The Weekly Sift

OK, you’ve already heard about the Signal chat where a journalist was admitted to a Principals meeting discussing highly classified information. It’s been has been widely discussed all over the media. So ordinarily, I’d just find a good link summarizing the whole thing and post it with minimal comment.

But I feel like this event deserves some special care, and I also believe I have some personal insight. (I used to have a Top Secret clearance, so I’ve listened to many briefings about how secrets are supposed to be safeguarded.) It’s a complicated multi-layer screw-up that is easy to mischaracterize and deflect. So this week’s featured post is “How Bad Was the Signal Fiasco?” It should be out shortly.

The weekly summary will cover tomorrow’s special elections, RFK Jr.’s ongoing war against vaccination, the administration’s continuing threats against Greenland, the most recent tariffs, and the latest on the legal battle to restrain the Trump administration’s illegal actions. It should be out around noon.

To me, two stories stand out above all others this week: Senate Democrats deciding not to shut down the government, and the arrest of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. I’ll cover the first in the weekly summary and the second in a featured post.

The Khalil case raises two fundamental issues: (1) Is freedom of speech a human right that our government should respect for all people under its jurisdiction? Or is freedom of speech a privilege of citizenship that even legal permanent residents don’t have? (2) Do we still respect the famous quote attributed to Voltaire, that we will defend someone’s freedom to say something we disagree with?

The featured post will discuss those issues, and should appear maybe 10 or so EDT.

Chuck Schumer’s acquiescence with the Republican continuing resolution to keep the government open is partly an issue of strategy (Would Trump give up anything to reopen the government, or would he actually welcome keeping it closed?), but also a question of planning: Even if Schumer didn’t expect House Republicans to hang together enough to pass their continuing resolution, he should have had a plan covering that possibility. As it was, Democrats looked weak and discombobulated.

The week also saw a number of developments in the fight against Trump in the courts. And several writers posted discussions of the secondary effects of Trump trashing America’s image overseas. The summary should be out sometime between noon and 1.

I have errands to run this morning, so the timing of posts will be a little iffy. And there won’t be a Sift next week, but for a good reason rather than a bad one: Friends in Hawaii have invited me to visit.

The featured post this week will examine where we are in the struggle to avoid autocracy. In general, I’ve noticed this last month that I’ve been calmer about the Trump administration than most of my friends, and this post is an attempt to explain why. There are three very different reasons, only one of which relates to optimism.

First, dealing with a personal disaster — my wife’s unexpected death in December — has put the more abstract problem of national autocracy in perspective. I realize this is a very self-centered, maybe even selfish, perspective. But there it is.

Second, I had my political depression after the election. If you took Project 2025 seriously during the campaign (which I did), nothing that has happened these last five weeks has been all that surprising. Of course there was going to be a shock-and-awe campaign to claim power unauthorized by the Constitution. Of course the guardrails of American democracy were going to face a severe test.

But third, we really don’t know yet how that test is going to come out, so defeatism is unwarranted. The scenario for getting through this is still intact. (My definition of “getting through this” is that we have meaningful elections in 2026 and 2028, and restore people to power who believe in the Constitution.) Here’s how it goes: Public opinion shifts against Trump, making his support in Congress waver enough that the slim Republican majorities in the House and Senate can’t stay together well enough to rubber-stamp his actions. Courts rule against his most illegal actions, and the Supreme Court refuses to overrule them. Trump feels the pressure of unpopularity and Republican defections enough that he doesn’t defy those rulings. Republicans get clobbered in the 2025 Virginia elections in November, sending shockwaves through the party. Democrats retake at least one house of Congress in 2026.

That scenario is still possible, but fragile. The Supreme Court might decide democracy has run its course. Trump might defy court orders and rely on a full call-out-the-troops response to put down mass public demonstrations. And the military chain of command might hold, so that American troops slaughter their countrymen and herd them into prison camps. That’s still possible too.

We’re going to find out a lot in the next month or two, as the American people realize that Trump’s “temporary” actions aren’t that temporary and aren’t solving the problems Trump campaigned on; Congress deals with the budget; and cases work their way up to the Supreme Court. Everything could still go south, but it also might not.

As I said, I don’t know when either that or the weekly summary will post.

This week resistance to illegal Trump/Musk actions began to surface: Judges issued orders to halt a number of unconstitutional practices, while Republican-leaning groups noticed that federal funding freezes hurt them as well — and they heard Musk lie about their own activities, not just those of distant liberals. A few Republican senators began to stand up for their affected constituents, while still not connecting the dots about how the Trump/Musk actions are hurting Americans in general.

I’ll cover that in the weekly summary. The featured post is a look back into a poorly understood episode of American history: the Populist movement of the late 1800s. In general, I’m trying to understand how America got from the Gilded Age and the robber barons to antitrust laws and the New Deal. It wasn’t just the Depression, it involved a larger change in what David Graeber called “political common sense”. How did that happen? Late-1800s Populism is a piece of that puzzle, and it tells us something not just about what we need to do next, but illuminates how the MAGA movement became what it is.

That post should come out between 10 and 11 EST. I’ll try to get the summary done by noon.

I know most of you are sick of reading about Trump and his various plans, plots, and threats. Unfortunately, that’s really what the news has been during his administration’s first week, so that’s what I’m writing about.

That said, I’ll be trying to maintain a different attitude than a lot of the media, even the liberal media. My focus will be on what you need to pay attention to and what kind of attention you should pay. I’ll try to avoid both normalizing and the hand-wringing, isn’t-that-awful coverage we see so much of.

This week’s featured post is “Week One”, covering the inaugural address and some of the early executive orders. I’ll be pointing you to good sources of information and recommending some Substack blogs to follow. I wish I could do an exhaustive classification of all the orders, but there are just too many of them.

Sadly, the weekly summary will also center on Trump. Or, more precisely, people reacting to Trump: Greenland’s prime minister, Bishop Budde, and a few others. I’ll also discuss Elon’s Nazi salute, but from the point of view of how we should think about and/or respond to this kind of trolling.

I just started a cold last night, so I don’t know what to predict about my energy. Posts will appear when they appear, and be as close to complete as I can manage.