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Being president of the United States is by far the most lucrative business venture of Donald Trump’s checkered business career. The June 30 release of his financial disclosure report makes this official. Trump has turned the American presidency into an extractive industry. In 2025, Trump mined more than $2.2 billion in income from being president, most of it from crypto, from which he extracted $1.4 billion. That’s all the more remarkable when you remember that crypto entered a slump last year and that investors in Trump’s crypto ventures who were not members of the Trump family lost $2.3 billion, according to a June 9 investigation by Tom Bergin of Reuters. It’s almost as if Trump’s ability to draw income from business ventures did not depend on those ventures being successful!A cynic might observe that Trump’s special treatment is no different from that of American chief executives in the private sector who are similarly insulated from failure. But Trump’s payday puts theirs in the shade. The only CEO whose compensation exceeded Trump’s last year was Elon Musk, who (for now) is a category of one. Musk’s $158 billion pay package from Tesla last year was more than 15 times larger than the combined pay packages of the other 391 chief executives surveyed in late June by The Wall Street Journal. If we set Musk aside, the highest-paid chief executive in the Journal’s ranking was Shankh Mitra, chief executive of Welltower, “a real estate investment trust focused on senior housing and healthcare.” Let’s leave for another day the ethics of harvesting a vast personal fortune from the physical and mental decline of one’s fellow human beings. My point here is that Mitra’s obscene pay package last year of $821 million was less than half of Trump’s $2.2 billion. Plus, I bet Mitra had to put in at least some actual work.I observed a year ago that Trump is America’s first rentier president. A rentier is someone who makes his money through the possession of assets rather than the exertion of labor. Rentiers are capitalism’s nepo babies. Prior to Trump, the main rentier occupations were real estate and finance. Trump himself was a classic rentier capitalist, a rich kid who joined the family real estate business, exaggerated his success to a credulous tabloid press, and inherited $413 million from his more successful father. Trump moved the family business from dowdy apartment buildings in Brooklyn and Queens to luxury apartments and hotels in Manhattan and beyond, but many of these went bankrupt. In 2018, The Economist concluded Trump would have made more money had he been a more conventional rentier and invested daddy’s money in index funds. The rentier presidency is a much more lucrative proposition than rentier capitalism, and one with which index funds can’t possibly compete. Crucially, there is no index fund that lets you acquire a stake without investing money or labor. During the 2024 presidential campaign the Trump family acquired a 60 percent stake in World Liberty Financial and was granted 75 percent on net revenues from token sales. (The Trump family stake in the company, the less valuable part of this deal, has since fallen to 38 percent.) Trump did not pay for these privileges, yet last year he earned more than $594 million from them. Neither is there any evidence, according to Reuters’ Bergin, that Trump ever paid for his stakes in the crypto firms ALT5 Sigma, American Bitcoin, or Celebration Coins. This last alone netted Trump more than $636 million last year. The business press often notes these days that Trump has become less a real estate investor than a crypto investor. But to call Trump a crypto investor is a misnomer because investors, um, invest. Trump doesn’t invest. He receives. Nor should we call Trump a media investor, because Trump didn’t pay one cent to acquire his majority stake in Trump Media & Technology Group. This company owns Truth Social, on which Trump posts his late-night rants, and “has engaged,” Michael Hiltzik observed last March in The Los Angeles Times, “in a number of baroque financial transactions.” It works out well for Trump that he didn’t put money into Trump Media & Technology Group because it lost $715 million last year on revenue of $3.7 million. Yet Trump’s stake in this money-losing venture somehow remains, according to his latest filing, worth more than $50 million. Nice work if you can get it.The business model for a rentier presidency might puzzle the untutored, given the extensive losses involved. Why would anyone invest with the president of the United States? Some of them are just suckers, still bedazzled by the phony business-genius image he created during 14 TV seasons of “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice.” But others derive value in other ways. The United Arab Emirates bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial for about $500 million, then dropped another $2 billion on a World Liberty Financial stablecoin, and in return got an export ban lifted on AI computer chips. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao found various ways to boost World Liberty Financial, including giving the firm some software free of charge, and snagged a presidential pardon. Other examples of Trump auctioning off government policy are too numerous to mention, but Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, provided a pretty good overview in a recent floor speech (video and transcript). Often what’s paid to Trump is protection money against some non-specific future harm. That explains ABC’s $16 million settlement of a baseless defamation suit Trump brought against George Stephanopoulos, and CBS’s $16 million settlement of a baseless election-interference suit Trump brought over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris. These were shakedowns for Trump’s presidential library. The ABC and CBS windfalls landed there, according to the financial disclosure, along with a $24.5 million settlement with Meta over Trump’s post-January 6 suspension from Facebook and Instagram, and a $22 million settlement with Google over Trump’s post-January 6 suspension from You Tube. People often speculate that Trump ran for president in 2024 in order to stay out of jail. That’s certainly possible. But I’m more inclined to think he did it to stay out of bankruptcy court. It’s hard to remember, but as recently as March 2024 bankruptcy looked like a real possibility for the ex-president, at least to me. At that time Trump was worth a mere $2.6 billion, according to Forbes, and his net-worth trajectory over the previous decade was downward. What a difference a presidential election makes. By March 2026 Forbes put Trump’s net worth at $6.5 billion. In 2024, according to last year’s financial disclosure, Trump earned more than $622 million. In 2025, according to this year’s financial disclosure, Trump earned more than $2.2 billion. How does a full-time politician increase his wealth by $4 billion over two years and his income by $1.6 billion over one? To ask the question is to answer it. And on top of everything else, he gets free housing.

The roundabout known as Memorial Circle, at the west end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, is among the more forgettable patches of public grass in Washington, D.C.—one that drivers whizz past on their way into Virginia or over the Potomac River toward the Lincoln Memorial. This spring, surveyors staked it out with pink flags, mapping the site of what President Donald Trump has promised “will be the GREATEST and MOST BEAUTIFUL Triumphal Arch, anywhere in the World.” In the Roman era, passing through a free-standing arch—its attic and friezes crowded with reliefs depicting military victories and the spoils of war—meant taking a historical tour of some of the empire’s greatest triumphs. The aim of the so-called Independence Arch is less clear. The 250-foot-tall structure is supposedly intended to honor America’s semiquincentennial, but when asked whom it’s being built for, Trump replied, “Me.” (Some observers have thus taken to calling it the “Arc de Trump.”) Trump, like a Roman emperor, is obsessed with building and renaming things in his honor. The arch has not begun construction, but the same can’t be said for his massive ballroom, for which he leveled the East Wing of the White House with nary an approval. Dulles International Airport may be next. Trump also had his name etched into the Kennedy Center (since removed, to comply with a court order) and the U.S. Institute of Peace (still there). He has plans for a National Garden of American Heroes on the National Mall, and he even wants people to think of him when they peer into the peeling, algae-infested Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.In Trump’s attempt to remake an already great capital, he brings to mind one twentieth-century leader in particular: Benito Mussolini. If, when in Rome, you were to take the subway south from the historic center, past the point where noisy tourists thin out, you would surface in a sea of massive white marble and travertine buildings—a neighborhood almost too geometrically perfect, and eerily out of place in a city known for its narrow streets and warm ochre or burnt orange walls. This is the Esposizione Universale Roma, or EUR: a fascist, megalomaniacal dreamland founded by the Italian dictator in 1937. Mussolini’s construction obsession, like Trump’s, was about etching himself into the historical record. (Il Duce also liked putting his name on things, like the obelisk in Rome’s Foro Italico—or the avenue beyond, which is paved with mosaics spelling out “DVCE” again and again.) The EUR was intended to prove Italy’s might and the success of fascism to the entire world: a sprawling exposition space for the 1942 World’s Fair, where Mussolini would receive representatives from every nation—not unlike Trump’s $600 million ballroom, where visiting heads of state will encounter gilded Corinthian columns and gold-inlaid ceilings. But the most revealing thing about the EUR, and what connects it most directly to Trump, is what Mussolini was trying to replace.The mock-ups of the arch that were approved last month by the Trump-packed Commission of Fine Arts are pure neoclassical pastiche: a heavy attic with the inscription “One Nation Under God,” topped by a winged “Lady Liberty” flanked by two eagles (all three in gold, of course). It recalls a form perfected by Rome’s conquering generals and, much later, borrowed by Napoleon for the 164-foot Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The antecedent is precise, and almost every strongman since has been inspired by the same playbook, knowingly or not. But no one in the modern era understood the power of pulling from ancient architecture more instinctively than Mussolini.“An architecture made of arches and columns is easily understandable by the masses,” explained Paolo Nicoloso, a historian and the author of Mussolini, Architect, which examines the dictator’s role in shaping major construction projects during the latter part of his reign. Nicoloso notes that Mussolini, who ruled from 1922 until his execution in 1945, used architecture to perpetuate two narratives that were crucial to his power: that of Romanità or Romanness, the belonging to a great and civilizationally essential nation; and his own personal legend, as the man delivering or returning greatness to a people that had ostensibly been denied it. “Fascism governed through myths,” he said. “This myth made people believe that, after almost 2,000 years, a new people of world rulers, Mussolini’s Italians, was reborn with the regime” and was “once again set to dominate the world.” At first, in seeking broad consent from the public, Mussolini’s government built schools, nurseries, opera houses, and homes for the disabled, but Nicoloso says Mussolini later pivoted to more “daring” projects, reaching for a more traditionalist style, closer to the classical idiom of Rome, to cement his rule. The EUR was to be the crowning achievement of his architectural projection of power, a celebration of 20 years of fascism and the rebirth of the new Roman Empire.While he involved a coterie of the most brilliant architects of his era, Mussolini was also personally invested in the EUR, conceiving it as a modern reinvention of imperial glory fused with rationalism, Italy’s answer to the international modern movement—a synthesis the regime would name the Stile Littorio. Today, walking down the wide boulevards flanked by leggy Roman pines, the effect is both impressive and jarring: The form is unmistakably ancient and familiar, yet the scale and the cold geometric repetition feel subtly, deliberately alien. It is, in a word, uncanny. The best example and the area’s most remarkable monument is the six-story Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana. Romans call it the Square Colosseum, which tells you most of what you need to know: It’s exactly what you would get if you compressed the most famous round arena on earth into a rectangular box and stood it on one end. What better way to make an impact on the masses than to put your own twist on one of the most striking ancient landmarks in the world?The palace highlights the absurdity of the entire project. Mussolini was ruling from Rome, one of the most beautiful, historically significant cities in the world, and the actual Colosseum was a few miles up the road, not to mention real imperial ruins scattered across the city. And yet, he decided that the city he ruled needed a new center, built by him, that would make everything that came before look like a prelude to his arrival. So he spent a fortune raising a second Rome on the edge of the first—because the past, to be useful, had to be remade as his. Rather than accepting his place in a long line of leaders who had shaped the city before him, Mussolini wanted to eclipse them entirely by moving Rome’s center of gravity away from the legacy of everyone who had come before him and anchor it to himself instead. Trump is doing the exact same in D.C. Where previous presidents understood themselves as stewards of an institution greater than themselves, and were honored to become part of a long line of American presidents, Trump wants to be its culmination—the most important name in a city full of important names. Mussolini, like Trump, had plans to build a triumphal arch of sorts in the EUR, to be called the Arch of the Empire—a towering parabola of steel and aluminum, not unlike the Gateway Arch built in St. Louis in the early 1960s. It never got built, like much of what Mussolini had planned for the EUR: Construction of the district began in 1938 and continued through Italy’s entry into the war in 1940, but fighting drained the regime’s resources and the 1942 World’s Fair was ultimately canceled. Only one building was fully completed before the war: the Palazzo degli Uffici, whose entrance still bears a bas-relief depicting Rome’s history from Romulus and Remus through to Mussolini himself, on horseback, at the bottom. The other half-finished marble palaces were occupied by the Germans after the fascist government fell in 1943, then by the Allies after Germany’s defeat. The postwar Italian government—backed by Washington, which preferred Christian Democrats to antifascist partisans and Communists, who would have likely razed it to the ground—finished the neighborhood in time for the 1960 Olympics, sticking to Mussolini’s original plans. The bones of the quarter remained his, and the idea of EUR endured. The myth of Mussolini the tireless builder, founder of cities, survived the man precisely because his buildings all over the country did. Architecture, the most patient form of propaganda, kept making its case long after the propagandist was gone and his ideology shunned. That, no doubt, is also the 80-year-old Trump’s intention.Nicoloso is careful not to flatten the comparison between Mussolini and Trump. The latter, he emphasized, is volatile in a way Mussolini was not, and it is hard to know whether his plans for the Memorial Circle arch “reflect a coherent plan or merely a whim.” That Trump should reach for classical architecture, “a time-tested, age-old instrument of power in the digital age, is certainly striking,” Nicoloso remarked, but he added: “I doubt that the extraordinary fascination that architecture held for the masses a century ago has the same hold on digital man today.” The ideologues behind Trump’s construction push suffer no such hesitation. Chief among them is Justin Shubow, president of a small Washington nonprofit called the National Civic Art Society, who helped draft Trump’s executive order last August titled “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” a revival of a near-identical order from Trump’s first term, which President Joe Biden scrapped.A critic rather than a practicing architect, Shubow has long argued that the architecture of American democracy was hijacked some 75 years ago by a modernist elite contemptuous of “ordinary people,” and calls brutalism, the raw-concrete style of midcentury government buildings, “aesthetic pollution.” Praising Trump’s order, he wrote that “since the mid-20th century, Modernist mandarins controlling government architecture have been forcing ugly designs upon us.” Shubow’s argument has genuine populist purchase because it is half true. Federal Washington is overwhelmingly neoclassical, and the midcentury turn to modernism was a real break from it. Americans associate government buildings with columns and domes because that is what they mainly were and are today. (And to be fair, Shubow’s view of Washington’s brutalist buildings is widely held among locals.)The Founders saw their fragile new republic as the heir to Athens and republican Rome, and they wanted the buildings to say so. Thomas Jefferson modeled Virginia’s Capitol building on a Roman temple precisely to claim that lineage in stone. The U.S. Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court, and the earlier memorials along the Mall used classicism as an argument that the United States belonged among the self-governing republics of antiquity. “Monuments can do different kinds of work politically under different circumstances,” said Reinhold Martin, a professor of architecture at Columbia University and co-editor of Architecture Against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International. Martin draws a distinction between buildings that mainly do something and buildings that mainly mean something. The dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority, built under the New Deal, are monumental as well as functional, public works for the general welfare. “In the case that we’re faced with now in the United States, we’re dealing mostly with symbols,” he explained. Referring to Trump and his cronies, Martin added, “In the world of architectural language, they are trying to transcend to a previous era and identify with ancient classicism, what they perceive as the heart and soul of the civilization, which is usually some form of mythic civilization.” For Martin, the style is not the scandal so much as the spirit behind it. Gold laid on gold, a ballroom bolted onto the White House where the East Wing once stood, grandeur measured by the ounce, an arch meant to overshadow both the monuments of the National Mall and Arlington National Cemetery. He calls it “a form of barbaric kitsch, because the term that applies most directly to these arches and the ballrooms is a kind of aesthetic barbarism.” Trump’s obsession with building “classical” monuments is, like Mussolini’s was, an overcompensation his country doesn’t need. If he were the ruler of a small, young nation, the impulse to borrow historical grandeur by raising gilded Roman arches would at least partially make sense. But the United States, on the 250th anniversary of its independence, should be secure enough in its identity and culture not to have to ransack the pasts of other countries. France, after all, built the Arc de Triomphe during its imperial era, but it does not build new ones (well, not “classical ones,” anyway). Confident nations let their old monuments stand and build forward. The United States deserves a president with the vision to do that—or, at least, one who is less susceptible to revisionists and more concerned with building a public legacy that’s worth carving into marble.

In spring 1970, Bernardine Dohrn, the 28-year-old leader of the radical leftist group the Weather Underground, declared a “state of war” against America. “Black people have been fighting almost alone for years,” she argued. “We’ve known that our job is to lead white kids into armed revolution.”The declaration kicked off the Weather Underground’s yearslong bombing campaign against institutions of “American injustice,” including the New York Police Department headquarters, the State Department building, and the Pentagon. Young white Weatherwomen would dress as secretaries, plant incendiary devices in bathrooms, set timers, and walk out undetected. Later, someone would call in a warning to evacuate the targeted building before the bombs went off; there were never any fatalities. The goal was to draw attention to the Weather Underground’s causes—fighting for an end to the war in Vietnam and to racism at home.In the 1960s, when Dohrn was studying at the University of Chicago, she had participated in the civil rights and anti-war movements in legal ways. As a law student in 1966, she conducted research on Chicago slumlords for Martin Luther King Jr. and marched with him through all-white neighborhoods to promote integration. She joined Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, in 1967 and traveled the country to provide advice to college students on how they could legally avoid conscription. But after King’s assassination and the My Lai massacre, Dohrn and many other white student activists in the SDS opted for militant action. “There’s no way to be committed to nonviolence in the middle of the most violent society history has ever created!” she told an SDS crowd in 1968. The next year, she split off a faction of the SDS into the Weathermen, committed to solidarity with the Black liberation struggle and with the Vietcong and other guerrillas fighting American imperialism abroad.Dohrn became a counterculture hero and a symbol of anxiety over how America could turn a well-educated, middle-class white girl into a violent revolutionary. In fall 1970, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover called her “The Most Dangerous Woman in America.” She became the fourth woman in history to be placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, replacing Angela Davis. Along with her partner, Bill Ayers, also a member of the Weather Underground, she would spend nearly a decade as a fugitive, frequently changing identities and apartments and low-paying jobs, moving from city to city, all while remaining dedicated to the idea that the only worthwhile response to injustice is militant struggle.But by the end of 1980—five years after the fall of Saigon, and with Ronald Reagan recently elected president—Dohrn felt that “the world had moved on.” It was time for her and Ayers to surface. The federal conspiracy charges against the two had long since been dropped, thanks to the FBI’s use of illegal surveillance tactics in the COINTELPRO program, but Dohrn was still wanted in Illinois on misdemeanor charges stemming from her role in a 1969 SDS uprising in Chicago called “the Days of Rage.” Her lawyer worked out a plea deal for probation, and she and Ayers drove from Harlem to Chicago so she could turn herself in.For Dohrn and Ayers, the strongest motive to leave the fugitive lifestyle behind was the fact that they had two additional passengers in their blue station wagon: their sons Zayd, almost four, and Malik, not yet one. In his new book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground, Zayd Ayers Dohrn, now a playwright and professor at Northwestern University, returns to what he calls “one of the most challenging tasks of my early childhood”—“understanding my mother’s revolutionary commitment.” Through interviews with his parents and their fellow radicals, as well as access to family documents and thousands of pages of newly declassified FBI documents, Dohrn pieces together his parents’ motivations, the extreme personal costs of their actions, and their conflicted loyalties—to the movement on the one hand and to their young family on the other.Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, which takes its title from the 1969 Jefferson Airplane song “We Can Be Together,” represents Dohrn’s second attempt to understand his family’s revolutionary history. In 2022, he released a 10-part podcast series with Crooked Media called Mother Country Radicals, which traces his parents’ radicalization in the 1960s and involvement in the Weather Underground in the 1970s, tells the story of the group’s rise through the counterculture, and explores its collaborations with groups like the Black Panthers and its splinter cell, the Black Liberation Army.The book’s structure highlights the tension between his parents’ dedication to changing the world and their responsibilities toward their family; each section of the book opens with a chapter set during Dohrn’s early childhood. The effect is to highlight the burdens of being raised underground, “living on the margins of society, under assumed names, with no school or regular place to call home, all to fight for ideals that were too abstract for us kids to begin to understand,” as Dohrn puts it. Both he and his brother were born at home and lacked birth certificates. As a toddler, Zayd learned from Ayers how to spot undercover FBI agents and plainclothes cops (“even disguised in long hair and scruffy jeans, undercovers usually wear cheap leather loafers, well-shined”). He recalls that “the closest I ever came to feeling totally safe in my family” was when they were together on the road, in flight.Growing up as the child of two Weather Underground revolutionaries also meant that Dorhn’s childhood education revolved around “radical lesson[s]” about race, class, and gender. Both boys were named for “freedom fighters”—Zayd for Zayd Shakur, a member of the Black Liberation Army killed in a shoot-out with New Jersey state troopers in 1973; Malik to honor the middle names of both Shakur and Malcolm X. “My parents always made it clear, even when my brother and I were still toddlers, that the only acceptable purpose in life, given our gender and skin color … was to find a way to fight for a better world,” he writes. “They showed us, in books and stories and by direct example, that white people in particular had a moral responsibility to be militant comrades in the struggle for Black liberation.”But while Dohrn makes clear his own leftist politics in the book, he didn’t choose to take up his parents’ brand of activism. He has carved out a more solitary path as a writer, observer, questioner. In a chapter about attending a protest against Operation Desert Storm with his parents as a teenager, Dohrn reflects on this split: He has always understood the necessity of mass protest, but he is temperamentally “suspicious” of crowds. He goes on to surmise that this characteristic could be “a reaction against my parents—their willingness to be swept away by a movement, to sacrifice their free will and agency, and even their own morality, in the name of mass solidarity.”Dohrn empathizes with his parents’ political motivations, weighing the personal and moral costs of revolution, while refusing to write off the idealism that powered it. “All of us kids who grew up in the underground know intimately the costs and tragedies of that struggle,” he writes. “But if all we inherit is their failure and tragedy, then we lose the value of their hope and idealism. Their youthful courage and fierce commitment to a cause. And the motive force of their wild and radical imagination.”And though Dohrn doesn’t dwell on recent events, he does note that Americans today are facing “a new era of American authoritarianism and racial reckoning, a new moment of widespread resistance and impetus for radical change”—a time when idealism and principled resistance is indispensable. It’s hard not to think of the nonviolent protesters and legal observers who have been met with harassment, violence, and even lethal force, as they came together to protect their neighbors from Donald Trump’s ICE surges in the last year. At a time when exercising one’s constitutionally protected right to protest can come with mortal danger, how do activists balance what they owe to the world against what they owe their families, especially their children?Dohrn’s parents had always told him a relatively neat story about where they placed the dividing line between activism and raising a family. When he was born, they assured him, they had forgone political violence in order to devote themselves to raising him—even if it didn’t always feel that way.When his parents came out of hiding in 1980, it seemed that they were choosing to give up their roles to dedicate themselves to their sons. As Dohrn writes, that was the narrative he absorbed from family as a child:If my mom and dad had done things in the past that were dangerous and illegal—I knew they had done them for the right reasons. To help people. To make the world a better place. And I trusted that they had stopped taking those terrifying risks after I was born. They had always told me—and I believed, as one of the first tenets of my childhood faith—that my brother and I were their first priority, the center of their hopes and dreams for the future.But the statement Bernardine Dohrn read after surrendering in a Chicago courtroom in 1980 made clear that becoming a mother had not softened her revolutionary ideals. “I regret not at all our efforts to side with the forces of liberation,” she said. “The nature of the system has not changed. Given the system which perpetuates such harsh oppression and suffering, rebellion is inevitable and continuous. And I remain committed to the struggle ahead.”Less than two years later, her family would be left to grapple with her revolutionary commitments when she was locked up in a federal jail in Manhattan, held in contempt of grand jury for refusing to testify against her comrades in the Black Liberation Army, against whom the government was trying to build a racketeering case. She would spend seven months incarcerated. Zayd was five years old when his worst fear as a child—that his mother would be caught and taken away from him—came true. “As the days of our separation stretched into weeks and then months—as it went from sudden rupture to bleak routine—I started to wonder how my mother could continue to choose loyalty to her friends over love for us,” he writes. “I didn’t understand the legal subtleties of her case, but I knew she was making a choice—day after day after day after day—not to come home.”The “myth” Zayd and Malik were raised with was that their parents “gave up on political violence. They stopped bombing buildings and breaking people out of jail…. They told us they had committed themselves to love for us, to a different kind of future.” But while researching Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, Dohrn would learn that his father participated in a jailbreak in 1979, when Bernardine was pregnant with Malik. He would learn that, around that same time, his mother participated in an identity theft scheme to aid white female members of a Weather Underground splinter group, who were in turn offering solidarity to a cell of the Black Liberation Army, itself a splinter group of the Black Panthers.His parents would be forced to confront just how perilous it could be to continue to act as movement soldiers while starting a family when their comrades Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert received lengthy prison sentences for their roles in a 1981 armed robbery with members of the BLA that resulted in the deaths of two police officers and a security guard. Boudin and Gilbert’s son, Chesa, was only 14 months old at the time. Dorhn and Ayers adopted Chesa and raised him alongside Zayd and Malik.Some of the most affecting passages of the book come as Dohrn challenges his father to confront the risks he took even after Zayd’s and Malik’s births. “I am seventy-six years old, and I have felt the most vivid sense of having survived and squeaked through again and again and again,” Ayers said. “The sense Bernardine and I always had was, there but for fortune. Because we were all living on the edge.”In truth, his parents had been thinking for several years about how raising children could fit into their political vision. A Weather Underground communiqué from December 1970 holds hints of the parenting philosophy. Earlier that year, three Weathermen died in an accidental explosion of hundreds of pounds of dynamite in a West Village townhouse—dynamite that the New York cell of the group was planning to use at an officers’ dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey, which could have been deadly not just to members of the military but to civilians, as the Weathermen did not plan to call in a warning. In the aftermath, Bernardine reflected on a new path forward for the underground: “the townhouse forever destroyed our belief that armed struggle is the only real revolutionary struggle.” Instead, the group was thinking seriously “about how hard it will be to fight in Amerika and how long it will take for us to win.” In the meantime, she wrote, she suggested a turn to the personal and domestic:People have been experimenting with everything about their lives, fierce against the ways of the white man…. They’ve moved to the country and found new ways to bring up free wild children. People are forming new families ... they are units of people to trust each other both to live together and to organize and fight together.As Dohrn explains, the idea that “having children was revolutionary” was drawn from the Black liberation movement. His mother would go on to take inspiration from Assata Shakur, a member of the BLA, who in 1974 gave birth to a daughter conceived with a fellow BLA soldier behind bars. Sha­kur later explained how she thought about having a child when she saw the world as a “terrible, terrible place”: “I thought about my mother. My grandmother. My great-great-great-grandmothers. And what they must have thought about as slaves bringing life into this world. And we just decided that we were going to live, you know?”By the time Dohrn was born in 1977, the Weather Underground had dissolved. “Without the moral gravity of opposition to the Vietnam war, and with the cultural zeitgeist shifting against them, the group was isolated and adrift, increasingly vulnerable to the purity tests and infighting that have always afflicted progressive leftist movements,” Dohrn explains. His parents needed to find a new sense of purpose, a new way to make sense of their pasts and to move forward in a future they had not imagined living long enough to see.In his conversations with his parents and through revisiting their letters, statements, and other documents, Dohrn comes to understand that his parents did not see their commitments to the larger world and their commitments to their children as contradictory. “Asked to choose between solidarity and family, revolution and romantic or familial love, my parents and their comrades chose the cause every time,” he writes. “This bothered me for a long time—it still bothers me, as a son and as a father—but I’ve come to think that, in my parents’ minds, the two ideas are inseparable: the fight to build a better world is a manifestation of their hopes for the future; the revolution itself is a birthright to pass on to their children and their children’s children.”This is a complicated legacy, one that can come with devastating consequences, as evidenced by the fates of many from the radical underground of the 1960s and 1970s, who died or were imprisoned and left behind young children. But it opens up an enduring set of questions. What is worth fighting for? And who should be prepared to fight, when they have obligations to care for family? Is fighting for a better world also a fight for one’s children?

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Democratic incumbents trying to run on holding Trump accountable are losing to progressive challengers willing to criticize Israel support.

News that the president made more than $1 billion from cryptocurrency while in office has emboldened Senate Democrats.

In today’s episode, MS NOW’s Steve Benen makes a strong case that Donald Trump has corrupted the process of awarding disaster aid to states. Trump has been rejecting aid requests from blue states at a lopsided rate. But this week, Trump announced that he’s awarding aid to Democratic-run swing states with critical gubernatorial, Senate, and House races. But here’s the key: As Benen details, in these announcements, Trump openly linked the awarding of aid right to his preferred candidates, even suggesting voters should reward them for securing the money. Trump blurted out the scheme, which Benen calls “breathtaking” in its “brazenness.” It all comes as New York Times polls find Democrats highly competitive in six key Senate races that no one expected to be close. Trump’s numbers are abysmal across these battlegrounds, particularly on the economy, even though he won five of them in 2024. Benen explains why Trump’s scheme matters, why the new polling is brutal for him, and why both developments neatly capture this moment. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

In a joke about receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor, Trump pointed out his “two beautiful sons” and quipped “I think I’m going to give one to myself, one to them, and we’ll have a threesome.”