Well, I Tried to Unplug...

What I learned while away: The world is disturbed by America's backsliding and Democrats need a plan

Whether it was while listening to a musician playing his guitar in the shadow of a glorious European cathedral or on a bumpy boat ride to explore some stunning coastal caves, my efforts to escape the news went about as well as I expected. You might say it was a big, beautiful bust. I tried to bury my phone in the sand. And the beach all but tossed it back in my face. I’ll get to the cathedral and the caves in a bit. But I need to get a few thoughts off my chest first.

Taking a break in Portugal

For starters, I was reminded of the fact that Trump’s lies can follow a weary traveler just about anywhere. He clearly misled the public about taking two weeks to decide whether to launch any military strikes against Iran. And the deceptions did not end there. He not only authorized the bombing of Iranian nuclear targets well short of that two week timeline. Trump and his top gaslighters, from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt proceeded to lie, rather obviously, about what Trump’s actions had accomplished. Despite Trump’s ridiculous pronouncements that the air strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities, it appears the initial intelligence assessments and press reports were correct that Tehran still possesses the ability to reconstruct its program. How quickly seems to be the right question.

The clearest indicator of the mixed outcome of Trump’s Iranian gambit were his attacks on the press and, in particular, on my former colleague, Natasha Bertrand, who happens to be a very good reporter. As I’ve observed before, when Trump cries “fake news,” it is usually because the story is true. That prompted Leavitt to once again make a mockery of her position in her performance for “the audience of one.” The job of the White House press secretary is not to act as the chief propagandist for the president. It is to inform the public. Leavitt will never understand this. Her bizarrely hyperbolic comments about Bertrand were a good barometric reading of that lack of respect for the office she unfortunately holds, as her remarks were, to be blunt, totally bananas.

“She should be ashamed of herself,” said Leavitt, who really should take a look in the mirror.

First of all, Leavitt’s attacks on Bertrand were based on the journalist’s work on a number of items that, not only have been in the news but covered by countless reporters, including yours truly. For example, Leavitt ranted about Bertrand’s reporting on former intelligence officials who had once written a letter alleging that the Hunter Biden laptop story was likely Russian disinformation. Other outlets reported on this letter at the time. We all did. Why should Bertrand answer for all of that coverage? As an aside, why is Trump still focused on Hunter’s laptop? Seriously, it’s nuts.

Then, Leavitt made some convoluted connection between Bertrand’s reporting and the intelligence community’s assessments on the origins of Covid, specifically whether the virus was human-made and had escaped from a lab in China. Leavitt spoke as if the “lab leak theory” were settled science when that is certainly not the case.

“Again the president was right about that,” Leavitt said of the origins of the virus, in a moment of staggering Orwellian doublespeak. In reality, Trump was one of the pandemic’s biggest liars.

Leavitt continued with her own version of “the weave”, Trump’s umbrella term for his rambling streams of consciousness, by somehow blaming Bertrand for the “suckers and losers” story, a scoop originally revealed by Jeffrey Goldberg at “The Atlantic,” and confirmed by this reporter and others. This is another well-worn Trump grudge. According to Trump’s former Chief of Staff and retired General John Kelly, the president once described soldiers as “suckers and losers” for being willing to die for their country. Again, how does Bertrand reporting fit into Leavitt’s narrative? Simply put, it doesn’t.

The press secretary then tossed the events from Charlottesville into her disinformation blender, denying on behalf of the president for the umpteenth time that Trump had talked about there being “very fine people on both sides” in referencing the violence unleashed by white supremacists on counter protesters back in 2017. I was at that news conference at Trump Tower when he made those remarks. In fact, his comments were in response to my shouted question to him on the subject. Any cursory Google search can uncover he did describe people on both sides of the protests as being “very fine people.” Trump has desperately clung to his own version of reality from that day. He claims he was not talking about the white supremacists in Charlottesville, only that there there were “fine people on both sides.” The question remains: who are the fine people he is talking about? Are you a “very fine” person if you are not a white supremacist but you march with them? Give me a break. Former officials of his administration at the time were so disgusted by his remarks that some contemplated quitting his team. Trump has since constructed his own hoax maintaining he never made the abhorrent statement. Trump "very fine people"

All of that is beside the point. What does Charlottesville have to do with Iran? Also, why is Leavitt raising the Charlottesville tragedy as part of her attacks on a reporter? Karoline, check your weave. It may be coming unglued. It is more likely because her initial accusation itself doesn’t hold any water. Leavitt seems to think every trip to the podium is an opportunity for a Fox News mic drop moment. I am sure the likes of Gutfeld and Watters would eat it up. But the late press secretary James Brady, who took a bullet for Ronald Reagan and for whom the briefing room was named, would be ashamed of her behavior.

Trump himself, at least the one who ran for president back in 2016, would be slamming such White House antics in hyping up the merits of the Iran operation. As a candidate for the presidency the first time around, Trump repeatedly attacked former president George W. Bush’s administration for its lies about Iraq’s non-existent arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Trump Accuses Bush of Iraq Lies The fact of the matter is we don’t know the ultimate outcome of the U.S. involvement in Israel’s offensive against Iran. Trump and Hegseth can thump their chests all they want.

What remains clear by the day is that Trump is expanding the powers of the presidency, in ways that could come back to haunt all of us. And not just because he launched a military assault on a nation that had not attacked America first, without seeking the authorization of Congress. Historians might yawn at this development, noting the legislative branch gave up on this battle long ago. But two other major developments of the last week also warrant special scrutiny - Trump’s victory on nationwide injunctions at the Supreme Court in the birthright citizenship case and the all but certain passage of his Medicaid-busting tax cuts package. Both have, at least temporarily, heavily and almost completely tilted the balance of power in his favor in Washington.

First, the High Court’s willingness to limit nationwide injunctions dramatically paves the way for the White House to continue its crackdown on civil liberties in America. Rulings from judges that protect Americans in one corner of the country may no longer offer that same coverage in another. Liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor captured the gravity of the moment in her dissent in the 14th amendment ruling, which she read aloud.

“All three branches of the government have unflinchingly recognized birthright citizenship,” Sotomayor said. “Today’s decision is not just egregiously wrong, it is also a travesty of law,” she added.

“No right is safe,” Sotomayor stated, cautioning that an administration could curb all sorts of constitutional protections, even ones the far right may care about such as the Second Amendment, with little relief from the courts.

That the same court that granted Trump immunity from prosecution before the 2024 election would also continue to shift more power to the executive branch while he is in office should worry all Americans. The Roberts court will undoubtedly be remembered as the Trump court. No wonder Trump took a victory lap in the briefing room Friday.

"This was a big one, wasn't it?" Trump he asked rhetorically.

The next big one is coming this week as the Republican majorities in the House and Senate have the numbers to push Trump’s extreme legislative agenda through Congress. Not even the latest social media grenade thrown by the world’s richest man is likely to stop what’s coming - explosive growth of the national debt, estimated to be at least $3.2 trillion by the Congressional Budget office, coming at the expense of future generations, coupled with steep cuts to Medicaid and other programs that protect poor and working-class Americans, all to pay for tax cuts for the mega-wealthy, yes like the folks in Venice for the Bezos-Sanchez wedding. This time, the skyrocketing deficit is not aimed at ushering the nation through a crisis, like a pandemic. The only emergency here is the insatiable greed of American fat cats.

Add to that, two of the GOP’s remaining moderates, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska and Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina have announced they won’t seek reelection, following threats from Trump to primary any Republican who dares to speak out against any component of the legislation. Tillis announced he could not support the bill because it “would result in tens of billions of dollars in lost funding for North Carolina, including our hospitals and rural communities.” The MAGA-cleansing of the GOP is nearly complete.

I was thinking about all of this too much while I was overseas during the past week. Perhaps it was the woman who took me on a tour of some coastal caves and noted a steady stream of Americans had been flocking to her country as of late, and not just for the croquettes. Or maybe it was the musician who grumbled that the dollars he sometimes makes in tips instead of Euros don’t go as far as they used to - thanks to a certain somebody back in Washington, he noted. Both of these friendly folks politely declined to refer to Trump by name. Why bother? He’s ever-present in their lives too.

Which is why it dawned on me that too much time is spent griping about our current captive state of affairs, and too little on what to do when power is inevitably returned to the people. Yes, worrywarts, I still believe that will happen. It seems to me the planning should begin for something of a “Project 2026” (or would it be 2027) when a new Congress arrives in Washington, capable of putting real curbs on Trump’s power and deliver on an agenda that will actually help working Americans, rather than exploit their economic anxiety or fears of changing demographics to hold on to power. Democrats may only control the House in a couple of years. But the Senate may not be as out of reach as some in the party think. Just look at the sudden and startling victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral primary election. It is early and he’ll have to answer for some of the controversial statements he’s made in the past. But his proposals aimed at affordability in the nation’s largest city demonstrate that voters want politicians to focus on more than just countering Trump. Even in progressive havens like Manhattan, people want solutions.

Personally, I’d love to see more of this. Before my failed attempt to completely unplug, I was discussing the need to repair and rebuilt what I like to describe as the nation’s information infrastructure. Building on the boom in independent media, such as what we are all seeing on Substack, is only part of the equation. Just in the way that Republicans have been knee-capping public broadcasting, Democrats should be drafting proposals to upscale PBS and NPR and turn them into large-scale multimedia news outlets, perhaps governed by bipartisan, but good-faith journalists who can help construct something along the lines of a new system of reporting information in America. A less than government-run, American version of the BBC, with TV, radio and web sites in every corner of the country. Rush Limbaugh and right-wing talk radio had their moment in the late 20th and early 21st century. Why can’t public broadcasters have their own? The corporate media model appears, at the moment, to be far too vulnerable as Trump has undeniably had some success bullying brand-name outlets with meritless lawsuits clogging the courts. I am passionate about this topic and I’ll be writing more about this in the coming days.

In the meantime, I’m glad to be back, sharing my work with all of you. While I didn’t fully unplug, I did get some rest. I’m feeling recharged. This past weekend marks five months since I took the plunge into independent media. Talk about a trip! Thanks for sticking with me while I was away. It meant the world to me to see so many folks willing to continue to support my work even as I was refueling for the road ahead.

My friends, we are just getting going.

And yes, I’ll post some more photos soon.