It’s easy in hindsight to say that Donald Trump’s ride down the Trump Tower escalator a decade ago changed everything. It’s more accurate and helpful to say that his journey merely heightened and channeled trends that were likely to emerge anyway.
Ten years ago, virtually no one was talking about populism or a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, working-class-based Republican Party. Democrats believed in the Rising American Electorate theory, which held that increased Democratic Party dominance was demographically assured because older, conservative whites were dying off and being replaced by young, Democratic-leaning voters plus people of color. The intra-GOP debate focused on which approach to the future was more compelling: doubling down on fiscal and social conservatism (Senator Ted Cruz was the most visible adherent of this view) or moving to the Left on immigration and same-sex marriage (the infamous RNC 2012 “Autopsy”).
Trump proved all three groups wrong. He ostentatiously ran against both GOP arguments, championing a hard-line immigration policy, attacks on free trade, and a notable unwillingness to compete in the GOP’s quadrennial “who’s the most religious candidate” primary pageant. He then upended the Democrats’ theory by attacking their soft underbelly: their reliance on blue-collar, Northern and Midwestern white votes. He assembled a coalition few had dreamed of, one that sacrificed moderate, college-educated whites for somewhat conservative non-college whites combined with the GOP’s conservative core.
For too long, many conservatives have relied on the Supreme Court to thwart the Left. I cheered over the last few years as President Trump’s appointees shifted the makeup of the Court to the Right, arguably becoming the most conservative Court since before the New Deal. I was thrilled when it handed down 6-3 decisions overturning Roe v. Wade, upholding gun rights, clawing back power from executive agencies, and quashing Biden’s attempts at student loan forgiveness.
The Supreme Court recently handed down two unanimous decisions that were clear conservative victories. The first vindicated the religious (and thus tax-exempt) status of Wisconsin’s Catholic Charities over against scrutiny from the state government. In the second decision, the Court sided witha heterosexual woman in Ohio who sued her state as a result of experiencing reverse discrimination that favored lesbians and gays. And in what is perhaps the biggest conservative win from the Court this term, we witnessed a 6-3 decision upholding Tennessee’s ban on transgender procedures for minors.
HB 2025 doesn’t fix the Oregon Department of Transportation’s financial problem—it makes it even bigger
The bill promises more than it pays for, and will lead ODOT to start projects it can’t afford to finish–without shortchanging road repair, or causing further tax increases.
There is still no accountability at ODOT: It’s simply failed to present accurate data on how it will pay for promised projects. And HB 2025 provides nothing for virtually certain cost overruns on the IBR project
ODOT’s track record of persistent cost overruns, and wildly optimistic schedule, engineering and revenue estimates virtually guarantees an even bigger problem in the years ahead.
Oregon’s Legislature is debating HB 2025, a $14.6 billion tax and fee increase to provide more revenue for transportation. According to Oregon Public Broadcasting:
As it passed out of committee Friday evening, HB 2025 would have enacted the largest tax hike in Oregon history. Via an eventual 15-cent increase to the state’s 40-cent-per-gallon gas tax, a new 2% tax on new car sales, a new 1% tax on many used car sales, increases in titling and registration fees and other changes, the bill is expected to raise $14.6 billion in the next decade.
On this episode of What’s the Big Idea?, former senator Bob Brown joins Paul Barclay to discuss the ‘price of extinction’, how monetising the environment won’t save it, the corporate capture of democracy and the failure of the major parties to truly protect the environment.
This discussion was recorded on 5 February 2025 and things may have changed since the recording.
On this episode of After America, Dr Emma Shortis and Angus Blackman discuss Trump’s decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear sites, the comparisons with America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, and what this decision could mean for Australia.
This discussion was recorded on Monday 23 June 2025 and things may have changed since recording.
You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.
Join Dr Emma Shortis and Dr Richard Denniss in conversation about After America: Australia and the new world order at the University of Melbourne at 6pm AEST, Wednesday 16 July.
Our independence is our strength – and only you can make that possible. By donating to the Australia Institute’s End of Financial Year appeal today, you’ll help fund the research changing Australia for the better.
Host: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis
Host: Angus Blackman, Producer, the Australia Institute // @AngusRB
This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor
As Taylor Swift said, if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
Last week the Trump administration sent Australia’s national security establishment into a spin when it announced that it was reviewing the Aukus submarine pact to ensure that it fits Trump’s “America First” agenda.
But even before that announcement, Aukus was on shaky ground. The deal was a political stunt foisted on the Australian people with no real plan and no democratic accountability at all.
In fact, Trump’s review means that Australia – the country with the most at stake in this deal – is the only partner not to have subjected it to real scrutiny.
That’s why we’ve launched a petition calling on the Australian government to hold a parliamentary inquiry into the Aukus deal. It’s truly wild that in a democracy, a change in our security policy this big and this expensive hadn’t already been properly and publicly examined.
Thank you to the 9000 of you who have already signed. If you haven’t, please add your name:
To say that we are living through an age of crisis has, by now, become commonplace – almost to the extent of being a truism. It is very evident that the post-Cold War world order is deep in the throes of profoundly turbulent transformations, and that those transformations have thrown up a conjuncture that is not only turbulent, but in many ways also perilous. But how do we understand this age of crisis from a distinctly Southern perspective? That is the question at the heart of the newly published book Southern Interregnum: Remaking Hegemony in Brazil, India, South Africa, and China, which I have co-authored with Karl von Holdt, Ching Kwan Lee, Fabio Luis, and Ruy Braga.
Donald Trump had publicly toyed with the idea of running for president many times before 2015. In fact, he even entered the Reform Party’s presidential primaries for the 2000 election. But the timing was never quite right, until it finally was.
Of the many actions and twists of fate that created the opening for Trump’s presidential candidacy, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision is an underappreciated one. Hailed by the conservative legal establishment as a win for free speech (on the merits I would agree), in practice it released a flood of money into the American political system that fundamentally reshaped the landscape of campaigns and how they were conducted. Suddenly the candidates themselves mattered much less, along with political parties. What mattered now were the new players who emerged from the wreckage of campaign finance law.
Super PACs could raise unlimited funds from corporations and billionaires. Dark money nonprofits kept their donors’ identities secret while spending hundreds of millions on attack ads. Labor unions could now spend unlimited treasury funds on elections. A new class of mega-donors wielded influence that dwarfed anything seen in American politics since the Gilded Age.
What’s On around Naarm/Melbourne & Regional Victoria: June 23-29, 2025 With thanks to the dedicated activists at Friends of the Earth Melbourne! . . See also these Palestine events listings from around the country: 9132
Almost seven in ten people who rent privately worry about asking for repairs in case they face a rent increase, according to research by the ACOSS/UNSW Sydney-led Poverty and Inequality Partnership, National Shelter and the National Association of Renter Organisations (NARO).
The study, which surveyed 1,019 people who rent in the private sector across Australia, also found a third of renters would be unable to afford their rent if it went up by 5%.
So, it’s a bit of mystery why the Liberal Party, in dire need of wooing back women voters in particular, has decided to oppose the changes. It suggests the Liberal Party won’t have much to meaningfully contribute to the serious tax reform debate Treasurer Jim Chalmers foreshadowed in his National Press Club speech.
Australia Institute research shows that twice as many Australians support (52 per cent) the government’s super tax concessions changes as oppose them (26 per cent), with around a quarter still undecided. The polling also found that about one in five of those surveyed thought it would impact their retirement plans when in reality, only one in 200 will be affected.
Perhaps people overestimate how much this will impact them because most people don’t think about their super at all until they get close to retirement, but let’s be clear, collecting more revenue from mostly wealthy men is good for both women and young people.
Only the very richest Australians will be affected by Labor’s plans to reduce the generosity of the superannuation tax concessions for people with earnings over $3 million.
Chalmers’ proposed changes will halve the super tax concession, meaning those will super balances over $3 million will go from paying 15 per cent tax to paying 30 per cent tax. It still represents an enormous tax concession for wealthy people, it’s just slightly less generous.
US military moving B-2 bombers from mainland US to Guam – report The Guardian | 22 June 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/21/israel-iran-war-live-fresh-attacks-exchanged-as-israel-says-it-has-set-back-tehrans-nuclear-program-by-at-least-two-or-three-years The US military is moving B-2 bombers from mainland US to the Pacific island of Guam, two US officials told Reuters on Saturday. The New York Times further reports that the bombers, which have a range […]
For many of us, day to day life in the United States proceeds as it would under a usual American federal government. We may be more distressed by the news than usual, we may be organizing or attending rallies and meetings, but still we go to work, hike or bike, meet up with friends for coffee or a drink. The ability to more or less continue our daily routines makes it easy to lose sight of the fact that we live in a country whose head of state has gone full-on authoritarian.
The dictatorship is here. The constitutional crisis is now.
Trump does as he pleases. He does not even bother to seek the Congressional approval that he might well be able to get given that his fellow Republican Fascists control the federal legislature. While most federal district courts have been doing all they can to rein him in, he has been able to use a combination of appeals and noncompliance to disregard many of their orders. While the Supreme Court has not rushed to endorse his every move, neither has it acted decisively to restrain him nor to demand he and his Cabinet obey lower courts.
What Trump pleases is to use force and federal prosecutorial power to attack, physically and legally, the progressive and Democratic blocs in the United States. Wretched as it is that he has turned his ICE goon squad on immigrants and detained and deported them without due process, his use of DOJ, DHS, the FBI, ICE, the National Guard, and the U.S. military has gone much further.
Free Palestine Melbourne Media Report Saturday June 21 2025 Israel is targeting Iran’s nuclear uranium enrichment plants. Here are the contamination risks https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-20/israel-attack-iran-nuclear-uranium-enrichment-contamination-risk/105441886 By Hanan Dervisevic with wires Israel has been targeting Iran from the air since last Friday in what it has described as an effort to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. According […]
Israeli tanks kill 59 people at Khan Younis aid site in Gaza, local medics say ABC / Reuters| 18 June 2025 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-18/brk-israeli-tank-fires-on-gaza-aid/105429632 At least 59 people have been killed at a Gaza aid site in southern Gaza. Local medics say Israeli tanks opened fire on crowds as they attempted to access aid. A spokesperson for […]
Given the news of the US launching strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities today, we're sharing Col. Lawrence Wilkerson's warning of what a war with Iran could mean for the West from last year.
This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor
A decade of the Trump phenomenon is a noteworthy milestone, worthy of commemoration and reflection. Yet in terms of this unusual bifurcated presidency, the high political drama has only just resumed after a four-year intermission. At Independence Day, Trump won’t even be six months into his four-year term. The real work is only beginning.
Not every citizen is bound to help the president succeed, but all must at least give him a chance to do so. Even those who don’t support Trump should recall Leo Strauss’s sound advice to expect less from politics and more from ourselves. Trump is trying to save republican self-government. Yet, since Americans fundamentally disagree on what a free society means, that depends just as much on us as it does on him—which is part of the challenge.
The Left attacks Trump for being a king, disregarding their undemocratic attempt to replace the doddering figurehead of Joe Biden with Queen Kamala, whose claim to the throne was that she is a black woman. The Right expects Trump to act with monarchical efficacy, forgetting that they elected him to regain control over the bureaucracy. This can’t be done in a day. Czar Alexander II took six years, acting by fiat, to free the serfs. Freeing citizens is even harder.
Hedges reflects on his years reporting from war zones, the cynical nihilism driving Netanyahu’s assault, and how Israel’s genocide in Gaza has become a “spectacle” that has irreparably broken trust between North and South.
Are Israel’s and the Pentagon’s stated shifting priorities real, or a façade to continue diminishing societal infrastructure in the region? Will the complicity of Arab states in the genocide lead to blowback? Is regime change the goal, or is this just an excuse?
It doesn’t add up: You can’t be accountable, unless you actually do “accounting.”
HB 2025, the transportation package in the Oregon Legislature purports to address ODOT’s massive financial problems, but only makes them worse
The bill provides only a fraction of the money needed to actually pay for promised mega-projects. HB 2025 provides just $1.75 to $1.95 billion in resources for five listed projects that together need about $3.5 billion–and likely more.
HB 2025 also provides nothing to cover entirely certain and predictable cost overruns on the largest highway project in the state, the Interstate Bridge Replacement, which is likely to end up costing $9 billion–when long delayed cost estimates are finally released. The bill also provides nothing for the $1.1 billion Hood River Bridge. Adding these projects would push the mega-project hole to $5 billion; far greater than the funds allocated in HB 2025.
Palestine-Israel Media Report Tuesday 17 June 2025 Australian deported from US says he was targeted for writing on Palestine protests https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/australian-deported-from-us-says-he-was-targeted-for-writing-on-palestine-protests-20250616-p5m7qn.html Washington: An Australian man who attended Columbia University and was returning to the United States for a holiday says he was detained and questioned for 12 hours by American border officials about his involvement […]
The role of Monash University in greenwashing the activities of Woodside and other fossil fuel companies has been revealed by journalist Royce Kurmelovs in climate-focused publication Drilled and Crikey.
Kurmelovs’ report reinforces Australia Institute research highlighting the crisis of integrity in the governance of Australia’s universities.
Upcoming Australia Institute research will further outline Monash and other universities’ links to the fossil fuel industry.
“It’s past time for Australia’s universities to stop greenwashing companies like Woodside,” said Rod Campbell, Research Director at The Australia Institute.
“Monash not only names buildings and hosts conferences for Woodside, it has multiple Woodside-funded scholarships and partners with Woodside in research grants.
“While scholarships provide financial support to individual students, this funding pales in comparison to the profits of Woodside.
“The $99,000 Woodside Monash Energy Partnership Research Scholarship represents just 0.00002% of Woodside’s 2024 profit of $5.6 billion, and just 0.0003% of Monash University Group’s $308 million consolidated net result in 2024.
“It gets worse. Monash has four projects funded by the Australian Coal Association Research Program, which aims to prolong the coal industry. Those grants are worth under $1 million.
“This is how cheaply the integrity of our universities is bought by malevolent companies like Woodside.
There is a salamander so rare, you can find it only in the Ozarks. It is born wide-eyed and willing, eager to explore its surroundings: blue streams, green forests.
One day, the salamander wanders into a crack in the earth. This is the most fateful decision it will make. The world darkens, but the salamander keeps going: down, down, down, until no light remains. Over time, its skin begins to mutate. A film grows over its eyelids and fuses them shut.
The salamander is now blind. But it does not know. It will live, and die, in the eternal darkness of a subterranean cave.
I spent No Kings Day in a cave because I wanted to see the salamander. But I also wanted to ensure no film comes to cover my own eyes. A cave 250 feet underground has no cell service and no surveillance. It has no AI or GPS. Lone light shines from lanterns held by humans. They reveal a labyrinthine land of stone, not dead but slow growing. I go to caves to reset my senses. They show me the peace I am missing.
On the drive to the Ozarks, I saw a photo on social media. A protester held a handmade sign with a warning I wrote years ago: “THIS IS A TRANSNATIONAL CRIME SYNDICATE MASQUERADING AS A GOVERNMENT.”
Sam is a research and evaluation expert with experience in the charity sector. Currently working within the Insights team at Youth Music, he collects and analyses data from the grassroots music network. These findings are used to evaluate impact and reinforce evidence-led decision making, with the aim of supporting marginalised young people to make and […]
Samia Khatun is an INGO, Social Justice and Global Health professional with extensive senior leadership, organisational governance and executive management experience. She currently works as Head of Programmes at King’s Global Health Partnerships where she is responsible for the overall strategic direction and management of its programmes, partnerships and operations which includes the London based […]
Aliyah Green is a racial and environmental justice facilitator, interested in justice movements and anti-oppression work generally. With a focus on empowering young people, Aliyah supports the development of their campaigning skills and delivers political education programs designed to inspire and equip participants with the knowledge and skills needed to make systemic change. She is […]
Prior to qualifying in Community Development Chris worked with homeless people and did youth work. Since 1990 Chris has focussed on equality working in and running Race Equality Councils and setting up and running health advocacy projects. Chris joined the Commission for Racial Equality in 2002 before moving to the Disability Rights Commission where he […]
I am a civil servant living in London since 2017, with a focus on climate and people. I am Franco-American, but have recently become a UK citizen, and very keen to partake in making this country and more equal and inclusive place. I have been lucky to mentor many colleagues, improve D&I in the civil […]
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Greg and Elinor discuss Australia’s growing wealth gap, what Australians think about the government’s proposed superannuation tax changes, and what the escalating conflict in the Middle East means for the global economy.
This discussion was recorded on Wednesday 18 June 2025 and things may have changed since recording.
Our independence is our strength – and only you can make that possible. By donating to the Australia Institute’s End of Financial Year appeal today, you’ll help fund the research changing Australia for the better.
Host: Greg Jericho, Chief Economist, the Australia Institute and Centre for Future Work // @grogsgamut
Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek
Hannah is a Senior Lecturer in Public Health at the University of Sheffield, where her research critically examines socially patterned inequities in health and wellbeing, with a particular focus on children, young people, and families. She is driven by a commitment to understanding and addressing the environmental, social, and political factors that influence health. This […]
Milla is Head of Maths at the London Screen Academy, a film and TV sixth form college dedicated to increasing diversity and access to opportunity in the creative industries. Having trained through Teach First, she entered the teaching profession with a hope to tackle education inequalities in the classroom, and continues this work as a […]
