“Donald Trump lashes out” is not always a newsworthy headline. But recent reporting from inside the UFC-festooned White House suggests that our commander in chief has somehow reached a new level of raging petulance. “He’s pissed, and people are not recognizing the level of pissed that he is,” is how one rattled White House ally put it to Politico.

What’s set Trump off is what always sets him off: the manifest failure of even today’s invertebrate Republican Party to carry out every self-glorifying iota of his bidding. His most recent tantrum concerned the reluctance of GOP lawmakers to sign off on his batshit nomination of Bill Pulte to head the Directorate of National Intelligence—a move that Trump was forced grudgingly to reverse on Thursday.

Not that that’s cause for much celebration. Trump’s new nominee is former Securities and Exchange commissioner and current US attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton—who, like Pulte, possesses zero intelligence experience and is also a practiced Trump bootlicker, having cheered the president’s $1.8 billion slush fund for January 6 rioters and his unhinged conspiracy theories about election fraud in California.

True, this post-9/11 sinecure is so inconsequential in the cabinet that it initially went to Tulsi Gabbard (for whom the agency’s acronym stood for “do not invite,” per Oval Office gossip hounds). Yet even so, both Pulte and Calyton were (and are) stunningly unqualified nominees for the post, which under law requires directors to have the kind of intelligence experience that both men conspicuously lack.

Pulte in particular was horrifyingly ill-suited to the job. As the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), his chief specialty was to go after public figures on Trump’s ever-expanding enemies list, such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, with content-challenged accusations of mortgage fraud. As intelligence chief, Pulte would have been empowered to carry out a far wider range of ideological vendettas against anyone who might flit across the president’s grievance-addled brainpan. His nomination was so egregious that even the Trump-appeasing Senate majority leader John Thune greeted it with stunned disbelief. “We don’t need a weaponized DNI,” Thune said to a group of reporters. “We need professionals there. If [Pulte] is someone we want in that position permanently, he’s got a lengthy road ahead of him.”

Translated from Capitol Hill–ese, that was a direct message to Trump that the nomination was a nonstarter. But of course the very qualities that make Pulte wildly unfit for a sensitive security post are exactly why Trump wanted him there. His willingness to fabricate baseless assaults on Trump’s political enemies at FHFA was a signal that he’d gladly turn the country’s intelligence operations into a glorified cottage industry of MAGA-branded retribution. (Gabbard, who had eagerly abased herself and, if such a thing is possible, further discredited the country’s spook complex by launching a plainly bogus and likely illegal investigation into Georgia’s voting systems as part of Trump’s bottomless 2020 election vendetta, can now only look on in professional envy.)

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It’s not hard to work out why Trump is selecting characters like Pulte and Clayton to oversee national intelligence. As he fends off record-low approval ratings, a growing defection from his heartland MAGA base over his ruinous economic record, and the stench from the deepening quagmire of his disastrous war in Iran, score-settling remains the only part of his agenda he still has a handle on. So when House Speaker Mike Johnson—another reliable Trump suck-up who’d been forced to acknowledge that the Pulte nomination was dead in the water—begged Trump to pull the nomination in order to expedite passage of the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) ahead of its expiration on Friday, Trump instead stepped up his public effort to get the party behind Pulte. Another unnamed GOP staffer told Politico that his rejection of Johnson’s overtures was “a middle finger to Congress.” And oddly enough for an institution mostly operating on brain-dead autopilot throughout this Trump term, Congress responded in kind; the House voted down a Trump-endorsed last-minute plan to re-up FISA.

Given the kind of unhinged power that FISA would deliver into a DNI run by MAGA lackeys, one can scarcely mourn this turn of events. Yet the bigger picture here is quite instructive, and speaks volumes about what we might call the Roy Cohn phase of the Trump presidency: In order to install a political hit man in the country’s top spying post, the White House is treating the operations that the DNI oversees as a complete afterthought. It’s a bit like telling Trump’s Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh, that he’ll have no control over the money supply—something that’s also not too outlandish to rule out in Trumpworld.

Cohn, of course, was the former legal henchman for Joe McCarthy, and Trump’s first political mentor. He taught the young real estate heir to never admit he was in the wrong and to pursue vicious public campaigns of reprisal against an expanding roster of enemies, along with more practical life hacks Trump took to heart, such as consistently stiffing your creditors. Cohn’s legacy of brutal score-settling is the clear through line in this Trump White House, from the recent proposal to crack down on press leaks by forcing nondisclosure agreements on employees of the federal government to Trump’s “revenge tour” set of primary endorsements to dislodge sitting GOP lawmakers he holds grudges against, like Kentucky House Representative Thomas Massie and Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas. (Indeed, another source of Trump’s seething rage against the GOP establishment is his failed endorsement of Iowa gubernatorial hopeful Randy Feenstra, in a farm state lately souring on the MAGA economic agenda.) The president’s insatiable appetite for payback is also the obvious driving force behind the January 6 $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” that he refuses to scuttle even though both congressional Republicans and his lickspittle acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, have backed away from it. (It says something about how very prostrate Blanche is in his other official duties that Trump has also nominated him to the office permanently in another power play that congressional Republicans are leery of.)

The problem with a vendetta-first approach to governance is that a Caesarist figure like Trump is prone to mistake his own grievances for the vox populi. To take one obvious example of this delusive counter-logic, Trump muscled aside an eminently electable figure like the Senate incumbent Cornyn in favor of Texas Attorney Ken Paxton—a squalid character so widely loathed in Texas that even the lawyer who defended him on corruption and impeachment charges over the past decade has endorsed his Senate opponent James Talarico. The same brand of imperial folly surfaced when a reporter asked Trump about the dismal new inflation numbers from May—the highest spike in prices over the past three years. “I love the inflation,” the president shot back, adding that prices “would come down like a rock” after the resolution of the Iran War. The stupefying exchange will doubtless appear in a tsunami of Democratic attack ads between now and the November midterms, as Exhibit A in the case that Trump is terminally out of touch with the struggles of ordinary Americans. That is certainly true enough, but the no-less disturbing truth here is that such considerations simply don’t matter to a president who can only see the common weal as the prime outlet for his wish fulfillment fantasies. In Trump’s funhouse-mirror version of reality, inflation matters only as something that will eventually deliver him better polling numbers.

This is also why, as a beleaguered GOP Congress staggers toward its remaining emergency fiscal votes, Trump is once more trying to ram through another unworkable reconciliation bill to bypass the Senate filibuster. (He’s also pressed Thune to nuke the filibuster itself, to no avail.) Trump wants to use this bill to revive his pet voter-suppression measure, the SAVE act, even though the Senate parliamentarian has previously, and correctly, ruled that the insane provisions of the legislation don’t have any material impact on the budget—the key threshold for any reconciliation vote. (Has Trump also pressured Thune to shitcan the Senate parliamentarian, again to no avail? Check, and check again—though in that case the pertinent thought crime was a similar ruling against plans to fund Trump’s hideous, outsize White House ballroom in the building’s former East Wing.) He also wants another $350 billion to continue funding the fiasco in Iran, which now appears to be on the verge of turning into a ground war.

The SAVE act itself is pure vendetta politics, since it seeks to address a nonexistent epidemic of voter fraud that in Trump’s megalomaniacal reveries represents the only possible explanation for his 2020 election defeat. Put another way, Trump is using his maximal executive powers to bully Congress into seeing all his vindictive fantasies through to the bitter end. It’s tempting to see the grim makings of Greek tragedy in this purblind model of governance as payback—but there’s far too much farce in the Trumpian ego to sustain any such analogy. A better life lesson can be drawn from the life story of Roy Cohn, who died alone, friendless, and closeted at the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1986, just weeks after the New York State Supreme Court disbarred him for unethical conduct. Revenge may be all that matters to Donald Trump now, but karma may well have other plans in store for him.

When President Donald Trump abruptly broke off his interview with NBC White House correspondent Kristen Welker on Meet the Press, the consensus among the commentariat was that Trump was once more acting out of hair-trigger pique and poor impulse control. The exchange “was explosive” and “heated”; the aggrieved president “stormed off” into a cloud of paranoid conspiracy theories about the media’s collusion with Democratic-engineered election theft.

Such accounts fit a common template of coverage during Trump’s second term: The president, never an avatar of calm, reasoned judgment, is increasingly in thrall to wild mood swings and tantrums—when, that is, he’s not falling asleep on the job after a late-night bout of online shit-posting.

Yet there’s always been ample calculation in Trump’s shows of grievance and outrage, and Sunday’s performance was no exception. It’s important to underline this given the context for Trump’s outburst: Welker’s insistence that Trump’s multiple allegations of rampant election fraud carried out by his political opponents have no basis in fact. In grouping this under the vague and ever-pliant heading of “Trump unhinged,” our keepers of public discourse are repeating the miscalculation that they made in the run-up to the failed coup attempt on January 6: By failing to account for Trump’s theatrics as anything more than the latest flourish from an old man predisposed to shouting at a cloud, they’re missing the urgent and disturbing effort to discredit an election that will serve as a referendum on Trump’s performance.

To grasp this point, we must pan back from the decontextualized presentation of “takeaways” from Trump’s interview with Welker and consider the full exchange. Trump’s belligerent replies to Welker’s correction of his false election claims came near the end of a 40-minute interview, which proceeded along remarkably equable lines—especially by the standards of Trump’s usual run-ins with mainstream press reporters, particularly those who are women.

More than half of the sit-down was devoted to Trump’s assessment of the Iran War and prospects for an agreement to end the conflict; seeming to relish the role of a diplomatic power broker, Trump described what he considered the successful US campaign to “decapitate” the leadership of the Iranian regime and to lay waste to its military resources. He also claimed, for the umpteenth time, that the United States is on the verge of a lasting peace deal with Iran—while also holding out the prospect that he could unilaterally bomb the country into submission. After claiming to have masterfully maneuvered Iran’s leaders into the framework of an agreement, he said they would sign “or I’m gonna blow the hell out of them.”

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This was all Trump’s usual fact-challenged bluster about his handling of the war, but apart from a stray swipe at opinion polling (“They’re all fake polls, especially yours,” Trump told Welker) and a drive-by characterization of Welker as “a big progressive,” Trump mostly projected a statesmanlike calm (once more grading on a curve) through most of the interview, hailing his own supposed breakthroughs in negotiations and contrasting the timeline leading to the conclusion of hostilities to the quagmires in Vietnam and Iraq.

Then there was the weird series of weather and technical delays that extended the scheduled taping of the exchange. Trump had invited Welker to interview him after an appearance in Wisconsin to shore up support in the beleaguered Midwest farm economy. As they sat in a corrugated tin shed in front of a prop John Deere tractor, the skies opened up, and the torrential rain made it difficult for the interlocutors to hear each other. They paused repeatedly for several minutes to let the rain let up; on another occasion, taping difficulties prompted a similar delay. Through the foul-ups, Trump maintained his generally even keel, marveling about the downpour and joking about the delays—scarcely the temperament of a guy hell-bent on blowing up the whole proceedings.

Trump’s talk became more overtly warlike when the discussion turned to domestic politics—though even then his tone didn’t modulate much. When Welker asked him about the status of his “so-called anti-weaponization fund” in the wake of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s announcement that the payoff scheme for January 6 rioters was dead in the water, Trump went into a tirade about the justice owed to victims of the “radical left lunatics that worked for the Biden administration and Sleepy Joe.” “People have been destroyed, many have committed suicide. Think of it, people have committed suicide because of a bunch of thugs went after them.”

If one were to actually think of it, of course, that phrasing is a far more apt description of the police officers victimized by the mob at the US Capitol than of the brownshirts seeking to install Trump as a dictator. But Trump was eager to revisit all the hits from the January 6 playlist, calling out James Comey—whom Trump fired more than three years prior to the insurrection—as “a dirty cop” and falsely claiming that FBI agents were leading rioters into the Capitol. As Welker patiently called out these falsehoods, Trump turned on her, saying she was “either crooked or stupid. You play right into their hands with this stuff. You know that these elections are rigged.”

In his trademark register of aggrieved customer demanding to talk to a manager, he claimed that Democrats are again seeking to rig the outcome of last week’s gubernatorial “jungle primary” in California because it’s taken more than five days to tally the votes—even though the lead GOP candidate, Steve Hilton, is poised to make it into the final runoff against Democratic opponent Xavier Becerra. Trump’s California charge is structurally identical to his claims that election night counts were manipulated against him when large numbers of anti-Trump voters in urban districts were accounted for later in the evening because it takes longer to count votes in more densely populated jurisdictions. The claims were bullshit then, and they’re bullshit now. So it was no wonder that Welker’s decision to make that point against Trump’s bogus assertion that he knows about voter fraud “by looking” evidently provoked the president to cut the interview short. Even then, however, he hadn’t “stormed off” or otherwise erupted; when Welker asked him to stay because she had flown out to Wisconsin to the sit-down, he countered that he’d been sitting with her for an hour in the rain—before signing off with, “Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

Yes, this was condescending, patriarchal Trump-speak, but it was hardly a devastating breach in White House media relations, as Welker confirmed from her perch in the NBC studio; in a followup exchange with the president, she recounted, they both agreed that the weather delays had created difficulties for the exchange and that there’d be a follow-up interview for the show at a later date. That all gave the lie to Trump’s fulminations over the “crooked” state of things at NBC and how “a country can never be great with a dishonest press.” (On Welker’s side, the closing blowup also served to dilute the memory of her disastrous debut on the show in 2023, with a Trump interview that left a series of trademark flagrant Trump lies unchallenged, including several whoppers about January 6.)

Why did Trump shift so rapidly to outrage before the NBC cameras? We can rest assured it wasn’t due to the controlled diplomatic prowess he always claims to be training on his counterparts across the negotiating table in Iran. No, Trump’s outburst allowed him to use a major network platform to cast unfounded suspicion on the vote in California, which happens also to be dominated by the Democratic Party. And in doing so, he once more got the rest of the punditocracy to focus on his allegedly erratic personal bearing—and not his election lies. Without missing a beat, Trump’s lickspittle speaker of the House, Mike Johnson—the ardent House member who strategized with the Trump White House to get a vote before Congress to upend the results of the 2020 on January 6—has taken up the same claim that the California voting count must be crooked because of… vibes. “Look, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove,” the addled lawmaker explained to reporters on Monday. “But I think everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here.”

By throttling Kristen Welker in the style of a professional wrestler, Donald Trump short-circuited the country’s public discourse in a way that a fierce Midwestern thunderstorm never could. After such a gratifying afternoon’s work, why on Earth wouldn’t he come back for more?

Remember the Golden Age? That was the main pitch behind Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign: On his return, he’d tame the inflationary legacy of the Biden White House, institute a new regime of tariffs to strengthen America’s standing in the global economy, pass yet more tax cuts for the wealthy, preside over a newly resurgent manufacturing sector and investment economy, and revive America’s hallowed extractive industries of oil and coal while mothballing federal subsidies for solar and wind energy.

Cut to a year and a half into his second term, and Trump has accomplished almost nothing in his promised suite of Golden Age breakthroughs. Yes, there were sweeping tax cuts in his 2025 taxation and spending bill, but they have produced no real broadly distributed economic growth; the labor economy has stalled, and manufacturing continues to decline in a service-dominated US economy. Even before the Supreme Court found them unconstitutional, Trump’s tariffs yielded little more than higher retail prices for consumers. And his feckless war of choice with Iran has sent the costs of energy, food, and other mainstay products skyrocketing.

Trump’s dismal economic record is more than an indictment of his policy agenda: It goes to the heart of the bogus public image he’s lovingly cultivated during his tour through American celebrity culture—the fable that he’s a Promethean business genius whose unerring instinct for exploiting market opportunities has vastly improved both his fortune and the world surrounding him. This was the origin story that launched Trump onto the bestseller lists with The Art of the Deal, landed him in the Rolodexes of a generation of TV bookers and producers, and fueled his mythic political image as an omnicompetent DC outsider who could “fix” all of the many ills besieging our once-mighty businessman’s republic.

It was also complete bullshit from the word go. Trump’s fortune, like that of many self-aggrandizing business titans, was built on his father’s wealth—amassed in his case through a racist New York real-estate empire. Trump’s initial run of Manhattan development projects became profitable through the exploitation of tax abatements and other government subsidies; and in emulation of his political mentor Roy Cohn, Trump further padded his bottom line by stiffing vendors and contractors on an epic scale. The mediagenic image of Trump as a business wizard was rudely upended in the 1990s when his Atlantic City casinos flatlined, joining his airline and his United States Football League franchise in the dustbin of Trump-branded properties. Before the decade was out, the world-shaking dealmaker had filed for bankruptcy six times over.

You’d think that anyone too clueless to turn a profit from a chain of casinos would have his business-genius credentials promptly retired. But Trump overcame the stigma of bankruptcy the same way he became a national real-estate brand in the first place—with massive subventions of public funds and family cash to leverage his debts. That he no longer owned anything capable of accruing actual economic value no longer mattered; Trump doggedly shilled out his name for licensing fees on a seemingly endless regress of aspirationally gilded consumer items, from vodka and health supplements to motivational lectures and his fraudulent eponymous university.

As the New Yorker scribe Mark Singer wrote of this echt-American transformation in a 1997 profile, “Trump’s vaunted art of the deal has given way to the art of ‘image ownership.’” It was the NBC producer Mark Burnett who lifted Trump out of this welter of self-branding squalor by tapping him as the host of The Apprentice in the early aughts. The hit show was in many ways the perfect self-referenced gloss on Trump’s tour as a market demigod: He was pretending to be the boss on TV of a legion of fame-hungry cosplayers miming their own version of savvy market prowess for the cameras. The only genuine product on offer in the whole Kabuki spectacle was celebrity.

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Thus, when Trump makes a harried show of walking back his threats to commit more war crimes in Iran in order to calm the restive spirit of the stock market, it’s crucial to understand that this prime mover of the American political economy literally has no idea what he’s doing. The same goes for Trump’s fallacious zero-sum understanding of how tariffs and trade balances work.

Trump’s fundamental economic illiteracy appears to be grounded in a breakdown of basic arithmetic. He’s often announcing his determination to send drug prices plunging by as much as 1,500 percent; he once vowed that he’d ensure the price of the weight-loss treatment Wegovy would plummet “from more than $1,300 to $199, a 578 percent difference.” There’s also strong circumstantial evidence that the man doesn’t understand what a trillion is—wildly inflating the estimated cost of last fall’s government shutdown by a factor of 100, while adding an additional trillion to his already bogus assessment of $2 trillion in estimated tariff revenues in the space of day, fueled by nothing more than MAGA-branded hopium.

Many of Trump’s opponents cite these frequent numerical face-plants as evidence that the president of the United States is simply an oaf, but the truth here is more troubling. Trump’s understanding of numbers, like his understanding of the economy, isn’t steeped in rank ignorance so much as in the business pieties of positive thinking.

That’s why the most revealing of Trump’s many court actions was his suit against his biographer Timothy O’Brien, for claiming that the ’80s-bred brand hustler was not, as he perpetually claimed, an actual billionaire. In his deposition for the suit, Trump argued that he was a billionaire for the simple reason that, on most days, he felt like one: “My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with my feelings…. Yes, even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day.”

The world is now captive in much the same way to Donald Trump’s ever-changing moods—only these days, instead of suing his way out of its obdurate unwillingness to play along, he’s sending the message with bombs.

Watergate analogies, together with the cursed “-gate” suffix, are often the most glib and least useful analytic devices in assessing the scale of government corruption. Still, hear me out: The Trump administration’s extralegal establishment of a free-floating slush fund for aggrieved (and overwhelmingly white) sufferers of Biden persecution complexes stands out in stark relief, by virtue of both its bald self-dealing and its fundamental abuses of power, against the scandals that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon.

All of the gravest trespasses of the Watergate scandal were brewed up and executed at the behest of the keepers of the Nixon White House’s vast network of covert slush funds. The Committee to Re-Elect the President, chaired by the administration’s fathomlessly corrupt attorney general John Mitchell, was the chief sluicegate for the White House’s dirty-tricks fund—but it wasn’t the White House’s only, or even most notable, foray into mob-style governance. Four months before the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters, a separate slush fund steered $400,000 in corporate dosh to the 1972 Republican National Convention in order to secure a favorable antitrust ruling from the White House. A year prior to that, a group of dairy cooperatives arranged a $2 million donation to the GOP in exchange for the White House agreeing to lift price controls on milk—which worked out to a nifty $100 million return on investment for the nation’s milk producers.

As it later would with Watergate, the Nixon White House sought to suppress and downplay critical reporting on the slush-fund scandals, but to no avail—these casual mob-style shakedowns harmed the administration’s reputation, fueled the greater lawlessness of the administration, and metastasized into what White House Counsel John Dean aptly called “a cancer” on Nixon’s presidency.

Now just review the basic background of the Trump January 6 slush fund. It is, to begin with, a complete legal fabrication—a preemptive make-believe “settlement” in a $10 billion lawsuit that Trump brought against his own Internal Revenue Service after an independent contractor leaked past Trump tax returns to the news outlet ProPublica. Trump’s suit was clearly modeled on the successful, though meritless, claims he’d lodged against CBS and ABC for editing and airing material adverse to his political interests; in all these cases, the objective was not to secure any sort of binding legal precedent but to engineer payouts that would serve to browbeat critics and intimidate dissenters. (Lost in most of the mainstream coverage of the Trump IRS suit was the critical point that the underlying harm alleged in the case—the public release of a president’s financial records—was in fact something that all modern candidates for the presidency prior to Trump had arranged voluntarily as a recognition that the public trust they seek to hold shouldn’t be compromised by conflicts of interest. That, needless to say, is not the Trump model of governance.)

Then there’s the sheer volume of taxpayer money amassed in the fund. The sums collected by Nixon’s enforcers were staggering for the time, but even after adjusting for inflation, the $1.8 billion Trump fund far outpaces them; it works out to roughly $224 million in 1972 dollars—much more than twice the astronomical payoff that Nixon’s dairy donors realized on their slush-fund investment. (The official tally for Trump’s baksheesh reserve fund is, of course, $1,776,000,000, since it was the clear aim of the American Revolution to direct tax revenues into the coffers of aspiring monarchs.)

Finally, just ponder the oversight provisions directing the disbursement of all this cash—which won’t take long, I promise, because there are none. The settlement agreement provides only for a five-member board appointed by Trump’s Department of Justice to approve quarterly payout requests from the fund. And what they decide to do, the settlement’s language stipulates, is very much their own business: “The Anti-Weaponization Fund shall have the power to determine its own procedures for submitting, receiving, processing, and granting or denying claims. The Anti-Weaponization Fund may make those procedures public in whole or in part, at its discretion.” (Calling the slush fund “the Anti-Weaponization Fund” is, like the $1.776 billion figure, a messaging mind-fuck—nothing says that you’re combating the alleged weaponization of justice like creating an unaccountable elite legal panel handing out cash on its own purblind whim.)

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The contrast with the Watergate reign of slush is again instructive: Nixon and his henchmen went to great lengths to conceal their crimes, whereas Trump and his MAGA coterie are using their grip on federal prosecutorial power to reward the crime of seeking to overturn the 2020 election. The crisis point in Nixon’s coverup campaign was the “Saturday night massacre”—his effort to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, which prompted the resignation of then–Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus. Congressional Republicans were forced then to concede that backing the Nixon White House and the rule of law were mutually exclusive propositions, setting the stage for Nixon’s likely impeachment and forced resignation. Trump and his apparatchiks are operating in the photographic negative of that moral consensus: They are unilaterally dictating the terms of political legitimacy and declaring themselves immune from all legal consequences in advance. When you’re brazenly corrupt, no cover-up is required.

As for what will follow in the wake of all this insurrectionist feather-bedding, well, the Board of Anti-Weaponizers disclaims all responsibility there as well: “Once the funds are deposited into the Designated Account,” Attorney General Todd Blanche—who is of course Trump’s former personal attorney—wrote in his order enforcing the settlement, “the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.” And appealing any of board’s financial awards is simply forbidden: “Because the claims process is voluntary, there shall be no appeal, arbitration, or judicial review of claims, offers, or other determinations made by the Anti-Weaponization Fund,” the settlement agreement states. The board’s awards are “enforceable and challengeable solely by Plaintiffs, Defendants, and the United States”—i.e., the very grifters who set up this self-dealing boondoggle at taxpayer expense.

As with virtually every other act of this administration, from its DOGE raids on federal agencies, workforces and taxpayer privacy to its mass-deportation sieges in American cities to its illegal wars and foreign murder campaigns, the impunity is the point. The administration is not interested in anything so drawn-out and laborious as an official inquiry into the purported “weaponization” of justice and law enforcement, let alone a reformist remedy. No, the aim is to use power as a brute reminder to everyone else that you’re in power, and are free to declare new public directives, casus belli, and policy mandates out of thin air. You can concoct bogus crime waves in Washington, DC, or a phantom Somali day care fraud epidemic in Minneapolis or nonexistent fentanyl trade routes in Caribbean waters—and then blithely proceed to intimidate, menace, and kill on virtual autopilot, while of course all the while proclaiming your own bitter victimization at the hands of the woke and weaponized liberal administrative state. The impunity zone is the ideological sweet spot where the tinpot corruption of the Trump clan merges seamlessly with the wrecking-ball agenda of Project 2025.

The impunity dividend was on blinding display the day that the settlement creating the Trump slush fund was announced. The White House dispatched Vice President JD Vance, the Yale-credentialed venture capitalist who likes to pose as a heartland empath, to Missouri to tout his farcical race-coded crusade against government fraud before voters in Missouri. Vance asserted that Medicaid fraud runs into the billions—a claim both unsubstantiated and overblown, designed chiefly to distract attention from the administration’s own punitive Medicaid cuts—and then sought to stick his demagogic landing with this appeal: “When people steal billions of dollars from the Medicare program, that is theft from you, and it’s also theft from the people who use the Medicare program to pay their bills.”

What Vance really meant is: Theft is what we say it is, and only counts when we ascribe it to our political enemies. Recall that this is the public official who proclaimed that he’s willing to “create stories” to advance the broader MAGA ideological project. That’s why his task force is suspending Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota—not because the alleged scourge of Medicaid fraud is greater there, but because both of these blue states are in the vanguard of opposition to ICE’s gestapo raids. In this same bleak register, we should recall Todd Blanche’s preeminent qualification to establish and direct the $1.8 billion Trump slush fund: As Trump declared at a recent White House event, Blanche is the man “who kept me out of jail for years.” As John Mitchell declared to Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein at the height of the paper’s Watergate investigations, “You fellows have got a great ball game going.… We’re going to do a story on all of you.” That could well be the motto for the Anti-Weaponization Fund, but here’s a more cogent variation: It’s the impunity, stupid.

The day after President Donald Trump told a reporter that “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” in the wake of his economically ruinous war in Iran, the White House duly stepped up with a let-them-eat-loaves-and-fish pronouncement to drive the point home. This Sunday, the Trump administration will kick off its grift-laden commemoration of the nation’s 250th anniversary with a nine-hour prayer jubilee on the National Mall, meant to signal “a moment of renewal” for the Christian nationalist project at the heart of the MAGA spiritual agenda.

It’s rare that you see the bait-and-switch logic of right-wing culture warfare in such stark relief, but the prayer marathon is very much in line with the broader cultural messaging that spurred Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. The central theme uniting Trump’s far-flung attacks on the Biden White House, his fury at the interlocking scourges of wokeness, trans tolerance, and CRT indoctrination, his hate-fueled mass deportation rhetoric, and his tariff-and-tax-cuts vision of a new economic golden age was that this iteration of MAGA was a revival movement in political guise. Seizing on the militant rhetoric of spiritual warfare crafted by self-styled movement prophets aligned with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) like Lance Wallnau, an oil-industry PR flack turned preacher, Trump campaign strategists positioned the president as a vessel for the country’s divine deliverance. Standing athwart political and theological rivals who, in the NAR’s apocalyptic telling, are actual demons seeking to wreak destruction and mayhem on Christian believers, Trump is channeling the righteous fury of the divine elect who have been cast out into the cultural darkness by satanic fifth columnists. Armed with this bellicose version of the gospel, the NAR preaches a full-fledged evangelical siege of what Wallnau and others call the “seven mountains” of cultural power: politics, education, the media, the family, business, arts and entertainment, and the church.

This is the broader polemic backdrop to an event launching a months-long celebration of the country’s founding that explicitly endorses fallacious Christian nationalist accounts of the American past. Project 250, the White House’s umbrella group programming the official recognition of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, is dispatching a caravan of “Freedom Trucks” across the country to promulgate an AI-enabled experiential tour of the country’s past—outfitted with instructional materials from PragerU and Hillsdale College, both premier outlets of Christian nationalist agitprop masquerading as respectable academic discourse.

Another program operating under the remit of Project 250 is the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, which counts both the right-wing advocacy groups Turning Point USA and Moms for Liberty as partners—thereby irreparably deranging the founders’ core understanding of what civics is and how it works. Still another initiative affiliated with Project 250 is America Prays, which has partnered with Wallbuilders, a nonprofit headed by Christian nationalist pastor David Barton, and the NAR TV show FlashPoint, which was pivotal in mobilizing evangelical support for the failed coup on January 6. FlashPoint features MAGA spiritual enthusiast Gene Bailey among its hosts—who has repeatedly interviewed Trump and who by his own account subscribes to a “Christo-fascist, Christian nationalist” agenda.

Not surprisingly, Sunday’s Jubilee is featuring speakers cut from the same ideological cloth. There’s Eric Metaxas, a member of the Trump White House’s Religious Liberty Commission and a lead orator at the pre–January 6 “Jericho Rally” for evangelicals seeking to overturn the 2020 election, who announced in a December 2020 Charlie Kirk podcast, “What’s right is right.… We need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.” Lorenzo Sewell, a Detroit-based NAR pastor, will also hold forth; he announced to Fox News in 2024 that the Democratic platform was “demonic,” while offering the generous Christian disclaimer that “we do not believe that every Democrat is a demon.” He is also a diehard election denier, who testified in the Michigan state legislature’s farcical hearings on post-2020 election integrity. Without citing any credible evidence, Sewell claimed to know of “people that had their votes switched. People that were registered without their knowledge.” He went on to say, “I’m actually the self-proclaimed, and I believe I deserve the title, as the election integrity evangelist.” And be sure to catch Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a Reconstructionist believer (and parishioner at the Church of Tarantino) who sports Crusades-themed tattoos, and who will no doubt deliver his trademark gloss on the gospel as a handbook for both spiritual warfare and the blood-soaked actual variety.

These belligerent apostles of MAGA impunity are, it bears reminding, a universe away from an American founding that sought to firmly distance itself from the corruptions of state-established religion—and expressly stipulated in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated by John Adams, that “the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” The MAGA grifters presiding over Sunday’s rally are also defying the religious-liberty case for the separation of church and state—it was, after all, leaders of the breakaway Baptist denomination, not a clutch of secular Enlightenment philosophes, who successfully fought to disestablish the Massachusetts Congregational Church in the 19th century, and create a model of competitive worship free from state interference for their many later successors.

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But figures like Baptist pioneer Roger Williams and the pious but establishment-averse Adams have no real place in the MAGA-branded spectacle of faith convening on the National Mall. In their place, we have prosperity preacher Paula White-Cain, Trump’s closest spiritual adviser and the head of the White House’s National Faith Advisory Board. White-Cain has explained that the Sunday prayer event will stress the nation’s ostensible Christian identity—religious figures “praying to all these different gods” will not be welcome. In the same vein, she has nonsensically solemnized the event as an occasion “about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible.… This is really truly rededicating the country to God.” At this year’s White House Easter celebration, White-Cain likened Trump to Jesus, and she has also announced that “saying no to Trump would be saying no to God.”

In other words, something is being rededicated at Sunday’s marathon prayer jubilee, but it’s not the fabricated tale of the country’s Christian founding; it’s the blasphemy that a serial sexual abuser, compulsive liar, self-dealing aspiring dictator, vicious warmonger, and recidivist fraudster can claim any position of moral leadership in the country’s tattered civic religion. It seems fitting here to summon the authority of Isaiah 1:15-16: “When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood! Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong.”

There’s a new Beltway consensus in the making: After a decade of self-dealing, executive-sanctioned thuggery, pardon-auctioning, and donor-appeasement in the sanctums of MAGA power, the electorate is at long last wising up. Whether it’s the White House’s campaign of lying about every facet of the Iran War, Donald Trump’s series of lawsuits against the IRS, his use of the Department of Justice to enrich himself at taxpayer expense, or the Versailles-on-ketamine reveries of a billion-dollar ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to be, voters are becoming outraged over an authoritarian regime that no longer bothers to offer any more than phoned-in rationales for its corruption. 

As The Bulwark’s Mona Charen argues, popular opinion has shifted from the cynical view that the venality of high-office holding was pretty much priced into the Trumpist model of power. “Voters in 2024 made a bargain,” she writes. “Though they knew Trump was corrupt, they bet that he would bring them the kind of economy they’d enjoyed in 2018.” Yet, with the cost of living skyrocketing and the tariffs-subsidized “golden age” that Trump hawked a demonstrable bust, that bargain is now null and void:

Economic conditions are now worse than they were in 2024. Nor can Trump rely on partisanship to come to his rescue because it isn’t the Democrats who are making the case about corruption, it’s Trump himself and his allies. It is Trump who used the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to make the case for his garish ballroom. It is Senate Republicans who are adding the insult of demanding taxpayers pay $1 billion for this monument to Trump’s ego. It is Trump, not his opposition, who instructs voters that they should be happy with fewer dolls at Christmas. It is Trump who accepts gold bars from the Swiss delegation and adorns the Oval Office in a style that could be called neo-Saddam.

Unfortunately, though, there are several obstacles in the path of a straightforward kick-the-bums-out case against Trump’s malfeasance in the upcoming midterms cycle. First, the MAGA right has been trafficking in its own theology of maximal Democratic and deep-state corruption over the past decade—the claim that Trump is a suffering servant targeted by his political foes is at the heart of the IRS and DOJ suits, as well as being the rationale for allied abuses of law-enforcement power such as the ongoing effort to prosecute former FBI director James Comey for unspecified vibes-driven offenses and the DOJ’s enlistment in a challenge to the $83 million civil action against Trump for assaulting E. Jean Carroll. (The acting head of the Justice Department, Todd Blanche, is Trump’s former personal attorney, so this sort of prostration is presumably second nature to him.) It’s a debased and self-serving political narrative, since no presidency in our history has been more corrupt than Trump’s, but it’s a narrative that’s proven effective across several election cycles and countless frivolous but vindictively targeted  legal actions. 

But the biggest challenge to an effective political case against Trump’s reign of self-dealing comes in Charen’s rushed disclaimer that this round of abuses of the presidency can’t be dismissed as partisan hackery since “it isn’t the Democrats who are making the case about corruption.” That aside contains a universe of failed political initiative, as any patient student of the right’s congressional inquisitions, from the Benghazi hearings to the long regress of Hunter Biden spectacles to the impeachment of Biden’s DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, can instantly confirm. For every ideological witch hunt unleashed by the Jim Jordans and the Trey Gowdys of the right, there’s a lumbering and self-undermining Merrick Garland inquiry into a matter of actual legal substance that went precisely nowhere. 

That’s because Democrats subscribe to an institutionalist, rather than a self-evidently personal, theory of political corruption. What stands out in their treatment of abuses of executive power is that these are regarded as, first and foremost, procedural affronts—defilements of the precious norms that are the foundational principle of good governance—and not a more telling and visceral failing of moral character. For three dreary election cycles, the chief Democratic anti-Trump message is that the MAGA movement is a threat to our revered public institutions—not that Donald Trump is stealing you blind and leveraging all the arms of the federal government into his graft-seeking business model, in precisely the way a Mafia don would. (As I typed these words, I realized that “Mafia Don” has been sitting right there as an ideal Democratic epithet for the occupant of the Oval Office, and yet the party has continued to leave it… sitting right there.) 

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The Democrats’ diffidence on this front is more than simple myopia; it’s a class blindspot. Party leaders see themselves as the credentialed gatekeepers of both the institutions now under threat of total MAGA takeover and of the public discourse writ large. They are, in short, managers, by both training and temperament—and like any rule-enforcing managers, they’re aghast when their authority is disregarded. That leads to a rhetorical style grounded chiefly on scolding (when the self-evident directives of institutional sovereignty get rudely shoved aside) and befuddlement (when, again and again, Democrats’ appeals to norms, managerial politesse, and “who we are” as a nation are derided, mocked, and steamrolled). 

You can see this style on full display in this week’s New Yorker—our country’s most reliable outlet for elite venting over transgressed norms. A long profile of Trump’s immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, dilates on his exasperation over the rapid pace of institutional derangement on Trump’s watch—while the former president also frets that he can’t relinquish his statesmanlike role as a “political leader” for that of a mere “commentator.” The natural outcome of this high-managerial anguish is a long recitation of set pieces like this:

In the past year, Obama has watched with disbelief as Trump has used his office to enrich himself and his family, and almost daily commits some sort of travesty. At times, often late at night, Obama will fire off a text or e-mail to a friend about “some dumbass thing Trump did,” Ben Rhodes, who served as Obama’s deputy national security adviser and is now a consultant to him, said. “What drives him insane is the double standard: ‘What if I took a Qatari jet?’ It’s not even sour grapes. It’s objectively insane. If Barack Obama did any of these things, he’d be obliterated on sight.”

As courtroom litigators are fond of saying: true, true, and irrelevant. Complaints of double standards and hypocrisy are nonstarters in ideological discourse, since they presuppose a disinterested arbitration of claims to power where none exists. That’s especially the case when a ruling party is pillaging the government in pursuit of personal gain and political vendettas. The point isn’t that a standard holds for other presidents and doesn’t for Trump—it’s that Trump is rendering standards of all kinds meaningless as he reinvents the presidency as an instrument of personal plunder. But that core message gets a muffled hearing at best in Democratic leadership circles—in large part because, like Obama, party leaders remain immobilized “with disbelief” before the specter of Trumpist corruption.

Among other things, that posture is a response that comes far too late in the cycle of MAGA government-by-graft to connect effectively with the real public disenchantment with Trump’s second term. After mounting ineffective bids to impeach Trump for flagrant abuses of power in his first term—including a literal effort to install himself as a dictator by fomenting a coup—Democrats have mostly retreated to a defensive crouch, intoning the mantra that they are focusing on “kitchen-table issues” instead of waging the political fight to hold Trump and his cabinet of handpicked cronies accountable for their crimes. 

Yet, particularly in Trump’s second term, this is a distinction without a difference: The administration’s forays into corruption have also entailed enormous spikes in everyday living expenses, from Trump’s imperious and unconstitutional tariffs regime to the oil shocks touched off by the illegal war with Iran, to the failure of the red-state farm economy. Unhinged authoritarian leaders despoil all of public life—and the economy is a premier first casualty in this strategy, not a depoliticized sphere delivering offstage verdicts on the regime’s performance and continued fitness for office. 

Indeed, key arenas of Trumpist economic influence, such as the crypto and AI sectors, are also principal theaters of Trump-family corruption, so it makes no sense to seek to disaggregate the effects of corruption in office from its economic causes. In the same vein, the Trump administration’s throttling of the international order is inseparable from the economic interests of White House players like Jared Kushner and Ben Witkoff, but Democratic leaders treat this executive branch malady as an outgrowth of Trump’s petulance and contempt for institutional protocols. Here yet again, the Democratic Party’s devotion to its managerialist ethos has prevented it from drawing the crucial lines of economic causation that any basic grasp of politics mandates.

Indeed, it’s striking that the source of constitutional corruption that’s been hiding in plain sight throughout both Trump terms—his flagrant defiance of the Emoluments Clause forbidding the president from realizing any personal gain from foreign powers during his tenure in office—has never commanded serious attention from Democratic leaders. Cynics might protest that the kind of corruption forbidden under the Emoluments Clause is increasingly the business model for both major parties—the crypto industry, which doubles as a money-laundering front for foreign bribes, was, after all, one of the biggest sources of campaign contributions to both Republican and Democratic candidates over the last election cycle. But I’d submit that the Democrats don’t dally with the Emoluments Clause because it’s too personal and vulgar an abuse of power—it essentially proscribes bribery, and bribery leaves no place for managers to chide us about our tragically forsaken public norms. Voters can see it with their own eyes, just as they can register the folly of the White House ballroom, support for which is now polling behind a belief in ghosts and telepathy in CNN opinion surveys. But you can at least rest assured that in the dead of night Barack Obama has fired off a few outraged texts and e-mails about it.

This weekend’s assassination attempt targeting members of the Trump administration has provoked the now-standard suite of responses to outbreaks of political violence: the rush to detect rigid partisan motivations in an otherwise messy and meaning-challenged act; the bad-faith demands to suppress political speech; the high-formalist calls for national unity from on high.

These formulaic set pieces in recrimination theater are the means by which the country’s national discourse sidesteps the traumas of political violence, and lets the actual conditions that foment political terror remain intact. Yet this latest episode at least offers a path to one meaningful response. If milksop and insincere appeals to civility and common purpose won’t arrest the country’s drift into ever deeper currents of politically minded mayhem, we can at least start to close down our nation’s cottage industry in bogus civility. It’s long past time to mothball, one and for all, the backdrop for this latest assassination attempt: the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Cole Thomas Allen, the alleged assassin, likely just seized on the Correspondents’ Dinner as a venue with comparatively porous security. Indeed, in the message about his plan to target senior Trump officials, he marveled at how easy it was to conceal his cache of firearms and knives during his stay at the DC hotel that hosts the dinner—known in town as “the Hinckley Hilton,” since it was also the site of the 1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life. Yet while the event furnished a comparatively obliging target of opportunity, it also undergirds one of the most toxic fictions behind the collapse of our democracy: the idea that the national political press and the executive branch of our government are chummy equal partners in the management of the polity.

This fable is immensely flattering to members of the Beltway press, who eagerly throng to the spectacle of the WHCD as ready validation of their civic and cultural clout. It’s why the sick exercise of elite news outlets frantically recruiting A-list celebrities to sit at their tables at the dinner has become the chief source of breathless gossip and speculation in an otherwise tsarist-grade show of journalistic prostration before power. It’s why, for months prior to the event itself, the nominally adult members of the Washington press corps manically call in favors and issue desperate smartphone appeals to be granted entry into this or that lavishly appointed afterparty, convened at an embassy or a Bloomberg-leased nightspot, so they can continue to be seen rubbing elbows, and spilling drinks, with the nation’s power elite and celebrity class.

The phoned-in rationale for the whole thing has always been that it’s an opportunity to deepen the (already corrupt) practice of access journalism by permitting reporters and government sources to lay aside their structural divergence of interests for an evening and relish each other’s well-lubricated company. But for this alibi to hold water, someone somewhere should by now be able to point to a concrete scoop or productive thaw in press-government relations that issued from all the schmoozing. I’ve lived in Washington for a quarter century, and amid all the secrets, whisper campaigns, and speculations that propel DC journalism, I’ve never heard the faintest suggestion that the Correspondents’ Dinner served any useful newsgathering purpose.

The Potemkin civility of the Correspondents’ Dinner and the Beltway punditocracy that embraces it, is in fact all about hierarchy and the boundary-policing of respectable elite opinion. That’s why the security protocols for the event, even in the studiously mythologized years of Barack Obama’s “post-racial” presidency, have followed a blatantly racist logic. It’s why there can be a journalistic atrocity like the pre-dinner party hosted by Skydance CEO David Ellison—who presides over CBS News, and is poised to run CNN as part of his company’s proposed $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. The president spoke for an hour there, as Ellison’s handpicked MAGA-enabling CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss sat at Trump’s table, while administration officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche—the cabinet member charged with approving the legality of the Skydance-Warners merger—looked adoringly on. (Miller, the architect of the White House’s vicious and bloodthirsty mass deportation offensive, and the Christian nationalist authoritarian Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were both invited guests of CBS News at the dinner.)

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It’s also why Trump—an undeniable master of manipulating the inert tropes of Beltway consensus when it’s in his interest to—called for the nation to heal itself by getting into the dinner’s spirit of elite self-congratulation:

We have to, we have to resolve our differences. I will say, you had Republicans, Democrats, independents, conservatives, liberals, and progressives. Those words are interchangeable, perhaps, but maybe they’re not. But yet everybody in that room, big crowd, record-setting crowd, there was a record-setting group of people, and there was a tremendous amount of love and coming together. I watched, I watched, and I was very, very impressed by that.

In such moments, we’re again invited to indulge the fantasy of a Trumpian “pivot” into sober and responsible statesmanship—and to forget the political history of the past decade, in which he’s goaded rally crowds to menace members of the press and protesters in attendance. Contrary to the pivoting framework always adopted by the commentariat, Trump continued whaling away at the “fake news” establishment throughout his 2024 campaign, after he’d served a full term in office and led a failed coup attempt to hold on to power. Even as he appealed to the Beltway’s household gods of civility this weekend, he also found time to ruefully note that he had planned to lay into the alleged thought crimes of the media yet once more from the Correspondents’ Dinner podium. “I was really going to rip it last night.… But I didn’t get a chance to do that. Probably I was better off if I didn’t. I don’t know.”

Unsurprisingly, Trump has called for the dinner to be rescheduled. “Tell them to get it going and we should do it again within 30 days,” he said in a 60 Minutes interview. “It’s not that I want to go. I am very busy; I don’t need that. But I think it’s very important that we do it again.” Here’s another idea: Pull the plug on the whole depraved late-imperial spectacle of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and start on the long, slow road back to having a national political press that does its job the way grown-ups do.

Taking a break from convulsing the news cycle with nonsensical ultimatums about the Iran war, President Donald Trump elected to stir things up at the start of the week by posting an image of himself as Jesus on his Truth Social account. That now-infamous depiction came in the wake of a long screed Trump posted the day before assailing Pope Leo XIV for his dissension from the illegal attack on Iran (as well as for being “soft on crime,” in an apparent call to revive the Spanish Inquisition). The general run of dazed commentary about Trump’s self-deifying display grouped it together with other Trump-branded power plays; as the Son of God, Trump could clearly claim to outrank the lowly pontiff. After evangelical and Catholic detractors properly called out the post as blasphemy, Trump finally took it down, and the backlash from diehard Trump devotees on the religious right seemed poised to dissipate, in keeping with thousands of other episodes of Trump-centric transgression.

Trolling the pope was no doubt part of what might be charitably termed the president’s strategic thinking, but there’s a broader, though equally demented, logic at work here. The best way to plot out this logic, curiously enough, is to contrast Trump’s Jesus post with another Trump image that came into prominence this week: an Oval Office shot from Getty Images photographer Andrew Harnick, which won the White House Correspondents Association Award for Excellence in Presidential New Coverage by Visual Journalists. It shows the president standing at the Resolute Desk as a group of White House functionaries have rushed in the background to attend to a pharmaceutical executive who fainted during the president’s photo-op touting a White House initiative to lower prescription drug prices.

It’s a revealing foil for the Trump-as-Jesus image, being such a vivid reminder of who the actual Donald Trump is. As everyone else in the room is animated by concern for the fallen man’s well-being—they’re elevating his legs to ensure that blood is flowing to his brain—Trump is assuming the bored-to–petulant affect he normally shows when he’s not the center of attention. He’s standing with his arms dangling at his side with his prepared remarks open on the desk in front of him. He’s registering awareness of the health crisis behind him with an exasperated sidelong glance, showing his seeming impatience to resume the carney-patter presentation of a drug plan that’s achieved vanishingly little in the way of actual consumer savings.

The photo sums up what we’ve long known about Trump: He brandishes the clinical narcissist’s hatred of weakness, disease, and dependence, which all serve as rude reminders of the mortality of the self. This trait goes far back in Trump’s biography, starting with his repudiation of his alcoholic brother, Fred, and his bid to secure the disinheritance of Fred’s disabled grandson with the reported comment that the boy’s father, Fred Trump III, should “just let him die.” On the stump during his first presidential campaign, Trump cruelly mimicked the movements of the disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, and then denied having done so—much as he ludicrously sought to dismiss his blasphemous Truth Social post as merely a depiction of him as a doctor, with no religious meaning whatsoever. (Baldfaced lying and gaslighting are of course two other central components of the narcissist’s psychic tool kit.)

But Trump’s half-assed evasions aren’t enough to shore up his central role in MAGA mythology as a righteous force of deliverance, vengeance, and redemption. That’s where MAGA’s evangelical wing—far and away the most ardent partner in the Trump coalition—comes in. Faced, during Trump’s first campaign, with a presidential standard-bearer who was a sociopathic bully and a confessed serial sexual assaulter, evangelical apologists for Trump jury-rigged a crude, but still notionally biblical, basis for supporting him. Following the lead of New Apostolic Reformation preacher Lance Walnau, they embraced the image of Trump as a Cyrus figure—someone who, like the ancient Persain king, could help bring about the reconstruction of the faith while falling outside the strictures of formal worship. This interpretation allowed for evangelicals to hold the cognitive dissonance of Trump’s true bottom-feeding character in place while fantasizing that he was, in the grander scheme of things, a powerful instrument of God’s will.

Yet that ultimately proved thin gruel for a political movement craving a savior. So after Trump’s first term—and most especially after the evangelical-fueled bid to overthrow the government on January 6—MAGA true believers entered what religion writer Jeff Sharlet calls the movement’s “martyrdom period.” This involved the depiction of the forces of liberal pluralism as literal demons, seeking to eradicate Christianity outright and establish Satan’s dominion over Earth. The evangelical mobilization for January 6 thus sought not merely the intervention of lickspittle GOP congresspeople, but the Lord himself. Figures such as Ashli Babbit, the demonstrator shot to death in the Capitol, were sanctified as martyrs for the holy cause.

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Trump also underwent a profound spiritual makeover in the wake of January 6. No longer an ascriptive outsider to the true faith, he was its full-blown redeemer. A widely screened video during Trump’s 2024 campaign was called “And God Made Trump.” It was modeled on radio personality Paul Harvey’s encomium to the yeoman figure of Middle American mythology, “And God Made a Farmer”—but went into a far deeper and more disturbing spiritual register than Harvey’s oration. While depicting members of the political opposition such as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez as wolves and pleading for a savior figure to “wrestle the deep state,” the video assures anxious viewers that, in the person of Trump, the moment of deliverance has arrived: “God had to have somebody willing to go into the den of vipers, call out the fake news for their tongues as sharp as a serpent’s. The poison of vipers is on their lips, and yet stopped. So God made Trump.”

Against this blatantly messianic backdrop, you can readily understand how Trump—whose grasp of theology is negligent to nonexistent—would have thought it was no big deal to post an image of himself as MAGA Jesus. In his mind, it was another instance of turning the pandering dial up to 11—a difference in degree, not in kind.

After all, the image Trump used in the post was a modified version of a worshipful piece of AI slop circulated by MAGA influencer Nick Adams, which caused no stir among Trump’s followers when it first appeared. The image shows the president plainly attired in the manner of Jesus, apparently healing a bedridden hospital patient with the aid of a mysteriously glowing orb in his hand, as a corps of grateful citizens—a nurse, a soldier, a woman in the attitude of Christian prayer, and a gray-bearded generic patriot—all look on in wonderment. Overhead, an angel and a group of spiritually transfigured soldiers look down on the scene as an Air Force plane and a bald eagle fly by.

The cumulative impact of all this crass spiritual self-aggrandizing may now shock the evangelical conscience after surfacing with a presidential imprimatur, but all of its components were firmly entrenched in MAGA circles long before the president decided it was a good idea to flame the pope. As Sharlet explained in 2024, when I interviewed him about Trump’s post-January 6 spiritual persona, “When you think of the Christian iconography of Trump, he is the Jesus figure on a tank. Or maybe there’s a Jesus figure hovering somewhere behind him, but Trump is always the focus. It’s an incarnation.”

And as Trump’s own governing agenda careens into quasi-apocalyptic global confrontations and fruitless bids to reclaim momentum in his fracturing coalition, Trump needs to recur to the dominant image of himself as national savior—though at this point it’s likely a maneuver that reassures him more than an increasingly restive and disaffected evangelical following. And even a raging narcissist like Trump has to know by now that he can’t afford to aggrandize himself at the expense of the evangelical army now amassed behind him; just two days after he was forced to remove his Trump-as-Jesus post, he launched a new Truth Social salvo depicting him enclosed in Jesus’ embrace. Liberal commentators greeted this as another detour into unhinged blasphemy, but in terms of MAGA-evangelical iconography, it announced a return to the fold; the post Trump was recirculating asked “doesn’t it seem, with all these satanic, demonic, child-sacrificing monsters being exposed…God might be playing the Trump card?” Trump’s own commentary was also clearly meant to signal that he was back in harness with the pandering culture-war rhetoric his followers demanded: “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!” Franklin Graham, the MAGAfied son of the 20th-century pastor to power Billy Graham, promptly picked up on the cue, declaring that the follow-up image simply conveyed that “we all need to be listening to Jesus”—while also, for good measure, dismissing the original furor over the Jesus post as “a lot to do about nothing.”

What secular liberals who read all of Trump’s religious pronouncements as unhinged hubris don’t understand is that such overtures, nakedly desperate and craven though they are, actually work. They reinscribe the image of Trump, the longtime sex-pest crony of Jeffrey Epstein, as the heroic scourge of “satanic, demonic, child-sacrificing monsters.” They reassure grievance-addicted believers that Trump is not only one of them but the foreordained agent of their deliverance—a righteous warrior who is poised to stage the ultimate act of divine retribution by waging an end-time holy war in Iran. Most of all, they posit Trump’s movement as the vanguard force that will visit richly earned eternal suffering on the far-flung defilers of just scriptural rule; that is the point at which the casually cruel Trump we recognize in Andrew Harnick’s photo achieves a kind of postmodern transubstantiation, and merges indistinguishably with the evangelically sanctioned image of Trump as Jesus on a tank. After all, as the Gospel of Matthew said, Jesus preached faith in a God for whom all things are possible.

Back in the George W. Bush years, my then-wife and I had dinner in New York City with Tucker Carlson. At the time, he was settling in as cohost of CNN’s Crossfire after a rocky tour through the cable-hosting wars and savoring his re-anointment as a political insider and media gatekeeper. Over drinks, he sounded off on the invasion of Iraq, which he was then souring on (along with much of the rest of the country) after having enthusiastically supported it. He also derided the GOP’s all-in crusade against gay marriage, which would prove by some accounts key to Bush’s subsequent reelection in spite of the Iraq debacle. And he regaled us with media gossip, recounting the tale of a prominent cable talking head whom he’d heard clumsily trying to burnish his standing as a political junkie by announcing his eagerness to cover the “Iowa primary” and the “New Hampshire caucus.”

Such encounters weren’t all that remarkable for the time, particularly as the Bush White House sank into greater chaos and corruption, and its erstwhile fellow travelers strained to distance themselves from its crimes and imperial folly. Yet as my then-wife and I compared notes afterward, we agreed that Carlson seemed to be verging on a significant revision of his worldview; he appeared to be aligning with the then-trendy-in-DC niche movement of “liberaltarianism.”

Well, that was then. And here we are now. After a few more turns of cable TV’s wheel of fortune, Carlson landed in the heart of Fox News’ prime-time lineup, hymning the MAGA project of national reclamation to his increasingly right-wing audience while peddling ghoulish campfire tales about the plagues of wokeness, critical race theory, open borders, and other damning specimens of anti-American liberal groupthink. Even after his unceremonious dismissal from Fox, Carlson continued his strange trajectory ever more rightward. Setting up permanent shop in the fever swamps of the conspiracy-minded far right, he palled around with Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán and lent his podcasting platform to the Nazi-Groyper influencer Nick Fuentes—a move that inadvertently sparked a still-raging civil war within the Heritage Foundation, the right’s most influential think tank.

Carlson’s transformation from an ingratiating bow-tied pundit into a plaid-and-khaki-clad Nazi enabler is the subject of Jason Zengerle’s Hated by All the Right People, a chronicle of Carlson’s career that is meant to double, as the book’s subtitle suggests, as a broader account of how the intellectual project of American conservatism has gone off the rails. As a straight media biography, Zengerle’s book is an instructive study in the amoral rounds of ambitious striving in the greenrooms and studio sets of cable TV—a kind of What Makes Sammy Run? for the chattering classes of the new millennium. But as a saga of the right’s intellectual decline, it’s less persuasive—not because Carlson isn’t a representative movement intellectual, but because the American right has long since parted company with political life as a forum of ideas. The watchword for the US conservative movement, at least since the rise of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, has been partisan bloodsport and the promotion of an unappeasable and demagogic politics of cultural grievance. Carlson’s descent, then, isn’t the “unraveling” that Zengerle posits it to be so much as a fulfillment of political destiny: In order to become the maximal Trumpist mouthpiece that he is today—and, indeed, an oft-rumored successor to Trump—Carlson had to relinquish the skeptical and heterodox cast of mind he was trying out during his Crossfire incarnation and become instead a hard-line culture warrior of the MAGA blood-and-soil vintage.

What’s striking about this shift is that it was not accompanied by any notable bouts of introspection and self-doubt or by a conventional political conversion narrative; it simply involved his reading from a different set of teleprompters. In the end, Carlson is not someone who relishes the hatred of others but rather is an inveterate people pleaser. Even in his most hate-filled diatribes, he tends to convulse with giggles and revert to his natural preppy, back-slapping mien. That he does so while indulging Nazis, white nationalists, dictators, and assorted edgelord authoritarians is an indictment of our mediasphere, our collective moral compass, and our political imaginations, but it’s largely the same Tucker Carlson at the center of the squalor.

All that said, Carlson’s public career, as Zengerle recounts it, is a compelling story. He grew up in Southern California as the eldest son of the TV journalist Dick Carlson, who would go on to head the Voice of America under Ronald Reagan. Carlson’s parents divorced after his father left Los Angeles for a job in San Diego and his mother, Lisa, stayed behind to savor the 1970s bohemian scene in Laurel Canyon. Dick would soon get custody of Tucker and his brother, Buckley (named for the conservative media icon William F. Buckley Jr.), after Lisa failed to show up for the hearing.

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Carlson remained estranged from his birth mother for the remainder of her life, but his father loomed large in his upbringing, schooling his sons in the aristocratic comportment while also ensuring they were well versed in alpha-male exploits. Zengerle writes that Dick would put his sons atop the roof of his station wagon “as he gunned the land yacht’s V-8 engine and careened down a dirt road.” In addition, “the nannies he hired were usually men—including a former Korean intelligence officer whom Tucker and Buckley addressed as Colonel Kwon and who instructed the boys on how to disembowel someone. Dick’s etiquette advice wasn’t just about the proper way to write thank-you notes, but also included tips like how, in prison, ‘the cigarette pack is your friend.’”

Carlson’s upbringing, in short, was quirky but privileged. After his parents’ divorce, his father married Patricia Swanson, heir to the eponymous TV-dinner fortune, and the couple packed the high-school-age Tucker off, first to an abortive stint at a Swiss boarding school and then to St. George’s School in Rhode Island. At St. George’s, Carlson acquired a “reputation as both a conservative and a contrarian” while also cultivating a hybrid prepster-hippie lifestyle, getting high and listening to the Grateful Dead as he dated the headmaster’s daughter, Susie Andrews, whom he would go on to marry.

Picking up the first whiff of potential inner conflict in Carlson’s biography, Zengerle pounces. Carlson’s alliance with Andrews, and his dutiful attendance at the Episcopalian services led by her dad, who was also a priest in the faith, seemed to signal Carlson’s search for a “stability sorely lacking in his own family”—but “when that stability became stifling, he returned to his group of male friends to play Hacky Sack, listen to the Dead, and smoke pot and drink Kool-Aid mixed with vodka. Indeed, Carlson seemed almost to suffer from a double consciousness.”

Nor was that all, Zengerle theorizes. Carlson’s lackluster academic performance at St. George’s—already a “second-tier” New England prep school—foreclosed admission to an Ivy League college, and so he landed instead at another second-
tier institution of the WASP aristocracy: Trinity College in Connecticut. Another proto-MAGA marker was thus laid down: “His failure to gain entrée to the Ivy League gnawed at him,” Zengerle writes, “and would, decades later, serve as a touchstone for his populist ideology.” These labored forays into psychological portent are a sign not only that Zengerle wasn’t able to land Carlson’s cooperation for his biography, but also that Carlson’s life story isn’t long on inner turmoil. Its psychodynamics are all on the surface.

In this regard, Carlson’s life story has many points of affinity with that of the man he’s now most commonly linked with: Donald Trump. Both men came of age in exceedingly comfortable circumstances, and both adopted grievance-driven public personas as a means of dampening the impression that they were Little Lord Fauntleroy–style scions of privilege. Their self-advertised “contrarian” streaks have, over time, proved to be at best elite affectations, and at worst alibis for their rampaging egos. In neither case are they a matter of great psychological interest.

Nonetheless, Carlson, unlike Trump, did eventually become something interesting: a talented and dedicated magazine journalist. When William Kristol, the former chief of staff to the first George (H.W.) Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle, launched The Weekly Standard in 1995, he tapped Carlson, who had recently quit his job as an editorial writer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, to become a staff writer. Kristol had initially turned Carlson down for the job after interviewing him, but Mark Gerson, a former colleague of Carlson’s during his postcollegiate internship at the Heritage Foundation, prevailed on Kristol to give him another shot. (Carlson had landed the Heritage internship via the good graces of his dad—so much for the career arc of this young proto-populist.)

Carlson instantly took to the gig. “I thought, ‘Jesus, it’s like it’s come out of the womb full grown,” Carlson’s former Standard colleague Andrew Ferguson told Zengerle. “He needed no grooming or tutoring or anything. He was just ready to go out of the box.” Carlson was also moving beyond his facile prep-school “contrarian” profile into gratifyingly unpredictable territory, publishing a withering takedown of the anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist for The New Republic and a damning profile of the anointed 2000 GOP primary front-runner George W. Bush for Tina Brown’s short-lived magazine Talk. (It was around this time that I initially crossed paths with Carlson; when I was working as an op-ed editor at Newsday, I quickly learned that some of the best sources for informed critical appraisals of the GOP were writers from the Standard.) At the height of his tour as a print journalist, Carlson even wrote an impassioned defense of his trade, standing athwart the well-flogged demonology of journalism on the American right:

I couldn’t be sicker of hearing how Ordinary People, Folks Outside the Beltway, Average Working Americans (insert your favorite euphemism for the Great Unread here) have contempt for journalists. (My gut response, seldom voiced, is: Good, now we’re even.) The problem is particularly acute in some conservative circles, where belief in the liberal media conspiracy is part of the catechism. Polls I keep reading about claim to indicate that most people consider journalists inaccurate and arrogant, if not simply evil. This bugs me, and not merely because it’s me they’re talking about. I don’t like the perception mainly because it isn’t true.

At the same time, though, Carlson’s ambition propelled him toward the more lucrative, high-visibility world of television. Zengerle conveys some of Carlson’s early drive for self-advancement in the book’s prologue, when he recalls his first encounters with Carlson when he was still at the Standard. In the late 1990s, Zengerle was an intern at The New Republic, and Carlson came by the magazine’s office for a standing lunch with the TNR writer and editor Stephen Glass, who was later exposed as a serial fabricator and forced to abandon his journalism career. Like many Beltway-adjacent writers, Zengerle sees alliances like that of Carlson and Glass as a relic of the bygone era of civility and professional fraternity among political journalists: “For all the partisan rancor” that ideological opposites like Carlson and Glass aired in the pages of their home magazines, “there was a LARPing quality to all of the political fighting. In print, writers at TNR and the Standard were waging ideological war. In real life, they were meeting for lunch.”

Yet such gauzy evocations of the old DC bonhomie gloss over a more revealing factor in the friendship between Glass and Carlson: the drive to be noticed—and celebrated—by the widest possible audience at virtually any cost. In Glass’s case, the results of this craving proved disastrous, since they involved the complete destruction of his credibility and career. In Carlson’s case, they were simply bathetic, as he laid aside his accomplished writing career to be a barking head in a long regress of pandering TV gigs. This preening impulse was emblazoned in his origin story as a TV pundit: In 1995, he obliged a CBS booker for the network’s newsmagazine show, 48 Hours, to do a conservative-leaning hit on the O.J. Simpson trial. Carlson got the gig not because of his Simpson expertise—he was indeed distinguished by “knowing nothing about the Simpson case,” Zengerle writes—but because the rest of the Standard’s staff was out to lunch when the booker called the office. After delivering an “unremarkable and utterly forgettable” take on the case, Carlson was nonetheless initiated into the great secret fraternity of camera-ready take-dispensers: “Once you’ve been booked, you’re bookable,” he would later explain. “The process is self-authenticating.”

Sure enough, Carlson was invited to supply another Simpson hit for CBS’s morning show the following day, and he eventually swung into the regular pundit rotation on CNN during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Six months into that seamy episode, a political tip sheet calculated that Carlson had clocked the second most Lewinsky hits, after the indefatigable greenroom habitué David Gergen but leading James Carville.

Gergen, Carville, and the legions of more lurid talking heads flogging the Lewinsky scandal, such as Nancy Grace and Geraldo Rivera, were disconcerting company to be keeping if, as Carlson’s longtime Standard colleague and close friend Matt Labash attested, his professional dream had been “to become a war correspondent for The New York Times, or to write some twenty-thousand-word [John] McPhee-style piece on the New Jersey Turnpike for The New Yorker.” But for Carlson, the hits—and the lucrative TV contracts—kept on coming. Come the new century, he’d landed a cohost gig on CNN’s late-night politics show The Spin Room. After eight months of lackluster ratings, the network canceled the show—but it then enlisted Carlson to replace Carville’s wife, Mary Matalin, on its prime-time jousting-pundits show Crossfire when Matalin decamped to work for the Bush White House. Carlson’s Crossfire tour ended disastrously in 2004, when he and cohost Paul Begala devoted an episode to Jon Stewart, who castigated the show’s fatuous pugilism for “hurting America” and Carlson in particular for being an actual “dick” while also playing one on TV.

The new head of CNN, Jon Klein, took Stewart’s words to heart and placed Crossfire on hiatus. Carlson remained under contract and, ever ingratiating, tried out for a news-reading spot on the network’s 10 pm show NewsNight while its main host, Aaron Brown, took a week off over the Christmas holiday. At the time, Carlson also had an offer from MSNBC to host a new show there, but mindful of CNN’s higher prestige and larger reach, he was trying to salvage a spot at the network. The gambit didn’t work, even though the audition went fine. (“I was not particularly worried that he would somehow damage us in prime time” was Klein’s wan appraisal.) On the first business day of 2005, Klein announced that Crossfire was officially canceled and Carlson’s contract wouldn’t be renewed.

Carlson’s acrobatic efforts to accommodate his CNN network boss again drives home how off-base it is to imagine him as a connoisseur of the hatred of others. You couldn’t begin to picture his cohost Begala (a true partisan hack), let alone other cable-anointed merchants of right-wing vituperation like Robert Novak—a longtime Carlson detractor on ideological grounds—or Bill O’Reilly, going for a spin in the news anchor’s chair to cling to their contracts. Carlson’s next career chapter—a woeful turn at MSNBC as the host of The Situation With Tucker Carlson (later desperately rebranded as Tucker by the flailing network suits after it had bombed in a variety of time slots)—further showcased Carlson’s thwarted will to achieve mass approval. When the network pivoted to a more superficially liberal identity under the influence of its popular omni-ranting host Keith Olbermann, Carlson was again out in the cold: Correctly sensing that he was about to be muscled out at MSNBC, he opted for the greatest possible pandering opportunity: a spot on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars. Never had John McPhee seemed farther away.

Carlson bombed there as well—he was the first contestant voted off the show, with one of the judges summing up his team’s performance with this 
terse appraisal: “What an awful mess.” Yet, ever dogged and ingratiating, he filmed a pilot for a prime-time game show for CBS called Do You Trust Me? (speaking of the self-authenticating rites of media belonging). But even after the network had taped six episodes, Carlson again was on the outs: CBS passed on the pilot and instead green-lighted a game show called The Singing Bee, Zengerle writes, “a karaoke-style competition that was hosted by Joey Fatone, a former member of the boy band NSYNC.” Carlson returned to MSNBC purgatory, only to have Tucker canceled a few months later, in March 2008.

In the wake of these defeats, Carlson retreated to DC political journalism, launching the right-wing news site The Daily Caller in 2010, after delivering an impassioned speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference declaring the need to revive accurate and accountable journalism in the house of American conservatism. But neither the American right nor the American Web was primed to accommodate such aims, and the Caller was reduced shortly after its launch to desperately courting links from Matt Drudge, who had long harbored a recondite anti-Carlson grudge of his own. Eventually, relations between the Caller and the Drudge Report mother ship thawed, but the site that Carlson captained was on the losing side of that Faustian bargain, chasing increasingly ephemeral Beltway scooplets to maximize clicks, while recruiting a staff that was openly flirting with the white-nationalist and proto-Groyper obsessions that would later overtake the online right.

In the meantime, Carlson continued to court TV renown, albeit at great cost to his ’90s-era self-respect: He signed on as a contributor at Fox News, a network that he had once derided as “a mean, sick group of people.” Carlson may have turned to Fox as a last resort, but by this point in his career he was also ready for the right-wing-grievance go-round. Soon he began appearing on the 6 pm Special Report with its new host, Bret Baier, a policer of right-wing orthodoxies who liked to cosplay as an actual news anchor. Baier hosted a chatter segment on the show that bore a similarly quasi-comic sobriquet: the “All-Star Panel,” which regularly featured old colleagues of Carlson’s like National Review Online founding editor Jonah Goldberg and Standard writer Stephen Hayes, an old fraternity brother of Baier’s. But standing in the way of Carlson’s ambition was yet another grudge-holding executive: Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who had only half-playfully called Carlson a “loser” when he offered him a contract as a contributor and, in the words of one former Fox suit, “loved kicking Tucker down the stairs and beating him up.” So Carlson mainly drew duty as a flunky on the weekend segments of Fox’s quasi-happy-talk franchise Fox & Friends, where he’d alternate standard agitprop outbursts with time-filling stunts like getting behind the wheel of a go-kart or playing cowbell with Blue Öyster Cult.

Still, over time, Carlson became a valued Fox asset. His Fox & Friends fill-in gig became a full-time hosting one, and when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Tucker Carlson Tonight debuted in the 7 pm slot the following week. Within six months, Fox prime-time mainstay Bill O’Reilly had been yanked from the lineup in the wake of a series of damning and expensively settled sexual harassment charges, and Carlson was suddenly the most influential voice both on Fox and in the new MAGA political order. Soon he was tailoring his show to be a Trumpian messaging delivery system, bringing ardent promoters of alt-right and white-nationalist ideology onto his writing staff, and devoting long editorial segments to the pillaging of Real America at the hands of Democrats, globalists, and a rotating cast of faithless, predatory elites. Even as he emerged as the premier media backer of the MAGA agenda, Carlson sought to keep an arm’s-length distance from Trump himself, perhaps out of deference to his background in print journalism. It didn’t matter, though; when Trump, at a Florida campaign rally, name-checked a fringe conspiratorial claim that the Swedish government was covering up a massive crime wave carried out by Muslim immigrants, it turned out that he had watched a Carlson interview on the subject the night before. Carlson was shocked to discover that he’d become one of the most powerful voices in Donald Trump’s head, simply by beaming out MAGA-grade propaganda on his show. (This revelation had to have hit Carlson’s Fox News colleague Sean Hannity especially hard, since Hannity had been frenetically lobbying Trump and his retinue behind the scenes to land the chief of staff’s job in the first Trump White House.)

In Zengerle’s account, Carlson’s prime-time carnival of MAGA grievance helped translate Trump’s own motley array of persecution complexes and revenge fantasies into “a populist-nationalist ideology that was far more coherent than anything being offered by Trump himself.” And it’s certainly true that Carlson retained a core narrative gift in his new role: He managed to present the hollowing-out of the manufacturing heartland as a tragic betrayal of a key constituency of forgotten Americans and, in one of his most effective monologues, drew a parallel between the callous abandonment of white working-class communities and the perennial effort to pathologize and oppress their Black counterparts throughout our history.

Yet just as often, and arguably far more often, Carlson was as incoherent and conspiracy-driven as Trump. He devoted several reports to publicizing the fake story that South Africa’s Black-led government was unilaterally seizing land from white farmers. In other segments, Carlson flatly declared that white supremacy was “a hoax” and “actually not a real problem in America.” Like Trump, he delighted in the demonization of immigrants, complaining in one infamous segment that American elites claim that “we’ve got a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor…even if it makes our own country poorer, dirtier, and more divided.” These hate-filled episodes might have helped Carlson grow his audience—by 2020, Tucker Carlson Tonight was receiving the highest ratings of any cable show in history—but they don’t really find him translating this politics of fear into an ideology so much as pandering to viewers much in the way that Trump does: deftly seeking out the greatest points of outrage in his audience’s collective psyche and giving them ready-made scapegoats—immigrants, Black Americans, university professors, feminists, Jewish financiers, and globalists.

A more cynical observer might wonder how much Carlson, in his heart of hearts, really even believes all of this rudderless bigotry—particularly after the discovery phase of the Dominion lawsuit against Fox turned up texts from Carlson professing his thoroughgoing hatred for Trump and his relief at Trump’s election defeat in 2020. But perhaps one of the most damning things about Carlson’s career is that, upon examining it closely, one begins to realize that what he believes never really seems to matter much to Carlson himself. Bolstering Trump’s white-nationalist appeal while secretly despising the man is a bit like a tobacco executive donating to the American Cancer Society: Your inner personal misgivings don’t make you any less a part of the problem. Again, the figure of Trump is useful here not as a gauge of Carlson’s actual beliefs but rather as a career model. Carlson’s drift into Groyper conspiracy-mongering is of a piece with Trump’s racist diatribes against Somalis and his justifications of ICE’s executions of protesters like Renée Good. Each man relies on bigotry to strategically conceal his own elite pedigree; Trump and Carlson both castigate remote and ill-defined elites spearheading shadowy plots to purloin the economic and cultural birthrights of white America. And each of these MAGA demagogues has exponentially enriched himself by monetizing online hatred while courting the same corporate backers they profess to despise in the abstract.

The most telling thing about the former glad-handing preppy magazine scribe with New Yorker ambitions making a fortune as a MAGA surrogate is that Carlson is now mired in a world of total intellectual stagnation. Much like pornographers, right-wing hate merchants can only continue getting a charge out of their mass audience by ratcheting up the outrage quotient in their content. So since Carlson was abruptly canned by Fox in the wake of the 2023 settlement of the Dominion suit, he’s been a virtual random-search engine for hyperventilating grievance theater on the right. His fawning two-hour interview with Nick Fuentes, which left Fuentes’s deranged antisemitic outbursts both unchallenged and indulged, was but the latest (if also the most justly notorious) specimen kicked up by this ugly business model. On his YouTube show, Carlson has interviewed a leader of the white-nationalist group VDARE, Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper, and fellow conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, who surrendered his own lucrative Infowars gig after losing a $1.4 billion defamation suit brought by the families of victims in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre, which Jones dubbed a deep-state “false flag operation.” That’s all on top of uncritically platforming authoritarian figures like Putin, Orbán, and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

As a seeming corollary of Carlson’s accelerating intellectual self-enclosure, he has also become besotted with the apocalyptic political theology of the New Apostolic Reformation movement, despite his continued identification with the Episcopalianism of his prep-school youth. Zengerle makes only glancing mention of this spiritual turn, citing an interview that Carlson gave to a Christian podcaster in which he described being attacked in bed by “a demon.” But Carlson has also interviewed the right-wing evangelical pundit Santiago Pliego, as well as the NAR-adjacent Calvinist pastor Doug Wilson, an avowed champion of theocratic rule. At the 2024 Republican National Convention’s Heritage Foundation policy confab, Carlson warned of a coming “spiritual battle” pitting righteous Republicans against Democrats who stand determined as a body to “eliminate” Christians. Carlson’s embrace of the most militant wing of the evangelical MAGA movement has grimly borne out his former Standard colleague Andrew Ferguson’s view that Carlson had become “the Father Coughlin of the twenty-first century”—a peddler of ugly bigotries dressed up as the pseudo-populist vindication of the forgotten man. And since bathos is never far offstage for the former stunt correspondent on Fox & Friends, Carlson also hosted an event in 2024 where accused sexual assaulter and rapist Russell Brand made his first major public profession of the Christian faith.

It’s easy, Lord knows, to make sport of such blatantly transactional avowals of faith, but the followers of Carlson’s improbable career should by now be well aware that he is an exceedingly savvy early adopter of media and political trends. In the airless room of self-authenticating reactionary MAGA politics, Carlson is charting a new quest for absolute conviction and certainty. Let us pray.

The second Trump presidency has been a through-the-looking-glass parody of executive-branch accountability, from its brazen agenda of self-enrichment to its lawless war making and campaigns of civilian murder. But Trump’s ouster of Attorney General Pam Bondi represents an especially grim moment in the White House’s backward-spooling approach to compliance with the law. In prior modern presidencies, attorneys general flamed out in office after touching off major scandals—such as Alberto Gonzales’s now quaint-seeming bid to hand over US Attorney gigs to political hacks. In nobler circumstances, they might have resigned in protest over Oval Office tampering with the Justice Department’s independence, as Elliot Richardson did during the Nixon White House’s Saturday-night massacre. Bondi, by contrast, was cashiered for failing to slow-walk and downplay the raging Epstein files scandal to the president’s satisfaction—while also, in a betrayal of Trump’s model of government by retribution, allegedly tipping off Democratic California Representative Eric Swalwell to the release of materials from the long-closed FBI investigation into his purported relationship with a Chinese spy.

In other words, Bondi lost her job for displaying insufficient fealty to her Oval Office boss—even after going to enormous lengths to transform the Justice Department into an outlet of MAGA agitprop, from firing DOJ attorneys who had prosecuted January 6 rioters to pursuing shoddy and baseless prosecutions of Trump’s political enemies, to threatening hate-speech prosecutions of people who didn’t mourn Charlie Kirk’s death to the administration’s satisfaction. Yet the larger irony is that Trump’s vanity and his demands for cringing loyalty have always been unquenchable; Bondi’s trespass wasn’t so much a function of her seeking to assert her own independence—as any minimally competent attorney general should—as of her inability to appease Trump’s demands telepathically.

The debacle of the Epstein files’ release is the purest illustration of her flailing courtiership. During his 2024 reelection campaign, Trump pledged to support the full release of the federal files on the late pedophile sex trafficker as a sop to the Q-pilled wing of the MAGA base. But after Trump won reelection, his interest in going public with the sick predations of his former South Florida crony plummeted—most notably after Bondi briefed him that he was a frequent presence in the files. The White House went rapidly into overdrive in an effort to downplay the scale of the Epstein scandal; FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino both issued statements asserting that, despite the extremely suspicious circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death while in custody, he had taken his own life. Patel also walked back Bondi’s initial claim that the files contained “thousands” of shocking videos showing Epstein with underage sexual partners and child pornography. (Meanwhile, Elon Musk, then on the outs with the Trump White House over its massive tax and spending bill, took to X to proclaim that Trump was suppressing the full release of the files because he was all over them.) Through it all, the president shrugged off disclosures relating to his close friendship with Epstein—including the gross and salacious entry he evidently composed for a book commemorating the pedophile’s 50th birthday.

It was Bondi’s misfortune to directly botch the rollout of the Epstein files’ release: When the administration first made a tranche of documents available to the public, it turned out mostly to be material that was already available. And after Bondi touted the existence of a full roster of Epstein’s clients in a Fox News interview—one that is “sitting on my desk right now to review right now,” as she put it—the administration then walked that claim back as well. A memo from Bondi’s own DOJ proclaimed that its “systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’ There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.”

This incompetent-to-incoherent message is indeed the calling card of someone who had no business being anywhere near the Department of Justice, let alone in charge. But more than that, Bondi’s flagrant mishandling of the Epstein disclosures underlines the untenability of the prime directive of all Trump White House flunkies: to appease both the whims of the king and the restive spirits of MAGA conspiracy-mongering. Trump has managed throughout his career to direct his following to disregard the plain evidence before their senses with the elan of Obi Wan Kenobi masking the presence of embattled droids in the Empire’s sights. But the Epstein scandal simply occupies too great a space in MAGA’s mindscape for management by Trump’s conventional strategy of grandiosely changing the subject. And as we now know, it’s simply impossible for any of Trump’s appeasers—even one with the lickspittle credentials of Pam Bondi—to keep up with the flailing directives of the MAGA monarch.

So just as the fork in the road abruptly arrived for former DHS Director Kirsti Noem when she seemed to show the temerity to actually blame Trump for his own actions and decisions in her testimony before Congress, it was all but foreordained that Bondi was on the path to defenestration when she proved unable to square all the many circles leading back from the Epstein files to Trump’s well-documented history of ugly sexual predation. The ironies here, too, are hard to adequately describe: Bondi came into the job, after all, only after Trump’s first pick, ex–Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, proved too toxic on the basis of charges stemming from his own alleged sexual fraternization with underage partners.

Meanwhile, the reported front-runner to replace Bondi is EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, who Senate Democrats charge has lied to them under oath about the cancellation of climate grants. Zeldin also was the House’s most vocal defender of Trump during his first impeachment, and voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election. There is, in short, no Trump-authored lie too big for him to swallow—which in this debased phase of the American imperial presidency, appears to be the chief requirement for the job.

It’s a bit too on the nose, metaphorically speaking, that the latest example of the utter prostration of our national legislature before an unhinged and power-mad executive branch concerns the failure to competently manage air travel. Senseless holding patterns, traffic bottlenecks, unscheduled delays, and pointless marathon waits in line—the many indignities of flying almost perfectly mirror the business model of Congress in the Trump 2.0 era.

Just consider the ludicrous series of feckless legislative self-owns that have produced the present crisis at US airports. In response to ICE’s nationwide reign of terror, congressional Democrats blocked additional money for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the latest government-funding deadline approached. Their quite reasonable demand was for some basic reforms to tamp down ICE’s most egregious abuses—for example, requiring agents to wear bodycams and banning them from wearing masks. (In reality, nothing about this corps of brownshirts mustered to implement Stephen Miller’s punitive racist fantasies is reformable, but that is a sermon for another occasion.)

House Republicans refused to go along with this plan and approved their own DHS funding bill without the ICE restrictions. That bill predictably ran aground in the Senate, where it couldn’t surmount the filibuster requirement of 60 votes in the face of unified Democratic opposition.

Meanwhile, with American airports increasingly resembling Soviet-era supermarkets and polling showing that a majority of Americans correctly blamed Republicans for their latest non-governing clusterfuck, the Trump White House intervened as only the Trump White House can: by mobilizing ICE agents to replace the TSA workers left unpaid by the dilatory GOP. Not only was this an act of ludicrous political symbolism—deploying the very despicable and authoritarian vigilante force whose actions touched off the whole DHS funding battle in the first place—it was also an operational nonstarter, since ICE agents aren’t even properly trained to perform their own jobs, let alone to take on the responsibilities of security screening at airports. So in addition to airports’ being overrun with irate passengers, they’ve also taken on legions of ICE workers standing around, looking like bored yet heavily armed hotel concierges.

Faced with this spiraling chaos, Senate Republicans took on the disorienting task of actually doing something. After weeks of rejecting viable plans to fund the TSA while tabling ICE’s budget, they abruptly reversed course and accepted the basic framework put forward by Democrats. GOP Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and John Kennedy of Louisiana—lawmakers who are pretty much the polar opposite of apostles of bipartisan moderation—sponsored a bill to continue funding the DHS, while arranging to move through the budget line for ICE on a separate reconciliation vote that would no longer have to meet the 60-vote threshold imposed by the filibuster. It was a partial capitulation to Democratic demands, sure, but it was also a way out of the GOP’s hilariously extended streak of rake-stepping on the issue. After the proposal won passage with the blessing of Senate majority leader John Thune, the Senate not unreasonably adjourned for two weeks, figuring that at least one major headache for the GOP had been palliated.

Cue the next executive branch power grab: Trump abruptly announced that he would bring TSA workers back on payroll, by simply redirecting ICE’s lavish budget line in last year’s tax-and-spending law into the airport-security arm of the DHS. This represented yet another completely illegal executive-branch end run around Congress’s fundamental spending authority—yet with Congress permanently asleep at the wheel, it scarcely seemed to matter.

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But all this maneuvering failed to account for a key factor: the bottomless stupidity of the House GOP conference. Notified of a provisional governing win out of the Senate, House Speaker Mike Johnson, the MAGA clown who couldn’t think straight, promptly and inaccurately disowned it as the handiwork of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. (In fairness, one probably can’t expect Johnson, who was a critical House strategist in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, to offer anything like a good-faith account of how the Senate works.) And since Johnson owes his House leadership perch to the most militant anti-government wing of the chamber’s MAGAfied GOP majority, he appeased it with a meaningless new House measure to lock in eight weeks of DHS funding with the ICE budget at full strength. In other words, the House has met a prospective resolution of the DHS shutdown with the very same brand of legislative wishcasting that provoked the funding impasse in the first place. Then, naturally, Johnson gaveled his own chamber into a two-week recess of its own.

It’s hard to imagine how one could draw up a more farcical parody of legislative governance. In a weird aberration, the Senate stumbled into acting as it was originally intended to—brokering a compromise deal on a key budgeting failure that was wreaking havoc with a basic mode of transportation and sparking public outrage. Yet a House that has made it a point of ideological pride to refrain from doing its job in any sphere proceeded to do something worse than nothing—it reinscribed the basic terms of the original failure for no discernible reason other than to dramatize its own contempt for governing. As Noah Berlatsky of Public Notice writes, the whole episode encloses on itself, origami-style, as a textbook illustration of MAGA incompetence: “Trump made sure all travelers knew he was responsible for airport delays by sending hated ICE agents to stare at them while they wait in line, then Senate Republicans publicly blamed Trump for scuppering a deal, then Trump (illegally) declared he could have funded TSA anytime he wanted, then Republicans in Congress had a massive internal fight which ended with them refusing to fund TSA and going on vacation.”

At the same time, the White House’s still greater self-inflicted calamity—the “excursion” into Iran—continues. The Pentagon is reportedly planning to deploy ground troops for an engagement projected to last at least several weeks. This move would represent a dire escalation of an already illegal and unauthorized war. It’s the very sort of executive abuse that Congress is supposed to exercise fundamental oversight over. Yet a national legislature that can’t even govern its way out of airport delays isn’t about to reclaim its constitutional responsibilities in wartime. The scandal here isn’t so much that Congress is on recess at this parlous moment but that, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, it’s no longer possible to tell the difference.

Everything about America’s reckless and baseless attack on Iran flies in the face of objective reality, from the failed round-robin competition within the Trump White House to identify a coherent casus belli to President Donald Trump’s fabricated anecdote about a conveniently unnamed former president’s professing envy over the war to his invention of nonexistent ceasefire negotiations to climb down from the next war-crime escalation of the conflict he was poised to unleash.

Our president is, of course, a bottomless fount of this sort of auto-generated delusion, going back to the days when he posed as his own PR flack to manipulate New York tabloid coverage of his flailing real estate empire. But harnessing Trump’s defective grasp of the real to the towering Moloch of the American war machine represents an unprecedented new level of imperial nihilism—and the chief motive force behind it is the same thing that transformed this inert Caligulan stooge into our commander in chief in the first place: television.

Amid the senseless mounting carnage of the Iran war, NBC News’s report on how Trump’s daily briefings on the conflict consist not of substantive information but of bite-sized video montages came off as a deflating afterthought. Nor was it shocking to learn that these clip reels appear to be little more than glorified cheerleading exercises, documenting the scale of destruction wrought by the American air war while pointedly omitting the deflating news of Iranian counterattacks and diplomatic resistance to the shambolic succession of jury-rigged American “off-ramps.” One administration official characterized the daily clip roundup as a nonstop loop of footage devoted to “blowing stuff up.” Condensing each day’s new digest of carnage from on high into a tight two-minute compass calls to mind the “two-minute hates” immortalized in George Orwell’s 1984—only where those rancorous hallucinations of current events were crafted for mass consumption, these videos are curated for the Maximum Leader’s delectation.

This poses a very fraught problem in terms of what cultural studies mavens used to call “audience reception theory”—the notion that consumers of media aren’t passive automatons but active interpreters endowing texts with new layers of meaning. In Trump’s case, the reception field is very much a closed loop—so much so that the president is reportedly upset and disoriented by actual news reports on the conflict that contradict the warm bath of bombing montages that start his day. White House sources told NBC that

the videos are…driving Trump’s increasing frustration with news coverage of the war. Trump has pointed to the success depicted in the daily videos to privately question why his administration can’t better influence the public narrative, asking aides why the news media doesn’t emphasize what he’s seeing, one of the current U.S. officials and [a] former U.S. official said.

In one truly scary episode, Trump was reportedly bewildered to see news reports of a successful Iranian strike on five Air Force planes as they were refueling at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia; his daily video montage had contained nothing about the attack. Yet while Trump “reacted angrily behind the scenes” to this gap in his spoon-fed account of the war’s progress, he nonetheless continued hewing to his election-tested message of blaming the press for allegedly fabricating the news he dislikes; “publicly he posted on Truth Social calling coverage of the strike misleading and accusing media organizations of wanting the U.S. ‘to lose the War,’” NBC reports.

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In other words, even when confronted with evidence that his personal war briefings are bowdlerized agitprop, Trump’s solution is not to change his briefings but to change the reporting—to the point of seconding his lickspittle FCC commissioner Brandan Carr’s threat to withdraw broadcasting licenses from networks that don’t produce news that meets the White House’s jingoistic standards. In this strongman version of audience reception theory, Trump, as the most powerful TV viewer alive, naturally should dictate the content and coverage priorities for the entire mediasphere.

There are, of course, endless problems arising from this model of news as agitprop for an audience of one. For starters, it’s vital for any commander in chief to encounter and absorb bad news about a military conflict, since under the deranged and unconstitutional conditions of the imperial presidency, the occupant of the White House is endowed with maximal war-making power. If he continues to operate in a blissful information bubble assuring him all is well and that his military prowess is unparalleled, conflicts quickly become quagmires, and quagmires turn into world-historical imperial follies. That’s the long-memory-holed reason that the modern conservative movement’s ideological assault on the media was hatched from the grievances of the Nixon White House, as it presided over the successive disastrous interventions in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; that administration, too, demanded a newly prostrate and compliant media to cheerlead on its blind imperial madness.

At a deeper level, though, Trump’s Baudrillardian experience of war as TV does something arguably worse than transform him into a cathode-addled Caesar figure; it numbs the planet’s most lethal perpetrator of mass violence from comprehending the effects of his actions. We saw this syndrome in horrifying real time during Trump’s deeply unsettling press conference after the US illegally kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. Trump, who at times appeared on the verge of falling asleep, offered yet another jury-rigged rationale for the violent violation of another nation’s sovereignty, citing the country’s nationalization of its oil industry in the 1970s as evidence that “they stole our oil. We can’t let them get away with that”—even though the oil in question was never really ours, and despite the US oil industry’s repeated insistence that it would prefer to have nothing to do with the capital-intensive effort to upgrade Venezuela’s decaying oil infrastructure. Trump blearily went on to threaten military takeovers of Cuba and Mexico—at that point Iran was out of the administration’s kaleidoscopic axis of evil, since Trump was no doubt still relishing the sugar high of his bombing attack on the Islamic Republic last summer. For no intelligible reason, he riffed on the National Guard siege of Washington DC and ICE’s reign of terror in Los Angeles; these lawless exercises of federal force were evidently all of a piece in the president’s war-besotted lizard brain. It was like watching Chauncy Gardner, the TV-addicted simpleton president from Being There, morph into Coriolanus before our eyes.

That was evidently how Trump experienced it as well. In an interview with Fox & Friends ahead of the press conference, he enthused about his own audience reception of the Venezuela raid: “I watched it literally like I was watching a TV show.”

As the US Senate seeks to end the Department of Homeland Security funding shutdown by finding a workable compromise on reforms to the unconstitutional and murderous Immigration and Customs Enforcement putsch in American cities, it found time to confirm a new head of the DHS who is almost certainly going to expand ICE’s reign of terror. The legislative chamber that likes to call itself the “world’s greatest deliberative body” mostly phoned in the confirmation of Oklahoma GOP Senator Markwayne Mullin as new DHS edgelord. The most nettlesome sticking point in his confirmation hearings was Mullin’s comments that a neighbor’s rib-breaking assault on his conference colleague Homeland Security and Government Affairs chair Rand Paul of Kentucky was probably justified.

Mullin, true to form, refused to apologize and accused Paul of conducting “character assassination” from his committee chairman’s perch—a classic Trumpian plaint converting a delusional bout of aggression into fodder for grievance. Given Mullin’s previous violent threats in the Senate—he infamously challenged Teamster president Sean O’Brien to a fistfight over a string of derisive tweets in a 2023 committee hearing—Paul’s opening challenge to Mullin should have prompted a searching inquiry into the nominee’s character. Instead, the committee shrugged it off, together with Mullin’s troubling stance as an election denier at a moment when President Donald Trump is threatening to deploy ICE thugs to election precincts as part of the GOP’s authoritarian crackdown on ballot access.

After the Trump administration ditched former DHS Director Kristi Noem for her clueless sanctioning of lethal ICE attacks on peaceful protesters and detainees (compounded by the unforgivable MAGA thoughtcrime of implicating Trump himself in ICE’s brownshirt assaults), senators were insisting that her successor initiate an across-the-board policy reset in an agency that’s targeting immigrant communities and fundamental First Amendment protection under the bogus guise of detaining and deporting violent criminals and dangerous predators. Yet the Senate did what it’s done throughout the second Trump term: inertly rubber-stamp the administration’s wildly unqualified and ideologically vindictive senior appointees after some desultory airing of objections before C-SPAN cameras.

This is a rank perversion of the “advise and consent” powers relegated to the Senate as a coequal branch of government in the Constitution. The Senate apparently learned nothing after it royally fucked up the confirmation of the plainly inept xenophobic demogogue Noem. Now it’s confirming Mullin as a buffer and more rhetorically belligerent entry in the same administrative product line. The case for turning down Mullin should have been clear after the nominee pointedly refused to rule out dispatching ICE agents to voting precincts this November, and for good measure failed to acknowledge the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory as he defended the DHS’s baseless investigation of 2020 election results in Arizona. Yet Mullin cruised into confirmation on a 54–45 vote; Democrats Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and John Fetterman voted with the Republican majority, while Ruben Gallego of Arizona abstained, even as Mullin endorsed DHS’s duplicitous assault on voting rights in his home state. Unsurprisingly, Paul was the only Republican to break ranks and vote against Mullin’s confirmation.

This travesty of oversight is par for the course in the US Senate. During the Trump White House’s run of depraved and sycophantic cabinet nominees, mostly drawn from the Fox News lineup, the nominal leaders of the Senate opposition couldn’t be bothered to withhold unanimous consent—the body’s somnolent routine of suspending the rules of debate to expedite votes—in order to shed proper and sustained public attention to the gallery of rogues, grifters, and MAGA sycophants now entrusted with making and administering policy in every sphere of public life. Apart from a failed and half-hearted effort to forestall the confirmation of supreme MAGA ghoul Russell Vought as head of the Office of Management and Budget, Senate Democrats politely connived in creating the impression, during the critical formative days of the second Trump administration, that this would be a more or less ordinary White House operating on the same protocols of Senate complaisance that all prior presidencies had enjoyed.

This do-nothing posture yielded the insane 100–0 confirmation of Marco Rubio as secretary of state, setting American foreign policy on its fateful course of rudderless unconstitutional intervention for no coherent aim or objective, all propped up by Rubio’s vile and lethal mendacity. In lieu of continuing to adhere to the hoary and delusive “greatest deliberative body” tagline, the Senate should heretofore take to calling itself “the legislature that looked at Marc Rubio and shrugged.” Instead of heeding Project 2025’s dictum that “personnel is policy,” Senate leaders ensured that the foundation of the second-term Trump agenda was laid without interruption; no Democratic senator holding forth at a No Kings rally should be allowed to forget that when the mandate to disrupt normal order was most urgent, the party’s conference’s de facto mantra was, “What next, my liege?”

Now that Mullin’s nomination has sailed through, the Trump White House is resuming its full-court press to secure the Senate’s passage of the White House’s pet voter-suppression bill, the SAVE America Act. Even some Senate Republicans are withholding support for the measure, since it could disenfranchise many key MAGA constituencies. So in a Hail Mary maneuver, GOP leaders are trying to broker a deal to end the DHS shutdown in exchange for an improbable bid to force a SAVE America vote under budget reconciliation protocols that would permit it to bypass the filibuster and pass on a straight-majority vote. Of course, there’s no sane interpretation of budget politics that would bring voting-rights crackdowns under its domains. But that’s the call of the Senate parliamentarian—with the likely connivance of Senate majority leader John Thune, who’s been loath to break any sort of protocol for a SAVE Act vote. Or to put things another way: Senate Democrats are leaving the most fundamental exercise of political agency in our formal democracy to recondite rule-making decisions in which they play no meaningful part. Just business as usual in the world’s most worthless deliberative body.

After declaring from his Doral, Florida, golf resort that the war he launched with Israel last week is “very complete,” President Donald Trump held a press conference dedicated to stabilizing global financial markets that tanked for much of Monday amid spiking oil prices. In between, he hosted a confab of top Republican Party donors and a gathering of the party’s congressional conference that kicked off with a North Korean–style minute-and-a-half-long standing ovation for the Maximum Leader. Trump’s frantic pronouncements on the historically unpopular and ecologically catastrophic Iran war were no more convincing than the symbolism of an announcement that economic conditions would be trending upward after the Iran “excursion” in America’s already inflation-battered, job-starved economy from a private golf club.

Yet, as Trump declared earlier in the day to CBS News, wrapping up the Iran war “is all in my mind, nobody else’s”—and the same glorified mind-cure formula holds for his declarations on the war’s calamitous economic fallout. This is, after all, the president who continually hails the onset of an economic golden age for the country as the cost of living spirals, new hiring flatlines, and trade policy has devolved into a long pratfall.

Trump’s press conference was basically an extension of the delusions and wish-fulfillment fantasies that studded his interminable State of the Union address last month. He began with a litany of the war’s achievements—the disabling of Iran’s navy and air force, the immobilization of 90 percent of its missile program, and ongoing US and Israeli bombing raids. Then, without missing a beat, he declared that the political objective behind the war was to install a new “head of the country who would be able to do something peacefully for a change”—since, as we all know, the way to ensure a country’s peaceful compliance is to bomb the shit out of it and kill more than 1,000 civilians, including some 160 students at a girls school.

He segued awkwardly from last June’s bombing assault on Iranian nuclear facilities—which he likewise claimed at the time to be a devastating blow to the country’s nuclear ambitions on a par with the Hiroshima attack—to the specter of a lethally armed Iran poised at any moment to “take over the Middle East” and wipe out Israel. Trump’s performance didn’t call to mind a composed commander in chief spelling out objectives, tactics, and exit strategies so much as a jumpy cable viewer clicking from Fox News to a History Channel segment on the Six-Day War.

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The same edgy, self-contradicting outlook shaped his comments on the war’s economic disruptions. “We’re also focused on keeping energy and oil flowing to the world,” Trump announced, and then toggled back into reveries of maximum military damage—which hardly seems like a formula for smooth oil transport from the Persian Gulf. “If Iran has anything to do with” disrupting the flow of oil, he threatened, “they’ll get hit at a much much harder level,” without of course noting that the bombing campaign is what’s caused oil prices to spike and investors to panic. Somehow, he insisted, the end result of all the bombing, the deliberate targeting of oil reserves and desalination plants, and the war’s mass civilian casualties would be a more stable oil supply “in the long run.”

In depicting the effort to keep ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz—which is a vital chokepoint not only for oil but also other basic staples such as fertilizer for American farmers at the start of planting season—Trump deployed the same stereopticon account of utmost security alternating with utmost carnage. “The Strait of Hormuz is going to be safe,” he started out, citing anti-mining operations there. But before you knew it, he was back to the admiring accounts of America’s vastly superior military might: Iran couldn’t threaten the strait’s commercial operations, after all, since “most of their ships are down at the bottom of the sea.” With the United States calling the shots in the region, he continued, “it will not be possible for [Iran] or anybody else helping that section of the world to recover.” And once again, the jarring segue to the ideal takeaway for US consumers: “The result will be lower oil and gas prices for American families.” Because what says minimal economic disruption like a massive regional attack on a major Gulf power without any clear rationale or plan of exit?

Indeed, what was missing from all of Trump’s word-pictures evoking a stabler, more compliant Middle East in the wake of the US-Israel war was any accounting for the agency of Iran—a country of 90 million whose military is in fact far from destroyed—or the neighboring powers being rapidly drawn into the widening conflict. Israel has used the Iran war as a rationale for resuming attacks on Lebanon, forcibly displacing more than half a million civilians as it claims to be targeting Hezbollah’s financial network. Iran’s decision to replace the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killed in the conflict’s initial bombing campaign, with his more hard-line son, Mojtaba Khamenei, is but the most telling recent development indicating that Iran’s leaders don’t remotely intend to keep to the hastily drafted and serially revised script that White House war planners are forcing on them. It’s stunning that in the horrific aftermath of the forever wars launched during the George W. Bush years, the notion of imperial blowback remains unthinkable in the sanctums of US diplomatic and military power.

But that’s par for the course in a presidency that continues operating as if it were immune to the forces of history, economic gravity, or indeed consensual reality. Fielding questions from reporters after his remarks, Trump spoke of American designs on Cuba—a prospect that sent Trump lapdog Lindsey Graham into unseemly heat on a weekend cable hit—again in argot of the bored TV viewer: “They’re going to make a deal or else we’ll do it—just as easy anyway.” That’s evidently just how the world looks when you believe you’re empowered to dictate its fate “all in my mind, nobody else’s.”

Our corporate media is often caught flat-footed by the many rapid convulsions in the American polity and broader economy—whether it’s the frenetic wishcasting behind the AI bubble or the collapse of the once-imposing 2024 Trump coalition. With Donald Trump’s surreal, unjustified, and illegal war on Iran, however, our press lords have regained their cognitive footing with a vengeance.

Like their yellow-press predecessors plumping for the opening conflicts of the modern American empire over a century ago, today’s establishment press is shaping yet one more narrative of interventionist impunity, out of the same hoary materials. Now, as in 1898, American leaders are posing as the selfless guardians of global self-governance; now, as then, the country professes that it will meekly deliver the sovereignty it has defiled back into the hands of a grateful and oppressed mass public on the other side of the field of battle. Now, as then, this newest imperial mission already seems fated to wreak broader havoc across the affected region—at which point, the government will move on to its next destructive adventure, and leave a rearguard contingent of freebooters and crony capitalists to clean up, albeit only in the metaphoric sense of the phrase. And now, as then, the press can’t get enough of war.

The familiar jingoistic media reset is so sweeping that even prominent supposed critics of Trump’s imperial presidency are pushing their way into the front of the cheering section. In my billionaire-ravaged hometown paper, normally reliable Trump-baiting tory columnist George F. Will has turned in a chin-jutting encomium to the rudderless Trump action worthy of William Randolph Hearst. Its headline bears eloquent testimony to Will’s palpable relief to be back in belligerent pundit mode: “At Last, the Credibility of U.S. Deterrence Is Being Restored.” The ensuing prose hallucination exults that “Iran’s regime, whose mantra since its inception in 1979 has been ‘Death to America,’ is near death by the clasped hands of Israel and America.”

That’s only Will’s second sentence. He proceeds nimbly from there to tarring critics of Trump’s surprise monarchical bid to achieve regime change in Iran as uncivilized fifth columnists: “Iran’s protesters dramatically underscored the regime’s barbarism, so those who today regret the regime’s demise reveal their barbarism.” And though Will often poses as a defender of strict constitutional obeisance (at least when it comes to overturning campaign finance laws or dismantling the regulatory state), here he waves away the idea that the intervention is a “war of choice”; it is, rather, a heroic act of national self-preservation on par with Lincoln’s refusal to permit the Southern states to quietly secede. (Yes, he really makes that comparison, though it’s somehow difficult to imagine our first assassinated president as the biggest fan of a state-engineered hit on a foreign leader.) Killing Iran’s head of state and hundreds of its citizens has suddenly turned Trump in Will’s eyes from an American Caesar manqué to the inheritor of the legacy of the Great Emancipator: “Donald Trump’s administration has chosen not to wager U.S. safety on Iran’s abandoning its multi-decade pursuit of nuclear weapons, or on Iran’s acquiring them but not really meaning ‘Death to America.’”

While Will offers the respectable high-church brand of war-mongering, the rest of our mediasphere is reveling in the ugly work of creating some semblance of popular support for Trump’s latest strongman escapade. Toggling over to the news coverage in The Washington Post, there’s a breathless account (supplied of course by wire-service reporters, after the paper shuttered most of its foreign desks) of how Israel’s brutal response to Hamas’s October 7 massacres brought Iran into its crosshairs: “Iran left the status quo behind,” a subhead enthuses, as if a genocidal campaign of state terror were nothing more than the handiwork of a brash tech startup. For a similarly credulous piece of reporting on the raid that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, see The New York Times’ quadruple-bylined paean to good old American spookery, “The C.I.A. Helped Pinpoint a Gathering of Iranian Leaders. Then Israel Struck.”

Of course, Trump himself has since lamented that this “pinpoint” operation also took out America’s top choices to lead the country after Khamenei’s murder. And serious students of Iran’s politics—i.e., people without any chance of a sustained hearing in Trumpian diplomatic or military circles—have observed that, however you grade the operational savvy of this particular mission, killing the supreme leader of a militant Islamic regime who openly courted martyrdom is not the strategic knock-out blow that the Trump White House desperately hopes it will be.

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Yet American imperial narratives are rarely upended by mere empirical details. Instead, the fantasies of remote and painless US-engineered takeovers of the country are already flourishing in our mediasphere. The most stunning and shameless example comes, of course, from CBS News, which under the watch of new network owner David Ellison has become a replica of Fox News with fewer adult incontinence ads and blonde anchor-bots.

CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss was exulting on social media over Trump’s Iran invasion and wasted little time in translating those sentiments into marquee coverage. On Sunday, the network’s flagship newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, opened with an adulatory extended interview with Reza Pahlavi, son of the late exiled Shah of Iran, as he auditioned to be the country’s post-invasion leader.

This was a stretch on several levels—Pahlavi hasn’t lived in Iran for nearly 50 years, and his alleged popular support relies in no small part on foreign social-media bot farms, as well as a desperate mood of monarchist nostalgia among some Iranian opposition leaders. Yet 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley was a jingoist Johnny-on-the-spot, feeding Pahlavi softball questions in his luxe Paris headquarters. (An early indication of the many spit-takes in waiting for hapless viewers came in the studio introduction to the segment, when the voiceover relayed the grim developments of the past weekend in Iran, and then awkwardly transitioned into the inapposite revelation that “Scott Pelley was in Paris.”)

Pelley opened with a query about Pahlavi’s leadership ambitions, which yielded a clumsy bit of evasive circumlocution. Iranians “trust me as a transitional leader,” said a man who has spent none of his time on Earth as an adult living with Iranians. “Not as the future king or future president or whatever. I’m totally focused on my mission in life, which is: Let me bring the country to the point where they can make that free choice. That would be enough for me, having said “Mission accomplished.’”

For any aspiring leader in the Middle East to be citing with a straight face George W. Bush’s infamously premature declaration of victory after his similar causeless and illegal invasion of Iraq should set off a torrent of skeptical follow-up questions from any honest journalist interlocutor. But this was Scott Pelley on Bari Weiss’s 60 Minutes, so when he did manage to cite the horrific plunder and repression orchestrated by Pahlavi’s dad, he allowed the exiled prince to whitewash the historical record while also (awkwardly) reassuring viewers that state vengeance just wasn’t his jam.

“Look, my father left Iran voluntarily to avoid bloodshed,” Pahlavi said, without of course noting that the prospective bloodshed in question would have been the shah’s own. “And he said, ‘I’m a king. A king doesn’t build his throne on the blood of his own people.’ If the nation today wants me out, I would leave. I would not turn my guns on them.” Apart from Pahlavi’s entirely ahistorical account of monarchy and his father’s reign, his “I will not turn my guns on my subjects” T-shirt could not help but raise many more questions than it answered.

For anyone other than Scott Pelley, that is. The designated war shill for this once-revered investigative journalism franchise opted instead to serve up confections like this: “When you see the courage on the streets that we’re witnessing now, I wonder how that moves you.” Pahlavi teared up repeatedly as he praised the genuine heroism of Iran’s street demonstrators, which then prompted this creaky bit of studio-voiceover explication from Pelley: “Pahlavi told us that there are units within the military and the police that would turn on the hard-line government. He says that many but not all troops could be given amnesty in a process of national reconciliation.”

In other words: Now that CBS’s choice for presumptive Iranian leader-in-waiting has done his Oprah turn before the cameras, he’s pledged to institute a US-grade crackdown on dissidents and critics. No doubt George Will and scores of TV producers and pundits across our failing imperial republic were weeping in concert—in relief over reclaiming their true vocations.

Aglance across the news headlines on Tuesday morning bore eloquent witness to the state of our union. President Donald Trump continues to threaten to invade Iran—even though he’s failed to offer a coherent rationale for it; meanwhile, the top general of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warns that an Iran strike would likely trigger a rapid descent into a military quagmire. (The president took to Truth Social to dispute this report, but as usual, he was lying.) Ryan Schenk, a former instructor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified on Capitol Hill that agency leaders cut 240 hours of “vital classes” in its already slapdash training program for new recruits, while running roughshod over Fourth Amendment protections for detainees and lying about their handiwork before Congress. Goldman Sachs analysts issued a report finding that the booming AI investment sector hyped by the Trump White House has added basically nothing to economic growth—which isn’t all that surprising, since overall GDP growth nearly flatlined over the last quarter of 2025. Trump’s Justice Department—which now sports a Mussolini-like banner of the president’s visage on its façade—has reportedly suppressed key documents in the Epstein files that reference Trump allegedly sexually assaulting a minor. The White House is scrambling to contain the damage from Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee’s saying that Israel has a biblically sanctioned right to rule over the entire Middle East, while Ambassador to France Charles Kushner has been relegated to persona non grata status there for trying to whip up militant right-wing sentiment over the assassination of a far-right leader.

As a consequence of all this corruption, stupidity, and authoritarian squalor, Trump has logged a historic swoon in polling; his approval rating now sits at a dismal 37 percent. In another poll, 61 percent of respondents—including 30 percent of Republicans—say that Trump has “become erratic with age.”

In a normal presidency, this barrage of bad news and self-owns would provoke an across-the-board reset, and a State of the Union address would serve as the ideal platform for it. In Trump’s second term, however, the clear evidence of total strongman failure is only further proof of the mandate to keep strongmanning harder. That was the message of Trump’s marathon speech Tuesday night, which began and ended with invocations of Trump’s idyll of the new American golden age he imagines himself to be launching, and was punctuated throughout with the awarding of civic and military medals to a corps of heroes invited to attend.

The running ceremonial callouts reinforced Trump’s preferred image of himself as the unrivaled bestower of honor and prosperity—even as his own craving for adulation undermined the solemn displays of state heraldry. As the two-hour speech wound down with one last award—a Medal of Honor given to 100-year-old Navy aviator Royce Williams, Trump ad-libbed on how he also “always wanted a Congressional Medal of Honor” but regrettably had neither the qualifications nor authority to bestow one on himself. It made for a cringeworthy segue into the speech’s conclusion—a prolonged hymn of American exceptionalism to mark the country’s upcoming 250th anniversary, which invoked the nation’s destiny as the handiwork of “Providence” and declared that “when God needs a nation to work His miracles, He knows exactly who to ask.”

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One might imagine a benevolent creator rather distressed to be downgraded into a de facto Trump supplicant—particularly in view of the president’s Epstein notoriety and his role in fomenting a deadly coup at the very site where he was letting these sonorities loose. But that was the uneasy tenor of the whole performance: When Trump was sticking closely to the script in his teleprompter, his delivery had a flat and grudging feel. “The spirit of 1776 keeps shining through,” he intoned at one point as something of an infomercial afterthought.

When he veered off script into his preferred mode of sneering, insulting, and mob-baiting, he was in his element—calling out Democrats promoting a new affordability agenda for promulgating “a dirty rotten lie,” or defaming “Somali pirates” in Minnesota whom he again accused without evidence of engineering a multibillion-dollar scheme of welfare fraud.

These lurches into gothic MAGA fantasy were no doubt more frequent because Trump was playing to a lopsided house. Many Democratic lawmakers elected to boycott the address in order to underline just how badly the second-term Trump presidency has defiled the country’s traditions of self-government and aspirations of civic virtue. The House chamber, which normally hosts a narrow-to-vanishing four-vote Republican majority, appeared for the speech’s duration to be a bastion of Trump country. So as Trump continued to riff on his pet themes of MAGA dominance and fantasies of immigrant-and-Democratic social predation, the traditional pieties of the State of the Union address succumbed to the spectacle and rhetoric of a Trump rally.

The shift in mood was apparent at the outset. Texas Democratic Representative Al Green stood in the chamber with a placard reading “BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES!”—a reference to a video that Trump posted on his TruthSocial account depicting Barack and Michelle Obama in that fashion. Security guards ushered Green out just as Trump delivered the first big selling point in his speech: “I can say with dignity and pride that we have achieved a transformation like no one has ever seen before, and a turnaround for the ages.” The GOP lawmakers began to chant “USA!” and it was impossible to tell whether they were responding to Trump’s grandiose claim or Green’s coerced departure.

Pundits were primed to see whether Trump would continue whaling into the Supreme Court for its decision overturning his tariffs agenda, as he did in Friday’s paranoid press conference on the ruling. But here too Trump mostly kept grudgingly to his prepared remarks, calling the decision “unfortunate.” He likewise didn’t signal any bellicose new turns in his Iran policy, stressing that he would prefer to reduce the country’s progress toward obtaining nuclear weapons diplomatically, but wouldn’t hesitate to use military force if diplomacy fails. (No mention, of course, was made of his petty and unprovoked cancellation of the Obama White House’s nuclear deal with Iran, nor to his claim to have completely wiped out Iran’s nuclear capacity in last summer’s unconstitutional strike.)

What there was of a domestic agenda in the speech was far thinner. Trump couldn’t credibly make claims for significant economic progress on his watch, so he cherry-picked achievements, calling out his symbolic cessation of taxes on tips and the minuscule deduction for interest paid on auto loans. Absurdly, he claimed to be yet again overturning the Affordable Care Act for a hand-waving proposal to direct government subsidies away from big insurers and toward “the people.” The same GOP Congress who was cheering for Trump eliminated ACA subsidies, and as a result, premiums are doubling for at least 22 million Americans. He touted the House’s recent passage of the SAVE America Act—the regressive voter-ID bill sponsored by Texas GOP Representative Chip Roy—and urged Senate majority leader John Thune to move it through his chamber “before anything else happens.” Trump again went off script with relish here to depict an election system besieged by “rampant” fraud and illegal voting by undocumented immigrants (none of which is true), while claiming that Democrats oppose voter-suppression measures because “they want to cheat. They have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.”

In his most gleeful moment of MAGA choreography, Trump set himself up with the kind of civic-textbook introduction that he rushed through over the balance of the speech, announcing that “one of the great things about the State of the Union is how it gives Americans the chance to see clearly what their legislators really believe.” Then he reverted to rally mode, telling his audience, “So if you agree with this statement, stand up: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” When the members of the thinned-out Democratic delegation remained seated, Trump once more reveled in his dominance, theatrically shrugging and grimacing at them. “Isn’t it a shame?” he called out. “You should be ashamed of yourselves for not standing up.”

No, we should all be ashamed that these kinds of demagogic stunts are what passes for political discourse; it now looks more and more as though Obama’s know-nothing heckler South Carolina GOP Representative Joe Wilson, who shouted “You lie!” at a 2010 joint address to Congress on healthcare, was a man ahead of his time. But Trump is hemorrhaging public support amid economic stagnation and a bloodthirsty and illegal mass detention-and-rendition campaign—and nothing in his stock arsenal of taunts and stunts is likely to reverse his political free fall. Maybe he’ll give himself that Medal of Honor as his final petty consolation prize.

In a press conference on Friday, President Donald Trump brought down the curtain on his bold “Liberation Day” tariffs agenda in much the same way he ushered it in—with a rolling litany of grievances against foreign economies allegedly ripping off the United States, a misleading characterization of trade deficits as zero-sum attacks on American prosperity, and fantasy-driven word-pictures of “strong and powerful” US business owners miraculously restored to their entrepreneurial prime by the sheer force of Trump’s presidential will. The only notable addition to this exercise in magical economic thinking was Trump’s attack on the Supreme Court, which had earlier gutted his tariff regime in a 6–3 ruling joined by, among others, two of Trump’s appointees to the court, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.

“I’m ashamed of certain members of the court, absolutely ashamed of them for not having the courage to do what’s right for our country,” Trump said, in an ominous use of the rhetoric he deployed against his first-term vice president, Mike Pence, on January 6, 2021. Trump also found time to revive his pet lies about the supposedly stolen 2020 presidential election, which he tied to an equally nonsensical conspiracy to deny him lifelong maximum executive power, and—what amounts to the same thing in his mind—to render the United States a cringingly weak economic force, battered by rival powers determined to “treat us very badly.”

After offering a pro forma attack on Democrats as a congeries of villains who are “against anything that makes America strong, healthy, and great again,” including rank perfidies “having to do with voting,” Trump then took his court-bashing to an even wilder level. The parallel threats of hostile economic infiltration from without and anti-Trump sabotage from within prompted Trump to suggest that the court had succumbed to unspecified “foreign interests” in an effort to undermine America’s God-given economic sovereignty. “You can’t knock their loyalty,” he said grudgingly of the Democrats, “but you can with our people.… The court has been swayed by foreign interests and by a political movement that’s far smaller than people think”—a claim backed by no more evidence than he managed to adduce in support of the stolen-election fantasy. The conspiracy-mongering hung so thickly in the air of the White House briefing room that Trump officials conspicuously dimmed the lighting, as if to conjure an air of menace right out of The Phantom of the Opera, a standby on Trump’s rally playlist.

Ironically, one of Trump’s swipes at the court—“People are being obnoxious, ignorant, and loud, and certain justices are afraid of that”—is actually a fine summation of the Roberts court’s dismal record of prostration before the MAGA agenda, from its delusional executive immunity ruling to its all-out war on voting rights to the kneecapping of whatever remains of the regulatory state. Yet, in Trump’s persecution-ridden worldview, Amy Comey Barrett and Neal Gorsuch have been seduced by the siren song of “political correctness,” part of a retrograde conservative movement made up of “fools, RINOS, and lapdogs to the Democratic left.”

Trump’s extended aria of betrayal at the hands of his own appointees was especially unhinged given that he tried to make the case over the balance of his remarks that the court’s decision didn’t really affect his tariff regime at all, beyond slowing it down with new investigative and procedural requirements. The court found that the battery of tariffs Trump sprung on the world economy last spring were not legal under their cited authority, the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act—but, as Trump noted, there are ample statutory and legal precedents to continue tariffs. The sticking point for him had been that these measures require sustained inquiries to show economic or national security harms wrought by trading partners, while the Trump administration prefers to impose economic penalties through demagogic handwaving about fentanyl and immigration (the GOP’s congressional majority, always happy to sit obligingly on its hands, never seems to enter the frame).

Trump also didn’t mention that the new legal authorities his administration is mustering to keep his tariffs going typically seek to impose deadlines of 150 days on those tariffs. That frustrates the real appeal of tariffs for Trump: manipulating them to reward his cronies and to punish his critics. So, bizarrely, Trump tried to peddle his stab-in-the-back narrative about the Roberts court at the same time as he enthused that the ruling—and especially an obsequious dissent from Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump duly hailed as a “genius”—would allow him to impose tariffs on a still greater scale. He also praised the ruling for bringing much-needed “certainty” to business conditions in the United States. (Trump being Trump, he of course didn’t mention that all the uncertainty the economy is contending with was generated by him and his lickspittle economic team.)

Even by Trump’s usual standards, his briefing room tantrum was grievously detached from reality. The economic golden age he continually claims credit for is a receding mirage: In the final quarter of 2025, the American economy grew at an anemic 1.4 percent, while inflation, stoked by the consumer taxes enacted under Trump’s tariffs, has leveled up to 3 percent. American workers and consumers are accordingly not falling into line behind Trump’s patent-medicine-grade claims on behalf of his tariffs. A new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll finds a 64 percent majority of respondents disapproving of Trump’s tariff regime, with just 34 percent supporting it. Overall approval of Trump’s handling of the economy isn’t much better; an NPR/PBS/Marist survey finds 59 percent disapproving—the highest number of Trump’s second term—and only 36 percent in favor. With those kinds of numbers, it’s no wonder that Trump is glomming onto an incoherent narrative that a foreign-run Supreme Court is simultaneously undermining the economy and grandiosely empowering him. Perhaps, at next week’s State of the Union address, he’ll blame the actual Phantom of the Opera.

Just a week after the centibillionaire owner of The Washington Post ravaged its news operations in the service of plutocratic impunity, the news regime installed by the centibillionaire owner of CBS News has said, in essence, “Hold my beer.” After Late Show host Stephen Colbert had scheduled an interview with Democratic Texas state Representative James Talarico, the network’s legal division told him to cancel the segment. The rationale for the move was the same pretext that the Federal Communications Commission cited in opening a ludicrous regulatory investigation into Talarico’s earlier appearance on ABC’s daytime talk show, The View: Featuring a candidate for office during an election cycle without also hosting that candidate’s opponents was a violation of the agency’s equal-time doctrine.

News reports and talk-show appearances have long fallen out of the ambit of equal time, because news consumers benefit from hearing the views of candidates when they’re up for election—the exemption basically holds that viewers of such shows can be expected to act like adults who can discern the difference between public affairs and entertainment fare and straight news coverage. But Brendon Carr, the MAGA hack Donald Trump appointed to head the FCC in his second term, is hell-bent on abolishing these genre distinctions and transforming the enforcement of equal-time regulations to benefit right-wing candidates. He is continuing to stoke the media-persecution mania at the core of Trump’s grievance politics. This debased reasoning led Carr to pressure ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel for criticizing MAGA theories about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Even though Carr has yet to float a formal revision of equal-time strictures, the Trump White House’s multifront assault on media independence has advanced to the point where, as Colbert noted in his opening monologue, “my network is already acting as though he had.”

CBS’s lawyers counseled Colbert to refrain not only from airing his Talarico interview but from using the show to discuss the network’s decision to yank it. But since CBS announced last year that it’s canceling Colbert’s show in the spring, he invoked the hallowed privilege of the short timer—what are they going to do, fire me?—to target CBS and Carr in his opening monologue and post his interview with Talarico on the show’s YouTube page. (You can watch it here; Colbert’s opening monologue is here.) “You’re chairman of the FCC, so FCC you,” Colbert said to Carr, before rehearsing the agency’s clearly lopsided and self-dealing invocation of the equal-time rule. “You are motivated by partisan purposes yourself,” Colbert continued. “Let’s just call this what it is: Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about him on TV because all he does is watch TV.” Colbert also noted that Carr’s equal-time vigilance doesn’t extend to talk radio, which is overrun with right-wing hosts giving interviews to right-wing politicians.

But you don’t need to subject yourself to drivetime AM radio hates to see the damage unfettered MAGA ideology has wrought on our mediasphere—you can just gaze across the wreckage left by Bari Weiss, the laughably unqualified editor in chief of CBS News, whom billionaire nepo baby David Ellison handpicked after Paramount Skydance acquired the network. Just hours before the Colbert fiasco became public, 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper announced that he was quitting the show, ostensibly to spend more time with his family, though this rationale doesn’t extend to the post he’s continuing to hold at CNN. The Occam’s-razor explanation for Cooper’s departure is that he’s fed up with Weiss’s ideological meddling, which deliberately diluted a report on horrific conditions at the El Salvadoran CECOT facility where the Trump administration is warehousing immigrant detainees. (Though CNN may not prove all that safe a harbor for his journalistic integrity—the cable network is potentially next in line to be swallowed up by Skydance as it revives a hostile bid to thwart the Netflix acquisition of CNN’s parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery.)

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Meanwhile, at CBS Evening News, which has become a Fox News doppelgänger under the witless tutelage of its new, Weiss-recruited anchor Tony Dokoupil, senior producer Alicia Hastey also fled journalistic ruination. After she took a buyout from the network’s new corporate masters, she circulated a blistering farewell memo castigating the network’s rightward lurch. Where she had formerly been empowered to produce “segments that aimed to foreground underrepresented perspectives, interviews that challenged conventional wisdom, and efforts to make our journalism more responsive to a skeptical public,” the new CBS News regime has scuttled that newsgathering model. In its place, Hastey wrote, “a sweeping new vision prioritizing a break from traditional broadcast norms to embrace what has been described as ‘heterodox’ journalism.… Stories may instead be evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations—a dynamic that pressures producers and reporters to self-censor or avoid challenging narratives that might trigger backlash or unfavorable headlines.”

Hastey could have cited virtually any segment from Dokoupil’s garbage fire of a broadcast as an exhibit for her appraisal of this posture of all-out sycophancy before MAGA power, but the anchor’s refrain closing out a worshipful profile of Secretary of State Marco Rubio after the Trump administration’s lawless kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife will likely serve as the epitaph for the network: “We salute you, Marco Rubio.”

That sickening performance also drives home a point Talarico raised in his bumped interview with Colbert: “This is the party that ran against cancel culture…and this is the most dangerous kind of cancel culture—the kind that comes from the top. Corporate media executives are selling out the First Amendment to curry favor to corrupt politicians. And any threat to our First Amendment rights is a threat to all our First Amendment rights.”

Over to you, Bari Weiss.

Give Pete Navarro, President Donald Trump’s economics adviser and ex-con, credit for gumption: He’s seeking to direct public attention away from one of the White House’s least-popular policy initiatives to one that’s performing even worse in opinion polling. During a Tuesday appearance on Fox Business, Navarro cautioned the Trump faithful, “We have to revise expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like.… Wall Street has to adjust for the fact that we’re deporting millions of illegals out of the job market.”

Navarro’s downbeat appraisal of the job market is familiar news. The Trump administration has averaged an anemic 49,000 increase in jobs per month, well under one-third the rate that Joe Biden’s economy added.

Today’s job numbers, as it happens, came in stronger than expected, with an estimated 130,000 new positions added in January—yet downward adjustments in monthly reports show that virtually no employment growth occurred during 2025. The Trump administration’s already feeble job additions over the year were downgraded to a mere 181,000 positions, while 2024 saw the addition of nearly a million and a half new jobs. What’s more, January’s hiring surge was chiefly powered by hiring in healthcare—a sector in which immigrant labor plays a pivotal role. In other words, Navarro was wrong in both his assessment of hiring trends and in sizing up how mass deportation is affecting them. Meanwhile, the structural malaise of the Trump economy remains unchanged, hampered by Trump’s erratic-at-best tariffs, continued inflation, and sluggish performance in key sectors like housing and manufacturing.

After inaugurating his second term with a vow to create an economic “Golden Age,” Trump has been a Midas in reverse. Over the last year, one economic indicator after another has gone to shit. The United States is now in the weakest jobs economy in a non-recession year since 2003, while the scale of layoffs in January hasn’t been matched since the annus horribilis 2009.

Navarro’s approach to spinning the White House’s dreadful economic performance is to shout, in essence, “Look over there!” But what’s striking is that in trying to change the subject, Navarro is playing up a losing message for the administration. By blaming bad job numbers on the rolling immigration raids, he’s not only underlining the completely unforced nature of the administration’s botched jobs policy; he’s invoking a mass-deportation campaign that Americans dislike and disown. A recent NPR/Marist poll shows that two-thirds of all respondents believe that ICE’s immigration crackdowns have “gone too far”—an 11 percent spike since the raids began last summer. That number actually eclipses the percentage of respondents disapproving of the president’s handling of the economy, which stood at 59 percent in the same poll.

The broader political challenge before Trump’s GOP in a critical midterm cycle is to make it seem like growth and progress are gaining traction in spite of the evidence before voters’ eyes. You could call this the “managing decline” phase of the Trump regime—an all-out effort to persuade Americans that worse is in fact better.

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The zero-sum jobs-immigration tradeoff that Navarro floated is just part of the problem. The day before Navarro’s interview, the White House sent out its own memo to bolster shaky morale among MAGA true believers. “Don’t be a panican,” the headline blared. “We’re winning and we’re not slowing down.” (Pro tip to the Trump messaging shop: To rally sentiment behind you, it’s best not to lead with an awkward portmanteau that no one’s ever heard before.)

The body of the thing is just what you’d expect: rudderless bids to own the libs (“While the Fake News and Radical Left collude to distract, depress, and divide, they’re simply lying to mask the undeniable truth: America is safer, stronger, richer, and more secure than at any point in decades”) combined with flat-out untruths (a lurid laundry list of alleged hardened criminals detained by ICE, when in fact less than 14 percent of the people dragooned into ICE custody have had a violent criminal record, and gang members and terrorists—the so-called worst of the worst—make up just 2 percent of detainees; an absurd claim that there had been “record high crime across the country under Biden’s defund the police era”).

For good measure, the memo includes acrobatic bids to demonstrate measurable progress on the Trump administration’s bullying, hate-mongering agenda. Here’s one sample: “After the Trump Administration surged federal resources into crime-plagued Washington, D.C.”—the fable of a violent and chaotic DC being another agitprop lie—“the District went three weeks into the new year before recording its first homicide—the first time the nation’s capital had gone more than ten days into a new year without a murder in at least three decades.” (The memo might have noted that this was also the longest stretch of homicide-free life in DC while we’ve kidnapped and indicted the first couple of Venezuela, for all the sense its own chosen metric of temporal comparison made.) Under “Everyday Costs Continue Moderating” (a subheading that couldn’t have sounded convincing to even the memo’s authors), we find a citation of a six-month decrease in rents—a sector in which the federal government exercises weak authority. Then, for some reason, there’s this: “PepsiCo announced price cuts of up to 15% on core brands.” (Follow-up pro tip to White House message wizards: When you produce a talking point that is essentially “Let them drink Pepsi,” you’re definitely not winning.)

What makes the administration’s managing-decline messaging so futile is the failure of its apparatchiks to own up to the consequences of their own policy calls. When MAGA toadies like Navarro blame their own lackluster job performance on the ICE deportation complex, they’re effectively assigning blame to senior officials like ICE director Todd Lyons, who just handed in a classic “I don’t know anything about anything” performance in testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee. With all arms of the administration serving as alibis for the failure of any one of them, no one is ultimately responsible for anything. Events are clearly building to a point when the Trump White House will revert to January 6 form and find a way to blame everything on Mike Pence.

The other sign that MAGA is sunk in its managing-decline phase is its bid to dictate the basic terms of sports fandom and entertainment viewing in the face of a mass audience fundamentally uninterested in what it has to say on these subjects. When US Olympic skier Hunter Hess voiced ambivalence about representing a repressive and bigoted government in the 2024 Winter Games, Trump laid into him in a raving Truth Social post. Whinging Trump sycophant Florida Senator Rick Scott followed up with an X declaration that all US Olympic athletes criticizing the country should be stripped of team membership, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that the right-wing castigation of “cancel culture” was so much hot air.

Not to be outdone, Texas GOP Representative Mark Alford has announced plans to follow up Trump’s social-media meltdown over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance with a congressional investigation for… reasons. Here’s Alford’s stab at justifying a congressional probe, which somehow makes Scott seem like a statesmanlike defender of First Amendment freedoms by comparison: “We are still investigating this. There’s a lot of information that has come out about the lyrics.… These lyrics, if it is true, what was said on national television, we have a lot of questions for the… entities that broadcast this, and we’ll be talking with Brendan Carr from the FCC about this.” In other words, the Trumpified GOP is setting itself up to mount an ongoing attack on a musical performance that earned rave reviews, drew an audience of 135 million viewers in the United States, and even coaxed several MAGA influencers into shows of appreciative fandom. That’s arguably the ultimate form of managing decline: believing you’re mounting a popular and heroic culture-war crusade when you are, in fact, only talking to yourself.

For weeks after Renee Good’s murder, the MAGA right trained Zapruder-grade forensic attention on the video footage of her last moments in Minneapolis, hoping to convince Americans that they can’t trust the plain evidence before their eyes. This effort yielded obscene derangements of the truth, such as “border czar” Tom Homan’s contention that Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who gunned down Good, had “feared for his life”—a claim that’s hard to square with his decision to position himself in front of her car, and yet more of a whopper in view of her last words, directed to Ross: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Never to be outdone in the shameless recitation of official lies, Vice President JD Vance defiled bedrock norms of honest public discourse to smear Good as a “deranged leftist” responsible for her own death. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the sadist who gloried in the detention and torture of immigrants at El Salvador’s CECOT prison, dubbed Good a “domestic terrorist” hours after her murder and just kept going, announcing a fresh deployment of hundreds more ICE agents to Minneapolis in mid-January.

Noem’s escalation, which nonsensically vows to mobilize more rogue ICE agents to pacify a crisis sparked by rogue ICE agents, perpetuates the lie that the Trump administration’s rolling sieges of cities governed by political opponents are a legitimate use of peacekeeping force. But it also supplies an inadvertent reminder that the whole ICE mission in Minneapolis is founded on a racist lie. President Trump authorized the agency’s initial operation there in the wake of a video released online by MAGA influencer Nick Shirley purporting to document widespread fraud in federally subsidized daycare centers run by Somali immigrants in Minneapolis. Shirley’s investigations yielded no real evidence—several of the centers he tried to depict as empty of kids and hence hotbeds of graft were simply leery about giving a random man and his film crew access to their charges. (Grim irony alert: At one center, employees thought that Shirley’s masked-up crew could have been ICE agents intending to round up preschool children.) Another daycare center appears to have been in the midst of an employee shift change when Shirley’s crew showed up.

It’s true that state watchdogs have found some evidence of fraud in Minnesota daycare facilities, some run by Somalis in Minneapolis. In 2019, state prosecutors filed charges against a dozen centers and individuals; in response, Minnesota created a new agency to oversee licensing for the centers. After Shirley’s video went viral, the agency conducted unscheduled compliance visits at nine of the 10 centers featured in it (one had been shuttered several years ago). Eight of the centers that the inspectors dropped in on showed no irregularities, and one had yet to open for the day. State regulators say they’re still monitoring the facilities.

Shirley’s video relies mostly on charges floated by David Hoch, a lobbyist and former right-wing candidate for Minnesota attorney general. As The Intercept’s Jacqueline Sweet has reported, Hoch had posted anti-Somali broadsides on his since-deleted Instagram account: “EVERY Somali in MN is engaged in fraud. ALL of them,” one read; “Even the Blacks have had enough of the demon Muslims,” declared another. This is the narrative that the Trump administration has glommed on to, which is why Vance has anointed Shirley’s video as Pulitzer-caliber investigative journalism. Trump has also suggested, again without evidence, that Somali immigrants have committed widespread fraud involving Covid relief and nutrition assistance; he’s called them “garbage” and said he doesn’t “want them in our country.” In another two-minute tirade, Trump said that Somalia is “not even a nation. It’s just people walking around killing each other. Look, these Somalians have taken billions of dollars out of our country. Billions and billions. They have a representative, Ilhan Omar, who they say married her brother. It’s a fraud.” The president’s White House apparatchiks have gleefully echoed these sentiments and rushed to lend credence to the bogus cause of the Minneapolis ICE deployment; Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel said that the feds would be stepping up fraud investigations as part of ICE operations there. (Though, in another twist, the Trump regime’s fascist narratives are now collapsing upon one another—the two federal attorneys assigned to Somali fraud duty were among the six Minnesota-based prosecutors who resigned after the Justice Department instructed them to launch a McCarthyite investigation into the activist history of Renee Good’s widow, Becca Good.)

It’s important to recall the racist moral panic underwriting the original ICE deployment to Minneapolis, a reminder that none of this has ever been about the cut-and-dried enforcement of immigration law. ICE was turned loose on Minneapolis residents to stage a spectacle of racialized predation, proceeding solely on the imputation of criminal traits to a population group based on national origin, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. This is the far-from-subtle message that Noem now has emblazoned on her podium at press events: “One of ours, all of yours.” (The slogan can be traced in substance, if not in precise phrasing, to the fascist movements of the 20th century, which endorsed the idea that the life of one of their loyalists was worth those of all of their enemies.) After Good’s execution in Minneapolis, the Trump White House again sought to steer MAGA outrage toward Somali immigrants, announcing the suspension of temporary protected status for thousands of them and effectively compelling them to leave the country by March 17.

It took no great leap for ICE agents, emboldened by this explicit mission, to apply the same brutal and inhuman logic to anyone who got in their way—especially if the offender in question were deemed insufficiently deferential to their self-aggrandizing shows of force. Once a crusade of state violence targets one vulnerable population, it has no incentive to stop there.

For the past week, I’ve been unable to retrieve the copies of The Washington Post that usually get delivered to my home, since the brutal weather in the DC area has turned my front yard into an unfordable moat of frozen snow. This now seems a richly prophetic turn of events, since my hometown newspaper is being eviscerated under the disastrous ownership of centibillionaire monopolist and MAGA flunky Jeff Bezos.

Per a new report from The New York Times—cowritten by former Post media columnist Erik Wemple—the paper is initiating “a widespread round of layoffs.” Other outlets reported that at least a third of Post employees across business and editorial are being let go. In a Zoom call with the paper’s staff—one that neither Bezos nor his handpicked Post publisher Will Lewis deigned to attend—editor in chief Matt Murray announced that the Post’s sports section—a distinguished operation that formerly anchored a great deal of the paper’s market penetration in the mid-Atlantic—will be effectively dismantled, with a handful of staffers left to stoke a walking-dead version of it. Local news coverage—another historic strength of the paper, and one of the few coverage areas that cannot be easily replicated by other national titles—is also being gutted. The Post will also be shuttering its recently revived books section—where I worked as deputy editor in the early aughts. The paper’s daily news podcast will be deep-sixed, and its international desk is due to be hollowed out.

News of this impending bloodletting has been swirling around industry circles for weeks—so much so that foreign correspondents for the Post were reduced last week to publicly begging Bezos to save their jobs, and preserve the Post’s reputation as a serious news organization. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Bezos didn’t bother to reply and kept an arrogant oligarchic silence during the buildup to this gruesome journalistic dismemberment. Bezos also offered no comment when Post reporter Hannah Natanson had her devices seized by the FBI in the investigation of a series of leaks from a government contractor—an act of intimidation from a Trump White House waging sustained ideological war on the fourth estate. Bezos’s silence on these fundamental assaults on news-gathering underscores his complacent indifference to the civic value of journalism; his true priorities became clear amid the Post’s death watch when he stirred out of his state of public hibernation long enough to host Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—who has overseen the complete ideological purging of the Pentagon press corps—at his space start-up Blue Origin, which holds billions of dollars in defense contracts.

Bezos’s aloof posture isn’t so much a study in plutocratic reticence as the savvy impulse of a mobster determined not to return to a crime scene. The Amazon overlord was hailed as the paper’s savior when he purchased it from the Graham family in 2013. His takeover of the Post was part of a wave of tech-bro splurges in the legacy media market, including Facebook executive Chris Hughes’s ill-fated acquisition of The New Republic, and eBay cofounder Pierre Omidyar’s launch of First Look Media, whose signature outlet The Intercept is now in dire financial straits. Bezos’s acquisition of the Post stood out in this field, both because of the paper’s stature and because of his limitless resources. Surely, the thinking went, with this level of financial backing, the paper could reverse its declining circulation and jury-rig some sort of viable business model for daily journalism in the 21st century.

This scenario seemed plausible for a while, after Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016. The Post was able to reap a major surge in digital subscriptions by leaning into its image as a Trump-baiting organ of the resistance; its new Bezos-era slogan, crafted by Watergate veteran Bob Woodward, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” neatly distilled this marketing agenda.

But as the mogul-heavy history of modern journalism shows in stomach-churning detail, news organizations that live by oligarchic support often die by it as well. In reality, the Post under Bezos’s watch was already embarking on myopic and counter-journalistic bids to goose revenues and harvest eyeballs via management-driven plans to bulk up its news-aggregation operations, while launching a wage-soaking freelance initiative dubbed “the Talent Network.” This latter operation, in the rapt telling of Marty Baron, the Post’s editor in chief during the Bezos honeymoon, served as “ the journalistic version of TaskRabbit (freelance labor for everyday tasks) and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (a crowd-sourcing site for on-demand business tasks)…. Overnight, it dramatically expanded the journalistic reach of the Post at a bargain-basement price.”

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The sugar highs of all this digital gimmickry proved short-lived, especially after Bezos, ever attuned to the main chance for piling up more billions, joined the rest of the Silicon Valley power elite in aligning behind Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Bezos vetoed the Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, triggering the departure of the paper’s op-ed chief, David Shipley, and hundreds of thousands of canceled subscriptions from outraged readers. He then issued a new dictum for the paper’s opinion shop, ordering that it be devoted to the promotion of “free markets” and “personal liberties”—both long-standing items in the catechism of cosmically wealthy moguls courting public worship. The section has since become an unsightly congeries of glorified press releases from the Cato Institute—together with editorial board fantasias on the heroic leadership of Trump that read like they’d be a stretch for Pravda to pull off. In the wake of the exodus of its entire roster of accomplished liberal columnists, the section’s furthest-left regular contributor is arguably the Tory-Reaganite Never Trumper George Will.

This concerted ideological defacing of the Post, quite plainly, is at the heart of the paper’s most recent financial plight. But the logic of mogul newsroom dominance forbids Post management from squarely acknowledging this fact—or at least saying it aloud. So in a fraught 2024 newsroom meeting, publisher Will Lewis extended the great managerial tradition of blaming workers for the colossal fuckups of their bosses. “We are losing large amounts of money,” he proclaimed. “Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff.”

As any competent editor will tell you, Lewis’s use of the passive voice is telling. Audiences don’t halve themselves in a vacuum; the responsible parties were Bezos and his handpicked adjutant Lewis—an eager tabloid handmaiden for clownish and disgraced former British prime minister Boris Johnson, when he wasn’t running interference in the UK Telegraph’s phone-hacking scandal. It turns out that democracy doesn’t die in darkness at all—it succumbs to repeated group muggings at the hands of the moneyed power elite. But that’s a story you’re never going to read in Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post.

Through an unlikely set of circumstances, in the early aughts, I was at the media party where longtime New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd approached David Brooks about coming on board. I’ve long thought in retrospect that I should have put my body on the line to prevent the ensuing intellectual catastrophe from happening.

Brooks, who has occupied the prestigious (if mythical) “reasonable conservative” perch at the opinion section of the Paper of Record for nearly a quarter century, is now decamping for The Atlantic, another inert organ of elite consensus politics, to serve as a staff writer and host of a video podcast. For Brooks to be forsaking his role as the nation’s Times-branded civic scold while US democracy swoons further into the abyss amid Donald Trump’s second authoritarian term drives home how ineffectual-to-untenable he has been as a trollish Never Trumper. Still, his failure bears a closer look, if only to size up the vacuity of a particular strain of culture-calibrating punditry from the US right that has bent over backward to avoid acknowledging a clear and present mobilization of blood-and-soil reaction.

For in the moral universe that David Brooks presides over, there is never a sustained ideological threat to democracy and civic culture from an insurgent right; instead, the great hazard before us is the failure of liberal and left elites to strike just the right Goldilocks posture of sympathy with the conservative grievance-industrial complex. Across successive revanchist right takeovers of the GOP, Brooks’s columnizing output hewed to this message with the unshakable conviction of a Soviet apparatchik, and he also reliably plied it from his role as a reasonable right solon on the PBS News Hour—which, alas, shares the same editorial instincts as Maureen Dowd.

During a post-2016 election colloquy of pundits debating the laughably irrelevant proposition, “Do liberals hold the moral high ground?,” Brooks, who was of course arguing the negative claim, disclosed the formula behind all his sober diagnoses of what ails our body politic. “A lot of people voted for Donald Trump because they thought a lot of tenured radicals along the coasts thought they were morally superior to them,” he proclaimed. “So if you want the kind of politics we have today, think you’re morally superior to the other side.”

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That smug, counter-empirical refrain has fueled countless Brooks columns, to say nothing of a torrent of ponderous and unenlightening books, harking back to his reputation-making work of “comic sociology” Bobos in Paradise. In Brooks’s foreshortened social vision—which, for the record, is neither comic nor sociological—myopically privileged if provisionally well-meaning liberal elites have broken faith with the American civic tradition by putting themselves indelicately forward as role models for everyone else. The ensuing backlash is thus entirely their doing, in just the way that abusive spouses declare that their inattentive mates have left them no choice but to assault them.

This just-so fable of terminal social haughtiness from the left was, despite its rough plausibility for certain neighborhoods in Berkeley or Cambridge, always a lie. Back when Brooks, then a staff writer at The Weekly Standard, was burnishing his mainstream comic-sociological bona fides in the pages of—you guessed it—The Atlantic, he published a suburban safari dispatch from Montgomery County, Maryland, outside DC, and the Franklin County exurbs of Philadelphia professing to document the insular lifestyle politics in strongholds of “blue state” liberalism and “red state” cultural revolt on the right. The resulting Mad Libs–style account was classic Brooks; riding mowers and NASCAR viewing were duly name-checked as badges of conservative belonging, while NPR listening and (irony of ironies, given his subsequent career arc) a subscription to The New York Times were telltale signs of opportunistic liberal secession from the broader polis.

The only problem, as then–Philadelphia magazine writer Sasha Issenberg documented, is that the whole thing was a fairy tale. Three of the country’s top five NASCAR TV markets were in blue states, Issenberg found, and the QVC home-shopping network—another sign of red-state habitation in Brooks’s account—also drew most of its revenue from blue states. Brooks’s claim that he was unable to spend more than $20 on a meal in Franklin County was likewise easily exposed bullshit. When Issenberg interviewed Brooks about this barrage of falsehoods, he retreated to his “comic sociology” shtick, and argued that he was trafficking in broad generalizations that “ring true” to the worrisome cultural divides overtaking the country.

Tellingly, when Issenberg cited another unfounded claim in the Atlantic piece—the proto-Trumpian fable that “blue America” was awash with undocumented immigrants—the pundit’s genial comic mask slipped. “This is dishonest research,” the dishonest researcher announced. “You’re not approaching the piece in the spirit of an honest reporter. Is this how you’re going to start your career? I mean, really, doing this sort of piece? I used to do ’em, I know ’em, how one starts, but it’s just something you’ll mature beyond.”

In his own self-professed journalistic maturity, Brooks has been a one-man cottage industry in the sort of lazy cultural stereotyping Issenberg called him out for 22 years ago. His disingenuous account of the American right’s dismal racial politics deserve special mention in a career teeming with disingenuousness; here, he magically transforms the attitudes of professional elites into the basis for the claim that racial animus plays no serious role in the modern right. “Between 1984 and 2003 I worked at National Review, The Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and The Weekly Standard. Most of my friends were Republicans,” Brooks burbled in a 2017 column. “I never heard blatantly racist comments at dinner parties, and there were probably fewer than a dozen times I heard some veiled comment that could have suggested racism. To be honest, I heard more racial condescension in progressive circles than in conservative ones.” The real bearers of bad-faith racial division are accordingly, “white identitarians” of the right who by some truly recondite process of cultural osmosis, have seized on “the multicultural worldview taught in schools, universities and the culture and, rightly or wrongly, have applied it to themselves.” Once more, Brooks surveys the most destructive and immoral features of the American conservative movement and comes bearing the abuser’s self-serving alibi to the liberal opposition: Look what you made them do.

Through all this culture-war fabulizing, Brooks has been particularly obsessed, as he was in Franklin County, with the ostensible great divide in bespoke dining habits, devoting one infamous column to a lunch out with a companion who lacked a high-school diploma reduced to cringing terror before an exotic selection of deli meats. On social media, Brooks professed to document an outlandish airport restaurant bill as evidence of Biden-fomented inflation when in fact the greatest outlay on his check was the pundit’s bourbon order. After this bit of stunt commentary drew a torrent of viral outrage, Brooks was forced to retire the arrogant self-defense he mounted before a young magazine journalist and concede, “I screwed up.”

Unfortunately, no similar admission will be affixed to Brooks’s legacy of twice-a-week columns tracing the wrenching divisions of our political life to twee consumer choices and elite liberal wokeness run amok. For all of Brooks’s dissections of life inside the bubble of self-regarding blue-state privilege, his own ludicrously privileged rounds have battered his brand. In November last year, Brooks published a typically self-involved column dismissing the furor over the Epstein files as catnip to the conspiracy-minded MAGA right while calling out Democrats who agitated for the files’ release as bad civic actors “undermining public trust and sowing public cynicism.”

It turned out that a good deal of cynicism was very much in order here. Brooks himself was found in the Epstein files, having attended a 2011 gathering of plutocrats and plutocrat-adjacent know-it-alls that included Epstein and was organized by Epstein’s agent. In trying to brush aside this latest blow to his credibility, Brooks mounted a defense that was admittedly novel for a heroic interpreter of the harmful defamations of ordinary folk circulating in America’s bastions of cultural privilege: He hangs out with so many billionaires in his free time that he couldn’t really be bothered to learn whether one of them was a pedophile and sex trafficker. Perhaps sensing a threat to its own access-first model of journalism, the Times issued a statement parroting the ridiculous claim.

The Epstein embarrassment may well have played some role in Brooks’s decision to vacate one of the most influential pundit chairs in American journalism. But the real David Brooks scandal is that the same elite institutions he pretends to castigate hired him to continue propagating the kind of “rings true” lullabies that keep them believing in their own world-shaping importance. I have no doubt that he’ll be a successful podcaster for The Atlantic, which played such a pivotal role in demonstrating to him the professional benefits of lying your ass off.

The time for triangulating is over. With the second murder of a Minneapolis citizen at the hands of untrained, immunity-drunk, and predatory federal agents, Democrats must fundamentally shift their approach to immigration policy. It’s long past time for the party to move past its learned helplessness in the face of MAGA bloodlust fantasies about an invading horde of undocumented immigrants—and to vindicate the human rights of workers and neighbors confronting Gestapo-style seizures, renditions, and executions of a lawless invading force. Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old VA nurse shot 11 times in the back after being thrown to the ground by federal goons, was documenting their abuses in the hopes of halting them and returning our federal government to some semblance of moral responsibility. The bare minimum that national Democrats can do in his memory is to dismantle the ICE bureaucracy of terror once and for all.

After Pretti’s execution on Saturday, a key swing bloc of Senate Democrats had signaled that they would vote no on the House-passed appropriations bill that would deliver $10 billion in additional funding for ICE. This is on top of the tripling of the agency’s budget secured in last summer’s tax-and-spending bill. House GOP leaders had already carved out the ICE appropriation into a separate bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, so that another swing bloc of right-leaning Democrats would support it after a number of their pet spending priorities were attached to the legislation. That tactic was also garnering support from Democratic senators, with Appropriations Vice Chair Patty Murray of Washington all but assuring that Republicans would land the seven Democratic votes required to avoid a filibuster. Yet now that the feds have murdered another Minneapolis resident, Democratic support for the measure has collapsed, leaving GOP majority leader John Thune with the option of either blowing up the filibuster or stripping out DHS funding as a standalone bill that wouldn’t clear the 60-vote filibuster threshold, and thereby potentially touching off a partial government shutdown.

In material terms, the Senate vote wouldn’t do much to slow down the rampaging ICE invasions, given the agency’s vast $85 billion annual budget; ICE continued its marauding national tour during last year’s record-long government shutdown after all. But in political terms, the Democrats must not sidestep this battle. Democrats had previously relied on strong polling support for Trump’s immigration views to rationalize their passivity on the issue—yet public opinion is turning against ICE. A YouGov poll released on Saturday, hours before Pretti’s execution, showed 46 percent of all respondents backing the agency’s abolition, compared to 41 percent opposing it. The gap widens to 12 percent among independent voters—now the largest segment of the electorate—with 47 percent backing ICE’s abolition, and 35 percent opposing. Fifty-percent of respondents said they strongly disapprove of ICE, and just 24 percent of independents registered support for the agency. There’s every reason to believe that these negative numbers will continue to grow in the wake of Pretti’s horrific murder.

As political scientist David Faris recently argued in The Nation—again, prior to Pretti’s killing—Democrats cannot continue their dilatory enabling role in backing the rise of an immigration police state:

If the party can’t take a stand here for their own voters in the Twin Cities and elsewhere who are effectively living under an open-ended, vengeful military occupation, it may fritter away what looks like a decisive advantage in the upcoming midterm elections. Many Democratic voters now keen to have the party begin the long fight to reclaim basic constitutional protections and democratic traditions shredded by the Trump regime would be discouraged from turning out this November if the party refuses to meet this latest crisis with anything other than polite consultant-massaged demands to institute improved training protocols for ICE goons poised to terrorize our cities.

Unfortunately, the political exigency here stands athwart a dismal Democratic record of preserving status-quo state predation in immigration policy. Over the past decade of xenophobic immigrant-baiting on the right, the leaders of the Democratic Party have adopted their standard difference-trimming playbook to an issue that was always a stark question of basic human rights and basic human decency. The MAGA claim that the United States was in the grip of a violent immigrant crime wave was a blatant lie, as were scores of related dehumanizing slurs, from the nonsensical assertion that immigrants were bankrupting Social Security and health coverage to the urban legend that Haitian immigrants were eating the pets belonging to their neighbors in Springfield, Ohio. (Indeed, the ICE mobilization in Minneapolis is in response to another discredited battery of MAGA lies about a massive scheme of welfare fraud allegedly perpetrated by Somali-run daycare centers in Minnesota—though just how an armed Freikorps mobilization is expected to combat the accounting-based conduct of welfare fraud has never been explained.)

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Occasionally, Democratic lawmakers would try to swat down some of the right’s most lurid and baseless claims, but they also took great care to grant the basic premise of this hate campaign: that border enforcement in this country was broken and that some vast unspecified cohort of undocumented immigrants were, in some vague and implausible way, preying on the birthright safety and prosperity of native-born Americans. That’s why President Barack Obama oversaw a greater volume of deportations than Donald Trump had, prior to the present Trump administration’s mass deportation policy; it’s also why, once you combine interior removals of immigrants with administrative returns at or near the border, the Biden White House clocked a higher number of immigrants exiting the country in the first eight months of its final year than the second Trump administration has during the same time frame in 2025. It’s why Biden and his Democratic allies on the Hill continued increasing ICE’s budget lines. And it’s why the same Democratic Senate caucus now belatedly trying to stake out a dissenting position on state-sanctioned murder meekly rolled over to ensure the passage of the Laken Riley Act, which laid the groundwork for ICE’s rolling siege on Democratic-led cities.

The reasoning behind the House appropriations bid to continue spiking ICE funding is very much of a piece with this long train of Democratic capitulations on right-wing immigration crackdowns: If the party once again submits to the right-wing consensus on immigration, it won’t suffer a defection of highly coveted (if increasingly mythical) moderate voters in the next election cycle.

But the flagrantly fascist actions of the Trump White House have upended even the milquetoast logic of traditional Democratic acquiescence. There’s no middle ground to be staked out in a murderous authoritarian siege. In addition to the dramatic shift against Trump’s immigration program in opinion surveys, there’s now a mass revulsion against ICE in unlikely forums like NFL Reddit boards. For a political establishment that’s spent the past decade bending over backward to accommodate the smallest errant grievance from Trump-voting diner patrons, that should be a five-alarm wake-up call.

And aside from self-interested electoral calculations, the moral case against allowing ICE to survive is now unanswerable. In a powerful YouTube video posted shortly after Pretti’s execution, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie made the straightforward case that the administration’s concerted release of ideological death squads in US cities renders Trump’s presidency illegitimate. Bouie doesn’t cite manifestos from the margins of political life, but rather section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which forbids insurrectionists against the United States from holding federal office, and the language of the Declaration of Independence. That strikes me as a sound fundamental basis for the Democrats to finally act with genuine moral authority on a genuine moral issue.

The present crisis also calls to mind the counsel of Martin Luther King Jr. in “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” as he surveys the callow lecturing of his self-appointed Job’s consolers in the white moderate wing of liberalism. King wrote:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

King’s indictments extend not just to today’s congressional Democratic leaders but to all the major institutions we’ve seen capitulate to Trump’s fascist-gangster agenda over the past year, from universities and media corporations to the commercial interests backstopping the ICE regime. Voting down the next round of ICE funding won’t reverse this collapse into authoritarianism, but it would at least be a step in the right direction. It would also represent a quantum leap beyond the shallow understanding and lukewarm acceptance that has long been the Democrats’ calling card in immigration policy.

As President Donald Trump seeks to force the attendees of the World Economic Forum in Davos to submit to his fever dreams of imperial expansion, he also faces a more stubborn, far less operatic challenge to his grip on domestic power. The American public has turned on his presidency, chiefly because Trump has failed to deliver on his central campaign promise to make the US economy more equitable and less inflationary. In belated recognition of this looming threat, Trump gave us one of the more unlikely spectacles in a presidency overstuffed with improbabilities: He delivered an aspirationally populist address before an audience of billionaires at an exclusive Swiss ski resort.

The president’s rallying cry was aspirational for the same reason that his economic agenda is flailing: He and his party have no abiding interest in advancing an economic program that would actually benefit working-class Americans. And Trump, being Trump, has refrained from devoting any serious thought or attention to deep and lasting economic reforms. Instead, he’s pushed a series of gimmicky policy responses that amount to opportunistic photo-ops at best, and cynical afterthoughts at worst. He’s pressured banks to cap credit card fees at 10 percent for the next year—a measure that, at first glance, would seem to offer relief for debt-strapped Americans, but that, in the absence of other meaningful banking and credit regulation, would create the perverse effect of restricting access to credit for the working people who need it the most. One industry analysis found that a 10 percent cap would deny credit to anyone whose credit rating is below 740—some 175 million to 190 million consumers. That’s why Trump’s deadline for bank compliance came and went this Tuesday without any lenders falling into line—and why, during his Davos speech, he said he’d ask Congress to move legislation to formalize a 10 percent cap.

Yet even full compliance would produce only partial debt relief for most borrowers—because the top-heavy credit and banking industries are able to collude to keep merchant fees high, enforce punitive penalties for late payment, and charge annual fees to consumers. And like most of Trump’s symbolic sops to working-class voters—notably his campaign pledges to suspend taxes on tips and allow write-offs on the interest paid on car loans—the credit card cap comes with a hard deadline, which in all cases arrives shortly after the 2026 midterm elections. They are, in other words, simple campaign stunts meant to artificially jolt the electorate into a state of pseudo-populist gratitude; meanwhile, the grievous tax cuts to the rich enacted in Trump’s signature spending and taxation bill last year are permanent, and represent the largest upward distribution of wealth achieved by any piece of legislation in American history. Seizing on the attention to the issue generated by Trump’s proposal, Senators Bernie Sanders and Josh Hawley have produced a more substantive bill to cap fees for five years while enacting broader structural reforms to the credit market—a revived version of the bill the two senators introduced to no avail in 2024. But this measure will likely stall out for the same reason as it did two years ago —Congress is in thrall to the banking lobby. (For confirmation of this, see the banking sector’s full court press to kill off a provision in a pending crypto bill that would permit stablecoins to pay our competitive interest fees in the form of an annual bonus to coin owners.)

Trump’s other hasty and half-baked bid to be seen as a populist tribune of working America also got a passing mention in his speech in Davos: a proposal to bar institutional investors from owning blocs of single-family homes. Like the credit card gambit, this plan seems sensible at first: big private equity and hedge funds are major players in the housing market and, unlike single home owners, they can use their vast stores of capital to wait out passing convulsions in costs, and realize optimal returns on investment, all while passing on expenses to renters, mobile home tenants, and other hapless consumers.

In his Davos remarks, though, Trump underlined that his housing plan won’t aim to expand the nation’s existing housing supply—the most obvious remedy to lower costs for working Americans. “If I really wanted to crush the housing market, I could do that so fast,” he bragged—but added that “I don’t want to do anything to hurt” homeowners invested in the present market.

In gambling circles, this is what’s known as a “tell.” The false choice between “crushing” the housing sector and protecting existing equity in the market is Trump’s way of signaling that he intends, contrary to his pseudo-populist bluster, to ensure that the biggest players in real estate will see their stakes preserved when the market unwinds. Some observers indeed suggest that, by explicitly exempting measures to increase housing supply, the putative ban on institutional investments erects the framework for a bailout of major investors suffering from exposure to devalued assets. That is, after all, how Washington rescued Wall Street in the wake of the 2008 housing meltdown.

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And this is why Trump wants to be seen as a crusader against unscrupulous institutional investing, while letting the underlying inequities of the housing market remain intact. “Trump is doing this mostly as a distraction from the things he’s done to make the housing situation worse,” says Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project. “It would take the involvement of Congress to really reform the housing market. I just think this, at its most basic level, is a shiny object to hold up.“

To really benefit ordinary renters and homeowners, Roller argues, it’s crucial to look past the shiny object Trump is waving and once again reckon with the fine print of the tax code. “Serious reform would have to address tax policy. If you’re really targeting institutional investors, there are so many tax loopholes that reward speculation, and allow so many corporations to own significant amounts of land.” (Indeed, to get some broader sense of how the Trump administration is focused on the needs of struggling Americans seeking to make their rent or mortgage payments, look at Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who gave this aristocratic gloss on the White House’s sacred mission to safeguard existing home equity: “Maybe your parents bought 5,10, 12 homes. We don’t want to push the moms and pops out.”)

Meanwhile, Roller notes, Trump has gleefully leveled many cost protections in the housing sector: “There are things that are in Trump’s control. This White House has gutted the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. They’ve stripped all the Federal Housing Authority’s affordability requirements. They’re deporting heavily needed construction workers. There are now import taxes on a lot of building materials, which have also driven up costs.”

What’s more, Roller says, Trump’s proposal, by focusing on the status of existing homeowners, once more overlooks the people crowded out of affordable housing at the behest of big-ticket investors. “Institutional investors are a big deal in the purchase market, but they’re a bigger deal in the rental market, and an even bigger deal in the mobile home market”—and Trump’s plan does nothing to address the dismal role that such investors play as landlords. “For a long time, Fannie Mae was giving preferential loans to mobile home owners who kept rents affordable. I’m sure that’s no longer the case,” Roller observes.

Trump’s own demented ploy to seize control of Greenland from Denmark is, seen from this light, a classic real estate squeeze executed by a shitty landlord—the last person who should be trusted with guarding the interests of working Americans in a top-heavy and speculation-driven housing market. But this is the same plutocratic candidate who reaped acres of credulous campaign coverage from the still more slapdash and empty stunt of dressing up as a McDonald’s worker for a day—and who went on to see his family’s net worth skyrocket by more than $2.3 billion during his first year in office. If our political discourse can make that seem palatable, it can clearly swallow anything—even the specter of a Davos-branded populist.

In a colossal show of both imperial hubris and reality-TV-grade carelessness, America’s ruling regime has kidnapped a world leader and his wife and ordered them to go to trial on overblown charges of “narcoterrorism” (together with menacing-sounding but ultimately vacuous offenses such as being in possession of machine guns, which much of the MAGA movement regards as a sacred duty). Efforts to justify the action veer wildly from gangster-style resource extraction to the assertion of a new brand of hemispheric hegemony, while supposed plans to “run the country” on a puppet-colonial basis are plainly nonexistent. (Fittingly enough, the administration’s newly designated point-person in the arrangement is reportedly the racist thug who’s overseen a vastly unpopular and counterproductive federal siege of terror over US cities the administration doesn’t like.) In a symbolic flourish that says everything, the real proximate cause of the illegal coup appears to be the deposed leader’s habit of posting videos of himself dancing to troll America’s fathomlessly petty and dance-challenged maximum leader.

All of this would present a series of prime targets for a robust and engaged opposition party—particularly since one effective (if also bogus) plank of the MAGA movement’s mass appeal has been its professed allergy to America’s “forever wars” and the myopic military actions that provoked them. If only we had such a party. Instead, we have the Democratic Party. And what are the Democrats doing to call out the rapaciousness and the self-dealing hypocrisy of the Republican ruling caste? So far, as little as possible.

The central complaint from Democratic leaders has been that the Trump White House didn’t properly consult Congress in advance of its crime spree. And even that grievance rings hollow. Thus far, Democrats have shown no inclination to pursue an impeachment resolution against the president—the clear constitutional remedy for such abuses—even as a growing chorus of lawmakers are calling for it, together with leaders of the party’s activist base.

It’s safe to assume that party leaders will continue to brush aside calls for impeachment and other measures of accountability for the Trump regime’s brigandry—that is, after all, exactly what happened when Trump conducted his illegal bombing attack on Iran last summer. And the Democratic caucus failed to get traction behind a pair of earlier resolutions to curb the administration’s lawless military adventurism against Venezuela, even as a handful of dissident Republicans backed them.

The sorry record of party leaders on Trump’s brazen defiance of the Constitution’s war powers provisions reinforces the major liability that afflicts Democrats ahead of a critical midterm cycle: that they simply aren’t serious about making good on their many rhetorical denunciations of the Trumpified GOP’s lurch into cultlike authoritarian rule.

Sadly, the party’s inert approach to illegitimate acts of war well predates Trump’s Venezuela rampage; leading Democrats sat on their hands while their own president backed a genocidal war in Gaza—a lockstep posture of complicity so deeply ingrained that the Democratic National Committee refused to let any Palestinian speaker take the stage at the party’s 2024 convention. Democrats likewise enthusiastically hailed Barack Obama’s raid in Pakistan to kidnap and execute Osama bin Laden with little thought that it would serve as a precedent for later imperial errands like Maduro’s ouster.

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Some of this self-inflicted myopia can be traced to one variant or another of “the Vietnam syndrome”—the dread of appearing out of step with bellicose public opinion during one of the country’s countless acts of imperial plunder masquerading as a national security crisis. That was the feeble lamentation from a trio of centrist House Democrats in a recent report in Axios, one of the party establishment’s favorite clearinghouses for anonymous left-bashing. One said that Democratic criticism of the MAGA putsch in Venezuela “looks weak…. If you don’t acknowledge when there is a win for our country, you lose all credibility.” Warming to the strains of such do-nothing centrist lullabies, another lawmaker said, “As Democrats, we can’t just condemn what happened.… I wish the Democratic Party would be a little bit more measured on this.” Still another misunderstood soul complained that “everything Trump touches must be bad according to the base.” It’s worth noting that none of these heroic dissenters spoke on the record—a weaselly maneuver that’s far weaker than principled opposition to an unlawful and unprovoked violation of another nation’s sovereignty.

At a time when the MAGA creed is poised to project itself wantonly across the Western Hemisphere, these maundering statements aren’t just self-serving bromides—they’re a plea to be spared the work of actually doing politics. As Democrats gear up to make the case that they should be granted control of Congress to stave off the power grabs, racist internment campaigns, and crimes of the second Trump White House, the last thing they should be doing is to bypass the essential task of drawing firm and principled distinctions between their own agenda and that of the thuggish opposition they have deemed an existential threat to American democracy. Yet that is precisely the reflex of the party’s leadership. It’s why virtually every statement on the Venezuela raid issued from the sanctums of Democratic power starts with the denunciation of Maduro as an illegitimate dictator—as though that makes an American-led kidnapping-and-coup campaign somehow more palatable. To make the case that even antidemocratic foreign leaders should be shielded from externally engineered coups is to mount a political argument—a vindication of basic guidelines of conduct for any self-professed republic. And making that argument means countenancing resistance, hazarding electoral risks, and refashioning your party’s organizing convictions on more coherent and legible lines.

Democratic leaders have demonstrated again and again that they can’t be bothered with any of that. Instead, they’re poised to treat the Venezuelan travesty as they have most of the other power grabs, crimes, and corrupt bargains of the Trump era—as something that can be safely left untended until it passively ripens into an opportunity to eke out a narrow clutch of wins in the next electoral cycle. In that spirit, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer took to the bully pulpit of Morning Joe on Monday to preach bipartisan backing for another war powers resolution to prevent further incursions into Venezuela without advance notification to Congress. Never mind that the Democrats failed to advance their past two such resolutions. And never mind that Schumer’s appeal to his GOP colleagues was flat-out hallucinatory: “If there was ever a time, [Republicans] must step up to the plate. This is the time. And if they don’t, they’re gonna feel the heat from their constituents.”

In other words: The opposition party that continually rules out impeachment as a viable strategy is banking on lawmakers aligned with a ruling party that’s systematically purged and primaried anti-MAGA dissidents from its ranks to rescue flailing Democratic bids to get illegal war plans duly set down on paper before the concerned principals on Capitol Hill. That’s the polar opposite of politics—and it is most decidedly weak.

In a sane political universe, we’d have cause to hope that Donald Trump would be losing public favor as a result of his many crimes, moral trespasses, abuses of power, and bigotries. The saga of his second term has involved his casually bypassing any and all guardrails to shore up small-r republican self-governance in the crass pursuit of his preferred megalomaniacal obsessions, from the hulking wreck of his White House renovation to his hate-fueled brownshirt raids targeting law-abiding immigrant communities, to his campaign of murder in the Southern Hemisphere to his crypto-and-crony schemes of self-enrichment.

In our actual world, however, Trump is chiefly hemorrhaging support for the same predictable reasons that American presidents usually do: a lackluster-to-terrible economic performance. GDP growth has hovered below 2 percent on Trump’s watch—a marked downturn from the 2.5 percent the Biden White House clocked in 2024. Inflation, the chief economic scourge that Trump pledged to subdue in his second term, has gained fresh traction even in the face of recent rate cuts from the Federal Reserve, passing the 3 percent mark over the fall—a trend that Trump’s erratic collection of unforced errors known as his tariffs policy will only compound. “With some firms now paying average import duties of around 10%, inflation is likely to keep climbing in the months ahead,” The Economist notes. Overall business activity, as measured by the S & P’s index tracking services, now stands at a six-month low. And now a new jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics—the reporting agency that Trump tried to hand over to a MAGAratchik too unhinged for even the GOP Senate to approve—shows that unemployment has spiked to 4.6 percent—the highest level since the Covid recession. More unforced errors abound here, with 105,000 deferred resignations from federal employees besieged by the terrors of DOGE dragging down the overall figures. Manufacturing employment—the sector allegedly at the heart of Trump’s white working-class base—has dropped off steadily, again largely thanks to Trump’s tariffs.

Thus far, Trump and his White House lackeys have sought to deflect from these glum developments by pretending it’s still 2024 and blaming everything on the Biden White House. As Tuesday’s dismal jobs numbers dropped, Vice President JD Vance set off for a MAGA morale-boosting swing through Pennsylvania to yet again urge backers to be patient as the administration digs out from the mess it says it inherited from Biden. It’s not a pitch likely to get much fresh traction amid an expensive holiday season, a freezing winter with skyrocketing energy costs, and a 26 percent rise in the ranks of part-time workers over the past two months—most of them people unable to land secure full-time employment.

Still, Vance’s pitch is the soul of economic sophistication next to Trump’s own labored bid to defend the flagging economy. Affordability—the issue that Democrats are increasingly targeting in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s successful New York mayoral campaign—is simply a “hoax,” our grievance-addled chief executive insists, alongside all the other cunning liberal-led conspiracies designed to secure his downfall, like climate change, Russiagate, and the investigation into the January 6 coup attempt.

His continued appeals to the most baroque strains of right-wing victimology have done nothing to reverse Trump’s present polling free fall. His economic approval reached a record low in an AP poll released last week, with just 31 percent of respondents giving passing marks to his handling of the economy—a dramatic nine-point drop-off from the already low 40 percent Trump garnered in March. At the same time, a Century Foundation poll charted the impact of the Trump economy on working Americans, with 29 percent of registered voters saying they had delayed or skipped medical care over the past year, and 34 percent saying they had skipped meals to save money. Another 48 percent had tapped into savings to meet daily expenses, and 64 percent cut back on groceries or switched to budget grocery stores to make ends meet. Overall, the survey found two-thirds of respondents saying the economy was not performing well—including 45 percent of those who had voted for Trump in 2024. The red meat of high-paranoid MAGA culture warfare is, in other words, a poor and unconvincing substitute for actual red meat.

Yet Trump insists that he’s already tamed inflation, and that his administration deserves a grade of “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” on the economy. He made his own reputation-burnishing foray into Pennsylvania last week, again to deride concerns of affordability and to lie about his White House’s nonexistent victory over inflation. He also lashed out at critics of his frequent overseas absences from the Oval Office as “stupid people.” If the speech’s content didn’t adequately scream “out of touch,” its setting did: the ballroom at the Mount Airy casino resort in the Poconos.

In another way, though, the location was entirely fitting: Trump is going all in on the bubble-ridden investment economy as his path to economic deliverance. As the manufacturing sector slumps, investment on phantom returns from circular-funded artificial intelligence concerns now account for a full 40 percent of GDP growth, per the Financial Times. By showing complete derision for working Americans contending with a job-starved, inflationary real economy, Trump is betting everything on the make-believe returns from an untested, intrusive, and repellent technology meant to degrade human experience and further displace workers. That’s why he recently signed another plainly illegal executive order that bars states from regulating AI. Our president isn’t doing anything to address the rising cost of living, but he’s working overtime to accelerate our transformation into a total casino economy. And let us never forget that he has somehow managed to plunge his former network of casinos into bankruptcy six times over.

As Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth becomes more deeply mired in the scandal surrounding the military strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean, familiar refrains of Beltway discourse have lurched into gear. Democrats in Congress, for instance, are issuing calls for greater “transparency” and official “accountability” and vowing to widen the probes into the murderous attacks.

There is certainly much to investigate about Hegseth, who appears to have issued a second order to kill two stranded survivors in the first strike, and then proceeded to lie about doing so. Yet, amid the well-worn rounds of congressional inquiries and special investigations, Justice Department task forces, military probes, and international court proceedings, a cabinet criminal’s forcible removal from office is an all-but-guaranteed non-result. That’s why it’s so maddening that Democratic lawmakers have largely balked at invoking the most effective tool to secure such accountability—a motion to impeach Hegseth.

It’s hard to think of a case where impeachment would be a more appropriate remedy. After all, if murder doesn’t qualify as a “high crime and misdemeanor,” what does? And an impeachment inquiry, closely targeted on documenting criminal charges, would be an encouraging first step in holding Hegseth accountable for his conduct in an actually meaningful way.

Of course, an allied piece of conventional Beltway wisdom is that impeachments are inherently political—and therefore politically risky. And few Beltway operators are more conventional than the Democrats’ terminally risk-averse House leader, Hakeem Jeffries. So it wasn’t shocking when Jeffries made a point of ruling out an official impeachment inquiry not long after news of Hegseth’s role in the second strike first broke. Jeffries claimed that planned investigations by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees should produce “a meaningful investigation which we can hope would be bipartisan”—while also claiming that House Republican leaders were far too partisan to permit any impeachment articles to make it onto the legislative calendar.

Leaving aside the plain self-contradictory nature of Jeffries’s stand, the mechanism of impeachment isn’t actually as cumbersome as he makes it out to be. Under Rule IX of the House, any member can bring a motion to impeach a member of the executive branch under a privileged vote—meaning that House leaders in either major party don’t need to approve it in advance. Once an impeachment resolution is introduced under Rule IX, the House has a two-day window to vote on it, in a straight up-or-down balloting—or else to endorse another resolution to dismiss the impeachment one.

This is precisely the course of action that Michigan Democratic Representative Shri Thanedar is now pursuing against Hegseth. On Tuesday, Thanedar announced that he had filed articles of impeachment against Hegseth.

Thanedar’s motion cites both the second strike carried out on September 2 and the recent damning Pentagon investigation into Hegseth’s unauthorized sharing of details of a bombing raid in Yemen on an unsecure Signal group chat. “Here’s a secretary of defense who is managing a trillion-dollar budget, sending people into harm’s way, and he needs to be acting responsibly,” Thanedar said in an interview with The Nation. “The fact that he gives out war plans on a Signal chat puts our service members in grave danger.”

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As for the Caribbean strike, Thanedar added, “Really, this is murder; it has nothing to do with drugs and protecting the United States”—noting as well that President Donald Trump has recently pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted of trafficking some 450 tons of cocaine into the United States.

The first article in Thanedar’s resolution charges Hegseth with “murder and conspiracy to murder,” bypassing the more vague and euphemistic suggestion in most mainstream press reports that he may be guilty of “war crimes.” (An ancillary problem with this phrasing is that there is no declared war, or even a similarly euphemized “police action” that governs the US military’s rules of engagement in jury-rigged, barely rationalized attacks that are themselves illegal.) The article specifies that, in the September 2 attack, “in compliance with the order of Peter B. Hegseth, the Armed Forces carried out a second strike with the express, willful, and deliberate purpose of killing the shipwrecked survivors of the first strike,” citing provisions in the Defense Department’s Law of War Manual that proscribe actions that deprive survivors of quarter after attack—let alone actions that kill them outright after an initial attack. The second article calls for Hegseth to be impeached and removed from office for circulating the plans for the Yemen strike on the Signal group chat last spring.

Given that leaders in both parties want nothing to do with it, Thanedar’s resolution might not ultimately travel too far. But there’s a great deal to be said for simply initiating a serious discussion of Hegseth’s impeachment on the Hill. To begin with, an impeachment resolution represents a come-to-Jesus moment for all members of Congress to take a clear stand on Hegseth’s actions. For Democrats in particular, the continued invocation of the Trump White House’s criminal trespasses and threats to democratic self-rule start to ring hollow in the absence of clear measures to attach tangible consequences to the perpetrators. “That’s what makes them look weak,” said a consultant familiar with the Thanedar resolutions, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “I’ve heard it before— it’s a bit of a DC elite bubble thing to say, ‘Oh, the last impeachments backfired or failed.’ But it’s not true—the Democrats didn’t really pay any price at the ballot box” after their successive bids to impeach Trump in 2019 and 2021. “I think you can’t go out there and say, ‘They’re criminals and [Trump’s] trying to be a dictator,’ which is true and important, without something to back it up. And it’s not like they’d be taking a run at this at a time when he’s at an even split in the polls; he’s got a 20 percent disapproval gap.”

That’s a key reason that, even before they were formally introduced, Thanedar’s articles of impeachment got resounding endorsements from members of the Democratic Party’s activist base. “Pete Hegseth is an incredibly unqualified Christian nationalist lackey and alleged abuser who never should have been nominated in the first place,” said Hunter Dunn, a spokesperson for the 50501 movement, which has been instrumental in organizing the successful wave of No Kings protests across the country. “His support of Russia’s war crimes, the Genocide in Gaza, his role in Signalgate, his attempts to censor press, and his overall incompetence would each be reason enough for his removal. After he murdered multiple sailors in the Caribbean, the only place he belongs is in a jail cell. As such, we’re working on a number of different avenues to push towards his ousting, including having our members contact congressional representatives and lobby for impeachment, leveraging our social media platforms to build public support for an investigation into Hegseth and his removal, and targeted demonstrations.” Thanedar, who had earlier sought to initiate an Article IX impeachment measure against Trump until Democratic leaders prevailed on him to withdraw it, is now looking for a better reception from the party’s rank-and-file members, together with some possible recruits from the chamber’s increasingly fractious GOP majority. “What we saw from the Epstein files vote was that Republicans are now willing to question this president, and are willing to go against him on the right issue.” And if nothing else, he added, a Hegseth impeachment vote should supply a record to keep organizing around. “The question is not ‘What is the politics?’ or ‘What do the polls say?’ It’s more about, “Does this amount to a crime?’ If it does, then we need to do what is right…. This puts members of Congress on notice to take a stand. That’s what we’re elected to do.”

Remember “economic anxiety”? That was the central concept in an all-too-representative Democratic effort to explain away the mass movement aligning behind Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Back then, the liberal commentariat was mocking the notion that Trump’s supporters were motivated by questions of economic policy like trade and globalization. What really mattered to the MAGA faithful, in this overconfident diagnosis, was pure race hatred; the alleged economic worries fueling the Trump phenomenon were really only a fig leaf for a resurgence of white supremacist rancor on the right.

Of course, things weren’t that simple, as Brian Beutler, who had pioneered the ironic online usage of “economic anxiety” to underline the racial animus of MAGA insurgents, admitted in August 2016:

Trump’s racism explains why he has essentially no support from poor minorities but, at a time of stagnant wages and high inequality, it doesn’t necessarily explain his appeal entirely. Even if, as I suspect, his stated empathy for the white working class is purely affected, some white workers believe it is sincere and support him for it…. Liberals should be interested in improving economic conditions for everyone, even the most loathsome racists in the Trump coalition, but if we overinterpret racism’s role in Trump’s support, and then find that 40 percent of Americans support him, we will draw inaccurate conclusions about the extent of racial discord in our society, and our inclination to work in tandem with chastened Republicans to lift up downscale whites will start to diminish.

Certainly, Trump’s strong showing among key non-white constituencies in the 2024 election confirmed the broad contours of this argument. He nearly doubled his support among African American voters over his 2020 showing; Asian voters supported him by a 40 percent plurality, and he almost won a majority of the Hispanic vote—a landmark no other GOP presidential candidate has come close to reaching. Economic anxiety was definitely the dominant theme of Trump’s 2024 campaign; he hammered away at the scourge of inflation under Joe Biden’s presidency, even as he continued to tout an aggressive new regime of mass deportation, demonize immigrants, and decry the “left-wing lunacy” of DEI policies and critical race theory. This time, in other words, Trump was able to exploit the zero-sum race-versus-class theorizing of the liberal punditocracy to his advantage, and contrive an appeal to many of the constituencies he often dismissed in his bigoted rally outbursts, based on his promises to usher in a new “golden age” of unprecedented mass prosperity.

Yet there’s a big problem when the premise of that pitch implodes on contact, as we’re now seeing. Trump is presiding over a sluggish, top-heavy economy, with energy and food costs continuing to spike. ADP payroll figures—the only reliable current employment measure since Trump’s White House has used this fall’s government shutdown as an alibi to stop publicizing job numbers—showed an overall decline of 32,000 private-sector jobs in November, with small businesses shedding 120,000 jobs, continuing a trend of significant losses over four of the past six months. And Trump’s numbers on the question of rising prices—his signature campaign issue—are toxic, with two out of three respondents saying the president has done more to raise prices than to lower them.

So, as Trump becomes increasingly desperate to reverse his free fall in public approval, we’re witnessing a striking, if far from surprising, inversion of the old “economic anxiety” saw: in an effort to distract Americans from the economic anxiety he is responsible for generating, Trump is keen to further sow race hatred across the MAGAsphere.

This reflex is of course never far from Trump’s lizard brain; he engineered his first foray into political debate by buying full-page ads in New York newspapers demanding the reinstatement of the death penalty in order to execute the since-exonerated Black and Hispanic defendants in the Central Park jogger case. And even amid his 2024 assault on the failures of Bidenomics, Trump found ample time to boost the false racist claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the pets of their neighbors. Yet the barrage of bad economic news for the White House has spurred Trump to unleash his hate-infested id on any non-white target that flits through his overtaxed brainpan. In response to the shooting of two National Guard troops near the White House by an Afghan immigrant, Trump announced a halt on processing immigrants from all “Third World countries”—a sweeping racist imputation of group responsibility for the shooting that has since metastasized into a 30-country travel ban and a cruel and disastrous cessation of decisions on asylum claims.

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And in a televised cabinet meeting this week, Trump let loose a stream of ugly attacks on Somali immigrants, whom he called “garbage,” and then proceeded to insult with well-worn anti-Black stereotypes:

These are people who do nothing but complain. They complain, and from where they came from, they got nothing. When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.

In the supine authoritarian messaging complex of the MAGA movement, this was a barely coded cry of “Everybody into the pool!” for Trump’s vast supporting cast of racist demagogues. That message was conveyed in real time by reliable MAGA toady Vice President JD Vance, who “banged the table in encouragement,” per The New York Times’ writeup of the meeting’s Klan-rally finish. (Trump, clearly pleased with this sort of response, followed up with an equally grotesque anti-Somali rant on Wednesday.)

The diffident, Trump-normalizing Gray Lady was provoked to observe, “Even for a president who has frequently made derogatory comments about immigrants, the rant against Somalis was an alarming use of vulgarity from the White House against an entire community.”

I’m afraid I have bad news for the Paper of Record about the rest of the MAGAsphere. If you toggle over to the right’s coverage of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s murderous attacks on boats alleged, without evidence, to be transporting drugs to the United States—either fentanyl or cocaine, depending on which MAGA mouthpiece is whipping up the two-minute hate in question—you’ll find the same vicious race libels, only in more graphic terms. Megyn Kelly, a lawyer and self-professed Christian, announced on her Sirius XM show that she didn’t think Hegseth should be held accountable for the second strike he reportedly ordered on the first of the boats taken out in the administration’s Caribbean campaign—and that, indeed, the two survivors killed in that strike in defiance of the laws of warfare didn’t suffer nearly as much as she wanted them to:

I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer.… I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little.

Like I’m really having a difficult time ginning up sympathy for these guys who 10 seconds earlier almost got taken out by the initial bomb. But because they managed to get ejected, you know, a little too soon, had to be taken out in the water.

This is also not much of a shock for the odious Kelly, who came to prime-time prominence on Fox News for touting lurid and baseless conspiracy theories about the New Black Panther Party and fervidly insisting on the caucasian bona fides of Santa Claus—thereby efficiently streamlining the network’s demented coverage of the phony “War on Christmas” into fodder for a race war. Yet, like Trump’s Somali outburst, Kelly’s performance was a repellent bid to dial up MAGA-branded race hatreds to 11, in the absence of any plausible program to alleviate the economic worries of working Americans.

We can expect a steady torrent of this obscene and inhumane posturing from a Trumpified GOP that is otherwise at a loss to govern effectively or deliver tangible material gains to its working-class supporters. To take yet another ready example from this week’s news cycle, the New York Young Republicans Club is hosting for its annual gala Markus Frohmaier, the deputy leader of Germany’s Alternatives for Deutschland (AfD) party, which celebrates the country’s Nazi heritage while promoting a draconian set of anti-immigrant policies; an August communiqué from the club contained the Nazified slogan “AfD über alles.” You might think that the New York City–based arm of the Young Republicans network would have been chastened by the fate of the rival New York State Republicans, which was forced to disband after a series of leaked group chats showcased the affinity that members and leaders of the group professed for Nazism, up to and including fantasies of consigning their political opponents to the gas chambers. But you would, of course, be wrong: Anything goes, it’s clear, in a MAGA movement untethered from expectations of economic improvement. Economic anxiety must succumb, under the direction of Trump and Vance, to the utmost impunity of the white volkisch Reich.

As President Donald Trump’s approval numbers continue to plummet—he’s now clocked his first-ever majority of male poll respondents giving a thumbs-down—he’s reached for the pet crusade of all right-wing demagogues losing public favor: a culture war against the press. Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the Trump White House debuted its media bias tracker—a laundry list of alleged press outrages committed against the righteous, truth-telling MAGAfied executive branch.

As an exercise in media criticism, the bias tracker is sorely wanting. It itemizes ostensible distortions and falsehoods perpetrated by news outlets but doesn’t bother to supply textual hyperlinks to the stories in question, except in a motley array of “sources” at the end of each entry. Doubtless the rationale here is to deprive the coverage of clicks, but the practice also alleviates the grudge-bearing authors of the site from needing to cite context, disclaiming language, and the White House’s own responses in the main text. The other sources marshaled as putative citations are the White House’s own social media diatribes and fellow-traveling merchants of social-media outrage such as the Libs of Tiktok X site. As a result, the site’s content analysis replicates the firehose-style dudgeon of right-wing social media, as a tour of its lead categories of putative bias instantly confirms: “Lie,” “Misrepresentation,” “Omission of Context,” “Malpractice,” and by far the most commonly cited trespass, “Bias.”

In this cauldron of cultural affront, the actual substance of the coverage cataloged on the site is crowded out. Take the lead entry, which presumes to document how the “Media Misrepresents and Exaggerates President Trump’s Calls for Democrat [sic] Accountability” in relation to the video that six veteran Democratic Congress members recorded to remind service members that they can and should refuse to obey illegal orders.

The “offense,” the White House claims, is that “the media misrepresented President Trump’s call for Members of Congress to be held accountable for inciting sedition by saying that he called for their ‘execution.’” And the scorned “truth” of the matter, the site continues, is that “the Democrats and Fake News Media subversively implied that President Trump had issued illegal orders to service members. Every order President Trump has issued has been lawful. It is dangerous for sitting Members of Congress to incite insubordination in the United States’ military, and President Trump called for them to be held accountable.” 

The means of accountability that Trump endorsed is, of course, not mentioned here; his Truth Social claim was that the lawmakers were guilty of “seditious behavior” that was “punishable by death”; for good measure, he recirculated a post from a supporter proclaiming, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!”

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It’s an immediate tell here that the alleged “truth” at the bottom of the dispute is simply a restatement of the White House’s grievance. It means nothing to contend that press outlets “subversively implied” that Trump’s orders to the armed services are illegal. In reporting the video’s content, news organizations are not implying anything, subversively or otherwise—they’re presenting the issue at hand. And generally speaking, they haven’t done nearly enough to document the full scale of lawlessness perpetrated by the Trump White House under bogus military and national security pretexts. The unprovoked attacks on allegedly drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific have now claimed more than 80 fatalities, with no public documentation of the administration’s claims and no congressional authorization of the attacks. Indeed, Congress is now investigating the reports that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized a second attack during the initial September 2 raid so as to kill the two survivors who were clinging to the boat’s wreckage—a charge that, if proven, would be a war crime—if the United States were at war.

It’s also now come to light that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defied a federal court order forbidding the transfer of detained Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador’s brutal CECOT maximum-security prison—at the same place where she earlier recorded a torture-porn video—falsely claiming that international rendition and detainment “are my decision at the Department of Homeland Security” and no business of “activist judges.” Oh, and the whole legal rationale for these deportations—that members of Venezuela’s Tren De Aragua and represent a first-order threat to national security under the Alien Enemies Act—is also unconstitutional, per the ruling of a Trump-appointed federal judge.

And these are just the Trump-sanctioned illegalities of the last news cycle. The ongoing illegal mobilization of federal troops in cities and states governed by Trump’s political opponents, together with warrantless raids and detentions carried out by masked ICE goons and Customs and Border Patrol agents are basic assaults on civil liberties and due process guarantees, and overwhelmingly victimize residents without prior criminal records. The handiwork of DOGE and Trump’s quisling appointees like Kari Lake and Linda McMahon in dismantling federal agencies with statutory mandates is also plainly illegal, as is the Trump family’s long history of corrupt self-enrichment schemes.

It’s no surprise that, in the face of this Mafia-like governing record, Trump and his enablers should fixate on a group of Democratic lawmakers reminding people of how the rule of law is supposed to work. Yet, even within this absurdly narrow compass, the White House bias tracker is unable to contain its will-to-vituperation long enough to make a consistent point. In claiming that the press has somehow cunningly abetted the claims of the Congress members, the site features a video at the top of the page including snippets from the video and cutting off the statements with a loudly thudding red stamp emblazoning “SEDITIOUS” across their faces. 

In the act of claiming utmost media victimhood for itself, the Trump White House can’t resist blaring out the substance of Trump’s own case to snuff out his political opponents. Instead, it wraps the whole entry up with another dogmatic falsehood: “President Trump has never issued an illegal order. The Fake News knew that, but ran with the story anyway.”

This has always been the logic behind the American right’s half-century-long crusade against the alleged perfidies of “liberal bias” in the press: Instead of pressing for tangible reforms such as serious fact-checking or enhanced public accountability (let alone public ownership) for the corporate media, the chief demand is for media outlets to dutifully echo right-wing agitprop. This was the clear demand of Vice President Spiro Agnew’s 1972 broadside against the elite East Coast media for the thought crime of reporting on the US war in Vietnam, and the basic coordinates of the bias lament on the right haven’t altered since. This has entailed no small amount of manifest absurdities, such as the recent defunding of a public media infrastructure that disproportionately benefits audience in red-voting rural communities, and a determination to divine Maoist messaging in all manner of bloated Hollywood offerings. Yet such victimization narratives are irresistible to a conservative movement that has long deflected attention from its unpopular governing program with the stirring refrains of unappeasable culture warfare.

And sure enough, the White House bias tracker is steeped in rudderless affront-taking. It castigates an opinion piece published in the Beltway trade rag The Hill (and in the process misdescribes the freelance author as a reporter) for using an image of National Guard troops in DC from the Biden administration. Once again, the substance of the piece—which correctly maintained that Trump was abusing his powers to eclipse the authority of local political leaders in Washington and other cities he’s targeted—was disregarded in favor of the whiny assertion that “The Hill used an image of law enforcement agents from Joe Biden’s Presidency to inaccurately portray President Trump’s law enforcement efforts as ‘autocratic.’”

A basic acquaintance with news production on the web would lead any notionally honest interlocutor to conclude that the packagers of this piece resorted to an older image because Trump’s full National Guard deployment was then still in progress. What’s more, the image in question dates from March 2021 and depicts the mobilization of the National Guard in the nation’s capital in response to the Trump-led coup attempt of January 6. (That deployment was originally slated for 60 days but was extended in response to a credible threat of continued MAGA-aligned violence in DC.) In other words, Trump’s vigilant bias trackers are claiming that The Hill’s editors maliciously targeted the wrong example of Trump-instigated violence targeting the nation’s capital.

It goes on like this, in a monotonous refrain of offense-taking that only a true Trump sycophant can sustain. You have CBS Mornings host Nate Burleson hauled up on the charge of seizing the “opportunity to politicize the Charlie Kirk assassination” when his offense was asking former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy whether this was a suitable moment to reflect on the right’s rhetoric endorsing and celebrating violence. Never mind that McCarthy was free to answer in the negative, as he indeed did. This was prime grievance fodder in the right-wing mediasphere, where calls for reflection are treated like kryptonite and leftists are always and forever the faithless violent insurrectionists. And you have this unthinkable defilement of Real American virtue: “The View’s Whoopi Goldberg Makes Up a Song to Slam Trump for Building White House Ballroom.” The countervailing “key point” here is “ABC’s The View criticized President Trump for improving the White House complex despite the ample precedence for the improvements.” Yet again, restating a grievance in a vacuum is tendered as a simulacrum of fact-checking. This parody of media criticism would be merely laughable if Trump wasn’t also abusing his powers and regulatory authority to remake the corporate media in his own image. The right-wing media-bias complex may be a joke, but as the Trump administration is supercharging it, the joke will ultimately be on all of us. 

Future chronicles of the utter debasement of American political journalism will have to devote an entire chapter to the blowjob. The oral sex act was central to the 1998 Monica Lewinsky scandal, and figured prominently in President Bill Clinton’s deposition advancing the argument that it didn’t actually fall under the rubric of active “sexual relations.” An avalanche of forensic scrutiny in the press ensued. Then, in 2007, a notorious airport restroom contretemps involving Idaho GOP Senator Larry Craig got such blanket coverage that his flimsy alibi—that he employed a “wide stance” during bodily evacuation, and happened to brush his foot against a patron in an adjoining stall who turned out to be an undercover cop—soon became a synonym for “gay and closeted.”

Somehow, in hindsight, this salacious discourse comes off as positively quaint next to the revelations recounted by Beltway journalist Ryan Lizza in his serial Substack breakdown of the demise of his relationship with Olivia Nuzzi. In case you haven’t already heard, Nuzzi, the former DC politics scribe for New York magazine, had conducted an apparently digital-only affair with current (and currently married) Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during his third-party presidential run, after Nuzzi had profiled the candidate for New York. The ensuing scandal plunged Nuzzi into a short bout of professional disrepute, prior to her full rehabilitation as West Coast editor at Vanity Fair, and the author of a leadenly composed memoir graced with the unbearably pompous title American Canto. In his follow-up Substack post, Lizza describes his discovery of Nuzzi’s dalliance with RFK Jr. when he came across a poem to Nuzzi by the Camelot heir. It is my unfortunate duty to present it in full here:

Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest. Drink from me Love. I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth. I’ll hold your nose as you look up at me to encourage you to swallow. “Dont spill a drop”. I am a river You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love.

The challenges that this word-picture presents to reader comprehension make Bill Clinton seem a mere piker in plumbing linguistic ambiguity. A river is somehow generating a harvest, while acting in domineering fashion to “subdue and tame” a canyon—a process that takes roughly a million years. (Perhaps acts of fellatio stretching across millennia of geologic time is what our conspiracy-minded, vaccine-averse HHS secretary means by Making America Healthy Again?) Having only recently had breakfast, I can’t offer much comment on the imagined manipulation of the inamorata’s face, except to note that it is distinctly un-river and un-harvest-like.

Of course, one probably can’t expect a sustained unmixed metaphor from the pen of someone whose successful Harvard application essay consisted entirely of his name. One of the most chilling disclosures in Lizza’s scandal-drenched confessional Telos News post is that Nuzzi was in possession of not just this poem but “many others” that were “too explicit to print.”

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Lizza insists that we know about these exceedingly graphic details to get a full sense of the mysteries of Nuzzi’s serial infatuations with much older and more powerful men—in addition to the RFK Jr. entanglement, she had earlier affairs with indefatigable cable monologuist Keith Olbermann and, according to Lizza, the former GOP governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford. She was engaged to Lizza for much of this star-fucking. But as with so much in this sensational and sordid tale, there’s no discernible “there” there. This is all that Lizza offers by way of pained insight into his lost love: “Olivia develops addictive-like attachments to the men she loves, who are generally older and more powerful, and she pursues them until she conquers them. ‘I’m three for three,’ she said to me in a moment of levity after the affair with Mark.”

Nuzzi’s own book excerpt, devoted to her RFK Jr. obsession, is likewise filled with banal efforts to conjure meaning from the attachment, while offensively employing the backdrop of Ventura County’s 2024 Mountain Fire, leveraging the planet’s climate crisis for still more clumsy metaphor-mangling. “You cannot outrun your life on fire,” she writes bathetically—and, alas, she’s just getting, er, warmed up:

The earth here is hot. Inside the bonfire, what evidence can I burn? I think of all I turned to ash in hotel rooms. I think of how you cannot burn a cloud.

(Whereas I think, where are Nuzzi’s editors?)

I think of the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, how there were so many, how the officials did not know what to do with them, and how fire seldom seemed to occur, though the White House and the president’s properties are studded with fireplaces. Too easy. I worry.

Indeed, what becomes clear across the dreary narrations of this dreary imbroglio isn’t so much that Nuzzi is addicted to age and power, or that Lizza is addicted to Nuzzi and “revealing the truth”; no, it’s that all parties are in thrall to the act of portentous narration itself. There’s Robert “A River Runs Through It” Kennedy Jr., frantically commemorating a sexual act that was evidently never consummated in gruesomely purple prose; there’s Lizza, who has for some reason adopted the similarly weak metaphor of an untamable patch of backyard bamboo to explain how deceit and betrayal ate away at his illusions of domestic peace. And there’s Nuzzi, whose penchant for self-narration and rapid-fire self-reinvention stands lethally athwart her grasp of the reality principle. After Lizza confronted her about her affair with Sanford, he apparently found still another damning document in the Nuzzi archive (the author’s habit of casually strewing the evidence of her unfaithfulness also seems to be of a piece with her manic tell-all drive; nothing, however intimate, appears to transpire in her life without an audience). Here’s Lizza’s synopsis:

Olivia had written a tabloid-style news story about how “sources in Washington, D.C. and Charleston have been buzzing recently about an unexpected romance: Mark Sanford and Olivia Nuzzi,” who was described as “one of the most famous political reporters in America,” a “blonde beauty” who “gained critical acclaim as a skilled profile writer, gaining access to the powerful and the mysterious and turning it into pure journalistic gold.”

Nuzzi tells her fiance that this was an exercise in plotting out the worst-case scenario of her exposure for sleeping with a source (she had published a fawning profile of Sanford prior to their more intimate acquaintance)—an explanation he rightly notes “didn’t make sense given the piece’s tone.” Yet again, however, Lizza settles for a plodding pop-psychology takeaway, noting only that “fantasizing about what it would be like when her secret relationship with a notorious politician finally became public would repeat itself during her affair with Bobby.”

The more damning, and likely more accurate, moral of this set piece is that this was, and remains, the business model of Olivia Nuzzi’s public career—together with the bloated and corrupt enterprise of Beltway journalism writ large. To appreciate this point, it’s crucial to focus not on the daytime-TV-grade anatomies of Nuzzi and Lizza’s relationship, nor on Nuzzi’s imagined verbal alchemy and blond pulchritude, nor on RFK Jr.’s heavy-breathing reveries. No, the skeleton key here is Nuzzi’s generic invocation of “access to the powerful”—the dynamic that governs what gets written about the most influential figures in our civic life, and how it continues to defile any intelligible notion of the public interest.

Nuzzi’s serial assignations with her profile subjects are more a difference in degree than in kind from the main run of our intellectually inert journalism-power complex. In gaining the closest possible proximity to figures such as Sanford and RFK Jr., Nuzzi was pushing the logic of conventional Beltway access reporting to its natural extreme. The notion that our most powerful leaders must be courted with sycophantic flattery is one of the most toxic articles of faith in the mainstream media; Nuzzi’s error was to not merely deploy it in the register of erotic life but also train it on marginal figures like the disgraced also-ran Sanford and the manifestly deranged RFK Jr., who was then little more than a late-night TV punch line. But she was genuinely faithful to the core precepts of access-driven political writing, which holds out to reporters the empty promise of early access to the inner workings of plutocratic thinking ahead of the competition.

That’s why the real sins of access journalism aren’t locked into the ids of the parties to this ugly social contract but are hiding in plain sight. The myth of Camelot that proved so beneficial to RFK Jr.’s Harvard prospects and subsequent career was an invention of Life magazine election scribe Theodore H. White (and closely edited by JFK’s widow) meant to distract public attention from the decidedly equivocal record JFK compiled in office. The press’s prostration before war criminal Henry Kissinger was a veritable cottage industry. Former New York Times DC bureau chief James Reston all but officially leased space in his regular column to Kissinger’s pet crusades and talking points; in one especially repellant episode, Reston intervened at Kissinger’s behest to spike a Pentagon reporter’s news report that bombing in North Vietnam was set to resume in December 1972. When Kissinger was again found to be lying and the bombing proceeded on schedule, the ever-obsequious Reston published a column citing Kissinger, wrongly, as a critic of the operation. (This was all fairly routine conduct at the Paper of Record; when former Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger excitedly telephoned his mother with the news that he’d just had lunch with President Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush, her wan reply was “What did they want?”)

In the Trump era, as a washed-up reality-TV star assumed ultimate power during the economic free fall of the media industry, all these baleful trends have gone into overdrive. Beltway scribes present witless accounts of Trump as an innately mesmerizing and enchanting character, while the president himself leans on his regulatory powers to create a maximally deferential media complex. It’s now common practice for Beltway reporters to sit on consequential news scoops to milk them in later book releases—when the relevant trespasses and abuses of power have often passed their sell-by date for effective public oversight. Amid these conditions of unchecked megalomania on high and abject moral cowardice in the sanctums of corporate journalism, it’s perhaps not surprising that the petty and squalid longings of Nuzzi, Lizza, and RFK Jr. should command such wide interest. Or that blowjobs, however clumsily imagined, should be the guiding metaphor here.

Amid the country’s general collapse into fascist squalor, culture has struggled to keep up. Pop music may have been central to the New Left, but today’s listeners are mostly reduced to hunting for Easter eggs, finding anti-Trump messaging in the likes of octogenarian Neil Young’s tossed-off anthems. The eager critical embrace of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, based on a 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel steeped in the backwash of curdled 1970s left-wing militance, serves chiefly to underscore the film industry’s studious disregard of the way America lives now. A cultural scene reduced to elevating Jimmy Kimmel as a surrogate Dalton Trumbo is clearly running on fumes.

This state of political inertia is probably most advanced in American fiction, where MAGA encounters are routinely transposed into domestic fables of errant masculinity. When I took on the thankless assignment of charting the themes of this subgenre, slogging through fare like Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill and Jess Walter’s So Far Gone, I found myself turning to a long-discredited work of fictional anti-fascist prophecy as a striking counter-text: Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here.

Lewis’s novel was a response to the initial power grabs by fascist movements in Spain, Italy, and Germany; its title, drawn from a standard refrain of liberal reassurance about the exceptionalist character of the American republic, was meant to shake readers out of their complacent state of Yankee self-congratulation.

Judged by this de facto mission, Lewis’s book was mostly a failure. It did launch the 1920s bard of small-town folly back onto the bestseller list, but its ripped-from-the-headlines prophesying was badly off the mark. It imagines a 1936 presidential election in which the incumbent, Franklin Roosevelt, is muscled off the Democratic ticket by the folksy authoritarian Senator Berzelius Windrip. Windrip’s gospel of phony populist uplift is cribbed from the dogmas plied by old hard-right constituencies like the KKK and the Daughters of the American Revolution and packaged for mass consumption via the broadcasts of Bishop Prang, a Catholic prelate modeled on the antisemitic scourge of the New Deal era, Father Charles Coughlin, who commands a mass following called the League of the Forgotten Men. Windrip calls his new movement Corpoism—“Corpo” for short—and he promises to use it to smash the faithless elites prospering at the expense of the plain white American working class. Once elevated to the presidency, he wastes no time in reorganizing the country along a grid of tight ideological submission, abolishing former state boundaries, erecting new universities and media organs to parrot Corpo propaganda, and banishing dissidents to concentration camps—when not simply executing them.

The book’s protagonist, a small-town Vermont newspaper publisher, Doremus Jessup, is a classic Yankee individualist given to deploring the homogenizing logic of mass culture. The book traces Jessup’s political migration toward violent resistance against the country’s Corpo masters as they seize control of his newspaper, visit terror on his family, and intern him in a concentration camp. From his stalwart New England standing as “a mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal,” he comes to at least a provisional accord with the apocalyptic worldview of John Brown, a man whom his father taught him to regard as “insane and a menace.”

The main character’s transformation into a liberal-minded guerrilla, together with the broader botched prophecy of the narrative, consigned It Can’t Happen Here to the antiquarian bin of American letters. It had been out of print for decades before New American Library decided a reissued edition would have topical relevance for the George W. Bush years.

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The novel suffers from some of the excesses of overeager topicality. Lewis populates it with scores of real-life 1930s political and intellectual luminaries, from FDR’s labor secretary, Frances Perkins, to America First press baron William Randolph Hearst. But for readers in the MAGA era, the long-­neglected novel makes for bracing and prophetic reading. Windrip bears an uncanny resemblance to Trump, apart from his claim to humble log-cabin beginnings. Like Trump, he is largely a creation of the media; like JD Vance, he rises to national prominence on the publication of a quasi-memoir, which endorses a wide range of punitive and reactionary positions cloaked as true-blue American patriotism. And like Trump, he demonizes journalists, claiming they sit above the fray “in spider-dens…plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions.”

Windrip also translates his pseudo-populist appeal into an oligarch’s policy wish list: His version of Project 2025 is a program called “The Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Men.” It includes directives to revoke the franchise of Black voters and banish women from the workforce, while punishing socialists and dissidents for high treason and banning all labor unions that aren’t sponsored by the federal government. It also calls for constitutional amendments to further consolidate power in the executive branch “during this critical epoch,” consigning Congress to “serve only in an advisory capacity” and stripping the Supreme Court of any powers of judicial review. (One difference between Trump and Windrip, apparently, is that the latter strongman didn’t have a quisling Roberts Court to do his bidding.)

And Windrip peddles his fascist program in the familiar patois of the pandering American huckster. He was “a Professional Common Man,” Lewis writes: “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a travelling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of the country store.” His “stagecraft” could “make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-­libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe.”

Lewis’s predictions may not have come to pass in the decade after the book’s publication. But the myopic complacency summed up in its title continues to eat away at the country’s political culture more than 80 years later. All that remains to be seen is whether the pusillanimous Democratic leadership caste will come to heed Jessup’s grim warning that Windrip’s rise was the fault “of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.”

Over the weekend, it seemed that months of Trump administration stonewalling of the release of the trove of federal documents behind the prosecution of notorious pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein came to a close. Late Sunday night, Trump bowed to the likely passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act sometime this week with a Truth Social post announcing, “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax.” The public may get a crash course in the broken system of elite impunity that vaulted Epstein, and Donald Trump, to prominence in the first place.

It’s not clear whether the Senate will also endorse the measure—or whether Trump would refrain from vetoing it after Congress approved it. (He created a potential legal out for himself by designating a new investigation into Epstein’s syndicate—focusing, of course, on Democratic malefactors—and could easily get his legal flunkies to say they’re unable to release files pertaining to an ongoing investigation.)

But if they are released to the public, the cache of documents relating to Epstein’s prosecution promises to upend the steadied, jealously guarded silence of the many bad actors in Epstein’s orbit in a way just hinted at in the 20,000 e-mails the House Oversight Committee released last week. Those documents were the property of Epstein’s estate, after the disgraced financier allegedly killed himself in custody, and didn’t figure into the legal case against him. The materials in what are now known as the Epstein Files, by contrast, directly targeted Epstein’s wide trafficking network, and the many powerful, wealthy, and influential men involved in it; the Justice Department reports that it makes up some 300 gigabytes of physical and digital evidence, including graphic documentation of the sexual victimization of underage girls at the hands of Epstein and his colleagues and cronies. If his journalistic collaborator Michael Wolff is to be believed, Epstein possessed around a dozen photos of Trump in the company of topless girls at Epstein’s Palm Beach compound, including a shot in which a group of them are pointing at a stain on Trump’s pants and laughing.

Trump’s Justice Department and FBI have issued predictably disingenuous statements saying that the files don’t contain materials suggesting that Epstein had blackmailed his clients; nor did they include “evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.” This would be something of a shock to the former prince Andrew, who was stripped of his monarchical title and perquisites after a series of damning disclosures about his alliance with Epstein. It would be news as well to former treasury secretary and Council of Economic Advisers head Larry Summers, who, per a new report from The Harvard Crimson, relied on Epstein as his “wingman” in an unsuccessful effort to bed one of his graduate students, who was apparently the daughter of one of Summers’s close associates atop the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Summers has announced that, in the wake of these latest Epstein disclosures, he’s curtailing his “public commitments.”

Regardless, Trump’s federal law enforcement team has concluded that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted,” claiming to adhere to the initial court-imposed seal on the documents, which was put in place to “protect victims.” One problem with this reasoning, of course, is that many Epstein survivors continue holding press conferences demanding that the files be made public—including one today, ahead of the House’s scheduled vote on the bill to secure their release.

The problem with trying to maintain a cordon sanitaire around the Epstein Files, keeping them solely focused on the abuses of Epstein and his convicted paramour and coconspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, is that Epstein was the polar opposite of a lone-wolf predator. His whole career was a case study in benefits accrued from the cultivation of wealthy and powerful associates, going back to his improbable elevation from a math-teaching gig at an exclusive Manhattan prep school to a lucrative spot on the trading desk at Bear Stearns. He then became the chief wealth-management adviser for Les Wexner, head of the Victoria’s Secret empire.

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After he obtained power of attorney over Wexner’s holdings, it was easy for Epstein to put together the whole infrastructure behind his trafficking ring—his private jet, dubbed the Lolita Express, the island where he arranged no end of assignations involving trafficked girls and young women, and a host of financial instruments to fund it all—without leaving any paper trail beyond mundane stock trades. Fueling it all was a convoluted network of shell companies and dummy bank accounts—yet the funding behind Epstein’s depraved predatory empire appears to have been perfectly legal, and in line with offshore wealth management operations commonly deployed to create tax shelters and nameplate companies for the 0.1 percent. As Carl Beijer observes, “while Epstein likely used blackmail and other illegal schemes to avoid prosecution for his crimes, his primary strategy—offshore wealth management—was not just legal but a central feature of modern financial capitalism.”

That’s also why, in last week’s tranche of Epstein e-mails, his well-heeled correspondents were so comfortably candid in discussing both their desperate seduction campaigns and their financial affairs. There was no concern over their possible discovery, even though at the time of the exchanges, Epstein was already a convicted sex offender (albeit on a grotesquely plea-bargained reduced charge). There were no Eyes Wide Shut passwords, no evident adjournment to secure servers or chat channels (though Summers and Epstein did refer to the grad student whom Summers was targeting as “peril”—an evident racist call-out to her Asian heritage). It was simply understood that people given over to careers in financial predation were also practitioners of sexual predation; it wasn’t an accident that the lead financiers of the 1980s boom that made Epstein’s fortune called themselves “big swinging dicks.”

Nor is life under the predator’s code by any means confined to the American scene. In 2011, the head of the International Monetary Fund, French economist Dominique Strauss-Khan, faced rape charges from Nafissatou Diallo, a maid at Manhattan’s Sofitel hotel. She alleged that while she was cleaning his room, Strauss-Khan charged at her naked from out of the shower, molested her, and forced her to perform oral sex on him. The case was eventually settled out of court, with a rumored $6 million payout. Strauss-Khan was also arrested in France on gang-rape charges relating to a prostitution ring hosting sex parties there; French authorities later dropped the charges. Nevertheless, the principal overseer of the global financial system—and widely touted candidate for the French presidency—was, like Epstein, repeatedly arrested on sexual assault charges; unlike Epstein, he was permitted to fully buy his way out of them.

Be prepared to see many variations of Strauss-Khan’s high-finance version of droit du seigneur if and when the full release of the Epstein files comes to pass. But just bear in mind that, contrary to the quisling testimonials of Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, the next wave of documents won’t prove the absence of a legal case; rather, they will likely remind us of the many untouchable predators out there who remain above the law.

There’s a sickening sense of recognition attending the release from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee of a new cache of e-mails from Jeffrey Epstein and his associates indicating that Donald Trump had full knowledge of the pedophile sex trafficker’s activities—and indeed “spent hours ”at Epstein’s house with one of Epstein’s victims, as one of the e-mails from 2011 says. This is, after all, the same Donald Trump who had been close friends with Epstein for more than a decade prior to the still-unexplained falling out between the two in the mid-aughts. It’s the same Trump who creepily lurked in the dressing room of the Miss Teen USA pageant he sponsored, and who still more creepily touted his own young daughter’s erotic appeal in media interviews. And it’s the same Trump who bragged in the infamous Access Hollywood tapes that his celebrity conferred upon him the right to approach women and “grab them by the pussy”—and who reportedly laughed when Gary Busey was accused of the same conduct on the set of his reality-TV show The Apprentice. It’s the same Trump who was found liable for sexual assault in E. Jean Carroll’s $40 million civil suit alleging he attacked her in the dressing room of a Manhattan department store in the 1990s, and was found liable for engineering campaign payoffs to his former mistress Stormy Daniels.

Still, Trump’s Epstein escapades stand out, both because of the sheer depravity that characterized Epstein and his trafficking ring and because the specter of rampant child sexual predation has been a centerpiece of MAGA-fueled conspiracy theorizing, thanks largely to the prominence of QAnon activists in the Trump coalition. The prospect that Congress would release damning Epstein documents has been a key concern for Republicans since the start of Trump’s second term—thanks in no small part to the president’s own promise during the 2024 campaign to sign off on the opening of the Epstein files.

Having weathered the steady torrent of revelations about his own predatory sexual past, Trump no doubt calculated that he once again could direct his followers away from any damaging disclosures in the files, waving them away as just another Democratic-engineered “hoax” seeking to undermine his grip on power. But the narrative around the push for the files’ release didn’t bend to Trump’s usual strategy of denial and conspiracy-mongering.

As pressure built to secure the release of the files, Trump wanly told his followers to move on; meanwhile, Epstein’s former paramour and convicted coconspirator Ghislaine Maxwell appeared to be selectively leaking damaging information about the Trump-Epstein alliance, including the president’s winking contribution to the sex trafficker’s 50th-birthday book of testimonials from powerful friends and fellow predators. Even some Republican House members dug in on their demands for the release of the files—and that prospect prompted MAGA-quisling Speaker Mike Johnson to keep the House closed over the past month and half, since its reopening would entail the swearing in of newly elected Arizona Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva, who represents the decisive 218th vote in a resolution to release the files. (The House is now scheduled to reopen today to vote on the Senate’s bill to reopen the government, and Johnson will finally have to permit Grijalva to be sworn in.)

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The e-mails released by Democratic Oversight members underline the desperate political rationale behind Johnson’s stonewalling efforts. When Epstein was first facing a federal investigation, he wrote to Maxwell in 2011, “i want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [REDACTED VICTIM’S NAME] spent hours at my house with him,, he’s never once been mentioned.” Maxwell’s terse reply also speaks volumes: “i have been thinking about that.”

After Trump announced his campaign in 2015, the journalist Michael Wolff, who had compiled hundreds of hours of interviews with Epstein, wrote to him to alert that CNN was planning to question Trump about his ties to Epstein; Epstein asked Wolff how he’d go about crafting a statement on Epstein’s behalf in the wake of such an exchange. Wolff’s response again suggests that the sex trafficker possessed a wealth of damning information:

I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane [Epstein’s private aircraft ferrying underage girls to his island, dubbed the Lolita Express] or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he could say Jeffrey Epstein is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.

There’s no indication that CNN posed the Epstein question to Trump back then—yet, six years after Epstein apparently killed himself in a New York jail cell, the currency he might have possessed over Trump now seems like an inescapable toxic liability to a president who has survived no end of past sexual scandals. Just before these latest e-mails surfaced, Ghislaine Maxwell was reportedly petitioning Trump for a commutation of her 20-year prison sentence; Epstein’s former trafficking partner has also been receiving special treatment behind bars, according to a whistleblower cited by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. Maxwell’s earlier leaks seem aimed at a commutation deal, and it must seem to her that such a cozy arrangement should be no great stretch, given that Trump has pardoned many of the ringleaders in the election-denying agitprop campaign that led to the failed coup of January 6. Yet there’s no maneuvering room here for Trump to engineer one of his trademark Mob-style pardon deals; Epstein has improbably become this administration’s greatest threat. In the court of public opinion, Epstein’s epitaph may be that he hanged both himself and Donald Trump.

The online celebrity, legal woes, and final liberation of the irate, ICE-defying DC resident known throughout the world as Sandwich Guy seem tailor-made for late-night TV wisecracking. But given that we’re presently slogging through the world’s stupidest fascist timeline, the Sandwich Guy set piece can give us some surprisingly useful lessons in how to mount protests that can deflate the Mussolini-style self-regard of the MAGA power elite.

The original incident, caught on a bystander’s phone, showed former Department of Justice employee Sean C. Dunn in a loud and heated conversation with a group of federal agents patrolling the capital city’s nightlife corridor on U Street. This, as it happens, was on August 10, the night before President Donald Trump announced a phony crime emergency to justify a plainly illegal mobilization of federal officers to supersede local law enforcement. Dunn was carrying a recently purchased Subway sandwich and abruptly hurled it at the chest of one of the agents before tearing down U Street at an impressive clip before his pursuers finally caught and arrested him. Attorney General Pam Bondi fired him after his arrest, declaring on social media that the hoagie-slinging malefactor was “an example of the Deep State we have been up against.”

At a moment when Trump and his authoritarian lackeys were peddling lurid and untrue tales of the mortal peril that the mean streets of Washington posed to ordinary God-fearing Americans, the viral video of Dunn’s exploits was a welcome and entertaining documentation of what was really happening in DC: A corps of federal agents cosplaying as righteous peacekeepers was menacing residents for no good reason.

Dunn’s status as a white Air Force veteran sporting the most preppy imaginable summer attire punctured Trump’s racist claim that the miscreants wreaking mayhem in the district were all Black, brown, and immigrant perpetrators. Here was a guy who not only looked like he could be an employee of the Trump administration but until recently actually was one, performing a brave, if absurd, act of resistance against MAGA brownshirts.

Then, of course, there was the sandwich itself, which instantly birthed a legion of online jokes and memes, together with an avalanche of labored headline puns. No Kings demonstrators turned up with oversize inflatable sandwiches, and a widely circulated bit of graffiti modeled on a Banksy work depicted an antifa-style insurgent preparing to hurl a sandwich in lieu of the flowers featured in the original.

This was all just a prelude, though, to the absurdist main event: the Trump administration’s dogged efforts to prosecute and jail Dunn for his late-night snack attack. Prosecutors initially sought to get a DC grand jury to indict Dunn on a felony assault charge, without success—triggering still another torrent of jokes citing the old line about district attorneys inducing grand juries to indict a ham sandwich..

The prosecution, led by former Fox News vengeance merchant Jeanine Pirro, who took over as DC’s district attorney after Ed Martin, the MAGA thug initially appointed by Trump, proved too extreme even for Senate Republicans to confirm him, was forced to downgrade the assault charge to a misdemeanor. (This was after Pirro recorded a gloating video hailing the prosecution as a showpiece of Trump’s DC crackdown and telling Dunn to “stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else.”) That maneuver just made the whole effort seem like the desperate and corrupt Trump-appeasing parody of legal probity that it actually was.

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This past week’s jury trial accordingly provided the sort of bloviating and surreal asides immortalized in the courtroom chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (which, let us recall, also centered around an act of comestible criminality—the alleged theft of tarts). Prosecutors called two witnesses—a DC transit cop who saw the whole episode unfold, and Gregory Lairmore, the Customs and Border Patrol agent whose heavily padded vest absorbed Dunn’s yeasty fusillade. “The sandwich kind of exploded all over my uniform,” the agent testified in a labored bid to make a fast-food item seem like a hazardous projectile. “It smelled of onions and mustard.”

In the annals of anguished courtroom testimony, Lairmore’s performance fell short of a climactic Aaron Sorkin or Perry Mason scene, but it did wonders in magnifying just how far out of their way Trump’s corps of MAGA-ratchiks would go to manufacture a threat out of thin air—or a condiments bar, as the case may be. Indeed, just like the initial video that touched off Dunn’s unlikely global renown, the federal case against him served only to underline how tetchy, brittle, and self-serious the administrators of our fascist takeover truly are. (Though anyone reviewing coverage of Trump’s Caligulan Great Gatsby Halloween celebration in Mar-a-Lago can see Pirro in a moment of fanciful ease along with a sequined burlesque dancer in a giant champagne coupe.) When you’ve reached the point of compelling a heavily armed federal interloper to drive home the unbearable trauma of being assailed with the scent of onions and mustards, it’s a fair bet that no jury is going to convict.

Mind you, even that agitprop overture from Pirro’s team promptly went south during Lairmore’s cross-examination from Dunn’s defense attorney, Sabrina Shroff. She brandished a photo from the scene showing Dunn’s sandwich lying on the ground, largely intact in its wrapper, after Dunn’s fateful throw. She noted further that Lairmore’s coworkers had presented him with his own plush toy sandwich as a gag gift, which he displayed in his office, together with a decal featuring Dunn in the act of sandwich hoisting, above the legend “Felony Footlong.” Lairmore affixed that, appropriately, to his lunchbox. As Shroff pointed out, victims of actual assault don’t typically display jokey souvenirs of the act: “If someone assaulted you, someone offended you, would you keep a memento of that assault?” she asked. “Would you stick it on your daily lunchbox and carry it around with you?”

For all the ludicrousness of the Trump administration’s crusade to turn Dunn into a bread-bearing terrorist, the deeper logic of his prosecution is still driving MAGA’s quest for maximal impunity and total submission from the citizens and immigrants they harass, hound, and unjustly detain, arrest, and rendition. Another DC ICE protester was arrested (though never actually charged) after he followed federal law enforcement agents around while blasting the “Imperial March” from Star Wars—Darth Vader’s theme song—to mock the needless DC mobilization; he has now filed a civil suit in collaboration with the ACLU, alleging violations of the First and Fourth Amendments, together with claims of false arrest and battery.

Far more seriously, ICE commander at large Gregory Bovino, who is overseeing the Trump administration’s “Midway Blitz” initiative targeting Chicago-area immigrants and protesters, recently testified in a suit over the crackdown that he had instructed agents to arrest anyone making “hyperbolic comments” during protests. ICE’s former Chicago field director, Russell Hott, testified in the same case that he did not agree that arresting people for voicing dissent over the operations of Midway Blitz would be unconstitutional. In the face of this demented view of how we exercise our civil liberties, a steady barrage of airborne sandwiches would represent a rational and measured response.

Afunny thing happened to our political blowhard class on its way to its next appointed bout of savvy prognosticating. As breathless pundits looked to this week’s handful of off-year elections for telltale signs of the country’s mood swings, the news broke that President Donald Trump has reached a new low in his national approval ratings. In a CNN poll released Monday, 63 percent of respondents disapproved of his performance in office, leaving just 37 percent approving. As polling analyst G. Elliot Morris notes, the 26 point net gap in disapproval is the lowest Trump has ever clocked—even in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, when many observers predicted his political demise. By comparison, an enfeebled and marginalized Joe Biden sported a 40 percent approval rating when he left office. A plurality of 42 percent approval would show Trump holding on to the 2024 coalition that elected him, but this latest swoon indicates that independents and even traditional GOP supporters are turning against him. Meanwhile, The Economist’s poll tracker shows that Trump’s approval is underwater in all seven of the swing states he carried last November, as well as in Texas. That’s right: The state that’s frantically (and secretively) redrawing its congressional maps to suit Trump’s whims—and has even filed an actual lawsuit against Tylenol based on Trump and RFK Jr.’s fabricated claims that the pain suppressant promotes autism in utero—has soured on Trump’s agenda.

It’s easy to make too much of snapshot surveys of presidential approval, but, as Morris also notes, polling averages have been trending strongly away from Trump over the past two weeks. The intensity of that disapproval is also striking: “Depending on the polls you pick for your average,” Morris writes, “between 46 and 50 percent of U.S. adults tell pollsters they “strongly disapprove” of the job Trump is doing as president. That is double the percent that strongly approve…. Put another way, less than half of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 currently ‘strongly approve’ of his presidency.” When you factor in disapproval among respondents who didn’t vote in the last election, the MAGA picture gets grimmer still, with less than a third of American adults approving of Trump, and 53 percent disapproving—48 percent of them doing so “strongly.”

All of this would, you would think, represent a massive opportunity for Democrats as they gear up for next year’s critical midterm balloting. A weak and unpopular president, abetted by a supine congressional GOP leadership, has only strengthened the 1 percent’s oligarchic grip on our political economy, while menacing working-class immigrants and cities and states with Democratic political leaders, all the while brazenly enriching himself and his family at the public’s expense. The guy hosted a Great Gatsby–themed Halloween party at his gilded resort home, replete with scantily clad models in oversize cocktail glasses and tableside bump-and-grind dancers, just as SNAP food assistance was expiring for as many as 42 million Americans. (Trump and his party planners didn’t seem to notice that the novel they were memorializing brutally condemned the blind hubris of a former mobster desperate to repeal the logic of history, as he courted the wife of a Jazz Age groyper.) This should not be all that hard for a robust and motivated opposition party to smite down as a sign of the country’s contemptuous takeover by a self-enriching gangster syndicate.

Yet we’re talking about the Democrats here. In the midst of Trump’s free fall, yet another centrist Democratic messaging shop produced yet another report promoting a don’t-frighten-the-horses mandate. In our manically right-shifting political discourse, the moderate-minded WelcomePAC intends to keep candidates for the party stalwartly aligned with the muddled middle. That call to armlessness replicates the message of still another ballyhooed new Democratic think tank senselessly peddling moderate talking points in an age of populist confrontation and negative polarization. Ezra Klein at The New York Times echoed the same played-out formula, because he had a deadline to meet. At a moment when the GOP is dismantling basic regulatory safeguards against monopoly, environmental degradation, and rampaging inequality, Democratic thought leaders in Klein’s circle have fulsomely embraced his Abundance agenda of… still more rampant deregulation and market prostration.

Among other things, the Democrats’ unimaginative posturing on these issues marks a basic misreading of the country’s disenchantment with Trump. That same CNN poll shows a whopping 72 percent of respondents saying that the economy is in “poor shape,” with 61 percent saying that Trump’s economic policies have made things worse. Democrats have taken an important step toward promoting that fundamental message in holding the line on the government shutdown and pushing for a deal in Congress to reverse the punishing increases in ACA healthcare premiums that the GOP enacted as part of Trump’s signature tax-and-spending legislation.

Yet the party needs to dramatically expand the playing field on issues of political economy if it has any hope of a strong showing in the midterms. Democrats haven’t effectively targeted the role of the crypto industry—which was the largest source of campaign donations in the 2024 election cycle, and is again looming as the GOP’s main cash connection in the midterms—in underwriting Trump’s agenda of government by bribery. (Indeed, Democratic lawmakers collecting crypto donations voted in favor of the comically titled GENIUS Act, which has lifted regulations curbing the industry’s grifting business model.) They haven’t productively called out the ruinous effects of an AI bubble that now accounts for 40 percent of the country’s growth in GDP, or the cartel powers of regional transmission organizations, which are now causing energy bills to spike.

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In part, this is because Democrats are courting many of the same big-ticket donors as the Republicans do, which blunts their credibility as crusaders for antitrust and economic democracy. Kamala Harris was the most recent avatar of this weakness, as she tried to galvanize working-class and rural voters while leaning on the counsel of her Uber-executive brother-in-law Tony West and signaling to donors that she’d consider ditching Biden’s head of the FCC, Lina Khan, who had compiled an impressive record of actually enforcing antitrust law. But more fundamentally, the party clings to the security blanket of centrist messaging thanks to its core managerial ethos. Ever since Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council pointedly shunned the party’s New Deal agenda and rebranded the Democrats as a “party of business,” it has been at a loss to revive any economic populist program in the centers of Democratic policy debate. As a result of these shifts, Democratic congressional districts have eclipsed Republican ones in per capita income for the past 15 years, wiping out the party’s modern advantages among working-class voters. The popular equation of the Democratic Party with elite governance is now so advanced that, per a recent study by the Center for Working Class politics, even candidates in the party aligned with economic populist measures suffer a significant electoral penalty simply on the basis of their party affiliation. Sampling opinion in Rust Belt states, the study found a sobering trend:

In head-to-head tests, Democratic candidates underperformed their independent counterparts by over 8 points, even when delivering the exact same economic populist message. This “Democratic penalty” was largest among working-class, Latino, rural, and swing voters, and is more than enough to lose competitive elections across the region.

This is anything but a prescription for the Democratic Party to stay the course—but the party’s leaders are mostly oblivious to these blaring warning sirens. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries responded to Trump’s inauguration early this year by jetting off to Silicon Valley to reassure big-ticket donors there that the Democrats would continue hewing to the center. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer is even more hopeless on issues of political economy—which is scarcely surprising, since Silicon Valley and Wall Street double as a full-employment plan for his family. Both men studiously avoided acknowledging democratic socialist Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdami’s mayoral candidacy in their home state of New York, with Jeffries delivering a grudging 11th-hour message approving of his party’s candidate, and Schumer bypassing an endorsement altogether, even failing to say on Election Day whether he’d backed his own party’s mayoral candidate.

This, mind you, is the same major party that reflexively sidesteps comment on Trump’s brownshirt campaign of mass deportation, and the federal takeover of law enforcement in major cities on the grounds that such measures are intended to distract the public’s attention from “kitchen-table issues.” Yet Mamdani has been laser-focused on those same issues, and unlike his betters atop the party’s chain of command, has advanced serious proposals to address them, instead of phoned-in rhetoric. That could be a teachable moment for a party leadership that’s been almost comically averse to seizing on the all-too-plain weaknesses of a flailing Trump presidency. Yet that’s the least likely outcome for a party of managers awkwardly posturing as the tribunes of the American worker.

“It doesn’t matter what we do in the House,” GOP Speaker Mike Johnson announced in a press conference this week. While it’s tempting to give the MAGA leader grudging points for candor, that churlish admission speaks volumes about a once-robust legislative branch now relegated to inert duty as a satellite Trumpian messaging complex: a glorified Fox News set with gavels.

Johnson was fending off press queries about why the House hasn’t returned from its fall recess for five weeks now, and disingenuously blaming Senate Democrats for the holding pattern, since they continue to reject continuing resolutions to fund the government that omit the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits that would prevent monthly insurance payments from increasing by well over 100 percent for many middle-income families. As a matter of parliamentary procedure, the Senate’s GOP leadership could suspend the filibuster to move the ruinous spending resolution through on a majority vote. And far more consequentially, the long nihilistic run of last-minute spending resolutions is a direct consequence of the failure of both arms of Congress to do the basic job of approving annual spending measures through the appropriations process. In other words, Johnson’s admission that his legislative chamber no longer matters is the outcome of a series of deliberate leadership decisions to ensure that it doesn’t matter.

This disastrous dynamic has only accelerated under Donald Trump’s Caesarean second administration. Operating on a narrow six-vote majority (which has only expanded to that margin courtesy of the deaths of three Democratic lawmakers sworn into the 119th Congress), Johnson has handed over all legislative initiative to the White House, producing lockstep votes to secure passage of signature Trump priorities like the massive spending-and-tax-cut package that ratified the ACA and Medicaid cuts now at the center of the government shutdown. And the actual reason Johnson hasn’t reconvened the House is that he doesn’t want to swear in Arizona Democratic Representative Adelita Grijeva—the daughter of one of those recently departed Democratic House members, Raul Grijeva, who won a September special election to replace him—because she represents the decisive 218th vote in a long-tabled House resolution to compel the Justice Department to release its files on Trump’s late pedophile crony Jeffrey Epstein. The House has a long and checkered history of deference to corruption, but it’s never before been brought to a complete standstill in order to whitewash the past fraternizations of a serial sexual assaulter in the Oval Office.

Indeed, the conspiracy of silence surrounding the Epstein documents has caused a handful of GOP House members to go rogue–notably Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has accused Johnson of “spreading misinformation” about the Epstein vote. Massie has now drawn a Trump-sanctioned primary opponent as punishment for breaking ranks.

Johnson’s Epstein handiwork is the most egregious instance of his complete fealty to Trump, but it’s far from the only one. Indeed, Johnson’s signature public watchword, when he’s not openly confessing to the uselessness of his job, is to claim utter ignorance of the basic facts of American public life. He executed the maneuver the day after his “House? What House?” rejoinder to reporters, when he was asked about ICE agents pepper-spraying a member of the clergy at protests outside DHS’s Broadview, Illinois, detainment facility and implausibly replied that he had “not seen or heard” anything about the episode, which got wide media coverage over the past month. He’s delivered the same canned non-reply at virtually every moment that anyone has asked him about any entry on the expansive roster of MAGA roster of corruption and criminal wrongdoing, from Trump’s Qatari jet boondoggle to Trump’s bid to extort $230 million in “damages” from the Department of Justice for past prosecutions to Trump’s unhinged speech before military generals to Trump’s creepy Epstein birthday greeting. Political philosopher John Rawls theorized a “veil of ignorance” as a device to assess just social outcomes, but Johnson has embraced the notion as an all-purpose alibi for failing to keep up with the basic demands of his job. His public-facing role doesn’t call to mind the legacies of well-known deal-making predecessors like John Boehner or Tip O’Neill; instead, it resembles nothing so much as the mien of a bobble-headed puppy in the rear window of a car, outfitted with glasses and a power suit.

If Johnson were merely the sort of buffoon he comes across as, he might be a forgettable blip in the annals of House leadership, like his immediate predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, who was a raging quisling on autopilot. But where McCarthy’s cowardice before Trump was a venal political calculation, Johnson’s is an expression of hardcore ideological orthodoxy. Johnson was one of the key House strategists in the bogus effort to throw the 2020 election results open to a House vote to invalidate and override them; early on in his speakership, he bedecked his office door with an Appeal to Heaven flag—a Christian nationalist symbol prominently displayed during the January 6 coup attempt. When reporters pressed him on that choice, he became uncharacteristically articulate and indignant, claiming that it was simply a callout to the Revolutionary Era he adopted as a constitutional lawyer and “American history buff.”

Anyone displaying those credentials in earnest can tell you that fusing governance with a grievance-driven theology of cultural payback the way that Johnson and Trump have is a first-order betrayal of the actual American Revolution and Constitution. This is just another alibi-seeking lie from the worst House speaker in modern history—together with his typical explanation of why he ostensibly can’t be bothered with keeping up with the news cycle: “I’ve been really busy.”

It’s long been evident that the MAGA siege on American governance is a glorified wrecking job, but this week’s installment has been just a little too on-the-nose: After pledging not to molest the White House in the process of constructing a $250 million ballroom addition seemingly cribbed from the gaudier reaches of Versailles, President Donald Trump has now approved the demolition of the structure’s entire east wing.

The reckless lurch into gilded ruination has triggered a chorus of denunciations from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to Never Trump defenses of “the People’s House” (a characterization undercut considerably by the use of slave labor to build it) to a show of civic dudgeon from former East Wing occupant Hillary Clinton (which provoked just as predictable bouts of outrage from the right).

It’s true that, even by Trump’s standards, the literal destruction of the White House is an unusually brazen show of Caligulan impunity. Yet as has been so often the case over the past decade of MAGA-branded pillaging of our public sphere, critics in and around the house of liberalism are left sputtering and huffing before the specter of Trump simply being Trump—which is to say, leveraging every resource at his disposal to promote his own crass and venal self-interest. Put another way, Trump continues to downgrade constitutional governance into a backsheesh delivery system because our political order no longer sustains any viable theory of corruption as an outgrowth of executive power.

It wasn’t all that long ago that such a massive blindspot in the American body politic would have been unthinkable. The Watergate scandal, and the arguably more damning findings of the Church committee’s inquiry into abuses in the US intelligence community, together with the Vietnam War’s corrosive legacy, spurred a healthy backlash in public opinion against what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the imperial presidency. But now, many of the most important executive-curbing, corruption-fighting pillars of that time, such as the 1974 Impoundment Control Act and the 1973 War Powers Resolution, have become virtually meaningless as the American republic shrinks into an autocratic plaything. And do not get me started on US intelligence abuses.

This shift is not merely due to Trumpism. A central factor has been the agitprop jurisprudence of the Roberts court, which long before Trump’s ascension had wished away the whole concept of corruption in landmark rulings such as 2010’s Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. Following the standard set there, the court has proceeded to deregulate virtually any moneyed assault on good government, so long as the recipient of a payoff doesn’t loudly announce in a bank-deposit line that “I am transferring the proceeds from my bribe today.”

This is very much the backstory to Trump’s hostile takeover of first the Republican Party and then our government at large—and it is also very much what’s behind the lurid saga of the White House’s demolition. Trump is funding the ballroom’s construction via massive contributions from big corporate donors; an October 15 fundraising dinner at the White House included firms such as Blackstone, OpenAI, Microsoft, Coinbase, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon and Google, as well as a clutch of reliably corrupt NFL owners. Google’s parent company Alphabet has also kicked in a $22 million settlement of Trump’s frivolous lawsuit against YouTube (which Alphabet also owns) for banning him from the platform in the aftermath of the attempted coup on January 6. “I view this enormous ballroom as an ethics nightmare,” Richard Painter, a former ethics lawyer for the George W. Bush White House told the BBC. “It’s using access to the White House to raise money…. These corporations all want something from the government.” That’s right: The sheer scale and volume of executive corruption has accelerated to the point where it has scandalized an ethics veteran from the White House that launched a baseless illegal invasion, sanctioned torture, and handpicked John Roberts as Supreme Court chief justice.

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Meanwhile, the leaders of the Democratic Party have been notably sluggish in connecting the relevant dots in scandals like this. This is not too surprising when you remember that the opposition party in Washington draws a tremendous amount of backing from the same corrupt corporate oligarchy as Trump. That’s the bracing object lesson supplied by any look back at the donor roster for the 2024 Kamala Harris campaign, and its top-heavy economic program. Indeed, in an awkward bit of timing, the same day that Trump’s east wing demolition began, news broke that the Democratic National Committee retired another $1.6 million in debt from Harris’s record-breaking $1.5 billion failure of a campaign, bringing to $20 million the total post-campaign cleanup spending that the party is effectively sacrificing from more productive use in the 2026 midterm cycle. The MAGA GOP’s moneyed crusade of civic ruination just happens to be more blatant, and executed at a higher level of symbolic outrage.

Hence the high-flown rhetoric, on Trump’s crass personal assault on “the people’s house”; the interests springing for this particular wrecking job aren’t forces that either major party can afford to alienate. This is also why each new MAGA enclosure of the civic commons is treated as its own freshly perpetrated outrage, rather than as part of an all-too plain extension of a corruptionist ideology. So in this week’s same accursed news cycle, Trump is also reported to demand another $230 million (he clearly favors nice round 12-figure sums) from the Department of Justice as “damages” for the harms wrought by legal investigations into his transfer of classified documents to Mar-a-Lago and possible Russian influence over his 2016 campaign. He has, without bothering to offer a remotely plausible explanation, pardoned the expelled New York congressman and convicted fraudster George Santos. And he’s extended his campaign of murder on the high seas to a ship in the Pacific, once again alleged to be involved with drug trafficking without any credible public proof of the charge (not that such a crime would, in any event, justify a campaign of extrajudicial murder carried out by the US military).

The same fundamental outlook drives all of this self-dealing and wreckage; indeed, even Trump’s reckless physical assault of the White House is of a piece with his long-ago ransacking of the Bonwit Teller building and his destruction of art deco frescoes he pledged to protect, in order to erect Trump Tower, the first great ugly monument to his insatiable ego. It’s not a hard mentality to dissect; all you need is a political system that’s able to call it by its true name.

With much of the political press focused on the insurgent candidacy of Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist running to be mayor of New York, another young, left-reform candidate has announced an underdog primary challenge in an unlikely-seeming jurisdiction: Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional District. Justin Pearson, a state representative, will face off against the longtime incumbent representative, Steve Cohen, to become the Democratic Party’s nominee to represent the district, which is anchored by Memphis, a blue stronghold in a red state.

Pearson, a Memphis native, is collaborating with the national progressive groups Justice Democrats and Leaders We Deserve to help counter the advantages of incumbency and big-ticket fundraising that Cohen enjoys. “We’re going to have to run our own race,” Pearson told me. “And it’s going to be a great people-powered campaign for justice. I’m not taking any corp money, and I know Cohen has millions in corporate donations. I believe in the power of people, and we’re counting on the people to organize and galvanize a campaign to win this race.”

Pearson came to national prominence in 2023 as part of the “Tennessee Three”—a group of state lawmakers disciplined by the legislature for hosting protesters in the chamber demanding stricter gun-control measures in the wake of a Nashville school shooting. Still, as Pearson acknowledges, this will be a challenge. Cohen has served for two decades, cruised to reelection with 71 percent of the vote in 2024, and has more than $1.5 million in cash on hand. Pearson and his backers are banking on being able to harness the growing discontent with Democrats in Congress, who clock abysmal levels of support in opinion polls, and are viewed by the party’s base as risk averse and complacent in the face of the MAGA seizure of authoritarian power.

Pearson isn’t alone in running against establishment Democrats. Just before his announcement, Maine state auditor Matt Dunlop announced his campaign to primary Democratic Representative Jared Golden, who represents the state’s Second Congressional District, also on the grounds that Golden—a center-right lawmaker who cast the only Democratic vote for the Republican plan to fund the government at the end of September—doesn’t meet voters’ demand for “someone who’s going to fight for them for the things they care about.”

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While Memphis is in every sense a long way from rural Maine, Pearson’s campaign will hit the same themes. “I think every Democrat in Tennessee wants to have a candidate who’s going to stand up for the community and its values, and fight back against Donald Trump and the affordability crisis for working people,” Pearson said. “I’m a person who knows about that struggle because I’ve lived it.” He stresses that working-class background against Cohen’s status as a veteran Capitol Hill insider who recently purchased a condominium in Washington. “You know the fight to make one job be enough,” Pearson says in the ad announcing his candidacy, which endorses Medicare for All and cites his successful opposition to a multibillion-dollar pipeline project in the district and his 2023 expulsion from the legislature.

Pearson also told me that he would diverge from Cohen’s stalwart support for Israel in Congress. “What’s happening in Gaza is heartbreaking,” he said. “As we recognize the two-year anniversary of the war, we have to take a moment and remember the horrible assault on Israelis by Hamas—but we also have to remember that all human life has value and what’s happening to the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s government is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”

He insisted that Congress has to do more to stop the tragedy in Gaza while helping Americans at home: “I’m not going to be supporting the sending of billions in bombs overseas, when people in my own district—their houses are sinking, and their kids are hungry. It always amazes me that America will always find billions and billions to fight wars, but won’t do anything like that to fight poverty and hunger.”

Pearson is generally reluctant to harp on the liabilities of his primary opponent. “I’m grateful for Steve Cohen’s service, and his 20-plus years in Congress. I’m not making his age an issue in this campaign. What I’m saying is that a lot has changed in the last 42 years.”

Justice Democrats, in the tradition of campaign advocacy groups, goes after Cohen more directly in its statement endorsing Pearson. “Over the years, Cohen has embraced the model of the average absentee Congressman,” it reads in part. “He rarely shows up for the community, campaigns for support, or holds town halls—taking incumbency in Tennessee’s only Democratic district for granted at the expense of his own voters—while still cashing checks from corporate PACs. His lack of engaged and active representation has lowered expectations Memphians have for their Congressperson, further eroding civil engagement and inspiring political cynicism in a working-class community already under attack on all sides.”

Another challenge for Pearson is to find a way for his campaign to gain traction among the district’s rural voters. He argues that his core policy platform—which focuses on healthcare access, affordable housing, and environmental protection—addresses the concerns of both rural and urban voters, while also noting that Trump’s tariffs are a huge cost-of-living issue for farmers in his district. “Look, people are fomenting culture wars in order to take attention away from these bread-and-butter issues; it’s all part of the plan to give more power to billionaires,” he said. “So I tell rural voters, ‘These tariffs aren’t designed to help you.’ I talked to soybean farmers in the district two days ago, and they’re telling me China is the one benefiting from the tariffs.”

For all the uphill challenges facing his campaign, from Cohen’s well-resourced campaign warchest to pushback from centrist Democrats, Pearson does enjoy one advantage: For some unfathomable reason, Cohen’s reelection slogan is “Keep Goin’ with Cohen!,” an imperative that echoes the cringey reelection ads featured in the 1997 Hollywood political satire Wag the Dog; Pearson has already cited it in the press release announcing his candidacy, saying, “For too long, voters have been told to ‘keep going’ with the same leadership and the same outcomes.” In conversation, he laughed and added, “It’s like, ‘Keep going to where?’ In our district, one in three kids is in poverty, one in five adults is in poverty, and our democracy is crumbling.”

Late Monday, with the deadline for a government shutdown just two days off, congressional leaders met with President Donald Trump to try to reach some workable consensus to move ahead on a continuing resolution to fund the government. The sticking point remained Democrats’ insistence on restoring critical tax credits under the Affordable Care Act—a pending loss of benefits created under the provisions of the GOP’s massive tax-and-spending bill. In pushing to extend these benefits, Democrats weren’t just looking to protect the pocketbooks of working Americans already contending with spiraling costs; they were trying to make the case that extending the benefits also promoted the interests of Republicans claiming a robust working-class base. Senate majority leader Charles Schumer announced after the meeting that the president “seemed to understand for the first time the magnitude of this crisis.”

If so, he sure had a funny way of showing it. Later that evening, Trump posted an AI video meant to show Schumer and his House counterpart, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, giving a press conference. In it, Schumer is synced to a fake voice saying that his party has “no voters anymore, because of our woke, trans bullshit” and is now desperately hoping that “if we give all these illegal aliens healthcare, we might be able to get them on our side and vote for us”—until, that is, they learn to speak English and come to realize that Democrats are just “woke pieces of shit.” Driving the point home in a racist flourish, the video shows Jeffries sporting a giant sombrero and a false mustache as mariachi music plays in the background. (In the euphemistic prose stylings of the Trump-appeasing Washington Post, the stupid and hateful outburst of bigotry becomes this: “a fake video…with Schumer saying things about benefits for immigrants that he hadn’t actually said and Jeffries wearing a sombrero he hadn’t been wearing.”)

Thus is the American government grinding to a halt on the strength of nothing more than MAGA-branded trolling. The video Trump posted was vulgar and childish, but it was completely in line with the talking points of Republican lawmakers refusing to consider Democratic demands. Undocumented workers aren’t qualified to receive ACA or Medicaid benefits, any more than they can receive subventions from Social Security or Medicare—another pet fabrication of the MAGA right. But no matter: The bogus claim that the ACA extensions were giveaways to undocumented immigrants caromed through the MAGAsphere all during the week leading up to Trump’s meeting; Utah Senator Mike Lee, Vice President JD Vance, and House Speaker Mike Johnson have taken up the baseless charge with gusto, since they all know full well that the Medicaid and ACA cuts in their party’s spending bill will be fueling a brutal spike in insurance costs. And as Trump’s video post shows, the president seconds all this demagoguery—just with more explicit racism.

As with most features of the Trump agenda, this is nothing new on the American right. Indeed, the phony benefits claim fueled Tea Party animus against the original passage of the ACA—along with kindred pieces of urban legend like “government death panels.” The political proof of concept behind this particular big lie came when GOP Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina stood up and shouted, “You lie!” (oh, the irony!) during former President Barack Obama’s first address to a joint session of Congress in 2009, as Obama was explaining that the benefits in his proposed healthcare reform package would “not apply to those who are in the country illegally.” As Beltway pundits chided Wilson for his breach of decorum and prophesied his political death, he cruised to reelection on a massive fundraising haul, and has gone right on bilking credulous right-wingers for outrage cash through the present day; if you’re looking for the spiritual godfather of the Trumpist gospel of trolling through anti-governance (and vice versa), Wilson has to be a top-tier candidate.

It’s fitting, then, that his lie about the ACA, which is now old enough to have a learner’s permit, is the Trumpified GOP’s only threadbare rationale for allowing a shutdown to proceed. In reality, a time-limited extension of health coverage under the ACA would be a boon to Republicans in centrist-leaning districts, who will already be hard-pressed to defend the Trump-Vought war on basic services, income supports, and entire government departments, alongside the MAGA right’s devolution into overt fascism. But again, these are political calculations that rarely detain the dedicated ideological troller—any more than the consideration that putting the vast nonessential majority of the nearly 3 million-member federal workforce, 80 percent of which is located outside metropolitan Washington, on indefinite furlough will wreak considerable havoc on an already shaky US labor market, with just-released September jobs number showing more losses. (MAGA-ratchiks are no doubt relieved to be learning that the Labor Department has announced that a shutdown will delay the release of jobs data.)

MAGA dogmatism on the phony immigrant stampede to claim health benefits is more than an overheated reverie of the right’s collective lizard brain (though it is certainly also that); it’s a way of signaling that all government business is a trick foisted on a long-traduced-and-abandoned Real America. The tacit promise in all MAGA propaganda is that Trump is reversing the polarity of the trick, so as to restore Real Americans to their pride of place. That’s been the through line in the White House’s cross-agency blitz of social media posts about how mass deportations and ICE raids are shoring up a white American Heimat. It’s the reason the Labor Department sported a giant Mussolini-style banner of Trump’s face as a workers’ protector on Labor Day (while on its own social media feeds, it had to make do with AI-generated images of American workers). It’s also why the Department of Housing and Urban Development—now under fire for its failure to uphold basic antidiscrimination protections under the Federal Housing Act—posted a notice on its website the day before the shutdown began blaming “the Radical Left” who “are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people unless they get their $1.5 trillion wish list of demands. The Trump administration wants to keep the government open for the American people.” Lest this somehow come across as overly subtle, Trump also instructed all federal agencies to issue agitprop mass e-mails blaming the shutdown on Democratic extremism.

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Depending on how long and punishing the shutdown proves to be, it could signal a moment when the authors of MAGA propaganda have become much too high on their own supply. The conventional Beltway wisdom has always been that the party instigating a government shutdown is the one that pays the price come the next election cycle. But that wasn’t the case over the 2018–19 shutdown, which at 35 days was the nation’s longest—the Republican losses in 2020 were not even notionally attributable to Trump’s tantrum over funding the border wall, which was then the GOP’s shutdown casus belli. (That now all-but-forgotten episode also gives the extravagant lie to the Republicans’ heavy-breathing claims that Democrats are holding the government hostage over their demands—health coverage is at least a real thing, as opposed to a 450-mile long monument to a real-estate nepo baby’s vanity that’s mostly produced environmental damage.)

A Morning Consult poll released over the weekend found that 45 percent of respondents said Republicans would be blamed for a shutdown, with just 32 percent holding Democrats responsible. That 13 percent margin actually increases to 17 percent among independent voters. Remarkably, Republican voters were more likely to blame their party for a shutdown than Democrats were. Meanwhile, the Kaiser Foundation, in a survey conducted over the summer, found that 77 percent of voters want the ACA credits to continue, compared to just 22 percent saying they should be phased out. Democratic leadership remains, as always, worryingly irresolute and feckless, but these political trend lines appear to be giving them at least a plausible simulacrum of a backbone. After all, without a credulous public or a cringing opponent to badger, most trolls just wind up sulking beneath a bridge.

Donald Trump’s approval ratings are cratering; public support for his positions on crime, immigration, and the economy is underwater. The upcoming showdown over funding the government affords the Democratic Party rare leverage to marshal this discontent into palpable gains against the consolidation of MAGA authoritarianism. So, naturally, savvy Beltway Democrats have launched a policy shop to steer the party toward the right.

The new think tank, the Searchlight Institute, is the brainchild of former Senate staffer Adam Jentleson. Taking up a common plaint in the centrist consultant wing of the party, it seeks to diminish the influence of “liberal groups” in shaping Democratic priorities, the New York Times report on Searchlight’s launch notes. Jentleson insists that the Democrats’ path back to political relevance requires repudiation of liberal positions on issues like climate change and LGBTQ+ rights. “The folks who are most to blame about Trump are the ones who pushed Democrats to take indefensible positions,” he told Times reporter Reid J. Epstein. “Right now we’re pursuing every tactic imaginable except for the obvious one, which is taking positions that are more in line with the people we are trying to win over.”

Whatever else this analysis may be, it’s not exactly groundbreaking. Tacking obsessively to the right was the mission of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), founded in the 1980s to put Democratic presidents in the White House after the successive debacles of the Reagan campaigns. The DLC’s policy arm, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), translated that mandate into policy initiatives, which is how the Democrats, historically the party of the working-class voter, wound up on the vanguard of financial deregulation, the courtship of Big Tech, the rollback of the welfare state, and other unlovely agenda items for right-wing governance.

The DLC folded in the aughts, though the PPI lumbers on, brandishing the self-flattering and entirely misleading slogan “radical pragmatism.” The reason the DLC closed up shop was that its mission had so completely captured the Democrats’ policy infrastructure that the group was pretty much redundant. The Brookings Institute, the Center for American Progress, the New America Foundation, and an army of pollsters and consultants all chimed in in unison behind the message that America was too deeply enmeshed in right-wing policy aims for Democrats to make any more than marginal and incremental headway. Meanwhile, notionally centrist groups such as No Labels and Third Way are all but official recruitment arms of the GOP. Within this tight cordon sanitaire, talk of sweeping universal reforms like truly universal health coverage, an aggressive wealth tax, or serious climate mitigation was mostly banished; in its place a thousand school privatization schemes, carbon-exchange markets, insurance subsidies, and small-bore tax credits bloomed.

Not coincidentally, all the policy savants and consultants in on the grift made handsome livings, and operated in a professional bubble largely impervious to the inconvenient evidence furnished by mounting, and increasingly calamitous, electoral failures. Searchlight already seems well positioned to occupy this same Goodfellas-style niche; the Times reports that its $10 million annual budget is bankrolled by “a roster of billionaire donors highlighted by Stephen Mandel, a hedge fund manager, and Eric Laufer, a real estate investor.”

What Searchlight seems to be adding to this dreary drumbeat of Beltway consensus is a superficially more confrontational rhetorical style. In his interview with the Times, Jentleson lashed out at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), whose most prominent role in Democratic Party politics was to serve as a foil for an otherwise rudderless George H.W. Bush campaign nearly 40 years ago. But in Jentleson’s overheated telling, the ACLU “did more to contribute to Trump’s victory than many conservative groups.” Then there’s the Center for American Progress, a massive sluice gate for corporate donations that briskly adopts the policy positions that come with them, which Jentleson accuses of purveying “100 percent pure uncut resistance drivel.”

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Jentleson himself, though, staked out a position early in his career more than a little adjacent to the drivel he dismisses today. His 2021 book Kill Switch derided the reactionary record of the modern Senate and called for the abolition of the filibuster, and he worked with Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy group now challenging much of Trump’s second-term agenda in court. But he has followed the same Beltway career trajectory that has seen former left-leaning advocates veering right as a host of professional incentives emerged on that path—he’s a Senate-bred version of Sean McElwee or David Shor, who laid aside more intemperate activist pasts when the Hill came calling. Jentleson’s own ideological transformation seemed to occur after his stormy tenure as chief of staff for Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who has also veered to the right after running as a left- and working-class-branded outsider (in spite of being the son of a wealthy insurance executive and graduating from Harvard Business School).

One striking irony of Jentleson’s recent transformation is that he now uses his longtime affiliation with the Senate, which he had formerly singled out as a principal obstruction to democratic governance, as his rainmaking calling card. Searchlight is named for the Nevada hometown of the late Democratic majority leader Harry Reid, who was Jentleson’s first employer on the Hill. (Though, even here, the affiliation claimed by the group doesn’t really fit its policy profile; it turns out that Reid was more aligned with the liberal groups, being well ahead of most Democratic lawmakers in endorsing LBGTQ+ equality and serious climate-change mitigation, in contrast to Searchlight’s agenda.)

It’s long been a sign of wised-up Hill pragmatism to advertise your hard-won bona fides as the only adult in the room—but as has been painfully clear during the Democrats’ four-decade-and-counting march toward rightward retrenchment, that reflex comes with a great many intellectual and strategic liabilities. Among other things, leaving the Democratic agenda in the care of self-styled political managers isn’t remotely consonant with the sort of mass (small-d) democratic politics essential to countering the bad-faith pseudo-populism of the MAGA right. “The Democrats have this constant desire to build something new out of something old,” says Claremont-McKenna history professor Lily Geismer, author of a critical study of the DLC and its legacy, Left Behind. “And it works from this drive to set aside the existing grassroots structure of the party—the classic case is unions—and in its place, you decide to build all these insular think tanks.” This is now the go-to model for Democratic institution-building, she says: “Right after the election, I had a conversation with someone who was trying to start a PPI-like organization. Even though this wasn’t my own politics, I told him to do what the DLC didn’t do: They didn’t build any kind of grassroots structure, or any sort of organization at the state level. They were an organization of party officials agreeing with each other.”

This supremely insider-branded talent pool has produced a “deep disconnect” between Democratic elites and the mass support they need to reverse the party’s downward slide, Geismer argues. It’s telling that former Senate staffers make up most of Searchlight’s leadership team. “That does seem like a core component here,” Geismer says. “It was the same thing with the DLC. [DLC founder and CEO] Al From was a congressional staffer. This poses an interesting question about idea-generating: With this background, you come up with solutions that mostly make sense to people invested in the status quo.”

This brand of self-inflicted intellectual sclerosis is now so ingrained in the Democratic Party’s leadership caste that it’s long past time to examine just where it comes from, and why it endures. “I think existentially, this project is a very stupid thing to do,” says Gabe Garbowit, cofounder of the Citizens’ Impeachment campaign and himself a former communications staffer for Minnesota Democratic Senator Tina Smith. “The eerie part of all this for me is that we’re living in the context of Trump trying to murder everybody in Congress, and everybody who’s influential in the Democratic Party cannot stop humming the tune that in order to succeed, we have to come together with this party.”

Indeed, the right-leaning feints that have been the stock in trade for the Democrats’ consultant class work chiefly to enable a MAGAfied executive branch explicitly designed to exploit all the weaknesses of go-along, get-along centrism. So what has, for decades, been packaged as insider savvy in the sanctums of Democratic power now seems like so much whistling in the dark. Just consider Searchlight’s own model of change, which is a rehash of the Yglesias/Shor theory of “popularism”—a centrist course correction aimed at winning over moderate swing voters to soft-focus policy fixes polled within an inch of their lives, in a negative-partisanship climate of mounting polarization that has rendered such voters a distinctly endangered species. “This is an endemic problem of Democratic consultant proposals,” Geismer says. “They all hinge on an idealized moderate voter, but this is not even a real person that’s out there.”

It’s not as though Democrats have shunned centrist candidates in their banner presidential campaigns: They’ve run them, alongside enthusiastic musterings of donor cash and think-tank messaging, over the past nine cycles. Over the past three, they’ve lost twice to the clownish and demagogic figure of Donald Trump, improbably made over into a tribune of economic populism as he lords over tax cuts for his ruling-class peers and the conversion of government into a rolling bazaar of Christian-nationalist graft.

Yet instead of that record provoking any serious introspection, the same money players and hack messaging merchants continue to insist that the party must under no conditions consider ambitious plans to reverse the collapse of the American political economy into oligarchic squalor. No, the challenge ahead is to pursue ever more finely calibrated feints rightward, to the point where, as voters desperately try to detect a principled stand or a remnant of fighting spirit in FDR’s party, they’re given just more triangulation in a vacuum: Let them eat targeted tax credits. That is not rhetorical hyperbole; it is, rather, the explicit strategy adopted by party leaders gearing up for the battle over a government shutdown at the end of the month. It’s also the dead-end reasoning that shapes absurdist displays of phony savvy like Ezra Klein’s recent call for Democrats to recruit anti-choice candidates for statewide office—in states that have already endorsed ballot initiatives to protect reproductive freedom.

All these absurdities are ultimately rooted in the folkways of the cluttered terrarium known as Capitol Hill. Once a Democratic knowledge worker is pressed into service there, it soon becomes clear that the centrist boondoggle is the only game in town. “I was shocked when I got to the Hill about how little strategic thinking there was. There really is almost no space for dissenting thoughts,” Garbowit says. The cumulative effect of this insular and cliquish outlook is a professional culture overrun with perverse incentives—of the most lucrative kind. “Because of the center of gravity, you have to be accepted by people within the system,” Garbowit says. “Then there’s a path forward. If you want to do this career as a stable thing, you’re going to end up having some people paying you money to say completely outrageous things. You can find a lot of people in DC who talk that lingo, but it’s a totally detrimental, awful thing for the country.”

A key component of this argot is bespoke polling numbers—surveys commissioned by party insiders and consultants to ward political leaders off the supposition that they need to alter their thinking or policy options in any fundamental way. “It’s like this complicated ritual to use science to prove the points that a poll seems to establish are valid,” he says. “But there’s no questioning of what happened. At one polling briefing, I remember asking about the underlying assumptions that shaped the findings. The briefer actually turned to the campaign manager and asked if I belonged in the meeting.”

Another former Hill operative, who requested anonymity to speak freely, recounts how this willful state of ignorance creates truly demented policy thinking. “There was a meeting about creating a communications plan to attack Elon Musk,” the staffer recalls. That seemed reasonable enough on the face of things; yet when the meeting convened, it turned out that the actual brief was to drive Musk further to the right—a feat that seemed both mathematically impossible and morally bankrupt. Yet, in the grand Hill tradition, the ultimate prize was a recondite policy objective; the idea was to expand the market for electric vehicles like the ones Musk manufactured by enlisting more hard-right consumers under Musk’s crazed ideological-cum-persecution fantasies. “Someone said to me afterward that Yglesias wrote that,” the staffer recalls. “That shows just how important that kind of stuff is.” Again, however, the broader trend line in the actual political news cycle was unmistakable: “At that point, it was quite clear what direction Elon was going. So the whole thing was like this gambit from people who want to feel like they’re in control of the situation.”

This will-to-narrative control is indeed a prime directive for the centrist power elite, as Adam Jentleson demonstrated the weekend after Searchlight’s launch was announced. In a convoluted set of spats on Musk’s social media platform, X, he offered a delusional account of the origins of the New Deal. In Jentleson’s telling, FDR’s appeasement of the Democratic Party’s powerful segregationist wing played an equally decisive role as his embrace of “economic populism.” That’s the polar opposite of what political history shows. FDR secured an historic surge in African American support during his 1936 reelection campaign, which was a referendum on the New Deal, despite his courtship of Southern Democrats—as a corps of patient online interlocutors pointed out. Yet Jentleson continued digging in, with an unhinged determination to make Roosevelt’s shabby capitulation a savvy Sistah Souljah moment avant la lettre. This is the kind of policy insight that now commands major outlays of cash and clout in and around Capitol Hill—and it is both historically bankrupt and morally incoherent. For all its hectically self-advertised brashness and acuity, Searchlight is but another grim Beltway instance of the blind leading the blind.

The homestretch phase of most elections marks the moment when party leaders come together in a show of unity to rally behind a major party’s nominee—a feat that even the Trump-fractured GOP of 2016 managed to pull off. So it was striking that, as The New York Times reported on Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen’s endorsement of the city’s Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, the paper of record had canvassed the one prominent Mamdani holdout, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, in response. In announcing his own support for Mamdani, Van Hollen called out New York’s “spineless” delegation in Congress that continued withholding its support for Mamdani.

So Jeffries spokesperson Justin Chermol, who no doubt carefully vetted his comments for placement in the Times, chimed in with this: “Leader Hakeem Jeffries will have more to say about the general election well in advance of Nov. 4. Meanwhile, confused New Yorkers are asking themselves the question: Chris Van Who?”

That failed zinger was likely intended to call out Van Hollen’s comments as the handiwork of a mid-Atlantic interloper, but it underscored Jeffries’s ineffectual and aloof leadership style—a major liability for the Democrats as the party prepares for its next battle over a prospective government shutdown at the end of the month. New York Democrats, who are strongly backing Mamdani’s candidacy, aren’t likely to need an introduction to Van Hollen, who’s shown stronger moral leadership than many national Democrats have, by traveling to El Salvador to visit the unjustly detained immigrant Kilmar Armando Ábrego García as he was renditioned in that country’s brutal maximum-security CECOT prison.

At the time of Van Hollen’s visit, Jeffries publicly praised the senator, though The Bulwark reported that he also told members of his caucus to “slow down” on the “El Salvador stuff,” as one Democratic House member put it—a charge that another of the leader’s spokespeople denied, albeit by denouncing the report as “thinly sourced” rather than inaccurate. In short, Jeffries was then, as on so many other occasions, seeing how the political winds might break prior to committing himself either way. This was an all-too-typical case study after Van Hollen stood before Iowa Democratic activists at the Polk County Steak Fry urging a more decisive and forthright agenda on a party that’s “too cautious, too rudderless, too attached to poll-washed, pundit-rinsed, and donor-dried messages.”

Indeed, Jeffries’s own reaction to the El Salvador visits of Van Hollen and other Democratic lawmakers was the off-topic observation that “Donald Trump has the lowest approval rating of any president in modern American history”—another labored and anemic effort, apparently, to suggest that whole controversy over Ábrego García’s detention fell under the broad category of GOP-engineered “distractions” devised to direct attention away from the second Trump administration’s political failures. That growing litany of phoned-in messaging from Democratic leaders also bears out Van Hollen’s criticisms of the party, since actions like Ábrego García’s detention—and the pending government bid to deport him to Ghana—are very much the main event for a White House seeking to consolidate its grip on power via Mob-like intimidation and authoritarian spectacle.

Yet this has been the fallback position of Jeffries and his Hill lieutenants throughout the crucial early months of the second Trump term: dismiss or downplay the urgent demands of the party’s base to force open confrontations with the White House’s unpopular strongman agenda, in the talismanic faith that polling and Trump’s own unforced political miscalculations will more or less organically reverse the Democrats’ flailing prospects in time for the 2026 midterms. That’s why, for instance, Jeffries and leading House Democrats opted for a diffident strategy when Trump debuted his federal takeover of law enforcement in Washington, DC, denouncing the emergency justification for the administration’s actions and touting what the leader called a “strongly worded letter” from the DC attorney general to the White House.

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Jeffries rallied to the introduction of the White House’s signature spending-and-immigration-crackdown bill with a marathon speech denouncing the package from the House floor—the longest such speech in the history of the House. Yet the disastrous measure passed on strict party lines, thanks in no small part to the deaths of three Democratic lawmakers sworn into the 119th Congress in January. The split-screen image of the party’s House leader commanding media coverage during the measure’s floor debate yet lacking the basic numbers to thwart its passage because of the caucus’s blind commitment to gerontocratic rule just about sums up the plight of a risk-averse Democratic caucus dogmatically resistant to new ideas and fresh governing approaches.

The same malady afflicts Democratic leadership’s woeful support for the Gaza genocide—a central factor in the party’s declining popular fortunes, in which Jeffries has played an outsize and indefensible role. Despite his recent pronouncement that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza had reached a “breaking point” under the Trump administration’s watch, Jeffries had voted in favor of legislation to suspend funding for the UN Relief Works for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), on the basis of unproven charges from Israel that agency employees had taken part in the October 7 massacre led by Hamas. As caucus leader, he’s done nothing to advance a bill by Democratic Representative Andre Carson of Indiana to restore funding to UNRWA–let alone the measure cosponsored by Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Pamila Jayapal of Washington to embargo American arms shipments to Israel. As Spencer Ackerman writes, “These are material and not rhetorical steps to stop the genocide and save Palestinian lives. The choice is his. The judgment is history’s.”

Indeed, while a caucus leader isn’t primarily charged with managing day-to-day legislative business, Jeffries’s efforts on this front are notably lackluster, particularly in comparison to the track record of his predecessor, California Representative Nancy Pelosi, who navigated the difficulties of directing the caucus during its periods of minority exile (indeed, the House held majorities for just four of her 16 years as leader). Jeffries is in the unfortunate position of sidestepping direct and galvanizing fights with the White House on key issues such as Gaza, crime, and immigration, while failing to supply desperately needed leadership and direction for a party that is operating without an effective political compass at a key moment of crisis in America’s unraveling democratic experiment. It was no wonder that a plainly exasperated Pelosi implored him, in the heat of last spring’s government spending showdown to “use your power.”

That plea is gaining renewed urgency as Congress gears up for another showdown over spending—and a possible government shutdown—at the end of the month. So far, Jeffries and Schumer are building a strategy that seeks to restore some of the brutal cuts to the Affordable Care Act enacted in Trump’s spending legislation. While that’s an undeniably worthy goal in and of itself, it’s scarcely commensurate to the scale of the authoritarian putsch now well under way at the behest of the Trump White House and its GOP allies in Congress.

For a party that’s long, and properly, denounced the threat of MAGA Caesarism and the antidemocratic governing agenda of 2025 to count on insurance subsidies to make the affirmative case before the 2026 electorate is roughly akin to assembling a bucket brigade to fend off a tsunami. That’s why Charles Gaba, the leading advocate for the rescue of ACA tax credits, has denounced this as a myopic, weak-sauce strategy. It’s also why an ideologically diverse set of critics from center-left wonk Josh Marshall to recovering neocon Jennifer Rubin are loudly calling for the Democratic leadership on the Hill to seize this moment of leverage to fight back and get meaningful and material concessions from the Republican opposition. So instead of having his staff taking potshots at his critics in the Senate, Jeffries would be far better served by ensuring that the pending spending fight produces a legacy that his caucus members can confidently run on in 2026. If he doesn’t, voters across the country may soon be asking, “Hakeem who?”

The MAGA mediasphere has been convulsing with disingenuous skepticism since the release of the depraved birthday greeting heard ’round the world. When Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal team leaked the brothers-in-predation message that Donald Trump shared with high-flying pedophile Jeffrey Epstein on his 50th birthday, Trump and his movement had stoutly denied the existence of any such communiqué. In a standard move of media intimidation, Trump filed suit against The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, alleging in his complaint that the document was a fabrication.

Now that the document has surfaced—together with the gruesome (if redacted) contents of the 238-page birthday book Maxwell compiled for Epstein—the MAGA messaging complex now contends that Trump’s contribution is a forgery. The reasoning would require that back in 2003, Trump’s far-seeing enemies had planted this false flag in Maxwell’s curated panegyric to her boyfriend/co-procurer in order to mine it for damaging intel 22 years later. It’s the same labored exercise in political demonology that Trump himself pioneered in his evidence-free campaign to suggest that Barack Obama was not a US citizen: In that reverie, cunning deep-state operatives forged Obama’s US birth certificate in 1961, since it was plain as day that a mixed-race newborn was destined to ascend to the presidency 47 years later.

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Yet plausibility is not the point of the counteroffensive here; rather, it is to kick up conspiratorial speculations so that no one discusses the damning nature of this latest twist in the Epstein saga. For this maneuver, the right has a template even more successful than Trump’s birther crusade: the 2004 scandal involving a botched news report on President George W. Bush’s military service. During the height of Bush’s reelection campaign, 60 Minutes aired a segment on Bush’s tour with the Texas Air National Guard; it was common for Texan power players like Bush’s father to arrange for cushy National Guard sinecures for their sons in order to sidestep being drafted into combat duty in Vietnam. Typescript sleuths on the right analyzed the fonts and claimed that the documents used in Rather’s report were post-hoc forgeries.

In the aftermath of the controversy, CBS apologized for the segment and fired four senior news-division employees; several months earlier, the on-air correspondent Dan Rather for the 60 Minutes segment had announced that he was stepping down from his weekday news anchor post for the network. The episode has since served as proof text in the right’s long-running campaign against ostensible liberal media bias, but just as important is the nomenclature here; the scandal was memorialized as “Rathergate,” summoning all the sinister ideological motives the right has been ascribing to TV news readers for more than half a century. Meanwhile, the gist of the segment—that Bush was grounded from flying further missions in the guard after failing to turn up for a mandatory medical exam, and that the whole incident was smoothed over in the public record—jibes with what other reporters have found.

Today’s mainstream media, cursed with the historical consciousness of a goldfish, is already demonstrating that it has learned nothing from these past exercises in conservative-movement intimidation. Indeed, my hometown paper, The Washington Post, has accelerated its descent into MAGA-tipsheet status under the direction of its owner Jeff Bezos with a bogus report from its White House bureau chief Matt Viser, appearing under the headline “No Clear Answers on Whether Trump Signed Epstein Birthday Book.” The piece obligingly platforms the social-media pronouncements of MAGA quislings like Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson confidently asserting that Trump’s signature was forged; when Viser stirs himself to talk to Thomas W. Vastrick, an actual authority on signatures, he gets this response:

There’s not anything standing out to me to say it is a forgery, meaning not written by Donald Trump.… It’s very consistent in letter design, slant, and letter height ratios. For someone to say it’s not his handwriting or doesn’t look like his handwriting, I don’t know where they’re coming from. It certainly does have the pictorial evidence of it.

Vastrick does offer the proviso that Trump’s signature could still have been cut and paste, even though there is nothing in the formatting of the greeting suggest that. But never mind: Viser has raised a speculative whiff of controversy, mostly by quoting movement hacks who rely on Trump’s presidency to make a handsome living and a handful of Trump’s retainers in Congress who would declare the sky green at the Great Leader’s behest. Thus does a straightforward piece of evidence billow away into the “who can say?” canons of Vichy newsgathering.

Yet the problem for Trump’s defenders, and his invertebrate media enablers, is that the context in which the greeting appears—the sprawling, sickening Epstein birthday book—offers plenty of clues to indicate that it is Trump’s message. The contributions of Joel Pashcow, a real-estate magnate who was a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, deserve at least as much focus as Trump’s ghastly note to Epstein (where, it should be noted, the president’s signature appears in the pubic region of a sketch of a young female form that could be generously described as at the margins of the age of consent).

In one photo from Pashcow, Epstein is shown on a golf course hoisting a novelty check signed by Trump. (This is an actual instance of cut-and-paste photoshopping, and boy is it obvious.) Underneath, Pashcow scrawled that Epstein had sold Trump a “fully depreciated” woman whose name is redacted here; he jokes that this is an example of “Jeffrey showing early talents with money and women!” What he doesn’t note, but what’s obvious from the context, is that Trump and Epstein were so closely identified as voracious sexual predators that the trafficking of young women would be instantly recognized as fodder for a joke in Epstein’s Caligulan social circle.

Pashcow also included his own doodled tribute to Epstein in the same vein as Trump’s, and even practiced sycophants like Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson couldn’t do anything to wish its contents away. An inset drawing shows Epstein handing out lollipops to young girls of elementary-school age under the timestamp of 1983; the larger image shows what are presumably the same grooming subjects servicing Epstein on a beach lounging chair in 2003; a private plane featuring the initials “JE” on its side appears in the background, signifying Epstein’s “Lolita Express” plane. In the background is a redtile-roofed mansion that bears a closer resemblance to Mar-a-Lago than to any property of Epstein’s. Under the timestamp, Pashcow wrote “what a great country.”

These days, Pashcow, a Trump and RNC donor, is likely more prone to say he’s dedicated to making the country great again. God knows that Jeff Bezos and Matt Viser are doing all they can to lend aid to the cause.

For all the justified focus on the second Trump administration’s authoritarian agenda, and the suite of debased governing protocols that go with it, the basic messaging apparatus behind it has received scant attention. As it happens, this past weekend supplied a pair of textbook illustrations showing how the MAGA power elite throttle the mediasphere to serve their purposes.

Exhibit A was House Speaker Mike Johnson’s bizarre declaration to Capitol Hill reporters that President Donald Trump had operated as an FBI informant during his decade-and-a-half friendship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down,” Johnson confidently asserted, without presenting any evidence.

In all likelihood, Johnson—a reliable MAGA wind sock who famously sought to contrive a constitutional rationale for the failed coup of January 6—let his base-pandering instincts lead him into fanfic-style delusion. But, as is often the case in such episodes, the delusion shored up a key plank of the Q-pilled GOP base’s fantasizing about the Trump-Epstein relationship; for the QAnon faithful, the notion that Trump was an informant rationalizes his long bro-ship with Epstein.

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Never mind that Trump himself has disavowed any past civilian dealings with the FBI, even though he did do some informing work to advance his casino interests—something far more on-brand for him than a deep-cover op targeting a notorious sexual predator of underage girls. Never mind as well that if Trump did undertake this covert role, it didn’t stop him from helping Epstein’s allies; in 2017, Trump’s first White House signed on Alexander Acosta, the former Florida prosecutor who oversaw Epstein’s get-out-of-jail agreement there, as its secretary of labor. And never mind that just two months ago, Trump abruptly fired the federal prosecutor who did bring Epstein to justice, without any plausible rationale. But the denizens of the overlapping worlds of QAnon and MAGA are never detained by mundane considerations of evidence.

Even so, Johnson’s contention provoked instant pushback, most significantly from the White House itself, since informants are, in most legal cases, co-perpetrators. In his purblind rounds as Trump sycophant, Johnson wound up drawing the very sort of attention to Trump’s standing in Epstein’s circle that the administration is desperately seeking to short-circuit. So Johnson was forced to issue a clarifying statement, which, as is typical for the genre, clarified nothing whatsoever. “The speaker is reiterating what the victims’ attorney said, which is that Donald Trump—who kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago—was the only one more than a decade ago willing to help prosecutors expose Epstein for being a disgusting child predator,” the statement read in part.

Johnson was clumsily referencing a remark by Brad Edwards, an attorney for several Epstein victims, suggesting that Trump had cooperated with his efforts to document Epstein’s abuses; but Edwards’s full comments at last week’s press conference held by Epstein victims indicate that after Trump had discussed victims’ complaints with him in 2009, Trump did “an about-face” on holding Epstein accountable; nor had Edwards ever intimated that Trump had worked with federal law enforcement officials. In other words: Johnson was trying to deflect attention from his own wholesale fabrication about the Epstein case with another wholesale fabrication about the Epstein case.

This was not, however, the takeaway from the coverage of the initial gaffe and its aftermath—even The Washington Post’s own story citing Edwards’s comments meekly records that Johnson “backed off” the informant claim, without citing the broader conspiracy-mongering movement on the right that emboldened him to float it in the first place. Newsweek was content to report that Johnson had “clarified” his informant comment—something that occurred in no known universe where words have meaning.

Likewise, no news outlet covering the controversy bothered to supply any context for Johnson’s rushed citation of Epstein’s eviction from the membership rolls of Mar-a-Lago, which comes across in the speaker’s statement as another blow struck on behalf of Epstein’s victims. It’s true that in some of Trump’s explanations of the rupture between the two men, Epstein’s creepy attention to a Mar-a-Lago member’s daughter plays a role. But Trump’s own most recent account suggests that the breach occurred because Epstein “stole” former Mar-a-Lago employee Virginia Giuffre from him—scarcely the language likely to be adopted by a heroic undercover figure exposing Epstein’s career as a sex trafficker.

Instead, the whole news cycle’s coverage of Johnson’s remark followed the standard Beltway template for political leaders briefly tripped up by their own public statements: a formalist exercise whereby a moment of potential scandal is passively “walked back” and all the relevant players are palpably relieved to move on.

The same content-challenged, context-ignoring discourse dominated the weekend’s other MAGA-walkback moment: Trump’s own decision to post a Truth Social meme indicating his White House is preparing to go to war with the city of Chicago under the paper-thin pretext of combating violent crime there. There’s even less room in this case for a Trump-excusing interpretation than there was in Johnson’s aside; Trump said outright that Chicago was about to find out why Trump has renamed the Defense Department as the Department of War, and the meme features an image of Trump decked out as Robert Duvall’s Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore from Apocalypse Now. (Which Trump glossed as, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”) Lest any of this somehow land with muffled impact, the meme appeared under the heading “Chipocalypse Now” with an image of the city’s skyline.

Nevertheless, the same mannered and brain-dead media “walk back” proceeded on schedule. The White House’s “border czar” Tom Homan took to CNN’s State of the Union to declare, ludicrously, that Trump’s meme was “taken out of context” and that “criminal cartels” are the object of the country’s militarized wrath. You’d think a follow-up question might have surfaced asking why, if that were in fact the case, the meme didn’t bear the legend “Cartel-pocalypse Now” (which is far more euphonious than the Windy City–baiting one it employed), or stipulate that the cartels, and not the city, was going to get a crash course in the reason behind the Pentagon’s renaming.

Instead, the press obligingly lapped up the MAGA-branded lying about the MAGA-branded lying. Homan’s dissembling act billowed through the Sunday news cycle in exactly the same fashion that Johnson’s did, with interested viewers and readers essentially told there was nothing to see here. Meanwhile, a typically abusive and untruthful Trump exchange with NBC reporter Yamiche Alcindor about the same post yielded this milquetoast headline in The New York Times: “Trump Downplays Post Threatening Chicago, Says He Wants to ‘Clean Up’ City.”

Of course, a functioning political press might have observed that napalm—the substance that charmed the olfactory of Bill Kilgore in Francis Ford Coppola’s film about the deadly folly of the US war against North Vietnam—was also adopted in that conflict under the pretext of cleaning things up: to expose Viet Cong positions and clear vegetation. (The inventor of the incendiary gel also never envisioned it being used against humans but as a means of destroying buildings.) A critically minded press corps might even go further to note that the character of Kilgore in the film represents the very blind jingoist hubris that the Trump administration is tapping into as it launches its war on American cities—and that the Vietnam War, particularly as depicted in Coppola’s film, is as far as you can conceivably get from a narrative of executive-branch heroism. But what am I saying? It’s all been walked back, after all.

American history abounds with well-known monuments to brittle intellectual orthodoxies, from the Scopes trial to the cult of the Marvel blockbuster. To that illustrious lineage, we can add the perennial spectacle of the Democratic establishment blanching before the prospect of a successful movement-driven populist campaign. The latest campaign in question, of course, is Zohran Mamdani’s bid to be the next mayor of New York, and skittish party leaders are already declaring it a pox on their efforts to recapture a House majority in the 2026 midterms.

Never mind that the two elections involve vastly disparate constituencies and are separated by a full calendar year. And never mind the complete lack of symmetry, with not a single GOP election consigliere getting remotely worked up over the host of MAGA authoritarian power grabs now polling at toxic levels will play out in the midterms—or how extreme-right candidates such as New Jersey GOP gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciatterrelli are likely to alienate moderate swing voters in purple-trending districts.

No, this is simply how you get to be a respected strategist in the upper echelons of the Democratic consensusphere: You only perceive threats to your left, and you tirelessly position yourself as the voice of reasoned moderation, in touch with the authentically centrist impulses of the Real American Median Voter. Witness a curious recent report in Politico bearing the pitch-perfect Beltway headline “‘Giddy’ Republicans Cheer Mamdani’s Impact on Democrats.” In any sanely configured political system, taking advice from an irredentist authoritarian party on the risks of an intraparty realignment candidacy would be filed under the general heading of life tips from Job’s counselors—particularly coming out of a 2024 cycle in which this same opposition party relentlessly portrayed a status-quo centrist ticket as a threat of commie insurrection. Now that Mamdani, an unabashed Democratic socialist, has won more votes than any prior mayoral candidate in his June primary victory, the notion that the Republicans are gearing up to unleash their full McCarthyite wrath on the Mamdani campaign is scarcely surprising, or cause for serious concern.

Yet, even though Politico packages its report as a cascade of GOP schadenfreude, the body of it is taken up with lamentations from Democrats. Indeed, the wording of the headline comes not from any Republican operative but from a concern-trolling Democrat—former Nassau County executive Laura Curran, who absurdly opines that the GOP opposition is “more excited about this than Mamdani’s followers or supporters.” Not to be outdone, Hank Scheinkopf, a longtime Democratic operative in New York who is working with an anti-Mamdani PAC, delivers this whopper: “Mamdani is the greatest threat to Democrats probably since Ronald Reagan because he’s everything Democrats have been accused of being and in fact is—to the extreme. Republican ad makers will know what to do with this.”

This narrative is so firmly ensconced in mainstream discourse that Politico reporters Nick Reisman and Jeff Coltin go out of their way to enable it. In a mind-bending excursion into speculative punditry they write:

While Democratic socialists are on the verge of a high-profile victory in a deep blue metropolis, that success stands to be curdled by Trump’s vow to exert more federal power over American cities. Trump’s focus on urban crime has further driven a wedge into a party struggling to find its identity. And Mamdani’s since-qualified support for slashing police budgets while pushing to increase taxes on rich people to pay for services like free bus fare and child care has put Democratic officials on edge as their party’s nominee barrels into the general election with a comfortable polling lead.

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Here on planet Earth, there’s zero evidence that Trump’s illegal and authoritarian putsch into urban law enforcement (which, in practical terms, translates into masked ICE renditions and failed bids to harass detainees into facing unfounded federal charges) is anything like a political asset for the GOP, let alone a fatal wedge issue for Democrats. Polls show a majority of respondents opposing it, even as they also register general concern about urban crime. (Oh, and speaking of which, Trump’s federalized crime boondoggle isn’t even doing much to reduce crime in the District of Columbia, the centerpiece of Trump’s program.)

Yet the canons of sober political analysis hold that Republicans aggressively set the prevailing terms of debate, and Democrats just as reliably freak out and flee in terror. Hard as it may be to believe midway through the 20th century’s second decade, this template was established in the aftermath of the disastrous 1972 election—the last time modern Democrats nominated a movement-backed candidate for the presidency, the anti-war South Dakota Senator George McGovern. Ever since then, the wised-up establishment has clung to the hoary commandment that a Democratic Party hoping to succeed must always and forever shun any disturbances on its left flank. That’s the logic behind the successive presidential runs of Bill and Hillary Clinton. It’s why the 2004 anti-war candidacy of Howard Dean got shoved briskly aside for the infinitely more equivocal critic of the Iraq War John Kerry, whom the smart money in the party knew was a sure thing based on his own credentials as a war hero. (Note to the New York Democratic sachems thinking they can outwit GOP attack strategies with candidates bearing Republican-seeming résumé entries: Kerry got ruthlessly attacked for his war record anyway, in stunningly dishonest fashion.)

Evidently a glutton for punishment, Dean went on to captain the Democratic National Committee, where his ambitious 50-state strategy to keep the party competitive in every voting constituency was overruled by the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Rahm Emanuel, thereby locking in long-term Republican advantages in many winnable districts. (Is Emanuel still adhering to the party establishment like gum on its shoe, and positioning himself for a content-challenged and trans-baiting 2028 presidential run by bashing Zohran Mamdani? You’d better believe it!) All of this savviness in a vacuum was of course but a prelude to the party establishment’s well-documented bid to marginalize Bernie Sanders’s successive presidential runs; the party’s final anti-Sanders piece of primary choreography had all of the 2020 cycle’s centrist candidates dropping out ahead of Super Tuesday to secure Joe Biden’s hold on the nomination—the collective dive into change-averse gerontocratic rule that all but guaranteed Donald Trump’s second term in office. Meanwhile, Sanders remains one of the country’s most popular politicians.

The Democrats’ addiction to left-marginalization strategies is especially unwarranted in Mamdani’s case, since the substance of his platform does what this same cohort of centrist party leaders tirelessly claim they want to do: He focuses on “kitchen-table issues,” with plans to secure affordable housing, provide free transportation, and mitigate the rise of daily living expenses in the country’s most costly city. In a never-ending regress of subject-changing rhetoric, Democratic officials can be heard claiming that virtually every authoritarian power grab from the Trump White House is a desperate ploy to distract voters from kitchen-table issues. They said it about the illegal mobilization of federal troops in Los Angeles; they said it about the mobilization of the broader immigration police state; they said it about the Epstein files; and they keep saying it about the battle to restore the foundations of American democracy.

Now the party has a charismatic, well-spoken advocate to actually solve kitchen-table issues, and its leaders have rallied to declare him anathema. (They are also keen to repudiate Mamdani for his principled stand against the Gaza genocide, to the point of militantly ignoring the extensive polling showing his strong support among Jewish voters in New York, but that’s another column entirely.) It’s long past time to recognize that the true distraction here are the members of a Democratic consulting class dogmatically opposed to revising their stratagems in the face of system-wide failure. Alas, it’s far from certain that they will get out of the party’s way before another midterm debacle.

The day after President Donald Trump declared that he intends to unseat Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, the White House unfurled a giant banner emblazoning Trump’s visage across the front of the Labor Department. Below it was the legend “American Workers First!”

This latest foray into dictator branding was clearly meant to burnish Trump’s image in a flailing jobs economy on the verge of the Labor Day holiday weekend. But it also doubled as advertising for Trump’s ongoing putsch against the Fed, an institution he’s roundly castigated for failing to reduce interest rates on his preferred schedule, as the administration’s feckless tariffs program continues to stoke inflation. But a more truthful sentiment for the banner would have been “Sowing Administrative Chaos to Silence My Critics!”

Trump’s action against Cook, like all his other second-term power grabs, rests on a flimsy pretext—the allegation from Bill Pulte, the MAGA lackey now captaining the federal Housing Finance Agency, that Cook obtained mortgages on two properties at lower rates by improperly claiming them as primary residences. Pulte’s charge hasn’t been proven, and Cook is preparing a suit contesting her dismissal. Still, even if the relevant documents point to an abuse here, it’s an exceedingly common one that’s unlikely to rise to the level of the standard for firing a Fed governor, who has to be dismissed “for cause” under federal statute. To take just one example from the house of MAGA, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed the same homestead exemptions for the mortgages on three homes, per his divorce proceedings; no Trump apparatchik is calling for his head on a pike. And of course Trump himself was found guilty of misrepresenting his own real estate holdings on a massive scale as he tried to secure advantageous loans, which resulted in a $500 million fraud judgment against him (though the financial penalty was overturned on appeal, the fraud charge sticks). No conscience-stricken resignation appears to be forthcoming.

What Trump intends to achieve at the Fed is the same ideological makeover he’s launching at the Bureau of Labor Statistics—another critical arm of independent macroeconomic analysis that provoked his strongman ire for publishing bad job numbers. Trump’s solution there was to fire the Biden-appointed head of the bureau, Erika McAntarfer, and replace her with the woefully unqualified MAGA bootlicker E.J. Antoni, who is awaiting Senate confirmation hearings.

Trump faces a heavier lift in seeking to make the Fed a platform for deceptive economic messaging. In addition to the central bank’s storied independence from outside political pressure, its governing structure isn’t amenable to top-down bureaucratic takeovers. Along with the seven governors charged with setting interest rates and making macroeconomic policy, the Fed’s Open Markets Committee includes five presidents from the Fed’s network of regional banks. Fed governors also serve staggered 14-year terms, which doesn’t make them inviting quarry for a rapid executive branch purge.

But none of this means that Trump, who’s run roughshod over all other legal and governmental restraints to his consolidation of power, will refrain from seizing every opportunity to undermine the Fed. Prior to his bid to dismiss Cook—the first time a president has ever pursued such an action against a Fed governor—Trump exulted over the surprise resignation of Fed Governor Adriana Kugler, and swiftly nominated the head of his Council of Economic Advisers, Stephen Miran, to serve out the balance of her term. The White House wants Miran to remain on the council while also serving at the Fed—a blaring conflict of interest that further erodes the independence of the central bank. And now that Trump is trying to engineer another vacancy on the governing board, White House officials are proffering Miran—who has yet to be confirmed by the Senate—as Cook’s replacement, which would land him on the board until 2038. The term of Fed chair Jerome Powell also expires in May, which presents enormous leverage for Trump to appoint a demonstrated quisling such as Economic Council head Kevin Hassett to be the bank’s own E.J. Antoni.

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The Trump White House is also weighing a plan to destabilize the five-member bank-president bloc on the Open Markets Committee, via its strategy of paralyzing federal agencies by depriving them of operating quorums. At key executive branch offices such as the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Elections Commission, Trump has fired incumbent appointees (all Democrats, needless to say) and left them to languish in bureaucratic limbo. The bank members aren’t subject to federal nomination and confirmation protocols, but are rather appointed by a combined group of Fed governors and private bank officials. (This is another reminder that the Fed is a classic captive regulatory agency, serving the interests of its notional constituency rather than the public good, but that is a sermon for another occasion.)

The governors are scheduled to go over the bankers’ terms in February, as part of a five-year review process. Per a Bloomberg report, the administration is considering using this review—traditionally a routine reauthorization—to launch a series of Lisa Cook–style purges. The calculation here is that, should Cook be ousted, the board of governors would have a majority backing the administration’s demands—but the bankers have been consistent inflation hawks, and “no” votes on rate cuts.

This whole dynamic may be shifting in any event, since Powell has recently signaled that he’s receptive to rate cuts after initially toeing a hard line against them. Yet Trump, who’s relentlessly laid into Powell—whom he appointed in 2017—as a “moron,” isn’t likely to take the Fed chair at his word. So be prepared for a giant Trump banner to bedeck the Fed’s renovated headquarters in DC soon—as new chair Hassett regales the great leader with the shit-eating sycophantic praise that’s now standard fare at Trump cabinet meetings. All that’s missing is a robust jobs market and an affordable existence for most working Americans—but who are we to quibble? Let them eat MAGA revenge fantasies.

Amid the shock and awe of occupation by armed National Guard troops with the mission of policing a city experiencing a 30-year low in violent crime, it’s been easy to overlook just how bloated and extravagant Donald Trump’s siege of Washington, DC, is proving to be. With 2,100 National Guard personnel now roaming the streets looking to hound detained residents into inflated federal charges to make Trump’s MAGA putsch a more effective exercise in propaganda of the deed, the authoritarian project is running up a price tage of more than $1 million a day, per Nick Turse’s report in The Intercept. Trump has already indicated that he plans to extend the siege beyond the 30-day time limit imposed under the section of the Home Rule law he initially invoked to justify the takeover. 

That means that the costs will continue ballooning—particularly under the president’s just-issued executive order calling for sweeping mobilizations of personnel and resources across the federal government in what he’s pleased to call the Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful initiative. Trump’s order calls for new hires at the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense (in its capacity as the agency administering the DC National Guard), and the US Park Police, while beefing up policing measures under the DC Transit Authority and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The order also calls for the establishment of an “online portal” for applicants with law enforcement backgrounds to join a new “specialized unit” devoted “to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital that can be deployed whenever the circumstances necessitate, and that could be deployed, subject to applicable law, in other cities where public safety and order has been lost.”

This vast mobilization is a far cry from what Trump originally peddled as a quick fix to a bogus crime epidemic abetted by Democratic “incompetence.” The long-term costs of this massive security-state boondoggle are hard to gauge, with so many more arms of the government bulking up under its open-ended mandate, but there is one recent analogous authoritarian action to use as a rough measuring stick: the administration’s enormously wasteful and ineffective crackdown on protests of the immigration goon-squad tactics it employed in and around Los Angeles. That federal show of illegal military force lasted 60 days, and under a likely lowball estimate of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, ran up a $134 million price tag.

Compared to the DC action, which features the dual open-ended missions of law enforcement and upgrading the city’s infrastructure, the federal mobilization in LA was a targeted exercise—even though the exercise in question was baldly authoritarian and antidemocratic. To give some sense of Trump’s Mussolini-like ambitions for making DC his playground, he’s asked Congress for an additional $2 billion to spring for urban renovations alone. (Of course, Trump styles this a beautification plan, but any cursory look at his recent overhaul of the White House, and the plans for the $200 million ballroom he wants attached there reveals that designation as a category error.)

The administration is also overseeing other enormous DC-based projects to feed the Great Leader’s vanity, including a MAGA makeover of the Kennedy Center, with plans for it to host the 2026 World Cup draw in December. Trump lackeys are also supervising the National Capital Planning Commission, which oversees the renovation of the Federal Reserve’s headquarters that has lately drawn Trump’s ire; Trump has sought in addition to use the agency’s authority over the planned $3.7 downtown stadium for the Commanders football team as blackmail bait to restore the team’s racist former moniker.

All of these big-ticket efforts to remake Washington into Trump’s Caligulan image are outlandish and undemocratic on their own terms, but one development makes them especially so: At the 11th hour of last spring’s deal to continue funding the government, Senate Republicans engaged in some accounting legerdemain to deprive the district of $1 billion in funds raised from taxpayers in the district. This act of looting left the city hard-pressed to meet the costs of basic services and income supports that, in any rational political order, are key elements of genuine public order. It is indeed testament to the city’s overall governing competence, pace Trump’s lies, that crime has not spiked under these steep and completely unjustifiable budget pressures.

To put things another way: Washington, which has already been reeling from the economic impact of the Trump administration’s parallel illegal and ideological sacking of the federal workforce, is now effectively subsidizing the conditions of its own daily MAGA oppression. And just as Chicago and New York appear to be next in line for the praetorian MAGA throttling debuted in LA and Washington, so will the rest of the country experience a version of DC’s beggaring as Trump’s massive spending bill transforms Medicaid and SNAP spending into tax cuts for the MAGA crony class. Trump called that boondoggle a beautification project too.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: As an aggressive MAGA policy initiative lurches into gear, Democrats fret over a just-so messaging response and generally dither over the prospect of alienating an increasingly mythic political center. As the initiative in question sows fear and terror, steamrollers the separation of powers, and generally disrupts whatever remains of normal life under conditions of authoritarian siege, it becomes massively unpopular. So the Democratic political leaders who once flattered themselves with the faux-savvy conceit that they were keeping their powder dry for a deferred moment of confrontation are once more at a loss to harness growing anti-Trump sentiment in real time.

That’s been the grim dynamic preventing establishment Democrats from putting forward a serious alternative to the second Trump administration’s mass-deportation regime, a despotic and unlawful undertaking that has rendered the president’s immigration stance—once held to be one of his central political assets—a huge polling liability. It was the saga of the DOGE rampage through the executive branch, which created zero meaningful fiscal savings and leveled basic federal initiatives such as public health, weather forecasting, and foreign aid, while Senate Democrats continued rubber-stamping more government-shredding cabinet appointees. But the only thing approaching the ugliness of DOGE’s track record is its polled public support, with the agency’s approval rating at just over 40 percent and its billionaire godfather Elon Musk well below that. The same old saw was also a fair description of the bankrupt logic that prompted Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to fold like a cheap suit in the first budget showdown of the second Trump term. That particular show of Democratic inertia directly led to the debacle of Trump’s signature spending and taxation bill, which now has the president’s polling numbers so far underwater that the GOP is frantically trying to rebrand the whole thing as something that it decidedly isn’t—a working-class tax cut.

Now, in an accelerated news timeline, it’s the same old song and dance in response to the Trump administration’s fascistic mobilization of federal and National Guard troops on the streets of Washington, DC. Democrats were once again leery about endorsing any response to this brownshirt offensive against a nonexistent wave of violent crime. In fear of appearing “soft on crime,” they largely tried to depict the Trump action as a “distraction” to direct public attention away from the simmering Epstein files scandal. This maneuver was so bereft of substance that it earned a blistering denunciation from reformed neocon William Kristol as “a rare trifecta of intellectual failure, political stupidity, and moral obtuseness.” And sure enough, Data for Progress is now out with poll findings showing that the MAGA siege of Washington is unpopular, with a 51 percent majority of respondents opposing the crackdown and 57 percent agreeing that Trump is “being authoritarian” in his bid to federalize DC law enforcement.

The pattern is by now so well established that it’s long past time to ask just what the hell Democratic leaders think they’re doing. Having granted the overarching premises of a MAGA putsch, they’re trapped in a brutal regress of faint-hearted policy accommodations that reinforce the Democrats’ image as a status-quo party with vanishingly little interest in, or capacity for, altering the fundamental terms of political engagement. It’s the reason that, for all of the GOP’s polling woes, congressional Democrats suffer from dramatically lower approval ratings.

To this day, establishment Democrats remain in blind thrall to what’s arguably the last major political innovation in their Beltway habitat: the woeful Clintonian cult of “triangulation.” This three-decades-old reflex was Bill Clinton’s effort to outflank the 1994 Gingrich revolution during his 1996 reelection bid; it basically positioned Democrats as meek dissenters to Republican power grabs and policy boondoggles so that they could make the pitch to voters that the party had outgrown its putative New Left excesses in favor of bipartisan difference-trimming. The inventor of the tactic was political consultant Dick Morris, who has followed its core logic to its inevitable conclusion, becoming a hard-right merchant of MAGA persecution narratives. The same fate has beset another well-heeled, Clinton-bred triangulation apostle, Mark Penn.

You’d think that these dismal career arcs would render triangulation a cautionary tale for Democrats—but you would, of course, be wrong. Triangulation remains the venerated, savvy move for an opposition party that scorns its own base and fawns on big-money donors. There’s a reason, after all, that its two most notorious devotees in the last congressional session were the now-retired Senators Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, arch foes of the Build Back Better legislative package that might have staked a claim to visionary long-term governance in the party. It’s far from a coincidence that both lawmakers also ranked among the Democrats’ biggest recipients of corporate campaign dosh. The triangulating impulse is also why the 2010 Affordable Care Act emerged from Congress without a public funding option, and why the Democratic Party elite is smitten with regressive measures like the privatization of public education and the means-testing of social welfare benefits. These are all pet Republican causes that Democrats falsely believe can be negotiated into passably humane form. The party’s position on many major GOP policy aims is roughly that of the fictional insurance company that continues agreeing to cover the perennial effort to reopen doomed upgrades of the Jurassic Park resort.

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The other thing to note about the legacy of Democratic triangulation is that, throughout the played-out maneuver’s death grip on the party establishment, the Republican Party has moved ever further to the right. It’s not hard to see why that’s the case; once your opponents grant the basic premises of your political agenda, you don’t go to the bargaining table—you go in for the kill. The GOP’s last feint toward reciprocal moderation in the triangulation mode came in the wake of Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat, when the Republican National Committee produced a postelection autopsy urging the party to become more moderate on divisive issues like immigration, and to improve its outreach among African American, gay, and Latino voters. I assume I don’t need to remind you how all that worked out.

The triangulation regime was already an unforced capitulation to the forces of political reaction in the Gingrich years; in a Trump regime that’s actively dismantling the rule of law and savaging the institutional foundations of our formal democracy, it’s an act of civic suicide. So, with the continued decline of the Democratic Party’s reputation in the public eye, let’s start calling triangulation by its true name: appeasement.

Casual followers of our politics can be forgiven for greeting the torrent of authoritarian power grabs engineered by the Trump White House as a disjointed series of passing obsessions—the antics of a supreme post-constitutional leader with poor impulse control. Unleashing federal troops and National Guard units in Los Angeles and Washington seems to appeal to Trump’s alpha leader fantasies, which had long marinated in his forays into football professional wrestling. Getting a mid-decade gerrymander on the books in the Texas legislature reflects a panicked bid for leverage in a 2026 midterm cycle that’s already shaping up badly for the GOP. And Trump’s threat to issue another executive order to abolish mail-in voting while shutting down voting machines he dislikes looks to be a reprisal of the conspiratorial greatest hits from the January 6 insurrection—another exercise in score-settling with Democratic candidates that, as Trump declared in his Truth Social rant on the subject, “CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE.”

Yet these disparate shows of MAGA strength are in reality all of a piece: They drive home a determination to continue depriving voters of basic ballot access, while intimidating the exercise of civic freedoms in Democratic cities led by Black mayors. “Washington, DC, is a dress rehearsal for Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta,” says David Daley, a longtime chronicler of Republican efforts to throttle the right to vote. On Election Day 2026, Daley says, “there will be National Guard troops and masked ICE to intimidate potential Democratic voters in force. You can’t intimate people through the mail.”

Lest that sound like one strain or another of Trump derangement syndrome, it’s important to recall that voter intimidation, under the flimsy guise of election monitoring, was one of the Republican Party’s most reliable tactics for suppressing the vote in heavily Democratic urban districts. A 1982 consent decree arising from the Republican National Committee’s mobilization of soi-disant election watchers in New Jersey had tamped down on the practice until a federal judge overturned it in 2018. Since then, aspiring intimidators of voters on the right have had a field day—during the 2024 cycle alone, Republicans dispatched 100,000 poll watchers, with heavy concentrations in swing states. In vowing to eradicate mail-in votes and shut down voting machines that can process ballots rapidly, Trump wants to dramatically ratchet up conditions for voter intimidation in future elections.

Trump’s threatened order is plainly unconstitutional—the Constitution clearly entrusts the states with the power to run elections in whatever ways they see fit. That’s why Trump’s Truth Social outburst also contained this bit of pseudo-legal sophistry: “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.” In a sanely configured legal order, Trump’s claims would be laughed out of court. But under a hard-right Roberts court that’s extended all manner of unwarranted executive privilege to the Trump White House and has undermined basic voting-rights protections, Trump’s ballot putsch may not be as outlandish as it seems.

In all events, the Trump administration is gearing up to suppress and distort the vote by any means necessary in the 2026 cycle—and it has plenty of ammunition at hand. In addition to the president’s assaults on a high-functioning and reliable elections infrastructure, there’s the bald power grab under way in the Texas legislature, which is on course to approve the addition of five safe GOP seats to a congressional delegation that’s already drawn up to produce the extreme over-representation of Republicans. Two weeks after Democratic members of the legislature fled the state to block the new maps, they have returned, bolstered by California Governor Gavin Newsom’s vow to create a four-seat gerrymander to bolster his state’s heavily Democratic delegation in Congress.

Newsom and his supporters say that this move is a long-overdue instance of Democrats fighting fire with fire—meeting the threat of Republican enclosures on the vote with some state-level dirty trickery of their own. But as Daley notes, this tactic comes too late in the districting wars to create any significant advantage. “Now the Democrats are saying they’re going to fight, but they can’t win,” he says. “No one is willing to say it—you can’t win this fight. There’s zero chance of that.”

That’s because Democrats aren’t facing up to the real nature of the GOP’s ballot putsch—continuing in the same conceptual rut that’s kept the party flat-footed in the face of Republican voter-suppression methods that have fundamentally reshaped the political playing field over the past decade and a half. Just for starters, Californians would have to approve a ballot initiative to overturn the popular and effective state districting plan endorsed by a nonpartisan commission. “So Democrats there are going to have to spend $200 million, probably, to convince people that gerrymandering is suddenly OK,” Daley says. “Then they’re going to pretend that this is temporary, but what are they planning to do in 2030, when the California delegation is 48–1 Democratic, and New York is 28–1? At some point, you’re going to have to win elections someplace else.”

And that is not shaping up as a strength for Democrats heading into the next midterm cycle. The Democratic National Committee is being shellacked in what Beltway insiders call “the money primary.” As Politico reports, the DNC had $15 million on hand at the end of June, while the Republican National Committee’s war chest is $80 million—a gap that’s twice the size of what it was at this juncture in Trump’s first term, and the DNC’s lowest cash reserve over the past five years.

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These money woes pale, however, beside the structural obstacles before Democratic candidates. Party leaders are mostly continuing to hew toward risk-averse strategies as the midterms loom into view—in thrall to the fantasy that somehow preexisting power arrangements will prevail if they eke out a win in the House. “I think they’re kidding themselves if they think this is going to be a wave election,” Daley says. “The generic ballot has Democrats just 2.1 percent, which is far behind where they were at this time in 2018.”

But what’s chilling is that even the 2018 blue wave did very little to alter the fundamentals of a right-skewing political system operating on gerrymandered maps and limited ballot access. “In 2006”—the last major Democratic midterm wave—“you won enough so that you could actually move the maps,” Daley says. “In 2018, they had a wave and the maps didn’t budge.” Indeed, Daley notes that the narrow wins that the Democrats clocked in 2018 were due largely to successful court challenges to gerrymanders in key states, together with an aggressive bid to flip seats in districts that the GOP had yet to gerrymander. But that all changed by the 2022 cycle, when Republicans instituted restrictive new maps, closing off Democrats from making conventional overtures to pick up formerly flippable seats. “A 2018 wave, if it happened today, would not turn the same number of seats,” Daley says.

And if you want to ponder true structural impossibilities, there’s the Senate map. “You’re looking at something like 19 Harris states, 24 red states, and seven that have been swing states,” Daley says. “In all of the Trump states, you have 100 percent Republican senators—that gets you to 48–50 right away. If Democrats even want to get within sniffing distance of a majority, they have to hold the two seats from Georgia and the two seats from Arizona. They can’t even get to 50 if the map holds.”

The only way to break through this doom cycle is for Democrats to undertake political persuasion in a different register—laying aside the twinned delusions of bipartisan comity and moderate-minded power sharing in favor of a robust defense of social democracy and actual democratic voting rights. Yet that involves acknowledging past failures and jettisoning the empty bromides of a consultant class that continues steering the party into debacle after debacle. It involves, in other words, meeting a genuine crisis with new ideas, an engaged moral imagination, and most of all, a grassroots politics that gives the party’s base something to vote for.

“This is the reality of American politics,” Daley says. “The Republicans have a stranglehold on the most important institutions that they don’t intend to give up.”

As pundits and political handicappers rallied to size up the impact of Donald Trump’s signature tax-and-spending bill, one of its defining features eluded them: The legislation graced with the taunting moniker “One Big Beautiful Bill” was in almost every respect a retread. Not just in that it rolls out unmerited tax cuts uniquely unsuited to prevailing economic conditions as a snake-oil panacea. In almost all of its provisions, the massive bill codified the disposition summed up in the Trump movement’s slogan “Make America Great Again”: a basic phobia of the future.

It bears noting that MAGA is itself a retread—a directive that Trump cribbed from Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. The postwar conservative movement has always been a decisive break with America’s past, disowning the familiar image of the country as a frontier-­driven agent of progress, dispensing massive outlays of resources to promote ambitious initiatives like the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, and the space program. True to that backward-spooling sentiment, the Trump spending plan eviscerates key federal efforts to confront pressing challenges of the future. Where the noted postwar conservative thinker William F. Buckley Jr. announced his ambition to stand athwart history and yell “Stop!,” the Trump movement has done him one better by pulling a lever and reversing course.

Consider, for example, the greatest future-­facing challenge before the planet: the existential threat of irreversible climate change. Trump’s bill eliminates the critical subsidies to solar and wind power that the Biden administration had won when the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 became the most far-reaching climate measure that any Western country has ever passed. In place of the desperately needed innovations Biden’s bill would have encouraged, the new bill restores the leasing of federal lands for oil, gas, and coal production. A report from Princeton University’s ZERO Lab and Evolved Energy Research calculates that by 2035, this reversion to traditional dirty energy sources will boost US carbon emissions by more than 1 billion tons—an increase of 20 to 25 percent over the totals projected under the Biden-era policies.

Then there are the bill’s deeply regressive reversals of social spending—$1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid alone, as well as steep reductions in spending for health coverage under the Affordable Care Act and critical income supports such as SNAP. MAGA defenders of this cruel brand of social predation had trouble squaring it with the simultaneous extension of historic giveaways to the highest earners. They were left reviving the hoariest bootstrap exhortations to the non-wealthy, claiming that Medicaid work requirements, for example, will spur Americans to achieve great individual success. (Never mind that the vast majority of Medicaid recipients already work.) Faced with the material consequences of its own shoddy policymaking, the MAGA right has retreated further into the past, reprising a brand of discredited social mythology that crested in the late 19th century.

Meanwhile, the bill also declares economic war on one of the more reliable channels of social mobility in modern America: an affordable college education. It eliminates the Grad PLUS program, established in 2006, which lets lower-income students in graduate programs and professional schools use federal loans to cover the full cost of tuition. Under­graduate federal loans that parents can take out on behalf of their child are now capped at $20,000 per year, with an aggregate limit of $65,000—a pittance in the face of spiraling college costs, and again a burden that will fall disproportionately on students from lower-income backgrounds.

These rollbacks are part of the debilitating horror that right-wing dogmatists experience before the workings of secular and skeptical inquiry—the prospect that the ownership of their children (and hence control of the future) will be wrenched from their grasp.

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The spending bill’s draconian cuts are but a distilled version of the MAGA movement’s broader future-phobia. The administration’s authoritarian and increasingly unpopular mass deportation campaign seeks to conjure a principally white Anglophone workforce out of the ether, because that’s how ghouls like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller—along with Trump himself—envision a “real America” restored to its full and natural sovereignty.

The same goes for Trump’s bedrock confidence that a restored tariffs regime—an outmoded economic palliative that also peaked in the 19th century—will magically revive American manufacturing when the country’s transformation into a service-based economy is well-nigh complete. The administration’s assaults on diversity programs, campus free speech, and public K-12 education all bespeak the same bid to conjure up an imagined community of uncomplicated, white-dominated institutional life—and to fiercely repudiate any program or initiative that acknowledges the country’s actually existing multiethnic makeup and multicultural future.

It was a fitting grace note to the spending bill’s passage that, just a few days later, a leak from the White House confirmed earlier reports that the Trump administration is set to impose brutal cuts to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—the signature program of New Frontier liberalism. Trump then named Sean Duffy—the hack reality-TV star he’d appointed, to disastrous effect, to head the Department of Transportation—as NASA’s interim director, after realizing that his previous nominee to the post, the tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, was a close confrere of Trump’s excommunicated former “first friend” Elon Musk and an occasional Democratic donor to boot. It was a perfect MAGA set piece: a petty ideological purge that delivered control of publicly funded space exploration to a minor TV celebrity who’s afraid of riding the New York subway.

When Trump’s insurgent 2016 campaign still looked to be a long-shot bid, his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton offered a typically anemic and unpersuasive rejoinder to his pet slogan, contending smugly that “America is already great.” Now that we are living through the implementation of the full MAGA agenda, it’s clear that her campaign would have been better off cribbing its riposte from the country’s first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln: “You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

It takes no great leap of the imagination to divine what President Donald Trump expects of E.J. Antoni, the man he’s nominated as the next head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Trump had fired Antoni’s Biden-appointed predecessor, Erika McAntarfer, on August 1, after the BLS had released a revision to the last jobs report in May, claiming without evidence that she had “rigged” the updated job report against him. The BLS numbers for May initially reported 144,000 new jobs added, but were revised drastically downward to 19,000; for June, the original tally of 147,000 new jobs plunged to just 14,000; July likewise showed an anemic boost of 73,000 jobs. In announcing Antoni’s nomination on Monday, Trump also tendered his marching orders: “Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I know E.J. Antoni will do an incredible job in this new role.”

And so he shall, given that Antoni’s only remote qualification for the job is a dogged commitment to the administration’s fanciful interpretation of leading economic indicators—a demonstrably false story of tariffs and tax cuts working a miraculous across-the-board recovery from an economy that was left for dead by the Biden White House. Unlike other commissioners of the BLS, Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, has no background in labor economics, and his social media forays into macroeconomic debates show vanishingly little knowledge there as well. Someone who doesn’t grasp basic metrics such as the import price index and who fails to account for the aging of the broader population in assessing workforce participation is now poised to oversee what’s arguably the most important set of data tracking the performance of the jobs economy.

Despite Trump’s histrionics over the July numbers, the BLS is often forced to revise past reports and projections for job growth on the basis of late-breaking payroll submissions from employers. There’s no scenario in which BLS commissioners can “rig” the job numbers since they don’t even see them prior to approving them for release. What Trump characteristically viewed as sinister deep-state sabotage was actually due diligence in reviewing early iterations of employment data. As commentators noted about McAntarfer’s dismissal, the drive to cook basic measures of economic performance in advance is another sign of the country’s descent into authoritarian squalor.

But killing the messenger who brandishes bad economic news is only half the battle for the ambitious MAGA fateful; to really get things rolling, you need to promote a practiced bootlicker into the new policy void. And this is where central casting appears to have unearthed Antoni, who is basically the economics version of Chris Rufo—a mendacious talking head who will do virtually anything to distort the basic terms of inquiry in order to arrive at an ideologically predetermined outcome. Even before Trump’s midsummer massacre at BLS, Antoni had been calling for the equally data-challenged Department of Government Efficiency to “take a chainsaw to the BLS.” In an August 4 Fox News interview, he also suggested that the BLS should simply suspend the release of jobs numbers until they’re subject to fuller vetting—a shift that, given the source and venue, could only mean further manipulation of the numbers into ideological agitprop. (This was the rare case of a MAGA apparatchik shouting the quiet part out loud so forcefully that White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt was forced to notionally walk it back—at least for now.)

In other social media broadsides, Antoni denounced Social Security as “a Ponzi scheme” arguing that “at some point…you’re just going to have to sunset the darn thing.” In a tendentious analysis of the housing market purporting to show that the Biden-led economy had been in recession since 2022, Antoni again misread basic data to classify housing investment figures as consumption metrics, effectively double-counting the numbers. 

This track record is so alarming that many conservative economists are already denouncing Antoni’s nomination. “He has either shown a complete misunderstanding of economic data and principles, or he’s showing a willingness to treat his audience with contempt and mislead them,” Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told The New York Times. Pomerleau’s AEI colleague Stan Veuger offered this blunt appraisal of Antoni’s professional profile to The Washington Post: “He’s utterly unqualified and as partisan as it gets.” Dave Herbert, from the American Institute for Economic Research likewise wrote on X, “I’ve been on several programs with [Antoni] at this point and have been impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed at which he’s gone full MAGA. I can only hope the Senate blocks this.”

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Most of the Beltway speculation surrounding Antoni’s nomination concerns Trump’s continual pressure on Fed Chairman Jerome Powell to lower interest rates as his tariffs policy continues to introduce inflationary shocks; using the BLS to launder data in order to create the broad impression of sound jobs growth would be an important gain for that crusade. But the salience of BLS data stretches far beyond the sanctum of the central bank and its client base of finance professionals. As the executive-branch watchdog group the Revolving Door Project notes, BLS findings are “baked into our economic policy…by law, several BLS data series also provide for the automatic adjustment of social insurance programs and welfare benefits. Juking the stats could harm the massive number of people that make use of these programs.”

The BLS jobs numbers directly affect access to unemployment insurance in most states. Cost-of-living increases for Social Security payments are weighted to the BLS’s Consumer Price Index, which tracks the impact of inflation on the purchase of basic goods. COLA findings also determine eligibility for other basic income supports such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (aka food stamps), Medicaid, and (in most states) Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. CPI research also grounds the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Fair Market Rents program, which allocates housing vouchers and other forms of rental assistance. If something as important as the collection and publication of fact-based assessments of real economic conditions were to fall completely under the sway of the administration’s MAGA-boosting narratives, it will place many Americans already living precariously at the mercy of whatever appeasement strategies hacks like Antoni adopt to appease the Great Leader.

Altogether, the CPI “affects the income of more than 108 million people because of statutory action,” per the BLS. As Revolving Door goes on to explain:

In other words, one-third of Americans have a source of income whose relationship to BLS data is written in the law. Virtually all of us will at some point in our lives receive benefits for which this is the case—assuming that Antoni is unsuccessful in sunsetting Social Security. The relationship between the CPI and your income also extends beyond public benefits: It is widely used in employment contracts, for example, for workers’ annual cost-of-living raises (especially in unionized workplaces).

Manipulating the stats is easier said than done, but if Antoni is able to make inflation look artificially low to benefit Trump politically, anyone who receives any kind of inflation-adjusted income should feel cheated.

Of course, the Trump White House has sought to steamroll the growing chorus of bipartisan critics. “Antoni’s education and vast experience as an economist has prepared him to produce accurate public data for businesses, households and policymakers to inform their decision-making,” White House spokesman Taylor Rogers says—an instance of magical thinking every bit as delusional as Trump’s conviction that Erika McAntarfer was “rigging” the data to make him look bad. In reality, Antoni’s “education and vast experience” boils down to one scholarly citation of his Northern Illinois University dissertation on fiscal policy—from the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2021, during the time that Antoni worked there. McAntarfer’s own research, The Wall Street Journal found, earned 1,327 citations. 

Then again, most followers of this White House’s swoon into slipshod and vibes-driven data oversight don’t need to consult the scholarly record to behold Antoni’s key qualification for the job. It’s right there in his Zoom background, which pays homage to the sunken Nazi battleship the Bismarck. MAGA’s leader has found a willing and eager mouthpiece to go down with the ship.