That’s not accountability, Karoline. That’s revenge. “Accountability” would be to either defeat them at the ballot box or charge them for malicious prosecution or something along those lines. Having your henchmen go out and find something to charge them with so you can punish them is just tin-pot dictator garbage.
They just say this stuff out loud now and nobody really calls them on it. “Yeah, Trump’s a tyrant! What else is new?”
The Financial Times’ Edward Luce runs down the litany of Trump’s crimes (so far) with startling clarity and then he asks a question that I think we all need to take seriously:
That his economic ratings are in freefall should be a source of alarm not complacency. Less than a year after Trump was elected, the separation of powers is not working. Congress is irrelevant. The Supreme Court is quiescent. The media is punch drunk. Democrats are fragmented. Independent federal agencies are losing autonomy. The markets are high on the AI gold rush, crypto deregulation and the prospect of a return to easy money. Stephen Miller, Trump’s most influential domestic adviser — prime minister to Trump’s king — calls the Democratic party a domestic extremist organisation and wants to suspend America’s constitutional habeas corpus right to due process. He is a true American autocrat.
It has been widely observed that the speed of America’s democratic slide surpasses that of other “elective autocracies” such as Narendra Modi’s India and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey. But that understates Trump’s impatience. Others have shifted to authoritarianism with relatively fast-growing economies, which makes it easier to sustain public support. Trump’s trade war and his “big beautiful [budget] bill” will rob most Americans of income growth. The idea that the disaffected middle will therefore clip Trump’s wings in next year’s midterm elections is quixotic.
Having silenced most institutional dissent within his first nine months, what could Trump accomplish in the next 14?
This isn’t a rhetorical question and I think we need to start thinking about it. Their shock and awe has succeeded beyond their wildest expectations and the entire society from top to bottom is stunned. (His observations about why the financial markets continue to just carry on is important too.)
What have they got left?
Well, it seems that Trump is now fully engaged on vengeance and domination. He and Miller believe they are untouchable and they aren’t trying to hide it. Trump is bent on revenge against his personal enemies. Miller is seriously committed to completely destroying all political opposition. The establishment Republicans are fine with that and the Supreme Court seems poised to let them do it. And then there’s the fact that Trump seems to be provoking the world into some kind of war. I think we know what that looks like.
This isn’t hysteria or doom saying. Nothing says that this has to happen. There are any number of scenarios that could thwart it. But it could. They have already made much, much more progress than we could ever have dreamed possible.
Seriously — what’s next?
Until very recently the consensus among historians and political observers was that President Richard M. Nixon was the most corrupt president in American history. There were other scandals, of course, many of them quite serious. But none of them featured the same crude, gangster quality of the Watergate scandal, the details of which shocked and appalled the American people when they were uncovered. The public learned that the president of the United States acted like a common thug in private, issuing orders to his enforcers in language closer to that used by the mobsters featured in the recent hit movie “The Godfather” than the dignified leader of the free world.
He was an amateur compared to Donald Trump.
Everyone knew that Nixon was a sour type, who liked to whine that he had always been treated unfairly but people obviously overlooked that personality flaw. He had, after all, just won one of the biggest landslide victories in electoral history and had more or less succeeded in ending America’s involvement in the Vietnam war, the most important issue of the time. Nixon, however, was consumed with resentment at his perceived enemies about whom he nurtured a long list of grievances. He was obsessed with punishing them and perceived the presidency as his vehicle for doing so.
In June of 1973, John Dean, the former White House Counsel, testified before the Senate Watergate Committee for a solid week. And he revealed the existence of a formal Enemies List, that included reporters, actors, business leaders, political rivals, Democratic donors and more. which he had compiled for the president the purpose of which was explicitly “to use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
He saw no limits on presidential power. He wiretapped reporters, weaponized the IRS and infiltrated groups like the student movement and the Black Panthers. At one point he’d even wiretapped his own National Security Council to find leakers and as everyone later learned he had even formed a secret group called “the Plumbers” that was tasked to do criminal wet work like burglaries, members of which were among those caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate setting in motion his eventual downfall.
Much as President Trump was stopped by the proverbial “guardrails” in his first term, Nixon was thwarted in some of his worst nefarious plans by career bureaucrats and members of his administration who refused to follow through on his orders. Attorney General Elliott Richardson along with his deputy William Ruckelshaus ended up resigning when Nixon ordered them to fire the Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who was investigating the Watergate cover-up. In another pivotal moment it had been revealed in testimony that Nixon had been taping his conversations and Cox demanded that Nixon turn them over. The president eventually found someone who would fire him, but the die was cast.
Another Nixon administration scandal had unfolded during this period that would have been huge if it weren’t for the fact that the president was enmeshed in an even bigger one. The Vice President, Spiro Agnew, had been found to have been taking bribes for government contracts in the form of envelopes full of cash as Vice President of the United States. He was forced to resign and was let off with a minor fine despite the fact that such clear cut criminal behavior would have cost anyone else jail time.
The corruption and abuse of power was overwhelming. Nixon had started out his second term with an impressive electoral mandate and a 68% approval rating. But as the scandal deepened and at each of those pivot points it sank dramatically, dropping all the way to 24% on the day he left office. The American people were shocked by Nixon and his accomplices’ behavior and they wanted him out.
This is an old familiar story but it’s worth looking at it again as we contemplate a couple of events that unfolded over the weekend. We all know the litany of President Trump’s abuse of power in this second term, much of which is still being litigated. It is pervasive across virtually every aspect of American society at this point and even more blatant than Nixon’s who at least had the good graces to try to keep it under wraps.
On Saturday Trump published a very odd post on Truth Social. It was addressed specifically to “Pam”, as if it was meant to be a text or a direct message to Attorney General Pam Bondi that he had mistakenly posted publicly. (He’s done that before.) His own staff wasn’t sure if he had meant it to be published. It was quickly deleted and then promptly reposted, likely because they realized it had already been distributed all over the internet because it was essentially an order to get cracking on prosecuting the enemies on his list. “They’re all guilty as hell but nothing is going to be done,” he proclaimed.
He complained about the Virginia US Attorney who said he couldn’t find the evidence to get a conviction against Trump’s arch enemy NY York Attorney General Letitia James, declaring “There is a GREAT CASE,” and “I fired him, he didn’t quit.” His intentions could be clearer:
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility, they impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!! President DJT.”
Nixon may have been paranoid but at least he didn’t sound like a petulant teenager.
Also on Saturday MSNBC’s Carol Leonig and Ken Dilanian reported that “Deportation Czar” Tom Homan was caught red handed by FBI agents accepting a paper bag filled with a $50,000 cash bribe in exchange for contracts, exactly the same crime that sent Spiro Agnew packing. They even have it on tape. But instead of prosecuting him or even forcing him to resign, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel dropped the case and Homan is evidently completely secure in his job.
When people heard about Nixon’s crimes the Republicans in Congress abandoned him and the courts ruled against him. He was forced to resign. But Trump went farther than Nixon ever contemplated when he incited an insurrection to overturn the election he lost in 2020, and he was rewarded with a triumphant return to the White House four years later. Now he’s literally committing the same crimes and his people are gladly carrying them out with the full support of his party.
One of the big questions has always been whether President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon did more harm than good. Its seems clear today that it did. It opened the door to what was possible if only you could maintain partisan political support in the Congress and had a compliant media. Today we know that despite the efforts of some reformers in the Congress to rein in future presidents after Watergate they relied on good faith adherence to norms and rules and it clearly wasn’t enough. That open door was just waiting for someone like Donald Trump to walk through it and this time it’s just business as usual.
Makes you proud to be an American doesn’t it?
Or a North Korean:
Meanwhile, Trump refuses to negotiate to keep the government open:
I’m sorry. Until we get transgender for everyone there’s simply nothing to talk about.
He’s fine folks. Nothing to worry about just because this person has lost his mind and has control of the world’s most powerful military. It’s all good.
Carry on.
Not to deny Stephen Miller all the opprobrium he so richly deserves, Jonathan Chait comments on Donald Trump’s pet psychopath’s call to Armageddon on Sunday.
Chait observes:
Republicans have never stopped complaining that Hillary Clinton once described a portion of Trump’s base as “a basket of deplorables.” Yet over the weekend the president’s most powerful adviser depicted half the country as worthless, irredeemably wicked, and fated for destruction.
“We are the storm,” Miller shouted (leaving “troopers” off the end). “We” are the builders, the heirs to the Greeks and the Romans, the source of all things bright and beautiful, etc. You, dear Readers, are destined to be ground under his boot heel.
MAGA disciples who once raged at Clinton over her deplorables comment bristle today at comparisons to 1930s Germany. Just not enough to reconsider behaviors that evoke them.
Chait lampoons Trump 2.0 as less gleaming than Miller’s depiction of Trumpism bearing western culture on its shoulders:
I feel less confident than Miller does that future historians will laud Trump’s distinct additions of legalized bribery, casino-style decor, and Ultimate Fighting Championship matches on the White House lawn as cultural and philosophical advances. Yet Miller confidently conscripted the pillars of Western civilization into his domestic political war.
David French laments that MAGA in fact gets Christianity upside down and inside out. It has adopted Trump’s gnawing malice as God’s instrument and Miller as MAGA’s high priest of grievance. There is no sign of them coming back to Jesus.
Chait sees the irony:
Having nothing to share but bitterness is a strange insult for Stephen Miller, of all people, to hurl. But part of the Miller worldview is an almost proud insistence on holding his enemies to standards he refuses to abide by. The Trump camp has insisted that the fault for last year’s attempts on Trump’s life lies with anybody who has attacked him as dangerous or authoritarian. Yet Trump himself attacks his enemies in such terms routinely, and Miller seems to be attempting to exceed his boss’s Manichaean style by depicting their opponents as the literal embodiment of malevolence.
Watch Miller’s speech and Trump’s refutation of Christ’s admonition to “love your enemies” if you want to see malevolence in action. If Americans don’t wake up to it soon, the concentration camps coming online will begin to fill, and not just with foreign migrants.
George Herbert Walker Bush once delicately described such situations as being in “deep doo- doo.” And that’s putting it mildly. Tom Lehrer once put in song.
* * * * *
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Immediately after Donald Trump’s reelection last fall, I told my mother, 93, “We’re in trouble.” Rarely have I been so prescient.
The Bulwark’s Mona Charen feels it. So does David French at The New York Times. As does Michael Tomasky at The New Republic.
Charen once found discussions of America’s founding salutary as “essential guidance for the present and future.” The lives of the founders, the Federalist Papers, etc. But the other day she had to turn off a podcast on such matters because what we are experiencing now looks like the end of the story. The wise but flawed system of government born out of the Enlightenment seems to be “spiraling down into authoritarianism following a convulsion of baseless hatred and self-inflicted ignorance.”
Charen laments:
Trump doesn’t hold a monopoly on baseless hatred, but he and his fascist enablers have elevated it to a place of centrality in American life. They are using the full power of the state to intimidate, to punish, to silence, to exile, and even to kill. Is America still a free country? Less so than at any time in memory. It’s not too late to reject the fascists, but it’s damn close.
MAGA Christianity makes French’s head spin. The faithful who came on Sunday to mourn Charlie Kirk, cheered when his widow, citing Christ’s example, forgave his murderer. But they also cheered Stephen Miller’s Joseph Goebbels-adjacent eliminationist speech. Miller declared everyone opposed to Donald Trump’s (and Miller’s) authoritarian makeover of the United States as enemies of western civilization.
“Particularly disturbing was the rising crescendo,” French writes, “as Miller repeatedly declared other people — human beings whose lives are every bit as precious as those of every person in that stadium — to be ‘nothing.’” That way lies gas chambers.
French laments how MAGA Christians get their own faith so miserably wrong. “It is a great tragedy of our time that so many Christians see Trump’s malice as an instrument of God’s divine plan.”
Reviewing the Tom Homan bribery story from MSNBC’s Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian, Tomasky ponders what it means that we learned that Trump’s DOJ killed the investigation the same day Trump ordered prosecutions of three people what done him wrong. He declared New York Attorney General Letitia James, Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, and former FBI Director James Comey “guilty as hell.” Of what, it doesn’t matter. He demanded retribution and right now, “We cant [sic] delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.”
It doesn’t matter that “Presidents Harris, McCain, and Romney would [never] have publicly ordered their attorneys general to prosecute three high-ranking political opponents, two of them elected officials.” Trump has turned the DOJ into an instrument of his vengeance.
He’s openly violating the U.S. Constitution, defying the courts, and violating the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, the Fourth, and the Due Process clauses of both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. He’s threatening the Fourteenth’s birthright citizenship clause, and he’s turned our government into an open-air extortion market.
Tomasky writes:
Combine this with what happened last week to Jimmy Kimmel, and I think we can now just say it. The United States of America is no longer a democracy. It’s not a totally authoritarian state. I’m obviously writing these words of dissent, as are hundreds, thousands of others like me. We’re still having elections, so far. Most courts are still functioning normally. At many levels where the White House can’t just do turnkey autocracy, there is ferocious resistance. And there is a defiant public making their voices heard, alongside a not-insignificant faction of Trump voters who are growing disillusioned with what they’re seeing. And as the polls tell us, the mad king is failing to win people over, and public opinion, at least much of the time, still matters too. These facts can reassure us.
Count me anxious.
The irony to all this is that the rock upon which Donald Trump built his MAGA church is Donald Trump. Donald Trump is built upon the stable constitutional democracy that he exploited that made him wealthy and famous (not that he’d admit it). The world is watching as he and his reactionary Christian-nationalist allies strangle that golden goose. Put another way, it is not clear today if Trump is chopping down the tree of liberty (Miller wants to water with blood) or standing on the branch he is sawing off.
* * * * *
Have you fought dicktatorship today?
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May Day Strong
No King’s One Million Rising movement – Next national day of protest Oct. 18
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Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
Axios: President Trump likely “wouldn’t oppose” Congress creating a national holiday honoring Charlie Kirk, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday.
Huh. The last I heard he wanted fewer holidays:
If you look at the date you can see that this was around Juneteenth. So I think we know what that was all about.
Charlie Kirk didn’t think Martin Luther King should have a holiday. So maybe Trump could just change that one to Kirk and nobody would be allowed to say a word about it lest they anger the cult. That’s the way these things work now, right?
Never forget the bleach thing:
*TRUMP: NO REASON TO GIVE NEWBORN BABIES HEPATITIS B VACCINES
— Fed (@lord_fed) September 22, 2025
*TRUMP ON TYLENOL: DON'T TAKE IT
The same man who said to inject disinfectant during Covid?
pic.twitter.com/4BMb93hIOS
And this:
THE PRESIDENT: And, by the way, NIH, what they’ve done — I spent time over there — and I like this stuff.
You know, my uncle was a great person. He was at MIT. He taught at MIT for, I think, like a record number of years. He was a great super genius. Dr. John Trump.
I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, “How do you know so much about this?” Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for President.
His performance was shockingly bad in the worst crisis of his presidency and he lost the election largely because of it.
Unfortunately some fools put him back in the White House. Fast forward five years:
Trump: “I think it has — I think it’s very bad. They’re pumping, it looks like they’re pumping into a horse. You have a little child, a little fragile child, and you get a vat of 80 different vaccines, I guess. 80 different blends. And they pump it in. So ideally, a woman won’t take Tylenol.”
(My God….)
Babies who are infected in the first year of life have about a 90 percent chance of developing a chronic infection. And about 30 percent of children infected between the ages of 1 and 5 develop chronic hepatitis B. Left untreated, chronic infections can lead to irreversible liver damage, scarring, failure and cancer over time. These complications can be deadly.
Utter bullshit. They can get it from their mothers or from contaminated items. Here’s what can happen:
But babies who are infected in the first year of life have about a 90 percent chance of developing a chronic infection. And about 30 percent of children infected between the ages of 1 and 5 develop chronic hepatitis B. Left untreated, chronic infections can lead to irreversible liver damage, scarring, failure and cancer over time. These complications can be deadly.
This is another one of Bobby’s weird anti-vax fetishes and Trump is all onboard because he’s a moron.
Dr. Trump vibes again. Awesome. The last time that happened we lost hundreds of thousands who didn’t have to die.
Yeah, he’s not so careful with what he says. Understatement of the year.
This is insanely irresponsible and MAGA kids are going to die. (Normal people are going to talk to their doctors and will be told that this is nonsense.) But kids will die and mothers will suffer, either through pain they have to endure in pregnancy or guilt that they took a Tylenol and now their child is neurodivergent because of it. All of that is cruel and stupid.
There is no part of American society that this cretin isn’t destroying. Nothing. We knew it when we saw how he handled the pandemic and how he incited a violent insurrection rather than admit that he lost. His malignant narcissism combined with his crippling ignorance didn’t stop Americans from voting for him again though, all because the old man didn’t make them feel better and they didn’t like the Black woman and eggs cost more than they should. Now we all reap the whirlwind of that inane decision.
Stopped clock watch:
G. Elliott Morris has a good piece today about a blind spot American companies have about the make-up of their customer base. (If you’re interested in this stuff I highly recommend his Substack. It’s worth the money and he’s building out something we are going to need now that the media is caving to MAGA.)
Last week, ABC/Disney canceled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of television stations that carry the program. The backlash has been swift: As I pointed out Saturday morning, search interest for “Cancel Disney+” has hit an all-time high — even higher than the boycott movements from when Disney “went woke” in 2020-2022. The current Disney boycott is now 4x as large as any over the last 5 years, gauged by search interest:
This is not limited to internet posters and Google searchers; investors are worried too. Disney’s stock is down 2% over the last week, while the overall market is up nearly 1%.
This all intersects with a point I’ve been making in this newsletter for a while: many people fundamentally underestimate how unpopular Trump is. As the Disney episode illustrates, they do this at their own peril.
Compare Trump’s topline job approval (-11) to that of other recent presidents, and he stands out quite clearly (not in a good way):
And this is an even bigger problem: the intensity gap
He wonders why all these companies are capitulating considering the threat to their customer base. He hypothesizes:
From what I can tell, executives at these companies are making a simple statistical mistake that is imperiling their decision-making: They are assuming that all U.S. adults, in 2025, look like U.S. voters in 2024. Let’s do some quick math:
- 53%: Trump’s topline disapproval in our polling average today
- 48%: The percent of U.S. adults who “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s job as president.
- 49.8%: The share of the vote Trump won among voters in 2024
Now, you could say that since 49.8% is bigger than 48% — or, similarly, that Kamala Harris only won 48.3% of the vote in 2024 — then to keep the public on your side, you need to do whatever the 49.8% wants. But this ignores a crucial fourth statistic:
- 64.1%: The share of voting-eligible adults who turned out to vote in 2024
That’s right, not all adults voted in 2024. To calculate the share of adults who voted for Trump, you need to multiply the percentage of adults who voted by the percentage of people who voted for Trump:
- 64.1 * 0.498 = 31.9%
That gives us 32%. So:
- Under a third of American adults are Trump voters
- 53% of adults are Trump disapprovers — with 48% intensely opposed
It’s not hard to see how making decisions for the former, pissing off the latter, would be bad for business. Elections reward coalitions of voters, while markets respond to consumers — voters and non-voters — whose preferences show up not just on Election Day, but in audience ratings, subscription revenue, purchases (like trips to Disney World), etc. If a president is unpopular with the broader public (and not just the out-party), you should expect friction for brands, platforms, and legacy media that appear to bend toward him.
This is an excellent point. Looking at the election as a guide to your customer base is true folly. A whole lot of people don’t vote but they do buy your stuff. And a large majority of those people can’t stand Donald Trump.
He goes on to analyze the media companies specifically (he used to work for ABC so knows whereof he speaks) and believes that they just really don’t understand the modern news ecosystem, their place in it or how the audience has accepted the “brand” that says facts have a liberal bias. He’s got a point although I would suggest this was a very long term right wing project that was begun long before Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump. This goes back to Nixon and Roger Ailes in the 1970s.
Anyway, the bottom line is this:
Trump won a close national vote in 2024, but he remains broadly unpopular today. The share of the adult population that voted for Trump is closer to one-third than to “most,” and the intensity of resistance against him is 2x the intensity of his supporters. Businesses that don’t understand this are destined to make key strategic and tactical errors — as are parties and politicians.
I think he’s right. Fingers crossed that it translates into a block on Trump’s power in 2026.
MIller spoke at the big Charlie Kirk event yesterday. He was very moving. My favorite highlights:
“Our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion, our lineage, and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture, they built the industry….
We stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And for those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us. What do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, you are jealousy! You are envy! You are hatred! You are nothing! You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity….
“To our enemies, you have nothing to give, you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to share, but bitterness. We have beauty, we have light, we have goodness, we have determination, we have vision, we have strength. We built the world that we inhabit now.”
The enemy he speaks of, of course, is us.
His boss agrees:
So much healing.