Trump Corruption and an Upcoming 'Bombshell'

Plus the usual cartoons and two "December" oldies from the Rolling Stones.

Dec 01, 2025

Greg Mitchell has authored more than a dozen books (see most of them here) and directed four recent PBS films. Subscribing to this newsletter is still FREE—so if you want to help fund, maybe purchase one of my books, thanks!

Heather Cox Richardson this morning:

The Trump administration is replacing American democracy with a kleptocracy, a system of corruption in which a network of ruling elites use the institutions of government to steal public assets for their own private gain. It permits virtually unlimited theft while the head of state provides cover for his cronies through pardons and the uneven application of the law.
It is the system Russia’s president Vladimir Putin exploits in Russia, and President Donald J. Trump is working to establish it in the United States of America…..There is a growing sense that an elite group of wealthy people is running the world without accountability to the law, and that the Trump administration is protecting and even advancing the people in that group.
Unlike the robber barons of the late nineteenth century, today’s power elite is, as Anand Giridharadas of The Ink wrote on November 23 in the New York Times, a borderless network of people connected not to nations or their fellow citizens but to each other. They exchange nonpublic information and capital to enable the members of that group to control events, disregarding the effects of their decisions on those outside their network.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggested Friday that the deep unpopularity of AI comes in part from the fact that it has become a symbol “of a society in which all the big decisions get made by the tech lords, for their own benefit and for a future society that doesn’t really seem to have a place for most of the rest of us.”

Happy to report that a film I’ve been a rather key part of for several years is finally coming to PBS via its hallowed “American Experience” series on January 6. It’s “Bombshell: The Fight to Control the A-Bomb’s Story,” directed by Ben Loetterman. I was one of its advisers and appear on screen half a dozen times as a talking head (as well as comment numerous times off-screen), and I provide the closing commentary before the credits roll.

The film focuses on the same time period (1945-1947), and many of the same subjects, covered by my 1995 book with Robert Jay Lifton, “Hiroshima in America” and my recent “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” as well as my PBS film and book “Atomic Cover-up.” (My latest PBS film and book, “The Atomic Bowl,” on the surreal U.S. all-star football game near ground zero in Nagasaki, also comes out of that time period.)

Here’s the current brief trailer for “Bombshell.” An excerpt from the press release below. I’ll be writing more in the coming month.

Eighty years after the devastating atomic bombings that ushered in the nuclear age, “Bombshell” explores how the U.S.government manipulated the narrative about the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Through propaganda, censorship and the co-opting of the press, the government presented a benevolent picture of atomic power, minimizing the horrific human toll of the bombings. Written and directed by Ben Loeterman, produced by Loeterman and Gaia De Simoni, executive produced by Cameo George, and narrated by Ann Curry, “Bombshell” sheds light on the efforts of a group of intrepid reporters to let the world know the truth.