Top Stories Daily Listen Now
RawStory
RawStory

Of course Trump has no Venezuela plan — look what made him attack it

Why did Donald Trump invade Venezuela? His id made him.

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

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

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

It isn’t normal.

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

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

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

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

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

They make more sense than Trump has ever made.

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

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

As I said at the time:

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

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

Not just any war, though.

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

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

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

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

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

Every reason for doing anything is downstream from there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s our conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think this is basically Marco Rubio.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This man nailed Trump — then elite conspirators helped him wriggle free

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

And Donald Trump got away with it.

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

Special counsel Jack Smith, who investigated the events of that treasonous day, told lawmakers last month he could prove Trump’s guilt.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power,” Smith said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The institutions of democracy — in this, I include the courts, the media and universities as well as the American people — now face a never-ending insurrection, because they failed to hold a traitor, and the corrupt elites before him, accountable for their crimes. And as long as we keep failing, we can keep expecting more of the same.

As Trump said after the attack on Venezuela, “We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us."

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

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

Adam chose to be optimistic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It really shakes your faith in our politics.

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

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

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

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

Trump lies show White House is terrified — rightly — of this victim's simple humanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We have a 6-year-old at school.”

Good's former teacher, Kent Wascom, a professor at Old Dominion University, posted a memorial on Twitter.

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

He added: “God damn them all.”

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

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

Vice President JD Vance blamed the victim.

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

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

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

Every single word is a lie.

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the Times investigation.

I will add a small but telling detail.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why would the FBI do this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They had to desecrate her, too.

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

Trump's attack on Venezuela is linked to the Epstein files — but not the way you think

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

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

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

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

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

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

That, among other things, offers hope for justice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, it's a tough question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This mega MAGA mover saw it was all a fraud — soon voters will do too

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

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

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

Greene spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. She defended the January 6 insurrection. She suggested support for executing Democrats. She once stalked a survivor of a shooting massacre to accuse him of being a fraud. Am I supposed to believe she’s had a change of heart?

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

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

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

“The multiple fumbles and lies about the Epstein files have given some Republicans a valid reason to declare their independence,” Claire told me.

“Creating air between themselves and Trump will be critical to any Republican who wants a political career once maga starts to swirl the drain next year. We are seeing tremendous swings in districts Trump won in double digits, and that it is the Republicans’ failure to deliver that will, in the end, lead to their defeat, not just in 2026, but in 2028.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is why MAGA will die when Trump is gone

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

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

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

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

Such fractures, however, were always evident, according to political historian Claire Potter, publisher of Political Junkie.

“There has always been a broad streak of antisemitism in the MAGA movement and, at the same time, strong support for Israel among rightwing Christians like Mike Huckabee and Jewish media figures like Ben Shapiro,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Epstein sideshow exposes elites' bad faith — and the ruin of our country

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s bad faith, up and down.

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

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

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

They never mean what they say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wrote about the selling of democracy here.

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

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

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

The Bari Weiss 60 Minutes scandal is just one sign of drastic media rot

In light of the scandal at 60 Minutes, it bears repeating that the primary crisis facing American democracy is about information. There are just too many ways for the rich and powerful to control the truth.

Over the weekend, news broke that the new head of CBS News, Bari Weiss, had spiked a highly revealing 60 Minutes investigation into the torture prison in El Salvador, where the president has sent deportees.

According to lead reporter Sharyn Alfonsi, the investigation had gone through all the levels that investigations go through at 60 Minutes, including lawyers. But at the last minute, Weiss yanked it, saying it couldn’t run without a reaction from the Trump administration.

For non-journalists, understand that this is not a valid reason. Alfonsi asked for a reaction. That’s what reporters do after they discover facts that those in power do not want to be made public. That she didn’t get one is a part of the story. In saying the story couldn’t air without one, Bari Weiss in effect gave Donald Trump control of editorial choices.

And hence control of the truth.

Non-journalists should also understand that this is what Weiss is being paid to do. Trump-aligned billionaires Larry and David Ellison, father and son, respectively, installed her after taking ownership of CBS. She’s best known as an “anti-woke” pundit. She has no experience in reporting or broadcasting.

But what Weiss does have is the “only qualification that matters,” said Jennifer Schulze, a Chicago journalist and publisher of Indistinct Chatter, a newsletter about the news.

“She embraces Trump/MAGA friendly content,” Jennifer told me.

“I thought the Erika Kirk townhall was a questionable move, but even that ratings/advertising disaster can’t compare with what she’s just done to 60 Minutes,” Jennifer went on to say. “To suggest that the piece on the El Salvador torture prison was somehow unfinished and need more work is a cover for, 'Trump won’t like it so it can’t run.’”

The 60 Minutes scandal is one example of the larger moral and professional corruption of the news by the rich and powerful. In this wide-ranging interview with me, Jennifer discusses courageous local coverage of ICE raids, the sacrilege of Olivia Nuzzi, the threat of media consolidation, Trump’s health and the apparent end of PBS in Arkansas.

“It's such a shame that Republicans turned PBS into a political issue,” Jennifer said. “It's been a valuable, free source of news and information for the entire country, but the future of PBS looks grim, especially in red states where there is little or no political will to keep it alive.”

JS: Let's start locally. Chicago news media has been covering ICE raids better than the national media. Is that a fair statement?

JS: Local Chicago media is on the story every single day 24/7. The coverage has been and continues to be really impressive, even inspiring. It's exactly what everyone should want from local, fact-based reporters and news outlets: timely, sustained, in-depth.

It's also deeply personal. These reporters and photographers live here. This is happening to their city and they are out there every day making sure the stories get told. With the help of vigilant residents and rapid response groups, Chicago journalists are holding ICE/CPB to account.

The videos of immigration incidents along with eyewitness on-the-ground accounts of how ICE rammed a car, not the other way around, or how ICE threw tear gas canisters at a peaceful crowd, are providing some powerful truth-telling. Many of these accounts gathered by our local press have also been used in federal court cases to show how and when Border Patrol head Greg Bovino, Kristi Noem and their federal agents are lying and behaving unlawfully. The national press dips in from time to time, then leaves. It is not lead story news for national newspapers or TV networks, but it should be!

Olivia Nuzzi's book, American Canto, is a sales dud. Yet here I am asking you about her. Why is she important, or a liability, to journalism? Why is that important to non-media folk?

The Nuzzi story is very much insider baseball for media types. It is at its heart a story about massive, ongoing failures by all involved, and that includes the magazines she worked for and the other journalists who continue to prop her up. I would want non-media people to be reminded that most journalists operate by a strict code of ethics that prohibit reporters from being romantically involved with a source and doing political work for a source. Nuzzi is apparently guilty of both.

The story of 21st-century news media is the story of 21st-century corporate consolidation. I'm thinking about the Ellisons controlling CBS and bidding for Warner. Why is that bad for democracy?

The last thing the country needs is Donald Trump running CNN. That's essentially what will happen if billionaire David Ellison succeeds in taking over the news network's parent company, WBD.

Ellison has apparently already promised Trump sweeping changes at CNN, including firing news anchors that Trump dislikes. We've already seen how Ellison is accommodating Trump at CBS with the hiring of rightwing pundit Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of the news division, naming a Trump ally as the network's “ombudsman,” and promises to shift news content to a more “fair, balanced” coverage, which in maga-speak means pro-Trump plus no fact-checking. It would be a big blow to fact-based journalism and democracy if the same pro-Trump sensibilities take hold at yet another news organization like CNN.

There was endless news about President Joe Biden's health. There was almost nothing but news about his cognitive decline after the June debate. Trump is clearly in decline. He falls asleep during televised cabinet meetings. Yet there’s nothing close to the media's treatment of Biden. Why and why is that imbalance important?

Ten-plus years in and the mainstream press still struggles with sticking to any one Trump story. Of course, that's part of Trump's plan — to flood the zone with endless stories so that nothing sticks. I think that's the main reason we don't see ongoing news coverage of Trump's age/cognitive ability/and plain ole bat---- crazy behavior.

Trump falls asleep in a cabinet meeting and it's a one- maybe two-day story, because here's another weird thing or another international crisis to cover. Sometimes I wonder if it's the press version of FOMO. We can't really dig into this topic because we'll miss that one over there. I also think we have to acknowledge that the White House press corps has changed dramatically since Trump came into office. This is not the same press corps that was chasing all those Biden age stories. Now there are dozens of rightwing media personalities taking up oxygen in every briefing, especially the Oval Office gaggles.

That has changed the number of questions and the nature of the questions being asked, so it has an impact on the coverage itself. I still contend that fact-based news outlets should send cameras to the White House and set their reporters loose to report. Look at the big stories that have come out about Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon ever since the Pentagon press corps left the building.

Finally, Arkansas appears to be the first state to sever ties with PBS. PBS came into existence amid the Great Society reforms of the early 1960s. Is this the end of an era or the beginning of something new?

Millions of people in Arkansas rely on the PBS programming they see on one of the six PBS stations in that state. There's no way that this new local Arkansas effort can come close to filling the gap, particularly with children's programming. It's such a shame that Republicans turned PBS into a political issue. For years, it's been a valuable, free source of news and information for the entire country, but the future of PBS looks grim, especially in red states where there is little or no political will to keep it alive.

Trump wants you to love him again. What he'll do to woo you is insane

Donald Trump is ready to launch an illegitimate war against a nation that did us no harm in a cynical bid to make America love him again.

I think it’s that simple.

No, his war-mongering isn’t about the midterms. If the president cared about politics, he would act politically. He would, for instance, prevent his supporters from being emmiserated by skyrocketing health insurance premiums. As it is, he allows the House Speaker to suggest in front of television cameras that some Trump voters are expendable.

If Trump cared about politics, he would care about his public image — and the effect of that image on the GOP’s fortunes. He wouldn’t p--- on the still-warm bodies of Rob Reiner and his wife, who seem to have been killed by their troubled son. He wouldn’t suggest that the creator of beloved films like This Is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me and The Princess Bride had it coming. He wouldn’t hint at wanting more of the same.

If Trump cared about politics, he would do what every single president has done in the face of economic crises. He would say something to the effect of, “I get it. Things are bad right now and I’m gonna do something about it.” Lots of presidents can’t live up to their promises, or don’t bother to follow through on them, but no president in our lifetimes has said to the American people that their hardship is “a hoax” and anyway, kids don’t need that many Christmas presents.

Some say the president’s saber-rattling over Venezuela is a bid to revive his party’s chances before the midterms. Others say it’s just another distraction from issues that are dogging him (eg, “the Epstein files”). But I think the reasons are dumber. Consider Harry Enten:

"The report card is negative. Every single day since March 12, Trump has been in the red. Two hundred and twenty-eight days in a row. The bottom line is Americans don't like what Trump is doing and they haven't liked what Trump's been doing for a long period of time."

To Trump, for whom “ratings” are everything, this is certainly evidence of America falling out of love with him. What can he do? Oh, America loves a war president! They are strong. They are tough. They look good on TV! If Donald Trump can become a war president, no matter how much he’s failing otherwise, America will love him again!

What we’re seeing isn’t the behavior of a politician.

It’s the behavior of a man drunk on power.

In understanding this, let’s thank Susie Wiles. Trump’s chief of staff told Vanity Fair that JD Vance has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade.” She said Elon Musk is “an avowed ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck.” She said Russ Vought is “a right-wing absolute zealot.” And she said Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” at handling “the Epstein files.”

But her greatest unintentional insight was reserved for Trump.

He “has an alcoholic’s personality,” she said.

In characterizing him that way, Wiles brings forward the idea that there’s no higher-order thing — not morality, decency or honor — that can rival Trump’s insatiable need. In his case, it’s not a need for booze. It’s a need for power, attention, validation, and, I would suggest, love.

Everyone must love him or everyone must pay. The president might turn desperate in order to make that happen, even launching a war against a nation that did us no harm. But he won’t succeed. Drunks, or in his case dry drunks, can’t get enough. They can only hit bottom.

In threatening war to force us to love him, Trump illustrates something Jen Mercieca told me. A communications and journalism professor at Texas A&M, she said autocrats “try to project strength, masculinity and virility, because they believe that those are the characteristics of strong leaders. Yet scholars who study leadership find that those autocratic ways of leading are actually weaknesses.”

That weakness could be hastening Trump’s descent to the bottom, she said. “According to recent polling, this government is very unpopular. If the elections are fair and free in 2026, we would expect to see what they called an 'electoral purification' in 1816. That's when the majority of Congress were kicked out for the self-dealing Compensation Act.”

A president drunk of power is in need of purification.

Here’s my conversation with Jen.

JS: After the election, you wrote: "The fascists won temporarily, but fascism is for losers. They'll fail. They are con men and swindlers. And when they do lose, we make a real democracy. The kind they hate. Their ‘creative destruction’ will be democracy rising." How are we doing now?

JM: The only way forward is through it. And we're going through it. The rule of law does not constrain autocrats. Rather, they "rule by law" — using the law as a cudgel to punish enemies and outsiders.

Autocrats are not "cognitively responsible" leaders. They don't want to explain why they do things. They act first and make up reasons later.

This is the way Trump's second term has operated and so problems like the economy and affordability are only getting worse. That's the way it works when all accountability is stripped from government.

According to recent polling, this government is very unpopular. If the elections are fair and free in 2026, we would expect to see what they called an "electoral purification" in 1816. That's when the majority of Congress were kicked out for the self-dealing Compensation Act.

Before Trump returned, he presented himself rhetorically as macho. His campaign regularly featured the song "Macho Man" (without being aware, seemingly, that it's a gay anthem.) Yet now, the long macho man con is slipping. What should his opponents do with that?

It's almost cartoonish to think about what autocrats think is leadership and what actually constitutes good leadership. Autocrats try to project strength, masculinity and virility, because they believe that those are the characteristics of strong leaders. Yet scholars who study leadership find that those autocratic ways of leading are actually weaknesses. The best leaders are empathetic, inclusive and dialogic – the very opposite of the autocratic projection. Trump's opponents should hold him accountable to the rule of law, the Constitution of the US, and the basic American values of dignity, decorum and decency.

Marjorie Taylor Greene seemed to signal to QAnon believers that Trump isn't the hero of the story about the battle between good and evil. What's going on? Did Trump take believers for granted?

Trump is a lame duck, so lots of people are trying to figure out how to take over after he is out of power. Greene seems to be making a play to inherit the maga movement and it appears as though she's decided to make that play by attempting to erode Trump's base of support.

She would like to drive a wedge between Trump and his followers, which would position her for 2028 as an outsider. Essentially, Greene has argued that she knows exactly why America is still corrupt, even after Trump promised that he would end corruption. Politicians typically run on a hero narrative that argues that they are the right hero for the moment and only their election can save the nation.

In 2016, Trump argued that he had been a corrupt insider himself and because of that, only he knew how to fix corruption and make America great again. Based on recent polling, most Americans don't think that Trump has made America any greater, so it is perhaps politically expedient to separate Trump from the maga movement – though it's unclear if that movement can survive without Trump.

You have said that the public square is dominated by conspiracy theory. Everyone knows at least one person who's been indoctrinated. It's like Sen. Joe McCarthy never died. What can we do?

Conspiracy is incredibly enticing and most of us have succumbed to conspiratorial ways of thinking. A conspiracy theory is a narrative that is "self-sealing," meaning evidence is not allowed to count against it. The narrative can never be proven, but it can also never be disproven.

Conspiracy rhetoric is like a “self-sealing” tire that has magic goo in it to prevent it from popping when you run over a nail. Conspiracy rhetoric is a “self-sealing” narrative that prevents it from popping when confronted by facts, logic or evidence. We're all vulnerable to conspiracy narratives, because believing in them makes us heroes.

We're vulnerable because of basic cognitive biases like motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. We're also vulnerable because our information environment is designed to spread conspiracy. And we're vulnerable because we've lost trust in institutions, the political process, the media and each other. We're quite vulnerable to conspiracy, which makes it a profitable way to engage in the public sphere for people who like to exploit our vulnerabilities.

We are in this nightmare for one reason — and it's our own leaders' fault

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

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

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

Instead, over those years, the Democrats accepted as true the lies told by Trump and Republican allies about immigrants and immigration law.

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

Over time, the result has been a kind of conventional wisdom about the southern border that is so deeply established that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) avoided facing it head-on in a recent interview with CNN. Instead, the New Yorker gave Trump credit for securing the border.

“The border is secure,” he said. “That's a good thing. It happened on his watch.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Copyright © 2026 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 .