After a car bomb in Moscow. Getty Images

Proving that a lying clock tells the truth twice a day, JD Vance recently quipped that politics have shifted so much that “if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story.” Vance was unwittingly acknowledging his own handiwork as he and his intellectually stunted boss flex Steve Bannon’s flood the zone strategy: throw crap on the wall, throw it often and fast, until the American public is too overwhelmed to pay attention.

It’s working. Eighteen months into this nightmare regime, as one corrupt move follows the next, Americans are turning away. One study found that 65% of Americans across political affiliation and age groups are consuming less news due to information overload and fatigue. It’s exactly what a corrupt administration wants.

As Trump awards billions in no-bid federal contracts to his political donors, from the no bid multi-million dollar Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool debacle, to hundreds of millions to build a ballroom, to multi-billion dollar no bid contracts to rape and pillage our national parks, his political donors are reaping unprecedented windfall rewards.

His sons aren’t doing too poorly either. After Republicans blew a gasket over Hunter Biden serving on a corporate board, the Trump boys have cashed in big time with an Air Force contract to buy interceptor drones from Don Jr. and Eric (who have no experience in the drones business), Don Jr.’s ownership stake in a mining project that just secured $1.6 billion in government backing (ditto), and a $620 million Pentagon loan for Don Jr.’s venture capital firm. Trump’s crypto scams have caused investors to lose up to $3.8 billion while the Trumps pocketed up to $2.3 billion across the same crypto projects. Now Trump wants to personally profit from “selling” early internet access to his social media posts, which will facilitate large scale insider trading.

Meanwhile, as wealthy individuals spend millions to secure presidential pardons, and Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for his supporters refuses to die, the Department of the Treasury just announced that it is destroying its anti-corruption database, the federal registry of shell-company ownership. It plans to destroy all the data it has already collected, to prevent future FBIs, future DOJs, and future local police departments from ever seeing the incriminating data. A true crime novelist couldn’t write this stuff as fast as it’s happening.

Money is one thing, national parks are another

One piece of corruption that appears to be getting through to the public involves the Big Bend National Park in Texas. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security fast-tracked multibillion-dollar, no bid contracts to erect a nonsensical steel barrier wall along parts of the Rio Grande River where cliffs and canyons already serve as natural border barriers of up to 1,500 feet. The administration waived all standard financial transparency, competitive bidding laws, and environmental reviews so that the massive no-bid contracts would go to long time Trump donors.

Robbing the American taxpayers of billions most people can’t comprehend is one thing, robbing them of their national parks is another. Even Republicans in Texas are pushing back. Calling it a “crazed road-building spree,” and an unnecessary “boondoggle,” given the region’s “God-given barriers,” a bipartisan furor has erupted. James Talarico, running for U.S. senate, calls it Trump’s “monument to corruption” that “no Texan asked for.”

When I discussed the issue on Thom Hartmann’s show earlier this week (it’s about 10 minutes, you can watch it here), Hartmann characteristically pulled the camera back to widen the perspective. He noted that the award of massive no bid contracts to donors— spending billions for unnecessary projects just to reward them—was the same modus operandi of despotic regimes like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. As Hartmann put it, this conduct is exactly how Orban and Putin “cement loyalty with their oligarchs.” It’s also why Republicans in Congress won’t quit Trump: he’s brazenly corrupt, while the spoils spill over into their donors’ hands as well.

Corruption speaks with one accent

In Russia, when communism fell, rapid privatization—which Project 2025 is pushing for government services— allowed crooked Russian oligarchs (“apparatchiks”) to divvy up Russian industry and national resources. I experienced the ruthlessness first hand, and wrote about it last year.

Before I became a 1^st A trial lawyer, I was general counsel to a Chicago beverage maker, negotiating contracts and foreign licensing agreements. My client’s biggest customer was Russian, and they tried to misappropriate my client’s world famous trademark. When I was in Moscow litigating the matter, two things happened: The government representative from what is now called Rospatent (Russia’s Patent and Trademark Bureau) said, point blank and on the record, that my client was at a legal disadvantage because of U.S. prohibitions against bribing government officials. My adversary had greased government palms as a routine procedural matter.

The other thing that happened was worse. An American businessman staying in my hotel was murdered, gunned down as he left the building. The LA Times reported that Paul Tatum helped develop the Radisson-Slavjanskaya Hotel into one of the first Western-style hotels in Moscow. Just before he was killed, Tatum said he was in Moscow to “defend his share in the hotel against unscrupulous executives, the Chechen Mafia, and a Russian business culture that wouldn’t play fair.”

After doing business in Russia for several years, Tatum observed quite accurately that murder is “a corporate strategy in Moscow.” It’s something everyone doing business in Russia knows.

I traveled with a bodyguard because hundreds of business executives are killed annually in Mafia-style hits throughout Russia, while Putin himself is infamous for assassinating inconvenient people. This is the business culture our ‘president’ is incubating in the U.S.; he’s just stupid enough to think Russian-style corruption is ‘masculine.’ In a 2017 interview, while he was president, Trump defended Putin’s killings by saying, “What? You think our country’s so innocent?”

Fast forward nine years. Trump’s IRS has nearly eliminated audits of rich Americans and large corporations, and haulted criminal referrals for tax fraud. His Treasury Department is looking the other way on Americans bribing foreign officials, while his DOJ deprioritizes prosecution of corporate crime.

Trump is a convicted white-collar criminal who does business with other criminals, actively facilitating corruption. If he and his oligarchs get their way, America’s rule of law will fall.

If that happens, ruthless Americans will be no different from ruthless Russians. Trump’s financially impenetrable oligarchs, who will do anything to destroy the taxing and regulatory state, will easily slip from white collar crime to murders for hire, and American business people will start needing bodyguards.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Masked contractors grade the road to Glenn Springs in Big Bend National Park. Credit Big Bend Sentinel

On August 6, a date that’s been called ‘a day of infamy,’ construction began on Trump’s border wall through Big Bend National Park. Under a $1.7 billion federal contract strongly opposed by Texas localsregardless of party affiliation, Southwest Valley started bulldozing for profit at 8 a.m., razing habitats of threatened species and destroying native vegetation. Running along parts of the Rio Grande, the project threatens mountain lions, black bears, and desert bighorn sheep that need back and forth access to habitat routes on both sides of the river. Conservationists have made clear that Trump’s 30-foot tall steel wall will sever and permanently destroy those routes.

Nearly as bad as the senseless destruction of habitat(s) is the expense. The project will cost two thirds of the entire, chronically underfunded National Park Service’s annual budget. And for what? The area sees almost no illicit cross-border traffic, accounts for only 1 % of annual U.S.-Mexico border crossings, and is the least busy of nine U.S. border sectors. The park was already endowed with natural barriers that cost nothing: Big Bend’s sheer cliffs and canyons rise up to 1,500 feet above the Rio Grande, making Trump’s wall redundant as well as ridiculous.

Trump, adept at breaking things without knowing how to fix them, is spending billions to destroy habitats and ruin the horizon of a beloved national park for fabricated “national security” concerns. Like his decision to bulldoze significant portions of the White House while framing it as “national security”as if he owned the place, Trump is wielding yet another destructive hammer blind to consequence.

A corrupt environmental dimwit does his worst

Over 100 Texas business owners sent a letter to Congress pleading for help, transparency, and a modicum of thought for what is being destroyed. “Big Bend has been called ‘Texas’ Gift to the Nation’ and generations of Texans have built their lives on this river,” they wrote. “We are asking you, our elected representatives, to protect our livelihoods, our river, and one of our state’s most treasured landscapes from needless and permanent destruction.”

Alas, such entreaties can’t compete with Trump lining his own pockets: Southwest Valley, the private contractor doing the unnecessary and unwanted work, is a subsidiary of Kiewit Corp, a big Trump donor.

Trump’s on again, off again giant steel wall threatens one of the most ecologically intact, biodiverse areas on the continent. The area’s desert and mountain terrain support fragile ecosystems that recover slowly, if they recover at all. Extreme aridity, poor soils, and a delicate climate with hard scrabble plant life means that when soils are disturbed and vegetation is cleared, there will be no rapid regrowth, leaving the newly denuded landscape vulnerable to erosion for decades if not forever.

It will also disrupt the Rio Grande floodplain. Erecting a solid barrier along part of the river will act as a dam, completely altering how water flows through the valley. The administration therefore waived environmental review, even though waiver authority is strictly limited to “areas of high illegal entry,”making Trump’s waiver patently illegal.

Fox News headlines as surrogate for governance

Like so many of his hasty, incompetent, governance by-Fox-News-headlines botched jobs, Trump is serving up permanent destruction in Big Bend without the bare minimum of environmental scrutiny required by law. To quote national treasure Jeff Tiedrich, the incomparable lunacy of Trump and his “abject morons meddling in shit they don’t understand,” is hard to comprehend.

If starving animals, environmental ruination, and harm to local tourism is hard to swallow, even harder is the realization that Americans put a known idiot in office just to shake things up. Said idiot is shaking said things up by destroying everything he touches: the environment, rule of law, global economy, civil rights, military alliances, public education, and banking. There is no sector of American life Trump hasn’t injured, and now, cherry on the rancid cake, he’s re-writing U.S. nuclear strategy.

It is clear that we are being led by the stupidest cohort of the American population, while they, in turn, are being manipulated by the richest cohort to vote against their own interests.

What will it take for Americans to stop the madness?

A quick, partial list of Trump disasters after only 18 months comes easily: ICE agents have caused the deaths of at least 57 people, none of them hardened criminals. Hegseth’s murders on the high seas may trigger an ICC warrant for his arrest as a war criminal. The kidnapping of Venezuela’s president did nothing to help the people of Venezuela as $19 billion in seized oil profits remains unaccounted for. Trump’s unauthorized war in Iran has empowered the world’s most dangerous theocracy and spiked energy prices world wide. His economically illiterate tariffs have extracted thousands of dollars from American families, while his geopolitical ignorance and arrogance have pushed allies into regrouping without America. I could go on, but why?

The point is that these horrific things are happening, and are predicted to get worse, because we let them.

I don’t blame MAGA; MAGA is less educated than most, with attendant IQs. They have been lied to by right wing media serving hidden corporate agendas for decades, and don’t understand that right wing media serve them addictive pablum and rage bait to keep them entertained while the oligarchs’ takeover continues. MAGA still supports Trump in spite of his incompetence because Fox News hides the danger from them.

I don’t even blame the oligarchs who manipulate MAGA into voting against their own interests. At least it makes sense. Oligarchs and the wealthiest 1% fund Trump’s chaos because it serves them—citizens manipulated into hating each other and doubting the system object less when the system is destroyed, and destruction of the regulatory, taxing state is what Republicans have been about since Reagan.

Instead, I blame complacency. Too many Americans either never learned or have forgotten that protecting democracy requires real, sustained effort. It requires sacrifice, it requires time. But 91 million voters didn’t bother voting in the 2024 election even after they saw J6. If watching Trump’s violent coup attempt against the U.S. capital wasn’t enough to get them to vote, what the hell will be?

The phrase, ‘rape and pillage’ originates from pre-modern warfare, and reflects conquering armies’ brutal habit of looting captured towns, often raping the townspeople. Today the phrase fits a deranged and destructive leader unmoored from morals, law, or conscience, freed by the highest court to extract whatever he can and leave the scraps to the poor. We will continue being looted until we learn that freedom requires work, and rise up willing to do it.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

German soldiers goose-step. Photo credit UK Telegraph

In the 1930s, a conservative social movement took root in Germany urging good citizens to hype their nationalism and reassert ‘pure’ German virtues. Promoting social cohesion, the movement demonized intellectuals and attacked racial and sexual diversity in all forms. In 1933, the movement began to ban books scorned as “intellectual,” eventually burning books that supported diversity of thought or culture of any kind.

Along with banning books, the state issued edicts controlling the content of the press. By the early 1940s, the state began to encourage- then it required- citizens to spy on and report their neighbors.

It’s no longer past as prologue. It’s present.

It used to be easier to relegate the horrors of Nazi Germany to the past, thereby confining them to history, even while struggling to understand how Germans let it happen. It’s no longer a struggle. Every day under Trump 2.0, the mystery unravels: Trump keeps trotting out one horrific act of lawless cruelty after another, and Americans keep going to concerts, taking the children to school, living their lives. Last week when a conservative UFC fighter said the cult-like frenzy of Trump rallies showed him “how Hitler happened,” it was relatable.

“How” is no longer a mystery, and comparisons are no longer hyperbole. As of 2026, 23 Republican-led states have passed laws reminiscent of Nazi Germany, including laws that ban books and discussions, laws that force media content, laws through which the state controls private medical decisions, laws that mandate Bible study in public schools, and, most ominous of all, laws that encourage vigilante citizens to turn on their neighbors for a state reward.

Led by a grievance-obsessed president who keeps lying to the American public about everything—Iran, the price of gas, climate change—authoritarianism is America’s newest deadly virus.

Perpetuation of cruelty and lies

Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen has so successfully infiltrated the GOP that over 130 election deniers are running in November’s midterms across 35 states from North Carolina to Arizona. But no state has embraced Trump’s lie and attendant barbarity more than Texas.

Although Texas is well known for paying bounty hunters to hunt down scared women seeking an abortion, Gov. Greg Abbott became a national poster boy for cruelty after he intentionally stripped Medicaid from two million Texans, most of them children. He also vetoed a state proposal to feed them during a SNAP freeze, despite increasing childhood hunger through state-forced births.

Not to be outdone, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, now campaigning for U.S. Senate, led 17 GOP states in a lawsuit before the US Supreme Court trying to set aside Joe Biden’s election win in 2020. As argued by the Lawyers Defending American Democracy, Paxton was trying to “cast doubt on whether truly democratic presidential elections” would ever be held in America again.

Paxton’s resume of corruption includes indictments on two counts of first-degree securities fraud, counts he later settled by paying restitution. Shortly after his legal stunt to unseat President Biden, Texas State Bar officials urged regulators to discipline him for serious ethical misconduct. In an unrelated case, eight members of his staff reported Paxton to the FBI for accepting bribes; after he fired several of them in retribution, they were awarded millions, at taxpayer expense, under Texas Whistleblower laws.

Citizen informants, in the original German

In the early 1930s, as Hitler was beginning his political ascent in Germany, one of his first moves was to encourage citizens to relay information about their neighbors, family, and friends to the state. The Gestapo, which grew into Hitler’s most effective instrument of terror, soon operated with a network of thousands of informants.

Texas has passed replica initiatives, calling on members of the general public to report on their neighbors. If you see a masculine looking woman in the bathroom, if you think your neighbors are providing their minor with private gender medical care, or if your teenager thinks a girl in his class is pregnant and may be planning an abortion, Paxton has a “hotline” waiting for you.

Texas’ anti-abortion law specifically set up a citizens’ gestapo reward system whereby Texas authorizes private citizens to enforce the state’s abortion ban by suing abortion providers and anyone else who helps a woman seeking an abortion in any way, including her husband, parents, neighbor, friends, family members, even her taxi or Uber driver. If the lawsuit shows the state’s draconian 6 week abortion ban was violated for any reason, the vigilante, under state law, collects a bounty of at least $10,000 and attorneys’ fees, a feature designed to intimidate.

Draw your own conclusions

Ken Paxton’s goal of an all-powerful state with unfettered powers to dictate speech, generate hate, and control thought by force should alarm anyone with a passing knowledge of history.

Using the power of the state to turn citizens against each other, encouraging, rewarding, and requiring vigilantism, is sinister and unAmerican. Texas’ expansion of state power not only mocks Paxton’s campaign brag that he “takes on” governmental overreach, it also marches in goosestep with one of the most dangerous regimes known to man.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Alex Wong / Getty Images file

According to the Federal Reserve, the share of wealth owned by the top 1% in the US recently hit a record, the highest since tracking began. The top 1% today holds $55 trillion in wealth, roughly the same amount held by the entire bottom 90% of all Americans. Today’s uber rich enjoy staggering wealth, and they wield control of traditional and online media outlets to keep it that way.

Nationwide, television, print, and major digital platforms are now controlled by a handful of largely right wing, ultra-rich individuals and corporations using those media to forge national narratives that serve their own interests. Billionaires and massive corporations use their wealth to promote and lobby for tax gifts, subsidies, write-offs, loopholes, deregulation, and weakened labor, environmental and banking laws to advance their own wealth at the expense of everyone else.

Economists say we are in our second Gilded Age, where industry scions and robber barons run roughshod over labor, the environment, and the rule of law. The long-simmering, slow-motion transfer of political power from the working electorate to wealthy elites began decades ago, through legal and regulatory changes rather than any single dramatic event. The key to transferring political power back to the middle class is understanding what took it from them.

How Republicans pulled off the oligarchs’ coup

Democracy has always depended on access to a truthful public square—from which to shape informed political judgments— where political power flowed from informed votes rather than wealth. This foundation was compromised from two shifts: The 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, and the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United. These two developments cleared the way for the top 1% to exert outsized, largely unaccountable control over both public opinion and state and federal elections, turning the US into the billboard of inequality we are today, with broken healthcare, barely-there public education, and eroded social safety nets limping alongside massive wealth and the most corrupt regime the nation has ever known.

The Fairness doctrine, in effect from 1949 through 1987, required broadcasters to tell the truth in the news, and, when offering opinions, to present the opposing viewpoint. After Reagan Republicans repealed the Fairness Doctrine, broadcasters were suddenly free to adopt a single ideological orientation and promote it for profit, harm to public discourse be damned. Today we see the effect of building an audience around opinion, grievance and outrage instead of verified facts. It is no surprise that the percentage of Americans who still support Trump despite his nonstop parade of incompetence correlates exactly with the percentage who watch Fox News.

Then, beginning in 2010, the horrific Citizens United ruling allowed Super PACs to raise and spend unlimited sums on elections while dark money nonprofits, which are not required to disclose their donors, expanded. In result, private wealth began buying elections, converting economic power of the elites into political power.

Elon Musk alone spent $250 million on the 2024 election. Last week, right after SpaceX landed a $1.6 billion federal contract, Musk committed to spending another $120 million to increase Republican voter turnout in the midterms. Excessive spending by high wealth political donors doing business with the federal government reinforces the anti-tax and anti-regulatory environments that make their wealth possible. Republicans thus have the legally dubious political advantage of megadonor and dark money contributions, giving them a substantial financial advantage heading into the midterms.

End stage: Trump’s illicit gains from the White House

The breakdown in our democratic system rests on the interaction between Citizens United and un-regulated news, not just their individual effects. A media environment unmoored from accuracy requirements provided the infrastructure — cable networks, talk radio, and later digital platforms — through which right wing political messaging could be aired with no competing viewpoints or facts. Campaign finance deregulation amplified that messaging at scale, letting the nation’s top 1% spread the same narratives pushed on conservative “news” outlets. Together, they produced the most corrupt administration in our nation’s history, leading to unprecedented cuts in food assistance, health care, education programs, and student loan services while serving up massive tax breaks for the ultra-rich.

In short, the uber rich have bought up media outlets to manipulate low education voters with addictive culture wars so that they can decimate government services, extract with wild abandon, and rob them blind.

Trump, who sued the IRS when a contractor leaked that he paid only $750 in federal taxes the year before he first ran for president, and paid zero in federal taxes for ten years before that, has turned the presidency into a personal wealth gambit to monetize the office from every angle. The Trumps have pocketed billions through foreign government bookings at Trump hotels, overseas real estate ventures, and digital asset banking, to say nothing of Eric and Don Jr.’s federally-backed adventures in defense, cryptocurrency, mining, and consumer tech. Trump collected $2.4 billion in 2025 alone from illicit cryptocurrency ventures, illegal foreign “gifts,” and collusive taxpayer-funded “settlements” of bogus legal cases. According to Forbes, Trump’s revenue last year was triple what he earned privately when out of office, and now, Patron Saint of Insider Trading, he’s “selling” early access to his social media posts.

There isn’t any real debate about Trump’s corruption. He flexes low intellect, mob boss criminality on purpose; the reptilian brain demonstrates brute power to stay alive.

Republicans and right wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation laid the tracks that brought us to the Gilded Age of Trump decades ago. Thanks to the erasure of truth in the news and the Supreme Court’s transfer of political power to the elites, we are, indeed, in the ‘age of enshittification.’ At least we know how to wipe it off: return fairness and accuracy to the news, and reverse Citizens United to get money the hell out of politics for good.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Jeff Bezos’s yacht Karu, a $500 million custom-built superyacht, is a 417-foot-long and accompanied by a 75-meter support vessel named Abeona Credit: @editmarcgt23

Heading into midterm season, voters are experiencing Trump’s economic illiteracy first hand, even as Trump, embarrassingly, keeps blaming Biden. If he hadn’t elevated personal loyalty over professional competence when choosing his cabinet, staff would advise him that blaming a long gone predecessor makes Trump look weak, but he did, so they don’t, and here we are.

Trump’s illegal tariffs and un-strategized war in Iran have caused prices to skyrocket globally. His tariffs on essential inputs like steel, aluminum, and clean energy components have driven up operational expenses across the power sector, raising costs that are then passed down to consumers. His war in Iran has also elevated the price of oil, energy, travel, and consumer borrowing costs. As global oil markets face increased volatility, prices for gasoline, diesel, heating oil, airfares, and mortgage rates remain significantly higher than their pre-war baselines.

Americans are also just beginning to enjoy Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB), signed into law in July 2025 with staggered effective dates. The bill delivered the largest cuts to food assistance, health care, education programs, and student loan services in U.S. history, in order to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy. Slashing taxes for the uber rich while cutting subsidies for healthcare and the poor, the law also hurt small businesses and farmers while benefitting large corporations. Can you say oligarchs’ coup?

The BBB also gave a specific boost to the superyacht, private jet, and private luxury travel sectors. Massive tax and regulatory gifts freed cash for the 1%, allowing them to spend their windfall on toys for the uber rich, like superyachts. By restoring 100% first-year bonus depreciation for qualifying “business assets” like superyachts and private jets, the BBB juiced demand, now skyrocketing.

Trump’s Big Bill: Beautiful if you’re rich, downright ugly if you’re not

Despite clearly contracting economic indicators, Trump continues to call the affordability crisis a “hoax,” and a fake narrative manufactured by Democrats, much to the consternation of any Republican candidate not guaranteed re-election via gerrymandering. But numbers don’t lie, which likely explains Trump’s aversion to them.

The law cut roughly $187 billion from SNAP food assistance, the largest cuts to SNAP in the history of the program, with reductions phasing in between 2026 and 2028, after the midterms. If Democrats regain control of one or both legislative houses, Republicans, by design, will be able to blame them for the cuts Republicans passed. On food assistance, expanded work requirements, more frequent recertification, and the defunding of SNAP-Ed nutrition programs are expected to lower SNAP enrollment by an average of 4.7 million people while reducing nutrition allotments for those who remain. Economists expect these cuts to increase poverty, food insecurity, and hunger among low-income communities.

On the healthcare side, over 11 million Americans are expected to lose their eligibility for Medicaid by 2034 due to increased work-reporting requirements, shorter certification periods, and new copays for poor adults who are living at or just above the poverty line. The law cut ACA marketplace open enrollment, and eliminated special enrollment periods for low-income people. Republicans claim the cuts will reduce waste, fraud, and abuse and encourage people to work, but the cuts fall almost entirely on low-income working households while the benefits accrue to high earners.

The exploding national debt is another Trump disaster. The national debt rose by a staggering $7.8 trillion during the first Trump administration, ranking “as the third-biggest increase, relative to the size of the economy, of any U.S. presidential administration…” This year, the national debt jumped past $37 trillion, despite draconian program cuts nationwide, thanks to Republicans’ out of control spending on Iran, ICE, and building a police state, paired with tax gifts to the rich. This debt is not sustainable.

So what are the GOP’s plans to address consumer prices, other than leaving the bill for our children?

Despite the obvious cause and effect of Trump’s tariffs, war in Iran, Big Beautiful Bill, and overall administrative incompetence, Trump continues to blame Biden for nearly every current economic ill. Earlier this week, Trump told supporters in Michigan that the affordability problems they were experiencing were “vestiges of the Biden administration,” then devoted most of his speech to lying about what the United States could look like if “Dumocrats” or “Dumbocrats” win this fall. “I’m one day in office,” he brayed, “and the fake news goes affordability, affordability!’” His audience roared in appreciative laughter.

Trump lacks the economic acumen to understand or care that Biden inherited a covid economic crisis in 2021, and spurred the strongest economic and labor market recovery in modern history. With limited bi-partisan support, Biden modeled the economic recovery package of FDR with his left hand, while galvanizing NATO’s response to Russia with his right. The resulting infrastructure, chips, and manufacturing initiatives had not been seen in the US in half a century. Trump can’t compete, at least not with voters outside the Fox propaganda network.

So this year, instead of addressing costs, inflation, and a faltering economy, the GOP is relying on messaging, framing the Democratic Party as aligned with far-left radical agendas. Sadly, their anti-communist messaging doesn’t seem to be landing, since most MAGA voters don’t understand what the term means, but know that hamburger and gas now cost more.

In every political debate of this midterm season so far, republicans have blamed democrats for problems they, and Trump, have caused. Ultimately, if voters don’t educate themselves, ween themselves off State News, and turn out to vote, we will get the government we deserve. But fear not, all is not lost. Superyacht sales in the US rose by over 40% following Trump’s first tax giveaway, and continue to rise under Trump 2.0. Surely- hopefully- eventually- someday, that staggering wealth will start to trickle down.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

(Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

On Monday, days after a federal appeals court blocked and enjoined key parts of Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting, Trump turned to the Supreme Court, once again, for help in rigging the midterms. Solicitor General John Sauer filed an emergency application for a stay of that injunction, claiming the appellate court ‘interfered with’ Trump’s righteous efforts to ‘promote election integrity.’

The Constitution vests control over federal elections with the states, reserving a secondary role for Congress, and an even more attenuated role for the executive branch. Under Article I, Section 2 and the 10th Amendment, states—not the president— determine who is eligible to vote. The Elections Clause similarly vests state legislatures with the power to set the time, place, and manner of voting. States are charged with organizing and administering elections, serving voters, and counting ballots, with Congress—not the president— holding overriding legislative authority.

The executive branch, by Constitutional design, has a limited role in federal elections. The founders built an intentionally decentralized structure because they knew that giving control over federal elections to the executive branch would be letting the fox guard the henhouse. This particular fox, modeling the rationale behind the design without understanding it, has been relentless in trying to eat the hens.

Trump’s unprecedented election-rigging efforts

After Trump lost the 2020 election, he got caught on tape pressing government officials in Georgia to “find” an extra 11,000-plus votes. Since his return to office, Trump has continued his unprecedented election rigging scheme through a series of actions intended to wrest control of federal elections away from the states. Ignoring the Constitution’s clear, limiting mandates, Trump has tried to arrogate control over federal elections to himself by:

• · Bullying the Senate to pass the SAVE Act, already passed by the House, which would prevent more than 21 million Americans without a current passport or birth certificate from voting.

• · Threatening to imprison Democratic elections officials who refuse to turn over confidential voter rolls.

• · Demanding that red states gerrymander to eliminate black voting majorities, to defeat democrat candidates with former strong leads in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama.

• · Threatening to station armed, masked ICE agents at polling places to intimidate women and minority voters.

• · Raiding election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, and seizing reams of sensitive voting records.

• · Ordering the US Post Office not to deliver mail in ballots to addressees he doesn’t approve.

Aside from these overtly illegal actions, Trump’s oligarchs are spending hundreds of millions to elect candidates who won’t tax their wealth, and won’t enforce corporate, financial, AI, and environmental regulations they dislike. Trump’s political action committee has raised over four hundred million dollarssince the 2024 election. Meanwhile, Republican super PACs have nearly twice as much cash on hand as their Democratic equivalents, and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is at it again. Undeterred by a felony probable cause finding of election bribery, Musk has emerged as one of the single largest individual donors backing Republican candidates in the upcoming midterms. He has donated $90 million to date, with far more expected.

Trump’s EO to weaponize the U.S. Post Office

While several of these extreme initiatives remain under legal challenge, Trump has returned to the Supreme Court for help on the last initiative, his executive order restricting mail-in ballots.

Despite having zero Constitutional authority to regulate federal elections or decide who can vote, Trump’s EO directs the Department of Homeland Security to create state-by-state approved “citizen lists” to determine which voters are eligible to vote. In Section 2, it directs DHS to compile such lists and prioritize prosecution of officials who issue ballots to voters who aren’t on them. In Section 3, it directs USPS to initiate rulemaking on ballot envelope design—to aid the USPS in identifying and withholding envelopes from voters not on the approved lists.

Over 20 Democratic attorneys general challenged the order, arguing that it violates the separation of powers by letting the executive branch usurp election-related functions Constitutionally reserved to the states and Congress to itself. In short, Trump’s EO trying to limit mail-in voting to voters he selects is yet another appalling, unconstitutional power grab.

The DOJ’s disingenuous “lacks ripeness” argument

The midterms are less than 100 days out. Poll after poll on the congressional generic ballot shows Democrats with an advantage, but only a slight one. Republicans’ prolific gerrymandering, coupled with their oligarch-juiced fundraising advantage, and Trump’s relentless attack on free and fair elections, outlined above, is turning what should be a blue tsunami into a reddish purple rain.

Thanks for reading The Haake Take! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The administration’s chief legal argument now pending before the Supreme Court, as presented Monday, is that the underlying suit against Trump’s EO on mail-in voting is premature or unripe. The administration argues that Trump’s EO is merely “internal policy guidance” to agencies, and it is up to them how they implement it, therefore no harm is present, and there’s no standing to challenge it. Trump’s emergency application argues that, “The (appellate court’s) injunction is particularly remarkable because (Trump’s) Order merely sets forth general policy guidance, leaving substantial discretion to agencies about how to implement the Order while admonishing them that they may do so only consistent with applicable law.”

Trump, doing everything he can to spread skepticism about a federal election he’s about to lose, is reaching for massive voter disruption right before the November midterms. Claiming before the Supreme Court that agencies can “only act consistent with applicable law” under his EO is a legal punt designed to run out the clock; what actions are ‘consistent with applicable law’ depends on who is doing the interpreting. Under the administration’s argument, Trump’s anti-mail-in voting EO won’t be ‘ripe’ for review until after states have begun implementing Trump’s directive and the USPS has stopped delivering ballots. By then, the election will be underway, and it will be too late for voters to do anything about it.

The high court recently affirmed state power over elections. In Watson v. Republican National Committee, the majority allowed counting mailed absentee ballots that arrive after Election Day in Mississippi, reiterating strongly that election procedures belong to the states. Ruling for Trump on his EO would be a major departure from that ruling, but skeptics will note that this application is pending on the shadow docket, where rationale often seems secondary to results.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Eric Lee/REUTERS

On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee, hats in hand. The war in Iran has depleted key weapons stockpiles, reducing U.S. inventories of interceptor missiles and stealth cruise missiles to less than halfand costing over $37 billion to date. To the naked eye, these expenditures against a nominal force reflect waste and incompetence: disastrous mismanagement of an undefined, intractable, and escalating war.

Hegseth expected lawmakers to correct his urgent shortfall, but wouldn’t correct, clarify or explain his own obviously false claims about Iran. Hegseth’s early-in-the-war announcements that Iran’s military had been dismantled, “destroyed and made combat ineffective,” while claiming “historic and overwhelming victory” were obviously untrue, but on Wednesday, the GOP-led House put another $1 trillion in Hegseth’s hands anyway. Not only did the MAGA wing reward Trump’s incompetent war in Iran with a massive spending boost, it codified Hegseth’s rebrand of the “Department of War,” snuck in Trump’s voter suppression bill, and blocked hormone therapy coverage for gender care just as Hegseth is braying about increased testosterone levels.

Arming a blowhard who delivers culture war braggadocio instead of sober analysis is not confidence inspiring, it’s irresponsible. It’s also dangerous as hell.

Hegseth’s bloodlust

As a Fox News commentator, Hegseth lobbied hard for presidential pardons for war criminals, leading Trump to fully pardon a Lieutenant convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians, and a Major who admitted to the CIA that he killed someone off base in 2010 and buried his remains. For his own activities in Iraq, Hegseth kept a ‘kill board’ totaling up his kills, including dead civilians, providing context for his bloodlust today (“maximum lethality not tepid legality”) and his disdain for restraint (“stupid rules of engagement.”)

Hegseth seems to be grooming U.S. servicemembers for war crimes by modeling how rules and laws do not apply. Added to over 200 extrajudicial killings in South America, he bombed a school in Iran, killing175 grade-schoolers, and is now bombing Iran’s civilian energy infrastructure and water desalination facilities, more war crimes. Millions of Iranians are living under fire in nightmarish hellscapes, compounding anti-American hatred sure to outlast Trump for generations.

This is the same idiocy that blames other countries for climate-change induced wildfires, while pouring gas on the flames. But of all the mistakes, bloodlust, and incompetence displayed to date, none is more dangerous than Hegseth’s new experiments with testosterone.

Hegseth is mandating testosterone testing

On July 16, Hegseth announced mandatory annual testosterone screening and optional T supplements for troops 30 ​years and older, a new initiative Hegseth claims will ‌ensure enlistees “have the right ​testosterone levels to operate at your absolute ⁠best.” What he didn’t announce is that testosterone supplements can cause infertility, shrink testicles, and drive up red blood cell counts, which thickens blood and raises the risk of blood clots and pulmonary embolism.

Even worse is what T supplements can do to overall IQ and cognitive functioning. Medical studies have tracked how increased testosterone levels can induce aggressive behavior because they also change brain wave patterns.

Although Hegseth and other chest beaters think increased testosterone will make men quicker and sharper, medical research suggests the opposite. The relationship between T and IQ is shaped like an inverted U: cognitive performance is strongest when testosterone sits in a moderate range, and declines dramatically at both low and high ends of the spectrum.

In short, when T levels are too high, men get stupid. While that may explain Hegseth’s frequent blunders, excessive testosterone among the troops would present unanticipated and unconsidered risks.

Too much T rots your brain: How excess testosterone impairs cognitive performance

In controlled studies that raised serum testosterone in healthy men to ‘supraphysiological’ levels — beyond what the body normally produces — researchers measured how verbal and spatial memorychanged, confirming a downturn in cognition levels at high doses. Rather than testosterone being simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for the brain, research shows that it can help or hurt cognition depending on where a person’s levels fall relative to their own physiological baseline.

This pattern shows up in the medical research repeatedly, across different populations and cognitive domains. But Hegseth’s directive aims to establish hormonal baselines across the force, which cannot measure or indicate how a person’s levels compare to their own past historical baseline.

None of this makes testosterone a villain. Men with low testosterone face meaningfully higher risk of dementia, and testosterone loss with age also contributes to cognitive decline. The nuance assuredly lost on Hegseth is that pushing testosterone artificially high for younger troops— whether through unsupervised supplementation, misuse of steroids, or aggressive hormone therapy — can backfire, erode memory and impair executive function. Addicted to simplistic maxims, Hegseth seems to think that hormones are simple dials where more is better. But they are biometric signals the brain has evolved to interpret within complex ranges, and stepping too far outside that range — in either direction — comes at a cost.

Will Hegseth have the cognitive bandwidth, or even the professional discipline, to consult medical research before pushing T supplements to millions of servicemembers? Color me skeptical. He’s chief mouth-breather to the most incompetent, destructive, anti-science, anti-intellectual administration the world has ever seen. But he knows that when Trump starts deploying the military against U.S. citizens, aggressive soldiers with low brain function will make the perfect Praetorian Guard.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. CreditDave Sanders for The New York Times

On Friday, Trump blasted another announcement of his ignorance to the world, claiming that Canada’s wildfire smoke is an air “invasion,” one that he’s going to fight with… tariffs. Before thanking everyone for their attention to this matter and announcing more punitive Canadian tariffs, Trump deemed Canada “responsible” for the wildfire smoke still blanketing parts of the U.S. “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!... This is Willful Negligence!...”

Republican toadies were quick to parrot the idiocy. Meeting Trump’s bombast and raising him one, Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, introduced the “CANADA FIRE Act” declaring a national emergency, stripping Canadian officials of their visas, and expelling the Canadian ambassador until the smoke clears. Moreno announced, “Ohioans across the state are being subjected to hazardous conditions – we will not tolerate this incompetence.” Representative Lisa McClain borrowed Trump’s phrasing andhis penchant for turning everything into us vs. them, claiming that Michiganders were “breathing Canada’s negligence,” because Canada is “exporting” their smoke “into our skies.”

Yet another coalition of Republican dunces sent a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney threatening military reprisals. They warned that if Ottawa didn’t act, the US military/agencies would “act on our own” by physically crossing the border to perform unilateral logging and fire suppression. Apparently, threatening invasion against a sovereign ally is easier than contradicting a petulant boss.

Satire and irony glove up, punch back

While Trump and Republicans try to punish the wind, the internet is having a field day. Mocking the sheer absurdity of the world’s largest historical carbon emitter demanding damages for climate-driven wildfires, one plan, the “Build a Sky Wall” Plan, would have Trump construct a massive wall along the border to keep the “illegal air” out. A competing “Weather Bureaucracy” proposal would post U.S. customs agents at the border to issue speeding and littering tickets to wind currents passing through.

Canadian satirist David Hehn presented an initiative to draft every able-bodied Canadian between 16 and 65 to tidy up the Boreal Forest. The Forest Undergrowth Clearing Kindling Operation for Foreign Friends (boss acronym) promises to negotiate with local Canadian beavers to submit environmental impact reports. Canadian internet users, overall, were quick to see the incongruity, with one viral tweet noting: “We’ll pay for the smoke as soon as you give us a refund for the acid rain and global warming.”

While this irony may be obvious, another one, more subtle and even more delicious, hasn’t made the headlines. By demanding damages from Canada for the wildfire smoke, Trump and his anti-science republicans are endorsing a rising legal theory currently pending in 51 lawsuits brought by states, cities, and municipal governments against major fossil fuel corporations. Big oil accountability lawsuits, filed by ten states, fifteen municipalities, and two tribal governments, seek to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for deceiving the public about their role in the climate crisis.

Republicans’ outrage also implicitly endorses legal claims from developing countries now demanding that nations like the U.S. and China, which have emitted the most greenhouse gases since the industrial revolution, assist them financially in addressing heatwaves, floods, disappearing coasts, droughts and crop failures worsened by rising temperatures.

An adult in the room responds

Although political commentators routinely criticize Trump for dismissing climate change as a ‘con job’while simultaneously complaining about its effects, no U.S. elected official has yet accused Trump of causing Canada’s wildfires through climate inaction. It’s not clear why democrats haven’t come out swinging on this; research shows that the U.S. has directly caused over $10 trillion in climate damages globally since 1990.

At least Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the only adult in this spat, can still state the obvious. Carney countered Trump’s accusations by pointing out Trump’s willful failure to address the climate crisis.

Carney replied to Trump’s wildfire threats by noting, statesmanlike, that “fighting climate change is the responsibility of all countries, including the United States.” While Canada is investing in clean energy, Carney noted, Trump is doing the opposite.

An anti-science moron, Trump is deliberately accelerating climate change

Carney’s right. Trump has systematically rolled back almost every clean air protection; his regulatory rollbacks directly accelerate emissions and global warming. Aside from withdrawing the US from global climate bodies like the Paris Agreement, Trump consistently promotes climate disinformation (“it’s a hoax”) and claims black air from burning coal is good for you. One expects an Executive Order requiring home furnaces to convert to coal.

While Trump engages in coercive, anti-factual measures to benefit his fossil fuel donors, he has halted all federal permitting for offshore wind, closing deals with energy companies to abandon wind farms off California, New Jersey, New York and North Carolina in exchange for investing in fossil fuel projects. His other climate-change acceleration projects include:

· Revoking the scientific declaration that greenhouse gases threaten public health.

· Eliminating federal tailpipe emissions and efficiency rules for cars and trucks.

· Weakening methane regulations and enforcement codes that required fossil fuel companies to fix gas leaks.

· Freezing billions of dollars in incentives for renewables and paying over $2.6 billion to cancel wind farms already under development.

Even Trump, at 80 years old, knows he won’t be around in 30 years when Miami slips into the ocean.

As he engages in unparalleled corruption, starts WWIII out of sheer stupidity, and tries to take the planet into the grave with him, the silver lining in his attack on Canada should be celebrated. Just as his war in Iran is hastening the world’s transition to renewables, his lets-sue-Canada-for-climate-damages policy will make a fine opening exhibit— and closing argument— for plaintiffs suing big oil.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Inscription outside DOJ headquarters in DC, from the ACLU’s website

In May of this year, Todd Blanche signed a one-page order under seal of the U.S. Department of Justice “FOREVER DISCHARGING” Donald Trump and his family from pending and viable federal tax claims, and “FOREVER BARRING” the federal government from ever pursuing those claims. Blanche’s order, if a federal judge hadn’t just voided it, would likely have cost taxpayers up to $650 million in lost penalties and back payments.

Although Blanche’s order would have allowed a sitting president to defraud the U.S. treasury with impunity, the outrage quickly passed. It’s just another episode of corruption under the most corrupt administration our country has ever seen, what’s another few hundred million between friends?

But the legal contortions behind Blanche’s order, the unethical legal jujitsu that brought it into existence, are lasting. By orchestrating this deal, Blanche acted in his former client’s personal interest, at great cost to his current client—the American public. What Blanche tried to rig up for Trump was a major ethical violation under any legal code of ethics. Even during his confirmation hearings on Wednesday, Blanche seemed confused about who his client was, explaining that, as part of the Executive branch, he serves the president. The U.S. Attorney General, for the record, serves the people, and was created to do so by the Judiciary Act of 1789. Blanche’s confusion over this most fundamental aspect of his role as AG could not be more corrosive to the rule of law Blanche has vowed to uphold.

Blanche’s brazen attempt to hijack the justice system

In overseeing the Department of Justice, any US Attorney General is legally entrusted to enforce our laws in a fair and evenhanded manner, and to use its investigatory and prosecutorial powers in a manner that is ‘free from partisan consideration.’ This duty requires, above all else, an Attorney General’s commitment to honor and protect the law above both his personal interests and those of the President who nominated him.

Blanche, after blatantly protecting Trump’s personal, illegal interests over the public’s legal interests, perjured himself when he testified Wednesday in his Senate confirmation hearing. When directly asked if he would resign rather than carry out an illegal or unethical order from Trump, Blanche answeredambiguously, “I’m not going to violate my oath to the Constitution.” But he already has, and not just by trying to gift Trump $650 million in waived tax penalties, along with $1.8 billion to reward J6 rioters.

Far worse than the amount of the attempted theft was the way Blanche tried to go about it: by contriving a completely fake federal lawsuit, then trying to hoodwink a federal judge by dismissing the suit after she questioned how one party could be on both sides, then defrauding the American public by claiming there had been a “settlement” of a case that never existed. On July 13, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams issued a scathing order concluding that the whole scheme was an attempt to “manipulate the judicial process” in an effort to lend the “court’s legitimacy” to collusion between Blanche, the IRS, and Trump to enrich the Trumps. She slammed Blanche for abdicating his responsibility to the public, and referred him for formal sanctions by the commission holding his law license.

The New York Bar Association’s warning

Blanche was admitted to practice law before the Attorney Grievance Committee of the State of New York. That means New York— not the federal government, not Trump— holds his law license. If he loses his license, he loses the ability to practice law anywhere in the country, and he could not supervise the work of other DOJ attorneys without engaging in the unauthorized practice of law.

On July 13, 2026, the New York Bar Association submitted a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committeeholding hearings on Blanche’s nomination to become AG. They vehemently oppose his confirmation, stressing the systemic damage Blanche has already inflicted on the legal system. They point out five distinct areas where Blanche has already violated his oath of office by elevating Trump over the rule of law, and by engaging in conduct contrary to the Rules of Professional Conduct and the DOJ’s own Justice Manual.

The NY Bar Association letter came after 101 former judges filed an official complaint with the New York Commission to “initiate an investigation into Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (Registration No. 4192456) for violation of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct.” In addition to the same ethical breaches identified by the NY Bar Association in its letter to U.S. Senate, the judges’ formal complaint strongly encourages disciplinary action against Blanche for his blanket abuse of authority in using the DOJ to pursue politically motivated investigations and lawsuits against Trump’s personal and political enemies.

The judges also questioned Blanche’s “personal involvement in overseeing the Department of Justice’s botched and incomplete release” of Epstein documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and raised “serious concerns” about Blanche’s interview of Ghislaine Maxwell. The judges point out the obvious: that Blanche remains “burdened” by his conflicts of interest, which “reflect adversely on his fitness as an attorney.”

Republican Senators, fearful of Trump’s promised retribution, are likely to confirm; Senator Cornyn will likely cave and vote with his party. But the Attorney Grievance Committee of New York is equally likely to disbar him, which will make Blanche only the 2^nd U.S. AG to be disbarred.

Etched into the limestone exterior of the DOJ headquarters are the words, “Where law ends tyranny begins.” It is not possible to write a more apt warning about what lies ahead.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. At his last birthday, in March, in the home he built. Photo from League of United Latin American Citizens

ICE agents just shot and killed two more innocent people, a man in Texas and another in Maine. Both men were legally authorized to work in the United States; both were shot in the early morning while driving to work.

Neither victim was ICE’s intended target, meaning each man died because federal agents pursued him in error.

Anyone who’s ever been chased—even if just in a nightmare— can imagine the terror of being followed by a masked and armed aggressor in hot pursuit. But instead of waking up from the dream right when he catches you, the masked man chasing you is actually real. He’s not floating at the foot of your bed, he’s at your car door with a loaded gun. He really does pull the trigger, you really do die, and your family really does have to grieve your absence for the rest of their lives.

An American horror story

On July 7, 2026, in Houston, Texas, ICE fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who had lived and worked in the U.S. for over 30 years, recently reaching his goal of owning his own construction company. According to preliminary reports, ICE agents in unmarked vehicles pursued Araujo while he was driving his construction crew to the morning’s job site.

Although agents admit that Mr. Araujo was not even their intended target, DHS is claiming Mr. Araujo “tried to run over an officer” with his vehicle. The three workers in the van with Araujo said no one was in front of his vehicle. They said that Araujo, a life-long construction worker with expensive tools in his work van, thought the masked men chasing them in two unidentified, unmarked black vans wanted to steal his equipment.

Six days later, similar story. In the early morning of July 13, 2026, an ICE agent shot and killed 26-year-old Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. Guerrero was from Colombia, was authorized to work in the U.S., and was also on his way to work when he was killed. Although Mr. Guerrero was not the federal agents’ intended target either, ICE claims that Guerrero also “tried to use his vehicle as a weapon” against officers, similar to ICE allegations against Araujo and Renee Good in Minnesota. A witness saw Guerrero “bleeding profusely from the head. He was talking. (Guerrero) said: ‘I tried to stop’” before taking his last breath.

The only definitive proof of what happened in either encounter would be video footage. Authorities have not released any such video, and the agents were not wearing body cams, but rest assured some doctored recording will soon surface on Fox News, cropped and manipulated to blame the victims.

Thanks for reading The Haake Take! Please subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Killing reflexively

Since last year, federal ICE agents have shot at least 21 people, several of whom were attempting to drive away when they were killed. Then, after Senator Markwayne Mullin replaced Kristi Noem as DHS Secretary in March 2026, it seemed ICE began keeping a relatively quiet and lower profile. That was either because Mullin preferred less attention, or because he wanted to avoid making waves while waiting for Congress to grant DHS even more funding. On June 10, 2026, Congressional Republicans authorized another $70 billion for ICE, after DHS had already received an unprecedented and absurd $170 billion last year from Trump’s big bill.

Armed with an un-American, dystopian level of funding, with taxpayers literally buying the bullets now aimed at them, rogue ICE is back, pushing mass deportation levels up to where Stephen Miller wants them.

Although Trump officials are trying to block independent investigations into ICE killings, the truth will eventually come out, as it just did for Renee Good. When all the evidence is finally released, ICE agents will learn that they are not as free to kill as Stephen Miller would have them believe.

Not only can ICE agents be prosecuted, tried by jury, and sent to prison (or worse) for murder, but Trump can’t pardon them. Anyone convicted of murder under a state’s criminal code is stuck with state justice as they languish in that state’s penitentiary.

Federal agents are not immune from state prosecution and never have been

Under state and federal law, a federal agent acting outside the scope of his duties is not immune from state prosecution for murder, manslaughter, or any other crime under state law. Since 1890, the Supreme Court has held federal officers immune from state prosecution only if 1. they were acting within the scope of their official federal duties, and 2. their actions were objectively reasonable.

If an ICE agent is prosecuted in state court, he does have the right to remove his case to federal court, but a case removed to federal court is still prosecuted under state law. Federal procedural law applies, but so what? The state’s substantive law still governs whether or not a crime was committed.

Federal courts apply this strict two-pronged test to determine whether Supremacy Clause Immunity exists in each case, given all the facts in evidence. It is never automatic.

Trump officials are lying to agents about immunity

DHS, Steven Miller, and other Trump officials routinely abuse this principle to claim, loudly and falsely, that state prosecutors cannot independently investigate or charge federal agents with state crimes. In Renee Good’s case, for example, they boldly declared that Minnesota had no jurisdiction to investigate her killing. Whether their position was the product of fiat, ignorance, bad legal counsel, hubris, or all of the above, the administration finally conceded error and submitted investigation evidence to state officials this week.

Stephen Miller frequently claims ICE agents have “federal immunity,” insinuating both license and encouragement for them to commit crimes in pursuit of his detention goals. But Miller’s bloodlust must be clouding his legal judgment, because he is demonstrably wrong, and he is risking future incarcerations of federal agents by lying to them.

Federal agents do not have absolute immunity of any kind, and never have, since 1890. Anyone reading this who knows an ICE agent, tell them to watch something other than Fox News, because ignorance of the law will not save them.

This week, masked men in two unmarked vans aggressively chased the wrong targets. They sped, cut them off, then got out of unmarked vans and ran toward them, guns drawn. When the terrorized victims got confused or scared or both and pulled away, officers ran after their vehicles, on foot. When they got closer, in a testosterone-spiked rage, they shot two innocent men, in two separate states, to death. Whether those actions were reasonable, necessary and proper, and within the officer’s official duties, won’t be up to Stephen Miller to determine. It will be up to a jury.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Frank Becerra Jr./The Journal News

House Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee have released a report describing how the White House cheated the American public on its 250th birthday. It outlines interim findings that the Trump organization put together a shell company to supplant the Congressionally-created commission, America250, with a partisan one, Freedom 250, defrauding donors and pilfering donations along the way.

In 2016, ten years in advance of the country’s 250^th birthday, Congress created a nonpartisan commission called America250 to plan and orchestrate the largest commemoration in U.S. history. Its mandated purpose was to encourage all Americans to ‘remember the nation’s past, celebrate the present, and look forward to building a promising future.’

America250 spent ten years organizing events, volunteer campaigns, and educational initiatives across all 50 states to celebrate our Semiquincentennial. America250’s slogan, “350 for 250- Engaging all 350 million Americans in celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary,” stresses civic inclusivity devoid of politics.

But last year, after his attempts to pack America250 with loyalists were unsuccessful, Trump created a competing commission, Freedom 250, via executive order. Falsely describing Freedom 250 as the “national, non-partisan organization leading the celebration of our Nation’s 250th birthday,” Freedom 250 was incorporated as an LLC in October 2025. Under the National Park Foundation, governed by a board of Trump loyalists, Freedom 250 solicited pay-to-play donationsfrom companies with major federal contracts pending— including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Oracle —to financially support Freedom 250 instead of America250.

Defrauding the nation on its 250^th birthday

The report describes how Trump demanded that his name and name-branded politics should dominate the historic celebrations. When America250 pushed back on Trump’s plan as too partisan, he supplanted the commission by creating his own.

After Freedom 250 hijacked federal planning activities, most scheduled performers withdrew from the celebration. They had agreed to perform at a national, nonpartisan concert, but cancelled when they found out it was overtly partisan. Other activities planned by Trump’s Freedom 250 included the very on-brand Military Parade for Trump’s birthday and this year’s White House UFC cage fight, along with the controversial Great American State Fair. The latter featured partisan exhibits complete with a confederate flag; the 16-day event caused extensive damage to the lawns and the National Mall. Meanwhile, Freedom 250 continues the Trump-centric assault, planning construction on his 250-foot-tall “triumphal arch.”

Trump illegally billed his July 4 culminating speech on the National Mall as a “TRUMP RALLY”, making himself—not the nation, not our history— the central figure of America’s only 250^th birthday celebration. Trump’s rally, replete with partisan rhetoric and fearmongering about Democrats, concluded with “the largest fireworks display ever,” costing taxpayers an estimated $45 million.

Millions for Trump’s cronies

A separate report from Public Citizen describes how a “Trumpified series of events at the public’s expense” awarded over $100 million in no-bid contracts to celebrate our 250^th birthday to a network of Trump-affiliated political allies. One of those contracts awarded tens of millions of dollars to Event Strategies, Inc., the same firm behind the J6 attack on the U.S. Capital.

Out of $120 million in public funds Congressionally earmarked for America250 planned celebrations, over $100 million was funneled directly to entities with political ties to Trump, essentially turning it into Trump’s slush fund with little or no transparency, accounting, or public reporting. Overall, Trump’s Freedom 250 received between $65 and $80 million of the fundingCongress allocated to America250.

Alas, the fraud and self-dealing didn’t stop there. Aside from the deceptive rebrand, awarding hundreds of millions in no-bid contracts to Trump cronies, inviting pay to play federal contractor donations, and diverting Congressional funds to Trump’s partisan commission, public donations intended for America250 were purposely diverted to Trump’s organization instead.

Wire fraud and deception are not Presidential activities entitling Trump to criminal immunity

According to interim findings, donors who tried to send money to America250 were misled and given Freedom 250’s banking information, meaning contributions solicited in the name of the Congressionally mandated commission were routed instead to the President’s substitute entity. As yet unverified, the facts suggests that America250 donors were defrauded through wire transfer instructions, bank account numbers, and routing numbers that funneled their donations to Trump’s Freedom 250 commission.

Trump converted America’s once-in-250-years celebration into a parade of self-regard and personal enrichment, embodying our founders’ warnings about men like him. Assuming the evidence matches the allegations, his tactics constitute criminal fraud, and the evidence won’t be hard to track down. Electronic records of online donations and routing can’t be erased; metadata will prove what was sent, by whom and when, and how it was diverted to Freedom 250. Such deception also likely constitutes wire fraud as well as charitable solicitation fraud.

Democratic lawmakers are now demanding a full accounting of diverted donor records and contracts, while Republican leadership has largely blocked information, shielded people involved, and refused to hold hearings on the matter. Democrats, in the minority, have diminished subpoena power, but that is likely to change in November.

Trump’s criminality will be challenged after the midterms; even now, his immunity only applies to “presidential acts” arising from core constitutional duties. Establishing an entity to compete with the Congressionally mandated America250 commission, then using it engage in deceptive fundraising, was illicit, extra-judicial, and purely partisan, and exceeds any official or statutory authority on its face. Trump billing our 250^th July 4 celebration on the national mall as a TRUMP RALLY seals the deal.

Trump robbed Americans of a sacred commemoration that won’t come again for many generations, if ever. He wanted to make our nation’s 250^th birthday all about him. History books will very likely oblige.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Wikimedia Commons

Trump’s July 3 anti-communist rant from Mt. Rushmore was pure McCarthyism. In the 1950s, Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare ruined thousands of American lives through politically motivated accusations of communism. Hundreds of innocent people were sent to prison, thousands suffered witch hunts and ruined reputations; some were tormented into suicide.

McCarthy made baseless and sensationalized claims, such as waving a fabricated ‘list’ of 205 alleged communists in the State Department, to elevate himself from a little-known politician into the most feared figure in Washington. Like Trump, McCarthy employed aggressive, evidence-free tactics to intimidate political opponents, silence critics, and consolidate power.

It was one of our nation’s darkest times, and Trump wants a re-enactment for the midterms.

At Mt. Rushmore, Trump tested midterm campaign slogans meant to scare voters into equating recent primary victories for the Democratic Socialists of America with a “communist takeover.” Never mind that socialism and communism are not the same; never mind that many federal programs like Social Security, Medicare, child labor laws, and subsidies are types of socialism in action. “We don’t want communists in our country,” Trump bellowed, warning of “a resurgence of the communist menace in our land,” “a mortal threat to American liberty,” and calling communism “the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.”

Trump is the one pushing state-ownership of industry

Trump has repeatedly characterized the Democratic left as ‘hardcore, godless communists,’ an ‘evil’ that threatens the very existence of the United States. Because they have nothing else to run on, the GOP is preparing to double down on false claims that the modern Democratic party has capitulated to communism. Speaker Mike Johnson is all in, warning that if democrats win the midterms, the country will “go down some road toward a communist utopia.”

Lucky for Republicans, MAGA doesn’t understand what communism is. Under a communist system, the state owns all industry, and all resources belong to the government. The choke-worthy irony of Republicans’ new red scare is that the only U.S. leader pushing for state ownership of private industry is Trump himself.

It’s not an original observation to note that most Trump accusations are confessions; it’s pattern recognition. Trump accuses adversaries of his own malfeasance so often it’s become a reliable tell. After claiming without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, for example, Trump’s attempts to rig the 2026 midterms have become legion. His accusations of “communism” should be understood the same way: as a confession.

Trump’s unprecedented federal acquisition of private interests

The Trump administration’s pursuit of direct government equity stakes across U.S. business sectors is both unprecedented and under-reported.

Unlike past instances of government seizure or ownership during crises or wartime, this administration is strategically acquiring ownership to generate “public revenue” and to exert government control over corporate decision-making. Trump has already secured government ownership shares in the following sectors:

· Intel Corp.: Trump negotiated a $8.9 billion deal to take a 10% stake in the semiconductor giant’s business, using previously promised CHIPS and Science Act funds as leverage. Trump insisted on the U.S. government acquiring 433.3 million shares, resulting in partial-nationalization of the semiconductor giant.

· Trump acquired stakes in critical mineral and nuclear firms, including an 8% stake in the nuclear power company Westinghouse. Trump’s Department of Defense secured a 15% equity stake in MP Materials by purchasing $400 million in preferred stock, solidifying Washington’s position as the largest shareholder of the only operational rare-earth mine in the United States.

· Trump’s Commerce Department has acquired a 10% stake in USA Rare Earth—receiving 16.1 million shares—as part of a $1.6 billion debt-and-equity investment package to develop a domestic mine and magnet facility.

· Critical Minerals & Energy: The government acquired a 10% equity stake in Lithium Americas Corp., and 10% of minerals exploration company Trilogy Metals In.

· U.S. Steel Corporation- Rather than a direct economic or financial equity stake, the federal government negotiated a governance stake known as a ‘golden share,’ granting the president substantial control over the steelmaker’s operations.

While these private interests have already been converted to partial state ownership, Trump has also expressed an intention to take ownership stakes in major defense contractors. Trump is pushing partial federal ownership of contractors that rely heavily on federal budgets, such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, to ensure that the corporate strategies of top military contractors—who rely on the Pentagon for the vast majority of their revenue— align with Trump’s policies.

It is painfully obvious who the real communist is.

Trump’s oligarchy blends Putin’s Russia with Xi’s China

Trump is fast imposing authoritarian crony capitalism, where major industries and wealth are partially owned by the government, ala China, and partially controlled by a handful of corrupt oligarchs, ala Putin’s Russia. What Chris Christie recently called a “Putin-esque type of corruption and self-enrichment” is making Trump exceedingly wealthy along the way.

Trump’s unprecedented and growing acquisition of government ownership stakes in key industries proves that he is the one marching the U.S. economy toward state control. His and Johnson’s new mid-term slogans about the ‘cancer of communism’ are just more ironic self-owns with vast economic implications.

Scott Bessent argues that, in grabbing shares of key industries, the administration is reducing U.S. dependence on China. To private industry leaders, and anyone outside the Fox News propaganda bubble, it looks like Trump is trying to beat China by copying it.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Uncredited photo of corporate pollution | COPD, Environmental News

This week the Supreme Court contradicted itself in such glaring terms that a conservative justice admitted it could not be legally justified.

In Trump v. Slaughter, the republican majority ruled that Trump can fire federal agency commissioners and directors without cause, despite statutory language requiring cause, and despite Supreme Court precedent dating back to 1935 protecting for-cause only removal. Thanks to Slaughter, Trump can now fire any director for revenge, for political purposes, or for no reason at all. Any federal regulator who rules against Trump’s corporate donors will now be on the chopping block.

But the Court contradicted this holding in Trump v. Cook. In Cook, the majority prevented Trump from firing Lisa Cook, a Governor of the Federal Reserve, pending the outcome of an underlying case on whether there was proper cause for her removal. In the underlying case, Bill Pulte, Trump’s partisan henchman, presented Trump with unproven allegations of mortgage fraud against Cook, which Trump then used to fire her.

The contradiction between the two decisions is alarming. Under Slaughter, no cause is necessary before Trump can fire directors of dozens of federal agencies who, until now, were expected to perform their statutory duties free of political interference. But under Cook, Trump cannot remove directors without cause, but it only applies to the Federal Reserve. Why?

These rulings contradict each other to elevate corporate interests over human interests

The contradiction is obvious, and there’s no legal justification to explain it away. Justice Coney Barrett, after she ruled that Trump can fire agency directors just for fun in Slaughter, dissented in Cook and admitted the gross contradiction between the two decisions. “How can history support both a categorical rule and a carve-out?,” she wrote. How, indeed? Coney Barrett’s observation proves that one of these momentous decisions is in error, and anyone familiar with Trump’s dangerous incompetenceand thirst for revenge knows which one.

Chief Justice Roberts crafted a “unique historical and statutory exception” for the central bank to justify the Fed carve out in Cook, reasoning that the Fed exercises monetary policy rather than ‘generalized’ executive power, which justifies protecting its independence from the President in order to “prevent severe financial panics.” But Roberts could have and should have applied the same justification to protect the quasi-independence of other federal agencies as well. Letting Trump trash, politicize and privatize them will have consequences even more disastrous than “severe financial panic.”

For example, the EPA relies on scientific expertise to enforce corporate regulations that protect clean air, soil, and water, through statutory boards and federal advisory committees. These boards provide independent scientific peer review, oversight, and policy recommendations based on scientific expertise and evidence. Under Slaughter, Trump can fire them if they offend his corporate donors by enforcing or recommending regulations they don’t like. The air we breathe and the water we drink are now subject to Trump’s know-nothing whims and the protection of his corporate donors, the very ones doing the polluting. In the court’s majority view from these two cases, financial markets cannot be subordinated to politics, but human survival can.

Roberts understands the rub

Allowing Trump to fire a Fed Governor without cause, Roberts wrote in Cook, would contradict “the statute Congress enacted and our nation’s tradition of central banking protected from political interference.” But that is exactly what he did in Slaughter: he erased Congressional mandates that require cause for directors’ removal, and dismissed the nation’s 91 year legal precedent, history and tradition of upholding agencies’ protection from political interference.

In Cook, protecting fed governors with only-for-cause removal is necessary, Roberts wrote, because “Without such constraints in place, any perceived or alleged misstep (past or present) could provide a ready pretext for a Governor’s removal — a fact that he would surely know, and that would surely weigh on him as he decided what to say and how to vote. Nothing could be more corrosive of the independence that Congress sought to preserve.”

Roberts is absolutely correct, but his exact words and rationale apply to all directors, not just fed governors, suggesting the majority in Slaughter intended to corrode a functioning federal government. Robert’s prediction of corrosion makes clear that the majority knew Slaughter would end the functionality of all federal agencies Congress created.

The court is elevating corporate interests over all else

Roberts is right to worry that Trump firing fed governors at whim would affect financial markets. If a President can fire the Federal Reserve without cause, financial analysts say it would permanently dismantle central bank independence, trigger immediate turmoil in global financial markets, and lead to higher long-term inflation and borrowing costs. It would also trigger long-term structural damage including a bond market sell-off and weakening of the U.S. dollar, and instantly erase between $880 billion and $1.5 trillion loss in value from the stock market.

The Supreme Court decided in Cook that that financial risk was too high, and they were correct. But they decided in Slaughter that the risk of toxic particles infiltrating the human body, killing over nine million Americans a year with lung, liver, and brain cancer, are acceptable. Trump can now fire regulators who even hint at enforcing environmental, health, and safety regulations against his corporate donors, and he will do so with relish and absolution.

Cook and Slaughter are contradictory rulings, but both cases prove that this court will protect corporate profits above all else. They also prove that the country will not survive under the current radical composition of the Supreme Court.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Richard Sharrocks/Getty Images

In a 6-3 decision breaking on partisan lines, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Slaughter that Trump can fire Federal Trade Commissioners and other federal agency directors without cause. The ruling overturns longstanding Supreme Court precedent and express statutory instruction that combined to protect the political independence and subject matter expertise of federal agencies for over 90 years.

The ruling presents a novel reading of a president’s Constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” expanding that power for a rogue president hellbent on breaking laws instead of executing them. As Justice Sotomayor put it, “The Court… is elevating (Trump) above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

An activist Roberts Court has now written into existence an all-powerful unitary executive despite elaborate instructions in art. I, II and III to keep the three branches of government separate and equal. Rejecting federal laws that restrict a president’s removal of agency directors to for-cause removal, SCOTUS has made the president all powerful and Congress less relevant, while arrogating scientific and technical questions to itself.

Trump’s corporate donors can now choose their own regulators

Before republicans on the bench rewrote it this week, the Federal Trade Commission Act stated that a President could only remove a commissioner for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” That statute clearly and intentionally barred presidents from firing directors for partisan or corrupt reasons, and from punishing regulators who rule against a president’s corporate donor(s). Vesting a singularly authoritarian executive with unprecedented, expansive powers, the Supreme Court re-wrote federal laws to advance their own political narrative.

Over two dozen federal agencies will be affected, covering everything from the financial markets, the commodities markets, and nuclear power. Agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission were all Congressionally designed to be independent watchdogs, enforcers insulated from partisan whims. Now Trump can remove any commissioners who threaten to rule against his allies, assuring that his political supporters will be afforded preferential review, licensing, merger approvals and other rulings.

With Trump’s new latitude to fire any agency head who threatens meaningful regulation, his corporate donors have been effectively empowered to choose their own regulators. Federal laws passed to protect human health, finance, banking, communications, workplace safety, and clean air, soil and water have been rendered functionally meaningless.

Replacing science, expertise and merit with political fealty

Congressionally created and funded federal agencies serve express, statutory purposes written to safeguard the American public. The Supreme Court had protected agency autonomy and expertise dating back to 1935, ruling that some degree of autonomy was necessary for federal agencies to meet specific scientific, economic, communications, trade, health, and environmental mandates. Federal agencies were never meant to be a president’s personal toys with which to reward donors and cronies.

For a president in the habit of accepting lavish gifts and cash from foreign governments, along with hundreds of millions from domestic supplicants, finding even more room for self-dealing, corruption and political favoritism must be heady. For the rest of us, it’s dangerous. We actually need competent people to run the federal government, even in its post-DOGE watered down state.

If Trump declares that every home must be heated by dirty coal, the head of the Energy Commission must try to effectuate that command no matter the harm to Americans’ lungs. If Trump declares that particulate matter, fossil fuels and the widespread use of Monsanto is good for the environment, any EPA director who contradicts him with cancer and death statistics will be silenced through removal. It’s governance by full Idiocracy.

A know-nothing, anti-science president can now follow his gut

To every American outside the Fox News propaganda bubble, Trump has demonstrated astonishing incompetence on all fronts. From economically illiterate tariffs to our defeat in Iran, sprinkled with comically disastrous results in between, an ignorant and arrogant “I follow my gut” Trump revels in rejecting science and expertise as Americans pay the price.

The only thing saving the nation from complete chaos and disaster to date is that several federal agencies had retained some level institutional competence despite Trump (and Musk’s) best efforts to dismantle them. The people Trump brought in to destroy federal institutions were expressly chosen for their lack of competence, which tracks for an administration dismantling the entire federal government to advance an oligarchs’ coup. Trump’s cabinet has widely and apolitically been described as the least competent and least qualified Cabinet in US history, and any federal agency left standing is about to morph into a Trump-affiliated, for-profit private scheme.

Trump has said that Article II of the Constitution gives him “the right to do whatever I want.” The same six justices who handed him immunity for crimes committed in office just agreed with him.

The rest of us can kiss health, safety, banking, and environmental regulations goodbye. The best advice I can give anyone is to 1. Vote, and 2. Buy a damn good oxygen mask.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. Andrew Harnik

/Getty Images North America

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth just hijacked more promotions of high-ranking service members, this time blocking career professionals with exemplary records who were on track to become one-star generals and admirals. Not only is Hegseth’s behavior unusual, there is no clear legal authority for what he is doing.

Congress entrusted military promotions largely to the respective promotion boards and Secretaries of the Military Departments, not the Secretary of Defense. Although 10 U.S.C. § 629 empowers the President with removal authority, a longstanding executive order limits the Secretary of Defense’s removal authority to grades below colonel or captain, not the general or admiral promotions Hegseth has blocked. The Pentagon’s own regulations restrict grounds for removing an officer from a promotions list to specific circumstances like moral, mental, or professional deficiencies, none of which were present in Hegseth’s removals.

It’s obvious that a disproportionate number of Hegseth’s blocked, delayed, or demoted officers are women and people of color. However, while mainstream headlines suggest Hegseth is motivated by race and gender animus, an even worse—and more dangerous— likelihood is that he is weeding out those he deems “ideologically incompatible” with how he and Trump plan to use the military.

Hegseth likes to emphasize that “every officer serves at the pleasure of the president,” arguing that Trump’s policy goals require removing commanders “tied to the culture” of previous administrations. He argues that past promotions were based on race and gender instead of qualifications, but military records refute those claims, and there is no evidence that any promotions he blocked were attributable to anything other than merit.

An unqualified hack defends his own

Hegseth, a former Fox News bobble head, is notoriously unqualified to serve as Secretary of Defense, which seems to have been Trump’s point in naming him. He was a mid-level National Guard officer, had no senior leadership role in the military, and had no experience anywhere that qualified him to oversee three million personnel and an annual budget of $800 billion.

More dangerous than his lack of qualifications is his bloodlust. As a media commentator, he lobbied aggressively for presidential pardons for service members convicted or accused of notorious war crimes, including Army Lt. Clint Lorance, convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians, and Maj. Matt Golsteyn, who admitted during an interview for the CIA that he and another soldier took an alleged Taliban bomb-maker off base in 2010, shot him, and buried his remains. Trump granted full pardons to both.

In Iraq, Hegseth’s own unit was nicknamed “Kill Company” and he kept a ‘kill board’ that tallied kills, including dead civilians, expressing daring contempt for the military’s strict rules of engagement. It’s anyone’s guess what gruesome deeds he got up to. Today, he barks a constant mantra about “war fighters” and “lethality” and sees violence and unrestrained power as a distinct virtue.

Ineptitude with a platitude chaser

Hegseth’s tenure has been marred by a series of high-profile blunders, including the SignalGate security breach, his ‘dirty line’ Pentagon internet setup, and unforced diplomatic errors such as upbraiding NATO allies without understanding the subject matter. Just as Trump governs by spectacle over substance, Hegseth manages by platitude. His attempts to project authority through chest thumping—“Maximum lethality not tepid legality”— like his sophomoric speech to the Generals at Quantico, routinely fall flat and inspire parody.

Hegseth’s embrace of violence over circumspection (“Lethality is our calling card”) while rejecting what he calls ‘stupid rules of engagement’ reveals an almost pathological immaturity. While pushing back against operational restraints, i.e., military rules of engagement, and weeding out generals who don’t suit him, he insists that, under him, there will be “No politically correct wars.”

What he’s really weeding out are legal protocols in order to elevate ‘maximum lethality’ in pursuit of politically incorrect and illegal wars: Trump’s.

History is clear on why the military should never be politicized

Throughout history, authoritarian regimes have tried to put professional militaries under the direct control of their own political movements. Recognizing that an independent officer corps poses an existential threat to one-party rule, in Nazi Germany, Hitler systematically dismantled the autonomy of the traditional Wehrmacht, and required all soldiers to swear a personal oath of loyalty to him rather than to the state or constitution.

In the former Soviet Union, Stalin subjected the Red Army to the Communist Party’s political commissar system, embedding party officials at every level of command to monitor ideological conformity. From 1937–38, Stalin’s purges decimated the senior officer corps, to ensure political fealty, even at catastrophic cost to combat readiness on the eve of World War II.

Historical clarity is not confined to Europe. In Maoist China, the People’s Liberation Army was not a conventional national military but was the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party. Mao’s dictum that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” led to political loyalty campaigns purging those deemed insufficiently loyal. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein constructed an elaborate system of Republican Guard formations and tribal loyalties to prevent any single military institution from possessing enough power to threaten him. Officers were promoted based on personal loyalty rather than merit, and suspected disloyalty was met with execution.

Throughout history, subordinating military professionalism to political fealty, which is what Hegseth is really doing, has produced armies that were reliable instruments of internal repression but dysfunctional when facing real external threats. Since Hegseth and Trump are both fixated on domestic “enemies within” and hope to deploy the military against Americans (internal repression), it’s likely Hegseth’s promotions are less about demographics and more about fortifying top brass willing to break the law, by removing from the ranks those who are likely not so willing.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

CJ Gunther/Getty Images

A president, by Constitutional design, has no legal authority or direct role in administering, altering, orconducting elections. Authority over the mechanics of elections is legally split between state governments and Congress, leaving no constitutional role for the executive branch.

That has not stopped Trump from commandeering the US Post Office with instructions to deliver mail ballots only to people on Trump-approved, Trump-purged voter lists. Trump’s “ENSURING CITIZENSHIP VERIFICATION AND INTEGRITY IN FEDERAL ELECTIONS” Executive Order, issued March 31, 2026, is his bold scheme to wrest election control from the states, which are Constitutionally vested with that authority, to transfer it to the federal government, which is not. On May 29, an eagerly compliant United States Postal Service issued proposed rules to effectuate Trump’s EO.

Trump’s fear of the midterms and the accountability they threaten is palpable. Alongside his unprecedented post office ploy, now under legal review, he has begun ordering FBI raids of progressive voter outreach organizations, as he teases the deployment of armed federal agents to polling places. Sending armed troops to intimidate voters is, for obvious reasons, forbidden by federal law, and has not been done by any US president since the Civil War era.

Trump is complementing these efforts with an all-out appropriation of state voter rolls, from which he has extracted data to build a master federal data base.

A federal judge blocks Trump’s Orwellian database

Threatening to cut funding to states that refuse to turn over their rolls, he has already sent federal agents to seize voter records in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan. It’s plain extortion: To avoid losing federal resources they have already paid into, states must agree to run their voter rolls through the administration’s SAVE database (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, not to be confused with Trump’s SAVE America Act), to verify citizenship. The SAVE database has been expanded, widely tested, and determined to be deeply flawed. In St. Louis County alone, for example, roughly 35% of the people labeled noncitizens were citizens who registered to vote at naturalization ceremonies.

Trump has been using states’ voter roll data to build an illegal, nationwide database of Americans’ private information including home addresses, social security numbers, and other confidential “data-mined” information extracted by Palantir Technologies, a data mining and analytics firm co-founded by JD Vance promoter Peter Thiel. On Monday, a federal judge put a stop to Trump/Vance/Thiel’s Orwellian database.

In League of Women Voters v. DHS, US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled that the federal government “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote” by utilizing an unauthorized voter-screening database. The court found the administration’s actions presented “major violations” of the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

A closer look

In her landmark 75-page ruling, Judge Sooknanan excoriated the Trump administration for ignoring federal privacy laws as it overhauled and expanded the SAVE system into what she characterized as a “faulty citizenship checker.” The worst of her criticism was reserved for how recklessly the administration handled Americans’ personal data to expand the program. She wrote that “agencies were scrambling to comply with (Trump’s March 31) Executive Order aimed at reshaping federal elections, which directed them to create a system for mass voter verification,” and that in doing so, they “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

She found that the system specifically violated the Social Security Act’s prohibition on disclosing Social Security numbers. The judge sharply condemned real-world consequences, noting that (Republican) states had “partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”

She pointed to concrete examples from Texas where naturalized citizens were wrongly flagged and had their registrations canceled or placed under review, but citizens in Texas are not alone. The SAVE system merged Social Security data with immigration files extracted across multiple state and federal platforms, resulting in widespread data flaws and false positive matches. System studies revealed faulty data matching, outdated records, and user compliance failures resulting in high rates of false positives. These flaws are systemic, flagging citizens as non-citizens across dozens of counties in multiple states.

Big brother by any other name

In June of last year, NPR first reported on the federal government’s massive expansion of SAVE into a Big Brother tool; they also reported that DHS, in partnership with DOGE, had not followed public notice protocols required under the Privacy Act before it expanded the system. Such data integration, resulting in a federally sanctioned, nationwide master list, has never before existed.

A centralized national database of Americans’ personal information has long been opposed by privacy advocates. Although political conservatives traditionally oppose mass data consolidation by the federal government, they set aside such objections for Trump. Conservative legislators strongly supported Trump’s expansion of the SAVE program as a tool to prevent non-citizens from voting after Trump and Fox News falsely convinced them that fraudulent voting was widespread. It wasn’t, and never has been.

Judge Sooknanan rejected the Justice Department’s argument that only a small number of voters might be affected, calling it a “red herring.” She reiterated that the APA mandates that a “reviewing court shall. . . hold unlawful and set aside agency action” that is in excess of statutory authority, contrary to law, unconstitutional, arbitrary and capricious, or procedurally defective. Trump’s unauthorized expansion of the SAVE program was all of those things, leading the judge to nullify the entire modified SAVE data system.

Her ruling concluded with a pointed moral declaration: the federal government was using an unauthorized, faulty-by-design federal database to threaten the sacred right to vote, and courts should decline to “stand idly by while that happens.”

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

Pool/Getty Images

The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, passed in 2015, is a federal law that requires the President to submit any nuclear agreement with Iran to Congress, prevents the President from lifting statutory sanctions during a review period, and establishes ongoing congressional oversight. Several Republicans and Democrats have called on Trump to follow the law on the Iran MOU, but Trump plans to skip it after alienating voices he’d need to defend it.

Trump’s personal thirst for revenge at home is hurting him on Iran. Congressmen he attacked in pursuit of personal retribution, and who lost their primaries as a result, have zero Fs left to give and can now criticize him openly.

Republican Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and John Cornyn of Texas represent precisely this threat, and they came out swinging at the MOU. Senator Cassidy called the deal “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.” Cassidy noted that, “Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future.” Senator Thom Tillis noted the cost of the war, to date: $100 billion. Rep. Thomas Massie criticized the figure as five times what Congress spends on roads and bridges annually. Even Mike Pence said the MOU, “smacks of appeasement,” while Sen. Ted Cruz called the reconstruction fund giving “billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us.”

Making JD Vance cling to the bottom of the bus

Fifteen weeks ago, Trump declared in all caps that, “there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER.” He sought the fall of the regime, total destruction of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, and American control of Iran’s oil. But under the terms of the MOU, Trump is basically paying Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, financially propping up the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Before talks in Switzerland were cancelled due to continued bombing in Lebanon, Trump tried distancing himself from the MOU by having JD Vance become its face. When a reporter suggested Trump was setting JD Vance up for a fall by sending him to Switzerland, Trump tried to turn the reporter’s comment into a joke, but he didn’t deny it.

After Vance made his opposition to the war known, Trump forcing him to publicly “conclude” a war he opposed— on embarrassing terms— looks like a political hit job. Flexing a psychopath’s instinct to blame victims, Trump laughed as if war were a joke and announced that, “If (the MOU) works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.”

The devil in the details

The White House spent four days attacking leaked drafts of the MOU as pure Iranian propaganda and misinformation. On Wednesday when Axios published the entire text of the MOU, it contained the exact language as leaked. The administration framed the MOU as a “major win” for the US, while nearly everyone outside of Fox News calls it a disastrous foreign policy blunder, one that compromises long-term security in exchange for short-term concessions.

Trump was so eager to get oil flowing through the Strait and stop the slide into another Great Depression, he agreed to:

· Premature Sanctions Relief: The MoU immediately waives U.S. sanctions and allows Iran to resume oil exports and unblock restricted assets on “day one.” Critics, like former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, warn that this trades away vital economic leverage before hardline nuclear and regional negotiations even begin.

· Rebuilding the Iranian Threat: Analysts warn that the estimated $300 billion reconstruction and financial package will be funneled directly to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to finance terrorism and accelerate nuclear ambitions.

· Compromised Lebanon Strategy: The agreement’s ceasefire provisions require de-escalation in Lebanon without involving Israel or Hezbollah in the negotiations. Israel has already rejected thisas giving Iran veto power over Israeli self-defense.

· Bribing Over Shipping Lanes: The deal immediately lifts the U.S. blockade on the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran only temporarily allowing toll-free passage for the 60-day negotiation period. Critics point out that the U.S. is effectively paying Iran to stop threatening international shipping, while Iran has already signaled its long term intent to charge “fees” for passage.

So, no unconditional surrender. No nuclear disarmament. No permanent agreement to open the Strait of Hormuz without tolls; Vance said on CNBC that those details remain to be “figured out.” But Iran will get a $300 billion reconstruction fund and all sanctions lifted, even without those concessions, which is hard to spin as anything other than US surrender.

Poor J.D.

This is the PR trap Trump pushed Vance into: chief defender of an agreement Trump can’t explain. Trump even admitted that the MOU might “not be the kind of document that I should be signing.” The dynamic is vintage Trump: deliver ambiguity instead of details, spectacle over substance, and proclaim victory while reserving blame for everyone else.

Vance, now clinging to the chassis of the bus, made his own bed. After calling Trump America’s Hitler, he joined forces with him anyway. Vance, along with Trump’s Heinrich Himmler, Stephen Miller, pushed to suspend habeas corpus, the legal foundation of democracy itself, and urged Trump to deploy the US military against US citizens in an effort to shut down mass protests in Minnesota.

Vance struck a deal with the devil in pursuit of raw power and now he’s eating it. He can’t criticize Trump, or the MOU, and he can’t remind the country of his own opposition to the war. He can only smile through the embarrassment, putting his own face on the catastrophic loss, while Trump moves on to the next shiny object.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

An Iranian woman at Valiasr Square in Tehran on June 15, 2026. Atta Kenare/AFP

On Monday, Trump announced beginning concepts of a plan to discuss an outline of understanding on how to end to the war in Iran. It was Trump’s 39^th such announcement since he started the war.

Israeli leaders, ostensible partners in Trump’s war, are increasingly convinced that Trump’s MOU with Iran makes Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal look perfect in comparison, after Trump tore that deal up, calling it “a deal at the highest level of incompetence” and “the worst deal ever negotiated.” Obama’s 2015 deal featured highly detailed, multi-decade uranium enrichment caps and verification protocols, while the core mechanisms of Trump’s MOU remain unseen, unfinalized and deferred for 60-days.Although Trump’s MOU may pause the fighting he started, it has not established any permanent, legally binding nuclear dismantlement or the long-term inspection protocols Trump initially demanded, and it includes a plan to hand Iran up to $300 billion in taxpayer money. The biggest achievement will be the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, which, of course, is simply a return to the prewar status quo.

Yesterday Fox News, after promoting Trump’s attacks on the 2015 Iran deal, said Trump “deserves credit for bringing this conflict to this point.”

Fox News manipulated Trump into Iran

Fox may be reluctant to criticize an end to a costly war it encouraged. Fox News and its hawkish hosts played an aggressive role in pushing Trump toward greater military force in Iran — a troubling dynamic critics call a “doom loop” between the White House and the network, a self-reinforcing feedback cycle where the administration’s grievances and policies prioritize media spectacle over conventional governance, which in turn shapes presidential policy and messaging.

As early as June 2025, Fox talking heads pushed for war with Iran, encouraging Trump into open conflict. Mark Levin reportedly helped push the June 2025 U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities by convincing Trump over lunch that the country was just days away from getting a nuclear weapon. When a fragile ceasefire was declared in April 2026, rather than celebrating, many Fox voices including senior security analyst Jack Keane and host Brian Kilmeade demanded it be broken. These voices agitated for the Trump administration and Israel to resume aggressive bombing campaigns rather than continue diplomatic negotiations, demanding Trump restart the war and, in their words, “finish the job.” Host Ainsley Earhardt even told Trump that Americans were supportive of escalating aggression in Iran, which was not true.

Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade, and Jesse Watters all floated the idea of flooding Iran with small arms to provoke an uprising. Kilmeade, one of the network’s most prominent hawks and co-host of Fox & Friends, proposed relentless U.S. strikes against Iranian targets to “open up the strait,” “grab the uranium,” and “target bad actors,” an apparent embrace of assassination. Other Fox News hosts also pushed Trump to seek regime change in Iran, hosting retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, who called for “putting boots on the ground” and for the U.S. to seize Iranian territory.

This was not commentary or news, it was Fox television personalities directly shaping foreign policy at the highest level.

The doom loop endangers the nation

What makes this dynamic especially fraught is the structural relationship between Fox and the Trump administration. Trump has appointed more than two dozen former Fox News hosts into administration positions, blurring the line between media and government in an unprecedented way. When Trump calls into Fox & Friends, he is not just doing an interview — he is engaging a network with an inherent interest in promoting conflict and spectacle. Fox hosts also reward Trump with hyperbolic praise: when Trump ordered military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, Sean Hannity said the strikes would “go down in history as one of the greatest military victories,” while other hosts claimed Trump deserved “six Nobel Peace Prizes” and a spot on Mount Rushmore. Trump went on to demand—and expect— both honors.

Fox’s lockstep promotion of Trump’s war reflects the network’s calculated plan to keep MAGA enraged and engaged. War framed as a righteous confrontation with a Judeo-Christian undertones is good television. It generates ratings, emotional investment, and brand loyalty. It is what happens when the line between journalism and political advocacy dissolves.

A network that functions as an echo chamber for a sitting president, with hosts who propose military strikes rather than analyze them, and treats war as a network ratings strategy, has abdicated its responsibility to the public and should be held to account. The feedback loop between Fox and the White House helped produce a war that cost American lives, roiled the global economy, and left our allies disgusted. Even if Trump’s MOU miraculously holds, analysts predict the global economy will take months and even years to recover. As the NYT Editorial Board assessed the MOU, “Mr. Trump made a terrible mistake starting this war... The United States is emerging weaker — militarily, diplomatically and economically — and will pay strategic costs for years to come.”

What will Fox News pay? Fox has inflicted lasting damage on our democracy by selling Trump propaganda as news, directly profiting from falsehoods in a classic case of consumer fraud. Fox paid nearly $1 billion for lying about the 2020 election. One wonders what they’ll pay the families of 13 soldiers who died for nothing other than their ratings.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

The Claw by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Today’s South Lawn of the White House features a huge, brightly lit metal cage called “the ​Claw.” It is a stage erected to showcase men beating each other bloody, Caligula style, to entertain a wannabe Roman Emperor on his 80^th birthday.

After musical performers refused to sing at the ​nation’s 250^th birthday party Trump made about himself, the UFC cage match has taken top entertainment billing. The Claw complements golden Trump statues, illegally-minted gold coins bearing Trump’s likeness, commemorative passports featuring Trump’s photo, and huge Nazi chic banners of Trump draped on the edifices of the DOJ, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture buildings.

A former FBI Director called the banners ‘sickening’ for their authoritarian symbolism.

An arch for one

Monument by revered monument, Trump is painstakingly desecrating the U.S. capital. Last week, Trump said that the 250 foot arch he is demanding as a monument to himself would be, “along with the White House Ballroom, the Greatest Structure in Washington.” His drive to overshadow national monuments to Presidents Washington and Lincoln reflects a level of delusion best described by the DSM: “Grandiosity presents an exaggerated sense of self-importance, entitlement, a constant need for admiration, and a lack of empathy …” It also presents profound disrespect for our nation’s history.

Trump’s ‘Triumphal Arch’ would obstruct the historically significant sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington House at Arlington National Cemetery. Historical preservationists emphasize that the Lincoln Monument was designed so that it would forever gaze at the final resting place of over 400,000 veterans, a somber reflection on the cost of freedom. The sightline also connects Lincoln to the Robert E. Lee Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery to symbolize national unity, the post-Civil War reconciliation between North and South.

The massive scale of the arch, which will be more than double the height of the 99-foot Lincoln Memorial, would block the views along the Memorial Avenue Corridor and across the Arlington Memorial Bridge. When viewed from the Arlington House, the arch would obscure much of Lincoln’s Memorial, like someone walking in front of a movie screen and just... standing there.

To Trump, historical symbolism is noise. According to recent National Park Service documents, Trump is planning year-round, 20-hours-per-day construction on his arch, for projected completion within three years. Several years of construction all day and night, diverted traffic, and marred sightlines is extremely aggressive; one intuits that the completed arch will take less time to tear down.

Branding a nation

Trump’s handiwork on Lincoln’s Memorial Reflecting Pool isn’t much better. Trump posted a video on Truth Social showing workers draining and cleaning it, as Trump’s voice talks about “Biden filth and incompetence.” The Reflecting Pool, built in 1922 and restored in 2012, has nothing to do with Biden, who clearly competes with Trump in the rent-free occupation of Trump’s own head.

The Reflecting Pool was originally designed with a reflective surface intentionally subordinate and solemn, a dignified spatial connection between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.Trump had it repainted in circus blue, again missing the historical significance of solemnity.

The work was also performed by another of Trump’s overpaid no-bid contractors. Trump said he handpicked Atlantic Industrial Coatings because they had done work on his personal swimming pool at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. Shortly thereafter, perhaps realizing that ‘I hired my pool guy’ was not the best justification, Trump did an about-face and claimed he had never used the firm’s services before. After the contract was awarded, bypassing standard competitive bidding channels, the cost ballooned from initial estimates of under $2 million to $13.1 million.

What will the future say?

Trump lawyers recently argued in federal court that they could bulldoze the Statue of Liberty and the courts couldn’t do anything to stop them. A man who slapped his name on steaks, vodka, a fake university, candles, soaps, NFTs, casinos, and an airline that went bankrupt has now upgraded to more durable media on the public dime: marble, federally funded, and gold, omnipresent. Trump has redecorated the Oval Office with heavy gold filigree, including gold cherubs, gold trim, and gold furniture. His gold overkill aesthetic, reminiscent of Versailles just before the French monarchs were beheaded, proves that Trump’s historical ignorance isn’t confined to American history.

Congress, not the president, controls federal property, but Trump doesn’t want to work with Congress, preferring to rebrand DC in his own personal, bawdy image. The National Trust has sued, arguing that the White House grounds, a designated national park, cannot be updated without congressional approvaland that the park, like Yellowstone, can’t simply be repurposed at one man’s whim. That suit is pending.

Future generations will study this era and learn many things. They will learn about the fragility of democracy, and the extraordinary load-bearing capacity of our capital’s foundation, now bearing the weight of history, the republic and Trump’s self-regard.

E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. And that one would really like his own monument.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.

That’s me yesterday, listening to how the Biltmore’s glass atrium foyer was constructed.

I just toured the opulent Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. I love beautiful homes as much as anyone, but this tour didn’t land as intended.

To me, America’s largest private residence, one that took 1,000 laborers six years to build, is a testament to inherited wealth and inequality. The lavish indoor swimming pool was built at a time when most homes didn’t have plumbing. As I walked through the gardens and imported Italian tapestries, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the laborers who built the estates of Gilded Age scions lived in squalor themselves, and could barely afford to eat.

The warning was also deafening: Trump and his corporate backers, pushing an economic regression most supporters can’t even recognize, are taking us back to that era. MAGA keeps buying the same robber-baron con job the working-class finally defeated over a century ago, even as they bear the brunt of it.

Fast foward only a hundred years and we are watching the same well-planned, deliberate, and coordinated effort by a handful of tyrants to dismantle the regulatory state, enrich themselves at taxpayers’ expense, and erode the rule of law. The parallels to the late 19th century are disastrous and obvious.

Robber barons then and now

During the first Gilded Age, robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Carnegie operated under laissez-faire capitalism where laborers were expendable and civil rights were non-existent. The man who built the Biltmore, a 175,000 square foot monument to extreme wealth, inherited his massive fortune from Cornelius Vanderbilt, his grandfather, who built railroads on the backs of starvation wages.

The Gilded Age top 1% claimed that their hyper-monopolies were the natural result of a free market, but in truth those monopolies were protected by corruption: oligarchs openly bribed legislators, crushed labor unions with brutal force, and treated the working class as disposable. Trump’s grid of exploitation, anti-regulation, and legal evasion follows the same formula.

Trump’s entire political apparatus models the 19th-century political machine where Trump is the Tammany Hall boss and the presidency is a vehicle for transactional profits lining his family’s pockets. With the help of corporate-aligned Supreme Court justices, US health and environmental protections have been dismantled to favor big oil and corporations, while education, health care, and food assistance have been gutted to finance another massive tax giveaway to the rich.

This isn’t conservatism; it is an oligarchs’ coup, a return to the robber baron past where laws applied only to the poor.

Trump, Musk and Bezos’ deliberate dismantling of institutions that could check them

Trump’s constant attacks on the judiciary and the press are meant to weaken the only institutions capable of checking his lawlessness and the concentration of wealth it affords his family and donors. His anti-regulation, pro-corporate policies even drive US foreign relations, with his latest National Security Strategy pledge to push “Europe… to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.” Escaping regulations and laws altogether, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are building a private resort on Albanian protected land. Don Jr just married Epstein’s banker’s daughter, with a record $620 million Pentagon loan for his start up to boot. Eric is taking an Israeli drone company public for $1.5 billion, directly profiting from Trump’s war in Iran.

Elon Musk is the modern equivalent of a railroad tycoon, contemptuous of the laws of nations where he operates. Musk has utilized his massive wealth, much of it accumulated through taxpayer-funded government subsidies, to build global communication networks only to weaponize them against democratic institutions. Why? To end corporate regulations/ environmental protections, labor laws, and fair taxation. By bankrolling political disinformation campaigns and turning Twitter into a right wing echo chamber, Musk helps distract voters with manufactured culture wars so they won’t notice their economic rights being stripped away. Gilded Age tycoons controlled the printing presses; Musk controls the algorithms.

Jeff Bezos completes the triumvirate. Much like Gilded Age factory owners who locked workers in unsafe facilities for starvation wages, Bezos built an empire that invades the privacy of its employees and tracks their bathroom breaks while spending tens of millions to fight workers’ unionization efforts. He, like the Robber Barons, also pays Amazon warehouse and delivery staff sub-standard wages. While his employees rely on federal assistance programs just to survive, Bezos builds himself mega-yachts and finances space tourism projects for the rich. The Biltmore would have been right up his alley.

If past is prologue, we’re going to be ok

The central tragedy of our moment is how easily millions of Americans were conned into voting against their own self interests, and remain conned, with the help of Fox News. Informed only by propaganda, working-class supporters defend Trump’s policies because they can’t see that they are directly aimed at their clean water, safe workplaces, and economic survival.

As we drove away from the Biltmore grounds, I looked up the Progressive Era on my phone, America’s response to the Gilded Age. The good news is that gross inequality during the robber baron era led to the rise of organized labor, legal reform, political resistance and antitrust enforcement. If things get bad enough under Trump—SNAP and Medicaid will begin to disappear in October— anger and hunger will morph into political will. If that happens, in 2028, we will balance the high court, reverse Citizens United, and pass a real wealth tax so that we can fix our broken systems.

US history has shown what happens when a handful of corrupt tyrants dictate the laws of the land; it has also shown what happens when voters get fed up.

Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.