Masks Or Rather Hoods Off

 The decision to end TPS status for Haitians is tightly linked to the increasingly obvious racism of the Trump Administration, especially the imagery they are using. Haitians in this country have been offered the protection from danger that they would face at home, because that used to be what America offered the world. 

Of course, that wasn't always true. In the 1920s, the US - really for the first and only time - deeply restricted immigration. They set quotas designed to dramatically decrease the number of immigrants from "undesirable" places like Italy, Greece and Eastern Europe. Under the apartheid-like delineation of race under "scientific racism" those people were considered different races than more Nordic, Northern European races. 

The engine backing this legislation was the "Second Klan" which drew on anti-Catholic, antisemitic and anti-Black prejudices to become briefly very powerful across the nation, not just in the South. Donald Trump's father was arrested at a Second Klan rally in NYC.

The dynamic seems to be this: Trump is losing his juice. He's unpopular across broad swaths of the public. His supporters are upset with him. He has backed himself into a losing war with Iran and a stupid trade war with Canada. The alarm bells are going off among Congressional Republicans, as a Blue Wave seems to be building across America. Democrats are slightly favored to win statewide races in places like Texas, Iowa and Alaska.

In response, all he has left is the racism that exists deep within his DNA (The Central Park Five anyone?) and to unleash the foulest creatures in his administration. Just as the Adults In The Room, who prevented him from disastrous and illegal policies in his first term, are gone, they have been replaced with just the absolute dregs of society: racists, Nazis, and an army of trolls and sycophants.

Look, this November shouldn't be close. Democrats should win in places like Kansas and Kentucky if the American people had a shred of sense and decency about them. Trump isn't telling you who is, he's screaming it. If we don't course correct, that's the end of America as we know it.

The Wrong 80 Year Old

 Dolly Parton's death rather unexpectedly floored me. I was not a huge fan of her music, but enjoyed it. Rather I was a massive fan of Parton the human being. As many have noted, Parton was perhaps the last universally loved American. She was authentic and authentically kind. Her charity work is legendary and her sense of humor sublime. She was the best of us.

That obviously stands in rank contrast with the man who is trying to tear down the country in, as Krugman suggests, a rage against a people that have moved against him. Trump's depredations are increasing precisely because he can read the polls. His threat to tear down the Kennedy Center, because the Courts won't let him put his name on it is a prime example of his narcissistic rage in action.

This is also the "logic" of a domestic abuser: if he can't have you, no one can. He would destroy the country rather than let it pass into someone's hands. Trump's tidal wave of bullshit swept him back into the Oval Office, but he never had a plan or even really a motivation to actually improve people's lives. He never has. He ran for president to stay out of jail and millions of Americans were stupid enough to believe him over the legion of people who told them - straight out - who he was. 

There are two big, huge, massive differences between Hitler and Trump. The first, obviously, is age. Hitler's death was...sudden. Trump, however, is old and looking older every day. The second difference is that Hitler was popular. His early actions and even his actions in the first half of the war were designed to shield the German people from his worst policies. He pulled Germany out of an economic spiral - he did not start one. Right now, Trump is manifestly unpopular with the American people and becoming more so. He's lost the Iran war, which people didn't want him to fight in the first place. 

He's not Hitler, he's Mussolini but with a more powerful country at his feet. 

We are a lesser country and a lesser world with Dolly Parton gone. Her goodness and decency, her ability to laugh at herself, her grace and even her tackiness were all so wonderful and the world is dimmer without her around. Do better next time, Reaper.

Immigration

 Krugman has a wonky post where he points out that job growth has stalled and it's almost certainly a byproduct of Trump and Stephen Miller's pogroms against immigrants. I've been reading a book about national power by Phillip Payson O'Brien about national power, and he does a lot of recounting about how the world power dynamic shifted over the course of really the last 140 years. One thing he notes, is how the United States surpassed the United Kingdom, but did so in a way that the UK and US both found a way to live with.  The UK responded less enthusiastically to Germany's rise, for instance.

Anyway, the story of the last 140 years is the emergence of the United States as possibly the most powerful country in history. A lot of that is economic, and a lot of that economic vitality comes from immigration. 

I think about a country like Ukraine and how they will need to replenish their population and child bearing numbers are unlikely to meet those needs. Immigration would do the trick, but I doubt Ukrainians are different from other European countries in their disregard for immigrants. If you're from Nigeria and you want to better your prospects in life, Europe would be a natural destination, except Europeans are pretty hostile to immigrants (unless they play for their national soccer teams).

The real question is whether immigrants will want to return to the US after Trump is gone. You see a lot of rhetoric about how this or that aspect of America has been "destroyed" by Trump. I tend not to think in terms of binaries in a lot of those examples. The Department of Justice has been degraded beyond Nixon's wildest dreams, but has it been "destroyed"? Will we be able to inspire young lawyers to join the post-Trump DOJ to clean up America?

With immigrants, we clearly need a better process - especially surrounding asylum - and the law proposed in 2024 (that Trump killed) would have been a great place to start. The question will be whether we fix immigration and immigrants decide maybe they don't want to come to a place that might elect another Trump.

Pawns

 One of Trump's defining character traits is a complete lack of empathy to the point of sociopathy. He cannot see other people except as they exist to be utilized by him. 

His recent comments about the conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln can be filed in the massive folder "Things That Would End Any Other Politician's Career." He has trapped himself within his ignorance surrounding the Iran War, but while he's "suffering" from cratering approval ratings, the sailors floating off the coast of Iran are truly suffering. Soldiers based in the Middle East are dying and being wounded by Iranian attacks. For Trump, though, their suffering is irrelevant. He needs a way to declare victory over Iran and if the troops suffer, well, they're just "suckers" anyway for volunteering.

Just a hateful human being, and I use the term human being loosely.

It should also be said that sailors and soldiers will endure a lot. If the mission is broadly legitimate. This one is not, and that has to weigh on the service members.

Presumption of Regularity

 In her recounting of the dismissal of charges against David Hearn, Richardson points out that judges are starting to deny "presumption of regularity" to Department of Justice lawyers. Basically, judges assume that DOJ lawyers aren't lying or otherwise being sketchy (like hiding evidence from a grand jury. Presumption of regularity is based on centuries, really, of precedent that the government is not captured by a patrimonial strongman bent on destroying American democracy to sate the void in his soul. Certainly there have always been DOJ lawyers who fucked around with this principle, but the presumption requires this to be treated as an act of individual malfeasance. Judges are now saying that this is policy.

Joe Biden made two huge mistakes as president. The first, obviously, was deciding to run again at an advanced age with a speech impediment that was getting worse. He simply could not communicate well on a daily basis.

The second was Merrill Garland.

Garland was a judge, not a prosecutor. He had been denied a seat on the Supreme Court by Mitch McConnell (is he dead yet?), and that moment was really a watershed moment in Republican fuckery. Holding a Supreme Court seat open for a full year in order to gamble on a Republican winning the next election was a huge violation of "norms." Garland was supposed to reestablish the professional neutrality of the Justice Department, but in the process  delayed in prosecuting Trump for his many crimes. One has to think that Trump actually being in jail in the winter of 2024 might have made a difference. But "norms" man.

Making Garland Attorney General was not just a consolation prize, it was an effort by Biden and Democrats to reestablish those norms like regularity. Democrats have the burden of defending flawed but critically important institutions in the face of an historical moment when people are strongly anti-institutional. For instance, the Food and Drug Administration can be painfully slow in approving new treatments. However, RFK, Jr deciding that vitamins can cure measles is not a step in correcting this.

There has been talk in some quarters about the need for a Democratic Project 2029. Given the unpopularity of Project 2025, I'm not sure I see the point. However, there are some topics that Democrats need to coalesce around. Some are easy: kill the tariffs, restore America's alliances, raise taxes on the wealthy, undo the GOP's attacks on healthcare, end environmental degradation and his incessant building of monuments to himself. 

When it comes to norms in the Justice Department, this gets trickier. You absolutely need an impartial, professional DOJ. You also need to have real, tangible accountability for the orgy of corruption under Trump. 

Threading that needle - the creation of an independent commission, perhaps - will be an important part of restoring the presumption of regularity, by not engaging in the Garland-style caution about norms and prosecuting those leaving office.

UPDATE: And just on cue, the Republican holdouts against Todd Blanche as Attorney General have caved, because of course they did.

A True Reflection

 Richardson recaps the saga of the Trump reflecting pool fiasco and the indictment and then retreat from that indictment of David Hearn, the former Olympian who was arrested for vandalism for touching the algae mucked water in the reflecting pool.

I think this is an interesting angle on the question from yesterday: Is Trump suffering from dementia? As I wrote, Trump is of mediocre or below average intelligence; he has never been interested in the discomfort of educating himself; he is now surrounded by a host of sycophants who feed his delusions. This case is a great example of Trump making a stupid claim to assuage his ego and then having the machinery of the Federal government have to support that stupid claim.

For all the very real failure of Congress to act as a co-equal branch of government and the corrupt enabling of Trump by the Supreme Court, the courts - in general - have held. Especially when it comes to the many, many lies that Trump says, the Courts require proof and he has none. This exposes his "legal" team when they have to defend these lies. 

Trump is a malignant narcissist, and as such is psychologically incapable of admitting when he has been defeated. Whether in court, in the Persian Gulf or in an election, Trump cannot lose. It's simply impossible for him to admit this. 

So we get the spectacle of this farcical arrest, the quagmire in the Straits of Hormuz and January 6th. And millions of Americans felt this fucking guy deserved to be returned to the White House.

Bliss...Until It Isn't

 One of the nice things about the trip we were on was that I didn't feel compelled to read my writers every day. I didn't need to process all the hot takes and sage musings that I usually do. Driving through the Colorado high country, I could just take it all in and enjoy the company of friends and family.

It strikes me that this is how most Americans live and it must be nice. Sure, there are times when things seem really bad, and you don't have the cognitive architecture to process and understand it, but most of the time, a certain amount of ignorance really is blissful.

I did peek in on Krugman's shorter pieces, and it was interesting the theme of the past week has been just how damaging ignorance can be when it typifies the people in charge of government. Two examples that Krugman cites are the willful ignorance (or more like obstinate refusal to acknowledge facts) around climate change and the lying ignorance around the Iran war. 

Of course, you can't have any of this without the signature fact of the age: Donald Trump is a deeply stupid and damaged man. He has then surrounded himself with other deeply stupid people and smart people who make themselves stupid to twist themselves into courtiers to sate the omnivorous ego of this awful fucking man. 

The bizarre spectacle of the Fauci obsession is another brick in this towering edifice of stupidity. Anthony Fauci - and really the whole communicable disease community - were groping in the dark in the early days of Covid. They erred on the side of caution, but the stupidity and lack of leadership of Donald Trump and the fever swamps of right wing and woo woo conspiracy sites made Covid something it wasn't. "It's just the flu." 

In the end, over a million Americans died earlier than they otherwise would have because of Covid. If things like masking where taken seriously, that number would be lower. If people took the vaccine, that number would be lower. America had one of the worst records during Covid, because we were led by deeply stupid people in the early days of the pandemic, and because right wingers politicized it. 

People will point to the closing of schools as being a mistake, because kids rarely died from Covid (How many dead kids would have been too many?). This neglects that teachers - many of them older - were also part of school communities. 

All Fauci did was try and save lives. His caution and the desperate need for Covid to be a "lab leak" made him out to be a villain. Six years later, he's being dragged before Rand Paul because RFK, Jr. searched every file to find his personal diary - a diary that does nothing to discredit his decision making. 

One of the conversations we had in Colorado was with an old friend who works in the tech sector. He said he read a definition of intelligence that was basically: the ability to make predictions. I have been thinking about intelligence as a concept, and I came up with four different levels of intelligence.

The first is "Training" or simply the ability to be trained. A dog can be house trained, and a kid can be trained in spelling. The second is "Knowledge." This is the ability to recall information. Again, a dog can remember where her favorite plushie toy is, and a kid can remember the French word for toy. The third level is - with a nod to my friend - "Prediction" or "Analysis". Can you use knowledge and your mental training to predict things or draw meaningful connections? The final level is "Wisdom". Do you know the true value of things - not its price, its value?

When I think about the Trumpist movement - extending beyond Trump himself to his whole movement - I can see some Training, but when it comes to Knowledge they are so warped in what they "know" because they just don't want to understand the complexity of the world. They don't value complexity. 

This is how you get the Iran War. This is how you get inflationary tariffs. This is how you get a tariff on Canada for not raking their forests. 

The root of populism is that any person is as good as any other person and therefore rule by elites - especially cognitive elites or experts - is disdained in favor of putting loyalists into positions of authority and even in the implementation of policy.

It's stupid and it's degrading this country a little bit every single day. 

Fever In The Heartland

 The other day, I finished Timothy Egan's book A Fever in the Heartland about the rise and fall of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Interestingly, I can remember a student paper from many years ago that tackled this same subject. In the '20s, the Klan was reinvented from a specifically Southern terror group aimed at unraveling Reconstruction to a national group simmering in the resentments of small town Protestant outrage over a changing America. They lashed out beyond their traditional hatred of Black political and economic autonomy, but also immigrants, cities, modernity and religions they felt were un-American.

Sound familiar?

Coming out of World War I and the Influenza pandemic of 1920 and centered in the struggling farm economy of the '20s, the resentment towards the new urban power was broadly held - especially in states without a center of gravity in the new industrial urban landscape. Places like Indiana, but also Colorado and Oregon, were natural centers of the new Invisible Empire.

Egan's book centers on D.C. Stephenson, a charismatic con artist and drifter, estranged from his family and harboring a deep need for sexual dominance. As he built up a massive empire, he took his cut from membership dues and bilked the rubes for their dollars. He was also a serial rapist.

Again, sound familar?

In the end, Stephenson - despite controlling the Klan that controlled Indiana - was put on trial for the rape and murder of a young woman. Even as the jury deliberated on his guilt the Klan slate of candidates won victories in the November election. However, shortly after the election, Stephenson was found guilty of second degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He expected a pardon from his creature in the governor's mansion, and when it didn't come, he exposed all the corruption that he had participated in with the elected officials who abandoned him. This caused a collapse in the Klan in the North. It would briefly resurrect itself again in opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, but it would never again reach the heights it had in the 1920s.

Reading the book, it was impossible not to see the parallels to our own age. For instance, the widespread prevalence of sexual predators in the MAGA-sphere precisely mirrors the sexual violence in the Klan, which extended beyond Stephenson. The nurturing of resentments to create a climate of hatred is the classic "Populist" playbook, and it was not unique to the '20s Klan, but I think the more interesting question is not "Is the Klan's spiritual successor MAGA?" because it clearly is. The question is: If we finally get a full airing of Trump's sexual crimes - especially as it relates to Epstein - will that be enough to break the grip of this particular fever?

Fascism

 During Trump's first term, I tried very hard to avoid using the term "fascist" to describe his presidency. I felt that he was a patrimonial authoritarian, and to a certain degree, I still hold that belief. Trump believes that the state should exist as an extension of his will and as a means to his personal enrichment. The state should reflect glory and power onto him. I also felt that many of the creatures around him are, in fact, fascist.

At this point - as Richardson so capably catalogs - any plausible argument that Trump is not a fascist has evaporated. The change might be because he's been marinating the increasingly crazed world of people like Stephen Miller and the echo chamber of Fox News. Trump has always denigrated his enemies, but now he's dehumanizing them, and that is the first step on a very, very dark journey. 

His unhinged speech last night and the eager willingness of Markwayne Mullin to threaten to illegal imprison state election officials gives us a pretty clear picture of where things are headed. Republicans must be getting slaughtered in their internal polling, because they aren't even making a case to win elections fair and square. I think they hoped that their gerrymandering would prevent a Blue Wave, but that plan seems to be unravelling on them.

I honestly don't know how successful they can be in finally destroying American democratic governance, but I do know that if Democrats don't win control of at least one, but preferably both chambers of Congress, we are mightily fucked. 

Living Within A Narcissistic Wound

 I didn't watch Obama's speeches; I sure as hell wasn't going to watch President Sundown scream and slur his way through a tired list of grievances. It is of course dangerous that in order to be nominated for any position, including Director of National Intelligence, you have to be willing to coddle the fragile ego of the world's oldest man-baby.

We have to consider the following:

- Trump was a spoiled little shit, who likely struggled with undiagnosed learning disabilities. We know he really doesn't read anything, and he was shipped off to New York Military Academy, which was effectively a reform school.
- Trump spent a LOT of time trying and failing to live up to his more intelligent brother in the eyes of his distant and harsh parents.
- Trump subsequently spent decades in real estate and marketing. He went bankrupt numerous times. He became tabloid fodder and the particular target of Spy magazine back when it was a thing.
- Trump was able to resuscitate his exhausted status via reality TV. This created a false image of the sort of business acumen that he never really possessed.
- Trump then rode misogyny into a fluke 2016 electoral win that endeared him to millions and created a cult of personality around him. 
- Trump - who has struggled his whole life with the gap between his image of himself and his actual accomplishments - now has a coterie of minions and a legion of cultish fans. His omnivorous id is now consuming every scrap of praise and gnawing on every criticism and slight. 

Anyway, we are screwed as long as the Worst Person in American History is effectively in charge of all three branches of the US government.

Institutional Serial Killer

 According to Richardson's research, ICE is responsible for killing 10 people on the streets of America. In ICE run detention centers - outside of the public eye - another 21 people have died this year.

The tactical decision to throw the outright Nazi, Greg Bovino, out the door has reduced the rhetorical temperature and some of the more egregious public displays of force in American cities. This has not meant a change in culture within Trump's Brown Shirts. They can't help but feel that they are immune to public accountability, as the killers of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are still shielded from the consequences of their actions.

The killing yesterday of Juan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine is a sadly typical extrajudicial killing for ICE. They targeted the wrong person based on appearance - a Kavanaugh Stop - and then got trigger happy. Guerrero was shot in the head in front of his 3 year old daughter. Guerrero is legally able to work in the US, but for the Nazis like Stephen Miller, it is not his legal status but his skin color that makes him a target. His crime was not crossing a line on a map without paperwork, but being brown skinned.

It is worth noting that this happened in Maine. Susan Collins will not have the luxury of facing a rapist with a Nazi tattoo. Maine Democrats will select a replacement soon, but Collins will have to go before the voters of Maine and explain her support for an organization that has killed 31 people in about six months. 

According to the Gestapo's own statistics, there have been 9 killings (including manslaughter) by undocumented aliens so far this year. From 2023-25, the number ranged from 23 to 29. That means ICE is responsible for more deaths than the so-called "dangerous aliens" that they have purportedly mobilized against. At this pace, they will extinguish the lives of about 60 human beings, which is an par with the worst surge of violence committed by undocumented people during the crisis of 2021-2.

ICE is often compared to a criminal gang, but I also think they are like an institutional serial killer. They operate across geographic distance to dilute their crimes, they prey on a certain ethnic group, they escape accountability for far too long.

We are governed by psychopaths. 

Slaughtered

 Richardson notes one of the myriad scandals that flies under the radar in the never ending onslaught on professional governance wrought not just by Trump but by Republicans. The Slaughter decision seems to give the President the ability to fire the heads of independent commissions created by Congress. This was an egregiously terrible decision in the way so many decisions - Citizens United, Rufo, Shelby, Trump - have been. It's a wholesale attack on the capacity of the government to produce neutral public goods and competent administration. For the Federalist hacks on the SCOTUS, poor government performance is a feature, not a bug. The worse the government performs, the more it justifies the anti-government, pro-business positions that are what truly motivated the Federalist Six. This makes a 2008 style crash far more likely.

So far, the lower courts are protecting the independence of our elections, but this is why the outcome in November is so critical. Two more years of unfettered Trumpist attacks on the fabric of civil governance and there might not be a government left to save. 

The good news is that the pissy little drama queen watched the Housing Bill become law at midnight last night without his signature. The subsequent problem is that some elements of the bill will have to be put into effect by his cronies and grifters, blunting the ability of the law to actually help ease the housing crunch.

Josh Marshall is correct when he has been arguing that Court reform has to be at the top of the list of any incoming Democratic trifecta.

The Post-US World

 Richardson does her usual brilliant round up of the day's atrocities, which is usually most damning when it just quotes Trump verbatim. In this case, there is the embarrassing performance of Trump at the NATO summit in Ankara.

Krugman provides a bit more analysis. Trump went in and started doing his usual blustering bullshit, including resurrecting his Greenland nonsense. What was significant is that it seems that NATO heads of government mostly just ignored the senile old fool. As Krugman argues, this is because what Trump has done is expose every possible weakness in America's place in the world.

We are measurably weaker than we were on January 19th, 2025.

His tariffs have not worked to do anything but weaken our economy by driving up prices. Europe is de-Americanizing its economy, working to decouple from their crazy cousins in Washington. The debacle in Iran - now starting up again - has demonstrated his fecklessness and the failure of defense planners to recognize the new contours of 21st century warfare. He has abandoned the commitment to defend democracy in Ukraine. His constant antagonism has led countries to begin to move away from a dependence on US financial institutions. 

Richardson points to a quote from Robert Kagan:

In January, Robert Kagan warned that Trump’s destruction of the order that has underpinned global security for the past 80 years was creating the most dangerous world since World War II. With the end of open access to global resources, markets, and strategic bases and without reliable friends or allies, the U.S. will need more military spending than ever.

“Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future,” Kagan warned. They are accustomed to the “basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world” and have come to think it is “the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.”

Everything will be up for grabs, Kagan wrote, with myriad “flash points for potential conflict.” “If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive,” Kagan wrote, “wait until they start paying for what comes next.”

"There is a lot of ruin in a nation." We will find out just how much.

Republicans Can't Govern

 Martin Longman looks at Trump's demand that his lickspittles in Congress pass a third reconciliation bill. He notes that one issue is that the last bill defunded Planned Parenthood, but that ban has just expired. There aren't the votes in an election year that is already shaping up as a bad one for Republicans to take on a bunch of unpopular votes. 

Longman notes

This is something people on the left are familiar with. The base is angry that the Republican leadership didn’t do something they didn’t have the votes to accomplish and feels demoralized because its representatives won’t fight with every tool in the box, even if those tools won’t work.

That's a pretty cogent analysis of the state of politics in America. For years, I've noted that Republicans can't govern, they can only rule. They cannot govern, because governing involves legislating, and their caucus is fucking insane. I certainly hope that some of the loopier DSA candidates who are going to enter the House this fall won't fall into the same batshit dynamic of demanding that their every whim is made into law and if it isn't, it must be corruption. 

Still, this isn't a bothsides moment. Biden was not as historically great a president as some have decided to make him out to be in their anger at the processes and his own decline depriving them of a victory in 2024. Still, Biden was exceptionally effective at getting legislation passed. There were enough Republicans in Congress still willing to legislate that important bills made it through. The tragic counterexample was when they had a really decent bipartisan immigration bill, and Trump killed it. 

That's the ballgame, when it comes to the current GOP and their inability to govern. They are now - even more than then - the Party of Trump and legislating, a process that involves compromise, good faith and trust, is anathema to him and the creatures that surround him.

This system of compromise and working together was why the Framers established checks and balance, separation of powers. No one person, no one faction was intended to rule this country. We would have to come together to govern it. To self-govern it. 

One of the many ways that Republicans have lost the plot.

Capture The Flag

 Yglesias writes about how tawdry it is to have the 250th anniversary of independence tarnished by a man who has no conception of what actually made America great. Take Trump's assault on birth rite citizenship. That's not a policy debate about contours of immigration policy, it's an attack on a fundamentally American Idea: America is not a single people, it's an aspirational idea.

Trump has defiled so many basic ideas - about democracy, self-government, the rule of law, America's role in a dangerous world, that "all men are created equal" - that it's totally understandable to feel robbed of the opportunity to celebrate this great and flawed nation.

I guess I disagree. I think the celebration of the Declaration of Independence is more vital this year than if Harris had won and Trump was languishing in a prison cell. 

Of all the many ways that Trump has disgraced his office and our country, none are as profound than his assault on democracy itself. Before becoming President in 2017, Trump had never taken the oath of office - either as a soldier or public official - the first person ever to assume the office without first serving the country in some other way. In fact, Trump never even had to answer to a Board of Directors for most of his career. The idea of checks and balances is as foreign to him as the Nepalese language is. The recent string of Supreme Court cases have served to largely inoculate Trump from Congressional oversight or criminal consequences. 

What's more, Trump's cultists are not the sort of people who think in abstract, ideological terms. Democracy or the rule of law in the abstract are not as important as a "businessman who gets things done." When Trump promised to "be a dictator on Day One" that was a selling point for MAGA.

It is at this historical moment that we need to revivify the language and purpose of the Declaration. "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed" isn't as famous as "all men are created equal" but it's equally powerful and important as a hallmark of American political identity. 

I get why you might not feel like waving the flag this 4th of July. What you cannot do is cede the flag to a man whose every utterance is either an attack on America's founding principles or a verbal attack on America itself. How many times does Trump talk about how awful America is? He cannot go a day without denigrating some aspect of this country in ways that no other American president would even dream of doing. 

Do not let this creature destroy your love of what actually makes America great: the ability of the people to control their political destiny; the ability to create a "more perfect union" rather than accept the current limitations; the very real opportunity that this land and people have offered millions of immigrants to build a new and better life. 

If you let the shortcoming of this country define it for you - as quite a few leftist commentators tend to do - then you are basically doing the same thing Trump does: "We're no angels."

This country is far, far from perfect - no country is. But what is good about it is worth fighting for.

The Lawless Court

 Yesterday's SCOTUS decision in the Slaughter case is another example of the Corrupt Six on the Court just absolutely Calvinballing the Constitution. It overrules a century's worth of precedent and concentrates power in the hands of Trump that shouldn't be given to an angel, much less the most corrupt, authoritarian demagogue ever to pollute the office.

It goes without saying that if we get a Democratic President in 2029, the Court will not extend the same powers to that person for reasons. 

UPDATE: OK, so the Court "preserved" the clear reading of the XIVth Amendment on birthright citizenship, but only 6-3. It should have been 9-0. Again, one of the weirder aspect of this illegitimate Court is that it is the Bush appointees (both Thomas and Alito were appointed by different Bushes) that are the most egregious peddlers of ad hoc legal bullshit.

The Court also continues to gut any campaign finance laws. Among the many things Democrats will need to contend with is the flood of money that warps our politics, especially with the rise of a new class of billionaires typified by Elon Musk.

Civic Education

 In his mailbag, Yglesias talks about "stealth democracy."

Stealth democracy is a theory that people have this idea that all that is required to solve a problem is for people of goodwill to sit down and hash out their disagreements like colleagues do. They see "corruption" as any action by a government that does not really benefit them. Sure, they can see things like Trump's desecration of the White House and DC in general as being "corrupt" for THAT reason, when the real reason is that he is accruing money to himself and his family and acting outside the cover of law. 

This misconception about "corruption" is really interesting. 

The elections in NYC are the flavor of the minute, and the factionalism expressed there is not an advantage for the Democratic Party in November. Adults - or at least people who really understand our politics and history - understand that you need a Big Tent to win elections, and what resonates in the congressional district around Columbia University does not resonate 25 miles to the north. Still, elements of the Left - and I do not really include Mamdani here - think that if a Democrat representing suburban Yonkers has a difference of opinion on, say, Israel, that isn't a difference of opinion. It's "corruption." They are corrupted by AIPAC.

(I need to take a moment and express my exasperation with the primacy of the Israeli-Palestine issue in Leftist politics at the moment. I fully support the idea that Israel has and continues to commit war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank; I do not think it is genocide, but I understand the arguments that it is. I fully support conditioning American military aid to Israel on the ousting of Netanyahu from power and Israel re-committing to a two-state solution. What I do NOT agree with, is that this is the most important issue facing this country. It is not in the top-10. Ultimately, much of the Israel-Palestine discourse feels performative, and that's just exhausting and not a path to winning control of Congress this fall. <end rant>"

Back to the issue at hand. So much of our politics - from MAGA to the DSA - seems fixated on a version of politics that is simply false. Yes, there is corruption, and Trump is so far and away our most corrupt president, that second place isn't even in the same league. You'd have to run through about 20 Trump scandals before landing on a previous scandal of similar depth. Most of those did not involve the direct participation of the president himself. Only Watergate rises to that level, maybe Iran-Contra. 

So, Trump is legit corrupt. When members of Congress disagree with each other, THAT IS NOT CORRUPTION. 

We've reached this perilous moment, because our parties are more ideological than perhaps they have ever been, and Trump adds breathless stupidity to the mix. The left of the Republican Party does not overlap with the right of the Democratic Party in any meaningful way. When they actually DO accomplish something, like Chris Murphy and James Lankford coming together to fix the immigration system, it gets blown up by Trump. The same thing could be happening with the bipartisan housing bill, but I think that has the votes to override Trump's veto. 

You've had this sort of venomous partisan discord since the '90s, but at least some of it was performative. That's the old "Senate Club" idea, where they yell at each other on CNN and then go have dinner together. Trump, because he has no saving graces or subtlety of thought, has turned that into a politics of grievance that has truly broken Congress and perhaps American democracy. Election denialism is really an offshoot of this. Democrats cannot legitimately win an election is not a position Newt Gingrich or Tom Delay would have entertained.

All of this is to say, we have to find a way out of this moment. 

People do not seem to understand the basics of how democratic governance and politics actually work. Hey, sometimes you lose an election! That's not corruption! Sometimes a good bill dies for bad reasons. That's not corruption! Sometimes there really aren't easy solutions to problems! That's not corruption! 

I've argued that we live in a consumer culture where we really don't have to compromise. You never have to go to Blockbuster only to find out the movie you wanted is checked out and then you have to compromise on whether to watch the rom-com or the action-buddy movie. You just click and stream. 

We've made much of our society frictionless and that simply isn't how politics works. Our whole system is based on friction! That's the point of the separation of powers. 

Instead, both the median voter AND the voters at the extremes simply decry the whole thing as "corrupt" because they can't get what they want all the time. 

That allows a demagogic troll to eviscerate our national institutions, just in time for the 250th anniversary of republican self-government. 

UPDATE: Slightly different take on the same issue of "corruption" from Martin Longman.

UPDATE II: Yet another take on the rise of "dirtbagism."

Peace Likely Won't Help Trump

 The surrender to Iran has largely been understood as Trump desperately needing to turn things around before the midterms. He needs the oil to flow again and bring prices down. As Krugman explains, though, that's unlikely to happen for a lot of reasons. Among them are the fact that even if the war was really over - and the ceasefire keeps collapsing because Trump keeps threatening Iran - it would take weeks and months to restore the flow of oil, urea and other goods through the Strait. We would also have to replenish reserve stockpiles that we have been drawing down to reduce the impact of the loss of the Gulf oil on world markets. Finally, there are baked in inflationary effects from this war that we really haven't seen yet, but almost certainly will.

So, Trump seems to be flailing around. You have weathervanes like Tucker Carlson blowing away from Trump. Leaving aside whatever pathologies are surrounding Trump psychologically and neurologically, he is facing collapsing poll numbers and rumblings among his base that portend even more ominous signs. The MOU is simply another sign of this flailing. His desperation for a favorable peace deal is more palpable than the load in his Depends, and Iran knows it.

There are a host of things going wrong, all of which create a gestalt of incompetence and corruption. While I think a lot of what Yglesias writes about politics is suspect, he's right about persuadable voters. This is really just another way to describe the Ariana Grande Voter Theory, and we have to acknowledge that partisanship has left American democracy at the whims of people who do not understand American democracy. 

This should redound to Democrats' favor in November, because things aren't great now and are going to stay bad. Trump can't help but make some of these things worse - the Reflecting Pool is a good example of how he simply cannot admit a mistake - and so the question for the midterms is pretty simple.

Democrats will turn out. They are motivated. Even if many of them have qualms about the party, they are going to show up. They will hold their noses and vote for people like Graham Platner. The questions are about what will happen to Republican turnout? And where will the feckless middle land? If a lot of Republicans just sit out the midterms, that's important. If angry Ariana Grande voters show up to vote for Democrats, that's important. 

We need both Houses to really correct things. I don't think surrendering to Iran is going to help Trump prevent that.

UPDATE: We are in the midst of a market correction. That seems an especially likely outcome over time. The stock market seems disconnected from the world at large. 

When we have market crashes, typically we get some foreshadowing in the spring and the real collapse in the fall. Is this foreshadowing or just a small correction?

Can America Lead Again?

 This thread is an interesting one, where Bret Devereaux makes the case that future democratic leaders around the world will, in fact, be eager to make friends with a post-Trumpist United States. I think it's broadly true on the merits. The US remains an impressive country. The gleeful reactions of international visitors to the World Cup is a helpful reminder that Americans - if not their government - retain a lot of goodwill, because Americans are generally nice and welcoming and generous. 

I think that the malignant forces that launched Trump into a position of power are not unique to the United States. Britain is losing another Prime Minister to what is fundamentally the dysfunction created to British government by Brexit. 

Brexit preceded Trump and was a herald of the anti-globalization, anti-international movement that benefits backwards powers like Russia. Fears of immigrants and the loss of status of "native" whites is a common thread running through British and American politics since 2016. This anti-integrationist populism was roundly defeated in Hungary recently, but only after two decades of non-democratic corruption and cruelty. 

We need to get past this faster than that.

As Trump's ridiculous tariffs and his defeat in Iran have shown, even the a superpower can be defeated if it's left isolated. Trump isolates America further and further every day. His beef with Georgia Meloni is great example of his crass belligerence undermining what SHOULD have been a productive relationship with another right wing populist. The idiot just can't help himself as he tries to protect his whiny assed fragile ego.

Meanwhile, Vance is being humiliated at peace talks, because Trump continues to undercut him and give him jobs that would be difficult in the best of circumstances, not counting for the fact that ANY agreement with the US while Trump is president is effectively useless. 

America will shamble along, a concussed giant stumbling across the world stage, until Trump finally dies or leaves power.  When that happens, I do believe that the world will be wary of the post-Trump US, but not hostile. 

We need each other. That's what Trump and Brexiteers don't understand.

Gordon Wood

 Gordon Wood died yesterday at the age of 92, amazingly struck down by a car and not his advanced age. Wood was one of the finest living historians of US History and certainly the Dean of Historians when it came to the American Revolution. Himself a student of Bernard Bailyn, Wood argued for the essential revolutionary nature of the American Revolution. He stood against some - and I occasionally include myself - that argued that it was more a War of Independence than a true "revolution," especially if compared against the French or Russian Revolutions. In this telling, the Civil War and Reconstruction Era is much more of a revolution than replacing the monarchy with a representative government.

But of course, establishing a Republic - over so large an area no less - was a revolutionary act. It was fraught with pitfalls and dangers that the generation that framed the Constitutions was very much aware of. 

None more so than James Madison.

It was Madison who spent years thinking about how to preserve liberty and self-government. Today, we think of them as being reinforcing, but it was understood at the time that self-government tended to degenerate to anarchy, which led to the rise of a dictator. As Madison wrote in the Federalist: 

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

This framework is at the heart of our long practice in representative government, of combining democracy and republicanism to create something truly new over 235 years ago when the Constitution was written. 

As Richardson notes at the link above, Madison was also the author of the Bill of Rights. Initially reluctant, he came to see how writing down fundamental rights was part of the needed constraints on those who governed, especially the desire of those who - once in power - might wish to restrict the freedom of the press to blunt criticism of themselves, or perhaps ban public assemblies and petitions to the same purpose. 

It also extended to the free practice of religion, which had been pioneered by Roger Williams of Rhode Island in the 17th century, but then picked up by Virginians like Madison and Thomas Jefferson. If a government could dictate religious belief and practice, what couldn't they dictate? The free exercise of conscience preceded all other rights.

As we begin to mark the commemoration of the Declaration of Independence, we can see these "inalienable rights" under assault from a cabal of wicked people who surround a fundamentally ignorant and weak bully who would destroy those very rights that the Revolution was fought over. Pete Hegseth wants to tell servicemember how to worship. Various creatures wish to destroy the free press and outlaw protests. This is not hyperbole. 

Wood's death - just a few weeks before the 250th anniversary of the declaration of universal, inalienable rights - should help us reflect on how those rights which were so revolutionary 250 years ago are not self-enforcing. Wood reminded us that we are heirs to a revolutionary tradition, and at the heart of the revolution was the belief that government must belong to the governed.