Despotic Encroachment

It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.

– George Washington, The Farewell Address (1796)

This week’s featured posts are “The Shutdown Gets Serious” and “Could a Third Term Happen?“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. The most important article to read this week came from the NYT’s Editorial Board: “Are We Losing Our Democracy?“. It lists 12 traits of an autocratic regime, and details how Trump has achieved some and is making inroads on the others. Articles like this one make it clear that words like “autocrat”, “fascist”, etc. or not just insults or evidence of Trump derangement. They are clear assessments of where we are.
  • Climate change. I’m late to notice, but the rhetoric of climate denial has changed.
  • Gaza. Nominally there is still a ceasefire, but the killing continues: “On Tuesday, Israeli airstrikes killed more than 100 Palestinians, at least 66 of them women and children, in the deadliest day since Donald Trump declared the war was over. Israel said the bombings were in response to an attack in Rafah city that killed a soldier carrying out demolitions there.”
  • Ukraine. Russia continues a slow and costly advance in the Donetsk region, while Ukrainian drones get increasingly effective inside Russia.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was talking about the shutdown

A lapse in SNAP benefits and higher premiums on ObamaCare policies both kicked in on Saturday. That’s the topic of one of the featured posts.

This week Trump floated his solution to the shutdown, which is the one I predicted two weeks ago: The Senate should do away with the filibuster so that he wouldn’t have to negotiate with Democrats. So far, Senate Republicans don’t seem interested.

and tariffs

The Senate voted three times this week to revoke the national emergencies Trump declared to raise tariffs on Canada, Brazil, and the broad range of countries in his “liberation day” tariffs. The votes will have no practical effect because the House will not concur and Trump would veto the resolution if they did, but they do mark the first stirrings of resistance in the Senate, at least among Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell.

Friday the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether the  International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 really works the way Trump says it does, and gives him the power to do whatever he wants with tariffs. Lower courts have said no, but that’s because they were doing law; the Supreme Court may be doing something else.

The Brazil and Canada tariffs should be the biggest piece of evidence against Trump having the power he claims. Both seem to have less to do with national security and more with Trump’s personal rages.

He imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil because that country prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, for doing essentially the same thing Trump did on January 6. He recently raised tariffs on Canada because the province of Ontario produced an ad he didn’t like.

and tomorrow’s elections

Odd-numbered years are usually slow for elections, but there are a few: Tomorrow New York City will elect a new mayor, and Virginia and New Jersey will elect new governors.

Democrats are favored in the Virginia and New Jersey races.

In NYC, Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary, but the party establishment has not united around him. Former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo is running as an independent. Mamdani is ahead in the polls.

Mamdani is a charismatic candidate who appeals to young voters. He is also Muslim, has been critical of Israel, and is part of the Democratic Socialist wing of the party. Big money is being spent to take him down, but it doesn’t seem to be working.

and the White House

Three stories of Trump’s abuses of power got attention these last two weeks:

  • tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a massive gilded ballroom
  • filing claims against his own Justice Department asking for $230 million
  • hinting at a run for a third term

The third term, which he later backed away from, at least for now, is covered in one of the featured posts. As for the $230 million,

The president insisted on Tuesday that the government owes him “a lot of money” for previous justice department investigations into his conduct, while at the same time asserting his personal authority over any potential payout.“

It’s interesting, ’cause I’m the one that makes the decision, right?” Trump said at the White House, responding to questions about administrative claims he filed seeking roughly $230m related to the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago and the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The New York Times had reported the claims on Tuesday.

Trump’s comment lays out a circular situation: Trump as president would in effect decide whether Trump as claimant receives taxpayer money for investigations into Trump as defendant.

The circularity is the only reason these claims might be paid. Both the Mar-a-Lago search and the Russia investigation were totally justified, and his claims otherwise would be laughed out of court. Trump says he would give the money to charity, but he’s said things like that before.

You might wonder how Trump can spend $300 million on a ballroom without consulting Congress, but he says he’s raising the money privately, from a list of individuals and corporations all of whom will likely want government favors at some point. In the long run, taxpayers would probably be better off paying for the ballroom themselves.

He also hasn’t consulted the National Capital Planning Commission. Hillary Clinton made the key point: “It’s not his house.”

and you also might be interested in …

Here’s a typical story about how the Trump administration responds to corruption: Last Sunday, FBI Director Kash Patel began taking heat on social media for going to State College, PA on an FBI jet so that he could watch his girlfriend sing the national anthem at a wrestling match. The plane then went on to Nashville, where she lives.

Clearly somebody should be fired for this, and somebody was: the guy who oversees the FBI’s jet fleet. Patel appears to blame him for the story getting out, despite the fact that his flights were trackable by the general public.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) also considers disinformation to be part of its mission, which is how they got interested in climate change. They put out a report about how climate denialists have changed their tactics in 2024. (But I just noticed it this week). They distinguish “old denial” (which says climate change either isn’t happening or isn’t caused by humans burning fossil fuels) from “new denial” (which creates doubt about what can or should be done).

They had an AI algorithm produce and examine transcripts from more than 12K YouTube videos posted by climate denialists between 2018 and 2023. This graphic explains what they found.

It’s worth noting that President Trump mixes old and new denial. In September he said this to the UN General Assembly:

This “climate change,” it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.

The PBS article I quoted this from debunks many of Trump’s claims.

One big step towards the MAGA takeover of American media is faux-independent Bari Weiss becoming editor-in-chief of CBS News. How this happened is an instructive lesson in media consolidation: CBS was taken over by Viacom in 2000, spun off in 2005, then reacquired in 2019. Viacom took the name of its subsidiary Paramount, reflecting its entertainment-media focus.

Paramount then merged with Skydance. The merger was announced in 2024, but needed Justice Department approval to avoid antitrust issues. That approval came in August, after Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle a his meritless lawsuit against CBS’ 60 Minutes, and then cancelled Stephen Colbert’s show after the comedian called the settlement what it was: “a big fat bribe”.

Paramount-Skydance is now controlled by the Ellison family, who are Trump supporters. Larry Ellison, who co-founded Oracle, is #2 on Forbes list of the richest people in the US. He was briefly the richest man in the world in September with a net worth over $300 billion. His son David Ellison is the CEO of Paramount Skydance. David is the one who picked Weiss to head CBS News.

The best intro to Bari Weiss comes from John Oliver, who focused on her three weeks ago.

Now Bari Weiss is choosing the next anchor of CBS Evening News, which was the most important job in news back when Walter Cronkite had it. Most of the names being kicked around are from Fox News.

You might wonder why Texas AG Ken Paxton would do this:

Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue for deceptively marketing Tylenol to pregnant mothers despite knowing that early exposure to acetaminophen, Tylenol’s only active ingredient, leads to a significantly increased risk of autism and other disorders.

I mean, it’s not like anyone but RFK Jr. actually believes Tylenol significantly increases autism risk. So how can Paxton hope to win a suit claiming that Tylenol’s makers “knew” something none of the experts in the field know today?

Amanda Marcotte explains: Paxton has lost his lead over incumbent Senator John Cornyn for the GOP senate nomination in Texas. He desperately needs Trump’s endorsement, so he is demonstrating to the Mad King that he is willing to act on whatever nonsense the regime spits out.

and let’s close with a song parody

The Marsh Family adapts a Paul Simon tune to the RFK Jr. era: “Measles and Polio Down in the Schoolyard.”

November 3, 2025 – 12:42 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

The Shutdown Gets Serious

If you’re poor in America, food and healthcare just got way more expensive.

Up until Saturday, most Americans had been able ignore the government shutdown. If you didn’t work for the federal government, weren’t visiting the national parks, and weren’t waiting for a government office to process your application for some kind of benefit, the shutdown seemed like one of those inside-the-beltway issues. Politicians were arguing with other politicians about the kinds of things politicians argue about. Trump wanted you to blame Democrats for something. Democrats wanted you to blame Trump. Blah, blah, blah.

Then on November 1, two things happened:

  • SNAP (food stamp) payments ended for 42 million Americans.
  • The ObamaCare open enrollment period began without the subsidies that have kept premiums affordable for 22 million Americans.

Both of these are important, but the loss of SNAP benefits is more immediate. The ObamaCare plans are for 2026, so we’re still a couple months away from people skipping needed medical care. But the SNAP lapse is already causing suffering: Americans who otherwise might have used their SNAP cards to buy food for their families Saturday were unable to do so. State and local governments, as well as private charities, are trying to step into the breach, but many people are still falling through the cracks.

The mind-boggling thing about the SNAP snafu is how avoidable it was: The Department of Agriculture has $6 billion in contingency funds that it could use, but it initially refused to do so. Friday, a federal judge ordered USDA to allocate the funds “as soon as possible”, and to report back by noon today. A second federal judge stopped short of issuing an order, but explained why such an order might come soon.

At core, [the Trump administration’s] conclusion that USDA is statutorily prohibited from funding SNAP because Congress has not enacted new appropriations for the current fiscal year is erroneous. To the contrary, Defendants are statutorily mandated to use the previously appropriated SNAP contingency reserve when necessary and also have discretion to use other previously appropriated funds as detailed below.

Other funds would clearly be necessary to pay full benefits, because SNAP costs $8.6 billion every month.

As of this morning, it was not clear what the Trump regime would do: Trump himself claims to be confused about what the government can do, is asking for more specific guidance from the judges, and warned that payments would be “delayed” in any case. Up until now, Trump has been cavalier about spending any money that isn’t nailed down; but now suddenly he is worried about the legal details.

All in all, his Truth Social post seemed more concerned with scoring political points than with human suffering.

I do NOT want Americans to go hungry just because the Radical Democrats refuse to do the right thing and REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT. … The Democrats should quit this charade where they hurt people for their own political reasons, and immediately REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT. If you use SNAP benefits, call the Senate Democrats, and tell them to reopen the Government, NOW! Here is Cryin’ Chuck Schumer’s Office Number: (202) 224-6542

We should know more this afternoon.

Unlike the lapse in SNAP benefits, the ObamaCare premium subsidies are not a consequence of the shutdown. They are, instead, what the shutdown has come to be about: The “clean” continuing resolution that Republicans want has no money to fund them; Senate Democrats are withholding their votes until an extension happens.

In other words: If Democrats cave, the government will open but the ObamaCare policies will still cost much more.

Republicans claim to be concerned about the price increase — which probably affects more of their constituents than Democrats’ — but they have no plan for dealing with it. Similarly, the Big Beautiful Bill they passed will cause millions of Americans to lose health coverage under Medicaid. Senator Hawley is so concerned about this that he has introduced legislation to reverse the Medicaid cuts he voted for.

Majority Leader Thune has offered Democrats a vote on extending the ObamaCare subsidies, if they first pass his resolution to open the government. But forcing a vote is only a way to score political points; it doesn’t help anyone pay for their health insurance.

Speaker Johnson continues to call ObamaCare unworkable, but again, Republicans have no alternative plan. We have been waiting for Trump’s healthcare plan since 2015.

To me, Trump’s finger-pointing raises an explanation for this mess: He believes his own propaganda, and believes the American people believe his propaganda.

If it were true that the American people broadly blame Democrats for the shutdown, then every new example of suffering caused by the shutdown would put more pressure on them to cave. So it would make political sense for the regime to engineer as much suffering as possible.

That seems to be what it has done.

But the public hasn’t been blaming the Democrats for the shutdown, and these two issues — hunger and health care — are where Democrats have their most credibility. So it doesn’t help Trump’s cause that a judge has to order him to feed the hungry. And since extending ObamaCare subsidies is exactly what Democrats have been demanding, letting them lapse is clearly Trump’s fault.

Finally, we get to Mike Johnson’s posturing: He has kept the House in recess since September 19. He claims there is no need to meet, because the House did its job then by passing a continuing resolution. By keeping the House in recess, he has made an excuse not to seat Democrat Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who won a special election September 23. Grijalva would be the 218th signature on the discharge petition to force a vote on subpoenaing the Epstein files.

Johnson denies that protecting Trump from Epstein revelations is his motive. But all his rationalizations are starting to run thin. The continuing resolution the House passed only funds the government until November 21, which probably isn’t enough time to pass the appropriation bills needed to fund the government for all of FY 2026. So the House will be needed again soon, one way or another.

November 3, 2025 – 9:51 am Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

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Could a Third Term Happen?

It’s far-fetched but not impossible.

For months Trump has alternately encouraged and then tamped down speculation that he might seek a third term. Wednesday, he acknowledged the constitutional reality that “it’s pretty clear I’m not allowed to run”. But since it’s always a mistake to assume that any Trump statement is his final word, the third term idea will likely surface again at some point.

So how seriously should we take this? My conclusion: moderately seriously. Pay attention, but don’t lose your mind about it. That’s an attitude I’m trying to model this post.

The main reason to take it somewhat seriously is this: If Trump floated an idea like this and nobody pushed back, before long he’d be doing it. As you may remember from junior high, that’s how bullies operate. Every abuse, from pulling your pony tail to rape, starts as a joke. “Why do you have to be like that? I was just kidding around.” But if your response to the joke indicates that he might get away with it, it’s game on.

The main reason not to take it seriously is the 22nd Amendment, which seems pretty clear:

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

And yet, Steve Bannon believes he has a way to get around that prohibition.

“There’s many different alternatives,” Bannon said when asked about the 22nd Amendment. “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is.”

And Trump himself said back in March “There are methods which you could do it.”

So let’s think about what those methods might be.

Is there a loophole? Sort of. In a New Yorker conversation with Michael Luo, Ruth Marcus explains:

Note that it says “elected . . . more than twice,” not “serve as President for more than two terms.” The way—maybe—to get around that would be to have Trump elected Vice-President, and then to have whoever is the incumbent President resign to make way for a third Trump term. (Trump himself, by the way, said that this approach was “too cute,” and that “the people wouldn’t like that.”)

Alternatively, and even more fancifully, Trump could be elected Speaker of the House (you don’t have to be a House member to be Speaker), putting him in line for the Presidency, and both the elected President and Vice-President would clear the decks for him.

Marcus’ “maybe” depends on how the Supreme Court interprets the 12th Amendment, which says:

But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

Again, though, Trump could argue that he’s not ineligible to be president, he’s just ineligible to be elected president. So maybe the same loophole covers the 12th Amendment too. An honest Supreme Court — especially one that puts so much emphasis on the original intent of the laws — would not allow this, but we don’t have an honest Supreme Court. So maybe it flies.

Could it work? Not if the 2028 election has anything to do with the will of the American people. Remember a few things:

Not to mention the fact that Trump is right: The plan to run a stooge (or two stooges) who then resign is too cute for the public to back. And then there’s the execution problem: Would you trust J. D. Vance to resign once he had been sworn in as President? Trump doesn’t seem like the trusting type.

Summing up: In any free and fair election, a Stooge/Trump or Stooge/Stooge ticket would lose in a landslide. Anybody who seriously proposes the plan, i.e., Steve Bannon, must also be planning to rig the election in a significant way. A small amount of corner-cutting wouldn’t do the job.

Whether that can happen or not is a different topic.

Does Trump understand that it won’t work? Hard to say. He seemed to understand it Wednesday, but I have long subscribed to the theory of Trump’s mind that David Roberts enunciated in 2016:

When he utters words, his primary intent is not to say something, to describe a set of facts in the world; his primary intent is to do something, i.e., to position himself in a social hierarchy. … Even to call him dishonest, to say he “lies,” doesn’t quite seem to capture it. The whole notion of lying presumes beliefs — to lie is to say something that one believes to be false, to knowingly assert something that does not correspond to the facts.

It’s not that Trump is saying things he believes to be false. It’s that he doesn’t seem to have beliefs at all, not in the way people typically talk about beliefs — as mental constructs stable across time and context. Rather, his opinions dissolve and coalesce fluidly, as he’s talking, like oil on shallow water. That’s why he gives every indication of conviction, even when, say, denying that he has said something that is still posted on his Twitter feed.

Wednesday, Trump found it useful to agree with people like Mike Johnson that he can’t run. (Of course, he also said this was “sad”, because “I have my highest numbers that I’ve ever had”, which is completely delusional. So Wednesday’s comment did not come at some moment of peak lucidity.) Tomorrow, he may find it useful to agree with Steve Bannon.

What makes this problematic for Republicans in general, even the fascist ones, is the Mad King problem: No one can tell Trump he is wrong. So if he starts asserting that one of the third-term scheme works, and in fact works easily because he’s so popular, who’s going to tell him that some serious election-rigging is needed?

Meanwhile, no Republican legally entitled to compete for the presidency can start organizing a campaign, for fear of antagonizing the Mad King. Typically, the primary field starts to assemble in earnest after the midterm elections, so there’s still time. But Democrats like Governors Newsom and Pritzker are already starting to position themselves. Republican candidates would too if the field were clear.

What does the third-term talk accomplish for Trump? At least for his followers (or for Republicans intimidated by his followers), talk of a third term pushes back the moment when he becomes a lame duck. No one is going to risk breaking the law for him if they anticipate someone else holding the presidency soon. But the fantasy of Trump remaining in office indefinitely keeps that realization at bay.

November 3, 2025 – 8:46 am Categories: Articles | Comments (10)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Saturday, the government shutdown started to bite in a much more serious way: SNAP benefits for 42 million Americans failed to appear as scheduled, and the open enrollment period for 2026 ObamaCare policies started without the federal subsidies that made those policies affordable for 22 million Americans. Suddenly, it’s not just politicians finger-pointing at other politicians; it’s millions of households wondering how they’re going to afford necessities.

One featured post will describe what’s going on there, and with the shutdown in general. That still needs some work, and probably won’t be out until 10 EST or later. But I already have a second post written about Trump’s possible plans for a third term. Right now, his latest word is that a third term isn’t possible; but the idea has risen and fallen so many times that I’m sure it will be back at some point. So I thought I’d address how it might or might not work. That should be out shortly.

That still leaves the weekly summary a lot to cover: the destruction of the White House to make room for the Epstein Ballroom; tomorrow’s elections in New York City, Virginia, and New Jersey; Trump’s demand that his own Justice Department pay him $230 million; the Senate’s attempt to end Trump’s tariffs just as the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments about their legality; the NYT laying out the case for calling the Trump regime autocratic; and a few other things. That should be out by maybe noon or 1.

November 3, 2025 – 8:24 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

In Free Countries

For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.

– Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)

No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on November 3.

This week’s featured post is “The Resistance Stiffens“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. The American People pushed back a little this week. That’s the subject of the featured post.
  • Climate change. Lots of statistics get thrown around about climate change, but the most important one is the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere. In 2024, atmospheric CO2 jumped by a record 3.5 parts per million, to reach a record 424 ppm.
  • Gaza. The ceasefire didn’t last long.
  • Ukraine. Over the last few weeks, Trump did what he does so often: floated an idea to support Ukraine (by supplying it with long-range Tomahawk missiles), got a lot of positive headlines for it, but then backed down after talking to Vladimir Putin. Now he’s planning to meet Putin in Budapest, a move that supports not just Putin, but Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, Putin’s only ally in the EU. Trump likes to appear independent of Putin, but remains incapable of standing up to him.

This week’s developments

This week’s theme: resisting the regime

That’s the topic of the featured post, which covers the No Kings rallies, the revolt of the Pentagon press corps, universities refusing to sign Trump’s compact, Democrats standing firm on the budget, and an appeals court ruling keeping troops out of Chicago.

One minor bit of resistance: Juries are refusing to convict people the regime should never have charged.

Yesterday the NYT published the most clueless article I’ve seen in some while: “It’s 2025, and Democrats Are Still Running Against Trump“. Apparently, we’re supposed to ignore the fascist takeover that’s happening and talk about more normal political issues.

I also love the idea that we should take advice from “a veteran Republican admaker and political strategist” who says “If I were running a Democratic campaign, I would be attempting to broaden my coalition beyond a visceral hatred of Trump”.

Maybe seeing democracy collapsing before their very eyes can change the minds of previously uncommitted voters. Anti-Trump might become a very broad coalition indeed.

and voting rights

John Roberts has been chipping away at the Voting Rights Act for years, enabling a great many voter suppression laws in red states. Now he seems ready to finish the job.

Basically, Roberts wants every government action to be color-blind. That sounds good if you don’t think about it too hard. But when generations of racism has created a problem, how do you address that problem without mentioning race?

Wednesday, the Court heard arguments in Louisiana v Callais, and the issue in question is whether states can engage in racial gerrymandering — the only kind of gerrymandering that current interpretations of the law bans.

Not only is this the kind of thing Roberts has wanted to do his whole career, it might have the side benefit of making it virtually impossible for Democrats to recapture the House in 2026, or maybe ever. An analysis in the NYT says that in some scenarios, Democrats would have to win the national popular vote by 5% or more in order to get a majority of House seats.

and the shutdown

Republicans are claiming that Democrats just didn’t want to fold before the No Kings rallies, but that they will now that the rallies are over. I’m not seeing it.

At stake here is the narrative of Trump’s invincibility: If he has to offer a concession, even a popular one, then resistance is productive. If Democrats cave without getting anything, then they’re useless.

A local TV station suggests five dates that are pressure points for the shutdown: three paycheck dates, the open-enrollment starting date for the ObamaCare exchanges (November 1), and Thanksgiving, when millions of Americans will try to travel and air-traffic controllers would still be working without pay.

I hear a lot of speculation of the form: “They’ll have to resolve this by X, because otherwise this painful thing will happen.” But which side does the pain move? Either Trump makes a concession or he doesn’t, so there’s no obvious compromise on that.

The only way out I see is for Republicans to nuke the filibuster in the Senate. Then they can run over Democrats without giving up anything.

and the Navy murdering Venezuelan fishermen

From the beginning, I’ve been appalled by the policy of blowing up boats in the Caribbean because someone suspects they might be carrying drugs. Appalled, but also puzzled: What’s the point here? Even if the suspicions are true, drug smuggling is not a capital offense, and the people on the boats have been denied due process, or any kind of process at all. The boats could have been stopped by the Coast Guard and the drugs confiscated. And boats from Venezuela are not the main avenue for drug smuggling anyway. So who is better off because the boats are destroyed and the people on it dead?

Well, it seems like the officer in charge has some of the same doubts. Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of the U.S. Southern Command that oversees operations in the Caribbean, quit his job one year into a three-year assignment, and will retire after a 37-year career.

Thursday was the sixth such attack, and the first one to leave survivors, who have been captured.

The strike, which President Donald Trump confirmed Friday, was the sixth known strike on a boat allegedly involved in drug trafficking. But it appeared to mark the first time an attack had not killed everyone on board.

The detention marks the first time that the Trump administration’s military campaign targeting drug traffickers has resulted in the US holding prisoners, and it sets up a complicated legal and policy situation for the administration. … The men held by the US Navy could hypothetically petition the courts to rule on the legality of their detention in what’s known as a habeas corpus claim, Finucane noted — a pathway followed by a number of detainees in the past that could reveal more information about the Trump administration’s secretive legal rationale for the strikes.

We may also finally find out what evidence the regime has that these boats are smuggling drugs. It’s a serious question whether these are actually drug smugglers, or just fishermen in the wrong place.

and you also might be interested in …

Montana has come up with a creative proposal to get corporate money out of politics. Prior to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, governments controlled corporate contributions directly, by passing campaign-finance laws. Jay Kuo:

The High Court’s decision rested on the notion that corporations, long defined as “legal persons,” are entitled to First Amendment protections just like actual people. Therefore, they held, it is a violation of their “freedom of speech” to put restrictions on what their money can say and do, even in politics.

We know what happened next. Big corporations, through super PACs and outside groups, flooded the system, drowning out individuals’ voices. And there seemed no way to stop it, short of a constitutional amendment that would allow limits on corporate political spending.

Just this summer, a federal court citing Citizens United struck down a Maine law that limited contributions to political action committees to $5,000 per donor, whether that donor was an individual or a corporation.

Critics of Citizens United like to talk about “corporate personhood”, the idea that a corporation has the rights of a human being. A constitutional amendment eliminating corporate personhood (a right invented by the Supreme Court itself) seemed to be the only way out.

But a new idea is being pushed in Montana: Even if corporations are people, they are still defined by the state that incorporates them, and only have the powers their charters give them. Organizers hope to have a ballot initiative in 2026 that revises Montana’s corporate code to take away corporations’ power to contribute to political campaigns. Further, it would allow corporations incorporated in other states to have only the same powers as Montana corporations when they operate in Montana.

Unless the Supreme Court comes up with some new oligarchic doctrine knocking this down, other states could imitate it.

Vox’ Ian Milhiser lists the five safeguards we used to have against rogue government agencies like ICE, and how the Supreme Court has blocked them.

Is anyone really surprised to discover that when Young Republicans chat among themselves, the conversation turns racist and fascist?

One more reason why Pete Hegseth should never have been allowed anywhere near the SecDef office: He OK’d a plan to celebrate the birthday of the Marine Corps by firing live artillery shells over Interstate 5 in California.

Governor Newsom ordered I-5 closed, and the administration widely criticized him for doing so. But then a shell misfired, and shrapnel rained down on J. D. Vance’s security detail.

Trump commuted the 7-year prison sentence of former congressman George Santos. There has never been any question about Santos’ guilt, so I can only surmise two justifications: (1) Trump doesn’t think Trump supporters should be punished for committing crimes. (2) Being a fraudster himself, Trump identifies with fraudsters.

Vox’ Bryan Walsh writes an optimistic piece about cities becoming more bike-able. Grist has an article on the same topic.

and let’s close with something unique

I don’t normally do much sports coverage, but it’s worth noting that in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, Shohei Ohtani produced what is probably the greatest single-game performance in the history of baseball. Ohtani pitched six scoreless innings and hit three home runs in a 5-1 victory that sent the LA Dodgers to the World Series.

The only player comparable to Ohtani, Babe Ruth, had two 3-homer games in his career and also had scoreless pitching starts in the post-season, but never both in the same game.

October 20, 2025 – 1:12 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (6)

The Resistance Stiffens

Chicago on Saturday.

The No Kings rallies were the most obvious signs of resistance to Trump’s authoritarian rule, but congressional Democrats, Pentagon reporters, major universities, and an appeals court also refused to cave to him.

Saturday I had a choice to make: attend the No Kings rally where I live in Bedford, Mass., or go to the much bigger rally in Boston, which stood a chance of making national news. I opted for the local rally. At one point I counted over 500 people in attendance before I lost count. I would guess there were 600 or more. That’s in a town of about 14,000, at a rally that probably didn’t draw a lot of out-of-town people because all the surrounding towns had their own No Kings rallies.

The independent Strength In Numbers website estimated that 5.2 million people participated nationwide, and possibly as many as 8.2 million.

Our estimate is based on reports from local officials, local organizers, and attendees, and suggests the count from organizers — who report 7 million participants nationwide — may be a bit optimistic (but is not impossible). Still, regardless of whether the precise number is 5, 6, 7, or 8 million, Saturday’s events are very likely the biggest single-day protest event since 1970, surpassing even the 2017 Women’s March demonstrations against Trump.

The largest rallies were in blue states, with 320K in New York City and 225K in Chicago, but 20K came out in Austin, Texas and 10K in Boise, Idaho. No Kings was truly a national event.

The regime’s response. The organizers could hardly have asked for a better response from the Trump administration, because the regime’s disdain and even hatred for these millions of Americans only served to underline everything the rally speakers were saying.

Trump himself posted an AI-generated video on his Truth Social account, in which a crowned Trump flies a fighter jet labeled “King Trump” and drops sewage onto protesters in what appears to be New York. VP Vance posted a video to BlueSky in which Trump dons a crown and a robe, and brandishes a sword while Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer kneel and bow to him. White House spokesman responded to the protests with “Who cares?“

Leaders of democratic countries don’t act like this.

Presidents are, of course, within their rights to put their own spin on events. Trump might legitimately doubt whether these millions of people accurately represent the country, or even postulate a “silent majority” as Richard Nixon did a few years before he had to leave office in disgrace. Even if the majority of the country has turned against Trump — as the polls show — he is not obligated to agree with the People or change his unpopular policies.

But when large numbers of their citizens take to the streets in nonviolent protest — even Fox News had to admit that “there were no reports of violence or arrests at the afternoon rallies” — leaders of democracies don’t respond with a lordly “Who cares?” or publicize their fantasies of dropping shit on the dissenters. But would-be dictators might, because they don’t serve the People; the People are supposed to serve them.

It’s nearly impossible to imagine any Democratic president showing similar hostility to peaceful conservative protesters. (The January 6 protests, recall, included a violent takeover of the Capitol and sending over 100 police to the hospital. The subsequent arrests and trials were basic law enforcement, not persecution.) The moments conservatives point to as evidence of Democratic disdain — Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” and Obama’s “clinging to guns or religion” — don’t really hold up if you look at the full context, which included considerable empathy for Trump voters.

For example, Clinton put “half” of Trump voters in her basket of deplorables.

But the other basket, the other basket, and I know because I see friends from all over America here. I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas, as well as you know New York and California. But that other basket of people who are people who feel that government has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they are just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroine, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

The closest genuine analogy from recent years is the Tea Party protests against President Obama, which were much smaller than No Kings. Paul Waldman has numbers:

The Tea Party’s biggest distributed event was on tax day 2009, with 750 modestly attended protests. No Kings had 2,600. Its biggest single gathering was on 9/12/09 in DC, with somewhere between 75K and a few 100K participants.

Nonetheless, Obama had a delicate response to the Tea Party: The protests represented a “noble” American tradition of “healthy skepticism about government” as well as a noble tradition of “saying that government should pay its way”. But he engaged the ideas of the Tea Party, challenging them to specify how they would close the deficit.

The challenge, I think, for the tea party movement is to identify specifically what would you do. It’s not enough just to say, get control of spending. I think it’s important for you to say, I’m willing to cut veterans’ benefits, or I’m willing to cut Medicare or Social Security benefits, or I’m willing to see these taxes go up.

It is impossible to imagine Trump or Vance or Speaker Johnson or just about any Republican leader showing that level of respect for Americans who disagree with what they’re doing. We are “terrorists” or “pro-Hamas” or some other ridiculous thing. They can’t even admit that Americans don’t like seeing soldiers patrolling their streets, or American citizens being harassed because of their accents or the color of their skin.

In their fascist worldview, Trump IS America, so any dissent against Trump is un-American.

Resistance from the Pentagon press corps. No Kings wasn’t the only example of Americans refusing to bend their knees to the Mad King.

Nearly the entire Pentagon press corps cleaned out their desks and turned in their access passes Wednesday rather than submit to Pete Hegseth’s new attempt to control their coverage of his department.

News outlets were nearly unanimous in rejecting new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would leave journalists vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information — classified or otherwise — that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.

Even several Trump-supporting outlets, like Fox News, Newsmax, and The Wall Street Journal, have given up their Pentagon access.

“What they’re really doing, they want to spoon-feed information to the journalist, and that would be their story. That’s not journalism,” said Jack Keane, a retired U.S. Army general and Fox News analyst, said on Hegseth’s former network.

Yahoo News reported that the “hundreds” of credentialed Pentagon reporters had been reduced to 15. The Washington Post identified who they represent:

The list of signatories included four reporters from right-wing outlets: one from the website the Federalist, one from the Epoch Times newspaper, and two from the cable network One America News.

“The rest,” the WaPo says, “are freelancers, independent or work for media outfits based overseas.”

(Even Epoch Times’ Pentagon reporter resigned after his bosses signed the agreement. “I can no longer reconcile my role with the direction the paper has chosen, including its increasing willingness to promote partisan materials, publish demonstrably false information, & manipulate the reporting of its ground staff to shape the worldview of our readers.”)

Resistance in Congress. The government shutdown is now in entering its fourth week, with no end in sight. Democrats are holding out for a popular concession: They want long-term funding for the subsidies that make policies on the ObamaCare exchanges affordable. If those subsidies lapse on November 1, as they are currently scheduled to do, millions of Americans — many of them represented in Congress by Republicans — will see their health insurance premiums skyrocket.

But Trump’s myth of invincibility will be damaged if he makes any concessions at all, so Republicans are refusing to negotiate. So far the only offer on the table is that the Senate will hold a vote on the ObamaCare subsidies after Democrats vote for a continuing resolution to reopen the government.

This vote, of course, will just be a gesture, a chance for Democrats to vote for something that ultimately fails. It will help no one pay for health insurance.

The House, meanwhile, is still out of session. This has the added plum for Speaker Johnson that he doesn’t have to swear in Adelita Grijalva who won a special election weeks ago. Grijalva would be the 218th signature on the petition to vote on releasing the Epstein files, which Johnson does not want to do. (You have to wonder what in the files could be so bad for Trump that he’s willing to go through this.)

Republicans are predicting Democrats are about to fold, but I see no sign of it. They have a popular position and the public is mostly agreeing with them. Rather than offer Democrats anything substantive, the regime is upping the threat level, as authoritarians are wont to do.

Resistance from universities. Today is the deadline for nine universities to sign a compact with the Trump administration, submitting to regime-dictated policy changes in exchange for favorable decisions on federal funding.

The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education was sent on Oct. 1 to nine colleges — both private and public — and would require schools to bar transgender people from using restrooms or playing in sports that align with their gender identities, freeze tuition for five years, limit international student enrollment, and require standardized tests for admissions, among other things.

Of the original nine schools that received the document, as of Sunday night, six had indicated they are not planning on signing.

MIT was the first to refuse, followed by Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California.

On Friday, the White House held a virtual meeting with colleges that hadn’t yet sent rejection notices, including the University of Arizona, the University of Texas at Austin, Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College and the University of Virginia. Three additional schools were also invited: Arizona State University, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Kansas, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Subsequent to that meeting, Virginia and Dartmouth announced they wouldn’t be signing. No universities have signed.

Columbia was the first university to try to appease Trump, but although Trump claims every few weeks that Harvard is about to give in, its lawsuit is still in court.

Resistance in court. A three-judge panel from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals — including one Trump appointee — unanimously upheld a lower-court order blocking the regime from deploying National Guard troops in Illinois.

The case hinges on whether the regime’s claims of “rebellion” or of being “unable to execute the laws of the United States” are credible. The district court found that they were not credible, and the appeals court found no errors in that assessment that they needed to correct.

Political opposition is not rebellion. A protest does not become a rebellion merely because the protestors advocate for myriad legal or policy changes, are well organized, call for significant changes to the structure of the U.S. government, use civil disobedience as a form of protest, or exercise their Second Amendment right to carry firearms as the law currently allows. Nor does a protest become a rebellion merely because of sporadic and isolated incidents of unlawful activity or even violence committed by rogue participants in the protest.

Trump has appealed to the Supreme Court, which so far has shown itself to be corrupt and partisan in his favor. We’ll see if they’re willing to take this further step down the road to autocracy.

October 20, 2025 – 11:33 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This weekend was an encouraging one for Americans who want Trump’s bid for absolute power to fail. Something like 5 or 10 million of us turned out for No Kings rallies on Saturday, but that wasn’t the whole story. Democrats in Congress held firm, refusing to be railroaded into giving Trump what he wants with no negotiations or compromises. More universities turned down his demands for concessions in exchange for federal funding. Pentagon reporters turned in their credentials rather than consent to be mouthpieces for Pete Hegseth. An appeals court refused to let Trump deploy troops in Chicago.

All in all, the narrative that Trump can’t be resisted got interrupted this week. That doesn’t mean everything turns around from here, but it is a good sign. I’ll summarize in a featured post “The Resistance Stiffens”, which should post between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the failing ceasefire in Gaza, Trump backtracking once again on helping Ukraine, the Supreme Court looking ready to kill of the Voting Rights Act once and for all, a big leap in CO2, and a plan to get corporate money out of politics without a constitutional amendment. That should post a little after noon.

October 20, 2025 – 8:54 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Who will protect us from our protectors?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

– Juvenal, 2nd century AD

This week’s featured posts are “Only Trump represents the People” and “Fantasies of a vast, violent left-wing conspiracy“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. Chicago resists, while Portland responds with absurdity.
  • Climate change. There’s a new warning about a tipping point for coral reefs.
  • Gaza. The peace agreement is holding, at least for now. Hostages are coming home.
  • Ukraine. Russia is escalating the risks because it is running out of time to win.

This week’s developments

The Gaza Peace Plan

To my surprise, the peace agreement has held for an entire week. Today, Hamas released its surviving hostages. Here’s what The Atlantic is saying:

Just over a year ago, President Joe Biden had proposed a similar deal to the one pitched by Trump, to no avail. Did Trump succeed by pressuring Netanyahu in a way that his predecessor refused to do? Or did Israel simply degrade Hamas so badly that the terrorist group had no choice but to agree? Both factors seem to have played a role. Did Arab countries sway Hamas, or did the monarchies push Trump to change his stance? Both, again, seem to have been factors, according to our conversations with 10 officials from the United States, Israel, Arab nations, and Europe, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing talks. Now the question is whether the swap of hostages for prisoners unfolds as planned, and whether this week’s diplomatic success will amount to anything more than a blip in the fighting.

and the ongoing invasion of Chicago

The semi-comic superhero Peacemaker once said: “I made a vow to have peace. No matter how many people I have to kill to get it.” Trump’s ICE raids and National Guard deployments are similar: He would have us believe that he is dead set on stopping crime, no matter how many laws he has to break to do it. And if armed men have to drag you and your family out of your home in the middle of the night and zip-tie you all in the back of a van in order to keep you safe, Trump’s people are up to the job.

Here are just a few of the cases I ran into this week:

  • In Chicago, ICE shot a Presbyterian pastor the head with a pepper ball. ICE agents shot from the roof of their building. The pastor was among nonviolent protesters in the street.
  • A Delaware domestic violence victim with protected status and no criminal record was taken from her home in front of her children and flown to ICE’s Louisiana concentration camp, where she was held for nearly a month before relatives and the Delaware attorney general were able to find her and negotiate her release.
  • A 13-year-old boy got arrested by police in Everett, Massachusetts. His mother was called to pick him up, but before she could get there ICE had wisked him away to Virginia. “The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, [immigration lawyer Andrew] Lattarulo said.”
  • And this: “Doctors at Adventist Health White Memorial hospital in Boyle Heights told LAist that hospital administrators are allowing federal immigration agents to interfere in medical decisions and block doctors from properly treating detainees who need emergency care.”

I believe I could find large numbers of similar abuses if I looked harder. There is a crime wave in our cities, but it’s not immigrants: It’s ICE agents who pay no attention to the legal limits on their actions.

The big news this week mainly happened in court. The question to be resolved is how much deference courts owe a president who is either lying or completely deranged.

The laws that allow the President to federalize National Guard units and deploy them to American cities are all based on the existence of certain conditions, like “invasion” by a foreign nation, “rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States”, or “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States”.

Ordinarily, if it’s anything like a close call, courts defer to a president’s judgment about whether such conditions exist. But if a president can make stuff up, then the conditions might as well not be in the law at all. If that’s what Congress intended, the law should just say, “The President can take command of the National Guard whenever he wants.”

Obviously, the law doesn’t say that, so there is some limit to the deference a president is owed. Just as obviously, when Trump described Portland as “war ravaged”, he passed that limit. His claims about Chicago are only somewhat more credible.

What Trump intends to do with the troops is also a factor. If the problem he intends to address is “crime” rather than rebellion or insurrection, that is better in one way and worse in another. All cities have crime, so he is at least not delusional when he refers to crime as a problem. But Posse Comitatus and other laws put firm limits on the conditions under which National Guard or regular military units can participate in law enforcement (which has long been a state and local responsibility). So he can call up units, but it’s hard to see what they can do (legally) to solve a crime problem.

Here’s where things stand at the moment. In Portland, a federal district judge barred Trump from sending National Guard troops — either Oregon’s or some other state’s — to Portland. However, a three-judge appeals court panel reviewing the matter has two Trump appointees, and they seemed skeptical of the lower-court’s order. Portland’s Channel 6 anticipates that Trump will be allowed to deploy the guard to protect ICE offices and other federal buildings, but not to do any law enforcement.

A Chicago-based federal appeals court has allowed National Guard troops (including 200 from Texas) to remain under federal control in Illinois, but not to deploy to Chicago.

Meanwhile, large numbers of non-military federal agents — including many whose arms and uniforms make them almost indistinguishable from soldiers — have deployed to both cities and are engaging in violent activities: attacking apartment buildings, tear-gassing peaceful protesters and journalists, marching masked down Michigan Avenue, shooting protesters, and so on.

Governor Pritzker explains Trump’s plan:

This escalation of violence is targeted and intentional and premeditated. The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protestors are a mob, by firing gas pellets and teargas canisters at them. Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act, so that he can send military troops to our city. He wants to justify and normalize the presence of armed soldiers under his direct command.

The best thing anti-regime media outlets can do is post videos of what is actually happening in places like Chicago and Portland. Jimmy Kimmel has created a #ShowMeYourHellHole hashtag and asked people to post videos of what’s going on around them. Here’s my favorite so far.

Meanwhile, Portland is being Portland.

Crowds that have gathered daily and nightly outside the immigration facility in Oregon’s largest city in recent days have embraced the absurd, donning inflatable frog, unicorn, axolotl and banana costumes as they face off with federal law enforcement who often deploy teargas and pepper balls.

Sunday, there was a naked bike ride to protest against troops deploying into the city. See the closing for more Portlandish absurdity.

and the shutdown

There is essentially no progress to report. Democrats are refusing to approve a continuing resolution unless it addresses Obamacare subsidies, which are lapsing and will cause huge increases in many families’ health insurance premiums. Republicans are refusing any concessions, even though many of them realize their own constituents are being hurt.

This week the regime announced that it was using the excuse of the government shutdown to fire more federal workers. About 4600 were let go in all, which doesn’t sound like a lot compared to the size of the federal government. But certain areas were hit particularly hard: about 100 were fired from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Because, it’s not like substance abuse is a problem in America.

and the increasing evidence of Trump’s dementia

Just after midnight on Sunday, Trump posted this:

THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6. If this is so, which it is, a lot of very good people will be owed big apologies. What a SCAM – DO SOMETHING!!! President DJT

Anybody see the problem? January 6 happened at the end of the first Trump administration. There was no “Biden FBI”. Did Trump forget he was president then?

Friday, Trump held a news conference to announce an agreement with the British drug company AstraZeneca.

Under the deal, AstraZeneca agreed to sell its drugs to Medicaid, the health insurance program for lower-income Americans, at about the same prices that it offers to wealthy countries in Europe.

As with all Trump announcements, we’ll have to wait and see whether this agreement has any actual effect. But I will guarantee you one thing: It won’t have the effect Trump promised. Here’s what he said:

Now drug prices are going to be going down 100 percent, 400 percent, 600 percent, 1,000 percent, in some cases. … And as an example, one particular drug that’s hot, very hot, 654 percent, on inhalers, COPD and asthma, as well as certain diabetics medications. They’re going to be averaging about 654 percent reduction in price.

If math isn’t your strong suit, let me interpret: Suppose a pill costs $1. A 100% price cut means that AstraZeneca gives you the pill for nothing. 1000% of $1 is $10. So a price reduction of 1000% means AstraZeneca will pay you $9 to take the pill. A 654% reduction means they’ll pay you $5.54. Do you really believe that’s going to happen?

This wasn’t a slip of the tongue or a teleprompter screw-up. At the 5:20 mark in the White House video, the camera pulls back enough that you can see a poster on an easel. The poster claims that some drug has a 654% price reduction.

This raises two issues:

  • Does Trump’s brain really work so badly these days that he believes price reductions over 100% are possible? (Seth Meyers would say yes.)
  • Think about the number of people who had to be involved in producing that poster and setting it up. None of them had the courage to push back and tell the Mad King “This doesn’t make any sense.”

And finally, let’s look at the credulous press coverage Trump gets. The WaPo article on this event doesn’t mention his laughable claims. The NYT mentions this dementia symptom in the 7th paragraph of its article:

He spoke of delivering seemingly impossible price reductions, such as a “654 percent discount” on Bevespi Aerosphere, an AstraZeneca inhaler for patients with respiratory problems.

Seemingly impossible? Compare this to the wall-to-wall coverage Biden would get whenever he flubbed something.

During the week that the Special Counsel’s report came out, we examined the top 20 articles on the Times’ landing page every four hours. In that time, they published 26 unique articles about Biden’s age, of which 1 of them explored the possibility that Trump’s age was of equal or more concern.

Now, Trump outright babbles and the WaPo ignores it while the NYT tells us he seems to have made a mistake. Apparently the NYT believes it is a matter of opinion whether drug prices are going down more than 100%.

and you also might be interested in …

Don’t forget the No Kings protests on Saturday. There’s bound to be one in your area. You may not feel like you can do much to stop the Trump regime. But you can at least do this.

After a few months of relative peace, the trade war with China has restarted. China is restricting exports of rare-earth metals that are used in a wide variety of electronic devices. Trump is threatening 100% tariffs on imports from China. Investment markets crashed on Friday and have recovered somewhat today.

A new report says that the Earth’s coral reefs are at a tipping point and have entered into a period of “long-term decline”.

The report from scientists and conservationists warns the world is also “on the brink” of reaching other tipping points, including the dieback of the Amazon, the collapse of major ocean currents and the loss of ice sheets.

Back in May, Trump added a carrot to the stick he brandishes against undocumented immigrants: If they would self-deport, the US would fly them to any other country for free, and also give them an “exit bonus” cash payment. ProPublica followed up with immigrants who tried to take advantage of this offer. For many, it hasn’t worked out the way Trump described.

Trump’s Columbus Day proclamation combines Christian Nationalism with White Supremacy:

Upon his arrival, he planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith. … Guided by steadfast prayer and unwavering fortitude and resolve, Columbus’s journey carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas — paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776.

Isn’t it weird that the Native Americans aren’t more grateful for the “thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture” Columbus brought to them?

and let’s close with something relevant

OK, normally the closing is supposed to get your mind off the news. But the most amusing video I’ve seen this week is this animated music video of Portland’s dancing frogs.

October 13, 2025 – 12:05 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (11)

Only Trump represents the People

Pam Bondi’s disrespect of the Senate is only one example of a larger principle.

If you watched Pam Bondi’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, you saw a number of things:

  • an embarrassing performance aimed at impressing Donald Trump rather than the Senate or the American people.
  • several damaging confessions implicit in her refusal to answer simple questions.
  • an unprecedented level of disrespect for elected officials, and for Congress’ constitutional duty to oversee the Executive branch.

But if you took a step back, there was also something larger to see: an example of one of the key principles of fascism.

Previous American administrations, and democratic governments elsewhere in the world, have sometimes had contentious relationships with opposition parties or with the press. But I can think of no other example where those relationships devolved into such open hostility and disrespect as Bondi showed to Democratic senators, or as Trump regularly shows to the press.

The reason for this is simple and goes to the heart of the democratic project: Each of the three — the President, Congress, and the press — represents the People in a different way. Yes, the People elect the President, but they also elect representatives to Congress. And by choosing who they read or watch or otherwise pay attention to, the People informally anoint journalists to raise questions they are unable to raise themselves.

Previous administrations have understood this. So while their officials and spokespeople might banter with Congress or the press, while they might dodge some questions, spin their way out of others, and sometimes launch into long filibustering answers that made questioners give up, there was always some minimum level of decorum. To berate the questioners or insult them also insulted the American People that they represent.

But fascist regimes work according to a different principle: The Leader exists in a state of mystical identity with the Nation and its People. Guardian columnist and Princeton professor Jan-Werner Müller saw the writing on the wall after Trump’s first inaugural in 2017:

All populists oppose “the people” to a corrupt, self-serving elite the way Trump did. But not everyone who criticizes the powerful is a populist. What really distinguishes the populist is his claim that he and only he represents the real people. As Trump explained, because he now controls the executive, the people control the government. By implication, all opposition is illegitimate – if you oppose Trump, you oppose the people.

In particular, no one can adversarially question the Leader on behalf of the People, because the Leader IS the People.

This mindset is very obvious when Trump holds a press conference, and nearly as obvious when his press secretary Karoline Leavitt does: In the regime’s mind, the reporters represent no one but themselves. Trump is doing them a favor to speak to them at all, and that privilege can be revoked for the most trivial of reasons (as when AP got thrown out of the Oval Office press pool for refusing to accede to Trump’s demand to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico).

The same principle was at work in Bondi’s testimony. Previous department heads have shown at least a nominal respect for the congressional committees tasked with overseeing them, for the simple reason that the senators and representatives are elected officials and the department heads are not.

But Bondi’s performance took place inside a very different frame. Democratic senators like Dick Durbin or Sheldon Whitehouse may have gone through the technical procedure we call “elections”, but they do not in any way represent the People. Bondi directly represents Donald Trump himself, and Trump IS the People. So respect should flow from the senators to her, and not the other way around. (The Republican senators in the room seemed to understand this.)

This attitude was unfortunate for the People, because Democrats on the Committee actually did a good job asking questions that I think a lot of Americans would like to hear answered:

Trump supporters may see those as “gotcha” questions, but that depends on what the answers are. If Bondi could simply say “No such pictures have been found and we have no reason to believe any exist”, or “Our office was ready to indict Comey before the Truth Social post”, or “The story about agents flagging Trump’s name in the Epstein files is false” — where’s the gotcha? She might have followed any of those answers with “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to clear that up.”

In other words: If Bondi had good answers to those questions, Republicans should have asked them. But she didn’t and they didn’t.

Instead of answers, Bondi came armed with a binder of opposition research, so that whenever a senator posed a difficult question, she could counterattack with an accusation. She attacked several Democratic senators for taking money from an Epstein associate, or of not caring about corruption when Biden was president; called Adam Schiff a “failed lawyer” who should apologize to Trump; accused Dick Durbin of not caring about the safety of Illinois, and so on.

Some of her attacks were taken from the fever-swamps of Fox News and may or may not have any basis in reality. But beyond that, they did nothing to answer those excellent questions.

Probably the only person who enjoyed this performance was Donald Trump, who always loves to see his people insult his enemies. (Rick Wilson compared Bondi’s testimony to a faked orgasm: “loud, theatrical, sweaty, and meant to trick just one man into keeping her around by flattering his ego.”) But any smart Republican had to realize that it did their cause no good: By dodging the questions, Bondi all but admitted that the only true answers are bad: Trump is in the Epstein files, the photos do exist, Comey’s prosecution was motivated by Trump’s malice rather than evidence of wrongdoing, Homan kept the money, and so on.

I mean, if somebody accuses you of something and you can say “no”, don’t you say “no”? You can get all offended and angry about it in your next sentence, but you do say “no”.

Bondi, who was under oath and subject to lying-to-Congress charges should the Department of Justice ever start enforcing the law again, did not say “no”.

Speaker Mike Johnson and other congressional Republicans have provided another example of the fascist identification of the Leader with the Nation. They refer to the No Kings protests planned for October 18 as “hate America” rallies. In their fascist worldview, Trump is America. You can’t protest against Trump unless you hate America.

October 13, 2025 – 9:50 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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Fantasies of a vast, violent left-wing conspiracy

Trump’s security memorandum projects his friends’ behavior onto his enemies.

Executive Order NPSM-7 got past my attention when it was first released on September 25. Seeking to exploit MAGA’s horror at Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the memo paints rising political violence as purely a problem for the Left (when the vast majority of political violence for years has been on the Right). And it sees this left-wing violence as the result of a vast, well-funded conspiracy.

This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.

The sad thing here is that while there are occasional large-scale acts of political violence (like January 6), most examples of political violence against either Republicans (like Charlie Kirk) or Democrats (like Melissa Hortman) don’t require funding or manpower. The country is awash in guns, and you can train yourself to be a sniper without drawing much attention. But Republicans don’t want to do anything to curb guns, so they need another explanation.

Fortunately, they have one: NPSM-7’s conspiratorial vision builds on the longstanding right-wing fantasy that somebody (George Soros?) is paying people to protest against Trump. It makes perfect sense: Since everyone loves Trump, the large crowds that protest against him must be artificially generated. (For the record: Neither I nor anybody I know has ever received a payment for participating in anti-Trump protests. Even more telling: Nobody ever sends me emails trying to raise money to pay other protesters.) And once you have such a covert funding network, using it to promote violence — at least to a certain kind of mind — is an obvious next step.

The memo calls for federal law enforcement agencies to investigate these conspiracies and disrupt their plots before they result in violent acts. (So far, so good. If somebody had spotted Tyler Robinson sooner and taken his guns away, Kirk might still be alive. Ditto for Vance Luther Boelter and Hortman.) But it also calls to investigate

institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations, that are responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in the criminal conduct described in subsections (a) and (b) of this section.

Since there are no such institutions and individuals, this section’s only conceivable result would be harassing investigations and show-trial indictments like the ones against James Comey and Letitia James. The IRS is also instructed to get involved in the harassment of Trump’s political opponents:

The Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service (Commissioner) shall take action to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism. In addition, where applicable, the Commissioner shall ensure that the Internal Revenue Service refers such organizations, and the employees and officers of such organizations, to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution.

I have to wonder how “indirect” such financing can be and still trigger an investigation or indictment. Suppose there is one violent act during an otherwise peaceful protest, but 100 protesters get arrested. If the ACLU steps in to defend them in court, are they “indirectly” funding the single act of violence?

But even more interesting (to me, at least) is this section, which is clear projection. Trump knows his people are doing these things, so he imagines his enemies are too. (I have added links to make the projection clearer.)

These campaigns often begin by isolating and dehumanizing specific targets to justify murder or other violent action against them. They do so through a variety of fora, including anonymous chat forums, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions. These campaigns then escalate to organized doxing, where the private or identifying information of their targets (such as home addresses, phone numbers, or other personal information) is exposed to the public with the explicit intent of encouraging others to harass, intimidate, or violently assault them. As in the case of several ICE agents in Los Angeles being doxed, the goal of these campaigns can be to obstruct the operations of the Federal Government as well as aid and abet criminal activity the Federal Government is lawfully pursuing. These campaigns are coordinated and perpetrated by actors who have developed a comprehensive strategy to achieve specific policy goals through radicalization and violent intimidation.

I can only chuckle as I imagine a left-wing network with a “comprehensive strategy to achieve specific policy goals”. If only there were one!

In the meantime, Trump will continue to be frightened by his reflection in the mirror. I wish I could think of some way to use that against him.

October 13, 2025 – 9:15 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

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