Tag Archives: democracy

Could a Third Term Happen?

November 3, 2025 – 8:46 am

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.

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The Resistance Stiffens

October 20, 2025 – 11:33 am
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.

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Only Trump represents the People

October 13, 2025 – 9:50 am

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.

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Fantasies of a vast, violent left-wing conspiracy

October 13, 2025 – 9:15 am

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.

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Trump Comes for Chicago

October 6, 2025 – 12:07 pm

Whatever this is about, it’s not public safety.

I went to graduate school in Chicago during the 80s and lived there for six years. I’ve been back many times since and marveled at how much safer the city is today than 40-50 years ago. Then, I had a car stolen and two bicycles. My future wife was accosted on a sidewalk, and managed to push her attacker away. But in recent years, I have walked anywhere I wanted, including a number of places I would not have dared in the 80s, despite being younger, fitter, and less cautious then.

One neighborhood I stayed away from then, perhaps foolishly, was the Hispanic area on the near South Side. But a few years ago, I went to the National Museum of Mexican Art on 19th Street. A lovely middle-class neighborhood has grown up in that area, and the museum itself is wonderful. These days, Mexican-American can be just another Chicago ethnicity, like Italian-American or Irish-American.

There is, of course, still crime in Chicago (as there is not just in every city, but in small towns as well), and places I would not want to go at night. But in every measurable way, the city is much safer now. You can see that if you take the famous Architecture Boat Tour on the Chicago River. The gentrification of downtown began in the 1970s with the Marina Towers, which were built to be a fortress against the rest of Chicago: You could park your car and even moor your boat without exposing yourself to the public. But as the decades went by, the buildings became more and more open to the city, built to highlight the public riverwalk. From the river, you can see the record of the gradual unfolding of Chicagoans’ confidence.

So I have taken it personally when Trump has repeatedly smeared Chicago as a crime-ridden hellhole. And in particular, I object to his scapegoating of Hispanic immigrants as some kind of vermin to be eliminated.

Saturday, the regime announced it was sending 300 federalized National Guard troops to Illinois. Governor Pritzker says the troops will come from Texas. The governor has sued to stop this invasion, making claims similar to the ones that have been successful in Portland. (More on Portland below.)

I have to wonder what troops can do that other federal agents aren’t already doing. Agents from ICE, the Border Patrol, the FBI, BATF, and DHS have been wearing military fatigues, sporting heavy weapons, and conducting military-style attacks.

Federal agents rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters. Dozens of others, their faces hidden behind masks, arrived in moving trucks. In total, 300 officers stormed a South Side apartment building that Department of Homeland Security officials say harbored criminals.

Maybe, maybe not. But the building also contained US citizens and families with children.

Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said. Agents approached or entered nearly every apartment in the five-story building, and U.S. citizens were among those detained for hours.

… The feds also claimed the South Shore neighborhood was “a location known to be frequented by Tren de Aragua members and their associates,” but DHS gave no evidence to support the assertion, and authorities did not confirm that any of the people arrested were members of the Venezuelan gang.

Alleged Tren de Aragua members have been charged and detained in the city as recently as August. But the Chicago Sun-Times has found little evidence tying them to violence in Chicago.

Rodrick Johnson, 67, is one of many residents who were detained by federal agents during the South Shore raid. A U.S. citizen, he said agents broke through his door and dragged him out in zip ties.

Johnson said he was left tied up outside the building for nearly three hours before agents finally let him go.

Many of the residents were said to be Venezuelan. I wonder if the regime would be similarly brutal in a White neighborhood.

Last Sunday, though, masked agents in military style dress marched through some of the most upscale and touristy parts of the city, not far from where you’d board that boat tour I mentioned.

Agents, some masked, walked north on Michigan Avenue from Millennium Park toward the Wrigley Building. They then walked down Wacker Drive near Trump Tower, while some headed to the Riverwalk. They then made their way to River North.

The point here could only have been intimidation. They were not pursuing criminals or making arrests. Governor Pritzker has it right:

One thing is clear: none of what Trump is doing is making Illinois safer. This is not about fighting crime or about public safety. This is about sowing fear and intimidation and division among Americans.

Portland. Yesterday’s announcement sounded like a classic good-news/bad-news joke: Trump was pulling the last 300 federalized California National Guard troops out of Los Angeles … so that he could send them to Portland. He had previously tried to federalize Oregon National Guard troops to invade Portland, but a federal judge he appointed himself blocked that plan with a temporary restraining order in response to a lawsuit from Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, the mayor of Portland, and numerous other state and local officials.

Judge Karin Immergut observed that in an earlier case (concerning Los Angeles) the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had overturned a similar restraining order because courts owe “a great deal of deference” to a president’s judgment that conditions on the ground justify his decision to deploy National Guard troops. Specifically, that the federal government is unable to execute the laws with less extraordinary forces.

But Immergut contrasted the relatively peaceful situation of Portland (where the most serious protests had happened in June, but by September had faded to predominantly nonviolent protests drawing 20-50 people per day) with the more serious situation in LA prior to the president’s declaration.

Here, this Court concludes that the President did not have a “colorable basis” to invoke § 12406(3) to federalize the National Guard because the situation on the ground belied an inability of federal law enforcement officers to execute federal law. The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.

In a hearing Sunday night, Judge Immergut asked a Trump administration attorney: “How could bringing in federalised national guard from California not be in direct contravention of the [decision] I issued yesterday?”

She extended her order to block the Trump regime from deploying any National Guard troops to Portland.

I’m encouraged by the fact that an appointee from Trump’s first term sees the law this way. I hope some similarly-minded judge gets the Chicago case.

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Is Kimmel’s return a turning point?

September 29, 2025 – 10:34 am

For the first time, Trump used autocratic power in a way that the public couldn’t ignore, and a popular pushback forced a big corporation to stand up to him. Is that an anomaly or the start of a turn-around?

After Charlie Kirk’s murder, ABC’s latenight comedian Jimmy Kimmel said something Donald Trump didn’t like:

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

Four things are worth noting:

  • Kirk’s assassin was brought up in a conservative family, but later developments showed that Kimmel was wrong to imply that he was MAGA himself.
  • Kimmel was right that MAGA pundits did everything they could to score political points from the assassination.
  • Kimmel did not insult Kirk, or in any way make light of his assassination.
  • But he did make fun of Trump’s response to the assassination. He played a clip of Trump being asked about Kirk and then seguing to the new White House ballroom he wants to build. “That’s not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend,” Kimmel said. “This is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish.”

For these dubious sins, Trump’s FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr leaned on ABC to fire Kimmel, implying that ABC stations might lose their licenses otherwise.

Appearing on Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday, the Trump-appointed chairman said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Hours later, a spokesperson for Disney’s ABC confirmed to PEOPLE that Jimmy Kimmel Live! would be put on an indefinite hiatus.

This is far from the first time that corporations who want future favors from the government (like approval of mergers) have given in to an autocratic demand from Trump. But this time the public pushed back. Even Republican senators like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul pushed back. Kimmel returned to ABC on Tuesday (to record ratings), and even conservative local affiliate owners like Sinclair have ended their boycott.

If you haven’t watched Kimmel’s return-to-the-air monologue, you should.

Be sure to watch to the end of the 28-minute clip so you can see Robert De Niro play the new head of the FCC. Nobody can deliver a mafioso threat like De Niro, who clarified the new meaning of “free speech”.

“You want to say something nice about the president’s beautiful thick yellow hair and how he can do his make-up better than any broad, that’s free,” De Niro said. “But if you want to do a joke like, ‘He’s so fat he needs two seats on the Epstein jet’, that’s going to cost you.” The actor struggled to suppress a smile.

Kimmel asked: “For clarity, because it’s a pretty good joke, how much would that one cost me?”

“A couple of fingers, maybe a tooth,” came the reply.

Trump howled with rage at Kimmel’s return.

I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his “talent” was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who’s not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE. He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution. I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers! Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad Ratings.

His post should settle a few previously contentious points:

  • Trump was deeply involved in Kimmel’s suspension. Why else would ABC have told the White House that the show was cancelled? All the MAGA attempts to attribute the suspension to bad ratings or other legitimate causes were bogus.
  • Trump reiterated his threats of censorship. Kimmel’s criticism of Trump “puts the Network in jeopardy”. Nice network you got there; be a shame if something happened to it.
  • In Trump’s mind, the issue is criticism of him, and has nothing to do with Charlie Kirk. That was already apparent from Trump’s tweet of September 17, shortly after Kimmel was taken off the air: “That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!” Late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers didn’t have a Kirk problem, they’re just Trump critics.
  • Trump has not won any of his media lawsuits in court. Instead, he has used his government power to extort settlements out of parent companies that need favors. (These settlements are essentially bribes, as Stephen Colbert was cancelled for pointing out.) If ABC-owner Disney stands firm, Trump’s proposed lawsuit will fail.

And yet, that howl has not produced any action so far. David Frum and Paul Krugman each suggest that Trump is in a race against time: His bid for authoritarian power is racing against his plunging popularity. At some point, he will have so much autocratic power that politics barely matters any more, but he’s not there yet. And if his targets begin to believe they can stand up to him and win, while his Republican allies begin to worry that he will drag them down with him, that autocratic creep might stop or even reverse.

Krugman summarizes the situation:

It’s clear that if Trump were subject to normal political constraints, obliged to follow the rule of law and accept election results, he would already be a political lame duck. His future influence and those of his minions would be greatly reduced by his unpopularity. But at this juncture he is a quasi-autocrat. He is the leader of a party that accommodates his every whim, backed by a corrupt Supreme Court prepared to validate whatever he does, no matter how clearly it violates the law. As a result, Trump has been able to use the vast power of the federal government to deliver punishments and rewards in a completely unprecedented way. … This has created a climate of intimidation, with many institutions preemptively capitulating to Trump’s demands as if he already had total power.

… It’s important to understand that Trump’s push to destroy democracy depends largely on creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Behind closed doors, business leaders bemoan the destruction that Trump is wreaking on the economy. But they capitulate to his demands because they expect him to consolidate autocratic power — which, given his unpopularity, he can only do if businesses and other institutions continue to capitulate.

If this smoke-and-mirrors juggernaut starts to falter, the perception of inevitability will collapse and Trump’s autocracy putsch may very well fall apart.

Jay Kuo lists a number of areas in which Trump’s autocratic push is meeting resistance. But a key source of Kuo’s optimism is that there is a limit to how far the Supreme Court will let Trump go. So far, they have largely delayed ruling on the legality of his actions while allowing those actions to continue temporarily. One big question still to be resolved is which way they will ultimately go: Will they defend the Constitution, or will they usher in the new fascist state?

In large part that may depend on how Trump’s self-fulfilling prophecy plays out in John Roberts’ mind.

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The Timescale of News

August 18, 2025 – 10:18 am

Or: Why the Sift’s weekly summary has a new format

Like the fictionalized and hybridized T-Rex of Jurassic Park, our news media can only see motion. No matter how significant a situation is, it will vanish from our news feeds if it stands still or just moves very slowly.

This may sometimes look like a conspiracy to suppress certain ideas, but it happens for a reason: In our culture, “news” is what has happened since the last time you talked to somebody. So at your high school’s 10-year reunion, “I had a kid two years ago” might be news. But when you and your office mate take your daily coffee break, it isn’t.

Same thing with news organizations. If a publication thinks of itself as a daily, its timescale is a day. “News” is something that is true today, but wasn’t true yesterday. The timescale of a weekly is a week, and so on. Something that doesn’t fit in that timescale just isn’t news, no matter how important it is.

The best example of this is climate change. On most days, probably the most important thing that happens is that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher than it was a year ago. But that will never be a headline, because it could be a headline every day. So it’s not news.

Something similar has been happening in American politics. Almost every day, the most significant story, the one that people most need to understand, is Trump’s attempt to transform our democracy into a Putin-style authoritarian government. But again, a story you could write every day is not news, so it will never be covered quite so explicitly.

So how will it affect news coverage?

Dressing it up. Now go back to the example of a daily coffee break. “I had a kid two years ago” isn’t news. But “Bobby had his second birthday Tuesday” is. It’s mostly the same information, but it’s packaged as a more current event.

Journalists do this all the time. They get around the media’s blindness about slow-moving stories by covering related events that change fast enough to be news-visible. So while climate change itself is not news, a storm that rapidly intensifies to a category 5 hurricane (as Erin did on Saturday) is news. And if you cover that story, you can mention climate change as the context of that intensification (though the CNN article I linked to doesn’t). Other news-visible developments that relate to climate change might be when a new report comes out or CO2 measurements pass some round number.

The problem with this trick is that it’s largely up to the reader to connect the dots. The heat waves, the hurricanes, the wildfires — those news events form a picture, but the picture itself is not news. It changes so gradually that daily news reports can’t see it. “Planet Earth is warming” is never breaking news. Climate change is a forest, but journalists can only cover trees.

Ditto for Trump. Individual aspects of his quest for unchecked power move fast enough to create news. This week he took over the DC police department and sent National Guard troops into the capital (ostensibly to fight the “emergency” of violent crime, which hit a 30-year low last year). That’s news. But it’s also part of a larger story that includes executive orders that are based on no constitutional or statutory presidential power, usurping Congress’ power of the purse, defying court orders, encroaching on the sovereignty of states or cities run by Democrats, ignoring the human rights of non-citizens (especially their right to due process), abusing government power to get political or economic concessions out of private institutions like corporations or universities, unleashing the Justice Department and other government agencies on Trump’s personal or political enemies, and much else.

Each of those stories also becomes news from time to time, when some noteworthy development has happened in the last 24 hours. But the larger picture they paint when you consider them together, of a democracy little by little turning into an autocratic state, isn’t news. In the news business, that larger picture is “context” — which means that it’s optional, like the extra credit questions that your term paper might also address. And if the overall slant of a news organization finds that context inconvenient, its readers and viewers will never hear about it. Maybe individuals will put it together for themselves, or maybe they won’t.

In fact, that’s the best way to judge the slant of a news organization: What context do they consider relevant? For example, The Guardian makes a climate-change connection in the final paragraph of its story on Erin this morning, but The Washington Post does not.

Think about how this news-and-context distinction influences a responsible journalist. The larger, longer-term, slower-moving story is what your readers really need to know. But it’s not news, at least not as your organization understands news. The larger story is a forest, but forests aren’t news. Trees are news.

So you find yourself trying to communicate the bigger stories to your readers through the filter that your organization’s definition of news imposes on you. You can only report news-visible stories, but if you do it artfully, you can find traces of the too-large-to-see stories in that visible news.

If you’re not artful enough, though, the readers will see what you’re doing: You’re writing the same story over and over, but dressing it up with different details to make it current. It will seem dishonest, like you’re trying to put something over on them.

What’s this have to do with me? Every week, I try to sift out what happened this week that you really ought to know and understand. A big part of that mission is taking a step back from the minute-to-minute news cycle and filtering out the hype.

In essence, I’m making a virtue out of necessity. Not having the focus and energy of bloggers like Heather Cox Richardson, I can’t put out a high-quality post every day. That forces me to take a week-by-week approach to the news. But for many stories, I believe, that’s a healthier vantage point. Following a news story too closely just gets people over-stimulated, and causes them to think the same shallow thoughts over and over again. And if a story comes and goes before a week is out, probably it wasn’t worth your attention to begin with.

Lately, though, I’ve begun to feel that even a weekly approach puts me on the wrong timescale. I largely cover American politics, and what you need to understand about American politics right now is that single big story: Trump wants to be like his hero, Vladimir Putin. Turning a democracy into a strongman autocracy is a well-known process now. And Trump is trying, day-in day-out, to follow the path that has been worn by Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, and many others.

So I find myself writing the same story every week, but trying to make it sound fresh by dressing it up in the particular developments of the last seven days. It doesn’t feel right. It feels like I’m trying to fool you, even though I’m convinced most of you see what I’m doing.

At the same time, it also feels like the thing that needs doing: People need to see both the macrocosm and the microcosm, and to understand how they fit together.

So I want to keep doing what I’ve been doing, but express it in a format that is more direct and honest.

The new weekly summaries. This week I’ll be trying out a new format for the weekly summaries. This week’s summary, which should appear maybe around noon EDT, will start with a “Significant Ongoing Stories” section. This is where I name the forests, and explain very briefly which events of the week constitute trees in each forest. When somebody writes a good where-we-stand article on that big topic, I’ll reference it there.

I don’t expect the list of ongoing stories to change much from week to week. To that extent, I will explicitly be writing the same story every week.

Then will come a “This Week’s Developments” section, which is basically the old form of the weekly summary, but without the stretching to bring in “context”.

My hope is that this will be more satisfying for me to write and for you to read. The repetitive stuff will be repeated explicitly, without trying to make it sound fresh. And the new stuff will be covered for itself, and not as a stalking horse for a story too big to be weekly news.

This is all an experiment. Feedback is welcome.

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An Authoritarian Economy is a Bad Economy

August 11, 2025 – 9:14 am

Some Democrats want the party’s message to center on preserving democracy. Others say no, we should run against the Trump economy. What if we could do both at the same time?

When I talk to liberal activists, the issue that most scares them is Trump’s assault on democracy: denial of due process, flouting of court orders, siccing the Justice Department on his personal or political enemies, misusing the military by marching troops into Democratic cities like Los Angeles, usurping Congress’ power of the purse, sending masked thugs out to racially profile the population and whisk people off into what we might as well call concentration camps, extorting personal payments out of businesses by threatening them with government power, trying to keep power (even if the voters disapprove) by gerrymandering Congress, and so on.

But I also often hear another point of view: Maybe we ourselves care about democracy, but democracy issues are too abstract to run on in the 2026 midterms. At any given moment, most Americans aren’t using their due-process rights, and aren’t counting on court orders to protect them. If troops are turned loose on some far-off city they never visit, or if some politicians play an unfair game against other politicians, what’s it to them? Instead, Democrats should run on “kitchen table issues” that hit people in the pocketbook.

Right now what they’re feeling is the everyday things that are affecting them: the cost of groceries, gas prices, paying for rent. That is the number one issue; we need to be focused on that.

More and more, though, I’m becoming convinced that Democracy-or-Economy is a false choice, for a simple reason: An authoritarian economy is a bad economy.

Think about the countries that are further down the authoritarian road than we are, the ones often described as Trump’s models: Putin’s Russia, Orbán’s Hungary, Erdoğan’s Turkey, and so on. None of them are places you’d want to go to start a business or begin your career. Before long, Trump’s America won’t be such a place either.

Let’s think about why that is.

No checks and balances. We often talk about checks and balances as a procedural virtue, the kind of thing good-government types get excited about for reasons no one else understands. At times Americans even lament about all the checks and balances, because they make it hard to get things done.

But if we think about this purely economically, checks and balances serve a very practical purpose: error correction. When a leader gets a really bad idea in his head and begins to implement it, people who occupy other positions of power in the government can make him change course before things go too far. As the implications of the bad idea start showing up in the economy, the people who are suffering can appeal to other centers of power for relief.

In an autocratic system, on the other hand, no one can tell the autocrat he’s wrong. Policies that almost everyone else knows are destructive can nonetheless proceed all the way to disaster. Take Turkey for example:

A principal factor in Turkey’s poor economic performance over the past decade was President Erdogan’s misguided belief that interest rates were the cause of rather than the cure for inflation. This induced him to lean heavily on the Central Bank of Turkey to cut interest rates even at a time when inflation was rising. He did so by firing a succession of central bank presidents and by appointing a central bank board that totally complied with his desire for low interest rates.

It was only when inflation soared to 85 percent and when the Turkish lira was in free fall that Erdogan was forced to make an abrupt monetary policy U-turn.

Similarly, Putin’s war against Ukraine (whatever you think of it morally or even militarily) has done enormous damage to Russia’s economy. Mere weeks into the war, it became clear that expectations of a quick and easy victory had been delusional. At that point, Russia would have been much better off if someone else in the government — a leader in the parliament, perhaps — had been able to go to Putin and say, “This isn’t working. You’re going to have to figure a way to change course.”

Anyone who tried that, though, faced a serious risk of being dropped out of a high window. So more than three years later, a war that nearly everyone knows is a bad idea churns on.

We’re seeing something similar happen now with Trump’s tariffs. They’re doing precisely what nearly all economists said they would do: raise prices and slow growth. Pointedly, they’re not doing what Trump said they would do: bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. In fact, while manufacturing employment in the US surged during Biden’s administration, it has fallen during Trump’s.

Not only are the Trump tariffs a bad idea in general, they’ve been implemented in the worst possible way: erratically. Tariffs work by changing the market’s expectations. The only way a tariff might convince a company to go through a years-long process to move a factory to the US is if the company is convinced the tariff will still be there when the new factory opens. But when tariff rates seem to depend on what Trump had for breakfast, who knows what to expect two or three years from now?

As with Erdoğan and Putin, though, no one can tell Trump this simple fact. He has filled his administration with yes-men, and Republicans in Congress are afraid to challenge him. No independent agency or rival branch of government can stand in his way. And so we charge forward towards an economic disaster.

No single person is always right. So a country needs to have a way (or maybe many ways) to correct its leader when that leader is wrong. Checks and balances allow democratic governments to correct their errors, but autocratic governments can stay on the wrong path for a very long time.

Crony capitalism. If the foolishness of Trump’s tariffs is so obvious, you might wonder why he doesn’t see it himself. The answer is simple: Emergency laws passed by Congress under previous administrations (at least if you believe Trump’s interpretation of those laws, which is being tested in court) give the president the power to raise or lower tariffs at will, without any further input from Congress or anyone else.

In other words, tariffs are a place where Trump could seize autocratic power, so he has. His ability to raise tariffs or grant exceptions to them give him enormous power over some of our largest corporations. He can reward those who play ball with him and punish those who don’t.

In the textbooks, capitalism is supposed to work like this: The way to get rich is to come up with better and better ways to produce products and services that people want. Build a better mousetrap, the adage says, and the world will beat a path to your door.

In an autocratic system, though, the way to get rich is to get on the good side of the autocrat — maybe through flattery, through political support, or by cutting him in on the action. If you do, then you can expect lucrative government contracts, or maybe regulations you get to ignore will handicap your competitors, or maybe you’ll be allowed to cheat your customers without them having any recourse against you. On the other hand, if you displease the autocrat, your government contracts might suddenly disappear.

Think about all the times you’ve heard someone referred to as a “Russian oligarch”. Have these rich men invented anything? Developed anything? Marketed some new product? Of course not. They are rich because they are allies of Putin. And when Putin decides he doesn’t trust them any more, they fall — sometimes literally.

Again, ignore the morality for a minute and just focus on the economics. Whatever problems a textbook capitalist economy may produce, it does have one signature advantage: better mousetraps. Economic decisions are made for economic reasons, so they tend to turn out better economically.

Not so in an autocratic system, where economic decisions are made to bolster the autocrat’s power.

For example, one of the most important regulatory decisions governments face at the moment is what to do with crypto-currencies. Maybe they’re the future of finance, or maybe they’re a bubble waiting to pop. Maybe they will turn out to have benefits if they’re regulated properly, but huge downsides if they’re not.

But how can we expect wise regulations under these circumstances?

$TRUMP (stylized in all caps) is a meme coin associated with United States president Donald Trump, hosted on the Solana blockchain platform. One billion coins were originally created; 800 million remain owned by two Trump-owned companies, after 200 million were publicly released in an initial coin offering (ICO) on January 17, 2025. Less than a day later, the aggregate market value of all coins was more than $27 billion, valuing Trump’s holdings at more than $20 billion. A March 2025 Financial Times analysis found that the crypto project netted at least $350 million through sales of tokens and fees.

Here’s how things have worked out in Hungary:

Although Hungary’s GDP reaches roughly 77% of the EU average, lifting it above several low-income EU nations, its households nonetheless remain poorer in consumption terms. This discrepancy highlights the fact that economic output isn’t translating into real benefits for Hungarian families.

Behind the numbers lies a painful reality: under Viktor Orbán’s increasingly authoritarian and pro‑Russian Fidesz regime, Hungary has been systematically pillaged. State-owned industries have been hollowed out, public subsidies redirected to political allies, and EU funds commandeered by power networks close to the government. Meanwhile, ordinary Hungarians contend with low real wages, high inflation, brain drain, and a hollowed middle class—classic symptoms of wealth siphoning from citizens into elite pockets.

Bad information. Information is the lifeblood of a market economy; the more accurate and trustworthy a country’s economic information is, the better its economy will work.

Conversely, the less trustworthy economic information is, the more cautious economic decision-makers will be. If, say, a car company thinks that incomes are rising, it might be inclined to increase production, figuring that richer citizens will buy more cars.

But what if its executives suspect the government is just making up the numbers that show incomes rising? Then they’ll be slower to react, even if incomes actually are rising. That kind of sluggishness will percolate through the economy.

We already started down that road last week, when Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because BLS’ June jobs report (accurately) made his economy look bad. Similarly, Trump doesn’t want to deal with climate change, so his Department of Energy is now issuing reports that say it’s not a big problem. Past National Climate Assessments have been taken off government web sites, and the Energy Secretary says they’re going to be revised — presumably to paint a picture Trump (and his political allies in the fossil fuel industry) finds more palatable.

It would be bad enough if bad information from the government caused unsuspecting people to make bad economic decisions out of ignorance. But within the government itself, decision-makers will be afraid to make good decisions, because those very decisions might communicate that they doubt what the autocrat is telling them.

The dystopian picture. If you want to see how the pieces might come together, look at a dystopian vision by the blogger Umair, “America’s Path Towards an Authoritarian Economy“.

There’s a vicious spiral that nations collapsing into autocracy tend to follow. It goes like this. Capital controls, price controls, informational vacuums, monetizing the debt, defaulting on it, and crashing the currency.

He paints a picture of what might come next: Trump’s tariffs increase companies’ costs, so they will want to raise prices. But then Trump will pressure them not to raise prices, because inflation makes him look bad.

So to stem this inflationary tsunami, autocrats tend to put in place price controls—autocrats tell CEOs you’d better not raise prices this much, on this or that. Often, they’re hard, dictated by an “economic board” or equivalent body. In America’s case, they’ll probably be softer: Trump dictating to boardrooms, threatening them, bullying them, coercing them into not raising prices.

If you can’t raise prices, you have to cut costs — in other words, lay off workers. But rising unemployment also makes the autocrat look bad, so he’ll lower interest rates in an attempt to increase economic activity. (That’s assuming Trump has taken control of the Federal Reserve, which he is trying to do.)

But when interest rates go lower than the inflation rate, nobody wants to own your currency. So the dollar falls. That starts investment capital fleeing the country, which the autocrat then tries to make illegal: No, you can’t invest your money in more stable countries.

What I’m trying to teach you is that autocratic collapse becomes a vicious spiral. It’s a very real one, which we’ve seen around the world, from Latin America to Asia and beyond. And it has a classic pattern, which goes like this. Tariffs beget price controls. Price controls beget unemployment. Inflation surges, the economy slows, and demand shrinks, usually dramatically. Autocrats cook the books to try and hide it all. Markets stop functioning, and crashes and crises erupt. … All of this is very real. This isn’t a far-off prediction: it’s an observation. This vicious spiral has already begun.

I’m not as fatalistic about this as Umair is: The tariffs are just getting rolling, the bad results are already becoming apparent, and there’s still time for the checks and balances we have left to function.

But the path he describes is in front of us, and we need to get off of it — not just for moral or idealistic reasons, but because it leads to an economic catastrophe.

So we don’t need to choose Democracy or Economy as the center of the anti-Trump message. We democracy to save us from the autocratic economic spiral Trump has started.

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Shaping Ourselves

August 4, 2025 – 9:35 am

In a democracy, the people shape their government. But in the long run, the government also shapes its people. What kind of citizens does a democracy need to have, if it’s going to sustain itself?

Back in the auspicious year of 1984, conservative pundit George Will published a book out of step with his era: Statecraft as Soulcraft. In those days, a popular liberal backlash to the rise of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and its influence on the Reagan administration argued that government “can’t legislate morality”. Will countered that government not only can shape public morality, but it inevitably does whether it intends to or not. The “first question” of government, he claimed, is “What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?”

At the time, “legislating morality” evoked thoughts of controlling sexuality. (The Devil’s greatest trick, I remember telling someone, was to convince Christians that morality is primarily about sex rather than caring for others.) Persecuting homosexuals, banning abortion, cracking down on female promiscuity — those were the issues “moral” politicians seemed most concerned with. Later generations of social conservatives have argued that “the family” is the cornerstone of society, and so the traditional family must be protected against innovations like same-sex marriage.

More broadly, “What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?” recalled Communist efforts to produce the “new Soviet man“, who would fit perfectly into the Soviet state, gladly foregoing personal fulfillment to help the dictatorship of the proletariat pursue the greater good. Similarly, an oligarchy might raise lower-class children to believe that they were better off being subjugated, or a Confederate-style slave republic might inculcate a sense of inferiority in Black people, so that they aspired to nothing higher than slavery. A North Korean-style cult of personality might raise children to hold the ruler in god-like awe.

Surely good Americans would want their government to stay far away from that kind of self-serving nurturance.

And yet, a democratic republic does require a certain kind of citizen. Government “of the people” assumes that the people have certain capabilities and virtues. In the long term, a democratic republic that doesn’t instill those capabilities and virtues will be unstable; it will preside over the destruction of its own foundation.

In the past, Americans have understood this. Universal public education became the law in one state after another precisely because of the fear that immigrant children would not understand democratic values, or learn to speak and read English, which was assumed to be the only possible medium for the public discourse democracy depends on.

This line of thinking came back to me this week when I read Mary Harrington’s “Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good” in the New York Times. The article had two main points:

  • Smart phones and services like Tik-Tok are changing the way people (especially children) think, creating an easily distracted consciousness that looks for quick and amusing input without regard to accuracy. As a people, we are losing a more literate consciousness capable of “concentration, linear reasoning, and deep thought”.
  • This tendency is more pronounced among poorer children, whose parents are less likely to insist on (and pay for) a more video-restrictive education.

Here’s the paragraph that brings the consequences home:

What will happen if this becomes fully realized? An electorate that has lost the capacity for long-form thought will be more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories. If that sounds familiar, it may be a sign of how far down this path the West has already traveled.

Harrington compares Tik-Tok videos to junk food, and argues in favor of an “ascetic approach to cognitive fitness”. We used to say “you are what you eat”. Maybe the same thing works on the mental level: If you put garbage into your mind, garbage will come out.

As Cal Newport, a productivity expert, shows in his 2016 book, “Deep Work,” the digital environment is optimized for distraction, as various systems compete for our attention with notifications and other demands. Social media platforms are designed to be addictive, and the sheer volume of material incentivizes intense cognitive “bites” of discourse calibrated for maximum compulsiveness over nuance or thoughtful reasoning. The resulting patterns of content consumption form us neurologically for skimming, pattern recognition and distracted hopping from text to text

Like junk food, though, addictive-but-vacuous snippets of video are easier to obtain and harder to screen out than input that develops a deeper mind. More and more, it’s upper-class households that have the resources and the will to create an environment conducive to good cognitive development.

As Dr. [MaryAnne] Wolf points out, literacy and poverty have long been correlated. Now poor kids spend more time on screens each day than rich ones — in one 2019 study, about two hours more per day for U.S. tweens and teenagers whose families made less than $35,000 per year, compared with peers whose household incomes exceeded $100,000. Research indicates that kids who are exposed to more than two hours a day of recreational screen time have worse working memory, processing speed, attention levels, language skills and executive function than kids who are not.

Bluntly: Making healthy cognitive choices is hard. In a culture saturated with more accessible and engrossing forms of entertainment, long-form literacy may soon become the domain of elite subcultures.

Critics will argue that none of this is new. Older people (I’m 68) have always complained that younger people don’t think clearly, and have blamed new media and new technology for the change. Back in the early 1600s, Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote was in part a critique of what could happen to people who read too many of the cheap romances that Gutenberg’s printing press had made available: Their minds might fill up with fantastic notions disconnected from reality.

I grew up in a generation supposedly warped by comic books and (later) low-quality television. (I was exposed to a vast quantity of both. I can still sing the theme song of “My Mother the Car”.) Neal Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death raised the specter of an electorate that chooses to be entertained rather than informed.

I also grew up in the working class (my father worked in a factory through most of my childhood, and neither of my parents went to college). So I have long been skeptical of studies supposedly proving that professional-class child-raising is superior to working-class child-raising. Too many well-born and well-educated sociologists have descended into working-class neighborhoods and seen the natives as a backward culture far inferior to themselves.

And yet … I came to literate culture with the enthusiasm of an immigrant. Arriving at a giant Big 10 university — an entire city about the size of my hometown, apparently devoted to discovering, recording, and passing down knowledge — was like entering the Emerald City of Oz. (I have never understood the ho-hum attitude that the children of my professional-class friends take towards college. Kids today approach Harvard with less awe than I had for Michigan State.)

Mathematics gave me an appreciation of truths that can’t be shaken by desire or popular opinion. Meditation taught me the virtues of a quiet mind, one that can let the waves of hype roll past until deeper thoughts emerge. (On the wall of my office is a painting of a young woman whose eyes are closed. She holds up one finger as a faint breeze begins to stir her hair. “Wait for it,” she seems to be saying.)

And so what particularly disturbs me about the present moment, beyond the rampant cruelty and the disregard of democratic traditions, is the impotence of rational thought, the inability of Truth to overtake Lie, and the lack of any deep engagement of mind with mind.

How can democracy survive this?

If the people are going to rule, then every child should be educated like an heir to the throne.

There has never been a democracy where the people were truly wise. But democracy rests on the belief that Truth has a persistence that eventually will win out. That’s why the Founders built so much delay into our system, particularly for fundamental changes like constitutional amendments. They recognized that momentary enthusiasms might sweep through the electorate. But over time, they believed, the cacophony of noises would cancel each other out, allowing the constant voice of reason to rise above the din.

But technology has raised the volume of noise. Somehow, we will have to produce a population that can think deeply anyway. That will require a new kind of soulcraft, one quite a bit deeper, I think, than George Will had in mind.

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“Unitary Executive” is a euphemism for Tyrant

July 28, 2025 – 10:04 am

How a conservative legal theory set us on a path to fascism.

If you clear your mind of preconceptions and read the Constitution end to end, I think you’ll see not just a list of rules and procedures, but a vision of the proper governance of a free people. [1] The newly established Government of the United States does not rule over its people in totality. Instead, the People have granted the government a specific list of powers to achieve specific goals.

Alexander Hamilton, for example, thought this structure made an explicit Bill of Rights unnecessary.

For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?

During the ensuing centuries, the power of the US government has grown, largely because social and economic change made the powers granted to it more significant. Interstate and international commerce, for example, was a comparatively small part of the average American’s life in 1787. Today, on the other hand, restricting your purchases to products wholly made within your home state would involve radical lifestyle choices. The power to regulate interstate commerce, consequently, opened the door to a much broader regulatory power.

Similarly, technological progress has opened up unforeseen new worlds of commerce and communication, requiring someone to define new ground rules. America’s ascension to world power likewise extended the powers of our government.

But those enhanced powers did not automatically flow to the President. The Constitution gave those expandable powers to Congress, including what has become known as the Elastic Clause, because it can be stretched in so many ways.

The Congress shall have Power… To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

Other powers are split between Congress and the President. So, for example, the President can enforce the laws, but cannot make laws. The President is commander-in-chief, but cannot build an army or declare war. [2] The judiciary, in turn, defines what the laws mean.

The 20th century saw the growth of what has become known as the “administrative state”: The kind of detailed and fast-changing regulation that the government’s new powers required couldn’t be managed through a body as cumbersome as Congress. [3] And so Congress empowered a smorgasbord of agencies: FDA, SEC, EPA, Federal Reserve, and so on — each with its own power and purview.

In this manner, some of the spirit of Constitution was preserved, even as the executive branch expanded: Specific powers were granted for specific purposes. Each agency had its own mission, and while the agencies were part of the executive branch and overseen by presidential appointees, the rank-and-file employees belonged to the civil service and maintained a degree of independence. [4]

The norms of the presidency, in turn, required a President to compartmentalize, or at least to maintain the appearance of compartmentalization. So, for example, it was considered scandalous if President Obama was directing the IRS to give conservative organizations a hard time. [5] President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland kept their distance from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation and subsequent indictment of Donald Trump.

A President is human and has enemies and resentments, but s/he is not supposed to use the government to exact personal vengeance. The person-with-enemies and the President-with-powers are intended to be kept separate.

But during the Reagan years, conservatives began to float the notion of a “unitary executive”. The theory is based on the first line of Article II of the Constitution, which says:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

For a long time this was interpreted loosely: Any grant of executive power had to pass through the President in some way, but did not come from him minute-to-minute. FBI directors, for example, were appointed by a President, but served 10-year terms that stretched well beyond the 4- or 8-year term of the appointing President, and were fired only for cause. [6] Similarly, chairs of the Federal Reserve are appointed by a President, but have never been replaced simply because a new President takes office.

But the Unitary Executive Theory says that any executive power is by definition a presidential power. The various agencies and officials of the executive branch are essentially fingers of the President’s hand. They do the detail work that is beneath the President’s notice, but have no real independence.

For a long time the unitary executive was a crank theory, but under the partisan Roberts Supreme Court it has increasingly become the law of the land. [7] In Trump’s second administration, the Court has allowed the firing of a series of people previously believed to be independent and protected by law.

“By means of such actions, this Court may facilitate the permanent transfer of authority, piece by piece by piece, from one branch of Government to another,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote for herself, as well as Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Most recently, Trump has attempted to reshape (and shrink by half) the Department of Education simply by firing its employees. [8]

Proponents of the unitary executive argue — as authoritarians often do — that government power will be wielded more efficiently by a single hand, and that government will be more responsive to the voters when elected officials are better able to implement the programs they ran on.

But the behavior of the Trump administration belies these claims. In a government of largely independent agencies, each wielding its own power to achieve a specific mission, American individuals and institutions have to worry about the laws and agencies as individual entities. So: You worry about the IRS at tax time, and try to make sure that your returns follow their rules. You worry about the Justice Department if you are contemplating some crime of theft or violence. A corporation worries about the SEC in its dealings with the market and their own stockholders, about the EPA when it considers what emissions its factories are putting into the environment, and about OSHA when it designs its work environment. And so on.

But under a unitary executive, when all these agencies are fingers of the same hand, everyone has to worry about being seen as enemies of the government. If we have displeased the executive in some way, any agency of government might be used to punish us or whip us back into line.

Take CBS. Does their news coverage displease Trump? Then the FCC balks at the corporate merger of CBS parent Paramount and cash-rich Skydance. It balks not until a specific public interest is satisfied, as would be the case under another administration’s FCC, but until Paramount has paid Trump $16 million to settle an otherwise baseless lawsuit, until Stephen Colbert’s show is cancelled, and until CBS agrees to have an ombudsman address complaints of anti-Trump “bias” in its news coverage.

Take Columbia University. Complaints that university wasn’t doing enough to protect Jewish students from harassment would ordinarily fall under the civil rights division of the Education Department, which might make a referral to the civil rights division of the Justice Department, with a narrow focus on the experience of the university’s Jewish students. But under a unitary executive, the offense is more general and the consequences far more sweeping: Columbia allowed pro-Palestinian demonstrations that expressed opinions contrary to Trump’s support of Israel’s government.

And so, the State Department revoked the green card and student visa of protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, allowing ICE (which is part of Homeland Security, not the the State Department) to arrest and detain Khalil for three and a half months without filing any criminal charges against him. Columbia’s research grants (primarily from the Health and Human Services Department) were frozen, and all of its federal grants were threatened. [9]

And the result? Not a specific set of adjustments to Columbia’s policies about antisemitism (antisemitism was always just a pretext), but a sweeping agreement to get Columbia right with the Trump administration, “including the re-organisation of its Middle Eastern studies department, and hiring a team of ‘special officers’ empowered to remove students from campus and make arrests”.

A similar administration assault on Harvard resulted in demands to

  • shift power from “faculty and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship” to “those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter”, i.e., from Trump-hostile faculty to Trump-friendly faculty.
  • “reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence” and “report to federal authorities … any foreign student … who commits a conduct violation”.
  • authorize an “external party” satisfactory to the government “to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse”. [10]

Again, the administration has mounted pressure by trying to freeze funds from a wide range of government departments. This is happening not at the end of a process in which Harvard has been found guilty of something and refused voluntary reforms, but as cudgel to beat the University into line with the administration. (Harvard is fighting this in court.)

The administration has also gone after law firms, getting concessions in exchange for release from a variety of threats that include

limiting the ability of attorneys to obtain access to government buildings, stopping any consideration for future employment with the government, canceling government contracts, and preventing any company that uses such a firm from obtaining federal contracts.

To sum up: Increasingly, we are in an environment where it is not enough to obey the laws. Instead, you need to maintain a friendly relationship with the government, and particularly not offend Trump himself. Otherwise, the full power of the government might come down on you.

The Germans have a word for this: gleichschaltung.

Gleichschaltung is a compound word that comes from the German words gleich (same) and Schaltung (circuit) and was derived from an electrical engineering term meaning that all switches are put on the same circuit allowing them all to be simultaneously activated by throwing a single master switch.

This unitary-executive metaphor goes back to the Nazis, because of course it does.

The Nazi term Gleichschaltung, meaning “synchronization” or “coordination“, was the process of Nazification by which Adolf Hitler—leader of the Nazi Party in Germany—established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society “from the economy and trade associations to the media, culture and education”.

The unitary executive is precisely the person with his or her hand on that master switch. If American society retains any freedom, it will be due to the restraint of that executive, not to our inherent human rights.

So getting rid of Trump will not be enough to restore American freedom, as long as his successor — whether MAGA or some Democrat — continues to be a unitary executive holding the government’s master switch. Restoring freedom will require a sweeping change in the Supreme Court, as well as in re-establishing cultural expectations of the compartmentalization of presidential power.

[1] Recognizing, of course, that in 1787 not everyone was free. Much of our social progress in the last quarter-millennium has consisted of extending that vision of freedom more and more widely.

[2] The Founders never imagined the US achieving the kinds of world-spanning power it has today, or that it would need to maintain powerful armed forces in peacetime. Nor could they imagine a nuclear war, which could be lost before Congress could be convened.

[3] Imagine having to pass a new law each time a pharmaceutical company marketed a new drug or a food company began using a new preservative.

[4] This is the origin of the notion of a “Deep State”. President after president came into office with ideas for sweeping change, only to discover that the actual government had a great deal of bureaucratic inertia. The career employees of the various agencies had their own vision of their mission, which did not change just because they had a new boss.

You can see this today, for example, in the Justice Department, where many career employees — more than half in some offices — have quit rather than carry out orders that, by their lights, are corrupt. It’s impossible to know how many other civil servants have quietly sabotaged plans that violate what they see as their agency’s mission.

People join the EPA because they want to protect the environment, DoD because they want to defend the country, and so on. If asked to do something counter to those goals, they will do their best not to cooperate.

Properly understood, then, the Deep State is a culture, not a conspiracy.

[5] He wasn’t. IRS targeting of conservative groups for heightened scrutiny was never conclusively established, and no link to the Obama White House was ever found.

[6] Prior to Trump, only Bill Clinton had fired an FBI director — for ethical violations, in that case.

But President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on a pretext in 2017, only four years into his term. During his transition period in 2024, Trump announced Kash Patel as his replacement for his own appointee Christopher Wray, seven years into Wray’s term. Wray might have challenged his apparent dismissal, but chose instead to resign.

[7] At least when Republicans are in the White House. The Roberts Court repeatedly found that President Biden had overstepped his legal authority. But now that Trump is president again, the bounds of presidential power have become increasingly vague and malleable.

[8] I have to wonder how well this would have worked for Biden. Would the Court have allowed him to eliminate student debt by firing all the people tasked with keeping track of it or collecting payments?

[9] Ordinarily, ending federal grants might be the conclusion of an anti-discrimination finding against a recalcitrant institution, not an opening salvo.

[10] “Viewpoint diversity” is a common MAGA euphemism for giving preference to MAGA-friendly students and professors. An economics department with no Marxists can be “viewpoint diverse”, but a biology department with no creationists might not be.

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