Robert Reich

For years, big corporations have been assaulting democracy with big money, drowning out the voices and needs of ordinary Americans—fueling much of the anger that opened the door to Trump in the first place.

There is no middle ground between lies and facts. There is no halfway point between civil discourse and violence. There is no midrange between democracy and fascism.

Those who say we should "look forward" to a new administration and forget or dismiss what occurred last week are delusional.

If we can afford to bail out corporations and Wall Street, we sure as hell can afford to help people—and six other lessons we must remember from that singular year.

If no one is held accountable, norms collapse. Trump's impunity is an invitation for some future president to do even more damage to our democracy.

The returns from major public investments are huge. The costs of not making them are astronomical.

The heinous resurgence of COVID makes clear that corporations need more—not fewer—incentives to protect their workers from the virus.

As it was in the time of FDR and LBJ, power is redistributed only when those without it demand it.

Trump was not aberration. He was an inevitability, produced and promised by the same "normal" that now seems so nostalgic. We can't afford a return to the same mistakes again.

In testing times like ours, democracy depends on moral courage. Don't come looking for it at the top of the GOP.

President-elect Joe Biden and Democrats must respond not with kumbaya but by becoming the party of the rest of America.

The GOP evidently prefers continuous warfare because that's the only way it thinks it can win.

Who will win? What about 2016? The Electoral College? Late ballots? The Supreme Court? The Senate?

What's at stake is not partisan politics. It is representative government.

President Donald Trump's Supreme Court pick would have the government intervene in the most intimate aspects of personal life. But a mask mandate? Never.

Trump famously boasted that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and still not lose voters. The pandemic is putting this claim to the test.

Whether responding to Trump's hospitalization or political maneuvers, Democrats want to act decently. This is admirable. But the other side isn't playing the same game.

Whatever happens after Election Day, Donald Trump's ego will have prevailed in tearing America apart.

The bulwark is a public that holds power accountable—demanding stronger guardrails against its abuses and voting power-mongers out of office.

The wildfires are inconvenient for a president who has dismantled every major climate policy he could lay his hands on. And these states didn't vote for him.

The solution is not found in mere redistribution of income. It is found in redistributing power.

Donald Trump is openly justifying violence by some Americans against other Americans. This nation needs protection from him, as well as the lawless behavior he incites.

There's an old saying that "the personal is political." A threat to one's life or the lives of loved ones, or the imminent loss of a job, concentrates the mind.

The GOP can't even agree on basics like how to respond to the pandemic. The problem is policy ideas rarely make headlines; conflict does.

The market operates under laws that ban profiteering, price gouging and monopolizing, bar insider trading and tax excess profits in wartime. Where did these laws go?

After a small uptick in June, the economy is tanking again, and ending the extra unemployment benefits will only cause more unnecessary suffering.

Trump can't find federal personnel to do contact tracing for the coronavirus but has found thousands of agents for his secret police to wage war on his own citizens.

The president has built a multi-racial, multi-class, bipartisan political coalition opposed to his own re-election.

If the Senate majority leader had an ounce of concern for the nation, his priority would be to shield Americans from the ravages of COVID-19 and American democracy from the ravages of Donald Trump.

By rushing to reopen America before the virus was contained, President Donald Trump has not only caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths but put the economy into a stall.