The national debt isn't the cause of our problems: it's the receipt. It's the paper trail of the largest upward transfer of wealth in 250 years of American history… Tonight is the State of the Union speech. If it follows the routine of previous GOP presidencies, Trump will use our national debt as an excuse to call for more tax breaks for billionaires along with drastic cuts to social spending, just like Reagan, Bush, and Bush did. "The national debt is the United States' next great war," Jodey Arrington, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, thundered this month about our $38 trillion national debt and $1 trillion annual interest payments on that debt. If we're going to use his war analogy to describe this very real crisis, the first shots were fired in 1981, when Republicans' so-called supply-side tax cuts began a forty-five-year upward transfer of over $50 trillion in wealth that made billionaires fabulously rich while it hollowed out our nation's Treasury. They stole $38 trillion from our government, and another $12 trillion (at least) from working class families via wage freezes and the destruction of unions.

"The social compact would dissolve, and justice be extirpated from the earth, or have only a casual existence, were we callous to the touches of affection." —Thomas Paine In January, as another brutal Maine winter gripped the Northeast, Dwayne LaBrecque faced an impossible choice. The diabetic father of five, who’d lost several toes and part of his foot to infection, stared at his most recent heating bill with a growing dread. After losing his job as a shipping manager, Dwayne’s income had collapsed. For years, he’d relied on LIHEAP—the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program created by Congress in 1981—to keep his family warm through Maine’s harsh winters. But soon after his inauguration, Trump and congressional Republicans had put LIHEAP on the chopping block.

The coverup is widening, the documents are missing, and history suggests the collapse comes faster than anyone expects… We've only had one genuinely failed presidency in the modern era: Richard Nixon's. I believe we're on the verge of the second, and for very similar reasons. If it plays out the way I expect, the consequences could be world-changing, and will certainly alter how our politics work for decades to come. The tipping point began in a big way when Attorney General Pam Bondi went before Congress to defend Trump. When asked how many of Epstein's co-conspirators she'd indicted, she refused to answer and instead completely lost it, going off on a bizarre rant.

From Hitler to Putin to Orbán and Trump, the first step is always the same: act illegally, dare anyone to stop you, and behave like losing in court is only a delay… Donald Trump's Crusade against Kilmar Abrego Garcia is "on life support" as it may finally be dismissed this week or next by District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Tennessee. But will that be the end of this father's and husband's ordeal? ... Today we look at how a country finally, fully crosses from being a self-correcting democracy into a rigid tyranny like those two countries, and how average people like us can identify that moment in time to do something about it before it is utterly too late.