Jonathan P. Baird

Presidents come and go. During my years of political awareness, I have seen more than ten men hold the position of president. Whether they were Democrats or Republicans, they conformed to American political norms and traditions. Some presidents accomplished part of an agenda like Obama with health care while others like Bush Jr. presided over disasters like the war in Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina. Whether they served one or two terms, they did their time and left office when the time came.

Nothing has prepared us for the presidency of Donald Trump. Expectations based on past behavior of any president have not prepared us for his second term. It is a mistake to size Trump up compared to past presidents. I would suggest a different frame of reference since reality has proven to be stranger than fiction.

The character I would compare Trump to is Ian Fleming’s character, Goldfinger. In the novel, Goldfinger has a plan to steal the gold reserves from Fort Knox. The plan is called Operation Grand Slam. Trump might as well be backing up a Brink’s truck to Fort Knox. His scheme to remove $1.776 billion from the U.S. Treasury is Goldfinger-like.

Consider the Trump slush fund. When his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS proved to be a non-starter, he revised the plan to allow a supposed settlement of the non-dispute where he could grab $1.776 billion of taxpayer money. He has been trying to settle the case with himself and cut out any judicial interference.

What we are seeing is a heist movie. Even the least ethical presidents like Richard Nixon never tried for anything on a scale like this. Trump is, in effect, saying, ” I can take anything I want. Sky is the limit”. He is not asking Congress or any entity for permission. Normally the Department of Justice would defend a lawsuit like this but the acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is behaving as Trump’s consigliere. The DOJ is supposed to be the steward of the peoples’ money but we are so far past that point. They have become the tool of a thief.

Congress was supposed to be the entity that appropriates taxpayer money but they have become supine. Trump is using his alleged Article II power as a smash and grab. There is no constitutional or other authority that allows Trump to take this money.

The most egregious aspect of the slush fund affair is the side deal inserted and signed by Todd Blanche that states the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” pending tax claims against Trump, his family members and his businesses. This amounts to a free pass forever from any IRS investigation, audit or prosecution.

To appreciate the magnitude of this side deal, it must be recognized that Donald Trump has long had IRS problems. The IRS audited Trump because he claimed questionable deductions to reduce his taxable income. During the years 2016 and 2017, Trump paid $750 each year in federal income taxes. When he ran for president he said he could not release his tax returns because he was being audited.

According to a New York Times investigation in 2020, in 10 of the previous 15 years, Trump paid no income taxes to the federal government. In 2022, the Trump Organization was convicted of 17 counts of tax fraud . The New York Times has written that an audit battle with the IRS could have cost him more than $100 million

This side deal approved by Blanche would be a dream come true for Trump. If the deal goes down, Trump would never be responsible for any tax crime he, his family or his organization have committed or would commit.

This hasn’t been mentioned much in the reporting of this story but there is a federal law that bars the President, the Vice-President or their aides from influencing or directing an IRS investigation. Tre top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, resigned over concern about Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS. He must want to keep his law license.

Not only is the slush fund a shakedown, it can be seen as an investment in the future. Trump can use the fund to pay off his private army of January 6 rioters to insure loyalty in case he needs them again. Also, knowing Trump, it is hard not to imagine some of the slush fund money flowing into his own pocket. Todd Blanche gets to pick all five of the members of the board who will decide who gets a cut of the fund.

The word corruption barely begins to describe this betrayal of the public trust. Every time something is written about Trump’s corruption it is almost instantly outdated as new developments surpass the previously known criminality. There are and will be multiple lawsuits around the slush fund.

We, the public, did not have enough imagination to anticipate that something like Donald Trump might happen. Trump is a sociopathic plutocrat like Goldfinger. He is an older and less mobile version of Goldfinger. They both are obsessed with gold and gold ornamentation. Both share qualities of boundless greed and cruelty. Todd Blanche is Trump’s less physical Oddjob. Blanche will do the dirty work.

Trump and Goldfinger also share a love of golf. Goldfinger is a golf cheat whom James Bond outsmarts on the course. Trump has a reputation for cheating at gold too. Rick Reilly wrote a book on this theme,Cammander in Cheat. Reilly wrote that Trump “always gets a turbo-charged golf cart that goes three times as fast as yours, so he’s always 200 yards ahead, and that gives him time to cheat”. He wrote Trump puts his ball in better position and puts his opponents balls into bunkers before they arrive. As Reilly says, “cheat at golf – cheat at life”.

With the heat on Trump increasing as his popularity wanes, Trump must know his glory days are coming to an end. He is grabbing what he can while the getting is good.

Of all the crummy things the U.S. Supreme Court majority has done including overturning Roe v Wade and issuing the Trump immunity decision, destroying the Voting Rights Act ranks at the top. The decision in the case of Louisiana v Callais was epically bad. It is almost Roger Taney-level bad. He was the author of the Dred Scott decision. It is like the Court has entirely lost track of the value of equality, a fundamental American value.

The Court demolished Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the only piece of the Act that had been left after earlier demolition. In 2013, in the Shelby County case, they eviscerated Section 5, the pre-clearance section. At that time, Chief Justice Roberts had reassured that Section 2 was “permanent” and would remain in place and be applied nation-wide.

To appreciate how bad this decision is it is necessary to revisit why the Voting Rights Act has been so important. Since Reconstruction until the 1960’s, black people in the South were denied the right to vote. Literacy tests, poll taxes and voter intimidation were the norm, effectively preventing exercise of the franchise. Before the Voting Rights Act only 7% of Mississippi’s black people were registered to vote even though blacks comprised 40% of the state’s population. All the Southern states had very low percentage of their black population able to vote.

No one knows how many black bodies disappeared forever into the rivers and swamps of the South because those individuals, who were considered too uppity, wanted to vote. Nor do we know how many of those who were lynched ended up in that situation because they had tried to vote. Southern states then had no black representation. White supremacy brutally ruled for almost 100 years.

When the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, it was because of the Civil Rights movement. So much advocacy, effort, blood and tears went into getting that law passed. The Court majority was oblivious to that history. President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act after Bloody Sunday and people like John Lewis making “good trouble”.

The Voting Rights Act literally changed the face of Southern politics. Just three years after the Act passed, Black voters registered in the South increased by 1.3 million people. By 1968, 60% of eligible black voters were registered, up from 7% in 1965.

To stay in power in the South, white supremacists changed tactics. They still worked to suppress the black vote. They now called themselves “conservatives” and they retooled the charges of voter fraud and corruption. These were the same charges earlier generations of white supremacists, the former Confederates, had employed during Reconstruction against black elected officials and their white allies to undermine their legitimacy.

It is forgotten now but in 1985, Jeff Sessions, then U.S. Attorney in Alabama, used the voter fraud allegation against black defendants, including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr. who had been beaten on Bloody Sunday. Turner had been leading voter registration drives. Sessions brought a case against the Marion Three (which included Turner and his wife). When questioned that he only targeted blacks, Sessions said:

“We will respond to any substantiated charge of voter fraud against whites or blacks. I know of no charges against white election officials in our jurisdiction.”

The Marion Three were acquitted by a federal jury. Turner explained his targeting: “I stand in the way of the white power structure”. The voter fraud narrative persists as a popular Republican tactic to winnow down the black vote. Trump has indulged the same narrative about the 2020 election complaining about places with large black voter concentrations.

Southern white racists have also used the tactic of voter caging since the 1980’s. That was a practice of sending mail to addresses on the voter rolls, compiling a list of the mail that was returned undelivered and purging voters on th list on the grounds that they don’t legally reside at their registered addresses. Republicans justified voter caging as a way to identify voter fraud but they focused their efforts on black and Latino neighborhoods only. Republicans used caging to eliminate thousands of minority voters from the rolls. They know that in close races, keeping the minority vote down could be decisive.

Contrary to the Supreme Court majority’s assumption both in Shelby County and Callais that things have changed in the South, those justices are living in a fantasy land. The Southern white power structure is getting rid of majority minority districts and they are gerrymandering like it was 1877. They fight equality tooth and nail and they never stopped fighting it. The same Jim Crow racism that ruled the South for much of American history has not gone away.

What the Supreme Court majority did in Callais was a white power grab. They did not have to decide the case this early in the term. They decided Callais to allow southern states time to re-district in 2026. In the past, the Court had said maps should not be redrawn close to an election but not this year. Callais was a gift to Donald Trump and his maximum gerrymandering scheme. Almost the minute Callais was decided, we saw a greatly expanded gerrymandering effort across many Southern states. These states are hell-bent on reducing black legislative representation to nothing.

All the Supreme Court’s anti-equality efforts are an affront to the Reconstruction era constitutional amendments, especially the Fifteenth Amendment.

In the name of colorblindness, the Supreme Court has given constitutional cover to racist policies and practices. We are seeing a counter-revolution against the civil rights movement. Never has the need for reforming the Supreme Court been more apparent.

In honor of this summer’s America 250/Concord 300 anniversary, the Concord Monitor asked its readers to offer a submission on the question: What does New Hampshire mean to you? Here is my submission.

As a city boy who grew up in the Philadelphia area, New Hampshire means elbow room. With Mt. Kearsarge in the background, the physical beauty of my town, Wilmot, is stunning. New Hampshire means a great place for dogs. For me it is about hiking back roads, trails and mountains with my golden retriever, Blue. It also means hoping Blue won’t get porcupined

New Hampshire means the darkness of a long winter but also the warmth of reading a book near my wood stove. It is the spring thaw also known as mud season where dirt roads turn to gravy and your car can literally sink in the road. We start hearing peepers and they are loud. Planting my tomato plants, the black flies get intense even before Memorial Day.

Living rural, it is hard not to love the long days of summer. As a morning person, I love the days lengthening in May. When the fall comes, I always hope there is no early frost to take out my garden. There are always the sly woodchucks too, hanging around.

Although it is little remembered now, New Hampshire was very much part of a proud New England abolitionist tradition. Abolitionists started as a tiny despised minority and ended up persuading much of the nation of the evil of slavery. Before the civil war, New Hampshire had radical abolitionist leaders like Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, editor of an anti-slavery newspaper, Senator John P. Hale who opposed slavery’s expansion and Parker and Sarah Pillsbury who were both in the William Lloyd Garrison wing of the abolition movement. They were ahead of their time.

In 1835, abolitionists opened a racially and sexually integrated school, Noyes Academy, in Canaan. Many young black men and women flocked to the school. It ended up being destroyed by a mob but the school had brought black and white students together. Considering the racism that still defines America, I am proud there was an anti-racist tradition in our state and that New Hampshire pioneered integration. That is the New Hampshire I am proud of.

I just drove down to Philadelphia and I realized another reason I like New Hampshire: lack of traffic jams. After hours on the Garden State Parkway, I am happy to report we have no equivalent even on busiest days. If there is a traffic slow down it might be caused by a flock of wild turkeys stubbornly lolling in the road.

Back in the 1980’s I moved to New Hampshire to start a legal career. For me, New Hampshire means New Hampshire Legal Assistance. Talk about an underapppreciated, devalued asset. New Hampshire Legal Assistance has helped thousands of the neediest and most vulnerable people in our state for over 50 years. Its contribution to the well-being of people in the state has been immense and life-changing. New Hampshire Legal Assistance has maintained a tradition of excellence that continues to this day.

There is, of course, a dark side to New Hampshire but for today, the good stuff deserves highlighting.

One of the biggest tragedies of the Trump regime has been the havoc it has created in the Department of Justice (DOJ). Previously highly regarded, the DOJ has been emptied and partially repopulated. Many ethical and competent attorneys have exited the DOJ. What is left is a shell of its former self. Regime loyalists, opportunists and careerists trying to survive remain. Lawyers who remain have to wonder if their actions now at the service of a corrupt president will lead to disciplinary actions later, like disbarment.

The DOJ should be renamed the Department of Trump. Instead of its prior role as a law firm with commitment to serving the American people, the replacement version led by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is slavishly devoted to the whims of Dear Leader, no matter how absurd. Whether it is covering up Epstein files or advocating for the grandiose ballroom, the DOJ will do whatever is demanded.

If Trump wants to pursue his vendetta against his political enemies, DOJ falls into line. We have seen that with the prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Trump targets enemies and the DOJ attempts to create a case out of almost nothing.

The malicious prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a long-time leading civil rights organization, fits the pattern. The prosecution borders on the incomprehensible. Lawyers competing to advance their careers and gain Trump’s attention are willing to file trash lawsuits. A whistleblower has already come forward saying that a top official working in Todd Blanche’s office pressured prosecutors to file the SPLC case in spite of serious misgivings about the strength of the case.

To appreciate the evil of this prosecution, history is helpful. For almost 100 years, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists terrorized African American communities in the South. The Klan’s murders, massacres, floggings, rapes and castrations were legendary. They were almost never stopped. In the South, white supremacy was an institutionalized way of life.

The Equal Justice Institute documented nearly 6500 racial terror lynchings between 1865 and 1950. Lynchings evolved from events carried out in the dark by night riders who were afraid of being recognized to public spectacles attended by huge crowds. In his book, Klan Wars, Fergus Bordewich wrote:

“Americans embraced a kind of vast willful forgetting, the mental erasure of an entire era, which in turn shaped the writing of a falsified history that influenced generations to follow. The replacement of fact with fiction was breathtaking.”

To this day, the Republican Party maintains that vast willful forgetting. Racism never happened. Well into the 20th century, the failure of American responsibility continued. Thousands of lynching victims never received justice and perpetuation of heinous crimes were almost never prosecuted. White supremacy maintained a position of dominance until the advent of the civil rights movement.

It was extremely dangerous to stand up against the racist terror but the SPLC did it. In 1971, lawyers Morris Dees, Joseph Levin Jr, and activist Julian Bond founded the SPLC. Bond was the first president. The SPLC filed many cases challenging racial and sexual discrimination in the South. In 1975, they successfuly defended Joanne Little, a black woman accused of murdering a white jail guard in North Carolina who had attempted to rape her. The SPLC filed tort suits holding the Klan financially responsible for acts of violence committed by its members.

Its biggest case was its role in 1981 in representing the mother of a 19 year old lynching victim, Michael Donald. Angry that an interracial jury had failed to convict a black man for killing a white police officer, two members of the United Klans of America abducted an innocent black youth, cut his throat and hung his body from a tree on a residential street in Mobile, Alabama. In 1987, SPLC attorneys won a historic $7 million verdict against the Klan members. The suit bankrupted the Klan, They were forced to turn over their headquarters to the victim’s mother.

For five decades the SPLC has tracked white supremacists and has monitored hate groups. They produced Teaching Tolerance, a program to provide free classroom materials on tolerance and diversity to teachers. The SPLC has won innumerable cases against hate groups. They did sometimes use paid informants to infiltrate hate groups, a practice that ended three years ago. This is a practice the FBI also used and SPLC previously shared information learned with the FBI.

The DOJ lawsuit against SPLC alleges that SPLC defrauded its donors by paying informants inside racist groups like the Klan and the Aryan Nation. But no donor to SPLC has come forward to complain about the covert informer program. In its pleadings, the DOJ names no name, a serious legal deficiency. The government actually alleged that SPLC is trying to manufacture racism. They are saying paid informants took money they received from SPLC and plowed it back into hate groups.

Anyone who knows Southern history would know that over the last 55 years the SPLC has been an effective legal advocacy group that had the courage to stand up to the Klan and white supremacy. Hardly any group had that courage for 100 years because Southern racists would harm or kill them.

The Trump regime doesn’t like the SPLC because it has investigated and pursued Trump allies on the Far Right like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and January 6 defendants. This prosecution is an attempt to put a political enemy out of business. They want to make it more difficult for civil rights organizations to track racist extremists and oppose hate. The SPLC prosecution is part of a racist project to turn back the clock to a time before the civil rights movement.

Even the most cynical must stand in awe before Donald Trump’s latest attempted grift. Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion. He is suing because someone leaked his tax information to the public in 2019 and 2020 showing that he paid almost no income taxes for years.

The crazy thing is that he is both plaintiff and defendant in the case. He, his sons and the Trump organization are the plaintiffs and his appointees control the IRS, the defendant. They are negotiating among themselves how much taxpayers will pay for someone disclosing that Trump didn’t pay taxes. Never has not paying taxes been so lucrative.

That swindle is not surprising when you consider the overall Trump financial picture. He has primarily become a crypto entity. Monetizing the presidency has been his full-time gig. He and his family have netted $4 billion in his second term. Wealthy donors and large corporations give him hundreds of millions for the proposed ballroom and his vanity triumphal arch. Others who seek favors or pardons spend millions on his crypto products.

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother and national security advisor to the president of the United Arab Emirates, purchased a half-billion dollar stake in the Trump family’s crypto fund, World Liberty Financial. They received access to the most advanced AI chips in return.

That was followed by Sheikh Tahnoon announcing that another investment company, MGX, was buying a $2 billion stake in Binance, a crypto firm, using the cryptocurrency provided by Trump’s firm, World Liberty Financial. The deal would net the Trump family up to $80 million a year in interest.

The Pentagon just awarded a $24 million contract to a robotics startup tied to Eric Trump, the son. That Trump serves as the chief strategy advisor of the firm. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) asked “Is the Pentagon just a cash machine for Trump’s kids now?”

While the corruption itself is astounding, what is often missed is the other side of the corruption equation. The corruption has negative consequences for everyone else. It is the people who get scammed. When the rich oligarchs make out like bandits, everyone else is left in a struggle for survival. Human needs are neglected as the rich line their pockets. I submit that Trump’s tax cut, his major achievement, only benefited himself and his rich allies and friends. Hiring for jobs is the lowest it has been since 2020.

The whole matter of the crisis of affordability remains unaddressed. Nothing is done to tackle that crisis. The American people face layoffs, flat wages, inflation, exploding rents, outrageous gas price increases, unaffordable health care and rocketing food prices. Trump says we are living in the golden age but actually it is the golden age of fraud. People are right to feel the system is rigged but it is not being rigged by immigrants or minorities. Those groups have little power.

The parallel to Victor Orban and Hungary could not be clearer. MAGA and the Far Right have touted the Orban model for years. I remember Tucker Carlson broadcasting from Budapest on FOX for a full week in 2021. Then he produced a documentary praising Orban and his regime to the skies. Hungary was supposed to be right wing utopia and the defender of Western civilization.

Orban did many of the things Trump has done or tried to do. He stacked the courts, replaced civil servants with loyalists, tilted the electoral system in his favor and took over much of the mass media undermining media pluralism. He scapegoated immigrants and George Soros and promoted vicious anti-immigration policies. He did some things Trump has not been able to do like rewrite Hungary’s constitution and shut down political opposition.

People in Hungary were fed up with the corruption and economic stagnation. During his 16 year tenure as Hungary’s strong man, Orban funneled billions in EU funds and state contracts to a close circle of elites and family members. Orban built a variety of projects like a family mansion, a golf course, a stadium and roundabouts that were unneeded but they were a vehicle to make his family and friends ultra-wealthy.

He drained critical investment money that could have gone to schools and hospitals. Orban made Hungary both the poorest and the most corrupt state in the European Union. He was the poster boy for illiberal democracy. Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation that authored Project 2025, had described Hungary as the model for conservative statecraft.

Peter Magyar, the victorious Hungarian opposition leader, successfully made the link between Orban’s corruption and the impoverishment of the Hungarian people. We need to make that same connection between Trump family corruption and the Trump regime’s oblivious response to the unaffordability of necessities.

While not addressing the economy, Trump predictably will blame his usual list: trans people, Somalis, and anyone else he can scapegoat. Trump’s routine is pretty old and repetitive at this point. You can know what he will do before he does it. He will say everything that has happened in the last 15 months is the greatest. The 2020 election results should “be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force and effect”.

The Hungarian people did show us a very useable roadmap for how to defeat an authoritarian leader. We need a united front against fascism that stretches from the far right to the far left. Everyone who supports democracy needs to unite to oppose the Trump regime. I am making the assumption there will be elections in 2026 and 2028. No president has the authority to cancel that. Whomever the Democrats ultimately choose for 2028 needs to be supported to defeat the MAGA fascists.

As a Jewish person and as a democratic socialist, I have long been a student of fascist movements. It was the failure to build a broad coalition of opposition that allowed Hitler and the German Nazis to come to power. Left parties warred among themselves rather than recognizing the greater threat. Hungary shows the way to defeat fascism in America.

As we approach another May Day, the origins of that holiday remain largely unknown. Almost no one knows this holiday dedicated to international labor solidarity came out of the Unites States. That history got buried and remains untold. Growing up, I mostly remember May Day as a Soviet celebration with big parades in Red Square. Missiles, tanks and troops paraded before authoritarian leaders like Leonid Brezhnev.

May Day, the international workers’ day, has such a different start-up story. In the late nineteenth century, the American working class constantly struggled to gain the 8-hour day. Workers toiled six days a week, for 60 to 70 hours. Factory workers often had 80 to 100 hour a week schedules. Conditions were very unsafe. There was no OSHA. Death and severe workplace injuries were common.

In 1884, a national federation of unions announced a campaign to establish an 8-hour workday by May 1, 1886. Rank and file workers poured into the Knights of Labor, then the largest labor organization in the U.S., passed resolutions and set up committees to prepare for a general strike to demand the 8-hour day.

In April 1886, thousands started demonstrating for reduced work hours. Chicago was the heart of the movement. 1000 brewers reduced their hours from 16 to 10 hours a day. Bakers who formerly worked 14 to 18 hours won a 10 hour day. Furniture workers won the 8-hour day for 10 hours pay.

The strike movement raised additional demands besides the 8-hour day, A six point Manifesto drafted by Albert Parsons and August Spies, two revolutionary leaders of the movement, demanded “equality without distinction to sex or race”. Many workers saw the political dimension of the struggle. The fight was a class struggle of the workers as a class against the employers as a class.

On May 1, 1886, 350,000 workers in 11,562 establishments all over the country went out on strike. Every railroad in Chicago shut down and most industries in Chicago were paralyzed. By May 3, more and more workers were joining the strike. That day, however, the police fired on a crowd that was attacking strike breakers at the McCormack Harvester Works, killing four and seriously wounding many.

Organizers called a rally for the next day in Haymarket Square in Chicago to protest police brutality. It was rainy and only around 1200 people attended. As the rally was almost ready to break up and only about 300 people were still there, someone threw a bomb into the ranks of the police, killing one and wounding about 70. Seven later died. To this day no one knows who threw the bomb. The police responded by firing into the crowd, killing one and also wounding many more.

Haymarket justified an intense round of red scare repression. Cops rounded up hundreds of radicals, meetings were broken up and the Socialist press was seized. The authorities called out the Militia to break up any labor gatherings which were deemed “dangerous’. Employers organized in associations to blacklist strikers and institute yellow dog contracts forcing workers to swear they would never join a union.

The police arrested eight anarchist leaders. The evidence against them was their ideas. There was virtually no evidence tying the defendants to the crime. Only one of the eight, Samuel Fielden, was even at Haymarket when the bomb exploded. After a trial, a jury found them all guilty and four were sentenced to death. A year later, the four, Albery Parsons, August Spies, Adolf Fischer and George Engel were hanged.

The executions aroused people all over America. While the repression dampened union organizing, many felt class anger. For years after, there were memorial events for the Haymarket martyrs all across the country.

Haymarket is widely considered the origin event of International Workers’ Day. The events of 1886 linked May Day in the minds of workers with the struggles and sacrifices for a better life. In 1888, the American Federation of Labor called for a massive demonstration to be held on May 1, 1890 calling again for the 8-hour day.

In 1889, the Paris Congress of the Second International (an international organization of Socialist Parties and trade unions) adopted a resolution making May Day an international holiday. They called on workers everywhere to demonstrate international labor solidarity and to fight for the 8-hour day. Demonstrations and strikes on May 1, 1890 accompanied this new holiday. From this time on, May Day was firmly established as a workers’ holiday.

Workers and people on the left in America celebrated May Day for years. In the 1930’s, May Day drew together the struggles of the U.S. working class against unemployment and for industrial unionism, against Jim Crow racism and for full equality, and against fascist aggression and for peace.

Since at least the 1950’s, the American ruling class has done an effective job disappearing May Day as a workers’ holiday. In 1928 President Hoover set aside May Day as Child Health Day. In the later 1940’s-early 1950’s, McCarthyism terrorized people on the left ruining many lives in the process. In 1958 Congress designated May 1 as Loyalty Day. Then President Nixon made May 1st Law Day.

Part of the effort to erase May Day was the creation of Labor Day in September. Congress first passed that legislation in June 1894. May Day is an official holiday in 66 countries and it is unofficially celebrated in many more. Labor Day is not celebrated outside the U.S. except in Canada. It is an apolitical excuse for a three day weekend and a pale shadow of May Day.

In our era, I think May Day should be resurrected as a worker holiday. It is so much more than a celebration of spring, maypoles and fertility. Workers fought for the rights and dignities we enjoy today. Our ruling class in 2026 doesn’t want workers to remember that.

Watching a president threaten to end an ancient civilization so that it never will return was sobering. It may have been the worst thing an American President ever said. That same president calls any Democrat who disagrees with him a radical leftist. The irony is that few of the Democrats who oppose Trump are radical. Most are scared of that label and run away from it like it was a poisonous snake.

Democrats’ biggest problem is their timidity and lack of vision. It is hard to say what the Democratic Party even stands for and that is its biggest weakness. Too many Democrats want to stand on being anti-Trump as if that is enough self-definition. For much of the party, in contrast to the Republicans, taking a strong stand on anything is anathema.

Centrist Democrats, allied to corporate money, attack the progressive wing of the party whether the issue is Israel/Palestine or abolishing ICE. This has gone on since at least the Bill Clinton years and even earlier. I would suggest that Democrats should ignore those attacks against the progressives because now is a time we should be thinking big. We need to be giving voters, especially young voters, powerful reasons to cast ballots.

The historical example that comes to mind is FDR. Coming out of the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration advanced a bold vision for the country. The New Deal was a massive reinvention of America. FDR created the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the Social Security Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Recovery Administration and the Federal Housing Administration, among others.

To win over masses of people and to end the fascist threat represented by MAGA, Democrats should pursue a radical, democratic socialist vision. Since Democrats will be accused of being radical leftists anyway, how about delivering something genuinely progressive. The world (not just the U.S.) needs a renewed democratic socialist agenda led by people of high moral character, intellect and dedication. Such an agenda could include items like the following:

• Universal health care. It is way past time for America to guarantee health care to all. Too many people have no access, no insurance or inadequate coverage. America has the capacity to make universal health care happen.
• Making housing a right. It is a disgrace that the wealthiest country in the world tolerates homelessness like we do. We could provide low-interest, long-term loans to encourage home construction and ownership. We could address crushing rents.
• Federal jobs program. With millions scared by AI, we could advocate for expanding and protecting jobs to pursue full employment. Like the Works Progress Administration in 1935, we could employ millions in public works projects, including building infrastructure, schools and the arts.The tech broligarchs don’t own us and their agenda is not what the people need.
• Supreme Court reform. We must add at least four seats to the High Court. As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has shown, the Court has been captured by extreme right wing billionaires. Without court reform, all progressive change would get blocked in defense of the billionaires’ interests.
• Addressing climate change. Instead of pretending climate change is not happening, we should be investing in alternative energy like wind and solar. Getting away from fossil fuels is essential to human survival on the planet.
• No more imperialist wars. Trump betrayed his promise to avoid forever wars. Democrats must oppose the Iran war and any future unnecessary conflicts that only benefit the military industrial complex. We must advocate for massive cuts in war spending, Restoring respect for democracy and human rights as American goals and values is critical. We must stop allying with autocracies.
• Advancing voting rights. We must fight for maximum turnout of all who are eligible to vote. Republicans have sought to narrow and eliminate the right to vote, especially for minorities. No to Ctizens United and yes to publicly financed elections so dark money can no longer buy who wins elections.
• Abolish ICE. We must try and stop ICE from disappearing people with no due process. We must oppose mass incarceration and unjustified deportations of people with no criminal record. We don’t know half of what this renegade agency has done. ICE cannot be reformed. We need an entirely new approach to immigration that includes a pathway to citizenship.
• Dismantle racial capitalism. Since the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, capitalism has perpetuated racial hierarchies to extract, exploit and profit. We must devise strategies that respond to the ways racism and colonialism are embedded in political and economic structures.
• Oppose sexism, heterosexism and scapegoating of sexual minorities. We must oppose all discrimination. Tolerance and “live and let live” should be watchwords for our new society.

This agenda is an example of what a renewed democratic socialist platform could look like. Socialism admittedly has a checkered history but it could be adopted to incorporate the best of American tradition. Respect for the rule of law, multi-racial democracy, due process and the First Amendment should all be part of a new libertarian democratic socialist vision.

Just as is true with capitalism and its many forms, socialism also comes in many varieties. No doubt there are many Democrats who won’t like seeing the party move left but to beat back fascism, Democrats need to fight back more aggressively while offering more to the people. That is the way to win voters, not offering empty platitudes as centrist Democrats always do.

I get sick watching Democrats who don’t react to fascism. So many say nothing. When they don’t call it out they guarantee it will come back in a worse form. It is easy to think Donald Trump is as bad as it can get but Nick Fuentes and other Nazis are waiting in the wings.

Government has been entirely corrupted by the Trump regime. Look at the DOJ, the CDC or the EPA. These agencies need to be gutted and rebuilt from scratch. We are at a place where America needs a new vision. Democrats must be the party to make that happen. Big change, based on advancing the interests of working class people, is the way forward.

Eleven years ago, when Donald Trump was first running for President, I wrote in the Concord Monitor about the question of whether he and his MAGA movement were fascist. At that time, I recognized that the word could just be considered a form of name-calling or insult. It has been loosely tossed around.

Recognizing the sloppy use of the word, I do think fascism is the right framework for understanding Trump and MAGA. As the writer John Ganz has said, fascism is a hypothesis. Fascism takes different forms in different nations but it is the best fit to describe what has happened in recent years in America.

Using the term doesn’t negate our hybrid situation where aspects of authoritarianism co-exist with aspects of democracy. Fascism has not been consolidated and it can still be opposed as evidenced by the massive No Kings demonstrations.

The word fascism has a European lineage but contrary to what Americans might think, it has an American variant. The scholar of fascism, Jason Stanley, has elaborated on America’s fascist origins. Unlike the European version of fascism with a tyrant-leader like Hitler or Mussolini, Stanley traces our leaderless fascism back to 19th century Jim Crow. For roughly 100 years in the American South, black Americans lived in a system where they were systematically abused and turned into second class citizens. Stanley cites W.E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison as individuals who saw America as embodying a form of fascism.

What is critical in demarcating a fascist society is the creation of a division between an “us” and a “them”. The system of white supremacy (like the later Nazi system in Germany) effectuated such a distinction. After Reconstruction, Black people in the South were widely deprived of their right to vote. Slavery was replaced by a new system of absolute control enforced by lynching and mass violence. Law, particularly state laws in the South, reinforced white supremacy.

I thought of the “us” and “them” distinction with the birthright citizenship case, Trump v Barbara, currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Trump through his Executive Order takes the position that babies born on American soil after February 19, 2025 would be denied citizenship at birth if neither parent is a U.S. citizen or has permanent immigration status.

It is hard to imagine anything that could do more to create a permanent underclass. Those babies would become stateless individuals outside constitutional protection. They would join other black and brown people relegated to an inferior status in America. A central MAGA mission has been turning back the clock on race to a time before the civil rights era.

Fascism thrives on racial distinctions. It is a devolution from liberal democracy where equality before the law, even if not practiced, was touted. The Nazis studied Jim Crow laws and admired the system Americans had set up in the South. Nazi authors saw clear parallels between the American “Negro problem” and their own “Jewish problem”. The Nazis lionized white supremacy and they seized upon American race-based immigration and citizenship laws. America was seen as the leader in race law-making. This background is thoroughly explored in James Whitman’s book, Hitler’s American Model.

Trump’s recent comments about Somalis were brutally racist, calling people “garbage” and claiming they “contribute nothing”. They follow his comments about “shithole countries”. He has repeatedly suggested the United States should seek more immigrants from Norway, Scandinavia or whites from South Africa. No one has more clearly articulated a white supremacist vision.

Another part of fascism is the creation of a mythic past (Make America Great Again). Things that MAGA doesn’t like are unconsidered unpatriotic, like Black history. I see the effort to ban critical race theory and to censor museums as part of the fascist re-write of our history. Honesty about racism is a no-no.

Anyone concerned about free speech should be opposing efforts to ban the teaching of critical race theory. MAGA is trying to reverse history and say, without evidence, that white men are victims of discrimination. Critical race theory is about understanding our legacy of institutional racism. MAGA and the Far Right are trying to dictate what we can remember. As Kimberly Crenshaw has said, “Critical thinking is kryptonite to fascism”.

Still, I would not see fascism as primarily a cultural struggle for power. And it is not simply ultranationalism or worship of a charismatic leader. What we are seeing in America is the Executive Branch taking power away from the other branches of government. There is an attempt by Trump to hoard excessive power. At the same time we are seeing the tech broligarchy accumulate unlimited privileges and wealth while rights are taken away from working people.

Fascism wants to replace democracy and pluralism with a monistic, total, authoritarian government organization that enables a massive crime spree by the super-rich. Trump is always talking about law and order but police action is only meant to be enforced against poor people. Law and order talk is a cover for his extensive efforts to loot government resources for his own benefit.

Project 2025 has been our Mein Kampf equivalent. If we are able to salvage democracy it will take years to recover from this entirely retrograde agenda. The damage done already has been enormous.

Historically, fascist dictators have wielded state power to create an economy that benefits the economically top 1% while crushing labor and the racial “other’. It is an elite-driven campaign to seize power. As is evident though, the people of the Unites States are engaged in a massive campaign to prevent the consolidation of fascist power.

I think the No Kings movement has been fabulous and I have no criticisms of it but I would make one suggestion. The problem we face is not so much a king as a fascist system. Even if Trump resigned tomorrow, we would face the same system. Maintaining and making real democracy requires systemic transformation. not simply removal of a king.