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"I go after what I want, but maybe that’s what they don’t like," said the congresswoman.
It's been five days since US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a potential 2028 presidential contender, went public with her decision to freeze her eggs.
But the response from right-wing influencers and operatives has already given her an opportunity to turn the discussion of her fertility into one that addresses Republican policies driving the affordability crisis, questions how committed the right really is to "freedom," and points out conservatives' hypocrisy when they urge women to "have babies younger"—while applying little of the same pressure to young men.
Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) announced her decision to freeze her eggs last Sunday with the first in a series of Instagram videos in which her nearly 10 million followers have been able to follow along as she injects hormones and attends ultrasound appointments in preparation for the procedure—all while appearing on news programs to discuss foreign and domestic policy and talking to her followers about the side effects as well as the cost of fertility preservation treatment.
"I want you all to see that, because women can do anything,” Ocasio-Cortez, often known as AOC, told her followers. “And I think it’s badass that I’m going to be, you know, giving myself shots in the greenroom, get my glam on, roll out, talk about international events, domestic policy, elections, pop out, live my life, do my thing.”
Right-wing commentators who have bemoaned low birth rates and attacked liberal women for buying "into the feminist lie and spend[ing] their childbearing years climbing the career ladder," as podcaster Katie Miller said, immediately pounced on AOC's decision.
Allie Beth Stuckey, a popular right-wing podcaster and author of the books Toxic Empathy and You're Not Enough (And That's Okay), the latter of which warned against "the toxic culture of self-love," responded to the 36-year-old progressive congresswoman's videos with a list of reasons she should have already had children. She accused AOC of being "selfish and irresponsible" for potentially becoming a mother after 40 and said she was "glamorizing the lie that women can have it all."
Miller, the wife of President Donald Trump's homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, allowed that "we should celebrate" a woman's efforts to have children in the future, but said that “more women should get married and have babies younger," while a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, the right-wing group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, said AOC's fertility decisions were a "cautionary tale" for women.
Meanwhile, conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who is said to have considerable influence in the White House, announced that AOC had "failed as a woman" and had “wasted her entire 30s living with a man pretending to be engaged when she could have gotten married and had a baby." (It was reported this week that AOC's long-term relationship had ended.)
Some conservatives questioned whether attacking the popular, social media-savvy lawmaker over her desire to have children was a wise move for the MAGA movement, with one former Office of the Director of National Intelligence official, Alexa Henning, telling The Times in the UK that "dunking on AOC for freezing her eggs is not a winning message with women voters."
On Thursday evening, Ocasio-Cortez suggested Henning was right to be concerned, as she posted her latest Instagram video on the topic.
She said she has found "the freak-out" around her egg-freezing process to be "pretty funny," because "my choice is a threat to them."
"Despite the rhetoric they use and the bald eagles that they plaster all over the place, they actually really do not believe in a free country," said AOC. "Very aggressively do not believe in a free country, because they attack everyone who exercises their freedom to choose all sorts of lives... They attack those who choose the life that they don't lead or a life that they don't approve of."
"And people say you’re peddling this 'dangerous lie that women can have it all.' You know, maybe in life you can’t have everything, but here’s the secret: You can have a hell of a lot. And I am very grateful for my life. I go after what I want, but maybe that’s what they don’t like either," she continued, before shrugging: "Too bad for them."
AOC: I also find the freakout around it pretty funny as well. I’m not gonna lie. A commentator that was like, “What she’s doing is peddling the dangerous lie that women can have it all.” Can you believe that?
What I find funny is that my choice is a threat to them. Despite the… pic.twitter.com/rwpPL8YH0F
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 14, 2026
She emphasized that the procedure "is not a guarantee" that she'll be able to use the eggs to have children later in life, but said the process had relieved "a certain amount of anxiety or stress that can come with feeling like you are in a race against biology that men simply don't have to engage in."
She then took aim at commentators like Stuckey and Miller for directing their pronatalist pressure campaigns disproportionately at young women.
"In straight relationships, who are you supposed to be having babies with?" said AOC. "They aren't pressuring men to be ready to have a baby young, as the way that they are pressuring women to have a baby when they're young."
AOC: For all of these right-wing people who are harping about women having to and needing to have families at a young age—and again, if that’s your choice, that’s amazing—but they are doing nothing to make sure that men in their culture respect and value women.
In fact, many of… pic.twitter.com/ox70tJzth1
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 14, 2026
The congresswoman then suggested that while Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk's widow and now the CEO of Turning Point USA, recently told a crowd of young college graduates to "have more kids than you can afford," financial concerns may play a role in falling birthrates and delayed parenthood. Housing unaffordability has soared to record highs in recent years, while Trump's tariff policies and war in Iran have contributed to rising costs for groceries, gas, and other essentials. Republicans have also attacked government healthcare programs including Medicaid and Affordable Care Act subsidies, and about a third of Americans reported cutting back on spending in order to afford healthcare last year.
"The basics are more expensive than they've ever been," said Ocasio-Cortez. "For a lot of people, we would have kids at a much younger age if the conditions were right, if women got paid equally, and if people in general were paid enough and things were affordable enough that you feel like you could comfortably provide for a child."
With her series of videos, said Amanda Litman, executive director of the political action committee Run for Something, AOC had opened up "a larger conversation on women, ambition, family, gender politics, and so much more."
Journalist Zaid Jilani suggested right-wing commentators had fallen into a trap: "Intentionally or unintentionally she got the Republicans to act really weird."
The response from influential commentators on the right "is why her allies think she could run for the White House," wrote Katy Balls, Washington editor for The Times. "Her ability to set the terms of debate and trigger the right just as Trump does the left."
The end result of GOP cuts to the domestic social safety net and to foreign aid will be the cleansing of people defined by the Trump regime as being useless, needy, and inferior.
Throughout history, malicious regimes have risen to power and, thinking they are superior, have targeted groups of people they have decided are a threat to their economy, their society, or their race. These governments then proceed to disenfranchise and eliminate those they decree as inferior, the “out-groups.” This is eugenics, the discredited beliefs and practices that claim to improve the genetic quality of a specific group by eliminating the propagation of the “out-groups.” This has been accomplished in the past by forced sterilization, inhumane institutionalization, or outright euthanasia. In reality, the practice of eugenics is about preserving the power of the dominant group or government, not genetics.
The United States has a dark history of eugenics targeting people of color and those with disabilities. Though it may be less glaringly obvious today, eugenic thought and policies have been empowered by the MAGA movement. In 2024 the Trump administration defined “out-groups” both nationally and internationally, with massive funding cuts to social programs, healthcare, and research directed at reducing health disparities—efforts that they call “woke.” As ever, these actions will have the deadliest effects on their designated “out-groups”: immigrants, the elderly, the poor, those with disabilities, people with mental illness, retirees, and Black and brown people. These are all groups that the administration and MAGA Republicans see as using the social services they want to eliminate, or as not being important to the economic growth of the US. The end result is the eugenic cleansing of US citizens defined by the regime as being useless, needy, and inferior.
How did they do this? In the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Republicans succeeded in undermining social programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). This greatly affects the health of those they disfavor, such as those who experience poverty and struggle for adequate healthcare and nutrition. These actions also directly harm people with disabilities, who are more likely to live in poverty and to require food assistance. Additionally, people with mental health conditions, as well as people who are unhoused, are being targeted by administration policies aimed at institutionalizing them. Institutionalization has a dark history in the US and is just one step from state-mediated sterilization and elimination.
To further assure poor health for the “out-groups” the administration, in league with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his HHS cronies, has methodically weakened the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Vital disease monitoring programs have been halted, lifesaving research has been crushed, vaccine uptake has been attacked, and fact-based science and medical practices have been exchanged for conspiracy theories and the promotion of unproven supplements. All of these actions will most severely damage the health of the most vulnerable, the “out-groups.”
The administration, right-wing politicians, and the MAGA movement seem to have taken it upon themselves to eugenically cleanse the Earth of poor, non-white people.
And it doesn’t stop in the United States. Immediately after the inauguration, the Trump administration began with severe cuts to foreign aid through the elimination of US Agency for International Development (USAID) and other destructive policies. It has been predicted that this will ultimately end in the deaths of millions across the globe. It is already happening.
This is eugenics—many of the millions who die, or become permanently disabled, will be children, who will be eliminated before they can reproduce. And the greatest effects of the withdrawal of aid are directed against Black and brown people, the “out-group” who, according to the crude language of the US president, live in “shit-hole” countries—as if these countries and the human beings who live there are worthless and expendable, a burden to the US and the world.
The administration, right-wing politicians, and the MAGA movement seem to have taken it upon themselves to eugenically cleanse the Earth of poor, non-white people. Apparently, they believe they have the power and the right to reduce the world’s population by promoting terrible suffering through fatal diseases and starvation in places far out of their view.
Let’s say it outright—this is state-sponsored eugenics and it is happening in the America which was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The actions of the current administration have disgraced those principles. Even hard-core MAGA followers should be opposed to the behavior of their chosen leaders, who are resorting to eugenics, using the infliction of terrible suffering, pain, diseases, and starvation for political power, economic gain, and supremacy. And MAGA followers should remember you are not immune; a small change in status will bring you into the crosshairs of state-sponsored eugenics. We should all be alarmed.
The flow of smoke down from Ontario has produced a perfect MRI of the MAGA nervous system, revealing with unparalleled clarity the belligerence, ignorance, self-love, and utter lack of irony that mark the species.
Everything I’m about to write is fairly obvious. But since wildfires, and hence smoke, will persist all summer, and since the hot world we’re creating produces ever more wildfire and hence an endless supply of future smoke, I think it’s worth taking a moment to get all this on the record.
Also, the flow of smoke down from Canada has produced a perfect MRI of the MAGA nervous system, revealing with unparalleled clarity the belligerence, ignorance, self-love, and utter lack of irony that mark the species.
To hit the basics: Roughly 1,000 wildfires are currently burning in Canada, many in northern reaches of the province of Ontario. Much of the direct fire damage is being borne by members of Canada’s First Nation communities, whose small communities are the main inhabitants of these wild places. People are crowded into Thunder Bay, Ontario, where every hotel room is filled; the stories of escapes like the one pictured above are truly harrowing. Alessandra Freitas, for instance, interviewed members of the Namaygoosisagagun First Nation in the northwest part of the province. Here, for instance, is the account of Miiyah Paavola:
“It was all very fast-paced. There was not really much time to think about what was happening,” Paavola told CNN.
She grabbed a wet towel before squeezing aboard a small aluminum boat with five other people, three dogs, and a cat. The isolated community, also known as Collins First Nation, has no road access, only a railway line and Collins Lake.
Paavola couldn’t fully grasp the scope of the danger until her boat pulled away.
“All you could see was orange and gray and it was very dark,” she said. But as they sailed away, she could finally see just how close they’d been to the fires. “When I was going across maybe about the second island, that’s when I watched it. I could just barely see the flames reach the shoreline. And it was a very thick wall of smoke that followed it very quickly.”
“If we had waited any longer, we would have been dead.”
As Johnnie Jae, the founder of Red Pop! News pointed out:
It's NOT just that people and wildlife are losing their homes... it's the history that is being lost for generations to come.
It's tribal records, artifacts, art, regalia, ceremonial grounds, things that have been passed from generation to generation, hidden, protected and preserved, repatriated and restored.
So, just to be clear—the most powerful disruption from these fires is to small bands of people who have done nothing to cause them, and whose culture has been endlessly damaged by the larger Western project of settlement and control.
But flame, of course, is not the only product of fire. There’s also smoke, which contains high concentrations of particulates, the solid and liquid droplets in all forms of air pollution that are especially dangerous because they can slip past a body’s natural filters, aggravating asthma and pulmonary disease and contributing to heart attacks and smoke. Those clouds of smoke drift on the prevailing winds, which have been blowing south towards southern Ontario, where Toronto has been engulfed in smoke. Here’s a particularly vivid portrayal of the life in North America’s fourth-largest city.

But of course the border with the US does not prevent smoke from spilling across, and some of the most densely populated parts of America have been inundated with smoke as well. Last Thursday, for instance, Detroit had the most polluted air in the world, as Charles Ramirez chronicled:
Detroit had an air quality index, or AQI, of 724 at one point, the No. 1 spot on IQAir’s ranking of the most polluted global major cities on Thursday. IQAir makes air quality monitoring and air cleaning products. The index is a measure of PM2.5 or particulate matter, and the index reading makes the air “hazardous,” according to the company, which means unhealthy for everyone.
By 5:00 pm, Detroit’s index number had fallen to 341 and its ranking to second, behind Chicago’s 402. Both measures were considered “hazardous.”
Parts of Ohio were even worse. Toledo, for instance, doubled its old record for air pollution, and nearby Monroe recorded AQI values above 800. I’ve been in Beijing and Delhi on days when you couldn’t see across the street, and this was worse.
Jeff Masters has the most comprehensive set of numbers, as per usual:
The award for worst air in the nation on July 16 went to the city that has in the past billed itself as a climate haven: Duluth, Minnesota. The city’s 24-hour air quality index, or AQI, for PM2.5 particle pollution hit 934, over three times the threshold for “Hazardous” pollution. This shattered Duluth’s previous all-time AQI record of 159 set July 20, 2021. EPA pollution records go back to 1999.
Now, in a normal world, this scenario would trigger a compassionate response, as leaders sought to help the people most at risk. But MAGA is an almost perfect mirror world, where every impulse is bad. On Fox, for instance, the channel’s public health expert timidly (“I know you’re going to cringe”) recommended that people at risk wear KN95 masks to prevent particulates from getting sucked down your throat. “Not a chance. Not a chance,” said host Brian Kilmeade.
Meanwhile, a series of Republican “leaders” started producing angry denunciations of Canada, for polluting America’s air with their thoughtless fires:
Michigan congressman John James, whose campaign for state governor has been endorsed by President Donald Trump wrote in an X post on Thursday: “FINAL WARNING TO CANADA: Manage your forests to prevent these fires. American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year.”
Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, longtime car dealer, said he planned to introduce “a bill next week to sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity.”
And of course the ultimate source of all MAGA craziness weighed in as well. Here’s Donald Trump:
We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!
Trump promised tariffs to make up for the costs, and indeed—and remember this—insisted that “maybe they should pay us some damages.”
The GOP case, such as it is, rests on the idea that Canada has erred in “managing” its woodlands, an outgrowth of the idea that he expressed during one wave of California’s hideous fires that the state should simply “rake its forests.” Or, as he expressed it during its first term, “You gotta clean your floors.”
Whatever the use of this prescription in America’s forests, it doesn’t apply to most of the land now burning in Canada. That’s because Canada has never managed these forests in any way, certainly not to suppress burning the way that America did across the 20th century. These are not forests with roads; these are vast, trackless expanses. Climate analyst Zeke Hausfather has performed his usual public service by actually looking at the data:
Here’s the short version. Canada’s area burned has surged, and it has surged in step with warming: hot, dry fire seasons burn far more forest, with area burned rises roughly 80% for each 1°C increase in fire-season temperature (with a correlation coefficient of 0.61). This relationship is robust to a variety of statistical tests and controlling for confounding variables. The boreal burns in rare, high-intensity crown fires on a natural cycle measured in a century or more, across enormous remote areas that have never been logged, thinned, or effectively suppressed. Only about a fifth of Canada’s burned area over the past four decades was even inside forest regions that have ever been actively managed. You cannot have a fuel-buildup from forest mismanagement in a forest you were never managing.
As he points out, even if the Canadians somehow decided to go “thin the forest,” it wouldn’t work:
The boreal is on the order of 3 million square kilometers. You are not going to thin or prescribe-burn your way across it, and the crown fires that produce the smoke wouldn’t stop at a fuel break anyway.
So what is driving the huge increase in Canadian wildfires? It appears some mysterious force is raising the temperature of the Earth. As Quinn Gablicki points out, quoting the University of Michigan climate scientist Jonathan Overpeck:
As long as humans continue to burn fossil fuels, global temperatures will increase, droughts will worsen, and there will be bigger, more frequent wildfires and smoke events.
The haze hanging over much of the United States today, Dr. Overpeck said, is “the harbinger of worse times to come.”
Or, as Eleanor Olszewski, Canada’s minister of emergency management put it on Friday:
“Warmer, drier weather is becoming more common, increasing wildfire risk in Canada and around the world,” she wrote. “Northern Ontario and Quebec, for example, received less than 40% of normal precipitation this June, with temperatures above historical averages.”
None of this, of course, is surprising in any way. America’s forests are currently on fire too, and in remarkable fashion. With our no-pack snowpack year, large fires are burning across the interior West—and what do you know, lots of the smoke is drifting north into Canada, causing bad air quality in British Columbia:
“As wildfire activity increases, so has smoke across many areas of the region. Much of this smoke is originating from fires south of the Canada-US border and will have varying impacts over the coming days,” an update Saturday evening from the provincial wildfire service said.
This is far from the smallest irony in this saga. In fact, “irony” hardly seems an apt word, suggesting that there is something even slightly subtle about the idiocy. For instance, as our leaders complain about Canada, it seems as if it might be nice if they also noted that our neighbors to the north have consistently set firefighters south to help America fight its great blazes. When Los Angeles caught on fire in January of 2025, Ontario deployed 150 firefighters to help:
“Our closest friend and our closest ally needs help, and we’re going to make sure we’re going to be there supporting them,” the province’s premier said.
And what do you know, last week a Canadian pilot died fighting one of the vast conflagrations on the Colorado-Utah border. As Michele Brunoro reports, Nicholas Dale left behind a wife and two sons:
“He was out there doing his best and just so very sad that we lost a great person and an experienced person fighting something, a natural disaster,” said Dale’s long-time friend Adam Gilliver.
While we’re on ironies, let’s note in passing that the smoke pouring out of these great blazes temporarily diminishes the power of the solar panels that are our main weapon in slowing the heating of the Earth. Miriam Wasser reports on the experience of one Massachusetts homeowner:
In the two days before the first big plume arrived, Stephen Gordon’s solar array produced about 53 kilowatt-hours of power per day—an amount he said is typical for a warm summer day, and more than covers his household needs during daylight hours.
Then came Wednesday, when people throughout New England woke up to gray or even orange-tinted skies. Gordon’s total output that day was just under 23 kilowatt hours, less than half of what his panels generated the previous day.
But of course all of those ironies pale next to the main one: Smoke drifts across borders when there’s a big fire, but carbon dioxide constantly drifts across every border every day. And if you could see carbon dioxide, and watch its flow over time, the biggest single cloud has emanated from the United States. China may catch us someday, but we’re the ones who have produced the current mess.
I’m sitting listening to David Wallace-Wells lecture this morning at the Chautauqua Institution, and he reminds us that the carbon humans have produced “weighs more than everything we have ever built on the surface of this planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life on the planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life and buildings combined.”
So—if there are “damages” to be paid, who should pay them? Canada, whose forests are burning? Or America, who set those forests on fire.
This is not an academic question. Lots of players are trying to extract damages from the fossil fuel companies. As the Center for Climate Integrity documented:
Eleven US states and dozens of city, county, and tribal governments collectively representing more than 1 in 4 Americans are currently taking major oil and gas companies to court to hold them accountable for deceiving the public about the dangers of fossil fuels and make them pay for the resulting damages.
And MAGA politicians are doing everything they can to try and stop those suits from succeeding. As Abraham Lustgarten reported in April:
Republican-led state legislatures are passing a slate of laws that effectively shield oil and gas companies from legal claims that they are responsible for the destruction and mounting toll caused by climate change. Fifteen laws have either been passed or are currently being debated in 11 states. Together, they threaten to remove long-standing tools for the public to hold corporations accountable.
A ProPublica investigation has found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups that share staff or have funding ties to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo, who is credited with placing conservative justices on the US Supreme Court. These groups have drafted state legislation, planned its dissemination and engaged a well-connected lobbying firm to get them signed into law.
At the federal level, the very same politicians complaining about Canadian wildfires are trying to moment, this takes the form of the Stop Climate Shakedowns Act. They’ve drawn support from the industry that owns them:
“We thank Senator Cruz and Rep. Hageman for introducing legislation to stop a growing patchwork of state laws and lawsuits that threaten American energy and risk raising costs for consumers,” said American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) President and CEO Chet Thompson and American Petroleum Institute (API) President and CEO Mike Sommers in a joint statement.
America, though the all-time champion, is not alone in spewing fossil fuels, of course. One of the other ironies of the moment is that just as Canada catches on fire, its Prime Minister Mark Carney is announcing a new system of pipelines from the tar sands of Alberta. As veteran climate journalist Adam Radwanski wrote in the Toronto Star, under Toronto’s “dystopian haze” Canada’s pivot away from climate action is “impossible to ignore.” In her excellent new newsletter Patterns, Naomi Klein writes, “As the nation burns, Carney celebrates new fossil fuel projects as 'nation building.'”
So irony drifts back and forth. But responsibility can never really be shed. MAGA means never having to say you’re sorry, but that’s simply not true.
It’s not godless communists who are walking around, arresting and sometimes killing Americans, it’s the Trump Gestapo, also known as ICE.
“These are not social Dumocrats, these are hardcore, godless communists.” And they will “attack all religions, but in particular, Christianity. They always do..."
“It's like crazy. They will close your churches in this country... They will kill your people, and that's what they're about. They want to end religion. They have to end religion because their ideology doesn't work if you have strong religion... This is the greatest threat to our country since its founding, in my opinion, 250 years ago, what's happening right now.”
This is our Dear Leader speaking, of course, ripping our seriously problematic political system to shreds and turning it into a cult, with Donald Trump as the cult leader, of course. Only he can save us, and by “us” I mean real Americans: the true believers in virtually nothing except what they’re told to believe, also known as MAGA,
“Donald Trump is a desperate man,” writes Elliott Negin at the LA Progressive. “With the midterms on the horizon and his approval ratings under water, he doesn’t want to talk about affordability. Nor does he want to talk about his war with Iran. And he certainly doesn’t want to talk about Jeffrey Epstein.”
Trump’s fearmongering is just a cover for his administration’s fear creating.
What he wants to—needs to—do is offer his followers, which in good times may amount to about half the country’s voters, an enemy so terrifying it takes their minds off Epstein, Iran, et al. Even the “white replacement” invasion by immigrants isn’t enough right now. He has decided to return to the Cold War, when nuclear annihilation was a possibility that everyone thought about, and bring back the godless commies. Oh my God, they’re back under our beds! But they’re Americans now: Democratic socialists. And somehow they’re on the rise politically.
Welcome to what’s starting to look like the end of actual democracy. If Trump succeeds, that’s what it may well be. Candidates will base their campaigns on vicious insults, not policies of any sort. Every last breath of reality could get squeezed out of our elections. Watch out, the commies are coming!
And they want to kill you. Here’s the truly unbearable irony of Trump’s words. It takes one to know one. Trump’s fearmongering is just a cover for his administration’s fear creating. It’s not godless communists who are walking around, arresting and sometimes killing Americans, it’s the Trump Gestapo, also known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Eleven people, for instance, have been killed by ICE or Customs and Border Patrol, agents during the second Trump administration, including two men in the past week: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, age 52, was shot while driving to work in Houston, Texas on July 7; and Joan Sebastian Guerrero, age 26, was shot in Biddleford, Maine on July 13. He was also driving to work.
In both incidents, federal officials claimed that the victims had attacked the agents with their vehicles and were killed in self-defense. The agents were not wearing body cameras and no evidence supports this claim. But in both cases, witnesses say that’s not what happened. The vehicles were not “weaponized,” and the men were shot for no reason (except, perhaps, racism).
And both victims were husbands and dads, and their families have been tossed into horrific shock and grief. Guerrero, for instance, had a 3-year-old daughter. His wife posted a photo of him on social media a day after his killing and wrote: “I love you. I have no words for this pain, my life, my love, watch over me, help me to have strength, I love you, stay with me always—don’t leave me alone, I beg you, my love.”
Yeah, better blame this—and so many other deaths—on the godless commies. So far there have been 11 killings by Homeland Security agents this year, along with 21 deaths in immigrant detention centers. Not to mention multi-thousands of arrests, with many detainees essentially disappeared from their loved ones’ lives.
And then there are the wars, the trillion-dollar military budget... on and on and on. I certainly don’t blame this solely on Trump. He's only making the best (by which I mean the worst) of the system he inherited.
"At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power for themselves by turning us against one another."
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Friday delivered a speech commemorating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America that drew a sharp contrast with President Donald Trump's vision for the country.
Speaking from New York City Hall, Mamdani recounted how his city had long served as a refuge for people from across the globe who came seeking a new life an opportunity.
It was these immigrants who ultimately shaped New York and made it into what it is today, said Mamdani—who is an immigrant and among the rising number of democratic socialists who have recently won at the ballot box.
The mayor then moved to the present day, where he took aim at the anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies emanating from Trump and his MAGA movement.
"The story of America has been written by those who have so often been told by those with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional," Mamdani said. "For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best."
Mamdani took aim at the ideology espoused by many rich and powerful people who see America as "an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal."
"America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes," the mayor continued. "America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit."
"How small they are," Mamdani remarked. "How weak, how unoriginal. At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power for themselves by turning us against one another."
The mayor then pivoted to a more hopeful tone by arguing that "time and again, including 250 years ago, those forces of division have been vanquished by the forces of progress."
Mamdani insisted that the greed shown by American oligarchs and the division sown by its current political leadership are "not all we see when we look for America."
"We see it too in the nurse who works a double shift and then stops on her way home to check on her ailing neighbor," he said. "Yes, we see in America corporate landlords for whom negligence is a business model. We see it too in the father who tucks his children into bed in a ceiling stained with leaks, who wakes before dawn to go to work, and who still believes this country can do better by his family."
In his conclusion, Mamdani paid tribute to "those ideals upon which our nation was built," which he described as "strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them."
"Ours is a nation working each day towards the perfection in which it was conceived," he said. "A nation striving each day to better itself. Therein lies the work of America: The striving, the bettering, the reaching towards perfection. What a privilege each of us has to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape."
The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.
On Saturday, Trump took revenge on Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy for Cassidy’s vote five years ago to convict Trump, in his second impeachment, for instigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Cassidy thereby became the first GOP senator defeated by a Trump-endorsed candidate in a Republican primary. (Other Republican senators who have stood up to Trump — such as North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Utah’s Mitt Romney — saw the writing on the wall and didn’t seek reelection.)
Trump’s purge of Cassidy comes in the wake of Trump’s purges of House Republicans who stood up to him, such as Wyoming’s Liz Cheney.
Trump’s next Republican target in the House is Kentucky representative Thomas Massie, who had the guts to oppose U.S. military involvement in Iran, demand release of the Epstein files, and criticize Trump’s spending bills for adding to the national debt. Massie appears likely to be defeated by a Trump-backed opponent in Tuesday’s Kentucky primary.
Trump has also purged state legislators who have refused to do his bidding, such as the seven Indiana Republicans who refused to redistrict the state as Trump demanded they do, and who Trump insured were defeated in their recent primaries.
The message is clear to every current or aspiring Republican politician: Be a toady to Trump, or you’re out.
In his concession speech Friday night, Cassidy stated the obvious reference to Trump:
“Our country is not about one individual. It is about the welfare of all Americans, and it is about our Constitution. And if someone doesn’t understand that and attempts to control others through using the levers of power, they’re about serving themselves. They’re not about serving us. And that person is not qualified to be a leader.”
Nicely put but sadly irrelevant because Trump — who’s clearly serving himself rather than the American public — now possesses all levers of power in the official Republican Party.
As Republican senator Lindsey Graham said yesterday on Meet the Press, “There’s no room in this party to destroy [Trump’s] agenda.”
Former generations of Republican politicians had principles, beliefs, ideals. They thought the federal government too large. Or believed it spent too much money. Or was too lenient on criminals. Or was too eager to support the civil rights of Black people. Or any number of issues with which Democrats disagreed.
Today’s Republican Party no longer has any purpose other than achieving whatever Trump wants, which is making Trump richer and more powerful. The GOP is now Trump’s; it is no longer America’s.
Today’s Republican voters, by contrast, are showing increasing frustration with Trump. Those who think of themselves as traditional Republicans don’t like Trump’s expansive use of federal power. Those who are fiscally conservative, like Thomas Massie, are upset by Trump’s wanton spending, tax cuts, and soaring debt. “America-first” Republican voters are concerned about Trump’s intrusions into Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere. And they want the rest of the Epstein files released.
Yet for elected Republicans, survival now depends on personal loyalty to Trump.
All of which raises a fundamental question: Has the official Republican Party — now nearly purged of anyone willing to reflect the concerns of Republican voters rather than Trump’s will — become complicit in Trump’s criminality? Is it aiding and abetting Trump’s lawlessness?
A case can be made that the official Republican Party is indeed complicit.
For Trump, the first and most basic sign of loyalty to him — and therefore survival as a politician in Trump’s Republican Party — is a willingness to publicly proclaim as truth what we know to be two big lies: that Trump won the 2020 election, and that he did not seek to overturn its results by illegal means. As a result, almost all congressional Republicans are now election deniers.
Trump has also made it clear that loyalty to him bars any criticism of his unlawful immigration dragnet, which has so far resulted in the murders of three U.S. citizens by ICE agents and the detention and deportation, without a hearing, of people suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.
To Trump, loyalty requires full support of his foreign policy — including the abduction of a foreign leader, an undeclared war with Iran, and the killing on the high seas of people only suspected of smuggling drugs, in violation of international law.
Loyalty also demands unquestioned support for other of his lawless acts — using the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents, building a mammoth White House ballroom, issuing no-bid contracts to his friends, promoting his family’s businesses and implementing policies favorable to them, accepting gifts from foreign powers, and defying court orders.
Is it fair to conclude from all of this that today’s official Republican Party — the people who are in office because Trump has put them there, or who maintain their office because they back whatever Trump wants — has in effect become a criminal organization, analogous to the mafia or a drug cartel, whose members are blindly loyal to their criminal bosses?
Working class voters need a home, but the Democratic Party refuses to build them one.
A new study by Jared Abbott and Joan C. Williams, of nearly 2 million 2024 Trump voters, shows that more than one in five are not planning to vote for the Republicans in 2028. That group, which they call the “waverers,” is disproportionately poor, non-white, and working class.
But neither are these waverers planning to return to the Democrats. According to the study:
Of the 20.1 percent who are wavering, only 3.4 percent plan to vote Democrat. The remaining 16.7 percent say they will vote for neither party or are unsure.
That poses a severe problem for anyone who believes that our political system should better represent the needs and interests of working people. And it should scare the hell out anyone who fears the rise of more authoritarians in the future.
These workers clearly are telling us that they don’t have a home. We’d better figure out how to help build one.
Run more working-class candidates in the Democratic Party?
That’s what most progressives argue for. They believe that such candidates can attract these disgruntled workers back into the Party. As one progressive campaign operative said to me, “Our goal is to once again make the Democratic Party the party of the working-class.” That’s also what the League of Labor Voters and the Working Families Party are trying to do.
But it’s an uphill struggle. According to the Guardian:
“Millionaires make up less than 3% of the general public but have unified majority control of all three branches of the federal government. Working-class Americans, on the other hand, make up about half of the country. But they have never held more than 2% of the seats in any Congress since the nation was founded.
For every former bartender like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, there are thousands of ambitious candidates who are well-off members of the bar.
The Democratic Party brand is in big trouble. In the study the Labor Institute conducted with the Center for Working-Class Politics (again with Jared Abbot, that boy gets around), 70 percent of the 3,000 voters surveyed in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin had negative things to say about the Democrats. And a hypothetical Democratic candidate ran 8 percent behind an independent candidate even when they said exactly the same things.
That makes it next to impossible to launch Democratic working-class candidates in the 130 congressional districts in which the Democrats already lose by more than 25 percent. In those areas, the Democratic Party is not just dying, it is dead.
What are the odds, really, of the Democrats changing their stripes? Do the reformers really believe that a trickle of working-class candidates can turn into a torrent of new working-class candidates, if only we pushed harder?
Never say never, but that would be more likely if Democrats faced a real threat from the outside—from new working-class candidates running as independents. Should those independents gain traction, we can be sure the Democrats will take notice.
Independent working-class candidates in red areas
If you are tired of seeing nearly all of rural America flash bright red on your screen a few seconds after the polls close, there has to be a new approach outside of the Democratic Party. Dan Osborn, a mechanic and former local union president, is doing just that in his Senate run in Nebraska. In 2024 he ran 15 points ahead of Kamala Harris though still lost by six points. He’s running again in 2026, and so far the race is a toss-up.
Osborn knows that his only chance is to run against both parties as an independent. He calls it the “two-party doom loop.” He is directly taking on the wealthy in both parties, including the scion of a billionaire against whom he is running for Senate in 2026.
At a recent United Steelworkers conference I ran into a young miner who is running for the state legislature in Wyoming, also as an independent in this deep read state, and he thinks he will win in a landslide.
The point is that these working-class candidates with union credentials understand that voters in these red areas, including their fellow union members, have little use for the Democrats, and the only way to run is by running against both parties. Their slogan seems to be: “Not Blue, Not Red: I’m a working-class independent!”
If more and more working-class independents run against the two parties, and succeed, then maybe the Democrats will realize that they too should run working-class candidates in red areas.
But I’m not holding my breath. I truly believe that it will be much harder to wean the Democratic Party from its wealthy donors and consultants than it will be to run independent working-class candidates in red areas. But that prediction won’t matter until more working people, and their allies, jump into the fray as independents.
Then and only then will those disaffected MAGA voters have a place to go, and candidates they are willing to vote for. If we keep playing pattycake with the Democrats we may be delivering these disaffected working-class voters to Cruella de Vance, or worse, next time around.
As he is surely a 2028 presidential hopeful, Marco Rubio is a real threat to the better world we hope to build.
MAGA has been, throughout, an amorphous entity—curling, folding, dividing—as it slimed and slithered its way into this American life. Neocon MAGA is one particularly noteworthy division within, a more-than-slightly schizophrenic aberration that, if MAGA-world had any interest in maintaining conceptual coherence, would surely have long ago been run out of town.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is Neocon MAGA’s chief exemplar. In contrast to unreconstructed neocons like Lindsay Graham and John Bolton, who have tried to bootlick their way into President Donald Trump's good graces with spotty results, “Little Marco” was a neoconservative boy who has growth-spurted his way into a Neocon MAGA man.
Rubio recently gave a very buzzy speech at the Munich Security Conference on the 14 of February. This speech was received warmly by a crowd of beleaguered European leaders, threadbare from a year of belligerent rhetoric and mercenary tariff threats by the very Trump administration that Rubio is also underwritten by. In this speech, Rubio argued passionately that the West has lost its mojo. Rubio confidently slalom-skied his way through ideas and histories whose engagement he has only a mediocre competency, replete with omissions and partial truths that start to make one think he just might not be an honest broker. As his speech rounded one particular bend, his central thesis came into view: that ever since 1945, with the formation of the United Nations and what is often called the rules-based order, the West has become, despite its gloriously pearlescent past, a civilization in “terminal decline.” But with strategic solidarity (between Europe and the US), we might restore this civilization to its former greatness. That is his thesis.
There is a lot that is concerning about this speech. Rubio presented anti-colonialist uprisings as a categorically negative thing. He trumpeted dominance as the long-lost coin of the realm. He posited guilt and shame as some pathetic weakness, without any acknowledgment of the truly generative corrective that these kinds of senses can perform. He sounded the alarm about “civilizational erasure,” without buckling even a little under the weight of the cultural and racial supremacy on full display in his language and its implications. This was an expansionary speech, hoisting the sails of Make America Great Again into a full armada of Make Imperialist West Imperialist Again, with all the attendant wink-wink, nudge-nudging that sets folks like this Munich audience into full transfiguration mode, their countenance aglow.
To say European settler immigrants failed to assimilate once they got here would be a remarkable understatement.
But one significant contradiction in his speech that warrants analysis—if not only by me, then his lovingly concerned, anti-immigrant MAGA brothers and sisters—is his profuse, unqualified celebration of relentless, centuries-long, mass migration: the mass migration of westerners to remote corners of the world. In a section of his speech, Rubio enthusiastically proclaims: “For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding—its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.” I mean, come on. Eat your heart out, leftists (or at least the conservative caricature of leftists)! If ever there was a sentiment expressed about a world without borders, this is it.
If JD Vance is concerned about Ohio Haitians eating cats or Randi Fine is concerned that immigrants are here to get “free stuff,” Vance and Fine's vision quests and critical discourse are in pursuit of small potatoes compared with the horrors Western settlers propagated in the “new world.” To say European settler immigrants failed to assimilate once they got here would be a remarkable understatement. Rubio enthusiastically and playfully (he got some laughs; he was working the room) detailed the many, MAGA would say, illegitimate border-crossers (illegals?!) who radically altered the fabric of life of the people who lived in these lands: Italian explorers, English settlers, German farmers, and French fur traders.
But, in a section just a little bit earlier, Rubio seemed to suggest migration is a bad thing, saying, “Mass migration is not, was not, isn’t some fringe concern of little consequence. It was and continues to be a crisis that is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.” How far can coherence stretch before it snaps? What are the material differences between one migration and this other migration?! It can not only be because now is the time of nation-states who “have a right to exist” and require hardened borders, but then was a time of exploration, expansion, and settlements—different times, different rules—because Rubio is, in a very Winkelmannian sense (J.J. Winkelmann, the German neoclassical art historian extraordinaire), imploring us to do now as our imperialist forbears did then. To do as great men of great civilizations did is the way for us to become great. If that is the logic, then what really is the difference among these migrations?
In, what was meant to be a particularly touching section of the speech, Rubio details his Sardinian and Spanish ancestry, name-dropping good old Lorenzo and Catalina Geroldi and Jose and Manuela Reina, who he feels could not have fathomed (and he probably believes would have been very proud) that their direct descendant would have graduated from neocon “Little Marco” to Big Boy Marco giving his big boy speech. But that story excludes an even more critical and thoroughly American portion of the Rubio family history. The Rubios are a family of immigrants, of course. They migrated at some point from Southern Europe to Cuba; the details of what prompted that migration are perhaps lost to history. But then Marco Rubio’s parents migrated from Cuba to the US, not as refugees fleeing the Castro regime and the supposed horrors of communism as he has erroneously claimed. But rather as economic migrants seeking a more prosperous life for their family in the US, a few years before Fidel Castro started organizing in the Sierra Maestra mountains, propelled by the very same economic misery that caused the Rubios to leave a few years earlier.
While Rubio’s family moved around the US a bit when he was quite young, the South Florida Cuban migrant community was enormously culturally, politically, and spiritually (Marco received his first communion in Miami in 1984) formative. Many have speculated that his false claims of his parents being political refugees forced to leave Cuba post-revolution, which were debunked by the Washington Post in 2011, were motivated by the reality that, as a young South Floridian politician, one has far more electoral opportunities connected to such a political-victim narrative. The Post stated, “[in] Florida, being connected to the post-revolution exile community gives a politician cachet that could never be achieved by someone identified with the pre-Castro exodus, a group sometimes viewed with suspicion." Rubio has argued his narrative was not meant to deceive for political gain, but rather he was just innocently presenting “family lore.”
The reality is that in a speech like what Marco Rubio gave in Munich, there are many assumptions, biases, and contradictions harbored unexamined by this dominant neoliberal capitalist logic. A “migration for me, not for thee” doctrine is allowed to float unimpeded and unquestioned out of the mouths of low melanin-faced folks who hail from particularly choice real-estate markets (preferably Western Europe and the US) because it is underwritten by a system of logic that forgives an ethnic cleansing here, a theft of Black and brown bodies there on the grounds of the “price of doing business.” There is a straight and logical line between the enclosures of common land and the attendant immiseration of peasants and the consolidation of wealth and power among the elites in England in the 16th to 19th centuries, and the brutal colonial enclosure of the Americas in this same period. The difference is scale, not type.
An alternate logic to the domination, conquest, and hard borders of global capitalism is left internationalism. In global capitalism, goods and wealth freely pass across borders, while workers’ bodies and their class solidarities are captured and enclosed. Left internationalist logic is the inverse of global capitalist logic. Left internationalism promotes class solidarity across borders, it rejects nationalist ideologies that align workers with their exploiters, and it seeks global well-being in the face of the very kind of neo-imperialism with which Rubio’s speech is shot through. Left internationalism asks us to see the Global South as an opportunity for planetary solidarity—a real lifting of all boats—not as a region of resource riches ripe for plunder.
There was a time in our not-so-distant past when the US border was far more porous than even the laxest moments of the Biden years. This was a border over which migrant workers came and went, sometimes in the same day, sometimes for a season, to work in various opportunity regions in the US. They would do their work here and then return to their homes and families on the other side of the border. This was a remarkably open flow of bodies across borders, not because of any dominant radical-leftist theory, but because it was a practical arrangement that offered benefits to the greatest number of people. And it worked. If only Make America Great Again harkened back to instances like this, or when American communists and anarchists agitated for and won (for all of us) better working conditions and an eight-hour workday. These are times in our history when the US still had enormous problems, of course. But these were also times when we were seeing real progress, won together across cultural and racial differences in class solidarity.
In 2015, Pope Francis addressed the US Congress, saying, “Millions of people came to this land to pursue their dream of building a future in freedom. We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners because most of us were once foreigners. I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descendants of immigrants.” It was reported at the time that then-Senator and candidate for president Marco Rubio became emotional from this speech, stating later that he was “moved” by the Pope’s statements. Some reported he wiped a tear from his eye. This suggests that Rubio, like all of us, holds his contradictions in his body. And sometimes, we experience an involuntary, emotionally eruptive response to our efforts to contain those contradictions inside. Rubio’s contradictions, of course, include the incongruent differences between MAGA and neoconservatism. But his emotional display may, just may, evidence contradictions inherent in his status as a self-hating child of immigrants, making his otherwise frictionless slide toward neo-imperialist par excellence perhaps a bit complicated.
As he is surely a 2028 presidential hopeful, he is a real threat to the better world we hope to build. The prayers and tears of Marco Rubio may have the potential of curtailing (or at least moderating) Little Marco’s seeming unobstructed pathway to the tyrannical monster he may one day be. But left to this administration’s current direction and the almost unprecedented amount of power Rubio has amassed as both the US secretary of state and national security adviser serving under a remarkably distractible and aimless president, MAGA may very well complete its foul transmutation into MIWIA (Make Imperialist West Imperialist Again).
When given the opportunity to seek justice for countless women and children who were trafficked, abused, and exploited by the world’s wealthiest, most powerful people, the MAGA movement and its leaders have shown a startling disinterest in accountability.
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s contentious House hearing about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files offered a clear message to the nation: Sex trafficking of women and minors is perfectly acceptable as long as wealthy white men do it.
Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced late sex trafficker, fixer, and political networker, was found to have ties to huge number of the world’s elites on both sides of the political aisle—including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Ehud Barak, Bill Gates, Steve Bannon, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, and of course, Donald Trump.
For years, Trump’s conservative backers have attacked LGBTQ+ people, drag queens, immigrants, and others, claiming a desire to protect women and children from rapists and groomers. Trump even boasted that “whether the women liked it or not,” he would “protect” them from migrants, whom he slandered as “monsters” who “kidnap and kill our children.”
But when given the opportunity to seek justice for countless women and children who were trafficked, abused, and exploited by the world’s wealthiest, most powerful people, the MAGA movement and its leaders have shown a startling disinterest in accountability. During her hearing Bondi tried desperately to deflect attention, claiming that the stock market was more deserving of public attention than Epstein’s victims.
For elites like Epstein, ideological differences were superficial. The real distinction was money, power, and connections.
Even the Republican rank and file is now mysteriously detached from the Epstein files.
Polls show that in summer 2025, 40% of GOP voters disapproved of the federal government’s handling of the Epstein files. But by January 2026, only about half that percentage disapproved—even after the Trump administration missed its deadline to release millions of files and then released them in a way that exposed the victims while protecting the perpetrators.
While some European leaders are facing harsh consequences for associating with Epstein, no Americans outside of Epstein and his closest associate Ghislaine Maxwell have faced any consequences, legal or otherwise.
That’s despite very concrete ties between the Trump administration and the sex trafficker. Not only did Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admit to visiting Epstein island after lying about it (and has so far faced no consequences), but Trump himself is named more than a million times in the files, according to lawmakers with access to the unredacted documents. Several victims identify Trump by name, alleging he raped and assaulted them.
And it’s not just Trump. Epstein was an equal opportunity fixer. He was just as friendly with liberals as he was with conservatives, including Summers, Clinton, and, disconcertingly for the American left, Noam Chomsky. For elites like Epstein, ideological differences were superficial. The real distinction was money, power, and connections.
Epstein was a glorified drug dealer, and his drugs of choice were the vulnerable bodies of women and children, offered up to his friends and allies as the forbidden currency he traded in. A useful moniker has emerged to describe the global network of elites whose power and privilege continues to protect them from accountability: the Epstein Class.
Georgia Sen. John Ossoff, who faces reelection in 2026, is deploying this label, understanding that voters—at least those who haven’t bought into the MAGA cult —are increasingly aware of the double standards that wealthy power players are held to.
“This is the Epstein class, ruling our country,” said Ossoff in reference to those who make up the Trump administration. “They are the elites they pretend to hate.”
He’s right. And if the Trump administration won’t hold them to account, Americans should demand leaders who will.
No matter what Trump or his allies allege, the video depicting the Obamas as apes is entirely consistent with their racist worldview; for them, Black is ugly, dangerous, and savage, while white is beautiful, safe, and civilized.
On February 5, a video was posted on President Donald Trump’s Truth Social account depicting former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes in a jungle. The racist depiction of Black people as primates dates back centuries. It is meant to represent them as ugly, savage, and unintelligent—as fundamentally incapable of building a human (white) civilization.
The post was deleted 12 hours later. The White House initially blamed an unnamed staffer for posting it. One White House adviser told reporters, “The president was not aware of that video, and was very let down by the staffer who put it out.” Apparently, they forgot that Trump himself had claimed that only he and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino have access to his social media account.
Later that day, Trump admitted that he knew about the video before its posting. He told reporters, “I looked at the beginning of [the video]. It was fine.” He then added, “Nobody knew that that was at the end. If they would have looked, they would have had the sense to take it down.” Neither the current president of the United States nor his staff is apparently capable of watching a 1-minute video before posting it.
Trump refused to apologize, insisting that he “didn’t make a mistake.”
In some respects, Leavitt is right—that Truth Social post shouldn’t surprise anyone. Trump is the nation’s Racist-in-Chief.
Notably, even conservatives condemned the post (albeit meekly). Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) posted on Twitter-X that this is “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) shared Scott’s post, writing, “Tim is right. This was appalling.” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) similarly wrote: “This post was offensive. I’m glad the White House took it down.”
Democrats, by contrast, used stronger language. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said, “Fuck Donald Trump and his vile, racist, and malignant behavior.” Finally, bipartisanship has been achieved!
Despite this outcry, the White House was quick to dismiss the post as being anything newsworthy. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt demanded that journalists “please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
In some respects, Leavitt is right—that Truth Social post shouldn’t surprise anyone. Trump is the nation’s Racist-in-Chief. It’s a slow day indeed if that video is the only racist thing Trump did all day.
In recent months, he has referred to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a sitting Black congresswoman, as “a disgusting person, a loser,” and “garbage.” Trump says that she, a US citizen, “should be thrown the hell out of our country.” To emphasize, not her country, but “our country.”
More broadly, he says that Somalis are “low IQ people” and that Somalia is “barely a nation.” It “stinks” and is “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” For Trump, Somalis are savage, ugly, uncivilized, and unintelligent people—fundamentally distinct from the “nice people” from civilized societies like Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Notice the direct parallels between how Trump explicitly describes Somalis on the one hand, and the underlying racist meaning behind comparing Black people to primates on the other. Trump is applying the exact same set of stereotypes in both instances.
For MAGA Republicans, that success is always vulnerable to the threat of “foreign cultures” and Black immigrants, which in this case include both Ilhan Omar and Barack Obama.
Somalia is not the only example. He refers to Haiti as a “shithole” and “hellhole.” That Haitians are “eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” This narrative—not only wildly racist, but demonstrably false—was amplified by several Republicans, including Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.), Representative Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and then-Vice President-Elect JD Vance.
Trump’s racism is not an anomaly among MAGA Republicans. Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller remarks, “If Somalians cannot make Somalia successful, why would we think that the track will be any different in the United States? If Libya keeps failing, if the Central African Republic keeps failing, if Somalia keeps failing, right? If these societies all over the world continue to fail, you have to ask yourself, […] what do we think is going to happen?" For Miller, no matter where those people go, the result will be the same: “consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.” Test scores will also consistently drop: “If you subtract immigration out of test scores, all of a sudden our test scores skyrocket!” Like Trump, for Miller, Africans and their descendants are incapable of building a human (white) civilization.
Indirectly, Trump applies this standard to Obama too. Per Trump’s birther conspiracy theory, Obama was born in Kenya. At the same time he promoted that lie, Trump insisted that Obama allowed the US to collapse to the level of “a third world country.” Taken together, from Trump’s perspective, Obama is an African immigrant whose “destructive” policies led to the country “dying.” This is precisely what he and others in his administration allege that African immigrants always do.
One might (confusedly) object that all of this is xenophobia, not anti-Black racism specifically—truly a distinction without a difference.
On February 3, Trump issued a proclamation emphasizing that “the history of black Americans is an indispensable chapter in our grand American country.” Thus, he calls upon “public officials, educators, librarians, and all the people of the United States to observe [Black History Month] with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.”
Yet, this objection overlooks a crucial detail: Trump’s proclamation is explicitly not a recognition of diversity—“This month, however, we do not celebrate our differences.” For Trump, Black History Month is not a celebration of Black people, but rather of the ability of “black American heroes” to successfully embrace and defend the “very special culture” that America and Europe inherited. Importantly, for Trump and his allies, the values, beliefs, and principles of that special culture are uniquely white.
This is the white-washed version of Black History Month that MAGA recognizes—one where Black people’s contributions to America are completely divorced from their lived experiences; where it is white values that abolish slavery, end discrimination, and save the nation.
Trump is not honoring Black arts, culture, or philosophy. He is calling on us to remember Black people’s “enduring commitment to the American principles of liberty, justice and equality.” It is those principles that freed the Western Hemisphere from “empires, ended slavery, saved Europe, put a man on the moon, and built the freest, most just, and most prosperous society ever known to mankind.” Black patriots like Coretta Scott King, Booker T. Washington, and Thomas Sowell “fiercely defended the values set forth in the Declaration of Independence and helped to make our Republic the greatest country in the history of the world.”
For Trump, America’s “bedrock belief in equality” is inextricably tied to the nation’s Christian foundation and the belief that all are equal under God. It is that belief “that drove black American icons to help fulfill the promise of [America’s] principles.”
What Trump is expressing here is entirely consistent with the racist worldview that he and other MAGA Republicans endorse. Black values and cultures ruin societies, while white values uplift them. This is why Haiti, Somalia, Central African Republic, and Libya fail to develop, while the US thrives. If Black people succeed, it is because they have championed Christian and Enlightenment (white) principles and values. This is the white-washed version of Black History Month that MAGA recognizes—one where Black people’s contributions to America are completely divorced from their lived experiences; where it is white values that abolish slavery, end discrimination, and save the nation.
For MAGA Republicans, that success is always vulnerable to the threat of “foreign cultures” and Black immigrants, which in this case include both Ilhan Omar and Barack Obama. This vulnerability is why US cities like Baltimore, where more than half the residents are Black, can become “dangerous,” “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
No matter what Trump or his allies allege, the video depicting the Obamas as apes is entirely consistent with their racist worldview. In every instance, their comments reflect the same underlying dichotomy: Black is ugly, dangerous, and savage, while white is beautiful, safe, and civilized. This is true whether they explicitly state it or metaphorically represent it.
It is this racism that leads Trump to blame Black Americans for violent crimes. It is this racism that leads the Trump administration to invade Minnesota. It is this “racial and national origin animus” that spurs their desire to end Temporary Protection Status for Haitians. It is this racism that makes everyone, regardless of race or citizenship status, vulnerable to the Trump administration’s Christian and ethnonationalist agenda. It is this racism that we must all resist.