Top Stories Daily Listen Now
RawStory
RawStory

This expert shatters Trump's reasoning for troop surge that saw two shot in DC

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

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

West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, deployed a number of his state’s guardsmen to Washington as part of the president’s scheme to send military forces to US cities.

Donald Trump has suggested that local police departments are failing to fight crime.

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

Trump's gambit was never about crime-fighting, Radley told me. It was about an administration putting on a show of force.

“That's really what we've seen in D.C. Guard troops have been patrolling in low-crime, tourist areas, not in parts of the city with higher crime rates.”

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

The old debate was underscored by a shared understanding, he said — that democracies don’t use the military for law enforcement:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The truth is that Trump has always:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump's thug just revealed this cowardly truth about the GOP

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

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

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

That’s when Tree characterized the September boat bombing as a much bigger deal.

“I think this policy of murdering civilians goes much deeper in this administration … This was a conspiracy to commit murder and that's how it should be investigated.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holsey said no.

But Adm. Bradley said yes.

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

“Just sink the boats," he said, according to NPR.

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

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

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

Donald Trump suggested that they should be executed for sedition. Hegseth threatened to bring Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), who is a retired Navy pilot, back into service in order to court martial him.

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

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

The indignation promises to rise even higher. At the classified briefing last week, lawmakers saw video of the first and second strikes on Sept. 2. Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent: “It looks like two classically shipwrecked people.”

It is a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight,” Smith added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump's thug just turned America against him — for good

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

How?

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

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

Donald Trump is now helping Hegseth run from criminal consequences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He went on:

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

Contempt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This fighting Dem understands what's needed in the time of Trump

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

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

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

The reason, Gallego said, was Donald Trump.

Norms are “out the window.”

“You’re talking about norms in the time of Donald Trump?” Gallego said.

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

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

Again, Gallego is representative.

He was asked what he would say to Pete Hegseth after the Defense Secretary threatened to prosecute Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ).

“You will never ever be half the man that Sen. Kelly is,” Gallego said.

“You, sir, are a coward. And the fact that you are following this order from the president shows how big of a coward you are. I can't wait until you are no longer the secretary of defense” (my italics).

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

But here, Gallego suggests a new set of norms:

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

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

He even used the word “tribunal.”

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

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

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

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

Is this talk of future consequences real or just talk?

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

The fear of power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need more than just vetocracy.

We need a real revitalization of effective governance in America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there it is.

Win primaries and win the war of ideas.

We gotta do both.

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

Trump may never recover from this breathtaking backfire

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or it should be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earl is the former managing editor of Stars and Stripes, a newspaper covering the military and military affairs. He now publishes the newsletter Enough Already. Like me, he’s a regular contributor to Raw Story.

“Either we are a law-abiding country or we aren't,” he told me.

Here’s my short interview with Earl.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We damn well better learn from that.

This MAGA leader's angry exit spells mortal danger for Trump

Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene surprised me Friday by announcing her resignation, effective Jan. 5.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On ABC’s The View, co-host Sunny Hostin said, “I feel like I’m sitting next to a completely different Majorie Taylor Greene.”

Co-host Joy Behar said, “Maybe you should become a Democrat.”

In response, Greene said, “I’m not a Democrat. I think both parties have failed.”

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

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

But the truth is probably the opposite.

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

Greene implied as much in her resignation announcement.

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

She said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

In her resignation announcement, Greene affirmed that the enemies are indeed real:

“Standing up for American women who were raped at 14 years old, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president.”

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

There will be no storm, she suggests.

She isn’t a traitor to MAGA.

But, by implication, Trump is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They don’t vote for Democrats.

They stay home.

Fake working class candidates like this one won't help Dems regain control

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

My interest in him is personal, not political. Platner claims to be the son of the American working class. On the basis of that authority, he hopes Mainers will give him the power to fight for the common man against an oligarchy that’s crushing him.

“I’m a veteran, oysterman and working-class Mainer who’s seen this state become unlivable for working people,” he said. “And that makes me deeply angry.”

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

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

There are many ways of interpreting these facts. To me, they paint a picture of a man born into a comfortable and supportive middle class family who over time chose for himself a “working-class lifestyle.”

Graham Platner didn’t finish college. He served in the armed forces. Oyster farming looks tough. These are choices that he made amid an abundance of them. No son of the working class has such luxury.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like Platner, none comes from the working class.

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

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

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

Setting aside the serious and obvious differences, I see a similar dynamic at work in Graham Platner. He wants the authority that comes with being seen as a son of the working class who has had to fight his way through life, but none of the pain of fighting. He wants to accuse his opponents of lacking the courage to do what needs to be done. And he wants influential people, the online left, to play along with him.

“Nothing p----- me off more,” he said, as if he would know.

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

15 reasons the GOP's Epstein nightmare is nowhere near over

The House passed a bill this week that would force the Department of Justice to release what’s now known as the Epstein files. The measure passed overwhelmingly, by a vote of 427-1. Even before it arrived at the Senate, Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called for its passage by unanimous consent. He succeeded. The bill went2 to the president for his signature.

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

Here are 15 thoughts.

  1. After all the fighting to prevent passage, we should ask why Trump is now going to authorize the release of documents in which his own name appeared so frequently that the attorney general determined that it was better not to release them at all.
  2. Mark Epstein suggested an answer. He’s Jeffrey Epstein’s brother. Yesterday, he told Chris Cuomo that Trump changed his mind over the weekend, and encouraged the Republicans to vote in the affirmative, because “they’re sanitizing the files.”
  3. Mark Epstein: “I’ve been recently told the reason they’re going to be releasing these things, and the reason for the flip is that they’re sanitizing these files. There’s a facility in Winchester, Virginia, where they’re scrubbing the files to take Republican names out of it. That’s what I was told by a pretty good source.”
  4. Mark Epstein denied the claim that the widely circulated email in which he asked his brother to ask Steven Bannon if Vladimir Putin had photos of “Trump blowing Bubba” is evidence of kompromat. However, “Jeffrey definitely had dirt on Trump,” he told Cuomo. “You could see in the emails. Trump could deny it all he wants, but it’s pretty clear everything Trump says is a lie.”
  5. Trump put intense pressure on House Republicans who are prominent voices within the MAGA movement. The House speaker humiliated himself many times over by refusing to swear in a congresswoman who was the last vote needed to pass the discharge petition. Over 1,000 FBI agents pored over as many as 100,000 documents in the Epstein case to redact each instance of Trump’s name. It was after that process that AG Pam Bondi decided against releasing them, triggering Trump’s current dilemma. If only the names of Trump’s enemies appear in the files once they’re released, no one is going to believe it.
  6. The bill requires, per Bill Kristol, “that the Justice Department make public within thirty days all the unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in its possession related to any of Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal activities, civil settlements, immunity, plea agreements, and investigatory proceedings. It specifies that ‘no record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.’”
  7. Moreover: “The authors of the legislation tried to make sure any exceptions were narrowly drawn. The attorney general can only withhold or redact information from personal or medical files — the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy — or information that would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution, ‘provided such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary.’ The law requires that all redactions must be accompanied by a written justification in the Federal Register.”
  8. But, as CNN’s Jake Tapper said after House passage: “The legislation as it stands clearly says, ‘The attorney general may withhold or redact personally identifiable, information of victims or victims, personal and medical files,’ and any material that depicts injury, physical abuse, death or child sexual abuse, or jeopardize an active investigation or national security.”
  9. In these loopholes are the makings of a familiar play, wrote MS Now’s Ryan Teague Beckwith. Trump will pretend to be exonerated. That’s what he did with documents showing his collusion with Russia before the 2016 election, and that’s what he’s going to do with the Epstein files. Teague Beckwith: “If the report doesn’t prove the worst thing imaginable, then it proves Trump is totally innocent … We won’t know what is in the Epstein files until they’re released. But no matter what they show, we can expect Trump will say that they exonerate him.”
  10. There is one big difference, though. Back then, when the Republicans wanted Trump to get reelected in 2020, they had incentive to play along with his makebelieve. Things are very different now. Though Trump is selling the idea of running for an illegal third term, ambitious Republicans aren’t buying it. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie and others are competing for advantage in anticipation of the time when Trump is gone. So the GOP push for releasing the Epstein files can be seen as a fight over future party leadership. If enough Republicans believe his time is over, that might expose Trump to the outcomes of Democratic aggression: impeachment, removal, and perhaps prosecution. ABC News’ Jonathan Karl was right to say Trump seemed rattled. But he isn’t rattled by defeat. He fears what could happen if his party stands by and watches.
  11. Taylor Greene and Massie speak for the party’s conspiracy wing. Supporters of that faction wanted to see members of a Jewish pedo-cabal, which is what Epstein represented, brought to justice: arrested, tried and executed in what was called “The Storm.” They were not interested in whether Trump was incriminated. They didn’t believe he was until he triggered a crisis of faith in him. He may yet be redeemed, but that won’t depend on pretending to be exonerated. Trump’s redemption will depend on how much ambitious Republicans fluent in the coded language of antisemitism are willing to play along.
  12. Some liberals appear to be looking to the Epstein files the same way they used to look to the Mueller report. In doing so, I think they’re missing the big picture. Almost certainly, the Epstein files are not about something specific, like “Trump blowing Bubba.” They are about a capital-T truth. The Republicans know it, especially those who are attuned to the QAnon conspiracy theory. For them, the truth is that the Democrats are part of an evil, Jewish conspiracy against “real Americans.” All that’s needed to achieve “justice” is “proof.” Today, House Oversight Chairman James Comer said he will provide it. "If there's no Epstein list – and we want to find out if there were people that were violating the law and who they were – we'll have to construct our own."
  13. The Democrats must counter with their own capital-T truth, one that’s fundamentally different from the Republicans’ in that it’s grounded in reality. Specifically, in the testimony of every single one of the survivors of Epstein’s child-sex trafficking syndicate and the elite men who sustained it. Broadly, in the daily experiences of everyone living with the legal and moral consequences of an elite cohort whose corruption is so deep and whose impunity is so vast that we’re literally paying for it.
  14. “I was going to places like Johnstown, Pa., and I was going to places like Warren, Ohio. When I was there, the issue would come up about ‘the Epstein class’ — that’s what they called it. They said, well, are you on the side of the forgotten Americans or on the side of the Epstein class?” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) told the Times.
  15. The California congressman expounded on that Tuesday, saying the Epstein vote should be seen as part of the Democratic Party’s efforts to “build an enduring coalition around a vision of new economic patriotism that can unite the left and right. The elements of that are to rail against an elite governing class that has created a system that’s not working for ordinary Americans. And then to offer a concrete vision of how we’re going to prioritize the economic independence and success of those forgotten Americans, as opposed to … the Epstein class that has accumulated power and doesn’t play by the rules and has impunity at the expense of ordinary Americans.”

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

Trump's Epstein fiasco makes sense if you remember this insanity at the heart of MAGA

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

On Monday, we saw concrete consequences of that crisis.

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

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

Greene did not back down from calling for the release of the Epstein files.

“It really makes you wonder what is in those files and who and what country is putting so much pressure on him,” she said. “I forgive him and I will pray for him to return to his original MAGA promises.”

Then Trump retreated. Early Monday, he said, “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files. We have nothing to hide.”

If that’s true, he could order the Justice Department to release the files.

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

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They called it “The Storm.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The way Trump's acting shows this time he truly is worried

I want to get back to some of the content that was found in the 23,000 emails released by the House Oversight Committee that were obtained from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein.

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

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

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

‘Use the spa to try to procure girls’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using Giuffre to shield Trump

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

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

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

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

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

Guilty is as guilty does

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

Which is to say, like he’s guilty.

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

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

Perhaps that’s due to growing public skepticism.

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

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

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

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

This hapless leader can't even see when he's winning

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

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

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

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

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

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

While there was no serious movement toward abolishing it, just talking about it seems to have given Schumer the chills.

“This was all about the filibuster,” Tumulty said on Twitter.

When asked if she meant the Democrats hoped that the Republicans would nuke it, she clarified: “They were afraid they would.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This direct line leads from 9/11 to Trump

This week, on Veterans Day, as I sometimes do, I thought about the memorable preface to Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel, Breakfast of Champions.

This is what he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One million.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That the silence was the voice of God.

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

Trump’s extortionist tactics were backfiring, leaving Republicans to absorb the blame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This man could have brought down Trump. There's no way to defend him

MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian recently discussed a new book that claims to reveal the nature of deliberations inside the US Department of Justice after the 2020 presidential election that “may have hampered the federal criminal investigations” of Donald Trump.

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

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

Dilanian cited some of those examples from the book. They are damning.

They show time and again that Garland’s Republican critics were wrong. Leonnig and Davis write that Garland made sure the cases were free of even a hint of political consideration. He “had chosen to impose a very conservative interpretation” of DOJ policies. He froze the cases prior to the 2022 midterms in the belief that no action should be taken near or during elections.

“Trump was not even on the ballot and had not yet declared his presidential candidacy for 2024,” Dilanian said. “But Garland nonetheless imposed the freeze.”

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

He and Smith “faced criticism then from Democrats who wanted them to move faster, but no evidence has surfaced showing that anyone from the White House imposed that sort of pressure.”

Moreover, Dilanian wrote, though we are months into Trump’s second term, his allies “have not produced evidence establishing that any decision in the cases was made for political reasons or that any White House official or Biden partisan had any influences over the investigations."

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

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

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

Colorado’s highest court had decided on 14th Amendment grounds that Trump’s role in the J6 insurrection disqualified him. After the Supreme Court overturned that decision, it was clear that no court was going to stop Trump before the election and that voters were suddenly burdened with the responsibility of deciding his verdict on their own.

As I said at the time, the court’s Republican justices put democracy on a collision course with the law.

“If he loses, he’s guilty of all crimes committed against democracy. (Perhaps the justice system would then proceed.) But if he wins, he’s innocent. He will have been granted absolution for everything he’s ever done. Everything. There might never again be such a thing as a crime if the president does it. He could have his opponents murdered, safe in the knowledge that a majority approves. Democracy will have obliterated the rule of law.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump's house of lies collapses under this undeniable fact

Look, Zohran Mamdani is not the future of the Democratic Party.

I know this is true, because the same was said of Eric Adams. New York City’s outgoing mayor did not live up to his billing. Its incoming mayor (presumably) is almost certainly not going to live up to his. The reason isn’t because Mamdani will become as corrupt as Adams became (though who knows?). The reason is that New York is New York.

Yes, it’s the largest urban center in the country. Yes, its influence cannot be overstated. But what’s good, or bad, for New York isn’t necessarily what’s good, or bad, for America. It may no longer be entirely true that all politics is local, but most of politics still is.

Once you accept the truth of this, all other considerations of Mamdani and the rest of the Democratic Party seem rather dull, as he becomes just another politician in a constellation of politicians who figured out how to appeal to a winning majority in their respective constituencies.

Once you accept that a city isn’t a metaphor for a country, or for a national party, the talk about how he’s dividing Democrats looks kinda stupid. Yes, he calls himself a democratic socialist. So what? Is that going to work in a place like Virginia? Maybe, but probably not. If it did, someone would have tried it. Since no one has, there’s your answer.

Think of it this way. Donald Trump is from New York. His business is based there. He represents the city’s elites. But he’s never won there. Three straight campaigns made no difference. Is anyone going to seriously suggest that, in this context, as New York goes, so goes the country (or so goes the GOP)? No, because that would be stupid.

Yet somehow, seemingly no one thinks how stupid it is to ask if Mamdani is the future of the Democrats, because only the Democrats, never the Republicans, are subjected to that kind of questioning. The reason for this is rooted in the Democratic Party itself, among certain elites who want to prevent it from becoming a fully realized people’s party. And they do this, foremost, by accepting as true the premise of the lies told about the Democrats by Trump and the Republicans.

What lies? First, remember that the number of actual democratic socialists in the Democratic Party (I’m talking about people who choose to call themselves by that name) is vanishingly small. Only two have any kind of national profile. (They are US Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Sanders doesn’t really count. He’s technically an independent.)

This stone-cold fact means nothing to Donald Trump. All Democrats, all liberals, all progressives, all leftists, and all socialists, democratic and otherwise, are the name. They are radical Marxist anarchist communists or whatever word salad pops into his soupy brain. There are no enemies to his right. There is nothing but enemies to his left. Does he respect his enemies enough to speak truthfully about them?

No, he lies.

His lies are what certain elites inside the Democratic Party are paying the most attention to. They are not celebrating Mamdani’s success. They are not defending him on the merits. They are not standing on the truth. They are not even standing in solidarity. What they are most focused on is the lies Donald Trump tells, which are magnified by the right-wing media complex, which are echoed by the press corps.

And what they see is either a fight they believe can’t be won or an opportunity to shiv a competing faction within the Democratic Party. Either way requires accepting as true the lies told about their own people, thus making it seem perfectly reasonable to wonder if winning a major election in America’s biggest city is good for the Democrats.

(The answer: don’t be stupid. Of course, it is.)

That these certain elites would rather surrender to lies than fight them tells us their beef with Mamdani isn’t about ideology. (It’s not about whether “democratic socialism,” or any other school of thought, would be appealing to voters outside New York.) It’s about how Mamdani, but specifically lies about him, complicates messaging efforts in a media landscape already heavily coded in favor of Donald Trump, especially of his view of the Democrats, which is that they’re all communists.

Those who are worried about Mamdani’s impact on the Democrats also take for granted the assertion that voters rejected Kamala Harris on ideological grounds – that her policies were out of touch with voters whose main concern was good-paying jobs and lower inflation.

They are ignoring that Harris actually campaigned on so-called working-class issues and that few voters could hear her working-class messaging over the din of Trump’s lies about her. The crisis facing the Democrats is not one of ideology. It’s a crisis of information. Certain elites are pretending otherwise, because it’s better for them if they do.

Mamdani’s victory is a local matter. That is the lesson for certain elites inside the party. It’s also a lesson for their loudest critics.

Certain progressives, let’s call them, believe that Mamdani’s popularity comes from focusing on class (the cost of living in New York). They believe that by doing so, he transcended “identity politics” to amass a following sizable enough to defeat the Democratic establishment.

This overlooks the fact that the establishment, in the form of the DNC and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, are backing him. But more important is again the question of ideology. Certain elites think his will turn off voters outside New York. Certain progressive think it will turn them on. They believe a class-based ideology is the unifying force that working people across the country have needed. They just can’t see it, they say, because the establishment gets in the way.

But race and class can’t be easily disentangled, not in America. To many Americans, the idea of government of, by and for the people is a perversion of the “natural order.” It flattens the hierarchies of and within race and class. This belief is bone deep in many of us. It prevents lots of white Americans from being in solidarity with nonwhite Americans, even if they face similar grinding hardships.

Most of all, such thinking overlooks the basics. Many New Yorkers struggle to make ends meet. Housing is too high. Healthcare is too expensive. Food is too much. I trust Mamdani when he says he’s a democratic socialist. But I also trust that he’s not fool enough to believe that struggle is the same as class consciousness. He identified the problem. He asked voters to give him the power to try to solve it.

That’s not ideology.

That’s just good politics.

Copyright © 2025 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | Masthead | Privacy Policy | Manage Preferences | Debug Logs
For corrections contact corrections@rawstory.com , for support contact support@rawstory.com .