Democracy Now! Nov 3, 2025 Latest Shows Support our work: https://democracynow.org/donate/sm-de… President Trump held a lavish Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago Friday, just hours before an estimated 42 million people lost SNAP benefits across the country. Kirk Curnutt, the executive director of the international F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, says that while “Gatsby is famous for its lavish party scenes, [what] people often miss is that the entire thrust of the book is to critique that conspicuous consumption and the wastage that goes on in these sorts of events.”

The president hosted his glittering, Roaring ’20s-themed event at Mar-a-Lago hours before federal food benefits were set to go on pause.

By Hilary Hanson

Nov 1, 2025 (HuffPost.com)

Hours before millions of Americans were set to lose federal food benefits amid the ongoing government shutdown, President Donald Trump hosted a glittering party at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.

The official theme of the Halloween night bash was “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody,” according to a pool report. The line is a title of a song featured on the soundtrack for the 2013 movie version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, “The Great Gatsby.”

Reporters at the event described a “smoky party scene” and noted guests were “dressed up in flapper costumes” and “seated at well decked-out tables while a band played.”

“The Great Gatsby,” published in 1925, takes place during the Roaring ’20s and famously explores the emptiness of material wealth and moral decay of the rich, among other themes.

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The day after the party, Nov. 1, is the date that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are set to go on pause. The Trump administration says there’s no way to pay out SNAP benefits while the government is shut down, although it did manage to do that during a previous shutdown in 2019.

Before the event kicked off, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was trying to find ways to “legally fund SNAP as soon as possible.”

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Top Trump officials including Miller, Marco Rubio, and Kristi Noem are opting for housing situations that keep them away from the public.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is one of a handful of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet members who are hiding out on military bases so they don’t have to be exposed to the public that hates them.

The Atlantic reported Thursday that Miller, his wife, and their two children have relocated out of their home north of Arlington, Virginia, to a U.S. military base after local activists embarked on a campaign to shame Miller for his role leading Trump’s fascistic crime and immigration crackdown.

A group called Arlington Neighbors United for Humanity have organized protests near the ghoulish politico’s home, posted wanted posters with his address alleging he’d committed “crimes against humanity,” and written messages on the sidewalk in front of his house in chalk warning that “Miller is preying on families.” Katie Miller lamented that the day after far-right activist Charlie Kirk was killed, a protester approached her outside her home. She claims the protester said, “I’m watching you.”

Now Miller and his family have reportedly joined a smattering of political appointees who have fled to the safety and seclusion of military facilities, where the public’s anger can’t reach them and their own insidious policy ideas can fester.

Another unnamed senior White House official had also relocated to a military base after Kirk’s assassination, The Atlantic reported. They were not named due to a specific foreign threat. 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem moved into military housing typically reserved for the Coast Guard commandant on Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, after the Daily Mail described the location of her Washington, D.C., apartment building. A top administration official told New York magazine last month that DHS had stalled confirming any high-ranking Coast Guard officials because it could threaten to remove her from her new digs.

Both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth live on “Generals’ Row” at Fort McNair, where Hegseth’s home was expected to undergo more than $137,000 in renovations before he moved in. 

These Trump officials’ removal to military bases risks deepening their cultural and political division from the Americans they serve. It puts a strain on military resources, while also emphasizing the military’s growing role in the Trump administration. 

“In a robust democracy, what you want is the military to be for the defense of the country as a whole and not just one party,” Adria Lawrence, an associate professor of international studies and political science at John Hopkins University, told The Atlantic.  

Meanwhile, Trump has stripped security details from his political opponents. It’s worth noting that the only politicians who have been assassinated in the last year were Democrats. 

(Schwartzreport.net)

Link to video: This is how. Every Dem, please, this is how. EVERYONE in the media, please!! – GIF – Imgur

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Voters cast their ballots at a polling place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on November 8, 2022.

 (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

“Trump’s attempt to impose a documentary proof of citizenship requirement on the federal voter registration form is an unconstitutional power grab,” said one plaintiff in the case.

Brett Wilkins

Oct 31, 2025 (CommonDreams.org)

A federal judge on Friday permanently blocked part of President Donald Trump’s executive order requiring proof of US citizenship on federal voter registration forms, a ruling hailed by one plaintiff in the case as “a clear victory for our democracy.”

Siding with Democratic and civil liberties groups that sued the administration over Trump’s March edict mandating a US passport, REAL ID-compliant document, military identification, or similar proof in order to register to vote in federal elections, Senior US District Judge for the District of Columbia Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found the directive to be an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers.

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“Because our Constitution assigns responsibility for election regulation to the states and to Congress, this court holds that the president lacks the authority to direct such changes,” Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, wrote in her 81-page ruling.

“The Constitution addresses two types of power over federal elections: First, the power to determine who is qualified to vote, and second, the power to regulate federal election procedures,” she continued. “In both spheres, the Constitution vests authority first in the states. In matters of election procedures, the Constitution assigns Congress the power to preempt State regulations.”

“By contrast,” Kollar-Kotelly added, “the Constitution assigns no direct role to the president in either domain.”

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This is the second time Kollar-Kotelly has ruled against Trump’s proof-of-citizenship order. In April, she issued a temporary injunction blocking key portions of the directive.

“The president doesn’t have the authority to change election procedures just because he wants to.”

“The court upheld what we’ve long known: The president doesn’t have the authority to change election procedures just because he wants to,” the ACLU said on social media.

Sophia Lin Lakin of the ACLU, a plaintiff in the case, welcomed the decision as “a clear victory for our democracy.”

“President Trump’s attempt to impose a documentary proof of citizenship requirement on the federal voter registration form is an unconstitutional power grab,” she added.

Campaign Legal Center president Trevor Potter said in a statement: “This federal court ruling reaffirms that no president has the authority to control our election systems and processes. The Constitution gives the states and Congress—not the president—the responsibility and authority to regulate our elections.”

“We are glad that this core principle of separation of powers has been upheld and celebrate this decision, which will ensure that the president cannot singlehandedly impose barriers on voter registration that would prevent millions of Americans from making their voices heard in our elections,” Potter added.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Brett Wilkins

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

“The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who.”

–Kevin Phillips

(Image from WGBH.org)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kevin Price Phillips (November 30, 1940 – October 9, 2023) was an American writer and commentator on politics, economics, and history. He emerged as a Republican Party strategist who helped devise its Southern Strategy in the 1960s. Phillips became disaffected with the party by the 1990s, subsequently leaving it to become an independent and staunch critic of the Republicans. He was a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Magazine, and National Public Radio, and was a political analyst on PBS‘s NOW with Bill Moyers.

Early life

Phillips was born in Manhattan in 1940, and grew up in the Bronx, raised by a family of Irish, Scottish, and English descent. He was drawn to the Republican Party from an early age, supporting Dwight D. Eisenhower for president in 1952 and 1956.^[1] He attended the Bronx High School of Science before earning a bachelor’s degree in political science from Colgate University and a juris doctor from Harvard Law School; he also studied at the University of Edinburgh.^[1]

Early career

Phillips began his political career as an aide to Republican Representative Paul A. Fino.^[1] He worked as a strategist on voting patterns for Richard Nixon‘s 1968 campaign, which was the basis for a book, The Emerging Republican Majority, which predicted a conservative political realignment in national politics and is widely regarded as influential in the field of American political science.^[1]

Southern strategy

Phillips told a journalist during the 1968 presidential election that “the whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who”.^[1] After Nixon was elected, Phillips wrote a book on what has come to be known as the “Southern strategy” of the Republican Party. Entitled The Emerging Republican Majority, it argued that the southern states of the US would keep the Republicans winning presidential elections and more than offset the decline in Republican support in Northeast states, based on the racial resentment of white voters.^[1][2]

As he stated to the New York Times Magazine in 1970,

All the talk about Republicans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage. Even ‘Jake the Snake’ [liberal Republican Senator Jacob Javits of New York] only gets 20 percent. From now on, Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote, and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.^[2]

The book however was not used in the campaign itself, Phillips notes in the preface to the Princeton Edition,

Some observers concluded that The Emerging Republican Majority was the emerging Republican strategy. Newsweek labelled the book “The political bible of the Nixon Era.” Not quite. The book was not a blueprint of the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” as some claimed,. … Richard Nixon had read memos based on the book’s analyses during the week before the November 1968 election, but in mid-1969 he truthfully said he had not read the actual book. He read it a few months later.^[3]

His predictions regarding shifting voting patterns in presidential elections proved accurate, though they did not extend “downballot” to Congressional elections until the Republican revolution of 1994.

Political commentary

Phillips briefly worked in the Department of Justice during the Nixon administration, but later left to embark on a career as an author and commentator.^[1] In his books, he coined the term Sun Belt to refer to the southern states. During this time, he was associated with the New Right.^[1]

Later career

As time went on, Phillips grew increasingly disillusioned with the Republican Party. Claiming that the Watergate scandal had dealt a fatal blow to his vision for a perpetual Republican majority, he was a critic of expanding wealth inequality under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and was a staunch opponent of George W. Bush‘s administration, which he extensively criticized in his 2006 book American Theocracy.^[1]

American Theocracy (2006)

Main article: American Theocracy

Rev. Dr. Allen Dwight Callahan ^[4] states the book’s theme is that the Republican Party (GOP), religious fundamentalism, petroleum, and borrowed money are an “Unholy Alliance.”^[5]

The last chapter, in a nod to his first major work, is titled “The Erring Republican Majority”. American Theocracy, “presents a nightmarish vision of ideological extremism, catastrophic fiscal irresponsibility, rampant greed and dangerous shortsightedness.”^[6]

The New York Times wrote:

He identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration’s policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world. One is the role of oil in defining and, as Phillips sees it, distorting American foreign and domestic policy. The second is the ominous intrusion of radical Christianity into politics and government. And the third is the astonishing levels of debt — current and prospective — that both the government and the American people have been heedlessly accumulating. If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country’s immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.^[7]

Phillips uses the term financialization to describe how the U.S. economy has been radically restructured from a focus on production, manufacturing and wages, to a focus on speculation, debt, and profits. Since the 1980s, Phillips argues in American Theocracy,

the underlying Washington strategy… was less to give ordinary Americans direct sums than to create a low-interest-rate boom in real estate, thereby raising the percentage of American home ownership, ballooning the prices of homes, and allowing householders to take out some of that increase through low-cost refinancing. This triple play created new wealth to take the place of that destroyed in the 2000-2002 stock-market crash and simultaneously raised consumer confidence.

Nothing similar had ever been engineered before. Instead of a recovery orchestrated by Congress and the White House and aimed at the middle- and bottom-income segments, this one was directed by an appointed central banker, a man whose principal responsibility was to the banking system. His relief, targeted on financial assets and real estate, was principally achieved by monetary stimulus. This in itself confirmed the massive realignment of preferences and priorities within the American system….

Likewise, huge and indisputable but almost never discussed, were the powerful political economics lurking behind the stimulus: the massive rate-cut-driven post-2000 bailout of the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sector, with its ever-climbing share of GDP and proximity to power. No longer would Washington concentrate stimulus on wages or public-works employment. The Fed’s policies, however shrewd, were not rooted in an abstraction of the national interest but in pursuit of its statutory mandate to protect the U.S. banking and payments system, now inseparable from the broadly defined financial services sector.

Critical reception

American Theocracy was reviewed widely. The New York Times Book Review wrote “It is not without polemic, but unlike many of the more glib and strident political commentaries of recent years, it is extensively researched and frighteningly persuasive…”^[8]

The Chicago Sun-Times wrote “Overall, Phillips’ book is a thoughtful and somber jeremiad, written throughout with a graceful wryness… a capstone to his life’s work.”^[9]

Bad Money (2008)

Phillips examines America’s great shift from manufacturing to financial services. He also discusses America’s petroleum policies and the tying of the dollar to the price of oil. Phillips suggests that the Euro and the Chinese Yuan/Renminbi are favourites to take the dollar’s place in countries hostile towards America, such as Iran. He then tackles the lack of regulatory oversight employed in the housing market and how the housing boom was allowed to run free under Alan Greenspan. The book concludes with the proposal that America is employing bad capitalism and extends Gresham’s law of currency to suggest that their good capitalism will be driven out by the bad.^[10]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Phillips_(political_commentator)

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