Ever since the Orban regime fell in Hungary, I’ve been wondering what lessons Democrats should learn from Péter Magyar’s campaign. The challenges are similar: Both Orban and Trump are authoritarians with a flood-the-zone strategy: They did so many objectionable things, but a national campaign needs to focus on a theme. Does any one theme provide a trunk to hang all the branches on?
Magyar settled on corruption: Things are bad for you because Orban is running the country for the benefit of himself and his allies, not you.
That’s certainly true of Trump as well, and this week gave us some prime examples of Trump’s corruption. But is it the right theme? The featured post will explore that possibility, as well as catalog the various strands of corruption. It should be out before 11 EDT.
The weekly summary will discuss the summit with China; southern states racing to reinstate all-White congressional delegations, now that the Supreme Court has blessed that plan; inflation; the Christian nationalist rally you paid for Sunday; and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by 1.
With the help of the courts, Republicans have won the redistricting wars. The pro-Democratic Virginia redistricting has been thrown out, and the Supreme Court has given southern states the go-ahead to get rid of all their non-White congresspeople — which they are racing to take advantage of.
It probably won’t save Mike Johnson’s Republican majority in the fall, but it will turn a big Democratic popular-vote victory into a small Democratic House majority.
Other than that, everything that was happening last week is still happening: Trump still isn’t admitting his strategic blunder in Iran, so the price of gasoline keeps rising. The climate change catastrophe keeps creeping closer. Trump’s popularity keeps falling, but the stock market keeps rising for some reason I can’t fathom. Ukraine continues to seize the initiative from Russia, but Putin also can never admit that he made a mistake, so the killing will continue. The hantavirus scare continues.
So this seemed like a good week to do a book review: War and Power by Phillips O’Brien. It focuses on two questions: Why do analysts keep making horribly wrong predictions about how wars will turn out? (Kyiv was supposed to fall in a few days, remember.) And what does a proper understanding of war say about any possible conflict between China and the US, maybe over Taiwan?
The review should be out maybe around 10 EDT, and the weekly summary around noon.
Ordinarily, things that you see coming aren’t shocking. Tax day, your best friend’s wedding, the visit your mother booked in March — whether you’re looking forward to it or dreading it, it’s not going to be shocking.
People who watch the Supreme Court like I do have seen the Callais decision coming for a long time. John Roberts and his conservative majority have been out to scuttle the Voting Rights Act for more than a decade. They’ve been chipping away at this section, then that one — always reassuring the public that it didn’t really matter, because the rest of the VRA was still there to protect minority rights, at least until the next case.
It was only a matter of time before they finished it off, and Calais looked like the case to do it. And yet, reading Justice Alito’s majority opinion this week was shocking all the same. The bad history, the gaping holes in his logic, the complete non sequiturs, but most of all the arrogation of Congress’ power into the Supreme Court — I could still be shocked by the level of corruption that has gotten into our highest court. They’re not even trying to do law any more, or to convince us that they are.
So I had to write about it. This week’s featured post “What to do about a lawless Supreme Court?” should be out by around 10 or so EDT.
The weekly summary has another court case to discuss: the Fifth Circuit’s attempt to keep the primary abortion drug from passing through the mail. And then there’s the complete joke Todd Blanche is making of the Justice Department with its absurd indictment of James Comey for posting a picture of seashells on a beach. The Iran War continues to drag on, because Trump can neither win it nor admit defeat. And that means gas prices will continue to rise and the economy will suffer. Trump’s popularity will continue to tank and it will become ever more essential for him to find ways to cheat in the fall elections.
Expect to see the weekly summary around noon or so.
For the last couple of days, the news has been dominated by the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner Saturday night. But I’m going to just note that event without dwelling on it, because I think we all understand it. And since the shooter failed to get off a shot at the President or any other major official, his attack shouldn’t have any lasting consequences.
More significant was the election result in Virginia, where Democrats passed a redistricting map that is expected to net them four House seats in the fall election. This makes the recent gerrymandering tally just about even, or maybe gives Democrats a small advantage. The entire redistricting battle marks a major change in Democratic strategy, which used to revolve around trying to maintain good-government norms even as Republicans changed the rules around them. So this will be the focus of the first featured post, “Where the Gerrymandering Battle Stands After Virginia”, which should be out shortly.
Something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while is the process for refugees to seek asylum in the US, which has been broken for some while. This has given Trump an opening to fix the problem by breaking the rule of law, in a two-wrongs-should-make-a-right manner. Democrats wind up in a complicated position, because the previous status quo is indefensible, but dictatorship is not the right answer.
This week an appeals court rejected Trump’s asylum-limiting executive order. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will have to decide this issue, but the appellate decision gives me a hook to raise the topic. So the second featured post will discuss asylum, starting with the Holocaust-based reasons our asylum laws exist. That should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.
Finally, the weekly summary will note the WHC dinner shooting, summarize the lack of progress in the Iran War, list a few of the other court cases the Trump regime has lost recently, and cover a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon, but it may slip.
Having been home long enough to catch my breath, I’m planning to write the article I should have written last week, about MAGA discontent and how Democrats might appeal to some of the former Trump voters, using Peter Magyar’s landslide victory over the authoritarian Orbán regime in Hungary as a model.
I’m basing the piece partly on my own observations, but also leaning heavily on two blog posts you might not have seen: one by a female Hungarian lawyer and another by a guy who got into a MAGA focus group under false pretenses. My conclusion is that it’s a mistake for Democrats to force this topic into their ongoing progressive/centrist debate. Neither framing quite fits the issue or takes advantage of the opportunity.
That post should appear around 10 EDT. The weekly summary will cover the war, Trump vs. the Pope, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
The world generally goes crazy when I take a week or two off. Trump threatened to “end” civilization in a nation of more than 90 million people, then announced a ceasefire to give Iran a chance to surrender, which it predictably did not do. Now Trump is threatening to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, a strategy no one really understands, least of all him. It’s a little like “You can’t burn down the house. I’ll burn down the house.”
Meanwhile, democracy had its best day in years: Sunday, Hungary decisively rejected the proto-Trump autocracy of Viktor Orbán. Orbán had rigged the system in such a way that only a landslide could unseat him — and the landslide came. I wasn’t sure how Orbán would respond to that, but he did the right thing and conceded.
I wish I could claim I had something to do with this. Purely coincidentally, I was on a tour that stopped in Budapest Thursday. So I was too late to see J. D. Vance campaign for Orbán, but too early for the opposition victory celebration. Still, I am getting satisfaction out of watching TV coverage and saying, “I know where they are.”
During my trip, I wandered through Czech, German, and Austrian history museums that gave me a little insight into nationalistic movements, which I’ll try to sum up in coming weeks. But I’m not yet sufficiently recovered from jet lag to do justice to the topic.
So this week the only post will be the weekly summary (unless the Iran note gets unreasonably long). I’ll try to get it out by noon.
I’m going to be taking the next two weeks off, this time for an actual vacation rather than because I’m putting together a talk somewhere. I’m hoping the world can behave itself while I finish moving and cruise the Danube.
Once again this week, the Iran War drowns out other news, though at least this time I’ll be updating the “ongoing stories” part of the weekly summary. Everything we’re finding out supports what the pessimists have been saying all along: Escalation will continue, because there is no other plan. The featured post this week will be a collection of notes on the war and its consequences. It should be out shortly.
The weekly summary will cover the latest news about ICE, the Trump regime’s continuing losses in court, the strange case of conspiracy-theorist-turned-MAGA-defector Joe Kent, the death of Robert Mueller, and a few other things. I’ll try to get it out around noon EDT.
Once again, the war in Iran dominates the news, and yet we know so little about it. Why did we attack? What are our goals? How will the tactics we are using achieve those goals? There’s not enough there for a featured post, but it seems silly to focus on something else.
So instead of being news-focused, the featured post will cover some general sociological and psychological analyses of the administration that have come out recently. Why are they the way they are? I’ll try to get that out between 10 and 11 EDT.
So the actual news will all be in the weekly summary: the war, the ongoing persecution of trans people, the administration’s continuing legal problems, the WaPo’s sudden change into the voice of the billionaire agenda, and a few other things. Expect to see that around noon.
So we’re still at war and we still don’t know why. I’ll cover that in the weekly summary, but it’s hard to write at length about all the things I don’t know.
Instead, I want to look at an interesting question raised by James Talerico’s senate candidacy in Texas: After years of Trump’s blatant immorality and policies directly opposed by the Sermon on the Mount, can Democrats start competing for the explicitly Christian vote? And if so, should they? I’m not sure how long that article will take, but I hope to get it posted by 10 EDT.
That leaves the weekly summary to cover the war, last week’s primary elections, Kristi Noem’s departure, and a variety of other things. I’ll try to get that around noon.
Friday night, it seemed like I had a newsy week to cover: the State of the Union address; further developments in the Epstein case, including testimony from the Clintons and questions about why Trump isn’t testifying; still more instances of ICE’s excessive violence; the midterm primary season kicking off in Texas tomorrow with consequential Senate races in both parties; the War Defense Department showdown with a major AI firm about killer robots; and the usual collection of lesser stories.
And then Trump attacked Iran, killing its leader and at least 175 schoolgirls, getting at least three American servicepeople killed in the process.
That move shoved everything else into the background. But the problem it presents to me and other commenters is that we don’t have a lot of facts to pass along. We don’t know what’s happening on the ground in Iran. We don’t have any clear explanation from the Trump regime about why they’re doing this, what the ultimate goal is, or even what the short-term plan is.
But I remember something my high school journalism teacher said: “If you can’t write about the is-ness of something, you can write about the not-ness of it.” (Thanks, Mr. Connelly.) So that’s the focus of this featured post: Why don’t we know?
Usually, when you hear references to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, it’s a cautionary tale: Don’t be like that. But in one sense, George W. Bush did much better then than Trump is doing now. Bush’s people may have pushed all sorts of lies about their prospective invasion, but at least they respected the American people and the Congress enough to spend months trying to convince us. Trump seems not to care.
So the featured post “Why?” should be out shortly. All the other stuff I thought I was going to talk about will be in the weekly summary, which I’ll try to get out by noon EST.
The Weekly Sift 