Dear Progressive Reader,

On August 8, the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Florida estate at Mar-A-Lago (formerly dubbed his “southern White House”). According to one of Trump’s lawyers, the agents seized about a dozen boxes of documents (after fifteen other boxes of illegally removed government documents from Trump’s Administration had been previously relinquished to the National Archives). In a humorous corollary, Hillary Clinton announced on Twitter that her “But Her Emails” hats and t-shirts are selling like, well, gangbusters.

It is also of historical note that the raid on Trump’s basement storage area comes on the same day as the announcement by former President Richard Nixon in 1974 that he would leave the presidency because “the interest of the nation must always come before any personal considerations.” Nixon, like Trump, went through an impeachment process – in Nixon’s case, for “obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress.” But Nixon resigned before facing an actual impeachment vote. As I wrote in 2019, on the eve of Donald Trump’s first of two impeachments by the House, “The Progressive was a leading voice in the call to impeach Nixon and, in December 1973, even issued a ten-point ‘Bill of Impeachment’ to help spur the process. ‘[T]he crisis that grips America today is of another, higher magnitude,’ wrote the editorial staff. ‘It swirls, of course, around the person of the President of the United States, but it impinges on every facet of the national life and character.’” Only time will tell whether the recent raid on Mar-a-Lago will eventually lead to justice in this twenty-first century impingement on “every facet of the national life and character.”

This past week also marked two horrific anniversaries, the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. In August of 2020, for the seventy-fifth anniversary of those bombings, anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott wrote in The Progressive, “Seventy-five years after the dawn of the nuclear age, we are as ready as ever to extinguish ourselves. The human race is clearly an evolutionary aberrant on a suicidal mission. Our planet is in the intensive care unit, approaching several terminal events.” As I chronicled on our website in 2019, The Progressive has, since 1945, been a consistent voice for nuclear disarmament, and, over the past several decades, for the possibility of preserving a livable planet. Just this week, another shadow of nuclear threat loomed as Russia shelled a nuclear power facility in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine. As Phyllis Bennis notes in the current issue of The Progressive, “This war has the potential to escalate to a nuclear exchange between the world’s biggest nuclear powers. The risk is less a calculated decision to use nuclear weapons than the fact that wars take on lives—and deaths—of their own, meaning that an unanticipated mistake by either side could quickly spiral out of control.” The risks are too high. We must eliminate nuclear weapons.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

P.S. – The Progressive is participating again this year in the annual Netroots Nation conference. From August 18-20, activists and strategists will gather in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for this in-person networking event. More than 4000 attendees and 400 featured speakers will participate in 100 panels and events during the three days. Jeff Bryant, lead fellow of our Public Schools Advocate project, will be hosting a panel on Friday, August 19, titled “Democrats Desperately Need A Winning Strategy For Public Education.” For more information on the event and how to register to attend in person, or to view all of the sessions online, visit the registration page.

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