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Rights, Privileges, and Mahmoud Khalil

March 17, 2025 – 10:31 am

Can a legal permanent resident be deported for expressing views the President disagrees with?

A long-standing debate runs through American history: Does the Bill of Rights enumerate human rights, i.e., something that anyone can claim by virtue of being human, or privileges of citizenship that our government can ignore when it deals with non-citizens?

The Declaration of Independence uses theistic language to promote a human-rights view: Human beings (or at least “all men”) have been “endowed” with rights “by their Creator”. To say that a man lacks rights is tantamount to claiming that he was not created by God. But in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Supreme Court took the opposite view: Rights derive from the social contract embodied in the Constitution. Africans residing in the United States, the Court held, were not party to that contract, and thus they “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”.

Dred Scott has long been in the dustbin of history, and is widely viewed as one of the Court’s worst decisions. Currently binding Supreme Court precedents take an in-between view that leans towards human rights. Basically, the Court interprets the Constitution and the laws to mean exactly what they say: If lawmakers had intended a provision to apply only to citizens, they would have used the word “citizen” rather than some more general term like “person”. For example, the 14th Amendment uses both words:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

So there are privileges that apply only to citizens (the right to vote, for example), but due process and equal protection are not among them.

The Trump administration shows every sign of wanting to move that line. Just how far it wants to go is not clear. But the first case in point is Mahmoud Khalil.

Who is Mahmoud Khalil? Two weeks ago, Khalil (an Algerian citizen born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria) had the next layer of privileges short of American citizenship: He came here originally on a student visa, but became a legal permanent resident, a “green card holder”. He is married to an American citizen, who is eight months pregnant. If nothing goes wrong, in another month he’ll be the father of an American citizen.

He is also a pro-Palestine activist. Last spring, he participated in demonstrations at Columbia University, where he was a student at the time. (He has since finished his degree.) Wikipedia describes his views like this:

Following the start of the Gaza war in 2023, Khalil became involved in pro-Palestinian activism. He served as a negotiator for students associated with Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) when they were bargaining with Columbia University officials. In a 2024 interview, Khalil said, “As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand by hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other.” He characterized the movement as one “for social justice and freedom and equality for everyone”. Of concerns about antisemitism, Khalil said, “There is, of course, no place for antisemitism. What we are witnessing is anti-Palestinian sentiment that’s taking different forms, and antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism [are] some of these forms.”

The Trump administration describes him differently, claiming that he “led activities aligned to Hamas” and “engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity“. But it has produced no specifics to back those claims up, and the language itself is slippery. What does it mean that an activity is “aligned with Hamas”? Aligned in whose view? Similarly, unless Khalil himself endorsed terrorism or attacked Jews or America in so many words — and if he had, I’d expect his critics to have produced specific quotes — “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American” is an opinion, not a fact.

Khalil’s arrest. A week ago yesterday, agents from the Homeland Security department arrested Khalil at his home in New York. Khalil’s wife Noor Abdalla recorded the event on her phone while simultaneously talking to Khalil’s lawyer on his phone. It isn’t exactly a classic police-state arrest — Khalil is not roughed up, for example — but it still has a lot of disturbing aspects. When Khalil’s wife asks for the names of the arresting agents, she is told “We don’t give our names.” They also refuse to say which agency they represent. All they’re willing to tell her is where Khalil is being taken: Immigration Custody at 26 Federal Plaza. They refuse to talk to Khalil’s lawyer, who is on the phone. “They’re literally running away from me,” Noor reports to the lawyer.

When Noor tried to visit Khalil at a detention center in New Jersey, she was told he was no longer there. It took some time for his lawyer to determine that Khalil had been moved to a facility in Louisiana, where at first he was not allowed to consult privately with lawyers. An immigration hearing to have him deported was scheduled for March 27.

Last Monday, a federal judge in New York ordered that Khalil not be removed from the US until a hearing in his court can determine whether deporting him violates constitutional rights.

The Just Security blog analyzes the legalities: No one in the executive branch can unilaterally revoke a green card.

To obtain authority to deport a green card holder, the government must charge (or accuse, as this is not a criminal matter) them with a condition under the immigration laws that in some way makes them “deportable.” “Deportable” is a term of art under the immigration laws. It refers to conduct defined in a set of provisions—most though not all involving criminal activity—codified at 8 U.S.C. 1227(a).

To prove that an [legal permanent resident] is deportable, the government must convene a “removal hearing” before an immigration judge. At that hearing, government attorneys must prove deportability by “clear and convincing” evidence.

Notably, the Trump administration has not accused Khalil of committing crimes, or of committing fraud in his green-card application (another deportability condition). Instead, it points to a condition that has never been used in this way before:

the government has invoked a rarely used “foreign policy” ground of deportation. That provision, located in section 237(a)(4)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, makes deportable any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” (emphasis added).

The statute contains a (freedom of speech and association) safe harbor, incorporated by reference to the inadmissibility provisions, prohibiting deportation “because of the alien’s past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States,” but then contains an exception for the safe harbor: “unless the Secretary of State personally determines that the alien’s [presence] would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest” (emphasis added).

It’s worth pointing out that much of what the administration claims about Khalil (even if true) consists of “beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States”. The First Amendment would protect an American saying “I support what Hamas did on October 7”, even if most other Americans would find that statement reprehensible. (Again, Khalil seems not to have said anything like that.)

The foreign-policy justification is pretty obviously absurd: Khalil is up for deportation because Trump promised to deport pro-Palestinian campus demonstrators. There is no “compelling US foreign policy interest” involved. What the administration will probably argue, though, is that identifying US foreign policy interests is a judgment call that belongs to the executive branch, not the judiciary.

The case, then, will turn on whether an immigration judge feels empowered to use common sense, which says that the foreign policy interest here is a pretext, not a reason.

Protests. The administration has pledged that a Khalil deportation will be “the first of many“, and has already arrested a second Columbia protester. A third has returned to India after having her student visa revoked.

Protests calling for Khalil’s release were held in several cities this weekend. The most striking was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace. Thursday, over 100 demonstrators were arrested for occupying Trump Tower in New York.

It would be a mistake to conclude from this that American Jews in general support Khalil. (A pro-Israel group is apparently fingering pro-Palestinian protesters for deportation.) But the administration’s usurpation of the fight against “antisemitism” as an excuse for curtailing freedom of speech is making a number of American Jews uneasy. Whatever pretext they claim for curtailing human rights, authoritarian governments have a way of using their powers against Jews eventually. Elon Musk’s antisemitism, as well as Trump’s and Vance’s embrace of the antisemitic Alliance for Germany party, undermines the administration’s claims to be fighting antisemitism.

In truth, the administration seems to be fighting freedom of speech, not antisemitism. The Khalil case shows the lengths it will go in order to find legal pretexts to punish people it disagrees with. That should worry all of us, no matter what we think about Palestine or Israel.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (3)

Those Mysterious Tariffs

March 10, 2025 – 10:12 am

It’s clear that Trump loves tariffs. It’s not clear why.

LIstening to President Trump talk about tariffs is like listening to a teen-age boy talk about the object of his crush. Tariffs have every conceivable virtue and no drawbacks. The Daily Show runs together a series of Trump tariff quotes:

Tariffs are easy. They’re fast. They’re efficient. And they bring fairness. … We’re going to bring so many things back to our country, and the thing that’s going to get us there is tariffs. … We’ll take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs. And we’re going to make our country so strong and so rich. It will never be so rich. … Tariffs. It’s a beautiful word, isn’t it?

It’s like listening to Tony sing about Maria.

Maria! Say it loud and there’s music playing.
Say it soft and it’s almost like praying.
Maria! I’ll never stop saying “Maria”.

To hear Trump tell it:

  • The threat of tariffs will make other countries do what he wants.
  • Tariffs are essentially free money. They will provide a dependable stream of government revenue that comes from foreigners rather than Americans.
  • In order to avoid tariffs, corporations will move production facilities from other countries to the United States, creating good jobs here.

What’s not to like? But strangely, most economists don’t like tariffs, and the stock market tanks whenever it looks like Trump is getting serious about imposing them. So what’s going on?

Well, to start with, those justifications contradict each other. If tariffs are going to raise money and cause corporations to change their production patterns and supply chains, they need to be imposed for the long term. (Ford isn’t going to move a Mexican factory back to the US unless they expect a tariff to be in place for years.) But if a tariff is supposed to change a country’s behavior, it has to come off as soon as the behavior changes. (Tariffs won’t make Mexico crack down on fentanyl-smuggling cartels unless the Mexican government expects the tariffs to end when it does.)

So which is it? Does he want long-term tariffs to raise money and move supply chains, or short-term tariffs to threaten other countries with?

And even if you pick one or the other, it doesn’t really work. Using a tariff to change a country’s behavior might (or might not) work once, acting like a threat from a protection racket. (“Nice economy you got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”) But national leaders are smart enough to know that extortionists never go away after they’re paid. If a country gives Trump some concession to avoid a tariff, and then he comes back and threatens it again, they going to figure out that he intends to bleed them dry. Resisting being pushed around by the US is always a good look for a foreign politician, so they’re going to dig in their heels. Some already are.

A tariff can raise money, but that money will come from Americans, not foreigners. The American importer pays the tax, and probably passes it on to its customers. In the end, a big broad-based tariff will act like a national sales tax, which raises money by raising the cost of whatever is sold. Worse, that money tends to come from poorer Americans, who have to spend nearly all the money they get their hands on. (Meanwhile, the rich can pile up savings and pay nothing.) All those working-class Trump voters have essentially voted to shift the tax burden onto themselves.

Tariffs can work to change production and investment decisions — that’s their traditional use. (Typically, a developing country tariffs imported goods to encourage local manufacturers to replace the import. That was how the US used them in the 1800s, and how nations like South Korea used them more recently.) But in order to have that influence, a tariff needs to be predictable. And that’s a problem for Trump:

  • February 1: Trump orders 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
  • February 3: He pauses the Mexico and Canada tariffs for a month.
  • February 27: He announces that the 25% Mexico/Canada tariffs will be back on when the month runs out.
  • March 4: The 25% tariffs go into effect.
  • March 5: The tariffs related to the auto industry are paused for a month.
  • March 6: Tariffs on goods covered by the USMCA (a trade agreement Trump signed in his first term) are paused for a month. (That covers about half of Mexican imports and 38% of Canadian imports.)
  • March 7. Trump threatens tariffs on Canadian lumber and dairy products.

So OK, imagine you’re a CEO trying to decide where to invest your company’s capital. How do you plan for that?

Conspiracy theories. When the reasons a leader gives for his actions don’t make sense, inevitably people start trying to imagine what the real reason is. The most prominent conspiracy theories about the tariffs that I’ve heard are

  • It’s a shakedown. Your tariffs go up until you figure out who to bribe. The Big Picture blog quotes a study describing what happened during the trade war with China in Trump’s first term: “Politically connected companies were far more likely to receive valuable tariff exemptions than those that were not connected to Trump or Republicans. Specifically, the authors found that companies that had invested substantially into the GOP before or at the start of Trump 1.0 were more likely to win exemptions to Trump’s tariffs than those that had not.”
  • It’s a market manipulation. The market crashes whenever Trump announces a tariff. So if you know when he’ wa’s going to do that, you can make a killing by selling short, and then covering your short after he reverses himself. So Trump jerking the markets around is a way for well-connected insiders to make money.
  • Trump hates Canada.

The Canada-hating theory requires a little explanation. Trump’s original reason for both the Canada and Mexico tariffs was to defend the border from illegal immigrants and fentanyl smuggling. So in order to avoid the tariffs, Canada would have to address those problems and show real results. But there’s a catch: There is no problem to address in Canada. Take fentanyl, for example. According to the Council on Foreign Relations:

Canada plays virtually no role in the U.S. fentanyl influx, especially compared to the other countries. The country contributes less than 1 percent to its southern neighbor’s street fentanyl supply, as both the Canadian government and data from the DEA report. 

Paul Krugman puts it like this:

[R]emember that Canada can’t concede to U.S. demands, even if it were in a mood to do so (which it very much isn’t) because there aren’t any coherent U.S. demands; Canada has done nothing wrong!

But hey, truth has never been a problem for a Trump administration. Sunday, the White House sent National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett (and maybe some other people I didn’t notice) out to lie on the talk shows.

I can tell you that in the situation room I’ve seen photographs of fentanyl labs in Canada that the law enforcement folks were leaving alone. Canada’s got a big drug problem.

Yes, Hassett has seen photographs he can’t show you. I haven’t heard such convincing evidence since Bush and Cheney were getting ready to invade Iraq.

And here’s a graph no Republican will display: Fentanyl deaths in the US had been plunging for at least a year before Trump took office. Eventually, he’ll declare victory and take credit for everything that has happened since 2023.

Meanwhile, Trump himself is doing everything he can to piss off Canadians, suggesting they become the 51st state and referring to their former prime minister as “Governor Trudeau“. As a result, the US national anthem is getting booed at hockey games. And the patriotic “Joe Canada” character created by Molson Beer in 2000 has come back to defend his country from US imperialism.

They mistake our modesty for meekness, our kindness for consent, our nation for another star on their flag and our love of a hot cheesy poutine with their love of a hot cheesy Putin. … We are not the 51st anything. We are the first to unite in the crisis, the first to build bridges – not walls – and the first to stand on guard for thee.

So whatever Trump is trying to do to Canada, I don’t think it’s working. But what is he trying to do? That question is just as mysterious as the tariffs themselves. Krugman’s theory goes like this:

In any case, efforts to find some kind of economic justification for Trump’s Canada-hatred have the feeling of desperate efforts to avoid the obvious. Canada is a pretty decent place, as nations go. And Trump, whom nobody would describe as a decent person, dislikes and maybe even fears people who are.

Let me put a less psychological spin on this: Trump is building a hellscape, an America where people hate each other, let each other go hungry or die without healthcare, where diseases once eradicated come back, where corrupt oligarchs pillage the government and corporations are free to despoil the environment and treat workers like slaves. And then there’s Canada, right across the border, ready to demonstrate that life doesn’t have to be this way.

Sure, countries like Denmark or New Zealand also prove that point, but they’re far enough away that nobody in Trump’s base needs to notice them. Your cousin from Des Moines probably isn’t going to come home raving about Copenhagen or Christchurch. But Toronto, Vancouver — maybe. So Canada needs to be slandered in advance, painted as an enemy country full of propaganda that can’t be trusted. Say something about Canada and MAGA types will roll their eyes as if you’d just quoted something you heard on MSNBC.

And as for the tariffs, I’ll explain them like this: Tariffs are a power that Congress has yielded almost entirely to the President. So they’re a model for what Trump wants the country to be. He can announce a tariff without anybody wondering whether he has the votes for it. He says “tariffs” and there are tariffs. A day later he can say “no tariffs” and they go away. And every time he does, there are headlines and big moves in the stock market and people getting upset. Trump loves that stuff. He’ll never learn how to use his tariff power constructively, because it’s a toy that is just too tempting to leave on the shelf. For as long as he’s president, he’ll feel compelled to take that toy down and play with it.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (10)

How Things Stand

February 24, 2025 – 9:48 am

The struggle to preserve American democracy is still undecided.
Neither despair nor complacency is warranted.

I keep having the same conversation with my friends, who are anxious and/or depressed about the Trump/Musk attempt to establish an autocracy, and wonder how I stay so sanguine. There are three reasons, one of which is personal and won’t help anybody else. But the other two might.

The personal reason is that my wife died in December. So from my point of view, nothing worse is going to happen anytime soon. I realize that’s a very self-centered point of view, but it is what it is.

The other two reasons, though, are generalizable and linked:

  • Nothing about the current struggle should be all that surprising.
  • The events that will tell us how it plays out haven’t happened yet.

I didn’t read all 900+ pages of Project 2025, but I did see enough of it to realize that the first few months of a second Trump administration would constitute an all-out assault on American democracy. I can’t claim that I foresaw the details of the current mess — Elon’s role in particular surprised me — but the general outline was all there. And I know Trump denied Project 2025 was his plan, but nobody should have taken that denial seriously.

So now we’ve seen Trump’s opening moves: a blizzard of executive orders claiming unprecedented powers that can be found nowhere in the Constitution. That was all predictable.

What wasn’t predictable, and is still unknown, is how the other American power centers would respond. I’m talking about Congress, the courts, the state governments, and the People. That’s all still very hard to predict, because each of those power centers will influence the behavior of the others.

It’s important for us to be neither complacent about all this nor resigned to our fate. Things really are still up in the air. Let’s look at the possible resistance centers one by one.

The People. Let’s start with the People, who elected Trump in November with 49.8% of the vote — hardly the “mandate” he likes to claim. Historically, voters have rewarded election winners with a give-the-guy-a-chance response that pundits sometimes refer to this as a president’s “honeymoon”. So, for example, Barack Obama got 52.9% of the vote in the 2008 election, but his post-inauguration approval rating bounced up to 69% (the highest it ever got).

By contrast, Trump’s post-inauguration approval (as estimated by 538’s polling average) was almost identical to his vote total: 49.7%, with disapproval at 41.5% (indicating that some Americans who voted for Harris or someone else were now neutral. By contrast, Obama’s post-inaugural disapproval was a mere 13%.) Trump’s most recent split is still positive, 48.5%-47.0%, but just barely. Some recent polls have turned sharply negative, like Ipsos, which has gone from a post-inaugural 47%-41% to a recent 44%-51%.

Polls that focus more specifically on what Trump is doing look worse for him. A WaPo/Ipsos poll showed 57% of Americans believe that Trump has overstepped his authority. 54% disapprove of his management of the federal government. Elon Musk’s approval is 15 points underwater with 49% disapproving and only 34% approving.

Short version: As people see what Trump is doing, they’re turning against him. I expect this to continue as more and more Americans notice that Trump’s “temporary” actions aren’t temporary, and aren’t solving any of the problems he campaigned on. (Bought any eggs lately?) I anticipate worse polls for Trump and a lot more demonstrations like the one I participated in February 14 in Boston.

Congress. Republicans hold slim majorities in both houses, so Democratic responses are necessarily limited: Democrats on their own cannot pass legislation, hold hearings, or subpoena witnesses. They can make speeches and create photo ops, but that’s about it. And the press, knowing Democrats can’t do much, don’t pay much attention to them. (I often hear comments like “Why don’t the Democrats say or do X?” Chances are some of them have, but you didn’t hear about it.)

Initially, congressional Republicans have been loyal Trump supporters, including confirming obviously unqualified cabinet nominees like Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard. (No Democrat voted for any of the four.) But Republicans can also read polls, and apparently constituents are burning up their phone lines, so some are beginning to get uneasy about cuts that affect their home districts.

But will they do anything to rein Trump in? The real test happens when the government runs out of money on March 14. It’s easy to be for or against things until somebody puts price tags on them and adds them all up. In order to get the bill he wants, Trump will need support from almost all of the Republicans in the House. If Democrats stay united and only two Republicans vote against a spending deal, it fails.

If that happens, that’s when congressional Democrats begin to have negotiating leverage.

State and local governments. Contrasting with decades of Republican rhetoric idealizing government close to the people and villainizing know-it-alls who meddle from distant Washington, Trump is trying to use federal power to overwhelm the states and cities.

The scandal over Trump’s deal to drop federal corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams is all about Trump trying to make liberal cities dance to his tune, in spite of what their voters want. So is his attempt to cancel in New York City’s congestion pricing. Ditto for border czar Tom Homan’s threat to “bring Hell” to Boston after the Boston police commissioner said he would obey local laws that don’t give him the authority to enforce federal immigration laws. In a White House meeting with governors of both parties, Trump tried to bully Maine Governor Janet Mills into submitting to his executive order banning transwomen from women’s sports. “I’ll see you in court,” Mills replied.

All in all, Democratic officials at the state and local level are standing firm against federal usurpation. Democratic attorneys general are leading a number of the lawsuits against the Trump administration’s overreach. How well they succeed, though, largely depends on the courts.

The courts. Many of the things Trump is doing are illegal or unconstitutional. His attempt to undo birthright citizenship is a blatant contradiction of the 14th Amendment. His refusal to spend money already appropriated by Congress violates both the Constitution’s assignment of spending power to Congress and the Impoundment Act of 1974. He has no authority to disband agencies created by Congress, like USAID or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. His treatment of federal employees violates the laws establishing the civil service, as well as union contracts signed by previous administrations.

But laws do not enforce themselves if lawbreakers are determined to ignore them. Victims of the law-breaking have to go to court. Judges have to rule in accordance with the law in spite of executive pressure against them. Court orders can be appealed, so the process can take a long time.

So far, the lower courts are following the law and the Constitution, so Trump is losing most of the cases.

This is all leading up to two questions:

  • Will the Supreme Court invent new interpretations of our laws to back Trump up, essentially ending the rule of law as we have known it?
  • If the Court does rule against Trump, will he defy the Court’s orders?

In theory, Supreme Court decisions take place in an abstract world of law. In practice, though, public opinion will play an important role. If Trump’s excesses are popular, the Court will be more likely to jump on the fascist bandwagon. But if his poll numbers keep spiraling down the drain, the Court may not want to go down with him.

Similar considerations apply to the defiance option: If the public is solidly behind Trump and sees the Court as blocking him for no good reason, he will be more likely to ignore the Court’s orders. On the other hand, if the public is turning against him, the thought that even this Supreme Court thinks he’s wrong may increase the slide.

The first of the cases has already reached the Supreme Court, briefly, sort of. Hampton Dellinger was the head of the Office of the Special Counsel, and independent agency established by Congress to do things like protect whistleblowers in the government. He was appointed by President Biden and confirmed by the Senate to a five-year term. The statute establishing the position makes provision for the President to fire the special counsel “only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” But on February 7 Trump fired Dellinger without claiming any of those things. A district reinstated Dellinger temporarily, and the Trump administration appealed, losing 2-1 at the appellate level. From there they went to the Supreme Court.

The Court also declined to overturn the district court’s order, but it’s hard to read much into that decision, because essentially it is just giving time for the lower court to complete its work. The restraining order runs out Wednesday, when the district court has a hearing scheduled.

The issues here get to the heart of the separation of powers, because it’s hard to see how the OSC can do its job if the head of it can be fired on a presidential whim. Presidents typically dislike whistleblowers, so the OSC won’t be much of a protector if it has no independence from the President. If it finds for Trump, the Court will be saying that the goal the Congress had in mind can’t be achieved.

The good scenario. Obviously, Trump is going to do a lot of harm no matter what anybody else does. The USAID freeze is already killing people in Africa, and no one knows how much damage American medical research will suffer from having its funding stream interrupted or perhaps cut off altogether. A lot of the near-term impact of the research-funding freeze will depend on unpredictable events like whether some future mutation of bird flu enables human-to-human transmission. Trump’s almost vandal-like approach to Biden’s climate change initiatives is going to make it that much harder to deal with long-term challenges that already threaten catastrophe. In short, the voters made an enormous mistake in November, and that mistake will have consequences.

But in my mind those consequences pale compared to the establishment of a lasting autocracy in the United States — and that outcome is still avoidable. The scenario that avoids it goes like this:

  • Trump continues losing popularity. He never had much, but his brand becomes politically toxic.
  • That lack of voter support makes support from congressional Republicans waver. They may not openly defy Trump, but the slim Republican majorities (especially in the House) lose their cohesion, making it impossible to pass legislation without at least some Democratic support. The lack of legislative accomplishments feeds back into public opinion: Maybe Trump isn’t such a strong leader.
  • The Supreme Court, at least partly influenced by public opinion, refuses to invent new legal principles to justify Trump’s seizures of power.
  • The refusal of congressional Republicans and Trump’s own appointees on the Supreme Court to go along with his wishes feeds back into public opinion: If even his would-be minions can’t fully support him, maybe his critics are right.
  • Facing an extreme lack of public support as well as dissension in his own ranks, Trump reluctantly obeys court orders. Or, if he doesn’t, the military refuses orders to crack down on mass public protests.
  • Republicans get soundly defeated in the November, 2025 Virginia elections, sending Republican elected officials into a panic.
  • Democrats win back control of the House in 2026, putting them in a position to block future usurpations.
  • Trump is dissuaded from trying to hang onto power in 2028. The MAGA movement splinters into its component factions — tech bros, racists, burn-it-down nihilists, etc. — none of which is able to win the national election.

That scenario is far from a sure thing, but the way is still open. We’ll learn a lot from future polls, from how Congress handles the possible March 14 government shutdown, and from what the Supreme Court does as cases arrive on its doorstep.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (23)

Can Ethical People Work in the Trump Administration?

February 17, 2025 – 9:38 am

This week seven federal prosecutors resigned rather than follow unethical orders from their bosses in Trump administration. This case raises a more general question: Given Trump’s disrespect for ethical norms intended to insulate certain key government functions from inappropriate political interference, will there be space in the Trump administration for ethical government employees to do their work?

The Guardian provides the shortest possible summary of the current situation:

[S]even prosecutors – including the acting US attorney in southern district of New York, the head of the criminal division and the head of the public integrity section – resigned in protest rather than dismiss the case [against New York Mayor Eric Adams] for political reasons.

Now let’s back up and review this story from the beginning, following a timeline compiled by ABC News: After an investigation that had been going on for at least a year, last September federal prosecutors at the Southern District of New York (SDNY) sought and received a grand jury indictment of Mayor Adams.

At the time, the Adams indictment was used in arguments that the Biden Justice Department had not been politicized or “weaponized”, as Trump frequently claimed. Yes, a special prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland had indicted Trump, but that was because Trump had broken numerous laws. DoJ also went after Democratic lawbreakers like Adams and New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez.

The indictment, which is unsealed the next day, alleges Adams accepted illegal gifts, including plane upgrades and hotel stays, from Turkish businessmen and officials in exchange for preferential treatment when he was Brooklyn borough president and later as mayor. The indictment also alleges Adams received illegal campaign straw donations from Turkish nationals.

Adams denied the charges, refused to resign, and pleaded not guilty. [1] A trial was scheduled to begin in April. During the transition period after Trump’s election win in November, Adams met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and with Trump’s border czar Tom Homan. Adams attended Trump’s inauguration. The next day, Adams began claiming that his indictment was retribution for criticizing President Biden’s immigration policies (even though the timeline on that doesn’t work). On February 10, after additional meetings between Adams, his attorneys, and Trump officials, Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove sent a letter instructing SDNY to dismiss charges against Adams “without prejudice”, meaning that the charges could be refiled in the future.

Danielle Sassoon. Dismissing a federal indictment is not an automatic thing. The prosecutor’s office has to file a motion with the court asking for the dismissal. The motion typically contains some justification for the dismissal, which the judge then must rule on. And that brings Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. Attorney for SDNY, into the picture.

Sassoon is not anybody’s idea of a liberal Democrat. She clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia, a legendary figure in conservative legal circles. Trump had appointed her as acting US attorney just three weeks before. Sassoon responded to Bove’s instructions by writing an eight-page letter to his boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi. [2]

Mr. Bove rightly has never called into question that the case team conducted this investigation with integrity and that the charges against Adams are serious and supported by fact and law. Mr. Bove’s memo, however, which directs me to dismiss an indictment returned by a duly constituted grand jury for reasons having nothing to do with the strength of the case, raises serious concerns that render the contemplated dismissal inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor and to advance good-faith arguments before the courts. … I cannot fulfill my obligations, effectively lead my office in carrying out the Department’s priorities, or credibly represent the Government before the courts, if I seek to dismiss the Adams case on this record.

Sassoon went on to recount the Bove’s justifications for dismissing charges, the first of which she finds unethical

First, Mr. Bove proposes dismissing the charges against Adams in return for his assistance in enforcing the federal immigration laws, analogizing to the prisoner exchange in which the United States freed notorious Russian arms dealer Victor Bout in return for an American prisoner in Russia. … Adams has argued in substance and Mr. Bove appears prepared to concede that Adams should receive leniency for
federal crimes solely because he occupies an important public position and can use that position to assist in the Administration’s policy priorities.

and the second unbelievable.

Second, Mr. Bove states that dismissal is warranted because of the conduct ofthis office’s former U.S. Attorney, Damian Williams, which, according to Mr. Bove’s memo, constituted weaponization of government as defined by the relevant orders of the President and the Department. The generalized concerns expressed by Mr. Bove are not a basis to dismiss an indictment returned by a duly constituted grand jury, at least where, as here, the Government has no doubt in its evidence or the integrity of its investigation. … In short, because there is in fact nothing about this prosecution that meaningfully differs from other cases that generate substantial pretrial publicity, a court is likely to view the weaponization rationale as pretextual. [3]

The first consideration is the disturbing one, because it suggests a truly dystopian role for the Department of Justice: If elected officials refuse to play ball with the Trump administration, Trump could use a Justice Department investigation to get something on them, then hold that potential prosecution over their heads until they do what he wants.

In a footnote, Sassoon lays it out:

I attended a meeting on January 31, 2025, with Mr. Bove, Adams’s counsel, and members of my office. Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion. [4]

In her letter, Sassoon asked AG Bondi for a meeting, and offered her resignation if Bondi did not want to further justify or reconsider DoJ’s position. Her resignation was accepted.

Public Integrity. The obvious next option for Bove would have been to ask SDNY’s second-in-command to file the motion to dismiss the charges, but (perhaps seeing Sassoon’s resistance as an SDNY independence issue), he pulled the case back to DoJ’s aptly named Public Integrity Section in Washington, which often handles political corruption cases. ABC reports:

However, as soon the Public Integrity Section was informed it would be taking over, John Keller, the acting head of the unit, and his boss, Kevin Driscoll, the most senior career official in the criminal division, resigned along with three other members of the unit, according to multiple sources.

The case soon claimed a seventh scalp, SDNY’s Assistant US Attorney Hagan Scotten, another prosecutor with impeccable conservative credentials, having clerked for Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts. He expressed no hostility to the policy goals of the Trump administration, but strongly implied that someone needs to explain legal ethics to the President.

There is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake. Some will view the mistake you are committing here in the light of their generally negative views of the new Administration. I do not share those views. I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.

Friday night, the motion did get filed, though apparently with great reluctance.

The roughly hour-long meeting, where the public integrity section weighed whether to resign en masse after agreeing that the dismissal of the Adams case was improper, culminated with [Edward] Sullivan, a veteran career prosecutor, agreeing to take the fall for his colleagues, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The judge. The judge in the case, Biden appointee Dale Ho, appears to have little choice but to ultimately accept a motion to dismiss. After all, a judge can’t also prosecute the case if the government is unwilling to do so.

However, Ho would be within his rights to hold a hearing into the circumstances of the dismissal motion. Sassoon had warned about this in her resignation letter:

Seeking leave of court to dismiss a properly returned indictment based on Mr. Bove’s stated rationales is also likely to backfire by inviting skepticism and scrutiny from the court that will ultimately hinder the
Department of Justice’s interests. In particular, the court is unlikely to acquiesce in using the criminal process to control the behavior of a political figure.

One option I can imagine (though I don’t fully understand the law here) is that Ho could give DoJ a choice: proceed with the prosecution or accept a motion to dismiss with prejudice, meaning that DoJ would lose the option to refile the charges if Adams wasn’t cooperating completely enough with Trump’s political goals. That change would take away Trump’s leverage over Adams going forward.

Larger considerations. Benjamin Wittes (founder of the Lawfare web site) takes a step back to

  • describe the inherent conflict between the way politicians behave as a matter of course (horse-trading, partisan maneuvering) and the ethical behavior we expect from prosecutors,
  • discuss the Justice Department norms intended to insulate prosecutors from politics,
  • explain how Trump has undone those norms.

Then he concludes:

There is a deep problem here and it goes way beyond the Adams case: Having ripped apart the only system that allows prosecutors to function ethically, we no longer have a mechanism by which federal prosecutors can function ethically. We have a rule in which the president can reach down to the assistant U.S. attorney level and order political favors for his friends in exchange for other remunerations. And we have ethical expectations of prosecutors that they will not entertain such demands.

The result? We have resignations. And we’re going to have more. Because if the president or his minions care about the case you’re working on, there is no place in government for an ethical prosecutor any more. …

As long as a prosecutor can do good work, my plea is to stay in place. But at this point, all federal prosecutors need to be prepared to resign. They are all one phone call away from being put in the position of facing a demand to behave unethically, one phone call away from a demand that is fundamentally political in character, not about justice. And when that call comes, it is imperative that prosecutors do as these ones did—resign publicly, showing their work along the way.

Wittes is talking specifically about prosecutors, but similar considerations apply throughout the government. Every profession within the government has its own ethical standards that protect against inappropriate political interference, and it’s not hard to imagine situations where Trump might circumvent those standards to pursue his goals. (Paul Krugman warns against buying inflation-protected TIPS bonds, precisely because Trump might make himself look good by pressuring government statisticians to minimize the rate of inflation.)

So the admonition Wittes gives to prosecutors needs to apply to federal employees across the board: As long as you can do your job ethically, keep doing it. Don’t resign and give Trump an opportunity to appoint someone more loyal to him than to the nation or to the mission of your agency. But if at some point you’re faced with a choice between your job and your soul, defend your soul and resign.

And if you can make a lot of noise on your way out the door, so much the better.

[1] New York’s state constitution gives Governor Hochul the power to remove Adams. While his case was playing out in court, it made some sense for Hochul to keep her distance. But now that the fix is in, her lack of action is mysterious.

[2] It’s worth pointing out that both Bondi and Bove had been defense lawyers for Trump before being appointed to head DoJ. They are literally Trump’s lawyers, not lawyers for the United States.

[3] A similar statement could be made about dismissing the classified-documents indictment against Trump.

[4] Not wanting anyone to take notes indicates what lawyers call “consciousness of guilt“.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (9)

How Do Things Change?

February 10, 2025 – 10:30 am

a tentative start to a historical investigation

Last week I argued that mere election tactics — a more attractive candidate, some new slogans, a better framing of the issues — will not be enough to overcome the MAGA movement in the long run. (We defeated them soundly in the elections of 2018 and 2020, but MAGA showed amazing resilience.) MAGA itself is not just an unfortunate convergence of political forces, it is a cultural movement of some depth. Defeating it will require a counter-movement.

The 2024 campaign showed that the counter-movement can’t just be a reversion to some prior status quo. My assessment of how the Harris campaign failed is that Trump managed to tag Harris as the candidate of the status quo and present himself as the candidate who will shake things up. [1]

Harris’ problem was that (as a whole) the status quo is not working for many Americans. I listed a number of ways that things are not working, but fundamentally they boil down to this: It gets harder and harder to plan for a successful life with any confidence that your plan will succeed. Far too many Americans feel that the system is stacked against them, and that simply trying harder is not the answer.

Rather than present any coherent program, Trump has responded to the public’s justified anxiety with scapegoating and nostalgia: Immigrants, foreigners, minorities, and people who rebel against their assigned gender roles are the problem, and we should look to the greatness of America’s past — now, apparently, the high tariffs of the 1890s — for our salvation. To the extent that he has a plan — like ignoring climate change and reverting to the fossil-fuel economy of the 20th century — it is likely to be counterproductive.

But “don’t do that” has turned out to be an unpersuasive message for the Democrats. It worked when Trump was in office, actively doing unpopular things. But as soon as he was defeated, nostalgia renewed its charms. To a large extent, Trump’s 2024 message was that electing him would make it 2019 again, and all the disruption of the Covid pandemic (including the parts he brought on himself) would be behind us.

But realizing that we need a deeper movement is not the same as having one, or even knowing what it would be or how it might come together.

With that question in mind, I’ve been looking at history. Despite recently being idealized as the new “again” in Make America Great Again, the late 1800s were a low point in American history, dominated by the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Industry after industry was reorganizing as a monopolistic trust with the power to maximally exploit both workers and consumers. It was a hard time both for urban factory workers and rural small farmers.

Somehow, things got better: Antitrust laws got passed. Governments began to regulate working conditions, product safety, and child labor. Standard Oil was broken up. Unions began to win a few battles. And the gap between rich and poor narrowed. The New Deal was unthinkable in 1880, but by the 1930s it was popular. This was a profound change in what David Graeber referred to as “political common sense“. How did it happen?

A friend recommended a place to start: The Populist Moment by Lawrence Goodwyn. The book was published in 1978, so to the extent that it says something about the present day, either about MAGA or how a democratic movement might oppose it, that message arises naturally from the history, and not from some pro- or anti-Trump bias of the author. [2]

What was Populism? These days, MAGA and similar neo-fascist movements in other countries are often described as “populist”, but the version in the late 1800s was quite different. There is a surface similarity — in each case, large numbers of working class people found themselves resisting their era’s educated consensus — but from there things diverge fairly quickly.

In the 19th century, farming was still the largest American occupation, employing over half the labor force as late as 1880. But the system was stacked against small farmers in two ways: First, farmers with no capital beyond their land found themselves at the mercy of “furnishing merchants”, who would lend money for them to plant a crop (and survive through the growing season) in exchange for a contract on the harvest. Once he had contracted with a furnishing merchant, the farmer was stuck with that merchant, and would typically end up both paying high prices for his supplies and receiving a low price for his crop. [3]

But second, that long-term situation was made much worse by post-Civil-War monetary policy. The Civil War had been financed in part by printing paper currency, known as “greenbacks“. That had caused inflation during the war, and the prevailing economic wisdom of the time was that the dollar needed to be made “sound” again. In other words, the greenbacks had to be withdrawn from circulation, so that all US money could be redeemable for gold again. (Greenbacks became fully convertible to gold in 1878.)

In modern terms, the government’s policy was to shrink the money supply. If expanding the money supply had caused inflation, shrinking it could be counted on to achieve deflation; i.e., prices would come back down.

if you think like a consumer, deflation sound great. (Just last fall, that’s what Trump was promising his voters: “Prices will come down. You just watch: They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast.”) But now imagine being a farmer who is counting on selling his wheat or cotton at the end of the season: You bought and borrowed when prices were high, and now you have to sell when prices are lower. The result was that large numbers of farmers were failing to clear their debts. Every year, many would lose their land and wind up as sharecroppers or worse.

The conventional wisdom of the time was that, sure, times were hard. But the “sound dollar” had to be restored, so farmers would just have to become more efficient. If some had to go broke in the process, well, that’s capitalism for you. Creative destruction and all that.

At some point, though, farmers began to realize that this wasn’t a story of individual failure, but of a badly structured system. And some postulated a solution: Farmers could cooperate rather than compete. They could form “farmer alliances” to pool their resources, negotiate for common supplies, and market their crops collectively.

Through the 1870s and 1880s, farmer alliances played a game of escalating pressure with the merchants and banks. Initial co-op successes would lead to new merchant strategies to freeze the co-ops out of the market, resulting in some larger co-op plan. The ultimate trump card was played by the system’s last line of defense, the bankers: Banks would take mortgages on individual farms (the old model), but they would loan nothing to a co-op backed by the land of its members.

Watching the more prosperous classes act in concert to thwart their plans radicalized the farmers and made them turn to politics. They created the People’s Party, whose presidential candidate carried four western states in the 1892 election. The party was organized around a platform, some of which was achieved decades later, but much of which might still be considered radical today. It wanted a revision of the banking system that would orient it toward the interests of “the producing classes” rather than “the money trust”. It wanted a flexible money supply (which we have today) rather than a gold standard. And it wanted government ownership of the railroads and other essential utilities that could be manipulated against working people by monopolies and trusts.

Ultimately, the People’s Party supported the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, in 1896, and then faded into insignificance.

So Populism was a failure in the sense that it never achieved power. But David Graeber once said that “one of the chief aims of revolutionary activity is to transform political common sense”. By that standard, Populism was more successful. [4]

Partisanship. The People’s Party ran into partisan loyalties that were left over from the Civil War and generally had more to do with identity than with life experience. If you were a White Southern Protestant or a Northern urban Catholic, then you were a Democrat. But if you were a Northern Protestant or a Southern Negro, you were Republican. Those loyalties were hard to break, and each party charged that the Populists were really agents of the other party. “Patriotism” meant faithfulness to the team your people played on during the War.

How movements happen. Goodwyn has a lot to say about this, and argues against the view that protest movements arise naturally during “hard times”. History, he says, does not support this.

“The masses” do not rebel in instinctive response to hard times and exploitation because they have been culturally organized by their societies not to rebel. They have, instead, been instructed in deference.

He points to parallel ways this worked in his own day on both sides of the Iron Curtain. (This is 1978, remember.)

The retreat of the Russian populace represents a simple acknowledgment of ruthless state power. Deference is an essential ingredient of personal survival. In America, on the other hand, mass resignation represents a public manifestation of a private loss, a decline in what people think they have a political right to aspire to — in essence, a decline of individual political self-respect on the part of millions of people.

He then asks the billion-dollar question:

How does mass protest happen at all then?

Which he then proceeds to answer: There are four stages:

  • forming: the creation of an autonomous institution where new interpretations can materialize that run counter to those of prevailing authority
  • recruiting: the creation of a tactical means to attract masses of people
  • educating: the achievement of a heretofore culturally unsanctioned level of social analysis
  • politicizing: the creation of an institutional means whereby the new ideas, shared now by the rank and file of the mass movement, can be expressed in an autonomous political way.

And he notes that “Imposing cultural roadblocks stand in the way of a democratic movement at every stage of this sequential project.”

For the populist movement, the first stage was the creation of farmers’ alliances. After years of experimenting, the farmers alliances came up with a mass recruitment model: large-scale cooperatives that farmers could join in hopes of getting cheaper supplies, better crop prices, and various other benefits. Then the co-ops themselves became educating institutions that taught farmers how the monetary system tilted the playing field against them, and how an alternative system might work. And finally the People’s Party itself provided an electoral outlet.

How well the People’s Party did in various states corresponded to how well the previous stages had taken hold.

In the 20th century, labor unions played a similar role to the co-ops: Masses of workers would join a union in hope of getting better pay and improved working conditions. And the union would then educate them in the issues relevant to their situation. [5]

MAGA. It’s worth considering how Goodwyn’s model applies to MAGA. You wouldn’t expect it to fit perfectly, because fundamentally MAGA isn’t a democratic movement. There has always been big money behind it, and the grassroots aspects, while genuine in some sense, also include quite a bit of astroturf. [6]

However, there are a number of parallels. The initial hurdle MAGA faced was getting its working-class foot-soldiers to believe in themselves rather than be intimidated by experts like economists, climate scientists, and medical researchers. The internet has undoubtedly made this easier, but the validation of “doing your own research” was also key.

And what was the recruiting institution that could attract masses of people and educate them in the new way of looking at the world? Evangelical churches. People came to them for the variety of reasons that always attract people to churches, and usually not for political indoctrination. But once there, they could be taught that elite scientists (like those promoting anti-Genesis ideas of evolution) were agents of the Devil. Their sense of grievance could be raised and sharpened, and the whole idea of a fact-based or reason-based worldview could be undermined. You might join because you enjoyed singing in the choir, but after a few years you were ready to believe that DEI was an anti-White conspiracy, or that economic malaise was God’s punishment for tolerating gay marriage and trans rights. You were ready to march for Trump.

Counter-movement. The lack of an obvious recruiting-and-educating institution is an obvious hole in the formation of an anti-MAGA counter-movement. Conservatives seem well aware of possible avenues — like the universities, a revitalized union movement, or even charitable activities like refugee resettlement or soup kitchens — and are committed to shutting them down.

Conversely, this is why a number of left-leaning voices (Perry Bacon, for one) are encouraging their listeners to connect with institutions where they can meet with like-minded folks.

I find the historical pattern evocative, even if I can’t immediately see how to implement it: The recruiting-and-educating institutions offer a very simple practical advantage: higher wages, say, or better crop prices. But by engaging in the institution’s core activity, people begin to see the oppressive forces arrayed against them, and begin to radicalize.

[1] And indeed, he is shaking things up. In my opinion, however, the parts of the status quo he is attacking are the best parts: the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the independence of federal institutions like the Department of Justice and the military, just to name a few.

Trump’s attacks on what he calls “the Deep State” are telling. If you know any federal employees, you probably understand that there is a Deep State, but it’s not the monster Trump paints it as.

The Deep State consists of federal workers who are more committed to the mission of their agencies than they are to the current administration. So career EPA officials will resist a president who wants to harm the environment, career prosecutors will drag their feet about harassing the current administration’s political enemies, career public health officials will do their best to support best practices against pressure from above, and so on. To the extent that the agencies are well set up and well motivated, their employees’ loyalty to the agency mission is a good thing, not a bad thing.

[2] Populism is literally just a place to start. I’m going to be delving into other aspects of the 1870-1941 period in future posts.

[3] Something similar happened to miners and factory workers who were paid in vouchers that could only be redeemed at company-approved merchants, who used that monopoly power to drive workers ever deeper into debt. As 16 tons puts it “I owe my soul to the company store.”

[4] Another movement that benefits from Graeber’s political-common-sense standard is the French Revolution. It is frequently judged a failure (especially by comparison to the American Revolution) because it didn’t achieve a lasting Republic, but instead devolved into the Reign of Terror and the dictatorship of Napoleon. However, the French Revolution changed political history. Before the revolution, absolute monarchy was still seen as a valid and plausible form of government. Afterwards, it wasn’t. The Czars of Russia might hang on for another century or so, but the writing was on the wall.

[5] It is unfortunate that farmers alliances and labor unions didn’t peak at the same time. Combined, they might have achieved significant political power.

[6] MAGA precursors, like the John Birch Society and the Tea Party, always had wealthy donors. You can see the pattern in present-day groups like Moms for Liberty. While there are indeed concerned moms in Moms For Liberty, the group’s expansion has been greased by professional consulting and seed money from wealthy establishment groups like the Heritage Foundation.

By weeklysift | Tagged , , | Comments (9)

Campaign or Movement?

February 3, 2025 – 9:18 am

Does the Trump resistance need a rival candidate, or a cultural turnaround?

This week, two very different articles caught my eye. In one, The Washington Post ranked “The 12 Democrats who make the most sense for 2028“, starting with Tim Walz at #12 and concluding with Josh Shapiro at #1. In the other, Rolling Stone picked “The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time“, reminding us of moments when history was moved not so much by politicians as by songs (or perhaps, going further back, by novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or pamphlets like Common Sense).

Three years out from the 2028 campaign — assuming elections are still meaningful in three years — should we be uniting behind a candidate or promoting a broader cultural movement?

Maybe it’s the people I hang around with, but the anxieties of my friends keep manifesting in two opposite ways: Many are just refusing to watch the news at all. And the others are obsessed with campaign-and-candidate analysis: What states do Democrats need to flip? What demographic groups might be persuadable? What policy positions should our messaging emphasize? And most of all: Who can lead us to that promised land?

I’ve been pretty useless in those conversations, because (while I am watching the news) anything about candidates and strategy leaves me cold right now. I think they play into an unhealthy framing: politics as game. We lost the last game, so how are we going to win the next one?

What I think we need to reestablish in America is that politics is about something, and the things it is about are important. Our politics should be about the People banding together to make systems work for us rather than grind us into the dust.

And that’s what the list of protest songs symbolizes for me. Not candidates and campaigns, but ending wars, establishing justice, and liberating people from oppression.

What MAGA does. MAGA, of course, is both a candidate and movement. It’s a cult of personality, full of images of Trump as a superhero or God’s chosen one. But it’s also a culture of grievance revolving around the message that favored groups in America — Whites, men, Christians, etc. — are actually victims of some vast Satanic force. And America itself — the richest most powerful country on Earth — is the most aggrieved nation of all, battling a world system that is unfairly stacked against it.

In 2024, Trump often played the role of a typical American presidential candidate: He raised money, held rallies, won primaries, made TV commercials, and toured swing states. But it was the MAGA cultural movement that lifted him out of situations that would have doomed any previous candidate. Elected Republicans were ready to be done with Trump after the 2020 loss and his failed coup on January 6. But the movement would not hear of it, and party “leaders” were forced to come around.

If we could unstring the MAGA movement by winning an election, 2020 would have done it. But instead, being rejected by the voters was just one more grievance to add to its list. Getting past the MAGA moment in our politics will have to involve a change in the larger culture, not just a winning campaign.

What happened in 2024? Everyone has their own theory about what went wrong in 2024, and just about any of them can be justified if you slice and dice the exit polls with that conclusion in mind. Harris should have run further to the left or the center, said more or less about the economy, defended trans youth or thrown them under the bus, defended Biden better or denounced him. Maybe she should have picked a different VP, or maybe Harris herself was the problem and we should have run a White man. Maybe Biden should have gotten out of the way sooner. On and on.

But OK, I get it. Without some reasonable explanation, people begin to think that the currents of History are against us, or the Universe is, or God. Without a plan (or even a fantasy) of what we might do next, despair can seem overwhelming.

So let’s briefly talk the language of analysis. After considering the various theories, I’ve come down here: Trump won because he managed to cast himself as the candidate of change and Harris as the candidate of the status quo. The problematic part of Trump’s candidacy, which Harris tried to point out but never made stick in the minds of low-information voters, is that Trump was specifically running against the best parts of the status quo: the rule of law, the separation of powers, democratic process, and even the existence of Truth itself. What we’re seeing in the early days of the Trump administration is that he has no program for change beyond aggrandizing himself: His supporters are good and should be rewarded; his detractors are bad and should be punished.

But try as he might, it will be hard for Trump to avoid responsibility for the status quo going forward. So in my mind, the fundamental question for Democrats to answer in 2026 and 2028 is: What’s wrong with the status quo?

That was a hard question for Democrats to message in 2024, because the Biden/Harris administration really did have accomplishments it deserved credit for (but never got). It managed the post-Covid economic rebound well, resulting in spectacular job creation with inflation no worse than the rest of the world. It made investments for the future, ended the long fruitless war in Afghanistan, and began taking action against climate change. Biden left office with excellent economic statistics: GDP rising, unemployment low and steady, inflation under control.

But claiming credit for all that sounds a lot like claiming responsibility for the status quo, and arguing that it’s not so bad. (And it honestly wasn’t as bad as Trump kept making it sound. There never was an immigrant crime wave, for example. Or a crime wave of any kind.)

So let’s start here: What’s not to like about the status quo? Plenty, as it turns out. Put aside the statistics, and consider how life looks to a large number of Americans.

  • It’s hard to get out of college without a lot of debt.
  • Once you get out, it’s hard to get a career started.
  • If you do get a career started, it’s hard to find a house you can afford in a town with good schools.
  • If you’re not in a town with good schools, it’s hard to pay for private schools for your children.
  • If your children have any special problems — physical handicaps, learning disabilities, neuro-diversity, etc. — you’re on your own.
  • At any moment, you might fall through one of the cracks in our healthcare system and be bankrupted.
  • At every moment, you’re vulnerable to the risks of a market economy: Your good job may vanish. To get employed again, you may have to move away from your town with good schools.
  • Even if the difficulties of your own life work out, you may have to take care of your parents and deal with a nursing-home industry that can eat life savings of almost any size.
  • It’s hard to get your children through college without burdening them with a lot of debt.

In short, America may be a rich country statistically, but most Americans don’t feel rich. Life looks like a labyrinth with lots of dead ends.

Now, all those difficulties have been building for decades, so there’s no particular reason voters should have blamed them on Joe Biden or his party. (Republicans have held the presidency for 6 of the last 11 terms, and none of those situations improved during Trump’s first term.) But the Democrats did not tell a convincing story of how they were going to take on these problems.

To be fair, neither did Trump. It’s hard to look at any of the hardships on that list and paint a plausible picture of Trump solving that issue, or even helping you deal with it. Much of what he has proposed — eliminating ObamaCare, say, or defunding the Department of Education — will probably make some of them worse.

But Trump did do something politically clever. He told unhappy voters who to blame: immigrants who are stealing your opportunities; women who don’t know their place; rebels against the God-given order, where there are only two genders and you mate with the opposite one; people who worship the wrong God, or none at all; so-called “experts” who make you feel stupid by quoting “facts”; Chinese scientists who engineered the Covid bio-weapon, a.k.a. the Kung Flu; environmentalists who care more about fish or birds than about you or your children; and (most of all) liberals who enable all the other villains by putting the government on their side rather than yours.

What was going to solve these problems was not any particular Trump plan, but rather the abstract “greatness” of America, or perhaps of Trump himself. Or alternately, the greatness of God, who will once again shower His blessings on America once the atheists and Satanists are removed from power.

It’s not a rational story, but it is a story.

Prospects for 2026 and 2028. My thinking going forward is based on the assumption that Trump will provide his followers with entertainment and satisfying spectacles (like immigrant children in cages or FBI agents on trial), but he won’t actually improve anyone’s life. (He didn’t in his first term either, though he was able to take credit for the economic momentum established in Obama’s second term.) We can see that already in the skyrocketing price of eggs. Somehow, neither Trump’s inherent greatness nor his Day-One executive order is bringing prices down, and he has never had any actual plan to fall back on.

So if the labyrinth of American life looks difficult now, it’s not going to look any better in 2026 or 2028. Trump will likely have consolidated his influence over most major media platforms (both broadcast and social), but there are limits to propaganda’s effectiveness when it tells you that you ought to be happy when you’re not.

Consequently, I expect there to be considerable discontent with Trump in 2026 and 2028, just as there was in 2018 and 2020. (Now, it’s entirely possible that by then he has made elections irrelevant. I don’t expect that, but it’s a possibility. In that case, though, this whole discussion is moot; neither a candidate nor a movement has any hope.)

If that’s the lay of the land, how do we want to be positioned? In my mind, this is where the candidate-centered vision falls short — unless your candidate is a genuinely mythic figure whose mere presence will give the electorate hope. Unfortunately, I don’t see any of those on the horizon. If I’m, say, a 20-something worried about my future, I don’t think “Gretchen Whitmer will save me” goes very far. Nothing against Gretch — I’ll be happy to vote for her against the MAGA candidate in 2028 if it comes to that — but there’s nothing messianic about her or Gavin Newsom or anybody else on the Post’s list of 12. Plus, I expect the failure of salvation-by-Trump to discredit the whole idea of individual saviors.

Instead, I picture just about any Democratic candidate having a message like this:

  • I know many of you are facing a difficult path into the future.
  • Our explanation of who you should blame is better than MAGA’s. The oligarchs are to blame. While the American economy remains productive, the benefits of that economy keep getting channeled towards a smaller and smaller group of people, who keep exchanging wealth-for-power and power-for-wealth, with a profit on every transaction. (This point comes from the playbook of the Bernie/AOC left, but there’s no reason a centrist can’t use it too.) If Elon is still around (doubtful, I think), he can be the poster boy for the corrupt interplay between corporate and government power.
  • We have specific ideas that can help you, but the general idea is simple: The productivity of America needs to be redirected towards making people’s lives better, rather than further enriching the oligarchs.

The protest songs almost write themselves. America has a long tradition of songs about people being cheated out of the fruits of the economy they built. Here’s one from the Depression:

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, 
Made it race against time. 
Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. 
Brother, can you spare a dime? 

What about now? It’s important to recognize that Democrats currently have no national power base, so demanding that they “do something” is unrealistic. They can’t bring legislation to a vote. They can’t launch investigations or subpoena witnesses. They can vote No on things that do come up for a vote, but if all (or nearly all) Republicans vote Yes, those things will pass anyway.

The urge to do something is misplaced for another reason: Trump is the one who needs to show quick results right now. He has a unleashed a flurry of activity, and that will carry him for a while. But without some actual progress, the public disgust with the game of politics will rebound against him. All his activity will look (in MacBeth’s words) like “sound and fury signifying nothing”.

Some liberal pundits are calling for the kind of resistance shown in 2017, with millions of marchers and other displays of energy. But demonstrations that are simply anti-Trump harden people into their current stances. We just had an election about Trump, and we lost. Demonstrations will come into play again, I imagine, and probably soon. But it’s important that the demonstrations be about something more than Trump. Heather Cox Richardson puts it like this:

This is the time for the American people to say “Hang on just a red hot minute here. It’s my country. Those are my tax dollars. And this is what I want the government to do.” And to reshape the way we approach this moment from saying “I gotta stop this. I gotta stop this. I’m afraid of this.” to say “I care deeply about cancer research, something Trump has stopped money for.” [Lists other things you might care about.] Those things are ways to define America in this moment as something other than what Trump is trying to kill. Because that takes the initiative away from him, and away from his people, and gives it back to us.

The important thing to ask about any political activity is “Will this persuade anybody who wasn’t already on our side?”

Unfortunately, protests that are about something more than Trump require waiting for things to play out a little. There need to be visible results worth protesting, not just possibilities.

Similarly, Democratic votes in Congress will start to mean something again as we approach March 14, the date when the government runs out of money. If Speaker Johnson can’t muster unanimity among his troops — something he has never done in the past — then Trump and Johnson will need Democrats. Then there will be leverage to make demands.

More importantly, March 14 is when Trump’s vague promises and intentions have to resolve into actual numbers and legislation.

In the meantime, the only arena currently open for struggle is the courts, and they are being used. State-level Democrats have filed lawsuits to block illegal Trump actions, and so have organizations like the ACLU. Legal action means delay, and delay works in our favor.

These last two weeks have felt like an assault, as Trump tries to panic and stampede us. It’s a time to endure, to remember your core values, and wait for the wind to blow itself out. And if you can learn the guitar while you’re waiting, that would be good too.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (29)

Week One

January 27, 2025 – 9:44 am

Trump is president now, and that fact has consequences. But he’s not all-powerful. We need to educate ourselves about how to oppose him most effectively.

Last Monday, while I was taking some time off, the second Trump administration began. During the campaign, Trump made a great deal of noise about what he would do on Day One, including be a dictator. (So far, that seems not to have happened.)

So let’s look at what did happen. Day One (or Week One) is shorthand for two things: his inaugural address and his first executive orders.

The Inaugural Address. Inaugural addresses have no force of law behind them, but they provide a motivating vision for the new administration. They are typically occasions for soaring rhetoric, like “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” or “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” or “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

But Trump does not soar, he markets. In particular he markets himself: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” (FDR survived an assassination attempt just a month before his first inaugural; he didn’t consider it worth mentioning.) And he makes salesman-like promises about his effect on the nation.

From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer. … America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before. I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success. A tide of change is sweeping the country, sunlight is pouring over the entire world, and America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before.

Elon Musk sounded a similar note in his inauguration day speech (and then gave a Nazi salute).

This was no ordinary victory. This was a fork in the road for human civilization. … It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.

The whole world will benefit from this surge in American power.

Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable.

However, the clock has already run out on Trump’s promise to end the Ukraine War in 24 hours. So far, Putin seems unimpressed by his threat of sanctions and tariffs — as if the Biden administration had never considered putting economic pressure on Russia.

And that leads to the other thing I draw from this address: Truth will continue to place no restrictions on what Trump says. His 49.8% plurality is “a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place”. It demonstrates that “the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda. … National unity is now returning to America, and confidence and pride is soaring like never before.”

We will be a rich nation “again”. (The Biden economy’s post-Covid recovery has been the envy of the world.) “America will be a manufacturing nation once again”. (200K manufacturing jobs were lost during the first Trump administration, while 775K manufacturing jobs were added during Biden’s four years.) His government will wave a magic wand to roll back recent price increases:

I will direct all members of my cabinet to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices.

And he will achieve these results by reinstating the 20th century economy, based on oil and gas, the “liquid gold under our feet”. He will “drill baby drill”. (American oil production is already at an all time high, easily surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia. Given how expensive the world’s remaining oil is to find and produce, it’s not clear how much lower oil prices can possibly go in the long term.) He will end the nonexistent “electric car mandate” and let Americans “buy the car of your choice” (which I just did by buying a hybrid in September; pure EVs currently account for just 8% of sales and no one is forced to buy one).

The speech doubled down on many of the lies of the fall campaign: “millions of criminal aliens” come here “from prisons and mental institutions” and belong to “foreign gangs and criminal networks”. They bring “devastating crime to U.S. soil, including our cities and inner cities”. (Violent crime has been dropping nationally, and in nearly all American cities. Trump has never provided the slightest evidence for his “prisons and mental institutions” claim. The vast majority of undocumented people keep their heads down, work hard for very little money, and do jobs it would be hard to fill without them.)

New tariffs will bring in vast new revenues from “foreign sources”.

Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.

(Tariffs are paid by American importers, not foreign exporters, and ultimately the money comes from American consumers.) China is running the Panama Canal (it isn’t), and “American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly” (not true).

Rhetorically, Trump’s speech evoked a lot of 19th-century imagery, including the phrase “manifest destiny”. He talked about the “untamed wilderness” and winning “the Wild West” (as if the continent had been empty and Native American civilizations had never existed). Ominously, he envisioned once again becoming “a growing nation” that “expands our territory”.

Three kinds of executive orders. I agree with Jay Kuo in dividing Trump’s executive orders into three classes. My reframing of those classes goes like this:

  • legitimate orders that exercise recognized presidential powers. They may not be moral or wise, but yes, a president can do that.
  • speculative orders that test what the courts or Congress will let him get away with. It sure looks like laws or the Constitution forbid this, but who’s going to tell him?
  • fanciful orders intended to excite his base and/or troll his opponents. Like when King Canute ordered the tide not to come in. He’s just trying to upset you, so don’t fall for it.

Legitimate orders. Presidential pardon power is essentially unchecked, so Trump’s pardon of all 1250+ January 6 criminals is a done deal. That includes the people convicted of seditious conspiracy, as well as the folks who sent more than 100 police to the hospital.

Similarly, Trump and the Republican Senate majority have the power to turn the Defense Department over to an inexperienced misogynistic guy with a drinking problem. There’s no recourse; it’s done. Fortunately, all Senate Democrats voted against the nomination, so when the inevitable Hegseth scandal arises, they’ll be in prime I-told-you-so position.

Presidents have broad latitude over programs concerning refugees, so Trump’s order suspending the refugee resettlement program looks sound. Remember: These are not people sneaking over the border. These are people from countries with recognized problems that previous administrations have given refuge to. They have applied via a legal process, been vetted, and may have waited a long time. Some are victims of natural disasters. Others are people we owe something to, like the Afghans who helped our soldiers.

He really can pull the US out of the Paris Climate Accords, but not immediately. He can impose tariffs, which will backfire on him, because they will raise prices on US consumers.

Since these cases are just Trump using the powers the voters (unwisely) gave him in the election, all we can do in response is register our disapproval, publicize the unfortunate results as they appear, and hold Trump-supporting officials responsible in future elections. In some cases, protests or civil disobedience might be appropriate.

David Litt has some good advice about messaging on these issues: Fight big lies with small truths.

Everyone will have different ways of winning the ideas war over the next four years and beyond. For right now, if a total stranger asked me to sum up this week, I’d say something like this:

“There’s a guy named Daniel Rodriguez. On January 5th, 2021, he texted his friends ‘There will be blood.’ On January 6th, when he stormed the Capitol, he grabbed a police officer and shocked him repeatedly in the neck with a stun gun. A jury of peers sentenced him to twelve years in prison for his violent crime. And less than 24 hours after taking office, Trump let Daniel Rodriguez back out on the street.”

I could say more, of course. But that’s the most important thing: a story about one person, who isn’t Donald Trump – and one action Trump took which just about everyone can agree makes us less safe.

In other words, don’t hit your Trumpist friends and relatives with big rhetoric about ending democracy and establishing dictatorship, because they’ll just write you off. Come at them with small stories about people Trump has wronged, and specific ways that he is making all our lives harder.

Speculative orders. These are the most dangerous ones, because if the courts and Congress don’t step up to oppose them, Trump will amass dictatorial power. And if public opinion doesn’t rise against them, Trump may decide that his “mandate” extends to defying the other branches of government.

The most egregious of his speculative orders was the one ending birthright citizenship, i.e., the full citizenship of anyone born in the United States. What’s dangerous about this is that it violates the clear text of the 14th Amendment.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The order attempts to wriggle through a loophole created by “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, which until now has chiefly been interpreted to mean people the US government has to deal with through some other government, like diplomats and their families. But Trump wants to reinterpret it like this:

the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, was having none of it. He quickly issued a 14-day restraining order, pending a hearing on whether to extend his order to a permanent injunction.

“I’ve been on the bench for four decades, I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is,” Coughenour said, describing Trump’s order as “blatantly unconstitutional.”

Undocumented immigrants are subject to US courts and can be arrested by the police without consulting any other country’s government. Clearly the US claims jurisdiction over them.

I wish I could remember who pointed out an unintended consequence of nixing birthright citizenship: Disputes over citizenship become open-ended. Previously, if someone doubted your citizenship, you could produce your birth certificate and be done. But under Trump’s interpretation, your birth certificate just pushes the question back a generation: What about your parents’ citizenship status? And their parents? Where does it end?

Coughenour’s common-sense reading of the Constitution should stand at least until the case reaches the Supreme Court, which may or may not side with the Constitution against Trump.

Other speculative orders include his attempts to redefine the civil service, creating the kind of political machine the Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 was intended to outlaw. Federal employee unions are suing over that.

It’s also not clear how much of Trump’s attempt to define two genders will be upheld. A trans woman in federal prison is already suing, claiming that her pending transfer to an all-male facility will expose her to rape. An aside: The order is laughably wrong about science:

“Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

Since male characteristics don’t develop until 6 or 7 weeks into gestation, the order literally means that everyone is female.

Speculative orders are subject to the same public-opinion responses as legitimate orders, but the main battleground will be in the courts. So you’ll want to stay informed through some reliable legal news source. (I recommend Law Dork.) Also, contribute to the ACLU. If you’re in a blue state, encourage your attorney general to sue the Trump administration. Ditto for any union you belong to.

Fanciful orders. A lot of what Trump does or announces is intended just to make headlines and get people arguing with each other. So the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America? Just laugh. Or when he ordered his underlings to stop inflation, i.e., “to deliver emergency price relief, consistent with applicable law, to the American people and increase the prosperity of the American worker”? Laugh.

Every time you get upset about something like this, you’re distracting yourself from an issue where you might actually do some good.

Hopefulness. Frankly, I expected worse from Trump’s first week, so I’m modestly encouraged.

If you read novels an memoirs from the Nazi era in Germany, one thing that stands out is how artful the Nazis could be at pushing people into compliance. There is a boiling-the-frog aspect to many of these stories, and many people were left thinking, “If this is as bad as it gets, maybe I can deal with it.” Of course, it always got worse, but somehow it never seemed like the right moment to take a stand. The result was that many people missed their chance to oppose Hitler, and then later missed their chance to get out of Germany.

What I was most afraid of going into the second Trump administration was that Trumpists would display a similar kind of deftness. Extreme things would happen, but always with hint that maybe it won’t be so bad.

But Week One makes it clear that these people are not deft. They are not clever. They aren’t even unified. The Mad King is in charge, and none of his advisors is in a position to make him face reality. That will lead to mistakes, and mistakes can be exploited.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (8)

A Disastrous Development in Our Response to Disasters

January 13, 2025 – 8:53 am

All my life, America’s leaders have encouraged us to unite in the face of disasters.
But now Trump is using them to tear us apart.

This week, if you wanted to pay attention something other than Jimmy Carter’s funeral, you had two choices: the L.A. wildfires or Donald Trump’s wild statements about taking over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada. Both of those stories will get attention in this week’s summary (the next post), but what interested me more than either was something in the intersection: Trump’s wild statements about the wildfires, and the disturbing approach he is taking to public disasters in general.

When a community faces a catastrophe, it can respond in one of two opposite ways:

  • Survivors can bond together to mourn the dead, care for the injured, and rebuild. Shared pain can create new bonds across former social divisions. People untouched by the disaster may realize that only circumstance separates them from the victims, and may develop a new empathy not just for recent victims, but for the less fortunate in general. A post-disaster attitude of “We’re all in this together” has a chance to grow and spread.
  • The community can damage itself further by finger-pointing, scapegoating, and other forms of turning against itself.

History provides examples of both responses. On the positive side, political partisanship in the United States all but vanished after Pearl Harbor, and lapsed at least temporarily after 9-11. But on the negative side, persecution of Jews sharply increased during the Black Death in Europe, as unfounded rumors of Jews poisoning wells spread widely. All through history, disasters without an easily grasped cause have led people to seek scapegoats. Sophocles’ play “Oedipus Rex” begins with a report from the Oracle of Delphi that one person’s crime has brought a plague to the city. In the Biblical story of Jonah, sailors cast lots to decide who to blame for the storm that threatens to sink them.

Sometimes a community goes both ways simultaneously: At the same time the US was uniting to fight World War II, it was rounding up Japanese Americans and putting them in camps. After 9-11, President Bush put considerable effort into talking Americans out of blaming the attack on Muslims in general, though some did anyway.

Bush’s rhetoric was an example of responsible leadership, which does its best to turn the community response towards positive rather than negative responses. (Using 9-11 to promote an invasion of Iraq, on the other hand, was irresponsible leadership.) Responsible post-catastrophe leadership also has several other identifiable traits:

  • Unfounded rumors spread wildly after disasters, so responsible leaders set up reliable systems of information. They speak calmly and stick to facts in order to calm public panic.
  • They call attention to heroes rather than villains, promoting the notion that community members should help and trust each other.
  • They promote trust in the institutions set up to deal with the catastrophe, and pledge that those institutions will get the backing they need to resolve the situation.

Now look at how President-elect Trump and the right-wing media that takes its cues from him have responded to the Los Angeles wildfires. Wednesday, he posted:

One of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States of America is burning down to the ground. It’s ashes, and Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!

And he followed up with

Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!

and

NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!

Just about every sentence in these posts is false. The December bill that appropriated money to keep the government open added $29 billion to FEMA, and FEMA told CNN Wednesday that it had a $27 billion balance in its accounts.

That sum may well prove inadequate to meet the needs created by every disaster that ends up happening this year, but it’s not “no money.”

There were indeed some dry hydrants, but that had nothing to do with any general lack of water in Southern California, or some mythical “water restoration declaration” Newsom refused to sign. Most of the problem was a more specific lack: of water that had been pumped into tanks in the hills above LA. This created a lack of water pressure in key places, but not a regional lack of water. Shifting more water resources from Northern to Southern California would not have helped.

Firefighting planes were grounded by hurricane-level winds, not by some action of Governor Newsom.

In short, Trump spread lies in order to scapegoat Gavin Newsom, a prominent Democrat who might be his opponent when he runs for an unconstitutional third term in 2028.

Other voices on right-wing media were quick to blame DEI or whatever else they don’t like.

This is all of a piece with the right-wing response to the New Orleans terrorist attack on New Years. Long after it was known that the suspect was a US citizen born in Houston, MAGA supporters were still spreading the rumor that he had crossed the border illegally two days before. This allowed them to smear undocumented immigrants while simultaneously pinning responsibility on President Biden’s immigration policies.

Our media occasionally combats this scapegoating on a small scale, by fact-checking clear lies. But the larger story is going almost completely uncovered: Responsible leadership in times of crisis is a thing of the past. We can no longer expect that our leaders will take care to learn the facts before they speak, pass on reliable information, or try to prevent panic. Instead, they will tell lies that turn public fear and anger against their political enemies. Rather than use a crisis to bring people together, they will use it to create scapegoats and turn different groups of Americans against each other.

In the long run, that reversal of policy may be more destructive than fire.

By weeklysift | Tagged , | Comments (8)

A meditation on American Greatness

January 6, 2025 – 9:19 am

One counterproductive argument I keep hearing goes something like this: A Trump supporter says “Make America Great Again”, and a Trump resister responds “When was America great? During slavery? When women couldn’t vote? The Native American genocide? Jim Crow?”

The problem with this argument is that it typically ends with each side hardened into its position. The resister goes away believing the supporter wants to return to an era when White male Christians reigned supreme and everyone else was second-class or worse. The supporter goes away believing that the resister resents anyone who has pride in America, and that liberals want Americans to feel ashamed of their country. But the supporter is never going to give up patriotic pride, and the resister is never going to voluntarily go back to times of oppression and domination. Both are immovable.

Imagining any kind of compromise within this frame is impossible. Is the Trump resister going to give ground and admit that a little bit of racism and sexism might be beneficial? Will the Trump supporter agree to be a little bit ashamed of his country? Not likely.

I want to claim that the root of the problem here is the frame, not the participants or their points of view. The problem is that the issue has been framed as being not doing.

If you start talking about doing, the logjam resolves: All through its history, the United States has done both great and terrible things.

As a liberal and a Trump resister, I have no trouble admitting that America and Americans have done great things over the decades. Like these:

  • The US played a key role in defeating both Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism.
  • After World War II, we helped rebuild Europe (including Germany) through the Marshall Plan rather than keep potential economic rivals down.
  • All through our history, we have created opportunity for people who were destitute in other countries (like the survivors of the Irish Potato Famine).
  • The example of our revolution and our constitution inspired the expansion of human rights around the world.

I could go on. If you’re searching for reasons to take pride in America, there are lots of them.

But here’s the key point: I can acknowledge those facts without forgetting that they all had downsides. We have never entirely lived up to the ideals of our revolution. The opportunities we offered immigrants weren’t available to everyone. Our fight against fascism in World War II also included the Japanese internment. During the Cold War we supported many oppressive right-wing regimes in the Third World, and also fought a ruinous war in Vietnam.

The problem with framing “greatness” as a state of being and pinning it to America in some past era is that those downsides either go away or become insignificant. Worse, saying America was great then, but is not great now, implicitly promotes the idea of going back. And none of those eras is a time we should want to go back to. Jim Crow America is nothing to be nostalgic about, even if that’s who we were on D-Day.

Idealizing past greatness also makes an unfair connection between our great and terrible deeds. We created unprecedented economic growth in spite of our social injustices, not because of them. Forcing gays back into the closet or women back into the kitchen won’t end inflation or bring back well-paid working class jobs.

But has America done great things? Of course it has. It’s important to recognize those achievements and take inspiration from them, because looking ahead, we need to do great things again. Converting our economy so that it no longer relies on cheap fossil fuels, for example, will be a huge undertaking. But the nation that put a man on the Moon and built the interstate highway system should be up to the task.

In fact it is the Left, not the Right, that most needs to believe in our ability to do great things. At the root of MAGA fascism lies a zero-sum view of the world: There is a limited amount of goodness to be had, so we — native-born White male Christians, or whoever “we” refers to in some particular context — have to seize all of it. There is a limited amount of freedom in the World, so any gain for women or gays or people of color must be a loss for everyone else.

Believing that the goodness in the world is a limited pile of pirate treasure, and then seizing more than your share of it, is a very shallow conception of greatness. Our greatness needs to be greater than that.

In short, it’s a mistake to get baited into arguing that America was never great. You’ll never win that argument and you shouldn’t want to. Great things still need to be done, and Americans need to see ourselves as the kind of people who can take on those challenges.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (15)

Cracks in the MAGA Coalition

December 30, 2024 – 9:51 am

Fractures are already showing in the MAGA coalition,
and they haven’t even taken power yet.

When a party out of power suddenly finds itself on the verge of taking control of the White House and both houses of Congress, you’d expect to find them coasting on a wave of good feeling. Victory salves all wounds, so everybody should be ready to dance with everybody else at the inaugural balls.

Strangely, though, MAGAWorld is full of conflict these days. One Trump-supporting fascist (Steve Bannon) is calling another Trump-supporting fascist (Elon Musk) a “toddler” who needs a “wellness check” from Child Protective Services. And American workers, says Vivek Ramaswamy, can’t compete with immigrants because they suffer from our “culture”, which venerates mediocrity over excellence.

But wait: Isn’t the whole point of Trumpism that “real” (i.e. White Christian) Americans are victims of the liberal Deep State that wants to “replace” them with brown-skinned Third Worlders? What’s going on?

First skirmish: Foreign investment. Trump owes his election to two groups whose interests don’t match up: White working class voters and ultra-rich technology barons like Elon Musk. During the campaign, Trump could keep his plans vague enough that both were satisfied, and many low-wage workers could imagine that the richest man in the world was their friend.

But now that the election is over, the question keeps coming up: Who’s the real president, Trump or Elon? At first I interpreted such comments as Democratic trolling, trying to stir up trouble in MAGAWorld by taking advantage of Trump’s ego. (I remember in his first term how similar questions about Mike Pence riled him. Speculation at the time was that Trump would bask in the glory of the presidency, leaving Pence to do the actual work of governing.)

But more and more, there seems to be something to the murmurs. The move to reject a compromise and risk a government shutdown last week started with Musk, and Trump eventually got on board. Musk was the leader and Trump the follower.

Support for the stopgap spending bill then collapsed, forcing [House Speaker Mike] Johnson and his leadership team to scramble to find an alternative path forward. As they did, Musk celebrated, proclaiming that “the voice of the people has triumphed”.

It may be more accurate, however, to say that it was Musk’s voice that triumphed.

In the end, Congress passed a continuing resolution that still included the most important extras Democrats wanted: rebuilding the Key Bridge in Baltimore and disaster relief. And it kept government spending at basically the levels set before Republicans took control of the House two years ago.

Trump did not get the extra he wanted: suspending or eliminating the debt limit. But Musk did get what he wanted: The original proposal included an “outbound investment” provision limiting how American companies could invest in China.

We have heard for years about the problem of manufacturing businesses shipping jobs overseas to China, with its low worker wages and low environmental standards. China typically forces businesses wanting to locate factories in its country to transfer their technology and intellectual property to Chinese firms, which can then use that to undercut competitors in global markets, with state support.

Congress has been working itself into a lather about China for years now, and they finally came up with a way to deal with this issue. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) have the flagship bill, which would either prohibit U.S. companies from investing in “sensitive technologies” in China, including semiconductors and artificial intelligence, or set up a broad notification regime around it.

One corporation that would be affected by this is Musk’s Tesla.

Elon Musk’s car company has a significant amount of, well, outbound investment. A Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai opened in 2019; maybe a quarter of the company’s revenue comes from China. Musk has endorsed building a second Tesla factory in China, where his grip on the electric-vehicle market has completely loosened amid domestic competition. He is working with the Chinese government to bring “Full Self-Driving” technology to China, in other words, importing a technology that may be seen as sensitive. Musk has battery and solar panel factories that are not yet in China, but he may want them there in the future.

Lo and behold: The outbound investment provision vanished from the final version of the continuing resolution. In other words, Republicans in Congress spent their negotiating chips getting what Musk wanted, not what Trump wanted.

Second skirmish: H-1B visas. A second conflict is still playing out: One of the most important issues for the MAGA base is immigration, and in particular protecting the jobs of American citizens from immigrant competition. “They’re taking American jobs” is one of the most effective attacks on immigrants at all levels, even the ones working jobs hardly any Americans want, like picking crops by hand or watching rich people’s kids for practically no pay.

However, American corporations have a different agenda: They want to hire the best people in the world and pay them as little as possible. This is not new. America has been draining the brains of the world at least since the 1930s, when Jews and other anti-fascists escaped from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. We may sympathize with the American physicists who suddenly had to compete with the likes of Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, or American actresses who lost roles to Marlene Dietrich or Hedy Lamarr, but in retrospect it’s hard to feel bad about letting those people into our country.

Similarly today, the US tech industry employs foreign-born workers in jobs many Americans would undoubtedly like to have. The legal vehicle that allows this is the H-1B visa. Employers can sponsor foreign nationals with at least a bachelors degree to apply for H-1B visas that allow them to live and work in the US for three years, with a possible renewal to six years. Currently, 85,000 such visas can be issued each year. 84% of them go to people from India or China. Maybe a handful of those immigrants really are exceptional Einstein-like talents we’d be foolish to turn away, but probably not all 85,000 of them.

The employer has to affirm that the worker will be appropriately paid and that his or her (mostly his) employment won’t negatively impact similar American workers. In practice, though, these provisions are hard to monitor or enforce. Critics charge that H-1B workers are easily abused, because (if no other employers are waiting in the wings) the employer can expel a worker from the US just by withdrawing sponsorship. So H-1B workers can become cheap-but-highly-trained labor that corporations may prefer to American workers that the company doesn’t hold as much leverage over.

Obviously, the tech barons want to be free to import as many cheap engineers and programmers as they want, while Americans with comparable credentials want H-1B visas limited or eliminated. This conflict goes to the heart of what “America First” really means: Should we be strengthening Team America by bringing in talent wherever we can find it, or should we be defending the livelihoods of individual Americans? (An analogy to bring this home: Imagine you’re a young outfielder for the New York Mets, and that you’ve been struggling for playing time so you can prove yourself. How do you feel about the team signing Juan Soto? Your team is better, so your odds of going to the World Series have improved. But your individual prospects have taken a hit.) TPM:

The two sides began to argue on Sunday, after Donald Trump appointed Sriram Krishan, a partner at Andreesen Horowitz, as a White House policy adviser on Artificial Intelligence to work with Sacks, the Trump administration’s crypto and AI czar.

This may seem like a relatively minor White House appointment. However, Krishan has also been a proponent of removing country caps on green cards and H1-B visas, which allow American companies to hire foreign workers for certain specializations.

Nativists like Laura Loomer (who not so long ago was rumored to be having an affair with Trump) found this appointment “deeply disturbing“. Musk and Ramaswamy replied by attacking American workers, with Musk approvingly retweeting a post that described American workers as “retarded”.

Then Musk was attacked back, and responded by taking away privileges on X from people who criticized him. (Remember when Elon was a “free speech absolutist“? It turns out that just applies to Nazis.)

I think Paul Krugman has put his finger on what’s at stake here:

Every political movement is a coalition made up of factions with different goals and priorities. Normally what holds these factions together is realism and a willingness to compromise: Each faction is willing to give the other factions part of what they want in return for part of what it wants.

What’s different about MAGA is that I’m pretty sure that almost all of the movement’s activists (as opposed to the low-information voters who put Trump over the top) knew that he was a con man, without even concepts of a plan to reduce prices. But each faction believed that he was their con man, putting something over on everyone else.

But now the two most important factions — what we might call original MAGA, motivated largely by hostility to immigrants, and tech bro MAGA, seeking a free hand for scams low taxes and deregulation — have gone to war, each apparently fearing that they may themselves have been marks rather than in on the con.

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