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The most powerful tool of the American imperium is not, as is generally supposed, its military, but rather its currency. Other nations (China, India) possess more troops, but none possesses more legal tender. There were 57,000,000,000 dollar-denominated bills in circulation last year. By comparison, euro-denominated bills—the world’s second-most-widely circulated currency, minted not by one nation but by 21—numbered 31,000,000,000. The combined monetary value of the 57 billion greenbacks was $2.4 trillion; for the 31 billion euro notes, $1.6 trillion.And that’s just paper money. How much of your net worth resides in your wallet? In our increasingly cashless society, I sometimes go months absentmindedly forgetting to pull dead-tree dollars out of my ATM. Serious money resides in banks and other financial institutions. Economists speak of “reserve currencies,” or currencies held round the world by central banks and other government institutions like our Federal Reserve. These reserves can be paper currency or paper bonds or gold bars, but mostly they’re just blips on a computer screen. Well over half of this money, or about $7 trillion, consists of U.S. dollars. Euros account for less than $3 trillion. Most international trade occurs in dollars, too, not just in the United States but throughout the world, and when foreign corporations hedge against currency fluctuations, they do so overwhelmingly with dollars. In effect, the dollar is not merely American currency; it’s a global currency, too.The dollar has ruled the world for the past 80 years, and in the past 50, it has displaced gold as the anchor of the world economy. As a consequence, Republican presidents have been able to cut taxes on the rich without reducing government spending to any meaningful degree. Economic logic dictates that, if the United States runs up irresponsibly large budget deficits—as of March 31 the deficit exceeds 100 percent of gross domestic product—the result will be cripplingly high interest rates as the bond market becomes glutted with U.S. debt in the form of Treasury bonds. But that hasn’t happened, because the global appetite for Treasurys has been limitless. Debt is America’s leading export.With countries as with people, there’s bound to be some point at which so much debt accrues that the debtor can’t repay. Over the past four decades, deficit hawks have been consistently wrong about where, for the United States, that point lies, and in the view of some modern monetary theorists, no such point exists. A more likely answer is that that point, though more distant than previously we dared believe, will one day be stumbled upon, and when it does the United States will renege on its obligations through either hyperinflation (thereby reducing its creditors’ expected return) or outright default.Foreigners who buy U.S. Treasurys aren’t stupid; they’re well aware of this danger. Yet they continue to buy Treasurys, bolstering what Valéry Giscard ­d’Estaing, when he was France’s minister of finance in the 1960s (later he was president), described resentfully as America’s privilège exorbitant. The U.S. government, Giscard complained, can manage its economy however it wishes and never diminish the dollar’s dominance. In 1971, for instance, President Richard Nixon wished unilaterally to tear up the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement by taking the United States off the gold standard. Treasury Secretary John Connally casually told emissaries from our leading trade partners: “The dollar is our currency, but it’s your problem.” It was our trading partners’ problem because their currencies’ value was now pegged to a dollar that was losing value. But did our trade partners uncouple from the United States? They did not.At the moment, President Donald Trump is doing his inadvertent damnedest to throw America’s exorbitant privilege away. During the brief period of extreme financial turmoil that followed Trump’s announcement of his “Liberation Day” global tariffs in April 2025 (before a market tumble persuaded Trump to delay their implementation to permit negotiations), there was no rush to buy Treasurys; instead, there was a sell-off. That prompted speculation that the dollar would never again be a safe haven. Trump also threatened not-so-obliquely to default on the nation’s debt. Overall, Trump’s presidency has driven the dollar’s value down about 10 percent. But in spite of all this, the dollar retains its dominance in global finance. It’s harder to kill than Rasputin.Why do other countries put up with our dollar? Why do foreign investors enable exorbitant privilege no matter what?The biggest reason the U.S. dollar reigns supreme is liquidity. When you have a lot of money, you’ve got to stash it someplace, and your choice of where will depend a lot on how easily you can extract it when you need to. As the Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff puts it in Our Dollar, Your Problem, “U.S. Treasury debt is very easy to sell quickly and without excessive transaction costs.” It’s easy to extract because there’s so goddamned much of it. With the U.S. national debt totaling about $39 trillion, nobody who sells a lot of Treasurys in a hurry need worry that doing so will drive down the price.Why do other countries put up with our dollar? Why do foreign investors enable exorbitant privilege no matter what?Another reason foreigners put their money in Treasurys is stability. The dollar’s governing structure is more consistent than that of the multilateral euro, and the rule of law is much stronger in the United States than in, for instance, China, whose renminbi might otherwise be an excellent substitute. Granted, the rule of law is taking a heavy beating under Trump, including within the realm of finance. But the world operates under the TACO hypothesis (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) that Trump’s most erratic governing impulses will always be checked by adverse market signals.Another check on Trump has been the independence of the Federal Reserve. The primacy of the dollar makes the Fed chair a sort of central banker to the entire world. This extraordinary power has always created tension between presidents and the Fed. Trump differs in carrying it to an extreme by, for instance, attempting to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook (resisted thus far by the courts) and harassing then–Fed Chair Jerome Powell with the threat of frivolous prosecution (ended by the refusal of Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina to advance Trump’s nomination of Kevin Warsh as Powell’s successor, until the investigation was dropped). Should Trump successfully gain control of a previously independent Fed and set interest rates irresponsibly low even as inflation rises—which is what Trump wants—then Treasurys will get harder to sell.Even if that happens, though, it remains likely that the dollar will maintain its global primacy. A notable test was the Great Inflation of the 1970s. In 1973, Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, imposed an oil embargo against the United States. These countries were already angered by Nixon’s ending the gold standard two years earlier, because it reduced the value of their petrodollars. Now they pushed inflation even higher because they were furious that the United States supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War against Egypt and Syria. The embargo quadrupled the price of oil, creating an enormous windfall for Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis had to figure out where to put it. You can guess the rest. In secret negotiations, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Treasury Secretary William Simon persuaded the Saudis to park it (shh!) in Treasurys sold on uniquely favorable terms—never mind that this benefited the same United States that the Saudis were trying to punish. International skirmishes come and go, but the dollar is forever.The paradoxes multiply. Foreign nations nearly always buy Treasurys in times of international turmoil … even when that turmoil originates in the United States! Remember the 2008 global financial crisis? “The bulk of the misfeasance, nonfeasance, and malfeasance,” the former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporter Paul Blustein explains in King Dollar, “stemmed from problems in the United States,” mainly through reckless securitizing of mortgages on houses that buyers couldn’t afford. “Yet money rushed into the dollar.” Heads we win, tails you lose.For the United States, the dollar isn’t only a tool for borrowing on the cheap; more ominously, it’s what Rogoff calls “a de facto branch of the U.S. armed services.” In recent decades, presidents and the Treasury have gotten bolder about weaponizing the dollar against enemies through the imposition of economic sanctions. If we’ve been slow to notice this, that’s probably because the only high-profile target we’ve seen surrender unequivocally to sanctions is South Africa’s apartheid regime. Cuba, the Soviet Union, Iraq, Russia, and Iran all found ways to defy American sanctions.But shift your eyes from our enemies to our friends, and you’ll see how powerful sanctions can be. The United States uses the threat of secondary sanctions against U.S. allies to compel them to participate in our embargoes. Under Trump, such bullying of America’s friends has been routine. Thus when Trump in 2018 declared, largely out of petty personal animus toward President Barack Obama, that we would withdraw from the multilateral agreement restricting Iran’s nuclear program and reimpose sanctions, the European Union declined to reimpose sanctions alongside us. But because Trump’s secondary sanctions barred U.S. banks from engaging in any transactions with foreign companies that did business with Iran—effectively exiling those companies not only from the United States but also from other countries with which they bought and sold in dollars—foreign firms were forced to comply with the sanctions.In King Dollar, Blustein argues persuasively that the dollar will remain the world’s reserve currency for the foreseeable future. In Our Dollar, Your Problem, Rogoff is less confident about that. “It would be folly,” Rogoff writes, “to ignore the many ‘this time is different’ Pax Dollar assumptions built into today’s markets that may well be upended over the next decade, if not much sooner.” In his preface to the paperback edition of King Dollar, Blustein in effect says he hopes Rogoff is right and that he is wrong, because after observing the first year of Trump’s second presidency, he’s concluded that the dollar is too dangerous a weapon for Trump to possess. “Trump has been using economic coercion for purposes that I consider boneheaded and shameful,” Blustein writes, citing, among other actions, his threats to annex Canada. “With the dollar,” Blu­stein continues, “Trump can wield an even more fearsome bludgeon than the tariffs he has imposed. I wish Trump didn’t have that kind of power, but no good will come of pretending that it isn’t so.”Brendan Greeley, after 20 years at the FT, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Economist, chucked full-time journalism to pursue a doctorate in economic history at Princeton and write a passion-project narrative history of the dollar. Deeply researched and almost giddily contrarian, The Almighty Dollar treats the dollar not as an instrument of imperial might but rather as an itinerant hunk of metal, piece of paper, or blip on a screen with something resembling free will. In Greeley’s conception, the Fed chair and the president don’t control the dollar; the dollar controls them. His book transports the reader out of the distressing present into distant times and places that echo loudly into the present.“The biography of the dollar,” Greeley explains, “is not the biography of America.” The dollar was born 506 years ago in what today is the Czech Republic; it was raised to maturity in what today is Spain; then washed ashore in the American colonies. No nation invented it. It was extracted initially from the Ore Mountains dividing Bohemia and Saxony—two kingdoms within the Holy Roman Empire—by a minor Bohemian nobleman named Stephan Schlick. Schlick was, Greeley writes, “an ambitious huckster.” He had no clear claim to the land and lacked permission from the Bohemian crown to mine it. But there was a lot of silver there, so he took it.Schlick’s purpose was not to create currency. The Holy Roman Empire already had a currency, the silver groschen coin and the gold Rhine florin. Rather, Schlick extracted hunks of silver to ship in ingots to Nuremberg, located outside Bohemia and therefore an illegal destination for Bohemian silver. The ingots were to pay off a debt of 34,000 Rhine florins that Schlick borrowed so he could live beyond his means. Schlick never paid off his loan in full, situating the dollar’s origin story in a familiar mire of insolvency.To pay for his operations, Schlick had to mint coins—crummy little silver pennies mixed with copper for his peasant employees, and big, prettily milled silver coins to pay dividends to his Saxon investors. The big coin, first created in 1520, was named the joachimsthaler after the Bohemian town where it came from, Joachimsthal (“the Valley of Saint Joachim”). The Saxon investors who received joachimsthaler dividends resided in Leipzig, a key center of finance and trade. That enabled the stateless and abundant joachimsthaler to spread far and wide. Within a decade, joachimsthaler were known familiarly as taler, a nickname later corrupted into dollar. “By the middle of the sixteenth century,” writes Greeley, “merchants in Leipzig, Hamburg, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and even Florence and Genoa had come to expect their silver in taler.” In 1566, the Holy Roman Empire, bowing to reality, adopted it as official currency.Meanwhile, Spaniards (specifically Castilians) were finding fantastic quantities of silver in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia. They hired Saxons and Bohemians, by now Europe’s recognized silver experts, to mine it and mill it into a deliberate knockoff of the taler. The result was a real de a ocho (piece of eight), made to look like the taler, that came to be known as the Spanish dólar. Spanish dollars were made in even greater quantities than the joachimsthaler and its various other knockoffs minted throughout Europe. Extracted from the bottomless silver mines of the New World, the dólar eclipsed them all. By 1611, the coin was sufficiently familiar to Elizabethan audiences that William Shakespeare could spin wordplay out of it in The Tempest, with Sebastian speaking of “a dollar” and Gonzalo answering, “Dolour comes to him, indeed; you / have spoken truer than you purposed.”The Spanish dollar rocketed north to the American colonies because the Crown wouldn’t let its American territories mint or print currency. Urging London’s Council of Trade and Plantations to allow the Massachusetts Bay Colony to build a mint, Increase Mather and William Phips—shortly to become president of Harvard and governor of the colony, respectively—said there was “practically only Spanish money in New England.” When the new nation of the United States established a mint in 1792, Congress decreed that the U.S. dollar would be “of the value of the Spanish milled dollar.”“Congress did not create an American dollar,” Greeley argues. “It simply consented to the silver dollar that had already been in place well before the American Revolution.” Greeley scoffs at the notion of “fiat currency,” which says that governments create money. In Greeley’s telling, governments race to keep up with and control money’s creation by private opportunists, plunderers, and freelancers who see a need for money someplace and race to fill it. In the modern era, these players are commercial banks. Greeley recognizes the importance of the Federal Reserve, but he believes it’s the banks that manufacture dollars when they make loans. Greeley’s notion that banks create money is really a semantic difference, because the ability of banks to make loans has a lot to do with reserves supplied by the Fed and financed by loans that the Fed makes to the federal government through the purchase of Treasurys. But banks predate the Fed, which has only been around since 1913.Even after the United States started minting silver dollars, it allowed foreign silver dollars (mostly Spanish and, later, Mexican) to be circulated as legal tender until 1857. The timing was dictated by yet another matter of happenstance outside the government—the 1848 gold strike at Sutter’s Mill. Over the next decade, the California Gold Rush doubled America’s quantity of gold and silver (for which gold could be traded), finally giving the United States enough precious metal to make all of its own dollars.Human agency is not entirely absent from Greeley’s story. Powerful East Coast bankers preferred a single gold standard to the existing silver-and-gold standard because it was less inflationary, and in 1873 Congress obliged by dropping its legal definition of a dollar as a fixed weight of silver, “severing,” Greeley writes, “the last remaining legal link to the joachimsthaler.” A Free Silver movement arose in the West to restore the silver standard and boost farm prices—inflation be damned. That was what the dollar wanted. But the bankers beat back these pitchfork-wielding Populists and proceeded (in the later words of William Jennings Bryan) to crucify the American farmer on a cross of gold. Restrained in the late nineteenth century from proliferating as fast as American farming was growing, the dollar yielded “a long, slow deflation,” with crop prices falling even as well-fed plutocrats ushered in what was, in more senses than one, a Gilded Age.Later, after the onset of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt seized control of the dollar in a more helpful way by extending federal insurance to bank deposits to lure out of hibernation money stashed in coffee cans and under mattresses. Greeley’s discussion of this breakthrough is a bit grudging, because it killed off small-town experiments to revive local commerce by issuing scrip.Still, the dollar does have an uncanny ability to slip the surly bonds of regulation. The foreign dollar, exiled in 1857, staged a comeback a century later with the postwar advent of eurodollars—not physical dollars but tradable ones, manufactured first in London and then elsewhere. This started as a way for large multinational American banks to get around the Fed when it moved to tighten the money supply to curb inflation. That large American bank could simply borrow money denominated in dollars from a British (or other foreign) bank. In effect, Greeley writes, foreign banks “were just doing exactly what banks in America had already been doing for a century and a half.” They were manufacturing dollars. The eurobond followed, wherein London banks issued dollar-denominated bonds. It was, writes Greeley, “a triumph of practice over theory.”If we ask, again, why other countries put up with our dollar, Greeley might answer: because it’s their dollar, too. Foreign countries can make and remake dollars for their own purposes. For example, it was the eurodollar that allowed postwar London to reestablish itself as a global capital market center after the pound had lost its status as a reserve currency. If a foreign bank runs into trouble with its eurodollars, the Fed will often step in with an emergency loan or some other intervention to keep a local dollar problem from going global. America’s exorbitant privilege can sometimes be an exorbitant burden.Greeley’s alternative history can, and probably will, be read as justification for minimal bank regulation in general and for unfettered cryptocurrency in particular. If the dollar has a mind of its own, why can’t bitcoin? But Greeley is no libertarian; he thinks American currency needs to be regulated much more aggressively, because, all the way back to when Stephan Schlick paid his miners in bad pennies, letting the dollar do what it wants usually means that very little money finds its way to those who need it most.The dollar is very difficult to control, but it is not uncontrollable. The United States demonstrates its governability whenever it weaponizes American currency to bully our friends into sanctioning our enemies. A better way to assert mastery over the dollar would be to allocate credit to better reach ordinary Americans. There are ways to achieve this without letting inflation run wild; the dollar is smart, but we humans are smarter. Sadly, the dollar has seldom been used to the betterment of humankind, not because our government lacked the ingenuity, but for the simpler and more depressing reason that it lacked the desire.

Everywhere I look, I see people expressing alarm about the popularity of socialism. It polls in the mid-to-high 30s, and considerably higher among younger people. Older people, who have a living memory of the various socialist regimes that once dotted the planet that at best didn’t deliver prosperity to their people and at worst threw them in jail by the thousands, can’t understand how this can be and seem to want to talk endlessly about it.I, however, marvel at the other consistent result of all these polls, which these people don’t seem nearly as interested in talking about. I refer to the ratings Americans give to capitalism. They’re terrible. A big Gallup poll from last fall is representative. Socialism won the approval of 39 percent, while capitalism’s positive number was 54 percent.That is pathetic—barely half the country! In the country that invented modern capitalism and where it is worshipped by the elite class. And you know what? It’s entirely deserved. In fact, it deserves to be a little worse (as it is among Democrats). The kind of capitalism we’ve been practicing in this country over the last 40-plus years is cruel, corrupt, and a perversion of what a humane capitalism ought to be. The people who are so freaked out about socialism ought to realize that the only way they’re going to arrest its rise is to change capitalism for the better.From the founding of the country until the stock market crash of 1929, the general belief was that government should be small and markets should not be regulated. Some people say it worked pretty well until 1929, but in fact that isn’t true. It worked well enough to perpetuate itself, because if capitalism is anything it’s elastic and dynamic, but that’s about it.First of all, 15 states had slavery up until it was prohibited, along with the obscene concentrations of wealth that came with that evil system. Also, throughout the nineteenth century, there were five major depressions and roughly 15 or 20 recessions. These downturns stemmed from a range of causes, but a common theme through many of them was the speculative bubble; that is to say, conmen trying to make a quick buck and bamboozle investors.After the Great Depression hit, Franklin Roosevelt hired a few thousand cops to police this beat, creating the Securities and Exchange Commission and other entities that kept an eye on Wall Street. Human nature being what it is, this did not create a nirvana, but it improved matters considerably. The New Deal did four other things that reined in capitalism and made it more humane. Roosevelt raised taxes on the rich, which had the dual benefits of bringing in more revenue and just being the right thing to do morally. He vastly increased public investment—Keynesianism—producing for example the water power that still delivers electricity to 10 million homes and businesses down in states where they curse the federal government and where a Democrat couldn’t get elected dogcatcher (its power sources today go beyond water to nuclear and gas). Third, he signed legislation that made it possible for many more workers to join unions, which gave them better wages and more humane working hours and conditions.Fourth—and this is as important as the first three but isn’t mentioned as often—he cracked down on monopoly power. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson created antitrust enforcement, but FDR really amped it up. In addition, his 1944 Economic Bill of Rights contained eight provisions. Most of them were rights he wished to confer upon people simply for being born: an adequate wage, a good education, decent health care. But one right was directed specifically at owners of businesses: “the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.”And what happened as a result of these changes? What the economists Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo called “the Great Compression”: a roughly 30-year period when income gaps decreased as never before in this country or pretty much any other peer nation. In addition to the vast reduction in economic inequality, the economy did great, too, with GDP growth in the 1960s for example averaging around 4.5 percent a year. That was capitalism working at peak.Today? Capitalism is badly broken. At least four big things are wrong. First of all, it’s rapacious and corrupt, yes, but it is also, to use a word cold-blooded economists might actually care about, inefficient. There are young people in rural Appalachia, inner-city Detroit, or on a New Mexico reservation who might have the potential to grow up to cure Alzheimer’s or invent a nifty device or write a great novel. But the way we refuse to educate and invest in these kids, we’ll never know, and they’ll end up being hospital orderlies. Among other things, that’s inefficient. Second, monopoly power today is wildly out of control. And monopoly power, as FDR knew, is a complete bastardization of capitalism. It kills competition. It stifles shared prosperity. It gives rise to cronyism, corruption, and robber barons. These fraud-idiot free marketeers who bomb us with their propaganda and sing the praises of Adam Smith ought to take 10 minutes to go read about what an inveterate foe of monopoly Smith was. The damage done on this point to our country by Milton Friedman and Robert Bork (among others) is enormous, far greater than any socialist could inflict in his wildest dreams.Third, these vast fortunes are just sick. Would you like to venture a guess as to what Elon Musk was worth in 2015? Go ahead. I’ll wait.Ready? It was $13.9 billion. Today, as we all know, he briefly became the world’s first trillionaire, although I guess it depends on the day. That is sick. There is no other word for it. The same thing has happened with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and so many others. Their fortunes have increased tenfold or more in the past decade. They constitute an oligarchy that is gaining more political power every year.Fourth, technology has made it possible for corporations with bad intent to nickel-and-dime people in ways that just weren’t possible until the invention of these algorithms. People are getting hammered by hidden fees, all-but-secret subscription service price increases, and now, even surveillance pricing, which is just a disgusting practice. Brad Lipton of the Roosevelt Institute asks these disturbing and not-so-hypothetical questions:Should people with iPhones pay more than Android users for food delivery? Should delivery drivers earn different amounts for the same job, based on personal information the app has about them? Do we want nurses who staff shifts at hospitals bidding against each other for work, competing over who will accept the least amount of money? Should people who live in certain zip codes be charged more for online test prep? What about single parents?These four factors, among others, have given this country a capitalism today that is—well, to use Bernie Sanders’s favorite word, rigged. Everybody knows it. I believe capitalism has two compelling qualities that make it, to borrow from Churchill, less bad than all the other economic “-isms.” The first is that at its best, it fosters healthy competition. The old Econ 101 textbook thing about the guys starting shoe stores on opposite corners is, or should be, true. The one who offers a better product at a better price will thrive, and consumers will benefit. The other guy needs to go find something else to do, but that’s life, and usually, in a balanced economy that offers ample opportunity, he will.Second, capitalism does encourage innovation. It’s not a coincidence that most of the great inventions and scientific discoveries have happened in capitalist societies. Capitalism gives individuals room to experiment and tinker and grow. Of course, government can play a huge role here, too, with sufficient public investment in medicine, science, and related fields.We do have competition and innovation in the United States today. But we could have a lot more of both if we had the right people in office passing the right laws. What we mostly have is system in which hard-working middle-class people are feeling more and more left behind, and in which young people in particular see very little opportunity and are convinced that Social Security, the crown jewel of United States public policy, won’t exist when they hit 67. And that is why socialism is gaining in popularity.People who think they can stop this socialist renaissance by caviling about the state seizing the means of production or by issuing warnings about our becoming like Bolivia are going to get exactly nowhere. Those kinds of arguments are theoretical and very remote from people’s daily lives.Anyone who’s interested in stopping socialism needs to work on fixing capitalism. If we had a more humane capitalism in which workers made a solid wage; in which basic health care was a right and was free or at least affordable; in which the government was investing in the small towns where opportunity has vanished; in which those kids in Appalachia and Detroit and New Mexico were given the tools they need to fulfill their potential; in which the very rich were appropriately taxed; if we had these things, socialism wouldn’t be so popular. Any foe of socialism who doesn’t see this and isn’t working to change capitalism just isn’t a serious person. If the form of capitalism that we have now in this country continues unchecked and unchanged, socialism’s popularity will rise and rise. In this sense, the uber-capitalists and all those who ignore these deformities are dooming themselves, perpetuating a system that … well, contains the seeds of its own destruction. Didn’t a famous guy once say that?

On April 28, Chairman Verlon Jose of the Tohono O’odham Nation received a message from a representative of the Department of Homeland Security. A contractor working on behalf of DHS to construct an additional border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border had destroyed part of a site sacred to the Tohono O’odham—Las Playas Intaglio, an archeological site featuring art engraved in the earth in the shape of a fish (comparable to the Nazca Lines in Peru). Angered, Jose told media that day: “This was a devastating and entirely avoidable loss. There is nothing more important than our history, which is what makes us who we are as O’odham. This site was also an irreplaceable piece of the United States’ history, one none of us can ever get back.” Now the Tohono O’odham Nation finds its lands at the center of a dispute with the Trump administration over the building of new segments of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. As part of the Trump administration’s attempt to enforce mass deportations, the Department of Homeland Security has hired contractors to construct new additions to the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Using funds earmarked by last summer’s spending bill, DHS has hired several construction companies to build new segments, adding on to the existing wall originally built during the first Trump administration. One of those segments would cut through the Tohono O’odham Reservation. The Tohono O’odham are facing another battle, in addition. Since construction began in April, workers for Sullivan Land Services, a Texas-based construction firm, have desecrated several religious landmarks sacred to the Tohono O’odham—the aforementioned Las Playas Intaglio among them. Other sacred sites, such as Horse Peak, would be affected by the wall construction, as well. In response, the Tohono O’odham Nation is now suing the Trump administration to block future construction of the wall, arguing that it undermines both tribal sovereignty and a long-standing precedent of cooperation between the nation and the federal government. The recent contract to expand the current wall project is another unconstitutional vanity project that comes at the expense of the American people. Like the first border wall, the project is mostly spectacle that won’t actually achieve its ostensible goal of reducing migration. In this case, it is also representative of Trump’s and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s unprecedented challenge to tribal sovereignty, whether through this or the unlawful detention of Native Americans across the country in immigration raids. As Chairman Verlon Jose told The New Republic, “This attempt to unilaterally diminish the nation’s reservation is just the latest example of the federal government violating its own rules regarding sovereign tribes. It should be of grave concern to all 575 federally recognized tribes in the U.S., as the same thing can happen to them.”It also underscores the kickbacks given to Trump donors who receive lucrative contracts for building the border wall. For an administration that has already declared having “the most secure border in American History,” it begs the question: Why build the border wall? Following the contours of the high Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona are the lands of the Tohono O’odham Nation. For thousands of years, the Tohono O’odham have lived in a region that encompasses southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico, occasionally moving during winter and summer seasons throughout the Colorado River region.The Tohono O’odham first came to the attention of the U.S. government when, in 1854, Mexico sold the U.S. a strip of land in northern Sonora, in what became known as the Gadsen Purchase. Suddenly, the new border split the Tohono O’odham Nation into two. President Ulysses S. Grant identified the nation by the old Spanish term, the Papago, which would remain the tribe’s legal name until 1986, when Tohono O’odham members called for the tribe to be recognized by its traditional name. In federal terms, the land of the Tohono O’odham was delineated during the early twentieth century, amid the restructuring of Native lands. On January 14, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson penned an executive order that set aside 2.8 million acres of land from the new state of Arizona for a reservation for the Tohono O’odham. A few years later, Congress enacted legislation affirming Wilson’s executive order. By American legal standards, the Tohono O’odham Nation is transnational, with its lands straddling the U.S.-Mexico border. Today, the Tohono O’odham lands encompass, among Native American tribes, the second-longest territory along a border. On May 27, 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt issued a proclamation stating that space within 60 feet of the U.S.-Mexico border belonged to the federal government, to help monitor the border. When Wilson penned his February 1, 1917, executive order outlining the boundaries of the Tohono O’odham Reservation, there was no mention of the U.S.-Mexico border. It should be noted that, until the late twentieth century, the border was nothing more than a series of stone markers in the high desert. The first time a fence was erected, it was to keep encroaching ranchers from claiming Tohono O’odham land as their own. In 1918, Congress directed the building of a border fence for cattle.This did not mean that the Tohono O’odham Nation neglected the border. Starting in the late 1970s, the Tohono O’odham began working with Border Patrol on monitoring traffic across the dividing line. In the decades since, the Tohono O’odham tribal council has hosted Customs and Border Protection officers and permitted the construction of CBP bases. During the late 1980s, instances of border crossings ranged from 50 to 60 per month.Then came Operation Gatekeeper. Beginning under the Clinton administration in 1994, the Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service (the predecessor to ICE) implemented a strategy of “prevention through deterrence” to reduce the number of immigrants entering via the southern border. Border walls were constructed around metropolitan areas and ports of entry, checkpoints were militarized, and detention centers were expanded. Entry into the U.S. was also more restrictive. One key aspect of this policy was that it forced undocumented migrant movement to dangerous terrain, where migrants could be easily spotted or deterred by the forces of nature. The result was a movement of migrants through the Sonoran Desert, where many perished. In increasing numbers, border crossers entered through Tohono O’odham land. In the decade that followed, thousands of immigrants ventured toward the Tohono O’odham lands to bypass more securitized border entries. On April 27, 2003, The Arizona Republic, in a multipart series on the border, reported that from 2001 to 2002, 85 of 145 immigrant deaths at the border occurred on Tohono O’odham land. Tribal Chairman Edward Manuel approached Congress, requesting additional funding for border protection and social services to address the rise of migration through the reservation. Since 2003, 1,500 migrants have died on Tohono O’odham lands while attempting to cross the border, and the tribal government has spent $6 million of its own funds to process those deaths.The nation also faced additional concerns over the border: the harassment of tribal members by Border Patrol agents. Already, in November 2001, members of the Tohono O’odham Nation raised complaints against Border Patrol agents who targeted nation members for undocumented crossing despite being U.S. citizens. In response, Tohono O’odham members pushed for the recognition of Tohono O’odham membership cards as valid proof of citizenship, which could serve as U.S. passports for crossing the border to visit ancestral lands in Mexico. Congress has not yet recognized Tohono O’odham IDs as such.The federal government did, however, help bolster border security—with the consent of the Tohono O’odham. In 2007, tribal leadership agreed to work with CBP to erect large vehicle barriers along the border. During the first Trump administration, in 2019, tribal members approved of the construction of an Integrated Fixed Tower system, which installed sensors that alerted CBP agents about border activity. Yet the Tohono O’odham protested the Trump administration for attempting to construct a new border wall that cut through Tohono O’odham land. In 2019, the Tohono O’odham Nation submitted an amicus brief in support of the Sierra Club in its lawsuit against the border wall, Trump v. Sierra Club.  In February 2020, CBP contractors destroyed a burial ground at Monument Hill and damaged Quitobaquito Springs during the construction of a border wall. Construction of the wall, however, stopped following the election of Joe Biden in November 2020.During the Biden years—even during periods when thousands of asylum petitioners camped by the U.S.-Mexico border for entry—members of the Tohono O’odham lobbied against future border wall construction, arguing that the current tower system worked effectively and that wall construction would produce more harm than good. In 2024, Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Verlon Jose testified before the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on the status of the border. Jose implored the subcommittee that a wall would do nothing to help with border issues. “As the Nation and others have warned for years, the border wall is particularly ineffective in remote geographic areas like our homelands, where it can easily be circumvented by climbing over, tunneling under, or sawing through it.… CBP data shows that most illegal drugs are smuggled through ports of entry rather than through the borderlands. The data clearly shows that federal funds would be put to much better use supporting tribal and federal law enforcement and border security services and public health services.”Since the return of Donald Trump to the White House, Native Americans have found themselves directly affected by new policies. During the first year of the Trump administration, Native Americans were severely affected by funding cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE terminated leases for at least 12 Indian Health Service facilities that provide medical care on Indian reservations. Among those impacted were the nearby Tucson IHS facility.In the first year of Trump’s second term, the border remained in the background as the Trump administration centered its immigration policy on mass deportation. Many victims of immigration sweeps were Native Americans. In several ICE operations, as reported by El País, members of the Oglala Sioux and the Navajo Nations reported being detained by ICE agents. In April 2025, the Trump administration issued a memorandum excluding federal Indian reservations from any border construction plans. To expedite construction, former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem waived dozens of regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act. That changed in February 2026, when the Trump administration announced new plans to construct a border wall through Tohono O’odham land, reversing its previous memorandum. On April 19, Jose announced that legal protection was needed to stop the construction of the two new border walls. In an interview with the Arizona Daily Star, Jose told reporters, “The wall does not work. There are so many other things we can work on together to address this issue. What happened to the government that’s supposed to be for the people, by the people, when the people have no voice?”On June 16, legal representatives of the Tohono O’odham Nation filed an injunction through the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia to halt anticipated construction of a new border wall. Ten days later, the Trump administration awarded a contract to Sullivan Land Services, or SLSCO, a construction company based in Galveston, Texas, to build the segment of the wall on Tohono O’odham land. The project, which is estimated to cost north of $1 billion, is dubbed the Tucson 5 Project. The design includes two 30-foot, 62-mile walls that run directly through Tohono O’odham land. For the current border wall construction, SLSCO was also awarded contracts to work on the Del Rio 3 Project and the Laredo 2 Project; it previously built several segments for the border wall during the first Trump administration. In 2021, the company was sued when a whistleblower alleged that it overcharged for construction costs and even illegally hired armed Mexican nationals to guard border wall construction sites. Most importantly, the Houston Chronicle’s report detailed how the Sullivan brothers have carved a monopoly out of federal construction projects ranging from disaster relief in Haiti to construction work on the Port of Galveston.Weeks later, on July 7, representatives of the DOJ’s Environmental and Natural Resources division challenged the Tohono O’odham’s injunction in a brief, claiming that allowing the nation to block construction would be a threat to national security.“According to Plaintiff Tohono O’odham Nation, however, Congress silently left a sixty-two mile stretch of the Arizona border unprotected,” wrote DOJ attorney Stacy Stoller. “That stretch, Plaintiff says, shares a border with its reservation (the Tribal Reservation). As Plaintiff tells it, the Secretary may secure that portion of the border only if it [the Nation] agrees. Under this theory Plaintiff wields veto power over any border-barrier project in this area. Plaintiff’s theory would, to say the least, break new legal ground.” Except the challenge does not break new legal ground. If anything, it preserves a status quo between the nation and DHS that has existed for decades. What would be unprecedented, however, is DHS’s move to challenge tribal sovereignty and create the illusion that the nation dictates all border policy. On July 22, attorneys representing the Tohono O’odham and the Department of Justice convened at the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia for a preliminary hearing. Presiding over the case was Judge Richard Leon, who had already made headlines when he blocked the Trump administration’s construction of the new White House ballroom after it demolished the historic East Wing.In the courtroom, attorney Riyaz Kanji, on behalf of the nation, argued that the Trump administration engaged in ultra vires actions—that is, going beyond its legal power—to construct the wall on Tohono O’odham land. Kanji noted that on several occasions, the Tohono O’odham Nation had warned the federal government that building a border wall through the nation’s lands would do nothing to deter migration, that migration levels were at an all-time low, and that such a project would desecrate sacred sites and have environmental impacts. Rather, Kanji noted, the existing border system worked well and border crossings were down dramatically from past years.  Judge Leon questioned Kanji about the nation’s case, citing the government’s argument that President Theodore Roosevelt had initially designated the lands of the border as a public reservation, regardless of tribal jurisdiction. Noting that the 1907 Roosevelt executive order designated all land 60 feet within the border as government property, Leon asked Kanji to explain why the 1907 order did not grant the federal government the power to build the wall. Justice Department attorneys asserted that the border remains U.S. government property, that the project would pose no environmental threat, and that the national security threat of immigration was real. By the end of the hearing, Judge Leon asked both parties to bring in written statements, delaying a final judgment by a few weeks.  For now, the case remains in limbo. Following the hearing, Representative Adelita Grijalva of Arizona’s 7th district, which encompasses the Tohono O’odham lands, released a statement in response. Joining in support of the nation, Grijalva reminded the press that “it is against the law for DHS to unilaterally alter the boundaries of a sovereign Tribal Nation, yet that is exactly what they are trying to do—usurping authority that only Congress has.” Chairman Verlon Jose told me, in response to the trial, “The Nation has worked closely with CBP and other agencies for decades to protect the U.S. homeland. A clear purpose for undertaking these extensive security efforts was to avoid an unnecessary wall that would separate our people, desecrate our sacred sites, and devastate our environment. History and experience with the terrain in this part of the country clearly show that an expensive wall won’t work. That is why we implemented multiple levels of technology and personnel, which has been effective. The administration has repeatedly stated for months that the current border is 100 percent secure. As a result, the only impact of building a wall is to curry political favor, all at great expense to the taxpayers.”In the meantime, the Trump Administration has decided to take advantage of the delayed ruling to act. On Thursday, August 6, DHS stated it would send contractors to the Tohono O’odham Reservation to resume construction on the wall. The following day, the Tohono O’odham Nation announced that any contractor who enters the Nation’s lands to work on the wall without prior authorization would be found illegally trespassing. Other judgments have been granted to the Trump administration to continue wall construction. On August 3, federal Judge Reggie B. Walton allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with the construction of the border wall through the levee system near the town of Presidio, Texas. Environmental groups argued doing so would ruin the structure of a nearby levee, which would lead to flooding. The ruling underscores the legal uncertainty facing border communities regarding their ability to have a voice in the border wall construction. The current attempt to construct two border walls on Tohono O’odham land reeks of the political graft and backroom deals typical of the Trump administration. The outcome of the trial is about more than just another one of the president’s many vanity projects. It could have long-standing consequences for Native American sovereignty. By ignoring these precedents, as outlined by Congress, the current border wall project on Tohono O’odham land would mark an erasure of Native American rights in the U.S. Most of all, it represents another obliteration of checks and balances between the branches of government. By allowing Trump to sidestep its authority, Congress sets another precedent to allow an unchecked executive to dictate federal policy, to the detriment of those who must live in the aftermath.

You’d be forgiven for thinking the saga involving Donald Trump’s vile prosecutions of innocent people over his Reflecting Pool fiasco has finally come to an ignominious end. On Thursday, a judge officially threw out felony charges against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn, who’d been falsely accused by Trump of vandalizing his disastrous renovation of the landmark. Not long after, Hearn projected an air of resolution by going on CNN. Asked if he had any “final message” for the president. Hearn criticized Trump for wrongly accusing him and added: “Leaders don’t do that.”But this is not the final chapter in this story—not by a long shot. And what happens next will help settle whether we are capable of dispensing real justice to all those Trump accomplices who are helping make our slide into authoritarianism possible.Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are set to launch an investigation into the decision to criminally charge Hearn and others over the Reflecting Pool fiasco, I’m told. Although Democrats are in the minority, their probe offers a blueprint for what they’ll pursue with subpoena power if they control the House in six months.This week, Representative Jamie Raskin—the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and potentially its future chair—will formally demand that the Justice and Interior Departments turn over a wealth of documents related to the charging decisions made in this case.“Judiciary Democrats will investigate who lied, who buried the evidence, and who decided to threaten an American citizen with prison simply to protect Trump’s wounded feelings and continuing corruption,” Raskin said in a statement to me. “Participants in this frame-up will be held to account.”At the center of this saga is Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, DC, a longtime Trump confidante. Pirro’s office eagerly indicted an innocent man after the ailing despot in the Oval Office, embarrassed over reports of algae and other problems plaguing his Reflecting Pool renovation, raged that his underlings must produce a scapegoat to spare him humiliation. Pirro did subsequently move to dismiss the case. But there’s a ton we still don’t know about all these corrupt machinations.The more we learn, the worse it will likely get. Hearn, 67, had claimed he’d merely stopped to observe the already-widely-discussed failures at the Reflecting Pool and dipped his hand in the water. Yet despite the plausibility of this account, when Pirro charged him July with felony property destruction (several others received lesser charges), she declared she had “tremendous evidence” of his guilt.But only weeks later, when Pirro moved to drop the case in late July, her office admitted that a wealth of information provided to prosecutors by the Department of the Interior—which oversees management of the Reflecting Pool—showed that the damage had been caused by a “botched installation and not vandalism.”What remains to be answered fully is this: How did Pirro’s office secure the July 2 indictment of Hearn for a felony, and what happened inside the Trump administration leading up to it?Pirro’s office has defended itself by insisting that at the time of this indictment, the Interior Department misled prosecutors by initially failing to provide them info indicating that bad contracting caused the damage. Pirro’s office has also argued that the Interior Department provided limited evidence that Hearn had tampered with the project. But even that evidence looks awfully thin for felony charges.Making the Keystone Kops nature of this even more buffoonish, Pirro has now angrily accused Interior Secretary Doug Burgum of deliberately misleading her office by persuading prosecutors of Hearn’s guilt. But under ethics guidelines, prosecutors aren’t supposed to bring indictments unless they really think the charges are supported. Shouldn’t Pirro have looked more skeptically at this “evidence” before throwing the book at Hearn?Indeed, none of Pirro’s excuses explain why her office brought the indictment when it did. After all, her office hadn’t yet gotten a full accounting from the Interior Department of how the damage had been caused. Heck, the government’s own sole witness testified to the grand jury that this damage was visible before Hearn ever touched it, and it was obvious to the naked eye that something far more than vandalism had marred the project.“The notion that they did not know that there was a botched, rushed renovation of the Reflecting Pool does not hold water,” Norm Eisen, a lawyer for Hearn, told me. Eisen and Hearn’s other lawyers are not letting this drop. For some time now, they’ve been seeking access to full transcripts of the grand jury proceedings—including instructions that prosecutors gave jurors on charging guidelines—to determine whether prosecutors misled them to secure Hearn’s indictment.Eisen confirmed to me that the push for those grand jury materials will now continue, despite Hearn’s exoneration. That’s because the court dismissed the case without prejudice—so prosecutors can theoretically revive the charges later. Getting those materials will hopefully persuade the court to rule that prosecutors cannot bring back this case, Eisen said, because they will “reflect on whether prosecutors were candid with the grand jury.”True, success on that front will be difficult; for many good reasons, defense lawyers rarely are permitted to view grand jury materials. But it’s not unheard of. “Courts are generally very reluctant to grant access to grand jury transcripts,” Daniel R. Alonso, a former prosecutor and law professor at Cornell, told me. But here, Alonso said, the defense has “more than a colorable argument.”Recall that well before the indictment, Trump was already publicly stating as fact that the project had been vandalized. This was surely understood by Pirro and Burgum as a command to make it true that vandalism caused the renovation’s failure. And that provides more grounds for transparency on grand jury materials, as Alonso noted: “If anything, the president’s involvement strengthens the defense’s position.”The stakes here are very high. The Justice Department has become the site of an epic struggle over Trump’s lawless efforts to unleash law enforcement on his critics. Hearteningly, many of these gambits have imploded on contact with facts and law. Many prosecutors have resisted, leading to resignations and firings.Yet the authoritarian abuses continue, relying on underlings who are willing to carry them out—some eagerly, and others no doubt because going along is easier than resisting, as there’s no perceived accountability in the offing. That’s why it’s critical to seek all manner of censure and redress. In the Hearn affair, this will likely include civil lawsuits against the government, asking the courts to impose professional sanctions on key actors, and seeking their disbarment—possibly up to Pirro herself.“You can’t just limit this to the lowest person on the totem pole or the highest,” prominent legal commentator Katie Phang told me. She argued that “each and every lawyer who’s had their fingerprints on this illegal indictment” are complicit in “the collective destruction of the rule of law.” Raskin’s committee, then, will demand documents relating to the decision to prosecute Hearn; inter-agency communications relating to the decision, including with the White House; and evidence presented to the grand jury leading up to Hearn’s indictment.Subpoena power would help fumigate all this. Were there internal objections to this prosecution based on lack of evidence? Were they overridden? What communications about this went on with the White House? Why did Burgum look away as the prosecution proceeded—and why did he continue to allege vandalism—even as his own agency knew what really caused the damage? Democrats should put Pirro and Burgum under oath and take them apart. Impeaching Pirro should be on the table, too.On this affair and so many others, Democrats should proceed in the following spirit: Any and all insiders and whistleblowers who want to come forward can be confident Democrats will have their back. But those who corruptly enable Trump’s vile lawlessness should know that on the other side, accountability is waiting.

The Senate punted a vote on the crypto industry’s top priority to September, which doesn’t bode well for the industry’s legislative agenda or their key alliance with certain moderate Democrats. The post Crypto Democrats Are Ghosting the Industry appeared first on The American Prospect.

Socialism has not been this popular in America in at least a century, but how it’s defined, and who defines it, matters. The post Why Have Less Than One Percent of American Socialists Joined DSA? appeared first on The American Prospect.

In an interview with Punchbowl News, Donald Trump said straight out that his voters just might not show up for GOP candidates this fall. That’s a striking admission of one of the thorniest problems the GOP faces. But it gets worse. Trump also declared that “a lot” of his voters are “not angry at me,” but “are very angry at Republicans.” That will likely be read by his supporters as a declaration that Republicans are failing Trump, and as encouragement to stay home. Meanwhile, polling shows MAGA voters turning against his war in large numbers. And MS NOW interviewed Trump voters and found them deeply disappointed with his second term. In short, MAGA is cracking up. We talked to Shripal Shah, who runs ad expenditures for the Dem-aligned House Majority PAC. We discuss whether Trump voters are gettable by Democrats, whether the current Democratic lead in the generic House matchup is enough, and how big a challenge the tattered Dem brand really poses. Listen to this episode here.