Billionaires Are (Mostly) Sociopaths

 Krugman recaps the rise of the "Centi-Billionaires" who dwarf all human wealth from previous eras. He notes that this era compares unfavorably with the Gilded Age in terms of wealth inequality. That's certainly something. This ties into the Citizens United ruling that unlocked the ability of the super-rich to exerts incredible influence on our elections. Would Trump have won had Musk not bought Twitter and turned it into a Nazi echo chamber? What are we to make of Bezos destroying the Post? The Ellisons destroying CBS?

Krugman notes that this is not solely about making money. The utility of spending all that money is not to make marginal gains. Destroying the Post and CBS is NOT good for their bottom lines. It has to be about the deep howling void in the center of their souls. Compare Bezos or even Gates to their ex-wives, who using their divorce riches to actively work to better the world.

When we look at the depredations of Trump and his cronies, it's not simply about getting more loot. Today, I start teaching authoritarianism in Comparative Government and one of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is (the poorly named) phenomenon of rent seeking. Elites use the government to exploit money and other forms of wealth for their own benefit. The make the government buy jets or house them, like Kristi Noem does. They rake in billions in crypto in return for gutting oversight - creating a potential time bomb in the heart of the economy.

When that happens - when Trump makes the IRS pay him $10 billion to settle a meritless lawsuit - the incentive, in fact the prerogative, is to never give up power. You can afford to leave office, because you will lose access to that money and potentially be prosecuted.

For the billionaires who support Trump, they simply cannot accept democratic control of their fortunes. They are self-identified Uber mensch. The rabble cannot touch them or thwart them. For Trump and his ilk, democratic accountability could lead to a reckoning from his many crimes. 

Can they put this into action and end American democracy? We will know in about seven months.

Yes, Corruption

 Richardson is a far better historian than me, researching and cataloguing events in greater detail. She, too, used her post about yesterday to look at corruption and compare it to the restraint that Washington showed during his presidency. 

Some details:

- Trump has filed a trademark for any airport named after him. Palm Beach Airport is currently in the process of being renamed for him, but he wants Dulles. If that happens, he gets all profits from the merchandise and to license his name. This is basically the bulk of his career before entering politics. Trump is a poor businessman when it comes to  building properties and developing products, but he can slap his name from his tabloid driven celebrity onto any old shit and make a quick buck. 

- The Trump Crime Family has made somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 billion because of his presidency. Much of this comes from crypto-laundered bribes, but it also comes from crap like Trump sneakers, bibles and those stupid fucking hats. Because everything is a lie with this asshole, Trump's mouthpieces like to blabber about how he is only putting hard working Americans' needs above his own. This is bullshit, and, yes, that should be the message for Democrats. Everything else works off of that.

- Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion and sycophantic weasel Scott Bessent will almost certainly cut him a check. If this happens, this has to be the biggest story of the year, even bigger than Minneapolis, and - yes - even bigger than someone's elderly mother being kidnapped. A president who loots the treasury for his own enrichment is so far from any other presidential scandal that we have ever had as to beggar the imagination. Even if - as I predict - he "settles" for $2-3 billion and thus claims he saved billions, this is clear graft. This is a scandal the likes of which are usually reserved for Gilded Age hacks like the Whiskey Ring. Never - and I do mean never - has corruption on this scale reached the Oval Office.

The "Epstein Class" of billionaires is as popular as syphilis right now. Hang that around Trump's neck. Billions for him, no health care for you. Billions for him, no housing for you.

Corruption

 When the Whigs - both American and English - talked about corruption, what they meant was not necessarily outright bribery or quid pro quo relationships, but rather the overall rot at the heart of monarchical politics. I think that's why "corruption" in this archaic sense is really so apt to describe Trump's maladministration. 

When you look at something as facially absurd as actively blocking green energy, you have to balance the supreme idiocy of Cleek's Law (oppose whatever Democrats support) but also the naked financial relationship between hydrocarbon extraction industries and the Republican Party. There is absolutely zero reason to support coal, except to enrich coal mine owners. Solar, wind and battery technology are cheaper and more sustainable, and the lies Trump tells about it are just another example of the rot of corruption in our government.

To be clear, it's not just Trump. If you look at the fall of Marco Rubio or JD Vance from bog standard asshole Republicans to Trumpist creatures actively destroying America's place in the world, you can trace this to Josh Marshall's Authoritarian International. Whether it's the techno-libertarian/post-liberalism of a Peter Thiel or the petrostate autocrats of the Persian Gulf or the cultural revanchists of the post-Soviet world, you are talking about a fundamental corruption and rot at the heart of everything. All of this, by the way, was made possible by the corruption of the Supreme Court and decisions like Rufo and Citizen's United.

Trump is flamboyantly corrupt in so many ways, but when you look at the naked enrichment and entitlement of people like Kristi Noem, it's pretty apparent that Trump is not just the largest practitioner of corruption, but the vessel through which others enrich themselves. 

When a culture becomes corrupt enough, it seems foolish to be honest. 

One of the largest problems Democrats have is trying to focus on one outrage, because Trump commits so many. You can't message against the farrago of horseshit coming from the GOP. As we enter the celebration of our 250 years of independence, we should look to revivify the old Whiggish language of corruption.

It fits to a tee. 

Tariffs

 Krugman has a long, wonky post about why the impact of Trump's tariffs on prices is only about a 1% increase in overall prices. If you want to dig into the weeds of that, be my guest.

Prices rose 2.4% last month (if we believe the government data, which in this case we probably should). Absent tariffs, prices would - presumably - have risen by 1.4%. If I'm right - and I very much might not be - I think that there are two possible impacts of tariffs.

The first is that 2.4% is still on the high side. That makes it unlikely that we will see dramatic interest rate cuts. Inflation is not galloping ahead, but it's not quelled either and people are still upset about prices.

The second is that if prices might hypothetically have only risen by 1.4% without the tariffs, then we might be seeing a slacking in consumer demand. While the economic data are generally positive, consumer sentiment is in the toilet. That might just be the overall unpopularity of Trump. I do believe that people will complain about "the economy" when they are really just unhappy overall. 

The only thing buttressing Trump from hitting the Crazification Factor of 27% approval is that the floor has not fallen out of the economy. My guess is that it was going to happen at some point this year, but maybe it won't. Maybe the US economy is just too resilient to be knocked off course by these corrupt idiots. 

I Hate My Job, I Love My Job

 Working at a small independent school has been my life's work. I am not a perfect teacher or coach, but I care deeply - very deeply - about my student's growth.

Increasingly, though, it has become apparent that I no longer work for a small, community-based institution where we all labor, laugh and struggle together. 

I work for a corporation.

This makes believe in the mission of the school so much harder when I am not longer treated as a respected teacher with the independence to act on my own expertise and experience. As if things couldn't get any worse, yesterday we had a consultant firm come in and tell us that we will be instituting a radical new schedule next year. As he himself admitted, this will be very disruptive and we will struggle for at least one year, more likely two, to adapt to this new schedule.

The time we have with our students is precious and all most of us really want is the tools to teach them as well as we can. The Covid year of 2020-21 was so hard not simply because it was hard, but because we couldn't teach well. We knew we weren't teaching well, and it was soul crushing. Now, we are going to voluntarily teach poorly for a year or two to institute a new schedule that the consultant firm basically implements wherever they go. There really is no solid evidence that it's better, but they get paid to "disrupt" the "paradigm."

My wife and I are a few years from being able to retire. I would have liked to make it to 30 years here, but if I had the money, I would retire now. To paraphrase a political expression: I didn't leave the school, the school left me.

The Damage Done

 The sheer amount of damage that Trump and Republicans are doing to the world is tough to keep track of. Certainly, millions of people - many of them children - are going to die because they killed USAID. Other outrages - putting his name on the Kennedy Center - are easily fixed. Reversing his budgets are done in 2029 (presuming we still have a democracy by then). He is increasingly toxic, and as Minnesota demonstrated, when the people stand against him, he loses.

There are two areas that were especially galling yesterday. 

Trump basically went all in in dragging the power grid back to 1947. By repealing every single piece of constraint on emitting greenhouse gases, he is paving the way for massive amounts of pollution. The question, though, is really whether companies will actively move backwards on this. Yes, the massive open coal pits of Wyoming will continue to feed the data centers being built there. However, some tech companies are more eager to build small scale nuclear plants, because they have to know that once Trump is gone, coal will no longer be viable. It's not viable now, due to cost, not "woke."

Why is he doing this? To pwn the libs? In return for payoffs from hydrocarbon companies? However, if you're Ford or GM, do you really want to fall behind the rest of the world as they spring towards more hybrids and EVs? 

We also have the baffling (but not baffling) decision to simply not review the efficacy of mRNA flu vaccines. This is RFK, Jr's war on vaccines that everyone with half a brain saw coming. The US already takes longer than Europe to approve new drugs and treatments. Now, we have a really promising new form of vaccine and it's being killed to placate the roughly 20% of Americans who are skeptical of vaccines, a 20% that resides overwhelmingly now in the Republican Party.

Europe will no doubt plow ahead with medical advances, but the US is ceding that ground and it has been the US that has usually been at the forefront of medical breakthroughs, which is really the only possible defense for our expensive health care system. Our medical care costs too much in order to fund medical research and treatments. Now, we are destroying that, too. 

All of this is just an inconceivably stupid catering to unbelievably stupid people. 

Providing Democrats win in November, businesses will have to evaluate what the end of Trump and Trumpism might mean for them. I can't imagine the executive that will greenlight a coal burning power plant, knowing that it will never be profitable and won't even come online before Trump is out of office. Hopefully, medical research will simply relocate overseas so that science can progress during our sojourn in the America where race science is more popular with the government than actual science. 

So much awfulness everywhere you look. 

Global Oligarchy

 Josh Marshall has been running a series of posts on what he's calling the global oligarchy or the Authoritarian International. Here and here. 

Normally, I would dismiss this as somewhat conspiratorial, but at the same time, I do think he's on to something. He ties it, interestingly, to the various petrostates of the Middle East rather than Russia, though Russia is also emblematic of its politics. Basically, the new Axis of Evil is the oil states of the Gulf, Silicon Valley anti-democrats and hedge fund billionaires. 

The basic thread holding them together is the desire to escape democratic accountability, which is at the heart of democracy: the powerful must answer to the people. 

There have been a host of articles this week about the coming apocalypse in white collar jobs from AI. Some of these are coming from people working in AI who are seeing how efficient and fast it is becoming, especially at coding. There is a school of thought that this is all hype to elevate their stock price, but if it's even a little true, I think we need to see AI as part of this Authoritarian International (yes, also AI). The purpose of AI might be to change the world, but the practical impact will be to divorce knowledge skills from scarcity and therefore disempower the broad swath of middle and upper middle class workers. 

If you own a company, why not employ an AI bot rather than three humans? Why not maximize your profits this way? Why answer to the bothersome people that work for you, when you can have a compliant digital workforce? 

Democracies will, at some point, have to address AI and its potential deprivation of livelihoods among important constituencies. If you can destroy democracy, you can prevent that from happening. 

Bondi Beeyotch

 Pam Bondi's performance yesterday was...woof. Performance is the right word for it, as it was calculated to appeal to the gelatinous rage mass in the Oval Office and him alone. It was more than "combative", it was unhinged.

Kevin Kruse put it best:

So, to wrap up today's insanity: President Trump, who is deeply implicated in a pedophilia scandal involving his best friend, the sex trafficker, sent Attorney General Bondi -- who only has that job because Trump's first choice was also implicated in a separate pedophilia scandal -- to the House to stonewall releasing the full files about the president's pedophile friend, relying there on the friendly support of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, who was himself implicated in the coverup of a *third* sexual abuse scandal at a college.

And as others noted, Bondi also helped cover up Epstein's crimes as Florida AG!

Corruption

 Yglesias looks at the kind of bizarre way that Americans look at public corruption. The whole thing is bizarre, as it usually is when you ask Americans about policies and specifics. For instance, 86% of respondents say that public officials who take cash in return for votes is corrupt. That means 14% are either unsure or think that's not corrupt.

Anyway.

Some of the things that people think are corrupt really aren't. If you get speaking fees for a group that has any political agenda (which is most groups), 62% think that's corruption. If a politician votes with "social elites" over constituents, 78% think that's corruption. In other words, if a politician votes for climate legislation that his constituents disagree with, then - rather than being just a policy disagreement - respondents see that as corruption.

All of this is to say, that this is why Donald Trump's unprecedented corruption seems to sail under the radar. Sure, there are things like his demolition of the East Wing that have landed in public opinion, but overall, people seem inured to Trump's really unprecedented corruption. Yglesias says it's the most corrupt in decades, but I think it has to be considered the most corrupt of all time. Certainly no president has engaged in such naked corruption. Grant and Harding had men around them who were corrupt, but they engaged in very little themselves. Trump is engaging in the outright sale of his office.

Because Americans think "all politicians are corrupt" - and they think that because they define corruption so loosely - then Trump is able to get away with unprecedented corruption because "they all do it."

We see this in the fact that Trump basically won in 2024 by carrying low-information voters. This tends to show up in the fact that they just weren't aware of things like "tariffs lead to higher prices" or "deportations won't increase jobs." It also shows up in things like being surprised that Trump would pursue vendettas against his enemies - something he admitted to on the campaign trail. Low information voters tend to blame the president for higher prices, even if - like Biden - it's not particularly his fault. They are less upset with inflation than with nominal prices. Because prices aren't coming down (which would actually be bad), they think it's corruption. In this case, it's incompetence and malevolence. 

Morris gives us this graph:

Trump won in 2024 in large part because ~one-quarter of the electorate wasn’t paying enough attention to his promises to know much about what he’d do as president. Now that they are seeing the results — especially on prices — they are just as anti-Trump as voters who spend all day consuming political news.

The corruption thing is part and parcel of the striking ignorance of the American voter.  Evidence seems unimportant, because evidence cannot contradict certain dearly held positions, and we are cooked because of it. 

What The Hell Was That?

 Two head scratchers.

Yesterday, Pete Navarro went on the TeeVee to prep viewers for a bad jobs report. Basically urging markets not to freak out over a bit of bad news. Everyone was preparing for an absolutely apocalyptic jobs number. We got a good one.  While my first impulse was that they cooked the books (and maybe they did), why send out Navarro to warn of a bad one? Maybe they did cook the numbers, Navarro saw the real numbers and no one told him about the fudged numbers. Navarro IS a complete idiot, but it still didn't make any sense.

Then we had the closing of El Paso's airspace ostensibly for days. Then, nope, it was re-opened. Why? Something to do with drones at Fort Bliss, but the original order was for ten days. El Paso is not close to anything (except Juarez). It needs an airport. Maybe the Defense Department wanted it closed and it was pointed out to them that they can't just seal off a small city because they want to. Maybe the original order was for ten hours and those complete fucking morons can't read. The official reason was that they were testing new counter drone technology, except, no, Transportation Secretary MTV Real World says that cartel drones violated the airspace. That's almost certainly bullshit.

Krugman spent some time ripping apart Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for lying about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Richardson has a fuller run down of the Epstein developments. TL;DR: The Trump administration is lying at a rate that science cannot measure. They are lying about small things and big things. The thing about lying is that it's hard. You have to remember the truth AND the lie. So you get the weird El Paso situation. Someone is lying - likely Real World - and that will lead to cascading series of other lies.

It is tiresome at this point to note that if Scandal X had happened in any other administration then yadda yadda yadda. What's apparent is that MAGA has now dug itself so deeply into a world of outrageous fictions that they cannot go back. What's more, they cannot admit it. MAGA is never wrong, even when it is, in which case, it's Joe Biden or the Crooked Media's fault. 

The genius of democracy is its ability to self-correct. Democracy assimilates information and reacts accordingly. Maybe not always well, but it acknowledges the reality of the situation. If you don't, you lose the next election. MAGA - as a deeply authoritarian movement - cannot self correct. They also cannot tolerate a "loss" so they don't fire hacks like Hegseth or Lutnick. The hackery is the point. 

When a truly shattering crisis comes - and it will come - these idiots will hold the fate of our country and our world in their palsied hands. 

Does Moving To The Center Work?

 Morris argues that - contrary to the narrative - Bill Clinton's tack to the center in 1992 was not responsible for his victory in the election. I do think there's some truth to that, in that 1992 was clearly a "change" election with Bush becoming very unpopular due to the economy. Ross Perot's unusually robust third party campaign took from both Bush and Clinton among voters simply fed up with the whole system. This sort of free range anger is pretty typical when the economy is bad. Trump in 2016 presented as both the Republican candidate AND the third party candidate, as he was so far from any previous type of candidate.

I certainly agree with Morris that 1992 was largely about the poor economy and the 12 years of rampant wealth transfer up the tax brackets.

However, the Democratic Party was in pretty poor shape nationally 1990. Morris notes that Clinton was perceived as being further left than Michael Dukakis, but I have to wonder how much of that was his draft evasion and libertine reputation. Clinton spoke centrist, but vibed left. I also agree with Morris that most voters aren't making ideological decisions when they vote. Every election is a vibes election when you start talking about the politically disengaged.

Here's where I have questions. I do think perceived centrism matters simply as a way to allay swing voters concerns. The critical test case this year might be the Senate race in Texas. Democrats have been trying to flip Texas for quite some time. It's a diverse state with a lot of metro areas, but it's also a deeply conservative rural state. Having a majority of Democratic House members in the Texas delegation seems like a pipe dream. Winning statewide has always been out of reach for reasons that excite the center v left debate.

Obviously, this is playing out in 2026 with the Senate race. Republicans seem intent on nominating scandal factory Ken Paxton and ousting normal Republican John Cornyn. If they do that - if MAGA eats its own - then Texas would SEEM to be ripe for an important pick up in what could be a close contested race for control of the Senate. 

For Democrats, they are going to choose between the firebrand partisan in Jasmine Crockett and the choirboy in James Talarico. The argument Crockett can make is that she will "fire up the base", but previous candidates have tried that and it hasn't worked. Beto O'Rourke ran multiple times as a stalwart of the Progressive Left and came away empty every time. Maybe if he tacked to the center he might have lost by less or won....or maybe Texas simply wasn't going to elect ANY Democrat.

Talarico is betting that he can win statewide by not scaring the swing voters. That anger and dissatisfaction with Trump will not - in an of itself - carry the day. You need to give space to allow someone who typically votes Republican to shift to a Democrat to check Trump. 

Yes, race and gender play into this. Crockett is a brilliant communicator on MSNow and as a House back bencher. She's lacerating and on point, but she is also a Black woman in a state that leans pretty consistently to the right, especially culturally. The "Angry Black Woman" attacks will be relentless, especially if they GOP runs the sewer rat that is Ken Paxton. 

However, it also seems evident that elections are simply not playing out along those lines. If voters in Texas are significantly outraged at Trump, at ICE, at the corruption, at the cost of living, then the candidates themselves might not matter.

In the end, even the election results themselves won't answer this question. The context of every state and every election cycle is different. Let's say Talarico beats Paxton by 5000 votes. Was that because he didn't scare the normies? Was that because Paxton is awful? Was that because Trump is awful? Was that because of 3% inflation? Switch out Talarico for Crockett and the questions are roughly the same.

I do think that Crockett's argument that she will motivate non-voters is pretty weak, simply because this myth of latent progressive voters has been pretty thoroughly debunked. She might be able to ride outrage and disgust but the winning margins are going to come from the Texas suburbs, not some mythical wellspring of people who don't usually care.

Ironically, only one candidate has been able to pull that off has been Donald Trump, but I don't think you can pull off his crudeness, his cruelty, his norm violating, his simmering rage and grievance, his racism, his sexism...and still be a Democrat.

Privilege

 An interesting and slightly odd confluence of columns by Yglesias on DoorDash economics and Krugman on the coddled lives that Trumpists have carved out for themselves at the public's expense. What's the link? The idea of what constitutes comfort and privilege is always changing - both for the general public and individuals.

I've felt this was true, when I look at how unbelievably comfortable life has gotten and yet how unhappy everyone seems to be. The DoorDash thing is a good example. As Yglesias notes, food delivery was formerly restricted to pizza and Chinese food. The idea that you could get a Big Mac or a Starbuck calorie bomb or Lamb Vindaloo delivered to your home in a frictionless transaction is something we couldn't have dreamed of fifteen years ago. As that becomes commonplace (along with Amazon delivering anything you want in a few days) your experience with the world becomes incredibly easy in a way that only the VERY affluent of a couple of decade back would have been able to access. 

As things get easier, our natural hard-wiring about threats and hardships get recalibrated towards whatever the most frustrating or upsetting thing in our lives actually are. 

At this point, you can add in comparison being the thief of joy. As unbelievably coddled as many of us are (historically and globally speaking), we have access to a tiny fraction of the privileges of true wealth. This is where Krugman talks about JD Vance bringing food to Milan. Food.  To Milan.

What he does is link this (and Kash Patel and Kristi Noem's abuse of federal resources) to the "Epstein Class." We rapidly become accustomed to the perks that life offers us, and we become blind to how we got them in the first place. We also become blind to the work that goes into providing them to our every whim. (I don't use DoorDash, because I find it extravagant, but I also know that people rely on working for DoorDash to make ends meet. I'm conflicted.)

With Epstein, we have hundreds of names of prominent people (almost all men) who, at best, looked the other way. Epstein was an extraordinary suck up to rich and powerful men, I would guess especially those rich and powerful men who had a yawning void of insecurity in their core. How many of them actually abused girls? I do hope we find out and hold them accountable. How many of them turned a blind eye to his depravity? I would guess that number is the considerably larger one. 

Pedophilia is a psychological pathology; expecting beautiful girls to fawn all over you is too. Seeing this go on from the corner of your eye and excusing it or denying what your eyes tell you is part of the pathology of privilege. "Epstein is such a great guy, I can't be seeing what I'm seeing" is precisely the mindset of men who have risen to a point where they just don't fucking care about the Little People. (There was an interview with Melinda Gates who attended one of those parties, was creeped out, told her husband and he ignored her concerns.)

As has been said, there are two Epstein scandals. There are the crimes specific to Epstein himself and his cohort like Maxwell. We don't know yet, for sure, who is in that circle. Then there is the second scandal of everyone who saw, who understood, who said nothing. 

Super Bowl Sunday

 As the Team I Hate The Most vies with the Seattle Seahawks for the championship, my miserable, wretched, cursed team decided that they should take one of their most controversial decisions from last year's draft and have it explode in their face. Meanwhile, a co-owner of the Giants is in the Epstein Files, less as a pervert and more as an enabler. 

Even the Olympics are now so riddled with professionals that it saps what used to be so compelling about amateurs competing when anything could happen. 

Meanwhile, my phone keeps telling me I need to get on FanDuels or Kalshi and become a degenerate gambler.

Yeah, He's A Racist

 Yesterday, Trump retweeted an incredibly racist "meme video" of the Lion King that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. (There are no apes in the Lion King.) For those of us not in the cult or not in the Very Serious Media that cannot fathom that Donald Trump (Central Park Five, firing Black dealers at his casino, Birtherism, Charlottesville, yada yada yada) might actually be a seething racist this was hardly a surprise. 

Somewhat surprising was the host of usually sycophantic Republican legislators saying "This is racist, take this down." When a Republican Senator from Mississippi say, "I dunno, but this is pretty racist" then it's a pretty good bet that it's racist.

Also less surprising was the inevitable journey that the White House embarked on when called on this. 

"This video isn't racist. You woke snowflakes in the media can't tell a joke."

"OK, this racist video was actually posted by a staffer who has access to the President's social media accounts at 12:30AM."

Then they ask Trump: "Yeah, I posted it. So what?"

A-plus work everyone. 

This feels similar to the Alex Pretti video where they initially went into attack mode, realized it wasn't playing well AT ALL and then actually seemed to lose support in certain segments of MAGALAND/GOP.

Again, I feel like pointing out that the GOP does not have to actually put up with this shit. When Nixon went off the rails, they cut him loose, because the country and even the party came first. This bloated narcissistic racist piece of shit does, indeed, seem to win elections that he should lose, but this iteration is WAAAAAAY worse that the last time - and getting worse by the day.

They own this fucking guy.

Will It Work?

 Democratic leadership has settled on a set of demands for funding DHS. It is simultaneously ambitious and insufficient in many ways. Personally, I would ban Border Patrol from being anywhere that isn't the border. That will both reduce the gun-slinging cowboy dynamic within cities but also deny DHS a LOT of their foot soldiers.

Still, what Democrats have landed on is pretty popular with the public at large. The most popular reforms are making ICE/BP wear body cameras; independent investigations of ICE shootings; requiring a judicial warrant to enter homes; allowing people to video ICE; banning racial profiling; ban ICE from entering schools and churches; focusing efforts on deporting criminals, not just anyone who looks Brown.

This is where the upside-down nature of American politics in 2026 comes into play. The requested reforms are popular. They really aren't THAT controversial - or wouldn't have been before Trump came on the scene. Yeah, you should have a warrant to enter someone's home. Yeah, we shouldn't have a masked secret police dressed in paramilitary costumes yanking people off the street. 

However, there can be no distance between Republicans and Trump. You cannot defy Dear Leader. Even if Democrats are able to pass these reform bills, there's little chance Trump will actually sign them. Shutting down the government - even just part of the government - has rarely worked to extract concessions from the majority.

Of course, if and when it doesn't work, we will be told it is because Democrats are feckless and won't fight for things. Even as FEMA and TSA close and things get dicey, and Democrats will once again face the fact that closing the government hurts people, they will be expected to cave, because no one expects Republicans to care about people beyond their base. Even though the reforms are very popular, Republicans will simply double down on cruelty in the service of Trump and his hateful legions.