MAGA's sheer hatred of one man could be the thing that saves us from Trump

Is the No Kings movement the new Tea Party movement?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He meant Joe Biden.

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

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

For these reasons and more, elites hated Biden.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's how the GOP is burning its own in the shutdown fight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

House Speaker Mike Johnson said the legal explanation by the White House for why it can’t fund food stamps beyond Nov. 1 “certainly looks legitimate to me.”

“The contingency funds are not legally available to cover the benefits right now,” Johnson said.

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

But the law never stopped him before.

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

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

And Johnson isn’t saying which is better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I think it’s the opposite.

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

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

No Kings didn't just oppose Trump — it had a clear warning for Dems

Recently, I talked about how the No Kings rally exposed the regime’s weakness. Donald Trump wants the common folk of America to surrender in advance, just like their betters did. But when more than 7 million said hell no, what did he do? Well, let’s just say it was profane.

Today, I want to talk about another kind of weakness that it revealed. Instead of the president and the Republicans, however, the No Kings rally exposed the weakness of certain centrist Democrats.

How so? First remember what centrism is. These days, it’s the capacity for a Democrat in a competitive district to accept as true the premise of the lies told about Democratic Party by Trump and the Republicans.

For instance, when it became conventional wisdom, as a result of all this lying, that Vice President Kamala Harris was defeated because she pushed too hard for trans rights, centrist Democrats accepted that as true, though it was false, in order to seem moderate by comparison.

This is what Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts aimed for when he invoked transgender girls in sports. Harris lost, he said, because his party spent “too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest … I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Centrists do this in order to portray themselves to independent voters as honest brokers whose primary concerns are above partisan politics. In reality, however, it’s conflict-avoidance. They don’t want to take the risk of fighting Republicans. So they fight their own side instead. They make the demands of advocates and reformers — known cynically as “the groups” — seem radical or impractical or beyond “what’s really important to the American people.” The result? Nothing changes.

What I’m describing is the normal for Democrats like Moulton. They believe that it earns them credibility and public trust. But norms can’t endure in the face of an ongoing constitutional crisis. The Trump regime isn’t just violating the rights of one or two marginal groups. It is violating the rights of all Americans, triggering a national reckoning that fueled the biggest one-day demonstration in American history.

More than anything else, No Kings was a necessary reaffirmation of bedrock democratic principles, because so few elites, including centrist Democrats, have been willing to affirm them. And if centrists choose to smear more than 7 million people the way they have smeared “the groups,” they risk discrediting themselves completely.

It may not be clear yet that centrism is fictional, but it will be.

In the case of Seth Moulton, perhaps sooner than he thinks.

Moulton is set to primary Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts. While he’s acting like trans rights are negotiable, Markey isn’t playing. At the No Kings rally in Boston, which drew 100,000 demonstrators, he declared trans rights to be human rights and the people there roared.

When Moulton got up to speak, they booed.

That was a bright line, according to Evan Urquhart. After writing extensively for The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and others, he set up Assigned Media in 2022 to report on transgender news. Evan was in Boston.

“The Democratic rank-and-file is disgusted by Trumpism,” he told me in the interview below. “They don't want to see Democrats who compromise and meet Trumpism halfway. They want to see fighters.”

JS: In a thread prior to the No Kings rally, you shared some wisdom about how to balance the evils facing the trans community with the joys found within it. You seemed to be addressing the old problem with hope: too much makes you naive, too little makes you nihilist.

EU: I've noticed that informed Americans in general, and especially trans people, are crying out for ways to push through the despair at seeing our country's rule of law collapse. Ideals that we may have thought were universal and unassailable, such as human rights or the worth and dignity of every person, are suddenly very much up for grabs.

It is, as you say, naive to imagine that good is simply going to triumph here. We've blown past most of the guard rails that were supposed to protect us, and no one is more keenly aware of that than trans people. The federal government officially defines us as not even existing, and they've hinted that they want to go further to define us as terrorists.

My thread is about finding ways to live with the reality that we are losing our rights and there's no clear floor, no knowing how much we will lose before this insanity ends, while also contributing to efforts to find that floor and begin pushing that floor back up again.

Ed Markey was at the No Kings rally in Boston. He said: "Here in Massachusetts we stand for what is right. We stand with trans people because trans rights are human rights.” That's in contrast to Seth Moulton, his primary challenger, who seems to think trans rights are negotiable. You were there. How are you feeling today?

Ever since November, when we learned Trump would be president, I've known that the trans community would be in a uniquely vulnerable position, because Trump's closing argument against Kamala Harris was that she was too trans-supportive.

Never mind that Harris didn't say one word in support of trans rights during her campaign. The conventional wisdom was always going to be that Democrats were punished for being too trans supportive.

So the struggle for my community has been participating in a movement for democracy led by Democrats who aren’t sure they want our community with them — or want to blame us for all their troubles.

Sen. Markey is a longstanding supporter of trans rights, and his primary challenger is Rep. Moulton, who was one of the early Democrats distancing himself from the trans community.

And what I think we're seeing, and saw so decisively with Markey being cheered in Boston for standing up for trans rights and Moulton being booed by that same crowd, is that the Democratic rank-and-file is disgusted by Trumpism. They don't want to see Democrats who compromise and meet Trumpism halfway. They want to see fighters.

Trans people are great fighters. Our activists are out there, unbowed, defiant in the face of all of this scapegoating and oppression, and I think that fighting spirit is resonating with many Americans.

In your thread, you hint at the importance of federalism — the decentralization of federal power and the sovereignty of the states — in protecting trans and human rights. You suggest that there could be a "soft secession with blue state protections growing more meaningful as federal power fades." Talk about that more please.

I think that the No Kings rallies showed that Americans are not willing to go quietly into dictatorship. Unfortunately, there are a lot of deep structural problems in the American system that Republicans are determined to exploit. The Supreme Court has become a partisan rubber stamp on the most lawless actions by the president. The government is currently shut down and House Speaker Mike Johnson doesn't even seem like he's trying to find a solution, to the point where you almost start to suspect Republicans would rather us not even have a legislative branch and just vest all power in the executive.

These are headwinds that national Democrats might be able to overcome with a strong enough midterms and a strong enough Democratic president in 2028, but even if a lot of things broke that way, it does not feel assured. So, what's the alternative?

If Trump is too weak and unpopular to turn all of America into a dictatorship, but Democrats are unable to restore constitutional governance, we could see a much stronger federalism, with blue states increasingly ignoring the federal government. It's a sad picture in a lot of ways, but trans people have got to be practical, and practically speaking, I'd rather live in a strong Massachusetts that can protect me, perhaps even a Massachusetts that has strong regional alliances with other New England states, than be forced out of the country.

You remind me of something I came back to often: that the crisis probably can't be overcome through elections alone, but through political change that starts with individual hearts and minds.

I think we do have deeply moral people and movements, but those movements are increasingly detached from any institutional power.

When I think about the concern people have about the fate of the Palestinian people, people halfway around the world that we've been indoctrinated to hate and look down on, I see a deep belief in the principle that where a child is born shouldn't determine whether they're able to grow up safely.

When this deep care and concern for others is treated as radical, idealistic, naive and impractical, what happens at first is that no action is taken to protect the children in harm’s way, but in the end the leaders and institutions who worked so hard to distance themselves from these movements wind up delegitimizing themselves.

In journalism, we're seeing this with the deepest values of our profession. Journalists are expected to hold powerful people accountable without fear or favor, and bring audiences the truth even when it might be risky or unpopular. That’s being treated in the same way, as naive, childish and something no one believes any more, in a time when news organizations have been defanged by billionaires.

And what happens at first is that you see a loss of hard-hitting, honest reporting, but what I think happens next is that those institutions lose their legitimacy, and independent reporters who are willing to carry the mantle of those deep values rush into the vacuum.

We gave Trump a bloody nose — here's how we give him another

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

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

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

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

To act like a king.

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

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

He said that before the phony AI video.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before the rally, the Republicans said protesters are “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, violent criminals.”

They are the “most unhinged in the Democratic Party.”

They are the “pro-Hamas wing, the antifa people.”

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

As my senator, Chris Murphy, said of Trump:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump just committed yet another felony — and this time he knows he's been seen

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

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

It isn’t acceptable.

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

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

Trump and the Republicans want the Democrats to sign off on a continuing resolution (CR), so the government is funded this year at similar levels as last year.

The Democrats say they would if Trump and the Republicans agreed to renewing federal (Obamacare) health insurance subsidies expanded during the Covid pandemic.

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

So far, this story suggests the Democrats are on the brink of victory.

The story itself, however, isn’t keeping up with changing conditions.

First, it does not account for the administration’s habit of impounding congressionally appropriated funding. It has been breaking the law, and violating Article 1 of the Constitution, by refusing to send federal money wherever the Congress has said it shall go.

This pattern became more pointed after the shutdown on Sept. 30 in what Don Moynihan has called “ideological targeting.” The Times reported that $27 billion in funding is being expressly held from Democratic districts.

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

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

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

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

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

And it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump and MAGA's true driving force is now on full display — and it's chilling

As we look forward to seeing the effect of the “No Kings” protests, I think it’s important to bring forward the theological nature of what millions of Americans demonstrated against.

Donald Trump not only believes that his rule is absolute and that his word is law. He believes that he’s infallible — that he can do no wrong. To many in Magaworld, he’s less president than the right hand of God.

George Orwell once said that since no one is infallible, in practice, it’s frequently necessary for totalitarian rulers “to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.”

In “The Prevention of Literature,” published in 1946, Orwell said, “this kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment.”

One such opinion is whether your faith is real and genuine. If it lines up with Trump’s views, it is. If it doesn’t, it isn’t. Religious Americans are protesting the treatment of immigrants by ICE. (A well-known example is Pastor David Black of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago being shot in the head with pepper balls and sprayed in the face with tear gas for leading a prayer outside an ICE facility.) But for Maga, you can’t be religious if you disagree with God’s right hand. (The Department of Homeland Security said Pastor Black was a “pastor.”)

The potential is for some religions to get protection while others get punishment. As Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons put it in a recent column for MSNBC: “That dynamic is antithetical to religious freedom.”

Then there’s Trump’s opinion of what counts in religion.

At last month’s memorial to demagogue Charlie Kirk, Trump said Kirk “was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose. He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them.”

In this, the president was giving voice to Christian tradition of loving thy enemy.

But then:

“That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don't want the best for them. … I can't stand my opponent.”

In his opinion of the infallible ruler, love doesn’t count in religion.

Hate, however, is the One True Faith.

According to historian Claire Bond Potter, Trump’s “unprecedented statement” is a command that fits “the definition of truthful hyperbole: it asks an audience inspired by Charlie Kirk’s slick combination of bigotry, reason, and xenophobic patriotism to think big.”

Claire concluded:

“And the big thought from Donald Trump is this: You may be Christian — but don’t be a sucker. Hate is more powerful than love. Look at me — why, hatred made me president. Think what it could do for you.”

Claire is the author of Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy. In this wide-ranging interview below, we discuss the role of an “angry God” in Christian nationalism, dangers to religious minorities, and what liberal and moderate Christians are doing to fight back against the infallible ruler’s belief that hate is more powerful than love.

JS: Hate is more powerful than love. That's what Donald Trump suggested at the Charlie Kirk memorial, where the audience was said to be filled with the followers of Jesus Christ. You noted the connection in one of your latest. Walk me through that please.

CBP: One of the things we know about social media is that negative emotions – anger, hatred, resentment – are animating for a mass audience. The Maga movement has energized a populist audience with negativity. It's what is behind not just the policies they choose, but the reasoning behind those choices.

Let's take immigration as an example. Historically — and you can go back to the 19th century anti-Chinese movements — immigration has been a vehicle for white people, who believe they already "own" the United States and are entitled to its benefits, to express their resentment of institutions: corporations and the government are prominent.

Where religion enters the picture is the claim on the sacred as a litmus test as to who is entitled to the benefits of the nation and who isn't. Chinese, for example, were characterized as "godless," and allowed anti-immigrant organizers to ascribe a range of other characteristics to them following from that godlessness: sexual perversion, disease, dishonesty. Those are also core animating features of antisemitism.

Similarly, Maga’s anti-trans logic ascribes disease (mental illness), perversion (wanting to harm women) and dishonesty (pretending to be something you are not) to rejecting God's plan for your body and gender.

So religion, in this case, could point a political leader in two directions — the Christ/God of love, in which we embrace those who are different and even frightening; and the God of righteous retribution, who punishes those that reject His will and rewards the faithful.

It is that second God that animated the Conquest, the earliest stages of European colonialism, slavery and American Manifest Destiny — and it is no accident that it is these histories, with the exception of slavery, that MAGA embraces. And this God requires darkness and violence to animate followers to seek a world that is purged of their enemies.

It seems to me that religious minorities who are aligned with the Maga movement are putting themselves in danger, as the view of God's plan that you describe here will eventually come for them. I'm thinking specifically of the recent Mormon church massacre. I believe the shooter was a Christian nationalist in all but name. We know he saw Mormons as "the antichrist." Thoughts on that?

I would be careful with the thought that the Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) is Maga-aligned. Some Mormons are and some aren't. Fundamentalist Mormons (who have been excommunicated from the mainstream church) don't participate in politics at all. According to the Deseret News, about 64 percent of Mormons voted for Trump and 32 percent for Harris. But character has always been an issue for Mormons. Younger Mormons are less likely to even be Republican.

But back to violence: The LDS Church has always been a target for violence and conspiracy-mongers since it was founded in 1830 during the Second Great Awakening as a charismatic religion. One piece of this is that it essentially reinterpreted the scripture on the basis of revelation — but unlike Baptists, for example, those revelations keep arriving. One of them, quite recently, overturned the church's founding belief that people of color were less favored by God.

But the second reason that Mormons were targeted for violence was the principle of plural marriage, or polygamy, the practice of which coincided with the increasing moral authority of mainstream Protestant women over questions that were specifically sexually: Black women abused by southern white men who "owned" them, and anti-prostitution campaigns in urban areas, and polygamy was framed as a way of enslaving with women, specifically.

Which leads us to the third reason: secrecy. The LDS Church is governed by a concentric series of male leaders, and as you move to the center of that — the Temple in Salt Lake City — there is almost absolute secrecy about the rituals, practices and decisions that occur within. I mean, this is part of what powers anti-Catholic animus too, except that you can walk into any Catholic Church in the United States and see what is going on. That is less true of the LDS Church.

So anti-Mormon violence is as American as apple pie — and Christian nationalists who are animated by conspiracy theories, paranoia and a belief in opaque power systems are going to be drawn to it.

It's probably also worth saying the LDS Church has its own history of violence, as it established itself in the Utah territory. Church fathers punished dissent in their ranks, and were also murderous towards Native American inhabitants. Some of that survives in the illegal fundamentalist communities. But I actually think that the increasing Maga turn towards the use of state violence in particular is likely to be making Mormons more and more uncomfortable with Trump.

The Mormons may be unique in that they provide critics and enemies many ways to demonize them, but all religious minorities and sects can be demonized if the means and motive are there. Which brings me to suggest that moderate and liberal Christians are allowing Christian nationalists to speak for them. They need to speak out before the president prevents them from speaking out. Are there moments in history in which such Christians did that?

Moderate and liberal Christians are speaking out. A group of pastors who were shot with pepper balls outside an ICE facility near Chicago filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the Trump administration.

You could go back to the 15th century and Bartolomé de las Casas's critique of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, a project driven in large part by religion — the conversion of indigenous people and the acquisition of gold to defend the faith against Protestantism in Europe.

But in the United States, religious people of all faiths animated the fight against Black slavery, resistance to war in the 20th century, and the fight for Black civil rights - -and in each case, there were religious voices that supported the projects.

One good example are Quakers, a religious minority that was persecuted in the early colonial period in New England; then, tied itself to slavery; then became the leading voice opposing slavery; and in each war, Quakers have courageously stood up against violence.

But I would disagree that Christian nationalists are, in any sense, speaking for Christians. We have seen a number of prominent Southern Baptist women, most recently Jen Hatmaker, breaking with the Southern Baptist Convention over its alliance with Maga. What Christian nationalists have is the political megaphone.

Here's how to bring Trump and his lawless thugs to justice

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

“I don’t know if we can trust what’s coming out of the Department of Justice,” the former vice president told MSNBC.

“That pains me to say that, as someone who spent the majority of my career as a prosecutor. Many who have worked as US attorneys … talk openly and rightly about the fact that they should do their work without any fear and not in the interest of favor. That so clearly is not what is ruling day there.”

In her new book, she repeatedly says the Democrats should fight fire with fire. Should they do with the US Department of Justice what the Republicans under Donald Trump have done to it? Her answer: No.

“No president should think of the Department of Justice as being their personal attorney,” Kamala Harris said. “No president should try to influence prosecutorial decisions based on a political agenda, period.”

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

The people want payback, wrote Christopher Jon Sprigman.

“When this is over – and it will end – there has to be a sustained and severe campaign of retribution, from Trump down to the masked ICE fascists who carried this out,” he said. “No f–––––g kumbaya. Consequences.”

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

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

CS: There are two reasons.

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

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

What would that something be?

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

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

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

Later in his speech, Jackson noted that trying the Nazis in regular US courts would be an interminable process — and that years of delay was unacceptable:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Law for some. Impunity for others.

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

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

That will breed more contempt for the law.

And it should.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The GOP should heed this unlikely messenger — it warns of what's coming for them

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

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

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

The tide seems to be turning.

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

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

She added:

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

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

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

But what if it’s simpler than that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even to Republican voters.

And that right there is the thing.

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

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

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

She suggested as much. Though she’s the first House Republican to endorse the Democratic side, she’s trying to shield Trump from the coming blowback.

“I'm actually putting the blame on the Speaker [Mike Johnson] and [Senate Majority] Leader [John] Thune,” she told CNN. “This should not be happening ... We control the House and Senate and have the White House."

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

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

Lying Republicans just admitted their victory strategy — and it can be stopped

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

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

But coercion isn’t the Republicans’ only tool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His reply: "Republicans have zero credibility, zero."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two things that are working:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump's very own Wormtongue is goading him to declare martial law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Low-info voters might not understand much.

But they can understand that.

Trump is clearly mentally diminished — Dems must target these people pulling his strings

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

And you should be grateful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The president very often doesn’t seem to know what’s going until an outsider tells him. It could be a congressional Democrat. For instance, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump didn’t understand the coming spike in insurance premiums, the result of him and the Republicans failing to renew federal subsidies.

“We laid out to the president some of the consequences happening in healthcare, and by his face and the way he looked, I think he heard about them for the first time,” Schumer said.

It could be a Democratic governor. After watching a Fox segment that made Portland look like a hellscape, Trump planned to send National Guard troops there. Then he talked to Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, who, like New York’s Kathy Hochul, set him straight.

Trump told Kotek: “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’”

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

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

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

“It’s a war from within,” he said. “It’s really a very important mission. We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military ... because we’re going into Chicago very soon.”

(Subsequently, the regime ordered Texas National Guard troops to Illinois against the wishes of JB Pritzker. The Illinois governor has filed suit to stop it.)

Retired Army General Barry McCaffrey told MSNBC the speech was “one of the most bizarre, unsettling events I’ve ever encountered.” And: “The president sounded incoherent, exhausted, rabidly partisan, at times stupid, meandering [and] couldn’t hold a thought together.”

(In fairness, Trump isn’t too far gone yet. As Jen Psaki noted, he is still aware enough to put the kibosh on any plan to defund the police.)

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

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

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

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

It also hits different when, in the context of dementia, it seems that someone – or a group of someones – is pulling the strings and that Donald Trump is more puppet than president.

That framing could also have a powerful effect on swing voters in joining an anti-authoritarian and pro-democracy coalition. They would not have to blame the president, thus blaming themselves by implication. Instead, they could blame the unelected liars and cheats – Russ Vought and Stephen Miller spring to mind – who are conspiring behind his back. Indies might even be encouraged to take the moral high ground. At least some of the power-grab involves humiliating a demented old man in public.

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

For independent voters who may be looking for an off ramp, it’s not Project 2025. It’s Puppet 2025.

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

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

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

Hallelujah — a leading Dem finally uses the right word to describe Trump

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

A threefer! Pritzker said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The article, headlined “Trump Gave the Military’s Brass a Rehashed Speech. Until Minute 44,” was about how difficult it is to pick out the newsworthy bits from Trump’s speeches, as they tend to be retreads of the same things he’s always going on about.

Despite addressing elites of the American military, Trump twaddled on about Biden and the “infamous autopen”; about the unfair media; about tariffs; about the border; about “the time he went to a restaurant in Washington to eat dinner”; and even the “Nobel Peace Prize he felt he had earned.”

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

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

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

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

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

McCreesh could have taken a different reportorial approach.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider comments made by Jack Cocchiarella. A CNN host asked the young YouTube influencer for his thoughts on the government shutdown.

“Trump to me is kind of this dementia-addled nursing home patient in the White House right now,” he said. “He’s leaning on [budget director Russell] Vought, he’s leaning on [Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller, because he doesn’t want to get the job done.

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

“This Administration doesn’t want to engage.”

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

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

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

These GOP tactics just show you can't deal with cheats and liars

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

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

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

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

On Tuesday, Jake Grumbach brought my attention to a superb illustration of this conflict between strategy and truth. An economist at UC Berkeley, Grumbach commented on a conversation between Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and podcaster, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, perhaps best known as the author of Between the World and Me.

Their chat touched on many things, but the standout topic was Charlie Kirk.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s murder last month, Klein wrote that Kirk “was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”

This might be true if you squint hard and tilt your head, but Klein’s goal wasn’t to represent reality accurately. It was to bridge political divisions that he believes triggered the spasm of violence that ultimately killed Kirk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Tuesday, Trump told admirals and generals “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” He also suggested military leaders “could be tasked with assisting federal law enforcement interventions against an ‘invasion from within’ Democratic-led cities, such as Chicago and New York City,” the Military Times reported.

As usual, Times columnist Jamelle Bouie was blunter and clearer: “The president of the United States wants to use the American military to kill American citizens on American soil. That's the whole story!”

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

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

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

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

It's not the Dems who must feel real pain if this shutdown is ever to end

One of the main assumptions in the story about the government shutdown, which began at midnight, is that the Democrats see a “rare opportunity to use their leverage to achieve policy goals.”

That quote is from the Associated Press. Here’s some more: “Senate Democrats say they won’t vote for [the Republican funding resolution] unless Republicans include an extension of expiring health care benefits, among other demands. President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans say they won’t negotiate, arguing that it’s a stripped-down, ‘clean’ bill that should be noncontroversial.”

I wonder about that, though.

I mean, I know the Democrats have to demand something concrete in exchange for their vote, but the opportunity seems bigger than just getting the GOP to renew Obamacare subsidies that were expanded during the covid pandemic. The opportunity seems bigger than policy.

It seems like a chance to expose the Republicans’ lies.

Then ask why. Why do they lie so much?

Then answer: because Republican voters can’t know the truth.

The truth is that Trump and his party do not care one way or another if, in the coming months, health insurance premiums for those who are enrolled in Obamacare exchanges double, triple or quadruple.

They do not care if everyone else enrolled through their employers sees their insurance premiums spike, or sees the cost of their health care spike, as a result of healthy people leaving Obamacare exchanges.

What they do care about is stealing from Medicaid — to the tune of $1 trillion over a decade — to cut the taxes of very obscenely rich people who will never notice that their taxes have been cut. Oh, and they care about seeing their social inferiors suffer. That’s a whole lot of fun.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with not caring. It is part of the makeup of a native-born authoritarian cartel that’s invested above all else in maintaining a social hierarchy with rich white men on top.

Though rule-by-the-rich is very popular among the rich, it’s not so popular among workaday folks, even conservative Americans who otherwise see advantage in being aligned with their social betters.

Though the Trump cartel is working hard to change it, America is still a democracy. The GOP still needs its base until it has completed its consolidation of power. For now, it can’t afford to alienate its supporters with the truth – that the Republicans are scamming them.

Who will suffer most from cuts to Medicaid? Republican voters in GOP-controlled states. Who will suffer most from Obamacare spikes? Ditto. Because, in both programs, there are more Republican voters than anyone else combined, the Republicans must pretend to care.

But mostly, they lie.

At first, the lies were of the “waste, fraud and abuse” variety.

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) said he might think about renewing the Obamacare subsidies, but “there is a lot of, whatever you want to call it, fraud,” he told Axios. “And I think everybody acknowledges that, so how do you reform it and still get bipartisan support?"

Also per Axios, Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) said they’re thinking about requiring “ACA enrollees to have ‘skin in the game’ by making them pay a minimum premium and barring zero-premium plans that are ACA-compliant but that critics contend fuel fraud.”

Yes, they contend it’s fraud. It isn’t, though. Those are just the rules. If you don’t like the rules, get enough support to change them. But that’s the thing. Americans like the rules, as they are. So Republicans lie.

“Waste, fraud and abuse” was always a code for “Obamacare is for Black people,” so no Republican feared opposing it. But apparently the dogwhistle wasn’t getting through to the base. So the Republicans dropped the coded language to say outright that the Democrats want one and a half trillion dollars to give “illegal aliens” free health care.

Here’s Vice President JD Vance:

Democrats are “saying to the American people that [they] wanna give massive amounts of money, hundreds of billions of dollars to illegal aliens for their health care, while Americans are struggling to pay their health care bills. That was their initial foray into this negotiation. We thought it was absurd. We told them it was. Now they come in here saying that if you don’t give us everything that we want, we’re gonna shut down the government.”

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

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) went straight at him for that lie:

“The federal government by law … does not fund health insurance for undocumented immigrants in Medicaid, period. Nor the ACA, nor Medicare. Undocumented immigrants do not get federal health insurance premiums. Period. Period. They’re lying.”

Let’s be real. There is no reality in which Republican voters suddenly wake up to the truth of Schumer’s words and as a result, admit to themselves that the Trump cartel has been lying to them all along. That’s because lying, no matter how disgusting, is not the worst part of the predicament America finds itself in. The desire to believe lies is.

So the goal wouldn’t be convincing Republican voters they’ve been lied to. The goal would be convincing they’ve been scammed. To do that, however, requires much more than merely calling Republicans out as liars. It requires pain — pain felt by Republican voters themselves.

That’s what Republican voters will feel if Trump and the Republicans get what they want from the Democrats: a “clean CR” that includes nothing to stop the shock that’s coming, when health insurance premiums skyrocket while the safety net unravels. Pain is the only teacher in politics. That’s the Democrats’ real opportunity.

Not policy.

Pain.

This GOP defeat suggests Trump finally has a fight on his hands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schumer now thinks the situation is much different, because the president and his party are weaker than they were then.

“The BBB bill, which they have passed, is highly unpopular with the American people,” he said. “Democrats are unified. We have been strong on the same message for a very long time, which is: We need to help the American people lower their costs, particularly on health care.”

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

How do the Democrats win the argument?

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

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

He has said he has the right to do whatever he wants, however he wants, to whomever he wants.

“I’m the president,” he said.

He has determined press freedoms are “really illegal.” With the Supreme Court’s blessing, he’s arresting people for the “crime” of their identity. He has ordered prosecutors to indict at least one of his enemies by declaring him “guilty as hell.” (He said there’s no “enemies list,” but more indictments are coming.) And now, he has deemed that liberal groups that criticize him are “domestic terrorist organizations.”

He said, “they are sick, radical left people, and they can’t get away with it.”

And on top of this, the Republicans control everything.

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

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

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

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