It’s premature, but so far, I think the congressional Democrats have shown some spine in the face of another government shutdown.

Let’s hope they show more. If they do not, their public reputation for wimpiness is going to balloon. And I don’t mean among Republicans and independents. I mean among their own kind. This is no time for finding a comfy spot between freedom and despotism. The Democrats must fight, even though there’s a cost, as there always is, to fighting.

Last time, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer shucked and jived about 30-day extensions, all the while scheming in the background for face-saving ways to cave. In the end, he said keeping the government open was better than closing it, as Donald Trump would then have the power to redefine “essential services” and cut them to the bone. Nine Senate Democrats acquiesced. Did they get something in return? No.

But this time at least, Chuck Schumer isn’t messing around with 30-day extensions. The House passed one last week, with one Democrat for it and two Republicans against it, but it was killed off almost immediately in the Senate by a Democratic filibuster.

If Schumer were planning to shuck and jive again, he would have gotten his caucus to vote for it – it’s called a temporary “Continuing Resolution” – while claiming party leadership is still negotiating with Trump. He didn’t, though. For now, I’ll take that as a hopeful sign.

That’s partly because there’s no one to negotiate with. GOP leaders in the House and Senate don’t want to make any moves without the president’s say so. Meanwhile, the president himself seems to believe his party doesn’t need the Democrats to keep the government open. (This assumes Donald Trump cares, and I’m very much unconvinced that he does: “If it has to shut down, it'll have to shut down,” he said.)

That Schumer isn’t messing around (so far, at least) with a phony CR extension comes from something else – monumental upward pressure from the base of the Democratic Party to stand firm against Trump, even if doing so undermines efforts at bipartisan compromise.

Poll after poll shows Democratic voters are themselves increasingly furious with party leadership, especially with its weakness in the face of tyranny. That can be explained in the plainest of terms. Trump’s evil is no longer theoretical. It is real, and it must not be bargained with.

Schumer now thinks the situation is much different, because the president and his party are weaker than they were then. “The BBB bill, which they have passed, is highly unpopular with the American people,” he said. “Democrats are unified. We have been strong on the same message for a very long time, which is: We need to help the American people lower their costs, particularly on health care.”

A lot of people are asking the question: what then? In exchange for keeping the government open, the Democrats want the Republicans to agree to renewing Obamacare subsidies and rolling back cuts to Medicaid. If the Republicans balk and the government closes, how will it end? Will the Senate Republicans nuke the filibuster? Then what?

How do the Democrats win the argument?

Honesty, I don’t think this question is one of politics. It’s one of punditry. It’s the kind of question you ask yourself when you think of yourself as a disinterested arbiter who stands in remove of the words used by each party, and who assesses which side “won the debate.” It’s a whole lot of fun spending your time gaming things out (trust me), but in the end, it’s still punditry, not politics. And now, it’s irrelevant.

Trump acts like the Congress doesn’t matter. (The Republicans in the Congress act like the Congress doesn’t matter. The Republicans on the Supreme Court have ruled that in some cases, the Congress really doesn’t matter.) The president has pushed his party to claw back money signed into law by previous presidents. His administration has illegally impounded hundreds of billions of dollars in congressionally approved funding, all because it’s not “consistent with his priorities.”

He has said he has the right to do whatever he wants, however he wants, to whomever he wants. “I’m the president,” he said. He has determined press freedoms are “really illegal.” With the Supreme Court’s blessing, he’s arresting people for the “crime” of their identity. He has ordered prosecutors to indict at least one of his enemies by declaring him “guilty as hell.” (He said there’s no “enemies list,” but more indictments are coming.) And now, he has deemed that liberal groups that criticize him are “domestic terrorist organizations.” He said, “they are sick, radical left people, and they can’t get away with it.”

And on top of this, the Republicans control everything.

As one observer put it: “You think people are going to blame the party that controls zero branches of the government and not the guy who repeatedly says he has the power to do literally whatever he wants?”

How do you win the argument against a criminal? You don’t. Absent the power to investigate him, all the Democrats can do right now is fight, and they must fight though fighting could come at a price. Yes, the shutdown may go on indefinitely. Yes, the Senate Republicans might nuke the filibuster. Yes, a lot of bad things might happen, especially to the Democratic base pushing the leadership to fight. But guess what? A lot of bad things are already happening and they will continue to happen whether the Democrats cooperate or not.

Those who are worried about arguments fear losing and won’t fight. Those who are willing to fight know they might lose and do it anyway.

Until now, the debate over government funding has always boiled down to one question: which party is to blame for the shutdown.

This time, however, is there really any question? The congressional Democrats want to negotiate. The president refuses to. Since the government can’t be funded without a deal, the blame’s on him.

The Democrats want to prevent an explosion of health insurance premiums, which is expected in the coming months, by extending pandemic-era Obamacare subsidies. They want Donald Trump to agree in exchange for their vote in keeping the government open. (They also want the Republicans to backtrack on Medicaid cuts.)

But Trump won’t talk. He canceled a previously scheduled meeting, because “no meeting with their congressional leaders could possibly be productive,” he said on Truth Social, his social media site. That’s not something you say when you want the opposition to come to the bargaining table, which raises the question: what does Trump want?

An answer was suggested late last night when the White House issued a threat to slash even more of the government workforce if there’s a shutdown. Here’s Roll Call: “The budget office plans to advise federal program managers to fire employees whose paychecks are financed by annual appropriations if a partial government shutdown begins Oct. 1, rather than just furloughing them as is the usual practice.”

I don’t think the message could be clearer: either the Democrats do what Trump tells them to do or their precious government gets it.

Any other president in our lifetimes would not have done this. First, because doing so would undermine their own demands. (Trump wants to keep the government open but also shred it if it closes? Just be honest and shut it down, because that’s what you wanted all along.) Second, because it looks thuggish, like something a hostage-taker would do for ransom. Third, and most important, such a move is blatant coercion, giving the opposition more incentive to say no.

The subtext is Trump is not a dealmaker. He’s a bully. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was right to call his bluff. This is “an attempt at intimidation,” Schumer said. Trump has “been firing federal workers since day one — not to govern, but to scare. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government. These unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back, just like they did as recently as today.”

But the subtext is also that he’s a cheat.

Even if the president agreed to the Democrats’ demand for extended subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (and even if he said, “my bad, here’s all that Medicaid money back, all $1 trillion of it, so please, pretty please, vote to keep the government up and running!”), what’s to prevent him, a day later, from double-crossing the Democrats? In July, he rolled back $9 billion in funding for public TV and radio that the Republicans had already agreed to. He said claw it back, and they did.

The answer is nothing. There is no guarantee.

Which is all the more reason for the Democrats to say no.

The Democrats are under enormous pressure, from inside and outside the party, to act like “the adults in the room” and to pretend, at least, that the president is a reliable bargaining partner. This is, after all, the logic of Washington. Only the Democrats make choices while Trump and the Republicans are free to act as irresponsibly as they wish to.

But this “logic” should be rooted in two hard facts. One is that the president has been at war with the government workforce since taking office. (Schumer said as much.) Open or shut, it makes no difference to him. Two is that he will say whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to whomever he wants, for as long as it takes to get him to wherever he wants to go, whatever that goal might be at any given moment.

Not only does it not matter to him whether the government is open or shut, it doesn’t matter whether his words are true or false. Fraud, deceit and confabulation run in his blood, and if he were just some street crazy, rather than the president of the United States, no one would be blamed for saying no to him. Saying yes would be crazy!

Trump is the president, however. I wish I knew what the Democrats should do, but I don’t. How do you bargain with a man who either forgets what he said the day before, because he’s in the early stages of dementia, or denies he said any such thing, because it’s convenient to? How do you make a deal with a president who doesn’t want a deal? (Not to mention, how do you hold him responsible when the rightwing media complex, and the press corps, enables his forgetting/denials?)

What I do know is much of the current debate among liberals feels like it’s beside the point. Some say Schumer and the Democratic leadership should stick with health insurance. Others say they should demand Trump lift his stupid tariffs. Others still say they should trade their vote to keep the government open on a promise to defend free speech. All of these are trying to appeal to a broad majority in the hopes that a broad majority won’t blame the Democrats if negotiations fail. And all of them overlook the fact that Donald Trump never stands by his word.

As of now, the Democrats are warning of a shutdown if the president does not accept their demands. He doesn’t care, one way or another, so perhaps that’s what the Democrats should demand – that he care. He will prove he doesn’t when the government shuts down, thus bringing us back to the beginning and the question of who to blame.

We should talk about two stories published over the weekend, and what they tell Americans about the true objective of Donald Trump.

First, the administration shut down a bribery investigation of Tom Homan. Before Trump was reelected, Homan accepted a $50,000 bag of cash from an undercover FBI agent, according to Reuters. Homan apparently promised “immigration-related” government contracts once he was back in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Second, Trump demanded that US Attorney General Pam Bondi move more quickly to prosecute named enemies, including US Senator Adam Schiff, former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Trump called them “guilty as hell” on Truth Social in what appears to be a post that was intended to be a direct message to Bondi. As one observer noted wryly, “this is literally just Watergate but instead of the Nixon tapes, Trump just… tweeted it out.”

This twofold perversion of the law is indeed what Richard Nixon was guilty of. He knew he was guilty of it. That’s why he hid it and it took a year for investigators to uncover it. Trump, meanwhile, isn’t bothering to hide it, but either way, it’s criminal. As Jonathan Bernstein said:

“Richard Nixon resigned ahead of certain impeachment and removal in part for a much milder version of all this, one that took place in absolute secrecy and took over a year to uncover. Trump is doing a much worse version. Out in the open. It’s obviously a blatant, massive violation of his oath of office, and John Roberts notwithstanding … well, I’m not a lawyer, but it sure looks criminal to me.”

More than that, however, it’s a window into what Trump truly wants – rules and laws that protect him and his friends while at the same time, those very same rules and laws punish his enemies. He wants rules and laws to explicitly recognize in-groups and out-groups. And he wants law enforcement to recognize that difference when enforcing the law.

All men are created equal? Nope. Justice is blind? Nah.

Most of us believe the law should be applied without fear or favor. Whether you’re white or Black, Christian or Muslim, straight or trans – everyone is subject to the same rule of law. Everyone should be treated equally. And when the law isn’t applied that way, we call it injustice.

But I think most of us misunderstand, more or less, how equality is viewed by Trump and the rest of their maga movement. Equality is no virtue. It’s a vice. It is a violation of their rights and liberties, and a subversion of what they believe to be the natural order of things – in which American society is shaped like a pyramid, with money and power gathered toward the top and controlled by rich white men. Importantly, the in-group should never be treated the same way as the out-group. When the law is applied equally, they call that injustice.

All this is blindingly hypocritical (and we should say so) but the term “hypocrisy” can’t capture the enormity of the fraud. Maga does not pay lip service to equality. It opposes it, often openly. A better term is impunity – for the rule of law and for the rest of the small-r republican values that are enshrined in the Constitution. Impunity is the true goal. Trump’s success, whatever that means, literally depends on everyone else obeying the law, under penalty of law, while he is free to break it.

That’s what was going on when Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked today: "Why won't the president accept the conclusions of his DOJ to not bring charges against Letitia James?" Her response: "The president has every right to express how he feels about these people … who literally tried to ruin his life … He wants to see accountability."

Crimes for me, punishment for thee.

Trump isn’t hiding the fraud the way Nixon did, but he is hiding it in his own way – beneath a mountain of propaganda about his enemies.

The Justice Department official who closed the bribery investigation into Tom Homan said it was a “deep state” op. Trump himself urged Bondi to prosecute quickly based on the lie that his impeachments and indictments were baseless. He said: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me … OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

But I think the lies could fade into the background as the abject unfairness of his presidency comes more into the mainstream view. Indeed, the lies could end up fading even faster thanks to Trump himself. His post, which was clearly intended for Bondi, conveys a sense of urgency – as if he’s aware that time is running out for his totalitarian project and people are beginning to figure out his scam.

Polls indicate a public deeply dissatisfied with his presidency, creating conditions for a potential takeover of the Congress by the Democrats. Such uncertainty is going to give collaborators and opportunists like Pam Bondi a serious reason to hesitate. As David Frum wrote today, “such people now have to make a difficult calculation: Do the present benefits of submitting to Trump’s will outweigh the future hazards?"

That’s why, it’s a good idea for the Democrats to begin building a case for law and order, which is to say, for restoring the equal and moral administration of justice. (Reformers like Casey Michel and Adam Bonica might call this an anti-corruption platform, for other reasons.) Do it now, as Trump’s power grab is reaching a tipping point. Promise to hold accountable anyone tempted to break the law in Trump’s name.

“I want to make it clear. There’s going to be a Democratic majority in just over a year,” California Congressman Eric Swalwell said. “To the FCC chairperson [Brendan Carr] and anyone involved in these dirty deals: get a lawyer and save your records, because you’re going to be in this room answering questions about the deals that you struck, and who benefited, and what the cost was to the American people.”

I have some sympathy for Democratic leaders in that it’s difficult to pinpoint a “kitchen-table” issue that will appeal to a broad majority of people, but especially voters who are loosely affiliated with the parties. Right now, they have settled on health care. All the power to them.

But Donald Trump is unlike any president in our lifetimes, even Richard Nixon, who was a crook. Everything Trump has done since taking office a second time – illegal tariffs, illegal self-dealing, illegal funding cuts, illegal terminations, illegal military occupations, illegal immigrant detentions, illegal media censorship, illegal everything, virtually – is rooted in the fact that his administration is, as David Letterman said last week, an “authoritarian criminal administration.”

Fighting crime is perhaps the kitchen-table issue.

Besides, being the party of crime-fighters has a nice ring to it.

As you know, Jimmy Kimmel’s show was canceled due to two factors. One is a federal government, specifically the FCC, that is turning into the Thought Police. Two are the cowards and quislings at Disney and ABC, who are under the illusion that they can forfeit just a little of their freedom and the Thought Police won’t eventually confiscate it all.

Since then, there has been an outpouring of support by artists and journalists, politicians and free-speech advocates, as well as other late-night hosts. CBS News reported that, last night, “Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon opened their late-night shows using a mix of humor, song and expressions of solidarity” with Kimmel.

Colbert’s commentary was notable. He reran the segment of Kimmel’s remarks that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr called “the sickest conduct possible.” That segment: “The MAGA Gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”

“Given the FCC’s response, I was expecting something more provocative,” Stephen Colbert said. “That’s like hearing that Playboy has a racy new centerfold and finding out it’s just … Jimmy Kimmel.”

https://youtu.be/ZdGLJly6P7c?si=YYZMcr3FUdnVhTri

He went further.

Colbert said it sounds like the FCC told ABC to punish Jimmy Kimmel or else. “It feels to me shutting down this type of speech would represent a serious threat to our freedoms,” he said. “And you know who else thinks that? Brendan Carr in 2020 when he tweeted: ‘From internet memes to late-night comedians … political satire … helps hold those in power accountable. Shutting down this type of political speech - especially at the urging of those targeted or threatened by its message - would represent a serious threat to our freedoms.’”

That’s good, and I think we should remain hopeful, but I think we should also be realistic. The regime has moved from being coy about its plan to punish dissent to being open about it. The Times reported yesterday that the president said “broadcasters risk losing licenses when hosts criticize him.” His followers are bragging. Benny Johnson, the prominent propagandist, said: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re just getting started.” With Kimmel canceled, a chill has set in.

I would now expect TV people to be looking over their shoulders, not only at the candya---- who cut their paychecks, but to the snitches eager to rat them out. We can expect that chill to seep into their work. And that chill will likely be chilliest among people Trump already dislikes. Indeed, as I was writing those words – “a chill has set in” – I was alerted to Kelby Vera’s piece in HuffPost: “'The View' Stays Silent After ABC Shelves Jimmy Kimmel's Show.” Vera said: “It seemed like ‘The View,’ which also airs on ABC, wasn’t going to risk ruffling any feathers by broaching the Kimmel controversy on Thursday’s show.”

It’s as MSNBC’s Anthony Fisher said yesterday afternoon: “What is happening now is actual, successful, speech-chilling censorship.”

And we have seen it before.

Fisher refers to the “maga thought police,” a spin on the secret police force, modelled after Soviet Russia’s, featured George Orwell’s 1984. (It punishes “thoughtcrimes.”) Zack Beauchamp wrote a big piece about the “the third red scare,” a reference to the first one, in the 1920s, and the second one, in the 1950s, in which the country seemed to erupt in paranoia about Communists hiding behind every tree. This time, though, instead of the red being that of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it’s that of the Republican Party of the United States.

And finally Jeet Heer said on Thursday: “This is the biggest attack on free speech since the McCarthy era but it also has significantly less popular consensus behind it than the second Red Scare. It's being done on behalf of a minority faction led by the most unpopular president in modern history. Organizing against this can win.”

Good organizing needs good messaging. That’s why, in addition to saying what’s happening now is like what happened in the first and second Red Scares, we should dust off the old 20th-century liberal rhetoric and update it for a new kind of totalitarian regime. And I think, without really being aware of it, Ro Khanna did just that.

“This administration has initiated the largest assault on the first amendment and free speech in modern history,” the congressman said. “They’re making comedy illegal. Brendan Carr pressured ABC to cancel Jimmy Kimmel and Disney [which owns ABC] canceled Jimmy Kimmel, this canceling from an administration that lectured us about culture.

“That’s why today I’m introducing a motion to subpoena Brendan Carr to bring him in front of this committee to stop the intimidation of private businesses and to stand up for the First Amendment.

“Now it’s not just Brendan Carr. Attorney General Pam Bondi is prosecuting hate speech, even though hate speech is constitutionally protected and even though we’ve had so many lectures from my friends on the other side of the aisle not to prosecute hate speech.

“And then what about our vice president, the champion of free speech, as he told us during the campaign. The vice president is telling Americans to snitch on fellow Americans with offensive posts and to call their employer so they can be fired. And the vice president is threatening to prosecute political organizations that he disagrees with.

“We are Article 1 of the Constitution, not foot lackeys … It is time that we stand up for our constitutional role to defend the freedoms of Americans? People are tired of us giving our power to Donald Trump at JD Vance. We have an obligation to our constitution, not to Donald Trump at JD Vance, as they ride roughshod over the First Amendment.”

In yesterday’s edition, I explained how telling the truth about a propagandist and liar has been deemed a radical act worthy of punishment. I used the case of novelist Stephen King to illustrate.

King had said Charlie Kirk, who was murdered last week, “advocated for stoning gays to death.” King was speaking the spirit of the truth, if not the precise letter of it, but was nevertheless hounded and harassed into apologizing by rightwingers who not only want to police speech by compel it. You shall honor the saintly demagogue or pay a price.

Unsurprisingly, the dragnet is widening. I woke up this morning to news about late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel being “suspended indefinitely.” (That probably means his show is canceled.) According to the AP, it’s because comments he “made about Charlie Kirk’s killing led a group of ABC-affiliated stations to say it would not air the show and provoked some ominous comments from a top federal regulator.”

What comments?

Before I tell you what Jimmy Kimmel said, it’s important to tell you what other people are saying he said. Why? Because it’s like a sinister game of telephone, and the farther we get from the facts of what he said, the more chances there are for the totalitarians among us to replace reality with lies, making us all liars (not to mention insane).

First, a voice from the right, Piers Morgan: “Jimmy Kimmel lied about Charlie Kirk’s assassin being MAGA. This caused understandable outrage all over America, prompted TV station owners to say they wouldn’t air him, and he’s now been suspended by his employers. Why is he being heralded as some kind of free speech martyr?”

Second, a voice from the left, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: The ABC affiliates said they would refuse “to air Kimmel’s show, they say, because the comments the late night host made on Monday night relating to the motives of the man who shot and killed Charlie Kirk wrongly suggest[ed] the killer was part of the maga movement. He was not.”

Morgan is wrong. Kimmel didn’t lie. Hayes is wrong, too. Jimmy Kimmel did not suggest “the killer was part of the maga movement.”

Here’s what he said, per the AP:

“The MAGA Gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.” Also: “Many in MAGA land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk.”

See anything wrong here? I don’t.

Indeed, neither did “multiple executives” at ABC, who, according to Rolling Stone, “felt that Kimmel had not actually said anything over the line.” What they did feel, however, was fear of an unfavorable interpretation of Kimmel’s words. Rolling Stone reported that two sources said “the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed.”

What retaliation? Hayes reported on it, as did the AP. Just before the Kimmel news broke, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, issued an open threat to ABC, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company: get rid of Jimmy Kimmel or else.

“This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney,” Brendan Carr told maga propagandist Benny Johnson. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

And with that, it’s clear this is no longer about a dead demagogue. It’s about exploiting the memory of a dead demagogue to advance the totalitarian project: to not only police speech but compel it. I expect Kimmel to follow Stephen King’s lead and apologize in time for doing something he did not do, affirming the lie and undermining the truth.

I think the union representing Kimmel’s musicians is right.

“This is not complicated,” said Tino Gagliardi, the president of the American Federation of Musicians. “Trump’s FCC identified speech it did not like and threatened ABC with extreme reprisals. This is state censorship. It’s now happening in the United States of America, not some far-off country. … This act by the Trump Administration represents a direct attack on free speech and artistic expression. These are fundamental rights that we must protect in a free society.”

But I think it’s wrong too. This is complicated.

What’s happening is not just a consequence of government thugs attacking free speech and artistic expression. It’s also the consequences of three decades of corporate consolidation and the near-total lack of antitrust law enforcement. A handful of companies now own media outlets tens of millions use. In the case of the ABC affiliates, two firms – Nexstar and Sinclair – own nearly all of them.

This results in not only an artificially narrow range of information and views, but also a vulnerability on the part of media owners faced with a belligerent government such as the current one. They can stand on free press and free speech grounds and risk the wrath of a criminal FCC, or they can play along. ABC could have chosen to interpret Kimmel’s words in his favor – he didn’t say what critics said he said. Instead, it chose to interpret his words in maga’s favor. It sacrificed Kimmel in the misbegotten hope that doing so will appease them.

It won’t.

I don’t mean ABC won’t get something for failing to take its own side in a fight. (I have no idea what it might gain.) I mean surrendering in advance won’t end well, as we have seen in countries like Hungary and Turkey, where “autocratic carrots and sticks,” as Brian Stelter put it, have led to their respective governments having near-total control of the media. No one in Hungary mocks Viktor Orban. No one in Turkey jokes about Tayyip Erdogan. And that’s what Donald Trump wants.

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t just a comedian. To the president and maga faithful, he represents “the left,” which is to say, anyone who has enough independence of mind to laugh. Indeed, that might be the biggest obstacle to their hostile takeover attempt. If you have the courage to laugh at the reality of the human condition, you don’t need a strongman like Donald Trump to save you from the truth about it.

But courage, like the enforcement of antitrust law, is lacking. It’s one thing for the state to bully private enterprise. It’s another for private enterprise to roll over, because it believes rolling over is its interest.

I’ll end by quoting Dan Le Batard. “Once you’re a coward who is extorted, the bully’s gonna keep extorting” you, the sportswriter and podcaster said today. “When [ABC] gave Trump $16 million on something that [ABC News anchor George] Stephanopoulos said, they opened the doors now to all of media feeling like it needs to capitulate to a threat – and now you get dangerously close to state-run media.”

He added: “I’ve never seen, in my lifetime, America in the position it’s presently in where the media is running this kind of scared from power, as if we’re not a place where one of the chief principles is free speech.”

A few hours before this Friday's presser, in which law enforcement authorities announced they had taken into custody Charlie Kirk’s killer, Meghan McCain, daughter of the late John McCain, weighed in on “the fundamental difference between the right and the left in this country.”

“It’s that the left glorifies death, particularly of adversaries, and the right does not,” she wrote on Twitter. “And it’s not something I think I really have fully faced until Charlie’s assassination. And it’s petrifying.”

I know, I know. But before you say anything more, lemme get back to this morning’s press conference. Turns out the bad guy is 22-year-old Tyler Robinson. He’s white, comfortably middle class and apparently from a respectable conservative Utah family. His mom and dad are registered Republicans. (Their son is unaffiliated.) Tyler was steeped in gun culture (not surprising given that he killed Kirk with one shot at more than 175 yards). And he was, as they say, Extremely Online.

This is clear in the messages he wrote on four shell casings. They were: 1) “Notices bulges OWO what’s this?”; 2) “If you read this, you are gay lmao”; 3) “Oh bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao ciao ciao”; 4) “Hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow symbol, right arrow, three down arrow symbols.”

The message on the first shell casing, which was fired, alludes to “an internet meme tied to animated videos and furry culture,” according to USA Today. “OwO references an emoticon, and ‘what’s this?’ denotes cuteness or curiosity. It’s frequently referenced by video game streamers.” The message on the second casing contains an online taunt. But those on the third and fourth are the most important.

“Oh bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao ciao ciao” are lyrics to “the anthem of the antifascist Italian resistance during World War II,” according to USA Today. “Hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow symbol, right arrow, three down arrow symbols” refers “to a cooperative shooter video game called Helldivers 2,” the paper said. “The input is the code for an airstrike. It has morphed into a meme and is used to imply a devastating reaction to something that should be destroyed.”

But The Verge revealed something about that video game that is getting little or no attention. First, that it featured “Bella Ciao,” the anti-fascist Italian resistance song, and second, that it was a satire. The Verge reported that “the world of Helldivers — which evokes Robert Heinlein’s book Starship Troopers and the subsequent movie — concerns fascism thematically” and “developer Arrowhead has characterized it as a satire where players fight for a fascist state.”

Again, with feeling – players fight for the fascist state.

During the presser, Utah Governor Spencer Cox was asked about the significance of the inscriptions on the shell castings, as they might suggest a motive. Cox said he couldn’t speak to all of them, but did say that “Hey fascist! Catch!” seems to speak for itself, adding that the implication is that Robinson’s intention was for Kirk to catch his bullet.

Cox took “Hey fascist! Catch!” out of its video-gaming context, first because he probably was not aware of it, but second, because that fits the narrative that he and others on the right want to tell – that political violence is coming solely from “the left” and that, as Meghan McCain said, anyone who has been critical of Charlie Kirk “glorifies death,” thus justifying the president’s abuses of power to stop them.

But if you put “Hey fascist! Catch!” (and the other inscriptions) in their proper context of Extremely Online culture, a different picture emerges, one where the right is so focused on alleged enemies they’re missing what’s happening among their own, and it’s here that I must beg your pardon if I’m introducing you for the first time to groypers.

In a nutshell, groypers are hardcore, unrepentant racists. They hate everyone, openly and without reservation. (They are also weird about sex and women. They overlap with “incels.”) They are decentralized and defuse, but Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist podcaster, speaks for them. Fuentes didn’t like Charlie Kirk. For instance, he thought Kirk was too soft on Israel, which is to say, he wasn’t antisemitic enough. Fuentes used to be on Team Trump but parted ways for reasons I have forgotten. Anyway, he thought Kirk was a sycophant. Kirk backed off from demanding Trump release “the Epstein files.” Meanwhile, Fuentes raged against him, calling for his party to be “hanged in the midterms.”

There are many important (and repugnant) aspects of groypers, but for our purposes here, the main one to remember is they communicate online using an array of obscure images that most people would see as meaningless, if they were not also Extremely Online. One of them is called Pepe the Frog. Basically, if you see it, it means whoever is using it is a white-power nihilist (or, at the very least, a terrible human being.) And guess what? Tyler Robinson knew how to speak groyper.

In 2018, when Robinson was 15, his mother posted a Halloween picture on Facebook in which her son is wearing a black track suit with white stripes. He’s striking a pose similar to one taken by Pepe the Frog in a well-known rendering. Robinson’s mom, Amber Jones Robinson, wrote that Tyler was dressed up like “some guy from a meme,” suggesting she had no idea what he was. (She probably didn’t know “Bella Ciao” is on the “Groyper War” playlist on Spotify either.) In this, I think Jones Robinson has something in common with the entire GOP, which is the near-total lack of awareness of just how close they are to danger.

That seems to have changed. Suddenly (as in, yesterday and today), high-profile rightwing chaos-agents are expressing an awareness of the possibility that if Charlie Kirk can get popped, so could they.

Richard Hanania, the authoritarian apologist, has discovered the virtues of gun control. “‘The Left’ did not kill Charlie Kirk,” Hanania said. “Talking like this is an attempt to silence critics of the Trump administration. No movement is responsible for crazy people. The only way you get something close to complete safety is strict gun control.”

Christopher Rufo, the “antiwoke” provocateur, was more deceitful. He said FBI Director Kash Patel (who said during today’s presser that he’d see Kirk “in Valhalla”) didn’t have “the operational expertise to investigate, infiltrate and disrupt the violent movements — of whatever ideology — that threaten the peace in the United States” (italics mine).

Rufo continued, saying the country has two choices: “enter a spiral of violence, which would be a catastrophe” or “federal law enforcement makes a credible plan to restore the civil order, initiates a campaign to disrupt domestic terror networks in all fifty states, and sets them in motion with the goal of preventing further bloodshed, all of which can and must be done in a principled, legal, nonpartisan manner.”

Rufo didn’t say “the left” didn’t kill Kirk but he didn’t say it did either. Like Hanania, law and order, rather than lawlessness and disorder, are suddenly very important to him after an apparent groyper killed Charlie Kirk. Together, they represent a notable departure from rightwing dogma, and not only from the position, articulated by Kirk, that “some gun deaths every single year” are a “rational” price to pay for having “the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” It’s also a notable departure from Trump’s current trajectory.

The Republicans, especially at the state level, are not prepared to do anything about the actual means of achieving political violence, which is to say, about guns. (Utah Governor Spencer Cox had nothing to say about the fact that it’s easy to buy and legal to openly carry long guns on Utah’s college campuses. Trump, meanwhile, seems to believe political violence doesn’t count if it’s against Democrats). The party will instead follow the president’s lead in criminalizing political speech.

Hanania and Rufo seem to be the canaries in the coal mine. While Trump and the Republicans are busy telling their story – “that the left glorifies death, particularly of adversaries, and the right does not,” according to Meghan McCain – they are not seeing the actual right-on-right white-on-white danger to their lives. And while the attempted assassination of Trump should have been their first sign of trouble, it wasn’t. It took Charlie Kirk getting popped to see that.

You don’t have to say nice things

You don't have to say nice things about Charlie Kirk just because he’s dead. You can condemn political violence in all its forms – and you should. You can wish his family well. You can express your sincere condolences to all families of all victims of all political violence. You can even overlook, if you believe it’s worth it, the fact that he spent nearly all of his young adult life selling for profit the hatred of racial and sexual minorities, liberalism and the Democrats generally. You can choose to do these things in full confidence that you have lived up to your obligation as a decent human being. But otherwise, you don’t have to say nice things in order to prove to someone – whoever that is – that you are not glad he’s dead. You don’t have to prove anything.

Live by the sword …

It would be appropriate to suggest that Kirk could be a victim of the kind of politics that he sold, just as it was appropriate to suggest that the Marlboro Men were victims of the kind of products that they sold. (All five men died of smoking-related diseases). Kirk embraced political violence as a “remedy.” He bussed his followers to the J6 insurrection. He once said: “We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor.” It is in no way an endorsement of political violence to suggest that Kirk saw the consequences of his choices, just as it was not an endorsement of, say, lung cancer to suggest that the Marlboro Men saw the consequences of theirs.

In 2023, Kirk famously said annual gun deaths are a “rational” price for our society to pay in exchange for its liberties. “We should not have a utopian view [of gun violence],” he said. “We will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. That’s drivel. But I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have the cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

So it’s not only appropriate to suggest that Charlie Kirk died by the sword that he lived by, it’s deeply moral, as it affirms the belief that no one but the individual can be held responsible for the choices of that individual. (The shooter, it should go without saying, will be held responsible for his.) I would even say it’s deeply conservative to say so.

I took that to be Matthew Dowd’s intention when he said, in reaction to news of Kirk’s death, that “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words which then lead to hateful actions.” Dowd’s comments were downright bland to those who know Kirk’s work, as historian Seth Cotlar does. He noted this week that “when a conservative gun enthusiast tried to assassinate Trump, Kirk immediately tried to fan the flames of division by blaming it on ‘them,’ by which he meant … everything on ‘the left.’”

Though bland by conservative standards, it was too much for MSNBC. The network sacked Dowd before saying that he “made comments that were inappropriate, insensitive, and unacceptable. There is no place for violence in America, political or otherwise,” as if he were endorsing violence. By contrast, consider this moment during a recent Fox broadcast in which the cohost suggests “involuntary lethal injection” as a remedy for homelessness. “Just kill them,” said Brian Kilmeade.

On Charlie Kirk’s “assassination”

This week, the Associated Press said Charlie Kirk was “assassinated” Wednesday on a college campus in Utah, where he was evidently shot through the neck. That characterization, however, is not neutral. It conveys the president’s preferred view of his death, as an example of America becoming a “killing field” that requires the remedies of a strongman, like murdering the homeless, per Trump’s fave TV show.

But Kirk was not assassinated. He was murdered.

Yes, he was a prominent figure. Yes, he was very important to the Republican Party. But he wasn’t running for high office, he wasn’t leading a mass movement and he was not democratically elected. If anything, he had a high perch, because billionaires gave it to him.

Melissa Hortman was assassinated, however. She was a Democratic legislator and the former speaker of the state House who led the enactment of sweeping progressive reforms in Minnesota. In June, she was assassinated by an anti-vaccine terrorist named Vance Boelter.

Boelter killed three others, including Hortman’s husband. But he was not assassinated. Neither were the other two, though two of the three were also lawmakers. They were murdered. Hortwan was a former speaker. For that reason, her murder rises to the level of assassination.

This is not just semantics.

By elevating Kirk’s murder to the level of an assassination, he’s turned into a moral figure who appears to transcend politics, such that we are forced to either praise him – or at least say nice things about him – or remain silent for fear of being seen as endorsing political violence.

That is, of course, one of the goals of authoritarian politics – to censor, silence and suppress the opposition by any means. Kirk was key to that. He presented himself and his organization as champions of free speech on college campuses while also keeping lists, complete with pictures, of professors and students who said and wrote things he didn’t like in order to encourage people to monitor and harass them.

Kirk’s bad faith wouldn’t have been so bad for freedom and democracy if highly visible liberals had not also accepted as true the lies he told. Sadly, that continues to be the case, even in death. This week, the Times’ Erza Klein wrote that he practiced politics “the right way” by “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.”

Yes, demagogues can be very persuasive, and you’d think a liberal like Ezra Klein would have said so plainly – if he were not more smitten with his reputation for reasonableness than he is focused on actual politics. For that, we must turn to a rightwing writer, Richard Hanania, who explained how “rightists justify calls for repression and violence.” In doing so, he explained the very tactic Kirk worked hard to perfect.

• Go to social media and find the most obscure people celebrating violence. Say that this is "the left." 2) Say "the left" wants you dead, blaming the entire Democratic Party.
• Literally, not a single Democrat is celebrating the Kirk assassination. It's complete wishcasting on the right. They're radicalizing their followers based on an inaccurate view of their opponents that fits with a victimization narrative.
• Meanwhile, the most prominent people on their side start indulging in conspiracy theories and gleefully sharing memes after [Nancy] Pelosi's husband is attacked … The hypocrisy is overwhelming. They get off on the idea of “civil war” and collapse and invent the reality they want to see. They imagine Democrats are like themselves when they're not.

I try to keep distance between me and the people I write about – for me, not them. I can’t get emotional every time Donald Trump does something terrible. That would get too exhausting too fast. Anyway, I got a newsletter to run. I won’t risk boring readers with daily rants.

Today, however, I’ll make an exception.

The Wall Street Journal published a copy of the birthday note Trump gave in 2003 to infamous child-sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. You can see it by clicking the headline of this email. (The Democrats on the House Oversight Committee also posted it after Epstein’s estate complied with a subpoena for it and other documents)

In brief, it’s a simple line drawing of a young woman’s body, complete with breasts, in which Trump wrote imaginary dialogue between them. He wrote that “we have certain things in common, Jeffrey.” He signs off with “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Where the woman’s pubic hair would be, he signed “Donald.”

After reading the Journal’s reporting, which added to what I already know about Trump’s “friendship” with Epstein, including the fact that Trump’s name was redacted in recent months from 100,000 Epstein documents in the Justice Department’s possession, I think it’s time for me to say, without reservation, that the president is barely a human being. He’s a hot garbage bag, unequivocal gutter sludge, beyond redemption. If a billion people pissed on his grave, the deluge wouldn’t be nearly enough to teach his criminal bones the meaning of shame.

At this point, little should prevent good and reasonable people from concluding that the “certain things” Trump had in common with Epstein, and the “secret” they kept, was their mutual habit of sexual intercourse with underage girls. Intimations of pedophilia have dogged Donald Trump for years. Time to drop the hints and just say it plain.

That Donald Trump is a sexual deviant of the highest possible order isn’t the most disgusting thing, though. Neither is the fact that this sexual deviant is the duly elected leader of my country of birth.

No, the most disgusting thing is that no sexual deviant could be president without powerful elites who found ways to ignore, rationalize or accept his sexual deviance, thus making the crime of statutory rape seem like a silly pastime rich white men do for fun.

Epstein’s co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, is the only person ever brought to justice. (She’s currently serving a 20-year sentence in a federal penitentiary.) How can that be? She and Epstein pimped girls to rich and powerful clients. These men made the world go round, yet none was ever perp-walked, none was ever convicted. Only Maxwell?

Meanwhile, Epstein’s “best friend” becomes president, despite their “secret” being known among elites who have all kinds of incentive to pretend that they don’t know anything about it. With that power, Trump is tipping America toward autocracy: stealing our money, shredding our benefits, stripping our liberties, and silencing us with crimes against the Bill of Rights. Still, the nation’s elites look away.

To see how this works, consider Politico. Its reporting on the Wall Street Journal’s scoop does pretty much everything it can, by way of word choice, to make Trump sexual deviance seem like nothing much.

It described the birthday note to Epstein as “alleged,” as if the Journal’s reporting was about an accusation against the president rather than a concrete document originating from the Epstein family. Ghislaine Maxwell confirmed its existence. Moreover, Trump’s signature matches signatures of the same period (conservative attorney George Conway provided evidence of that.) Perhaps more importantly, the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee do not dispute its authenticity, only that the panel’s Democrats “cherry-picked” it.

So … not alleged.

Politico also called the birthday note “racy,” which is an overwhelming understatement given the subject of discussion is the president’s involvement with a man who ran a child-sex trafficking syndicate.

Politico also said, oddly, that it could not “independently confirm the letter’s veracity” in the same sentence in which it said Trump denies association with it. It then quoted Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt saying Trump did not draw the picture or sign the letter, and that he would continue pursuing a defamation lawsuit against the Journal.

If there’s a better way of demonstrating how elites have been corrupted in the service of a garbage-bag president, let me know.

By the way, that lawsuit against the Journal always gets a pass from the nation’s elites, especially in the press corps, though every single one of them knows you cannot defame a president, especially not this one.

Under current law, plaintiffs must prove at least two things in a defamation case: actual malice and actual injury as a result of actual malice. Trump can’t prove the former, because the Journal is telling the truth. But even if it lied, he couldn’t prove the latter, because legally speaking no one can injure a president’s reputation, because he’s president. And that goes double for a president named Donald Trump.

That these “defamation” lawsuits get a pass is another way for elites to look away while Trump acts without consent. (ABC and CBS were similarly sued. Each settled to make nice, though neither case had an ounce of merit.) Elites know these lawsuits are not about self-defense, but Trump’s attempt to strong-arm who gets to arbitrate reality.

The president is snatching people off the street for the crime of their identity. (These immigrants are brown; they must be “criminals.”) Yesterday, the Supreme Court said that’s fine, effectively declaring that whole amendments in the Bill of Rights are unconstitutional. We are a ball-hair away from the leader of the free world outlawing opinions that displease him. Yet there’s still a question as to whether a president like that can possibly be a hot garbage bag who liked assaulting teenagers.

NOW READ: Expert warns of 'absolute madness' — thanks to 'worst dregs of society' in the GOP

If the Republicans cared about the public’s wellbeing, they wouldn’t have confirmed Robert F Kennedy Jr as head of the US Department of Health and Human Services. He had no business there, but that didn’t matter. Their top concern has been the wellbeing of Donald Trump.

Kennedy is now giving the Republicans a headache with insane talk of vaccines causing autism and how he had no choice but to fire the CDC director because, he said, she told him she was not trustworthy. But that headache isn’t borne of caring about people. It’s borne of concern that people might figure out the Republicans don’t care about them.

The secretary was under pressure before he fell to pieces last week during testimony before a Senate committee. More than a thousand former HHS workers had signed a petition calling on him to resign. The pressure only increased afterward. Kennedy’s sister and her son, who is a former congressman from Massachusetts, added their voices.

Here’s the New York Daily News’ reporting on it: “‘Robert Kennedy Jr. is a threat to the health and well-being of every American,’ Joe Kennedy wrote on X the day after the hearing. As a purveyor of misinformation and sower of confusion, RFK is not adequately ‘protecting the public health of our country and its people,’ the secretary’s nephew said. “At yesterday’s hearing, he chose to do the opposite: to dismiss science, mislead the public, sideline experts and sow confusion.’

The Daily News report added: “The essential values of ‘moral clarity, scientific expertise, and leadership rooted in fact’ required of anyone taking on current challenges to public health in the US are simply ‘not present in the Secretary’s office,’ Joe Kennedy said. ‘He must resign.’”

But even if he resigned today, the fact remains that the Republicans who confirmed him still don’t care about public health. In addition to taking away Medicaid benefits from millions of people over the next decade, there’s the immediate emergency facing anyone who buys their health insurance through state exchanges (aka “Obamacare”).

If the congressional Republicans do nothing, and no one expects them to do anything, there are about 20 million enrollees in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces who will see their monthly premiums jump by an average of 75 percent, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

And that’s if they’re lucky.

Charles Gaba, a health policy expert and founder of ACAsignups.net, told me in an interview last week (see below) that some people who are currently getting expanded federal subsidies could see their monthly premiums jump by “100 percent, 200 percent, 300 percent or more.”

Charles explained “there are two main reasons for this: congressional Republicans allowing the improved tax credits which have been in place since 2021 to expire, and the Trump administration changing the underlying ACA tax credit formula to make it even less generous yet.”

The Obamacare crisis won’t happen gradually over ten years, like the Medicaid crisis will. It will happen over the next four months if congressional Republicans do not act by the end of this month.

The congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to ramp up the pressure on their Republican colleagues by getting insurance providers to inform enrollees in September what’s going to happen.

In a letter, Democratic senators, including minority leader Chuck Schumer, told insurers “individuals and families need clear, direct information from their health plans as soon as possible about their rising premiums and cost-sharing requirements, and worsening coverage.” They said the info should be sent "as early and directly as possible … Under these dire circumstances, annual premium notices set to be released in October will not come soon enough."

Axios said some Republicans are open to extensions “but they're also worried about the projected $335 billion cost over 10 years.”

That, my friend, is the tell.

The Republicans took one trillion dollars away from Medicaid and food stamps to cut taxes for rich people who will never notice their taxes were cut. Before that, the Republicans confirmed a conspiracy theorist, crank and weirdo as secretary of health and human services.

Do you think they’re really concerned about the public’s concern?

“There's still a small chance of Congress extending the tax credits this month, but it's unlikely,” Charles Gaba told me, “and even if they do, I expect them to either weaken them, include a poison pill provision so they can blame a failure to extend them on Democrats, or both.”

Lots of people still don't know they are going to be facing an enormous spike in their premiums. How bad is it going to be?

Very, very bad.

As you know, I've spent the past several months shouting from the rooftops that tens of millions of Americans (around 23 million, give or take) enrolled in individual market health insurance policies are facing massive net premium increases starting January 1, 2026.

The increases will range widely depending on a variety of factors, of course, including where they live, what their household income is, how old they are and what policy they're currently enrolled in.

Overall, I estimate gross premium hikes (for those not currently receiving subsidies) will average around 23 percent, while the healthcare policy analysts at KFF estimate that net increases – that is, what the enrollees actually pay after federal tax credits are applied – will increase by an average of 75 percent nationally.

There's about 1.8 million unsubsidized enrollees on-exchange and 1-2 million off-exchange, who will be hit with the 23 percent average.

Meanwhile, there's around 21 million currently subsidized enrollees who will face the 75 percent average … and again, in many cases it will be much more than that: 100 percent, 200 percent, 300 percent or more for the same policy they're currently enrolled in.

There are two main reasons for this: congressional Republicans allowing the improved tax credits, which have been in place since 2021, to expire, and the Trump administration changing the underlying ACA tax credit formula to make it even less generous yet.

There's still a small chance of the Congress extending the tax credits this month, but it's unlikely, and even if they do, I expect them to either weaken them, include a poison pill provision so they can blame a failure to extend them on Democrats, or both.

Again, this will be happening well before the midterms, starting Jan. 1, 2026 – less than four months from now. And yes, my own family is among those facing this, as are you, as I understand it.

Kennedy testified last week. If you were a Senate Democrat, what would you have asked him about exploding insurance premiums?

To resign.

Seriously.

I thought about another long-winded answer, but there's no longer any point in arguing or debating his justifications for what he's done.

He's a eugenicist without the slightest clue about protecting the public from legitimate health crises and who, in fact, has caused and is causing more of them to happen daily. He needs to resign. Now.

He's going to try phasing out the covid vaccine. I don't know what better evidence there is that it worked than the fact that we're still alive. Yet here we are, giving this man the benefit of the doubt.

Absolutely. During the depths of the covid pandemic, conspiracy theorists were making all sorts of absurd claims that they were being "magnetized," that Bill Gates was using the vaccine to implant microchips into our bloodstreams (which is not only insane but ironic, given that Elon Musk is literally installing microchips into people's brains now via Neurolink), that it was supposedly causing Parkinson's-like shaking, etc, etc. All of this was complete garbage.

The boldest claim I heard was that everyone who took the covid vaccine would shortly be dead, and in the months and years that followed, any time a public figure passed away from any cause (old age, hit by a car, whatever), somehow that "proved" their claim, which is absurd. Over 270 million Americans have received at least one covid vaccine. Yet the vast majority of us are doing fine four years later.

It's absolute lunacy, doubly so when you consider that Operation Warp Speed – the public-private partnership by the first Trump administration to accelerate the development of the mRNA covid-19 vaccines – was a massive, legitimate success, which the Trump administration can sincerely claim bragging rights for. Yet somehow, his own base has decided that the very product of that success is some sort of liberal/Democratic conspiracy. Absolute madness.

The press corps can't be let off the hook. I can't count how many times I have read the phrase "vaccine skeptic," as if Kennedy is considerate and thoughtful, rather than liars and scammers. I don't know how to get truth-tellers to privilege facts over lies. Do you?

One of the reasons I've gained whatever respect I have for my healthcare data wonkery over the past decade-plus is that I do my best to use reliable sources. I cite those sources and when I make a mistake (which does happen from time to time), I do my best to own up to it, correct it and explain how I got it wrong.

While there are exceptions, a large portion of the press corps has allowed themselves to become bothsides stenographers who mindlessly repeat whatever drivel comes out of the mouths of Trump, Kennedy, Mehmet Oz and other charlatans in this administration. In many cases they're continuing to do this even as the Trump administration defunds, bullies and extorts their own organizations.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to get them to change their behavior; all I can control is my own, including doing the best I can to get my own data analysis and reporting right.

The erosion of science (vaccines), the erosion of health care (Obamacare), the erosion of the safety net (Medicaid). It's like the Republicans don't care about public health at all unless it affects them personally, and perhaps not even then (in the case of mass shootings). If people die, they die. Thoughts and prayers. Yet they enjoy a reputation for caring about people. How did this happen?

I don't think it was any one thing; racism and misogyny have played a major role, of course, along with decades of attacks on public education and on education in general. Regardless of what got the ball rolling, though, that it gained momentum makes perfect sense to me.

When the Republican Party started to become a slave to its most extreme elements, it started scaring away its genuinely sane, decent members, which, in turn, made those who remain more extreme and awful on average, which scares off more moderates, turning those who remain more extreme yet, and so on.

If this was the only part of the equation, it would be a recipe for the death of the party. However, the other factor is that as it's scaring off more and more moderate voices, it's also attracting more extreme members who had previously been shunned by both major parties.

Once Donald Trump came along, the floodgates were opened – he welcomed in and praised the most awful, racist, bat---- members of society. So here we are – with a Republican Party that seems to consist of almost nothing but the worst dregs of society.

NOW READ: How capitulating to Trump could your boss into legal trouble

The numbers were bad. There were just 22,000 new jobs added to the economy. Here’s how the Post summarized things:

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported fewer jobs in downward revisions to June job creation, in a warning sign about President Donald Trump’s tougher tariffs and immigration enforcement. In August, the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3 percent.”

Fox Business is interested in shielding Trump from the consequences of his terrible choices. So this morning host Stuart Varney asked the US secretary of labor if Trump’s tariffs “have anything to do with this slowing job market?” Unsurprisingly, Lori Chavez-DeRemer lied.

“Tariffs are working. … How do I know this? Because companies are reinvesting in the American workforce. We’re seeing the consumer confidence up. We’re seeing real wages up. Blue-collar boom? I talk about it. It seems like something that is rhetoric but it’s not because that’s what we’re seeing on the ground blue-collar wages are up 1.4 percent. Unemployment is still holding steady. Statistically, it’s nonexistent. That’s the key to the American people is that we’re leaning in. We’re doing everything we can for this workforce and now this is one more thing that the Fed can do. And [Federal Reserve Chairman] Jerome Powell hasn’t done his job and .. that’s why [Trump has] been so vocal about this. We need those interest rates down.

As I said, Chavez-DeRemer lied, but she lied a lot.

Wages are not up, blue collar or otherwise. Companies are not “reinvesting in the American workforce.” They are bribing Trump to be the exception to his import tax. Unemployment is not “nonexistent,” statistically or otherwise. It literally increased to its highest level since October 2021, when America was still in the throes of the pandemic.

If “tariffs are working,” they’re not working for men.

They were supposed to restore the former glory of the American working man by bringing back factory jobs. But “men have lost 56,000 jobs over the past four months, with women gaining 76 percent of the jobs in 2025 (compared to around 50 percent normally),” economist Mike Konczal said today. “Trump's effort to bring back men jobs with tariffs has backfired spectacularly, causing those industries to shrink.”

But of course the biggest lie is the one out in the open. Could tariffs possibly have something to do with a slowing job market? Yes! In fact, that’s exactly what everyone expected would happen after Trump imposed – without Congress and without law – a massive national sales tax. They would eat into profits and bring hiring to a crawl.

And since the president is the main cause of the slowdown, his administration has the incentive to hide that fact, especially to find someone else to blame for it. That’s why Chavez-DeRemer spends so much of her Fox time accusing Jerome Powell of dropping the ball.

Powell has already said an interest rate cut is likely. He said that before today’s job report. And he said a rate cut was needed because of the “downside risks to employment,” which I take to be bureaucratese for “Trump’s tariffs are killing off jobs so we gotta juice the economy.”

Point is that Powell was already signalling to do what the president has been demanding, but that’s inconvenient timing for Chavez-DeRemer, who was tasked today with finding a scapegoat in order to hide from Trump’s supporters that he, and he alone, is the cause of the problem.

And because protecting Trump from the consequences of his terrible choices is the goal of his administration, no one is going to say boo after it’s clear a rate cut had practically no effect on jobs. Mike Konczal also said today that employers have been pricing a cut into their planning. By the time it happens, it may not make a lick of difference.

Our second item is a local news report by KATV reporter Andrew Mobley on the reason why Arkansas farmers are facing catastrophe.

The reason is Trump, but no one blames him. Here’s Mobley:

“Almost everything that could go wrong for Arkansas farmers did go wrong this year and it’s so bad that many are facing bankruptcy or even the closure of farms that have been passed down for generations.”

“A dismal global market, and plunging commodity prices, mean there’s little to no hope of breaking even for many farmers, even as sky high input cost rise, because of inflation and now tariffs” (my italics).

“Though President Trump’s big beautiful bill provided them much-needed update to safety-net subsidies for farmers, they won’t see those federal dollars until late next year, by which time some have projected that as many as one-fourth or even one-third of Arkansas farmers will face bankruptcy or be forced to leave the business.”

Mobley’s report covers a meeting between farmers and their US representatives. Not one of the farmers states the obvious: that they are facing the wall, because Trump put them against it, and he put them against it, because they supported him, and they supported him, despite knowing that his tariffs would put them against the wall.

And now, because Arkansas farmers cannot implicate the president, or the Republicans in the Congress, without also implicating themselves, they are reduced to pleading with them for some sort of federal bailout, which is to say, begging their kidnappers to pay ransom.

That said, it’s not often you see the most salient feature of American politics – whiteness – stand out so perfectly formed in the wild.

“Real Americans” (ie, white farmers “who put food on your table”) are transparently asking to be rescued from the dire consequences of their terrible choices by their savior, but instead of being held accountable for them, as anyone who is not white most certainly would be, they are portrayed as victims of circumstances to be pitied, not condemned.

“Until the federal government steps in to save them, they have had no one to turn to but God,” reporter Mobley said. “It’s hard not to be moved by the cries of the people who put food on your table.”

Actually, it’s not that hard.

And finally, and once again, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

I have talked about him a lot this week, but I wanted to end on this note: During three hours of testimony Thursday, before a Senate committee, that man fell to pieces under the slightest pressure.

This is not a small concern. Kennedy is the top public health official in the country. Boil down everything and the most important thing about him is that the public trusts him to act in everyone’s best interest.

Most people don’t know much about medicine, about science and about policy, but everyone can size up a man as trustworthy or not. And I don’t know how Kennedy didn’t fail that assessment in every way.

Kennedy could not be corrected on matters of fact, forget about matters of public health, without becoming defensive, petulant and emotional. He grunted. He groaned. He wiggled nervously in his chair. He rolled his eyes. He scowled at United States senators. I could go on.

Watch the clip between Kennedy and US Senator Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico. Pay attention to Lujan’s face.

Do you see a man who can be trusted?

NOW READ: 'He's managed to screw it up': Economists dismantle key Trump myth

I guess I was doing something right over the weekend. By the time I got to this afternoon, I had no idea that the internet had blown up with speculation over the president’s poor health. I try to unplug at least once a week, for my own health reasons, and apparently I succeeded.

As far as I can tell, Donald Trump is not dead, but he was an hour late to today’s White House presser, where he announced something. It doesn’t matter what it was, because the purpose of the announcement was proving he’s alive, though he’s clearly in a state of steep decline.

I think Garrett Graff’s piece this week says pretty much what needs saying about the newsworthiness of the subject, but I will take it a step farther: the reason Trump’s health has not made the leap from “news story” to “news event” is because the Washington press corps, especially the people who cut checks, doesn’t have the incentive.

The press corps needs attention. It’s the kind of need normal people cannot understand, nor should they, for their own sake. Trump, meanwhile, provides attention, especially when he says insane things.

So the incentive is not toward revealing the truth about Trump’s failing health but concealing it, even going so far as to accept uncritically the preposterous claim that he’s the fittest man to ever hold the office. If there’s nothing to see, even though it’s happening in front of television cameras, the gravy train can continue, and “everyone” is happy.

Here’s an example. At today’s presser, Trump was asked by one of the Fox chodes whether he would send National Guard troops to Chicago and other major cities. Trump hemmed and hawed, as he usually does, searching for an answer. He was clearly not trying to make an announcement, just saying whatever popped into this demented head.

Then the AP pushed this breaking news alert, in effect giving an improvised response the look and feel of serious presidential thought: “President Donald Trump said he will order federal law enforcement intervention in Chicago and Baltimore, despite local opposition.”

Joe Biden did not do that. He did not bring mindless attention to himself. He did not invite reporters into the White House every day. He did not say crazy things in front of cameras, though he could mangle the English language like few others could. He did not speak with absolute contempt for facts and the truth. And he did not provide attention-seekers with what they needed more than anything else.

So like junkies, they went looking for what Biden would not give them. They accepted as true Trump’s allegation that the Afghan withdrawal was the worst disaster in history, even though Trump negotiated the disastrous terms of it. Reporters also accepted as true allegations made by a federal prosecutor who said Joe Biden was old and tired.

These are two examples of dozens of stories that generated enormous public interest, that is, enormous attention for the attention-seekers. Together, along with Biden’s terrible debate performance, these stories paved the way for Jake Tapper’s postelection book alleging a secret and massive cover-up of Biden’s health, especially his mental decline, and even that Biden is somehow responsible for Donald Trump’s victory.

If reporters like Jake Tapper (and Alex Thompson) really believed what they said about a massive cover up of Biden's infirmities, you would expect them to never, ever, make that mistake again. You would think professional integrity and service to the public would compel them to chase down every tip as to the well-being of the current president.

But here we are in the middle of the near-total absence of any serious and sustained reporting on Trump's visible infirmities – as Graff said, the bruised hands, the swollen ankles, the changes to his personal habits (since when does he spend a holiday weekend at the White House?) and, most of all, the utterly confabulated things he says daily.

This near-total absence is reason alone to believe that Tapper, Thompson and others did not themselves believe what they said about Biden, only that saying it brought them the attention they needed.

And this near-total absence is reason alone to believe something else: that they don’t need to go out looking for attention because the president already provides it. As long as he does, the public may never know what shape he’s really in, perhaps not until the day he dies.

And even then, we may never know.

Donald Trump’s death would trigger a power vacuum full of infighting and backstabbing between contentious factions of his already fragile coalition, especially between his family, which wants the grift to keep going, and anyone who might get behind Vice President JD Vance.

In life and in death, Trump is good news for the news business. And it’s because the demagogue and the press are in a symbiotic relationship that the evidence of our eyes – the daily decay of the oldest man to take the presidential oath – is not nearly enough incentive for beltway reporters to set aside their self-interest for the good of the people.

Donald Trump is the most miserable person on God’s earth. He’s never known a moment of joy. He steals it from those around him. The only people he’s ever made happy were those who need attention like you and I need air. For this reason alone, they might mourn his passing.

Maybe.

NOW READ: Republicans have a death wish

I’m going to talk about Hakeem Jeffries’ recent appearance on CNN in which he made another one of his tone-deaf remarks about evil being a distraction from what’s important to the American people.

But before you say what I know you’re going to say, let me say he’s not hopeless yet! Leaders can change. They must be pushed. They must be made to hear the roar. Anyway, if Ken Martin can do it, so can Jeffries.

As you may know, Ken Martin is the head of the Democratic National Committee. Until recently, he was a dictionary squish. In Minnesota, a close friend of his was assassinated by a man who is clearly in thrall to Donald Trump. Yet when the opportunity came to blame him for creating the conditions for cold-blooded murder, Martin blinked. All he could do, in so many words, was ask why we all can’t get along.

But then something happened.

Martin grew a spine!

- YouTube www.youtube.com

He was asked recently whether the Democrats should shut down the government in the next funding faceoff if Trump keeps doing crimes (my word) like using “the Justice Department to go after his enemies or if he keeps National Guard troops on the streets?” Martin said yes!

“You have a fascist in the White House,” Ken Martin said. “We cannot be the only ones playing by the rules with a hand tied behind our back. That old playbook, the norms that used to have guardrails on our democracy and protect all of us, that doesn’t exist anymore.

“We gotta throw that playbook out the window, because the Republicans have,” he said. “We cannot be the only party that’s playing by the rules anymore. That’s why I said this isn’t your grandfather’s Democratic Party, where you bring a pencil to a knife fight. We are bringing a bazooka to a knife fight. Donald Trump wants a showdown. The Republicans want a showdown. We’re gonna give it to them.”

This heel turn is new. Earlier this year, during the most recent funding showdown, Chuck Schumer said a handful of Senate Democrats would vote with the GOP to keep the government running, even though they knew the president would prosecute a totalitarian agenda. In essence,

Schumer had argued, it was better to bargain with evil than fight it.

Now Martin is saying: fight! fight! fight! And that fighting spirit is almost certainly the consequence of traveling the country and listening to Democratic voters, who are tired of the Democrats asking the Republicans for permission to get along with the Republicans.

Jeffries can do the same. But we have to push him in more ways than one. Right now, the main focus is getting him to stop using the word “distraction.” On Sunday, he again used that formulation on CNN.

“We should continue to support local law enforcement and not simply allow Donald Trump to play games with the lives of the American people as part of his effort to manufacture a crisis and create a distraction because he is deeply unpopular,” Jeffries said. “The one big ugly bill is unpopular, ripping healthcare away from millions of Americans is unpopular, enacting tax breaks for their billionaire donors is deeply unpopular, and that’s why a lot of this is taking place.”

But I think “distraction” is only part of a larger problem.

Though he accuses Trump of diverting our attention away from the fact that he’s cheating us, Jeffries still accepts as valid the president’s “reasons” for doing things – in this case, commandeering local law enforcement and replacing police departments with US military personnel to patrol major cities, like Washington and Chicago.

The president’s “reasons”? Crime is so out of control that it’s tantamount to a national emergency demanding a military response.

That’s a lie.

We are seeing historically low levels of crime, especially violent crime.

But instead of calling out the lie, presenting the facts, and accusing Trump of attempting to grab power, Jeffries implicitly concedes that there’s some truth to it. He probably figures there’s no point in arguing the point and that he’ll make more hay by dismissing Trump’s power grab as a distraction before redirecting us to things like healthcare that he believes will be convincing to voters who believe Trump’s lies.

In other words, Hakeem Jeffries is doing what Chuck Schumer was doing, which is what all centrist Democrats do: accept as valid the premise of the lies in order to make themselves seem moderate (especially not the “radical left Democrats” that Trump would have everyone believe), and as such, portrays themselves as honest brokers who care about “things that really matter to the American people.”

But when you accept as valid the premise of the lie, you forfeit the opportunity to confront it. You might even find yourself looking weak and on the defensive, as Jeffries did. When asked if people in Chicago are manufacturing concerns about crime, he sputtered and bumbled through the rest of the interview, spending his time trying to prove that his party cares about crime as much as Trump does, thus deepening the false impression that he cares at all. For God’s sake, the highest-ranking Democrat in the Congress looked like he was on trial!

Trump does not care whether there are high rates of crime in American cities. If there is, so be it. If there isn’t, he’ll lie about it. He’ll accuse the local cops of faking the data. (He’ll get his congressional goons to validate the allegation by launching an investigation into it.) What’s important isn’t the substance of the allegation but whether the allegation justifies what he wants to do. If it does, he’ll send in the troops. If it doesn’t, he’ll find some other rationale for his malign goals.

Facts don’t matter to Donald Trump, because he doesn’t care what’s true. That seems to be the conclusion that Ken Martin finally came to. There is no point in searching for good faith in a president who has none. There is no point in compromising with a criminal when all a criminal sees in compromise is more reason to commit more crimes.

Go ahead, Martin seemed to say. Shut down the government.

But stay focused.

Because “playing by the rules” is the biggest distraction of them all.

Jeffries could prove hopeless, but not yet! As I said, if Ken Martin can make the journey from bargaining with evil to fighting it, he can too.

NOW READ: Gavin Newsom just made Mike Johnson look like a Democrat

An 18-year-old boy was kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement outside LA just days before he was to begin his senior year in high school. He was walking his dog when they came for him.

ICE never told his parents. For a week, they had no idea where he was. During that time, ICE had taken him to one facility, then another, then another, before sending him to Arizona, where he awaits his fate.

This story is being repeated across the country. Federal immigration authorities are taking from churches, schools, workplaces and courts people whose crime is coming, or staying, without authorization. Otherwise, they are hard-working, family-oriented and law-abiding.

A typical reaction to these stories is that they are at odds with Donald Trump’s campaign promise of getting rid of “the worst of the worst,” those who have committed serious crimes, especially violent ones.

To continue with that reaction would do more harm than good, however, as it accepts as true the belief that Trump cares about crime and about public safety, and that the solution is for him to pull back.

The president doesn’t care about crime, except as a pretext for doing what he wants, nor is he going to pull back, even if the pretext is proven lawless and false. Indeed, it will be used by his thugs as rationale for committing crimes even greater than the ones they claim to fight – like kidnapping an 18-year-old boy, violating his rights, frightening his parents and terrorizing his community – because crime, as they see it, is not about what you do, but who you are.

And as long as there are people in America who are walking their dogs while brown (or Black), Trump will see a “crime wave” so massive it justifies commandeering local law enforcement and replacing police with armed soldiers to do what needs doing to “keep the country safe.”

Are we safer thanks to ICE?

ICE conducted a raid in Connecticut recently. It detained about 65 people living in the country without authorization. The name of the raid was “Operation Broken Trust.” It was not only a comment on my state’s sanctuary laws. It was a warning, as if to say: We can do to your people whatever we want and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.

With exceptions, Connecticut’s Trust Act puts strict limits on how state and local police cooperate with federal immigration authorities. The law, like all so-called sanctuary laws, does not interfere with federal agents. It only forces them to do their work on their own. As the office of Connecticut Attorney General William Tong has said, the Trust Act “reflects the unremarkable proposition that immigration enforcement is the responsibility of the federal government.”

But by protecting brown people (read: “criminals alien offenders”), Connecticut’s Trust Act actually breaks the public’s trust, an ICE spokeswoman told the New Haven Register. “Such laws only force law enforcement professionals to release criminal alien offenders back into the very communities they have already victimized,” she said.

The subtext here is that Connecticut, like all cities and states run by Democrats, is being hopelessly overrun by “criminals alien offenders,” that its leadership is weak, and that the only way to make things right is for the president to come in and enforce law and order. Two top state Republicans agreed that things are so bad they justified violating Connecticut’s sovereignty. “Connecticut’s streets are now safer,” they actually said in a statement. “Violent offenders are now in custody.”

But are we safer thanks to ICE?

It takes a criminal to beat “the criminals”

ICE said it took immigrants who had broken federal law, but did not cite federal crimes committed. The crimes it did cite were almost entirely state crimes – assault, rape, robbery, etc. ICE also said the immigrants it took had already been convicted of those crimes by the state. In other words, and in its own words, ICE suggests that Connecticut’s streets are safer because Connecticut enforces the law.

That ICE took them anyway tells you public safety and public trust are not its main concerns, nor is serving justice, as justice has already been served. Indeed, that they were taken anyway suggests their prosecutions were not enough, that something more had to be done, for some reason beyond criminal justice. And that should be telling.

It tells us their real “crime” isn’t what they did.

It’s who they are.

And it tells us that their very existence, according to this president, constitutes a national emergency requiring a national response such that no law should be able to stand in the way of victory. Donald Trump will defeat these “criminal aliens” if he has to break every law to do it. If he has to become a criminal to beat “the criminals,” so be it.

Dictators are criminals

Trump benefits from the appearance of good intentions – that what he’s doing, no matter how horrible it seems, is in the people’s service.

But when you strip away the facade, as I hope I have done, and see that the “crimes” in question are not crimes but rather identities, it’s hard to continue giving Trump the benefit of the doubt (unless you long to see the explicit restoration of the white-power order in America).

And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that what we are seeing, in the case of an 18-year-old boy in California and hundreds of other stories like his, is a massive crime wave. If I snatched a boy off the street while he was walking his dog, and kept him separated from his family for a week, then took him across state lines for unknown but presumably malign reasons, I would be prosecuted for kidnapping and more.

The regime wants us to quibble over the allegation that this boy overstayed his visa, but the visa question fades into the background when you bear in mind that the president does not care about preventing crimes but rather committing crimes, in order to grab more power for himself and others, who will commit more crimes.

After all, dictators are criminals first.

The president seems to understand the downside of being seen as a criminal. During an Oval Office meeting Monday, in which he talked about sending troops to Chicago, because it’s “a killing field,” he said:

“They say, ‘We don't need him, freedom, freedom. He's a dictator. He's a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we like a dictator.’ I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and I’m a smart person. When I see what’s happening to our cities, and then you send in troops, and instead of being praised they're saying you're trying to take over the republic. These people are sick.”

Trump hasn’t committed enough crimes to establish enough control over the population and suppress enough dissent against him to declare himself a dictator. “I’m not a dictator.” But he’s getting close.

And he may get there if we continue to accept the lie rather than insist on the truth. There really is a massive crime wave. It really deserves a national response. But it has nothing to do with an 18-year-old boy.

NOW READ: How to hit Trump hard on his own horrific record

The president of the United States is cheating.

His tariffs are pushing up the price of everything, which means inflation remains high, which means interest rates remain high.

But instead of rethinking the wisdom of a ruinous national sales tax, which is what tariffs are, he’s bullying those who set interest rates.

Last night, Donald Trump claimed to have fired one of them. It was his first real attempt at taking control of the independent Federal Reserve.

He doesn’t have the authority to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook. (This morning, she said she won’t resign. This afternoon, her attorney said she will sue.) But the US Supreme Court could give it to him.

Then what? Trump will set interest rates more or less at random. The last time a strongman did that was in Turkey. Inflation soared. This time next year, you could be remembering $7 eggs with nostalgia.

And then, after it’s clear that Donald Trump is the cause of the biggest inflationary spike in American history, wiping out entire sectors of the economy, what will he do? Find someone else to blame for his terrible, stupid, malicious decisions. As he did with Lisa Cook, he’ll make up out of whole cloth the flimsiest of pretexts for doing what he wants to do.

He will cheat again to cover up his cheating.

And when I say “malicious,” I mean it. In Trump’s hands, tariffs were never a tool for achieving a policy goal, like bringing manufacturing back to America. They were and are tools for committing high crimes.

Everyone gets taxed, but there are exceptions – paid for by very obscenely rich corporate leaders who do not see the bribery of a president as treasonous but merely the cost of doing business.

The malice goes deeper. It’s not enough to make himself richer than he is. He has to take something away from you. With the national sales tax, cuts to government services, his toxic legislative agenda and more, he’s taking your money, your health care, your security and your hope. They must complement their wealth with a dollop of suffering, which is to say, yours. Watching you struggle is fun! The only thing better is watching their own supporters volunteer to struggle. Funner!

Feeling resentful yet?

You were told all your life that if you educate yourself, work hard and act honorably, you can succeed. That was the deal. You understood and accepted the terms. So you planned, you organized and you invested, accordingly, with the reasonable expectation of living up to your end of the bargain, thus making the American dream come true.

Donald Trump, however, never met a bargaining partner he did not betray in the end. In his eyes, square deals are for suckers. There are winners. There are losers. And he’s always the winner, because he always cheats. The trick is hiding his intentions, getting you to buy into the idea and committing yourself. Then he’s got you. You have to live by the terms of his contract on you. But Trump? Cheat cheat cheat.

A normal president would see falling poll numbers and change course quick to get right with the American people. Not Donald Trump. He sees falling poll numbers as reason to cheat harder. He’s squeezing more Republicans out of red states (gerrymandering) and creating conditions to scare voters away from voting next year with armed military personnel patrolling the streets of major American cities.

First, he picks our pockets. Then, he obstructs justice.

The perfect crime.

Here’s what I want you to do: Think about what it means for a criminal president to be the primary source of economic instability, disorder and chaos while, at the same time you, a normal law-abiding person, are doing everything you possibly can to get ahead or just get by.

Think about the fact that you’re falling farther behind, despite working hard and despite obeying the rules. Think about the feeling you have when you hear Trump say, as he did today, that he has “the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States."

Is that feeling resentment? It should be.

Liberals don’t usually talk about resentment. We think that’s what Trump and his people do. We think nothing good can come of it.

But there’s resentment based on bigotry and prejudice, and there’s resentment based on actual material harms done to you and your family by a president who breaks the terms of the social contract, with impunity, all while falsely claiming that the dream is coming true.

Liberals tend to think resentment is irrational. But there’s nothing irrational about getting angry at the sight of a president who cheats to cover up his cheating, and who could, in the coming months, take over the Federal Reserve, spike inflation, and vaporize lives and fortunes.

It would be irrational if you didn’t feel resentment.

In the years ahead, resentment is almost certainly going to be a major feature of American politics, if not the feature, as it will drive the resistance against Trump while forcing him to crack down on that opposition by whatever means are befitting of a criminal president.

NOW READ: The GOP has no one to blame but themselves for this unspeakable horror — and they know it

The president has been working hard trying to convince Americans that crime is so bad right now that he has no choice but to send armed military to patrol major cities to restore law and order, in the process stripping citizens of rights and liberties in the name of public safety.

Unfortunately, the reaction among Democratic leaders has been mixed, to put it mildly, but I think California Governor Gavin Newsom has shown a way forward. He said that if Donald Trump truly cared about crime, he would “invest in crime suppression” in states like “Speaker Johnson’s state and district.” Look at the murder rate in Louisiana, he said. It’s “nearly four times higher than California’s.”

The implication, of course, is that neither Trump nor the Republicans in the Congress actually care about crime. They only say they do as a smokescreen for trying to subdue, control and “own” their perceived liberal enemies residing in cities and states governed by Democrats.

And because Newsom’s allegation – that Trump and the Republicans care less about crime than they do political oppression – rang so loudly and clearly, the House speaker was asked this morning on Fox to respond. What I want to tell you is that it was a sight to behold!

“We have crime in cities all across America and we are against that everywhere,” Johnson said. “My hometown of Shreveport has done a great job of reducing crime gradually. We’ve got to address it everywhere that it rears its ugly head, and I think every major city in the country, the residents of those cities are open to that, and anxious to have it, and we’re … the party that’s going to bring that forward.”

Amazing! Why? Because in that brief moment, the Republican leader of the United States Congress sounded just like a Democrat would sound after being attacked by a Republican. Johnson does not counterattack. He did not say Newsom was lying (Newsom was not lying). Instead, Johnson did what his counterpart Hakeem Jeffries often does after a Republican lays into him. He retreated to a “reasonable man’s” position to show that his party is the party that really cares about crime.

How did this happen?

First, Newsom told the truth. Red-state crime surpasses blue-state crime. Second, by telling the truth, he questioned Trump’s intentions. If crime is such an emergency in Washington and Chicago that he has to send in the military to restore public safety, why isn’t he doing that in Louisiana? Why isn’t the House speaker demanding law and order? The implied answer is they don’t really care about law and order, only whether what they say about it leads to the subjugation they desire.

But importantly, Gavin Newsom did not accept as true anything Trump and the Republicans say about crime and public safety. He did not validate any of their lies. He did not concede any ground to them. He did not say to himself, “Well, Americans really are concerned about crime and Democrats shouldn’t ignore that.” He knows Trump does not care, and did not cover up bad faith with good faith. Most of all, he did not, as historian Timothy Snyder often warns, surrender in advance.

The result?

Johnson retreated. In the face of attack, he tried making himself seem like “the adult in the room.” “We’ve got to address [crime] everywhere that it rears its ugly head.” He did what Democrats do. That’s amazing.

Most Democrats do not have the megaphone that Newsom has. Most are not going to force Fox to ask high-level Republicans to respond to them. Even so, what Newsom is doing is replicable. Do not accept in any way the lies told by Trump and the GOP, even when, or especially when, those lies come out of the mouths of independent voters. The Republicans do not mean what they say. They do not act in good faith. Overlooking this fundamental truth inevitably makes things worse.

This is why I see potential disaster in efforts by a “new coalition” of more than 100 “new Dems” in the House to show voters they really care about immigration reform. The Post reported on the group’s “bipartisan” proposal, a mix of increased “border security” and more ways for immigrants to reside legally. And while that may sound reasonable, it’s not, because it accepts as true the allegations against undocumented immigrants: that they are committing serious crimes.

They are not. Entering the US without authorization is a misdemeanor on par with reckless driving and breaching the peace. Because it’s also a civil offense, judges hear cases in immigration court, not criminal court. “Unlawful entry” doesn’t rise to a felony unless it’s been done many times over, and most immigrants, once they come, they stay.

This is not news to the Democrats, but they have ceded this ground over and over for decades in the mistaken belief that it was better to compromise with the Republicans than to fight them head on, even though the Republicans, especially after 2016, did not act in good faith.

They said the immigration issue was about “law and order.” They said it was about “border integrity.” They said it was about an important thing that mattered to everyone. It was never so. The immigration issue was always about maintaining the dominance of white people in America.

But by accepting the Republicans’ lies in “the spirit of bipartisanship,” the Democrats made the lies real. They also made themselves complicit in turning immigrants into threats so monstrous that the president was justified in creating a secret police force (ICE) that is now breaking the law and profaning the Constitution to expel “the criminal aliens.”

Worst of all perhaps is that while finding “common ground” with liars and bigots, the Democrats have not mounted an unadulterated defense of immigration. It is good, in and of itself – for our economy, our communities and our culture. We should want more immigrants to become Americans. We should make it easier for them, not harder. And we can do that by upholding the true meaning of law and order.

That immigration is an essential good is implicit in recent polling that shows the uglier Trump gets with immigrants, the less popular he gets. To me, that suggests an opportunity for the Democrats. But before they move ahead, they should follow Gavin Newsom’s example in believing bipartisanship does not require surrendering in advance.

NOW READ: The GOP has no one to blame but themselves for this unspeakable horror — and they know it

I was not planning to write about Cracker Barrel’s new logo. Neither was I planning to write about the voluminous rightwing backlash against it. The redesign, which does away with the old man sitting on a chair leaning against a barrel, doesn’t look “woke” to me. But change is hard for some, especially rightwingers who see dangers everywhere.

But I feel compelled to talk about it, because the official Twitter account for the Democratic Party decided to talk about it. Not only that, but the account, in a post put up yesterday evening and viewed nearly 8 million times, decided to agree with the rightwing freakout.

“We think the Cracker Barrel rebrand sucks, too,” the post says, over Norman Rockwell’s painting of a man voicing an unpopular opinion.

I don’t want to make too much of this, but this is a microcosm of a macro problem within the Democrats, in particular that faction of the party that has most of the money and most of the influence over the press corps. In short, the problem is rooted in the belief among elite Democrats that they can compromise with bad actors who in turn are motivated by compromise to be worse. Even shorter, if you accept as true the lies told by the fascists, you have two enemies: them and you.

If I must guess, I’d say the Democrats’ point is showing at least some portion of the people who are freaking out about Cracker Barrel’s redesign that the Democrats played no role in the “wokification” they see. The point might even be some sort of solidarity, as if to say the Democrats dislike “radicals” and “cancel culture” as much as you do.

To this dominant faction of the Democratic Party, I would imagine this move is reasonable, perhaps politically strategic, as it seems to create a middle ground between partisan poles. (Some wonks might call this by its old name, “triangulation.”) If that doesn’t appeal to rightwingers, per se, it might appeal to indie voters who value more than anything their reputations for being nonpartisan. I might even concede to its effectiveness if the rightwing freakout were based on something true.

There’s your problem.

It isn’t based on anything. The total substance of the allegations against Cracker Barrel is the impact of the allegations themselves. That is to say, if the allegations “work” as intended, the allegations are real.

Those allegations are themselves the consequence of a reaction to change and the search for the presumably malicious causes of it. Because these are fascists and rightwing authoritarians, those causes are always the result of some kind of conspiracy by their perceived enemies. And because perceived enemies are always seeking to destroy them, change is always some sign of imminent destruction.

From their view, Cracker Barrel’s rebrand is a declaration of war.

That’s why, from the rightwing perspective, that Nazi Christopher Rufo did not sound delusional when he said “we must break the Barrel.” He went on: “It's not about this particular restaurant chain — who cares — but about creating massive pressure against companies that are considering any move that might appear to be ‘wokification.’ The implicit promise: Go woke, watch your stock price drop 20 percent, which is exactly what is happening now. … The Barrel must be broken.”

Objectively speaking, it is delusional, and no one is entitled to a public hearing of their delusions, no matter how stentorian they may seem. As Tommy Vietor said, in reaction to Rufo: “This idiotic bull---- might have been good politics at one point, but I’m confident the pendulum has swung back and people now see these guys as insufferable little tyrants. No one cares about Cracker Barrel, you annoying dork.”

I think Vietor was on to something, briefly. After all, there’s some truth in claiming that “this idiotic bull----” has lost its populist appeal and that, as a result, the pendulum has begun swinging back so that people can now see men like Rufo as the “insufferable little tyrants” they are.

But then an official organ of the Democratic Party decided to get in the way of that pendulum swing by agreeing, and the most immediate implication is that the Democrats themselves are not nearly as liberal or democratic as they seem to be, nor are the “insufferable little tyrants” nearly as insufferable, little or tyrannical as they seem to be.

With that post, the Democrats conceded the fascists have a point.

And the Democrats should never concede anything to fascists.

Before that moment, as Vietor’s comment suggested, there was a bright moral line between the sane and the insane. There was no need to take seriously the delusions that haunt the hobgoblins of the right, and it was clear and obvious that Rufo isn’t interested in the substance of his allegations (whether they are true; whether they are based on something real), only in whether they bring him closer to his goals. And as long as liberals saw this bright moral line, there was no point in searching for good faith in the hobgoblins who have none. As Tommy Vietor said, “No one cares about Cracker Barrel, you annoying dork.”

But then the official Twitter account of the Democratic Party stepped in. It decided to see good faith where there is none. It decided to give the benefit of the doubt to malicious actors who would never give it in return. And worst of all, that decision took a simple and rational discussion, in which it was clear which side was the sane side, and made it insane. And now, instead of dismissing the hobgoblins, here I am, in today’s edition of the Editorial Board, taking them seriously.

The pattern is everywhere.

The president makes some insane allegation (crime is out of control in Washington, DC!) to advance his fascist agenda under false pretenses (the National Guard commandeered local cops in the name of public safety, despite crime rates being at historic lows). In response, a centrist Democrat who values his reputation more than his liberty decides to accept as real the insanity (well, crime really is a problem and cancel-culture can’t cancel that!), making himself complicit in advancing a fascist agenda ("Chicago is next and then we'll help with New York,” Donald Trump said), and making everyone insane.

And I don’t see this pattern changing any time soon, not until the dominant faction of the Democratic Party, the one with most of the money and most of the influence on the Washington press corps, understands the party’s majority, that faction without the money and without the influence, is no longer going to tolerate the belief among elite Democrats that it’s better to bargain with evil than to fight it.

To me, this is the true fault line – between those Democrats who look at the president and the Republicans and believe what they see, and those Democrats who look at them both and see what they want to see, because it suits their interests. The rightwing mind is not the only host of hobgoblins. The defenders of “the center” host them, too.

NOW READ: MAGA is panicking as Trump finally meets his match

The vice president was on the TV this week and said something that was not only stupid but a bald-faced lie made more disgusting by the fact of its stupidity. “As we've kicked illegal aliens out of our country,” JD Vance said, “you actually see housing costs start to level off."

Though the regime is snatching more immigrants from our streets, housing costs are not leveling off here in Connecticut. Someone like me, who makes a modest living, cannot find a modest house for under $350,000. Rents are worse, and they keep going up. Mine did. And none of this is due to the presence, or absence, of “illegal aliens.”

Vance is lying but he’s also asking us to be stupid. Are we supposed to blame the most vulnerable people for a policy problem? That’s what the housing crisis is. For one thing, there’s not enough of it. (State and local laws inhibit new construction.) For another, bad actors are gaming the system (private-equity groups gobble up properties and use AI to gin up rents.) One more thing: much of the blame for the housing crisis can be laid at the feet of the president. And JD Vance knows it.

High inflation leads to higher interest rates, which means people are not selling, because there are not enough buyers who want to buy at higher rates, which reduces an already-reduced housing supply. Meanwhile, people like me, who cannot afford to buy, must compete for apartments, which drives up rents. And lying beneath all that is something the vice president would prefer you did not think about.

Tariffs.

Donald Trump’s illegal national sales tax is keeping inflation high, because it pushes prices higher. The Federal Reserve won’t cut interest rates with inflation as high as it is, which means borrowing is more expensive, which means people are not buying, which means people are not selling, which means the housing supply keeps getting smaller.

In theory, I suppose you could say, as Vance does, that a solution to the housing crisis is just getting rid of “illegal aliens” so there are fewer people competing for housing. But that’s stupid. A better solution is to stop taxing the essentials of life so inflation can ease, so interest rates can fall, so people can start putting their houses up for sale again. But it’s not just stupid. It’s disgusting. Getting rid of people should not be the solution to a policy problem. What we need is better policy.

To hear the vice president tell it, the Trump regime isn’t to blame for these problems, only a Democratic Party that allegedly puts “the rights of foreigners over the interests of American citizens.” And while they search for scapegoats for the problems they create, the problems they create continue to impoverish people like me. And that makes me mad.

Let me put it this way.

In the coming months, my health insurance premium is going to spike. By how much? I don’t know exactly, but it will be more than double. I buy coverage through Connecticut’s insurance exchange (Obamacare). In his “big, beautiful bill,” the Republicans in effect repealed the federal subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. They are set to expire at year’s end, at which point I will face a kind of Sophie’s choice: Either I pay impossible rates every month or I just go without health insurance.

I won’t be alone. “Nearly all of the roughly 24 million Americans enrolled in healthcare coverage via the ACA exchanges will face massive premium hikes – in many cases, three and four times higher than what they’re paying right now,” Charles Gaba told me recently.

“Millions will be priced out of being able to afford coverage at all,” Charles said, “while most of the rest will have to either eat the higher premiums, downgrade to a lower-quality plan with higher deductibles, higher copays, a worse provider network or all of the above. Or they’ll have to move to non-ACA coverage via so-called ‘junk plans,’ which have few if any of the patient protections required by ACA plans.”

Millions will be priced out. That almost certainly includes me.

The vice president would have us believe that whatever problems the people of this country face, the solution is getting rid of “illegals.”

Let me tell you something: no immigrant ever taxed me, illegally. No immigrant raised my rent. No immigrant made it prohibitive to buy a house. No immigrant made choices that resulted in my grocery and electric bills going up and up. No immigrant forced me to give up my health insurance. No immigrant lied about the injuries he caused.

And no immigrant tried to silence me.

The regime has established checkpoints in Washington, DC, to demand that residents prove who they are. It’s a model that could be replicated nationally at next year’s midterm elections. “This will not start and end in DC,” said Attorneys General Kathy Jennings of Delaware and Kwame Raoul of Illinois in a statement. “The president has made his intentions very clear that he wants to abuse his powers to take over other cities, using these troops as a tool to advance his political agenda.”

If voter intimidation and harassment don’t work, there’s always cheating. Texas passed legislation last night that would redraw its congressional maps, giving the president five more House seats. Other red states are following suit. The governor of Texas has said he will sue in federal court to prevent blue-state leaders from counterattacking.

In a democracy, we are supposed to be able to complain when our leaders and their policies do us harm. But Trump is creating conditions that are tantamount to those of rape, so he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and all the rest of us can do is shut up and take it.

As you can imagine, I’m not in the mood for Democratic leaders to be equivocal about the injuries that are being committed by this regime.

I’m not receptive to Hakeem Jeffries, for instance, for saying New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s rent-controlled apartment is a “legitimate” subject of public concern, not when my own extortionate rent is very much a burden to me for the fact of it being out of control. I’m not warm to Democrats accepting as true the total falsehood that Americans actually like the military occupation of Washington, DC. And I’m not open to Democrats who pretend to believe the lies told by their enemies about virtually anything – whether the subject is crime or immigrants or other Democrats – not when inflation would be down, interest rates would be lower, housing would be more affordable and I would still have healthcare coverage had Kamala Harris been elected.

I am, however, interested in resentment, which is to say, I’m interested in any Democrat who can tell the difference between resentment based on nothing (the kind the vice president panders to) and resentment based on something (like mine). I’m interested in any Democrat who has the spine to come to his own conclusions for the purpose of putting all that energy to good use. And I’m interested in any Democrat who is willing to speak the whole truth, saying that no immigrant has hurt Americans the way this president is hurting us.

No immigrant told me lies.

And unlike JD Vance, no immigrant asked me to be stupid.

NOW READ: MAGA is panicking as Trump finally meets his match

Lindsay Graham says he believes Donald Trump is ready to “crush” the Russian economy if that country’s leader, Vladimir Putin, doesn’t agree to peace talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Trump believes that if Putin doesn’t do his part, that he’s going to have to crush his economy,” the US senator told reporters in South Carolina on Tuesday. “Because you’ve got to mean what you say.”

This is an amazing thing to say.

Just three days prior, Trump met with Putin in Alaska for three hours. Beforehand, he said there would be “severe consequences” if Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine. Trump said he “solved six wars in six months,” implying that this one would be no different.

Then he choked.

His demands melted into the air. He was all smiles, all handshakes, all deference verging on reverence. The leader of the world’s most powerful military emerged from his meeting with a cut-rate tyrant as if he’d been dogwalked. It was so bad even a Fox reporter had to admit it looked like “Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left.”

The Post’s George Will, who is not a liberal, also saw the plain truth. “The former KGB agent currently indicted for war crimes felt no need to negotiate with the man-child,” Will said (my stress). “The president’s thunderous demands — a 50-day deadline, a 10-day deadline, 'severe consequences,' a ceasefire before negotiations — all were just noise."

So yes. Senator Graham is right. You’ve got to mean what you say. Trump doesn’t. Indeed, he never does. That’s why he choked.

Because of that, he and other Trump allies have spent their time in the days after that disastrous “summit” trying to rewrite history in order to protect the president from the consequences of his own weakness.

Graham now says Trump is ready to “crush” the Russian economy, as if Trump really were the big strong man he portrays himself to be, rather than the milksop who actually called Putin “the boss” and later phoned him during a meeting with European leaders, as if getting permission.

But Graham isn’t alone.

“The president has this uncanny ability to bend people to his sensible way of thinking,” US envoy Steve Witkoff told Sean Hannity last night.

“He does it each and every time,” he said. “I've never seen anything quite like it and I've been around some master dealmakers. He is the legend as far as I'm concerned. His policy prescriptions are so pragmatic and so sensible and in a distorted world, he’s recalibrating it all. It’s simply remarkable. And every single leader that I have met in my travels, they say the same things I do. Every single one of them.”

Witkoff is the envoy who Anne Applebaum said was “an amateur out of his depth” who “misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful.”

On Fox, noted international relations expert Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke said: “President Trump has done an unbelievable job against long odds,” before speculating, oddly, that “it'll end up probably with a land bridge between the Crimean peninsula and Russia.” He also said that Trump “hasn’t changed where his mission focus is. It’s peace.”

Peace through surrender.

Isn’t that the most striking thing? The US is unrivaled in its military and diplomatic might. We could end this war, now. As Applebaum said, “arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war. Then there will be peace.”

But Trump chooses weakness.

He chooses to look strong, not be strong.

And no matter what his Republican allies in the Congress do to cover up that fact, they themselves cannot make him. They, too, are weak.

Lindsay Graham said the clock is ticking and that Trump must “impose steep tariffs on countries that are fueling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by buying its oil, gas, uranium, and other exports,” according to the AP, and such threats might push Putin to the negotiating table. “If we don’t have this thing moving in the right direction by the time we get back, then I think that plan B needs to kick in,” Graham told the AP Tuesday.

Plan B would be Congress acting without Trump.

Which means there is no plan B.

The Republicans are weak, because they surrendered their power, first to the rightwing media apparatus, then to Trump, who surrendered his power to Putin, who dominates the rightwing media apparatus.

And has for a decade.

We can speculate about the dirt Putin has on Donald Trump, but fact is, he could mortally wound the president by turning the world’s biggest firehose of disinformation away from his “woke” enemies and toward him. Trump’s base is already confused by his refusal to release “the Epstein files.” Russian propaganda could be deployed to savagely widen the already broad gap between him and the maga faithful.

More likely, though, the Kremlin could sow doubt about Trump’s alleged strength. He’s all talk, no walk. We saw it. Russian state media brags about it. Echoes are now bouncing around mainstream media.

On Tuesday, while Graham was shielding Trump from his weakness, the UK’s biggest conservative paper ran this hed and dek: “European rearmament is pushing Trump into irrelevance on Ukraine. This vain, vacillating, gullible US president no longer commands the West.”

The importance of the rightwing media apparatus to the Republicans is evident in their efforts at damage control. Trump showed his whole ass. Now it’s up to allies to persuade his supporters that they did not see what they saw or if they did, it was the most amazing thing ever.

They have a lot of work to do. The Economist reported that Americans have a -14 approval rating of his handling of foreign policy. The public knows next to nothing about global affairs, but we know what fear looks like. After meeting Putin, Trump looked scared. And I think he looked scared, because Putin reminded him of something important.

He who can destroy a thing controls it.

So Trump chooses weakness.

And the rest of his party follows.

NOW READ: Behind Trump's latest purge — and why MAGA's no longer pretending

I don’t know why, but few are saying what’s plainly obvious about the president’s “summit” with his Russian counterpart. He’s afraid of him.

Donald Trump made all kinds of noise about “severe consequences” that Vladimir Putin would face if he did not agree to a ceasefire with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the war in Ukraine.

Trump created conditions, however feeble they may have seemed, in which he appeared to negotiate from a position of strength. “I’ve solved six wars in the last six months,” he said before the trip, all lies.

Then, when the moment came, nothing. Trump got nothing.

Not so for Putin.

“The extraordinary meeting at Anchorage’s Elmendorf Air Force base has ended Putin’s pariah status and brought Washington’s stance on the war closer to Moscow’s,” the Financial Times reported Saturday.

“And Putin did not need to budge an inch.”

Liberals and Democrats tend to think Donald Trump gets along with Putin due to them being birds of a feather. Putin is a strongman. Trump is a strongman. Both love power. Both hate liberal democracy. While true, that doesn’t explain the president’s dramatic heel-turn.

But fear does.

The White House clearly believed it was important, not only for the meeting but for the president’s image at home, for him to look strong beforehand. Professor Heather Cox Richardson has the context:

“US envoy Steve Witkoff had been visiting Moscow for months to talk about a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine when he heard through a back channel that Putin might be willing to talk to Trump in person to offer a deal. On August 6, after a meeting in Moscow, Witkoff announced that Russia was ready to retreat from some of the land it occupies in Ukraine. This apparent concession came just two days before the August 8 deadline Trump had set for severe sanctions against Russia unless it agreed to a ceasefire.”

But then, Putin said not gonna happen. Moreover, Putin said Trump really got a raw deal with the 2020 election. He totally won. So unfair! And with that combo of flex and flattery, Putin “got what he wanted — to play for time and press his military advantage over Ukraine,” exiled Russian political scientist Ilya Matveyev told the Financial Times.

Here’s how it looked to Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich: “The way that it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well. And it seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left.”

She went on:

“Of course, that is only the piece of the picture we have right now and certainly President Trump, who is the host and who is the president, would not want to enable something that would make him look weak.”

Too late.

Now the president can be “safely ignored,” Anne Applebaum wrote.

“If the US is not willing to use any economic, military, or political tools to help Ukraine, if Trump will not put any diplomatic pressure on Putin or any new sanctions on Russian resources, then the US president’s fond wish to be seen as a peacemaker can be safely ignored,” she said.

She even enumerated the moments of disgrace.

“It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy … misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful.”

I don’t know if Putin has something on the president (kompromat). I don’t know if Trump is in Putin’s pocket. I can speculate, but I don’t know. What I do know is Trump talked a good game and choked. I know he humiliated himself and America. And I know something else.

All this is rooted in cowardice. It’s safe to attack friends, because they won’t fight back, because they’re friends, but it’s not safe to attack enemies, because they will fight back, and because they are enemies.

Trump’s MO has always been to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to whomever he wants, safe in the knowledge that no one has the will to stop him. That holds up as long as the “no one” in question is American or an American ally. Actual enemies, though? Nuh-uh.

Trump was “very tough” with Zelensky the last time he was at the Oval Office. (He will probably be “very tough” with him today.) But that’s because Trump knows that Zelensky will never fight back, as Zelensky needs America’s support to defeat an even more malicious opponent.

But Putin?

He gets smiles, handshakes, the red-carpet treatment. He gets photos of himself riding in “The Beast” with the United States president and of American troops seeming to kneel in front of his plane, all of which is for the purpose of makebelieving back home that Russia is once again America’s equal and that the glory days of empire are soon to return.

All because Trump is scared.

It’s a pattern we’ve seen so often Robert Armstrong came up with an acronym to memorialize it: TACO or “Trump Always Chickens Out.” Trump “does not have a very high tolerance for market and economic pressure, and will be quick to back off when tariffs cause pain,” he said.

Same thing with foreign affairs. According to one analysis, Trump has threatened “severe consequences” 22 times against adversaries, but pulled the trigger just twice. He has chickened out even in the face of America’s weakest foes. For instance, the Taliban conceded absolutely nothing in exchange for American troops leaving the country in 2021.

Liberals and Democrats spend a lot of time thinking about the unseen. Is Trump compromised? Is he in Russian pay? And so on. But we don’t spend enough time on the seen, which is damning enough all by itself.

Trump is the biggest chicken on the planet.

Putin knows it.

If only the Democrats would come around.

NOW READ: 'Past time anyone can consider Trump mentally sound': President's new claim ripped by critics

You may have noticed something. I used to talk about the president’s dementia pretty regularly, but haven’t in months. That’s because I’ve lost faith. I used to believe the Washington press corps would see the plainly obvious. I no longer believe that. The hypocrisy is too baked in.

The double standard that prevents political reporters from seeing Donald Trump’s totalitarianism is the same double standard that prevents them from seeing his dementia. He doesn’t make choices. Only Democrats do. He can’t be held responsible for what he says.

President Joe Biden tried to get his facts straight, because he believes in speaking truthfully and because he took seriously his role as an honest broker. But he sometimes stumbled over this or that word. He’s old. He’s a stutterer. Old stutterers sometimes mangle what they say. He was held responsible, anyway, and ultimately driven from office.

Trump can’t be arsed when it comes to facts. He lies with confidence and “authority,” though what he says is often insane. No one says he has dementia. No one asks. Anyone who has seen it up close likely wonders why it seems like no one sees what’s plainly obvious.

In the absence of questions about his brains falling out of his ears, Trump looks strong. That’s his MO: do whatever you want, whenever you want, to whomever you want, safe in the knowledge that no one has the will to stop you. Therefore, if no one in the press corps has the will to doubt his mental fitness, then – voila! – he’s mentally fit, and every single unchallenged confabulation stands like a pillar of truth.

As long as the Washington press corps looks away from Trump’s dementia, he will never seem demented. And they will continue to look away, because they are incentivized to. They need attention. Trump brings attention, even when, or especially when, his statements are insane. As long as they do that, his insanity will seem like strength.

“Clearly trolling the president”

This is where Gavin Newsom comes in. I know virtually nothing about his record, but I do know the California governor has been pursuing a media strategy that is a model for other ambitious Democrats to follow. It also has the potential to expose the president’s weakness.

And Newsom doing that by unlikely means: copying Donald Trump.

First, some context. Yesterday, Gavin Newsom held what he called a “big beautiful press conference” in which he announced his intention to ask voters in California to approve a plan to redraw that state’s congressional districts in response to Texas’ bid to do the same.

He put the coming midterms in the context of insurrection. “We’re here, because Donald Trump on January 6 tried to light democracy on fire, tried to wreck this county, tried to steal an election,” he said. “And here we are, in open and plain sight, before one vote is cast in the 2026 midterm elections, and here he is, once again, trying to rig the system.”

Newsom added: “He doesn't play by a different set of rules. He doesn't believe in the rules. And as a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done. It's not enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil and talk about the way the world should be. We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt.

“We have got to meet fire with fire.”

While Newsom was making these remarks, the president’s secret police showed up outside. ICE agents reportedly arrested at least one person. The LA Times would later call the episode a “show of force.” “Right outside, at this exact moment, are dozens and dozens of ICE agents,” Newsom said at the presser. “Do you think it's coincidental? … He's a failed president. Who else sends ICE at the same time we're having a conversation like this? Someone who's weak. Someone who's broken. Someone whose weakness is masquerading as strength."

After the presser, Newsom took questions from reporters. One asked about the ICE agents outside. “It's pretty sick and pathetic,” the governor said. “It's everything you need to know, the setting we’re under. They chose the time, manner and place to send [ICE’s] district director outside, right when we’re about to have this press conference.

“It’s everything you know about Donald Trump's America,” Newsome said. “It was top-down. You know that for a fact. They’ll deny it, I’m sure. Maybe they won’t deny it. It’s everything you know about the authoritarian tendencies of the president of the United States. … Wake up, America. You will not have a country if he rigs this election. You will see a president running for a third term. Mark my words.”

But it was only at the end of the presser that Newsom’s media strategy came to light. It was when a reporter asked about “posts on X that are clearly trolling the president?” As the redoubtable Jamesetta Williams said, it was a brilliant strategy. “He knows if he trolls the president by posting the way he does, the press will give him scrutiny that Trump escapes, allowing him to give this kind of compelling answer," she said.

Sounding like a demented old man

What answer?

“I hope it’s a wake up call for the president of the United States,” he said. “I’m just following his example. If you have issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns with what he’s putting out, as president. To the extent that it’s gotten some attention, I’m pleased, but I think the deeper question is how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets and Truth Social posts over the course of the last many years to go without similar scrutiny and notice.”

See what’s going on here?

First, let’s note what he’s not doing. Newsom is not playing by the old playbook saying Democrats should not go low, where the Republicans always go, for fear of bringing every discussion down to their level. Newsom is playing two levels at the same time: calling for America to wake up before a despot completely takes over as well as mercilessly mocking said despot by using the same tone and tenor he uses daily.

Second, Newsom is counting on the press corps to be exactly what it is: an amoral group of attention-seekers that is happy to play along with Trump’s authoritarianism if it’s convenient, even if that means sacrificing their credibility by holding the Democrats to the highest standard while holding the Republicans to none at all. For the last week, Newsom’s office has been trolling Trump (see the top image for an example), as Trump trolls everyone, and yesterday, a reporter wanted to know why, which is a question Newsom can predict will come from reporters who are oblivious to their double standard.

Third, he can comment on that double standard and raise awareness of it not only among people who consume the news but among people who produce it. It’s one thing for Newsom to say Donald Trump is weak and “broken” (that’s Newsom’s code word for dementia), and that his “weakness is masquerading as strength.” It is another to level those allegations while suggesting reporters have conspired for years in the masquerade. He suggests: You notice my trolling? You notice it sounds like I’m a demented old man yelling at clouds? But not Trump? Why?

And while all that is happening, Newsom is demonstrating what real strength is by calling on voters to defend their democracy while the president sends his goons to silence him. To be honest, Newsom could not have bought better staging of the message he was trying to send.

And with this trolling, I think Newsom paves the way for something even more powerful. Trump has convinced lots of Americans that the press corps is against them, because the press corps is liberal, and lots of reporters do backflips trying to prove they are not. But by trolling Trump – by speaking in the voice of an old man who has lost his mind – and by baiting the press corps into asking him about it, Newsom creates conditions in which it’s possible to see that the press corps protects Trump from the people by hiding the truth about him.

Donald Trump wants people to see the media through the lens of us-versus-them. Newsom is flipping that around, and I’m all for it.

Indeed, I think he should drop the other shoe.

Show up for his next press conference wearing a suit that’s too big, a tie that’s too long, pants that are pulled up too high, and a tan that obviously comes out of a spray can, all while bragging about how he’s the manliness man to ever walk the earth, despite falling in love with any man who flatters him, or chickening out at the sight of conflict.

I would love to hear questions about that.

NOW READ: One basic truth about Trump's America chills me to the bone

The president is doing what he can to demonstrate his sincere belief that he’s the God-Emperor of the United States. But to hear some tell it, it’s still an open question as to whether Donald Trump is “extreme.”

There is no question, however, when it comes to a figure like Zohran Mamdani. A veritable consensus exists in which it’s uncontroversial – indeed, it’s simple common knowledge – that the New York City Democrat would be, if elected, the most left-leaning mayor in America.

The double standard is perhaps most evident in questions reporters ask, and don’t ask, according to historian Larry Glickman. No one hesitates to ask if Mamdani is a “communist.” (They ask so often he sounds guilty in his denials.) But there is immense hesitance to ask if Trump is a totalitarian, even as he prosecutes a totalitarian agenda.

Just today, he implied that a dictatorship is fine as long it’s “fighting crime.” “Already they're saying, 'He's a dictator!" The place is going to hell and we got to stop it,” he said. “So instead of saying 'he's a dictator,' they should say 'we're going to join him in making Washington safe.' They say 'he's a dictator!' and then they end up getting mugged.”

Is this not, yanno, an extreme thing to say?

No one’s asking.

This double standard is why liberal Democrats are at a disadvantage every time they propose making things more equitable and more just. They can’t call for tax hikes on the rich without facing the “simple common knowledge” that puts reformers like Mamdani in the position of proving they’re innocent of the allegations made by their enemies.

Indeed, for decades, Republicans (as well as the Democrats who fear them) argued that raising taxes on the rich is an act of class war and cutting them is an act of liberation. And during those years, the argument became so commonplace as to become indisputably true.

It wasn’t true, but let’s focus on how maintaining the facade required Republicans (as well as the Democrats who fear them) to cut taxes for the rich but leave more or less untouched programs associated with the New Deal and Great Society: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, weather service, medical research, science, and so on.

As long as inflation was in check, as long as employment was steady, normal people did not notice the one-sided class war against them.

I can’t help thinking something’s changed when I see footage like this. It’s from a town hall held by Republican Congressman Doug LaMalfa of California. Unlike his House colleague, Nebraska’s Mike Flood, LaMalfa acts like he’s in trouble, but his humility doesn’t matter, as the crowd booed and jeered with disapproval over his support for an unpopular president and his unpopular agenda. I mean, just listen to that roar.

Here’s CNN:

“At both town halls, LaMalfa was pressed over how Trump’s agenda, which includes historic cuts to federal support for the social safety net, would affect rural hospitals, particularly those in his district.

“Other attendees asked questions about transparency around the so-called Jeffrey Epstein files. At the morning event, LaMalfa called it a ‘bad look’ to have Epstein-related information continue to be ‘suppressed.’ Still other attendees warned the president’s tariffs would harm farmers in California and attacked the congressman’s credibility.

“‘If you’re not here to either announce your resignation, why aren’t you here to apologize to the farmers of the north state because of your support for the Trump tariffs?’” one audience member said” in Chico.

The Congressional Budget Office released an analysis Monday of the GOP’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB). The law will make the rich richer and the poor poorer. “The top 10 percent of earners in the country will see an average boost of $13,600 per year over the next decade as a direct result of provisions in the law, while the bottom 10 percent will see an average annual decrease of $1,200,” according to a report by The Hill.

Pennsylvania Congressman Brendan Boyle, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said “Trump is enriching his billionaire friends at the expense of American families.” The BBB “is the largest transfer of wealth from working Americans to the ultra-rich in history.”

That’s a polite, technocratic way of saying it.

When put in context, another word comes to mind.

That context is this: Trump and the Republicans are taking the safety net out from beneath Americans, like Medicaid, food stamps and Obamacare. They are removing critical services that make a middle class life possible, like banking regulation, food inspection and vaccine research. And despite their talk of liberating us from the tyranny of taxation, there’s a tax they love, a national sales tax called “tariffs” – the most immiserating force any of us has faced in five decades.

Indeed, a Federal Reserve official said today that Trump’s tariffs are “a stagflationary shock” that could echo a time when wages kept falling but prices kept rising, while the cost of borrowing soared, making the 1970s first time the American middle class shrank since World War II.

When put altogether, it doesn’t sound like something benign, like “a transfer of wealth.” It sounds like theft. It sounds like a crime.

I’m reminded of what comedian Trae Crowder said.

“The worst part is that the amount of wealth the rich are going to gain from [the BBB] is negligible to them, relatively speaking. This bill effectively takes a few thousand dollars out of the pocket of a regular American per year and puts a few million dollars into the pocket of an American billionaire per year. Well, if a billionaire was walking down the street and a few million dollars fell out of his ass, he wouldn’t debase himself by bending over to pick it up. But if you take three grand away from an Iowa school teacher, her whole life is ruined.”

Crowder went on:

“This bill is the equivalent of taking a life preserver from someone who’s barely treading water and chucking into the incinerator of a super yacht owned by a guy who invented a drone strike app, or whatever. And that guy don’t need it. He just doesn’t want you to have it.

“It pleases him to take it away from you.

“The way you flail makes him giggle.”

It’s early yet. Perhaps normal people will never fully figure out that billionaires have been waging class war against them. And many may be content with suffering as long as perceived enemies suffer more.

But at this rate, the president will need to cheat to prevent the voting public from trying to hold him responsible for the ongoing debilitation of their lives and fortunes. (That’s what he and the Republicans are trying to do with the redrawing of congressional maps in Texas and other red states.) Or he will have to turn everything into a “national emergency” to justify the continuing prosecution of his totalitarian agenda. Escaping accountability will require silencing the people.

Today, the “emergency” is crime. Tomorrow, it could be voting.

A class war could turn into a real one.

NOW READ: Trump's catastrophic collapse is real — and he may take us all down with him

I think it’s worth dwelling on a small comment made by a small man who thought it was a good idea to sacrifice his dignity as a man, on live TV, for the sake of a dictatorial president and his dictatorial ambitions.

I’m talking about Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett. In a side comment in an interview this morning CNN’s John Berger, he said: “You don’t want to go out on the streets at night in Washington, DC. … That’s one of the reasons I live in my office at night. … It is too dadgum dangerous, brother. It’s too dangerous and everybody knows it.”

Burchett’s goal is convincing us that crime in Washington, DC, is so bad that Donald Trump is completely justified in taking over the duties of the city’s police department, and in ordering the National Guard, the FBI and the Secret Service to commandeer the enforcement of law.

To be believable, however, we must ignore the fact that Washington, as well as every other major city in America, is seeing historically low rates of crime. “Homicides, robberies and burglaries [in DC] are down this year when compared with this time in 2024. Overall, violent crime is down 26 percent compared with this time a year ago,” per the AP.

“A recent Department of Justice report shows that violent crime is down 35 percent since 2023, returning to the previous trend of decreasing crime that puts the district’s violent crime rate at its lowest in 30 years. That report shows that when compared to 2023 numbers, homicides are down 32 percent, armed carjackings are down 53 percent and assaults with a dangerous weapon are down 27 percent.”

So when Burchett says everybody knows it’s too dangerous to walk the streets at night, clearly, not everybody knows. If asked, however, I’d imagine the congressman would suggest we can’t believe what we’re told by the DC police, or even by the president’s Department of Justice.

After all, if “the deep state” can conspire with America’s enemies, foreign and domestic, to cover up evidence of the secret conspiracies contained in Hunter Biden’s laptop, it can conspire to cover up a crime wave so massive that Trump has no choice but become a dictator.

In asking us for our trust, Burchett is tapping into his carefully cultivated image as a man of honor in a city without it. He illustrated that two years ago when recalling a time when former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy came up from behind Burchett while he was talking to a reporter and allegedly elbowed him with “a clean shot” to the kidney.

Never one to let a sucker punch go unanswered, Burchett gave chase, but failed to catch his assailant. He later suggested, however, that the episode was a lesson: A real man looks you in the eye and tells you straight up. If there must be violence, so be it. He doesn’t hit and run.

“[McCarthy] is a bully with $17 million and a security detail,” Burchett said. “He’s the type of guy that, when you’re a kid, would throw a rock over the fence, and run home and hide behind his mama’s skirt.”

I think Burchett understands the situation he’s in.

On the one hand, he wants us to believe he’s a man who lives by his own rules, circumstances be damned, and that those rules stand against rich men like McCarthy, who is too chicken to say what he means and who need other men (“a security detail”) to defend him.

On the other hand, however, he wants us to believe that normal life in Washington is so riven with violence and crime – is so dangerous and “everybody knows it” – he’s justified in never leaving the safety of his office, and in hoping the president of the United States will save him.

And I think he understands that he can’t have it both ways on account of using that little word: “It is too dadgum dangerous, brother.”

That’s a word men sometimes use in solidarity with other men, especially men so similar in appearance and background that it justifies using the word “brother,” which, in this case, is another white man, who on hearing the word might decide to play along, for selfish reasons, in a game in which one man tells the other, you’re still a real man even though you’re admitting you’re too scared to go out at night.

And in using the word “brother,” Tim Burchett suggests what’s really important to him is not manliness, but the appearance of manliness, and, in the context in which he has used the word, he suggest what’s more important than that is the price of that appearance, which is to say, he’s happy to sell off his “code of honor” in exchange for power.

You might say Burchett didn’t hate Kevin McCarthy so much as envy him, as Burchett is indeed the type of guy who would throw a rock over the fence, then hide behind his president’s suit. He just hadn’t yet figured out how to be a bully with $17 million and a security detail.

All this smallness is worth dwelling on because authoritarianism depends on whiny little brats like Tim Burchett getting together with other whiny little brats to convince themselves they are big and strong when they are actually small and weak, in the hope their whiny little complaining grows large enough and loud enough they won’t ever have to do the hard work of looking for the inner courage to be men.

When we stop tolerating their cowardice, things might change.

I don’t know whether Donald Trump’s takeover of the Washington, DC, police force is a distraction from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that’s still dogging him. Some liberals say it is. Some say it isn’t. I also don’t know why it must be either/or. I do know this, however: white power is distacting, and we need every tool to break through the distraction.

I’ll explain.

Dictatorial moves should be corrosive

While it might be technically legal for Trump to send the National Guard to commandeer law enforcement (the District of Columbia is a creation of the Congress, not a sovereignty), it is a moral abomination.

Federalism isn’t just America’s form of government. It is America’s great moral philosophy. We believe local affairs should be determined by local people who decide their destinies according to their collective will. That DC residents don’t have full local control, as a result of living in a federal city, does not take away from the force of that moral claim.

So it should be straightforwardly offensive to our national moral sensibility for this or any president to push aside local authorities in order to impose his will on residents without their consent. In this case, however, it should also be an insult to our intelligence. Trump’s excuse is fighting crime, but crime rates in DC are at historic lows.

It could be that this dictatorial move by the dictatorial president is an effort to distract us from the corrosive effect that the Epstein scandal is having on his and his party’s standing with the public. But let’s not overlook the obvious – that this is a dictatorial move by the dictatorial president. That may not have the same corrosive effect, but it should.

Totalitarianism is okie-dokie

The Republicans used to be the party of federalism, which is to say, the party that would talk endlessly about the fundamental importance of preserving the history and tradition of state’s rights and local control. Matter of fact, they used to argue that they were the true defenders of liberty, as without their vigilance in maintaining the separation of powers, the federal government would descend into totalitarianism.

Here’s Dixiecrat-turned-Republican Strom Thurmond in 1948:

“[The Civil Rights Act] simply means that it's another means, that it's another effort on the part of [President Harry Truman] to dominate the country by force and to put into effect these uncalled for and the damnable proposals he has recommended under the guise of so-called ‘civil rights.’ … The American people, from one side to the other, had better wake up and oppose such a program, and if they don't, the next thing will be a totalitarian state in these United States” (my italics).

After Americans experienced the crimes and atrocities of World War II, a new consensus emerged in which the public began believing the federal government should serve everyone – the law should be applied equally – even those previously excluded, which is to say, Black people.

With this new national consensus in mind, the white conservatives who would eventually become Republicans began making an abstract argument in favor of state’s rights, with the understanding that such arguments in reality sought to stop the federal government from liberating Black people from the apartheid evils they faced at home.

In other words, state’s rights and local control were never about the state sovereignty or the right of local residents to determine their own destinies, but about defending a power structure favorable to white people and disfavorable to everyone else, but especially Black people. Totalitarianism was okie-dokie, as long as they were the ones doing it.

And because white power has always been the most important thing to the Republicans (and to the segregationists and Dixiecrats before them), not one Republican has anything to say about Trump imposing his morally reprehensible will on a majority-Black city like Washington.

And no, it’s not because the District of Columbia is a creation of the Congress or some other abstraction of law. They are OK with what Trump is doing to Washington, because they are OK with what he wants to do to any big American city, because to them, big cities are not deserving of rights, because in their minds, big cities are Black.

White power is distracting

The key place of white power in Republican politics should be obvious now that the president is demonstrating that America’s great moral philosophy – federalism and separation of powers – doesn’t apply if you’re Black. Indeed, everyone should agree with the Rev. Al Sharpton.

“Calling all Black and low-income neighborhoods slums, and throwing away the humanity of homeless people by equating them to criminals, is the beginning of the end if we don’t stand up,” Sharpton said in a statement today. “This is the ultimate affront to justice and civil rights many of us have dedicated our lives to protecting and expanding.”

But not everyone will agree with Sharpton, because his obviously correct statement will not seem obviously correct to those (white) people who can’t see the place of white power in their own lives.

Perhaps this fact is why Sharpton added that Trump “was inspired to take this disgusting, dangerous, and derogatory action solely out of self interest. Let’s call the inspiration for this assault on a majority Black city for what it is: another bid to distract his angry, frustrated base over his administration’s handling of the Epstein files” (my italics).

It’s as if Sharpton knows a dictatorial move by the dictatorial president is not enough to move most Americans, especially those who believe he should crack down on Black people for the “crime” of being Black.

“The military takeover of Washington is not a ‘distraction’ from Epstein,” one writer said. “It’s a military takeover of Washington, which is an even bigger deal, and those of us who kill brain cells reporting on this stuff know it’s been an explicit goal since before the election.”

True, but most people are distracted by white power. They can’t see a moral abomination of law and morality, even when it’s happening in front of them, even when it’s a “bigger deal” than the Epstein scandal.

Matter of fact, the scandal offers a rare opportunity to break through the biggest distraction of them all. Trump’s anti-Blackness probably won’t have a corrosive effect on his standing with the public, but his relationship with a notorious child-sex trafficker? Well, that might.

NOW READ: The simple act that will cripple Trump

If anyone deserves to hang by the neck until dead, it’s Vance Boelter. Unfortunately, he won’t. Minnesota, the state where he assassinated a Democratic lawmaker, murdered her spouse and shot two more people, abolished capital punishment in 1911, after a botched hanging.

But state and federal prosecutors are looking at bringing him up on federal charges. Luigi Mangione, who murdered an insurance executive in Manhattan in broad daylight, faces a similar fate. Like Minnesota, New York abolished capital punishment. If Mangione is convicted on federal charges, a jury could sentence him to death.

In Boelter’s case, there is an opportunity that would be obvious to liberals if we were not so squeamish about revenge killing at the hands of the state. This opportunity would be obvious to Democrats, too, if we were not so deferential to the impartiality of the court system.

What opportunity? Make an example of Vance Boelter. Turn his story into a story in the national interest, in which the good guys beat the bad guys, clean up corruption, restore the peace and revive faith.

In that story, Boelter is the evil villain who symbolizes the waves of darkness that have rolled across America over a decade, undermining the common good, shattering values and perverting virtue. And in the telling of that story, liberals and Democrats can tell a story of hope. Donald Trump’s reign will end one day, just as Boelter’s life will end.

Justice won’t prevail on its own, though.

We have to make it happen.

A violent and evil end

What I’m suggesting is what the enemies of liberal democracy do.

Trump, his party and their allies regularly pluck some random person out of obscurity and turn him into a character in a story about the battle between good and evil. Few know who Zohran Mamdani is, but they will soon, as the rightwing media apparatus is turning the New York mayoral candidate, who has a foreign-sounding name and calls himself a democratic socialist, into the greatest perpetrator of a great evil. Today, a Fox talking head said the city is “on the verge of electing an open communist who believes in blowing up buses and cafes.”

The same could be said of child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Over time, he went from mere creep to monster when he became shorthand for a conspiracy theory about “the deep state” – a secret cabal of (Jewish) super-elites that controls the government, businesses and the media. The cabal is so powerful it can commit any crime, including pedophilia and even cannibalism, and get away with it, all while conspiring with allies, foreign and domestic, to bring America down.

Say what you will about QAnon (that’s the name of the conspiracy theory about “the deep state” and, indeed, we have had a lot to say about it here at the Editorial Board), but at the heart of the story is something noble, a longing for justice and the restoration of trust.

Yes, it’s a longing felt by people who believed that Donald Trump would win the election and destroy a phony conspiracy of Jewish monsters like Jeffrey Epstein, who were raping (and eating) children. (Trump has sabotaged that belief by not releasing “the Epstein files.)

But they are not wrong to long for justice, or for the restoration of trust, as there really is a conspiracy against the American people. It can be seen in the president’s bid to hide his own involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-crime syndicate, to crush the middle class, corrupt government and profane the law. And it can be seen in Vance Boelter’s assassination of a former speaker of the Minnesota House.

Trump represents the rightwing reaction against liberal democracy.

Vance Boelter took that reaction to its logical, violent and evil end.

Burn them all

Meanwhile, the forces of darkness continue to roll over America.

• The Air Force announced Thursday it would “deny all transgender service members who have served between 15 and 18 years the option to retire early and would instead separate them without retirement benefits,” according to the AP. Such betrayal raises doubts about the trustworthiness of the federal government to future recruits and almost certainly ensures that those who do sign up to serve won’t give the necessary sacrifice.
• NPR reported Thursday that a former Jan. 6 defendant who is now working as a senior adviser for the Department of Justice urged insurrectionists to “kill” Capitol police officers who repelled the attempted paramilitary takeover. In testimony, Jared Wise “acknowledged that he repeatedly yelled ‘kill 'em’ as officers were being attacked ... Wise was not convicted of any crimes related to Jan. 6, due to President Trump's order to end all Capitol riot prosecutions.” Wise was later given a job at the Justice Department. A wanna-be cop-killer is now a cop.
• US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr announced Tuesday that he would end the government’s development of vaccines, including the kind that saved us from the covid. “Everything [Kennedy], the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are doing seems to be intended to ensure that sick people simply die off, which presumably would make those who survive healthier on average, thus achieving his ‘maha’ goal,” healthcare policy expert Charles Gaba told me.

These are but three examples of what seem like daily moral offenses, and as they pile up, we must consider what’s necessary in the future.

In this, I think former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is right. He told NPR recently that the Epstein scandal that’s enveloping the Trump White House speaks to a larger pattern of “breakdown in social trust.” I think he’s also right to say the Democrats can’t restore trust by restoring the status quo to where it was before Trump tore it down.

Some of the Democrats seem to get it. They are embracing the idea of creating a new social order, even if it means sacrificing some of their own. Those on the House Oversight Committee forced their GOP counterparts to subpoena records and testimony in association with the government’s investigation of Epstein. Trump is notably absent from the list, but otherwise, the panel wants to talk to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Merrick Garland, Bill Barr, Alberto Gonzales, Jeff Sessions, Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder, James Comey and Robert Mueller.

Burn them all, I say.

Lousy with criminals

I think the most ambitious Democrats are warming up to the idea, because after Trump is no longer in the White House, whenever that day comes, there must be a long period of purging in order to rid a government of, by and for the people of the stink of Trumpism.

The FBI, the US Department of Justice, the US Department of Health and Human Services and especially the US Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the regime’s project of disappearing immigrants without due process, are all lousy with criminals whose greatest loyalty is to Trump, not morality, law or the Constitution. (I name four agencies, but virtually the entire government is rotten.)

They must be purged.

If they are not, they will sabotage from the inside whatever new status quo the Democrats try to build up from the rubble Trump left behind.

To do that, however, we need to begin telling the story, right now, in order to justify any future purge, a story that’s just as powerful as the one told by the enemies of democracy, in which the good guys defeat the bad guys, clean up corruption, restore the peace and revive faith.

If sacrificing the old guard of the Democratic Party is necessary to that, so be it. If calling for the death of an assassin is needed, so be it.

NOW READ: There's a tape — and Trump's in deep you-know-what

If you consume mainstream news, you might think the Republicans are in trouble ahead of next year’s congressional elections. In a recent report by CNN, for instance, Republican Congressman Mike Flood of Nebraska is met with a barrage of boos and jeers at a town hall.

They should be in trouble. Though the president’s policy agenda is dramatically unpopular, Flood and the Republicans have gone along with him. Donald Trump’s net approval is now -15 percent, according to the latest numbers by The Economist, with 55 percent disapproving. Gallup’s are worse. His rating among independent voters is 29 percent.

You’d think a congressman like Mike Flood, who represents a district that’s evenly split, would at the very least pretend to be contrite, knowing that being on the good side of voters is the key to remaining in office. You’d think he would behave like he knows he’s in trouble.

But he’s not. In that CNN report, Flood gives the impression that the opinions of his constituents, whose outrage is abundantly clear, are immaterial to his goal of staying in power – which is to say, he’s behaving as if he has no fear of democracy holding him accountable.

In that, he’s following the president’s lead. In a recent CNBC interview, as Joe Walsh put it, Trump said that “won the 2020 election (he didn’t). He has a 71 percent approval rating (he doesn’t). The jobs numbers were rigged (they weren’t). I could say something funny here, but I won’t. It’s just so damn dangerous to have him in the White House.”

In the same interview, Trump said he would “probably not” run for office again, understanding full well that the Constitution limits presidents to two terms, whether or not those terms are consecutive.

Walsh is often right, but here he’s doubly so. It’s so damn dangerous when a president and his party act like democracy doesn’t matter.

In 2009, after they passed into law the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama and the Democrats faced the prospect of a wipeout in the following year’s midterms. The law started out unpopular and grew more unpopular by the day. But they didn’t try to change the rules of democracy to avoid the consequences of their choices, even though the consequences were catastrophic. The Democrats lost 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate. Obama’s presidency never recovered.

Donald Trump and the Republicans, however, are trying to change the rules of democracy to avoid the consequences of their choices. I don’t think there’s any one source of disapproval, like the ACA used to be for the Democrats. Instead, public ire seems to have multiple layers, with the deepest being the gigantic sales tax, in the form of tariffs, that the president has unilaterally imposed on everyone. And Trump knows it. That’s why, in anticipation of a wipeout, he asked legislators in Texas to redraw its congressional districts to give his party five more seats.

This should be damning. And the Republicans should be running from the idea, in the same way that some Democrats ran from Obamacare. But most are doubling down. Texas is going to try gerrymandering its districts to give Trump the advantage, as likely will any state controlled by the GOP that has at least one big blue city in it. (Perhaps this is why Mike Flood can shout down constituents with impunity. Nebraska Republicans could choose to redraw his district to ensure reelection.)

But the Republicans are doing more than changing the rules of democracy. They are creating the conditions for criminalizing it.

Democratic legislators in Texas left the state to deny a quorum for Republican efforts to redraw its congressional districts. The state’s attorney general declared the move illegal. The state’s governor ordered state law enforcement agencies to arrest and return them. Texas has no jurisdiction in Illinois, where some Texas Democrats decamped, but that didn’t stop vigilantes from issuing bomb threats.

This is in addition to the Justice Department opening an investigation into alleged tampering of the 2016 election by Barack Obama and his administration. (The allegations are completely imaginary.) There is, moreover, the fact that two Democrats have been arrested and are pending trial; two Democrats were manhandled and arrested; one Democrat was assassinated; not to mention the president ordering the (short-lived) military occupation of the city of Los Angeles. More recently, three House Democrats were “in essence, incarcerated,” after a masked ICE agent locked them in a room at a detention center.

The goal is silencing dissent, and elected Democrats are not the only targets. All of us are. Even as Trump and the GOP do things that make people angry – like taking away their food money, taking away their vaccines, taking away their jobs, all while forcing them to pay more and more for the essentials of life – people can’t vent their anger.

The heart of democracy is our ability to petition the government for a redress of grievances. But the Republicans are creating conditions nationally, after having done so locally, in which that’s not possible.

They are either gerrymandering voters out of existence, their judges are narrowing the right to vote to the point of extinction, or they are preparing to prosecute people for their opinions. At the rate we’re going, it won’t be long before being a liberal is a criminal offense.

The only Republicans acting rationally are those who represent districts in blue states. “What Texas is doing is wrong and I’m opposed to it,” New York Congressman Mike Lawler told Politico, adding that “he’s sponsoring a bill with fellow blue state Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley of California that would ban gerrymandering nationwide.”

But they are only acting rationally, because their party cannot change the rules of democracy to avoid being held accountable by their constituents for their choices. Blue states like New York and California are now considering redrawing their congressional maps in reaction to potential moves by Texas, Florida and others to do the same. In other words, blue-state Republicans have an immediate incentive to behave themselves while the rest of the GOP, including its leader, does not.

That fact alone should be damning.

NOW READ: 'Really strange vibe': Visitors to bizarre Island say 'skeevy' Epstein gave them the creeps

Bloomberg journalist Jason Leopold reported this morning that the president’s name has been redacted from more than 100,000 documents the FBI has on child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Leopold said that after 1,000 FBI personnel pored over more than 300 gigabytes of data and evidence in the government’s investigation of Epstein, the files were sent to US Attorney General Pam Bondi.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Bondi met with Donald Trump in May to say his name appears “multiple times” in the files. On the basis of that finding, she decided not to release them to the public, despite the president’s campaign promise to do so. Trump apparently agreed.

On July 8, Pam Bondi issued a memo, saying that “no further disclosure” of the Epstein files “would be appropriate or warranted.”

“While we have labored to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein,” the memo said, “it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”

If so, why did the FBI spend so much time and manpower redacting Trump’s name? And why did they redact his name on the flimsy basis of protecting his privacy, as if the president were a private citizen – as if the public did not have an overwhelming interest in knowing about his relationship with the country’s most notorious child-sex offender?

The answer?

The deep state is real and it works for Donald Trump.

A real conspiracy and a theory of one

Some conspiracies are real. Most conspiracy theories are not. But the phony ones can be used to cover up for the real ones. And that’s what I think has happened in the case of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

They were friends. They clearly shared an interest in sex with underage girls (or in statutory rape, if you prefer). But Trump has avoided serious public exposure in part by deliberately obscuring his past and in part by exploiting a conspiracy theory about his friend.

That conspiracy theory is sometimes known as QAnon. More generally, it’s known as “the deep state.” It tells the story of a shadowy cabal of powerful (Jewish) elites embedded in the government, in businesses and the media. They conspire with enemies foreign and domestic to hijack democracy out from under the noses of the American people.

Among Trump’s most loyal supporters, Jeffrey Epstein was the great (Jewish) representative of “the deep state,” and Trump was the hero who was supposed to defeat it. Whenever a story came up about sex offenses in Trump’s past, as when a judged said that he had raped a famous magazine columnist, his followers chalked it up to another attempt by the deep state to bring him. The conspiracy theory became cover for the actual conspiracy to obscure Trump’s sexual crimes.

Too much to hide
That conspiracy continues with this latest report showing the FBI chose to black out Trump’s name, because he was a private citizen at the time of the Epstein investigation in 2006. Here’s Jason Leopold:

“In particular, the reviewers applied two FOIA exemptions to justify their redactions. The first, Exemption 6, protects individuals against ‘a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.’ The Supreme Court has said the exemption protects ‘individuals from the injury and embarrassment’ that would result from the disclosure of personal information in possession of the government. … The second, Exemption 7(C), protects personal information contained in law enforcement records, the disclosure of which ‘could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.’”

You and me and everyone we know are entitled to privacy protections, because without them, we are more or less powerless. The president is not powerless, nor is entitled to such protections. He is the president.

The public has a right to know whether Trump was part of Epstein’s pedophile ring; whether he covered up his involvement; and whether he has induced government agents to pervert privacy laws in the furtherance of an ongoing conspiracy to hide his sexual crimes.

Trump could waive his rights to privacy and order the release of the Epstein files, with his name appearing through them “multiple times.” He could let the chips fall where they may, but he’s never done that. There’s too much at stake and, evidently, there’s too much to hide.

“Smacks of a coverup”

In addition to the government scrubbing Trump’s name from the Epstein files, it moved Epstein’s accomplice from a maximum-security prison to a cushy one in Texas. Ghislaine Maxwell was transferred after being interviewed by the second in command at the Department of Justice. Journalist Michael Wolff has said that was an effort to ascertain whether she has more incriminating evidence on Trump.

The family of Maxwell’s best-known victim, Virginia Giuffre, said the news is an offense to her memory (she killed herself in April) and “smacks of a coverup.” In a statement, the family said: “Without any notification to the Maxwell victims, the government overnight has moved Maxwell to a minimum-security luxury prison in Texas. This is the justice system failing victims right before our eyes.

“The American public should be enraged by the preferential treatment being given to a pedophile and a criminally charged child sex offender. The Trump administration should not credit a word Maxwell says, as the government itself sought charges against Maxwell for being a serial liar. This move smacks of a cover up. The victims deserve better.”

Indeed, the deep state is real and it works for Donald Trump.

NOW READ: The truth finally trickled out of Donald Trump — but the media largely ignored

Liberals don’t usually traffic in conspiracy theories. We think of ourselves as rational people who defer to the authority of facts. We believe we can shape perceptions of reality, but not reality itself.

It’s because we are the reality-based community, however, that we can’t sidestep what’s becoming clearer every day about Donald Trump.

He’s a sexual deviant.

And there’s a conspiracy to cover it up.

The latest in a string of revelations came yesterday during an interview with Michael Wolff. The author of All Or Nothing, a book about the 2024 election, Wolff said the source of a Wall Street Journal report about Trump’s birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein was his accomplice.

“The salacious birthday greeting that Donald Trump sent Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 on the occasion of his 50th birthday was a leak from the Maxwell family,” Wolff said, referring to the family of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison. “In the White House, they regarded this as ‘a shot across the bow’ – a threat that Ghislaine has damaging material on Donald Trump.”

Wolff said the leak is why the No. 2 official at the Justice Department, who was also Trump’s criminal defense attorney, interviewed Maxwell in prison to see what other incriminating evidence she might have. The meeting is widely seen as an attempt to either silence Maxwell with a presidential pardon or induce her to lie about Trump’s enemies.

About two weeks ago, the Journal reported on a birthday greeting featuring the outline of a naked woman. Trump had drawn breasts and signed his name so the signature suggested pubic hair. There was also a card with imaginary dialogue between the men in which Trump seemed to joke about their secret interest in sex with underage girls.

The Wolff interview was posted the same day the president explained why, after decades of friendship, he had a falling out with Epstein. The White House had said Trump kicked Epstein out of his Florida resort for being “a creep.” Yesterday, however, Trump suggested the real reason was that Epstein “stole” Virginia Giuffre from Mar-a-Lago.

Though there are more than a thousand victims, Giuffre is perhaps Epstein’s most famous. She revealed that, as a teenager, she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” to wealthy untouchable men who have escaped accountability to this day. She grew up to become an advocate for victims of child-sex crimes. She killed herself in April.

It’s unclear why Trump said this is the reason for his breakup with Epstein. What is clear is that it muddles the timeline and raises more questions. Ahmed Baba noted that Giuffre “was recruited in 2000.” He added: “Trump praised Epstein and said he likes young women in 2002. Reportedly sent him a birthday card in 2003. Didn't cut ties until 2004.”

In any case, revelations about Giuffre came less than a week after another report by the Journal. US Attorney General Pam Bondi met with Trump in May to discuss his name appearing multiple times in the Epstein files. The implication is that for this reason, she decided against releasing them, despite them being central to his campaign. The Journal report suggested Trump agreed with Bondi’s decision.

Some will say these details build on what’s already known. Trump has a long history of sexual deviance. He bragged he was so famous he could grab women by the pussy. Before the election, a judge used the word “rape” to describe how he victimized E Jean Carrol. With respect to Epstein, there have been intimations of pedophilia for decades.

So from a certain point of view, what we’re seeing now is indeed a conspiracy to cover up for Trump’s deviance, but that conspiracy has been obvious for a long time to anyone who has been paying attention. The question, from this point of view, might be: what’s different now?

I think the answer is that the primary means of covering up the conspiracy has come undone. By that, I mean conspiracy theory.

In that story, Jeffrey Epstein is part of a shadowy group of elites who control the government, the corporations and the media. This cabal is so powerful it can commit any crime – including the most heinous, like pedophilia and even cannibalism – and get away with it, all while conspiring with allies, foreign and domestic, to bring America down.

And in that story, Trump is supposed to be the hero, the “chosen one” who is supposed to save the country from an evil so great that he must do whatever it takes to defeat it, even commit massive crimes. This story, and variations of it, was told so frequently and so loudly by Trump’s media allies that the volume drowned out legitimate suspicions obvious to anyone who was paying close attention.

All that changed after Pam Bondi met with Trump to determine that his name appeared in the Epstein files too many times to risk releasing them, despite the central role that information played. Her decision, which Trump agreed with, forced his followers to choose between belief in him and belief in their enemies. It was maga’s crisis of faith.

A phony conspiracy theory, sometimes referred to as QAnon or “the deep state,” covered up for the real conspiracy. But now that the conspiracy theory is no longer effective in doing what it had been doing – now that it is fading somewhat in importance to those who clung to it most fiercely – the actual conspiracy is coming to light.

And now that the actual conspiracy is coming to light, liberals have no reason to be squeamish about saying what is increasingly obvious.

Donald Trump is a sexual deviant.

And there’s a conspiracy to cover it up.

NOW READ: Behind the real reason Americans voted for Trump