For the first time, Trump used autocratic power in a way that the public couldn’t ignore, and a popular pushback forced a big corporation to stand up to him. Is that an anomaly or the start of a turn-around?
We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.
Four things are worth noting:
Kirk’s assassin was brought up in a conservative family, but later developments showed that Kimmel was wrong to imply that he was MAGA himself.
Kimmel was right that MAGA pundits did everything they could to score political points from the assassination.
Kimmel did not insult Kirk, or in any way make light of his assassination.
But he did make fun of Trump’s response to the assassination. He played a clip of Trump being asked about Kirk and then seguing to the new White House ballroom he wants to build. “That’s not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend,” Kimmel said. “This is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
Appearing on Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday, the Trump-appointed chairman said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Hours later, a spokesperson for Disney’s ABC confirmed to PEOPLE that Jimmy Kimmel Live! would be put on an indefinite hiatus.
Be sure to watch to the end of the 28-minute clip so you can see Robert De Niro play the new head of the FCC. Nobody can deliver a mafioso threat like De Niro, who clarified the new meaning of “free speech”.
“You want to say something nice about the president’s beautiful thick yellow hair and how he can do his make-up better than any broad, that’s free,” De Niro said. “But if you want to do a joke like, ‘He’s so fat he needs two seats on the Epstein jet’, that’s going to cost you.” The actor struggled to suppress a smile.
Kimmel asked: “For clarity, because it’s a pretty good joke, how much would that one cost me?”
“A couple of fingers, maybe a tooth,” came the reply.
I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his “talent” was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE. He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers! Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad Ratings.
His post should settle a few previously contentious points:
Trump was deeply involved in Kimmel’s suspension. Why else would ABC have told the White House that the show was cancelled? All the MAGA attempts to attribute the suspension to bad ratings or other legitimate causes were bogus.
Trump reiterated his threats of censorship. Kimmel’s criticism of Trump “puts the Network in jeopardy”. Nice network you got there; be a shame if something happened to it.
In Trump’s mind, the issue is criticism of him, and has nothing to do with Charlie Kirk. That was already apparent from Trump’s tweet of September 17, shortly after Kimmel was taken off the air: “That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!” Late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers didn’t have a Kirk problem, they’re just Trump critics.
Trump has not won any of his media lawsuits in court. Instead, he has used his government power to extort settlements out of parent companies that need favors. (These settlements are essentially bribes, as Stephen Colbert was cancelled for pointing out.) If ABC-owner Disney stands firm, Trump’s proposed lawsuit will fail.
And yet, that howl has not produced any action so far. David Frum and Paul Krugman each suggest that Trump is in a race against time: His bid for authoritarian power is racing against his plunging popularity. At some point, he will have so much autocratic power that politics barely matters any more, but he’s not there yet. And if his targets begin to believe they can stand up to him and win, while his Republican allies begin to worry that he will drag them down with him, that autocratic creep might stop or even reverse.
Krugman summarizes the situation:
It’s clear that if Trump were subject to normal political constraints, obliged to follow the rule of law and accept election results, he would already be a political lame duck. His future influence and those of his minions would be greatly reduced by his unpopularity. But at this juncture he is a quasi-autocrat. He is the leader of a party that accommodates his every whim, backed by a corrupt Supreme Court prepared to validate whatever he does, no matter how clearly it violates the law. As a result, Trump has been able to use the vast power of the federal government to deliver punishments and rewards in a completely unprecedented way. … This has created a climate of intimidation, with many institutions preemptively capitulating to Trump’s demands as if he already had total power.
… It’s important to understand that Trump’s push to destroy democracy depends largely on creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Behind closed doors, business leaders bemoan the destruction that Trump is wreaking on the economy. But they capitulate to his demands because they expect him to consolidate autocratic power — which, given his unpopularity, he can only do if businesses and other institutions continue to capitulate.
If this smoke-and-mirrors juggernaut starts to falter, the perception of inevitability will collapse and Trump’s autocracy putsch may very well fall apart.
Jay Kuo lists a number of areas in which Trump’s autocratic push is meeting resistance. But a key source of Kuo’s optimism is that there is a limit to how far the Supreme Court will let Trump go. So far, they have largely delayed ruling on the legality of his actions while allowing those actions to continue temporarily. One big question still to be resolved is which way they will ultimately go: Will they defend the Constitution, or will they usher in the new fascist state?
In large part that may depend on how Trump’s self-fulfilling prophecy plays out in John Roberts’ mind.
A federal judge on Wednesday ruled Donald Trump’s administration unlawfully terminated about $2.2bn in grants awarded to Harvard University and can no longer cut off research funding to the Ivy League school.
The judges in these cases have been sending a clear message: The law still counts for something, and it doesn’t change just because Trump says so.
But for that message to stick, two things have to happen: The Supreme Court has to back up the lower-court decisions, and the Trump administration has to obey the court orders once they become final. Will those things happen? I’ve seen both optimistic and pessimistic views.
There’s an understandable tendency to hear about a big court victory for the good guys but then cynically dismiss it, claiming either that the Supreme Court will overturn it, or that the Trump White House will simply ignore the courts’ orders.
I want to encourage readers to not fall into this trap. True, the Supreme Court has intervened in a few cases to lift a few injunctions imposed by lower courts, and that admittedly has been awful to see. But it hasn’t ruled substantively on much of anything yet. And that has allowed court victories by the good guys to produce some real progress.
He points to blue-state attorneys general suing to claw back CDC grants the Trump administration had frozen. Red states, with their Trump-worshipping AGs, have taken the loss.
The Department of Justice wants the American public to assume that none of the orders granted by federal judges are being heeded. They want us to believe that they, and not the judiciary, are in control. But this is simply not the case.
Kuo points to the Guatemalan-children case, where (unlike in an earlier case with adults) planes in the air really did turn around, because “this time the government wasn’t up to playing more games with the courts”.
Nor is Trump the only litigant who receives this Court’s special treatment. The Republican justices favor religious conservatives so much that they will make up fake facts to bolster Christian conservative litigants. Meanwhile, they hate abortion providers so much that they once handed down an anti-abortion decision that, if taken seriously, would permit every state to neutralize any constitutional right.
If any other government official behaved this way, it would be obvious they were placing partisanship ahead of the law. It is no less obvious when these six specific government officials do so. The most reasonable explanation for the Republican justices’ behavior is that they are acting in bad faith.
It’s possible that even the most well-reasoned lower-court decisions against Trump will be reversed based on some gobbly-gook reasoning that we can expect to conveniently vanish should a Democrat ever again assume the presidency. That’s certainly what happened in the Trump immunity ruling.
But it’s worth noting that although the Court has thrown procedural hurdles in the way of those who would stop Trump’s lawlessness, and has sometimes reversed injunctions without much explanation, so far it has given Trump very few outright victories on the underlying merits of the cases. Birthright citizenship, for example, still stands.
The people caught in the middle are the lower-court judges themselves, ten of whom took the unusual step of talking anonymously to NBC News. Their problem is simple: When you do your best to apply the law as it was written and has always been interpreted, and then the Supreme Court reverses your decision in a shadow-docket ruling with little or no explanation, what do you do with the next case? You can’t apply the Court’s new reasoning, because that reasoning was never published.
In late July, the Constitution Daily Blog listed five Trump executive orders that are likely to hit the Supreme Court soon:
reversing birthright citizenship.
invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants
using emergency powers to impose tariffs
firing heads of agencies protected by Congress
banning transgender people from serving in the military
I could imagine (but not agree with) the Court siding with Trump on the last two. But if any of the first three get the Court’s blessing, something is seriously wrong.
The government runs out of money again on October 1. That gives the Democratic minorities in Congress some rare leverage. What should they do with it?
The 2026 fiscal year starts in less than a month, and nobody yet knows what the FY2026 federal budget will have in it.
In the House, Republicans currently hold a 219-212 majority, so they can pass whatever budget they want if they have fewer than four defectors. In the Senate they have a 53-47 majority, but they need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. So Democrats have leverage in the House only if the Republicans can’t stay unified, but Republicans need seven Democratic votes in the Senate unless they’re willing to nuke the filibuster. (Don’t count that out. Trump will almost certainly ask for it before conceding anything he cares about.)
This raises two questions: Are Democrats willing to shut down the government if Republicans don’t negotiate with them in good faith? And if they are willing to take such a stand, what concessions should they ask for?
Ezra Klein discussed the first question in yesterday’s NYT. He notes that Democrats faced a similar decision in March when the previous continuing resolution ran out. Hakeem Jeffries in the House wanted to go for a shutdown, but Chuck Schumer in the Senate didn’t. Schumer won out, and Democrats got nothing for their cooperation.
This looked really bad at the time, and demoralized Democrats around the country. But Klein notes that in the moment it actually was a close call. Schumer argued:
The courts were already reining in Trump’s excesses.
Markets were reeling from Trump’s tariff announcements; a shutdown would just give him a chance to blame Democrats for the economic chaos.
A shutdown would help DOGE eliminate government jobs and departments.
In addition, Klein notes that the Democrats weren’t ready for that battle. They hadn’t agreed on a message worth shutting down the government for.
But now, he claims, none of those arguments hold. The Supreme Court hasn’t held the line, markets have stabilized without a tariff-fueled economic catastrophe, and Elon Musk is gone.
Even more, Trump’s autocratic project is up and running now.
I want to be very clear about what I am saying here. Donald Trump is corrupting the government — he is using it to hound his enemies, to line his pockets and to entrench his own power. He is corrupting it the way the Mafia would corrupt the industries it controlled. You could still, under Mafia rule, get the trash picked up or buy construction materials. But the point of those industries had become the preservation and expansion of the Mafia’s power and wealth. This is what Trump is doing to the government. This is what Democrats cannot fund. This is what they have to try to stop.
… The case for a shutdown is this: A shutdown is an attentional event. It’s an effort to turn the diffuse crisis of Trump’s corrupting of the government into an acute crisis that the media, that the public, will actually pay attention to.
So when they get public attention, what exactly should Democrats demand? Jen Rubin makes these five suggestions:
Defend Congress’ power of the purse by undoing FY2025’s rescissions.
Reverse the Medicaid cuts that take effect after the 2026 elections.
Restrictions on DHS’ most outrageous practices: No rendition to third countries. No masks. Reports on how many people without criminal records are being rounded up.
New sanctions to pressure Russia into peace talks.
Ban stock trading for members of Congress, as well as the president and vice president.
The key test for demands is that Republicans should sound ridiculous defending what the Democrats want to put a stop to. (This is a lesson taught by the Epstein files.) Do Republicans want to shut the government down to defend Trump’s right to trade stocks? They should go right ahead.
If I had to sum up in one word the reason Democrats should give for their stand, it would be “corruption”. I think both Rubin and Klein would agree with that, and it’s also in line with what the Epstein phenomenon should be teaching Democrats.
President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. will host next year’s Group of 20 summit at his golf club in Doral, Florida, arguing it was “the best location” for the high-stakes international gathering but insisting his family’s business “will not make any money on it.”
Of course it won’t. Trump would never lie about something like that, and no doubt his independent Justice Department would watch like a hawk to make sure nothing corrupt happened.
As RFK Jr. purges the CDC and cancels billions in research grants, Americans need a refresher course on what happened to Soviet biological research during the Stalin years.
In many ways, Trofim Lysenko was just the man Stalin had been looking for. He grew up in the peasantry rather than the elitist intelligentsia. He promised new techniques for growing crops that might solve the Soviet Union’s difficulty producing food in the same quantities the Czars had. And he represented a rebellion against Mendelian genetics, whose vision of evolution relied more on the individual’s struggle for survival than on the collective class struggle more in line with Marxist ideology.
From our 21st century point of view, as well as from the perspective of 20th-century geneticists, Lysenko was a crank. He espoused “vernalization”, a process by which winter wheat could be converted to spring wheat and then pass its new abilities on to its descendants. Following LeMarck rather than Mendel, he believed that acquired characteristics could be inherited — a possibility that appealed to a regime dedicated to producing the “new Soviet man”.
Lysenko’s political success was mostly due to his appeal to the Communist Party and Soviet ideology. His attack on the “bourgeois pseudoscience” of modern genetics and the proposal that plants can rapidly adjust to a changed environment suited the ideological battle in both agriculture and Soviet society. Following the disastrous collectivization efforts of the late 1920s, Lysenko’s new methods were seen by Soviet officials as paving the way to an “agricultural revolution.” Lysenko himself was from a peasant family and was an enthusiastic advocate of Leninism. The Party-controlled newspapers applauded Lysenko’s practical “success” and questioned the motives of his critics, ridiculing the timidity of academics who urged the patient, impartial observation required for science. Lysenko was admitted into the hierarchy of the Communist Party, and was put in charge of agricultural affairs.
He used his position to denounce biologists as “fly-lovers and people haters”, and to decry traditional biologists as “wreckers” working to sabotage the Soviet economy. He denied the distinction between theoretical and applied biology, and rejected general methods such as control groups and statistics:
“We biologists do not take the slightest interest in mathematical calculations, which confirm the useless statistical formulae of the Mendelists … We do not want to submit to blind chance … We maintain that biological regularities do not resemble mathematical laws.”
By 1940, Lysenko had become the director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Those who opposed him or criticized his theories did not fare well.
From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko’s admonitions and with Stalin’s approval, many geneticists were executed (including Izrail Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko and Georgii Nadson) or sent to labor camps. The famous Soviet geneticist and president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943. In 1936, the American geneticistHermann Joseph Muller, who had moved to the Leningrad Institute of Genetics with his Drosophila fruit flies, was criticized as bourgeois, capitalist, imperialist, and a promoter of fascism, and he returned to America via Republican Spain. Iosif Rapoport, who worked on mutagens, refused to publicly repudiate chromosome theory of heredity, and suffered several years as a geological lab assistant. Dmitry Sabinin’s book on plant physiology was abruptly withdrawn from publication in 1948. He died by suicide in 1951.
His hold on power began to waver after Stalin’s death in 1953, but he remained influential far into the Krushchev years. The results were predictable:
Lysenko’s ideas and practices contributed to the famines that killed millions of Soviet people; the adoption of his methods from 1958 in the People’s Republic of China had similarly calamitous results, contributing to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961.
Historians regard the Lysenko Era as a prime example of what can happen when ideology triumphs over science. During the same period, Soviet rocket scientists led the world in space exploration, and Soviet nuclear physicists nearly caught up with the far-better-funded Americans. But Soviet biology and agronomy could not free themselves from the ideological mud.
RFK Jr. Today, we are seeing history beginning repeat itself, with RFK Jr. as the new Lysenko. Like Lysenko, he has gained the backing of an autocratic regime; criticizing RFK Jr. or his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement marks someone as anti-MAGA, exposing them to the retribution of the US government. At the moment, that just means firing from government jobs or the cancellation of research grants; it doesn’t yet send you to a labor camp. But the regime is young.
Unlike Lysenko, RFK Jr. is a child of wealth and privilege; he undoubtedly would not be where he is if his name were Smith. But he has tapped into a similar anger against elites and a distrust of expertise. He favors explanations that are sweeping and easily explained, while distrusting results that depend on careful procedures and statistical analysis.
Research. Also like Lysenko, Kennedy is a crank. His anti-vaccine ideas (which are his most prominent, but not his only departure from scientific orthodoxy) are fixed, baseless, and impervious to data. Control groups and statistics may “confirm the useless statistical formulae” of MRNA vaccines, or refute Kennedy’s hobby-horse belief that vaccines cause autism, but no matter. Henceforth, the US government will not fund MRNA research, and a report claiming that autism is caused by vaccines or other environmental factors should be out this month:
We will have announcements as promised in September, finding interventions, certain interventions, now that are clearly almost certainly causing autism. And we’re going to be able to address those in September.
Kennedy has long claimed that environmental factors like vaccines, toxins, or food additives are likely culprits behind the rising rate of autism diagnoses, arguing research to back this up has been blocked by federal authorities. In fact, research on the environmental factors related to autism had been proceeding for years at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Kennedy cancelled its funding, along with more than 50 other autism-related studies.
What is wrong with that research? It keeps coming to inconvenient conclusions. Autism, it seems, is a more complicated problem than Kennedy wants to acknowledge.
Genetic factors account for a significant portion of autism cases. Research like the kind McCanlies and other government-funded scientists have conducted over the past two decades has established that environmental factors have a role, too, and can combine with genetics. Multiple factors can even converge within the same individual. Some of those environmental risks could be reduced by the very measures the Trump administration is rolling back.
But “genetic factors” are anti-MAHA, just as they were anti-Soviet. All our ills must be traceable to human deeds in the food industry, Big Pharma, or our own lifestyle choices.
Ideology over science. This week, the Center for Disease Control was decapitated: RFK fired Director Susan Monarez, a Senate-confirmed Trump appointment who had only served for three weeks. Her attorneys said that she had “refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.”
was an early supporter of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement and a vocal critic on social media of the CDC’s role during the pandemic.
The double-tap of firing Monarez and backing new vaccine recommendations motivated more by ideology than science led to the resignations of three other top CDC officials: Chief Medical Officer Deb Houry, Daskalakis, and Dan Jernigan, who led the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Disease.
A key issue for Houry, Daskalakis and Jernigan are the actions Kennedy has taken that align with the views of anti-science activists. Houry told NPR that ethically they couldn’t abide the direction the agency is taking, and she said they wanted to time their departures for impact after the news broke that Monarez was being fired.
I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public’s health. … The data analyses that supported this decision have never been shared with CDC despite my respectful requests to HHS and other leadership. This lack of meaningful engagement was further compounded by a “frequently asked questions” document written to support the Secretary’s directive that was circulated by HHS without input from CDC subject matter experts and that cited studies that did not support the conclusions that were attributed to these authors. … We are seven months into the new administration, and no CDC subject matter expert from my Center has ever briefed the Secretary. I am not sure who the Secretary is listening to, but it is quite certainly not to us. Unvetted and conflicted outside organizations seem to be the sources HHS use over the gold standard science of CDC and other reputable sources.
Thursday, CDC employees staged a brief walkout to protest the agency’s turn away from science, and to support Monarez and the resigning officials.
The medical community is beginning to adjust to a CDC that can no longer be trusted. For example, numerous non-government medical groups are preparing their own vaccine advice.
Political Pandering. Kennedy owes his position to Donald Trump, so MAHA will always serve MAGA. Trump’s EPA has been working entirely counter to Kennedy’s long-espoused views, but he has had nothing to say about that.
The Environmental Protection Agency, under Administrator Lee Zeldin, is rolling back rules and regulations that will result in an increase in air pollution, which multiplestudies have linked toautism. The agency is in the process of reversing bans on several chemicals, including TCE, one of the solvents associated with the disorder, and has told a federal court it won’t legally defend certain aspects of a ban on methylene chloride, another of the solvents linked to autism. It also began dismantling its Office of Research and Development, which has funded research into the environmental conditionscontributing to autism.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that RFK Jr. does not actually care about the things he says he cares about, but simply wants the spotlight and a position of power.
This is where we find ourselves: with current public health practices and future medical research controlled by one man who is as opinionated as he is ignorant: the American Lysenko.
You may think that Trump’s policies are just indifferent to climate change. You would be wrong.
Not so long ago, conventional wisdom said that an administration should focus on one goal at a time. In order to get significant changes through Congress, it was necessary to shepherd public opinion, which would fail to coalesce if you pursued too many initiatives at once.
So if you had wanted the Obama administration to pursue green taxes or a cap-and-trade plan for CO2 emissions, you were out of luck: His priority was ObamaCare, and by the time he got around to climate change, he had lost his majority in Congress.
But things don’t work that way any more, largely because Trump barely needs Congress. If you rule by executive order rather than legislation, use the full power the Supreme Court has granted the unitary executive, don’t worry too much about the letter of the law, and dare the courts to stop you, you don’t need public support. And across the board, Trump doesn’t have it.
In fact, the shoe is on the other foot: It’s the opposition that needs public support to try to stop what Trump is doing. The more things he does at once, the more scattered the opposition gets. And our news cycle tends to fragment issues, making the larger picture harder to grasp.
Nowhere is this more apparent than with regard to climate change and CO2 emissions. You may have heard individual reports about how this offshore wind project was cancelled or those EV subsidies phased out. If you have heard enough such stories, you may have pieced together a general impression that the Trump administration is indifferent to climate change.
But the actual situation is far worse. Across the board, the administration has targeted any effort to take action to reduce CO2 emissions. Worse, the US government is now actively promoting fossil fuels, even in situations where the free market would make a more sustainable choice.
The Trump administration is not indifferent to climate change. It is working hard to make it worse.
Electrification
Fundamentally, the strategy for dealing with climate change has two pieces: electrify everything, and then produce electricity without burning fossil fuels. The Trump administration has attacked both sides of this plan.
Electric vehicles. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” cuts off virtually all subsidies for electric vehicles by the end of this fiscal year, September 30. That’s not just the tax credit for purchasing an EV, but also subsidies for electrifying commercial fleets and installing charging stations.
EVs are a natural fit for fleets of vehicles that have a defined territory and return to base every night, like postal delivery trucks. The Biden administration planned to use such government fleets to jump-start the larger EV market.
But under Trump, EVs have become no-nos within the federal government. Not only are federal agencies not installing any charging stations or buying new EVs, they’re ripping out brand-new charging stations and selling off EVs at a loss. All-in-all, de-electrifying the federal vehicle fleet could cost as much as $1 billion.
Think about that: The government is not just reassessing future EV purchases and deciding they are too expensive. That would be a suspicious calculation, but at least a plausible one. In fact, though, it is spending money to get rid of the EVs and EV infrastructure it has.
Sustainable electrical generation. Trump has long had an animus against wind power, going back at least to 2012, when he thought offshore wind turbines marred the view from his Aberdeenshire golf course. Since then, he has been a font of anti-wind disinformation, charging that wind turbines not only kill large numbers of birds, but that offshore wind farms are driving whales crazy and causing them to beach themselves and die. (The birds claim is exaggerated — birds do run into turbine blades occasionally, but a 2009 study concluded that wind farms kill far fewer birds per kilowatt hour than fossil fuel plants. The connection to whale deaths is entirely imaginary.)
Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill terminated a variety of subsidies for sustainable energy, wind and solar alike. But his administration is actively anti-sustainable-power. The Interior Department has created new bureaucratic requirements for wind or solar projects on federal land, and just this week halted work on a wind farm offshore from Rhode Island. The project was scheduled to begin delivering power to Rhode Island and Connecticut homes in 2026.
The order to stop work on the Revolution Wind project is the latest move by the Trump administration targeting the country’s renewable energy industry. President Trump, a longtime critic of the wind industry, in January issued a moratorium on new development of offshore wind projects. The Internal Revenue Service recently put out new guidance that makes it harder for companies building wind and solar projects to qualify for federal tax incentives. And the Commerce Department is investigating whether imports of wind turbines and their components threaten national security.
Any State that has built and relied on WINDMILLS and SOLAR for power are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS. THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY! We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar. The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!! MAGA
End-to-end, this post is nutty. Electricity costs are rising because of demand, especially demand for computation related to AI and cryptocurrency mining. The Sustainability By Numbers blog ran the state-by-state numbers and found no correlation, positive or negative, between sustainable energy and prices.
Besides, just take a step back and think this through from economic first principles: Adding supply is not going to raise costs.
Equally nutty is a Trump post that “STUPID AND UGLY WINDMILLS ARE KILLING NEW JERSEY”. NJ.com fact-checks: New Jersey’s offshore wind project has already been cancelled before coming online, and the state barely has any windmills.
Even worse than the specific projects being cancelled is the chill this sends across the industry. If you are a utility looking for additional generating capacity, wind and solar now entail a political risk that is hard to work into your calculations. If you make a success out of sustainable energy, you are making Trump look bad. He may come after you.
Conservation. One way to partially mitigate the increased demand from AI and crypto — both of which Trump favors — is to use less electricity to power our household appliances. This effort has been going on since the days of Bush Sr., and its flagship has been the Energy Star program. Energy Star certification has helped consumers identify appliances that use less electricity, saving them $500 billion in their utility bills.
Funding for Energy Star was zeroed out in Trump’s original Big Beautiful Bill proposal, but Congress seems to have put it back. Whether or not this money will actually be spent is another question, one that probably depends on what the Supreme Court says about Trump’s previous attempts to impound funds.
Drill, Baby, Drill
While the Big Beautiful Bill was zeroing out subsidies for EVs and sustainable energy, it was increasing subsidies for fossil fuel production. The Union of Concerned Scientists’ Equation blog lists the benefits and estimates the cost to the taxpayers at $80 billion over the next ten years.
But this week’s most outrageous energy story concerned a coal-fired utility plant in Michigan. Coal is probably the dirtiest form of energy in common use, but the Trump administration loves it.
Donald Trump has made several unusual moves to elongate the era of coal, such as giving the industry exemptions from pollution rules. But the gambit to keep one Michigan coal-fired power station running has been extraordinary – by forcing it to remain open even against the wishes of its operator.
The hulking JH Campbell power plant, which since 1962 has sat a few hundred yards from the sand dunes at the edge of Lake Michigan, was just eight days away from a long-planned closure in May when Trump’s Department of Energy issued an emergency order that it remain open for a further 90 days.
On Wednesday, the administration intervened again to extend this order even further, prolonging the lifetime of the coal plant another 90 days, meaning it will keep running until November – six months after it was due to close.
This order, like so many of the questionable things Trump has done, is justified by a mythical “state of emergency” that he can see but no one else can. The Energy Department says the local electrical grid will be strained by the loss of this plant, but the operating utility doesn’t think so. While it’s not unusual for a utility to seek permission to extend the life of a coal plant that violates pollution standards, extending the life of a plant the operator wants to close is virtually unheard of.
So far, 71 coal plants, along with dozens of other chemical, copper smelting and other polluting facilities, have received “pollution passes” from the Trump administration according to a tally by the Environmental Defense Fund, allowing greater emissions of airborne toxins linked to an array of health problems. Coal is, despite Trump’s claims, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels and the leading source of planet-heating pollution.
Information
If you want to assess the current state of the planet and its climate, the federal government does not want to help you.
In accordance with the Global Change Research Act of 1990, the federal government has produced a National Climate Assessment every four years.
The sprawling report is the most influential source of information about how climate change affects the United States.
The National Climate Assessment is widely used by teachers, city planners, farmers, judges and regular citizens looking for answers to common questions such as how quickly sea levels are rising near American cities and how to deal with wildfire smoke exposure. The most recent edition had a searchable atlas that allowed anyone to learn about the current and future effects of global warming in their specific town or state.
Sadly, though, the federal web site that hosts the report has been taken offline. Work on the next report has been halted and the contract to produce it cancelled. It’s up in the air whether any report at all will appear when the next one is due in 2027. Perhaps some fossil-fuel industry think tank will produce one. DoE recently published a climate-change-denying report by five fringe scientists.
The attack on the USGCRP and national climate assessment did not come as a surprise. In the Heritage Foundation’s far-right policy blueprint Project 2025, Russ Vought – now Trump’s head of the office and management and budget – called to end the USGCRP or fill it with pro-oil industry members.
“We’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports,” [Energy Secretary Chris] Wright told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in an interview on “The Source.”
Wright dismissed the past reports, saying “they weren’t fair in broad-based assessments of climate change.”
President Donald Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2026 includes no money for the Orbiting Carbon Observatories, which can precisely show where carbon dioxide is being emitted and absorbed and how well crops are growing.
One of the observatories is a satellite launched in 2014, and the other was attached to the International Space Station in 2019. The two systems are
more sensitive and accurate than any other systems in the world, operating or planned, and a “national asset” that should be saved, said David Crisp, a retired NASA scientist who led their development. They helped scientists discover, for example, that the Amazon rain forest emits more carbon dioxide than it absorbs, while boreal forests in Canada, Russia and places where permafrost is melting absorb more than they emit, Crisp said. They also can detect the “glow” of photosynthesis in plants, which helps monitor drought and predict food shortages that can lead to civil unrest and famine, he said.
The OCO instruments in the space station might just be turned off, while the satellite could be “brought down”, i.e., allowed to burn up in the atmosphere. Needless to say, launching a replacement satellite (assuming the US government ever cares about climate again) will be far more expensive than just maintaining the one already in orbit.
Why make this very wasteful decision?
NASA said in an emailed statement Wednesday that the missions were “beyond their prime mission” and being terminated “to align with the President’s agenda and budget priorities.”
Now, the Trump EPA is arguing that the endangerment finding was a mistake and overstepped the EPA’s statutory power. Daren Bakst, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, comments:
If the EPA finds the 2009 endangerment finding is no longer applicable, Bakst says that “would preclude future greenhouse gas regulations.” And he says “it should be easy to repeal existing rules that are predicated on the 2009 finding.”
Foreign policy
The administration is not just seeking to burn more fossil fuels at home, it’s also pushing fossil-fuel exports overseas. For example, the recent trade deal announced between the US and the EU stipulated that the EU buy $750 billion of US energy exports — primarily fossil fuels — over the next three years. Trump got this benefit for US energy companies by threatening Europe with crippling tariffs.
While China is dominating clean energy industries, from patented technologies to essential raw materials, the Trump administration is using the formidable clout of the world’s biggest economy to keep American oil and gas flowing.
In a full reversal from the Biden administration’s effort to pivot the American economy away from fossil fuels, the Trump White House is opening up public lands and federal waters for new drilling, fast-tracking permits for pipelines and pressuring other countries tobuy American fuels as a way of avoiding tariffs.
Washington is essentially pursuing a strong-arm energy strategy, both at home and abroad with allies and friends. It’s premised on the idea that the modern world is already designed around these fuels, and the United States has them in abundance, so exporting them benefits the American economy even if solar energy is cleaner and often cheaper.
Lately, the I.E.A.’s influential forecasts have suggested that global demand for oil and gas could peak by the end of the decade as electric-vehicle sales grow and the cost of solar panels and battery storage plummets.
The US responded in a typical Trumpian fashion, by threatening the messenger.
Chris Wright, Mr. Trump’s energy secretary and a former fracking executive, has called the agency’s projections of peak oil demand “nonsensical” and has said the United States could withdraw from the global organization if it doesn’t change the way it operates. House Republicans have said the agency is publishing “politicized information to support climate policy advocacy” and have threatened to withhold U.S. funding.
In short, I don’t know what other conclusion to draw: The Trump administration is trying to make climate change worse. I could speculate about why, but that seems like a distraction. The What is more important than the Why. The Trump administration is trying to make climate change worse.
Or: Why the Sift’s weekly summary has a new format
Like the fictionalized and hybridized T-Rex of Jurassic Park, our news media can only see motion. No matter how significant a situation is, it will vanish from our news feeds if it stands still or just moves very slowly.
This may sometimes look like a conspiracy to suppress certain ideas, but it happens for a reason: In our culture, “news” is what has happened since the last time you talked to somebody. So at your high school’s 10-year reunion, “I had a kid two years ago” might be news. But when you and your office mate take your daily coffee break, it isn’t.
Same thing with news organizations. If a publication thinks of itself as a daily, its timescale is a day. “News” is something that is true today, but wasn’t true yesterday. The timescale of a weekly is a week, and so on. Something that doesn’t fit in that timescale just isn’t news, no matter how important it is.
The best example of this is climate change. On most days, probably the most important thing that happens is that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher than it was a year ago. But that will never be a headline, because it could be a headline every day. So it’s not news.
Something similar has been happening in American politics. Almost every day, the most significant story, the one that people most need to understand, is Trump’s attempt to transform our democracy into a Putin-style authoritarian government. But again, a story you could write every day is not news, so it will never be covered quite so explicitly.
So how will it affect news coverage?
Dressing it up. Now go back to the example of a daily coffee break. “I had a kid two years ago” isn’t news. But “Bobby had his second birthday Tuesday” is. It’s mostly the same information, but it’s packaged as a more current event.
Journalists do this all the time. They get around the media’s blindness about slow-moving stories by covering related events that change fast enough to be news-visible. So while climate change itself is not news, a storm that rapidly intensifies to a category 5 hurricane (as Erin did on Saturday) is news. And if you cover that story, you can mention climate change as the context of that intensification (though the CNN article I linked to doesn’t). Other news-visible developments that relate to climate change might be when a new report comes out or CO2 measurements pass some round number.
The problem with this trick is that it’s largely up to the reader to connect the dots. The heat waves, the hurricanes, the wildfires — those news events form a picture, but the picture itself is not news. It changes so gradually that daily news reports can’t see it. “Planet Earth is warming” is never breaking news. Climate change is a forest, but journalists can only cover trees.
Each of those stories also becomes news from time to time, when some noteworthy development has happened in the last 24 hours. But the larger picture they paint when you consider them together, of a democracy little by little turning into an autocratic state, isn’t news. In the news business, that larger picture is “context” — which means that it’s optional, like the extra credit questions that your term paper might also address. And if the overall slant of a news organization finds that context inconvenient, its readers and viewers will never hear about it. Maybe individuals will put it together for themselves, or maybe they won’t.
In fact, that’s the best way to judge the slant of a news organization: What context do they consider relevant? For example, The Guardian makes a climate-change connection in the final paragraph of its story on Erin this morning, but The Washington Post does not.
Think about how this news-and-context distinction influences a responsible journalist. The larger, longer-term, slower-moving story is what your readers really need to know. But it’s not news, at least not as your organization understands news. The larger story is a forest, but forests aren’t news. Trees are news.
So you find yourself trying to communicate the bigger stories to your readers through the filter that your organization’s definition of news imposes on you. You can only report news-visible stories, but if you do it artfully, you can find traces of the too-large-to-see stories in that visible news.
If you’re not artful enough, though, the readers will see what you’re doing: You’re writing the same story over and over, but dressing it up with different details to make it current. It will seem dishonest, like you’re trying to put something over on them.
What’s this have to do with me? Every week, I try to sift out what happened this week that you really ought to know and understand. A big part of that mission is taking a step back from the minute-to-minute news cycle and filtering out the hype.
In essence, I’m making a virtue out of necessity. Not having the focus and energy of bloggers like Heather Cox Richardson, I can’t put out a high-quality post every day. That forces me to take a week-by-week approach to the news. But for many stories, I believe, that’s a healthier vantage point. Following a news story too closely just gets people over-stimulated, and causes them to think the same shallow thoughts over and over again. And if a story comes and goes before a week is out, probably it wasn’t worth your attention to begin with.
Lately, though, I’ve begun to feel that even a weekly approach puts me on the wrong timescale. I largely cover American politics, and what you need to understand about American politics right now is that single big story: Trump wants to be like his hero, Vladimir Putin. Turning a democracy into a strongman autocracy is a well-known process now. And Trump is trying, day-in day-out, to follow the path that has been worn by Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, and many others.
So I find myself writing the same story every week, but trying to make it sound fresh by dressing it up in the particular developments of the last seven days. It doesn’t feel right. It feels like I’m trying to fool you, even though I’m convinced most of you see what I’m doing.
At the same time, it also feels like the thing that needs doing: People need to see both the macrocosm and the microcosm, and to understand how they fit together.
So I want to keep doing what I’ve been doing, but express it in a format that is more direct and honest.
The new weekly summaries. This week I’ll be trying out a new format for the weekly summaries. This week’s summary, which should appear maybe around noon EDT, will start with a “Significant Ongoing Stories” section. This is where I name the forests, and explain very briefly which events of the week constitute trees in each forest. When somebody writes a good where-we-stand article on that big topic, I’ll reference it there.
I don’t expect the list of ongoing stories to change much from week to week. To that extent, I will explicitly be writing the same story every week.
Then will come a “This Week’s Developments” section, which is basically the old form of the weekly summary, but without the stretching to bring in “context”.
My hope is that this will be more satisfying for me to write and for you to read. The repetitive stuff will be repeated explicitly, without trying to make it sound fresh. And the new stuff will be covered for itself, and not as a stalking horse for a story too big to be weekly news.
Some Democrats want the party’s message to center on preserving democracy. Others say no, we should run against the Trump economy. What if we could do both at the same time?
But I also often hear another point of view: Maybe we ourselves care about democracy, but democracy issues are too abstract to run on in the 2026 midterms. At any given moment, most Americans aren’t using their due-process rights, and aren’t counting on court orders to protect them. If troops are turned loose on some far-off city they never visit, or if some politicians play an unfair game against other politicians, what’s it to them? Instead, Democrats should run on “kitchen table issues” that hit people in the pocketbook.
Right now what they’re feeling is the everyday things that are affecting them: the cost of groceries, gas prices, paying for rent. That is the number one issue; we need to be focused on that.
More and more, though, I’m becoming convinced that Democracy-or-Economy is a false choice, for a simple reason: An authoritarian economy is a bad economy.
Think about the countries that are further down the authoritarian road than we are, the ones often described as Trump’s models: Putin’s Russia, Orbán’s Hungary, Erdoğan’s Turkey, and so on. None of them are places you’d want to go to start a business or begin your career. Before long, Trump’s America won’t be such a place either.
Let’s think about why that is.
No checks and balances. We often talk about checks and balances as a procedural virtue, the kind of thing good-government types get excited about for reasons no one else understands. At times Americans even lament about all the checks and balances, because they make it hard to get things done.
But if we think about this purely economically, checks and balances serve a very practical purpose: error correction. When a leader gets a really bad idea in his head and begins to implement it, people who occupy other positions of power in the government can make him change course before things go too far. As the implications of the bad idea start showing up in the economy, the people who are suffering can appeal to other centers of power for relief.
In an autocratic system, on the other hand, no one can tell the autocrat he’s wrong. Policies that almost everyone else knows are destructive can nonetheless proceed all the way to disaster. Take Turkey for example:
A principal factor in Turkey’s poor economic performance over the past decade was President Erdogan’s misguided belief that interest rates were the cause of rather than the cure for inflation. This induced him to lean heavily on the Central Bank of Turkey to cut interest rates even at a time when inflation was rising. He did so by firing a succession of central bank presidents and by appointing a central bank board that totally complied with his desire for low interest rates.
It was only when inflation soared to 85 percent and when the Turkish lira was in free fall that Erdogan was forced to make an abrupt monetary policy U-turn.
Similarly, Putin’s war against Ukraine (whatever you think of it morally or even militarily) has done enormous damage to Russia’s economy. Mere weeks into the war, it became clear that expectations of a quick and easy victory had been delusional. At that point, Russia would have been much better off if someone else in the government — a leader in the parliament, perhaps — had been able to go to Putin and say, “This isn’t working. You’re going to have to figure a way to change course.”
Anyone who tried that, though, faced a serious risk of being dropped out of a high window. So more than three years later, a war that nearly everyone knows is a bad idea churns on.
We’re seeing something similar happen now with Trump’s tariffs. They’re doing precisely what nearly all economists said they would do: raise prices and slow growth. Pointedly, they’re not doing what Trump said they would do: bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. In fact, while manufacturing employment in the US surged during Biden’s administration, it has fallen during Trump’s.
Not only are the Trump tariffs a bad idea in general, they’ve been implemented in the worst possible way: erratically. Tariffs work by changing the market’s expectations. The only way a tariff might convince a company to go through a years-long process to move a factory to the US is if the company is convinced the tariff will still be there when the new factory opens. But when tariff rates seem to depend on what Trump had for breakfast, who knows what to expect two or three years from now?
As with Erdoğan and Putin, though, no one can tell Trump this simple fact. He has filled his administration with yes-men, and Republicans in Congress are afraid to challenge him. No independent agency or rival branch of government can stand in his way. And so we charge forward towards an economic disaster.
No single person is always right. So a country needs to have a way (or maybe many ways) to correct its leader when that leader is wrong. Checks and balances allow democratic governments to correct their errors, but autocratic governments can stay on the wrong path for a very long time.
Crony capitalism. If the foolishness of Trump’s tariffs is so obvious, you might wonder why he doesn’t see it himself. The answer is simple: Emergency laws passed by Congress under previous administrations (at least if you believe Trump’s interpretation of those laws, which is being tested in court) give the president the power to raise or lower tariffs at will, without any further input from Congress or anyone else.
In other words, tariffs are a place where Trump could seize autocratic power, so he has. His ability to raise tariffs or grant exceptions to them give him enormous power over some of our largest corporations. He can reward those who play ball with him and punish those who don’t.
In the textbooks, capitalism is supposed to work like this: The way to get rich is to come up with better and better ways to produce products and services that people want. Build a better mousetrap, the adage says, and the world will beat a path to your door.
In an autocratic system, though, the way to get rich is to get on the good side of the autocrat — maybe through flattery, through political support, or by cutting him in on the action. If you do, then you can expect lucrative government contracts, or maybe regulations you get to ignore will handicap your competitors, or maybe you’ll be allowed to cheat your customers without them having any recourse against you. On the other hand, if you displease the autocrat, your government contracts might suddenly disappear.
Think about all the times you’ve heard someone referred to as a “Russian oligarch”. Have these rich men invented anything? Developed anything? Marketed some new product? Of course not. They are rich because they are allies of Putin. And when Putin decides he doesn’t trust them any more, they fall — sometimes literally.
Again, ignore the morality for a minute and just focus on the economics. Whatever problems a textbook capitalist economy may produce, it does have one signature advantage: better mousetraps. Economic decisions are made for economic reasons, so they tend to turn out better economically.
Not so in an autocratic system, where economic decisions are made to bolster the autocrat’s power.
For example, one of the most important regulatory decisions governments face at the moment is what to do with crypto-currencies. Maybe they’re the future of finance, or maybe they’re a bubble waiting to pop. Maybe they will turn out to have benefits if they’re regulated properly, but huge downsides if they’re not.
$TRUMP (stylized in all caps) is a meme coin associated with United States president Donald Trump, hosted on the Solana blockchain platform. One billion coins were originally created; 800 million remain owned by two Trump-owned companies, after 200 million were publicly released in an initial coin offering (ICO) on January 17, 2025. Less than a day later, the aggregate market value of all coins was more than $27 billion, valuing Trump’s holdings at more than $20 billion. A March 2025 Financial Times analysis found that the crypto project netted at least $350 million through sales of tokens and fees.
Although Hungary’s GDP reaches roughly 77% of the EU average, lifting it above several low-income EU nations, its households nonetheless remain poorer in consumption terms. This discrepancy highlights the fact that economic output isn’t translating into real benefits for Hungarian families.
Behind the numbers lies a painful reality: under Viktor Orbán’s increasingly authoritarian and pro‑Russian Fidesz regime, Hungary has been systematically pillaged. State-owned industries have been hollowed out, public subsidies redirected to political allies, and EU funds commandeered by power networks close to the government. Meanwhile, ordinary Hungarians contend with low real wages, high inflation, brain drain, and a hollowed middle class—classic symptoms of wealth siphoning from citizens into elite pockets.
Bad information. Information is the lifeblood of a market economy; the more accurate and trustworthy a country’s economic information is, the better its economy will work.
Conversely, the less trustworthy economic information is, the more cautious economic decision-makers will be. If, say, a car company thinks that incomes are rising, it might be inclined to increase production, figuring that richer citizens will buy more cars.
But what if its executives suspect the government is just making up the numbers that show incomes rising? Then they’ll be slower to react, even if incomes actually are rising. That kind of sluggishness will percolate through the economy.
It would be bad enough if bad information from the government caused unsuspecting people to make bad economic decisions out of ignorance. But within the government itself, decision-makers will be afraid to make good decisions, because those very decisions might communicate that they doubt what the autocrat is telling them.
There’s a vicious spiral that nations collapsing into autocracy tend to follow. It goes like this. Capital controls, price controls, informational vacuums, monetizing the debt, defaulting on it, and crashing the currency.
He paints a picture of what might come next: Trump’s tariffs increase companies’ costs, so they will want to raise prices. But then Trump will pressure them not to raise prices, because inflation makes him look bad.
So to stem this inflationary tsunami, autocrats tend to put in place price controls—autocrats tell CEOs you’d better not raise prices this much, on this or that. Often, they’re hard, dictated by an “economic board” or equivalent body. In America’s case, they’ll probably be softer: Trump dictating to boardrooms, threatening them, bullying them, coercing them into not raising prices.
If you can’t raise prices, you have to cut costs — in other words, lay off workers. But rising unemployment also makes the autocrat look bad, so he’ll lower interest rates in an attempt to increase economic activity. (That’s assuming Trump has taken control of the Federal Reserve, which he is trying to do.)
But when interest rates go lower than the inflation rate, nobody wants to own your currency. So the dollar falls. That starts investment capital fleeing the country, which the autocrat then tries to make illegal: No, you can’t invest your money in more stable countries.
What I’m trying to teach you is that autocratic collapse becomes a vicious spiral. It’s a very real one, which we’ve seen around the world, from Latin America to Asia and beyond. And it has a classic pattern, which goes like this. Tariffs beget price controls. Price controls beget unemployment. Inflation surges, the economy slows, and demand shrinks, usually dramatically. Autocrats cook the books to try and hide it all. Markets stop functioning, and crashes and crises erupt. … All of this is very real. This isn’t a far-off prediction: it’s an observation. This vicious spiral has already begun.
I’m not as fatalistic about this as Umair is: The tariffs are just getting rolling, the bad results are already becoming apparent, and there’s still time for the checks and balances we have left to function.
But the path he describes is in front of us, and we need to get off of it — not just for moral or idealistic reasons, but because it leads to an economic catastrophe.
So we don’t need to choose Democracy or Economy as the center of the anti-Trump message. We democracy to save us from the autocratic economic spiral Trump has started.
In a democracy, the people shape their government. But in the long run, the government also shapes its people. What kind of citizens does a democracy need to have, if it’s going to sustain itself?
Back in the auspicious year of 1984, conservative pundit George Will published a book out of step with his era: Statecraft as Soulcraft. In those days, a popular liberal backlash to the rise of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and its influence on the Reagan administration argued that government “can’t legislate morality”. Will countered that government not only can shape public morality, but it inevitably does whether it intends to or not. The “first question” of government, he claimed, is “What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?”
At the time, “legislating morality” evoked thoughts of controlling sexuality. (The Devil’s greatest trick, I remember telling someone, was to convince Christians that morality is primarily about sex rather than caring for others.) Persecuting homosexuals, banning abortion, cracking down on female promiscuity — those were the issues “moral” politicians seemed most concerned with. Later generations of social conservatives have argued that “the family” is the cornerstone of society, and so the traditional family must be protected against innovations like same-sex marriage.
More broadly, “What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?” recalled Communist efforts to produce the “new Soviet man“, who would fit perfectly into the Soviet state, gladly foregoing personal fulfillment to help the dictatorship of the proletariat pursue the greater good. Similarly, an oligarchy might raise lower-class children to believe that they were better off being subjugated, or a Confederate-style slave republic might inculcate a sense of inferiority in Black people, so that they aspired to nothing higher than slavery. A North Korean-style cult of personality might raise children to hold the ruler in god-like awe.
Surely good Americans would want their government to stay far away from that kind of self-serving nurturance.
And yet, a democratic republic does require a certain kind of citizen. Government “of the people” assumes that the people have certain capabilities and virtues. In the long term, a democratic republic that doesn’t instill those capabilities and virtues will be unstable; it will preside over the destruction of its own foundation.
In the past, Americans have understood this. Universal public education became the law in one state after another precisely because of the fear that immigrant children would not understand democratic values, or learn to speak and read English, which was assumed to be the only possible medium for the public discourse democracy depends on.
This line of thinking came back to me this week when I read Mary Harrington’s “Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good” in the New York Times. The article had two main points:
Smart phones and services like Tik-Tok are changing the way people (especially children) think, creating an easily distracted consciousness that looks for quick and amusing input without regard to accuracy. As a people, we are losing a more literate consciousness capable of “concentration, linear reasoning, and deep thought”.
This tendency is more pronounced among poorer children, whose parents are less likely to insist on (and pay for) a more video-restrictive education.
Here’s the paragraph that brings the consequences home:
What will happen if this becomes fully realized? An electorate that has lost the capacity for long-form thought will be more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories. If that sounds familiar, it may be a sign of how far down this path the West has already traveled.
Harrington compares Tik-Tok videos to junk food, and argues in favor of an “ascetic approach to cognitive fitness”. We used to say “you are what you eat”. Maybe the same thing works on the mental level: If you put garbage into your mind, garbage will come out.
As Cal Newport, a productivity expert, shows in his 2016 book, “Deep Work,” the digital environment is optimized for distraction, as various systems compete for our attention with notifications and other demands. Social media platforms are designed to be addictive, and the sheer volume of material incentivizes intense cognitive “bites” of discourse calibrated for maximum compulsiveness over nuance or thoughtful reasoning. The resulting patterns of content consumption form us neurologically for skimming, pattern recognition and distracted hopping from text to text
Like junk food, though, addictive-but-vacuous snippets of video are easier to obtain and harder to screen out than input that develops a deeper mind. More and more, it’s upper-class households that have the resources and the will to create an environment conducive to good cognitive development.
As Dr. [MaryAnne] Wolf points out, literacy and poverty have long been correlated. Now poor kids spend more time on screens each day than rich ones — in one 2019 study, about two hours more per day for U.S. tweens and teenagers whose families made less than $35,000 per year, compared with peers whose household incomes exceeded $100,000. Research indicates that kids who are exposed to more than two hours a day of recreational screen time have worse working memory, processing speed, attention levels, language skills and executive function than kids who are not.
Bluntly: Making healthy cognitive choices is hard. In a culture saturated with more accessible and engrossing forms of entertainment, long-form literacy may soon become the domain of elite subcultures.
Critics will argue that none of this is new. Older people (I’m 68) have always complained that younger people don’t think clearly, and have blamed new media and new technology for the change. Back in the early 1600s, Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote was in part a critique of what could happen to people who read too many of the cheap romances that Gutenberg’s printing press had made available: Their minds might fill up with fantastic notions disconnected from reality.
I grew up in a generation supposedly warped by comic books and (later) low-quality television. (I was exposed to a vast quantity of both. I can still sing the theme song of “My Mother the Car”.) Neal Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death raised the specter of an electorate that chooses to be entertained rather than informed.
I also grew up in the working class (my father worked in a factory through most of my childhood, and neither of my parents went to college). So I have long been skeptical of studies supposedly proving that professional-class child-raising is superior to working-class child-raising. Too many well-born and well-educated sociologists have descended into working-class neighborhoods and seen the natives as a backward culture far inferior to themselves.
And yet … I came to literate culture with the enthusiasm of an immigrant. Arriving at a giant Big 10 university — an entire city about the size of my hometown, apparently devoted to discovering, recording, and passing down knowledge — was like entering the Emerald City of Oz. (I have never understood the ho-hum attitude that the children of my professional-class friends take towards college. Kids today approach Harvard with less awe than I had for Michigan State.)
Mathematics gave me an appreciation of truths that can’t be shaken by desire or popular opinion. Meditation taught me the virtues of a quiet mind, one that can let the waves of hype roll past until deeper thoughts emerge. (On the wall of my office is a painting of a young woman whose eyes are closed. She holds up one finger as a faint breeze begins to stir her hair. “Wait for it,” she seems to be saying.)
And so what particularly disturbs me about the present moment, beyond the rampant cruelty and the disregard of democratic traditions, is the impotence of rational thought, the inability of Truth to overtake Lie, and the lack of any deep engagement of mind with mind.
How can democracy survive this?
If the people are going to rule, then every child should be educated like an heir to the throne.
There has never been a democracy where the people were truly wise. But democracy rests on the belief that Truth has a persistence that eventually will win out. That’s why the Founders built so much delay into our system, particularly for fundamental changes like constitutional amendments. They recognized that momentary enthusiasms might sweep through the electorate. But over time, they believed, the cacophony of noises would cancel each other out, allowing the constant voice of reason to rise above the din.
But technology has raised the volume of noise. Somehow, we will have to produce a population that can think deeply anyway. That will require a new kind of soulcraft, one quite a bit deeper, I think, than George Will had in mind.
How a conservative legal theory set us on a path to fascism.
If you clear your mind of preconceptions and read the Constitution end to end, I think you’ll see not just a list of rules and procedures, but a vision of the proper governance of a free people. [1] The newly established Government of the United States does not rule over its people in totality. Instead, the People have granted the government a specific list of powers to achieve specific goals.
Alexander Hamilton, for example, thought this structure made an explicit Bill of Rights unnecessary.
For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?
During the ensuing centuries, the power of the US government has grown, largely because social and economic change made the powers granted to it more significant. Interstate and international commerce, for example, was a comparatively small part of the average American’s life in 1787. Today, on the other hand, restricting your purchases to products wholly made within your home state would involve radical lifestyle choices. The power to regulate interstate commerce, consequently, opened the door to a much broader regulatory power.
Similarly, technological progress has opened up unforeseen new worlds of commerce and communication, requiring someone to define new ground rules. America’s ascension to world power likewise extended the powers of our government.
But those enhanced powers did not automatically flow to the President. The Constitution gave those expandable powers to Congress, including what has become known as the Elastic Clause, because it can be stretched in so many ways.
The Congress shall have Power… To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
Other powers are split between Congress and the President. So, for example, the President can enforce the laws, but cannot make laws. The President is commander-in-chief, but cannot build an army or declare war. [2] The judiciary, in turn, defines what the laws mean.
The 20th century saw the growth of what has become known as the “administrative state”: The kind of detailed and fast-changing regulation that the government’s new powers required couldn’t be managed through a body as cumbersome as Congress. [3] And so Congress empowered a smorgasbord of agencies: FDA, SEC, EPA, Federal Reserve, and so on — each with its own power and purview.
In this manner, some of the spirit of Constitution was preserved, even as the executive branch expanded: Specific powers were granted for specific purposes. Each agency had its own mission, and while the agencies were part of the executive branch and overseen by presidential appointees, the rank-and-file employees belonged to the civil service and maintained a degree of independence. [4]
The norms of the presidency, in turn, required a President to compartmentalize, or at least to maintain the appearance of compartmentalization. So, for example, it was considered scandalous if President Obama was directing the IRS to give conservative organizations a hard time. [5] President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland kept their distance from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation and subsequent indictment of Donald Trump.
A President is human and has enemies and resentments, but s/he is not supposed to use the government to exact personal vengeance. The person-with-enemies and the President-with-powers are intended to be kept separate.
But during the Reagan years, conservatives began to float the notion of a “unitary executive”. The theory is based on the first line of Article II of the Constitution, which says:
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
For a long time this was interpreted loosely: Any grant of executive power had to pass through the President in some way, but did not come from him minute-to-minute. FBI directors, for example, were appointed by a President, but served 10-year terms that stretched well beyond the 4- or 8-year term of the appointing President, and were fired only for cause. [6] Similarly, chairs of the Federal Reserve are appointed by a President, but have never been replaced simply because a new President takes office.
But the Unitary Executive Theory says that any executive power is by definition a presidential power. The various agencies and officials of the executive branch are essentially fingers of the President’s hand. They do the detail work that is beneath the President’s notice, but have no real independence.
For a long time the unitary executive was a crank theory, but under the partisan Roberts Supreme Court it has increasingly become the law of the land. [7] In Trump’s second administration, the Court has allowed the firing of a series of people previously believed to be independent and protected by law.
“By means of such actions, this Court may facilitate the permanent transfer of authority, piece by piece by piece, from one branch of Government to another,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for herself, as well as Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Most recently, Trump has attempted to reshape (and shrink by half) the Department of Education simply by firing its employees. [8]
Proponents of the unitary executive argue — as authoritarians often do — that government power will be wielded more efficiently by a single hand, and that government will be more responsive to the voters when elected officials are better able to implement the programs they ran on.
But the behavior of the Trump administration belies these claims. In a government of largely independent agencies, each wielding its own power to achieve a specific mission, American individuals and institutions have to worry about the laws and agencies as individual entities. So: You worry about the IRS at tax time, and try to make sure that your returns follow their rules. You worry about the Justice Department if you are contemplating some crime of theft or violence. A corporation worries about the SEC in its dealings with the market and their own stockholders, about the EPA when it considers what emissions its factories are putting into the environment, and about OSHA when it designs its work environment. And so on.
But under a unitary executive, when all these agencies are fingers of the same hand, everyone has to worry about being seen as enemies of the government. If we have displeased the executive in some way, any agency of government might be used to punish us or whip us back into line.
Take CBS. Does their news coverage displease Trump? Then the FCC balks at the corporate merger of CBS parent Paramount and cash-rich Skydance. It balks not until a specific public interest is satisfied, as would be the case under another administration’s FCC, but until Paramount has paid Trump $16 million to settle an otherwise baseless lawsuit, until Stephen Colbert’s show is cancelled, and until CBS agrees to have an ombudsman address complaints of anti-Trump “bias” in its news coverage.
Take Columbia University. Complaints that university wasn’t doing enough to protect Jewish students from harassment would ordinarily fall under the civil rights division of the Education Department, which might make a referral to the civil rights division of the Justice Department, with a narrow focus on the experience of the university’s Jewish students. But under a unitary executive, the offense is more general and the consequences far more sweeping: Columbia allowed pro-Palestinian demonstrations that expressed opinions contrary to Trump’s support of Israel’s government.
And so, the State Department revoked the green card and student visa of protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, allowing ICE (which is part of Homeland Security, not the the State Department) to arrest and detain Khalil for three and a half months without filing any criminal charges against him. Columbia’s research grants (primarily from the Health and Human Services Department) were frozen, and all of its federal grants were threatened. [9]
And the result? Not a specific set of adjustments to Columbia’s policies about antisemitism (antisemitism was always just a pretext), but a sweeping agreement to get Columbia right with the Trump administration, “including the re-organisation of its Middle Eastern studies department, and hiring a team of ‘special officers’ empowered to remove students from campus and make arrests”.
A similar administration assault on Harvard resulted in demands to
shift power from “faculty and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship” to “those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter”, i.e., from Trump-hostile faculty to Trump-friendly faculty.
“reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence” and “report to federal authorities … any foreign student … who commits a conduct violation”.
authorize an “external party” satisfactory to the government “to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse”. [10]
Again, the administration has mounted pressure by trying to freeze funds from a wide range of government departments. This is happening not at the end of a process in which Harvard has been found guilty of something and refused voluntary reforms, but as cudgel to beat the University into line with the administration. (Harvard is fighting this in court.)
The administration has also gone after law firms, getting concessions in exchange for release from a variety of threats that include
limiting the ability of attorneys to obtain access to government buildings, stopping any consideration for future employment with the government, canceling government contracts, and preventing any company that uses such a firm from obtaining federal contracts.
To sum up: Increasingly, we are in an environment where it is not enough to obey the laws. Instead, you need to maintain a friendly relationship with the government, and particularly not offend Trump himself. Otherwise, the full power of the government might come down on you.
Gleichschaltung is a compound word that comes from the German words gleich (same) and Schaltung (circuit) and was derived from an electrical engineering term meaning that all switches are put on the same circuit allowing them all to be simultaneously activated by throwing a single master switch.
This unitary-executive metaphor goes back to the Nazis, because of course it does.
The Nazi term Gleichschaltung, meaning “synchronization” or “coordination“, was the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler—leader of the Nazi Party in Germany—established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society “from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education”.
The unitary executive is precisely the person with his or her hand on that master switch. If American society retains any freedom, it will be due to the restraint of that executive, not to our inherent human rights.
So getting rid of Trump will not be enough to restore American freedom, as long as his successor — whether MAGA or some Democrat — continues to be a unitary executive holding the government’s master switch. Restoring freedom will require a sweeping change in the Supreme Court, as well as in re-establishing cultural expectations of the compartmentalization of presidential power.
[1] Recognizing, of course, that in 1787 not everyone was free. Much of our social progress in the last quarter-millennium has consisted of extending that vision of freedom more and more widely.
[2] The Founders never imagined the US achieving the kinds of world-spanning power it has today, or that it would need to maintain powerful armed forces in peacetime. Nor could they imagine a nuclear war, which could be lost before Congress could be convened.
[3] Imagine having to pass a new law each time a pharmaceutical company marketed a new drug or a food company began using a new preservative.
[4] This is the origin of the notion of a “Deep State”. President after president came into office with ideas for sweeping change, only to discover that the actual government had a great deal of bureaucratic inertia. The career employees of the various agencies had their own vision of their mission, which did not change just because they had a new boss.
You can see this today, for example, in the Justice Department, where many career employees — more than half in some offices — have quit rather than carry out orders that, by their lights, are corrupt. It’s impossible to know how many other civil servants have quietly sabotaged plans that violate what they see as their agency’s mission.
People join the EPA because they want to protect the environment, DoD because they want to defend the country, and so on. If asked to do something counter to those goals, they will do their best not to cooperate.
Properly understood, then, the Deep State is a culture, not a conspiracy.
[5] He wasn’t. IRS targeting of conservative groups for heightened scrutiny was never conclusively established, and no link to the Obama White House was ever found.
But President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on a pretext in 2017, only four years into his term. During his transition period in 2024, Trump announced Kash Patel as his replacement for his own appointee Christopher Wray, seven years into Wray’s term. Wray might have challenged his apparent dismissal, but chose instead to resign.
[8] I have to wonder how well this would have worked for Biden. Would the Court have allowed him to eliminate student debt by firing all the people tasked with keeping track of it or collecting payments?
[9] Ordinarily, ending federal grants might be the conclusion of an anti-discrimination finding against a recalcitrant institution, not an opening salvo.
[10] “Viewpoint diversity” is a common MAGA euphemism for giving preference to MAGA-friendly students and professors. An economics department with no Marxists can be “viewpoint diverse”, but a biology department with no creationists might not be.
Democrats should avoid the substance of the Epstein controversy and focus on a single point: If his supporters feel Trump is insulting and disrespecting them, they’re right. The best thing that could come from this episode is if they begin to question the other “hoaxes” and “fake news” Trump has sold them on.
Yes, he does think you’re stupid. He always has.
That’s the only Democratic/liberal message that seems useful to me here. Trump ran on a promise to release the Epstein Files. It was key to promoting his image as the man who would finally stand up to the the Deep State and end the ability of privileged elites to do whatever they want with impunity. His Justice Department repeatedly teased his base with the notion that major revelations were coming soon. The holy grail of the Epstein conspiracy theory — the client list, the names of the powerful men who allegedly abused Epstein’s harem of underage girls — was on Pam Bondi’s desk, awaiting her review.
And then: Never mind. There never was a client list. Epstein’s death in prison was just the suicide that authorities had always claimed. Nothing suspicious about it. Nothing to reveal. Just: Move on everybody. Go back to talking about tax cuts or mass deportation or Joe Biden’s dementia. (A good summary of the contradictions between these official announcements and DOJ’s previous statements is in Senator Durbin’s letter to Attorney General Bondi.)
Trump has seemed surprised, offended, and then angry when his supporters did not do as they were told. The whole Epstein conspiracy theory, he now claims, was concocted by Democrats. It’s a “hoax” that only “stupid” and “foolish” Republicans fall into.
This time, though, the base isn’t falling into line. Two weeks have gone by, and still MAGA World is roiled by the controversy. Trump has tried to placate them by having Pam Bondi ask a judge to release the grand jury files from the Maxwell trial, but that’s unlikely to satisfy anyone: It will take time, the judge will likely say no, and even if he said yes, the information presented to the grand jury was aimed at Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently in jail. If a client list exists, it wouldn’t be there.
The Trump administration has much more extensive information now, and could release it quickly. It just chooses not to.
This MAGA infighting seems like a godsend to Democrats, but it’s a tricky gift to open. Democrats have never bought into the Epstein conspiracy theory, which was rooted in the idea that Epstein’s fabled client list would be full of high-ranking Democrats and the liberal Hollywood elite. (It’s related to the Pizzagate theory that connected Hillary Clinton to a network that trafficked missing children for sexual exploitation.)
One thing Democrats lack these days, at least among the voters who shifted from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024, is authenticity. Championing the Epstein theory won’t help, because Democrats can’t do it authentically. (I know I can’t.)
I can’t even authentically call for DOJ to release its files. There’s a reason Merrick Garland never did: DOJ has terrifying investigative power, and a corresponding responsibility not to abuse that power. DOJ policy is to release the information it collects only in indictments and trials. It releases information to prosecute crimes, not to defame people that it can’t prove a case against.
That would be a terrible policy to reverse, especially in the Trump era. DOJ exists to enforce the law, not to keep the public informed.
Congressional investigation, though, is an avenue to inform the public. It would be entirely appropriate for a congressional committee to inquire about the strange contradictions in the administration’s public statements, or for Congress to appoint a commission to inquire.
But that’s as far as I think Democrats should go: Call for investigating the contradictions, not for investigating the conspiracy theory itself. If Republicans are willing to take the lead on a deeper investigation, fine. But that’s not for us to do.
One thing we can do, though, is validate the outrage felt among the MAGA rank-and-file: Yes, he does think you’re stupid. He thinks he can tell you up is down and you’ll start repeating it. He’s been doing it for years. Maybe this is a moment for you to re-evaluate many things.
That’s the point I think Democrats, liberals, and anybody else trying to turn the tide of fascism should emphasize. Not some Epstein conspiracy theory of our own. Not even the demand for DOJ to release the files. It seems obvious Trump has something to hide here, but I wouldn’t even dwell on that.
But Trump has always counted on his ability to influence the thinking of his followers. He has been uncanny in knowing how to wave a red flag, change the subject, or make himself the victim. This time, though, his Jedi mind tricks aren’t working. Even the magic word “hoax” is failing to make his followers go glassy-eyed and get back in line. All over MAGA, people are thinking about the Epstein Files and thinking, “I don’t care what he said. Those are the droids I’m looking for.”
But if members of his cult have briefly stepped outside his mind control, encourage them to stay there. If you don’t believe him when he says the Epstein stuff is a “hoax”, maybe you should re-examine all the other “hoaxes” he has claimed, from climate change to the well-established facts that Biden won the 2020 election and Russia interfered in Trump’s favor in 2016.
Most MAGA folks won’t do this re-examination, because are in fact the sheep Trump believes they are. But a few will. Jess Piper, who lives in Trump country, argues that they will never be converted into Democratic voters, and she’s probably right. But if they just lose their enthusiasm and decide to sit out future elections, that could make a difference.
The Weekly Sift 