The final chapters from Who Stole The American Dream? Next weekend, Sunday August 30 at noon ET, 9am PT, we’ll discuss this book, my newest, Who Killed the American Dream. This weekend and next, I’m sharing the final chapter of the book. History teaches us that oligarchies are unstable systems of government that typically either collapse from their own internal rot—as happened here in 1929 when the Republican Great Depression brought down the oligarchs of the Roaring Twenties—or get overthrown by their own people, as happened in the 1860s when the fascist system that had taken over the Old South was destroyed by the Civil War. But when oligarchies don’t collapse or get overthrown, they morph into tyranny, and usually that happens within a single generation.

What began in the shadows with Nixon and Reagan is now happening openly as Trump targets the machinery of the 2026 election. Trump and his Republican partners in the destruction of American democracy really don’t want us to vote this fall or in 2028. And there’s a good reason for it, at least in their minds. Joyce Vance just pointed out that Howard Lutnick, Trump’s morbidly rich crony Commerce Secretary, claimed this week that they’d found over 24,000 noncitizens who’d illegally voted in the 2020 election. It’s a lie, of course, and a pretty naked one at that, but this will be the foundation for Republicans establishing even more draconian rules to prevent married women, racial minorities, city dwellers, and low-income people from voting this fall and in 2028.

The insults, the threats, the humiliation of women, and the obsession with male dominance are no longer fringe behavior in the GOP… Yesterday, the guy Donald Trump had earlier endorsed for the House of Representatives who’d been accused of sexual crimes lost his Republican primary election. But the day before was even worse. Monday was a rough day for Trump’s ongoing lifelong war against women who dare stand up to him. In the morning, the Supreme Court told him for the second time to take a hike on his appeal of a jury’s finding that he’d raped E. Jean Carroll and had to pay her a bit over $5 million. In the afternoon, he reprised his disgusting and condescending slams on women, this time against CNN’s Kristen Holmes, calling her a “fake reporter,” saying she was “loud” and “boisterous” when she dared ask him why he’d ordered the military to scale back our exercises with our longtime ally South Korea in deference to the tender feelings of his dear friend Dictator Kim Jong Un. And then, amazingly, it got even uglier when his staff followed up and went after Holmes’ children.

There’s a reason everything is getting so expensive and inflation seems intractable, and it goes way beyond just Trump’s stupid war-of-choice in Iran. It explains why the morbidly rich keep getting richer while the rest of America struggles, and why people are paying absurd interest rates on everything from credit cards to home mortgages to car loans, and it all rolls back to a wild conspiracy Republicans hatched in the late 1970s and Reagan put into place in 1981. It starts with — thanks to three mind-bogglingly corrupt and illegitimate Republican presidents (Reagan, W. Bush, and Trump) — our national debt rolling past $40 trillion in the next few days, probably before Labor Day. That’s more than our entire nation’s total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the sum of all goods and services produced in the last year, which came in just a whisker over $32 trillion. And we’re paying over a trillion dollars a year on that debt that was intentionally run up by those 3 Republican presidents and their buddies in Congress, which is a large part of why we’re the only developed country in the world where families can go bankrupt because somebody got sick and kids graduate from college with debt that will take them decades (if ever) to pay off.