Trump’s assault on American democracy. Now that gerrymandering has failed as a strategy for hanging onto power, I eagerly await Trump’s next move.
Climate change. Check out George Manbiot’s column on the possible collapse of the the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.
The Iran/Lebanon War. Formal peace talks aren’t happening. Saturday, Trump told Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to stay home for now. Iran is offering to re-open the Strait of Hormuz to end the war, essentially offering Trump no gain from it.
Ukraine. Here’s the Institute for the Study of War’s current update.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about gerrymandering
and the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Saturday, a gunman fired several shots during the dinner, which President Trump and many other administration officials were attending. The shots were audible inside the ballroom, but none of the guests were injured.
From a pure how-could-this-happen point of view, I found the analysis at the Doomsday Scenario blog informative and down to Earth. Garrett Graff is a journalist who has attended past WHC dinners and has written extensively about presidential security. He thinks the security plan worked pretty well: It’s unreasonable to expect the Secret Service to lock down an entire hotel that has multiple unrelated events and guests, so the goal is to stop would-be attackers well before they get within range of the president. That’s what happened Saturday.
My political response is that I’m glad the attack was unsuccessful. Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I consider the Trump regime to be the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War, and I have no great affection for Trump as a person. But I think we’re on track to restore the constitutional order through the electoral system, as the Founders intended and as Hungary has recently done. Anything that sends us off on a violent trajectory is a risk I’d rather not take.
Speaking frankly, the attack was fortuitously timed for Trump, perhaps breaking a cycle that sees his popularity touch new lows with each poll. Given the boost his 2024 campaign got from a failed assassination attempt, it’s hard not to be suspicious. But I’m not going to push any conspiracy theories unless substantial evidence presents itself. I’d be far more suspicious if the shooter hadn’t survived to tell his own story.
Dean Blundell (who is a little too rabidly anti-Trump for my taste) noted that it only took minutes to start the talking point that “This is why the White House needs its own ballroom.”
Predictably, the media is asking Democrats if they regret their anti-Trump rhetoric, and completely ignoring the overall rhetorical environment. Trump himself is by far the greatest source of inflammatory rhetoric, often referring to his opponents or critics as insane or treasonous.
and the war
Not much new to say. Trump continues to want to dictate terms to Iran as if he had won the war. Iran doesn’t feel defeated and won’t be dictated to. The Obama agreement that Trump tore up looks better and better all the time.
Everyone more-or-less agrees on the basic facts: The SPLC paid people to infiltrate various right-wing and white-supremacist groups, as it has done for decades. Since their agents were undercover, the SPLC didn’t publicize their work. DOJ is charging that this was a fraud against SPLC’s contributors. I haven’t given money to the SPLC in years, but I’m still probably fairly representative of their donors. I would not feel defrauded.
Remember the Afghans who are in trouble with the Taliban because they helped us? We’ve got 1100 of them housed at a military base in Qatar, and we’ve made them this amazing offer: Go to the Congo or go home to the Taliban.
Canary Media makes the case against biofuels, which sound like a great idea but often aren’t. Not only do biofuel crops (like corn) have a high carbon footprint in the US, but internationally they encourage cropland expansion that results in deforestation. Sadly, both parties have latched onto biofuels as a good idea.
Democrats need a new approach to agriculture, focused less on the 1% of Americans who farm and more on the 100% who eat. That would mean redistributing less money from ordinary taxpayers to the biggest farmers who grow the most common row crops, while also opposing the tariffs, price supports, and biofuel mandates that raise prices at the supermarket. Let Trump stand for giving farmers “much better than a level playing field.” Democrats should stand with everybody else.
Small farmers are in trouble this year: Thanks to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, fertilizer and diesel fuel costs are way up. Most farmers voted for Trump.
Trump and his allies have been having a hard time in court. Laura Loomer’s $150 million lawsuit against Bill Maher (for saying on his comedy show that Trump “might be” f**king Loomer) was thrown out — at least partly because of evidence the claim was true.
And a federal judge appears skeptical of Trump’s $10 billion shake-down of the Treasury. He’s suing the IRS because some of his tax information got leaked to the media during his first term. Conceivably there might be damage there, but nothing like $10 billion. But that’s not what’s bothering the judge: Since Trump oversees the IRS, he controls both sides of the litigation. He is essentially in a position to award himself money.
The No Kings protester who dressed as a penis holding a “No Dick Tater” sign is not guilty of whatever police in Fairhope, Alabama tried to charge her with. Attempting to show the woman was trying to get arrested, the prosecution called her husband to the stand as a surprise witness, and asked if he had brought bail money to the protest.
“I always make sure I have bail money!” Fletcher replied emphatically, as if this should be the most obvious thing in the world. Did he have bail money on him now? “Yeah!” Fletcher exclaimed, then gestured broadly. “With this many cops around? Come on.” The room erupted with laughter.
One of the first things President Trump did in his second term was to “declare that an invasion is ongoing at the southern border” and respond by directing “that entry into the United States of such aliens be suspended until I issue a finding that the invasion at the southern border has ceased.” His order also denied the right of migrants at the border or having entered the US to contest removal by applying for asylum.
A federal court previously found that the president had overstepped the bounds of his power, and Friday the DC Circuit Court of Appeals agreed.
we hold that the Proclamation and Guidance are unlawful insofar as they circumvent Congress’s carefully crafted removal procedures and cast aside federal laws that afford individuals the opportunity to apply and be considered for a grant of asylum or withholding of removal.
This topic is a bit messy to discuss, because several things are true at the same time.
Our laws about asylum exist for very good reasons.
Our current asylum process doesn’t work well and is open to abuse.
Processes established by law need to be changed by Congress, not by the President.
Why do we grant asylum? Asylum allows people escaping oppression in one country to seek refuge in another.
Any discussion of asylum needs to start with the voyage of the St. Louis, an ocean liner in the Hamburg-Amerika fleet. After Kristallnacht, many German Jews decided that it was not safe to stay in Germany. The St. Louis left Hamburg on May 13, 1939 with 937 passengers, nearly all of them Jews. The original destination was Havana, where many of the passengers hoped to wait until they could be granted admission to the United States. But the Cuban government allowed only 28 of them to land. The rest remained on the ship, which then tried to go to Miami, where the passengers were also denied entry. (Direct appeals to President Roosevelt went unanswered.) The St. Louis then returned to Europe. Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France accepted most of the passengers, at least temporarily. But few managed to get out of Belgium, the Netherlands, and France before the Germans conquered those countries. Eventually, 254 of the St. Louis passengers died in the Holocaust.
Often when we look back at the Holocaust, we ask “Why didn’t more Jews leave while they could?” The answer is that many did try, but had nowhere to go. Hundreds of Jews who would ultimately die in the Holocaust made it as far as Miami’s harbor, but were sent back.
Much of the world made a Never Again pledge in response to the horror of the Holocaust. That sentiment got institutionalized in several international agreements, like the Convention on Refugees, the Convention Against Torture, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United States is party to all these agreements, and Congress has passed laws to implement the promises we made there. When the Trump regime announced that it would no longer accept applications for asylum, it was violating not only US laws, but the treaties we had signed.
I think now in the year 2025 – we’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century – we take a step back and we see that there are massive migratory flows taking place, and a lot of times massive amounts of people are claiming asylum. In our system at least, when these claims get adjudicated, 90-plus percent of people are found not to be eligible for asylum. And we all know this kind of abuse is happening, frankly. And people who are economic migrants are coming in, in our country, saying that they are – that they should be given asylum. Our problem is when you have hundreds of thousands of people who arrive all at once and claim this, that really requires an individualized adjudication.
So now, we are in a sense saying, okay, well, please, you take a number and we will be back for your individualized interview in six years. And in the meantime, people can live in our country legally. They can start – they might get married. They can work. And so in a sense the migration – the asylum system has become a huge loophole in our migration laws. And we just have to be realistic about this, right? And I think the UN has a responsibility – just as it was instrumental, I think, in encouraging countries to adopt these kind of laws, I think we have to be realistic that these laws are now being abused. And we have to just acknowledge that.
Now, this is a Trump official, and the Trump regime is famous for fudging numbers. So ignore some of Landau’s specifics, like the 90% and the six years. But here’s the liberal Brookings Institute saying something similar:
Further complicating the task of managing the southern border was an historic change in the nature and sources of unauthorized border crossers. During the final decades of the 20th century, most of such crossers were working-age young Mexican men. But during the current century, the mix shifted to families from Central America and beyond who sought asylum in the United States by claiming a “reasonable fear of persecution” in their country of origin.
The evidence suggests that most asylum seekers were fleeing poverty, lack of economic mobility, crime, and political disorder — all good reasons for leaving but these do not meet the standard for being granted asylum. Nevertheless, the law requires that asylum claims be assessed on a case-by-case basis, and as the number of cases rose sharply, the institutions responsible for adjudicating them were overwhelmed. During the past decade, the share of immigration cases resolved each year has fallen by half, and the backlog of pending cases rose from about 400,000 in 2013 to more than 3.1 million by the end of 2023. Few were held in detention for long periods; most were released into the U.S. with court dates far in the future, a policy that critics denounced as “catch and release.”
So the gist is: Yes, you’re poor and you long for the kinds of economic opportunity you might find in the US. But you’re not the future Holocaust victim our asylum laws were meant for.
The problem with a system like this is that once the problem becomes known, it gets worse: The swamped immigration courts result in longer delays, which encourage more people to apply even if they don’t have a good case. And that swamps the courts further.
What to do. Obviously, we need to process asylum cases faster. If we could do that, the motivation to file a flimsy asylum case would diminish, reversing the vicious cycle we’re currently in.
There are two ways to do this:
Create more immigration courts to work through the backlog faster.
Streamline the process so that each case takes less court time.
Each way has a downside: More courts require more money, and a streamlined process may not give asylum seekers a fair opportunity to present their cases. So a certain amount of care needs to be taken. But both are preferable to just shutting the door, as Trump wants to do.
In any case, the solution needs to take account of our treaty obligations and the laws Congress has already passed. And that means that Congress has to pass the solution; it can’t just be imposed by the President.
What stands in the way of a legislative solution is that Trump does not know how to make a win-win deal. He wants what he wants, and he wants to get it without giving up anything. But Democrats are going to want things too, like a path to citizenship for the Dreamers and limits on mass deportation. Congress is a place for compromise, and Trump hates compromise.
Partly that’s just him, but it also represents the people who elected him. In 2024, a compromise immigration bill was ready to go through Congress, but Trump urged Republicans to pull out of the deal so that he could have a better issue to run on against Biden or Harris. And before Trump, back in 2013 a carefully crafted bipartisan compromise passed the Senate before House conservatives rejected it. (Arguably, his role in crafting the compromise was what scuttled Marco Rubio’s presidential candidacy in 2016.)
Above all, we need to do something. There are still oppressive governments in the world and still people in need of refuge. When the next St. Louis liner arrives in Miami, we don’t want to turn it away.
Iran is not the only war Trump started, but appears to be losing.
Virginia became the latest state to gerrymander its congressional districts ahead of the midterm elections. Tuesday, a referendum to redraw the state’s maps passed by 3%, 51.5%-48.5%. The likely effect is to turn the current 6-5 Democratic majority in Virginia’s US House delegation into a 10-1 advantage.
Vox estimates that this result puts the Democrats one seat ahead in the redistricting battle that Trump started in Texas. Florida could still tip the balance in the GOP’s favor, but probably not by much. [1]
Prior to the current round, partisan gerrymandering had more or less balanced out: In 2024, Republican House candidates got a small majority of the votes and their party wound up with a small majority of the seats, as they should have.
Republicans have gone to court to prevent Virginia’s new map from taking effect. A circuit-court judge blocked implementation, but was overturned by an appeals court. The case goes to the Virginia Supreme Court today. The deadline for candidates to file to be on the ballot is May 26, so this process can’t take long.
Republicans are asking the courts to throw out 3 million votes in an election that they lost.
For Republicans, democracy is nothing more than a word.
They are content if every person who waited in line to vote or took time off from work to cast their ballot did it for naught. They seek a result that would mean that every election worker who worked the polls wasted their time. They want the people who knocked doors or canvassed on either side of this question to feel as though they have accomplished nothing.
Meanwhile, here’s how the so-called “liberal media” has covered this story.
When Trump started this battle by pushing Texas to redraw it already-gerrymandered maps, hoping to gain five Republican House seats, The Washington Post characterized Democratic opposition as a “freakout”, and reassured its readers that “What’s happening in the Lone Star State is not a threat to democracy.”
But there’s no mystery here, and no hypocrisy to expose. AOC summed up the Republican reaction to the vote as “Wah, wah, wah” and explained the larger context:
Listen, Democrats have attempted and asked Republicans for 10 years to ban partisan gerrymandering. And for 10 years, Republicans have said no. Republicans have fought for partisan gerrymanders across the United States of America, and these are the rules that they have set.
One notable attempt to end gerrymandering was the For the People Act, which Nancy Pelosi pushed through the House, but Republicans filibustered in the Senate. AOC says that deal is still available. [2]
If Republicans decide that they would like to revisit a ban on partisan gerrymandering, I welcome them. We have the bill right here to end this all today. But they don’t want to, because they like pursuing and continuing to enact an unfair electoral landscape, and so we have an obligation to defend ourselves.
This obligation to “defend ourselves” represents a major change in Democratic tactics, beginning with Gavin Newsom’s aggressive response to the Texas gerrymander. Previously, Democrats had tried to cast themselves as the good-government party, avoiding the bad-faith tactics that Republicans have used to seek power. [3]
But perversely, joining Republicans in the gutter may ultimately work a good-government purpose. Now that Republicans realize they could lose too, perhaps a bipartisan consensus against gerrymandering will finally develop.
[1] All such estimates are iffy, because voters may not vote the same way they have in recent elections.
Gerrymandering works by spreading a party’s majority thin to stretch it over more districts. So a miscalculation could result in a previously safe seat flipping.
For example: Suppose a state has a 51-49 partisan majority. The majority party could gerrymander its congressional districts so that each district gives it the same 51-49 advantage, setting up the possibility that it could win all the House seats. However, even a small shift in the political winds could turn the situation around and give the other party all the seats.
This question arises particularly in Texas, where the new maps are based on the 2024 results. However, polls indicate that many Hispanics who voted for Trump in 2024 may regret their vote, or may not see themselves as Republican voters generally. So trying to gain five seats conceivably could result in losing a few seats the GOP had thought were safe.
[2] AOC might have added that liberal Supreme Court judges have tried to find gerrymandering unconstitutional, but conservative justices have supported it, arguing that district maps are a “political question” to be decided perhaps by the very legislatures that have been gerrymandered to lock in one-party rule.
A related court case should be decided soon: In Louisiana v Callais, the Court appears to be ready to drive the final nail into the coffin of the Voting Rights Act. Current interpretations of the VRA require states to draw a certain number of minority-majority districts, so that Black or Hispanic voters have a chance to elect congresspeople to represent their interests. Without this stipulation, a state could spread its minority populations across multiple districts and elect White-only congressional delegations. While this change would likely not take effect until the 2028 elections, it could result in as many as 15 Black House members in the South losing their seats.
[3] For example, Biden re-established the wall between the White House and the Justice Department that Trump had torn down in his first term. Arguably, Merrick Garland’s desire to end DOJ’s politicization is the reason that the Trump indictments appeared so slowly, which allowed him and the partisan Supreme Court to run out the clock.
For the last couple of days, the news has been dominated by the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner Saturday night. But I’m going to just note that event without dwelling on it, because I think we all understand it. And since the shooter failed to get off a shot at the President or any other major official, his attack shouldn’t have any lasting consequences.
More significant was the election result in Virginia, where Democrats passed a redistricting map that is expected to net them four House seats in the fall election. This makes the recent gerrymandering tally just about even, or maybe gives Democrats a small advantage. The entire redistricting battle marks a major change in Democratic strategy, which used to revolve around trying to maintain good-government norms even as Republicans changed the rules around them. So this will be the focus of the first featured post, “Where the Gerrymandering Battle Stands After Virginia”, which should be out shortly.
Something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while is the process for refugees to seek asylum in the US, which has been broken for some while. This has given Trump an opening to fix the problem by breaking the rule of law, in a two-wrongs-should-make-a-right manner. Democrats wind up in a complicated position, because the previous status quo is indefensible, but dictatorship is not the right answer.
This week an appeals court rejected Trump’s asylum-limiting executive order. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will have to decide this issue, but the appellate decision gives me a hook to raise the topic. So the second featured post will discuss asylum, starting with the Holocaust-based reasons our asylum laws exist. That should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.
Finally, the weekly summary will note the WHC dinner shooting, summarize the lack of progress in the Iran War, list a few of the other court cases the Trump regime has lost recently, and cover a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon, but it may slip.
Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Justice Department is working increasingly hard to support Trump’s conspiracy theories about rigged elections.
Climate change. Rising sea levels is looking like a bigger problem than previously thought.
The Iran/Lebanon war. The Strait is closed again. Trump wants us to believe that he’ll achieve a victory-like peace any day now. But it’s not happening.
Ukraine. Ukraine is coping with its shortage of soldiers by fielding more robots.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the war
Last week I predicted that Trump’s anti-blockade-blockade would fail to convince Iran’s leaders they are defeated.
In a few days it will be clear that this move didn’t work either, so Trump will go back to threatening to kill Iran’s “whole civilization“.
We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!
I see no end in sight here. Trump won’t stop the bombing until he has an agreement he can spin as a victory, and there is no victory to be had. So he will keep doing what he’s been doing: destroying stuff and killing people, then stopping the bombing and announcing that Iran has made concessions it hasn’t actually made, then getting angry when Iran doesn’t do what he said they would do, then resuming the destruction and killing.
I am amazed the news media and the stock market keep taking Trump’s statements seriously. Thursday, for example, he claimed Iran had agreed to give up its enriched uranium. The claim got lots of headlines and a rise out of the stock market, which set records on Friday. But it was just a fantasy, so Sunday we’re back to threatening to commit war crimes.
Meanwhile, Trump’s approval is not exactly “cratering”, as some claim. Rather, it’s just inexorably headed downward, week by week. It’s not any one development that’s turning people around. Rather, it’s the unending bad decisions and outrageous behavior. Every day brings something new. Half the country now disapproves “strongly” of his overall performance, with another 13% disapproving “somewhat”.
and Trump vs. the Pope
I would like to ignore the Trump-versus-Pope story, because it’s another one of those stories that gets people wound up for no real purpose. (I mean: If Trump were generally governing justly and well, but just couldn’t get along with the Pope, it wouldn’t bother me.) But I have to comment on the ridiculous ways Trump’s sycophants have tried to support him. Nominally a Catholic himself, J. D. Vance warned:
I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.
To understand why the USA is where it is today, all you need to do is see that Trump cannot tolerate even the mildest, insightful criticism from the Pope, but Trump will allow Putin to humiliate him deeply and constantly, while still craving Putin’s approval.
and you also might be interested in …
As predicted last week, Eric Swalwell hasn’t just ended his campaign for governor of California, he has resigned from Congress. Simultaneously, Republican Tony Gonzales resigned. He’s the guy whose female staffer committed suicide after Gonzales pressured her for sex. The cases proceeded at very different speeds: The Swalwell allegations only surfaced about a week before his resignation. Gonzales had been in trouble since September.
Remember the Dreamers, undocumented people who were brought to America as small children and know no other country? Giving them a path to citizenship has been popular since the Obama administration first offered them protection. Well, Trump’s ICE has deported 174 of them.
ICE is doing a better job of avoiding headlines than it did pre-Minneapolis. But it is still a lawless gang of thugs. A federal judge in the Eastern District of New York explains his release order for two men unlawfully detained:
Respondents [i.e., ICE] have arrested individuals, detained them, and then afterwards issued arrest warrants that document the basis for the arrest. Sadly, ICE’s own “testimony confirmed that this illegal practice has become standard procedure for ICE enforcement efforts in this district.” … Police and law enforcement cannot operate as roving bands, detaining individuals, figuring out the reasons later, and papering over their failures afterwards. This sadly is the practice in many other parts of the world. But in the United States, the law prohibits such conduct.
Charter schools have to maintain a lot of public school standards (like admitting anyone), but they benefit from massive donations from rich supporters. They have better, newer facilities than legacy public schools.
Private schools can pick and choose students, so they get state money while avoiding expensive special ed students and students considered “disruptive”. They grow, and also become a destination for white flight, as well as for parents who consider the public schools dangerous.
Public schools lose students and funding, and have to worry about closing.
The Trump regime is stacking the deck in order to get more indictments of his perceived enemies. They have defined a “grand conspiracy” case that claims all the investigations of Trump’s illegal acts were part of a single plot, and they are pushing that case in a Florida district where corrupt Trump judge Aileen Cannon can oversee it. They’ve fired the career prosecutor and replaced her with a Trump puppet.
Utah is constructing a 1300-bed facility for the homeless. It’s seven miles from Salt Lake City’s center and isn’t planned to include public transportation. Common Dreams fears it could become a forced-labor camp.
Trump voters are beginning to regret their decisions. But that doesn’t automatically mean they’ll turn around. What Hungary can teach us about the full process.
I could list a dozen articles making these points, and you’ve probably seen a number without my pointing them out. But the most interesting to me was Patrice Mersault’s “I Lied My Way into a MAGA Focus Group” (parts 1 and 2).
In a nutshell, Mersault (a pseudonym taken from a Camus novel) kept getting rejected for focus groups when he (the Camus character is male, so I’ll use male pronouns) answered questionnaires honestly, so he created an imaginary MAGAt in his mind and answered as that character. He got in, with the idea that he would pretend to turn against Trump and see how many members of the focus group he could take with him.
Not a good plan, exactly. More of a concept of a plan. The idea was to blend in, say the right things, earn a little credibility, and then, at the right moment, turn. Say what I actually think. Disrupt the room.
But once the conversation moved past why everyone in the room voted for Trump—the familiar grievances: the immigrants, the stolen elections, the belief that cruelty is somehow a form of patriotism—the room didn’t behave the way I expected it to.
It turned out that the other 11 members of the group were fed up with Trump too, even though they had all voted for him three times. (I suppose we have to consider the possibility that Mersault’s entire account is a fiction, but I’ve decided to take it seriously.) Asked to give Trump a letter grade, the participants gave him six D’s and six F’s.
Why? Food and gas prices. The war. Worries about maintaining Social Security and Medicare. Lack of jobs. Epstein.
Who knows how they felt about Trump’s outrageous tweets and behaviors a year ago? But now that they were criticizing him, they didn’t like his manner either. The rudeness, the divisiveness, seeing everyone who doesn’t agree as an enemy. The sense that everything is about him. They didn’t try to defend it; instead, they brought up those criticisms themselves.
So far, so good. But Mersault points out that the voters themselves don’t seem to have changed. He characterized them at the beginning as having a vague and inchoate sense of grievance:
The sense that something had been taken from them. Or was being taken. Or was about to be taken any minute now, unless someone stepped in and stopped it.
The grievances manifested as discontent with a familiar set of issues:
The pandemic. The border. The economy. Woke culture. The various Democratic alternatives, all described with varying degrees of contempt.
None of that has reversed. Nobody had seen the light of liberal wokeness and was saying, “I see now that Black and brown immigrants really don’t do me harm” or “I guess transgender folks aren’t as different as I thought they were” or “Women and minorities do need some government protection”.
They had looked at Trump as “a tool”, someone who would fight back against the forces that they think are taking away their country and their future. They still have that sense of grievance, and they are still looking for a tool to break a system that they see working against them.
The question is: What will they do now? The focus group showed no enthusiasm for a Trump successor like Vance or Rubio. But what are their alternatives? Find some new hero? Stay home? Switch parties?
The Hungarian example. For years, the Orbán regime in Hungary has been a model for the American Right: Get into office and start changing the rules. Get control of the media. Corrupt the courts. Destroy the independence of the universities. Use government favors and regulations as carrots and sticks to make businesses line up with you. Gerrymander. Make voting easy for your voters but hard for opposition voters.
For a long time the Orbán program worked. But then it stopped. On April 12, Hungarian voters decisively rejected Orbán’s party, in such numbers that the tilted playing field couldn’t save him.
The opposition leader Peter Magyar did something American Democrats would like to do: He didn’t just raise dissatisfaction with the Orbán regime. (In fact, he didn’t have to, it was already there.) And he didn’t just get dissatisfied Orbán voters to stay home. He got some large number of those voters to vote for him.
Americans have been trying to read that election for clues about strategy. Maybe, after years of being a model of how a right-wing authoritarian regime rises, Hungary could provide an example of how a right-wing authoritarian regime falls.
She makes a few salient points about how Orbán came to power and stayed there: Hungarians were really fed up with the previous government, so Orbán represented a genuine uprising. And once he got into power and controlled the media, he made sure that every potential opposition leader was “pre-smeared”. Simply proposing to run so-and-so evoked a reaction of “Oh, not him again.”
But Magyar came from nowhere and represented no previous political movement.
Magyar Péter broke this because there was nothing to work with. He was, until early 2024, essentially unknown — a private citizen with no political career, no failed government, no scandal that could be weaponized. When the attacks came, as they did immediately and ferociously, they simply didn’t stick. Not because he was beyond criticism, but because what was said about him was, from the beginning, simply false. Without a kernel of truth at the center, the whole construction kept collapsing. Voters could feel the difference, even when they couldn’t articulate it. …
He also did something that sounds simple and is extraordinarily hard: he showed up. Over two years, he visited more than 700 settlements, some of them six times. Exhausting just to watch: the energy he put into it was extraordinary. He went to places the opposition had never reached, and talked to people who had never heard an alternative from someone standing in front of them, looking them in the eye. You cannot fact-check someone out of a worldview. But presence, over time, creates the conditions where doubt becomes possible. That is slower and less satisfying than a viral moment. It is also what actually works.
She identifies two deadly ideas: that the regime is inevitable, and that society is irreparably broken into two enemy camps.
The [authoritarian] method is consistent everywhere it has been deployed. Find the genuine fault lines in a society: urban versus rural, educated versus working class, the people who feel left behind versus the people who seem not to notice. Pry those lines open. Make sure every election is a referendum on identity and culture rather than on whether the pension is adequate or the hospital is functional. Keep the two halves of society furious at each other, convinced the other half is the enemy, and make sure your coalition is always the slightly larger half. The culture war is not a byproduct of this politics. It is the mechanism.
Like Trump, Orbán had no authentic convictions.
This is worth understanding, because it changes what you’re actually fighting. You are not fighting a true believer. You are fighting a machine that is very good at finding the line that divides society just enough – and parking itself on the larger side of it.
And this seems like the key point:
The grievances that get exploited are real – that is what makes it work. The sense of being left behind, of being looked down on, of watching your children leave and not come back – that is not manufactured resentment. It is legitimate. The autocrat does not invent it. He finds it, names it, and then aims it in a direction that serves him rather than the people experiencing it. … You cannot say that grievance doesn’t exist because it doesn’t affect you. The autocrat has a ready-made answer for it – simple, emotionally satisfying, and wrong. The alternative is to have a better answer, not to pretend the question isn’t being asked.
The opposition also has to avoid “the performance of contempt”.
The moment you hate your fellow citizen more than you hate the system that is robbing you both, the system has already half-won. … The lesson, though, is not simply that these systems can be beaten. It is about how. You cannot win by playing from their script. The moment you accept their frame – that your society is divided into two enemy camps, one good and one irredeemably wrong – you have lost something you won’t easily recover. The autocrat wins not just when he stays in power, but when he gets you to see your neighbor as your enemy. When the hatred flows horizontally, between citizens, rather than upward, toward the people actually responsible.
The alternative is simpler and harder to hold onto: we belong to each other. We love the same country. We want it to be better. We disagree -sometimes bitterly, sometimes irreconcilably- about how. That disagreement is not a war: it is politics, it is normal and it is supposed to happen.
What I learned in Europe. I spent the first week or so of April on a Viking Danube cruise. I went to Prague, Nuremberg, Vienna, Budapest, and a few other places. I walked through a lot of museums and talked to a lot of tour guides, but I’m going to resist the temptation to claim that I’ve become some kind of expert on Central Europe. I speak only a smattering of German, and no Czech or Hungarian at all. Most of the locals I spoke to (in English) probably aren’t typical or representative. So don’t interpret my trip as some kind of research project. I certainly don’t.
But the Danube trip did give me a good opportunity to meditate on America, and to see patterns in other societies that I should have recognized in my own.
On a walking tour of Prague, we eventually wound up at the castle that had been the seat of the German-speaking Habsburg emperor for a number of years around 1600 or so. The castle itself goes back well into the Middle Ages. While recounting some medieval transfer of power, the guide said, “And that was the last of our kings who spoke Czech.”
That sentence stuck in my mind. One perpetual theme of MAGA influencers is that the ruling elite (whoever you might imagine them to be) don’t understand ordinary Americans. That, they claim, is how you wind up with affirmative action programs and men playing women’s sports and vaccine mandates.
But in Czech history, that sentiment is literal: The kings can’t understand the ordinary people, because they don’t speak Czech. After the Habsburgs fell in 1918, there was briefly a Czechoslovakian democracy. But that fell into dictatorship, and then the Germans took over, and then the Russians. Today, the Czech Republic governs itself, but the transnational European Union is always looking over its shoulder. Czechs are probably fairly suspicious of this, and maybe that’s why they’re one of the few EU nations that don’t use the euro.
When I tried to imagine myself as a small-town Czech nationalist, I looked at Prague with great suspicion. The whole city is subtitled in English for the benefit of travelers. Lots of shops and other businesses seem not to have a Czech name at all. Places that ought to be sacred to Czechs (like that castle complex) are barely accessible, because they’re overrun with tourists speaking every known language. I might question whether Prague is Czech at all any more; it seems a lot like Czech territory occupied by some globalist empire.
That vision gave me a new appreciation of MAGA in America. There is real grievance in rural and small-town America, something I’ve written about before. It’s a sense that the place you live, which is maybe the place you grew up, has no obvious path into the future. The jobs are leaving, the talented young people are leaving, and there seems to be no end to it.
If that were the whole grievance, though, rural and small-town anger might focus where it really belongs: on the big corporations who rig the system in their favor and don’t care where they build things; and on the billionaires who get big tax breaks and leave no money behind for schools and roads and local investment. But laid over the economic grievance is a sense of dislocation: The America I grew up in isn’t just endangered, it’s already gone in lots of places. This gets you to the demonization of immigrants and people whose lifestyles diverge from what was socially acceptable in the past.
So often, when I run into conservatives obsessed with culture-war issues, I want to ask “Why do you care?” If someone with a penis wants to wear skirts and makeup and start using a name like Susan, what’s it to you that you should feel so incensed about it? If two men or two women want to marry, and to live a life not all that different from the one you live with your opposite-sex spouse, how are you harmed?
The dislocation theory makes sense of this. They aren’t harmed in any material sense, but the culture-war issues are symbols of their grievance: This is not their world any more. They used to know how they (and their children and their communities) could thrive, but now they don’t. The culture-war issue isn’t itself a grievance, but they’ve been trained to see it as a signpost pointing to grievances.
It also explains the hostility to cities. The new world, the world where they don’t belong and can’t succeed, has already taken the cities. The cities are territory occupied by a globalist empire.
It also explains the conspiracy theories. When you feel something, any story that explains and justifies the feeling seems plausible. Fact-checking the narrative doesn’t affect that sense of plausibility.
Progressive vs. centrist. At least since the Clinton administration, conflict has been raging between two theories of why Democrats lose and how they can win. The centrist theory says that Democrats lose when they become too liberal and alienate moderate swing voters. The progressive theory says that Democrats lose when they seem inauthentic and fail to give voters a clear new vision of where the country should go.
When they actually get into office, though, the two kinds of Democrats agree on a great deal. Centrists want to focus on proposals that are immediately achievable, while progressives see those same proposals as first steps on their path into the future.
Both factions want to spin current events in their favor. But if I take the lessons of Mersault and Zsofi to heart, I think both framings miss the point: what the reachable voters are looking for is not fundamentally a more liberal or conservative policy. They’re looking for authenticity and for someone they can trust. They want candidates who care about them enough to show up, to learn what they care about, and to speak to them as if they were intelligent people with real concerns. If you do that, you can get away with taking some principled stands they disagree with.
Look at candidates who are surviving or even thriving in what should be hostile environments. Andy Beshear is popular in Kentucky, but he still gets away with vetoing an anti-trans-rights bill. (“My faith teaches me that all children are children of God and Senate Bill 150 will endanger the children of Kentucky. … I heard from children that believe this bill is picking on them, and asking — in many ways — why? I told them that I was going to show them that there is at least one person in Frankfort that cares for all of our children in the commonwealth, no matter what.”) In Texas, James Talarico’s Christianity takes him different places than MAGA Christianity does, but so far he hasn’t compromised his vision. Jon Ossoff is doing well in Georgia, largely because of his way of speaking in terms voters identify with. (Listen to him make the case against Trump’s corruption.) Pete Buttigieg isn’t currently running for anything, but he goes into enemy territory (like Fox News) and holds his own — and not by throwing unpopular Democrats or Democratic constituencies to the wolves.
Of course Democrats, like all politicians, should focus on their popular positions. But they should put themselves in positions to be challenged on unpopular positions, and they should be ready to defend those positions in easily understandable terms, tracing them back to core values that are widely shared, or at least widely appreciated. They need to answer criticism without denigrating the critic.
Most of all, Democrats need to send the message that they will look out for the country, and not just for their own voters.
The moment you hate your fellow citizen more than you hate the system that is robbing you both, the system has already half-won.
But the right path is not to pander to those you disagree with, but to address them honestly, intelligently, and respectfully
Disagreement is not a war: it is politics, it is normal and it is supposed to happen.
Having been home long enough to catch my breath, I’m planning to write the article I should have written last week, about MAGA discontent and how Democrats might appeal to some of the former Trump voters, using Peter Magyar’s landslide victory over the authoritarian Orbán regime in Hungary as a model.
I’m basing the piece partly on my own observations, but also leaning heavily on two blog posts you might not have seen: one by a female Hungarian lawyer and another by a guy who got into a MAGA focus group under false pretenses. My conclusion is that it’s a mistake for Democrats to force this topic into their ongoing progressive/centrist debate. Neither framing quite fits the issue or takes advantage of the opportunity.
That post should appear around 10 EDT. The weekly summary will cover the war, Trump vs. the Pope, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
The war has accelerated or made evident a trend that was already there, which is that the whole Trump administration is about a kind of rebalancing of power, so that we are less powerful and our rivals are more powerful.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Hungarian election has no direct effect on the US, but Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat (after Trump and Vance pulled out all the tops to support him) has to worry the Trump regime. Orbán was the prototype, and he failed.
Climate change. The difficulty opening the Strait of Hormuz and the resulting $100-per-barrel oil should motivate more countries to transition away from fossil fuels.
Israel/Palestine. The focus of conflict has moved to Lebanon, where Israel is applying a tactic it used in Gaza: domicide, i.e., to “systematically destroy and damage civilian housing to render entire areas uninhabitable”.
Ukraine. One winner from the Hungarian election is Ukraine. Orbán was Putin’s man in the EU, and his objection was standing in the way of the EU making a 90 billion euro loan to Ukraine.
Epstein. The Iran War had gotten the Epstein scandal out of the headlines, but Melania put if back in. What was she thinking?
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the “peace” talks with Iran
One downside of taking a vacation is that I have missed my chance to say “I told you so” about the ceasefire and negotiations, because I did not in fact tell you so. During my vacation I told other people that Trump would announce a fake ceasefire, falsely claim that Iran had agreed to all kinds of concessions, and then resume the war when the reality became clear. But I have no written record to point to.
The reality is this: Trump badly miscalculated when he started this war. American air power can destroy anything it wants in Iran (other than the deeply buried uranium stocks), but it can’t make the Iranians surrender.
Trump, though, lives an in alternate reality where his power is absolute. J. D. Vance’s mission was doomed from the start because he went to Islamabad not to negotiate peace, but to dictate terms to an enemy Trump falsely insists is defeated. Vance explained his failure: “They have chosen not to accept our terms.” Of course they wouldn’t. As pummeled as Iran’s military currently is, the nation is not defeated. Defeating them will require either hundreds of thousands of ground troops or a willingness to commit genocide.
Increasingly, however, Trump’s alternate reality is being taken seriously in mainstream media. After Vance’s entirely predictable failure, The Washington Post wrote:
The involvement of Vice President JD Vance had raised hopes around the world that the weekend negotiations in Pakistan would solidify the ceasefire with Iran and put an end to the war within reach.
The WaPo article went on to describe Vance as “President Donald Trump’s most high-profile war skeptic“, which is probably how Vance will try to pitch himself in 2028. But there is no evidence that his pre-war self-description as a “skeptic of foreign military interventions” actually resulted in any protest once Trump started bombing.
As many people have reported, Trump went into the war with his Venezuela adventure as a model: A quick decapitation strike would convince the new leaders to do whatever Trump wanted.
Trump understood the Venezuelan leaders, because fundamentally they are like him: They are interested primarily in their own wealth and power, so there is nothing they are willing to die for. Iran’s leaders, on the other hand, are willing to lose everything including their lives. So Trump has no idea how to deal with them.
So Trump’s latest idea is to blockade the Strait of Hormuz himself. He didn’t like the idea that Iran could profit by charging tolls on the Strait, so he’s going to block everything, no matter what that does to the price of oil. And that would make sense if the Iranian leaders were motivated by profit the way Trump is. But they’re not, so Trump is essentially doing their job for them: Iran intended to disrupt the world economy by driving up the price of oil, and now Trump is helping them do it.
In a few days it will be clear that this move didn’t work either, so Trump will go back to threatening to kill Iran’s “whole civilization“.
Two points:
Ending a country’s “civilization” is a war crime. And since the world does not recognize a Nuremberg defense (“I was just following orders”), Trump will be involving members of the American military in war crimes. If anyone you care about is in the military, this should worry you.
Like Netanyahu before him, Trump has fallen for the fallacy that if your opponent is evil, you can’t become the bad guy. But you can. Hamas is certainly evil, but nonetheless Netanyahu became the bad guy in the Gaza War. The Iranian regime is likewise evil. But if Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran turns genocidal, he will be the bad guy.
For a high-level view of the Iran War and its place in geo-political strategy, I recommend listening to an hour-long conversation between Timothy Snyder (author of On Tyranny) and Phillips O’Brien (author of War and Power). That’s where the quote at the top comes from.
One scary conclusion they come to: The Iran War proves we would lose a non-nuclear war with China over Taiwan. Modern war is less about the big, expensive systems the US military is based on and more about manufacturing large numbers of cheap drones and similar devices. In World War II, the US was “the arsenal of democracy“, because we could manufacture planes, tanks, ships, and other munitions in larger quantities than anyone else. We’ve lost that edge. In the Iran War, we are firing advanced munitions like Tomahawk and Patriot missiles many times faster than we can build them.
Conversely, if you want to manufacture large numbers of things quickly today, where do you go? China. In a war with China, if we couldn’t win in a week, we would run out of weapons and lose.
Snyder and O’Brien both like the nonprofit foundation Come Back Alive, which supplies the Ukrainian military. As they describe it, CBA connects what the Ukrainians need to garage-level workshops that make drones and anti-drone tech. Their tech evolves constantly and is currently some of the best in the world.
The goal, at least immediately, is not a Hitler/Stalin style dictatorship where political opponents can be killed at will or arrested and sent to concentration camps. Instead, the government establishes a soft autocracy that maintains the appearance of freedom and democracy, but stacks the deck in ways that prevent the formation of any effective opposition. Vox sums up:
The basic goal was to create a system where the government doesn’t have to formally rig elections, in the sense of stuffing ballot boxes. It could generally rely on the background unfairness of the system, the structural disadvantages opposition parties face, to reliably maintain a constitutional majority. Political scientists call this kind of regime “competitive authoritarianism” — a system in which elections are real, but so unfair that they can’t reasonably be termed democratic contests.
… The result of all this has been a remarkably durable authoritarian system. In the 2014 and 2018 elections, Fidesz [i.e., Orbán’s party] managed to retain its two-thirds majority in parliament with less than half of the national popular vote. In 2022, the various opposition parties united around a single candidate and party list to try and overcome its structural disadvantages — and Fidesz actually improved its vote share, easily retaining its two-thirds majority.
The flaw in that model is that if the public gets sufficiently united against the government, the official thumb on the scale might not be heavy enough.
Sunday, Hungarians took advantage of what power they have left to oust Orbán. After 16 years in power, his party was decisively swept out. The opposition has won a 2/3rds supermajority in Parliament, which is big enough to undo the constitutional changes Orbán made.
I happened to be in Budapest Thursday, on a tour I arranged last fall without any journalistic motive. I don’t speak Hungarian and had little opportunity to talk to the locals, but I did see the election posters dominating every flat surface, and workmen setting up for a huge opposition concert Friday. I worried about a violent outcome to the election, so I was not sorry to get out before the action started.
and the astronauts
Sadly, the Artemis II mission all but vanished from the headlines. I’m showing my age here, but I remember when the whole nation was transfixed by each new space flight. One of the few things my grandfather and I were both interested in was watching the countdown for John Glenn’s launch. In school, we took time out of class to watch an unmanned mission that did nothing more than stick a TV camera onto a rocket and slam it into the Moon.
The four astronauts of Artemis II looped around the Moon, went farther from Earth than any human ever has, and successfully returned to Earth on Friday.
and you also might be interested in …
The week’s most mysterious story is why Melania called a news conference to read a statement saying that she was not connected to Jeffrey Epstein. She was not responding to anything obvious in the news cycle, so her main accomplishment was to start people wondering whether what she is denying is actually true.
The most logical explanation: The First Lady is trying to get ahead of forthcoming story about her ties to Epstein. But there are no specific rumors about such a story circulating on social media; it’s all just conjecture based on Melania’s statement.
But The Guardian’s Arwa Mahdawi offers a simpler theory:
I have another possible explanation. And that is that the Trumps aren’t just morally bankrupt, they’re also very, very stupid. A lot of people seem reluctant to acknowledge this about the president; they will tie themselves into knots trying to argue that his erratic actions actually represent a genius playing four-dimensional chess. He’s not really a madman, they insist, he’s just playing one on Truth Social! I understand why people want to believe this: it’s comforting to think there’s some sort of method behind the madness. But if there is any sort of method, I certainly can’t see it. All I can see is a man who thinks he can bully his way through life.
Here’s the thing: even if you are blessed with “a very high IQ”, when you are as rich and powerful as the Trumps, you can easily lose perspective. People rarely say “no” to you. Your employees don’t tell you that your ideas are ridiculous because they don’t want to lose their jobs. Melania may not be the president, but she is in the same sycophantic bubble as her husband. It’s possible she just thought she could hold a press conference and command all us plebs to stop talking about her, and we would immediately obey.
US Congressman and recent top contender to be the next governor of California Eric Swalwell has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least four women so far. He has denied the accusations, but a Democrat can’t ride something like this out the way Republicans can. He has suspended his campaign for governor, and I’ll be surprised if he hangs on to the House seat.
I’m always amazed by candidates who imagine something like this won’t come out. How do you recruit people to spend two years or more trying to get you elected, when you know that something you’ve done could result in all their effort being wasted?
As Congress returns to work, there is still no plan to fund DHS, and Trump really wants action on the vote-suppressing SAVE Act.
The regime revealed plans for Trump’s “arch of victory” monument, which is planned to be 250 feet tall. This motivated The Contrarian’s Tim Dickinson to review all the things Trump wants to name after himself.
All this self-aggrandizement is futile. As soon as he’s gone, everything he’s done will be reversed. The Kennedy Center will be the Kennedy Center again. Trump class battleships will never be built. The White House ballroom will be repurposed and renamed.
As for the money he’s planning to add his signature to, I think we can shame him out of it. You can get little stamping pads to add comments to currency. I think every Trump dollar should have “is America’s worst president” added to it.
Remember what Conan O’Brien said at the Oscars: “Welcome back, we are coming to you live from the Has a Small Penis Theater! Let’s see him put his name in front of that.”
and let’s close with something far out
The Artemis II crew got some new views of the Earth and the Moon. Here we see how everything is relative: the Earth setting over the Moon looks tiny.
The world generally goes crazy when I take a week or two off. Trump threatened to “end” civilization in a nation of more than 90 million people, then announced a ceasefire to give Iran a chance to surrender, which it predictably did not do. Now Trump is threatening to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, a strategy no one really understands, least of all him. It’s a little like “You can’t burn down the house. I’ll burn down the house.”
Meanwhile, democracy had its best day in years: Sunday, Hungary decisively rejected the proto-Trump autocracy of Viktor Orbán. Orbán had rigged the system in such a way that only a landslide could unseat him — and the landslide came. I wasn’t sure how Orbán would respond to that, but he did the right thing and conceded.
I wish I could claim I had something to do with this. Purely coincidentally, I was on a tour that stopped in Budapest Thursday. So I was too late to see J. D. Vance campaign for Orbán, but too early for the opposition victory celebration. Still, I am getting satisfaction out of watching TV coverage and saying, “I know where they are.”
During my trip, I wandered through Czech, German, and Austrian history museums that gave me a little insight into nationalistic movements, which I’ll try to sum up in coming weeks. But I’m not yet sufficiently recovered from jet lag to do justice to the topic.
So this week the only post will be the weekly summary (unless the Iran note gets unreasonably long). I’ll try to get it out by noon.
No sifts for two weeks. The next new articles will appear April 13.
In the dramatic circumstances of war … the media must guard against the risk of becoming propaganda. … It is up to you to show the sufferings that war always brings to the people; to show the face of war and to relate it through the eyes of the victims, so as not to transform it into a videogame.
Errata: Last week I did a particularly bad job as my own editor: I was fooled by a post apparently by the Stryker Corp IT chief, which was actually satire. (The community notes on X now say so explicitly.) The satirist posts a lot of imaginary inner monologues of tech company officials. They’re entertaining and occasionally insightful, but they’re not real. I also misspelled James Talarico’s name (two weeks in a row). And there were assorted typos that commenters pointed out.
Ongoing stories
Trump’s assault on American democracy. The Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) Institute in Sweden maintains a “Liberal Democracy Index” to measure the overall level of democracy in the countries of the world. The US LDI rating has dropped precipitously in the last year to 57, just behind Ghana (61), tied with Panama, and just ahead of Columbia (52). Most other NATO countries are somewhere in the 70s or 80s, where the US was in the Obama years. V-DEM’s annual report notes “The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.” Putin, Orban, and similar autocrats took much longer to unmake their democracies.
Climate change. If you worry about the impact of burning a tank of gasoline in your car, imagine how much damage is done by burning a whole tanker or a depot or setting a gas field on fire. In the long run, the Iran War raises the price of gas and points out the unreliability of fossil fuel supplies, which will push more people, corporations, and countries towards renewable energy. But the short-term impact is horrifying.
Israel/Palestine. The eyes of the world have mostly moved on, but NPR looks at Gaza during the Eid holiday. It observes that about 200 truckloads of aid get through Israeli checkpoints each day, when 600 are needed. Most of Gaza’s 2 million people “live in makeshift tents and rely on aid for survival”. Meanwhile, Israel is expanding its settlements in the West Bank “confining the Palestinian population to smaller and smaller patches of land”.
Ukraine. As winter ends, Russia is starting a new offensive and incurring large losses. The war in Iran works in Russia’s favor, as it is able to sell more oil at higher prices.
Epstein. The House Oversight Committee that is investigating the Epstein affair has subpoenaed AG Pam Bondi. Bondi announced a briefing for the lawmakers, but indicated she saw this as a replacement for testifying under oath. Democrats on the committee were having none of this and walked out. The deadline for the subpoena is April 14. So the cover-up continues.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about Iran
The Iran War is the subject of the featured post. What didn’t get covered there is the $200 billion supplemental appropriation the Trump regime is seeking to fund the war. The official request hasn’t been made yet, and getting it through Congress can only happen if it is part of a reconciliation package that circumvents filibuster rules in the Senate. Given Republicans’ narrow margin in the House, it may not even pass there.
Politically, the best thing for Democrats would be the Republicans passing the appropriation on a party-line vote. At that point, they own the war, and every spending cut Republicans want can be compared to it. “Why was there no money to keep your local hospital open, when there was $200 billion to blow hospitals up in Iran? Why is there no money for cancer research when there is plenty to fight foreign wars?” And so on.
But for the nation, the best thing would be to get this thing stopped any way we can. Democrats can’t do that on their own, though. That’s what being in the minority means.
and the strange case of Joe Kent
Opponents of both the Gaza and Iran Wars have faced the same challenge: How do you denounce what the Israeli government does without making common cause with antisemites? For centuries, conspiracy theories have been tracing every unfortunate situation back to some nefarious plot by Jews. But sane people should not get involved in that project. While Netanyahu and his buddies are responsible for plenty of wrongdoing, they are not the cause of all the world’s problems.
This week delivered a case in point: Joe Kent. Kent is a twice-defeated Republican congressional candidate who failed up: Tulsi Gabbard got him a job as head of the National Counter-Terrorism Center. This week he became the first Trump insider to resign in protest over the Iran War. In the message that accompanied his resignation letter on X, Kent said
Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,
So far so good, but the sentence didn’t stop there.
and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.
Vox’ Zack Beauchamp acknowledges that he ought to welcome defections within the Trump war machine, but …
Kent’s resignation should not be celebrated by principled critics of the Iran war, but rather serve as a cautionary tale for how a just cause could be hijacked by extremists to promote something awful.
Kent’s particular awful thing is to portray an American president as nothing more than the dupe of sinister Jews.
Trump and MAGA did not fail in Iran, in Kent’s view; they were betrayed by the same dark forces that have been corrupting American foreign policy for the entire 21st century. And given the corner of far-right politics Kent hails from, it should be fairly clear what religion those dark forces represent.
At the moment, most MAGA fascists are supporting the war whole-heartedly.
But if this war continues to go poorly, public opinion will turn — much in the same way as many Republicans now view President George W. Bush’s war in Iraq as an obvious mistake. In such a future, Republican voters will be looking for someone to tell them why their president led them astray. Kent’s letter is setting up an obvious scapegoat: the Jews. … Kent’s letter, then, is not really a sign of rising Republican resistance to the Iran war that could augur its premature end. Rather, it is an opening salvo in a future political war over how the war’s (likely) failure should be interpreted — and an extremely ugly one at that.
I’m going to repeat a message that I’ve posted many times before: Americans should not bring the troubles of the Middle East home. American Jews who support the idea of Israel because they believe there should be a Jewish refuge somewhere in the world are not the same as Netanyahu’s fascists. And American Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims who believe Palestinians also deserve a homeland are not the same as Hamas. Americans should not be persecuting or even killing other Americans because of their resemblance to overseas villains.
and ICE
Trump claims that today he will start sending ICE agents to help TSA at airports. Mark Jacob points out the obvious: This has nothing to do with ICE’s stated mission.
Trump’s plan to send ICE to the airports makes it clear that ICE isn’t really an immigration enforcement force. It’s Trump’s personal Gestapo, his goon squad ready to act out the dictator’s fever dreams, no matter how reckless and stupid.
Ron Filipkowski asks another obvious question: Will ICE agents at the airports wear masks?
BBC doesn’t sanewash the president’s plan, describing it as a “threat”. When you quote him more completely, it does sound that way:
I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before.
ICE agents behaving “like no one has ever seen before” is exactly what travelers should fear.
Republicans know that it looks bad for them when ICE agents murder American citizens in the streets and suffer no consequences. So they want to soften their rhetoric and present a more pleasant image. But the underlying thuggishness of ICE isn’t changing. Replacing Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin is just a change of figurehead at DHS. Stephen Miller still runs the show, and he likes the thugs.
If congressional Republicans really wanted a course correction at DHS, they have a straightforward opportunity without changing its leadership. The agency has been shutdown since Feb. 14, when Democrats refused to support legislation funding the agency because it lacked provisions reforming ICE. The list of demands in their counterproposal is straightforward. ICE agents would be required to wear identification badges and work without masks, and follow existing laws regarding warrants. They would also be banned from targeting people based on race. The GOP’s refusal to rein in the rogue agency even a little shows that the party does not want to “course correct” in any meaningful way.
Brian Beutler sees this as nothing more than an across-the-board plan to save Republicans in the midterms:
They now seem to be tacking back a subtler approach. Not just because they think they’ll get a second chance at authoritarian breakthrough, but because the nature of their conduct over the past 14 months has rendered the whole project politically toxic. What they want, therefore, is to freeze their progress in place, dialing back the braggadocio, in the hope that voters sense the atmospheric differences between March 2025 and March 2026 and assume the worst is behind them. In other words, they are hoping to salvage power through a change in rhetorical emphasis, without substantively backtracking.
Trump still calls the shots for the GOP in Congress, and he opposes “any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats”. The deal apparently on the table would lead to no changes at ICE, but would make Republicans fully own ICE’s rogue behavior: Democrats would vote to fund all of DHS other than ICE, while ICE funding would be part of a reconciliation bill that would be immune to filibuster.
To me, even the Democrats’ demands aren’t enough. At the very minimum, I want to see charges filed against the agents who murdered Rene Good and Alex Pretti. Until that happens, ICE’s thugs will go on assuming they have a 007-like license to kill.
ICE has illegally been taking DNA samples from protesters it arrests. “It’s very concerning to me because what it looks like the government is doing is creating this catalog of political dissidents.” DHS hasn’t said what it does with this information.
and law
The Trump administration had another bad week in court.
They had surrendered those passes in October instead of signing the policy, which empowered the Pentagon to declare journalists “security risks” and revoke their press passes if they engaged in any conduct that the Pentagon believed threatened national security. In his 40-page ruling, Judge Friedman wrote that the Pentagon’s policy rewarded reporters who were “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.”
Siding with an argument advanced by The Times, Judge Friedman added that the Pentagon had given itself too much power to enforce its new rules. The policy also violates journalists’ due process rights under the Fifth Amendment, he said, writing that it “provides no way for journalists to know how they may do their jobs without losing their credentials.”
According to Law Dork, third-country removals — deportations to someplace other than the deportee’s home country — is one of Trump regime’s “most dramatic anti-immigrant policies”. I invite you to think about what an extreme punishment this is: Imagine being dropped into a country you know nothing about, possibly a war-torn country like Sudan. You have no friends there and you may not speak the local language. You don’t know what rights (if any) the local system grants you. Even if you aren’t immediately imprisoned, you are in rough shape: You have no job and no prospect of getting one.
In its Wednesday post, LD gives a good summary of where the case to restrain these deportations stands: A district court has been trying to rein in this practice, and recently issued its final opinion — not an injunction or any similar temporary judgment.
[Judge Brian] Murphy has ordered the Trump administration to provide people with “meaningful“ due process before carrying out third country removals.
Trump’s DoJ took that ruling to the First Circuit appellate court, which put a stay on the lower court’s order while they consider the merits of the case. That stay allows third-country removals to continue temporarily, but LD interprets this as possibly a strategic move by one of the Biden appointees who might ultimately want to affirm the lower-court ruling.
Looking at this strategically, in light of the Supreme Court’s prior shadow docket order, the stay grant prevented the case from going to the Supreme Court now — allowing the First Circuit to fully consider these questions and issue a full merits ruling before this important case goes back up to the Supreme Court.
Instead, the First Circuit is going to hear this case quickly, with briefs and oral arguments finished in April.
RFK Jr.’s reign of error at Health and Human Services got bad news from the courts on two fronts.
Just about everything RFK Jr. has done to discourage vaccine use got thrown out by the same Judge Murphy.
A different federal judge set aside HHS’s declaration that gender-affirming care “is neither safe nor effective as a treatment modality for gender dysphoria, gender incongruence, or other related disorders in minors.”
Both rulings make similar arguments: There are legal ways to change HHS policy, but Kennedy circumvented them.
The vaccine ruling revolves around the role of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which is supposed to be a board of scientific experts on vaccines. Back in June, Kennedy fired the entire committee, which he subsequently replaced with hacks who agree with him. Judge Murphy noted that of ACIP’s 15 current members “only six appear to have any meaningful experience in vaccines”. This violates the legislation that established ACIP and numerous laws that refer to it.
HHS, sometimes with the advice of the new unqualified ACIP and sometimes without, changed childhood vaccination schedules and made other vaccine-related rulings — all pointing in the direction of Americans receiving fewer vaccinations. These moves also violated various laws, including the Administrative Procedures Act.
The ruling blocks these changes to HHS vaccine policy and bars ACIP from continuing to meet in its current form.
In the weeks after Mr. Kennedy issued his written declaration, the Department of Health and Human Services indicated that it would investigate institutions that continued to prescribe medication to minors for gender transitions and would potentially bar them from receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funds. (As an aside, the declaration re-names “gender-affirming care” as “sex-rejecting procedures”. )
The court ruling prevents HHS from enforcing its new policy. HHS will undoubtedly appeal.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing to stop construction of Trump’s massive White House ballroom until the project gets congressional approval and submits to the ordinary review process. Verbal comments by the judge in this case have observers speculating that he will side with NTHP when he rules later this month.
and Robert Mueller
The death of Robert Mueller at age 81 provides a news hook for renewed discussion of what Mueller investigated: Trump’s ties to Russia. Certainly Trump himself sees the connection:
Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!
(Remember all the handwringing about “civility” when liberals weren’t sufficiently deferential about Charlie Kirk’s death?) But certainly Trump is not one of those “innocent people”. Marcy Wheeler reviews the convictions Mueller’s Russia investigation led to, and points to the pardons of key figures that kept Mueller from fully uncovering the Trump/Russia conspiracy.
Mueller’s failure, solidified by Democrats’ failure to do anything with the impeachment referral, to thwart Trump’s betrayal of the United States is one of many aspects of a larger lesson that the US legal system was not built to hold a corrupt President accountable. Impeachment does not work, and even before John Roberts gave Trump a retrospective and prospective Get Out of Jail Free card, Presidents had too much power to tamper in investigations of their own crimes.
and the Illinois primary
Tuesday, Illinois held primaries for both parties. It’s a blue state, so the big news was on the Democratic side. Several races were interpreted in the media as progressive/moderate races, with moderates doing somewhat better. But there was not a clear trend. Illinois does not have a run-off rule, so several multi-candidate races were won with less than 50% of the vote.
The top of the ticket was the race to replace retiring Dick Durbin in the Senate. (Side note: I was living in New Hampshire during the 2008 primary campaign. The Obama victory party was supposed to be upstairs from my favorite brew-pub, but Obama was surprisingly defeated by Hillary Clinton. I was in the pub for dinner, went to the bar for some reason, and noticed I was standing next to Dick Durbin. I let him mourn in peace.) Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton won with 40%.
Another noteworthy race was for the 9th congressional district. I was rooting for Kat Abughazaleh, but Evanston Mayor David Biss performed well during the ICE focus on the Chicago area, so I was not sorry to see him win. The big loser in this race was AIPAC, which put a lot of money behind the third-place candidate.
The somewhat better showing of moderates touched off the usual debate about which direction the Democratic Party should go, with many voices pushing for what Matt Yglesias calls “popularism”: backing away from unpopular positions. Unfortunately, this is generally interpreted to mean throwing trans people under the bus. I have trouble seeing how this actually works in practice. Harris never mentioned trans issues during the 2024 fall campaign, but that didn’t save her because she had supported the trans community in the past.
About the only way this can work is to do what my congressman, Seth Moulton, did: repeat anti-trans talking points yourself. (He’s running for the Senate now, and I will not be voting for him in the primary against incumbent Ed Markey.) Even that probably won’t work, because your Republican opponent can always make a more extreme anti-trans attack and dare you to match him.
I’m struck by how seldom the same popularist point is made to Republicans about issues like abortion. At most, Republicans are told to soften their rhetoric, not change their position (that abortion should be illegal in nearly all situations, often including ones that endanger a pregnant woman’s health). Chair Richard Hudson of the National Republican Congressional Committee told Punchbowl News:
Republicans don’t have a policy problem. We have a branding problem.
Their policy is that a woman who is raped should be forced to bear her rapist’s child. In other words, rape should be a viable male reproductive strategy; if you’re having trouble attracting women, you can still propagate your genes by force.
Republicans think they can win the issue by painting Democrats as even more out-of-step with the public than Republicans are.
We need to point out that the Democrat position is abortion for any reason, up until the moment of birth, paid for by taxpayers.
But that’s hardly any Democrat’s real position. Not that the truth actually matters.
Here’s my take on where most voters are: They generally dislike abortions and wish the US had fewer of them. But if someone in their family needs one, they don’t want the government to tell them they can’t get one.
Coincidentally, I think most voters have exactly the same opinion about guns.
TPM collects what is known so far about the DHS contracting scandal. The gist: DHS funds big projects through dummy general contractors who then farm the work out to politically connected sub-contractors. This, plus a few other gimmicks, circumvents the usual government contracting process — which is cumbersome but designed to prevent exactly this kind of corruption.
Republican rhetoric about the SAVE Act started as painting the bill as common-sense, nothing-to-see-here. But as it looks increasingly unlikely to get through the Senate, they are revving up evidence-free conspiracy theories about noncitizen voting.
The accusation that there is rampant cheating in our election is dramatic, alarming, and oft-repeated. It is also totally false.
After years of audits, recounts, lawsuits, academic studies, and investigations across red states and blue states alike, there is absolutely no evidence—zero—that substantial, outcome-changing voter fraud is present in American elections. There simply isn’t proof.
It turns out that the real fraud is not at the ballot box; it’s claims like the one the president made as he addressed a joint session of Congress.
If I were a Democrat in a general-election debate with a Republican, I’d want to ask this question: “Do any of your proposals address a problem that actually exists?”
The Idaho House has passed another transgender persecution bill. This one makes it a misdemeanor to “knowingly and willfully enter a restroom or changing room … designated for use by the opposite biological sex”. First offense can get you a year in prison, while the second offense can get you five.
OK, I see how this makes life more difficult for transfolk. But how does it make life better for the rest of us? What problem do such bills solve?
Accept for the moment that transgender and nonbinary people exist. (Off the top of my head I can think of three that I’ve met personally. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are others that I haven’t noticed.) So picture a person with a female birth certificate who now presents as male, to the point that you really can’t tell unless you stare. Like all humans, that person may need a public bathroom from time to time. Which is more disruptive?
Going into the men’s bathroom and using a stall.
Going into the women’s bathroom looking like a man.
I think the answer is obvious. Idaho’s law is mandating the more disruptive outcome. So the point isn’t to make society work more smoothly. The point is to persecute trans people.
Trump’s concentration of lies seems to be rising. This post must be some kind of record:
FREE TINA PETERS, A 73-YEAR-OLD WOMAN, WITH CANCER, GIVEN A NINE YEAR DEATH SENTENCE IN A COLORADO PRISON BY DEMOCRAT GOVERNOR, JARED POLIS, AND A CORRUPT POLITICAL MACHINE, FOR EXPOSING FRAUD BY THE DEMOCRATS IN THE 2020 ELECTION.
Kyle Clark finds four false claims in those 40 words:
Peters is 70 (not 73), does not have cancer, was sentenced by a judge in Mesa County (not the Governor), and did not expose fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
The Weekly Sift 