By Robert Reich

Friends,

I’m sitting in the United Airlines terminal at the San Francisco airport. The plane on which I was scheduled to travel to Newark, New Jersey, has already been delayed three times. It was scheduled to depart at 1 pm. It’s now departing at 4:40 pm.

They’re blaming strong winds in the Northeast. But another United flight scheduled to depart at 2:30 pm just took off on time. I asked the service …

By Robert Reich

Friends,

A groundswell of rage against the establishment has been growing in America for decades.

It became a gale-force wind after the Wall Street financial crisis of 2008, when banks that gambled with other people’s money had to be bailed out by taxpayers but millions of average Americans lost their savings, jobs, and homes.

It has been fomented by record levels of inequality. CEO pay has soared to 320 times that of …

BY Sarah Kendzior

My parents saw Elvis Presley live in 1976, one year before he died, and somehow didn’t tell me until last week. They had near front-row seats and my mom could see Elvis up close, stuffed into a white suit, gasping his way through the hits. He was sick and sweaty and slurring, suffering on the stage.

It was clear he wasn’t well. But they never thought that in a year he’d be …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

My mind is awash in memories these days … so much to reflect on. Jean and I shared everything over the 67 years of our marriage. She was a wonderful woman and partner, and I miss her dearly. Someone asked me the other day if I remembered our first date. Of course, like it was yesterday. The year was 1956. Jean Goebel was working as a secretary at KTRH, …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

Elon Musk has been dubbed Donald Trump’s “First Buddy” — a riff, I assume, on the title First Lady. The moniker seems innocuous, almost cute. It is anything but.

Musk now has unchecked access to Donald Trump. He is a regular fixture at Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago. He has sat in on calls with world leaders and has met with the Republican leadership in Congress. Trump …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

Thank you again for all your heartfelt words and kind thoughts. They are most appreciated during a very difficult time. My life and my mission go on, laser-focused on providing, to the best of my ability, reasoned analysis on an incoming administration that seems hell-bent on self-inflicted wounds.

The latest example: Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, whose colleagues have gone on record detailing his …

DAN RATHER

There is no way to sufficiently express my gratitude to all of you who’ve offered your condolences. You have proven once again that the Steady community is a close one. Your notes of sympathy and support, thousands of them, have buoyed me in this time of great sorrow. Your thoughts mean so much to me, my children, and my grandchildren. Jean was my world for more than 67 years, but we all must …

TEAM STEADY

From Team Steady:

Today is the saddest of days for Dan and the extended Rather family. Jean Rather, Dan’s wife, passed away at their home in Austin, Texas, early this morning. She had been on hospice care for some time, but the news still comes as a shock for those of us who knew and loved her. Please keep the Rathers in your thoughts. Jean lived a full life as an incredible wife, …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

The morning after the election, I was talking with a friend who said something that made me pause: “The American people aren’t buying what the Dems are selling.” At the time I acknowledged the notion but filed it away for closer inspection, once the shock wore off.

Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party were selling hope and freedom, upholding the rule of law, saving …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

As you might imagine, a lot of news comes across my computer screen on any given day — some of it hopeful, some of it distressing. Then you read something that just makes you downright furious. A recent move by the speaker of the House falls into that category.

The issue here is the nomination of former Congressman Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. The House …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

I love a good twist, and this one is a whopper. It is why we are taking a departure from our usual music-focused A Reason to Smile this week.

“The Onion Wins Bid to Buy Infowars, Alex Jones’s Site, Out of Bankruptcy,” is a headline from Thursday’s New York Times. When I saw it, I thought, could this be a joke? Apparently the idea started as one.

As you …

BY DAN RATHER AND TEAM STEADY

Credit: Getty Images

There is no world in which Matt Gaetz should be the top law enforcement officer in the United States. While he does hold a law degree, that’s pretty much the only place his resume matches up with any qualified candidate for attorney general.

This newsletter is for all Americans, but especially those 75 million of you who didn’t vote for Donald Trump because you knew, or …

by George Chidi

The Federal Advisory Committee Act says in plain language that an advisory committee – as Elon Musk proposes the “Department of Government Efficiency” to be – must ensure that its recommendations are not biased by any special interest.

Yet, Musk, the richest man on Earth, has a wider and deeper range of potential conflicts of interest with the federal government than perhaps any person has ever had.

Musk owns, directs or invests …

THE LEFT HOOK with Wajahat Ali

n this week’s episode of Democracy-ish, Danielle Moodie and I diagnose the unfettered greed and voracious capitalism of our broken healthcare industry that profits off our collective sickness and misery. Investigators are still engaging in a nationwide manhunt for the killer who targeted and murdered UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City.

The response to this murder has been both alarming and illuminating, ultimately reflecting the majority’s rage …

Chris McGreal in New York

The killing appeared so well-planned that at first glance many assumed it was a professional hit.

The gunman who shot dead Brian Thompson, head of one of the US’s largest health insurance companies, on a New York street before dawn lay in wait with a weapon fitted with a silencer, kept his cool as his gun jammed and made a nimble escape after ensuring that his victim had been fatally …

Famously, 2024 has been the biggest election year in history, featuring polls in 72 countries affecting 3.7 billion people. In Romania, sadly, it is now destined to be remembered as a year in which democracy was derailed rather than celebrated.

The unprecedented move by the country’s constitutional court last week to annul the results of the first round of the presidential election, amid allegations of Russian interference, is a landmark moment in the increasingly embattled …

By Robert Reich

The media has it all wrong about Trump’s picks for his administration. The conventional view is they’re “Trump loyalists” whom Trump “recruited”.

Rubbish.

First, they’re not loyalists; they’re subservient hacks.

There’s a crucial difference.

All politicians want their underlings to be loyal, but Trump wants them to be more loyal to him than to the nation, and he demands total subservience without regard to right or wrong.

For the FBI, Trump has …

By Stacy Mitchell

The concept of the food desert has been around long enough that it feels almost like a fact of nature. Tens of millions of Americans live in low-income communities with no easy access to fresh groceries, and the general consensus is that these places just don’t have what it takes to attract and sustain a supermarket. They’re either too poor or too sparsely populated to generate sufficient spending on groceries, or they …

By Scott Dworkin

It’s been reported President Biden is considering offering preemptive pardons for different people Trump has targeted. That could include people like Dr. Fauci, Adam Kinzinger, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Liz Cheney, to name a few.

I’m all for it. Because we have a duty to protect everyone who stands up to Donald. Preemptive pardons would put at least some guardrails in place to help shield these patriots from Trump’s promise of …

By Harry Litman

I have been a contributor to the Los Angeles Times op-ed page in some fashion for more than 15 years. For the last three years, I have been the Senior Legal Columnist, writing regular weekly columns about Trump’s legal troubles, the Supreme Court, and a wide range of other topics. The Times also permitted me to cover Trump’s trial in New York and the 2024 Democratic convention.

My editors have been skilled, …

Whether the President to be has a mandate is clear. No. His was among the 3 weakest wins in presidential history. Certainly not a mandate. He barely scraped through.

Whether the president to be has a long rope is clear. YES. HE DOES. And he is using it. You know what they say about ropes. Give him enough and…..

The American public will decide. When they see the result of his programs and how they …

Sarah Kendzior

It’s been a long, lonely year with so many people lying. I keep waiting for nightmares, but my dreams have all gone blank.

I’ve been here before. William Gibson described it in 2003:

“We have no future,” he wrote in his novel Pattern Recognition. “Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did…For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like …

By Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Erica L. Green

During the campaign, President-elect Donald J. Trump swore he had “nothing to do with” a right-wing policy blueprint known as Project 2025 that would overhaul the federal government, even though many of those involved in developing the plans were his allies.

Mr. Trump even described many of the policy goals as “absolutely ridiculous.” And during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, he said he was “not going …

by Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke

Microsoft hired Andrew Harris for his extraordinary skill in keeping hackers out of the nation’s most sensitive computer networks. In 2016, Harris was hard at work on a mystifying incident in which intruders had somehow penetrated a major U.S. tech company.

The breach troubled Harris for two reasons. First, it involved the company’s cloud — a virtual storehouse typically containing an organization’s most sensitive data. Second, the …

By Katie Rogers

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice of Kari Lake to serve as the director of the federally funded broadcaster Voice of America sent a chill through the ranks of the organization, where journalists expressed anxiety about Ms. Lake and what the future could hold.

Several of them said they were concerned about this statement in particular: “Under my leadership, the VOA will excel in its mission: chronicling America’s achievements worldwide,” Ms. Lake wrote …

With so many of our great old papers seemingly purchased or over-influenced by billionaires, the last real source of news is independent journalism, unfettered by corrupt corporate support. As many people around the USA are learning this and reacting, trusted old news papers are going to close down. Large networks, like CNN and MSNBC, with their opinion based news, are suffering great losses in today’s America.

It’s a new day.

Click here to support the …

by Jessica Glenza

Rage, frustration and bitterness – all were on display in social media comments following the fatal shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Brian Thompson.

Even though Thompson was brazenly murdered in midtown Manhattan just before the company’s annual investor conference, leaving behind a widow and two sons, many Americans struggled to find sympathy for a man they viewed as complicit in denying or deferring what they saw as needed care – rage that …

A January 6 pardon means that the president can commit a crime by directing the public to do illegal things, as he did January 6th, and they will not be punished, nor will he.

Other events like that Jan 6 attack on our US Capital are now possible. His loyalists will be free to destroy our US Government property and kill people.

A great many of the president elect’s voting supporters, Americans, did not go …

By Michael Sainato

In his first sit-down television news interview since winning a second presidency in November’s election, Donald Trump renewed promises to pardon his supporters involved in the attack on the US Capitol in early 2021.

He also doubled down on promises of mass deportations and tariffs in the conversation with NBC’s Meet the Press host Kristen Welker – the latter of which he acknowledged could cause Americans to pay more after riding voters’ …

I am reconsidering my support of SPOTIFY.
NY

By Robert Reich

Friends,

When she was a member of Congress, former Representative Liz Cheney took positions on many issues that I abhorred. I suspect you did, too.

But on the transcendent issue of American democracy and Trump’s culpability in trying to destroy it, she’s been a rare voice of clarity and courage — and continues to be.

Yesterday, Cheney called out Trump’s threat, which he made on “Meet the Press,” to imprison her and …

By Moira Donegan

It takes a lot to get a man’s mother to declare him an “abuser of women”. Mothers, as a rule, are not known for their ungenerous assessments of their sons’ behavior. But Penelope Hegseth, the mother of the Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense, once did just that in an email to her son.

“I have no respect for a man that belittles, lies, …

By Oliver Darcy

Bezos Addresses WaPo Backlash: Jeff Bezos really wants those government contracts. The Amazon billionaire appeared for an interview with Andrew Ross SorkinWednesday afternoon at The New York Times Dealbook Summit, saying he is "very optimistic" and "hopeful" for Donald Trump's second presidency. (Maybe Bezos is not yet aware of some of the extremists Trump is trying to stuff his administration with?) Asked by Sorkin about Trump's menacing rhetoric toward the news media, …

By Oliver Darcy

The MAGA-curious owner, who drew controversy when he blocked the newspaper's planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, has waded further into its operations since the November election, according to new information I have learned and public remarks the billionaire made Wednesday during a media appearance with right-wing personality Scott Jennings. The meddling has alarmed staffers, some of whom now harbor concerns that the billionaire presents an active danger to the paper they once …

By Jared Yates Sexton

Though I left academia a couple of years ago to write and organize full-time, I’m still a teacher at heart and always will be. In the classroom I learned that effective education is dependent on scaffolding information, meaning you need to build on ideas and expand them, but also take moments to make sure everyone is on the same page. So, with an influx of new readers who are looking for …

By Roxane Gay

For the past decade, as Donald Trump has risen in political stature, I have waited for that precarious but inevitable moment when his well-documented liabilities would end his political ascendancy, when it would all finally be too much. I waited through scandalous allegations about affairs and payoffs, and misogynistic and violent talk about grabbing women. There were the sexual abuse allegations for which he was found liable in one instance, dozens of …