Category Archives: Articles

Beth Macy Goes Home Again

November 17, 2025 – 11:23 am

The author of Dopesick goes back to her small Ohio home town and wonders: Could a troubled teen do today what she did decades ago? Maybe. But the hurdles to jump are higher now.

In the Broadway musical A Little Night Music, a minor character sings a poignant song about hope and hopelessness in the serving class. In “The Miller’s Son“, the verses argue with the chorus, as a kitchen maid alternately dreams of a better life and realizes that the only pleasures available to her are momentary ones that lead nowhere.

Her opening thought is that “I shall marry the miller’s son, pin my hat on a nice piece of property.” Each verse lets the fantasy run a little wilder: “I shall marry the businessman, five fat babies and lots of security”, and then “I shall marry the Prince of Wales, pearls and servants and dressing for festivals.” Of course, if the pleasures of the moment lead to a pregnancy, none of that is possible. But was it ever possible? She ends by bitterly repeating “I shall marry the miller’s son”, recognizing that for her such a match is no more likely than the Prince of Wales.

Beth Macy is 60-something now. She came from a poor family with an alcoholic father in the small town of Urbana, Ohio. She studied hard in school and was a good if unspectacular student. She went to college on a Pell Grant, became a journalist, and (eventually) an author of several best-selling books — one of which, Dopesick, about how corporate greed led to an opioid crisis in small-town America, was made into an Emmy-winning miniseries.

Her life, from one point of view, is the quintessential American rags-to-riches story we like to tell children: Work hard, don’t give up, and you can make something of yourself, no matter how unlikely that may seem at the moment. Abe Lincoln went from a log cabin to the White House; you can too.

But in her new book Paper Girl, Macy goes back to Urbana and (over a period of years) interviews everyone from her relatives to troubled high school students to the mayor. The main question on her mind: Is the path that she walked still open today? Along the way she learns a lot about hopelessness in the White working class, its turn to the political right, and political polarization in general.

Getting a degree. The quick answer to Macy’s original question is: The path is still open, but much narrower and more treacherous than it was in her day.

She follows several of Urbana’s young people who grew up in difficult circumstances, and runs into the same story again and again: They have the talent and ambition to get out of poverty and possibly make it in the wider world, teacher and other mentors are rooting for them, but something comes up. Juggling a job, school, and ongoing family trauma gets to be too much. Or some close relative needs care and has no one else to provide it. Or maybe it’s something as simple as a car repair they have no money to cover; the fifty miles to the state university turns into an insurmountable obstacle.

Almost as bad as the immediate problems is the fatalism they lead to: Of course something would come up. People don’t actually walk the path to education or training and a secure future any more. It was never in the cards for them to marry the miller’s son.

What reminded me of “The Miller’s Son” was how the get-educated path can sound just as improbable as the make-the-NBA or become-a-rap-star path. People have done it, but could you do it? Is it worth making sacrifices (and asking others to make sacrifices for you) to keep that dream alive?

Politics. So what changed between the 1970s and 80s and the 2020s? Part of it is political: As a society, we stopped investing in education. When Macy got her Pell grant, it was a free ticket to college, but it no longer is. Once, Pell grants were how we made real the promise of America, and we told ourselves (truthfully) that a college grad’s increased lifetime earnings would lead to income tax payments that more than reimbursed the government for its generosity. But during the miserly years of the Reagan revolution (and Clinton’s ratification of much of that course change), poor young people in college became just another kind of welfare queen.

And as federal support was drying up, colleges themselves have gotten more expensive, largely because states pay a much smaller part of the costs of their state university systems. Financial aid shifted from grants to loans, so that a graduate might start a career with six-figure debts. And if you didn’t graduate — if, say, something came up that knocked you out of college — you’d have almost as much debt but not the degree to help you pay it off.

Piling on further, the degree itself is not worth as much in the job market. Even a STEM degree might not help you if the job market is looking for some other kind of STEM degree the year you graduate. (For example, the freshmen who chose a computer science major four years ago may not have realized they’d have to compete with AI algorithms for entry-level jobs.)

I’m not sure anybody is asking this question, but they should: What kind of program would it take to make the promise of America real today?

Family. Macy quickly notices the symptoms that students’ lives have changed: High school graduation rates are down. Attendance is down. Ohio’s liberalized homeschooling laws make even those numbers look better than they actually are, as parents who can’t get their children to school and are sick of dealing with truant officers sign a paper saying their child is being homeschooled. No one checks that the child is actually getting an education.

Meanwhile, public schools are losing funds to Ohio’s private-school voucher program, which makes private schools less expensive for the well-off without truly making them accessible to the poor.

Of course, homeschooling only works if home is working. And here we run into the opioid crisis Macy chronicled in Dopesick. She tells stories of teens who either couchsurf or are homeless through high school, because one parent is a drug addict and the other is in jail. It’s hard to say whether there is more sexual abuse than in Macy’s teen years, but there is certainly a lot of it. Paying attention to trigonometry or Shakespeare is probably not at the forefront of many students’ minds.

Many teachers, counselors, and coaches try to step into the breach, but it’s too much for them. A gay man who runs a teen center wrangled a grant out of the state, but couldn’t get the local government to sign off on it because of homophobic fears that he was “recruiting” teens into the gay lifestyle.

Community. In Macy’s day, Urbana was a more integrated community, at least in the sense of class. One way she coped with her dysfunctional family was by spending a lot of time with friends whose families were thriving. But increasingly, Urbana is siloed into the haves and have-nots.

Urbana is basically the country club and the ghetto, and neither group has any idea that the other group exists.

So a present-day Beth Macy may not know about those thriving families or be invited into their homes. She might not hear friends’ professional-class dreams and wonder “Why not me?”

A journalist herself, who began her career writing features about local characters for local newspapers, Macy sees great significance in the decline of local journalism: Urbana’s main local news outlets are Facebook pages and advertising sheets that publish press releases rather than news stories. How do Urbana’s people hear about folks unlike themselves? How do they find out about events happening outside their silo?

The results are twofold: On the one hand, Urbana’s citizens have lost their town as a source of identity, causing them to seek identity in politics or religion. On the other, they have lost a sense of their fellow citizens as Us, and have a corresponding willingness to accept conspiracy theories about Them.

Polarization. Urbana, and in particular its working-class population, is among the victims of globalization. The family business that once was the town’s major employer was long ago sold off, and most of its jobs have gone overseas. When Bill Clinton was pushing NAFTA and similar once-Republican free-trade policies, the promise was that new jobs would replace the old jobs, and that the overall benefit to the American economy would allow us to invest in retraining the displaced workers.

That never worked out. The new jobs weren’t where they needed to be, and the retraining rarely prepared the displaced workers adequately. Most of them wound up working in places like WalMart and never regaining the financial stability the old jobs had offered. Many found ways to retire early or claim disability.

So when Trump tells such people that they’ve been forgotten, he’s not wrong. Much of what he tells them after that is false; the Haitians in nearby Springfield were never eating the local dogs and cats. But having seen them and offered at least some explanation of their situation gets him in the door. When he offers to deport the immigrants who are “stealing their jobs”, that’s at least a plan of some sort.

Now connect that with the sense of hopelessness in the young people: They can’t hope to get the jobs their parents or grandparents had. Getting post-high-school training and going on to land the good jobs that still exist — that seems like a pipe dream, not a realistic plan. Parents can’t look forward to their children having a better life than they did.

One of the questions “Make America Great Again” always raises is “When was the great age that ‘again’ promises to restore?” The obvious answers raise issues of racism and sexism: Was America great during Jim Crow? Was it great when women couldn’t get a credit card without their husbands’ signature? When gays had to be in the closet? When?

And yes, MAGA has always been tainted by a background scent of bigotry. But fundamentally, “again” appeals to the feeling among White working-class families that Americans like them used to have hope. Those dim memories make them feel entitled to hope, and to recognize that they don’t have it now.

Someone must have taken it from them.

That’s the opening that Q-Anon and other conspiracy theories exploit. Macy recounts many conversations with relatives or high school friends who have bought some form of conspiracy theory. When Macy tries to offer facts, she is told “You can’t trust the media.” And she replies “But I am the media.” If this provokes any cognitive dissonance in people who ought to trust her, it’s not enough.

That disconnect is, I think, typical of the college/non-college divide. If you went to college, and even moreso if you went to graduate school, you have a sense of the accessibility of expertise. I may not know Anthony Fauci, for example, but I know biologists who understand infectious diseases. There was a point in my life where I could have gone into biology or climate science or a discipline at the center of some other alleged conspiracy. When would the conspirators have read me in? Why don’t my friends ever tell me about such moments?

But if you didn’t go to college, those disciplines may seem so distant that literally anything could be happening there.

Privilege. I think I also understand now why the MAGA working class is so hostile to any “woke” talk about White privilege or male privilege. Again, racism and sexism probably play some role, but maybe not the main role.

It’s always been the habit or ruling classes to rob Peter to pay Paul. If a ruling class has a debt, chances are it will steal from someone else to pay it, like the United States taking Liberia to offer to freed slaves. I mean, God forbid that those who profited from slavery should shoulder the cost!

Integration of public schools followed a similar pattern: Well-to-do Whites thrust that social experiment onto working-class Whites, while either moving to upscale suburbs or sending their own children to private schools.

So if recognition of privilege takes hold, who will be asked to pay the debt owed to the un-privileged groups? White or male MAGAts anticipate being handed the bill themselves, and not being able to pass it on to the billionaires. And they’re probably not wrong.

How to win them back? For too long, Democrats have tried to depend on Truth to win out: Climate change is real. Privilege exists. Immigrants benefit the economy. Cutting rich people’s taxes never works out for those who aren’t rich. And so on.

What we miss is that Truth will not win out if the Truth is hopeless. If the Truth is: “You’re screwed. Try to get used to it”, that Truth will not win elections for us, even if the other party offers transparent nonsense.

We need to recognize the hopeless parts of America and begin speaking to them. We need to begin offering plans for them and their children and their communities to have futures they can believe in.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (13)

What would a Republican healthcare plan look like?

November 10, 2025 – 11:04 am

The government can cut healthcare spending if it tempts people into gambling with their lives.

The longest government shutdown in American history came down to one issue: healthcare. Republicans have been persistent about dismantling the ObamaCare model, claiming that they have a different approach that will yield better care for less cost. And so the subsidies that kept policies on the ObamaCare marketplace affordable have been allowed to lapse for 2026 policies. Democrats tried to reverse that as a condition of reopening the government, but appear to have failed.

Of course, Trump has been promising to spell out a “beautiful” healthcare plan since 2015, and we’ve still seen nothing. Critics say Republicans don’t really have a plan, which is true in the sense that they don’t have a written piece of legislation that can be compared to the Affordable Care Act, apples to apples. (They also have nothing that could take effect in time to replace the 2026 ObamaCare policies they have now made unaffordable for millions of Americans.) Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene makes an even stronger claim, that even within the Republican House conference, Mike Johnson has not yet presented “a single policy idea”. Speaker Johnson counters that Republicans have “pages and pages and pages of ideas of how to reform healthcare”, and has pointed to a report the Republican Study Committee wrote in 2019.

It’s natural and probably appropriate to be cynical about that claim, but for a few minutes let’s take Speaker Johnson seriously. What’s in that report? It’s 58 pages, most of which are spent criticizing ObamaCare. But it does get around to presenting some ideas on pages 32-50: things like health savings accounts, allowing a wider range of choices in insurance, changes to the way employer-paid premiums are taxed, and so on — enough individual notions to get you confused about the overall picture. But basically it comes down to this: They want you to gamble with your life and health.

In order to understand their proposals, let’s lay out the context: starting with the pre-ObamaCare situation, then what ObamaCare did, and then the ways Republicans have broken ObamaCare since.

Before ObamaCare. When the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, about 16% of Americans — 48 million in all — did not have health insurance, and the number was growing every year. Tens of millions of others (the exact number depends on your definitions) had some form of “junk insurance” — a policy that worked just fine for relatively minor things like a broken arm, but would leave you in a lurch if you developed some really expensive condition.

People were uninsured for a variety of reasons: Some couldn’t get insurance because they had pre-existing conditions like cancer or heart disease that made them bad risks. Others were young and healthy and saw no reason to pay significant amounts of money for care they believed they would never use. (I did this myself at age 21 in the summer between my undergraduate and graduate-school coverage. Looking back, I feel foolish about that gamble, but I got away with it.) For others, health insurance had to compete with rent and food for their limited resources. Or perhaps their health was not so bad as to make them uninsurable, but bad enough that the rates they were offered were astronomical.

Junk insurance came in a variety of forms. Maybe, if you had survived some expensive illness like cancer, it would specifically exempt any condition related to a return of that illness. Maybe it would have an annual or a lifetime cap on what it would pay out. (If you had a debilitating disease like MS, or a child born with significant birth defects — as my college roommate did — you might go over that lifetime cap in just a few years. Then you’d be uninsurable.) Maybe it would have to be renewed every year or two, giving the insurance company a chance to drop you if it wasn’t making money on your policy.

In short, somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of Americans lived with the worry that if they needed significant medical care, they wouldn’t be able to pay for it.

The roots of ObamaCare. This healthcare anxiety is a uniquely American problem, because other rich countries don’t regard medical expense as a personal responsibility, and instead pay for it through some national system. Statistics argue in favor of that approach: Among wealthy nations, the US stands out both for its per capita spending on health care, and for its low life expectancy. So we pay more, but get worse results.

But national healthcare is “socialism”, which is anathema to American conservatives. So in an attempt to stop the US from opting for a European-style national health system, the conservative Heritage Foundation created a different model in a 1989 report. The basic idea was that you achieve 100% coverage through a private-insurance system by

  • mandating that individuals have insurance
  • forcing insurance companies to cover everybody who wants their coverage
  • subsidizing insurance for those who can’t afford it

That model was the basis for the RomneyCare plan that Massachusetts adopted in 2006 under Republican Governor Mitt Romney. RomneyCare in turn begat ObamaCare in 2010.

So this is an important thing to understand about the politics of healthcare: Republicans have had a hard time coming up with a healthcare plan because Obama stole their plan. He left them with a difficult choice: They could have declared victory, but that would have meant joining forces with the Black guy in the White House, which was unimaginable.

I have occasionally wondered how Mitt Romney would have fared in 2012 if he could have run on his record as the Father of ObamaCare and general solver-of-impossible-problems. But this was not to be.

What Obama did. In addition to the Heritage Foundation’s mandate-and-subsidize idea, Obama and Romney recognized the patchwork way that most Americans were already covered: If you were old, you had Medicare; if you were poor, you had Medicaid; children got covered under CHIP; veterans had the VA; people with good jobs got coverage through their employers. American healthcare was like a big bed with a lot of small blankets that covered most people, but not everybody.

So a second fundamental idea of ObamaCare was to make the blankets bigger: Insist that companies employing more than 50 people full time had to offer health insurance, expand Medicaid so that it covered the working poor as well as the destitute, and so on.

Even the bigger blankets wouldn’t stretch to cover everybody, so the ObamaCare exchanges were created: marketplaces where individuals could buy their own policies, without regard to their previous health record, and with a sliding scale of subsidies depending on income.

The mandate-and-subsidize system only works if the term “insurance” actually means something, so ObamaCare also defined what private insurance had to cover. In particular, this made junk insurance illegal. Annual and lifetime caps were gone, as were provisions not to cover certain common problems. Many people who had junk insurance didn’t realize the risks they were taking, and resented the fact that their cheap policies were now illegal. This is how Obama’s claim that “If you like your plan you can keep” got picked out as the Lie of the Year for 2013. (Personally, I liked my employer-provided insurance, and I kept it.)

And it all sort of worked. As you can see in the graph above, the number of uninsured began to drop after 2010, dropped more when the exchanges came online in 2014, and didn’t start rising again until Republicans began breaking the system during the first Trump administration. And these numbers don’t give the ACA credit for the number of people whose junk insurance was replaced by real insurance.

John McCain turns thumbs-down on repealing the ACA with no replacement.

How Republicans have sabotaged ObamaCare. Republicans have tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act again and again ever since it was passed — at least 63 times in all. Their effort always foundered on the same point: Repealing the ACA would instantly create about 20 million uninsured Americans, and the Republicans had no plan for dealing with them. The closest they came was in 2017, with the slogan “Repeal and Replace”, where the “replace” half was always left vague. That vote came down to John McCain’s famous thumbs-down moment.

But failing to repeal didn’t mean failing to sabotage. The most obvious bit of sabotage was the ultimately successful attempt to end the individual insurance mandate, which assessed a penalty on people who went uninsured. At first they tried to undo it through the courts, and nearly succeeded. The Supreme Court overturned decades worth of interpretation of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause to find that it didn’t allow the penalty. But John Roberts saved the individual mandate by reinterpreting its penalty as a tax.

But Roberts also sabotaged the system by not allowing the federal government to withdraw all Medicaid funding from states that refused to expand Medicaid. This created a two-tier system where some states expanded Medicaid and others didn’t. Gradually, even red states like Oklahoma and Missouri expanded their programs, but 10 states are still holding out.

Republicans finished killing off the individual mandate in the Trump tax cut of 2017, which didn’t eliminate the penalty, but set it to zero. This created a hole in the system: If you’re healthy right now, you can save money by going uninsured, remaining confident that you can get insurance after you develop some health problem.

The RSC’s 2019 report castigates ObamaCare for this hole in the system, which the Republicans created themselves.

Unfortunately, because the ACA created a perverse incentive for people to forgo insurance until they developed an illness, costs across the board rose dramatically, which required higher premiums on the existing plans in the individual market exchanges. Not surprisingly, the premium spikes further repelled healthy individuals.

How Republicans want to “fix” ObamaCare. If you don’t think ObamaCare is working, the obvious way to fix it continues to be a universal single-payer healthcare system, like Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All. Countries with such systems continue to spend less on healthcare than Americans do, while getting better results in terms of life expectancy.

But Medicare for All is still socialism, which is still anathema. So what can be done?

The report is full of wonderful-sounding words like “choice” and “freedom”, but the essence of it comes down to this: The healthcare system can save enormous amounts of money if it exposes people to more risk.

I’ll give a personal example here: In 2023 I had a scary incident where I lost vision in my right eye for about five minutes. It was like looking at a gray screen. Afterwards, I returned to normal, as if nothing had happened. I’ve had no recurrences in the two years since.

All indications point to this incident being just one of those annoying brain things without long-term significance, like migraine headaches. But it could have been a stroke or a blood clot or a tumor. Medicare spent an huge amount of money checking all that stuff out. I didn’t keep track, but I’m sure it’s well into the tens of thousands.

And it all could have been saved if someone had said, “It’s probably nothing. Let’s ignore it and see if it happens again.”

Now, if some government or insurance bureaucrat says that, it’s horrible. They’re telling me to gamble with my life. But (from the Republican point of view) if I say it, that’s great. So that’s the heart of the Republican program: incentivize people to gamble with their lives.

They do this in a lot of different ways. For one, junk insurance is back.

[I]n order to provide Americans with health insurance options that fit their individualized needs and do not add unnecessary expenses, the RSC plan would undo the ACA’s regulations on essential health benefits, annual and lifetime limits, preventive care cost-sharing, dependent coverage, and actuarial value. … The cumulative effect of these changes would result in Americans being provided with more insurance choices that are personalized to their needs and available at affordable rates.

(“Actuarial value” is essentially a limit on the insurance company’s profit margin.) So if you have a strained budget, a cheaper plan that risks your future if you wind up with some expensive condition is “personalized” for you. It “fits your individualized needs”.

Several provisions are designed to promote individual plans that can be “personalized” in this way. The biggest is to change the tax laws that allow employers to deduct what they spend on employees’ health insurance. With ObamaCare’s employer mandate also gone, this will have the effect of ending a lot of employer-supplied health insurance, pushing all those people into the individual market.

The other big “personalization” tactic is to emphasize Health Savings Accounts. Lots of people have those now for medical incidentals like glasses. But under the Republican proposal, HSAs are cut loose.

Under current law, health savings accounts plans cannot be used in conjunction with plans that are not a “qualified high-deductible health plan.” This unnecessarily hamstrings the ability for millions of Americans to access this important savings tool. Accordingly, the RSC would eliminate this requirement to allow health savings accounts to be utilized even if a person does not have a health insurance plan.

So you can go without insurance and pay your own health expenses out of an HSA. This is the ultimate individualization: Imagine me with an HSA instead of Medicare. My vision blanks out for five minutes, and I’m left with a choice: Do I want to drain my HSA checking out things that probably are OK? Or do I want to just risk it?

The limits of freedom. The unexamined issue in the Republican plan is class. Yes, you have “choices”, but only if you can afford to pay for them. The poorer I am, the more likely I am to risk a junk policy to save money, and the more likely I am to forego testing or treatment if I think it probably works out for me. Those are “choices”, in the same way that poor people “choose” to save money on rent by living in their cars.

Of course, when you’re talking about 350 million people, “probably” leads to many, many cases where the improbable happens. So these personalized decisions will lead to large numbers of medical bankruptcies, and some non-trivial number of unnecessary deaths.

The other thing “freedom” doesn’t take into account is the burden of making good decisions, especially decisions about big issues that involve many details that only experts in the field really understand. As we saw in the real-estate crash of 2008, “freedom” in the mortgage market led to people signing documents they didn’t really understand and losing their homes. More recently, “freedom” from vaccine mandates is allowing diseases like measles and polio to come back.

And if we are all making these decisions as individuals, the success of insurance or healthcare-providing companies depends on their ability to influence those decisions. Think about all the ads you see this time of year boosting “Medicare Advantage” programs (which provide enormous advantages to the companies offering them). That kind of marketing could be round-the-clock for every kind of medical decision. Just as the system forced us to make more decisions, all the corporate powers of persuasion would be focused on manipulating us into choosing badly.

All that marketing would cost an enormous amount of money, which ultimately would have to be reflected in the prices we pay. Would it eat up all the “savings” that result from taking bigger risks with your life? Maybe.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (8)

The Shutdown Gets Serious

November 3, 2025 – 9:51 am

If you’re poor in America, food and healthcare just got way more expensive.

Up until Saturday, most Americans had been able ignore the government shutdown. If you didn’t work for the federal government, weren’t visiting the national parks, and weren’t waiting for a government office to process your application for some kind of benefit, the shutdown seemed like one of those inside-the-beltway issues. Politicians were arguing with other politicians about the kinds of things politicians argue about. Trump wanted you to blame Democrats for something. Democrats wanted you to blame Trump. Blah, blah, blah.

Then on November 1, two things happened:

  • SNAP (food stamp) payments ended for 42 million Americans.
  • The ObamaCare open enrollment period began without the subsidies that have kept premiums affordable for 22 million Americans.

Both of these are important, but the loss of SNAP benefits is more immediate. The ObamaCare plans are for 2026, so we’re still a couple months away from people skipping needed medical care. But the SNAP lapse is already causing suffering: Americans who otherwise might have used their SNAP cards to buy food for their families Saturday were unable to do so. State and local governments, as well as private charities, are trying to step into the breach, but many people are still falling through the cracks.

The mind-boggling thing about the SNAP snafu is how avoidable it was: The Department of Agriculture has $6 billion in contingency funds that it could use, but it initially refused to do so. Friday, a federal judge ordered USDA to allocate the funds “as soon as possible”, and to report back by noon today. A second federal judge stopped short of issuing an order, but explained why such an order might come soon.

At core, [the Trump administration’s] conclusion that USDA is statutorily prohibited from funding SNAP because Congress has not enacted new appropriations for the current fiscal year is erroneous. To the contrary, Defendants are statutorily mandated to use the previously appropriated SNAP contingency reserve when necessary and also have discretion to use other previously appropriated funds as detailed below.

Other funds would clearly be necessary to pay full benefits, because SNAP costs $8.6 billion every month.

As of this morning, it was not clear what the Trump regime would do: Trump himself claims to be confused about what the government can do, is asking for more specific guidance from the judges, and warned that payments would be “delayed” in any case. Up until now, Trump has been cavalier about spending any money that isn’t nailed down; but now suddenly he is worried about the legal details.

All in all, his Truth Social post seemed more concerned with scoring political points than with human suffering.

I do NOT want Americans to go hungry just because the Radical Democrats refuse to do the right thing and REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT. … The Democrats should quit this charade where they hurt people for their own political reasons, and immediately REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT. If you use SNAP benefits, call the Senate Democrats, and tell them to reopen the Government, NOW! Here is Cryin’ Chuck Schumer’s Office Number: (202) 224-6542

We should know more this afternoon.

Unlike the lapse in SNAP benefits, the ObamaCare premium subsidies are not a consequence of the shutdown. They are, instead, what the shutdown has come to be about: The “clean” continuing resolution that Republicans want has no money to fund them; Senate Democrats are withholding their votes until an extension happens.

In other words: If Democrats cave, the government will open but the ObamaCare policies will still cost much more.

Republicans claim to be concerned about the price increase — which probably affects more of their constituents than Democrats’ — but they have no plan for dealing with it. Similarly, the Big Beautiful Bill they passed will cause millions of Americans to lose health coverage under Medicaid. Senator Hawley is so concerned about this that he has introduced legislation to reverse the Medicaid cuts he voted for.

Majority Leader Thune has offered Democrats a vote on extending the ObamaCare subsidies, if they first pass his resolution to open the government. But forcing a vote is only a way to score political points; it doesn’t help anyone pay for their health insurance.

Speaker Johnson continues to call ObamaCare unworkable, but again, Republicans have no alternative plan. We have been waiting for Trump’s healthcare plan since 2015.

To me, Trump’s finger-pointing raises an explanation for this mess: He believes his own propaganda, and believes the American people believe his propaganda.

If it were true that the American people broadly blame Democrats for the shutdown, then every new example of suffering caused by the shutdown would put more pressure on them to cave. So it would make political sense for the regime to engineer as much suffering as possible.

That seems to be what it has done.

But the public hasn’t been blaming the Democrats for the shutdown, and these two issues — hunger and health care — are where Democrats have their most credibility. So it doesn’t help Trump’s cause that a judge has to order him to feed the hungry. And since extending ObamaCare subsidies is exactly what Democrats have been demanding, letting them lapse is clearly Trump’s fault.

Finally, we get to Mike Johnson’s posturing: He has kept the House in recess since September 19. He claims there is no need to meet, because the House did its job then by passing a continuing resolution. By keeping the House in recess, he has made an excuse not to seat Democrat Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who won a special election September 23. Grijalva would be the 218th signature on the discharge petition to force a vote on subpoenaing the Epstein files.

Johnson denies that protecting Trump from Epstein revelations is his motive. But all his rationalizations are starting to run thin. The continuing resolution the House passed only funds the government until November 21, which probably isn’t enough time to pass the appropriation bills needed to fund the government for all of FY 2026. So the House will be needed again soon, one way or another.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (11)

Could a Third Term Happen?

November 3, 2025 – 8:46 am

It’s far-fetched but not impossible.

For months Trump has alternately encouraged and then tamped down speculation that he might seek a third term. Wednesday, he acknowledged the constitutional reality that “it’s pretty clear I’m not allowed to run”. But since it’s always a mistake to assume that any Trump statement is his final word, the third term idea will likely surface again at some point.

So how seriously should we take this? My conclusion: moderately seriously. Pay attention, but don’t lose your mind about it. That’s an attitude I’m trying to model this post.

The main reason to take it somewhat seriously is this: If Trump floated an idea like this and nobody pushed back, before long he’d be doing it. As you may remember from junior high, that’s how bullies operate. Every abuse, from pulling your pony tail to rape, starts as a joke. “Why do you have to be like that? I was just kidding around.” But if your response to the joke indicates that he might get away with it, it’s game on.

The main reason not to take it seriously is the 22nd Amendment, which seems pretty clear:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

And yet, Steve Bannon believes he has a way to get around that prohibition.

“There’s many different alternatives,” Bannon said when asked about the 22nd Amendment. “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is.”

And Trump himself said back in March “There are methods which you could do it.”

So let’s think about what those methods might be.

Is there a loophole? Sort of. In a New Yorker conversation with Michael Luo, Ruth Marcus explains:

Note that it says “elected . . . more than twice,” not “serve as President for more than two terms.” The way—maybe—to get around that would be to have Trump elected Vice-President, and then to have whoever is the incumbent President resign to make way for a third Trump term. (Trump himself, by the way, said that this approach was “too cute,” and that “the people wouldn’t like that.”)

Alternatively, and even more fancifully, Trump could be elected Speaker of the House (you don’t have to be a House member to be Speaker), putting him in line for the Presidency, and both the elected President and Vice-President would clear the decks for him.

Marcus’ “maybe” depends on how the Supreme Court interprets the 12th Amendment, which says:

But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

Again, though, Trump could argue that he’s not ineligible to be president, he’s just ineligible to be elected president. So maybe the same loophole covers the 12th Amendment too. An honest Supreme Court — especially one that puts so much emphasis on the original intent of the laws — would not allow this, but we don’t have an honest Supreme Court. So maybe it flies.

Could it work? Not if the 2028 election has anything to do with the will of the American people. Remember a few things:

Not to mention the fact that Trump is right: The plan to run a stooge (or two stooges) who then resign is too cute for the public to back. And then there’s the execution problem: Would you trust J. D. Vance to resign once he had been sworn in as President? Trump doesn’t seem like the trusting type.

Summing up: In any free and fair election, a Stooge/Trump or Stooge/Stooge ticket would lose in a landslide. Anybody who seriously proposes the plan, i.e., Steve Bannon, must also be planning to rig the election in a significant way. A small amount of corner-cutting wouldn’t do the job.

Whether that can happen or not is a different topic.

Does Trump understand that it won’t work? Hard to say. He seemed to understand it Wednesday, but I have long subscribed to the theory of Trump’s mind that David Roberts enunciated in 2016:

When he utters words, his primary intent is not to say something, to describe a set of facts in the world; his primary intent is to do something, i.e., to position himself in a social hierarchy. … Even to call him dishonest, to say he “lies,” doesn’t quite seem to capture it. The whole notion of lying presumes beliefs — to lie is to say something that one believes to be false, to knowingly assert something that does not correspond to the facts.

It’s not that Trump is saying things he believes to be false. It’s that he doesn’t seem to have beliefs at all, not in the way people typically talk about beliefs — as mental constructs stable across time and context. Rather, his opinions dissolve and coalesce fluidly, as he’s talking, like oil on shallow water. That’s why he gives every indication of conviction, even when, say, denying that he has said something that is still posted on his Twitter feed.

Wednesday, Trump found it useful to agree with people like Mike Johnson that he can’t run. (Of course, he also said this was “sad”, because “I have my highest numbers that I’ve ever had”, which is completely delusional. So Wednesday’s comment did not come at some moment of peak lucidity.) Tomorrow, he may find it useful to agree with Steve Bannon.

What makes this problematic for Republicans in general, even the fascist ones, is the Mad King problem: No one can tell Trump he is wrong. So if he starts asserting that one of the third-term scheme works, and in fact works easily because he’s so popular, who’s going to tell him that some serious election-rigging is needed?

Meanwhile, no Republican legally entitled to compete for the presidency can start organizing a campaign, for fear of antagonizing the Mad King. Typically, the primary field starts to assemble in earnest after the midterm elections, so there’s still time. But Democrats like Governors Newsom and Pritzker are already starting to position themselves. Republican candidates would too if the field were clear.

What does the third-term talk accomplish for Trump? At least for his followers (or for Republicans intimidated by his followers), talk of a third term pushes back the moment when he becomes a lame duck. No one is going to risk breaking the law for him if they anticipate someone else holding the presidency soon. But the fantasy of Trump remaining in office indefinitely keeps that realization at bay.

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The Resistance Stiffens

October 20, 2025 – 11:33 am
Chicago on Saturday.

The No Kings rallies were the most obvious signs of resistance to Trump’s authoritarian rule, but congressional Democrats, Pentagon reporters, major universities, and an appeals court also refused to cave to him.

Saturday I had a choice to make: attend the No Kings rally where I live in Bedford, Mass., or go to the much bigger rally in Boston, which stood a chance of making national news. I opted for the local rally. At one point I counted over 500 people in attendance before I lost count. I would guess there were 600 or more. That’s in a town of about 14,000, at a rally that probably didn’t draw a lot of out-of-town people because all the surrounding towns had their own No Kings rallies.

The independent Strength In Numbers website estimated that 5.2 million people participated nationwide, and possibly as many as 8.2 million.

Our estimate is based on reports from local officials, local organizers, and attendees, and suggests the count from organizers — who report 7 million participants nationwide — may be a bit optimistic (but is not impossible). Still, regardless of whether the precise number is 5, 6, 7, or 8 million, Saturday’s events are very likely the biggest single-day protest event since 1970, surpassing even the 2017 Women’s March demonstrations against Trump.

The largest rallies were in blue states, with 320K in New York City and 225K in Chicago, but 20K came out in Austin, Texas and 10K in Boise, Idaho. No Kings was truly a national event.

The regime’s response. The organizers could hardly have asked for a better response from the Trump administration, because the regime’s disdain and even hatred for these millions of Americans only served to underline everything the rally speakers were saying.

Trump himself posted an AI-generated video on his Truth Social account, in which a crowned Trump flies a fighter jet labeled “King Trump” and drops sewage onto protesters in what appears to be New York. VP Vance posted a video to BlueSky in which Trump dons a crown and a robe, and brandishes a sword while Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneel and bow to him. White House spokesman responded to the protests with “Who cares?“

Leaders of democratic countries don’t act like this.

Presidents are, of course, within their rights to put their own spin on events. Trump might legitimately doubt whether these millions of people accurately represent the country, or even postulate a “silent majority” as Richard Nixon did a few years before he had to leave office in disgrace. Even if the majority of the country has turned against Trump — as the polls show — he is not obligated to agree with the People or change his unpopular policies.

But when large numbers of their citizens take to the streets in nonviolent protest — even Fox News had to admit that “there were no reports of violence or arrests at the afternoon rallies” — leaders of democracies don’t respond with a lordly “Who cares?” or publicize their fantasies of dropping shit on the dissenters. But would-be dictators might, because they don’t serve the People; the People are supposed to serve them.

It’s nearly impossible to imagine any Democratic president showing similar hostility to peaceful conservative protesters. (The January 6 protests, recall, included a violent takeover of the Capitol and sending over 100 police to the hospital. The subsequent arrests and trials were basic law enforcement, not persecution.) The moments conservatives point to as evidence of Democratic disdain — Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” and Obama’s “clinging to guns or religion” — don’t really hold up if you look at the full context, which included considerable empathy for Trump voters.

For example, Clinton put “half” of Trump voters in her basket of deplorables.

But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

The closest genuine analogy from recent years is the Tea Party protests against President Obama, which were much smaller than No Kings. Paul Waldman has numbers:

The Tea Party’s biggest distributed event was on tax day 2009, with 750 modestly attended protests. No Kings had 2,600. Its biggest single gathering was on 9/12/09 in DC, with somewhere between 75K and a few 100K participants.

Nonetheless, Obama had a delicate response to the Tea Party: The protests represented a “noble” American tradition of “healthy skepticism about government” as well as a noble tradition of “saying that government should pay its way”. But he engaged the ideas of the Tea Party, challenging them to specify how they would close the deficit.

The challenge, I think, for the tea party movement is to identify specifically what would you do. It’s not enough just to say, get control of spending. I think it’s important for you to say, I’m willing to cut veterans’ benefits, or I’m willing to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits, or I’m willing to see these taxes go up.

It is impossible to imagine Trump or Vance or Speaker Johnson or just about any Republican leader showing that level of respect for Americans who disagree with what they’re doing. We are “terrorists” or “pro-Hamas” or some other ridiculous thing. They can’t even admit that Americans don’t like seeing soldiers patrolling their streets, or American citizens being harassed because of their accents or the color of their skin.

In their fascist worldview, Trump IS America, so any dissent against Trump is un-American.

Resistance from the Pentagon press corps. No Kings wasn’t the only example of Americans refusing to bend their knees to the Mad King.

Nearly the entire Pentagon press corps cleaned out their desks and turned in their access passes Wednesday rather than submit to Pete Hegseth’s new attempt to control their coverage of his department.

News outlets were nearly unanimous in rejecting new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would leave journalists vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information — classified or otherwise — that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.

Even several Trump-supporting outlets, like Fox News, Newsmax, and The Wall Street Journal, have given up their Pentagon access.

“What they’re really doing, they want to spoon-feed information to the journalist, and that would be their story. That’s not journalism,” said Jack Keane, a retired U.S. Army general and Fox News analyst, said on Hegseth’s former network.

Yahoo News reported that the “hundreds” of credentialed Pentagon reporters had been reduced to 15. The Washington Post identified who they represent:

The list of signatories included four reporters from right-wing outlets: one from the website the Federalist, one from the Epoch Times newspaper, and two from the cable network One America News.

“The rest,” the WaPo says, “are freelancers, independent or work for media outfits based overseas.”

(Even Epoch Times’ Pentagon reporter resigned after his bosses signed the agreement. “I can no longer reconcile my role with the direction the paper has chosen, including its increasing willingness to promote partisan materials, publish demonstrably false information, & manipulate the reporting of its ground staff to shape the worldview of our readers.”)

Resistance in Congress. The government shutdown is now in entering its fourth week, with no end in sight. Democrats are holding out for a popular concession: They want long-term funding for the subsidies that make policies on the ObamaCare exchanges affordable. If those subsidies lapse on November 1, as they are currently scheduled to do, millions of Americans — many of them represented in Congress by Republicans — will see their health insurance premiums skyrocket.

But Trump’s myth of invincibility will be damaged if he makes any concessions at all, so Republicans are refusing to negotiate. So far the only offer on the table is that the Senate will hold a vote on the ObamaCare subsidies after Democrats vote for a continuing resolution to reopen the government.

This vote, of course, will just be a gesture, a chance for Democrats to vote for something that ultimately fails. It will help no one pay for health insurance.

The House, meanwhile, is still out of session. This has the added plum for Speaker Johnson that he doesn’t have to swear in Adelita Grijalva who won a special election weeks ago. Grijalva would be the 218th signature on the petition to vote on releasing the Epstein files, which Johnson does not want to do. (You have to wonder what in the files could be so bad for Trump that he’s willing to go through this.)

Republicans are predicting Democrats are about to fold, but I see no sign of it. They have a popular position and the public is mostly agreeing with them. Rather than offer Democrats anything substantive, the regime is upping the threat level, as authoritarians are wont to do.

Resistance from universities. Today is the deadline for nine universities to sign a compact with the Trump administration, submitting to regime-dictated policy changes in exchange for favorable decisions on federal funding.

The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education was sent on Oct. 1 to nine colleges — both private and public — and would require schools to bar transgender people from using restrooms or playing in sports that align with their gender identities, freeze tuition for five years, limit international student enrollment, and require standardized tests for admissions, among other things.

Of the original nine schools that received the document, as of Sunday night, six had indicated they are not planning on signing.

MIT was the first to refuse, followed by Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California.

On Friday, the White House held a virtual meeting with colleges that hadn’t yet sent rejection notices, including the University of Arizona, the University of Texas at Austin, Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College and the University of Virginia. Three additional schools were also invited: Arizona State University, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Kansas, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Subsequent to that meeting, Virginia and Dartmouth announced they wouldn’t be signing. No universities have signed.

Columbia was the first university to try to appease Trump, but although Trump claims every few weeks that Harvard is about to give in, its lawsuit is still in court.

Resistance in court. A three-judge panel from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals — including one Trump appointee — unanimously upheld a lower-court order blocking the regime from deploying National Guard troops in Illinois.

The case hinges on whether the regime’s claims of “rebellion” or of being “unable to execute the laws of the United States” are credible. The district court found that they were not credible, and the appeals court found no errors in that assessment that they needed to correct.

Political opposition is not rebellion. A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows. Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest.

Trump has appealed to the Supreme Court, which so far has shown itself to be corrupt and partisan in his favor. We’ll see if they’re willing to take this further step down the road to autocracy.

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Only Trump represents the People

October 13, 2025 – 9:50 am

Pam Bondi’s disrespect of the Senate is only one example of a larger principle.

If you watched Pam Bondi’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, you saw a number of things:

  • an embarrassing performance aimed at impressing Donald Trump rather than the Senate or the American people.
  • several damaging confessions implicit in her refusal to answer simple questions.
  • an unprecedented level of disrespect for elected officials, and for Congress’ constitutional duty to oversee the Executive branch.

But if you took a step back, there was also something larger to see: an example of one of the key principles of fascism.

Previous American administrations, and democratic governments elsewhere in the world, have sometimes had contentious relationships with opposition parties or with the press. But I can think of no other example where those relationships devolved into such open hostility and disrespect as Bondi showed to Democratic senators, or as Trump regularly shows to the press.

The reason for this is simple and goes to the heart of the democratic project: Each of the three — the President, Congress, and the press — represents the People in a different way. Yes, the People elect the President, but they also elect representatives to Congress. And by choosing who they read or watch or otherwise pay attention to, the People informally anoint journalists to raise questions they are unable to raise themselves.

Previous administrations have understood this. So while their officials and spokespeople might banter with Congress or the press, while they might dodge some questions, spin their way out of others, and sometimes launch into long filibustering answers that made questioners give up, there was always some minimum level of decorum. To berate the questioners or insult them also insulted the American People that they represent.

But fascist regimes work according to a different principle: The Leader exists in a state of mystical identity with the Nation and its People. Guardian columnist and Princeton professor Jan-Werner Müller saw the writing on the wall after Trump’s first inaugural in 2017:

All populists oppose “the people” to a corrupt, self-serving elite the way Trump did. But not everyone who criticizes the powerful is a populist. What really distinguishes the populist is his claim that he and only he represents the real people. As Trump explained, because he now controls the executive, the people control the government. By implication, all opposition is illegitimate – if you oppose Trump, you oppose the people.

In particular, no one can adversarially question the Leader on behalf of the People, because the Leader IS the People.

This mindset is very obvious when Trump holds a press conference, and nearly as obvious when his press secretary Karoline Leavitt does: In the regime’s mind, the reporters represent no one but themselves. Trump is doing them a favor to speak to them at all, and that privilege can be revoked for the most trivial of reasons (as when AP got thrown out of the Oval Office press pool for refusing to accede to Trump’s demand to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico).

The same principle was at work in Bondi’s testimony. Previous department heads have shown at least a nominal respect for the congressional committees tasked with overseeing them, for the simple reason that the senators and representatives are elected officials and the department heads are not.

But Bondi’s performance took place inside a very different frame. Democratic senators like Dick Durbin or Sheldon Whitehouse may have gone through the technical procedure we call “elections”, but they do not in any way represent the People. Bondi directly represents Donald Trump himself, and Trump IS the People. So respect should flow from the senators to her, and not the other way around. (The Republican senators in the room seemed to understand this.)

This attitude was unfortunate for the People, because Democrats on the Committee actually did a good job asking questions that I think a lot of Americans would like to hear answered:

Trump supporters may see those as “gotcha” questions, but that depends on what the answers are. If Bondi could simply say “No such pictures have been found and we have no reason to believe any exist”, or “Our office was ready to indict Comey before the Truth Social post”, or “The story about agents flagging Trump’s name in the Epstein files is false” — where’s the gotcha? She might have followed any of those answers with “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to clear that up.”

In other words: If Bondi had good answers to those questions, Republicans should have asked them. But she didn’t and they didn’t.

Instead of answers, Bondi came armed with a binder of opposition research, so that whenever a senator posed a difficult question, she could counterattack with an accusation. She attacked several Democratic senators for taking money from an Epstein associate, or of not caring about corruption when Biden was president; called Adam Schiff a “failed lawyer” who should apologize to Trump; accused Dick Durbin of not caring about the safety of Illinois, and so on.

Some of her attacks were taken from the fever-swamps of Fox News and may or may not have any basis in reality. But beyond that, they did nothing to answer those excellent questions.

Probably the only person who enjoyed this performance was Donald Trump, who always loves to see his people insult his enemies. (Rick Wilson compared Bondi’s testimony to a faked orgasm: “loud, theatrical, sweaty, and meant to trick just one man into keeping her around by flattering his ego.”) But any smart Republican had to realize that it did their cause no good: By dodging the questions, Bondi all but admitted that the only true answers are bad: Trump is in the Epstein files, the photos do exist, Comey’s prosecution was motivated by Trump’s malice rather than evidence of wrongdoing, Homan kept the money, and so on.

I mean, if somebody accuses you of something and you can say “no”, don’t you say “no”? You can get all offended and angry about it in your next sentence, but you do say “no”.

Bondi, who was under oath and subject to lying-to-Congress charges should the Department of Justice ever start enforcing the law again, did not say “no”.

Speaker Mike Johnson and other congressional Republicans have provided another example of the fascist identification of the Leader with the Nation. They refer to the No Kings protests planned for October 18 as “hate America” rallies. In their fascist worldview, Trump is America. You can’t protest against Trump unless you hate America.

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Fantasies of a vast, violent left-wing conspiracy

October 13, 2025 – 9:15 am

Trump’s security memorandum projects his friends’ behavior onto his enemies.

Executive Order NPSM-7 got past my attention when it was first released on September 25. Seeking to exploit MAGA’s horror at Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the memo paints rising political violence as purely a problem for the Left (when the vast majority of political violence for years has been on the Right). And it sees this left-wing violence as the result of a vast, well-funded conspiracy.

This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.

The sad thing here is that while there are occasional large-scale acts of political violence (like January 6), most examples of political violence against either Republicans (like Charlie Kirk) or Democrats (like Melissa Hortman) don’t require funding or manpower. The country is awash in guns, and you can train yourself to be a sniper without drawing much attention. But Republicans don’t want to do anything to curb guns, so they need another explanation.

Fortunately, they have one: NPSM-7’s conspiratorial vision builds on the longstanding right-wing fantasy that somebody (George Soros?) is paying people to protest against Trump. It makes perfect sense: Since everyone loves Trump, the large crowds that protest against him must be artificially generated. (For the record: Neither I nor anybody I know has ever received a payment for participating in anti-Trump protests. Even more telling: Nobody ever sends me emails trying to raise money to pay other protesters.) And once you have such a covert funding network, using it to promote violence — at least to a certain kind of mind — is an obvious next step.

The memo calls for federal law enforcement agencies to investigate these conspiracies and disrupt their plots before they result in violent acts. (So far, so good. If somebody had spotted Tyler Robinson sooner and taken his guns away, Kirk might still be alive. Ditto for Vance Luther Boelter and Hortman.) But it also calls to investigate

institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations, that are responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in the criminal conduct described in subsections (a) and (b) of this section.

Since there are no such institutions and individuals, this section’s only conceivable result would be harassing investigations and show-trial indictments like the ones against James Comey and Letitia James. The IRS is also instructed to get involved in the harassment of Trump’s political opponents:

The Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service (Commissioner) shall take action to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism. In addition, where applicable, the Commissioner shall ensure that the Internal Revenue Service refers such organizations, and the employees and officers of such organizations, to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution.

I have to wonder how “indirect” such financing can be and still trigger an investigation or indictment. Suppose there is one violent act during an otherwise peaceful protest, but 100 protesters get arrested. If the ACLU steps in to defend them in court, are they “indirectly” funding the single act of violence?

But even more interesting (to me, at least) is this section, which is clear projection. Trump knows his people are doing these things, so he imagines his enemies are too. (I have added links to make the projection clearer.)

These campaigns often begin by isolating and dehumanizing specific targets to justify murder or other violent action against them. They do so through a variety of fora, including anonymous chat forums, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions. These campaigns then escalate to organized doxing, where the private or identifying information of their targets (such as home addresses, phone numbers, or other personal information) is exposed to the public with the explicit intent of encouraging others to harass, intimidate, or violently assault them. As in the case of several ICE agents in Los Angeles being doxed, the goal of these campaigns can be to obstruct the operations of the Federal Government as well as aid and abet criminal activity the Federal Government is lawfully pursuing. These campaigns are coordinated and perpetrated by actors who have developed a comprehensive strategy to achieve specific policy goals through radicalization and violent intimidation.

I can only chuckle as I imagine a left-wing network with a “comprehensive strategy to achieve specific policy goals”. If only there were one!

In the meantime, Trump will continue to be frightened by his reflection in the mirror. I wish I could think of some way to use that against him.

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Trump Comes for Chicago

October 6, 2025 – 12:07 pm

Whatever this is about, it’s not public safety.

I went to graduate school in Chicago during the 80s and lived there for six years. I’ve been back many times since and marveled at how much safer the city is today than 40-50 years ago. Then, I had a car stolen and two bicycles. My future wife was accosted on a sidewalk, and managed to push her attacker away. But in recent years, I have walked anywhere I wanted, including a number of places I would not have dared in the 80s, despite being younger, fitter, and less cautious then.

One neighborhood I stayed away from then, perhaps foolishly, was the Hispanic area on the near South Side. But a few years ago, I went to the National Museum of Mexican Art on 19th Street. A lovely middle-class neighborhood has grown up in that area, and the museum itself is wonderful. These days, Mexican-American can be just another Chicago ethnicity, like Italian-American or Irish-American.

There is, of course, still crime in Chicago (as there is not just in every city, but in small towns as well), and places I would not want to go at night. But in every measurable way, the city is much safer now. You can see that if you take the famous Architecture Boat Tour on the Chicago River. The gentrification of downtown began in the 1970s with the Marina Towers, which were built to be a fortress against the rest of Chicago: You could park your car and even moor your boat without exposing yourself to the public. But as the decades went by, the buildings became more and more open to the city, built to highlight the public riverwalk. From the river, you can see the record of the gradual unfolding of Chicagoans’ confidence.

So I have taken it personally when Trump has repeatedly smeared Chicago as a crime-ridden hellhole. And in particular, I object to his scapegoating of Hispanic immigrants as some kind of vermin to be eliminated.

Saturday, the regime announced it was sending 300 federalized National Guard troops to Illinois. Governor Pritzker says the troops will come from Texas. The governor has sued to stop this invasion, making claims similar to the ones that have been successful in Portland. (More on Portland below.)

I have to wonder what troops can do that other federal agents aren’t already doing. Agents from ICE, the Border Patrol, the FBI, BATF, and DHS have been wearing military fatigues, sporting heavy weapons, and conducting military-style attacks.

Federal agents rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters. Dozens of others, their faces hidden behind masks, arrived in moving trucks. In total, 300 officers stormed a South Side apartment building that Department of Homeland Security officials say harbored criminals.

Maybe, maybe not. But the building also contained US citizens and families with children.

Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said. Agents approached or entered nearly every apartment in the five-story building, and U.S. citizens were among those detained for hours.

… The feds also claimed the South Shore neighborhood was “a location known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates,” but DHS gave no evidence to support the assertion, and authorities did not confirm that any of the people arrested were members of the Venezuelan gang.

Alleged Tren de Aragua members have been charged and detained in the city as recently as August. But the Chicago Sun-Times has found little evidence tying them to violence in Chicago.

Rodrick Johnson, 67, is one of many residents who were detained by federal agents during the South Shore raid. A U.S. citizen, he said agents broke through his door and dragged him out in zip ties.

Johnson said he was left tied up outside the building for nearly three hours before agents finally let him go.

Many of the residents were said to be Venezuelan. I wonder if the regime would be similarly brutal in a White neighborhood.

Last Sunday, though, masked agents in military style dress marched through some of the most upscale and touristy parts of the city, not far from where you’d board that boat tour I mentioned.

Agents, some masked, walked north on Michigan Avenue from Millennium Park toward the Wrigley Building. They then walked down Wacker Drive near Trump Tower, while some headed to the Riverwalk. They then made their way to River North.

The point here could only have been intimidation. They were not pursuing criminals or making arrests. Governor Pritzker has it right:

One thing is clear: none of what Trump is doing is making Illinois safer. This is not about fighting crime or about public safety. This is about sowing fear and intimidation and division among Americans.

Portland. Yesterday’s announcement sounded like a classic good-news/bad-news joke: Trump was pulling the last 300 federalized California National Guard troops out of Los Angeles … so that he could send them to Portland. He had previously tried to federalize Oregon National Guard troops to invade Portland, but a federal judge he appointed himself blocked that plan with a temporary restraining order in response to a lawsuit from Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, the mayor of Portland, and numerous other state and local officials.

Judge Karin Immergut observed that in an earlier case (concerning Los Angeles) the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had overturned a similar restraining order because courts owe “a great deal of deference” to a president’s judgment that conditions on the ground justify his decision to deploy National Guard troops. Specifically, that the federal government is unable to execute the laws with less extraordinary forces.

But Immergut contrasted the relatively peaceful situation of Portland (where the most serious protests had happened in June, but by September had faded to predominantly nonviolent protests drawing 20-50 people per day) with the more serious situation in LA prior to the president’s declaration.

Here, this Court concludes that the President did not have a “colorable basis” to invoke § 12406(3) to federalize the National Guard because the situation on the ground belied an inability of federal law enforcement officers to execute federal law. The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.

In a hearing Sunday night, Judge Immergut asked a Trump administration attorney: “How could bringing in federalised national guard from California not be in direct contravention of the [decision] I issued yesterday?”

She extended her order to block the Trump regime from deploying any National Guard troops to Portland.

I’m encouraged by the fact that an appointee from Trump’s first term sees the law this way. I hope some similarly-minded judge gets the Chicago case.

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The Silence of the Generals

October 6, 2025 – 10:16 am

Lack of response leaves a lot of room for projection.

Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hosted an unusual meeting: America’s top generals and admirals, 800 or so of them, were called to Quantico from around the world to listen to Hegseth in person. And once the meeting was on the calendar, President Trump decided he should speak too.

DoD rules prohibit uniformed members of the military from participating in political events. Directive 1344.10 allows attendance at a political rally

provided the member is not in uniform and does not otherwise act in a manner that could reasonably give rise to the inference or appearance of official sponsorship, approval, or endorsement.

So for generals and admirals to show up in uniform at Hegseth’s meeting at all, they couldn’t view it as “partisan political activity”. In particular, it was not a Trump rally. They were attending to receive instructions from their civilian leadership, so that they could interpret that top-level guidance to their subordinates.

Typically, when you are receiving instructions from those above you in the chain of command, you don’t cheer or boo or heckle or stomp your feet. You listen, take notes, and think about what this means for your particular command. And if something you hear sounds political, you avoid “the inference or appearance of … endorsement”.

So that’s what the generals did.

One thing we know about Donald Trump is that he does not compartmentalize. For most of us, compartmentalization is such an integral part of being an adult that it’s hard to imagine someone going through life without it. Sometimes you speak as friend, as a colleague, as a parent, as a polite stranger, or in some other role. Depending on what role you are in, you may seem like a completely different person. You would no more confuse those roles than you would show up at work in your pajamas or wear a tuxedo to the beach.

But Donald Trump is, at every moment, Donald Trump acting in the interests of Donald Trump. The particular role the situation seems to call for makes no difference. So at the Quantico meeting he was not playing the role of President of the United States, or Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, or any other role. He was Donald Trump being Donald Trump.

Trump loves crowds, loves to rouse them, and loves to hear them cheer. He is used to the crowds that show up at his political rallies, so that’s how he spoke to the generals. He rambled, baited his enemies, threw red meat to his fans, and voiced weird sentiments that any other president would have restrained himself from saying out loud.

The generals took it all in without response. This left a lot of room for interpretation.

In his blog, West Point History Professor, Terrence Goggin claimed to have seen “silent fury“. But Jack Hopkins, interpreting lack of protest as complicity, saw “silent surrender“. Retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling saw leaders worrying about what to tell their troops. The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols saw men grasping, perhaps for the first time, that the Commander in Chief is not OK. Lev Parnas, a repentant Rudy Giuliani associate who may or may not be for real, attributed to his “sources” that the generals’ faces were being scanned by AI to determine who is and isn’t loyal to the Trump regime.

That’s a lot to sort out. But I present that range of reactions to emphasize that you should take everybody’s interpretation (including mine) with a grain of salt. Some reporters may have spoken to a few of the generals themselves — none of whom talk to me — but I doubt that anybody has interviewed a representative sample of them. So we’re all just applying what we think we know about the military mindset and speculating from there.

The speculation began before the meeting started. From the first announcement, it was an odd event. Gathering all our military leaders together in one room is a huge security risk; one well-placed bomb and the greatest military force in the world would be led by J. D. Vance and a bunch of colonels. It was also expensive. The generals came from all over the world, and many probably traveled with their staffs. It was also expensive in another sense: Probably these guys all had things they were supposed to be doing, and many of those things probably went undone for a few days.

So the before-the-fact speculation revolved around one question: What could Hegseth and Trump have in mind that would be worth all this? Retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges made an alarming guess:

July 1935 German generals were called to a surprise assembly in Berlin and informed that their previous oath to the Weimar constitution was void and that they would be required to swear a personal oath to the Führer. Most generals took the new oath to keep their positions.

Fortunately, it wasn’t that bad. Hegseth’s speech is here and Trump’s is here. Neither was worth flying around the world to hear in person, but they weren’t sign-or-else demands for a loyalty pledge. So we’re still just guessing about what the meeting was supposed to accomplish.

And as so often happens in the Trump administration, at times the absurdity overwhelmed the content. One way to watch the event is to view Hegseth as the comedian who warms up the crowd before the song-and-dance act comes on. The reaction that the generals might have had the hardest time suppressing was laughing out loud.

I mean, think about it: Pete Hegseth, the most unqualified Secretary of Defense in America’s history, declared that “promotions across the joint force will be based on one thing: merit; colorblind, gender-neutral, merit based”. There is no definition of merit under which Hegseth becomes Secretary of Defense. No one with Hegseth’s resume could rise this high without being a White man, but we’re supposed to believe that everything in the Trump administration is colorblind and gender-neutral.

The Trump military, Hegseth said, would promote top performers and “get rid of poor performers more quickly”. But of course, Hegseth himself is a poor performer. He endangered the security of a combat mission by discussing its details over an unclassified nonmilitary channel with uncleared civilians present, a blunder that would have gotten him fired in any previous administration. But he suffered no consequences, because standards are only for the lower ranks, not Trump’s inner circle.

The gist of Hegseth’s speech called for the military to better match the John-Wayne-movie image of the military Trump sees in his mind: more manly, more fit, clean-shaven. (Talk to Generals Grant and Lee about the military importance of shaving.) If servicemen don’t want to shave their beards, “it’s time for a new position or a new profession”. But the past administration was wrong “to kick out Americans who refused an emergency vaccine” — as if a beard were a bigger threat to combat readiness than being unvaccinated during a pandemic.

And then, just before yielding the stage to the grossly obese Trump, he derided “fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon”.

Hilarious.

Note: This image is AI-generated.

Of course, this image of manliness is going to have real consequences for military people who are transgender or female or perhaps even non-White or non-Christian. Each of the leaders in the audience has a decision to make: Are they going to stay loyal to their people and try to shield them from those consequences, or will they offer them up as sacrifices to the new regime?

Now we get to Trump. It’s hard to know what to make of Trump’s speech, because he blathered for 70 minutes. Much of Trump’s stream-of-consciousness consists of random thoughts that have no consequences. For example, he mused about bringing back battleships, which were already mostly obsolete when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships, by the way. You know, we have — Secretary of the Navy came to me — because I look at the Iowa out in California and I look at different ships in the old pictures. I used to watch Victory at Sea. I love Victory at Sea. Look at these admirals. It’s got to be your all time — in black and white. And I look at those ships, they came with the destroyers alongside of them and man, nothing was going to stop. There were 20 deep and they were in a straight line and there was nothing going to stop them. And we actually talk about, you know, those ships. Some people would say, no, that’s old technology. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s old technology when you look at those guns, but it’s something we’re actually considering, the concept of battleship, nice six-inch size, solid steel, not aluminum, aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. It starts melting as the missile is about two miles away. Now those ships, they don’t make them that way anymore. But you look at it, and — your secretary likes it and I’m sort of open to it. And bullets are a lot less expensive than missiles, a lot of — a lot of reasons. I should take a vote, but I’m afraid to take that vote because I may get voted out on that one. But I tell you, it’s something we’re seriously considering. They were powers. They were big powers. They were just about as mean and scary as you could be, and so we’re looking at that.

That’s the kind of thing you nod your head to and then say, “Sure, Grandpa. Can I get you a glass of water? Do you need to go to the bathroom?”

Other parts of the speech seem more serious, and maybe they were, but who can say? Much has been made of Trump saying that “America is under invasion from within”, which doesn’t actually make any sense. He blathered about removing “1700 career criminals” from Washington DC, which seems to be all the people arrested for immigration offenses during his military crackdown, many of whom either had no non-immigration criminal record or minor offenses like traffic violations.

It’s hard to know what to think about this. During the campaign, he painted a picture of major cities afflicted by an “immigrant crime wave” that no one else could find in the statistics. (Cities with lots of immigrants had no worse crime that cities with few.) Maybe no one has told him that this was nonsense, so he honestly imagines that his military sweeps are achieving long-term results. (Violent crime indeed was cut in half during his occupation of DC. But was the cause really “1700 career criminals” who are now off the streets permanently? Or did the native-born muggers and carjackers just stay home during the occupation, and will return as soon as the troops go away?)

Reading the transcript, again and again I found myself wondering: Does he really believe all this? Maybe he’s surrounded by people who feed his delusions so that he can live in a pleasant fantasy world where his inspired leadership has made America “the hottest country anywhere in the world”, and he’s stopping wars right and left.

So I wonder: Is that what the generals heard?

Military people, in my experience, are practical fact-based people. They are surrounded by bullshitters (like contractors who make extreme promises about the latest whiz-bang they’re building), and they can be bullshitters themselves sometimes, so they develop a good ear for claims that can’t be verified.

If that’s an accurate picture, then they were well aware that Trump was describing a fantasy world. And they wondered, as I did, whether or not he believed in it. If they concluded that he did, then I imagine that they are very afraid right now. Not just their careers, but possibly their lives and the lives of their troops as well, depend on surviving under the Mad King for another three years.

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What to make of Charlie Kirk

September 29, 2025 – 11:37 am

In response to Charlie Kirk’s murder, most coverage has fit into one of two polarized bins:

Neither struck me as the whole story, so I challenged myself to form an independent opinion about Kirk. I listened to his wife’s eulogy for him, I watched most of his conversation with Gavin Newsom, I read as much of his book The MAGA Doctrine as Amazon would show me for free, and I looked for anybody else who had a view of him deeper than a partisan knee-jerk.

This is where I’ve gotten to. Unsurprisingly, I wind up mostly on the cynical side.

In Erika Kirk’s speech, I mainly heard standard Christian evangelism not all that different from what Billy Graham was saying half a century ago: Americans are in a spiritual crisis that can only be solved by turning their lives over to Jesus and living according to traditional gender roles that I don’t recall Jesus ever advocating. Kirk’s brand of Christianity was mostly Christian Nationalism, which I (and many others) believe is a perversion of Jesus’ message.

(For those of you without a Christian education, Jesus had a lot to say about feeding the poor, healing the sick, and living your life according to compassion rather than rules. The gospels paint his opponents the Pharisees as the strict rule-followers. A few years ago, I wrote a post about where I think Christianity went wrong. Later I turned it into a sermon at a Unitarian Universalist church. The sermon is a little better, in my opinion.)

Kirk and Newsom talked amicably (to the point that I was getting angry with Newsom for not challenging some very questionable assertions). Here, the evangelism played a very small role: This was two political operators comparing notes. Still, I heard Kirk’s voice and heard him speak for himself; we should all do that before we pass judgment on people.

The MAGA Doctrine is Kirk’s 2020 take on Trumpism, though I’ve seen no sign that he ever revised his the worshipful view it presents. His political worldview, to me, feels based in resentment: Both political parties are presented as uncaring, and Trump is the revenge of the neglected voter. There is a whiff of traditional conservative rhetoric: small government, individual freedom, and so on. But it’s hard to take seriously given that Kirk stuck by Trump even as Trump was expanding government power and concentrating it in an autocratic presidency. As with so many conservatives, Kirk’s idea of “freedom” was freedom for people like himself, not freedom for everybody.

One thing Kirk was very good at — and this is where all those objectionable quotes come from — was trolling people like me. He played the game of making people angry, then painting himself as the victim of that anger. (And ultimately, he did become the victim of someone who felt trolled. “I had enough of his hatred,” the accused shooter texted to a friend.)

Another thing Kirk was good at was getting funding from the very rich. Erika made a point of how little he had when he started his crusade to win young Americans for Christ (and later Trump), but Turning Point has never lacked for funding. Charlie got his first $50K at age 20 from the multimillionaire Dunn family. He soon attracted the attention of billionaire Foster Friess, and he was on his way. The Dunns eventually contributed millions. The Bradley Impact Fund gave TPUSA $8 million in 2023, and millions more came from a fund connected to Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus.

The ValueWalk website recently estimated Kirk’s net worth at $12 million, including a $4.5 million mansion in Scottsdale.

People sometimes wonder why there’s no Charlie Kirk of the Left. Well, money is one big reason: It’s hard to picture an 20-year-old liberal or socialist running into somebody at a conference and walking away with the funding to start a national organization, much less get rich in the process.

The Voice of Reason blog had an even more cynical take on Kirk’s entrepreneurial nature, painting him as a front for older, richer men.

Here is what really happened. In 2012, a 72-year-old Tea Party activist named Bill Montgomery heard Kirk give a talk at a small local event. Montgomery took one look at this kid with ambition in his eyes and told him to skip college and start an organization. Within weeks, Turning Point USA was born. Montgomery wasn’t just a mentor. He was the co-founder, treasurer, and strategist. In plain English: Kirk didn’t invent Turning Point USA. He was recruited into it by an older political operative who saw in him a useful mouthpiece.

Then came the money. Kirk didn’t scrape together pennies from bake sales. He stalked the Republican National Convention in Tampa in 2012 memorizing donor faces. That’s how he buttonholed multimillionaire Foster Friess, pitched him, and walked away with a five-figure check. Add in Bruce Rauner, the future governor of Illinois, and the DeVos family, and suddenly this “teenage entrepreneur” had more capital than most actual start-ups. By 2016, Turning Point’s budget had ballooned from $50,000 to over $5 million. That doesn’t happen because of hustle. That happens because deep-pocketed billionaires decide you are worth buying.

Amanda Marcotte doubts that Erika can keep TPUSA rolling, because so much of Charlie’s following was based on misogyny.

Charlie Kirk was an aspirational figure for his male audience. They wished they could go on campuses and condescend to cute girls, but they knew — they continue to know — that wouldn’t go well for them. They’d get ignored, mocked or worse, have campus security called on them. Charlie Kirk, though, had the charisma, money and organization to tilt the field so that he “won” every encounter — even though the kids that approached him usually had better arguments. He offered a fantasy of male domination. His audience will never accept a woman in this fake “alpha male” role.

Numerous people noted the similarities between Stephen Miller’s speech at Kirk’s memorial service and the one Joseph Goebbels gave to honor Nazi martyr Horst Wessel.

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