Can Americans Reclaim Their Revolutionary Heritage?

 As we enter the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, the Trump Administration has decided to behave like a monarchy. Trump assumes the air of a king when he builds his knock-off Versailles, when he conflates opposition to him with treason, when he uses the language of force rather than consensus.

In Richardson's dispatch, she notes that Joe Rogan has likened the militarized ICE presence in Minnesota to the Gestapo. I know most people to his left consider Rogan a meathead, whose embrace of vaccine quackery and general rightward tilt make him suspect. If you're going to persuade America that Trump is acting, in fact, like a despot, then it's Rogan that you have to flip. It's Theo Von. 

The state's "monopoly of violence" is actually a monopoly of legitimate violence, and the citizens of Minneapolis have made very clear what they think of ICE's good squad intimidation tactics. So have Chicago, LA and Portland. All policing requires the consent of the community, or else it ceases to be policing and becomes tyranny.

Americans have historically been a difficult lot to govern. Our institutions with their veto points and separated powers reflect this. Hopefully more and more Americans will become ungovernable in the face of Trump's emerging police state.

The Politics Of Renee Good's Murder

 Josh Marshall asked (sarcastically) "Is it good politics to defend a harmless woman getting shot in the face?" He was rebutting the idea that Trump has some mastermind media strategy that allows him to shape reality. In fact, that's clearly not the case - or not exactly the case.

The initial polling is pretty clear on two things: Democrats are outraged at this, Independents are pretty much opposed and Republicans are mostly OK with it. This polling will likely change, especially as there is a continuous stream of video from Minneapolis of people being harassed or beaten by ICE goons. Given both the pushback from the residents of Minnesota, the besieged psyche of ICE/BP, the belligerent nature if ICE/BP folks and the clear message that acts of violence will be met with official impunity, I suspect we shall see another shooting sooner rather than later.

What's more: It's Minnesota. Yeah, the Twin Cities are lefty-coded, but Minnesota could not be more centrally in the actual "Heartland." This isn't Portland or San Francisco or LA. It's white people being shot. There is a certain sociopathic segment of the Right that will cheer this on, but if this sort of state violence continues, I think it's going to make more and more segments of our society REALLY uncomfortable.

The Fed Is The Bright Red Line

 Trump's spurious prosecution of Jerome Powell is both deeply chilling and unlikely to work. The Federal Reserve was specifically constructed to avoid political pressure. They have to make the hard choices that presidents and congressional members cannot. Paul Volcker purposefully forced the country into a brutal recession from 1979-1983 in order to kill the inflation that had curdled the American economy. Powell has skillfully navigated the post-Covid inflationary period to quell inflation without forcing us into a deflationary recession.

As Krugman notes, this is part of Trump's overall assault on anyone with the temerity to not kiss his ass. He is so ensconced in sycophants that he cannot be contradicted, cannot be defied, and Powell wouldn't cut interest rates. (By the way, why now? Why launch a prosecution now? I have to wonder if they are seeing some flashing red lights on the economy and are that desperate for a rate cut.)

Last year, the Sycophantic Six on the SCOTUS basically allowed the president to fire anyone at any agency, even if it had been set up to be beyond the reach of presidential firings. They specifically said that this does not apply to the Federal Reserve. The reason is that the Court ultimately works for the Money. Yeah, they may secretly thrill to Trump's attacks on Democrats or minorities, but their real purpose was to overturn Chevron and gut the regulatory state. 

The broadest trends in macroeconomics are fuzzy at the moment. The tariffs have not really been universal and the effects have not been as profound as the published rates. There is still some hope that the Court will overturn them, for the same reason that they might protect Powell. The economy is soft, but not receding, and that softness has largely come from Trump's erratic policy making. No one knows what he might do with tariffs or punishing a specific industry from one day to the next. No one wants to go into Venezuela because he might simply walk away from it and stare out the window at his construction project in the old East Wing. 

The economy is frozen in uncertainty, even as Trump guts regulatory oversight and funnels money to the rich. Attacking the Federal Reserves' independence is unlikely to sooth markets and allay the concerns of business.

The Policy Incoherence Of Morons

 I'm teaching Progressivism this week, and we are looking at how there are two aspects of Progressivism that were in direct tension with each other: the desire to have experts direct policy and the desire to have more democracy to represent the "people" and not the "interests." Both were and are laudable goals, but they can work at cross purposes.

Under Trump we have the dual incompatibility of the attack on experts and the destruction of democratic norms. Part of me thinks that someone read something about Progressivism, and then decided to undo anything that smacked of it. This would certainly be consistent, for instance, with Trump's war on Jerome Powell. In fact, the new year has brought such a torrent of terrible news that it seems to have slipped the banks of a coherent narrative. But the attacks on Powell, on Minnesota, on science, and the literal attacks on Venezuela, Syria and maybe Iran or freaking Greenland are all part of the "logic" of authoritarianism.

The reason why authoritarianism is historically unpopular is because authoritarianism - with some exceptions, like maybe Singapore - typically has to business for technocrats. This gives us the darkly comical moment of Trump waging a war for oil in Venezuela and the oil companies saying, "Nah, we're good, dude."

Trump promised an economic utopia when he ran in 2024, and gullible people conflated the circumstances of 2019 with Trump's alleged business acumen. In fact, he's given is a noticeably weak and sluggish economy that Krugman argues is sluggish because of the incoherence and chaotic nature of an autocrat making shit up on the fly. It's all very noisy, but the combination of chaotic tariffs, the prospects of AI taking white collar jobs and general overall problems like firing 300,000 government workers has all led to a period of instability.

Simon Rosenberg notes that Republicans are beginning to break with Trump over issues of clear policy malfeasance. Hopefully, this becomes contagious, and they pass veto proof resolutions denying Trump the ability to invade Greenland or to protect Jerome Powell and the independence of the Federal Reserve. If Trump gets his tiny little paws on the Fed, we are well and truly cooked, and I think even most Republicans know this to be true.

Of course, on one level, the policies pursued by Trump are not incoherent. They are completely coherent with his curdled worldview. They are coherent to his own ignorance and impulses.

Famously some Bush 43 lackey said of Iraq: "We are an empire. We make our own reality." 

How did THAT work out?

RFK, Jr's Reign Of Error

 The Atlantic published a series of thumbnail bios of people who have been fired or accepted retirement or quit on principle over the last year. It's a sobering example of the gutting of the Federal bureaucracy of it's institutional ballast.

What becomes clear is that the devastation wrought by RFK to public health and public science is brutal, far reaching and soon to be lethal. 

That gasoline, gargling creature with a face like a dried apricot is among the many sins of the swing voters who thought, "Eggs are pricey, what's the worst that can happen."

Maybe?

 Simon Rosenberg is an optimist - his place is called the Hopium Chronicles. He ponders that for everyone who is doomcasting about the end of democracy in America and the end of the postwar liberal order, what if it wasn't? He points to the protests in Iran, Ukrainian resiliency on the battlefield (something Philip Bump mentions in this conversation) and even a possible democratic or at least not kleptocratic Venezuela. What if Orban finally loses in Hungary?

Imagine if there are far more people like this Iranian woman?

I think history suggests that there are. And maybe the US engulfed in democratic backsliding means that Europe and other places are going to have to step up and maintain the world order until we get our shit together? What if Iranians are protesting not only their awful government, but because they know no one else is coming to help them?

Maybe America remembers its antifa past. 

It's pretty to think so. 

DHS

 The Abolish ICE mantra has been embraced by people as diverse as Bill Kristol. I think Josh Marshall is right though that we need to think more generally about basically eliminating Homeland Security. DHS was a weird reaction to 9/11, as Democrats were looking for a way to "get tough" on terrorism without countenancing pogroms against Muslims in America. It was very much of the Liberal Organizational Flowchart school of technocracy. 

The idea was to take a host of disparate agencies and house them in one place. There was always a slight fascist aesthetic to a lot of DHS, right down to the words "homeland security." The Boys gave the name Homelander to their fascist Superman. There has to be some form of border patrol, for instance. Democrats would be insane to embrace the Open Borders lunacy that some spouted in 2020. Housing Border Patrol in a different department would be the first step towards accountability and oversight. As we have seen with Trump, Miller and Noem, DHS was just ripe for the sort of abuses that they are visiting on American cities and citizens.

"Terrorist Agents"

 I was reading this Times piece about the mass protests in Iran. The language the regime is using to describe the pro-democracy protests is pretty much the identical language that Trumpists are using to describe protests in America. 

If - hopefully, hopefully - the Iranians finally throw off their awful government, Trump will no doubt take credit for it, but make no mistake, he wants to be Supreme Leader himself.

Alexandra Petri Is A National Treasure

 This is a brilliant, funny and even poignant piece of writing.

King Donald The First

 The atrocious murder of Renee Good in Minnesota by masked agents of the state has been likened to the Orwellian line of  "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." This connects - and rightly so - the actions of the Trump administration with 20th century totalitarianism. I don't think they've achieved it, but that is clearly their goal.

However, in describing Trump himself, I think Krugman is correct here and here. Trump clearly sees himself as a monarch, a sovereign. His actions work to blur the lines between the state and his person. He sees the achievements of the state as HIS achievements and the resources of the state as HIS resources. This is why dissent of any kind is "treason," because the king is the sovereign. 

The basic, foundational idea of America - the thing we are celebrating this year's 250th anniversary - is that the people are sovereign. Trump's "L'etat cest moi" bullshit is deeply, deeply Unamerican. The raid to get Maduro was a very impressive bit of work by the extraordinary professionals of Joint Special Operations Command. Trump thinks he did it. He crowed about watching it on TV, like he was playing some sort of video game and the controller was in his hands. His desecration of the East Wing of the White House is reminiscent of some fading potentate building a palace in his own honor to stave off the looming reality of his own mortality. 

I honestly am not going to predict the fallout from Good's murder or Trump's illegal actions in Venezuela. I've been humbled trying to predict things where Trump is involved. Still, shooting a white mom in the face is not likely to increase support for his internal deportation policies. Those policies were never popular, as people wanted more border security, not attacks on their schools and neighborhoods in an effort to deport some roofers, line books and housekeepers. Before these events we had two polls on Trump's job approval. CBS had 41-59 or 18 points "underwater" and Rasmussen (Rasmussen!) had him 45-53 or 8 points down. 

ICE itself has seen support collapse, from +16 to -14 in November. That number is sure to fall further. People want the border "secure" but they don't want raids on apartment buildings, they don't want masked goons provoking confrontations on American streets. Support for abolishing ICE entirely has reached 42%, up from 29% in 2018. Not yet the majority position, but this was before ICE start shooting people in the face and then being held unaccountable for their actions.

I've been learning about pre-Norman Britain, and it is striking how the character of government often depended so completely on the character of the king. Trump is a man of low character, and his administration reflects this. I was reflecting on the fact that "shame" isn't actually a bad thing, if it serves a moral code. Relentless shame is debilitating, but if you wrong someone and feel shame, that's actually good. It allows you to make amends and rectify your behavior.

Trump's superpower is shamelessness, and that extends to his courtiers, who smear Renee Good rather than reflect on their actions that led to her slaughter in the streets of her hometown by agents of the state that are not welcome there. Their king revels in the blood on his hands, he bathes in it.

But hopefully, America remembers that we are not a nation of kings.

The Lying Is The Point

 Yesterday, video clearly showed an ICE officer in Minneapolis shoot and kill a woman who was "in the way" of an ICE raid. He violated many basic rules of law enforcement - don't stand in front of a vehicle; don't discharge your weapon into a moving vehicle - and he basically murdered her for "not complying."

Immediately the Trump administration made false claims about the woman, the incident and the nature of the threat to ICE. There are so many disturbing aspects of this incident that it does remind me of January 6th, in terms of which aspect I should be angriest about.

This happened for one reason only: Trump and Stephen Miller are looking for performative acts of oppression and intimidation in "blue" cities. They aren't finding the hundreds of thousands of "illegals" in these cities, and maybe they are stupid enough to think that this is just a matter of more raids. In fact, these wholesale assaults on civil liberties very much feels like the point of all of this. They've started to focus on Minnesota because of a fraud case surrounding day cares, which is currently being adjudicated. Yes, it was a crime, but it's being dealt with appropriately. The pretext is all that matters.

It is, of course, depressing to go online and see the inevitable toeing of the party line for what amounts to the lynching or extrajudicial killing of Renee Nicole Good. All the Trump sycophants and fascists immediately assumed the GroupThink about radical antifa leftists and the utter bullshit that - apparently in their minds - justifies shooting a mother in the head from point blank range.

It is also incredibly depressing to see the "she should have just complied" crowd place the cause of her death on her as opposed to the ICE agent who was very much NOT in danger of imminent death. That these are the same people who think Ashlii Babbit is a martyr and January 6th was no big deal is not surprising.

It is the ability of Trump and Trumpism to get their followers to believe the lies - even with obvious video evidence showing the opposite - that is truly terrifying. The actual act of violence is appalling, but life can be cruel and capricious. Terrible things do happen. 

It is watching the entire Republican Party bow down before an altar of lies that is so unsettling. How can you recreate civic democracy under those circumstances?

Stupid Imperialism

 As Trump's imperial project stalls at home, with the National Guard removed from American cities and Republicans beginning to buck him in the House, Trump looks afield to sate his imperial pretensions. As with everything he does, it's stupid - a sort of "Didn't Do The Reading" attempt to mimic the late Gilded Age of McKinley: tariffs and wars of empire.

Richardson notes his rambling, incoherent speech yesterday, and how it ties to his renewed threats against Greenland. This is a great example of Stupid Imperialism. (All imperialism is pretty stupid, but this stuff is...woof.) Trump wants Greenland because it looks huge on a Mercator projection and because he heard they have rare earths. Rare earths are not "rare" but are simply hard to refine. China - who doesn't give a shit about polluting its own air and water - have moved into a monopolistic position on rare earths because they have built infrastructure, not because they own the dirt.

Even with Venezuela, Krugman notes that much of Venezuelan oil wealth is hypothetical to the point of being fictional. It's heavy, bitter crude rather than the light, sweet crude that refines most easily into usable petroleum. 

Let's leave aside the stupidity of Trump saying we "run" Venezuela, when we obviously do not. Let's leave aside the stupidity of tearing apart the NATO alliance to annex Greenland for no meaningful advantage. Yes, the process is stupid and thuggish.

The thing is, the GOAL is stupid, too. The original mercantilism arose from Malthus' insight into the economics of scarcity. If there was a limited amount of a good or resource, it made sense to have a national monopoly on that. Adam Smith and the industrial revolution ended that basic idea - even if it took a century to learn that it was dead. There is no advantage to an empire, which is why - leftist caterwauling to the contrary - America largely did not pursue a true empire. When we did, it largely ended poorly.

The dumbification of America has happened, because one of our two major parties has lobotomized itself to reflect the imbecility of their Orange God. 

January 6th

 Richardson makes a compelling case about the links between Republican rhetoric surrounding Democratic electoral victories that stretches back to the 1990s, and Trump's efforts to overthrow electoral democracy five years ago today.

She goes on to note the common thread from his two impeachments and the complete faceplant from Merrick Garland to delay the appointment of Jack Smith and then the SCOTUS' grant of immunity for presidential actions and how that created the lawlessness we see from Trump now.

Trump's whole life has been a bully who uses his money to bully contractors and debtors and escape the most significant consequences for his actions. He ran for president - allegedly - to boost his ability to start some sort of OANN type "Trump TV" to challenge Fox from the right. (Let that sink in.) Once he won, he now has to continue to bully and threaten to stay on top. The entire system of constitutional checks and balances is as foreign to him as calculus is to a sea urchin. 

January 6th was the moment when the old Republican Party could have held him responsible for his actions and we could have escaped this nightmare. If ten more Republican Senators had voted to convict in the Senate - and they all knew he was guilty - then we would not be staring down the insanity of 2025 and now 2026. We would not be threatening Greenland/Denmark. We would not be levying tariffs on whatever seizes his fancy. We would not be rounding up citizens and residents and deporting them to offshore gulags. In fact, there probably (certainly) would be a Republican president right now anyway, given the anti-incumbent tides that swept the world after Covid. They could have had their tax cuts and deregulation. 

Instead, it has become a party steeped and dependent on fear-mongering conspiracy theories.

Instead, democracy in our country is undergoing a series of battering blows every day. 

The Locus Of Evil

 Donald Trump is a depraved, small, heartless man with the mental architecture of a Jersey Turnpike toilet. However, the real locus of evil on this fell times is Stephen Miller. His recent incantation of the threats against Greenland and Denmark is a great example of just how batshit insane his political impulses are. 

The threats against Greenland are a great example of the stupidity and evil of Trumpistan, and how they are effectively the same thing. Greenland hosts American military bases as a member of NATO. They are our allies, especially against Russia and maintaining the UK-Iceland gap. It is otherwise a barely inhabitable frozen wasteland. It has "rare earths", but again, rare earths are not rare, just hard and dirty to refine. It also looks huge on a map. This cascading features of stupidity are what drives Trump and Miller to threaten a long time ally. 

And this doesn't even cover his jackbooted thugs breaking into schools.

Miller is most likely universally reviled in whatever remains of the old Republican Party - a party that itself was hardly a beacon of intelligence and decency. I am hopeful that there are enough of the old Republicans left to muzzle this rabid Pomeranian before he does even more damage to our country.

The Donroe Doctrine

 Among the more stupid utterances from our most stupid president was Trump's assertion of a Donroe Doctrine because people "hadn't heard about the Monroe Doctrine." That's always a tell that he has just learned something. Now, most anyone with a working knowledge of US History remembers the Monroe Doctrine, but the reason they remember it is often muddled.

The Monroe Doctrine was largely the brainchild of John Quincy Adams, Monroe's Secretary of State and an experienced diplomat. Quincy Adams had been our minister to Russia during the Revolution when he was about 19 years old. The situation was that during the Napoleonic Wars, Spain had been both weakened and liberalized during Napoleon's conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Existing elites in the Spanish New World colonies were upset at the democratic and anti-clerical reforms coming from the puppet government in Madrid, so Continental Spanish America rose up in wars of independence stretching from Mexico to Argentina. 

After Napoleon had been defeated and the forces of monarchical conservatism had created the Concert of Vienna to maintain order in Europe, they looked westward to reestablish Spanish control of the New World. Britain, who had benefitted from the newly opened ports and was ideologically disposed to freer trade, wanted to enlist American help in guaranteeing Spanish America's independence. 

Adams realized that the real guarantor of that independence was the British Navy. Still, riding the wave of American nationalism that resulted from the War of 1812 (fought against the British, and therefore making it hard to visibly align with Britain), Adams wrote the doctrine that the New World was to be free from further colonization of any kind, and it was American policy to guarantee this. In return - in a laughable boast at the time - the US would remain aloof from European affairs. 

Very few people on either side of the Atlantic took much note of the Doctrine at the time. It was not a law or treaty, it was just something James Monroe said. Britain made sure no one crossed the Atlantic to reinstate Spanish colonialism, until the Civil War came. With both the US and UK preoccupied by the war, France installed a Hapsburg prince, Maximillian, as Emperor of Mexico. Once the war was over, Grant moved a full army to the Rio Grande, France withdrew support and Maximillian died before a Mexican firing squad. The Monroe Doctrine was revivified a bit there.

However, the real prominence of the Monroe Doctrine came at the end of the 19th century, with America's war against Spain. This conflict focused American military planning on the building of the Panama Canal after the war and this in turn led to America - a country founded on anti-imperialism and self-determination, which the Monroe Doctrine buttressed - becoming an imperial power. We seized and held Puerto Rico, Guantanamo Bay and would later help wrest Panama from Colombia. 

Teddy Roosevelt would issue his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, stating the US was the sold policeman and debt collector for the Western Hemisphere, especially the Caribbean. Many of the small countries rimming the Caribbean were deeply in debt to European powers and incapable of paying those debts off, at least in part due to the corruption in their Customs Departments. Because most revenues at the time came from import duties, control of the Customs Houses was a great way to get rich. This had been true in the US as well, until civil service reform helped end that corruption. Roosevelt initiated a period of American bullying and quasi-imperialism that lasted until his cousin, Franklin, began the Good Neighbor policy.

To recap: The original Monroe Doctrine was an expression of America's deep antipathy towards imperialism. In the late 19th and early 20th century, it actually became a lever to shift America into a quasi-imperial power, leaving the US very much hated until FDR reversed that policy. Since then, America had vacillated between supporting and opposing democracy in the Caribbean basin.

What Donald Trump is expressing in his Donroe Doctrine is a return to the worst of Teddy Roosevelt's imperialism but ramped up to 13 out of 10. TR - and Wilson with his invasion of Mexico - embraced the sort of paternalistic racism that at least had benevolent intentions - as misguided as they were. TR took over Customs houses in order to forestall European creditors from coming in and doing the same. Wilson invaded Mexico, because they were under a terrible miliary dictator during a revolution. Neither wanted or certainly stated such a naked statement of intentions to loot those countries. 

Donald Trump's operational persona is and always has been that of a wannabe Mafia Boss. He uses threats and boasts to cow opposition, but as we have seen, he usually backs down when he's opposed with sufficient resolve. This bullying persona meshes with Don Trumpeone, the insecure mob boss who needs to display dominance and opulence, because deep down, he knows he's the son his parents were disappointed in.

Trump is stripping away even the pretense of paternalism in favor of naked predation. In the Puzo/Coppola mythology of the mob, the first Don Corleone was a protector of the poor immigrants of New York, whereas Michael becomes simply a ruthless, heartless killer. Trump is that ruthless killer, devoid of human connection or feeling, alone in his darkened mental landscape and seeing the entire world as either wolves or sheep, and visualizing himself as the biggest wolf of all.

This is, to borrow a phrase from conservatism, deeply un-American.