One of the debates I keep hearing Democrats have is where to center the party’s message: Are we all-in on stopping the rush towards fascism? Or should we focus on kitchen-table issues like jobs and inflation?
This week I want to argue that this is a false choice, because autocracy is in fact the biggest threat our economy faces. The one place in our economy where Trump is exercising autocratic power is over tariffs, and that is precisely where our economic problems are coming from. The tariffs themselves are causing inflation, and the uncertainty caused by Trump’s arbitrary decisions about tariffs has caused businesses to stop hiring.
That’s not a coincidence. If you look around the world, the kind of strongman governments Trump admires — in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere — are presiding over shrinking economies. So if you’re worried about your economic future, you should want to stop America’s slide into authoritarianism.
So the featured post this week is “An Authoritarian Economy is a Bad Economy”. It should be out shortly.
The weekly summary will discuss Gaza, Ukraine, RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines, the Texas redistricting standoff, and a few other things. It should be out before noon EDT.
By the way, I’m going to try an experiment this morning: I’m going to cross-post the featured post on Substack, just to see how it works. If you’re on Substack, check it out and comment.
This week Trump’s autocratic tendencies reached an almost comical level, evoking a “He did what?” reaction even from people otherwise inclined support him: He responded to bad news in the June jobs report by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Don’t like the numbers? Fire the number-crunchers! That’ll fix it.
That firing resembled the moment in his first term when he suggested that the way to deal with accelerating rates of Covid infection was to stop testing. Fewer tests, fewer positive results — problem solved! Such out-of-the-box thinking is what makes Trump a stable genius.
So anyway, the entire federal data-gathering bureaucracy is now on notice that doing your job honestly can get you fired. We’ll see how the bureaucrats respond.
In the meantime, the jobs report actually is bad, and points to the possibility of stagflation, a combination of increasing unemployment and increasing inflation that was widely believed to be impossible until it started happening in the 1970s.
There’s been a lot else going on: The Smithsonian was caught dropping Trump’s impeachments down the memory hole. The Gaza horror continued. Trump encouraged Texas to help him cheat in the 2026 midterms.
But what caught my eye this week was a column in the NYT: “Thinking is Becoming a Luxury Good”. It raised the possibility that what we’ve been seeing lately is just the beginning of a trend: Maybe our culture is producing people fundamentally incapable of self-rule. What happens to democracy in that situation? That led to this week’s featured post “Shaping Ourselves”. That should be out shortly.
The weekly summary, which covers the aforementioned stories plus a few others, should be out by noon EDT.
Three weeks ago, who would have thought the Epstein controversy would be dragging on, and perhaps even picking up momentum. And yes, I’ll mention it in the weekly summary, but I’m not going to focus on it.
Instead I want to take a step back and connect two ideas that should be bound together in the public mind: the unitary executive legal theory that gets argued before the Supreme Court, and the Trump administration’s increasing authoritarianism. I want to argue that those are simply different faces of the same fascist tendency: “unitary executive” is a euphemism for “tyrant”. In the modern era, a traditionally American vision of liberty is only possible when government power is divided not only between the three branches of government, but when the power of the executive branch itself is divided among agencies that retain a high degree of independence.
The unitary executive, then, is not some esoteric legal notion. It’s a fundamental assault on American freedom.
That post should be out by 10 EDT. (Yes, I’m back home.) The weekly summary will include the Epstein developments (briefly), what’s been going on in Gaza, the recently announced trade deals with Japan, and the EU, and various other developments, closing with a remembrance of musical satirist Tom Lehrer.
Everything is going to run late today because I’m on vacation near Denver, two hours behind my usual eastern time zone.
The featured post today is “Yes, he does think you’re stupid”, which outlines how I think Democrats should respond to the continuing strife in MAGA World concerning Jeffrey Epstein. That should be out shortly, maybe by 10 EDT (8 Mountain Daylight).
The weekly summary will then cover Congress’ vote to defund $9 billion of money it had already appropriated, focused on cutting public broadcasting and foreign aid; the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late-night TV show; the poet Andrea Gibson, who I had never been aware of before her death this week; Trump’s attempt to rescue a fellow autocrat wannabee, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, from his well-deserved legal jeopardy; the harm anti-abortion laws have done to women’s health; and a few other things, culminating in your moment of schadenfreude, the CEO who got caught on the kisscam at a Coldplay concert. That should appear by 11 EDT, or 9 Mountain.
Of all the indignities the second Trump administration has put me through, this may be the most annoying: Today I have to write about Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein is the guy who seduced underage girls into having sex, and allegedly shared them with a long list of rich and powerful men that he then blackmailed to keep himself rich and out of prison. How much of that is true is anybody’s guess, as is the list of those rich and powerful men. Epstein’s apparent jailhouse suicide in 2019 has been a mother lode for conspiracy theories, especially in the fever swamps of the MAGA movement. Hardly anybody claims to be Q-Anon any more, but Q-Anon’s belief in a vast conspiracy of elite pedophiles has taken root in MAGA World, and Epstein is the one real-world hook you can hang that theory on.
This week, Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to remove that hook: Never mind, she says. There is no Epstein “client list”, nobody else needs to be charged with anything, and no further release of Justice Department information is warranted. Move along, people. Nothing to see here.
Now, I moved along years ago. I have no theory about what “really” happened to Epstein, and no interest in forming one. But the controversy itself has become news. There’s a real uprising in MAGA World, and Trump telling everyone to settle down and get back in line doesn’t seem to be working. The Trump faithful have ignored real issue after real issue, but this one seems to be more than they can stand.
Anyway, “Is Epstein the issue that will finally break through?” is this week’s featured post. It should be out shortly. The rest of the week’s news — court rulings about birthright citizenship, response to the Texas floods, and so on — will be in the weekly summary, which will appear around noon.
So the Big Beautiful Bill got passed and signed. I have to confess that I underestimated Trump’s ability to intimidate Republicans in Congress, several of whom have publicly admitted that the bill will hurt their constituents. (Immediately after she voted for it, Senator Murkowski said she hoped the House wouldn’t pass it in the form she had voted for. But of course the House did.)
I feel like the basics of the bill have been well covered, at least for those outside the MAGA news bubble: It will benefit the rich by cutting their taxes, hurt the poor by taking away their health insurance and food assistance, and increase the national debt.
But while the increased spending on immigration enforcement has also been covered, I feel like the massive size of the increase — and the negative implications for the future of American democracy — haven’t gotten nearly the attention they deserve. So that’s the subject of today’s featured post: “Trump only has ICE for you”. When you make Nazi comparisons you always risks being written off as an alarmist, but some fairly well known democracy experts are pointing out how the BBB lays the groundwork for a Trump Gestapo and Trump concentration camps. Trump may not be Hitler yet, but when Dachau opened in 1933, Hitler wasn’t Hitler yet either.
That post is basically done and should be out before 9 EDT.
That leaves the rest of the BBB to the weekly summary. Also: the role federal policy played in the Texas floods, the soon-to-run-out 90-day pause on the Trump tariffs, a somewhat sorrowful 4th of July, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
A scheduling problem has created a Monday-morning conflict for me, so I’m not going to be putting out the Sift on its usual schedule. There is no weekly summary this week, just a featured post: “The Rot Goes Deeper Than Trump” about the social and cultural failings that Trump exploited but did not create. That will go out soon — on Sunday night rather than Monday morning.
Expect a more normal schedule next week.
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.
The Sift will be a bit abbreviated this week, because I’m on vacation in New York City. (I saw Hadestown yesterday, which I can heartily recommend to anyone who hasn’t had a spouse die recently.) There won’t be a featured post this week, but I will try to cover the broad sweep of serious events that happened this week: the political assassinations in Minnesota, Trump’s continuing occupation of Los Angeles, the court pushback against that occupation, the No Kings protests, Israel’s attack on Iran, and Trump’s military celebration of his own birthday.
I’m going to try to get done early today, maybe by 11 EDT. Then on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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 Weekly Sift 