The Dictatorship
For America’s 250th birthday, Trump plans to celebrate himself
On the first day of the first Black History Month of his first term, Donald Trump announced: “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Whatever confusion the president’s tenses suggested over when America’s most eloquent abolitionist lived, Douglass, dead for 122 years then and almost 131 years now, is due all the posthumous recognition he gets. But when a group tapped by Congress suggested minting a Douglass quarter as part of next year’s semiquincentennialthe administration of the man who thinks Douglass has been amazing said “no,” The New York Times reported this week.
The Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee suggested a series of coins, according to the Times, that would tell a story of America that doesn’t stop at the Declaration of Independence or the Revolutionary War but would also include abolition, women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement. But this second Trump administration, dedicated to the proposition that any comprehensive history of the U.S. amounts to godless DEIhas resisted minting coins celebrating the pluribus in our unum — even as it plans a coin celebrating Trump.
“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”
President Donald Trump on Feb. 1, 2017
In October, the U.S. Treasury shared proposed images for a $1 commemorative coin featuring an image of Trump on both sides. “Heads” showed the president’s profile and “tails” showed Trump with his fist raised, an American flag behind him and the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” along the circumference. The administration appears to have since toned it down. But only slightly. Now each of the proposed reverse images shows a bald eagle, either alone, with the Liberty Bell or with the U.S. flag.
No U.S. coins depicted U.S. presidents until Abraham Lincoln was put on the penny — rust in peace, penny — in 1909, the centennial of his birth. George Washington’s face was added to the quarter in 1932the bicentennial of his birth. Washington said “no” to having his face on a coin when he was president because that struck him as something only a king would do. But Trump, seemingly indifferent or outright oblivious to the pro-republic, anti-monarchist spirit of 1776, apparently glories in the idea of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding doubling as a celebration of himself.
“President Trump’s self-celebrating maneuvers are authoritarian actions worthy of dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, not the United States of America,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said in a statement last week after he and Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut introduced the Change Corruption Act. That act makes a declaration that all Americans ought to be able to get behind: “No United States currency may feature the likeness of a living or sitting President.”
U.S. Treasurer Brandon Beach told the Times that the Democrats behind that legislation are “so triggered by the proposed coin celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary that they are trying to recklessly change law to block it.”
Beach is being deliberately obtuse. Trump’s face on a coin is no more a celebration of America’s 250th than Trump’s name on a high rise is a celebration of architecture. It’s not the job of the American government to create yet more reflecting pools for Narcissus.
America is bigger than a single person, even if that person is president. It’s one of the more disappointing coincidences of history that when the country’s big birthday happens, we’ll have a president who acts otherwise.
The coin advisory committee also suggested coins honoring Douglass and the suffragists as well as one honoring Ruby Bridges, who was 6 years old when she walked a gantlet of jeering segregationists and integrated William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960.
But the Trump administration rejected those ideas, just like in 2019 when it halted an Obama administration plan to have the liberator Harriet Tubman bump the genocidal Andrew Jackson off the $20 bill. Trump had dismissed that idea as “pure political correctness” and suggested that “Maybe we do the $2 bill.”
The abolition of slavery, the Civil Rights movement – all of it is part of the history of this country and we should not shy away from celebrating the progress we have made toward equal rights for all.
Trump’s decision to scrap these designs is shameful.https://t.co/n9lxGtt6y3
— Senator Cortez Masto (@SenCortezMasto)”https://twitter.com/SenCortezMasto/status/2001030519161504102?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>December 16, 2025
Although even some progressives have objected to the idea of honoring Tubman this way, the push to replace Jackson’s face with Tubman’s has been raised anew this yearand a descendant of Tubman continues to push for her inclusion on paper currency. At this point, it’s unclear if any of us will ever get to say that we’ve been spending twenties since they had white faces.
Trump’s stumbling Black History Month acknowledgment in 2017 was made by a new president who knew next to nothing about this country’s Black history but felt he needed to pretend to value it.
This term, he’s pretending less and less, and showing us more and more that he values nothing as much as memorializing himself.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily.
Wednesday marks four years since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Dobbs decisionwhich effectively overturned Roe v. Wade and repealed the constitutional right to an abortion. On “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski explained how the ruling set off a domino effect across the United States, affecting not just abortion-related care, but also altering “the state of women’s healthcare as a whole.”
As Brzezinski noted, states across the country have enacted harsher abortion restrictions since the 2022 ruling, with 13 outright banning the procedure with very limited exceptions. This has created a climate of fear among those who treat pregnant patients, with many healthcare providers worrying that any care involving an abortion could violate the law, even when the mother’s health is at risk.
“We are talking about people dying when they’re miscarrying because doctors are too afraid to intervene and save their lives,” Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation, told MS NOW.
Brzezinski said the laws have effectively limited women’s “access to lifesaving healthcare.”
The MS NOW host reflected on some high-profile stories of pregnant women who faced delayed care in states with near-total abortion bans, noting “the numbers of cases that we’ve covered here on the show of women who have had their lives threatened, have been forced to give birth to dying or dead babies, and then, by the way, denied the access to ever create life again, because they became sterilized in the process.”
“There’s an image I can’t get out of my head,” Brzezinski added, before sharing reporting from ProPublica about Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old mother who died in Texas in 2023 after not receiving timely care for a miscarriage.
“For months afterward, Porsha’s 3-year-old son would chase after women who looked like her on the street, shouting, ‘That’s Mommy!’” Brzezinski said. “That’s the detail I can’t forget. I can’t stop imagining that little boy chasing after strangers on the street. And that story repeats itself.”
You can watch Brzezinski’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
One of the biggest upsets in Tuesday night’s primaries came in New York’s 13th Congressional District, where Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist, managed to beat incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, 71, who was backed by establishment Democrats.
Chevalier, a doctoral student in sociology at the City University of New York, secured 49.4% of votes in the district — which encompasses upper Manhattan, Harlem and parts of the Bronx — defeating Espaillat, who received about 46% of the votes after representing the district for nearly a decade, according to The Associated Press. She now advances to the November general election, which she is presumed to win in the solidly Democratic district.
Chevalier’s primary win marks a major win for the Democrats’ left-wing flank that backed her, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdaniwho endorsed Chevalier last month during a joint interview on MS NOW’s “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
Here is what to know about Chevalier and the platform she campaigned on.
She has never held elected office
Prior to her congressional campaign, Chevalier had never run or held elected office. But she has been involved with advocating for issues that became political flashpoints, including helping organize the pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University, according to her biography on the website of the Justice Democratsthe progressive group that recruited her to run.
The daughter of Dominican immigrants, Chevalier also worked as an organizer for Families for Freedom, a New York City group that assists immigrants facing deportation.
Chevalier earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Columbia University in 2016 and later worked as a paralegal, according to her LinkedIn.
Chevalier faced scrutiny during her campaign over previously articulated stances and incendiary comments, including her appearance at a Times Square rally the day after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, where attendees reportedly suggested the attack was justified.
At a March candidates’ forum, Chevalier declined to condemn Hamas, saying that a request to do so “ignores the 75 years of occupation that the Palestinian people have been subjected to and the conditions that that folks were living under before this genocide began,” the local outlet City & State reported. Later, on local radio station WNYC, Chevalier said she did condemn Hamas when asked, adding, “As far as I know, the U.S. does not send a single dime to Hamas. What we fund is the Israeli military.”
In a series of since-deleted social media posts between 2018 and 2022Chevalier also used expletives to refer to former Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic National Committee, calling for abolishing borders and stopping all deportations, according to BLN. Other reports noted that she called former President Joe Biden a “rapist” and disparaged white people in some of her posts.
Chevalier has said she has “grown considerably” since writing those posts and that she regrets them. Mamdani defended her after the social media posts surfaced but said he was unaware of them before endorsing Chevalier.
She’s the left’s preferred candidate
Chevalier’s focus on affordability, expanding housing access and opposing war and deportations made her the preferred candidate of many progressive groups. In addition to the endorsements from Mamdani and the Justice Democrats, she was also backed by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and several progressive members of the New York City Council.
After her primary win, the Democratic establishment also seems to have rallied behind her, despite her previous expletive-laden critiques of them.
In a statement Tuesday, DNC Chair Ken Martin called Chevalier “a tireless advocate for the hard-working people of New York City” who “will fight for healthcare, affordable housing, public education, civil rights, and an economy that works for everyone.”
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
When white South African refugees enter the United States in the coming weeks, they reportedly can expect a special treat: a gift bag containing an Android tablet, copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and an American flag. Oh, and one more perk: literature that argues white people in South Africa and the U.S. are victims of discrimination — and that the U.S. Civil Rights Movement was misguided.
That’s the plan that’s being finalized in the Trump administration, according to a new story from The New York Timeswhich cites government documents and an official familiar with the matter, and observes that welcome gifts of this kind are “unusual.” These welcome bags are a brazen expression of white nationalism. And remarkably, they represent the White House doing exactly what MAGA conspiracy theorists love to (ludicrously) accuse the left of trying to do: Use immigration policy to boost its political fortunes.
Literature reportedly included in the bags encourages incoming Afrikaners to align themselves culturally and politically with the MAGA movement.
According to the Times, the bags are expected to include a letter that reads, “The Trump administration understands America’s immigration system must put the U.S. citizen first, and only welcome in those who will assimilate into the American way of life and preserve our borders, language, culture, traditions and ideals.”
The president and his administration have long made it clear that Afrikaners are virtually the only people who fit the White House’s criteria. At a Turning Point USA event in April, Trump boasted, “We suspended all refugee resettlement — except for persecuted South Africans.” And Trump has said that the people in South Africa being “persecuted” are Africans — basing his claim on white nationalist disinformation that a “white genocide” is being perpetrated in South Africa.
Singling out this population, amid all the people enduring wars and serious persecution around the world, was in and of itself a white nationalist salvo. But the letter, combined with other texts and booklets planned for the bag, take it to another level.
Other literature reportedly included in the bags encourages incoming Afrikaners to align themselves culturally and politically with the MAGA movement. According to the Times, the plan is for the bags to include “several products from PragerU, which produces right-wing educational materials, such as a story about a Black South African who must protect a white rugby teammate from a Black mob.” That story describes Nelson Mandela, the legendary anti-apartheid activist and South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, as a “South African lawyer and activist who sought to end apartheid with acts of sabotage.” It also says that the South African government in the post-apartheid era has “made race relations even worse.”
The Times reports that the administration also plans to include a report by Trump’s 1776 Commissionwhich “likens progressivism to fascism, and says Americans were being indoctrinated with a false critique of the nation’s founding and identity, including the role of slavery.” The report says the Civil Rights Movement “was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders.”
Remarkably, Trump’s white nationalist goodie bags would help inaugurate a right-wing version of the right’s own racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. That evidence-free theory holds that Democrats favor immigration as a way to “replace” the local population with meek immigrants who will (for some reason) vote as a bloc in favor of Democrats. Now it seems the Trump administration is angling to create a new bloc of immigrants who help support right-wing ideologies and political goals — to the exclusion of all other populations.
The planned white nationalist goodie bags make it clear that Trump is willing to welcome foreigners with welcome arms. They just need to look and think a certain way.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.
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