Opinion

When Donald Trump talked about immigrants eating people’s pets during a 2024 presidential debate, he was carrying on a longtime Republican campaign tactic: Win the votes of White Americans by scaring the hell out of them.

According to Andrew Goldberg’s documentary White With Fear, this strategy can be traced back at least as far as the 1968 presidential campaign. Even though the controversial Vietnam War was still raging, we learn, the campaign of Republican Richard Nixon focused mainly on race.

Among the film’s many interviewees is author Rick Perlstein (Nixonland), who explains that the GOP worked to recapture the White House by tapping into many White Americans’ hatred of Blacks. This was done largely through innuendo and dog whistles.

When Nixon pledged to support “law and order” and fight crime, for example, it was understood that he was talking specifically about Black crime. The candidate’s subtext was hard to miss when he made statements such as referring to Black-majority Washington, D.C. as “the crime capital of the world.”

Alejandro thought that driving full-time for Uber offered freedom — flexible hours, quick cash, and time to care for his young son. But that promise faded fast.

“There are hours when I make $20,” he told me. “And there are hours when I make $2.” As his pay dropped, he pawned his computer and camera, began rationing his insulin, and started driving seven days a week just to break even.

Alejandro, whose real name is withheld for his privacy, is one of millions of workers powering a billion-dollar labor model built on legal loopholes.

Companies like Uber insist they are “tech platforms,” not employers, and that their workers are “independent contractors,” not employees. This sleight of hand allows them to sidestep minimum wage laws, paid sick leave, and other workplace protections while shifting risks onto workers. It also lets them avoid employer taxes, draining funds from public coffers.

Each week we are honored to join the Decommissioning Working Group, a community of sister and brother activists from various organizations in a Zoom meeting in which information about nuclear-related developments are shared in a sweep across the country for on-the-ground reports.

Just a brief summary of our notes from today’s DWG Zoom confab gives a synoptic nuclear situational awareness view of what can be described as an ongoing nuclear complex coup.

We have stolen the above title from a wry quip by meeting participant Paul Gunther of Beyond Nuclear.

In a series of recent executive orders, the Trump Administrations has detonated a demolition bomb in the existing architecture of nuclear energy regulation and arms control. [ See background links below.] The volley of moves combined have the unified goal of ushering in a so-called ‘American nuclear energy revival.’ They aim to:

1. Dismantle nuclear safety oversight by regulatory agencies;

Medium.com reports that Aaron Manley Smith published an article which is titled Chat GPT Analyzes Trump’s Alleged Assassination Attempt. “I asked ChatGPT Pro (the one you have to actually pay thousands of dollars for, not some freebie thing) to study this image closely…and we went down the rabbit hole”. The article itself is behind a $5 paywall. I will not publish it in it's entirety but enough that the reader may want to follow the link for the entire article.

Introduction 

This post focuses on examples of Trump’s inflated self-image as a president who sees himself as being above the law, his implausible notion of making manufacturing in the U.S. a dominating global force, and how, as one example, his policies harm the poor.

#1 - A thirst for power

Trump casts himself as a superior president, among the best 3 or 4 presidents in U.S. history. Indeed, he has said his presidency is like being a king. He has also viewed himself as a “messiah,” as Robert Reich notes, Donald Trump keeps comparing himself to Jesus. “Whether he actually has a messiah complex or is just conning his supporters, he's playing to a growing GOP faction that wants America to be a white Christian Nationalist state, with Donald Trump as a divine ruler. Be Warned” (https://tiktok.com/rbreich/video/7384440520371899694)

Press Release — APnews.com 8:01 AM EDT, May 29, 2025
NEW CITY, NY / ACCESS Newswire / May 29, 2025 / A seminal case questioning the accuracy of the 2024 Presidential and Senate election results in Rockland County, New York, is moving forward. In open court last Thursday, Judge Rachel Tanguay of the New York Supreme Court, ruled that discovery must proceed, pushing the lawsuit brought by SMART Legislation into the evidence-gathering stage. The lawsuit seeks a full hand recount of the Presidential and U.S. Senate races in Rockland County.

SMART Legislation, the action arm of SMART Elections, is the lead plaintiff in the case. Both organizations are dedicated to ensuring fair and accurate elections.