CHICAGO — In one of the most moving moments of the Democratic National Convention, on Wednesday night, the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a 23-year-old American who was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, took the stage at the United Center and spoke of the anguish they’ve experienced over the 320 days since their son was taken hostage.
They called for the release of the other hostages, including 8 American citizens, and for a cease-fire deal that “ends the suffering of the innocent civilians in Gaza.”
But the DNC’s invitation to the family created an uncomfortable contrast with the party’s refusal to provide space on the main stage for a Palestinian-American or doctors who have worked in Gaza. On Wednesday night, following that speech, the DNC informed the leaders of the Uncommitted Movement that they would not be given the opportunity to put a Palestinian speaker on the main stage of the convention, to discuss the Israeli military has inflicted in Gaza, with the backing of the United States.
The Uncommitted Movement — representing the over 700,000 pro-Palestine voters who cast “uncommitted” votes during the Democratic presidential primary — had requested speaking time at the convention and a meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign.
The DNC gave the movement space to speak at several untelevised forums. On Monday, a doctor shared harrowing stories from Gaza, where the Israeli military has led an unprecedented siege for 10 months, starting after Hamas’ October 7 attacks. The party refused to meet the Uncommitted Movement’s larger requests.
“I was working on it every day for the past week or more,” said James Zogby, who has held leadership positions in the Democratic Party for decades. “The campaign made a mistake — an unforced error. This didn’t have to happen the way it did and now needs to be fixed.”
The decision by the Harris campaign and the DNC threatens to torch the goodwill the campaign has enjoyed since Harris ascended to the top of the ticket. No significant protests have broken out inside the arena yet this week, and demonstrations outside have been smaller than expected. But already on Wednesday night that was starting to change. As delegates and convention attendees filtered out of the United Center, protesters with signs and bullhorns were reading the names of children killed in Gaza and encouraging passersby to turn back and join a 24-hour sit-in the leaders of the Uncommitted delegates had begun earlier that evening outside the arena.
“We are waiting for a phone call from Vice President Harris and the DNC to allow a single Palestinian-American speaker from the convention stage,” those delegates — Abbas Alawieh, June Rose, Sabrene Odeh — said in a statement. “Our party’s platform states that every life is valuable: whether American, Palestinian, or Israeli. We will conduct a moral act of sitting in at the convention to push our party to better align our actions, instead of just our words, with the notion that every life is valuable by simply allowing a Palestinian American to speak from the stage.”
Progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), one of two Muslim women serving in Congress, joined the Uncommitted sit-in Wednesday evening.
One Democratic lawmaker on Capitol Hill who’s been in Chicago this week tells Rolling Stone bluntly: “If we lose Michigan by a hair… it will be hard not to conclude that a reason why is because we did not treat these people with respect they deserve and instead just wished they’d go away and stop complaining.”
Two representatives for the DNC did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Harris campaign declined to comment about the decision.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said late Wednesday, “The Palestinian right to self determination was erased by the British with the Balfour declaration in 1917 which only mentioned civil and religious rights but not political rights for the Palestinian people. The Democratic Party, which aspires to be the party of human rights, must not in 2024 perpetuate this erasure of the Palestinian story.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who declared onstage at the United Center on Monday that Harris is “working tirelessly to secure a cease-fire in Gaza,” responded to the DNC’s decision to exclude Palestinian voices on Wednesday.
“Just as we must honor the humanity of hostages, so too must we center the humanity of the 40,000 Palestinians killed under Israeli bombardment,” she wrote on X. “To deny that story is to participate in the dehumanization of Palestinians. The @DNC must change course and affirm our shared humanity.”
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.