Health and Health Care worsen under Trump
Bob Sheak and Arlene Sheak, August 1, 2026
Introduction
Trump and his Republican Party not only continue to fail in creating a viable health care system, they are also making the present system even more inadequate. It is but one example of how Trump and his Republican cronies are reducing opportunities generally for the majority of Americans. His Iran War, tariffs, massive deportation, regressive tax cuts, and self-enrichment schemes are examples. All this is happening despite his hollow presidential campaign promises to support policies that would benefit all citizens.
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Trump Is Making America Uninsured Again
Sasha Abramsky offers some evidence of this trend, May 16, 2026
(https://truthout.org/articles/trump-is-making-america-uninsured-again).
Abramsky’ central point is that the Trump’s GOP is heading into the 2026 midterms as the party that is making health coverage out of reach for millions of Americans. Consider some of his ample evidence.
He writes, “In 2025, the Trump administration successfully pushed Congress to enact nearly $1 trillion in health care cuts over the coming decade, which the Congressional Budget Office analysis estimated would result in 10 million people losing health coverage by 2034. More recently, it has blocked any and all efforts to extend the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credit subsidies for people buying insurance on the state exchanges. In demanding that the GOP leadership in Congress prevent at all costs a continuation of the expanded ACA tax credits, Donald Trump intimated that his administration was on the verge of proposing a better and more affordable health care reform to replace the ACA system.
“Nothing of that nature has materialized. Instead, the administration’s health reforms have been shockingly small-bore — a handful of measures to lower the costs of prescription drugs, more incentives for consumers to create health savings accounts, a rollback of regulations on catastrophic coverage plans — thus, making it easier for younger, healthier, patients to buy junk insurance, but doing nothing for those who are older or suffer from chronic conditions.
Abramsky continues. “Over the past months, even these baby steps have stalled out, with the GOP seemingly and inexplicably resigned to the fact that it will be heading into the midterm elections as the party that is putting health coverage out of reach for millions of Americans. Early in the Iran war, Trump was caught saying that the federal government could no longer afford its massive Medicare commitments now that the country was engaged in an expensive overseas conflict, and it would have to roll back responsibility for paying for this bedrock safety net program onto the states.”Bottom of Form
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Evidence that millions of Americans are already losing their health insurance
Journalist Aparna Soni reports that “2.6 million Americans Lost Health Insurance in 2025 After ACA Subsidies Expired, Leading to Real Health Consequences,” July 15, 2026 (https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/15/2-6-million-americans-lost-health-insurance-in-2025-after-asa-subsidies-expired-leading-to-health-consequences).
Soni continues. “Millions of Americans who buy their own health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces faced a stark choice this year: pay more than twice as much to keep the same plan or go without. Many did not keep their coverage.
“Federal data released on June 26, 2026, shows that marketplace enrollment fell from 21.8 million people in February 2025 to 19.2 million in February 2026, a decline of about 2.6 million people, or 12%. That is the steepest single-year decline since the marketplaces opened in 2014. ACA marketplaces (or exchanges) are government-regulated platforms where individuals and small businesses can shop for and purchase compliant private health insurance.
Soni is a health economist who studies how insurance coverage affects people’s health, I see the drop as more than a numbers story. The key question is: What happens to people’s health when coverage becomes too expensive to keep?”
Why enrollment fell
“The drop in enrollment numbers traces back largely to the expiration of the ACA’s enhanced premium tax credits, which lowered enrollees’ monthly payments when they were in effect from 2021 through 2025.”
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Trump also eliminated Medicare Part D Subsidies After Vowing to “Protect” the Program in 2024
Chris Walker reports on this for Truthout, July 29, 2026
(https://truthout.org/articles/trump-to-end-medicare-part-d-subsidies-after-vowing-to-protect-program-in-2024). Walker is a news writer at Truthout, “based in Madison, Wisconsin. Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues of the day and their impact on people.”
Walker provides context.
“Mehmet Oz, [Trump’s appointed] head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, justified the change by citing the hollow reason, ‘stabilizing’ markets.’
“On Tuesday [July 28] the Trump administration announced its plans to end a subsidy program for Medicare Part D, which has helped lower prescription drug costs for tens of millions of enrollees in the program for the past two years.”
“The Biden-era program provided subsidies to insurance companies, which in turn lowered the cost of drugs for seniors in Medicare. If repealed, many enrollees in the program could see their prescription costs increase by hundreds of dollars annually.
“The announcement comes at a time,’ Walker writes, ‘when other costs, including for everyday consumer goods, have been increasing, too. The changes to Medicare Part D will go into effect at the end of this year.”
Trump misled the public
Walker reports that the upcoming program cuts Bottom of Form
contradict “promises and commitments to protecting Medicare that President Donald Trump and the Republican Party in general made during the 2024 elections.” During his presidential campaign, for example, Trump said he would ‘always protect’ Medicare,’ strengthen it for future generations, and promised there would be ‘no cuts’ to the program.”
Now millions of Americans struggle to afford medical insurance
Walker cites DNC Rapid Response Director Kendall Witmer who said in a statement “Donald Trump and Republicans are doing everything they can to make healthcare unaffordable for Americans, especially for seniors,” She added:
Trump and Republicans massive healthcare cuts have pushed working families to the brink, Walker writes. Americans must now grapple with skyrocketing insurance premiums, even bigger medical bills, and rising prescription drug costs. They “are taking on record amounts of medical debt just to make ends meet — all while Trump and his family get even richer and his wealthy donors rake in tax cuts.”
Democrats have a different approach
Democrats and those on the Left want a very different approach. For example, “ In an op-ed for Truthout co-written last month by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, the pair called for repairing the broken U.S. health system by expanding Medicare eligibility to every person in the country.”
Walker notes that Omar and Gilbert added: “Given the resources of our country, we can no longer justify the status quo. The U.S. spends almost twice per person on health care compared to other wealthy nations and our outcomes are often worse. Millions of Americans remain uninsured or underinsured. This is utterly outrageous, especially in the wealthiest country in the world.
“‘We are sick and tired of our health care system putting profits before people,’ Omar and Gilbert said. ‘We need to create a future in which every single person in the U.S. can get the care they need regardless of their ability to pay.’”
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Hospitals are now facing an increasing number of uninsured patients
Reed Abelson reports on how a report by hospitals document that the healthcare cuts have led to a sharp increase in uninsured patients coming for uninsured care
(https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/30/business/aca-obamacare-health-insurance.html).
She writes, “More people who lost coverage after congressional Republicans ended enhanced federal subsidies are now seeking care in emergency rooms and unable to pay bills.”
Abelson continues. “More and more uninsured patients are showing up in hospital emergency rooms and clinics, having lost their coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
“Executives running some of the biggest hospital systems, including large for-profit chains spanning many states, expressed concern over the unexpectedly sharp rise in uninsured patients and the costs associated with treating them.”
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More evidence on how hospitals are facing funding problems and many are closing
Whitney Curry Wimbash reports for The American Prospect on how Trump Funding Cuts are Endangering City and Rural Hospitals Alike
(https://prospect.org/2026/07/15/trump-funding-cuts-endangering-city-rural-hospitals-alike). Here’s some of what she reports.
“A year after Trump ripped $1 trillion out of the American health care system, hundreds of hospitals have closed and millions of people are without health insurance. The majority are in urban areas.”
Winbash continues. “In the year since President Trump stole $1 trillion out of the American health care system to free up funding for mass deportation, tax breaks for his billionaire friends, and, it turns out, illegal wars of aggression, much of the resulting conversation has focused on how the funding cuts would impact rural hospitals and patients. The idea was that most of the harm would hit there, since rural medical providers were already on the brink of collapse across the country.
“But new research from National Nurses United challenges that assumption. Researchers identified 602 financially vulnerable hospitals across 47 states, which together operated with an aggregated deficit of about $10.2 billion. They found that when the full impact of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act finally hits, the group’s deficit will increase to between $15.4 billion and $17.9 billion. Of this group, 366 are in metropolitan areas, nearly 61 percent, while the rest are in rural or semirural areas,” often financially vulnerable hospitals in cities that tend to serve communities of poor and working-class people.
Trump ended the Affordable Care Act
Winbash continues. “Trump’s Republican Party also refused to extend Biden-era Affordable Care Act enhanced premium tax credits, which caused enrollment for ACA insurance to drop by about 4.2 million people as of February 2026. Insurers that participate in the program jacked prices so high that enrollees faced an average 114 percent increase just to stay with the same plan as the year before; they have proposed a double-digit increase for next year, too, with a median increase of 14 percent for 2027.”
Hospitals are sending patients massive bills just when they can’t afford them and even suing them for payments, Winbash notes.
There’s more bad news.
Winbash continues. “The services hospitals typically cut first are pediatric, maternity, and psychiatric units as well as home health care, all of which typically do not make hospitals as much money as other divisions, Protect our Care’s Director of Policy Programs Vaishu Jawahar told the Prospect. With more cuts on the way, however, more hospitals are converting to emergency-only service centers.”
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The Crisis of Care Work
Robert Kuttner focuses on “the crisis of care work in an article for The American Prospect “(https://prospect.org/2026/07/21/crisis-of-care-work-trump-tps-haitians) .
His contention is that “The end of Temporary Protected Status and Trump’s budget cuts make a bad situation worse.”
Examples of the non-professionals who serve the sick.
Those who serve the sick “come from Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Uganda, Jamaica, the Philippines, and dozens of other nations. They serve people who may be aging, frail, sick, disabled, dying; often frightened, sometimes angry and unappreciative.
“They bathe their clients, change adult diapers, supervise medications, and provide companionship in relationships that are intimate as well as professional. Their compassion can be ennobling.
“These are the people Donald Trump hates.
Growing shortage of care workers as funds are cut
“America today faces a worsening shortage of care workers, as the population ages, needs expand, and deportations increase. Too few people are willing to work for low pay in nursing homes, hospice care, home care, and as personal care attendants for people with disabilities. These jobs start at $20 an hour or less, and max out at around $25 for experienced people.
Care workers are both skilled and kind
“Anyone who has personally encountered care workers notices that despite the low pay, they tend to be both skilled and kind. The label, care, is exactly the right term. In my own experience with loved ones reliant on nurses and aides, most care workers are deeply caring.
Government has paid too little for much of care work
Kuttner points out, “Care work is heavily funded by government, except for a minority of affluent clients who can self-pay. Hospice care is financed by Medicare. Long-term nursing home care is mostly reimbursed by Medicaid. Care that supports independent living for people with disabilities is funded by Medicaid or the VA. Home care is underwritten by several agencies.
“All of these sources of public funding are barely adequate to the need, and that severely limits the room for better pay. And all are under further threat from Trump
budget cuts as well as mass deportations.
Unions have pressed for improved benefits for care workers
“In heavily Democratic states, the strategy of the labor movement and other advocates has been to press allies in government to allocate more budget for reimbursements, typically through Medicaid, which in turn can translate into better pay. Unions also organize workers directly. This has had only limited success because of other financial demands on Medicaid.
“SEIU has focused on nursing home workers. In Massachusetts, modest increases in Medicaid funding have created a bit more space to press for higher wages. SEIU’s big health local 1199 has organized certified nursing assistants in about 9 percent of Massachusetts nursing homes. According to Massachusetts SEIU leaders, CNAs in unionized nursing homes start at around $22-$23 an hour. That union premium makes life better for these workers but is far from sufficient to increase worker supply.”
Trump’s war on immigrants cuts care service
Kuttner observes that “TRUMP’S WAR ON IMMIGRANTS has cut deeply into the care workforce. The strategy of using ICE to intimidate immigrant workers into self-deporting, even when they currently have legal work status, is all too effective.”
Trump’s ends Temporary Protect Status adding to the shortage
“Separately,” Kuttner writes, “Trump has been systematically ending a legal immigration system called Temporary Protected Status. When Trump’s second term began, TPS was protecting some 1.3 million people facing various perils in their home countries. However, Trump has already ended TPS for people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Honduras, Liberia, Nepal, Nicaragua, and for most Venezuelans.
“Ai-jen Poo, the founder of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the coalition Caring Across Generations, told me, “The end of Haitian TPS will be devastating for hundreds of thousands of families who rely upon Haitian care workers. Providers will close their doors, jobs will be lost—for citizens as well as immigrants. The entire industry was already buckling under the pressures of cuts to Medicaid, and high workforce turnover due to low wages. At a moment when the need for care is surging, particularly on the part of our growing aging population, we should be expanding and strengthening our care workforce, not gutting it with cruel and misguided policy.”
Solutions?
Kuttner sees two long-term solutions. “First, we need massive investment in caregiving work, so that different categories of care are not reliant on a patchwork of chronically inadequate funding. Second, the war on immigrants needs to end.” Both have a chance only when Trump’s presidency ends.
“After Trump finally leaves office, Congress could also resume its efforts to enact comprehensive immigration reform, which was fast-tracked for passage in early 2018 until Trump decided that he’d prefer to use immigration as a political cudgel and persuaded key Republicans to oppose it. Comprehensive immigration reform would regularize the status of long-term undocumented residents who have stayed out of trouble, give legal status to ‘Dreamers’ who were brought to the U.S. as children, and crack down on employers who hire people not entitled to work.”
“Congress should revise the law so that admission of asylum seekers and refugees is mandatory, not optional; and shift judicial review to the independent judiciary established in the Constitution.
“America has plenty of immigrants who want to work in the care economy. We should welcome that workforce and pay them decently.”
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Concluding thoughts
Trump has made the already inadequate U.S. healthcare system far worse than it has been. His supporters, perhaps one-third of the population, have gone along with him as they have Trump’s other priorities. His rich and well-to-do followers like the tax cuts, deregulation, and pro-fossil-fuel energy policy.
He and his administration do all this because they are ideologically opposed to programs and policies that give benefits to ordinary Americans. To top it off, Trump falsely believes in his ability to make the best decisions.
Fortunately for democracy’s future, Trump’s poll rankings are low, Republicans are losing elections, his Iran War is highly unpopular, and he is having trouble getting his candidates confirmed by the Senate. Meanwhile, as this post shows, he is doing a great deal of harm. But there is light at the end of this dark time.
Trump cares less that his policies contribute to global warming
Bob and Arlene Sheak
July 13, 2026
I – There is an option to fossil fuels
Ezra Klein considers the very good and the very bad news on climate crisis (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html).
“Here’s the good news: Green energy is getting better and cheaper, faster than we had ever dared hope.”
“In April, the energy think tank Ember found that all of the new electricity demand around the world in 2025 was met with green power. That is wild.”
Klein quotes Bill McKibben. “The stuff that we spent my whole lifetime calling alternative energy from the sun and the wind is now the obvious, common sense, straightforward way to produce power. Sometime earlier this decade, we passed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce energy from the sun and the wind than from setting stuff on fire.”
McKibben –
“Australia is now producing so much solar power and wind power that in the middle of the day, they have more than they need. So they’re trying to get people to switch some of their demand to the middle of the day. The way that they’re doing it is saying to Australians: You get free electricity between noon and 3 p.m.”
“But they’re also out there buying storage batteries, which are now cheap, so they can fill them up in the afternoon and run the household at night. That’s a miracle.”
McKibben continues.
“Half of America, 180 million people, live at the same latitude as Australia.
“But here’s something that will at least give you some sense of possibility: California is the place in the U.S. that committed most thoroughly to building out renewable energy.
“Sometime in the last two years, they’ve passed a real tipping point. Most days now in California, they produce more than 100 percent of their electricity for long stretches of the day from clean energy. When night falls on the Golden State, often now the biggest source of supply to the grid are batteries that have spent the afternoon soaking up excess sunshine.
“The bottom line is that California, the fourth largest economy in the world, is using 60 percent less natural gas to produce electricity than it was two years ago. That’s a very big shift in a very big place.”
“In April 2026, the global energy think tank Ember released their Global Electricity Review — as you know better than me, a big moment every year for energy wonks. It found that 75 percent of global electricity growth in 2025 was met by solar alone, which is amazing.
“Renewables were over one-third of power generation, for the first time overtaking coal, and — I found this kind of wild — I think it defies a lot of people’s expectations — in 2025, in China and India, fossil fuel generation fell for the first time.”
The bad news
“But here is the bad news: Climate change is accelerating. We’re discovering new ways that the climate system is more fragile, more sensitive to emissions, than we previously had thought.”
II – Heat waves would be virtually impossible without “climate change”
This is the central point of Raymond Zhong’s New York Times’ article (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/03/climate/heat-wave-us-canada-climate-change.html}. Zhong reports on climate and environmental issues for The Times.
He writes, “Heat and humidity as severe, prolonged and far-reaching as this week’s would have been ‘virtually impossible’ in the Northeast and eastern Canada before humans began warming the planet, a team of scientists said on Friday.”
Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the burning of oil, gas and coal have trapped more of the sun’s heat at Earth’s surface, raising temperatures worldwide for more than a century. Summer hot spells are nothing new, but because of the excess heat around the planet caused by global warming, they can produce higher temperatures today than they once did.”
III – Heat waves in Europe
Chris Walker reports for Truthout on a Study: Europe Heat Wave “Virtually Impossible” Without Human-Made Climate Change,” June 30, 2026
(https://truthout.org/articles/study-europe-heat-wave-impossible-without-human-made-climate-change).
Chris Walker is a news writer at Truthout, based in Madison, Wisconsin. Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues of the day and their impact on people. He can be found on most social media platforms under the handle @thatchriswalker.
Here’s some of what he reports.
“A recently published study finds that the current heat wave embroiling Europe would be ‘virtually impossible’ were it not for human-made climate change.”
“The study from World Weather Attribution notes that, over the regions of the continent they examined, this heat wave is the most severe that has ever been seen, with nearly half of the cities and geographical areas observed breaking heat stress records. Heat stress occurs when the body is unable to cool itself through sweating.”
“Climate change is to blame” for the heat wave that Europeans experienced, said Theo Keeping, co-author of the study and research associate at Imperial College London. ‘This heat wave would have been virtually impossible even 50 years ago without human-caused climate change.’”
Bottom of Form
Walker continues. “World Weather Attribution studied more than 800 cities in Europe. Of those areas, 45 percent have recorded or are forecast to report their highest heat stress levels ever for the late June period, the organization said.
“Greenhouse gas emissions emanating from the burning of fossil fuels, leading to climate change, are to blame, the report said.”
Europe’s Heat Waves Melt the Alps’ Glaciers
Raymond Zhon and Mira Rajanasakul report on this example of global warming’s efects (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/02/climate/europe-heat-waves-melting-glaciers.html). Raymond Zhong reports on climate and environmental issues for The Times. Mira Rojanasakul is a Times reporter who uses data and graphics to cover climate and the environment.”
They report, “Europe’s recent heat waves erased the snow atop Switzerland’s glaciers far earlier in the year than normal, exposing bare ice that could melt away in extraordinary volumes in the coming months.
“‘We are now in a state where we should normally be in August,’ said Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at the Swiss university ETH Zurich. ‘It is really a worrying situation.’”
“The glaciers of the Alps supply water across Europe for drinking, farming, generating hydropower and cooling nuclear plants. Each winter, fresh snow piles up on the glaciers, shielding them from the sun in the spring. But once the snow has melted, the ice itself begins to disappear, and the water is effectively lost to the glacier forever. That leaves less water for future use, bringing closer the day when water in Europe becomes an erratic resource.
“‘It’s not something that is just in 100 years or so,” Dr. Huss said. ‘It’s in 10, 20 years from now.’”
“Switzerland’s glaciers started this spring with 25 percent less snow than the average from 2010 to 2020. Two hot spells then came in quick succession.
“Temperatures reached record highs across France, Britain, Germany, Switzerland and other nations, in an extended bout of severe heat that climate scientists said would not have been possible without the influence of global warming caused by humans.
“As a result, the total amount of snow and ice on Switzerland’s glaciers had shrunk back to its level from before last winter by June 29, a month sooner than normal, according to scientists’ estimates. Only in 2022, another record-hot year for Europe, was that milestone crossed earlier, by just three days.”
IV – Trump’s policies worsens global warming: Examples
Investing in coal plants
The burning of fossil fuels is the primary source of global warming. Ajani Stilla reports on how Trump and his administration ignore this well-established scientific fact and continue to invest in coal, the most polluting of the fossil fuels
(https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18062026/trump-administration-funds-coal-plants-with-repeated-violations). Stilla’s article was published on June 18, 2026.
Stilla writes, “At least three of the 12 coal plants the Trump administration funded have been repeatedly cited for violating environmental regulations, amplifying public-health concerns.”
Here’s an example.
“In 2023, after years of pollution, equipment failures and health concerns, the Cumberland Fossil Plant in Tennessee was slated to close within the decade.
The coal-fired plant had been part of a multibillion-dollar settlement in 2011 after its operator, the Tennessee Valley Authority, failed to install pollution control technology a decade earlier. Regulators cited the plant for more air-pollution violations in 2017 and 2023. TVA said it would shutter Cumberland’s units in 2026 and 2028.
“Then the Trump administration replaced four of TVA’s board members, and the agency reneged on its retirement plan in February. Now, TVA has a federal pledge for $46 million to extend Cumberland’s lifespan—part of a nationwide push by President Donald Trump to keep older coal plants running.
“Cumberland is one of at least three of the 12 plants receiving the Department of Energy grants that have been repeatedly cited for violating the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, or both, an Inside Climate News review found. The other two are Grand River Energy Center in Oklahoma and the Roxboro Steam Electric Plant in North Carolina, cited for various environmental violations, such as releasing wastewater with excess pollutants, over the past decade.”
Stilla quotes Maggie Shober, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy’s research director, who told her that “retiring coal plants is ‘one of our primary ways’ to combat pollution, climate change and associated health harms. Extending their operations, she said, ‘will make climate change happen faster and will make it worse over the long-term.’”
“Courtney Bernhardt, research director for the watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project, said funding plants with a record of violations aligns with Trump’s second-term policies.
“‘I’m not surprised—but I am disturbed,’ Bernhardt said in an email. ‘The Trump administration seems to disregard the compliance status of many of the plants that they’re trying to put forward, and they’re trying to, at the same time, weaken permitting requirements for the energy sector.’”
Paying energy corporations to close wind farms
-Maxine Joselow reports that the “Trump administration paid Duke Energy $129 million to halt an offshore wind farm” project (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/climate/trump-offshore-wind-duke-energy.html). Wind energy is a relatively clean source of energy.
Joselow writes, “The Trump administration on Monday said it would pay Duke Energy $129 million to abandon its plans to build an offshore wind farm off North Carolina.”
Here’s more from Joselow’s report.
“It was the fourth such deal struck by the administration to throttle the development of offshore wind power, a source of renewable energy that President Trump has disparaged for decades.
“Under the agreement, Duke Energy would surrender its lease in federal waters for a wind farm that was planned in the Carolina Long Bay area, roughly 15 to 22 miles off southeastern North Carolina. The project was in the early stages of development and construction had not yet begun.
“The government plans to reimburse Duke Energy $129 million, slightly less than the amount that the utility paid for the lease under the Biden administration. Duke Energy would then reinvest that money in other sources of energy favored by the Trump administration, which could include new nuclear and natural gas projects, according to the utility.
“Scientists and environmentalists say that offshore wind farms could play a crucial role in the fight against climate change. Unlike burning fossil fuels, wind turbines do not generate any of the greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming the planet. And unlike large-scale solar farms, they do not take up vast amounts of valuable land.
Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum “repeated his earlier claims that offshore wind farms threaten national security. Last year, the Interior Department cited those concerns when ordering a halt to the construction of five other wind farms off the East Coast, saying their spinning turbines could interfere with military radar. But several federal judges struck down the stop-work orders, saying they were unpersuaded by the administration’s arguments.
“After its losses in court, the administration pivoted to a new strategy: paying developers to walk away from offshore wind projects. It struck the first such deal in March with the French energy company TotalEnergies.
“That deal saw the government pay TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to abandon plans to build two wind farms, one off New York and the other in the same area off North Carolina. Seven Democratic-controlled states have sued the administration over that agreement, calling it an illegal use of taxpayer dollars.
“The latest deal with Duke Energy means the government has so far committed to spend more than $2.5 billion to get companies to terminate their offshore wind leases.”
The Trump Administration Taps Climate Science Critic to Oversee Flagship Report
Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer report on this
(https://www.nytimes.co/2026/07/10/climate/trump-climate-assessment-wielicki.html).
They write, “The Trump administration has appointed a critic of mainstream climate science to oversee the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change affects the United States.
“Matthew M. Wielicki is a former geochemist at the University of Alabama with no formal training in climate science. On social media and podcasts, he frequently argues that the mainstream scientific view on climate change is too dire and overlooks the positive effects of a warming planet.
“Now Dr. Wielicki is leading the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which compiles the National Climate Assessment, a sweeping report required by Congress that details the effects of rising temperatures in every region of the country. Policymakers, communities and industries use it to plan for the future.
“The report is typically published every few years. But last spring, the administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been working on the next update.
“The last climate assessment, published in 2023, found that human-caused global warming was supercharging wildfires in the West, droughts in the Great Plains and heat waves from coast to coast.
“President Trump has called climate change a ‘hoax,’ and his administration has dismantled climate initiatives across the federal government. Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, has called for overhauling the Global Change Research Program, saying its findings have been used to justify environmental lawsuits that constrained government actions.”
“Politico first reported on Dr. Wielicki’s appointment. Reached by phone on Friday, Dr. Wielicki said he could not speak to reporters without permission from the White House, which declined to make him available.”
“In 2023, Dr. Wielicki resigned from his untenured position as an assistant professor of geosciences at the University of Alabama. He wrote on social media at the time that earth scientists had embraced a ‘false ‘climate emergency’ narrative’ and that academia had been overrun with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.”
But the evidence says otherwise.
“The planet has already warmed roughly 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, on average. Global sea levels have risen about 8 to 9 inches since the 19th century, with some parts of the U.S. coast seeing even higher rates, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Some regions of the Southeast and Gulf Coast have seen a five to tenfold increase in coastal flooding at high tide as a result, the agency has said. Globally, rising seas could inundate large swaths of low-lying island nations this century under even moderate warming, according to the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international assessment compiled by hundreds of scientists around the world. Some smaller coastal villages have already relocated to higher ground.
“‘The reality is that accelerating sea level rise is already having impacts all around the world, including along the U.S. East Coast,’ said Rachel Cleetus, the senior policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group.
“‘We need good science to help us get ready for these impacts that are coming our way instead of putting our heads in the sand and denying it’s happening, and as a result, putting more people’s lives and safety at risk,’ said Dr. Cleetus, who was among the scientists the Trump administration dismissed from working on the next climate assessment.”
“Meade Krosby, a principal scientist at the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group and a former contributor to the assessment who was also dismissed by the Trump administration, said she worried that the next version of the report would include false or misleading information.
“‘Communities are experiencing unprecedented heat and wildfires and floods and other climate risks that are being driven by the burning of fossil fuels, and they really need credible tools and resources right now to help them respond, not a collection of climate denial talking points,’ Dr. Krosby said.”
“The U.S. Global Change Research Program was established by Congress in 1990 and coordinates environmental research among 15 federal agencies.
“During Mr. Trump’s first term, his administration published the fourth climate assessment on the day after Thanksgiving in 2018, in an apparent attempt to minimize attention. But The New York Times and other media outlets still highlighted its conclusion that global warming posed an imminent threat to the economy, environment and public health. The Biden administration released the fifth climate assessment in 2023.
“After the Trump administration dismissed the scientists who had been working on what would be the sixth assessment, two major scientific groups
said they would carry on a large portion of that work independently. The groups, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, said they planned to publish a collection of climate research in their peer-reviewed journals to help inform future assessments”
V -What to expect in the future
Mark Hertsgaard writes on global warming becoming ever more dangerous, The Nation, June 22, 2026 (https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/this-summers-heat-is-only-the-beginning). Here’s some of what he writes.
“This week, a brutal heat wave is shattering heat records in Europe. But it’s worth recalling however that last summer the same thing happened in Asia: China, Japan, and Korea suffered their hottest summers on record in 2025, the World Meteorological Organization noted in a new report. Now it’s France’s turn. And maybe Belgium, Spain, and Britain’s as well. As global warming driven mainly by burning fossil fuels continues to intensify, scientists say that record breaking heat will become increasingly frequent throughout the world.
“Temperatures in France this week have been the hottest ever recorded, exceeding 44 degrees Celsius (112 degrees Fahrenheit) on June 23. French authorities placed more than half the country on ‘red alert’ and warned that the extreme heat would continue for days to come, Agence France-Presse reported. The Guardian quoted the French health minister explaining that ‘many people are going to suffer, because bodies suffer from an accumulation of high temperatures.’”
Hersgaard continues. “The science is unequivocal: Until fossil fuels are phased out, global temperatures will keep going up and up and up. Though not much discussed these days, what our civilization decides to do about that is among the most consequential questions of our time.”
Record Heat Waves Are Preview of Our Future on a Warming Planet
Writer David Wallace-Wells was interviewed on Democracy Now on this topic
(https://www.democracynow.2026/7/6/david_wallace_wells_climate_heat_wave). He is a New York Times opinion writer and a columnist for The New York Times Magazine.
Host Amy Goodman opens with unsettling news.
AMY GOODMAN:
“This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn now to the record-breaking heat wave that scorched the northeastern United States over July Fourth weekend.
“At least 25 people are dead in New Jersey due to extreme heat and humidity after a massive heat dome settled over the eastern half of the U.S., bringing triple-digit temperatures, disrupting travel and prompting emergency measures for millions of people. Many of those who died were found in homes with no air conditioning, on the street and in park cars, according to officials in New Jersey.
“More than 185 million people — more than half of U.S. residents — were under heat alerts over the weekend, with extreme weather forcing the cancellation of Independence Day events in states from Alabama to Connecticut. Severe weather forced the cancellation of the Great American State Fair, a two-hour evacuation of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and delayed President Trump’s Fourth of July speech. Here in New York area, the heat wave shattered records dating back nearly 60 years. Central Park reached 100 degrees, subway stations registered even higher temperatures, while 17,000 customers lost power. This weekend’s North American heat wave follows a record-shattering European heat wave that’s already been blamed for thousands of heat-related deaths across Spain, France and
Germany.
“Climate scientists say the burning of fossil fuels by humans is the primary cause of global warming and the reason why heat waves are becoming longer, hotter and more frequent.”
Excerpts from the interview
——————————————–
AMY GOODMAN: For more on the extreme weather here and around the world, we’re joined in studio by David Wallace-Wells, New York Times opinion writer, columnist for The New York Times Magazine, his recent piece headlined ‘We Need to Retrofit the Planet. The Heat Wave Proves It.’ He’s also author of the book The Uninhabitable Earth.
“Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, David. Start off by talking about what’s happening here. And if you can put it in the context of climate change?
“DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, the planet is now warmer than it has ever been in modern human history, basically since the agricultural revolution 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. We’re already outside the window of temperatures that enclose the entire history of human civilization. And we are warming more rapidly than the planet has ever warmed in its history, including periods where warming produced deaths of 50 to 90% of all life on Earth.
“So, we’re running a pretty radical experiment, and things are changing pretty rapidly. Just over the last couple of decades, we’ve seen the pace of warming accelerate, and we’ve seen the chances of heat waves like the one that we saw in Europe grow as much as a hundredfold more likely. So, just since the 2003 heat wave, which killed tens of thousands of people in Europe, a heat wave like the one that we just saw in Europe has gotten a hundred times more likely.
“There are a lot of questions about why we haven’t prepared adequately for these heat waves, and we should be asking them and doing more to protect ourselves in the future. But I think the baseline observation that we have to make is that things are moving incredibly quickly, and that makes it incredibly hard for us to change our ways.”
“In the U.S., we’re not producing nearly as much of that technology. We are building out our green energy infrastructure relatively quickly, but we’re not doing nearly enough to bring emissions down into line with our targets. And that means that we’re heading up against some really terrifying climate thresholds.
AMY GOODMAN: What has the Trump administration done?
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: “They’ve gone to war with clean energy and tried to undermine it everywhere that they could. They’ve literally bought off wind projects, so that those will not go forward. They’ve taken an ax to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which was essentially a climate bill, and tried to undo all of the tax incentives that were in it to subsidize clean energy. And they’ve done very little to help the problem of interconnection and the grid, which are so essential to the buildout of clean energy in America.
“They haven’t totally succeeded. Last year, 90-plus percent of new energy infrastructure was green. But they’re doing everything they can to put their hand on the needle and change the direction of policy and make America more like a petrostate and less like the electrostate that China is trying to be.
AMY GOODMAN: So, how can the U.S. be a leader on green energy?
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, we need to spend considerably more particularly on these technologies, the grid and interconnection, so that the developers who are willing and ready to build out solar farms, in particular, can build them quickly and can install them and make them — make that power available to American citizens. When you saw something like that happen in Australia over the last couple of years, they’re now offering their citizens three hours of free electricity every single day, because the buildout has been rapid and the infrastructure alongside it has been so successful.
….
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: One of the more optimistic things that’s happened in the last few years, though, is that countries in the Global South, across sub-Saharan Africa, across South Asia, have actually taken decarbonization into their own hands and started building out new green energy capacity on their own, even without help from the Global North, which was long assumed to be necessary. They’ve done that in part because that technology is so cheap, coming from China, that they’re able to afford it themselves. And you’ve seen some of the most rapid uptake of solar power, in particular, in the world’s developing countries, much faster even than in the Global North, where we expected it to be the fastest.
AMY GOODMAN: The Manhattan Project developed the U.S. atomic bomb. What would a Manhattan Project for renewable energy look like?
DAVID WALLACE-WELLS: Well, the interesting thing about the energy sector is that we have the technology that we need to get a lot more progress than we have right now. Solar and wind and batteries are most of the solution. They’re not the entire solution, but geothermal needs to be promoted considerably more.
The things that I’m more worried about are heavy industry and agriculture, which are big parts of the carbon emissions puzzle, which we don’t yet have quite satisfying solutions for. And in fact, some of the things that we thought were going to be quite successful, especially in agriculture, have proven much less useful over the last few years, not panning out like we hoped. So, I think we need considerable R&D in those areas, and money just flowing into the system on the renewable side to make sure that the technology that we have today actually gets implemented at scale and pace.
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Concluding thoughts
There appears to be no hope on curtailing or reversing global warming as long as Trump is president, the Republican Party retains control of Congress, corporations continue their production and use of fossil fuels, and the public relies on fossil-fuel generated energy. While cleaner energy based on solar, wind, and geothermal, along with the development of new storage batteries, are becoming more available, they still represent only a small percentage of energy sources. Is it too late?
Sleepy Donald and the Misbegotten Iran War
Bob and Arlene Sheak, June 23, 2026
I – Trump’s health
There are questions about his mental and physical health and thus his ability to be President. He rants from his social media platform early in the morning. He tends to fall asleep at his administration’s events.
Jem Bartholomew, considers this issue of Trump’s sleepiness in an article titled “Sleepy Trump” for the Columbia Journalism Review, June 15 2026, and what it reveals about the president’s mental and physical health (https://www.cjr.org/the_medea_today/sleepy-trump-discourse-health-reveal-conceal-oval-office-memorial-day-raskin-tapper-schiller-mtg-php). Here are a few excerpts.
He writes, “Donald Trump has seemed extremely sleepy lately. He appeared to doze in a cabinet meeting, caught forty winks during a meeting in the Oval Office, nodded off at a Memorial Day event, and fell into a light snooze during the NBA finals.”
Here’ are two of several other points Bartholomew makes. One, he writes “you’ve probably seen the footage from a June 4 event on what is being called ‘beautiful, clean coal,’ as Trump’s posture slumps, his eyelids droop, and he raises his eyebrows in what seems like a strained attempt to stay awake and pay attention.” Two, “Dan Diamond of the Washington Post wrote last month that Trump ‘now receives some of the same questions that dogged’ his predecessor, Joe Biden: ‘namely, whether he is mentally and physically fit to perform the duties of commander in chief.’”
II – Trump’s war of choice in Iran
He launched the war with huge bombing attacks without consulting Congress or considering the UN Charter’s views on what makes a war lawful. The Charter says this:
“
The United Nations was established in 1945 to prevent war and promote peace, human rights, and social progress. Its Charter emphasizes that all member states must settle disputes by peaceful means and refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, except in cases of self-defense or when acting under Security Council authorization (UN Charter Articles 1 and 2.”
Trump’s war raise questions about the legality of the war he started and his mental state.
Trump believed that the war was necessary to keep Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, although there was no evidence they were doing this or had intentions of building such a weapon. Nonetheless, his assumptions about the upcoming war were justified by Trump’s false beliefs.
He falsely believed it would be an easy war to win, and that Iranian citizens would rise and transform their oppressive government. The number of Iranian casualties did not matter to him. He expected there would be few if any American casualties. He gave little thought to the costs of the war or its domestic economic effects.
The relevance of the Strait of Hormuz was absent in his war impulses.
III – Trump chooses to start the war
The US and Israel launched a full-scale war on Iran on February 28, 2026.
Damian Murphy, Allison McManus, Andrew Miller, critically analyze Trump’s Iran War after the first week of the war, March 5, 2026 (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-case-against-trumps-war-choice-in-iran).
“In starting war with Iran,” they write, “President Trump and his administration have knowingly put service members in harm’s way, inflicted suffering on innocent civilians, and left the American people to bear the financial burden of this needless conflict.”
“President Donald Trump has dragged the United States into a needless war with Iran—and one with no clear end. His war has already exacted a steep human toll: Six American service members are dead, and President Trump has suggested more will follow. At the same time, hundreds of Iranian civilians [soon to be thousands], including children, have been killed in Operation Epic Fury strikes. And for what? The war promises to be a strategic disaster that risks long-term instability, with no clear strategy to mitigate Iran’s incentive for nuclear weaponization or establish a pathway to democracy.
“Who foots the bill for this needless, immoral war? The American taxpayer.” The journalists make their argument in three points. Bear in mind, they are writing this only after a week of the war has transpired.
IV – The reality of the war after the first week
Here are examples of the evidence compiled by Murphy, McManus, and Miller.
The war had already taken a massive human toll
“On March 1, 2026, the U.S. Department of Defense acknowledged that four U.S. Army Reserve soldiers—Capt. Cody A. Khork, Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, and Sgt. Declan J. Coady—had been killed in an Iranian drone attack in Kuwait. The death toll has since risen to six U.S. service members, and at least another 18 have been seriously wounded since the start of operations on February 28. Without a doubt, these service men and women—fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters—made the ultimate sacrifice in service to the nation. The deceased soldiers had been assigned ‘to a post with woefully inadequate protection in place, described as a ‘makeshift office space.’ One source put it bluntly, ‘We basically had no drone defeat capability.’”
“While the war has killed many officials in Iran’s brutal regime, the Iranian people—on whose behalf Trump said, at least at one point, that he was engaging in war—have already suffered greatly as well. The Iranian Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) has reported that civilian fatalities exceed 1,000, with more than 180 children among the casualties. One strike on March 1 hit a school for young girls, killing as many as 175 children….”
“As the war continues and Iran expands its retaliatory strikes, casualties in other nations will mount as well. Already, deaths have been reported in Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iraq, and Oman.”
The war had cost billions already, and the costs would continue to rise every day.
Operation Epic Fury has already cost U.S. taxpayers more than $5 billion in its first few days—a figure that includes the expense of conducting massive missile barrages, repositioning forces, and the loss of three F-15 fighter jets. These costs increase by the day: Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), who sits on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, has estimated the war costs around $1 billion daily.”
The war has upended global energy markets and risks long-term economic harm
“The war in Iran has also upended global energy markets and created volatility in financial markets. Iran plays a disproportionately large role in the global energy system, not only because of its massive crude oil and natural gas production but because of its strategic position along the Strait of Hormuz. About one-fifth of the world’s oil, one-fifth of the world’s natural gas, and one-third of global trade in urea—the most widely used nitrogen fertilizer—usually pass through the choke point daily.”
The war subverts American democracy
“Trump has presented neither a logical nor a compelling rationale for a campaign that entails serious risks to American service members, U.S. interests, and innocent civilians across the Middle East. This is not only a strategic failure; the president’s refusal to come to Congress to authorize this war plainly undermines the U.S. constitution. Trump’s contempt for Congress’ constitutionally mandated role denies the American people a meaningful say in decisions of war and peace—particularly egregious when 59 percent of Americans disapprove of the war. This is not just a violation of process but a subversion of democracy itself: Members of Congress are the people’s representatives, giving voice to the full diversity of interests and perspectives in the country.”
V – Recent estimates of the costs of the war
The Costs of the Iran War: Thousands of Lives and Billions of Dollars
Edward Wong and Aruni Soni report recently on tentative agreements and the costs of the Iran War, pointing out that it has already taken thousand of live and led to billions in costs (https://www.nytimes/com/2026/06/19/us/politics/iran-war-costs-death.html).
There seems to have been US-Iranian agreement to cease hostilities on June 17.
“The war against Iran lasted just over 15 weeks before a preliminary U.S.-Iranian peace deal was reached this week. But the human and economic toll mounted rapidly, with consequences far beyond the region.”
Trump looked for a ceasefire after pressure mounted at home and abroad.
Wong and Soni write, “Facing pressure at home and abroad, President Trump announced on Monday that he and Vice President JD Vance had electronically signed a document the previous day with the Iranians formally ending the war. The conflict began on Feb. 28 when the United States and Israel attacked Iran.
“On Wednesday, the president signed the agreement again in France at the Palace of Versailles, where an ill-fated treaty was concluded to end World War I more than a century ago.
The costs of the war to the United States, estimated at $132 billion overall, are still being tallied as a 60-day period for further negotiations begins. Here is what we know, according to the report by Wong and Soni.
Death Toll
“About 3,500 Iranians have been killed in the war, according to an Iranian government agency. Israel says 26 Israelis have been killed. Thousands of people in both countries have been injured.
“The U.S. military says 13 of its members have been killed.”
“In the deadliest known civilian casualty incident, a U.S. missile strike demolished an Iranian school, killing at least 175 people on the first day of the war, according to Iranian officials.”
Financial Costs
“Iran’s economy was already deeply troubled before the war. But now it is free fall. Prices for food and other basic goods have surged, and daily life is a struggle.
“The scale of devastation has been great, with hundreds of schools and health care facilities damaged or destroyed in the war, according to the Iranian Red Crescent Society, the country’s primary humanitarian relief organization.
“For U.S. taxpayers and consumers, the cost of the war is at least $132 billion, according to Moody’s Analytics. That factors in military spending, rising energy and commodity prices and interest rates, said Mark Zandi, the company’s chief economist.
“A top Pentagon official told Congress last month that the cost had risen to around $29 billion for the military. That estimate did not include the price of repairing about a dozen U.S. bases in the region damaged by Iranian attacks.”
“The costs of repair and maintenance, as well as keeping carrier strike groups at sea, also need to be factored in. ‘It costs a lot of money to just keep everyone and all this apparatus deployed there,’ said Linda Bilmes, a public finance expert and senior lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. She added that the replacement costs of the enormous number of munitions that the U.S. military has expended will be much higher than the original purchasing costs.
Energy Prices
“Americans have paid roughly $60 billion more for gasoline and diesel since the conflict began as a result of higher prices, according to an Iran War Energy Cost Tracker from Brown University. That’s about an extra $460 per household. That number is still rising.
“When the United States and Israel started the war with Iran, Americans were paying, on average, $2.98 a gallon at the pump, according to AAA, a non-profit organization of motor clubs.
“Since then, gasoline prices have spiked regularly and are now around $4 a gallon.
“Oil prices surged when the Iranian military attacked some commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway to and from the energy producers of the Middle East. That effectively shut down the strait and disrupted the global flow of petroleum. Crude oil is the main ingredient for gasoline.”
The global benchmark for crude oil has dropped since a peace agreement framework was announced on Monday. It is currently near $80 a barrel. At one point in March, prices climbed to around $120 a barrel.
“Those high fuel prices have trickled down the chain and inflated many other costs tied to fuel, like airline fares and the transportation of commodities and manufactured goods.”
VI – US Voters have disapproved of this war and continue to do so
Julia Conley reports that “Poll Shows US Voters Have Disapproved of Trump’s War of Choice Against Iran from Beginning to End,” June 19, 2026 (https://www.commondreams.org/news/pollint-on-iran-war).
“Nearly two-thirds of respondents to an Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll taken from June 11-17 said they were unhappy with President Donald Trump’s handling of issues with Iran, which he began attacking as he insisted the country must not have enriched uranium that can be used to make a nuclear weapon and that the US must ‘destroy their missiles.’”
“The poll was in line with an analysis of eight reputable surveys that were taken in early March, just days after Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began the attacks—a decision Secretary of State Marco Rubio said was made by the Trump administration because the White House believed Iran would retaliate against bombing that Israel was intent on starting.
“Those surveys found that just 38% of voters approved of the military strikes against Iran in the days after they began, with polling expert G. Elliott Morris warning that “wars only get less popular” over time.”
“In the poll released Friday, 53% of voters said the US military action against Iran has gone “too far,” slightly down from 59% who said so in March. The poll was taken as the US released a memorandum of understanding with Iran and as the president indicated a retreat from the central demands he had made regarding Israel’s missiles and nuclear program, which Iranian officials have maintained is not for military purposes.
VII – Trump lost the war
Tom Nichols maintains that Trump has lost the war and he doesn’t realize it, The Atlantic, June 16, 2026 (https://www.theatlantic.com/2026/06/trump-G7-comments),
Nichols reports that the “president’s comments at the G7 summit revealed that he doesn’t understand the war he started—or the words that come out of his own mouth.”
“Donald Trump arrived in France yesterday for this morning’s G7 summit and promptly confirmed America’s capitulation to Iran. Instead of merely repeating the outlines of what looks to be a terrible peace deal, however, Trump made a series of statements so bizarre, even by his usual standards, that they raise the question of whether the president still understands the words that come out of his own mouth.
“The president began with a classic Trumpian move, daring his listeners to forget today what they knew yesterday. Just this winter, Trump had promised the Iranian people that the tyrants who ruled them would be gone. But now? ‘I never cared about regime change,’ he told reporters, waving away his failure to achieve a primary strategic goal by denying that it had ever been a goal at all.
“Things got a little weirder, however, when he described the Iranians who have stepped in to replace the regime leaders killed in U.S. strikes: ‘We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with.’
“‘They were strong people, smart people.’ he added. And then he dropped this remarkable claim: ‘They’re not radicalized, and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.’”
“Trump’s description of the current regime in Tehran as a bunch of swell guys was brewed in a heavy-duty vat of wishful thinking. It’s an extreme version of Trump’s tendency, when he’s been outplayed by powerful enemies, to describe his opponents as basically reasonable people.”
“Trump fared no better talking about the Iranian nuclear program. Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium exists largely because Trump unilaterally called off U.S. participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 agreement that was meant to prevent Iran from enriching uranium beyond minimal levels for civilian uses. After the U.S. and Israeli attacks last year, and yet more pounding during Operation Epic Fury, that uranium remains underground, either hidden in storage or buried beneath tons of rubble; some of it can likely be recovered and enriched for military uses. Trump has said, repeatedly, that Iran must hand it over.
“Until today.
“‘I call it the nuclear dust, their enriched material, right?’ Trump said. (Why he calls it this remains a mystery.) Does America still insist on its removal from Iran?
Well, maybe.
Trump said.
“‘You could make the case ‘Why are you even bothering?’ cause it’s not really valuable. It’s, you know, it’s probably half a million dollars’ worth. It’s not very valuable stuff, but I think psychologically we wanna get it.”
Nichols continues. “A regime that was once the epitome of evil is now a reasonable partner; nuclear material that once represented an existential threat to America might now sit in Iran forever; Syria and Iran and Israel and Lebanon will now do things that they would never do, just because he wants them to.
“None of this makes any sense, except as desperate rationalizations from a man who cannot face facts and admit defeat. Trump has always had a tenuous relationship with the truth, but evidence is mounting that on the most important questions of war and peace, the president of the United States seems to be losing his grip on reality itself.”
VIII – How Does Trump’s Deal with Iran Compare to Obama’s?
Ephrat Livni delves into this issue (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/world-middleeast/trump-obama-deals.html).
“President Trump has repeatedly said that any deal he made with Iran to curtail its nuclear program would be different from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that the Obama administration entered into in 2015.” Livni writes that Trump is “not wrong.”
Livni continues. “The current memorandum of understanding is a general agreement to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, putting off talks about Iran’s nuclear program for a subsequent round of negotiations. The Obama-era agreement, sometimes referred to as the J.C.P.O.A. or the Iran nuclear deal, was extremely detailed.” How do they compare at this point?
1 – “Who’s involved: The Obama-era deal involved Iran and the United States, and also China, France, Germany, Russia, Britain and the European Union. It addressed Iran’s nuclear program.
“The recently negotiated memorandum of understanding is an arrangement between Washington and Tehran that addresses the conflict that began with the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran in late February. It refers to the countries’ ‘allies in the current war’ but does not name them. It mentions Lebanon’s sovereignty, but not Israel or Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group that renewed fighting with Israel in March after the attack on Iran.
2 – Comprehensiveness –
“Iran’s nuclear program: The 2015 Iran nuclear deal was a comprehensive plan to address Iranian nuclear ambitions and ensure the country’s program was ‘exclusively peaceful.’ It was 18 pages long and accompanied by dozens of pages of additional details about specific elements of the nuclear program, monitoring, sanctions relief and more.
“The current memo is 14 paragraphs long. It states that Iran commits to not having a nuclear weapon but leaves all details to further negotiations in the 60 days following finalization, a time period that can be extended if both sides agree.”
3 – Sanctions on Iran. Sanctions relief for Iran: The J.C.P.O.A. [Obama’s deal] tied sanctions relief for Iran to specific goals related to its nuclear program. In the current agreement, the United States is explicitly committing to ‘terminate all types of sanctions’ against Iran, on ‘an agreed-upon schedule as part of the final deal.’ The J.C.P.O.A., meanwhile, was a final arrangement.”
4 – Other financial relief. “The current agreement commits the United States and regional partners to develop a plan for a fund with a minimum of $300 billion for reconstruction in Iran — an issue that was not on the table during previous negotiations, as they were not prompted by war. It also states that the United States will grant any required licenses, waivers and permissions needed for financial transactions related to the fund. Trump administration officials have said Iran will only receive these financial benefits and sanctions relief if it complies with its obligations under the agreements, but does not specify what precisely it must do to qualify for reconstruction funds.”
Concluding thoughts
This war is Trump’s war. The casualties, the economic devastation of Iran, the global turmoil and suffering, the extensive harms to the domestic economy, the humiliating US capitulation to Iran, all are attributable to Trump’s decision to start this war. It reflects his stupidity and narcissism. Now he has turned his attention to vanity projects in his hope of creating a legacy worth honoring, of subverting elections, and surrounding himself with cronies who are completely subservient to his presidential power.
Fortunately, his popularity is low and the democratic opposition to him is growing.
Trump is stupidly consistent in his disregard of science and global warming. We all pay the price
Bob Sheak, June 7, 2026
Introduction
It has long been established by experts and scientists that the carbon dioxide in the air and the resultant increase in global temperatures is produced overwhelmingly by fossil fuels. Even some of the major emitters of these climate pollutants have acknowledged as much, though most have not. The Harvard Gazette, among many others, confirmed this (Exxon scientists predicted global warming with ‘shocking skill and accuracy,’ Harvard researchers say — Harvard Gazette). Here’s are excerpts from the Gazette.
“Projections created internally by ExxonMobil starting in the late 1970s on the impact of fossil fuels on climate change were very accurate, even surpassing those of some academic and governmental scientists, according to an analysis published…in Science by a team of Harvard-led researchers. Despite those forecasts, team leaders say, the multinational energy giant continued to sow doubt about the gathering crisis.”
“In ‘Assessing ExxonMobil’s Global Warming Projections,’ researchers from Harvard and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research show for the first time the accuracy of previously unreported forecasts created by company scientists from 1977 through 2003. The Harvard team discovered that Exxon researchers created a series of remarkably reliable models and analyses projecting global warming from carbon dioxide emissions over the coming decades.”
Katie Surma at Inside Climate News also confirms the involvement of the fossil fuel corporations in their knowledge of the impact of their emissions in a May 14, 2025 report based on the internal company documents and other public records that “outline the fossil fuel industry’s decade-long campaign to mislead the public and avoid paying for their products’ harms (How the World’s Most Powerful Corporations Have Fought Accountability for Climate Change – Inside Climate News).
Such evidence does not sway the climate crisis deniers like Trump who ardently contend that there is no climate crisis and what we need to do is go ahead and maximize the production of coal, oil and gas, the principal sources of global warming.
Trump the denier
Trump not only has long disregarded any evidence but continues to claim that there is no climate crisis; it’s “fake,” as he said in a speech at the United Nation (Trump called climate change a ‘con job’ at the United Nations. Here are the facts and context | PBS News). This article is authored by Melina Walling and Seth Borenstein. Here is more of what they report.
Trump said. “‘This ‘climate change,’ it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.’”
Trump is totally wrong
Surma points out, “But the world U.S. President Donald Trump described in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday didn’t match the one many world leaders in the audience are contending with. Nor did it align with what scientists have long been observing.
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Unsurprisingly, Trump wants to fund the expansion of coal production
Maxine Joselow and Brad Plumer report on Trump’s offer of Funds for the first new U.S. coal plants in 13 Years (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/04/climate/trump-coal-plants-funding.html).
They write that the president announced a total of $700 million in federal money to reinvigorate the domestic coal industry, which has been in decline for decades.
“Of the new funding, $425 million would be used to upgrade and extend the life of 12 coal plants that otherwise might have closed in the coming years. To unlock this money, Mr. Trump invoked a Korean War-era law called the Defense Production Act, which gives the president sweeping powers to bolster domestic industries deemed essential to national security.
“The Energy Department separately announced that it would invest up to $350 million in coal projects, including funding for two companies to build the first new coal plants in the United States since 2013, one in Alaska and the other in West Virginia. Some money would also go to a power company that wants to restart a shuttered coal plant in Maryland.
“The money for the new coal plants would come from funds that Congress originally designated for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from polluting industries.”
Joselow and Plumer continue. “In recent months, the Energy Department has ordered units at five aging coal plants to stay open instead of shutting down as planned. And Mr. Trump has directed the Defense Department to buy more electricity from coal plants to power military installations nationwide.”
The president revealed his ignorance when on Thursday, June 4, “he said the move would help lower consumers’ energy bills, though experts say coal plants are more expensive to build and operate than gas plants and renewable energy.”
Unlike what the President and other deniers claim, there is no such thing as “clean coal.” “Experts say the phrase ‘clean coal’ is misleading, noting that coal plants produce more harmful air pollutants and planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions than do gas plants, solar panels and wind turbines. Burning coal emits mercury and other heavy metals linked to an array of health problems.”
“Despite the unfavorable economics of coal,” Joselow and Plumer write, “some proponents think the fuel could make a comeback if electricity demand from data centers continues to rise and the Environmental Protection Agency continues to relax pollution regulations that have significantly increased costs for operators.”
“Mr. Trump on Thursday also announced $75 million for a new coal export terminal in Oakland, Calif. City officials have tried for nearly a decade to block the terminal from being built, but courts have repeatedly sided with the developer, and the project is now set to move forward.”
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Unprecedented run of very hot weather
Bob Berwyn reports on a recent climate report that shows an “unprecedented run of global heat, Jan 13, 2026 (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13012026/multiple-reports-show-2025-extreme-global-heat”) …. Here’s some of what he writes.
“Several annual international climate reports released Tuesday indicate that relentless human-caused warming continued in 2025, especially in the oceans and at the poles.
“For the third year in a row, Earth’s average temperature ran close to 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than the climate that sustained human civilizations as the 20th century began, before fossil-fuel pollution started damaging the atmosphere.
“The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service report released Tuesday ranked 2025 as the third-warmest year on record, just a hair cooler than 2023 and within striking distance of 2024, the hottest year on record. Together, the past three years have averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, the first time any three-year stretch has crossed that threshold.”
‘Exceeding a three-year average of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is a milestone none of us wished to reach,” said Mauro Facchini, head of earth observation at the European Commission’s directorate general for defense industry and space.”
“At today’s pace of emissions, Copernicus scientists said, the world is on track to hit the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree Celsius limit permanently by the end of this decade, sooner than expected when the deal was signed.”
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NBC News reports on March 27, 2026, that the most recent evidence documents that Arctic sea ice hits its lowest winter level as unprecedented heat smashes records all over Earth
“The sea ice is crucial to Earth’s climate because without it reflecting sunlight, more heat energy goes into the oceans.
“Vital Arctic sea ice shrank to tie its lowest measured level for the winter, the season when ice grows, as a warming Earth shattered records across the continents.
“Arctic sea ice levels, especially in the summer, are crucial to Earth’s climate because without the ice reflecting sunlight, more heat energy goes into the oceans. Ice of all kinds around the poles acts as Earth’s refrigerator. Wildlife, such as polar bears and seals, also depend on sea ice. Lack of sea ice in the Arctic creates new shipping routes and in doing so causes geopolitical disruptions, making once-ignored places such as Greenland, more desirable.
“The shrinking Arctic sea ice was announced Thursday as temperatures broke March heat records across the United States, all over Mexico, in Australia, across Northern Africa and through parts of Northern Europe. Climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks extreme temperatures, called the extreme March temperatures ‘by far the most extreme heat event in world climatic history” and said on social media that the next few days would be “much worse.’
Sixteen states broke March temperature records in the past week or so, said weather historian Christ Burt. Twenty-seven locations had temperatures in the past week high enough to tie or surpass the hottest April day on record, including St. Louis, meteorologists said. Mexico has had thousands of records shattered, some of them warmer than the hottest May temperatures, but that’s nothing compared with what’s happening in Asia, where “dozens of thousands of monthly records” were smashed by 30 to 35 degrees (17 to 19 degrees Celsius) margins, Herrera said.”
Steady decline of sea ice
Each year Arctic sea ice grows over the cold winter and shrinks in the heat of the summer. This year the growth was so small that its peak, before starting to shrink, measured 5.52 million square miles (14.29 million square kilometers). That’s slightly smaller than last year’s 5.53 million square miles (14.31 million square kilometers), but the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which does the measuring, considers those two figures so close that it’s a tie.
This year’s sea ice area was about 525,000 square miles (1.36 million square kilometers) lower than the 1981 to 2010 winter average peak. That’s about twice the size of Texas.
“‘As temperatures have warmed and are continuing to warm, especially in the polar region, there is less opportunity to grow ice and it’s gonna tend to, on average, be less,’ said data center senior scientist Walt Meier. ‘It’s not like we are seeing a regime shift or anything. It’s more of a steady decline in the winter and at the maximum. And it also gives us a head start on the summer melt season. We’re starting from a lower number.”
Why it’s important
“The summer melt season — which precedes a September measurement known as the Arctic sea ice minimum — is ‘really the critical time,’ Meier said. One reason is that when there’s less white ice reflecting the strong summer sun, the oceans can absorb more heat. And when that happens, the Arctic warms closer to temperatures further south and atmospheric pressure changes. A leading theory — that is still controversial — says those Arctic changes then alter the movement and shape of the jet stream, which moves weather west to east and contributes to extreme weather bursts, he said.”
“On the other end of the planet, Antarctic sea ice is heavily affected by local weather and ocean factors. In February, Antarctica hit its annual low point and while it was smaller than the 30-year average, it was nowhere near the record low levels of the past three years, Meier said.”
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Trump wants to gag scientists
Bill McKibben writes on Trump’s efforts to “gag American Scientists When We Need The Most,” Common Dreams, June 1, 2026
(https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-silences-science). He coins the term “scilencing” to capture this situation. Here’s some of what he writes.
In late May, “the White House announced plans for a major tightening of political control over research grants. Instead of relying on the advice of expert panels as to which research should be funded, the new policy relies on political appointees. McKibben writes, “One or more senior political appointees designated by their agency head must conduct ‘a pre-issuance review’ of all discretionary grants, making sure they follow several principles, including to ‘demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.’
McKibben refers to Jeff Mervis at Science, who interviewed several observers of this Trump policy. Here are examples.
“‘What OMB [Office of Management and Budget] is proposing is not a reform of grants management,’ Elizabeth Ginexi, a former program officer at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), writes in a Substack post. ‘It is a vehicle for complete political control of science… over every stage of the federal science funding lifecycle.’ Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a leading critic of the Trump administration’s research policies, calls the proposal ‘a dystopian move that woulddestroy what remains of merit-based review.’”
McKibben points out, “The science the Trump administration really hates is climate science, because it threatens the ‘energy dominance’ that the White House has made its basic foreign and economic policy, not to mention the profits of the fossil fuel industry that has been such an attentive donor.”
He refers to the view of John Timmer, who wrote at Ars Technica:
“‘The result is a horror show for US science research. Not only is peer review made a secondary consideration, but the new rules would allow any federal agency to cancel any grant at any time based on the vague assertion that it isn’t in the ‘national interest.’ The document would also ban any grants on a number of culture war topics, limit international collaborations, and block spending on things like publishing papers and attending conferences.”
Some good news
McKibben sees some good news. Renewables in the form of solar panels and wind energy continue to grow. There is also progress in batteries that store energy when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. He refers to sources that document that “2025…was the first year the world installed more than a hundred gigawatts of battery storage, up 48% from the year before, and expected to grow another 46% this year.”
He continues. “And the possibilities are everywhere. Canary Media’s Julian Spector wrote last week, a new global report shows that these so-called ‘firm renewables’ (wind and sun coupled with batteries).”
“IRENA [International Renewable Energy Agency] looked at 252 solar projects that went online there in 2024 and found that many of them could be augmented with extra solar capacity and batteries to deliver power cheaper than the $100-per-megawatt-hour benchmark for new gas-fired plants. Almost all the modeled solar-battery plants could beat that cost for firm clean power 90% of the time; even at the higher reliability threshold of 99%, nearly half the projects remained competitive, and the lowest cost was $46 per megawatt-hour.”
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Is there time to save the planet?
C.J. Polychroniou argues that “a just transition is still within reach, June 1,2026
(https://truthout.org/articles/despite-climate-policy-setbacks-a-just-transition-is-still-within-reach). C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Here are excerpts from his article.
The present situation is dire
The evidence for rapid human-caused climate change keeps piling up, yet the world continues to flood the atmosphere with greenhouse gases amid a political backlash against the struggle for a future free of fossil fuels. Greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow, which means humans are continuing to make the climate crisis worse. Global average temperatures are expected to stay at record levels for the 2026-2030 period, exceeding preindustrial averages by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. As global warming speeds up, events like wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and floods will become more intense, and there will be a substantial increase in premature deaths, with the overwhelming majority occurring in low-and middle-income countries. The climate crisis presents a grave threat to life on Earth, although scientists have now scrapped the worst-case climate scenario on account of the expansion of renewable energy — which means there is still hope.
In the interview that follows, world-renowned economist Robert Pollin talks about the forces resisting green transition and highlights the results of a major study he and some of his co-workers at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) produced for advancing a green transition in Michigan. According to Pollin, there are simply no technical or economic considerations preventing Michigan and other U.S. states from achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. Pollin is distinguished professor of economics and co-director of PERI at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.”
The example of Michigan
Pollin is the lead author of a new and massive study on how the state of Michigan may become carbon neutral by 2050.
“In a 2022 report from Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) called the MI Healthy Climate Plan, the state established, as its central climate target, for Michigan to achieve carbon neutrality — i.e., net zero emissions — by 2050. Reaching zero emissions in Michigan by 2050 is a realistic target as long as the state maintains its commitment to achieve it. As a starting point, it is a major statement in itself that the state government set this emissions reduction target and is actually still taking it seriously. This isn’t easy under Trump 2.0.
“At present, about 85 percent of all energy consumed in Michigan’s economy comes from burning oil, coal and natural gas. The challenge is obvious: how to go from 85 percent dependence on fossil fuel energy sources as of now to zero, or near zero, fossil fuel consumption in 24 years.
“Our study works out a plan to accomplish this. The central feature of our plan is to build a clean energy infrastructure to supplant the existing fossil fuel–dominant infrastructure. Solar and wind power will be the state’s primary new energy sources, operating at a greatly upgraded level of energy efficiency. Geothermal and low-emissions bioenergy will be supplemental renewable sources. Michigan will also need to create large-scale battery storage capacity to account for the fact that solar and wind are intermittent energy sources — i.e., the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow all day everywhere.
“We estimate that the costs of these clean energy investments — including all renewables, efficiency upgrades, and battery storage — at about 2 percent of Michigan’s overall spending (GDP) per year every year between now and 2050. For 2027, this total spending would amount to about $15 billion. That’s obviously real money. But it is still only 2 percent of total spending in Michigan. That means that 98 percent of spending in the state can still go to everything else besides its green transition project.
“It is also critical to emphasize that, according to our estimates, these clean energy investments will generate an average of between 85,0000-100,000 jobs per year between 2027-2050 within Michigan, equal to about 2 percent of Michigan’s current workforce. These will include jobs across all occupations in the state, including, for example, roofers, machinists, accountants, office managers and assistants, truck drivers, and wind turbine engineers. This level of job creation will continue as long as the state continues to invest 2 percent of its GDP on clean energy projects.
A major component of the study revolves around a just transition for fossil fuel workers,, which “has to be a first-order priority of the overall green transition project, as the late, great labor and environmental leader Tony Mazzocchi first emphasized decades ago. This is a matter of simple economic justice. But without a generous just transition program fully embedded in the green transition project, it is also fair to expect that a large share of the workers and communities staring at major losses in their living standards will become green transition opponents. They then become fertile targets for exactly the type of brazen political opportunism practiced by Trump and company. Trump, for example, recently anointed himself the champion of the miners in ‘America’s beautiful clean coal industry.’”
“In Michigan, there are now about 21,000 people employed in the full range of fossil fuel-based industries, amounting to only 0.5 percent of the state’s current workforce. Virtually all of these jobs will be phased out between now and 2050 under the statewide green transition. If we assume that the phase-out proceeds in more or less steady increments between 2026 and 2050, and we also take account of workers voluntarily retiring over the next 25 years, we end up with only about 350 workers getting laid off every year. This compares with our lower-end estimate that about 85,000 jobs will be created in Michigan as long as the state invests 2 percent of GDP per year on clean energy projects.
“Still, each of the 350 workers who will be displaced every year needs to receive generous transitional support. This should include pension guarantees, guaranteed re-employment at their previous pay levels, as well as job retraining and relocation support as needed. We estimate that a generous transitional support package for all these workers would cost about $45 million per year. That is less than 0.01 percent of overall 2025 statewide spending in Michigan.”
“For Michigan, an additional major concern is the impact on employment of automobile manufacturing transitioning from building internal combustion engine powered autos to battery electric vehicles (EVs). As of 2025, total auto manufacturing employment in Michigan was about 49,000 jobs, i.e., more than double the employment level for all fossil fuel sector jobs in the state. It is possible that this transition to EV manufacturing could expand employment levels and improve conditions for auto workers within Michigan. But whether this happens will depend on the effectiveness of industrial policies to locate EV manufacturing operations, battery production in particular, within Michigan. More broadly, these trends demonstrate the imperative of a commitment to full employment policies, along with rising wages and expanded benefits, as a centerpiece of a U.S. economy-wide Green New Deal.”
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Concluding thoughts
Trump’s policies are exacerbating the climate crisis. He is committed to expanding fossil fuels, including coal, the dirtiest of them. Most Republicans in Congress support him. He continues to have the support of much of the MAGA movement, though his overall poll ratings are very low. The ratings have little to do with the climate crisis and a lot to do with high prices due to Trump’s foolhardy Iran War and his tariffs. There is a lot of commentary in the news about his tendency to fall asleep at cabinet meetings and other events. He spends a lot of time bragging about his “ballroom” and other vanity projects. This only reveals his rampant narcissism. Meanwhile, the planet gets hotter.
Some reasons why the country will be better off without Trump
Bob Sheak
Arlene Sheak edits
Introduction
Historians have ranked Trump as the worst present ever. According to Factually, “recent expert surveys commonly place Donald Trump and James Buchanan among the lowest-rated presidents… with Trump ranked last in several 2024 specialist polls (https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/worst-us-president-historians-ranking-6854f1).
There is considerable evidence that documents the appropriateness of this ranking. Here are some examples.
#1 – A president of “lost opportunities.” E.J. Dionne, Jr., writes on Trump’s “lost opportunities” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/16/opinion/trump-lost-opportunities.html). Mr. Dionne is a contributing Opinion writer. He has done damage “to the rule of law, to the United States’ standing in the world, to the constraints on corruption and self-dealing we once took for granted.”
He offers a general summary in two paragraphs of his detailed article.
“He has wasted the nation’s time and attention span on a festival of personal obsessions: tariffs, Greenland, a ballroom, the outcome of the 2020 election and an ill-considered war. In doing so, he created a public agenda entirely out of sync with the problems our nation needs to solve. He also blinded himself to the ways in which he might have made his presidency more successful and more popular.
“We are in a moment when we need to build — more housing and better ways to address child care, elder care and health systems. The country also needs to think ahead: about the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence, the need for alternatives to fossil fuels, the imperative of strengthening rather than wrecking alliances and of curbing inequality that is rising unsustainably and leaving nearly 60 percent of consumer spending in the hands of just the top 20 percent of us
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#2 – Trump’s “staggering corruption”
Trump filed a suit back in January, saying the IRS should have done more to prevent the leak of his tax returns during the 2020 presidential campaign. He initially asked for $10 billion in recompence.
Rep. Jamie Raskin comments in a segment of Democracy Now that Trump modified has monetary claim but still is able to get a bundle of taxpayer money channeled to one of his outlets (https://www.democracynow.org/2026/5/18/anti-corruption). Raskin points out, Trump did manage to bilk the taxpayers in what he describes as “staggering corruption.”
Raskin says that “Donald Trump on Monday dropped his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over a leak of his personal and business tax records, a bizarre case of a sitting president suing his own government and essentially acting as both plaintiff and defendant. This comes amid reports that Trump’s Department of Justice was considering settling the case in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate victims of so-called weaponization of the DOJ under the Biden and Obama administrations. Trump allies who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol could file claims and be compensated.
“They want a $1.77 billion slush fund, which comes to a million dollars a head in terms of Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the insurrectionists, with $100 million left over of taxpayer money to spread around in different ways,” says Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, who spoke with Democracy Now! shortly before news broke of Trump dropping the IRS lawsuit.
Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who is also a constitutional law scholar, calls the proposal an illegal “political slush fund.” Last week, Congressmembers Raskin and Senator Adam Schiff introduced the Protecting Our Democracy Act to curb the president’s profiteering and corruption.
Here are parts of Raskin’s Democracy Now interview.
REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Sure. Well, the $1.7 billion political slush fund in the Department of Justice may take the cake in terms of being the most thoroughly corrupt movement of the Trump administration, after the billions of dollars that they’ve been getting through the crypto schemes and the foreign governments.
“But, so, let’s go back to the beginning. The $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS is completely bogus. It’s empty. It’s vacuous. There’s nothing to it. There was a private contractor who leaked reports of Donald Trump’s tax returns, that Trump had promised to make public. Like every other president had done, he said, ‘I’m going to release my tax returns.’ Then he said he wouldn’t. The IRS didn’t do anything, but this private contractor released some of the details. And he’s in prison. He went to jail for it. There’s no private right of action under the statute, and it’s happened to lots of people.
“So, the idea that it’s $10 billion that he’s going to order the secretary of the Treasury to order the IRS chief to give to him is ridiculous. There’s just nothing there. So, there’s nothing to trade, but then they traded that mythical $10 billion they claimed to be owed, for dropping real criminal investigations into all of the corruption, or some of the corruption, that the Trump family is engaged in, and then also for the creation of this $1.7 billion slush fund.
“Well, there are 1,600 people that he’s pardoned, and they want a $1.7 billion slush fund, which comes to a million dollars a head in terms of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the insurrectionists, with $100 million left over of taxpayer money to spread around in different ways. Congress never voted to appropriate that money. We control the power to spend. We never created that, and we never would.”
“So, they’re using the judgment fund of the United States, which is for valid court verdicts against the United States or valid court settlements, to simply confer money on their private political militia, their street-fighting militia, which went to battle for them on January 6, 2021. And what do you know? Right before this election, they want to shower these people with a million dollars a head. I mean, it’s just a — it’s an outrage, and it’s a scandal. It’s also unconstitutional, because the 14th Amendment says in Section 4 that no money shall go to pay for insurrection or rebellion. That, of course, was in the wake of the Civil War, but it’s written in general terms. Basically, they’re paying his insurrectionary army.”
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#3 – Trump’s Iran policies have put many Americans under economic stress and threaten more instability in the country
Tony Romm and Ben Casselman address this issue (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/business/for-trump-soaring-prices-test-voters-fiances-and-patience.html).
Romm and Casselman remind readers that “President Trump promised at his inauguration to ‘bring prices down.’” That was in January 2025. But then “the White House would forge ahead with an agenda that has sent inflation roaring back, testing the patience — and the finances — of a cost-wary American electorate once again,” as consumer prices rise” “outpacing workers’ wages.”
As a result, they continued, “Americans are racking up more debt. Families are saving less. And a key measure of consumer confidence dipped to an all-time low this month. The anxiety has bled into recent political polls, which have registered broad public disapproval of Mr. Trump’s handling of the economy.
“At the heart of matter is the war with Iran, which sent the average gallon of gasoline to about $4.52 nationally, according to AAA. That is a more than 40 percent jump from a year ago, an uptick that has cut across the global economy, affecting everything from the cost of workers’ daily commutes to the prices of goods at grocery stores.
“Yet the president has largely dismissed those recent signals, telling reporters at one point last week: ‘I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation.’”
The dire situation could help Democrats in the November elections.
Romm and Casselman point out, “The jump in fuel costs is only the latest blow for American families, who have suffered through years of rising prices, high interest rates and a softening labor market — as well as much longer-running concerns about the affordability of housing, childcare and other essentials.”
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#4 – Trump wants more money for the Pentagon and the Iran War.
Nick Turse reports on Secretary of War Hegseth request for more money for the Iran War (https://theintercept.co,/2026/05/12/hegseth-pentagon-budget-defense-iran-war-cost).
Turse refers to this central point: “War Secretary Pete Hegseth was on Capitol Hill Tuesday to defend the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion budget request.” This is despite a “ceasefire” that has been in “effect” for more than a month. The largest request in history.
Turse continues. “Two weeks ago, the Pentagon claimed the war had cost $25 billion, a figure that analysts said was likely a gross undercount. In testimony before the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, the Department of War’s comptroller, Jay Hurst, said the cost of the war has risen ‘closer to $29 billion because of the “repair and replacement of equipment’ and ‘general operational costs’ of keeping troops in the Middle East.’ But experts referred to by Turse were even skeptical of this revised count.”
They now want $350 billion through reconciliation and $1.15 trillion in the base budget.
“Hegseth said the Pentagon was prepared to reignite hostilities with Iran. ‘We have a plan to escalate, if necessary; we have a plan to retrograde if necessary. We have a plan to shift assets,’ the secretary testified, declining to say more in the public hearing.”
Bear in mind that this has always been an unnecessary war.
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#5 – Trump’s spends on a myriad vanity projects: Examples
Collin McDonough provides us with a list of Trump’s vanity projects, May 5, 2026 (https://momentrumadvocacy.substack.com/p/trumps-vanity-projects). Here’s what he found, admitting that it is not a complete list.
“The new Republican Senate Judiciary Committee budget would allocate $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to ‘security’ upgrades for Trump’s attempt to remake the White House’s East Wing.”
Bottom of Form
· $400 million for the Trump ballroom (the initial estimate was $150-200 million paid for by private donors).
· $1 billion in changes to the Washington Commanders’ NFL stadium.
· $377 million request in his executive budget recommendation for this year and $174 million for next year to do various White House renovations.
· $100 million for the DC archway.
· $17.4 million for fountain renovations (which were estimated to cost $3.3 million when Biden was going to do the same thing last year).
· $2 million in disgusting changes to the reflecting pool.
· $2 million for changes to the Rose Garden.
· $1.75 million for White House furniture and rugs.
McDonough figures the cost of these projects add up to “almost $2.7 billion.” He also notes that Trump plans to put his name on half of these. There are better ways to spend this money. Here are a few examples.
· A month of SNAP funding for almost 14.3 million Americans—a third of the total population enrolled in the program.
· Half of the annual funding for WIC, which is used by 41% of infants in the US.
· A quarter of the annual funding for national free breakfast and lunch for school students.
This is a time when food programs for children and families are being cut. There are also cuts in Medicaid with 300 hospitals poised to close across the nation.
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#6 – Trump promotes fossil fuels, including coal, despite their toxic impacts on human health
As Coal Rebounds, More Toxic Mercury is In the Air
Irena Hwang and Hiroko Tabuchi report that the production of more coal puts more toxic mercury in the air (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/climate/as-coal-rebounds-more-mercury-a-potent-toxin-in-in-the-air.html). Irena Hwang is a data reporter at The Times, using computational tools to uncover hidden stories and illuminate the news. Irena Hwang covers pollution and the environment for The Times. She has been a journalist for more than 20 years in Tokyo and New York.
Here is some of what they write.
“Coal-fired power plants across the country released more mercury last year as power demand surged, reversing a yearslong downward trend in the emissions of a toxic metal that impairs brain development.
“Mercury emissions from coal-burning plants increased by roughly 9 percent in 2025, compared with a year earlier, totaling more than 4,800 pounds, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency.
“At the same time, the Trump administration launched a series of moves that experts say may make those emissions climb even higher this year and beyond.
“The administration has encouraged the burning of more coal, which emits more carbon dioxide and other pollutants than other fossil fuels, while also blocking tighter pollution controls on coal-burning plants that were supposed to take effect by 2027. It has directed the Pentagon to buy more coal-powered electricity and reopened millions of acres of federal land to mining while working to stymie nonpolluting energy, like wind and solar power.”
“The rise in mercury ‘adds to the growing evidence that, as the administration has made a significant effort to bring back coal, it is making us sicker,’ said Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has also analyzed the data.
“Public health experts say savings for the industry ignore the economic impact of additional pollution, including health care costs associated with cardiovascular disease and developmental problems in children; researchers at Harvard had calculated that keeping stricter limits on mercury pollution from lignite plants alone would have resulted in $200 million a year in public health benefits in just the first year.”
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#7 – McKibben dismisses Trump’s unscientific and uninformed desire to eliminate “wind power”
Bill Mckibben provide evidence to support this Trump position, May 13 2026
(https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-war-on-wind’). Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org. His most recent book is “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?.”
McKibben makes his main point, “the administration has stopped all approvals on wind farms across the country.” He continues, “As Katherine Krawczyk explains, for 15 years wind farms have applied to the Department of Defense (DOD) where:
they’re supposed to undergo a “timely, transparent, and repeatable process to evaluate potential impacts” to national security and military operations. It’s a routine that has spanned presidencies, including the first Trump administration, and that typically revolves around making sure turbines don’t interfere with radars or federal airspace.
“This has always been routine, until last summer when it became… impossible. Pete Hegseth’s DOD simply stopped replying, and didn’t explain why till last month when it sent a letter to developers saying it was ‘reevaluating how it reviews wind projects national security impacts.’ Somewhere between 165 and 250 big projects are in limbo, and that’s obviously the point: Not only does it screw up their financing, it means they may not get done in time to qualify for what tax credits are left from the Biden Inflation Reduction Act.”
McKibben continues. “That this is stupid goes without saying. Those blocked projects constitute… about 30 gigawatts of cheap clean energy at a time when we desperately need it. But it also goes without saying that the blockage serves two purposes. One is to artificially increase demand for fossil fuel (and the other Trump-favored power sources, like the expensive array of nuclear reactors whose development the government is currently generously funding). The other is to serve his febrile rage at the wind farm built off his Scottish golf course all those years ago. A policy that feeds both his appetite for corruption and supplies his narcissistic hunger—well, that’s a twofer that can’t be missed. Hegseth may have no idea how to win the war in Iran, but he knows how to win favor from dear leader.”
McKibben offers a summary of his rebuttal. “Of course, it means indulging in a huge number of lies, from President Donald Trump’s claim that wind power is the most expensive energy on Earth (actually, second-cheapest, right behind solar) to his claim that it causes cancer (1 death in 5 on this planet comes from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel) to his claim that though the Chinese build and sell wind turbines they don’t actually use them. If he glances out the window of Qatar Force One on this week’s trip to China he’ll be forced to recant that one: The Chinese actually lead the world in producing not just wind turbines but wind energy.”
China is way ahead. “Last year, China installed three times as much wind power capacity as the rest of the world combined, even as its turbine exports jumped. The global industry’s center of gravity has shifted decisively: All of the world’s six largest wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese, displacing once-dominant European firms and companies like General Electric.”
Technology over Trump. “Fewer turbines, spaced further apart, and equipped with modern bird-detection technology such as IndentiFlight, should reduce bird mortality in the Altamont Pass going forward.”
“Turbines will be equipped with individual AI paired cameras to detect the presence of avian species which would trigger feathering/shut-off of specific turbines.”
A Stanford University study
McKibben cites Justin Gerdes, who reports, “this kind of repowering could happen at every wind farm across the country:
“‘By replacing aging turbines with modern technology at existing sites, the United States could more than double its current onshore wind capacity and electricity generation without requiring new land,’write the authors of a Stanford University study published in March.”
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#8 – Trump Is Making America Uninsured Again
Sasha Abramsky makes this argument on Truthout, May 16, 2026
(https://truthout.org/articles/trump-is-making-america-uninsured-again).
Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and a part-time lecturer at the University of California at Davis. Abramsky’s latest book, American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government, is available for pre-order now and will be released in January. His work has appeared in numerous publications,
He opens his article with these statements:
“The GOP is heading into the midterms as the party that made health coverage out of reach for millions of Americans.
“In 2025, the Trump administration successfully pushed Congress to enact nearly $1 trillion in health care cuts over the coming decade, which the Congressional Budget Office analysis estimated would result in 10 million people losing health coverage by 2034. More recently, it has blocked any and all efforts to extend the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credit subsidies for people buying insurance on the state exchanges. In demanding that the GOP leadership in Congress prevent at all costs a continuation of the expanded ACA tax credits, Donald Trump intimated that his administration was on the verge of proposing a better and more affordable health care reform to replace the ACA system.
Abramsky continues. “Nothing of that nature has materialized. Instead, the administration’s health reforms have been shockingly small-bore — a handful of measures to lower the costs of prescription drugs, more incentives for consumers to create health savings accounts, a rollback of regulations on catastrophic coverage plans — thus, making it easier for younger, healthier, patients to buy junk insurance, but doing nothing for those who are older or suffer from chronic conditions.
“Over the past months, even these baby steps have stalled out, with the GOP seemingly and inexplicably resigned to the fact that it will be heading into the midterm elections as the party that is putting health coverage out of reach for millions of Americans. Early in the Iran war, Trump was caught saying that the federal government could no longer afford its massive Medicare commitments now that the country was engaged in an expensive overseas conflict, and it would have to roll back responsibility for paying for this bedrock safety net program onto the states.”Bottom of Form
“Predictably, following Congress’s failure to renew the expanded tax credits, in the first months of 2026 state exchanges calculated that up to 2 million people dropped coverage, and millions more shifted to lower cost plans with far higher deductibles, some in the $10,000 a year range.”
Concluding thoughts
Trump’s presidency is costly and harmful. It reflects anti-democratic priorities. It reveals the true values of this self-serving, oppressive and incompetent president. We can only work for an alternative to the Republicans who both laud and fear him. Right now, as Trump’s popularity declines, it seems the Democrats will continue to do well in upcoming elections, if people vote.
Trump’s policies are self-serving and harmful
Trump’s policies are self-serving and harmful
Bob Sheak, May 11, 2026
Arlene Sheak edits
Here are some examples.
#1 – As U.S. Debt Hits a Worrying Milestone, Washington Barely Notices
This is the title of Tony Romm’s article, New York Times, May 7 2026
(https://nytimes.com/2026/05/07/business/us-debt-trump-policies-budget.html). Here’s some of what he writes.
“The debt is outgrowing the size of America’s economy. The president’s policies could accelerate the country’s fiscal headaches, experts say, unless policymakers intervene.
The debt problem.
Romm writes this. “The U.S. government learned last week that it may have reached an unfortunate milestone: The size of its debt surpassed the nation’s total economic output.
“It was a striking imbalance, according to early estimates, one that the country has experienced only in rare circumstances — briefly during the pandemic, and in the aftermath of World War II.”
The source of the problem.
“U.S. debt has soared in recent years because of a mismatch between federal spending and tax revenue, one complicated by a rapidly aging population, which has driven up costs across government.
The problem increases.
“For economists, the fear is that these conditions are inching the United States toward a fiscal crisis, one in which its debt is so great that the country can’t easily afford to pay the rising interest on it. But their warnings have long gone unheeded in Washington, calcifying the strains on the government’s balance sheet in ways that President Trump’s agenda is expected to exacerbate.”
Republican-controlled Congress ignores the problem
“Despite winning a congressional majority, Republicans have cut little in spending over the past year. With the few savings they did achieve, they put that money toward offsetting a fraction of the cost of Mr. Trump’s tax cuts, which are still expected to add more than $4 trillion to the debt in the coming years.”
Evidence
“Those fiscal risks aren’t yet fully realized in the total federal debt held by the public, which topped about $31.26 trillion in March, federal records show. By comparison, the nation’s nominal gross domestic product, a measure of its output using current dollars, reached $31.21 trillion in the 12-month period ending in March, according to data released last Thursday and analyzed by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which supports deficit reduction.”
The looming threat of a “debt spiral”
“Marc Goldwein, its senior vice president, said the symbolic milestone helped to illustrate the fiscal risk facing the United States. If its debt continues to grow faster than the economy, he said, it will only become more expensive for the government to borrow money, as investors demand higher yields on bonds to finance that debt.
“‘When that happens, at some point, you’re in this debt spiral,’ Mr. Goldwein said.
““The only way to stop it is through some kind of big shock to the system.’
Image
The debt will be higher at the end of this fiscal year
“…the Trump administration itself has recently estimated that the annual imbalance will still reach around $2 trillion by the end of fiscal 2026, which could mark an increase from a year earlier.
“Adding to the challenges, the U.S. government is just beginning to refund billions of dollars collected from Mr. Trump’s once-vaunted, and now illegal, global tariffs, with the first checks expected to reach businesses next week. That could further rattle the nation’s finances, just as the Trump administration simultaneously confronts the potentially towering cost of the Iran war.”
The debt will continue to grow
“In its annual report, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected in February that the government’s debt would outpace economic growth this year — and worsen in the years to follow. Pointing to a changing, aging work force, the scorekeeper estimated that U.S. debt held by the public would soar to 120 percent of gross domestic product by the end of 2036.
The effects
“If that occurred, the budget office warned, the ‘risk of a fiscal crisis’ would increase, eroding trust in the dollar and constraining the ability of lawmakers to ‘respond to unforeseen events or for other purposes, such as to promote economic activity or strengthen national defense.’”
Trump will compound the problem
“In the meantime, Republicans under Mr. Trump added to the debt, chiefly through enacting their package of tax cuts last year. William McBride, the chief economist at the Tax Foundation, which generally supports lower taxes, said that the cuts may levels of debt closer in time, maybe a few years.’
“Mr. McBride said the problem would only be compounded by Mr. Trump’s push for a massive increase in military spending, which he hopes to set at nearly $1.5 trillion starting next fiscal year. The president first indicated he would seek the boost, the largest in modern history, before declaring war on Iran — and since has suggested that the administration could seek additional money for that conflict.”
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#2 -America in Decline
In an article in The New York Times, Christopher Caldwell posits that “America Is Officially an Empire in Decline” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/03/opinion/oran-us-empire.html).
Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer for the paper and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”
Caldwell makes his basic point as follows.
“The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word ‘hegemony’ to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.”
“The assumption in Washington over the past decade has been that the world is engaged in a game of geostrategic musical chairs and the music is about to stop. China may soon overmatch us not just in military-industrial capacity but also in information technology. The world will harden into a new, less favorable geostrategic configuration. This is the last moment to reshape it in America’s favor.”
The war on Iran demonstrates this. Caldwell writes, “That is because the United States lacks the military means to impose its will on Iran in a long conflict.” Its missiles and other weapons “are needed to defend allies and interests in other theaters, and the United States is depleting them. According to reporting in The Times, it has already used 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles, earmarked for potential conflicts in Asia, leaving just 1,500 in the stockpile, and fired an additional 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, about 10 times as many as the military buys in an average year. American leaders have been scolding their European allies for years about the inadequacy of their fighting forces. But if one measures America’s military might against our pretensions rather than our G.D.P., it is just as inadequate.
Caldwell notes the U.S. has options, but it will “pay a very steep price, no matter which of them it chooses. It can desist in Iran — having demonstrated, for no good reason, that its military is far less dominant than the world had assumed. Or it can draw resources from theaters that are of vital national interest, such as Europe and East Asia, to fund what the president refers to as his Iranian ‘excursion.’ Or it can resort to the extreme military options Mr. Trump darkly alluded to in social media posts starting in early April, which will redound to the everlasting shame of the country he leads.
The United States stands to lose its reputation, its friends or its soul in this war of choice.
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#3 – As Trump’s Poll Numbers Fall, His Authoritarian Instincts Grow More Extreme
Sasha Abramsky, The Nation, April 1, 2026
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-authoritarianism-polls
Sasha Abramsky is the author of several books, including The American Way of Poverty, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar, and Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America. His latest book is American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government.
Increasingly unpopular and facing a fracturing coalition, Trump is using government power to punish his critics, take political revenge, and revel in his own cruelty.
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“Even as President Donald Trump’s hold over the electorate wanes, his administration’s naked authoritarian tendencies intensify. If you can tell a man’s mettle by how he behaves under pressure, Trump—mired in a ludicrous standoff of his own making with Iran and cratering in the polls—is putting on a display of raw narcissism and petty cruelty unparalleled among modern democracies.
Abramsky writes: “When Robert Mueller died in March, Trump went onto social media to post a note explaining that he was glad that Mueller was dead. This was after he had declared that the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife by their mentally ill son was a result of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome.’ Yet, when late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a mildly off-color joke about Melania Trump looking like an “expectant widow”—this was before the shooting and possible assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—Trump responded first by demanding, again, that ABC fire Kimmel and then by siccing Brendan Carr’s pliant FCC onto the broadcaster, initiating an unprecedented review of many of the network’s local licenses.”
Abramsky points out, “The FCC has argued that the scrutiny being accorded ABC licenses is solely to do with an investigation into its diversity policies (since, clearly, according to the white supremacist mores of the administration any efforts to present a diverse face to US viewers are somehow, inherently, illegitimate). Yet the timing of this makes it all too clear that in reality it is spiteful, vengeance politics, designed to pressure ABC into ditching Kimmel.
“In all likelihood, the efforts to pull ABC affiliates from the air will go nowhere; after all, the broadcaster’s parent company, Disney, has pretty deep pockets, and its lawyers aren’t going to let the company go quietly into the night. But the mere fact that the Trump administration is attempting to pull this trick shows just how far from democratic norms it has strayed and just how much it is willing to lean into the playbook used to such great effect over the past two decades by authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Tayyip Erdoğan.”
“Now, any wrap-up of the week’s authoritarian bilge would be remiss in neglecting to mention the extraordinary State Department decision this week to issue a limited number of Trump-embossed US passports to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. Let me emphasize how abnormal this is. Not a single other country on earth—not North Korea, not Iran, not Putin’s Russia, not Xi Jinping’s China—etches its current leader’s image onto its passports.”
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#4 – Economist: Don’t Listen to Hegseth, Trump’s Iran War Will Cost ‘Very Possibly Trillions’
Jessica Corbett refers to sources that offer this viewpoint, May 8, 2026
(https://www.commondreams.org/news/cost-of-iran-war). Here are excerpts.
“University of Michigan professor Justin Wolfers on Friday joined a growing number of economists and other critics casting down on what he called ‘the Pentagon’s lowball $25 billion estimate’ for the cost of President Donald Trump’s illegal war on Iran.”
Trump’s cabinet officials vastly underestimate the cost of this war.
Corbett writes, “While testifying before Congress last week alongside US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Pentagon comptroller Jules ‘Jay’ Hurst offered the $25 billion figure. However, experts have responded with raised eyebrows. Stephen Semler, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, estimated that the government spent at least $71.8 billion during the first two months of the war, or around $1.2 billion each day.
Although Trump told Congress last Friday—a key deadline under the War Powers Act—that his assault on Iran had been ‘terminated,’ citing the ceasefire deal reached a month ago after his genocidal threat, the administration has maintained its naval blockade and on Thursday bombed what it claimed were ‘Iranian military facilities responsible for attacking US forces.’
“As the threat of more US bombings of Iran loomed, Wolfers wrote Friday in a New York Times opinion piece that ‘the Pentagon’s stated number reflects only a narrow accounting of the tab that Operation Epic Fury is running up. It’s the price of the more than 2,000 Tomahawk and Patriot missiles already fired, the warplanes already flown and in some cases lost, and the rest of the gear already chewed through. It does not measure the true cost of the war—including the human toll.’”
Corbett continues citing Wolfers.
“‘Since the start of the war, oil markets have been disrupted, consumer confidence has cratered, the global economy is groaning, and military budgets are growing,’ the economist continued. ‘The toll from this upheaval must be counted in lives disrupted, jobs lost, companies shut down (see: Spirit Airlines), and the income and output sacrificed. The less easily quantified costs—death, disability, and mental health—could become much more dramatic should President Trump send troops into Iran, which still can’t be ruled out.’”
The US and Israel have not achieved any of their objectives in the Iran War.
“The US and Israel said they wanted to eradicate Iran’s nuclear program and change its regime. The regime is now composed of more hard-liners than before, and Iran’s nuclear capability has not budged since last summer. Now the two sides are negotiating the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the conflict, and the terms of Iran’s nuclear program, which they were negotiating before the conflict. Moreover, the compromise being contemplated involves Iran pausing uranium enrichment in exchange for the US lifting sanctions and unfreezing Iranian funds. That sounds suspiciously like the deal President Obama struck in 2015 that Trump ripped up when he took office….”
The US war has done harm to Iran and also the US.
“All this war has done is killed thousands of people, opened a new front for Israel in Lebanon, damaged most US military sites and most energy production facilities in the region, led to oil spills that are visible from space, created a shipping bottleneck that will take at least a year to fix, raised domestic gas prices to a record for this time of year, cost American consumers $34.3 billion and counting, ended the life of one US airline with more likely to come, and led us down an imminent path to physical shortages of critical commodities like oil, including in the United States.
There is no end in sight.
Corbett continues. “The Washington Post reported Thursday that the Central Intelligence Agency has privately warned the Trump administration that ‘Iran can survive the US naval blockade for at least three to four months before facing more severe economic hardship,’ and its ‘analysis might even be underestimating Iran’s economic resilience if Tehran is able to smuggle oil via overland routes.’”
A global recession?
“The reporting heightened concerns,” Corbett writes, “about how long the war may drag on. The International Monetary Fund warned last month that a prolonged conflict could cause a global recession.”
Wolfers estimates “based on the movement of oil prices, along with the S&P 500—is that stocks are about 5% lower than they otherwise would be, suggesting that the war has wiped about $3 trillion off the value of these companies.”
Trump wants a huge increase in military spending
“Shortly after launching the war in February, the White House signaled it would need $200 billion for the operation. However, it is now seeking a $1.5 trillion defense budget for the next fiscal year—which Hegseth tried to frame as a fiscally responsible plan that puts ‘the American taxpayer first’ in a widely ridiculed video this week. Wolfers highlighted that the budget request is ‘a roughly 40% boost over this year. That’s a massive $600 billion increase, or roughly $4,000 per household.’”
Military costs will exceed what Trump anticipates
“‘The best any economist can do right now is get the order of magnitude right, and my math suggests the Iran war will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and very possibly trillions,’ Wolfers concluded.” Current estimates from the Trump administration also do not figure in ‘lifetime medical care and disability benefits for veterans, and the higher recruitment and retention costs that follow a bloody war—all compounded by a rising interest bill.’”
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#5 – Trump Administration Covering Up “Extensive” Damage Done to US Bases by Iran
Sharon Zhang reports on this cover up for Truthout, Published, April 27, 2026
“In their initial retaliatory strikes of the war, Iranian forces caused far more extensive damage to U.S. military assets than Trump administration officials have admitted to in public and private, new reporting finds as Germany’s chancellor says the U.S. is being ‘humiliated’ by Iran.
“In these strikes, Iran hit over 100 targets across 11 U.S. bases in the Middle East, striking ‘warehouses, command headquarters, aircraft hangars, satellite communications infrastructure, runways, high-end radar systems and dozens of aircraft,’ according to reporting by NBC, citing an analysis by conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
Zhang continues, “These strikes caused damage that will cost billions of dollars to repair, the publication found, citing U.S. officials, congressional aides, and another person familiar with the damage. The reporting corroborates earlier findings that many of the U.S.’s 13 bases in the region have been rendered ‘all but uninhabitable’ due to strikes.
Bottom of Form
“In all,” Zhang writes, “the damage is far worse than Trump administration officials have acknowledged both in public and in private briefings with Congress, aides told NBC. The Pentagon is not even disclosing the extent of the damage or estimated costs of repairs to members of Congress, the aides said.
“No one knows anything. And it’s not for lack of asking,” one congressional GOP aide said. “We have been asking for weeks and not getting specifics, even as the Pentagon is asking for a record-high budget.”
Zhang: “Officials told NBC that the Trump administration is still gearing up to request over $100 billion — on top of its record-shattering $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget ask — in supplemental funding for the war, despite some of the more expensive aspects of the war, like airstrikes, having come to a standstill in recent weeks.
The Trump administration is attempting to withhold information on the costs of the war.
“Meanwhile,” Zhang continues, “multiple private satellite imagery companies are withholding imagery of the region at the request of the U.S. government.
“Officials are also reportedly withholding U.S. casualty numbers. The Intercept has reported that the Pentagon’s casualty counts keep shifting, and that last week officials actually dropped the total number of casualties from 428 to 413, without explanation. One U.S. government official said the Pentagon’s practices are the ‘definition of a cover-up.’”
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#6 – An Almost Unthinkable Threat’: Trump Warning That Iran Will ‘Glow’ Sparks Latest Fears of Nuclear Attack
Stephen Prager reports on Trump’s seeming allusion to the use of nuclear weapons in his Iran War, May 8, 2026 (https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-make-iran-glow).
Prager writes, “As he struggles to force Iran’s capitulation, US President Donald Trump issued what seemed to be yet another threat to commit an act of mass destruction against the country through nuclear warfare.
“When negotiations have faltered in recent weeks, Trump has on multiple occasions defaulted to genocidal threats—including that the ‘whole nation of Iran’ would ‘die,’ and that the whole country would be ‘blown up’—which have only seemed to anger and galvanize his Iranian adversaries rather than make them quake with fear.”
“On Thursday, the US launched what it said were ‘self-defense’ strikes on military facilities it claimed were responsible for attempting to attack three US Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran called the attacks a violation of the ceasefire and said its attacks on US ships were in response to American bombings of Iranian oil tankers the previous day.
“Trump told reporters on Thursday that if the ceasefire were truly over, everyone would know. ‘If there’s no ceasefire, you’re just going to have to look at one big glow coming out of Iran,’ he said. ‘They’d better sign the agreement fast… If they don’t sign, they’re going to have a lot of pain.’”
“Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, the editor-in-chief of Responsible Statecraft, noted that if it were indeed a nuclear threat, it would be ‘ironic since the war today supposedly is to prevent Iran from getting… a nuclear weapon.’
“The National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) said that ‘threatening to make Iran glow—with nuclear weapons or otherwise—is an almost unthinkable threat to commit a mass war crime against 92 million people. It must never be normalized.’
“Trump’s pledge to wipe out Iranian civilization last month drew widespread condemnation and led dozens of Democratic members of Congress to call for his Cabinet to remove him from office using the powers of the 25th Amendment.”
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#7 – Sunlight Doesn’t Go Through the Strait of Hormuz: Bill McKibben on Iran Oil Shock & Green Transition, interviews on Democracy Now (https://www.democracynow.org/2026/4/30/climate_change_super_el_nino_amoc).
Bill McKibben. as a guest on Democracy Now, sees a good thing coming out of
Trump’s war on Iran, namely that some countries are moving away from fossil fuels to renewables. He has published many books and is a co-founder of 350.org and founder of Third Act.
The title of this episode it “Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization”
Here it most of the Transcript of the interview.
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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to climate change. Last month was the warmest March on record in over 130 years in the United States, and average rainfall across the country is at a record low so far this year. The dry conditions are fueling wildfires across Georgia and Florida ahead of what is expected to be a very hot summer. And now the WMO, the World Meteorological Organization, is predicting a likely super El Niño weather pattern to begin later this year through 2027, further driving up average global temperatures.
Meanwhile, new research has found that a major ocean circulatory system in the Atlantic, known as AMOC, is in danger of weakening to the point of collapse faster and sooner than previously thought. The AMOC system, which includes the Gulf Stream, helps distribute heat around the planet. Its collapse could have catastrophic consequences. Scientists are now concerned the tipping point could be reached as early as the middle of this century.
But despite overwhelming scientific consensus, the United States, the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, is moving away from taking the threat seriously. This is President Trump earlier this month at a [Turning] Point USA rally in Phoenix.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The green new scam, one of the greatest scams in history. Remember, climate change, global warming, all of this. They actually had global warming, remember. Then that wasn’t working, because we were actually cooling as a planet. … And then they just said climate change, because climate change takes care of heat, snow, whatever you have.
AMY GOODMAN: That was President Trump speaking at Turning Point. Despite this, the energy crisis caused by the war in Iran is underscoring the economic and security benefits of transitioning away from fossil fuels and towards renewable alternatives.
For more on all of this, we’re joined by climate activist and author Bill McKibben. His recent article in The New Yorker magazine is headlined “The Iran War Is Another Reason to Quit Oil.” Bill McKibben is co-founder of 350.org and Third Act, joining us here in our New York studio.
Welcome back, Bill, to Democracy Now! If you can talk about what the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran means for the climate?
BILL McKIBBEN: Well, what it meant, what it means for energy policy is that everyone around the world can suddenly see the utter folly of relying on a fuel that not only is destroying the planet’s climate, but also that can be bottled up behind a 20-mile-long waterway. I mean, sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, but none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz. That makes it a very appealing alternative, especially now that it’s cheaper than burning coal and gas and oil. So, the movement in the last month has been pretty remarkable around much of the world in the direction of what we used to call alternative energy. The only place that’s not happening, of course, is here at home.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And could you explain? I mean, first of all, the U.S. now produces the most oil in the world. So, how does that play into this?
BILL McKIBBEN: Well, Pete Hegseth said the other day that there were tankers lining up outside the Texas ship channel to get good old American crude. It’s true that in the short run, this will probably be a bonus for the big American oil companies, whose profits are through the roof, and who, by the way, should be paying a serious windfall profits tax in any serious government. But over the slightly longer term, what we’re seeing is demand destruction around the planet.
Look, the forecast for how American oil companies were going to stay rich and prosperous for the next couple of decades pretty much depended on everybody in Asia deciding they were going to drive gasoline-powered pickup trucks. That’s not what’s happening. Instead, people are crowding into the showrooms of companies like BYD, the Chinese EV giant, because they don’t want to pay. I mean, we’re paying $4 and $5 for gas. It’s much higher in much of Asia, which is, you know, where this story will be decided.
Would that we were doing all this for climate reasons. I mean, we’re meeting right now, or just finished this big meeting in Santa Marta in Colombia, with many nations trying to work towards a fossil fuel phaseout on climate grounds. That isn’t happening anywhere near fast enough. A bigger catalyst at the moment is the clear geopolitical imperative to get off fossil fuel while you can.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about where you’re seeing this around the world. As you say, in fact, countries are running to this, as the U.S. administration is running away from this.
BILL McKIBBEN: The president of South Korea said the other day that he wasn’t able to sleep at night, trying to figure out where they were going to find energy supplies. The place they’re going to find them, he said, is homegrown energy. Indonesia, which is going to be one of the most important powers in the world, announced, within days of the start of hostilities, that they were going to put 100 gigawatts’ worth of solar on their grid in the next few years. Everybody’s figuring out that it is ludicrous to be exposed any more than you have to to the completely volatile and undependable supply of fossil fuel, when, you know, the sun rises pretty much every morning.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could explain, to your point — you know, the argument here is that, you know, renewables are too expensive, they take too long. But China, meanwhile, has built so much clean energy very, very quickly, it’s a world leader in clean energy investment, installation and manufacturing. How did that happen?
BILL McKIBBEN: Well, the Chinese decided that this was going to be the strategic imperative, and so they got to work. And they’ve driven the price down so far that this is by far the — we live on a planet where the cheapest way, Nermeen, to produce energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That’s been true now for three or four years. And it’s showing up in the fact that 95% of new electric generation around the planet last year came from the sun and the wind.
Now, the U.S. is the exception to that. Even here, though, we’re seeing continued investment in this stuff, just because of economics. The state where it’s growing the fastest is that radical progressive hub, Texas. And at Third Act, we’ve been having lots of luck this spring in state legislatures around the country, getting them to approve this so-called balcony solar, or plug-in solar, that’s the very easiest, cheapest way for apartment dwellers and others to get in on this burgeoning revolution.
AMY GOODMAN: Bill, we just have two minutes, and I want to get to the El Niño and the possible collapse of this AMOC, the Atlantic Ocean circulation system, what this means.
BILL McKIBBEN: Nothing good. When I wrote The End of Nature 40 years ago, this was one of the things that we were talking about as a possible result of climate change. As you melt, as fresh water pours off a melting Greenland, it changes the salinity, and hence the density, of sea water in the North Atlantic. That density drives this giant heat distribution engine, the biggest on the planet. If it collapses, as the chief scientist on this work now said is at least a 50% possibility this century, then it’s a civilizational-scale event. Temperatures plummet across Western Europe. Sea levels rise sharply and quickly along the eastern U.S. But, basically, this — basically, we add, I don’t know, 30 or 40 parts per million CO2 almost immediately to the atmosphere, as CO2 leaves the ocean. These are the kind of things that they make science fiction thrillers about. It would be the biggest tool that we have right now to do that is the very rapid deployment of clean energy.
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Concluding thoughts
Trump and his administration are taking to country into a steep decline, with their right-wing policies that benefit the rich and powerful, along with Trump and his family, greatly. At the same time, they are advancing policies that will continue doing harm to most Americans. Trump pursues vanity projects while all this is taking place. He calls for massive increases in military spending, ostensibly for the continuation of the current war and to rely on force or the threat of force in his international relations. Under Trump, the US is no longer recognized as a reliable ally and is in the process is undermining long-standing alliances. And, to top it off, he is increasing the country’s debt and undermining the nation’s future.
The Climate Catastrophe advances and may be unstoppable. Trump’s policies contribute to the dire trend
Bob Sheak, April 19, 2026
Arlene Sheak edits
Introduction
In this article I offer an update of evidence on the accelerating climate crisis. We may be at a point where the crisis will continue to advance, as it has, and cause ever-more destruction and death across the planet. It is an existential threat to humanity.
It would take far more effort by nations, especially those in the West and China, to end dependence on fossil fuels and the accompanying torrent of carbon emissions they produce. This appears to be increasingly unlikely, but the only recourse.
Every Key Climate Indicator is Flashing Red
Julia Conley reports on March 23, 2026, on the absence of effective action in the U.S. and across the globe to slow down the climate crisis (https://www.commondreams.org/news/un-report-climate). She writes that “every key climate indicator is flashing red,” referencing the annual State of Global Climate report by the United Nation’s meteorological agency, The World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO). Here’s some of what she reports.
“The annual State of the Global Climate report by the United Nations’ top meteorological agency was released Monday, marking the first time the authors of the report have included the Earth’s energy imbalance as a key indicator of the climate emergency.
“The World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) inclusion of the imbalance only provides more evidence of what scientists have been warning for decades: The continued extraction of fossil fuels is causing heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane to build up in the atmosphere and is causing planetary heating, which is leading to extreme weather including wildfires, drought, and severe hurricanes and cyclones.
“The State of the Global Climate report explains that in a stable climate, incoming solar energy is roughly equal to the amount of energy leaving the Earth.
“But with greenhouse gases at their highest level in the atmosphere in at least 800,000 years, that equilibrium has been thrown off, and the energy imbalance—which has increased steadily over the past two decades—is at its highest since the observational record began in 1960.”
“Last year was the second- or third-hottest year on record, depending on the data set, owing to La Niña conditions that temporarily cooled the planet. Earth was about 1.43°C warmer than the pre-industrial average, and 2024—when hotter El Niño conditions were in effect—remains the hottest year with global temperatures averaging 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels.”
“Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump—whose country is the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases—has taken steps to weaken the world’s ability to respond to the climate emergency, withdrawing from dozens of climate- and energy-related international treaties and slashing climate research and emergency response spending.
“Trump has also pushed for more fossil fuel emissions—investing in the expensive, pollution-causing coal industry; demanding that the Pentagon obtain energy from coal plants; and mandating oil and gas lease sales.”
World Meteorological Organization: Last 10 Years Have Been the Hottest on Record
Eloise Goldsmith reports on this for Common Dreams, March 19, 2025
A WMO [World Meteorological Organization] report also found that 2024 was the warmest year in a 175-year observational period.
“A report released by the World Meteorological Organization on Tuesday found that not only was 2024 the warmest year in a 175-year observational period, reaching a global surface temperature of roughly 1.55°C above the preindustrial average for the first time, but each of the past 10 years were also individually the 10 warmest on record.
“‘That’s never happened before,’ Chris Hewitt, the director of the WMO’s climate services division, of the clustering of the 10 warmest years all in the most recent decade, told The New York Times.”
World on track for catastrophic 3 degrees Celsius warming, UN warns
Zia Weise and Lucia Mackenzie also consider evidence that documents the rise in global warming, Oct 24, 2024 (https://politico.eu/article/united-nations-emissions-gap-global-warming-data-climate-change-report).
“Current plans and policies will lead to 2.6 to 3.1 degrees Celsius of global warming this century, with zero chance of limiting the temperature increase to the totemic 1.5C target agreed in Paris in 2015, according to a new report out Thursday.
“In fact, existing measures are falling so far short of what’s needed that the world even risks blowing past 2C, the Paris accord’s upper limit, the U.N. warned.
“The severity and frequency of dangerous heat waves, destructive storms and other disasters rise with every fraction of warming. At 3C, scientists say, the world could pass several points of no return that would dramatically alter the planet’s climate and increase sea levels, such as due to the collapse of polar ice caps.”
“In general, the G20 — which comprises industrialized countries such as the EU and U.S. as well as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia — were responsible for 77 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2023.
In stark contrast, all 55 African Union countries accounted for just 6 percent.”
2025 Ranked as One of World’s Hottest Years Due to Human-Made Climate Crisis
Chris Walker , Truthout, Dec 30, 2025 (https://truthout.org/articles/2025-ranked-as-one-of-worlds-hottest-years-due-to-human-made-climate-crisis). Chris Walker is a news writer at Truthout, and is based out of Madison, Wisconsin. Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues of the day and their impact on the American people. He can be found on most social media platforms under the handle @thatchriswalker.
“Climate change made 2025 heat waves 10 times more likely, a new report finds.
“A new analysis of the world’s climate in 2025 finds that this year was one of the three hottest ever recorded, demonstrating that the threat posed by the human-made climate crisis is not going away anytime soon.
“The analysis by World Weather Attribution (WWA), an organization that examines the likelihood that the climate crisis played a role in severe weather events, also shows that, over the past three years, the world has exceeded the 1.5 degrees Celsius global increase limit outlined in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
“Bottom of Form
Overall, the WWA report published on Tuesday documented 157 extreme weather events throughout 2025, defined as an event that either causes more than 100 deaths in a given area, detrimentally affects more than half that area’s population, or results in a state of emergency being declared.”
Friederike Otto, a co-founder of WWA and a professor of climate science at the Imperial College of London, said the climate crisis and humanity’s role in exacerbating it could not be debated.
“‘Each year, the risks of climate change become less hypothetical and more brutal reality,’ Otto said.
“‘The heat waves we have observed this year are quite common events in our climate today, but they would have been almost impossible to occur without human-induced climate change,’ Otto explained.
“WWA called for rapid and deep reductions in the use of fossil fuels, stating that extreme weather will continue to intensify without immediate changes.
“Globally, the world isn’t doing enough to slow, let alone reverse, the trend. China, for example, is investing in renewable energy sources, but also still heavily invests in coal. And in the U.S., the Trump administration is ending once-planned renewable energy projects in favor of fossil fuels.”
“‘A lot of policymakers [are] very clearly making policies for the interest of the fossil fuel industry rather than for the populations of their countries,’ Otto opined.”
New Climate Reports Show ‘Unprecedented Run of Global Heat’
Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News, Jan 13, 2026 (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13012026/multiple-reports-show-2025-extreme-global-heat)….
“Data from multiple international agencies shows the reality of a rapidly warming world.
“Several annual international climate reports released Tuesday indicate that relentless human-caused warming continued in 2025, especially in the oceans and at the poles.
“For the third year in a row, Earth’s average temperature ran close to 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than the climate that sustained human civilizations as the 20th century began, before fossil-fuel pollution started damaging the atmosphere.
“Avoiding more than that level of warming is also the key long-term temperature goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Research shows that warming by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the baseline will spell the end of nearly all global glaciers and coral reefs and mark a dangerous red zone for damage and destruction of ecosystems, food supplies, human health and infrastructure.”
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service report released Tuesday ranked 2025 as the third-warmest year on record, just a hair cooler than 2023 and within striking distance of 2024, the hottest year on record. Together, the past three years have averaged more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, the first time any three-year stretch has crossed that threshold.
“‘Emissions simply haven’t come down as fast as people believed they would,’ Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, said when asked about crossing the Paris Agreement limit so soon.
“‘And the extreme temperatures of 2023, 2024 and 2025 will be seen as cooler than average in just a few years, Burgess said, warning that continued fossil-fuel emissions are rapidly resetting what the world considers normal.”
“‘By far and away, the high global temperatures of the last three years have been due to the record amount of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere,’ Burgess said. Other factors can have regional impacts, such as reductions in industrial and shipping pollution that reflect heat away from Earth, especially over oceans, and can also nudge the global average by about 0.1 degrees Celsius.
“Major climate monitoring centers around the world are releasing their annual assessments in coordinated fashion Tuesday and into early Wednesday, including the World Meteorological Organization, NASA and the United Kingdom’s Met Office.
“The reports’ exact global temperature figures differ by a few tenths of a degree, reflecting slightly different datasets and analytical methods, but they all point in the same direction: Global warming is accelerating, driven overwhelmingly by human emissions.”
“‘We’re all very consistent in the near term, because our planet is better observed than it has ever been,’ said Burgess.”
“A separate analysis released last week by Climate Central quantifies the damage caused by climate extremes in the United States. The group found that the country experienced 23 weather and climate disasters in 2025, from destructive storms and floods to heat-driven wildfires, that each caused at least $1 billion in damage, totaling about $115 billion in losses.”
“Climate Central is a nonprofit organization of scientists and journalists that researches and communicates climate science and impacts. After the Trump administration cut NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster database, the group revived it to keep long-term loss tracking publicly available using the same scientific methods.
“In addition to the disaster database, the Trump administration last year reduced weather balloon launches, said it would shut down the National Center for Atmospheric Research and cut thousands of positions at science-focused agencies. Experts warn that weakening or sidelining science leaves communities more vulnerable.
“Several groups of former federal scientists are working outside the government to ensure critical information continues to flow. The American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union are teaming up to publish a series of peer-reviewed papers to help fill the gap left by the discontinuation of the National Climate Assessment. Other former federal officials are building Climate.us as a replacement for a federal website that the Trump administration shut down last year.”
“For the contiguous U.S., 2025 was the fourth-warmest year on record, according to the annual State of the Climate report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, also published Tuesday. The NOAA report highlights that heat was concentrated in the West, with Nevada and Utah recording their warmest years in the 134-year record. As part of that report, the U.S. Climate Extremes Index ranked 2025 as the 12th-highest on record, particularly for maximum and minimum temperatures and for dry conditions.”
Arctic sea ice hits lowest winter level as unprecedented heat smashes records all over Earth
NBC News March 27, 2026 (https://www.nbcnews.com/science/climate-change-artic-sea-hits-lowest-winter-level-unprecedented-heat-records-rcna265501).
“The sea ice is crucial to Earth’s climate because without it reflecting sunlight, more heat energy goes into the oceans. Ice of all kinds around the poles acts as Earth’s refrigerator.
“Vital Arctic sea ice shrank to tie its lowest measured level for the winter, the season when ice grows, as a warming Earth shattered records across the continents.”
“The shrinking Arctic sea ice was announced Thursday as temperatures broke March heat records across the United States, all over Mexico, in Australia, across Northern Africa and through parts of Northern Europe. Climatologist and weather historian Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks extreme temperatures, called the extreme March temperatures ‘by far the most extreme heat event in world climatic history’ and said on social media that the next few days would be ‘much worse.’
“Sixteen states broke March temperature records in the past week or so, said weather historian Christ Burt. Twenty-seven locations had temperatures in the past week high enough to tie or surpass the hottest April day on record, including St. Louis, meteorologists said. Mexico has had thousands of records shattered, some of them warmer than the hottest May temperatures, but that’s nothing compared with what’s happening in Asia, where “dozens of thousands of monthly records” were smashed by 30 to 35 degrees (17 to 19 degrees Celsius) margins, Herrera said.
Steady decline of sea ice
“This year’s sea ice area was about 525,000 square miles (1.36 million square kilometers) lower than the 1981 to 2010 winter average peak. That’s about twice the size of Texas.
Americans Are Concerned About Climate Change—but They Should Be Afraid
Mark Hertsgaard makes this point in The Nation, July 17 2025
(https://thenation.com/article/environment/covering-climate-now-americans-afraid).
Mark Hertsgaard is the environment correspondent of The Nation and the executive director of the global media collaboration Covering Climate Now. His new book is Big Red’s Mercy: The Shooting of Deborah Cotton and A Story of Race in America.
Americans still don’t comprehend how imminent, dangerous, and far-reaching the threat is—and journalists are partly to blame.
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“Anthony Leiserowitz, the executive director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said Yale’s latest survey found that only 29 percent of Americans are ‘very worried’ about climate change—a remarkably low number, considering that climate change is already killing people and devastating communities around the world and threatens much worse if left unchecked.
“‘I constantly make the point that only 29 percent are very worried, when it should be 100 percent,’ Leiserowitz told Covering Climate Now. ‘This reflects [climate change’s] lack of salience for most Americans. There are many who are not deniers, but do not adequately understand the risks, that the impacts are here and now, and the urgency of action.’”
“In the United States, the percentage of people supporting stronger climate action is 74 percent. Why, then, are significantly smaller percentages ‘greatly worried’ about climate change?
“‘There’s a big difference between general support for stronger climate action and prioritizing climate action,’ Leiserowitz said. He invoked a concept from political science, the issue public, defined as ‘a relatively small proportion of the general public that is both passionate about an issue and directly engaged in taking political and personal action.’ He added, ‘While it’s important to have a large majority of the public supporting action (e.g., 89 percent), most issues also need an organized, powerful ‘issue public’ that is loudly demanding policy change and implementing personal change.’”
“The fact that less than half of the public is ‘greatly worried’ about climate change shows that most Americans still don’t comprehend how imminent, dangerous, and far-reaching the threat is. There is a ‘critical need for better climate communications,’ Leiserowitz said, ‘especially quality media reporting.’”
Trump to World: Green Energy Is a Scam and Climate Science Is From ‘Stupid People’
Somini Sengupta and Lisa Friedman quote Trump in this, New York Times, Sept 23, 2025, article (https://nytimes.com/2025/09/23/climate/trump-climate-energy-united-nations-unga.html).
“President Trump went on a rant against climate change at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, calling it the ‘greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world’ and saying that the scientific consensus on global warming was created by ‘stupid people.’ He also berated countries, including close allies of the United States, for adopting renewable energy.
“It added up to an extraordinary diatribe that ignored the human suffering exacted by the heat waves, wildfires and deadly floods that are aggravated by the burning of fossil fuels and, at the same time, stood at odds with the rapid expansion of renewable energy all over the world.”
“‘Trump continues to embarrass the U.S. on the global stage and undermine the interests of Americans at home,’ Gina McCarthy, who served as the United States climate policy director in the Biden administration, said in a statement. ‘He’s rejecting our government’s responsibility to protect Americans from the increasingly intense and frequent disasters linked to climate change that unleash havoc on our country.’”
“On his first day in office, Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a voluntary pact among nearly 200 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is the only country to have done so. His administration also has thwarted renewable energy projects, stripped federal incentives for wind and solar power and removed climate-science data from government websites. It has also commissioned a report downplaying the consequences of climate change.”
“The United States is already the world’s leading exporter of natural gas and the biggest producer of oil, and the Trump administration is encouraging new development. Mr. Trump has also signed executive orders to expand the burning and mining of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.”
“He referred to global warming as ‘the greatest con job ever perpetrated’ and upbraided world leaders for sticking to an international agreement to limit global temperature rise and transition away from fossil fuels. The moment was all the more remarkable because the United States is responsible for the largest share of global emissions since the Industrial Revolution.”
“Jennifer Morgan, who has served as Germany’s climate change envoy, said European countries saw clean energy as a way to ensure their energy security and to expand their economies. To build a strong Europe, she said, it is necessary to ‘tackle climate change to avoid people having to leave their homes.’”
Trump orders USDA to take down websites referencing climate crisis
Gabrielle Canon, The Guardian, Jan 31, 2025 (https://theguardian.com/2025/jan/31/trump-orders-usda-websites-climate-crisis).
“On Thursday, the Trump administration ordered the US agriculture department to take down its websites documenting or referencing the climate crisis.
“By Friday, the leading pages on the United States Forest Service website for key resources, research and adaptation tools – including those that provide vital context and vulnerability assessments for wildfires – had gone dark, leaving behind an error message or just a single line: “You are not authorized to access this page.”
“The government website was one of many that were affected on Friday by new directives from the Trump administration on what information federal agencies can publish.”
The changes at the Forest Service website followed a directive issued by the United States Department of Agriculture’s office of communications. In the memo, which was reviewed by the Guardian, officials instructed website managers across the agency to ‘identify and archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change.”
Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change
Lisa Friedman considers this issue in the New York Times
(https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/climate/trump-epa-greenhouse-gases-climate-change.html).
“The Environmental Protection Agency rejected the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human life and wellbeing. It means the agency can no longer regulate them.
“President Trump on Thursday announced he was erasing the scientific finding that climate change endangers human health and the environment, ending the federal government’s legal authority to control the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet.
“The action is a key step in removing limits on carbon dioxide, methane and four other greenhouse gases that scientists say are supercharging heat waves, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather.”
“Led by a president who refers to climate change as a ‘hoax,’ the administration is essentially saying that the vast majority of scientists around the world are wrong and that a hotter planet is not the menace that decades of research show it to be.”
Trump to World: Green Energy Is a Scam and Climate Science Is From ‘Stupid People’
Somini Sengupta and Lisa Friedman, New York Times, Sept 23, 2025
In a remarkable United Nations address, the president lashed out at wind turbines, environmentalists and allies around the world while dismissing the dangers of climate change.
“President Trump went on a rant against climate change at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, calling it the ‘greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world’ and saying that the scientific consensus on global warming was created by ‘stupid people.’ He also berated countries, including close allies of the United States, for adopting renewable energy.
“It added up to an extraordinary diatribe that ignored the human suffering exacted by the heat waves, wildfires and deadly floods that are aggravated by the burning of fossil fuels and, at the same time, stood at odds with the rapid expansion of renewable energy all over the world.”
“On his first day in office, Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, a voluntary pact among nearly 200 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It is the only country to have done so. His administration also has thwarted renewable energy projects, stripped federal incentives for wind and solar power and removed climate-science data from government websites. It has also commissioned a report downplaying the consequences of climate change.”
Against Humanity’: Leaders Denounce Fossil Fuel-Loving Trump as He Skips Out on Global Climate Summit
Stephen Prager writes this in a article for Common Dreams, Nov 7, 2025
(https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-skips-cop30).
“Every fraction of a degree means more hunger, displacement, and loss—especially for those least responsible,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres on Thursday. “This is moral failure—and deadly negligence.”
“As world leaders gathered in Brazil for this year’s global summit on the accelerating climate crisis this week, many took note of the absence of US
President Donald Trump.
“”This year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) summit comes on the tenth anniversary of the Paris Climate agreement, in which nations committed to adopting policies intended to keep global temperature increases below the threshold of 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, considered a tipping point at which many of the worst ravages of climate change will become irreversible.
“Ten years later, progress has fallen far short of the mark, with leaders scrambling to keep the deal’s goals intact—an aim that is likely untenable without the cooperation of the US, the globe’s largest historical emitter of carbon.
“America’s president has not only once again pulled the US out of the Paris agreement, but also sought to turn climate denial into public policy and spent his term in office thus far grinding American investment in renewable energy to a halt—actions viewed as extraordinary abdications of responsibility at a time when the globe is ever more rapidly approaching the point of no return for warming.
“Every fraction of a degree means more hunger, displacement, and loss—especially for those least responsible,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Thursday. “This is moral failure—and deadly negligence.”
“Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has emerged as one of the world’s leading climate defenders from the heart of the Amazon rainforest, began the conference by delivering an indirect but unmistakable shot at Trump.
“He denounced the “extremist forces that fabricate fake news and are condemning future generations to life on a planet altered forever by global warming.”
“Other Latin American leaders were more direct. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, whom Trump recently hit with sanctions and threatened with military action, denounced the US president as ‘against humanity,’ as evidenced by ‘his absence’ at the conference.”
“‘The president of the United States at the latest United Nations General Assembly said the climate crisis does not exist,’ added Chilean President Gabriel Boric. ‘That is a lie.’”
“In Trump’s stead, over 100 other state and local figures from US politics have traveled to Brazil to take part in the conference: Among them are California Gov. Gavin Newsom, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers.”
“Even without Trump present, COP30 is crawling with fossil fuel lobbyists seeking to stymie progress. A report released Friday from the climate advocacy group Kick Big Polluters Out found that over 5,350 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended UN climate negotiations over the past four years. The corporations they represent are responsible for more than 60% of global emissions.”
2 Weeks of Iran War Released More Carbon Emissions Than 84 Countries Do Yearly
Sharon Zhang reports on this fact for Truthout, Published March 23, 2026
“The first two weeks of the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran released a deluge of carbon emissions equivalent to the combined yearly climate warming pollution output of the lowest 84 emitters in the world, a new analysis finds.
“Researchers for progressive think tank Climate and Community Institute found that the first 14 days of the assault released over 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. This is more than the annual emissions of mid-sized economies like Iceland or Kuwait, and roughly the same as dozens of the lowest emitters together.
“‘No matter which of the many reasons Trump has since provided for attacking Iran, the US intervention in Iran is now clearly about oil, plunging the Middle East into another crisis and deepening the social, economic, and environmental costs of war,’ wrote researchers Patrick Bigger, Benjamin Neimark, and Fred Otu-Larbi in a newsletter post about the analysis.
“Bottom of Form
For their analysis, researchers examined reports from the media, international organizations and other independent institutions in order to gather data on factors like munitions quantities, fuel consumption, and infrastructure destruction. They then used that information to determine the volume of emissions based on prior research on emissions from the U.S. invasion of Iraq and from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“The largest cause of emissions in the report is the destruction of homes and buildings, which has resulted in nearly 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, the analysis found. Researchers based this estimate on data from the Iranian Red Crescent Society, which says that 20,000 units were damaged or destroyed in the conflict, including dozens of medical facilities and schools.”
“The emissions from building destruction alone are equal to those of 1.1 million gas-powered cars yearly, the group said.
“The second largest contributor was the attacks on oil facilities by Israeli and Iranian forces in areas across Iran and the Middle East, as well as strikes on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, amounting to 1.9 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
“The remaining emissions came from fuel used by military warships, fighter jets, and support vessels and vehicles; the loss of equipment like the U.S.’s and Iran’s downed aircraft, lost naval vessels, and destroyed missile launchers; and the intensive use of drone and missile attacks.
“‘The carbon costs of the war will continue to rise dramatically as it drags on’ the Climate and Community Institute researchers wrote.
“‘However, the most significant climate impact of the attack on Iran will not be the emissions of the conflict itself, but from its aftermath,’ they went on. ‘As the US continues to press on in its ill-conceived quest for ‘energy dominance,’ fossil fuel production will be expanded in the name of energy security, locking in emissions from extraction infrastructure for decades.”
But the climate emissions from the war, which has no end in sight, will affect the entire world.
The report comes as the U.S. goes through a record heat wave, with eight states setting an all-time high heat record in March. The heat wave would have been ‘virtually impossible’ without changes caused by the climate crisis, research group World Weather Attribution said. More heat may be yet to come, as weather and climate experts predict an extremely strong El Niño this year, which typically means hotter temperatures across the globe.”
Concluding thoughts
This record of a continuing dependence on carbon dioxide emitting fossil fuels, especially in the U.S., where Trump celebrates it, is causing the planet’s temperature to continue rising, with increasingly disastrous consequences.
If Trump, the Republicans, and their corporate allies remain in power, the U.S. contribution to this existential calamity will not be reversed. Unfortunately, it is not a sure eventuality that Democratic administrations would be willing to do enough. Americans are understandable concerned with “affordability” and getting by. The issue of the climate crisis remains an abstraction or non-issue.
The harmful behavior and policies of Trump did not just start
Bob Sheak, April 17, 2026
Arlene Sheak edits
The news is filled with the harm Trump has generated over his second presidential term, and before. He is linked to Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile networks. His association with Elon Musk led to the reduction of federal jobs and serivces. His “Big Beautiful Bill” reduced taxes on the rich and powerful permanently. He has deployed ICE agents in cities across the country to find, detain, and/or deport immigrants, most of whom have been law-abiding and employed residents and citizens. Millions of people have protested against Trump’s ICE policies. He seems egomaniacally to look for every opportunity to have his name put on government building, monuments, and even on a one-dollar bill.
His tariffs inflated costs in the economy and had a drastic impact on many Americans. He started an unnecessary war on Iran that has led to much higher gas prices, fertilizer prices, and even higher inflation. He ordered the war on Iran without authorization from Congress. It is a lawless and unnecessary war. The war has caused immense destruction and death in Iran, including children. Now Trump has proposed a budget for 2027 that would raise military spending to levels not seen since WWII, while calling for severe reductions in other parts of the federal budget. He has even implied that he could order the use of nuclear bombs on Iran.
———-
Trump’s 2027 budget proposal favors military spending
LISA MASCARO and KEVIN FREKING report in an article for AP News on April 3, 2026 that Trump’s 2027 budget seeks $1.5T in defense spending alongside cuts in domestic programs (https://apnews.com/article/trump-2027-annual-budget-congress-defense-f95715d838bc17afd9799208cd3181.e3). Here’s some of what they write.
“President Donald Trump has proposed boosting defense spending to $1.5 trillion in his 2027 budget released Friday, the largest such request in decades, reflecting his emphasis on U.S. military investments over domestic programs.
“The sizable increase for the Pentagon, some 44%, had been telegraphed by the Republican president even before the U.S.-led war against Iran. The president’s plan would also reduce spending on non-defense programs by 10%.”
“‘It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare — all these individual things,’ he said. ‘They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal.’”
Debt, deficits and tough choices ahead
Mascaro and Freking continue. “With the nation running nearly $2 trillion annual deficits and the debt swelling past $39 trillion, the federal balance sheets have long been operating in the red.
“About two-thirds of the nation’s estimated $7 trillion in annual spending covers the Medicare and Medicaid health care programs, as well as Social Security income, which are essentially growing — along with an aging population — on autopilot.
“It’s the rest of the annual budget where much of the debate in Congress takes place, as Democrats over the years have insisted that changes in the level of spending for defense and non-defense need to be equitable.
Trump’s proposals “suggests $1.1 trillion for defense would come through the regular appropriations process, which typically requires support from both parties for approval, while $350 billion would go in the budget reconciliation process that Republicans can accomplish on their own, through party-line majority votes.”
———–
War crimes
Over 100 legal experts say Trump committed ‘war crimes’
In an article for Mick Hilden, Alternet on April 2, 2026, Mick Hilden reports that “over 100 legal experts say Trump committed ‘war crimes’
(https://www.alternet.org/trump-war-crimes-2676655530). He writes,
“When President Donald Trump launched war against Iran at the end of February, his conduct then and since may amount to ‘’war crimes,’ according to an open letter signed by over 100 international law experts. The experts assert that ‘the attack was a clear violation of the United Nations Charter’ as there was no evidence that Iran posed an imminent threat.
“The letter signatories include senior professors, leaders of prominent international law organizations, former government legal advisors and military law experts including former Judge Advocates General, who signed to “express profound concern about serious violations of international law and alarming rhetoric by the United States, Israel and Iran in the present armed conflict in the Middle East.”
This body of experts asserted that the war — ‘which is costing U.S. taxpayers between $1-2 billion each day’— raises four main concerns.
“First, there is the violation of international use-of-force laws, as ‘there is no evidence that Iran posed an imminent threat’ to justify Trump’s self-defense claims.
“Second, there appear to have been serious violations of international humanitarian law, with 67,414 civilian sites struck, 498 of which are schools and 236 of which are health facilities, killing at least 1,443 Iranian civilians, including 217 children.
“Third, the letter points out ‘concerns about rhetoric and threats from senior officials.’ These include threats of ‘no quarter’ from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has said that ‘the U.S. does not fight with ‘stupid rules of engagement’ and may conduct strikes on Iran ‘just for fun.’ At the same time, Trump has been making threats to civilian infrastructure like power and water desalination plants, which if carried out, entail serious war crimes.
“Finally, the signatories are worried about the reduction of institutional safeguards against further violations, asserting that Trump and his officials have ‘deliberately and systematically weakened the protections meant to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law.’ They have achieved this by removing senior military lawyers without cause, replacing military advocates general, and abolishing ‘civilian environment teams’ and other mechanisms specifically designed to limit harm to civilians during operations.”
“The letter concludes by urging ‘U.S. government officials to uphold the UN Charter, international humanitarian law and human rights law at all times, and to publicly make clear U.S. commitment to and respect for norms of international law.’
“But their pleas may fall on deaf ears as on Wednesday night, Trump delivered a national address in which he gave little sign of changing course, instead declaring that he would bomb Iran ‘back to the Stone Age.’
———-
Mentally unstable
Amidst all this harm and chaos, Trump is now being characterized as mentally unstable, that is, MORE mentally unstable than in the past.
Peter Baker has a lenthy article in The New York Times on Trump’s condition
(https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/us/politics/trump-mental-fitness-25th-amendment.html). Baker writes, “President Trump’s erratic behavior and extreme comments in recent days and weeks have turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate that has followed him on the national political stage for a decade.” Baker seems to favor the latter, just plain-crazy option. “A series of disjointed, hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements capped by his ‘threat to wipe Iran off the map last week and his head-spinning attack on the pope on Sunday night’ have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.”
Jamelle Bouie writes in the NYT on how Trump is “not a man in control of himself” (https://www.nytimes.com.2026/04/15/opinion/trump-iran-power-unitary-executive.html). “The president is struggling with the consequences of his actions, raging in protest of the fact that for all its firepower, the United States cannot bomb Iran into submission.” Trump looks for others to blame. “Over the last few days, Trump has denounced ‘the Fake News Media’ as ‘CRAZY, or just plain CORRUPT!’ for its reporting on the war. He attacked Pope Leo XIV in a bizarre rant, calling him ‘WEAK on Crime’ and ‘terrible for Foreign Policy.’ And he posted an A.I. image of himself as Jesus, surrounded by devotees, healing an unnamed man.”
Some top psychiatrists, have also written to Congressional majority and minority leaders in the US Senate and US House about Trump’s mental instability. The psychiatrists include James Gilligan, Prudence L. Gourgueshon, James R. Merekanges, and Jeffrey D. Sachs. The letter is reproduced on The Alternet website, April 15, 2026 (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/top-psychiatrists-issue-urgent-letter-to-congress-about-trump-s-mental-instability-opinion/ar-AA20WQwAl).
“Dear Senate Majority Leader Thune, Senate Minority Leader Schumer, Speaker Johnson, and House Minority Leader Jeffries:
“We write to you today with a sense of urgency that we do not use lightly. The behavior and rhetoric of President Donald Trump have crossed a threshold that demands the immediate and bipartisan attention of Congress. This is not a partisan assessment. It is a judgment grounded in observable fact, consistent professional assessment, and the constitutional responsibilities that your offices carry.
President Trump exhibits what forensic mental health experts have, across dozens of independent assessments, identified as the ‘Dark Triad’ of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Rather than constituting a clinical diagnosis, this trait-based assessment is grounded in behavioral observation and is particularly useful for assessing the level of danger an individual poses in a political leadership position. We do not offer this as a clinical verdict. We offer it as the considered judgment of a substantial body of professional opinion, based on well-researched evidence that is consistent, accumulating, and impossible to dismiss.”
“What makes this more than an academic matter is what predictably happens when this personality structure collides with immovable obstacles. The clinical literature is clear: individuals with Dark Triad profiles, when confronted with situations they cannot control or escape, do not recalibrate. They escalate. The psychological imperative to relieve narcissistic collapse overrides strategic calculation, concern for consequences, and ordinary self-restraint. Rage surges to domination. Impulsivity overrides caution. The urgent need to extinguish psychological pain eclipses every other consideration.”
The most urgent of their recommendations is that “Congress must immediately retake its constitutional authority over war. The bombing of Iran and the initiation of a naval blockade — acts of war under both US and international law — cannot be authorized by presidential fiat. Article I of the Constitution vests in Congress the sole power to declare war and to regulate commerce with foreign nations. The Framers intended Congress to deliberate upon and be accountable for precisely such consequential actions. Congress must assume its constitutional authority now, before further escalation renders the question moot.”
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There are other deeply serious indications of Trump’s mental instability and the reckless policies that stem from it. Tom Nichols offers some glimpses into Trump’s behavior in an article titled “Trump’s Latest Meltdown” for The Atlantic Magazine, published on April 14, 2026
(https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/trump-pope-post-truth-social/686802).
Here are excerpts.
“On many recent nights, Donald Trump has been posting obsessively on his Truth Social site into the wee hours. The president, of course, has never been one for a solid night’s sleep—or restrained and temperate commentary on social media—but his emotional state seems to be fraying: This weekend, he attacked Pope Leo XIV, presented himself as Jesus Christ, and then jabbed at his phone until dawn.
“Judging from those posts, the commander in chief is in distress. No one can say for sure what is causing the president’s bizarre behavior. Perhaps Trump’s narcissistic insistence that he is always successful in everything he undertakes is feeling the sting and strain of multiple public failures, including the collapse of his campaign to dislodge the Iranian regime, plummeting approval ratings, the decline of the U.S. economy, and, on Sunday, the crushing defeat of one of his favorite fellow authoritarians, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.”
Nichols describes Trump’s posts on Truth Social on Sunday night, April 12.
“So a few minutes after nine on Sunday night, Trump posted a salvo of more than 300 words on Truth Social. According to the White House’s official schedule, he had just landed at Joint Base Andrews after his trip to Miami and was likely posting from the plane.
“His post was, in every way, bonkers. The president accused the pope of being ‘Weak on Crime’ and ‘Weak on Nuclear Weapons.’ He said that Leo ‘wasn’t on any list to be Pope’ and that he likes Leo’s brother Louis much better because ‘Louis is all MAGA.’”
“He had recommendations for the pontiff about how to be a better Vicar of Christ, saying he ‘should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left, and focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.’”
“This one screed against the leader of a billion and a half Catholics was worrisome enough, but for Trump, it was just the beginning of a long night. Only 45 minutes after flaming the pope, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as (apparently) Jesus Christ, healing a sick man while soldiers and nurses and other worshipful white people gaze in awe and military jets fly overhead. You have to see the image to really grasp its weirdness, and to take in how offensive, even heretical, it might be to Christians of any mainstream denomination. (Trump has since taken that post down, claiming that he thought it depicted him as wearing a doctor’s outfit—a denial that is not only laughable, but is also hardly reassuring about his cognitive health.”
Nichols then provides a timeline for Trump’s behavior from 10:10 p.m. until 4:10 a.m.
“Five minutes after this sacrilegious nonsense, Trump posted a mock-up of a Trump Tower on the moon. (Sure, why not.)
“Twenty minutes after that, at 10:10 p.m., Trump shared a silly meme about how Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Biden all look old after so many years in office, unlike himself. Twelve minutes later, he posted a clip from Newsmax’s Rob Carson Show. Twenty minutes later, he posted yet another Newsmax clip from the same show.
“Relative calm then overtook Trump’s phone until 12:43 a.m., when he announced that the U.S. Navy would be blockading Iranian ports in the morning—as if it were just another stray factoid to share in his news feed.
“Then, a bit more than two hours later—at 2:35 a.m.—he posted a link to a right-wing news site that approved of his Iran actions. At almost the same time, he posted another news story from the site about the Biden family and Ukraine. Two minutes later, he posted an article about Eric Swalwell leaving the California governor’s race. A few minutes later, he posted the same Biden story, again.
“Within another minute, Trump posted a link about an appeals court ruling that he could keep building his beloved ballroom until April 17. Finally, after a brief pause, he wrapped things up by posting a laudatory article from the New York Post—at 4:10 a.m., not long before dawn.”
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Concluding thoughts
Our president is an unstable, self-serving, and vindictive person. He has done great damage to the society, not the least of which is take the men and women of our military to an unnecessary war in Iran. This war has done great harm to the Iranians and has been costly to the U.S. in money, the use of expensive weapons, and the loss or wounding of American soldiers. Despite massive protests against his policies, he does what he wants, knowing that Republicans who control both houses of Congress will bend their knees to him. Despite all this, there is opposition outside of his Republican base to his policies and support in recent elections for dozens of Democratic candidates, pointing toward victories in November.
Trump proposes a huge increase in military spending, despite widespread economic stresses
Trump proposes a huge increase in military spending despite widespread economic stresses.
April 10, 2026
Bob Sheak
Arlene Sheak edits
Introduction
Trump and Republicans in Congress are – and have been – advancing a budget for the country that reduces assistance for ordinary citizens. This is glaringly obvious in Trump’s budget proposal for 2027, a budget that likely will be approved by Republicans in Congress. It is a budget that overwhelming favors military spending. It would not be so bad if citizens generally were in sound financial shape, but many are not. There has been an “affordability” problem across the country for most of Trump’s second term.
At the same time, people are also being negatively affected by Trump’s tariffs, cuts in government programs and staff in the early months of his second term, a precarious job market, and the disastrous effects of his Iran War reflected, for example, in high gas prices and high fertilizer prices. See the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities for a detailed analysis if the economic difficulties associated with the policies of Trump and the Republican party (https://www.cbpp.org.research/federal-budget/a-record-of-historic-harm-in-the-first-year-of-trumps-second-term). Here is a summary of the CBPP’s research.
“The Trump Administration and congressional Republicans advanced one of the most radically regressive policy agendas in our nation’s history during the first year of President Trump’s second term. As a result, tens of millions of people will be less able to meet the growing cost of their basic needs — whether it’s affording groceries, seeing a doctor, keeping the power on, or paying the rent — even as the wealthiest households get a windfall of more tax breaks. At the same time, President Trump and his Administration have undermined and corrupted many basic functions of government, including the proper and timely allocation of funds approved by Congress, leading to more disruption and harm.”
These problems figure in the low poll ratings of Trump. For example, here is the most recent Trump approval rating, according to the latest from The Economist (April 1, 2026):
- Favorable: 36%
- Unfavorable: 57%
- Not sure: 7%
In this context, consider Trump’s 2027 budget proposal.
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“A Moral Obscenity”
Jake Johnson refers to this term in describing Trump’s 2027 budget proposal (https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-2027-budget). Here is some of what he writes.
“President Donald Trump’s White House released a budget proposal on Friday [Sept. 3] that pairs an unprecedented, debt-exploding $1.5 trillion in military spending with tens of billions of dollars in cuts to domestic agencies and education, healthcare, climate, and housing programs.”
“Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2027, which must be approved by Congress [now controlled by Republicans] includes $73 billion in total cuts to nondefense spending while boosting military outlays by 42%—or nearly $500 billion—compared to current levels.”
Johnson continues. “Programs cut or eliminated in the proposed budget—under the guise of slashing ‘woke programs’ and ‘ending the Green New Scam’—include the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice program, Community Services Block Grants, electric vehicle charging subsidies, renewable energy initiatives at the Interior Department, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing.
“The budget proposal also calls for cuts to the already-depleted Internal Revenue Service, without offering specific figures.”
“One budget expert noted that, if enacted, the White House’s requested cuts would bring nondefense discretionary spending to ‘its lowest level in the modern era.’”
Alternatively, what would $500 billion in Pentagon spending if it were spent on non-defense programs and the needs of typical citizens? Here are some answers to which Johnson refers.
“The $500 billion annual increase in proposed Pentagon spending—if it were instead deployed humanely—would be enough to solve or meaningfully address the nation’s great problems, from healthcare to daycare, from the climate crisis to affordable housing, from improving schools to making college education affordable,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen. “Instead, Trump and Vought propose to spend an unfathomable amount on a Pentagon that can’t even pass an audit to further empower an out-of-control and incompetent leader in Pete Hegseth.”
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Trump’s Imperial Military Budget
Robert L. Borosage refers to Trump’s budget proposal as an “imperial military budget, The Nation, April 8, 2026
(https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-imperials-military-budget).
Borosage writes: “In his recent military budget, Trump is saying the quiet part out loud: Waging war is more important to his administration than providing for basic needs at home.”
He points out that “the $1.5 trillion military budget—a $500 billion, 42 percent increase that would be the largest year-on-year percentage increase since the mobilization for Korean War.” Trump is all-in on this increase, while saying that the federal government should not have to continue to pay for a host of non-defense programs. He quotes Trump.
“I said to [Office of Management and Budget director] Russell [Vought], ‘Don’t send any money for daycare because the United States can’t take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare…. We’re fighting wars…. it’s not possible for us to take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing, military protection.”
Borosage continues. “It wasn’t just daycare that would take the hit. The press reported that president’s budget called for a 10 percent cut in all non-defense discretionary programs (outside of Medicare and Medicaid, which were savaged last year, and Social Security), targeting primarily anything related to climate, the environment, civil rights, education, and food support and other poverty programs. But in reality, compared to the cost of continuing current levels of service, it slashes domestic programs by nearly one-fourth. With ICE and Homeland Security getting increases, targeted programs were cut to the bone: the Environmental Protection Agency cut by more than one-half, LIHEAP—heating subsidies for low income families—eliminated, another $20 billion lopped off rebuilding infrastructure.”
Borosage elaborates his point.
“The proposed $1.5 trillion annual military budget, about 5 percent of the GNP, is real money. As Dean Baker notes, it comes to about $12,000 per family. And that doesn’t include the $200 billion supplemental that the Pentagon will reportedly seek to pay for the war on Iran.
Borosage continues. “The money lards a military-industrial complex that is the largest source of waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government—and has never been able to pass an audit.”
And he refers to Representative Ro Khanna on what alternative non-military spending could buy.
“Let me tell you what $200 billion could do here in America. It would allow for free public college for every American kid. We could build a thousand trade schools, we could pay every American teacher $60,000 to start.
“We could have universal childcare: childcare at $10 a day, with childcare workers making $25 an hour. And we could fully fund special needs education at 40% of what the federal government needs to fund.
“Or it could pay to reverse the cuts already made in vital needs. Reversing the cuts in Obamacare made by Trump and the Republican Congress last year would cost $27 billion annually. Extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit that aided low-wage workers curing Covid would cost about $40 billion annually.
We don’t need more military spending to keep us safe. We already have such a force.
Indeed, “Trump repeatedly and correctly boasts that the US military is already the most powerful military in the world by far. The ‘Department of War’ accounts for 40 percent of the world’s military spending, more than the next nine costliest militaries combined—seven of which are (or were before Trump) our allies. This despite the fact that, surrounded by oceans to the East and West and allies to the North and South, the United States is uniquely secure against any conventional assault.”
Trump’s “military fantasies”
“But,” Borosage writes, “Trump’s budget request isn’t really a wartime budget. Most of the increase is a down payment on military fantasies. A centerpiece is an initial investment in Trump’s Golden Dome, his utterly fantastically recycled version of Reagan’s Star Wars, calling for building a defensive ‘dome against missile attacks. It will squander hundreds of billions on multiple layers of land-, sea-, and space-based sensors and interceptors designed to protect the US from next-generation missiles and drones. Like Reagan’s fantasy, the system won’t work, serving only to enrich high-tech military contractors, accelerate the arms race in space, and lead China and Russia and other future nuclear-armed adversaries (France?) to move toward hair-trigger alert postures. Add to that a down payment of $65.8 billion in shipbuilding for Trump’s ‘Golden Fleet,’ featuring ‘Trump-class’ battleships that, if our corrupted military contractors actually succeed in building, will provide tempting targets for inexpensive air and underwater drones that are becoming the weapons of choice for weaker countries.”
Borosage offers the following conclusion. “A $1.5 trillion annual military budget isn’t necessary for the defense of the United States. Rather it assumes that the US will continue to police the world. We will remain committed to global military hegemony—aiming to be dominant militarily in this hemisphere, from Europe to the Russian border, counter China in the South China Sea, strike terrorists across the world, sustain a global empire of 750-plus military bases, and deploy military forces to over 100 countries, while patrolling the seven seas.”
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William Hartung contends in an article for Common Dreams. April 3, 2026that Trump’s $1.5 trillion Pentagon Budget will make US weaker
(https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/1-5-trillion-pentagon-budget). William D. Hartung is a Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and the author most recently of “Pathways to Pentagon Spending Reductions: Removing the Obstacles.”
Here’s some of what Hartung writes.
““It has been reported that the Pentagon on Friday [April 3] will release a proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2027 of almost $1.5 trillion, with approximately $1.15 trillion in discretionary spending contained in the department’s regular annual budget and an additional $350 billion dependent on Congress including it in a separate budget reconciliation bill.
“Whatever vehicles the administration chooses to promote this huge increase, it will be doubling down on a failed budgetary and national security strategy. If passed as requested, $1.5 trillion in Pentagon spending—in a single year–will make America weaker by underwriting a misguided strategy, funding outmoded weapons programs, and crowding out other essential public investments.
“The current war in the Middle East is a case study in the ineffectiveness of an overreliance on military force in seeking to make America or the world a safer place.”
Here is a key point. Hartung writes: “In his first term, President Trump abandoned a multilateral agreement that was effectively blocking Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon. Six years later, in his second term, the president initially justified his disastrous intervention against Iran as being motivated by fears” that Iran might be developing such a capacity. He did this without evidence they were doing so.
Hartung emphasizes that diplomacy worked, while reckless resort to force does not, as evidenced by the devastating human, budgetary, and global economic consequences of the current Middle East war. Passing a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget would be a recipe for endless war.
“Meanwhile, other, non-military investments needed to protect the lives and livelihoods of Americans are being sharply reduced. By one account, the first week of the war on Iran cost $11.6 billion. That’s more than the Trump administration proposed for the annual budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and the Environmental Protection Agency combined for this year. Yet addressing the climate crisis and the need to prevent future outbreaks of disease are essential to the safety and security of Americans.
“The administration has also reduced our available tools of influence on the foreign policy front by decimating the Agency for International Development, laying off trained diplomats at the State Department, and withdrawing from major international agreements. This leaves force and the threat of force as virtually the last tools standing for promoting U.S. security interests.”
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Eric Ross writes at length for Tom Dispatch on “The Price of Empire and the Costs of War on Iran.” April 2, 2026 (https://tomdispatch.com/blowback-2026). In his opening paragraph, Ross presents a summary of the many “costs” of Trump’s war on Iran, not only for the US but even more on Iran.
“What will the costs of the latest round of illegal, ill-fated U.S. military adventurism in the Middle East amount to? Some of the toll is already clear. Washington has squandered billions of dollars on a reckless war of aggression against Iran. A merciless campaign of aerial bombardment has driven millions from their homes. American and Israeli airstrikes have rained destruction on 10,000 civilian sites and already killed more than 3,000 people in Iran and Lebanon. Among the dead are more than 200 children, many killed in a U.S. strike on a girls’ school, a war crime that evokes the grim precedent of such past American atrocities as the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam or the 1991 Amiriyah shelter bombing in Iraq.
“The latest war has also dealt a potentially fatal blow to our already battered democratic institutions. It’s a war neither authorized by Congress nor supported by the public. Instead, it was launched by a president who refuses to submit to the law or heed the will of the people, claiming in true authoritarian fashion that he is the law, and that he alone embodies the popular will.”
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Sarah Fortinsky writes on how Trump’s approval rating has hit a new low as the Iran war squeezes economy, and reminds us how this war was arbitrarily started by Trump, with no consultation with Congress and with no concern about public opinion. Now, the public is reacting, belatedly negatively(https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5811709-trump-approval-rating-iran-war-economy). Here’s some of what she writes.
“President Trump’s approval numbers have slipped in recent weeks, hovering near the lowest levels of his second term, as Americans — including his conservative base — grow increasingly wary of a prolonged war in Iran that could portend trouble for the U.S. economy.
“Recent polling from YouGov and The Economist has Trump’s approval rating down 4 percentage points since just before the U.S. struck Iran, falling from 39 percent in late February to 35 percent in the latest survey.
“A Reuters/Ipsos poll similarly put Trump’s approval at 36 percent, down from 40 percent earlier this month, while a Fox News survey found the president’s disapproval rating at 59 percent, the highest level recorded in either of his terms.
The shift has coincided with declining support for Trump’s handling of the Iran war, which saw its sharpest drop yet this past week — as gas prices climbed to more than $4 for the first time since 2022….”
“Trump, who spoke to the public Wednesday night [April 1] about the conflict, saw his polling on Iran start out at 39 percent in early March, before dropping to 36 percent for two weeks and then ticking down to 30 percent in the latest YouGov/Economist survey.”
“The drop-off in Trump’s overall approval rating comes as Americans broadly sour on the economy, with only 14 percent saying conditions are improving….”
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Concluding thoughts
Trump’s budget proposal, with its emphasis on military spending and dismissal of federal responsibility for most non-defense programs, is losing his support among vast numbers of citizens, even among his base. This is reflected in polls and also in recent Democratic electoral victories. It is also reflected in the 8 million people who demonstrated against Trump on “No King’s” day. Still, it is of great concern that Trump is still able to wield such great power as president.
Vital issues - challenging pol and econ power 