The Weekly Sift

Breaking news keeps interfering with my plans. I have a number of planned articles that haven’t gotten finished in recent weeks because something else has come up to grab my attention.

This week, the obvious attention-grabber is war. Here we are, involved in another Middle Eastern war. Saturday, President Trump announced that US warplanes had bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. Maybe this will be a one-and-done situation, as Trump and his administration sometimes seem to hope. Maybe Iran will take its punch-in-the-nose and go on about its business. Or maybe Trump will push for regime change in Iran, which might make us responsible for the regime that follows, as we were in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or maybe we’ll be happy with a large oil-rich failed state.

I often warn about the dangers of speculation that purports to be news coverage. It’s always important to separate what we know from what we hope or fear. Speculation at best is a poor use of your time, and at worst can make you crazy about possibilities that never manifest. So I’ll try to discipline myself. Rather than claim to know things, I will just raise “Questions to Ask at the Start of a War”. That article probably won’t appear until 11 or so EDT.

In the meantime, I’m going ahead with another article based on breaking news: the Supreme Court’s refusal to strike down Tennessee’s law banning gender-affirming care. “The Court fails trans youth” will summarize both what should have happened and what did happen. I’m hoping to get that out by 10.

That still leaves a few things for the weekly summary: new outrages in the Big Beautiful Bill, the continuing military occupation of Los Angeles, what Trump plans for ICE, the cases we’re still waiting for at the end of the Supreme Court’s term, and a few other things. That may not appear until after noon.

It’s been one of those weeks where everything seems like a distraction from everything else. Trump and ICE have provoked a showdown with protesters in Los Angeles, and used it to push another overreach of executive power: Any violence that erupts during a protest is now evidence of a “rebellion against the government of the United States”, and justifies taking federal control of state National Guard units.

Meanwhile, Trump and Elon Musk had a major falling out this week, putting passage of Trump’s “big beautiful bill” in jeopardy. And it turns out that the Trump administration can get Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador after all — now that they’ve got charges to file against him.

Anyway, the featured post deals with the situation in Los Angeles. As always, I stay away from trying to cover unfolding events. But the legal authority Trump is invoking and its implications are worth paying attention to sooner rather than later. That should be out shortly.

Musk and Garcia are covered in the weekly summary. I’ll mostly avoid the sensational parts of the Trump/Musk spat, but the story implies a bunch of things that the mainstream media is mostly ignoring. Like this: If Trump isn’t corruptly using his power to reward his friends and punish his enemies, why does Tesla’s stock price gyrate based on whether Musk seems like a friend or enemy at the moment?

Also in the summary: Southern Baptists debate whether to try to reverse same-sex marriage. Missouri’s broken public schools are a preview of what the GOP has planned nationally. And a few other things. That should be out by noon EDT.

The featured post today is another take-a-step-back post, where I try to make sense out of something that looks mysterious at first glance. The subject this week is greatness, as in “Make America Great Again”. There’s been a lot of debate about what era “again” refers to: the Confederacy? the Gilded Age? Jim Crow? Pre-feminism? When?

But hardly anybody asks what era “great” refers to. Because the meaning of national greatness has changed over the centuries. You can drive yourself nuts trying to figure out how “national greatness” can lead a movement to slash funding for science, destroy higher education, weaken our alliances, or undermine the rule of law. From a 21st-century perspective, everything Trump is doing tears down America’s greatness. So how can his followers be so gullible as to imagine he’s making us “great again”?

I think I know the answer to that one: Trump and his most ardent followers don’t have a 21st-century concept of greatness. They’re stuck in the Napoleonic Era, when “greatness” meant something completely different, like territorial expansion and mercantile dominance.

That’s the topic of the featured post, “The Greatness Paradox”, which should be out before 9 EST.

That leaves a lot for the weekly summary: passage of the “big beautiful” budget bill through the House, the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis, and so on. I’ll try to get that out by noon.

So I’m back. Did anything happen in the last three weeks?

Well, we’ve got a new pope, an American who represents a continuation of Francis’ vision rather than a reversion to Benedict’s harsher culture-war positions.

In US politics, the conflict between Trump and the courts continues to escalate, pushing towards the crisis that has been coming since he took office: The Supreme Court makes a very precise order for Trump to stop doing something he really wants to do, an order he will have to either obey or defy. Then we’ll see if we still have the rule of law in this country. (I know what commenters are preparing to type: They already did that with the order to “facilitate” Albrego Garcia’s release from the concentration camp in El Salvador, an order that Trump defied. But that’s not exactly what happened. They gave an order they assumed the administration would interpret in good faith and instead it was interpreted in egregiously bad faith. The crisis we’re steaming towards is one where the Court stops assuming good faith and instead is very explicit.)

I spent my two weeks off driving from Massachusetts to Illinois and back, stopping to see a number of friends and relatives along the way (if Nashville counts as “along the way”). I wound up in my hometown, Quincy Illinois, to give a sermon about grief — something I’ve seen close-up these last six months — at the local Unitarian church. I’ve posted the text.

Something striking I noticed: Just about all my friends are more pessimistic and depressed about the political situation than I am. I’ll try to explain in the featured post, which should be out by 10 EST or so. The gist: The crisis we’re approaching has been inevitable since Trump was elected, and we’re in better shape to get through it than I had expected.

The weekly summary will cover the new pope, the recent court decisions, prospects for the FY 2026 budget, and a few other things. I’ll try to get it out by noon.

The tariff fiasco continued this week. After swearing that he’d never back down from last week’s tariffs, Trump did indeed back down — and then claimed he’d meant to do that all along.

This week’s featured post focuses on not getting trapped in whatever position is the opposite of Trump’s. In this case, that means being careful in how you oppose Trump’s nonsensical tariff policy. These particular tariffs are crazy, but that shouldn’t push us to critique them from a neo-liberal free-trade stance. Globalization has had its victims, particularly among the non-college White men who make up the core of Trump’s coalition. They’re not wrong to want change.

So tariffs and industrial policy have a role to play in the Democratic worldview. But not this role. It’s a more nuanced and harder-to-communicate position than free trade, but otherwise we’ll get trapped into defending the very flawed pre-Trump status quo.

That post should go out around 10 EST. The weekly summary will cover the approaching clash between Trump and the Supreme Court, some very wrong-headed executive orders concerning the environment, abuse of the Social Security database, and one more thing I may spin off into its own featured post: As we approach the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, anti-Trump and anti-King-George rhetoric is starting to merge.

That should post in the vicinity of noon.