The Logic of Destruction

 

What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.

The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate.

For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.

The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.

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All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.

Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow.

Think of the federal government as a car. You might have thought that the election was like getting the car serviced. Instead, when you come into the shop, the mechanics, who somehow don’t look like mechanics, tell you that they have taken the parts of your car that work and sold them and kept the money. And that this was the most efficient thing to do. And that you should thank them.

The gap between the oligarchs’ wealth and everyone else’s will grow. Knowing what they themselves will do and when, they will have bet against the stock market in advance of Trump’s deliberately destructive tariffs and will be ready to tell everyone to buy the crypto they already own. But that is just tomorrow and the day after.

In general, the economic collapse they plan is more like a reverse flood from the Book of Genesis, in which the righteous will all be submerged while the very worst ride Satan’s ark. The self-chosen few will ride out the forty days and forty nights. When the waters subside, they will be alone to dominate.

Trump’s tariffs (which are also likely illegal) are there to make us poor. Trump’s attacks on America’s closest friends, countries such as Canada and Denmark, are there to make enemies of countries where constitutionalism works and people are prosperous. As their country is destroyed, Americans must be denied the idea that anything else is possible.

Deportations are a spectacle to turn Americans against one another, to make us afraid, and to get us to see pain and camps as normal. They also create busy-work for law enforcement, locating the “criminals” in workplaces across the country, as the crime of the century takes place at the very center of power.

The best people in American federal law enforcement, national security, and national intelligence are being fired. The reasons given for this are DEI and trump-washing the past. Of course, if you fire everyone who was concerned in some way with the investigations of January 6th or of Russia, that will be much or even most of the FBI. Those are bad reasons, but the reality is worse: the aim is lawlessness: to get the police and the patriots out of the way.

In the logic of destruction, there is no need to rebuild afterwards. In this chaos, the oligarchs will tell us that there is no choice but to have a strong man in charge. It can be a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras, or a conniving Vance who, unlike Trump, has always known the plot. Or someone else.

After we are all poor and isolated, the logic goes, we will be consoled by the thought that there is at least a human being to whom we can appeal. We will settle for a kind of anthropological minimum, wishful contact with the strong man. As in Russia, pathetic video selfies sent to the Leader will be the extent of politics.

For the men currently pillaging the federal government, the data from those video selfies is more important than the people who will make them. The new world they imagine is not just anti-American but anti-human. The people are just data, means to the end of accumulating wealth.

They see themselves as the servants of the freedom of the chosen few, but in fact they are possessed, like millennia of tyrants before them, of fantastic dreams: they will live forever, they will go to Mars. None of that will happen; they will die here on Earth, with the rest of us, their only legacy, if we let it happen, one of ruins. They are god-level brain-rotted.

The attempt by the oligarchs to destroy our government is illegal, unconstitutional, and more than a little mad. The people in charge, though, are very intelligent politically, and have a plan. I describe it not because it must succeed but because it must be described so that we can make it fail. This will require clarity, and speed, and coalitions. I try to capture the mood in my little book On Tyranny. Here are a few ideas.

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If you voted Republican, and you care about your country, please act rather than rationalize. Unless you cast your ballot so that South African oligarchs could steal your data, your money, your country, and your future, make it known to your elected officials that you wanted something else. And get ready to protest with people with whom you otherwise disagree.

Almost everything that has happened during this attempted takeover is illegal. Lawsuits can be filed and courts can order those executive orders be halted. This is crucial work.

Much of what is happening, though, involves private individuals whose names are not even known, and who have no legal authority, wandering through government offices and issuing orders beyond even the questionable authority of executive orders. Their idea is that they will be immunized by their boldness. This must be proven wrong.

Some of this will reach the Supreme Court quickly. I am under no illusion that the majority of justices care about the rule of law. They know, however, that our belief in it makes their office something other than the undignified handmaiden of oligarchy. If they legalize the coup, they are irrelevant forever.

Individual Democrats in the Senate and House have legal and institutional tools to slow down the attempted oligarchical takeover. There should also be legislation. It might take a moment, but even Republican leaders might recognize that the Senate and House will no longer matter in a post-American oligarchy without citizens.

Trump should obviously be impeached. Either he has lost control, or he is using his power to do obviously illegal things. If Republicans have a sense of where this is going, there could be the votes for an impeachment and prosecution.

Those considering impeachment should also include Vance. He is closer to the relevant oligarchs than Trump, and more likely to be aware of the logic of destruction than he. The oligarchs have likely factored in, or perhaps even want, the impeachment and prosecution of Trump. Unlike Vance, Trump has charisma and followers and could theoretically resist them. He won’t; but he poses a hypothetical risk to the oligarchs that Vance does not.

Democrats who serve in state office as governors have a chance to profile themselves, or more importantly to profile an America that still works. Attorneys general in states have a chance to enforce state laws, which will no doubt have been broken.

The Democratic Party has a talented new chair. Democrats will need instruments of active opposition, such as a People’s Cabinet, in which prominent Democrats take responsibility for following government departments. It would be really helpful to have someone who can report to the press and the people what is happening inside Justice, Defense, Transportation, and the Treasury, and all the others, starting this week.

Federal workers should stay in office, if they can, for as long as they can. This is not political, but existential, for them and for all of us. They will have a better chance of getting jobs afterwards if they are fired. And the logic of their firing is to make the whole government fail. The more this can be slowed down, the longer the rest of us have to get traction.

And companies? As every CEO knows, the workings of markets depend upon the government creating a fair playing field. The ongoing takeover will make life impossible for all but a few companies. Can American companies responsibly pay taxes to a US Treasury controlled by their private competitors? Tesla paid no federal tax at all in 2024. Should other companies pay taxes that, for all they know, will just enrich Tesla’s owner?

Commentators should please stop using words such as “digital” and “progress” and “efficiency” and “vision” when describing this coup attempt. The plotting oligarchs have legacy money from an earlier era of software, which they are now seeking to leverage, using destructive political techniques, to destroy human institutions. That’s it. They are offering no future beyond acting out their midlife crises on the rest of us. It is demeaning to pretend that they represent something besides a logic of destruction.

As for the rest of us: Make sure you are talking to people and doing something. The logic of “move fast and break things,” like the logic of all coups, is to gain quick dramatic successes that deter and demoralize and create the impression of inevitability. Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.

What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. Sometimes self-government just means elections. And sometimes it means recognizing the deeper dignity and meaning of what it means to be a people. That means speaking up, standing out, and protesting. We can only be free together.

-Timothy Snyder

https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-logic-of-destruction

 

“God puts us exactly where we’re supposed to be” -Sean Duffy, Trump's Secretary of Transportation

 

Reality TV thrives on conflict, competition and humiliation—much like working for the Trump administration.

President Trump’s new Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy’s résumé includes roles on three reality shows: The Real World: Boston in 1997, Road Rules: All Stars in 1998, and Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Seasons which aired in 2002.

In that last series, Duffy and his partner crushed the competition, winning challenges that included rounding up cows while riding horses and playing a version of musical chairs involving inner tubes? Sure.

The introductory voice-over for The Real World informed viewers they were watching “a true story” about a group of strangers from deliberately disparate backgrounds thrown together, to see what happens “when people stop being polite… and start getting real.”

But reality TV never gets real. It’s all manufactured. It’s all for show. Learning how to make a dress out of newspaper is not actually useful training for a dress designer as it appears on Project Runway.

And shearing sheep (as Duffy did on Road Rules) is not training for being responsible for more than 55,000 employees and a budget of some $110 billion to maintain and build infrastructure and enforce safety regulations across air, land, and sea.

Reality TV conflict is manufactured, too. It’s what excites an audience. Trump knows that from his years hosting The Apprentice; he exploits it at every twist and turn in his current “show.” Someone getting humiliated, fired or voted off the West Wing makes for good TV.

But in real life, when people crash in midair, they don’t come back.

The day after Duffy was sworn in, he found himself in a very tough spot. On Wednesday night, a Black Hawk helicopter carrying three members of the U.S. military crashed into a commuter jet carrying 64 people as the latter aircraft came into land at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington D.C. There were no survivors.

“This is not what I expected my first day on the job to be,” Duffy later took to social media to explain. But that’s the thing about real life. It doesn’t go according to a producer’s—or a president’s—plan. There’s no stopping the cameras and rewriting a key punchline. There are no second takes.

“God puts us exactly where we’re supposed to be,” Duffy continued in his social media post. Which, for him, meant back in the spotlight.

At a press conference Thursday kicked off by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, Duffy addressed the press and the nation. Using all those skills honed on reality TV—and later as an ESPN color commentator—he started with a statement that promised answers. (He also pronounced the word “pattern” twice as “patter-in.” Maybe it’s a Wisconsin thing?)

He continued, offering a distressed public and grieving family's insightful observations like, “Obviously, it is not standard to have aircraft collide. I want to be clear on that.”

It’s not currently standard, but it may become so if this reality TV version of American government continues. It’s one thing to clash with the competition on The Real World and storm out of the room when the argument gets heated.

But this week, we saw the possible consequences of Elon Musk calling for the resignation of the head of the Federal Aviation Administration. As soon as Trump took office on Jan. 20, FAA leader Michael Whitaker quit. Nine, days later, the first civilian aircraft crash on U.S. soil in 16 years occurred—right in Trump’s backyard.

This tragedy presents a challenge to Trump, too. First, he tried to blame diversity. Next, it was the helicopter’s military crew. And after he tried blaming the Biden administration, Pete Buttigieg pushed back.

“President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe,” the former Secretary of Transportation wrote.

Trump has also called for congressional investigations into the deadly crash—it would be nice if Secretary Duffy had to answer questions for 11 hours, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was grilled over Benghazi. In fact, since the death toll in the midair collision was 15 times higher than Benghazi, maybe Duffy should be grilled for 165 hours.

Still, the last person Trump would blame for this tragedy is himself because, unlike Harry Truman, the buck never stops at his desk.

Meanwhile, expect more tragedies. Trump’s regime is parroting Musk’s failed Twitter tactics, slashing funds for staff and oversight on the federal government. Failing to round up a cow is one thing on TV, but failing to enforce safety regulations across air, land, and sea travel is quite another.

That’s the reality. And it’s a deadly one.

-Nell Scovell, Daily Beast

Trump's War on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

 

Diversity, equity and inclusion policies are retreating nationwide, from the federal government to corporations around the country. President Donald Trump immediately upon taking office began rooting out diversity, equity and inclusion positions within the federal government by ending programs and removing DEI staff.

Meanwhile, the pressure is also ramping up against private companies to stop embracing DEI. Several major companies have announced they are cutting back or ending their DEI programs, including Meta, Walmart and McDonalds.

While companies are not cutting as aggressively as Trump, they are at least publicly pulling back from DEI goals and language. Target reportedly sent out a memo this week to that end.

“Many years of data, insights, listening and learning have been shaping this next chapter in our strategy,” the memo said. “And as a retailer that serves millions of consumers every day, we understand the importance of staying in step with the evolving external landscape, now and in the future – all in service of driving Target’s growth and winning together.”

Costco made headlines for pushing back on the trend of Trump and others, doubling down on their DEI work after shareholders voted nearly unanimously this week to keep the DEI policies in place.

Jeff Raike, who has served on Costco’s board since 2008, encouraged businesses to "maximize DEI efforts" in a column published earlier this month by Forbes. Raike blamed “opportunistic politicians” for trying to “frighten and divide” the nation on the issue.

Costco's board last week, ahead of the shareholder vote, urged investors in the company to reject calls to scale back DEI policies in the company.

"Our success at Costco Wholesale has been built on service to our critical stakeholders: employees, members, and suppliers. Our efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion follow our code of ethics: For our employees, these efforts are built around inclusion – having all of our employees feel valued and respected," the board wrote, according to Fox Business.

Conservative activist Robbie Starbuck, whose public campaigns against companies such as Lowe's, Ford, Molson Coors and others, led them to scale back DEI initiatives, said Costco should do the same or face consequences.

“I suggest conservative consumers find other places to spend their money if Costco is so dedicated to doubling down on DEI," Starbuck wrote on X. "If they’re smart, Costco will do right by their shareholders and change before we turn our attention to them.”

The pressure on private companies is increasing. Ten attorneys general sent a letter now putting pressure on the private sector to end the DEI practices.

The letter went to Bank of America, BlackRock, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley and asked for an accounting of their DEI practices, including whether they broke the law.

"There is, however, mounting concern that political objectives have, in some cases, influenced your decision-making at the expense of your statutory and contractual obligations,” reads the letter, which was signed by the attorneys general of Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Virginia.

“Specifically, you appear to have embraced race- and sex-based quotas and to have made business and investment decisions based not on maximizing shareholder and asset value, but in the furtherance of political agendas."

The anti-DEI effort has been bolstered by a 2023 Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action policies on college campuses. DEI can lead to hiring or promotion discrimination against white Americans, critics argue. For instance, internal documents at the Pentagon showed discrimination against white Americans for promotions.

“Banks and financial institutions are finally starting to realize that the ESG and DEI policies pushed by radical activist groups are bad for consumers and potentially violate the law,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a statement.

“Unlawful race- and sex-based quotas and so-called ‘green energy’ schemes will not be allowed to stand and I will continue to urge these organizations to uphold the legal obligations they owe to consumers and investors. Any institution found to be violating the law will be held accountable.”

Even before Trump took office, DEI’s corporate decline had begun with companies like Tractor Supply, John Deere and Amazon cutting back DEI programs. Some of those cuts, though, began after Trump won the election in November.

Critics say DEI has become a catch-all term for every liberal and progressive doctrine around race and gender. Until this week, those ideas were backed with federal funding across every federal agency and most of the largest corporations in the U.S.

Now, however, the conservative resistance to DEI has new power and focus on rooting out the DEI programs, which teach everything from white privilege to the litany of gender pronouns to the inherent racism of all white people and the U.S. as a whole.

Trump’s executive actions this week immediately put all DEI federal employees on paid leave with plans to fire all of them in the coming weeks. It also required essentially an audit of all federal DEI activities and DEI contractors, ceasing funding for them as well.

Trump sent a memo to the federal agencies later in the week saying he has seen initial reports that some federal employees are seeking to hide DEI efforts by rebranding or changing the language they are using.

Now, many companies are following suit. Whether this is a new reality or a temporary setback for DEI remains to be seen. "Corporate leaders who embrace discriminatory D.E.I. practices should be afraid, but they shouldn’t be confused,” said GianCarlo Canaparo, a legal expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. 

“Trump’s order is clear: no organization doing business with the federal government may use discriminatory D.E.I. practices and those that do are subject to non-payment on their federal contracts, federal enforcement, and qui tam suits.

“And any corporation, nonprofit, university, or association subject to federal regulation that engages in D.E.I. discrimination will be identified, publicized, investigated, and punished according to the nation's colorblind civil rights laws,” he added.

-Casey Harper, The Center Square

Arrested Grief: Liberal America’s Moral Problem? by Kim C. Domenico

 

…I have often wondered why grief – the deep, cleansing kind – is so difficult to reach when, upon reaching it, tears spilling involuntarily down the cheeks, it feels so like the most priceless sweetness, as though one has reached a shore in a new land where all will be well; the arrival at a “homier” home than one has ever known.  

The problem is deep grief is not accessible using the ordinary logical thought processes by which we talk about sadness and grief without actually feeling it. So, if thinking doesn’t get you there, would it be amiss to conclude it’s the heart that hosts this “scene” of self-transcendence, entered only with difficulty, and only according to terms set by the heart in imagination?  

In other words, what’s mysterious to left-brain-oriented me, may be “child’s play” to the heart.  Although I share the problem with grief I’m discussing, I have been there.  And having been there, I know the rapture of grief, shown so movingly in the scene between Lisa and her mother at the end of Margaret.  The restoration of the truth of human connection, of love, of meaning. 

With grief not being given its due as a health requirement, our society is stuck in aggrievement. And what is aggrievement, with its potential for rage, resentment, projections, and plain indifference to the suffering of others – its shaky moral basis that wants to blame – but a derailment of the process of grief?  

What if this aborted grieving process is the way to restore the imagination of the heart, and with it, the truth of all-connected, now so endangered?  After all, though we wish success for ourselves and others we care about, success is not what binds people to one another.   We are bound by our wounds, failures, the in-common but under-acknowledged experiences that both threaten all meaning and – I’m asserting – make it possible.  

In some ways supreme among the horrors today that defy meaning is the ongoing genocide in Gaza; we know terrible suffering is being inflicted on children, and also that we are helpless to stop it. But keeping in mind the fact – and this is a fact substantiated by neuroscientific trauma research – that both the infliction of atrocity and the need to justify it are symptoms of trauma, we could say meaning – its retention or loss – is not entirely dependent upon ending or ameliorating a particular catastrophe. This is not to shrug and say what can one person do or call it “God’s will.”   

But the reality of trauma means the so-called good guys as well as the bad guys are all traumatized; all handling unconscious trauma in different ways, all adding up to keeping things the same, leaving the odds stacked against meaning – i.e., connection, love.  

But what if the “good guys,” us, opted for meaning, instead of accepting the reality we’re in as if there’s no other?  That is, the possibility for meaning remains, despite everything, in the individual human heart, in its capacity for transcendence.  And for transcendence, one must know one’s undeserved suffering. Meaning, that is, is in the hands of individuals who will seek it, even unto entering the darkness within oneself.

The experience of black Americans of inconceivable suffering during the Jim Crow era, theologian James Cone points out, gave meaning to the symbol of the cross that, in white churches, with white supremacy unchallenged, was in effect meaningless. That capacity to transform suffering into energizing belief fed and led the powerful civil rights movement. 

Not dogmatic belief, not necessarily Christian or other specific ideology, but experience of the transcendent allows the divine energy of all-connected unity to work on human beings. The results will be different – not everyone has the same genius in them, but moral vision, the truth of all-one, can be attained when suffering is not denied, and grief can reach its truth.

I do not expect America to alter its course by my speaking this way.  Suffering, as I’ve noted many times, doesn’t make a great lure.  But knowing what we now know about trauma, each of us has a basis for transcendence within, in personal darkness. Each one, in realizing one’s trauma, suffering undeserved, now has ground for seeing one’s life as a revolution, without ideology or hierarchy, overturning the American way of life that has been constituted in order to deny that very truth (for white people).

As I write about grief, into my mind come memories of that “grief shaman,” Robert Bly, who would weep unashamedly before an audience, over, for instance, the death of a friend such as he did for the poet Etheridge Knight. Not just a quick watering of the eyes and tremor in the voice, but full-out weeping, loss of control!  By now, the heart inside most of us could justifiably feel reproachful towards ego’s demand for stony control.  One can imagine the heart even saying, on those rare occasions when we experience that mystery of grief, what took you so long?   […]

Arrested Grief: Liberal America’s Moral Problem? Kim C. Domenico

CounterPunch

   

Trump’s Scare Tactics

 

Donald Trump is Scary Movie 6. How much is spoof and how much is genuine horror?

Going into 2025, the world was already pretty scary. Take your pick: climate change, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, pandemic, Elon Musk.

But in two short weeks, the current occupant of the White House has made life scarier still for specific communities of people. The Trump administration has already taken into custody thousands of undocumented immigrants and begun flying them out of the country. It has stripped trans Americans of federal recognition.

It has removed security protection for dozens of former federal employees, including former health official Anthony Fauci and diplomat Mike Pompeo, who have been the subject of death threats. And it tried to suspend all federal grants, disrupting countless people and communities.

As if that weren’t enough, Trump has let fly a quiver full of threats at a range of overseas targets. He has threatened tariffs against countries, some of them just for looking at him the wrong way. He has pledged to put the Panama Canal back under U.S. control.

He has made noises about seizing Greenland, regardless of what Denmark and nearly 57,000 Greenlagreenders have to say about it. Most recently, he promised maximum pressure on Colombia if it didn’t accept back its deported citizens (after some initial resistance, Colombia buckled).

Voters backed Trump because they wanted change, not chaos. Is the president driving America and the world to the precipice to give us all a good scare? Or does he intend to drive off the cliff because he can’t be bothered to take his foot off the accelerator and apply the brakes?

There’s no question that Donald Trump is Scary Movie 6 (release date: last week). What’s not entirely clear is how much is spoof—Greenland, really?—and how much is genuine horror.

Trump’s Record of Threats

In his first administration, Donald Trump gave a four-year preview of what he’d do if given a second chance and a team of loyal extremists.

In that distant time—before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, before the latest war in Gaza, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, before the coronavirus—Trump promised to build a wall on the southern border with Mexico.

He threatened to repeal Obamacare. He pledged to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton. He was going to repeal federal funding for cities that provided sanctuary to the undocumented. He intended to kick China out of the World Trade Organization, end birthright citizenship, bring back waterboarding, balance the federal budget, and ban Muslims from entering the United States.

In all, Trump made 55 promises (or threats, depending on your point of view) that he didn’t keep. Many of these intended policies got bogged down in the courts. Or Congress blocked them. Or they were unconstitutional, impossible to implement, or deeply unpopular. In some cases, Trump probably forgot that he even made a particular threat in the first place since he made so many of them.

Before you get all optimistic about how this record of failure is predictive of his current trajectory, Trump did indeed make good on a number of his threats. He imposed import tariffs. He defunded Planned Parenthood and changed the composition of the Supreme Court so that it could, among other things, reverse Roe v. Wade.

He bullied European countries to pay more for their own military operations. He withdrew the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change and canceled U.S. participation in the Iran nuclear deal.

One speed bump the last time around was Congress. Though the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress during Trump’s first two years, the party had not yet been turned into a full-on personality cult. Senator John McCain, for instance, famously prevented Trump from repealing Obamacare, an initiative the Arizona Republican didn’t even like. In those days, some Republicans simply refused to bullied.

Now, under the dubious leadership of Speaker Mike Johnson, House Republicans have generally become a team of presidential lapdogs. In the Senate, traditionally a more independent-minded institution, only a couple Republicans dare to stand up to Trump (and not that often either).

In the confirmation vote for Pete Hegseth, Trump’s clearly incompetent choice to head up the Pentagon, only three Republicans dared to object. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) are the last moderates in the party.

The third naysayer, Mitch McConnell, was the Senate majority leader during Trump’s first term. His occasional opposition to Trump is now something of a surprise. This was the guy who carried water for Trump during his first term. Oh, how the Senate has changed if McConnell has become a cornerstone of the tepid resistance.

Threats as Policy

Trump’s approach to foreign policy can be summed up with this shorthand: flatter up, threaten down.

If Trump thinks he holds the more powerful hand, he confidently shoots off his mouth. So, for instance, Denmark is tiny, so Trump’s going after Greenland. This is the tactic of a hostile takeover. Trump sees a business opportunity—a huge undervalued enterprise that can be seized from a distracted and comparatively weak owner.

But, of course, geopolitics does not operate according to the rules of corporate capitalism, and Trump seems almost bewildered that everyone isn’t just rolling over and accepting his plan.

U.S. allies often have difficulty saying no to Washington, given the power differential, so Trump has long tried to bully them into spending more on their own militaries. This time, he is pushing NATO members to spend 5 percent of their GDP, an absurd figure that even the hypertrophied United States doesn’t reach (though tiny Estonia and Lithuania have both knuckled under).

Trump likes to make examples of countries, killing chickens to scare the monkeys, as the Chinese like to say. Thus, he brought out the big guns to threaten Colombia if it didn’t accept returned deportees. There was no formal diplomatic process. The entire episode was conducted on social media, Trump’s preferred mode of discourse. 

Targeting Colombian President Gustavo Petro, Trump vowed to impose 25 percent tariffs on Colombian exports right away, which would obviously affect the crude oil, coal and coffee industries. The tariffs would double if Mr. Petro didn’t fold on the issue within a week…. Presumably, Mr. Petro looked at his chances of coming out on top of this conflict and decided it was zero. 

The objects of Trump’s flattery are generally the kind of strong-arm militarists that Trump aspires to be: Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Kim Jong Un. These leaders don’t just make threats, they follow through on them. Putin threatened Ukraine, then invaded it. Netanyahu threatened the leadership of Hamas, then set about destroying it. Kim Jong Un threatened to build a nuclear arsenal, and then did so.

China is in a category by itself. It is powerful, to be sure, and Xi Jinping thus receives his share of Trumpian flattery (“I like President Xi very much,” Trump said of the Chinese leader this week. “I’ve always liked him.”). But China also challenges American hegemony by controlling the supply chains of critical raw materials, replacing the United States as the primary trade partner for countries throughout the world, and outperforming everyone in producing renewable energy infrastructure.

With its capacity to make America look bad, China must be subjected to both threats and flattery, according to Trump’s playbook. This is perhaps the one place where Trump’s strategy resembles a kind of diplomacy, given its resemblance to past carrot-and-stick approaches coming out of Washington.

And Then There’s Ukraine

The real test of Trump’s threat-based foreign policy will be Ukraine. Initially, Trump’s approach was quite simple: threaten both sides until they come to the table and negotiate a settlement. It’s a classic Three Stooges skit: bang heads together until the two sides come to their senses. But again, geopolitics does not run according to the rules of the Three Stooges, which results in headaches more often than peace.

No surprise then that the Trump team now talks about a 100-day timeline for resolving the conflict, not the 24-hour deadline that Trump boasted of as a candidate. The 100-day plan is still built around a double-threat strategy. Most recently, Trump waxed ineloquent about the damage further U.S. sanctions could have on the Russian economy.

But this is where Trump’s approach breaks down.

Neither side is interested only in territory, which can be divided up in a peace deal. Putin wants Ukraine, obviously, but it is also sacrificing so many soldiers in order to catapult back into superpower status, to regain a place at the table to influence European security, the global economy, and the very DNA of the international community. If that option is not available under Trump, Putin has another strategy: ratchet up conflict with the West alongside a range of rogue states.

Ukraine, meanwhile, wants to eject Russian troops from Ukrainian territory, obviously, but it also wants to avoid full occupation, frozen conflict status, and perpetual limbo as a country-in-waiting for membership in the European Union. It wants NATO membership, too, but it would probably accept some form of heavily armed neutrality, at least for the interim.

Mere threats can do little to bridge such differences. Maybe Trump can achieve a ceasefire through sheer force of will. But it won’t last. The Three Stooges are not a good role model for conflict resolution.

What About Us Chickens?

Trump’s threats are meant to be entertainment—to grab the media’s attention, mobilize MAGA followers on social media, and enrage his adversaries at home and abroad. But these threats are also very real, as the record of his first term demonstrates. Threats, for Trump, are like seeds. He scatters them to the wind and then sits back to see what germinates.

The most important way of confronting Trump’s full-spectrum threats is to find a strategic point of resistance and allocate a lot of resources to reinforcing it. One recent example is the lawsuit that Democracy Forward launched to stop Trump’s suspension of federal grants. A federal judge temporarily halted the suspension. And then, under pressure from all sides, the administration backed down.

A lot of dead chickens will of course scare the monkeys. But a chicken that continues to cluck despite all the force deployed against it? The monkeys will see that courageous chicken and take heart. A powerful poultry pushback also sends an important message to all the rest of us chickens.

Resistance is not futile.

Foreign Policy in Focus, by John Feffer | January 29, 2025 | Scholars, advocates, and activists seeking to make the U.S. a more responsible global partner.

 

Trump, Nixon, Reagan, Kennedy Jr., Musk, Republican Lies...

 

In a conversation with Greg Sargent of the New Republic published [yesterday], writer Amanda Marcotte called out an important moment in White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s first press conference yesterday.

When a reporter noted that “[e]gg prices have skyrocketed since President Trump took office,” and asked, “what specifically is he doing to lower those costs for Americans?” Leavitt answered: “Really glad you brought this up because there is a lot of reporting out there that is putting the onus on this White House for the increased cost of eggs.

I would like to point out to each and every one of you that in 2024, when Joe Biden was in the Oval Office or upstairs in the residence sleeping, I’m not so sure, egg prices increased 65 percent in this country. We also have seen the cost of everything—not just eggs—bacon, groceries, gasoline, have increased because of the inflationary policies of the last administration.”

During his campaign for the presidency, Trump repeatedly attacked Biden for the post-pandemic inflation that afflicted the country and promised to bring down “the price of everything.” Even before he took office, Trump had begun to walk back his promise, and J.D. Vance has also suggested price relief would “take a little bit of time.”

Now coffee and egg prices are at an all-time high, and the administration’s solution is to attack Biden. No matter the incompetencies of the Trump presidency, Marcotte notes, it appears the answer will be: You might not like what we’re doing, but don’t you hate Democrats more?

President Richard Nixon’s team pioneered this strategy before the 1970 midterm elections to rally wavering Republicans around the president’s party. Nixon had won election with a promise that he would end the war in Vietnam honorably, but had, in fact, increased the U.S. presence there.

By the end of 1969, with opposition mounting, he insisted that a “silent majority” agreed with his Vietnam policies. Then, at the end of April 1970, he told the American people that he had sent ground troops into Vietnam’s neighbor Cambodia. Protests led to the killing of four college students at Ohio’s Kent State University. Members of Nixon’s key demographic, middle-class white Americans, threatened to abandon him.

Nixon’s advisors urged him to win his voters back by attacking their opponents as lazy, dangerous, and un-American. They called their strategy “positive polarization” because it stoked the anger, they needed voters to feel in order to show up to vote, a development they saw as positive.

Patrick Buchanan wrote a memo to Nixon urging him to take much stronger control over the nation, to manipulate the media, and to go to war with his opponents, whom he considered illegitimate, warning: “[W]e are in a contest over the soul of the country now and the decision will not be some middle compromise—it will be their kind of society or ours.”

Nixon so internalized this advice that by 1972 he was willing to sabotage his Democratic opponent’s campaign in order to win, convinced that a Democratic victory would destroy America.

He ended up having to resign when his participation in covering up the bugging of the Democratic National Convention’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel surfaced, but in his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan picked up the rhetorical technique of dividing the country in two.

In part, that depended on constructing a false world, claiming when challenged on his stories of government mismanagement that a “liberal media” was determined to undermine him. When voters elected him, Reagan began the dismantling of the post–World War II government that protected equality before the law, equal access to resources, and the right to have a say in government.

Whenever it seemed that voters were turning against the Republicans’ policies, which moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% between 1981 and 2021, Republicans doubled down on the idea that popular government programs were “socialist” or “Marxist,” designed to redistribute wealth from hardworking Americans to undeserving “liberals.”

By 2020, accompanying that rhetoric with voter suppression and a flood of money into Republican election war chests had made many Republican voters loyal to the party above the country. So convinced were they that the government was corrupt and that they were fighting a war for America that they were willing to die of Covid in order to “own the Libs.” And in 2021 they tried to overturn democracy in order to keep their leader in power.

Now, in 2025, the impulse simply to hurt Democrats no matter how badly such actions would hurt the country showed in a social media post today by Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) that the Senate should confirm Trump’s deeply problematic nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. because “no Cabinet nominee could damage the political future of Democrats more than RFK.”

Kennedy is before the Senate Finance Committee today in confirmation hearings to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Food and Drug Administration, among other agencies.

Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist who opposes the vaccines that have slashed deadly illnesses in the U.S. and has attacked the institutions he would oversee; more than 18,000 physicians have signed a letter opposing his confirmation.

Yesterday, Kennedy’s cousin, Caroline Kennedy, broke her silence about him to write an open letter to senators. She warned that he “lacks any relevant government, financial, management, or medical experience” and, calling him a “predator,” warned that he has “gone on to misrepresent, lie and cheat his way through life.”

Forcing the Republican agenda by continuing to portray political opponents as dangerous to America because of wasteful spending and misguided priorities has reached cartoonish extremes. Trump has nonsensically claimed that thanks to him, the U.S. military has “TURNED ON THE WATER” in California, apparently misunderstanding that the Army Corps of Engineers had conducted maintenance on federal water pumps for three days and turned them back on when the maintenance was complete.

Yesterday, Leavitt claimed that the Trump administration tried to stop all foreign aid because Biden supposedly sent $50 million of condoms to Gaza and that the administration was just focusing on being “good stewards of tax dollars.” The story is simply false. The U.S. Agency for International Development spent about $7 million on condoms in 2023, the vast majority of which went to Africa through anti-AIDS programs; Trump’s first administration made similar investments.

At the same time, they are portraying Democrats as wasteful and misguided, Trump and MAGA Republicans are claiming Democratic accomplishments for themselves. Last night, Trump claimed he had “just asked Elon Musk and [SpaceX] to ‘go get’ the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration,” and Musk chipped in that it was “[t]errible that the Biden administration left them there so long.”

In fact, as fact-checkers quickly noted, NASA says the astronauts whose damaged spaceship has returned to Earth are not stuck in space but are staffing the space station, and that a SpaceX capsule has been docked at the station since September in an arrangement made by the Biden administration to bring them back to Earth as soon as a new crew arrives.

True MAGA is buying the lies the administration is selling—Fox News Channel pundit Jesse Watters suggested Gazans were using condoms as balloons to float explosives into Israel—but it is possible Nixon’s system of polarization is reaching the end of its rope.

Key to Trump’s 2024 win was his insistence that violent crime was skyrocketing in the U.S.—in fact, it was plummeting—and he vowed to deport “criminal” migrants. Since he took office, a number of made-for-television sweeps have tried to demonstrate that he is making America safer.

But his commutations and pardons of all the January 6 rioters convicted of crimes has made that a hard sell, especially as one is now wanted for soliciting sex with a minor and another has been killed by Indiana police for resisting arrest. In addition, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that Trump officials ordered prosecutors to divert resources away from truly dangerous drug traffickers to go after undocumented immigrants.

Those who believed Trump would not come for anyone, but “criminals” are learning otherwise: NBC News reported on Monday that nearly half the migrants arrested in a Chicago sweep on Sunday either had nonviolent offenses or had committed no offense.

While the Trump administration defends its sweeps by saying it considers anyone who has broken immigration law to be a criminal, being undocumented is in fact a civil offense, not a crime, and many of Trump’s supporters did not think he would make such general sweeps.

But the biggest wake-up call for those embracing the longtime language of polarization is that when Trump on Tuesday shut down all federal funding and grants to stop what he called the “Marxist” diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives of the government, he was attacking virtually all Americans.

The administration’s pause of all federal funding and grants until it could make sure “DEI” had been purged out of them cut everything from Meals on Wheels, a food delivery program for shut-ins, to education, local law enforcement, and the Medicaid on which programs for the elderly depend.

The outcry was so strong that today the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo to rescind its previous memo freezing all federal programs. But Leavitt immediately contradicted the apparent content of the new memo, saying the cuts were still in effect. Judd Legum of Popular Information noted that the plan seemed to be “to create as much chaos as possible.”

That chaos keeps attention on the administration, and it appeared to be a way for the White House to upend lawsuits against the freeze. So far, that has not worked. U.S. District Judge John McConnell said he was inclined to grant a restraining order, noting that “the administration is acting with a distinction without a difference.”

The Trump administration’s cutting of the federal funding on which Americans depend in the name of opposition to “Marxism” and “DEI” contrasts spectacularly with its embrace of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk; the billionaires in Trump’s Cabinet; and the billionaires who have poured money into the Trump administration.

CNN’s Chris Isidore notes that government subsidies built Musk’s fortune and that he continues to receive government contracts worth billions of dollars. In addition to government contracts, Trump’s tax policy favors the very rich. On Monday, January 27, the Senate confirmed Trump’s nominee billionaire Scott Bessent for Treasury secretary. 

In his confirmation hearings, Bessent told the Senate that he believes extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts is “the single most important economic issue of the day…. If we do not fix these tax cuts, if we do not renew and extend, then we will be facing an economic calamity.”

Republicans identify the rapidly growing federal deficit as a crisis for which Democrats are to blame, but in fact, President Bill Clinton—with an assist from Republican president George H.W. Bush—eliminated the federal deficit in the 1990s.

What threw the deficit into the red was the tax cuts and unfunded wars under George W. Bush, along with Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or TCJA, that disproportionately benefited the very wealthy and corporations. The U.S. Treasury estimates that extending the TCJA as is—Trump has mused on deeper cuts—would cost $4.2 trillion over the next ten years.

Slashing the federal funding that supports ordinary Americans will make it easier to fund federal contracts and further tax cuts for the wealthy. With that tradeoff so visible in 2025, will “owning the Libs” still be worth it?

Trump seemed to be worried that it might not be. This afternoon he threw red meat directly at the MAGA base with an announcement that he would be signing an executive order to open a 30,000-person-capacity migrant detention center at Guantanamo Bay to “detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.”

—Heather Cox Richardson

What We Can Do about Authoritarianism

 

1. Protect the decent and hardworking members of your communities who are undocumented or whose parents are undocumented.

This is an urgent moral call to action. As Donald Trump’s Ice begins roundups and deportations, many good people are endangered and understandably frightened.

One of Trump’s new executive orders allows Ice to arrest undocumented immigrants at or near schools, places of worship, healthcare sites, shelters and relief centers – thereby deterring them from sending their kids to school or getting help they need.

If you trust your mayor or city manager, check in with their offices to see what they are doing to protect vulnerable families in your community. Join others in voluntary efforts to keep Ice away from schools, hospitals and shelters.

Organize and mobilize your community to support it as a sanctuary city, and to support your state as a sanctuary state. Trump’s justice department is already launching investigations of cities and states that go against federal immigration orders, laying the groundwork for legal challenges to local laws and forcing compliance with the executive branch. Your voice and organizing could be helpful in fighting back.

I recommend you order these red cards from Immigrant Legal Resource Center and make them available in and around your community: Red Cards / Tarjetas Rojas | Immigrant Legal Resource Center | ILRC. You might also find these of use: Immigration Preparedness Toolkit | Immigrant Legal Resource Center | ILRC.

2. Protect LGBTQ+ members of your community.

Trump may make life far more difficult for those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and of other expansive identities through executive orders, changes in laws, alterations in civil rights laws or changes in how such laws are enforced.

His election and his rhetoric might also unleash hatefulness by bigoted people in your community.

I urge you to work with others in being vigilant against prejudice and bigotry, wherever it might break out. When you see or hear it, call it out. Join with others to stop it. If you trust your local city officials, get them involved. If you trust your local police, alert them as well.

3. Help protect officials in your community or state whom Trump and his administration are targeting for vengeance.

Some may be low-level officials, such as election workers. If they do not have the means to legally defend themselves, you might help them or consider a GoFundMe campaign. If you hear of anyone who seeks to harm them, immediately alert law-enforcement officials.

4. Participate or organize boycotts of companies that are enabling the Trump regime, starting with Elon Musk’s X and Tesla, and any companies that advertise on X or on Fox News.

Don’t underestimate the effectiveness of consumer boycotts. Corporations invest heavily in their brand names and the goodwill associated with them. Loud, boisterous, attention-getting boycotts can harm brand names and reduce the prices of corporations’ shares of stock.

5. To the extent you are able, fund groups that are litigating against Trump.

Much of the action over the next months and years will be in the federal courts. The groups initiating legislation that I know and trust include the American Civil Liberties Union, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Defense Fund and Common Cause.

6. Spread the truth: [Talk to your neighbors about this situation. Write letters to your legislators. Create a blog and disseminate the truth.]

Get news through reliable sources, and spread it. If you hear anyone spreading lies and Trump propaganda, including local media, contradict them with facts and their sources.

Here are some of the sources I currently rely on for the truth: the Guardian, Democracy Now, Business Insider, the New Yorker, the American Prospect, Americans for Tax Fairness, the Economic Policy Institute, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, ProPublica, Labor Notes, the Lever, Popular Information, Heather Cox Richardson and, of course, my Substack.

7. Urge friends, relatives and acquaintances to avoid Trump propaganda outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, X and, increasingly, Facebook and Instagram.

They are increasingly filled with hateful bigotry and toxic and dangerous lies. For some people, these propaganda sources can also be addictive; help the people you know wean themselves off them.

8. Push for progressive measures in your community and state.

Local and state governments have significant power. Join groups that are moving your city or state forward, in contrast to regressive moves at the federal level. Lobby, instigate, organize and fundraise for progressive legislators. Support progressive leaders.

9. Encourage worker action.

Most labor unions are on the right side – seeking to build worker power and resist repression. You can support them by joining picket lines and boycotts, and encouraging employees to organize in places you patronize.

10. Keep the faith. Do not give up on America.

Remember, Trump won the popular vote by only one and a half points. By any historical measure, this was a squeaker. In the House, the Republicans’ five-seat lead is the smallest since the Great Depression. In the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races, including in four states Trump won.

America has deep problems, to be sure. Which is why we can’t give up on it – or give up the fights for social justice, equal political rights, equal opportunity and the rule of law. The forces of Trumpian repression and neofascism would like nothing better than for us to give up. Then they’d win it all. But we cannot allow them to.

We will never give up.

What is giving me hope now.

Finding room in life for joy, fun and laughter. We cannot let Trump and his darkness take over. Just as it’s important not to give up the fight, it’s critically important to take care of ourselves. If we obsess about Trump and fall down the rabbit hole of outrage, worry and anxiety, we won’t be able to keep fighting.

-Robert Reich, The Guardian

 

"The real witch hunt is here" -Joyce Vance

 

Donald Trump’s acting attorney general fired the prosecutors who worked on the January 6 and classified documents prosecutions against Trump. Acting Attorney General James McHenry told the people he fired that he “does not trust” them “to assist in faithfully implementing the President’s agenda.”

An administration can’t fire career federal prosecutors based on their perceived political loyalties. Prosecutors can be fired based on their conduct or performance if they are given notice, an opportunity to improve, and sufficient time to do so. But that’s not what happened here. They were fired because they were assigned to prosecute Donald Trump.

The real witch hunt is here. And it’s a warning to all other federal employees to mind their loyalty if they want to keep their jobs. That’s the point. Trump knows he can’t lawfully fire these people in this manner. He wants to make the point that he’s willing to do it, in hopes others will stay in line.

Also today, the interim U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., who identifies himself in his Twitter bio as “@EagleEdMartin” has launched a probe into the 250+ January 6 cases the office prosecuted. His announcement follows Trump’s day one executive order on “weaponization of the federal government” that directed the attorney general to search out what he characterized as misbehavior in Biden’s DOJ and asked for “recommendations for appropriate remedial actions.” In an email to staff earlier today, Martin called the cases “a great failure for our office” and said they need to get to “the bottom of it.”

“You played a significant role in prosecuting President Trump,” the letter said, according to parts read to NBC News. “The proper functioning of government critically depends on the trust superior officials place in their subordinates. Given your significant role in prosecuting the president, I do not believe that the leadership of the department can trust you to assist in implement the president's agenda faithfully.”

This is an extraordinary step for a U.S. Attorney to take. My former U.S. Attorney colleague from Michigan and #SistersInLaw podcast cohost Barb McQuade characterized it like this, “Prosecutors did nothing wrong in bringing obstruction cases just because the Supreme Court subsequently interpreted the statute to require a connection to documents, despite no such limitation in the text.

Besides, Martin has all the public records he needs to determine who participated in these good faith prosecutions. By assigning supervisors to conduct an internal investigation, he creates an impression of misconduct. Trump and his allies often complain about witch hunts. This is what a witch hunt really looks like.” 

These cases were indicted by grand juries. Judges accepted guilty pleas in open court or juries convicted the defendants. Some of the cases were affirmed on appeal. Going back to revisit them now is politics in a place where it doesn’t belong, the Justice Department.

There are ways to assess and punish misconduct by prosecutors. The Office of Professional Responsibility investigates allegations of professional misconduct involving Department attorneys. DOJ’s inspector general has jurisdiction to look at violations of fraud, abuse, and integrity laws that govern DOJ employees, and their investigations can lead to criminal prosecution or civil or administrative action in appropriate cases. Those offices intervene in cases where they see reason to open an investigation.

But political appointees in a new administration don’t have the authority to fire prosecutors just because they worked on cases they were assigned to. It’s an abrupt capture of the Justice Department by the White House and deeply alarming. As with the inspectors general, Trump is violating the law to test just how far he can go before there is opposition.

Past history suggests Trump backs down when challenged forcefully. The question in this critical moment is whether the people with the power to do so, largely on Capitol Hill and in the courts, will stand in his way. The rule of law is meant to be a shield for democracy in moments like this. 

But Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, a member of the Senate’s inspector general caucus, offered this weak tea: “There may be good reason the IGs were fired. We need to know that if so. I’d like further explanation from President Trump. Regardless, the 30 day detailed notice of removal that the law demands was not provided to Congress.”

Grassley, who proudly announced he had joined the Senate’s IG caucus, saying, “Inspectors General play an essential role in protecting taxpayer dollars and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse in the executive branch. I rely heavily on these independent watchdogs when carrying out my constitutional responsibility of oversight, and I’m glad to join Senator Ernst’s effort to support their invaluable work,” didn’t announce any intent to support them now that push has come to shove.

Tonight, I had intended to write more about Trump’s pardon of the January 6 defendants, and these new developments highlight the point I wanted to make: the outrage here is the attack on democracy.

Much of the initial outburst following the pardons came from people in law enforcement and others who were upset that the pardons meant there were no consequences for assaulting police officers. That was certainly one impact of the pardons and deeply disturbing. But it shouldn’t obscure the fact that Trump pardoned people who deliberately attacked democracy itself and that they did so on his behalf.

The goal of January 6 was to keep Trump, who had lost the election, in power. He rewarded the people who attacked democracy with pardons. The lawlessness is front and center in the pardons, as it is in firing the IGs and in firing DOJ employees. It’s all about loyalty to Trump, and you can’t have that and a functional democracy living in the same room.

The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which supported Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024 criticized him because the pardons included violent rioters who attacked police officers. “Crimes against law enforcement are not just attacks on individuals or public safety,” the FOP’s joint statement with the International Association of Police Chiefs said. “They are attacks on society and undermine the rule of law …

When perpetrators of crimes, especially serious crimes, are not held fully accountable, it sends a dangerous message that the consequences for attacking law enforcement are not severe, potentially emboldening others to commit similar acts of violence.”

The point about police is well-taken. And even more so when we’re talking about an attack on democracy.

Trump did an interview last week with Sean Hannity on Fox News. He explained the pardons like this: “They were in there for three and a half years … treated like nobody’s ever been treated. So badly. Treated like the worst criminals in history …

The other thing is this: some of those people with the police, true. But they were very minor incidents. They get built up by a couple of fake guys who are on CNN all the time.” The whole narrative at that point was about police and pardons; democracy had been forgotten.

We cannot allow Trump, or even well-intentioned concerns about attacks on police, to obscure what these crimes and these pardons were really about. Motive is not an element the government has to prove for most federal crimes, but here, the motive was apparent throughout.

We understood it when Trump told the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by, when he summoned his followers to Washington, D.C., on January 6, tweeting, “will be wild,” and when he spoke to them at the rally on the Ellipse, claiming the election had been stolen from him and telling them, “We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.”

That same level of lawlessness and disregard for democracy is back. It’s happening in front of us again. In 2020 the voters went to work, and the courts held. Trump is trying to ensure that doesn’t happen again.

What can you do? Don’t be quiet. Talk with people about why it isn’t okay for a president to routinely operate by breaking the laws. And know it for what it is: Trump could have fired the IGs by giving Congress 30 days' notice of his reasons, and he could have transferred prosecutors into minor roles like prosecuting misdemeanors in the District of Columbia. Instead, he chose to proceed lawlessly, threatening anyone to tell him he can’t. And it’s not just the outright lawlessness.

We’re seeing the fallout from executive orders now, and we know that it’s as widespread as stopping treatment for cancer patients and canceling job offers made to people who wanted to become public servants.

It’s time for Americans, even the ones who supported Trump, to raise their voices and say they didn’t vote for any of this, before their voices don’t matter at all. For us here, we can provoke those conversations, and of course, we have to write to our elected officials and make sure they know we’re watching what they’re doing at this critical moment.

This video, posted by Aaron Rupar, is from today. Trump, again, is contemplating whether he can run a third time. It’s not a joke; it is clearly something that stays on his mind. The Senate abdicated its constitutional obligation to engage in advice and consent and confirmed Pete Hegseth. Now, Trump is violating laws regarding who he can fire from government service and how he can do so. If there is no push back, where does it all end? Where is this leading? I think we know the answer.

We’re in this together,

Joyce Vance