Michael Rivera is the Berks County Commissioner. The Republican began serving in January of 2020.
"My number one priority is fiscal responsibility," Rivera said in describing the focus of his work as County Commissioner. "Counties generate their money primarily through property taxes. My commitment to the residents of Berks County is to be fiscally responsible with their money."
I spoke with Commissioner Rivera on a recent episode of the Fulcrum Democracy Forum (FDF). The program engages citizens in evolving government to better meet all people's needs. Consistent with the Fulcrum's mission, FDF strives to share many perspectives to widen our audience's viewpoints.
I met him while recording the first episode of The 50, a four-year multimedia project that visits with the public where they live across all 50 states to learn what motivated them to vote in the 2024 presidential election and see how the Donald Trump administration is meeting those concerns and hopes.
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Pennsylvania, with the largest electoral prize of all major swing states, was a highly coveted prize for Vice President Kamala Harris and then-President Donald Trump in the 2024 race for the White House. It was predicted that the winner of the Keystone State was highly likely to win the entire election.
It was fitting for us to begin The 50 project by visiting Reading, PA. The majority Latino city inched a win for Harris, but ultimately Trump easily won Berks County, home to Reading, by 12 points and the state by more than 50% of the vote.
I spoke with Rivera about the aggressive moves coming from Washington, D.C., and their impact on people, particularly Reading's immigrant community. Rivera explained that many of his constituents aren't opposed to immigrants who come to the country legally and reacted favorably at the polls to Trump's closing-the-border campaign.
Rivera agrees that the broken immigration system must be fixed to make it easier for people to come to the U.S., as the economy depends on it. "There are more job openings than there are people that are able to fill those jobs," he said. "We're not going to birth our way out of that. The way we're going to do that is through people coming in through legal immigration. So, the laws here in the United States do need to be improved."
The Pew Research Center estimates that more than 8 million undocumented immigrants are working in the U.S., representing about 5% of all workers.
Rivera was born in Pottstown and lived there till the age of 6, when he and his family moved to Puerto Rico, where he grew up and got married. In 1996, he and his wife moved to Pennsylvania to start their real estate business. He is a Real Estate professional at Keller Williams Platinum Realty in Wyomissing.
Rivera also worked as Assistant Vice President of Business Services at the Greater Reading Chamber of Commerce & Industry, where he assisted and guided entrepreneurs and business owners in obtaining the resources they needed to succeed. He developed and implemented programs to help small businesses grow and become sustainable.
He resides in Bern Township with his wife, Zylkia, and their children, Andre and Adriana.
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Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and a board member of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund, the parent organization of The Fulcrum. He is the publisher of the Latino News Network and the only person to serve twice as president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ).
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.