Let me see if I have this right.

The Russians are helping Iran in its war against the United States, first by providing “targeting information,” according to the Post, and second by providing “drone tactics,” according to CNN.

So the Russians are not only helping the Iranians kill American military personnel (seven have died and 140 have been injured since the start of the war). They are also helping Iran choke off the global supply of oil at the Persian Gulf’s Strait of Hormuz.

With aid from the Kremlin, the Iranians attacked three tankers Wednesday. They attacked three more today. They attacked a port in Oman. They forced ports in Iraq to close. Around a quarter of the world’s oil passes through the strait. Iran’s new supreme leader vowed to keep it shut. Oil prices are soaring.

With prices soaring, the Russians have taken in $7 billion in oil revenues in the last week alone and stand to take in more. Donald Trump is under immense pressure to increase supply. He could send in ground forces, but that would be hard. It’s easier to ease sanctions on Russian oil. The Treasury lifted them for 30 days. Expect more easing while the Strait of Hormuz is shut.

So, again, let me see if I have this right.

The Russians are not only helping Iran kill Americans, but they are also helping reduce the supply of oil, which raises the price of oil, which pressures Trump to ease oil sanctions, which enriches the Russians, which rewards them for helping Iran kill Americans.

Right?

I think USA Today’s Chris Brennan is right. On hearing credible reports of an enemy helping an enemy, “a conventional US presidential administration would respond in one of two ways.” Either “deny the reports” or “demand an end to that assistance.”

But, as Brennan suggests, the president can’t be bothered. Instead, he said Russian aid to Iran is irrelevant. “We don’t know [if it’s true],” he said, “but it’s not doing well. If they are, it’s not helping much if you take a look at what’s happening in Iran in the last week. If they’re getting information, it’s not helping them much.”

(To be clear, it’s true.)

The president also said Putin was “very impressed with what he saw,” an odd thing to say about the friend of your enemy. But the gaslightingest thing he said was that Putin “wants to be helpful.”

He wants to help himself to Ukraine and more. By helping Iran bog down Trump in another forever war, Putin is not only filling his war chest. He’s creating conditions in which Trump can’t be seen as a trusted negotiator. After all, if he can’t broker peace with Iran, he can’t broker peace between Russia and Ukraine. And if the president objects, Putin can bog him down some more.

Aside from the geopolitical considerations, however, there’s the relatively unexplored question of leadership. What does it look like to American military personnel for the commander-in-chief to act like this? Russia is helping Iran kill Americans, yet he beams with pride when recalling how “very impressed” Putin was by Trump’s war with Iran, “because no one has seen anything like it.”

Half a dozen service members were killed last Monday by an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait. That same day, the Iranians attacked US military personnel stationed in Saudi Arabia. A seventh American died Sunday from the injuries he sustained.

When Trump talked to Putin Monday, did he ask if intel or drones given by Russia to Iran led to any of those seven deaths? How much responsibility does Russia carry? Did the president tell Putin there would be consequences in the future? Did he, you know, stand up to the man who’s helping kill his own people?

Another commander-in-chief would. With Trump, however, there’s a sense he’s not responsible. When troops die, he seems unmoved by their sacrifice. A reporter asked this week how many casualties he would accept in wartime. He said, in effect, that if death doesn’t bother families, why should it bother me? “I met the parents [of the war dead] and they were unbelievable people,” he said. “They said, 'finish the job, sir.' I'll leave you at that.”

The same indifference was evident at Sunday’s dignified transfer. Trump wore a white cap emblazoned with “USA” and “45-47” in gold available for purchase from the Trump Organization for $55. The image of the president as a walking advertisement during an event memorializing the honored dead was so insulting that Fox aired an old video to prevent Trump supporters from seeing it.

Over ten years, we have seen this draft-dodger use the military as a backdrop. At the same time, he’s called volunteers for service “suckers” and “losers.” He thinks soldiers maimed in combat are embarrassing. He said prisoners of war are unworthy. He insulted recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor. And through that, we wondered: Why is he so deferential to Vladimir Putin?

In the absence of war, however, the insults were theoretical. His chumminess with the leader of “one of America’s chief nuclear-armed competitors with exquisite intelligence capabilities,” as the Post said, didn’t mean much in real life. After all, it wasn’t like agreeing with Putin got anyone killed.

Until now.

Again, it’s the president’s war, not America’s. Poll after poll after poll show a majority, sometimes a vast majority, does not want the US to be entangled in a Middle East war. There was no imminent threat. There are no clear goals. There is no exit plan. Donald Trump started a war for selfish reasons. It’s his, not ours.

Yet the president won’t be held accountable for it. Four separate investigations, including one by the Pentagon, have determined that a US bomb landed on an elementary school in southern Iran on the first day of war, killing 150 girls. Perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps it was unintended. (It was near a military target). If so, a commander-in-chief of noble spirit would accept responsibility.

We don’t have one of those.

“It was done by Iran,” Trump said Sunday, incredibly.

Over the weekend, American bombs destroyed a desalination plant in Iran, according to the Post. The plant was a vital piece of civilian infrastructure in the parched desert conditions of the Persian Gulf. Yet when the president was asked about it Saturday, the Post said, he told reporters he was unaware of its destruction.

Rewind: either the commander-in-chief does not know what the military under his authority is doing or he’s bald-faced lying about what the military under his authority is doing. Both are evidence of the desire for power without responsibility for it.

Last Tuesday, Trump was asked about the worst-case scenario he had planned for in Iran. Evidently, there is no such plan, given that he guessed. “I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person.”

Three days later, the president declared that his war will end when Iran capitulates. "There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Trump wrote in a post on his social media site. “After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. 'MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).'”

But last night, the worst-case scenario happened, as Trump defined it. The son of Iran’s assassinated leader was chosen to be the next head of state. Mojtaba Khamenei, the Post said, is a “powerful regime insider deeply intertwined with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.” His pick “sends a strong message of defiance to the Trump administration.” NDTV said the US killed not only his dad, but also his mom, his wife and one of his kids.

So Trump killed Khamenei’s family, but expects him to give up? That, in addition to his reportedly “serious interest” in sending troops to Iran, makes you wonder if he’s right in the head. When asked for his reaction to the news of a possible ground invasion, retired General Paul Eaton, who trained combat troops in Iraq, told MS Now the first word that came to mind was “dementia.”

Whether he’s demented or not, the outcome of Donald Trump’s war is the same – someone else will be responsible for it, not him. Fox host Maria Bartiromo raised the specter of the military draft to the press secretary. “Mothers out there are worried that we’re going to have a draft, that they’re going to see their sons and daughters get involved in [the war]. What do you want to say about the president’s plans for troops on the ground?”

"It's not part of the current plan right now," Karoline Leavitt said. "But the president, again, wisely keeps his options on the table."

There hasn’t been a military draft since the end of the Vietnam war, but a ground invasion that no one wants is so personally important to this president that turning America’s sons and daughters into cannon fodder is a sacrifice he’s willing to make.

Just don’t ask for anything else, especially respect for the war dead. At the Dover Air Force Base Sunday, during the dignified transfer of six service members, Trump wore one of his caps with “USA” printed on the front and “45-47” on the side, both in gold.

The image of a president attempting to profit from the ultimate sacrifice was so insulting that Fox “accidently” aired footage from a previous dignified transfer. In its apology, however, Fox did not show the correct footage, nor did it describe what happened.

The war dead may have been killed thanks to Russian aid to Iran, but the president won’t take responsibility for that either.

The AP reported Friday that Russia has give Iran intelligence to help “strike American warships, aircraft and other assets in the region.” When a Fox reporter asked about it, Trump snapped back: “What a stupid question that is to be asking at this time.”

(On the same day that the AP reported on Russia’s abetting of Iran, the US Treasury said it might lift sanctions on Russian oil.)

A president who won’t give anything, not even respect, still expects the rest of us to. “Oil prices have crossed into triple digits for the first time since 2022,” Axios reported Sunday, “a stark sign of how the Iran war is throttling global supplies and raising consumer costs.” Politico said experts are “predicting we may see $4 and perhaps $5-a-gallon gas prices within weeks. And this in a country where the cost of living is already the hottest political issue in a midterm year” (bolded stress in the original).

Though Trump promised to bring down costs and put America First, spiking costs with $5-a-gallon gas is apparently the price for stability in … some place that’s not America, said Florida Congressman Carlos Gimenez: “You gotta pay the price. If [the war] takes four weeks, so be it. If it takes a bit longer, so be it.”

Trump is spending tens of billions in the name of the American people while driving up the cost of living for everyone with an illegal war, as well as illegal tariffs, and cutting off the safety net and gutting health care. But it’s all going to be worth it, right?

Hardly. Even before Mojtaba Khamenei was installed to replace his murderous dad, the Iranians had Trump’s number. They know they can use “economic pain” to exhaust his political will, which was already in short supply, as the point of the war was never defense but creating conditions in which an old, depleted and unpopular president looks big, tough and loved on American TV.

And just like that, the president seems ready to TACO.

Amid news of soaring oil prices, Trump told CBS News today that “the war is very complete, pretty much.” He said “they have no navy, no communications, they’ve got no Air Force,” which, even if true, is far short of his previous demand for “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Iran predicted this would happen. Then it did.

What has all the sacrifice been for? Iran has a new leader who’s more murderous than the last one. It is more motivated than ever to acquire nuclear weapons. Its pro-democracy movement has been crushed. Experts worry Tehran will activate “sleeper cells” in the US. And war, not peace, has spread across the region. (Not to mention Iran’s incentive to choke off the global supply of oil at the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf whenever it wants to.)

Iran is winning the war.

Because it’s Trump’s, not America’s.

The list of reasons for the president’s illegal and unjustified war against Iran keeps growing. First, it was because Iran had nuclear weapons. (It didn’t.) Then it was because the Iranian people longed for democracy and human rights. Then it was because Iran is a leader in state-sponsored terrorism. Now it’s because of America’s obligation as “a free people” to liberate the oppressed.

But Donald Trump doesn’t mean a word of what he says about his reasons for attacking Iran without the consent of the Congress, because he is a man who never means a word he says. He will say virtually anything to achieve his objectives, no matter how petty or consequential those objectives may be, and if achieving them requires him to contradict previous statements, so be it.

In 2011, Trump famously accused President Barack Obama, who was struggling in the polls, of planning to “start a war with Iran because he has absolutely no ability to negotiate. He’s weak and he’s ineffective so the only way he figures that he’s going to get reelected, and as sure as you’re sitting there, is to start a war with Iran.” In saying this, he appeared to believe that a president who starts a war to protect power is a cheat and a criminal.

He did not mean a word of it, unless he meant that it’s bad when a Democratic president does it but okie-dokie when he does. Either way, that allegation was levied in bad faith in order to deceive – to make Americans believe, in 2011, that Trump cared about things like principles and morality when principles and morality have always been mere tools for achieving his goals.

That Trump does not believe anything he says is illustrated moreover by the fact that he’s been calling individual reporters to determine which war rationales sound best in persuading a skeptical public. One in four say they support war with Iran, Reuters said today. According to an AP poll released last week, just 27 percent trust him to make good choices when it comes to using military force. Meanwhile, a CNN poll released last week found a stunning 68 percent believe he has the wrong priorities.

In that context, The Economist’s Gregg Carlstrom noticed Trump has been workshopping goals and rationales with reporters. To the Post, he said the goal is "freedom for the people.” He told Axios he can get Iran to make a deal “in two or three days.” He told the Times a deal might take "four to five weeks.” (He even suggested that he has “three very good choices" as to who would control Iran.) However, he told ABC News, actually nevermind.

“He doesn't sound convinced by any of it,” Gregg Carlstrom wrote on Twitter today. “He's throwing spaghetti at the wall. Ultimately I suspect he just wants to say he ‘solved’ a problem that has vexed every American president since Jimmy Carter. But there's no clear idea what that looks like and no plan for how to get there. And there are plenty of possible scenarios in which Trump declares victory and leaves the region with an absolute mess.”

The president does not sound convinced of his own words, because, again, he does not believe in his own words. He didn’t mean it when he said he would lower the cost of living. He didn’t mean it when he said he would bring “the Epstein class” to justice. He didn’t mean it when he said only “bad immigrants” would be deported. And now, after a decade of presenting himself as a peace-seeking isolationist who serves America’s needs first, he’s going to war, because he never meant a word.

Everything he is saying right now has one goal, which is creating conditions in which the unpopular president looks big and tough on TV for the purpose of gaining support in advance of this year’s midterms. You could say Trump is doing exactly what he accused Obama of doing. But you also say he’s doing what Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu is currently doing: waging a forever war in order to stay in power forever. Trump has been bragging for months about ending “eight wars.” (He said as much during the State of the Union address.) He believed being seen as a peace-making president would rally the base. That’s not working, so he now believes victory lies in the path of war-making. That this is a diametric reversal of a decade of isolationist rhetoric is irrelevant to him, because everything he said was intended in bad faith.

In the absence of an actual emergency, most Americans aren’t buying the rationale for war. Today, a new CNN found that nearly 60 percent disapprove. That’s before body bags start coming home. How high will disapproval go after the press corps focuses on the war dead? (Pete Hegseth said today he has not ruled out a ground invasion. Trump said today that the war could last four to five weeks.) And that poll was taken in the context of Trump’s heelturn. Every report I have read about Trump’s war has noted how it stands in stark contrast with his previous disdain for “forever wars” – a disdain now revealed to be totally fake.

The Democrats in the Congress are concentrating their energy on a bipartisan war-powers resolution. The goal is to reclaim constitutional authority from an executive who is abusing his. The president has to ask for permission to go to war, and many of the Democrats seem certain that the answer is going to be no.

That’s good, but the president’s betrayal of his stated principles in pursuit of a war to maintain his power presents a bigger opportunity – to dismantle what remains of the public’s trust and, most specifically, to accelerate the demoralization of his base. Maga voters are almost certainly not going to vote for a Democrat, but the Democrats can give reasons to stay home.

I’ll end by quoting Democrat Eric Swallwell, the California congressman: “This guy has lied to the American people about everything he promised he would do. … He said he would lower prices on day one. Instead, he put in his idiotic tariff policy that has raised Price. He said that he would get rid of war and now we are … a year into the administration. We have two new wars on the map in Venezuela and Iran. He has done the exact opposite this entire presidency of what he told he was going to do.”

The president lied and lied. He lied so much he appears to think he’s going to scam his way to victory in November. Last week's State of the Union was a preview of what's to come.

Above and below each of Donald Trump's lies was a set of deep-seated beliefs. He doesn’t need the Congress. He doesn’t need the people. He doesn’t need the “disloyal.” He doesn’t need the truth. He believes he can create reality. He believes everyone’s going to believe it.

However, you might not know any of that from reading this morning's headlines. The Associated Press called his lies “takeaways.” NPR called them “familiar notes.” Worst of all, an email alert I received from USA Today called the vast scale of deceit “fighting words.”

A deeper read of followup coverage shows the press corps’ meaning. The president said he was going to use the speech to “sell the public on the economy and unveil new measures meant to lower costs,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The Atlantic said it had “the potential to put his presidency on more stable ground — if he doesn’t get in his own way.”

Turns out, however, the speech was just more of the same scam.

“Trump has spent the last year boasting of his accomplishments while mocking the record of his predecessor, Joe Biden,” the AP reported today. “But much of this bluster has been based on misinformation, which he again fell back on during his State of the Union address.”

For instance:

"When I last spoke in this chamber 12 months ago, I had just inherited a nation in crisis, with a stagnant economy." No. “Incomes are rising fast, the roaring economy is roaring like never before.” Nope. Tariffs are “saving our country, the kind of money we’re taking in.” Nuh-uh.

One falsehood revealed true intent. Tariffs are part of a scheme by moneyed elites to push the burden of taxation downward so that you, me and everyone we know pay more for a civilized country than they do. The ideal is eliminating the income tax, which burdens moneyed elites most, replacing it with a sales tax, like a tariff, which burdens everyone else.

But success would depend on a majority of the people who would be fully burdened by it not to fully understand it. If they did, it would fail. So, I guess, whoops: “I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love,” the president said.

“The people that I love,” of course, are the moneyed elite.

Trump is lying so hard about foreigners paying for his tariff scheme, because he wants to prevent the truth from being broadly understood. It's the biggest tax increase in over 30 years, according to multiple studies. Importers pony up the extra expense, but charge more to recoup it. The Federal Reserve said US consumers paid over 90 percent of the added cost.

What’s more is this historic tax increase was illegal the whole time. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Congress, and only the Congress, has the tax power. It’s being said Trump accepts the court's judgment, but I don’t know how that can be. He responded with a new round of tariffs (under a new authority) that is, according to Judd Legum, just as illegal.

So not only did Trump scam us with an illegal tax, and not only are corporations that passed on the cost to us going to be refunded, an act the Treasury secretary has already called “ultimate corporate welfare,” he’s also finding new ways of scamming us – at least until the Supreme Court catches up with to him a year from now to strike down his new illegal tax.

By then, of course, it will be too late.

A president who intended to turn the economy around with policies that benefit the majority of people would take into account polling saying that a majority of people disprove. A Fox News poll taken before the high court’s ruling found 63 percent believe Trump has gone too far on tariffs. That’s in addition to 65 percent who disapprove of his handling of inflation.

That poll and others like it amount to what House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called "an extinction-level event." "He’s like negative 40-plus with independents," Jeffries said before last week's speech. "Latino voters are leaving him. Young voters are leaving him. Working-class white voters are leaving him. Independents have abandoned him a long time ago. Any normal person would realize we better change course because this is not working."

That the president’s current course is not working is beside the point, however, given that economic policies benefiting the majority were never the goal. The real objective has always been enacting economic policies that benefit a tiny minority – “the people that I love” – while scamming everyone else into believing Donald Trump cares enough to solve their problems.

Last week's speech was marketed as a chance for Trump to reset. But there’s nothing to reset. If the Republicans hope to avoid slaughter, they'll have to scam even harder.

“He needs all four years to fix the mess,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson in a Fox interview after the State of the Union. “If we lost the midterms – heaven forbid, if we lost the majority in the House – it would be the end of the Trump presidency in a real effect."

“We gotta keep this going,” he said, meaning the scam.

Last week's speech was a preview of what’s of the come.

The American people were under no imminent threat from Iran. Its government does not have nuclear weapons. It was no more threatening to Israel or any other US ally than it normally is. The decision this morning to attack Tehran, the capital, has nothing to do with “freedom for Iran,” as Donald Trump told the Post. He’s not going to “raze their missile industry to the ground” and “annihilate their navy.” Why? Because that’s not the point.

The point is creating a made-for-TV war that makes Trump look like a big, tough war president. He’s doing this for transparently obvious reasons: things are going badly, very badly, for him at home. Freedoms are being violated. The middle class is being immiserated. There’s a general sense that the rich and powerful – the Epstein class – can act with impunity while everyone else pays the price. If Trump doesn’t change the subject, his presidency, and perhaps more than his presidency, will cease to be as it is once the Congress is turned over to the Democrats.

Trump believes Americans will rally around the presidency in a time of war, thus boosting his poll numbers among people who only pay attention to the news if there’s a war going on. This is not an Israel-Iran war. This is not a US-Iran war. Those titles give this moment too much dignity. This is little more than a political stunt, with the real consequences being murdered Iranians.

As such, it has to be as brief as it is spectacular to watch on Fox. There can’t be any US casualties, anyway not so many that it looks bad on video screens. He is making titanic declarations to suggest that he has an indomitable will to achieve objectives at any cost. “All I want is freedom for the people,” Trump told the Post this morning. “I want a safe nation, and that’s what we’re going to have.” But again, that’s just part of the performance.

As soon as something goes sideways, and it will go sideways given enough time, Donald Trump will chicken out. That’s why he will end it quickly – to prevent what is so far a carefully managed political stunt from blowing up in his face. He will accept any convenient reason to declare victory over Iran, even if victory falls short of “a safe nation, and that’s what we’re going to have.”

I will defer to authorities on Middle East politics, but from where I’m standing, Trump today ended the democratic spirit that was rising up from the Iranian people. Iran’s government has been crushing dissent for months. Trump is acting like he’s enabling regime change, as if he were the Great Liberator. In reality, he’s justified more repression by an already repressive government. More than that, he’s undermining dissidents. Who’s going to be seen as American allies after the US bombed a girls school?

Indeed, Iran’s government benefits twice. Not only can it justify more, and more violent, crackdowns on individual liberty in the name of national security, it can also defeat “the Great Satan” with a lucky punch. Again, this is a made-for-TV war. Trump does not have the will to do what it takes to “liberate” Iran. That would require a generation-defining occupation of the kind that George W Bush attempted in Iraq in the 2000s. All Iran has to do is bloody Trump’s nose – bomb a base, sink a ship, humiliate the titan so that his titanic declarations seem farcical. They can declare victory, then go back to repressing their own people.

Because the point of all this is looking good on TV, Trump has overlooked the fact that he’s not in complete control. As someone wiser than me once said, the enemy gets a vote, too. Benjamin Netanyahu is clearly pretending to act like an ally, as if his top priority is Israel’s and America’s safety and security. In reality, what he needs is a continual emergency to stay in power to prevent him from being prosecuted and imprisoned for life. As such, he’s happy to provide cover to Trump’s stunt, as attacking Iran seems more justifiable in America if seen as defending Israel. But Netanyahu’s credibility in America is now deeply strained, to put it mildly, by the fact that he murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians. He’ll be all right if the Democrats in the Congress play along with him and Trump. What happens if they don’t?

Whether the Democrats do play along will be determined by how far they are willing to go in accepting Trump’s lies – if they accept that Iran posed such a threat to America and Israel, by way of possessing nuclear weapons, that Trump and Netanyahu were justified in triggering a conflict that could engulf the world. There is no reason the Democrats should accept those lies, given that Trump already said Iran’s nuclear sites were “obliterated.” If the Democrats decide against playing along, we might expect them to lump the president’s new illegal war with all other high crimes committed against the Constitution and the American people, so that a made-for-TV war intended to boost his standing with voters before the midterms becomes just another liability.

Not only for him but for Netanyahu, too. You could argue that but for the faith of the Democrats, Netanyahu would be in jail. His war crimes have put a wedge between the Democrats and the biggest pro-Israel lobby. That wedge could become permanent, as Democratic elites slowly come around to accepting the idea that Joe Biden’s position on Gaza cost Kamala Harris precious votes.

Moreover, Gallup found for the first time in 25 years that more Americans, not just Democrats, sympathize with the Palestinians more than they sympathize with the Israelis. Whatever the American consensus on Israel used to be, it clearly no longer is. The more Netanyahu exploits Trump’s vanity to stay out of jail, the wider that gap will get, to Netanyahu’s detriment.

Until yesterday, it wasn’t clear to me why Savannah Guthrie’s mom was still missing nearly a month after her disappearance. Then came images Sunday of the FBI director, Kash Patel, partying with members of the US Olympic hockey team after they won the gold medal.

Then it all started to make sense.

Why wouldn’t Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping remain unsolved given the country’s leading lawman doesn’t take the law seriously? He thinks the FBI gives him access to things other people can’t, as if law and order were an exclusive membership card to an elite club.

Meanwhile, real people suffer.

For all we know, Nancy Guthrie could be dead.

If you haven’t heard, Kash Patel took a taxpayer-funded jet to Italy to watch the men’s hockey final. His office said he was checking on security. His people accused reporters of lying when they reported the news. Their boss, with images of his partying, exposed their lies.

Sunday’s episode was only one instance of a larger pattern of lawlessness that's getting so big that the Times noted that Patel has “shown little willingness to curb or even conceal his jet-setting." He "has offered comparable explanations" (ie, lies) "to provide SWAT team protection for his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, a country singer and rightwing activist, as well as for his heavy use of federal resources for travel that has at times appeared to blur professional lines.”

The Times said that "over the summer, he flew on a government jet from the Washington area to Inverness, Scotland, for a getaway at the exclusive golf resort, the Carnegie Club, with friends ... He has also taken flights, at taxpayer expense, to a private hunting ranch in Texas and to a wrestling match in State College, Pa., to watch a performance by Ms. Wilkins.

The Times and others say Patel’s bad behavior comes in spite of “multiple, fast-developing crises.” These include Americans in Mexico being told to shelter in place after a drug cartel leader was killed by the military. Closer to home, police killed a Florida man who tried to enter Mar-a-Lago with a shotgun and a gas can. Scott MacFarlane added more context:

The FBI is being pushed by Epstein survivors to do more to investigate some of the people … that have come out in the released batch of Epstein files, which show the circle that surrounded Jeffrey Epstein as he prayed on girls and young women. … All these things, not to mention crime nationwide, opioid crisis, gun crimes, child pornography, drug running, gun running, are happening as the FBI director is ... partying with his buddies.

But I think it’s the other way around. It’s not that Patel’s lawlessness is happening in light of these crimes. They are happening in light of his lawlessness. Why care about the law, or criminal consequences, when the country’s leading lawman shows so much contempt for it?

The Times reported that Patel was cheering Team USA when he tweeted that the FBI would dedicate “all necessary resources” to investigating the Mar-a-Lago incident. The implication is that he’s falling down on the job, as “all necessary resources” clearly didn’t include him.

But consider the message he's sending – that law enforcement is just empty talk. That's more consequential than falling down on the job. With his actions, Patel is saying that as long as you’re hooked up to the right people, you can do all the criming you want. Even if you’re not hooked up, just wait. When the cops are away, the criminals can come out to play.

This message was deepened by Patel’s (almost certainly fictional) claim that he was invited by the men’s hockey team to celebrate their victory with them. A different FBI director would have refused such an invitation out of concern that accepting it would not only compromise the bureau’s standing with the American people but also appear to encourage lawlessness. But public trust means little to a man who acts like he will never face public accountability.

Lawlessness isn’t harmless.

An FBI director who properly feared public accountability would never have let an Arizona sheriff investigate Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance without the FBI’s aid. He or she would have given Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos a choice: save yourself the humiliation of failure by accepting that the FBI is “the premier agency to deal with kidnappings,” as one expert described the bureau, or I will open my own investigation and guarantee your humiliation.

Instead, the FBI joined the investigation many days after Guthrie went missing, a debilitating loss of time, critics told the New York Post, that allowed for serious errors – for instance, surrendering the crime scene too soon, “with everyone from reporters to true-crime sleuths able to walk right up to Guthrie’s front door with no security or crime scene tape.”

As things stand, Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance is now approaching a month in duration. Her family seems increasingly desperate. Savannah Guthrie herself is forced to make public pleas to her mom’s kidnappers that yield no results. Nanos and Patel are both humiliated, but only Nanos, who faces future reelection as a sheriff, will be held accountable. Meanwhile, Patel jet-sets on the taxpayer dime, hastening the decline of public faith in law enforcement.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s tariff scheme, because the power of taxation goes to the Congress, not the president. “The Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court’s majority.

The news is being framed as a loss. “The 6-3 ruling is a major blow to the president’s signature economic policy,” NPR said. It “represents a stinging political setback,” the Post said. “The first major piece of President Trump’s broad agenda” has been upended, the AP said.

In truth, the court probably saved Trump from himself.

Hours before the court’s ruling came news of the US economy slowing down to a degree much greater than economists expected, because consumers pulled back so sharply. They did so, of course, because Trump’s tariffs scheme amounted to the biggest tax increase of the last three decades, according to the Tax Foundation. (JP Morgan Chase, in an assessment published last April, said it’s the biggest since 1968.)

The Times said the government collected nearly $290 billion in custom duties last year, triple what was collected the year before. Last week, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York issued a report saying more than 90 percent of that came out of the pockets of American consumers. (This quarter was shaping up to be worse than the last, as consumer confidence “collapsed” last month to its lowest level since 2014.)

So the court probably stopped Trump from burning up the rest of the American middle class, and sparking a broad-based backlash against him in this year’s midterms, threatening to take his party down with him. (Even people who do not pay attention to politics, indeed, who know almost nothing, rated his handling of prices at -40 percent.)

Still, in saving Trump from himself, the court made something clear to Americans that may not have been clear before this morning’s ruling – tariffs are taxes. Not only that, thanks to the court, everyone now knows the biggest tax hike since the Clinton administration was illegal.

So you could say the court saved Trump, but you could also say it gave his enemies strong grounds for accusing him of pulling off the biggest heist of the 21st century, and, because of the massive scale of the burglary, the economy came to a crawl. Again, we’re talking about nearly $290 billion, almost all of it paid for by you, me and everyone we know. (I’m using that figure. Others estimate upwards of $1 trillion.)

Even Brett Kavanaugh suggested, though without meaning to, that there’s been a robbery and victims are entitled to just compensation. In his dissent, the associate justice said that Trump’s tariff scheme is too complicated to unwind, with the primary complication being “refunds.”

“The court’s decision is likely to generate other serious practical consequences in the near term,” Kavanaugh wrote. “One issue will be refunds. Refunds of billions of dollars would have significant consequences for the US treasury. The court says nothing today about whether and if so how, the government should go about returning the billions of dollars that it has collected from importers, but that process is likely to be a ‘mess,’ as was acknowledged at oral arguments.”

Of course, Kavanaugh is talking about refunds to importers, which deepens the injustice of it all. They didn’t ultimately pay! We did!

I think Democratic leaders should make a deal with voters: Give us the Congress in November and we’ll pass a law forcing Trump to give back the money he stole from you. Moreover, I think the Democrats should dare their GOP counterparts to codify Trump’s tariffs and risk the allegation, entirely justified, that not only did the president pick the people’s pocket but his party now wants to make pickpocketing legal.

The Republicans probably won’t have to go that far given that Justice Kavanaugh, in his dissent, actually suggested ways for the president to get around today’s ruling, and wouldn’t you know it, that’s what Trump is going to do. In today’s press conference, during which he said he was “absolutely ashamed” of the high court, Trump announced a new set of global tariffs under a different law that restricts levies to 150 days.

It’s often said Trump doesn’t understand how tariffs work, but he does. He gets what they really are: leverage against rich people, corporations and countries he’s seeking to extort. It was reported today that he was angry with the court, but it wasn’t because it “set back his agenda.” It was because it took away his most powerful tool for seeking bribes.

The president’s criminal intent snapped into focus during the presser, though it was so subtle that it went mostly unnoticed. A reporter asked why Trump didn’t work with the Congress to establish import taxes, rather than pursuing another round of tariffs that will end up being challenged in court again. Trump’s reply: “Because I don’t have to.”

“I have the right to do tariffs,” he said. “I’ve always had that right to do tariffs. It’s all been approved by Congress. There’s no reason to do it.”

Rewind: The Supreme Court just said he can’t do tariffs unilaterally, that “the Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the Executive Branch,” and that actions to the contrary are illegal. (Plus: Congress has not, and almost certainly will not, approve new taxes.)

Even though the Supreme Court ruled Trump’s tariffs are illegal, the criminal intent behind them hasn’t changed. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, in so many words, that the theft of the American people will continue through 2026. As for the money already stolen from us, he said: “I got a feeling the American people won’t see it.”

The president is burning up the American middle class with the largest tax increase since the early 1990s, which itself is snowballing the price of everything from coffee to clothes to carpets to car parts.

Yet this isn’t a major, ongoing, attention-grabbing story.

To be sure, there’s plenty of reporting about Donald Trump’s approval ratings. He’s underwater on every issue you can think of, including immigration. His so-called deportation crackdown has lost support, even among men. Reuters said today that only 41 percent approve.

But even that reporting carries an undercurrent of uncertainty, as if the Washington press corps can’t figure out the cause of what is becoming a broadbased backlash against the president’s tariffs. In the absence of clarity, there are abstract questions, especially about the unknowable future, ie, how will "affordability issues” impact the midterm elections?

Meanwhile, the American middle class is practically screaming for attention in hopes that someone somewhere does something now.

In January, consumer confidence “collapsed” to its lowest level since 2014, the AP reported. That same month job losses piled up to their highest level since 2009, according to an independent report. (Tariffs are driving job loss and slowing hiring, CNBC reported.) Meanwhile, health care costs keep going up, as do housing and energy costs.

The news media is not making a major story out of the fact that Trump is burning up the middle class because it’s the middle class that’s getting burned up.

Last week, G Elliott Morris, the data journalist who publishes Strength in Numbers, found that among people who don’t pay attention to politics (they don’t know which party controls the Congress), the president’s approval on the handling of prices is negative 40 percent.

Trump’s polling is getting so bad some pollsters are doubting whether he has a floor of support at all. On Monday, after the new Q Poll showed Trump’s net approval with independent voters is at -27 percent, CNN’s Harry Enten asked: “Where is the floor for Donald Trump? I’m not sure he has a floor, because if there is one, Donald Trump, at least in term No. 2, has just fallen through it to another low level.”

All of this, in one way or another, is driven by Trump’s tariffs.

You would think that a president who is immiserating middle-class Americans with the biggest tax increase in over three decades would get the attention of a press corps that can otherwise be trusted to chase down every detail of every program that affects tax-payers.

As things stand, however, we can reasonably conclude that, to the owners of the county’s most lucrative media properties, taxes are less important than the question of who’s paying for them. They are not making a major story out of the fact that Trump is burning up the middle class because it’s the middle class that’s getting burned up.

Remember, they knew. Tariffs are taxes we pay for products brought into the US. It was never going to be foreign countries. It was always going to be us. But the press corps, in deference to Trump’s lies about what they really are, made it sound like it was a question of maybe.

Well, there’s no more maybe.

The Federal Reserve of New York said Friday that US consumers are paying nearly all the cost of tariffs (90 percent). A previous report by the Tax Foundation said average households are paying the equivalent of $1,000 in taxes. (That’s expected to climb to $1,300 this year.)

All that pain might have been a honeymoon. According to the Wall Street Journal, importers that had been absorbing costs are no longer going to. “After holding the line on prices for several months, companies — big and small — have begun a new round of increases, in some cases by high-single-digit percentage points,” the Journal said.

And more pain is on the horizon. The White House wants to impose a new tariff, or “cargo tax,” on imports as part of a scheme to revitalize domestic shipping, according to Roll Call. “To help fund shipyard improvements, the administration wants to impose a new fee on all foreign-built commercial vessels bringing merchandise into US ports.”

In its assessment, the Tax Foundation said in no uncertain terms that Trump’s tariffs amount to the biggest tax increase in 33 years, and what I was to know is: why don’t major media outlets say it just like that?

I don’t mean now. I mean then – back when saying it just like that would have mattered. If voters understood, truly understood, that he wanted to impose a tax hike bigger than any since 1993, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, would voters have made the same decision?

Kamala Harris tried to warn us. She said Trump’s tariffs were “a sales tax on the American people.” But she wasn’t taken seriously, not as seriously as Trump would have been had their roles been reversed – if Harris, not Trump, had proposed a historic tax increase that keeps increasing. In that case, there would have been saturation coverage about the peril of raising taxes in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.

Why didn’t that happen to Trump?

I think part of the reason is media stereotypes. The GOP, not the Democrats, is seen as the anti-tax party. In addition to Trump’s lies, what prevents reporters from building a narrative about the largest tax increase since the late 20th century is a kind of cognitive dissonance. The story can’t be that big since it’s the anti-tax party that’s doing it.

But I also think part of the reason is media interest. Whenever Democrats talk about raising taxes, they mean raising them on rich individuals and corporations, asking them to pay their fair share for everyone’s benefit. Such proposals always get wall-to-wall coverage, because who’s getting taxed is rich individuals who own corporations.

Trump’s tariffs are different. They are part of the elite goal of making the US tax code more regressive, so that less of the responsibility for a civilized country falls on those who can afford to pay more. Though they are known as the anti-tax party, the Republicans don’t mind taxes, as long as it’s you, me and everyone we know who’s paying for them.

It’s because Trump’s tariffs are in line with this larger, and largely unknown, effort by elites that headlines about them rarely featured their real and politically-charged name: tax. And instead of saying definitively what they are, and explaining definitely what their impact would be on middle-class Americans already heaving under the weight of an affordability crisis, the news media turned a fact into a question.

The aligned interests of the Republicans and the billionaire owners of news media corporations is also why, no matter how loudly or how strenuously Democrats accuse Trump of implementing “the largest peacetime tax hike in US history,” the allegation rarely breaks through.

Basically, if it’s a tax on elites, elites make it sound like a tax on you. If it’s a tax on you, they make you wonder if it’s a tax at all. When you understand this double standard, you can see how the news media actually created conditions during the 2024 election in which some middle-class Americans unknowingly voted for their own immiseration.

And now they’re mad.

On Tuesday, Larry Kudlow, the Fox personality and former Trump advisor, was on the TV.

You will be shocked to learn he lied.

“I vote in the state of Connecticut. You don’t need a photo ID. You could vote if you just show them a credit card or a debit card, which anybody can get their hands on. I think it’s a scam."

The context was “election integrity” and voter-ID laws. At the time, the House was debating a bill that would nationalize elections to an alarming degree. (The so-called SAVE America Act passed the following day.) Kudlow’s “commentary” primed Donald Trump to respond.

“Connecticut is an extremely corrupt voting place,” he said. “That's why a guy like [Richard] Blumenthal can keep getting elected. He admitted he cheated on the war. I went to Vietnam for a couple of days and I spent two more days than he did there. He was never there."

All but one thing above, which I will get to, is a lie.

I also live in Connecticut. I vote in Connecticut. You cannot walk into a polling station, present a credit card and vote. I don’t know if that would be illegal. I do know it would fail.

You are permitted to vote without photo-ID, but the documents you are required to produce are the same ones you are required to produce to get a Connecticut drivers license.

In other words, proof of residency.

According to today’s New Haven Register, those documents include:

a utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck or government document that shows their name and address; a Social Security card; or any form of identification that shows the voter’s name and address, name and signature, or name and photograph.”

But Connecticut’s election laws don’t stop there.

Even if you have photo-ID, or produce the same documents required to get photo-ID, you still have to go through an additional process. Volunteer poll workers find your name and address on a list of voters. That list is maintained by Republican and Democratic registrars. It is created via voter registration, a process that happens in advance of Election Day.

So there are at least two stages, registration and verification.

Here’s Connecticut’s top elections official with the rest of the details:

“Every community has both a Republican and a Democrat responsible for running elections. We use paper ballots. Our voting equipment is not connected to the internet. We conduct rigorous preelection testing and post-election audits. And when an issue is identified, it is investigated and addressed through law and not rhetoric."

Here's an example of “when an issue is identified”: In 2023, the state's media was abuzz with news of an attempt to stuff mail-in vote boxes in favor of Bridgeport’s Democratic mayor, Joe Ganim. The perpetrators, all Democrats, were found, prosecuted and convicted. The state’s legislature, which is dominated by Democrats, tightened rules to prevent future abuse.

It’s safe to presume that Larry Kudlow knows the same things I know given that we both live and vote in the state of Connecticut. I think it’s therefore reasonable to conclude not only that he’s lying, but that he knows he’s lying. And I think it's important to say that plainly.

A lot of time is put into fact-checking in a valiant effort to defend the truth, but the lies themselves are worth paying attention to, because without them, the true position of the GOP would be indefensible. Achieving their goals would be impossible without deceit.

The liars know election fraud is rare. States and localities have multi-stage verification processes. They know that rarity is due to state laws holding criminals accountable. And liars know Americans prefer tradition. We prefer states and localities be in charge of elections.

What do the liars really want?

To stop the Democrats from winning.

To do that, the president and his allies need to put in place a system with rules that suppress voters who favor Democrats. To do that, they need to take away voting authority from localities and states. That’s the point of the SAVE America Act. (It is also the point of a lawsuit against Connecticut and other blue states to force them to turn over voter rolls.) If successful, the effort would give the GOP a means of voiding Democratic victories.

That’s what they want, but they can’t say that. So they lie.

They ask “questions” about “election integrity,” as if manifesting the will of the American people were their highest value. They talk about “election security” as if threats by Russian or Chinese aggressors were of actual concern. They do this not to raise awareness of problems, or to search for good-faith solutions, but to sabotage trust in free and fair elections.

And they smear.

That brings me to Richard Blumenthal.

Before he ran for the Senate in 2010, Blumenthal was Connecticut’s attorney general for 20 years. He was popular. Everyone knew running for the Senate was a foregone conclusion.

In the run up to Election Day that year, the Times ran a story documenting a few times when Blumenthal seemed to suggest he served “in” Vietnam. He didn’t. He served stateside for six years in the US Marine Corps Reserve during the Vietnam War. But most Nutmeggers, as we sometimes call ourselves, were already familiar with his biography. It was widely understood what Dick Blumenthal meant to say. The allegations of “stolen valor” fell flat and he won.

Donald Trump often comes back to this moment when Blumenthal is in the headlines criticizing him. This time, however, the president didn’t just smear Blumenthal. He smeared the whole state. After all, only an “extremely corrupt voting place” like Connecticut would keep electing a senator who “admitted he cheated on the war. … He was never there."

That’s the only true thing Donald Trump said: Blumenthal wasn’t there. Otherwise, his every word was a lie designed to project onto enemies his own criminal intent in the belief they will chose to protect themselves and the truth rather than go on the offensive against him.

Liars expect us to defend the truth.

They don’t expect us to attack them for lying.

From where I was sitting Wednesday, it looked like the attorney general pretty much invited the United States Congress to impeach her. Here’s how the New York Daily News put it, summarizing the AP’s coverage of her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee:

Attorney General Pam Bondi launched into a passionate defense of President Donald Trump Wednesday as she tried to turn the page from relentless criticism of the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, repeatedly shouting at Democrats during a combative hearing in which she postured herself as the Republican president’s chief protector.

I put that last bit in italics not only to emphasize the key fact of the news, but also to suggest it’s all the reason you need to impeach.

The attorney general is the top law enforcement officer of the United States. The attorney general is not the president’s defense counsel. Anything short of that standard is dereliction of duty and betrayal of the oath, high crimes demanding she be removed from office.

I mean, ranking member Jamie Raskin’s opening statement could be used later in drawing up articles of impeachment against Bondi. The Maryland congressman enumerated all the ways the attorney general “ignored the law” passed by the Congress to release the Epstein files.

Watching clip after clip, I was surprised to see Bondi didn’t bother hiding it. In behavior unbecoming of a high officer, she screamed, she pouted, and she insulted the Democrats, all without apparent concern that doing so revealed the intent behind her actions – that Donald Trump’s interests are her interests, those of the people be damned.

Immediately, Bondi’s theatrics raised more questions than answers, according to New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

“She was screaming and thrashing, and I think that’s because she knows that she is implicated in a massive coverup to protect a powerful ring of pedophiles through the redaction of the names of perpetrators, the holding of 3 million files, the unexplained moving of Ghislaine Maxwell into a new cushy facility – all of these things are what she personally oversaw. That’s before even digging into whatever questions may arise from her history in Florida, and I think that her thrashing and her very erratic performance today pointed to the fact that there are real questions that point to the DOJ under her leadership specifically.”

Clearly, her performance was strategic. It was part of her goal of deflecting attention away from the president and the fact that his name appears more than a million times in files related to Jeffrey Epstein that were released by the Department of Justice, according to Raskin.

She beclowned herself and perhaps it worked. Most headlines I have seen about her testimony are a variation of the Daily News’: “Bondi shouts down Democrats in hearing on Epstein files release delays.”

At one point, the attorney general said instead of criticizing Trump, we should be glorifying him, as the Dow Jones Industrial broke a new record this week. She spoke as if she were a fan girl. “They said it couldn’t be done in four years, yet President Trump has done it in one!”

At another, instead of answering Jerry Nadler’s question about how many of Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators she has indicted, she all but knocked the pitcher over to avoid saying the embarrassing truth: none.

Bondi even allowed herself to be seen thumbing through “flash cards with individualized insults,” Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie said. “But she couldn’t memorize them, so you can see her shuffle through them to find the flash-cards-insult that matches the member.”

Bondi humiliated herself for Trump’s sake, but we shouldn’t just move on. We should dwell on that choice. As Raskin said, in response to her petulance, Bondi was trying to “filibuster” the Congress in order to prevent it from manifesting its will, in this case, getting answers from the attorney general about delays in releasing the Epstein files.

That is contempt. Contempt of Congress is a crime. When you show contempt for Congress to the Congress – to the actual faces of elected members while under oath – the Congress cannot overlook it without expecting such crimes to continue. Nip it in the bud. Impeach Bondi.

It’s important to say that plainly. Too often, liberals get bogged down in debates over intent. Why did Bondi play the fool? Ron Filipkowski, at Meidasnews.com, said her “reprehensible performance was to please an audience of one who expects reprehensible performances.”

I have no doubt that’s true, but I also think the reasons are secondary to the behavior itself. It doesn’t really matter that her clown act was intended to protect Donald Trump. More important is holding her accountable so future officials know clown acts come with a price.

Impeachment isn’t possible right now. The Democrats do not have the numbers. Even if they did, there’s no guarantee her indictment by a House majority would lead to conviction by two-thirds of the Senate.

But that, too, is beside the point. Fortunately, some Democrats appear to understand the point is saying she’s unfit, right now, to build momentum toward retaking the House, and once achieved, using that majority power to advance the cause of justice. As Raskin said:

“If [the Democrats] had the power, we would subpoena [Bondi], and we would require her to answer our questions.” Raskin went on to say:

“So that is the importance of who’s going to be in control in Congress after the 2026 elections because we would like the subpoena power, so we don’t see this kind of phenomenal disrespect of Congress.”

The way I see it, the Democrats seem to be building up to a position from which they can send a message to future toadies: Pam Bondi might be spared in the end, but not before we make her life hell.

At this point, you have probably heard enough about the effect of Bad Bunny’s Superbowl halftime show on the president and his coalition. While there are plenty of details to debate, including the ludicrous allegation that the Grammy-winner’s performance was “pure smut,” I think it’s important to keep your eyes fixed on what’s really at stake.

Rightwingers don’t mind “indecent acts,” as their protection of “the Epstein class” should attest. What they mind is a global superstar, whose originates from Puerto Rico and whose native language is Spanish, making affirmative claims about who belongs in America.

Bad Bunny’s halftime show was an extension of remarks he made two weekends ago after winning six Grammys. “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ICE out,” he said. “We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.”

His argument in favor of kindness and common cause, and in defense of diversity and inclusion, was later immortalized on words written on a football – “Together, we are America” – and it lay beneath a spectacle seen by 135 million, according to the Daily News.

The strength of Bad Bunny’s argument was enhanced by the impotence of its counterpart. The Turning Point USA, the hate group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, organized an alternate musical event. Emceed by Kid Rock, the show’s message was, more or less, America is for “us,” not “them.” And, according to the Daily News, just 6 million people watched it.

That’s their beef.

Donald Trump and his rightwing allies will not believe their vision of America – essentially, a racially exclusive club – is unpopular. And when I say “will not believe,” I am strictly speaking.

They will never accept that America has fallen in love with a man who was born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, who was bagging groceries a decade ago before rising to Spotify’s top global artist, who welcomes everyone and whose life embodies the American Dream.

So they smear him, accusing him of involvement in a criminal conspiracy to somehow force Americans into loving him against their will. That’s the thinking behind a new complaint by US Congressman Andy Ogles. The Tennessee Republican described the Superbowl halftime show as "pure smut" featuring "explicit displays of gay sexual acts, women gyrating provocatively, and Bad Bunny shamelessly grabbing his crotch while dry-humping the air."

Ogles continued, saying Bad Bunny "openly glorified sodomy and countless other unspeakable depravities." Ogles said "these flagrant, indecent acts" break federal law regulating television airwaves. He called for an investigation in a letter to the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees broadcast regulations.

But such allegations are decoys. Rightwingers do not care about “family values.” If they did, they would not tolerate the incarceration of babies. (The youngest person in the Dilley Detention Center in Texas is 2 months old, according to Univision.) Rightwingers do not care about higher-order things, only whether they can be used to accomplish their goals.

In this case, the goal is discrediting a global superstar who is popularizing a new and dangerous idea of belonging in America. You don’t need to pass a test. You don’t have to know the rules. You don’t even need the correct paperwork. If you’re here, you’re American.

Because “together, we are America.”

“Together, we are America” is new, as it casts immigration in the context of brotherhood, so the burden of government is finding ways of turning a fact of life into a fact of law.

It is dangerous, as it upends a decade of rightwing effort to move public understanding of immigration away from a matter of freedom and opportunity to a matter of crime and punishment. The burden is now entirely on individuals. They’re presumed guilty until proven innocent. “Together, we are America” has the potential of turning that around.

Bad Bunny’s ethic of belonging is dangerous for another reason. It comes as the logical conclusion to ten years of fear-mongering and hate speech is coming into view: families ripped apart, communities shredded, citizens murdered and concentration camps opening.

Even respectable white people, or “independent voters,” are recoiling (mostly because they are shocked to learn that an “immigration crackdown” includes them). Thanks to the horrors the country has witnessed over the last month, they are now open to alternatives, especially alternatives being advanced by the most popular performing artist on the planet.

Right now, the focus is on ICE and its crimes. That, however, is like the allegation that Bad Bunny’s show was “pure smut” – it limits politics to terms favorable to Trump. “Abolish ICE” should be part of a bigger picture so the meaning of belonging is radically redefined.

Immigrants are Americans. They might not speak the language. They might not know the rules. They might not have the right papers. But they are here. That makes them American.

The question is not if they are, but when it becomes official.

A lot of attention has been given to Hakeem Jeffries recently on account of him dropping the f-bomb. In reaction to the president reposting a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, the House minority leader, in his own video, said “f--- Donald Trump.”

I think it’s worth asking why Jeffries did that beyond the usual explanations. The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump’s video was so disgustingly racist that Jeffries was expressing an appropriate level of emotion in calling on his Republican colleagues to condemn it.

But while emotion would explain the reaction of a normal person, Hakeem Jeffries is anything but. He’s a party leader in the United States Congress. As such, emotional reactions are typically taboo. For him to say “f---- Donald Trump,” something in the political landscape must have changed so that saying it is not only OK, but good for his party.

What has changed? Consider the following example of Trump’s behavior since ICE and Border Patrol killed two middle-class white people in Minneapolis. Referring to Alex Pretti and Renee Good in an interview, he said: “He was not an angel and she was not an angel.”

When I heard the president say that, I immediately thought of a Times article published in 2014 reflecting on a white police officer killing Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The Times reporter accepted as true propaganda provided by the Ferguson police department pushing the view that the 18 year old was somehow deserving of his death.

“[Brown] lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol,” the Times reporter said. “He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.”

In addition to Brown stealing a box of cigars, the above details were enough for the Times reporter to conclude that he “was no angel.”

What was done to Brown was done in accordance with what you might call the rules of white power – the law should protect inpeople (in this case, a white cop) and punish outpeople (in this case, a Black man). That he did nothing to deserve death by the state is incidental to enforcing the rules of white power. Michael Brown was already seen as guilty. Smearing him was merely an effort to prove “the truth” after the fact.

After Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed by ICE and Border Patrol, respectively, they were smeared the same way that Michael Brown was, all in an effort by the regime to justify their deaths by the state. The difference, obviously, is that they aren’t outpeople. Anti-Black racism was never supposed to be directed at them. Donald Trump may be the paragon of the white-power social order, but he’s breaking the rules.

And white people don’t like it.

According to a poll released February 4, Trump’s approval rating dropped 11 points over the last month. Just 41 percent approve, with 57 percent disapproving (an increase of 12 points). This poll is important to note because it’s Rasmussen. The most Trump-friendly poll, Rasmussen tends to reflect the views of America’s white majority. Forty-one percent in Rasmussen is like 31 percent in a more legitimate poll.

I think implicit in such polling is a concern white people have rarely if ever had before – whether their own police departments will shield them from the same violence that killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Occasionally, a viral video will show state and local cops doing what’s expected, but those seem to be overwhelmed by the number of videos showing state and local cops appearing to take the side of the regime.

Compounding matters is a largely unknown effort by the Trump regime to co-opt state and local law enforcement. Called “Task Force Model,” the program pays salaries and benefits to state and local cops who aid ICE and Border Patrol. During an appearance on MS Now, Matt Lewis said the arrangement could be detrimental to the midterms. His larger point, however, is “the person who pays you becomes your boss.”

It is an article of faith among respectable white people (the term I prefer) that state and local police departments are there to serve and protect everyone. This faith is rarely shaken, even when white cops kill Black men. Indeed, such moments usually serve to deepen that faith.

The only way imaginable to undermine that trust would be if the institutions of law enforcement started treating respectable white people the same way they have historically treated everyone else – in other words, if inpeople no longer receive the unconditional protection of the law and are instead punished the way outpeople have been.

I wouldn’t say that faith has been shaken, but Trump is creating potential for it by wedging two camps no one imagined could be wedged. In doing so, I think he risks white power backfiring on him. Not because respectable white people will become anti-racists, but because they are unlikely to tolerate being treated like Black people.

That’s what’s changed. That’s why someone like Hakeem Jeffries, a Democratic leader whose job depends on his skill in finding the middle of the middle of the road, a man who was until last month focused on affordability and nothing else, suddenly has the confidence to cuss out Trump. He believes he’s speaking with the blessing of a new majority.

He probably is, but don’t be fooled as to why. It’s not because Trump has “lost the culture.” It’s not because he has “lost the country.” Those are euphemisms for a backlash among respectable white people to a president whose authoritarian impulses did not stop at the color line, as they were supposed to, according to the rules of white power.

Lots of white people are, at best, indifferent to anti-Black politics. They want to be seen as “above politics,” because that’s what makes them “respectable.” However, that indifference melts into the air when anti-Black politics is directed at them. The shock of that kind of immorality and injustice is enough to turn them into revolutionaries.

In Washington this week, at the National Prayer Breakfast, the president actually took credit for the Bible being a bestseller.

“In 2025, more copies of the Holy Bible were sold in the United States than at any time in the last 100 years,” Donald Trump said.

In and of itself, this is not amazing. I remember as a child watching a commercial on Sunday afternoon TV about how “The Good Book” sold more copies than any book in human history.

What is amazing is Trump taking credit when that credit would traditionally be given to the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, especially by the traditional folk at the National Prayer Breakfast.

It’s also amazing that someone as religious as, for instance, House Speaker Mike Johnson can tolerate blasphemy when such tolerance would be inconceivable for a Democratic president.

You would think that Don the Evangelist would understand the power and the glory of the Word, given his suggestion that his presidency is why America is returning to God. (Sources told Publisher’s Weekly “the sales boom” is attributable to “people seeking spiritual footing amid today's tensions and troubles.”)

That would be a mistake.

“Mike Johnson is a very religious person,” the president went on to say. “He does not hide it. He'll say to me sometimes at lunch, 'Sir, may we pray?' I'll say, 'Excuse me? We're having lunch.'"

I’m sorry to point out the obvious. Donald Trump claimed to be ignorant of the reason why “a very religious person” would call for the religious practice of praying before a meal at an event named after the religious practice of praying before a meal.

Even if Trump were only playing dumb, and I don’t know that he was, it’s again inconceivable that ignorance of a traditional religious practice, even in jest, would be tolerated if he were a Democrat. Yet Johnson lets it slide. The Republicans let it slide.

Indeed, if a Democratic president were to claim credit for God’s handiwork, there would be a nationwide outcry beginning with the rightwing media, spilling into the Washington press corps, before occupying highly visible pages in op-eds sections of elite papers with headlines echoing the GOP view of godless liberals not only looking down on Christians, but claiming to be God.

I think it’s worth asking why.

A typical explanation is bad faith – that the Republicans don’t mean what they say. It’s OK to blaspheme if a Republican does it. (Another explanation is power is religion to the GOP. As long as the blasphemer is powerful, his blasphemy is sanctioned by God.)

But I’m not satisfied with that answer. It fails to explain why there are so many good people of religious conviction in this country who are fighting tyranny on expressly religious grounds, but who are not getting credit for their religious expression. Pastors, ministers, rabbis, imams – there is a huge multifaith resistance taking shape, especially against Trump’s immigrant purge.

And you probably never heard of it.

That would not be the case if the roles were reversed – if, say, a “liberal” government were murdering or disappearing people and “conservatives” were protesting on expressly religious grounds. I have no doubt the narrative would be framed as good versus evil.

The entire anti-abortion movement can be described as such, with “the unborn” being those murdered or disappeared by the state, and “conservatives” being those crusading against God’s enemies. No one in America has any doubt about which side of the abortion debate claims to be on the right side of God.

While there is a smattering of news reports about Christians being divided over Trump, there is nothing like the tidal wave of coverage you would otherwise expect. Remember what it was like after September 11, 2001? The framing was, more or less, God and America against the infidels. That’s what it would be like if the roles were reversed. That’s what it should be like now.

The best explanation is often the simplest. Some religions count. Some don’t. And, of course, the difference depends on who.

If you live in a rural community in a rural state, or if you live in an area associated with white conservative politics, yours is an authentic religion entitled to national attention and respect.

If, however, you live in a city (even a small one) or in a state associated with multiracial liberal politics, your religion isn’t authentic. It might be given lip-service now and then, as is happening now, but there’s something not quite real about it. Anyway, it’s not as real as the religion of good country folk.

For their protest of crimes against immigrants, a broad spectrum of faith leaders have been intimidated, manhandled, arrested, and denied religious expression, all at the hands of the state. Their sanctuaries have been profaned, congregants terrorized. One pastor was shot in the head with pepper balls while praying.

Yet all serve “blue” communities. That’s why you don’t know about their holy rebellion. Their religion doesn’t count.

Here’s how Mike O'Malley put it, in a different context.

The reason is the “iron journalist rule.”

“Some people are authentic and some people aren’t,” the George Mason University historian wrote. “Farmers? Authentic. College professors? Not. There are around 1.9 million farms in America, and 1.5 million college teachers. Farmers aren’t authentic because there’s more of them. It's because journalists love cliches.”

These cliches, myths and tropes – Thomas Jefferson famously declared that “those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God” – mean genuine acts of religious expression by nonwhite or urban-dwelling believers won’t be represented as such by the Washington press corps. Instead, their religious expression will be downplayed and represented as political.

This tradition of privileging “authentic” Americans over everyone else among professionals tasked with representing reality favors bad actors who are bent on distorting reality to their advantage.

Consider what happened last month in the aftermath of what has been called the Minnesota church protest. On January 18, it was reported that a group of anti-ICE demonstrators “rushed” into a southern baptist congregation in St Paul during Sunday services to protest a church leader who is also a field director for ICE. Attorney General Pam Bondi swiftly vowed to prosecute those responsible for a “coordinated attack” on religious expression.

Missing, or minimized, in news reports of the protest was the religion and religious expression of those who protested. Virtually absent was the fact that one of the group’s leaders, Nekima Levy Armstrong, is herself an ordained minister.

Here’s what she told CNN.

We did not rush into that church. We actually went and sat down and participated in the service. And after the pastor prayed, that is when I stood up and asked him a question in response to his prayer. And then he responded to me. And then I proceeded to ask him about Pastor David Easterwood and how is it possible for him to serve as both a pastor and the director of ICE for Minnesota?

And instead of responding to me, as soon as I said the name David Easterwood, the pastor said, ‘shame, shame.’ And that is when I led us in chants ‘Justice for Renee Good’ and ‘Hands up, don’t shoot.’ So I want to clarify that we didn‘t rush in. We didn’t bust in. We were a part of the service until I got up and posed that question to the pastor.

Knowing this, it’s clear the framing of that story – anti-ICE protesters versus devout Christians – is problematic at best. A more accurate framing would be devout Christians versus devout Christians, with one side objecting to David Easterwood preaching “love thy neighbor” and “snatch thy neighbor” in the same breath, while the other uses the Gospels to defend ICE.

Such a framing might have invited us to see the church protest as the reason why we have the First Amendment right to religious expression, as religions can and do disagree so fiercely over matters of faith that conflicts arise. When they do, each side has certain inalienable rights that shall not be infringed by the state.

But such framing does the regime no favors, as it contravenes its preferred narrative of godless liberals not only looking down on devout Christians, but claiming themselves to be God, and on the strength of that narrative, its plan to use the power of the state to persecute religious people who are challenging the regime.

The regime wants us to believe multiracial democracy threatens religious expression when, in fact, it’s the regime that’s using a phony defense of religion to threaten all faiths everywhere.

There is, quite literally, a rebellion bubbling up from below in the name of God. The regime knows its potential. It knows it can inspire even more resistance. And it’s taking steps to crush it.

That goal might be obvious if the press corps treated everyone’s faith as equally authentic, hence equally legitimate, but it doesn’t.

It distorts reality.

And in doing so, it enables the persecution of religion.

Turns out the Border Patrol officers who murdered Alex Pretti are of Hispanic lineage. Their names are Jesus Ochoa, 43, and Raymundo Gutierrez, 35, according to Pro Publica.

This appears to be causing some confusion among people of good-faith. How can men of Hispanic lineage work for a paramilitary organization dedicated to terrorizing Hispanics?

The news is also, I presume, being used by people of bad faith. Donald Trump’s critics say ICE and CBP are purging Latinos in order to achieve his real goal – to make America white again. His defenders can point to this news to say the “crackdown” has nothing to do with race. See? Latinos want what Trump wants.

While racism is real, race isn’t. Talking about a thing that isn’t real can cause real confusion. Confusion provides opportunities for bad actors who search for ways to exploit it. So let’s clarify our terms: White doesn’t mean white race. It means white power.

Specifically, it means an unequal and unjust racial caste system with rich white men at the very top. They are protected the most by the law. They benefit the most from the economy. Everyone else in this pyramid-shaped hierarchy is subject to decreasing degrees of protection and economic benefit, going all the way down to the bottom where everyone is Black or brown, no one is protected by the law and no one benefits from the economy.

Sadly, this is what some Hispanics want, no matter how long their families have been in the US. They want to be white, that is, to stake a claim on white power. Instead of fighting oppression, they aim to sit with the oppressors, as if they were equals. They seek for themselves a warped, corrupt version of the American Dream.

However, they have to prove themselves. Immigrant history is full of stories of nonwhites gaining access to positions of authority and using them to demonstrate to people they believed were their superiors (ie, white people) that they were not only “good immigrants,” but also deserving of the blessings of whiteness.

So it’s not ironic that Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez work for Donald Trump’s paramilitary. It’s in keeping with American history. They’re like some Irish cops in 19th century New York who beat down other Irish to prove they left behind the Old World to be loyal to the whiteness that was assimilating them.

In the case of Alex Pretti, this dynamic has another dimension. According to the either/or logic of white power, the ICU nurse was disloyal. He rejected his birthright by choosing to fight for people brutalized by an unequal and unjust racial caste system.

In defying CBP, Pretti thought he was being true to the soul of America. According to the logic of white power, however, patriotism isn’t loyalty to one’s country. It’s loyalty to one’s race.

“You feel bad for this race traitor?” said white supremacist Nick Fuentes. “We are thoroughly in the Trump era. If you don't get it at this point, you're irredeemable. If you're out there throwing yourself in front of ICE to die for these dirt bags, let them.”

(Nick Fuentes is also of Hispanic lineage. His dad is a biracial Mexican. Fuentes speaks fluent Spanish. He works harder than any other white supremacist to prove he’s truly white, because the white race is, for him, a thing of such importance that it must reign supreme over every other thing, including self-love.)

As for Ochoa and Gutierrez, the CBP officers who murdered Pretti, what better way to prove you are worthy of whiteness than by punishing a privileged white man for turning his back on the social order that gave him so much? Pretti was not worthy.

But Ochoa and Gutierrez are.

I suppose the real irony is that this pursuit of the blessings of whiteness by Hispanic men in positions of authority is demonstrating to their fellow Hispanics a stone-cold truth: No matter what they do, how hard they work, how obedient they are, or how much excellence they achieve, they will never be white enough to white people invested in the orders of white power.

Poll after poll suggests that the inroads Trump made with Hispanic voters in the 2024 election (as well as with other minorities) have been wiped out since unleashing ICE and CBP on America. Back then, he said only violent criminals would be targeted. Today, he said the same thing (“really hard criminals”). The difference is few people of Hispanic lineage believe him.

Virtually everyone now understands the “illegal” part of “illegal immigrants” has nothing to do with legal status and everything to do with whiteness, as in: if you’re not white, you’re “illegal.” Even if you are white, you might still be “illegal,” as was evidenced by the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They were guilty of treason against their “country” (ie, their race), a crime undeserving of due process, instead straight to execution.

In an interview today, JD Vance was asked if he would apologize to Pretti’s family after an official investigation of his death had been completed. The vice president responded: “For what?”

But perhaps the biggest irony is what the pursuit of the blessings of whiteness is doing to white people, especially respectable white people who usually avoid the appearance of being political.

It’s forcing them into greater awareness of their race, which is something respectable white people hate thinking about. And it’s building future conditions in which they may end up consciously choosing between whiteness and the values that make it possible for respectable white people to be respectable white people.

Their status and race are increasingly in conflict.

No one knows how that’s going to go.

I think most liberals are probably familiar with what has become known as Wilhoit’s Law – that the true goals of the right are inequality, injustice, repression and control. This is how composer Frank Wilhoit put it in 2018:

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect,” Wilhoit wrote. “There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.”

I think liberals are probably less familiar with another part of Wilhoit’s “law” – that these goals are so indefensible in a country founded on liberty and equality that it is necessary for conservatives to cover them up with lies.

“As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly,” Frank Wilhoit wrote, “it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny.”

On the right, US citizenship has always been a matter of race and white power. The overarching objective of conservatism since the founding has been maintenance of a social order in which rich white men are on top. But that can’t be plainly said in the land of freedom and opportunity, where everyone has an equal shot at success if they work hard and play by the rules.

So the right lies. The Republicans say “illegal immigration” is a matter of law enforcement. They say “border integrity” is a matter of national security. They say liberal immigration policies that fall short of enforcing the law and securing the border debase what it means to be a law-abiding US citizen.

They make endless appeals to higher principles in order to cover up for the fact that their true goal is the abomination of those same principles.

But as the right expands its power, it sometimes requires new and better rationalizations. It occasionally finds it necessary to slough off the old lies.

Since the 1990s, for instance, nothing has been more “sacred” than the Second Amendment. We were told the freedom to bear arms “shall not be infringed.” On the strength of this apparent conviction, little if anything has been done to address the spread of shooting massacres over the last decade.

Yet when the Trump regime needed an explanation for why Border Patrol officers were forced on January 24 to kill Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis, the sacredness of the Second Amendment was easily forgotten. “You can't have guns,” the president said in the aftermath. “You can't walk in with guns. You just can't. You can't walk in with guns. You can't do that.”

Alex Pretti was legally permitted to conceal carry. (He did not brandish his weapon. CBP disarmed him before he was shot.) That, however, wasn’t enough. “You bring a gun into the District, you mark my words, you're going to jail,” said US attorney for DC, Jeanine Pirro. “I don't care if you have a license in another district and I don't care if you're a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else. You bring a gun into this District, count on going to jail.”

The right refused to act on a decades’ worth of shooting massacres because it was in the right’s interest to allow terror to spread across the land. That could never be plainly said, of course, so it covered up that objective with the Second Amendment. Once gun rights were no longer useful – terror is the intention of a paramilitary going door-to-door searching for “illegals” almost exclusively in states run by Democrats – they could be easily discarded.

There is, however, risk in throwing away the old lies. The Republican Party is the white man’s party but its viability in a multiracial democracy like ours depends on most white people not really understanding the truth. The party’s future depends on most white people continuing to believe lies about, say, immigration being about the security and integrity of US citizenship.

If a majority of white people come to believe that what the Republicans really mean by citizenship is whiteness, not legal status, the GOP could risk losing parts of its coalition in ways it can’t afford. I think the risk is especially acute if white people understand that patriotism itself is racialized – that white people who defend the American Dream are seen as traitors to their race.

I don’t want to overstate this risk. Whiteness is resilient. Even if most white people unite to punish Trump in some way, I wouldn’t expect such unity to last. Yet the more the right uses its power to achieve its goals, the more it throws away the lies that it told to gain that power. And the longer that pattern holds true, the more chances there are for the truth to be revealed.

Consider the above clip by white supremacist Nick Fuentes. He says Renee Good and Alex Pretti were “race traitors,” who were "not acting like citizens.”

Are people waking up to Wilhoit’s Law?

Alan Elrod thinks so. He’s the president and CEO of the Pulaski Institution, a think tank in Arkansas. In his latest for Liberal Currents, he looked at Fuentes’ statements, as well as those by other far-right commentators, to explain that whiteness isn’t the protection that many white Americans believe it is.

In a follow up interview with me, he explained further.

“Enemies can be excluded and treated however the state deems fit,” he told me. “This was at the heart of Nazi juridico-political theory, and I think we are seeing it play out today. I think that the murders of two white, middle class people in a Midwestern city is absolutely driving that message home.”

Here’s the rest of our conversation.

Nick Fuentes isn't the first to link whiteness with citizenship, but he might be the most honest about it. Others, like Matt Walsh and Megyn Kelly and Glenn Beck are much better at lying about their intentions. Thoughts?

I think they're more invested in layering their prejudices beneath what they see as more socially appealing calls for law and order, child safety and cultural concerns. But these are pretty recognizable tropes in racist politicking. I'd also say that Kelly and Walsh in particular are becoming less inclined to hide their bigotry. Walsh repeatedly talks about "Third World" people with total contempt on his show. Kelly has praised Fuentes. The big difference, I think, is that they still want to be seen as important, popular media figures. There's the occasional coyness you don't get with Fuentes.

When I saw Fuentes' reaction to Good's and Pretti's murders, I thought of Wilhoit's Law: inequality and injustice are the point of conservatism. That's indefensible in a country founded on freedom and equality. So conservative must lie. Are Good's and Pretti's murders opening people's eyes?

I think so. Wilhoit's Law, which I believe is derived from a blog comment by Ohioan Frank Wilhoit, is essentially a pithy distillation of Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction. In this sense, the state is not obligated to extend protections or presumptions of innocence to all people, only those it considers friendly. Enemies can be excluded and treated however the state deems fit. This was at the heart of Nazi juridico-political theory, and I think we are seeing it play out today. I think that the murders of two white, middle class people in a Midwestern city is absolutely driving that message home.

It seems to me that people like Rand Paul understand the stakes much better than Trump and his gang -- that the long-term viability of a white man's party depends on most white people not really knowing that it's a white man's party. Suddenly Paul is saying the DHS can't be trusted to investigate Pretti's murder. Perhaps there's even potential for getting rid of Trump. Thoughts?

I think Paul is an outlier. He certainly appears to be genuinely committed to some of his non-interventionist and civil libertarian beliefs. But I don't think there's appetite among Republicans for getting rid of Trump. This is both because I think many Republicans are on board with him and because the remainder are too cowed by the political realities of party politics. The fact that even people like Thom Tillis, who is retiring, and Susan Collins, whose state of Maine is also being targeted by ICE at the moment, won't take any serious steps toward checking Trump is evidence of this.

I can't remember another time when rightwingers subjected white people -- or "race traitors" -- to the same kind of denigration that we saw given to Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and dozens of other victims of state violence. Good and Pretti are getting "no angels" treatment, with the help of the press corps. I'm told "the normies" are waking up. True?

I think a lot of people who don't pay close attention to politics are repulsed by stuff like this. My friend Nicholas Grossman wrote a great piece at Liberal Currents about how the Pretti discourse is breaking through in traditionally apolitical parts of the internet. But I also think Americans have short memories, and our politics remains discouragingly thermostatic. I thought January 6 would have woken up the normies. It did for a minute, I think. But then we re-elected Trump.

Trump has done more to discredit gun rights than any president in my lifetime. He's so focused on smearing Pretti that he suggested he deserved death for carrying a gun. These lies -- in this case the inviolability of the Second Amendment -- are very important to keeping what I call respectable white people in the Republican camp. What do you make of it?

I think the hypocrisy here is pretty important. I'm from Arkansas. I grew up around gun owners, and I know plenty of gun owners today. No one with any appreciation or respect for guns and gun ownership can look at what happened in the Pretti murder and see anything other than the gross violation of someone's Second Amendment rights by impulsively violent and thuggish goons.

However, I think that the hypocrisy that's been revealed on this issue by Republican elected officials and policy groups is just one more snowflake in the blizzard. Under MAGA, this is just another application of the friend/enemy distinction. Everything is.

The facts are so damning that it’s unclear to me why moderate Democrats are being careful about their reaction to them.

Renee Good was shot in the face. Alex Pretti was shot in the back. Their deaths were not accidental. They were not the result of poor or insufficient training. They were the result of intent.

Why are moderates worried about seeming extreme when the context is murder by the state? In that setting, there’s no such thing as an overreaction. Call on Kristi Noem to resign. Call on Stephen Miller to resign. Call on the president himself to resign.

The real danger is underreacting. Noem shouldn’t only be impeached and removed. She should be arrested and tried.

In addition to murder, ICE and CBP are going house to house, kicking in doors, terrorizing people. It’s taking babies from mothers. It’s preventing fathers from grieving their dead sons. It’s letting sick kids taken from their parents die while in custody.

These are crimes against humanity that everyone would recognize as such if they were taking place in Iran. It’s a sick joke to suggest they wouldn’t happen if ICE had proper “guidance.”

Sadism doesn’t occur in a vacuum. It is accepted. It is condoned. It is encouraged. It is a choice originating from the very top. Without criminal accountability, sadism as policy will continue.

Fortunately, moderate Democrats are not most Democrats. Some in the Senate are threatening to shut down the government if Donald Trump and the GOP do not accept their reforms. More importantly is what’s happening among House Democrats.

The leadership there is now calling on Kristi Noem to resign or face impeachment proceedings. It also seems to be bridging the gap between opposing factions within the party – between Democrats who believe they should pursue accountability and Democrats who believe they should pursue “affordability.”

I’m going to quote the full statement by Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar so you can see that, in their view, accountability and “affordability” seem to be the same.

Taxpayer dollars are being weaponized by the Trump administration to kill American citizens, brutalize communities and violently target law-abiding immigrant families. The country is disgusted by what the Department of Homeland Security has done.

Republicans are planning to shut large parts of the government down on Friday so that the DHS killing spree unleashed in Minnesota can continue throughout America. That is immoral.

Dramatic changes at the Department of Homeland Security are needed. Federal agents who have broken the law must be criminally prosecuted. The paramilitary tactics must cease and desist. Taxpayer dollars should be used to make life more affordable for everyday Americans, not kill them in cold blood.

The violence unleashed on the American people by the Department of Homeland Security must end forthwith. Kristi Noem should be fired immediately, or we will commence impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives.

We can do this the easy way or the hard way.

Personally, I have never seen Jeffries speak so aggressively.

Neither has Jill Lawrence.

She’s the author of The Art of the Political Deal and a contributor to The Bulwark. Jill used to be an opinion editor at USA Today.

“It's inspirational,” she told me in an interview Tuesday.

“Jeffries is using their language (‘the easy way or the hard way’), making irrefutable points, and talking about impeachment from a position of strength, given the swell of Democrats who are co-sponsoring an impeachment resolution against Noem.”

She went on.

“If you want to talk about affordability, after the GOP let health insurance subsidies expire and passed nearly $1 billion in Medicaid cuts coming next year, this is a dramatic way to make the point: ‘Taxpayer dollars should be used to make life more affordable for everyday Americans, not kill them in cold blood.’”

“I think the statement generally is an acknowledgment that people really care deeply about these abuses of power,” Jill said.

The last time Jill and I discussed accountability was in May. Back then, she said talk of impeachment was premature. In a recent piece for The Bulwark, however, she changed her mind. The time is now, she told me, not only for Trump but for his cabinet, too.

The breaking point, she said, was murder.

Moderate Democrats take note.

Last time we talked about impeachment, you said the key is timing. You were concerned about the Democrats moving too quickly, risking the appearance of playing politics. In a recent piece, you say the time has come. What changed your mind?

The breaking point for me was the ICE killing of Renee Good, and the pile-up of impeachment articles filed against Trump and members of his cabinet. Impeachment talk was growing, and even as I was working on the piece, Illinois Congresswoman Robin Kelly announced she would file articles of impeachment against Kristi Noem.

In part, I thought it was time to stop ridiculing and dismissing people who, quite justifiably, thought Donald Trump should be impeached for any one of many, many reasons. In truth, I found those articles – against Trump and against several cabinet members – to be interesting and clarifying reading. I liked the idea of publicizing them in formal investigatory hearings, like January 6, and decided to make a public argument for that.

What do you say to those who say there's no point in impeaching Trump if he can't be convicted by the Senate?

I don't think Democrats should try to impeach Trump right now, and maybe not even this year. The idea would be to build up to it after making cases against several cabinet members who have earned impeachment by any objective standard. My thought was that Democrats should lay the groundwork for an impeachment proceeding against him next year, when they seem likely to control the House. And by then, who knows who will control the Senate, or how many Republicans will have had it.

I suggested starting out with Robert Kennedy Jr, because his policies are literally deadly, and he's nowhere near finished unspooling our progress on public health. But Noem seems more urgent at this point. It was reported today that at least 145 Democrats have co-sponsored the impeachment resolution against her. And Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin says he will hold investigatory hearings to fill in and expand the articles.

I agree with your view that there's no need to pick between accountability and "affordability." That, however, is not the view of influential Democratic strategists. They believe winning means picking "a kitchen table issue." Yet there are people out there saying golf becomes political when an agent of the state can murder you. What are these strategists not getting?

I am as puzzled as you are. I don't think the strategists get how deeply these killings and tactics have penetrated into the public consciousness. Or how intensely people feel them. Or how it's obvious to the public that Trump is not prioritizing prices, he cares about Greenland and ICE and the ballroom and the Board of Peace charade. I wrote last year and still believe that the most important thing is for candidates to be true to themselves, their beliefs, their communities. There is no reason not to talk about the dangers we face now, as well as all the idiotic Trump policies that are raising prices, from food to health care to electricity.

The people of Minneapolis have proven something important -- attention moves public opinion and public opinion moves the Democrats. Even Chuck Schumer seems to be growing a spine (threats to cut DHS funding). It seems to me impeachment hearings, whether official or not, can do the same thing.

I totally agree. And Raskin agrees as well. He just said today that unless Noem resigns or is fired, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan needs to launch impeachment proceedings against her. And if he doesn't, Raskin said he will do it to create a record of "fact-finding, public hearings, and committee reports."

One commenter on my original story suggested an interesting way Democrats could proceed: Work with legislators in a state Democrats control so the hearings can be part of an official record. Minnesota would be a perfect place to start.

I'm seeing a lot of talk among prominent liberals about how something deep is shifting. The suggestion is that the American people are moving away from Trump and toward something better. The skeptic in me says hold on. We said the same thing after George Floyd's murder. Then came the elite backlash. Then came Trump's reelection. What do you say to that?

First, I'll mention another suggestion from a commenter, who said House Democrats should start an impeachment website that publishes all the articles of impeachment filed against Trump and his administration to date. Other material could be added as necessary. The popularity of such a site would be one gauge of public interest. I think it would be high.

I think this could really be a hinge point for a few reasons. Tragedies breaking through. Trump's age and massive overreach. The lower federal courts. Younger Democrats in the Congress and White House pipeline. And one more thing.

I feel like I'm a pretty mainstream center-leftie, and fiscally conservative on debt, but I have changed. I am interested in a lot of fundamental change geared not only to guarding against a repeat of this awful period, but also to getting done some of the business that Americans want done on issues like health and gun safety.

So, curb the dependence on presidential character in our system, because it's a demonstrable and tragic failure. And end the legislative paralysis, in the Senate in particular. Sorry about the soapbox. You did ask!

Independent journalist Don Lemon was arrested this morning. So was Georgia Fort, also an independent journalist. Both covered a January 18 church protest in Minneapolis. It’s unclear what they’ve been charged with.

It’s also unclear whether the federal agents who arrested them had the authority to. The US Department of Justice went to one judge. He said no. Then to another. He also said no. Then it went to a court of appeals. That panel said no, too. The Post quoted one of the judges: “There is no evidence that those two engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so.”

Georgia Fort live-streamed her arrest this morning. She said federal agents at the door claimed to have in their possession an arrest warrant authorized by a grand jury “within the last day.” But, later this morning, the Post’s Carol Leonnig told MS Now that career federal prosecutors in Minnesota and Los Angeles refused to be involved in charging her and Lemon. Leonnig said the prosecutors said they don’t believe the evidence supports the charges.

It’s not even clear which law enforcement agency arrested them. Reports I have read say it was “federal agents.” In Fort’s live-stream, a masked man peers in the window. “DEA Police” is written on his vest. In that video, Fort demands to see the warrant. She is evidently shown. She then appears to say that it is not a “judicial warrant” – that is, a warrant ordered by a judge.

In normal times, I would give arresting authorities the benefit of the doubt. I would presume they went through proper channels. I would presume they would not want to blow up their criminal case with procedural mistakes.

We don’t live in normal times.

As things stand, it’s likely Lemon and Fort were arrested but not charged.

For those who react to all this with mocking and scorn, please consider the experience from Georgia Fort’s perspective. She doesn’t have Lemon’s celebrity. She doesn’t have his clout. She doesn’t work for a big media corporation with teams of attorneys ready to fight for her in court.

She’s a reporter who apparently believes in the mission of journalism to hold power to account. She’s a faithful person who acted on faith – that the First Amendment would protect her from those with enough power to silence her.

We all act on such faith. We believe the government would never arrest us without cause or authority. But that faith presumes a government acting according to law. It could be that Lemon was arrested because rapper and Trump ally Nicki Minaj said she wanted him put in jail after seeing his coverage of the church protest in Minneapolis. It could really be that stupid. The stupidity, however, is beside the point. The government really does have the power, but not the authority, to ruin you, me and everyone we know.

It has endless resources.

We don’t.

As Julian Sanchez said: “That the cases are meritless makes them more effective for intimidation. Prosecuting actual criminals sends no broader message. They’re saying: ‘P---us off and we’ll find some bull---- reason to tie you up in court whether or not we have any chance of making it stick.’”

There’s something else that’s beside the point – all the reasons the regime will give for why it had to arrest Don Lemon and Georgia Fort. It’s going to cherry-pick this and that fact about the January 18 church protest. For the sake of understanding, I recommend this excellent breakdown by Liz Dye.

In short, anti-ICE demonstrators stormed a white evangelical church during Sunday morning services to protest one of its leaders, a man who also decides immigration matters for the regime. The demonstrators claimed that he cannot preach “snatch thy neighbor” while also preaching the word of Jesus. Naturally, the congregants were outraged and objected. Lemon and Fort covered the whole thing, documenting a broad swathe of reactions.

Don’t get hung up on the details, though. Getting hung up on the details allows the regime to control the terms of debate. It wants us to ask whether the protesters, and by extension Lemon and Fort, violated congregants’ protected right to religious expression. It doesn’t want us to ask why the government thinks their religion trumps Lemon and Fort’s rights.

But if you can’t help it, see this detail from Judge Patrick Schiltz’s assessment. In accusing protestors of conspiracy to violate religious expression, he said “the government lumps all eight protestors together and says things that are true of some but not all of them. Two of the five protestors were not protestors at all; instead, they were a journalist and his producer.”

I can’t say I understand why the January 18 church protest triggered regime officials. That would require me to get inside their heads and I just took a shower. But, again, they don’t need legitimate reasons for using force. All they need to know is that Black anti-ICE demonstrators burst into a Christian nationalist church to school them on the real teachings of Christ, and Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, who are also Black, broadcast it to the world.

That said, their arrest is pretty clearly a reaction by the regime to the public condemnation of ICE and Border Patrol officers murdering Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. In response, the regime said it was pulling back from the battle of Minneapolis. (Tom Homan called it a “drawdown.”) But with these arrests, it’s clear the president resents being forced to say sorry.

Elias Isquith explained in Donald Trump’s voice. “You made me pretend I care. You made me look weak. You made me feel small. I will not forget, and you will not be forgiven. I take it back. [Alex Pretti] was an insurrectionist. and your civil society actors? Your journalists and activists? They will be arrested, even on the thinnest pretext. And your heroes? the former leaders you think are untouchable? The red lines you think I won’t cross? F--- you.”

Instead of seeing a “drawdown,” we are seeing an escalation. This time, however, the regime is expanding the scope of conflict to include journalists, which itself is a continuation of a previous expansion. In the beginning, regime violence came only for nonwhite immigrants without documentation. Then it came for nonwhite immigrants with documentation. Then it came for nonwhite citizens. Then regime violence came for white citizens, too.

I don’t see why the regime wouldn’t eventually arrest a white reporter for the same reasons it arrested Lemon and Fort – because it can; because it’s petty and resentful – just as it eventually killed two white people after killing scores of nonwhite people. If that happens, it should come as no surprise to the media profession that authoritarianism did not stop at the color line.

But it will.

In Tuesday’s edition, I said liberals should face the fact that the Democrats can’t do it alone. The viability of democracy requires some Republican buy-in. I said “liberals have to work more to create conditions in which the Republicans choose to behave.”

About those conditions.

I didn’t mean taking a phony middle position on something like immigration to appear moderate compared to a blood-and-soil Republican. I have said before and will say again: accepting lies as if they are true is not centrism. It’s just another form of deceit. There’s no reward in it, because most voters can tell it’s fake.

What I had in mind was something Professor Matt Seyhold of Elmira College told me in my recent interview with him. We must expand the tent of freedom to beat “totalitarian kleptocracy,” he told me. To do that, we must include “a whole lot of dumba-----.”

Those are the conditions liberals should work to create.

How do we bring in the “dumba----”?

First, Professor Seybold said, by recognizing that nonvoters decided the election. About 90 million eligible voters stayed home on Election Day. He and his colleagues call that “couch.”

“Couch cannot be defeated on a Tuesday in November every couple of years unless couch is being defeated on the regular.”

And how do we do that?

Make community – “take a night course at a local college, join community theater, volunteer at soup kitchen, start a book club.”

“If more people are making community, that’s bad for any politics which depends on feelings of isolation, fear and powerlessness,” Professor Seybold told me. “A precondition to political empowerment is simply feeling seen and heard.”

He went on:

“If you want better electoral outcomes, but you don’t want to try to ‘convert Trump voters,’ just make community. My greatest hope for the 2020s has nothing to do with Donald Trump. My hope is that we all win a lot more days against couch. If that happens, our politics will start looking a lot more sane.”

Matt Seybold is a professor of American literature at Elmira College in upstate New York. He’s also a Mark Twain scholar and the host of a Twain-inspired podcast called The American Vandal.

In the first part of our two-part conversation, Professor Seybold explained at length what he meant by “dumba----.” He meant Americans who just don’t know any better as well as Americans who do know better but can’t or won’t do anything about it.

In this second part, he focuses on a solution to each.

Your comment [about dumba----] speaks to the problem of hope. At least my problem. America saw Trump, didn't like him, threw him out. Then we put him back in. And the dumba---- were central to that. Why should I put my faith in them?

By Mark Twain’s definition, hope is precisely what “the facts refuse,” and it is the only remedy to suicidal depression - from which he himself suffered - in the face of the “incurable disease” of our mortality.

For my part, I will simply argue the dumba----- didn’t put Trump back in office nearly so much as the kleptocrats did.

And, so long as our system of free and fair elections holds, the project of making fewer dumba---- and defeating kleptocracy will be the same project. Intelligence is just access to information, the existence of expertise, and the time and wellbeing necessary to avail oneself of each.

So, if we turn our attention to supporting education, healthcare, journalism and libraries, the project of undumbing is underway.

It has been said that Trump's abuse of power -- what I think of as the ongoing insurrection -- is radicalizing people. It's snapping them out of their ignorance, complacency, apathy. Do you agree? If so, what can liberals do to take advantage of it?

Let’s forgo “taking advantage.” There’s that intrinsic criminality in the language of US party politics again.

I just saw a poll this morning in which the percentage of people in favor of “abolishing ICE,” which was a pretty fringe position under Joe Biden, is now higher than Trump’s approval rating.

If there are people being “radicalized,” we don’t have to worry about motivating them. They don’t need nudging. Being “radical,” whether you see that as a positive or negative, is not compatible with inaction. Your moral urgency compels you.

Hopefully, there are a rather large number of people who, though they will never be radicals, are being broken of their complacency by the events of the past year.

My friend, Anna Kornbluh, is fond of saying, “Donald Trump didn’t win the 2024 election. Couch did.”

Eighty-six million eligible voters decided the difference for them wasn’t great enough to get to the polls. That’s 9 million more than voted for Trump.

Couch cannot be defeated on a Tuesday in November every couple of years unless couch is being defeated on the regular.

If more people are touching grass, if more people are making community, that’s bad for any politics which depends on feelings of isolation, fear and powerlessness.

Getting people to rallies, phone-banks, marches, and explicitly political gatherings is great, but honestly, if they take a night course at the local college, join community theater, volunteer at soup kitchen, start a book club, I think that’s almost as good.

A precondition to political empowerment is simply feeling seen and heard. If you want better electoral outcomes, but you don’t want to try to “convert Trump voters,” just make community.

My greatest hope for the 2020s has nothing to do with Donald Trump. My hope is that we all win a lot more days against couch. If that happens, our politics will start looking a lot more sane.

The phrase "new deal" appears to have come from Twain. Liberals think they know what it means. What did Twain mean? What does his meaning of the word say to our moment?

I’ll just give people some context and they can interpret it for themselves.

FDR got “The New Deal” from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The Yankee arrives in feudal Britain, and this is what he says after getting his lay of the land:

Here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. For the 994 to express dissatisfaction with the system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason. So to speak, I was become stockholder in a corporation where 994 of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of directors and took all the dividends. It seems to me that what the 994 dupes needed was a new deal.

I wish I had said “dupes” instead of “dumba----.”

Twain’s still a helluva lot better at this than me.

We are living in a kind of dark ages in which fear, ignorance and superstition are encouraged by those in power. What can a regular person do? What do you tell your students?

I don’t talk about contemporary partisan politics barely at all. And not because of the recent witch-hunting of professors either. I never have. But two things have changed about my philosophy of instruction in recent years.

One, I teach as much history as I possibly can, supported by as much primary source documentation as I can, if possible getting students to lay hands on those primary sources, and to think about the media environments of previous eras in comparison to their own.

Two, I try to give students (and myself, frankly) a break from the surveillance. No phones. No laptops. Paper and ink. Chalk and slate. Human voices and human ears. Make community first.

Don’t take it for granted.

Learning will follow.

I think one of the hard and inconvenient truths that liberals need to hear is that the Democratic Party cannot save democracy on its own. There is no future in which the Republican Party loses forever. That’s not realistic. That’s perhaps not even desirable.

Liberals have to work more to create conditions in which the Republicans choose to behave. Obviously, one way of doing that is defeating them as often as possible. But while that’s an immediate and necessary end, it can’t go on indefinitely. At some point, a Republican will be in the White House again. Then what?

But that’s only one hard and inconvenient truth. The other is about America itself. Fact is, there are a lot of people who are not that bright, who are not paying attention, who are not informed, who don’t care about politics, or who feel like democracy is a lie.

Put another way, I don’t think liberals, including myself, have thought enough about what we might call the paradox of liberal democracy. We need to expand the tent to fight tyranny and rebuild, but doing so means bringing in people who don’t know they need to be in the tent or who don’t care whether they are.

They’re “dumba----”

That’s Matt Seybold’s term. About three months ago, while liberals were flushed with the anti-imperial energy of the No Kings rallies, Seybold poured the following pitcher of ice water:

“Imperative to remember, any big tent, including one that defeats totalitarian kleptocracy, must have a whole lot of dumba---- inside it. To spurn the American dumba-- constituency is to lose.”

To which I responded: “Jesus, this feels true.”

Matt Seybold is a professor of American literature and media at Elmira College in upstate New York. He’s also a Mark Twain scholar and the host of a podcast called The American Vandal.

In an interview with me, Professor Seybold said that he might come to regret using the word “dumba----.” His answer to my first question was very long, he said, because he felt like he should explain himself better. That answer was so lengthy and illuminating I decided to break our interview into two parts.

Here’s part one.

But before I leave you with Professor Seybold’s thoughts, I think I should say one more thing about liberals. We tend to see the dumba---- as part of the problem. (I have said as much in various ways.) But perhaps they are the solution – or at least part of it.

After all, dumba---- don’t seek power. Only the insane do, Mark Twain believed. As Professor Seybold told me, Twain believed “the only people who … will ever stand for election to the executive or legislative branches at the federal or even the state level are sociopaths, narcissists, monomaniacs and greedheads.”

Professor Seybold added: “Those who, by choice, seek to put their hands on the levers of power cannot be trusted. They should be presumed to be criminals by temperament.”

Liberals tend to see the Democrats as the Good Guys.

But recent events should spur us into rethinking that.

You have said the Democrats are going to be in trouble in the long term if they don't make room for "dumba----." Your word. I'm guessing you're drawing on your knowledge as a Twain scholar. What did you mean?

You are right that I used the term “dumba----,” which I may come to regret (more on that in a moment), but first I want to quickly point out a term I didn’t use, which is “Democrats.”

While obviously Democrats remain practicably the sole opposition party in most elections, especially at the federal level, I’m pretty cynical about establishment Democrats’ plans (and even their intentions) to build the “big tent” coalition that will be necessary to defeat “totalitarian kleptocracy,” as I put it. I think the Abundance Bros, for instance, are giving lip-service to inclusive politics, but are actually building a veil for fascism Lite, which will obviously fail.

The project of defeating totalitarian kleptocracy cannot rely on the Democratic Party as it is currently comprised, but “big tent” coalitions are being formed at the grassroots level for the purpose of activism, protests, labor movements and local campaigns (see, for instance, Zohran Mamdani, who was rejected by the Democratic establishment, but backed by democratic socialists).

My rare moments of hope are based on things like the Debt Collective, Higher Ed Labor United and the litany of disperse municipal, neighborhood, professional and special interest groups whose successes are often premised on paying little or no heed to the binaries – liberal/conservative, progressive/centrist, red/blue, etc – which have become useless for anything beyond activating our lizard-brain tribalism.

Which brings me to the “dumba----,” a word-choice more befitting a 25-word skeet than a reasoned defense, but which I would divide into two categories.

The larger – as Twain puts it, “the ignorant are the chosen of God,” by which he means, the majority – are those who are stuck in information deserts, the victims of long-running attacks on education, libraries, local and public media, and are subjected perpetually to micro-targeted misinformation and parallel journalism. This constituency, sizable at every moment in US history, is arguably growing.

The other category of “dumba----” are those who do not lack for access to information or education, who possess the tools to see the dangers of totalitarian kleptocracy, but who lack the will. Perhaps they are cynically planning to go along to get along, or they are just placing too much faith in the incremental, business-as-usual of US governance, presuming a pendulum swing is inevitable. This is a smaller, more frustrating constituency, but also one that tends to be possessed of greater resources and position.

My view of US political history and its theory of governance is, indeed, deeply influenced by Mark Twain (perhaps too much so!). Twain believed intensely in electoral democracy, although he also believed human nature was such that authoritarianism was always, inevitably lurking. He also supported labor unions, social justice activism and many varieties of secular organizing that expanded the conception of the democratic masses (to include women, for instance, and Blacks and Jews). In these respects, he’s not especially different from a left-liberal American of our time.

Where Twain is ingenious, I think, is in understanding the federal system as reflecting a misanthropic vision of human nature and society. Twain does not believe that any sane person will ever want anything to do with national government. The only people who he can imagine will ever stand for election to the executive or legislative branches at the federal or even the state level are sociopaths, narcissists, monomaniacs and greedheads. Those who, by choice, seek to put their hands on the levers of power cannot be trusted. They should be presumed to be criminals by temperament.

For Twain, the ingenuity of the American System is that it puts the most craven seekers of power in furious competition with one another, limiting the damage any one of them can do, forcing them into constantly shifting rivalries and alliances, reducing the likelihood that a true authoritarianism can emerge.

I’m not as down on humanity as Twain is, but I have a pretty hard time arguing against this vision of governance. Which is not to say that I cannot imagine a strong and egalitarian state, but rather to say that such a state is not arrived at by trusting those who seek its employ, but rather by being vigilantly suspicious of them, demanding extensive checks on their power, and strict accountability for violations of law and custom.

I confess. I don’t fully understand why anyone steeped in the culture of MAGA would be having doubts. Donald Trump is the same man he was the first time he was elected. Literally nothing about him has changed. If you didn’t mind what you saw after 2016, why would you mind what you’re seeing after 2024?

And yet it appears to be the case that MAGA is cracking. It hasn’t broken apart. It hasn’t crumbled. Not yet. But cracks are discernible not only in polling (Trump’s approval rating has been underwater for more than 300 days), but in the US Congress.

The Republicans appear nervous about the fact that Trump is paying more attention to Venezuela’s problems than America’s. More importantly, they appear nervous about his broken promises. He said he’d bring down the cost of living on Day One. Nope. He said he’d release the Epstein files. Nope. He said he’d focus on America and leave the rest of the world alone. Nope.

In general, he said he’d make America great again, but even to his most devoted followers, America still doesn’t feel that great.

The Republicans in the Congress have reacted with a pace that seems to be increasing. First, it was the Epstein files. All but one voted for their release. Then it was health insurance. Seventeen House Republicans voted to renew ACA subsidies for three years. (That bill now goes to the Senate.) Then it was Greenland and Venezuela. The Senate is poised to vote on a war powers resolution aiming to restrain a president gone rogue.

Cracks, however, are just cracks. The edifice of MAGA stands firm for now. Trump can send his paramilitary (ICE, CBP) to execute frightened widowed mothers but still expect at least 33 percent of the population to back him. (The most recent Gallup survey that I have seen shows his approval rating to be 36 percent.)

And yet something is happening. Trump’s blatant abuse of power really does seem to be radicalizing moderates and causing Trumpers to experience cognitive dissonance (a mental collision of diametric beliefs). I haven’t seen Republicans this anxious since a mob sacked and looted the Capitol. Josh Hawley voted for the war powers resolution faster than he ran away from insurgents.

If congressional Republicans are indeed scared, maybe there’s an opportunity. What that might be, exactly, I really don’t know. What I do know is that, in the long term, the Democrats cannot save democracy on their own. They need some Republicans to join them. Perhaps now is the time to help some MAGA voters step away from the edge, for their sakes and everyone’s sake.

This is the hope of Rich Logis. He’s the founder of a group that helps MAGA voters betrayed by Trump to come to their senses, though he doesn’t put it that way in this interview with me.

Instead, Rich told me that some issues, like the invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its leader, are so contrary to the MAGA worldview (in this case, “America First”) that “over time, more and more in MAGA will realize that Trump's actions are not for the benefit of most Americans – including his supporters.”

I got in touch with Rich, because he himself reached out to liberals. In a piece for Salon in November, he explained his own indoctrination in MAGA, why it held him until about 2017, why it still holds millions more, and how liberals can help get them out.

I went fairly hard on Rich, as you will see. But I think his answers are strong. You might find them persuasive. Anyway, he’s right.

“If we are going to successfully fight back,” Rich told me, “against the administration's anti-democratic (lower-case d) and unconstitutional actions (defying court orders, apprehending and deporting without due process, among others), it will require unlikely, but necessary alliances.”

Liberals believed the Epstein files are breaking MAGA. The president is struggling to regain the previously unconditional support of his base. Is that true? What signs are you seeing?

I do think there are fissures within the MAGA community. Our organization, Leaving MAGA, has been approached by remorseful 2024 MAGA voters. It would seem from recent polling (even though I am somewhat skeptical of polls) that Trump is losing support among Latinos in particular. What is remarkable about the Epstein story is: in our current media environment, in which stories tend to come and go, the Epstein saga isn't going away. I believe many in MAGA are experiencing cognitive dissonance over the story, and are beginning to wonder if Trump has been lying to them.

In Salon, you said: "I believe most in MAGA are good people who have been led astray, exploited and manipulated." Trump hasn't changed. His first term showed who he is. Are you letting his supporters off the hook?

I will not defend my, or anyone else's, ignorance. I, like all MAGA Americans, support(ed) Trump of our own volition. None of us were coaxed or coerced into voting for Trump and defending him. One of the reasons MAGA is an extremist group is because vilifying, demonizing and dehumanizing those with whom we disagree is encouraged.

It is also important, however, to acknowledge that all of us are susceptible to being influenced. Personally speaking, I allowed myself to be inculcated into the MAGA black-and-white way of thinking, primarily because I consumed only MAGA-friendly media and spent most of my time with other MAGA supporters.

You say liberals must create conditions in which MAGA apostates are welcomed? You can understand that liberals often don't want to welcome those who can't or won't take responsibility for their actions. What's your advice?

Liberals are not wrong about the damage MAGA and Trump have wrought. I understand why liberals may be weary to befriend MAGA voters. Trump has traumatized America for more than a decade.

But if we are going to successfully fight back against the administration's anti-democratic (lower-case d) and unconstitutional actions (defying court orders, apprehending and deporting without due process, among others), it will require unlikely, but necessary alliances.

I don't ask that MAGA Americans be coddled. But if one believes all is not lost — after all, many of those in MAGA are our friends and family — then I would ask my fellow anti-MAGA countrymen and women: what is gained by publicly judging and ostracizing them? I guarantee that invective against MAGA supporters strengthens the already-strong tie that binds them to Trump.

You mention MAGA media. It is everywhere and it's on all the time. It is why otherwise decent and intelligent people believe lies. It is why MAGA adherents stay adhered to MAGA. There are rich Democrats who could create their own media universe. If you had five minutes of Warren Buffet's time (for example), what would you say to him?

I'm biased, since our organization features stories of those who left MAGA. What is needed is more content and media about those who have left, as well as those having doubts about their support for Trump.

If I started a well-funded media company, I would craft my content to find MAGA Americans who are feeling remorse over their past votes, not to censure them, but to give them a voice that legacy media doesn't seem much interested in providing. There are plenty of published reports focused on reasons Americans had for supporting Trump. But what about those who are now questioning their beliefs? They are among us and we need to get in front of them, and go to where they are.

MAGA media and MAGA influencers have a stranglehold on the national political discourse. Mis- and disinformation were the primary reasons Trump was reelected. To combat this, there need to be more efforts to engage the apolitical, who follow and consume very little political news.

Apoliticism is its own bubble, and effective pro-democracy media would seek to pop it.

Many liberals believe MAGA wants what its getting -- a president who is trying to make America white again. And I think this is largely true. What you're saying is there are some MAGA who are reachable. How can they be reached if they didn't see the bigotry that was obvious to others? What kinds of policies are appealing? What values?

I have no problem with people enduring the consequences of their electoral choices. This is how the real world works. And, like any large group, there are some in MAGA who revel in bigotry and hatred. But I think for the balance of MAGA supporters, there are deeds and rhetoric of Trump's that have given them pause. In my case, one of the earliest such moments was Trump's response to Charlottesville.

For so many, MAGA is their identity, and they are heavily personally and politically invested in MAGA, which is why they justify the unjustifiable. I am not defending them, but I cannot emphasize enough how MAGA has shaped their being and personhood, and how frightening it is to admit that one erred in one's ways and allowed one's self to believe lies.

I understand why someone might say, "Trump voters are getting what they deserved" or "how could they not have known what Trump would do?" However, many MAGA voters didn't know much of what Trump would do because the information sources they consume didn't tell them.

MAGA media didn't tell them that American citizens would be kidnapped by ICE. Many didn't know that they would be personally and financially harmed by tariffs, as examples.

Having lived a MAGA life for seven years, I’m unsurprised by anything that has happened this year. Perhaps that is cynical of me to say. But I am still optimistic headed into 2026, because I believe that more and more people in the MAGA community are having doubts about their support for Trump and the movement.

It will take time, but please remember that epiphanies usually occur gradually, and then suddenly, all at once.

There’s something we need to talk about before talking about anything else related to Renee Nicole Good’s murder.

The likelihood of convicting her killer is very low.

No matter how damning you may think the video evidence is – and it is damning – Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who shot Renee Nicole Good in the face, is still a cop.

Put that with another fact – this is America. Together, they paint a picture of the difficulty of bringing him to justice. Ross is a cop. America reveres cops. Convicting a cop of any wrongdoing, much less murder, is an enormous task.

“It’s like trying to convict Jesus,” Ken White said.

“If you think it is obvious that the videos prove murder and nobody can say otherwise, your view is based on how you want the system to be, not how it is,” he said. “It will be brutally hard, fighting inch by inch against what America is, to convict Jonathan Ross. Your feelings don’t enter into it.”

And that’s under normal circumstances.

These circumstances are not normal.

First, Ross fled the scene of the crime. Second, the FBI barred state investigators from accessing evidence. Third, there have been reports of federal agents entering the home of Jonathan Ross, in greater Minneapolis, and removing stuff. Fourth, the US Department of Homeland Security has “shadow units” dedicated to destroying evidence of crimes committed by immigration officials.

That’s on top of relentless and malicious lying. As Stephen Colbert said, the message is only the administration has the authority to determine the truth. Well, it’s also going to try making sure there’s no evidence to prove them wrong.

Oh, and then there’s the misdirection.

That’s the point of the video of the shooting taken by Ross that he appears to have released to Alpha News. (See above.) Apparently, Ross believed it would show that he was forced to kill Good in self-defense. What it actually does is reinforce conclusions drawn from analyzing the original videos, including this key detail flagged by the Post: “Ross crosses in front of the vehicle as it moves in reverse.”

From there, he took a stance, aimed and fired.

I don’t mean to be cynical. My intent is to be realistic. This is the country we have. Accountability for Jonathan Ross is going to be as difficult as accountability for the man at the top, Donald Trump, who set this crime wave in motion.

That doesn’t mean good people shouldn’t try. Local prosecutors, though at a disadvantage without the aid and cooperation of the FBI, still opened an inquiry Friday, asking the wider public for any evidence it might have.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, moderate Democrats are experiencing something rare: a spine. Some are moving toward impeaching Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem. (Hakeem Jeffries called her “a stone-cold liar.” He did not endorse impeachment, but notably did not rule it out.) Others have raised the question of whether they’ll vote to fund ICE. On the margins are those wanting to abolish it.

For everyone else, there’s democratic politics. The most important thing right now is gathering and disseminating video evidence of abuses of power by ICE for the purpose of discrediting not only Trump but all federal authorities.

That won’t be hard, and not only because everyone has a smart phone. According to an editor at the Star-Tribune, locals feel like they’re under siege. “Not an exaggeration at all to say that the feeling in Minneapolis is that the entire metro area is being treated as occupied territory by federal agents. Impossible to overstate how overwhelmingly people here do not like it. This does not feel sustainable.”

Indeed, something seems to be shifting.

Whereas the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, took weeks to grow into a national narrative, the murder of Renee Nicole Good, a widowed, white and blond-haired mother of three, who had stuffed animals in the glove box, whose wife wailed in despair and whose dog needed its leash, has triggered a virtually instantaneous backlash.

America is still a majority white country and a lot of those white people, especially white women, are apparently seeing themselves in Renee Nicole Good. It’s to the point that even respectable, middle-class white people are asking themselves if their local cops are going to protect them against ICE or if they’re going to take Donald Trump’s side.

Those doubts and fears are deepened every time ICE is captured on video showing Americans what it believes is the true meaning of law and order: Comply or die.

Indeed, ICE officers appear to believe altogether that that’s the lesson it was teaching the American people with the murder of Renee Nicole Good – we can do whatever we want, to whomever we want, and the moment you object, we can deem you a criminal who’s deserving of whatever punishment we deem appropriate at that moment.

As this ICE officer tells a woman who is filming him:

“Have you not learned?”

(Then he grabs the woman’s phone.)

My point here is not to be cynical of the likelihood of Ross seeing justice. That could happen, but only if state prosecutors are careful and only if they are lucky. This is still America, even if many of us no longer recognize it.

My point is expanding the idea of accountability so that failure in one area doesn’t seem like failure everywhere. Obviously, it would be better if Renee Nicole Good were alive, but in death, she might finally show people who didn’t believe it, or were focused on their wallets, that Trump is an evil man, and that other evil men are drawn to him.

Evil might be the most important thing to emerge from the video that Ross leaked to Alpha News. In it, Renee Nicole Good can be heard saying to him: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Seconds later, after he shoots her in the face three times, Ross can be heard saying: “F------ B----.”

A small detail has stayed with me from the video of Renee Nicole Good being shot to death in Minneapolis by ICE officer Jonathan Ross.

In the video, she’s behind the wheel, signaling with her left hand to the driver of an ICE vehicle that she’s letting him go before she goes. Then out of that vehicle come two officers. One goes straight to her door.

“Get the f--- outta the car,” says the officer, who is not Ross.

Then he tries to open her door.

That’s the small detail I’m talking about and here’s the reason it has stayed with me. I have been pulled over a few times in my life – for speeding or turning right on a red light when it should not have. But I cannot recall a time when the police officer tried to open my door.

Forget about swearing at me. That’s never happened either. But no law enforcement officer has communicated to me a hint of physical aggression, even when I deserved it (a story for another time). I don’t mean speaking sternly. I mean with his body – like he intends to hurt me. That’s surely the message received by Renee Nicole Good.

There’s another thing about this detail worth dwelling on.

The fact that I have never experienced a police officer who has communicated to me a hint of physical aggression is due, at least in part, to the fact that I am white. I’m also a man. A white man in a country that was built for white men can live his whole life in blissful ignorance of state violence experienced by nonwhite counterparts.

I bring this up, because I wonder about the role of Renee Nicole Good’s race in her experience of the ICE officer acting like he’s gonna hurt her. As I said, he strides over to her, and tries to open her door. (It’s locked.)

What did she feel? It must have been a shock.

To even the wokest white person, violence by the state is still mostly theoretical. We might believe it’s true. We might trust Black people and other people of color are speaking truthfully about their experience. We might see videos online. But we don’t know what it feels like.

What I’m trying to say is that it makes sense to me if Renee Nicole Good experienced panic on two levels at the same time. Once, because here’s a “cop” trying to open her door, acting like he’s gonna hurt her. Twice, because the abstractions of white power were suddenly real.

I would have panicked, too.

She was right to be afraid. As she focused on the ICE officer cussing her out and trying to open her door, something that I’m pretty sure she had never experienced before, ICE officer Jonathan Ross took a position in front of her car, as she was backing up. Before moving forward, she turned the wheel to the right to avoid him. That’s when Ross crouched, aimed and fired, first through the windshield, then the open window.

Ross’s defenders want us to believe the fear felt by Renee Nicole Good doesn’t count. The only fear that counts is Ross’s. They say he believed she would have killed him. They say he was justified in killing her.

It’s that classic closed-circuit logic.

“It's so f------ convenient that they get to ‘fear for their lives’ anytime they want to absolve themselves of anything,” said writer Luke O’Neil, “and when we actually fear for our lives because of them and do anything a scared person would do it's justification for our death.”

It’s also ridiculous.

“The obvious critique I have not heard explicitly articulated is that the point of making a self-defense argument would be saying ‘but for’ his shooting her, she would have killed him,” said Jonathan Kahn, a law professor at Northeastern. “Clearly, had he not shot her, the outcome for him would have been just the same - ie, no threat to his life.”

The irony is that Renee Nicole Good did not seem afraid of Ross. That’s clear from the video that Ross took during the shooting and that he leaked afterward to a sympathetic media outlet. He released it in the apparent belief that it proves he acted in self-defense. It doesn’t.

In that video, Renee Nicole Good can be seen smiling at Ross. As he’s walking around her car, recording her, taking note of her out-of-state license plate, she tells him: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”

Everything changes when the other ICE officer, who can also be seen in Ross’s video, strides toward her vehicle, tries to open the door, cussing as he orders her to get out. She was evidently sensing danger. Ross was not justified in killing her. But she was justified in trying to get away.

Perhaps the most shocking thing, according to David Lurie, an attorney who writes for Public Notice, is what all this says about dissent.

Ross’s defenders argue that his video proves Renee Nicole Good and her spouse, Rebecca Good, were a threat in that they “were not fans of ICE and were in fact protesting the thugs’ activities,” David told me.

In other words, their dissent was a threat. If Ross and his defenders actually believe that, David told me, “that is also deeply creepy.”

“It is effectively a declaration that dissent merits death.”

Jonathan Ross leaked his video Friday. Afterward, I got in touch with David Lurie to discuss it. Here’s the rest of our conversation.

Jonathan Ross appears to believe that his video absolves him -- that he killed Renee Nicole Good in self-defense. I don't see it. Do you?

First of all, how that video ended up being published is a major issue, which we can discuss. Second, it is not remotely exculpatory – and it takes a truly twisted mind to see it that way.

Why is it a major issue in your view?

It is yet another indication that the FBI investigation is entirely unreliable. The FBI should have control of all of the evidence, including and especially any recordings or other records created by the officers.

And, of course, it should not be releasing those materials piecemeal.

If the officer retains control of the recording, and is engaging in his own publicity campaign, then that necessarily means the FBI is not conducting a professional and reliable investigation.

And if the FBI is itself releasing items of evidence to favored press outlets piecemeal, while freezing out state law enforcement authorities from the investigation, then that is as bad or worse.

You have seen the video. You say it's not exculpatory. Is it damning? It seems to show her steering away from him.

What I focused on is that it confirmed that the victim was – including by her words – trying to deconflict the situation, which is what cops are supposed to do, while it was the ICE thugs who were escalating.

It was chilling.

There’s another disturbing insight.

Apparently, the perpetrator or others in the Trump regime think the video "justifies" the murder, presumably because it shows that the victim and her spouse were not fans of ICE and were in fact protesting the thugs’ activities.

That is also deeply creepy, because it is effectively a declaration that dissent merits death.

That's what I was thinking. If you do not immediately comply, that is justification enough for use of maximum force. And that would be a perversion of law and order, not its preservation. Thoughts?

Agree.

Also, in fact, she was not getting clear instructions from the menacing gang of masked thugs that appeared around her, and to the extent that some of the thugs were demanding to get access to her person, she had every reason not to freely comply.

The fact that the cameraman thug turned out to be a reckless and amoral murderer itself demonstrates that she was rightfully fearful of getting out of her car.

What now? The FBI is blocking state investigators, though local prosecutors are apparently gathering their own evidence.

You are ahead of me on news of the prosecutors, but that does not surprise me. They have the ability to gather a lot of probative evidence without the cooperation of the thugs and their bosses or the FBI.

But it is obviously problematic for state or local authorities to undertake a criminal investigation of the conduct of a federal law enforcement officer while the federal government is actively obstructing the investigation.

Assuming the (clearly wrongful) obstruction of the Minnesota investigation continues, it seems more than likely that the Minnesota authorities will seek judicial intervention to force the feds to give them access to the investigatory materials.

We shall see how that plays out.

If Ross is arrested and there's an indictment and so on, a big if, couldn't the feds just ask a judge to move the case to federal court, where they can have the charges dropped? If so, what then?

There is a lot to be said on that topic. But here are the basics. If there is a criminal case, it will be tried in a federal court, even if it is a state prosecution. Although it seems a bit odd, a state law criminal prosecution of a federal officer for state criminal violations is highly likely to be "removed" to federal court under applicable law.

But if it is removed, it will still be prosecuted by state officials, and state criminal laws will apply to the case, but before there is a trial, there will likely be a "Supremacy Clause immunity" issue to be resolved.

This sounds arcane, but is conceptually simple. While the constitutions define state and the federal governments as "sovereigns," with independent authority to enforce their respective laws, where there is a conflict between state and federal law, under the Constitution's Supremacy Clause, federal law prevails.

It follows that if the allegedly criminal conduct of a federal law enforcement officer was consistent with federal law, including governing law enforcement policies, then it is unconstitutional to permit a state law prosecution to proceed.

But it is not going to be enough for the officer to put Kristi Noem in front of the court and for her to make bogus claims about the facts and about federal law enforcement policies. The court will undertake its own independent review of those matters.

Why did Trump invade Venezuela? Trump’s id made him

Look at me, love me – every reason for doing anything is downstream from there.

I was telling you the other day that it’s not really clear why the president ordered the illegal and unconstitutional invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its head of state. Regime officials provided reasons but were often contravened by Donald Trump.

“Aren't We Tired of Trying to Interpret Trump's Foreign Policy Gibberish?” asked Marty Longman in the headline of a piece published after news of the attack. Indeed, we are, and I hasten to add that endless attempts to figure it all out are a form of oppression.

It isn’t normal.

Even if you disagreed with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, you understood the argument for it. George W Bush said Saddam Hussian had weapons of mass destruction. That was a lie, but at least the thinking above and below it was coherent.

In contrast, senior officials in the Trump regime are all over the place about why the US had to violate Venezuela’s sovereignty, giving the impression that no one above the level of military operations actually knows what they’re doing or why they’re doing it.

Meanwhile, critics can’t form a precise counterargument since the original “argument” is, well, no one really knows what it is. So, for the most part, liberals have decided to brush aside the confusion and incoherence to pinpoint two reasons that makes sense to them:

Vladimir Putin and oil.

Don’t get me wrong. If you believe Donald Trump is a tool of a Russian dictator, I’m with you. If you think Donald Trump is a criminal president who is willing to use the awesome power of the United States military to commit international crimes, I’m with you.

But I also think these arguments tend to share a flaw.

They make more sense than Donald Trump has ever made.

I’m reminded of that time Susie Wiles seemed to trash other people in the Trump regime. The White House chief of staff called Russ Vought “a rightwing absolute zealot,” for instance.

To savvy observers, she seemed to be looking for a scapegoat for her boss’s troubles. But in this White House, what you see is often what you get – if it looks like chaos, it probably is.

As I said at the time:

“There are no anchoring principles, no moral guideposts, no concept of national interest, no sense of the common good. It’s just mindless impulse and rationalizations after the fact.”

Set aside Putin and oil to consider something Donald Trump values above everything else – “ratings.” He believes the more people watch him, the more they love him. What better way to get everyone’s attention than to be seen as a war president on TV?

Not just any war, though.

In a recent interview with me, the Secretary of Defense Rock (a pen name) said Trump “dislikes large, open-ended occupations that produce visible casualties and political backlash.”

(That’s almost certainly a result of watching coverage of the Iraq War in which images of death and destruction were common.)

Instead, he likes “coercive actions below the threshold of war — air strikes, sanctions, seizures, energy pressure, and threats that generate profit and leverage without requiring public buy-in.”

In other words, he likes one-and-done military ops. Venezuela was one of those. So was the bunker bombing of Iran last June. Though they look good on TV, they looked even better with Donald “War President” Trump at the center of it all.

That’s Trump’s id – look at me, love me.

Every reason for doing anything is downstream from there.

What does it all mean? That’s what everyone is asking, but the question itself is more dignified than the thing it’s questioning.

Trump got his made-for-TV war. He got everyone buzzing about what he’s going to do next about Greenland, Mexico, Canada, wherever.

Meanwhile, back in Venezuela, it looks like life is going to go on pretty much as it had been, the difference being that the new leader is even more tyrannical than the last one.

“The idea that she can't rig another election or the opposition will magically take over seems pretty far-fetched, especially because we don't have troops on the ground,” the Secretary of Defense Rock said.

The Secretary of Defense Rock doesn’t use his real name, because Trump is president. He’s the publisher of History Does Us, a newsletter about the intersection of military and civilian life. The last time we spoke, we discussed how the commander-in-chief undermines military discipline.

“The idea that we will launch more air strikes or raids or blockades if she doesn't play ball seems kind of dumb, given where the polling is,” he told me. “At this point, I kinda assume the status quo will hold, and that this entire episode will ultimately amount to little more than content-production and performative-posting.”

Here’s our conversation.

The US now opposes democracies in Europe. We have invaded Venezuela. We are war-drumming about Greenland. Is Vladimir Putin's investment in Donald Trump finally bearing fruit?

I’d be careful with the phrase “investment bearing fruit,” because it implies command-and-control that we don’t have evidence for. What is clear is something more structural and, frankly, more troubling: Vladimir Putin doesn’t need to control Donald Trump to benefit from him. He benefits from Trump’s own instincts.

Putin’s core objective isn’t territorial conquest in the Cold War sense. It’s the erosion of Western cohesion, legitimacy and confidence. On that score, Trump has been extraordinarily useful without being directed. Attacking allies, casting doubt on democratic norms, treating sovereignty as transactional, and framing international politics as raw deal-making all weaken the post-1945 order that constrains Russia.

On Venezuela specifically, what you’re seeing isn’t a coherent imperial project so much as improvisational, performative power politics — noise that signals disregard for norms rather than a plan to replace them. That norm-breaking itself is the point. It tells allies that rules are optional and tells adversaries that the West no longer believes in its own system.

So no, this isn’t about Putin cashing in some secret investment. It’s about a global environment where authoritarian leaders benefit when the United States abandons restraint, consistency, and democratic solidarity—and Trump does that instinctively. The fruit isn’t conquest. It’s corrosion.

Most of the Democrats in the Congress seem to be pushing back against Trump's imperial overtures. Is that your perspective? If not, what do you think they should do?

There is meaningful pushback from a lot of Democrats (no matter what Democrats are complaining about on background on Axios), more quickly and more openly than during Trump’s first term.

You’re seeing sharper rhetoric and a greater willingness to use oversight, but they don't control any branch of government, so there isn't much they can do.

But with such tight margins, particularly in the House, I don't think it's crazy to shut down the government again (I believe funding expires at the end of the month?), or hold up an NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act). You have senior administration officials openly stating they want Greenland and would use military force, which is so insane that you might as well take extreme measures.

Sad to say, Stephen Miller might be right. "Nobody is gonna fight the US militarily over the future of Greenland," he said. If so, NATO could be a paper tiger. Is that what could happen?

I still can't believe this is a thing. Miller is probably right on the narrow, grim point that Denmark isn’t going to “fight the US military” in a conventional war over Greenland. But the leap from that to “NATO becomes a paper tiger” is not automatic — because NATO’s credibility isn’t just “can Denmark win a shooting war with the US.”

It’s whether the alliance remains a political commitment to mutual sovereignty. A US move to seize Greenland would be less a “test of NATO’s tanks” than a self-inflicted alliance-killer that destroys Atlanticism probably forever.

But it is a move that is so outrageous that I think there would be more alarm among congressional GOP's and the military.

Fighting foreign wars is as popular as Jeffrey Epstein's child-sex trafficking ring. Yet Trump continually takes the side of elite interests, in this case, oil companies. What is going on?

I think this is basically Marco Rubio.

I thought he would have very little influence because he came from the internationalist wing of the GOP, but being both secretary of state and national security advisor (and archivist if you care about that) clearly gives Rubio a lot of influence, and Venezuela has been a pet project of his for a while. Add support from Stephen Miller and this was probably an inevitability.

I'm not even sure a lot of the oil companies want anything to do with Venezuela, because of the security concerns, age of infrastructure, and the capital investment that would be required to get any meaningful profit. I also thought the US was supposed to be energy independent?

In addition, Trump’s “anti-war” image is real only in a very narrow sense. He dislikes large, open-ended occupations that produce visible casualties and political backlash. What he’s perfectly comfortable with are coercive actions below the threshold of war — air strikes, sanctions, seizures, energy pressure, and threats that generate profit and leverage without requiring public buy-in.

If a helo goes down, we're having a very different conversation.

There is no followup plan for Venezuela, is there? Trump is just winging it. He has no idea what he's doing. Every choice is made with how it looks on TV in his mind. Am I wrong?

Ya, this is why I never understood all the editorializing about how things have really changed and this is a really great success.

The structures and principals of the Venezuelan government that were set up by Maduro are still intact. From everything I have read, Delcy Rodriguez is a more ruthless political operator than Maduro was, so the idea that she can't rig another election or the opposition will magically take over seems pretty far-fetched, especially because we don't have troops on the ground.

The idea that we will launch more air strikes or raids or blockades if she doesn't play ball seems kind of dumb, given where the polling is. At this point, I kinda assume the status quo will hold, and that this entire episode will ultimately amount to little more than content-production and performative-posting.

The first thing that should be said about the fatal shooting in Minneapolis is that the victim’s name is Renee Nicole Good.

Good, 37, was a mother, a wife, a poet and fervent Christian. Her mother, Donna Ganger, told the local newspaper that her daughter and her partner were not involved in protests.

“She was probably terrified. Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being,” Ganger said.

Good was a widow. Her husband, a veteran, died in 2023 at 36. They had a son. He’s 6. Good was with her partner when ICE shot her in the face, then dithered long enough for her to bleed out.

A video taken by a witness moments after the shooting shows Good’s partner sitting on the ground with her dog. There’s blood on the snow. Between sobs she can be heard saying, “they killed my wife. I don’t know what to do,” according to The Advocate.

"We stopped to videotape, and they shot her in the head."

“We have a 6-year-old at school.”

Her former teacher, Kent Wascom, a professor at Old Dominion University, posted a memorial to Renee Good on Twitter.

“I held her baby,” Wascom said. “She was kind and talented, a working-class mom who put herself through school despite circumstances that would’ve crumpled the pathetic rich boy politicians who sadistically abetted her murder.” He added:

“God damn them all.”

Good’s humanity needs to be the first thing that’s said, because the regime that killed her started erasing her humanity from virtually the moment she was murdered Wednesday morning.

US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Good was an “agitator” who “weaponized” her vehicle in an act of “domestic terrorism.” The ICE officer, she said, acted in self-defense.

Vice President JD Vance blamed the victim. “Don't illegally interfere in federal law enforcement operations and try to run over our officers with your car,” he said. “It's really that simple."

On his social media site, the president added his own smears.

“The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting,” Donald Trump wrote. She “then violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer. ... It is hard to believe [the ICE officer] is alive but he is now recovering in the hospital."

Every single word is a lie.

I spent a lot of time yesterday watching and rewatching the video of the shooting (a different one from the video I reference above). And virtually nothing, perhaps literally nothing, that the Trump regime is saying matches up with the reality of what happened.

Good was not “very disorderly, obstructing and resisting.” She did not “violently, willfully and viciously [run] over the ICE officer.” The officer in question was not injured in any visible way.

Indeed, after he shot Good three times, and after her SUV rammed into a parked car, the ICE officer checked her condition, then walked to his own vehicle and, moments later, drove away.

I’m not going to do a frame-by-frame analysis. There are pros out there who do that kind of thing better than me. For instance, Eliot Higgins, head of Bellingcat, an investigative reporting group.

“Bellingcat, the New York Times Visual Investigation Team and the Washington Post's Visual Forensic team have all published analysis showing the ICE shooter wasn't in the path of Renee Nicole Good’s vehicle when he shot her, contradicting statements by the president and his cronies,” Higgins said this morning.

Here’s the Times investigation. I will add a small but telling detail.

The masked ICE officer, who has been identified as Jonathan Ross but whose whereabouts are unknown, was not in any danger.

Good was clearly steering around him, and because of that, Ross had time to position himself in front of the car, crouch, take aim, both arms straight out, and fire. Ross shoots once through the windshield, then twice more through the driver’s side window.

Hers was an act of self-defense, not terror.

His was an act of terror, not self-defense.

The difference between what happened to Renee Nicole Good and what administration officials say happened to her is so vast and obvious that the president is no longer taking any chances.

Yesterday, the FBI said the investigation would be done jointly by federal agents in coordination with the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA). Today, however, the FBI changed its mind.

The BCA “would no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation,” a spokesman said.

Why would the FBI do this?

To cover up the crime in order to protect the president from the consequences of allowing his secret police to commit crimes.

The FBI is going to try hiding the ugly truth: ICE claims it can declare anyone “illegal” and that it can be the judge, jury and executioner of any accused criminal, including a white, blonde mother of a 6-year-old, who had stuffed animals on the dash and whose partner wailed in despair yards from her bloodied corpse.

But hiding the truth is only part of it. Trump must also erase Good in the same way he erased what happened five years ago, nearly to the day of her death, when he organized and led an attempted paramilitary takeover of the United States Congress.

There is a straight line of causation from January 6, 2021, when Donald Trump launched an insurrection, to January 7, 2026, when his insurgents not only shot an innocent woman but prevented a physician, a bystander, from trying to save her life.

As David Lurie noted, if the GOP cannot win by legitimate means in November, “they will return to the 1/6 strategy of seeking to remain in power with the use of intimidation and force.”

This time, David said, “they won't need to enlist an ad hoc group of thugs to serve as enforcers, because they are assembling a massive force of government-funded and armed thugs who are practicing, and honing, their violent repression skills and strategies on the citizens of cities across the country.”

We may think the evidence of our eyes is so damning that surely Good’s killer will be brought to justice. But we thought the same thing five years ago. Trump and his insurgents mounted a massive disinfo campaign to erase history. They succeeded.

Like last time, they are going to lie, but most of all, they’re going to make it seem like Renee Good’s humanity never existed, just as they made it seem like the J6 insurrection never happened.

Don’t believe me? See this video. After the morning’s shooting, locals set up an impromptu memorial that evening – chalk messages on the sidewalks, candles in solemn remembrance. In this video, an ICE officer literally kicks one of them over. He then taunts a bystander who’s visibly enraged by such disrespect.

‪They murdered her. They fled the scene of the crime. They stopped a doctor from rendering aid to her. And they lied to protect the man who did the killing. But that wasn’t enough.

They had to desecrate her, too.

This is why I said at the top that the first thing that needs to be said about all this is Renee Nicole Good’s name. The Trump regime is terrified of her humanity, because it puts flesh and bone on the consequences of autocracy – on what happens when a free society allows lawlessness to come straight from the top.

Yesterday was the five-year anniversary of the J6 insurrection. On January 6, 2021, the then-president organized and led an attempted paramilitary takeover of the US government.

And Donald Trump got away with it.

He ran for president for a second time like a man who was trying to outrun a jail sentence. That’s because he was.

Special prosecutor Jack Smith, who investigated the events of that treasonous day, told lawmakers last month that he could prove Trump’s guilt. “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power,” Smith said.

Trump stalled and obstructed and dragged his feet, abusing every judicial courtesy afforded to powerful men and every procedural loophole, all while campaigning as if his life depended on it. He turned himself into the “hero” in a grandiose narrative about the battle between good and evil (QAnon), and when justice came knocking, he made it seem like evidence of the conspiracy against him – and America.

Once safely back in power, Trump stopped all the criminal investigations. Smith, with damning proof in hand, was forced to stand down. Trump claimed the authority of judge and jury. He saw no law that could stop him from doing what he wants, to whomever he wants, because his word is law.

But Trump couldn’t have gotten away with treason by himself. First, there were the Republicans who saved him from being held accountable by the same Congress that he attacked. Then there were the oligarchs who paid for a massive rightwing media complex that defended an unapologetic traitor and encouraged conspiratorial thinking among followers. Then there were the mainstream corporate leaders on Wall Street and beyond, who quickly understood that he really could get away with it, like all the other elites over the last 20 years who’d gotten away with their crimes.

Every single Trump ally already believed they were above the law, morality and tradition. That belief was validated by GOP justices on the Supreme Court, who manufactured legal immunity, and by Trump’s victory. Society is now at a point where one of the world’s biggest communications platforms, owned by one of the world’s richest men, can produce literal child pornography – and the elites of the world just shrug.

What began on January 6, 2021, was continued the day Trump was sworn back into office. From there was a renewed push to unwind the political settlements of the previous century. The explicit goal was to loot the safety net; create a secret police force; suppress freedoms of speech, religion and movement; immiserate the property-owning middle classes; and reshape society so that rich white men like Donald Trump could once again rule with impunity.

The never-ending insurrection applied to foreign affairs as well. Trump has sabotaged the lawful, international order that the US established after the atrocities of World War II. Bribery of the American president is now factored into the cost of global trade, a pattern of corruption that will no doubt deepen as heads of state realize that, in the wake of the kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Donald Trump will take what he wants if it is not given to him.

The institutions of democracy – in this, I include the courts, the media and universities as well as the American people – now face a never-ending insurrection, because they failed to hold a traitor, and the corrupt elites before him, accountable for their crimes. And as long as we keep failing, we can keep expecting more of the same. As Trump said after the attack on Venezuela, “We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us."

All that said, the truth about the J6 insurrection isn't going away, no matter how contested it is currently. Do you see a time in the future when justice will prevail? Or do you think injustice baked into the cake of the American republic?

These are some of the questions I asked Adam Cohen, a lawyer and activist with a large online following who commented thoroughly on Jack Smith’s deposition. (It was released on New Year’s Eve by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee for absolute minimum exposure to it.)

Adam chose to be optimistic.

“Some people scoff at the concepts of American ingenuity and exceptionalism, but I think we're going to need some realistic, feasible ideas to fix our country,” Adam told me.

“I think we can, but it's going to take time, perhaps generations. I mean, we've been trying to get this right for 250 years. We just have to keep pressing forward, calling out the inequalities inherent in our system and look for ways to fix them. We've done it before. We can do it again.”

Today is the anniversary of the J6 insurrection. Trump is president again. Jack Smith said last month that there is proof beyond doubt that he's responsible for the attempted takeover of the US government. Did he get away with it?

The January 6 select committee extensively showed the depths that Trump went through to illegally steal the 2020 election – the lies, the extortion of election officials, the attempts to find 11,780 nonexistent votes, the fake electors, and the insurrection itself, which included incitement, threats against his own vice president, refusal – for hours – to do anything to stop it, and telling his supporters who had just bludgeoned 140 police officers that he loved them.

He was never prosecuted, and now he's president.

Unfortunately, the answer to your question is self-evident.

Smith said the attack could not have happened without Trump. It looks like those who said he was campaigning to stay out of jail were right. Even Joe Biden said that. What does that say about the system? What can reformers do?

I believe Smith's testimony showed that Trump announced he was running shortly after it was announced there was going to be a criminal investigation into the classified documents scandal and, potentially, January 6.

During his candidacy, Trump repeatedly attacked the investigation as an attempt to silence him. He then argued for – and received – immunity from a Supreme Court featuring three of nine justices chosen by him. Even the most cynical of us were shocked by that opinion. The whole affair exposed significant cracks in the system. We need to look at serious SCOTUS reform – then go on from there.

What was the most damning thing in Smith's deposition? What was the key detail that made you think this is the reason the Republicans released it on New Year's Eve.

Even though we've seen so much coverage of January 6, time has a frustrating way of dulling memory, doesn't it? So it was profoundly infuriating to be reminded that almost all of Trump’s co-conspirators were Republican officials. And they were willing to testify against him. You have to think he didn't want the world, and especially maga, to see how thoroughly they were duped, used and summarily discarded.

This president claims the right to kidnap leaders of foreign countries in order to try them in US courts. He also claims total immunity from US courts. Forget about whether he's above the law. He is. The question is whether and for how long Americans will tolerate a depraved president.

Oh boy, you're asking the wrong person. I was out in 2015 when he came down the escalator and called Mexicans criminals – and the campaign rhetoric devolved from there.

Then, four years after January 6th, he gets reelected?

It really shakes your faith in our politics.

The truth about J6 isn't going away, no matter how contested it is. Do you see a future in which justice will be done to future evil men, if not this president, who is 79? Or is injustice baked into the cake of the American republic?

The optimist in me says we will reform our government to stop this from happening in the future. The pessimist sees the Supreme Court greatly expanding executive power, which will be difficult if not impossible to overcome.

Some people scoff at the concepts of American ingenuity and exceptionalism, but I think we're going to need some realistic, feasible ideas to fix our country.

I think we can, but it's going to take time, perhaps generations. I mean, we've been trying to get this right for 250 years. We just have to keep pressing forward, calling out the inequalities inherent in our system and look for ways to fix them. We've done it before. We can do it again.

If you’re like me, it’s unclear why the president ordered the illegal and unconstitutional bombing of Venezuela, the kidnapping of its head of state, and the theft of its oil. As soon as we were given one reason, the White House came up with another, usually contradicting the first.

Ditto for what the US is going to do now. Donald Trump said we’re now going to run Venezuela, as if colonizing a foreign nation was something any of us voted for. Apparently, however, what he really meant is that Venezuela’s new leader, the former vice president, had better do what he tells her to do or face another illegal and unconstitutional attack.

In a sense, this extortionist attitude toward Venezuela is the same extortionist attitude that Trump has toward blue states: Do as I say, not for any particular or compelling reason, but because I said so – or else. The president believes his word is law. Foreign leaders can be held accountable for their crimes, but he can’t be for his. He also believes might makes right. “We have to do it again [in other countries],” he said. “We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us."

On hearing news of the Venezuela attack, some liberals said it was to distract from the Epstein files. Some cited Trump’s own words. He once said Barack Obama was getting so unpopular that we should expect him to bomb the Middle East to boost his poll numbers.

But “distraction” assumes that one thing is worse than another, and the fact is, everything Donald Trump does is corrupt, meaning everything is a potential liability. Withholding Epstein files is illegal. Invading a sovereign nation is illegal. (Impounding congressional funding to Democratically controlled states is illegal). It’s all illegal. And defenders of liberty don’t have to decide which is more corrupt.

I interviewed Noah Berlatsky about a recent piece of his arguing that Trump’s corrupt handling of the Epstein files could backfire on him. We discussed an array of things, including the seeming impossibility of holding Trump accountable. Our conversation took place before last weekend’s attack, but Noah connected the two subjects. He said maga infighting over Epstein eroded Trump’s polling. Maga infighting over Venezuela – a betrayal of “America First” – could do the same.

That, among other things, offers hope for justice.

“War with Venezuela is about as unpopular as Trump's handling of the Epstein files!” said the publisher of Everything Is Horrible, a newsletter about politics and the arts. “I think the idea of ‘distraction’ in general isn't very helpful. Trump does lots and lots of horrible things; they're all horrible in themselves, and we should pay attention to and oppose them all. I don't think one horrible thing distracts from another.”

In your piece for Public Notice, you say that Donald Trump's corrupt handling of the Epstein files could backfire on him. He has escaped scandal before. What makes this different in your mind?

I don't think he really does escape scandal. His rhetoric and actions do harm him in many ways. He's always been an extraordinarily unpopular president, and he's always suffered a lot of losses because of that, and because he's bad at his job. Partisanship is just a very powerful force, as is white supremacy and bigotry, so his many losses and failures, and his unpopularity, don't necessarily destroy him the way people often think they should, which leads to this myth of invulnerability — even though there's a lot of evidence that he's not invulnerable.

Having said that, I think the Epstein files are particularly dangerous for him because Epstein's real crimes became conflated with Qanon anti-Democratic conspiracy theories. A lot of people in Trump's base — like Dan Bongino, for example, or Marjorie Taylor Greene — have invested a lot of energy in the idea that exposing Epstein would bring down the Democratic Party, and so when Trump says that Epstein is a hoax, that seems to be targeted at them and they don't like it.

Basically, Trump's usual strategies to contain the damage, which is claiming it's an entirely partisan attack, are not very effective when the right is also very invested in this scandal. It's a case where Trump's interests are very much out of sync not just with the Republican mainstream, but with the far-right base. So that creates unusual dangers for him.

If there is accountability in the future for Trump, it will be because the Democrats insisted on it. But the Democrats have a lot of incentive to just move on once they regain power. That would set up future tyrants for success. How do we change that?

Yeah, it's a tough question.

I think that the Democrats have incentives to move on, because antifascist actions — expanding the court, for example — are difficult and may not be super-popular with the electorate as a whole, which is often more focused on things like lowering inflation. This was Biden's approach. He figured that a good economy would allow him to win the next election and that was the best way to fight fascism — just win elections. Electoral parties are hyperfocused on winning elections, so this is an appealing approach for Democrats.

However, Democrats, of course, lost in 2024, because you can't win every election or control the economy entirely. And you'd hope that would be a warning to Democrats and create some incentives the other way. And of course fascists actually want to arrest and murder the opposition, which you'd hope would encourage Democrats to be aggressive in containing and crushing fascism when they're in office.

I think there are some signs that some Democrats at least are thinking about this — and there's also evidence that you can move the party through advocacy. Chuck Schumer — poster child for appeasement — moved from immediate capitulation in the first budget showdown to leading a very extended and in many ways successful budget shutdown at the end of the year. Impeachment votes have garnered more and more support in the House, and GOP leadership has moved from outright opposition to refusing to vote.

This is not enough, obviously, but it suggests that as Trump's approval craters and as people demand better, representatives do react.

I think continued pressure will help. I also think it would probably help if there were some high-profile mainstream losses to fighters in the midterms. Brad Lander beating Dan Goldman would be a big deal. Kat Abughazaleh winning in IL-9 would be a big deal. A couple more wins along those lines would help a lot.

Accountability will require sustained attention from the press corps, but the press corps allows its agenda to be set by the rightwing media complex, as I call it. Are the divisions we are seeing among maga media personalities the only hope we have?

Again, it's a tough question. I think that the current fissures on the right do help in terms of eroding Trump's approval and making it more difficult for the right to create sustained propaganda talking points. There hasn't been any consistent rightwing pushback on Epstein for example. The right has been notably unable to make a convincing sustained case for war in Venezuela; I think that's polling at 11 percent or something ridiculously low.

I think people can also underestimate the extent to which resistance can create effective propaganda. [Editor-in-chief of CBS News] Bari Weiss attempted to kill the story about El Salvador's horrific prison conditions for US deportees, but it got bootlegged and distributed by independent media and just interested people, and the result is it was seen I believe millions more times than it would have been if it just aired. Democratic politicians like Chris Murphy also talked about it. So I thought that was all pretty hopeful.

So I guess the answer is … yes. Maga infighting helps, but I think we're able to take advantage of it in part because there's just a ton of resistance to the regime, and that creates opportunities for counter-messaging through both formal and informal channels.

Liberal hope is often rooted in belief in the American character, which is that we the people believe in liberty and justice for all. Trump has exposed that as problematic. He's also convinced people that such beliefs are fraudulent. What do liberals do?

Well, there's no one American character. The US has always been really racist and authoritarian. It's also fostered pioneering antiracist and liberatory movements. The "truth" of the country isn't one or the other. It's just what we choose to do.

I think that the belief in American exceptionalism and in some sort of inborn virtuous American character has always really been a tool for fascism and repression, so liberals are better off without it! I think that liberals and leftists and people of good will in general are best off acknowledging that the country has always had grotesque fascist traditions, but highlighting that there have also been people who have fought against those — Frederick Douglass, Ida B Wells-Barnett, MLK, Alice Wong, and on and on. The fight's the same as it ever was, which is grim, but hopefully a source of sustenance as well.

I have never seen a Democratic base as divided and disillusioned as I see it today. Not even the post-9/11 years were this bad. I suspect it's because of dashed hopes. There seemed to be so much promise in the wake of George Floyd's murder. America seemed to reject conservative orthodoxy. Then came the radical centrist backlash and Trump's reelection. Thoughts?

I think there's a lot of reason to be depressed for sure. And I think despair and a real uncertainty about tactics will lead to a certain amount of infighting. But, I mean, I don't exactly see the base as divided and disillusioned. There's a lot of coordinated and effective resistance. People are turning out to vote in massive numbers, and winning major victories everywhere from New Jersey to Miami to Oklahoma. Protests against ICE in the streets are ubiquitous and have been quite effective. The consumer boycott against Disney to restore Jimmy Kimmel was massive and victorious. I mentioned the circulation of the 60 Minutes segment in defiance of CBS.

I don't mean to say it's all good. Obviously, we're in a dire and ugly situation. But I think despite differences and understandable despair, a lot of people are pushing back in a lot of ways. I think that Trump's position, and the radical centrist position, is much, much more precarious than it was at the beginning of the year because of this pushback. Victory is very much not guaranteed, but I think there's reason to hope that continued resistance can continue to gain ground.

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been blessed with a profile in the Times magazine. The headline – “‘I Was Just So Naïve’: Inside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Break With Trump” – gives the impression that the Georgia congresswoman and maga zealot has seen the error of her ways.

Details from the interview appear to deepen that perception. When Greene threatened to go public with the names of men implicated in “the Epstein files,” the president reportedly told her on speaker phone that she can’t, because, according to Greene, “my friends will get hurt.”

I don’t know why a man who will throw anyone under the bus would protect anyone but himself. But I do know bad faith can take many forms. If anyone is a master of bad faith, it’s Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Greene spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. She defended the J6 insurrection. She suggested support for executing Democrats. She once stalked a survivor of a shooting massacre to accuse him of being a fraud. Am I supposed to believe she’s had a change of heart?

Still, her break from Donald Trump is politically significant. It suggests that his hold on the Republican Party has limits. It also suggests that true believers are thinking about and preparing for a future without him. (She is resigning next month but appears to be positioning herself nonetheless.) Maga might die or evolve into something new. Either way is an opportunity for the Democrats and liberal reformers generally.

I don’t think Greene is key to reviving the liberal tradition in America, as The Bulwark’s Jonathan V Last suggested, but I do think, as he does, that she will play some kind of role in getting the Republicans to behave. Greene embodies maga’s id. She appears to feel betrayed. If those feelings are real, and can be turned against the GOP, so be it.

In this second of a two-part interview with me, political historian Claire Potter, publisher of Political Junkie, touches on the meaning and importance of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “naivete,” the unlikelihood of accountability for Trump, and why the reaction to “the Epstein files” is more likely a reaction to authoritarians who fail to deliver on promises.

“The multiple fumbles and lies about the Epstein files have given some Republicans a valid reason to declare their independence,” Claire told me. “Creating air between themselves and Trump will be critical to any Republican who wants a political career once maga starts to swirl the drain next year. We are seeing tremendous swings in districts Trump won in double digits, and that it is the Republicans’ failure to deliver that will, in the end, lead to their defeat, not just in 2026, but in 2028.”

What do you make of recent news about Greene? Principled pariah or craven opportunist? What's the right reaction from Democrats?

I think Greene is using the word "naive" not in the usual sense of a person being innocent and expecting the best of others, but in the sense that she had no idea about what being a politician required and that her devotion to Trump, which initially served her, turned out to be wildly misplaced. Back in 2020, a New Yorker profile described Greene as a kind of seeker who reincarnated herself periodically: as a wife and mother, as a businesswoman, as a QAnon devotee, as a charismatic Christian, and finally, as a maga true believer.

Remember, she ran for Congress having zero background as a politician, but a quite successful career in the construction industry – not unlike Trump. She inherited a family business, she did well with it, and then pivoted out of her marriage and into the CrossFit community, which she was also very successful at, both as a participant and as an entrepreneur. She had enough money to self-fund her own campaign, and once elected, realized that her media talents were ideally suited to the political world Donald Trump had made.

I think conspiracy theorists are idealists in a way. They see a world they don't like, and they want to know, specifically, who is responsible for it. In maga world, that can be Jews, pedophiles, trans people, the deep state or Nancy Pelosi, but the perpetrators of injustice are real, and they walk the earth.

I think Greene saw going to Washington as a way to be a warrior, to get to the bottom of things in the second Trump administration. What she didn't understand – and this is where the naivete comes in, I think – was that politics is a profession, she didn't know how to do it, and that only Trump can get away with pretending he knows how to do a job.

To the extent that Greene's Republican colleagues were willing to draft on her outrageousness and fundraising ability, which should have been a route to influence in Congress, she understood by the end of her first term that there was a Trumpian front stage and a more conventional backstage where Republicans who said they were maga functioned more or less conventionally. Trump was not only out of office, but disgraced, in 2021. Most elected Republicans did not see a way back for him after January 6, and were eager to move on. Greene acted as though the rudeness and brashness of maga could just continue, and her own party collaborated in putting her on the shelf for her whole first term.

There's an old saw about Trump: take him seriously, but not literally. Greene took Trump's language about loyalty both seriously and literally. She believed that his vows to release the Epstein files and get to the bottom of the conspiracy to protect Epstein were real, and she believed that he cared viscerally about white working people. Neither of these things were true, and combined with the lack of respect from her colleagues, and MIke Johnson stonewalling legislation, I think Greene began to see politics as a pointless and cynical exercise.

Andrew Tate, who has been accused child-sex crimes and is a leading figure in the so-called manosphere, was shamed in the boxing ring recently. An amateur beat and bloodied him. The Trump regime saved him from prosecution. Is public humiliation all the justice we can expect when criminals like Tate have powerful allies?

Let me start by saying that it was a real joy to see someone beat the c--- out of that monster of a man, and as I understand it, Tate and his brother are still facing charges in England. The Tates are also an interesting case, because as I understand it their real friends in the White House are Don Jr and Barron Trump, and that the pardon really jolted Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, whose horrible traits do not happen to include sex crimes and battering women.

And while it is easy to imagine people like Doug Burgham and Marco Rubio simply turning away from this kind of thing while Trump is president, I don’t think they will forever. Here, I think, we will see another rift widening up in the Republican Party, one that intersects with the revulsion many in the maga movement have harbored for Bill Clinton for 35 years, and more recently, for Jeffrey Epstein. You don’t have to be a QAnon adherent to see the rot in the party when it comes to gross male sexual behavior.

But I get your point. It seems almost impossible to imagine accounting for this period in our nation’s history — the crimes against immigrants, women, trans people and the poor, to name a few — without a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Forget that our justice system is not functioning to rein in gross malfeasance, and that it seems designed to permit endless appeals and deferrals even when it does work.

It’s hard to imagine bringing Donald Trump, and the network of people activated by Donald Trump, to justice without bringing the rest of the government to a complete stop. It makes me understand why other countries just put their dictators on a plane to some warm, neutral country and tell them to just keep the money.

Perhaps no one pushed the story of "the Epstein files" as hard as former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Now that he has been exposed as one of Epstein's pals, will it make a difference to followers?

Well, one of my favorite comments on Epstein was when Dan Bongino was asked why he took completely different positions on Epstein as a podcaster and as a top FBI official, he answered — as if it was perfectly obvious — that these were two different jobs with two different realities. I could practically hear J Edgar Hoover spinning in his grave.

I think on some level, except for the very hardcore conspiracy types, maga people know the whole system is a fraud. Think of all the people who go to Disney World over and over again because it fulfills a fantasy about returning to childhood. They see someone in a Snow White suit who is in reality about to vomit from the heat and treat that person as if she is really Snow White.

Similarly, I suspect that Steve Bannon is not a real person to most maga adherents, and neither is Donald Trump. Bannon and Trump are characters in an entertainment called “politics,” and like reality shows or multiplayer games, the story evolves to accommodate contradictions. I would predict that if you follow the right subreddits, or Gab threads, you will see people promoting theories that Bannon was there spying on Epstein, or that he was sent by Q to rescue the girls, or whatever.

Honestly, I think none of this matters to actual voters in the end, although I do think the multiple fumbles and lies about the Epstein files have given some Republicans a valid reason to declare their independence. Creating air between themselves and Trump will be critical to any Republican who wants a political career once maga starts to swirl the drain next year. We are seeing tremendous swings in districts Trump won in double digits, and that it is the Republicans’ failure to deliver that will, in the end, lead to their defeat, not just in 2026, but in 2028. And Trump’s people — including Bannon — will have gotten what they wanted all along: to fleece the American public.

As long as there was a Democrat in the White House, the rightwing media complex, which is global in scale, had something solid to push up against, allowing internal divisions to fade into the background.

Now that Joe Biden is gone, however, and now that his successor is slipping further into incompetence and incoherence, the maga media unity that vaulted Donald Trump to power seems to be coming apart.

The cracks looked especially apparent during the last gathering of Turning Point USA, the hate group co-founded by the late Charlie Kirk.

Ben Shapiro accused Tucker Carlson of befriending antisemites, like Nick Fuentes. Candace Owens had implied that Israel assassinated Kirk. JD Vance called for unity, saying that “in the United States of America, you don't have to apologize for being white anymore." (To be clear, not one American has been forced to apologize for being white.)

Such fractures, however, were always evident, according to political historian Claire Potter, publisher of Political Junkie. “There has always been a broad streak of antisemitism in the maga movement and, at the same time, strong support for Israel among rightwing Christians like Mike Huckabee and Jewish media figures like Ben Shapiro,” she said.

Claire told me that this combination has meant the maga coalition was inherently unstable from the start. Kirk’s murder didn’t reveal cracks so much as “create a new focus for antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

If it’s true that rightwing media personalities are cannibalizing themselves, what does that say about the future of maga? Can it outlive Trump? Is JD Vance the heir apparent? Will the GOP quit pretending to believe in equality and openly embrace fascism?

In this first of a two-part interview, Claire explains that the GOP will probably evolve into something that echoes maga without actually being maga. As for the vice president, however, there is no future.

“He has real deficits, in the sense that he is interracially married, he has no charisma or stage presence, and he projects very little authority,” Claire said. “Also, frankly, he just isn’t mean enough.”

The murder of demagogue Charlie Kirk appears to have divided maga media personalities. Do you think it's an opportunity for Donald Trump's opponents or is it just squabbling among siblings?

I would start by pointing out that these siblings were always an uneasy coalition. There has always been a broad streak of antisemitism in the maga movement and, at the same time, strong support for Israel among rightwing Christians like Mike Huckabee and Jewish media figures like Ben Shapiro. Recall, for example, that Candace Owens has always trafficked in antisemitic conspiracies, and that hostilities came to a head in 2024, as she and Shapiro clashed over the October 7 attacks on Israel launched from Gaza.

That resulted in Owens being fired by Shapiro’s Daily Wire, but it long predated Trump’s return to the White House or Charlie Kirk’s death. What Kirk’s murder did was create a new focus for antisemitic conspiracy theories: Owens, Milo Yiannopoulos, and others have floated false theories about Israel’s involvement with Kirk’s death, for example, while Tucker Carlson and groyper Nick Fuentes (who any number of people thought might really have been involved with the assassination) jumped into that space for their own clicks.

And now, the president of the Heritage Foundation’s support for Carlson – and refusal to condemn Fuentes – has sent prominent conservatives running off to Mike Pence’s project. So, while Kirk’s murder may have been the tipping point, these fractures were there already.

I also think that Charlie Kirk was probably more broadly liked in retrospect than he was during his lifetime. I knew several maga influencers who saw him as an opportunist, someone who was suddenly sucking down millions in donations that had previously gone elsewhere. Once the narrative of Saint Charlie was established however, you didn’t hear those criticisms.

What will be interesting to see is whether Erika Kirk’s power play in expanding the organization’s presence, particularly in Texas and Florida high schools, creates a possibility for a maga future without Trump, QAnon, and the fringier elements of the coalition — something more corporate, along the lines of the Campus Crusade for Christ or Young Americans for Freedom.

Vice President JD Vance seems to be positioning himself for a post-Trump future as heir to the maga movement. Is there a maga movement without Trump and if so, does Vance have the juice?

No, JD Vance will not be the next president. He has real deficits, in the sense that he is interracially married, he has no charisma or stage presence, and he projects very little authority. Also, frankly, he just isn’t mean enough. He tries to be mean on X, but just ends up sounding like a cluck, whereas Trump’s cruel and incoherent ravings have a kind of weird charm for the maga faithful.

I also think Vance is a terrible campaigner and a mediocre fundraiser, and working for Trump will not have made him more than marginally better at these things. He barely won the primary for his Senate seat, and only because Trump jumped in and pushed him over the top and Peter Thiel gave him millions of dollars.

But I don’t think there is a maga movement without Trump. It will be something else, something that bears a relationship to it, much as many of the rightwing or explicitly fascist parties in Europe have evolved out of the fascisms of the interwar period, coyly gesture to that history but also disown it. AfP, for example, bears a strong resemblance to Nazism, but of course, since Nazism is illegal in Germany, it has to gesture at it rather than be explicit about its genealogy. Georgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, was steeped in Italian postwar fascism. She is a fascist and she governs as a fascist, even though her party is euphemistically called the Brothers of Italy.

There’s another problem. Like all fascisms, maga is a nostalgic movement, imagining a nation that strayed from an “original” America that was white, virtuous and Christian. This produces two problems. One is the profound unease many magas have with the fact that JD Vance is married to a brown daughter of immigrants and that he has mixed-race children. The many photos of Vance embracing Erika Kirk, who I think is going to have real problems hanging on to the very male-centered TPUSA, have anointed her as a potential “office wife.”

But the second problem is that Trump’s nostalgia, when translated into economic policies, is driving the nation into debt at an accelerated pace, at the same time as he is cutting as many Americans loose from the social safety net as he can. This is going to drive the United States into a social crisis that the Republican Party will not survive in its current form. It’s why we see so many GOP office holders streaming for the exits. It’s not just the 2026 midterms: it’s that they understand that there is no Vance presidency in 2028 — nor a Rubio, DeSantis or Abbott presidency.

The rightwing media complex is vast and powerful. And it's getting bigger. Can you imagine a future in which Republicans shed all pretense to equality and outwardly embrace bigotry?

I think those tendencies were there from the beginning. Part of what is so startling about the maga movement is the reemergence of a variety of bigoted, authoritarian tendencies in American politics that for the first half of the 20th century expressed themselves in the Democratic Party as the Klan, the Anti-Immigration League and White Citizens Councils, and in the Republican Party as America First, McCarthyism, and conservative Catholicism. All of these tendencies had fused in the New Right by the 1970s — a movement that looks shockingly tolerant from our perspective, but it really wasn’t. It was just more polite. And those tendencies survived, not just in politics, but among ordinary Americans. People don’t start hanging Confederate flags in their 60s.

But it wasn’t until rightwing media — whether Fox or YouTube or major publishing houses marketing rightwing books — that these views go mainstream. Remember that the Tea Party was born, not just as a racist reaction to Obama that was willing to express itself in explicitly racist language, but as a movement designed to take over the GOP. Tea Partiers weren’t fringe — they understood themselves as “real” Americans, as opposed to the guy with the funny name born in Hawaii.

And that’s where the idea that America has been usurped really goes mainstream on the right. If you look at Ann Coulter’s 2015 book, ¡Adios, America! The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole, it’s all there. And remember that she breaks with Trump because he didn’t carry out the deportation agenda he promised, didn’t build the wall, didn’t eliminate birthright citizenship. If you listen to Coulter today, she says: “This is the President I voted for.”

David Brooks, the conservative columnist who is beloved by liberals, wrote last month that the Democrats make too much of the Epstein story. He said they’re acting as conspiratorially as the Republicans.

Brooks said he was “especially startled” to see leading progressives characterizing all elites as part of “the Epstein class.” If he were a Democrat, he said, he’d be focused on “the truth”: “the elites didn’t betray you, but they did ignore you. They didn’t mean to harm you.”

Brooks went on to say: “If I were a Democratic politician … I’d add that America can’t get itself back on track if the culture is awash in distrust, cynicism, catastrophizing lies and conspiracymongering. No governing majority will ever form if we’re locked in a permanent class war.”

Sounds noble, but he didn’t mean any of it.

Last week, it was discovered that David Brooks had palled around with Jeffrey Epstein. Pictures of him were part of a trove released by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. It was deduced that they were taken at a 2011 “billionaires dinner.” A 2019 report by Buzzfeed identified Brooks, among others, along with Epstein, who had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for sex just three years prior.

Buzzfeed: “In 2011, after Epstein had been released from a Florida jail, it was an exclusive gathering, dominated by tech industry leadership. A gallery of photos taken at the event by Nathan Myhrvold, formerly Microsoft’s chief technology officer, named 20 guests, including just one media representative: New York Times columnist David Brooks.”

While defending Brooks, the Times inadvertently confirmed Epstein's presence at the dinner. “Mr. Brooks had no contact with [Epstein] before or after his single attendance at a widely-attended dinner.”

Sure, but Brooks knew Epstein was there. If he didn’t know about his crimes, which is doubtful, he still chose to write a column warning the Democrats against waging “permanent class war” without disclosing his non-trivial association with the namesake of “the Epstein class.”

It’s bad faith, up and down.

“I think that's what we get when (very) wealthy people are shaping opinion,” said Denny Carter, publisher of Bad Faith Times, a newsletter. “We can never really know the depths of their conflicts of interest, whether it's covering for a known pedophile ringleader or promoting a cause or politician or company that will benefit them financially.”

In 2023, Denny wrote a piece highlighting the importance of bad faith, which is to say, if you don’t put it at the center of your thinking about rightwing politics, you’re going to be very, very confused. He wrote:

“Republicans today support women’s sports (if it means barring trans folks from participating). They love a member of the Kennedy family. They’re skeptical of Big Pharma. They hate banks. None of it – not a single part of it – makes any sense unless you understand bad faith.”

They never mean what they say.

Denny brought my attention to that two-year-old piece by reposting it. I immediately thought of Brooks. Scolding the Democrats about demonizing “the Epstein class” while fraternizing with “the Epstein class” (it was a “billionaires dinner,” for Christ’s sake) – that’s the kind of behavior you might expect from a man who’s ready to betray you.

“You see these op-eds about supporting the fossil fuel industry and continuing to accelerate climate collapse in the guise of electoral advice for Democrats without having any idea if the writer means what they're saying or has some financial stake in promoting Big Oil and its various subsidiaries,” Denny told me in a brief interview. “You assume good faith among these writers and influencers at your own peril.”

In a 2023 piece you recently reposted, you said the world is upside down. The right loves Russia. The left hates Russia. This is confusing for those of us who remember 20 years ago. What happened?

This one, I think, is pretty straightforward. The right despised the collectivism inherent in Soviet ideology and the left was curious about how it might look in action. The fall of the USSR (eventually) led to a totalitarian fascist Russian state ruled by a vicious dictator who used religion and "traditional values" as a weapon against his many enemies, or anyone who dared promote democracy in Russia.

Listen to Putin and you'll hear a Republican babbling about “woke” this and “woke” that and positioning himself as the last barrier between so-called traditional society and some kind of far-left hellscape.

It's the same script every modern fascist leader uses, and it appeals very much to Republican lawmakers and their voters. You sometimes read stories about Americans fleeing to Russia to escape the “woke” scourge, only to deeply regret it. That's always funny or tragic, depending on how you look at it.

You say bad faith explains the upside-downness, but you also suggest the center has not held -- that social fragmentation brought us here. You even cite David Bowie. How did you come to that insight?

I've been a Bowie superfan for a while now, and like a lot of folks who spend too much time online, I've seen the viral clip of Bowie explaining the world-changing potential of the internet way back in 1999.

He was right on a few levels, but most of all he identified the internet's potential for destroying any sense of commonly held reality. Here we are today, a quarter century later, trying to operate in a political world in which there are a handful of different realities at any one time.

A traitorous right-wing mob tried to overthrow the US government in 2021. We all saw the footage. We all know what happened. Yet there are tens of millions of Americans who believe January 6 did not happen or was in fact a walking tour of the US Capitol.

We can't even agree that there was a coup attempt orchestrated by the outgoing president because social media took that event, broke it into a million pieces, and allowed bad actors to piece it back together to fit a politically convenient narrative. I wrote about it here.

You suggest that simply telling the truth won't fix things. Why?

I don't mean to sound cynical but if we've learned anything over the past decade of small-d democratic backsliding, it's that the truth doesn't mean anything anymore because of the societal fragmentation created by social media. There is no truth. We can choose our own adventure now because our phones will confirm our priors about what happened and why.

Pro-democracy folks in the US can't rely on facts and figures to win the day. They won't. The Harris campaign reached a highwater mark in August 2024 when they were ignoring facts and figures and coasting on vibes. It was a heady time because it seemed like Democrats had finally learned their lesson: good-faith “Leslie Knope” politics [facts will win the day] has no place in the modern world, if it ever did.

The right has a gigantic media complex and it's getting bigger. Twitter, CBS News and soon perhaps CNN -- all are right-coded or soon could be. Are you seeing recognition among liberals and leftists that this imbalance is unsustainable? If so, what's the plan?

Look, there are plenty of pro-democracy folks in the world with more money than they could spend in 50 lifetimes. A little bit of that money could go a long way in establishing pro-democracy media outlets that operate as propaganda outlets for the kind of liberalism that has been washed away by the right's capture of the media. Democracy needs to be sold to Americans just as fascism was sold to them, first in the seedy corners of the internet, then on Elon Musk's hub for international fascism, then in mainstream outlets run by people cooking their brains daily on Musk's site.

I'm not sure of a specific plan. I'm just a blogger. But people are awash in fascist propaganda 24 hours a day on every major social media site. It has ruined a lot of relationships and radicalized Americans who spent most of their lives ignoring politics as the domain of nerds.

There has to be a flood of pro-democracy messaging in the media and that can't happen without billions being invested in a massive network of outlets that can effectively push back on the right's unreality.

I wrote about the selling of democracy here.

The meaning of "elites" is central to the fascist project. As defined by David Brooks, they are educated liberal-ish people who drive Teslas, or used to. With an affordability crisis underway, liberals and leftists have a chance to redefine "elites" for the long haul. Thoughts?

I think engaging the right on the meaning of "elites" is probably a road to nowhere. They will label as "elite" anyone who has ever read a book or graduated from college. I would say the left can and should point out the vast gulf between real populism and fake right-wing populism. Media outlets, of course, have conflated these two because the media assumes everyone in politics is operating in pristine good faith.

But pointing out that Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are real populists while Trump and his lackeys talk a big populist game while selling the country for parts to their golf buddies and business associates could offer people real insight into what it means to be on the side of the working person. Barack Obama has toyed with the idea of rejecting Trump as a populist; I think every pro-democracy American needs to push back harder on that label because it's disingenuous and a powerful tool for fascist politicians who have nothing if they don't have at least some working-class support.