Articles & Videos

“This is not who we are,” many well-meaning public officials said last week in various statements. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials’ assassination of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti has been a shock to the American system, causing even sleepy Democrats to call for abolishing ICE and firing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.But this shocked response obscures a much more troubling truth: As horrifying as Pretti’s murder was, it was not an anomaly. The killing of mother-of-three Renee Good just 17 days prior, also in the streets of Minneapolis, was not an anomaly. The problem is bigger than Minneapolis, bigger than ICE, and bigger than Trump. And it’s not just a matter of police brutality in general. Violence against protesters is on the rise in the United States and all over the world, reflecting a horrifying escalation of authoritarianism and an elite disregard for basic democratic freedoms. Amnesty International cites “misuse of force” by the state as one of many trends making it harder, around the world, to “stay safe while making your voice heard.” In 2024, an international group of researchers—affiliations included University of California–Berkeley and the European University of Madrid—found a global rise in the use of dangerous weaponry against protesters.In Iran early this month, at least 5,200 people and possibly many more were killed by government forces during widespread protests. Raha Bahreini, an Iran expert for Amnesty International, has called it “a state-orchestrated massacre,” unprecedented even for this repressive regime. (As horrific as this situation is, it is rich for President Trump to threaten the Iranian regime with bombing for killing protesters, while his masked goons kill people on the streets of Minneapolis.) It’s easy to recognize Iran’s government as a totalitarian one, and Trump’s disregard for democratic freedoms is also well known. Trump seems proud of his disregard for such freedoms, threatening protesters with “very heavy force” and consistently labeling them, without evidence, as domestic terrorists. But violent crackdown on protest is not limited to these obvious bad actors.  More than 2,000 climate and environmental protesters have been killed around the world since 2012, University of Bristol researchers found in 2024—including in Atlanta, where Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as “Tortuguita,” was killed by state troopers in 2023, the first time an environmental protester had been killed in the U.S. In 2024, although protests had reached their lowest point since 2020, the rate of police intervention in protests was higher than it had been in years, especially at protests related to Palestine.  I asked Oscar Berglund, one of the Bristol researchers who co-authored the paper on the attacks on environmental protesters, why he thought this was happening. He attributes it to the fact that many of these protests—whether over racism, economic inequality, or climate change—have serious traction. Recent years  have seen “an increase in protest, and some of that protest has shifted public opinion quite dramatically,” he said. The violence is a sign of the protesters’ success—that ruling elites know that the protesters aren’t just a bunch of marginal kooks but may be speaking for, and influencing, millions more. Berglund also had another general observation that seems resonant, whether in Tehran or in Minneapolis. “Repression often increases when efforts to legitimize ‘things as they are’ have been less effective,” he said. “States with decreasing legitimacy will therefore resort to repression.”Sarah McLauglin, a senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, affirmed Berglund’s analysis: “From Tiananmen decades ago to Tehran today,” she said, “ governments have violently cracked down on public protest because they understand that protest has power—perhaps even enough power to unseat public officials.” She thinks protest is, if anything, growing more powerful as a social force because it is so easily disseminated on social media, “where information can travel faster than the state can respond. That’s exactly what happened after the killing of Alex Pretti, where the immediate narrative conveyed by U.S. officials fell apart” because people could see with their own eyes, on their phones, what had really happened. In past eras—putting aside moments of great upheaval, like revolutions or wars—there has often been a sense that protest is futile, performative, a waste of time. Paradoxically, the recent killings and violence against protesters may suggest the opposite: that protest is, in fact, effective. Today, around the world, the threats to protesters are multiplying—but so is the support. Protesters’ concerns are not seen as niche or silly but, rather, are broadly shared. From protests to polls, the ruling class is increasingly confronted by the possibility that there is, in fact, a global consensus against injustice, for democracy, for climate action, and for basic humanity. These movements aren’t going away. That’s encouraging, suggesting that we can someday unseat these bad actors. It’s also terrifying, because as our governments continue to desperately spiral into illegitimacy, they may kill more and more of us. Yet as we’re seeing from Minneapolis to Tehran, an amazing number of people are confronting both these realities right now—and choosing hope.

Last week Donald Trump filed suit against the IRS, demanding $10 billion in compensation for the unauthorized disclosure of his taxes in September 2020. Oftentimes a news story will seem outrageous at first glance but, on closer inspection, will become less outrageous, or perhaps not outrageous at all. On such occasions, it’s the duty of a sober journal of opinion like The New Republic to set the record straight. This is not one such occasion. Rather, this is a story that, the more you dig into the details, the more outrageous it becomes. News coverage has actually failed to capture fully how very stupid this lawsuit is. I have now reviewed the relevant documents and can attest that, even for Trump, this lawsuit is an outlier. It’s batshit crazy.And now, I’ll be happy to take your questions.Has a president of the United States ever before sued the executive branch over which he presides?He has not.Wait, didn’t Trump previously sue the Justice Department over the FBI’s Russiagate investigation and its Mar-a-Lago search for documents that he refused to turn over to the National Archives?Trump wasn’t a sitting president then, and that wasn’t a lawsuit but rather two administrative claims filed with the Justice Department. An administrative claim bypasses the courts to seek settlement under threat of filing a lawsuit. The Russiagate claim was filed in 2023, and the Mar-a-Lago claim was filed in 2024. You can read a copy of the latter here.The administrative claims were unresolved after Trump began his second term, and as recently as October The New York Times reported that they remained so and that Trump was demanding the Justice Department pay him $230 million. In one respect, the administrative claims are even more kleptocratic than the IRS lawsuit: The decision about whether to settle, and for how much, resides entirely with Trump’s own Justice Department.“It looks bad,” Trump admitted in October. “I’m suing [sic] myself, right? So I don’t know. But that was a lawsuit [sic] that was very strong, very powerful.” It’s possible that Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion to make his demand for a $230 million settlement seem reasonable.OK, so Trump just became the first sitting president to sue the executive branch. But he’s suing over something that happened not recently, but years ago. Who was president when Trump’s taxes were disclosed?Donald J. Trump! Trump’s taxes were downloaded and then made public during Trump’s first term. This is a president not only suing his own executive branch, but suing it over something that happened while he was running it. Do we know who stole the tax records?Yes. It was an enterprising IRS contract employee named Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn (whose surname, yes, is also how the Merry Men addressed Robin Hood’s second-in-command). Littlejohn downloaded Trump’s tax information in October 2018 and gave it to The New York Times in May 2019. The Times then used the material in a September 27, 2020, story headlined “Long-Concealed Records Show Trump’s Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance.”  Littlejohn also downloaded tax filings by thousands of rich people and gave those to ProPublica, which, starting in June 2021 (after Trump was president), published a series of stories documenting how the ultrarich avoid paying taxes.Where is Littlejohn today?Between now and 2029, you’ll find him at the Federal Correctional Institution in Marion, Illinois. Although Littlejohn’s removal of the tax filings went undetected for three years, after the Times piece was published the IRS tracked Littlejohn down and prosecuted him for unauthorized disclosure of tax information. Littlejohn entered a guilty plea and is now serving a five-year sentence.Is five years a lot?Sure is. Federal sentencing guidelines recommend 10 months, and if the judge had followed these, Littlejohn would have gotten out last March. But the prosecution asked for five years to make an example of Littlejohn, and the judge (a Biden appointee, incidentally) assented.Do people who cheat on their taxes get five years?Not even close. More than a third who are prosecuted get no prison time at all, and among those who do, the average sentence is 16 months. Of course, every case is different. But in May 2024, Reuven Avi-Yonah of Tax Notes reviewed recent cases of massive tax fraud and couldn’t find anybody sent up the river even for three years. In effect, the federal judiciary would rather you commit tax fraud than that you make public the tax returns of the only president since Richard Nixon who refused to do so.Trump’s lawsuit says it’s the IRS’s fault that Littlejohn downloaded his files. How did Littlejohn do it?He explained all in a video deposition taken in March 2024. This was in a lawsuit that Citadel hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin brought against the IRS because he was mad that details of his tax returns turned up in ProPublica. Although the IRS’s internal computer safeguards prevented anyone from downloading tax files to Dropbox or other large-file storage sites (something that was well known inside the agency), Littlejohn discovered that the safeguards didn’t prevent him from downloading these to a private web page set up for that purpose. Then he transferred the tax files to a flash drive.OK, Trump was president when Littlejohn downloaded his taxes and gave them to The New York Times. Still, how was Trump supposed to know there were vulnerabilities in the IRS’s internal computers?Because while he was president, the IRS inspector general told him so. In support of its argument that the IRS is culpable, the Trump complaint says:“Every year from 2010 through 2020, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (“TIGTA”) has warned the IRS about security deficiencies related to the protection of taxpayers’ confidential tax return information.” “Many of these deficiencies went uncorrected and … allowed Littlejohn to misappropriate the information, upload it to a private website, and then disclose it[.]”But for four of those years Trump was president. If the IRS was negligent in not responding sufficiently to these inspector general warnings, then Trump’s White House was negligent too. As Harry Truman said, the buck stops here. And for crying out loud, these reports were available not just to the Oval Office but to the general public.It’s weird that Trump’s lawyers think mentioning the IRS inspector reports helps Trump’s case when so clearly it does the opposite. Probably this language is included because Griffin’s lawsuit included near-identical language. The Trump lawyer who cribbed this language doesn’t seem to have considered that Trump’s relationship to the IRS is markedly different from Griffin’s. Would you like to hear Citadel’s take on the matter? Well, per a spokesperson, here you go: “Rather than seeking actual damages, Ken’s complaint sought only the minimum $1,000 required by law to proceed with litigation. This was never about money for Ken; what he wanted, and what he received in the settlement, was a public apology acknowledging wrongdoing and a commitment from the IRS to improve its data security protections for all American taxpayers.” Hope that helps.So Griffin’s lawsuit was the dry run for Trump’s. What happened?Griffin filed his lawsuit in 2022 and reached a settlement with the IRS in 2024. In the settlement, Griffin received no money; the IRS apologized and promised certain reforms. I can’t resist voicing my disappointment that the IRS apology didn’t say the following: “We are sorry there was an unauthorized disclosure that showed Ken Griffin paid an average effective income tax rate of 29.2 percent when Griffin was the fourth-highest paid human in the United States.” The apology just said the IRS “failed to prevent Mr. Littlejohn’s criminal conduct,” that it was working hard to prevent such disclosures in the future, et cetera.In his lawsuit, Griffin demanded $1,000 for every unauthorized disclosure of his tax returns, including subsequent disclosures. The court never settled on how much that amounted to. Trump’s demand for $10 billion may have some surface similarities to Griffin’s suit—but again: Griffin didn’t get a dime. You’d think that would discourage Trump. Maybe nobody told him. (Trump deals harshly with subordinates who deliver bad news.)Why did Griffin settle? Because the judge tossed out Griffin’s claim that the IRS violated the 1974 Privacy Act, on the grounds that Griffin (net worth: $51 billion) couldn’t show he suffered pecuniary harm. Trump’s lawsuit similarly claims that the IRS violated the Privacy Act. But since the Times published his tax data, Trump’s net worth has more than tripled to $6.5 billion. That should make it very difficult for Trump to show pecuniary harm. Griffin’s lawsuit never established that Littlejohn was a joint employee of both his contracting firm, Booz Allen, and of the IRS (though the judge declined a request by the IRS that he dismiss the case on grounds that he wasn’t). Trump’s lawsuit also seeks to establish that Littlejohn was a joint employee.“Joint employee.” That terminology sounds familiar. Don’t Republicans typically move heaven and earth to prevent contract employees from being assigned legal status as joint employees, in order to shield big corporations that routinely contract out work, especially low-paid work?Bingo. Trump’s expansive definition of joint employment in his IRS lawsuit flatly contradicts his own administration’s policy, which is to narrow that definition to maximally benefit big business. In this, as in so many other instances, Trump is a total hypocrite.During his first administration, Trump’s Labor Department issued a regulation dramatically limiting the circumstances under which the law would consider a contract employee to be jointly employed by the company (again, typically a large corporation) that hired out the work. Doing so effectively gave big corporations carte blanche to outsource labor violations to smaller and less visible firms. It also freed those big corporations from having to provide legally required benefits like Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. The human cost of this practice is documented extensively in David Weil’s 2014 book, The Fissured Workplace.The Biden administration reversed Trump’s rule, but the Trump administration is expected to reverse Biden’s reversal, restoring a narrow definition of joint employment.  If Trump actually pried $10 billion from the IRS, would it be the biggest civil judgment in history?Just about. The very biggest was the $206 billion tobacco company settlement in 1998. But the plaintiff in that case was not one person but forty state governments.The second biggest judgment was in a lawsuit against a 13-year-old boy who sexually assaulted and then set fire to an 8-year-old boy, who years later died from related causes. In 2011, the jury gave the child’s estate $150 billion, but of course the perpetrator didn’t have and would never have the money to pay even a fraction of that. The case was brought mainly to pressure prosecutors in Montgomery County, Texas, to bring murder charges against the 13-year-old, who was now an adult. The prosecutors did so, and in 2015 the killer was convicted of murder.Trump’s $10 billion, if he got it, would be the third-biggest civil judgment in U.S. history. It would be the the biggest civil judgment ever awarded to a plaintiff in a case where the defendant didn’t kill at least one person.What’s the IRS’s overall budget?The Trump administration has requested $15 billion to fund the IRS this fiscal year. So yes, Trump wants to help himself to two-thirds of the IRS’s annual budget.So, wow, the whole thing is pretty nuts, huh.You can say that again.This article has been updated.

Last week, Senate Democrats made a deal with Senate Republicans to fund the Department of Homeland Security for only two more weeks while they hash out new accountability measures for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, in the wake of Alex Pretti’s shooting and other acts of brutality. It was the least they could do to address Americans’ growing concerns about the way the Trump administration is threatening daily life in Minneapolis and elsewhere, killing citizens, and kidnapping people as young as 2 for deportation based only on their skin color and accents.This DHS funding battle, however, is part of a bigger question Democrats must answer as they fight to regain power. Large sections of the Democratic base are now echoing calls to “abolish ICE.” Some Democratic leaders, like New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, are pushing back against this with much more tepid, unwieldy, and frankly pretty weak ideas to “restrain, reform, and restrict” the agency. Others are pointing out that ICE is just over 20 years old, formed as part of the security theater fever after 9/11, and that the United States had immigration enforcement before it was created. Dismantling an agency that at least eight people have died interacting with this year doesn’t seem that outrageous.Up to now, the Democratic Party has been reluctant to wade into immigration, believing that President Donald Trump and the Republicans have an advantage on the topic. But that’s only partly true if investigated through a very narrow lens in the last presidential election. Most of the public doesn’t support the mass deportations Trump has carried out. There’s room to shape and reform public opinion on immigration and come out ahead, especially if Democrats make the issue part of their overall messaging on how to rebuild the U.S. post Trump.Following Trump’s second inauguration, Republicans quickly lost whatever advantage they had on immigration. Most voters believe Trump’s policies and the way he’s enacted them have gone too far. Even before the election, most voters didn’t like the most extreme things that Trump said. They believed American institutions like Congress and the courts would put the brakes on his administration. They were disappointed.By June, the Democratic research group Way to Win found that voters responded to messages emphasizing how Trump’s actions, lack of due process for immigrants, and the administration’s refusal to be reined in by the courts were a threat to all of us. These can fit into larger points about Trump’s disregard for the rule of law.Before the most recent events in Minneapolis, Democrats thought affordability would be their winning message in the 2026 midterms. But talking about the affordability crisis can include a pro-immigration message too. Americans generally like immigration and think immigrants make the United States a better place. In the run-up to 2024, Republican rhetoric about the border being “out of control” and a surge in migration under President Joe Biden had increased concern about the amount of immigration to the U.S. That concern has since waned. In June, one Gallup poll found a record high of 79 percent of Americans saying immigration is a good thing.Most people can see in their own communities that immigrants strengthen local economies. They start new businesses at higher rates than those born here, and studies have found they don’t pull down wages, as conservatives often claim. In fact, without immigrants in the workforce, we’re likely to see labor shortages and continued inflation. All of that is before the cost of continuing to fund ICE is taken into account. It’s hard to find a more wasteful way to spend government money than sending hastily hired, poorly trained agents into American cities.Trump’s immigration policies and ICE are extremely unpopular, and voters increasingly want someone in power to stand up to them. There’s room for Democrats to change the story on immigration; in fact, continuing to ignore it and act as though economic issues are separate from what’s happening on the ground—many Minneapolis restaurants and small businesses have closed until ICE operations cease—rings false to those of us watching.Over the next two weeks, there’s room for the minority party to be braver than simply requesting restraint from an agency and federal government apparatus that continues to ignore the rules already in place. It could actually shut the government down to force Trump’s hand; it could demand an end to deportations until the Trump administration agrees to abide by the courts; it could demand less funding for ICE and more for the overwhelmed immigration courts that are the actual path to citizenship for people who come here; and, even more importantly, it could demand negotiations on the immigration reforms it’s been trying to make since Barack Obama was in office. Democratic leaders have the upper hand now and could use it to change the policy conversation about what immigration means to Americans. It’s the smart and strategic path. It’s also the least they could do—to partly match the bravery and effort of regular people organizing and putting their bodies on the line in cities around the country.

Posted by Joshua Scher Venezuela’s National Assembly has approved a sweeping overhaul of the country’s hydrocarbon law, dramatically rolling back state control over the oil industry while the Trump administration simultaneously moved to loosen selected sanctions on Caracas. The reform, fast-tracked through the legislature and signed into law by Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, dismantles key […]

Veterans, people aging out of foster care, and parents of teenagers are just a few of the groups who will face dire consequences from work requirements for people receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, that are taking effect for several states across the country on Sunday, February 1.  Expected to impact millions of Americans […]