Shiving Ukraine and Bowing to Russia, Trump Tries to Move U.S. Onto Team Autocracy

Perhaps because it is not just news but a catastrophic and epochal shift, the Trump administration’s ongoing project of casting off democratic allies and embracing autocratic adversaries has not received nearly the coverage it merits. Certainly it hasn’t provoked sufficient outcry or resistance from the Democratic Party. But Donald Trump and MAGA’s open efforts to ally the United States with Russia and far-right European parties is not some abstract political game without impact on ordinary Americans. It is a perverse project to put the United States on the side of dictators and oppressors, because Donald Trump sees such countries and rulers as his natural allies, sharing a common interest in the idea that might makes right, and that the powerful should be free to plunder the powerless. As Nicholas Grossman, a professor of international relations at the University of Illinois, puts it, “The US switching sides in the world, from pro-democracy and rule of law to anti-both — most immediately seen in helping Europe against Russia to helping Russia against Europe — is the biggest, most profound change to the international system since the USSR collapsed.”

This schism in American identity has been particularly visible in a series of grotesque tableaux over the last few weeks. There was Defense Secretary’s Pete Hegseth’s visit with our NATO allies, to whom he delivered the message that they are basically not actually our allies, that the U.S. would not be involved in any peace-keeping missions in Ukraine following a future ceasefire, and that any European troops deployed in such missions would be outside the NATO umbrella of mutual support should they be attacked.

As if Hegseth’s visit were merely the amuse bouche to a full wrecking-ball MAGA entrée, Vice President JD Vance then arrived on the continent, delivering a speech that painted far-right European forces as oppressed agents of democracy, and European efforts to fight extremism as more dangerous than a potential Russian invasion. It was an up-is-down, night-is-day presentation that included a tacit endorsement of Germany’s extreme far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is highly sympathetic to Russia and draws political inspiration from the Nazis. As if this did not send clear enough a signal, Vance also met with the AfD’s leader while shunning a meeting with German chancellor Olaf Scholz. As the New York Times described the moment, “Eighty years after American soldiers liberated Dachau, top German officials this weekend all-but accused Mr. Vance — and by extension, President Trump — of boosting a political party that many Germans consider to be dangerously descended from Nazism.”

It is difficult to overstate the horror of Vance’s remarks. As the German chancellor remarked in response, “A commitment to ‘never again’ is not reconcilable with support for the AfD.” The moral vacuity of Vance, and MAGA, has rarely been on more vivid display as the vice president of the country that helped destroy Nazism told the Germans that it’s time to let Nazi’s inheritors back into power. And Vance’s rationale was superficially inane but substantively unsettling, as he claimed that opposition to immigration meant the AfD was reflecting the democratic will of voters (reality check: the AfD is polling support from about 20% of the German voting public). Yet Vance’s claim of democratic legitimacy for the AfD excludes the parts of its agenda that are not so democratic or compatible with the open, liberal society that Americans associate with democracy — the demonization of non-German ethnic groups, the support of political violence, the participation of some of its members in literal attempts to overthrow the German government. As Washington Post columnist Lee Hockstader put it, “It’s one thing to oppose unbridled and illegal immigration, which has inspired anger and despair in the United States and Europe. It’s another to traffic in symbols and slogans that were proscribed by postwar German lawmakers specifically because they feared a revival of Nazism in its birthplace, and were determined that Germany would forbid it.”

And then, completing the banquet of MAGA international awful, we witnessed the Trump administration’s moves to embrace Russia, most prominently by working with Putin’s government on a peace plan for Ukraine that excludes. . . Ukraine. These efforts were accompanied by a blatant attempt by the U.S. to shake down Ukraine in exchange for American assistance, with the Trump administration trying to get that country to agree to give up something like half a trillion dollars’ worth of mineral rights. It is hard to overstate the bad-faith, exploitative twist-of-the-knife malignity that this offer entailed, as if the U.S. would only help Ukraine via a deal that robbed that country of its wealth, in an approach that many rightly called out as colonial in nature.

And so I return to a basic point I tried to make last time. Even conceding that most Americans do not follow closely what happens overseas, and that there is some sense in Democrats wanting to make sure they’re seen as engaged with the priorities of working Americans, there are still a few foreign policy issues that can’t be ignored as not worth the effort. The way that Donald Trump is working to pervert the role of U.S. power in the world, to ally our collective wealth and might with that of countries and movements that are adversarial to our most basic, majoritarian beliefs, requires far more attention, outrage, and repudiation than it’s currently receiving. JD Vance endorsed a neo-Nazi party, which is not just offensive in itself, but provides a harsh and needed gauge as to how far right the Trump administration truly is — so far right that it thinks that it’s time to put back in power the spiritual successors of the German psychos who brought so much of the world to ruin eight decades ago. Stating the fact that the Trump administration would have the U.S. ally itself with neo-Nazis is both morally correct and politically potent. It speaks to a deep sickness in MAGA, a dark worship of intolerance and a politics of dehumanization, of exclusion, of dominance; seeing what MAGA looks like when Germans are doing it could potentially alter Americans’ perceptions of this movement.

And if invocations of the Holocaust and mass murder strike some Democrats as playing too harsh a card against Trump, then perhaps they should open their perspective a bit more to take in what’s happening in Ukraine at the hands of MAGA’s top ally Putin — where that dictator’s armies are committing war crimes, engaging in ethnic cleansing, and otherwise prosecuting an unprovoked war for the greater glory of Mother Russia. The violence promised by these far-right forces that MAGA sees as allies is already upon the world. Donald Trump, in aligning the United States with perpetrators like Putin, is trying to make every one of us complicit with murder, with hatred, with the triumph of the warmongers over those who just want to live their lives in peace. At a smaller scale, it’s the same mentality that he’s currently trying to promote at home, where peaceful immigrants are labeled as an invading army, where a tiny minority of trans Americans are scapegoated as an existential threat to home and hearth, and where women and minorities are disparaged as “DEI” hires should they happen to hold positions of authority.

M. Gessen, who has written extensively on the nature of authoritarianism in Putin’s Russia, recently offered an assessment of the Democrats’ response to Trump’s efforts to destroy constitutional democracy in the United States. One observation in particular struck me: they noted that while Democrats are understandably attacking Trump for breaking the procedural rules of American democracy, this line of defense has significant limitations. After all, Gessen points out, Trump is simply going ahead and doing things that Democrat say he can’t. Noting that “Admonitions to obey the law will not stop Trump and will not dissuade his supporters,” Gessen goes on to counsel that “Trump’s bad ideas must be countered with good ones.”

I think this insight can be applied to Trump’s destruction of our alliances and tentative construction of what we might call a “MAGA Axis of Evil” connecting Trump-ruled Washington, far-right European parties, and Putin’s Russia. There is very little Democrats can do directly to stop Trump from conspiring with Putin and cheering on Germany’s neo-Nazis. However, there is a lot they can do to talk about the world-historically bad ideas that are propelling Trump, and his engagement with these traditional enemies of America. Most Americans know that Nazis, ethnic cleansing, and suddenly treating countries like France and Germany as enemies is wrong at a basic level. And so the Democrats have a stark backdrop against which to promote ideas that might otherwise feel more abstract — such as the importance of having allies, why worries about immigration don’t justify putting neo-Nazis in power (in Germany or elsewhere), why it’s self-destructive for the United States to ally with war-mongering countries like Russia, and how it’s far better to ally with fellow democracies.

Such an articulation of basic ideas about the world is all the more crucial as MAGA acolytes like VP Vance twist ideas of democracy to justify their authoritarian alliances. For instance, in his baleful European speech, Vance asserted that illiberal forces like the AfD are truly democratic because they have voters’ support, while pretending that attempts to defend elections against misinformation and Russian meddling are actually anti-democratic. MAGA and its supporters understand the importance of maintaining at least a veneer of democratic legitimacy; it is in the interest of democracy’s defenders to deny them this veneer, and to speak straightforwardly about how actual democratic societies are open ones that promote solidarity, compassion, and mutual aid.

Democrats can’t expect to revive and maintain a stronger, more democratic international order in the future if they can’t bring themselves to start articulating a vision of it; and their fight to save democracy at home will be all the harder if they can’t persuade the public that the country shouldn’t be corrupted by alliances with anti-democratic forces abroad.

Endorsing Germany's Nazi Successors, JD Vance Betrays America

On his first visit to Europe as vice president, JD Vance gave a speech to a gathering of European leaders in Munich, Germany this week that should fill every decent American with shame, revulsion, and rage. Channeling Russian talking points and illuminating the hyper-nationalism at the heart of the MAGA movement, Vance told his audience that the continent is threatened not by Russia, but by “the enemy within”: an ominous embrace of fascistic rhetoric from the darkest days of the twentieth century. And echoing the Great Replacement theory that has come to dominate MAGA, he suggested that immigration to Europe amounted to an invasion more dangerous than Russia’s actual bombs-and-bullets invasion of Ukraine.

Perhaps most shockingly, he offered a tacit endorsement of Germany’s Nazi-inspired party, Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), considered so extreme and dangerous by German authorities that there have been serious efforts to ban it as being in violation of Germany’s Basic Law, which holds that, “Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behavior of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.” And as the Center for American Progress recounts, “Germany’s own domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, has declared that [AfD’s] youth wing, Die Junge Alternative, engages in frequent far-right hate speech, classifying it as an extremist organization and recently placing it under state surveillance. So radical is the AfD that in May 2024 it was expelled from the Identity and Democracy group in the European Parliament, which includes Marine Le Pen’s National Rally from France and Matteo Salvini’s Lega from Italy.” Moreover, it’s a party that’s avowedly anti-American, with its leader stating, “The security interests of the Federal Republic of Germany are diametrically opposed to those of the United States.” And an AfD politician was even arrested a few years ago for his part in a plot to literally overthrow the German government. Despite all this, the AfD is polling in second place in Germany’s upcoming elections.

Yet, as the New York Times describes in a well-contextualized account of his speech that, as of this writing, has distressingly not merited top billing in the eyes of the paper’s editors, Vance told German leaders “to drop their objections to working with a party that has often reveled in banned Nazi slogans and has been shunned from government as a result.” This, despite the fact that lockstep efforts by a broad range of German parties, from left to right, to stop Nazi-adjacent parties from gaining power were long seen as common sense by any credible American politician. And so, eighty years after the end of World War II, we finally have a presidential administration bold enough to ask the question that the rest of us were apparently too lily-livered to ponder: Were the Nazis really all that bad? But it’s even worse than this, as the Trump administration is actually promoting their spiritual inheritors’ takeover of the German government. Witnessing a far-right German party that scapegoats immigrants, engages in political violence, and threatens to undermine a key American ally, Trump and Vance are enticed rather than instinctively repelled.

Vance’s speech didn’t come out of nowhere. Trump and his MAGA allies have long celebrated illiberal European leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and of course Russia’s Vladimir Putin. But by offering an open hand to parties that trace their lineage to forces that literally blew up Europe, slaughtered millions, and challenged our very conceptions of civilized society, Trump and Vance are implicating the American public in a political vision that should make us sick to our stomachs. They are lending the weight of American power and prestige to forces whose values are directly opposed to the values held by most Americans. Parties who see nationality and citizenship as rooted in blood and soil, and who promote the denigration and dehumanization of those of other ethnicities. Parties who stoke reservations about recent waves of immigration into hateful division and incitement to violence, while promoting an atavistic, reactionary vision for European society. In offering parties like the AfD a stamp of approval, Trump and Vance abuse their positions of power, offering comfort to adversaries of the United States.

It’s also notable that Vance used his speech to dismiss European concerns and efforts to combat Russian disinformation campaigns aimed at undermining democracies and promoting right-wing parties (not coincidentally, the AfD is sympathetic to Russian authoritarianism and stands against the defense of Ukraine). Alongside his efforts to downplay Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its expansionist threats against U.S. allies like the Baltic nations, Vance showed that there is little, if any, daylight between Russian propaganda and core MAGA beliefs. The disparagement of democracy; the promotion of ties not to democratic allies but to fellow authoritarians; and the emphasis on extreme nationalism over international solidarity: Vance and Trump would be doing little different if they were actual agents of Moscow, yet it is becoming clear that this rancid world view is also simply basic to MAGA.

If there’s a silver lining here, it’s the illumination that Vance’s insane speech casts on what MAGA has become, and perhaps alway was. It has been hard for Americans to fully grasp how far-right Trump and his movement have tended, given their takeover and colonization of the Republican Party, and its associations with a certain conservative tradition. But on that European stage, Vance showed us that on the spectrum of left and right, MAGA fits snugly among the shittiest parties that Europe has to offer, the Nazi apologists of the AfD and the fascist admirers of Italian prime minister Meloni. MAGA occupies a political space that most Americans at one time were wise enough to revile; in his self-incriminating European debut, Vance left no doubt that MAGA has evolved to a point where it’s indistinguishable from parties we once collectively understood to be barbaric, and America’s enemies.

But that’s the limit to the good news here. The reality is this: through his speech, Vance shit on the U.S.’s role in defeating European fascism and fostering the re-birth of European democracies after World War II. Few would claim that the American role in Europe over the decades has been anything close to perfect, or was free from self-interest. Yet Trump and Vance’s alignment of American foreign policy with the worst of the European worst marks the start of a chapter far darker than we’ve seen before. Coddling neo-Nazis, cozying up to Russian autocracy, Trump II is intent on transforming the United States into a malign actor on the international stage, an enemy of democracy, freedom, and human rights.

There is certainly a basic reality that Americans are skeptical of foreign aid and international commitments. Surely any openness has been greatly abused over the last couple decades by the Republican-launched forever war on terror and insane occupation of two Middle Eastern countries for no sane strategic end. It is not at all crazy for an ordinary American to want to turn away from the world, and put America first. Not crazy — but also not right, as JD Vance has helped to make clear what it means when Americans don’t care enough about what’s going on in other countries, and how terrible things that happen far from our shores can find their way to harm us. It should be intuitively clear to all but the truly lost that empowering neo-Nazis who hate America can’t possibly turn out well for the United States. Similarly, it should be intuitively clear that a presidential administration that gives its stamp of approval to a German political party that celebrates Nazi rhetoric, echoes that party’s animus towards outsiders, and literally opposes the United States has either lost its fucking mind or doesn’t understand a single damned thing about what makes America actually great.

What I am getting at is that, in the taxonomy of low-hanging political fruit, this is literally a golden apple hovering a centimeter off the ground. JD Vance has just told Europe that the Trump administration, and by extension the American people, want neo-Nazis to rule Germany. The Democratic Party cannot stay silent. Ordinary Americans cannot stay silent. The Trump administration has crossed a red line that must be defended and re-inscribed. It is unacceptable for an American president to disgrace the American public by putting our country on the side of a party inspired by actual Nazis. Democratic politicians need to ignore the pollsters who say that Americans don’t care about foreign affairs; they need to listen to their gut when it tells them that it’s beyond fucked up to put America prestige behind America’s neo-fascist enemies. The American majority needs to distance itself from this evil act as quickly and powerfully as is humanly possible, and to make Trump and his MAGA enablers pay dearly for defiling our World War II dead, our invested treasure, our most basic common ties of humanity and decency to the peoples of Europe.

Trump II, Week 3: Getting Perspective

I didn’t have time to do a retrospective of Week 3 of the Trump presidency re-run, but in its place I thought I’d direct readers to this darkly tongue-in-cheek overview by journalist Garrett Graff. He assumes the point of view of a foreign correspondent reporting on American politics, rendering our crisis simultaneously alien and more comprehensible. It’s a case where a slightly “fictional” approach captures our reality better than a more traditional one in various ways. The use of accurate terms like “Christian white nationalists” and “purges” of the security services are particularly welcome and on point.

Speaking of purges, I’d also recommend this recent snippet from David Kurtz, whose been a steadfast chronicler of our still-reversible dissent into strongman rule. He reminds us that all the talk of “firing” federal employees is a misuse of an economics term, when the more apt word is closer to “purges.” After all, firing hardly captures the mix of illegality and malice inherent in the dismissals of thousands of skilled workers loyal not to the bottom line, or to the president, but to the Constitution and the public they serve. Kurtz’s note that even “purge” may be a placeholder for a better word is well taken, and points to a larger challenge we all face — that we lack some of the basic vocabulary to describe the onslaught we’re collectively experiencing. To describe the overall Trumpian-MAGA project, I’ve played around with “MAGA authoritarianism” and “MAGA fascism,” which honestly feel good to write, and I continue to think that “white nationalism” and “white supremacism” are extremely useful supporting terms, and need to be mainstreamed (as descriptive terms, not as ideologies!) far more than they are. But I share the sense that we’re still building up a necessary vocabulary to describe, and fully confront, the array of assaults on America.

Time to Get Tough Against the Power-of-the-Purse Snatchers

As was clear within a day of his inauguration, and has only come into sharper focus over time, President Trump and his allies are attempting, through a combination of norm-breaking and outright illegality, to transform the United States from a constitutional democracy to an authoritarian regime with power centralized in the president. If this were happening in any other country, we would correctly label it as an attempted coup — but for a variety of reasons, the reality that Trump and the Republican Party have embarked on destroying our democratic government is only imperfectly and occasionally articulated in public. Republican complicity means that a GOP-controlled Congress stands by as its powers are challenged and stripped away by the president; our news media’s fear of retribution means that while we get some insightful reporting, it is largely decontextualized, the big picture kept unexamined; and congressional Democrats remain mostly in a state of confusion, paralysis, and cowardice, with few levers of power at their disposal, and with a deep-seated reluctance to fully embrace confrontation by accusing Trump of a second, larger-scale insurrection.

But there is a point where a refusal to correctly call this attack on democracy what it is, and to use all available tools to oppose it, slides from bad politics to at least tacit complicity. This is the point that Brian Beutler makes in an important piece out this week that takes a look at the Democrats’ response to our present crisis. For as it turns out, congressional Democrats do have a powerful piece of leverage available in the coming weeks that could both force Trump to retreat while exposing the depths of our national nightmare. Republicans, with their razor-thin control of the House and fractious membership, will almost inevitably need Democratic votes to pass a continuing budget resolution and raise the debt ceiling in coming days. Without such a vote, the U.S. economy faces potentially disastrous consequences, not only in terms of a government shutdown, but through a potential default on our national debt that would call into question our government’s willingness to pay its bills. Beutler suggests that as the price for their support, Democrats require that Trump’s lawless actions stop, essentially using this crucial vote to veto the powers of an out-of-control president.

Beutler’s not the only one who has floated this hard-line budget/debt limit approach to rein in Trump, but he goes further than most by getting at what it would mean for the Democrats not to use all tools at their disposal to stop or slow down Trump’s destruction of our government. If Democrats were to provide crucial votes to fund the government and increase the debt limit, they would end up giving tacit endorsement to Trump’s actions, a signal of business-as-usual and that even an authoritarian spree was not important enough to make the Democrats break against their tradition of extreme, even self-defeating caution. As Beutler puts it, “If Democrats provide those votes before the rule of law has been restored, and without locking in any mechanism to maintain the rule of law going forward, they will have in essence assented to the wrecking of democracy.”

The possibility that such a strategy might fail is not a reason to reject it. Beutler sees a chance that, if stymied by a lack of votes, Trump may try “to seize dictatorial power more aggressively. He might order the Treasury Department to continue issuing new debt in defiance of the debt-limit statute; he might honor the debt limit statute, but try to deploy the government’s incoming revenue to bond holders and politically influential populations like Social Security recipients and members of the armed forces.” But Democrats shouldn’t assent to their own complicity in Trump’s lawlessness to prevent further speculative lawlessness; they shouldn’t give in just because they fear Trump’s escalation in response. Rather, they should not be afraid to dare him to escalate, and risk the repercussions of his actions, even if those repercussions are not at all known at this point.

If anything, though, I think Beutler lets the Democrats off a little easy. Because it’s not just that Democrats risk making themselves complicit in Trump’s power grab, as bad and self-destructive as that would be. I think it’s even more to the point to say that, in doing so, they would be actively betraying the millions of voters who put them in office and expect them to defend both their interests and American democracy against MAGA mayhem. They would be signaling that however outrageous individual Americans view Trump’s actions, they do not care to represent and embody that righteous faith that spits in the face of would-be authoritarians. They would be declaring that the dead dream of bipartisanship is more important than a living nation.

Beutler ends with a point that’s too little acknowledged when thinking about what the Democrats should do, faced as they are with those who would destroy our constitutional form of government. He writes, “But, corny as it sounds, they are also public officials—they take an oath to the Constitution just the same as Republicans do. And when those two imperatives come into tension with one another, as they do today, it’s the former that must give.” I don’t think this is a corny point at all — just a massively overlooked one. At this point, Democrats pondering how to secure election victories two years from now, rather than addressing the existential crossroads we are at right now, are failing to do their jobs. As much as some of the rules of American politics remain the same, it is unquestionable that we are at a point where Trump and the GOP are aiming to permanently alter the structures of American government in an anti-democratic direction that allows the GOP to maintain one-party rule indefinitely, at least at the federal level.

After all, ask yourself this: is Trump acting like someone who expects a Democratic president to wield the same vast powers he’s trying to assert? Is the GOP acting like a party that expects the shoe to be on the other foot any time soon, or ever? At a minimum, Trump’s ongoing destruction of bureaucracy would cripple a subsequent Democratic administration that wished to make the government work for the people. The pro-democratic majority is arguably in a non-violent war against an authoritarian takeover, and acting as if powerful non-violent tools are off the table isn’t just folly, it’s unspeakable betrayal. The Democratic Party needs leaders who grasp the stakes, and who see the continuation of American democracy as non-negotiable. And looking a few steps ahead, after Trump inevitably begins ignoring Court orders and confirms that he’s going to ignore budgets passed by Congress, we’re going to need Democratic politicians who will speak honestly to the American public, and remind us that a presidency acting beyond the law lacks the barest legitimacy. 

You Can't Defend Democracy Without Defending an Effective and Accountable Bureaucracy

Donald Trump and Elon Musk chose their first big target well. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about U.S. politics, but though I’d heard of USAID, I was largely unfamiliar with its range of activities or importance to U.S. foreign policy. So, it seems, are the great majority of Americans. To Trump and his allies, though, the convergence of government bureaucracy, promotion of democracy abroad, and money flowing to foreigners hit a sweet spot that made the agency ripe for destruction under Trump II. If USAID is now gone, and no one misses it, well, where’s the possible blowback to the president?

As political writer Paul Waldman observes of Musk’s ongoing rampage through the federal bureaucracy, most of us barely bother to consider the hundreds of ways government action and intervention underly our daily existence — and it is this web of unnoticed structure that is now being ripped apart, willy-nilly, in an illegal wave of destruction that amounts to a coup against our constitutional order. The widespread invisibility of government is working to Musk’s advantage, as he helps destroy what most people simply take for granted, from food that doesn’t kill us to Meals on Wheels programs that keep elders alive. Stopping the destruction, Waldman counsels, will necessarily involve reminding people of what’s being lost.

Such an educational effort is being made massively easier by what appears to be Trump and Musk’s aim for wholesale elimination of broad swathes of government function. Simply put, it’s going to be hard for people to miss the results of the destruction — the opposition’s work will be in tying it back to Trump’s actions. Trump and his allies are almost certainly underestimating what the backlash could be to the public being denied elementary aspects of life that it currently takes for granted. As Waldman puts it, “you can’t opt out of having your government affect your life.” From a certain perspective — one we would do well to encourage — they’ve decided to fuck over most of the American population for reasons that range from malign to murderous. This is not something a smart politician does; it’s what a politician does when he thinks he’s well insulated from the consequences of his actions.

But I also want to echo critiques of the role Democrats have played in creating an atmosphere of anti-government skepticism. Those who point to Bill Clinton proclaiming the end of the era of big government remind us that a poisonous bipartisan consensus formed decades ago that disparaged public accountability and privileged private sector profit-motive as a guarantor of competence, that fantasized of superior market solutions while ignoring the anti-democratic implications of downgrading government employees and responsibilities. A central GOP lie for decades has been that the federal bureaucracy constitutes an alien, invading force that seeks to impoverish our lives. But this line of attack has also necessarily involved disparaging the democratic processes by which these bureaucracies were created in the first place — by acts of Congress and signatures of presidents, and the legitimacy they thereby possess. Even Joe Biden, who acted in decisive and substantial ways to insist on a positive role for government in growing the economy, did not do nearly enough to counter-attack the long-established narrative that government is wasteful, inefficient, and unnecessary.

Perhaps nowhere has the Democrats’ lackluster case for a government that works for the people been more galling than in connection with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB itself is an example of government bureaucracy at its best; the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren in the days of the Great Recession, it was created under a Democratic Congress and presidency to take on the predation of banks and other businesses that try to rip off consumers. Those regulated by the bureau gunned for it even before it was even created, and financial sector hatred has continued undimmed to the present day. Actually, that’s not entirely correct: the CFPB has actually managed to increase the wrath of its enemies by looking to regulate tech companies with financial offering to consumers, including giants like Apple and Meta. If right-wingers measure their success by how many liberal tears they provoke, then you could say that the CFPB’s success could be measured by how many banker’ and tech titans’ tears it jerked loose from their ashen faces. You could tell the bureau was doing was it was supposed to because it gained the right enemies — the rich and powerful — and protected ordinary folks who were able to take their complaints to a bureau that acted in the interests of the little guy.

But though Warren in her life as a senator has not been remiss in reminding Americans of the CFPB, too many other Democrats declined to seize the golden opportunity to elevate the bureau as a stellar example of the type of government the party wants more of. Among other things — and this might seem like a small thing, but it’s really not — they never figured out how to brand it with a catchy name. After all, CFPB doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, or connote consumer empowerment. But the main problem is that the Democrats didn’t make it more of a household name, try to point to it as a model for government agencies that work for ordinary people, even if it means pissing off powerful interests.

I think this sort of investment would have redounded to Democrats’ benefit in recent days, as Elon Musk and Trump has moved to close down the agency — an illegal act that in itself would provoke an impeachment effort in better circumstances. Created by Congress and the survivor of lawsuits to disband it, the CFPB is a perfect example of the Trump administration acting illicitly to demolish democratic governance. And as the Washington Post reports, Elon Musk himself has financial interests that the CFPB was set to regulate, as his X/Twitter platform prepares to offer financial services to users, making its neutering not just illegal but deeply corrupt, an example of oligarchic interests cutting down ordinary people’s capacity to fight back through the government they elected.

But although the Democratic Party may have erred in not providing better political protection and public outreach for the CFPB, this is not to say that the fight is over this particular agency, or that the party has failed. Democrats created the CFPB; Democrats can still fight for it, and, more to the point in the current moment, wield its mission and its illegal closure as a weapon against a lawless regime. Not only can they employ its closure to highlight Trump’s lawlessness, they can tie Trump’s unconstitutional and anti-democratic maneuvers to a slavish devotion to some of the least popular businesses in America. After all, most Americans realize that financial sector companies like banks and payday lenders are untrustworthy and exploitative forces in American that require heavy regulation, lest they destroy our economy again like they did in 2012. 

Democrats need to act as if the attack on the CFPB is a big deal; that it’s a blow not against the Democratic Party, but against the nitty-gritty enactment of democratic government that only a dictator or a corrupt business would embrace. Remember: all those businesses who’ve been howling about the CFPB being too powerful are doing so because they want the right to rip off American consumers without consequence. Its shuttering makes Trump look weak, not strong: he’s the henchman and lackey for businesses that can’t even make an honest living, but have to create profit models in which American citizens are re-cast as marks and dupes, ideally without recourse should they ever learn they’ve been exploited.

Speaking of Musk’s role in closing the agency, but addressing its larger role as well, Elizabeth Warren remarked that, “This is like a bank robber trying to fire the cops and turn off the alarms before he strolls in the lobby.” This is a strong line of defense, and of attack; Democrats can link the CFPB putsch to similar attacks on law enforcement and intelligence agencies like the FBI and CIA. It is an attack on our collective defenses, which will now be manned by. . . Donald Trump? Elon Musk? You’d have to be a die-hard MAGA voter to think that these guys should be in charge of absolutely everything, and the professional crime-fighters nothing.

Donald Trump and his Republican allies completely own their attempts to gut American government so that Trump can install loyalists and businesses can evade regulations meant to protect the public; they will be responsible for the harm and chaos that ensues. But the scale of this crisis requires the Democrats to step up, in order to mitigate the damage as much as possible. More than this, it points to the necessity of the Democratic Party re-evaluating its awkward pro- and anti-government straddle, and to fully embrace a vision of democratically accountable, highly competent government that serves the public interest. None of the Musk-led, Trump-sanctioned destruction should be accepted as acceptable or permanent; rather, acts of destruction directed at disempowering ordinary Americans and strengthening corrupt actors are vivid displays of MAGA’s dark intent, and of its real vulnerability to a concerted defense on behalf of everyday Americans.

Memo to Democrats: Embrace the Fact of Existential Conflict with GOP, or Face Annihilation

Trying to follow the Trump administration’s various outrages against the country feels overwhelming and even debilitating to many of us. In part, this is by design — Trump and his team have explicitly said they intend to “shock and awe” the public. But it is one thing for the public to be confounded by this deliberately disorienting onslaught of activity; it is another for the elected officials of the Democratic Party to fail to prioritize and respond to these threats. Doing so is literally their most important job as the opposition party. The failure to perform it becomes even more glaring when the threats include Donald Trump’s efforts to take an axe to the rule of law, to basic powers of Congress, and thus to the ability of ordinary Americans to exert the non-negotiable control over their lives and their government that is their birthright. Make no mistake — by attempting to make himself into a de facto king, Donald Trump is spitting in the face of every one of us, whether you voted for him or not. The Democrats aren’t just failing to defend themselves, or “democracy” writ large; they’re failing to protect the rights and futures of every single American.

It remains incredible to the point of incomprehensibility that even a single Democrat would have suggested after November 5 that the party might work with him on certain issues. Trump’s attempt to overthrow American democracy following the 2020 election looms permanently over the political landscape, and certainly over the question of whether the Democratic opposition might ever consider him a partner in government. In his violent and illegal attempt to reverse the 2020 election results, Donald Trump rendered himself an enemy of the United States. Nothing that has transpired since then — not the Supreme Court’s illicit proclamation that a president can commit no crimes so long as they are “official” acts, not even his election by a bare majority of voters — changes the reality of his hatred of our country, of our highest values, of our halting but real progress towards multi-ethnic democracy over the past century and more. And though Trump lied throughout his re-election campaign, he also slipped in the truth. He said he wanted to rule as a dictator; he said he wanted to overturn the rule of law by illegally prosecuting his political opponents; he cozied up to the richest men in America to fund his campaign and drive his second-term agenda of empowering the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us; he made clear that he would incite violence against vulnerable minorities (trans people, immigrants) from the highest office in the land.

And it is even more incredible that any Democrats would continue to advocate for cooperation now. A bare two weeks into office, Donald Trump has unleashed unconstitutional attacks on the separation of powers, on the birthright citizenship unambiguously protected under the 14th amendment, on our collective safety through pardons of the January 6 insurrectionists, on the rights of trans Americans to even exist. He is delivering on the anti-democratic, anti-freedom agenda that he promised, and that too many voters disbelieved — or frighteningly, endorsed. 

If this is all so glaringly obvious, then why are so many Democrats, specifically those in the House and Senate, still failing to meet this moment? Put another way, why has the party’s long-term propensity for conflict avoidance carried over to a point where avoiding conflict is tantamount to surrendering the country to fascism?

The advanced age of so many in leadership likely plays a part. Many entered politics in another era, when the GOP had not yet radicalized and the sorting of the parties into center-left and far-right was not nearly so advanced.  They have fond memories of bipartisanship as a hazy ideal that would theoretically attract voters of either party. And longevity feeds an inability to comprehend tectonic changes in American politics, as the radicalization of the GOP occurred slowly over many years, then quickly under Trump, leaving many with the tantalizing hope that all might go back to the way it had been once he was ushered off the stage. There is a class of politicians who simply will not believe the evidence in front of their eyes.

So the cult of bipartisanship is one reason for the Democrats’ perennial desire to avoid real conflict with the GOP — but I don’t think it’s the main reason, or sufficiently explains their present paralysis. Rather, as the GOP has radicalized into holding a host of positions whose logical consequence would be significant and even savage harm to traditional Democratic constituencies (African-Americans, Latinos, women, union members), the Democrats have notably declined to explicitly identify the sources of these conflicts: that the GOP has transformed into the vehicle for a white supremacist, misogynistic backlash against a liberal and tolerant society. Only slightly less notably, and though the party has been more open in discussing it as a major line of conflict, the Democratic Party has again and again demurred in taking on concentrated corporate power and the ever-increasing wealth divide in this country, even as GOP tax cuts and other policies opened this economic chasm ever wider.

I think the best possible spin is that many Democrats believed that demographic change and growing social liberalism would naturally bring the party into greater power, even against GOP radicalism. But something darker was also going on: I think a lot of Democrats feared that making their grounds for conflict with the GOP more explicit would place them in a losing position, tie them too closely to rights for minorities and gays and socialism. Calling out the GOP as a party of white supremacy might turn persuadable whites against the party; really going after corporate greed and power might cause big money to double down on the GOP and leave the Democrats at a serious campaign cash advantage. There was a perception that truly acting like these fissures in American society and politics were real would commit the Democratic Party to an actual fight that it might not win — so why not just keep their heads down and pray for a sort of progressive manifest destiny?

Unfortunately for them, and even more unfortunately for the millions of Americans who are now facing the consequences of such timidity, we have now reached the logical conclusion of a Democratic Party that can neither name nor engage over the fundamental conflicts in American society — including, crucially, the question of whether we should even be a democracy at all. As uniquely malevolent as he personally is, Donald Trump’s anti-democratic animus has merely amplified the minoritarian, anti-democratic trajectory of a GOP that in the past few decades stole a presidential election (in 2000), re-configured the federal and Supreme courts into a de facto pro-GOP legislative body, gerrymandered itself into Congressional and state government majorities, and embraced Trump’s lies and insurrectionary ends following the 2020 election. Fearful of an anti-GOP majority, the GOP has done all it can to nullify that majority’s party — to the point of opposing democracy itself.

And now we are at a point where Donald Trump has a reasonable roadmap to becoming an actual dictator, and the GOP to installing itself into permanent national power — and yet most elected officials in the Democratic Party, even up to this very moment, cannot bring themselves to characterize the GOP as an authoritarian or anti-democratic party, and are only slightly less inhibited about saying the same about Donald Trump. Even as the president embarks on a host of actions meant to racially purify the country (mass deportations) and solidify white men’s position at the top of America’s social hierarchy (anti-DEI initiatives that disparage and demote non-white, non-male federal workers), most elected Democrats cannot bring themselves to characterize the GOP as a white supremacist party — as if re-instituting segregation in America is not a bridge too far, but calling it out is. Even as the president empowers the world’s richest man to act as his anti-constitutional hatchet man, the newly-elected head of the Democratic National Committee talks about the Democrats’ willingness to take money from “good” billionaires. Even as the president has made clear with his appointments to head the Justice Department and FBI that he will seek to illegally prosecute Democratic opponents, Democrats can barely bring themselves to raise the alarm that our free and fair elections are in grave danger.

In a piece out this week, Off Message’s Brian Beutler writes of Democratic elected officials being in a state of denial rooted in fear. He sees the fear as based in Trump’s immediate threats to democracy and government, and to their own existence as a party, noting that they hold on to “[a]nything to keep them in their comfort zones and avoid reckoning with the existential threat staring them in the face.” I agree with his assessment of paralyzed cowardice — but we could say that this fear actually goes back years, if not decades. And going forward, the Democrats will not be able to shake their sense of denial without confronting the full sources of their fear — that democracy might be weaker than authoritarianism, that the forces of reaction might be more powerful than the forces of progress, that if clearly stated the progressive vision of the Democratic base would provoke more backlash, that big business will squish Democrats like bugs if they really demand a fair economy that works for everyone.

But with his multi-front attack on Americans’ rights, on the Constitution, and on our safety and economic well-being, the Democrats’ implicit wish to paper over the major conflicts of American society, and to not accept the essential risk inherent in any effort to win, are simply no longer tenable. There is no compromising with the vision of Trump and the GOP, on the one hand, and acting as a legitimate pro-democracy party that protects the rights and interests of both its voters and the broader public. Trump is obviously trying to seize dictatorial powers; to advance white supremacy; to further empower the billionaire class so that they might better loot America; and to profit off the whole mess himself, into the bargain.

Given this reality, it’s in the interest of the Democratic Party to maximize conflict with Donald Trump on vital matters affecting our democracy, our freedom, and our economic and national security. It may seem overly ambitious at this low point of disarray, but the lodestar for the Democratic Party should be to destroy Trump’s presidency, and, ideally, drive him from office before his term ends, as the surest route to mitigating the harm he can do. By contrast, shooting low and aiming to accommodate themselves to Trump has already — and predictably — resulted in further Democratic (and democratic) disempowerment; for example, as many Democratic senators have voted to approve his cabinet picks, Trump’s minions have attempted to seize illicit control of the U.S. Treasury’s payment functions, and the Democratic base spirals into demoralization as its elected officials seem to be experiencing a different Trump presidency than they are. The Democratic Party has a clear responsibility to stop a president who wishes to be king, and to embrace a necessary confrontation with the MAGA-fied GOP.

To put my cards on the table: the democratic political competition with the GOP that prevailed through most of our lifetimes is no longer possible, because the GOP has transformed into an authoritarian, anti-democratic vehicle for the personal ambitions of Donald Trump and the reactionary dreams of millions of (predominantly white Christian) Americans. The Democratic Party’s route to both self-preservation, and to preserving the advances in personal, religious, political, and sexual freedom of the last 50-plus years, now requires not simply competing with the Republican Party but delegitimizing it in the eyes of a strong American majority, and ultimately destroying it as a national political force. I am not saying this will be easy, or in any way quick, but it seems to be unavoidable as a matter of logic. To turn away from this reality is to turn away from American democracy, freedom, and equality, and to embrace the darkness of criminal authoritarian rule.

Northern Overexposure: Trump's Dumb Dreams of Greenlander Pastures and Canadian Statehood

President Trump’s talk about taking over Greenland and converting Canada into the 51st state has slipped from absurdist distraction into a more concrete stupidity that opponents should take more seriously — not least because such musings represent a possibly damaging line of attack against our demented chief executive. In a way that wasn’t initially clear, the synergy of these two ideas amounts to a mass of craziness greater than the sum of its land-grabbing parts.

It’s possible you’ve seen some of the stories from mainstream outlets that have taken at face value Trump’s talk about acquiring Greenland, by monetary hook or Marine expeditionary crook. Some have ascribed a strategic logic to Trump’s talk — untold mineral wealth buried beneath the ice! New strategic sea lanes opening up due to climate change! — that seems unlikely to me, which is not to say that advisors who believe such things didn’t put the Greenland buzz back in his ear. Rather than representing a well-thought-through conception on Trump’s part, I think what we’re seeing here is a perilous convergence between his inherent grandiosity and extreme insecurity, on the one hand, and the logic of a MAGA-infused neo-imperialism that sees the U.S. as necessarily dominating its “natural” sphere of influence, i.e. North America, that parallels and rationalizes his psychological impulses. (As many have already pointed out, the U.S. is already well able, through its alliance with Greenland’s owner, Denmark, to use Greenland for military purposes, rendering a potential acquisition in a still-harsher imperialist light).

The idea of massively expanding the size of the United States appears to have a primal appeal for Trump. But this impulse is not really separable from the fact that any acquisition of Greenland requires bullying its current owner, Denmark — which allows Trump to express and enjoy his own sadistic impulses against a country that he sees as powerless to resist him. Trump has been indulging his feelings of supremacy both publicly and privately, through comments to the press, on the one hand, and with a pre-inauguration phone call with the Danish prime minister, on the other, in which Trump reportedly took an aggressive tack that left the Danes deeply unsettled. He has also threatened to impose tariffs on Denmark to force a sale of Greenland.

Trump’s recent but persistent comments that Canada should join the U.S. are more obviously outlandish, given that our neighbor to the north is a sovereign nation whose population of 41 million edges out that of California, our most populous state, and whose leaders have indicated that their country is not interested in a merger. Unlike the Greenland gambit, these northern takeover dreams appear to be rooted far more in Trump’s own internal cogitations, divorced even from the fever dreams of MAGA or far-right “logic.” But it is precisely because his Canada talk is so bonkers — why does this guy keep talking about something that isn’t going to happen?! — that those who oppose Trump should not just dismiss it, but tie it together with his only-vaguely-more-plausible Greenland dreaming. Because a Canadian merger is so obviously crazy, attacking such talk can do double-duty by also helping to disparage and derail his Greenland agenda. And we should note for the record that U.S. public opinion already appears to be against these ideas: some 28% supported trying to buy Greenland, with 47% opposed, while only 18% supported Canada becoming part of the U.S., with 60% opposed. Democrats would hardly be howling into the (Arctic) wilderness, but building off existing public reservations.

Democrats and other opponents of Trump don’t need to worry overmuch about nuance here. Trump’s talk of gobbling up our northern neighbor and Greenland should be talked about as the batty ramblings of a senile uncle. They are a combination of newly-revealed but quite logical MAGA desires to beat up on other nations with which we share a hemisphere, and Trump’s unhinged mind seeking a path to self-aggrandizement. If Trump’s initial talk about Canada becoming a state seemed silly and dumb, his continued references to the idea, even after clear pushback from Canadian leaders, seems outright stupid. To be blunt: he sounds like a moron, and he’s making the rest of us look bad. In the case of Greenland, Trump also sounds dumb, but also increasingly dangerous. The idea that the United States would threaten and bully a close ally for pointless ends isn’t just wrong on principle — it sends a clear message to our other allies that the United States no longer prizes loyalty to its friends.

Indeed, the larger message in Trump’s Greenland talk is one that his opponents should seize on: Donald Trump is incapable of distinguishing friend from foe, daydream from reality. Democrats should hit on this basic idea: that Trump is not only incapable of distinguishing friends from enemies, but actually sees friends as enemies (Denmark, Canada), and enemies as friends (authoritarian dictators, homegrown insurrectionists). His idées fixes are our national nightmares, and none of us needs to act like this is OK — certainly not members of the political opposition, some of whom he has literally vowed to prosecute for fictional crimes. In his dreams of northern overexposure, Donald Trump is validating a toxic indictment against him: that he’s both an authoritarian and mentally ill. And based on how easy it is to goad Trump, it’s quite plausible that making fun of his Canada talk in particular could lead him to escalate his idiotic rhetoric, which is almost guaranteed to become more unhinged and less appealing. The added benefit would be to arrest any possible rise in public support, as Trump’s unchallenged repetition of his inane plans might build them some measure of plausibility and normalcy.

Americans have not yet begun to fully see, let alone come to grips with, the degree to which a second-term Trump essentially thinks that he’s just been elected king of the world. This Greenland and Canada talk is of a piece with such fantastical notions of himself, and offers a preview of more extremism to come — but with it, more opportunities to make him pay dearly for his fantasy-world overreach. I’ve seen people compare his Greenland demands to the derangements of a Roman emperor naming his horse as a senator, and I don’t think this is far off the mark. MAGA loyalists may be willing to keep sucking down the crazy orange juice, but a canny opposition should be able to start galvanizing a majority against such obvious insanity.

Trump II, Week Two: A Full-Spectrum Attack on the Rule of Law and National Security

Passing into the second week of the Trump II presidency, the incoming administration’s pattern of anti-democratic aggression, disinformation, and political vandalism has continued apace, even as the flurry of activity has been inherently difficult to keep track of, and as the Democratic opposition and mainstream media have failed to contextualize this unprecedented wave of illegal and malign activity. Nonetheless, a big picture is in fact discernible. The new president and his allies are acting to radically reshape the nation in the arenas of government, social relations, economics, and foreign policy:

— waging war on American democracy by attempting to degrade and subvert the federal government, with the aim of centralizing supreme power in the presidency

— implementing a deeply reactionary social policy that seeks to establish white supremacy, misogyny, and trans hatred as the law of the land; and the white supremacist motivation is evident as well in the continued threats of massive deportations of immigrants and Trump’s assertions that children of immigrants do not automatically have citizenship (in clear contravention of the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship provision). 

— engaging in extreme economic protectionism that seems poised to deeply damage the United States economy by upending long-standing trade relations with close partners (Canada and Mexico in particular, but also major western European countries as well) in the name of validating Trump’s monomaniacal focus on tariffs as the route to national greatness,

— conducting a rhetorical war on American allies that seems to have the goals of divorcing the United States from long-standing alliances (particularly European allies and NATO), positioning the United States to dominate its allies in the Western Hemisphere (particularly Mexico and Canada), and inexplicably creating opportunities for both China and Russia to run riot in their areas of the world, and even beyond (particularly in the case of China)

Any one of these areas would rightly justify a massive political and public backlash to Trump II; taken together, they amount to a war on the American society and democracy that demands a full-scale mobilization by the majority. Trump has not only exceeded his mandate, he and his allies are using propaganda and disinformation to justify a crime spree against the citizenry’s rights, freedoms, security, and wealth (both collective and personal). 

On multiple fronts, beginning with what has been described as an effort to neutralize the federal government, Trump and his allies have been breaking the law, often to the point of violating basic constitutional provisions. An executive order to freeze all federal spending on grants caused chaos for hundreds of vital programs, then was both blocked by a Court and supposedly rescinded by the administration — yet statements from the president’s press secretary indicated that the administration was still asserting the right to halt authorized spending that it opposes. The usurpation of Congress’ basic role in authorizing and specifying how money is spent could not be more direct, or the consequences more dire should Trump and his allies somehow prevail in their court challenges. 

Over the past several days, we’ve gotten reports of another massively consequential attack on the rule of law in the realm of federal spending and administration, as minions of Elon Musk have apparently been working to seize control of the U.S. Treasury’s ability to spend money. If I’m reading things right, it appears that they are actually gaining control of the actual means by which the U.S. government issues — or withholds — payments. If this sounds unprecedented and insane, it is. It seems of a piece with the administration’s efforts to block spending it does not favor, and the involvement of people who are apparently not even government employees but lackeys of a Trump loyalist offers more evidence that Trump and his allies are implementing an illegal initiative to obey the plain letter of the law and the Constitutions’s separation of powers. Indeed, the scope of the lawbreaking is so vast as to constitute an ongoing coup against the United States — one aimed at demolishing Congress’s role in governance and shifting to the presidency all discretion over how the federal budget is spent. 

It’s also notable that Trump’s more general attack on the rule of law continued this last week, not only in the various illegal efforts to subvert the functions of the federal government, but also in his continued efforts to seek “retribution” against those who defended the United States against his 2020-21 insurrection and the 1/6 attack on the Capitol. Trump’s surrogates have now begun pushing out Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents involved in investigating and prosecuting those insurrectionary crimes. As with the pardons of the Capitol attackers, Trump is turning the powers of the federal government against itself, in an effort to bless criminals and patriots and to defame actual patriots as criminals. 

On the social engineering front, Trump and his allies accelerated their push to roll back the civil rights of millions of Americans. Conducted under attacks on the bogeyman of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies, there’s been a multi-pronged effort to establish state-sanctioned white supremacism and misogyny across both the federal government and American society. With Trump attempting to promulgate bans on trans minors’ ability to seek medical treatment, drunkard Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminating the Pentagon’s endorsement of diversity (including an explicitly racist banning of observations of Black History Month and a goal of removing women from combat roles), and other government agencies’ banning of DEI initiatives, the goal of reinstating the primacy of white, patriarchal supremacy has been at the forefront. Yet the reactionary ends of these attacks were made most explicit by the president himself in his deranged response to the collision between a passenger jet and a military helicopter near the Washington Airport last week. Before any investigations had even begun, Trump was blaming “DEI” for the tragedy, all but explicitly said that only white men are qualified to be pilots, and for good measure offered a grotesquely eugenicist vision of America by suggesting that the disabled are not capable of carrying out high-demand jobs.  

This weekend, Trump levied 25% tariffs against Mexico and Canada on the basis of his accusations that both countries are ripping off and exploiting the United States, only to call them off after they’d barely been in effect for a day. With this declaration of economic war against allies deeply integrated into the U.S. economy, Trump claims to be striving for a revival of American manufacturing, even as actual economists warn of the catastrophic damage that they could well inflict on all three companies’ economies (including by provoking retaliatory tariffs by Canada and Mexico). Notably, Trump appears to have finally dropped his lie that other countries would pay for the tariffs, saying on social media that they may well cause pain to American consumers. This unexpected turn towards truth should be seen as an effort to prepare Americans for the sticker shock they’re going to see, but also as more evidence that Trump sees even his supporters as necessary victims in a deranged vision to validate his 19th century economic nostrums - and to enrich his corporate allies by giving them cover to raise prices on American consumers. 

Finally, on the foreign relations front, Donald Trump made clear that his threats to obtain Greenland and magically incorporate Canada into the United States are no passing fancies. Social messages this weekend even seemed to appeal directly to Canadians, as Trump claimed that country’s citizenry would be safer under American protection (memo to Canada: not true), even as he continued to lie that Canada is an unapologetic economic aggressor against the U.S. Such musings are also closely tied to the imposition of tariffs on Canada, as they concretize the notion that the United States is in a state of economic war with our northern neighbor. Meanwhile, discussions among European leaders on how to strengthen the continent’s security have apparently been set off by an understanding that Trump’s determination to take Greenland from Denmark is far more serious than many initially thought, and that a Trump II presidency has marked the U.S. as a dubious ally.

Mass 1/6 Pardons Signal Even Greater Lawlessness Ahead

It has been barely over a week, and already it feels as if the Democrats are inexplicably letting pass the necessity of crucifying President Trump for his pardons of the January 6 insurrectionists. As I wrote a few days ago, the president’s release and forgiveness of those who tried to derail an election, hunted down politicians, and beat police officers is an almost uniquely disqualifying event, second only to the insurrection itself. Trump signaled to his supporters, particularly the most bloody-minded, that it’s completely legitimate to use violence to seize power. Forgiving those who tried to overthrow the government is the same as endorsing their cause, which Trump has unsurprisingly done, as insurrection was his cause as well. The pardons are the acts of a would-be dictator, not of someone who just took an oath to protect the Constitution.

A decent number of Republican officials seem to feel that the pardons are a subject best left behind. The sense of political vulnerability practically radiates from some, like the shimmer of heat off a goose being cooked; for instance, “Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) indicated she was unfamiliar with the pardons but would disagree with them if they were for violent offenders” — a laughable statement given that it’s simply not credible that she was unaware of the pardons, and something that deserves to haunt her when the Democrats try to unseat her in 2026.

Yet many others have outright endorsed the pardons, with party leadership moving in an aggressive and sinister direction. Last Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced the creation of a “new select subcommittee to investigate events before and after Jan. 6, 2021,” according to NBC News. The committee’s focus has been presented in vague terms, with Johnson talking about going after “false narratives” around January 6, but it is highly likely the committee will seek to further spread disinformation about the insurrection. Equally likely, and even more troubling, the committee may target those on the original January 6 committee and others who have worked to uncover the facts about that day. In other words, the House GOP is set not only to whitewash insurrection, but to further that insurrection’s ends by defaming those who attempted to defend America by investigating it, and even seeking their prosecution by the Justice Department.

As if this were not far enough down the rabbit hole for one week, some of those who received pardons and commutations from President Trump have voiced a desire for vengeance against those who brought them to justice. Sickeningly, Enrique Tarrio, former head of the Proud Boys, told reporters that, ““Now it’s our turn. The people who did this, they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars and they need to be prosecuted.”” And Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers right-wing militia and whose sentence Trump commuted, said that, “What has to happen first is that the prosecutors who suborned perjury — that’s a crime — need to be prosecuted for their crimes.” Other January 6 insurrectionists are looking at suing the federal government for civil rights violations.

I want to be clear here: the idea that those who tried to overturn an election through violence are now howling for retribution against those who defended the Capitol, investigated their crimes, and brought them to justice is alternately laughable, enraging, and unsettling. Trump’s pardons have clearly licensed them to feel as if they are not only above the law, but also that they may now resume their insurrectionary efforts through attempts to pervert the justice system by turning those who oppose insurrection into the actual criminals. This is sick, perverse stuff, deserving of our contempt.

Yet these criminals obviously feel empowered to talk and act like this because the president of the United States has abused the power of the pardon to clear them of their crimes, and has in this way officially blessed their insurrectionary actions. And these expressed desires for retribution should not be seen as separate from either the House committee’s intent to invert ideas of criminality around January 6, or Trump’s ongoing efforts to redefine that day.

Indeed, Trump’s own recent remarks and executive orders constitute yet another thrust by MAGA forces to revive and repurpose the dark spirit of January 6. Not only has Trump expressed openness to meeting with pardoned insurrectionists, he has also indicated “he will consider turning his commutations into full pardons for the violent extremists convicted of seditious conspiracy,” according to the Washington Post. Moreover, he has already signed an executive order that “directed agencies, including the Justice Department, to review decisions by the Biden administration for political influence and recommend responses.” And when he was asked at a press conference last week “whether far-right groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers would now have a place in the political conversation given his expansive efforts to pardon their members or commute their sentences,” he responded by saying, “Well, we have to see. They’ve been given a pardon. I thought their sentences were ridiculous and excessive.” And last weekend, Rhodes was present at a Trump Rally in Las Vegas; I think we can well expect more such appearances by other pardonees in the coming weeks and months.

Taken together, this rhetoric and these actions form the latest chapter in Trump and MAGA’s concerted efforts to dissemble about the events around January 6. But they don’t simply indicate a battle to define the history and truth of January 6 — they also represent an effort to actually continue the insurrection that only seemed to culminate on that day. The goal of punishing those who defend America is in fact an insurrectionary goal, no different than what Trump and the attackers attempted to accomplish four years ago, an attempt to overthrow the rule of law and replace it with the will of a lawless faction.

Democrats and other defenders of American democracy need to come to grips with this reality: that they cannot simply try to “turn the page” on January 6 as a distraction or a losing issue. Four years on, Trump, joined again by some of the insurrectionists and broadly backed by the GOP, is doubling down on a path of lawlessness by targeting their political opponents as America’s true enemies. This inversion of right and wrong, of truth and fiction, is a battering ram they are using to help take down our democracy and wreck our freedoms.

The worst thing in the world would be for the Democrats to try to ignore these threats: the GOP investigations, the insurrectionists baying for retribution, and the president’s continued attempts to glorify his coup attempt and achieve some of its previously foiled goals. With MAGA’s shift into turning the tables on their political opponents and behaving as if they are the actual criminals, Democrats have every incentive to resist an effort that, if successful, might actually see some of their ranks imprisoned on false charges, and competitive elections gutted. They cannot be crippled by a failure of imagination as to how far Trump might go; the pardons, too, were unthinkable four years ago, and yet they happened, striking a dangerous blow that will become all the more damaging if not vigorously opposed and countered by those who value democracy.

There is no way forward but to confront the president and his minions on their continued aim to crush American democracy in favor of an untrammeled Trump. If the GOP intends to spend the next two or four years arguing why it’s good that a gang of white nationalists attacked cops and sacked the Capitol, with the end goal of criminalizing the Democrats, then the Democrats need to turn this crisis to their advantage, and double down on identifying Trump as a violent-minded would-be dictator who coddles criminals, and his party as gutless lackeys who can’t stand up to this disgrace of a president.

Trump Keeps on Keeping On With the Insurrecting

Ever since Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, culminating in the attack on the US Capitol, I’ve encouraged readers to view the former and now current president as engaging in insurrection against the United States. It wasn’t just the violence of January 6 that made this term click for me, though that was part of it. Rather, it was the sudden clarity that Trump was bent on overthrowing our democracy and the rule of law by whatever means necessary, and putting himself in power as a strongman or dictator figure.

Though it may seem counter-intuitive, Donald Trump resumed his insurrection shortly after being sworn in as our 47th president, first by pardoning those who tried to cancel an election by force four years ago. Through the pardons, Trump validated his previous efforts to overthrow an election, and with it, American democracy; he also signaled that he would protect those who engaged in violence on his behalf going forward, indicating a view of power incompatible with a chief executive bound by the rule of law and popular will. By arming himself with the tools of a dictator right out the gate, Trump openly resumed his attempt to overthrow our democratic form of government. Being president wasn’t enough for him; he wanted to rule without restraint.

In the last day or so, he’s committed another insurrectionary act by freezing the spending of possibly trillions of dollars authorized by Congress. The Ink has a great rundown of what’s happened and why Trump’s actions are illegal, and makes the case that usurpation of the Congress’s power to authorize spending is great enough to constitute a coup attempt by placing extreme and unconstitutional power in the president’s hands. Trump is trying to make his own laws rather than working with Congress to pass new ones; claiming he alone can direct spending, Trump is trying to elevate the presidency into a supreme power center. The Ink calls it a coup, but we can easily substitute my preferred term of “insurrection” in its place.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it because it’s foundational to the crisis we find ourselves in: Donald Trump is a sociopathic and violent man who, through his words and actions, has declared himself to be an open enemy of the United States. He channels not only his own sick lust for dominance, but the reactionary intent and backing of significant segments of American society, including Christian and white nationalists and the ultra-wealthy, who see democracy as an obstacle to power, essential freedoms as objectionable, and the right to dominate as their destiny. Yet a sort of repression of these basic facts has taken hold of the media and even large swathes of the Democratic party, so that when Trump does something that is obviously intended to destroy our government — such as rewriting the balance of power between the Congress and the president so that the former gets nothing and the latter everything — it is framed as Trump “shaking up” Washington, as “delivering on his campaign promises.”

Everything that has happened over the past week was utterly predictable, yet too many prefer to behave as if what is happening is not actually what it appears to be. But it is. Donald Trump wants to rule like a dictator, and the GOP is along for the ride, hoping to leverage his destruction and eventual passing from the scene into permanent one-party rule. I never dreamed that the U.S. would experience an insurrection in my lifetime, much less that so many would pretend it wasn’t even happening. Yet as Trump’s illegal acts of budgetary buccaneering start to cause real pain and suffering, this mass sleepwalking may yet start to pass, as more people begin to see and feel the tangible effects of lawless rule.

Trump II, Week One: As New President Engages in Political Mayhem, Democrats Dither

One week into Trump’s second presidency, the outlines of worst-case scenarios imagined by some us are already heaving into view. Here’s a partial-list of the serious, worrisome (to say the least) developments so far: purges of inspectors general charged with investigating government corruption; orders intended to scare and induce departures among federal workers; pardons of insurrectionists; an executive order to eliminate birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants; an apparently unquenchable obsession with buying/invading/annexing Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal; the appointment of a drunkard white nationalist as defense secretary; an ominous pause on federally-funded medical research; efforts to deny the existence of trans people; the deployment of the military within the United States to repel a supposed “invasion” by unarmed, destitute immigrants who made the mistake of being born poor and brown-skinned; the continued corrupt influence of billionaires on government policy; and Trump’s vicious attacks on a bishop who dared use a sermon to gently ask the president to be kind to the indigent and vulnerable.

In particular, by immediately violating his oath of office with the January 6 pardons and intent to ignore the plain language of the Constitution by repudiating birthright citizenship, Trump has made clear that his presidency will be lawless and anti-democratic — nothing we didn’t know prior to his inauguration, but nonetheless chilling to witness in real time.

Alongside this developing crisis of an authoritarian presidency, we are plagued by a parallel emergency: the broad failure of the Democratic Party to act as a pro-democracy opposition party in the face of this long-advertised onslaught of executive orders, proclamations, and illegal firings. With a handful of notable exceptions, and with some possible further stirrings in the past few days, congressional Democrats have hewed to a largely non-confrontational approach that emphasizes the idea of finding common ground with Trump while holding him to account on the narrow grounds of whether he’s working to lower prices for American consumers. Every day that goes by without strong Democratic opposition to Trump’s agenda brings us one step closer to the normalization of the abnormal, and to the rule of the powerful over the rule of law.

Most shocking to date is the Democrats’ lack of effort to define the nature of the Trump presidency for citizens. In the absence of such an initiative, Trump has had free rein to do what many warned that he would do, which is to overwhelm the American people with so much disorienting activity that the whole seems both unstoppable and unintelligible. Even in a more ordinary political environment, defining your opponents is politics 1A; in our present situation of studied efforts to overwhelm the body politic’s ability to comprehend Trump’s extremism, the Democrats’ lack of effort is borderline incomprehensible.

What’s particularly infuriating is that the Democrats’ strategy doesn’t need to be particularly complicated, particularly at this early stage of Trump’s presidency. Over at Talking Points Memo, for example, associate editor David Kurtz has proposed that the Trump administration be viewed through what he calls the “three horsemen of the Trump II apocalypse”: retribution, corruption, and destruction. Kurtz suggested this trio of angles not only because they broadly capture key aspects of Trump’s second term agenda, but as an acknowledgment that the MAGA onslaught demands a framework to help us grasp it. 

Complementarily, The Editorial Board’s John Stoehr observed recently that the country is facing the unprecedented challenge of a “demented criminal president” who is likely to ignore the Constitution and the rule of law, relying on subordinates to carry out his illegitimate orders with the knowledge that he will simply pardon them to avoid any possible repercussions. This, too, is a great frame for understanding the Trump administration, capturing both his fundamental lawlessness and a baseline insanity that’s arguably much more advanced than eight or even four years ago.

Alongside the Democrats’ lack of urgency in defining the corrupt and authoritarian ends of the Trump administration, they’ve been remarkably lackadaisical about identifying the forces beyond Trump that are benefitting from and abetting his rise to power. The religious right, the billionaire class, white nationalists: all are societal actors that must also be countered in different ways, and whose influence, once properly acknowledged, could help build opposition to how Trump is working to benefit such groups at the expense of the rest of us. We are not just facing “a demented criminal president,” but a broad reactionary movement (effectively described by historian Thomas Zimmer and others) that seeks to push American society back at least half a century, funnel wealth ever upwards, and impose extremist Christian beliefs on an unwitting citizenry.

I’ve harped so much over the need to frame events for the American people not only because it’s inherently right to help citizens understand their political reality, but because a proper understanding of this reality is necessary in order to counter MAGA’s attack on America government, society, and freedoms. Here’s one example among many possibilities: last Friday, Trump declared that he had fired a dozen or more inspectors general. This action violated the legal requirement that Congress be given 30 days notice of such terminations, yet was largely buried by major news sources like the New York Times. Trump and his allies presented the firings as both normal for a new administration and necessary to root out government corruption. For an ordinary person casually following the news, it all could come across as no big deal, and even as evidence as Trump is cleaning up Washington (as Greg Sargent observed in a recent episode of the Daily Blast podcast). But if the Democrats had already worked to alert Americans to the coming retribution, corruption, and destruction (to use Kurtz’s framing) of the Trump presidency, they would have had a hook for attacking these firings — they could talk about how Trump was illegally firing the IG’s so that he and his cronies could better engage in corrupt activities, given that they are empowered to act as watchdogs against waste and abuse in government agencies. The blur of the news could have been arrested, and the Democrats would have been much better positioned to do both short- and long-term damage to Trump’s agenda.

I want to emphasize that describing the depravities of the Trump administration in broad, easy-to-grasp terms is just a starting point, though a necessary one. We obviously are all still figuring out how to stop an authoritarian movement that is willing to ignore the law and subvert government to its own ends. As Stoehr admits, “Like a lot of liberals and Democrats, I don’t yet know how to resist a president who is criminal enough to ignore the courts (or turn a blind eye to crimes committed in his name) and demented enough to ignore public opinion. I don’t yet know how to think about politics as applied to a president who won’t act like any president who came before him.” But it’s going to be a lot harder to figure out winning political strategies if Democrats don’t help ordinary Americans understand what’s going wrong in the first place.

Hegseth Hack Job

With the Senate’s narrow approval of Pete Hegseth as defense secretary (Vice President J.D. Vance cast the tie-breaking vote), Democrats need to realize that only the first stage of the fight over Hegseth is over. Manifestly unfit for office, indeed arguably an active danger to the country given his reported propensity to show up to work drunk, there’s no simply moving on from this embarrassment of an appointment. If the president and his Senate allies were foolhardy enough to empower such a man, then the opposition needs to make sure Trump and the GOP end up eating this shit sandwich they’ve just forced America to buy. If Hegseth is as unfit as we have reason to believe, then it will not be long before evidence of his depravity begins to surface. Whether it’s his drinking, his violent sexism, or his affinity for white nationalism, this guy is a ticking time bomb for our national security. Indeed, we could go a step further and say that Democrats have an affirmative obligation to hold to account a man they know is poison both to national security and to the orderly running of the U.S. military; they should actively encourage service members and citizens alike to contact their Democratic members of Congress should they encounter evidence of his near-inevitable incompetence and recklessness to come. There should be no resigning ourselves to a man who will surely weaken or severely damage our national defense

With January 6 Pardons, Trump Shows Us That the Insurrection Never Stopped

With his sweeping Day One pardons for the vast majority of the January 6 insurrectionists, President Donald Trump committed a heinous and unforgivable attack on America that bookends his original insurrection. By loosing his loyalist army from jail and blocking ongoing investigations of those not yet convicted, Trump has declared himself an enemy of the United States — at war with democracy, at war with the rule of law, at war with ordinary citizens who have good reason to fear the return of these terrorists to their cities and towns. Particularly despicable are the pardons of leaders like Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and Proud Boys head Enrique Tarrio, who were for all practical purposes accomplices in Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results, the armed muscle to his lies and legalistic mayhem about a “stolen” election.

We can’t defend our democracy if those who attack it so directly and violently are treated as above the law. This was the case when Trump evaded justice for his coup attempt, and this is the case now as his foot soldiers — whom Trump has called “political prisoners” — are freed, as if they did nothing wrong on January 6 when they beat cops, hunted down politicians, and tried to stop a duly-elected president from taking power.

Though the president has broad pardon powers, this action clearly lies outside its legitimate use. As Brian Beutler wrote in anticipation of this travesty, “Pardoning violent January 6 felons would be an impeachable violation of the president’s oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution from criminals who sought to replace it with mob rule.” But beyond a doomed yet necessary impeachment effort by House Democrats, I think it’s equally important for Democrats to communicate to the public righteously and incessantly about how Trump has started his second presidency by doubling down on lawlessness and violence through these pardons. This cannot be allowed to be just another outrageous and unstoppable thing Trump did. Like his insurrection, it is the crossing of a line that, if normalized, will change America in dangerous, anti-democratic ways that will harm and diminish us all.

So while it’s not possible at this moment to undo Trump’s act, what we can do is work to accomplish the next best thing: to forge his own action into a rhetorical weapon against him. Wielded correctly, these illegitimate pardons can stir public unease, enrage the Democratic base, introduce stirrings of regret in non-enthusiastic Trump voters — and remind America that there is such a thing as right and wrong, as good and evil. We are in a fraught moment, with a majority of voters having cast their ballots for an authoritarian sociopath, but without many of them fully comprehending the consequences of putting Trump back in power. The crimes committed by the January 6 insurrectionists — both the violence against police and the larger end of overthrowing an election — are easily understood and viscerally repugnant.

But this weapon’s potentially most important target isn’t going to be Trump — it’s going to be every single Republican elected official who greeted the pardons with either celebration or silence. This is a weapon to keep the GOP on defense for literally years, even after Trump has left the scene, as their opponents ask them the simple question: Why is it acceptable to pardon people who beat police officers and tried to overthrow democracy?

This moment is also a clear test of the Democratic Party, particularly those members of its congressional leadership like Senator Chuck Schumer whose continued calls for bipartisanship ring not just hollow but crazy, as the president they want to work with just released from jail the mobs that tried to kill many of them. There is no point in treating Donald Trump like a normal partner in government, surely not after these pardons. Ordinary Americans will not automatically understand the full horror and meaning of Trump’s action, but they will have a far better chance of doing so if the Democrats respond with the appropriate levels of contempt and condemnation — which does not involve critiquing Trump out of one side of the mouth while praising him as a reasonable partner from the other.

It is simply not credible to think that Donald Trump’s lawlessness will stop with these January 6 pardons. Indeed, it has not, with other first day actions that included a direct attack on birthright citizenship (which is unambiguously guaranteed by the Constitution). The Democrats, to maintain their credibility as a major political party, must defend the rule of law. Even more obviously, they must defend Americans from violent threats. The January 6 pardons touch on both cardinal responsibilities; if they fail to treat then with the appropriate level of seriousness, it won’t just be Donald Trump who’s crossed an unforgivable line.

With a “shock and awe” strategy that views the American people as an opponent to be subdued, the incoming Trump administration hopes to create the appearance of strength to compensate for the outrageous and largely unpopular far-right agenda Trump is embarking on. Trump and his allies truly want Democrats and ordinary citizens to assume that they’ve already lost, that Trump is simply unstoppable. I don’t have to tell you how absurd it would be to buy into this transparently self-serving strategy by going along with it. Attacking the January 6 pardons would mean attacking Trump exactly where he wants us to believe he’s most powerful, but most certainly is not. The pardons were a reckless, high-risk, high-reward move, and none of us should let this fresh round of insurrectionism get passed off as business as usual.

On Eve of an Insurrectionist's Inauguration, Cowardice Grips America's Leaders

On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, this analysis out from the New York Times is alternately infuriating and depressing in its account of how the powerful are rushing to accommodate themselves to Donald Trump’s rule, and how those who should be his opponents are either urging cooperation or wandering about in a demoralized daze:

Defiance is Out, Deference is In: Trump Returns to a Different Washington

As Donald J. Trump prepares to take the oath of office for a second time, much of the world seems to be bowing down to him and demoralized opponents are rethinking the future

Much of the world, it seems, is bowing down to the incoming president. Technology moguls have rushed to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage. Billionaires are signing seven-figure checks and jockeying for space at the inaugural ceremony. Some corporations are pre-emptively dropping climate and diversity programs to curry favor.

Some Democrats are talking about working with the newly restored Republican president on discrete issues. Some news organizations are perceived to be reorienting to show more deference. The grass roots opposition that put hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Washington to protest Mr. Trump just a day after he was sworn in back in 2017 generated a fraction of that in their sequel on Saturday.

Yet, for all its reporting on acts of submission and deference, the piece curiously avoids noting the most basic reasons why any of this behavior is happening. The reality is that many of the rich and powerful are accommodating themselves to Trump because they expect him to rule in a lawless, vindictive fashion, a prospect that some fear and others welcome. He has already indicated that he will illegally set federal law enforcement on his “enemies,” while his first term demonstrated that he is happy to corruptly use the federal government’s vast indirect powers, like the rewarding or withholding of government contracts, to punish perceived corporate opponents and reward his cronies. In other words, the rich and powerful are accommodating themselves to Trump because they expect him not to be a normal president but an unrestrained dictator willing and able to break the law in pursuit of power.

This unspoken reality haunts the article like a lost conscience, making the piece an exemplar of the double-think currently at play in coverage of Trump. As when CNN reports that President Trump aims to “push the boundaries” of the Constitution as it describes his plans to violate and negate it, major news sources are suppressing basic, known facts about Trump’s plans and why he has seen corporate America metaphorically kiss his feet.

Likewise, the article’s reporting of demoralization among those who oppose Trump is tellingly selective. It quotes people who are exhausted and discouraged by Trump’s victory, but it downplays the fear they are also feeling, as well as the prime reasons why: because Trump appears set to further erode American democracy, including our ability to elect officials who oppose him. Plans to persecute and jail political opponents, and to staff the federal government with religious bigots, lackeys, and ideologues, are demoralizing because they reveal a man who seems bent on permanently ensconcing himself and his allies in power. Those who are used to working to win democratic elections are understandably dismayed at the prospect of challenging unchecked power — power that under our Constitution should be considered illegitimate, and described by ethical members of the press as such.

Not once does the article note that much of the political world is abasing itself before Donald Trump because so many fear his illegal and illegitimate abuses of power.  Not once, even though this is the black hole around which all their actions and fears orbit. It’s a fact so fearsome, in fact, that even the New York Times seems afraid to name it. 

Four Suggestions For Crashing Donald Trump's Inauguration Party

In the days since Donald Trump’s narrow win, it’s become increasingly clear that the Democrats will face a president bent on wrecking our democracy, undermining our economy, rolling back the fight against climate change, illegally prosecuting his opponents, and encouraging hatred and even violence against disfavored groups. As I’ve argued before, for the Democrats to see cooperation and bipartisanship as a reasonable path forward requires adopting a deeply selective view of what Trump has done in the past, what he has promised to do in the future, and what he is already starting to do as evidenced by his staffing choices and post-election messaging. A plain and honest reading of the facts shows that full-throated opposition is necessary for both the good of the Democratic Party and of the country.

The truth of our situation is that Donald Trump years ago declared himself to be an enemy of the United States, due to his failed 2020-21 insurrection, his multi-year quest for vengeance against those who defended democracy against his predations, and his promises of anti-democratic behavior to come. The Supreme Court’s intervention into the government’s prosecution of his crimes, and even his re-election, do not erase the fact that he committed an unpardonable injury against our country in attempting to overthrow the 2020 election results. The fact that a bare majority of voters voted for him does not change the underlying reality — that he is a deranged, power-mad man who would rather destroy our democracy and our freedoms than ever face any consequences for his illegal actions. There is no basis for thinking he has changed; if anything, there’s plenty of evidence that he’s more enraged and bent on illicit revenge than ever, based on his own words and actions.

Trump also poses a host of lower-order threats that amount to more than the sum of their parts, and that likewise call for unstinting opposition. The financial corruption he is poised to unleash, both to benefit himself and his allies, would bring a host of harms, from creating still more economic inequality to empowering an oligarchic class with unearned and dangerous levels of influence. Plans to staff the federal government with lackeys and incompetents will threaten Americans’ lives and livelihoods in countless ways, affecting vital government functions that most of us take for granted.

The constellation of threats that Trump poses cannot be set aside in Democratic political calculations, as if they might be counter-balanced by parts of Trump’s agenda that might do actual good for the country. It makes no sense for Democrats to try to find common ground with a man whose overall vision for American is so diametrically opposed to their own. Trump and the MAGA movement espouse an agenda that, were we to see it enacted in another country, we would not hesitate to label as authoritarian and illegitimate. For reasons both practical and moral, the Democrats can’t simply aim for harm mitigation; they must steer for democratic victory over the forces of racism, reaction, and autocracy that Trump embodies, based in the understanding that only a democratic and egalitarian America merits public legitimacy.

And so what Trump has done, and what he promises to do, requires the Democrats in turn to do all they can to bog down his presidency and diminish his power. The Democrats must do everything within their power to stop what evils they can, and to communicate to the public why their own pro-democracy, pro-working and pro-middle class vision is the right one for America. They must expose and communicate the illegitimacy of his authoritarian pretensions, including by everyday language and examples.

There is much to say about the various possible strategies that might blunt Trump’s power and roll back MAGA. But as a first step, and in honor of his impending inauguration, I want to lay out some concrete areas where the Democrats can act now and in the coming weeks to highlight and oppose Trump’s basic unfitness, the lawlessness he would bring to our country, and his contempt for mainstream American values. As I’ll discuss more in a follow-up piece, Democrats need to do as much as they can to take the initiative, wreck the idea that Trump represents some sort of overwhelming national consensus, and exploit lingering doubts about Trump even among many who voted for him. Metaphorically speaking, they need to crash Trump’s inaugural party.

To begin: given that Donald Trump has indicated that his first order of business upon taking office will be to pardon January 6 insurrectionists, the Democrats must raise holy hell around this obscenity. Their outrage should be aimed at unsettling a large swathe of the American people, reminding them of Trump’s propensity to violence and lawlessness. The army of degenerates — white supremacists, neo-Confederates, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers — who attacked the Capitol didn’t just attack a building. They attacked America; they attacked the rest of us. As Brian Beutler puts it, “Pardoning violent January 6 felons would be an impeachable violation of the president’s oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution from criminals who sought to replace it with mob rule.” Some of them aimed to kill Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, and other elected officials. Yet Trump’s highest priority is letting them loose on America’s streets, which raises plenty of questions beyond its inherent outrage. Does Trump intend for these ex-prisoners to be his own private, ultra-loyal militia? Does he think that they did not actually attack the Capitol, or, alternately, that attacking the Capitol was a just act?

Unlike the Democrats, Donald Trump understands quite well how very badly his insurrection still hinders his ability to win support in this country, an indelible reminder of his fundamental rottenness. Pardoning the terrorists who attacked the Capitol will be a grand bid to re-write history in a way that favors his revisionist, authoritarian vision. Defenders of American democracy need to recognize that the culpability and odiousness of the attackers must hold firm in the public record; erosion of this basic reality will only embolden Trump further. With the pardons, Trump is trying to close the door on a disqualifying past; Democrats should kick that door open and ask why Trump thinks it’s OK to attack America. As I suggested above, use the planned pardons to remind Americans right out the gate that he’s a depraved insurrectionist.

Second: though the window has arguably almost closed, Democrats should attack his nominees for cabinet and other high-level positions for their incompetence, their extremism, and their loyalty to Trump over the Constitution and the American people. Above all, they should use the nominees to highlight Trump’s contempt for the public and his dark vision for the country. Take Pete Hegseth, the nominee for Secretary of Defense. He’s a Fox News personality clearly unqualified at the most basic level to run as important and complex an organization as the U.S. military. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s plentiful evidence that he’s a raging drunk, an abuser of women, and a white nationalist, to boot. He has voiced his opposition to women being in combat. His nomination, in short, sends a loud message that Democrats should be unafraid to amplify: that for all his lip service to the U.S. military and American strength, Donald Trump doesn’t really care about either. He cares about one thing above all else — installing a bootlicker into one of the most important positions in U.S. government, and who has the added benefit of sharing his belief in keeping women in their place.

Other nominees, like RFK, Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services, former representative Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, and former Florida AG Pam Bondi for attorney general, also follow this template of incompetence, lickspittlism, and malice in varying proportions. RFK, Jr., a literally brain-wormed individual, lives in fantasy world where life-saving vaccines should be abandoned; meanwhile, Bondi made clear in her confirmation hearings that she won’t stand in the way of Trump’s desire to prosecute political opponents. Overall, the Democrats have a ready-made message of opposition: In nominating such figures, Donald Trump is showing his contempt for the American people, whether it involves the national defense, our health systems, or the rule of law. He only cares that he has people who will follow his orders, no matter how deranged they might be.

Next: Trump obviously sees it as a high priority to illegally prosecute his political opponents, such as former Representative Liz Cheney and Senator Adam Schiff, as well as persecute and harass other influential political players, such as major media. However, in the case of political “enemies,” it’s a reasonable assumption that Trump and his allies’ strategy is as much to make examples of a few people in order to cow far greater numbers of their political opponents. After all, the potential costs of sic’ing the Justice Department on dozens of Democratic senators and representatives would be unpredictable and more plausibly garner public backlash. Indeed, a poll out from the New York Times this weekend shows that a heartening 73% of Americans oppose “Trump pursuing legal charges against his adversaries.”

As observers like Jamelle Bouie have noted, Trump is not nearly as strong politically as he’d have us believe, and he is reliant to a significant degree on a divide-and-conquer strategy. Where illicit prosecutions are concerned, then, Democrats will need to rally around those targeted to signal that they are not alone, and to provide all available resources in their defense. And as some have argued, anti-Trump individuals outside the party should provide legal and monetary resources to defend those who Trump would try to isolate and destroy.

And last but not least: Trump has indicated that one of his highest priorities will be to deport millions of immigrants through a process that he asserts will be “bloody.” Those involved in organizing the efforts, such as former acting head of ICE Tom Homan, have said that U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants will also be deported, under the pretense that the Trump administration does not want to separate families. Democrats should not be taken in by these fake humanitarian concerns. Deportations of U.S. citizens would be a gross violation of their rights, full stop. “Donald Trump is deporting U.S. kids to Mexico” should be an unending talking point. It doesn’t matter what polls might say — Democrats would absolutely own the high ground, and it beggars the imagination to think they wouldn’t be able to rally majority support around a defense of literally our fellow American citizens, and children, at that.

The Democrats could run this defense as a benign mirror opposite to the MAGA campaign to slander all immigrants for the crimes of a few: find some targeted families with particularly adorable kids who speak perfect English, and publicize their plight. Above all, humanize and normalize them, and shame those who would deny them the full benefits of citizenship. And if the result is to cause the Trump administration to double-down on family separation — well, let’s fight that battle again, too, and see how well it goes for them this time. Democrats cannot submit to the MAGA logic that some Americans are less American than others.