Knives are out for Ken Martin as Democratic National Committee chair, and they probably should be. Fundraising has been anemic, spending has been questionable, and he broke a clear promise to release the committee’s post-2024 autopsy.

So Martin may not be long for the job. He may not even want the job anymore. But if he’s hanging on for dear life, I have an idea, offered for free, that he can put to the test relatively cheaply: He can sue CBS News for $20 billion (but be willing to settle for $16 million and not a penny less).

The story begins on Sunday, when Donald Trump participated in a 60 Minutes interview with Nora O’Donnell. First, observers noticed the segment seemed spliced together. Then CBS posted the full transcript of the interview, and critics confirmed that 60 Minutes producers edited a bunch of Trump’s emotionally dysregulated ranting out of the final cut.

“No, I’m not a king,” our president said. “I-- I get-- I-- I don’t laugh. I don’t-- I-- I see these No Kings, which are funded just like the Southern Law was-- funded-- you saw all that? Southern Law [sic] is financing the KKK and lots of other radical, terrible groups. And then they go out and they say, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta stop the KKK.’ And yet they give, you know, hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. It’s a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows you that-- like Charlottesville. Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law [sic]. That was a Southern Law [sic] deal too. And it was done to make me look bad, and it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was-- a rigged election.”

One could reasonably argue it’s journalistic malpractice to edit stuff like this out of an interview with the sitting president. Sanewashing is the newish term of art. But the general practice—that television news magazines edit down interviews to sharpen focus on particular topics—is uncontroversial.

Except… when 60 Minutes applied that practice to its pre-election interview with Kamala Harris, Trump sued for $10 billion, then $20 billion, claiming “election interference.” He alleged, falsely, that CBS had concealed damaging portions of the interview to help Harris and thus hurt Trump and the GOP. The suit was frivolous, a loser, a p.r. stunt. But then he won the election, and CBS settled. For $16 million.

The shoe’s on the other foot in an obvious way now, but it’s of little interest to anyone in power, except as a gotcha. Democrats are weak, Trump is aggressive. They play by the old rules, he plays by his. Nothing will come of this, so it’s not worth making a fuss. Outsiders like me and others can wail about the hypocrisy—of Trump, of CBS, of its new editor Bari Weiss. Her website, The Free Press, spent months pretending to believe 60 Minutes was in the wrong for editing down its Harris interview—until Trump effectively installed her to turn CBS into a pro-regime outlet, and her misgivings vanished.

We can whine, whine, whine about their shamelessness all day. And we’re obviously right to be outraged. But this kind of limp appeal to hypocrisy is a symptom of partisan asymmetry. It’s pervasive only because everyone takes for granted (with good reason) that Democrats won’t stoop to the GOP’s level. But what if they did? What if Ken Martin were to claim CBS News interfered in the 2026 election by editing down Trump’s interview, no less than it interfered in the 2024 election by editing down Harris’s? What if he filed an angry lawsuit, if only to hold up a mirror to the perversity of the status quo? What if he insisted that nominally neutral institutions treat the parties equally? Why not let CBS decide whether it wants to settle the score, or whether it wants to be known as the network that gives money to Republicans only?

I don’t know how CBS would respond, but I suspect some rank-and-file Democratic voters, people who’ve stopped donating to the DNC, would develop strange new respect for Martin. Enough to save his job and fix the party’s fundraising problems? Again, hard to say. Probably not! But it couldn’t possibly make things worse.

Martin is in many ways a victim of the same asymmetries that leave the rest of us whining about hypocrisy while Republicans bend powerful institutions to their will. It may be that he’s uniquely unsuited to this job in this moment (I don’t know nearly enough to say) but he’s certainly in the wrong place at the wrong time. He didn’t create the crisis of confidence in the Democratic Party as an institution—people like Chuck Schumer and other long-time machine hands did that, leaving Martin holding the bag.

But of course, as DNC chair, Martin can’t blame his own woes on the weakness of the party’s congressional leadership and its reluctance to fight.

What he can do is think creatively, then lead by example. He, or whoever replaces him at DNC, could demonstrate to disaffected Democratic base voters that the party is remaking itself as one that won’t take shit lying down. That, whenever possible, it will impose penalties on Republicans and their enablers for dealing in bad faith.

It’s frustrating, because I’m basically restating what I wrote almost six years ago, just a few weeks before the 2020 election. Joe Biden was poised for victory, and it was clear to me that allowing bygones to be bygones wouldn’t just result in miscarriages of justice vis-a-vis specific crimes. It would teach Republicans that there’s no downside to operating in bad faith as a default mode. Reading back on it, as I do from time to time, is a bit painful.

The Republican Party’s core rottenness—its dishonesty, corruption, pettiness, racism—is the defining political fact of our time. Whatever we say about it, confronting all of us in the weeks and months ahead is the more important question of what we do about it. What do the rest of us—most importantly elected Democrats, but also journalists, political elites, and regular citizens—need to change about public life to account for the fact that one of the two major parties has embraced bad faith as an organizing principle?

…

[Democrats can] codify norms so that Republicans can’t violate them or take hostages going forward. Rather than increase the debt limit, they can eliminate it; rather than devise new stimulus every time the economy turns downward, they can create permanent programs that snap into effect when unemployment climbs. Donald Trump proved that Republicans will withhold disaster relief from states that don’t vote for Republicans; Democrats can change the law to treat all victims of disaster equally, no matter their politics or the partisan leanings of their states. Rather than shame Republicans out of suppressing votes, they can expand the franchise by law. Rather than acquiesce to the GOP theft of the courts, they can expand the judiciary, erasing decades of conservative scheming to rule the country without winning elections.

These are strategies that the House and Senate can implement. But they won’t do it without presidential leadership, and that would require Biden to govern with the understanding that Republicans don’t just disagree with him, but want to destroy his presidency. He can’t, for instance, stop Republicans from pretending to care about deficits the minute Donald Trump departs the political scene, but he doesn’t have to play along. When they pretend to believe that backward looking accountability for Trump’s wholesale corruption of the government is petty retribution, he can ignore them. Or he can behave as if he was born yesterday.

…

If in the name of unearned and unreciprocated comity we grant Republicans a seat at the table and a voice in governing, they’ll learn only one thing: that cheaters prosper. If we do nothing but elect Joe Biden and close the book on the past, things will only get better until the pendulum inevitably swings back again, and Republicans come roaring back to power unchastened.

Well, guess what happened.

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There is, I’ll concede, some tension between zealously policing partisan tit-for-tat, and portraying the Democratic Party as big-minded, or attuned to public need. But not nearly as much as Democratic strategists seem to think.

Would a big public relations campaign against CBS News be a “distraction” from “affordability,” the magic word that powers politicians to victory? Maybe in the narrowest, most literalistic sense.

But zoom out. This would also be a fight about Trump and his incoherence and unfitness for office. People might hear the word “affordability” a little bit less each day for a couple weeks, but that discourse would be replaced with something just as damaging to Trump and the GOP. And it’s not as though prices are poised to fall!

It’s also of material interest to voters. The public obviously and always has an interest in lowering the cost of living. But it has a similar interest in diminishing the power of corrupt right-wing oligarchs—and, crucially, Democrats can more credibly promise to impose accountability on Trump and his media cronies than to lower prices.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if Democrats never draw a hard-line against the bad faith of their opposition, they will resign themselves to governing under the current rules, fully rigged for the GOP. If they won’t take easy shots across the bow like this, would they really do bigger, more important things that need to be done? Break up firms that bribed Trump for merger approval? Investigate executives who arranged the payments? Impose accountability on organizations, foreign governments, judges, and others who participated in the Trump-era bonanza of venal and intellectual corruption?

Sam Alito and the five other Republican Supreme Court justices, just rendered the Voting Rights Act a dead letter, and justified it on intentionally deceptive grounds. I encourage you to read this whole thread to understand just how mendacious the justices chose to be, but the gist is this: Fear not, we don’t need a Voting Rights Act anymore, because racism is over, and we know racism is over because black turnout exceeded white turnout in two of the last five presidential elections. Almost half!

Except: Barack Obama, the first and only black president, was on the ballot for both of those elections. And they both took place before John Roberts stuck the first dagger in the heart of the VRA with his decision in Shelby County. Indeed these are the same two elections Roberts cited in justifying Shelby County, which allowed southern states to redraw district lines without first demonstrating to the federal government that the districts weren’t gerrymandered by race. Immediately after that ruling, the racial turnout gap returned and widened. Things are getting worse, but Alito justified further dilution of black voting power by trying to trick people into thinking things are getting better.

As long as that ruling stands, we are governed by its bad faith; if we choose to abide it, rather than change the law and the composition of the court itself, we legitimate it and accede to all of its knock on effects for public policy. If it at some point throws control of Congress into Republican hands, that’s just our tough luck. Again.

Democrats can’t do anything substantive about that ruling now. But every time they stand up for themselves, it strikes fear into the hearts of people like Trump, Alito, and the Republican leadership, who must wonder if Democrats will reach a breaking point and claw back the GOP’s ill-gotten gains. When Democrats regain power, expanding the court will be more than a matter of policing bad faith. It will determine whether we get to have anything resembling representative democracy in this country. In the meantime, they can say to the court what Ken Martin should say to CBS, and really to all participants in Trump’s authoritarian takeover: We will not submit to being governed by unprincipled actors. We are taking notes, and you will pay a price.

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Heather L. What is continually shocking to me is that even when Trump’s poll numbers are “plummeting”, the approval rating among Republicans remains an absolutely staggering 68%. I mean WTF. Just in the past few weeks alone, he’s insulted the Pope, threatened nuclear war, ranted incomprehensibly for hours and hours in the middle of the night, on social media, etc. etc.

What do you think it will take -- will anything EVER -- change the MAGA faithful’s minds about Trump? And if they NEVER change their minds, do you think that means that elected Republicans will NEVER change their support for Trump -- not until they’re voted out of office? And then what does this all mean for any possible recovery effort to salvage our democracy? How do we rebuild the country if some subset of people literally never come to their senses?

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Hi Heather. Not sure which poll or polls you’re looking at, but I want to challenge your intuition that 68 percent in-party approval is staggering. In a polarized system, it’s actually perilously low. The helplessness we all feel from time to time isn’t really because Trump’s supposedly unshakable base makes him teflon. It’s because public opinion is more or less our only source of leverage against him, and he doesn’t respond to public opinion in the manner of a well-adjusted person.

Trump is almost as unpopular now as he was after the insurrection, with room left to fall. But I think from there we intuit, reasonably, that this should prompt a change in behavior, and often it just doesn’t. Trump has spent the overwhelming majority of his two terms in a limbo zone where he’s not popular enough to win a snap election, but not so unpopular that members of his party will turn on him in droves. That is less a function of people not changing their minds (they definitely are changing their minds) than of a system that (under certain circumstances, anyhow) insulates incumbent parties from consequences. We don’t have snap elections! And that means a disciplined majority party can commit to a program of abuse that’s terribly unpopular, and “get away with it” for at least two years.

But setting that aside, here are two habits of mind that help me keep a handle on where things are and where we seem to be going: The first is to think along the margin; the second is to not over romanticize human nature.

I frequently hear from people in this pro-democracy movement that Trump voters are beyond reach, and so Dems should stop trying to appeal to them. Reroute their efforts into reaching demoralized Democratic and Dem-leaning voters. And—sure turnout and persuasion are two great tastes that taste great together. But take this post for instance:

The screen grab comes from a recent New York Times focus-group report. I don’t mean to pick on posters at random, this one just happened to cross my feed a couple days ago. And, yes, Argenis and Alla seem pseudosavvy about politics in a barstool-prophet kind of way. In Alla’s case, she uses cliched insights about politics to justify her bad decisions to others and maybe to herself. She either likes Trump’s predatory nature deep in her lizard-brain, or can’t admit she was wrong. Stubborn people are very frustrating. But to draw the inference that all Trump voters are beyond reaching, you have to ignore both of the other participants in the same screen grab! Obviously Pamela and Franceska deserve a heap of “I told you so”-style gloating from their liberal relatives. They got suckered by a con artist more transparent than the wallet inspector. But here they are admitting error and regret! Their sentiments:

‘I should’ve known Trump was who he always appeared to be.’

‘I should’ve realized his outrageous promises were false.’

That’s two gettable voters right there, out of four. Not a valid sample, but revealing. When Trump drops from 90 percent support among Republicans to 70 percent support among Republicans, that means many, many, many millions of Americans have shifted. They will not all vote Dem. But some will! And others will choose not to vote Republican. That’s plenty for Dems to win elections by landslide margins.

Then on human nature: It’s sad but worth remembering that even in democratic societies with better systems of accountability, something like 20 or 25 percent of citizens are basically fascist. So once Trump gets down into the low 30s, he won’t have much farther to fall.

I reflect at least once a month on this blog post that’s almost old enough to buy alcohol. Read the whole thing if you want, but the profound insight I took away from it, all the way back in 2005, is in the part where John asks Tyrone to estimate George W. Bush’s approval floor, and—without skipping a beat—Tyrone responds “27 percent.”

Why such a precise number? Because that’s the percentage of the vote Alan Keyes won when he ran for Senate against Barack Obama. Back in 2004, Illinois was pretty well representative of the whole country. And both Keyes and Obama were black men, so the experiment was controlled for racism and sexism. But Obama was an incredibly impressive, thoughtful candidate, while Keyes was a deranged fanatic. And yet 27 percent of Illinois voters that cycle voted for him anyhow, putting raw partisanship and authoritarian ambition ahead of every other consideration.

Polls vary, but that’s about where George W. Bush ended his presidency. And whether or not Trump ever reaches his floor, I suspect it’s somewhere in that neighborhood as well. That means tens of millions of your fellow countrymen are OK with the late-night tweeting, pope-attacking, nuclear war-threatening—the whole package. So long as they get to tell us what to do. And they will probably always be with us.

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Cassandra: I worry about the Dems “affordability” campaign. At some point we need to start talking about what that is going to look like. While the government can’t control much pricing, how are Dems going to get more money into the pockets of working people? Do you think that a lack of specificity on what fixing affordability is a long-term Achilles heel for Dems?

To answer the second question first, no, I don’t think so. If anything it’s the other way around, or almost the other way around. Specificity tends to hobble campaigns, making it harder to win. Making vague, non-credible promises, by contrast, is a great way to win elections, if you’re okay with everyone getting pissed when you fail to deliver.

So how should Dems thread that needle? They should start by examining “affordability” discourse in both literal and figurative terms. I explained the difference at length in the November piece you’ll see embedded below. The tl;dr is that “affordability” is a catch-all complaint. Some use it to express partisan antipathy—Trump bad, cite prices. Some people mean it in the strict dictionary sense—price level too high. Some mean it in a figurative sense—my circumstances are or feel precarious. Maybe if things were cheaper, I’d be less anxious about A.I., or the next recession or pandemic. If calamity were to strike tomorrow, it would wipe me out.

That kind of nonspecific “affordability” concern can be addressed relatively quickly, through safety nets. Enhancing existing ones, building new ones. Those can be campaigned on and enacted fairly fast, at least in theory. And that’s great news, because bringing down prices in certain critical sectors is a much longer-run challenge.

For the literalists who really do mean that they want nominal prices to drop, Dems should distinguish, e.g., housing, health care, child care from staple goods and discretionary commercial products like televisions.

I don’t know how people would respond if given a binary choice between a world where essentials are affordable, but luxuries are expensive, and another (ours) where luxuries are affordable but essentials are expensive. I do know they’d almost certainly feel more anxious in the latter. Policymakers thus owe it to us to ensure essentials are within reach. It’s just a hard thing to accomplish within an election cycle. We can surely build a ton of dwellings in order to lower market prices, but when’s a policy like that going to allow John and Mary Swingvoter to afford a home? Three years? Five? If you’re a single issue “make houses cheaper” voter, that’s probably not gonna cut it.

But the root solution to the affordability problem probably isn’t to increase expendable income and reap political dividends for giving people breathing room. In fact, I know it isn’t. How do I know this?

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If you’ve been troubled by the re-emergence of conspiracy theorizing in the American center-left, if you’re frustrated by all the people who believe Donald Trump has engineered false flag attacks against himself, I get it. But I also invite you to put yourselves in their shoes. Not because their theories have merit, but because you’ll understand why resorting to conspiracy theories is attractive specifically vis a vis Donald Trump.

Trump’s low character justifies suspecting the worst of him. His whole life has consisted of advancing various rotten schemes, of course he’d stoop deep to manipulate people for political advantage. But the more straightforward explanation is that the same low character attracts all of the chaos and violence Trump has fomented in American politics.

We can run this experiment any number of ways, but let’s start here: It’s 2019. The special counsel’s investigation into Russian election interference has just ended, and, heeding the wisdom of James Clyburn, Democrats have moved on to “the next chapter” of opposition: health care.

Elsewhere in the country, Democratic voters are trying to decide who to nominate for president. The most well-known candidate is Joe Biden, who also happens to be closely associated with Barack Obama, the most popular Democrat in the country. He isn’t the most polished or inspiring person in the field, but he feels safe. Particularly relative to the other candidates with high name recognition—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren—both of whom poll a bit weaker than Biden against Trump head-to-head.

Trump’s advisers can read these numbers, too, and know they need to change the trajectory of the election. They need to either weaken Biden’s standing among Democrats, so that Democrats nominate a more beatable candidate, or weaken Biden’s standing with swing voters, so that Trump stands a better chance of re-election in 2020.

Then, as if the gods owed Trump a favor, a miracle: The newly elected president of Ukraine, dependent on the U.S. to resist the Russian invasion of Crimea, announces something shocking. He’s uncovered evidence that, as vice president, Biden had coerced the Ukrainian government into dropping a corruption case against the energy firm Burisma, so that his son Hunter could collect large sums of money as a member of Burisma’s board of directors. Speaking from Kyiv, Volodymyr Zelensky announces he’s transmitted evidence of this extortion scheme to United States Attorney General Bill Barr, who in turn declines to comment on “an ongoing investigation.”

The Bidens insist this is a set up, but they seem to be protesting too much. They can’t prove the negative; and Biden really did get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired—because the prosecutor was corrupt! They say if you’re explaining you’re losing; well, if you’re explaining and under grand jury investigation, you’re definitely losing.

So in lieu of proving their innocence with factual evidence, the Bidens posit a theory: That Trump blackmailed Zelensky into fabricating this allegation, threatening to illegally suspend U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine, unless Zelensky interfered in the 2020 election.

This speculation would have been 100 percent correct. But without evidence, let alone proof, it would’ve reeked of desperation. Trump derangement syndrome. Reckless slander. If you’d posited it out of nowhere, people would’ve called you a conspiracy theorist and told you to touch grass.

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There was a whistleblower, so we’ll never know how things might’ve played out differently. But you can see that if Trump had kept his phone call to Zelensky under wraps, history might have unfolded differently. And there are many such cases. Indeed, to an under-appreciated extent, Trump’s politics really do play out as a series of schemes—criminal conspiracies in some cases—most of which would sound like deranged conspiracy theories if they unfolded as planned, and you tried to make sense of them after the fact.

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For those just tuning in, the event attracted an armed man who tried to rush past the security perimeter, failed, and was captured far outside the dinner hall. But he got close enough for Trump to play martyr and for his retinue of hangers-on to promote a new White House message: Trump needs his palace ballroom expedited, for national-security reasons.

I’ll explain why this position is stupid on the merits in a moment, but first let’s examine why Republicans seem so set on squandering whatever political good will they might have earned by transforming this into a fight over Trump’s ballroom.

The ballroom is Trump’s only real fixation, and he’s frustrated to have run up against legal obstacles. Nobody ever authorized him to demolish part of the White House or build anything new on the grounds. That’s what’s ultimately driving this. But Republicans in Congress had tried to keep arm’s length from the whole project until now. And I think their sudden enthusiasm for joining this particular political fight has less to do with any supposed threat to Trump than with resetting the game board after a series of recent defeats. Most pointedly, the gerrymandering race-to-the-bottom Trump kicked off in Texas last year.

Confused? Let’s discuss further.

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The lopsided Democratic map Virginia voters passed last week had the literal effect of neutralizing Republican efforts to rig the 2026 midterms in the tally of redrawn districts. But the practical effect was symbolic.

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Thread is open for members.

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As a younger person, I struggled to absorb and process history, and thus didn’t appreciate it—not as a student, not as a sightseer. At least not for the reasons people devote their lives to history as a vocation1. My preferences ran to puzzles with correct solutions, and history, in those days, struck me as a discipline that mostly required students to commit factoids to memory.

College classmates flipping through flashcards all seemed to be studying for organic chemistry or history exams, and I wanted no part of that kind of learning. When I’d travel, my goal was to hoover up experiences and check famous places off lists in my mind, but without necessarily learning why those things mattered, or what systems and people produced them.

In part I was just a stereotypically arrogant STEM-type, but I also want to plead to a kind of perspective blindness.

I couldn’t really situate myself in bygone circumstances—at least, not the kinds that we memorialize in books and engravings. Asking me to inhabit distant lives, to feel what it must have been like to experience madness and danger all the time—you might as well have taken me to a natural history museum, then quizzed me on the interior lives of dinosaurs. These were artifacts from a world that didn’t exist anymore, from back when History still happened. The age of dinosaurs ended with an asteroid impact. History ended with…the surrender of the Axis powers? Globalization? My own birth? In any event, it doesn’t happen anymore, so why take more than cursory interest?

I of course had many peers who weren’t nearly this shallow, who became intellectually mature much faster than I did. But my story isn’t so unusual. It’s what happens to people who are born or raised in stable circumstances in stable places, in the world’s only superpower, where it’s easy to take permanence for granted. Particularly if you look and act a certain way.

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Working as a reporter covering news of historical significance shook me out of all that. It exposed me to aspects of human nature that helped me grasp why powerful people do seemingly inexplicable things. Why regular people react the way they do. How an uneasy truce or fragile consensus, of necessity in a given moment, can burden future generations.

Age and self-knowledge helped, too.

But the scales really fell when the illusion of certainty went poof. That’s mostly a story about Donald Trump.

I was seven when the Berlin wall came down, and for the next 30 years, shocks and traumas and atrocities seemed to simply wash over the United States. It isn’t that 9/11 or the wars it inspired or the great financial crisis or even COVID-19 were insignificant. But the country’s wealth and power and relative enlightenment gave it immense margin for error. We could endure traumas that’d cripple smaller nations and be back on trend within months or maybe a few years at most.

At an individual level, life could be cruel, but the social scaffolding seemed durable in ways that people who lived through world war or civil war or famine or plague couldn’t have fathomed. People in circumstances like those would give anything for the kind of stability people like me took for granted. Which is why so many of them put themselves through hell to live here.

The kind of myopia I confessed above is endemic among people who come of age in an empire, and a perverse consequence of such immense privilege is it leaves the population unprepared to snap into survival mode. Good times, weak men.

Taking prosperity for granted, believing history had ended because that’s how it felt in our blasé hearts—this attitude didn’t just afflict bourgeois nobodies like me, but people with real power and influence. Their critics have derided them as managers of imperial decline. But I think they feel or felt more like superintendents, tasked with being on site in case shit happened. To patch and paint over holes, knowing most systems would chug along on their own, in perpetuity. The bones are good, and it’s mostly up to responsible people like us not to fuck things up too much.

Legislators, civil society leaders, journalists—their jobs became routine. They slotted themselves into their roles, hit autopilot, and left it on long after it began to malfunction.

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I write this as an appeal to the egos of these same ambitious people.

There’s no particular occasion, though the sentiments here were animated by the fact that, this weekend, many of those people will attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, alongside authoritarian censors like Brendan Carr, and enemies of press freedom like Kash Patel, in order to sit silently and absorb abuse from Trump himself.

They’re still carrying on as though history ended.

The politicians and journalists—particularly marquee writers, editors, and television news hosts—who’ve chosen to attend the dinner probably won’t be receptive to the argument that they’ve disgraced themselves and done a disservice to others. But they might well ruminate on the way this will all be written about and taught if the good guys win again. Some of your faces will be filmed and photographed; some of those images will circulate for centuries.

But this is much bigger than the dinner and pre-parties and afterparties. The assumptions undergirding the dinner infect the entire U.S. establishment. Journalists, in the way they cover news; donors, in the causes they fund; lobbyists, in how they advocate for client interests; and politicians, in their approach to spiraling crises. Nero’s fiddle turns out to be a metaphor for horserace punditry, access, and rent seeking, all discussed over an under-seasoned meal.

I suspect few Democrats will attend Saturday’s dinner. But their party isn’t immune to the same kind of thinking. They may be overcoming it. They made Trump and his Republican allies regret their attempt to rig election maps. But we can detect outmoded ways when they tiptoe around questions of impeachment, or court packing. When they oppose fascism on the basis of what pollsters tell them about how to win elections—under conditions no American pollster has any experience navigating.

There is a reasonable chance that Trump will die in office, and a similar chance that, if he does, Democrats will unilaterally suspend hostilities in the battle for historical memory. An American president has died, we must at least pretend to be mournful. Certainly we can’t deny him the usual honors.

I’m getting ahead of myself obviously, but the point is that everything short of determined opposition will be understood by students and disbelieving documentarians as a choice, no less than Chamberlain’s appeasement or in northerners’ indulgence of Lost Cause mythology. And to be clear: those choices were not crazy. They had internal logic, in the prevailing contexts, just as there’s a logic to going through the motions of dead customs—two-handed journalism, the correspondents’ dinner, running everything by focus groups.

Trump is self-immolating at the moment, which is better than the alternative, but if nobody will force him out, there’s also nowhere for him to go, and he has more than 30 months left to wreck spitefully. Long-shot efforts to contain or dethrone him might fail, but they will be noted and remembered reverently. Choosing to behave as though it’ll all blow over, like everything else, will be remembered a different way.

Michael: What can the Democratic party or left of center people more generally do to more effectively convince the public that the Supreme Court is run by a partisan Republican majority? To make reforms up to and including court expansion is going to require a level of public support or even public demand, and very few in the Democratic party are doing anything even remotely effective in this space. (The best work being done is by people such as Leah Litman, but I think there needs to be some level of institutional Democratic party involvement along with the liberal legal community, just as the GOP has always been highly focused on judges and the courts).

P.S. Yes, this question is prompted by Saturday’s NYT expose on the beginnings of the Roberts shadow docket.

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Everyone should read the expose. It’s based on memos from 2016 proving John Roberts weaponized both the shadow docket and a dubious constitutional principle (the major questions doctrine) because he personally felt President Obama’s industrial greenhouse-gas regulation was icky. Or that the big-business elite shouldn’t be burdened with it. Whatever his animating emotions, the decision was purely instrumental. And the consequences have been perverse. Right-wing abuse of the shadow docket has metastasized into one of the biggest and most opaque arrogations of power in American history. The MQD removed one of the last tent poles of principled federal jurisprudence. And, as it turns out, the regulation in question wouldn’t have been costly after all. Specifically, it would’ve cost $0. Because, contra John Roberts the genius, it wasn’t terribly onerous, and polluters thus met the rule’s benchmarks without any rule in place.

Now to the question: The main thing I want to do here is stress-test the premise that “[t]o make reforms up to and including court expansion is going to require a level of public support or even public demand.” Obviously if court expansion were toxically unpopular, and a highly salient issue, it would be a pipe dream. But assuming you mean something more like, “Democrats can’t do this until it’s popular and there’s a large clamor for it,” I don’t agree. To my eye, the urgency of court reform looks more like the urgency Democrats faced after Donald Trump ordered Texas to re-gerrymander its map last year. That confronted Democrats with a binary choice: respond or accept your status as a second-class party in our two party system. There wasn’t some huge national clamor for state-by-state gerrymandering in 2025. Most people probably couldn’t define gerrymandering if you asked them to, and the idea didn’t poll well in the abstract. But it had to be done, and in the context of “fighting back” the public rallied behind Dems.

By analogy, Republicans and their justices have confronted Democrats with no shortage of provocations, and Democrats should accept that if they don’t expand the Court, they’ll be dooming themselves—just the same as if they hadn’t responded to Trump’s gerrymandering provocation in Texas.

The good news is, what you (and I) want has already happened for the most part. Between the theft of the Merrick Garland seat and the Amy Coney-Barrett power grab and the Clarence Thomas revelations and the Dobbs ruling and the presidential immunity ruling, the liberal public has developed a pretty clear sense of what’s up with the GOP justices.

A small amount of credit goes to left-of-center critics doing what they should be doing: building an unassailable case for reform; making it hard for status quo-happy Democrats to win primaries. Another small increment goes to the handful of elected Dems (Sheldon Whitehouse comes to mind) who’ve been consistent and intelligent critics of the Roberts court.

We could surely use more of that. Democrats themselves should be vocal about the need for some kind of reckoning, whenever appropriate: After bad rulings, to point fingers; after “good rulings,” to remind people that (e.g.) upholding birthright citizenship doesn’t wipe the slate clean.

Then if Thomas or Sam Alito retire this summer—or, in an increasingly likely scenario, if one of them retires during the lame duck period after Republicans lose the Senate, Dems should oppose Trump’s nominee theatrically. Especially if he selects a partisan hitman like Aileen Cannon or Emil Bove, as he likely would. That’ll be like the Texas gerrymandering moment. Either you fight back or you die.

But those kinds of maneuvers should all tend to reinforce a dynamic that has already radicalized the left of center against the Court. Most of the work here is done, and Dems who point to public opinion data to suggest reform isn’t popular enough are telling us something disqualifying about themselves.

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Chris Morfas: What do you think of Matthew Yglesias’ argument (voiced with Zac Beauchamp in a recent Vox podcast) that Democrats and the nation would have been better off had Biden formed a unity government in 2021 to stabilize democratic institutions and processes instead of listening to The Groups? Any lessons going forward?

With the caveat/disclosure that I’ve only read the auto-generated transcript of this portion of the episode, I’d say Matt’s take is correct, but also that there’s no one correct answer to the implied question, and the bar for correct answers is extremely low.

What’s the implied question?

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It’s instructive to imagine yourself (or a composite, fake person) living life severed from media and rhetoric and marketing. Or as insulated from those things as it’s possible to be in modern times.

No TV, no radio, no streaming, no social media (text or video), no newspapers, no magazines, few friends. A misanthrope who reads old books, but refuses to engage with headlines at the checkout counter, or chyrons in places like airports and gyms where televisions are forced upon the public.

We hear all the time, online and in politics, about how people must be met where they are, their “lived experience” respected. But how would a person like this ever draw correct inferences about the world as it exists beyond the horizon?

How would an ascetic recluse ever come to know, say, that immigration and border security had become unusually salient issues in national politics? Maybe if they lived in Eagle Pass, TX, they’d have seen the challenges up close. But in most of the country, they’d have no way of knowing. Not without the benefit of some kind of media, first or second-hand.

Same is true, most years, with respect to crime. Crime goes up, crime goes down. The national trend has been down for decades, notwithstanding a brief COVID-era reversal. But to know that, you have to be unusually well informed—enough to check ambient signals against official statistics. A normally mediated person must be forgiven for believing that crime is and has always been at crisis levels. That’s what our local news broadcasts imply, what social media wants us to believe, and what right-wing politicians need us to believe.

But our loner friend Ted1 ? Years and years could go by without him encountering anything to suggest that the orderliness of society at large had changed in either direction. A rash of neighborhood break-ins could be part of a trend, or it could be happenstance. Things in the narrow confines of his personal experience would have to get quite bad before he could intuit that the country had fallen into crisis. Even in a violent country like ours, most people seldom experience crime directly. And even when they do, it’s foolhardy to draw huge inferences. Did Ted get robbed because America’s going to hell in a handbasket? Or was he just unlucky?

The answer is almost always going to be “unlucky.” Which is why it’s uncontroversial, at least in progressive circles, to note that public misperceptions about the state of crime and immigration in America are driven almost entirely by media, and social interactions about what’s happening in the news or online.

Controversy only arises when you suggest that these same dynamics drive economic sentiment, too.

Back to Ted, our weird shut in.

How would he ever know anything certain about the American macroeconomy? He has a house. He has a job. His neighbors have houses, and most of them have jobs, too. Prices at the grocery store fluctuate. Sometimes they go up, sometimes, they’re flat. Sometimes the prices of certain goods rise, while other stuff gets cheaper.

Then Ted gets laid off, and we’re back to the question above. Did he lose his job because America’s going to hell in a handbasket? Or was he just unlucky?

Without mediation of some kind, it’s going to be hard to tell. Does the human resources officer provide any meaningful context? Is the entire workplace shutting down? And without an informational world curated by faithful journalists, even a better-adjusted person would have a hard time gleaning much with certainty.

Almost 30 years ago—when I was a teenager with a job, but no make-or-break expenses and no positions in any market—I would catch headline economic news on the radio in the car going to and from school. But I could’ve been a nerd who read the Financial Times or a cable-news junkie and the story would’ve been the same. That is how I knew the national economy was booming, and the country was optimistic about the future. If I’d lost my job anyhow, I would’ve felt sad, but it wouldn’t have given me any meaningful information per se about the national economy.

If identical economic conditions were to materialize in 2026, today’s teenagers would get a murkier picture. Yes, they’d know the president had gone to war and set an energy shortage into motion. They’d also scroll past doomer memes and conspiracy theories and pictures of homeless encampments and advertisements for apocalypse scams, and they’d be hard pressed not to conclude that the economy sucks (which makes sense in this hellhole country with all the immigrants and violent crime).

Ted, on the other hand, isn’t getting news from gate-kept sources or the digital commons. He loses his job, and he’s left to wonder what it means. Maybe he finds a new job quickly, and it sets his mind at ease. Or maybe he has a rough go of it, but none of his neighbors lose their jobs. What to infer? The answer is almost always nothing—unless more hardship ensues. Multiple neighbors sacked. Houses in foreclosure. Gas station lines stretching around the block. Signals this large would be tipoffs that the region or the country was experiencing an economic shock. But Ted’s lived experience, taken in isolation, tells us little.

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There’s a separate question of whether there’s a correct way to feel about anything. I could tell someone who’s anxious about crime that crime is at or near historic lows, and she could respond, reasonably, “compared to what?” She’s from Munich, Germany. Her lived experience tells her America remains intolerably violent.

Who’s right?

It is empirically true that past generations of Americans were much happier with far worse economies than this one. But maybe they were naifs, or masochists. Maybe their consent had been manufactured by elites who never told them about life in more equal or prosperous societies. Maybe they were in denial about how much better things could be.

The point is not to scold people who claim to feel distressed. It’s to solve the mystery about what’s changed.

And the purpose of this tedious thought experiment is to remind everyone that one, big thing has changed: How we all know what we think we know about the world. We’ve lived through an epistemological revolution, and on this side of it there’s much more information, much more sorting into ideologically conformed social networks, and many more incentives to produce information that is either wrong or negative or both.

It’s not that Americans who believed it was morning in America under Ronald Reagan had it “right,” but that they were more easily able to experience the feeling of optimism because they weren’t surrounded by concerted, conflicting information.

Another thing has changed since then, as well: The parties have finished sorting ideologically. Reagan, unlike Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, could credibly strive for approval ratings in the high 60s. That’s hard to imagine today, except under unusual circumstances, likely bleak ones.

This sorting has had a big and obvious effect on economic sentiment. When the presidency switches hands, the out party becomes more pessimistic, the in party becomes more optimistic, like clockwork—though the phenomenon is asymmetric: Republicans are more reactionary, more prone to larger swings. But Democrats aren’t immune. And it’s worth saying that in some cases, negative polarization is a good heuristic. I think I’m pretty well justified in losing economic confidence under Trump, who is erratic and corrupt in ways that tend to both destroy demand and increase prices. We may not yet be in a recession, but we are endangered! Plus, we have a clear and theoretically well-grounded track record: the economy performs better under Democrats than Republicans.

By contrast, right-wing doomerism under Democratic presidents mostly reflects tribal hatred and disinformation. Republican media is much more propagandistic than mainstream or progressive media.

But if polarization alone explained the change in the relationship between the economy and consumer sentiment, Democrats would be sitting pretty. Biden’s economic approval would’ve held steady, even if people still believed he was too old to be president. His co-partisans would’ve felt good about the economy, offsetting Republican despair. Kamala Harris would’ve won.

Likewise, if polarization told the whole story, Trump would’ve been sitting pretty in 2025. Polarization should create a low ceiling on economic sentiment, but also a high floor underneath it. Instead, Americans feel no better about the economy today than our ancestors did in October 1929.

Even a loner like Ted could detect the dissonance.

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Politix

Matt And Brian Solve The Vibecession

Donald Trump has, in fact, damaged the economy. He’s juiced inflation and weakened the labor market and created deep uncertainty. But the public seems to think things are worse now than at any time since the Great Depression. And that is empirically not true…

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9 days ago · 4 likes · 5 comments · Politix Podcast

Let’s use Donald Trump’s Iran debacle as a metaphor for domestic accountability politics.

If you asked me to place a bet on the near-term resolution of Trump’s war on Iran, I’d ̶i̶n̶f̶i̶l̶t̶r̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶W̶h̶i̶t̶e̶ ̶H̶o̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶e̶t̶i̶z̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶f̶o̶r̶m̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶K̶a̶l̶s̶h̶i̶ still wager that it ends as stupidly as it began: Something resembling the status quo ante will be restored, but with Iran’s hand greatly strengthened. America will be humiliated everywhere outside redoubts in the U.S. where people find comfort or profit in the propagation of self-soothing lies.

But that could be wrong! Predicting near-term events with great specificity is hard even under the best circumstances, unfogged by war.

What about the medium and long run? Even harder! As we drift away from specificity toward broad strokes, things get a little clearer. For instance: I don’t think Iran’s rivals in the region, nor the broader world, will gladly tolerate a new status quo in which, thanks to Trump, Iran gets to control a global economic kill switch.

Iran is not as megalomaniacal as the U.S. under Trump. Iranian leaders seem to realize their fortunes will change if and when global publics no longer view it principally as a victim of foreign aggression. Nobody can credibly blame Iran for defending itself, but they will blame Iran for extorting the world after the war is over. So I don’t suspect Iran intends to brandish its ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz the same way, say, Trump wielded tariff authority over the past year. Iran isn’t mighty enough to force the world to its knees.

But it does have regional ambitions. Either those will yield, and the Iranian revolution will give way to normalized relations with the west, or it will husband its new power long enough to develop a nuclear deterrent. As nice and clean as the Hormuz deterrent turns out to be, it can be worked around. If keeping the strait open and safe requires making endless concessions to a scheming and corrupt regime, rival powers will make new investments—in infrastructure, to bring commodities to market other ways, and in innovations, to reduce our dependence on dirty energy. Or there will be more war.

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This is why Benjamin Netanyahu had such bad luck, until Trump’s second term, trying to persuade American presidents to effect regime change in Iran on his behalf.

The U.S. government surely sits on many different plans for war with Iran. These plans just as surely include contingencies for the risk to the Strait of Hormuz. The idea that Iran would respond to an air campaign or invasion by making passage through the strait impossible (or intolerably risky) has been well understood for decades. Thus, the only truly viable war plans are ones in which that risk is eliminated, or in which the U.S. and allied publics are bought-in enough to endure the sacrifice of a lengthy energy crisis: an occupation big enough, and well-enough supported with intelligence, to protect ships transiting the strait; a just-war scenario in which everyone knows why we’re at war, and broadly supports its aims.

The approach Trump has taken, of punching Iran in the nose (decapitating its leadership, destroying its military infrastructure) without landing a knockout blow, and placing himself on the hook politically for all the economic and humanitarian consequences, is not contained in any viable war plan, because it is dumb. Good advisers would never intentionally tempt their decision-making bosses to pick a big fight without preparing for easily anticipated consequences.

And I think this is more or less why Democratic leaders and their advisers are so impervious to arguments from the outside that they retool the party for fighting.

In their minds, fighting Trump the way he should be fought, to say nothing of fascism-proofing America post-Trump, entails political risks that are a bit like going to war with Iran on a lark. It isn’t that the pro-democracy coalition is too weak to prevail in theory, and in this case, the cause is clearly righteous. It’s just that winning will be hard, and fighting will unleash political consequences that an unprimed public will not tolerate. If Dems cross a red line, then retreat, we’ll all be worse off than if they’d made do with the rotten status quo ante; and the fascists will know liberals lack the determination required to win.

And here’s my big concession:

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On one hand, it’s frustrating that a political data analyst like Harry Enten would hype a survey finding that Donald Trump has 100 percent approval among people who identify as MAGA. (Not accounting for a significant margin of error.)

Enten surely understood the results were not probative. Unworthy of hype. No different from asking self-identified Bernie Bros whether they approve of Bernie Sanders or Obamaniacs whether they approve of Barack Obama. Surprise! They all do. The difference is that liberals and social democrats aren’t shameless or stupid enough to bandy about such a factoid boastfully. The internal cultures of those two factions discourage bimboism, at least for now.

Trump, by contrast, still advertises this polling tautology several weeks later, as if it’s a seminal finding. And since the world is full of marks, surely some voters have been fooled—if not into liking Trump then into assuming his political standing is stronger than ever. This is how journalism about polls, good and bad, makes polling itself endogenous to politics.

On the other hand, it’s all enjoyable as an indicator of how badly MAGA is floundering. It’s good that Trump and his loyalists have nothing better to work with. And it’s actually heartening for anyone in the Trump opposition who knows how to read polls and is willing to spend some time in the cross tabs.

MAGA remains all-in for Trump. But Trump has become more unpopular over time. Much of that slippage has been among people who never identified as MAGA. But not all of it. MAGA may be all in for Trump, but that’s the nature of an identity. That’s not the interesting finding. The interesting finding is that MAGA, like the larger pro-Trump universe, is shrinking.

In the NBC poll that had Enten frothing, 30 percent of respondents identified as MAGA. In its new survey, with different pollsters, NBC News Decision Desk finds Trump’s overall approval way down, all the way to 37 percent. Only 53 percent of Republican respondents claimed to identify as MAGA, rather than as supporters of the GOP generally, suggesting a pretty big drop in the number of Americans who claim to be MAGA.

But to my eye, the best way to identify the erosion is to monitor the changing composition of Trump’s approval.

A year ago 26 percent of respondents strongly approved of Trump, while 42 percent strongly disapproved. Trump’s always been intensely disliked, so it’s no surprise that so many people felt so negatively about him, even during his brief post-election honeymoon. But look what’s happened since. Today, only 20 percent of respondents are strong approvers—what you might loosely call MAGA. Down almost a quarter. Meanwhile, half of all adults now strongly disapprove.

This can’t really happen without MAGA shrinking. Committed Trump fans still surely support Trump, but millions have softened from strong to weak support. And for every new respondent who only “somewhat approves,” a former “somewhat approver” crosses the fifty-yard line to become a “somewhat disapprover.” And the shift propagates all the way through the spectrum. When you tally it all up, Trump’s strong approval has fallen, and strong disapproval climbed, in basically equal measure.

The erosion has been steady enough to ignore as background noise. But the logic of it all suggests MAGA isn’t just shrinking. It’s devouring itself.

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And it couldn’ta happened to a nicer bunch of folks.

MAGA functions much like an invasive species. It works, as movement conservatism worked, by seeking to destroy or discredit rival or independent sources of authority. If there’s a difference, it’s that movement conservatism aimed to discipline Republican officeholders in pursuit of ideological and partisan aims. For MAGA, the litmus test includes obeisance to Trump himself.

But the methods are similar.

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Thread is open for members.

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Everyone’s looking to Hungary for lessons. What does it mean that Viktor Orban conceded defeat? What does it mean that Hungarians ousted him in the first place? What does either fact mean for the United States, insofar as Orban was an inspiration figure for the MAGA elite? These are fair questions, so long as we resist the temptation to reason backward from the premises—to observe the many vestiges of freedom in Hungary and the U.S., and mistake them for the character of their heads of state.

Hungary held an election, and Orban conceded defeat, ergo, how bad could he be? How endangered was Hungary’s democracy, really?

This is an analytic error we’d recognize in almost any other context. Outside of truly totalitarian societies, when would we ever view governing outcomes as perfect proxies for the ideologies, personalities, or methods of political leaders?

The similarities between civic life in America and Hungary; the fact that Trump and his movement looked to Orban rather than some other autocrat for inspiration—these things matter less than we think. What we need more than anything is a clear sense of how repressive they’d be if left to their own devices.

Dictators tend to possess similar personality traits, but they are not interchangeable. Some are insane and some are rational, some are genocidal maniacs, and some are not. But they don’t typically disclaim power when an opportunity to grab it arises. Indeed, most dictators don’t govern quite as tyrannically as they’d like, because they face real external and psychological constraints.

Trump’s motives and his lust for power are unusually vain. He suffers from mental illness. He’s a self-aggrandizer who’s desperate for glory, but also to avoid ego injury. It is this quality, more than anything real, that impels him to deny the results of the 2020 election, even though he knows he lost. Or to incite an insurrection, then call it off when the risk of permanent disgrace becomes intolerable.

This stands in contrast to Orban or Vladimir Putin, who are both greedy crooks like Trump, but were each, in their own ways, forged in ideological and nationalist crucibles.

There’s small comfort here, in that Trump’s ineligible for another term, diminishing the stakes of future elections in his mind. If that piece of the Constitution holds, it’ll remove a crucial ingredient from the stew that produced the January 6 insurrection. Trump surely wants Republicans to remain in power and build monuments to him across the country; but if they lose coming elections, he won’t feel personal shame; indeed, he’ll happily blame them for their own defeats.

This may spare us another insurrection. But it won’t spare us efforts to rig elections in the manner of Orban or worse. None of these guys want to lose elections. They go to great lengths not to. And here is where the differences between them start to matter less than the forces that constrain them.

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I got a small amount of unconvincing pushback this week for making a correct observation: Orban’s decision to concede defeat proves nothing about the regime he oversaw. Many dictatorships have fallen in response to election results, including ones much more repressive than his.

Orban did everything he could to make his elections impossible to lose, but that is not the same as saying he did everything he would’ve liked to do.

As others have observed, when incoming Prime Minister Peter Magyar addressed the people of Hungary after the election, it marked his first time doing so on television, because under Orban’s rule, he’d been banned from campaigning on Hungarian airwaves. That’s quite enough to confirm Orban’s Hungary was authoritarian in nature. It does not tell us whether Orban would’ve jailed or murdered Magyar if he could have.

If we mean to assess the depths of a dictator’s depravity, we can’t just tally up their abuses or size up their role models. We have to look at the constraints they face as well.

To circle back to the example I used earlier this week, Augusto Pinochet’s Chile was much more repressive than Orban’s Hungary, though both regimes lasted 16 years, and voters ended both dictatorships at the ballot box. But that doesn’t tell us Pinochet had a darker heart than Orban. We can’t determine who has the most evil intent by counting bodies and lost liberties.

This is important, because I think people are over-reading. They know Trump and Orban supported one another; they know MAGA viewed Orban’s Hungary as a model for establishing semi-permanent control over the U.S. government. The common inference seems to be that the MAGA movement wants only as much control as Fidesz was able to establish, no more no less.

But this is bad thinking. Trump does not have Orban’s heart. And he and Orban don’t face the same constraints.

Orban, unlike Pinochet, didn’t murder Hungarians by the tens of thousands, or throw dissidents from helicopters. But is that because he’s a less sadistic person than Pinochet was? Or is it because the particular constraints he faced limited his repressive capacity?

I think the latter quite obviously played a larger role: these are different people with different tolerances for brutality, which can in turn be hard to gauge. But we should generally assume they will attempt as much as they think they can get away with.

Orban was in cahoots with Putin. He called himself a mouse to Putin’s lion‚ an allusion to Aesop’s fable about how the strong and weak can be of mutual use to one another. But because Hungary is in the E.U. and NATO, and is a tiny, weak country, Orban could not subdue the population with the same forms of brutality available to Putin or Pinochet or other villains. His economy depended on Europe and so he had to follow some of its rules.

Pinochet wasn’t surrounded by aligned, integrated democracies. Quite the contrary! And his coup d’etat and dictatorship had U.S. backing, further freeing him to brutalize dissidents.

But even with U.S. backing, Chile was a small country subject to international pressures. Pinochet allowed the plebiscite that ended his dictatorship for many of the same reasons Orban held elections and Putin still holds “elections.” He thought he had enough control over the society that he could never lose, and that if he tried suspending elections altogether, he’d face real consequences. His own constitution (like Hungary’s) required the plebiscite. Military leaders had a legitimating interest in overseeing some kind of election. And his years of oppressive rule had rendered Chile a pariah state throughout much of the free world. Allowing a plebiscite that seemed credible, complete with opposition figures and international observers, was a strategic play to earn good will abroad, while maintaining a viselike grip on power domestically. He just happened to miscalculate.

Would Orban have governed like Pinochet or Putin if he could have? I suspect he would have. At the very least, we have little reason to believe he wouldn’t have.

And that’s why I can’t take much solace in the fact that the U.S. authoritarian right embraced Orban more openly than other thugs.

They didn’t turn to him because they believed he’d found an ideological sweet spot—just authoritarian enough, without all the messiness of broken windows and missing persons. They turned to him because his approach seemed more likely to consolidate lasting power on their side than something more aggressive, like a criminal declaration of martial law.

Happily, Trump’s authoritarian breakthrough attempt has been shambolic. He’s undisciplined and strategically impaired and more unpopular than Orban was in his early years. U.S. institutions are compromised, though sturdier than Hungary’s, and our people are raised to be jealous guardians of their own freedom. Trump's failures stem from being stupider than Orban, and from facing tougher internal obstacles 16 months into his presidency than Orban did 16 years into his premiership.

But Trump is comparably unconstrained on the global scene. What does Trump care whether Brussels thinks American elections are adequately free and fair?

Trump has not successfully imprisoned his dissident enemies. But does anyone doubt he’d do it if he could? He insists they be arrested and prosecuted, publicly and privately, all the time. But he hasn’t established enough control of the judiciary. He can’t crack the grand jury system in any straightforward way. And his appointees can not or will not simply sweep up Trump critics and throw them in dungeons. Is that because Trump is magnanimous at heart? Does he fear a bad international reputation? Or is this actually just a work in progress?

Likewise, if Trump’s FCC director could force Democrats off the air, the same way Orban censored his opponents, he would1. Trump could never shoot anyone on Fifth Avenue by his own hand, but if he were given the opportunity to helm a dictatorship in which people took care of all his dirty work for him, he’d accept it happily.

He’s done something quite like this vis-a-vis immigrants, people mistaken for immigrants, and people resisting his secret immigration police: Indefinite detentions, torture prisons, two dissidents murdered in the street. That’s all real life under Trump, courtesy of his henchmen.

It’s a big part of why we can’t take for granted that a darker turn isn’t coming. I do not believe any attempt to Orbanize or Putinize our elections would succeed, at least not in the near term. But the only deterrents are internal: Among other things, they include Trump’s ego, the character of his loyalists, the political independence of the military, and the willingness of freedom-loving American citizens to brave physical danger.

I like our odds…but I don’t love them.

Gary Paudler: Trump is reported to have promised pardons to all cooperating criminals. If I recall correctly, if one accepts a pardon, one is acknowledging guilt. If so, wouldn’t there be at least symbolic meaning to investigating, prosecuting and trying administration miscreants if only to attach “convicted fraudster/inside-trader/war criminal/whatever” to their name, in-perpetuity or longer? Mightn’t announcing that intention now have some minor deterrent effect?

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Pardons are meant to be accepted, not just issued. Thus, ideally they’d only ever go to people who’d acknowledged guilt or wrongdoing at some point during their time in the criminal-justice system, or to people who’d been exonerated by evidence, but were never freed from custody, or never had their convictions overturned.

That way we could read every pardon issued to reflect atonement, or correct some form of injustice.

Alas, in practice, presidents have pardoned guilty people who’ve shown little to no remorse, and nothing has stopped presidents from issuing preemptive pardons to people who denied criminal wrongdoing. Most recently, Biden pardoned people on Trump’s enemies list, who almost surely did not commit any crimes. In their case, the thing being preempted was an abuse of power, the injustice being corrected was anticipated harassment by the Justice Department.

But the Ford to Nixon instance is most apt, because Nixon did commit crimes, only ever copped to “mistakes,” and got off scot-free.

So we should accept at the outset that Trump likely will pass out pardons like candy, to actual criminals, and it will create a meaningful impediment to a certain kind of accountability. I’d expect the recipients (particularly the MAGA made-men with tons of resources) to challenge any federal effort to even investigate their crimes, slowing DOJ efforts to charge unpardoned conspirators, or to compile evidence for posterity.

But all is not lost! Pardons don’t cover state offenses, and many federal corruption offenses violate sister statutes at the state level. Pardons can’t stop Congress or inspectors general or a post-Trump truth commission from investigating, and airing their findings. Pardons can’t stop disbarment proceedings. And Democrats should absolutely put Republicans on notice that all of it is coming for them.

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No Not Me: it’s January 2027. The senate just went blue. What’s the reaction? My gut says the left professional class views this as a realignment. Meaning: no longer prioritizing institutional hardening: the voters will be (more likely) save us now. How do we guard against the complacency that many of the dem adjacent institutional forces will be paying to incentivize?

This is depressingly plausible. Some thoughts on deterrence:

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If Viktor Orban’s willingness to acknowledge defeat helps underscore Donald Trump’s aberrance, it also provides refuge to right-wing authoritarians in America. They can now unctuously cite Orban’s concession and (so far) peaceful hand-off of power as proof that their political project is harmless. Normal. All in the game.

Rod Dreher, the American wingnut who moved to Budapest to become one of Orban’s yes-men, shrugged off the abrupt reversal of fortune for the global-nationalist movement. “Orban won four free elections in a row. He lost this one because the economy has been lousy for three years, [and people] wanted change,” Dreher wrote. “Fair play. It’s hard for globalists to understand, but it’s still democracy when [people] vote in ways you don’t like.”

“Strong political parties that bend the rules to entrench their power and succumb to corruption are a consistent feature of democracy qua democracy,” explained the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who frequently defends Trump and is personally close with JD Vance. “[I]f your entrenched ruling party can lose everything in a wave election, you are not living in an authoritarian state.”

See? Those of you bemoaning the crimes of Viktor Orban simply don’t know democracy when you see it!

Perhaps Douthat thinks the word “strong” serves as a kind of escape hatch. If Trump attempts another coup in six months or two-and-a-half years, Douthat can split the difference. 'Orban's Fidesz was a strong institutional party that bent rules but ultimately respected democracy. The GOP is just a weak party that got hijacked by one tyrannical man. Totally different!'

But there’s no real distinction here. True, Orban has not declared the election stolen, but he stayed in power for 16 years the same way Republicans are trying to stay in power now—in ways no liberal-democratic party in the western world has attempted. Through capture. Orban supported gerrymanders in one partisan direction, just like Republicans. Orban extorted, then commandeered, the country’s media, education, corporate, and judicial institutions—the same consolidation the Trump regime is attempting right now.

“Both sides” emphatically do not do it. The implicit equivalence between authoritarian parties and broadly liberal ones rests entirely on insipid or dishonest right-wing tropes. An American conservative might complain that redistribution of income from rich to poor amounts to buying votes; Trump-aligned Republicans skip the highbrow plaint and cut straight to the racist lie that Democrats only win by importing illegal voters.

In reality, the Democratic Party’s approach to power-building in the U.S. bears no resemblance to the Republican modus operandi of claiming office, crushing rival power centers, and arrogating the residuals.

There is no Democratic equivalent of 2010-style Republican gerrymandering. There is (now, finally) a reciprocal counter-gerrymandering strategy—but Democrats alone support nationwide nonpartisan districting and other means of ensuring proportional representation. Republicans remain committed to an unprincipled system in which the rules are determined by whatever maximizes their power in the moment.

There is no Democratic equivalent to the Republican war on unions, progressive nonprofits, and opposition fundraising platforms. Democrats have in the past supported generally applicable campaign-finance and disclosure laws. But they do not single out Republican activists for harassment.

As if to prove the point, they would surely respond in one voice to what I’ve written above by citing what they call the “IRS targeting scandal,” when federal officials in the Obama administration scrutinized political non-profits that appeared to be engaged in unprotected electioneering activity. That controversy first came to light when newly formed Tea Party organizations began complaining about the scrutiny. It was thus investigated as a potential case of partisan abuse: a Democratic administration harassing conservative activists.

But the early depiction was so useful to American rightists that they simply embraced it as canon and stopped following the story. In the end it proved mundane: The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United flooded the system with politically slanted “social welfare” organizations, and the IRS—underfunded and out of its depth—developed ad hoc methods to scrutinize right-wing and left-wing nonprofits alike. No partisan targeting, no scandal.

What would the left-wing equivalent of eradicating unions even look like? Maybe a progressive war against the church? Something like this surely exists in the right-wing imagination. Conservatives claim to believe popular culture is both a degenerate enemy force, and overwhelmingly aligned with Democrats. They also can’t help but notice that organized religion is dying in America. Ergo, they must be under partisan siege, and losing. Never do they look inward to ask whether right-wing culture—with its easy toggle between hedonism, puritanism, and bigotry—has made organized religion unattractive to potential converts. Or to all the adolescent parishioners who gain independence in adulthood and promptly leave their churches.

Democrats don’t entrench themselves at all like Republicans do. Indeed, they’d never so much as propose applying normal tax law to religious institutions.

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There’s a reason this post-Orban revisionism comes off a bit desperate, like a lawyer pleading for a guilty client, or a reckless driver making a hasty case for leniency: it’s hard to distinguish what I did from ordinary speeding, and…you know… everyone speeds sometimes.

The Orban apologists prove too much in the formal sense. After all, if losing power in an election refutes all accusations of authoritarian control, then (to take one example) Augusto Pinochet, who left power after losing a plebiscite, was also not a dictator.

But the point isn’t to be logically rigorous. It’s to gain absolution, and pre-empt any future efforts to fascism-proof backsliding democracies like Hungary and the U.S.

I say this with some confidence, because I can remember past yesterday: Indeed, I can remember all the way back to when Barack Obama was president, trying to govern through the normal channels of America’s byzantine policymaking apparatus. Did commentators like Dreher and Douthat believe they were living through ordinary times as opposition intellectuals in a “fair play” democracy? Let’s run the tape:

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Viktor Orban conceded, Donald Trump never did.

These two basic facts, etched into history after Orban lost his election Sunday, quickly formed an interpretive lens through which to view democratic backsliding in Hungary and the United States. If you’re an American Trump apologist who won’t defend the January 6 insurrection, but you’ve also convinced yourself Trump isn’t some aspiring dictator—congratulations, you have a new contrast to contend with, and it isn’t favorable to Trump.

If you’re a liberal Trump critic who nevertheless dislikes the organized resistance to Trump, and thinks Trump critics overstate the danger to U.S. democracy, the story is similar. It took 16 years to dislodge Orban, and Trump’s authoritarian inclinations are more naked. Surely you’ve miscalculated, not the resist libs.

But at the risk of peering into an empty orb in search of meaning, I am interested in understanding why. What differences between these two bad men explain Orban’s willingness to accept defeat, while Trump goes on claiming he secretly won Minnesota and other states that have voted against him three times?

Maybe Orban only conceded because Magyar’s margin of victory was so large. Maybe he would’ve attempted a coup if the election had run closer. But ample reporting and testimony tell us Trump intended to claim victory on election night 2020 no matter what. He is different from Orban at least in this way, and it isn’t a meaningless difference?

I hope Democrats choose to learn from the Hungarian resistance—how it won, and what its new government will choose to do to restore democracy. Clearly the U.S. approach post-2020 did not work; just as clearly, Hungarians had more time to experiment with new strategies than we did.

But I also want them to be mindful of key differences. America remains a more open society than Hungary was as of a few days ago, but Trump didn’t concede and Orban did? What does that tell us? What if Hungarians had the luxury of waiting 16 years, and staking everything on elections, but we do not?

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The fact that Trump didn’t concede could cut one of two ways.

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I think JD Vance might have finally fumbled the ball irretrievably. He’s midair, horizontal, arms extended, face contorted in panic. He’ll do anything he can to salvage it—it, being the ball, which represents his deeply held pretensions to power. But it’s exceeding his grasp.

Many have made note of Vance’s recent tactical failures: His failure to talk Donald Trump out of starting a disastrous war. His subsequent failure to negotiate an end to the war. And his crowning failure to help Viktor Orban, a fellow authoritarian stooge, win re-election in Hungary. The two men campaigned together in Budapest on the eve of the election—a highly aberrant act of U.S. meddling—only for Orban to lose Sunday in a landslide.

But I think Vance’s larger strategic failure is much worse than any of the tactical ones. His goal all along has been to keep himself clean enough to all factions of the pro-Trump coalition that he remains heir to Trump by default. That of course entails being Trump’s errand boy, setting himself up for humiliation after humiliation. But he’s recently tacked on an aggressive public relations offensive to portray himself as a tragic hero, hard at work keeping things on an even keel. The only senior official with both the wisdom to suspect war with Iran would descend into quagmire and the courage to say so to the boss’s face. Allegedly.

As the New York Times has it, in a piece that’s suspiciously favorable to Vance, “Mr. Trump’s war cabinet—with the stark exception of Mr. Vance, the figure inside the White House most opposed to a full-scale war—deferred to the president’s instincts, including his abundant confidence that the war would be quick and decisive.”

This has already created a bunch of problems. By depicting himself as the lone voice of reason, Vance has managed to alienate almost all of his colleagues, and made it harder for Trump to end the war. He’s thus positioned himself as the avatar of MAGA’s future at the exact moment when he’s failing most visibly. His pitch: Join our party, where the only worthy person is an arrogant loudmouth taking L after L.

But it gets worse. I think that by wrapping his holy honor in a Cassandra-style myth, Vance has weakened many of the incentives pointing to a quick and dirty peace. With his failed negotiations this past weekend, he may have actually locked us into war indefinitely. Let’s walk through the logic together.

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Quick disclaimer: it isn’t actually clear that the Vance-side leaks are true. They’re not obviously false, but they come from the guy who admitted he makes up stories to manipulate media into skewing political coverage to his advantage.

So…skepticism is warranted.

But the harm doesn’t stem from what’s true so much as what’s been reported. Even if his version of events is narrowly accurate, seeding it for public consumption now makes it more than ordinary public relations, the kind of post facto cleanup you’d normally read in a memoir many years after the fact.

Instead, it’s become endogenous to the conflict itself.

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Thread is open for members.

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Donald Trump now claims to own all of his presidential records. To be more precise, his Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which interprets law for the entire executive branch, recently opined that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional, and thus that any government documents that cross the president’s desk, or pertain to his work, are his to keep, unless he chooses to leave them with the National Archives.

DOJ published the opinion on April 1, but it’s no joke, and the political class, consumed by war and myriad other dramas, is not making enough of it. Trump has asserted total political control over the department, which means this opinion was written at his request or insistence, or because he made clear he needed impediments to stealing presidential records removed.

Diligent legal thinkers, all of whom understand this opinion is bullshit, will nevertheless explicate its defects at length, because calling something “bullshit” doesn’t do much work in court. But for our purposes, we can dispense with the artifice: This is bullshit because the president works for the public, not the other way around; he is no more entitled to make off with our documents than you’re entitled to charge a Ferrari to the company credit card.

For now this is “only” an opinion. The Presidential Records Act has not been overturned by any court, nor have the merits of the OLC opinion yet faced the scrutiny of any judge. But the executive branch typically adheres to OLC guidance up until such time as a judge orders otherwise (or Congress acts, or a new administration takes over). Which means millions of documents are endangered right now. Some may have already disappeared.

And we should suspect the worst, because this action only really makes sense as a fabricated legal defense against actions Trump and his subordinates have already taken or intend to take imminently. There was no reason for Trump to do this unless he means to make off with or destroy a large number of incriminating or valuable public records in short order—not merely at the end of his term. If Trump had sincere, above board motives, he could have challenged the Presidential Records Act in court directly, rather than make a lawless assertion of power and wait for litigants and judges to stop him. The reason an administration of such low character would do this now, years before Trump leaves office, is to begin the process of burying or destroying or privatizing records right away—many months before Democrats regain control of Congress.

Do not be shocked if this devolves into a fact-finding inquiry to determine which documents were destroyed or spirited out of the government between the publication of the opinion and its enjoinment or withdrawal.

In a normal administration, it’s perfectly ordinary for outgoing presidents and archivists to haggle at the margins over what constitutes a presidential record versus a personal one. Thus, if Trump wanted to keep certain documents, he could make an ordinary claim to them. The existence of the opinion is evidence of serious irregularity in and of itself. And, more importantly, we weren’t born yesterday.

Trump shredded documents routinely in his first term, forcing White House employees to salvage them from the trash and hand them off to records keepers to be reassembled. At the end of that term, he stole a bunch of government documents, including state secrets, and concealed them from the government at his Florida palace. Federal prosecutors concluded he did this at least in part for personal financial gain. He’s spent the past year and three months looting the federal government in broad daylight. And even if none of that had happened, the opinion is so sloppy and appeared so abruptly that we must infer ulterior motives. There’s almost certainly more driving this than a pissing contest over the merits of an old indictment, and it certainly doesn’t reflect a sincere dispute over constitutional interpretation. The frivolousness of the opinion suggests it’s doing work Trump needs done now.

The picture looks worse when you zoom out. This isn’t an isolated assertion of personalist power over a small number of documents. It is part of a larger legal scaffolding that Trump could and surely will exploit faithlessly, to gain dominion over basically every document in the possession of the U.S. government. The text of the opinion might facially pertain to presidential records, and nod to distinctions between presidential records and agency records. But what in Trump’s history suggests he respects these distinctions?

He’s the unitary executive, with absolute immunity from criminal accountability for actions he takes that touch on his official duties. If (hypothetically) he and his advisers have left a documentary record of their Epstein files coverup—notes of meetings at the White House or directives from the executive office of the president to DOJ—those would be presidential records, and his interest in destroying them would be obvious. But what would stop a crook with unitary authority and official-acts immunity and a pliant judiciary from ordering DOJ to produce the entire Epstein files cache to the White House? And once Trump claims to have incorporated those documents into his own work product, why wouldn’t he simply deem them all presidential records and have the incriminating ones destroyed, or buried on the grounds of one of his golf resorts? (Also, apropos nothing, why did Trump abruptly fire Attorney General Pam Bondi, then obstruct her testimony under subpoena to Congress?)

If the presidential records aren’t ours, they’re his. If they’re personal records, he owns them. If he owns them, he can destroy them or sell them as he sees fit. If a judge later concludes his legal cover was ludicrous? Oh well, too late. They’re gone now. And Trump is immune. And anyone who conspired with him can point to the OLC memo as a defense, assuming Trump doesn’t simply pardon them. This is not raw inference. It’s his m.o. He is a serial recidivist, and this opinion provides bad-faith legal cover for a type of crime he’s already committed.

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Happily, there are political and institutional checks on top of legal obstacles, and those can’t be written out of existence even temporarily with an official memorandum. As I wrote recently, it’s much easier for administration officials to violate the law in failing to disclose the Epstein files than it is for them to disappear or destroy those files.

It would be very hard to destroy a substantial quantity of evidence without some people of good character growing wise to it. And once word got out, it would destroy the Justice Department. Imagine you’re a criminal defense attorney, and you learn that the Justice Department leadership has been caught destroying evidence in a different matter? What would you do? How would you use that information to help your clients? Suddenly every federal case would be at risk, because every decent defense attorney would argue that evidence must be presumed tainted or fabricated or [destroyed].

And that’s to say nothing of whistleblowers, inside the administration and out, who’d come forward to say what they know: what they witnessed DOJ officials do, or what they know should be in DOJ custody, but may have been destroyed.

These checks are real but nowhere close to foolproof. If Trump wants to destroy or sell a document badly enough, he can surely do it, even at the risk of getting caught, because once met, his objectives can’t easily be reversed. Burned documents can’t be pasted back together. Once sold, they’re no longer secret.

Trump obviously has little interest in the vast majority of the federal government’s work product. But he has immense, corrupt interest in subsets of embarrassing or incriminating records, and market-moving or geopolitically significant information. Epstein files and January 6 records and insider-trading evidence on the one hand, foreign intelligence of various kinds on the other. The stuff he’d want to destroy and the stuff he’d want to steal.

As I began to draft this article shortly after DOJ published the OLC opinion, I wrote, “litigants with specific claims over documents that are now at risk [must] get into court quickly [and] seek accounting of any documents that have already been tampered with.” In the days since, the watchdog group American Oversight, joined by the American Historical Association, filed suit, on the grounds that its outstanding FOIA requests pertain to documents that Trump now claims to own.

The prayer for relief includes a requirement that the administration “disclose to the Court any known instances in which the President destroys, converts for personal use, or otherwise fails to maintain Presidential records as required by the PRA.”

We similarly need retrospective accounting. Even if the judge in this case is inclined to order the requested relief, we can not take administration lawyers at their word (or as the final word) if they claim there are no “known instances” of document destruction or theft. Getting to the bottom of all this will require thorough investigation, including sworn testimony. A trial court judge is unlikely to conduct such an inquiry, which means Democrats will have to add it to their long list of oversight priorities for the next Congress.

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Sean: How should elected Democrats fight back against the epic levels of “sanewashing” we are seeing since the start of the Iran War, which reached yet another peak with shocking downplaying of Trump’s profane Easter threats.

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For those who weren’t following along, basically all independent media in the U.S., along with the handful of foreign news outlets I perused, covered Trump’s Easter threats as you’d expect: with full quotes, and an appropriate degree of urgency, given that he is the president of the United States, and was threatening in a blind panic to commit war crimes, because his own reckless actions have imperiled global stability. But, at least at first, big legacy American news outlets defaulted to their inside voices. They edited out the meat of Trump’s now infamous quote—“Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” and distilled it all down in the style of the New York Times, which wrote, “Trump Escalates Threats to Hit Iranian Power Plants After U.S. Rescues Downed Airman.”

I’ve written quite a lot in the past weeks about how Democrats can fight back against Republicans for enabling all this insanity, and I believe that remains the most important focus. Exposing, attacking, and cornering the elected opposition. Demanding accountability. Forcing votes. Citing all the MAGA infotainers who raced for the hills while acknowledging Trump should be removed from power. It is essential that the country have another public debate, right now, over Trump’s fitness for office, staged in a way that the media has no choice but to cover.

But media ref-working is important, too, and of a piece with the larger goal.

For a long time now, I’ve maintained the best way for Dems to do that is to borrow one piece of the GOP’s media relations playbook. Not the part where Republicans lie and tell people mainstream media is in cahoots with Democrats, and should be distrusted or destroyed as an institution. But the part where Republicans are willing to publicly upbraid specific reporters and outlets. Republicans do this whenever journalism impedes their objectives; Democrats could do it on more above-board grounds, e.g., when journalists knowingly misinform their readers or viewers in order to avoid telling the unvarnished truth about Trump.

It’d obviously be better if we could put reason back at the center of everything, from media criticism to tax policy, but when one of the two major parties devolves everything into a contest of raw power, the other party can either choose to engage, or watch helplessly as discourse and policy get warped in favor of the opposition.

One place Democrats could start, if they wanted to test my theory, is by monitoring legacy outlets to see if they’ll echo Trump’s false claim to have achieved regime change in Iran. That’s doublespeak for the whole administration now, much like last year, when everyone working for Trump had to assert that he’d “obliterated” the Iranian nuclear program. Or like how they all say “Department of War” and “Gulf of America” to signal tribal allegiance. But it’s a far more corrosive lie, and Democrats should have no misgivings about shaming journalists who echo it.

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No Not Me: What is the platform we should demand at a minimum as a matter of future totalitarianism prevention therapy from the 2028 candidates? I can already see dems salivating at winning a couple of elections by default, which is the prelude to complacency in advance of another putsch.

As a threshold matter, I disagree with the implicit premise that we should expect our favorite Democratic primary candidates to lay out detailed plans for totalitarian-proofing the United States. They’ll likely need to maintain a degree of ambiguity, so that their campaigns don’t get mired in controversy and minutiae. But I do think we should expect them to convey, in word and deed, that they understand the assignment. For example, it might not be wise for them to say “I promise to add X seats to the Supreme Court,” but they could say, “there will have to be a reckoning for the theft of the court [wink wink]” or “we are going to have to move aggressively to clean up the wreckage of the Trump presidency.” And if they can show they recognize the status quo is designed to ensure they fail, they will be drawn inexorably toward many of the following reforms.

Herewith, Brian’s plan to vanquish fascism for all time!

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I called it “The Humiliation of Donald Trump” for two reasons. First, because schadenfreude is more powerful than my restraint: It’s good when bad things happen to him, and we should rub it in his face. Second, more importantly, because he and his loyalists will never concede defeat—even obvious defeat—which makes it incumbent on the rest of us to tell blunt truths just as vigorously. If we don’t jeer their pathetic claims of victory, they will bombard us with lies—e.g., the United States achieved regime change in Iran (no it didn’t)—until history itself is contested.

Reflecting on it overnight, though, I realized this framing, while important, is a bit too parochial on its own to capture the historic magnitude of events culminating in his April 7 surrender. Yes, we should insist on keeping score: Trump fucked up, he blew it, he got his ass kicked, and embarrassed the country in doing so. Mock his puppets mercilessly when they try to insist otherwise. The unfolding of American politics has critical ramifications for every living person.

But homing in on that alone—as if this were just another embarrassing Trump episode—is an error. It obscures a bigger picture, in which we can see the whole world white knuckling it and contorting itself, at immense cost, to weather the destructive whims of a single sociopath. In a way, myopia plays to Trump’s preference that this be a story about him and the quality of his performance—as if it were a figure-skating or gymnastics routine, and he were trying to play off a minor tumble. Some say he succeeded, some say he failed, and in any case, it’s just one more forgettable scene from the never-ending Trump show.

But that’s not what it is. It is, instead, a historic crisis that revealed the full danger of unchecked imperial power.

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The Iran debacle was not and is not a historically inert event. Many of Trump’s idiotic gambits, even some of the high-stakes ones, are just as ridiculous, and threaten similar harm, but in practice can be contained, and the consequences reversed, if and when he backs down. Allies were and remain rightfully pissed at Trump (and thus the U.S.) for strong-arming them with tariffs and threatening to seize their territory. Trump squandered good will and wasted jobs and wealth. His actions gave our partners no choice but to begin making new, potentially redundant trading and security arrangements, in order to reduce their dependence on America. But looking at those episodes in the rearview, we see little rubble, real or metaphorical—at least relative to what happened this week. It is (or was) even possible to imagine those things blowing over with time, leaving pre-existing arrangements largely intact. A parenthetical in the history books, to help future humans comprehend Trump’s aberrance as a world leader.

This instance is different. It may feel similar. Many people quite understandably processed it as a new Trump provocation, and anticipated Trump would back down at some point. And at some level, that’s what actually happened. But any future history book that recalls the events of April 2026 as just one in a series of Trump dramas can be safely thrown in the trash.

Trump’s illegal war against Iran was (is?) a bizarro amalgamation of historic crises and defeats—a dash of Napoleonic hubris, a morsel of Cuban Missile Crisis, a tablespoon of 1914 Sarajevo, blended on high-speed with a sprinkling of the USSR in Afghanistan—all willed into existence by one crazy person who should have no power over others, yet has lucked into more power than anyone else on Earth. We make ourselves his subjects if we convey, in word or deed, “glad he got it out of his system, now let’s move on.”

Suffice it to say, that is not an acceptable outcome.

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In the final analysis, we may have to tolerate it for a time, because we can’t change it on our own. But we can not acclimate to or forget it. We need to find ways to make the enormity of the crisis clear and paramount. When we ask, in earnestness or frustration—what will it take before Republicans in Congress decide they’ve had enough?—we usually intend it as a rhetorical question, or a note of sarcasm. But this week they answered it once and for all: Republicans will stand back and allow armageddon to unfold before using the only tools in existence that can stop it. Nothing matters to them more than preserving Donald Trump’s unchecked power, and so they will let him destroy the world if that’s his preference.

This is more important than domestic public opinion, or the battle for narrative control over Trump’s capitulation, or even the lasting geopolitical consequences of this illegal war of choice. Yes, Trump has degraded the U.S. and may have inverted the balance of power in the Middle East and empowered America’s greatest adversaries for a generation, and he did it all on a whim. All of that is quite bad enough, worthy of Trump’s impeachment or resignation in disgrace.

But the main thing is the usurpation of power—the full power of the United States—for the purposes of holding the entire planet hostage. Trump did that. Our greatest Cold War nightmares seldom contemplated the possibility that the Soviet empire might fall, through succession crisis, into the hands of a madman who’d begin hot wars with enemy client states, decapitate their governments, and threaten to nuke their civilian populations. We would have understood that, rightly, as subjecting human civilization to tyranny. For the sake of all humanity we would have made it the foreign policy of the United States to remove that person from power by any means short of global thermonuclear war.

Well, now that person is in power, here. Yes, he humiliated himself. Yes, he humiliated the United States. Yes, he should be brought low politically for it. And yes, we should hope that his experience here will deter him from doing the same thing again, to Iran or any other country—if only to avoid further narcissistic injury. But for the most part, life goes on when decadent empires weaken or destroy themselves. Life even goes on when empires lose wars. We can’t be certain it goes on when the person at the helm of the crumbling U.S. empire does what Trump did this week and faces no consequences.

So, I’ll reiterate my plea from earlier this week.

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Hakeem Jeffries should force an immediate vote, at the first opportunity, on a privileged resolution to impeach Trump. And I’ll add a new one: If Jeffries refuses, another ambitious Democrat should go over his head and do it themselves. Jeffries alone among Democrats is entitled to an immediate vote on an impeachment resolution, but any Democrat can make the same vote happen just a couple days later. In the hours preceding Trump’s climbdown, dozens of House Democrats joined a call for Trump to be removed from office. They should not withdraw that demand, and they should not accept an implicit agreement between Jeffries and frontline Democrats to tiptoe away, treat it as bygones, let public opinion be the final word—‘self-impeachment’ as Nancy Pelosi once put it.

Democrats have largely justified their impeachment paranoia as a question of strategy: The midterms are the only game in town, so why waste time between now and then on doomed efforts to check him. His threat to eliminate Iranian civilization resolves the strategic debate on the pro-impeachment side. There’s still seven months until the midterms, and two years to go after that. Trying to remove Trump may be fruitless, but we’re unnervingly likely to regret it some day soon if we don’t try.