From Robert Reich today, making clear what couldn’t be any clearer already:

Trump’s playbook is Viktor Orbán’s

Friends,

A few days ago I had breakfast with my old friend John Shattuck, who, as president of Central European University in Budapest, saw firsthand how Viktor Orbán took over Hungary’s democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state.

When Trump was elected in 2016, Trump endorsed Orbán, and Orbán started attacking universities — forcing the Central European University out of Hungary.

John believes Trump is emulating Orbán’s playbook. (Steve Bannon once declared that “Orbán was Trump before there was Trump.”)

Orbân’s playbook has 10 parts, according to John:

One: Take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using polit...

Authoritarianism is here.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/authoritarianism

Now threatening to deport U.S. citizens.

This is a time that will, indeed, go down in history. But who will write the history that our children and grandchildren read?

Another day, another struggle with despair over what we are living in and how “U.S.A.” becomes something despicable. Robert Reich offers some words of encouragement on his substack:

“Friends,

It’s been another grueling week.

Several of you have asked me how to live in a nation whose leader has embraced cruelty as public policy. How do we inhabit Trump’s America without becoming complicit in this cruelty?

Molly watched Trump sign the executive order initiating criminal investigations of Miles Taylor (who wrote an anonymous 2018 New York Times op-ed describing internal resistance to Trump in his first term) and Christopher Krebs (who played a major role in undercutting Trump’s false claims about 2020 election fraud).

Molly asks: Is this America?

No, Molly, it is not...

Here is just one example of the amazing work science researchers are doing at universities, this one in Australia. This is the very sort of thing that would also happen at American institutions, but our idiocracy is using $ to turn education into a set of political litmus tests.

I don’t even want to note the absolute nonsensical craziness going on with the idiocracy’s approach to the world economy and global trade. Just look at any news source, but try not to look at the markets. Probably an overstatement, but a number of sources report that In 11 weeks, 11 trillion dollars has disappeared.

The daily news truly is unbelievable. Even his own team is calling its internal rivals “morons.”

Today’s posting from Heather Cox Richardson:

Stocks were up early today as traders put their hopes in Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s suggestion that the Trump administration was open to negotiations for lowering Trump’s proposed tariffs. But then U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said there would not be exemptions from the tariffs for individual products or companies, and President Donald J. Trump said he was going forward with 104% tariffs on China, effective at 12:01 am on Wednesday.

Markets fell again. By the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen by another 320 points, or 0.8%, a 52-week low. The S&P 500 fell 1...

From the NYTimes Editorial Board today:

In his attacks on law firms, universities and other American institutions, President Trump is relying on an illusion. The illusion is that the institutions are powerless to fight back and that they face a choice between principle and survival.

These institutions do not have to capitulate to Mr. Trump. They have a realistic path to defeating his intimidation. Some law firms and others have begun to fight. In doing so, they have provided the beginnings of a playbook for standing up to his attempts to weaken core tenets of American democracy, including due process, free speech and the constitutional system of checks and balances.

For anybody who is skeptical of this idea and sees Mr...

It appears that Heather Cox Richardson’s posts on Facebook are not available any longer. Since she continues to post, but the posts disappear, one can only conclude that Facebook is removing her posts. Here is her post from substack which arrived in my emailbox this morning:

“Today Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) made history.

For more than 25 hours he held the floor of the Senate, not reading from the phone book or children’s literature, as some of his predecessors have done, but delivering a coherent, powerful speech about the meaning of America and the ways in which the Trump regime is destroying our democracy.

On the same day that John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that members of Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including national security advisor Michael Wa...

From Robert Reich’s daily posting:

“Friends,

The past week has been another horror show, and I share your anxiety and sleeplessness.

But the past week also reveals the utter incompetence of Trump and his regime.

Even The Wall Street Journal criticized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for trying to dismiss “Signalgate” as a hoax, calls Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff “out of his depth in dealing with world crises,” and condemns the administration for thinking “it can bully its way through anything by shouting Fake News.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) instructs the administration to “own it and fix it.”

During the ensuing uproar, Witkoff goes off the deep end, telling Tucker Carlson that Vladimir Putin is “straight up” and not a “bad guy,”...

From Robert Reich’s substack of this morning:

“Friends,

I was talking yesterday to a friend who’s a professor at Columbia University about what’s been happening there. He had a lot to say. When he needed to run off to an appointment, I asked him if he’d text or email me the rest of his thoughts. His response floored me. “No,” he said. “I better not. They may be reviewing it.” 

“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked, suddenly worried. 

“They! The university! The government! Gotta go!” He was off. 

My friend has never before shown signs of paranoia. 

I relate this to you because the Trump regime is starting to have a chilling effect on what and how Americans communicate with each another...

From a post by Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor,

“Friends,

Yesterday, Trump dismantled much of the Department of Education. He ordered wrestling executive-turned-Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shut most of her department, although student loans and special education funding will continue.

His executive order will effectively destroy a $100 billion-a-year executive department created by Congress under President Jimmy Carter 45 years ago.

But there’s a much larger story here.

Combine this with Trump’s attacks on higher education — his gutting the funding of the National Institutes of Health (which provides a large portion of biomedical research) and the National Science Foundation (engineering and computer research) and his effective closure of USAID (whi...