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.

The permanent fence around Lafayette Square isn't just about security. It's the latest warning that oligarchy is preparing to defend itself from democracy… Friday afternoon the Trump administration released a formal proposal to ring Lafayette Square with a permanent fence up to ten feet tall and to install gates across Pennsylvania Avenue at 15th and 17th Streets, all of it designed so officials can seal off America’s most famous protest ground within minutes. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton had already introduced legislation to stop Trump, warning that we shouldn’t leave “citizens peering at their democracy from behind permanent fences.”

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — The Trump DOJ has decided that monopolies are people too, and they deserve a break — Donald Trump promised to cut your electric bill in half. Instead he’s spending your tax dollars to guarantee it goes up — In the middle of the worst housing-affordability crisis in a generation, Trump refused to sign the biggest housing bill in a generation, all to throw a childish tantrum. — With one more purge, Trump moved to seize the machinery that referees American elections. — ICE thugs went looking for one man in Houston, found someone who sorta resembled him, and killed him instead. — Vladimir Putin assumed Siberia was too far away to feel his war. Ukraine just corrected him. — While the administration burns coal and blesses monopolies, an entire species is quietly starving to death off our coast.

They don't agree on politics. They do agree that the American Dream is slipping away, and that could change everything… Democratic primary elections, in particular, are showing us America is both in the midst of a deep crisis and is on the verge of what could be transformational, positive, life-altering political and economic change comparable to FDR’s New Deal. It became obvious, really, in the first minute of New Year’s Day this year, when two things happened at once vividly showing us all the contrast and the crises around where America stands right now. In a long-abandoned subway station deep under lower Manhattan, progressive Democrat Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City, largely on the simple promise that New York could once again become “a city we can afford.” And at that very same midnight — because Republicans refused to extend them — the enhanced Obamacare subsidies expired for more than twenty million Americans, jacking their health insurance prices overnight into stratospheric amounts that are now pushing families to skip pills, skip meals, and skip the doctor entirely.