politics – Page 2

Bangs and Whimpers

Published on May 11, 2025May 22, 2025 by thekingsnecktie2 Comments

Ever since the earliest days of the second Trump administration, I’ve been telling people that I couldn’t get my head around where we’ll be in three months, or six months, or a year, let alone four years. Given the lightning pace at which Trump & Co. are rolling out a right wing police state (a blitzkrieg, some might call it), and the GOP’s shocking lack of concern for any kind of blowback from that endeavor, I just couldn’t fathom what things will look like down the road, short of the most dystopian scenario.

But now I’m beginning to think I can, and while it’s not quite at full Atwoodian level, it’s still incredibly depressing.

For so long I have been among those wondering when the moment will come when Don does something so egregious that America finally rouses itself in recognition that homegrown fascism has arrived in our shores—wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross, or wearing Trump brand sneakers and selling a meme coin, or what have you—and rises up in righteous democratic anger against it. But now I’m beginning to think that this expectation is much like the futile wait for the moment when, at long last, Republicans themselves turn on Trump, which we’ve been fruitlessly awaiting for almost a decade. In other words: it ain’t ever coming.

After all, he has already had people he dislikes kidnapped and disappeared into foreign gulags, already defied the Supreme Court, already eviscerated the federal government, already suggested suspending habeas corpus and said he’s considering a third term, to name just a from the first hundred days. What more do you want?

In short, I’m beginning to fear that autocracy—or whatever you want to call it (more on that in a moment)—is descending on us with nary a ripple of recognition or significant opposition from the body politic, if in fact it has not already done so. I’m not the only one who’s worried about that, of course. And luckily, some of those people have ideas how to counteract it.

BUDAPEST ON THE POTOMAC

In a piece for The New Yorker called “What It’s Like to Live Under Autocracy,” Andrew Marantz describes life in contemporary Hungary, the country whose “illiberal democracy” (sometimes called “competitive authoritarianism”) has turned so many American conservatives and Fox News personalities into slobbering fanboys for its strongman Viktor Orbán. Not coincidentally, it is also the country that credentialed, sober critics of Trumpism most often cite as a model for where we might be headed.

What Marantz describes in Hungary is a country where the ruling government has unchallenged de facto (if not de jure) one-party rule, along with control of the electoral process, the courts, the media, the universities, and every other important public institution, but still maintains a laughable façade of democracy. That, as we know, is the new paradigm for political oppression worldwide. Quoting the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, Marantz writes:

“Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world,” Levitsky and Ziblatt write. “Democracies still die, but by different means.” Some of this may happen under cover of darkness, but much of it happens in the open, under cover of arcane technocracy or boring bureaucracy. “Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts,” the authors write. “They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy.”

Yet Hungary is also a place where much of the citizenry goes on as before, accepting the oppressive rules of the Orbán regime in exchange for some semblance of the life that existed under its more democratic predecessor. The reason they do that is that, for most Hungarians, the price of dissent is too high, and the temptation to just accept the new normal is too easy. Marantz quotes a Hungarian social scientist named Péter Krekó:

“Before it starts, you say to yourself, ‘I will leave this country immediately if they ever do this or that horrible thing,’ ”…..“And then they do that thing, and you stay. Things that would have seemed impossible ten years ago, five years ago, you may not even notice.” (Krekó) finished his gnocchi, considered a glass of wine, then opted for an espresso instead. “It’s embarrassing, almost, how comfortable you can be,” he said. “There are things you could do or say—as a person in academia, or in the media, or an NGO—that would get them to come after you. But if you know where the lines are, and you don’t cross them, you can have a good life.”

A similar dynamic is clearly in the works here in the US.

Of course, that is the bargain is being offered to straight, white citizens under the Trump regime. People of color, immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and—I would argue—women in general face a fare more brutal scenario. I recently saw someone write on Facebook: “America has become a living hell for immigrants.” Yes, and for the Stephen Millers of the world, that’s a feature not a bug. In fact, it’s far more than just a feature: it’s their primary goal. And they are counting on the rest of America not to care, much.

Describing the terror that graduate students studying in America feel in the wake of the Mahmoud Khalil atrocity, Marantz writes that even as these visitors fear being kidnapping off the street and disappeared by masked and anonymous federal agents, “(their) neighbors go about their lives—shopping at Whole Foods, picking up the dry cleaning, then going home to catch up on the news and curse the latest Trump outrage, as if it were all happening somewhere else.”

To make matters worse, the aforementioned Prof. Levitsky has expressed his belief that Trump is turning the US into an authoritarian regime much faster than Orbán did Hungary, which is concerning to say the least. As I wrote in these pages a few weeks ago, Orbán took decades “to undermine the judiciary and the media and other Hungarian institutions with kabuki-like gestures toward the rule of law while actually running a dictatorship. Trump is ripping through those same institutions in America while barely bothering even to pretend.”

Yet at the same time that Trump is moving at a pace that makes Orban look like a slacker, Trumpian autocracy is descending upon us so incrementally that many of us fail to register it…..and that is true not only of low-information Americans, but even people who are actively alarmed by the administration’s actions.

Marantz himself describes how this can happen:

In a Hollywood disaster movie, when the big one arrives, the characters don’t have to waste time debating whether it’s happening. There is an abrupt, cataclysmic tremor, a deafening roar; the survivors, suddenly transformed, stagger through a charred, unrecognizable landscape. In the real world, though, the cataclysm can come in on little cat feet. The tremors can be so muffled and distant that people continually adapt, explaining away the anomalies. You can live through the big one, it turns out, and still go on acting as if—still go on feeling as if—the big one is not yet here.

One does not often see Robert Frost invoked on the topic of a police state, but here we are.

Other experts who were once skeptical about the prospect of Trump-led American fascism have now done 180s. Marantz writes: “For years, Samuel Moyn, a historian at Yale, argued that liberals should stop inflating Trump into an all-powerful cartoon villain—that he was a weak President, not an imminent fascist threat. But in March, after the disappearance of the Columbia student activist Mahmoud Khalil, Moyn applied the F-word to Trump for the first time.” Ruth Ben-Ghiat of NYU, an expert on authoritarianism who was an early and vocal critic of Trump, made that switch several years ago. The political scientist Lucan Way told Marantz:

“When people would predict, ‘America will turn into Hungary,’ I would roll my eyes. But, boy, have I been humbled.” Way and Levitsky recently co-authored a piece in Foreign Affairs in which they wrote: “Democracy survived Trump’s first term because he had no experience, plan, or team. US democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy.”

SMASH THE PATRIMONY

Cutting through the angels-on-the-head-a-pin debate over whether Trump is an autocrat, an authoritarian, a fascist, or just an fucking asshole, one of the very best pieces I’ve yet read about the second Trump administration is from the Brookings Institution’s Jonathan Rauch.

Writing in The Atlantic, Rauch describes what we’re facing as “patrimonialism,” a term coined by the turn-of-the century German sociologist Max Weber, and recently revived in a book called The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future, by Stephen E. Hanson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary, and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, a political scientist at UC Irvine.

Essentially, patrimonialism is what we now more commonly call a “mafia state,” in which the country is run like a crime family, with its boss—the father or godfather figure—doling out favors and punishments according to his whim, based on who has pleased or displeased him at any given moment.

This is “the default form of rule in the premodern world,” Hanson and Kopstein write. “The state was little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler; it did not exist as a separate entity.” Rauch adds: “Weber called this system “patrimonialism” because rulers claimed to be the symbolic father of the people—the state’s personification and protector.” (Trump—risibly—made that explicit claim on the campaign trail last year.)

Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations.

In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business.

Sound familiar?

Patrimonialism is rife in the modern world, with states that subscribe to it—Hungary, Poland (for a time), Turkey, India, the Philippines—working as a kind of syndicate, as Anne Applebaum has written in her 2024 book Autocracy Inc.

Rauch writes that patrimonial states are suspicious of bureaucracies as obstacles and potential rivals; hence the need to disembowel them and replace their ranks with toadies and hacks. He also notes that, “Once in power, patrimonialists love to clothe themselves in the rhetoric of democracy, like Elon Musk justifying his team’s extralegal actions as making the ‘unelected fourth unconstitutional branch of government’ be “responsive to the people.” Though it might rise to power democratically, and temporarily co-exist with it, eventually the mafia state all but inevitably destroys any democracy that it infects.

And the longer this goes on, the more entrenched a patrimony like Trump’s will become. Already we have a whole generation of young people who are accustomed to a US President whose public persona is like that of a pro wrestler (and a heel, not a face), who is wantonly corrupt and openly sells access to his office and political favors, and who professes ignorance of basic civics and of what is going on in his own administration. They don’t know anything different. When that vision of the presidency is normalized, in conjunction with the chokehold that right wing authoritarians are obtaining on American politics and the electoral process, our democracy is in what George H.W. Bush—a kind of quaint figure these days—called “deep doo-doo.”

FROGS AND CROCODILES

The other hackneyed description for this dynamic of a slow slide into illiberalism is, of course, the “frog in boiling water,” in which an emergency creeps up so slowly and imperceptibly that its victims don’t realize the threat until it is too late.

To that end, this very week Way, Levitsky, and Ziblatt co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times called “How Will Americans Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?” In it they write:

The descent into competitive authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarms. Because governments attack their rivals through nominally legal means like defamation suits, tax audits and politically targeted investigations, citizens are often slow to realize they are succumbing to authoritarian rule.

The authors propose what they call “a simple metric” for determining whether or not autocracy has taken hold: “the cost of opposing the government.”

In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power. They need not worry about publishing critical opinions, supporting opposition candidates or engaging in peaceful protest because they know they will not suffer retribution from the government. In fact, the idea of legitimate opposition—that all citizens have a right to criticize, organize opposition to and seek to remove the government through elections—is a foundational principle of democracy.

But under authoritarianism, those who cross the government—opposition politicians, media outlets, even private citizens—often find themselves investigated for trumped up charges, slapped with frivolous lawsuits that are nonetheless financially backbreaking to fight, subjected to tax audits, unjustly stripped of business licenses, or even targeted for vigilante violence. As we have observed in Hungary, it is quite easy for a citizenry to accommodate itself to that state of affairs, and kept its collective head down. “When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy. By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.”

I need not list here all the ways that Trump & Co. are carrying out exactly that sort of campaign. (But Way, Levitsky, and Ziblatt do; check it out if you want a reminder.) The repercussions are stark:

The administration’s authoritarian offensive has….changed how Americans behave, forcing them to think twice about engaging in what should be constitutionally protected opposition. Consequently, many of the politicians and societal organizations that should serve as watchdogs and checks on the executive are silencing themselves or retreating to the sidelines.

That, of course, is the goal. Kill one, frighten ten thousand, to go all the way back to Sun Tzu and The Art of War.

The acquiescence of our most prominent civic leaders sends a profoundly demoralizing message to society. It tells Americans that democracy is not worth defending—or that resistance is futile. If America’s most privileged individuals and organizations are unwilling or unable to defend democracy, what are ordinary citizens supposed to do?

The authors note that, “Americans are living under a new regime. The question now is whether we will allow it to take root. So far, American society’s response to this authoritarian offensive has been underwhelming—alarmingly so.”

Strategies of self-preservation have led too many civil society leaders to retreat into silence or acquiesce to authoritarian bullying. Small acts of acquiescence, framed as necessary defensive measures, feel like the only reasonable course. But this is the fatal logic of appeasement: the belief that quietly yielding in small, seemingly temporary ways will mitigate long-term harm. It usually doesn’t.

On the contrary: acquiescence large or small only encourages the oppressors to even worse behavior once they smell blood in the water. Witness Columbia University, whose craven surrender of its lunch money to Trump and his gang of schoolyard bullies has only emboldened those bullies to go further, even proposing to put the school under a consent decree in which it would effectively become a subsidiary of the administration, which is to say, of the Trump Organization. (And Trump University joins the Ivies at last.) I hate to root for Harvard, but its willingness to stand up to the administration stands in stark contrast.

“Autocrats rarely entrench themselves in power through force alone,” write Way, Levitsky, and Ziblatt, “they are enabled by the accommodation and inaction of those who might have resisted. Appeasement, as Churchill warned, is like feeding a crocodile and hoping to be the last one eaten.”

“When the most influential members of civil society fight back, it provides political cover for others. It also galvanizes ordinary citizens to join the fight,” W, L & Z note.Among the forces they suggest could lead the pro-democracy charge they single out the courts, progressive billionaires, well-endowed universities like that one up in Cambridge, deep-pocketed law firms, and “a vast infrastructure of churches, labor unions, private foundations and nonprofit organizations.” They also refer to “a well-organized and well-financed opposition party,” but I’ll confess that I don’t know who they mean by that.

More on point, they acknowledge that “So far, the most energetic opposition has come not from civic leaders but from everyday citizens, showing up at congressional town hall meetings or participating in Hands Off rallies across the country.”

When organizations work together and commit to a collective defense of democratic principles, they share the costs of defiance. The government cannot attack everyone all at once. When the costs of defiance are shared, they become easier for individuals to bear.

SIGNS OF LIFE ON THE LEFT

So is there hope?

The good news is that the proverbial wheels are coming off this administration (which was kind of a unicycle to begin with) as it continues to show its incompetence, malevolence, and simple cruelty. At the same time, resistance is building. Other countries have fought their way back to democracy—Brazil, Poland, Slovakia, South Korea and elsewhere. Bolsonaro is on trial and so is Duterte. Less dramatically, anti-Trump candidates recently triumphed in Canada, Australia…. and the Vatican, proving that Donald is indeed adept at winning elections, just not always for his side.

The administration’s weaknesses and missteps can be exploited, but it takes conscious and concerted effort. “America’s slide into authoritarianism is reversible,” Way, Levitsky, and Ziblatt write. “But no one has ever defeated autocracy from the sidelines.”

“In that sense, ‘How Democracies Die’ is actually a terrible metaphor,” Levitsky told Marantz. “Everything is reversible…..We are not El Salvador, and we are not Hungary. We spent centuries, as a society, building up democratic muscle, and we still have a lot of that muscle left. I just keep waiting for someone to use it.” A few public figures are heeding that advice. When the mayor of Newark gets himself arrested to protest ICE detention in his state, that is an inspiring—and telling—statement.

Specifically, Rauch argues that patrimonialism has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack.” That weakness is actually two-fold.

First, patrimonies founder in competition with modern governments peopled with competent professionals, because the erratic nature of a mafia state is at odds with competent politics. “Patrimonial regimes are simply awful at managing any complex problem of modern governance. At best they supply poorly functioning institutions, and at worst they actively prey on the economy.” But patrimony’s even greater liability is its inherently corrupt nature. Rauch again:

Patrimonialism is corrupt by definition, because its reason for being is to exploit the state for gain—political, personal, and financial. At every turn, it is at war with the rules and institutions that impede rigging, robbing, and gutting the state.

We know what to expect from Trump’s second term. As Larry Diamond of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution said in a recent podcast, “I think we are going to see an absolutely staggering orgy of corruption and crony capitalism in the next four years unlike anything we’ve seen since the late 19th century, the Gilded Age.”

Rauch argues that this is the pressure point at which we should focus our attacks:

Corruption is patrimonialism’s Achilles’ heel because the public understands it and doesn’t like it. It is not an abstraction like “democracy” or “Constitution” or “rule of law.” It conveys that the government is being run for them, not for you. The most dire threat that Putin faced was Alexei Navalny’s “ceaseless crusade” against corruption, which might have brought down the regime had Putin not arranged for Navalny’s death in prison. In Poland, the liberal opposition booted the patrimonialist Law and Justice Party from power in 2023 with an anti-corruption narrative.

(T)he history of patrimonial rule suggests that (Democrats’) most effective approach will be hammering home the message that he is corrupt. One thing is certain: He will give them plenty to work with.

He is surely right, and even low-information voters have begun to take note when Burgermeister Meisterburger Donald von Drumpf tells America’s kids they can only have two dolls at Christmas instead of thirty (thirty????), and that they don’t need so many pencils, while spending $92 million in taxpayer dollars on a military parade for his birthday, and $400 million to dip his new Qatari-built Air Force One in gold.

The counter-argument is that the public already knows how corrupt Trump is and, apparently, doesn’t care. But Rauch argues that “driving a strategic, coordinated message against Trump’s corruption is exactly what the opposition has not done. Instead, it has reacted to whatever is in the day’s news. By responding to daily fire drills and running in circles, it has failed to drive any message at all.”

Also, it is not quite true that the public already knows Trump is corrupt and doesn’t care. Rather, because he seems so unfiltered, he benefits from a perception that he is authentic in a way that other politicians are not, and because he infuriates elites, he enjoys a reputation for being on the side of the common person. Breaking those perceptions can determine whether his approval rating is above 50 percent or below 40 percent, and politically speaking, that is all the difference in the world.

HOLLOWED OUT

This is the way the world ends, T.S. Eliot famously wrote in “The Hollow Men”: not with a bang but a whimper. (My but this blog is literary this week.) It has become cliché. But that is how America feels as we slide into full blown mafia statism, which may well descend upon us and take root while we barely notice, let alone stir ourselves to appreciable complaint. I fear that there is no great inflection point coming, no “I am Spartacus” moment, no triggering event a la the murder of George Floyd that turns millions out into the streets. (On the contrary: every day I expect word of a pardon for Derek Chauvin on his federal convictions.) Instead, we daily slip further and further into a cruel parody of what the American experiment was meant to be, incorporating some of the worst elements of our complicated and not always flattering history, while adding new depths of neo-fascism to which we have never before sunk. Yet on we go, creeping in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded democracy. (Move over, Bob and Tom—Bill is here.)

And that is a place from which it will be very very hard to climb out. Especially if we don’t try.

*********

Illustration: A frog. Duh.

Bitter Crop: A Conversation with Michael Meeropol

Published on April 29, 2025May 8, 2025 by thekingsnecktieLeave a comment

Interviews used to be a mainstay of this blog, but it’s been a while since I’ve done one. So it’s fitting that the practice returns with the estimable Michael Meeropol.

Michael was ten years old in 1953 when his parents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death by the US government. While the case was already outrageously controversial at the time, subsequent scholarship has exposed even more howling misconduct by the government, particularly with regard to efforts to implicate Ethel and send her to the electric chair along with her husband, despite her innocence.

During their parents’ incarceration and following their executions, Michael and his younger brother Robert were at the harrowing center of the Red Scare hysteria, including being covertly surveilled by the FBI while they were still small children. They spent a number of years living with family friends and in a children’s shelter until they were adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol, who raised them. In a great irony, Abel was the composer of “Strange Fruit,” maybe the most haunting anthem ever written not only about lynching, but as an indictment of the entire history of racist terror in America.

Michael went on to become an accomplished professor of economics (now retired), writer, and progressive activist. He and his brother have also waged a brave, fifty-year crusade to discover and make public the truth about their parents’ persecution, no matter where that inquiry led and what it revealed. On that front, his daughter Ivy is also the director of a remarkable documentary about her grandparents called Heir to an Execution.

In short, few living Americans have the visceral first person experience of state terror as Michael, a perspective that he brings to the current political crisis. We spoke by Zoom. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

A LETHAL BLUFF

THE KING’S NECKTIE: For those young people who may not know the story, what do you think was the driving factor in the US government’s pursuit of your parents?

MICHAEL MEEROPOL: The government wanted my father to roll. They knew that he had organized a bunch of people to help the Soviet Union during World War II and after, and he wouldn’t rat them out, I think—not because he was an ideologue, but because they were his friends. My father violated all the rules of espionage and spycraft by recruiting his friends. So he wasn’t about to rat them out, period.

The other thing is that the government wanted to get the death penalty, and the only way to get that was to make believe that he had—through his brother-in-law—stolen the secret of the atom bomb. With 20/20 hindsight, it wasn’t the secret of the atom bomb. It probably had almost no positive impact on the Soviets. Then they arrest my mother to use as a lever against him; they basically took her as a hostage. And there’s this chilling statement by a former Justice Department official, William Rogers, who went on to be Secretary of State under Nixon. Just before he died Rogers told a reporter, “We didn’t want to kill them. We wanted them to talk.” And the reporter said, “What went wrong?” And Rogers said, “She called our bluff.”

Notice the word “our.” It was a team effort. The idea to get my father a death sentence was agreed upon by members of Congress, by members of the Justice Department, by the judge, Irving Kaufman, who was primed to give my father the death sentence. What was uncertain was whether they would give it to my mother too. And when the judge learned that there was disagreement about that, he said, “Okay, I’ll make the decision on my own.” My guess is that, as an immigrant Jew who had “made it” in America, Kaufman hated my parents as immigrant Jews who became communists. And I think he took it upon himself to sentence my mother to death.

TKN: But to ask a really dumb question, when Rogers said “we wanted them to talk,” what did he and the government want your father to say, given that he really had no secrets to spill about the Soviets?

MM: They wanted him to say, “Here are five other people who worked with me and I’ll testify against them.” The problem is, he would’ve had to admit to being an atomic spy, which he wasn’t. Because we now know from Soviet-era documents that in the crucial period when the so-called “secret of the atom bomb” sketch was delivered, he was out of contact with the Soviets and he remained out of contact for two years. And that’s in Soviet-era documents, in black-and- white.

We now know that the atomic spying was done by David Greenglass, my mother’s brother, who was a machinist at Los Alamos, who drew a crude diagram, and his wife, who was his courier, and was never even indicted. That was the deal Washington made with David Greenglass.

TKN: I always think of the joke in Woody Allen’s movie Crimes and Misdemeanors, where his character says about Alan Alda’s character, who is a real jerk: “I love him like a brother—David Greenglass.”

MM: When David Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years, his family and his lawyer said that he’d gotten a raw deal after all that he had done for the US government. He was mad when he was in prison that Washington sort of went back on their deal. His lawyer felt that he should have gotten five years at the most, not fifteen. He served ten; he ended up getting out in 1960.

TKN: And for people who are gonna read this interview and who don’t know, there is a direct connection, of course, between your parents’ case and the current moment in the person of one guy.

MM: Thank you for bringing it up. I’m gonna be a proud papa. My daughter Ivy made a film called Bully Coward Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn.

When Roy Cohn graduated from law school, he was so young that he had to wait two years before he could be admitted to the bar. And in 1950 he was a lawyer in the US Attorney’s office in New York, and was one of the prosecutors of my parents. Cohn was the man who examined David Greenglass at the trial, and he didn’t like the fact that, early in the investigation, David Greenglass kept saying, “I never even talked to my sister about this. I never even talked to Ethel Rosenberg about this.” And they had very little evidence on her.

So they’re arrested in August. Greenglass testifies before the grand jury that same month. He’s adamant that Ethel had nothing to do with it. In February, Roy Cohn goes to Greenglass and says, “You know, your wife just remembered that your sister Ethel did all the typing. Are you gonna call your wife a liar?” And he changed his testimony. And at the trial, he and his wife say, “Ethel Rosenberg was the typist.” And then on summation, the prosecutor said she “struck the keys, blow after blow, against her country in the interest of the Soviets”—all a complete fabrication. In 2003, David Greenglass, with a fake beard, is on 60 Minutes. He admits to having committed perjury about the typing, but it’s too late.

TKN: Way too late. And of course, that same Roy Cohn became Donald Trump’s mentor: the one who taught him how to be ruthless and how to use the media and how to attack attack attack, and to lie, and to never admit guilt or failure.

MM: That’s right. And that’s the beauty of Ivy’s film about Roy Cohn. Because you’ve got Cohn saying, “There’s this young man, Donald Trump, and we’re gonna see more of him in the future.”

TKN: More than we wanted to, in fact. Much more.

(NB: Roy Cohn will also be the subject of a new, forthcoming biography by Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus.)

THE RULES OF THE GAME

TKN: I’d love hear the lessons that you believe your parents’ terrible experience holds for our contemporary moment.

MM: In the 1950s, the left were very much afraid of fascism. My mother, I think a week before their deaths, specifically said, “We are the first victims of American fascism.” But she was wrong. The Red Scare did not go all the way to fascism the way she expected. So why not, and why is there a move towards fascism now? I’ve thought about it a lot, and over the previous year, before the election, I gave a bunch of talks on that topic where I tried to compare the threat in the ‘50s to the threat today, using Project 2025 as my blueprint.

I think the reason is that back then, the opposition wasn’t strong enough for the other side to need to resort to fascism. In Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, you had very strong communist and socialist parties and a very strong socialist movement. Most people don’t realize that in the 1932 elections in Germany, the Nazis’ share of the vote went down and the communists’ share went up. The ruling class wanted to use the Nazis to counter the communists, and thought they could control Hitler in doing so.

Compare that to today, when you have all these billionaires kissing Trump’s ass. Why do they do that? Because they think that they will be the ones who profit from it. Whereas Trump himself is not a theorist. He doesn’t understand anything; he goes with his gut. He’s like a criminal who will only reward his friends. When he’s tired of Elon Musk, he’ll throw him on the trash heap. So I think that it’s an entirely different situation today.

It wasn’t this bad in the 1950s, even though, yes, my family, suffered terribly. But we weren’t the only ones. Black folks were lynched regularly in the 1950s. So I think my mother was being hyperbolic. As one of the speakers at the American Historical Association in January of 2025 said, Black folks in the South lived under American fascism during Jim Crow. That was not some sort of parlor game; that was real fascism.

TKN: That is such an interesting theory. But if that’s true, why do we now see fascism rising in the United States? Because the opposition from the left is weaker than ever.

MM: Agreed. But the Republican majority in the Congress is slim. The Democrats—the old fashioned liberals represented by the Biden Administration—are pretty strong, and they had control of both houses Congress for part of the previous four years, and the Senate for all four. They could retake control of the House in two years, and that worries the Republicans. So it seems to me that the fascists want to preclude the chance for a comeback such as occurred in 2018 and 2020.

The right is also trying to smash the economic order that was created at the end of World War II. They have come to believe—at least some of them have come to believe—that they don’t benefit from it, but they have opposition within what I call the ruling class. I use the term “ruling class” the way G. William Domhoff uses it. He’s my guru. Back in 1967, he wrote a book called Who Rules America?, which I highly recommend. He discusses how the very, very rich intermarry, they go to the same schools, they go to the same playgrounds—you know, Bohemian Grove and places like that. They constitute a ruling elite and every once in a while, they have to accommodate the rest of us, but mostly they set policy.

Between World War II and very recently that elite were internationalists. But Trump’s decided that internationalism doesn’t work anymore, which is not surprising. Think of Great Britain, which was the superpower that ruled the world throughout most of the 19th century, and was led by internationalists. But by the end of that century, they had moved to imperial preference. The United States, meanwhile was the new kid on the block. We were in favor of, quote, unquote “free trade,” because we had the productivity advantages that allowed us to conquer the world economically, which happened between World War I and the end of World War II. But now you’ve got the rise of the EU, you’ve got the rise of China, and all of a sudden it ain’t so easy to be top dog. And if there is any rationality to Trumpism it’s in that. And I say “Trumpism,” because Trump himself is irrational, he doesn’t know a thing, and sometimes his advisors can convince him to do what is in the interest of that wing of the American ruling class, but sometimes not. So Trumpism is a revitalization of mercantilism, the old system, so that when you’re threatened by other rising powers you have to introduce all sorts of rules to give yourself a leg up. And that’s what they’re in the process of doing.

TKN: But once again you’ve got the elites deluding themselves that they can control a demagogue. Anybody who thinks, “Oh, I can make a deal with Trump and then maneuver around him, I can survive collaborating with him”—they all end up getting trampled. And that’s happening with Wall Street and the others who backed Trump.

Even McConnell. And no tears for him, because he is horrible and did terrible things to the country. But I do find it ironic that the guy whose whole reputation was this steely-eyed master manipulator ended up getting steamrolled by a two-bit con man from Queens.

MM: Oh, Mitch McConnell! He wanted to go down as the man who remade the Supreme Court, but everybody will remember him as the guy who could have stopped this thing by voting to convict Trump in the second impeachment, but he didn’t. That will be his obituary.

A BRIEF SURVEY OF THE DESCENT OF POSTWAR AMERICA

TKN: Since we’re on the topic of mercantilism, as an economist, what do you make of this tariff debacle?

MM: Well, the good news for the world is that Trump is so mercurial (laughs), and changes what he does so often, that it will be a flop. It didn’t necessarily have to be a flop. You know, if Trump died tomorrow and Vance took over and his advisors gave him a lot of good advice, there’s a whole mess of stuff that a well-run mercantilist America could develop as a way of fighting for hegemony with China, and trying to keep the EU in its place, and keeping Canada and Mexico as junior partners in the Western Hemisphere. But Trump is destroying all of that, and actually making the idea of the United States coming out on top less and less likely. And when he screws things up, even his supporters are gonna get mad. If the economy is in rough shape at the midterms, I think the Democrats get the House, for sure, and who knows, they might even get the Senate.

TKN: Boy, I hope so. But like all of us. I’ve been burned so many times thinking this is the moment America will turn on Trump. But I do think that, for Americans, the pocketbook is really the only place that matters in that regard.

MM: No question. You know the old joke about the stock market, right? That it’s predicted nine of the last three recessions. In other words, sometimes the market will move around and it won’t mean a thing. But when the market goes down, and there’s a danger of recession, people then dump stocks and buy bonds. But after quote “Liberation Day,” the bond market went down, and that scared the bejesus out of everybody, because that meant that people lost faith in the United States as a safe haven.

That’s why many people think Trump “paused” the tariffs for 90 days, because someone went to him and said, “This is a disaster. We cannot experience a sell-off of bonds at the same time that the stock market is selling off,” because that threatens the centrality of the United States dollar as the international reserve currency. And there’s been a slight recovery, but of course it’s such a short term thing. You know the old Yogi Berra line, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” It’s particularly hard when things are changing like this, and we haven’t got a clue really what’s going on.

TKN: But it’s logical that the world should be losing faith in the United States—not just in economics, but in foreign policy, on the environmental issues, on public health. On everything. For obvious reasons.

MM: Yeah. You’ve got a madman in control. Then there’s the idea of Elon Musk, the bull in the china shop of governmental activities. The hidden agenda, of course, is that they start to screw it up so thoroughly that they’ll end up privatizing it. We’ll have private companies collecting taxes instead of the IRS doing it. We’ll have Medicare Advantage policies, which is in effect the partial privatization of Medicare.

TKN: Privatize the Post Office.

MM: Right. There’s a whole host of possible privatizations that could be in play once they screw up the way the government works. And what better way to screw it up than to reduce their workforce by half?

TKN: It’s always driven me crazy that the Republicans have made a hobby horse of saying “government is bad” when they are the ones who are actively working to make it bad! So they create the conditions that become that self-fulfilling prophecy.

But I want to ask you to step back just a little bit. What is your feeling about how we got to this place as a country?

MM: It’s very interesting. In 1980, I was in Great Britain on a sabbatical and Margaret Thatcher had just come into power there, and when I came back in 1981, Reagan had just won here. So I was very interested in the arguments used by right-wing economists, what they call neoliberalism, which was a rediscovery of the “magic of the market,” reducing the role of government in the economy other than defense and law and order. And I threw myself into studying it and made it my area of expertise and started to write about it.

And the result is very clear. Neoliberalism didn’t work. The system that started with the end of World War II and went up to maybe 1978 was a phenomenal success. The Great American Middle class was basically built in those years. But it ran out of steam in the Seventies, and Reagan powered to victory in 1980 because of it. And he introduces the “Reagan Revolution,” which was tax cuts and regulatory relief, and yes, we had a recovery that allowed him to get reelected in 1984. But if you take the entire decade, all the way up through the Bush Number One administration, it didn’t improve things. All it succeeded in doing was increasing inequality. And the Democrats joined in, and that’s why my book is called Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution, which was published in 1998.

So neoliberalism founders on the financial crisis of 2008, and it founders so badly in terms of inequality and the fact that quote unquote “free trade” is sapping the lifeblood of the American working class, that Trump has an opening in 2016, and he sneaks in. Neoliberalism had failed to deliver the goods. That’s why we got Barack Obama in 2008. But Barack Obama turned out to be an unbelievable centrist: he didn’t do anything remotely reformist that he should have done. The result was that Trump could complain bitterly about the working class being hollowed out and manufacturing jobs being lost. I mean, there’s so many reasons that Trump won in ‘16, not all of them related to his complaining about trade deals, but certainly that was some of it.

But then he comes in and he doesn’t succeed, which is why Biden wins. And Biden did good stuff, but for a variety of reasons, the Democrats don’t win reelection. Biden tried, and I think some of the things Biden did were good, but he only had four years—really he only had three years. And so now we’re in it, and we’re in it because of the failure of neoliberalism from the Reagan administration up into the financial crisis of 2008, the failure of Obama to do anything big about it, the partial success of Biden that was not publicized well, and now we have Trump making believe it’s an incredible crisis, promising he would get prices down the day after he was inaugurated. And now we are in it. Trump and company are introducing Project 2025, they don’t have any of the guardrails that existed in the first Trump administration. And our side has just got to fight back with every tool we have.

STRATEGIC OBSTRUCTION (OR, THE DOWNSIDE OF ADULTHOOD)

TKN: What do you foresee for the future? Where do you think we’re headed?

MM: Viktor Orban is kind of a playbook. On paper, Hungary is a democracy, they have elections, and there’s an opposition party. But that opposition party is irrelevant; they do not have any power. Orban has taken control of the media, he’s taken control of the universities, and he‘s turned Hungary into a Third World country. It is the poorest country in the EU. All sorts of very competent, skilled people are leaving to go somewhere else to make their fortune, because Hungary has no future for them. He and his cronies are sucking it dry.

And Hungary has a system that is self-perpetuating. The way Orban achieved that was by changing election laws to perpetuate his rule. And that same kind of voter suppression is one of the key things that is going on in the US right now, state by state.

TKN: Chris Murphy was talking about that same thing with David Remnick a couple weeks ago, this Hungarian model where they have farcical, Potemkin elections. It’s not jackbooted suppression, but the effect is the same, because the opposition is just unable to raise money, doesn’t control the media, there are de facto poll taxes in the form of voter ID requirements, and so on. This SAVE Act that could prevent women from voting if they don’t have documentation, like birth certificates and wedding licenses showing their name changes? It’s crazy.

MM: And by the way, when the next census is done in 2030, a whole bunch of red states are gonna increase their share of the Electoral College and the US House of Representatives, and a whole bunch of blue states are gonna lose votes in the Electoral College and the House. That will turn a state like Georgia from purple to red. So that’s the loss of a seat. Now, I think our side could win North Carolina, but we gotta net three seats, and I don’t know where those three seats are. That’s why I’m more optimistic about the House. And I hope that if the Democrats take the House, they will immediately interfere with the Trump agenda: that they’ll impeach him and as many members of the Cabinet as they can, just keep sending impeachments over to the Senate, make the Republicans in the Senate go on record supporting the dictatorship.

TKN: Yeah, I think that would be a huge difference to where we’re at right now, where the GOP has control of all three branches. If we had the House back, we could at least gum up the works—not just for the sake of gumming up as an end in itself, but strategically, to stop the march of Trumpism. Now, by the time those midterms roll around, about 18 months from now, we may be so far down the authoritarian path that control of one house of a bicameral legislature will be meaningless. But maybe not.

MM: I live in New York State, and I just called both of my US Senators, who are Democrats, and I said, “You should get up on the floor of the Senate and say there will be no business as usual until Mr. Garcia is back home.” And then demand that every Republican go on record answering the question: “Are you in favor of sending this legal resident of the United States, who has committed no crime, to a foreign country, and then making believe you can’t get him back, when in fact, the United States is paying El Salvador all the costs of imprisonment?” They can do all sorts of things. They got two guys out of a Romanian prison relatively recently. You know, just make a phone call. So it’s absurd. So the Democrats should be making the Republicans own this, because then that becomes a campaign issue.

TKN: I’ve written about this very issue, that the Democrats are making a huge mistake in acting as if it’s business as usual. A few Senators like Bernie and Murphy and Booker have said, “No, we’re gonna just dig in our heels and nothing goes forward until this stops.” But we need more of that.

MM: The problem is, as you pointed out, too many Democrats wanna say, “Oh no, let’s be the adults in the room.” No. This is a five alarm fire. You’ve gotta get everybody out of the house. And it doesn’t really matter how you do it. You don’t have to necessarily convince your teenager that she has to get out of the house, or he has to get outta the house. Grab him by the scruff of his neck and drag him out. I applaud Bernie and AOC, I think it’s just fabulous that they’re doing what they’re doing. I guess the question is, what will the Democratic primaries look like?

TKN: That is a good question. We have a habit of eating our own, so, I don’t know. But given the questionable efficacy of the Democratic Party, let’s call it, how much of the change has to come from outside the system, from “regular” people?

MM: Well, I think that’s where what happened on April 5th was so interesting. That to me, is a bottom-up activity. I went to a very small and lovely demonstration, right opposite West Point: maybe 150 people with signs, standing in a drizzle, with the wind blowing, and the cars driving by were either neutral or they would honk and gave the thumb’s up. The whole time we were there only two people yelled epithets out of car windows. I think that was pretty indicative. And it was West Point: I don’t think that’s a particularly liberal section of the state.

It was good to do something. Now, there, there are a whole bunch of things that people still want to do. People are talking about a one-day general strike, a tax refusal. But people want to do something. And I think that is what will ultimately force at least some Democrats to come along.

Here’s an analogy. During the American War in Vietnam, for the first two or three years after LBJ began increasing the bombing, Democrats were united with Republicans in excoriating the antiwar demonstrators for being pro-communist, et cetera, et cetera. But year after year after year it declined, and by 1970 there were a lot of Democrats who were opposed to the war. And by 1975 Congress cut off the funds. Now that’s a long war, and a lot of people died because it took so long. But the opposition started at the grassroots: it was bottom-up. The official Democrats gave the antiwar movement the back of their hand initially, except for a handful of people like George McGovern, God bless him. It took a long time, but ultimately, it won.

I am also hoping that there are people in the government who will throw sand into the gears to stop Musk & Co. Like Miles Taylor, at a higher level, but I’m talking about ordinary people just working in offices who see the injustice of what’s going on, and they want to do as much as they can to screw up Trump. It would be the patriotic thing to do. And afterwards people can write books and say, “I was an anti-Trump worm in the Department of Agriculture, or wherever, where the Trump and Musk were trying to screw things up. I did my best to stop them.”

TKN: I absolutely believe they can wage a—peaceful—guerilla war from inside the bureaucracy. And that’s why Trump and Musk wanna purge them.

MM: Yeah. But they don’t know who to purge. And you can’t purge everybody. It’s a huge bureaucracy.

TKN: It’s funny you bring up Miles Taylor: no coincidence that he’s been singled out along with Chris Krebs as the first targets of potential criminal prosecution of Trump’s political opponents by his weaponized and partisan DOJ.

So, to that point, from your unique personal experience, and a lifetime of activism and study, what do you think is the way forward for the pro-democracy movement?

MM: First you’ve gotta get the Democrats to be a real opposition. And there’s a real question as to whether you do that by threatening to go outside—in others words, with AOC and Bernie, and form a third party, which puts the Democrats on notice that they will go the way of the Whigs. In the 1850s you had the Whigs and the Democrats and the Whigs destroyed themselves over slavery, and into that vacuum came the Free Soil Party, which morphed into the Republican Party. So that’s possible. I don’t think it is likely. But the threat of it could be useful. You know, the Oscar Wilde quote: “Nothing will concentrate a man’s mind more than the thought that he surely will be hanged” (laughs). And nothing will concentrate the Democratic Party’s mind more than the thought that it will be relegated to irrelevance. So Schumer maybe needs to be replaced. They need to be dragged kicking and screaming in the direction of AOC and Bernie and Chris Murphy.

I thought that Cory Booker’s speech in the Senate was a very interesting indicator. No business as usual. Let’s do something unusual. Chris Van Hollen going down to El Salvador to camp out at that prison. These are the kinds of things the Democratic Party has got to do. But it depends on people at the grassroots level, who may not even be Democrats, who may have voted for third party candidates, who may be supporting insurgent primary campaigns against incumbents to apply pressure from the bottom up. The opposition has got to just be as loud and as angry and as persistent as possible. And it can’t give up. You absolutely cannot give up. Because if you give up, you are basically condemning your grandchildren to a horrible future.

TKN: I couldn’t agree with you more.

THE SONG OF THE CENTURY

TKN: Can I ask you one last weird, off-topic question? I can’t resist, so I hope you don’t mind. Can you talk a little bit about your adoptive father, Abel, who wrote one of the most beautiful and stirring songs in our country’s history?

MM: Time Magazine called it The Song of the Century in 1999. Bruce Springsteen put it at the top of his 2020 playlist for the Trump era. I mean, there’s no question. It was made famous by Billie Holiday—there’s actually a film about it by this wonderful filmmaker named Joel Katz from maybe 20 years ago. Cassandra Wilson has done it, Audre McDonald has done it—she made it one of the centerpieces of her one-woman show. And my daughter Ivy bought Annie and me tickets to it. We got to meet Audre. Oh my God.

TKN: PhD dissertations have been written about it, but the lyrical imagery of it, the poignancy of it. I can’t think of another song that says so much about America.

MM: And originally Columbia wouldn’t let Billie Holiday record it, so she took it to Commodore Records, which was owned by Milt Gaber, who, by the way, is Billy Crystal’s uncle. It’s short, you know—it’s a relatively short poem, so short that when it was first recorded on Commodore, Milt Gabler had Sonny White, the pianist, improvise a long introduction to build out the space. And it works because at first it’s very dirge-like. So by the time Billie comes in with the first line, “Southern trees bear strange fruit,” it’s just unbelievable.

TKN: It’s crazy that you’re at the confluence of these two epic pieces of American history: the terrible execution of your parents, which was the low point of the entire McCarthy era, and by sheer coincidence, the composition of this song that haunts all of the American experience, written over a decade before, by the man who went on to adopt you.

MM: And my father didn’t live to see it become the giant hit that it is. The fact that it gets covered all the time, and it gets referred to all the time—it’s just a wonderful thing. (My brother) Rob and I have been interviewed about that song a lot, and actually, in one of my radio commentaries, I said that “Strange Fruit” is gonna be relevant until racism is a thing of the past.

TKN: So, forever.

MM: Yeah, my father was so proud of that song.

TKN: He should be.

*********

Photo: Michael Meeropol outside Sing Sing State Prison in upstate New York, where his parents were executed by the government of the United States on June 19, 1953—Juneteenth.

Further reading and viewing:

“Judge Irving Kaufman, the Liberal Establishment, and the Rosenberg Case,” by Michael Meeropol, Monthly Review, January 2024

The Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case by Walter Schneir, Melville House, 2010

Who Rules America? by G. William Domhoff, UC Santa Cruz Press, 1967

Bully Coward Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn, documentary film by Ivy Meeropol, HBO, 2020

Heir to an Execution, documentary film by Ivy Meeropol, HBO, 2004

The Apprentice, narrative film by Ali Abbasi, 2024

“Could Trump’s tariff war reshape global capitalism? An interview with Marxist economist Sam Gindin,” Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, April 2025

“Damage and Dissent,” The King’s Necktie, April 9, 2025

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, by Gary Gerstle, Oxford University Press, 2022

Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison, Penguin Random House, 2024

Surrender: How the Clinton Administration Completed the Reagan Revolution, by Michael Meeropol, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1998

“We Are Sleepwalking into Autocracy,” Sen,. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) interviewed by David Remnick for The New Yorker and The New Yorker Radio Hour, March 2025

“Murphy’s Law,” The King’s Necktie, April 12, 2025

“‘Strange Fruit’: The Timely Return of One of America’s Most Powerful Protest Songs,” by David Browne, Rolling Stone, August 2020

Excerpts from “Resisting the Right”

Published on April 23, 2025April 23, 2025 by thekingsnecktie2 Comments

As there are a number of new subscribers to this blog, I would—shamelessly—like to call attention to my book Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, a guide to how to confront a second Trump administration and the rise of right wing authoritarianism in the United States, published by OR Books here in New York last July (four months before the election, I hasten to add).

The intent of that book, drawing on my experience as a military intelligence officer, was to look “over the horizon” as they say at the Pentagon, and contemplate the worst case scenario so that we could be prepared should it befall us. I was hoping the book would prove unnecessary and wind up on a high shelf, to be retrieved only in some far off, break-glass-in-case-of-emergency dystopian future.

Sadly, to paraphrase the late George Allen, that future is now.

While the book contemplated the full range of outcomes following the 2024 election and offered contingencies across that whole spectrum, its most pertinent parts have proven to be its assessment of the autocratic threat and prescriptions for how to combat it in its most pernicious form. What follows are two key excerpts from the book. If you find the material of value, I encourage you to buy a copy: either directly from the publisher (here, or at the link above, or order from your local bookstore, or wherever you get your books. And please tell your friends. Thanks.

LISTENING TO YOU, I GET OPINION

The contemporary Republican Party is at once the logical result of its downward trajectory over the past 57 years, and yet unrecognizable from the GOP of only a few decades ago. Both Nixon and Reagan would be ostracized from the Republican Party of today. On taxes, on the environment, on foreign policy, on nuclear arms control, on wage and price controls—across a range of issues, they championed ideas that would cause the contemporary GOP to scream liberalism, or even socialism. More likely, if I may speculate, those men, operating in today’s climate, would have quickly changed their tune, as so many other contemporary Republican politicians have done, keenly aware of the melody that the right-wing piper is calling.

All political parties look for wedge issues to peel voters away from their opponents, but the GOP has made an art form of it. In his 2012 book The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted, Mike Lofgren, a longtime GOP congressional staffer, pulled back the curtain on this kayfabe, declaring in an interview with Truthout that same year: “The primary purpose of the GOP these days is to provide tax breaks and other financial advantages—such as not regulating pollution and other socially costly externalities—to their wealthy donor base. All the rest of their platform, all the culture wars stuff, is simply rube bait.”

That “rube bait” includes guns, abortion, homosexuality, trans rights, immigration, and a whole slate of other social issues that the plutocratic wing of the party did not really care about. Trump himself—who had been a registered Democrat for almost a decade before running against Hillary Clinton—was very much on record as being pro-choice, moved comfortably in circles with gay people, and was generally live-and-let-live….appropriate for someone who was himself so libertine. But he was also happy to reverse course like a stunt car driver doing a screeching, rubber-burning one-eighty when it served his ends. Prior to that, Trump’s low-information liberalism was largely a function of the well-to-do Manhattan milieu in which he moved—not a world where Confederate flag decals and gun racks were often seen on Lincoln Town Cars. But as a natural-born shitbag with a long history of ignorant, incendiary, unsolicited commentary (see: the Central Park jogger case), Trump had no problem whatsoever feeding the most disgusting instincts of the GOP’s aptly named base. But like all demagogues, he also took his cues from his audience, and tailored his act to suit it. In that regard, he was simultaneously leading the mob and following it.

For example, the Republican Party of the twentieth century had always had a nativist bent, but the euphemistic “family separation policy”—better described as a deliberate and openly sadistic campaign of kidnapping small children and caging them in inhuman conditions—represented a new low of almost incomprehensible depths. As Caitlin Dickerson concluded in her Pulitzer Prize-winning reportage for The Atlantic, “family separation” wasn’t an unfortunate by-product of Trump’s border policy: it was the goal, aimed purely at punishing migrants and thrilling the base. Or Adam Serwer wrote, in what might be the single most memorable comment ever made about the Trump administration, “The cruelty is the point.”

This willingness of both casual conservatives and diehard denizens of MAGA Nation to get onboard with Trump’s worst atrocities was a worrying sign—a chilling homegrown demonstration of Arendt’s banality of evil, and the crucial complicity of the great swath of nonchalant citizenry in abetting the monstrous actions of authoritarian regimes. And it would only accelerate throughout his time in office.

This hold Trump had on his followers—and still has, for many of them—has led many observers to refer to Trumpism as a “cult-like” phenomenon. But other experts argue that the modifier is unnecessary.

In a 2018 piece for Truthdig called “The Cult of Trump,” the journalist and author Chris Hedges outlines the ways in which Trump’s followers meet the dictionary definition of a cult, and not just metaphorically, noting that the “more outrageous the cult leaders become, the more they flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity.” Hedges goes on at length: about the use of the language of hate and violence; of fearmongering and divisiveness; of the denial of objective reality and the malleability of facts and truth, even when it comes to the leader’s own past statements; of the leader’s bombast and grandiosity, emotional abusiveness, and insecurity; and of the fawning obedience they demand, and the psychology of their followers’ willingness to submit.

Sound familiar?

Of course, not all Republicans can be said to be in the grip of the Trumpist cult of personality the way that its most Kool-Aid-drunk adherents are. In some ways, however, the Republicans who are not Trump cultists but merely making a cynical, utilitarian calculation are worse, in that they cannot be excused by reason of mental incapacitation. They are quislings and collaborators who will one day face history’s harshest verdict.

As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait writes: “Would-be dictators gain crucial support from allies in the political system who may not be committed authoritarians themselves but side with a factional leader who will advance their policy goals at the expense of democracy,” a segment the Spanish political scientist Juan Linz calls “semi-loyal actors.” In The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (1978), Linz, who was born in Germany on the eve of the Nazi era, writes that in order to stop a political party that is showing autocratic tendencies, reasonable political parties that are otherwise in opposition to each other must join together—in other words, put country before party. It happened in Belgium and Finland in the early 1930s, successfully stopping the rise of homegrown authoritarian parties even as kindred spirits rose to power elsewhere in Europe. As recently as 2016 it happened in Austria, despite that nation’s chilling history of susceptibility to fascism. In the United States, it would have meant key leaders of the Republican Party breaking ranks to join with Democrats in opposing Trump, publicly announcing the threat he posed to the nation, and perhaps even declaring their support for Hillary Clinton. Precious few did, and those were all excommunicated, or left the GOP willingly before that sentence was pronounced upon them.

The question of whether or not Trumpism is a literal cult, then, is ultimately moot. Even absent Trump himself, right-wing fanaticism in the United States remains extraordinarily dangerous, such that—as Hedges points out—the mere demise of the man and the breaking of the fever of his followers will not solve our long-term problem. We must lime the soil from which it sprung.

THE DEATH OF NORMALCY

The enduring notion that Trump was an aberration in US politics, or that the GOP would return to some sort of “normalcy” if and when he is ejected from a position of power, flies in the face of history.

Trump represents the logical end state of the process that had begun with the Southern Strategy. The GOP’s alliance with segregationist dead-enders, and then with Christian fundamentalists, and finally with outright white nationalist semi-fascists comprising both of those strains, was a deal with the devil that had finally come due. The plutocrats had imagined that they could use these allies as shock troops, and for a time they did. But now the center of gravity in the party has shifted to its openly seditionist, neo-Confederate faction. We should therefore postpone any mourning parties for the “Rockefeller wing” of the GOP, which after all, brought this fate on itself, and continues to be a willing—now junior—partner in this antidemocratic axis. The irony of its sorcerer’s apprentice-like plight in no way mitigates the danger to the entire nation, and world, that it unleashed.

It’s true that the tension between MAGA Nation and those Republicans who merely grit their teeth as they bend the knee to Trump may help keep the party paralyzed, a case of malevolence tempered by squabbling. But as the anti-Trump conservative Jennifer Rubin notes in The Washington Post, the media rarely holds the GOP “moderates” to account and does “a disservice to the voters by characterizing them as somehow more sensible than the Freedom Caucus crazies.” Team Normal, as it likes to style itself, has thus far not shown enough courage to power a nightlight, belying its own self-flattering moniker.

The fact is, there is little evidence that the policies that the moderates wish to pursue are much different from that of the party’s far-right wing. As Rubin writes, “it would take only a few of them to defeat radical measures. Yet time and again, they cave”—because the ends they seek are largely the same even if their methods are less aggressive. Caving, then, is almost too generous. The pattern of centrist submission suggests either cowardice or dishonesty, with these alleged moderates using the seditionists as cover to advance far-right policies with which they privately agree.

Rubin’s fellow anti-Trump conservative Robert Kagan goes further, arguing that these ostensibly anti-Trump Republicans, consciously or not, are actually aiding the Trumpist cause by insisting on business as usual “even though they know that Trump’s lieutenants in their party are working to subvert the next presidential election.”

Revolutionary movements usually operate outside a society’s power structures. But the Trump movement also enjoys unprecedented influence within those structures. It dominates the coverage on several cable news networks, numerous conservative magazines, hundreds of talk radio stations and all kinds of online platforms. It has access to financing from rich individuals and the Republican National Committee’s donor pool. And, not least, it controls one of the country’s two national parties. All that is reason enough to expect another challenge, for what movement would fail to take advantage of such favorable circumstances to make a play for power?

Personally, I am astonished that any American gives the Republican Party even passing consideration as a viable political organization, or that any candidate can run under its banner without crippling shame. But apparently you can kidnap and cage children as a matter of deliberate policy, preside over the deaths of half a million Americans through sheer malevolence, and try to overthrow the government on your way out, and still demand to be treated like legitimate public servants.

Why do people continue to support this openly neofascist, would-be theocratic party that is openly rife with corruption, brazenly antagonistic to the basic ideals of this nation, eager to suppress your vote, and dedicated to a long-discredited brand of reverse Robin Hood economics that hurts the very people it claims to champion? I know that just asking the question invites withering criticism for being a snotty and condescending “coastal elite.” But the Republican Party did so much damage to this country in so many different ways during the Trump years (we can go back further if need be, but that period will suffice) that no sentient American ought to give it the time of day unless and until it undergoes a radical reformation of a kind it seems unlikely to undertake.

(Update: The actions of the second Trump administration thus far over less than a hundred days bear that sentiment out. By contrast Trump 1.0 was a garden party.)

In a 2022 interview with Al-Jazeera, Noam Chomsky noted that, in the past, he had typically described the Republican and Democratic Parties as merely two wings of the same “Business Party.” But that characterization no longer obtained. The GOP, he argued, had ceased to be “a political party in the traditional sense,” but was now “a radical insurgency that has abandoned any interest in participation in parliamentary politics.” The Party itself gleefully announces it.

So let’s be clear. The Grand Old Party has no business presenting itself as any kind of reliable steward of the public trust, and its efforts to do so ought to be dismissed out of hand. I am not astounded that Republicans are brazen enough to say and do the things they are currently saying and doing: their shamelessness is well-established. But I am astounded that we are letting them get away with it.

DEMOCRACY FOR BEGINNERS

Autocracy in America is not new, and we can learn how to confront it from those who came before us, and who even now continue that struggle. Effective communication and control of the information space are paramount. In that effort, we must commune with our fellow Americans in the smallest possible groups, and work locally to improve life at the most direct level. Finally, we cannot lose faith by fixating on seemingly overwhelming long-term goals.

“Don’t focus on the outcome,” the esteemed historian, novelist, and longtime activist James Carroll told me. “Because if you start by doing that, you’ll be too discouraged to keep going. Focus on the importance of standing for the principle, and the truth, that’s at stake in the present moment.”

Ultimately, the final defense against autocracy is to destroy its appeal. A just and equitable society, where the rule of law is evenly applied irrespective of wealth, social status, race, ethnicity, place of origin, religious faith or lack thereof, sex, sexual orientation, political belief, or any other metric, will be infertile ground for autocracy and demagoguery to flourish. A society in which people feel they have agency, and a proper voice in their own governance, and a chance to make better lives for themselves and their children, is one in which con artist politicians will have only a paltry audience, and where alienation, anger, and divisiveness find no purchase.

But even in such ideal conditions, there will always be outliers, people who admire authoritarianism—so long as it benefits them—and are perfectly happy to oppress their fellow citizens, people who crave submission to a cretinous “strongman” and are ready to exchange freedom for security, or what they imagine security to be. We will never totally eradicate that mentality or its adherents, nor should we imagine that we can. What we should do instead is work to keep that cohort as small and powerless as possible.

I hesitate to suggest that the rise of Trump will lead to anything beneficial, even accidentally. Only a Pollyanna would cheerfully look for the proverbial silver lining here; it’s probably mercury. But the wounds of Trump’s reign have undeniably exposed sobering realities about who we are as a people, about the strengths and weaknesses of our institutions, and about our character as a nation. Those realities have not always been flattering. But they are invaluable.

Unless we act, the problems exposed by Trump’s rise will still be with us decades from now. It is within our power to determine whether he goes down as the anomaly many of us would like to believe he is, or as the harbinger of a dark future for this country.

In the fall of 2023, the aforementioned Robert Kagan sparked something akin to mass hysteria in progressive and centrist circles with a piece in The Washington Post that called a Trump dictatorship a near-inevitability, including a grim, point-by-point litany of how efforts to stop it were likely to fail. Kagan’s goal almost certainly was to sound a wake-up call. But the ensuing depression among liberals risked becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, to the point where numerous other pundits felt compelled to publish responses cautioning against defeatism—including Kagan himself.

The right wing would like us to believe that their eventual triumph is a fait accompli, and that there is no point in resisting. But nothing could be further from the truth. “Authoritarians create a climate where they seem unstoppable,” Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat of NYU told The Washington Post. “Creating an aura of destiny around the leader galvanizes his supporters by making his movement seem much stronger than it actually is. The manipulation of perception is everything.”

The fundamental paradox of America remains the same as it was when Tocqueville visited these shores in the nineteenth century. The first nation on Earth to attempt to form a true representative democracy was also founded on twin crimes: the genocide of its original inhabitants and the abduction and servitude of enslaved people brought here by force to build that new nation. Can a country with that history shed the damage of its past and remake itself to be true to the values on which it was founded and continues to espouse? Can we make a second American Revolution, a slow and nonviolent one that acknowledges and repudiates that blood-soaked past and lives up to the lofty ambitions and ideals of our founders, flawed though they were? Are we going to face at last the sins of our past and the bitter paradox at the very core of our country’s origin, and strive for the ideals we claim to revere, rather than ignore the ways we have fallen short, or flatter ourselves that we did not fall short at all? Are we going to care for the hungry, the poor, the ragged and the hopeless, the motherless children, the broken, the suffering and oppressed yearning to breathe free, the ones filled with righteous anger, the dreamers who came here seeking a new life in a place dedicated to freedom and democracy, or will we turn our backs and prove ourselves hypocrites? Are we going to be true to the notion of a nation founded on the equality of all people, or is the contradiction that those words were written by a slaveholder, however brilliant, too damning?

The fight against autocracy is a long one—eternal, in fact. For a majority of Americans, it has never been a threat great enough to occupy much of our bandwidth. For less fortunate others it is a familiar struggle, generations long. Shamefully belated though it is, it’s time for those of us in the former category to recognize our common dilemma and band together. We must keep up our morale, and never let our determination flicker out, even if it occasionally flags. As the Rev. Dr. Norvel Goff, deacon of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, SC, told me, “Without hope we are just lost. We’ve got to make sure that there’s a brighter light. You can’t curse the darkness—light a candle, and let your light shine, and before you know it, there will be other candles, and when all those lights come together, we’ll bring about a brighter day.”

He smiled at his own eloquence. “You know what? I might use that in a sermon.”

Ultimately, we are not just trying to stave off an autocracy, or resist it should it arise. We are trying to build a true democracy in a form that our country has never fully been able to mount, despite the best intentions of some, the opposition of others, and our collective delusion about how well we live up to the lofty principles which we claim to hold dear. It is impossible to achieve that goal if we are not clear-eyed about the past or the current state of play. The right-wing autocracy that now threatens the republic is gasping for air, recognizing that time and demographics are against it, and is making a final, panicked, ferocious attempt to hang on to power. If we can defeat it and fulfill the promise of the much-vaunted American experiment, we will earn the flattery we regularly dole out to ourselves, and all that poetry that makes our hearts swell. Naively or otherwise, I believe all that is within our capability as a people, even a people who so recently saw fit to elect as our leader Donald Trump.

It’s in our hands.

***********

Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm is available for order directly from OR Books, or online from the usual retailers, or from your local bookstore.

Photo: Comedian Judy Gold and me recording an episode of her podcast “It’s Judy’s Show with Judy Gold” at East End Books in Provincetown, MA, July 2024.

The Reddest Line

Published on April 16, 2025April 21, 2025 by thekingsnecktie2 Comments

Well, the metaphorical ink was barely dry on last week’s blog pondering whether Trump would defy the Supreme Court and go full-blown fascist dictator when we got our answer.

Last Thursday, when the Court directed the White House to comply with a lower court order and “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an infamous El Salvadoran gulag, I suggested there were three general scenarios for how Trump & Co. would respond: comply; slow-walk things for a while and then disingenuously contend it can’t be done; or openly defy the order.

But we found out there was a fourth and even more extreme option: not only openly defy the Court (speaking in a rare 9-0 unanimous decision), but proclaim that even if the Bukele government did return Mr. Garcia to the United States, it would just arrest and deport him back to El Salvador again, which is what White House deputy chief of staff and xenophobic anti-immigrant fanatic Stephen Miller impudently told reporters on Monday.

Many informed observers have long noted that with his openly autocratic, norm- and law-breaking agenda, Trump was headed for an inevitable showdown with the Supreme Court, and that that moment would be the defining one in America’s rapid slide into authoritarianism…..or more optimistically, the moment that slide is moderated. Well, the showdown has arrived, and the verdict is not good.

With Trump’s brazen defiance of the Supreme Court, we have just crossed the reddest of lines. It only took us 84 days to get here, so Hitler still has the record with 53 days, but this is still pretty impressive.

On Substack, the historian Timothy Snyder—currently of Yale but soon to depart for the University of Toronto—wrote, ”This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped.” When the guy who literally wrote the book on tyranny is fleeing the country, what does that tell you?

The silver lining is that this should mean no more think-pieces about whether we’re headed into a constitutional crisis, which have arrived with numbing frequency over the last nine years. In my view, that boat sailed back around 2019 with Trump’s first impeachment, but now its mizzenmast is not even a speck on the distant horizon.

LET’S NOT QUIBBLE OVER WHO IMPRISONED WHO

Now, you may say that the administration is not openly defying the Supreme Court. No offense, but that is the exact kind of semantic game the administration itself is playing.

It’s true that Trump didn’t bluntly give the berobed nine the middle finger live on CNN. But for all his bluster, that’s never been his style, has it? His trademark dissembling, gaslighting, twisting of words, and legal foot-dragging are effectively the same thing, except in that it’s perhaps even more insulting.

In its initial refusal to redress the horrific error of Garcia’s removal and imprisonment in a foreign hellhole, the administration would have us believe that once an individual leaves US airspace—be that individual an undocumented migrant, a legal permanent resident, or even a US citizen, and regardless of whether they were removed from American soil legally or not—there’s just nothing we can do. Sorry: our bad!

Such bad faith has remained at the core of the administration’s case ever since.

So we have the Trump administration insisting that the order to “facilitate” Garcia’s return means only that it shouldn’t stand in the way, not that it is required to take an active role, and insisting that it’s all in the hands of the government of El Salvador. Pam Bondi, bless her heart, said that all the Department of Justice would do is send a plane if El Salvador’s strongman president Nayib Bukele were to release him from CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or Terrorism Confinement Center). Meanwhile the DOJ has filed motions claiming that the judge’s deadline for compliance is unrealistic, insisted that the courts have no power in this matter anyway because it is in the realm of foreign policy, and refused to offer any concrete evidence that it has done a single thing to repatriate Mr. Garcia, even when the lower court judge Paula Xinis demanded it.

In fact, the DOJ has acted in such bad faith that Lawfare’s Ben Wittes writes that he wonders why Judge Xinis—or the Supreme Court for that matter—would trust anything the government says in this matter. After all, the first DOJ attorney on the case, the one who admitted that Garcia was deported in error, was subsequently fired (as was his boss, just to really make the point), and publicly rebuked by Bondi for failing to “zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.” As Wittes writes, “Given that Judge Xinis knows what happens to a Justice Department lawyer who behaves as an officer of the court during the Trump administration, why should she assume that the government’s current filings are meeting those standards?”

Such contemptible behavior by this administration is enough to constitute non-compliance in my book. But Monday’s press event in the Oval Office made that contempt even clearer, in what The Atlantic’s David Graham called “a performance of smirking, depraved, and wholly unconvincing absurdity.”

The event very much recalled the Oval Office travesty involving Volodymyr Zelenskyy last month, except that this time the foreign visitor was part of the theater rather than its victim. As Graham described it, even as the White House continues to insist that it’s all in Bukele’s hands, Bukele himself was “insistent that he was powerless to do anything about a man in a prison he controls.”

Make no mistake: when Trump and Bukele appear together in the Oval Office and jointly announce that Garcia is not coming home, that is open defiance of the US Supreme Court. The rest is kabuki. So this is not really scenario #2 above, pretending to comply, not even temporarily. It is more like pretending to pretend. (“No version of this ends with him living here,” as Stephen Miller said.) Even the WaPo’s odious right wing columnist Jason Willick observed that the White House appears to be taunting the Supreme Court, even as he said that he, too, would have exploited the generousness of SCOTUS’s wording. (Trump is just so awesome even when he’s evil, you know????) As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer noted, the “rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law.”

The argument of DOJ lawyers—echoed by nauseatingly cynical and self-serving others like Vance and Rubio—that the US can’t control or even influence the actions of sovereign foreign nations is risible. We do it all that time: that’s what foreign policy and diplomacy are. The idea that we cannot exert pressure on this tiny, impoverished country is ridiculous, and an insult to our intelligence. Or as NPR’s Steve Inskeep put it: “If I understand this correctly, the US president has launched a trade war against the world, believes he can force the EU and China to meet his terms, is determined to annex Canada and Greenland, but is powerless before the sovereign might of El Salvador. Is that it?”

Similarly, a BlueSky user named Laurie ES wrote that the Trump administration “was somehow able to get the Tate Brothers out of a Romanian Prison, have them flown 2 Florida in a Private Jet & housed on the taxpayer dime, yet they are powerless 2 bring back a GreenCard holder wrongfully deported 2 an El Salvador for-profit Prison.”

There can be no question that Bukele is simply doing Trump’s bidding; he is a paid contractor of the US, having received $6 million in taxpayer dollars from the United States government for (unconscionable) services rendered. The White House could certainly prevail upon him to return Mr. Garcia, if it wanted to. If Bukele says he will not or cannot do so, it is because that is what Donald Trump has conveyed to him that he wants him to say, like a fucking puppet with his hand up Nayib’s ass. But it ain’t convincing. I thought the White House would plead helplessness but I didn’t think Bukele would. What kind of strongman is he, anyway?

But the administration has gone beyond simply saying it can’t comply, or that it’s up to another government: it has argued that the courts don’t even have the power to order it what to do in this case, because it is really a matter of foreign policy, and the judiciary has no jurisdiction in that realm, which is the purview of the president.

Timothy Snyder made short work of that shameless ploy, writing:

On the White House’s theory, if they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal, because it is the conduct of foreign affairs…

If we accept the idea that moving a person from one place to another undoes rights and disempowers the judiciary, we are endorsing the basic Nazism practice that enabled the killing of millions.

DON’T LET THE TERRORISTS WIN

While the administration initially admitted that Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error” (paging Mr. Buttle); its position is now that it was not a mistake at all. Trump, Miller, and others in their circle are now promoting the idea that Garcia is obviously a criminal—they say so!—and not just any old criminal either, but a monster on the order of—wait for it—Bin Laden. (On that front, Bukele went beyond mere criminality and pronounced Garcia “a terrorist,” again without a shred of evidence.) The White House even claims, also without any evidence, that he’s a member of MS13, with which Trump arbitrarily considers the US to be in a state of war, thereby conferring on him wartime-level presidential powers. Speaking of the ol’ GWOT.

But as with many would-be despots, this trope of declaring someone a “criminal” is at the heart of Trump’s autocratic project. (Parallel allegations: traitor, terrorist, pedophile.) During the Oval Office event, Trump was challenged by a broadcast journalist over breaking his promise to abide by any Supreme Court ruling on the matter; in reply he sneered: “Why don’t you just say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country?’,” adding, “That’s why nobody watches you anymore.” The gaslighting continued as Trump turned to Bukele and marveled that his critics want to return a “criminal” to the US. “They’re sick,” he said. “These are sick people.”

That assertion that Mr. Abrego Garcia is a criminal is Fascism 101. Show us the proof, I would say. Because once the label of “criminal” is attached to a given individual, an authoritarian regime finds it all too easy to justify even the most brutal acts against that person, and expects the public to go along, which it frequently does. As a result, the DOJ has also claimed that Garcia’s protected status as an asylum seeker is no longer valid, making him eligible for removal should he return, alive. Hence Miller’s repeated insistence that he is an “illegal alien,” which in Little Stephen’s worldview makes him subhuman and justifies any actions the US government wishes to take against him. (Life’s no fun indeed.) Ironically, Garcia’s current situation actually proves quite the opposite, very much affirming that he had a well-founded fear of persecution in his home country. And of course, there is the final irony that Trump himself is a convicted felon, 34 times in fact, who barely dodged still more and far worse convictions by the skin iof his teeth and massive political and legal maneuvering.

But immigration status is not really the core issue here, because the allegation of “criminality” as a tool of authoritarianism trumps (ahem) passport status. Asked about the idea of sending US citizens convicted of violent crimes to CECOT, Donald himself said “I’m all for it,” and then he and Bukele and Vance and Rubio all laughed about the idea of building more gulags. (The despicable Christian nationalist and mercenary kingpin Erik Prince of Blackwater fame is already pitching the administration such plans.) That’s horrifying enough—and by now we know that these outrages usually start with trial balloons that are initially dismissed as just loose talk but eventually become policy. But if you think Trump & Co. will stop with convicted criminals, or with non-citizens, you obviously haven’t been paying attention for the past decade. Garcia himself—though a legal alien and not a citizen—is a case in point, a man with no criminal record whatsoever, simply proclaimed one by the administration after the fact because that designation suits its needs. From there it is not a very big step to doing the same thing to you or me or anyone else.

I don’t know if the arrest of Mr. Garcia and the ensuing crisis were deliberately planned by the administration or merely opportunistic on its part, but it doesn’t matter because the effect is the same. It is now being used as a blunt and chilling demonstration to the American people to shut the fuck up and toe the line or this is the sort of fate that awaits you. It has become a conscious, pointed effort by the Trump regime to demonstrate to the American people, and to the whole world for that matter, and in particular to any institutions that might dare oppose it (like the courts, big law, the media, academia, Congress, and so on), that it intends to rule with absolute unfettered and unchallenged power and if you don’t like it you can go fuck yourself. Wait, never mind, no need: they’ll fuck you for you and save you the trouble. It is an announcement that if they don’t like you, for whatever reason, and without any evidence of wrongdoing or any nod at due process, they assert the authority to have secret policemen grab you off the street and throw you in a foreign gulag under the control of a despot, the stated policy of which is that you will never return. Migrant, refugee, legal permanent resident, US citizen—it matters not.

In that sense, the Garcia case is even scarier than the Mahmoud Khalil case. The chilling aspect of the latter is that it turns on the administration’s desire to punish someone simply because it doesn’t like their political views—in other words, a free speech case, which is terrible in its own right. But the former suggests that the Trump administration thinks it can disappear anyone it wants into the hands of a foreign despot at will.

In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last writes:

If these precepts are allowed to stand—and so far, they have been—what would stop the government from apprehending a US citizen, putting the American on a plane to El Salvador, and handing him to that country’s government with the expectation of indefinite imprisonment

Certainly if some namby-pamby, woke, DEI lawyer filed a writ of habeas a court might say, “This is very bad. You, government attorneys, cannot do that.” To which the government would respond, “Maybe we ‘can’t.’ But we did. And there is no longer a remedy for this action. We have no jurisdiction over the El Salvadoran government. Moreover, no one in America has standing to contest our actions. Where’s the defendant? I don’t see any defendant here. Do you see a defendant, your Honor?”

(But her emails, amirite?)

To that end, there are several reasons why the administration and its El Salvadoran ally don’t want Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned. For one, it would make him the only human being ever to leave that concentration camp alive, and Bukele cannot have him describing to the world what goes on there. But from the US perspective, there is an even more sinister motive, which Heather Cox Richardson breaks down, quoting the legal analyst Chris Geidner of Law Dork:

Geidner….noted that Trump’s declaration this morning that he wanted to deport “homegrown criminals” suggests that the plan all along has been to be able to get rid of US citizens by creating a “Schroedinger’s box” where anyone can be sent but where once they are there the US cannot get them back because they are “in the custody of a foreign sovereign.”

“If they can get Abrego Garcia out of the box,” Geidner writes, “the plan does not work.”

For that reason, I am very concerned that we will suddenly hear that Mr. Garcia mysteriously died in custody, by suicide I am sure we will be told.

WILL JOHNNY STRIKE UP THE BAND?

How Orwellian have things gotten? This Orwellian: Stephen Miller claimed that the Supreme Court’s 9-0 decision ordering the White House to bring Mr. Garcia home was actually a victory for the administration. Miller actually said that, insisting that “the Supreme Court said that the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9–0 unanimously,” an assertion that Geidner called “disgusting, lying propaganda.” Miller even had the gall to say that bringing Garcia back would be tantamount to “kidnap(ping) a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here.” Joe Goebbels would doff his cap in awe.

All of this is a farce and John Roberts knows it. Whether he will stand up and do anything about it is another story. But perhaps he is fine with going down in history as the most feckless Chief Justice in US history, the one who presided over the final collapse of American democracy, having already overseen a series of decisions that set us up for that outcome.

So Mr. Bigshot Chief Justice: the ball is in your court. Though maybe “balls” is not the right allusion here.

Even if Roberts does rediscover his cojones and stands up to the president, will Trump obey, or will we drift into apocryphal Andy Jackson/John Marshall “let him enforce it” territory? (By some accounts, Jackson did eventually comply with the Marshall’s order in that case, by the way.) If Roberts does not stand up, or even if he does and we as a nation allow Trump to trample over him, any pretense of democracy on these shores will have become a cruel joke.

In a Bulwark piece titled “Bring. Him. Home,” Jonathan Last—who for my money is beginning to rival Adam Serwer as the sharpest political writer in America today—argues that no one from America who goes into CECOT will ever come out. What goes on there, he writes, is “not incarceration; it is liquidation,” and that “is why Donald Trump cannot allow Kilmar Abrego Garcia to return to the United States. And it is why the democratic opposition must go to the mattresses to bring him home.”

Last argues that Garcia is a symbol around which anti-Trump, pro-democracy opposition can and must gel. And he has a concrete plan for so doing:

Chris Murphy and Chris Van Hollen get it. Murphy laid out the stakes clearly yesterday after Trump and Bukele set the Constitution on fire: Van Hollen announced that he will travel to El Salvador this week to seek Abrego Garcia’s release. That is a start. Here is what should come next:

An elected Democrat ought to be on the ground in El Salvador every minute of every day until Abrego Garcia is brought home. They should be in constant communication with the Salvadoran government and should make an endless list of demands. In short: Congressional Democrats should do the job that Justice Department lawyers, in contravention of the Supreme Court, are refusing to do. They should take it upon themselves to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia. Everyone who is not part of the authoritarian regime is a member of the dissident movement now. The sooner they realize it, the better.

In this role, Democrats should give daily updates to the public about their progress. They should make themselves targets. And they should inflict political pain on Donald Trump.

This will require a paradigm shift for Democrats. They will have to act less like an American political party and more like Solidarity in Poland in the 1980s or Alexei Navalny’s People’s Alliance over the last decade.

But they should be under no illusions. The old American order is dead. It ended on April 14, 2025, when a Latin American strongman sat in the Oval Office and discussed sending US citizens to foreign concentration camps with the American president while they jointly defied the Supreme Court.

Everyone who is not part of the authoritarian regime is a member of the dissident movement now. The sooner they realize it, the better.

This is our reality and I do not see how, after yesterday, anyone in America could fail to see it.

GOODBYE (AMERICA THE) BEAUTIFUL

We are in a bad place. On the same day that Trump and Bukele staged their farce in the Oval Office and told the Supreme Court to pound sand, a Trump supporter tried to set fire to Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s house while Shapiro and his wife, their four children, and another family were asleep there after celebrating Passover. For good measure, the attacker also expressed his hatred for the governor and his desire to beat him with a hammer, Paul Pelosi-style. That this stochastic political violence is happening in tandem with the march of authoritarianism within the official system is especially chilling. This is full-blown Germany in the Thirties stuff.

And yet I’m shocked that the Abrego Garcia story is not a bigger “we interrupt our regular programming” type deal, seeing as it’s kinda the end of the rule of law in the USA. As yet another BlueSky user named Max Berger wrote in a widely shared post, “We’ve reached the point in our descent into fascism where the Jewish governor’s house getting firebombed on Passover by a guy trying to bash his head in with a sledgehammer is overshadowed by the story of the President saying he wants to build foreign gulags for US citizens.”

The next step will be to ship a US citizen to a foreign concentration camp like CECOT—perhaps an inmate from the federal prison population, so the administration can accuse anyone who so much as clears their throat in mild complaint of being a bleeding heart liberal who is soft on crime and out of touch with real ‘Merica. And then, after they succeed in doing that, they will do it to a journalist or public servant who has done nothing more than displease Trump, like Chris Krebs or Miles Taylor.

Do you doubt it for a moment? Before the election, I posted a blog titled “How Far Would He Go?”, suggesting that Trump is not beyond a Wannsee Conference type policy. Hyperbole? Hysteria? Trump Derangement Syndrome. Tell it to Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s family.

There’s an anti-fascist Italian folk song from the 1940s called “Bella Ciao,” a new version of which Marc Ribot and Tom Waits released in 2018. It starts like this:

One fine morning I woke up early
Bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao
One fine morning I woke up early
To find the fascists at my door

Those same visitors came knocking in America yesterday. Pretty soon they won’t wait for us to open up.

**********

Photo: Prisoners at the Terrorist Confinement Centre (CECOT) in Tecoluca, El Salvador, March 15, 2023. Credit: Government of El Salvador.

Murphy’s Law

Published on April 12, 2025 by thekingsnecktie4 Comments

So Trump blinked on the tariffs, and then behaved like an arsonist taking credit when the fire was put out. (The New Republic’s Timothy Noah compared it to a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy.) Still, MAGA World continues to cling to the delusion that he’s some kind of genius, while the plutocracy humors him on that same front in hopes of preventing an encore. But let’s be clear: his megalomaniacal recklessness and ignorance briefly wiped out 12% of the market’s value in a single swoop and threatened even worse damage before those billionaire donors and others fired a dart into his neck and clawed back some semblance of common sense. (Jeff Bezos’s new MAGA-friendly WaPo offered this howlingly generous description: “From Tuesday evening to Wednesday afternoon, Trump and his trade advisers spoke to several Republican lawmakers and top foreign leaders who raised concerns about the faltering global markets.”) The long term damage of this intentional volatility remains to be seen, not to mention the possibility of Trump doing it again, or worse.

So all in all, just another example of why it’s a bad idea to have a deranged toddler with the morals of a rattlesnake as your head of state. Who knew?

Whether Democrats will be able to capitalize on the tariff debacle is another question, even though it would appear to be a slam dunk for them. But that party has a habit of smacking the ball against the rim and then falling to the floor and breaking its ankle. For example, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, oft mentioned as a potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, gave a speech last week where she said:

I understand the motivation behind the tariffs, and here’s where President Trump and I do agree. We do need to make more stuff in America….Let’s give more hardworking people a fair shot at a decent life. And let’s usher in, as President Trump says, a ‘Golden Age’ of American manufacturing.

As The Bulwark noted: “We are but humble newsletter writers. But we’re not totally convinced Democrats should be out here offering even nuanced, guarded praise for the trade philosophy that is about to turbo-crash the global economy.” Fortunately, other Democrats—including governors like Andy Beshear of Kentucky, Jared Polis of Colorado, and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania—have taken a more aggressive stance. “Literally all we have to do is point to the fucking disaster Trump is causing. We don’t need an econ 101 lecture ‘well actually’-ing the usefulness of tariffs,” wrote Brian Tyler Cohen, the co-founder of Chorus, a Democratic digital group, in response to a similar equivocation by Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Penn.). “Why Democrats insist on squandering every moment is beyond me.”

But I don’t mean to be negative. Let’s rejoice in Trump’s humiliating own goal, even as we reckon with the damage, and spend this week’s essay on one of the handful Democratic politicians who clearly does recognize the clear and present danger we face, and has been boldly proclaiming we ought to respond accordingly.

DEMOCRACY DIES IN DAYLIGHT, TOO

In the past twenty years, both of the two political parties in the United States have been destroyed. The Democratic Party, the only one of the two still committed to participatory democracy, is in complete disarray and totally dysfunctional. It may yet recover but, per above, at the moment it’s as useless as a lactating bull. Much worse, the Republican Party—whatever its flaws in the bad old days (and they were many)—has gone from being a center-right party that more or less deserved the label “conservative” to a radical, fascist party of theocratic white nationalism. And in case you missed it, that is the party that is currently in control of all three branches of the US government, although only one of them matters anymore.

As a result, at the moment the United States does not have a functional “small d” democratic party.

Among the Democrats, one of the few US Senators behaving like we’re really in an existential national emergency and not conducting business as usual has been Chris Murphy of Connecticut. (I’d include Bernie and Booker in there as well, and Hawaii’s Brian Schatz, my Punahou homeboy, except for his vote with Schumer to rescue the GOP on its self-inflicted debt ceiling debacle.) Murphy has the bland white guy look of a background actor playing a senator in a movie, but he is a firebrand on the order of Sanders—a deceptively anodyne and familiar front that is actually quite useful for the broader public, I would like to think. Murphy has consistently called the Republican crusade out for what it is, insisted on confronting it with bold tactics, and been an increasingly public voice sounding the alarm for the rest of the country.

Murphy believes—as I do—that “we have months—not a year—before our democracy is rendered so damaged that it can’t be repaired.” But there is a bitter irony in play here. At a time when the Democrats’ internal chaos, demoralization, and general fecklessness has rendered them unfit to be a proper counter to the GOP, those very ills have also exacerbated public contempt for them among the very folks that the Party needs to rally to its side, like young people.

By contrast, Chris Murphy is a model of what the Party should be doing to combat the fascist threat.

Last week, in a powerhouse radio interview with The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick, Murphy said:

Long ago, the Republican Party decided that they cared more about power than they did democracy. That’s what January 6th was all about—regardless of who won the election, they wanted to make sure that their person was in charge. They believe, and have long believed, that the Democratic Party progressives are an existential threat to the country, and thus any means justifies the end—which is making sure that a Democrat never again wins a national election.

So, this seems pretty purposeful and transparent—this decision to rig the rules of democracy so that you still hold elections, but the minority party, the opposition party, is rendered just weak enough, and the rules are tilted toward the majority party just enough, so that Donald Trump and Republicans and the Trump family rule forever….And that is, I think, the very concrete, very transparent plan that Trump and his White House are implementing right now.

That is as clear and direct a statement of the current crisis as you are likely to find anywhere. That it is coming from a US Senator is even more surprising and grave.

Murphy told Remnick “that over the last four years, those surrounding Donald Trump put together a pretty thoughtful plan to destroy democracy and the rule of law, and you are seeing it being implemented.” He notes that Trump & Co. have trained their assault in particular on academia and the legal community, including judges and the biggest law firms, two institutions that “are, in many ways, the foundation that undergirds the rule of law…..where people think about the rule of law, protect it, warn when it is being undermined.”

And so it is not coincidental that Trump is trying to force both higher education and the legal profession to capitulate to him, and to commit….to essentially quelling protest. And, of course, what the Administration is doing by taking on these very high-profile institutions is sending a warning to other law firms and to other colleges: if you take us on—if you file lawsuits against the Administration, if you support Democrats, if you allow for campus-wide protests against our priorities—you’ll be next.

Without using this precise metaphor, what Murphy is describing is a Pacific war-style island-hopping strategy, one that has been used in many other autocracies, where “the Administration won’t have to go after every institution or every firm, because most of them will just decide in advance to stay out of the way.”

“This is how democracy dies. Everybody just gets scared. You make a few examples, and everyone else just decides to comply.”

PARTY OF ONE

Murphy describes the Democratic Party as divided between those who think “we should just engage in normal politics—try to become more popular than Republicans” and his own faction, which believes “it won’t matter if we’re more popular than them, because the rules won’t allow us to run a fair election.” To that end, Murphy believes that “everything we are doing right now, both inside the Capitol and outside the Capitol, should be geared toward trying to make Republicans stop this assault on the rule of law and democratic norms.”

The problem with opposing the Trump regime, as The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last recently wrote (as detailed in last week’s King’s Necktie), is that most of the Democratic Party is trying to use methods and a mindset from an earlier era that is woefully ill-suited to the current threat. Like Last, Murphy rejects the idea—common among the sclerotic Democratic leadership apparently—that the party can just keep on “pushing down (Trump’s) approval ratings, and eventually win the 2026 election, and set up a potential win in 2028.” On the contrary, Murphy believes that, “Every single day, I think the chances are growing that we will not have a free and fair election in 2026.”

I’m not suggesting that there will be election officials out there stuffing ballots. What I’m talking about is that the opposition—the infrastructure necessary for an opposition to win—will have been destroyed. No lawyers will represent us. They will take down ActBlue, which is our primary means of raising small-dollar contributions. They will threaten activists with violence, so no one will show up to our rallies and to our door-knock events.

This is what happens in lots of democracies around the world; the opposition is just kept so weak that they can’t win. That’s what I worry about being the landscape as we approach 2026. And, if you believe that, then everything you do right now has to be in service of stopping that kind of weakening or destruction of democracy.

This is a crucial point, as it requires us to re-think how we conceive of a fair election. As I wrote in Resisting the Right:

(T)he jackbooted authoritarian regimes of the ’30s and ’40s are passé these days. In the postwar period, much more sophisticated forms of “soft” autocracy have arisen, carefully cultivated pantomimes of democracy that are no less brutal in many cases, and more treacherous for their veneer of legitimacy: what Moisés Naím, the longtime editor of Foreign Policy magazine, calls “stealthocracy.” These Potemkin republics feature the trappings of legitimacy—fair elections, a free press, commitment to civil rights, limits on the power of the head of state—but in truth employ them only as camouflage while the state maintains tight control of all the mechanisms that would otherwise serve as checks on its power.

That means kabuki elections, where there’s no need for the right wing ruling government to rig anything, because its rivals can’t raise money, can’t organize, and can’t effectively get their message out to inform and mobilize the electorate. As a mechanism of oppression, that approach is far better than hamfisted brutality, especially as it offers the useful excuse that, “Hey, the people voted and this is what they asked for.” Chief among the right wing state’s tools and deserving of special mention is control of the narrative—which is to say, supremacy in the media—which is already the case in the United States.

To that end, Murphy also thinks it’s all but a foregone conclusion that Trump will attempt to stay in office for a third term (and why not a fourth?), or a de facto one by passing the presidency off to a relative, thus keeping the Trump family in power. “If he breaks the Supreme Court and breaks the Constitution and pays no consequence for it, we could ultimately be living in a situation in which the President just declares that he will stay in office.”

ALTERNATIVE OUSTER

Maybe most important of all, Murphy believes that the Democrats’ 2024 argument that “democracy is in danger” failed to find purchase because the party was “shilling for the existing version of democracy—which is deeply corrupt, which does not work.”

Whoa: as noted above, Murphy looks like Charles Grodin, but he talks like AOC, stumping for once-frequently-discussed progressive policies, like campaign finance reform. “Somewhere along the line we stopped talking about reforming democracy, so it became easy for voters to just believe that we were all corrupt, and that neither Republicans nor Democrats were actually sincere in fixing what was wrong with democracy.”

Murphy notes that Trump is so open about his corruption that, maddeningly, he normalizes it: “It must not be corrupt if you’re doing it in public.” It’s a Bizarro World situation, where the absence of the usual secrecy and shame—replaced with boasting, no less—actually serves as a weird kind of absolution. He cites Trump’s “meme coin” as an example of Democratic failure—the idea of an item of merchandise that the President of the United States has for sale on his website that functions, in effect, as mechanism for wanton bribery:

I’m just shocked that the Trump meme coin isn’t, like, the only thing that we’re talking about. It’s probably the most massive corruption scandal in the history of the country. You literally have an—I guess—legal, open channel for private donations to the President and his family in exchange for favors. And we just think that it’s part of Trump’s right to do business in the White House. It’s gross. It’s disgusting. It’s deeply immoral. And the fact that we didn’t talk about that every hour of every day, once he released that coin, was kind of a signal to the country that we weren’t going to take the corruption seriously.

Yet Murphy argues that Trump’s shameless, world-beating levels of greed and lawbreaking (he calls this “the most corrupt White House in the history of the country”) gives the Democrats an opportunity to run on an anti-corruption platform. If they find the intestinal fortitude to exploit it. But it requires courage, and actions that back it up. You can’t tell the American people that the Republicans constitute an existential threat to democracy and then play ball with them as if they are garden variety politicians and good faith actors. Not if you want to maintain your credibility and have the public to take your warnings seriously.

So what does Murphy suggest we do that is different from politics as usual, beyond a fundamental shift of mindset, huge and necessary as that is? In short, he recommends treating a housefire like the emergency it is.

At the most basic level, Murphy supported a full-on Democratic boycott of the recent State of the Union address, arguing that while Trump is destroying every aspect of American democracy, we should not accord him the normal courtesies that normalize and legitimize his actions. Small symbols of defiance announce that “that is not OK.” On a far more extreme and concrete front, he advocated letting the Republicans shut down the federal government and then forcing them to take the blame, as they should, rather than rescuing them as Schumer & Co. did.

This is not just GOP-style infantile obstructionism for its own sake. There is a strategic reason for it:

If the public doesn’t see us taking risks—tactical risks, daily risks—then they are not going to take what will be a risk on their part, standing up to a repressive regime where it’s clear that the government is willing to make you pay a personal price if you exercise your voice.

He echoed that idea in a separate interview recently with Jon Stewart, saying: “I don’t think you can ask the people of this country to do these exceptional things that are going to be necessary to save our democracy if we”—meaning the Democratic leadership—”are not willing to take risks.”

He continues to advocate for Democrats bringing the Senate to a grinding halt by refusing to let the Republican majority bring any bills forward at all, which it is within the minority party’s power to do. (In a similar move, the aforementioned Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii is currently blocking some 300 Trump nominees, Tommy Tuberville-style….except that this is in the service of democracy and not madness.) “(W)e have regularly been providing the votes to the Republican majority to move forward legislation that they care about,” Murphy told Remnick. “We could choose not to do that. We could say to Republicans: Unless you work with us on some targeted measures to prevent the destruction of our democracy, we are not going to continue to pretend like it’s business as usual….If you think that democracy is the No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 story, then you have to act like it.”

So ICYMI, I would argue vociferously that the Democratic Party is in desperate need of more Chris Murphys and fewer Chuck Schumers and John Fettermans. The good Senator one last time:

We desperately want to believe that we can play politics as normal because it’s uncomfortable—really uncomfortable—to play politics as not normal. It involves taking really big risks. And, of course, you just want to wake up and believe that you live in a country where people wouldn’t make a conscious choice to move away from democratic norms. But while some people are being hoodwinked into being along for that ride, others are making the conscious choice because our democracy has been so broken for so long.

So, yes, I believe that there is a chance that we miss this moment. We just wake up one day and we are no longer in a democracy, which is why I think we have to start acting more urgently right now.

POSTSCRIPT: THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT I WISH WASN’T

In addition to the tariffs, this was also a week in which Congress moved forward with yet another tax cut for the rich—even as it cuts programs for poor children—a move that is set to add between $4 and $9 trillion to the deficit, which Republicans perennially claim to care about with near-religious fervor when any Democrat is in the White House.

It was also a week in which the inevitable and long-awaited showdown between Trump and the Supreme Court toward which we have been hurtling appears to have arrived.

With two decisions earlier in the week, the Court seemed to indicate that it was going to continue giving cover to Trump’s neo-fascist project, including the gestapo-like campaign of deportation/rendition, behaving exactly as it did in his criminal cases before the election: stroking its collective chin thoughtfully in a charade of good faith, while using the procedural mechanisms of the system to aid Donald at every step. (On Friday a lower court did likewise in affirming the White House’s right to detain and deport Mahmoud Khalil just because it doesn’t like his politics.) But Thursday’s unanimous unsigned Supreme Court decision in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, marks a change and a potential turning point for Trumpian authoritarianism.

Mr. Garcia is the El Salvadoran-born US resident—in this country legally, with court-sanctioned political asylum because of his well-founded fear of violent persecution in his home country—who was mistakenly/not mistakenly deported as part of the administration’s zealous campaign of sadistic xenophobia. He is now sitting in El Sal’s notorious CECOT prison, from which no one has ever been released as a matter of bluntly stated national policy under the Bukele dictatorship. If the Trump administration defies the SCOTUS order to bring Garcia back—or more likely, drags it feet, or makes a half-assed gesture at compliance and then throws up its collective hands in mock helplessness—we will have taken a giant step toward open, undisguised fascism.

The right wing majority on the Court brought this crisis on itself, of course. After protecting Trump from criminal prosecution for his various crimes, and openly aiding his re-election, and telling him outright that he’s a king who can do anything he wants, it’s rich that that majority is now upset that he is behaving that way and treating them like shmucks. The Garcia case is the first real test of how far he will go.

Depending how it shakes out, maybe people will find that Chris Murphy’s warnings were right on the money after all.

*********

Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Cassandra Awaits Her Apology

Published on April 4, 2025April 4, 2025 by thekingsnecktie8 Comments

We are only two months into the second Trump administration and already it is much more nightmarish than almost anyone forecast, even its darkest and most pessimistic critics, a team to which I usually belong. But we should have learned that lesson around 2018: No matter how bad you think Donald is going to be on (insert topic here), he’s always worse.

For almost ten years now (yes, it has been almost ten years), those of us who were and are alarmed about Donald Trump have been condescended to by the right, the center, the center-right, and in some cases even the far left. We’ve been told that we’re overreacting, that we’re being hysterical, that we have Trump Derangement Syndrome, that we’re letting Donald live rent-free in our heads. (Can we retire that worn-out expression please?) But I’ve never had any truck with that critique and I have even less now—not even a very small one, like a Toyota Tacoma. The events of the past two months would seem to vindicate my position and that of my fellow hair-on-fire, TDS-plagued, brainspace-landlord anti-Trumpers, even if I do say so myself.

The model usually cited for where a Trumpist United States would be headed has typically been Hungary, but now even that is looking far too tame. The Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, among other books, recently noted that Trump is actually moving much faster and more aggressively than Orbán ever did. Viktor took decades to consolidate power in his country and create a so-called “illiberal democracy” (which is to say, not a democracy at all), to undermine the judiciary and the media and other Hungarian institutions with kabuki-like gestures toward the rule of law while actually running a dictatorship. Trump is ripping through those same institutions in America while barely bothering even to pretend.

As just one benchmark, let’s recall Trump’s firing of then-FBI director James Comey in May 2017, early in his first term. I remember precise moment that I got The New York Times alert on my phone, back when I relied on the Gray Lady as my main source of news. It was a shock to almost everyone who paid attention to such things, and it set in motion a huge swath of the events that followed, including the Russia investigation, the import of which has only grown as Team Trump’s fearless leader daily does Vladimir Putin’s bidding with eyepopping openness. But these days Trump does things on the order of firing the FBI director without cause ten times a day as a matter of course, and almost no one bats an eye, or at least has minimal eye-batting time available before moving on to the next outrage. It’s a deliberate strategy of course, and a chillingly effective one.

The Overton window has moved so far, it’s now located in a house three doors down the block.

LITANY OF HORRORS

We have become somewhat inured to Trumpism over the past near-decade, so now is a good time to pause and take in the breadth of its insanity. A good place to begin is by thinking back to, say, late November 2016, just before he took office for the first time, and how we were told he wasn’t gonna be so bad, that we had to give him benefit of the doubt, that America had strong democratic guardrails, and that everything was probably going to be fine. (Probably.)

Now let’s jump to the present and survey the state of play in early April 2025.

We have Gestapo grabbing people off the streets and disappearing them for no reason other than the fact that the president and his allies don’t like their political views. We have senior GOP leaders arguing that the courts have no power over the White House and calling for the impeachment of judges who try to exercise any, and even suggesting abolishing the federal judiciary altogether. We have a billionaire fond of Nazi salutes turned loose in the machinery of the federal government and given carte blanche to destroy it at whim. We have a vax skeptic in charge of public health (and gutting it). We have the Kennedy Center being turned into a temple of the president’s cult of personality and the Smithsonian ordered to whitewash US history to his personal taste. We have Black and female four star generals and admirals being fired because they are Black and female while the new national security team is led by a drunk former Fox News host and other clowns who accidentally text classified war plans to a journalist because they’re using Signal to coordinate airstrikes on Yemen. We have ICE raiding college dorms and universities under McCarthyite attacks for their DEI policies, starved of funding, and bowing down to the White House’s intimidation. We have major law firms being similarly bullied into submission and similarly caving. We have books being banned, of course, and the FBI going after Habitat for Humanity as a criminal organization. We have a robust economy being needlessly tanked because of Trump’s stupidity and ego and not even the plutocrats able to muster the courage to object, unless they’re onboard with burning it all down on purpose. (Whoda thunk that putting a deranged megalomaniacal con man and serial bankruptcy filer in charge of the economy would be bad?) We have Trump destroying NATO and threatening to annex Canada and invade Greenland, while Russia is given everything it wants on a silver platter. We have the social services into which we have all paid at risk of being gutted while Trump prepares to give another massive tax break to the richest Americans, adding another $4.5 trillion to the deficit that the GOP claims to be so worried about (when a Democrat is in office), and breaking the Senate’s parliamentary rules so that Linsdey Graham can wave his wand and pronounce the math all OK. We have the president selling a “meme coin” that functions as a way for anyone with the means—including foreign nationals and governments—to send him untraceable bribes. We have the names and stories of Black Medal of Honor winners being removed from Pentagon websites, and Dr. Oz in charge of Medicaid, and a pro wrestling exec being allowed to shut down the Department of Education, and Laura Loomer telling the president which national security staffers to fire, and bootlicking Republican Congressmen who want to put Trump on the hundred dollar bill and Mt. Rushmore and rename Dulles airport for him and make his birthday a national holiday.

Oh, and all this is happening after Trump stole classified documents, was convicted of 34 felonies, and refused to participate in a peaceful transfer of power instead summoning a violent mob to try murder his own vice president and various members of Congress by way of overturning a fee and fair election.

I could go on, but you get the idea. And now Trump is talking openly—no joke—about staying in office for a third term.

If you had a time machine and went back to November 2016 and told the American people this is what they were in for, they’d have never believed you. Because a fair number of prognosticators did tell the American people that way back then, even without benefit of a time machine.

OF BOILED FROGS AND PERFECTLY ROBUST DUCKS

The frog in boiling water is an apt metaphor, although there have been times in the (ugh) Trump era when the water temperature was ratcheted up much too fast so for anyone to miss. But there is no doubt that we have slowly become accustomed to this madness, so much so that looking back, it’s hard fathom what was once considered normal and what aberrant.

I’ll offer just one more example of how far we have fallen and what we have come to accept as normal, everyday life in Trump’s America. That example is Trump’s post on his Truth Social joke-of-a-social-media-platform last month in which he attacked federal judge James Boasberg, who had ruled that the administration’s summary rendition of hundreds of Venezuelan nationals to a gulag in El Salvador was unlawful.

The content of what Trump did—attacking a judge—is mind-boggling enough. But the language and the tone and the trademark ALL CAPS style is absolutely demented and unthinkable for a US president prior to 2016.

That’s from the President of the United States, y’all.

Last December, before the inauguration, I published a somewhat hopeful blog titled “A Lame Duck on Day One?,” in which I pondered the possibility that, once free of the threat of criminal comeuppance, Trump might be too lazy to do any of the bad shit we were really worried about. Like others who entertained such starry-eyed notions, I turned out to be wildly wrong, grossly underestimating Donald’s appetite for revenge, muscle-flexing, and sheer nihilism. The odious libertarian columnist Megan McCardle noted as much in a recent piece in The Washington Post, where she was sort of obliquely gleeful about it, repeatedly complimenting Trump on blowing through both the conventional wisdom and conventional norms like a superman. The piece didn’t hide its sympathies, titled as it was “Trump Has Been Liberated by the YOLO Presidency” and subtitled “The president doesn’t feel constrained in his second term. Instead, he’s doing as he pleases.”

It’s a good time to be an admirer of psychopathic assholes, I guess.

But that is the state of the once proud WaPo these days. The paper that brought down Nixon now offers the risible spectacle of the ~~pathetic sycophant~~ columnist Marc Thiessen arguing with a straight face that the real lesson of the Signal fiasco (he just calls it a “chat”) is as “a window into the inner workings of a highly competent national security team carrying out a successful military operation on the orders of a decisive US president,” which he contrasts favorably with what he calls “Joe Biden’s disastrous leadership on the world stage.” (Ask Zelenskyy about that.) The big takeaway, he argues, is that “Trump has built an effective team.”

Memo to Jeff Bezos: Loving your new editorial policy!

I’VE SEEN THE FUTURE, BROTHER

Surveying our ongoing descent into fascism and ignominy, the question before us is how much farther will we drop, and can we climb our way back up again to some semblance of decency and democracy?

In a recent piece for The Bulwark called “What We May Forget,” Andrew Egger called back to Phillip Larkin’s 1969 poem “Homage to a Government,” and its line about Britain rebuilding after the Second World War: “Our children will not know it’s a different country.” Egger wrote that, “The damage being done today, the scope of the global cruelty and tragedy, is hard to take in,” speaking of “a slow hardening into the new normal.”

Trump and his allies know that, as they work to build a future that is smaller and crueler, more paranoid and more violent, human nature is on their side. We rationalize the current, block out the past, and imagine something brighter can emerge in the future….

But even if this does happen, that doesn’t mean putting things back together will be simple. Whether it will even be possible remains to be seen.

Getting out of this starts with remembering. It was good to be a country that cared about babies born with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, that was willing to save their lives for pennies a day. It was good to be a country that cared about Ukrainian children torn from their families by a hostile power, that strove toward a future that saw them home. Maybe someday we can claw our way there again—if we remember.

As I’ve said before, if this is how far we’ve come in just two months, it’s hard to fathom where we’ll be in six months, or a year, let alone four years. But it is very possible that the United States will be fatally damaged, perhaps beyond repair…..or at least repairs that will take decades, presuming the authoritarian movement is sufficiently defeated and discredited and the soil from which it sprung salted such that sanity can prevail.

In an influential article for The New York Review of Books called “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.”

published right after Election Day 2016 (and later expanded into a book of the same title), Masha Gessen imagined an alternate history in which Hillary Clinton’s concession speech offered not the usual congratulations to her opponent and platitudes about the peaceful transfer of power, but this:

“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.”

Of course, Hillary would have been excoriated if she had said that. Then again, Hillary gets excoriated even when she pets a puppy. But it would have been the God’s honest truth, and set a tone, and nudged us toward the aggressive mindset that is now called for, one that is appropriate when one’s foes are irredeemable fascists. (So, yeah, I guess I am saying that it’s all Hillary’s fault, isn’t it?)

So as we feel the temperature continuing to rise and our skin scalding in this frog soup, let us try to keep some perspective as to just how low we have sunk, and remember that THIS IS NOT NORMAL. In part two of this essay, coming in a few days, we will consider further thoughts on the beginning of a movement to change course.

********

Photo: Don descends the golden escalator in Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan to announce his presidential run, June 16, 2015. Credit: Tom Briglia/FilmMagic.

Paging Martin Niemöller

Published on March 12, 2025March 25, 2025 by thekingsnecktie2 Comments

An alarming acceleration of Donald Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the United States took place this week when ICE agents went into the home of a legal permanent resident and arrested him simply because Trump and his followers do not like his political views.

That man, you probably know by now, is named Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, who was one of the leaders of the student protests at that university over the war in Gaza. The administration most certainly chose him because it believes he is an individual few Americans would rise up to defend, part of a small and very vulnerable minority (see also: trans people), and one who is easily demonized for much of the general public, even if it requires a wantonly dishonest distortion of (if not outright lies about) his views and activities. But that is how the descent into autocracy traditionally begins.

Khalil—who was born in a refugee camp in Syria and is a citizen of Algeria—quickly vanished into the archipelago of ICE detention centers, with his family and lawyer initially unaware of his location and unable to contact him. First thought to be in a jail in New Jersey, he turned out be in one of the government’s most remote and inaccessible facilities, in rural Louisiana, where he now faces deportation on specious grounds that bode ill for us all. What is happening to him is a terrifying precedent and a terrible omen of where the Trump administration is headed, and what it intends to do going forward.

TRIAL AND ERROR

For the rest of this blog, I feel like I could just repost Adam Serwer’s excellent piece about the case in The Atlantic. But since I’m told by some sticklers that that is not journalistically ethical, I will confine myself to merely quoting big chunks of it. (Happy now, hairsplitters?)

Serwer’s piece described Khalil’s detention as a “trial run,” noting that he was arrested without due process simply for exercising his Constitutional right to free speech. The administration’s feeble efforts to gin up a more defensible pretext are deeply alarming in themselves, as they indicate that Trump & Co. intend to criminalize political views they don’t like and dissent full stop.

Khalil has committed no crime. The ICE agents did not even allege that he had done so when they went into his home in university-owned housing, at night, and arrested him in front of his wife, an American citizen who is eight months pregnant, threatening her with arrest as well.

Initially the agents told Khalil that his student visa was being revoked; when he explained that he was not on a visa, but was a legal permanent resident, they quickly changed their story and announced that it was his green card that was being rescinded. (Revoking the status of LPRs generally requires a hearing before an immigration judge and evidence of specific wrongdoing.)

His removal to a mysterious detention center was predicated on the specious claim that he represents a threat to the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act, a portion of which authorizes the expulsion of an “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” Pretty goddam vague and ripe for abuse, wouldn’t you say? Especially if—hypothetically—some bad actors were in the White House and were predisposed to abuse it in that way.

You know whose views, in my considered and pretty well-informed opinion, REALLY “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”?

Donald J. Trump.

But I don’t see no SWAT team coming to arrest him. (Yet. See: Rodrigo Duterte.)

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin issued a statement saying that Khalil was detained “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism,” and claimed—without evidence—that he “led activities aligned to Hamas.” But the administration has provided no proof of these alleged ties to Hamas, or what unspecified “activities” Mr. Khalil engaged in: ya know, the kind of thing the authorities usually have to produce when they put a person in handcuffs and throw them in jail and then out of the country.

As the blogger John Ganz writes in Unpopular Front:

(T)he law is clear: it’s only unlawful for a person to provide “material support” for an FTO, which is clearly defined as “any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instruments or financial securities, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safehouses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel (1 or more individuals who maybe or include oneself), and transportation, except medicine or religious materials.”

But Trump administration officials have not made any such charges against Khalil. Instead, that deliberately ambiguous phrase “aligned with Hamas” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Serwer:

They do not accuse him of being a member of, fighting for, or providing material support to any terrorist group, all of which are prosecutable crimes. The phrasing aligned to implies that if Trump-administration officials think the views of a green-card holder are unacceptable, they can deprive him of his freedom. How does one even prove they are not “aligned” with Hamas, a subjective and arbitrary judgment that could be thrown at anyone deemed too critical of the Israeli government?

In other words, the administration has bluntly announced that it will find a way to equate dissent with a criminal threat to the security of the United States, punishable under the law. (“Law” in quotes.) This is not a novel strategy for budding authoritarians, which is precisely why we should be alarmed when we see it unfolding. Ganz also notes that Khalil’s ordeal is taking place “in a climate of mob activity and at the incitement of demagogues,” with racist and fascist organizations having specifically targeted him online and encouraging the Trump administration’s actions.

Trump himself bragged about the arrest and incarceration and impending deportation.

The chilling effect of Khalil’s arrest speaks for itself. As Serwer writes, “Trump has styled himself a champion of free speech, but this is what Trumpists mean by ‘free speech’: You can say what Trumpists want you to say or you can be punished.”

Trump has announced as much, declaring that the administration would not tolerate “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”…. The administration is using the power of the state to silence people who express political views that Trump dislikes. And it is worth noting that Trumpists define any criticism of Trump as “anti-American.”

Above all, Serwer warns us that Khalil “will not be the last” to suffer this fate. Indeed, that is the very point of what the administration is doing:

Leaders who aspire to absolute power always begin by demonizing groups that lack the political power to resist, and that might be awkward for the political opposition to defend. They say someone is a criminal, and they dare you to defend the rights of criminals. They say someone is a deviant, and they dare you to defend the rights of deviants. They call someone a terrorist, and they dare you to defend the rights of terrorists. And if you believe none of these apply to you, another category might be “traitor,” the label that Trump and his advisers, including the far-right billionaire Elon Musk, like to give to anyone who opposes them.

Trump’s assault on basic First Amendment principles may begin with Khalil, but it will not end with him. Trump’s ultimate target is anyone he finds useful to target. Trump and his advisers simply hope the public is foolish or shortsighted enough to believe that if they are not criminals, or deviants, or terrorists, or foreigners, or traitors, then they have no reason to worry. Eventually no one will have any rights that the state need respect, because the public will have sacrificed them in the name of punishing people it was told did not deserve them.

See why I saw no need to write this blog, when Adam already said it, and dropped the mic?

ANTI-DEFAMATION FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE

Another sinister aspect of the Khalil scandal is the administration’s cynical claim to be fighting anti-semitism, which is connected to its disturbing equation of unpopular speech with criminal behavior.

The Anti-Defamation League, of all people, which might have stood up against the egregious violation of the rule of law and what it bodes for freedom of expression in America, instead did the opposite, applauding the Trump administration for its “bold set of efforts to counter campus anti-semitism” by “holding alleged perpetrators responsible for their actions.”

To say this view is short-sighted is an insult to the blind. The former US Attorney Joyce Vance notes what should be bleedingly obvious to all but the most deluded MAGA supporters is that “this is not an attempt to protect Jewish Americans from anti-semitism….This is about using anti-semitism to justify unconstitutional actions, and no one, least of all the Jewish community, benefits when a dictator begins to seize people who have not been charged with any crime.”

As Serwer writes, “If there is one obvious lesson of Jewish history, it is that when governments persecute people based on their political views and ethnic background, it is unlikely to end well for Jews.”

This sort of reaction, where a self-styled civil-rights organization endorses depriving people of their basic rights of speech and due process because they find the target unsympathetic, is what the Trumpists are counting on….They are counting on the public deciding that free speech and due process are optional for this category of people or that one, and that they will be safe, as they have done nothing wrong. The Trump administration wishes to lull people into this complacency until it is too late to react….

Despots are always in need of powerful enemies to justify an insatiable drive for absolute power. Where none exist, they will invent them. Mass graves across the world are full of those who believed they had nothing to fear.

Dear Republicans: I regret to inform you that anti-semitism, while vile, is protected speech so long as it doesn’t cross into incitement to violence, which is the standard for defining hate speech. Kinda like your own vile views. Trump can no more sign an executive order banning anti-semitism than he could sign one preventing people from liking Nickelback. (An old and dated dis, I know, but I’m old and dated myself.)

Indeed, it’s rich that a party full of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and other brazen Jew-haters wants us to believe that it’s a great opponent of anti-semitism. Trump’s Vice President is stumping for the AfD in Germany and lecturing EU leaders to embrace the far right; his Secretary of Defense has Crusader tattoos; and his unelected co-president, a child of apartheid (and also a proponent of the AfD) goes around giving Nazi salutes. Trump even pardoned the J6 insurrectionist who stormed the Capitol in a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt with the motto, “6MWE,” meaning “six million wasn’t enough.” So the administration’s alleged commitment to anti-semitism is rather performative, and shamelessly so. Khalil was chosen to pander to Trump’s right wing Jewish supporters even as the GOP carries on its long tradition of Jew-hating, and as cover for it.

(The Trump administration also recently withdrew $400 million in funding to Columbia, accusing it of being soft on anti-semitism on campus, a crippling blow to an academic institution, and doubly ironic since Columbia was actually among the harshest in cracking down on student protests. In that regard, the Republican auto-da-fé of college presidents in December 2023 looks in retrospect like a calculated preparation of the battlefield for what is happening now.)

I have no idea what Mahmoud Khalil’s specific political views are on Israel or Gaza except in the broadest sense, let alone the incendiary accusation of “alignment” with Hamas, apart from the fact that there has been no allegation of actionable material support, let alone evidence of it. None of that matters, though. All that is protected speech under the First Amendment, and as soon as we say it is not, that is the slipperiest of slopes, which as Vance writes, is something everyone should be worried about, conservatives included:

Perhaps your Christian beliefs run afoul of Christian nationalist designations of some sects as heterodox—maybe you’re suddenly the “wrong kind” of Protestant. Or could it be that this week’s attack is against labor unionists, LGBTQ people, or pro-democracy advocates? Once you accept the arrest of a person for no reason other than their speech, we are all in danger.

We already know that leopards are eating people’s faces right now faster than they can digest them, even as many Trump supporters are convinced that his draconian measures—from mass firings of public servants to the obliteration of the public health system to self-destructive tariffs to extrajudicial deportations—affect only the ”bad people,” and will never happen to them. But conservatives, right wing Jews, and others who are unbothered by what is happening to Mahmoud Khalil, or even openly enthusiastic about it, should take heed. Serwer again:

This is what is important: It does not matter if you approve of Khalil’s views. It does not matter if you support the Israelis or the Palestinians. It does not matter if you are a liberal or a conservative. It does not even matter if you voted for Trump or Kamala Harris. If the state can deprive an individual of his freedom just because of his politics, which is what appears to have happened here, then no one is safe. You may believe that Khalil does not deserve free speech or due process. But if he does not have them, then neither do you. Neither do I.

ALS SIE KAMEN

The title of this essay refers to the German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem about complacency and complicity under the Nazis. If it has become hackneyed of late, that is even more reason for us to be alarmed, as that would not be the case in a healthy nation. What is happening to Mahmoud Khalil could not be a more perfect illustration of that dynamic if we cooked it up in a lab. (Niemöller himself was put in a concentration camp, though he survived.)

And the authoritarian movement is not even trying to hide it.

“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

Well, we won’t be able to say he didn’t warn us. Joyce Vance one last time:

This is the moment where we must all stand up for what we believe in. If we are willing to turn a blind eye when other people are at risk, we lose. If we cede our democracy to the Trump administration out of fear—fear that what they are doing to other people, they might do it to us—we lose. There is no reason to believe they will stop; they will be emboldened. For people who believe they have the ability to sit it out without being affected personally, just how much are they willing to watch happen to others while they continue on with their own lives?

A federal judge has ordered the government to not deport Mahmoud Khalil until the court has a chance to review the case: a hearing on that matter is scheduled for today, March 12, followed by an initial hearing in immigration court in Louisiana on March 21. What happens after that will tell us a lot about what is going to happen in the United States of America over the coming months and years. As John Ganz writes, “The state cannot make it up as it goes along. It can’t seize people in the night and invent flimsy pretexts later. And if it does, then we no longer live under the rule of law, we live in a police state. And don’t kid yourself: They will not stop at non-citizens.”

In other words, this is a test, folks—one very deliberately put before us by Trump and his minions. What happens next is likely to be a harbinger of just how fast authoritarianism is taking hold in the United States, and how readily both “the system,” and we the American people, will allow it.

*********

Photo: Mahmoud Khalil speaking to the press in 2024. Credit: Stella Ragas / Photo Editor, The Columbia Spectator

Remarks to the ‘Writers for Democratic Action’ Town Hall

Published on March 1, 2025 by thekingsnecktieLeave a comment

Last weekend I was honored to be invited to speak at an online “emergency town hall” sponsored by Writers for Democratic Action and Books & Books in Miami. You can check out those remarks here.

The topic of the town hall was the ongoing autocratic emergency in America and potential responses to it, a subject I’ve been fixed upon for several years, pre-dating Trump’s re-election, as detailed in Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm.

Writers for Democratic Action is an activist group of—you guessed it—writers, formed in August 2020 to oppose Donald Trump’s administration and to promote the cause of—you guessed it again—democracy during this exceptionally fraught time in American history. Founded as Writers Against Trump by Paul Auster, Peter Balakian, James Carroll, Carolyn Forché, Todd Gitlin, Siri Hustvedt, and Askold Melnyczuk, it is a volunteer organization with a membership of over 3000. Its activities range from get-out-the-vote efforts, to the fight against book banning, to educational webinars with folks like Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), authors such as Margaret Atwood, Ada Limón, and Javier Zamora, and writers and scholars from as far afield as Ukraine and Turkey. (I was privileged to be the guest at one of WDA’s “Democracy Book Clubs” last summer.) Last July 19—the day before Trump accepted the Republican nomination—WDA also sponsored simultaneous readings of its homage to Sinclair Lewis, titled “It Can’t Happen Here—Again,” at 91 locations in 71 cities in 24 states.

I was flattered to be invited to the town hall by James Carroll, who was also my interlocutor at the Democracy Book Club last year. The other speakers were former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky; Harold Meyerson, editor-at-large of The American Prospect; Nancy Rosenblum, professor of politics and government at Harvard; and Gene Nichol, professor of law at UNC, as well as a vigorous conversation in an open forum. The full recording of the event is here.

If you or your friends or colleagues are interested in having me come talk, please DM me. In this fraught moment for America, solidarity with each other and the frank exchange of ideas are essential.

The Limits of Force and the Endgame in Ukraine

Published on February 25, 2025 by thekingsnecktieLeave a comment

Last week’s essay, “Fighting Fascism Isn’t Fun,” spent some time talking about the foreign policy and national security implications of the newly Trumpified United States. This week let’s look at one piece of that in more detail.

Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, I wrote here (and on Consequence Forum, an online journal about violent conflict) about the worrying zeal for military force that had understandably gripped many in the West in response to that brutal aggression. The sheer brutality of Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked attack, and the valor of the Ukrainian people and their leaders in resisting it, were deeply stirring. But the brave Ukrainian struggle also brought out a bellicose wave of enthusiasm for warfighting among many in the West who are usually more reluctant about such things. Predictably, it also elicited a disgusting pro-Putin response from the American right, which lives in an alternate reality where day is night, up is down, and villains are heroes.

Military force was undeniably required to resist the Russian campaign, but the rah-rah cheerleading for it—even among people not usually given to jingoism—and the simplistic grasp of what that entailed, irked and worried me. (Among its risks, it also opened the door for those aforementioned right wingers to justify their own acts of violence when their temporary pacificism inevitably abated.)

When it came to a cause as noble as Ukraine’s, I understood where that aggressive feeling came from, and how seductive it was. It’s very much human nature. But my concern at the time, continuing to this day, is how that justifiably righteous fervor placed far too much faith in the effectiveness of brute force as a tool for achieving national objectives.

To paraphrase a famous Prussian: war is only the continuation of politics by other means. As such, it is not an objective nor an end in itself, and is constrained by multiple other factors in any given conflict.

Now that the endgame in Ukraine—or should I say for Ukraine—is at hand, we see that dynamic demonstrated in its most sobering form.

CARL IS RIGHT AGAIN

The people of Ukraine fought valiantly against their Russian aggressor, dealt him losses and setbacks that few thought possible before hostilities commenced, and for a time—with Western aid—looked like they might even prevail. But with Putin’s vassal Donald J. Trump back in the White House and US aid to Kyiv is about to be shut off, the strategic situation has irrevocably changed. Now we are faced with a completely different and much more grim scenario: a political solution that renders the bravery and physical courage of the Ukrainian people and their leaders moot in the face of a deal between two despots, Putin and Trump. And won’t Donnie be pleased to mentioned in the same breath with his hero.

Ukraine has been at the center of Trump‘s horrific reign for two administrations now. It’s worth remembering that the “perfect call” to Zelenskyy in 2019 to blackmail him over the Javelin missiles that Ukraine desperately needed to defend itself against an earlier and ongoing Russian incursion, in 2014—and Trump‘s desire for manufactured dirt on Biden for use in the 2020 election—is what got Donnie impeached the first time. And of course there’s the whole Manafort/Yanukovych/Deripaska connection, which is tied to Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Trump‘s acceptance of it. Now, in this third presidential cycle in a row, Ukraine again is front and center.

Trump has never made any secret of his venal, shortsighted view that any foreign aid constitutes the US being “suckered.” Twinned with that, ever since his first KGB/Intourist-sponsored visit to the then-USSR in 1987, he has vocally promoted an isolationist foreign policy that perfectly aligns with Moscow’s goals, both in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. (Why he feels that way is a topic for another day, or yet another remake of The Manchurian Candidate.)

Atop that broad selfishness and strategic ignorance, we have the added factor of Trump’s adoration of Putin and despots in general. As Robert Kagan wrote in The Atlantic last month, “Trump himself is no ideologist, but his sympathies clearly lie with those around the world who share a hatred of what they perceive to be the oppressive and bullying liberal world order, people such as Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Vladimir Putin.”

That spells doom for Kyiv—and a painful demonstration of how battlefield success or failure is far from the deciding factor in geopolitical outcomes.

Ultimately, it will be the economic power of the United States—specifically the withdrawal of it—that will doom Ukraine, not military defeat. It’s true the situation would be different if Ukraine had had even more operational success in repelling the Russian invaders, but that too was constrained by non-battlefield factors such as economic and military assistance from the West. One may argue that they are connected, of course, because economic power in the form of money, ordnance, and intelligence furthered Ukraine’s military efforts. Very true—but that is just another way of making my point. All these factors are always inextricably connected. Military force never operates in a vacuum—never. It’s impossible by definition. One cannot untangle military affairs from the broader political context in which they sit.

So now, after three years of courageous self-defense and sacrifice by the Ukrainian people, Ukraine’s fate will not be decided on the field of battle: it will be decided over a conference table, by the US and Russia.

In other words, by Russia.

WELCOME TO THE OCCUPATION

When a Western democracy makes weak-kneed and ill-conceived efforts to mollify a brutal dictator, the specter of Chamberlain and the appeasement at Munich in ’38 is usually invoked. But this is something worse. This is the United States actively aligning with a brutal dictator, and doing his bidding, and sacrificing a smaller democracy on the altar of greed, autocracy, and our own would-be dictator’s pathology.

Ukraine is about to be fed to the lions—or perhaps should I say to the bear?

Trump‘s attacks on Zelenskyy as an unelected “dictator,” (an appellation he refuses to apply to Putin), blaming him for starting the war, threatening him with the obliteration of his country, and faulting his failure to make a deal, are all preludes to Trump throwing up his hands and saying “I did what I could!” as he lets his pal Vlad gobble up an entire country and exterminate its people as if it had never existed at all, which of course Putin claims it did not. Trump is playacting at brokering a lasting peace, but all he’s really doing is the kabuki preparatory to giving Moscow everything it wants on a plate, with only the thinnest pretense of any sort of negotiation. And that should scare the piss out of Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and even Hungary.

Of course, short of maintaining US materiel support, which he has ruled out, Trump could probably not save Ukraine even if he wanted to, which he clearly does not. Kagan notes that Trump, for all his bluster, has no leverage with Russia. Putin knows he does not want to carry on supporting Ukraine, so he has no incentive to fold. Trump has a pair of twos and Vlad knows it. So much for the art of the deal.

I’ve quoted Kagan’s juggernaut piece from last month at length before, and I’m going to do it again, because it’s the clearest statement I’ve seen about the dire state of play:

(Putin’s) goal for more than two decades has been to weaken the US and break its global hegemony and its leadership of the “liberal world order” so that Russia may resume what he sees as its rightful place as a European great power and an empire with global influence….

(H)e also believes that victory will begin the unraveling of eight decades of American global primacy and the oppressive, American-led liberal world order.

Think of what he can accomplish by proving through the conquest of Ukraine that even America’s No. 1 tough guy, the man who would “make America great again,” who garnered the support of the majority of American male voters, is helpless to stop him and to prevent a significant blow to American power and influence. In other words, think of what it will mean for Donald Trump’s America to lose. Far from wanting to help Trump, Putin benefits by humiliating him.

So what will the sacrifice of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people mean? Kagan again:

Putin’s aim is not an independent albeit smaller Ukraine, a neutral Ukraine, or even an autonomous Ukraine within a Russian sphere of influence. His goal is no Ukraine. “Modern Ukraine,” he has said, “is entirely the product of the Soviet era.” Putin does not just want to sever Ukraine’s relationships with the West. He aims to stamp out the very idea of Ukraine, to erase it as a political and cultural entity.

And what will life in Russian-ruled former Ukraine look like? Like this, again per Kagan:

Putin has decreed that all people in the occupied territories must renounce their Ukrainian citizenship and become Russian citizens or face deportation. Russian citizenship is required to send children to school, to register a vehicle, to get medical treatment, and to receive pensions. People without Russian passports cannot own farmland, vote, run for office, or register a religious congregation. In schools throughout the Russian-occupied territories, students learn a Russian curriculum and complete a Russian “patriotic education program” and early military training, all taught by teachers sent from the Russian Federation.

The targeting of children in this crusade is among the most despicable and stomach-turning aspect, not unlike Trump’s targeting of children in the “family separation” policy.

Parents who object to this Russification risk having their children taken away and sent to boarding schools in Russia or occupied Crimea, where, Putin has decreed, they can be adopted by Russian citizens. By the end of 2023, Ukrainian officials had verified the names of 19,000 children relocated to schools and camps in Russia or to Russian-occupied territory. As former British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly put it in 2023, “Russia’s forcible deportation of innocent Ukrainian children is a systematic attempt to erase Ukraine’s future.”

In the best case scenario, then, Ukraine will be a hobbled, war-weary fragment of itself, greatly geographically diminished, and living under Russian dominance. The worst case scenario is that Ukraine ceases to exist altogether, its people are exterminated as a nationality, and its entire culture, language, and history obliterated. Whether or not European peacekeeping forces wind up on the ground is meaningless. (Putin has already denied Trump’s claim that he will accept them.) But any way it shakes out, you can mark my words: there will be no peace in Ukraine, except on terms that are onerous to Kyiv and acceptable only to Vladimir Putin.

THE RAISING OF THE WHITE FLAG

Even if you don’t give a shit about your fellow humans in Ukraine or anywhere else, there are tectonic implications for the US in terms of our relationship with our erstwhile partners in what was once called the Free World. “The divisions between the US and its allies, and among the Europeans themselves, will deepen and multiply,” Kagan writes. “Putin is closer to his aim of splintering the West than at any other time in the quarter century since he took power.”

Some of that damage has already been done, and may be irreversible, as these events in Ukraine come on the heels of last week’s appalling and cowardly American abdication of global responsibility by Hegseth and Vance on their respective visits to Europe, and the installation of Russia’s useful idiot Tulsi Gabbard and the pro- authoritarian Kash Patel atop the US Intelligence Community. No one in Europe or anywhere else will ever trust the US again, knowing that we would elect a government like this that would do the things it has done, and with the threat of even worse.

NATO itself may soon since to exist—can you imagine a greater victory for Russia?—or at least be radically reimagined as a Europe-only venture without the participation of the once-indispensable United States. Remember the “end of history,” per Francis Fukuyama, when the West was triumphant and the Warsaw Pact allegedly consigned to the dustbin of history? Well the loser now will be later to win, ‘cause the times they are a-changin’.

(In fairness to Francis, his original earthquake of an article carried a question mark—”The End of History?”—though his subsequent book did not.)

At the extreme end of this trajectory, ask yourself this: If all US forces are withdrawn from Europe, and Article 5 of the NATO charter is no longer in effect, what happens if Vladimir Putin gets the bright idea of invading Germany or France? Not that he would necessarily do that, for various practical reasons, but just as a thought experiment, imagine that he did. Do you think Donald Trump would send US troops back to Europe to defend our old friends? I can’t imagine that he would.

But such baroque scenarios are not really the point. The point is that after eighty years of active US engagement and investment in global security, Donald Trump is now openly surrendering to Moscow and leaving the planet at the mercy of the worst dictators around, whom he actively admires, and doing it without so much as a shrug. More like a rictus of a smile, in fact.

When future historians write about the last two weeks, it will be the most scalding indictment of the United States and its “leaders” that you can imagine. And even worse is likely still to come.

RETURN OF THE PIRHANA BROTHERS

But Trump & Co,. aren’t just throwing Ukraine to the wolves. (Lions. Bears. Whatever. The whole damn zoo.) They’re shaking them down in the process like the two-bit gangsters they are.

The Guardian reports: “White House officials have told Ukraine to stop badmouthing Donald Trump and to sign a deal handing over half of the country’s mineral wealth to the US, saying a failure to do so would be unacceptable.”

The US national security adviser, Mike Waltz, told Fox News that Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, should “tone down” his criticism of the US and take a “hard look” at the deal. It proposes giving Washington $500bn worth of natural resources, including oil and gas.

Waltz said Kyiv was wrong to push back against the US president’s approach to peace talks with Moscow, given everything the US had done for Ukraine. He denied accusations the US had snubbed Ukraine and America’s European allies by excluding them from talks earlier this week with Russia. This was routine “shuttle diplomacy”, he said.

Yes—routine shuttle diplomacy. “Nice country ya got here. Shame if somethin’ happened to it.”

The Guardian further reports that there are “signs that the Trump administration now considers Ukraine an adversary, and is working against it on a diplomatic level.” Sure looks that way.

So wtf is this “proposal,” contained in a surprise two-page document delivered to Zelenskyy by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a visit to Kyiv last week? In The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum writes:

(The document) calls for the US to take 50 percent of all “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine,” including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure,” not just now but forever, as the British newspaper The Telegraph reported and others confirmed: “For all future licenses the US will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals,” the document says.

These terms resemble nothing so much as the Versailles Treaty imposed on a defeated Germany after World War I, and are dramatically worse than those imposed on Germany and Japan after World War.

The $500 billion figure supposedly is meant to “recoup” the price of military aid the Biden administration provided Ukraine since the 2022 Russian invasion. Where Donald got that figure no one knows. Estimates of how much the US has given Ukraine vary depending on how you calculate it, some as low as $106 billion, but even the very highest no more than $175 billion. (Of that, about $65.9 billion is military aid.)

Comparing US aid to EU aid is also trickly, depending on how one defines the terms and separates grants from loans, but they are roughly on par, despite Trump’s lies to the contrary. Ian Bremmer’s GZERO website reports that “European countries, including the EU, have collectively exceeded America’s support, providing $138 billion in allocated aid compared to America’s $119 billion (though America maintains a slight edge in military assistance). When factoring in additional pending commitments, Europe’s lead increases further. However, nearly 90% of EU institutional financial support consists of loans (albeit with very favorable terms), while approximately 60% of American financial aid has been delivered as outright grants.”

Clear as mud?

Zelenskyy has already refused to sign the document, which apparently would violate Ukrainian law in any event, but he has also offered to resign if that will bring better peace terms for his people. (Again, contrary to Trump’s lies, Zelenskyy is immensely popular with his countrymen, with approval numbers an American president would die for—around 57%. Trump, pulling a number out of his fat white ass, claimed it is 4%.) But that does not mean somehow the bullies that comprise the Trump administration will not succeed foisting this criminal arrangement down Kyiv’s throat.

But it isn’t just the money at issue here; apparently it’s also about Donald Trump’s feelings. The AP reports that Waltz said: “There needs to be a deep appreciation for what the American people and the American taxpayer, what President Trump did in his first term and what we’ve done since. There’s some of the rhetoric coming out of Kyiv, frankly, and insults to President Trump (that) were unacceptable.”

So this isn’t even about policy, or even money—it’s about our infantile leader’s fragile fucking ego.

And what will the betrayal of Ukraine mean for domestic US politics? (The most American question imaginable.) When Donald Trump presides over the violent dismemberment of an ally, sitting idly by while Putin crushes an entire democracy and its people and turns it into a Russian fiefdom, will the American people believe Donald’s bullshit that it was some sort of US diplomatic triumph?

Bobby Kagan doesn’t think so. In fact, he believes that Trump’s entire presidency rests on this decision, and that his chosen path will be disastrous for him as well as for Kyiv:

(Trump) faces the unpalatable prospect of presiding over a major strategic defeat. Historically, that has never been good for a leader’s political standing. Jimmy Carter looked weak when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, which was of far less strategic significance than Ukraine. Henry Kissinger, despite his Nobel Prize, was drummed out of the Republican Party in the mid-1970s in no small part because of America’s failure in Vietnam and the perception that the Soviet Union was on the march during his time in office. Joe Biden ended an unpopular war in Afghanistan, only to pay a political price for doing so.

The fall of Ukraine will be far messier—and better televised. Trump has created and cherished an aura of power and toughness, but that can quickly vanish. When the fall of Ukraine comes, it will be hard to spin as anything but a defeat for the United States, and for its president.

This was not what Trump had in mind when he said he could get a peace deal in Ukraine. He no doubt envisioned being lauded as the statesman who persuaded Putin to make a deal, saving the world from the horrors of another endless war. His power and prestige would be enhanced. He would be a winner. His plans do not include being rebuffed, rolled over, and by most of the world’s judgment, defeated.

AH, BUT THE STRAWBERRIES

In addition to the US surrendering to Russia, and the impending collapse of security alliances that have been a bulwark against authoritarianism for eighty years (while that same vile ideology is on the rapid rise here at home), there are other worrying developments of late.

In Germany, results of the election on Sunday were certainly brow-raising. The neo-Nazi AfD doubled its showing in 2021, to about 20% of the vote, edging the ruling Social Democrats (more or less analogous to the Democratic Party in the US), putting them second after the conservative CDU/CSU. That is by far the best showing for a far right party in Germany since the end of World War II. And—big shock—the Trump administration is openly embracing it. While the conservatives have sworn that they will not form a coalition government with the AfD, and will seek other partners, including the Social Democrats and/or the Greens, the sheer fact that a party like that has jumped in popularity the way it has is extremely concerning to say the least. There is also good reason to fear that the Christian Democrats might break that promise down the road.

At the United Nations, the US voted against a resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and calling for it to end its occupation. In so doing, we joined Russia itself, Israel, North Korea, Belarus, and fourteen other countries friendly to Moscow in opposition as the measure passed overwhelmingly. (China and India abstained.) Please consider the company we have chosen to put ourselves in, and the side with which we are now eagerly aligned. Following the vote, Heather Cox Richardson notes, “On Google Maps, users changed the name of Trump’s Florida club Mar-a-Lago to ‘Kremlin Headquarters’.”

On the media front, there was a Trump-driven bloodbath at MSNBC this week, taking out a huge number of its most prominent top non-white anchors, almost certainly connected to the network’s parent company, Comcast, currying favor with the administration ahead of a hoped-for merger with Charter Spectrum. But that was nothing compared to the DEI bloodbath at the Pentagon.

In the first week of his second term, Trump fired the commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Linda Fagan, because she is a woman, and this past Friday he fired the Navy’s top officer, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti also because she is a woman, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., because he is Black, and let’s not pretend there were any other reasons.

Trump’s nominee to replace General Brown as CJCS, USAF Lieutenant General Dan Caine, is retired, and was a three-star general, not four-star as the law requires, and would therefore need a waiver to take the job. (That won’t be a problem, though, since it’s up to Trump to issue that waiver.) Nor, evidently, does Caine have the requisite command, staff, and educational experience typical of a Chairman, including graduation from one of the senior service colleges like the Army War College, Naval War College, or Air War College. (You can divine for yourselves what it means that his undergraduate degree is from VMI.)

But apparently Caine impressed Trump during their introduction in 2018, when Trump claims that Caine told him “he could defeat the Islamic State in a week.”

“‘One week?’” Mr. Trump said he asked incredulously. “‘I was told two years!’”

“‘We’re only hitting them from a temporary base in Syria, but if you gave us permission, we could hit them from the back, from the side, from all over, from the base you’re right on right now, sir,’” Mr. Trump quoted him as saying. “‘They won’t know what the hell hit them.’”

I don’t know much else about “Razin’” Caine, the callsign (I presume) by which he likes to be known, but that interaction is a bad omen. The idea that airpower alone can win wars is the oldest canard in modern military affairs, dating back to Billy Mitchell and the advent of the warplane itself, and has had disastrous consequences every time it has been tried. But if Razin’ gets confirmed, can look forward to it being applied a lot in the near future.

So now evidently we’re going to have an underqualified Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (to go without our wholly unqualified SecDef) who believes in Curt LeMay-style “bomb ‘em into the Stone Age” warfighting—the same naïve and wishful thinking that would have you believe that force alone was going to be the solution in Ukraine, any more than it was in Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan.

Of course, Trump’s storytelling can’t be trusted. In a later telling, he changed General Caine’s estimate from two years to four, but then claimed that Caine told him that Trump was the only politician ever to listen to his field commanders, donned a MAGA hat (in defiance of regulations against wearing political paraphernalia) and said, “‘I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.’”

All of which Caine denies. (Insert Caine mutiny joke here.)

Perhaps even more worrying than the JCS Friday night massacre was the simultaneous purge of all four armed services’ top JAG officers (Judge Advocate General), the senior military attorneys who would decide what presidential orders are legal or not…..such as attempts to involve the active duty military in the mass arrest, detention, deportation of migrants, or deployment against fellow Americans should Trump invoke the Insurrection Act.

And Caine’s appointment plays into that as well. After getting humiliated in his first term by the courageous Mark Milley, who played a key role in preventing a self-coup, Trump is clearly determined to have a compliant lickspittle in that role this time around. I don’t wanna prejudge the guy before he even gets confirmed, but the initial indicators for Caine are not good. In fact, he looks to be the anti-Milley, which is clearly what Donald wants.

We are in a dark place both domestically and internationally. But the impending fall of Ukraine should remind us that wars are not won with bombs and bullets alone, or even principally, and that democracies must fight in many ways—not just with violence—against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

We are living in a time when there are plenty of both.

*********

Photo: Ukrainian soldier during the battle for the city of Avdiivka, which fell to Russia in February 2024. Credit: Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images.

Fighting Fascism Isn’t Fun

Published on February 20, 2025February 20, 2025 by thekingsnecktie3 Comments

When I was young, and romantic, I used to be dazzled by stories about people who had faced vast challenges and overcome them. Not just heroes, but even the mass of ordinary people who simply lived through epic, Earth-shaking periods of history, whether it was the Second World War, the McCarthy era, the Civil Rights Movement, or going back further, the Civil War, the westward expansion of the United States, the founding of this country, and so on. Times that try men’s souls, as Mr. Paine once wrote. Times of danger, and high stakes, and life-and-death drama.

It all seemed very exciting.

At my age, I am of a generation that has seen a few bold-faced moments of our own: Vietnam, the AIDS crisis, 9/11 and the ensuing wars, the 2016 election and all that followed, the COVID-19 pandemic, and January 6^th all come to mind.

We are in another such historic moment right now, bigger perhaps that any of those, or any that our generation has lived through before, maybe even rivaling some in that first paragraph. It’s a time of an unprecedented test of America democracy, with no guarantee that the republic will survive. Stakes don’t get much higher or scarier than that.

And I gotta tell ya: it ain’t as much fun as I imagined.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight and the certainty of a happy outcome, the struggle to defeat Hitler and Nazism—to take but one very extreme example—seems glorious. But while it was going on, and people were suffering and dying, and the prospect that fascism might triumph and crush all humanity under its bootheel was very real, it must have been…..uh…..stressful.

I do not mean to invoke Godwin’s Law here with that analogy, only to note that we are in a hard slog, the outcome of which is by no means certain. And it’s sure to get worse before it gets better, if in fact it gets better at all. Let’s hope that our children and grandchildren are able to read about it and feel that same vicarious, romantic glow that we get looking back on the dark times that our predecessors lived through and prevailed over.

AMERICA WORST

Of late this blog has, for obvious reasons, been focused on our domestic crisis, but let’s spend a little time on foreign affairs, which once upon a time was my preferred métier, and with which the ongoing emergency at home is unavoidably intertwined.

Pete Hegseth went to Europe and put down his cocktail glass and stopped groping women long enough to announce that the US was turning its back on 80 years of security commitments and to give the EU and NATO and non-aligned but friendly countries a big fat middle finger. To their great credit, American middle schoolers in Department of Defense Dependent Schools in Germany heckled the new Secretary of Defense (cough, cough) and staged a walkout when he spoke. (The White House recently banned a bunch of books from DoDDS schools for being “too woke.”)

I am a product of those schools, where my mother was a teacher, in Germany no less, way back when the Berlin Wall first went up, and it made me proud to see what those middle schoolers and some of their parents did. Why are those kids braver than the entire Republican Party and half the Democratic one too? That’s a rhetorical question, in case it wasn’t sufficiently clear. (Literally old school DoDDS education ain’t too shabby, n’est-ce pas?)

But speaking of craven cowardice, elsewhere on the Continent—in Munich, to be precise, for those of you who like things really on the nose—J.D. Vance had the gall to lecture Europe’s leaders on authoritarianism with language that sounded better in the original Russian. Then to top it off, and in case anyone missed the neo-Nazi point, he met with the leadership of the odious far right AfD party, already poised to make big gains in the German elections next week, and to praise it.

Who’s gonna tell the Greatest Generation—those very GIs who fought the world war that I referred to at the top of this piece—that we switched sides? Sorry about that whole “please invade Normandy” thing, fellas. Turns out we prefer the fascists to be in power after all.

What else? Oh, a Russian stooge was confirmed as Director of National Intelligence. (That sound you hear is Champagne corks popping in the Kremlin.) Way over yonder in the monarchy, Secretary of State Marco “L’il Marco” Rubio was in Riyadh to see what Crown Prince Mohammad Bonesaw Salman wants us to do. Of course, that’s a complicated triangulation with what Vladimir Putin wants us to do. It’s hard to have lot of different masters we’re beholden to, people.

And last but not least, the draft dodging, twice-impeached, 34 times-convicted felon Don Trump himself sold Ukraine down the river, barring it from “peace talks” (more like mobsters carving up newly acquired turf) about its own future, as well as—similarly mobster-like—demanding Versailles-dwarfing protection money, blaming Kyiv for being invaded by Russia, and calling Zelenskyy a “dictator” who “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.”

Sheesh.

All in all it was one of the worst weeks for American foreign policy in recorded history.

I have long been critical of US military misadventures abroad. It’s a topic near and dear to me. But what we are seeing now is not a welcome antidote to that by any measure. On the contrary: it is a tragic error just as wrongheaded in its own way, and ironically, driven by the same venal and arrogant nationalism. Because in the end, isolationism is just interventionism’s equally evil twin.

The United States’s abdication of its essential role as the indispensable nation (I did not say “exceptional”), a role that it has played since 1942, is a world-rattling shift, and not in a good way. For all America’s flaws—not something MAGA cops to, or that figure in its calculus—withdrawing from engagement with the rest of the world like this does nothing but cede power to the Putins, Xis, Erdogans, Bibis, Orbans, and Kims of the world, vile company that Donny is of course desperate to join. It further imperils the already imperiled cause of liberal democracy the world over, and it consigns beleaguered peoples like those of Palestine and Ukraine and elsewhere to something that can without exaggeration be called extermination, if not the dreaded “g” word.

And it makes me ashamed of my passport.

THIS WEEK IN SHINY OBJECTS

So that’s the wider world. But maybe things were better here at home?

LOL. It’s good we can laugh, right?

Here in the land of round doorknobs, Musk’s hostile takeover of the mechanisms of the US government continues, even as his figurehead partner carries on establishing a white nationalist regime.

The notion that Musk is curbing waste is laughable on its very face when Trump is firing inspectors general and DOGE is slashing nutrition programs for poor children (to name just one of its highlights). This week we learned that Musk wants to get into the weeds of the IRS, as The Washington Post reports that DOGE “is seeking access to a heavily-guarded Internal Revenue Service system that includes detailed financial information about every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country, according to two people familiar with the activities, sparking alarm within the tax agency.” Can you imagine if a Democratic administration wanted the IRS to give this kind of access to a bunch of unelected twentysomething staffers under the control of a billionaire in its camp?

In a piece for The New York Times called “Elon Musk’s Business Empire Scores Benefits Under Trump Shake-Up,” Eric Lipton and Kirsten Grind reported that there are “at least 11 federal agencies that have been affected” by Trump’s attack on the federal government, agencies that have “more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies.” Those companies include Tesla; SpaceX and its subsidiary Starlink; Neuralink, the AI startup XAI; the Boring Company (which is a tunneling venture); and of course, the Gulf of MeXico, Formerly Known as Twitter. Edsall adds that, “In addition, the federal government has awarded contracts with a total value of $13 billion over the past five years to Musk companies, Lipton and Grind found, most of which went to SpaceX, making it “one of the biggest government contractors.”

And now Musk even wants to be let into Ft. Knox. (And I thought Ian Fleming was dead.)

Responding to polite inquiries about what the fuck this Boer douchebag is up to, the White House risibly claimed that Elon Musk is just an unofficial advisor with no authority, and not even an actual employee of DOGE (which it can’t definitively say is or is not a federal agency or what). Man, I was born at night, but guess what? Wasn’t last night.

Trump/Musk, of course, claim they are only carrying out the will of the people. At a White House briefing last Wednesday, Elon defended what DOGE is doing by saying, “If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected officials in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.”

Irony, thou hath an Afrikaaner accent.

The New York Times’s Thomas Edsall asks, “How, then, does granting one man, a very rich man, unchecked power to reconfigure the federal government from the ground up get to be described as democratic?” He then gives us Musk’s answer, as delivered at a White House press event this week:

“We have a majority of the public vote voting for President Trump. We won the House. We won the Senate….The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get. They’re going to get what they voted for…..And that’s what democracy is all about.”

We have already discussed in previous blogs that Trump’s claim of a mandate is both mathematically false and willfully deceptive. (I know, it’s hard to believe, right?) But even beyond that, the idea that an unelected outsider—who also happens to the world’s richest man, with a pronounced affinity for far right wing politics and massive federal contracts—is going in and taking control of the machinery of government with no legal authority to do so, and almost no transparency to what he is doing, is the very opposite of democracy.

The Guardian quotes Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island):

“I think their claims that they’re going after waste, fraud and abuse is a complete smokescreen for their real intentions”……Likening Trump’s firing of the IGs to “firing cops before you rob the bank,” Whitehouse stressed: “It’s pretty clear that what’s going on here is a very deliberate effort to create as much wreckage in the government as they can manage with a view to helping out the big Trump donors and special interests who find government obnoxious in various ways.”

That is it exactly. All this zone-flooding-with-shit is ultimately in the service of distracting us from the giant tax break the GOP is about to give the richest 1% of Americans, to the tune of about $4.5 trillion, “justified” on the money saved/not really saved by cutting programs for poor children.

You know, I am beginning to regret voting for Elon.

AND HE SHALL BE ELON

So what exactly is going on here? In that same issue of the New York Times, Thomas Edsall neatly summarized the state of play in a piece called, “Elon Musk Is Leading a ‘Hostile Takeover of the Federal Government’.” Laurence Tribe, emeritus professor of constitutional law at Harvard, told Edsall:

“I can think of no precedent in American history of such enormous power being entrusted to a private citizen.

To say that this delegation of unsupervised authority by President Trump to Elon Musk is an unprecedented violation of the appointments clause of Article II of the Constitution, which at a minimum would demand the Senate’s advice and consent to the appointment of anyone exercising the kind of power, would be an understatement.”

Michael Dorf, a constitutional scholar who is a professor of law at Cornell, told Edsall that the authority given to Musk is “truly unprecedented in US history.”

By way of comparison, opposition parties have occasionally raised substantial objections when even a small amount of power was given to persons who held no official office: think about the Republican reaction to the essentially advisory role that Hillary Clinton had in the formulation of health care reform in her husband’s administration.

Or consider the concerns raised by many Democrats when Dick Cheney (who was the elected VP at the time) was meeting with private industry leaders to help formulate energy policy during the George W. Bush administration. Yet Hillary Clinton and the industry captains with whom Cheney met held only advisory power. By contrast, Musk appears to be formulating and executing policies.”

Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, speculated to Edsall that Trump is empowering Musk as payback for what he did to get him re-elected, and/or “for future financial assistance with Trump’s legal difficulties.” He also suggested that “having Musk do the dirty work” will let Trump be the good cop when it comes time to negotiate some of the more extreme measures. (I am not sure that is going to happen, but let’s hope.)

Brooke Harrington, a sociologist at Dartmouth, has been studying wealth, power and the rise of oligarchs since the turn of the century. In a phone interview, told Edsall “that a tech broligarchy has effectively bought the presidency.”

Trump gets to be chairman of the board, cut the ribbons in day-to-day ceremonies, while control of the structure of government is left to them, in what amounts to a hostile takeover of the federal government.

Speaking to Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” the night after Trump’s inauguration, Harrington compared Putin’s relationship with his oligarchs to Trump’s with his own wealthy patrons who propelled him back into the White House:

“At least Putin has a red line with his oligarchs. The grand bargain was that he was going to let them get rich on condition that they kept their noses out of his political business. At most, they would be his errand boys. What Trump has done is so extraordinary. He doesn’t have that bright line with the new oligarchs of America at all. He basically said, ‘You bought it. Do what you want’.”

Even some on the right are unhappy with what’s going on. In a January 13 interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, Steve Bannon called Musk “a truly evil person. Stopping him has become a personal issue for me.” Wow, it’s a rare day when I agree with Steve Bannon. (Other than that, it’s mostly just our mutual love of field jackets.)

Yet even as he’s at odds with the far right wing of the American GOP, Musk is somehow managing to cozy up to the far right in other countries, the ideological brethren of the racists who ran the apartheid-era South Africa in which he was raised. Speaking to an AfD rally via pre-recorded video, Musk told the young brownshirts: “I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” adding: “It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” He added that there has been “too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that.”

Still think that wasn’t a Nazi salute he gave? The man is openly courting the connection. Musk is even to the right of Nigel Farage, who has bristled at Elon’s ideas for his Reform UK party.

Edsall writes:

Musk’s engagement with these parties suggests….that his agenda at DOGE is at least as much about being partisan and radically conservative as it is about cutting spending or increasing efficiency. His targets, so far, have been liberals in the federal work force, particularly those involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and such federal programs as consumer protection and foreign aid that draw workers, in the main, with liberal views. Musk, then, is in charge of a campaign to purge left-leaning or liberal government initiatives, with little or no regard to legal or constitutional constraint.

WHEN PUSH COMES TO SHOVE

So far, the most significant push back to what Trump and Musk are doing has come from the federal courts, which Robert Reich calls our “last defense.” That is also why the White House and its allies have begun shamelessly attacking them.

Calling Trump “the most lawless president in American history,” Reich writes in The Guardian:

But the big story here (which hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves) is that the Trump-Vance-Musk regime is ignoring the courts. On Sunday, J.D. Vance declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” This is bonkers. In our system of government, it’s up to the courts to determine whether the president is using his power “legitimately”, not the president.

Vance, a Yale Law School graduate who clearly knows better, also told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “If the Supreme Court said the President of the United States can’t fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling, and the president has to have Article II prerogative under the constitution to actually run the military as he sees fit.”

It’s a nonsensical analogy, as it’s premised on the Court making a plainly unconstitutional and incorrect ruling. One might as well say, “If the Supreme Court said the head of state is really Ryan Seacrist, the President has the prerogative to ignore it.” As Reich writes, what Vance really means is, “if the US Supreme Court rules against Trump on an important issue, there’s a fair chance the Trump-Vance-Musk regime will thumb their nose at it.”

They are already at it. Just last week, federal judge John McConnell Jr. expressly declared that the Trump White House is disobeying his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, alleging that the administration is openly defying the “the plain text” of his edict. The previous week, US district judge Loren AliKhan reprimanded the OMB for disregarding a similar order.

So yes, we should take heart that there have been such orders, and others from federal judges like Paul Engelmayer and John Coughenour denying DOGE access to the US Treasury Department’s payment and data systems, and blocking the executive order ending birthright citizenship, as well as lawsuits from sanctuary cities and counties challenging Trump’s executive order on that front, and from state attorney generals led by New York’s Letitia James. But we should not kid ourselves that they will stop Trump, who is quietly—and not so quietly—ignoring rulings invalidating his actions.

Undoubtedly we are on the road to a showdown at the Supreme Court, where, to quote Woody Hayes, only three things can happen and two of them are bad.

The Trumpified Court might have his back (as it did when it was asked “Is Trump a king?”), or,
The justices rebuff him and he defies them.

Possibility No. 3, the idea that the Court remembers what it learned in law school and upholds the Constitution, remains a longshot.

IS DONALD TRUMP GOOD OR BAD? THE JURY IS STILL OUT, PEOPLE

Despite all this, the center-right MSM (let alone media outlets even further right) continue to treat Convicted Felon Donald Trump like a conventional politician—rather than a terrorist and aspiring despot—and give his proposals credibility they don’t remotely deserve.

We see it from The Wall Street Journal (“Peace in Ukraine Needn’t Mean Russian Victory”) to The Economist (“Will Donald Trump and Elon Musk Wreck or Reform the Pentagon? America’s Security Depends Upon Their Success”). That last one cannot be a serious question, of course, and just asking it makes it impossible to view The Economist any longer as a serious magazine. Next week: Are Trump and Musk going to serve poor people at a soup kitchen next Thanksgiving, or will they be lighting cigars with US citizens’ Social Security checks? No one knows!

Of course, the WSJ has gone even further in it drooling subservience to Trump, like its recent piece “Did Trump Just Win a ‘Tectonic’ Election?,” in which the Princeton historian Allen Guelzo—also an ordained minister and harsh critic of the 1619 Project—muses that Donald could wind up in the company of FDR or even Lincoln. And we need not even get into the bootlicking Republican politicians who want to make his birthday a national holiday (an honor accorded to—hang on, lemme count—zero other US presidents), or put him on Mt. Rushmore, or rename Dulles Airport for him.

Even The Atlantic has gotten into the act. It ran an article recently with the infuriating headline “How Progressives Broke the Government,” which leads one to believe it is yet another piece blaming the left for the right wing nightmare we’re in. In fact, it’s mostly a discussion of turn-of-the 19th-century Teddy Roosevelt-era Progressivism…..and even when it does turn to today, its ultimate critique is that small “p” progressives have been too timid, too willing to bow to the less-government-not-more mindset of conservatism. So in that regard it’s really a critique of the right. So the headline is the worst of it, but the piece itself is also sketchy in its desire to be transgressive. It even includes the classic journalistic CYA trope of “to be sure,” comme ça: “Conservatism, of course, hasn’t been helpful in making government more effective.”

Oh, is that so?

Give me a fucking break. We will continue to be in this mess as long as the journals that the chattering class reads busy themselves with this tripe. It’s bad enough that allegedly respectable conservative ones like the WSJ and Economist do.

Despite the navel-gazing solipsism of the MSM, we keep hearing that the American people will soon begin to feel the pain from Trump’s actions—that is to say, from both the things he has lied about, like lowering the price of eggs. and the things he didn’t, like his plan to destroy the federal government as we know it. But for now, Trump is still in the mode of blaming Biden and Buttigieg for air disasters that happened on the GOP’s watch (a fourth one this week, an American flag carrier, though it crashed in Toronto) even as it was in the process of gutting the FAA. And I don’t see barricades going up in the streets.

Is all this very dramatic, very grave, very profound? It is. And I wish it wasn’t upon us, and I could devote all my time to “Seinfeld” trivia and fantasy football and re-organizing my record collection alphabetically by recording engineer. Sadly, none of us have that luxury right now.

We all know the famous curse, “May you live in interesting times”—often (but apparently erroneously) said to be an old Chinese proverb. But I never truly appreciated it until now.

*********

Photo: Two American GIs of the 79th Infantry Division after a battle in the Bien Woods, near Lauterberg, France, December 20, 1944. Photographer unknown.

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