The Supreme Court says it will determine whether the Trump regime can “end birthright citizenship.” That’s the name given to the clause in the 14th Amendment that says that if you’re born on US soil, you’re a US citizen entitled to the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship.

Many roads were traveled to get here, the main one being Donald Trump’s decade-long campaign of hatred against immigrants.

But a road that gets less attention is just as important: Trump’s hate-mongering never saw an equal, opposite and liberal reaction.

Instead, over those years, the Democrats accepted cand Republican allies about immigrants and immigration law.

For instance, the southern border is not open. It has never been open in our lifetimes. But Trump says it is. The Republicans say it is. Their rightwing allies say it is. And the Democrats rarely challenge them.

Over time, the result has been a kind of conventional wisdom about the southern border that is so deeply established that Hakeem Jeffries avoided facing it head-on in a recent interview with CNN. Instead, the House leader gave Trump credit for securing the border. “The border is secure,” he said. “That's a good thing. It happened on his watch.”

Fact is, nothing about the southern border has changed. It wasn’t open last year, under Joe Biden’s watch. It wasn’t secured this year under Trump’s. That there are fewer migrants coming across is the result of other factors, mainly Trump’s criminal treatment of immigrants. (In practice, they now have few legal protections. Everyone knows it.)

By giving Trump credit for something he did not do, Jeffries validates the lie – that under a Democratic president, the southern border was open. In doing so, he undermines his own party’s position, allowing the GOP to define the terms. That makes it untenable to stand up for immigrants and their constitutional rights. Ultimately, Jeffries cedes ground in a much bigger debate over who counts as an American.

Repeat this pattern long enough, in the absence of an equal, opposite and liberal reaction to Trump’s hate-mongering, and you get what we now have: a high court that will decide whether a president can break the law and ignore the unambiguous wording of the 14th Amendment.

For too long, the Democrats have treated the southern border as a distraction. The Republicans have not, because it represents the highest stakes – the power to decide who America is for. Is it for the rich white men who have historically controlled it or for everyone?

I don’t know what the Supreme Court is going to decide, but I do know the mainstream position of the Democratic Party can no longer hold. The Democratic Party needs to be reminded of its values, the liberal principles that have animated reformers since the founding.

For that task, the republic is fortunate to have visionaries like Adam Gurri. He’s the editor of Liberal Currents, a publication dedicated to the revival of American liberalism after a long period of complacency. Adam is currently in the middle of a big fundraising push to expand the magazine’s reach and influence. I think he’s doing so just in time.

In this interview, Adam tells me about an ambitious project coming up, something he calls The Reconstruction Papers, an effort to lay down the intellectual basis for the restructuring of the constitutional order.

Above and beyond that, Adam told me, “we will stand for and promote a set of principles and won't be cowed either by political expediency or institutional force. And we will continue to cultivate a community alongside the publication that people can feel safe inside of.”

American liberalism has needed a refresher for a long time. I think Liberal Currents is that refresher. Its focus, above all, is liberty and justice for all. How did you get started and why?

We started out as a response to Trump the first time around. More to what he represented than the man himself. It seemed to us that liberalism had grown complacent. Its values had become assumptions held by a lot of people, and those assumptions had gone more or less unquestioned for a generation.

We got started because we believed those assumptions were by and large good, actually, but that people had been left unable to articulate why they were good. There was an intellectual vulnerability in this regard, because our enemies had spent decades aware of what our assumptions were and positioning themselves to attack them, whereas we liberals spent that time feeling as though we had already won.

Good times make weak liberals? Hard times make strong liberals?

I don't like to put it that way just because it sounds like we need some kind of existential battle in order to make progress, and I just don't believe that's the case.

What I would say is that things were becoming untenable already. A lot of our best institutions were designed under economic and social conditions that no longer apply. A lot of our oldest institutions were first drafts of democracy that sorely needed updating and we just sort of knuckled down and kept going.

A lot of work needed to be done, I suppose is my point. And a lack of truly understanding the heart of it, the why, the rationale behind these choices made in the past made it harder to to get that work done. The open conflict of the Trump era has certainly brought things into sharper focus for a lot of people. I'd like to think that wasn't the only path we could have taken, and I certainly believe we needn't hope for some future conflict to help us advance yet further some day.

Where do you see the place of Liberal Currents among other liberal publications, the few there are, and where do you want it to be?

If I were to draw a parallel, I would say Liberal Currents seeks to be The Atlantic, if The Atlantic were run by people truly committed to liberalism and to opposing the consolidation of dictatorship here.

We are a place where liberals can have internal debates about how to orient ourselves to events, as well as for ideas and principles. But we are also a place that won't blow with the political winds, but instead continue to fight for liberal principles, on behalf of everyone, even when trans rights or immigration does not poll well, say.

We are also a place that seeks to give positive answers and provide an actual vision of a liberal future. A lot of people have been caught flatfooted by the crisis. Many genuinely just don't know what to do, even if they understand the danger. We want to be a place that provides at least the beginnings of answers, starting points and ways of thinking about the problem.

You're in the middle of a big fundraising push. What do you envision for Liberal Currents?

We're going to grow the voice of genuine liberals who hate fascism in our media system. One concrete thing we're going to do is invest in a project we're calling The Reconstruction Papers, a printed essay collection where we will draw on a wide variety of subject matter experts in political science, higher education, media studies and more.

These experts will write about how to not only repair the damage that has been done in their area of focus, but how to rebuild and reform into something better than we started with. In general our pitch to people is that we will aim to grow ourselves into a version of The Atlantic that will never abandon trans people or immigrants or people of color to fascists.

We will stand for and promote a set of principles and won't be cowed either by political expediency or institutional force. And we will continue to cultivate a community alongside the publication that people can feel safe inside of.

When I heard the news about two National Guard troops who were shot in Washington over the Thanksgiving holiday, the first person I thought of was Radley Balko. He’s the author of The Rise of the Warrior Cop and publisher of The Watch, a newsletter. If anyone knows about the complex intersection of criminal justice and civil liberties, it’s him.

I wanted to ask what he thought. See the interview below.

West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, had deployed a number of his state’s guardsmen to Washington as part of the president’s scheme to send military forces to US cities. Donald Trump has suggested that local police departments are failing to fight crime.

But it was Washington police that not only caught the shooter. They shot him. And now, in the wake of that crime, DC police are escorting Guard troops for their own protection. (Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said the guardsmen were targeted. One of them is dead, the other remains gravely injured. Meanwhile, the shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is hospitalized. He was charged with murder last week.)

So the gambit was never about crime-fighting, Radley told me. It was about an administration putting on a show of force. “That's really what we've seen in DC. Guard troops have been patrolling in low-crime, tourist areas, not in parts of the city with higher crime rates.”

But it would be a mistake to see this effort as part of a larger, decades’ long pattern of militarizing American police departments, Radley said.

The old debate was underscored by a shared understanding, he said – that democracies don’t use the military for law enforcement. “What's happening now in some ways supersedes that debate. Trump wants to use the military itself for domestic policing. He's obliterating that shared understanding that this isn't something free societies do.”

The president has always wanted a paramilitary that’s loyal to him. In many ways, he now has one, not in the state National Guard but in ICE and Border Patrol. They are acting as if answerable only to him.

Therefore, accountability is going to be hard to come by, Radley said.

State and local authorities that have tried have faced daunting odds.

Even so, Radley said, “I think local prosecutors should try anyway.”

“The administration is encouraging a culture of aggression, lawlessness and racism,” Radley told me. “It's really dangerous stuff. So accountability has to come at the state and local level. Even if it's ultimately futile, I think it sends an important message that they don't get to just rampage through these cities with impunity.”

Washington cops are now patrolling alongside National guardsmen in Washington. Weren't the cops doing such a poor job that the National Guard had to get involved to fight crime? What is going on?

DC’s crime rate has always been higher than that of other cities its size. There are lots of possible explanations for that. But when Trump deployed the National Guard, crime was going down in the city, after a surge during the pandemic (a surge that hit most of the rest of the country, too). Moreover, Guard troops aren't cops. They aren't trained to conduct policing patrols, respond to emergencies or threats, or to solve crimes. There's really no reason to deploy the National Guard other than as a show of force. And that's really what we've seen in DC. Guard troops have been patrolling in low-crime, tourist areas, not in parts of the city with higher crime rates.

The two victims were targeted, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser said. The shooter’s motive is still unclear. What's your best guess?

From what I've read, he was part of an elite, CIA-trained unit in Afghanistan who undertook extremely dangerous missions to aid the US war effort [the “war on terror”]. And also from what I've read, other members of that unit have felt abandoned by the US government — as have other Afghans who assisted US troops during the war.

It looks like the Democrats are not arguing over crime rates and whether the president is justified in ordering troops to DC and other cities. They seemed to be focused on blaming Donald Trump for the attack. Are they right? The news today, about the shooter being CIA-trained, suggests there's more to blame the president for.

I won't claim to be a political operative. So while I don't know what would be most persuasive to the public, in terms of fostering public understanding, I think it's important to point out all of these things.

The crime rate is down in every city to which Trump has tried to send the National Guard to "fight crime." But also, he has zero authority to send the National Guard to fight crime. The National Guard isn't trained to fight crime. And Trump has offered different justifications for sending the National Guard depending on whether his audience is the federal courts, Fox News, the press, or someone else.

(In addition to "fighting crime," he has claimed it's necessary to send in the military and National Guard to carry out deportations, to put down protests, and because protests have inhibited the ability of federal law enforcement to carry out mass deportations.)

It's all been rooted in shameless lies and distortions of reality.

The truth is that Trump has always

• wanted a paramilitary force answerable only to him, and which he could deploy anywhere in the country for any reason
• expressed his admiration for strongmen and dictators who had such a force and used it to suppress dissent and put down their enemies, and
• he neither understands nor cares much for the norms and laws that restrict a president's ability to deploy the military domestically.

The government has militarized civil society for many years now, especially since 9/11. Police departments, as you have written, are more or less small armies. Is a president sending troops to cities the end point of that process or more of the same with no end in sight?

It's really a new, disturbing, and in some ways ambiguous escalation.

The discussion about police militarization has always been grounded in a shared understanding that using the military for domestic law enforcement is a dangerous idea that free societies avoid. It isn't what soldiers are trained to do. And democracies that go down that road tend to not remain democracies for long.

The debate had been about whether the police were becoming too influenced by the military -- whether the use of military weapons, uniforms, gear, and lingo was fostering in police an aggressive "us versus them" mindset that's inappropriate for domestic policing.

What's happening now in some ways supersedes that debate. Trump wants to use the military itself for domestic policing. He's obliterating that shared understanding that this isn't something free societies do.

Yet in some ways, police in the US have become more "militarized" (for lack of a better term) than the military. I've often had police officials who agree with me on these issues tell me that officers who are ex-military tend to have a positive influence on other cops, because the military instills more discipline and accountability than modern police agencies do. We're seeing this play out right now.

The way ICE and Border Patrol have behaved in Chicago, LA, Charlotte and other cities is as aggressive, confrontational, and ugly as it gets.

It's actually hard to imagine the National Guard doing worse. It is made up of part-time citizens who tend to live in the communities where they're deployed (though Trump is changing that, too). They aren't immersed in toxic police culture. We saw this on display during Trump's first term, after the violent clearing of Lafayette Park in DC. It was the National Guard troops and commanders who came forward to dispute the White House narrative about what happened.

That said, I do think what Trump wants to do with the military is dangerous. And as we've seen in other areas, if he encounters National Guard commanders and troops who aren't as aggressive and loyal as he wants, he'll remove them and replace them with people who are.

The president already has a paramilitary in ICE and Border Patrol. Democratic leaders like Illinois Governor JB Pritzker have ramped up their rhetoric. Are we seeing the makings of conflict, perhaps armed conflict, between state authorities and ICE and Border Patrol? Or is there a plan to keep a paper trail on ICE agents for future investigation by state prosecutors? What are you seeing?

It will be very difficult to prosecute ICE or Border Patrol officers in state courts. On the few occasions state prosecutors have tried, the DOJ has just had the case removed to federal court, then dropped the charges (this has been true in administrations from both parties). I think there's a real worry that submitting federal agents to local authority will diminish federal policing powers.

That said, I think local prosecutors should try anyway. Currently there's no accountability for these officers. They can't really be sued. Trump's DOJ won't prosecute them in federal court. And he's likely to pardon them from any prosecution in a future administration.

Meanwhile, the administration is encouraging a culture of aggression, lawlessness and racism. It's really dangerous stuff. So accountability has to come at the state and local level. Even if it's ultimately futile, I think it sends an important message that they don't get to just rampage through these cities with impunity.

When I interviewed Sanho Tree, I wanted to discuss a recent CNN report. Apparently, in 2016, when Pete Hegseth was still a Fox anchor, he said military personnel should refuse to obey unlawful orders.

I wanted to talk to Tree, who is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, about the hypocrisy of saying one thing when the president is Barack Obama and another when the president is Donald Trump.

That’s mostly what we discussed (see below) – until the last question.

That’s when Tree characterized the September boat bombing as a much bigger deal. “I think this policy of murdering civilians goes much deeper in this administration. … This was a conspiracy to commit murder and that's how it should be investigated,” Tree told me.

I’m putting up front this concept of a conspiracy to commit murder, because of what the Post reported today – details from a meeting in October between congressional leaders and military officials on the killing of suspected drug runners in the Caribbean near Venezuela.

Evidently, the Pentagon did not send any lawyers to explain the legal basis for the boat attacks. (There have been nearly 20 since the first one on September 2.) The Department of Defense could not explain the mission’s “strategy or scope.” Leading Republicans complained about receiving more transparency from the Biden administration. Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers, who is chair of the House Armed Services Committee, was critical of the Pentagon’s “secrecy.”

Yet despite the “secrecy,” Admiral Frank Bradley, who was in charge of the September 2 bombing, is expected to tell lawmakers during a classified briefing today “that he considered the survivors viable targets, not shipwrecked, defenseless mariners,” the Post reported.

What was the legal basis for his decision that could not be explained by Pentagon lawyers? What was the “strategy or scope” of the mission that could not be explained by Department of Defense officials? Are lawmakers going to accept Bradley’s view or will they demand more?

The Post report went on to say that support of Hegseth by GOP congresspeople has “atrophied,” because his “ability to lead the department, some people argued, could be weakened even if Congress ends up clearing him of wrongdoing in the boat strike inquiries.”

It’s still not clear to me why Hegseth is in trouble. After all, he survived the Signal scandal. But the reason might be suggested in three ways.

One is that subsequent strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean did not “kill everybody,” as Hegseth had ordered. According to the Post, “in the strikes occurring since [September 2], the US military has rescued survivors or worked with other countries to attempt doing so.” Someone somewhere decided it was a bad idea to repeat the exercise.

Two is that Hegseth asked the man in charge of military operations in that part of the world to resign. According to a Wall Street Journal report published Wednesday, his argument with Admiral Alvin Holsey “began days after President Trump’s inauguration in January and intensified months later when Holsey had initial concerns about the legality of lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean.”

Reading between the lines, Hegseth wanted Holsey to commit murder.

Admiral Holsey said no.

But Admiral Bradley said yes.

And finally, the idea of killing drug runners without due process of law had been in circulation throughout the regime since at least February. That’s when former Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who is now a federal judge, said authorities shouldn’t bother ceasing drugs at sea anymore. “Just sink the boats," he said, according to NPR.

“Bove's remarks, which have not previously been publicly reported, suggest at least some members of the administration were considering this policy shift as early as six months before the boat strikes began.”

Put another way: a policy shift away from due process to murder.

When six congressional Democrats with backgrounds in national security came out with a video last month reminding military personnel of their obligation to refuse illegal orders, the response by the White House was excessive even by its own hysterical standards.

Donald Trump suggested that they should be executed for sedition. Pete Hegseth threatened to bring US Senator Mark Kelly, who is a retired Navy pilot, back into service in order to court martial him.

But the reaction might have been appropriate if the White House believed the six Democrats had learned about a conspiracy to commit murder and were getting ahead of news about it coming to light.

The Democrats released their video on Tuesday, November 18. Every day since then has brought headlines about illegal orders, putting the Democrats, especially Kelly, in a position of righteous indignation.

The indignation promises to rise even higher. At today’s classified briefing, lawmakers saw video of the first and second strikes on September 2. Washington Congressman Adam Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent that: “It looks like two classically shipwrecked people.” It is a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight.”

I said Sanho Tree’s comment about the conspiracy to commit murder was the first thing about my interview with him that I wanted to bring to your attention. But the rest of the interview (see below) is also important, because it suggests the disgusting belief underlying the conspiracy: that murder is OK when Republicans are the ones doing it.

That’s going to come as a shock to a lot of Americans and every single Republican in the Congress knows it. That explains why some of them are following Mark Kelly’s lead and getting ahead of future bad news. Pete Hegseth has survived plenty of scandal so far. Can he survive this?

In 2016, Hegseth said the same thing that Mark Kelly and the other Democrats said -- that military personnel should not obey illegal orders. Why is it OK when he says it but not OK when Kelly says it?

Hegseth answered truthfully and now he's feigning ignorance so that his new stance comports to the whims of the Mad King. All policies in this administration cater to an audience of one. There is no sign of the old interagency process when stakeholders and agencies come to the table to give their best advice. It's all about kissing Trump's a--.

In his report, CNN's Andrew Kaczynski foregrounded the context. Hegseth made his remarks at the end of Obama's presidency. What's changed? he asked. The president, he said. What's your view on that?

The entire GOP has either reversed gear on their longheld beliefs to align with Trump or they've left the party to become Never Trumpers. It's certainly true in Congress. Marco Rubio is but one example.

Loyalty is at the heart of this. Under Obama, it was loyalty to the Constitution, not to the president. Under Trump, it's loyalty to the president, not the Constitution. Where is the honor in that?

Being craven is not honorable. I can see how one's views may evolve over time (and mine certainly have), but the GOP is doing so many 180-degree reversals in order to not contradict Donald Trump that there can be no honor when it's so deeply rooted in dishonesty.

Because of the difference between what Hegseth said under Obama and what he is saying under Trump, I should point out the obvious color of law for Hegseth. White is legal, thus deserving of loyalty. Black is illegal, thus undeserving of loyalty. Any reaction to that?

Take Trump's attacks on Somalis as a response to an attack by an Afghan refugee. Those countries have nothing to do with each other. Around 90 percent of Somalis in Minnesota are citizens. Republicans call them "illegals" and attack them because they aren't white.

Trump laid out his attack against people of color when he rode down that escalator in 2015. He always links immigrants to crime, the same way Nazis linked Jews to crime. Der Sturmer had a daily column in the 1930s that highlighted crimes committed by Jews. Trump set up a similar office in the White House in January 2017 to publicize immigrant crimes. I outlined his worldview back in 2018.

If Hegseth is forced to resign, how would that affect cabinet members? How would it affect government workers who fear retribution? Seems like the flood gates would open and cabinet members would have targets on their backs? What do you think?

I think this policy of murdering civilians goes much deeper in this administration. Trump started ranting about taking Venezuela's oil in 2017. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller began asking about sinking boats in 2018. In February of this year, Emil Bove (now a federal judge) said we should “just sink the boats.” They actively sidelined critics and anyone else who raised any concerns. This was a conspiracy to commit murder and that's how it should be investigated.

Don’t be fooled. The only people undermining the American military’s chain of command are the president and his secretary of defense.

How?

Specifically, by blaming the admiral who was in charge of the boat bombing in the Caribbean in September. More generally, by lying and acting cowardly. Leaders who stand by their decisions and take responsibility for them tend to inspire trust. Those who don’t don’t.

According to the Post, Pete Hegseth gave the order to “kill everybody.” Now, however, he’s now scapegoating Admiral Frank Bradley. That suggests that Hegseth is well aware of the truth – that the bombing was illegal, that the follow-up bombing of survivors was illegal, and that killing alleged criminals without due process of law is murder.

Donald Trump is now helping him run from criminal consequences.

The president wants us to believe that six Democrats who made a video urging military personnel to refuse illegal orders are “sowing distrust and chaos in our arms force,” according to the Pentagon, and “putting military servicemembers in harm’s way by telling them to disobey their commander-in-chief,” according to the White House.

Asking servicemembers to act honorably never hurt them. Reminding them to act lawfully never sowed distrust. But leaders commanding subordinates to murder and then throwing them away? Forget about disobeying illegal orders. Hegseth is making it so no one obeys any.

The focus now seems to be on the second strike and whether it was legal. The question is of consequences – should a “secretary of war” who commits a “war crime” in the absence of war still have his job?

That seems overwrought. There is no war. There are no war crimes. Hegseth wanted to pretend, because “war” makes good TV and makes his daddy look strong. But when playtime was over, and he realized he was in trouble, Hegseth decided that the principles of the “warrior ethos” weren’t worth it. It was better to save his own skin. Yesterday, he said the “fog of war” prevented him from seeing the September bombing survivors. He repeated that killing them was Bradley’s call.

Whatever the facts of the bombing are, and they will be determined by a forthcoming congressional investigation, they are secondary to the facts of Hegseth’s behavior afterward. That behavior is more devastating to the military than his command to kill everybody.

“The ‘kill everybody’ chest-thumping only works as long as he never has to own the moral and legal weight that actual soldiers carry,” an authority on military strategy and civil-military relations told me.

He went on:

“The moment accountability enters the picture, he backpedals and shifts blame onto the uniformed military. That’s precisely the kind of cowardice that professionals, people who live in a world where responsibility is inseparable from lethality, find contemptible.”

Contempt.

Once it’s sunk in, there’s no going back.

The authority I’m quoting here goes by the name of Secretary of Defense Rock. I asked for his real name, but because Trump is the president, he declined. He publishes History Does You, a newsletter about “the complex dynamics between military and civilian spheres.”

In the interview below, he explains why Trump’s critics are missing the big picture. “The White House’s willingness to validate Hegseth’s narrative is setting up a collision course between the president and the military, and the only open question is how far the brass will go in quietly distancing themselves while still providing him political cover.”

Hegseth seems to be saying that Admiral Bradley made the call to kill survivors of the September boat attack. The White House seems to be backing him up. What's going on here from your perspective?

It increasingly looks like the military is being positioned as the fall guy. With the House and Senate now pledging bipartisan investigations into the strikes, the uniformed side, bound by its "apolitical" posture, won’t publicly contradict the president, but senior officers will almost certainly push back through background briefings. The real story is that the White House’s willingness to validate Hegseth’s narrative is setting up a collision course between the president and the military, and the only open question is how far the brass will go in quietly distancing themselves while still providing him political cover.

It seems to me Hegseth has triggered a crisis of leadership. I mean, the Democrats want military personnel to refuse illegal orders. Hegseth is creating conditions in which people might refuse to obey any orders. If you can't trust the leader, then cover your ass, right?

Hegseth is effectively manufacturing a leadership crisis by eroding trust in the chain of command and civil-military relations. Democrats are focused on the narrow issue of refusing unlawful orders, but Hegseth’s framing invites something far more destabilizing: a worldview in which service members doubt the legitimacy of any orders from senior commanders. Once you introduce the idea that the commander might be lying or covering up war crimes, the instinct becomes cover your ass rather than execute, and that corrodes the very foundation of military discipline.

It should be said that Hegseth is demonstrating cowardice. "Kill everybody, but don't blame me.” That seems to expose the falsehood behind his whole "warrior ethos" position -- that there's no actual warrior there, just a cardboard cutout of one. I can't imagine that going over well with people with a sense of honor. Thoughts?

It cracks me up that he went to hang out with SOCOM, where they allowed him to ride on a little-bird helicopter, and cosplay as a warrior, and is now throwing them under the bus months later. The “kill everybody” chest-thumping only works as long as he never has to own the moral and legal weight that actual soldiers carry. The moment accountability enters the picture, he backpedals and shifts blame onto the uniformed military. That’s precisely the kind of cowardice that professionals, people who live in a world where responsibility is inseparable from lethality, find contemptible. It clearly exposes his “warrior ethos” as theater, not a character trait, and that gap will be evident to anyone who has actually worn a uniform or taken real risks, the more he continues to backpedal and blame others.

A warrior without honor is just a thug or the kind of man who would try telling us that murder is actually a heroic act of war worthy of praise. That seems to be missing from the debate so far. All the focus is on the second strike. But the first strike is clearly illegal, as in: America is not at war. What are we focusing on this and not that?

I kind of presume it’s because the American political system and the media ecosystem around it is always drawn to the spectacle around an action rather than the legality at the core of it. You’re right that a warrior without honor collapses into mere thuggery, and that is exactly the type of figure who reframes killing as valor while disowning responsibility. But the public debate isn’t grappling with that deeper moral question, because everyone has fixated on the second strike, the sensational story, the alleged order, the human drama. It is easier to fight over personalities, blame-shifting, and who said what than it is to confront the uncomfortable foundational issue that the first strike, and the strikes over the last few months, may have lacked a clear legal basis because the United States is not formally at war.

Focusing on the second strike lets politicians argue over process, mistakes, and optics without questioning the mission's legality. It's particularly safer for Republicans because it avoids forcing a reckoning with whether the president of their own party authorized an act of war without proper authority.

Hegseth survived the Signal scandal. He's clearly a national security threat. He will become more so over time. Is there impeachment in his future in your view? Perhaps if Mark Kelly leads the charge?

I have a hard time believing Republicans are going to make a serious effort, even though there is a lot of infighting. I think it's going to boil down to how successful Democrats are in the midterms, and if the leadership thinks that's a worthwhile use of political capital. I think there will be a clear case for impeachment, especially if uniformed military personnel testify about the strikes and point the finger at Hegseth. It already sounds like, behind the scenes, the administration is thinking of changing out Hegseth, but he wants a golden parachute. I think Mark Kelly certainly has the credentials as a centrist Democratic veteran for impeachment. Again, it's really going to boil down to elections and what the military says happened.

The 43-day government shutdown did not produce the outcome that the Democrats said they wanted. In fact, eight of them* caved before getting the president and the Republicans to negotiate on healthcare.

But the shutdown did demonstrate something important – that the Democrats are no longer the party of “norms and institutions.”

In October, US Senator Ruben Gallego was asked why his party was using the shutdown to reach a policy goal when the Democrats said in the past that doing so was in violation of “the norms of government.”

The reason, Gallego said, was Donald Trump.

Norms are “out the window.”

“You’re talking about norms in the time of Donald Trump?” Gallego said. “It’s also not normal to tear down the East Wing. … This is a man who’s extorting people. He’s literally breaking every rule. We’re not going to go back and play by the norms … I’m not going to abide by old norms, especially when you’re dealing with this presidency, this administration, and how the Republicans themselves have been acting.”

However, it’s one thing to say you’re not going to abide by old norms. It’s another to make new ones. That’s what some Democrats are doing.

Again, Gallego is representative.

He was asked what he would say to Pete Hegseth after the Defense Secretary threatened to prosecute US Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona.

“You will never ever be half the man that Senator Kelly is,” Gallego said. “You, sir, are a coward. And the fact that you are following this order from the president shows how big of a coward you are. I can't wait until you are no longer the secretary of defense” (my italics).

In the past, no Democrat would have made such a veiled threat. They would have feared the appearance of violating the norm against “weaponizing the federal government” against partisan adversaries.

But here, Gallego suggests a new set of norms:

• There must be consequences for presidential-level crimes.
• The Republicans can’t be trusted to hold their own accountable.
• Only the Democrats can do that. They must be the consequences.

“Donald Trump is gonna be gone in a couple years,” Gallego told CNN last week. “If you're part of the military that is going after sitting members of Congress … there will be consequences without a doubt.”

He even used the word “tribunal.”

“There’s going to be a lot of officers that will be part of this tribunal, if you want to call it that,” Gallego went on. “They’re going to be looking over their shoulders, because they know that Donald Trump will be gone and they will not have that protection. They’re going to have to do the safest thing possible, which is to follow the Constitution.”

The vast scale of corruption we are witnessing, with the blessing of the Republican Party, means the terms and conditions of the old social contract are void and no longer apply. The stakes, meanwhile, are much bigger than one authoritarian president. Everyone pays for the crimes of what some are calling “the Epstein class.” Here’s the Post:

“Today is the first real reckoning for the Epstein class,” Ro Khanna said, before calling the effort to obscure Epstein’s crimes “one of the most … disgusting corruption scandals in our country’s history.” He later told us that being “America first,” parroting the messaging that elevated Trump’s political career, meant “holding the Epstein class accountable” and “lowering costs” to make “people’s lives better.”

All the above is being said in the context of Trump’s growing weakness. Poll after poll show public dissatisfaction with his job performance, even among supporters. (Henry Enten said today that, all things being equal, there is no path to holding the House majority.) The Democrats see a chance to win back power. But what will they do with that power once they get it? Will they return to the old norms or make new ones?

Is this talk of future consequences real or just talk?

For an answer, I turned to Samantha Hancox-Li. She’s an editor and podcast host for Liberal Currents. In a recent essay, she wrote about the biggest problem facing liberals and Democrats, and the reason why they have in the past clung so fiercely to “norms and institutions.”

The fear of power.

“We have built systems that are so good at preventing us from doing anything that they also prevent us from doing good things,” Samantha told me. “And in this time of crisis — housing crisis, climate crisis, among others — we desperately need to do good things and not just prevent anyone from doing anything that might be bad.”

You have said the biggest problem with liberals is our fear of power. That probably comes as a surprise to some. What do you mean?

I mean the fear of power exercised badly. For many progressives, we start with an image — maybe a corporation polluting the environment or the government bulldozing a minority neighborhood in the name of urban renewal. And then we conclude that the correct response is to put a shackle on power. We need to make sure that before we do anything it's not going to hurt anyone. Sounds good, right?

But the devil's in the details. What does "make sure" really mean? Does it mean that we need 10 years of studies, of community engagement, of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits, of even more studies, before we can implement congestion pricing in New York City? Does it mean years of process before building 20 units of housing next to a busway? Does it mean that every random NIMBY can sue to stop the construction of solar energy, transmission, battery factories, etc?

In practice, the answer is yes: we have built systems that are so good at preventing us from doing anything that they also prevent us from doing good things. And in this time of crisis — housing crisis, climate crisis, among others — we desperately need to do good things and not just prevent anyone from doing anything that might be bad.

I was trying to think of an example: Merrick Garland. Thoughts?

Absolutely. I've focused on physical objects — on climate and housing — because these are longstanding problems and our self-imposed shackles have prevented us from effectively responding to them.

But it's also clear that when we take power back from Trump II, we're going to need to do some serious housecleaning. Biden came in on the idea that "the fever would break," everything would go "back to normal," that he didn't need to upset the apple cart by prosecuting criminals in high places. Hence, Garland's shocking inaction in response to Trump's J6 attack on the capital – inaction that ultimately enabled Trump's return to power.

But if we're going to do that kind of housecleaning, we can't allow ourselves to get hung up on process. We're going to have to nuke the filibuster. We're going to have to revitalize Congress. And that means expanding the Senate and adding states. We're going to have to do serious court reform. If we allow ourselves to get hung up on norms that Republicans treat as dead letters, we're going to fail. This means that we are going to need to really exercise power — not trip ourselves up with self-imposed process.

I think if we do come back into power, there's going to be a lot of voices calling for a "return" to normalcy, for creating even more process requirements that the next Trump will simply ignore. Look around us — have process requirements stopped Trump II? No.

We need more than just vetocracy.

We need a real revitalization of effective governance in America.

I would put your argument in the norms and institutions category. There's no sense in defending them if they have become corrupt or are too weak to do what needs doing. I found this surprising, from Ruben Gallego. You might have seen this clip. A hopeful sign?

A good sign, absolutely. Gallego is not exactly some radical leftist. He's a relatively moderate Democrat from a purple state, but he rightly recognizes that with Trump II's total assault on our republic and our constitution, we have exited the era of "normal politics."

That to me is the fundamental dividing line in progressive and Democratic politics — not between "moderates" and "progressives," but between those who want to fight and those who are still in denial.

As I wrote recently, "you don't get to decide when you're in a fight." MAGA made that choice. What matters now is how many of us wake up to that fact.

In my experience, the Democratic base knows we're in a fight. The base is raging angry and wants real change, not empty words.

The divide is among elites — in the Democratic Party, in the media, in civic institutions like colleges and law firms. Some want to pretend they can extract this or that policy concession from Trump. Others recognize that Trump wants to be king, that he wants to shred our constitution in favor of a vision of a white man's republic, and that we have to throw out our old ways of thinking and embrace war mindset.

It seems to me the Democrats, if they are going to use power to do good, need to relearn how to talk about it. In an interview with me, Will Bunch drew on language from the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s to secure more personal freedoms. Perhaps in a climate of tyranny, the Democrats can appeal to individual liberty?

I think the language of freedom and liberty is the fundamental terrain of American politics. I think a lot of leftists have been very uncomfortable with this for a long time. They don't want to talk about freedom. They don't want to talk about the Constitution. They don't want to wave the red, white and blue. They want to stand on the outside and critique all that. Personally I think these people are addicted to losing. If you want to win power in America, you do it using the language of freedom and the iconography of Americana.

So I think we as liberals need to embrace that imagery. I've seen an explosion of imagery drawing on the Revolutionary War, the Founding Fathers, and especially the Civil War and the long struggle against the slave power. I think this is great, because these are core parts of liberal history! Liberalism has always been a fighting faith. Liberalism has always been a revolution against oppression and tyranny. It's just that in the doldrums of the Long 90s, we allowed ourselves to forget that. But it's time to go back and remember what we're fighting for.

And that means insisting on democracy, insisting on inalienable rights, and insisting on the rule of law. All of these are under attack. Trump is deporting citizens, murdering random fishermen, deploying thugs and masked secret police to our cities. Maga wants a king. We must stop them and deliver on the promise of America for all Americans — a better life, hope for the future, freedom in a diverse country.

About those elites. Many inside the Democratic Party are going to lobby hard against the use of power to do good things, because those good things will help everyone, and anything that helps everyone tends to be bad for elites. What are your suggestions?

First and foremost, we gotta win some primaries. That is the single biggest lever of power we've got to change the internal makeup of the Democratic Party. Earlier, you mentioned Ruben Gallego. He's in that seat because he beat Kyrsten Sinema, a notoriously centrist politician, in a primary. But at the same time, we can't go chasing after every random newcomer who talks a big game about bringing populism to Washington — just look at what happened with John Fetterman. People liked his "sticking it to the man" vibes, and it turns out those were mostly just vibes. In practice, he's been a relatively conservative senator. So we need to actually think about good primary challengers.

Second, I think we need to win the war of ideas. Politicians mostly know politics. When it comes time to implement policy, what they do is go to "the bookshelf." This is the collection of ideas and policies and programs that intellectuals and pundits in their coalition have come up with. Why did Biden pursue a radically more aggressive stimulus than Obama? Because Democratic intellectuals had consolidated around inadequate stimulus as the cause of the Great Recession.

So we need to make sure the bookshelf is well-stuffed with workable plans that Democrats can implement. We need to demonstrate that moderation is a false light — and that a real reforging of the constitutional order is necessary. That means both high church policy and a trench fight of social media, the constant war for attention in the attention economy. The posting-to-policy pipeline is very real.

So there it is.

Win primaries and win the war of ideas.

We gotta do both.

*There were, in fact, nine. Chuck Schumer orchestrated the Senate’s surrender, though he himself voted against reopening the government.

US Senator Mark Kelly is one of six Democrats with national security backgrounds who released a video last week reminding military personnel they are obligated by law to refuse to obey illegal orders.

The reaction by the Trump regime is a distillation of animating force that has driven America to its current crisis: the impunity of elites.

First, the president suggested that the Democrats should be executed for sedition, which is not only a lie but an incitement to violence. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Trump accused his enemies of domestic terrorism. But what’s good for them isn’t good for Trump.

Then, the US secretary of defense threatened to prosecute Kelly under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for the fact that he and the other Democrats quoted from the Uniform Code of Military Justice in their video urging members of the military to refuse to obey illegal orders.

The president gave Pete Hegseth an illegal order. Hegseth obeyed. And now they’re mad about Kelly and the Democrats calling them out on it.

But impunity is only half the story. The other half is contempt.

Or it should be.

That’s why I was pleased to see Mark Kelly’s appearance on Rachel Maddow’s show this week. At the end, she asked how he was doing – if the stress of the president’s threats were getting to him and his family.

Mark Kelly is a decorated combat pilot. He flew close to 40 missions during the First Gulf War. He was an astronaut. His wife survived an attempted assassination. To my ears, his reply was contemptuous – not of Maddow’s question, but of the idea that Trump can intimidate him.

“I’ve had a missile blowup next to my airplane. I’ve been nearly shot down multiple times. I’ve flown a rocket ship into space four times. … My wife, Gabby Gifford, meeting her constituents, shot in the head, six people killed around her. A horrific thing. She spent six months in the hospital. We know what political violence is and we know what causes it, too. The statements that Donald Trump has made are inciteful. He’s got millions of supporters. People listen to what he says more than anybody else in the country. He should be careful with his words.

“But I’m not gonna be silenced here. Is it stressful? I’ve been stressed by things more important than Donald Trump trying to intimidate me in shutting my mouth and not doing my job. He didn’t like what I said. I’m gonna show up for work every day, support the Constitution, do my job, hold this administration accountable – hold this president accountable when he is out of line. That’s the responsibility of every US senator and every member of Congress. He’s not gonna silence us.”

The written word can do a lot but it can’t carry the emotion in the bolded sentence above. Listen for yourself. What I hear is contempt.

That’s what this country needs to hear. That’s what this country needs to hear from men like United States Senator Mark Kelly. America needs more contempt for impunity for the law, morality and decency, and for one more thing – untouchable elites, like Trump, who never grew up.

Last week, when Trump met New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, he met a man who, like Mark Kelly, could not be intimidated. The reaction from the president, according to Bruce Fanger, was “that strange little-boy energy, the hero-worship vibe, like he’s suddenly standing in line for an autograph from someone who embodies a version of power he’ll never actually possess: calm, earned, rooted.”

You could say Trump’s behavior with Mamdani was obsequious, Fanger said, but there’s more to it. There’s “that schoolboy glow — ‘Notice me. Approve of me. Let me stand near your seriousness so I look serious too.’ It’s the emotional posture of someone who’s been trying to cosplay adulthood for 50 years and gets starstruck by the real thing” (my italics).

Trump has lived a long life believing he’s the exception to every rule – that he will never face the consequences of his choices, not even the seemingly heinous, like association with known child-sex trafficker.

Only the little people are accountable, not this One Special Boy.

That deserves contempt, or at least righteous anger, which is what D Earl Stephens heard in Kelly’s voice when I asked him. In any case, Earl said, it’s amazing that everyone isn’t feeling one of those emotions.

Earl is the former managing editor of Stars and Stripes, a newspaper covering the military and military affairs. He now publishes the newsletter Enough Already. Like me, he’s a regular contributor to Raw Story. “Either we are a law-abiding country or we aren't,” he told me.

Here’s my short interview with Earl.

Rachel Maddow asked Mark Kelly if he was stressed by the president's attempts to intimidate him. Kelly's answer dripped with contempt. Is that the spirit we need to see from the Democrats?

I didn't hear contempt. I heard righteous anger, and I just don't know how everybody isn't angry at this point right now.

Pete Hegseth talks endlessly about "warriors." Yet by his words and deeds, he's a fool. This is evident to the personnel inside of the military, isn't it? Or are there too many people willing to play along?

Sorry to say, there are far too many people willing to play along. Hegseth speaks to far too many young, immature white men, who are angry and aren't even sure why. They are led by their emotions, which is why we lean on them to do most of our fighting.

Ruben Gallego put it in terms of manliness. What's your view?

This is 100 percent correct, and goes to my earlier point of immaturity.

Am I right to say Kelly is going to get more famous thanks to Trump that Trump will look at him the way he looked at Zohran Mamdani?

You are. The more people get to know Kelly, the more they will be impressed by him. “Patriot” is a word that is tossed around too much, but Kelly fits the definition.

Is accountability the direction the Democrats need to go on? Whether it's the cabinet or ICE thugs?

I just don't see another direction. Either we are a law-abiding country or we aren't. This all should have been nipped in the bud with urgency following the attack on January 6. For whatever reason, Joe Biden and/or Merrick Garland dawdled, and allowed Trump a second wind.

We damn well better learn from that.

Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene surprised me Friday by announcing her resignation from the Congress effective January 5.

I was surprised, because just a few days prior she flexed her muscle when she got the president to step off. She had been demanding the release of the Epstein files. Donald Trump called her a traitor. Though she got death threats, she didn’t budge. Then, last Monday, he caved.

CNN’s Dana Bash said their feud was the breakup heard around the world. That seemed confirmed by Greene’s resignation. Trump called her a RINO (Republican in Name Only). He pledged support for a primary challenger. Indeed, it appeared she is similar to many moderate Republicans, a casualty of a GOP that’s in thrall to Trump.

But I think there’s another way of looking at it.

First, it’s far from certain that she would have lost. As I have said before, Greene is highly attuned to the conspiracy wing of the Republican Party. That’s the faction that demanded the release of the Epstein files. That’s the faction, on hearing last spring that the Justice Department would not make them public, that lost faith in Trump.

Greene stood up to him and won. Would she lose next year? Maybe. But she also raised the question of whether Trump is a spent force.

Second, Greene is ambitious. She appears to be dissatisfied with representing a district and is aiming for something bigger, perhaps a run for the presidency or, more likely, a role in the pundit corps.

Before the official “breakup,” Greene said the president “abandoned” his MAGA base. She criticized the Republicans’ role in the longest government shutdown in history. She was vocal about dramatically rising Obamacare premiums. She trashed Speaker Mike Johnson.

On ABC’s “The View,” co-host Sunny Hostin said, “I feel like I’m sitting next to a completely different Majorie Taylor Greene.” Co-host Joy Behar said, “Maybe you should become a Democrat.” In response, Greene said, “I’m not a Democrat. I think both parties have failed.”

It doesn’t take much to imagine her as a television pundit who speaks for the alienation of the MAGA faithful from all politics. (Also: she’s resigning in January. Congresspeople don’t usually do that if they believe they can’t win. Instead, they say they aren’t running again.)

That leads me to my final point. It’s being suggested that Greene wasn’t MAGA enough. Trump declared her persona non grata. As a consequence, she’s resigning. This is the president’s preferred view.

But the truth is probably the opposite.

Greene is MAGA to the core. She embodies its purest id. She spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. She defended the J6 insurrection. She suggested support for executing Democrats. The list goes on and on. It could be that Greene is leaving because there’s no future for her. But it could be that she’s leaving because there’s no future for MAGA.

Greene implied as much in her resignation announcement.

In the video, she characterized herself and Trump voters as loyal soldiers in a rebellion against the establishment. She suggested that they were betrayed by their leader, who joined forces with the enemy.

She said:

“I refuse to be a battered wife, hoping it all goes away and gets better. If I am cast aside by the president … and replaced by neocons, big pharma, big tech, military industrial war complex, foreign leaders and the elite donor class that can never ever relate to real Americans, then many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well.”

But the strongest evidence to suggest that Greene herself does not believe there’s a future for MAGA came when she said the following:

“There is no plan to save the world or a 4-D chess game being played.”

It’s just one line, easily overlooked, but it’s critically important. It refers to the story that the conspiracy wing of the Republican Party believes to be the absolute truth – that there is a secret cabal of pedophiles, represented by Jeffrey Epstein, that’s trying to destroy America.

The hero of the story, Donald Trump, was supposed to return to power after being cheated in 2020 to reveal the names of the conspirators. (They were said to be people like billionaire George Soros and other super-Jews who “control” Democrats like Barack Obama.) The plan was supposed to culminate in a bloody day of reckoning called “The Storm.” It was to vanquish evil, restore justice and make America great again.

When the Justice Department decided against releasing the Epstein files, on account of Donald Trump’s name appearing in them too many times, maga supporters experienced a crisis of faith. He had forced them to choose between believing in him or believing in their enemies.

In her resignation announcement, Greene affirmed that the enemies are indeed real. “Standing up for American women who were raped at 14 years old, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president.”

And in saying “there is no plan to save the world,” she came as close as she’ll get to telling supporters they’re right to stop believing in him.

There will be no storm, she suggests.

She isn’t a traitor to MAGA.

But, by implication, Trump is.

The president’s most zealous supporters have for years been willing to overlook his crimes, because, as believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory, they believed he was chosen by God to vanquish villainy.

Their loyalty got him through the first impeachment. It got him through the pandemic and the J6 insurrection. It got him through the second impeachment. And, after GOP elites left him for dead, it was the basis for his political revival and victory nearly three years later.

However, during the past few months, his most zealous supporters have been increasingly demoralized, unsure of what to believe about “the plan.” Now, with the alienation of a figure with impeccable MAGA credentials, they have a persuasive confirmation of their suspicions.

Trump continues to believe, as president, that he can do whatever he wants, the law and the Constitution be damned. He was always mistaken in that belief, but the error is becoming increasingly acute.

He has divided MAGA, the most powerful political force protecting him from facing the full consequences of his actions. Meanwhile, the opposition is not only more united but downright burning with rage.

The story of Greene and a demoralized maga base is the untold aspect of next year’s congressional elections. Most of the focus is on indie voters who are getting madder about the high cost of essentials, and for good reason. Independents helped Trump beat Kamala Harris.

But what happens when MAGA thinks of Trump as no better than Harris? As Marjorie Taylor Greene said, “both parties have failed.”

They don’t vote for Democrats.

They stay home.

When it comes to Graham Platner, I don’t have skin in the game. I live in Connecticut, not Maine. The good people of that state will figure out for themselves whether he has the right stuff to be their next Democratic candidate for the US Senate. Indeed, there’s a lot to sort through, including the story of his Nazi tattoo. I wish them the best.

My interest in him is personal, not political. Platner claims to be the son of the American working class. On the basis of that authority, he hopes Mainers will give him the power to fight for the common man against an oligarchy that’s crushing him. “I’m a veteran, oysterman and working-class Mainer who’s seen this state become unlivable for working people,” he has said. “And that makes me deeply angry.”

But Graham Platner is not the son of the American working class. This is evidenced by a few facts about the world he was born into. His mom is a restaurateur. His dad is an attorney and elected official. His dad’s dad was a famous architect and furniture designer. Warren Platner was part of the firm that designed Dulles Airport and Ezra Stiles College at Yale. There’s even a chair named after him, the Platner Armchair.

That Graham Platner is not the son of the American working class is also evidenced by a few facts about his life. In childhood, he was at one point enrolled at the Hotchkiss School, the elite prep school here in Connecticut. (He does not appear to have been there long, though.) In adulthood, after returning from military service, the oyster farm he now owns was given to him by a family friend. It was then financed in part by family money. His mom’s business buys most of his harvest.

There are many ways of interpreting these facts. To me, they paint a picture of a man born into a comfortable and supportive middle class family who over time chose for himself a “working-class lifestyle.” Graham Platner didn’t finish college. He served in the armed forces. Oyster farming looks tough. These are choices that he made amid an abundance of them. No son of the working class has such luxury.

It’s hardly damning. As I said last time I wrote about Platner, there’s nothing saying that “a decent man of integrity from a respectable bourgeois background cannot be a champion of the masses. Solidarity against the ruling oligarchy does not require warriors for the working class to be of the working class. After all, Franklin Roosevelt wasn’t.”

But since there’s nothing wrong with it, why doesn’t Platner come clean? In his most recent federal disclosure filing, which was overdue, he offered strikingly few details about his finances. Why? The answer is that there’s something more authentic about being seen as a “working-class Mainer” than in being seen as the privileged son of a well-off family who seems to have failed to live up to expectations.

More importantly, however, is this: The authenticity that comes from appropriating the culture of the working class seems to satisfy the needs of elites outside the Democratic Party who seek to reshape it.

As The Guardian’s Moira Donegan said, in Platner, “some pundits and members of the consultant class seem to have found a vehicle for their own project for the party’s reform, one that is less about policy outcomes than about transforming the Democratic Party’s image to embrace men, masculinity and a vision of a rugged, rural whiteness.”

So the problem isn’t only that Platner is a man born of good fortune who has successfully co-opted the image of the working-class man. It’s also that this image is being exploited by elites who want to move the Democrats away from being a party of multiracial pluralism to one that serves the interest of the only Americans who are supposed to count.

The belief is that in order to win again, the Democrats must relearn “a style of masculinity,” as Donegan put it, that will bring young white men back. To succeed, you must accept his “ruggedness” at face value.

When you know something about his origins, however, the truth is revealed. What kind of “masculinity” arises from the fact that his business was given to him by a family friend and that his mom, by being his best customer, effectively gives him a regular allowance?

Answer: “masculinity” as imagined by men who can afford to cosplay “manliness” without the risk and responsibility of serious manhood.

One more thing about those elites. They include more than the rich consultants who keep getting richer by advising Democrats to restore “rugged, rural whiteness” to the center of their party’s attention.

They also include what some call the pod bros or the dirtbag left. These are online personalities. Some are former party insiders. Some are self-proclaimed democratic socialists. All stand in dedicated opposition to the Democratic establishment while claiming to be tribunes of the people. They are educated, articulate, witty and ideological. They see themselves as champions of the working class.

Like Platner, none comes from the working class.

Because of that, they can’t see that he doesn’t either. All they see is his “working-class image.” He’s a “gravel-voiced vet.” He’s a “rugged oyster farmer.” In fact, Platner is a leftist intellectual’s idea of a working class man, or rather, the idea of a working-class man that’s envisioned by children of affluence who turned to leftist politics as some kind of recompense, or who see in him something that’s lacking in themselves. They want it so much they’re willing to overlook his Nazi tattoo. It’s not an indicator of questionable morality. It’s a mark of authenticity!

That Platner doesn’t carry the burdens of the working class can also be seen in the frictionless way he interacts with online leftists who will also never face the consequences of failure. They read the same books. They cite the same authors. They know the same cultural references. They share what you might call the unspoken vocabulary of the upper middle class, in which humor is usually expressed ironically – “I am not a secret Nazi,” Platner said – while conflict is expressed performatively – “Nothing p----- me off more than getting a fundraising text from Democrats talking about how they're fighting fascism,” he said.

The late comedian Paul Mooney once said that everybody wants to be Black but no one wants to be Black. Everybody desires the social capital of blackness, but no one desires the burden of racism. People take what they want – Black music, Black fashion, Black food – and leave the rest. They appropriate the product of the struggle without the struggling, which allows them to pretend to be what they’re not.

Setting aside the serious and obvious differences, I see a similar dynamic at work in Graham Platner. He wants the authority that comes with being seen as a son of the working class who has had to fight his way through life, but none of the pain of fighting. He wants to accuse his opponents of lacking the courage to do what needs to be done. And he wants influential people, the online left, to play along with him. “Nothing p----- me off more,” he said, as if he would know.

I said at the top that my interest in Platner is personal, not political. This is why. He has no idea what the struggle is. I’m sure he has had his own, but the struggle he wants Mainers to believe is his is not his. No true son of the working class can pretend like that. He knows that if he fails, he fails downward. (And if he gets a second chance, he’s lucky.) There is no time for such childish make-believe. He can’t afford it.

The House passed a bill this week that would force the Department of Justice to release what’s now known as the Epstein files. The measure passed overwhelmingly, by a vote of 427-1. Even before it arrived at the Senate, Chuck Schumer called for its passage by unanimous consent. He succeeded. The bill now goes to the president for his signature.

Donald Trump caved, but I agree with those who say this is not over.

Here are 15 thoughts.

1. After all the fighting to prevent passage, we should ask why Trump is now going to authorize the release of documents in which his own name appeared so frequently that the attorney general determined that it was better not to release them at all.

2. Mark Epstein suggested an answer. He’s Jeffrey Epstein’s brother. Yesterday, he told Chris Cuomo that Trump changed his mind over the weekend, and encouraged the Republicans to vote in the affirmative, because “they’re sanitizing the files.”

3. Mark Epstein: “I’ve been recently told the reason they’re going to be releasing these things, and the reason for the flip is that they’re sanitizing these files. There’s a facility in Winchester, Virginia, where they’re scrubbing the files to take Republican names out of it. That’s what I was told by a pretty good source.”

4. Mark Epstein denied the claim that the widely circulated email in which he asked his brother to ask Steven Bannon if Vladimir Putin had photos of “Trump blowing Bubba” is evidence of kompromat. However, “Jeffrey definitely had dirt on Trump,” he told Cuomo. “You could see in the emails. Trump could deny it all he wants, but it’s pretty clear everything Trump says is a lie.”

5. Trump put intense pressure on House Republicans who are prominent voices within the maga movement. The House speaker humiliated himself many times over by refusing to swear in a congresswoman who was the last vote needed to pass the discharge petition. Over 1,000 FBI agents pored over as many as 100,000 documents in the Epstein case to redact each instance of Trump’s name. It was after that process that Pam Bondi decided against releasing them, triggering Trump’s current dilemma. If only the names of Trump’s enemies appear in the files once they’re released, no one is going to believe it.

6. The bill requires, per Bill Kristol: “that the Justice Department make public within thirty days all the unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in its possession related to any of Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal activities, civil settlements, immunity, plea agreements, and investigatory proceedings. It specifies that ‘no record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.’”

7. Moreover: “The authors of the legislation tried to make sure any exceptions were narrowly drawn. The attorney general can only withhold or redact information from personal or medical files — the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy — or information that would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution, ‘provided such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary.’ The law requires that all redactions must be accompanied by a written justification in the Federal Register.”

8. But, as CNN’s Jake Tapper said after House passage: “The legislation as it stands clearly says ‘the attorney general may withhold or redact personally identifiable, information of victims or victims, personal and medical files,’ and any material that depicts injury, physical abuse, death or child sexual abuse, or jeopardize an active investigation or national security.”

9. In these loopholes are the makings of a familiar play, wrote MS Now’s Ryan Teague Beckwith. Trump will pretend to be exonerated. That’s what he did with documents showing his collusion with Russia before the 2016 election, and that’s what he’s going to do with the Epstein files. Teague Beckwith: “If the report doesn’t prove the worst thing imaginable, then it proves Trump is totally innocent … We won’t know what is in the Epstein files until they’re released. But no matter what they show, we can expect Trump will say that they exonerate him.”

10. There is one big difference, though. Back then, when the Republicans wanted Trump to get reelected in 2020, they had incentive to play along with his makebelieve. Things are very different now. Though Trump is selling the idea of running for an illegal third term, ambitious Republicans aren’t buying it. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie and others are competing for advantage in anticipation of the time when Trump is gone. So the GOP push for releasing the Epstein files can be seen as a fight over future party leadership. If enough Republicans believe his time is over, that might expose Trump to the outcomes of Democratic aggression: impeachment, removal, and perhaps prosecution. ABC News’ Jonathan Karl was right to say Trump seemed rattled. But he isn’t rattled by defeat. He fears what could happen if his party stands by and watches.

11. Taylor Greene and Massie speak for the party’s conspiracy wing. Supporters of that faction wanted to see members of a Jewish pedo-cabal, which is what Epstein represented, brought to justice: arrested, tried and executed in what was called “The Storm.” They were not interested in whether Trump was incriminated. They didn’t believe he was until he triggered a crisis of faith in him. He may yet be redeemed, but that won’t depend on pretending to be exonerated. Trump’s redemption will depend on how much ambitious Republicans fluent in the coded language of antisemitism are willing to play along.

12. Some liberals appear to be looking to the Epstein files the same way they used to look to the Mueller report. In doing so, I think they’re missing the big picture. Almost certainly, the Epstein files are not about something specific, like “Trump blowing Bubba.” They are about a capital-T truth. The Republicans know it, especially those who are attuned to the QAnon conspiracy theory. For them, the truth is that the Democrats are part of an evil, Jewish conspiracy against “real Americans.” All that’s needed to achieve “justice” is “proof.” Today, House Oversight Chairman James Comer said he will provide it. "If there's no Epstein list – and we want to find out if there were people that were violating the law and who they were – we'll have to construct our own."

13. The Democrats must counter with their own capital-T truth, one that’s fundamentally different from the Republicans’ in that it’s grounded in reality. Specifically, in the testimony of every single one of the survivors of Epstein’s child-sex trafficking syndicate and the elite men who sustained it. Broadly, in the daily experiences of everyone living with the legal and moral consequences of an elite cohort whose corruption is so deep and whose impunity is so vast that we’re literally paying for it.

14. “I was going to places like Johnstown, Pa., and I was going to places like Warren, Ohio. When I was there, the issue would come up about ‘the Epstein class’ — that’s what they called it. They said, well, are you on the side of the forgotten Americans or on the side of the Epstein class?” Ro Khanna told the Times.

16. The California congressman expounded on that Tuesday, saying the Epstein vote should be seen as part of the Democratic Party’s efforts to “build an enduring coalition around a vision of new economic patriotism that can unite the left and right. The elements of that are to rail against an elite governing class that has created a system that’s not working for ordinary Americans. And then to offer a concrete vision of how we’re going to prioritize the economic independence and success of those forgotten Americans, as opposed to … the Epstein class that has accumulated power and doesn’t play by the rules and has impunity at the expense of ordinary Americans.”

If nothing else comes of Tuesday’s vote, I hope it’s an awareness among liberals that conspiracists who fear an evil cabal doing evil things are mistaken only in terms of the identities of those who constitute that cabal. Otherwise, they are right. There is a real conspiracy against them – against all of us. And it's evil.

In July, I said the president triggered a crisis of faith in maga. It had been revealed that the US Department of Justice would not release the Epstein files. With that decision, Donald Trump made his most zealous followers choose between him and their imaginary enemies. Since they were never going to stop believing in evil super-Jews conspiring against “real Americans,” he forced them to rethink their trust in him.

On Monday, we saw concrete consequences of that crisis.

Trump spent last week pressuring two key House Republicans, Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert, to vote against a measure leading to the release of the Epstein files. He summoned them to the Situation Room, along with the US attorney general and FBI director. (This was after Speaker Mike Johnson adjourned the House for nearly two months during the shutdown and refused to swear in Arizona’s Adelita Grijalva. She had vowed to be the 218th vote on the Epstein discharge petition.)

Then Friday, Trump attacked the Republican who is probably the most maga of all maga, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. He said he was taking back “his support and endorsement.” He called her a “lunatic.” He offered “complete and unyielding support” for anyone who would primary her. In another post, he called Greene a “RINO,” who had “betrayed the entire Republican Party when she turned Left.”

Greene did not back down from calling for the release of the Epstein files. “It really makes you wonder what is in those files and who and what country is putting so much pressure on him,” she said. “I forgive him and I will pray for him to return to his original maga promises.”

Then Trump retreated. Early Monday, he said, “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files. We have nothing to hide.” (If that’s true, he could order the Justice Department to release the files.)

Some are saying that Marjorie Taylor Greene is coming to her senses. Others are saying there’s a place for her among the Democrats.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Taylor Greene isn’t standing up to Trump. She’s exploiting the crisis of faith that he has created. She’s her authority by taking command of the story that brought him to power. She doesn’t care about sex-crime victims. She cares about her position in the GOP after Trump is gone. I think she’s been quietly sussing about possibilities for a while. Monday’s head-on collision with Trump is the quiet part getting loud.

None of this week’s news makes sense if you forget about QAnon.

In that conspiracy theory, Jeffrey Epstein is part of a shadowy group of Jewish super-elites who control the government, corporations and the media. It is so powerful it can commit any crime – including the most heinous, pedophilia and cannibalism – and get away with it, all while conspiring with allies, foreign and domestic, to destroy America.

In that story, Trump is the hero, “the chosen one,” who is supposed to save America from enemies so evil that he must do whatever it takes to defeat them, even if that means committing massive crimes himself. Thanks to that story, Trump could broadcast during his campaign all the crimes he was going to commit once reelected (ie, vengeance), and it didn’t matter to the most conspiracy-addled faction of the GOP.

Anything was acceptable as long as Trump defeated the Great Evil.

On the release of the Epstein files, this pedo-cabal (“Democratic politicians, Hollywood actors, high-ranking government officials, business tycoons and medical experts,” per Wikipedia) was supposed to face immediate justice: mass arrests and summary executions.

They called it “The Storm.”

But last spring, US Attorney General Pam Bondi determined that the president’s name appeared too many times in the government’s case against Jeffrey Epstein to risk releasing the files. (Bloomberg reported in August that 1,000 FBI agents reviewed 100,000 documents in order to redact his name. Bondi made her determination after that.)

Trump agreed with Bondi, and once he did, he took his most zealous followers for granted. He failed to consider what he was asking them to do: choose between believing in him, and the heroic role he played in the cosmic story about the fate of America, and believing in the existence of deadly threats to America by imaginary Jewish enemies.

Put another way, he forced them to choose between him and their antisemitism and they were never going to let go of antisemitism. (QAnon is a 21st-century update of very, very old hatred of Jews.)

In doing so, Trump introduced doubts that have deepened with every revelation about his ties to Epstein. Instead of being the exception to every rule, he seems to be the rule itself. Instead of being the solution to the problem, he seems to be part of it – or worse. Before long, it could be understood that he exploited those who truly fear a phony pedo-cabal to hide his own involvement in a real pedo-cabal.

As long as Trump was a victim – as long as he represented the heroic victimhood of “the nation” – he could be forgiven for anything, even crimes that ultimately hurt his followers. Without the authority that comes with being the exception to the rule, however, efforts to blame his enemies are falling on deaf ears. He has repeatedly tried accusing the Democrats of making up the “Epstein hoax,” as he did with the “Russia hoax,” yet followers don’t look to him. They look to Republicans like Majorie Taylor Greene who still seem loyal to the One True Faith.

So not only has Trump undermined maga’s trust in him. He made room for rivals who have been seeking moments of weakness to exploit. Taylor Greene presented herself as a true believer who is saddened by the former hero’s fall from grace: “I forgive him and I will pray for him to return to his original maga promises.” But she also dared him to reclaim what she had taken: “It really makes you wonder what is in those files and who and what country is putting pressure on him.”

It wouldn’t take much for a figure like Taylor Greene to expand the conspiracy theory about a pedo-cabal to include a Russian dictator who is blackmailing the president into covering up a pedo-cabal.

Trump seems to know it. That’s why he balked.

His base is fractured. His rivals are emboldened. His opponents are united. The result was today’s House vote in which members voted 427-1 to force the Justice Department to release the Epstein files.

How this ends is anyone’s guess. The measure now goes to the Senate. But if this ends badly, it will be due to Trump’s hubris – in taking for granted the conspiracy theory that brought him back to power.

In yesterday’s edition, I said I would get back to some of the content that was found in the 23,000 emails released by the House Oversight Committee that were obtained from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein.

Here, I’m going to go straight to the authority, Julie K Brown. She’s the reporter for the Miami Herald who wrote that blockbuster series revealing that Epstein got a sweetheart deal from federal prosecutors. It’s because of her that any of us knows the name of Jeffrey Epstein.

Here are the facts reported in Brown’s piece published Wednesday about the new collection of Epstein correspondence. For brevity’s sake, I’m going to liberally edit so the only quotes are from the emails.

• Epstein wrote that Donald Trump not only knew he was trafficking girls – but that in one case, Trump had “spent hours” with one of the sex trafficking victims at Epstein’s house.
• In releasing three emails, Democrats on the Oversight Committee redacted the victim’s name. The Republicans, on releasing all 23,000, revealed her to be the late Virginia Giuffre, who had previously said that, to her knowledge, she never saw Trump do anything inappropriate with girls or women.
• “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Epstein wrote to accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in 2011.
• In 2019, Epstein told journalist Michael Wolff that Trump “of course knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
• That exchange with Wolff came less than a month after the Miami Herald published in 2019 an investigation into Epstein’s crimes – the sex trafficking of dozens of underage girls
• Epstein offered insight on Trump to a Russian diplomat.
• Epstein offered to send New York Times reporter photos of Trump posing with girls in bikinis in his kitchen.
• Larry Summers, the former Harvard president, asked whether the Russians had “stuff” on Trump. Epstein didn’t answer.
• In March 2018, Epstein’s brother, Mark, told him to ask the Trump-advisor Steve Bannon if Vladimir Putin has “the photos of Trump blowing Bubba.” It is unclear what “Bubba” refers to, but it was a nickname for former President Bill Clinton.
• In 2018, Kathryn Ruemmler, who worked in the Obama White House, sent a Times op-ed debating whether Trump should be impeached. “you see i know how dirty donald is,” Epstein said.
• Epstein’s death was ruled a suicide, although a subsequent investigation by the Federal Bureau of Prisons noted that cameras in the unit were not working properly and that guards had fabricated their reports. Mark Epstein believes he was killed because he had damaging information on powerful people.

‘Use the spa to try to procure girls’

When I read that Epstein had told Wolff “of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop,” I was reminded of something. It was a piece written by the Editorial Board’s own Lindsay Beyerstein.

In July, Lindsay had dug up an old Page 6 gossip item from the October 15, 2007, edition of the New York Post. In it, an anonymous source explained Epstein’s exile from Trump’s Florida club, Mar-a-Lago.

That anonymous source, Lindsay said, was almost certainly Trump. He “was notorious for laundering his version of reality through Page 6, either anonymously or under the pseudonym ‘John Barron.’” she said.

Here’s what that source (Trump) told Page 6 about Epstein: “He would use the spa to try to procure girls. But one of them, a masseuse about 18 years old, he tried to get her to do things. Her father found out about it and went absolutely ape-[bleep]. Epstein’s not allowed back.”

Lindsay had dug up that item, because of something Trump said on Air Force One last July. He said the reason he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago was because he was poaching spa workers.

“People were taken out of the spa, hired by him. … When I heard about it, I told him, ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people, whether it was spa or not spa.’ I don’t want him taking people. And he was fine. Then not too long after that, he did it again and I said, ‘out of here.'”

As Lindsay wrote, Trump made it sound like their falling out was due to Epstein “hiring away valued employees with in-demand skills.”

But the Page 6 item suggests he knew more was going on – that there was a longstanding pattern to “use the spa to try and procure girls.”

This latest revelation in Epstein’s own words is a further incrimination. “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

Using Giuffre to shield Trump
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee accused Democrats of redacting for bad-faith reasons the name of the sex-trafficking victim who had “spent hours” with Trump at Epstein’s house. They said that by hiding the name of the late Virginia Giuffre, the panel’s Democrats were just trying to smear the president with selectively leaked emails.

It’s true enough that Giuffre had said under oath that she didn’t believe Trump had any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. In her memoir, she said she met Trump once. Giuffre did not accuse him of any wrongdoing.

But aboard Air Force One back in July, the president acknowledged that Giuffre was one of the teens taken from the club. In 2000, Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her, she said. In 2007, Trump said anonymously that “a masseuse about 18 years old, [Epstein] tried to get her to do things.” That wasn’t Giuffre, but the point is, he knew. And according to Epstein, that’s why Trump asked Maxwell to stop.

The suggestion is that Giuffre didn’t know the whole story.

It’s also that the Oversight Republicans are using a dead sex-crime victim (Giuffre killed herself in April), who “spent hours” with Trump at Epstein’s house, to shield the president from the consequences of knowing what a child-sex trafficker was doing under his own roof.

Guilty is as guilty does
A lot is still unknown, but what we do know is how the president is behaving to the revelations found this week in the Epstein emails.

Which is to say, like he’s guilty.

Trump also ordered the Justice Department to redirect attention away from him and toward Bill Clinton and other Democrats who were in Jeffrey Epstein’s circle. There is no credible evidence connecting the former president to Epstein’s crimes, Reuters said in its report.

The House Republicans are expecting “mass defections,” according to Politico, in favor of the discharge. The House votes next week. I don’t put much stock in him, but it’s worth noting Joe Scarborough said Thursday he does not expect Senate Republicans to stand in the way.

Perhaps that’s due to growing public skepticism.

CNN’s poll editor Henry Enten said Thursday, “nobody is buying what Trump is selling on Epstein. His net approval on it is an absolutely dreadful negative 39 points, far worse than any other major issue. It isn't improving over time. Even among the GOP, just 45 percent approve of the job the Trump admin is doing on the Epstein case."

"It's clearly the biggest scandal in presidential history,” said US Senator Chris Murphy during an interview. “He wouldn't be acting this way if he wasn't so deeply worried about what's in those files. What we've already seen is immensely incriminating. Clearly Trump was at the center of a child-sex ring ... the scandal could bring him down."

“The scandal could bring him down"? Eh, maybe. He might be acting guilty now, but this criminal president is always acting guilty … of something. It’s all in plain sight. Will this one bring him down?

All I can say is we’ve been here before.

On Monday, I was angry with the eight Democrats, under Chuck Schumer’s direction, who voted with the GOP to reopen the government. I called them traitors who betrayed their party by surrendering before the fight was over.

This morning, I thought perhaps I was too hard. Then I read Bill Scher’s assessment in the Washington Monthly. Turns out I wasn’t hard enough.

I had surmised that Schumer caved under pressure from the airlines and business interests depending on them. (The FAA had reduced 10 percent of flights, causing thousands of cancellations and more than 10,000 delays as of Sunday.) But Bill, citing the Post’s Karen Tumulty, suggested a worse reason.

It looks like Schumer capitulated because he and others were afraid that Donald Trump and the Republicans would eliminate the filibuster. (To be clear, Bill said this is one of the reasons for his rolling over, not the reason.)

The Democrats had used that 60-vote rule to force the president to bargain over healthcare policy (eg, Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid cuts). Trump refused. Instead, he decided to fire federal workers, steal food stamps and otherwise ramp up public suffering in order to bring the Democrats to heel.

But Trump’s extortionist tactics were backfiring – on the Republicans. Poll after poll blamed them for the pain of the shutdown. Last week’s elections rewarded the Democrats for standing form and trying to bring down costs. Trump, though, would never admit being wrong. So he pestered Senate Republicans into nixing the rule that he saw as the source of his problems.

While there was no serious movement toward abolishing it, just talking about it seems to have given Schumer the chills. “This was all about the filibuster,” Tumulty said on Twitter. When asked if she meant the Democrats hoped that the Republicans would nuke it, she clarified: “They were afraid they would.”

The point of the shutdown, in my view, was never about extracting policy concessions, as the regime is a criminal enterprise that cannot be trusted to honor its agreements. Instead, it was about drawing a bright line between illegitimate rule and legitimate resistance to it. Thanks to the regime’s cruelty, the public seemed to get behind the Democrats in asserting that whatever Trump and the Republicans do with appropriations, it’s on them.

That said, the end of the filibuster would have been a win for the Democrats, no matter how “win” is defined. In time, and with the 60-vote threshold out of the way, the Democrats could achieve previously unimaginable policy goals, including Medicare for all, adding two more states, hence two more senate seats, adding more justices to the Supreme Court, raising the federal minimum wage, reformed housing policy, “Green New Deal,” the list goes on.

That might be why eight Democrats, under Schumer’s direction, caved.

A Senate without the filibuster would expose “moderate” Democrats, forcing them to choose between serving the progressive demands of the base or the status-quo demands of many of the elites. “The world’s greatest deliberative body” would be reshaped by removing the greatest means of rationalizing cowardice. Many Democrats talk a good game about democratic reforms. No filibuster would reveal those who are all talk and who are ready for action.

There are those who would say that ending the filibuster would be as bad for democracy as it is for the squishes in the Senate. Jonathan Bernstein said Tuesday that liberals like me “are dramatically underestimating the damage that Republicans would do over the next 15 months with that constraint removed,” including “election reforms” that so far have been filibustered.

“Essentially, in the middle of a full-on assault by Republicans against the republic, eliminating the filibuster would suddenly give them a powerful new weapon,” Bernstein wrote. “That doesn’t seem sensible to me. At all.”

But if that’s the reason for capitulating, Schumer should say so. He should have added harms done by ending the filibuster to all the harms that were being done by the regime during the shutdown. As David M Perry put it: “Maybe Senate Democrats should say: ‘The Republicans were going to kill people by starving them to death, and because we aren't monsters, we decided to let this fight go. We'll keep fighting. Stop electing monsters.’”

Instead, we got a fantasia of rationales, the most dispiriting being that “standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work,” according to Angus King.

And even if I’m underestimating the damage that could be done by the Republicans without the filibuster, it’s still true that the regime is doing great damage without the Congress. In saying no, the Democrats refused to be complicit in its crimes. In saying yes, they made themselves complicit and made the public task of identifying the “monsters” that much harder to do.

I agree with Bill. Replacing Schumer would not make the Democrats more progressive. But it would send a message. Failure has consequences. Rolling over was a failure. Sadly, only a handful of Democrats in the Congress are calling for his head. The message so far: failure has no consequences and asking a party like that to enact democratic reforms is a fool’s errand.

But getting rid of Schumer would do something else. It would restore some measure of trust among people like me who are deeply skeptical of his real motives. If it’s about protecting the republic and not the status quo, prove it.

It’s Veterans Day and as I sometimes do, I’m thinking today about the memorable preface to Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel, Breakfast of Champions.

This is what he said.

So this book is a sidewalk strewn with junk, trash which I throw over my shoulders as I travel in time back to November eleventh, nineteen hundred and twenty-two.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

One day is for remembering people who served our country. The other day is for remembering that time when people “stopped butchering one another.”

To give you an idea: the Battle of the Somme saw more than 1 million men killed or injured. From July to November in 1916, 1 million men died, or their lives, and the lives of everyone they loved, were changed forever.

One million.

According to Vonnegut, Armistice Day was a reprieve. A moment of grace.

That’s something you want to remember. Do we?

Something happened to America after 9/11. The conservatives were in charge. They thought the best way to protect democracy was to militarize it. For the duration of George W Bush’s tenure, he was seen by the press corps as more commander-in-chief than president. A democracy shouldn’t do that. When it does, well, I don’t have to tell you who the current president is.

It’s not like there weren’t signs of what was to come.

In the midterms following the 2001 terrorist attack, US Senator Max Cleland, a Democrat, lost. His GOP opponent, Saxby Chambliss, questioned his patriotism, though Chambliss himself got a medical deferment (bum knee) to avoid the draft. Cleland, meanwhile, lost an arm and both legs in Khe Sanh.

John Kerry was decorated for valor in Vietnam, but later protested the war. By 2004, when he challenged Bush, the GOP acted his campaign was an insult to the divine right of commanders-in-chief. They swiftboated his patriotism.

A Black president shocked those who believe this is a white man’s country. Pre-2008: “We must support the command-in-chief!” Post-2008: “Well …”

Veterans Day should remind us what honor means to some. It doesn’t mean sacrifice in defense of American principles. It means unconditional loyalty, especially by way of militarization, first to a party, then to a single man.

Donald Trump takes a militarized attitude toward everything, such that he can designate Caribbean fishermen as “narco-terrorists” to justify murdering them. His secretary of defense talks as if preparing for civil war. Trump’s national police force, ICE, acts like American citizens are enemy combatants.

There is a straight line from 9/11 to now.

I’m not a historian, but the way I understand it, the attitude we are seeing now from the Trump regime is similar to the attitude of governments in the run up to the First World War. They all thought that they were invincible, that war would “cleanse” their people, that combat sorted the men from the boys.

On Veterans Day, we remember the people who served our country, especially in times of war, but tend to forget the consequences of war.

Vonnegut didn’t. He was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the Second World War on the night allied bombers turned that city into a storm of fire. When the bombs ceased falling, he probably felt what the old men felt when “millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another.”

That the silence was the voice of God.

The more we forget that history, the more likely we are to repeat it.

Yesterday from the Associated Press: “On Sunday, a group of moderate Democrats agreed to proceed without a guaranteed extension of health care subsidies, angering many in their caucus who say Americans want them to continue the fight.”

My thoughts:

1. Eight Democrats betrayed the Democratic Party over the weekend in deciding to vote with the Republicans to reopen the government – eight Democrats in the US Senate under Chuck Schumer’s leadership. None of the House Democrats cracked while under Hakeem Jeffries’ leadership. They stood firm.

2. The Democrats failed to stand by their word. In the beginning, they said they refused to keep the government open until the regime faced the reality of health insurance premiums for 24 million Americans doubling, tripling or quadrupling, without immediate action. They said negotiate first, then vote to reopen the government. Turns out eight of them didn’t really mean it.

3. The Democrats traded their power for an IOU. Their power was the filibuster. The IOU is a vote on Obamacare subsidies. Not a promise to renew them, just a promise to hold a vote – in January! There’s nothing saying Senate Majority Leader John Thune will honor the IOU. If he does, the vote will be subject to the filibuster. If the GOP is united, guess what? More than 40 days of government shutdown will have been for nothing.

4. The Democrats sabotaged public trust. They had earned enormous good will among Democratic voters as well as Americans generally. Poll after poll suggested that most of the blame for the shutdown was on Donald Trump and the Republicans in the Congress. Last week’s off-year elections suggested a new perspective was emerging – that the shutdown was a legitimate form of resistance against illegitimate rule. Pressure was mounting. Food stamps weren’t going out. Flights were being cancelled. House Republicans were sweating. Trump was calling for the end of the filibuster. Then Schumer caved.

5. Eight Democratic traitors are covering for Chuck Schumer. Yes, yes. Schumer voted against reopening the government, but think about it. What caused his heel-turn? It wasn’t the cost of health insurance. It wasn’t food stamps. It wasn’t federal workers getting fired. He would have pushed for reopening the government weeks ago if that were the case. No, it was the effect of the shutdown on the airlines and businesses that rely on them. More than 10,000 flights were delayed on Sunday. I would guess that someone high up the food chain said Trump can’t be reasoned with, so it’s up to you, Chuck! Their interests trumped those of scores of millions of struggling Americans.

6. The Democrats protected the Republicans. Not only did the Democrats squander public faith by caving (again), they ended up protecting the Republicans from the wrath of their own supporters. Trump is hurting them. GOP voters were waking up to that fact. Now, in the aftermath of surrender, the Democrats have lent credence to the GOP claim that they won the fight to reopen the government to relieve the pain caused by the Democrats. GOP voters often make choices that turn them into hostages. Admittedly, there wasn’t a lot of reason for them to reconsider that behavior, but now there’s none at all. Trump was walking the path toward self-immolation. The filibuster was finally in contention. Nine Democrats saved him from himself.

7. The Democrats encouraged Trump’s crime spree. Weakness in the face of lawlessness does not appease it. It endorses it. That’s what these eight Democrats, plus Schumer, have done. Trump was already hurting people to avoid compromise and force the Democrats into submission. Now he knows what works. It’s not the suffering of workaday Americans. It’s the “suffering” of airline passengers whose plans were interpreted and the elites who profit from them. Next time the Democrats get in his way, Trump can ground every plane and expect the same result.

8. The Democrats beclowned themselves. This morning, a day after caving, Dick Durbin said in a column for MSNBC that he’s going to do everything he can to hold the president accountable for the criminal actions of ICE agents in Chicago and Illinois. Why would anyone believe that when Durbin is one of the eight, plus Schumer, who stopped fighting before the fight was over. Same thing with New Hampshire’s Jeane Shaheen. This morning, the senator said: "I think we can get a bipartisan bill out of the Senate that will address this [healthcare] issue. And if not, we know that the voters are going to know who's on their side and who's going to hold them accountable." Who is she kidding!

9. Chris Murphy is right. "There will be pretty substantial damage to a Democratic brand that has been rehabilitated if on the heels of an election in which the people told us to keep fighting, we immediately stop. … If we surrender without having gotten anything, I worry it'll be hard to get them back up off the mat."

10. Greg Sargent is right. “Great job, @schumer.senate.gov. You've changed the story from "GOP hurting millions of Americans to please unpopular, failing, delusional despot who's destroying his party" to "Democrats are too weak and divided in the face of Trump's strength to take a stand and protect Americans."

11. Hakeem Jeffries is right. “We can’t let a handful of random senators take us off track as it relates to the fight that we’re waging to lower the high cost of living, to fix our broken health care system and to clean up corruption,” he told Aaron Parnas.

12. Hakeem Jeffries is wrong. Should Schumer leave? No, he said. Unacceptable. Weakness welcomes contempt. Contempt is going to be felt by all the Democrats, not only “a handful of random senators” who blinked in the face of lawlessness and cruelty. Democratic leaders must get their house in order. There should be no tolerance for sabotage. Why would anyone trust a Democrat to stand by his or her word when nine of them are allowed to undermine the credibility of the entire party?

13. Are the Democrats going to fix the problem? They say they want to stop health insurance premiums from skyrocketing. At this point, why believe them? They’re willing to fight but only if the consequences of fighting reach normal people, like 42 million who depend on food stamps or 24 million who depend on Obamacare. But if the elites are merely inconvenienced, forget it. It’s back to business as usual – a betrayal of everything they said they believe in. Some even convince themselves that fighting a cruel and lawless president is a bad thing: “Standing up to Donald Trump didn't work,” Angus King actually said.

I’m still on Tuesday’s election. Here are nine more thoughts.

1. Word is that some “centrist” Democrats in the Senate are eager for a deal with the president that would end the government shutdown. I don’t know what the incentive is. Just two days ago, Republican candidates were handed their asses in statewide elections in New Jersey, Virginia, Mississippi and Georgia, as well as municipal elections nationwide. I do know this, though: backing away from the fight will backfire. The Democrats are now finally being rewarded for courage. Voters like courage. They trust fighters. Guess what happens when you stop before the fight is won? You look weak. Worse, you welcome contempt.

2. “Centrists” believe they are being reasonable, which might be true, but mostly they’re being short-sighted. The Democrats want voters to give them power to solve problems, like the out-of-control cost of living. (Apparently, the regime believes the cost crisis is fake. One day after getting shellacked, Donald Trump said: “This is the golden age of America.”) But once power is given, voters expect it to be used, in their name. In this shutdown fight, the Democrats have leverage. They at last have some power. Voters are poised to deliver more when the time comes. However, if the Democrats concede now, what will that say? That voters shouldn’t bother empowering them, because the Democrats won’t do what they say they’ll do, even after voters give their consent. Lesson: Don’t be afraid of power. Using it inspires trust. Failing to use it inspires outrage.

3. Before Tuesday’s elections, I said the shutdown is legitimate resistance to illegitimate rule. Trump refuses to negotiate. He holds food stamps hostage. He inflicts pain on his own people. (More people in red states than blue are facing skyhigh health insurance premiums.) And let’s not forget his criminal conduct as president. Now that voters have spoken, it seems truer than ever that the Democrats are the spearhead against tyranny. Even the president acknowledged the shutdown hurt. US Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told Axios Wednesday: "I think it would be very strange if on the heels of the American people having rewarded Democrats for standing up and fighting, we surrendered without getting anything for the people we've been fighting for. “Strange,” indeed – a titanic understatement.

4. Trump will not act like a responsible leader. He wants to rule. He wants to enrich himself. He wants to tell others what to do. But he does not want to govern, because that would mean giving something away. (Trump never gave anything away for free.) The shutdown is the Democrats’ means of forcing him. They have him wedged between an election and the holidays, when public awareness of the pain he’s causing in terms of food aid and job losses and flight cancellations will be high. That’s going to pressure the Senate Republicans to think about the future.

5. Trump is accustomed to members of his party asking “how high?” when he tells them to jump. “If you don’t terminate the filibuster, you’ll be in bad shape,” he told Republican senators yesterday. But the deeper the Democrats dig themselves in, with the apparent backing of voters, the less willing the Republicans will be to take orders blindly. There are consequences to obeying a criminal president who posts AI videos of himself wearing a crown, flying a fighter jet and bombing Americans with what can only be called turds; who rips families apart and terrorizes neighborhoods; who murders fishermen under the guise of drug enforcement; who threatens war with countries that have done nothing to us; who knocks down part of the White House to put up a gold-gilded ballroom; and who withholds food aid, in defiance of a court order, while holding lavish parties for her obscenely rich friends. The Republicans often act like they are the exception to the rules. The shutdown is the Democrats’ opportunity to smack them into adulthood.

6. Trump will not budge. The Democrats should answer in kind in order to force the Republicans to choose between service to constituents and service to a leader who is not only indifferent to the interests of their constituents but also to their humanity. Trump will punish everyone if he believes that will hurt the Democrats. (Due to the shutdown, the FAA cut 10 percent of air travel today, the biggest cut ever, according to CNN.) He cares about his party’s future as much as he cared about the poor man who fainted today onto the floor of the Oval Office (see picture), depriving a sociopathic president of the attention he craves to relieve the misery of his sad, sad life. And the Republicans seem to be thinking hard about the choice they are facing. Politico reported that, after Tuesday’s election, the Senate Republicans have “made it very clear: They planned to blow Trump off.”

7. Whether they recognize Trump is a lame duck is to be seen. Despite the election, the Republicans are yet to act in good faith. According to another Politico report, they are now asking Senate Democrats to reopen the government in exchange for bringing back some federal workers fired in the shutdown – to trade their power for a promise to obey the law by a criminal president who has made a habit of breaking it. This should be recognized as weakness and reason for Senate Democrats to stay put. If they don’t budge and Trump doesn’t either, there’s only one way out for the Republicans – nuking the filibuster.

8. But they have to stay put. That’s no small thing for Democrats. They have a bad habit of taking responsibility when the GOP refuses to, accepting the risk of failure and blame when they do. Compounding matters is a news media that treats them as if they’re the only adults around. Moreover, reporters have made Trump’s victory seem like an act of God, any resistance to it a perversion of God’s will. Tuesday’s success should correct that. It showed not only that Trump is fallible but that reporters are liable in the rage felt by voters who are behaving like they’re victims of a scam. It wasn’t just a referendum on Trump’s second term. Tuesday’s election was a referendum on the press corps.

9. The Democrats are most vulnerable to pressure by the press corps. If they cave, it will be in hoping they get points for being reasonable or moderate or whatever. However, the press corps can be trusted as much as Trump can be. The Democrats should act accordingly. With voters beyond them, they should talk to reporters as if they were co-conspirators in a scheme to fleece the people, driving up prices, driving down wages and otherwise whitewashing lies, rationalizing evil and sanewashing Trump’s just plain obvious deterioration. “The United States has the strongest economy, the strongest borders, the strongest military, the strongest friendships and the strongest spirit of any nation anywhere,” Trump said Wednesday. Reporters won’t see his dementia, because it’s in their interest not to, but the Democrats can force them by implicating them in its cover up.

MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian got his hands on an advanced copy of a new book that claims to reveal the nature of deliberations inside the US Department of Justice after the 2020 presidential election that “may have hampered the federal criminal investigations” of Donald Trump.

In their forthcoming book, Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department, Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis report on former US Attorney General Merrick Garland’s principled, cautious and slow decision-making (Dilanian’s adjectives) in two cases: the one about state secrets found in his Florida mansion and the one about the conspiracy to use fake electors to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden.

Garland moved with exceptional care for fear of establishing a “legal precedent” that might affect past and future presidents, according to Leonnig and Davis. What emerges from their book, Dilanian said, is a picture that “runs contrary to the GOP allegation that the federal indictments of Trump by special counsel Jack Smith were the product of a Democrat-led plot to weaponize the Justice Department. Instead, the book depicts example after example of the opposite happening.”

Dilanian goes on to cite some of those examples from the book. They are damning. They show time and again that Garland’s Republican critics were wrong. Leonnig and Davis write that Garland made sure the cases were free of even a hint of political consideration. He “had chosen to impose a very conservative interpretation” of DOJ policies. He froze the cases prior to the 2022 midterms in the belief that no action should be taken near or during elections. “Trump was not even on the ballot and had not yet declared his presidential candidacy for 2024,” Dilanian said. “But Garland nonetheless imposed the freeze.”

While Garland’s slow-walking of key decisions may have hampered the investigations of Trump, there’s still a smell of approval rising up from Dilanian’s piece (and perhaps from the book, too, though I have not yet read it) – despite the “handwringing,” Merrick Garland did things right.

He and Smith “faced criticism then from Democrats who wanted them to move faster, but no evidence has surfaced showing that anyone from the White House imposed that sort of pressure.” Moreover, Dilanian wrote, though we are months into Trump’s second term, his allies “have not produced evidence establishing that any decision in the cases was made for political reasons or that any White House official or Biden partisan had any influences over the investigations."

Just to be clear, Dilanian only suggests that Garland did things right. But even so, I don’t know how anyone could even accidentally suggest as much. It’s plain that Garland did not ensure cases were immune from the appearance of politics, because every choice appears to have been made with a single question in mind: “what will Donald Trump say about this?” or “what will the rightwing media say about this?”

Though it appears to be true that no one from the White House pressured Garland, he was still pressured. That’s clear. More precisely, Garland allowed himself to be, as he placed more importance on his reputation, and that of the Justice Department, than he did on justice.

I don’t know what the consequences would have been if Garland had gone all Judge Roy Bean on Trump, but I do know the consequences of the choices he did make. Due to the extraordinary delays that came from, as Dilanian said, “straining to give the former president every benefit afforded under DOJ norms and policies,” the US Supreme Court had time to strike down an early 2024 effort to keep Trump off state ballots. Colorado’s highest court had decided on 14th Amendment grounds that Trump’s role in the J6 insurrection disqualified him.

After the Supreme Court overturned that decision, it was clear that no court was going to stop Trump before the election and that voters were suddenly burdened with the responsibility of deciding his verdict on their own. As I said at the time, the court’s Republican justices put democracy on a collision course with the law. “If he loses, he’s guilty of all crimes committed against democracy. (Perhaps the justice system would then proceed.) But if he wins, he’s innocent. He will have been granted absolution for everything he’s ever done. Everything. There might never again be such a thing as a crime if the president does it. He could have his opponents murdered, safe in the knowledge that a majority approves. Democracy will have obliterated the rule of law.”

I concede that the rule of law has not been obliterated. It still applies to you, me and everyone we know. However, that doesn’t take away from the fact that if the law can’t bring down a rich and powerful criminal who acts with total impunity for it, there’s no point in the law. This conclusion is so obvious that it’s somewhat surprising to see a big-foot reporter like Dilanian not only suggesting that Garland did things right but also falling into the same trap Garland fell into.

Just as Garland privileged Trump’s interests in how he chose to proceed with the two criminal cases, Dilanian privileges Trump’s interests in how he chose to write about Leonnig and Davis’ book. He decided to maximize how it proves Garland’s Republican critics were wrong while minimizing how it proves his liberal critics were right.

In doing so, Dilanian prioritizes lies – that Garland “weaponized” the law against Trump – while de-prioritizing the truth – that Garland’s public image as an impartial administrator of justice was more important to him than the impartial administration of justice.

It counts as political if it’s the left that’s demanding justice. It doesn’t count as political if it’s the subject of investigation who’s howling about “injustice.” And such allegations are not political, because they seem more or less normal, and they seem more or less normal, because the rightwing media complex has made them so. Long before Garland was even confirmed, Trump’s media allies had already begun establishing in the public’s mind a “truth,” thus making all subsequent efforts by the attorney general to reveal the truth seem political by comparison.

As with most political discourse, rightwing propaganda is nearly totally absent from the question of whether Merrick Garland did things the right way, which suggests he absolutely did not. It also suggests that future attempts to hold rich and powerful men accountable for their crimes must learn from his mistakes or be doomed to repeating them.

When the end comes, there must be a purge of the government. The guilty must be hunted down like the J6 insurrectionists were. Reforms must be made – abolishing ICE or packing the US Supreme Court, for example – to make sure no traitor is again able to hijack the republic. That’s a very tall order made much taller by the fact that rightwing propaganda will continue to work in the shadows if the impartial administrators of justice continue to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Is the No Kings movement the new Tea Party movement?

That’s certainly the opinion of some Never Trump conservatives. In the more than 7 million people who protested against the Trump regime, they see the highest ideals of the Tea Party, chief among them limited government, individual liberty and the sovereignty of the people.

But that’s the thing. Those highest ideals were darkened by the fact that the Tea Party was an artificial construct. It’s sometimes called “astroturf” to distinguish it from a real, organic grassroots movement.

The Tea Party was funded by billionaires, conspicuously by the Koch brothers. It may have had the veneer of high-mindedness, but in truth it aimed to spread fear, hate and lies about the first Black president in order to expand and consolidate the power of those self-same elites.

So no. No Kings is not the new Tea Party if we are talking about the Tea Party in terms of the noblest principles of the American republic.

Because it wasn’t. It was, however, a political movement against elites. In this, No Kings has something in common with the Tea Party.

The key difference, of course, is that No Kings has the potential to reject the legitimacy of elites generally. The Tea Party wanted us to believe that the “elites” were all those wine-and-cheese liberals on the east coast who forced “real Americans” to live under the rule of a secret Muslim and covert Marxist by the name of Barack Obama, who was himself a mere puppet of a global conspiracy against America.

The Tea Party movement was a gigantic shuck and jive – a means of distracting Americans, but especially white Americans who are (um) receptive to such messaging, while actual elites pick their pockets.

While No Kings is mainly focused on Donald Trump, it holds the promise of expanding its scope to include all those elites that the Tea Party was intended to serve. Indeed, the circumstances are changing rapidly. No Kings could evolve into a mass movement against oligarchs, which could turn into a mass movement against billionaires, which could turn into a mass movement against the monopoly control that all those billionaires now have over the institutions of democracy.

And like the Tea Party, No Kings is emerging from an economic emergency. Back then, it was a crisis of collapsing assets, mainly housing, and how that impacted jobs. The crisis now is much, much greater, as inflation and cost of living affect vastly more people than unemployment ever did. It’s so bad that retailers that manage to hold their prices down are being celebrated as champions of the people!

No Kings is already huge. Its recent one-day march was the biggest in American history. Everyone who is not capable of bribing a president is struggling to pay for the necessities of life. Many of those folks are going to be open to a movement that gives them someone to blame. A protest of seven million-plus people could double before you know it.

Donald Trump looked at the Tea Party and found ways to harness its energy. (He chose “birtherism,” because he understood what it was really about.) Ambitious Democrats are surely doing the same regarding No Kings. One of the most ambitious is Gavin Newsom.

In an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Kark, California’s governor said we ought to be standing up for the noblest principles of the American republic. “The founding fathers did not live and die to see us as cowards,” Newsom said. Then he identified the cowards, broadening the scope of the No Kings movement to include “the richest, most powerful people selling their souls and selling out this country.”

He then implied a list: the Republicans in the Congress, Wall Street and the corporate media, elite universities and elite law firms. Missing was the supermajority of the Supreme Court, but Newsom’s message was otherwise clear. Americans should be “disgusted” by the “cowards” who have monopoly control over the institutions of democracy.

Newsom borrowed from the No Kings by saying that the language of liberty is requisite to fighting for it. “It’s a revolution that’s going on in this country and I think you have to start using those words,” he said. “[Trump] is attacking every single institution of independent thinking and he’s succeeding because we’re still playing by the old set of rules.”

“The old set of rules” is hotly debated among liberal folk, but at its root, it refers to a status quo that, by dint of being a status quo, gives certain elites every advantage they could hope for in preventing the Democrats from developing into a fully realized opposition party.

It means continuing to make room for certain elites who (in good faith, let’s say) wish to stop the Democrats from becoming “too extreme,” which really means stopping them from centering the interests of the people. Once these are set aside, Newsom suggests, the Democrats can “fight fire with fire” for the purpose of establishing a new normal.

The language of revolutionary freedom in the context of old rules serving elites is important to understanding what Newsom says in the very next breath – that once order is reestablished, “we will continue to build on the legacy, I would argue, of the former president, who I think was one of the most successful presidents of the last century.”

He meant Joe Biden.

Far too few realized Biden was the bridge between the past and the future that so many Americans want to see in their president. His economic policies in particular were transformational, as they reversed the priorities of previous administrations, including Obama’s.

Biden privileged workers over “job creators.” (He was the first president to cross a picket line.) He oversaw a dramatic increase in hourly wages. (They outpaced inflation for the first time since the 1960s.) Unemployment, especially Black unemployment, had rarely been lower. By the end, inflation was returning to pre-pandemic levels.

For these reasons and more, elites hated Biden.

The hatred was especially sharp among corporate bosses. Biden championed their workers. He regulated their industries. He put the national interest above theirs. Most of all, they hated that Joe Biden threatened to stem the tide of consolidation. Capital will concentrate if left alone. Biden didn’t leave it alone. He knew that the unchecked concentration of money and power spells doom for democracy.

He was right. We know he was right. Look what’s happening now.

And that brings me back to No Kings. It has the potential to clarify history. The conventional wisdom is that Biden, through his hubris, brought himself down, paving the way for Donald Trump’s return.

With enough effort, another story can come to light – that the elites who are now lording it over us, who are now planning to pal around with a criminal president in his new gold-plated “ballroom,” conspired against a truly working-man’s president. Yes, he was old. Perhaps he overstayed his welcome. But no one can dispute the stone-cold fact that elites across the spectrum attacked him virtually from the start.

And from that betrayal of democracy and the common good arose the stirrings of an organic grassroots movement against not only despotic rule but against “the richest, most powerful people selling their souls and selling out this country” – those who made despotism possible.

Newsom didn’t bring up Biden only because he’s still popular with the Democratic base. He did so also because he knows that what the former president did is the foundation on which to build the next chapter of American history as well as the history of the Democratic Party – and whoever the base chooses to be the party’s next leader.

“Thousands could lose SNAP food benefits.”

That story ran last Sunday in the New Haven Register. The headline actually reflects an undercount. “Several hundred thousand people in [Connecticut], including some in every single town and city, could go without food assistance they rely on to survive,” wrote Alex Putterman.

About 10 percent of Nutmeggers, or more than 360,000 in a state of 3.6 million residents, are expected to lose their food stamps, as the shutdown of the federal government goes into its second month.

Why is this happening?

Because Donald Trump is holding hungry people as ransom in order to force the Democrats in the Senate to accept a Republican funding bill.

Speaker Mike Johnson keeps saying there’s no legal mechanism for accessing food-stamp money. Therefore, he says, the only way to release it is for the Democrats to vote to reopen the government.

That’s a lie. Last month, the USDA released a contingency plan in case of a shutdown, according to Roll Call. In a memo, the agency said:

“Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds that can be used for State Administrative Expenses to ensure that the State can also continue operations during a Federal Government shutdown. These multi-year contingency funds are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs in the middle of the fiscal year.”

Put simply, the president is impounding money already set aside by the Congress to fund the SNAP program. Put more simply, he’s stealing it.

The state of Massachusetts is being surprisingly blunt. “President Trump is currently choosing to not issue November SNAP benefits that help you and your family put food on the table,” its health agency said.

That’s in stark contrast to the reasons cited by the regime.

The USDA’s website said the Senate Democrats have voted against funding the food-stamp program, because they “continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures.”

That’s not what the agency said last month.

Johnson seems to think hostage-taking is just the kind of leverage his party needs to force the Democrats into complying with the regime.

“Things are getting real,” he told his conference Tuesday. “Pressure mounts on the Democrats,” he said, if House Republicans stay unified. With 42 million Americans on food stamps, “the pain register is about to hit level 10,” he said, adding that “we deeply regret it on our side.”

It’s a helluva thing to suggest, as Johnson did, that he has no regrets about starving people as long as it’s the right people being starved.

Aside from that, however, is Johnson’s misplaced confidence.

Democrats at the state level are acting to protect constituents from Trump’s extortion. According to NBC News, they are moving to secure tens of millions in emergency funding. (Moreover, 25 Democratic AGs are suing the Department of Agriculture.) Here in Connecticut, Governor Ned Lamont is setting aside $3 million as a partial stop-gap.

Connecticut’s Republicans are in line. They are not taking the risk of explaining themselves to hungry voters. The most vocal critic of Lamont suggested that neither he nor his caucus would be party to the fact that “people are being leveraged now and people are being hurt.”

“I stand in support of the governor’s first initiative,” House Republican leader Vincent Candelora told the Courant. “It’s not a substitution for SNAP. Our caucus is certainly willing to work with this administration to figure out a way to get more funds into these programs.”

In other words, don’t look at me.

It appears that Mike Johnson is using the old playbook. His party hurts people in the belief that the Democrats will save them in their quest for independent voters and GOP voters disaffected by Donald Trump.

But the gambit could backfire this time.

First, because the Democrats are not making the shutdown only about a normal policy disagreement. They are also making it about the crimes committed against the people by the president. Holding hungry people hostage only magnifies the allegations against him. As I said, the Republicans are used to burning supporters as leverage. They are not used to the Democrats standing by and letting them get burned.

The second reason Johnson’s gambit could backfire is because the cost of living is already unsustainable. It is becoming more so, as a consequence of the president’s tariffs and their inflationary effects.

Indeed, inflation was the deciding factor for millions of Americans in the last election. It was the only reason they voted for Trump. They didn’t care about his crimes. They cared only about rising costs.

But with a criminal president literally stealing the lunch money of 42 million Americans, forget about the price of eggs. There’s no eggs at all.

And finally, it could backfire by eating into the invisible profits associated with being a Trump supporter. I don’t mean real profits. I mean fake ones – the “wages” that come from believing that he’s going to stop “undeserving” people from “unfairly” competing with you.

WEB Dubois called this “the psychological wages of whiteness.” By voting for Trump, lots of Americans, and not just white ones, thought they were giving themselves a pay raise of some nebulous sort. But the longer this shutdown goes on, and the hungrier these people get as a result, the more that phony pay raise will feel like a very real pay cut.

Mike Johnson says that the pressure is building on the Democrats, but Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Forever Trumper, are trying to tell him that they fear what will happen when constituents open their mail to find out their health insurance premium has tripled, go to the pharmacy to find out they no longer qualify for Medicaid, or go to the grocery store to find out there’s no more SNAP money left.

They won’t blame Trump, but someone’s gotta pay.

Given the Democrats don’t control the Congress, guess who?

Before the No Kings demonstrations two weekends ago, I suggested that the shutdown of the government would look different afterward.

Previously, the view had been that the congressional Democrats were demanding health insurance subsidies expanded during the covid era. That made it look like a policy fight. If you wanted Obamacare subsidies renewed, you took their side. If you didn’t, you didn’t.

Then 7 million Americans came out in a massive display across 50 states. They protested against a president whose ambitions are clearly despotic and whose claims to authority are illegal and illegitimate.

Deepening the impression was Donald Trump’s reaction. He posted a fake AI video of him wearing a crown, flying a fighter jet and bombing protesters with what can only be called t----. That, however, pales compared to him bulldozing the entire East Wing of the White House, an act of utter impunity for the law, the Constitution and the republic.

This combo of allegation and reaction appears to be reshaping some perceptions of the shutdown. Instead of fighting over health insurance premiums, which are painful enough, the Democrats look like they’re advancing a legitimate form of resistance against an illegitimate ruler.

This new perception came to light in reporting by the Associated Press published over the weekend: “Democrats are confident they have chosen a winning policy demand on health care plans offered under Affordable Care Act marketplaces, but there is an undercurrent that they are also fighting to halt Trump’s expansion of power” (my italics).

That report was featured on the frontpage of the Hartford Courant under the headline: “Trump using shutdown to consolidate powers.”

The AP report says the Democrats’ resolve will be tested later this week. At that point, it will be a month since federal employees have gone without pay. SNAP benefits will end November 1. (One in eight people lives on food stamps.) Plus there’s a shortage of air-traffic controllers. The report suggests the more airport delays there are, the more pressure there is on Democrats to vote for the GOP’s “clean CR.”

But the reverse is more likely to be true. The Republicans are feeling heat from below, as their supporters face dramatically increasing health insurance premiums, especially in states without expanded Medicaid coverage. Food stamps benefit plenty of Republicans, too. Oklahoma has the fourth-greatest number of recipients, according to one survey. Louisiana has the second-most. (New Mexico is No. 1.)

If I’m right, and the shutdown is being seen more broadly as legitimate resistance to Trump’s illegitimate rule, the point could be made more memorable by GOP voters going hungry while watching Trump build his gold-gilt “ballroom” paid for by “friends.” And if that pain goes on long enough, the Republicans risk reminding their base that, though they dislike the Democrats, their lives are entwined with their policies.

It’s the Republicans, not the Democrats, who need an off-ramp. They risk revealing that Trump’s power is more important to him, and to them, than the health, well-being and freedom of their supporters.

Today, House Speaker Mike Johnson said the legal explanation by the White House for why it can’t fund food stamps beyond November 1 “certainly looks legitimate to me.” “The contingency funds are not legally available to cover the benefits right now,” Johnson said.

The law, in other words, stops Trump from taking action.

But the law never stopped him before.

Most recently, the president broke federal law to cover the Pentagon’s payroll. (There is no military funding during a shutdown so the White House raided a separate account unrelated to defense funding in violation of the Antideficiency Act and Article 1 of the Constitution. He robbed the American people of their power to control their money)

So Trump will break the law to consolidate his power – in this case, in the hopes of buying the loyalty of those in the armed forces – but won’t break the law if anyone but him is the beneficiary of the crime.

And Johnson isn’t saying which is better.

In essence, Donald Trump and the Republicans are acting like they can do whatever they want to the government, even inflict serious injury, in the belief that their base will stand behind them no matter what. They believe that they can hold their own people hostage in order to create leverage over the Democrats, and that the Democrats, in their rush to win over disillusioned Republicans, will pay their ransom.

That kind of thing has worked for as long as I can remember, but key to the Republicans’ success has always been the idea that government shutdowns were a consequence of policy disagreements and that resolutions to those disagreements were also a question of policy.

However, the Democrats have elevated, or are in the process of elevating, the shutdown so that it’s seen as a weapon against tyranny. After the No Kings protests and after Trump demolished the East Wing in response (and after a pardoned J6 insurrectionist threatened his life), Hakeem Jeffries said that the Democrats were fighting against corruption as much as they were fighting for affordable health care.

“We have an American president behaving like an organized crime boss, stealing taxpayer dollars in real-time in front of everyone in plain sight,” Jeffries said last week. “And the Republicans have nothing to say about the emerging crime scene at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Importantly, the Democrats are positioning themselves so that victory can’t come from Trump and the Republicans conceding to demands of policy – whether to renew health insurance subsidies, for instance. Victory can only come from them conceding to demands of power. Indeed, it’s a demand so noble that it’s worth pursuing at any cost.

The Republicans are used to burning their own people as leverage.

They are not used to the Democrats saying, “let them burn.”

US Senator Josh Hawley is among a handful of Republicans who are raising the idea of nuking the filibuster. (That’s the Senate rule that requires a supermajority of 60 votes for any legislation to pass.) Right now, that’s being seen as a sign of strength. After all, the filibuster is the only thing that the Democrats have to stop the Republicans.

But I think it’s the opposite.

The Republicans must be aware that even if they gave the Democrats what they asked for, the Democrats can’t accept without complicity in the “emerging crime scene at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” Expanded health insurance subsidies won’t be satisfactory, not when the demand is the return of congressional authority that was stolen by Trump.

And the Republicans must know that Trump will never do that. He will never stop acting like a criminal president, even if every Republican who voted for him sees their lives and livelihoods turned to ash.

It’s important to stay focused. Yes, it’s an outrage for the president to post a phony AI video of himself wearing a crown, flying a fighter jet and bombing peaceful protesters with human waste.

It’s outrageous for the congressional Republicans to defend the video or pretend they don’t know Donald Trump posted it. It’s outrageous, moreover, for the press corps to bend over backwards to avoid describing in plain English what everyone can see for themselves.

I mean, “brown liquid”! Jesus God, c’mon.

But let’s keep our heads. We have just witnessed the biggest one-day demonstration in our country’s history. About 7 million Americans across 50 states, including in small towns in rural districts, protested against the crimes of the regime. Together, they sent a message: America does not and will never have a king. What was his response?

To act like a king.

“I think it’s a joke,” the president said of No Kings. “I looked at the people — they’re not representative of this country. And I looked at all the brand new signs… I guess it was paid for by [George] Soros and other radical left lunatics … It looks like it was. We’re checking it out.”

“The demonstrations were very small, very ineffective, and the people were whacked out,” he added. “When you look at those people, those [people] are not representative of the people of our country.”

He said that before the phony AI video.

No one can imagine a Democratic president suggesting he can s--- on Americans with impunity. That would be a weekslong scandal. Yet reporters tend to shrug when Trump does it, because they accept as true the argument that Republicans are the only legitimate Americans.

That alone is an occasion to rehash the old grievance against the press corps. Every liberal I know is sick of the double standard embedded in media coverage of the parties, such that the Republicans are free to say anything at all while the Democrats are always held accountable.

But let’s not lose sight of what has been accomplished.

On the one hand, Trump is confessing to the allegations of illegitimacy against him. Protesters said he is not a king. Then he said, in effect, Oh yeah? Watch me. That alone is worth celebrating, as it affects people who have doubts about Trump, but don’t yet trust the opposition. No Kings drew about 5 million people in June. This time, it added a couple million more. Next time, perhaps, a couple million more than that.

On the other hand, however, is something deeper and more powerful.

The president and his party want the American people to believe that the Republicans – and the Republicans alone – are the real arbiters of reality. Critics do not have the liberty to interpret facts independently. They do not have the right to express beliefs according to guaranteed liberties. Only Republicans have the true authority to define America.

With one voice, more than 7 million Americans said no.

Before the rally, the Republicans said protesters are “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, violent criminals.” They are the “most unhinged in the Democratic Party.” They are the “pro-Hamas wing, the antifa people.”

In reality, No Kings featured millions of mostly white, mostly middle-class citizens over the age of 50. For some, demands were specific. (“Abolish ICE,” for instance.) For most, the protest was a necessity reaffirmation of America’s most basic republican virtues, for instance, that the people are sovereign and the Constitution is law.

As my senator, Chris Murphy, said of Trump:

“The truth is that he is enacting a detailed step-by-step plan to try to destroy all of the things that protect our democracy: free speech, fair elections and independent press, the right to peacefully protest. But the truth is he has not won yet. The people still rule in this country.”

Until now, the president has been able to convince elites in the media, corporations, universities, law firms and even the Democratic Party that he was an unstoppable force, practically an act of God. And in effect, that’s what he became, after they surrendered without a fight. No one dared bloody the bully’s nose. So he became a de facto king.

Things look different now that his nose is bloodied. Those who oppose him are more emboldened. Those who caved are humiliated and discredited. But mostly, the facade has fallen to expose a weakness present all along. His power is determined by the willingness of his enemies to defeat themselves. Now that they refuse, he’s furious.

The common folk are supposed to roll over the way their betters did. Yet here they are, reaffirming America’s bedrock democratic principles, as if they were entitled to them. The worst part is they are from a class of Americans that has the least to lose and the most to gain by opposing him. Under the banner of the most benign political demand – No Kings – they pose the greatest threat. If they were Black or brown, or Muslim or trans, his smears against them might work. But as it is, Trump is making comfortably middle-class white people over the age of 50 feel like warriors in the rebellion against the crown.

To be sure, Trump will escalate. The first thing a bully does after getting bloodied is look around for victims he believes will not fight back. Indeed, after the rally, he said, “don't forget I can use the Insurrection Act. Fifty percent of the presidents almost have used that. And that's unquestioned power." There’s no telling how far he will go.

But the point has been made. Donald Trump is not invincible. He is not infallible. He is not inevitable. And in reacting to the momentum that’s building against him – with a turd post – he’s making the point himself more persuasively than 7 million Americans can. He’s deepening the obscenity of his illegitimate rule by becoming even more obscene.

The president says he has the power to pay members of the military even though the government’s fiscal year ended on September 30.

That may seem acceptable. After all, why should those who serve the country suffer while partisans blame each other for the shutdown?

It isn’t acceptable.

Donald Trump has taken yet another criminal step toward conditions that allow him to do virtually anything with the people’s money, even maintaining an army to occupy cities as if they were the colonies of some distant empire. The president’s move is a reminder of the original anti-theft meaning of “no taxation without representation.” With each new move, this would-be king is setting things up so the Democrats can’t say yes to reopening the government without coronating him.

Right now, the story of the shutdown goes like this.

Trump and the Republicans want the Democrats to sign off on a continuing resolution (CR), so the government is funded this year at similar levels as last year. Meanwhile, the Democrats say they would if Trump and the Republicans agreed to renewing federal (Obamacare) health insurance subsidies expanded during the covid pandemic.

As of now, the Democrats seem to have the upper hand. They do not control any of the three branches of government. News of the coming spike in premiums is reaching GOP voters. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a high-profile Forever Trumper, blames her party. Polling continues to indicate that majorities agree with her.

So far, this story suggests the Democrats are on the brink of victory. The story itself, however, isn’t keeping up with changing conditions.

First, it does not account for the administration’s habit of impounding congressionally appropriated funding. It has been breaking the law, and violating Article 1 of the Constitution, by refusing to send federal money wherever the Congress has said it shall go. This pattern became more pointed after the shutdown on September 30 in what Don Moynihan has called “ideological targeting.” The Times reported that $27 billion in funding is being expressly held from Democratic districts.

Even if the Democrats get what they want, and the president says yes to renewing Obamacare subsidies, the Democrats must still face the near-certainty that his administration will cheat them. (They must also face the House speaker’s stated intention to claw back, or rescind, money by way of reconciliation bills requiring only a simple majority.)

So already, the Democrats are demanding much more than help for Americans facing skyrocketing health insurance premiums. They are demanding that the president cede the power that he has taken through criminal means (with the Republican Party’s blessing). They are using their leverage, by way of the filibuster, to pull Trump back from the brink of dictatorship. That’s the whole story – or it was until this week.

Now, with news about military pay, the story takes a different and more consequential turn. In addition to illegally impounding funds appropriated by the Congress, the administration is now taking money that Congress intended for a particular purpose to be spent during a particular time, and moving it around to meet the president’s needs.

Specifically, the administration is moving money from an account the Congress intended to be spent on research and development, and moving it to an account to pay members of the armed services. I don’t know if that’s embezzlement, per se, but I do know it’s a violation of the Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 of the US Constitution, which was written to make sure the people don’t lose control of their money.

I know something else thanks to Bobby Kogan at the Center for American Progress. This move by the White House is a blatant and willful violation of the Antideficiency Act, a law meant to clear up any question about whether it’s a felony for anyone in government to spend any money on anything that’s not approved by the Congress.

And it is.

What’s also clear is Donald Trump’s latest crime (for now, let’s call it embezzlement) progressed from the previous crime (impoundment). That seems to me a logical evolution that began with the idea that the Constitution and subsequent federal law are mere suggestions. And that this progress happened is itself an indication that it will continue, if left unchecked. The worst-case scenario is no longer theoretical.

Under normal circumstances, blue cities and states subsidize red states. They send more tax dollars to Washington than they get in return. However, under a president who’s stealing the people’s power to control their money, the pattern could turn openly exploitative. Blue cities especially could be seen as no more than colonies whose wealth is to be extracted and whose populations are to be controlled. That future may not be plausible yet, but it’s not impossible, as it would be the natural, criminal consequence of taxation without representation.

Which brings me back to the Democrats. First, they can’t make a deal with Trump without being complicit in making any of the above horrors real. Second, they are the only remedy. Trump is not going to prosecute himself. Federal courts of law might be an option, but just getting a hearing would require proof of standing, which would be a high bar even if the Supreme Court were not corrupted. (The Republican Party, meanwhile, is happy to let all the criming happen.)

If a remedy cannot be found in federal law enforcement or the federal courts (or the national Republican Party), then what? If there is to be an American republic in more than name, there must be serious consequences for a lawless executive stealing “the power of the purse” from the American people. As New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, only the Democrats can be those consequences.

How? I can’t say I know exactly. What I can say is the Republicans seem to be aware of being watched. Senate Majority Leader John Thune referenced this weekend’s No King’s protest, for instance. Perhaps he fears the effect it might have on public perception of the shutdown.

People might understand the stakes are about far more health insurance premiums. If big enough, the protest could expose the lie that the Democrats are pandering to their base, increasing the legitimacy of their resistance to Trump. Most of all, the protest could affirm for us our origin story, which is that all men are created equal and that equality is impossible under the illegitimate rule of kings.

We are witnessing lawlessness on a scale none of us has seen in our lifetimes. It’s so bad that over the weekend, even Kamala Harris was forced to admit she’s lost faith in the American system of justice.

“I don’t know if we can trust what’s coming out of the Department of Justice,” the former vice president told MSNBC. “That pains me to say that, as someone who spent the majority of my career as a prosecutor. Many who have worked as US attorneys … talk openly and rightly about the fact that they should do their work without any fear and not in the interest of favor. That so clearly is not what is ruling day there.”

In her new book, she repeatedly says the Democrats should fight fire with fire. Should they do with the US Department of Justice what the Republicans under Donald Trump have done to it? Her answer: No. “No president should think of the Department of Justice as being their personal attorney,” Kamala Harris said. “No president should try to influence prosecutorial decisions based on a political agenda, period.”

But I suspect she knows it’s more complicated. No legal institution – not the courts and not the Department of Justice – is going to hold Donald Trump accountable for the crimes he has committed without the political motivation to do so. But there will be no such motivation if the Democratic Party sticks with its “norms and institutions” view of criminal justice. It must channel the public’s desire for retribution.

The people want payback, wrote Christopher Jon Sprigman. “When this is over – and it will end – there has to be a sustained and severe campaign of retribution, from Trump down to the masked ICE fascists who carried this out,” he said. “No f—ing kumbaya. Consequences.”

Sprigman is the Murray and Kathleen Bring Professor of Law at New York University and co-director of its Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy. I got in touch with Chris. Below is our conversation.

The Democrats seem to have stopped talking in terms of compromise and have begun talking in terms of accountability. You think they need to demand retribution (your word). Why?

There are two reasons.

First, the American people need to hear that when this is all over, elected Democrats aren't going to want to sing kumbaya – which is probably the instinct that a lot of them have. If that happens, if perpetrators in this administration aren't punished – severely punished – we'll be right back in this mess very quickly.

Second, the word "retribution" is part of justice. And in situations like the one we face, it should take center stage. Existing law and courts – the institutions we rely on to provide justice – are plainly inadequate to meet the challenge of the widescale lawbreaking, abuse and utter lack of human decency that we see from Trump on down to ICE. What's needed is something beyond existing law and legal process.

What would that something be?

I've been re-reading Justice Robert Jackson's opening statement at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. I'm not saying the administration has risen, or sunk, to the level of the Nazis ... although, give them some time, I suppose. What I am saying is that some of what Jackson says about why a special set of proceedings was required for Nazis – you can't just try them in US courts – is applicable to our situation.

Jackson insisted that "[t]he common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched."

I think our courts – most notably the Supreme Court – have demonstrated that they will not hold Trump to account. So, for example, if Trump's attacks on alleged Venezuelan drug boats are really the murder of a bunch of innocent fishermen, US courts are not going to permit him to be tried for murder.

Later in his speech, Jackson noted that trying the Nazis in regular US courts would be an interminable process – and that years of delay was unacceptable: "Never before in legal history has an effort been made to bring within the scope of a single litigation the developments of a decade, covering a whole Continent, involving a score of nations, countless individuals, and innumerable events. Despite the magnitude of the task, the world has demanded immediate action. This demand has had to be met, though perhaps at the cost of finished craftsmanship. In my country, established courts, following familiar procedures, applying well-thumbed precedents, dealing with the consequences of local and limited events seldom commence a trial within a year of the event in litigation."

So too here. This administration has been in power less than 10 months, and already the scale of its lawbreaking is immense. Trials in US courts would likely drag on for more than a decade.

Why do we need to go outside existing law and legal process? Why can't we do it ourselves, so the people can get fully behind it?

There is simply no law that squarely covers a lot of what Trump has done. Partially because we could not previously imagine a criminal sociopath being elected president. Partially because the Supreme Court has – based on literally nothing – conjured a crazily broad presidential immunity doctrine just at the moment a criminal sociopath was in place to abuse it.

And also partially because the federal courts are now packed with partisans who cannot be trusted to apply the law evenhandedly. We need new rules, and we need a new institution to judge Trump and his enablers and thugs. We need to apply the Nuremberg model here.

It seems to me, for all these reasons, Trump is going to get away with his crimes. But the same might not be said for his minions. Can our system seek retribution sufficiently to deter future conspirators?

I don't think it's time yet to accept that Trump is going to get away with it. If we leave this to regular law and courts, he will. That's why I'm making these arguments.

The US is currently in a state of lawlessness. It may not seem that way to the average person. The law still applies to them. But that's the trick. The law doesn't apply to Trump and his allies. That is a particularly threatening type of lawlessness.

Law for some. Impunity for others.

And my point is: the law is broken. The response to that should not be strictly legal – at least not "law," as it stands currently. We need a new law that responds to lawlessness. We need a new institution to enforce it on the lawbreakers. That was the essence of Nuremberg.

To answer your question directly: if there's no punishment for Trump and we focus on Trump's enablers, that's a terrible outcome.

That will breed more contempt for the law.

And it should.

To make reforms happen, there must be political will. Something big enough to force the Democrats -- who are the only way Trump will feel the consequences of his actions -- to act. Perhaps Epstein is the stand-in for all elite corruption and impunity for law?

I worry every day that this is asking too much of a party that retains as its legislative leaders two men as limp as Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. I mean, how can any elected Democrat explain that?

But it's not in my nature to just throw up my hands. And there is a level of anger and frustration in this country – and revulsion in seeing our government turn into a crime syndicate – that I think some enterprising politician will eventually harness. Of course, that comes with great danger. We're living very close to the edge right now, and will be for some time, unless we fall completely into the abyss.

The furor around the Epstein files is an indicator that this fury at our elites is shared by many Republicans as well as Democrats. Trump has somehow convinced people – for now – that he is the vessel for retribution (that word again) against corrupt elites. Of course, he never was that. People bought it. They may continue to. But the Epstein files seem to have had some power to shake people's faith in Trump and Trumpism. We'll see how that develops. I'd be surprised if it goes away.

In any event, I hope voters will send Democrats a clear message.

If they do ever regain power, they cannot leave the Trump administration’s lawbreaking unaddressed. And they cannot leave it to existing law and our politicized courts. We need new rules and new institutions. And they have to judge Trump and his enablers, right down to the masked, violent ICE agents on the street.

It’s tempting to believe the Democrats are winning the shutdown fight. After all, if Marjorie Taylor Greene, she of Jewish space laser fame, is now the voice of reason, something is surely going their way.

On Monday, the Georgia congresswoman tweeted that “WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE ABSOLUTELY INSANE COST OF INSURANCE FOR AMERICANS,” after revealing that her adult kids are going to see their own Obamacare premiums increase by 100 percent.

Taylor Greene said “not a single Republican in leadership talked to [the House GOP conference] about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING!!!”

The tide seems to be turning.

“How can you tell Democrats have the upper hand in the week-old shutdown fight?” said MSNBC anchor and columnist Catherine Rampell. “Marjorie Taylor Greene just endorsed their key demand.”

Indeed, others are putting the Democrats’ demand in a larger theory of political change. Symone Sanders Townsend, another MSNBC anchor and columnist, said the Democrats are winning because they are asking for something clearly defined in exchange for their support, not “some abstract principle or unreasonable demand.” She added:

Fighting is the only way to win. Progress is never handed over; it is wrestled into being. From the Civil Rights Movement to the labor movement, history tells us that those who wait patiently for justice are the ones left behind. As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Democrats are demanding something concrete: health care security for the people they represent.

I don’t see any reason to doubt the assertion that the Democrats are currently winning the fight over the government shutdown, as polling suggests broad agreement in blaming Donald Trump and the GOP.

I question the cause, though. The consensus among liberals and Democrats seems to be that a concrete “kitchen-table issue” like rising health insurance premiums is pushing public opinion and, therefore, forcing at least one highly influential House Republican to break ranks.

But what if it’s simpler than that?

What if public opinion is turning against the president and his party, because the shutdown has exposed something true about them?

Donald Trump has acted like the Congress doesn’t matter, like the courts don’t matter, like the electorate doesn’t matter, like the law and the Constitution don’t matter. All the while the Republicans have greased the skids of his impunity. That includes the Republicans on the Supreme Court. They occasionally legalized his crimes after the fact.

The president has been telling us for going on a decade that the Democrats are part of a vast, secret and malign conspiracy to destroy the country from the inside – the Democrats are now “the enemy within” same as “domestic terrorist organizations” – and that he is not only the solution to America’s problems but America’s retribution.

And for the last 10 months, the administration, the congressional Republicans and, to a large extent, the Washington press corps have been talking about Donald Trump as if he were less a man than an act of God whose mandate by “real Americans” shall not be denied. The accumulated effect of all this effort has been turning the president into a tiger burning so brightly there’s no point in resisting him.

Yet, despite the hype, the government is shut. The Democrats revealed a tiger made of paper. And all it took was the simple act of saying no.

That’s a better explanation for polling that blames Trump. It’s not that the Democrats are making concrete demands. It’s that they’re fighting, period, using Obamacare subsidies as a credible pretext. They are forcing the president to step off, thus proving he’s neither invincible nor inevitable. Mostly, however, they’re proving he’s not what he seems, and the longer this fight goes on, the clearer that will get.

Even to Republican voters.

And that right there is the thing.

From the point of view of the congressional Republicans, there’s nothing wrong with health insurance premiums going up by two or three or four times. They don’t care, even if their own people are suffering. This is evidenced by Medicaid cuts. They will devastate GOP voters, over a decade, out of public view, giving the Republican enough time to devise a plan to prevent their people from knowing Donald Trump and the Republicans have been scamming them the whole time.

What they do care about is the shutdown giving the Democrats a chance to link the pain that GOP voters are about to feel to Donald Trump. That risks them knowing that he’s the one hurting them, not the Democrats, as well as knowing that the Democrats are trying to help them. The Republicans don’t care about pain, only the lessons of pain.

The consensus right now seems to be that the Democrats are winning the shutdown, because Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to be standing up to the president. (Politico is calling it her “populist rebellion.”) More likely, however, is that Greene is like the canary in the coal mine, an early warning to Trump that something bad is coming, and it’s coming fast, namely, that the Republican Party is about to experience what happens when GOP voters realize what they have done to themselves.

She suggested as much. Though she’s the first House Republican to endorse the Democratic side, she’s trying to shield Trump from the coming blowback. “I'm actually putting the blame on the speaker and Leader Thune,” she told CNN today. “This should not be happening ... We control the House and Senate and have the White House."

The Democrats are winning, but not because they are sticking to economic issues that affect millions of Americans (including me, by the way). They are winning, because the consequence of their choice to fight has been to expose Trump’s weakness. He’s not what he seems.

Perhaps, the same goes for Marjorie Taylor Greene. Though it’s a running joke that she’s suddenly the voice of reason, it’s rational for her to protect Trump. Among the worst things to happen to him and their party would be for GOP voters to learn the truth about them.

This week, House Speaker Mike Johnson said there would be no votes next week. (That’s after canceling votes this week.) The White House, meanwhile, said it has begun mass firings of federal workers because the congressional Democrats haven’t caved to reopen the government.

The combined news is being reported as a “leverage,” as if these were normal rounds of negotiation between equal sides. The AP said it was an “attempt to exert more pressure on Democratic lawmakers” — the blandest possible way of saying coercion. “Take the deal or else” isn’t a reason for anyone to say yes. It’s the best reason in the world to say no.

But coercion isn’t the Republicans’ only tool.

In a call with the House Freedom Caucus, Johnson said, "we worked on rescissions, and there'll be more of that, we expect, in the days ahead." And: "Now, we would like to do another reconciliation bill this fall, before the end of the calendar year, and potentially, a third one in the spring, where we will also show more and more fiscal responsibility."

Translation: if the president has to give in to the Democrats’ demand for renewing health insurance subsidies, don’t worry. We can come back later with clawbacks (“rescissions”) that require a simple majority (“reconciliation bill”) to pass a Republican-controlled Congress.

In other words, Johnson is announcing his intention to cheat.

The Democrats are demanding a suite of concessions related to the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid (namely, restoring cuts made to it under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act). But their demands will mean nothing if the Republicans can steal back money after promising it.

The Democrats’ demands will also mean nothing if Donald Trump later finds a way to send some healthcare money to people who voted for him but not to people who didn’t. This is called impoundment and impoundment is illegal. The regime, even now, is impounding money intended for cities and states run by Democrats. It’s yet another bid to extort the Democrats in the Congress into accepting Trump’s terms.

(The Republicans on the US Supreme Court know impoundment is illegal but have occasionally ruled that it’s legal if a Republican does it.)

Any deal involving the Democrats’ demands on healthcare must have reassurances that Trump and the GOP won’t go back on their word. I don’t see how that’s possible with the speaker of the House saying out loud that Hell will freeze over before the Democrats can trust him.

Indeed, during a presser today, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was asked: “If Republicans were to commit to putting forward a vote on extending the ACA subsidies, would that bring Democrats to the negotiating table?” His reply: "Republicans have zero credibility, zero."

I don’t know how this is going to end. Neither does Tiffany Carlock. She’s an activist who uses her newsletter, Candidly Tiff, to educate people about civics, strategy and what’s really happening in politics.

In this brief interview, we touch on whether the Democrats are “winning” the shutdown fight, the role of “the Epstein files” in their thinking, how they are breaking through a media landscape coded in Trump’s favor, and what to do in this age of rampant lawlessness.

“Democrats have truth on their side and are using it,” Tiff said.

First, are the Democrats winning the fight over the government shutdown? I'm skeptical, but what do you think? And why?

Democrats are “winning” on the messaging front but personally, I don’t think anyone wins when the government shuts down. Republicans went into the fight thinking Democrats would cave, but they have held strong. This has stunned the legacy media as well as some Democrats.

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to keep his caucus home is a very poor strategy and he looks weak. Refusing to negotiate and swear-in Adelita Grijalva looks so bad on his part. Johnson has proven he has no idea how to govern. Even Majorie Taylor Greene, of all people, has called Johnson and John Thune out. The “clean CR” framing did not work for Republicans like they thought it would.

What do you think of the role of the Epstein files? Some Democrats are making the case that Johnson is keeping the government closed to protect Trump. How does that fit into your thinking?

I think it’s a legitimate talking point considering Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva is the 218th vote needed for the Epstein file petition to make it to the House floor. Sometimes 1 + 1 = 2, so why not use Mike Johnson’s weakness to create a Democratic advantage? This issue has been a major point of contention since right before the August recess.

Is it being done to protect Donald Trump? I doubt it. I think Mike Johnson is just scared of losing control of his conference and leadership. A vote on the files will be embarrassing for him. Trump has the Department of Justice to protect him, so he seems unbothered.

As you know, the mainstream news is coded in ways favorable to the Republicans. And yet the Democrats' messaging seems to be getting through to people. What's going on? How do you explain that?

Two things that are working:

One, Democrats are calling lies LIES! This is something they have never been good at because they like to play nice. But the gloves are off. Finally!

Two, the messaging is simple: healthcare costs will rise. In this economy, that message resonates and people will get premium increases in the mail soon enough. Democrats have truth on their side and are using it as leverage. Repetition matters and they are marching to the same beat. Unity is important.

How does this end? If Trump caves, what have the Democrats accomplished – protecting GOP voters from their choices?

I have no idea how this ends, but I have a few guesses. Marjorie Taylor Greene putting pressure on Mike Johnson is a significant development. Trump will never admit to caving and even if did, he is Trump.

Letting the credits expire would hurt Republicans, but do we want to dismantle the healthcare system to get a win? I am conflicted on this.

The most likely outcome is Democrats back off the immigration language changes and get an extension of Affordable Care Act premiums for one year. That would be a win for the American people. Trump can pretend to work on a new fabulous concept of a plan.

Eventually Republicans will need to negotiate or kill the filibuster to pass a continuing resolution. This is on them.

My theory is that the Democrats should reclaim law and order, and perhaps use the lessons of the shutdown as a foundation for that. This president is lawless. His party is lawless. You want to heal our divisions? Well, enforce the law! Thoughts?

My rebuttal to that is: Who is going to enforce the law? The DOJ? They are compromised. The judiciary branch for the most part is seemingly the only non-compromised check and balance we have left. While slow, the courts are holding up the law for the most part.

Congress cannot enforce the law. Its role is to legislate. So now we have to rely on states to sue and win in court to stop the lawlessness of the DOJ, the FBI and the White House. This is why democracy is dying. The legislative branch has mostly ceded its Article 1 power. We are in hell, as I like to say, and it will take the courts and the American people to save what little of our democracy is left.

Today, I have a few things to say about that putz Stephen Miller. First, he’s been on TV a lot lately, because that’s how he pours more poison onto the president’s already-poisoned brain. He doesn’t whisper lies into the ear of the old and demented sovereign the way Wormtongue does in Tolkien's epic. King Théoden didn’t have a TV. King Donald can’t stop watching his. So Stephen Miller delivers poison that way.

Over the weekend, the White House advisor wrote on Twitter there’s “a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”

In the days since, Miller has repeated a variation of that “insurrection” theme during numerous TV appearances. Last night, for instance, he told a CNN anchor that ICE protesters are “actually, as we speak, trying to overthrow the core law enforcement function of the federal government. … ICE officers have to street battle against antifa, hand-to-hand combat every night, to come and go from their building.”

Every word here, including “and” and “the,” is a lie.

But today, we saw the fruit of Miller’s labor.

“Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers,” Trump wrote on his social media site. “Governor Pritzker, too.”

I have talked a lot before about how Trump has dementia and how growing public awareness of his disease could make him vulnerable to the allegation that he’s not really in charge – that malicious and unaccountable forces are pulling his strings. But I haven’t talked about how. Well, this is how. And Stephen Miller is doing it in plain sight.

The second thing I want to say about that putz is about his personality, specifically, about the character of a man who goes on TV to goad an old, demented president into invoking the Insurrection Act to impose martial law. (Miller seems to believe if he says “insurrection” on TV enough times, something in Donald Trump’s head will finally click.)

Before they lie to anyone else, liars like Stephen Miller lie to themselves. They must, because they cannot face the truth. However, I don’t mean just any old truth. I mean capital-T truth, which is to say, the whole truth about themselves. If they had to face it, they would die. (They believe they would die, because they have no faith.)

So they lie, as if their lives depend on it.

What truth? In Stephen Miller’s case, I can’t say I know for sure, but it’s probably that he’s a mediocrity. He’s neither exceptionally intelligent nor exceptionally gifted. Let’s say he’s bland-looking. He’s short by Washington standards. (He says he’s 5 foot 10.) Of course, there are plenty of men who are born of average appearance, talent and smarts, but who accept who they are and lead decent, honorable, happy lives.

Not Stephen Miller. Why? Titanic ego. The truth shall never be true! So he lies to himself, about himself. I would surmise that from a very early age, he began living his life as if he were surviving an endless series of traumatizing events. Do this long enough and you end up not knowing who you are, what you want or what you stand for. And because the lies you tell yourself, about yourself, literally prevent you from feeling joy or satisfaction, always present in life is a desperate, junkie need.

I would suggest this junkie need is the root of hatred. Miller looks around at others who are living their best lives according to the truth about themselves. He sees you doing you better than he’s doing him – and it makes him mad. You cannot do that to him. It’s an injustice. You must be stopped. Indeed, the only way he’s going to feel better is if you are forced to accept the lies he tells himself, about himself. The Stephen Millers of the world, including the president of the United States, are not mediocrities. They are not even human. They are gods. You shall obey. And if you refuse, they will “use legitimate state power.”

I’m dwelling on this facet of Stephen Miller’s personality, as well as on the nature of the totalitarian mind, for a reason. What he’s doing – goading an old, demented president through TV appearances into imposing martial law – is scary. But manipulating the president only gets Miller and the rest of the regime so far. If they are going to take control of the republic, which is their objective (make no mistake), they must convince the American people there’s no use in fighting back – that resistance is futile. And they are going to do that by lying.

During TV appearances this week, Stephen Miller made Donald Trump seem like a sovereign lord endowed by the law and the Constitution (and perhaps by God) with the divine right (“plenary authority,” Miller told CNN) to do whatever he wants in the name of his people, and that any opposition to his divine rule is not only pointless but punishable.

Greg Sargent put it this way. Miller “believes that if he supercharges the debate over Trump's abuses of power with enough propaganda, he can polarize it and force low-info voters to embrace authoritarianism.” (Greg’s latest in The New Republic is about how Democratic Governors JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom are taking Miller’s “theory of fascist power politics” at face value and devising a strategy to combat it.)

In other words, Miller is lying in order to get you (and “low-info voters”) to give up. And he’s doing that, because surrender is strategically vital. That is, without surrender, Miller and the rest of the regime got nothing. They lie, believing that you will believe their lies, and you end up doing their work for them – by conquering yourself.

But they can’t conquer you if you don’t believe them.

The moment you stop believing them is probably their most vulnerable moment, as we saw when Stephen Miller was asked by a Fox host to respond to comments made about him by New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In a stream for constituents, AOC discussed the critical role of ridicule in fighting fascism. For instance, she said:

“Laugh at them. Stephen Miller is a clown. I’ve never seen that guy in real life but he looks like he’s 4’ 10”. He looks like he’s angry about the fact that he’s 4’ 10”. He looks like he is so mad that he is 4’ 10” that he’s taking that anger out at any other population possible. Laugh at them.”

Fox’s Laura Ingraham played that clip, right there on live TV. The written word cannot do justice to the face Miller made while watching it. (You have to see it for yourself.) All I can say is he looked wounded, as if AOC had stabbed him, and that’s because the injury was very real.

She did the unforgivable: refused to accept the lies Stephen Miller tells himself, about himself, and she deepened that wound by daring to enjoy herself while doing it. She not only hurt him, emotionally and psychically, but she reminded him of his misery he endures daily.

I’ll close with this. You cannot debate a liar like Stephen Miller. You cannot persuade him with logic or facts. You cannot find common ground with him. There is no compromise. They are too weak to be worthy of trust, and therefore, they can only be opposed. Trump said JB Pritzker should be jailed. In reply, Pritzker said come and get me.

Low-info voters might not understand much.

But they can understand that.

On Friday, the president changed his mind. He decided that he is not going to break the law by withholding $187 million in federal funding for an intelligence and counterterrorism initiative in New York City.

And you should be grateful.

“I am pleased to advise that I reversed the cuts made to Homeland Security and Counterterrorism for New York City …” he said. “It was my Honor to do so. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

But Donald Trump didn’t change his mind. Not really. He just wants us to think so. Fact is, he wasn’t part of the decision to (illegally) cut off the money. Someone in the regime decided for him. Here’s the Times:

The cuts, which represented the largest federal defunding of police operations in New York in decades, were made by the Department of Homeland Security, without explanation and without the approval of President Trump, White House officials said.

Indeed, President Trump was blindsided by the decision to defund the police, not learning of the cuts until Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York called him on Sunday to protest the change after the fact, according to three people with knowledge of the call.

If the cuts had gone through, Trump would have defunded the police more than anyone, ever. That would not have been a good look for a president who bills himself as the great champion of law enforcement, and here’s the thing about that: someone in the White House knew it.

They knew it would hurt Trump to be seen as the president who kneecapped New York cops, seemingly making it harder for them to stop the next 9/11. Yet this someone went ahead and did it anyway, in the knowledge that Big Daddy is preoccupied with other matters.

I don’t want to belabor the obvious, but this sometimes happens when the father of the family, as it were, is old and doddering, and can no longer be trusted to tell the difference between reality and television. This sometimes happens when a “family member” really hates Big Daddy and wants to expose him. That way, everyone sees the truth!

I kid, but only slightly. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s someone in the White House who really hates Trump, despite working for the hate regimes, and actively seeks ways to humiliate him. (Consider the unknown aide responsible for putting makeup on his hand to cover up whatever ailment he has. The makeup’s color and his skin color are so mismatched that you can’t help thinking it was done on purpose!)

More important is that it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s someone – or a group of someones – that recognizes the chance to seize the reins of power for themselves and if it goes sideways, Trump can take the fall.

The president very often doesn’t seem to know what’s going until an outsider tells him. It could be a congressional Democrat. For instance, Chuck Schumer said Trump didn’t understand the coming spike in insurance premiums, the result of him and the Republicans failing to renew federal subsidies. “We laid out to the president some of the consequences happening in healthcare, and by his face and the way he looked, I think he heard about them for the first time,” Schumer said.

It could be a Democratic governor. After watching a Fox segment that made Portland look like a hellscape, Trump planned to send National Guard troops there. Then he talked to Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, who, New York’s Kathy Hochul, set him straight. Trump told Kotek: “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’”

But mostly, Trump learns about what his regime is doing when the press corps asks about what it’s doing. This is an ongoing pattern but most recently, Trump did not know that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had convened a meeting of the top military officials until questioned. The AP: “the president's participation was not part of the original plan for the meeting but that he decided that he wanted to go.”

His speech there was word salad. As I wrote Friday, he twaddled on about Biden’s autopen; about the unfair media; about tariffs; about the border; about “the time he went to a restaurant in Washington to eat dinner”; and even the “Nobel Peace Prize he felt he had earned.”

Then, amid the outpouring of words, there was a moment of clarity, and Trump seemed to remember what his people had been telling him.

“It’s a war from within,” he said. “It’s really a very important mission. We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military ... because we’re going into Chicago very soon.” (Last night, the regime ordered Texas National Guard troops to Illinois against the wishes of JB Pritzker. The Illinois governor has filed suit to stop it.)

Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey told MSNBC the speech was “one of the most bizarre, unsettling events I’ve ever encountered.” And: “The president sounded incoherent, exhausted, rabidly partisan, at times stupid, meandering [and] couldn’t hold a thought together.” (In fairness, Trump isn’t too far gone yet. As Jen Psaki noted, he is still aware enough to put the kibosh on any plan to defund the police.)

This pattern is so frequent and so public that the Washington press corps really should be asking, as Dan Froomkin recently suggested:

• “Is he a confused old man?
• “Is he being manipulated by his staff?
• “Is he delusional? Is he gaslighting us?
• “Who’s in charge?”

On Friday, I argued that the growing awareness of the president’s dementia (so far primarily due to Pritzker’s use of the d-word) could present an opportunity for coalition-building – between anti-Trump partisans who always believed him to be a threat to democracy and non-partisan swing voters who supported him in the mistaken belief that he’d solve pressing problems, like inflation and the cost of living.

The main obstacle to building a coalition is changing minds, namely, that indie voters are not going to admit they were wrong to choose a fascist. It hits different, however, when the same fascist appears to have dementia and, as a result, is doing weird stuff, like trying to defund the police while ordering troops to do the work of the police. At that point, the lift is less heavy. Liberals are not asking swing voters to stand up for democracy, just to stand against demented chaos.

It also hits different when, in the context of dementia, it seems that someone – or a group of someones – is pulling the strings and that Donald Trump is more puppet than president. That framing could also have a powerful effect on swing voters in joining an anti-authoritarian and pro-democracy coalition. They would not have to blame the president, thus blaming themselves by implication. Instead, they could blame the unelected liars and cheats – Russ Vought and Stephen Miller spring to mind – who are conspiring behind his back. Indies might even be encouraged to take the moral high ground. At least some of the power-grab involves humiliating a demented old man in public.

In this light, I think Project 2025 becomes something bigger than the authoritarian playbook that liberals go on and on about, and that indie voters tend to tune out. It becomes a stand-in for the schemers pulling Trump’s strings. They know their policies are so unpopular that they would never become reality if Vought and Miller couldn’t whisper in the ear of a doddering old man who can no longer be trusted to tell the difference between reality and television. For independent voters who may be looking for an off ramp, it’s not Project 2025. It’s Puppet 2025.

To be sure, I don’t trust the press corps to do the work that democracy needs. Reporters are happy to show a live feed of Trump seemingly not knowing what’s going on, but that’s the extent of it. They are not going to ask for the names of the puppet masters. They are not going to hold Trump to the same ageist standards that they held Joe Biden to. (They are certainly not going to flirt with the same conspiracy theories.) The hypocrisy is so baked in that, for now, I have no hope of it changing.

(And to be sure, all my talk of Donald Trump’s dementia might give the impression I don’t think he’s an evil man who’s capable of committing his own atrocities. Let me be the first to disabuse you of that notion.)

But the news media isn’t the only thing that swing voters experience. They also experience the pain and the chaos of unpopular policies pursued by this regime: tariffs, inflation, healthcare cuts, not to mention masked thugs ripping families apart. The more pain and chaos they feel, the more they might be open to the argument that the pain itself is proof that the democratically elected president isn’t in charge.

I could be wrong, but JB Pritzker may be the first Democrat to apply the d-word to Donald Trump. More importantly, the Illinois governor may be the first to link his criminality to his dementia. And! He may be the first to explain America’s existential crisis in context of a remedy.

A threefer! He said:

"It appears that Donald Trump not only has dementia set in, but he's copying tactics of Vladimir Putin. Sending troops into cities, thinking that that's some sort of proving ground for war, or that indeed there's some sort of internal war going on in the United States is just, frankly, inane, and I'm concerned for his health. There is something genuinely wrong with this man, and the 25th Amendment ought to be invoked."

Like I said, I could be wrong. California Governor Gavin Newsom came close to saying it. Last month, his social media account mocked one of Trump’s Truth Social posts, parsing all the lives, with a zinger on top: “Take your dementia meds, Grandpa. You are making things up again.” (Newsom has also said there’s something wrong with Trump. He suggested his cognition has decayed dramatically since his first term.)

But that’s as close as Newsom got, and as far as I can tell, no Democrat as high as Pritzker has said outright that Donald Trump is demented.

This is not to say no one has been talking about it directly. I have. USA Today’s Rex Huppke has. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent has. The Hill’s Chris Truax has. There are dozens more examples. (There’s also a repertoire of wink-wink-nudge-nudge that the Democrats have used since Joe Biden dropped out of the campaign. Kamala Harris talked a lot about Trump’s “stamina” and “weakness.” Others followed her lead.)

But that’s pretty much the extent of it. Despite wall-to-wall coverage of Joe Biden’s mental state, now to the point where some respectable journalists are claiming there was a vast conspiracy to cover it up, the Washington press corps seemed to have priced into their coverage of Trump his obvious deterioration. There’s barely a hint of anything about it. Absolutely no one has used the d-word in their reporting. It’s enough to make you wonder if there’s a vast conspiracy to cover it up.

I will say that something changed this week, at least in terms of coverage by the New York Times, which tends to be a bellwether for newspeople. A piece on his gathering of top military brass resulted in this reaction from a seasoned Times-watcher: “I assert that The New York Times has changed its approach to writing about Trump.”

The article, headlined “Trump Gave the Military’s Brass a Rehashed Speech. Until Minute 44,” was about how difficult it is to pick out the newsworthy bits from Trump’s speeches, as they tend to be retreads of the same things he’s always going on about. Despite addressing elites of the American military, Trump twaddled on about Biden and the “infamous autopen”; about the unfair media; about tariffs; about the border; about “the time he went to a restaurant in Washington to eat dinner”; and even the “Nobel Peace Prize he felt he had earned.”

As Times reporter Shawn McCreesh said: “These were pretty much the same things he talked about a day earlier while standing next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in the State Dining Room at the White House, which were the same things he talked about at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona, which were the same things he talked about at Windsor Castle and at Chequers in England.”

But then, out of that miasma of mangled words, broken thoughts and disconnections arose “something new. Something different,” McCreesh wrote. The president of the United States said that “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

To make sure you don’t miss it, McCreesh repeats those words in italics. “‘We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,’ the president of the United States said.”

McCreesh is reporting, not commenting. He’s not saying directly that Trump looks like an old man whose brain is so broken he can’t stop perseverating on the same five topics or that out of that word salad, he sometimes spews the pristine proclamations of a dictator. Instead, he takes a reportorial approach toward arriving at a similar conclusion. He’s showing, in other words, not telling, and the showing is clear.

“It has become harder to perceive the occasionally revealing things the president says … because of the way he sometimes says them,” McCreesh wrote. “For a 79-year-old, he’s often shown a great deal of energy, but he seemed a bit sapped Tuesday. As his remarks went on and on, his voice took on a more monotonous quality. A day earlier, when he spoke … Mr. Trump sounded out of breath at times.”

McCreesh could have taken a different reportorial approach.

He could have backgrounded the word salad and focused on how the “training ground” remark is in keeping with all the other dictatorial things Trump has said, which altogether are in keeping with Project 2025, published prior to the election. McCreesh could have focused on how, with each of these statements, the president seems to be coming around to publicly embracing that manifesto, after having renounced it. Indeed, such an approach would have gone viral. Just today, Trump said, in essence, he lied when he said he had nothing to do with it.

In short, McCreesh could have set aside the word salad to establish continuity between, say, the president who led an attempted insurrection and the president who said, years later, “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

Instead, McCreesh foregrounds Trump’s word salad to suggest that something has changed, and that such change could itself suggest that his dictatorial statements are the exception to the rule. “Thousands of words pour forth from the president’s mouth,” he wrote. “Sometimes, he tucks in a wild insight about the direction he is taking the country.”

Which brings me back to JB Pritzker. He’s why I’m dwelling on this piece and the way Shawn McCreesh wrote it. In being the first leading Democrat to use the word “dementia,” he’s doing something similar – foregrounding Trump’s deteriorated mental state such that all the crazy things that he’s doing in defiance of reason, morality, the Constitution and the law are downstream from there. (McCreesh’s foregrounding is, of course, implicit while Pritzker’s is explicit).

While other Democrats are making what seem to be ideological or policy-based arguments against the president – he’s a threat to your freedoms or he’s failing to protect your health care – Pritzker can take what you might call a position of big-hearted centrism. He can stand against Trump’s tyranny while at the same time genuinely lament that his disease has turned him into a despot. Now the dementia has set in, Pritzker said, Trump is copying Putin. “I'm concerned for his health.”

This won’t be fully convincing to a lot of people, myself included, but its effectiveness with independent voters might bring us around in time. Pritzker, or another ambitious Democrat, could easily pivot this framing to include all those things that swing voters thought he was going to do but didn’t. Why is food still so expensive? Why did my electric bill go up? Why didn’t Trump do what he said he was going to do? You could, as liberals often do, say that he lied, or that he actually wants to immiserate the middle class. But that would require changing swing voters’ minds. It would require them to admit they were wrong. Probably more effective to say, well, he’s gone mad with the dementia.

It’s the difference between the patient and his sickness. He isn’t saying “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds,” because he’s a fascist. He’s saying it because he’s sick. While the symptoms are the same, the diagnosis is politically what matters.

Consider comments made by Jack Cocchiarella. A CNN host asked the young YouTube influencer for his thoughts on the government shutdown. “Trump to me is kind of this dementia-addled nursing home patient in the White House right now,” he said. “He’s leaning on [budget director Russell] Vought, he’s leaning on [Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller, because he doesn’t want to get the job done.

“He just doesn’t seem interested in negotiating. He’s taking pleasure in what Russ Vought said, which would be the traumatizing of federal workers. That was their goal coming into this administration. So it seems like that’s all they wanna do. And I don’t know how that gets any Democrat, who actually cares about people who are gonna see their premium double, triple, to come to the table, and why would you?

“This Administration doesn’t want to engage.”

Nothing here about Trump being fascist. Cocchiarella merely thinks he doesn’t want to negotiate with Democrats because he’s old and mean.

Since last year’s election, the Democrats have been in debate with themselves. Some say they need to keep sounding the alarm about Trump’s threat to democracy. Others say that didn’t work last time and they should focus on “kitchen-table issues,” which is to say, economics.

Dementia, in the way that Pritzker used it, could be the link between them. Why is Trump acting like a dictator? Why didn’t he do more to bring down my grocery bill? Same answer. It’s as elegant as it is simple.

I don’t know who is going to win the fight over the shutdown of the US government. I do know that it’s wrong for Donald Trump and the Republicans to do nothing while 24 million Americans enrolled in state exchanges watch their health insurance premiums spike by two, three or four times. I know it’s wrong for them to steal $1 trillion in Medicaid from 83 million people, who can’t live without it, and hand it over to people who are so rich they will never notice an extra $1 trillion.

I know you can’t make deals with liars and cheaters. Even if the president and his party agreed today to the Democrats’ terms, there’s no assurance they won’t turn around tomorrow and impound the money they said they would spend. Trump has already impounded – illegally – billions and billions, some with the Supreme Court’s blessing. This mistrust is deepened by the increasingly extortionist language coming out of the White House. The press secretary said yesterday that if the Democrats “don't want further harm on their constituents back home, then they need to reopen the government. It's very simple.”

That’s what criminals say when they’re blackmailing you.

There are two schools of thought in American politics, specifically among liberals and within the Democratic Party – between those who want to game things out in terms of “good” and “bad” strategy and those who are sick of gaming things out and want to focus on the good and the bad. Who is going to win the shutdown fight? I don’t know and to a degree, I don’t care. The Trump cartel is evil. It must be fought. It must be forced to face the truth about itself and what it has done. That’s what I care about. If saying so puts me in the minority, so be it.

On Tuesday, Jake Grumbach brought my attention to a superb illustration of this conflict between strategy and truth. An economist at UC Berkeley, Grumbach commented on a conversation between Ezra Klein, the Times columnist and podcaster, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, perhaps best known as the author of Between the World and Me. Their chat touched on many things, but the standout topic was Charlie Kirk.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s murder last month, Klein wrote that Kirk “was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.” This might be true if you squint hard and tilt your head, but Klein’s goal wasn’t to represent reality accurately. It was to bridge political divisions that he believes triggered the spasm of violence that ultimately killed Kirk.

In contrast, here’s what Ta-Nehisi Coates said about Kirk:

“I don’t take any joy in saying this, but we sometimes soothe ourselves by pointing out that love, acceptance, warmth – that these are powerful forces. I believe they are. I also believe hate is a powerful force. I believe it’s powerful, a powerful unifying force, and I think Charlie Kirk was a hate-monger. I really need to say this over and over again that I have a politic that rejects violence, that rejects political violence. I take no joy in the killing of anyone, no matter what they say. But if you ask me what the truth of his life was, the truth of his public life, I would have to tell you it’s hate. I would have to tell you it was the usage of hate, and the harnessing of hate towards political ends.”

On the one hand is a liberal who is willing to say nice things about a hateful dead man, even though those nice things are not grounded in reality, for the purpose of easing tensions with hateful living people. Tell them some sweet little lies and just maybe things will get better.

On the other hand is a liberal who is unwilling to say nice things about a hateful dead man, because those nice things are false, and because he knows that no amount of nice is going to stop hateful living people from hating him. Bargaining with evil obscures evil outcomes. While those sweet little lies might feel good, the devil always gets his due.

“The main point I think most are missing [about Klein’s interview with Coastes],” Jake Grumbach said, “is that Klein is saying the role of the journalist-intellectual is to do strategic politics, whereas Coates [is saying] the role of the journalist-intellectual is to tell the truth.”

And truth is, demagoguery is not debate. Calling Charlie Kirk a debater obscures the fact that he was a demagogue. Propaganda is not persuasion. Kirk didn’t try to persuade college students so much as humiliate, or demonize, them into submissive silence. Lying is not the same as free speech, but Kirk attacked those who tried “censoring” his lies. It may seem strategic to accept certain falsehoods as if they were true in order to avoid conflict, but that’s if the other side wants unity. Kirk, Trump and the rest never saw a point in that. Indeed, gestures of peace, no matter how mutually beneficial, are provocations of war.

On Tuesday, Trump said “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” He also suggested military leaders “could be tasked with assisting federal law enforcement interventions against an ‘invasion from within’ Democratic-led cities, such as Chicago and New York City,” the Military Times reported. As usual, Times columnist Jamelle Bouie was blunter and clearer: “The president of the United States wants to use the American military to kill American citizens on American soil. That's the whole story!”

There was a time for strategic politics with Republicans, back in the day when they recognized the basic humanity of Democrats, but that time is gone. Trump and his party will not be constrained by morality, the Constitution or the law. So the more liberals (like Erza Klein but not only Ezra Klein) pursue strategic politics, in the hopes of “turning down the temperature,” the more it looks like complicity or worse.

If the Democrats choose to bargain with Trump over the shutdown, knowing that he will betray them once their backs are turned, they would not only enable his crimes, but protect him from their consequences. They would permit him to avoid facing the truth.

“We have to understand that standing up matters, that our voice matters, to not give into the cynicism, because that is what they rely on in order to perpetuate this idea that they have total immunity from consequences,” New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Tuesday night. “They will experience the consequence of this, but [the Democrats] have to be the consequence.”

You cannot make a deal with a criminal for whom you must be the consequence. If he faces the truth, maybe. But not until then.