Like No One Has Ever Seen Before

The president is suing himself and compensating other people for legal claims that have not been identified from people that we don’t know. We just haven’t seen anything like that.

– Adam Zimmerman

This week’s featured post is “Has Trump finally pushed Republicans too far?“

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. The fund to reward January 6 rioters for their crimes essentially makes Congress and the courts irrelevant. So bad as it is in itself, the precedent it sets is much worse.
  • Climate change. See the closing for a creative response to climate-change-related flooding in West London.
  • Iran war. Trump is always saying that he’s close to an agreement with Iran, so I ignore those claims. But this weekend, some other sources were saying the same thing and laying out some sketchy details.
  • Ukraine. This week, Phillips O’Brien’s update describes how Ukraine’s medium-range strike ability is shutting down the main supply road for Russia’s forces, while it’s long-range strikes are targeting Russia’s oil refineries.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was reacting to Trump’s “thug fund”

I talk about the political implications of this for Republicans in the featured post. But it’s important to take a step back and just see it on its own terms. Trump has found a way to get the US Treasury to pay for his private army of brownshirts.

The striking thing about this “settlement” is that nobody who isn’t answerable to Trump has anything to do with it. Trump’s Justice Department negotiated the agreement with Trump’s IRS, and avoided letting any judge oversee the result. The five commissioners who run the fund will be appointed by Trump, and can be removed by him at will. The fund has no obligation to reveal who it has given the money to.

So the upshot is that Trump, on his own, is removing $1.8 billion from the Treasury and doing whatever he wants with it.

and rumors of a deal with Iran

Maybe it’s real this time, maybe not. The devil is in the details. One thing that seems clear: The terms are nothing close to the “unconditional surrender” Trump said he was aiming for. Axios reports:

The agreement the U.S. and Iran are close to signing involves a 60-day ceasefire extension during which the Strait of Hormuz would be reopened, Iran would be able to freely sell oil, and negotiations would be held on curbing Iran’s nuclear program, according to a U.S. official.

The thing to watch for is whether Trump just gets back to the pre-war situation, if he falls short of that, or if he makes some gain. That will tell you who won the war. The Strait was open before the war started, and we were already negotiating about Iran’s nuclear program. So if that’s the deal, what did the war accomplish, beyond spending a lot of money, raising gas prices, and depleting our stock of weapons?

Jennifer Rubin:

If this deal holds, there will be no question that Trump’s war amounted to a major strategic failure. Maybe we get an agreement similar to the JCPOA, which would have been in place had Trump not exited the deal. (Getting back in war something you already had is nothing to cheer about.) The agreement would leave the regime (perhaps more radical than ever) in place, deny Israel any permanent end to the Iranian threat, reveal the limits of U.S. influence and power in the region, and, by default, afford China (as evidenced by Trump’s pathetic showing at the summit) increased stature and confidence. Preventing a restart of a war no one wanted and an end to the energy shock Trump provoked can hardly been called “wins.”

But anyway, wait for real details before getting too excited one way or the other.

I have to laugh at the Republican senators warning that we can’t trust Iran to negotiate in good faith. Why would anyone trust Trump to negotiate in good faith? The air attacks that killed most of Iran’s ruling council happened while negotiations were underway in Geneva.

and the Democratic “autopsy”

It’s common for a political party that loses an election to fund some kind of study about why it lost, in hopes that something can change before the next election.

The Democrats funded such a report after 2024, but then didn’t release the results. Recently a partial report surfaced. It’s 192 pages and I admit I have only skimmed small parts of it. It has drawn a lot of commentary, almost entirely negative. The main criticism repeated many times is that the report avoids a lot of significant issues:

  • Biden should have dropped out soon enough for there to be a real nomination process, rather than just a coronation of Harris.
  • The Israel/Gaza situation demoralized a lot of progressive voters.
  • Harris needed a response to the anti-trans message that Trump focused on in the closing weeks.

All the same, I’m not sure I would have focused on any of that if I had written a report, because it’s not likely to matter as much in 2028. I mean, Biden isn’t going to try to run again, we will have a nomination process, and the winning candidate will probably have a different message about Israel or trans rights (not that I know what it will be).

A lot of what is in the report sounds like platitudes: court rural votes better, for example. Or build up the state and local party operations. Great. Tell me how.

An interesting counterpoint to most of the chatter about the report comes from the Strength In Numbers blog, which focuses on data.

When we boot up the data, it’s obvious the main reason Harris lost — and the reason I am going to explore here, at this website, it being a data-driven website — is that 2024 simply had too much inflation-induced anti-incumbent sentiment for the incumbent party to overcome.

The author puts together a model for predicting how an incumbent party should do based on approval of the current president and public optimism/pessimism about the economy. That model predicts Harris should have done slightly worse than she actually did.

So maybe Harris wasn’t such a bad candidate and didn’t run such a bad campaign. Maybe all our 2024 autopsies are trying to analyze factors that made no difference.

and you also might be interested in …

The Ebola outbreak in the Congo comes at a bad time. The Trump regime has cut way back on programs to track and mitigate diseases in Africa.

The only refugees the Trump regime is taking in any numbers are the white South Africans who feel oppressed by the Black-majority government. This week they announced plans for 10,000 more.

But racism is over in this country. John Roberts says so.

Wish I’d said that: Tom Tillis commented on Ken Paxton, who will probably be the Republican nominee for a senate seat in Texas now that he has Trump’s endorsement:

To call Paxton ‘ethically challenged’ is to call Jeffrey Dahmer suffering from an eating disorder.

RIP Barney Frank. I was in the same room with Frank once, at a fund-raiser for another congressman. He predicted 2020 would be a 1964-scale Democratic landslide, which didn’t happen. Biden’s win was convincing, but not LBJ-like.

Trump missed Don Jr.’s wedding in the Bahamas Saturday. I just note the fact and refuse to speculate about the reason.

Tulsi Gabbard will resign as Director of National Intelligence at the end of June. Her stated reason is to support her husband, who has just been diagnosed with cancer. The rumor mill says that she’s out because she can’t get behind Trump’s foreign wars.

It’s tempting to be happy she’s leaving, because she never should have had this position to begin with. But she’s likely to be replaced with someone just as unqualified and less independent.

In a recent CNBC interview, Jeff Bezos said that Trump is “more mature, more disciplined” in his second term.

I have a theory about what has happened to Bezos lately: His first wife was his conscience. And now she’s gone, so he’s just another rich asshole. Meanwhile, she’s using her divorce settlement to do all kinds of good.

and let’s close with something creative

As the climate changes, London’s famous fog and drizzle is more often turning into serious rain. So West London had a flooding problems that it could try to solve with expensive public works projects. Instead, it has brought in beavers, who had been virtually extinct in Britain.

In West London, conservationists got a government license to resettle a family of five beavers in a 20-acre urban park near the Greenford Tube station. It used to be a golf course, with a creek running through it. Within weeks, the beavers dammed up the creek, creating a pond that holds water and stops it from spilling into the city. They also diverted the creek’s flow into smaller tributaries, creating a wetland that better absorbs heavy rainfall — mitigating the risk of flooding downstream.

“They effectively turned this site into a giant sponge that can take heavy rainfall and slowly release water back into the landscape, creating a lot more resilience for flooding,” explains Sean McCormack, a local veterinarian who started the Ealing Beaver Project, named for the London borough of Ealing, where it’s located.

May 25, 2026 – 12:35 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Has Trump finally pushed Republicans too far?

I hate to even ask this question, because it’s been discussed so often over the years, and the hopes raised have (up until now) always been dashed. But maybe? Maybe?

Way back in 2015, when Trump came down the escalator characterizing Mexican immigrants as rapists, and then a few weeks later denigrated John McCain’s war record, the conventional wisdom was certain that he had gone too far. Outrageousness had always been his shtick, but this was too much. Surely even his supporters would start backing away from him now.

Needless to say, it didn’t happen. It also didn’t happen after he bragged to Billy Bush that he could “grab ’em by the pussy” and get away with it. Or when two dozen women verified that he really did behave that way. Or when a jury unanimously concluded that he had sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll.

It didn’t happen when he said he trusted Vladimir Putin more than American intelligence services. Or when his mismanagement of the Covid pandemic expanded the death toll by hundreds of thousands of American souls.

It didn’t happen when he withheld aid approved by Congress in an attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into launching a bogus investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden. Or when he was impeached for that. Or when he incited rioters to attack the Capitol to reverse the result of the election he lost to Biden. Or when he was impeached for that. Or when he pardoned the rioters of all the crimes they had committed in his name, including hospitalizing over a hundred Capitol police.

Every time, very smart people told us this was it, he had finally gone too far. But it was never true.

So why might it be true now?

The downward slide. Hemingway once said that bankruptcies happen two ways: gradually, and then suddenly. The undermining of Trump’s popularity has been following a similar pattern.

For months, Trump supporters have been getting less and less sure of themselves. Maybe it began with the Epstein Files, which Trump had campaigned on releasing, and then did his best to hide once he got into office. (His Justice Department is still dragging its feet, and Trump keeps flirting with the idea of pardoning Epstein’s primary accomplice — the only one currently in jail for Epstein’s crimes.) Or when the prices he said when come down “on Day One” kept climbing — often due to Trump’s own policies like illegal tariffs and the effect of his war with Iran. Or when he attacked Iran for no discernible reason after running on not starting foreign wars.

That all resulted in a steadily declining approval rating from the general public, to levels unlike anything he had seen before.

That set the stage. But more recently three events have brought it into focus: the White House ballroom, his insider stock trades, and (most of all) the $1.776 billion fund he has illegally created to reward the same violent criminals he pardoned for the January 6 riot.

Primary voters. Probably the last people to leave Trump will be the MAGA faithful who show up to vote in Republican primaries where he has made an endorsement. Recent results have shown him to still be strong there — strong enough to punish Republicans in Congress who step out of line.

So Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) lost his primary on Tuesday after being targeted by Trump for (among other things) pushing to release the Epstein Files. Last week Republican Senator Bill Cassidy also lost his primary five years after voting to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial. Neither Massie nor Cassidy, though, had defined himself as anti-Trump. Both pitched themselves as loyal Trump Republicans who maintained just a smidgen of independence.

But that’s not good enough for Trump, and he clearly retains enough sway with Republican voters to punish elected officials who cross him in any way at all. Tomorrow we’ll get another test: Trump has endorsed Texas’ corrupt attorney general, Ken Paxton, over Senator John Cornyn, who not long ago was in contention to be Majority Leader. Cornyn’s sins are even less tangible than Massie’s or Cassidy’s — he hasn’t been enthusiastic enough about Trump’s agenda to want to scrap the Senate filibuster. Trump also ousted Indiana legislators who refused to redraw their state’s congressional map.

Republicans in Congress. But Republicans in Congress don’t just have primaries to worry about. In spite of gerrymandering, some have to win in competitive districts, where they need votes from independents and maybe even a few Democrats. Senators, meanwhile, have to run statewide. So unless they’re from clearly red states, they also need support from more than just Trump and his most fervent followers.

That’s where you would expect to see the cracks form first — and we’re seeing them in two places: the reconciliation bill trying to move through the Senate, and the war powers resolution attempting to limit the Iran War. In both cases, Republican leaders in Congress adjourned for the Memorial Day recess rather than hold a vote that they would lose.

The reconciliation bill. Remember how this started. After Trump’s masked police (some combination of ICE and the border patrol) terrorized Minneapolis, murdering Alex Pretti and Renee Good, Democrats refused ICE and CBP any further funding without putting some common-sense restrictions on these rogue agencies.

first, federal immigration agents need to remove masks, turn on their body cameras, and wear visible, clear identification. Second, Democrats want to end the roving patrols. This is a nation of laws guided by the Constitution that everyone—including ICE—must abide by. This means that federal immigration officials must stop racial profiling and end random arrests; and agents must obtain a judicial warrant signed by a neutral judge—not an administrative warrant—to enter private property. They also cannot detain Americans for hours or use excessive force against them just for peacefully protesting in support of their neighbors and friends. Third, Democrats are demanding accountability. ICE and Border Patrol squads cannot indiscriminately smash in car windows, use tear gas on protestors, and shoot at people without any accountability.

Republicans refused any meaningful limits on ICE, and resolved to fund the mass-deportation agenda without Democratic votes (the same way they passed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” last year). That was the origin of the current reconciliation bill.

Since then, the bill has become a Christmas tree with all kinds of baubles on it. Trump wanted it to include $1 billion for his White House ballroom — which originally wasn’t supposed to cost the taxpayers anything (beyond the cost of whatever favors Trump offered donors). Senators balked at this, but then were bailed out by the Senate parliamentarian, who ruled that the ballroom funding violated the arcane rules that govern reconciliation bills. Trump then demanded that Majority Leader Thune fire the parliamentarian, which he has not done.

The reconciliation bill doesn’t fund Trump’s corrupt “anti-weaponization” fund, which the Justice Department claims it can create with money from a fund previously established to pay settlements of lawsuits against the government. But there is no settlement in this case. Settlements are overseen by courts, and probably no judge would sign off on what Trump wants.

On May 20—the same day the parties’ jurisdictional briefs had been due—[the judge] issued an order formally closing the case. In her order, she noted that the Justice Department, which has an “independent obligation to uphold the ‘public’s strong interest in knowing about the conduct of its Government and expenditure of its resources,’” had “neither submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed.”

So if it’s not in the bill, why is the fund a problem for Senate Republicans? The reconciliation process allows the opposing party a chance to offer amendments. Democrats are almost certain to propose an amendment saying that no federal money can be spent on the anti-weaponization fund, or perhaps just that no money be awarded to people who have been convicted of assaulting police officers or committing sedition against the United States. Since those are precisely the people Trump wants to reward, he will demand Republican senators vote against such an amendment. And how will they explain such a vote to their constituents?

That prospect set up a tumultuous private meeting between Republican senators and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is spearheading the anti-weaponization fund effort. Mitch McConnell came out saying this:

So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — Take your pick.

The upshot was that the reconciliation vote wasn’t held before senators left for the Memorial Day recess. Whether any of this can be resolved after they come back in June is still up in the air.

Iran war. We’re now three months into a war that Trump insisted was won on the first day. He has never explained the goals of the war to the American people, and has never gone to Congress for authorization. He just wanted to attack Iran, so he did. Why does anybody need to know any more than that? The reasons he gives may shift from tweet to tweet, but why does that matter?

Democrats have been proposing resolutions to limit the war since it began, but Republicans have been holding them at bay. But defections on the Republican side have been building up, and a resolution asking Trump to withdraw American forces by the end of June looked ready to pass the House Thursday, forcing Speaker Johnson to delay the vote until after the Memorial Day recess.

Of course, Trump could veto that resolution even if it passes, and there aren’t nearly enough votes to override such a veto. So the legal effect of passing the resolution would have been nil. But putting the House on record opposing Trump’s war would be a big deal.

And eventually, Congress will need to appropriate some money to pay for all the bombs and missiles and military deployments. What will happen then?

Where are we? Opposed to the now-he’s-gone-too-far conventional wisdom is the Trump-has-a-floor view that his base of support is unshakeable. What seems to be true is something in between. The process of Trump’s fall should go something like this: He’ll lose the support of independents who voted for him in 2024 (which has pretty much already happened). Then Republican senators and congresspeople will peel off one-by-one, which has been happening slowly for several months. Then the drip-drip of leaking support will become a flood. Eventually, even previously fervent supporters will go silent, or forget that they were ever MAGA.

It won’t happen all at once. There’s even a chance that a deal-on-paper with Iran will reduce the pressure on the GOP congressional majorities to assert themselves, or that some fig-leaf concessions on the ballroom or the weaponization fund will allow the reconciliation bill to pass.

But the erosion is still happening. Long-term, I don’t think it can be stopped.

May 25, 2026 – 11:04 am Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

Tagged , |

The Monday Morning Teaser

This week, Senate Republicans left town for the Memorial Day recess without passing the reconciliation bill they’ve been drafting ever since Democrats refused to fund ICE without reforms. (Reconciliation is a process that circumvents a Senate filibuster, and so would allow Republicans to fund a number of programs on a pure party-line vote.) This bill touches on a number of controversial issues beyond ICE, but what derailed the process was Trump’s corrupt “anti-weaponization” fund to funnel taxpayer money to the violent criminals who invaded the Capitol on January 6.

At the same time, the House looks ready to pass a war-powers resolution calling for limits on the Iran War. Speaker Johnson had to take the bill off the floor to stop it.

Those two actions, together with some very public grousing about the cost of Trump’s gilded ballroom, suggests that (as the midterms approach and the regime makes ever-more-outrageous demands) Trump is losing his ability to dominate Congress.

Now, I hesitate to raise this idea, because we’ve lived through 10 years of speculation that Trump had finally gone too far, and his Republican support was about to crack. But it hasn’t. Is this time different?

That’s the subject of this week’s featured post, which should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will look at the rumors of a deal with Iran, Barney Frank, Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation, the progress of the Ukraine War, the Democratic “autopsy” of 2024, and a few other things. It should be out a little after noon.

May 25, 2026 – 8:35 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Narrow Ideology

We are deeply concerned that what is really being rededicated is a nation to a very narrow and ideological part of the Christian faith that betrays our nation’s fundamental commitment to religious freedom.

– Rev. Adam Russell Taylor on Sunday’s “Rededicate 250” rally

This week’s featured post is “Is Corruption the Democrats’ Unifying Theme?“

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. It just broke today: Trump’s Justice Department established a $1.7 billion fund to pay “damages” the US owes to Trump’s January 6 brownshirts for harassing them by convicting them of their crimes.
  • Climate change. I lost track of this issue this week. I’ll do better.
  • Iran war. Announcing fake peace deals is getting old, so Trump issuing ominous threats again. The basic situation hasn’t changed: Trump wants Iran to surrender, but he hasn’t defeated them. He talks about a “deal”, but an authentic deal has benefits for both sides.
  • Ukraine. The war is still a stalemate, but seems to be turning Ukraine’s way. Both sides are pummeling each other with missile and drone attacks, but Ukraine is attacking strategic industries while Russia is terror-bombing civilian targets.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about Trump in China

I continue to wonder why media outlets cover what Trump says, given how often it turns out to be meaningless. Trump came out of China boasting of “fantastic trade deals”, but no one can get details and Chinese sources don’t verify those deals.

I was surprised to hear Chinese leader Xi Jinping make a classical Greek reference I had to look up. He warned against a “Thucydides Trap“, which is when a declining power feels that it has to fight a war to keep down a rising power. (Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War between rising power Athens and declining power Sparta.)

The reference implicitly slammed the US as a declining power. Trump did not rise to the occasion.

and Black voting rights in the South

One fact to remember when you read articles about redistricting: Prior to the round that began with Texas, gerrymandering had pretty much balanced out. In 2024, Republican congressional candidates won a small majority in the popular vote, and they got a small majority in Congress.

Now, it’s looking like the Republicans have given themselves a 10-15 seat advantage, which probably won’t be enough to save their House majority in November.

and inflation

[Having just posted two Nick Anderson cartoons in a row, I feel obligated to recommend that you subscribe to his Substack or follow him through Raw Story.]

The inflation rate in April hit a 3.8% annual rate, which is higher than the 3% when Trump was inaugurated in January 2025.

and you also might be interested in …

Trump’s approval rating continues to sink: 37% in today’s NYT/Siena poll, and 38% in the NYT’s polling average. Only 30% think the Iran attack was a good decision.

Austin Ahlman is an independent running for Congress in Nebraska against a Republican incumbent and a Democratic challenger. I knew nothing about him yesterday, but today I know that he can make one hell of a campaign video.

Your tax dollars paid for a Christian nationalist rally on the National Mall Sunday. (Remember when the Trump regime was all about rooting out government waste?) “Rededicate 250” was part of Trump’s one-sided celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Religion Unplugged commented:

The Rev. Adam Russell Taylor, a Baptist minister who heads the progressive Christian organization Sojourners, noted: “We are deeply concerned that what is really being rededicated is a nation to a very narrow and ideological part of the Christian faith that betrays our nation’s fundamental commitment to religious freedom.”

The role of Christianity in early American history is complex and should be presented in a nuanced way: Yes, the vast majority of Americans in 1776 thought of themselves as Protestant Christians. (Catholics who buy into the idea that we were founded to be a Christian nation should be careful: The same argument would say that you also are a second-class citizen.) Patrick Henry, for one, would probably fit in well in an Evangelical church today.

However, a significant number of the Founders (Franklin, Jefferson) were essentially Deists, Thomas Paine was very close to being an atheist, and Washington’s Christianity was vague at best. The Constitution does not mention God, which was a radical statement at the time. Contrast it with the Magna Carta, whose second paragraph begins:

KNOW THAT BEFORE GOD, for the health of our soul and those of our ancestors and heirs, to the honour of God, the exaltation of the holy Church, and the better ordering of our kingdom, at the advice of our reverend fathers …

But the Constitution’s only mentions of religion curb religious excess. (“no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”). The Founders were familiar with the destruction wrought over the centuries as various sects of Christians battled for control of the government of England. That’s why they created a secular government for this country, regardless of any of their personal beliefs.

BTW: All the media accounts I’ve seen refer to “thousands” of people in attendance, which is not that big for an event like this. This picture from WaPo (during Marco Rubio’s presentation) shows a lot empty chairs.

Whether you know it or not, somebody you care about is taking anti-depressant drugs under a prescription from their doctor. In their later years both of my parents did, and both described the effects as life-changing. My father in particular had reached the point of despair, but became himself again.

Our quack Secretary of HHS, RFK Jr., would like to change all that. Speaking from a vast wisdom that doesn’t depend on mundane details like medical studies or other tangible evidence, Kennedy says prescribing anti-depressants is a form of “over-medicalization”, which his fevered imagination pictures as a cause of addiction and even violence. He recommends doctors prescribe non-drug remedies like exercise. (Have you ever tried to get a depressed person to exercise?)

Stat News comments:

Kennedy’s willfully uninformed rhetoric on antidepressants is going to cost lives. The similarity to his anti-vaccine chatter is clear: When you bad-mouth effective, lifesaving vaccines, you end up driving people away from lifesaving medical care. Kennedy’s antidepressant rhetoric is not only based on bad science, it fuels distrust in mental health treatments at a time when adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide rates are at record highs.

The Department of WarDefense has just released a trove of previously classified documents pertaining to UFOs.

I didn’t consider that particularly interesting, but this piece from the WaPo “Awakenings” newsletter is: Belief in UFOs, religion professor Diana Walsh Pasulka notes, is taking on many of the roles traditionally played by religion.

It organizes communities of belief, creates narratives of revelation, offers cosmological meaning and establishes interpretive frameworks through which people understand mysterious experiences and humanity’s place in the universe. … Mistrust of institutions has powered the rise of anti-institutional forms of belief. Religious impulses have migrated into new technological and media environments that bypass gatekeepers.

Historians have been upgrading their opinions of President Dwight Eisenhower. At the time he was often dismissed as a “do-nothing president” who presided over a boring era, providing a backdrop for a charismatic JFK presidency and the socially transformative Johnson presidency.

I wonder if the Trump presidency has raised historians’ opinion of boring government. Yes, Ike didn’t appear to be doing much. But among the things he didn’t do: He didn’t bail out the French after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu. He didn’t roll back the New Deal. He didn’t give in to the temptation to take advantage of our lead in nuclear weapons.

and let’s close with something impressive

This peacock is yet another image from The Guardian’s “Week in Wildlife“.

May 18, 2026 – 1:10 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

Is Corruption the Democrats’ Unifying Theme?

Maybe the reason the government is working so badly for you is that it works so well for him.

Ever since he came down the escalator in 2015, Donald Trump has posed a unique problem for his opponents: There’s so much to run against, how do you focus?

  • Maybe his ongoing attack on democratic governance and the rule of law is the most serious problem. But that can sound legalistic and abstract to a low-information voter. Harris tried to make democracy a major issue in 2024, and it didn’t get traction.
  • Maybe in the long run his gutting of the already-inadequate Obama/Biden response to climate change is the most serious thing. But there you run into a fossil-fuel-company disinformation campaign that has been going on for decades. Lots of Americans just don’t believe in climate change and don’t see why they should make sacrifices to head it off.
  • Maybe we need to turn around his “Promises Made; Promises Kept” slogan and point to all the reasons his supporters should be disappointed: Inflation is worse, not better. The deficit has gone up, not down. Tariffs and deportations haven’t opened up manufacturing jobs for Americans. Quite the opposite of exposing Epstein’s co-conspirators, his Justice Department has been helping hide them. Rather than curb wasteful government spending, he has pushed for expensive vanity projects like a billion-dollar ballroom and the Arc de Trump. After claiming that Harris would get us into another expensive war, he has gotten us into another expensive war.
  • Maybe we should push a class theme: Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” cut billionaire’s taxes and paid for it by cutting food and healthcare benefits for the working poor.
  • Maybe Trump’s personality is the problem: the constant lying, the childish insults, his mistreatment of women, and the way he demands a North-Korea-like level of praise from everyone in his administration. But Trump has a unique teflon-coating in this area. His over-the-top rhetoric channels the free-floating anger many voters feel.

I could go on. But if you don’t focus, if you catalog everything, you sound obsessive. Trump’s counter-narrative is that his critics have Trump Derangement Syndrome, an irrational urge to denounce anything Trump does. (The real TDS, in my opinion, is suffered by the Republicans who abandoned their previous principles to follow Trump: the libertarians who are now pro-autocracy, the deficit hawks who support both cutting taxes and fighting unnecessary wars, the religious leaders for whom Trump’s personal immorality doesn’t matter, and so on.)

The underlying problem is that everything is a distraction from everything else. Picking out one thing seems to imply that the others are acceptable. And that gets us squabbling among ourselves rather than uniting in opposition.

If only there were a theme that was unifying rather than divisive. Is there any aspect of the Trump regime that could serve as a trunk, with all the other objections as branches?

The Hungarian example. Péter Magyar faced a similar problem when he ran against Viktor Orbán, the neo-fascist autocrat of Hungary. Like Trump, Orbán had been an across-the-board negative influence on Hungarian society for many years. But as a result, the people who ought to oppose him did not form any coherent whole. So how could they be united behind a single party or candidate?

Magyar chose to focus on one central issue: corruption. And it worked.

Could it work for us?

Trump’s corruption. There’s a lot to work with here. To start with, there’s the bottom-line result: Trump’s net worth has skyrocketed since he got re-elected. Somehow, being president again has tripled his wealth in less than two years.

How? According to Forbes:

His cryptocurrency ventures, stalled out before the election, exploded after his victory, adding an estimated $1.8 billion to his fortune overall. Another $500 million came in court, where Trump’s legal team succeeded in eliminating a half-billion judgement against him. His once-dormant licensing business surged $400 million, as foreign developers clamored to do business with an American president.

Then there are the bribes channeled through lawsuits. For example, Trump filed a legally baseless lawsuit against CBS, but the parent company Paramount paid $16 million to the Trump Library to settle it — and got approval for its merger with Skydance. ABC had previously settled a similarly frivolous lawsuit for $15 million.

Then there are the indirect bribes, like Qatar giving a $400-million airplane to the Trump Library rather than directly to him, or the government contracts his sons are getting, or son-in-law Jared Kushner doing billions of dollars in private business ventures with the same governments he’s negotiating with for the United States.

This level of corruption has filtered down to his appointees, like border czar Tom Homan, who reportedly was taped taking $50,000 in a bag. (The investigation into Homan was quashed and Pam Bondi refused to answer questions about it in a congressional hearing.) Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem reportedly commissioned her own “palace in the sky” for $70 million.

This week’s self-dealing. But it’s hard to find a more blatant example of corruption than Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Supposedly, this is about the damage he suffered from having his tax returns leaked to the New York Times.

Bear in mind that all presidents since Nixon have released their tax returns voluntarily, for free, because the American people have a right to know how their presidents have been making money. Trump repeatedly had said he would release his returns, but always claimed there was some reason it couldn’t happen immediately.

Who knew that information was worth $10 billion?

Trump also has filed claims against the government for $230 million, concerning fantasized abuses of the investigations into his dealings with Russia and the successful FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home. (Both were entirely justified. Most obviously the Mar-a-Lago search: Trump illegally kept classified documents after he left the White House and became a private citizen. He told the government he had turned everything in. But the FBI searched for additional classified documents and found them.)

So anyway, these are claims in which Trump as an individual is suing the government he heads. He is effectively controlling both sides of the process — literal self-dealing. In April, a federal judge objected, requiring both “sides” to write memos explaining how this suit belongs in an adversarial process, when the two sides are not adversaries.

Rather than do that, according to both ABC News and the New York Times, Trump planned to “settle” with himself, by using $1.7 billion of taxpayer funds to create a slush fund controlled by Trump that could be used to pay off anyone who claimed to have been damaged by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the Justice Department: For example, the violent criminals who assaulted police officers on January 6.

All weekend, the obviousness of this scheme created bad publicity for the Trump regime. But that didn’t stop him. This morning, Trump dropped the lawsuit and the slush fund got created.

How is corruption a unifying theme? Trump’s corruption deserves to be an issue in its own right. It’s unparalleled in American history. (Even past corrupt presidencies typically didn’t enrich the president directly. Grant, for example, wrote his memoirs as he was dying so that his widow could have some money to live on after he was gone.) Any of a dozen or so similar scandals would have sunk any previous administration. (Think about how the Republicans tried to spin Hunter Biden, and what small potatoes all that is compared to Jared, Eric, and Don Jr.)

But Magyar made corruption unifying like this: The government isn’t working for you because it’s not trying to. It’s trying to work for him.

Do you not see what you’re getting from the Iran War? You’re not supposed to. It’s not for you. Tariffs? That was about bullying foreign governments into cooperating with Trump; it was never about you. Inflation? Trump was too busy designing his ballroom (and making sweetheart deals with contractors) to worry about it. Climate change? The big money is with the oil companies, so who cares about your children’s future?

And finally there’s the democracy issue, which is famously difficult to package in a way that reaches the voters we need. To many, it all sounds like politicians fighting turf battles: Who cares about Trump defying court orders or usurping Congress’ power-of-the-purse? How does any of that affect me?

It affects you like this: What Trump has consistently done is bulldoze any power center in government that could stop him from stealing. That’s why there are no independent inspectors general in government departments any more. That’s why cabinet secretaries won’t answer questions in congressional hearings. That’s why he wants to pre-determine elections through gerrymandering and voter suppression. He’s taking power away from anybody who could call him to account for his corruption.

May 18, 2026 – 12:00 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (10)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Ever since the Orban regime fell in Hungary, I’ve been wondering what lessons Democrats should learn from Péter Magyar’s campaign. The challenges are similar: Both Orban and Trump are authoritarians with a flood-the-zone strategy: They did so many objectionable things, but a national campaign needs to focus on a theme. Does any one theme provide a trunk to hang all the branches on?

Magyar settled on corruption: Things are bad for you because Orban is running the country for the benefit of himself and his allies, not you.

That’s certainly true of Trump as well, and this week gave us some prime examples of Trump’s corruption. But is it the right theme? The featured post will explore that possibility, as well as catalog the various strands of corruption. It should be out before 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will discuss the summit with China; southern states racing to reinstate all-White congressional delegations, now that the Supreme Court has blessed that plan; inflation; the Christian nationalist rally you paid for Sunday; and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by 1.

May 18, 2026 – 8:42 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Profoundly Wrong Things

Good people, people who go to church, people who love their families, people who believe they’re good have, throughout the history of this country, done deeply, profoundly wrong things to Black Americans, and they told themselves it was about something else. They told themselves that it was about economics, heritage, party, patriotism. It was never about something else. And today it’s not about something else.

– Tennessee State Senator Charlane Oliver

This week’s featured post is a book review: “Phillips O’Brien’s ‘War and Power’“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. With the Virginia Supreme Court throwing out the result of the state’s redistricting referendum, and various southern states taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s invitation to get rid of majority-minority districts, Republicans have now managed to tilt the playing field in their favor. Democrats will have to win the popular vote decisively in November to get a House majority.
  • Climate change. Early signs point to a strong El Nino effect this year, making weather events more extreme.
  • Iran. The pattern continues: Trump keeps announcing peace deals that the Iranians never agreed to. Nothing can change until Trump recognizes that he’s going to wind up with a situation worse than the one at the start of the war. Trump can’t admit that, so the Strait stays closed and gas prices keep rising.
  • Ukraine. Phillips O’Brien’s weekly update discusses Putin’s (realistic) fears that Ukraine could attack his Victory Day parade in Moscow with a long-range drone. Ukraine now hits Russia with more long-range drones than Russia uses against Ukraine. This must be very demoralizing for the Russian public, which (like Americans and Iran) has to wonder why it’s in this war at all.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the race to disenfranchise southern Blacks

The Virginia Supreme Court tossed out the results of the recent referendum. It’s a 4-3 decision and highly questionable, but there’s not a federal issue that would invite US Supreme Court intervention, even if we had an honest Supreme Court.

The Virginia redistricting was supposed to pick up four Democratic seats in Congress, and briefly looked like it put Democrats narrowly ahead in the redistricting wars. But not only has that been undone, but southern red states are wasting no time in using the Supreme Court’s Callais decision to eliminate majority-Black districts. Tennessee has already eliminated its last such district by dividing the voters of Memphis among three districts that will now all have White Republican majorities.

The new map points to a 9-0 Republican advantage in the Tennessee delegation in the US House.

In one particularly outrageous moment, Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were kept out of the room where the redistricting proposal was being voted on, resulting in this soon-to-be-iconic photo of Justin Pearson and the sergeant-at-arms.

Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina are expected to follow suit this week with their own proposals to end Black representation in Congress.

and Trump’s ballroom

I would hate to work for The Onion these days, because Trump keeps doing things that already sound like over-the-top parodies. Case in point: the proposed White House ballroom.

Originally, it wasn’t supposed to cost the taxpayers anything (other than the cost of whatever favors Trump does for the private donors who funded it, plus the money lost to the tax deductions from these bribes gifts). That was the go-to response whenever anybody objected to Trump exceeding his authority by tearing down the East Wing without approval of Congress or buy-in from the appropriate DC architectural committees: It’s free; be grateful.

But the ballroom kept getting bigger and glitzier. The price tag kept going up. And now We the People are getting the bill: $1 billion tucked into the omnibus bill Republicans are hoping to pass through reconciliation (i.e., without any Democratic votes).

So rich donors aren’t building Trump’s ballroom any more than Mexico has paid for Trump’s wall. At a time when the government is saving money by kicking Americans off food stamps or refusing to subsidize their health insurance, it seems to have plenty of money to fight an unnecessary war and build a monument to Trump’s vanity.

You and I will never see the inside of this ballroom, if it ever gets built. We’ll just pay for it.

The ballroom issue is putting pressure on congressional Republicans, who face a choice between their constituents and the desires of He Who Must Be Obeyed.

One interesting political strategy: Democrats should make them own this. At some point in the reconciliation process, amendments will be possible. If Democrats propose to strip the ballroom funding out of the bill and then back that amendment, only a handful of Republican votes will be needed to pass it. That would let the vast majority of Republicans tell Trump they did their best, but tell their constituents that their bill doesn’t pay for the ballroom.

But what if Democrats abstain on any anti-ballroom amendment? Then Republicans actually have to choose between voters and Their Lord and Master.

and Ka$h Patel

About a month ago, Atlantic reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick used a large number of anonymous sources within the FBI to verify that Director Kash Patel has a drinking problem — something we all had to suspect after seeing the viral video of his alcohol-fueled celebration with the gold-medal-winning US Olympic hockey team.

On multiple occasions in the past year, members of his security detail had difficulty waking Patel because he was seemingly intoxicated, according to information supplied to Justice Department and White House officials. A request for “breaching equipment”—normally used by SWAT and hostage-rescue teams to quickly gain entry into buildings—was made last year because Patel had been unreachable behind locked doors, according to multiple people familiar with the request.

Patel responded with a $250-million defamation lawsuit, which (to begin with) assumes Patel ever had a reputation worth $250 million. Further, he would need to prove not just that the story is false, but that Atlantic either knew or should have known it was false, but published it anyway out of malice.

Simultaneously, Patel abused his position to open a leak investigation into Fitzpatrick’s sources — contradicting the implication that she didn’t really have sources and just made the story up. (It’s reminiscent of an old joke: A reporter writes that the president is a moron. He is prosecuted and goes to jail — not for defamation, but for revealing a state secret.)

Well, Fitzpatrick and The Atlantic are so intimidated that they followed up:

After my story appeared, I heard from people in Patel’s orbit and people he has met at public functions, who told me that it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “Kash Patel FBI Director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: Ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well. One such bottle popped up on an online auction site shortly after my story appeared, and The Atlantic later purchased it.

Why would anyone think that Ka$h has a problem, or that alcohol plays too large a role in his life?

and you also might be interested in …

So far, the hantavirus doesn’t seem worth panicking over. Still, it would be nice to have a trustworthy CDC right now.

So far, the rising price of gas, Trump’s illegal tariffs, and other economic woes have not shown up in the job numbers. The April jobs report showed 115K more jobs and the unemployment rate holding steady at 4.3%.

However, it’s worth pointing out that the government is running a $2 trillion annual debt to get those results. As soon as a Democrat becomes president, the national debt will become an existential emergency again.

On the surface, the results of Trump slashing funding to fight AIDS in Africa doesn’t look bad: People previously diagnosed are continuing to get their drugs and are not dying in large numbers. The forward-looking projections are alarming, though. Funding has collapsed for testing, so new people are getting AIDS and spreading it undetected.

For those former Christians who have chosen to worship Trump instead of Jesus, his Doral golf course now provides an idol they can use: a 17-foot gold-leaf statue sitting on a five-foot pedestal.

It’s yet another case where satire has a hard time staying ahead of the news. In the current (and concluding) season of Amazon Prime’s “The Boys”, the series’ villain (the super-powered Homelander) is declaring himself to be God, challenging the loyalty of his Christian nationalist base.

We can only hope that actual MAGA “Christians” will feel similarly challenged. So far they don’t seem to.

Add Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) to the list of current or former Trump staffers with multiple accusations of domestic abuse.

A. R. Moxon raises an interesting point, related to accepting ex-MAGA folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Tucker Carlson: It’s one thing to try to meet people where they are. But it will never work to try to meet people where they think they are, when they’re not really there.

If they will only meet us in a place where we will agree with them that their bigotries have justification, their awareness need no expansion, and their conviction needs no progression, then I would say we can’t meet them where they are, because even if we show up where they are, they won’t be there, and if we go to where they think they are, we won’t be where we need to be.

and let’s close with something hopeful

If you’re looking for some reason not to give up, check out LOLGOP’s “The Case of Earl Warren“.

It begins with a provocative set of questions:

[W]hat if good and evil—as concepts, as actual forces in the world—what if they exist? What if people—regular, flawed, embarrassing, complicated people—can actually be moved beyond the programming of their nervous system or algorithm or the combination of the two? What if it’s possible to change your mind, or someone else’s mind, or the collective mind of a country that has been, let’s say, unwell? And maybe, by making the case now, we can shape history in the coming years by beginning a process that might regenerate something we once called conscience?

After that Twilight Zone intro, I can almost hear Rod Serling say: “Case in point: Earl Warren, an ambitious state attorney general with his eye on the governor’s mansion.” In the 1942 campaign, Warren found his issue: Japanese Americans. They were all potential traitors and needed to be put away. So after he ascended to the governorship of California, he enthusiastically went along with the Japanese internment, one of the most shameful things America had done since slavery. Warren was, in other words, xenophobic, hateful, and willing to scapegoat an entire ethnic group of innocent people to advance his political career.

But somehow, by 1954, he had become chief justice of the Supreme Court that outlawed racial segregation in America’s schools. Between 1953 and 1969, the Warren Court established previously unrecognized rights of minority groups both racial and religious. It expanded our notions of free speech and put limits on the ability of police to railroad defendants.

As someone who remembers the last chunk of that era, I can testify: Warren was not just going with the flow here. The Warren Court wasn’t being pulled along by the trends of its era. In many cases it was leading the parade towards human rights. Far from trying to please the crowd, Warren was making himself unpopular. “Impeach Earl Warren” was the right-wing slogan of the day.

While Warren’s conversion probably didn’t happen overnight on Christmas Eve, and I have no reason to believe ghosts were involved, it was a transformation worthy of Dickens.

He became, by many accounts, a genuinely different person. Under different conditions, with different pressures, with enough exposure to the consequences of what he’d helped create—he changed.

I’m not telling you this to make you feel better. I’m not telling you this because the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice and all of that. I’m telling you because the conditions that produced Earl Warren in 1942—the organized fear, the nativist infrastructure, the information environment that made cruelty feel like common sense—those conditions are not so different in their structure from what’s producing the people who scare and exhaust us today.

Which means: they are not a different species. Which means: some of them can be moved. Which means: the work of figuring out how to move them is not naive.

May 11, 2026 – 12:25 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (6)

Phillips O’Brien’s “War and Power”

Why have predictions about recent wars gone so horribly wrong?

Ukraine. On February 21, 2022 — just three days before Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine — Robert Kagan, a foreign policy specialist who had served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, wrote a forward-looking article in The Washington Post: “What we can expect after Putin’s conquest of Ukraine“. Kagan skipped over the oncoming war entirely, to the post-conquest aftermath, when Ukraine would “cease to exist as an independent entity” and be incorporated into Russia, which would now border four new NATO countries (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania) in addition to the previous Estonia and Latvia.

Kagan’s view was a typical expert take on the military situation. Earlier that month, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, told Congress that Kyiv might fall only three days into a full Russian invasion. After the invasion began, President Biden offered to evacuate Ukrainian President Zelensky, to which Zelensky famously replied “I need ammunition, not a ride.“

If there would be any hiccup in this conquest at all, Kagan imagined, it could only be in the form of an insurgency after Russian troops overran the country.

Some analysts today imagine a Ukrainian insurgency sprouting up against Russian domination. Perhaps. But the Ukrainian people cannot be expected to fight a full-spectrum war with whatever they have in their homes. To have any hope against Russian occupation forces, an insurgency will need to be supplied and supported from neighboring countries. Will Poland play that role, with Russian forces directly across the border? Will the Baltics? Or Hungary? And if they do, will the Russians not feel justified in attacking the insurgents’ supply routes, even if they happen to lie in the territory of neighboring NATO members? It is wishful thinking to imagine that this conflict stops with Ukraine.

And yet, four years later, Ukraine is still resisting the Russian invasion — not as an insurgency, but as a nation with a free capital and territory under its control. Zelensky is still president, and still in Kyiv. Who will ultimately prevail in this war is still very much up in the air.

The kind of mistaken certainty military experts expressed prior to the first shots being fired in Ukraine is far from unusual. The United States was supposed to defeat North Vietnam and the Taliban. The Iraq War was expected to end quickly with a more clearly favorable outcome. The Soviet Union was bound to succeed in Afghanistan. China should have had no problem handling Vietnam. The Trump administration expected that the successful decapitation strike the US and Israel mounted against Iran at the end of February would bring the Tehran regime to its knees and end the war quickly.

None of that happened. But why didn’t it? And why did so many learned people think that it would?

Phillips O’Brien’s War and Power is an attempt to answer that question, and to apply that answer to the current rivalry between the US and China. (The book came out last October, before the attack on Iran.)

O’Brien deserves a certain amount of credit right now, because he did not think Russia would roll through Ukraine. In “The New Appeasement“, published in January, 2022, O’Brien wrote:

If we have relearned any lesson over the last two decades, it is that military operations are expensive, usually counterproductive, and with the constant possibility of going dangerously wrong for the richest and most advanced economies, let alone weak ones. … If Russia we actually stupid enough to attack Ukraine, it would tax their military in a way not seen since the Cold War ended.

Why did he see Russia vs. Ukraine differently? War and Power is a study of the factors that make for success in war.

Existing forces. Too often, O’Brien says, analysts focus on the immediately available resources of the two sides: number of soldiers, quantity and quality of equipment, and so on. They take those assets and use them in war games that play out various strategies. Often, those games produce some decisive outcome in a short period of time.

Actual wars, he argues, looking back at the wars of the last two centuries, seldom work out that way. All the nations entering World War I, for example, had war plans that resulted in some quick victory. None of those plans became reality.

What is likely to happen instead is that the war quickly chews up the resources that were available at the beginning: Soldiers get killed or wounded, equipment gets destroyed, and sometimes entire types of equipment (and the tactics that go with them) prove to be obsolete in the face of new realities. (The cavalry charge, for example, had to be abandoned due to machine guns. Horses that would have been the stars of a 19th-century battlefield became mere draft animals, and then lost even that role to trucks.)

So the outcome of a war winds up depending not just (or even primarily) on the resources available at the beginning, but on each side’s ability to replace their loses with new weapons developed to match the challenges the war has posed. This depends on the entire societies involved: How wealthy and technologically sophisticated are they? Do their populations have the will to keep fighting? Does the war engage the innovative abilities of the whole nation? What kind of allies does each side have, and what can those allies provide?

What O’Brien saw in Russia was a corrupt system in which units often did not have the equipment that existed on paper, and the equipment that existed in the real world often did not perform as designed. (My favorite first-days-of-the-war story was of a Ukrainian farmer on his tractor who found a broken-down Russian tank in his field. He offered to tow it back to Russia.) The Russian military had never fought against a determined, sophisticated foe, and had no experience organizing complex operations like the suppression of air defenses. Their command structure did not give lower-level officers the power to change tactics that weren’t working. Putin himself lived (and still lives) in an informational bubble, making decisions based on the facts that people aren’t afraid to tell him.

The result was that much of the Russian advantage in tanks an similar equipment was wasted. Poor logistical planning produced traffic jams on the few roads to Kyiv, making those tanks sitting ducks for air power that Russia was unable to suppress, as well as artillery and attacks from small units of Ukrainians. Ukraine’s army proved to be resourceful and creative. As the war has dragged on, Ukrainians have mastered the new warfare of drones, which pre-war analysts did not see coming. Ukrainians in the field knew what they were fighting for and were willing to do so, while Russians often did not and were not.

So here we are, more than four years later: Russia has taken enormous losses and still is no closer to victory. Putin’s stooge Trump has backed away from supplying the Ukrainians, but Europe has increasingly stepped up. The outcome is still in doubt.

National interest. O’Brien is also critical of geo-political analysis that focuses on “national interest” as an abstraction that denies the significance of choices made by leaders. The field has shied away from what it contemptuously calls the Great Man Theory of History in favor of larger forces that constrain leaders to follow certain paths.

But leadership matters. O’Brien points to the late 19th century, when Great Britain could have felt threatened by the rise of the United States, but chose not to. So leadership of the world crossed the Atlantic without without Americans and Englishmen needing to shoot at each other.

Throughout the world wars, the choices of leaders mattered, for good or ill. For example, in the late 19th century Britain sought an alliance with Germany, but Kaiser Wilhelm rejected the idea, forcing the British to ally with France and Russia instead. How World War I might have played out in a Britain/Germany world — or if it would have happened at all — is anybody’s guess.

O’Brien could not have asked for a better example of leadership choices than the Iran War that has played out since his book’s publication. Trump need not have torn up the agreement Obama had negotiated to restrain Iran’s nuclear program, and need not have gone to war at all. Even after choosing war, he could have stated clear goals and rallied the nation behind them, but did not.

So even as Iran endures massive destruction and casualties, it may well outlast Americans’ willingness to pay high gas prices.

China vs. the United States. The rise of China is the kind of development that doesn’t have to lead to war (see the US vs. Great Britain), but often does. An obvious flash point is Taiwan, which China covets and the US protects.

What will happen if we go to war?

The final chapter of War and Power applies the concepts O’Brien has been developing. He does his best not to sensationalize his conclusions, but I have a hard time seeing how the US wins this war (short of escalating to nuclear weapons).

Initially, he says, the US would have several big advantages: US equipment is generally more technologically advanced, and US forces have a lot of war-fighting experience, while Chinese troops and systems are largely untested (and didn’t do well when they fought Vietnam in the late 1970s). It’s hard to imagine the Chinese pulling off the kind of complex operation the US did to snatch Venezuelan President Maduro out of his own palace.

So a quick American knock-out is a possibility. But if the war lasts, the advantage turns: The Chinese are good at making stuff, and we aren’t any more. As planes are shot down, ships sink, and ammunition from bullets to missiles gets used up, the Chinese will replace their losses much more easily than we will. The productive advantage that won World War II for us might win the next war for China.

And in the Trump era, Americans have lost all sense of diplomacy. So could we count on South Korea or Japan to stand with us and make the things (like ships) that we no longer manufacture in any quantity?

In the end, the war might hang on the Taiwanese themselves. How badly do they want to stay independent? In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, we saw the fruitlessness of propping up an ally that doesn’t want to fight. Taiwan might prove as resilient as Ukraine. Or it might not.

May 11, 2026 – 9:50 am Categories: Articles | Comments (10)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

With the help of the courts, Republicans have won the redistricting wars. The pro-Democratic Virginia redistricting has been thrown out, and the Supreme Court has given southern states the go-ahead to get rid of all their non-White congresspeople — which they are racing to take advantage of.

It probably won’t save Mike Johnson’s Republican majority in the fall, but it will turn a big Democratic popular-vote victory into a small Democratic House majority.

Other than that, everything that was happening last week is still happening: Trump still isn’t admitting his strategic blunder in Iran, so the price of gasoline keeps rising. The climate change catastrophe keeps creeping closer. Trump’s popularity keeps falling, but the stock market keeps rising for some reason I can’t fathom. Ukraine continues to seize the initiative from Russia, but Putin also can never admit that he made a mistake, so the killing will continue. The hantavirus scare continues.

So this seemed like a good week to do a book review: War and Power by Phillips O’Brien. It focuses on two questions: Why do analysts keep making horribly wrong predictions about how wars will turn out? (Kyiv was supposed to fall in a few days, remember.) And what does a proper understanding of war say about any possible conflict between China and the US, maybe over Taiwan?

The review should be out maybe around 10 EDT, and the weekly summary around noon.

May 11, 2026 – 8:21 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Necessary Means

Our difficulty with the Court today rises not from the Court as an institution but from human beings within it. But we cannot yield our constitutional destiny to the personal judgement of a few men who, being fearful of the future, would deny us the necessary means of dealing with the present.

– Franklin Roosevelt, On “Court Packing”
March 9, 1937

This week’s featured post is “What to do with a lawless Supreme Court?“

Ongoing stories

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about voting rights

The Supreme Court’s decision voiding the remainder of the Voting Rights Act is the topic of the featured post.

and abortion access

Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order against mailing the abortion drug mifepristone. Today, the Supreme Court stayed that order for a week.

States that have outlawed abortion, like Louisiana, object to their citizens still having access to it via teleprescriptions and the mail. They allege that taking mifepristone at home is unsafe, though that seems to be a pretext.

It’s not clear what the next step in this case is.

and the war

Nothing major seems to be happening, but it’s hard to tell because of conflicting claims and counter-claims by the two sides. The US claims to have escorted two ships through the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranians claim to have hit a US warship.

The two sides’ peace proposals continue to be far apart. Iran’s 14 points are all about ending US attacks without any concessions on their part. US proposals want Iran to turn over its nuclear material and swear off future nuclear ambitions without any concessions on our part.

Meanwhile, oil remains around $114 per barrel. Paul Krugman keeps pointing to the physical constraints: The world is burning more oil than is being shipped. If this continues, the stockpiles will run out. At that point, if not before, the price will have to rise high enough that demand falls to equal supply.

and the Comey indictment

Nearly a year ago, James Comey photographed seashells arranged to spell out “86/47”, which Trump and his loyalists exaggerated into a threat of assassination (86) against Trump (47). As soon as Comey heard this interpretation, he took the photo down and apologized.

Now he has been indicted for making a threat and transmitting it over social media. Each count carries a maximum sentence of ten years in prison.

The whole thing is absurd on many levels, and illustrates just how far the current Justice Department will go to harass people Trump views as his enemies.

  • 86 has a variety of meanings, and it’s not clear that killing someone is even the most typical one.
  • We’re not sure whether Comey arranged the shells himself, or just found someone else’s arrangement on a beach.
  • Comey denies he intended the photo as a threat, and no evidence publicly available indicates otherwise.
  • It’s not clear whether Comey is supposed to have intended to carry out this alleged threat himself, or was saying that someone should do it.
  • In all previous cases, statements like this unconnected to a specific plan aren’t prosecuted under this statute. Simply saying “Somebody should kill this guy” is just free speech unless you are directly inciting somebody to do it. Ditto for “I’d like to kill this guy” if you have no specific plan to do so.

A judge will throw this out well before a jury hears it.

Isn’t it wonderful that the US is so crime-free that the Justice Department can waste its time on stuff like this?

and you also might be interested in …

The government owes billions in refunds to American businesses that paid Trump’s illegal tariffs. The big corporations have lawyers and other specialists to navigate the refund process, so they’ll probably get their money back. But small businesses probably won’t.

The DHS funding shutdown is over, except for funding Trump’s mass deportation programs. Republicans are preparing a reconciliation measure this summer to fund ICE and the border patrol through the end of Trump’s term, presumably so that next year’s Democratic Congress won’t have any leverage over these rogue agencies.

Democrats objected to funding ICE and CBP without restrictions after the videotaped murders of Alex Pretti and Rene Good in Minneapolis in January. The agents who committed these crimes have faced no charges, and federal agencies have done everything they could to block Minnesota’s investigations.

Democratic senators have been asking Trump’s judicial nominees who won the 2020 election and whether Trump could run for a third term in 2028. They can’t answer clearly, which should make everyone doubt their objectivity and resistance to Trump’s intimidation.

On Star Wars Day, Paul Krugman compares the proposed Trump battleships to the Death Star. The difference: The Death Star actually got built.

Trump’s new surgeon general nominee is yet another Fox News talking head, but at least this one has an active medical license. She says a lot of questionable things, but doesn’t appear to be crazy.

60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi received the Ridenhour Courage Prize for standing up to CBS’ management efforts to alter her piece on El Salvador’s CECOT Prison, where the Trump administration had sent a number of migrants.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. Fear is a funny thing – it can paralyze you, or it can point you to exactly what needs to be protected. Right now, our industry is afraid of the wrong things. We’re afraid of offending power. We’re afraid of losing access. We’re afraid of another baseless lawsuit. But what we should all be afraid of is silence. Because as I learned [at her first job as a waitress], there is a fine line between being a team player and being an accomplice.

The Ridenhour Prizes are named for Ron Ridenhour, who exposed the My Lai massacre. They’ve been awarded since 2004, with the first prize going to Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

and let’s close with something wild

If you want to get your mind off the news, The Guardian’s “Week in Wildlife” gallery is a good choice. The squirrel above appears to be adjusting the camera.

May 4, 2026 – 10:14 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)