By Jessica Corbett
Oct 26, 2025
Twenty-six days into the shutdown, US Sen. Chris Murphy argued on CNN‘s “State of the Union” Sunday that President Donald Trump “is refusing to negotiate… because he likes the fact that the government is closed, because he thinks he can exercise king-like powers, he can open up the parts of the government that he wants, he can pay the employees who are loyal to him.”
The second-longest government shutdown in US history began early this month because congressional Republicans want to maintain their funding plans, while Democrats want to help the millions of Americans facing healthcare coverage losses and surging insurance premiums by reversing the GOP’s recent Medicaid cuts and extending Affordable Care Act subsidies.
“Let’s be clear. We’re shut down right now because Republicans are refusing to even talk to Democrats about a bipartisan budget bill,” Murphy (D-Conn.) told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “Yes, we have priorities, just like they do. One of our priorities is pretty simple, making sure that premiums don’t go up by 75% on 22 million families this fall.”
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What To Do About 3 Authoritarian Trump Admin Memos? Keep Protesting
By Jason Pramas
Oct 04, 2025
President Donald Trump is obviously unhappy with the resistance from a broad and growing protest movement against much of his administration’s agenda. Which goes at least part of the way toward explaining why he and his allies have just passed an executive order, a national security presidential memo, and an attorney general’s order aimed squarely at suppressing the free speech of a very poorly defined host of millions of people in the United States.
First, on September 22, Trump issued the executive order “DESIGNATING ANTIFA AS A DOMESTIC TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.” According to National Public Radio, while federal law does allow the State Department to designate “foreign terrorist organizations,” no “similar list or process exists for domestic groups.”
The fact that “antifa”—short for anti-fascism—is a political stance against the takeover of government by oligarchs and their servants, not a literal organization, clearly matters not at all to Trump given that he tried and failed to do the same thing in 2020 in the wake of the second wave of Black Lives Matter protests. Nor does the fact that there are anti-fascists across the political spectrum, since conservatives can also be anti-fascist … not just liberals and leftists.
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Trump Is a Fascist, That’s Clear. But What Kind Exactly?
By C.J. Polychroniou, Alexandra Boutri
Sep 29, 2025
With each passing day, the Trump administration becomes more authoritarian, shifting the country from a flawed
Alexandra Boutri: I’d like to start by asking you how worried you are about the collapse of “democracy” in the United States and whether it is worth defending a governing system that has worked almost exclusively for the super-rich and the privileged classes
C. J. Polychroniou: This is a provocative but nonetheless gripping question! My own feeling is that everyone who cares about fundamental personal freedoms, such as freedom of speech, and basic human rights, such as the rights to health, education, a decent standard of living, and a clean environment, should be terribly worried about what is happening in the United States under the current administration. President Donald Trump and his cronies are a real menace to everything that defines a decent society in today’s world. First of all, they want to go back to a time when whiteness was dominant and there was a clear racial hierarchy. They despise racial equality and have nothing but contempt for poor and working-class people. They loathe the idea of an open society and find intolerable constraints on their powers to do as they please. Trump’s priority is concentrating wealth and power for himself and his family. It is a self-serving, special interest presidency unlike anything we have seen in contemporary U.S. politics. George W. Bush’s corrupt presidency, with its long-standing connections to the oil industry, pales in comparison to the way Trump is using the office of the presidency to increase his own personal wealth and that of his family. Donald Trump is the ultimate used car sales conman who will say and do anythig to make an extra buck. For him, democracy and the rule of law are meaningless concepts as evidenced by the way he is systematically targeting universities, courts, the press, and his political opponents. He is astonishingly corrupt, shockingly cruel, and all his political moves are out of the authoritarian playbook. I should add that he is also one of the dumbest presidents, profoundly ignorant of history, geography and scores of other subjects. As so many sources have pointed out, he most likely does have a “lethal aversion to reading.”
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