Saturday, June 27, 2026
Trump Just Keeps Getting Humiliated (And That Makes Him Dangerous)
From Robert Reich:
Nothing makes Trump angrier than being humiliated. Humiliation involves public shame, which Trump’s malignant narcissism cannot abide.
But Trump is facing humiliation after humiliation. They’re causing him to lose his mind even faster than before.
The Iranian regime knows this, which is why it’s publicly humiliating Trump by contradicting everything he says about making progress on the peace talks.
Yesterday, Iran went further. It refuted Trump’s claim that Iran did not control the Strait of Hormuz, and that the strait was again open to shipping, by striking a container ship passing through the strait. Oil prices immediately jumped.
Meanwhile, American judges are humiliating Trump by ordering his name off the Kennedy Center, requiring that the center remain open, pausing work on his billionaire ballroom, threatening to stop his Arch de Trump, ending his slush fund, and vacating charges that Trump’s Justice [sic] Department has brought against Trump’s enemies.
Performing artists are humiliating him by pulling out of his so-called “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall because they don’t want any part in what’s become a Trump rally.
Congressional Republicans are humiliating him by rejecting his demands that they enact the “SAVE” Act (which would make it harder for millions of people to vote), pass his next reconciliation package, and blow up the Senate filibuster.
Four Senate Republicans even crossed party lines to back a war powers resolution directing Trump to halt military operations against Iran or seek congressional authorization to continue. Their support delivered a bipartisan rebuke to Trump’s handling of the war. (After lobbying by Trump, the Senate reversed its stance and rejected the resolution in a late-night vote.)
Turning 80 is itself a humiliation for Trump. Even if the media weren’t harping on it, his body is continuously reminding him that he’s the oldest president ever elected. Not to mention increasing calls from Democrats to invoke the 25th Amendment in light of Trump’s erratic behavior — including his feud with the pope, his doomsday threats on Truth Social, and his posting of an AI photo of himself as Jesus.
But the very worst type of humiliation for Trump is ridicule — as first became apparent in 2011 when Obama skewered him at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner by producing his birth certificate and saying Trump could “now get back to focusing on important issues like did we fake the moon landing?”
The audience roared. Trump fumed.
Trump can’t take ridicule — which is why he tried to get ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel and gloated when CBS got rid of Stephen Colbert.
Yet late-night comedians are now having a field day with Trump’s algae-infested Reflecting Pool. Some are calling it the Strait of Warm Ooze.
The pile-up of humiliations is causing Trump to lash out at anyone and everyone, including his recent explosion at NBC correspondent Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and Wednesday’s reported shouting match with Republican Senator Bill Cassidy during a closed-door lunch at the Capitol. The lunch came just after Trump dropped a bombshell by canceling plans to sign a bipartisan landmark housing affordability bill until he gets his way on the SAVE Act.
I’m tempted to enjoy the Trump humiliations. But I think it also important to note that as they mount, Trump is becoming even more erratic and dangerous. So beware.
Don't Fear The "S-Word" - It Just Means An Affordable Life For Everyone
The following is part of an excellent post by Thom Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:
On Tuesday night, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party got a message it would prefer to pretend it didn’t hear. In New York, Mamdani-backed progressives swept the congressional primaries, ousting two sitting Democratic congressmen and taking an open seat in a single evening. . . .
The corporate press and just about every Republican in the country will tell you these candidates are “socialists,” and they’ll spit the word the way you’d say “arsonist.” A little history clears the fog.
When a young public defender in upper Manhattan or a state assemblywoman in Brooklyn calls herself a democratic socialist today, she isn’t talking about Havana or the old Soviet Politburo (the way Republicans and much of the press want you to think). . . .
Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works forty hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.
That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped-out about.
Americans have wanted those things for a very long time. More than a hundred and twenty years ago, Teddy Roosevelt stood up and called it the Square Deal: a fair shot for the worker, the consumer, and the “honest businessman” against the trusts and the railroad barons who’d swallowed the economy whole.
Franklin Roosevelt built the scaffolding of it with the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson finished the second story with the Great Society, and for about three decades we actually had it. The middle class in the postwar years grew faster and richer than any middle class in the history of the world. By 1980, it was two-thirds of us with a single paycheck (it’s about 41% now, and takes two paychecks to get there). . . .
And then it was taken apart on purpose. As I lay out in The Hidden History of American the American Dream, the dismantling of that middle class wasn’t an unfortunate side effect of globalization or robots or some impersonal economic weather. It was a deliberate Republican neoliberal project that began with Ronald Reagan imitating Maggie Thatcher and following Heritage’s A Mandate for Leadership in 1981 and has been carried forward by both parties ever since.
The tools were straightforward. Going back to Taft-Hartley in 1947 and the spread of “right-to-work-for-less” laws Republicans and their corporate funders handed states and giant companies the power to strangle unions, and a worker without a union is a worker without leverage.
They froze the federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour, where it has sat untouched since 2009. America’s oligarchs fought, decade after decade, to keep the United States the only wealthy nation on Earth without national healthcare, herding us instead into the arms of insurance conglomerates and hospital and physician monopolies, more and more of them now owned by private equity firms that treat a sick patient as a line item to be squeezed.
The result, as the nonpartisan RAND Corporation recently calculated, is that roughly $79 trillion has been pumped upward from the bottom ninety percent of Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich top one percent since Reagan, and the middle class has sunk below 50% of us and is hanging on — now requiring two paychecks — by its fingernails.
In that same span the share of national income going to the bottom ninety percent fell from about two-thirds to less than half, we’ve watched the largest upward transfer of wealth in the history of the American republic all the way back to George Washington, and every dollar of it was a choice some oligarch or his wholly-owned politician made. . . . .
Republicans have to scream “socialism” at any candidate whose actual platform is “rent you can afford” and “a doctor you can see when you need to without going broke.” They can’t argue the economics (and their billionaire donors won’t let them even if they wanted to), so they change the subject to fear.
But the American people aren’t buying the GOP’s oligarchic bullshit anymore. The GOP got crushed in last year’s off-year elections on the simple issue of affordability — which I read as blowback against oligarchy. . . .
The Democratic base is trying hard to pull its party back toward its FDR and LBJ roots. . . .
What these voters keep saying they want is fighters against neoliberalism, fascism, and a return to the New Deal and Great Society.
The Republican Party, meanwhile, is bowing and scraping lower and lower to Trump, Project 2025, and their neofascist agenda. . . .
After forty-five years in the wilderness, Americans are reaching back for the Square Deal that Teddy Roosevelt promised and the New Deal and Great Society that FDR and LBJ delivered, and no amount of red-baiting about Havana is going to talk them out of it.
Democrats must choose to kick the oligarchs out and let the people back in.
Friday, June 26, 2026
53% of Adults Think There Is Likely Grounds To Impeach Donald Trump
The chart above is from the Strength in Numbers / Verasight Poll -- done between June 17th and 22nd of a nationwide sample of 2,087 adults, with a 2.2 point margin of error.
New Poll Has The U.S. Seante Race In Texas A Virtual Tie
The chart above is from the University of Texas / Texas Politics Project Poll -- done between June 5th and 12th of 1,200 registered Texas voters, with a 2.83 point margin of error.
Why Does The U.S. Public Hate AI?
Why does the United States public hate AI? Economist Paul Krugman gives us five reasons why that is true. He writes:
First, we fear that AI will do terrible things because the companies selling it told us it would do terrible things. Last year, for example, Anthropic CEO Darius Amodei declared in an interview with Axios that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs and drive overall unemployment as high as 20 percent within 1 to 5 years.
More recently Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have tried to walk back their predictions of a “jobs apocalypse”. But why were they so willing to promote apocalyptic visions in the first place? The answer is money. They pushed the idea that they had a technology that would quickly and utterly transform the economy partly to dazzle Wall Street and secure financing, and partly to scare businesses into rushing into AI adoption for fear of being left behind.
Second, many ordinary people view AI negatively because they feel that it is being forced on them.
It’s true that many people are voluntarily using large language models for personal convenience or as a business productivity tool. But a significant part of AI use isn’t voluntary.
Why are companies doing this? Presumably they believe that AI will raise productivity. But just as importantly, they’re responding to pressure from financial markets, which are rewarding companies for quickly adopting AI, apparently without regard to demonstrated results.
And while Americans workers are being dragooned into using AI, American consumers are being force-fed AI whether they want it or not. Most dramatically, Google has replaced its search engine with AI, without offering the option to opt out.
Third, datacenters are a highly visible reminder of AI’s costs. Datacenters occupy huge tracts of land — one proposed site in Utah will be twice the size of Manhattan. They guzzle electricity and water. When they generate some of their own power, they create major local pollution. Not surprisingly, there is intense opposition to datacenter construction. According to a Reuters Ipsos poll, 57 percent of Americans — two-thirds of Democrats and half of Republicans — would oppose a datacenter in their neighborhood.
Only 14 percent would support one.
Fourth, even before the advent of AI, tech companies had lost the public’s trust. Over the years Pew has regularly surveyed the public for its views on technology companies, asking whether they have a positive or a negative effect “on the way things are going.” In 2015 public opinion of tech companies was overwhelmingly positive. By 2022, the year ChatGPT was released, that goodwill had evaporated.
Finally, AI is tightly linked in the public mind with the tech oligarchs who are pushing it. There is widespread awareness of the growing concentration of wealth and power at the top and how this is distorting our politics and harming our society. Aside from the MAGA faithful, Americans overwhelmingly favor government policies to reduce wealth inequality.
And AI is widely perceived, for good reason, as a technology that will increase the concentration of wealth at the top. Indeed, as I said, the AI companies themselves have already told us that the technology will have extremely negative effects on workers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)