Opinion

"Trump Is Trying to End Our Democracy": Alarm as President Attacks Elections Ahead of Midterms

Johnson reports alarm from Democratic officials and voting-rights advocates over Trump's election speech, including Sen. Bernie Sanders calling Trump's threat to revoke ABC and NBC's broadcast licenses over their refusal to air the address live "true authoritarian fashion... insane."

Posted on Jul 16, 2026 | Jake Johnson

July 16, 2026

Hours before Trump's primetime address, Sen. Jon Ossoff repeatedly asked Trump's director of national intelligence nominee, Jay Clayton, "Who won the 2020 election?" Clayton refused to answer. Richardson argues Trump needs loyalists to keep that fiction alive to justify rigging future elections, and quotes Ossoff calling the coming speech "a prime-time presidential sour grapes address" pursuing "6-year-old grievances."

Posted on Jul 16, 2026 | Heather Cox Richardson

Trump sends DOJ after journalists for reporting on his corruption

Raw America frames the Justice Department's subpoenas of four New York Times reporters over their Air Force One security reporting as retaliation for journalism that exposed corruption rather than a legitimate leak investigation, part of a pattern following the administration's earlier, later-withdrawn attempts to subpoena reporters at the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

Posted on Jul 15, 2026 | Raw America

Call It What It Is

Two ICE officers killed two men in two vehicle stops six days apart, and neither man was the person agents had come to arrest. Judged by the standard DHS applies to everyone else, that is state terrorism.

Posted on Jul 14, 2026 | The Enemy Within

Trump is America's biggest national security threat

Becker argues Trump has become the country's greatest national security threat in his own right, pointing to the war of choice against Iran that depleted America's weapons stockpile (experts estimate roughly three years to rebuild), and that Congress's most urgent national-security task is removing him from office.

Posted on Jul 13, 2026 | William S. Becker

Stephen Miller is outraged over birthright citizenship. His arguments are nonsense

After the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, Stephen Miller called the ruling "destructive" and warned it would "suicide your civilization," insisting the 14th Amendment's author never meant it to cover "aliens." Sidney Blumenthal takes apart the historical and legal claims behind that outrage.

Posted on Jul 12, 2026 | Sidney Blumenthal

ICE's fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston raises serious questions

Salgado Araujo is now at least the 10th person killed by ICE or CBP since the start of Trump's second term, the officers involved wore no body cameras, and a federal judge in Chicago has already found ICE's "weaponized vehicle" claims so unreliable it's "difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything" the agency says.

Posted on Jul 10, 2026 | MS NOW

Trump's authoritarian project now includes science

The Trump administration's push to fund only research it deems "pro-American," with political loyalists rather than scientists deciding what gets studied, argues Salon, is not just an anti-science policy but evidence that Trumpism has moved past ordinary authoritarianism into an attempt to control what Americans are allowed to know.

Posted on Jul 10, 2026 | Salon

ICE Kills People. Then Investigates the Victims

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo died on a Houston street under a "weaponized vehicle" justification ICE has now used at least 13 times since last summer. ICE says it investigates its own shootings. In practice, federal investigators keep landing on the victim, or someone close to them -- never the officer who fired.

Posted on Jul 9, 2026 | The Enemy Within

The Trump administration is cracking down on dissent. That's chilling.

After Homeland Security Investigations agents tracked Rochester resident David Streever to a New York hotel to warn him over a harshly worded email he'd sent ICE's former director, FIRE president Greg Lukianoff argues the episode is part of a broader pattern of the administration using federal power to punish protected speech.

Posted on Jul 8, 2026 | Greg Lukianoff