First, whatever the final results in the Midterms, America is indebted to a couple dozen patriots standing figuratively in front of Trump’s big tank. Recall when he acted unstoppable after winning for the second time and then apparently neutered an entire political party? He - and we - are in a very different place now due significantly to their convincing collective voice explaining that Trump himself was the national emergency spurring his own backlash.

• Electeds especially Jamie Raskin, Robert Garcia, Elizabeth Warren, Sheldon Whitehouse, Chris Murphy, Cory Booker.

• Journalists notably Lawrence O’Donnell, Rachel Maddow, Jamelle Bouie, Michelle Goldberg, Jessica Tarlov, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Michael Tomasky, Greg Sargent, the NYT Editorial Board.

• Lawyers: Laurence Tribe, J. Michael Luttig, Andrew Weissman, Norm Eisen, Marc Elias, Jack Smith.

• Authors: Maggie Haberman, Robert Reich, Tim Snyder

• Celebrities: Robert DeNiro, Bruce Springsteen.

• Organizers: No Kings.

Because of them and millions of engaged and enraged citizens, Donald John Trump himself, as he menacingly sneers of others, “will be going through some things now.” And he’s showing how – like Friday’s meltdown when a Reuters reporter asked why he was cancelling two scheduled rallies and he went off imitating a toddler demanding his toy back.

Second, we now arrive at Inflection Election II, which will open the door to several other inflection points that’ll produce the next chapters of the American story.

The truth is no one has more than an educated guess since each event kinetically interacts with all the others. Here’s a “butterfly-effect” that’s not merely a metaphor but a reality. I attended lectures from visiting scholar Hannah Arendt when I was a student at Cornell in 1969 and heard her say, “a series of dots imply a progression but don’t determine where the next dot will appear.”

So let’s assume for today that Democrats win a 235 seat House Majority, a 53 seat Senate Majority, and 27 Governors, up from 23. Even this strong result will only begin to reflect whether a pathological Trump ends up a public pariah or whether Trumpism becomes a modern-day Hooverism obliterating the GOP for a generation.

Because Trump cannot temperamentally allow himself to look like a defensive loser in news stories, he’s likely on November 4th to pursue strategies to redirect public opinion if his GOP is “shellacked” on November 3. Or to see this from a more important angle: will the Trump Era set America back five years or 50 years? At least five big variables — and a few lesser ones — may provide the answer.

Inflection #1: RE-START IRAN WAR? He blew through numerous earlier threats to “obliterate” Iran because that would have been really dumb and Iran knew it. Until recently, it would have appeared immoral and beneath a super-power to play “Wag-the-Dog” for small media gains, especially when it came to the world’s most dangerous neighborhood while imperiling thousands of lives and the world economy to boot.

But that logic ignores that this drama queen lacks not only logic but also the character to resist trying to perform as a Strongman who can never be counted out. So after lying us into war and then trying to lie his way out a few months later. It’s now probable that he will shortly again unleash Pistol Pete Hegseth since nothing succeeds like excess.

Inflection #2: USE TREASON AS A POLITICAL TACTIC? “Treason” obviously is a strong word – on a par with “Hitler,” which is how JD Vance once referred to his current boss. But now that Trump and Blanche have suffered a humiliating string of six major judicial setbacks this week alone**, it’s probable that they’ll keep abusing their DOJ to search for another patsy like Judge Eileen Cannon or the same Supreme Court to bail him out – again.

**These decisions included a grand jury not indicting Cassidy Hutchinson, the Supreme Court upholding California’s refusal to hand over state voter rolls, another vacuous charge against James Comey, the unlawful firing of his lawyer-daughter from Main Justice, stopping construction of his prized golf course, dismissal of a “weaponized” case against FBI agents over Hunter Biden’s laptop and the rejection of preemptive action against Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola of Alaska.

Six major federal rebukes by judges using similar withering language in the week before a national election has to be some kind of record, right? By now it’s beyond doubt that nearly everything AG Todd Blanche does is designed to set up a Second Coup if the results don’t go TeamTrump’s way. That means pretending there are millions of “illegal aliens” voting to justify using the Insurrection Act or even Martial Law to escape accountability.

Even though Article I of the Constitution clearly gives states the power to establish the “time, place and manner” of federal elections – with no role for the president – his political history predicts he’ll roll the dice shouting stuff about a “stolen election.”

If regularly violating the Rule of Law, undermining Free Elections and trying to jail political opponents isn’t treasonous in the context of the greatest Democracy ever, what would be? When Blanche is eventually asked under oath by a congressional committee or a disbarment proceeding, “Was it your incompetence or corruption that produced the worst losing record in court of any attorney general ever?”

Inflection #3: ALIBI THIS? Trump’s never been big at accepting blame for anything. So even though he insisted that the Midterms be about him, it’d contradict his DNA to now accept responsibility for his failure. Get ready for a flood of absurd alibis that need not make sense but merely need to fill some air time to satisfy bewildered MAGA voters.

Guessing what they’ll be is a fool’s errand since the possibilities are infinite due to the “weave” of his wandering mind; e.g., blaming Iran and Ukraine for not surrendering early; blaming FOX for running 20 segments on the Alaska Sullivans’ scandal, not 50; blaming the Nobel Committee for…well, you get the picture.

Inflection #4: Will SCOTUS RISE TO THE OCCASION THIS TIME? Images of Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown come to mind. The odds are probably 50-50 depending on which case gets to them in the weeks after he makes his move to ignore the rule-of-law again.

The Roberts Six appear to be about the only people in the country naive enough to ignore how Trump is playing them for fools as he pretends to be seriously concerned about presidential prerogatives and they pretend to believe him.

For just one example, will any of the Republican majority – looking at the Himalayan avalanche of money slamming into the elections – begin to rethink their decision on Citizens United that allowed multi-billionaires to attempt their hostile takeover of our government? Might they admit to themselves to getting it wrong or even be ashamed to allow people with the net worth of small countries to openly buy ours?

It’s one thing for the “willful suspension of disbelief” to be an essential element in the theater so that we stay enthralled in Romeo and Juliet despite knowing the final act. But quite another for federal prosecutors and The Court — all of whom take an oath “to faithfully execute the law” — to indulge in the same magical thinking when our democracy is on the line because of their disproven theories about money and speech.

Inflection #5: WILL THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA DO A SINCERE AFTER-REPORT? What if anything have they learned from the American unicorn of a wannabe fascist? It’s likely that they will continue to tut-tut anyone who uses the “F word” to describe Trump’s admitted lunge for authoritarianism…or is it possible that some media-ites will rethink their failed both-sidesism when dealing with an entire political party that refused to play by the rules and the law

There are lesser but other pivotal moments coming with the potential to tilt the axis of history: it appears, for example, that a Rep. Massie-led discharge petition will attract a majority of House Members to vote to impeach Hegseth, which would further weaken #47; Will speaker-to-be Hakeem Jeffries be able to rise above a successful inside leader to propose a winning narrative to contest Trump’s continued bluster? Does Musk — a bottom-line guy — consider quitting the field of politics should his hundreds of millions spent to flip seats come up empty, as they did in the 2024 Wisconsin Supreme Court race? If Trump’s physical ailments, unhinged monologues and awful decisions keep pushing down his polls, could there come a moment when more GOP Members flee his sinking ship and make the respite of resignation and martyrdom more plausible and lock-in Vance’s grateful succession? And, of course, the biggest potential inflection point this decade will be if a Democratic president in 2029 engineers a paradigm shift or only a political one?

Will the sum of all these these inflection points emerging from the Midterms determine whether Trumpism becomes a Salem Witch Trials bizarre exception to our history or stays a poison in our political bloodstream like McCarthyism? That is, will our story-line end up with a reactionary populism or a progressive populism that voters in fact desire? A government for one family or all our families?

This is Mark Green, still in the distortion field known as The Inflection Zone.

Sorry, that’s not the way a serious Democracy works and voters are not that stupid.

Obama’s tan suit was not a big deal and neither is the new Alaska procedural kerfuffle since the highest state court has already ruled that both Dan Sullivans can run now that they’ve been identified on the ballot; and, in a ranked choice state in any event, the contest WILL end up in a head-to-head between Sen. Sullivan and Peltola.

Knowing of Trump’s favorite tactic of highlighting one thing while ignoring hundreds of contrary things, here’s this week’s devastating New York Times institutional editorial summarizing Trump’s incompetence, illegality, indecency and inflation. http://bit.ly/4iKUcJg

Also, it’s worth re-posting our “Scorecard” Substack earlier week that compares the major strengths/weaknesses of the two major parties rather than cherry-picking one aspect of a controversy in a loud voice. https://bit.ly/4e8ZAU1 It’s a joke to compare whatever happened in the Sullivan maneuver to a President and party that exhibits bad-faith every day in every way. Elmer Gantry pulled off just such hypocrisy for a long time…until he was exposed and chased out of town.

The law and tradition are clear. The only automatic disqualifications in a Senate contest is if a candidate isn’t over 35 and is not a citizen. Voters now can decide whether to vote based on Trump and FOX exaggerations or for a Democratic Senate checkmating The Donald.

Late next Tuesday night, we’ll likely know which party controls the 120th Congress—and by what margins. But in an era shaped by an all-or- nothing/the-check’s-in-the-mail/catch-me-if-you-can Trump, the Red-Blue clash is actually a complex two-front war. First of course is the electoral war largely culminating November 3. Second is the narrative front beginning on November 4 to answer the question posed by the British rock band Oasis in their popular song, “What’s The Story, Morning Glory?”

So over a very consequential 24-hour period next week, we’ll see their respective strengths and weaknesses collide. Which party wins an election? Which narrative wins the future? Might there be a mandate for a new economic populism?

Get your scorecard here, starting with Team Red’s lineup:

I. The Electoral War

1. Tip of the Spear. The GOP ticket is led by an unusually powerful tandem: the most powerful politician in the world and the richest person ever. Impressive.

2. The Rolling Blunder Tour: Trump has been traveling to over a dozen states to promote GOP tickets. But that’s proven to be a mixed blessing since his long monologues include pronouncements that inflation and gas prices are down, that the Ohio GOP senator has an attractive “ass”, that oil firms are getting “frickin’ rich” in his second term, all whilewhile admiring authoritarians over allies. Not impressive.

3. A Tsunami of Money: There’s been breathtaking SuperPAC funding including Elon Musk’s $440 million and another $400 million from POTUS.

4. Smears and Fears: Character attacks have dominated headlines, from Ramaswamy’s toxic ad exploiting the sexual abuse of a 12 year-old girl to VP Vance calling Abdul El-Sayed “psychotic” and repeated accusations that mainstream Democrats are dangerous communists.

5. Targeted Payoffs. Billions in federal spending are being deployed to woo below-water farmers due to tariffs alongside promised ACA rebates to millions of voters and tilting FEMA funds to red states.

6. Disinformation Engine: A relentless wave of falsehoods has blamed Ukraine for Putin’s invasion, denied official BLS inflation data, and magically promised imminent cheap gas…which is immoral yet also effective since it can “fool some of the people some of the time…” Except this “ol’ okee dokey,” to quote Barack Obama’s withering dismissal this week, doesn’t have much oomph after a decade of repetition.

7. Deflection Tactics: A so-far successful effort to ignore and cover-up predators in the Epstein files.

8. Weaponized Law Enforcement: The DOJ seems to be announcing an indictment or investigation a day on supposed voter fraud to set up the possible abuse of the Insurrection Act or even Martial Law to rig the election, if necessary.

Whether this multi-layered plan works or fails, it’s loud and attention-grabbing, like #47.

Team Blue, on the other hand, is relying on fewer but higher-quality weapons:

1. Superior Candidates: A roster of young, modern communicators like Jon Ossoff, James Talarico, Abdul El-Sayed and Rob Sand are fluent in social media—a stark contrast to Republican counterparts like Ken Paxton, Darline Graham, Roger Marshall and Mike Collins – all of whom are on the defensive.

2. No Pendulum: Democrats this year aren’t the ones fearing the typical midterm backlash against the party in power.

3. Grassroots Financing. Massive small-donor fundraising in close races mean that Democratic candidates can afford to reach voters with both their negative and positive themes.

4. A Motivated Base: The party’s base is livid and highly motivated to vote due to Trump’s emolumental corruption, poor economic performance, and dumb war.

5. The Trump Taint. Team Blue needs no reminder to hang #47’s failures, scandals and polls around the necks of all GOP nominees to force them to figure out whether they’re more scared of Donald or voters.]

Comparing the two, the Red Hats possess the tools and willfulness to do whatever it takes, however unlawful or immoral. But behind the Blue Wave are more popular positions on the two defining themes of this election: affordability and accountability, specifically how corruption worsens inflation.

A year ago, Democrats aimed to hold the House by a modest 10 seats, while looking at a 48-seat floor in the Senate. Today, non-partisan analysts believe Democrats could break 235 House seats and secure a 50+-seat Senate majority, with up to 10 Senate races still in play.

Probable Democratic pickups include North Carolina and Ohio, with potential flips stretching into Texas, Maine, Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, perhaps even Mississippi. With very few undecided voters remaining, the party of FDR, JFK, and Obama appears on the brink of winning the Congress back from the party of Hoover, Nixon, Trump.

One side is pretty confident; the other mildly panicked.

II. The Narrative Front

In the modern era, both sides have leaned into negative campaigning to paint the opposition as nuts. Historically, Republicans have shown an edge for this kind of branding–like calling Democrats the “party of treason,” to borrow Joe McCarthy’s dark but memorable phrase.

But six years into the Trump presidency, the landscape is shifting. With younger national Democrats rising and the era of 80-year-old nominees drawing to a close, here comes a daily competition of new ideas, policies, and philosophies to win over independent, younger, Latino, white suburban female voters…and even some non-college blue-collar ones from the usual GOP coalition.

This midterm contest will begin to answer that fundamental question: What’s the American Story? The winning formula will connect hard facts into something easily understood by the 50 percent of voters who wake up every day neither MAGA nor Progressive.

History shows that narratives can change outcomes. The North won the military Civil War yet the humiliated South developed a “Lost Cause” mythology that wins cultural debates to this day. Similarly, despite the trauma of Hoover’s Depression, corporate interests have long used their financial bullhorns to pose as working class heroes.

This narrative war is about to begin in earnest on “The Day After.” Republicans have proven more ruthless in their rhetoric but Democrats have more villainous and visible targets like Donald and Elon. And the GOP has to be sweating late ominous tells like bad inflation data, nearly unanimous rebuffs from both D and R judges, huge turnouts in early voting aided byTrump’s taunt to “pretend I’m on the ballot,” timely reminders of corruption and cruelty in headlines about Ambassador Guilfoyle and a televised firing squad, violent anti-establishment protests in both France and India as well as Lula’s stunning comeback in Brazil. Overshadowing all that of course was the landslide that ousted Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Trump’s bff.

In that spirit, here are two options for November 4: “Voters chose workers over billionaires because America is not for sale.” Or: “ENOUGH of Trump’s inflation, inequality, indecency and incompetence!”

A more dynamic version came from a young counter-protester on Donald Trump’s birthday this year. If you’re not inspired by her two minute rant — Moment on X — go back to your nap.

This is Mark Green, looking forward to next week.

Mark Green: Hey, Mark Green here again from the distortion field we call The Inflection Zone. Under that umbrella, twice a month I interview leading scholars, politicians, media-ites about politics and culture. We call it Changing America because what matters is not merely what you’re against, but what you’re for.

Welcome, Thom Hartmann, to Changing America.

Thom Hartmann: Hey, Mark. It’s great to be with my old boss. How are you?

Mark: The “boss” is in a bit of quotes because it’s like I was also, at the time, Rachel Maddow’s boss. We were talent-driven, not executive-driven at Air America Radio when I was its last president,

The Thom Hartmann Program has been aired three hours daily continuously for 23 years, often ranked as the number one terrestrial progressive talk show. AND he’s the author of 37 books, including the influential The Last Hours of Ancient Summer.

Thom’s an expert conversationalist on climate, economics, history, and politics, and a fan of his is Leonardo DiCaprio, some of whose documentaries came out of his relationship with Thom.

Initial question: Abraham Lincoln, pre-polling, would invite people into the White House, and they’d get on a line where he would talk to someone about patronage or problems. He called it his “baths” and is how he understood public opinion, he said. Your radio show is like your baths, because you hear from people all the time in a quantity that few of us ever do. What are people saying are the top issues now against Trump?

Thom: So every day, I take an hour and a half worth of calls and what I’m hearing is that people are furious.

We’re in an age of rage right now in that Donald Trump is selling out America to Putin, that he is destroying our alliances with countries like Canada, for God’s sake, that he’s destroyed our reputation around the world, that he and Putin and Xi are talking about getting together to carve the world up in a second Yalta now, with Steve Witkoff – the guy that, with Jared Kushner, has been negotiating possible oil deals while kissing Putin’s ass and shining his shoes – telling him “you’re a great humanitarian.”

Mark. I don’t understand something: if you took a poll in the U.S. – Zelensky or Putin – it’d be 80/20. We support an ally of America, an heroic guy fighting for survival against an invading army. Why would Trump jump on that so hard? Politically, it makes no sense.

Thom: I think that Trump is – and all his whole entire life has been – a fascist.

He wants to be Putin when he grows up. Putin is one of the richest men in the world, universally feared or respected, depending on which country you’re talking about. Trump doesn’t believe in democracy. He’s always run little kingdoms with a half a dozen employees where he’s the absolute lord and master and everybody has to do what he says.

He does not like democracy. He does not like America. He’s up front about it. That’s why he goes after the media just like Putin does. That’s why he’s trying to rig elections just like Putin does. It’s why he’s arresting members of Congress just like Putin does. I think Putin is mentoring him through this whole process.

Mark: He’s buoyed by self-love and imperial self-delusion. At the same time, the 6-3 Roberts Court has given him unlimited power, officially saying that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for core functions.

Now that we’ve watched what Trump and Musk have done, is there any part of the Roberts Six that regrets decisions allowing one man to alone spend over $366 million in this one cycle? What could they do in the future now that we’ve seen their ratification of fascism?

Thom: You know, this project started back in the 1980s in a big way.

I mean, we could go back to the Powell Memo in 1971. Roberts worked for Reagan in the Justice Department, and I found a 27-page memo that Roberts wrote to Reagan and to other people in the DOJ suggesting that they start using “court stripping,” introducing legislation that invokes Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution saying the Supreme Court may not rule on something.

He wanted to use that to do away with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and to outlaw abortion. So this is a long-term project for Federalist Society billionaires who don’t believe in democracy. In their view, Democracy is the mob that just wants to tax them.

So at some point, there is this kind of natural progression, which slowly leads to the accumulation of massive wealth at the top. You know, the RAND Corporation says $71 trillion since Reagan came into office has been taken out of the homes and retirement savings of working-class people and put into the big money bins of the top 1%.

You get this massive inequality, and you get a class of people who want to maintain that. But at that point, the oligarchs have two choices. They can object or do what they did in 1933 and say, “Okay, we’ll go along with you, FDR, so go ahead and tax us and we’ll just back off,”

[But then they risk an American leader] doing what Putin did in 2003 when he in effect said, “No, I’m gonna squash you like a bug. We will not have protests. We will not have media.”] These six people on our Supreme Court have brought us to this point, and they’re going to have to soon make decisions about whether they are going to hand that kind of power over to Trump to end democracy

Mark: The Buckley v. Valeo decision in 1976 and Citizens United decision in 2010 basically said that money-is-speech in the context of elections. But the public doesn’t like that by a huge majority.

So is there any way to look forward to a Democratic administration appointing a few more seats on the court eventually and pulling back from Citizens United…and/or, we haven’t had a constitutional amendment in a while, which would be overwhelmingly popular.

Thom: I think there’s two options here that have historical precedent in the United States.

One is that we pass a law that basically rules that money is not speech and corporations are not persons. The most solid way to do that is with a constitutional amendment, as you point out. You can do a lot of it legislatively, and that was included in the For the People Act.

It passed the House of Representatives and got more than 50 votes in the Senate, but Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin stabbed us all in the back, refusing to overrule the Republican filibuster.

The second thing is the Court itself. In the first term of Franklin Roosevelt, the Supreme Court had been knocking down things that he had passed. They knocked down the minimum wage, and the next thing on their list was Social Security, which was the crown jewel for FDR. And so he started publicly talking about changing the Court.

He had a plan where five of the justices on the Court – all over 70 – become one vote. They’re still on the Court so we satisfy the Constitution, but they only have one vote and we’ll bring four new people in to get to nine votes.

Public opinion was actually with Roosevelt, and he probably would’ve been able to pull this off. But a couple of reactionary justices began to support Roosevelt’s New Deal, a flip that famously became called “the switch in time that saved nine”….which mooted the new restructuring for what critics called “Court-Packing.” [Editor’s Note: so FDR succeeded in his goal though not his plan.]

In other words, public opinion can affect the Court, and threats to the status of the Court can affect the Court.

Mark: In that spirit of big changes, what other things are you hearing from your callers?

Thom: I think there’s a growing consensus that we need to expand the commons, essentially. The commons is the stuff that we all own, that the government administers on behalf of we-the-people.

Every other advanced democracy in the world has said that healthcare is part of the commons. We need to expand the commons there by saying Medicare for All…everybody has access to healthcare. About a third of them not only provide free college for everybody, but about a third of them will actually pay you to go to college.

Here in the United States, of course, it’s the other way around. We got one and a half trillion dollars in student debt, which did not exist when Reagan came into office. We can talk about how that came about, but that has to change, too. We need to make college and trade schools available to everybody after high school.

There’s a huge consensus that it’s time for the rich to start paying their damn fair share of taxes.

Mark: What happens when Republican candidates then say, “Aha, that’s Democratic Socialism. You’re a Socialist, even a Communist”? My question is, does that have any purchase in 2026 America as if it’s the 1950s and we’re talking about Tailgunner Joe McCarthy?

Might that work to move some voters in two weeks, or is it just like the immigrant caravans were – that is, just late scaremongering that Trump raised in recent cycles?

Thom: Yeah. We’ll find out. I mean, El-Sayed basing his entire campaign basically on Medicare for All. You know, the guy’s an MD.

So I think the socialism scaremongering has passed. Now they’re trying to scare us with Trans and Muslims. I think increasingly Americans are realizing that it’s just BS.

Mark: You, mention, Abdul El-Sayed.

You and I, in different ways, have been in the communications business. Talarico, Ossoff, Buttigieg, Abdul – these are historically eloquent and shrewd talkers. Have you interviewed any or some of them?

Thom: No. My show is largely not guest driven. It’s mostly host driven.

Mark: I expect that my adult children will see someone as president among these four. Who among them do you think – it’s a personal opinion – might have the talent and brilliance to be our JFK or Barack Obama?

Thom: Increasingly, I’m thinking Jon Ossoff, but, you’re right, these are four real rock stars. I’d add JB Pritzker to that list, who I think is vastly underestimated, and a billionaire.

Mark: Now, while the word billionaire may not appeal to our audience but it matters. If Pritzker spends a few hundred million dollars – which is legal but not pretty – and he sticks to a populist platform, which his record reflects – don’t you think he could be really competitive in ‘28, even though he’s not maybe now in polls?

Thom. Yeah, I really do. I really think that Jon Ossoff is building a strong case for himself. Abdul El-Sayed, give him a couple of years in the Senate.

Mark: While your show may not be interview-driven, you’ve interviewed many bona fide liberal stars over the years. Putting Bernie aside, anyone stand out?

Thom. I’m blown away by Sheldon Whitehouse. The guy’s command of the facts and his understanding. I would love to see him as president. I would love to see him as attorney general.

Mark: If you were AOC, a skilled, authentic progressive voice, would you run for Senate for the Schumer seat – whom she is ahead of right now in polling – or go for president?

Thom: That’s a good question. Yeah.

You know, I may be wrong on this, but I think the only person to ever go from the House of Representatives to the White House was John Quincy Adams. At the most, it’s been two, right? [Editor: James Garfield also]. It’s a really, really hard lift.

Mark: Last question. Only one industry is mentioned in the Constitution.-- it’s the media, the press in the First Amendment.

There’s been tremendous criticism of the mainstream media, in general, and especially now the oligarch-owned mainstream media – Wall Street Journal, LA Times, X, Washington Post, the major networks. If you ran any of those institutions – and you’re not an oligarch, so I think your odds are long, but follow my hypothetical – what could and should they have been doing these past couple of years with this not wannabe fascist, but an actual fascist if you look at all the evidence?

Thom: They’ve made the mistake of thinking that Trump was a conventional politician. He was never a conventional politician. People want big change.

They don’t want the, you know, the same old, same old, same old. They’re sick of it. 45 years of neoliberalism has gutted the middle class. We’ve gone from 66 Percent of us being in the middle class with one paycheck when Reagan came into office, to 41 percent of us now, and it requires two paychecks.

I think this is a huge failure of our media. But by the way, the German media made the same mistakes in 1931, ‘32, ‘33. You can go back. There’s people who’ve documented it well. William Shirer’s book – The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich – is probably the best.

Mark: To share something about my personality – I read Shirer’s book on my honeymoon!

Thom: I read it when we moved to Germany for a year, and it was just, you know, an amazing insight. That was in the ‘80s, and I knew several people who had been in Hitler’s army. Everybody should read that book because reading that book right now is like reading, you know, the newspaper.

Mark: Critics had never been allowed to use the Hitler word in analyzing Trump, and the mainstream media never does.

But it’s increasingly gonna come up because of how he’s threatening to upend the election if he doesn’t win the election. And it’s a question whether his people and MAGA voters in general will ever admit what they’ve been doing, soon or ever. I had a friend who just passed at 100 years old, a lawyer, and he was a young army official who interrogated Nazi officers after the war about what they did and what they regretted.

He told me that their Nazism was so integral to what they were that even when shown pictures of children who were slaughtered, they couldn’t confront it. And so it was very hard for them to change, just like I think Trump and his people – if and when he loses – will be very hard to change.

Thom, congratulations on all your success, despite being my technical employee at Air America. You’ve gone beyond that. You, Franken, and Maddow have been stars who will shine for a long time to come. Thank you, and thank Louise

Thom: Thank you, Mark. And, and you know, you played a role in launching my career. I appreciate that too. It’s great to see you again, and keep up the great work you’re doing.

Mark: Well, thanks for the compliment which I don’t deserve but will listen to. This is Mark Green for Changing America and The Inflection Zone, which is getting clearer and clearer as we get closer to November 3rd and the presidential election in 2028.

We’re also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Instagram, and YouTube! Make sure to subscribe to follow along with new Changing America episodes and all other updates from The Inflection Zone.

[Author’s note: If you think Trump is a pathological solipsist unable to abandon the M.O. that made him the most powerful person on earth, what follows is farce. But if you believe reality is like gravity, read on.]

You’ve come a long way from when you refused to lease your father’s apartments to people with last names like Mamdani to winning the presidency twice (sorry, not three times) and now deciding, in effect, whether American democracy survives. You’re not in Queens anymore.

Sir, despite our obvious differences, I have an idea that may be useful at a fraught moment. All politicians have big egos, but yours by all accounts is interplanetary, and it has brought you to the brink of either historic success or lasting disgrace. The final result depends on three metrics that always mattered most to you: vanity, money and history.

On vanity, you’re the room where it happens. Everyone in the world knows your name (Fred and Roy would be proud!), and you drive the news more than anyone alive by a factor of ten. On money, you’ve gone from periodic bankruptcies to turning a $413 million inheritance (per The New York Times) into a net worth of over $4 billion, thanks largely, critics argue, to self-dealing. Yet even your Democratic successors may not be able to claw that back since federal conflict-of-interest laws exempt presidents, as you know so well.

But you’re about to fail your history exam.

You’ve long been a near-Houdini, escaping prosecutors and assassins while prosecuting your rivals and being a character assassin. Now your familiar tactics - dissembling, menace, scandal fatigue, slander plus the promise of a Golden Age - seem to be running out of steam and luck.

If your party loses the midterms in two weeks, then what? I have a Plan B.

You can keep delivering lounge act monologues to shrinking MAGA crowds while a growing majority of Americans see you as an epic sore loser, if not a fading fascist. The latest Fox poll marks corruption voters’ top concern, ahead of inflation. That’s Fox.

Or you can attempt a credible Nixon-to-China: flip the narrative to win a better place in history, since the Nobel Peace Prize and Mount Rushmore appear out of reach.

Naive and far-fetched? Probably. It’s hard to imagine someone who sides with Putin over Zelensky and who calls Abdul El-Sayed “Mohamed” soon executing a 180-degree turn. Yet since this big-time shift would be good for you, your family and your country, may I have the temerity to suggest a script for your final escape?

Thursday, Nov. 5:

“To all Americans: No one can say I didn’t give this my all. I held rallies everywhere, posed as ‘on the ballot’ and made huge donations to Republican nominees, all in the tradition of a muscular Reaganism. But numbers are numbers – otherwise known as ‘the bottom line’ – and the numbers last Tuesday say that the GOP lost control of the Congress.

For decades in business I made money reading and reacting to interest rates, market shifts and property values. Pretending nothing happened two days ago isn’t smart, as my genius uncle would tell me. So today I’m adjusting by kicking off Change, for Good, initially with four fresh approaches to help unite and fix America.

No lawfare. I’m withdrawing every lawsuit that relitigates 2020, an election the courts have uniformly found I lost by 74 electoral votes and 7 million popular votes. Why beat a dead horse? I’ll also urge the Attorney General to review any cases that look like partisan retribution. The High Court says I technically can order revenge prosecutions but it’s a bad look, and I’m done with it.

Elections. Due to the Roberts Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010, one person is now legally pouring $366 million into one party. Is it any wonder that 80 percent of Americans reject the argument that money- is-speech, as if $366 million were some guy on a soapbox? We’ll propose new laws, even a constitutional amendment, so elections aren’t auctions.

Borders without brutality. We need secure borders and the deportation of immigrants with criminal records. However, that no longer will mean armed ICE agents assaulting law-abiding people or sending them to countries they’ve never lived in. I’ll shortly propose a bipartisan bill to retrain every agent, dismiss the unqualified, cut the bloated $70 billion budget by two-thirds and redirect the savings to Trump Bonds for future babies. From ICE to NICE.

Enough war. Effective today, Pete Hegseth leaves the Pentagon for an ambassadorship to be named later. I’m directing the Joint Chiefs to deliver their best plans to end the Iran conflict, to protect Ukraine’s democratically elected government, and to repair relations with our oldest allies, starting with Canada and NATO.”

Donald, what’s the downside of this program for your last two years, beyond a few wingers balking, as some did after Nixon’s trip to China? If you think changing your mind when conditions change shows weakness, ask Joe Biden whether he regrets waiting so long before yielding to Father Time.

These proposals are popular, and they fit your healthy instinct to get back on offense. They would also avoid the risk of Martial Law leading to Tiananmen Square, lower the odds of impeachment and conviction, cool prosecutors’ ardor to pursue you and your family, and perhaps salvage the name that you bequeath to your grandchildren. Doing nothing, frankly, assures history will keep grading you the worst president.

To borrow Reagan’s useful metaphor, consider this a new beginning to be your “pony” in a room full of horseshit. What have you got to lose?

Unfortunately, your imminent problem is not whether it’s a good move to enhance your dismal stature…surely you recall the axiom that “when you’re in a hole, stop digging.” Rather – after your very bad month of more inflation, Guilfoyle and Zacharia fumbles, coverups of Bahrain and Epstein, and worse, looking like Putin’s sock puppet – it may be too late.

Sincerely

Mark Green, The Inflection Zone

“Great battles are won years before they’re fought,” wrote the renowned Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu in his book The Art of War.

Major elections also usually turn on key realities before voting begins: How’s the economy? Candidate qualities? Any wars or scandals? Midterms or presidential year?

By those standard measures, TeamTrump started out on Labor Day in a hole due to his record on inflation, war, corruption and Epstein. Yet Mr. Bravado then resorted to his usual tactic of “doubling down” in the hope that his strongman pose could deflect attention away from his electoral weaknesses. He implored his voters, for example, to act as if he were on the ballot.

Careful what you wish for.

His national polling in September was just barely 40 percent positive and the generic ballot matchup favored Democrats by four to five points. Yet in these final few weeks, his popularity has plunged toward a record-low 30 percent (Pew, Reuters, AP) and 8-10 percentage points on the generic ballot.

Late breaking news in an election cycle, however, can create a lens that the 10-20 percent of undecided voters see through by election day…like FBI Director James Comey’s resurrection of Hillary’s server “scandal” with only 11 days to go in 2016.

Here are eight Trumpian stories now dominating the news that separately or together could potentially blowback on Republican congressional prospects forced to defend his erratic extremism:

1. AFFORDABILITY: i.e., Inflation up. Trump keeps insisting that up-is-down and there’s no affordability problem…yet the final BLS inflation data produced this killer New York Times front page headline yesterday “Rising Energy Costs Put Inflation at a Rapid Pace.” That sure undermines Trump’s rosy claims that people weren’t paying higher gas and grocery prices. Or as Groucho famously put it, “who you gonna believe – me or your lying eyes”?

   According to a FOX poll, the public opposes the Administration’s inflation record by 77-22 percent.

2. CORRUPTION, i.e., Guilfoyle out: It’d be hard to conjure a worse example of emolumental graft than the MAGA guy who revealed that Greek Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle had tried to shake him down for $100,000 to pay off her AMEX bill and buy her influence. Trump had to admit that he “didn’t like that [WSJ] article” – not the corrupt act but the reporting of it – and that Don Jr. had in the past “dated” her…when they’d been engaged for four years.

   Since she obviously wouldn’t have been picked for this post if she weren’t Junior’s gal, she was forced to resign. Headlines ensued, including a major editorial in even Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post condemning the cancer of corruption.

3. HELP RUSSIA DEFEAT UKRAINE. i.e., Rooting for the invader over the invaded. Trump this week announced he would violate existing American law on sanctions by suspending them against Russia and in order to purchase their diesel fuel. At the same time, his ally Elon Musk stopped Starlink from providing Ukraine essential intelligence on how to shoot down incoming missiles.

   In a Newsmax interview Trump – himself a former reality TV host – unloaded on Zelenskyy as a “mediocre comedian” who was a “disgrace” for refusing Russia’s demands to settle the war they started. Yet in polls, Americans side with the elected Zelenskyy over the imperialist despot Putin by some 80-20 percent. Headlines ensued.

4. INCOMPETENCE: i.e. Lying when your one job is to tell the truth. Before appointing Katie Zacharia as his new press secretary, Trump admitted relying on "his own gut intuition" during "a brief phone call" after watching her on Fox News.

   Oops. She not only flop-sweated her way through her initial meeting with the media but also liesd – and dozens of times previously – by claiming she was a lawyer and an attorney who passed the California Bar Exam. Despite seeming to be out of “central casting” from the movie Legally Blonde as ironically representing the biggest ‘blonde’ presidential liar in history, the immediate question became whether she could last longer than a head of lettuce. Headlines ensued. [Double oops, a headline on deadline showed lettuce lasted longer!- MG]

5. VIOLENCE: i.e., Nothing says testosterone like a televised firing squad. When Pete Hegseth – a calisthenics coach running the Pentagon – announced that the killer of 13 soldiers at Ft. Hood would be the first convicted murderer in over 90 years to die by firing squad – and televised to boot – Trump said that he “absolutely” agreed with Pistol Pete. After blowback from both parties about how that warrior move might affect children watching and ISIS recruiters, however, Trump fortunately changed his mind. Headlines ensued.

6. ILLEGALITIES: i.e., A judicial losing streak to parallel the 1962 Mets. Several federal courts have just overuled our recidivist president when he denied press passes to three major media platforms, ordered the Postal Service to stop sending mail-in ballots to confidential state voting lists, ignored a judicial order to stop destroying trees to make way for a private golf course on public property, spent $20 million in taxpayers’ money on political ads…and when 26 times in 26 court rulings – involving Democratic and Trump judges – his DOJ lost attempts to force states to submit voter rolls to DHS to hunt for non-citizen voting, which almost never occurs. More bad headlines ensued.

   So Susie Wiles, how’s that strategy of “Let-Trump-be-Trump” working out?

   7. THREAT OF A.I: i.e., Armageddon or Y2k? With four simultaneous, nasty docs/films out this month on A.I./Musk/Zuckerberg + hatred of data centers, will fury at AI techbros rise? Already some polls in rural Republican areas in Texas are seeing a backlash against these huge facilities draining water and raising electric rates, along with the reasonable fear of job losses among younger voters.

   8. A MOUNTAIN OF MONEY. How much is too much? Last is the double-edged sword of several hundred million dollars being spent by dark money Super PACs in congressional and gubernatorial contests in Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Michigan and Maine. This may become a real-world test of whether such unprecedented spending this late can turn out GOP voters or turn off everyone else due to the annoying repetition…and the fact that Trump’s biggest donor from 2024 – Elon Musk – has alone pledged to spend $366 million. That is, one person spending 10 percent of what all contributors spent in all congressional races in inflation-adjusted dollars the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections.

   Headlines again ensued, though it was unclear whether the money would help GOP candidates more than it provided Democrats with a new closing argument: ”Stop Musk from buying our democracy.”

We’ll shortly know whether all this late news had no influence, a little sway or made a big difference in whether Democrats win narrowly in 2026 or in a semi-realignment like they did in 1974 after Watergate. That in turn would likely affect Trump’s reported plans to use the Insurrection Act or Martial Law to undermine losses by pretending non-citizen voters were the new Pearl Harbor.

We‘ll soon find out whether these easy-to-understand stories coalesce into the already growing narrative that Trumpers are an elite class of corrupt bad-faith actors obsessed with grievance and greed…the Rule-of-Law or Pay-to-Play wins…there’s a Blue Wave or a ripple..and Donald Trump ends up as Ronald Reagan or Viktor Orbán.

This is Mark Green from the distortion field we call The Inflection Zone..

SUMMARY: As the GOP spends hundreds of millions on late negative ads, below is a suggested strategy and narrative for interested Democrats in close races —first, yes assume the epically unpopular Trump’s “on the ballot” to tarnish your rival at every opportunity and second, frame everything under the memorable banner of ”Progress not Corruption,” ideally with the double-barreled rhetoric that “we-cannot-afford-their-sleaze.”

Trump’s seething admission that “I hate my opponents” and “under Article II, I can do anything” has pushed America to an Inflection Election when voters determine whether Trumpism survives Trump or whether it becomes a pariah ideology like McCarthyism.

What follows is a Declaration of Progress built on Democrats’ track record of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Affordable Care Act + Civil Rights/Environmental/ Consumer/Labor law reforms that enhance the health and safety of everyone. As Paul Wellstone used to say, “We’re all better off when we’re all better off.”

On the other hand, what is the legacy of Trump Republicans? It’s Jeffrey Epstein, Kimberly Guilfoyle, a billionaire’s Ballroom, extreme wealth inequality, a medieval televised execution and a President who elevates Putin over Zelensky and his family over ours.

This provides voters a vivid choice next month: looking down to Trump’s gutter of hate or looking up to the horizon of a stronger democracy.

I. A DECLARATION OF PROGRESS

1. Stop Political Prosecutions. Trump’s ‘Injustice Department’ is based on the unpatriotic rationale of “retribution” – his word – against the other party. That’s why a couple of hundred federal judges – Republican and Democrat – have ruled their actions illegal or unconstitutional, not occasionally but usually. Our Founders believed in the Rule of Law, not the Law of the Jungle.

A South American dictator once said his governing principle was “To my enemies the law, to my friends facilities.” Sound familiar? But persecuting innocent critics and pardoning only convicted Republicans and big donors is not the American Way.

2. Stop lying and gaslighting about everything. Democrats make mistakes…but we have not and will not distort the truth when it is politically convenient, like the over 30,000 documented lies and falsehoods in the Lyin’ King’s first term alone. In his second term, it’s worse – every time he opens his mouth, our collective intelligence shrinks. Any Democratic candidate should ask their opponent, "Most people don't believe a word he says, why do you?"

Democracy pays an immeasurable price when the public loses faith in their elected representatives and institutions. You won’t hear us say that an ethnic group is “eating dogs and cats” or relapse to the 1950s by attacking all opponents as “communists and socialists.” Now that IS “deranged.”

We should instead be guided by the words of the moral philosopher Sissela Bok. “Imagine a society where word and gesture could never be counted on. Questions asked, answers given, all would be worthless. Trust however is a social good as much as the air we breathe and water we drink.”

3. Stop sacrificing science on the altar of ideology. Should TeamDem defeat TeamTrump next month, vaccine-deniers who endanger the health of our children will not be heralded as heroes. Nor would we crush USAID funding and consign millions to death in poorer nations.

And climate deniers who place our planet at risk will have to find work elsewhere. Climate Violence is not a hoax but a horror. That’s the overwhelming consensus of the scientific and international communities…though not the wishes of fossil fools and their allies in a government that refuses to admit that glaciers are melting and wildfires spreading.

4. Stop the federal military occupation of urban neighborhoods. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act explicitly prohibits using federal troops against U. S. citizens, unless there’s a bona fide rebellion or insurrection that overwhelms local authorities…like the Civil War in 1861 and state-sponsored terrorism in the Jim Crow South.

The Founders were very wary of having a big standing army that could be used against civilians or to sow violence rather than prevent it. Presidents cannot be allowed to assemble personal armed militia to menace, injure or kill critics. Time to end The ICE Age because the U.S. should not have an S.S.

5. Stop suppressing speech. Trump consistently uses the huge hammer of the federal budget, military contracts and selective prosecutions to force people to self-censor and control public opinion…which many universities, law firms and media platforms have had to endure. As a unanimous SCOTUS concluded in NRA v. Vullo in 2024, “Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties to suppress views that the government disfavors.”

Let’s remind Todd Blanche and Clarence Thomas that the pro-monarchy side lost 250 years ago.

II. NEW POLICIES

It’ll likely prove even harder to enact big policy changes than to resist the specific abuses above. But since America needs better ideas to achieve Lincoln’s “more perfect union,” our Declaration of Progress will include “Do’s” as well as “Don’ts,” even if they appear visionary today.

The way fresh solutions go from impossible to implausible to inevitable is to win over public opinion based on the upbeat belief that, in the phrase of Norman Cousins, “No one’s smart enough to be a pessimist.” So:

6. Grow a More Affordable Economy. The country just saw what happens when multi-billionaires and corporatists grab the steering wheel of government—can anyone seriously defend an economic system where four individuals have as much wealth as 150 million Americans? We should remember the lessons of the Gilded Age and Great Depression in order to aspire to a society with no trillionaires but more thousandaires … otherwise known as the Middle Class.

Our program of economic populism -- as contrasted to their corporate populism -- will be based on five cornerstones: anti-monopoly legislation and enforcement so that big business can’t impose big price increases; world trade unburdened by self-immolating and illegal American tariffs; a tax code that recaptures trillions from the richest to help struggling families with health care, child care and education; an increased federal minimum wage that hasn’t budged in 16 years; and “Wealth Impact Statements” that would require the OMB to disclose how major bills might worsen wealth disparities.

7. Pursue Public Service, not Self-Service. Our conflict-of-interest laws apply to all public servants except ironically the president – since the Founders and early Congresses never imagined a shameless and unaccountable con-artist in the office occupied by George Washington. Yet many voters bought into the Reality TV story-line that we needed a businessman to run government.

Don Jr., Eric, Jared and Ivanka sure think it’s a great idea for THEIR family to emolumentally milk the White House of over two billion dollars, so far in crypto coins and insider trading.

Hence the Qatari gift of a $400 million plane, Putin’s pal paying for a big chunk of Junior’s wedding, a deal to stop any IRS audits of Trump’s previous tax returns, lucrative contracts for Kristi Noems’s boyfriend and using taxpayer money to pay for worshipful Trump pre-election ads. Their list of corruption – their creed of greed – seems only limited by term limits.

Because constitutional prohibitions against self-enrichment have proven ineffectual, the 120th Congress and 48th President should enact new conflict laws so future presidents don’t leave office worth many billions more than when they entered it by being corrupt in broad daylight.

8. Aspire to a multiracial coalition to win back America. Tolerance is the glue that binds our multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-faith nation together. But TeamTrump’s racial back-sliding has instead tried to perfume the history of slavery, rename military facilities after Confederate generals, deport brown people without due process, insult Black journalists especially and pretend that America can prosper by opposing diversity after centuries of exclusion.

9. Re-balance the Court. As a result of abuse in the Senate confirmation process, several reactionary decisions and ethical lapses by some justices, the High Court’s 6-3 super-majority has suffered a steep decline in trust, from 60 percent to 35 percent in just four years.

Let’s propose new ideas for term limits and additional jurists – by law or amendment – to make sure the Court more broadly reflects the values of all citizens and not just those in the Federalist Society.

10. Restore and strengthen Democracy. By allowing unlimited secret money to flood campaigns and permitting extreme gerrymandering, our system of free and fair elections has become very expensive and very unfair.

Since Standard Oil did everything to the Pennsylvania legislature in the 1880s except “refine it,” as one reformer then put it, money has been a thumb on the political scale for generations…though Elon Musk’s $270 million contribution to Donald Trump in 2024 and another $366 million this cycle to hold the Congress were unusually elephantine. Since Dred Scott, has there been a more insane decision than Citizens United concluding that political donations are merely “speech” – as if Musk’s $600 million-plus is just another John Q. Public’s soap box.

So we will work to overcome that deeply unpopular decision, prohibit extreme gerrymanders (one algorithm would do the trick) and re-establish the right to vote of the 15th Amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act that MLK enacted and John Roberts destroyed.

This means rejecting any return to one-man rule, serial lawlessness, disinformation, racism, glorification of violence and corrupt profiteering. Can Republican enablers of Trump’s dangerous extremism make and keep a similar pledge? They didn’t and now they can’t. Make them pay for being apologists for what is a unique example of disorganized crime and for the costs, corruption and war of their own tribe.

We instead believe in the party of FDR, JFK and Obama, not the party of McCarthy, Nixon and The Donald. For it’s not just Left vs. Right or Us vs. Them, it’s only us pursuing change for good.

Mark Green was the first elected Public Advocate for NYC and author or editor of 26 books on policy and politics, including Who Runs Congress?, the largest-selling book ever on our national legislature.

Mark Green: I’m your host, Mark Green, and today we’re doing our twice a month podcast, Changing America. Heather McGhee is the past head of the action-tank, Demos, in New York City, past chair of the board of Color of Change and frequent guest on cable and Sunday shows.

Most significantly, she’s the author of the best-selling, The Sum of Us in 2021 which I read then and thought was in the ranks of books on race by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Isabel Wilkerson. Welcome to Changing America, Heather.

Heather McGhee: Thanks for having me, Mark. It’s good to see you.

Mark: For those who might have slept through the year of 2021, can you remind us what you meant in your book by your powerful frames and metaphors about “drained pools” and the GOP “zero-sum” paradigm on race?

Heather: The Sum of Us is really a book about my journey to figure out why we can’t seem to have nice things in America.

Nice things like clean air and water, free and fair elections, democracy that’s responsive to everyone. You know, great public schools in every neighborhood. a strong middle class that’s growing and thriving and looks like America. That was my career for decades.

I came to the realization that we are being held back from achieving those nice things by zero-sum racial stories, stories that are sold for profit by wealthy and powerful people, and the politicians they pay for, mostly in the right wing but not entirely. And that zero-sum story says that you should fear is the growing presence of people of color, you should fear racial equality because that means that you and your family will be worse off.

When that thinking happens, you end up with lots of self-sabotaging towns and cities across America – not just in the South – which were willing to drain their segregated public swimming pools when threatened with integration.

This metaphor, drained pool politics, for when white Americans instead preferred to go without things that they really need -– healthcare, debt-free college, living wages, environmental regulation, pro-voter policies because of the threat that these are actually going to people of color.

Mark: I have a hard time understanding this entirely. Okay, 400 plus years of racism in the U.S., first formal slavery and then Jim Crow. How do you explain Trump’s continuing racism a mere 165 years after Appomattox and the Civil War Amendments, the same racial divisions, voter suppression and economic discrimination, along the same lines even on the same geographic lines?

Heather: Yeah, if you think about it, it’s not that shocking. We are a very young country. We were founded on this belief in a hierarchy of value along race. That structure was around ensuring that profit center of enslavement and that ideology of racial hierarchy.

And part of the reason we’re fighting that war is that even after the guns were laid down, the South kept fighting [in other ways.] They kept fighting an ideological war, a narrative war, a story war. You know, there are great books about the way that the South actually won the war with their Lost Cause ideology.

I think that drained pool politics helps us understand the ways in which the kind of New Deal era of public goods, the sort of liberal consensus that happened in the first half of the 20th century, really fell apart when wealthy and powerful people were able to use, let’s call it dog whistle politics or this kind of coded racial language to make a story that says that the reason why your family isn’t thriving is because of immigrants.

The reason why your schools aren’t successful and safe is because of Black and brown children or your Black and brown neighbors. That story is still a successful one because it deflects from who’s really responsible.

Mark: Well, you’re referring to right-wing provocateur Lee Atwater, who famously said a few decades ago that Republicans should continue to exploit racial tensions for votes by innuendo rather than simply, you know, using the N word.

It sure seems that the Trump Republicans have adopted and updated Atwater with their relentless campaign and full weight of federal power against DEI – for diversity, equity, and inclusion. How would you advise Democrats to start to deconstruct that slogan and story?

Heather: You know, the folks who are against diversity are against the tide of public opinion. They are against progress. They are against what most Americans know is good for business, is good for our country, is good for democracy, is good for neighborhoods and communities. What we’re seeing right now is not some sort of backlash where the majority of Americans are opposed to the kinds of racial progress that was clamored for by the largest social demonstration movement in American history in the years leading up to and then accelerating after the murder of George Floyd.

This is a sabotage, Mark, by wealthy, powerful people who have always wanted to keep mediocre white men over-represented in the halls of power and keep everybody else under-represented and locked out.

Mark: Hasn’t it been a pretty effective sabotage given that phrase and their implementation of it in their fight against universities, corporations, the Voting Rights Act?

Heather: Yeah, they have been relentless in their desire to use every lever of power that they have to repeal the multiracial progress of the 20th century.

The Supreme Court has repealed affirmative action for everybody except for white men. The federal government has tried to eliminate all forms of equal opportunity and civil rights enforcement through its branches of government, through the DOJ. But you know, at the same time the business community and science say that diversity is good for profitability, it’s good for innovation, it’s good for governance and stability.

You have some sort of financial penalties. It’s shocking what the federal government has done. Yet not every business has gone along, right? Costco said, “We’re sticking with DEI.” JPMorgan Chase said, “We’re sticking with it.” Delta said, “We’re sticking with it.”

And now we’ve seen just recently a new Gallup poll that since the Trump victory in 2024, the majorities of Americans – Independents, Democrats and Republicans – have agreed more and more each year that diversity is good for business.

So they are absolutely out of step, but it’s not gonna last because it doesn’t have the majority support in this country.

Mark: Do you think Democratic presidential aspirants in 2028 will pick up on your analysis and suggestions? Because either you’re on defense or you’re gonna retake offense on this?

Heather: They absolutely have to go on offense because it does not work to ignore the central organizing principle of our society. Racism is the Achilles heel in American politics, not the third rail, as if people don’t touch it.

Democrats need to make a multiracial coalition, right? Democrats can never be in power without a multiracial coalition because white men particularly but white women as well have been so well-organized, the majority of them into the right wing. You need a multiracial coalition, and you need a young coalition. Democrats’ victory is contingent on young voters being engaged.

What do we wanna see? We wanna see authenticity. We wanna see courage. We wanna see people who are willing to take on powerful interests. So powerful interests are the healthcare insurance companies. Powerful interests are Wall Street. Powerful interests are the polluters.

But they’re also the racists. We need to say that racism is bad for everybody, that it costs our economy, that it destroys the kinds of coalitions that can help win change for working-class people.

Nobody knows this better than labor organizers who are trying to create multiracial workforces. Nobody knows this better than grassroots organizers who are trying to unite neighborhoods to take them to the state house to lobby for power.

Mark: Were you able to sit down with the Democratic president-elect in December of 2028, what two or three top changes would you urge them to pursue as president?

Heather: So I think we need to, first of all, recognize that there is a potential political realignment that could happen to whatever party truly takes on the corruption that has infected not just Washington and state houses, but also our economy. It’s completely captured, right? By big tech, by big money, by the most powerful people in our society, and everybody knows that.

Right wing, left wing, center, that is the unifying worldview. Taking on corruption has to be the number one agenda item. That goes from antitrust and price fixing. That goes obviously to money and politics, campaign finance reform, lobbying members of Congress being able to trade stocks.

That goes to the corruption in our big cost centers in society. Whether it’s groceries and the concentration in agriculture and in the handful of grocery companies, or in terms of healthcare. Which remains, and has been for generations, the biggest pain point for Americans in terms of their finances, and is even worse now because of the Republican and Trump attack on affordable healthcare.

So it’s about taking on the big winners from our rigged economy and being willing to have that fight. If you don’t tell Americans that you’re willing to fight somebody powerful on their behalf, they’re never gonna believe you. We’re at the point right now where we need elected officials to be naming names to be going after concentrated money and power.

And then there will be the sense that, okay, maybe we can have some faith in, in the power of democracy again.

Mark: Given the supermajority on the Supreme Court, do we have to wait until we replace two sitting right-wingers to overcome Citizens United, for example?

Heather: I did not mention another source of the corruption is this corporate court, and the American people know it, right?

The Supreme Court has its lowest approval rating in generations because there is a very clear sense that they are trying to take the country backwards, that they are partisan, that they are corrupt, that they side with big corporate interests, that they’re not on the side of the American people.

And so court reform, which includes term limits, ethics reforms, expanding the court, absolutely has to be a first 100-day initiative for any new Democratic governing majority.

Mark: Speaking of the downhill decline of the GOP, I’m of two minds.

Will it take decades to repair, when they’re gone eventually? Or are Trump and Trumpism – like Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Roy Cohn, their historical predecessors – already on a steady path of going from high to low, from toast-of-the-town …to toast, like those three pariahs?

Heather: I think that depends on how much the Democrats have learned about what needs to happen to really bury anti-democratic forces.

I mean, the Democratic Party and its predecessors in history have never been really great at this, right? At holding on to power and making sure that the job is finished?

After January 6th, we didn’t hold Trump fully accountable and make sure that he was unable to ever run again. These are the kinds of lessons we need to learn. So what is it gonna look like for Trump and Trumpism to truly be considered so antithetical to the the flourishing of our democracy that the Democrats actually hold the entire ideology as well as him as a person accountable for the grift and the graft done under his name.

Mark: Well, that’ll turn on your implication that the next election could imitate 1974 and Watergate in terms of a semi-realignment around the issues you’re talking about. I can’t wait for Ketanji Brown Jackson to start writing majority opinions.

Last question: Democratic voters are pumped to hit Team Trump hard. Are their leaders?

Heather: I mean, the level of frustration with the Democratic establishment right now is so profound among young people, among its base. There has to be some accountability and some consequence for how low the Democratic brand is. This should be an easy election. We should have won the last election.

This is not rocket science. The party cannot continue to be the party of the status quo. Period.”

Mark: Well, ending on your “Period” sounds perfect.

Heather, thank you so much for your brilliance and time. Anyone who hasn’t read The Sum of Us should grab a copy and get ready because Heather is also working on a sequel book that will be out in… eleven days? I’m kidding! Next Year! Both Laugh

Heather: Thank you Mark, Thank you as always.

We’re also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Instagram, and YouTube! Make sure to subscribe to follow along with new Changing America episodes and all other updates from The Inflection Zone.

Vanity cannot survive gravity in a democracy – no matter how much Trump over-relies on his MAGA base, a compliant High Court and Natalie playing her harp, a reckoning is arriving for his lifetime of cheating rivals, banks, prosecutors, journalists, wives and the truth.

Since he is cunning though not teachable, Trump is now resorting to a familiar playbook of what he knows – bullying, bribing, boasting. It largely worked over his business career and in his six years as president. But with only four Tuesdays left until the midterm elections, Lincoln’s famous axiom will soon be tested: “You can fool some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

As a composite of the worst miscreants in our history – Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Roy Cohn – he has been running away from the political debt collector for tens of thousands of crimes, lies, insults, climate denials, vaccine denials, racism, misogyny and policies that enrich his family but not our families.

Now comes the reckoning on Nov. 3 – with Trump cheating to avoid losing:

• He ordered his Department of Homeland Security to find several millions in public funds to illegally pay for political ads this month that announce “God Made Trump,” with photos next to Mt. Rushmore and with the tag line “America Will Never be a Communist Country.” That came as a relief to the zero number of sentient voters who had been previously very worried about Lenin replacing Washington.

One ad even reprised an ad from his 2024 general election and all include a disclaimer “Paid for by the United States Government.” Trump lamely explained that they were fine because “I’m not a candidate”...except he’s now also urging MAGA rallies to pretend “I’m on the ballot” to spur turnout.

[Ooops: Trump just engaged in a double summersault to both reverse his decision to spend public money…but then walk it back explaining that he meant his own PAC would pick up only future spending on the ads, not the $10 million already spent. Got it?!) https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/us/politics/trump-taxpayer-funded-ads.html

• Again promised to spend public money at $5,000 a person if his party won the House and Senate in November – which adds up to a mere $1 trillion – which in effect would be about the biggest bribe ever and illegal to boot.

• Acting more as Santa Claus than Commander-in-Chief, Team Trump also announced last week that the administration would supposedly send $90 checks to 20 million Americans with his name on the letter to imply sole credit “because the best way to improve Medicare is to put healthcare dollars back where they belong — in the hands of our Medicare beneficiaries.” He’ll of course call this magical money “Trump Refunds.”

• A NYTimes front page article yesterday traced how realtor-diplomats Kushner-Witkoff are currently negotiating a big financial deal with Putin directly to enrich their friends and pull a rabbit out of the hat to induce him to end his war on Ukraine.

• His captive DOJ and AG just made a big announcement alleging that several dozens of voters illegally voted out of 160 million in 2024…or had their mail-in ballots ignored. Since that totaled .00003 percent of all voters, his own campaign team and Bill Barr – as well as 60 federal courts – decided they were inconsequential.

So why bother? Given his compulsion to cheat at every opportunity, it’s pretty naive not to see this as anything but a pretext to undermine expected losses by declaring a national emergency to justify a second coup.

Could all of this – plus $300 million injected in this stretch drive from Trump and Musk dark-money Super-PACs – conceivably move the needle enough among the target audience of swing voters? Maybe…if they believed anything he says now. But why would anyone since the Iran War is on, inflation is up and not one pedophile has been prosecuted for crimes with Epstein?

Well, he never promised this wouldn’t be a fascist country. If this sounds harsh, scholars of the rank of Professor Timothy Snyder and GOP lawyer Bruce Fein have tracked how closely Trump is replicating Hitler’s lurch from democracy to dictatorship at his start as Chancellor in 1933.

We’ll know shortly whether these maneuvers – and any October surprises they have up their sleeve – prove more convincing that his insane Birtherism and ploy of murderous immigrant caravans invading our homeland in 2018 and 2020 (fyi, they never got here). But that would require a sizable number of low-education MAGAs and inattentive Independents believing more in the philosophy of Jefferson Davis than Thomas Jefferson. In 2026.

A far more likely trend-line after the Midterms would be his reputational collapse from powerful to pitiful like real-life predecessors McCarthy and Nixon and Roy Cohn. My bet? His continuing ostracism from toast of the town… to toast.

This is Mark Green, from the Inflection Zone.

To appreciate what an amazing moment this is in America, let’s statistically contrast perhaps the best ever and likely worst ever in two separate arenas of popular interest:

BEST: In the MLB live-ball era, the #3 greatest pitcher ever based on strikeouts per game (over 600 innings) is now the same player who’s the #11 greatest batter ever (based on wRC (Weighted Runs Created) and with over 4000 plate appearances) where he ranks between #10 Mickey Mantle and #12 Aaron Judge.

His name is SHOHEI OHTANI...who never brags nor claims to be the best overall, despite these stats. He lets his performance talk for him...with the result that his image is everywhere in Japan.

WORST: #47 ranked dead last among all presidents since 1789, according to the non-partisan American Political Science Association survey, has the lowest popularity of any incumbent approaching his second midterm elections, is 71 points underwater w/ Independent voters, and whose international unpopularity has dimmed respect for the U.S. in nearly every country on Earth (except Israel). Also, after inciting a violent insurrection to overthrow the Biden election, he’s now losing his wars on Iran and Inflation and is widely considered the most corrupt POTUS by far.

His name is DONALD J. TRUMP...who declares that he ranks higher historically as president than either George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. He never doesn’t brag and insists that only his words can credibly describe his performance. He works hard to put his name on various monuments and buildings, admitting that after he’s gone, others won’t.

Although at opposite ends of the human species, some people admire them both.

The Inflection Zone / Mark Green is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Of course, saying-one-thing-while-doing-another has long been a sign of poor character. In film, it’s Elmer Gantry denouncing sin – in history, it’s Thomas Jefferson keeping Sally Hemings enslaved after fathering their children.

But again, Donald J. Trump goes to extremes by taking what some people may occasionally yield to and instead constantly do. It may not be the biggest arrow in his quiver of disinformation — e.g., big lies, frequent illegalities, gaslighting, insults, personal invective against journalists and judges — but it’s still among his favorites.

There are several reasons for this slippery indulgence. First, he has paid little-to-no political penality since he cynically (though correctly) assumes that nearly all controversies will settle into one of two existing molds – those who believe whatever he says or believe nothing he says – so his exact words don’t matter. Second, he now has formed a lifetime habit that anything-goes in order to win – after all, he is the product of both a seriously amoral father and a sleazy business career. Third, while no Reagan, he is a credentialed actor who can sound more believable lying than Biden did telling the truth. And he seems to have no sense of the past or future, only carpe diem to win every news cycle.

Finally, he wakes up each morning with at least five core commandments to protect at any cost: namely, grow his family net worth; blame his 2020 loss on voter fraud; help Putin; avenge critics; and excite white nationalists.

So Trump and acolytes will casually deploy double standards if that’s what it takes to square circles, to the extent that MSNOW host Nicole Wallace lamented “the death of hypocrisy and irony.” Here’s a handful out of hundreds of examples as he embodies that classic The Platters song from the 1950s, “Oh oh yes, I’m the Great Pretender, pretending that I’m doing well…I’m not you see what I appear to be.”

1. Trump repeatedly recites the phrase “Voter Integrity” as the basis of his SAVE America Act…while relentlessly trying to suppress the turnout of voters of color by limiting mail-in-ballots, reducing drop boxes in heavily Black and Brown districts and threatening to send armed ICE agents into them election days.

2. In a major prime time speech this year, he blamed Chinese interference in the 2020 election for his loss…yet fetes President Xi at the White House, didn’t ask him about this serious charge and separately has ignored irrefutable documentation of Russian interference in 2016.

3. He frequently accuses all Democrats of being Socialists and Communists – “I’m talking about seizing the means of production, dictatorship of the Proletariat”…yet lavishly praises communist and authoritarian leaders like Xi, Putin and Kim, not to mention that he’s the first president to coerce major private companies to give the federal government major voting shares.

4. VP Vance loudly presides over an Anti-Fraud Task Force…on behalf of the only POTUS ever serially convicted of criminal fraud. Meanwhile Team Trump has never commented on the charge by Ashley St. Clair, the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, that “he openly bragged he rigged the last election for Trump. I have all the emails and texts.” That sure sounds like a pretty big fraud.

   

5. FCC Chair Brendan Carr defended his threat to suspend broadcast licenses of stations carrying Jimmy Kimmel Live! because of his “concerted effort to lie to the American people”…which is an obvious content violation of the First Amendment and dwarfed by his own boss’s thousands of lies and falsehoods, earning him the title The Lyin’ King.

6. Team Trump frequently asserts that the Biden Administration “weaponized” the DOJ to go after their critics (despite no evidence - see pages 171-182 of Byrian Tyler Cohen’s The Day After)...while he publicly demands that his Attorneys General prosecute innocent political opponents (see Comey, James, Kelly, Schiff, and six congressional veterans).

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   REMEMBER WHEN TRUMP WOULD CALL BIDEN “SLEEPY JOE”?

   

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7. After Trump banned three credentialed media outlets from the White House, a DOJ lawyer said one reason was “national security”...except one cited article was based on information provided anonymously from J.D….and it was weird to allow Chinese – but not American – media to cover Xi’s state dinner at the White House.

8. Team Trump denounces federal deficits and debt compiled under Democratic presidents…but not those accrued under Republican ones (nearly a third of the $40 trillion debt has been added under him).

9. Trump ran for reelection promising not to get America into more “endless” wars, adding earlier this year that “the job of our military is to protect our security, not be the policeman of the world”…yet the very next month he launched a surprise attack on Iran supposedly for its imminent acquisition of nuclear material (which was false) while omitting that he ripped up the Obama-Kerry Accord that was stopping its uranium enrichment.

10. When asked for more disclosure on something, leading Trump surrogates like Leavitt and Bessent just recite their talking point that “he’s the most transparent president ever”…which is odd since he and Todd Blanche continue to cover up disclosure of all the Epstein Files (as the law requires), refuse to provide public transcripts of his private meetings with Putin and refuse to disclose all his medical records and tax filings, as all previous modern presidents have).

11. #47 portrays himself as a China Hawk by rejecting regulation of A.I. because that might let Beijing “win the A.I. race” and calling Covid 19 the “China Virus” or “Wu Flu”... yet that posture was directly at odds with a) how Trump asked the Chinese dictator whether he’d be interested in buying some U. S. military weaponry (contrary to American law) and b) how often he fawned over and kept physically touching the Chinese president during their recent two day “Summit.”

Even these few examples are mere dots in a pointillist painting that, when connected, frame a far bigger story – that Trump’s Party of Patriotism doesn’t believe in American Democracy; that the Party of Family Values protects pedophiles and discourages vaccines to babies and that the Party of “Truth Social” churns out more “Fake News” than all major media combined.

Cognitive dissonance anyone? No wonder occasional hypocrisy has become commonplace due to a corrupt party that’ll say one thing on one day and another on a different day in order to protect Trump’s core “commandments.”

So I’d ask independent-minded followers to weigh in on three questions: could anyone produce a similar reel of Obama repeatedly using hypocrisy to evade accountability? since reality tv show-runners like #47 know how hard it is to maintain interest year-after-year with the same formula, how might an increasingly desperate POTUS jump-the-shark even more in his final two scheduled seasons? last, might there be growing societal acquiescence for such inconsistency since at the country’s very birth Jefferson himself both helped create our democracy-for-all in the Declaration AND personally engaged in the sin of slavery?

This is Mark Green, from The Inflection Zone.

Yes he’s very underwater in national polls, especially among critical Independents and Latinos… and has only been bleeding supporters in past months, not gaining any. Other than the Rasmussen “Poll”, the trend for Team Trump is down and downer.

His vanity, violence and sheer vandalism have been in-plain-sight for years, interrupted by moments of sympathy after assassination attempts:

He excused Putin’s murders of opponents and invasion of Ukraine, berated Biden when diagnosed with cancer, threatened Iran with “obliteration” then adding “but I don’t want to do that,” keeps covering up the release Epstein Files to protect himself and pedophiles, uses armed ICE agents as a personal paramilitary, overturns decades of civil rights laws behind euphemisms like “Heritage Americans” and “DEI”, orders his DOJ to prosecute innocent critics…and gleefully engages in more big lies and pockets more conflicted money than the combined total of all prior presidents

He calls this piracy a “Golden Age”...while also calling the other party “Communists.” But that hasn’t gotten much purchase 70 years after JoeMcCarthy drank himself to death. Heck-of-a-job Donnie.

If many MAGA devotees still cannot comprehend his criminal regime, may I offer a question and a hypothetical: first, on what planet would it be permissible to lie about such sacred subjects as faking heroism on 9/11 and also launching a war of choice; second, if voters were asked who’d be more likely to secretly kill 100 children as the Faustian price of winning an election, would they say Trump or Obama?

That may sound absurd but recall an influential early book on Trump’s M.O. – Adam Serwer’s The Cruelty is the Point – as well as his repeated violent rhetoric at rallies and on social media. Though claiming to be in the “Party of Lincoln,” he sure acts more like Putin than Honest Abe.

Nor has he expressed a word of concern that his Administration’s 90 percent reduction of USAID may lead to 14 million avoidable deaths abroad (including 4 million children) by 2030, according to the prestigious medical journal The Lancet.

It’ll take many more years to tally up all the costs and causes of Trump’s derangement but the brilliant Bill Moyers came close when he said on MSNOW’S The Last Word, “Trump does not have what we normally think of as a soul; he has an open sore.”

Indeed, as of now, popular opinion has a nearly 2-1 split between those who think him evil and those who regard him as regal. Yet he survives with his mind-over-matter trick of a) simply denying all facts about his failures, b) scheming daily how to start a Reichstag Fire to justify a midterm election rejection and c) hoping that SCOTUS will simply crown him contrary to VP Pence refusal on January 6th.

So while he keeps conjuring up new ways to suppress speech and voters, a supermajority is, in effect, demanding, “GET OUT!”

Unless he’s willing to start and finish a civil war (recall his admiration for the “strength” Beijing showed at Tiananmen Square), he’ll continue to dig himself and our country into a deeper and deeper hole of corruption. We’re now closing in on three either/or moments which will likely turn on whether he plummets to Nixon-level disapproval or merely Bush 43 lows:

• After he resorts to some new inside coup, will SCOTUS capitulate or condemn him for the remaining months of his term? The loss of Roberts/Kavanaugh/Coney Barrett in the mail-ballot case may mean that they are now willing to jurisprudentially shout “Basta!” since he’ll be gone in two years though they risk living in obloquy in history.

• Will the midterms be close or produce a big blue backlash in the 120th Congress -– a House of 230+ Members and up to 55 Democrats – due to a skunk-like stink he sprayed on the GOP that can’t be washed off their clothes?

• Then, should Speaker Johnson refuse to swear-in a dozen Democratic winners next January 3 due to phony election claims, will the High Court ratify such constitutional treason? Judge J. Michael Luttig explains why not: “Everyone knows that the greatest threat to the midterm elections is not the Democrats or the Chinese, noncitizen voting, or electronic voting machines, but the President and his servile Republican Congress.”

The feasibility of such monarchical moves will depend on Trump’s unpopularity. Right now in the mid-to-low low 30 percentages in Pew, Reuters, Quinnipiac and WaPo, groupthink and habit may still allow remaining Trumpers to go with the flow. But is there a tipping point where #47 loses his tiny congressional majority and his SCOTUS super-majority: 30 percent approval? 25 percent? 15 percent? (Yesterday, ARG Research Poll had him at 29 percent).

At what juncture might Members and Justices be more afraid for their reputations than are afraid of his menacing ways. Is there a low enough number when peer pressure from neighbors/co-workers/ family shame Trumpers into admitting reality? If Democrats do attempt impeachment in 2027, is that when enough GOP senators concur to save their skins and seats to help J.D. Vance avoid becoming a 21st Century Barry Goldwater?

That is, at what degree might scalding frogs — like Mike Collins, Byron Donalds, Ashley Hinson — start jumping out of their pots of boiling water?

This is Mark Green from a changing Inflection Zone.

Mark Green : Mark Green here with our podcast version of The Inflection Zone, which we call Changing America so our side starts developing the best new paradigms and programs to be ready after the next two national elections. I’m happy to be talking today with my longtime friend, Katrina vanden Heuvel, who has been a major influencer of political and popular opinion since before the term was invented.

She’s owned and run The Nation magazine since 1995 with the late Victor Navasky, and it has been around since abolitionists founded it in 1865. Welcome, Katrina.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Thank you, Mark. I do feel 161 years old.

Mark Green : You don’t look a day over 106. You’re obviously the publisher of a major independent magazine(w (which I’ve subscribed to since 1966). What, if anything, has the mainstream media learned about how to – or not learned how to – handle Trump? Because he still never stops lying and still seems to get away with just brushing everything off as “fake news.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel: I’ll take The [New York] Times as an example of the kind of Gray Lady mainstream. It’s done a good job exposing Trump’s lies when it comes to the assault on democracy, the rule of law, voting machinations, corruption. I think it’s less powerful in its coverage of the lies he tells about war. I think it’s also less open to the breakdown of the Washington consensus, which is more about policing the economic parameters of what’s possible.

Mark Green: But is it even conceivable that they publish an editorial starting on the front page, maybe even a banner headline saying, “Resign Already” – or be impeached and removed – because the Times is an opinion leader, and who knows if that could shake up things, or is that just inconceivable given the DNA of the paper?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: I don’t think it’s inconceivable, but we live in a fragmented media landscape, so the impact of a New York Times, say, in the ‘70s around Watergate, urging “Resign,” “Impeach,” has been not flattened but modulated. Those times are gone. You have a kind of fractured media landscape, which in some ways doesn’t allow gatekeepers to control the news as it used to so that you do have more sense of Trump lying, but you also have a sense of media malpractice.

The mergers that we’ve seen coming together in these last couple years, the pandering on the part of corporate media to excuse him for his lies is more dangerous. It’s the fact that the corporate chieftains of some of these big companies have business before regulators in Washington, D.C.

Mark Green : Katrina, this may have to wait until the next Democratic president appoints you instead of Brendan Carr as the chair of the FCC.

Katrina, few know Russia and Putin better than you do over your career, or your late husband, Stephen F. Cohen, did. But what does Vladimir Putin think when he sits down and negotiates about Ukraine with son-in-law Jared Kushner, who a New Yorker profile this week described as a cocky heir-head, who the Kremlin can manipulate with ease.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: I don’t think Putin sees Witkoff or Kushner as capable. So he’s, I think, just being kind. Now, the more interesting stories are the bribery of Trump’s son, and the wedding [gift to Junior] from the oligarch.

There’s no question that corruption is real. But I think this war in Ukraine should be the responsibility of a group of nations to find a way to provide security for Ukraine, that it live in some form of peace, secure from Russia. But Mark, you know that 1.5 million Russians have been wounded, maimed, or killed, and Russians are war-weary.

I think Trump is impatient with diplomacy. So you need to have a team, a group of countries that see in resolving this crisis, that there are ways to work together. I think the weakness of Russia has been exposed by the legal strategic blunder Putin made in 2022. It’s beern a disaster for Russia.

Let me just add, when he came to power in 2000, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal praised him as someone they could do business with. The Nation, however, editorialized that he was instinctively authoritarian. He was selected by Yeltsin’s family to protect their wealth, and he has been there too long.

Mark Green: So as between Zelensky -- who is completely focused on not being devoured by Russia, and Putin, who in his view may be worried about NATO but really just wants to grab Ukraine to restore his country’s former glory, which he thought Khrushchev gave away — who yields? How does this end?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: This ends, one hopes, with the reconstruction and rebuilding of Ukraine. The World Bank estimated last year would be $400 million to one trillion to rebuild a secure Ukraine, and there is an anger, unity of nationalism, rightly, in the context of Russia’s violence.

But to continue fighting to the last Ukrainian is a disservice, and I say this with humility because I’m not Ukrainian. And Russia should pay some of it, reconstruction out of its frozen assets.

Mark Green: Would you favor 100% inheritance tax on Musk, since he’s worth a trillion dollars and could fund the whole thing?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: But you know what they’re gonna do, Mark? They’ll sell off Ukraine - and Ukrainian oligarchs will be part of this - to American oligarchs like Musk, who’s already in there with Palantir.

The fact also is that Ukraine has found a way through asymmetrical warfare via drones to hold Russia back to some extent, though Ukraine has a $27 billion deficit.

Mark Green: Katrina, Changing America is based on the through line that Democrats need to prepare for the worst, yet plan for the best.

Again, if you had dinner in the fall of 2028 with the next Democratic president-elect, what are the two or three issues you’d urge him or her to run on and include in their mandate? You have his or her ear. Go.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: To make America work for working people and what that means in all of its aspects.

To take on the corruption, not just the stables of Trump, but also the entrenched interests, the monopoly power, and then to rebuild a Democratic foreign policy that is about true security. And I think that is a conversation on all fronts, but particularly on foreign policy and international relations where there’s gonna be real openings.

I’d add one thing – we saw child poverty halved, and we saw a care agenda put aside for the infrastructure agenda under Biden. I think that there is a lot of room for real progress on an issue that doesn’t get the highlight headlines – childcare. In New Mexico, you see a state that has passed universal childcare, and you see the popularity of it in New York City.

Mark Green: Were you surprised at the 7-2 Supreme Court ruling a week ago against Trump that states regulate mail-in ballots, not the Postal Service?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: The courts generally – I’m not talking about the Supreme Court – but courts have played a backstop role in often surprising ways, good ways, like with the Postal Service. That should allow people to vote in big ways. The blue wave looks hopeful, but the money [is still a great problem.] You probably saw the other day, the reporting on the billionaires, I mean it’s really an unprecedented money time because so many are giving to Trump.

To me, that’s the court’s great sin. But until we unravel Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo, it’s going to be very hard. But we should monitor these elections because it may be that organized people do a better job than courts.

Mark Green: Most observers, me included, assume that Trump will make a big move to overturn the midterm elections within the next seven weeks, obviously, with some phony claim of a national emergency, or maybe with Speaker Johnson refusing to seat a dozen or so bona fide Democratic winners on January 3rd. So after this 7-2 mail ballot decision, how confident are you that even this Court would refuse to go along?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: I’m not confident, but I do see that there’s organizing going on among everything from poll monitors to legal challengers, I don’t have a confidence in this court except occasionally Roberts – he still wants to be the institutionalist.

Mark Green: Well, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett voted with Roberts against Trump on mail ballots.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Yeah, it was hopeful ...

Mark Green : …but that doesn’t hold when Trump tries to claim a phony Insurrection II, then we’re the in a territory that we’ve never even come close to other than the Civil War.

I assume there may be actual violence if Trump and the Court overturn the 2026 elections but I don’t want to go down there yet.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: No, the key is that the margins are strong, because that’s the most decisive way.

Mark Green As Mike Waldman said in an earlier Changing America podcast, the best guarantor is not a 1% win with Democrats getting 220 seats, but getting to say a six point win and 235 seats plus 55 seats in the Senate.

Now, while of course we’re not yet in the presidential primary season, allow me to get your appraise of Jon Ossoff, not the front-runner, since he possesses a near Obama-like ability to frame issues and connect with Democratic voters.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: We have a wonderful piece about Ossoff by Joan Walsh in the last issue. He’s a phenomenon. I think the “ideas primary” is important. I hope AOC decides to run for the Senate. Ro Khanna’s running Beshear’s running, Pritzker’s running [ed. note: and probably the uber-experienced Rahm Emanuel.]

Mark Green: Well, Ossoff’s background as a documentary filmmaker and is obviously brilliant deploying language with emotion and accuracy. He’s either gonna be Governor Bruce Babbitt, decades ago, very attractive candidate…but when he got to the national stage, he couldn’t perform.

And then Jerry Brown. In his first term as governor, got close to beating Carter. He caught lightning in a bottle, like Obama did. Well, we’ll see if Ossoff can duplicate not Bruce Babbitt but the early Jerry Brown and Obama.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Listen, Bernie deserves an essay about what losing can mean. Mark. You too changed the nature of much. Bernie has changed the narrative inside this pathway for a part of the Democratic Party.

Mark Green: In 30 years, who will be regarded as having a bigger impact on the United States of America, Bernie Sanders or Ralph Nader?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Oh, that’s brutal! I am so happy Ralph got his front page story in The New York Times, man. I spoke to him the weekend before that, he shouted at me for an hour.

Mark Green: Oh, that’s all?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: (laughs) I suspect, and this goes to mainstream media, I often hope that Ralph’s obituary begins with consumer safety.

Mark Green: I thought, while not everybody’s going to read this article, it is going to influence the influencers who write obituaries. And that article did not mention his 2000 race. So it kosherized people writing in future obituaries, that you can write about Ralph Nader and not just be cranky about 2000.

Here’s a final, even harder question: Who in 30 years will be regarded as having a bigger influence on America, Ralph Nader or Gloria Steinem?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Ralph Nader.

Mark Green: I agree with you, but most women professionals I ask that of say Gloria. She has a narrower constituency but more ardent.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: She was a great person. I loved her.

Mark Green: I urge everybody here to go to thenation.com to follow your publication and any Substacks so that you’re up to date through this election and the next cycle.

Thanks again, Katrina, for your time and insights.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Thank you, Mark!

The new explosive debate over whether and how the public sector should regulate A.I. is the ultimate example of MAGA’s dangerous extremism. Here we have a technology with an admitted non-zero risk of human extinction, yet Trump (who calls it “nothing but a hoax”) and Mike Johnson (who says AI firms “can self-regulate“ so “it’s not the job of Congress”) retreat to their predictable catechism against federal regulation. Chimes in J. D. Vance, “I felt it a little bit weird that so many frontier AI tech companies [are] begging government to regulate them…like a trojan horse.”

But what’s really weird is a governing party now ignoring a second extinction event – beyond their knee-jerk deregulation despite worsening climate violence — by lapsing into amnesia about our public health/safety successes.

Since that Trump Troika apparently never took a civics class in school, allow me to remind them of what a very different three-some thought about how to govern America. Benjamin Franklin concluded that “private property is a creature of society and is subject to the calls of that society, whenever its necessities shall require it.” Abraham Lincoln understood that “the legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to be done but cannot do in their individual capacities.” FDR powerfully added that “government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.”

None of them or anyone else had to say that the words “tech bros” or even “corporations” ever appear in the Constitution. They don’t. But “Congress… Commerce…President” do.

Hence, here’s how we resolved prior great national problems:

• When monopoly railroads in the 1890s were destroying farms and towns, federal antitrust laws regulated them.

• When The Jungle in 1906 exposed the extent and cost of contaminated food, the Federal Meat Inspection Act regulated it.

• When machine guns turned into slaughter machines in the ‘20s and ‘30s, the National Firearms Act of 1934 all but banned them.

• When Hooker Chemical poisoned Love Canal to death, Congress created the EPA in 1971 to regulate chemical companies.

• When the ozone layer – essential to life on earth – was thinning due to chlorofluorocarbons, Congress solved the problem by joining the 1987 Global Montreal Protocol banning them from aerosol cans.

• When Unsafe at Any Speed exposed Detroit’s built-in-dangers, Congress didn’t just say “they can self-regulate” but rather unanimously (yes unanimously) created the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission which has averted 4.2 million deaths over the following 60 years. So for one telling eample: after GM created shatterproof glass windshields, it didn’t put them into their cars because it would then be at a price disadvantage against their two big competitors; instead, it persuaded the auto safety agency to require that all new cars use the safer, more expensive glass. What worked for automobiles should work for A.I.

In other words, America figured out how to combine our governing systms – Capitalism and Democracy – as the two esszential sides of our one national coin.

Now, the same month that he’s meeting with his “good friend” President Xi of China, Trump is objecting to the risk…not of A.I. but of China possibly refusing to comply with any A. I. international safety standards. Of course, it was Trump himself who rejected the world-wide Paris Accords on climate change, Trump himself who rejected the successfully operational Kerry Iranian nuclear accord and that softy Reagan himself who went along with verifiable ballistic missile reductions with the then-Soviet Union.

Here’s the Social Truth: it’s laissez-faire Donald who’s now the problem, no one else.

The issue here is not whether to seize Greenland or rename the Kennedy Center or build a humongous Arch. Rather, the core question with A.I. now is whether a publicly elected President rather than a trillionaire tech bro should make key judgments based on public safety and not private profits. Other than the MAGA Fringe Fourth, that should not be a hard question to answer.

The problem in the next two months and two years, however, is that we in fact have a President who converts all policy questions into how they can make him money or use it as leverage for something else. Imagine this: “So you want to save mankind Hakeem? Very nice. How about trading away impeachment?”

This puts today’s loyal opposition on a tightrope: it can responsibly push for a non-partisan commission to suggest policy options to keep innovating but not let A.I. go rogue like HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey -– perhaps with some kind of structured eminent domain or the placement of public monitors in companies like the ones now in place in fraud consent decrees and Tort Claims Act settlements.Then we can be sure that the 48th President and 121st Congress implement the best policy, not Jared Kushner.

Over a century ago locale jurisdictions figured out that private fire departments charging a fee should be replaced by public fire departments paid by taxpayer funds. Does the very Far-Right really want to go back to those good old days? Would Vance be ok with Bezos, Zuckerberg or Altman owning and therefore having the property right to use nuclear weapons at their sole discretion?

This is Mark Green from a very dangerous The Inflection Zone.

This post contains some offensive language.

This is Mark Green from Trump’s distortion field we call The Inflection Zone.

Let’s conclude our two part Substack on the biggest variables that could decide whether Democracy or Autocracy prevails by this November’s election.

Will Donald Trump’s persistent “catch-me-if-you-can” approach finally wear down the Congress and Court? Here are the last two variables that could tilt the odds between possible outcomes for an Americanized Fascism – Mussolini’s triumphal March on Rome in 1922 versus the humiliating loss of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán earlier this year.

3. WILL JEFFRIES COUNTER-PUNCH OR NORMALIZE #47 POST NOVEMBER?

As explained in a previous Substack, the likely next Speaker is smart, disciplined and completely focused on getting to 218 Democrats…or ideally far more since the margin matters fdor future policy. So he had to grimace yet endure the enormous blowback to even just talking to Jared Kushner last month.

For now, Jeffries seems determined to hang the albatross of Trump around the necks of all GOP candidates while juggling the Democratic Caucus’s competing voices of democratic socialists and progressive moderates. But then he’ll have an existential choice if his party carries both chambers and he becomes de facto the leading National Democrat, namely, whether to remain the insider-incrementalist that easily won him the leadership post or become a warrior for democracy and accountability.

Then instead of just splitting differences with impossible-to-trust partners like the Gaslighting Trump and Squeaker Johnson, he could instead retake offense by shrinking this Republican Party down to the size of its fringy predecessor – the John Birch Society. Can there be consequences for Trump’s criminal regime even though unrepentant MAGAs will scream bloody murder at whatever governing Democrats attempt to do?

That momentous decision includes steering his Caucus to establish several red-line issues for the party of FDR, JFK and Obama – like intolerance for DEA racism, less economic inequality via systemic tax change, reduced climate violence by recommitting to the Paris Accords and EPA, more market competition with different antitrust and contracting strategies, no dumb wars, an expanded franchise, stronger unions…plus clawing back emolumental theft and razing Ozymandian vanity projects.

Such an aspirational agenda risks providing a handy checklist of failure if they fall short but not having a big vision makes big change unlikely-to-impossible. Why must the Overton Window only open to the right?

Is it naive to think Jeffries will rise to this occasion? True, he’s usually cautious when exercising authority. But recall that he successfully refused to reopen the government last year until Trump buckled on providing Obamacare subsidies to protect health insurance for average families. And he did say “Fuck You Donald Trump!” after #47 shared on Truth Social – reportedly at Natalie Harp’s urging – a video depicting the Obamas as apes.

Can he do a full-Zelenskyy as the Ukrainian president did once on Meet the Press: “We are not ready to give our freedom to this fucking terrorist, Putin.”

Jeffries has done a version. Recall his memorable defrocking of Justice Clarence Thomas at a House hearing in May, 2020 when he declared, “Brother Thomas, why are you such a hater?”

I’m hopeful. , fyi, isn’t

4. WILL THE 4TH ESTATE FIGHT FOR THE 1ST AMENDMENT?

If the free press doesn’t stand up for free speech – despite real worries about Trump’s threats of political, commercial or personal harm – who will?

While the FCC, for one example, is now in the grip of an extreme Trumpist, that can change once a new President takes office in 2029. To date, courts have largely inhibited the authoritarian strutting of Chairman Brendan Carr. After a big backlash election, however, new rules could be promulgated to reduce the power of “media monopolies” to mislead audiences.

The core problem, of course, is that multi-billionaires can simply buy major media properties so that they won’t tell the whole truth about Trump. Examples include Twitter, Paramount/CBS, Washington Post, WSJ, FOX, LA Times and Sinclair Broadcasting… at least not until after he’s gone and disgraced at Nixon- and Madoff- levels. That’s demoralizing but not the end of this story. The New York Times, Reuters, AP, Bloomberg, The Guardian, NBC and scores of others have shareholders but also credos lionizing speech.

For now, The New York Times does publish articles and editorials – by excellent journalists like Jamelle Bouie, Michelle Goldberg, Peter Baker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Thomas Edsall – that demolish DictatorDon in individual pieces…yet the Paper of Record still stops short of showing how Trump’s whole is worse than the sum of his parts.

That means the 120th Congress would go beyond merely reacting to dangerous extremism one-by-one to instead urge impeachment of the most deviant cabinet secretaries (Blanche, Kennedy, Patel). Or publish a major editorial starting on page one why a corrupt, lying president has to be impeached and convicted…or why Congress under Article 4 of the 25th amendment should remove him from office because of his manifest incapacity.

Unprecedented? Yes. So is Trump.

What “incapacity”? Lawrence O’Donnell brilliantly explained Tuesday night on MSNOW how to embarrass other Mainstream Media into also exposing how he didn’t risk his life at Ground Zero, showed images on Truth Social of him dropping nuclear bombs on other countries, outfitted himself as a decorated four-star general and promised to illegally send $5000 checks to all adults if his party won the midterm election (aka, an unsubtle bribe).

The Fourth Estate alone has never toppled an administration. But if Woodward and Bernstein, backed by Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee, could show how to report on Nixon’s Watergate crimes, the Times publisher also could a) similarly sway other platforms into exposing TeamTrump’s grotesque corruption, b) warn a revanchist SCOTUS against sabotaging lawful mail-in ballots to rig elections and c) do better than its traditional bothsides-ism to deter future Trump wannabes.

For there is a ‘national emergency,” and it’s him approaching his second inside coup.

This is Mark Green, from The Inflection Zone, worrying about the worst but reaching for the best.

As we officially begin the final quarter of this year’s election contest, time to strategically prepare for what’s possible.

But first, considering Trump’s ongoing autocracy project, what can we learn from the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago and the terrorist who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in 1914? Small shifts can have colossal consequences.

If that asteroid had been just a few degrees off in its billion-to-one journey and collision, most scientists speculate that dinosaurs would likely still roam the earth…but no humans (and no Substacks). And if the dejected assassin, after his first attempt failed, hadn’t gone to the tavern that the relieved Archduke happened to drive by – allowing a second successful attempt – it’s improbable there would have been a world war killing 16 million soldiers and civilians.

Now comes Donald Trump with his brazen “catch-me-if-you-can” approach – my description from two years ago – that may be nearing some resolution by November. Though hard to make precise predictions, here are the 5 people/events most likely to tilt the odds between two polar outcomes – America’s version of Mussolini’s success in 1922 versus the electoral failure of Hungary’s Victor Orbán in 2026.

1. WILL VOTERS TURN OUT OR BE TURNED OFF?

While it’s called “political science,” elections are more a prediction market than a science.

As of now, according to both Silver and Cook, it’s very likely that the House flips to a Democratic Majority and the Senate somewhat likely. Trump certainly thinks he can disrupt November to his advantage via massive GOP money, armed ICE agents, extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression – all backed by a supportive SCOTUS.

Historically, the President’s party lost in every initial midterm election since 1960, except in 1962 (after the Cuban Missile Crisis) and in 2002 (after 9/11). Otherwise, there’s been an average two dozen House seat shift to the opposing party.

Swing voters can collectively and unexpectedly lurch late one way or the other in national contests – as they did for Reagan in the final week after the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980 and for Bush43 after bin Laden’s public taunt (“Letter to Americans”) elevated anew the issue of 9/11 and W’s leadership. What October Surprise might stampede a big chunk of Independents to break off this year? (Can’t know…which is why it’s called a “surprise.”)

With one exception: an unpopular high-roller like Trump will try to sabotage this Fall election since he’s measurably plunging in polls and has his DOJ, FBI, Pentagon and most of the mainstream media lined up to assist a soft coup. The risk is that their obvious attempt to suppress the votes of millions of People of Color may instead inspire their even larger turnout. Presumably, Team Trump regards that risk as necessary given their sinking chance of outright winning the Congress. (Democrats surge to ten point advantage over GOP, 49% - 39%:)

Based on all polling and special elections, the odds now favor a large swing back to Democrats especially among Latino voters, young voters and even many white working-class/economically pissed-off ones…not to mention that the very unpopular POTUS, like a wasp at a picnic, insists on campaigning in the districts of anxious Republicans.

So if you’re an incumbent House or Senate Republican ahead of a challenger by 10 points or less, are you very nervous about a Himalayan-level blue wave due to Trump’s unpopular war, economy, ICE attacks on Latinos, criticism of an admired Pope Leo and Epstein stains?

Yes you are.

2. CAN TRUMP RELY ON HIS SCOTUS SUPER-MAJORITY?

With critical rulings imminent on Trump’s attempt to stymie mail-in ballots and to invent some “national emergency” justifying a new Insurrection, the High Court’s right-wing super-majority is another core variable to stop or green-light his insatiable lust to win at any cost.

On the one hand, the Justices have overturned lower court rulings against the administration an amazing 94% of the time, often deploying the “Shadow Docket” as a kind of privatized accomplice. They appear eager to treat “precedent” – like Roe, like Slaughter a century ago ensuring the independence of regulatory agencies – as another word for heads-I-win-tails- you-lose. Major decisions have often turned on legal formalisms and hypothetical horribles instead of considering real world climate violence, racism, inequality, disease and oligopolies that #47’s dangerous extremism creates – i.e., doctrine trumps reality.

So if a provably despotic president like Trump wants to ignore the separation of powers, this Court incredibly says in effect – sure, let’s just give him presidential immunity to encourage worse despotism. How’s that working out?

That is, five votes win. Period. That’s the way the Court crumbles.

But if the Roberts Court soon ignores the express language of Article I that only states regulate the time/place/manner of elections and not the Postal Service – and also shuns their own Purcell v. Gonzalez decision forbidding big election-law changes on the eve of an election – that’ll confirm their ideological antipathy to American democracy.

Or might the Court finally flinch at the reality that it has no army but must depend on trust and respect to maintain the Rule-of-Law. Yet its popularity has sunk from 60% to only 33% favorable in just five years, its largest decline in memory.

That depends on three justices.

Will the brilliant and blunt Ketanji Brown Jackson continue writing dissents that humiliate the ideological corruption of far-right colleagues? Can she finally shame John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett to stop tarnishing the Court’s reputation by issuing rulings with the moral and legal integrity integrity of Dred Scott and Korematsu…as the famous “switch-in-time-that- saved-nine” did for FDR’s New Deal in 1937?

Maybe…but nothing to bet on.

PART II of “Will Autocracy Fail This Fall?” coming tomorrow.

This is Mark Green from The Inflection Zone.

Dear Trumpist:

You are often portrayed as having an unflinching ardor for the Gen. George Armstrong Custer of our time…since Donald and George were each monumentally vain, overconfident, with flowing locks and suicidal impulses. (If you think about it, aren’t Iranians with their little drones as ‘mis-underestimated’ as were Crazy Horse’s warriors at the Little Big Horn?)

Yet fully 1 in 3 of Trump’s 49.4 percent of the vote in 2024 has already abandoned him, says the most recent Ipsos-Reuters poll, with only 13 percent “strongly” supportive.

You still one? If so, please try to silently answer these 14 fact-based Qs as you consider voting again for Trump’s party this Fall and then in 2028. After all, earlier this week he begged his base to vote as if he were “on the ballot.” Will do:

1. Has Trump’s seeming embrace of an autocrat like Putin over an elected Zelensky helped our national security?

2. Did Trump’s rejection of Obama’s nuclear non-proliferation deal with Iran lead to #47’s February bombardment in what he predicted would be a 4-6 week “skirmish”…28 weeks ago?

3. Does it create a national security problem that Trump has alienated so many traditional allies of the U.S. – like Canada, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, South Korea, Denmark, Australia, NATO – none of which agreed to his request to assist his war of choice on Iran?

4. Has Trump’s focus on tax cuts for the richest Americans and service cuts for average ones – including millions losing their health insurance –– advanced your own family’s well-being?

5. Although Trump’s original goal was to deport “the worst of the worst,” a recent survey showed that only 5 percent had a violent criminal record…so do you still support how ICE assaults, seizes and deports hundreds of thousands of People of Color?

6. Did Trump’s “Day of Liberation” last February when he began raising tariffs on our trading partners push inflation down or up?

7. Were Trump’s pardons of 1,200 people who violently attacked the Capitol to overthrow the results of the 2020 election – which he called “a day of love” – consistent with his repeated pledge of “Law and Order”?

8. Did Trump’s unprecedented takeover of the DOJ – ordering prosecutions of innocent Democrats and exonerations of many convicted corporate donors – reveal an American Autocrat?

9. When three dozen women claimed that he assaulted them, Trump responded that all were lying -- do you think that they were or he was?

10. Does it worry you that Trump referred to the biggest pedophile in American history as his best friend who also liked women “on the younger side”...and appeared several thousand times in the Epstein Files?

11. Do Trump’s frequent and unique attempts to put his name on monuments – towering Arch, Kennedy Center, White House Ballroom, battleships, airports, gold coins – indicate he’s more interested in himself than you…almost like a narcissist?

12. Would you consider it repugnant if a neighbor – or your own child – regularly referred to women and minorities as “low IQ …piggy…ugly …scum?”

13. Do you consider it a crisis that federal judges 200 separate times have overturned his actions as unlawful or unconstitutional – and that he was also convicted on 34 counts of fraud by a unanimous jury – despite his oath of office to “faithfully execute the laws?”

14. Would you consider it a national emergency if Team Trump implemented their plans to subvert the 2026 midterm elections via voter suppression by local election-deniers, armed ICE agents going to minority voting places, disqualification of legitimate mail-in ballots by the Postal Service, refusal by the House GOP majority next January to seat Democratic winners based on false assertions of voter fraud?

Of course, you’re entitled to continue supporting Republicans who support his campaign of “retribution” (Trump’s word). But I doubt there are many committed progressives who would comparably embrace a Democratic officeholder pursuing such marginal – even if “liberal” – measures.

If you are, however, still an Always-Trumper, surely you must have some overriding belief or animosity to outweigh his enthusiastic indecency. What exactly has led you to, hypothetically, prefer Trump over a Barack Hussein Obama?

What religious, regional, racial, substantive or ideological reason could motivate you to stick with Trumpism after all the thousands of documented lies, scandals, self-enrichment schemes, judicial reversals and obvious alignment with fellow billionaires rather than average workers like yourself?

Let’s assume that all current indicators accurately predict an electoral backlash the size of 1974 or 1980 and that the key political variable in America soon becomes not so much Left-Right as Right-Wrong. Why would you continue to favor a modern composite of Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon and Alex Jones over any normal member from the party of FDR, JFK and Clinton?

True, it’s not easy for any of us – me included! – to introspectively reexamine or regret long-standing political habits. But if you’re still a MAGA Man (or somehow, Woman) after the past 19 months of news about Trump’s hostility to so many core American values – and meaning no disrespect –I have to ask: WHAT. IS. WRONG. WITH. YOU?

This is Mark Green personally suggesting not that you be “Woke” but that you wake up from a distortion field we call the Inflection Zone that you created and made the rest of us live in. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

As noted in Part I, Michael worked with me at our Democracy Project and then went on to become President Clinton’s chief of speechwriting; he’s the author of eight public policy books including POTUS Speaks and a more recent volume on the Roberts Court, called Supermajority

In 2008 he was among 60 national progressive leaders in a book that I oversaw for the next President Elect called Changing America, which we gave to Barack Obama and which provided the title for this very podcast. He wrote the chapter on democracy. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Welcome back Michael.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Mark Green: The Cook Report has just concluded that not only the House but the U.S. Senate too would likely have democratic majorities after the upcoming midterm elections.

So if a Democratic House Speaker in 2027 and a Democratic President [in 2029] invites you to propose progressive ideas to enact what would you suggest? Let’s start with ethics.

Michael Waldman: It’s utterly vital that, when given a chance, we focus on ethics, on corruption, on strengthening democracy. Over and over again, people who wanna weaken democracy, as soon as they get a pinky on a lever of power, try to tilt the playing field – they rig the rules.

And Democrats, liberals, when they get into office, say, “Oh, you know, I’m not sure people care about this, it’s not a “kitchen table issue.” This year, it’s quite clear people are angry at government. They think that big money has corrupted the political process, that the government is not working for them, it’s working for a handful of insiders.

So in terms of ethics, for example, we’ve put out a series called Solutions for a Stronger Democracy.

And encouragingly, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, a few weeks ago introduced legislation that was very similar to what we had put out. He actually in his bill would fold the Federal Election Commission as well as other government ethics agencies into one powerful agency, recognizing that the FEC just doesn’t work.

There needs to be a top-to-bottom accountability. I’m taken with a phrase from the new Hungarian president, Peter Magyar, who beat [Viktor] Orbán, this Trump-like authoritarian who was in office for 16 years. Magyar said Hungary can no longer be a “country without consequences.”

That’s the spirit that we need to really clean house after Trump.

Mark Green: There’s an argument whether conflict laws do apply to a president, the only person we elect nationally. Is there any way to at least bring a case to enforce the Emolument clauses?

Trump is obviously profiting off his presidency, Or is that just off the legal table?

Michael Waldman: We actually think that the current ethics laws don’t apply to the president, and they should. The Constitution is very clear. As you said, the Emoluments Clause prevents presidents from taking domestic or foreign gifts.

In the first Trump term, there was litigation around things like his hotels and the courts basically never ruled on it and sort of threw the cases out, said the people bringing them did not have standing. Well, now in this second Trump term, we see an extraordinary frenzy of corruption, much more open than in the first term.

Trump has increased his net worth, I believe, something like $2 billion in a year and a half based on government decisions, people wanting to curry favor with the government. That was even before he started selling access to his social media posts for insider trading. I understand pretty much nobody has signed up for that because it’s illegal.

Mark Green: You also have proposals on the Supreme Court. You, Michael, were among the few dozen progressive experts, scholars appointed to a Joe Biden commission to look into changes at the Supreme Court given how imbalanced it’s become. What were those proposals? Why did Biden do nothing? And what would you try to do on a new round?

Michael Waldman: The Supreme Court has vast power and minimal accountability. It has become not a co-equal branch of government but a super legislature over the rest of government. It has been captured by a faction of a faction. It now has a very conservative six-vote super majority. Biden, when he was running for president and did not want to do anything about the Supreme Court, said, “Well, I’ll appoint a commission.”

And so when he became president, he did. I was privileged to be one of the members. He literally instructed us not to reach conclusions. But what was very interesting is we had hearings.

We heard from dozens of public witnesses from left and right, there is a broad public consensus for an 18-year term limit for justices of the Supreme Court. It reflects the very basic idea that nobody should have too much power for too long. It’s pretty much what George Washington taught us when he limited himself to two terms.

The most recent Fox News poll showed 79% support for Supreme Court term limits. It can be done, of course, by amending the Constitution. We believe it can be done statutorily by an act of Congress as well, and we’ve been urging Congress to take this step.

In recent days, Hakeem Jeffries has said that what he calls “dramatic Supreme Court reform” has to be at the center of the agenda for the Democrats if they get power.

That would help drain a lot of the partisan poison out of the confirmation process. You know, near the end of his term in office, Joe Biden endorsed term limits. We’re hoping the next president does it on the first day.

Mark Green: A third huge issue from the beginning of your career to now is campaign finance reform.

Remind everybody what you did in writing Bill Clinton’s proposal to the House in ‘93 – when you had a majority for campaign finance reform– why it was delayed, and what you would do now in a new era after Citizens United and Elon Musk.

Michael Waldman: When Clinton came in, one of the first things he did was to propose a reform bill that would have brought public financing of campaigns to congressional campaigns.

What happened is the liberal Democrats killed it. In public, they were demanding action. The door would close, and they would say in effect, “Are you crazy?” They were thinking as incumbents rather than as ideologues or idealists. So the Democrats missed their opportunity.

What has happened since then is Mitch McConnell, who was an ardent, zealous opponent of doing anything on campaign finance, among other things, helped stack the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court has made things much worse. But it’s still possible to take significant action. I do think there ought to be small donor public financing, voluntary, of campaigns at the federal level, like we see in New York City and New York state.

Which means that if you give a small amount to a candidate, that is matched maybe at a multiple level by the public funds, and it really increases the voice of ordinary people in the political system.

We need much stronger enforcement. And I do think we need a constitutional amendment to overturn not just Citizens United, but an earlier case, Buckley v. Valeo, bad Supreme Court rulings that have basically made it impossible to have a working democracy in our country because of the way they treat campaign finance law.

Mark Green: By the way, there’s a huge majority in favor of overturning Citizens United so that if it goes from Congress to the states, it’s not a foregone conclusion that it can’t be enacted.

Let me move on… Should Democrats take the Congress and the presidency, how do you deal with a criminal regime that governed America at least for four years, if not eight? There will likely be a lot of moderate Democrats and Independents who’ll say, “Ah, kumbaya, put everything behind us. Let’s just look ahead.”

Others will say, “Like hell.“ Unless we hold them accountable for their consequences, the next Trump wannabe will say, “Okay, I’m building on what Donald did, and now I’m going further.”

So in my view we’ll need a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” looking at prosecution at the state level or for the non-pardoned and for officially exposing obvious Big Lies – like tariffs affecting only foreign countries. This would be a more holistic attack Post-Trump.

Michael Waldman: I understand the dilemma because you wanna be forward-looking…you don’t wanna look like you’re just waging a vendetta against the previous administration. Having said that, I think it is really important to build support for future change that people understand what has happened before. It’s corrupt thieving by well-connected, wealthy, interested individuals.

But there’s lots of other stuff government could do. It has the ability to claw back money through corrupt or illegal deals with foreign countries, with individuals, with business people. If you look at effective history -- Franklin Roosevelt, yes, he was building the New Deal, but they also went after the swindlers who had a lot to do with the stock market crash.

I think a lot of the people who were part of the Obama administration say, as Rahm Emanuel did, that it was a mistake not to prosecute some of the bankers who were behind the mortgage fraud that helped bring down the economy. They thought, well, gee, things are so fragile, but actually it would’ve helped give the public a different idea of who was benefiting from all the various bailouts.

Ronald Reagan blamed Jimmy Carter for everything that happened for his eight years. Democrats need to not be afraid to do that if they get in office. We need to make sure this doesn’t happen again. It turns out that a lot of the stuff that we assumed were protections were just habits, tradition and not things with the force of law.

We assumed that the Justice Department was functionally independent of the White House, for example. Now clearly there need to be protections written in.

The last time we had that in a meaningful way was in the 1970s, as you know, after Watergate, where there was a serious effort to constrain the illicit power of the imperial presidency. Everything from the War Powers Act, to the Budget Act, to the campaign finance laws. We are well overdue for such a reckoning today.

Mark Green: Michael, thank you for reminding us that the new Hungarian president is an exhilarating model given how Trump has plummeted in popularity.

He’s not running but his ideas are running. And thank you for embracing, in effect, our favorite quote - Norman Cousins in the 1950s wrote, “No one’s smart enough to be a pessimist.” Thanks for the optimism of your Substack, The Briefing with Michael Waldman.

I recommend people go to it. And keep coming back to Changing America where we don’t simply look down to the mud of Trump but look up to the horizon of what’s possible. Thanks, Michael.

Michael Waldman: Thank you, Mark.

We’re now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Instagram, and YouTube! Make sure to subscribe to follow along with new Changing America episodes and all other updates from The Inflection Zone.

I’m a friend and admirer of and think it’s ok to talk to leaders of the other party, especially when asked by an emissary from a President… and since it was a reflection of political weakness for this president to even allow his son-in-law’s outreach.

At the same time, there should be a near zero percent chance that the Democratic Leader – as he knows better than anyone – would trust anything from Team Trump when it’s run by a bad-faith bully openly plotting to sabotage the Midterms, as Tuesday’s Substack explained.

Must Dems wait two months and then two years until the next national elections before deploying their offensive weapons? Here’s one way that later this year they can start to dominate the national narrative even while lacking de jure Congressional and Presidential authority.

Presidents usually out-arm wrestle Congress because, among other levers of power, the former speaks with one voice and the latter with many. The existential threat of MAGA and Trump, however, should generate a ballsy response to a brazen POTUS. Viz, imagine that the following machers (or some combination) issue a joint statement should Democrats win majorities in both chambers in December – Newsom, Harris, Buttigieg, AOC, Raskin, Whitehouse, Warren, Pelosi, Jeffries, Jack Smith – to collectively announce a new BIG DEAL when it comes to corruption, law and war:

“While there will soon be many specific proposals, hearings and debates about America’s next decades, we will today explain our foundational premise to end the era of despotism over democracy and to replace the dangerous extremism that has defined the Party of Trump.

Whether by civil or criminal process, we will hold those in office accountable if facts emerge that they corruptly used law enforcement to prosecute political enemies or to financially enrich themselves and also to correct repeated Big Lies before they harden into history.”

This is not retribution but justice. If we have anything to say about it – and we intend to – future MAGA aspirants should know that the 48th President and 120th Congress will hold them personally responsible for any attempts to confuse piracy with patriotism…not individual voters but accomplices to a conspiracy of illegality and lies, as Lincoln forgave Confederate soldiers but not Confederate generals.

This will help all MAGA Republicans better balance their fear of a nasty Trump tweet versus being named in courts if not the court of public opinion. They should appreciate that while Trump won’t be on any future ballot, they will.

It’s past time to end their attempts to erase the past century of progress and their imitation of a South American dictator who said, “to my enemies the law, to my friends, facilities.”

So no more two-tiered justice based on Red and Blue nor pardons for the powerful. No more coaxing and condoning insurrectionists, fake indictments of AGs and Senators, suppression of minority voters in the name of "voter integrity," banning books and the speech of critics, firings of career civil servants based on partisan retribution, free out-of-jail cards to family & friends, wars without congressional approval, tariffs as shakedown schemes, political destruction of law firms and universities, unqualified toadies as cabinet secretaries and judges who don’t know who won the 2020 presidential election. Enough!

Those who hoped to continue to escape accountability for their corruption will now face it.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Best,

A New Generation of Leaders

The New York Times on Sunday listed 134 examples of Trump’s steady march to autocracy (aka, “Fascism”). However, if the public doesn’t perceive a muted menace, the risk rises that it might succeed…think no Paul Revere in 1775.

Such one-sidedness by the MSM should be inexcusable given warnings from advocates and journos: Ralph Nader, The Washington Spectator, anything , and produce, especially her influential Hiding in Plain Sight.

They and others have blown-the-whistle on Trump’s in-progress maneuvers – fewer drop boxes/polling places, armed ICE agents in November, election deniers in key state offices, the Postal Service rejecting mail-in ballots (which SCOTUS yesterday temporarily allowed), Speaker Johnson’s refusal to swear in Democratic winners next January based on some hyperbolic “National Emergency” (people saying that China may invade San Francisco? An outbreak of Ebola in southern Italy,? a surge in red-light tickets?)...plus who knows what other conspiracies are in Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller’s heads?

These and other WTF ploys may be one Shadow Docket “decision” away from the Thomas 6.

Fanciful? Remember that Trump for six years has insisted that Biden lost an election he won by 7 million votes and that 60 courts confirmed the latter’s Electoral College majority was NOT tainted by voter fraud. If he’s still pathologically delusional about that, is any “October Surprise” really beyond his piratical imagination?

See PART II later week on how Democrats can better flex their potential muscle to counter Trump’s great but diminishing power to cheat to win.