The scenario where American democracy survives Trump got a little more credible this week.
Consider the events of this week, all of which will be described in more detail in the weekly summary I’ll post later this morning:
Monday, Cory Booker began his record-setting 25-hour speech in the Senate, making the case that “the country is in crisis”. At its peak, the livestream of this speech was being watched to 300,000 viewers.
Thursday and Friday, investors around the world reacted to Trump’s tariffs by selling their stocks. The S&P 500 lost 10% of its value in just two days. By Friday evening it was 17% below its February high. The panic is continuing this morning.
Saturday, “Hands Off” protest rallies happened in 1400 locations across the country. 800K people had signed up for the protests, making credible the organizers’ claim that millions participated.
It’s tricky to evaluate the significance of all this. If you look at it all pessimistically, Booker’s speech was a stunt that produced no direct congressional action, off-year elections are notoriously bad predictors of subsequent elections, Trump has announced and withdrawn tariff plans before that whipsawed the markets, and massive protests in his first term seemed to have little consequence. A month or two from now, none of this may look all that important.
But.
Six weeks ago, I posted “How Things Stand“, a summary of how Trump was threatening American democracy and where things might go from there.
So now we’ve seen Trump’s opening moves: a blizzard of executive orders claiming unprecedented powers that can be found nowhere in the Constitution. That was all predictable.
What wasn’t predictable, and is still unknown, is how the other American power centers would respond. I’m talking about Congress, the courts, the state governments, and the People. That’s all still very hard to predict, because each of those power centers will influence the behavior of the others.
It’s important for us to be neither complacent about all this nor resigned to our fate.
I projected a scenario that avoided the establishment of a lasting Trump autocracy, emphasizing that it was just a scenario, not a prediction. My point was that a way out of this was still possible. The first steps were:
Trump continues losing popularity. He never had much, but his brand becomes politically toxic.
That lack of voter support makes support from congressional Republicans waver. They may not openly defy Trump, but the slim Republican majorities (especially in the House) lose their cohesion, making it impossible to pass legislation without at least some Democratic support.
I had hoped that the looming government shutdown of March 14 would be the time when congressional support would waver, and that Republicans wouldn’t be able to pass a continuing resolution without negotiating a deal with the Democrats. That didn’t happen. Mike Johnson was able to hold his small majority together to pass the CR on a nearly party-line vote. Then Chuck Schumer folded in the Senate (for reasons I found plausible but not necessarily convincing), ending the threat of a Democratic filibuster. So the government is funded through September.
However, the events of this week show that we’re still on the path I laid out. Again, I’m not saying that success is certain, just that there is still a way out of this through political processes, without widespread riots or civil war.
There is no legal or political mechanism that directly links public opinion, market crashes, or elections for relatively minor offices to the kinds of legal or congressional action that will halt the Trump/Musk coup or lead to the restoration of American democracy. However, autocratic movements rely on a sense of inevitability and self-confidence, with each usurpation of power emboldening its leaders and foot-soldiers to dare the next one. Autocrats depend on a sense of public helplessness that demoralizes opposition and makes each successive victim feel alone and unsupported.
The narrative of Trump’s inevitability and his opposition’s powerlessness ran aground this week. He remains in office and retains his grip on the levers of executive power. But his true supporters have never been more than about 1/3 of the American public, and many in Congress, the courts, the media, the business community, and elsewhere have lined up behind him more from intimidation or a lack of attractive alternatives than real conviction.
The momentum that has swept Trump forward can turn, with each act of opposition emboldening the next. All along, there has been a scenario in which his seizure of unconstitutional power fails. That scenario is still intact, and is more credible today than it was a week ago.
By now you’ve undoubtedly heard the basics: Last Monday, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg reported that for several days (March 11-15) he had a connection with Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz over the private messaging service Signal.
On March 11 Goldberg received a Signal connection request from Waltz. He was puzzled and doubted its authenticity, but he accepted.
On March 13 he was invited to join the “Houthi PC small group”, a chat that eventually included Vice President Vance, several members of the Trump cabinet, and a variety of other high-ranking members of the administration. Waltz described the group as a “principles [sic] group for coordination on Houthis, particularly for over the next 72 hours”. (Goldberg explains: “The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA.”)
On March 14, members of the group (who had apparently received a classified communication Goldberg did not get) began discussing whether to attack the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have been shooting missiles at ships in the Red Sea. Vance wanted to delay the attack for a month, Defense Secretary Hegseth was for launching it immediately, and some others ambivalent. Vance yields, texting to Hegseth: “if you think we should do it let’s go”. (Strangely, President Trump was not on the chat and apparently did not make the final decision to launch the attack.)
On March 15, Hegseth began giving the group a play-by-play of the attack as it was carried out, beginning two hours before the bombs fell. Goldberg summarizes: “the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
Up until he received news reports of explosions in Yemen, Goldberg had not completely believed the chat group was genuine. The previous day,
I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.
After becoming convinced that he had been overhearing an actual Principals meeting discussing highly classified information, Goldberg left the group.
So much is wrong with this series of events that the subsequent public discussion has often gotten confused, starting off talking about one issue before veering off onto another one. So let’s start by listing the various wrongnesses I’ve heard about or noticed.
The chat group shouldn’t exist at all. The Signal message chain in question was set up to be deleted after four weeks. This violates the Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act, which require that require records to be kept of all communication involving official government business.
Signal is not an approved channel for discussing classified information. By law and policy, classified information can only be sent over very specific government systems.
Signal exchanges can be hacked. The security rules being broken here exist for good reasons, and are not just cumbersome or outdated regulations. The encryption feature in Signal is believed to be crackable by intelligence services of hostile foreign governments like Russia and possibly others. And even if an adversary has not hacked Signal, the cell phones or laptops several participants seem to have used could be compromised by malware.
Hegseth’s posts violate the Espionage Act. Apologists for the Trump administration have played legal/verbal games with the term “classified information”. Because Hegseth himself is the classifying authority for information like attack plans, they claim, he was implicitly declassifying it by posting it on Signal. But The Hill reports: “the Espionage Act … doesn’t rely on classification. Instead, it allows prosecution of those who share national defense information, whether intentionally or inadvertently. ‘While you can argue that it wasn’t classified — probably in bad faith — you cannot argue that it was not national defense information,’ said Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, a nonprofit law firm.” Whatever word-games you play, information about an imminent or ongoing attack is precisely the kind of thing the classification system was designed to protect.
No one on the chat objected. Back in the days when I had a Top Secret clearance myself, I was occasionally in conversations where an issue was alluded to, and then someone would say: “But we can’t talk about that here.” Everyone on the chat had an obligation to say that, and no one did. (The implication here is that this situation is not unusual. Possibly, highly-classified Signal chats are a regular occurrence in the Trump administration. I have not heard any Trump official address this precise point.)
Goldberg should not have been invited to the chat. People tend to focus on this part of the wrongness, but look how far we’ve gotten without mentioning it. The Russians could have been listening, and could have tipped off the Houthis to counter our attack or move what we were targeting. Goldberg is an inconsequential risk by comparison.
Hegseth had an obligation to verify that everyone on the chat had appropriate clearances to receive the information he was sending, but he did not. This is a problem even if you overlook the fundamental insecurity of Signal. Even if everyone on the chat had been gathered in a secure location like the Situation Room, attack plans shouldn’t have been shared when an uncleared person (i.e., Goldberg) was present. Protecting defense secrets is Hegseth’s job, not Goldberg’s, so the fault lies with him.
Waltz endangered intelligence sources in his after-action report. “The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.” So the Houthis know that somebody with a view of the building that day was an American agent. Undoubtedly they are trying to find and kill this person.
The attack’s “success” is no excuse.Attorney General Bondi was one of many administration officials making this point: “what we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission”. The best analogy I’ve heard is to drunk driving: The fact that you made it home safely doesn’t excuse it, or justify doing something similar in the future. If you take enough unnecessary risks, you will pay eventually. (BTW: Was the attack a success? Killing people and blowing things up is not an end in itself. The point of the attack was to either incapacitate or intimidate the Houthis so that they’ll stop shooting at ships. We don’t know yet whether the raid achieved that purpose. “The Signal chat reveals no suggestion of a strategic framework — or even the concept of a plan — into which the attack clearly fit.”)
So this is the kind of multi-layer screw-up that is hard to wrap your mind around. (An analogy: Imagine that your 15-year-old daughter is threatening suicide because her uncle has broken off their incestuous relationship after discovering that she’s pregnant. What aspect of the situation do you react to first? What’s the core problem here?)
Responses. One of the adages I heard while growing up was “It takes a big man to admit he’s wrong.” By that standard, there are no big men (or women) in the Trump administration. Across the board, everyone involved or implicated in the meeting has deflected, pointed elsewhere, or outright lied in order to deny responsibility.
Goldberg’s first article was circumspect about what he revealed. He wrote in generalities, like the quote above about “targets, weapons, … and attack sequencing”. Not wanting to damage national security himself, he didn’t spell out any details.
I’ve heard how it was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans. And that’s all I have to say about that.
White House apologists took up the “no classified information” talking point. Director of National Intellligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee
There was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to make the whole incident a he-said/she-said issue.
Do you trust the secretary of defense — who was nominated for this role, voted by the United States Senate into this role, who has served in combat, honorably served our nation in uniform — or do you trust Jeffrey Goldberg?
Goldberg’s response was basically: Don’t trust me; trust your eyes and your common sense.
The statements by Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and Trump—combined with the assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts—have led us to believe that people should see the texts in order to reach their own conclusions.
Since there was “no classified information” involved, he had no reason not to publish chunks of the transcript of the chat. Goldberg summarized one section:
This Signal message shows that the U.S. secretary of defense texted a group that included a phone number unknown to him—Goldberg’s cellphone—at 11:44 a.m. This was 31 minutes before the first U.S. warplanes launched, and two hours and one minute before the beginning of a period in which a primary target, the Houthi “Target Terrorist,” was expected to be killed by these American aircraft. If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds. The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic.
The release of the transcript should (but won’t) put an end to the attempts to dodge responsibility by vilifying Goldberg. (Leavitt: “arguably no one in the media who loves manufacturing and pushing hoaxes more than Jeffrey Goldberg.” Trump: “The guy is a total sleazebag.” Hegseth: “a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again”.) Goldberg’s transcript is either accurate or it’s not. If it’s not, other participants can release their own records. But they haven’t. So we can assume Goldberg’s reporting here is accurate, independent of what you think of the rest of his career. (Personally, I respect him as a journalist.)
How did this happen? The larger wrong — discussing an ongoing attack on an insecure platform — happened because the Trump administration is full of people who don’t take security seriously. Many of them — Hegseth in particular — are totally unqualified for their jobs. (Whenever the administration talks about “merit” as opposed to DEI, I think of Hegseth. Only a White man could ever get such an important job with such a flimsy resume and so many red flags in his personal life. Hegseth is a walking advertisement for why DEI is necessary.)
But none of that explains how Goldberg wound up on the chat. If we believe Goldberg’s account, it was a two-part process. First Mike Waltz (or somebody with access to Waltz’ Signal account) made a connection with Goldberg. Then two days later Goldberg was invited to join the Houthi PC small group. So it’s not just somebody hitting Goldberg’s number by fat-fingering a list. (That explanation would be more convincing if some “Johnny Goldsmith” should have been in the group and wasn’t. But I have heard no suggestion of who that person might be. And doesn’t anybody double-check lists with national security implications?)
The explanation (offered by Waltz) that Goldberg may have hacked his way onto the chat group is not only unlikely, but is damning in a different way. It’s bad enough to think that Trump officials are relying on an app that Russian or Chinese intelligence agencies might hack. But magazine editors?
Lacking any other explanation, I’m driven to a conspiracy theory formulated by former West Point history professor Terrence Goggin: “a highly effective cell operating deep in the Pentagon and National Security Council” that Goggin dubs “Deep Throat 2.0”. (Waltz denied this: “A staffer wasn’t responsible.”)
Goggin connects the Signal story with another leak that embarrassed the Trump defense establishment: The NYT finding out that Elon Musk was about to get a briefing on the Pentagon’s plans for a war with China.
Someone contacted the New York Times with a copy of a written order to brief Musk on the Operational Plan to oppose a massive invasion of Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army Navy (“PLAN”). … Someone transmitted the written order instructing the Joint Chiefs to brief Musk to the New York Times, 12 hours before the briefing was to take place, in order for this to reach its 10 million digital subscribers worldwide. … The leak was timed for a last minute shock without warning, for maximum public damage and embarrassment. This was not an accident, but a deadly strike.
Adding Goldberg to the Houthi PC small group was similarly “not a mistake” but “a well planed clandestine operation”.
Clearly rattled, President Trump declared today that the uproar is a “Witch Hunt”. Actually he may be right. But the witches are His Own Men! It is a planned and organized operation to destroy his ability to govern with unqualified and deficient officials using and exposing his Administration’s own national security mistakes to do so.
Imagine that you’re a career staffer at the Pentagon. You’ve seen people live and die by the book, and now a bunch of yahoos who can’t be bothered to take even minimal security precautions are in charge. You’ve tried to impress on them the reasons for doing things in the standard way, but they always think they know better.
What better way to get your point across than to let the public see what’s happening?
What happens to democracy when directing and misdirecting public attention becomes more important than convincing voters to agree with you?
Chris Hayes’ recent book The Sirens’ Call is worth reading in its entirety, but there is one particular aspect of it that I want to highlight. Once you’ve had this thought, it’s perfectly obvious, but I’ve never seen it spelled out so clearly before: Getting attention and holding attention are two very different problems. Getting attention is easy; holding attention is hard.
If you’re in a roomful of people and you want to get their attention, you have a lot of options: Drop something breakable, start yelling obscenities, run through the room naked or covered in blood, fire a gun in the air. The possibilities are endless.
But now imagine that you want to hold people’s attention long enough to explain something to them or convince them of something. That’s much harder. If the waiter who just dropped a tray of glasses starts trying to tell you about the dangers of climate change or rising government debt, you’re probably going to tune him out pretty quickly.
Traditionally, politics has been all about holding people’s attention long enough to change their minds about something or motivate them to do something. Politically active people might want to convince you that abortion is wrong or gays are people too or the rich have too much money or government regulations stifle economic growth, just to name a few possibilities. Yes, they need to get your attention. But more than that, they need to hold your attention long enough to present their case, maybe even long enough to overcome your initial resistance.
Hayes flashes back to something that seems unimaginable now: the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Back in 1858, people in Illinois more or less agreed that the biggest issue the nation faced was slavery and what to do about it. So that year’s two Senate candidates, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, toured the state together, debating the slavery issue for three hours at a time. (My home town, Quincy, hosted one of the debates.) That format gave each man a chance to explain some fairly complex and subtle ideas.
Admittedly, that’s unusual. For well over a century, most American politics has revolved around slogans: “Equal pay for equal work”, “No third term”, “Remember the Maine”, and many others. A slogan boils a political message down to its absolute minimum. You still have to hold attention, but you don’t have to hold it very long. Sometime a slogan is just a placeholder that your supporters will flesh out later; it makes people curious to find out what the slogan means. In 2024, “Make America great again” and “Democracy is on the ballot” were both like that. If you didn’t have at least a little background, both were so vague as to be meaningless.
But Hayes describes a way of managing attention that skips the difficult hold-attention step completely. It has been pioneered by the social-media platforms and has now been adapted to politics: If you want to keep somebody on your platform for hours at a time, you don’t need to produce an epic like Lord of the Rings or Lawrence of Arabia — content capable of holding a person’s attention that long. Instead, you just grab somebody’s attention, then grab it again, and grab it again. Keep doing that for hours. That’s the secret of the infinite scroll. Hardly anybody sits down thinking they’re going to devote the next two hours to TikTok or Facebook. They just look up and realize they’re late for something.
Now apply that idea to politics. What if I’m not trying to explain anything at all, even at the slogan level? What if I’m just trying to grab your attention in a particular way and prevent my opponent from grabbing it some other way?
This is something the Trump campaign seemed to understand much better than the Harris campaign. If a voter went into the voting booth thinking about inflation, immigration, or trans athletes, probably that vote would go to Trump. But a voter thinking about democracy, climate change, racism, or healthcare probably would probably choose Harris. It almost didn’t matter what a voter thought about any of those issues. Just direct their attention and you command their vote.
That was the method behind the madness of the Trump campaign. As far back as 2015, Trump has been saying things that were supposed to be political suicide. When he said that immigrants were “animals” or spouted “facts” about them that were obviously false, it didn’t matter if he looked like an ignorant asshole, because he made you think about immigration. If he grossly overstated the price of bacon and was proven wrong the next day, so what? He made you think about inflation — and the debunking article the next morning made you think about it again.
Harris could never catch up. I kept reading columns by pundits frustrated that Harris didn’t just say X — and those columns frustrated me, because I knew that Harris DID say X, but nobody paid attention.
The big thing I got wrong about the election was that I expected voters to get serious at the end of the campaign; low-interest and low-information voters who had been checked out all summer would check back in long enough to decide who to vote for. It never happened. Right up to the last day, Trump dominated the news cycle with his look-here, look-there, look-at-this-other-thing tactics. He had no message to speak of, just the idea that things were bad and he would somehow make them better.
What we’ve been seeing these last two months is the new attention-politics as a governing strategy. In traditional politics, an incoming administration tried to focus on a few simple themes, with the idea of raising enough public support to push one or two big ideas through Congress. So George W. Bush came in promoting his tax cut. Barack Obama was focused on his stimulus plan and then healthcare. (I remember the frustration many environmentalists felt when a carbon tax and other items from a climate-change agenda were sidelined so as not to interfere with the healthcare push.)
Trump hasn’t been doing anything like that. Instead, he’s doing a million things at once, including many that circumvent Congress in a way that is flatly illegal. By ignoring Congress and relying on executive actions, he avoids the need to marshal public opinion. Quite the reverse: It’s the opposition that needs to marshal public opinion to stop him. And that’s difficult, because what opposition leader or opposition agenda can get attention when Trump grabs all the attention in the room with a new outrage every day? (Invade Greenland! Annex Canada! Brief Musk about China war plans! Defy court orders! Fire the people who keep track of nuclear weapons! Turn Gaza into a seaside resort!)
I’m frankly unsure what I ought to be rooting for. Eventually, assuming Trump doesn’t establish his own version of the Thousand-Year Reich, some Democrat will figure out how to master the new attention politics and become president. But how good is that outcome really? The new politics lends itself to autocracy. Probably a Democratic autocrat would do more things I like than Trump is doing. But I’m not sure what would take us back in the direction of democracy.
It’s clear that Trump loves tariffs. It’s not clear why.
LIstening to President Trump talk about tariffs is like listening to a teen-age boy talk about the object of his crush. Tariffs have every conceivable virtue and no drawbacks. The Daily Show runs together a series of Trump tariff quotes:
Tariffs are easy. They’re fast. They’re efficient. And they bring fairness. … We’re going to bring so many things back to our country, and the thing that’s going to get us there is tariffs. … We’ll take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs. And we’re going to make our country so strong and so rich. It will never be so rich. … Tariffs. It’s a beautiful word, isn’t it?
Maria! Say it loud and there’s music playing. Say it soft and it’s almost like praying. Maria! I’ll never stop saying “Maria”.
To hear Trump tell it:
The threat of tariffs will make other countries do what he wants.
Tariffs are essentially free money. They will provide a dependable stream of government revenue that comes from foreigners rather than Americans.
In order to avoid tariffs, corporations will move production facilities from other countries to the United States, creating good jobs here.
What’s not to like? But strangely, most economists don’t like tariffs, and the stock market tanks whenever it looks like Trump is getting serious about imposing them. So what’s going on?
Well, to start with, those justifications contradict each other. If tariffs are going to raise money and cause corporations to change their production patterns and supply chains, they need to be imposed for the long term. (Ford isn’t going to move a Mexican factory back to the US unless they expect a tariff to be in place for years.) But if a tariff is supposed to change a country’s behavior, it has to come off as soon as the behavior changes. (Tariffs won’t make Mexico crack down on fentanyl-smuggling cartels unless the Mexican government expects the tariffs to end when it does.)
So which is it? Does he want long-term tariffs to raise money and move supply chains, or short-term tariffs to threaten other countries with?
And even if you pick one or the other, it doesn’t really work. Using a tariff to change a country’s behavior might (or might not) work once, acting like a threat from a protection racket. (“Nice economy you got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”) But national leaders are smart enough to know that extortionists never go away after they’re paid. If a country gives Trump some concession to avoid a tariff, and then he comes back and threatens it again, they going to figure out that he intends to bleed them dry. Resisting being pushed around by the US is always a good look for a foreign politician, so they’re going to dig in their heels. Some already are.
A tariff can raise money, but that money will come from Americans, not foreigners. The American importer pays the tax, and probably passes it on to its customers. In the end, a big broad-based tariff will act like a national sales tax, which raises money by raising the cost of whatever is sold. Worse, that money tends to come from poorer Americans, who have to spend nearly all the money they get their hands on. (Meanwhile, the rich can pile up savings and pay nothing.) All those working-class Trump voters have essentially voted to shift the tax burden onto themselves.
Tariffs can work to change production and investment decisions — that’s their traditional use. (Typically, a developing country tariffs imported goods to encourage local manufacturers to replace the import. That was how the US used them in the 1800s, and how nations like South Korea used them more recently.) But in order to have that influence, a tariff needs to be predictable. And that’s a problem for Trump:
February 1: Trump orders 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada.
February 3: He pauses the Mexico and Canada tariffs for a month.
February 27: He announces that the 25% Mexico/Canada tariffs will be back on when the month runs out.
March 4: The 25% tariffs go into effect.
March 5: The tariffs related to the auto industry are paused for a month.
March 6: Tariffs on goods covered by the USMCA (a trade agreement Trump signed in his first term) are paused for a month. (That covers about half of Mexican imports and 38% of Canadian imports.)
So OK, imagine you’re a CEO trying to decide where to invest your company’s capital. How do you plan for that?
Conspiracy theories. When the reasons a leader gives for his actions don’t make sense, inevitably people start trying to imagine what the real reason is. The most prominent conspiracy theories about the tariffs that I’ve heard are
It’s a shakedown. Your tariffs go up until you figure out who to bribe. The Big Picture blog quotes a study describing what happened during the trade war with China in Trump’s first term: “Politically connected companies were far more likely to receive valuable tariff exemptions than those that were not connected to Trump or Republicans. Specifically, the authors found that companies that had invested substantially into the GOP before or at the start of Trump 1.0 were more likely to win exemptions to Trump’s tariffs than those that had not.”
It’s a market manipulation. The market crashes whenever Trump announces a tariff. So if you know when he’ wa’s going to do that, you can make a killing by selling short, and then covering your short after he reverses himself. So Trump jerking the markets around is a way for well-connected insiders to make money.
Trump hates Canada.
The Canada-hating theory requires a little explanation. Trump’s original reason for both the Canada and Mexico tariffs was to defend the border from illegal immigrants and fentanyl smuggling. So in order to avoid the tariffs, Canada would have to address those problems and show real results. But there’s a catch: There is no problem to address in Canada. Take fentanyl, for example. According to the Council on Foreign Relations:
Canada plays virtually no role in the U.S. fentanyl influx, especially compared to the other countries. The country contributes less than 1 percent to its southern neighbor’s street fentanyl supply, as both the Canadian government and data from the DEA report.
[R]emember that Canada can’t concede to U.S. demands, even if it were in a mood to do so (which it very much isn’t) because there aren’t any coherent U.S. demands; Canada has done nothing wrong!
But hey, truth has never been a problem for a Trump administration. Sunday, the White House sent National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett (and maybe some other people I didn’t notice) out to lie on the talk shows.
I can tell you that in the situation room I’ve seen photographs of fentanyl labs in Canada that the law enforcement folks were leaving alone. Canada’s got a big drug problem.
Yes, Hassett has seen photographs he can’t show you. I haven’t heard such convincing evidence since Bush and Cheney were getting ready to invade Iraq.
They mistake our modesty for meekness, our kindness for consent, our nation for another star on their flag and our love of a hot cheesy poutine with their love of a hot cheesy Putin. … We are not the 51st anything. We are the first to unite in the crisis, the first to build bridges – not walls – and the first to stand on guard for thee.
So whatever Trump is trying to do to Canada, I don’t think it’s working. But what is he trying to do? That question is just as mysterious as the tariffs themselves. Krugman’s theory goes like this:
In any case, efforts to find some kind of economic justification for Trump’s Canada-hatred have the feeling of desperate efforts to avoid the obvious. Canada is a pretty decent place, as nations go. And Trump, whom nobody would describe as a decent person, dislikes and maybe even fears people who are.
Let me put a less psychological spin on this: Trump is building a hellscape, an America where people hate each other, let each other go hungry or die without healthcare, where diseases once eradicated come back, where corrupt oligarchs pillage the government and corporations are free to despoil the environment and treat workers like slaves. And then there’s Canada, right across the border, ready to demonstrate that life doesn’t have to be this way.
Sure, countries like Denmark or New Zealand also prove that point, but they’re far enough away that nobody in Trump’s base needs to notice them. Your cousin from Des Moines probably isn’t going to come home raving about Copenhagen or Christchurch. But Toronto, Vancouver — maybe. So Canada needs to be slandered in advance, painted as an enemy country full of propaganda that can’t be trusted. Say something about Canada and MAGA types will roll their eyes as if you’d just quoted something you heard on MSNBC.
And as for the tariffs, I’ll explain them like this: Tariffs are a power that Congress has yielded almost entirely to the President. So they’re a model for what Trump wants the country to be. He can announce a tariff without anybody wondering whether he has the votes for it. He says “tariffs” and there are tariffs. A day later he can say “no tariffs” and they go away. And every time he does, there are headlines and big moves in the stock market and people getting upset. Trump loves that stuff. He’ll never learn how to use his tariff power constructively, because it’s a toy that is just too tempting to leave on the shelf. For as long as he’s president, he’ll feel compelled to take that toy down and play with it.
The struggle to preserve American democracy is still undecided. Neither despair nor complacency is warranted.
I keep having the same conversation with my friends, who are anxious and/or depressed about the Trump/Musk attempt to establish an autocracy, and wonder how I stay so sanguine. There are three reasons, one of which is personal and won’t help anybody else. But the other two might.
The personal reason is that my wife died in December. So from my point of view, nothing worse is going to happen anytime soon. I realize that’s a very self-centered point of view, but it is what it is.
The other two reasons, though, are generalizable and linked:
Nothing about the current struggle should be all that surprising.
The events that will tell us how it plays out haven’t happened yet.
I didn’t read all 900+ pages of Project 2025, but I did see enough of it to realize that the first few months of a second Trump administration would constitute an all-out assault on American democracy. I can’t claim that I foresaw the details of the current mess — Elon’s role in particular surprised me — but the general outline was all there. And I know Trump denied Project 2025 was his plan, but nobody should have taken that denial seriously.
So now we’ve seen Trump’s opening moves: a blizzard of executive orders claiming unprecedented powers that can be found nowhere in the Constitution. That was all predictable.
What wasn’t predictable, and is still unknown, is how the other American power centers would respond. I’m talking about Congress, the courts, the state governments, and the People. That’s all still very hard to predict, because each of those power centers will influence the behavior of the others.
It’s important for us to be neither complacent about all this nor resigned to our fate. Things really are still up in the air. Let’s look at the possible resistance centers one by one.
The People. Let’s start with the People, who elected Trump in November with 49.8% of the vote — hardly the “mandate” he likes to claim. Historically, voters have rewarded election winners with a give-the-guy-a-chance response that pundits sometimes refer to this as a president’s “honeymoon”. So, for example, Barack Obama got 52.9% of the vote in the 2008 election, but his post-inauguration approval rating bounced up to 69% (the highest it ever got).
By contrast, Trump’s post-inauguration approval (as estimated by 538’s polling average) was almost identical to his vote total: 49.7%, with disapproval at 41.5% (indicating that some Americans who voted for Harris or someone else were now neutral. By contrast, Obama’s post-inaugural disapproval was a mere 13%.) Trump’s most recent split is still positive, 48.5%-47.0%, but just barely. Some recent polls have turned sharply negative, like Ipsos, which has gone from a post-inaugural 47%-41% to a recent 44%-51%.
Polls that focus more specifically on what Trump is doing look worse for him. A WaPo/Ipsos poll showed 57% of Americans believe that Trump has overstepped his authority. 54% disapprove of his management of the federal government. Elon Musk’s approval is 15 points underwater with 49% disapproving and only 34% approving.
Short version: As people see what Trump is doing, they’re turning against him. I expect this to continue as more and more Americans notice that Trump’s “temporary” actions aren’t temporary, and aren’t solving any of the problems he campaigned on. (Bought any eggs lately?) I anticipate worse polls for Trump and a lot more demonstrations like the one I participated in February 14 in Boston.
Congress. Republicans hold slim majorities in both houses, so Democratic responses are necessarily limited: Democrats on their own cannot pass legislation, hold hearings, or subpoena witnesses. They can make speeches and create photo ops, but that’s about it. And the press, knowing Democrats can’t do much, don’t pay much attention to them. (I often hear comments like “Why don’t the Democrats say or do X?” Chances are some of them have, but you didn’t hear about it.)
But will they do anything to rein Trump in? The real test happens when the government runs out of money on March 14. It’s easy to be for or against things until somebody puts price tags on them and adds them all up. In order to get the bill he wants, Trump will need support from almost all of the Republicans in the House. If Democrats stay united and only two Republicans vote against a spending deal, it fails.
If that happens, that’s when congressional Democrats begin to have negotiating leverage.
State and local governments. Contrasting with decades of Republican rhetoric idealizing government close to the people and villainizing know-it-alls who meddle from distant Washington, Trump is trying to use federal power to overwhelm the states and cities.
All in all, Democratic officials at the state and local level are standing firm against federal usurpation. Democratic attorneys general are leading a number of the lawsuits against the Trump administration’s overreach. How well they succeed, though, largely depends on the courts.
The courts. Many of the things Trump is doing are illegal or unconstitutional. His attempt to undo birthright citizenship is a blatant contradiction of the 14th Amendment. His refusal to spend money already appropriated by Congress violates both the Constitution’s assignment of spending power to Congress and the Impoundment Act of 1974. He has no authority to disband agencies created by Congress, like USAID or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. His treatment of federal employees violates the laws establishing the civil service, as well as union contracts signed by previous administrations.
But laws do not enforce themselves if lawbreakers are determined to ignore them. Victims of the law-breaking have to go to court. Judges have to rule in accordance with the law in spite of executive pressure against them. Court orders can be appealed, so the process can take a long time.
So far, the lower courts are following the law and the Constitution, so Trump is losing most of the cases.
This is all leading up to two questions:
Will the Supreme Court invent new interpretations of our laws to back Trump up, essentially ending the rule of law as we have known it?
If the Court does rule against Trump, will he defy the Court’s orders?
In theory, Supreme Court decisions take place in an abstract world of law. In practice, though, public opinion will play an important role. If Trump’s excesses are popular, the Court will be more likely to jump on the fascist bandwagon. But if his poll numbers keep spiraling down the drain, the Court may not want to go down with him.
Similar considerations apply to the defiance option: If the public is solidly behind Trump and sees the Court as blocking him for no good reason, he will be more likely to ignore the Court’s orders. On the other hand, if the public is turning against him, the thought that even this Supreme Court thinks he’s wrong may increase the slide.
The first of the cases has already reached the Supreme Court, briefly, sort of. Hampton Dellinger was the head of the Office of the Special Counsel, and independent agency established by Congress to do things like protect whistleblowers in the government. He was appointed by President Biden and confirmed by the Senate to a five-year term. The statute establishing the position makes provision for the President to fire the special counsel “only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” But on February 7 Trump fired Dellinger without claiming any of those things. A district reinstated Dellinger temporarily, and the Trump administration appealed, losing 2-1 at the appellate level. From there they went to the Supreme Court.
The Court also declined to overturn the district court’s order, but it’s hard to read much into that decision, because essentially it is just giving time for the lower court to complete its work. The restraining order runs out Wednesday, when the district court has a hearing scheduled.
The issues here get to the heart of the separation of powers, because it’s hard to see how the OSC can do its job if the head of it can be fired on a presidential whim. Presidents typically dislike whistleblowers, so the OSC won’t be much of a protector if it has no independence from the President. If it finds for Trump, the Court will be saying that the goal the Congress had in mind can’t be achieved.
The good scenario. Obviously, Trump is going to do a lot of harm no matter what anybody else does. The USAID freeze is already killing people in Africa, and no one knows how much damage American medical research will suffer from having its funding stream interrupted or perhaps cut off altogether. A lot of the near-term impact of the research-funding freeze will depend on unpredictable events like whether some future mutation of bird flu enables human-to-human transmission. Trump’s almost vandal-like approach to Biden’s climate change initiatives is going to make it that much harder to deal with long-term challenges that already threaten catastrophe. In short, the voters made an enormous mistake in November, and that mistake will have consequences.
But in my mind those consequences pale compared to the establishment of a lasting autocracy in the United States — and that outcome is still avoidable. The scenario that avoids it goes like this:
Trump continues losing popularity. He never had much, but his brand becomes politically toxic.
That lack of voter support makes support from congressional Republicans waver. They may not openly defy Trump, but the slim Republican majorities (especially in the House) lose their cohesion, making it impossible to pass legislation without at least some Democratic support. The lack of legislative accomplishments feeds back into public opinion: Maybe Trump isn’t such a strong leader.
The Supreme Court, at least partly influenced by public opinion, refuses to invent new legal principles to justify Trump’s seizures of power.
The refusal of congressional Republicans and Trump’s own appointees on the Supreme Court to go along with his wishes feeds back into public opinion: If even his would-be minions can’t fully support him, maybe his critics are right.
Facing an extreme lack of public support as well as dissension in his own ranks, Trump reluctantly obeys court orders. Or, if he doesn’t, the military refuses orders to crack down on mass public protests.
Republicans get soundly defeated in the November, 2025 Virginia elections, sending Republican elected officials into a panic.
Democrats win back control of the House in 2026, putting them in a position to block future usurpations.
Trump is dissuaded from trying to hang onto power in 2028. The MAGA movement splinters into its component factions — tech bros, racists, burn-it-down nihilists, etc. — none of which is able to win the national election.
That scenario is far from a sure thing, but the way is still open. We’ll learn a lot from future polls, from how Congress handles the possible March 14 government shutdown, and from what the Supreme Court does as cases arrive on its doorstep.
This week seven federal prosecutors resigned rather than follow unethical orders from their bosses in Trump administration. This case raises a more general question: Given Trump’s disrespect for ethical norms intended to insulate certain key government functions from inappropriate political interference, will there be space in the Trump administration for ethical government employees to do their work?
The Guardian provides the shortest possible summary of the current situation:
[S]even prosecutors – including the acting US attorney in southern district of New York, the head of the criminal division and the head of the public integrity section – resigned in protest rather than dismiss the case [against New York Mayor Eric Adams] for political reasons.
Now let’s back up and review this story from the beginning, following a timeline compiled by ABC News: After an investigation that had been going on for at least a year, last September federal prosecutors at the Southern District of New York (SDNY) sought and received a grand jury indictment of Mayor Adams.
At the time, the Adams indictment was used in arguments that the Biden Justice Department had not been politicized or “weaponized”, as Trump frequently claimed. Yes, a special prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland had indicted Trump, but that was because Trump had broken numerous laws. DoJ also went after Democratic lawbreakers like Adams and New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez.
The indictment, which is unsealed the next day, alleges Adams accepted illegal gifts, including plane upgrades and hotel stays, from Turkish businessmen and officials in exchange for preferential treatment when he was Brooklyn borough president and later as mayor. The indictment also alleges Adams received illegal campaign straw donations from Turkish nationals.
Adams denied the charges, refused to resign, and pleaded not guilty. [1] A trial was scheduled to begin in April. During the transition period after Trump’s election win in November, Adams met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and with Trump’s border czar Tom Homan. Adams attended Trump’s inauguration. The next day, Adams began claiming that his indictment was retribution for criticizing President Biden’s immigration policies (even though the timeline on that doesn’t work). On February 10, after additional meetings between Adams, his attorneys, and Trump officials, Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove sent a letter instructing SDNY to dismiss charges against Adams “without prejudice”, meaning that the charges could be refiled in the future.
Danielle Sassoon. Dismissing a federal indictment is not an automatic thing. The prosecutor’s office has to file a motion with the court asking for the dismissal. The motion typically contains some justification for the dismissal, which the judge then must rule on. And that brings Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. Attorney for SDNY, into the picture.
Sassoon is not anybody’s idea of a liberal Democrat. She clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia, a legendary figure in conservative legal circles. Trump had appointed her as acting US attorney just three weeks before. Sassoon responded to Bove’s instructions by writing an eight-page letter to his boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi. [2]
Mr. Bove rightly has never called into question that the case team conducted this investigation with integrity and that the charges against Adams are serious and supported by fact and law. Mr. Bove’s memo, however, which directs me to dismiss an indictment returned by a duly constituted grand jury for reasons having nothing to do with the strength of the case, raises serious concerns that render the contemplated dismissal inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor and to advance good-faith arguments before the courts. … I cannot fulfill my obligations, effectively lead my office in carrying out the Department’s priorities, or credibly represent the Government before the courts, if I seek to dismiss the Adams case on this record.
Sassoon went on to recount the Bove’s justifications for dismissing charges, the first of which she finds unethical
First, Mr. Bove proposes dismissing the charges against Adams in return for his assistance in enforcing the federal immigration laws, analogizing to the prisoner exchange in which the United States freed notorious Russian arms dealer Victor Bout in return for an American prisoner in Russia. … Adams has argued in substance and Mr. Bove appears prepared to concede that Adams should receive leniency for federal crimes solely because he occupies an important public position and can use that position to assist in the Administration’s policy priorities.
and the second unbelievable.
Second, Mr. Bove states that dismissal is warranted because of the conduct ofthis office’s former U.S. Attorney, Damian Williams, which, according to Mr. Bove’s memo, constituted weaponization of government as defined by the relevant orders of the President and the Department. The generalized concerns expressed by Mr. Bove are not a basis to dismiss an indictment returned by a duly constituted grand jury, at least where, as here, the Government has no doubt in its evidence or the integrity of its investigation. … In short, because there is in fact nothing about this prosecution that meaningfully differs from other cases that generate substantial pretrial publicity, a court is likely to view the weaponization rationale as pretextual. [3]
The first consideration is the disturbing one, because it suggests a truly dystopian role for the Department of Justice: If elected officials refuse to play ball with the Trump administration, Trump could use a Justice Department investigation to get something on them, then hold that potential prosecution over their heads until they do what he wants.
In a footnote, Sassoon lays it out:
I attended a meeting on January 31, 2025, with Mr. Bove, Adams’s counsel, and members of my office. Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion. [4]
In her letter, Sassoon asked AG Bondi for a meeting, and offered her resignation if Bondi did not want to further justify or reconsider DoJ’s position. Her resignation was accepted.
Public Integrity. The obvious next option for Bove would have been to ask SDNY’s second-in-command to file the motion to dismiss the charges, but (perhaps seeing Sassoon’s resistance as an SDNY independence issue), he pulled the case back to DoJ’s aptly named Public Integrity Section in Washington, which often handles political corruption cases. ABC reports:
However, as soon the Public Integrity Section was informed it would be taking over, John Keller, the acting head of the unit, and his boss, Kevin Driscoll, the most senior career official in the criminal division, resigned along with three other members of the unit, according to multiple sources.
The case soon claimed a seventh scalp, SDNY’s Assistant US Attorney Hagan Scotten, another prosecutor with impeccable conservative credentials, having clerked for Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts. He expressed no hostility to the policy goals of the Trump administration, but strongly implied that someone needs to explain legal ethics to the President.
There is a tradition in public service of resigning in a last-ditch effort to head off a serious mistake. Some will view the mistake you are committing here in the light of their generally negative views of the new Administration. I do not share those views. I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.
The roughly hour-long meeting, where the public integrity section weighed whether to resign en masse after agreeing that the dismissal of the Adams case was improper, culminated with [Edward] Sullivan, a veteran career prosecutor, agreeing to take the fall for his colleagues, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The judge. The judge in the case, Biden appointee Dale Ho, appears to have little choice but to ultimately accept a motion to dismiss. After all, a judge can’t also prosecute the case if the government is unwilling to do so.
However, Ho would be within his rights to hold a hearing into the circumstances of the dismissal motion. Sassoon had warned about this in her resignation letter:
Seeking leave of court to dismiss a properly returned indictment based on Mr. Bove’s stated rationales is also likely to backfire by inviting skepticism and scrutiny from the court that will ultimately hinder the Department of Justice’s interests. In particular, the court is unlikely to acquiesce in using the criminal process to control the behavior of a political figure.
One option I can imagine (though I don’t fully understand the law here) is that Ho could give DoJ a choice: proceed with the prosecution or accept a motion to dismiss with prejudice, meaning that DoJ would lose the option to refile the charges if Adams wasn’t cooperating completely enough with Trump’s political goals. That change would take away Trump’s leverage over Adams going forward.
Larger considerations.Benjamin Wittes (founder of the Lawfare web site) takes a step back to
describe the inherent conflict between the way politicians behave as a matter of course (horse-trading, partisan maneuvering) and the ethical behavior we expect from prosecutors,
discuss the Justice Department norms intended to insulate prosecutors from politics,
explain how Trump has undone those norms.
Then he concludes:
There is a deep problem here and it goes way beyond the Adams case: Having ripped apart the only system that allows prosecutors to function ethically, we no longer have a mechanism by which federal prosecutors can function ethically. We have a rule in which the president can reach down to the assistant U.S. attorney level and order political favors for his friends in exchange for other remunerations. And we have ethical expectations of prosecutors that they will not entertain such demands.
The result? We have resignations. And we’re going to have more. Because if the president or his minions care about the case you’re working on, there is no place in government for an ethical prosecutor any more. …
As long as a prosecutor can do good work, my plea is to stay in place. But at this point, all federal prosecutors need to be prepared to resign. They are all one phone call away from being put in the position of facing a demand to behave unethically, one phone call away from a demand that is fundamentally political in character, not about justice. And when that call comes, it is imperative that prosecutors do as these ones did—resign publicly, showing their work along the way.
Wittes is talking specifically about prosecutors, but similar considerations apply throughout the government. Every profession within the government has its own ethical standards that protect against inappropriate political interference, and it’s not hard to imagine situations where Trump might circumvent those standards to pursue his goals. (Paul Krugman warns against buying inflation-protected TIPS bonds, precisely because Trump might make himself look good by pressuring government statisticians to minimize the rate of inflation.)
So the admonition Wittes gives to prosecutors needs to apply to federal employees across the board: As long as you can do your job ethically, keep doing it. Don’t resign and give Trump an opportunity to appoint someone more loyal to him than to the nation or to the mission of your agency. But if at some point you’re faced with a choice between your job and your soul, defend your soul and resign.
And if you can make a lot of noise on your way out the door, so much the better.
[1] New York’s state constitution gives Governor Hochul the power to remove Adams. While his case was playing out in court, it made some sense for Hochul to keep her distance. But now that the fix is in, her lack of action is mysterious.
[2] It’s worth pointing out that both Bondi and Bove had been defense lawyers for Trump before being appointed to head DoJ. They are literally Trump’s lawyers, not lawyers for the United States.
[3] A similar statement could be made about dismissing the classified-documents indictment against Trump.
[4] Not wanting anyone to take notes indicates what lawyers call “consciousness of guilt“.
Does the Trump resistance need a rival candidate, or a cultural turnaround?
This week, two very different articles caught my eye. In one, The Washington Post ranked “The 12 Democrats who make the most sense for 2028“, starting with Tim Walz at #12 and concluding with Josh Shapiro at #1. In the other, Rolling Stone picked “The 100 Best Protest Songs of All Time“, reminding us of moments when history was moved not so much by politicians as by songs (or perhaps, going further back, by novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin or pamphlets like Common Sense).
Three years out from the 2028 campaign — assuming elections are still meaningful in three years — should we be uniting behind a candidate or promoting a broader cultural movement?
Maybe it’s the people I hang around with, but the anxieties of my friends keep manifesting in two opposite ways: Many are just refusing to watch the news at all. And the others are obsessed with campaign-and-candidate analysis: What states do Democrats need to flip? What demographic groups might be persuadable? What policy positions should our messaging emphasize? And most of all: Who can lead us to that promised land?
I’ve been pretty useless in those conversations, because (while I am watching the news) anything about candidates and strategy leaves me cold right now. I think they play into an unhealthy framing: politics as game. We lost the last game, so how are we going to win the next one?
What I think we need to reestablish in America is that politics is about something, and the things it is about are important. Our politics should be about the People banding together to make systems work for us rather than grind us into the dust.
And that’s what the list of protest songs symbolizes for me. Not candidates and campaigns, but ending wars, establishing justice, and liberating people from oppression.
What MAGA does. MAGA, of course, is both a candidate and movement. It’s a cult of personality, full of images of Trump as a superhero or God’s chosen one. But it’s also a culture of grievance revolving around the message that favored groups in America — Whites, men, Christians, etc. — are actually victims of some vast Satanic force. And America itself — the richest most powerful country on Earth — is the most aggrieved nation of all, battling a world system that is unfairly stacked against it.
In 2024, Trump often played the role of a typical American presidential candidate: He raised money, held rallies, won primaries, made TV commercials, and toured swing states. But it was the MAGA cultural movement that lifted him out of situations that would have doomed any previous candidate. Elected Republicans were ready to be done with Trump after the 2020 loss and his failed coup on January 6. But the movement would not hear of it, and party “leaders” were forced to come around.
If we could unstring the MAGA movement by winning an election, 2020 would have done it. But instead, being rejected by the voters was just one more grievance to add to its list. Getting past the MAGA moment in our politics will have to involve a change in the larger culture, not just a winning campaign.
What happened in 2024? Everyone has their own theory about what went wrong in 2024, and just about any of them can be justified if you slice and dice the exit polls with that conclusion in mind. Harris should have run further to the left or the center, said more or less about the economy, defended trans youth or thrown them under the bus, defended Biden better or denounced him. Maybe she should have picked a different VP, or maybe Harris herself was the problem and we should have run a White man. Maybe Biden should have gotten out of the way sooner. On and on.
But OK, I get it. Without some reasonable explanation, people begin to think that the currents of History are against us, or the Universe is, or God. Without a plan (or even a fantasy) of what we might do next, despair can seem overwhelming.
So let’s briefly talk the language of analysis. After considering the various theories, I’ve come down here: Trump won because he managed to cast himself as the candidate of change and Harris as the candidate of the status quo. The problematic part of Trump’s candidacy, which Harris tried to point out but never made stick in the minds of low-information voters, is that Trump was specifically running against the best parts of the status quo: the rule of law, the separation of powers, democratic process, and even the existence of Truth itself. What we’re seeing in the early days of the Trump administration is that he has no program for change beyond aggrandizing himself: His supporters are good and should be rewarded; his detractors are bad and should be punished.
But try as he might, it will be hard for Trump to avoid responsibility for the status quo going forward. So in my mind, the fundamental question for Democrats to answer in 2026 and 2028 is: What’s wrong with the status quo?
That was a hard question for Democrats to message in 2024, because the Biden/Harris administration really did have accomplishments it deserved credit for (but never got). It managed the post-Covid economic rebound well, resulting in spectacular job creation with inflation no worse than the rest of the world. It made investments for the future, ended the long fruitless war in Afghanistan, and began taking action against climate change. Biden left office with excellent economic statistics: GDP rising, unemployment low and steady, inflation under control.
But claiming credit for all that sounds a lot like claiming responsibility for the status quo, and arguing that it’s not so bad. (And it honestly wasn’t as bad as Trump kept making it sound. There never was an immigrant crime wave, for example. Or a crime wave of any kind.)
So let’s start here: What’s not to like about the status quo? Plenty, as it turns out. Put aside the statistics, and consider how life looks to a large number of Americans.
It’s hard to get out of college without a lot of debt.
Once you get out, it’s hard to get a career started.
If you do get a career started, it’s hard to find a house you can afford in a town with good schools.
If you’re not in a town with good schools, it’s hard to pay for private schools for your children.
If your children have any special problems — physical handicaps, learning disabilities, neuro-diversity, etc. — you’re on your own.
At any moment, you might fall through one of the cracks in our healthcare system and be bankrupted.
At every moment, you’re vulnerable to the risks of a market economy: Your good job may vanish. To get employed again, you may have to move away from your town with good schools.
Even if the difficulties of your own life work out, you may have to take care of your parents and deal with a nursing-home industry that can eat life savings of almost any size.
It’s hard to get your children through college without burdening them with a lot of debt.
In short, America may be a rich country statistically, but most Americans don’t feel rich. Life looks like a labyrinth with lots of dead ends.
Now, all those difficulties have been building for decades, so there’s no particular reason voters should have blamed them on Joe Biden or his party. (Republicans have held the presidency for 6 of the last 11 terms, and none of those situations improved during Trump’s first term.) But the Democrats did not tell a convincing story of how they were going to take on these problems.
To be fair, neither did Trump. It’s hard to look at any of the hardships on that list and paint a plausible picture of Trump solving that issue, or even helping you deal with it. Much of what he has proposed — eliminating ObamaCare, say, or defunding the Department of Education — will probably make some of them worse.
But Trump did do something politically clever. He told unhappy voters who to blame: immigrants who are stealing your opportunities; women who don’t know their place; rebels against the God-given order, where there are only two genders and you mate with the opposite one; people who worship the wrong God, or none at all; so-called “experts” who make you feel stupid by quoting “facts”; Chinese scientists who engineered the Covid bio-weapon, a.k.a. the Kung Flu; environmentalists who care more about fish or birds than about you or your children; and (most of all) liberals who enable all the other villains by putting the government on their side rather than yours.
What was going to solve these problems was not any particular Trump plan, but rather the abstract “greatness” of America, or perhaps of Trump himself. Or alternately, the greatness of God, who will once again shower His blessings on America once the atheists and Satanists are removed from power.
It’s not a rational story, but it is a story.
Prospects for 2026 and 2028. My thinking going forward is based on the assumption that Trump will provide his followers with entertainment and satisfying spectacles (like immigrant children in cages or FBI agents on trial), but he won’t actually improve anyone’s life. (He didn’t in his first term either, though he was able to take credit for the economic momentum established in Obama’s second term.) We can see that already in the skyrocketing price of eggs. Somehow, neither Trump’s inherent greatness nor his Day-One executive order is bringing prices down, and he has never had any actual plan to fall back on.
So if the labyrinth of American life looks difficult now, it’s not going to look any better in 2026 or 2028. Trump will likely have consolidated his influence over most major media platforms (both broadcast and social), but there are limits to propaganda’s effectiveness when it tells you that you ought to be happy when you’re not.
Consequently, I expect there to be considerable discontent with Trump in 2026 and 2028, just as there was in 2018 and 2020. (Now, it’s entirely possible that by then he has made elections irrelevant. I don’t expect that, but it’s a possibility. In that case, though, this whole discussion is moot; neither a candidate nor a movement has any hope.)
If that’s the lay of the land, how do we want to be positioned? In my mind, this is where the candidate-centered vision falls short — unless your candidate is a genuinely mythic figure whose mere presence will give the electorate hope. Unfortunately, I don’t see any of those on the horizon. If I’m, say, a 20-something worried about my future, I don’t think “Gretchen Whitmer will save me” goes very far. Nothing against Gretch — I’ll be happy to vote for her against the MAGA candidate in 2028 if it comes to that — but there’s nothing messianic about her or Gavin Newsom or anybody else on the Post’s list of 12. Plus, I expect the failure of salvation-by-Trump to discredit the whole idea of individual saviors.
Instead, I picture just about any Democratic candidate having a message like this:
I know many of you are facing a difficult path into the future.
Our explanation of who you should blame is better than MAGA’s. The oligarchs are to blame. While the American economy remains productive, the benefits of that economy keep getting channeled towards a smaller and smaller group of people, who keep exchanging wealth-for-power and power-for-wealth, with a profit on every transaction. (This point comes from the playbook of the Bernie/AOC left, but there’s no reason a centrist can’t use it too.) If Elon is still around (doubtful, I think), he can be the poster boy for the corrupt interplay between corporate and government power.
We have specific ideas that can help you, but the general idea is simple: The productivity of America needs to be redirected towards making people’s lives better, rather than further enriching the oligarchs.
The protest songs almost write themselves. America has a long tradition of songs about people being cheated out of the fruits of the economy they built. Here’s one from the Depression:
Once I built a railroad, I made it run, Made it race against time. Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?
What about now? It’s important to recognize that Democrats currently have no national power base, so demanding that they “do something” is unrealistic. They can’t bring legislation to a vote. They can’t launch investigations or subpoena witnesses. They can vote No on things that do come up for a vote, but if all (or nearly all) Republicans vote Yes, those things will pass anyway.
The urge to do something is misplaced for another reason: Trump is the one who needs to show quick results right now. He has a unleashed a flurry of activity, and that will carry him for a while. But without some actual progress, the public disgust with the game of politics will rebound against him. All his activity will look (in MacBeth’s words) like “sound and fury signifying nothing”.
Some liberal pundits are calling for the kind of resistance shown in 2017, with millions of marchers and other displays of energy. But demonstrations that are simply anti-Trump harden people into their current stances. We just had an election about Trump, and we lost. Demonstrations will come into play again, I imagine, and probably soon. But it’s important that the demonstrations be about something more than Trump. Heather Cox Richardson puts it like this:
This is the time for the American people to say “Hang on just a red hot minute here. It’s my country. Those are my tax dollars. And this is what I want the government to do.” And to reshape the way we approach this moment from saying “I gotta stop this. I gotta stop this. I’m afraid of this.” to say “I care deeply about cancer research, something Trump has stopped money for.” [Lists other things you might care about.] Those things are ways to define America in this moment as something other than what Trump is trying to kill. Because that takes the initiative away from him, and away from his people, and gives it back to us.
The important thing to ask about any political activity is “Will this persuade anybody who wasn’t already on our side?”
Unfortunately, protests that are about something more than Trump require waiting for things to play out a little. There need to be visible results worth protesting, not just possibilities.
Similarly, Democratic votes in Congress will start to mean something again as we approach March 14, the date when the government runs out of money. If Speaker Johnson can’t muster unanimity among his troops — something he has never done in the past — then Trump and Johnson will need Democrats. Then there will be leverage to make demands.
More importantly, March 14 is when Trump’s vague promises and intentions have to resolve into actual numbers and legislation.
In the meantime, the only arena currently open for struggle is the courts, and they are being used. State-level Democrats have filed lawsuits to block illegal Trump actions, and so have organizations like the ACLU. Legal action means delay, and delay works in our favor.
These last two weeks have felt like an assault, as Trump tries to panic and stampede us. It’s a time to endure, to remember your core values, and wait for the wind to blow itself out. And if you can learn the guitar while you’re waiting, that would be good too.
Trump is president now, and that fact has consequences. But he’s not all-powerful. We need to educate ourselves about how to oppose him most effectively.
Last Monday, while I was taking some time off, the second Trump administration began. During the campaign, Trump made a great deal of noise about what he would do on Day One, including be a dictator. (So far, that seems not to have happened.)
So let’s look at what did happen. Day One (or Week One) is shorthand for two things: his inaugural address and his first executive orders.
The Inaugural Address. Inaugural addresses have no force of law behind them, but they provide a motivating vision for the new administration. They are typically occasions for soaring rhetoric, like “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” or “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” or “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
But Trump does not soar, he markets. In particular he markets himself: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” (FDR survived an assassination attempt just a month before his first inaugural; he didn’t consider it worth mentioning.) And he makes salesman-like promises about his effect on the nation.
From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer. … America will soon be greater, stronger, and far more exceptional than ever before. I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success. A tide of change is sweeping the country, sunlight is pouring over the entire world, and America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before.
Elon Musk sounded a similar note in his inauguration day speech (and then gave a Nazi salute).
This was no ordinary victory. This was a fork in the road for human civilization. … It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.
The whole world will benefit from this surge in American power.
Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable.
And that leads to the other thing I draw from this address: Truth will continue to place no restrictions on what Trump says. His 49.8% plurality is “a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all of these many betrayals that have taken place”. It demonstrates that “the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda. … National unity is now returning to America, and confidence and pride is soaring like never before.”
We will be a rich nation “again”. (The Biden economy’s post-Covid recovery has been the envy of the world.) “America will be a manufacturing nation once again”. (200K manufacturing jobs were lost during the first Trump administration, while 775K manufacturing jobs were added during Biden’s four years.) His government will wave a magic wand to roll back recent price increases:
I will direct all members of my cabinet to marshal the vast powers at their disposal to defeat what was record inflation and rapidly bring down costs and prices.
And he will achieve these results by reinstating the 20th century economy, based on oil and gas, the “liquid gold under our feet”. He will “drill baby drill”. (American oil production is already at an all time high, easily surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia. Given how expensive the world’s remaining oil is to find and produce, it’s not clear how much lower oil prices can possibly go in the long term.) He will end the nonexistent “electric car mandate” and let Americans “buy the car of your choice” (which I just did by buying a hybrid in September; pure EVs currently account for just 8% of sales and no one is forced to buy one).
The speech doubled down on many of the lies of the fall campaign: “millions of criminal aliens” come here “from prisons and mental institutions” and belong to “foreign gangs and criminal networks”. They bring “devastating crime to U.S. soil, including our cities and inner cities”. (Violent crime has been dropping nationally, and in nearly all American cities. Trump has never provided the slightest evidence for his “prisons and mental institutions” claim. The vast majority of undocumented people keep their heads down, work hard for very little money, and do jobs it would be hard to fill without them.)
New tariffs will bring in vast new revenues from “foreign sources”.
Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.
(Tariffs are paid by American importers, not foreign exporters, and ultimately the money comes from American consumers.) China is running the Panama Canal (it isn’t), and “American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly” (not true).
Rhetorically, Trump’s speech evoked a lot of 19th-century imagery, including the phrase “manifest destiny”. He talked about the “untamed wilderness” and winning “the Wild West” (as if the continent had been empty and Native American civilizations had never existed). Ominously, he envisioned once again becoming “a growing nation” that “expands our territory”.
Three kinds of executive orders. I agree with Jay Kuo in dividing Trump’s executive orders into three classes. My reframing of those classes goes like this:
legitimate orders that exercise recognized presidential powers. They may not be moral or wise, but yes, a president can do that.
speculative orders that test what the courts or Congress will let him get away with. It sure looks like laws or the Constitution forbid this, but who’s going to tell him?
fanciful orders intended to excite his base and/or troll his opponents. Like when King Canute ordered the tide not to come in. He’s just trying to upset you, so don’t fall for it.
Similarly, Trump and the Republican Senate majority have the power to turn the Defense Department over to an inexperienced misogynistic guy with a drinking problem. There’s no recourse; it’s done. Fortunately, all Senate Democrats voted against the nomination, so when the inevitable Hegseth scandal arises, they’ll be in prime I-told-you-so position.
Presidents have broad latitude over programs concerning refugees, so Trump’s order suspending the refugee resettlement program looks sound. Remember: These are not people sneaking over the border. These are people from countries with recognized problems that previous administrations have given refuge to. They have applied via a legal process, been vetted, and may have waited a long time. Some are victims of natural disasters. Others are people we owe something to, like the Afghans who helped our soldiers.
He really can pull the US out of the Paris Climate Accords, but not immediately. He can impose tariffs, which will backfire on him, because they will raise prices on US consumers.
Since these cases are just Trump using the powers the voters (unwisely) gave him in the election, all we can do in response is register our disapproval, publicize the unfortunate results as they appear, and hold Trump-supporting officials responsible in future elections. In some cases, protests or civil disobedience might be appropriate.
David Litt has some good advice about messaging on these issues: Fight big lies with small truths.
Everyone will have different ways of winning the ideas war over the next four years and beyond. For right now, if a total stranger asked me to sum up this week, I’d say something like this:
“There’s a guy named Daniel Rodriguez. On January 5th, 2021, he texted his friends ‘There will be blood.’ On January 6th, when he stormed the Capitol, he grabbed a police officer and shocked him repeatedly in the neck with a stun gun. A jury of peers sentenced him to twelve years in prison for his violent crime. And less than 24 hours after taking office, Trump let Daniel Rodriguez back out on the street.”
I could say more, of course. But that’s the most important thing: a story about one person, who isn’t Donald Trump – and one action Trump took which just about everyone can agree makes us less safe.
In other words, don’t hit your Trumpist friends and relatives with big rhetoric about ending democracy and establishing dictatorship, because they’ll just write you off. Come at them with small stories about people Trump has wronged, and specific ways that he is making all our lives harder.
Speculative orders. These are the most dangerous ones, because if the courts and Congress don’t step up to oppose them, Trump will amass dictatorial power. And if public opinion doesn’t rise against them, Trump may decide that his “mandate” extends to defying the other branches of government.
The most egregious of his speculative orders was the one ending birthright citizenship, i.e., the full citizenship of anyone born in the United States. What’s dangerous about this is that it violates the clear text of the 14th Amendment.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
The order attempts to wriggle through a loophole created by “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, which until now has chiefly been interpreted to mean people the US government has to deal with through some other government, like diplomats and their families. But Trump wants to reinterpret it like this:
the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, was having none of it. He quickly issued a 14-day restraining order, pending a hearing on whether to extend his order to a permanent injunction.
“I’ve been on the bench for four decades, I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is,” Coughenour said, describing Trump’s order as “blatantly unconstitutional.”
Undocumented immigrants are subject to US courts and can be arrested by the police without consulting any other country’s government. Clearly the US claims jurisdiction over them.
I wish I could remember who pointed out an unintended consequence of nixing birthright citizenship: Disputes over citizenship become open-ended. Previously, if someone doubted your citizenship, you could produce your birth certificate and be done. But under Trump’s interpretation, your birth certificate just pushes the question back a generation: What about your parents’ citizenship status? And their parents? Where does it end?
Coughenour’s common-sense reading of the Constitution should stand at least until the case reaches the Supreme Court, which may or may not side with the Constitution against Trump.
It’s also not clear how much of Trump’s attempt to define two genders will be upheld. A trans woman in federal prison is already suing, claiming that her pending transfer to an all-male facility will expose her to rape. An aside: The order is laughably wrong about science:
“Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
Speculative orders are subject to the same public-opinion responses as legitimate orders, but the main battleground will be in the courts. So you’ll want to stay informed through some reliable legal news source. (I recommend Law Dork.) Also, contribute to the ACLU. If you’re in a blue state, encourage your attorney general to sue the Trump administration. Ditto for any union you belong to.
Fanciful orders. A lot of what Trump does or announces is intended just to make headlines and get people arguing with each other. So the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America? Just laugh. Or when he ordered his underlings to stop inflation, i.e., “to deliver emergency price relief, consistent with applicable law, to the American people and increase the prosperity of the American worker”? Laugh.
Every time you get upset about something like this, you’re distracting yourself from an issue where you might actually do some good.
Hopefulness. Frankly, I expected worse from Trump’s first week, so I’m modestly encouraged.
If you read novels an memoirs from the Nazi era in Germany, one thing that stands out is how artful the Nazis could be at pushing people into compliance. There is a boiling-the-frog aspect to many of these stories, and many people were left thinking, “If this is as bad as it gets, maybe I can deal with it.” Of course, it always got worse, but somehow it never seemed like the right moment to take a stand. The result was that many people missed their chance to oppose Hitler, and then later missed their chance to get out of Germany.
What I was most afraid of going into the second Trump administration was that Trumpists would display a similar kind of deftness. Extreme things would happen, but always with hint that maybe it won’t be so bad.
But Week One makes it clear that these people are not deft. They are not clever. They aren’t even unified. The Mad King is in charge, and none of his advisors is in a position to make him face reality. That will lead to mistakes, and mistakes can be exploited.
All my life, America’s leaders have encouraged us to unite in the face of disasters. But now Trump is using them to tear us apart.
This week, if you wanted to pay attention something other than Jimmy Carter’s funeral, you had two choices: the L.A. wildfires or Donald Trump’s wild statements about taking over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada. Both of those stories will get attention in this week’s summary (the next post), but what interested me more than either was something in the intersection: Trump’s wild statements about the wildfires, and the disturbing approach he is taking to public disasters in general.
When a community faces a catastrophe, it can respond in one of two opposite ways:
Survivors can bond together to mourn the dead, care for the injured, and rebuild. Shared pain can create new bonds across former social divisions. People untouched by the disaster may realize that only circumstance separates them from the victims, and may develop a new empathy not just for recent victims, but for the less fortunate in general. A post-disaster attitude of “We’re all in this together” has a chance to grow and spread.
The community can damage itself further by finger-pointing, scapegoating, and other forms of turning against itself.
Sometimes a community goes both ways simultaneously: At the same time the US was uniting to fight World War II, it was rounding up Japanese Americans and putting them in camps. After 9-11, President Bush put considerable effort into talking Americans out of blaming the attack on Muslims in general, though some did anyway.
Bush’s rhetoric was an example of responsible leadership, which does its best to turn the community response towards positive rather than negative responses. (Using 9-11 to promote an invasion of Iraq, on the other hand, was irresponsible leadership.) Responsible post-catastrophe leadership also has several other identifiable traits:
Unfounded rumors spread wildly after disasters, so responsible leaders set up reliable systems of information. They speak calmly and stick to facts in order to calm public panic.
They call attention to heroes rather than villains, promoting the notion that community members should help and trust each other.
They promote trust in the institutions set up to deal with the catastrophe, and pledge that those institutions will get the backing they need to resolve the situation.
Now look at how President-elect Trump and the right-wing media that takes its cues from him have responded to the Los Angeles wildfires. Wednesday, he posted:
One of the best and most beautiful parts of the United States of America is burning down to the ground. It’s ashes, and Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!
Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!
NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!
Just about every sentence in these posts is false. The December bill that appropriated money to keep the government open added $29 billion to FEMA, and FEMA told CNN Wednesday that it had a $27 billion balance in its accounts.
That sum may well prove inadequate to meet the needs created by every disaster that ends up happening this year, but it’s not “no money.”
There were indeed some dry hydrants, but that had nothing to do with any general lack of water in Southern California, or some mythical “water restoration declaration” Newsom refused to sign. Most of the problem was a more specific lack: of water that had been pumped into tanks in the hills above LA. This created a lack of water pressure in key places, but not a regional lack of water. Shifting more water resources from Northern to Southern California would not have helped.
Firefighting planes were grounded by hurricane-level winds, not by some action of Governor Newsom.
In short, Trump spread lies in order to scapegoat Gavin Newsom, a prominent Democrat who might be his opponent when he runs for an unconstitutional third term in 2028.
Other voices on right-wing media were quick to blame DEI or whatever else they don’t like.
This is all of a piece with the right-wing response to the New Orleans terrorist attack on New Years. Long after it was known that the suspect was a US citizen born in Houston, MAGA supporters were still spreading the rumor that he had crossed the border illegally two days before. This allowed them to smear undocumented immigrants while simultaneously pinning responsibility on President Biden’s immigration policies.
Our media occasionally combats this scapegoating on a small scale, by fact-checking clear lies. But the larger story is going almost completely uncovered: Responsible leadership in times of crisis is a thing of the past. We can no longer expect that our leaders will take care to learn the facts before they speak, pass on reliable information, or try to prevent panic. Instead, they will tell lies that turn public fear and anger against their political enemies. Rather than use a crisis to bring people together, they will use it to create scapegoats and turn different groups of Americans against each other.
In the long run, that reversal of policy may be more destructive than fire.
Fractures are already showing in the MAGA coalition, and they haven’t even taken power yet.
When a party out of power suddenly finds itself on the verge of taking control of the White House and both houses of Congress, you’d expect to find them coasting on a wave of good feeling. Victory salves all wounds, so everybody should be ready to dance with everybody else at the inaugural balls.
Strangely, though, MAGAWorld is full of conflict these days. One Trump-supporting fascist (Steve Bannon) is calling another Trump-supporting fascist (Elon Musk) a “toddler” who needs a “wellness check” from Child Protective Services. And American workers, says Vivek Ramaswamy, can’t compete with immigrants because they suffer from our “culture”, which venerates mediocrity over excellence.
But wait: Isn’t the whole point of Trumpism that “real” (i.e. White Christian) Americans are victims of the liberal Deep State that wants to “replace” them with brown-skinned Third Worlders? What’s going on?
First skirmish: Foreign investment. Trump owes his election to two groups whose interests don’t match up: White working class voters and ultra-rich technology barons like Elon Musk. During the campaign, Trump could keep his plans vague enough that both were satisfied, and many low-wage workers could imagine that the richest man in the world was their friend.
But now that the election is over, the question keeps coming up: Who’s the real president, Trump or Elon? At first I interpreted such comments as Democratic trolling, trying to stir up trouble in MAGAWorld by taking advantage of Trump’s ego. (I remember in his first term how similar questions about Mike Pence riled him. Speculation at the time was that Trump would bask in the glory of the presidency, leaving Pence to do the actual work of governing.)
But more and more, there seems to be something to the murmurs. The move to reject a compromise and risk a government shutdown last week started with Musk, and Trump eventually got on board. Musk was the leader and Trump the follower.
Support for the stopgap spending bill then collapsed, forcing [House Speaker Mike] Johnson and his leadership team to scramble to find an alternative path forward. As they did, Musk celebrated, proclaiming that “the voice of the people has triumphed”.
It may be more accurate, however, to say that it was Musk’s voice that triumphed.
In the end, Congress passed a continuing resolution that still included the most important extras Democrats wanted: rebuilding the Key Bridge in Baltimore and disaster relief. And it kept government spending at basically the levels set before Republicans took control of the House two years ago.
We have heard for years about the problem of manufacturing businesses shipping jobs overseas to China, with its low worker wages and low environmental standards. China typically forces businesses wanting to locate factories in its country to transfer their technology and intellectual property to Chinese firms, which can then use that to undercut competitors in global markets, with state support.
Congress has been working itself into a lather about China for years now, and they finally came up with a way to deal with this issue. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Bob Casey (D-PA) have the flagship bill, which would either prohibit U.S. companies from investing in “sensitive technologies” in China, including semiconductors and artificial intelligence, or set up a broad notification regime around it.
One corporation that would be affected by this is Musk’s Tesla.
Elon Musk’s car company has a significant amount of, well, outbound investment. A Tesla Gigafactory in Shanghai opened in 2019; maybe a quarter of the company’s revenue comes from China. Musk has endorsed building a second Tesla factory in China, where his grip on the electric-vehicle market has completely loosened amid domestic competition. He is working with the Chinese government to bring “Full Self-Driving” technology to China, in other words, importing a technology that may be seen as sensitive. Musk has battery and solar panel factories that are not yet in China, but he may want them there in the future.
Second skirmish: H-1B visas. A second conflict is still playing out: One of the most important issues for the MAGA base is immigration, and in particular protecting the jobs of American citizens from immigrant competition. “They’re taking American jobs” is one of the most effective attacks on immigrants at all levels, even the ones working jobs hardly any Americans want, like picking crops by hand or watching rich people’s kids for practically no pay.
However, American corporations have a different agenda: They want to hire the best people in the world and pay them as little as possible. This is not new. America has been draining the brains of the world at least since the 1930s, when Jews and other anti-fascists escaped from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. We may sympathize with the American physicists who suddenly had to compete with the likes of Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, or American actresses who lost roles to Marlene Dietrich or Hedy Lamarr, but in retrospect it’s hard to feel bad about letting those people into our country.
Similarly today, the US tech industry employs foreign-born workers in jobs many Americans would undoubtedly like to have. The legal vehicle that allows this is the H-1B visa. Employers can sponsor foreign nationals with at least a bachelors degree to apply for H-1B visas that allow them to live and work in the US for three years, with a possible renewal to six years. Currently, 85,000 such visas can be issued each year. 84% of them go to people from India or China. Maybe a handful of those immigrants really are exceptional Einstein-like talents we’d be foolish to turn away, but probably not all 85,000 of them.
The employer has to affirm that the worker will be appropriately paid and that his or her (mostly his) employment won’t negatively impact similar American workers. In practice, though, these provisions are hard to monitor or enforce. Critics charge that H-1B workers are easily abused, because (if no other employers are waiting in the wings) the employer can expel a worker from the US just by withdrawing sponsorship. So H-1B workers can become cheap-but-highly-trained labor that corporations may prefer to American workers that the company doesn’t hold as much leverage over.
Obviously, the tech barons want to be free to import as many cheap engineers and programmers as they want, while Americans with comparable credentials want H-1B visas limited or eliminated. This conflict goes to the heart of what “America First” really means: Should we be strengthening Team America by bringing in talent wherever we can find it, or should we be defending the livelihoods of individual Americans? (An analogy to bring this home: Imagine you’re a young outfielder for the New York Mets, and that you’ve been struggling for playing time so you can prove yourself. How do you feel about the team signing Juan Soto? Your team is better, so your odds of going to the World Series have improved. But your individual prospects have taken a hit.) TPM:
The two sides began to argue on Sunday, after Donald Trump appointed Sriram Krishan, a partner at Andreesen Horowitz, as a White House policy adviser on Artificial Intelligence to work with Sacks, the Trump administration’s crypto and AI czar.
This may seem like a relatively minor White House appointment. However, Krishan has also been a proponent of removing country caps on green cards and H1-B visas, which allow American companies to hire foreign workers for certain specializations.
Nativists like Laura Loomer (who not so long ago was rumored to be having an affair with Trump) found this appointment “deeply disturbing“. Musk and Ramaswamy replied by attacking American workers, with Musk approvingly retweeting a post that described American workers as “retarded”.
I think Paul Krugman has put his finger on what’s at stake here:
Every political movement is a coalition made up of factions with different goals and priorities. Normally what holds these factions together is realism and a willingness to compromise: Each faction is willing to give the other factions part of what they want in return for part of what it wants.
What’s different about MAGA is that I’m pretty sure that almost all of the movement’s activists (as opposed to the low-information voters who put Trump over the top) knew that he was a con man, without even concepts of a plan to reduce prices. But each faction believed that he was their con man, putting something over on everyone else.
But now the two most important factions — what we might call original MAGA, motivated largely by hostility to immigrants, and tech bro MAGA, seeking a free hand for scams low taxes and deregulation — have gone to war, each apparently fearing that they may themselves have been marks rather than in on the con.
The Weekly Sift 