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All Americans Need Pride Now

June 8, 2026 – 10:21 am

It’s the nature of fascism to keep expanding its list of enemies. No matter who you are, they’ll get to you eventually.

“First they came for the Communists …”

Martin Niemoller’s famous poem about the Nazis has been quoted so often it’s turning into a cliche. It describes how a tyrannical regime can peel off its enemies one little group at at time, allowing the rest of society to imagine it is somehow safe — until it isn’t.

When we repeat that poem today, we often imagine that the Nazis had all this planned from the beginning, that they were always going to come for Pastor Niemoller, and were just waiting until they had disposed of all his potential allies first. But quite likely that was not true. Going after one group and then another doesn’t have to be premeditated; it is baked into the fundamental nature of fascism. The list of enemy groups will inevitably keep expanding until the regime falls. Let me explain why.

I’ve been honing my definition of fascism ever since I first applied it to Donald Trump’s movement back in 2015. I wanted to use the word fascist in a meaningful way, rather than just as an insult. So rather than just throw it around, I defined what I meant by it and argued that my definition applied to the case at hand. I decided fascism is:

a dysfunctional attempt of people who feel humiliated and powerless to restore their pride by:

styling themselves as the only true and faithful heirs of their nation’s glorious (and possibly mythical) past,

identifying with a charismatic leader whose success will become their success,

helping that leader achieve power by whatever means necessary, including violence,

under his leadership, purifying the nation by restoring its traditional and characteristic virtues (again, through violence if necessary),

reawakening and reclaiming the nation’s past glory (by war, if necessary),

all of which leads to the main point: humiliating the internal and external enemies they blame for their own humiliation.

Eleven years later, I think that holds up pretty well, and matches closely what we’ve seen from the MAGA movement. Today, I think I’d sum up the fundamental fascist attitude more quickly: “Our nation was great and strong when we were pure. Now we are tainted and corrupt, but if we purify ourselves we will be great and strong again.”

Fascism looking outward is a quest for dominance, while fascism looking inward is a quest for purity.

To MAGA, purity has a number of key elements: white, English-speaking, male-dominated, Christian, and espousing traditional gender roles. Not every individual has to embody all those characteristics, but those factors have to be dominant in society.

But fascism inevitably fails to achieve its goals, because greatness has nothing to do with purity. When failure happens, though, there’s always a way to explain it away: “We just didn’t go far enough.”

We’ve seen this pattern in many places already. Capitalism is not making the bulk of our population prosperous any more, so the solution is more capitalism. Tax cuts haven’t created jobs, so the solution is more tax cuts. Cutting the government’s safety-net benefits hasn’t pushed people into the workforce, so we need more benefit cuts. And so on.

The same thing happens with purity. Trump won in 2024, partly on the idea that “illegal immigrants” were creating all our problems. Across the board, they were “poisoning the blood of our country“”like vermin“.

More specifically, they were criminals, so getting rid of them would solve the crime problem. They took our jobs, so if we got rid of them jobs would be plentiful. In spite of all those stolen jobs, they also bloated our safety-net programs, so getting rid of them would save money. And they were also somehow leveraging all those welfare payments and sub-minimum-wage jobs to bid up the price of housing, so getting rid them will make houses more affordable. They bring drugs and diseases, so getting rid of them will solve those problems. And so on.

So now that Trump has shut down the border and pushed many thousands of immigrants into concentration camps, all those problems should be getting better, right? But (other than the continuation of a long-term decline in violent crime), none of them have budged. We still have crime, under-employment, people on welfare, unaffordable housing, drugs, diseases, and the whole mess. Because in reality, undocumented immigrants had very little to do with any of that.

Of course, the Trump regime isn’t going to say “Sorry, I guess we were wrong.” It will claim, and is already claiming, that the reason an increase in purity hasn’t decreased our problems is that we aren’t pure enough yet.

So we don’t just need to cut out undocumented immigration, we need to cut documented immigration also. We’ve virtually stopped admitting non-White refugees (while seeking out White refugees). On the advancing edge of MAGA, we’re already hearing about “remigration“, i.e., plans to send non-White American residents (and even citizens) back to their ancestral homelands.

And it’s not just racial purity, it’s also purity in the sense of sexual morality. At the moment, the focus of MAGA’s sexual oppression is on trans people. But what happens after they have been suppressed, and America still has problems? If you draw the conclusion that we’re still not pure enough, who do we go after next? Gays and lesbians, I suppose, and then women who have gotten abortions. And promiscuous women. And then straight men and women who don’t act masculine or feminine enough. (You can see a preview of this in the campaign to smear Texas Senate candidate James Talarico.)

What about religious purity? If you buy the bogus argument that America was founded as a “Christian nation”, then all non-Christians are suspect. They already started with Muslims, because many of our external enemies are Muslims. But atheists won’t be far behind. And what if that’s not enough to solve all our problems? Hindus? Jews? Talarico-like Christians who foolishly try to follow the teachings of Jesus rather than Trump? (The Pentagon just reduced its list of recognized religious faiths from 211 to 31, 22 of which are Christian. My faith, Unitarian Universalism, is no longer recognized.)

You see where this goes. Once you’ve committed atrocities in the name of purity, you can’t admit that purity is a bogus value that has nothing to do with America’s problems. If problems haven’t been solved, we just haven’t gone far enough yet.

So here’s the thought I want to raise during 2026’s Pride Month: You may believe that Pride has nothing to do with you. Maybe you’ve never even thought about being a different gender. Maybe you’re happily rooted in a White heterosexual Christian marriage, with 2.3 children and a picket fence. Maybe you think the wave of oppression and bigotry will wash out long before it gets to you.

But it won’t, at least not on its own. Because purity is not a solution, and the further they travel on that road, the stronger the temptation to keep doubling down, to keep finding new enemy groups to purge. If they’re not stopped, they’ll get to you eventually.

So maybe we should stop them now, while they’re mostly just coming for immigrants and Muslims and trans people. Even if we’re not immigrants or Muslims or trans.

If any group of people are classed as subhuman, as vermin or poison, then everyone’s humanity is in doubt. If anyone does not deserve human rights, or can be shipped off to a hellhole without due process, then we’re all in danger.

We need to stand together while we still have people to stand with.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged culture wars, race, religion | Comments (9)

Has Trump finally pushed Republicans too far?

May 25, 2026 – 11:04 am

I hate to even ask this question, because it’s been discussed so often over the years, and the hopes raised have (up until now) always been dashed. But maybe? Maybe?

Way back in 2015, when Trump came down the escalator characterizing Mexican immigrants as rapists, and then a few weeks later denigrated John McCain’s war record, the conventional wisdom was certain that he had gone too far. Outrageousness had always been his shtick, but this was too much. Surely even his supporters would start backing away from him now.

Needless to say, it didn’t happen. It also didn’t happen after he bragged to Billy Bush that he could “grab ’em by the pussy” and get away with it. Or when two dozen women verified that he really did behave that way. Or when a jury unanimously concluded that he had sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll.

It didn’t happen when he said he trusted Vladimir Putin more than American intelligence services. Or when his mismanagement of the Covid pandemic expanded the death toll by hundreds of thousands of American souls.

It didn’t happen when he withheld aid approved by Congress in an attempt to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into launching a bogus investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden. Or when he was impeached for that. Or when he incited rioters to attack the Capitol to reverse the result of the election he lost to Biden. Or when he was impeached for that. Or when he pardoned the rioters of all the crimes they had committed in his name, including hospitalizing over a hundred Capitol police.

Every time, very smart people told us this was it, he had finally gone too far. But it was never true.

So why might it be true now?

The downward slide. Hemingway once said that bankruptcies happen two ways: gradually, and then suddenly. The undermining of Trump’s popularity has been following a similar pattern.

For months, Trump supporters have been getting less and less sure of themselves. Maybe it began with the Epstein Files, which Trump had campaigned on releasing, and then did his best to hide once he got into office. (His Justice Department is still dragging its feet, and Trump keeps flirting with the idea of pardoning Epstein’s primary accomplice — the only one currently in jail for Epstein’s crimes.) Or when the prices he said when come down “on Day One” kept climbing — often due to Trump’s own policies like illegal tariffs and the effect of his war with Iran. Or when he attacked Iran for no discernible reason after running on not starting foreign wars.

That all resulted in a steadily declining approval rating from the general public, to levels unlike anything he had seen before.

That set the stage. But more recently three events have brought it into focus: the White House ballroom, his insider stock trades, and (most of all) the $1.776 billion fund he has illegally created to reward the same violent criminals he pardoned for the January 6 riot.

Primary voters. Probably the last people to leave Trump will be the MAGA faithful who show up to vote in Republican primaries where he has made an endorsement. Recent results have shown him to still be strong there — strong enough to punish Republicans in Congress who step out of line.

So Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) lost his primary on Tuesday after being targeted by Trump for (among other things) pushing to release the Epstein Files. Last week Republican Senator Bill Cassidy also lost his primary five years after voting to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial. Neither Massie nor Cassidy, though, had defined himself as anti-Trump. Both pitched themselves as loyal Trump Republicans who maintained just a smidgen of independence.

But that’s not good enough for Trump, and he clearly retains enough sway with Republican voters to punish elected officials who cross him in any way at all. Tomorrow we’ll get another test: Trump has endorsed Texas’ corrupt attorney general, Ken Paxton, over Senator John Cornyn, who not long ago was in contention to be Majority Leader. Cornyn’s sins are even less tangible than Massie’s or Cassidy’s — he hasn’t been enthusiastic enough about Trump’s agenda to want to scrap the Senate filibuster. Trump also ousted Indiana legislators who refused to redraw their state’s congressional map.

Republicans in Congress. But Republicans in Congress don’t just have primaries to worry about. In spite of gerrymandering, some have to win in competitive districts, where they need votes from independents and maybe even a few Democrats. Senators, meanwhile, have to run statewide. So unless they’re from clearly red states, they also need support from more than just Trump and his most fervent followers.

That’s where you would expect to see the cracks form first — and we’re seeing them in two places: the reconciliation bill trying to move through the Senate, and the war powers resolution attempting to limit the Iran War. In both cases, Republican leaders in Congress adjourned for the Memorial Day recess rather than hold a vote that they would lose.

The reconciliation bill. Remember how this started. After Trump’s masked police (some combination of ICE and the border patrol) terrorized Minneapolis, murdering Alex Pretti and Renee Good, Democrats refused ICE and CBP any further funding without putting some common-sense restrictions on these rogue agencies.

first, federal immigration agents need to remove masks, turn on their body cameras, and wear visible, clear identification. Second, Democrats want to end the roving patrols. This is a nation of laws guided by the Constitution that everyone—including ICE—must abide by. This means that federal immigration officials must stop racial profiling and end random arrests; and agents must obtain a judicial warrant signed by a neutral judge—not an administrative warrant—to enter private property. They also cannot detain Americans for hours or use excessive force against them just for peacefully protesting in support of their neighbors and friends. Third, Democrats are demanding accountability. ICE and Border Patrol squads cannot indiscriminately smash in car windows, use tear gas on protestors, and shoot at people without any accountability.

Republicans refused any meaningful limits on ICE, and resolved to fund the mass-deportation agenda without Democratic votes (the same way they passed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” last year). That was the origin of the current reconciliation bill.

Since then, the bill has become a Christmas tree with all kinds of baubles on it. Trump wanted it to include $1 billion for his White House ballroom — which originally wasn’t supposed to cost the taxpayers anything (beyond the cost of whatever favors Trump offered donors). Senators balked at this, but then were bailed out by the Senate parliamentarian, who ruled that the ballroom funding violated the arcane rules that govern reconciliation bills. Trump then demanded that Majority Leader Thune fire the parliamentarian, which he has not done.

The reconciliation bill doesn’t fund Trump’s corrupt “anti-weaponization” fund, which the Justice Department claims it can create with money from a fund previously established to pay settlements of lawsuits against the government. But there is no settlement in this case. Settlements are overseen by courts, and probably no judge would sign off on what Trump wants.

On May 20—the same day the parties’ jurisdictional briefs had been due—[the judge] issued an order formally closing the case. In her order, she noted that the Justice Department, which has an “independent obligation to uphold the ‘public’s strong interest in knowing about the conduct of its Government and expenditure of its resources,’” had “neither submitted any settlement documents nor filed any documents ensuring that settlement was appropriate where there was an outstanding question as to whether an actual case or controversy existed.”

So if it’s not in the bill, why is the fund a problem for Senate Republicans? The reconciliation process allows the opposing party a chance to offer amendments. Democrats are almost certain to propose an amendment saying that no federal money can be spent on the anti-weaponization fund, or perhaps just that no money be awarded to people who have been convicted of assaulting police officers or committing sedition against the United States. Since those are precisely the people Trump wants to reward, he will demand Republican senators vote against such an amendment. And how will they explain such a vote to their constituents?

That prospect set up a tumultuous private meeting between Republican senators and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is spearheading the anti-weaponization fund effort. Mitch McConnell came out saying this:

So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — Take your pick.

The upshot was that the reconciliation vote wasn’t held before senators left for the Memorial Day recess. Whether any of this can be resolved after they come back in June is still up in the air.

Iran war. We’re now three months into a war that Trump insisted was won on the first day. He has never explained the goals of the war to the American people, and has never gone to Congress for authorization. He just wanted to attack Iran, so he did. Why does anybody need to know any more than that? The reasons he gives may shift from tweet to tweet, but why does that matter?

Democrats have been proposing resolutions to limit the war since it began, but Republicans have been holding them at bay. But defections on the Republican side have been building up, and a resolution asking Trump to withdraw American forces by the end of June looked ready to pass the House Thursday, forcing Speaker Johnson to delay the vote until after the Memorial Day recess.

Of course, Trump could veto that resolution even if it passes, and there aren’t nearly enough votes to override such a veto. So the legal effect of passing the resolution would have been nil. But putting the House on record opposing Trump’s war would be a big deal.

And eventually, Congress will need to appropriate some money to pay for all the bombs and missiles and military deployments. What will happen then?

Where are we? Opposed to the now-he’s-gone-too-far conventional wisdom is the Trump-has-a-floor view that his base of support is unshakeable. What seems to be true is something in between. The process of Trump’s fall should go something like this: He’ll lose the support of independents who voted for him in 2024 (which has pretty much already happened). Then Republican senators and congresspeople will peel off one-by-one, which has been happening slowly for several months. Then the drip-drip of leaking support will become a flood. Eventually, even previously fervent supporters will go silent, or forget that they were ever MAGA.

It won’t happen all at once. There’s even a chance that a deal-on-paper with Iran will reduce the pressure on the GOP congressional majorities to assert themselves, or that some fig-leaf concessions on the ballroom or the weaponization fund will allow the reconciliation bill to pass.

But the erosion is still happening. Long-term, I don’t think it can be stopped.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged democracy | Comments (4)

Is Corruption the Democrats’ Unifying Theme?

May 18, 2026 – 12:00 pm

Maybe the reason the government is working so badly for you is that it works so well for him.

Ever since he came down the escalator in 2015, Donald Trump has posed a unique problem for his opponents: There’s so much to run against, how do you focus?

Maybe his ongoing attack on democratic governance and the rule of law is the most serious problem. But that can sound legalistic and abstract to a low-information voter. Harris tried to make democracy a major issue in 2024, and it didn’t get traction.
Maybe in the long run his gutting of the already-inadequate Obama/Biden response to climate change is the most serious thing. But there you run into a fossil-fuel-company disinformation campaign that has been going on for decades. Lots of Americans just don’t believe in climate change and don’t see why they should make sacrifices to head it off.
Maybe we need to turn around his “Promises Made; Promises Kept” slogan and point to all the reasons his supporters should be disappointed: Inflation is worse, not better. The deficit has gone up, not down. Tariffs and deportations haven’t opened up manufacturing jobs for Americans. Quite the opposite of exposing Epstein’s co-conspirators, his Justice Department has been helping hide them. Rather than curb wasteful government spending, he has pushed for expensive vanity projects like a billion-dollar ballroom and the Arc de Trump. After claiming that Harris would get us into another expensive war, he has gotten us into another expensive war.
Maybe we should push a class theme: Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” cut billionaire’s taxes and paid for it by cutting food and healthcare benefits for the working poor.
Maybe Trump’s personality is the problem: the constant lying, the childish insults, his mistreatment of women, and the way he demands a North-Korea-like level of praise from everyone in his administration. But Trump has a unique teflon-coating in this area. His over-the-top rhetoric channels the free-floating anger many voters feel.

I could go on. But if you don’t focus, if you catalog everything, you sound obsessive. Trump’s counter-narrative is that his critics have Trump Derangement Syndrome, an irrational urge to denounce anything Trump does. (The real TDS, in my opinion, is suffered by the Republicans who abandoned their previous principles to follow Trump: the libertarians who are now pro-autocracy, the deficit hawks who support both cutting taxes and fighting unnecessary wars, the religious leaders for whom Trump’s personal immorality doesn’t matter, and so on.)

The underlying problem is that everything is a distraction from everything else. Picking out one thing seems to imply that the others are acceptable. And that gets us squabbling among ourselves rather than uniting in opposition.

If only there were a theme that was unifying rather than divisive. Is there any aspect of the Trump regime that could serve as a trunk, with all the other objections as branches?

The Hungarian example. Péter Magyar faced a similar problem when he ran against Viktor Orbán, the neo-fascist autocrat of Hungary. Like Trump, Orbán had been an across-the-board negative influence on Hungarian society for many years. But as a result, the people who ought to oppose him did not form any coherent whole. So how could they be united behind a single party or candidate?

Magyar chose to focus on one central issue: corruption. And it worked.

Could it work for us?

Trump’s corruption. There’s a lot to work with here. To start with, there’s the bottom-line result: Trump’s net worth has skyrocketed since he got re-elected. Somehow, being president again has tripled his wealth in less than two years.

How? According to Forbes:

His cryptocurrency ventures, stalled out before the election, exploded after his victory, adding an estimated $1.8 billion to his fortune overall. Another $500 million came in court, where Trump’s legal team succeeded in eliminating a half-billion judgement against him. His once-dormant licensing business surged $400 million, as foreign developers clamored to do business with an American president.

Then there are the bribes channeled through lawsuits. For example, Trump filed a legally baseless lawsuit against CBS, but the parent company Paramount paid $16 million to the Trump Library to settle it — and got approval for its merger with Skydance. ABC had previously settled a similarly frivolous lawsuit for $15 million.

Then there are the indirect bribes, like Qatar giving a $400-million airplane to the Trump Library rather than directly to him, or the government contracts his sons are getting, or son-in-law Jared Kushner doing billions of dollars in private business ventures with the same governments he’s negotiating with for the United States.

This level of corruption has filtered down to his appointees, like border czar Tom Homan, who reportedly was taped taking $50,000 in a bag. (The investigation into Homan was quashed and Pam Bondi refused to answer questions about it in a congressional hearing.) Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem reportedly commissioned her own “palace in the sky” for $70 million.

This week’s self-dealing. But it’s hard to find a more blatant example of corruption than Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Supposedly, this is about the damage he suffered from having his tax returns leaked to the New York Times.

Bear in mind that all presidents since Nixon have released their tax returns voluntarily, for free, because the American people have a right to know how their presidents have been making money. Trump repeatedly had said he would release his returns, but always claimed there was some reason it couldn’t happen immediately.

Who knew that information was worth $10 billion?

Trump also has filed claims against the government for $230 million, concerning fantasized abuses of the investigations into his dealings with Russia and the successful FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home. (Both were entirely justified. Most obviously the Mar-a-Lago search: Trump illegally kept classified documents after he left the White House and became a private citizen. He told the government he had turned everything in. But the FBI searched for additional classified documents and found them.)

So anyway, these are claims in which Trump as an individual is suing the government he heads. He is effectively controlling both sides of the process — literal self-dealing. In April, a federal judge objected, requiring both “sides” to write memos explaining how this suit belongs in an adversarial process, when the two sides are not adversaries.

Rather than do that, according to both ABC News and the New York Times, Trump planned to “settle” with himself, by using $1.7 billion of taxpayer funds to create a slush fund controlled by Trump that could be used to pay off anyone who claimed to have been damaged by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the Justice Department: For example, the violent criminals who assaulted police officers on January 6.

All weekend, the obviousness of this scheme created bad publicity for the Trump regime. But that didn’t stop him. This morning, Trump dropped the lawsuit and the slush fund got created.

How is corruption a unifying theme? Trump’s corruption deserves to be an issue in its own right. It’s unparalleled in American history. (Even past corrupt presidencies typically didn’t enrich the president directly. Grant, for example, wrote his memoirs as he was dying so that his widow could have some money to live on after he was gone.) Any of a dozen or so similar scandals would have sunk any previous administration. (Think about how the Republicans tried to spin Hunter Biden, and what small potatoes all that is compared to Jared, Eric, and Don Jr.)

But Magyar made corruption unifying like this: The government isn’t working for you because it’s not trying to. It’s trying to work for him.

Do you not see what you’re getting from the Iran War? You’re not supposed to. It’s not for you. Tariffs? That was about bullying foreign governments into cooperating with Trump; it was never about you. Inflation? Trump was too busy designing his ballroom (and making sweetheart deals with contractors) to worry about it. Climate change? The big money is with the oil companies, so who cares about your children’s future?

And finally there’s the democracy issue, which is famously difficult to package in a way that reaches the voters we need. To many, it all sounds like politicians fighting turf battles: Who cares about Trump defying court orders or usurping Congress’ power-of-the-purse? How does any of that affect me?

It affects you like this: What Trump has consistently done is bulldoze any power center in government that could stop him from stealing. That’s why there are no independent inspectors general in government departments any more. That’s why cabinet secretaries won’t answer questions in congressional hearings. That’s why he wants to pre-determine elections through gerrymandering and voter suppression. He’s taking power away from anybody who could call him to account for his corruption.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged corruption, democracy | Comments (10)

The Longer View

March 16, 2026 – 11:37 am

Ever find yourself watching Trump officials and thinking “What’s wrong with those people?” Three writers offer their answers.

We’ve known for a long time that the Trump administration works on a flood-the-zone theory: Do so many outrageous things simultaneously that the American People have a hard time comprehending them all, much less organizing a response. Are they disenfranchising large numbers of voters? Never mind that, ICE is murdering US citizens on the streets of Minneapolis. Want to do something about that? That’s yesterday’s news; the Epstein files are hiding evidence of billionaire pedophilia. Concerned about that? Never mind, we’re in a war now. On and on.

Further impairing our comprehension is the barely explicable attitudes central figures in the administration take. Again and again, before I can even get to the policy content of some statement, I have to deal with my first response: What is wrong with these people?

Saturday NBC reported:

Trump said he was “surprised” that Iran decided to attack other Middle Eastern countries in response to the U.S.-Israeli operation, and that U.S. strikes on Kharg Island on Saturday “totally demolished” most of the island but that “we may hit it a few more times just for fun.”

Fun? Trump is having fun killing people and watching his own people die? What’s wrong with him?

Just about any appearance by Secretary of ~~War~~ Defense Pete Hegseth includes a what’s-wrong-with-him moment. Friday during a press briefing about the Iran War, he said there would be “no quarter, no mercy for our enemies“. [Note the web site that link is on: war.gov] Just Security posted an article by Danial Maurer, a former Army JAG who has taught at West Point. Maurer imagined the memo a Pentagon legal counsel should have sent to Hegseth in response: It points out that “no quarter” is a war crime. The phrase refers to the ancient practice of killing opponents even if they try to surrender.

Maybe Hegseth intended to threaten war crimes and encourage his underlings to commit them. Or maybe he was just blabbing — saying a bunch of tough-sounding words without knowing what they mean. Either way: What’s wrong with that guy?

Trump gave his whole cabinet shoes identical to his own favorites, and “everybody’s afraid not to wear them.” For some reason he made Marco Rubio’s way too big. And Rubio wears them. Our Secretary of State attends important gatherings in clown shoes. What’s wrong with him?

Pam Bondi blew off questions from Congress about DoJ’s failure to interview survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes by pointing to the stock market:

The Dow is over 50,000 right now. … That’s what we should be talking about.

I was listening to that hearing live, and I had trouble even getting to the policy implications of her statement. Because all I could think was: “What’s wrong with her? What kind of human being thinks like that?”

Why are all these people so cruel, insensitive, self-centered? so devoid of qualities that we expect not just from leaders but from ordinary people?

Most of us don’t have the time or the presence of mind to step back and try to answer that question. But a few recent articles have been written by people who do.

The most interesting to me is “The Problem of Pathocracy” by Dr. Steve Taylor, which was published by The Psychologist, a journal of the British Psychological Society. It’s a recent article, but the theory it presents goes back to the pre-Trump era. Polish psychologist Andrzej Lobaczewski, who experienced both Nazi and Communist regimes, coined the term pathocracy decades ago.

As he put it, pathocracy is a system of government ‘wherein a small pathological minority takes control over a society of normal people’. Since he was living under a ‘pathocratic’ regime himself, Lobaczewski took great risks studying this topic. He was arrested and tortured by the Polish authorities, and unable to publish his life’s work, the book Political Ponerology, until he escaped to the United States during the 1980s.

According to Lobaczewski, the transition to pathocracy begins when a disordered individual emerges as a leader figure. While some members of the ruling class are appalled by the brutality and irresponsibility of the leader and his acolytes, his disordered personality appeals to some psychologically normal individuals. They find him charismatic. His impulsiveness is mistaken for decisiveness; his narcissism for confidence; his recklessness for fearlessness.

Soon other people with psychopathic traits emerge and attach themselves to the pathocracy, sensing the opportunity to gain power and influence. At the same time, responsible and moral people gradually leave the government, either resigning or being ruthlessly ejected. In an inevitable process, soon the entire government is filled with people with a pathological lack of empathy and conscience.

The first Trump administration included a large number of relatively “responsible and moral” people with conservative political views: Mike Pence, Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, John Kelly, and so on. But by the end of that term, all but Pence had been fired or resigned under pressure, and Pence was persona non grata after he failed to join Trump’s coup attempt in 2021. And so, as Lobaczewski predicted, we are left with a government “filled with people with a pathological lack of empathy and conscience”.

Not only is Trump’s sociopathy enabled by such people, they are drawn to him. He gives them permission to be what they always wanted to be. We can see the same process working on a larger scale: Across the country, people don the red hat because it lets them insult and abuse the kind of people they have always hated.

That leads to a second article: “Polarization and Strife” by A. R. Moxon on his blog The Reframe. That article was originally written in 2022, but Moxon reposted it this week because of its relevance to recent events.

This article flips the script on the word polarization. People complain about how polarized our society has gotten: Friendships are ending and relatives become estranged because of political disagreements.

But Moxon calls attention to a different kind of polarization, one that has always been with us: polarization between the comfortable and the marginalized, “gay or bi or trans or nonbinary, Black or brown, Muslim or Jewish or Sikh or Hindu, or undocumented, or disabled, ill, neuroatypical, impoverished, or unhoused people, and many others, too”.

The “unpolarized” world so many people are nostalgic for is one where the marginalized could be safely ignored. You could say words like bitch and faggot and nigger and retard, because all the comfortable people agreed that those marginalized groups don’t matter, and members of the groups themselves had been intimidated into silence. So you could insult or abuse marginalized groups openly, and no one would call you on it. But today you can’t even do it if you’re just joking, because nobody has a sense of humor any more.

Moxon looks at this not as polarization, but as solidarity: More and more comfortable people are feeling empathy for the marginalized and refusing to watch passively as they’re abused.

Consider the idea that treating certain people as if they don’t matter enough to care about their dignity and their lives—and doing this so thoroughly and effectively that society treats them as if they are nonexistent and disposable—creates a much deeper polarization than any fight over the holiday dinner table or on the airwaves over whether or not it’s good to do so.

And: the more peaceful that subjugation, the greater the polarization.

Consider a corollary, that as people stop going along with this unnatural injustice, it will decrease the peace of that subjugation; will increase resentment and strife, for as long as there are people still willing to fight to subjugate others.

But the strife isn’t polarization. It’s distressing, but it’s not polarization. The strife is the first early sign that we might be willing to stop being polarized by bigotry and injustice.

The third article I want to call your attention to is “The Most Divorced Men in History” by Andrea Pitzer, published on her blog Degenerate Art. Pitzer focuses on the weird affect of so many people in the Trump administration. Past administrations have at times had cruel policies, but they usually seemed apologetic about it: We don’t want to hurt anybody, but there’s this greater good to weigh the suffering against.

Trump’s people, by contrast, seem genuinely gleeful about the harm they can do. Stephen Miller, for example, appears to glory in the distress he causes immigrant gardeners and farm workers and healthcare aides. Greg Bovino gave a swaggering style to the ICE thugs who terrorized Minneapolis. Elon Musk seemed joyful and pleased with himself as he slashed programs to feed hungry people and inoculate children against infectious diseases. In the end, he caused vast numbers of deaths and didn’t even save the government money, but he appears untouched by the kind of regret the rest of us feel when we tap a stranger’s bumper in a parking lot.

Pitzer goes out on a limb and associates this kind of high-level viciousness with a phenomenon she sees in everyday life: divorced-guy energy.

What do I mean by “divorced guys”? I mean that they all have the energy of the man who won’t stop talking about the woman who left him and what a monster she is, with the clear implication that her mistreatment of him was entirely undeserved.

Several examples of this personality type exist in the right-wing influencer universe. In some cases, as with incels, the guys haven’t even been left by a partner yet, but they already speak about punishing women or restricting their rights as if the other sex has already betrayed them. In other cases, as represented by Andrew Tate, the men advocate the active physical and psychological abuse of women as a group as a means to power in a physical hierarchy in which men are supposed to dominate by default.

But the heart of divorced-guy syndrome in the U.S. today is the Trump administration. I mean that metaphorically, in which we see variations on the “divorced guy” energy of the podcasters, blaming women or assigning them very subservient roles. But I also mean it literally. The administration is filled with people who’ve had literal and often bitter divorces, and who seem to be tapping into some kind of primordial hatred of women that fuels their current work. Think Donald Trump. Or Russell Vought. Or RFK Jr. Or Pete Hegseth. I have no idea whether their issues actually rose out of their relationships with their moms, but they have played out through adult relations with women that have often ended in divorce.

Like Lobaczewski, Pitzer is pointing to the prevailing spirit in an administration, not something that affects each member individually. A few Trump officials, like Miller and Bovino, seem not to have experienced a literal divorce. And Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem are not even guys. But the administration as a whole accounts for a fairly large number of divorces, starting with Trump’s two-and-counting.

I would like to propose that the seething root of resentment that typically fuels these men is hatred of women. We are also witnessing tidal waves of racism and homophobia and disdain for the poor, but I have come to wonder if misogyny might not only sit alongside the rest but might even undergird the whole thing.

Patient zero in their hate, more often than not, is a woman each resents. The later targets might well be people who want simply to be treated as human that they refuse to treat as human because they need more targets for their fury. So instead, they come to feel they have been attacked by the actions or even the existence of minority groups. They direct their same kind of fury against those groups as they do the women they’re mad at.

She mentions Hillary Clinton as an example of a woman MAGA can’t stop hating, no matter how long she has been out of the public eye. More recent examples include AOC and the other members of “the Squad”.

Pitzer references an article by Maleah Fekete in the journal Rural Sociology, about risk-taking behaviors among rural working-class men — the heart of MAGA. Male recklessness is a major factor in the rise in “deaths of despair”. And periods of extreme recklessness often start with some triggering event.

Two-thirds of the triggering events involved relationship dissolution, which respondents frequently framed as a woman leaving. Importantly, these accounts reflect respondents’ interpretations of relationship dissolution rather than objective accounts of responsibility or causality.

Recklessness, you say? Like starting a war with no plan to end it? Or cancelling programs you don’t understand? Or firing people before you know what they do?

I admit, it’s speculative. But maybe she’s onto something.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged culture wars | Comments (7)

Why this? Why now?

March 2, 2026 – 9:46 am

Two decades ago, George W. Bush and his cabinet spent months raising support for an invasion of Iraq. Two days ago, the Trump regime attacked Iran without giving us any coherent explanation.

Saturday, the US and Israel began an air war against Iran. The widespread attacks had a variety of goals, but decapitating the government was clearly one of them: One early death was that of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, an ayatollah who has been in power since the death of the founder of the current theocracy, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989.

The first American deaths were reported yesterday: three service members who had not yet been named. Five more have been seriously wounded.

We have no idea how many Iranian civilians have been killed, but at least 175 of them appear to be schoolgirls.

It’s hard to know what to write about this, because we have been told so little. Comparisons to George W. Bush’s Iraq fiasco are everywhere, but this attack differs in one important respect: Bush spent months trying to raise public and congressional support for his invasion. Trump, on the other hand, has given no credible explanation. In retrospect, many Americans resented Bush’s deceptive propaganda, but at least he acted like our opinions mattered. Trump seems not to need either our approval or that of Congress. (The Constitution and the War Powers Act say he does need Congress’ approval, if things like that still matter.)

I remember where I was when Bush came on every TV network to announce we were going to war. Trump hasn’t bothered. He posted to social media an 8-minute video full of rhetoric and falsehoods, and never answered the questions “Why this? Why now?” Stylistically, he talked at us rather than to us — standing behind an official podium and hiding his eyes in the shadow of the visor of a USA cap.

Yesterday, he didn’t even send his people out to answer questions.

No senior Trump administration officials or cabinet members appeared on the Sunday show television circuit a day after the US and Israel began a major military operation in Iran, killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. … The White House’s communications operation indicated that it would let allies on Capitol Hill do the talking, three people familiar with the discussions said.

Why would Trump want Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton to make the case rather than Marco Rubio or Pete Hegseth or J. D. Vance? To me, the answer seems obvious: Republican senators aren’t official representatives of the Trump regime, so anything they say is deniable.

Trump has sent them out to lie to us, and doesn’t want to be answerable when those lies collapse.

Every hint of an explanation that we’ve been given so far is full of holes. We were told in June that the bombing raids then had “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability. But only months later we have to attack again because Iran “can never have a nuclear weapon.”

As they made their public case this week for another American military campaign against Iran, President Trump and his aides asserted that Iran has restarted its nuclear program, has enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days, and is developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States. All three of these claims are either false or unproven.

Of course, President Obama had already negotiated a plan to keep Iran from getting nukes, but Trump tore it up, promising a “better deal”. This war, apparently, is that better deal.

He told Iran’s military and police forces:

Lay down your arms. You will be treated fairly with total immunity. Or you will face certain death.

But there’s no way an air campaign can back that up. The Iranian forces would have to surrender to somebody on the ground, somebody with the institutional power to hold tribunals for some people but not others. Who is that?

Trump also claimed to be doing this for the Iranian people:

When we are done, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations. … America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force.

But yesterday he told the NYT

What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario.

In Venezuela after Maduro was captured, his vice president took power and the entire regime remained intact. All they did was let Trump control their oil.

So much for the Iranian people.

In the absence of any plausible explanation from Trump, we’re left to imagine some other motive. Here’s the opinion of Phillips P. OBrien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland:

Boil it all down and what do we have? We have a military operation with no clear ends at all. Stop asking what the US government’s intentions are, they do not exist outside of the personal interests of Donald Trump. They can and will therefore change in a heartbeat as he searches desperately for whatever end gives him the best chance to declare victory. He has made the national interest entirely personal.

The pundits who look for personal motives have identified two:

Trump attacked Iran to change the media narrative in the US. The testimony of the Clintons to the House Oversight Committee has raised the question of why Trump doesn’t testify. And polls show Trump’s party headed for a historic defeat in November, losing the House and possibly even the Senate.
This bombing campaign is what Iran’s regional rivals get in exchange for a series of bribes to Trump and his family: the UAE’s half-billion-dollar investment in Trump’s crypto company; a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar; Jared Kushner’s firm getting $2 billion in Saudi money to invest despite their high management fees and lack of experience; an Abu Dhabi firm using $2 billion in Trump meme coins to complete a business transaction; and perhaps countless others that are still hidden behind the veil of Trump’s real estate and crypto-currency operations. Rachel Maddow says: “And now for that low, low price, they appear to have rented the services of the United States military to start a war that they want, but that the American people do not, and that our American government hasn’t bothered to explain in terms that are even internally consistent, let alone rational and sound.”

A big, expensive distraction? A quid for the sheikhs’ quo? Trump may not like those theories. But if he doesn’t want them settling into the public mind, he needs to give us something better.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged iran, war | Comments (15)

Greenland: It’s getting serious

January 19, 2026 – 10:39 am

What started as a punch line is turning into a trade war with our allies.

When President Trump began fantasizing about annexing Greenland back in 2019, the suggestion was hard to take seriously. Maybe he’d been playing Risk, where Greenland-to-Iceland is the sole invasion path between North America and Europe. Or he’d been fooled by the Mercator projection map of the world, which exaggerates land masses near the poles and makes Greenland appear to be about the size of South America.

However he got to this strange idea, it had to be a joke. Governments buying and selling inhabited lands was commonplace in the age of monarchies. But slavery ended, and the idea of selling people wholesale vanished soon after.

Unsurprisingly, Denmark refused to consider the offer.

Danish PM Mette Frederiksen described the suggestion as “absurd” and said she hoped Mr Trump was not being serious.

He was serious enough to cancel a planned trip to Denmark in response. But nothing happened right away, and the next year Trump lost the 2020 election and had to leave office.

Most of us forgot, so when he began talking about Greenland again last year, it seemed to come out of nowhere. But he hadn’t even taken office yet when Don Jr. went to Greenland to drum up support. One Danish broadcaster claimed Trump bribed poor people to express their desire to join America.

Several sources said a portion of the people who appeared in a video by Trump’s campaign team that was recorded at a restaurant in the capital city of Nuuk, and pictures on social media, are homeless and socially disadvantaged, according to DR.

By March, J.D. Vance and his wife were scoping out Greenlanders’ support for becoming part of the US. Greenland’s prime minister described the trip as “aggressive“.

Last week, Stephen Miller brushed off a question about whether the US might take Greenland by force, saying “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” But if Trump thought he could bluff his way into Greenland, European powers have called that bluff.

The White House has been describing talks between the US, Greenland, and Denmark as “technical talks on the acquisition of Greenland” — as if the sale were a done deal, pending a little haggling about price. But Denmark and Greenland think they have agreed to no such thing.

Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, said the agreement at Wednesday’s meeting had in fact been “to launch a high-level working group to explore if a common way forward can be found to address the American security concerns in relation to Greenland.”

This week, countries began moving troops around.

Before the talks began Wednesday, Denmark announced it would increase its military presence in Greenland. Several European partners — including France, Germany, the U.K., Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands — started sending symbolic numbers of troops or promised to do so in the following days.

Ostensibly, the European troops are there to address Trump’s stated concern about defending Greenland against Russia and China. But they also make another point: Maybe somebody will fight the US over the future of Greenland.

The idea isn’t that a dozen or two French or German soldiers can fend off a concerted US attack. But they draw a line in the snow: Trump isn’t going to take Greenland without killing some of America’s most loyal allies.

The US did something similar during the Cold War, when it stationed troops in West Berlin. Berlin was entirely surrounded by Soviet-occupied East Germany, so it could not be defended by the troops we had stationed there. But their presence meant that the Soviet Union could not take Berlin without starting a war with the United States.

Having been denied his fantasy of a bloodless Anschluss, Trump upped the ante, saying on Truth Social that the European countries “are playing this very dangerous game”, and “have put a level of risk in play that is not tenable or sustainable”.

So he announced 10% tariffs on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Finland, rising to 25% on June 1, and “payable until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland”.

Presumably that’s an additional tariff, because Americans already pay 15% tariffs on goods from the EU.

The tariff move seems to have goaded European leaders into action. For some while, they have been trying to humor Trump, flattering him rather than criticizing him, and making relatively small concessions in hopes that some other shiny object would draw his attention. The EU signed a trade deal with the US in August that allowed the US to impose 15% tariffs on most European imports while having no tariffs in the other direction. But having seen how long that arrangement has lasted, they are discussing retaliation rather than further appeasement.

It’s hard to see how they could do anything else. Trump’s trade demands last summer were about money, but this crosses over into principle.

A second EU diplomat said the situation was seen as very serious: “There was a clear and broad understanding that Europe and the EU cannot start reneging on key principles in the international order, such as territorial integrity.”

Making the conflict even more mysterious is that Trump’s stated rationales for wanting Greenland don’t add up. He claims that Russia and/or China want Greenland, and that only the US (not Denmark) is able to defend the island.

But of course, the US is already obligated to defend Greenland through the NATO treaty. We already have bases in Greenland. Greenland and Denmark have expressed willingness to allow a greater US military presence, as well as openness to deals for exploiting Greenland’s mineral resources. So what do we gain by making Greenland a US territory?

I hope the Supreme Court is watching. If anyone needs more evidence that Trump’s use of tariffs has nothing to do with the intention behind the law he is using — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — this is it. Paul Krugman writes:

A tariff to promote territorial expansion is clearly illegal, under any sane interpretation of U.S. trade law. This is on the Supreme Court, which is obviously dithering while the world burns

Remember the dancing frogs of Portland? Well, Greenland defenders have their own absurdists. Numerous music videos depict an inter-species Greenland defense force. Also check out this one and this one.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged Greenland, NATO, Trump | Comments (6)

Renee Good and Our Epistemological Crisis

January 12, 2026 – 9:21 am

Is there any hope of finding a common reality?

Wednesday in Minneapolis, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot American mother Renee Good three times, killing her. There is so much to be upset about here, it’s hard to pick a focus. So I’ll start by listing a few and justify them later.

The shooting was senseless and had no legitimate justification. (See below.)
Despite the presence of numerous law enforcement officers, Ross was not taken into custody and was allowed to drive away with his weapon.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem immediately lied about the incident, pushing a narrative that painted Good as a “domestic terrorist” and made Ross the victim of her attack. President Trump and Vice President Vance quickly reinforced this lie. Noem repeated her gaslighting in an interview with Jake Tapper Sunday.
The false story Noem and other told is virtually identical to the stories ICE has told after previous violent incidents. Sometimes objective evidence doesn’t exist and those accounts have stood. But when evidence does exist, like video footage from body cams or bystanders with phones, it often shows that the ICE agents have lied about confrontations that they themselves caused and escalated.
ICE agents have subsequently shown extreme disrespect for Good and those mourning her. One agent (possibly Ross) can be heard to say “fucking bitch” immediately after the shooting, while another later kicked over candles mourners had set up to honor Good. (What kind of asshole does that?)
The FBI has blocked state and local police from investigating the shooting. So the only investigation will take place within DHS, whose leader has already announced a conclusion we know to be false.

Those things are all true and objectionable, but most of them are being well discussed elsewhere. This morning, I want to take a step back and look at something else: the ability of right-wing media to keep telling a story conflicting with widely available evidence, and the apparent belief inside the MAGA news bubble that objective reality does not exist; what you think happened is simply a matter of who you choose to believe and what evidence you choose to examine.

To me, analyzing the videos of this shooting should resemble what happens in instant-replay review during a sporting event. A questionable play has happened, and then the refs examine the available video. Typically, one or two camera angles aren’t definitive: Looking at them, you can still imagine outcomes favorable to either team. But then you get the angle that makes everything clear. (Here’s the ball, here’s the goal line. It either did or didn’t cross. Or: Here’s the shooter when the clock hits zero. The ball either is or isn’t out of his hand.) Once you’ve seen the definitive angle, the other angles don’t matter any more. You don’t go back to a previous shot and say, “Sure, but in this one the other conclusion still seems possible.”

In this case, there are several decisive moments and angles, all consistent with each other. Like this one, which is a still from a bystander video analyzed in detail by the New York Times:

Ross is the agent behind the agent by Good’s door. His feet are clearly visible to the left of the vehicle, while the front wheels are steering right. (The orientation of the wheels is hard to see in this shot, but clearer when you see the continuous video.) So two conclusions are obvious: (1) Good was not trying to run Ross over, as Noem claimed. Her wheels were pointed away from him. (2) Ross was not in any danger of being run over.

Trump posted a different video along with his claim that “Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.” It is a distant video that lets you imagine that anything could have happened — exactly the kind that the football refs would ignore. And in fact, Ross was not harmed, something that is obvious from video of him walking up and down the street seconds later. (It’s possible he was brushed as the car went by, but nothing more.)

Still, you might imagine that Ross believed he was in danger, even though he wasn’t. That conceivably might justify a self-defense claim for his first shot. (The bullet hole is on the left side of the windshield, consistent with him standing close to the left front wheel, and not directly in front.)

But there are two problems with that justification: First, he’s in front of the car because he moved there. Moving into danger so that you can use that danger as an excuse to kill someone does not usually fly in court.

But even more damning: He shoots twice more. His second shot is through the open window in the driver’s door, and his third comes from behind as Good is trying to drive away. In other words: the SUV has already missed him. Shooting as your alleged assailant runs away is not self defense.

You could also imagine that Ross got scared, panicked, and fired three times before he realized he was safe. Even if true, that’s not much of an excuse. At the very least, a guy with responses this bad should never again have a job where he carries a gun. And if I were a prosecutor, I would see what degree of murder I could make stick.

So far I’ve just been drawing clear conclusions from objective evidence. But now I’ll say what I believe in my heart really happened: ICE’s stated mission is to round up deportable immigrants, but that’s not the whole story. Another part of its mission is to intimidate American citizens, particularly citizens in majority-Democratic cities who might be inclined to protest against Trump’s policies. Intimidation is why they wear masks. (They claim it’s to avoid reprisals, but that excuse doesn’t hold water. Local police and FBI agents also investigate dangerous gangs, but they don’t wear masks. Why are ICE agents more cowardly?) And if you watch ICE behavior, it’s clear what rules of engagement the agents been given: If somebody isn’t sufficiently intimidated, escalate the confrontation until they are.

Renee Good’s primary offense was not being intimidated. When agents gave her conflicting orders, she didn’t freeze, she started to drive away. This made Ross angry, and so he killed her, with “fucking bitch” as her epitaph.

Other ICE agents know this. That’s why they are using Good’s death to further intimidate potential protesters. Here, an agent warns a woman sitting in her car not to “make a bad decision and ruin your life”. Nice life you’ve got there; be a shame if anything happened to it.

What has truly amazed me, though, is not that liars will lie. I never trusted Noem or Vance or Trump or ICE, so seeing them gaslight the country is not the least bit shocking. (A columnist for National Catholic Reporter had a different reaction to Vance: “The vice president’s comments justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith.”)

What amazes me is the number of people who simply repeat what the regime tells them, either not looking at the evidence or (even worse) looking at it and seeing what they have been told to see.

Friday evening, my church organized a vigil for Good. We stood on our town common and quietly held candles with a few signs. According to a reporter for the local online news, 77 people (some church members and some not) attended, which is not bad for a hastily organized event in a small town.

When I came home from the vigil, I saw the Facebook comments on an article that announced it. (122 at last count.) Many of the commenters repeated the regime gaslighting: Why were we holding a vigil for a woman who tried to kill a federal officer? When others disputed this characterization and pointed to the videos proving otherwise, they were answered by vague references to other videos that supposedly support the regime gaslighting. (Like this one: It does not support the regime, but apparently they looked at it and thought it did.)

I wonder what DHS expects its sheep to see in a video it posted yesterday. It shows the street the shooting happened on, during the three minutes before the shooting. There’s a snowy middle-class residential neighborhood, a lot of honking cars moving slowly, pretty much what you’d expect from the videos already out. Absolutely none of the “violent rioters” a DHS official had mentioned.

Maybe the point of such a video is just that it exists. I could point to a brick and claim that it proves I’m right about something. And if you’re sufficiently sheeplike, you might say, “It must be true. He showed me proof.”

I find all this disturbing on a deep level. Apparently, many of our fellow citizens are living in a world where there is no objective reality. There is just disagreement, and some people are powerful enough to make their version of events stick.

A second disturbing feature in the comments I saw was the claim that Good was responsible for her own death, because she didn’t obey ICE agents’ commands. First off, I’m not sure what authority ICE agents have to give commands to US citizens. But suppose they can. The penalty for civil disobedience is not summary execution. Apparently, a number of Americans think it should be.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (14)

The Venezuela attack is a constitutional crisis for the United States

January 5, 2026 – 10:07 am

Is Congress still a branch of government?

As I often point out: A one-person weekly blog is a bad place to cover breaking news. This morning, the attack on Venezuela is in that nebulous zone between breaking news and an ongoing story: US forces attacked Caracas early Saturday morning, seized President Nicolás Maduro, and apparently left. We can see the general outline of what happened, but what it all means and where it’s all going is still very cloudy.

At the same time, we can’t just wait for the dust to settle, because this is an emergency moment not just for Venezuela, but for America.

For almost a year now, Trump has been pushing Congress into irrelevancy, and the Republican majorities in both houses and in the Supreme Court have been letting him do it: Congress no longer controls government spending. Agencies set up by Congress to be independent of the President have been taken over. The deadlines laid out in the Epstein Files Transparency Act have been ignored. The Education Department established by Congress has been all but eliminated.

And now, Congress has been shoved out of any role in making decisions of war and peace.

Apologists for the administration will tell you that this is nothing new. Ever since World War II (the last war officially declared by Congress), Congress’ constitutional power to declare war has been in tension with the President’s constitutional power as commander in chief. [1] Exactly where the boundary lies — what the President can do on his own and what requires congressional authorization — has been a topic of legitimate debate. A rule of thumb has been that decisions that need to be made quickly belong to the President, while longer commitments require Congress.

Congress asserted its power in the War Powers Act of 1973, which set clear limits on presidential discretion. Subsequent presidents have refused to recognize the constitutionality of the WPA, but have generally respected its boundaries as a matter of good form and sound politics. [2] So, for example, President Bush II sought congressional approval before invading both Iraq and Afghanistan. Lesser military actions have sometimes been initiated without Congress.

But the Venezuela attack is completely outside the bounds of previous constitutional debates. Not only did Trump not seek authorization from Congress, but the congressional “Gang of 8” — leaders of both parties in both houses, who by law are required to be kept informed — did not know about the attack until it was underway. Worse, briefings by Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth actively misinformed congresspeople about the administration’s intentions. [3] In short, Trump has given Congress no role whatsoever in this decision to go to war.

If Congress were taking seriously its constitutional obligation to preserve our system of checks and balances, it would immediately launch an impeachment. But unfortunately, Republicans in Congress are mostly taking an all’s-well-that-ends-well view: Maduro was bad and he is out now. The mission itself was a stunning display of tactical brilliance. So we should all just be happy with our military success.

The problem with that view is that nothing has ended yet. Immediately, power has not passed to the opposition leaders whose election victory Maduro stole. Instead, Maduro’s vice president Delcy Rodríguez has taken charge of a governing structure that is very much intact. So far, she has sent signals in both directions, denouncing the US attack as “an atrocity that violates international law”, but also saying she want the US government to “collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation”.

Trump, meanwhile, has said several times that the US is going to “run” Venezuela now and “fix” it. No one in the administration seems to know exactly what that means, or whether American troops will have to occupy the country and take casualties. He seems to imagine that he can manage Rodriguez with threats. But even if he can, will Rodriguez’ people let her stay in power as an American puppet?

Rep. Jim Hines, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee (which makes him one of the uninformed Gang of 8) summed up pretty well:

We’re in the euphoria period of acknowledging across the board that Maduro was a bad guy and that our military is absolutely incredible. This is exactly the euphoria we felt in 2002 when our military took down the Taliban in Afghanistan, in 2003 when our military took out Saddam Hussein, and in 2011 when we helped remove Muammar Gaddafi from power in Libya. … Let’s let my Republican colleagues enjoy their day of euphoria, but they’re going to wake up tomorrow morning, knowing, oh my God, there is no plan here any more than there was in Afghanistan, Iraq, or in Libya.

[1] This is one of many situations where the Founders lived in a different world than we do now. The early United States had only a minuscule standing army. So any president who wanted to go to war first had to convince Congress to raise and supply a larger force. But World War II made the US a global superpower, so recent presidents have always had large military forces to command.

[2] One of the lessons of Vietnam was that it’s hard to sustain a war without popular support. Getting Congress to buy in is usually part of a larger effort to sell a war to the general public.

[3] Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told CNN’s “State of the Union” yesterday:

I can certainly tell you that the message that [Rubio and Hegseth] sent was that this wasn’t about regime change. When they came to Congress — and they literally lied to our face — they said, “This is just a counternarcotics operation. This is about trying to interrupt the drug flow to the United States.” Right around that same time, the White House Chief of Staff [Susie Wiles] said publicly if we ever had boots on the ground in Venezuela, of course, we would have to come to Congress.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged Venezuela, war | Comments (10)

Three days in the life of a pathetic man

December 22, 2025 – 9:55 am

Everything Trump does to aggrandize himself just makes him smaller.

From the time he came down the escalator in 2015, Donald Trump has gloried in his ability to get a rise out of people like me. All our howls of outrage, all the shocked shouts of “He can’t say that!”, have been music to his ears. But lately he’s been losing his touch. Donald J. Trump, once the greatest troll of the social-media era, has jumped the shark. The realization that he is past his sell-by date seems to be driving him ever further off the deep end.

I catch on slowly, so I didn’t notice until his Rob Reiner tweet.

I don’t know if Gen Z even knows who Reiner was, but several of his movies — The Princess Bride comes to mind — became cultural touchstones for my generation. They didn’t often make the critics’ lists of all-time greats, but you could quote them decades later and people would know what you meant.

So Monday, Reiner and his wife were found dead in their home, apparently murdered by their troubled son in the kind of tragedy that touches every parent somewhere deep: What if my kid had inner demons that all my attention, all my love, all the resources I could bring to bear, were helpless to exorcise?

And Trump’s response Tuesday morning was to make this tragic murder all about himself: Reiner died because his Trump Derangement Syndrome made the people around him crazy. The President of the United States went on at some length in that vein.

When I read that post, I was surprised to realize that it didn’t make me angry. No “How can he say that?”. No desire to strike back with some cutting insult.

His tweet wasn’t outrageous. It was pathetic. What a sick, sad little man.

The next two days backed up that assessment. Wednesday we found out about the presidential plaques now lining the colonnade connecting the White House residence to the Oval Office. It’s a newly installed “walk of fame” with plaques for Trump (twice, since he’s both the 45th and 47th president) and his predecessors.

But of course, the plaques for past presidents are not really about them, they’re about him. Andrew Jackson, for example, was “unjustifiably treated unfairly by the Press, but not as viciously and unfairly as President Abraham Lincoln and President Donald J. Trump would, in the future, be.” Ronald Reagan “was a fan of President Donald J. Trump long before President Trump’s Historic run for the White House.”

Joe Biden — who committed the unpardonable sin of kicking Trump’s ass by seven million votes in 2020 — got the nastiest treatment, with the plaque proclaiming him “by far, the worst president in American history”, and representing him not with a portrait, but with a picture of an autopen. The plaque declares that Biden became president “as a result of the most corrupt election ever” and “brought our nation to the brink of destruction”. Barack Obama is characterized as “one of the most divisive political figures in American history” who presided over “a stagnant economy” until his handpicked successor was defeated by Trump. Bill Clinton’s plaque also ends with the defeat of his wife by Trump.

Am I angered? No, I’m embarrassed for my country. Trump probably pictures himself impressing foreign dignitaries by leading them along this walk. In fact, they also will be embarrassed, like your friends are when your senile grandpa starts bragging about things they all know he never did. By casting his plaques in brass, Trump probably imagines them being read decades or even centuries from now. But of course they will vanish the instant he is gone, because they are sad and pathetic. They reflect badly on the White House and whomever its future occupants might be.

Wednesday night, Trump gave a nationally televised address. Typically, presidents demand time from the major networks either when there is something of substance to announce (like a the raid that killed Bin Laden) or some tragedy that calls for a presidential response (like like the Challenger disaster). Prior to Trump, addresses like this were non-partisan: The President was acting as president, speaking to or for all of us, and not as a politician revving up his base.

But that kind of compartmentalization is foreign to Trump’s nature. He demanded national attention Wednesday not because Americans needed to know something, but because his ego was hurting: The economy is doing badly and the American people are increasingly blaming him for it.

His 18-minute address (about the same length as JFK’s Cuban missile crisis speech) contained no news worth mentioning — no major developments, no policy initiatives. (The one apparent announcement turned out to be flim-flam: His $1776 “warrior dividend” to members of our military isn’t new money; it comes out of funds already appropriated for housing allowances.) The self-justification started in his first line: “Good evening America. 11 months ago I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it.” From there he launched into the kind of self-contradictory excuses you might hear from an 8-year-old: I wasn’t fighting, and besides, he started it.

Everything is wonderful, and the fact that it’s not wonderful is Joe Biden’s fault.

Most presidential addresses call for a fact-check, but that would not do this speech justice. A reverse fact-check would be more appropriate: Try to pick out some statements that are true. It’s a challenge. Sentence after sentence, clause after clause, is a travelogue from a fantasy world where Trump is a world-defining super-president.

What a sick, sad little man.

Thursday, his handpicked board at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts attached his name to this once-iconic institution. It’s now supposed to be known as the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But like the Department of Defense, the Kennedy Center was named in the statute that Congress passed to establish it, so Trump and his board of puppets have no power to rename it. The Washingtonian reports:

While the board’s “change” is basically just another flashy marquee that Trump has hung up in service of his inner real-estate developer, it’s likely to accelerate the tangible decline of the Kennedy Center’s reputation. Ticket sales have nosedived since the president took over in February, which has taken a palpable toll on the performers who work there—including the National Symphony Orchestra’s principal violist, who recently spoke to Washingtonian about his experience serenading half-empty audiences.

Maddening? No, pitiable.

One frequent discussion topic among my friends is how long it will take to undo the damage Trump has done to this country. Some of it, of course, can never be undone. The children who died of hunger or disease after he gutted USAID are beyond the help of future administrations. And we’ll never get back the four wasted years in the battle against climate change (plus a little from his undoing the small progress Biden had made).

I can’t guess how many responsible presidents will have to come and go before our allies trust us again. Or how long the CDC or the Kennedy Center will need to rebuild their reputations. How long before the Presidential Medal of Freedom becomes an honor again? Or until all the demons of bigotry he unleashed can be put back in their bottles? And what about our national sense of decency? Our respect for one another? To rebuild them will require decades of nurturing.

But Trump has never really cared about that kind of thing. He cares about promoting his name and about dictating the names others use. He cares about buildings and decor and gaudy gilding.

And I think he’s starting to realize that all those things will begin vanishing the instant he loses power. No one will ever again talk about the Gulf of America, or the Department of War, or the Trump-Kennedy Center. (JFK’s niece wants to wield a pickaxe to remove Trump’s name herself.) If he leaves before his term is up — this is precisely the situation Section 4 of the 25th Amendment was written for — not even Vance will want anyone to see those ridiculous plaques. The tasteless gilding of the White House will go away, and even his over-priced ballroom will be used for some other purpose and carry some other name.

As soon as he’s gone, the whole country (even most of the people who voted for him) will start pretending he was never there.

I think he’s starting to realize that, and so he’s been turning his Trumpiness up to 11. Every effort to aggrandize himself just makes him shrink faster, but he can’t help himself. It’s like he’s constantly screaming: “You can’t forget me!”

But we will, Donald. We will.

Maybe a small reminder will survive here or there. Perhaps, as in Shelley’s Ozymandias, somewhere the ruins of a statue will survey the wasteland of his legacy.

Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Comments (15)

A MAGA National Security Strategy

December 8, 2025 – 10:26 am

America used to frame its self-image around freedom and democracy. Now it’s about making money and preserving whiteness.

Back in July, J. D. Vance tried his hand at answering the question “What is an American?” But first he had to say what an American wasn’t, namely, someone who agrees with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time.

I don’t think many people would argue with the over-inclusive part. As Vance observed, there are probably billions of people who agree with the founding principles of the United States. They may even identify with America the way JFK was identifying with Germany when he said “Ich bin ein Berliner.” But that doesn’t make them Americans in any real sense. Now, if they come here, work, pay taxes, and pledge their allegiance to the government defined in the Constitution, we can start to have a discussion. But until then, hardly anyone would claim they’re Americans.

Where Vance caused controversy, though, was with “underinclusive”. If your ancestors fought in the Civil War, then you “have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say [you] don’t belong”, even if you don’t believe in the founding principles. Vance seemed to be saying that you could be, say, a Nazi. But if your ancestors fought for the fascist empire of its day, the Confederacy, maybe because they wanted to defend and preserve slavery, then you’re one of us.

In short, Vance’s America isn’t fundamentally about freedom or democracy or any other grand principle.

America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.

This is sometimes described as the “blood and soil” vision of a nation, and it quickly lends itself to what the far right calls “heritage Americans”, who are English-speaking and Christian and (predominantly) White and have a “way of life” that puts men (and not women) at the top of the pyramid. As one author explains:

Non-Christians can be tolerated, as long as they acquiesce to living in an unashamedly Christian America (i.e., submitting to Christian civil law, government support for Christianity, Christian moral, civil, and religious norms and customs, etc.). At the same time, both public and private citizens should be concerned to help the Christian Church flourish in our nation, since a collapse of Christian conversions, church plants, and influence will mark the end of America.

Like so much of Trumpism, this is deniable if you find it embarrassing (as I hope many Trumpists do). Vance didn’t actually spell all that out, and besides, it’s Vance, not Trump. Who takes what J. D. Vance says all that seriously anyway? And since Trump isn’t coherent enough to enunciate such a grand vision, MAGAts don’t have to own up to the full implications of redefining America in blood-and-soil terms.

NSS-USA. Last month, though, the regime put out a document that is harder to deny: National Security Strategy for the United States of America. The text part of it is only 29 pages, but I can’t recommend you read the whole thing, because (like nearly all regime publications) it’s full of praise for how Donald J. Trump rescued America from the pit of despair Joe Biden had left it in. Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of New York, and yadda, yadda, yadda.

But beyond the huckstering, the NSS-USA does have some real content. In particular, it declares an end to the era in which the US tried to be the linchpin of a rules-based global order, and tried (at least some of the time) to promote freedom and democracy. The NSS-USA characterizes this past policy both as “permanent American domination of the entire world” and as “lash[ing] American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty”.

But we’re done with all that now. Instead, we’re going to control immigration, make money, and launch a “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health”. And we’re not going to try to export American values like human rights that disrespect “other countries’ differing religions, cultures, and governing systems.” (So if MBS wants to lure an Washington Post journalist into a foreign embassy, kill him, and saw his body into little pieces, that’s just how they do things in Saudi Arabia, and we want to do profitable business with them. As the Emperor Vespasian supposedly said about raising funds by taxing public toilets, “Pecunia non olet“, meaning “Money doesn’t stink”, no matter where it comes from.)

Here’s what that “reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health” means:

We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age. We want a people who are proud, happy, and optimistic that they will leave their country to the next generation better than they found it. We want a gainfully employed citizenry—with no one sitting on the sidelines—who take satisfaction from knowing that their work is essential to the prosperity of our nation and to the well-being of individuals and families. This cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.

That’s why we have to turn our schools into propaganda mills that expunge any real discussion of slavery, genocide against the Native Americans, or the ongoing effects of racism and sexism. The American past must have nothing but “glories”, and we must ignore discouraging trends like climate change, the increasing concentration of wealth, or anything else that might cause our people to expect something other than the Golden Age of Trump. The NSS-USA doesn’t define “strong traditional families” or “healthy children”, but I hear a lot of ominous subtext there.

The document then goes region by region. Some of its goals are the same as previous administrations. We don’t want a hostile power to control the oil of the Middle East, and we want to maintain our access to other critical resources. We want to avoid seeing some rival power dominate the world.

But then it starts to diverge. It defines what is basically an American sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere. We want countries that are “reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States”. Beyond that, we don’t care what they do to their people.

The one place where we do want to interfere in other countries’ business is with our allies.

We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.

However, it looks like the regime sees those “elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions” mainly in our allies’ attempts to suppress right-wing radicalism. It promotes a view of Europe’s future that sounds a lot like proto-fascist parties such as Germany’s AfD (which Vance endorses). Due to immigration and falling native birth rates, Europe faces “civilizational erasure”. But the US wants Europe to “remain European” and to “regain its civilizational self-confidence”.

Europe’s support for Ukraine against Russia (i.e., its “unrealistic expectations for the war”) is due to its “anti-democratic” aspects.

A large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes. This is strategically important to the United States precisely because European states cannot reform themselves if they are trapped in political crisis.

Again, what this “reform” consists of is not spelled out, but I suspect the model is fascist Hungary.

American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism. … We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness.

But that’s not where NSS-USA sees Europe heading, so it wants to “cultivat[e] resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”, I suppose this means supporting blood-and-soil European parties like France’s National Rally.

If Europe refuses to defend its white cultural heritage, though, it sounds like the Trump regime wants to cut them loose.

Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter

I mean, we signed a treaty with white countries. We can’t be expected to honor it if Whites become a minority.

Other than Europe, where we want political change to preserve a native-European racial mix, we care about other countries only as potential business partners. Nothing in the document suggests that Russia is an enemy, a rival, or a threat to anyone in particular. China is a frenemy, a rival we can do business with. I would really worry if I were Taiwan, because this is how NSS-USA views it:

There is, rightly, much focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters

Taiwan is a fellow democracy and a long-standing ally, but who cares? It produces semiconductors and has a strategic location. China would have to cough up some serious bucks to induce us to turn our backs on that.

The Kagan interview. Robert Kagan is a historian of US foreign policy with whom I have often disagreed. Recently he was interviewed by Bill Kristol, who I also differ with on many things. But despite past differences, I’m fascinated by this interview [video, transcript], which takes a view-from-orbit perspective on American foreign policy. It happened before the NSS-USA came out, but anticipates much of it.

Kagan’s view, basically, is that the American-dominated post-World-War-II world order is a pleasant aberration in history, because for 3/4 of a century other potential great powers like Britain, France, Germany, and Japan have been content to live inside the American orbit. The unspoken contract was that America would take the lead in international affairs, the dollar would be the world’s reserve currency, and so on; and in return, the US would guarantee its allies’ security and wouldn’t use its preeminent position to take advantage of them.

Ordinarily, sovereign nations wouldn’t trust each other to keep a deal like that. (One cautionary historical example is the Delian League, an anti-Persia alliance that got coopted into an Athenian Empire.) But this one has held largely because of the faith all the nations had in shared liberal values like democracy and human rights.

Kagan sees that deal unraveling, largely because Trump doesn’t share liberal values and wants to take advantage.

[T]hat bargain has been exploded. And that’s why we are entering a new era, because if these countries, as is now the case, cannot rely on the American security guarantee, and I think the Trump administration has made it very clear that they can’t, that it’s sort of the intention of the Trump administration to make it clear that they can’t really rely on the United States, on the one hand.

While on the other hand, the United States now is using its superior power to demand, what is in effect, tribute from its allies in the form of these high tariffs. And so the United States is taking advantage of its overwhelming power and abusing it with its own allies. I don’t see how the alliance structure can continue under those circumstances. And now all these countries that have relied on the United States for their security are now going to have to go back to the world that existed before this unusual era in which they can only rely on themselves for security. And that has vast implications for regional geopolitics and global geopolitics that I think, again, Americans have not really begun to contemplate.

(Kagan doesn’t mention this, but from my point of view the contract has been slowly eroding for several years, as the US has used the dollar’s central role to finance enormous budget and trade deficits. In essence, the world sends us goods and we send them dollar-denominated bonds that we could devalue at any time. The Fed could, for example, create enough dollars out of nothing to redeem all the bonds.)

Needing to be able to go it alone, without the US, will probably change the nature of those countries and their governments. Kagan gives the example of Japan, which he says came out of World War I with a largely democratic pro-American government. But in the 1920s, America instituted high tariffs and strong barriers to immigration.

[P]olitics in Japan completely shifts, and then you get the Japan that invades Manchuria in 1931.

For now, our NATO allies may cut deals with Trump and pay his tariffs, while grasping that he no longer guarantees their security against, say, Russia. Short-term, they have little choice. But that’s not a stable situation.

Germany having to re-arm to the point where it can actually meet Soviet power means a completely new Germany again. Now, maybe a heavily armed Germany will still be a liberal Germany, that’s possible. But it’s clear that Germany’s neighbors are going to have the same reaction to that level of German power that they’ve always had in the past. If Japan can’t rely on the United States, it’s going to go become a nuclear weapon state. It’s going to build up its capabilities, and tensions between Japan and China are going to increase exponentially. And if there’s one thing Americans have learned over the past century is that when other great powers get into wars, the United States is immediately implicated in that. That’s the great lesson of World War II. And that’s why we created this liberal world order in the first place.

And again, that’s another thing that I think Americans just are not conscious of. A lot of Americans think we created this liberal order to fight the Soviet Union, which was not true. It was created without regard, even without anticipation that the Soviets were going to be the big problem. It was to prevent a return to effectively a multipolar world.

Trump may think the US can just collect its tribute and live happily ever after. But history has never worked that way before. Picture, for example, a re-militarized Germany led by a xenophobic far-right party like the AfD. What could possibly go wrong?

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged democracy, war | Comments (4)

The Weekly Sift

Tag Archives: Trump administration

All Americans Need Pride Now

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Is Corruption the Democrats’ Unifying Theme?

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Why this? Why now?

Greenland: It’s getting serious

Renee Good and Our Epistemological Crisis

The Venezuela attack is a constitutional crisis for the United States

Three days in the life of a pathetic man

A MAGA National Security Strategy

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