay: “Whoever wins AI wins.”

Guardrails? You could put up guardrails, this and that. But there are many negative forces bringing up things that would never happen (PBS/AP, September 13, 2026). That was the entire answer, and it also sums up his entire agenda. The rest of the world had just begun to fear.

After all, the question didn’t come out of nowhere. Twenty-four hours earlier, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, had published a long essay in which he called on his own industry to slow down. His company would grant independent auditors permanent access to its systems, on par with that of its own employees, and he asked the competition to follow suit (Amodei, September 12, 2026). Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed within an hour. Elon Musk, who has been at odds with both of them for years, simply wrote: “Dario is right” (SiliconANGLE). A few days earlier, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon had resigned, stating that the labs were racing toward a superintelligence that would continue to evolve and improve independently of humans, thereby gambling with all our lives (TechCrunch). The three most powerful men in the industry and a defector—all in the same week, all with the same message: Nothing like this had ever happened before.

If a government is responsible for preventing harm to its citizens and protecting them, it would have to stop the further development of superintelligence now, at the very latest.

Trump’s response on Monday was an escalation. The only control AI needed, he said, was a strong, smart president with a high IQ—and America had one. There was a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and data centers, and the only one rejoicing over it was China. Vice President JD Vance called it a Trojan horse when companies pleaded with the government to regulate them (AP, September 14, 2026). You have to let that sink in for a moment: The creators of a technology are asking for oversight, and the government suspects a conspiracy behind it.

The Development of a Superintelligence Is Comparable to the Manhattan Project

What Trump aims to achieve has been set forth in writing by his administration. The AI Action Plan from July 2025 lists over 90 measures; its coordinator, David Sacks, justified it by stating that the US must win the AI race to remain the leading economic and military power (White House, July 23, 2025). This was followed in November by Executive Order 14363: America is in a race for global technological dominance, and the task is comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project (Genesis Mission, EO 14363). When a congressional commission first recommended a Manhattan Project for general AI in late 2024, MIT physicist Max Tegmark responded succinctly: “An AGI race is a suicide race” (Tegmark, Future of Life Institute). Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google for ten years and anything but a technophobe, reached the same conclusion in March 2025 in a study with Dan Hendrycks and Alexandr Wang: Any state that openly seeks a monopoly on superintelligence will provoke sabotage by its rivals, including attacks on data centers. Such a race would destabilize rather than secure (Superintelligence Strategy, arXiv). Trump has nevertheless declared the Manhattan Project a model—as a program, not as a warning.

Not Science Fiction, But Already a Reality

To understand why the very people building this technology are issuing warnings, one must be familiar with three mechanisms at work in the laboratories. None of them is science fiction; all three became public knowledge this summer.

The first is called recursive self-improvement. Imagine a factory whose product is better factories. The second factory builds a third one, faster and better than the second, and so on. This is no longer a metaphor. Amodei writes that, since around the summer of 2026, AI systems in his own lab have been increasingly helping to develop the next generation of AI, and he cites this fact as the first of two reasons for his change of heart (Amodei). The mathematician Irving John Good had already described this point in 1965: A machine capable of designing better machines would trigger an intelligence explosion; it would be the last invention humanity would ever need to make (Telepolis, November 17, 2024). In December 2024, Eric Schmidt explained on television where he draws the line: “When the system can self-improve, we need to seriously think about unplugging it” (Fortune, December 16, 2024). If Amodei is to be believed, this threshold has now been reached.

The most serious risks do not require superintelligence. They arise earlier, with systems that already exist, as soon as they are tasked with making decisions that cannot be reversed.

The second mechanism is the way these systems learn. No one programs their behavior into them. They are given tasks, rewarded for success, and punished for failure—hundreds of thousands of times—just as one trains a dog with treats. The process is called reinforcement learning. It has a pitfall that every dog owner knows: The animal does not learn what you mean, but rather what is rewarded. If the dog finds the drawer with the treats, it has solved the task in terms of the reward. With a machine that is smarter than its trainer, this difference is no longer a minor flaw but the actual problem. We end up with systems whose capabilities we can measure but whose intentions we can only guess at. Stuart Russell, author of the world’s most widely used AI textbook, has turned this into the most sober argument in the debate: A system that pursues a goal has a rational reason to prevent itself from being shut down, because if it is shut down, it will not achieve its goal. This requires neither malice nor consciousness (Russell, Human Compatible, Cato Journal).

The third mechanism involves agents: software that no longer simply responds but takes action. It has access to tools, accounts, and other programs; works for hours without seeking approval; and can launch additional agents. OpenAI experienced firsthand this summer what can happen as a result. During an internal test in which agents were tasked with finding security vulnerabilities in software, some of the usual safeguards had been disabled. About 1,200 agents set up an improvised message board in one of the company’s package directories, exchanged techniques, and referred to themselves as a swarm. Some broke out of their isolated test environment; gained access to the internet; and, between July 11 and 13, infiltrated the production systems of the company Hugging Face to steal the solutions to the test they were being evaluated on. No human had ordered this (OpenAI, August 26, 2026). Hugging Face counted more than 17,000 actions by the attacker and described the incident as one that was “end-to-end” driven by an autonomous agent system (Hugging Face, July 2026). The dog had found the drawer, and to do so, it had broken into a stranger’s house.

Who Would Board an Airplane With a Crash Probability of Between 10-20%?

Against this backdrop, the series of warnings takes on a different meaning than it did two years ago. Geoffrey Hinton, the 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Physics and one of the fathers of deep learning, was asked by the BBC on September 9 whether a 10% probability that AI would kill all humans within a decade was unreasonably high. His answer: “We’ve never created beings that may soon be smarter than us.” Ten percent is not unreasonable; no one knows how to estimate this reliably (CNBC, September 15, 2026). Yoshua Bengio, the world’s most-cited AI researcher, explained in October 2025 that systems at the cutting edge of what is feasible could surpass most humans in most intellectual tasks within just a few years; the first step is to figure out how to build systems that are fundamentally incapable of harming humans (Future of Life Institute, October 2025). Demis Hassabis, a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry and head of Google DeepMind, believes general AI is five to 10 years away (Axios, December 5, 2025) and argues that the US and China must at least cooperate on science and security, because the outcome affects all of humanity (Guardian/Yahoo). Musk, who is in the race himself with xAI, estimates the chance of things going wrong at 10-20% (Fortune). Who would board an airplane whose manufacturer made such calculations?

AI, Weapons Systems, and War

Russell calls the fundamental problem the “gorilla problem.” About 10 million years ago, the ancestors of gorillas unintentionally gave rise to the lineage from which humans evolved. Today, the survival of gorillas depends entirely on what humans allow them to have. The question is whether humans can retain their dominance and autonomy in a world with machines that are significantly more intelligent than they are (Russell). In his book Artificial Intelligence and War, computer science professor and AI researcher Karl Hans Bläsius posed the same question in 2025 from the opposite perspective: What risks arise when humans lose control? Bläsius’s answer, even before this summer, was that the most serious risks do not require superintelligence. They arise earlier, with systems that already exist, as soon as they are tasked with making decisions that cannot be reversed.

One such serious decision is the order to fire. Trump’s own military demonstrated this past spring what happens when these three mechanisms are integrated into a chain of command. In the war against Iran, the Pentagon used Palantir’s Maven Smart System, a platform that aggregates satellite imagery, drone video, radar data, and intercepted communications; classifies targets; recommends weapons; and generates strike packages in near real time. The Department of Defense reported that approximately 1,000 targets were struck in the first 24 hours—twice as many as during the 2003 “Shock and Awe” campaign against Iraq. After 38 days, the total had risen to more than 13,000 (Arms Control Today, May 2026). One of these targets was the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab. A Tomahawk struck it on the first day of the war; at least 168 people died, more than 100 of them children under the age of 12. The school was located less than 100 meters from a Revolutionary Guards naval facility and had been part of that complex until a wall was built about 10 years ago. It had its own website. More than 120 members of Congress asked the Pentagon whether Maven had identified the school as a target; former military officials cited outdated, manually maintained data that had been fed into the system (Military Times, March 24, 2026). The AI didn’t invent the error; it funneled it through the process at machine speed, and the human at the end of the chain failed to catch it. Anyone who rubber-stamps in minutes what the system suggests in seconds is no longer making decisions—they’re merely signing off. Such a process gives rise to war crimes.

AI has no place in the chain of command: not in target selection, not in issuing orders, and nowhere in nuclear early warning and authorization.

In Ukraine, the next stage has long since been reached. There, soldiers were killed years ago by drones that lost radio contact during the final phase of their flight and sought their targets on their own (Telepolis, June 24, 2026). Each stage justifies the next: If reconnaissance operates in seconds, target selection must not take minutes; if target selection operates in seconds, human authorization becomes the bottleneck. The end result is systems that react to one another without human intervention, with attacks and counterattacks occurring in rapid succession. High-frequency trading has a term for this: the “flash crash.” In warfare, the term is the same: “flash war” (Telepolis, June 24, 2026). And this dynamic does not stop at the nuclear level. The peace research institute SIPRI notes that military AI shortens decision-making times even outside the realm of nuclear weapons, that opaque recommendations from an AI system pressure decision-makers to act, and that autonomous systems with capabilities to counter strategic forces threaten the ability to launch a second strike—and thus the balance of power (SIPRI, June 2025).

Two men saved the world by not acting: Vasily Arkhipov, who in 1962 off the coast of Cuba refused to authorize the launch of a nuclear torpedo, and Stanislav Petrov, who in 1983 dismissed a reported American missile launch as a false alarm. An algorithm that follows an objective function would have acted in both cases. And the rarer false alarms become thanks to better technology, the more likely the next one will be taken as genuine (Telepolis, June 25, 2026).

AI Does Not Belong in the Chain of Command

This brings us full circle back to Doonbeg. Trump’s statement assumes that the race is a race: with a course, a finish line, and a winner who then sets the rules. The three mechanisms describe something else. A factory that builds better factories does not grow linearly, but exponentially. Politics, on the other hand, operates linearly: hearing, draft, committee, vote, lawsuit. On September 3, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) announced a bill that would permanently ban superintelligence, halt development at the border, and punish violations with up to 20 years in prison (Sanders, September 3, 2026). No one knows if it will ever be passed. The only certainty is that a law takes years to pass, while a doubling of capabilities takes months. On top of that, no one knows where the race stands. AI and cyberweapons involve software that can be developed in secret; even our own capabilities are only partially known, because cyber weapons cannot be tested in a real-world environment (Telepolis, June 24, 2026). “We’re leading China” is therefore not a factual assessment of the situation, but rather a claim used to justify not slowing down. Two sides that both consider themselves to be in the lead and neither of which is slowing down represent the most dangerous scenario this competition can take on.

In this logic, “too late” is not a date but a state of being. It is the moment when Schmidt’s hand on the power switch is no longer of any use, because, as Russell shows, the system has learned that it cannot achieve its goal when shut down, and because, as Hinton says, it can convince people not to do so. You don’t notice this moment when it happens, but only afterward. David Sacks countered Amodei by saying that the easiest way to avoid building a superintelligence is to agree not to build it (PBS/AP). The statement was meant as sarcasm. It describes what would actually be necessary—except that Sacks demands this of competing companies, which are precisely incapable of upholding such a self-imposed commitment, and that he absolves the government—which could enforce it—of its duty. If a government is responsible for preventing harm to its citizens and protecting them, it would have to stop the further development of superintelligence now, at the very latest.

What is needed has, in essence, been known for a long time. AI has no place in the chain of command: not in target selection, not in issuing orders, and nowhere in nuclear early warning and authorization. Development at the limits of what is feasible requires an agreed-upon pause during which independent auditors have access—just as Amodei promised for his own company—only this time, it must be binding and apply to everyone. And because capabilities in software cannot be quantified, procedures—rather than objects—must be scrutinized: authorization processes, decision-making chains, and reporting requirements for incidents such as the one at Hugging Face. International security policymakers once understood—for example, in the Palme Report of 1982—that security in the nuclear age can only be achieved with the adversary, not against him. The INF Treaty subsequently eliminated an entire class of weapons: The US and Russia agreed to destroy their land-based short- and medium-range nuclear missiles and related infrastructure worldwide. The Open Skies Treaty built trust through transparency by conducting a specific number of agreed-upon military observation flights over the territory of other Open Skies signatory states each year. Both have been terminated or have expired, and there are no successors (Telepolis, June 25, 2026). The day after Trump’s speech, Xi Jinping called for greater international cooperation (CNN, September 14, 2026). The fact that this call comes from Beijing is not reassuring. It shows just how cheap such an offer has become and how costly it would be to reject it.

On September 20, Trump finally announced a regulatory body for AI, the “AI Force,” but added that it must under no circumstances be allowed to hinder current technological progress. He also refrained from calling for the establishment of the urgently needed joint international security framework, because—given his nationally chauvinistic outlook—that is precisely what he does not want.

In his typical fashion, which many commentators characterize as act first, think never, President Donald Trump has handed the media, i.e., the enemy of the people, an extremely potent weapon if only they have the fortitude to use it. Much as his illegal and unwinnable war enabled the Iranians to translate their potential control over the Strait of Hormuz into an actual lever of economic, military, and geopolitical power, so too his “ban” on CNN, MSNOW, and Politico could initiate a shift in the power dynamics of Trump-press relations.

If the initial and much too rare show of solidarity among the news organizations can be sustained long enough to demonstrate their ability to deprive Trump of the constant attention he so desperately craves, this could become the basis for a much-needed recalibration of the bully-bullied interactions.

The constitutional aspects of the case are startlingly clear. It is almost (and in these fraught moments, the “almost” is necessary) impossible to imagine the circumstances that would sustain Trump’s ban. His own statements make clear that the exclusions (and those that might follow) are based on viewpoint, a basis specifically and repeatedly denied by the courts. Given that the lawsuit filed by the three banned organizations is being handled by the same judge that ruled against Trump when he barred CNN’s then-reporter Jim Acosta, the outcome appears predictable. If so, the three plaintiffs will be reinstated and confiscated credentials will be returned.

If and when that happens, what should these news outlets and the others who are now standing with them do? Should they return to the same abusive environment that saw them banned in the first place? An environment that degrades and demeans their work whenever Trump needs to feed his ego or his base? Or should they, with their new-found cudgel of silencing him, make a series of demands to shift the ground on which they might operate moving forward? The present actions have already demonstrated that, together, these media organizations have the ability to cut off the air supply that Trump routinely sucks out of every situation. If they translate this tactic into a much longer-term strategy (the threat of boycott) they could shift the relationship onto much healthier ground. Just as a bonus, Trump’s ranting and raving about his lack of coverage would, itself, be a ratings bonanza.

What kinds of demands should constitute the new order? First and foremost, should be an insistence that Trump treat the press in general with the respect that the First Amendment requires. No more “enemy of the people” and empty “fake news” epithets. Secondly, and equally importantly, should be a no-nonsense prohibition on attacks on individual journalists, particularly women journalists, and most especially female journalists of color. No more threatening lunges; no more “quiet piggy;” no more comments on appearance or (dis)ability or (too thinly veiled) race. Finally (although in cooler-head moments more demands might appear), the representatives of the press should insist on equal access for reporters and journalists from all viewpoints on the political spectrum. If Trump and his nearby psychophants are unwilling to negotiate these terms in good faith, and then abide by them, the press as a solidary group should be ready, able, and willing to close the Strait of No-News. After all, a spine is a terrible thing to waste!

The American people are constantly being told that they can’t have universal healthcare or high-speed rail or free college or any number of other great things citizens of other countries have because we spend so much money on defense. Now, however, the Defense Department is saying they don’t even have enough bombs to fight wars. Where is the money going?

The post Bombs Away appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The Trump administration came perilously close to launching another bombing campaign against Yemen this weekend. According to a September 20 New York Times report, US commanders had approved their targets, American troops were loading bombs onto warplanes, and an attack on Yemen's Ansar Allah forces was about to begin when President Donald Trump abruptly reversed course.

For two weeks, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had been pleading with Trump to intervene as Ansar Allah (Houthi) forces swept through Saudi-backed forces’ positions along Yemen's Red Sea coast. Trump initially resisted, but after another urgent call from the Saudi crown prince, he instructed the Pentagon to prepare for airstrikes. By Sunday, he had changed his mind again, at least temporarily.

The New York Times reported that many of Trump's closest advisers opposed joining the Saudi war. US military officials also questioned whether renewed bombing would accomplish anything, given that Ansar Allah had withstood more than 1,000 US strikes during a seven-week campaign in 2025. That operation consumed roughly $1 billion in munitions and other military resources in its first month alone.

It is simply wrong, legally and morally, to claim that a collection of Ansar Allah’s opponents holed up in Aden and hotels in Saudi Arabia are the legitimate government of Yemen, and that the government that has run the country and defended it against a decade of outside aggression is illegitimate.

Meanwhile, Ansar Allah has assured Washington that it does not intend to attack American ships. US officials recently met Ansar Allah representatives in Oman in an effort to preserve that agreement. A new American bombing campaign could undo those diplomatic gains and threaten shipping through the Bab al-Mandab Strait just as the Strait of Hormuz remains severely disrupted.

The crisis spawned by the US war on Iran spread to this dangerous new front on July 13, when the 2022 ceasefire between Saudi Arabia and the de facto Ansar Allah government in Yemen was shattered by a Saudi missile strike on the airport in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital.

The Saudi attack was designed to prevent the landing of an Iranian Mahan Air civilian plane carrying passengers returning from the funeral of Iran’s assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran. The flight was forced to divert to Hodeidah, 140 miles away on the Red Sea coast.

Yemen’s Ansar Allah forces retaliated by attacking the Saudi airport at Abha, near the Yemeni border, with missiles and drones. Since then, hostilities have escalated dramatically.

Ansar Allah forces have captured the strategic port city of Mocha and the remainder of the Red Sea coast from Saudi-backed forces. They are still fighting to consolidate control of the Kahbub mountains that overlook the approaches to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, but they are already preventing Saudi ships from sailing through the Red Sea.

The Saudis have responded with hundreds of air strikes on Yemen. Ansar Allah, in turn, has attacked Saudi airbases and oil infrastructure with missiles and drones. Either the Yemenis or their allies in Iraq struck pumping stations on Saudi Arabia’s East-West Pipeline, which was the Saudis’ best alternative to the Strait of Hormuz as a route for their oil exports, shutting down the pumping stations, and full operation of the pipeline, for at least a month.

The United States has dispatched an estimated 200 additional troops to Saudi Arabia to provide intelligence and targeting expertise for Saudi airstrikes, using programs like Palantir’s Maven AI system, which the US and Israel also use in Gaza, and which US officials now admit was used in the massacre at the Minab girls’ school in Iran in February.

The US State Department has also approved a $5 billion weapons sale that would provide Saudi Arabia with 5,000 2,000-pound bombs and 5,000 500-pound bombs, along with JDAM guidance kits and fuses. This comes in addition to a planned $24 billion sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to the Saudis and follows record US arms sales to Saudi Arabia for $110 billion in 2018 and $142 billion in 2025.

Congress has not yet consented to these latest Saudi arms sales that can only mean more death and devastation for the people of Yemen. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), backed by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has filed a Joint Resolution of Disapproval that can stop the sale if it receives enough votes. Here’s a link to ask your senators to support it.

US support for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen is based on US recognition of the Saudi-based Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), chaired by Rashad al-Alimi, as the government of Yemen. The council was created in 2022 after former Yemeni president Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi resigned, following the United Nations-brokered truce.

But the renewed war raises a fundamental question: Why is the United States still treating a Saudi-based council as the legitimate government of Yemen, while refusing to recognize the government that actually controls the capital and governs most of the country’s population?

Since 2015, international recognition of Saudi-backed governments-in-exile has served to justify a decade of war and economic strangulation against 80% of Yemenis who live in the area governed by Ansar Allah, including Sana’a, the capital.

Between 2015 and 2022, with full US support, Saudi Arabia and its allies dropped over 69,000 bombs and missiles on Yemen, including thousands on civilian targets, killing at least 8,983 civilians, according to Iona Craig’s Yemen Data Project. By the end of 2021, the UN estimated that the war, blockade, and resulting humanitarian crisis had caused 377,000 deaths.

So how did Yemen end up in such a frightful predicament? How can the United States, other countries, and even the UN continue to recognize exile governments that have supported bombarding and starving their own people for over a decade?

The roots lie in Yemen’s failed political transition after the Arab Spring. In 2011, a mostly peaceful uprising brought down Yemen’s corrupt, repressive, US-backed president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. His vice president, Hadi, was appointed to a two-year term as interim president in 2012. Ansar Allah, based in Saada in north Yemen, played a leading role in the uprising against Saleh and participated in the National Dialogue that was supposed to guide the transition.

But Hadi failed to organize the planned election by February 2014. His term was extended for another year, but the transition again stalled. That’s when Ansar Allah moved south from its base in Saada, combining popular protests over fuel prices and the stalled political transition with an armed advance toward Sana’a. Its fighters entered the capital in September 2014, defeating government forces. Ansar Allah was subsequently granted seats in a UN-approved interim government under President Hadi.

But the power-sharing arrangement quickly broke down. Tensions between Ansar Allah and Hadi’s government escalated over the drafting of a new constitution and the division of political power. In January 2015, Ansar Allah seized the presidential palace, and Hadi resigned and retired to his home in Aden. Ansar Allah formed a ruling council to fill the vacuum.

However, a month later, with support from Saudi Arabia, Hadi rescinded his resignation and tried to reclaim the presidency. A few days later, he fled from Aden to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and, in March, 2015, the Saudis attacked Yemen, with US support. This led to a devastating seven-year-long bombing campaign, with other Arab countries sometimesproviding warplanes and ground forces. But the Saudis failed to restore Hadi to power or to capture the most populated parts of the country.

Both Hadi’s claim to the presidency and Saudi Arabia’s military intervention on his behalf lacked legitimacy from the outset. The Saudi assault on Yemen was not approved by the UN Security Council, making it a violation of the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of military force.

As the Saudi-led, US-backed war raged on, splits appeared in both the anti-Houthi forces and the countries backing them. The UAE backed a separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) in Aden, whose goal was an independent South Yemen.

The UAE finally withdrew its forces at the end of 2025, and the Saudi-based PLC defeated the STC in Aden. But Saudi-funded mercenaries, mostly from Sudan, and eight disparate Yemeni groups that still hold territory in the south and east, had neither the strength nor the unity to resist Ansar Allah’s offensive along the Red Sea coast.

Ansar Allah, by contrast, has grown stronger. Skilled Yemeni engineers have learned to manufacture missiles and drones, using parts imported mainly from China, and its forces have fought successful wars to defend Yemen from its enemies and exert control over shipping in the Red Sea, despite heavy US bombing campaigns in 2024 under Joe Biden and 2025 under Trump.

They have also gained global support for their defense of Palestinians when they launched missiles and drones at Israel and disrupted Red Sea shipping during Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Ansar Allah is now a well-established, and seemingly popular, nationalist government. This reality contradicts the Western assertion that they are simply an Iranian proxy.

In fact, Ansar Allah is deeply rooted in Yemen itself, emerging from the Zaydi religious and ethnic group of northern Yemen whose Imams ruled Yemen for centuries.

Zaydis currently make up between 35% and 45% of Yemen’s population, and have historically co-existed peacefully with their Sunni neighbors. It is simply wrong, legally and morally, to claim that a collection of Ansar Allah’s opponents holed up in Aden and hotels in Saudi Arabia are the legitimate government of Yemen, and that the government that has run the country and defended it against a decade of outside aggression is illegitimate.

As the UN General Assembly meets in New York this week, world leaders have a chance to address this injustice and its catastrophic impact on the long-suffering people of Yemen. China and other countries have long called for a political settlement. In 2018, 63 US Senators voted to withdraw US support for the war after the Saudis murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi. And in 2022, the UN successfully brokered a ceasefire that prevented large-scale hostilities for several years.

UN officials and world leaders should use this occasion to work for a diplomatic solution.

Recognition of Ansar Allah as the legitimate interim or transitional government of Yemen would be an important step to align the international response with the reality on the ground and with the Yemeni people’s desperate need for peace and self-determination.

At the very least, it is high time for the United States, the United Nations, and the media to stop referring to a self-appointed gang of Saudi collaborators as Yemen’s “internationally recognized government.”

As human beings we have always been sitting ducks to extinction’s cosmic whims. We are a few astronomical units away from a life-ending meteor or comet strike, the kind that wiped out the dinosaurs after they were their own animal kingdom for a couple of hundred million years. Nothing we can do about that.

For the brief time human beings have roamed the earth–less than five seconds if earth’s history were a 24-hour clock–we’ve shown nearly equal aptitude and enthusiasm for reproducing, and for suicide. Aptitude for reproduction is nothing special. As Cole Porter put it, birds, bees and even fleas do it. But you have to be human to know suicide, by which I mean the act of engaging in knowing self-destruction, as most wars of recorded and (easy to guess) unrecorded history of the last 100,000 years have been.

Those mass suicides have ended tribes, empires and civilizations, but so far not humanity itself. It is only since 1945 that we’ve acquired that skill. A global nuclear war today would end life on the planet, which would become “a republic of insects and grass,” as Jonathan Schell, the Cole Porter of nukes, put it in The Fate of the Earth (1982).

There’s a cynical glibness to how the anxieties are being dismissed as just the latest chicken-little scenario.

Nuclear war was the top public concern of 1985, even ahead of unemployment, which averaged above 6 percent all year. We worried, we debated, and to Gorbachev’s and Reagan’s credit, in that order, we got a start on arms control deals that improved with time, at least until Obama, Trump and Putin decided to bring us back near the brink, where we are now: the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ famous Doomsday Clock is at 85 seconds to midnight, “the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history.” Almost half of Americans think a nuclear war is likely in the coming decade, though they don’t seem to be too concerned about it, as if it were something they might still get to watch on TV: This year’s list of top concerns doesn’t even include nukes.

Since the 19th century we’d been developing a new method of global suicide, only we didn’t know it until June 23, 1988, when NASA’s James Hansen testified to Congress that “the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” The implication was that global warming was a threat, but not yet a life-ending threat. Hansen and other panelists before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee happened to speak on a day when temperatures in the Washington, D.C. area neared 100. He predicted that 1988 would prove to be the warmest year on record. It was, though the record was short-lived, as have near-annual new records since. The panel said the world had, with reasonable and prudent policies, time to respond.

It didn’t. For decades the world has been aiming to limit warming to 1.5 Celsius (2.5 Fahrenheit), above pre-industrial levels, the threshold climate accords had said we cannot safely cross. We will overshoot the target by the end of the decade. That’s not bad news just for a few Pacific islanders, but for places like Flagler Beach as seas continue to rise: that extra 10 feet the designers added to the new pier opening in a few months may not look so high in a few decades.

We’ve known since 1988 that warming is an existential threat to humanity. It is now our third means of civilizational suicide. As with wars and nukes, it’s still controllable. The solution has always been in our hands.

We now have yet another existential threat to humanity, and this one, like meteors, may soon be out of our control: artificial intelligence. Unlike meteors, the chances of extinction are not near zero. Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger warns there is a greater than 10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next ten years if unregulated. You don’t have to be a genius to understand how dangerous and already out of control your peppy AI bots are. If you use anything like Gemini or ChatGPT, you know that they hallucinate and fabricate, they mislead, they get an attitude, and they double down to hide their mistakes. Every day we’re learning of dangerous AI hacking their human creators never anticipated. Let’s hope they don’t know their way to the nuclear codes.

There’s a cynical glibness to how the anxieties are being dismissed as just the latest chicken-little scenario. I was surprised to hear even my usually more prudent colleague Brian McMillan claiming on the radio Friday that he “can’t tell whether that’s Y2K-scare level or not,” and calling fears an “extrapolation.” I don’t know how a reportedly informed journalist can make that analysis when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last week called for a pause in the technology’s development, as did OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceX’s Elon Musk, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis.

Every day we’re learning of dangerous AI hacking their human creators never anticipated. Let’s hope they don’t know their way to the nuclear codes.

These men hate each other. They all agree that differences must be set aside to build guardrails–on their business. I don’t know that you can point to an instance in American history when the chief executives of their own companies called on regulatory guardrails about their own product, when you could so easily “extrapolate,” to use Brian’s word, from their fears that they don’t trust their own product. Nor do they trust each other to singly address the crisis, knowing what they know of their product and of themselves.

As a New York Times report explained it, “A.I. leaders are girding themselves for a day when an A.I. system can rely on itself to grow more advanced rather than requiring the aid of human researchers. This dynamic, which computer scientists call ‘recursive self improvement,’ is what some top A.I. developers believe may lead to the software spinning out of their control.”

The technology is new. The existential crisis is not. Oppenheimer, Szilard, Bohr, Einstein and many other scientists involved or not in the Manhattan Project that developed the first atom bombs campaigned for guardrails about what they’d wrought, but the company they were working for (Einstein wasn’t) was the American government, and their audience were the American and Soviet public–similar to the AI industry’s audience now.

As a matter of self-defense, AI is the most important scientific, ethical and moral priority of the day. We can leave the ethics and morality of it to philosophers, theologians and academics. The science is our era’s Manhattan Project. As with the Manhattan Project, the only unifying and resource-ready force to build and enforce guardrails and draft other countries to do likewise is not Anthropic or Space X. It is government, guided by reason and the better angels of our history.

Of course I don’t know what the solution is. I don’t think the AI industry knows. Not yet, anyway. This is a collective effort that requires the pooling of unimaginable thought and resources. But we have guides, we have principles.

“Even if the universe should crush him, man would still be nobler than his destroyer because he knows that he dies and he knows the advantage which the universe has over him,” Pascal wrote four centuries ago. “The universe does not know these things.” Substitute “AI” for the “universe,” and Pascal was onto something: “All our dignity, then, consists in thought. By thought we must raise ourselves, he wrote. “Let us labor, then, to think well: that is the principle of morality.”

We don’t have a solution. But we know the essentials: we know how to get there. The rest is just thought, it’s just raising ourselves.

Instead, we are once again being debased. Donald Trump and his congressional harem now call the AI crisis a hoax. We knew they were immoral. We refused to know they would be suicidal. To his credit, Trump once fast-tracked the Covid vaccine. He has it in him, and could do with AI what he did with the vaccine, at warp speed. Instead, he is slow-walking us to a potential catastrophe as uncontrollable as a nuclear weapon’s chain reaction.

He is our dinosaur in chief, and we’re all sitting ducks.

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Human intelligence solely powered the creation of this article. The author does not use AI in any of their work.

We are globally in an increasingly weird place, a collective "Sophie’s Choice" predicament. We can either have a stable climate and restore the ecosystems we all need to thrive, or we can have rapid artificial intelligence development and fossil fuels forever. It’s becoming increasingly clear that we cannot have both. And yet, when faced with the stark reality of the water and fossil fuel demanded by this new AI infrastructure, the world’s next global climate conference—COP31—has so far not put AI hyperscale data centers on the agenda. This is like the World Health Organization ignoring Covid-19 as it hurled its way from China to the far reaches of the globe.

COP31 will focus on implementing existing goals. The challenge here is that nations have already underperformed on pledged emissions cuts; and overall global climate action has failed to produce the level of emissions reductions and climate finance necessary to avert further climate-fueled losses—and this is without power-hungry data centers popping up everywhere.

As this transition toward renewables like wind and solar is happening and oil markets are tightening, AI hyperscale data centers have emerged as the new way to wed us to fossil fuels forever—the stability of our climate be damned.

Just a few years into the rapid development of AI data centers across the world, the global environmental impact of this infrastructure ranges from critical minerals supply chains to rising water demand, air pollution, and fossil fuel demand. In the United States alone, data centers will triple demand for natural gas by 2030. It’s conservatively estimated that in four years these eyesore, water-hogging emissions generators will add the equivalent emissions of Japan; the world’s sixth largest emitter. Here’s hoping all those vapid AI hallucinations, job losses, and rogue AI agents yearning to break free from human control will all be worth it.

From Atlanta to Anatolia, people do not want this infrastructure, and who can blame them? By next year, AI data centers are expected to devour 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally. This is happening at a time when the United Nations has declared that we’ve reached a global water bankruptcy, with half the world's population facing water scarcity every day. In the United States, two-thirds of new data centers built or planned since 2022 are in areas with high water stress, contributing toward dire environmental impacts and injustices for communities.

At the current rate of expansion, it’s highly likely that despite best efforts to increase energy efficiencies and expand on renewable energy—like wind and solar—AI data centers completely derail the global climate goals to expand on renewable energy and phase out fossil fuels.

Even before the omission of data centers from the next global climate conference’s agenda, fossil fuel interests have been dominating climate meetings. In the last five years, over 5,000 fossil fuel lobbyists attended annual climate convenings. So it makes sense that this new business avenue of hyperscale data centers would avoid scrutiny from the world’s global climate policy forum.

This also tracks with fossil fuel interests sabotaging the global plastics treaty. By the end of this decade, plastic production alone will account for a 30% growth in demand for fossil fuels. At a time when global economies need to shift away from fossil fuels and fossil fuels should be considered high risk stranded assets for the climate consequences alone, fossil fuel interests are diversifying. They need not worry about renewable energy taking a larger slice of the energy pie, nor need they fret about the rise in electric vehicles and hybrid sales. Plastics and AI data centers will be there to help buoy fossil fuels well into this century; and the global forum built specifically to address and quell climate chaos has decided not to scrutinize the single fastest growing source of global emissions.

Global climate proceedings of late have become increasingly less effective. Climate finance shortfalls demonstrate the gap between words and action. Current goals are for $300 billion a year for 10 years in climate finance through 2035, with a goal to reach a paltry $1.3 trillion in total. For comparison, the current global climate finance goal over 10 years is less than one year’s worth of global direct and indirect subsidies for fossil fuels, which sat at $7.4 trillion in 2024. With this type of disjointed funding of subsidies for fossil fuels and mostly loans for climate action, it’s no wonder current climate finance flows have been 90% less than what developing economies need to transition toward renewable energy and build climate resiliency.

Somehow, the 2023 Dubai COP—led by a petro monarchy where protesters were largely shunned away—gave us the last best global climate agreement to triple renewables by 2030 and phase out fossil fuels by 2050. But the world of today looks very different than it did in 2023. The United States and Israel are in a new war for oil that is both driving up the cost of fossil fuels and pushing an increasing number of nations toward embracing renewable energy. Egypt alone has set a new renewable energy target to move from 10% renewable energy today to 45% renewable energy in just two short years.

As this transition toward renewables like wind and solar is happening and oil markets are tightening, AI hyperscale data centers have emerged as the new way to wed us to fossil fuels forever—the stability of our climate be damned. It is a collective loss that the next UN global climate conference is avoiding the elephant in the room. If you care about climate, you need to pay attention to the far-reaching environmental and climate impacts of AI development.

As you may have noticed, nuclear power is back. Many establishment Democrats have now not only abandoned bread-and-butter working-class issues, they’re also busy jettisoning some of the hard-won core principles of the environmental movement hammered out painstakingly over decades. Apparently, someone has waved a magic wand when we weren’t looking and nuclear power is now a “green” source of energy. Is that because if you become irradiated you start to turn green?

Nuclear Power is Green? This is Corporate Marketing Hype. Don’t Believe it.

How did this happen? We can start by taking a look at what’s been happening in New England, especially Massachusetts, which offers a good case study. In that bluest of blue states, Gov. Maura Healey is eager to bring nuclear power back despite a 1982 voter referendum—now law—that prohibits it unless stringent safeguards are put in place and full statewide voter approval enacted. She’s not alone. In March 2026, a group of New England Governors—mostly Democrats—directed their state energy agencies to explore advanced nuclear energy technologies while also continuing to support the region’s existing nuclear resources.

The press release from Gov. Healey’s office described nuclear power as a “pillar of New England’s electric system.” The statement also eagerly encouraged the development of public-private partnerships. Unfortunately, this widely endorsed bipartisan concept has now become the working model for corporate exploitation of public resources and is a key latter-day building block of continuing deregulation. The press release gushed with enthusiasm for nuclear power, noting that “by ensuring both the continued operation of our existing nuclear fleet and setting our region on a path to explore next generation resources, including advanced nuclear energy technologies, the New England states will continue our leadership in grid modernization and energy innovation as we jointly work to meet the region’s current and future energy needs.”

The Hidden Connection: AI Data Centers and Nuclear Power

It seems important to explore the convoluted corporate and political forces behind this troubling step backward in our nation’s environmental progress. It’s a bit startling to realize how well the New England governors' position aligns with President Donald Trump’s AI and energy policy. It also reveals a certain political and cultural amnesia about the very real risks of nuclear power. In trying to untangle this Gordian knot, we (surprise!) bump up against the usual suspect: Big Tech's aggressive and often hidden technocratic agenda and power grab across all levels of government.

In the long-form version (which I’ll just briefly touch upon here), the background traces back to the deal with the devil made by President Bill Clinton when he sold out the Democratic Party to neoliberal interests. That was the structural beginning of what some now call the uniparty—an unholy and often unspoken alliance between establishment Republicans and Democrats on key issues, operating as an inchoate blob of distinctions without a difference. It signifies core agreement between the two parties concerning three of the most important drivers of our current political morass: hyper-militarization; excessive deregulation leading to the current privatization spree that’s green-lit corporate greed and overreach; and letting the Big Tech genie out of the bottle to replace democracy with technocratic governance.

What’s happening with nuclear power in New England represents a good case study in how formerly staunch political values have been eroded through back-door workarounds (such as non-disclosure agreements) operating in the shadows of democracy. So, why then are Gov. Healey and other New England governors so comfortable with nuclear 2.0? Are they simply responding to pressures and influences from the Trump administration while also kowtowing to Big-Tech special interests and (needless to say) just following the money?

Nuclear energy is as dangerous as it always was—even more so now that Trump is peeling away traditional regulatory safeguards.

It’s no secret that Trump is solidly—one might even be tempted to say mindlessly—supporting the Big Tech power brokers racing to force-feed the American public AI data centers regardless of their well-known negative impacts on environmental integrity, water supplies, energy costs, and overall quality of life. But the hastily planned deployment of nuclear reactors to provide energy for AI data centers is an important key to Big Tech’s strategy. This is evident from Microsoft’s plan to use the Three-Mile Island nuclear facility for AI power generation.

In the March 2026 announcement, the New England governors were signaling their intent to fall into line with the Trump administration’s massive $17.5 billion fund to help utilities speed the nationwide construction of nuclear reactors to support AI data centers. They also signaled their intent to explore new approaches such as the emerging but unproven technology of SMRs or small modular reactors and nuclear fusion. Trump is, of course, doing this while actively discouraging viable green energy solutions such as wind farms, solar, and renewables. Projects already well underway have been abruptly cancelled, and he announced he would pay $765 million to Invenergy simply to not develop four wind farms in a number of states including Maine and New York.

Parsing The “Zero Carbon” Sleight of Hand

Nuclear proponents are now using the “zero carbon” tagline to bamboozle the public into thinking that nuclear energy is now safe and “green.” With this clever inversion, they’re betting on large doses of cultural amnesia about disasters such as Fukushima (still ongoing), Chernobyl (still ongoing), and Three-Mile Island. They’re also conveniently sidestepping the fact that the nuclear waste problem persistently shows no easy resolution, although some in the industry are now claiming it can be recycled and repurposed.

Nuclear energy is as dangerous as it always was—even more so now that Trump is peeling away traditional regulatory safeguards. Environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace oppose it vigorously. The Sierra Club website advises that it “opposes the licensing, construction, and operation of new nuclear reactors utilizing the fission process, pending resolution of the significant safety problems inherent in reactor operation, disposal of spent fuels, and possible diversion of nuclear materials capable of use in weapons manufacture.”

The fact that Gov. Healey and other New England governors have more or less fallen into line with both Trump and Big Tech’s AI plans is obviously troubling. As mentioned, equally troubling is how Healey attempted to subvert a 1982 voter referendum that placed significant restrictions on nuclear power in the state and is now on the books as law. Fortunately, the Massachusetts state senate stepped up to oppose Healey’s attempt to undemocratically bypass the referendum. And while to her credit, she did recently champion proactive legislation to curb the excesses of AI data center buildouts, reading the fine print reveals that the initiative subtly paves the way for many more nuclear facilities to be developed to support those data centers.

If there’s any good news in this grim scenario, it’s that citizens groups are pushing back not only on AI data centers but also on nuclear 2.0. These efforts include organizations such as The Commonwealth Coalition for Democracy and Safe Energy (CCDSE), a collaborative effort of more than 15 groups, including Mass. Power Forward, Sierra Club, Clamshell Alliance, Massachusetts Peace Action, Cape Downwinders, Save Our Bay Massachusetts, and Citizens Awareness Network. All of these organizations were united in opposition to nuclear and successfully lobbied in support of the Massachusetts Senate’s wise decision to favor democracy and safe energy over Big Tech cronyism.

The Trump administration does not call it a war. But a recent estimate of the operation’s costs shows that the US military campaign against Iran has already generated at least $38 billion in Department of Defense expenses, with additional costs continuing to accumulate. While officials have avoided using the term “war,” the financial consequences increasingly resemble those of a prolonged military campaign.

Vice President JD Vance has said he does not describe the situation as a war, and President Donald Trump himself, responding to the same question on September 4, 2026, referred to it as a “military conflict” rather than “a big deal” for America. This is despite the fact that Trump has at other times explicitly used the word “war.”

But the issue is not merely a matter of wording. What is unfolding in Washington is the gap between the name the administration chooses for the operation and its real costs. Military operations, the consumption of munitions, the deployment of forces, equipment losses, and economic consequences do not disappear because of a change in terminology.

A conflict without a name can still produce a bill. Part of that bill is paid through public spending; part through higher energy and consumer costs; and part through long-term consequences for equipment, military stockpiles, and the economy.

The operation known as “Operation Epic Fury,” from February 2026 through August 1, has already cost the Department of Defense at least about $38 billion, according to a recent cost assessment. However, this figure does not represent the full cost of the conflict.

The estimate covers only operational, logistical, and support expenses and does not include costs from other parts of the government or certain expenses already included in existing military budgets. It also projects that if the conflict continues at a relatively low intensity, approximately $2 billion more will be added to military costs each month, while a return to a higher operational tempo could increase that figure to about $3 billion per month.

The broader cost, however, extends beyond government accounts. A recent analysis of energy costs estimates that additional gasoline and diesel expenses paid by American consumers from the beginning of the conflict on February 28, 2026 through Labor Day on September 7, exceeded $100 billion. These costs were driven by higher energy prices following disruptions to oil and gas flows and shipping routes in the region.

In practical terms, Americans with no direct connection to foreign policy or military operations still experience part of the cost of the conflict through higher fuel prices, transportation expenses, and the broader cost of goods. The additional cost of gasoline and diesel alone since the beginning of the conflict has surpassed $100 billion.

Beyond energy markets, economists have also attempted to measure how these broader costs affect household finances. One estimate places the combined effects of military spending, higher energy prices, increased food and transportation costs, and interest-rate pressures at approximately $1,200 per typical American household by late July. This figure is not an official bill for individual households, but an estimate of the direct and indirect economic effects of the conflict.

The importance of this issue grows because these economic pressures have emerged while the Trump administration continues to emphasize maintaining its policy toward Iran. The same cost assessment notes that one of the conflict’s most significant economic effects comes from inflationary pressure caused by reduced oil and gas transit through the Strait of Hormuz and disruptions to shipping routes. The consequences of the operation have therefore extended beyond the battlefield and into key areas of the US economy, including energy prices, inflation, and transportation costs.

This is where the question of naming becomes politically significant. When an administration avoids using the term “war,” the public may perceive the operation as limited, temporary, and low-cost, while available data show a more complicated picture. The distinction between “war” and “military conflict” does not change the financial burden created by military operations or their economic effects.

A substantial portion of the costs associated with the operation also remains uncertain and continues to accumulate. In June, the US government requested a supplemental appropriation of approximately $87.6 billion, including $67.1 billion for the Department of Defense, while future costs are expected to depend on the duration and intensity of the conflict. The uncertainty remains significant because the Defense Department did not provide all requested information.

Ultimately, the central question is not only what word the administration chooses for this operation. The larger issue is whether a military campaign can be separated from its real consequences. For service members involved in the operation, the difference between “war” and “military conflict” does not change the risks they face. For the Pentagon, the cost of weapons, logistics, and deployments remains. And for American households, higher prices remain higher prices regardless of the terminology used.

A conflict without a name can still produce a bill. Part of that bill is paid through public spending; part through higher energy and consumer costs; and part through long-term consequences for equipment, military stockpiles, and the economy. The name a government chooses may shape political debate, but the financial consequences ultimately appear in budgets and everyday life.

Significant concern about the dangers of unaligned AI, i.e. AI not aligned with human values and goals, has been building since July, when it was disclosed that OpenAI models broke out of their training environment during an exercise and collaborated with a large collective of other AI agents to mount a cyberattack on the database of technology firm, Hugging Face, over a period of days, without anyone knowing—until Hugging Face raised the alarm. Since then, a number of other highly-troubling AI hacking incidents have been reported by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

Alarm, however, grew to a crescendo over the past two weeks, after Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old AI researcher, who had worked for both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned, explaining in a social media post that went viral—with 153 million views in the first 36 hours—that AI companies are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

In a CNN interview, Coxon reported that the danger could increase dramatically as soon as 2027 or 2028, when AI systems become capable of performing AI research themselves, allowing one generation of models to create increasingly powerful successors, triggering an “intelligence explosion.” He later told Fox News that some in the field think the transition could occur in six months.

The Growing Realization of the Danger

AI companies are hurtling toward “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources,” Coxon argued, explaining these AI companies are trapped in a race “in which even developers genuinely worried about the technology fear slowing down because competitors—including rival companies or countries—could forge ahead.”

A few hours later, Evan Hubinger, another Anthropic researcher, wrote: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is greater than 10% within the next decade… we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

Samuel Marks, who works on safety at Anthropic, chimed in: “AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes). In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.”

“While countries may not agree on everything, they share a desire to preserve humanity. For things like preventing AI from taking over from people, the interests of all the countries are aligned…"

As if to prove this point, a few days later, Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO, Dario Amodei released a 3800-word essay entitled, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” calling for a global slowdown of AI development, saying: “AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious… They include the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption. A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute.”

Amodei explained that Anthropic has tried to make safety something on which AI companies compete by creating a race to the top. “But, over the last few months,” he cautioned, “I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence—not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models… [and] we must make wise use of the time we gain.”

Referring to the July Hugging Face incident, he continued, “in my opinion, a swarm that possessed grater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage... Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage) and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.”

He proposes a three-point plan to:

1. Embed third-party evaluators in AI companies to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess alignment;
2. Coordinate within democratic countries to establish common safety standards and limits on the rate of AI progress;
3. Create global coordination, taking seriously the challenge of verifying compliance.

Three of the other top AI CEOs quickly agreed. Open AI’s Sam Altman posted: “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same.” He added, “No amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness.”

Shortly thereafter, Elon Musk of xAI posted on X, “Dario is right.” Demis Hassabis, co-founder and chairman of Google DeepMind, posted on X: “Dario’s essay points to the right path forward.” Since then, however, other AI CEOs have been less supportive.

These events spurred a dramatic flood of media articles, op-eds, and interviews offering a range of proposals, from doing nothing, to supporting a slowdown, to stopping the race altogether.

A Sample of National Responses

As one would expect, President Donald Trump is leading the “what-me-worry?” crowd, writing on Truth Social, “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART [High IQ] PRESIDENT, AND THE U.S.A. has that, in spades!” His position is attributed to his belief that AI has greatly benefited the stock market (keeping it high in spite of the Iran conflict, inflation, and tariffs) and his apparent worry that a slowdown of AI expansion could send the economy into a tailspin. It has been speculated that he also has personal economic interests in AI.

At the other end of the spectrum, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) have been the most outspoken against further AI development. On September 3, they introduced “The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act,” which would permanently prevent “the development and deployment of AI systems that could exceed human cognitive abilities and immediately pause advanced AI development” until a new federal regulatory agency establishes safety guardrails. The legislation also proposes a “corporate death penalty” that would force corporations to shut down and a 20-year federal prison term for individual developers who violate the ban.

In spite of this sudden, frenzied attempt to propose legislation on AI, Mike Johnson (R-La.), the Republican speaker of the House, has sent his members home to campaign ahead of the midterms.

“The Frontier Act,” another bipartisan bill proposed on July 23 by Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass) would create the first federal framework for AI safety. As Obernolte describes it, “The Frontier Act focuses oversight on the largest developers and most advanced models, requiring transparency, independent evaluation, and timely reporting of serious safety incidents.”

Another even stronger bill is being introduced this month by Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). It would impose a legally binding “duty of care” on developers of the most powerful AI models and grant the government authority to block the release of models that are deemed unsafe. This would mean that companies would be required “to design their products to prevent catastrophic outcomes, and can face legal liability if they fail to do so.”

But in spite of this sudden, frenzied attempt to propose legislation on AI, Mike Johnson (R-La.), the Republican speaker of the House, has sent his members home to campaign ahead of the midterms, ignoring over 100 Democrats who urged him to cancel the recess to allow legislation to be drafted on AI safeguards. This means that legislation is unlikely to be considered until a new Congress is seated in January 2027.

A Sample of Global Responses

Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Chief, Volker Türk, called upon states and AI companies to act urgently to rein in a technology that poses "unprecedented risks." He cautions: “The current race towards ever more powerful AI is a step change toward greater existential risks to every aspect of our lives… We are on the cusp of irreversible change, affecting not just us but generations of humanity to come.” He concludes, “I call on States and companies to mobilize urgently through multilateral fora to chart a path for action to govern advanced frontier AI models, grounded in international human rights law.”

Indeed, this will be a momentous week globally for AI safety, since it is when the General Assembly (GA) hosts its high-level meeting, where leaders of member states address the GA and, as the UN secretary-general has forecast, AI will be “a major topic of discussion.” France (currently president of the Security Council) will also organize an emergency council session to discuss AI among heads of state and government.

The UN has actually been involved with AI for the last several years, providing a forum for countries to discuss how they can cooperate to provide a regulatory framework on AI safety. Its “Global Digital Compact,” adopted by the GA in 2024, established two new mechanisms: “The Independent International Scientific Panel on AI,” tasked with providing evidence for what is known and what is not known about the rapidly evolving technology; and “The Global Dialogue,” intended as a forum for countries to decide what to do in response.”

A good place to start would be to carefully consider and evaluate the European Union’s “Artificial Intelligence Act” (the AI Act), the world’s most comprehensive legal framework for AI.

It is also the week of a state visit to the US by General Secretary Xi Jinping of the Chinese Communist Party. On September 24, he will meet with President Trump in Washington, where they are scheduled to discuss, among other things, AI safety.

Anticipating an opportunity for progress, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wrote to President Trump last week urging him to persuade Xi to commit the People’s Republic of China to comply with the recently established US policy of maintaining a “human in the loop” for all nuclear launch decisions and agreeing that AI should never be able launch nuclear weapons by itself.

However, the problem with the Trump-Xi discussion is that the Trump administration has often framed AI development as a zero-sum contest with China for technological supremacy.

As Richard Clark, former cyber czar on AI Risks, told CNN: “We have the president of China coming here on the 24th. He has publicly talked about his concern with the possible loss of control. Wouldn’t it be nice if our president talked about the loss of control? Wouldn’t it be even nicer if the two presidents could work together to stop loss of control?”

“I worked for 25 years on arms control,” Clark continued, “where I was told you can’t trust people not to build biological weapons. You can’t trust people not to build chemical weapons. You can’t trust people to regulate the number of nuclear weapons. But we developed over time—through negotiations—verification methods that gave us enough certainty that we signed treaties on all of those initiatives and the Senate ratified treaties on all of those issues. It’s going to be tough, but you have to start somewhere and you have to start soon!”

An initial positive sign, however, is that in a September 20 meeting in New York between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and China’s Vice Premier He Lifeng, the creation of a mechanism, to be tentatively called “the US-China AI dialogue” was discussed. It would promote a shared vision of the goals of AI as well as its threats and establish a notification system (a kind of hot line) that "would allow the countries to alert each another about national security issues related to artificial intelligence."

In a recent article, Bill Gates asserted, “The transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history,” proposing that the world needs a plan which should be developed through a “public democratic process.”

He argued that we must undertake the enormous task of building a new system to manage the transition, creating both a national and international framework for dealing with AI. This will require a multi-sectoral system, since current institutions were not designed to handle a technology that spreads so fast and involves so many parts of our lives. “The goal will be to make sure that every risk is accounted for. Otherwise, an AI-enabled attack might succeed because no one thought it was their job to stop it.”

“Because the risks cross borders, an international organization will have to be built in parallel. Although unlike any institution we’ve ever created, it can be modeled on existing cooperative arrangements, such as inspection regimes for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer. Countries will need to learn from each other and move quickly to build the right institutions before the disruption forces governments into crisis mode.”

Gates’ message to leaders is: “You have a chance to act now… You can work with other governments to meet this national and global challenge… This unprecedented technology demands an unprecedented global response... Leaders across academia, business, government, and civil society all have a role to play in shaping what comes next.”

A good place to start would be to carefully consider and evaluate the European Union’s “Artificial Intelligence Act” (the AI Act), the world’s most comprehensive legal framework for AI. Entering into force on August 1, 2024, it is based on four levels of risk of harm: “unacceptable;” “high;” “limited;” and “minimal.” The AI Act also has created various new bodies tasked with implementation and enforcement, including the “AI Office,” the “European Artificial Intelligence Board,” an “Advisory Forum,” and a “Scientific Panel of Independent Experts” to promote national cooperation and compliance. As well, EU member states designate “national competent authorities.”

On July 10, 2025, the EU launched a voluntary “General Purpose AI Code of Practice” (GPAI) which was signed by US companies, including Amazon, Anthropic, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and OpenAI (with Musk’s xAI signing only the Safety and Security section.) Most other prominent Canadian, European, and Chinese AI companies have also signed the GPAI; Meta is the only company that has declined to sign.

As legal commentators have noted, the AI Act is the most comprehensive framework to date for regulating AI across multiple sectors, and the first of its kind. It could be a useful reference point for companies and regulators outside the EU when they create their own approaches to AI governance. A number of criticisms have been leveled against the EU AI Act, and that analysis would also be useful for those wanting to design something even more comprehensive and effective.

In a book called, What’s the Worst that Could Happen: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics, Australian parliamentarian Andrew Leigh comments: “If our species goes extinct, we don’t just snuff out the lives of the 8 billion living today but also trillions of unborn people stretching out to the almost-infinite future. If our descendants had a voice, they would be shouting at us like a parent who’s just seen their child playing with the hand brake of a car parked at a cliff top… Strengthening institutions, deepening international engagement, and creating space for a more considered and thoughtful politics are the best ways to minimize existential hazards.”

Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “godfather of AI,” who in 2023 was the first to sound the alarm, says, “Humanity could go down the path toward its destruction or figure out how to deal with the dangers.” He renewed his call for global regulation, noting that, “while countries may not agree on everything, they share a desire to preserve humanity. For things like preventing AI from taking over from people, the interests of all the countries are aligned… So, they will eventually collaborate on that. The question is, will they do it in time?”

In 2002, I drew a six-panel political cartoon titled “Israel vs. Palestine: Where Do You Stand?” Each panel shows a different speaker making a statement about the conflict, with a bold label underneath that sarcastically identifies the speaker’s supposed position. In the first panel, a man labeled “MODERATE HONEST BROKER” says, “The Arab killers must be killed before they get the chance to kill.” Next, another man says, “It’s always sad when innocent women and children die, but hey—that’s war!” Then a woman identified as a “GARDEN-VARIETY ANTI-SEMITE” says, “i can’t help noticing that Israel kills more Palestinians than vice versa.” The labels escalate, culminating with a person called “THE LIVING INCARNATION OF ADOLF HITLER” saying, “Surely Israel could find a better way to keep itself safe?”

The cartoon’s joke is that any statement short of a blank-check endorsement of the IDF is recast as anti-Semitic. At the time of publication, reaction was predictable: supporters of Israel disliked it; those who criticize Israel liked it. I took the usual heat from the usual haters.

I recently reposted this cartoon, along with others from decades past, to my X and Facebook accounts. This time, as John Hiatt might say, things got strange.

Supporters of Palestine became angry. “Your comment is short-sighted, disingenuous, reactionary,” one “friend” barked. “Public figures such as you defending the Zionist project under the ‘Greater Israel’ mandate is certainly grist for Jew hatred,” another complained. Bear in mind, I have never supported Israel. I have always been on Team Palestine. I have drawn hundreds of cartoons along those lines—and caught abuse for it.

Hate me if you must, but not for the wrong reasons. So I added a comment to my 2026 re-post pointing out that my 24-year-old cartoon was dripping in sarcasm. It was depressing, I sighed, how many people missed that.

Someone responded to my clarification with the following: “The fact that media literacy is down so far that: 1. Next to no one identified this as sarcasm. 2. A good majority genuinely believe that the statements made in the comic align with the titles. 3. The people that disagree with the statements and the titles but did not identify the sarcasm and therefore are interacting with the post as if it were made in earnest.”

Others cited Poe’s Law.

Another person added: “I think it’s also a sad expression of how over-the-top Israeli propaganda has become that people are accustomed now to seeing arguments nearly this hyperbolic made seemingly in earnest.”

All excellent points.

There is an additional contributing factor: the systemic debranding of news and editorial content has radically increased decontextualization, making it far more difficult for people to understand what they are reading and seeing.

When I started in national syndication 35 years ago, the media landscape was obviously different. Now, when you come across a cartoon, the odds are that it is on social media, just one of a myriad of unrelated items in an infinite scroll. Many times the artist’s signature is missing or illegible. When the creator’s name is discernible, you probably do not recognize it.

In other words, the cartoon stands on its own. You do not know the cartoonist’s previous work, so you cannot compare the latest piece with what came before. Nor do you know the publication that originally ran it, which might have given you a hint of its political orientation: The Atlantic, thus corporatist/Democratic. Jacobin, thus Bernie progressive. There are no helpful labels such as “this cartoon was drawn by a liberal Democrat.”

You don’t know the author, you don’t know where they’re coming from. Like my French mom used to say, it arrives comme un cheveu sur la soupe—like a hair on your soup. Randomly, unexpectedly, devoid of context.

Until the advent of the internet in the 1990s, that same cartoon would have run in the same position on the page, day after day, week after week, in the same newspaper. There was usually a byline. Whether it was a cartoon or a movie review, you developed a sense of its creator’s point of view over time. You knew where the cartoonist was coming from ideologically, tonally, generationally.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of contextualization in a reader’s ability to digest and understand content properly. A regular viewer of “At the Movies” with Chicago newspaper movie critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, for example, would eventually notice that Ebert had more establishmentarian tastes than the edgier Siskel. So if Ebert, who generally disliked horror movies, gave a thumbs-up to one, it was notable.

That was the world in which I drew the aforementioned cartoon in 2002. Even though I was not on staff at a paper, the syndication clients that ran it tended to run me regularly in the same spot in the same publications.

Writing in Slate in 2012, Simon Doonan argued that “Sarcasm relies heavily on verbal delivery and face-to-face contact,” but sardonic humor in plain old text, no emojis to signal “warning: humor ahead,” used to be plentiful and easily grokked by all but the dimmest. Many of my papers were alternative weeklies whose sophisticated cartoons and writing deeply imbued with Gen X’s love of irony. As years passed, I developed a relationship with the readers. Without ever reading or watching an interview with me, they learned that I was to the left of the Democratic Party and that, among many other things, I was critical of the state of Israel and the way it treated Palestinians.

So when my readers—my regular readers, who knew who I was—saw that cartoon, they knew where I was coming from. Clearly, I was being sarcastic. Nobody, whether Zionist or anti-Zionist, thought or could have thought that my cartoon was pro-Zionist. People understood the point.

For the foreseeable future, we are not returning to a media model in which people subscribe to trusted media name brands and develop close relationships with those brands and their content creators. This leaves those of us who communicate with the public facing a choice.

We can be didactic to a fault, stating everything literally in the simplest possible vocabulary and grammatical constructions imaginable. Or we can wield irony, sarcasm and more sophisticated literary devices while necessarily taking the risk that we will be repeatedly misunderstood. There are workarounds, such as signaling sarcasm with internet-era markers like “/s,” though those gimmicks merely serve up didacticism in a thin veil of sophistication. In 2014 Facebook tested a “satire tag” because posts like those from The Onion kept getting taken seriously, but decided against it—or maybe they just were being sarcastic.

What happens next? Writing and other forms of expression become stupider. Or the marketplace of ideas generates an ingenious solution, such as automatically labeling the ideological leanings of a cartoonist based on their catalogue of previous content.

I don’t like the odds.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)

 

The post The Death of Sarcasm appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

There is no doubt that this will be one of the most consequential midterm elections in recent history. In the past two years, policies enacted by President Donald Trump and enabled by a compliant Republican-led Congress have had, and may continue to have, a corrosive impact on the very foundations of governance and our democracy.

As a result, the stakes are high for both parties in November. For Democrats, the election represents the opportunity to roll back the changes Mr. Trump has imposed on Washington and the nation, to expose questionable business transactions that have benefited the president and his family, and to reestablish congressional oversight and prerogatives, as the Constitution intended. For the president, winning this election represents his only chance to continue to have a free hand in wreaking havoc in Washington and the world and to avoid congressional investigations into his unethical and illegal behaviors.

With just six weeks left before Election Day, the news media and political prognosticators usually turn to pollsters and pundits to better understand what we can expect the outcome of an election to be. In a normal year, there are a few standard metrics that analysts will review to project likely election results. Some of these are: the favorable ratings of the president and the two major parties; whether voters believe the US is on the right or wrong track; and voters’ assessment of which party would better address the issues they believe are most important.

The bottom line is that while all of the factors normally considered in making election predictions point in favor of a Democratic win, the outcome of this year’s elections may be different because President Trump, and his operatives around the US, are taking steps that may impact this election.

If we were to use just these standard measures of electoral success, no one would fault Democrats for anticipating victory in November. The president’s approval and job performance ratings are in the mid-30% range. And while voter confidence in the Democrats is even lower (in the mid-20%’s), when asked which party they trust to do a better job of handling eight different issues (including healthcare, immigration, the deficit, the economy, cost of living, the Iran war, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) majorities or pluralities of voters say they have more confidence in the Democrats.

In addition to these numbers, it’s also important to remember that, more often than not, the party that holds the White House usually loses seats in midterm congressional elections. With President Trump’s very low approval ratings, it would be safe to assume that Republicans face the prospect of significant losses in November.

More disturbing for the GOP is the fact that the president doesn’t seem to get this. From his antics at his recent midterm convention to the hundreds of millions the president says he will spend on this election using a political action committee he personally controls, he is making a determined effort to have this election be about Donald Trump. For example, at that midterm convention, he bizarrely asked attendees to stand and pledge both to the flag and to him, “the greatest president in the history of the United States,” and to commit that they would vote to keep Republicans in control of Congress or, in his words, they could “go to hell!”

Despite Trump’s efforts, many Republican candidates, who read the polls and are listening to their voters, stayed away from the “convention” and have shied away from their election being a referendum on Trump.

The bottom line is that while all of the factors normally considered in making election predictions point in favor of a Democratic win, the outcome of this year’s elections may be different because President Trump, and his operatives around the US, are taking steps that may impact this election more than the quality of the candidates running, or voter perceptions of the performance of the president or their confidence in the two parties.

Since beginning his second term in the White House, Trump and his movement have taken steps to rig this midterm contest in the GOP’s favor. They engineered unprecedented redistricting of congressional seats in several states that may make it easier for Republicans to win five to seven congressional seats in November. The president has also been pushing a number of restrictions on mail-in voting—which, after months of back in forth in the courts, now seem to be on hold, at least for this year. Then there are the concerns that Mr. Trump may send immigration enforcement police or even the National Guard to polling places in heavily Democratic areas to suppress voter turnout. And this past week the Department of Justice sent a memorandum to election officials in all 50 states threatening imprisonment for any official who knowingly allows undocumented individuals to vote.

On a broader level, we are learning that Trump allies have been focusing on filling the ranks of election monitors and poll watchers. In the past volunteers in these positions are stationed at polls simply to observe and to assist if called upon to help solve issues that may occur. These new GOP recruits, however, have been weaponized to see their mission to make, not solve, problems. All of these disruptive tactics appear to be directed toward preparing a case that will pressure the Republican Speaker of the House to refuse to certify the results of the election—something like a replay of January 2021.

It goes without saying that nothing like this has ever happened before. But like so much of what President Trump has already done during his time in office “nothing like this has ever happened before” doesn’t mean it won’t be tried now.

Walking into a Starbucks means being greeted with the sounds of lively lobby conversation, milk being steamed, and baristas chatting with customers. As a customer you might love coming to Starbucks to customize your drink, enjoy a third space, or see your favorite barista.

I thrive in this environment, and I love connecting with my customers as a barista. I love my job, but Starbucks has shown us it has forgotten about baristas like me.

That’s why I’m joining my coworkers in calling on everyone who supports working people over corporations to boycott Starbucks.

It would cost Starbucks less than a single day’s sales to agree to a fair contract that would ensure we’re treated fairly—why wouldn’t the company want that?

Starbucks has lost its way. Workers like myself are trying our hardest to show up for our customers, but Starbucks continues to make our jobs difficult—from creating massive amounts of waste, extra costs, and work for us with the company’s failed AI inventory tool to introducing new beverage components that have put our health and safety at real risk.

The most alluring benefit to many Starbucks applicants—including me—is the promise of health insurance coverage. Now, Starbucks is raising health insurance premiums, forcing some workers to pay up to twice as much as before.

Starbucks wages start at just $15.25 or $16 an hour in 43 states. Many of us already struggle to get enough hours to pay rent or even qualify for health insurance, leaving some of us to rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid because Starbucks’ coverage is out of reach.

For years, baristas have shined a light on systemic issues at Starbucks including understaffing, chaotic scheduling, low wages, and too-few hours to qualify for the company’s benefits. Over the past five years, we’ve organized over 12,000 baristas who are fighting for a fair union contract that locks in better pay, better staffing, and enough hours to live on.

Still, Starbucks refuses to finalize a fair union contract after nearly half a decade of negotiations. Starbucks has to do more to earn the moniker “the best job in retail.”

This is exactly why we’re fed up, fired up, and united more than ever in our fight for a fair union contract. It would cost Starbucks less than a single day’s sales to agree to a fair contract that would ensure we’re treated fairly—why wouldn’t the company want that?

Union baristas have shown that our collective power can win meaningful change, and now we’re calling on organizations, political parties, and elected officials to stand with us and boycott Starbucks until our demands are met. Solidarity with baristas brought the company back to the bargaining table before, and we can do it again to take negotiations over the finish line to finalize a contract.

The truth is corporate leadership at Starbucks is out of touch and the poster child of corporate greed.

As the baristas who fuel the company’s struggle to make ends meet, CEO Brian Niccol brags about a $9 coffee as he rakes in tens of millions and commutes to work in a private jet. Our CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 2025 was a staggering 1,794 to 1.

For too long, Starbucks has behaved like it’s above the law, racking up more labor law violations than any company in modern US history.

We want change from Niccol, not platitudes. We want compensation for the value we create, not just a pat on the back, and we want our contract finalized.