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ABC—my former employer—yanked Jimmy Kimmel off the air after the White House and the FCC leaned on Disney, which owns ABC. The corporate surrender came after FCC Chair Brendan Carr—installed by Trump—issued a stark warning about Kimmel, sounding less like a high government official than a cheap hoodlum: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he said. No surprise—Disney execs knuckled under. Again.
That is not normal in America. It is a test. Of institutions. Of corporations. Of all of us.
Right now, our institutions and major corporations are failing us. Men and women with great power are simply giving in to breathtaking claims of authority no previous president has ever made. They don’t take the administration to court; they don’t try to rally the public; they don’t say a damn word. Not a peep. In most of the rooms where the great economic and political decisions in our country are made—the struggle is over. Trump won.
Rahm Emanuel has been in those rooms for three decades. Congressman. Senior adviser to President Clinton. President Obama’s chief of staff. Mayor of Chicago. U.S. ambassador to Japan. He knows how power moves, and he doesn’t mince words. He is always a fun interview, even in serious times—maybe especially in serious times.
In our talk, Rahm kept saying the quiet part out loud: Trump told us who he was, trained by Roy Cohn, and he is doing exactly what he said he’d do. The shock is not Trump. The shock is how fast everyone else folded. “Corporate America,” Rahm told me, “folded like a cheap suit.” He called the Supreme Court “feckless.” Which leaves one thin blue line, in his view: the judgment of the American people.
Is this president authoritarian? Labels matter, Rahm cautioned—and waffled. He’s not ready to go there. But he agreed that using the machinery of government to silence critics is the playbook of modern strongmen. In a country where the First Amendment is first among equals, that should chill every citizen.
He also turned the mirror on his own party. The American dream has been eroding for 30 years, he said: homeownership out of reach, health care unaffordable, retirement savings raided, schools failing too many kids. Democrats lost the plot, got stuck on cultural islands, and stopped talking plainly about the basics of upward mobility. If you don’t fight for the broad middle of the country, you don’t get the keys to the car.
Education is the pressure point he kept coming back to. Learning loss. A 30-year slide in reading and math. Schools that stayed closed long after the science said they didn’t have to. “It wasn’t about bathrooms. It was about classrooms.” That line stayed with me. If you care about equity, you cannot be complacent about the scoreboard.
On public safety, Rahm was just as blunt. National Guard theatrics are not a strategy. Crime comes down with a sustained, unglamorous grind: fully staffed and trained police, prosecutors focused on the small slice committing most violent crime, and real after-school and summer programs that give kids a place to go when the bell rings. Cities are not enemy territory to occupy. They are partners to support.
And then there is 2028. Rahm’s warning to Democrats was simple. You can win a referendum on the other guy in 2026, but by 2028 voters want a choice. Don’t just fight Trump. Fight for people. Spell out a concrete plan for the American dream: how families buy a home, save for retirement, get care without bankruptcy, and send their kids to good schools. That is the national message, and it is overdue.
We covered a lot more: Obama’s role now, the thin skin of power, Saturday Night Live as a civic mirror, even the Cubs. It is Rahm at full wattage, seasoned by hard jobs and harder fights, staking out a lane that is practical, not performative.
Watch the interview. Then let me know where you land. Are our institutions failing, or just faltering? Can a party reset around the kitchen-table issues that still define the American promise? I’ll be in the comments.
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—Terry