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​U.S. President Donald Trump is shown on television monitor.

The Contradictions at the Heart of Trump’s Iran War Narrative

Trump Fed Pick Kevin Warsh Could Shake Up the Central Bank With His ‘Family Fight’ Model

Trump Fed Pick Kevin Warsh Could Shake Up the Central Bank With His ‘Family Fight’ Model

Wisconsin Lawmakers Propose Ranked Choice Voting for All Elections

Wisconsin Lawmakers Propose Ranked Choice Voting for All Elections

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Congress Isn’t Failing—It’s Choosing Not to Govern

The U.S. Built a Blueprint to Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It.

The U.S. Built a Blueprint to Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It.

Fifty years later, I'm still a dreamer

Fifty years later, I'm still a dreamer

The American tragedy of the Trump assassination attempt

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David L. Nevins
By David L. NevinsJul 17, 2024
David L. Nevins
David L. Nevins serves as publisher of The Fulcrum. Additionally, Nevins serves as co-founder and Board Chairman of the Bridge Alliance. Nevins brings business acumen, vision and a tireless this-must-and-can-be-done zeal to the burgeoning movement to bridge divides to transform the political process. As a business leader, Nevins excels at building bridges between people and organizations from the right, left and center for civilized conversation and then action. He co-founded the Bridge Alliance because, as he says, “No matter how well managed and how well funded anyone organization is, significant political reform will not happen without an alliance to further collaborative interactions. Together we can and will raise the collective impact of all.” He is a member of the Aspen Institute Society of Fellows, with a focus on the Aspen Rodel Fellowship in Public Leadership, he established and continues to work with The Nevins Democracy Leaders program at Penn State University. Nevins graduated with honors in economics from Penn State in 1969 and received an M.B.A. in finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971.
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Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.

When I was a young man, I thought our country was more divided than it had ever been and couldn’t possibly get worse.

I was a young teen when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and a college student in 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were senselessly assassinated. I witnessed the near-fatal shooting that almost ended the life of President Ronald Reagan just three months into his first term in 1981.

And now the attempt on former President Donald Trump's life in 2024.

Despite these futile and senseless acts of violence, I still have hope in a higher consciousness that will help us rise above it all.

My hope endures despite the conflict profiteers who thrive by sowing disinformation, outrage, and hate on social media, and the politicians who feed into our division with violent rhetoric.

Our divide is amplified because we live in silos, separated from each other based on what side of the political aisle we are on. Most of us watch the news station that fits the narrative we want to believe. We prefer to make accusations, innuendos, or spew misinformation instead of living into a higher standard of discourse and mutual understanding. Instead of being kind, we choose to feel superior in our tribe.

Yet despite it all, I have faith in America and that we can come together.

In troubled times in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s and today I often turn to music for the solace I need. It serves as the strongest form of soothing magic for me.

In 1970, the words for “ Bridge Over Troubled Wate r” by Simon and Garfunkel provided the solace I needed:

I'm sailing right behind
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will ease your mind
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will ease your mind

In the same year, “ Let it Be ” calmed my soul as John Lennon and Paul McCartney sang:

When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
And in my hour of darkness
She is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.
Let it be, let it be.

Whisper words of wisdom, let it be. And when the broken hearted people
Living in the world agree,
There will be an answer, let it be.
For though they may be parted there is
Still a chance that they will see
There will be an answer, let it be
Let it be, let it be. Yeah
There will be an answer, let it be.

More than 50 years have passed, and once again our nation is being tested. We, the citizens, are being called to be better. The next few months leading up to the election will be a trying time for us all and the call to come together rings loudly once again. Together, we cannot fail.

“ You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” And today, I hope that “ you will join us.”

So heed the words. Let’s sing out loudly that “ We Are the World ” and must come together as one:

There comes a time
When we heed a certain call
When the world must come together as one
There are people dying
Oh, and it's time to lend a hand to life
The greatest gift of all

We can't go on
Pretending day-by-day
That someone, somewhere soon make a change
We're all a part of God's great big family
And the truth, you know, love is all we need

We are the world
We are the children
We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let's start giving
There's a choice we're making
We're saving our own lives
It's true we'll make a better day, just you and me

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Donald Trump’s second administration has fully clarified Latinos’ racial position in America: our ethnic group’s labor, culture, and aspirations are too much for his supporters to stomach. The Latino presence in America triggers too many uneasy questions (are they White?), too many doubts (are they really American?), and too much resentment (why are they doing better than me?).

Trump’s targeted deportations of undocumented Latinos, unwarranted arrests of Latino citizens, and heightened ICE presence in Latino neighborhoods address these worries by lumping Latinos with Black people. Simply put, we have become yet another visible population that America socially stigmatizes, economically exploits, and politically terrorizes because aggrieved White adults want to preserve their rank as our nation’s premier racial group. The cumulative impacts are serious: just yesterday, an international panel of investigators on human rights and racism, backed by the U.N., found that such actions have resulted in “grave human rights violations.”

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Earlier this year, the Bridge Alliance and the National Academy of Public Administration launched the Fellows for Democracy and Public Service Initiative to strengthen the country's civic foundations. This fellowship unites the Academy’s distinguished experts with the Bridge Alliance’s cross‑sector ecosystem to elevate distributed leadership throughout the democracy reform landscape. Instead of relying on traditional, top‑down models, the program builds leadership ecosystems: spaces where people share expertise, prioritize collaboration, and use public‑facing storytelling to renew trust in democratic institutions. Each fellow grounds their work in one of six core sectors essential to a thriving democratic republic.

Recently, I interviewed Joel Gurin, who founded and now leads the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE) and wrote Open Data Now. Before launching CODE in 2015, he chaired the White House Task Force on Smart Disclosure, which studied how open government data can improve consumer markets. He also led as Chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission and spent over a decade at Consumer Reports.

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Kristi Noem is a Criminal. They Fired Her Because She’s a Woman

Kristi Noem deserved to get axed. After ignoring thousands of stories of officers detaining American citizens in violent, indiscriminate, unconstitutional roundups, posing for a gleeful photo-op at a hellacious El Salvadoran prison, labeling American protesters as domestic terrorists, and lying under oath multiple times, Democrats and even many Republicans lauded her exodus. Still, in what was a brief, volatile tenure as Secretary of Homeland Security, Noem transformed the agency charged with the protection of the American people into a theater for performative cruelty. Now, as the door hits Noem on the way out, it is important to note that her ouster was not a triumph of ethics or the law or even a sudden recollection of what competence looks like. Despite no lack of legitimate grounds for dismissal, most sources say the final straw was a $220 million ad blitz, possibly complicated by an alleged affair with her adviser. But who among Trump’s inner circle doesn’t come with a laundry list of wasteful spending and personal embarrassments? The rest of the Cabinet is chock full of unqualified Trump-loyalists demonstrating incompetence so regularly that in any other era they would have all resigned or been canned long ago. Given the purported reasons Noem was ultimately fired, and where the conversation has lingered since, to the untrained eye, it seems like Noem may have been the first to get the boot, at least in part because she’s not a man.

There’s nothing Noem did that another member of the cabinet or Trump himself couldn’t top. Consider the shameful tenure of our Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, who engaged in intimate business deals with Epstein years after Epstein’s first conviction, and even planned family vacations to his private island. While Noem is fired for a $220 million ad buy, Lutnick remains the face of American business, despite once being in business with a convicted sex trafficker and lying about it. And our wannabe-fraternity-pledgemaster Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is, if possible, an even greater liability. Hegseth breached security protocol in his second month on the job and oversaw a record $93 billion of spending in a single month, $9 million going to king crab and lobster tails, and $15 million to ribeye steaks. More gravely, in his zeal to project “lethality," Hegseth gutted civilian harm mitigation programs by 90 percent; shortly thereafter, on his watch, in what is the most devastating single military error in modern history, the U.S. fired a Tomahawk missile into a school full of children, killing at least 168 children and 14 teachers. Noem may have turned federal agents against American civilians (which is not why she was fired), but Hegseth is committing war crimes around the globe.

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A balance.

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A Pay‑to‑Play Presidency Testing the Limits of Our Institutions

Another day, another outrage, and another attack on the Constitution that this President has twice taken a vow to uphold. Instead of accepting the Supreme Court decision striking down his imposition of tariffs, the President is now imposing them by executive order and excoriating the Justices who ruled against him. His disrespect for the Constitution and the judiciary is boundless.

To this retired New York State judge, all hell seems to have broken loose in our federal government. Congress lies dormant when it is not enabling the chief executive’s misuse and personal acquisition of federal funds, and, notwithstanding its recent tariffs ruling, a majority of the Supreme Court generally rubber-stamps the administration’s actions through opaque “shadow docket” rulings. In doing so, SCOTUS abdicates its role as an independent check.

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