Politics

Paris Marx On Tech Won’t Save Us: Jacob Silverman on how Trump is enriching himself through crypto scams. The post Trump’s Crypto Profiteering Is Worse Than You Think appeared first on The Nation.

John Nichols “The tide is turning,” says Bernie Sanders. “The American people do not want to spend billions to starve children in Gaza.” The post A Majority of Senate Democrats Now Oppose Arms Shipments to Israel appeared first on The Nation.

Juan Cole The pathological US support for dictatorships in the Middle East is blowing back across the Atlantic Ocean. The post With Trump, the US Is Getting a Taste of Its Own Medicine appeared first on The Nation.

President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he had once again failed to negotiate a trade deal with Mexico and has extended the current level of 25% tariffs for another 90 days. The decision showed Trump living up to the derisive nickname of TACO, which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. The acronym has been used by Wall Street traders as a guideline for making investments based on Trump’s inability to follow up on his grand pronouncements. On his social media account, Trump tried to portray the latest failure in a more positive light. “The complexities of a Deal with Mexico are somewhat different than other Nations because of both the problems, and assets, of the Border,” Trump wrote. “We have agreed to extend, for a 90 Day period, the exact same Deal as we had for the last short period of time.” The announcement was the second time Trump has blinked and granted Mexico an extension, following his previous retreat in April. Without an extension, Trump had said he would impose a 50% tariff on goods imported from Mexico, effectively triggering a massive tax hike for consumers. Mexico is the United States’ biggest trading partner and Americans purchase billions in goods from that nation. Trump tried to portray a phone call between himself and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum as “successful,” despite his diplomatic retreat and failure. Sheinbaum has previously shown that, like most world leaders, she is not intimidated by Trump’s bravado, mocking him before he even took office when he began pushing to inaccurately label the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” Trump has desperately tried to portray himself as a master negotiator and practitioner of the “Art of the Deal,” but has come up limp in the real world. Instead, the Mexico announcement showed Trump once again adhering to TACO, even as his actions continue to bring uncertainty to global economics. Even when Trump does reach an agreement with trading partners—like he did with the European Union over the weekend—it is consumers who suffer as tariffs spike from their previous levels and are passed on as extra charges to consumers. Those actions lead to price hikes for vital goods like medication, even as Trump pretends he has secured victories. Meanwhile, inflation is spiking as Trump’s tariffs settle in. The entire tariff argument is unraveling, and Trump cannot hold his ground.

Senate Democrats released a report on Thursday revealing that the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has wasted at least $21.7 billion in taxpayer dollars since it was launched by President Donald Trump and far-right billionaire Elon Musk. The revelation undermines the purported mission of the agency, which was to cut wasteful spending. The report, titled “The $21.7 Billion Blunder” and released by Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, summarizes that the billions wasted by DOGE came about because the agency was never set up to understand how the federal government works and instead was more focused on disrupting and breaking things. The subcommittee, led in the minority by Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, determined that the biggest area of DOGE waste comes from $14.8 billion spent under the “Deferred Resignation Program.” The program, launched by Trump a few days into his new term, was supposed to shrink the federal workforce. What that means in reality, as The Washington Post reported on Thursday, is that over 154,000 federal employees are currently being paid not to work. Despite the billions being spent, the spokesperson for Trump’s Office of Personnel Management, told the Post that it has “delivered incredible relief to the American taxpayer.” Rich idiot Elon Musk flashes his “DOGE” T-shirt to the media outside the White House on March 9. Key agencies have been affected by this drain of resources, including the departments of Defense (55,000 employees volunteered for “deferred resignation”), Agriculture (15,400), Veterans Affairs (9,400), Interior (7,400), and Justice (4,000). Democrats’ report also reveals that hundreds of millions in tax dollars have been lost because the administration destroyed food aid and medical supplies, wasted time by mandating employees send out accomplishment emails to Trump officials, and froze loans meant to fund ongoing government projects. “As my PSI investigation has shown, DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money. Instead it wasted at least $21.7 billion,” Blumenthal wrote on social media, following the report’s publication. “I urge Inspectors General to take my investigation’s findings & initiate a comprehensive review of DOGE’s careless actions.” Trump tapped Musk to lead DOGE after Musk donated millions toward Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election. Musk also allowed racism and disinformation to thrive on X, formerly Twitter, after he bought it. DOGE’s actions have been unpopular with the public and generated grassroots protests across the country. Many of those protests have occurred outside of showrooms for Tesla, the electric vehicle company Musk owns. Tesla sales have fallen following Musk’s actions with DOGE. Since Musk left DOGE around the end of May, many of the flunkies he brought along with him to disrupt government agencies have departed, leaving behind dysfunctional messes that will continue to cost taxpayers for years to come.

A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | Sorry, Trump, but Fed Chair Jerome Powell isn’t going anywhere

More Americans now affiliate themselves with the Democratic Party than the Republican Party, marking the first time this has happened since January 2024, according to a Gallup poll released Thursday.  Gallup finds that in the second quarter of 2025, an average of 46% of Americans say they identified as a Democrat or a Democratic-leaning independent, compared with the 43% who say they are a Republican or Republican-leaning independent. That’s a change from the first quarter of the year, when an equal 45% of Americans identified with either party. And it’s an even bigger shift from the fourth quarter of 2024—when last year’s presidential election took place—when 47% identified as Republicans. Datawrapper Content Gallup said that the shift is not unexpected since the party in power usually sees voters turn away from it in the first few months of a new administration. “Shifts in party affiliation away from the ruling party have occurred in the first year of most recent presidential administrations. The current movement in party preferences is primarily driven by a greater share of political independents saying they lean toward the Democratic Party,” Gallup said. Still, the Democratic Party has a lot of work to do to improve its image. Gallup also finds that just 34% of Americans view the Democratic Party favorably, which is the lowest rating for the party since Gallup first asked the question, in 1992. The GOP performs only marginally better, with 38% viewing it favorably. Datawrapper Content Gallup said that Democrats’ poor image is thanks to Democratic identifiers viewing their own party in an unfavorable light—likely because they want to see their party leaders fight harder against Trump’s shredding of the Constitution and the GOP’s cruel policies and evil attempts at stealing power.  “Seventy-three percent of Democrats now have a positive opinion of the party. This is down sharply from 87% in the prior reading in November and contrasts with a 91% favorable rating of the Republican Party among Republican identifiers,” Gallup said. Indeed, it’s why Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey unleashed on his fellow Democrats on the Senate floor on Tuesday, saying, “The Democratic Party needs a wake-up call.” “It’s time for Democrats to have a backbone. It’s time for us to fight. It’s time for us to draw lines,” Booker said. YouTube Video Still, despite the Democratic Party’s struggles, Gallup added that the shift in party affiliation away from the GOP is likely a worrying sign for Republicans going into the 2026 midterms. In each of the past few midterm elections, “midterm losses were preceded by shifts in party affiliation away from the ruling party during the president’s first year in office,” Gallup wrote. For example, in 2017, when Trump first took office, Republicans saw a 2-percentage-point decline in the number of people who affiliated with their party. In the next year’s midterms, a blue wave led to Democrats regaining control of the House. And in 2009, when Barack Obama first entered the White House, Democrats saw a 5-point drop in the number of Americans affiliated with the party between the first and fourth quarters of the year. A year later, Republicans romped to victory in the 2010 midterms. At the end of the day, the laws of thermostatic politics still stand.

President Donald Trump’s latest action is sure to materially improve the lives of so many Americans: He’s reviving the Presidential Fitness Test. If you are of A Certain Age, you probably just flinched. The Presidential Fitness Test, established during the Eisenhower administration in the late 1950s, tortured the nonathletic schoolchildren of America until the 2013-14 school year, when the Obama administration replaced it with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program, which focused on children’s health, not their capacity to do more sit-ups in 1 minute than their peers.  But that’s not the kind of health the Trump administration is interested in. That kind of health is for wusses. According to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, this will create “a culture of strength and excellence for years to come.” Trump is also reestablishing the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, which will be led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Oh god, you just know that Kennedy is going to take his shirt off and do push-ups. Or he might do pull-ups while wearing jeans. The possibilities are endless. Maybe Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shows up and they can have a bro-off? Elementary school students play on the last day of classes in Chandler, Arizona, in May 2023. The scheduled guests at the signing ceremony for this are a real grab-bag of winners. There’s Swedish golfer Annika Sörenstam, who thought it was a great idea to accept a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Trump on Jan. 7, 2021, also known as the day after the Capitol insurrection. There’s Harrison Butker, the kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, who gave a commencement speech in 2024 where he railed against Catholic leaders for being insufficiently conservative and “pushing dangerous gender ideologies onto the youth of America.” He went on to complain about Pride Month and abortion. So, basically perfect for the Trump era.  Also present for the festivities: registered sex offender Lawrence Taylor, a retired NFL player who pleaded guilty in 2011 to misdemeanor charges of patronizing an underage sex worker and sexual misconduct. Then there’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon, still a defendant in a lawsuit accusing her of ignoring child sex abuse while she was an executive at World Wrestling Entertainment. This does not seem like the greatest move for a president desperately hoping to shift people’s attention away from his friendship with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.  The resurrection of the Presidential Fitness Test is in keeping with the other “health” things promoted by Trump and Kennedy, many of which just seem to be the personal fixations of one or the other. So we’ve got Kennedy pressuring companies to change their food dyes and getting Steak ’n Shake to cook its French fries in rendered beef fat because it is, in his words, a more “traditional” ingredient. Sure, tallow clogs arteries and causes high cholesterol, but an increased risk of heart disease is a small price to pay for the crispy fries Kennedy said people are “raving” about. And who can forget one of Trump’s greatest second-term wins thus far: getting Coca-Cola to agree to use cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup. Truly a game-changer, sir.  Meanwhile, the administration has overseen a wholesale destruction of health research and public health efforts. It’s throwing out rules that would have lowered the amount of “forever chemicals” in drinking water. It has ignored a preventable measles outbreak. And it has been firing the people who review and approve new drugs. These actions compromise the public health of all Americans, but at least schoolchildren will have the privilege of trying to do a pull-up while everyone else watches.  So much winning, so much health. 

Fresh off announcing plans to accelerate climate change by deregulating carbon dioxide emissions, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin appeared on Fox Business Thursday to boast about the Trump administration speeding up the flow of gas. Yes, really. “We just sent a letter last week to the portable gas-can manufacturers, encouraging them strongly to vent the can. There’s a lot of frustration from Americans across the country because what should take 45 seconds takes 5 minutes. People feel like they need 3 hands or 6 hands to pour a gas can. Those vents should be added back in,” he said. YouTube Video Indeed, Zeldin sent a letter last week begging gas-can manufacturers to redesign their spouts. His key-jangling pledge to “Make Gas Cans Great Again” came just days after announcing plans to dismantle the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, which is structured to insulate research from political interference. But Zeldin is just one face of a multiheaded monster that puts business and billionaire interests above public health, joining charlatans such as Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Martin Makary, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz. Collectively, the Trump administration has proven that it’s not a team of public servants but a coalition of grifters.

A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Does Trump’s snobby Treasury secretary even know what his job is? And don’t even get us started on his awful ideas for Social Security. So much for Trump ending inflation Another Day 1 promise broken. Cartoon: The old Smokey Bear can’t come to the phone right now A lesson on how not to deal with forest fires. Trump’s top trade goon says the TACO king should win the Nobel for economics Perhaps Peter Navarro is unclear how trade works … Mexico gets a mouthful of TACO Don Trump sure is predictable. Americans move away from the Republican Party But the Democratic Party still has a lot of work to do. Click here to see more cartoons.