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The Federal Reserve reported that, in the last six months, there have been zero new jobs created in the private sector. Two million Americans have lost their health insurance and millions more have seen their insurance rates soar. Gas is up a dollar a gallon so far, groceries are up, and farmers are losing their farms. We are sunk in a quagmire of a war in the Middle East that is burning through one to two billion dollars a day, and Trump is asking for another $220 billion war appropriation that won’t even get us to the end of this year. He is also threatening even more cuts to social spending to fund this war. Meanwhile, Trump has added more than $1.5 billion to his personal wealth while President, which is thousands of times more than any previous president has usurped in office.
Trump is able to do this while being highly unpopular. His job approval is now at 36%, with 62% disapproving, and on Saturday, March 28, the largest single protest in the history of America saw Americans demonstrating their disgust at Trump’s policies and his entire regime in more than 3300 locations around the country.
Zahra Monazzah, whose son Soheil was killed in the US Tomahawk strike on his elementary school in Minab on February 28, two days before his eighth birthday, told NBC News, “Trump should not think that killing our children has made us despair. He should cry for himself, because he will end up in hell.”1
Meanwhile, the Big Tech companies pouring billions of dollars into the AI future have no hope of ever recouping this money. The only incentive for these corporations is to get to the point where AI replaces all human workers on the way to an anti-human future.
Steve Bannon is saying that putting ICE agents in airports is a “test run” for putting them at polling sites in November. “We can use what’s happening with these ICE [officers] helping out at the airports, we can use this as a test run, as a test case to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm elections.”
In a remarkable conversation between Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder on March 26, 2026, Tim Snyder talked about how any good politics has to be about the future, and Trump has us stuck in the present, while he is pushing a politics of nostalgia for something that never existed. The constant barrage of disinformation from the Supreme Misleader (“flood the zone with shit,” as Bannon advised) keeps us focused on all the crises of the present, so that we struggle to formulate a politics of the future. In order to push back, Snyder said, you have to be standing on something, you have to have leverage, and that means imagining a future.
Freedom is not just freedom from, but freedom for. The Right says that freedom is about keeping the government away from you, and that’s a negative freedom. I’ll be free if government is smaller. But when government is smaller, oligarchical rule fills the gap in power, which is what is happening under Trump.
Snyder also said that Trump is stuck in the world of hydrocarbons—oil and gas—which are highly centralized and so lead to authoritarian actions, while non-carbon decentralized energy sources are less so. He compared this to the centralization of media under Trump’s oligarchs, and advised that “energy and knowledge both have to be decentralized” in order to feed democracy.
In this, their first public conversation, Heather Cox Richardson asked most of the questions, but the two promised they would talk again in public soon. This first conversation proved again how valuable it is to have eminent historians put the present in historical context and perspective.2 A principle attack plan of the Trump regime is to obliterate memory—to make it impossible to imagine things being different.
HCR calls Trump “a weak vessel,” and Tim Snyder responds by saying that “American media tend to put Trump at the middle of everything, but I don’t think he is. He’s one cog in a set of oligarchical relationships. He’s primarily a spokesperson for people who don’t want to do this themselves.” Trump is able to say things that they would never be able to say in public and this is extremely useful to them. Trump fronts for them, and he’s very good at it. But he himself is not strong.
Both Richardson and Snyder see Trump as being trapped by the war in Iran, because he has neither the competence nor the courage to do what needs to be done. He is fundamentally a coward, physically and morally. He wants desperately to be a strongman, but he never will be. This is the hell he lives in.
1. Babak Dehghanpisheh and Marin Scott, “Iranians Grieving Over School Missile Express Rage at U.S., Trump,” NBC News, March 23, 2026.
2. “American Conversations: Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson,” March 26, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kqslmq4oIE
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.