The lettuce outbreak is just the beginning. This is the story of how, thanks to GOP politicians, corporate cash rewrites America's laws and why ordinary people keep paying the price…. As I write this, federal investigators are chasing the worst cyclospora outbreak in decades, thousands of people across more than thirty states doubled over with what the CDC delicately calls “frequent and sometimes explosive diarrhea,” and they still can’t tell you for certain which farm it came from. Over the weekend, after the $7 billion company’s CEO visited the White House, the FDA walked back a positive test on lettuce from Taylor Farms, the largest salad producer in North America, announcing that its own earlier finding of cyclospora had somehow turned out to be a false positive. That leaves thousands of sickened Americans with no confirmed source at all, which is a peculiar place to land in a country that once prided itself on knowing where its dinner came from. The reason nobody can trace it back isn’t much of a mystery. Back in March of 2025 Trump’s FDA and it’s boss, Bob Kennedy, delayed its new Food Traceability Rule by thirty months, shoving the deadline to track high-risk foods like leafy greens from the field to your plate all the way out to 2028. Six days after that delay went public, Taylor Fresh Foods, the parent company of Taylor Farms, cut a million dollar check to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC, part of the $2.2 million it has steered to Republican committees this cycle.

The colonists who fought the American Revolution and wrote our Constitution knew well who and what were the most dangerous enemies of democracy. It wasn’t just King George III; it was his British East India Company, the most powerful corporation in the world. This is why the Constitution never mentions corporations and why our nation’s Founders would have been horrified by corporate constitutional rights. Instead of a nation ruled by oligarchs and their businesses, the Founders and Framers of the Constitution envisioned a nation of independent citizens, small farmers, entrepreneurs, and journeymen who owned the fruit of their labor and enjoyed a continually improving standard of living. Although Hamilton’s vision was more industrial and Jefferson’s more agrarian, both saw a future for our nation, in their own ways, that we today call the American Dream.

The question is no longer whether Trump will contest defeat this fall. It's whether America's institutions—and its citizens—are prepared to stop him when he does… Last night, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning this fall, he will send in the troops. He’ll point back to last night’s speech and tell the nation: “I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.” He’ll mobilize ICE and the National Guard’s “Rapid Reaction Force” that he’s assembled over the past six months to seize ballot boxes and crush the inevitable “insurrection” — protests in the streets against his seizing ballot boxes — by “left-wing communist radical domestic terrorists.” He’ll declare a state of emergency, invoke his NSPM-7, and blame it on a foreign country and/or “Antifa.” He’ll declare protesting a crime, and tear gas will fill our streets.

Democracy has survived con men before, but only because ordinary Americans refused to become the mark… Tomorrow night at nine o’clock Eastern, Donald Trump will look into a television camera and tell America he’s rescuing democracy. He teased the address to reporters this week, promising “really big news” about “free and fair elections” and adding that “it doesn’t get bigger.” For once, he and I agree. It doesn’t get bigger. An administration official told Reuters that the speech will center on newly declassified intelligence about the 2020 election and what the White House calls voting machine vulnerabilities open to foreign hackers; multiple election experts quoted in that same reporting warn he’s laying the groundwork to contest Republican losses this November.