Reality Bites Trump and His Cabinet.

Posted on | February 3, 2026 | 3 Comments

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Mike Magee

In the 1994 classic movie, Reality Bites, college graduate and fledgling documentary film maker Winona Ryder forms a troubled bond with a troop of characters that includes GAP sales associate, Janeane Garofalo, who may have HIV; Steve Zahn who struggles to figure out how to tell his parents he’s gay; Ben Stiller, sometime lover of Winona; and Ethan Hawke who is falling apart in front of our eyes. As one Rotten Tomatoes reviewer noted, “In a picture full of painful moments, it’s hard to decide on the lowest point.”

Those words fit as well for the current political drama Americans have been forced to endure. Trump and Bannon and Miller, Kristi Noem and her ICE storm troopers, and JD Vance with a full range of supportive sycophants, religously  play out their roles. And the peoples iPhone cameras are always rolling.

But none of this is new. As far back as January 27, 2017, Trump signed his first executive order. It banned travel to the United States for 90 days from seven predominantly Muslim countries – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The action was temporarily blocked by court injunctions. But on June 26, 2018, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 opinion, gave the order a green light and even allowed an expansion of the list to include Venezuela and North Korea. By 2020, Trump added Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania.

Trump’s explanation: “As President, I must act to protect the security and interests of the United States and its people.” But his henchman, Bannon, was more forthcoming, publicly acknowledging that this was an intended “shock event.”

At the time, Boston College historian and political scientist, Heather Cox Richardson made this observation which continues to ring true today: “Such an event is unexpected and confusing and throws a society into chaos. People scramble to react to the event, usually along some fault line that those responsible for the event can widen by claiming that they alone know how to restore order…When opponents speak out, the authors of the shock event call them enemies.”

Steve Bannon may not be in the White House these days. But he’s never gone away. In the immediate wake of the ICE murder last week of ICU nurse, Alex Pretti, he boldly declared “He knew exactly what he was doing and he knew the consequences. The violent domestic terrorist mob in the streets of Minneapolis needs to stand down now.”

It’s only been a year or so since Bannon was released from his Danbury, CT, federal jail cell where he spent 4 months for Contempt of Congress. On the eve of his imprisonment, on July 1, 2024, Trump telegraphed what would happen next when he stated, “They wanted to silence him, but they’ll never silence him, but they wanted to silence him. Oh, this is pure weaponization. What they’ve done in this country is unthinkable, and Biden is going to pay a big price for it.”

Turns out that “reality bites.” After serving his 4 month term, in February, 2025, Bannon was forced to plead guilty to charges of fraud and conspiracy related to a financial scam in his “We Build The Wall” campaign. He was also barred from main stream social media platforms, but has reemerged with his “War Room” podcast targeted at the hardest core MAGA supporters.

The program has the partial support of Trump’s followers, and Bannon maintains a love/hate relationship with top Trump administration high rollers like JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Still his brand of “truth telling” still travels well in and among his conspiracy prone audience. Recently, the Brookings Institute examined 79 political podcasts and found that 70% of Bannon’s programs contained false information, exceeding both Glenn Beck and Charlie Kirk at the time.

In an effort to reach a larger audience, he’s moving the podcast to Texas this month, he says, to focus on the Texas primary March 3rd. He’s no stranger to the state. On January 9th, he hosted an all day “oldie but goodie” conference and dinner in Grapevine, Texas, titled  “Save Texas from Radical Islam”. It is indeed a period filled with “painful moments”, and one where “it is hard to decide on the lowest point.” 

And yet, this week’s surprising Texas state Senate seat win by Democrat Taylor Rehmet suggests this modern day version of the classic film may still have a happy (2026 Midterms) ending.

Trump’s AI-Enabled Autocracy

Posted on | January 28, 2026 | 1 Comment

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Mike Magee

This week, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, did it again – scaring the bejesus out of societal leaders worldwide with warnings that their grip on security and governance of human populations is dangerously close to AI extinction.

Amodei’s opening paragraph in his article titled “The Adolescence of Technology” wastes no time getting the reader’s attention. He writes, “There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan’s book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity’s representative to meet the aliens. The international panel interviewing her asks, ‘If you could ask [the aliens] just one question, what would it be?’ Her reply is: ‘I’d ask them, How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?’”

Now, I should be clear. I was already nervous. As a Medical Historian, preparing for a major lecture on the birth of Immunology this Spring, I’ve been researching the field. What am I looking for? The same thing I always find missing when exploring the frontiers of scientific progress – historical context. In most cases, facts and figures abound, but their impact on the complex web of human relations over the years is often missing.

Amodei is attempting to provide that context in real time. Real times include headlines like this one from the New York Times: “ICE Already Know Who Protesters Are “ from AI powered facial recognition technology . But Amodei’s concerns are more fundamental. The challenge for him is the speed of change with generative AI which he clearly states is alarming. As he says, “Because AI is now writing much of the code at Anthropic, it is already substantially accelerating the rate of our progress in building the next generation of AI systems. This feedback loop is gathering steam month by month, and may be only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.”

Clearly with Musk’s recent DOGE foray in mind, Amodei lays out a pretty plausible modern day vulnerability. He says, “It is somewhat awkward to say this as the CEO of an AI company, but I think the next tier of risk is actually AI companies themselves. AI companies control large datacenters, train frontier models, have the greatest expertise on how to use those models, and in some cases have daily contact with and the possibility of influence over tens or hundreds of millions of users.”

Getting a bit more specific without outright naming Musk-controlled Grok and X, Amodei leaves little doubt who he’s referring to when he says, “Some AI companies have shown a disturbing negligence towards the sexualization of children in today’s models, which makes me doubt that they’ll show either the inclination or the ability to address autonomy risks in future models.” 

At one point during the ICE offenses last week, a legal observer in Portland, Maine, filming an ICE agent, was approached by the agent who had just filmed her car and was now filming her face. Asking why he was doing that, the ICE agent replied, “Cuz we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that.”

The activities of the past week, and the unprovoked murders of two innocent US citizens make Amodei’s final warning prescient. He says,“Current autocracies are limited in how repressive they can be by the need to have humans carry out their orders, and humans often have limits in how inhumane they are willing to be. But AI-enabled autocracies would not have such limits.”

Trump v. Lincoln

Posted on | January 22, 2026 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

In the early days of 2026, we Americans find ourselves confronted by three undeniable realities: an obviously impaired President in his second term, a vaulted democracy with checks and balances that are struggling to rise to the autocratic challenge, and an ICE army of state invaders which appears ready to trigger a second Civil War. In short, conditions of distress for the American Democracy have radically escalated.

During the first Trump administration, there was serious debate over the use of the 25th Amendment to deal with the “Trump Problem.” On May 16, 2017, New York Times conservative columnist, Russ Douthat, wrote “The 25th Amendment Solution for Removing Trump.”

Let’s look at four archived slides from the 2017 lecture, and then discuss our current options in the case of 2026 Trump against Democracy.

Slide 1. Russ Douthat

• 

• Slide 4. The 25th Amendment 

In 2017, Scott Bomboy, chief of the National Constitution Center, wrote:

“Section 4 is the most controversial part of the 25th Amendment: It allows the Vice President and either the Cabinet, or a body approved ‘by law’ formed by Congress, to jointly agree that ‘the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.’ This clause was designed to deal with a situation where an incapacitated President couldn’t tell Congress that the Vice President needed to act as President.”

Had our leaders followed Russ Douthat’s advice nine years ago, it is highly unlikely that a 2/3rds majority of both chambers of Congress would have had their back. Instead, they went for Impeachment and failed, as Republicans chose rather to let voters decide. And they did, in 2020. Few likely envisioned that a malignant defeated candidate would launch a January 6th insurrection, embolden white nationalists militia (now ICE) across the nation, and follow thru on threats to run and win a 2nd term in 2024.

The 25th Amendment is no more a solution today than it was in 2017. Instead citizens loyal to our form of government rely in 2026 on two protective backstops:

1. Our third pillar of government – The Courts (most especially the Supreme Court.)
2. The voter, whose second day of reckoning fast approaches with the Mid-Term elections only 10 months away. In the interim, we now must physically engage and resist at every turn.

Some believe we are once again engaged in a great Civil War. In its’ summary of the Gettysburg Address, National Geographic states that “Despite (or perhaps because of) its brevity, since (Abraham Lincoln’s) speech was delivered, it has come to be recognized as one of the most powerful statements in the English language and, in fact, one of the most important expressions of freedom and liberty in any language.”

The last paragraph of that two minute speech, delivered now 162 years and two months ago, reminds us that Renee Nicole Good and other Americans are now dying on “a new battlefield” defending our democratic government against a home bred army. Lincoln’s words today are more relevant than ever.

As described by historians, Lincoln made it clear that the stakes could not have been higher, well before Trump’s mobilization of ICE or his efforts to destroy NATO this week. The battle in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and now in states throughout our nation, simply mirrors the struggle for “a new birth of freedom” with “equality for all.”

As they were spoken, November 19, 1863, here are Lincoln’s final words, ones that deserve a most careful reading: “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

MLK: “A Voteless People Is A Powerless People.”

Posted on | January 19, 2026 | 1 Comment

Mike Magee

Today is Martin Luther King Day. And in three days we’ll commemorate the 53rd anniversary of LBJ’s death. When MLK was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, LBJ asked Americans to seize a higher ground.

He said, in part: I ask every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King, who lived by nonviolence…I know that every American of good will joins me in mourning the death of this outstanding leader and in praying for peace and understanding throughout this land…It is only by joining together and only by working together that we can continue to move toward equality and fulfillment for all of our people. I hope that all Americans tonight will search their hearts as they ponder this most tragic incident.”

That’s quite a contrast to our current President’s remarks following the shooting death of Renee Goods’ by an ICE agent  last week. Exonerating the killer, he decided to label the 37 year old dead mother of three as “very, very  disrespectful to law enforcement.”

Predictably, that event has led to mass demonstrations in Minnesota’s twin cities, and further ICE escalation with 2000 federal agents (in contrast to a domestic police force of 500) in the region. And yet, on MLK’s holiday, the outraged citizens in cities throughout the nation have largely embraced non-violence.

In signing that original proclamation in 1983 for a national holiday bearing the name of our famous defender of civil rights, coming a short two decades after the signing of the Civil Rights Act, it is useful to remember what President Ronald Reagan said: “The majesty of his message, the dignity of his bearing, and the righteousness of his cause are a lasting legacy. In a few short years he changed America for all time.”

But MLK’s son reminds that his father knew very well that a day like today was not about glorifying him. What then is it for? Here are his words this past weekend: “My father was often traveling during the voting rights campaign. But my mother took the time to explain to my siblings and me what each of the Civil Rights movement campaigns was trying to accomplish. ‘The right to vote is a central goal of our freedom movement,’ she’d say. ‘Without it, we will continue to be oppressed. But with it, we can help change our society and make America better for everyone.’ The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool that the citizens have at their disposal. As we see an unacceptable increase in political violence, voter intimidation and other barriers that make voting harder, we need to remind all Americans that our political differences must be decided at the ballot box and elections need to be free and fair. As my dad said, ‘A voteless people is a powerless people.’”

On the Ability to “Attend.”

Posted on | January 11, 2026 | 5 Comments

Mike Magee

Society is so concerned with the medicalized issue of “attention deficit” that many experts jump right over a more fundamental query: “What do you attend to?”

In a recent New York Times Guest Opinion piece, three attention activist members of the Friends of Attention (more on that in a moment) delve into the topic.

This comment caught my eye: “Does it need to be said? We are not machines. Our lives are not data problems that can be quantitatively optimized. And the actual human ability to attend is something much more expansive and much more beautiful than a tool for filtering information or extending our time on task. True attention lies at the heart of personhood: reason, judgment, memory, curiosity, responsibility, the feeling of a summer day, the burying of our dead. All of these require and activate our presence.”

That struck a note because we just spent a few days with children and grandchildren on vacation. And one of the active topics was a discussion of what our grandchildren (many college age) should focus on (or attend to) in their studies. All of the parents had graduated from Liberal Arts institutions (many of them run by the Jesuit order) which highly valued core curricula that included humanities, social and natural sciences, and the arts. But clearly that approach is under attack. Parents struggle to manage college costs that have spiraled out of control, and worry that a future job market that is highly AI-constricted may undercut their kids future financial independence.

The Friends of Attention say the problem is a mis-direction of what humans attend to that dates back to organizational theory research first launched more than a century ago. Their words: “Begun in the 1880s and spanning the long 20th century, quantitative thinking about attention was conceived in a spirit of bold inquiry and undertaken with the goal of civic and medical betterment. The scientists who led the research succeeded in making many human experiences safer and more efficient. They helped to advance innovation and win wars. By using increasingly complex instruments to optimize our capacities, however, they established a powerful paradigm that saw humans as attention-paying machines, paying attention to machines. That model helped give rise to the present era, when most of us spend more than half our waking hours on devices designed to keep us enthralled to the taps and swipes of the attention economy.”

The Jesuits are no slouches when it comes to “attending.” After all St. Ignatius Loyola, who founded the Society of Jesus – also known as the Jesuit Order – holed up in a natural cave by the Cardener River in Catalonia (a province of Barcelona) for a year in 1522, to focus on “attentive contemplation.”

Apparently the time was well spent yielding two significant outcomes: 1) Conversion of Ignatius from a “worldly soldier” to a “dedicated spiritual leader” and, 2) the compilation of his Spiritual Exercises – meditations on his feelings of “gratitude and anguish, consolation and sadness” – which continue to be used in Jesuit’s formal training and daily life to this day.

The emergence of the Friends in 2018 roughly mirrors the appearance of AI. Who are they? “The Friends of Attention are a loose, informal network of creative collaborators, colleagues, and actual friends who share an interest in ‘ATTENTION’.”

Tell me more. Well,  eighteen artists, scholars, and activists first gathered at the  2018 Sao Paulo Biennial, with a common interest in the study and practice of attention. Since then, they have been gathering virtually  The distinctive vision—”to place the economies of attention at the center of our relationship to works of art… Attention lies at the nexus of perception and action, aesthetics and ethics, wealth and power.”  They make a special point of stating that “there is no ‘membership’ in the Friends. There are friends.”

Which brings me back to our family discussion and the role of Liberal Arts in a modern college education. Our kids continue to support a broad, multidisciplinary approach for our grandkids education. As for AI,  AI’s description of the components of a Liberal Arts education is reassuring. Here it is:

• Humanities: Literature, History, Philosophy, Languages, Art.
• Social Sciences: Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, Economics, Anthropology.
• Natural Sciences: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Environmental Science.
• Mathematics: Algebra, Statistics, Logic.
• Arts: Visual Arts, Performing Arts, Music. 

• Broad Knowledge: Provides a foundational understanding across disciplines.
• Critical Thinking: Analyzing complex issues from multiple perspectives.
• Communication: Strong reading, writing, and persuasive expression.
• Adaptability: Learning how to learn and apply knowledge in new contexts.
• Problem-Solving: Identifying, analyzing, and solving complex problems

Full disclosure: I am a graduate of a Jesuit High School (Fordham Prep) and a Jesuit College (LeMoyne College).

 

AI Potential In Medicine Is Unlimited

Posted on | January 7, 2026 | 5 Comments

Mike Magee

If you are wondering whether AI will take over the role of doctors in America, you may be surprised to learn that the numbers are going in the reverse direction.

A month ago, David J. Shorten MD, CEO of the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) proudly announced that “The growing number of applicants to medical school reflects the continued strong interest in medicine as a career.” And the numbers back him up. For the first time, over 100,000 students are already in Medical Schools across the U.S., and that number was about to increase by 1.3%.

One would think that American university students with an interest in Medicine, facing the uncertainties in the field, would be seeking out other options. Instead 2026 applications were up over 5%.  This should not be surprising since history has demonstrated that periods of rapid advance in technology, communication, mobility, and innovation have always been the friend of the profession. Still change is never easy.

In 1851, on its fourth birthday, the AMA was almost ready to give up their quest for legitimacy. The results of their commissioned 1851 survey of 12,400 men from the eight leading U.S. colleges was shocking. The best and the brightest clearly were chasing other professions. There it was in black and white. Of those surveyed, 26% planned to pursue the clergy, 26% the law, and less than 8% medicine.

It wasn’t that doctors with training (roughly 10% of those calling themselves “doctor” at the time) lacked influence. They had been influential since the birth of the nation. Four signers of the Declaration of Independence were physicians – Benjamin Rush, Josiah Bartlett, Lyman Hall, and Mathew Thorton. Twenty-six others were attendees at the Continental Congress. But making a living as a physician, that was a different story.

During the first half of the 19th century, the market for doctoring went from bad to worse. Economic conditions throughout a largely rural nation encouraged independent self-reliance and self-help. The politics of the day were economically liberal and anti-elitist, which meant that state legislatures refused to impose regulations or grant licensing power to legitimate state medical societies. Absent these controls, proprietary “irregular medical schools” spawned all manner of “doctors” explaining why 40,000 individuals competed for patients by 1850 – up from 5000 (of which only 300 had degrees) in 1790.

 The legitimate doctors in those early days saw 5 patients on a good day. Horse travel on poor roads, and the absence of remote systems for communication, meant doctors had to be summoned in person to attend a birth or injury. And patients lost a day’s work to travel all the way to town for a visit of questionable worth. The direct and indirect costs for both doctor and patient were unsustainable. As a result, most doctors had multiple careers to augment their income.

At the turn of the century, in 1800, only 6% of Americans lived in towns with a population of 2,500. With westward expansion, Manifest Destiny, forced relocation of native Americans, and slavery supported cotton and tobacco, that percentage reached only 15% by 1850. But the arrival of railroads and telegraph, canals, improved roads and steamboats transformed America. 

By 1890, 37% lived in cities. And that included doctors. Beginning in 1870, there was an exodus of doctors to cities in excess of the general population. In 1870, there were 177 doctors per 100,000 in large cities. By 1910 the number had grown to 241 per 100,000.

Congregating doctors in cities was a mixed blessing for the profession. It made contact easier to execute, allowing numbers of patients seen in a day to double and triple. But it also meant that more doctors (of widely different quality) would be competing for the relatively few patients who possessed the resources to pay fees for services.

The invention of the telephone was equally transformative. The first recorded local telephone network was in New Haven, CT in 1877. Soon after the Capitol Hill Drugstore in Hartford, CT, was linked to 21 local physicians. Not to be outdone, two years later, Dr. William Worrell Mayo connected his farmhouse in Rochester, Minnesota to the Geisinger and Newton drugstore in town. This made remote prescribing, as well as patient communications for emergencies and scheduling possible.

In modern times, the arrival of the Internet was equally transformative. But adding AI to the mix changes everything for the profession which is fundamentally scientific and fact-based, but relies on human trust, fostered by compassion, understanding and partnership, to ensure its premier role in society. In threading that needle, AI will service the profession in three critical ways:

1. AI is a problem solver. From new discoveries, to accurate diagnosis, to business efficiencies, to team connectivity, to lessening opportunity for human error, AI is a performance enhancer.
2. AI empowers patients by providing access to information, research, and inclusion in professional care teams, providing rapid feedback and opportunity to enhance mutual team partnerships.
3. AI has the potential to create and support a wide array of public health initiatives, and trigger policy changes that may finally convince independent minded Americans that universal health coverage is not a luxury, but a necessity.

“America Was a Providential Fact” – Did Tocqueville Get It Right?

Posted on | December 26, 2025 | 3 Comments

Mike Magee

We find ourselves in the middle of America’s most important religious, political, and economic holiday. The current Administration has made a point of pushing the envelope toward state sponsored religion for example with this official Homeland Security greeting on their X platform: “Christ is Born! We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior.” The integration of church and state is advanced despite its explicit disapproval in the First Amendment to our U.S. Constitution.

The debate over whether this is appropriate or not is a longstanding one. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831, he was struck by our individualism, decentralized forms of governance, and (notably) our extreme religiosity. As we have seen now over a two century experience, each of these traits, when carried to an extreme can undermine the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Equality and tyranny remain two sides of the same coin.

Tocqueville was an idealist but also a partial critic (at best) of slavery and the mass relocation and near extinction of native Americans. He saw our citizen forebears as displaying extreme individualism and possessing an “immense opinion of themselves.” Not surprisingly, he came from privilege. His parents were servants of the French Royalty, nobility imprisoned and nearly executed by guillotine during the French Revolution. 

His family history helps explain why he was both an elitist and a populist in writing and behavior. His two volume observations of our still freshly minted nation appeared in 1835 and 1840 under the title “Democracy in America.” 

Our forebears under his constant glaze are too “relaxed” in our “love of present enjoyments.” In his view, contentment would eventually lead to contempt. His words: Our version of democracy  “does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born.” 

Tocqueville is anxious for us and our future. That is in part why he saw integration of Church and state as desirable in the extreme. To him our form of government was “providential.” Christian equality underpinned social equity. Religion was not a subsidiary of the aristocracy as in France. Rather American history was flesh on a theological skeleton. Or as he described, “It was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.”

He experienced with emotion our homegrown injustice on a large scale. At a little river town next to Memphis, he watched as a group of Choctaw Indians being delivered by federal agents (under the auspices of the Indian Removal Act of 1830) to a steamboat for the first leg of a relocation to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. He recognized the apocalyptic nature of the event stating later, he had witnessed “the expulsion—one might say the dissolution—of the last remnants of one of the most celebrated and ancient American nations.”

He also saw Christianity in America make peace with slavery, but with significant hedging justification. He wrote, the state endorsed religion allowed slavery “but they accepted it only as an exception in their social system, and they took care to restrict it to a single one of the human races. They thus made a wound in humanity less large, but infinitely difficult to heal.” 

Literary critic, James Wood, noted that Tocqueville believed that “Religion doesn’t have to be true, Tocqueville thought, but it is very important that people profess it… religion leads democratic man away from the narcissism and materialism endemic to non-aristocratic societies… Tocqueville is really writing a theological history of society’s rise, which culminates in the founding of America….America was a providential fact.”

History, and the current administration in the extreme, makes the opposite case – that leaning into religion is not always prudent or fortunate. Our Founding Fathers, in penning the First Amendment to our Constitution, knew what they were doing.

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