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The Felon Echoes Nixon's Racist Strategy

If one takes the time to read Project 2025, it becomes clear that the endeavor is a white "Christian" nationalist plan to drag America back to the 1950's, include instituting Jim Crow 2.0 curtailment of the rights of blacks and racial minorities, erasing LGBT civil rights, and eroding the rights of women among other nefarious goals. The Felon, of course, lied about knowing anything about Project 2025 even as he has implemented it step by step after taking office.  At its core, Project 2025, is an effort to restore white supremacy which plays well with working and lower class whites who seemingly are desperate to be able to look down on and discriminate against others.  Indeed, this desire for a license to discriminate to boost a sense of superiority - which the Felon has openly embraced - has lead to such individuals voting Republican even as the GOP agenda is hostile to the financial wellbeing of these voters. All of this is part of a tend within the GOP that traces back to Richard Nixon and his "Southern Strategy" that sought to attract southern whites who were hostile to racial minorities - principally blacks - having voting protects and equal treatment under the law. Sadly, the extremists on the U.S. Supreme Court are all in on this effort to erase the rights of blacks, other non-whites, the LGBT community and others.  A piece at Salon looks at this ugly agenda and the Felon's willingness to fan open racism:

Anyone who’s observed the Supreme Court over the past few years knew it was pretty much assured that the conservative majority would gut the Voting Rights Act the first chance they got. But the anticipation made the Court’s 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais no less shocking and appalling for having been anticipated. 

The conservative justices paved the way for the massive redistricting of Southern states that is already transpiring only days after the ruling. These actions will almost certainly eliminate most of the South’s Black representation, leaving those states essentially where they were before the Civil Rights Movement. 

After the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, Republicans set out to maintain and solidify control of the South. The operation went into full force in 1968 when historian and political scientist Kevin Phillips took note of Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s success in embedding racist-coded “law and order” messages in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, and he persuaded GOP candidate Richard Nixon to follow suit. The GOP’s “Southern Strategy” was born. 

As the historian Rick Perlstein laid out in “Nixonland,” his epic history of the period, Phillips and Nixon understood something about the American cultural upheaval that most of the people in the media and elite institutions did not. White working-class and precarious middle-class voters were alarmed not only at the upending of the racial caste system but also at what they saw as an unraveling of society in general. The Vietnam War was raging, there were protests in the streets and their own kids were repudiating many of their values. The changes felt chaotic and overwhelming, so when Nixon promised “law and order,” they embraced it. In this sense, the Southern Strategy was about much more than just the Southern states — and remains so today.

As Perlstein wrote in the opening pages, “The main character in Nixonland is not Richard Nixon. Its protagonist, in fact, has no name — but lives on every page. It is the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.”

Despite the fact that Donald Trump thinks he invented the phrase “law and order,” the truth is that virtually every Republican candidate for president and Congress has used that slogan in the 60 years since — and everyone has always known exactly what they meant by it.

But in another important way Trump’s Southern Strategy is even more nefarious and blatant than Nixon’s, and it’s far older than the one Phillips imagined in the 1960s. The [Felon] president is reaching back to the really bad old days of the late 19th and early 20th centuries for inspiration. As the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch observed on May 3, the Justice Department, which has had a tough time prosecuting revenge cases against the president’s perceived enemies, has apparently realized that it would have more success bringing them in the solid Southern GOP states. 

Bunch notes that the recent case brought against former FBI Director James Comey was rejected by prosecutors and the courts in Virginia, which has trended Democratic in recent elections. But it was taken up by the very Trumpy U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina without any reported qualms. . . . . Federal prosecutors were able to get an equally absurd case handed down against the Southern Poverty Law Center in Mississippi by fatuously claiming that because the organization had paid informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups, it was supporting terrorism.

The late Republican strategist Lee Atwater famously laid out the Southern Strategy tactics years ago when he said that, in the past, politicians could just scream racist epithets and that would be enough. But he realized the GOP needed to be more subtle as the years went by. The results were coded tropes involving “law and order,” “welfare queens” and other veiled appeals that their racist base would understand, while not offending suburban whites who weren’t comfortable with overtly crude rhetoric. 

Starting with Nixon, virtually all GOP politicians skillfully deployed that tactic keeping the coalition of big and small business, evangelicals and anti-communists in the tent alongside true believers in the South’s “Lost Cause” myth. But [the Felon] Donald Trump is now on the verge of jettisoning that aspect of the strategy once and for all. 

As the Republican Party becomes more and more alienated from the white suburbs that no longer back its candidates — largely due to Trump’s grotesque behavior — they are finding they no longer need to hide their true agenda. It looks like the old Confederacy is making another run at it — this time with a loud-mouthed New Yorker at the helm and a Supreme Court majority ready to do its dirty work.

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Trump’s “Affordability Hoax” May Doom the GOP

It's another day and the Iran war continues - with no victorious  exit for the Felon in sight - oil prices remain high, the increased cost of energy is driving up consumer prices (my firm uses FedEx and the cost of sending packages has increased significantly due to s fuel surcharge) , and increased fertilizer costs mean food will be more expensive as well. Through all of this the Felon claims that price increases and "affordability" are a "hoax" fabricated by Democrats. Recently, he even called concerns about prices and affordability "bulls*it" to a crowd in Florida. As always, I cannot comprehend how people believed the Felon's lie that if elected he would lower costs "on day one" even as he offered tariffs as a silver bullet that would save the economy.   Warnings were everywhere that tariffs would increase consumer prices, not lower them, yet individuals chose to believe a pathological liar who cares nothing for citizens unless they are ultra wealthy or billionaires. Insanely, with his poll numbers on his handling of the economy dipping below 30%, the Felon is only doubling down on his lies and claims that the economy is doing well, with frequent efforts to blame everything on Joe Biden even though the Felon has been in office for 16 months now.  And then, there's his foolish war of choice in Iran which has given the Iranians a stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz.  A piece in Salon looks at the Felon's fantasies on the economy:

[The Felon] Donald Trump has a difficult relationship with the truth. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that at a time when his approval ratings on the economy are slipping into the 20s, he would double down on his insistence that the economy is actually exploding — and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. On May 4 he made an appearance at The Villages, the community in central Florida restricted to people over 55, where he told his assembled fans, “You know, it’s amazing. I come into office and I say ‘Wow, look how high these prices are,’ and the Democrats start screaming ‘Affordability! Affordability!’ They’re the ones that caused the problem! I’ll tell you one thing: They got one good line of bulls**t. That’s one thing I’ll say about ‘em.”

Those comments marked an unusual step for him: He admitted there was a problem. Yes, there was that week when he was touting himself as “THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT.” But really, ever since he returned to the White House, Trump has been trying to persuade the public that what they say they’re feeling — rising prices, economic unease, anxiety about the future — is nothing more than a Democratic hoax. Now he’s just taken to throwing out nonsense about the American economy being “the hottest in the world,” his favorite line, and “roaring.” 

Few believe that. The latest Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll showed that only 23% believe the president is doing a good job on the cost of living, and his approval rating on inflation fell to 27%. These numbers make his overall number on the economy — 34% — look good.

If affordability is a hoax, a whole lot of people seem to have bought into it. Despite the administration’s tiresome habit of saying that everything is Joe Biden’s fault, people have good reason to blame Trump himself for what’s happening today. The president promised to fix the economy on day one. He’s now been in office for 16 months. 

When he was quizzed during the 2024 campaign about his plans to confront inflation and the cost of living, Trump always said that his tariffs would fix everything and that growth would be so strong that the federal government would be in a position to pay for everything from childcare to medical insurance for the whole country. It was absurd, of course, but a lot of people bought it.

Taking him at his word that the economy over which he presided in his first term was “the greatest economy the world had ever known” — it was not — voters, then, turned against Joe Biden (and later, Kamala Harris) and Democrats in 2024 largely out of anger and frustration over inflation, which had spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath. Trump has only made it worse. 

Plenty of people who warned Trump and the GOP. Economists of all stripes said that tariffs would almost certainly raise inflation, and while nobody expected the president would start a war with Iran, everyone knows that shocks and disruptions in the oil markets cause prices to rise. Anyone would have assumed that Trump would move heaven and earth to avoid that in the middle of an already-precarious economic recovery, but hey — he marches to his own drummer.

According to the March 2026 consumer price index, overall inflation currently stands at 3.3% — up from 2.4% in March 2025. The price of energy has increased by 12.5%, and gasoline prices are up by a staggering 18.9%. Economists have predicted a rise in the second quarter of 2026.

One would think it’s surprising that since Trump was an adult businessman during the 1970s, when we last experienced similar economic problems, he would have known this. But the president’s grasp of history, even a period he has lived through, is always tenuous at best. During this era, when he and his father were being sued for discriminating against prospective Black and Puerto Rican rental applicants, the country was suffering from stagflation, a condition caused by stagnant growth, high unemployment and soaring inflation, which started in 1973 and clocked in at 13.5% by 1980. The parallels to today, while not exact, are interesting; along with the Iran hostage crisis, stagflation ended up destroying Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

The problem was finally resolved after Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker threw the country into a brutal recession by raising interest rates to over 20% by mid-1981, causing nearly 11% unemployment.

That was the last time the U.S. experienced any notable inflation until it shot up to just over 6% in 2022, which came as a shock to many consumers. Unlike Americans in the 1980s, they expected prices to come back down, but that will likely not happen. As the data analyst G. Elliott Morris recently wrote, it will take a long time before people have fully adjusted. Memories of the before-time are just too fresh. 

[E]conomist Robert Frank argued that inflation isn’t the villain. Instead, he wrote, “the real culprit was, and remains, something that neither Democrats nor Republicans have shown any willingness to tackle seriously: unprecedentedly high and growing levels of income and wealth inequality.” Frank believes that lavish spending by the wealthy is distorting both the economy and society-at-large, affecting everyone up and down the income ladder — and contributing to this ongoing sense of dissatisfaction and frustration. 

The problem is big and has been building for years; it won’t be solved by a return to 2% inflation or a rise in consumer confidence. And it certainly won’t change because Trump is pushing the bogus claim that America has entered a “golden age” and demanding that people believe him rather than their own lived experiences. 

Affordability is more than a political slogan. It’s a long-term global problem that’s getting worse every day, and Trump and Republicans look set to pay the price in November.

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The Iran War Is Smashing the Felon's Fossil Fuel Dreams

Both the Felon and much of the GOP are beholden to the fossil fuel industries - oil and coal - and have been relentless in their efforts to undermine the development of renewable energy sources, principally wind and solar, in order to please big oil in particular.  With the USA now a net exporter of oil and gas, the Felon seemingly viewed America as being immune to shortages and soaring gas prices that a closure of the Strait of Hormuz might bring.  Now, it is becoming clear that the Iran war - a war of choice for which the Felon is solely responsible - is driving other nations to accelerate efforts to reduce reliance on oil and gas energy sources in favor of wind and solar power. Who benefits from this effort to shift from hydrocarbons?  China, of course, which has come to dominate both the wind and solar energy industries even as the Felon's regime has undermined American efforts to grow both industries. This is yet another of the Felon's strategic failures.  A piece at The New Republic looks at how the Felon's war of choice is backfiring and another in the New York Times looks at how China stands to profit from the efforts of other nations' efforts to build renewable energy sources.  Meanwhile, dominance in both industries has allowed China to lessen its vulnerability to foreign oil sources.  First, here are highlights from TNR:  

The Strait of Hormuz is still closed, and it isn’t poised to open anytime soon. Donald Trump signaled on Wednesday that he intends to keep the U.S. blockade in place until Iran cries “uncle” and says, “We give up.” The longer the strait stays closed, the less likely any sort of return to normalcy gets.

Soon, this mounting human and economic disaster will crash into another climate-changed summer. Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, warned last week that the world faces “the biggest energy security threat in history.” Surging jet fuel prices and shortages threaten everything from commercial air travel in Europe to fighting wildfires in the western United States. Making matters worse, a potential super El Niño could trigger heat waves across Asia, further increasing demand for air conditioning and, accordingly, fossil fuels. Droughts or flooding from that weather pattern could force hydropower stations to shut down or reduce output, compelling hydropower-dependent regions to increase their demand for increasingly scarce, pricey supplies of oil and gas. The combination of extreme weather and shortages of gas-derived fertilizers that typically flow through the Strait of Hormuz stands to exacerbate a looming, climate-fueled global food crisis.

While the Trump administration certainly doesn’t seem too concerned about the crises its reckless, illegal war of choice is exacerbating in other parts of the world, the war is continuing to influence one of the few things Trump genuinely seems to care about: gas prices. In the U.S., they have soared to almost $4.30 per gallon. For the U.S., though, war in Iran risks a lot more than pissing off voters who are paying more at the pump. As the war drags on, more countries are souring on the idea that oil and gas are reliable and necessary ingredients for a thriving economy. The White House, meanwhile, is going to elaborate lengths to safeguard the fossil-fueled growth model its war is endangering.

Some nations are starting to chart out energy futures that depend less on fossil fuels and the U.S. Leaders from nearly 60 countries gathered this past week in Santa Marta, Colombia, to discuss getting off of fossil fuels. Part of the inspiration for the meeting was that powerful fossil fuel producing countries—namely Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States—have made such discussions virtually impossible at U.N. climate talks. . . . three-fourths of the world’s population live in countries that are net importers of fossil fuels. . . . “So today,” Hart continued, “the urgency of transitioning away from fossil fuels is no longer only a climate or environmental imperative. It is a security imperative, an economic imperative, and a development imperative.”

Wars in Russia and Iran, however, have helped underline the urgency of that message. Steep declines in the price of renewable energy—thanks largely to China—have made it much more possible for even fast-growing countries to reduce their reliance on imported hydrocarbons in key sectors like power and transportation. For the first time last year, renewables provided more power than coal worldwide.

The war in Iran has helped accelerate shifts that were already underway—and confirmed any and all suspicions that the U.S. is an unreliable partner for energy security. . . . Whether consciously or not, the Trump administration is resorting to increasingly desperate measures to ward off a future where its carbon-intensive products are less important. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has now spent nearly $2 billion bribing developers to ditch offshore wind projects.

The continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz is driving up fuel and commodity prices, forcing drillers to halt production, pushing governments and consumers alike to consider lower-carbon alternatives, and endangering what not too long ago had been considered promising growth markets for U.S. companies. In attempting to cling onto U.S. hegemony and global energy dominance, Trump might be ending both.

These highlights from the Times piece look at how China is pulling far ahead of the USA in the wind and solar energy industries:

As the war in Iran threatens to choke off oil and gas supplies from the Persian Gulf, China is seizing the moment to extend its dominance in wind power.

Across China, hilltops are dotted with wind turbines, and long rows of them span many miles in western deserts. Ultrahigh-voltage power lines carry electricity thousands of miles to the energy-hungry factories along China’s coast.

Last year, China installed three times as much wind power capacity as the rest of the world combined, even as its turbine exports jumped. The global industry’s center of gravity has shifted decisively: All of the world’s six largest wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese, displacing once-dominant European firms and companies like General Electric.

The war has made China’s investments in wind look prescient. Its Asian neighbors, long reliant on Middle Eastern oil and gas, are struggling to secure fuel supplies. Meanwhile, China, with its massive reserves and modern electric grid, is better positioned to weather the energy crisis

The contrast with the United States is stark. Under President Trump, energy policy has swung back toward oil and natural gas. In the past six weeks, the Trump administration has moved to spend nearly $2 billion reimbursing energy companies for abandoning plans to build offshore wind farms. This week, a leading renewable energy group said the administration has stalled more than 150 wind farm projects by delaying military reviews once considered routine.

The United States, the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas, has the luxury of relying on fossil fuels. China, the largest importer, does not. It is moving to reduce its exposure, motivated by concerns over national security, economic stability and climate change.

With the Strait of Hormuz, a critical artery for oil and gas shipments, largely closed for two months, China’s top leaders have grown more emphatic. “Energy is a strategic issue in development — our pioneering development of wind power and solar technology has proved to be forward-looking,” Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, said in late March, three weeks after U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran began.

Wind supplied 10 percent of China’s electricity last year, a share that is growing about one percentage point annually. Coal still accounts for just over half, but its share is slipping a couple of percentage points each year.

China is ramping up wind equipment exports in a hurry, unnerving competitors in the West and India. Exports of wind turbines and components to the European Union jumped 66 percent last year, while shipments to developing countries in China’s Belt and Road Initiative climbed 74 percent.

Chinese manufacturers, led by Envision Energy, are also gaining ground in India. . . . The standoff in Iran and the resulting spike in oil and natural gas prices have accelerated demand. Global wind turbine orders surged this spring, building on a 40 percent increase last year. Vietnam, for example, canceled plans for a major gas plant to focus instead on wind and solar.

Two decades ago, the wind industry was dominated by non-Chinese manufacturers: Vestas, General Electric, Germany’s Enercon, Spain’s Gamesa and Suzlon.

That began to change in 2005 when Beijing issued a directive, known as Notice 1204, requiring China’s wind farms to source at least 70 percent of their equipment domestically. Beijing’s top economic planning agency warned that projects failing to meet this threshold would not be approved.

Vestas, General Electric, Gamesa and Suzlon responded by building factories in China. Gamesa, which then held a 30 percent market share, localized nearly all its production. By 2009, its turbines for China were assembled with 95 percent Chinese components.

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The Felon, Rubio and America’s Global Decline

Since 2015 the Felon's mantra has been "Make America Great Again" yet in his second regime, no one has weakened America more than the Felon and his white nationalist policies that have seen America's soft power through foreign aid slashed if not eliminated, openly racist policies at home - the killing of the Voting Rights Act by the Felon's majority on the Supreme Court yet the latest example - that have sullied America's reputation abroad, and the Felon's alienation of long time allies, particularly in Europe. And then there's the Felon's war of choice with Iran that has depleted America's munitions and cause oil and gas prices to soar - and from which the Felon has no exit strategy.  Ironically, when a U.S. fighter jet was shot down by Iranians, the Felon reportedly was upset over the potential of the airmen being held hostage.  While the airmen were found, the real Iranian hostage is the Felon himself.  The war has shown the limits of airpower against Iran and, more importantly, the Iranian leadership appears to understand that all it needs to do is keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and oil prices high to destroy the viability of the Felon and the GOP on the home front. They realize that high oil prices through November could be catastrophic for the GOP and the Felon for whom a Democrat controlled Congress would be a nightmare.  A piece at Salon looks at America's decline in the world thanks to the Felon's deliberate policies:

Donald Trump’s war of choice against Iran is a strategic failure that has exposed the limits of America’s power and influence in the Middle East and around the world. In a highly unusual move, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been conspicuously absent from the negotiations with the Islamic Republic that led to a tenuous ceasefire, ceding the diplomatic spotlight to Vice President JD Vance, along with the administration’s “peace envoys” Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real estate developer and Trump friend. 

A recent New York Times report detailed how expansive Rubio’s absence has been. In addition to missing peace negotiations with Iran in Islamabad, Pakistan, he did not attend meetings in Doha and Geneva. He has not visited the Middle East since last October, nor has he played a direct role in diplomatic negotiations over Ukraine and Gaza.

But the secretary’s absence on the world stage doesn’t mean he has been idle. As the first person to serve simultaneously as secretary of state and national security adviser since Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, for Rubio “less time abroad means more time at the side of an impulsive president prone to making critical national security decisions at any moment.”

While also attending to Trump’s needs, Rubio has been busy remaking the State Department in the MAGA image — an act that is undermining democracy at home and accelerating strategic failures abroad. What the administration calls “America First” is, in practice, white racial authoritarianism and white Christian nationalism that governs who and what is deemed to be in America’s vital interests.

Historically, the State Department has emphasized cultural pluralism, secularism and inclusiveness in its public messaging and other communications — a deliberate choice rooted in the reality that American diplomacy takes place around the world. 

During the Cold War, America’s elites understood that racism at home made America weak abroad. Jim and Jane Crow were an international embarrassment, giving the Soviet Union a powerful counternarrative about American hypocrisy and the color line. How could a nation that oppressed its own Black citizens claim to be the world’s beacon of freedom against communism?

Civil rights activists understood this and used it for tactical and strategic leverage. Presidents from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson were forced to see that Jim Crow was not just a moral catastrophe but a geopolitical liability. Ralph Bunche, the Nobel Prize-winning diplomat and civil rights leader, connected the fight against American segregation to the broader struggle for human rights and peace around the world.

These traditions have been largely abandoned under Rubio at the behest of Trump.

On April 1 the State Department announced a series of “reforms” to the foreign service exam with the aim of eradicating “the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda” that the administration claimed was plaguing the department and diplomatic corps. As Puck’s Julia Ioffe memorably noted, these changes — which included an orientation curriculum centered on “America First” — were nothing short of “ideological screenings” and “political tests,” requiring prospective foreign service officers to “affirm their support for Trump’s executive orders…and demonstrate their ‘fidelity’ at every turn.”

Previous administrations understood that having a diverse State Department was a necessity, given how the majority of the world’s population is not white. Limiting the number of Black and brown diplomatic corps members at a time when China is making great inroads in Africa and other parts of the non-white world through infrastructure development, securing rare earth and other vital resources, and building military bases is a strategic blunder.  

The department has also overseen the systematic dismantling of America’s soft power. The gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and related programs that support public health have already contributed to an estimated 762,000 preventable deaths. Experts estimate that these cuts will lead to 14 million preventable deaths by 2030 if funding is not restored.  

Before Rubio’s tenure, Voice of America (VOA) served for more than eight decades as one of the country’s most powerful tools for exporting democracy and American values to people living under authoritarian regimes. Once a credible voice, under the leadership of Kari Lake, a Republican who served as Arizona secretary of state and ran for governor, experienced journalists have been fired and VOA now amplifies the administration’s talking points and disinformation.

Since Trump’s return to power, the United States has been repositioning itself as an explicitly Judeo-Christian nation — and government departments and agencies are following suit. On Easter Sunday Rubio shared a video on social media in which he passionately described the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The department’s Instagram account has featured images of Christian crosses and references to “Christ’s sacrifice.” As reported by the Intercept, the account has stopped marking Islamic holidays and other widely observed non-Christian religious observances.

Under Rubio, the department is cutting back on student visas, and it has begun monitoring the social media accounts of immigrants and travelers for material the administration defines as “hateful ideologies” and “hostile attitudes” and other thought crimes. 

At White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s urging, White South Africans, a group that enforced and benefitted from the white supremacist system of apartheid, are now being given refugee status on the grounds that they now face oppression under Black majority rule. In a cruel historical irony, White South Africans are now working as laborers under the H-2A guest worker program in Mississippi, where they are now displacing Black American farmers whose families and communities survived Jim Crow, America’s own form of apartheid. It is estimated that 25,000 South Africans came to the United States during the 2024-25 farming season alone under that program. 

Refugee status is also being revoked for Haitians and Somalis, communities that Trump and his administration have repeatedly dehumanized with racist screeds that have included calling them “poison,” “leeches” and “invaders.” These and other Black and brown refugees and immigrants now live in a state of existential fear from being deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or targeted by racist vigilantes.

In total, the State Department now serves as an enthusiastic enforcer for Trump’s nativist project and fortress America.

In December 2025, the Trump administration announced its new National Security Strategy, which is based on the premise that Europe is facing a common “civilizational erasure,” a lack of economic vitality, “cratering birthrates” and loss of “national identities” from migrants and other non-whites whose values are deemed incompatible with Western values. To survive, the document holds, Europe must move away from its pluralistic and cosmopolitan values. These are far-right talking points evoking racist books such as Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints” and Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race.” Previous American leaders would have condemned such a policy as antithetical to America’s democratic norms and values. 

Under Rubio’s leadership, the State Department has abandoned this tradition and strategic vision. As a senator, Rubio was a strong advocate for global democracy. He wanted America to be more confrontational with Russia and backed Ukraine in its freedom struggle. Now, while enduring the president’s humiliation rituals — the public debasements Trump uses to test and bind the loyalty of those around him — Rubio has adopted his values.

As secretary, he now sits fourth in the line of presidential succession, and there is speculation that Trump may see him as a potential successor. According to reports, Trump has taken to asking confidantes if they prefer Vance or Rubio as the party’s 2028 nominee, and focus groups indicate that Trump Republicans are also warming up to the secretary ahead of 2028. Many see him as a stabilizing force, as well as a more presentable and traditional representative for their “America First” nationalism and so-called conservative values.  

Rubio sacrificed his values and the storied institutional legacy of the State Department itself to be in closer proximity to Donald Trump, a chaos agent — and America’s reputation and power are collapsing.

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Republicans' Youth Voter Problem

While young voters are notorious for failing to get to the polls and voting, in close elections winning the younger voters by a significant margin can be what puts a candidate over the top to victory. In 2024, younger voters swung toward the GOP and the Felon in the insane belief their policies would improve their lot. Now, going on 16 months of the Felon's regime, many of these voters have learned that no one in the GOP, the Felon perhaps most of all, cares about young voters' concerns.  While billionaires and large stock investors may be pleased with the Felon's policies that take from the poor and give to the rich, the needs of millions of Americans are either ignored or outright harmed. The employment market for many younger voters remains harsh and the Felon is gutting clean air and clean water regulations that will long negatively impact the lives of younger voters.  And then there are the Felon's policies of choice which have harmed the economy and driven up consumer prices: the Felon's tariffs  and the war of choice in Iran that continues to have no solution in sight.  New polls are showing just how much the GOP and the Felon have alienated younger voters. Indeed, 81 percent of young Americans rate U.S. economic conditions as bad or terrible. A piece at Politico looks at the current situation:

Two years after young voters swung to the right in 2024, helping return Republicans to unified control of Washington, economic concerns are pushing 18- to 34-year-olds back to the left for the midterms, according to a new national survey of more than 1,000 young Americans.

The poll from nonpartisan outfit Generation Lab, shared exclusively with POLITICO, amounts to a flashing warning sign for Republicans. It shows young Americans planning to vote Democratic in November by a margin of 52 percent to 19 percent. Broken down by party, the data indicates that the GOP has a significant base problem: Just 58 percent of young Republicans say they’ll vote GOP — with nearly a third selecting “neither” or “won’t vote.” By contrast, 85 percent of young Democrats intend to show up for their party at the ballot box.

Just as in 2024, deep discontent with the state of the economy is driving anger at the party in power. Now, 81 percent of young Americans rate U.S. economic conditions as bad or terrible — including 68 percent of Republicans. The younger the age bracket, the more optimism diminishes.

[The Felon] President Donald Trump shoulders most of the blame among respondents, with 41 percent who rate the economy negatively naming him as the top culprit, plus 9 percent who select congressional Republicans. But it’s not just the GOP: Another 31 percent finger corporate greed/large companies. Just 6 percent blame Joe Biden or congressional Democrats.

In many ways, the polling looks like an inverse of Democrats’ struggles in the 2024 cycle, when surveys showed that voters didn’t personally experience the positive economic image projected by the Biden administration.

“We tie this really closely to what people can see and feel and touch in terms of their own personal economic situation,” Cyrus Beschloss, Generation Lab’s founder and CEO, told POLITICO. “Saying that affordability is a ‘line of bullshit’ is definitely not helping — to the extent that young people are clued into that.”

But a caveat remains. “Young people are voting at just obscenely low rates,” Beschloss said. Insofar as this demographic might swing to or from Republicans, “their power’s a lot more concentrated in social force” — as cultural barometers and pace-setters — “than it is electoral force.”

Young people’s social force on GOP politics looks highly negative right now, and not just over concerns about inflation, housing, jobs and gas prices. The survey also finds mass blowback to the U.S.-Israel war with Iran: Seventy-seven percent of young Americans say the U.S. made the wrong decision in striking Iran, and 75 percent say they disapprove or strongly disapprove of Trump’s handling of the military action.

Republicans are keenly aware of voters’ cost-of-living and economic concerns — but they argue that they’re positioned to sway Americans here with a message focused on lower government spending, new tax breaks and blaming Democrats.

The GOP is also addressing bad economic feelings head on by telling voters that they’re cleaning up messes created by Democrats. . . . . But Democrats have built out their own infrastructure to compete, including creator networks for candidates to work with and new resources devoted to communicating via YouTube, podcasts, social media, influencers and Substacks.

And the economic concerns are a lay-up for Democrats’ midterms messaging writ large, they say, which puts affordability front and center — the kind of laser-focused approach that scored the party big wins in 2025. “Young voters’ top concern is affordability, and we’ve been beating the drum on that issue all cycle,” said DCCC spokesperson Aidan Johnson. “Many don’t think they will ever be able to buy a home, or are graduating out of high school and college with not nearly the same kind of opportunities that their parents had.”

Looking beyond the midterms: The Generation Lab also asked young Americans about the 2028 presidential race — and at this early stage, name recognition seems to be paramount. 

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Trump's America: An Empire in Decline

The Felon's campaign throughout his campaigns has been "Make America Great Again."  The reality of the Felon's policies and agenda have had the exact opposite impact: a weakening and declining American empire that find's itself in a disastrous war of the Felon's choosing, long time allies alienated,  and with the undermining of technologies and clean energy sources of the future in favor of fossil fuels even as funding is slashed for research on  the medical research front and technology front, opening the way for China to dominate these elements of the future.   It's unclear if the Felon's destructive policies are the result of incompetence, worsening dementia and delusions of grandeur, or the Felon merely following Vladimir Putin's directions, but whatever the cause, America is anything but great again as it finds itself depleting its military resources, loathed by former allies, and deindustrializing and focused solely on the wellbeing of billionaires as benefits for everyday Americans are slashed. . Some in the MAGA base are slowly waking up to the reality that they were sold a false bill of goods and that the normalization of their prejudices will not bail them out from high gas prices, rising inflation or the closure of their rural hospitals. A column in the New York Times looks at the Felon's orchestrated decline of the so-called American empire.  Here are highlights:

The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.

A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it.

Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting.

Britain had to surrender its far-flung system of colonies and protectorates after World War II. . . . . Britain did not try to hold territories it could no longer afford. It wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions. Its disengagement was a success, though this can be hard to see because what was being managed was decline. Mr. Trump had a chance of pulling off something similar.

The assumption in Washington over the past decade has been that the world is engaged in a game of geostrategic musical chairs and the music is about to stop. China may soon overmatch us not just in military-industrial capacity but also in information technology. The world will harden into a new, less favorable geostrategic configuration. This is the last moment to reshape it in America’s favor.

The attack on Iran was different. It was not a defensive consolidation; it was the assumption of a dangerous, open-ended responsibility. Yes, it might be better if the mullahs fell. But for the United States, an energy-independent country withdrawing to its own hemisphere, this is not a vital interest. War with Iran was not on the radar screen of anyone in the administration just a few months ago.

That is because the United States lacks the military means to impose its will on Iran in a long conflict. In 1991 a million soldiers from more than 40 countries were needed to reverse the invasion of Kuwait carried out by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country less sophisticated than Iran and a fraction of its size. When Iran and Iraq fought each other to a standstill in the 1980s, deaths ran into the hundreds of thousands on each side. The United States would have to send a significant portion of its armed forces — which total only 1.3 million troops — to stand a chance of subduing Iran, and that force, if successful, would have to stay for a long time.

The argument can be made that the United States no longer depends on mustering huge armies: It has sophisticated missiles and other standoff weapons. But those weapons are needed to defend allies and interests in other theaters, and the United States is depleting them. According to reporting in The Times, it has already used 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles, earmarked for potential conflicts in Asia, leaving just 1,500 in the stockpile, and fired an additional 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, about 10 times as many as the military buys in an average year. American leaders have been scolding their European allies for years about the inadequacy of their fighting forces. But if one measures America’s military might against our pretensions rather than our G.D.P., it is just as inadequate.

It would be wrong to say the United States is trapped in the war it started. It has options. But it is now going to pay a very steep price, no matter which of them it chooses. It can desist in Iran — having demonstrated, for no good reason, that its military is far less dominant than the world had assumed. Or it can draw resources from theaters that are of vital national interest, such as Europe and East Asia, to fund what the president refers to as his Iranian “excursion.” Or it can resort to the extreme military options Mr. Trump darkly alluded to in social media posts starting in early April, which will redound to the everlasting shame of the country he leads. The United States stands to lose its reputation, its friends or its soul.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel urged this war on Mr. Trump . . . . Mr. Trump’s gullibility provided Mr. Netanyahu with a last chance.

It is tempting to ask where in the process of imperial decline the United States now finds itself. It certainly has elements in common with Britain a century ago: deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent. On the eve of World War I, Britain was dependent on Germany for industrial and even military technology — and unwilling to re-examine the free-trade system on which German supremacy had been built. By the eve of World War II, Britain was essentially bankrupt. There are parallels in America’s dependence on China today.

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In Trump’s America, It Takes a King to Praise Democracy

The Felon is widely hated in the United Kingdom. So hated in fact that many wanted Charles III to cancel his state vising to America. Charles ignored the calls to cancel and not only seemingly charmed the Felon - a man easily impressed by wealth and titles - but also gave a remarkable speech to the joint houses of Congress where he spoke of the benefits of liberal democracy, the rule of law, Magna Carta (signed by one of my distant ancestors), fighting climate change, and the importance of the NATO alliance, Basically, Charles praised everything the Felon is working against as if he were an agent of Vladimir Putin and those who hold democracy in contempt.  In the process, Charles gently trolled the Felon who seemed to be oblivious to the fact that he was being trolled in a sophisticated way. The contrast between Charles and the Felon could not be more stark: one the symbol of old wealth, tradition and public self-control versus the Nouveau riche Felon who prefers ostentatious and flashy displays rather than subtle, traditional luxury while acting in a boorish manner.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at Charles giving a speech that should be given by any worthy occupant of the White House, something that obviously is beyond the current crude and vulgar occupant.  Here are article highlights: 

Two hundred and fifty years into the American experiment, it turns out that it takes a King to tell us how to run our Republic.

On Tuesday, His Majesty King Charles III, the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of George III, the British monarch who lost the Revolutionary War to a bunch of impertinent colonists enamored of Enlightenment ideas about the natural rights of man, spoke to the U.S. Congress. With dry wit and a sense of irony that was surely lost on the host he so subtly trolled, Charles extolled the virtues of American-style liberal democracy now under threat by America’s own leader. What does it say about our current politics that polite British-accented clichés about the benefits of the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and the strengths that flow from “vibrant, diverse, and free societies” could end up sounding downright subversive?

The King’s biggest applause line was a tribute to Magna Carta, the thirteenth-century compact between an English monarch and his restive nobles, which, Charles noted, has become a pillar of American constitutional jurisprudence, with the Supreme Court citing it at least a hundred and sixty times in its history, not least to establish “the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.” It was a telling sign of our dysfunctional times that members of Congress from both parties, having been increasingly iced out of decision-making by a President claiming unprecedented executive power for himself, immediately rose for a standing ovation.

Did it matter that Donald Trump did not get the joke?

Even as Charles was speaking, Trump’s White House posted on social media an image of the two men with the caption “TWO KINGS. 👑” Later that evening, during a toast at a state dinner for his royal visitor, Trump praised his “fantastic” speech and lauded Charles for accomplishing what he could not—getting Democrats to stand and applaud him. He seemed utterly oblivious to why they had done so, and remained apparently unaware for the rest of the King’s trip. “He’s a great King,” Trump said on Thursday, at the conclusion of the state visit. “The greatest King, in my book.”

Trump spent the rest of the week proving Charles’s point about unchecked powers, with his Justice Department indicting the former F.B.I. director James Comey, for a social-media post of seashells—which prosecutors improbably claim constituted a threat on the President’s life—and his Federal Communications Commission ordering a review of the broadcast licenses for ABC stations just days after the comedian Jimmy Kimmel had used the network’s airwaves to make a joke that the First Lady did not like.

So here we are, two and a half centuries later, with a King who venerates the American Bill of Rights and a President who, increasingly, rejects it. It hardly seemed a coincidence that, on the same day as the King’s speech, reports emerged about the Trump State Department’s plans to honor America’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary with a commemorative passport whose distinguishing feature will be a large likeness of the President. Watching Trump and Charles together this week, I could not help but think of the bizarre contrast between the public modesty of the crowned monarch and the pomposity of the self-styled populist President; of these two, it’s not George III’s heir who is the one planning to erect golden statues of himself in his palaces.

The contrast between Charles and Trump was nowhere clearer than when it came to the King’s vision for America’s continued leadership in the world. In his speech, Charles, like every American President of my lifetime except Trump, hailed NATO as the foundation of our common defense. Then he exhorted Congress to defend “Ukraine and her most courageous people” with the “same unyielding resolve” that the United States has shown in fighting two world wars and other international threats to democracy over the past century. The times, he insisted, demand that America “ignore the clarion calls to become ever more inward-looking.”

These comments, as striking as they were in confirming a major international pivot by the United States, got little attention. They did, however, seem to prompt Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to shift his own tactics. . . . . “If the Vice-President is proud that he’s not helping us, it means he’s helping Russians, and I’m not sure that it’s strengthening the United States.”

On Wednesday, Trump spoke on the phone with Putin about the wars in the Middle East and Europe. Although Russia has, according to intelligence officials, been aiding the Iranians with targeting information in their war with the U.S., Trump claimed that Putin would “like to be of help” in resolving the conflict. As for Ukraine, he told reporters that Putin “was ready to make a deal a while ago,” all but publicly blaming Zelensky, once again, for the continuation of the Russian invasion.

Trump, in other words, was privately trash-talking Zelensky in what he himself called another “very good” conversation with his “friend” Putin. He may not have got Zelensky to agree to peace on Russia’s terms, but, in little more than a year, Trump has practically run down a checklist of other Putin priorities: undermining America’s European allies, effectively ending billions of dollars in funding for Ukraine, attempting to shut down Radio Free Europe and other U.S. government agencies that promote democracy in the former Soviet Union, even lying publicly on Putin’s behalf to claim that Ukraine, not Russia, started the war,

Just this week, while Charles praised the NATO alliance to the U.S. Congress as the West’s indispensable bulwark, Trump was threatening to pull troops out of U.S. bases in Germany, apparently because he’s angry about criticism of his war in Iran by the German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz.

There is, sadly, no other conclusion to draw from all this than the obvious one: Trump, however personally dazzled he is by the wealth and splendor of the British monarchy, much prefers the policies and the power of the modern-day tsar he spoke with on Wednesday to those of the King he hosted with such pomp the day before.

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The Iran War’s Impacts Have Only Just Begun

Another morning arrives and the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, the price of oil is more than $105/barrel, the average gasoline price in America is around $4.18/gallon, higher fuel prices are driving up the cost of numerous consumer products, and there are no schedule negotiations to end the war of choice that the Felon launched against Iran. The Felon was warned about the potential for Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz and chose to ignore the warns and now the world is living with the consequences of the Felon's arrogance and poorly thought through (if thought through at all) war.  Despite the Felon's attempts to distract and spin the situation, the one thing he cannot avoid is that he and he alone is to blame for the current quagmire.  Also bearing culpability are congressional Republicans who have voted down war power resolutions that would have put some constraints on the Felon. Obviously, the longer the quagmire continues, the higher the economic price to be paid by regular Americans and, hopefully, the higher the political price paid by Republicans (only 22% of Americans approve of the Felon's handling of the economy). As a piece in The Atlantic lays out, the consequences of the Felon's actions will linger for quite some time with economic pain continuing:

[The Felon] President Trump, celebrating Tehran’s declaration that the Strait of Hormuz would reopen to commercial shipping, posted on Truth Social on April 17, “IRAN HAS JUST ANNOUNCED THAT THE STRAIT OF IRAN IS FULLY OPEN AND READY FOR FULL PASSAGE.” The opening didn’t last. But, in his haste, [the Felon] Trump had inadvertently spelled out possibly the most consequential result of his eight-week war: The Strait of Hormuz now looks, in practice, like the “STRAIT OF IRAN.”

Although none of the Trump administration’s goals—an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, destroying Iran’s missile capability, neutralizing proxy forces, regime change—has been fulfilled, the war has led to enduring changes. Two sweeping conclusions—one short-term, one longer—have become clear, experts in defense, diplomacy, business, and economics told us.

In the short term, despite an indefinite cease-fire that kicked in last week following an initial two-week pause in hostilities, a durable end to the war isn’t coming anytime soon. The disparity in U.S. and Iranian demands for how negotiations should proceed, along with blockades by their respective forces in the strait, has locked the two sides in a stalemate. Many Americans still expect a quick end to the war’s economic strain. But that’s unlikely. . . . A retired general, a retired CIA analyst, and an energy-industry executive said anywhere from two to nine months, prompting a collective intake of breath from the audience.

Meanwhile, the economic geography of the Persian Gulf is likely changed forever. Iran now has greater authority over the strait than before the war began and stands to benefit from its closure. Iran might start charging exorbitant tolls for all ships that cross the strait. Or a consortium of nations, including Iran, might manage the waterway and split the profits. . . . the regime has proved that it can close the strait at will, despite being confronted by the world’s most powerful military.

That gives Iran extraordinary leverage over the roughly 20 percent of global oil and liquefied-natural-gas supplies that used to pass through the strait. In response, energy companies and shippers are exploring options that could involve billions of dollars in investment in new pipelines, port expansions, and alternative (though hardly fail-safe) routes through the Red Sea. Such a rewiring of global trade routes—akin to supply-chain changes made after the coronavirus pandemic—could ultimately render passage through the Strait of Hormuz unnecessary. But any such result is likely years away.

In the meantime, the grip Iran has on the strait is expected to disrupt business, keep global energy and fertilizer prices elevated for years, exacerbate inflation—and make it much harder for Trump to claim a win in the war he started. . . . Iran has shown no inclination to abandon its leverage, and no further negotiations are scheduled. . . . . That leaves the two countries in a test of who can endure more economic pain.

[P]ushing Iran to the point of yielding could take months or even years, potentially tying up U.S. military resources to enforce the blockade, respond to disruptions, and enforce the terms of any peace settlement.

Representative Ro Khanna of California claimed that the war will cost the average American household $5,000 a year in increased gas and food prices. Trump may face his own imperative to make concessions, given those costs and what the war has done to his popularity: A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week found that the president’s approval rating stood at 34 percent.

The White House has heard from unhappy Gulf and European allies about the strait’s closure and the unwelcome prospect of future Iranian control. China, whose economy was already struggling, depends heavily on the strait and has urged its reopening. A senior White House official told us that Trump is concerned that the issue could complicate his summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing in a little over two weeks. Yet there are no signs of a quick resolution.

The global economic damage from the first two months of the war has been stark. Traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has been reduced by about 90 percent, from some 120 to 150 daily transits to a handful, according to a new dashboard by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. This week, Brent crude reached its highest level in four years, at $126 a barrel. The gas-station billboards that line so many American roads reflect the increase: The average price of a gallon of gas hit $4.18. . . . The World Bank forecasts a 16 percent rise in food-commodity prices this year, driven by increased transport costs and the supply squeeze on the fertilizer industry, which relies on exports from the Gulf. The International Energy Agency has said that the world is on the brink of “the biggest energy security threat in history.”

The prevailing question facing those whose economic survival relies on Gulf exports is no longer when the Strait of Hormuz will reopen, but what role the strait will play in the postwar marketplace. Perhaps in anticipation of the disruptions to come, the UAE announced Tuesday that it was leaving OPEC, which it has long threatened to do, allowing the small country to chart its own course outside OPEC quotas.

Before investing billions, Gulf nations and companies are likely to want some reassurance that those new investments won’t become Iranian targets. In addition to shutting down traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran in the past two months has hit energy infrastructure in neighboring countries. In Saudi Arabia alone, daily oil output is down by 600,000 barrels because of Iranian strikes, a Saudi state news agency said earlier this month. The Fujairah port, a potential new alternative, also has been targeted by Iranian forces.

One diplomat from the Middle East stressed to us that anything other than a return to the strait’s prewar status of being free and open would be unacceptable. But other observers aren’t sure how feasible that is, noting that countries dependent on the strait may decide to work with Tehran instead. “The longer this goes on, the higher the likelihood that countries will look to protect their own economic interests and cut deals with the Iranians, even if that triggers the wrath of the U.S.,” Richard Nephew, a former U.S. deputy special envoy for Iran, told us.

“One of the ironies of this war is that Iran discovered that it had this weapon,” he said. “There was so much talk about nuclear ability, but they have the strait.” . . . Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a Monday appearance on Fox News that the U.S. would not tolerate Iran “trying to normalize” its control of the strait.

How the U.S. and its Gulf allies might avoid that reality is a question that will linger long after the fighting has ended.