EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Mark Green: Hi, Mark Green here with our Inflection Zone podcast we call Changing America, which looks at Trump now and post-Trump. Last week we had a good friend of mine, Ralph Nader, as the guest…this week he’s been profiled Tuesday on the front page of The New York Times.

Today joining our podcast is another long-time colleague and friend, Michael Waldman, who is generationally different from Ralph but in the same line of work.

Michael Waldman has for 20 years been president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, which he attended. Previously, we co-authored in 1984 the fourth edition of the best-selling Who Runs Congress?, after which he worked on my U.S. Senate campaign in 1986. He then shrewdly ended up with an even more successful politician and went on to join the Clinton White House, ultimately becoming the president’s chief of speech writing, which included overseeing his inaugural address, four States of the Union, and 2,000 speeches in all.

And he’s the author or co-author of eight books, including POTUS Speaks and a major volume on the Supreme Court called Supermajority. Well, here we go again, Michael. Thanks for joining us.

Michael Waldman: Great to be with you, Mark. As you know, I learned a large share of what I’ve been able to do in my whole career from those years working with you.

Mark Green : Michael, because of your rich history and present role, we anticipate breaking this conversation into two separate podcasts as we look back on Trump and to the horizon of a better America. First, after you worked on my Senate campaign, – and I couldn’t have lost without you really – you shrewdly hooked up with Bill Clinton, as mentioned. Looking back, [I’m sure] you learned a million things, but what big lessons did you take away from Clinton’s assets or weaknesses?

Michael Waldman: It’s a great question. The most significant thing I took away from working with Bill Clinton is, yes, charisma matters, yes, retail political skills matter, and of course, he has those in freakishly copious degrees.

But policy matters, ideas matter. He ran in 1992 forging a somewhat new approach to what Democrats ought to do – that combined elements of left and center in the party and, as he said at that time, he was running against the brain-dead policies of both parties.

Mark Green: Michael, I glanced before this conversation at the 2024 American Political Science Association ranking of all the presidents. The top three are Lincoln, FDR, and Washington. Hard to disagree with that. Are you surprised that Obama was Number 7 of all the presidents? JFK Number 10, Clinton Number 12, Reagan Number 16.

Having written the book POTUS Speaks, how would you contrast in that context Clinton and Obama?

Michael Waldman: I think it’s a little early, frankly, for either of them. Obama, on the one hand, was president during some very consequential times. He came in, of course, in the aftermath of the financial collapse, and that was an extraordinary opportunity to do things.

I think in some respects he didn’t actually make the most of that opportunity. Clinton got a lot done, but as he would often bemoan, did not have crises to deal with. And very soon into his presidency, the Democratic control over Congress ended, but he was hamstrung in that way. I think what he would say, and I certainly felt this way, was that he was engaged in a project of reconstruction of liberalism so that it could be something people could run on again.

One time in the residence of the White House, he said to me and a few other people, “you know, FDR saved capitalism from itself.” That’s not an original insight. But [Clinton continued] “Our mission is to save government from its own excesses so people will see it as a progressive force again.” I think without Clinton, you wouldn’t have had Obama.

In a variety of ways, he saw himself as a liberal president governing a conservative country.

Mark Green : Other than perhaps Justice [William J.] Brennan, no one is more a founding father of that institution than you. Going from a budget of about 4 million or so 20 years ago, to nearly 70 million now – a widely quoted, highly regarded, leader of the progressive law movement, what do you attribute that phenomenal growth to?

Michael Waldman: I would say that the issues of democracy of the Constitution, which we have been saying are central and under assault, are more and more evidently the case to more and more people. So we’ve grown to scale with the challenges that we all face.

I think it’s also the case – and Mark, this is something you taught me when we worked together in a think tank called The Democracy Project, which was two people – that ideas matter and that the right wing has been very successful building up institutions like The Heritage Foundation, like AEI, like the Federalist Society. That is what we have tried to do at the Brennan Center.

Mark Green : In that context, looking back, what have been some of your most influential and important accomplishments?

Michael Waldman: I would say we have been the Paul Revere, crying out that there were attempts being made to suppress the vote, going back 10, 15 years, and really connecting the dots in a way that others had not done before.

Now with Donald Trump as president saying it out loud every five minutes, (laughs) it’s a lot easier to make that case. But what I am most proud of in a lot of ways are the affirmative reforms that we worked to develop that have taken hold in states across the country and have become central to the progressive agenda in the United States.

The legislation called the Freedom to Vote Act, which you remember, H.R.1, S.1, came really close to being enacted in the Congress in 2022. It passed the House, had a majority in the Senate, only Senators Sinema and Manchin would not change the filibuster rule so it could pass. Much of that bill was based on proposals we had developed at the Brennan Center.

Small donor public financing as a national reform, like we have in New York City, automatic voter registration and numerous other things. We really are determined to see these things become the law of the land.

Mark Green: Chief Justice Roberts, profiled this week in The New Yorker, famously insisted that he just calls balls and strikes, not politics in his rulings.

In my last Substack, I called BS on that, noting four calamitous decisions that lurched not merely to the far right, but the farthest right. Without going into the weeds, can we get your view on these four amazingly important cases? He wrote the decision in Citizens United [vs. Federal Election Commission] that continued the fiction that campaign money is speech, and it wouldn’t lead - he predicted - to substantial changes in how campaigns are financed.

Michael Waldman: Citizens United was extraordinarily destructive of our democracy. That case – and then lower court rulings implementing it – fully deregulated money in American politics back to where it was in the Gilded Age. Increasingly it is dominated by a few very wealthy billionaires, who give a substantial share of the money.

Yes, there’s more money given by small donors, but they are being outpaced by ideological big donors, and they’re often people who keep their money hidden. And they have had a tremendous impact. Citizens United, you’re right, said “Oh, it’s all okay because this is all gonna be disclosed.” It’s not. “Also, it’s all gonna be independent of the candidates.” Who are you kidding? Those of us who care about campaign finance have to be very self-aware that whatever rules are on the books right now, they really don’t exist, and we need to start over. And part of that is a different approach from the Supreme Court.

Mark Green : Michael, the Shelby County [vs. Holder] case a decade ago dismissed the problem of racially [based voter] suppression and seriously sabotaged, by all accounts, the 1965 Voting Rights Act. And it wouldn’t have happened without Roberts, who’d been lobbying for just such a thing since he was a young lawyer in the Reagan White House. And now here he is 40 years later – Chief Justice! Your analysis to the people about the Shelby County case?

Michael Waldman: For all of [Robert’s] very effective spin of just being a Midwestern Republican calling balls-and-strikes at the country club, he’s been a very active, indeed zealous, judicial activist when it comes to the law of democracy. The last time the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was reauthorized by Congress, it passed the Senate in 2006 by 98 to nothing!

In other words, this was recent and this was a consensus. What Shelby County did was basically said, “Well, that was then, this is now. The South isn’t racist anymore, you know. Black voting turnout and white voting turnout rates are, you know, much closer together.” This was right after Obama had run. “And therefore you don’t need the Voting Rights Act.” And this was a case in which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg memorably wrote in her dissent, “That’s like standing in a rainstorm holding an umbrella and not getting wet, and deciding therefore that you don’t need an umbrella because you’re not wet.”

Mark Green: That was almost as good a metaphor as [Roberts] just calling “balls-and-strikes.” Both were memorable, but only one is true! (laughs)

Michael Waldman: And within hours of that ruling, [Ginsburg’s] predictions started to come true as states across the country began to pass new voter restriction rules. Some of them, as the federal appeals court in North Carolina put it, “surgically” targeted at Black voters.

Mark Green: Have you ever heard Roberts directly or indirectly admit, “Hmm, my predictions on money not mattering after Citizens United, my predictions on race not mattering after Shelby County didn’t exactly prove out”?

Michael Waldman. No. And we’ve done the math on this. We have a billion voter records at the Brennan Center in a genuine supercomputer here. The racial turnout gap, which was the thing Roberts pointed to in that egregious decision, started growing all over the country after 2013, after the year of the Shelby County decision. But in the states that used to be covered by the strong Voting Rights Act, the part of the Voting Rights Act that was destroyed in that decision, Section Five, in those states the gap grew at twice the rate of the rest of the country.

It’s empirically the case that that ruling has made it harder or impossible for hundreds of thousands of people to vote.

Mark Green: This Court and Congress seem dedicated to erasing 150 years of progressive laws and rulings.

In a third opinion by Robert’s 6-3 decision, he found something that had never been referred to before in the Constitution in 250 years of rulings – “presidential criminal immunity” for whatever a president says or does, if it’s within his “core functions.”

By the way, after his last State of the Union, Trump was seen mouthing to Roberts, who was in front of him, “Thanks so much. Thank you so much. I will never forget that.”

Michael Waldman: That decision, Trump v. US, is one of the worst in American history. I really would put it up there with the Dred Scott ruling and a handful of others.

The Constitution explicitly talks about presidents being able to be prosecuted after they leave office in the discussion of impeachment. There was an outlandish hypothetical that was used in the court, which is if a president ordered Seal Team Six to assassinate his political opponents – would that be an official act?

And the court basically said, “Yes!” You know who would be really rolling over in his grave - looking up or down at this - is Richard Nixon. What Richard Nixon was driven from office for doing would have been immune from investigation, let alone prosecution, under this ruling. It’s really bad, and every time you read it, it gets worse.

Mark Green : What Roberts et al. did was, in effect, raise a hypothetical fear, “Oh, presidents could be criminally hounded after they left office” versus the actual reality [of repeated presidential illegality by Trump].

A fourth decision that bothers me almost as much as the immunity decision apparently bothers you was the recent FTC Slaughter [Trump vs. Slaughter] case allowing a president to unilaterally remove commissioners at so-called independent regulatory agencies.

Trump fired a Democratic regulator at the FTC. Couldn’t that lead not so far off to a President Trump firing every Democratic commissioner at every regulatory agency and becoming, in effect, a dictator? The FCC, CPSC, SEC, FTC, et cetera, or am I being alarmist?

Michael Waldman: Well, you know, we haven’t seen all the litigation around all these other agencies, and there are some arguments to be made that they’re different from the FTC.

But as you know, we have a modern, civilized society in part because we built up over more than a century these expert agencies, sometimes insulated by Congress from political pressure in the way they were set up to do things like regulate air safety, auto safety, the markets, policing against white-collar crime and securities fraud.

We already know that some of these agencies can be dominated by a president. We’re looking at the Federal Communications Commission, which keeps doing all these things, absurd and illegal things, on Trump’s behalf. But yes, it’s a vast expansion of personal executive power over these parts of the government.

If presidents can fire the heads of se agencies or commissioners of these agencies “at will,” no matter what the law says – well, the Federal Reserve is an independent agency. And, you know, there’s a lot of people who care from a conservative and business-oriented perspective about the economy who think it’s pretty good to have an independent central bank.

So what the FED [and the Court] said was, “Well, then there’s the Federal Reserve. Some people note that’s also an independent agency. Well, it’s just different. It just is. Why Alexander Hamilton, he once had a bank and he was a founder…and so it’s different.” I’m not parodying that. That is basically what it said. So what’s the difference between the FTC and the FED? Well, the Chamber of Commerce loves the FED and hates the FTC.

Mark Green: Look, all, all these, in a sense, are the result of conservative doctrines from Scalia to Alito called Originalism and Unified Government, which cleverly require the High Court to lock its rulings into the mores, the rules, the laws of the 18th century.

That’s pretty clever if you’re a conservative wanting to go back to then. Is this gonna be an intellectual straitjacket for years to come, or are we gonna get over this eventually?

Michael Waldman: They apply originalism, the idea that the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution is to ask what it meant at the time it was ratified, which in most cases is 1787. But there’s no other country that says the only way to decide what kind of society we have right now is to look back at what the social mores and values of 1787, of property-owning white men in 1787 was. You know, in Great Britain, when someone has an idea for a policy, they don’t say, “Oh, you know, that’s a pretty interesting idea, but the really important question we have to ask is, what did King George III think about it?” But we say, “Well, what, what unpublished notes from James Madison would illuminate what, what we should be ruling on now?”

I think you can’t beat something with nothing, and so one of the things we at the Brennan Center are doing is working with other lawyers, other scholars, people in advocacy groups and elsewhere to develop some arguments about the Constitution as a pro-democracy document that isn’t just saying, “No, no, no, we don’t like Originalism,” but this is actually the way you should look at the Constitution.”

Mark Green: Michael, that was great, but now we’ll pause our conversation to prepare a Part Two, which will be our Substack in about a couple of weeks.

In that spirit, we hope to develop a practical, progressive vision over the next 30 months of this administration that would both help erase Trumpian pathologies and erect a stronger democracy - however long that takes.

Please suggest to friends and allies to follow us at our occasional Changing America podcasts from the distortion field we call Trump’s Inflection Zone.

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

See you soon for Part II!

Episode Transcript

Mark Green: Mark Green here, and welcome to the second of our new podcast, Changing America. This offshoot of The Inflection Zone will be about still exposing and deposing Trump but with a focus on proposing the best new suggestions, for America post-Trump. It’s based on the observation of Norman Cousins who sagely wrote that “No one’s smart enough to be a pessimist.”

With the possible exception of MLK, I've regarded our guest today as the most important private citizen since Benjamin Franklin.

His biggest selling novel Unsafe at Any Speed was one of the 100 most significant books published in America in the past century, concluded Time Magazine. He ranks among the 100 Most Influential People in American history, according to The Atlantic. In a public life so far spanning 64 years, he’s written 2,000 articles and comments, spoken at over 2,000 universities, written or sponsored 75 books, and enacted two dozen consumer and environmental laws.

But that’s just dry data. At the human level, after he persuaded the House and Senate to unanimously pass his Auto Safety Act and Agency, 4.2 million Americans have not died because of that safety agency and rules based on data of deaths per-mile driven.

Maybe YOU are one of them.

Archival Footage from 1966 Congressional Testimony

Ralph Nader: …I don't want to have a climate in this country where one has to have an ascetic existence and steely determinations in order to speak truthfully and candidly and critically of American industry.

General Motors President James Roche:  I want to apologize here and now to the members of this subcommittee and Mr. Nader. I sincerely hope that these apologies will be accepted.

Mark Green: And we’ve worked on-and-off together for a mere 58 years. Phew, even saying it gets me tired. Ralph, welcome.

Ralph Nader : Thank you, Mark.

Mark Green: Oh, I left out something. In 1977, you were a host of Saturday Night Live on a program with a new comedian named Bill Murray.

On the subject of new ideas for a post-Trump America, you’ve consistently suggested transforming Labor Day so it’s not just an anachronism but an active part of the labor and political worlds.

How would that work?

Ralph Nader : Well, Labor Day is supposed to highlight workers – instead, it highlights commercial sales of cars and furniture. We want to bring it back to engaging workers. The idea is to have events focusing on something as simple as a “Compact” for American workers to integrate higher minimum wages, universal health care, cracking down on corporate crime and tax reform…not just clambakes but civic events where organizers also engage like-minded citizen groups to invite candidates, local, state, and national, running for office.

Mark Green: What kind of response have you gotten, if any, from individual unions or the AFL?

Ralph Nader : Two years ago we got Liz Shuler, head of the AFL-CIO, very excited. Everything was in place. Rolling it out to the national unions, like the flight attendants, postal workers and the United Auto Workers, and then down to the local level. But what I didn’t know was the AFL-CIO ran these proposals by the Democratic National Committee, and they nixed it.

They turned it down. And so we’re trying again, for this coming Labor Day. We’re not involving the AFL.

Mark Green: Even though Labor, of course, has shrunk as a percentage of the organizable workforce, it’s still among the two or three cornerstones of the Democratic Party.

Speaking of which, you yourself are not a registered Democrat – indeed you ran four times for president as an Independent… and, pending recounts, were not yet elected. You’ve been very critical of House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries for not doing more to hold a malicious president accountable for his crimes and damage.

Ralph, since he has to keep the House caucus together – from Henry Cuellar to AOC – what do you suggest he can or should also be doing?

Ralph Nader: One thing is leading the fight to impeach Trump in the House and send it to the Senate, regardless of the prospects of the vote. It would be an important organizing tool all over the country.

Almost 90% of the Democratic voters want Trump out of there. “You’re fired,” to use one of his favorite expressions. Jeffries doesn’t agree with that.

Mark Green: Might that be his position right now, probably waiting until he is in the majority before proposing something that he then has the power to act on. Do you think that’s likely or enough?

Ralph Nader : I don’t think it’s likely at all. I think if he becomes Speaker he’ll say, “We’re not looking back, we’re looking forward.”

You have a massively criminal president surrounded by massively criminal sycophants heading cabinet positions and agency positions, and every day people out there are suffering. Some are dying, some are getting sick, some can’t get Medicaid, some can’t get food stamps. We’re talking tens of millions of people.

They’re wrecking Head Start. They’re wrecking AmeriCorps -- they’ve frozen the health and safety regulatory agencies that save lives and advance health – EPA, OSHA, NHTSA. He’s not listening to his Democratic voters. He said to a reporter who asked him about impeachment in April, “I’m not I’m not gonna get ahead of that discussion.”

What? Get ahead of the discussion of almost 90% of your voters? We’ve had two symposiums on impeachment. At one of them was Celinda Lake, who showed us all the polls saying that organizing an impeachment drive is good politics. It gets people excited, it answers the question – what does the Democratic Party stand for? – and it helps get out the vote.

Mark Green: If someone says to you, “Oh, come on, it’s unlikely to impossible he’d ever reach the 67 votes necessary to convict and expel in the Senate.” What’s your counter-argument argument – “if you don’t swing, you don’t hit”?

Ralph Nader: Well said. Two responses. One is they said all that about Nixon – you have to take him out of the White House feet first; he’ll never leave. Well, he won 49 out of 50 states in 1972, got over 60% and within a year or two he was out. Why? Because Republicans saw themselves sinking in the ‘74 election, and he was the reason they were sinking.

So Senators Howard Baker and Senator Barry Goldwater went to the White House and basically said, “Mr. President, your time is up.” And he resigned, saying he lost his base in Congress. You’re not gonna get two-thirds next year if you don’t start this year laying the basis and making the Republicans realize that Trump is a tremendous handicap come November

Mark Green: Ralph, you’ve been operational for one-fourth of America’s entire history. You’ve dealt with an awful lot of members over that time. Looking back, who were among the two or three greatest senators, house members, that you worked with and why?

Ralph Nader: Well, Senator Warren Magnuson was a power in the Senate. He was originally known as the go-to person for big business, and then he hired a couple great chiefs of staff – like Mike Pertschuk – who educated him…and he became the greatest consumer champion of legislation in Senate history. Senator Gaylord Nelson, tremendous progressive from Wisconsin, authored the Tire Safety Act and many other measures [such as launching the very first Earth Day in 1970.]

In the House, the towering figure was John Moss, the father of the Freedom of Information Act of 1966 and the critical amendments of 1974.

Mark Green: You remember when we two met personally with a 92-year-old Jeannette Rankin in 1972. She was the first woman ever elected to the House of Representatives back in 1916 but was then defeated in the next election due to her vote against our entry into World War I.

Ralph Nader : I sure do. She’s the greatest woman in politics in American history in my book.

She wasn’t just for women’s rights. She was for labor rights. She was for peace. She put her life on the line for Montana. That’s why Montanans have picked her to represent them in the Hall of Statues in the Congress, Jeannette Rankin.

Well, I get a call from her in the middle of a hot summer when we had hundreds of student volunteers doing profiles of nearly every Member of Congress. I said, “What a pleasure.” And she said, “I’m gonna fly in because I want to talk to you and your people about ‘single member districts,’ which I’ve been advocating for decades.” The one thing I remember she conveyed to the students was, “You gotta have stamina, patience, and long-term determination.”

That was a great scene. I wish it had been videotaped.

Mark Green: Talking about stamina, after she was voted out in 1918 as a pacifist against WWI, 22 years later she ran for her old seat, won, in time to be the only member to vote against our entry into World War II, for which – surprise! – she was then again voted out of office.

When I asked her, “How the hell did you continue to have this drive and idealism after losing political power and then coming back…to lose again?” She replied, “You can’t lose if you never give up. You can’t lose if you never give up.”

Ralph Nader : Great phrase.

Mark Green: Ralph, you had another seminal moment last year on the 60th anniversary of Unsafe, when you published a response to a major critique written by Lewis Powell, who later of course became a Supreme Court justice.

What was his critique, and how did your lengthy response anticipate the Slaughter decision earlier this year which overturned a century of precedent to allow a president to fire all commissioners of the other party so he becomes a dictator over so-called “independent” regulatory agencies?

Ralph Nader : Lewis Powell’s complaint against the consumer, environmental and labor movements sound quaint now.

He wrote how the universities were alive with protests against corporate power, which influenced Congress. They passed bills to regulate the auto industry, to regulate polluters, to hold these companies accountable. So Powell urged big corporations to wake up – they need to expand their core of lobbyists in Washington and their influence over universities and over the media. He wrote this extensive memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and they sort of followed his script.

At the time, I said, “What’s the big deal? All, all these groups, they just want corporations to stop stealing, to stop cheating, to stop polluting, to start obeying the laws. Now how radical is that?” Well, he named me as the leading antagonist of American business. I tried to ignore it. But 54 years later, I figured I’d use it as a yardstick to show how massively more powerful corporations have become in every sphere of life.

I explained that political action committees are staggeringly bigger. They secretly buy and rent politicians, as you’ve written about so much.

Mark Green: And now?

Ralph Nader: The net result is the citizenry is not organized in proportion to the crushing attack on them.

Instead, we have Trump, who to use the title of our book is Wrecking America. So he is teaching us a lot about the weakness of both our democratic institutions and our own role as citizens.

I don’t think most people understand the extent of the damage he’s inflicting. Because when you’re willing to lie yourself through the day, he’s a chronic liar, a fantasist, a broken-promise leader with his base — and you’re willing to violate all the laws and the Constitution day after day — you can create a spectacular amount of damage to our country.

We’re not prepared for pandemics, we’re not prepared for climate violence, we’re not prepared to deal with the wildfires since wants to cut the budget for FEMA. He’s put big business in charge. He’s eliminating all kinds of criminal prosecutions that he inherited from the Biden administration and the Justice Department and the Securities Exchange Commission.

He’s corrupted himself and his family to such staggering levels that even experts describe it all. The great thing about Trump is that he boasts about his impeachable offenses without saying “impeachable offenses.” He boasts about violating the laws and doing whatever he wants, destroying whatever he wants.

Mark Green: I’m not unbiased about this. Lewis Powell’s the extremist here. What you’re now and doing now is reflective of what Abraham Lincoln famously said in 1854, even before he became president, which, to paraphrase, is the purpose of government is so we all can do together what we know needs to be done, but we cannot in our individual capacities do them.

Ralph, on a personal note, I recall when a new president invited you to his home to play softball – that’s a tip-off – and to talk policy. Of course, I’m referring to Jimmy Carter in 1977. If the 48th president asked you to dinner (forget the softball) what are the two or three most significant policy suggestions you’d implore him or her to pursue, assuming that the Congress goes Democratic?

Ralph Nader : Well, one is pretty far off the screen here.

It’s to generate civic education in all our schools – civic education, civic experience, civic skills – instead of just having students stare at their screens and become computer programmers. We’re feeling the penalties of generations of youngsters going through elementary school and high school with no civic understanding whatsoever. That’s the kind of constituency that elects Trump, who then manipulates them and finds scapegoats.

Second is campaign finance reform. Get big get money out of politics, as you’ve written so frequently, and have public campaigns funded with public money, just the way public parks, public forests, public drinking water systems are funded with public money. The third is immediate universal healthcare insurance and quality healthcare as well as significant tax reform so taxes are equitably collected and the money goes back to where the people live, work, and raise their family.

That’s why there’s been so little tax revolt over the decades in Western Europe. A lot of it went back to the people, in the form of universal health insurance, great pensions and mass transit and many, many other important social benefits like paid family care, childcare, maternal care, all the things the richest country in the world has denied its population because its governments have been for sale or rent.

Mark Green: During Trump’s first term- I was walking my dog here in Manhattan and passed a woman walking her dog. We got to talking. She was an Australian woman, and I asked her, “What do your fellow citizens think of Donald Trump?” She immediately shot back, “We cannot understand how the greatest country in the world has chosen the worst person in the world to be its leader.”

If I had to explain to her Aussie pals and to my own grandchildren when they grow up – what’s your best answer to her question?

Ralph Nader: Well, two layers. One is it all comes back to the citizenry. If they’re passive, uninformed, can’t be bothered with politics, you get very bad politics. That’s the lesson of history.

And the second is the Democratic Party, which was severely criticized by John Kenneth Galbraith, basically a very loyal Democrat professor at Harvard who co-founded the ADA in 1948 [Americans for Democratic Action] in Harper’s Magazine, in 1970 or so. He warned the Democrats they were straying from their mission and spending too much time coddling corporations.

Add Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, to that school of analysis. He wrote an op-ed in The Post a couple decades ago saying the Democratic Party’s big problem was that they wrote off half the country. They’re the creators of the red-blue divide. They stopped competing completely in states like Texas and the mountain states -- and Mississippi and Alabama. We shouldn’t be surprised that reactionaries now control Florida.

Then look at the constituencies sitting on the sidelines.

Four ex-presidents are largely silent as Trump dumps on them all the time with little response. There’s also the retired military who hate Trump and Hegseth…national security advisors like generals Mattis and Kelly. And then how about our profession, the legal profession? Other than the Bar of the City of New York, which came out with two white papers denouncing Trump’s executive violations urging “his immediate impeachment.” Nor have I heard from the medical profession or the political science profession, demanding accountability for Trump.

There’s the contented classes. That’s my favorite. They haven’t been harmed very much so far by Trump because they’ve got their tax breaks, they’ve got deregulation, and they don’t have mortgages to worry about. They enjoy health insurance, they own their own homes, and they’re sitting on the sidelines.

Mark Green: Well, at the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, I and most of our viewers and readers agree with all that. But on the other hand – as we were trained to say at our law school – the most recent off-year elections have shown an average swing against the GOP of 10 to 12 points because of the backlash to Trump.

Of course, his polling went from 49% of the actual vote on election day in November, 2024 to 32 to 34% in the most recent major polls, an historic fall.

Ralph Nader: It’ll be interesting to see how contagious recent bread-and-butter progressive winners – like Mamdani and El-Sayed – will prove to be…not only in their superior messaging but also their deployment of an armada of volunteers who spread the word even if major media don’t, helped by social media communication.

Such stalwarts – like those who march on No Kings Days – show the strength of numbers of average people who keep up to date, are powered by passion and focus on the decisional arena to accomplish big change. If only one percent of the adult public made Congress their hobby – that’s 2 ½ million people – it would test my theory how the impossible could become the inevitable. Neither AIPAC nor big corporations could stop the momentum of change for good in a self-governing democracy.

We regulated the auto industry, saving many millions of lives, with no more than a thousand people around the country.

Mark Green. Thanks Ralph for your time, wisdom and, as always, your example. And listeners and viewers who want to read his column free electronically every week, they can go to nader.org to become more informed, agitated and activated.

Ralph Nader: Thank you Mark for your Substack, new podcast and life of advocacy.

NOTE TO READERS:

In our maiden episode of Changing America, a podcast all about how America can survive and thrive after Trump’s exit - if not exile - historian Jonathan Alter looks ahead to discuss Iran, ICE, a Wealth Tax, constitutional amendments on campaign finance and pardons...plus comparisons between Trump and Caesar since Jonathan is finishing a biography of the Roman dictator in 2027.

Let’s look up to the horizon of hope and not merely wrestle in the mud with MAGA.

Episode Transcript:

Mark Green: I’m Mark Green, pleased to announce today a new recurring element of our Inflection Zone Substack

It’s a podcast called Changing America, named after two large citizen transition books written by progressive experts, agency by agency, that I organized for the presidents-elect, first in 1992 and then again in 2008. Of course, Clinton and then Obama. Now, in 2026, I’ll be interviewing leading public advocates about how to further expose Trump and MAGAism with a special focus on how the next administration can end his corrupt despotism and establish an even better democracy.

I’m happy to inaugurate this positive podcast with my longtime friend, and among the leading journalists and biographers in the country, Jonathan Alter. His books on FDR and Carter, and others, plus deeply informed columns and many cable appearances, have helped educate Americans for decades. He’s now completing a biography of Julius Caesar.

Welcome, Jonathan.

Jonathan Alter: Thanks, Mark. Glad to be here. Thanks for the kind words.

Mark Green: Speaking of Caesar, I’ve been fascinated with him because of a shared date. He, of course, was famously assassinated, March 15th, 44 BC. I, less famously, was born on March 15th, 1945, separated by a mere 2090 years.

So beyond that small coincidence, why Caesar?

Jonathan Alter: Caesar was involved, not solely responsible, but involved in the demise of the Roman Republic. He didn’t live during the Roman Empire. He came at the end of more than 450 years of a republic in Rome. So I think you can understand why the collapse of the Roman Republic is of real interest right now, and it’s a complicated, rich, and I found fascinating story, and Julius Caesar was an utterly fascinating and brilliant individual.

Mark Green: So your comment invites this question – I glibly referred to Trump as an American Caesar in 2017 when he first came on the scene presidentially. Was I just being quick, or is that a useful comparison in your view?

Jonathan Alter: I think it’s useful to the extent that the word Caesar, after his death, 11 emperors had Caesar as part of their name, and then Kaiser is Caesar in German, and Tsar is Caesar in Russian.

And so he came to represent autocracy in the world of the last 2,000 years. So to that extent, I think it’s a valid comparison. But the two individuals had a few things in common, but not a lot, and basically Trump is not worthy of holding Julius Caesar’s toga. I like to say, some of you might remember the beverage that was made of orange juice and milk and can still be consumed in a different form at Dairy Queen called an Orange Julius.

And I would just say that Donald Trump is no Orange Julius.

Mark Green: (laughs) You lucked out on that one! A couple of Substacks ago, I wrote that Trump’s legacy is largely set in stone because millions of us separately cannot unlearn all his lies, distortions, arrogance, ignorance and crimes.

Of course, he has (presumably) 18 months to go. But do you think, however much he may talk about his legacy, it’s pretty fixed by this point?

Jonathan Alter: Oh yeah, it’s fixed. I mean he will be seen as the worst president in American history, and it’s not a close contest. And, you know, historians during and after his first term considered him the worst president in American history, and that judgment has been confirmed.

But, unfortunately, he’s not gonna be that easy to expunge. You know, I had thought when I wrote a book – called American Reckoning that came out in 2024 – I had some lines from Ozymandias in that book ‘cause I thought there was a chance that there would be nothing left of him. That he wouldn’t be remembered at all if Kamala Harris won the election, that he would just be this really unfortunate blip – you know, he’d quickly enter Millard Fillmore territory.

But that is not gonna be the case now. He will be remembered. This era will be, for better and much more often for worse, known as the Trump era. It’s not gonna be the Trump-Biden era. It’s gonna be the Trump era with everything that comes with that. A lot of what he did will be taken down.

But some of it can’t be taken down. So if he manages to get an arch built, it’s gonna be kind of hard to take that down. I think he’s a hugely memorable president. In terms of him being a hugely consequential president…now that we’re getting into some irreversible things going on with Iran, he may well be seen as an enormously consequential president.

In that sense, he can be like more odious, more menacing Nixon. So Gerald Ford becomes president and he brings in a new attorney general, former University of Chicago president named Edward Levi, and it takes Levi about 18 months to restore the integrity and credibility of the Department of Justice with the help of some new laws, and we will need some new laws.

We’ll need to not just reverse these executive orders, but actually codify [changes]. The way he becomes an enormously consequential president, Mark, is if J.D. Vance or even Marco Rubio gets elected in 2028. Then we’re truly living in a different country because a lot of this terrible stuff that he’s done will become entrenched and very hard to reverse

Mark Green: You just mentioned Iran. The President and Pentagon are right now deciding between two very unenviable options from his point of view - and for America. Either we’ll massively bomb, which he loves threatening to do, or TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) again, again, again, saying, “Oh, we’re gonna have a ceasefire ‘cause they wanna negotiate.” What do you think he’ll do and why?

Jonathan Alter: Well, I think that he will do what he always does, which is one thing on Monday, another thing on Tuesday, a third thing on Wednesday, and you’ll just see this intermittent bombing and then, “No, now we’re gonna negotiate.” Maybe they’ll come back to the table, sign another ceasefire, then they’ll have another bombing and, you know, somebody’ll violate the ceasefire and it’ll just be this for a long time.

So it’s already, according to Paul Krugman, close to or already too late for him to get gas prices down before the midterms. The whole world now rightly believes that the Iranians are holding him hostage the way they arguably held Jimmy Carter hostage, as I wrote about in my biography of Carter and that they basically won this war.

They’re much more clever negotiators and they have a lot of leverage.

Mark Green: I have a question internationally - especially after he humiliated himself after the World Cup. Do you think the world or our allies will ever again trust an American president or America, given how often Trump has been contemptuous of truth and [existing treaties]

Jonathan Alter: I don’t believe in that word “ever.” I’ve been around long enough to know. So you get a new American president and a new generation of European leaders, and they develop new relationships. And the other thing to understand is that international relations are not built on trust.

Trust is very helpful to coming to agreement. But basically, international relations are more along the line of what Reagan said about dealing with Russia, “Trust but verify,” right? So will you have more skepticism? Yes, but what are they motivated by? Are they motivated by trust, or are they motivated by their interests? If it’s in their interest to deal with the United States, to sign a deal with them on this or that, they will do so, Trump notwithstanding.

If it’s not in their interest, they won’t.

Mark Green: Let me move on looking ahead, if I can optimistically. This is called Changing America. How can America change? For example, the likely Maine Democratic Senate nominee, after Plattner withdrew, is proposing that we abolish ICE because it’s become almost a personal Gestapo for Trump.

[Give it] maybe a new name, slash it three-fourths, with the savings going to a childcare tax credit. Is this a good idea for a candidate to propose and a good idea for the next president to accept?

Jonathan Alter: I think it’s a good idea if you’re running in the Democratic primary, but it’s not a great general election issue ‘cause it’s too easily twisted into a variation on “Defund the Police.”

Well, border security is very popular, and to say, “in the future, we’ll create a new border agency” is not very smart. So I think it’s much better to say, “We are going to dramatically overhaul ICE. We’re gonna ban the use of masks. We are going to cut its budget because it’s way, way overfunded, and use some of those savings, and we are going to improve eligibility standards.”

Mark Green: But as a leading idea, for the next president?

Jonathan Alter: Yeah, I think if after he’s elected, [it would be good] to say, “You know, the name ICE has so many negative connotations that I’m gonna do what many presidents have done,” starting with Franklin Roosevelt, who was always opening and then shutting and reopening agencies with different names.

And there will be a real opportunity for a new Democratic president to have very aggressive ethics legislation. Some of it should include building support for a constitutional amendment on campaign finance, since the Supreme Court’s not gonna help. But campaign finance, it’s, it’s actually pretty popular.

Mark Green: Okay. In that spirit, how about an amendment on not making the pardon power unaccountable and unlimited, which I assume, like campaign finance abuse, is very popular.

Jonathan Alter: Yes. I think it should be like the post-Civil War era where they put in three constitutional amendments. And I’m not sure exactly what the three should be, but I think three or even four [can] pass quickly, they just require a majority vote in the Congress; then send them to the states and start the process of selling it in state capitals

And a lot of these are not, they’re not partisan. I mean, limiting the pardoning power is something that a lot of Republicans could get behind if it, especially if there’s a Democratic president. I also think some of it should be just very rough hard-ass politics that can be done on a straight party vote that don’t require a constitutional amendment.

One of those is statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and they should just push it through because we now have a very unrepresentative Senate. Look at the Dakotas. By the way, the Republicans did this in the 19th century. I think they created five new states.

Mark Green: Do you have any economic proposals? Economic populism is across the board pretty popular.

Jonathan Alter: So personally, I favor a wealth tax, and I think it’s doable for a variety of reasons. Elizabeth Warren’s [proposal] is a good one. The problem is this Court would unquestionably declare it unconstitutional.

The question is, is it worth the effort? And I’ve been convinced recently that it’s not worth the effort because it’d just get struck down. So we should go for a very sharp increase in the income tax. We should get rid of the 25% capital gains tax. Mark, you’ve written wonderful stuff on this. It shifted from being based on labor to finance.

We gotta shift that back so all of your income is taxable at the same top rate, 65%. They definitely have to lift the cap on Social Security to fund Social Security.

Mark Green: Let’s agree about – a wealth tax, let’s put that in the next president’s quiver. So if and when there’s Supreme Court reform, and/or a very conservative justice retires or leaves, there’s a change in the Court when a wealth tax might be smart to propose.

Jonathan Alter, are you allowed to tell me when you might publish Julius Caesar?

Jonathan Alter: Well, I was hoping it would come out on the Ides of March next year, but it’s gonna be later than that, sometime probably in the second half of next year.

Mark Green: Alright, well come back, as they love to say on MS NOW, Please come back!”

I wanna thank Jonathan for his time and deep expertise, though not as a campaign consultant, Frankly. the country is better off that you went all-in on writing and not pontificating

Jonathan Alter: (laughs)

Mark Green: Well, if you found our maiden podcast useful, if not informative, remember to check out Jonathan’s forthcoming biography next year called The Dictator. And before then, check out his Old Goats Substack, a tongue-in-cheeky title that I think refers to chats with people of my vintage.

To all Inflection Zone followers, please watch for future Substacks and Changing America podcasts where we aim to look up to the horizon of hope and not merely down in the mud with MAGA and Trump.

Also, of course, let your friends and family know how to subscribe and follow us. This is Mark Green. Thank you.

For novelists, magical thinking is a must. Not so, however, when it comes to modern wars or crises, when being high on your own supply is a recipe for calamity.

Chamberlain thought he had convinced Hitler to a peace agreement in 1938...the Chancellor four years later believed he would overrun Stalin in weeks... when Chernobyl exploded in 1986, Russia underplayed the dangers which misled Germany into sending the wrong robots to clean it up…so the acute radiation only spread.

More recently, TeamBush43 thought the invasion of Iraq would be a “cakewalk.”

No, no, no, and no. Yet now comes another wartime fabulist – after pretending to have ended eight wars in one year – that he can dictate reality because he needs to perfume the odor of Epstein and plunging polls. When informed by his own Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a confidential Pentagon intelligence report that there was no evidence Iran posed an imminent threat or would collapse if massively attacked, Trump blithely upped the ante: he had a hunch would attack first and then collapse.

So he demanded their unconditional surrender so that he can choose the country’s next leader…as he had previously done so well in both beauty pageants and senior golf tournaments. But as

Holly Dagress, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute, said, “Bending the knee to Trump would go against everything they stand for.”

Nor can wishful thinking and rhetorical bravado erase Iran’s size, drones, missiles, army and vengeance even after Trump’s 21st Century Pearl Harbor killed so many of its leaders. And his team of Witkoff, Kushner, Hegseth, and Leavitt are not confused for Metternich…but are more like Matthew Broderick playing videos early in the film War Games.

Here are three headlines from just one publication this past weekend: “Trump’s Iran Endgame Shifts”…another: “The War is colliding with Trump’s Economic Priorities”…another: “There’s Reason to Worry About the Iran War.” Were they in The Nation Magazine? Nope, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.

As a result, writes Peter Baker in the New York Times, we are in the first war America has fought without clear public support at its start …and with an administration that 1. neglected to warn American troops and civilians marooned in bases in the Gulf 2. failed to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve with low-priced oil or 3. failed to prepare local police departments against actual retaliatory domestic terrorism.

The Trump hunch will not be able to Maduro his way out of the corner he has painted America into. Instead, we are tragically reminded again of the axiom that in war, truth is the first casualty.

So will an uneducable Republican party steer us into new quagmires like Vietnam and Iraq?

Could be. Peace advocates can implausibly dream that Trump’s skin rashes spread so he retires claiming “Mission Accomplished.” Seems unlikely. Or they can pray for an intervention by a very politically vulnerable GOP… by a fact-based media tired of being bullied…or by a SCOTUS concluding he had acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner. Perhaps some serendipitous event will yet derail his presidency, such as a photograph with Epstein in flagrante or a Melania bomb (not including her biopic)?

This time, we won’t have Matthew Broderick magically saving the day.

The #1 news story in America now is not Iran, not Inflation, not ICE. It, however. is the answer to a question that’s never been asked: WAS the American President a member of a Pedophile Ring systematically raping children?

Now that this issue has gone from being covered only by MSNOW and NPR to include such mainstream platforms as the NYTimes, WSJ, and others, the Trump/Bondi/Blanche coverup is OVER. Like a huge boulder tumbling down a mountain, there’s now a momentum that’ll won’t stop until we get the answer.

This is a before & after moment: before & after Joseph Welch questioned Joe McCarthy, before & after Alex Butterfield revealed Nixon’s tapes about Watergate. Due to patriots like Ro Kanna, Tom Massie, Reps Garcia & Raskin, commentators like Lawrence O’Donnell, David Frum, and Molly-fast Jung, not even a more likely small bombing run in Iran to change the subject, will Trump be able to throw a monkey wrench at the legal and political process.

There are a few small canaries to watch in the coal mine: will even CBS and FOX cover the biggest scandal in American history? will a few GOP leaders ditch this anchor around their necks in an election year? Will Bondi or Blanche decide to avoid disbarment and prosecution to defend a child abuser?

Nixon was obviously peddling BS when he confidently announced that “Your president is not a crook!” And when Karoline Leavitt declares a version of “Your president is not a pervert,” the reaction will be the same: no serious public person or voter can believe what TeamTrump claims about a President with a long rap sheet of illegality and immorality.

We now begin a countdown to a fair legal process* and political election to clarify what’s real or false in The Inflection Zone. Now, as it should be, it’ll be up to a jury of citizens and then a jury of voters.

*fyi, not even Clarence Thomas will claim that child rape is an immune “core function” of a President. Right?

Elvis and Lincoln? Two very different icons came to mind as I endured Trump’s eternal, infernal State of the Union address.

Donald Trump is now in Elvis’s Catskills Phase, reduced to playing golden oldies with diminishing returns. There was the same ‘ol barely disguised racism of always doing the white-thing whenever possible, though last night had a slight update: “Somali Pirates” was creative but came off as a glib lie about fraud from the only president criminally convicted of it.

The template of his talk was identical to all earlier SOTUs and rallies: distort the past, smear all Democrats as inhuman, and brag about an unverifiable future, hoping that listeners will confuse predictions for facts. Most in MAGA will…but any rational actor will be able to compare, say, Trump’s assertions about $1.99 a gallon gas with what they’re actually paying at the pump today.

Then there was the level of “Stolen Valor” that broke records even for him. .His milking of the U.S. Men’s Hockey Gold medal came within an inch of implying that HE was on the ice, not to mention the truth that it was Biden not him, who brought inflation down to 3 percent before #47 even began his term. Also, “Trump Baby Bonds” was originally a Hillary Clinton policy idea.

And repeatedly trying to take credit for the misery of the victims of crimes by immigrants pretends there were no crimes by non-immigrants. As Trump nemesis @RickWilson smartly observed, “No matter how many heroes you trot out, Donald, you’re not one of them.”

Added together, his words bring to mind Lincoln’s enduring axiom that “you can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but not all of the people all the time.”

Overnight instant polls favored Trump since a disproportionate Republican audience tuned in to hear a triumphal Republican president. But even the first quickie measured only a “strongly positive” 38 percent, the lowest of his five SOTU addresses. And regular surveys reveal a president that most people no longer believe when he speaks. Why should they given his track record?

His fabulous rant was surely an emotional reprieve from press bloodhounds and leaks about pedophilia. But not even a brief bombing run or two over Iran would hold back the tides of opprobrium crashing down on him. News will now return to reporting a GDP slumping to barely one percent by the end of 2025, and job growth sharply falling as well. More Epstein disclosures will tighten the noose, assuming the major media will not continue to ignore the girl telling the FBI 4x that Trump sexually assaulted and then struck her, as NPR reported yesterday.

Talk will now as well return to his grotesque billionaire’s ballroom and Mussolini-like maneuver of naming buildings after himself or draping banners with his image over them. (This habit will backfire once critics start calling ICE prisons “Trump Concentration Camps” – or “Trumpvilles” in honor of the so-called “Hoovervilles” that housed poor WWI pensioners protesting on the Washington Mall in the Twenties. Nor will his soaring self-enrichment, documented to be in the billions in recent New Yorker and Atlantic articles, help his polling plunge.

As for his future prospects, it presumably won him no votes in crucial, future Supreme Court decisions after he berated Roberts, Coney Barrett, and Gorsuch for “disgracing their families.” Being smart conservatives, they can now see even more clearly the Frankenstein that their gift of immunity created.

Speaking of families, Trump bizarrely buried his first wife, Ivana, on his Bedminster golf course, but cannot bury bad news that will sprout through sidewalks during the run-up to the Fall midterms. For he can neither run nor hide from what he has done to America as he strains to seize credit for 250 years of a constitutional democracy that he daily demeans.

Sadly, as the film title puts it, “Reality Bites.”

It was a very regrettable lack of imagination by modern presidents that they never anticipated foreign terrorists using commercial aircraft as weapons. Before Jules Verne and the Wright Brothers, the Founders can be forgiven for their lack of prescience.

But we’ve also now arrived at a new moment in the Inflection Zone that those who spearheaded the Revolution and Constitution also never anticipated – a treasonous President surrounded by careerist yes-men and a cowed congress insisting that we overthrow our constitutional democracy on its 250th anniversary.

The familiar frog-in-boiling-water metaphor has now ceased to be merely allegorical. Traditionalists comforting themselves by saying “Well, he’d never do THAT” need to admit how often they were wrong before to assume any self-restraint by a person who appears more akin to King George than George Washington …although to be fair to the King, even he eventually surrendered.

Notwithstanding persistent losses in special elections and a tongue-lashing by the supposedly Supreme Court, here’s what a purely performative president is now doing: threatening to a) attack a country of 80 million that didn’t attack us, b) enact a work-around with different but also unconstitutional tariffs and c) prosecute TV hosts who mock him.

For those who understand that a democracy cannot survive three more years of a murder-suide pact between the executive and legislative branches, it’s time to pursue unprecedented strategies for an unprecedented president accustomed to getting the other guy to flinch.

*25th Amendment. It still seems impossible to anticipate his North Korean Cabinet of Hegseth/Noem/Bondi/Patel etc. invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. They are too unprincipled and fearful of actual MAGA violence to take that step. PM Thatcher’s own cabinet did just that but British officials in a country descended from the 1215 Magna Carter appear far more ethical when it comes to law and tradition.

*SOTU. As we recently noted and of far lesser consequence, messrs Schumer and Jeffries should organize their two caucuses to boycott the Tuesday State of the Union since business-as-usual is the wrong message when Radical Republicans are threatening to topple the temple. Apparently, Democratic leaders worry this move could endanger Members in swing states/districts, but the alternative is to risk appearing to be Trumpist props and accomplices.

*SCOTUS. Unlike its Presidential Immunity decision, it’s possible that a chastened Court will finally use its Shadow Docket to quickly enjoin any Trump effort on new tariffs, even an offensive war to block ‘47’s fresh extremism. Now conceivable though not probable.

*THUNE? In the pre-Fox era, congressional leaders in 1974 pressured a right-wing but not shameless GOP president to resign. A final strategy would also be novel but better than risking a civil war between not regions but zip codes: President Bush + President Obama + Majority Leader Thune could hold a joint press conference explaining why federal/state/local officials, the mainstream media and ex-Brass should agree that it’s past-time for Trump to resign.

Thune of course is no moderate but neither does he appear as unhinged as the Miller-Supreme Team has proven to be.

Democrats, a dozen Republicans, many in the media and 7+million No-Kings Marchers have shown their fidelity to the Declaration and Constitution rather than to a corrupt president. Since it’s surely conceivable that Obama and Bush might concur with this approach, a Senate Republican Leader subpoenaed by history might also relent in the realization that the status quo under a President Caligula is intolerable.

Might that trigger a more massive wave of majority pressure? It would obviously be paradoxical for a conservative leader...but something’s gotta give.

Can anyone listening pass this along to John Thune who is unlikely a paid subscriber but is surely miserable with the status quo.

I welcome other ideas to break today’s logjam of treasonous Republicans, cautious Democrats and the legacy media. But someone(s) need to do the right-thing and not merely the white-thing to save their country for another 250 years.

“Dear Mr. President,

We, Democratic leaders, must decline the invitation to again sit through your broadside of lying and self-glorification at your February 24th State of the Union address.

As President with a First Amendment, you can keep trying to poison the well of our democracy. But we have the agency to instead spend the time that Tuesday evening in our offices responding to citizen questions and complaints. As a talk show expert, you may desire to imitate Rod Sterling, luring everyone into a distortion field called “The Inflection Zone.” But we choose rather to be inspired by Benjamin Franklin, who in 1732 said, “When truth and error and truth both have fair play, the former is always an outmatch for the latter.”

Both parties, this past century, have engaged in the informative and entertaining SOTU custom of listening to good-faith presidents. But unlike say TR and Wilson, Ike and JFK, Reagan and Clinton – you are a bad-faith actor who shows only contempt for law, custom and truth. Your office deserves much respect. You, however, do not.

Why? Here are a few examples:

*The Electoral College concluded that you lost the state of Minnesota three times…yet you don’t.

*Sixty federal courts, William Barr, and the conservative CATO Institute agree there is next to zero voter fraud…yet you don’t.

*Every vote count and recount concur that Joe Biden won the White House by over 7 million votes in 2020…yet you don’t and indeed go on to boast that you won in 2024 by “an overwhelming majority” (which a plurality of 1.4 percent surely was not).

*Article I clearly states that only Congress can constitutionally impose tariffs, which all economists understand are taxes imposed on American consumers, not on foreign governments…yet you don’t.

*The Supreme Court agrees that it’s illegal to deport people with no criminal record and without Due Process…yet you don’t.

*There’s near-unanimity that Renee Good and Alex Peretti were not “domestic terrorists” when they were shot to death in Minneapolis by ICE agents…yet you don’t.

*immigration experts know that families dangerously travel hundreds of miles seeking asylum from oppression, not the possibility of voting…yet you don’t.

*Since 36 other nations use voting-by-mail, the world knows that the U.S. is not the “only one”...yet you don’t.

*12 jurors unanimously found you guilty of criminal fraud 34 times…which you dismiss as weaponized justice.

*No prior president has sent armed federal agents only into blue cities due to alleged violence…until you did.

*Although there were hundreds of child rapes in the biggest pedophile ring in American history – run by a close personal friend of yours – only one person is now incarcerated due to the Epstein scandal…yet you and your DOJ further disclosures or prosecutions.

This rap sheet of deception -- and hundreds of other examples -- compels average Americans to simply ask – what the hell is wrong with you?

You don’t get to create reality, only to live in it with the rest of us – it’s called a self-governing Democracy. You may want Democratic Members to sit as silent accomplices while TeamTrump plots to sabotage fair elections, non-partisan law enforcement and the Constitution. But why would we show respect to someone who hasn’t remotely earned it? We’re in Congress, not your cult.

We do, however, look forward to returning to our chamber and this custom after the 2028 national election. Then, presumably, there will be a president who obeys laws and facts rather than, as any dictator might say, his own “morality.”

But as for your SOTU next week, fugeddabouit as we say in Brooklyn. Include us out.

Sen. Chuck Schumer

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries”