Greg Olear is a gifted journalist and thinker who has a terrific blog. He writes about politics, literature and whatever he wants.
This is his obituary for Mitch McConnell, who has been a toxic force in our nation’s politics. Mitch is probably not dead yet but we should remember his toxic legacy.
Olear writes:
What with Donald Trump losing wars to Iran, using the Justice Department and the FBI as his vendetta agencies, sic’ing his murderous ICE Gestapo on innocent residents, building concentration camps, hawking presidential pardons, fucking up the global economy, destroying our institutions, bulldozing the White House, bankrupting farmers, plundering on a galactic scale, withholding the money he owes to the woman he raped, fluffing Putin and Netanyahu, spewing crazy shit, and behaving every day like a complete and total asshole…
…and with the erstwhile Senate Majority Leader off the grid for a full month with some undisclosed medical issue and presumed dead…
…and with the media focusing its attention on the Renfieldian Lindsey Graham, who we know for sure bought the farm…
…with all of that, it’s easy to forget just how much demonstrable harm Mitch McConnell has done did to the people of the United States and to American democracy.
Since his funeral appears to be imminent, it’s only right that we give the Turtle his (dead) flowers.
When Donald Trump put his short orange fingers on Lincoln’s Bible in January of 2017, Mitch McConnell was already one of the worst Americans to ever draw breath. As of that date, no individual in my lifetime—not Nixon, not Kissinger, not even Ronald Reagan—had done more damage to the United States than the malevolent Gentleman from Kentucky.
I wrote a short piece about it on my now-defunct online magazine in July of 2017, under the title “Worst Americans: Mitch McConnell.” It read:
Rather than participating in the governance of the country through the time-honored tradition of compromise, he spent eight years as a living, breathing roadblock. The current Senatorial system of obstructionism has his fingerprints all over it.
He engaged in a SCOTUS staring contest with Obama concerning the Merrick Garland nomination and did not blink until Neil Gorsuch, a pro-corporation-anti-human conservative of the worst kind, was sworn in. This will have malefic impact on our country for the rest of my natural life.
When debriefed on the extent to which malignant Russian intelligence forces were compromising the presidential campaigns and the election, he threatened to accuse Obama of playing partisan politics if he went public with the bombshell. Once again, Obama acquiesced. With the election over, and no Constitutional clause for an invalidation of the result, he is in a position to make noise about this act of war by an enemy power. He has done nothing.
His wife, Elaine Chao, is the daughter of the Taiwanese shipping magnate James S.C. Chao, who is responsible for both personally enriching his son-in-law and for contributing to his campaigns, which would be fine if not for the big cocaine bust nobody paid any attention to. Elaine Chao serves in Trump’s cabinet, because of course.
He censured Elizabeth Warren for attempting to read a letter by Coretta Scott King at the confirmation hearing of inveterate racist and Putinist collaborator Jeff Sessions.
He is the prime mover in the Senate of the campaign to repeal Obamacare. The toxic healthcare bill he’s floated would throw 23 million people off insurance and lead to thousands of deaths and bankruptcies. It would also have a deleterious effect on the economy, as many thousands of jobs would vanish if the ACA were repealed. He doesn’t care. At all.
The story of his recovery from polio being financed by the government is bogus, but he did suffer from the disease as a child, and he did recover thanks to a program put in place by FDR. That he is actively seeking to deny medical care to so many sick children (that’s who’s on Medicaid, mostly: children) speaks volumes about his loathsome character.
He’s sympathetic to the Confederacy.
Worst of all, and quite unlike almost every Republican involved with Trump, he’s astonishingly good at his job. He wants us to die and go bankrupt and be ruled by the laws of the Christian right and continue to have our elections stolen by the Kremlin. And he’s savvy enough to make it happen. As GOP strategist Rick Wilson said, “Washington is littered with the bodies of people who underestimate Mitch McConnell.”
He’s the worst person in America. And arguably the most dangerous.
That’s hardly an exhaustive list. And it was written far too early to cite the second impeachment, which McConnell handled even more abominably than he did the first.
[O]ur system of government gave the Senate a specific task. The Constitution gives us a particular role. This body is not invited to act as the nation’s overarching moral tribunal. We’re not free to work backward from whether the accused party might personally deserve some kind of punishment….
[F]ormer President Trump is constitutionally not eligible for conviction….But after intense reflection, I believe the best constitutional reading shows that Article II, Section Four, exhausts the set of persons who can legitimately be impeached, tried, or convicted. It’s the president, it’s the vice-president and civil officers. We have no power to convict and disqualify a former office holder who is now a private citizen.
Thus did McConnell concoct a technicality that allowed Trump to run for office again in 2024—even though, as Mitch well knows, under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, Trump is ineligible to serve.
In December of 2019, in “Obstruction is the New Secession,” one of the first pieces at PREVAIL, I expounded upon McConnell’s role as sand in the gears of democracy:
DEMOCRACY IS NOT, and was never intended to be, a zero-sum game. The winners are not supposed to take everything. Change comes slowly and incrementally—often frustratingly so, for progressives. But the flip side is that the United States has worked pretty damned well for a quarter millennium, becoming arguably the greatest nation the world has ever known, because of the willingness of its political parties to compromise.
In the run-up to the Civil War, Congress bent over backwards brokering one compromise after another, in a valiant attempt to preserve the union. These compromises infuriated Northern abolitionists (“This word compromise, when applied to human rights and constitutional rights, I abhor,” trumpeted Thaddeus Stephens in 1850), just as they vexed the Southern slaveholders. Ultimately, the peace did not hold—the differences between slave and free were irreconcilable—but the point is that, in an era when members of Congress sometimes kicked the shit out of each other, politicians still went to great lengths to compromise.
Compromise only works when both political parties are willing to budge. If one of those parties abdicates its responsibility to represent the American people, if it exists simply to obstruct the work of the other—if it flat-out refuses to compromise, ever, about anything—the US system of government, always a fragile thing, breaks down.
After the election of 1860, the Southern states said, “Fuck it. We’re not working with Abraham Lincoln no mater what,” and they seceded from the Union. After the election of 2008, Mitch McConnell and the Republicans said, “Fuck it. We’re not working with Barack Obama no matter what,” and proceeded to obstruct every single thing he tried to do, large or small, national security be damned. To avoid compromise, the South chose Civil War. To avoid compromise, McConnell allowed Moscow to sabotage the 2016 election. Both acts are tantamount to treason. (That the Party of Lincoln slowly morphed into the Party of Obstruction is a sad irony).
Obama, after spending most of his first year in office coaxing the recalcitrant Republicans to work with him, eventually gave up, and, like Lincoln, used the vast powers of the office to take action without the rival party’s input. This worked, sure, but it was not without consequences. As I wrote in “Obama the Terrible” in February of 2014, after the story broke about the president’s drone strikes on suspected terrorists:
If a terrorist can be blown to smithereens at the whim of a single individual, then so can I, and so can you. If a terrorist can be held indefinitely without trial, then so can I, and so can you….
Today, the man with his finger on the button is the genial Barack Obama, a man I voted for, a man I like and admire, a man whose judgment I trust. The president strikes me as grounded, guarded, pragmatic, and smart. Whatever some may believe, Obama is not Hitler. But the next guy might be. And therein lies the terror. Not recognizing this clear and present danger is Obama’s greatest failing as president.
While he has not yet gone to these terrifying lengths, the despotic Donald Trump has certainly exploited the “executive order” precedents set by the frustrated Obama. The GOP refusal to compromise—to so much as allow a vote on Supreme Court nominees and House bills!—begat both Obama’s executive power grab and the “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference in the 2016 election (in Mueller’s words), which McConnell through his cynical inaction aided and abetted. The result is Donald Trump—corrupt, venal, vain, petty, criminal, installed and controlled by Vladimir Putin—presiding over the most powerful executive branch in recent memory.
Many factors contributed to this outcome, yes. But the root of the problem is the Republicans’ refusal to compromise. The GOP are not small-d democrats any longer. Mitch McConnell and his confederates are the modern heirs of Christopher Memminger, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis. Which should come as no surprise:
Fortunately, the Confederate States of America did not have a state TV network spewing pro-slavery propaganda to North and South. There was no Fox & Friends to normalize the brutal war crimes of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Sean Hannity was not there to fawn over James Henry Hammond and extol the virtues of the Mudsill Theory. Nor did Jeff Davis have a Rudy Giuliani scurrying around Transylvania, calling into question Robert Lincoln’s ties with the Pullman Palace Car Company. If so, the Civil War might have played out quite differently.
The GOP does not want to Make America Great Again; it wants to make America white again—and, especially, to keep the White House white. This is a tall order. Like the antebellum South, the demographics do not favor the GOP. The country is becoming more diverse each year. White people will soon be a minority in the United States. The demographic shift could well turn Texas blue—which would be the death knell for the Republican Party. A blue Texas plus blue California, New York, Illinois, and New Jersey mean a Democrat POTUS for the foreseeable future.
McConnell surely understands this. He knows he’s running on borrowed time. If he can’t control the executive branch, or Congress, he has to infiltrate the judiciary—the only one of the three branches whose members, conveniently, serve for life. So far, this objective has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Obstruction has seen to that.
When it became clear that McConnell would never allow the Senate to vote to confirm Merrick Garland, President Obama should have gotten creative. FDR would have ordered Garland to take the seat after a waiting period of 60 days—something, anything to ensure not only that Garland took his rightful place on SCOTUS, but that the politics of obstruction failed spectacularly. Instead, Obama avoided a fight, assuming that Hillary Clinton would win and it would all be moot. This colossal error, an obvious blunder even at the time, guarantees a conservative judiciary—and perhaps, depending on the fragile health of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, an extremely conservative one—for decades.
The lesson is this: If the new president finds herself with a blue House and a blue Senate, she needs to be relentless. She needs to move quickly, decisively, and fearlessly. Yes, she should attempt to engage the GOP. But at the first whiff of obstruction, she should ignore them completely going forward. It is not her responsibility to beg them to do their fucking jobs. Let the Republicans go to Canossa if they want a seat at the table—and once they are at the table, let them do more than refuse to play along. The politics of obstruction must be eradicated, just as the Confederacy was. Traitors should have no voice in the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
The irony is, since I wrote that six and a half years ago, Donald Trump has eradicated the politics of obstruction. Ruling by executive order, by decree, by lawfare and intimidation, he has plowed through the feeble roadblocks set up by the opposition. By controlling the executive and judicial branches, he has made Congress moot.
The other irony is, even in semi-death, McConnell continues his life’s work of obstruction.
Yes, Trump has eclipsed Mitch McConnell as the worst American of my lifetime. So have other monsters Donald has empowered: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Stephen Miller, etc.
But without Addison Mitchell McConnell III, there would be no Donald Trump. Remember this: Mitch fed the cancer. He nurtured the tumor. He prevented the oncologists and surgeons from administering treatment. And knowing he possessed the singular cure, he chose to sit on his hands as the terminal disease ate away at our democracy.
That is the sum of his life’s work. That is his ignominious legacy.
Rick Wilson explains why the Senate should refuse to confirm Todd Blanche as Attorney General of the United States. It’s not just that he has covered up the Epstein files and refused to obey the law ordering their release. It’s not just that he personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, after which she was moved to a comfy low-security prison. It’s not just that he negotiated the sweetheart deal to create a slush fund for J6 prisoners and Trump’s disgraced friends. It’s not just that he pledged that Trump and his family would not be audited by the IRS.
The problem is that he is Trump’s personal lawyer, not the champion of justice on behalf of the American people. He will never say no to Trump.
There is a particular species of Washington careerist who convinces himself that the oath he swore was a formality, a bit of throat-clearing before the real work of pleasing the boss begins.
Todd Blanche is an apex predator of that species. He is the man who looked at the Department of Justice, an institution built to stand between raw political power and the citizen, and saw not a sacred trust but a tool to please Donald Trump.
A very large, very expensive tool, with 115,000 employees with guns and badges and legal power that he could hand to Donald Trump like a caddy handing over a nine iron.
Trump has now nominated this man to be Attorney General of the United States, permanently, with the title and the office and the flag behind the desk. So let us be clear about what confirmation would ratify.
Let us catalog the sins.
Start with the original sin, because everything else flows from it. Todd Blanche does not know the difference between his client and his country. When he walks into Main Justice every morning, the man he serves is not the American people. It is the man who signs his continued employment.
Adam Schiff put it with the precision of a former prosecutor: at every turn, Blanche has been unable to put aside his role as Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer and represent the American people instead.
This is not a metaphor. Blanche literally was Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, in three of the criminal cases brought against him in 2023 and 2024. He sat at the defense table. He argued for absolute presidential immunity before the Supreme Court, co-authoring the brief that helped birth the monstrous doctrine that a president is a king within the four corners of his office. And then, having done that work, he was installed atop the very department that had prosecuted his client, where he could finish the job from the inside.
The Attorney General’s client is supposed to be an abstraction so large it can be hard to hold in your head: two-thirds of a billion people, but the Constitution and the idea that the law applies without fear or favor.
Blanche traded that abstraction for a man. He knows exactly who he works for. He has never pretended otherwise. That is the whole problem, and it is disqualifying before we get to anything else.
People confirm men like Blanche imagining the damage as prospective, a risk to be managed. It is not prospective. He has been running the building since April 2, when Trump defenestrated Pam Bondi for the crime of trying, and failing, to gin up prosecutions unsupported by facts and law. Blanche’s qualification for the promotion was that he would not make the same mistake.
Under his leadership, more than 16,000 people have walked out of the Department of Justice, including roughly a quarter of its attorneys. Think about that number. Not a purge of the top layer, a hemorrhage of the institution itself, the career prosecutors and agents and staff who are the actual muscle and memory of federal law enforcement.
He fired the people who worked January 6 cases. He fired people who worked the Jack Smith investigations. He moved to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leadership, the men who organized the assault on the Capitol, as though the whole thing had been a misunderstanding.
And then he pointed the emptied-out machine at new targets. The Southern Poverty Law Center got indicted on a theory so thin that federal law enforcement had reportedly known about and been aided by the very informant program Blanche stood at a podium to condemn. A whistleblower alleges one of his enforcers ordered Alabama prosecutors to rush the SPLC indictment through despite doubts about whether the case was any good. This is what a weaponized DOJ looks like from the inside: the case comes first, and the facts get conscripted to serve it.
Nothing captures the man better than the persecution of James Comey. The former FBI director posted a photograph of seashells arranged to spell “86 47” and deleted it. For this, Blanche’s Justice Department indicted him. Twice, actually, because the first grand jury effort was such a legal embarrassment they had to go back for another bite.
Understand what the government is alleging: that a retired official committed a felony threat against the president by arranging shells on a beach. Adam Schiff, who spent six years as a federal prosecutor, said he had never seen a case this weak, and offered that in the future, when some DOJ lawyer proposes bringing something this flimsy, there should be a new name for it. He also named the actual motive without flinching. The case exists, Schiff said, because Comey is a political opponent, because the president called for his prosecution, and because Todd Blanche wants to keep this job.
There it is. The Attorney General of the United States, or the man who wants to be, running a federal prosecution not because a crime occurred but because bringing it is his audition tape. Bondi got fired for not being able to deliver the president’s enemies. Blanche learned the lesson. Comey is the receipt.
The same apparatus has been grinding away at Letitia James, at Schiff himself, at Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, whom Trump has publicly demanded be prosecuted. The through line is not evidence. The through line is a list of people who made Donald Trump angry.
Reread the Comey section. Retired federal official. Instagram post. Photograph of seashells arranged on a beach to spell “86 47.” Felony indictment. Not one grand jury but two, because the first attempt was such a legal embarrassment they had to go back for a second scoop.
Now the money, because there is always money in this corrupt griftorama era.
Trump had a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. Blanche settled it, and the settlement’s centerpiece was a fund, an “anti-weaponization fund,” to compensate people who claimed the federal government had done them wrong. The total was set at $1.776 billion. They chose that number as a nod to the Declaration of Independence, which tells you everything about the self-mythologizing grandiosity of these goons. They wanted to loot the Treasury and dress it up as a Fourth of July parade.
Who would the fund pay? Blanche was asked, directly, whether Proud Boys and Oath Keepers convicted of beating Capitol Police officers could collect. He would not rule it out. Anybody in this country can apply, he said, and the commission will set the rules, as though he were describing a raffle and not a mechanism to funnel taxpayer money to men who assaulted cops on live television.
Pardoned January 6 defendants lined up to file claims. So did Michael Cohen. Even Trump’s own allies gagged; a Republican congresswoman called it a billion-dollar-plus slush fund to his face.
The backlash got loud enough that Blanche went before a House committee and said the fund was not going forward, period. But watch the hands. Judge Leonie Brinkema asked him to put that in writing, under penalty of perjury, a sworn declaration that the thing was dead in any manner, under any name. He refused. The Justice Department called her request unnecessary and declined to file it. A man who genuinely meant it would sign the paper.
Blanche of course wants the option to bring it back, and the tax provision buried in the settlement, the one that quietly cleared away audits of Trump and his family and his businesses, that part he defended and that part stayed. The slush fund was the misdirection. The immunity was the trick. Fortunately, a Florida judge nuked the immunity case this week, but I suspect Blanche will fight like hell to bring it back.
Gotta protect the client, right, Todd?
And then there is Ghislaine Maxwell, which is where the contempt for the public curdles into something genuinely dark. When the Epstein files became a political inferno that scorched Trump’s own base, Blanche personally proposed, at a White House crisis meeting, that he interview Maxwell himself. The convicted child sex trafficker. Nine hours across two days.
He was not there as a prosecutor. He offered her immunity for the conversation and made no promises about her sentence, which is a strange way to interrogate a witness and a very natural way to conduct a job interview for a pardon. Weeks later, Maxwell was transferred to a lower-security facility, reportedly in violation of standing Bureau of Prisons policy. The Deputy Attorney General of the United States flew to Florida, sat across from a woman convicted of trafficking children, and gave her a 300-page platform to rewrite history and distance Trump from his old friend, never once challenging her court-proven lies.
Epstein’s victims and their families are outraged over this nomination, and rightly so. Even Pam Bondi, in her own testimony, put the Maxwell decision on Blanche.
Blanche is running the largest cover-up in American history, protecting sexual predators and harming their victims…and that alone utterly disqualifies him from becoming A.G. This is the tell. When the choice was between the survivors of the worst crimes imaginable and the political protection of Donald Trump, Blanche chose Trump, and he chose him by cutting a deal with the woman who helped commit those crimes. There is no version of the Attorney General’s oath that permits that. There is only the client.
I’ll repeat it again for the MAGAs in the back: the Attorney General does not work for the president in the way a White House lawyer works for the president. That distance is the entire point. It was built in blood and scandal, hardened after Watergate, when the country learned what happens when the Justice Department becomes the president’s personal enforcer.
The AG is supposed to be able to look at the man who appointed him and say no. To decline the weak case. To refuse the vendetta. To refuse to sign on to lies and oversights, no matter how much complying would help the President. That’s not Blanche, Blanche has inverted every one of those principles. He brings the weak case. He runs the vendetta. He signs on to every lie. He empties the building of everyone with the integrity to object and fills the silence with loyalists. He has taken the one office in American government whose independence is vital for the rule of law, and he has offered it, on his knees, to a man who wants to use it as a weapon.
The Senate is being asked to make this permanent. To take the temporary occupant who has done all of this in a matter of months and hand him the title, the tenure, and the flag. Every senator who votes yes is not voting for a man. They are voting to erase the line between the president’s lawyer and the people’s lawyer, forever, and to reward the man who took the eraser to it with the greatest prize in American law.
Todd Blanche knows exactly who he serves. It’s not the American people.
When Elon Musk started his Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), one of his first targets was USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the agency that sent food, medicine and health workers to the world’s neediest nations.
Musk and his DOGE shut down USAID. On February 3, 2025, Musk boasted on Twitter:
We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.
Clearly, Musk was very proud of what he did. American farmers complained that they lost $2 billion in sales that had previously been purchased by USAID to ship abroad to needy people.
Immediately, there were dire predictions that people would die without the food and medicine provided by the U.S.
Musk at first ignored the critics, but eventually insisted that no child had died as a result of closing down USAID.
Elon Musk is newly minted as humanity’s first trillionaire, but the world’s richest man seems grumpy. And he definitely is not a fan of mine.
“Kristof is lying through his teeth,” he announced on social media this week.
I got on his nerves for pushing back at his claims that his demolition of the United States Agency for International Development last year did not cost lives. The fracas began after Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, said that Musk had “possibly sentenced to death” a large number of children, and Musk retorted that it was “time to sue this liar.”
“There is not even a single dead child!” Musk protested on social media. I noted that I had met many families of children who had died — and that’s when he concluded that I was lying.
Musk’s assertion that not a single child died is absurd, yet he doubled down: “They cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!”
On X, I began to give Musk some names. Let me elaborate:
Jibia was a 10-year-old girl, ranking third out of 58 students in her fourth-grade class in Rwamwanja, Uganda. Aid cuts meant that the local clinic ran out of $2 bed nets to protect from mosquitoes, as well as anti-malaria medicines. Jibia died of malaria last July, her mother told me outside the family home. Medical records confirmed that, and health workers told me that she would have been fine without the aid cuts: Replacing her tattered bed net with a new one could have prevented malaria, and in any case drugs would have helped her to recover promptly.
Yamah Freeman hemorrhaged while pregnant with her third child in her village in Liberia. The United States had provided ambulances to the local hospital, but the aid cuts under Musk and President Trump meant that the ambulances had no fuel. The strongest young men in the village placed her on their shoulders and raced down the path toward town, shouting encouragement to her as they ran, but she bled to death along the way. Her parents and sister told me about this, and I visited her grave.
Achol Deng, 8, had been infected with H.I.V. at birth in South Sudan but had been kept alive by American-provided medicines costing just 12 cents a day. The dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. and the resulting chaos meant that she lost her caseworker and access to medicines, and soon died of an opportunistic infection, health workers told me.
I could keep going. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts have cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide. A study published in The Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates, the aid defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030.
These figures may not be accurate; we just don’t have solid mortality data, and the aid cuts have also reduced data collection. What I can say after visiting numerous impoverished villages is that aid cuts are unquestionably costing the lives of many children.
Some prominent conservatives leaped to the defense of Musk, saying in effect: Why is it our job to save the lives of children in South Sudan? Why don’t rich liberals write checks? Why don’t other countries do more?
Those are fair questions. But if any of us came across an ambulance that had run out of gas with a hemorrhaging woman inside, surely we would happily hand over a $10 bill to save her life.
Until Trump’s second term, American aid cost just 23 cents for every $100 of gross national income and saved a life approximately once every 10 seconds. Seems like a bargain to me. Certainly it appears wiser than spending billions of dollars on a war with Iran.
I say “wiser” because all this is not just about compassion but also about self-interest. Aid money serves national security and protects us from diseases. I’ve noted that the current Ebola outbreak in Africa may have gotten out of control precisely because we cut aid spending in the region.
Yes, other countries should do more, impoverished countries should be less corrupt, and our own aid can be allocated more wisely. But note that some countries in Europe are significantly more generous than America, spending up to 10 times as much on aid as a share of national income as we do.
Should liberals donate more to humanitarian causes? Sure. But compassion isn’t a liberal impulse — it’s a human one. It was evangelicals and Republicans who in 2003 started the single best aid program ever, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR; it has saved more than 26 million lives so far. Some of the most heroic aid workers I’ve met in dangerous locations have been Christian missionaries, from nuns to doctors; they would dispute the idea that empathy is woke.
It’s reasonable to ask how much we should spend or how we should reform the system. But why would anyone begrudge $2 bed nets or $4 malaria vaccines to save children’s lives?
So let me offer a challenge to Musk: Come with me on a reporting trip to South Sudan or Somalia or Mozambique. Meet starving children whose lives can be easily saved. Hold them. Look into their eyes. Talk to their terrified moms.
You’ll understand that these kids are just like ours, except that they didn’t do as well in the lottery of birth — and that just because we can’t save every child’s life doesn’t mean we should save none of them.
Back in the late 1960s, opponents of the war in Vietnam used to torment President Lyndon B. Johnson by shouting at him,
Hey, hey, LBJ,
How many kids did you kill today?
I can’t think of a word that rhymes with “Musk.” Can you?
Dan Froomkin writes a blog called “Press Watch,” where he keeps tabs on journalism.
In today’s post, he chastises the media for reporting uncritically Trump’s claim that he would impose a 20% toll on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz.
Both JD Vance and Marco Rubio had previously said that any attempt to put tolls on an international waterway was a violation of international law.
The headline, Froomkin wrote, should have been: “Trump Makes Crackpot Iran Announcement.”
Trump’s claim was ridiculous from the start, but everyone reported it as fact. True, he made the claim, but what he claimed would never happen.
So once again, TACO: Trump Chickened Out!
He wrote:
Well, it’s moot now, with Donald Trump this morning suddenly reversing his big announcement yesterday morning that the U.S. military would be taking over the Strait of Hormuz and demanding a 20 percent toll from ships that pass through it.
As it happens, I was just finishing up a post about how credulous the first-day coverage of his crackpot plan was. And now that I’ve been proven right, I still feel there’s some value in sharing what I found.
In a nutshell, my argument was that everyone – including American political journalists — knew that Trump’s “plan” was never going to happen.
It was a bluff from a mentally unstable man desperate to put the war he started behind him. It was completely unworkable and illegal. It would have put American servicemembers in harm’s way. No one would ever pay it.
It’s wasn’t going anywhere.
But you wouldn’t have known that from the coverage it got from our major news organizations. They treated it like a serious proposal. They gave it big headlines. They engaged in a lot of stenography.
Many news organizations paired the toll threat with Trump’s announcement ordering the resumption of the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports – an actual command that Centcom quickly acknowledged. (Centcom, notably, hasn’t said a peep about any further orders – because there aren’t any.)
One was real, the other was fantasy.
Now that said, if you pored through a number of different news sources yesterday, you could see hints of the real story. That’s because the reporters aren’t stupid. They knew the toll plan was bullshit, they were just too cowardly or lazy to tell you straight up.
If you add them all up, as I will below, you will see how clear it was that the plan was doomed – even though none of the stories, individually, reached that conclusion.
“How would a U.S. toll work?” she asked. “This isn’t exactly clear,” she wrote. “Mr. Trump did not elaborate on how the 20 percent fee would be calculated or how it would be collected.”
In fact, there was no evidence that anyone else in his administration knew anything about it.
“How would a toll affect shipping and markets?” she asked.
For a large tanker carrying two million barrels of oil, for example, the fee could add over $30 million in costs. Consumers would likely face higher prices as a result.
Because of the high cost, some analysts said they doubted whether the fee would come into force.
In a CNN explainer, Elisabeth Buchwald also asked and answered question about the plan, including “Who would foot the bill?”
She spoke to John McCown, a senior fellow at the Center for Maritime Strategy, who told her that the fee will likely be high enough that no party is willing to pay it:
As a general rule of thumb, shippers pay carriers 2%-3% of the value of their goods in fees, according to McCown, former CEO of shipping logistics company Trailer Bridge. A fee around 10 times the size would likely be entirely unaffordable to shippers, he said.
The Associated Press article by Ben Finley, Farnoush Amier, and Konstantin Toropin headlined “Why it’s so difficult for the US to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz” described a number of serious problems with the plan. Notably, the authors wrote that “restoring oil tanker traffic in the vital Middle East shipping corridor to prewar flows likely will require a much bigger armada of U.S. warships if not tens of thousands of American troops on Iranian soil, experts say.”
Jason H. Campbell, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and a former Pentagon official, told the reporters: “It’s very difficult to envision any scenario where you could satisfactorily secure the Strait of Hormuz absent ground forces.” Campbell said that would require tens of thousands of troops who would likely face insurgent attacks.
Relying on warships instead would require “a very large chunk of the U.S. fleet being dedicated to this on an open-ended basis,” Michael Eisenstadt, a former U.S. military analyst, told them.
In fact, Trump abandoned an earlier promise to protect the strait, Clayton Seigle, a nonresident scholar in energy security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told them. “Those naval escorts, U.S. warships, larger commitments like boots on the ground never came because I think that the rhetoric got a little ahead of our risk tolerance,” he said. “And when push came to shove, the United States was not ready to deploy its Navy, to deploy its other military forces in the capacity that would be needed to even have a shot at neutralizing those threats.”
Buried in a Wall Street Journal story that was mostly about the blockade being reinstated, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Feng, and Jared Malsinnoted the Iranian resistance to U.S. control of the strait. They quoted a spokesman for Iran’s armed forces, who said, “We will under no circumstances allow the United States to interfere in the management of the Strait of Hormuz.” The journalists conveyed “the likelihood of a continued standoff over control of the strait.”
Like I said, it’s all moot now. It took Trump all of 25 hours to chicken out — to go from posting this….
The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World. The process and formation will begin immediately
Based on highly productive conversations with Middle East leadership, I have decided to replace the 20% United States Reimbursement Fee with Trade and Investment Deals that the various Gulf States will be making into the United States.
American journalists would have done everyone a favor – including their own news organizations – if they had said what they knew to be true instead of quoting Trump saying things they knew to be bullshit.
But because of their cowardice and laziness, we had another insane 24-hour news cycle of everyone chasing after whatever Trump said last, no matter how absurd it was. As I wrote in June they should “Stop putting whatever Trump says about Iran in the headlines.”
Will they ever learn?
In the meantime, I urge the journalists who wrote about this yesterday to write something for tomorrow about how Trump cooked up this ridiculous idea and blurted it out, and why, and why he changed his mind so quickly.
They should use this sequence of events to tell the American public the other thing they all know to be true, but are too cowardly and lazy to write about: That Trump is deranged; that he is mentally unfit for duty.
As for why he changed his mind, presumably, someone he trusts told him his plan was crazy and unworkable. Too bad journalists hadn’t done the same.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the 14th Amendment is the foundation of modern civil rights law and that the 14th Amendment today is under attack by reactionary forces. Historian Heather Cox Richardson provides here a history of the 14th Amendment, which many–perhaps most–Americans don’t know.
I wish she had written a few paragraphs on the subject of birthright citizenship, which is the current target of Trump and his henchman Stephen Miller. The Supreme Court recently upheld birthright citizenship but by only a slender margin. The dissenters said that the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to apply only to formerly enslaved Black Americans.
Justice Katanji Brown Jackson eviscerated that claim in a brilliant 20-page commentary. This is the full decision in Trump v. Barbara. Justice Jackson’s scathing response to Justice Clarence Thomas begins on p. 32. She argues that birthright citizenship was always intended to apply universally, not just to Black Americans who were formerly enslaved. Read it. You will be glad you did.
Today marks the anniversary of a dramatic reworking of the U.S. constitutional order.
On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation that brought the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life. They required the federal government to protect the equal rights of all American men.
In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.
Northern Republican lawmakers refused to accept this caricature of freedom. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.
Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.
But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.
Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.
It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history: it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.
The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.
The Fourteenth Amendment overturned that idea, recognizing the federal government’s power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.
Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states.
The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.
Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.
Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”
At the time, Bork’s supporters expressed outrage at what they insisted was Kennedy’s smear campaign, for surely the right-wing attack on the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment would never so completely undermine modern society.
Two faculty groups filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday to block the Texas Tech University System from implementing its policies on how professors can discuss race, gender and sexual orientation in the classroom.
The suit, which marks a major legal challenge against a Texas university system over increased restrictions on what can be taught, focuses on two memos issued by Texas Tech Chancellor Brandon Creighton in the last academic year.
One memo, sent in December, banned content that advocates for one race or sex as “inherently superior to another” and prohibited faculty from teaching that there are more than two sexes. The second memo, sent in April, ordered universities to cut all academic degrees “centered on” sexual orientation and gender identity.
The two groups, the national American Association of University Professors and its Texas chapter, argue Creighton’s policies violate their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
Who is named
The lawsuit names Creighton, a former Republican lawmaker, as a defendant, as well as the nine members of the system’s Board of Regents. Representatives from the Texas Tech University System did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This case presents an extraordinary system of censorship in higher education,” the suit reads, “in which professors in the Texas Tech University System are prohibited from teaching the most basic scholarship, while at the same time not fully comprehending the contours of prohibitions that place them under threat of losing their employment and livelihood.”
The groups in the lawsuit say the system’s policies “suppress” professors’ constitutionally protected speech and “obscure documented history, facts and theories.”
In one instance, a law professor was blocked from teaching information about race related to the landmark Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. Sandford, which ruled that Black people were not U.S. citizens, according to the filing. The lawsuit against Texas Tech also says that medical faculty have been instructed to remove content about treating transgender patients and racial minorities. Professors are not named in the filing.
Allegations
The lawsuit argues that Creighton’s policies violate professors’ Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process because its language is “so vague and ambiguous” that they are “unable to discern what is, and is not, permissible.” That ambiguity, the filing says, has led to a chilling of speech.
Tuesday morning in Houston, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo did what he’d done nearly every morning for 35 years. He woke at 5 a.m., kissed his wife goodbye, loaded his van, and drove off to pick up his construction crew in Magnolia Park, the neighborhood that’s anchored Houston’s Mexican American community for a century.
He’d raised three sons in that city; they became a teacher and two engineers. He had no criminal record, and he was partway through the legal process of getting a work permit, biometrics and fingerprints already done.
By 7 a.m. he was lying face down on Canal Street with a bullet in his abdomen, crying out for help in Spanish while a federal agent knelt over him talking on the phone. He died at Ben Taub Hospital, the same hospital where two of his sons were born. The Harris County medical examiner has ruled the manner of his death a “homicide.”
ICE says he rammed their vehicle and “weaponized” his van to run down an officer, who fired in self-defense. His family says he almost certainly thought the unmarked cars tailing him were thieves after his work tools, because the men following him wore no insignia identifying them as law enforcement.
The League of United Latin American Citizens says photographs of the vehicles show little visible damage, which is a strange thing for a van that supposedly rammed a law enforcement vehicle hard enough to justify lethal force. David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute reviewed newly surfaced footage and concluded it appears to show ICE initiating contact with Salgado Araujo’s vehicle, not the other way around; Norm Ornstein looked at the same evidence and called it “cold-blooded murder.”
The federal government has released no body camera footage, no dash camera video, and no photos of the damage it claims exists. The three eyewitnesses who were in the van, including Salgado Araujo’s own brother, are in ICE custody and can’t speak out. The Harris County District Attorney is trying to investigate, but her office says access to key evidence “remains under federal control.”
The president of Mexico announced this week that her government will pursue legal action against the United States over the killing. The historical inversion packed into that sentence is complete: Mexico is now appealing to international bodies to protect its citizens from American police violence.
Which brings us to the question people keep asking me on my radio show and on social media: “Are we in a police state yet?” And the question underneath it, the one that really matters: “How would we know?”
I lived in Germany for years, working with Salem International, some of that time in the little village of Höchheim hard up against the East German border, where the guard towers and the death strip were part of the landscape you saw on your way to buy bread.
I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin in 1986 and felt what a mature police state does to ordinary people: the lowered voices indoors, the glance over the shoulder before anybody said anything real. (If you’ve never experienced that world, watch the brilliant film The Lives of Others; it captures the East German surveillance state better than anything else on film.)
My spiritual mentor and employer in Germany, Gottfried Müller, had been an intelligence officer in Hitler’s army who renounced Nazism, was captured by the British in Iran, and spent most of the war in prison; he devoted the rest of his life to peace work.
And my dear old friend Armin Lehmann, who was the teenage Hitler Youth courier in the Führerbunker who delivered the news to Hitler that the war was lost (I still have a picture of him with Hitler, that’s on the cover of his book), spent his last decades in America as a peace activist.
Both men told me essentially the same story about how it began. It started getting scary, they noted, when the regime began to explicitly come after verbotener Gedanke, “forbidden thought.” For example, the radio stations, they said, used to encourage ordinary Germans to call in — to the shows and to the police — and “out” their neighbors who weren’t sufficiently loyal to the regime. Informing became one of the highest expressions of patriotism.
The Germans even have a word for the process by which their entire society was brought into line during 1933 and 1934: as Timothy Snyder notes, it’s Gleichschaltung, a coordination, a synchronization.
Germany didn’t become a police state in a day, and there was never an announcement.
There was just a series of Fridays, each one slightly worse than the last, until one day the question, “Are we in a police state?” had become dangerous to ask out loud.
So instead of waiting for an announcement that’s never coming, let’s do what Herr Müller would have done and run through the inventory necessary to create a fascist police state:
— A police state is a nation where the police answer to the leader rather than to the law, and where nobody outside the leader’s circle is permitted to hold them accountable. It’s a nation where they can arrest, beat, torture, imprison, and even kill with both anonymity and impunity.
In January, ICE officer Jonathan Ross reportedly shot Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, through the window of her car in Minneapolis, and Border Patrol agents killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, on a public street days later. Within hours, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was calling both dead Americans “domestic terrorists,” a slander she refused six times under oath to retract.
Murder is a state crime, and in America state investigators have always worked police shootings alongside the feds. Not this time. The FBI agreed to a joint investigation with Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension the morning Good was killed, then reversed itself the same day after Trump declared Minnesota officials “crooked.”
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty called the categorical withholding of all evidence “unprecedented in American history.” Now the same machinery has closed around the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston. It won’t be the last time.
— A police state imprisons its dissidents, and it makes the sentences spectacular so everyone else gets the message.
On June 23, federal judges in Fort Worth sentenced eight members of a local book club who held a July 4, 2025 protest outside the Prairieland ICE detention center to a combined 450 years in prison, a figure the Justice Department bragged about in its own press release. Benjamin Song, who fired at an officer after the officer drew his weapon on the crowd, got 100 years.
Maricela Rueda, a doula and mother who was acquitted by the jury of every violent count against her, got 70 years in prison. Five others who were likewise acquitted of the attempted murder and firearms charges got 50 years apiece, because prosecutors persuaded the jury that wearing black and using the Signal messaging app constituted “material support for terrorism.”
And Daniel Sanchez Estrada, a Denton teacher and poet who wasn’t even at the protest, got 30 years for moving a box of anti-fascist political zines at his wife’s request, literature the prosecutors admitted was protected by the First Amendment.
For comparison, Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years for orchestrating the seditious conspiracy of January 6th, and Trump pardoned him anyway. In this America, leading an armed attempt to overthrow the government earns you a pardon, while a book club that protests ICE earns its members what amounts to life without parole.
— A police state criminalizes thought itself, as well as any expression of or action on that thought, no matter how “otherwise legal” it may be.
Last September, Trump signed NSPM-7, a national security directive that names “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as “indicators of domestic terrorism” and calls anti-fascism the “organizing rallying cry” of domestic terrorists. Consider how many of the roughly 75 million Americans who voted against Trump it could plausibly cover.
In December, then-AG Pam Bondi ordered every federal law enforcement agency to mine five years of data for anything “Antifa-related” by average Americans and hand it to the FBI, and directed the Bureau to publicize its domestic terrorism call-in tip line and establish a cash reward system for informants.
When Herr Müller and Armin told me about German radio hosts urging listeners to inform on their neighbors, I thought I was hearing history, but it turns out I was hearing a forecast, and the American version pays cash.
— A police state knocks on your door in reaction to your opinions, should you dare to express them out loud or in print.
In January, a Rochester software professional named David Streever sent a three-paragraph email to then-ICE Director Todd Lyons after watching the videos of ICE killings in Minneapolis.
“You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher,” he wrote. “You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.”
The email contains no threat of any kind, just a prophecy about a man’s conscience, the kind of furious letter Americans have been writing to powerful officials since before there was a Constitution to protect the practice.
Five months later, two federal agents rang his doorbell while he was in Finland with his seven-year-old daughter and handed his wife a document headed “WARNING NOTICE” and “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.” When he flew home, an agent showed up at his New York City hotel, a hotel whose location his wife had never disclosed, meaning Homeland Security found him anyway.
He’s now suing with the help of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which could, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and multiple DC law firms, cause the Trump regime to put FIRE in their crosshairs next.
That same week, federal agents confronted Paigelynne Gonyea while she was working the polls during New York’s primaries, over an Instagram post about the already-publicly-identified officer who killed Renee Good. Federal agents questioned this poll worker, at her polling place, during an election, about her opinion of a federal agent who killed an American citizen on live video for the world to see.
— A police state builds a security force loyal to the leader and his oligarch cronies rather than the nation.
Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post describe a new National Guard “quick reaction force” of roughly 23,500 troops across all fifty states, trained for domestic riot control, with the first units ordered ready by last January 1 and the rest by April, timed neatly to the midterms.
Trump has claimed “unfettered authority” to deploy troops into American cities, boasting “I could send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, I can send anybody I wanted,” while governors are cut out of the chain of command and Pete Hegseth has barred military personnel from even talking to Congress without approval.
Vladimir Putin built exactly this in 2016; he called it Rosgvardiya, and its job was never national defense but regime preservation. Hitler built his version too, and it started small, as a “protection detail,” which in German is Schutsstaffel. History remembers it as the SS.
— A police state needs a compliant press, and you don’t have to nationalize the networks when you can simply arrange for a friendly morbidly rich oligarch to buy them.
— A police state rewrites the past, because people who remember accurate history make poor subjects.As George Orwell wrote of fascism: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
In March of last year Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” and the sanitizing began: the National Park Service was ordered to strip signs and exhibits about slavery from national parks, including “The Scourged Back,” the famous photograph of the whip-scarred back of a man named Peter who escaped enslavement in Louisiana, and materials about John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry.
In Philadelphia, the administration went to court to replace the interpretive panels at the President’s House telling the story of the nine human beings George Washington enslaved there.
Trump himself complained that the Smithsonian was “OUT OF CONTROL” because its museums discussed “how bad Slavery was,” and this past weekend, on the Fourth of July no less, the White House released a report declaring that the National Museum of American History “cannot be trusted” to tell America’s story, faulting its director for, among other sins, wanting to move the museum away from an “America First mentality.”
Herr Müller and Armin lived through the original version of this, too: within months of taking power the Nazis had burned the books, purged the universities and museums of “un-German” scholarship, and rewritten the textbooks so that German children would grow up inside a glorious past that never existed. Control what people remember and you control what they’ll accept.
— And finally, a police state controls the vote.
In January, FBI agents raided Fulton County’s election warehouse and seized more than 650 boxes of 2020 ballots and voter rolls on an affidavit that omitted the state findings debunking its own claims, with then-DNI Tulsi Gabbard on scene and Trump personally on the phone with the agents.
On Tuesday, the same day Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed, the Justice Department sent letters to the election chiefs of all fifty states threatening each of them individually with criminal prosecution if noncitizens are found on their rolls, giving them five days to respond, this after the department lost eleven straight court cases trying to seize those very rolls.
Yesterday, Trump removed from office all of the members of the Federal Election Assistance Commission, an independent, bipartisan agency created by Congress that has the power to call out and punish election fraud, illegal campaign tactics and spending, and vote-rigging when it’s committed by candidates, parties, or state or local officials. It’s now effectively shut down.
And when senators asked, under oath, whether ICE agents would be kept away from polling places this November, both Kristi Noem and her successor and former plumber Markwayne Mullin refused to rule it out, while the White House press secretary said she “can’t guarantee” it and Steve Bannon openly muses that ICE at the airports was a “test run” for ICE at the polls.
So, are we in a police state yet?
Armin and Herr Müller taught me that we’re asking the wrong question — or at least at the wrong moment — because nobody ever wakes up one morning and notices, “Gee, I guess I’m inside a police state…”
Instead, a police state gets assembled around you, one component at a time, while officials assure you that each component is perfectly normal and even necessary to “maintain order” or, more insidiously, to “preserve freedom.”
Milton Mayer, in his 1955 book They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview ten “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here.
The stories he heard are so familiar to me, as I heard the same things over and over when living in Germany in the 1980s while talking with people who’d kept their heads down through the 1930s and early 1940s just to survive day-to-day.
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,” a German college professor told Mayer, “little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security….”
As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:
“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. …
“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. … [O]ne no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”
In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just assume that ultimately the good guys will win:
“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. …
“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”
In a police state, everything seems the same, Mayer’s friend told him. You still go to work, cash your paycheck, have friends over, go to the movies, enjoy a meal out. The regime even backs down from time to time, making things seem ever more normal. Little victories, you tell yourself.
Except, as the German professor told Mayer, they’re not. One day, he said, you inevitably realize that:
“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”
So, here we are. The unaccountable killings, the show trials, the informant bounties, the door knocks over emails, the leader’s praetorian guard, the captured press, the rewritten history, and now the reach for the ballots themselves: every component is now built, tested, and humming.
But what we still have, and what the DDR and the Third Reich did not, is one more election in which the machine’s operators can be stripped of their power by the people they’re trying to frighten.
That’s precisely why they’re working so hard on the machinery of that election, and precisely why the single most subversive act available to a free American this year is to vote, and to help everyone you know do the same.
So call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative to defend state authority over elections, demand independent investigations of the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and put a statutory ban on federal agents at the polls.
Check your registration right now at vote.org, because voter roll purges are already happening in Red states.
Sign up to be a poll worker in your county; they want poll workers intimidated, and the answer to that is more of us, not fewer.
Program the Election Protection hotline into your phone, 866-OUR-VOTE, and share it.
Support the people fighting this in court, from FIRE to the Blue state attorneys general.
And if this piece helped you see the machinery used to construct a police state more clearly, please share it and support independent media like my Hartmann Report, because a free press that can’t be bought by billionaires is one component of democracy they haven’t figured out how to seize.
Since I posted two scathing commentaries on the life of Lindsey Graham, I thought it only fair to finish with an admiring tribute to the late Senator. It was written by Jonathan Martin, Politico’s senior writer, and posted in Politico.
The setting on the article or website does not permit me to copy anything. I hope you can open it.
Martin praises Graham as a deft politician who held enormous power and wielded it skillfully. He was a war-hawk and a national security expert. He whispered into Trump’s ear, to keep the U.S. in NATO, to calm NATO about Trump’s demand for Greenland, to maintain relations with Ukraine, to support Israel. He had just returned from Ukraine shortly before he suffered cardiac arrest. He was evidently very charming and able to build bipartisan coalitions.
He was not my favorite Republican but Martin says that he had many friends on both sides of the aisle.
Judge Kathleen M. Williams blasted Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service and the settlement, which created a $1.776 billion “slush fund” for Trump’s aggrieved allies and granted Trump, his family, and his businesses immunity from IRS audits.
Judge Williams also referred Todd Blanche to the Florida Bar Association and the New York Bar Association for possible disciplinary actions. Blanche, the acting Attorney General, was nominated by Trump to be Attorney General; Senate confirmation hearings begin this week.
The New York Times reported:
A federal judge on Monday ruled that President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service was an improper exercise in self-dealing and barred him from claiming that the extraordinary tax protections he received were part of a legitimate settlement agreement.
In the order, the judge, Kathleen M. Williams, also referred the lawyer who brought Mr. Trump’s case against the I.R.S. to the Florida bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. Judge Williams added that she would forward her decision to the New York bar, which is already investigating the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche.
The decision by Judge Williams did not explicitly kill the deal that Mr. Trump had worked out with his own government to receive what amounted to amnesty from investigations into tax returns that he, his family and their businesses have already filed. But Judge Williams’s scathing ruling exposed the negotiations between Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and senior officials at the Justice Department he controls for what she says they were: backroom dealings that did not arise from a legitimate legal process.
“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the president and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” the judge wrote.
The 56-page decision, issued in Federal District Court in Miami, came two months after the Justice Department released a pair of documents purporting to be formal agreements that settled Mr. Trump’s remarkable suit against the I.R.S. The documents laid out a pair of separate but shocking moves — one granting the president, his family and his businesses wide-ranging immunity from tax inquiries and the other creating a $1.8 billion fund aimed at compensating allies of Mr. Trump who say they were the victims of so-called government weaponization.
After outcry from Republicans on Capitol Hill, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said the Justice Department would not move forward with the fund. But he said that Mr. Trump’s extraordinary protections from I.R.S. scrutiny would remain in place.
Steve Schmidt is a political strategist who worked for the campaigns of Republicans such as George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and John McCain.
Disgusted by Trump, he was one of the founders of the Lincoln project, an organization of anti-Trump Republicans. He left the Republican Party in 2018. In December 2020, he switched his party registration to Democratic. He writes one of the most popular blogs on Substack.
Lindsey Graham was a lonely and unprincipled man who betrayed his country for power and his decency for attention.
Let it be known for all time that he knew exactly what Donald Trump was from the very beginning, and chose him over his country:
“If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”
“I believe Donald Trump would be an absolute, utter disaster for the Republican Party, destroy conservatism as we know it.”
“We would get wiped out and it would take generations to overcome a Trump candidacy.”
“Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee of the Republican party. If he is, that’s the end of the Republican Party.”
“Trump is an interloper and a demagogue of the greatest proportion.”
When Donald Trump attacked America, and tried to burn down the republic built by Washington, saved by Lincoln and redeemed by King, he was aided by Lindsey Graham who supported the lies, dismissed the insanity and sought personal gain from it all.
Lindsey Graham was a pathetic man, a true cynic and a faithless servant of the Constitution.
He was a simple man to understand and a tragic one. He lacked a moral core and any sense of right and wrong. The great empty spaces of his life were filled with an insatiable need for “relevance.” He found it as a cast member in the most malignant reality show ever made.
Let there be no confusion about what Lindsey Graham was. There was no complexity to the man, nor much in the way to plumb and analyze about his journey to the bottom of the Trump sewer.
Lindsey Graham lived his life as a pilot fish, a parasitic sucker fish hovering about larger predators. He was a sidekick and the hollowest of hollow men. Here is what I once shared with Rolling Stone:
“People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now. The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.”
Let there never be any confusion over the choice Lindsey Graham made.
He chose Trump over his friend.
He chose Trump over his country.
He chose Trump over his duty.
He chose Trump over his oath.
Now he’s dead, and Trump is his rotten legacy — and in that, he won’t be alone.
In the end he made an adjudicated rapist laugh and played a lot of golf with him.
He was a warmonger and the architect of a lost war against Iran.
Lindsey Graham helped Trump divide America and break our alliances, ideals and traditions.
He was no patriot.
Lindsey Graham made his choice.
The high court of history will pass a brutal judgement about a man who knew better, but chose worse.
I won’t mourn Lindsey Graham’s death, but rather the country he helped break.
Diane Ravitch's blog 