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rederiswrites · 4 months ago

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Full text of Heather Cox Richardson's latest essay:

February 1, 2025 (Saturday)

Throughout now-president Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, it was clear that his support was coming from three very different factions whose only shared ideology was a determination to destroy the federal government. Now we are watching them do it.

The group that serves President Donald Trump is gutting the government both to get revenge against those who tried to hold him accountable before the law and to make sure he and his cronies will never again have to worry about legality.

Last night, officials in the Trump administration purged the Federal Bureau of Investigation of all six of its top executives and, according to NBC’s Ken Dilanian, more than 20 heads of FBI field offices, including those in Washington, D.C., and Miami, where officials pursued cases against now-president Trump. Acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove, who represented Trump in a number of his criminal cases, asked acting FBI director Brian J. Driscoll Jr. for a list of FBI agents who had worked on January 6 cases to “determine whether any additional personnel actions are necessary.”

Clarissa-Jan Lim of MSNBC reported that Trump denied knowing about the dismissals but said the firings were “a good thing” because “[t]hey were very corrupt people, very corrupt, and they hurt our country very badly with the weaponization.”

Officials also fired 25 to 30 federal prosecutors who had worked on cases involving the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and reassigned others. Bove ordered the firings. Career civil servants can’t be fired without cause, and these purges come on top of the apparently illegal firing of 18 inspectors general across federal agencies and a purge of the Department of Justice of those who had worked on cases involving Trump.

Phil Williams of NewsChannel 5 in Nashville, Tennessee, reported on Friday that federal prosecutors were withdrawn from a criminal investigation of Representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) for election fraud; Ogles recently filed a House resolution to enable Trump to run for a third term and another supporting Trump’s designs on Greenland. On Wednesday, federal prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss an election fraud case against former representative Jeffrey Fortenberry (R-NE). Trump called Fortenberry’s case an illustration of “the illegal Weaponization of our Justice System by the Radical Left Democrats.”

That impulse to protect Trump showed yesterday in what a local water manager said was an “extremely unprecedented” release of water from two dams in California apparently to provide evidence of his social media post that the U.S. military had gone into California and “TURNED ON THE WATER.” In fact, water was released from two reservoirs that hold water to supply farmland in the summer. They are about 500 miles (800 km) from Los Angeles, where the fires were earlier this year, and the water did not go to Southern California. “This is going to hurt farmers,” a water manager said, “This takes water out of the summer irrigation portfolio.” But Trump posted that if California officials had listened to him six years ago, there would have been no fires. Shashank Joshi of The Economist called it “real ‘mad king’ stuff.”

Trump’s loyalists overlap with the MAGA crew that embraces Project 2025, a plan that mirrors the one used by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán to overthrow democracy in Hungary. Operating from the position that modern democracy destroys a country by treating everyone equally before the law and welcoming immigrants, it calls for discrimination against women and gender, racial, and religious minorities; rejection of immigrants; and the imposition of religious laws to restore a white Christian patriarchy.

Former Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson has been a vocal proponent of Orbán’s ideology, and J.D. Vance this week hired Carlson’s son, 28-year-old Buckley, as his deputy press secretary. Although Trump claimed during the campaign he didn't know anything about Project 2025, Steve Contorno and Casey Tolan of CNN estimate that more than two thirds of Trump’s executive orders mirror Project 2025.

You can see the influence of this faction in the indiscriminate immigration sweeps the administration has launched, Trump’s announcement that he is opening a 30,000-bed migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay, and officials’ revocation of protection for more than 600,000 Venezuelans legally in the U.S. and possibly also for Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. You can see it in the administration’s attempt to end the birthright citizenship written into the U.S. Constitution in 1868.

It shows in the new administration's persecution of transgender Americans, including Trump’s executive order purging trans service members from the military, another limiting access to gender-affirming care for transgender youth, and yet another ordering trans federal prisoners to be medically detransitioned and then moved to facilities that correspond to their sex at birth, an outcome that a trans woman suing the administration calls “humiliating, terrifying, and dangerous.”

The administration has ordered that federal employees must remove all pronouns from their email signatures and, as Jeremy Faust reported in Inside Medicine, that researchers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must scrub from their work any references to “[g]ender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female.” Faust notes that the requirements are vague and that because “most manuscripts include demographic information about the populations or patients studied,” the order potentially affects “just about any major study…including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else.”

Those embracing this ideology are also isolationist. As soon as he took office, Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid except for military aid to Israel and Egypt, abruptly cutting off about $60 billion in funding—less than 1% of the U.S. budget—to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides humanitarian assistance to fight starvation and provide basic medical care for the globe’s most vulnerable and desperate populations. The outcry, both from those appalled that the U.S. would renege on its promises to provide food for children in war-torn countries and from those who recognize that the U.S. withdrawal from these popular programs would create a vacuum China is eager to fill, made Trump’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, say that “humanitarian programs” would be exempted from the freeze, but that appears either untrue or so complicated to negotiate that programs are shutting down anyway.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) appears to be beside himself over this destruction. “Let me explain why the total destruction of USAID…matters so much,” he posted on social media. “China—where Musk makes his money—wants USAID destroyed. So does Russia. Trump and Musk are doing the bidding of Beijing and Moscow. Why?” “The U.S. is in full retreat from the world,�� he wrote, and there is “[n]o good reason for it. The immediate consequences of this are cataclysmic. Malnourished babies who depend on U.S. aid will die. Anti-terrorism programs will shut down and our most deadly enemies will get stronger. Diseases that threaten the U.S. will go unabated and reach our shores faster. And China will fill the void. As developing countries will now ONLY be able to rely on China for help, they will cut more deals with Beijing to give them control of ports, critical mineral deposits, etc. U.S. power will shrink. U.S. jobs will be lost.” Murphy speculated that “billionaires like Musk who make $ in China” or “someone buying all that secret Trump meme coin” would benefit from deliberately sabotaging eighty years of U.S. goodwill on the international stage.

And that brings us to the third faction: that of the tech bros, led by billionaire Elon Musk, who according to year-end Federal Election Commission filings spent more than $290 million supporting Trump and the Republicans in 2024. Musk appears to consider colonizing space imperative for the survival of humanity, and part of that goal requires slashing government regulations, as well as receiving government contracts that help to fund his space program.

Before he took office, Trump named Musk and another billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy, to an extra-governmental group called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but Musk has assumed full control of the group, whose mission is to cut the federal budget by as much as $2 trillion.

Musk is interested in the government for future contracts, although a report from January 30, when Musk’s Tesla company filed its annual financial report, showed that the company, which is valued at more than $1 trillion and which made $2.3 billion in 2024, paid $0 in federal income tax. Today, Musk’s X social media company became a form of state media when the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it would no longer email updates about this week’s two plane crashes—one in Washington, D.C., and one in Philadelphia—and that reporters would have to get their information through X.

Musk’s goal might well be the crux of the drastic cuts to federal aid, as well as the attempt last week from the Office of Management and Budget to “pause” federal funding and grants to make sure funding reflected Trump’s goals. After a public outcry over the loss of payments to local law enforcement, Meals on Wheels for shut-ins, supplemental nutrition programs, and so on, the OMB rescinded its first memo, but then White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt immediately contradicted the new memo, saying the cuts were still in effect.

The chaos surrounding the cuts could have been designed to make it difficult for opponents to sue over them. This method of changing government priorities through “impoundment” is illegal. Congress—which is the body that represents the American people—appropriates the money for programs, and the president takes an oath to execute the laws. After President Richard M. Nixon tried it, Congress passed a 1974 law making impoundment expressly illegal. But the on-again-off-again confusion appeared at first to stand a chance of stopping lawsuits. It didn’t work: a federal judge halted the funding freeze, suggesting it was a blatant violation of the Constitution.

But then, yesterday, Elon Musk forced the resignation of David A. Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department. Lebryk had been at Treasury since 1989 and had risen to become the person in charge of the U.S. government payment system that disburses about $6 trillion a year through Social Security benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, contracts, grants, salaries for federal government workers, tax refunds, and so on, essentially managing the nation’s checkbook.

According to Jeff Stein, Isaac Arnsdorf, and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post, Musk’s team wanted access to the payment system. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) demanded answers from Trump’s new Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, warning that “these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically-motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy. I am deeply concerned that following the federal grant and loan freeze earlier this week, these officials associated with Musk may have intended to access these payment systems to illegally withhold payments to any number of programs. I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”

Now, though, with Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to.

Wyden continued by reminding Bessent that the press has reported that Musk has previously been “denied a high-level clearance to access the government’s most sensitive secrets. I am concerned that Musk’s enormous business operation in China—a country whose intelligence agencies have stolen vast amounts of sensitive data about Americans, including U.S. government employee data by hacking U.S. government systems—endangers U.S. cybersecurity and creates conflicts of interest that make his access to these systems a national security risk.”

This afternoon, Wyden posted that he has been told that Bessent has given the Department of Government Efficiency full access to the system. “Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk's own companies. All of it.”

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo posted: “This is more or less like taking the gold from Fort Knox and putting it in Elons basement. Anyone who gets a check from soc sec or anything else[,] he can cut it off or see all y[ou]r personal and financial data.” Pundit Stuart Stevens called it “the most significant data leak in cyber history.”

All three of these factions are focused on destroying the federal government, which, after all, represents the American people through their elected representatives and spends their taxpayer money. Musk, who is an unelected adjunct to Trump, this evening gleefully referred to the civil servants in the government who work for the American people as “the opposing team.”

But something jumps out from the chaos of the past two weeks. Instructions are vague, circumstances are chaotic, and it’s unclear who is making decisions. That confusion makes it hard to enforce laws or sue, although observers note that what’s going on is “illegal and a breach of the constitutional order.”

Our federal government rests on the U.S. Constitution. The three different factions of Trump's MAGA Republicans agree that the government must be destroyed, and they are operating outside the constitutional order, not eager to win legal victories so much as determined to slash and burn down the government without them.

Today, senior Washington Post political reporter Aaron Blake noted that while it is traditional for cabinet nominees to pledge that they will refuse to honor illegal presidential orders, at least seven of Trump’s nominees have sidestepped that question. Attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, now-confirmed defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, small business administrator nominee Kelly Loeffler, Veterans Affairs secretary nominee Douglas A. Collins, and commerce secretary nominee Howard Lutnick all avoided the question by saying that Trump would never ask them to do anything illegal. FBI director nominee Kash Patel just said he would “always obey the law.”

#current events #us coup

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mariacallous · 11 months ago

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lol philadelphia inquirer bodying nyt

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/editorials/first-presidential-debate-joe-biden-donald-trump-withdraw-20240629.html

President Joe Biden’s debate performance was a disaster. His disjointed responses and dazed look sparked calls for him to drop out of the presidential race.

But lost in the hand wringing was Donald Trump’s usual bombastic litany of lies, hyperbole, bigotry, ignorance, and fear mongering. His performance demonstrated once again that he is a danger to democracy and unfit for office.

In fact, the debate about the debate is misplaced. The only person who should withdraw from the race is Trump.

Trump, 78, has been on the political stage for eight years marked by chaos, corruption, and incivility. Why go back to that?

To build himself up, Trump constantly tears the country down. There is no shining city on the hill. It’s just mourning in America.

Throughout the debate, Trump repeatedly said we are a “failing” country. He called the United States a “third world nation.” He said, “we’re living in hell” and “very close to World War III.”

“People are dying all over the place,” Trump said, later adding “we’re literally an uncivilized country now.”

Trump told more than 30 lies during the debate to go with the more than 30,000 mistruths told during his four years as president. He dodged the CNN moderators’ questions, took no responsibility for his actions, and blamed others, mainly Biden, for everything that is wrong in the world.

Trump’s response to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection he fueled was farcical. He said a “relatively small number of people” went to the Capitol and many were “ushered in by the police.”

After scheming to overturn the 2020 election, Trump refused to say if he would accept the results of the 2024 election. Unless, of course, he wins.

The debate served as a reminder of what another four years of Trump would look like. More lies, grievance, narcissism, and hate. Supporters say they like Trump because he says whatever he thinks. But he mainly spews raw sewage.

Trump attacks the military. He denigrates the Justice Department and judges. He belittles the FBI and the CIA. He picks fights with allies and cozies up to dictators.

Trump is an unserious carnival barker running for the most serious job in the world. During his last term, Trump served himself and not the American people.

Trump spent chunks of time watching TV, tweeting, and hanging out at his country clubs. Over his four-year term, Trump played roughly 261 rounds of golf.

As president, Trump didn’t read the daily intelligence briefs. He continued to use his personal cell phone, allowing Chinese spies to listen to his calls. During one Oval Office meeting, Trump shared highly classified intelligence with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador.

Trump’s term did plenty of damage and had few accomplishments. The much-hyped wall didn’t get built. Infrastructure week was a recurring joke. Giant tax cuts made the rich richer, while fueling massive deficits for others to pay for years. His support for coal, oil drilling and withdrawal from the Paris Agreement worsened the growing impact of climate change.

Trump stacked the judiciary with extreme judges consisting mainly of white males, including a number who the American Bar Association rated as not qualified. A record number of cabinet officials were fired or left the office. The West Wing was in constant chaos and infighting.

Many Trump appointees exited under a cloud of corruption, grifting and ethical scandals. Trump’s children made millions off the White House. His dilettante son-in-law got $2 billion from the Saudi government for his fledgling investment firm even though he never managed money before.

Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic resulted in tens of thousands of needless deaths. He boasts about stacking the Supreme Court with extreme right-wingers who are stripping away individual rights, upending legal precedents, and making the country less safe. If elected, Trump may add to the court’s conservative majority.

Of course, there were the unprecedented two impeachments. Now, Trump is a convicted felon who is staring at three more criminal indictments. He is running for president to stay out of prison.

If anything, Trump doesn’t deserve to be on the presidential debate stage. Why even give him a platform?

Trump allegedly stole classified information and tried to overturn an election. His plans for a second term are worse than the last one. We cannot be serious about letting such a crooked clown back in the White House.

Yes, Biden had a horrible night. He’s 81 and not as sharp as he used to be. But Biden on his worst day remains lightyears better than Trump on his best.

Biden must show that he is up to the job. This much is clear: He has a substantive record of real accomplishments, fighting the pandemic, combating climate change, investing in infrastructure, and supporting working families and the most vulnerable.

Biden has surrounded himself with experienced people who take public service seriously. He has passed major bipartisan legislation despite a dysfunctional Republican House majority.

Biden believes in the best of America. He has rebuilt relationships with allies around the world and stood up to foes like Russia and China.

There was only one person at the debate who does not deserve to be running for president. The sooner Trump exits the stage, the better off the country will be.

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contemplatingoutlander · 2 months ago

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Jamelle Bouie gives us another excellent column about how JD Vance and the Trump administration lies to further its often illegal and cruel approach to immigration. This is a gift 🎁 link so there is no paywall. Below are some excerpts.

On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance wrote a long defense of the administration’s anti-immigrant rendition program, slamming critics who want the White House to obey a court order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. It is a notable example of the lengths the White House has gone to try to deceive the public as it deals with political fallout from its open defiance of the federal judiciary. [...] Vance begins with a lie. “Consider that Joe Biden allowed approximately 20 million illegal aliens into our country.” That is a load-bearing “approximately,” to say the least.... But according to an analysis by FactCheck.org, from 2021 to 2024 Customs and Border Patrol officers stationed there released 2.5 million people into the United States, with notices to report to immigration authorities for further hearings and processing, out of 6.5 million “encounters” across the U.S.-Mexico border and legal ports of entry. In addition, an estimated 1.6 million people evaded law enforcement to enter the country, for a total of 4.1 million people. [...] Vance goes on to assert that this imaginary horde of “20 million illegal aliens” placed “extraordinary burdens on our country” and “committed violent crimes, or facilitated fentanyl and sex trafficking.” It’s been shown again and again that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than citizens do. Stating otherwise is demagogic innuendo meant to short-circuit the rational mind and inflame prejudice. [...] Not content to mislead, the vice president goes on to distort the facts again. “When the media and the far left obsess over an MS-13 gang member and demand that he be returned to the United States for a third deportation hearing, what they’re really saying is they want the vast majority of illegal aliens to stay here permanently.” A reminder that there is no serious evidence that Abrego Garcia is a “MS-13 gang member.” At most, there is a flimsy, uncorroborated accusation from a police officer who was later suspended from the force. And a demand for due process — a demand that everyone has a chance to show that he is innocent until proven guilty — is not a demand to legalize the entire undocumented population of the United States. It is a simple demand to follow the law. [color emphasis added]

There Were No "Open Borders" Under Biden

I want to take the opportunity here to address the the fact that there were NO "open borders" under the Biden administration. That was misleading propaganda perpetuated by Trump Republicans to scare people into voting for them. Although Biden's handling of immigration was often problematic, he NEVER had "open borders."

In fact, according to a Jan. 22, 2025 report by Albert Sun in The New York Times, Biden "deported" (i.e., either removed, returned, or expelled) 4 million people during his 4 years in office; in contrast, Trump "deported" 1.9 million during his first term.

Even the conservative Cato Institute acknowledged in Nov. 2023 that "the Biden DHS is removing 3.5 times as many people per month as the Trump DHS did."

[See more below the cut.]

Although the right-wing, anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies(CIS) nitpicked about whether the numbers comparing Biden to Trump in a similar Reuters report were "returns" or "removals," it doesn't really make any difference regarding the argument about whether Biden's administration allowed for "open borders." There would have been no "returns" or "removals" if Biden had allowed truly "open borders." The whole "open borders" claim was just a scare tactic used by Trump Republicans to get people to vote for them--as were their lies that immigrants increase crime rates in the US.

Remember the truck convoy that went to Texas and how some of the truckers were surprised to discover that there wasn't an "invasion" of hoards of immigrants coming over the border?

youtube

Yeah, and there were NO Haitians eating dogs and cats either. 🤦🏻‍♀️

All these lies about immigration were part of a neofascist Trump Republican scare campaign. And now Trump, JD Vance, and Trump's administration is continuing the lies in order to justify doing away with due process.

#jd vance #immigration lies #abrego garcia #open borders #due process #jamelle bouie #the new york times #albert sun #the cato institute #gift link #Youtube

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 4 months ago

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Barbara Rogan

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 1, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 02, 2025

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) appears to be beside himself over this destruction. “Let me explain why the total destruction of USAID…matters so much,” he posted on social media. “China—where Musk makes his money—wants USAID destroyed. So does Russia. Trump and Musk are doing the bidding of Beijing and Moscow. Why?” “The U.S. is in full retreat from the world,” he wrote, and there is “[n]o good reason for it. The immediate consequences of this are cataclysmic. Malnourished babies who depend on U.S. aid will die. Anti-terrorism programs will shut down and our most deadly enemies will get stronger. Diseases that threaten the U.S. will go unabated and reach our shores faster. And China will fill the void. As developing countries will now ONLY be able to rely on China for help, they will cut more deals with Beijing to give them control of ports, critical mineral deposits, etc. U.S. power will shrink. U.S. jobs will be lost.” Murphy speculated that “billionaires like Musk who make $ in China” or “someone buying all that secret Trump meme coin” would benefit from deliberately sabotaging eighty years of U.S. goodwill on the international stage.

Now, though, with Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #the U.S.Constitution #illegal orders #wrecking ball #burn down the government #history #Musk #impoundment #CDC #Project 2025

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misfitwashere · 4 months ago

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HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

FEB 2

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) appears to be beside himself over this destruction. “Let me explain why the total destruction of USAID…matters so much,” he posted on social media. “China—where Musk makes his money—wants USAID destroyed. So does Russia. Trump and Musk are doing the bidding of Beijing and Moscow. Why?” “The U.S. is in full retreat from the world,” he wrote, and there is “[n]o good reason for it. The immediate consequences of this are cataclysmic. Malnourished babies who depend on U.S. aid will die. Anti-terrorism programs will shut down and our most deadly enemies will get stronger. Diseases that threaten the U.S. will go unabated and reach our shores faster. And China will fill the void. As developing countries will now ONLY be able to rely on China for help, they will cut more deals with Beijing to give them control of ports, critical mineral deposits, etc. U.S. power will shrink. U.S. jobs will be lost.” Murphy speculated that “billionaires like Musk who make $ in China” or “someone buying all that secret Trump meme coin” would benefit from deliberately sabotaging eighty years of U.S. goodwill on the international stage.

Now, though, with Musk’s people at the computers that control the nation’s payment system, they can simply stop whatever payments they want to.

—

#heather cox richardson #letters from an american

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creature-wizard · 2 months ago

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So uh…a couple of days ago Trump says he’s not kidding on wanting to run for a third term…is it too far to say that I should kms?/gen

It's a reason to be concerned and it's a reason to take whatever political action is available to us. Those of us who were paying attention always knew that if he'd got into office again, he'd do whatever he could to stay there regardless of laws.

I need you to understand this: the kind of government 45 and his people are gunning for is extremely bad, but it also can't last forever because it's inherently dysfunctional and therefore unstable. We can't predict how far they'll get with it, but eventually it will fall. And it will fall faster if we keep ourselves alive to do whatever we can.

Also, literally everyone needs to lock in for the long haul and think past their own selves. It's not about any single one of us, it's about people we'll never meet and children who aren't even born yet. It's about being willing to fight for a better future even that we personally may never see because it's what others deserve.

So please, stay alive. Stay alive and do whatever you can, however you can.

#answered #politics #us politics #american politics #uspol #sui mention

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milverton · 7 months ago

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I watch Jake Broe's update videos on the war in Ukraine pretty religiously, so I wanted to share what he had to say in his latest video because I at least felt a little better about this whole new trumpocalypse fiasco after hearing some of the points he made.

Here's his tweet that summarises what he says in the video, but I would recommend still watching the whole thing! (I've bolded the main points)

Okay! We all needed a day to reflect on what happened and I have good news and bad news for Ukraine about Trump returning to the US Presidency.

Let's start with the bad news for Ukraine…

Trump could end all US military cooperation

Trump could lift all sanctions on Russia

Trump could return all frozen assets to Russia

Yes, that is all very bad, but there might be good news.

First, Trump is always transactional. It does not matter if Russia was helping Trump or not in the past, Trump does not feel like he owes anyone anything for past favors. If Trump ever gives something up, then he will want something in return at the same time.

Russia will make demands that Trump is happy to accommodate, but only if Russia agrees to something that makes Trump look good. If Russia refuses, then Trump will rapidly escalate against Russia out of spite. American weapons in Ukrainian hands have already killed hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers. Putin might refuse any kind of transactional deal with Trump. Nobody knows what either Trump or Putin will do. Trump could inadvertently destabilize Russia without even meaning to.

Second, Trump does not take over until January 20th, which means we know for a fact that Russia is not going to use a nuclear weapon before Trump returns to office. Russia is not going to start a nuclear war if they think Trump will give them favorable terms. Meaning there is no risk of escalation management the next two months. Take the gloves off!

For the next two months Ukraine should be given permission to hit whatever they want with whatever is given to them anywhere on Russian territory. Additionally, Biden now is forced to rush deliver and allocate the rest of America's available funds allocated by Congress to Ukraine this winter.

If instead Harris was re-elected and MAGA controlled Congress, military aid would have ended anyways and Biden would have tried to stretch these funds out until next summer. Biden can't do that now. So Ukraine is actually going to get a huge boost in military aid right away.

Third, even though I do not think Trump cares at all about Ukraine, he does care about his own image and legacy. He is never running for office ever again, but he loves to be loved by his supporters. He does not want to look weak and if Ukraine refuses to a negotiated capitulation and instead fights on without US help, these are going to be top headlines daily (maybe the fall of Kharkiv or the fall of Odesa) and this will make Trump look weak. He hates that. These would be images that would look worse for America than the US withdrawal of Afghanistan.

Forth, Trump hates Iran. Trump fiercely supports Israel and Iran is currently trying to destroy Israel. If Trump takes any military action against Iran (or looks the other way when Israel does) this could weaken or cripple one of Russia's most important allies. Harris was never going to do anything about Iran. Trump might actually cripple Iran and their Russian allied proxies in the Middle East.

Fifth, Trump loves the idea of cheap oil. He might actually find ways (cutting regulations, building more pipes, granting access to more public lands) that brings the global price of oil down so much that this ends up bankrupting Russia faster. That is not Trump's goal, but he might accidentally do it.

Sixth, Europe might finally militarily wake up once Trump stops answering their phone calls. Europe has the population and the economic power to support Ukraine and defeat the Russians without America's help. This is Europe's moment. They can't use America as an excuse anymore for holding them back.

Lastly… this is crazy, but Trump's economic plan of tariffs and trade wars might actually trigger a massive recession in the United States. When the US goes into recession, this almost always triggers a global recession. We realistically need an economic collapse of Russia to defeat them and Trump might accidentally cause this without even wanting to.

It is all weird to think about. But we just do not know what will happen or what the state of the war will be three months from now. It is a complete mystery to everyone, including the Russians.

Keep supporting Ukraine. Russia will be defeated.

youtube

#ukraine #donald trump #us politics #war in ukraine #ukraine war #russia is a terrorist state #russian invasion #russia #jake broe #youtube #video

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canadanonn · 20 days ago

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Oh sweetie, @plaidos did you also know that the US has something called a two party system making it so third party candidates will NEVER have a chance in hell of being voted until that system is abolished.

And also not voting and voting third party was a vote for the 30 something convicted felon that has taken several trips to that one pedo's island of underage girls?

And you would also be aware that a lot of the anti LGBTQ shit was happening from the states because of Trump's pieces of political dick suckers that still had power and not Biden who was trying to clean up as much of Trump's mess that was caused during his first term AND that Kamala was going to work to get LGBTQ rights protected on a FEDERAL LEVEL which meant that states with Trumpers could only cry and bitch?

Also wow, Trump stopped one singular bathroom bill. What else has he done? Dismantle the DEI and encourage businesses in the US to do the same, remove trans people from being acknowledged as LGBTQ+, is letting his henchmen restrict women's health rights, forcing brain dead women to give birth and making it a federal crime for a woman to leave state to seak safe abortions options, closing a majority of disability and retirement offices and then tell the disabled and retired that they have to physically visit the offices once a month or they lose their benefits, deporting immigrants and legal citizens that don't match the mighty whitey man agenda, helping turn Gaza into a parking lot and helping Russia become the victor of their own genocide against Ukraine, letting his cronies work on removing the ACA and Medicaid so that the poor won't have insurance and die off and also raising the prices of everything to borderline unaffordable levels.

Note that I'm pretty sure there is more evil stuff he and his goons he put into power have done and will do but I'm Canadian so I'm not entrenched into US politics.

But point is that while neither side is perfect, there is currently no magical third side in US politics and lying about what Kamala and her Tim guy stood for was fear mongering and shitty.

#plaidos #politics #us politics #Either point to Kamala and tim directly talking about removing LGBTQ rights while punting the poor and murdering women like Trump did #Or apologize for being part of the 2 million that got Trump voted in #And note that the request does not mention Biden or Obama or Clinton but specifically Kamala and Tim #Or can we just assume that you didn't want to encourage others to vote for a woman of color because she wasn't white #Change doesn't happen in a day #And whoever gets voted in after Trump has to clean up so much more of his mess before they can actually make the first meaningful changes #Not to mention that trump will still have cronies in the various offices that will make whoever's job that much harder like with bidens ter #Also don't tell people to not lie about trump when you lied about Kamala btw #Makes you look like a trumper even if you are not

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axvoter · 2 months ago

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Blatantly Partisan Party Review IV (federal 2025): Australian Democrats

Running where: Qld, Vic, and WA for the Senate, plus the Dvision of Banks (NSW) in the House of Representatives

Prior reviews: federal 2013, federal 2016, federal 2019, federal 2022

What I said before: “Overall, this is quite centre-left stuff, but it’s not immediately clear why you would support the Democrats instead of, say, the Greens. There is little here that is actually distinctive, and they lack charismatic candidates to make you believe that they will be able to deliver on the platform they spend so much time trying to explain.” (federal 2022)

What I think this year: My first reaction was “oh god really?” It’s genuinely befuddling that this party is still alive. A strange and over-optimistic band of true believers persist in maintaining registration and contesting elections, despite the fact the party’s death knell was clearly in 2007 and even some of its former elected representatives now promote other groups such as the Greens.

The Democrats were indeed the third force in Australian politics from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, but they stumbled badly during the big debate over introducing a GST in the late 1990s at the same time as the Greens were eroding their vote—and a mooted “Green Democrats” merger never eventuated. The Democrats' last senators left office in 2008 after failing to retain their seats at the 2007 election, their final state MP quit the party in 2009 (David Winterlich in the SA upper house), and a few years later different factions fought for control of what remained of the party. I did my best as an outsider to try to piece together what was going on in my 2013 and 2016 reviews linked above. By 2019, however, they managed to largely get things back together, originally on a bland centrist platform and then with a more centre-left skew in 2022. Their national director since 2019 has been Lyn Allison, their Senator for Victoria in 1996–2008.

Not much has changed in the Democrats' platform since 2022. They offer to be “the people’s watchdog in the Senate” and they maintain a “Rorts Watch” on their website as a nod to their tradition of holding the balance of power in the Senate to “keep the bastards honest”. Some policies have been updated during the current term of parliament and in response to world events: their liberal-feminist-informed foreign affairs policy, for instance, criticises Donald Trump's misogynistic behaviour as a contrast to the party's focus on the need for women’s leadership on the international stage and on the safety and liberation of women in patriarchal societies and crisis zones.

Drawing on the quote at the start of this entry from my 2022 review, I’m just not sure what the Democrats are offering to win votes from near rivals with similar platforms. If you are a Greens or Animal Justice voter, a supporter of Fatima Payman's new party Australia's Voice, or if you’re on the Labor Left and have made your peace with not always getting your way over the Right factions, there isn’t much here to make you do more than put the Democrats third or so. Without eloquent and attention-grabbing candidates to inspire voters and get media coverage, the Democrats are wasting their time, not to mention their money on deposits with the AEC, which are only returned if you achieve 4% or more of the vote. In 2022, all they could manage was 65,532 votes, 0.44% of the national tally, from standing candidates across five states (their best proportionate performance was in Victoria, where they got 0.75% of the statewide total). As a comparison, David Pocock stood in just the ACT and won 60,406 (21.18%) first preferences and got into parliament.

I’ve no major problems with the Democrats’ platform; I just don’t see the point. I'm not sure what noteworthy gap on the political spectrum they fill, or why there’s still fire in the belly to run for office. There’s nothing here to make me say “hey if you care about x then consider the Democrats rather than other left-leaning options”, and nothing to prompt me to do anything but put them in a decent enough spot after parties that evoke a stronger positive response. Maybe they’ll speak more to you?

Recommendation: Give the Australian Democrats a decent to good preference.

Website: https://www.democrats.org.au/

#auspol #ausvotes #ausvotes25 #Australian election #Australia #Australian Democrats #Aus Democrats #Ausdems #Democrats #centrism #centre-left #zombie party #decent preference #good preference

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victusinveritas · 2 months ago

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Should I run for office

Yes.

If we are talking about the papacy, also yes. It's possible (and not entirely unprecedented thanks to various papal/conclaval shenanigans throughout the centuries) for any Catholic [male either genitally or with a good packer I'd imagine, though I'm not an expert on this sort of thing, so don't quote me or come at me if I'm using terms that aren't to your taste--remember that tumblr is free and sending hate-mail for not being inclusive enough in an answer about going for the Throne of Peter is really a bit much, but you do you, other anonymous tumblr person, you do you.] priest (again, in theory), then raised to bishop and cardinal (though those are formalities), and then have a two thirds majority of the conclave, and then bam, you're the new Pope Anontumblrius I. Have fun in your new hat, cool clothes, bitchin' rings, and very fancy chair. The papal throne (Cathedra Petri) is in a nice bronze reliquary designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the absolute master of Baroque Everything. You also get to chill under a cool baldachin, also by Bernini. The twisty columns are like that because they are larger versions of the serpentine (in shape, iirc they aren't made of serpentine marble, they certainly don't look like it) columns from the Temple of Solomon given by Emperor Constantine to show how cool he was with the Church being legit and all that (not going in to the Donation of Constantine stuff right now). Don't get your bags packed for Rome just yet. The conclave will start in around 15-20 days, since it takes a while to organize a funeral for a dead Pope (even one as humble and pomp-and-circumstance flouting as Francis, who requested a simple wood coffin), invite all the dignitaries from around the world (kind of doubt Trump and Vance will receive invites, but you never know). And then you've got to start schmoozing and reminding the cardinals of just how cool you'd be as the Pope.

For one look at how all this would work, go to this BBC piece on what happens when the Pope dies, which, historically, is something every Pope has done (even those that have retired).

More pope/conclave related stuff cut...

For another, more accurate look at the papal conclave (note, in its original form, this piece is broken up a bit to read like the poem it is, but here it is :

"How The Pope Is Chosen" by James Tate

How The Pope Is Chosen

Any poodle under ten inches high is a toy. Almost always a toy is an imitation of something grown-ups use. Popes with unclipped hair are called "corded popes." If a Pope's hair is allowed to grow unchecked, it becomes extremely long and twists into long strands that look like ropes. When it is shorter it is tightly curled. Popes are very intelligent. There are three different sizes. The largest are called standard Popes. The medium-sized ones are called miniature Popes. I could go on like this, I could say: "He is a squarely built Pope, neat, well-proportioned, with an alert stance and an expression of bright curiosity," but I won't. After a poodle dies all the cardinals flock to the nearest 7-Eleven. They drink Slurpies until one of them throws up and then he's the new Pope. He is then fully armed and rides through the wilderness alone, day and night in all kinds of weather. The new Pope chooses the name he will use as Pope, like "Wild Bill" or "Buffalo Bill." He wears red shoes with a cross embroidered on the front. Most Popes are called "Babe" because growing up to become a Pope is a lot of fun. All the time their bodies are becoming bigger and stranger, but sometimes things happen to make them unhappy. They have to go to the bathroom by themselves, and they spend almost all of their time sleeping. Parents seem incapable of helping their little popes grow up. Fathers tell them over and over again not to lean out of windows, but the sky is full of them. It looks as if they are just taking it easy, but they are learning something else. What, we don't know, because we are not like them. We can't even dress like them. We are like red bugs or mites compared to them. We think we are having a good time cutting cartoons out of the paper, but really we are eating crumbs out of their hands. We are tiny germs that cannot be seen under microscopes. When a Pope is ready to come into the world, we try to sing a song, but the words do not fit the music too well. Some of the full-bodied popes are a million times bigger than us. They open their mouths at regular intervals. They are continually grinding up pieces of the cross and spitting them out. Black flies cling to their lips. Once they are elected they are given a bowl of cream and a puppy clip. Eyebrows are a protection when the Pope must plunge through dense underbrush

in search of a sheep.

(James Tate, from Worshipful Company of Fletchers, 1994 Ecco books)

Fun fact: Gambling on who the next pope will be is one of the very few things explicitly punishable by excommunication.

When you absolutely need coverage from multiple saints, get yourself one of these heavy mamma-jammas.

Note: as a last resort when going up against an evil religious megaboss (Joel Osteen, Rupert Murdoch, the Pope of the Phantom Zone, nKorlok the Destroyer, JD Vance), pour all the relics into a spice/coffee grinder, set that thing to espresso, grind it, and then grab your handy dandy straw or a rolled up indulgence and snort a few of lines of sanctity. Effects should last about the time it takes to say the rosary in full twenty times. Have sex during this time and you will bring about the Kwisatz Haderach whether or not you want to, so... there's that. A bit on the Cadaver Synod (probably written during a manic episde):

View the following scene: Europe, the late ninth century. Rome is a game piece between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, largely controlled by small-time warlords, and wanted by pretty much everyone who was anybody in central Italy, for some reason, even though the place had, by papal admission, gone to shit. Everyone, including Saracen pirates, had sacked the city, stolen all the pope’s stuff several times over, and generally made a mess of things. After a few years of mediocrity, Pope Formosus dies. Pope Boniface VI becomes pope, dies. Pope Stephen VI becomes pope, promptly conducts the Cadaver Synod. Stephen had Formosus exhumed, tried in Saint John Lateran (Stephen and his pals placed Formosus on a throne and questioned him repeatedly about certain acts of which he was accused, and getting no reply other than a vague musty smell, presumed the late pontiff’s corpse was remaining silent because it was guilty of all charges), and found guilty of not being worthy of the office of the papacy, and punished accordingly: every act he passed was annulled, his papal vestments and rings (by this point, he was a tad bit moldy) were stripped from his body, three fingers on his right hand (those used for consecrating) were chopped off, and then he was tossed into the Tiber. However, a monk wandering along the Tiber, noticed his body, and remembering that one time Formosus gave him a sandwich, secretly buried it. Somehow, the washed up, eight-fingered ex-pope’s corpse became the source of rumors relating to its miraculous healing abilities (not, unfortunately for Formosus, on his own departed form, but rather on folks who touched it or asked nicely to be cured of an ailment in its presence), and Stephen VI promptly found himself with angry mobs pissed that he had exhumed, tried, defrocked, and unhanded their favorite pope. Shortly after the mob arose, Stephen was imprisoned and strangled by his political enemies (of which he had quite a few). The next few popes tried to gloss over that one time Stephen went out back with a shovel and started digging up former pontiffs, and so they passed laws that forbade the exhumation, trial, and sentencing of the deceased, because, apparently, it hadn’t been clear enough tosome people that you probably shouldn’t go around digging up the bodies of your political enemies and putting them on trial(and then yell at them when they didn’t answer your questions). There was also the matter of the bishops Formosus had created, who, under Stephen’s orders, needed to be re-consecrated as bishops due to Formosus not being pope enough for the job, one of those bishops was, awkwardly, Stephen VI. The papacy largely just shuffled papers around until everything looked legitimate, and did its best to pretend that nothing weird at all was going. So, Formosus rested as serenely as a seriously beaten corpse could rest in the crypt of Saint Peter’s for about a decade. But then Formosus was reexhumed by Pope Sergius III, whom, after teabagging Formosus and saying “No, you’re a douche,” recondemned Formosus for being a sub-par pontiff, reinvalidated all of his rulings, and then according to some rumors, ordered the corpse beheaded (because chopping off a few fingers and tossing the rest into the Tiber hadn’t been enough, apparently), before dropping dead dying himself and leaving it to his ecclesiastical successors to not so secretly bury Formosus in St. Peter’s, and just try to put the whole thing behind them without too much therapy or paperwork. Sergius III’s trial of Formosus was largely viewed as having been a ‘political’ matter, and not one questioning the faith of Formosus, so the Church ruled once and for all that the rulings made by Formosus were valid, and everyone should really stop digging him up to yell at him. Political matters in the early middle ages, you see, were those that involved digging up or otherwise utilizing a corpse in order to make everyone else just shake their head and mutter under their breath as they wonder just where they went wrong.

(The stuff below is from my brief run as Pope in 2014, when I had a seizure and a bit of a brain injury):

Bidding the vile webcam to work while wearing my awesome new spacepope tiara. "Once again, I am the Pope of the Sand!" -I screamed that in my sleep a few weeks ago, now I know why.

To return to the original question: If we are talking about mayoral office or something like that, also go for it. We need more folks on Tumblr in office.

#the papacy #popes #cadaver synod #church history #papal conclave #rip pope francis #rip frankie #anon asks #cathblr #catholic #luce vatican #the more you know #how the pope is chosen #college of cardinals #the vatican #meanwhile in rome #medieval studies #popeblr #pope-posting

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sageandred · 10 months ago

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Today, I saw someone say "I do not want that genocide on my conscience" in regards to voting Democrat or Republican, and opting for a third party in place. I ask you, do you want stripped rights of American minorities on your hands or innocent children's lives due to gun violence and no efforts to reform? Because that's what this is! For the love of god, I do not understand the take of fighting for a better outcome and aiming for world peace when the unlikelihood of a third party is evident as history has shown. We live in a democracy (supposedly), but we live under a system, regardless. It's Democrat or Republican; it's Democrat or Trump, now; it's Democrat or fascist. I'm not arguing that Kamala is perfect or parts of where she focusses her attention in policies won't disappoint; that's of the reality with anyone that gets in office; that's every politician. The goal has never been vote the "lesser of two evils;" do nothing else. (I hate the indication of "evils" when I don't think every politician is an awful human being (in a system guaranteed to codemn them with questionable ethics, but that's another post). The goal is make the logical and correct decision, so you have the chance to make it better again and for them to make it better in office. If you vote third party on the basis of moral terror, you will not have that chance to make the world better how you aim to. Trump has shown you what he'll do, and made it worse.

You are fighting the war for Palestinians and all who are being attacked by Israel, because they are targeted minorities and you cry for the innocent lives of children being taken, but that ethnic and communal cleansing is exactly what Trump is fighting for in dictatorship in America. If you vote third party, you will also have blood on your hands, because you are voting for Trump based on the historical unlikelihood of the 3rd candidate winning. If you choose not to vote, you are forfeiting your choice and indirectly voting for whoever comes into office. You will not feel like there is no blood on your hands if you see what comes of his presidency. The amount of people I've known & seen who felt stupid for abstaining in his election after the reality of his leadership is a large pool and proof of the regret and realized actuality. Do not put yourself in the position to feel like them!

Trump has said, he will have it "fixed" so you will never have to vote in another election again if he wins. You do not get to easily rectify your choices if your opted third party loses. You will not have that chance. (Let it be noted, that also the 4 years a president spends in the house are not so easily reversible (we have still been dealing with Trump's damage in Biden's term).

P.s. Here's what Kamala has said about Gaza:

x x

Here's what Trump has said:

Former President Donald Trump said that Israel needs to “finish what they started” and “get it over with fast,” as he continued arguing Israel was “losing the PR war” because of the visuals coming out of Gaza.

“You’ve got to get it over with, and you have to get back to normalcy. And I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it, because you’ve got to have victory. You have to have a victory, and it’s taking a long time,” Trump said in an interview with The Hugh Hewitt Show that aired Thursday.

Harris also recognized antisemitism, showing support for the community that's faced it, and that's not what this is.

Be definitive; make the choice; and don't be passive when your options are historically laid out between two separate parties!

Vote for hope, not a never-ending apocalyptic genocide with Trump.

Also, relevant to note, it's just as important to vote down ballot. Get supporting figures who will back the better choice, so that it's not all for nothing.

#us politics #2024 presidential election #kamala harris #donald trump #politics #current news

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sage-nebula · 4 months ago

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This should come as no surprise considering that Trump blatantly said during a stump speech that his supporters would "never have to vote again" if he won, but it sucks to see it starting so soon. A few key takeaways:

To ratify the 22nd amendment, the bill has to pass through Congress, which requires a 2/3rd majority in both the House and the Senate. Republicans have majorities in both, but only by three seats. It is vital we rip even those three seats away from them in the 2026 midterms.

If it did pass Congress, then 38 states would have to ratify the change to the amendment. Trump won 30 states in 2024. We don't want to get to the point where we have to beg 8 states to hold out, so again, we NEED to lock in for the midterms.

The change to the amendment would prevent three of the still living presidents from being elected again (Clinton, W Bush, and the one I'm sure they were most worried about, Obama). They worded it very carefully.

As the article points out, even if the change doesn't happen, there are still loopholes Trump could exploit to stay as president, and given his openly stated desire to be dictator, you know he'll be looking for them.

#uspol #it's doubtful they can do this right now bc their congressional majority is so slim #but if we don't fix that shit in the midterms? well.#we knew he was going to try this tho. he literally said so.#and his base venerates him as a god-king as Rep Ogles did in his proposal #so. yeah. i hate it here

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mariacallous · 2 months ago

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Representative Andy Ogles, a Republican from Tennessee, recently started making videos from his office on Capitol Hill. Ogles, a Freedom Caucus member in his second term, often films himself in front of a reproduction of “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” the painting by Emanuel Leutze. “What you have here is a moment in time that comes along once in a century,” he says in a clip called “The Case for Trump 2028,” in which he proposes that the President run for a third term. In another video, he walks through his office, with a chyron introducing him as “Judge Impeacher/Congressman.” Ogles recently filed articles of impeachment against several judges who have blocked executive orders issued by Trump. “Political hacks and their decisions belong in my SHREDDER,” he writes in a post promoting the video. Toward the end, he feeds a judicial ruling into an actual paper shredder. “Sicko Mode,” by Travis Scott, plays in the background.

Ogles began the year under investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics and the F.B.I. They were looking into allegations that he had violated federal campaign-finance laws by falsely reporting a three-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar loan to himself, something Ogles maintained was an “honest mistake.” (He had also allegedly raised nearly twenty-five thousand dollars on GoFundMe for a “burial garden” for stillborn babies—a project that donors say never materialized.) Before Inauguration Day, when Trump first displayed an interest in Greenland, Ogles proposed the Make Greenland Great Again Act, a bill authorizing the President to try to acquire it from Denmark. (The U.S. is a “dominant predator,” Ogles said.) Ten days later, just after Trump was sworn in, Ogles announced his bid to allow the President to serve a third term, by changing the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution. “If the man who created the disastrous ‘New Deal’ gets more than two terms, then the man who created ‘The Art of the Deal’ should get the same,” he said. The following week, in a Fox Business appearance, he echoed an assertion by Trump that D.E.I. might have caused a fatal plane crash over the Potomac River. Federal prosecutors withdrew their investigation into Ogles the next day.

Brazen transaction mixed with humbling obeisance is hardly unknown in Washington. “Shame is for sissies,” the late lobbyist Edward von Kloberg used to say. (He referred to his clients, among them Saddam Hussein, as “the damned.”) In Trump’s Washington, the imperative has never been more plain: if you want to get ahead or stay out of trouble, praise the President as much as he praises himself. “You are the leader of the world,” Archbishop Elpidophoros, of the Greek Orthodox Church, said, at a recent celebration in the White House’s East Room. “You remind me of the great Roman emperor Constantine the Great.” The crowd cheered. Elpidophoros presented Trump with a gold cross—the symbol, he remarked, that led Constantine to victory. “Wow,” Trump replied, as he cradled the cross. “I didn’t know that was going to happen, but I’ll take it.”

The gestures of servility come from all over.

At a Cabinet meeting not long ago, Trump’s secretaries took turns: “Your vision is a turning point and inflection point in American history” (Brooke Rollins, Agriculture); “You were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority—Americans want you to be President” (Pam Bondi, Attorney General); “What you’re doing now is a great service to our country, but ultimately to the world” (Marco Rubio, State). Jeff Bezos, whose business empire can easily be affected by the favor or disdain of the White House, announced that the newspaper he owns, the Washington Post, would no longer welcome opinion columns outside certain boundaries. He redoubled his bow by licensing Trump’s reality-TV show, “The Apprentice,” in order to make reruns of it available to stream on Amazon. (Amazon also paid forty million dollars for the rights to two forthcoming documentary projects on Trump’s wife, Melania.) Senator Ted Cruz, who had once called Trump a “snivelling coward,” “utterly immoral,” “nuts,” and “a pathological liar,” now rushes to compliment the President, along with his main campaign funder and close adviser, Elon Musk; Cruz recently tweeted a photograph of himself with a red Tesla parked on the grounds of the White House. “This may be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” he wrote.

The list goes on. When Trump complained about an unflattering portrait that hung in the Colorado state capitol—“Truly the worst,” he said—the state’s Republican-led legislature swiftly removed it. In Minnesota, Republicans in the state senate introduced a bill to codify “Trump Derangement Syndrome”—defined as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump”—as a mental illness. Law firms are offering pro-bono services to Trump so that he will reverse executive orders that target them; in a memo, the U.S. Attorney in D.C. referred to his staff as “President Trumps’ lawyers.” Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, wears a gold lapel pin in the shape of Trump’s head.

At the beginning of April, Trump instituted a tariff regime that sent markets plunging across the world. As losses in the S. & P. 500 neared six trillion dollars, he gloated about the many nations that wanted to negotiate with him. “These countries are calling us up and kissing my ass,” he told the National Republican Congressional Committee. “ ‘Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything, sir.’ ” He was also eager to remind any members of Congress who were opposed to his “big beautiful bill,” which called for tax breaks, spending cuts, and stepped-up immigration enforcement, to “stop grandstanding” and just vote for it. “Close your eyes and get there,” he said.

These days, they almost always do. “There’s never been anybody who has controlled that much of the base of any party,” Steve Cohen, a longtime Democratic congressman from Memphis, told me. “I don’t even think Franklin Roosevelt had that much power.” A person close to the Administration said, “Trump’s dealmaking often comes through a public assault.” Ralph Norman, a Freedom Caucus member from South Carolina, told me, “This is a blood sport now, more so than I’ve ever seen it.” Or, as a person close to Trump put it, “Republicans have an authority problem. Donald Trump is teaching them how to respect order.”

“NO DISSENT,” Trump recently posted on Truth Social. He was addressing House Republicans ahead of a vote on a stopgap funding bill. A lack of dissent is not what the Founders envisioned for the deliberative branch. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson assumed that Congress would be the strongest arm of the federal government. Madison wrote, in Federalist No. 48, that “the legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.” In 1960, Lyndon B. Johnson, then the Senate Majority Leader, initially balked at an offer to be John F. Kennedy’s running mate, because he felt it would be a downgrade from the role he already had.

And yet it now seems that Congress—with both houses controlled by Republicans—exists to do little else but flatter the man who lives at the other end of the Mall, and ratify his edicts. A week after Trump was inaugurated, Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican congresswoman from Florida, proposed legislation that would direct the Secretary of the Interior “to arrange for the carving of the figure of President Donald J. Trump on Mount Rushmore National Memorial.” “Let’s get carving,” she tweeted. The freshman congressman Brandon Gill’s third piece of legislation, the Golden Age Act of 2025, would require all hundred-dollar bills to feature an image of Trump. (This violates an 1866 law that forbids the Treasury to put the likeness of a living person on currency.) Claudia Tenney, a New York Republican, introduced a bill to make Trump’s birthday, June 14th, a federal holiday. “Just as George Washington’s birthday is codified as a federal holiday, President Trump’s birthday should also be celebrated to recognize him as the founder of America’s Golden Age,” she posted. Addison McDowell, of North Carolina, wants a new name for Washington’s Dulles Airport: Trump International. Last month, Darrell Issa, a Republican from California, announced that he was nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. “No one deserves it more,” Issa said.

In late March, I sat in on a hearing of the House Committee on Natural Resources, where a dozen or so members were discussing the Gulf of America Act of 2025, sponsored by Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her bill would require Trump’s new name for the Gulf of Mexico to be implemented across the government’s vast bureaucracy. Jared Huffman, the ranking Democratic member, leaned into the microphone. “There is crazy, destructive, incompetent, corrupt things happening in the executive branch of our government right now, and the independent branch of government, the Article One branch that our Founders created in order to serve as a check on Presidential abuses of power, as a check on corruption and incompetence, is totally missing in action,” he said.

As a staffer positioned a map of the “Gulf of America” behind Greene, I noticed a man slip quietly into the hearing room—this was Brian Glenn, Greene’s boyfriend and a pro-Trump TV anchor. Glenn got his start at Right Side Broadcasting Network, which emerged in 2015 by marketing itself as a channel that truthfully showed the size of Trump’s campaign crowds. (He is now the White House correspondent for Real America’s Voice, another right-wing media outlet.) Greene smiled at him, then introduced a slate of expert witnesses she had brought in to speak about how renaming the Gulf of Mexico would bolster national security.

Huffman’s mood seemed to darken further. “This is remarkable new stuff in this committee, just bootlicking sycophancy of the highest order,” he said. (Not long after the hearing, Huffman suggested an amendment to rename Earth “Planet Trump.” This, he said, would amount to skating “where the puck is going.”) Discussion in the committee room turned to a bill authorizing the purchase of tracking devices for fish living in the Great Lakes, and another to remove the gray wolf from the federal endangered-species list. Groups of touring schoolchildren occasionally filtered in and out.

Later, I caught up with Glenn at the White House. He was standing around waiting to go on air from “Pebble Beach,” the long driveway leading up to the West Wing, where the various networks have little green cabanas from which anchors and officials broadcast. Glenn is tan and has a puffy face. (He addressed his puffiness on a recently televised segment about the drinking habits of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. “It’s called allergies,” Glenn said. “And it’s called testosterone. That’s why my face gets puffy. I’m not an alcoholic.”) He sees himself as a sort of self-declared liaison between the President and Congress, helping the latter to more efficiently follow the former’s instructions. “Part of my job is to put pressure on Congress,” he told me. “We have to sell the President’s message to them. I want a carrier pigeon to fly straight from Trump’s desk to Speaker Johnson. Like a bank slot where you just put it in here and it comes out there.”

Lately, the President’s directive has been to stop the courts from derailing his agenda. In the first three months of his term, district judges have issued seventeen nationwide injunctions, blocking executive orders that, among other things, sought to end birthright citizenship, defund the Department of Education, and ban transgender people from serving in the military. Issa had introduced the No Rogue Rulings Act, which would bar district judges from issuing such universal injunctions. “It’s becoming an accelerating problem,” he told me. On March 20th, James Boasberg, a district judge in D.C., ordered the government to stop deportation flights that were carrying Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. Trump posted, “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Soon, House members were scrambling to do so. “All options are on the table,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said. Bondi, the Attorney General, accused Boasberg of “meddling in our government.” A growing number of Republicans were now calling judges “insurrectionists.” Ogles hung a “Wanted” poster displaying photographs of various judges outside his office, and issued “Impeachathon Updates” on social media. The updates got retweeted by Musk, who has donated the maximum amount to Ogles’s reëlection campaign.

I recently visited Issa’s office in the Rayburn Building, one of three outposts for House members. Issa is the wealthiest member of the House, with a net worth just under half a billion dollars. He made his fortune in the car-alarm business, eventually manufacturing an alert system that featured his own voice. “Step away from the car,” it boomed. (As a younger man, Issa might have better heeded his own admonition; when he was nineteen, he and his brother were indicted for grand theft auto. Prosecutors ultimately dropped the case.) Congress was out of session, on a district-work week. The halls were empty and echoey. Jonathan Wilcox, Issa’s deputy chief of staff, welcomed me at the congressman’s office and led me into a sitting room. Wilcox was in a casual-Friday outfit of jeans and a vest. A commemorative book called “Save America,” which was by Trump and filled with photographs of Trump, rested on a coffee table. I noticed “gold card” memes on various staffers’ computer screens. (In February, the Administration announced a plan to replace an existing immigration visa with a “gold card,” which would be available to purchase for five million dollars. They look like American Express credit cards, except with Trump’s face on them.)

For many members of Congress, the week back home had become unexpectedly contentious. Various news outlets were reporting that constituents, even in deep-red districts, were berating their representatives over Musk’s ransacking of the federal bureaucracy, via his Department of Government Efficiency, and Trump’s encouragement of it. There had been a town hall in Issa’s district, near San Diego, at which dozens of angry citizens addressed a stage with an empty chair. When I asked about the incident, Wilcox sighed, gesturing around the silent office. “Do you notice the phone ringing off the hook?” he said. “Our constituents love us.” He went on, “We have our hands full trying to be a fully effective legislative body.”

Two weeks ago, No Rogue Rulings came before the Rules Committee, which controls which bills go to the House floor. (Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, proposed companion legislation in the upper chamber.) Jim McGovern, of Massachusetts, the ranking Democratic member, opened the discussion. “While students are getting literally kidnapped off our streets by masked ICE agents because they wrote an op-ed Trump didn’t agree with, what are our Republican colleagues doing?” he asked. “Trying to undermine the Constitution by eroding the independence of an independent judiciary.” McGovern continued, “If this were happening in another country, our State Department would condemn it. This regime is marching toward authoritarianism, trying to trample over the courts and undermine the rule of law.” Issa viewed the situation rather differently; he argued that the Founders “did not anticipate quite as many checks and balances.”

Issa isn’t the first member of Congress to take up the issue of nationwide injunctions, and he pointed out that Trump wouldn’t be the only President to benefit from a ban. “We don’t write laws for one President,” Issa told me. “We write them for all time.” But it was difficult to ignore the current timing and context: the President was posting online that “Unlawful Nationwide Injunctions by Radical Left Judges could very well lead to the destruction of our Country!” (Next month, as part of an emergency appeal by the Trump Administration, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument about whether the lower courts have gone too far.)

Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a former chief counsel to Gretchen Whitmer, the state’s Democratic governor, opposes nationwide injunctions, because they allow district courts to make decisions that extend beyond the parties involved. Still, he told me, “there’s something grotesque about Congress focussing on the powers of district courts when there is such a grievous assault on the rule of law happening right now.” Many in Trump’s camp, meanwhile, have long pushed for the President to be less impeded by the law. Vice-President J. D. Vance recently questioned whether the Administration could afford to bother with “due process” at all. A person who served in Trump’s first Administration, and is poised to join the State Department in the new one, told me, “Trump stops listening to the courts? That’s my dream.” On April 9th, No Rogue Rulings passed the House, with just one Republican dissenter.

Over the decades, certain bars and restaurants in D.C. have served as a kind of political headquarters. Ebbitt House poured drinks for members of various Presidential Administrations in the later nineteenth century and the early twentieth. During the Kennedy Administration, New Frontiersmen could be seen tucking into a steak at Sans Souci. Richard Nixon liked Trader Vic’s; the Bombay Club was more Clinton era. In Trump’s first term, the main hangouts were BLT Prime, at the Trump Hotel, where you might find Rudy Giuliani, and Harry’s Bar, where members of the Proud Boys sometimes gathered. (Both have since closed.)

On a recent evening, I went to Butterworth’s, a Capitol Hill restaurant that has been dubbed a de-facto MAGA clubhouse for a newer, younger set. A man wearing an embroidered American-flag sweater walked in and greeted a table of women. “I’m not a crook,” he said, doing the Nixon double victory hand sign. Raheem Kassam, a former editor of Breitbart, is one of Butterworth’s investors. He was chatting with Saurabh Sharma, who works in Trump’s Office of Presidential Personnel, and sending French fries to customers who were waiting on drinks.

In the wake of Inauguration Day, Kash Patel, who has made a career of attacking Trump’s enemies and in return got appointed to run the F.B.I., appeared at Butterworth’s, as did Curtis Yarvin, the fringe anti-democracy writer. I’d last been during the Conservative Political Action Conference, a convention of right-wing activists that has transformed into a full-blown Trump rhapsody. As I walked in, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and the current host of the “War Room” podcast, was posing for pictures with fans. “Make a hole,” a staff member barked at me, so that Bannon, in his customary Barbour jacket, could pass through the crowd.

In past years, Butterworth’s might’ve been a safe haven for a movement that still saw itself in opposition to the establishment. That premise has become obsolete. “I’ve honestly had way more Democratic congressmen than I have had Curtis Yarvin appearances,” Kassam said. Crowds now intermingle with much less concern. Andrew Beck, a strategist who has had multiple clients go on to join the new Administration, told me, “Everyone’s just accepting this populist revolution. To maintain your standing, you have to take up what until recently would have been a ‘far-right’ position.”

Not long ago, when I got coffee with Beck, he still seemed bemused that, after working for many years outside the Beltway, he now had regular meetings in the capital. Beck is tall and seems to cast politics as an explicitly masculine project; he’ll lean across the table to say things like “It’s about men building civilization.” In the evenings, he sometimes goes to parties in a posh neighborhood in Northwest D.C., at the home of a tech billionaire who supported Kamala Harris but now finds himself with new friendships to maintain in Washington. “It’s the hottest ticket in town,” Beck said. One night, Beck invited his friend Trace Mayer, a Bitcoin evangelist and investor who hosts a cryptocurrency podcast, to a sort of maga salon at the house. State Department staffers were there, and over cocktails and crab cakes the chat briefly turned to a work-in-progress plan to deport alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang to El Salvador. The idea was to pay El Salvador to warehouse the deportees in a notoriously brutal prison, but there had been an impasse in the negotiations. Mayer, through his crypto connections, was able to help reopen the conversation between the staffers and members of the administration of the Salvadoran President, Nayib Bukele. “I had no idea it would set off a constitutional crisis,” Beck said. (The Trump Administration recently admitted that it had mistakenly deported a man living in Maryland to the Salvadoran prison, but has yet to comply with court orders, including from the Supreme Court, to try to bring him back.) For Beck, though, it wasn’t about what he saw in the headlines later. “It’s about being a spiritual king in the eyes of your bros,” he told me. “It’s about that validation in your group chats.”

Fluency in the folkways of the internet has become a valuable form of currency. “It used to be the gold standard was placing a W.S.J. editorial,” a D.C. political consultant told me. “Now the most important thing is an Elon tweet. That’s what everybody wants most.” He went on, “It’s X and podcasts. Heritage, A.E.I., Cato—they have a lot less influence. The Catturd Twitter account is way more important.” (Catturd—the nom de guerre of a man in Florida who turned to social media when arthritis prevented him from continuing to play the guitar—has helped to popularize various MAGA conspiracy theories: the F.B.I. planted evidence at Mar-a-Lago, the war in Ukraine is a “psy-op.” Trump has on several occasions retweeted him.) On a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Mike Benz, a former State Department official and an online crusader against the “deep state,” lambasted U.S.A.I.D. for nearly three hours. Musk reportedly listened to—and loved—the episode, before gutting the institution.

The other day, I met the consultant in an area of downtown that was surrounded by high-end co-working spaces and corporate-expense-account restaurants. When I told him that I was heading to the Hill, he said, “Congress doesn’t matter.” But he did see other industries acquiescing in ways that seemed consonant with congressional deference. Meta had paid twenty-five million dollars to settle a lawsuit with Trump for suspending him from Facebook and Instagram in the aftermath of January 6th; Comcast was trying to spin off MSNBC, which Trump routinely excoriates. They were all, the consultant said, “either migrating closer to what their actual beliefs always were, or they’re bending the knee.”

On April 2nd, referred to as “Liberation Day” by the Administration, Trump invoked national-emergency powers to impose sweeping tariffs on nearly ninety countries. His Cabinet gathered in the Rose Garden alongside supporters wearing hard hats and reflective vests—a stagy reference to all the manufacturing jobs that would presumably be flooding back to U.S. soil. Trump held up an enormous chart that displayed the names of countries and corresponding tariffs.

The print was very small. “I think you can, for the most part, see it,” Trump said. “Those with good eyes, with bad eyes.” He moved on. “They charge us, we charge them,” he said. “How could anybody be upset?” Soon afterward, the stock market plummeted. Trump left for Florida, where he was hosting a three-day golf tournament. At first, nearly everyone in the MAGA movement, and even MAGA-adjacent financiers, fell silent. “Mostly everyone hates this, they are just too afraid of the Mad King,” Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, remarked. On Truth Social, Trump insisted that an “ECONOMIC REVOLUTION” was under way.

As trillions of dollars of shareholder value evaporated, a coterie of defenders mobilized to quell any protest. Brian Glenn, of Real America’s Voice, was posting “#TrustTrump.” Those who were brave enough to betray their ambivalence about the tariffs were deemed “panicans,” a portmanteau of “panic” and “Americans.” (Trump considered them “weak and stupid.”) Jack Posobiec, a MAGA operative and podcaster, emerged as a primary enforcer. “Crush panicans, destroy panicans, deport panicans, roundhouse kick a panican into the concrete, slam dunk a panican into a trash can, banish filthy panicans,” he tweeted, to his 3.1 million followers. Early in his career, Posobiec had an internship in Shanghai with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; he later served as a naval intelligence officer. He was a fervent supporter of Trump’s first Presidential campaign, when he began to promote the idea that Democratic luminaries were holding sex parties with children in the basement of a pizza parlor. Posobiec’s brother, Kevin, with whom he co-hosts a podcast, told me, “Jack helped Trump get in the first time, but back then people thought he was a Russian asset pushing Nazi policies.” Now he is a mainstream, almost avuncular figure in Trumpworld. The Administration has brought him along on official trips—to the Canadian border, with Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and to Ukraine, with Scott Bessent, the Secretary of the Treasury. “Our job is to be that conduit between whatever the leader of the movement, which is of course Donald Trump, has been doing and our audience,” Posobiec told me.

Any objection, no matter how trivial, to what Trump has been doing is now grounds for punishment. In late March, the White House tweeted an A.I.-generated meme of a fentanyl trafficker weeping as she was arrested by ICE. Mike Solana, a venture capitalist and the editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires, who has been publicly supportive of Trump, wondered whether the image “inadvertently made a previously deported felon and literal fentanyl trafficker sympathetic.” Posobiec, sensing insubordination, responded, “Take note of counter-signalers.” (“The fuck kind of joseph stalin kgb shit is this,” Solana replied.)

Posobiec told me that he has spent years “making lists” of those who display insufficient fealty to Trump. He was especially vigilant about newcomers. “When people come alongside your movement and say they believe the same things as you, and say they want the same things as you, that’s when we have to be very wary of entryism,” he told me. “Just because they’re making pro-Trump statements right now—let’s be careful.” You were on board from the start or you were an object of suspicion. “Immigration and trade are the two biggest issues of the new right,” he said. “And everything else is ancillary to those, because otherwise we would just be Jeb Bush.” He went on, “Loyalty is the most important political virtue. . . . In Dante’s Inferno, the lowest circle of Hell was reserved for those who were betrayers.” His job, he said, was to have the President’s back.

Some loyalists have taken an even more active approach. Laura Loomer, a thirty-one-year-old far-right agitator and provocateur, has long made it her mission to root out potential turncoats circling Trump. Loomer twice ran (unsuccessfully) for Congress, and now conducts, in effect, an aggressive form of online obedience oversight. She travelled with Trump to his first Presidential debate with Kamala Harris, where he announced that migrants in Ohio were “eating the dogs.” She says that, “without Trump, we have nothing.” Trump has described her as a “great patriot” and sometimes calls on her for advice. Three weeks ago, she flew to Washington to meet with him in the Oval Office, where she suggested that he dismiss members of his National Security Council whom she deemed disloyal, largely because of loose associations with non-MAGA figures. The first targets were gone the next day. “People fail to do proper vetting,” Loomer told me. “A lot of these Republicans have a serious problem following instructions.”

In the wake of “Liberation Day,” and the catastrophic economic disruption that followed, Posobiec reminded me that this was all part of the plan. “It is meant to be a global shakeup,” he said. “All the right people are upset.” For the tech oligarchy, the business leaders, the rank-and-file Republicans, the tariffs were the ultimate loyalty test. He is focussed on insuring that the base remains committed.

Posobiec exists alongside a larger group of new MAGA enthusiasts in the White House press corps. In January, Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, opened briefing-room applications to any podcaster or “content creator” in the country. (Zero Hedge, a blog that claims to “liberate oppressed knowledge,” was recently added to the pool rotation; a former writer once suggested that an ideological guidepost for the site was “Vladimir Putin = greatest leader in the history of statecraft.”) New lines of inquiry have been pursued: What is Trump’s opinion on why his approval rating is so high? Can the Administration sustain its commendably breakneck pace? Recently, a correspondent for LindellTV, the streaming channel started by the election conspiracy theorist and pillow magnate Mike Lindell, said, of Trump, “He actually looks healthier than ever before—healthier than he did eight years ago, and I’m sure everybody in this room could agree. Is he working out with Bobby Kennedy, and is he eating less McDonald’s?”

“A lot of conservative outlets are in there to just sort of have a victory party for Trump,” Natalie Winters, the White House correspondent for Bannon’s “War Room,” told me. “They link the access to being very hype squad, fanboy, fangirl. And then you see media outlets who were anti-Trump now slobbering on him.”

Norm Eisen, a former Obama ethics lawyer who worked on the first impeachment case against Trump, told me, “It’s North Korean bootlicking.” Eisen understands where the impulse comes from. Many Republicans, he said, “live in red communities where a perceived act of betrayal to Trump is followed by an onslaught of targeting. They’re physically afraid for their lives or families’ lives. It adds up to an atmosphere of false fawning, pretend adulation, and genuine fear.” And it wasn’t just Republicans who had reason to be afraid. On a Friday afternoon in March, Trump had delivered an hour-long speech at the Department of Justice, in which he vented about the “tremendous abuse” he had endured during his criminal trials. He bragged about stripping security clearances from Biden-era officials, and pledged to continue to expose his political enemies, calling out Eisen by name. “They’re horrible people, they’re scum, and you have to know that,” Trump said. (Musk has called Eisen a “criminal” online.)

At a recent executive-order-signing session in the Oval Office, Trump introduced “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads”—“I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” he said. “It comes out drip, drip, drip. It’s ridiculous”—then directed the Department of Justice to investigate an official who had denied that the 2020 election was stolen. After Trump announced the cancellation of nearly half a billion dollars in grants to Columbia, which, he said, was allowing “illegal protests,” the university agreed to a list of demands, including that it hire a new internal security force that had the power to arrest students. Five more law firms reached deals to do pro-bono work to avoid Trump’s punishment. All of this made perfect sense to Beck, the consultant. “It’s restorative justice,” he said. “If you’re truly in charge, you better strike a degree of fear. Trump represents a father figure who is returning to the house, and there are various people living in it who are freeloaders and grifters and lowlifes abusing the kingdom. It says in the Bible, the city rejoices when the righteous rule.” Or, as Winters, of “War Room,” put it, “There’s a reason retribution was such a popular topic on the campaign trail. We operate in prison sentences.”

Eisen described Washington as “a wartime capital,” where the fight was between “the push of autocracy and the pushback of the Constitution.” He said, “Oligarchs, favor-seekers, and sycophants are all around. Either we’re at the beginning of the end of democracy or the beginning of a rebirth. There’s a surreal quality to that split screen.”

The Monday after “Liberation Day,” I went back to the White House. In the East Room, a brass band played “I Love L.A.”; Trump was hosting the Dodgers, to celebrate last year’s World Series win. As I waited for the party to start, I read an article about possible plans for a military parade to commemorate Trump’s birthday. The President had just returned from Florida, where he hosted a candlelight dinner at Mar-a-Lago. (The cheapest ticket was a million dollars.) On Air Force One, he told reporters that the golf had been “very good, because I won. It’s good to win. You heard I won, right? Did you hear I won?” As anxiety about the tariffs continued to spike, Trump linked on Truth Social to a post from an account called AmericanPapaBear: “Trump is playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.” The world was meant to sit back and respect the sacred, obscure geometry of his plan, but Congress, Wall Street, corporate executives, and even Musk were publicly backing away.

I found Glenn standing under a chandelier. “This event could take away some of the negativity,” he said. “Trump can do a lot of great stuff, but then nobody asks him to talk about it.” In Trump’s last term, the Dodgers’ manager had indicated that he’d decline an invitation to the White House. It was hard not to see this visit as a marker of changed times. Still, even Glenn admitted that the tariff rollout had left some cracks in the firmament. “If this goes on till September, the base is going to come unglued,” he said. Would he ever go on TV and criticize Trump? “Ask me in a year,” he said. “I’m scared about the midterms.” Republicans were mostly trying to put a good face on things. “Silently, they’re freaking out,” he said. Trump arrived. “You showed America that it’s not about individual glory,” he told the Dodgers. “It’s about the team digging deep.” He riffed on how many pitchers they had relied on to win the Series. “They had great arms, but they ran out,” he said. “It’s called sports.” He complained that nobody talks enough about how he lowered the price of eggs. Glenn grabbed my arm and said, “See, that’s the perfect example of what I would ask him about.”

The day before, I had gone to a brunch at the British Embassy in honor of the Shakespeare Theatre Company. In the garden, children played fetch with the Ambassador’s herding dog, who scurried up and down the sloping grass, underneath cherry trees in full bloom. “We like coming here, because it’s away from all the crazy,” a senior White House staffer told me. It was a sort of neutral space. A senior British diplomat said, “The golden-age MAGA people actually love this whole thing. It validates their status as the new D.C. establishment. Kash Patel comes and talks about the Premier League. We had one person giving a tirade about the Administration—I was at a table of Republicans who sort of gently rolled their eyes and we all just focussed on our soup.”

Peter Mandelson, the new British Ambassador, hasn’t always been a neutral operator. In 2018, when Trump, in his first term, threatened a trade war with China, Mandelson wrote that he was “a bully and a mercantilist.” Late last year, when Mandelson’s appointment was announced, Trump’s campaign co-manager, Chris LaCivita, called him an “absolute moron.” But, just before Trump was inaugurated, Mandelson wrote a piece for Fox News stating that Trump was sure to be “one of the most consequential” Presidents ever, and went on to call his earlier comments “childish and wrong.” (Kim Darroch, a previous British Ambassador, resigned in 2019 after a tabloid leaked cables of him saying that Trump was “radiating insecurity.”)

Inside, as the guests ate eggs Benedict, Mandelson delivered a set of oblique remarks, with careful emphasis. “People say that Shakespeare’s tragedies, his comedies, his histories capture the bygone age from the long-distant past—the power struggles, the feuds, the controversial advisers,” he said. “He wrote about great leaders with very strong personal brands.” Mandelson went on, “I have a lot to learn from Shakespeare, including from ‘Henry IV, Part 1’: ‘The better part of valor is discretion.’ ” The room roared with laughter. “I’m trying. I’m learning. I’m breaking the habit of a lifetime here. I know that my job is to keep below the radar, not on the radar.” He introduced the artistic director of the theatre. Shakespeare’s themes, the director said, ranged through “deception, betrayal, artifice, kingship, human tyranny.” He closed on a quote from “King Lear”: “The weight of this sad time we must obey. Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

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