Yes, he just said that.

Really? Let me help him out. I wrote out some of Trump’s top enrichment schemes below in the 15 minutes before my son’s hockey practice ended.

First, the stock trades. Trump has made tens of thousands of stock trades, including trades that have raised serious questions about whether he’s profiting from information available to him as president. Take Nvidia: Trump disclosed up to $1.6 million in stock purchases in August, just before announcing a policy change that stood to benefit the company’s stock price.

This is a major conflict of interest. We can’t just shrug it off. Read more.

Then there’s crypto. Trump has made over $1.4 billion from his crypto ventures. His family’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial, depends heavily on Binance, another crypto company whose founder, Changpeng Zhao, pled guilty to violating anti-money-laundering laws and went to prison. Trump gave Zhao a presidential pardon as Zhao’s company helped Trump amass his crypto fortune.

JD, you really haven’t seen anything concerning there? Read more.

How about suspicious bets on the Iran war? Just 15 minutes before Trump announced a major reversal in Iran policy, billions of dollars in oil-related contracts were placed in a way that stood to profit from falling prices. Federal regulators reportedly began looking into the trades, only for the investigation to hit resistance. Read more

If someone had advance knowledge of a major presidential announcement, they could make a fortune. We deserve to know whether that happened here.

Or the family business. Trump’s sons have pursued a mining deal in Kazakhstan, and the administration subsequently approved $1.6 billion in taxpayer-backed financing tied to the project. That is an extraordinary amount of public money flowing into a deal that could benefit the president’s own family.

This isn’t some minor ethics question. It’s a fundamental question about whether the presidency is being used to serve the public or enrich one family. Read more.

And then there’s the merchandise. Trump’s political products have reportedly been sold on military bases, turning spaces meant to serve our troops into another opportunity to promote his personal brand. Read more.

JD, military bases? Really?

These are just a few examples. We haven’t even gotten into the broader web of business interests, political favors, and conflicts of interest surrounding this administration.

Here’s the thing: I understand why JD Vance doesn’t want to talk about any of this. His job is to defend Donald Trump, even when that means asking Americans to ignore what’s right in front of them.

But Americans aren’t buying it.

Two-thirds of voters now say Trump is enriching himself in office. And corruption is emerging as a major issue for voters heading into the midterms.

People work hard, pay their taxes, and expect their government to work for them. They don’t expect a president to use the most powerful office in the world to pad his own bank account.

JD Vance can keep pretending he hasn’t seen the evidence. The rest of us aren’t going to look away. Voters are going to remember this and those who enabled him when they go to vote this election.

So, as soon as the Senate recessed for the fall election season, I got on a plane and headed for the Middle East - the first Democratic Senator to visit the Gulf since the war began. What did I hope to accomplish? First, I wanted to see for myself the damage done to U.S. basing in the region and the impact of the war on our partner nations. When at war, I have found there is no substitute for going into the theater and seeing the conflict firsthand. Second, I wanted to hear from leaders in the region about the path to end the war, and their view of the mistakes the U.S. has made that have caused this disastrous war to drag on this long. Third, I wanted to bring some hard messages to our partners in the region about Trump’s corruption of foreign policy.

This is the behind-the-scenes account of my visit.

QATAR

Dinner with the negotiators

On Friday evening, I boarded a plane bound for Doha, Qatar. My plan was to spend a day in Doha, since the Qataris are the primary interlocutors between the U.S. and Iran. I would also travel to the largest U.S. base in the region, Al Udeid, located in Qatar. Al Udeid sustained significant damage from Iranian strikes, and if Americans are going to be asked to send billions of dollars for repairs, I wanted to see the damage with my own eyes.

After a long flight, I had planned to simply meet with our U.S. Embassy officials upon my arrival Saturday night. But just before departing, I learned that Ali Al Thawadi, the Qatari diplomat who has been conducting shuttle diplomacy between the U.S. and Iran, wanted to host me for dinner to talk about the status of negotiations. Over a two-hour dinner, Al Thawadi told me that a deal to end the war was still possible, but if achieved, it would be limited in scope. It would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, provide Iran with significant sanctions relief (providing billions to the Iranian regime), and might include some small commitments to constrain their nuclear program. I told him that though that sounded like a terrible deal, I would support almost any deal to end the war since America’s security, treasury and reputation were hemorrhaging each day the war continued.

At the end of dinner, Al Thawadi started checking his phone more frequently and then somewhat abruptly suggested we take dessert in his sitting room. Was something breaking with the Iranians, I wondered? No, in fact. As we sat down in his living room, he pointed to the television.

“We are playing Saudi Arabia in the semifinals of the Gulf Cup! It’s gone to penalty kicks!”

For a few moments, he tried to keep the conversation going while watching the game, but the entire room was clearly and appropriately distracted by the game, as the Saudi goalkeeper made save after save. “Why don’t we just take a break and watch the game?” I suggested. After Qatar lost the game on penalty kicks (3-2), the mood quieted somewhat and I politely excused myself from a productive meeting that had run past three hours.

Meeting with the Emir

On Saturday, I conducted a series of meetings with Qatari officials, including the head of state, the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. The Qataris have been uniquely helpful partners to the United States over the years. They often serve as mediators of conflicts, like they are now. They host 1,000 Afghan refugees, at our request. Al Udeid and its thousands of American troops are there. I thanked the Emir for this partnership, and we discussed regional issues, like Iran, Yemen and Lebanon.

But I also had another message to deliver: my deep concern over the gift of a Qatari luxury jet to President Trump - a jet Trump has promised to take for his personal use after he leaves office. The Emir defended the gift as intended for the U.S. government and noted that Qatar had not done anything illegal. I told him that though I know how much pressure Trump put on Qatar to deliver the gift, we had to have zero tolerance on the corruption of U.S. foreign policy. Last year, I actually forced a vote on the Senate floor to suspend military sales to Qatar as a consequence of the plane gift, and I warned him that Qatar’s relationship with the United States would be damaged by any actions to personally enrich Trump or his family. A gift of that size to the President of the United States is corruption, plain and simple. I left hoping that my message was heard.

The cover up

By the time I left this meeting, it had become clear that I would not succeed in fulfilling the primary purpose of my visit: going to the Al Udeid base to talk to U.S. military leaders and troops about the war, and see the serious damage done to the facility.

I have visited many active theaters of war during my time in Congress. This is my job: to do oversight over U.S. military operations overseas, especially during times of war. Congress - not the President - decides questions of war, and we cannot exercise our warmaking power or our power to appropriate or withhold funds for war without seeing it firsthand.

Previous presidents have been very serious about honoring our constitutional responsibility. I toured Baghdad with our troops in the middle of some of the most active fighting there. I helicoptered to forward operating bases in Afghanistan that were being targeted by daily Taliban attacks at the height of the Afghanistan War. Never before have I been denied access to visit our troops overseas during times of active war. But this president is no ordinary president.

I made several formal requests to see Al Udeid ahead of my visit. Then, three days before I departed, I spoke in person with the U.S. CENTCOM Commander in charge of the war, Admiral Brad Cooper, and told him about my worry that I would be denied access in violation of the Constitution. I also told him that I had been told by the Department of Defense that I would be denied even a briefing by military leaders in the region. He told me the base visit policy was made by Secretary Hegseth, not him. He also said he was surprised that we were being denied even the opportunity to talk with his team and that he would look into that question.

Apparently he could not change Hegseth’s mind because by Saturday afternoon it was clear we would see no military installations nor meet with any military leaders while in Qatar. It was an outrageous decision - part of a coordinated cover up to hide the true costs and consequences of the war. I was furious but determined to make my time in Qatar as productive as possible. So I asked the Qataris to bring me out to their massive natural gas processing port, Ras Laffan, to see the damage Iranian drones had done there.

Ras Laffan

Ras Laffan is a breathtaking place. We all take for granted that our lights turn on and off reliably, and our home heat adjusts easily from season to season, but at Ras Laffan, you see the immense mechanical and human effort necessary to convert a fossil fuel into a source of energy that creates electricity and heating for billions of people. Gas production plants sprawl over miles of oceanside desert, for as far as the eye can see. 110,000 laborers live in camps throughout the complex (only men, with most allocated 8 square meters of living space per man), operating, building, and repairing the facility.

But the facility, aside from the ongoing construction, is largely idle - for two reasons. First, with the Strait of Hormuz constricted, only one natural gas tanker can travel through it per day (compared to ten per day prior to the war). Second, the Iranians hit two key areas of the facility (with precision strikes designed to do maximum damage), taking offline much of the work to liquify gas for transport. The repairs will cost billions and take three years to finish. Seventeen percent of Qatar’s gas exports are gone, and as a result, global prices will remain high for the long term.

Seeing the damage in person was important. And I was glad the Qataris (and the U.S. State Department) helped me see it. From Ras Laffan, we traveled directly to the airport, and I boarded a plane to Riyadh for my first visit ever to Saudi Arabia.

SAUDI ARABIA

A near mass casualty event

I have been perhaps the most vocal critic of Saudi Arabia and its leader, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (colloquially referred to as “MBS”), over the past decade. I organized an effort to stop President Obama’s plan to provide U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen in 2016, and I have been a loud critic of MBS’s campaign of domestic and foreign repression of free speech, including the infamous murder and dismemberment of American resident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

But I chose to come to Riyadh for two reasons, both of which I explained to the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., Princess Reema bint Bandar Al Saud, when I asked her to meet with me in September. First, I think it’s important for MBS and other Saudi officials to hear from opponents of the war and critics of his policies, not just Trump acolytes, many of whom are simply involved in a foreign policy grift, using their positions to make money from the Gulf. Second, despite its deep imperfections, Saudi Arabia is still a key partner in the region, especially when it comes to ending the war. And despite my criticism, there have been substantial cultural reforms in the Kingdom over the last decade that I wanted to see for myself.

My first stop in Riyadh on Monday morning was the U.S. Embassy for briefings with U.S. officials. While I was there, they showed me the immense damage that had been done to a section of the embassy by two Iranian drones that hit the building in the middle of the night during the early days of the war. No photographs have been released of the damage, and I might have been the first Member of Congress to see it in person (another reason why these visits are important). What I can say is that if the attack had happened in the middle of the day instead of the middle of the night, many Americans would be dead. As I stood in the dark, now abandoned space, I brimmed with anger at our president, who started this war without any real plan to keep our troops and diplomats safe. We are all very lucky this attack wasn’t a truly catastrophic one.

MBS

I thought hard about whether to meet with Mohammed bin Salman. What message would I send to meet face to face with a leader who subjects people who criticize him to beheading and ordered the murder of a Washington Post journalist ? But, on the other hand, what good does it do to avoid him, so that he only speaks with domestic sycophants and foreigners who refuse to confront him face to face? I chose to meet him.

MBS has a habit of keeping visitors guessing as to when and if he will meet them, with the appointed time often ending up being in the middle of the night. Once in Riyadh, I heard the story of a very high-level U.S. official who was told to go to the city of Jeddah to meet with MBS, and then waited hours for the meeting only to be finally told that MBS was in fact not even in Jeddah. This may burnish his mysterious reputation, but it certainly does not make friends. And Saudi Arabia needs friends.

I was told to keep Monday evening clear and I would be summoned to the palace at some point during the night. But then, in the late morning that day, as I was readying for lunch with longtime Saudi diplomat, Adel al-Jubeir, I was told that MBS was ready to meet me and asked if I could immediately come to the palace. I did, and after waiting there only a few minutes, MBS met me in a grand room, along with his Foreign Minister, National Security Advisor and Princess Reema. He began with a long recitation of the history of U.S.-Saudi relations and how important our partnership is. He finished by stressing his support for America’s global leadership, for which he believes there is no alternative. I told him I agree that our nations are inextricably linked, and that I want to think about how to bring back this partnership and resolve our disagreements.

For the next hour, we had a candid discussion about American values, domestic political dissent and Saudi Arabia’s financial support for the Trump family (Trump’s companies have done deals in the Kingdom recently and Saudi Arabia is a key investor in Middle East envoy Jared Kushner’s private equity fund). He defended both his campaign of repression (as necessary to prevent a revolution against his social reforms, he claimed) and his Trump family investments (just business deals, he said). I imagine he seldom has vocal critics like me in his palace, but he didn’t shy away from a spirited discussion. There was, of course, no meeting of the minds, but I believe it’s important for him to understand that his nation’s relationship with America will remain fragile as long as political opponents are hunted and Trump investment opportunities are favored.

We spent the second hour of our meeting discussing Iran and Yemen. He knew, of course, that I have long opposed Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Yemen. So he didn’t try to convince me - as he has been trying to convince Trump - that the U.S. should support his current ground campaign there with air cover. But I did concede that comparing today’s conflict to the prior era of fighting was not fair. The truce in Yemen was only interrupted because of Trump’s war in Iran. The Houthis, in order to support their ally Iran, began to fire at ships in the Red Sea and moved to control more territory along the Bab Al Mandeb Strait - along with sending missiles and drones into Saudi Arabia, in response to Trump’s attacks on Iran. I do not think it’s in Saudi Arabia’s interest to restart a long ground war in Yemen, but I understand they need to defend themselves from Houthi attacks. I told him that.

Missiles overhead

Over the rest of the day Monday and through Tuesday, I met with local Saudi citizens and other members of the government (including the Foreign Minister and Energy Minister). I will admit that the social transformation happening in Saudi Arabia is real. After dinner on Tuesday with the Foreign Minister, I watched a group of women walking on the street together, one with her head fully covered, one with a lightly wrapped hijab, and one with no head covering at all. As many women were driving on the roads as men. Movie theaters were open and busy, and men and women sat together in cafes. This social opening is no excuse for tightened political repression, but it is real and meaningful.

As our departing flight drew closer, we took more urgent note of reports of nightly missiles being fired at Riyadh from Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen. These warnings, combined with the sight of the horrible damage to our embassy, was a reminder that the war Trump began in February has completely spiraled out of control. Yemen is a battle zone again. Saudi Arabia suffers nightly attacks. Thousands are dead and wounded in Lebanon as a result of a new war with Israel. All of this horror and carnage was a totally predictable result of Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran. And seeing it all for myself - wondering whether our flight would be able to leave as the Houthis targeted the Riyadh airport - reinforced for me, in a unique, personal way, the ongoing, compounding disaster Trump has caused.

That is why these visits are critical. And it’s why Hegseth and Trump are so deeply committed to stopping Members of Congress from seeing the consequences of the insane, voluntary war they started. They know that if more of us saw in person the immense damage done to U.S. bases, or had the chance to directly interrogate war leaders about their sure-to-fail war plans, support for the war in Congress would dry up fast.

Once on the plane home, my staff forwarded me more breaking news out of Saudi Arabia. A missile had struck the Riyadh airport, perhaps just prior or after our takeoff. Another disastrous result of a disastrous war.

The NCAA has a long history of exploitation: its first executive director invented the term “student athlete” so it could legally deny athletes’ rights. For decades, it over-recruited, denied healthcare and injury compensation benefits, and allowed students to live below the poverty line.

Oddly, none of this evoked a “crisis” because coaches, the universities, and the NCAA were above the law. That changed when athletes won their cases, including several at the Supreme Court, and earned the right to be compensated for their talent and hard work.

Now, Congress is considering a bill that would hit the reverse button.

The Protect College Sports Act (PCSA) is, at its heart, an effort to erase most of the gains made by athletes, and put the money back in the hands of corporate executives. And we cannot ignore the fact that many of the highest paid athletes are Black while the adults in this system - the corporate executives and coaches - are mostly white. That reversal is why President Trump announced this month that the bill will be his top legislative priority for the fall.

Now, of course we realize this is not a simple issue. We both acknowledge that the rules and practices governing college sports could use reform and transparency. And we do not impute ill motives to the authors of the College Sports Reform Act; we believe their intentions are sincere.

But the crisis they say they are trying to solve is difficult to find. What do college sports need to be “protected” from? Revenue and fan support are at an all-time high. The Big Ten just signed a $13 billion contract to broadcast its games. More than 92,000 people filled an outdoor stadium to watch a women’s volleyball match. College sports are more popular, and generating more money, than ever before. There is also more parity than ever.

Is the problem that women’s sports are in jeopardy if high-value athletes keep getting paid? There is no evidence at all that this is true. Women’s programs are growing, not shrinking - more than 92,000 people filled an outdoor stadium to watch a women’s volleyball match - and there is no hard evidence that will change even as football and basketball revenues are directed toward the players who generate them.

No, the “crisis” to executives is simple: young athletes, many of them Black, who perform a service that would be worth billions in a free market, are finally getting what they lawfully deserve. The system of exploitation — in which colleges and their industry allies colluded to keep for themselves all the money college sports produce — started to crumble. That is the “crisis,” and that is the essential problem the PCSA seeks to solve.

How do we know? Look at the actual text of the bill.

First, it doesn’t even pretend to limit the impact of big money in college sports. It limits only the way that money reaches the athletes. It places a cap on the students’ cut of the revenues, but there are no caps on coaches’ salaries or on the size of donations to athletic programs.

Second, the legislation creates a system defined by double standards between students and coaches. Athletes are banned from transferring schools more than once, but coaches can switch schools whenever they please. In no other industry has Congress passed a law requiring a person to stay in a job, or remain at a school, for a fixed period of years. That would plainly violate the most basic freedoms of the American free-enterprise system.

The egregious double standards in the PCSA offer reason enough to oppose this bill, but they are small potatoes compared to the NCAA’s true target in this fight: a sweeping provision to exempt college sports programs from our antitrust laws. It’s those very antitrust laws that forced the NCAA to allow athlete compensation in the first place, and that’s exactly why they’ve been fighting for a congressional exemption ever since.

This is entirely unnecessary. There are easier, fairer, more effective solutions to the eligibility battles grabbing headlines this month: Congress could pass a standalone bill banning pro athletes from college sports. Better yet, it could grant athletes the collective bargaining rights every American worker is already entitled to, and let players and schools negotiate between themselves. But antitrust exemption is only necessary if schools want to keep colluding to unlawfully suppress athletes’ wages, keep working conditions dangerous, or stomp out any potential for athletes to fairly and equally negotiate.

This bill will ultimately create a detailed new body of federal law micromanaging the relationship between coach and player, university and athlete. No comparable statute exists for any other industry, or for any other relationship between coach and player, school and pupil, employer and employee. From here forward, Congress will be in the business of refereeing college sports. Every time the industry landscape shifts, the schools and their allies will return to Capitol Hill seeking a legislative adjustment. What a waste of legislative time — to install Congress as the permanent arbiter of college athletics simply because, at this particular moment, schools refuse to sit down with newly empowered student athletes and work the rules out themselves.

The impact of the bill will be immediate: athletes will make less money, and schools will exert more coercive control over them; extinguishing an athlete’s ability to bargain for their services. And that’s really the point — to put the largely white college presidents, athletic directors and coaches back in the driver’s seat, and to return the high-value athletes, who are mostly Black, back into servitude in the college sports industry.

We know this sounds like a harsh judgment. But we are not alone in it. The NAACP, the AFL-CIO, and virtually every organization representing student athletes strongly oppose this bill. They see it as a labor and civil rights issue, as do we.

We say all of this as people who love college sports. We want this enterprise to thrive. But nothing in this bill would make it thrive. It does not cap runaway expenses; it caps only what players receive. It does not empower athletes; it does the opposite by binding them in place while every adult around them stays free to leave for a better offer. It does not add transparency; it licenses the schools to collude quietly. And it will not hold, because talent eventually finds its price, and young men and women will not spend years risking their bodies for a fraction of what they are worth.

Strip away the language of crisis and an old story remains, with an unmistakable racial cast: adults that profited from a discriminatory system are panicking that young athletes are now empowered and are asking Congress to restore the old arrangement. Congress should decline — and tell the schools to go negotiate a resolution with their athletes, the way every other industry in America has to.

Trump and Rubio said the reason for removing Maduro by force was to restore democracy to Venezuela.

Every Republican who supported the invasion parroted that line. I sat in meetings where Republicans said elections would happen within months of Maduro's outster.

But there was and is no transition to democracy. Trump installed in power Rodriguez, who led the torture campaigns as Maduro's chief lieutenant. She continues to run a violent, repressive state. And the torture continues.

The real reason for the invasion of Venezuela was to allow political allies of Trump to profit from the country's oil.

More recently, one of Trump's biggest campaign backers, Harold Hamm, struck a deal to develop and operate a 126,000-acre region in the country’s oil-rich Orinoco Belt.

The deals are being handed out to Trump backers at a quickening pace.

Trump's Venezuela oil empire is coordinated by an alleged money launderer named Alejandro Betancourt - the kind of guy you need to run a scheme like this.

Trump had DOJ drop its investigations into Betancourt to allow him to keep the wheels greased.

Meanwhile, democracy isn't on the agenda. In fact, the oil deals just solidify Rodriguez's grip on power.

And Trump's meeting with her will further legitimize her.

But that's the point. As long as the money keeps rolling in for Trump friends.

That’s the good news. The people building AI now openly acknowledge that it poses real and immediate dangers.

The most alarming near-term danger is what researchers call recursive self-improvement: AI systems that can build better versions of themselves, each generation faster and more capable than the last, until the technology outruns our ability to control it. It is hard to overstate that risk.

If AI reaches that level soon, other crises will follow. Millions of jobs could vanish almost overnight. Machines could begin to stand in for the things that make us human: creativity, problem-solving, even friendship. We would face a national security crisis, an economic crisis, and a spiritual crisis all at once.

It’s a good thing AI leaders are finally waking up to the precipice they’ve brought us to. The problem is that the agreement ends there.

Amodei says we need government rules and approval processes now. But other companies, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI among them, are spending millions to elect candidates who promise to block AI regulation. OpenAI is part of a coalition pushing Congress to bar every state from regulating AI at all.

The President has sided with them. This week he waved away the danger, saying what matters is “beating China.” In Congress, Republicans have drawn a line against any regulation. Speaker Mike Johnson, a favorite of much of the AI industry, said flatly this week that it is up to the companies, not the government, to protect the nation.

That is absurd. It shows how completely market fundamentalism and corporate loyalty have blinded the Republican Party to reality.

AI companies have no incentive to protect us. They answer to investors, not the public, and those investors are pushing them to reach recursive self-improvement as fast as possible, because whoever gets there first will make the most money. Any company that slows down on its own risks losing its investors and, with them, its business. So they won’t protect us. They can’t. As long as money is the only incentive, they will race to build the machine that could destroy us.

The only way to slow that race is one set of rules that applies to every company, and only government can write them. That is what government does best: set rules that preserve an industry’s benefits and control its dangers. We did it with nuclear power, with prescription drugs, and with workplace safety. We made sure nuclear energy didn’t destroy us, medicines didn’t poison us, and factories didn’t kill their workers. Public oversight of dangerous industries didn’t used to divide the parties. It united them.

Today a dangerous alliance is forming between the AI industry, with Amodei the notable exception, and the Republican Party. It threatens to leave the industry’s own warnings unheeded.

Warnings matter only if we act on them. So far, most of the AI industry wants to sound the alarm about what it has built while clinging to the fantasy that it can manage the danger on its own. In the end, that belief may be more dangerous than the technology itself.

Photo credit: OFW member and photographer Nortei Dowuona.

Every year for the last decade, I’ve walked across Connecticut. It takes me about a week. I know it might sound a little quixotic: a U.S. Senator walking down Main Streets and country roads, stopping to talk to whoever might pass by. But there’s a reason I do it.

I started walking because I was worried I might confuse the echo chambers on cable news and Capitol Hill with the actual country. That if I only heard the loudest voices in our politics, I’d forget what normal, decent people actually feel.

So the walk is my annual reset.

A few years back, I met a man named Izzy. We crossed paths in Willimantic as he was leaving a liquor store on Main Street, six-pack in hand. He told me it was his ritual — his way of breaking up the monotony of the day.

Life hadn’t turned out as he’d hoped. He had once lived in New York City, with a career he was proud of and a wife he loved. But her death unmoored him. Heartbroken, he eventually moved to Connecticut to be closer to family. To make ends meet, he got a job at Walmart.

Izzy told me he was proud to work for an iconic American company. He was loyal to Walmart. He gave them seventeen years of his life.

But Walmart was not loyal to him. The job he’d clocked into day after day, year after year, paid little more than minimum wage. Instead of a pension, Walmart offers a 401(k) plan, but like nearly half of Walmart employees he was paid too little to save anything in it. So, after he stopped working, he was forced to survive on his Social Security check and food stamp allowance.

So now, Izzy was spending what should be his golden years in a cramped apartment with two strangers he found online. He can afford little more than his rent and that ritualistic six-pack. “Sometimes,” he told me, “my life doesn’t even feel human.”

That line has stuck with me ever since, because it tells the whole story. Izzy played by the rules. But the rules had been written by someone else, for someone else.

Let me explain.

In 1970, America’s largest private employer was General Motors. Average wages there were $34 an hour in today’s dollars. Employees got a pension and good health care. The CEO, meanwhile, made about 60 times the average worker.

Now let’s be clear: That time was far from perfect. But it’s worth remembering that in the not-too-distant past, a career at an iconic American company like GM brought more than just a paycheck. It provided a dignified life where a worker could buy a home, start a family, put some money away for retirement. Maybe a family trip every once in a while. Working people didn’t expect to live a lavish life. Just one with some security.

But for those at the top, apparently even that was too much for workers to ask. So corporate America rewrote the rules. Instead of prioritizing a fulfilled and productive workforce, and the wellbeing of the communities they called home, companies went all in on enriching shareholders. As they waged all-out war on unions, they redirected profits toward stock buybacks and executive compensation.

Their craven project worked exactly as intended.

Today, America’s largest private employer is the same one that employed Izzy. The average Walmart worker makes just over $15 an hour. Less than half, in real spending power, of what GM workers made in the 70’s. There is no pension.

It’s not like there’s less money to go around. What changed is where that money is going. Walmart’s CEO makes nearly 1,000 times the average worker’s pay. Meanwhile, the heirs to the Walton family are worth around $500 billion altogether.

This isn’t just a Walmart story. It’s the story of our economy these last forty years.

American workers are 92 percent more productive than they were in 1979, making their companies more profitable than ever. But in that same time, their wages — how they share in the gains of that productivity — have grown by less than 34 percent.

Profits that once flowed down to workers are now siphoned up to shareholders and corporate executives — the ultra-rich who then scapegoat immigrants, or China, or some other boogeyman as the real reason their workers can’t make ends meet.

And Congress has let them get away with it.

We’ve watched the cost of everything soar, but we haven’t raised the federal minimum wage — not since President Obama’s first term. It still sits at $7.25. But had it kept pace with inflation and productivity since 1968, it would be around $25 an hour today.

That gap is everything. Because there is nowhere in America where a person supporting even one dependent can actually afford their basic needs on less than $25 per hour. Not in Connecticut. Not in Mississippi. Nowhere. It’s simple math. >

That’s why, this week, I introduced the Living Wage for All Act, a bill to — finally — increase the federal minimum wage to $25 an hour.

Right now, 45 percent of American workers fall under that threshold. So, if passed, this legislation would transform the lives of tens of millions of American families.

I know some people will call it radical. But what’s radical about believing that, if you work full-time in America, you should get paid what you’re worth and be able to meet your basic needs?

That social contract used to be the one we all signed — including corporate executives. It is what made the American Dream real. And I would argue, as the rise of AI threatens to disrupt the workforce even more, it is more important than ever that we restore the economic promises that built the middle class in the first place.

It’s the bare minimum of what workers deserve — and of what workers should expect from their leaders. It’s also what’s best for the health of our economy and country.

The actual radical idea is the one we’ve been living under for 40 years: that CEOs and shareholders should get everything and workers should be grateful for whatever scraps are left.

Because when workers have money, they spend it. When they don’t, businesses don’t have customers — and communities hollow out.

And we know raising wages works. Every state that has raised its minimum wage has come out stronger – higher consumer spending, lower turnover, more economic certainty for businesses and families. The notion that companies can’t afford to pay workers more was born of greed, not economics. The money has always been there. It’s just been going somewhere else.

For decades, people like Izzy have been told to play by the rules of a game that’s been rigged to abuse their hard work and loyalty.

It’s past time we rewrite those rules again — so forty hours a week can pay for the kind of life we all deserve.

The Munich Security Conference this year felt a little bit like a funeral for the post-World War II order. Everybody at the conference recognized that, while that order had been decaying for years, Donald Trump is attempting to really deal a death blow. But while I was surrounded in Munich by people mourning the end of that order, I started wondering: how many people would show up if you held a funeral in the United States for the death of the post-World War II order? And I realized it’d be almost nobody - except for the exact same people who were with me at the Munich Security Conference.

That’s because, for as much good as this order has done, a lot of Americans have seen the rough edges of that order. They have seen how the post-World War II neoliberal economic order has consolidated economic power and social power to a tiny group of elites that have little concern for everybody else.

To most Americans, the economy they’re living in today - where social mobility is an afterthought and a small group of people control all the things that matter in their life - is a consequence of the decision we made after World War II to create an integrated global economy.

That decision created a transatlantic cult of profit and efficiency that has driven dignity out of work. It’s forced 40% of Americans into living paycheck to paycheck, so they don’t have enough money in the bank to even afford an emergency car repair. The post-World War II order is increasingly an order of scarcity for many Americans.

That order sold us on the benefits of a seamless world economy, a flattened, unifying world culture, and global citizenship. But what people really want is to be citizens of unique, local small places. And those places outside of DC, New York, San Francisco and LA are not terribly healthy today.

Our country has also gotten into disastrous war after disastrous war that Americans were told were essential to protect this nation and that world order. Instead, those wars just ended up getting a lot of Americans killed and wasting trillions of dollars. They distracted generation after generation of American leaders from fixing real problems at home. Many cheered President Biden when he declared that America is back. But people started asking, ‘Back for what? Is this more of the same? No thanks.’

I don’t mean to minimize the upside of this order.

Despite all of the fires that exist in the world, the trajectory of global deaths due to conflict is going down. That’s because our global order has prevented a lot of the frequent state-on-state violence that we saw prior to World War II. There have been tremendous advancements in our economy that have come from that order and many of those shared advances have helped people.

But we need to understand that we got stuck with Donald Trump a second time because Biden said we were ‘going back to what we had.’ And people said in response ‘No. We told you in 2016 we don’t want that. We want something new.’ If we, as progressives, don’t do a real accounting of what people really want from our engagement in the world, then we are not doing our work in this movement.

The right does a much better job than the left when it comes to a spiritual assessment of the state of the country. And people in this country are feeling really alone right now. They are feeling really powerless right now. We need a foreign policy that matches people’s sense of loneliness and powerlessness.

We would be misreading a lot of the essential elements of Donald Trump’s foreign policy if we just said it was about jingoism or xenophobia. Because a lot of what he talks about is really about power. His message is that these global forces, that we are endlessly told are just out of our control, can be inside our control. That in fact, we can exert power collectively on these forces.

Take global migration, which looked like a phenomenon that the United States could not control, as literally thousands of people poured over our borders on a daily basis. Donald Trump said ‘no, that is within our control. We can control that. And if you’re part of my coalition, we will control this force.’ Trump offered all sorts of terrible, xenophobic solutions: the suspension of asylum, the wall. But ultimately Trump was selling control.

What are tariffs about? Tariffs are fundamentally about control. Tariffs are saying, ‘this phenomenon that you thought was out of our control - the outsourcing of jobs away from the United States - we can control it with tariffs.’

Tariffs can also be an effective attack on the cults of profit and efficiency. The fact is, people are sick and tired of our entire economy being organized around maximizing investor returns and making things more and more robotically efficient. You can tell, because tariffs are inefficient. Tariffs signal that you care about something - in this case, domestic job creation - more than you care about profit. People noticed that the big corporations were crowing against the tariffs. That was a good thing, as far as they were concerned.

Now, Trump’s ham-handed tariffs don’t work. You can’t bring jobs back to this country without combining protectionism with incentives for domestic production. But we have to recognize Trump’s foreign policy conveys a message of powerfulness - just as Trump’s entire movement is a movement about connection and people finding a home with each other.

And so when progressives design our foreign policy, we have to start with a message that empowers Americans and empowers local communities. That means a purposeful effort with our allies in Europe to break up concentrated corporate power and put regulations around the poisonous technologies that are disempowering and corrupting families and kids. It means proving, across the Atlantic, government can be powerful in protecting you from harm, whether it comes from social media, AI, or crypto currency.

Thus far, people feel adrift because government has not been able to protect them from the harms of new technology. That means we need a responsible economic nationalism. We need to decide that yes, we are going to create a distinct American economy. We are going to decide to have a certain set of industries and jobs here at home. We are going to combine domestic manufacturing with a breakup of concentrated corporate power. When we succeed, that may even mean that those hollowed out local communities, that serve as an avatar for what was wrong about the post-World War II global economic order, become powerful again.

Finally, we have to bring a laser-like focus on corruption, in cooperation with our transatlantic allies. We need to decide that we are just not going to accept that a handful of corporations and billionaires and millionaires control our politics.

That kind of economy brings a sense of political powerlessness. People say, ‘I work hard at my job and I don’t advance, but I try to step foot inside politics and I can’t make a difference either,’ because our politics is corrupted by concentrated political power as well.

If we have a domestic message of taking on corruption, taking on concentrated power, and building a responsible kind of economic nationalism, that will empower the next set of progressives leaders to reenter the world. But if people don’t feel powerful here at home - if they feel alone and disintegrated and atomized by the technology that cycles us into withdrawal - then they are going to continue to follow leaders who say, ‘let’s just focus here at home and engage in pugilism against our allies.’

We have to build an answer for Americans who have been scratching their head about who our engagement with the world serves. They have come to believe that it serves the folks who make things for the Department of Defense and profit off of war. They have come to believe that it serves the big, powerful corporate interests. But we can build a new vision of America’s integration with the world that first and foremost serves the poor, the disenfranchised, and the middle class - the average workers here at home.

Hey, it’s Chris Murphy. My new book, Crisis of the Common Good, comes out next week. It’s about America’s spiritual crisis - how we’ve lost a sense of connection to our neighbors and how the cults of profit, globalization, consumption, technology, and credentialism have made it harder to find meaning, purpose, and happiness in our lives. Below is an excerpt from the book about the danger of outsourcing the things that make us human — creativity, moral reasoning, and connection — to AI. I’m hitting the road next week to talk about all of these problems and how the left and right can come together to restore the common good. Check out the tour schedule below to see if I’ll be in a city near you.

From Crisis of the Common Good —

Hannah Arendt’s journey to a Jerusalem courtroom, where she sat in the spring of 1961 watching evil on the other side of a glass booth, was a long one. She was sixty-four years old, a German Jewish philosopher who had fled Germany during the war and had been stateless for twenty years, eventually finding refuge in America, where she became one of her adopted nation’s most formidable political thinkers. She had been sent to that courtroom by The New Yorker to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the SS leader who had organized the logistics of the Nazi genocide. Eichmann was in charge of the train schedules, the deportation orders, and the coordination between the ghettos and the camps that kept the extermination campaign running on time.

Arendt thought she knew what she would see on the other side of that glass: a madman, a fanatic full of vile animus for the people he sent to the slaughter. Instead, Eichmann presented as something different entirely: an anonymous functionary, a man incapable of thinking for himself. He didn’t speak of his hatred or prejudice. He coldly spoke of transport schedules and following orders. Arendt believed she was looking into the eyes of someone who could not think from the standpoint of someone else, who could not make independent moral judgments. Pursuing his self-interest, he surrendered to the system built for him. And as a result, he helped murder millions of innocent people.

I’m normally loath to make contemporary comparisons to the Nazi regime. No cult being foisted upon our nation compares to the moral horror of the Third Reich. But what Arendt witnessed that day caused her to think broadly about the danger of surrendering our moral judgment to systems designed by others—especially those who don’t have our best interests in mind, or who operate without any moral frame at all. She called it “the banality of evil.” Many readers grew angry at her apparent minimization of Eichmann’s crimes, and she may well have misunderstood Eichmann himself. But her larger point still resonates: that wrongdoing does not always arrive in a hurricane. Sometimes it is the quiet result of our surrender—the outsourcing of moral thinking and judgment to systems and authorities that spare us the burden of deciding for ourselves.

Arendt worried that the industrial age would facilitate this banality through its construction of vast, integrated systems that operated constantly and evolved incessantly, with a momentum beyond meaningful human control. She could not have imagined what we are building today: machines designed to replace not our physical effort but our mental life itself.

The outsourcing of human cognition to algorithms and large language models (LLMs)—or, more broadly, artificial intelligence (AI)—may be the greatest threat to meaning and purpose our species has ever faced. Improperly managed, the transition to a world dominated by social media and AI could prove spiritually ruinous—as we surrender not just moral reasoning but also creativity, expression, and genuine human connection to machines that cannot understand what they are taking from us.

The surrender is already happening in slow, devastating ways, the full impact of which is just coming into view. In May 2022, I visited Amity High School in Woodbridge, Connecticut, to talk about the social media regulation bill I had just introduced with three other senators—Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Katie Britt of Alabama, and Tom Cotton of Arkansas—all parents of school-age kids.

I was convinced the students would object most loudly to provisions of the bill that required age verification or parental consent. But I was wrong. These students were focused on a different provision—the ban on the use of the personalized content algorithm for users under eighteen. Almost the entire conversation was devoted to their deep worry over losing access to the algorithms on Instagram and TikTok that provided them with a constant conveyor belt of content. Most of these kids had become dependent on an algorithm feeding them customized information. They simply could not imagine a world in which they had to engage in real-life trial and error to discover new passions.

The generation raised on social media algorithms is missing out on a key rite of passage for adolescents—the ritual of discovery. There is work that goes into searching the world for things to care about. There is wonder in the chaotic hunt for passions and subcultures that make life worthwhile: your neighbor’s older sister who introduces you to classic rock, the tucked-away comic book shop where you discover graphic novels, the afternoon you wander into the local park and join a game of pickup football for the first time and decide you want to get good at it. The algorithm is certainly more efficient than the old trial and error of discovery, but kids get less practice in failure, negotiating real-world spaces, and teamwork.

These students at Amity High didn’t know what they were missing—all they knew was the reality that the social media system was delivering to them. As I left the school, a teacher quietly followed me out and whispered, “These kids don’t realize how addicted they are. It’s scary.”

This “system” has been constructed by technology industry elites consumed by profit obsession and greed, willing to inflict incalculable spiritual damage on our nation in order to become billionaires and, soon, trillionaires. These leaders long ago surrendered their own moral judgment, not to machines, but to the cult of technology—to an evangelical-like belief that all innovation is inherently good, that what can be built should be built, and that the all-knowing market will sort out any kinks or collateral damage. “Move fast and break things,” Facebook famously instructed its employees. But the cult-of-technology crowd never stopped to ask what, exactly, they were breaking; at what cost; and whether what they broke could ever be repaired.

The book comes out May 26 and you can pre-order it HERE.

Tour Schedule:

NEW YORK CITY: Tuesday, May 26 - 6:30pm ET
McNally Jackson at Judson Memorial Church
In conversation with Katie Couric
https://www.mcnallyjackson.com/event/senator-chris-murphy-katie-couric

WASHINGTON, DC: Wednesday, May 27 - 7pm ET
Sixth & I with Politics and Prose
In conversation with Jonathan Capehart
https://www.sixthandi.org/event/senator-chris-murphy/

CHICAGO: Thursday, May 28 - 7pm CT
WBEZ and Exile in Bookville at the Studebaker Theater
In conversation with Zeenat Rahman
https://www.fineartsbuilding.com/events/an-evening-with-senator-chris-murphy/

ST. LOUIS: Friday, May 29 - 7pm CT
St. Louis County Library with Left Bank Books
In conversation with Sarah Fenske
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/author-event-senator-chris-murphy-crisis-of-the-common-good-tickets-1986459544973?aff=oddtdtcreator

CAMBRIDGE, MA: Saturday, May 30 - 7pm ET
Harvard Bookstore at First Parish Church
In conversation with Heather Cox Richardson
https://www.harvard.com/event/chris-murphy

NEW HAVEN: Sunday, May 31 - 2pm ET
RJ Julia at Omni New Haven
In conversation with Emily Bazelon
https://rjjulia.com/event/2026-05-31/senator-chris-murphy-crisis-common-good

LOS ANGELES: Saturday, June 6 - 4pm PT
Writers Bloc and Book Soup at Moss Theater at New Roads
In conversation with Elex Michaelson
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/writers-bloc-presents-us-senator-chris-murphy-tickets-1985887343503

CORTE MADERA: Sunday, June 7 - 4pm PT
Book Passage
In conversation with Steve Kerr
https://www.bookpassage.com/event/us-senator-chris-murphy-crisis-common-good

SEATTLE: Friday, June 19 - 7:30pm PT
Town Hall Seattle with Elliott Bay Book Company
In conversation with Marcus Harrison Green
https://townhallseattle.org/event/senator-chris-murphy/

CHARLESTON: Friday, July 24 - 6pm ET
Buxton Books at Circular Congregational Church
https://charleston.boldtypetickets.com/events/183820953/crisis-of-the-common-good-an-author-event-with-u-s-senator-chris-murphy

ATLANTA: Saturday, July 25 - 7pm ET
A Cappella Books at Wild Heaven West End Garden Club
https://www.freshtix.com/events/murphycommon

As families were putting on their Sunday best for Easter services and children across America were unearthing goodies in their Easter baskets and anticipating egg hunts, the American president - a figure those same children are taught to respect and revere - unleashed perhaps the most dangerous, unhinged social media rant of his entire five-plus year presidential odyssey.

Trump promised to destroy all of Iran’s bridges and power plants unless the regime reopened the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has closed to commercial traffic since Trump began his totally pointless and illegal war against Iran. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH,” the president greeted Easter revelers, before signing off, on the day of Christ’s resurrection, with “Praise be to Allah.”

As soon as Trump published the post, he began speed dialing political reporters to reaffirm his basic promise: to start committing mass war crimes on Tuesday. And then Monday afternoon, Trump doubled down, saying during a press conference, “the entire country can be taken out in one night, and that night might be tomorrow night.” Of the many presidential firsts America has witnessed under Trump, this was perhaps the most jarring and diabolical.

Am I sure that what he is planning to do if Iran won’t open the Strait are war crimes, you ask? Yes. And it’s not really a close call. The Geneva Conventions clearly limit bombing to military targets and some dual-use targets (sites used for civilian and military use). But Trump’s promise isn’t to target power or bridge infrastructure used by the military; he is calling reporters and telling them he is going to destroy EVERY power plant and bridge. That campaign will kill tens of thousands of innocent Iranians who work in the plants and travel on the roads. That’s a war crime.

A Wall Street Journal report over the weekend added some flavor to Trump’s decision. It detailed how Trump’s advisors told him the entire point of the new bombing campaign would be to terrorize civilians. Why? Because targeting civilian infrastructure would create political turmoil and maybe regime change. If this regime won’t reopen the Strait, then maybe after killing thousands of innocent people, a civil war might break out that would lead to this regime’s downfall. If this plan seems macabre and insane, it’s because…well, IT IS.

The International Committee for the Red Cross, the organization charged with interpreting the Geneva Conventions, is also clear that attacks designed for this purpose - to create civilian unrest just for the purpose of civilian unrest - are also war crimes.

Now, if you’re a student of international war crime conventions, you will know that many of the restrictions on bombing are included in the 1979 amendment to the Geneva Conventions - an amendment that was never ratified by the United States. True, but the U.S. has nonetheless honored and abided by these additional protocols even without formal agreement. A war crime is still a war crime.

But of course, Trump isn’t pretending that he cares. His entire threat is to purposely terrorize innocent Iranians and hope the regime responds by meeting Trump’s demand.

It won’t. Iran believes it is winning this war. And their immediate reaction to Trump’s early morning threat was to step up attacks on its neighbors. In my briefings from Administration intelligence officials, there is no evidence the regime is at risk of falling, and the U.S. attacks instead seem to be hardening Iranian antagonism toward the U.S., just as our strikes in Afghanistan pushed citizens back toward the Taliban.

But even if Trump’s war crimes were successful in forcing Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, how on earth is that a victory? The Strait was open before Trump’s disastrous war of choice that has spiked gas prices to over four dollars a gallon in the U.S. Did we really spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, throw the entire Middle East into chaos, hemorrhage the global energy market, and lose over a dozen American lives, just so we could commit a bunch of heinous war crimes to simply open a waterway that was open before we broke hell loose?

I raise the question of Trump’s promised war crimes because I worry deeply about our tendency to repeatedly look the other way at his norm-breaking. We do it all the time, and it’s never excusable. But on Sunday, he seemed to gain energy the more he bragged about committing war crimes. There was something unusually sinister about how off the rails his threats were, and we have to understand what the consequences are if this week our president proudly starts bombing civilians in Iran, like Putin bombs civilians in Ukraine.

I’ll spare the “our international credibility will be greatly damaged” monologue. Few Americans, too often living paycheck to paycheck and quickly losing touch with purpose, meaning and connection in their lives, care much for lectures about America’s international reputation. I will simply ask you to query: do you want your nation to be one of a handful in the world that brazenly tries to hurt innocent people and use their pain as ransom to get foreign governments to bend to our will? Would you do that in your personal life - threaten to hurt a neighbor’s infant child to influence their behavior toward you? I think Americans take pride in our exceptionalism - our decision to hold ourselves to higher standards than other nations. We fought and prevailed in the Cold War to not become like Russia - why model their war crimes now?

I wasn’t kidding when I responded to Trump’s Easter morning tweet that his Cabinet should start researching the 25th Amendment. It is possible he has come unglued in the face of a war he cannot win - a war that could be the world’s economic undoing and his political unraveling. The people around him - those that enable him - should stop him from committing these war crimes. And we should speak up loudly to make sure they do.

These markets are, of course, wildly corrupt and dangerous for our political process. These are not markets on events with unknowable outcomes like a basketball game. These are events entirely within the control of one or a small handful of people, who know the answer to the question the wager poses. Imagine a high-ranking U.S. military leader, who has wagered $50,000 on a U.S. invasion, pushing for war at the Situation Room table not because it is necessary for our national security, but because he stands to get rich quick from his bet. Imagine the powerful people close to President Trump using classified and highly sensitive inside information about the war to place highly lucrative, successful wagers based on their proximity to power.

Of course, you don’t have to imagine these scenarios because they are already happening in real life. The day before the U.S. launched its first strikes against Iran, a rush of unusual, high-value bets were placed on Polymarket that the war would begin the next day. These were clearly people who worked for Trump, or were in the White House’s inner circle. Many of the bets paid out in excess of $100,000.

This corruption keeps me up at night. But it’s not what worries me the most. No, there is something much more insidious about America’s newfound interest in prediction markets that allow us to place bets on high-stakes public policy and the often fatal consequences of those decisions.

What does it do to our soul, as human beings and as American citizens, when questions of life and death, misery and famine, war and peace, stop being matters of morality and become ways to cash in and make money? The United States clearly rushed into war with Iran without thoroughly or properly vetting our targets. That’s likely what got over a hundred little girls killed when a U.S. Tomahawk missile hit an elementary school in Tehran. But several very powerful people were cheering that day because they made money off of that tragedy. Every day, prediction markets allow Americans similar opportunities to make money off of the death and destruction caused by war.

I think the transformation of moral questions into financial questions hardens us to suffering, or at the very least, excuses us from grappling with the complicated questions of right and wrong in public decision making.

And these prediction markets are just the latest example of American culture erasing virtue from our public dialogue. Our economy today is built around an insatiable cult of profit and capital efficiency. Every private sector decision is deemed virtuous as long as it results in a company making money or boosting shareholder value. The lives ruined by closing a factory or selling a poisonous product don’t matter as long as the company turns a profit. In the same way that prediction markets gamify government decisions, stripping them of their moral character, the choice to view economic decision making through only a profit lens absolves us from asking harder questions of whether those decisions are morally right and wrong.

I worry that something really important dies inside us when we stop thinking about the big questions of how to organize our collective economic and political life through a moral lens. I think we are built to be moral creatures; we naturally care deeply about the suffering of others. When we can make money off of that suffering, or simply view government decisions that cause suffering as a game that we wager on, it hollows us out in unseen ways.

And that leads me to my second worry. Maybe there is so much interest in these novel markets because it’s a way for increasingly powerless citizens to feel personally connected to the biggest public issues of the day. Maybe all this wagering on war is happening because people have lost faith that more traditional means of political involvement will have an impact.

Today, millions of Americans view our government as captured by billionaires and corporations. And they are largely right. So they’ve given up on using tools like protest or political mobilization as the means by which they involve themselves in the public square. But prediction markets provide an illusion of connection to these big debates, just like your March Madness pool makes you feel much more connected to the NCAA tournament than if you didn’t have a little money riding on it. The problem is that we don’t need to be actual participants in March Madness; we are supposed to be active participants in our own democracy, and when prediction markets give us an excuse to simply act as voyeurs, it degrades our already fragile system of self-governance.

I’ve introduced legislation to ban prediction markets that offer wagers on government action like military strikes and ground invasions. I think the corruption it incentivizes is an urgent issue that demands our attention. But the damage these markets will do to us spiritually, as our national moral conversation degrades further and betting becomes an empty substitute for true civic participation, should concern us too. Not everything needs to be a commodity. There is not reason yet to give up on influencing government through traditional political action. Humans are built to feel and act on empathy, and to engage with our fellow citizens in common action. That is what makes us feel fulfilled and happy. Prediction markets threaten to rob us of that opportunity to think morally and act collectively. Before we choose to normalize their integration with public decision making, we should think hard about the spiritual cost on our already weary nation.

I had been asked to enter the courtroom by their lawyer, who was virtually certain of what would happen the minute the family left the judge’s courtroom. The family would be apprehended by the half dozen, plainclothes ICE agents standing immediately outside the door, and effectively disappeared into a shadowy nearby prison to which lawyers and elected officials could barely gain access.

It didn’t matter that this couple had played by the rules. They came to America to follow the process and apply for asylum. They had a good case. They showed up for all their court appearances. And on this day, the judge didn’t order their detainment or removal: he saw merit in their case and scheduled their next hearing.

But the ICE officers didn’t care. They were under orders from President Donald Trump to put in jail EVERY immigrant they could, including children. And no matter the legal status of the family or individual.

As they got up to leave, I huddled with the family and their young, nervous attorney. We decided we would all leave together, proceed quickly to the elevator, and move directly, all as one big blob of humans, to their ride in the parking lot. Our hope was that those ICE officers might not try to cause a scene, and rip the parents and their child away if they were attached at the hip to a U.S. Senator. Our hunch was right. The ICE officers made a half step toward us but then froze, and the family safely left the building.

It wasn’t the job I thought I was coming to Texas to do. I was there to inspect two massive detention centers that house families (including hundreds of small children) who have been ripped out of their communities by Trump’s ICE. When I was illegally denied entry, I decided to spend the following morning at the San Antonio immigration court, to see for myself the dystopian world that Trump’s immigration police have created.

Families who are complying with the law come to this court. These are not “illegal immigrants.” These are people who are doing it the right way: showing up for court dates and making the legal case for asylum protection. Trump’s ICE is making a mockery of the process, because no matter how meritorious the immigrant’s claim is, most get rounded up and put in detention as soon as they walk out of the courtroom.

The list of horrors I saw is long:

• Trump kicked the local legal aid group out of the San Antonio courthouse and gave the “pro bono attorney” room (it’s still got that sign hanging outside) to ICE to use as their interrogation room.

• An immigration judge was fired the night before I arrived, because she insisted on implementing the law and not ruling against every single immigrant applicant - a clear threat to any judge who is foolish enough to follow the law.

• The ICE officers at the courthouse (who I give credit to for speaking to me) admitted they don’t target criminals; they are looking to lock up EVERYONE, even legal immigrants.

• A giant ICE bus sits outside the courthouse each day, waiting to be loaded with immigrants.

• The prison many get sent to - Pearsall Detention Center - has 1800 detainees and 4 rooms for legal consultations, basically guaranteeing most migrants never see a lawyer before the expedited fake legal process inside the jail results in their deportation. It’s not detention - it’s effectively a campaign of DISAPPEARANCES.

What I saw in Texas was utter lawlessness: an agency out of control, making up its own law - with no respect for the actual law or the Constitution. DHS is terrorizing children and families because it can. They act like they are unaccountable.

This is the same story in Minneapolis (and soon in other cities). Trump is constructing a personal political police force, as fast as he can. He is looking to create confrontations and chaos - especially in swing states - as a possible pretext for something more sinister: the takeover of state elections. ICE is, potentially, his gateway to rig the 2026 election.

Trump’s DHS acts with impunity in places like San Antonio and Minneapolis because it believes Congress will keep giving it blank checks. We should not.

Next week, the Senate will vote on the annual funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security. The current version of the bill - which narrowly passed the House this week, with almost no Democratic votes - does not contain any new constraints on DHS’ lawless behavior. And it provides more - not less - money for ICE than the last full DHS budget negotiated by the two parties.

I know our negotiators had a very hard job. I know Republicans dug their heels in because they care more about appeasing their leader than standing up for the Constitution. But Democrats have no obligation to vote for a budget that funds a runaway, immoral agency just because Republicans are so beholden to Trump, they refuse to agree to any reforms. We shouldn’t pretend we are powerless; we aren’t.

We should demand that SOME reforms be built into the DHS budget before we vote for it. I’m not naive - I know this budget will not cure every problem or fully end the parade of horrors and lawlessness. But there are meaningful reforms we could implement. Congress could require warrants for arrests. It could return CBP to its actual mission - protecting our border. It could require a return to prior hiring practices and increase identification requirements or mandate consequences for violent conduct. It could suspend funding for DHS if they keep denying Members of Congress access to facilities. These reforms aren’t cure-alls, but they would save lives.

On the first night of my visit to Texas, I sat with two boys who had, just hours before, been released from an ICE prison. They were in the facility in Dilley, Texas that I had just been denied access to. It’s called “baby jail” by locals, since it holds most of the young children who have been swept up in raids. It’s a barbaric place, which is why I wanted to see it.

The eyes of these two elementary school age boys were hollow. Only once did the younger boy’s eyes fill up with tears, when his father described in detail the conditions of their incarceration. The older boy stared straight ahead for the entire hour we were together. He looked alive on the outside, dead on the inside.

They had spent Christmas in jail. They called their mother every few days in the lead up to Christmas, begging her to get them out. They worried every day that their friends at school had forgotten about them.

They were not “illegal immigrants”. Their father brought them here legally. They crossed the border and immediately presented themselves to authorities to apply for asylum. The boys and their father were whisked away to jail when they checked in during a required court visit (like thousands of other immigrants who have been disappeared, they were playing by the rules). ICE could have just taken the father (which would have still been illegal). But they took the little boys too - just for the purpose of traumatizing them.

Their mother dropped them off that morning for the check in, their school backpacks in the backseat. She waited for them to return. She waited. She waited. And they didn’t come back for six weeks. Six weeks that have likely poisoned those poor boys’ brains forever.

That night, across from the boys sat their friend from school. He looked to be about 10 years old. He knew they were coming to meet a Senator, to tell their story, and he wanted to be there with them.

The boys worried their friends had forgotten them. But actually, the opposite was true. After the brothers were taken, that friend noticed the boys were absent from school day after day. He remembered they were in immigration proceedings. And so he told his teacher and his mom. And those adults reached out to a local legal aid clinic who tracked down the family in Dilley and eventually helped get the boys out of prison.

No, their friend hadn’t forgotten about them. Their friend knew they were in trouble. He decided he wasn’t powerless. Even at 10 years of age. And so he decided to rescue them.

A lesson the Senate could and should choose to learn. Before it’s too late.

It’s heartbreaking mostly because we have continuous evidence that believing we can change minds or political realities in this complicated region by brute military force is folly. Our invasion of Iraq was an era-defining, catastrophic mistake. Twenty years later, we are still fighting the terrorist groups our invasion created. Bombing Libya without a plan for what to do next was a disaster that has plunged that nation into civil war for more than a decade. Our support for the Saudis’ military efforts in Yemen created the world’s worst humanitarian disaster and made the Houthis stronger than ever. In Gaza, turning a blind eye to violations of international law has led to unconscionable levels of death and starvation, but also the recruitment of more extremist fighters than have been eliminated.

But it’s also heartbreaking because the American public has never asked for nor wanted these mistakes to continue. They know better. That’s why when President Obama asked for congressional approval to bomb Syria in 2013, he didn’t get it. The American public rose up and demanded their representatives vote it down. But, we keep going to war, despite the evidence telling us “hell no,” because of a powerful but wrongheaded group of warmongers and cheerleaders in Washington: hawkish politicians; profit-obsessed weapons sellers; and capable but naively optimistic military planners.

As the nation comes to terms with this latest blunder – the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities – I thought it would be helpful to spell out eight ideas that should guide Americans’ thinking as they digest the hourly news updates during the early days of what may become yet another American war of choice in the Middle East.

1. There is an industry in Washington that profits from war, and so it’s no surprise that the merits of conflict are dangerously overhyped and the risks are regularly underestimated. I represent several major defense companies in Connecticut, and I’m proud of their commitment to our nation and the products they make. But there is just no doubt that when there is a $300 billion industry that makes its money off of war, there is a ready chorus of support when a conflict looms. Many of the talking heads you see on television are paid by this industry. And as capable as our military can be, political leaders too often let their can-do ethic get in the way of the true risks of overseas engagement. Their myopia on narrow terms of tactical military success blurs out the broader political and social context in the region and ignores the costs of wars in far off places. The war industry needs conflict to justify its existence – and the annual bloated defense budget. So it is often willfully ignorant of the risks.

2. Almost every war plan our military has devised for the Middle East and North Africa in the last two decades has been a failure. Our major offensive invasions (Iraq and Afghanistan) were disasters. Yes, ISIS has largely been defeated, but they emerged out of the ruins of the Iraq War, serving as a reminder of the unintended consequences of our military actions. There is solace in knowing Osama bin Laden is dead and his organization is still on the run, but no one can claim that Afghanistan was a success now that the Taliban – the very group that harbored Al Qaeda – is back in power. Even more limited engagements were deadly flops. Our halfway support for the Syrian rebels just prolonged that war – in the end, a group that received no support from the U.S. was the one that managed to overthrow Assad and take power. In Libya and Yemen, our air campaign just led to one civil war and extended another. Why would we believe that this plan (and let’s admit we don’t yet know whether the Iran “plan” is limited to the Saturday night strikes or if there’s a plan at all) will be any different?

3. The strikes are illegal, and a major setback for the international rule of law that has undergirded American security for 75 years. Trump’s mounting disdain for the Constitution is a present and clear danger to American democracy. We aren’t just on the verge of a constitutional crisis – we are in one. No president can take preemptive military action against another country without authorization of Congress, and what Trump has done in Iran is illegal. But just as importantly, it’s an assault on international norms, which also guard against nations attacking other nations absent a true threat of attack. It becomes impossible for the United States to lecture other powers – like China or Russia – about their aggression if we don’t even attempt to build international consensus for our actions (remember when we used to at least try to get UN approval for our foreign military campaigns?).

4. You cannot bomb knowledge out of existence. Iran knows how to make a nuclear bomb. They do. And bombing their facilities just destroys their equipment; it does not eliminate their knowledge. Richard Nephew, an expert on Iran’s nuclear program, rightly points out that a result of Trump’s strike may be to convince Iran’s leadership that it must rush to build a nuclear weapon once the dust settles from this attack. The next time, Iran could build their research labs so far underground no bomb could reach them, and with the help of partners (perhaps Russia or North Korea), they could probably speed to a weapon. Trump claimed after the attack that we set Iran back “years”, but really, we have no idea. If Iran makes the decision to build a weapon, and they have a country like Russia helping them, they could easily get a weapon in a dangerously short amount of time. That risk is why many of us believed that a negotiated agreement that put in place verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program was a safer bet than military action.

5. We didn’t need to start a war with Iran because we know – for sure – that diplomacy can work. If America hadn’t already successfully negotiated and implemented an agreement with Iran to stop them from obtaining a nuclear weapon, maybe the military option would look more reasonable. Yes, we don’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, but from 2014-2107, Iran’s advanced nuclear research program was dismantled, and we had inspectors crawling all over the country ensuring their compliance. Trump’s national security advisors urged him to stay in the deal – it was working! – but he disastrously withdrew. But early in his second term, Trump seemed to recognize the value in a diplomatic approach and reengaged in diplomacy and just days before the Israeli strikes began,, There was a real possibility that a new deal could be reached.

6. Even opponents of this strike need to admit Iran is weak, and we cannot know for sure what the future holds. Iran’s limited response to the Soleimani assassination and the recent Israeli attacks exposed Iran’s military and intelligence limitations. Their proxies in the region are less lethal today than a few years ago. Is it out of the question that the tired, elderly Supreme Leader decides that he doesn’t want a drawn out fight with the United States and responds in a way that doesn’t escalate the situation? Sure. But we can’t count on it and have to weigh those risks seriously.

7. There are many very, very bad potential consequences of Trump’s attack. The worst consequence, of course, is a full-blown war in the region that draws in the United States. Remember, after we assassinated the Iranian military leader, Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian missile strike in Iraq narrowly missed killing 100 American troops. Our forces are spread out all over the Middle East and it’s impossible to fully protect them from air attacks in many places. If Iran kills American troops, the conflict could spiral and America would be back at war in the Middle East – something almost no Americans want. Another potentially dangerous consequence would be the fall of the regime in Tehran. The Supreme Leader is a murderous tyrant who wants Israel wiped off the map and has killed hundreds of U.S. troops in Iraq. Even if he were pushed out internally, he could be replaced by someone even more hardline and bent on revenge, willing to order terrorist attacks all over the globe. A third scenario, a civil war in which Iran descends into chaos, could be even worse for the United States and the region (remember it was Syria’s civil war that allowed ISIS and Al Qaeda to grow their power).

8. Israel is our ally and Iran IS a threat to their people, but we should never allow Israeli domestic politics to draw us into a war. Netanyahu’s strikes against Iran began the day his government was up for a no confidence vote in the Knesset. His hardline stances on Iran and Gaza appear to be dictated more by what keeps him in power as Prime Minister than the long-term security interests of his country. And he certainly is not making decisions based upon what is right for American national security. He spit in Trump’s face by launching strikes right in the middle of Trump’s negotiations with Iran (he was so wildly brazen as to assassinate the official overseeing Iran’s nuclear negotiations with Trump), effectively backing the U.S. into a corner. With negotiations scuttled, Trump (wrongly) believed his only option was to join in Israel’s strikes.

This is a moment where Congress needs to step in. This week, we are likely to take a vote that makes it crystal clear President Trump does not have the authorization for these strikes or a broader war with Iran. This is also a moment for the American people to stand up and say we do not want another war in the Middle East. In the last twenty years, we have seen the untold damage done - the lives lost, the billions of dollars wasted, and our reputation squandered - and we won’t allow Trump to take us down that path again.

Yes, AI is a transformational technology. It will likely turn out to be the most socially and economically disruptive technology ever - bigger than the printing press or advanced medicine or the internet. And there is no doubt it will come with huge practical upside for our nation: medical advances will come more quickly, production will be cheaper, complex societal problems will be solved more easily.

AI industry leaders assert that losing the race to control the global AI market to China would be an existential threat to our safety, an argument that feels correct on its face. Of course America should want the jobs and the political power that would come by dominating the AI market. And of course we want American, not Chinese, standards to be applied to AI as it becomes mainstreamed with consumers and businesses.

But if the American AI industry gets its way, it’s likely that neither of those things will happen. First, once AI can reason more effectively than a human (called Artificial General Intelligence or “AGI”), AI will undoubtedly be a net job killer, not a job creator. Once a machine can problem solve better than a human - in addition to writing, creating, coding, and driving better than humans - the job displacement will be massive and devastating. That’s just common sense. And there will never be enough new jobs to keep up. The CEO of Anthropic, one of the biggest companies in the industry, recently estimated that AGI would wipe out half of all white collar entry level jobs, spiking unemployment by 10-20% within the next decade. American society would likely implode if unemployment reached sustained levels above 20%.

Sure, AGI will also create jobs. If America is where the industry flourishes, there will be jobs involved in the development and maintenance of these new supercomputers. And the vexing problems that AGI solves may require humans to carry out the solutions. But we’ve seen this playbook before. The AI industry leaders who claim that there will be net job gains in the U.S. are pulling the same trick that the outsourcing corporations pulled on us in the 1980s when they promised better jobs would replace all the manufacturing jobs that were leaving for Mexico and China.

Not enough jobs will be created to replace the jobs we lose, and even the new jobs likely won’t stay in the United States due to the industry’s insatiable desire to maximize profits. A year ago, OpenAI’s Sam Altman sat in my office pitching a new (at the time) idea: outsource the power supply and data housing necessary for AGI to the repressive but wealthy regimes in the Middle East. Trump is now implementing that plan - evidence that the industry doesn’t really care about creating U.S.-based infrastructure or jobs. They are hunting profits, and to boost return on investment, without any guardrails imposed on them by government, they will use the same labor arbitrage techniques that other industries utilize and ship as many AI jobs as they can to countries with lower labor costs.

As for the argument that we need minimal or no regulation of U.S. AI because it’s better for consumers if AI breakthroughs happen here, rather than in China, there’s no evidence that this is true. But when I was in Silicon Valley this winter, I could divine very few “American values” (juxtaposed against “Chinese values”) that are guiding the development and deployment of AGI in the United States. The only value that guides the AI industry right now is the pursuit of profit. In all my meetings, it was crystal clear that companies like Google and Apple and OpenAI and Anthropic are in a race to deploy consumer-facing, job-killing AGI as quickly as possible, in order to beat each other to the market. Any talk about ethical or moral AI is just whitewash.

They are in such a hurry that they can’t even explain how the large language models they are marketing come to conclusions or synthesize data. Every single executive I met with admitted that they had built a machine that they could not understand or control. One conversational AI program, affiliated with Google, recently began recommending to kids that were frustrated with their parents that they murder their mother and father. The industry argues that there is no need for regulation and guardrails because they will regulate themselves. This is simply not true. They are in a race to deploy and commercialize and profit, and they are paying mere lip service to the ways that AGI could destroy the already fraying fabric of our nation.

And let’s not sugarcoat this - the risks to America posed by an AI dominance with no protections or limits are downright dystopian. The job loss alone - in part because it will happen so fast and without opportunity for the public sector to mitigate - could collapse our society. But because the technology has advanced so rapidly, we have not even had time to fully consider all the other ways AI could destroy us. And the list is frighteningly long.

Fake video and audio, without accountability or legal liability, could obliterate any notion of objective truth. The social isolation crisis that already exists, especially for American teens, could be set on fire by AI chatbots and friendship programs (watch Mark Zuckerberg’s recent interview to witness how excited the industry is to replace human friends with robot friends). The substitution of essential human functions - like composition and creativity and conversation - by machines will likely lead to incalculable spiritual atrophy. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Of course, AI will change our lives in positive ways; I’m no Luddite. Lives will be longer, food will become less scarce, many breakthrough inventions will come faster. But part of America’s genius, especially in the last one hundred years, is our ability to see new emerging transformational technologies, and decide early to regulate and control them in a way that allows for and efficiently delivers the positive benefits, and protects Americans, as much as possible, from the rougher edges. We did this with the railroads, with advanced medicine, and with nuclear technology. We can do it with AI.

Finally, let’s confront the AI industry’s argument that while regulation is necessary, we shouldn’t do too much of it because it will constrain us in the race with the Chinese. This argument assumes, wrongly, that the Chinese will put no constraints on the development and dissemination of their own AI models. We know this isn’t true because as we speak, China is being relatively careful with how it develops and rolls out AI. From 2021 to 2023, China began to build out a governance framework with some of the world’s earliest AI regulations and technical standards, bringing service providers into compliance on issues from ethics, data protection, safety, and security. China’s attempts at regulation have been lighter and more targeted than the EU’s, but its governance framework puts constraints on AI developers - including reporting on how algorithms are trained and required security self-assessments. That China has been actively building towards a national AI law, while producing a cutting-edge model like DeepSeek’s, makes clear that AI regulation and innovation can, and do, co-exist.

A few years ago, the AI industry made a big public spectacle of coming to Washington to show their support for regulation. But when it came down to it, they refused to engage in specifics. They endorsed or formulated no concrete proposal. I thought at the time that was suspicious and telling. And once Trump came into office, we all discovered my suspicion was warranted. Gifted with a pliant White House, the industry made their real request: no AI regulation. They pushed for and secured a provision in the giant Republican budget bill that bans all AI regulation at the state level, knowing that federal regulation is normally inspired by state models that provide both a practical and political impetus for the federal government to step into the fray. Stopping state regulation makes it a whole lot easier for the industry to slow or stop federal regulation entirely.

I want to beat China in the race for advanced AI. I do. But not at any cost. If we do not use government policy and intervention to control for the job loss and to protect consumers, it won’t matter that we get to AGI before China. Unbounded, AGI could eliminate so many jobs and undermine so many of our values, that China will cheer our decision to rush to AGI in our blind, feverish desire to be first. Ultimately, China could end up winning the race, because we destroy ourselves along the race route.

I count myself in the latter category, and that’s why this week I decided to do something that no other federal elected official is doing: turn over my fundraising operation to fight Trump’s corruption, as opposed to supporting candidates in the 2026 election. There will be time closer to the election to do electoral work and raise money to win elections, but right now, I believe all our efforts need to be focused on the tools of political opposition: mobilization, message, and legal action.

Let me explain why I think this moment is so unique (and then I’ll tell you about the new effort I’m launching this week).

Since January 20th, Donald Trump has been on a mission to convert our democracy to a quasi-autocracy. He began endorsing political violence on his behalf (a key element of would-be autocrats) by pardoning all of the January 6 rioters. He then began to use the justice system to harass his political opponents and give get out of jail cards to his loyalists. He began to target law firms that protected citizens against his corruption. He is trying to shut down protest and free speech on college campuses, where anti-Trump sentiment is often the hottest. He is bullying journalists and media companies ceaselessly, trying to suppress unfavorable coverage of him and his thievery. The level of risk to our democracy has never been as high as it is today.

And at the same time, Trump has begun to use the White House as a blunt instrument to enrich himself and his MAGA allies, often illegally. $5 million for 1-on-1 meetings with the president. A meme coin for tech billionaires, Russian oligarchs, and Chinese CEOs to purchase in exchange for favors from the White House. A bill to rip health care away from 15 million Americans in order to fund a tax cut for billionaires. It’s hard to keep up with the sheer volume of graft and corruption - that’s by design.

The Trump administration thinks if they flood the zone and threaten the opposition, they’ll exhaust us. They want to intimidate us into submission. But it's not working. People are waking up to the threat to our democracy and the non-stop corruption. Over the past few months, I’ve talked to thousands of people all over the country. From Connecticut to North Carolina, from Florida to Michigan and Missouri, they all say the same thing: what can we do? People are ready to fight and looking for ways to take action.

So, here’s what I’m announcing this week: I’m launching a new fund: American Mobilization. The priority for this new fund is to provide a meaningful boost to the efforts to build an immediate, nationwide mobilization against Trump's authoritarian tactics, thievery, and rampant corruption.

American Mobilization is going to partner with citizen-led, local grassroots protest efforts. We’re going to give them funding, but also logistical support. We’re starting out by investing $400,000 in three organizations: the Committee to Protect Health Care, Georgia Youth Justice Coalition for Action and Project 26 Pennsylvania. The Committee to Protect Health is organizing doctors and nurses to protect Medicaid in Michigan, Louisiana, and Utah, and Georgia Youth Justice and Project 26 are organizing young people, including college students, to join the fight.

Since January, hundreds of thousands of people have generously decided to send $5 or $10 to support me in this fight. But I know they’re not sending me that money to save for future elections - they’re sending their hard-earned dollars to make a difference right now. So, that’s what we’re doing: supporting state and local groups mobilizing against Trump’s corruption with the financial resources they need to supercharge their efforts.

Trump and his billionaire friends want us to feel powerless, but they should remember it’s the people who hold the power. Saving our democracy will require the mass mobilization of millions of Americans across the country. We’ve got no time to waste.

For more information on how to join us, visit https://chrismurphy.com/american-mobilization-pac/

But there is a clear winner when it comes to the contest for the worst of the corruption: the Trump crypto coin, and the alliance between Trump and crypto industry. It’s all just a shameless scheme for Trump to legalize large scale bribery, and shockingly, very few people seem to have taken notice.

For most people, the crypto industry is an enigma. Ordinary Americans don’t understand and don’t try to understand it. That’s exactly why Trump knew it would be the perfect way to launder money into his pocket.

First, let’s rewind the timeline a little. The crypto industry was furious that the Biden administration didn’t let them run wild. Instead, the SEC and DOJ were cracking down on fraud, scams, and theft, which made it a lot harder for these billionaires to continue their get-rich-quick schemes.

Everyone knows Donald Trump can be bought, and the 2024 election was the perfect opportunity for the crypto industry to get someone in the White House who would let them continue to abuse the public. The industry poured $130 million into Trump’s campaign, and when he did, they started cashing in.

Almost immediately, investigations into major cryptocurrency firms have been halted. Lawsuits over crypto fraud dropped. And then, this weekend, Trump announced a new national crypto reserve, declaring “I will make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World.” The reserve is basically a vehicle to use the government to prop up the industry - using public resources to put money into the hands of crypto billionaires.

But that’s not the worst of it. No, the real grift is the Trump “meme coin”, which enables a kind of legalized presidential money laundering of a scale and scope never before seen in America.

Right before the inauguration, Trump launched his own ‘meme coin’ called $TRUMP. It’s a digital asset with a value tied to, well, nothing, other than the popularity of Trump himself. It has no independent value. Its price is just a function of demand. If a lot of people want it, its price goes up. If nobody wants it, its price plummets.

Trump knew his MAGA supporters, wild with enthusiasm during the inauguration, would buy up a ton of the worthless coin. It worked. When prices jumped from 18 cents to $75 apiece, his net worth, on paper, swelled to more than $56 billion. And when it fell back down to $17, where it sits today, many of his supporters who bought at the top lost actual real money. He duped his followers into buying the coin (with its real value of $0) at its highest price, knowing it was going to crash.

Trump doesn’t need to care about the fluctuation of the cost because he gets a transaction fee every time coin trades are made. The Trump family made $100 million just in trading fees, while many of his supporters have lost thousands of dollars.

But the real scam is not the transaction fees. No, it’s the way that the coin can be inflated in value, at key moments, to allow Trump to swell his fortune. Trump held back 80% of the coin, and he will put more up for sale when the price once again spikes. And how does the price spike, allowing Trump to cash in with an additional release of the coin? Well, all it takes is a few Russian oligarchs or billionaire CEOs to buy a large quantity of coin (therefore increasing net demand) for the price to rise.

You might think, surely, that’s illegal for a foreign government or a CEO to manipulate the Trump coin market to enrich Trump. Amazingly, it is not! There is nothing stopping a Russian oligarch, a Saudi prince, or an oil company’s CEO from buying $TRUMP to put money directly into Trump’s pocket. And guess what, we aren’t even yet to the worst part.

The biggest scam is that we will never know who is buying the Trump coin to inflate the price and put cash into Trump’s pocket, because the buyers of the coin are secret! So it’s essentially a private conduit for bribery. Billionaires with business before the U.S. government can buy coin in order to make Trump rich, and then whisper to Trump that they need a favor. And the American people would never know.

As an example, in the first minute of trading, one buyer purchased around 6 million tokens of Trump coin, sending the price through the roof. Two days later, the buyer sold off the entire supply for a profit of more than $100 million. Trump likely made money off those transactions, but we have no idea who the mystery buyer was. Reporting suggests the buyer was likely operating out of…wait for it…China.

It doesn’t stop there. When Trump cashes out, he’s not doing it through a mainstream exchange. He’s doing it through unregulated Chinese exchanges. Why? Because he’s got something to hide - either the sources of the money or the people connected to him that are getting the payments - and faces much less scrutiny by conducting his business on Chinese exchanges.

So, while Trump’s meme coin may seem like some silly, hard-to-understand online fad, it could end up being the most insidious tools of corruption in the history of the presidency. The whole scheme is akin to Trump posting his Venmo or CashApp handle and inviting corporate interests and foreign governments to send him funds. Just in secret.

Trump’s crypto scams are just further proof that this administration doesn’t give a crap about you or helping our communities. The only thing they care about is making money for Trump and his billionaire friends.

The dismantling of USAID has been breathtaking in its speed and ferocity. All USAID workers around the world will be placed on administrative leave at the end of this week. The website has been scraped from the internet, removing droves of public data about USAID’s programs all over the world. Finance systems to pay millions of aid workers have been shut down. American staff are stranded in dangerous places like Ukraine, Somalia, and Haiti, cut off from their security portals. The doors of the headquarters are locked, even to members of Congress. The entire enterprise is illegal and unconstitutional. A President — never mind his unelected billionaire backer — cannot shutter a statutorily authorized agency by executive action.

The work of USAID is not charity — it is strategic. Over the past 64 years, the agency has made the United States safer and stronger. As adversaries like Russia and China and non-state terrorist groups use their financial and informational might to curry favor and win allies in the Middle East, Indo Pacific, Africa, and Latin America, USAID is our counterweight. For the past week, Russia has been publicly cheering Musk’s murder of USAID. Why? They know if USAID isn’t helping Ukraine win the war, or stops tracking and answering Kremlin propaganda on Russia’s periphery, Russian influence will grow and American influence will retreat. In the Middle East, USAID’s work to counter Hezbollah is being shut down by Musk, allowing Hezbollah and other terrorist groups to grow their operating space and recruitment.

But the adversary with the most to gain is undoubtedly China. Few countries understand the value of soft power and investing in diplomacy, economic development, and humanitarian assistance better than China does. Between 2013 and 2022, Beijing invested $679 billion in infrastructure projects across 150 countries through its Belt and Road Initiative. It has financed 226 power plants in 64 countries and spent $26 billion on developing telecommunications networks. China is the world’s largest debt collector, holding close to $1.5 trillion in debt over the heads of low- and middle-income countries. The influence gained by these investments means China gets the inside track on contracts for critical minerals and ports and transportations hubs. China wants to completely control the piping of the global economy within the next quarter century, and the erasure of USAID could help make that nightmare a reality. Make no mistake, China is absolutely elated that their primary soft power competitor is choosing to sit this one out. They cannot wait to run laps around us in the Global South and buy up allies in ways the Soviet Union could only dream of.

Why is this happening? It is certainly not because there are major savings to be gained in destroying USAID. It represents less than one percent of the federal budget. The 2017 tax cuts spent more money on handouts for just four companies — AT&T, Facebook, Verizon and Walmart — than the entire USAID budget. No, USAID is being shuttered to benefit Elon Musk personally. Tesla makes half its cars in China, and right now Musk is in a fierce competition with Chinese-government subsidized industries in batteries, solar, and space launches that he is losing. Musk needs favorable treatment from China in order to remain the world’s richest man. It would stand to reason that Musk, who once pledged that his companies would “follow core socialist values” in order to win business in China, is offering up the dismantling of USAID — a constant thorn in Beijing’s side — as a peace offering to get the deals and treatment he needs.

Musk also wants to focus all national security cuts on USAID because he makes most of his money from Department of Defense contracts. In the last 16 years, Musk has made $20 billion from defense contracts. He denigrates any investments in non-military tools so that he can protect his subsidies in the military budget, which shockingly is never the target of Musk’s name calling.

If USAID disappears, terrorist groups will get stronger, Russia will grow in influence, pandemic disease will spread faster, and China will gobble up key parts of the global economic infrastructure. That’s an unmitigated disaster for the United States. The only interest that will benefit from this catastrophe is Elon Musk’s bank account. The closure of the agency presents not just a constitutional crisis, but a fundamental corruption.

The problem is that it wasn’t true. Colombia didn’t “back down”. Trump created a fake crisis that would not have existed but for his bungling. Colombia and the U.S. didn’t reach any new agreement. At the end of the day, the status of the U.S.-Colombia agreement was basically the same as it was at the beginning of the day and during the entirety of the Biden Administration - only more expensive.

But Trump played the media like a fiddle, getting glowing headlines trumpeting his victory over Colombian President Petro, insinuating that America had won a new right to send deported Colombian nationals back to their home country. The media believed that it was a real crisis, and played it like Trump had won a concession. But it wasn’t a crisis. And Trump didn’t win a concession. All he did was damage a key bilateral relationship and give a giant gift-wrapped present to China. The incident should serve as proof of how terrible Trump is as a diplomat, and how dangerous it is to have a media that is so overwhelmed by the ferocious pace of news from the White House that it often ends up parroting Trump’s talking points and White House press releases instead of asking hard questions and getting to the truth.

First, let’s give the mainstream media/White House press office version of the story. According to this version, Colombia was being very mean to the United States and denying us the ability to send back to Colombia their residents who were scheduled for deportation. Trump, the savvy statesman, threatened President Petro with massive tariffs on Colombian coffee if Petro didn’t comply. For a few hours, Petro fought back and floated his own retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods, but eventually backed down and agreed to Trump’s demands.

But what really happened? Well, first there was no crisis to be solved. President Biden made an agreement with Colombia back in 2022 for the country to accept three flights a week of deportees. Biden was already regularly sending deportation flights to Colombia, as well as Mexico and other countries in Latin America. Most of the flights were managed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) using chartered aircraft made for civilians. However, just to be as fiscally irresponsible as possible, when Trump came into office he decided to send a group of deportees on a much more expensive military plane to Colombia without clearing the change with the Colombian government. Early on Friday, the White House posted a photo of people in shackles being led onto a military aircraft with the caption “deportation flights have begun.” It was a move that was designed to be provocative. President Petro objected, and instead of working it out diplomatically, Trump put on a show of threatening sanctions and tariffs on all Colombian exports, and Colombia threatened reciprocal tariffs on U.S. goods. By the end of the day, the U.S. and Colombia were back to the same deal that existed during the Biden administration - except dumber, because Trump reserved the right to use military planes for the flights even though they are vastly more expensive. Had Trump done nothing at all, the US would be better off.

But Trump did do something on Sunday - he created a pretend crisis and then pretended to solve the pretend crisis. And it’s pretty amazing - and very, very worrying - that most of the press fell for it, resulting in headlines like the BBC’s “Colombia Yields on Deportation Flights to Avoid a Trade War” and the Associated Press’ “White House Says Colombia Agrees to Take Deported Migrants After Trump Tariff Showdown.”

But the other thing Trump did Sunday was open a major rift between the U.S. and a very important ally. Colombia is a key partner in the work to prevent the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. That work will undoubtedly be impacted by Trump’s tantrum and Americans’ lives will be in jeopardy. We rely on Colombia to take in millions of Venezuelan migrants to stem the flow of those people to the United States. This fake crisis, along with Trump’s separate boneheaded decision to shutter aid programs for Venezuelan migrants in Colombia, will result in more Venezuelans showing up at the U.S. border.

And of course, our adversaries gloat when Trump pushes nations in their direction. On Sunday, in the middle of the Trump manufactured drama, China posted on social media that Chinese-Colombian relations are currently at a 45-year high. China’s claim that they, not the U.S., are the low drama, stable partner for South American nations - many rich in the critical minerals the U.S. economy needs to succeed - just got more potent this weekend.

The more Trump gets away with this fake drama, the more Trump will create. President Petro is a savvy leader who didn’t let Trump’s stupid, self-aggrandizing theatrics spill into conflict. But somewhere else down the line, Trump won’t be quite as lucky. It’s time for all of us - including the media - to understand what is a real crisis and what isn’t. If we don’t learn this early lesson, then someday one of Trump’s fake crises will turn into a deadly real one.

Of course, Musk had many reasons to get into bed with the Trump regime. He’s a billionaire because of government policy - the government contracts for his engines, the government subsidies for his cars, the government’s trade policy that allows him to make half his cars in China without penalty. And he knows that Trump’s administration will give him more billions if he’s nice.

Zuckerberg’s Meta has only slightly fewer reasons to care about being in Trump’s favor. A FTC case is pending in federal court to punish Facebook for many of its anti-competitive practices. Trump could make that suit vanish. And its future ability to lead on artificial intelligence is dependent on whether government regulation favors one player over another.

So Zuckerberg paraded down to Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving to work out a deal with Trump. He arrived back at Meta headquarters with an urgent do-out: his team was to take down Facebook fact-checking processes as soon as possible. Normally changing a major Facebook policy involves a careful internal vetting process, but as a New York Times expose explained, “Mr. Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a closely held six-week sprint, blindsiding even employees on his policy and integrity teams.” Why? Because Trump had given his orders and Zuckerberg, trying to keep up with Musk’s dizzying sycophancy, had to act fast. Trump even admitted that Zuckerberg’s actions were “probably” an attempt to curry favor after previous threats Trump had made against Zuckerberg’s perceived anti-Trump bias.

This isn’t how our government is supposed to work. Until now. What you are watching is the construction of an oligarchy, where a handful of crazy rich, self-interested billionaires work with an elected leader to grab power so that the government works to enrich the small cabal of wealthy insiders and no one else. And what makes this particular oligarchy so worrying is that the companies that are folding into the Trump Administration are the tech and media companies - the very institutions that control the flow of information. They decide what news gets spread and who sees it. If they’re in Trump’s pocket, they’ll make sure nothing that contradicts his narrative sees the light of day.

This is made possible by a confluence of factors. First, the entire American economy, and in particular the American information economy, has become dangerously consolidated. Twitter, Meta, Google, and TikTok own a controlling share of the U.S. news and information ecosystem. Changes they make in what news is covered and what news is boosted can move the minds of tens of millions of citizens. Trump knows that if he can influence the decisions of these four companies - and get them to either parrot his message or suppress criticism of his administration - he can bury his political opposition.

But these companies would not, under normal circumstances, be so willing to change their practices to please an American president. Normally, the rule of law and some semblance of merit determine how a particular company is treated. But not in Trump world. Trump unapologetically trades favors with the private sector, responds to praise not merit, and uses his control over his massive following to crush companies that refuse to bend the knee. Every policy is a transaction.

With the online media market so consolidated, and companies motivated by money and profit instead of truth or the common good, no player can afford to fall behind. Thus, Musk’s fawning obedience to Trump demanded that Zuckerberg and other would-be oligarchs, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s Tim Cook, and others line up to get their piece of the pie. Especially when Bezos’ BlueOrigin is competing with SpaceX for government contracts, Google is awaiting a decision in the DOJ’s case over their monopoly on search, and Apple is hoping to avoid new tariffs on the iPhone. If an oligarchy is forming, and profit is the only thing that matters, no tech billionaire wants to miss out on the chance to get even richer.

I know this all sounds like alarmist hyperbole, but let’s be honest - every democracy and every civilization has an expiration date. And that expiration date, though unknown, always comes sooner when citizens deny that they are living in the final days. Curiously, and concerningly, many in the political mainstream refuse to acknowledge that the MAGA right has adopted a powerful and widespread intellectual argument that American democracy is too weak and irrelevant to last very much further into the twenty-first century. The shaman of this proud, anti-democratic strain inside the new right, Curtis Yarvin, just did a long, glossy coming out interview with the New York Times, titled “Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy is Done”, as if to signal that the underground planning for the death of democracy is now, upon Trump’s second inauguration, going mainstream. J.D. Vance is a fan of Yavin’s work, as are Musk and the billionaire greedy tech-bros who will have massive influence in the second Trump White House.

And the fastest way to destroy a democracy is to turn the media into a mouthpiece for the regime. Sometimes with small but determinative changes in editorial and filtering policy. Sometimes with big, bold moves (witness Trump’s plan, unveiled yesterday, to use taxpayer money to give Trump a 50% controlling stake in TikTok).

I get it: it’s easier to get through every day - even for elected officials - if you just assume the best instead of the worst. If you choose to believe that all this is smoke and not fire. If you just chalk it all up to the usual Trump bluster instead of the actual, planned conversion of American democracy to American oligarchy. But I am of the opinion that the end of the story certainly isn’t written yet. We have the power to put a stop to the burgeoning oligarchy. But only if democracy’s defenders start describing the events we are witnessing accurately and start ringing the alarm bells loudly and urgently.

First, let’s examine why Trump and his henchmen are pushing for a shutdown. In his statement released on Wednesday afternoon, Trump says he won’t support a government funding bill unless it raises the amount of money the government can borrow. Why is this really important to Trump and his rich friends? Because they are planning to pass another massive tax cut for billionaires and corporations and they have no intention of cutting spending to pay for it. So instead, they just want to borrow money - saddling regular Americans with even more debt - in order to increase Ramaswamy’s wealth from $1 billion to $2 billion. Because apparently $1 billion isn’t enough.

In the 6 years after Trump passed his first tax cut for rich guys, the net worth of America’s billionaires went up by…wait for it…$2.2 trillion. TWO POINT TWO TRILLION. It’s hard to even fathom how much money that is. During that same time, average wages for workers barely moved.

But now Trump wants to give more tax cuts to the uber rich, and the only way he can do it is if Congress increases the amount of money he can borrow to finance the tax giveaway.

Second, let’s talk about how a government run by billionaires has no clue about the impact of government policy. If the government shuts down over the holidays, Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy, and the 13 billionaires Trump nominated to his cabinet all get paid. Their kids and grandkids get loads of presents. Maybe a new car or a new vacation house shows up under the tree this year.

You know who goes without pay when the government shuts down? Our soldiers - 1.3 million men and women in uniform who will go without pay even as they continue to protect this country. The people who check your bags at the airport (are you traveling for the holidays?). 19,000 border patrol agents protecting more than 6,000 miles of our border. The people who run the passport office. The janitors who clean federal buildings. And many of those folks live pay period to pay period, so when they miss a single paycheck, the household budget falls to pieces. It’s their kids who won’t get presents under the tree this year.

But Trump’s billionaire advisors don’t know what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck. Trump never has - he’s had a silver spoon in his mouth since birth. And so they just don’t care if our brave soldiers can’t afford to fill their kids’ Christmas stockings this year. That’s just the price that needs to be paid in order to force Congress to raise the debt ceiling so that the billionaires can get another giant tax break.

Trump’s not even sworn in, and yet we are already seeing what a “billionaire first” agenda looks like. A skimpy, stressful Christmas for regular workers while the ruling class jets off to tropical vacations and laughs at how easy it is to rig the rules for themselves.

Merry Christmas!

Here’s a rundown of my fourth and final day on my eighth Walk Across Connecticut:

Stopped in to say hi to the team at the Ledyard Board of Education. One of the biggest topics that people raise with me on my Walk Across Connecticut is making sure our schools have the resources they need.

Later on, I talked to Pete. We spent a while in his front yard talking about the value of compromise and understanding. He’s worried that people don’t believe in the good — only the perfect. As someone who spends a lot of time trying to drive compromise in Washington and believes in making progress, it was a pretty amazing conversation. 

“I tell my grandkids,” he said, “find a way to get along with people. Don’t write them off because they’re different from you.”

I was shadowing Chris’s UPS truck on my walk for about a mile and I finally caught up with him to say hello. He loves working for UPS, in large part because the workers have a union. Good pay, benefits. Even the part time workers - like his son - get health care.

During my walk through Mystic, I learned that two local chefs are finalists for the prestigious James Beard award, celebrating the best chefs in America. I met with Reneé Touponce of The Port of Call. Also nominated is David Standridge of The Shipwright's Daughter.

There are so many great small businesses in downtown Mystic. I stopped into a few of them — Lighthouse Bakery, Bank Square Books, and Engine Room. 

After four days of walking, I finally reached the shoreline at the Mystic Seaport Museum. It’s always great to see so many friends at our end-of-walk celebration. Thanks to everyone who came out!

That’s a wrap on this year’s Walk Across Connecticut! It was an amazing four days walking from Suffield down to the shoreline, and I’m so grateful to everyone who took time out of their day to share their story with me. Until next year!