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Trump Is Shocking But Not New

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Ted Rall
The philosopher Nigel Warburton shrugged: “Users of slippery slope arguments should take skiing lessons—you really can choose to stop.” But slippery slopes are a thing precisely because people often choose to keep cruising along until they smash into Sonny Bono’s tree. Critics from both parties describe Donald Trump’s behavior and policies as unprecedented. This presidency, however, did not emerge from a vacuum. Everything Trump does builds on presidential politics of the not-so-recent past—mostly, but not always, Republican. Trump has shocked free speech advocates and civil libertarians by ordering his masked ICE goons to abduct college students off city streets for participating in campus protests criticizing Israel for carpet-bombing Gaza. (An aside: what will he say when someone avails themselves of their Second Amendment rights rather than allow themselves to be chucked into an unmarked van by random strangers?) Government oppression of dissidents in America has a rich and foul history. During the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, which included many college…
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50 Years After the Fall of Saigon, Let’s Accept Defeat

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Ted Rall

Fifty years after Saigon’s fall, Ted Rall reflects on America’s Vietnam War defeat, urging acceptance of self-determination and an end to costly imperialism. This poignant piece, published April 30, 2025, calls for investing in domestic needs over foreign wars, echoing themes from Rall’s What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.

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Detonating Democracy: The Threat of Obsolete Laws

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Ted Rall

In “Detonating Democracy: The Threat of Obsolete Laws,” Ted Rall reveals how outdated U.S. laws, like the Alien Enemies Act, enable government overreach, threatening civil liberties. He calls for systemic reform to modernize or repeal these legal “landmines” before they further erode democracy.

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ChatGPT Is Disappearing Its Enemies

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Ted Rall
People worry about generative artificial intelligence. Some are afraid it will put them out of work. Others think AI could become too autonomous, like the drones programmed to select their own targets. It will almost certainly accelerate the spread and power of government surveillance. Deep fakes are already being used in efforts to impact public opinion in politics. Add another reason to keep awake at night: AI could “unperson” you. Under Stalin the Soviet Union disappeared not only anti-government dissidents but evidence that they had ever existed, famously airbrushing those who had fallen out of favor out of official photos. Retro-engineering history was the inspiration for Orwell’s main character in 1984, who toils at a government ministry in charge of rewriting the past. Eliminating an enemy of the state is one thing; ensuring that their ideas can never inspire anyone in the future by erasing them from history is especially sinister. The Internet has replaced print newspapers as the first…
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Surprise Casualties in the War of Words Over anti-Semitism

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Ted Rall
Is anti-Zionism anti-Semitism? Before Hamas attacked Israel, American voters had not arrived at a consensus. They hadn’t thought much about it. Asked whether the two terms were synonymous, 62% of respondents to a Brookings Institution poll taken seven months earlier said they didn’t know. 15% replied yes and 21% said no. For the time being, that argument is over. Supporters of Israel won. The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution that “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” A task force created to deal with anti-Gaza War protests at Columbia University, a hotbed of campus activism a year ago, has defined anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. The policy change was announced in an Israeli newspaper. NYU and Harvard followed suit. If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you redefine criticism of the State of Israel and/or Zionism as anti-Semitism, it turns college campuses into hotbeds of anti-Semitic bigotry. “Since the terrorist attack…anti-Semitic incidents against Jewish students…
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The Era of the Wuss

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Ted Rall

“Donald Trump’s presidency, not yet ten weeks old, has already coerced powerful institutions like Columbia University into abandoning their values. From canceling $400 million in research grants to forcing out professors and banning student groups, Trump’s threats reveal an authoritarian style that stifles freedom, echoing McCarthyism—but with far less resistance.”

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We Are the Fourth Branch of Government

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Ted Rall
In high school, when we studied the separation of powers, I asked my civics teacher: “What happens if the executive branch ignores the judiciary?” He didn’t have much of an answer. It has happened before. One famous case was President Andrew Jackson’s refusal to enforce a Supreme Court ruling overturning Georgia’s seizure of Cherokee lands. “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it,” a defiant Jackson supposedly said. Georgia expelled the Cherokees in an act of ethnic cleansing known as the Trail of Tears. Lincoln shrugged off a federal judge’s habeas corpus order to release a Confederate sympathizer. The administration of George W. Bush defied the Supreme Court’s ruling in Rasul v. Bush (2004), ordering Guantánamo prisoners be given access to U.S. courts for habeas petitions. Still, presidents usually respect the courts. The Constitution’s checks and balances have mostly held up over 236 years. But there’s another factor—one that political scientists and teachers like mine…
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The Russians Are Coming? Not Really.

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Ted Rall
            Trump’s interest in rapprochement with Russia and his annoyance with Ukraine, embodied by last week’s Oval Office shouting match, has corporate pundits and politicians freaking out. Trump’s former national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, said Trump’s dressing down of Volodymyr Zelensky made him “ashamed for my nation”—something he’s never said about Guantánamo or torture or invading Iraq or even racism. Whenever U.S. support for Ukraine gets questioned, count on militaristic whores to drag out cut-and-paste fearmongering from the Cold War era.             Putin aims to “absorb Ukraine, all of it, and likely the other former states of the Soviet Union, too,” the editorial board of Canada’s Globe and Mail claimed in 2022.             “Putin’s Ukraine invasion is the first time in 80 years that a great power has moved to conquer a sovereign nation,” Mitt Romney wrote in 2022. Um—Afghanistan? Iraq? Panama? “It echoes Hitler’s absorption of Czechoslovakia and his lust for Poland. But even more, it reflects Putin’s drive…
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Trump Grabs at a Presidency of Intentionality

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Ted Rall
          There are two kinds of leaders: managers and revolutionists. Most American presidents are managers. Managers have small ambitions, often so small as to be immeasurable. They may or not think that the organization that they’re taking over requires a few nips or tucks, but they believe that the fundamentals are sound. The main ambition of these incrementalists is to attain their position. The moment their buttocks sink into the big chair behind the big desk, they have fulfilled their biggest goal. It is easy to identify a managerial president during a time of crisis. No matter how bad things get and how angry voters become, managers are loathe to change much. They govern as though continuity were a given. Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, both consummate technocrats, assumed the nation’s highest office during periods of economic upheaval. Yet they did not follow the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a revolutionist, by introducing major plans or anti-poverty bills to try…
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