Latest news with #BoilingFrogs
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Bad Faith
From the Boiling Frogs on The Dispatch Whom do you side with in the curious case of the deported French scientist? The scientist in question traveled to the U.S. earlier this month to attend a conference in Houston. Upon arrival, he was stopped and subjected to a random security check. Agents looked through his phone and laptop and discovered something so alarming that they turned him right around and put him on a plane back to France the next day. The dispute has to do with what they found. On Thursday a Department of Homeland Security official claimed that the security check had revealed 'confidential information on his electronic device from Los Alamos National Laboratory—in violation of a non-disclosure agreement—something he admitted to taking without permission and attempted to conceal.' That sounds like stealing state secrets, surefire grounds to bar someone from entry. France's minister of higher education says that's not what happened, though. 'This measure was taken by the U.S. authorities because the researcher's phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed his political opinion on the policies of the Trump administration on research,' he told Agence France-Presse. Two unidentified sources corroborated that to the news agency but alleged that the 'opinions' expressed in the exchanges went further than garden-variety criticism. One described them as 'hateful and conspiratorial messages' while the other claimed they 'showed hatred towards Trump and could be qualified as terrorism.' Whom should you believe? Normally I'd trust the feds. If they're willing to turn away a researcher who's talented enough to work at Los Alamos, they must have their reasons. Absconding with documents and/or threatening the president are pretty good ones. But remember who we're talking about here. In two months and one day, the Trump administration has withdrawn federal security protection from the president's critics, rescinded security clearances for law firms that worked against him in court, and barred the Associated Press from events for not adopting his preferred terminology. His acting U.S. attorney in D.C. has threatened detractors with criminal charges on flimsy grounds. A federal agency was defunded in part for being 'anti-Trump.' And at least one other immigrant has been targeted for removal not for committing a crime but for holding obnoxious political views. Not only would it not surprise me to learn that administration officials are barring visitors for mildly criticizing Trump, it would seem out of character if they didn't. They don't deserve the benefit of the doubt about their supposedly good intentions, especially with respect to free speech. They don't deserve the benefit of the doubt on anything. But what do you do if your job requires you to give it to them? There's a kernel of truth in the president's ongoing mental breakdown over judges enjoining his policies. Surely there are matters of executive authority in which the courts should defer to his judgment. As dismaying as it is to imagine him doing anything without supervision, including playing with matches, the nature of the job is such that the judiciary can't ride herd on him all the time. War powers are the supreme example. Imagine the absurdity of a court attempting to enjoin his battle plan for China. (Or Europe, more likely.) Respect for separation of powers means respecting the president's supremacy over Article II functions. That supremacy isn't total—Trump's belief that it should be is the cause of his breakdown—but it warrants extremely wide latitude from the courts when he's acting within the bounds of his constitutional duties. In fact, failing to show the president the deference he's due is the core grievance in a House Republican impeachment resolution aimed at James Boasberg, the federal judge who sought to halt Trump's deportation of accused Venezuelan gang members last weekend. The resolution claims that Trump's determination that an 'invasion' has taken place within the meaning of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is a political judgment, not a legal one, and therefore should be unreviewable by the courts. The fact that Boasberg is insisting on reviewing it anyway means he's overstepped his judicial authority and violated separation of powers, justifying his removal from the bench. Pretty straightforward. Here's the problem, though, with demanding greater deference to presidential discretion: What if the president is a fantastically corrupt authoritarian who routinely operates in bad faith? On Friday the New York Times reported that Trump's reliance on the Alien Enemies Act to deport the supposed gang members is more dubious than originally thought. By its own terms, the Act applies to 'any invasion or predatory incursion … against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government' (emphasis mine). According to the Times, however, a U.S. intelligence assessment published just last month 'concluded that the gang, Tren de Aragua, was not directed by Venezuela's government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders.' The only federal agency that dissented from that opinion was the FBI, helmed by super-toady Kash Patel, citing information that America's other intelligence agencies reportedly found not to be credible. The consensus saw 'the gang as lacking the resources and being too disorganized—with little in the way of any centralized command-and-control—to be able to carry out any government orders.' If that's true, it means Trump's own deputies informed him that his grounds for invoking the Alien Enemies Act were bogus—and he invoked it anyway. In order to use the emergency powers granted to him by the Act, he needed the gang to be acting at the behest of the Venezuelan government. So he lied. What do you do with that information if you're a federal judge weighing whether to defer to the president's judgment in invoking the statute? Relatedly, how much benefit of the doubt can you give him knowing that some of the 'gang members' he whisked off to an El Salvadoran prison without due process quite possibly aren't gang members at all? The U.S. government stands plausibly accused of having 'disappeared' innocent men, having done so in some cases based on notoriously sketchy 'evidence,' having denied them access to the courts by relying on a law that didn't actually apply, and having deliberately placed them beyond the reach of lawyers by dispatching them to a banana-republic gulag thousands of miles away. Going forward, shouldn't that affect the degree of deference that the executive branch receives in court? That isn't the first time Trump has used a dishonest rationale to justify questionable executive action. On February 1 he cited the 'extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl' at both the southern and northern borders as justification for new tariffs. But fewer than 25,000 people were apprehended crossing illegally from Canada into the U.S. last year, amounting to just 1.5 percent of apprehensions nationwide. The fentanyl disparity was even wider: The amount seized along the northern border over the same period represented just 0.2 percent of the amount seized along the southern one. 'During the first two months of this year,' the Wall Street Journal reported, 'the amount of fentanyl confiscated at the Canadian border weighed about as much as a can of soup.' That's the so-called 'emergency' that supposedly grants Trump legal authority to tangle with our neighbor to the north in what will end up being one of the most destructive trade wars in American history. Judges are being asked to yield to the president's judgment knowing that his judgment is sometimes based on transparent nonsense. And that's assuming that he's willing to explain his judgment at all. As I write this on Friday, we're on day six of Judge Boasberg trying to get a straight answer out of the Justice Department to a simple question about whether the alleged Venezuelan 'gang members' were flown out of the U.S. last weekend after he issued a written order halting their deportation. Shouldn't that persistent stonewalling influence how much other judges are willing to trust the executive branch? In theory, a judge should be blind to everything except the facts and the law in the case before him. It doesn't matter what's going on in Judge Boasberg's courtroom or if Trump is lying about the Alien Enemies Act and the fentanyl 'emergency' to the north. If the relevant case law says that the president is owed the benefit of the doubt in a matter then the court should show him the same degree of deference it would any other president. In theory. But he isn't any other president, and that reality can't help but penetrate the consciousness of judges. Trump extorts his opponents openly, including members of the legal profession. He demagogues anyone who demands accountability of him, the federal judiciary not excepted, and betrays no hint of remorse for the predictable consequences. He seems to regard remorse as weakness, in fact—a material deficiency in someone to whose judgment the courts are being asked to defer. His motives are frequently inscrutable, per his trade war on Canada, or malign, as his haste to make an example of the 'gangsters' who might not actually be gangsters demonstrates. Or both, of course: When the federal health bureaucracy is endorsing measles infections, you don't need to choose between extreme negligence and extreme malevolence. On top of all of that, let me remind you that the president is an actual convicted criminal whose rap sheet would have ended up a lot longer if not for his reelection. Judges don't normally defer to criminals, do they? The most salient fact about Trump's relationship with the judiciary, though, is that he's overtly engaged in a revolutionary project to consolidate federal power in the executive branch. And not just congressional power; he's coming for the judges too. How can respect for separation of powers compel the courts to defer to the president as much as they did to his predecessors when he's trying to dismantle separation of powers and subordinate them to his authority? We afford public officials a degree of discretion in exercising their duties because we trust that they'll restrain themselves from abusing their power. There's no such reason to trust Trump. He's done everything he can to show that he'd like to govern as a monarch and will seize any political opportunity to make it happen. Judicial deference is the idea that, so long as Article II grants the president a certain authority, the courts shouldn't second-guess his bad judgment in using it. The question judges will wrestle with for the next four years is whether a different approach to deference should be taken when the problem isn't so much bad judgment as bad faith. Blame Congress for putting the judiciary in this position. Ideally, judges wouldn't be tinkering with how much benefit of the doubt to grant to a new president since judicial credibility depends on consistent application of the law. When federal district judges issue almost as many nationwide injunctions in the first two months of Trump's term as they did in four years under Biden, that's a bad look. Although I'd argue that that's like comparing the number of arrests in a rough neighborhood to the number in a quieter one. Maybe it's less a problem with the cops being biased than with the fact that a lot more crime is happening in one than the other. Regardless, there's a good case to be made that judges should stick to the same ol' deference they've always shown the president. If someone needs to turn up the heat on the president to stop him from abusing his authority and threatening separation of powers, Congress can always step in and make him back off. The House and Senate have plenty of ways to punish him, from roadblocking his nominees to defunding his pet programs to investigating his administration to impeaching him if need be. They're much better suited to reining him in than the judiciary is, frankly. The courts can't muscle a renegade executive because they're passive by design, but the legislature is built for brawling. And Congress doesn't have the legitimacy problem that unelected judges do when they confront an elected president. When the legislature acts, it acts in the people's name. Letting Congress take the lead in restraining Trump is a nice theory. And utterly ludicrous in practice. I've said before but will say again here that congressional Republicans are political archvillains of this era no less than Trump himself is and will be remembered by history as such. They're bona fide American quislings, traitors to the constitutional order in having abandoned all pretense of resisting the president's autocratic ploys. We're not yet at the point where they'll do anything Trump tells them but we're certainly at the point where Trump can do anything he likes without fear of repercussions from the legislative branch. So long as Republicans are in charge, there's no doubt with whom Congress will side in an extended confrontation between the president and the judiciary. And they'll be really, really stupid about it too. The judiciary's dilemma in deciding how much deference to show Trump comes down to this, then: If they don't hold him accountable, no one will. And in a constitutional democracy, that's a profound conundrum. The 'constitutional' part should mean less discretion for the president when he's threatening separation of powers but the 'democracy' part points to giving him the same benefit of the doubt as his less Putin-ish forbears. After all, if Congress doesn't care about him trampling on Articles I and III and the electorate doesn't care much about anything except what groceries cost, why should judges care? The choice for courts is whether to give Trump broad latitude in making a mockery of enumerated powers or trying to rein him in hopes of saving Americans from their own civic anomie. Some choice.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Kill Switch
From the Boiling Frogs on The Dispatch On Monday the president displayed the latest sensitive document he managed to lift from the National Archives: the Declaration of Independence. Well, an original copy, anyway. He 'requested' it from the Archives to help spruce up the Oval Office's decor and they shuttled it over, having learned from the last time they tangled with him that resistance is futile. The words on the parchment are apparently much darker and more legible than they are in the famous version of the Declaration on display at the Archives. Presumably that's due to Trump's copy having been stored away from light, although I like to imagine that the archivists sent him a replica from the gift shop with assurances that it was the real deal. The artifact is now mounted on the wall near his desk, ostensibly as a source of national pride. But given his pretensions to monarchy, it more resembles a trophy from a hunting expedition, the civic equivalent of a stuffed moose head. Have a look at it while you can, as he's surely taking it with him when (if?) he leaves office. Come 2029, it'll be hanging over a gilded toilet at Mar-a-Lago, the world's most impressive bathroom word art. The news about it caught my attention because of a coincidence in timing. Since Donald Trump returned to the presidency, by far the biggest news in American international affairs has been … a declaration of independence. It came from incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz last month, a week or so after J.D. Vance antagonized European diplomats in Munich and a few days before he and Donald Trump tussled with Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House. 'My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,' Merz announced after his party won Germany's elections. 'I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program. But after Donald Trump's statements last week at the latest, it is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.' That was shocking. It was impolitic, for one thing, because having the leader of Germany kiss off his country's alliance with the United States in a televised address is just the sort of pretext Trump might plausibly seize on to justify ditching NATO. Granted, he's going to abandon it eventually anyway—but when he does, it would be useful to NATO supporters here in the U.S. if he didn't have a ready-made excuse to do so. Germany told us to get lost! But the other reason Merz's comments were shocking is that they were true. If anything, they were too kind. At best, the Trump White House is indifferent to the fate of Europe. At worst, it's eager to see the biggest beneficiaries of the Pax Americana end up under Russia's thumb. The chancellor was grappling with a reality that's both simple and very, very hard: A country capable of reelecting Donald Trump is a country that cannot be depended on. It's time for Europe to hit the kill switch on America's leadership of the west. Imagine the look on Zelensky's face yesterday when Trump proposed letting the United States take ownership of Ukraine's power plants, including its nuclear facilities. It's not crazy in principle. Ukraine wants to halt Russian attacks on its energy infrastructure, making that a key condition of the initial ceasefire that the White House proposed. Nothing would scare Moscow away from targeting that infrastructure like knowing that it's now effectively U.S. territory, possibly with American workers on the ground and in the line of fire. It would be a powerful, if limited, security guarantee for a country that's been desperate to secure such guarantees from Washington. The problem is that Zelensky has no reason to trust that Trump won't abuse his power over Ukrainian energy to harm Ukrainian interests. On the contrary. It was only a few weeks ago that the president halted weapons shipments and intelligence-sharing to soften up Kyiv's resistance to a peace deal (and to punish Zelensky for the Oval Office squabble, of course). Other pressure tactics that would handicap Ukraine's military have reportedly been considered but not yet implemented. You can see the next move on the chessboard as easily as I can: If the White House ends up in charge of Ukrainian electricity and Zelensky refuses some draconian new demand made by the U.S. on Russia's behalf, the lights will go out across Ukraine. Don't think Trump wouldn't do it. Summarily pulling the plug has become his go-to move on policy. The United States is now so unreliable an ally, in other words, that a nation at war might be better off holding onto its territory and letting it be bombed by Russia than trusting it to American stewardship. Moscow can only damage Ukrainian energy production; Washington, under Trump's deal, would have a kill switch. The phrase 'kill switch' has been a hot topic in European security discussions lately, in fact, specifically with regard to the American-made F-35 fighter jet. Sixteen U.S. allies, including Germany, have F-35s in service. Our former friends in Canada have an order outstanding for 88 of the planes, to the tune of $14.5 billion. It's easier for NATO partners to coordinate when everyone is working off the same tech and it's nice for Lockheed Martin and the U.S. economy to have that tech being made here. But after watching Trump sabotage Ukraine's military earlier this month to serve Russia's interests, those allies have understandably begun to wonder: Could America do the same with the F-35? What if there's a 'kill switch' embedded in the software on which the aircraft runs that might render it suddenly inoperable, like a phone being 'bricked' by a hacker, if the White House wishes it so? This is no random conspiracy theory. Paranoia about it overseas has risen to the point that Lockheed Martin felt moved to address it on Tuesday, noting that the Pentagon insists there's no way to remotely disable the F-35. But even if you believe that (and why would you?), nations that use the jet are still stuck relying on the United States for spare parts and software updates. If Europe were to end up at war with Moscow and the president gave the order to cut off those parts and updates—uh oh. Again, don't think Trump wouldn't do it. On Wednesday, a member of Denmark's parliament expressed public regret for his part in convincing the Danish government to use the F-35. In light of the way the White House has bullied Canada and sought to strengthen Putin at Europe's expense, he wrote, 'I can easily imagine a situation where the USA will demand Greenland from Denmark and will threaten to deactivate our weapons and let Russia attack us when we refuse (which we will even in that situation).' It's not hard to imagine, is it? 'Therefore,' he concluded, reasonably enough, 'buying American weapons is a security risk that we can not run.' Is he wrong? Overlooked amid the hype over Trump's indefensible decision to temporarily halt weapons and intelligence to Ukraine are numerous quiet ways in which the White House has realigned America's policy with Moscow's. The administration has halted offensive cyber operations against Russia, suspended cooperation in an international effort to prevent Russian sabotage, defunded agencies dedicated to counterprogramming Russian propaganda, withdrawn from a multinational task force investigating Russian war crimes, and—most despicably—defunded a program at Yale to track the whereabouts of kidnapped Ukrainian children inside Russia. Why would Denmark want to rely on the F-35 to defend itself from Russia if the country that makes the F-35 is increasingly on Russia's side? Why wouldn't Canada want to have the European Union as its chief military partner when its current chief military partner keeps babbling about how it shouldn't exist? What sort of lunatic would persist in letting this administration have a de facto kill switch over its national security? Trump can't be trusted. More importantly, Americans can't either. If this bothers you, you might reassure yourself that 2028 is right around the corner. The early polling is auspicious, too. A Fox News survey finds the president currently rocking a 61 percent disapproval rating among independents. The prospect of him defying a court ruling is about as popular as measles. And his Putinist treatment of Ukraine has ignited a sharp backlash among Democrats and independents, with the number who say the U.S. isn't doing enough to help Kyiv up sharply in both groups. Americans might plausibly elect a pro-western anti-Russian Democrat in 2028. They might even succeed in seeing him inaugurated after Trump inevitably attempts another coup. But so what? From the standpoint of a European weighing whether to trust the United States, what does it matter that a traditional liberal might take power in four years? The most damaging consequence of Trump's chaotic government-by-whim is that it makes long-term planning impossible. Tariffs might be imposed, or they might not. Legal immigrants might have rights, or they might not. Court rulings might be followed, or they might not. Vaccines might be available, or they might not. The United States might maintain its alliances, or it might not. If you're a highly skilled immigrant, a foreign corporation, a research scientist, or a European head of state, why would you wager your income, your career, your family, or your national security on America when American policymaking has never been more arbitrary and increasingly left to the devices of an imperious, mercurial mental defective by a Congress that's rancid with cowards? 'It'll change in 2028,' you reply. Sure, it might. Or it might not. That's the point. The thesis of this newsletter is and has always been that Trump and Trumpism are symptoms of a problem, not the problem itself. The problem is that America is no longer a country divided evenly between right-wing and left-wing versions of classical liberalism. It's a country divided between liberalism and postliberalism. Until Trump, Europeans could trust that America would backstop the western liberal order regardless of whether the president was Republican or Democrat. When the White House changed hands, foreign policy would shift at the margins—but never so much that a U.S. alliance with Soviet communists or Russian fascists was in the cards. When the White House changes hands now, however, the entire paradigm of American government changes with it. In 2029 the United States might reclaim the title it held for the past 80 years as leader of the free world, or it might not. There's a universe in which Trump is still in office at that point, one way or another, and is busily compensating for the decline in F-35 sales to Europe by selling them to Russia instead. I repeat again: Don't think he wouldn't do it. And if he does, given his affinity for Putin, the risk of him using a kill switch to disable those jets in a fit of pique would be minimal. But even if he leaves office on schedule, European leaders will have no earthly reason to go back to treating America as a reliable ally. Ours is now a country with a split personality, half liberal and half authoritarian (a chimera, one might call it), and whether the liberal or authoritarian half gets to set policy amounts to a coin flip every four years. Friedrich Merz might plausibly find himself dealing with President Josh Shapiro—or President Tucker Carlson. Europe's fate can't depend on a series of coin flips. An American house divided may stand for a while but it certainly can't be relied upon. The essential lesson of last year's election is not that the Orange Man is bad but that half the American public is now so civically debilitated that it can't tell or doesn't care that the Orange Man is bad. Who in their right mind would trust the future of the western liberal order to a country as depraved as that? Earlier today, Peter Wehner published an essay on Trump's obsession with revenge. This grabbed me: My Atlantic colleague Jonathan Rauch wrote to me that one thing that's surprised him is, among Trump's supporters, 'the sheer energy that's generated by transgression. The joy of breaking stuff and hurting people. It's a million-volt battery.' He added: 'I don't think this ends after Trump. He has raised a half generation of ambitious men and women who have been (de)socialized by his style. The most successful businessman in the world is a troll. It's just what smart people do.' 'Desocialized' is an arresting way to describe the right's moral collapse. This goes far beyond politics; what we're experiencing under Trump is a change in the American character, or possibly the American character laid bare. Cruel, spiteful, adolescent, gleefully destructive, glibly unbothered by the human wreckage it leaves—Rauch is right that it won't end with this presidency, as pathologies that profound aren't so easily cured. A population willing to be governed by a faction that's openly eager to find a kill switch for the constitutional order is a population that can't be depended on for anything, let alone global leadership. Too bad for Europe that it has no choice, huh? Not in the short term, anyway. Eighty years of outsourcing its security to the United States means that disentangling itself from America won't happen soon, even if, per Friedrich Merz, the will to do so is there. The irony of the F-35 debate is that whether or not there's a 'kill switch' that can disable the jet, the aircraft is so heavily dependent on other American military assets that it could be hamstrung by simply cutting off access to those systems instead. True European military independence from the U.S. may take decades. But it's essential and inevitable so they'd better get cracking, and in the meantime, they'd better hope that nuclear brinkmanship can keep Russia at bay. American leadership is a spent force. The sooner everyone realizes it, the sooner a worthy successor might emerge.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Green Lantern Theory, Revisited
From the Boiling Frogs on The Dispatch The further the right drifts from classical liberalism, the deeper it sinks into leftist modes of thought. Identity politics. Centrally planned economies. Simping for Russia. When I was a kid—and by 'kid,' I mean until I was in my early 40s—that was pinko stuff. Another left-wing idea of more recent vintage that the right has warmed up to is the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency. In 2014, Barack Obama was mired in Year 4 of being stymied by a Republican House majority dedicated to obstructing him at every turn. Frustrated liberals who'd been promised a golden age of Hope and Change demanded to know why the president wasn't doing more to break the stalemate. He should use his powers! To which smart Democratic wonks like Brendan Nyhan and Ezra Klein replied: Which powers? 'The belief that the president can achieve any political or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics' is how Nyhan defined what he derisively called 'the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency.' For those who don't know, the Green Lantern is a comic-book superhero who's capable of generating immense amounts of force but only by mustering a similarly immense amount of courage and will. That's not how politics works in a system where federal power is divided among three branches and enumerated in a written Constitution, Nyhan and Klein reminded dejected Democrats. Granted, some presidents' abilities are more superheroic than others'. Nyhan cited Ronald Reagan as an example of a leader whose communication skills rallied the public behind his agenda and Lyndon Johnson as a master of twisting congressional arms to move landmark legislation. The White House isn't powerless to influence American politics. But in the end, if Congress says no and the courts say no, there's no Green Lantern scenario in which the president can simply will his way into getting what he wants. Donald Trump's second term will be an extended attempt to rebut that claim. Do presidents really lack super powers, or did prior presidents simply fail to summon the requisite courage to smash through institutional obstacles to their wishes? There's no Green Lantern figure in a liberal system of government—but there sure is in a fascist one. That's sort of the point. Trump's popular image as a political superhero is important to understanding why he behaves as he does, I think, and why so many of his policies end up as goofy garbage. Superheroes are expected to act boldly, impose their will, and achieve things that mere mortals can't, and the president is very eager to meet those expectations. As he once famously said, 'I alone can fix it!' That's been his de facto motto for going on 10 years. The problem with having a president who's obsessed with proving that he can achieve things others can't is that the things he ends up achieving are often quite stupid. Barack Obama was brimming with superhero potential when he took office in 2009. He'd been elected in a national landslide with the most popular votes of any candidate in U.S. history. His party had won huge majorities in Congress. He'd broken a momentous racial barrier by becoming the country's first black president. And he was an 'outsider,' or as much of one as a sitting senator could be. He'd risen from obscurity in 2004 to win the White House just four years later at the tender age of 47. He wasn't of the system; he was here to save America from it. He had youth, charisma, a 'coalition of the ascendant' behind him, and the numbers in the House and Senate to move any legislation he wanted. That's as close to becoming the Green Lantern as a traditional president gets. No wonder liberals couldn't cope when the GOP clobbered Democrats in the 2010 midterms and their superhero president's powers disappeared overnight, a mere two years into what would end up being an eight-year tenure. Two presidential election cycles later, Trump gave Republicans their own superhero as leader. He was a true outsider, having never held office before and given to speaking in ways that no politician would. The TV game show he hosted solidified him as a national celebrity and bestowed upon him, laughably, a reputation as a business genius. He inflated his wealth and whispered to the tabloids about his sexual exploits to cultivate an image as the ultimate alpha male. And his pitch to voters leaned heavily on protecting them from threats like the many rapists supposedly pouring into the country from Mexico. He would clean up the streets of Gotham, beginning with 'the swamp' inside the Beltway. To a far greater degree than Obama, a Trump presidency portended something radically more transgressive than what had come before. Obama was a mainline neoliberal Democrat, a lawyer by training, and a creature of party politics, like nearly every other Democrat in government. Trump was a nationalist in a party of conservatives, evinced not the faintest respect for the constitutional scheme, and has only ever seemed to regard the Republican Party as a vehicle for his own ambitions. In fact, he's spent the last 10 years demonstrating superhuman political strength by vanquishing 'villains' in his own party who dared to cross him. Both men's supporters had messianic ambitions for them early on but most of the gas for Obamamania had gone out of the left by the time he was reelected in 2012. Trump is the opposite: Between his ruthless dominance of his party, his improbable victory over the 'deep state' that sought to imprison him, and his stature as the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote, he's more of a national savior to populist fanatics now than he was in 2016. They're expecting a superhero in his second term, even more so than in his first. So that's what he's striving to give them. Befitting his identity as the Green Lantern, the president is constantly trying to prove that he's willing and able to accomplish things no other president could. Take Russia. (Please!) On Tuesday, Trump excitedly announced that his latest phone call with Vladimir Putin had gone well and that both sides of the war had agreed to immediately halt attacks against the other's infrastructure and energy supplies. A few hours later, Russian bombs began falling on Ukraine. One knocked out the power in the city of Slovyansk. That wasn't all. Although Ukraine had already agreed to the White House's demand for a full 30-day ceasefire, the Kremlin declared after Putin's call with Trump that no progress will be made toward settling the conflict until Ukraine's western allies completely cut off weapons and intelligence to Kyiv. That's an unserious demand, tantamount to rejecting peace talks entirely. Even if Trump is willing to comply, European nations won't be. In other words, the Russians made Trump look like a chump, and an ego as fragile as the president's normally wouldn't tolerate that. But Putin has an ace in the hole: He knows that the Green Lantern promised many times during last year's campaign that he'd end the war in Ukraine 'in 24 hours.' Trump has now begun to inch away from that pledge—he says he was 'being a little bit sarcastic'—but he can't give up on peace due to Russian recalcitrance without conceding that his peacemaking abilities aren't so superheroic after all. To prove that he can broker a truce that no one else could broker—he alone can fix!—he's stuck humoring Moscow, potentially forcing concessions on Ukraine in the name of securing a deal that are so repellent even nations as illiberal as Turkey will struggle to condone them. The demands of being a superhero have left Trump in a weak negotiating position destined to produce an embarrassing settlement that favors Russia. No wonder Putin is driving a hard bargain. Forget foreign policy, though. How about deportations? If there's one aspect of domestic policy in which MAGA voters are expecting feats of political strength beyond what any mere mortal president could achieve, that's it. Last weekend, the White House delivered. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a statute previously used only in wartime, to authorize deporting certain criminal 'invaders' without the usual due process for immigrants. That's precisely the sort of Green Lantern-ism that liberals like Brendan Nyhan and Ezra Klein struggled to imagine in 2014. The president has lots of 'emergency' powers under the law that he can exploit if only he has the ruthless will and imagination to try. The one little catch is that some of the 'gang members' shipped off to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act … might not be gang members. If you believe their relatives (a big 'if'), some were misidentified based on tattoos that resembled gang insignias and sent to rot in a banana-republic dungeon without any chance to plead their innocence to a judge. Trump's need to prove that not even due process can resist his border-enforcing super powers may have left law-abiding asylum-seekers stranded in a nightmare with no easy legal remedy. If true, that's morally atrocious—and I suspect it'll also be politically atrocious if the public starts paying attention to the plight of the deportees. Everywhere you look in Trump's first 60 days back in office, you'll find him asserting outlandish abilities to shape events that his predecessors seldom or never claimed, all with lousy consequences for the country. Other presidents have imposed 'emergency' tariffs, for instance, but none in my lifetime has done so as prolifically, arbitrarily, or destructively as Trump has, effectively seizing control of U.S. trade policy. Other presidents have pressured American allies to comply with our wishes, but I've never seen one muse about annexing a neighbor, wrecking relations between our two countries to no obvious policy end. Other presidents have cut spending, but no one has dispatched a team of shadowy tech bros to dismantle federal agencies surreptitiously and possibly illegally. DOGE is the purest expression of Trump's Green Lantern identity, I think, because the ratio of performative dynamism to actual results is so large. Not only has it not saved much money, there's a chance it'll cost taxpayers dollars as lawsuits pile up, agency inefficiencies mount, and the IRS' ability to collect revenue erodes. It's terrible policy—but it's fantastic theater. What is Elon Musk if not a superhero in his own right, possessed of an historic fortune, consumed with visiting Mars, and now kicking down the doors of villainous federal bureaucracies to tear out supposedly wasteful spending by the roots? He and Trump are doing things no one thought possible and they're doing them fast, heightening the mystique they've cultivated as men of extraordinary ability and indomitable will who intend to change the world whether existing institutions are ready or not. Bold action, daring reforms, garbage results: We have a Green Lantern presidency at last. Which leaves us with an interesting question. Does Donald Trump want to be a superhero because he's an authoritarian or is Donald Trump an authoritarian because he wants to be a superhero? I typically approach his gambits as fascist strategic ploys aimed at consolidating power under the executive branch. Everything I mentioned above can be analyzed that way. He's going easy on Putin in Ukraine negotiations because he hopes to re-create Putinism here at home; he's siccing DOGE on federal agencies because he's keen to purge the government of rival 'liberal' power blocs; he's flouting due process in deporting gang members because he wants to get the public on his side in delegitimizing the courts; he's tariff-ing his brains out because he wants the whole world to have to beg him for their livelihoods; he's menacing Canada because seizing neighboring countries is just kind of what fascists obsessed with 'national greatness' do. His Green Lantern aspirations flow from his illiberalism, one might conclude, which is why Barack Obama was a poor match for the theory. The most distinctive 'super power' Trump wields, in fact, is the certainty that if you resist him you'll be threatened by the White House politically and economically and threatened by the scummiest elements of his base in more visceral ways. But not every Trump political gambit lends itself so easily to strategic logic. What's the strategic logic, for example, of vowing to convert Gaza into a resort? What was the supposed strategic logic of holding a photo op with Kim Jong Un in 2019? Is there really a strategic rationale behind slapping tariffs on Canada and Mexico, then lifting them, then slapping them on and lifting them again? When the president strong-arms nations like Ukraine and Canada while playing nice with international cancers like Russia and China, is it because of his ideological affinity for the latter? Or is it a simpler matter that smaller powers can be successfully bullied and major ones can't? A superhero always wins in the end, after all, and it's a lot easier to 'win' over weak allies than hostile enemies. And yes, Taiwanese readers should find that ominous. His interest in Gaza and in meeting Kim are more easily explained as efforts to distinguish himself as a singular figure willing to venture where his predecessors didn't dare. No other president would be so bold (or dumb) as to propose resolving the Israeli-Palestinian with a bit of ethnic cleansing and seaside development. No other president would take the political risk of meeting with a global pariah like Kim. No other president would toy with the American economy by imposing and then un-imposing tariffs on two of the country's biggest trade partners as a matter of whim. Only a leader endowed with superhuman courage and willpower is willing to confront and shatter the constitutional and international norms that have governed the world for the last 80 or so years. Trump is accomplishing things no other president could—or would want to. He's a superhero. Liberals wanted a Green Lantern behind the Resolute Desk 10 years ago. Now we have one. How do you like it?
Yahoo
17-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Banana Republican
From the Boiling Frogs on The Dispatch Due process in the federal justice system depends on many players. Some, like judges and lawyers, are more enthusiastic about the concept than others, like law enforcement and the prison system. But each has duties under the law to protect the rights of individuals. And if some or all of them fail in those duties and an obvious injustice results, the president himself has the power to set offenders free. Due process has redundancies, in other words. So if you want to get rid of it and fully weaponize the justice system, you need to undermine all of the players involved, not just one or two. You can make prisons crueler, but your enemies won't end up there if judges are protecting their rights. You can demagogue judges, but they might rule against you if your enemies are represented by talented lawyers. You can intimidate the lawyers, but your enemies won't face charges in the first place unless law enforcement is willing to persecute them. To collapse the structure of American justice and replace it with a proper banana republic, each pillar holding it up needs to be weakened. The president spent most of his first two months in office focused on a single pillar: law enforcement. He purged officials at the Justice Department and FBI and replaced them with clownish toadies like Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino. That was a sensible way for an authoritarian to prioritize: Of the institutional players I've mentioned, corrupt cops and prosecutors can do the most damage. As long as the DOJ is willing to behave like a secret police force, Donald Trump doesn't need to send Liz Cheney or Mark Milley to prison to make their lives miserable. Investigations are punishment enough. His Castro-esque speech on Friday to Justice Department officials reflected his priorities. The president labeled political enemies like former special counsel Jack Smith 'scum,' claimed that CNN and MSNBC are behaving 'illegally' somehow, babbled about the supposedly rigged 2020 election, and insisted that the January 6 defendants he pardoned were 'grossly mistreated.' The speech ended with the song 'YMCA,' as you might hear at one of his political rallies. Watching it felt like watching a dog mark his territory. If all Trump wants to do is harass his enemies, weaponizing law enforcement will suffice. But if he's after something more robustly caudillo-esque, the other pillars of due process will also have to yield. This weekend he began to discredit them more aggressively. On Friday night, a few hours after he'd turned the DOJ into a politicized joke, the president resumed his campaign to intimidate the legal profession. This time it was the law firm Paul Weiss whose security clearances were canceled and whose access to federal buildings was threatened. Paul Weiss attorneys worked with Robert Mueller on the Russiagate probe and the Manhattan district attorney in the Stormy Daniels matter, and had every right to do so. But Trump has never distinguished between his personal interests and the public's, so Paul Weiss has been stripped of state privileges for the crime of lawyering in a way that the president didn't like. This makes three firms that have been penalized by him. It's blatant retaliation designed to scare other attorneys away from challenging Trump's administration in court and to scare would-be clients away from hiring those that have already crossed him. But it also aims to discredit and delegitimize the profession writ large: As more firms lose their security clearances—and more will—more Americans will conclude that the entire legal industry is even swampier and more unethical than they'd assumed. On Saturday the administration turned its attention to one of the pillars of due process it had been reluctant to attack so far. For the first time, it defied a judge—sort of. Trump signed an executive order the day before invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (AEA), which empowers the president to summarily deport immigrants 'from countries with which the United States is at war, that have invaded the United States, or that have engaged in 'predatory incursion,'' in the words of the New York Times. That's why authoritarians are forever comparing immigration to an 'invasion' (and elections to terrorist hijackings), of course. As peacetime problems are reimagined as wartime crises, Americans are conditioned to expect fewer legal constraints on a president's power. Only three times before in American history had the AEA been invoked—the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II, when it was used to justify sending Japanese Americans to internment camps. Trump has resorted to it now because he wants to deport gang members from foreign countries without the usual nerdy due-process niceties designed to make sure that the deportee actually is in a gang, is subject to removal, and is who the feds think he is. A hearing was held in a Washington federal district court on Saturday regarding some of the several hundred immigrants targeted for immediate ejection under the AEA. Despite the likelihood that the judge would halt the deportations, the administration loaded the deportees onto planes and prepared for takeoff. Per Politico, two flights departed during a 40-minute break in the hearing; by the time the court was informed, the planes were en route to El Salvador. The judge told the administration's lawyers that the aircraft should be turned around and issued a written order to that effect. Around 10 minutes after the written order was issued, the Washington Post reported, a third flight took off from Texas. The White House ignored the court's order, claiming later that the first two planes were over international waters by the time it was filed and therefore had no legal effect. But that doesn't explain the timing of the third flight, and it sure doesn't explain why the administration was in such a hurry. One lawyer alleged that the deportees were removed before Trump had even notified the public that he'd invoked the AEA; a White House official who spoke to Axios claimed that the original plan was to get them out of the country 'before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out,' he said. Our friend David French made the point recently that, for all his incompetence in other matters, Trump is shrewd about picking political targets. He's done it again here. If you want to make Americans skeptical of due process and contemptuous of its judicial guardians, you don't dive in headfirst by defying a major Supreme Court decision. You start by choosing the least sympathetic defendants you can find—Big Law, campus Hamasniks, now alleged immigrant gang members—and trust that the public will side with you against them on political grounds, the legal merits be damned. As Trump plays the strongman eager to protect Americans from predators and their enablers in the judiciary, he'll earn the goodwill he'll need later to get away with telling the Supreme Court 'no.' That's what the AEA saga is about, I think: Rushing to deport the alleged gang members before a court could intervene was the White House's way of showing that safety must take precedence over the rights of violent thugs. To quote Tom Homan, Trump's immigration czar, 'We're not stopping. I don't care what the judges think. I don't care what the left thinks. We're coming.' Look around online today and you'll find various populists offering barely veiled fascist apologias for ignoring or punishing the courts when they get in the way of 'the common good.' If ruthlessness in pursuit of dominance is the core of Trumpist populism, and if due process is the chief bulwark against ruthlessness by the state, then a confrontation between populist postliberals and the courts is inevitable. The AEA saga is the first breeze in a hurricane that's already descending. You can have a system of rules and 'norms' that works for the bad guys or you can have a system led by Men of Action who deliver results for the good guys, but you can't have both. That's the choice Trump's apologists are setting up for Americans. The kicker to this weekend's court drama is where the alleged gang members were sent. It wasn't back home to Venezuela. It was to El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele has agreed to warehouse criminals deported from the U.S. regardless of their country of origin in return for a fee. Conditions in Salvadoran prisons are exactly what you'd expect, to the point that Bukele celebrated the arrival of the migrants with an online hype video hinting at how rough they'll have it. Bukele himself is what you'd expect too: He mocked the federal court order that Team Trump ignored ('oopsie') and enjoys a MAGA fan following online, which includes Elon Musk, for saying things like 'If you don't impeach the corrupt judges, you CANNOT fix the country.' Our partner in this deportation effort, in other words, runs an honest-to-goodness banana republic and conducts himself accordingly. For Team Trump, that's a feature rather than a bug. American prisons aren't bastions of humane treatment, but they're 'soft' compared to their third-world counterparts, and the president and his fans detest being 'soft' on bad guys. (Or on anyone, really.) They may disdain 'sh-thole countries' but they share the belief of many ruthless 'sh-thole' governments that there's no social problem that can't be solved by ratcheting up the brutality. That's why Pete Hegseth recently said he would replace top military lawyers: He's always had a soft spot for accused war criminals and seems to believe that a military that's less 'soft' will be more effective, never mind how that's gone for the Russians in Ukraine. Shipping off gang members to Bukele's prisons or to Guantánamo is Trump's way of discrediting the modicum of due process that America's prisons afford to inmates. Our system is too accommodating to such savages; only by moving them beyond the reach of American law—or reforming the justice system to be more brutal—will they receive the punishment they deserve. Which brings us to pardons, the 'break glass in case of emergency' option for presidents to mete out justice in cases where due process has failed to do so. You would think Donald Trump, the great liberator of insurrectionist miscreants, would zealously guard the executive's power to break that glass. Not so. On Monday morning, he discovered a loophole. The 'Pardons' that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen. In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them! The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime. Therefore, those on the Unselect Committee, who destroyed and deleted ALL evidence obtained during their two year Witch Hunt of me, and many other innocent people, should fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level. The fact is, they were probably responsible for the Documents that were signed on their behalf without the knowledge or consent of the Worst President in the History of our Country, Crooked Joe Biden! Needless to say, the Supreme Court isn't going to open a legal can of worms by siding with Trump and thereby calling into question the validity of every presidential document signed by Autopen, a practice that dates back many years. But this is what it looks like when the president, for once, presumes to be a stickler about procedure. Biden issued those pardons because he worried, justifiably, that due process wouldn't prevent Trump's administration from trying to persecute members of the January 6 committee. Now here's Trump making, of all things, a process argument against the pardons because he's keen to begin that persecution. It took the pardon power being used to avert an injustice, rather than to facilitate one, for Trump to finally become a skeptic of it. All in all, it was a busy 72 hours for the White House. Embarrassing federal law enforcement, disparaging the legal profession, flouting the judiciary, avoiding the prison system, and impugning presidential pardons: That's a full-court press in delegitimizing due process, exactly what we'd expect from a banana Republican eager to convince Americans that he's the only actor in the justice system who can be trusted to prioritize the country's best interests. I think that explains the outsized rage at Amy Coney Barrett among MAGA fanatics after she sided against the White House in a few minor rulings recently. True to the spirit of their leader, populists rationalize all political defeats as products of illegitimate motives—hate, spite, bias, weakness, corruption—in order to discredit the opposition that defeated it. The media is biased; the 'deep state' is hateful; moderate Republicans are spiteful; election-rigging Democrats are corrupt; the courts are weak bleeding hearts. Virtually every Trump antagonist can and will be dismissed on these grounds, up to and including milquetoast 'Bush judges' like Chief Justice John Roberts. But Barrett is a hard case. Trump himself appointed her; she replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, heralding a conservative judicial revolution; and she's earned serious right-wing cred already by voting to overturn Roe v. Wade. The grand fascist project to delegitimize rival institutional sources of power over American justice will struggle to discredit Trump's three SCOTUS appointees if they stand in his way, and Barrett appears to be the one who's most likely to do that. So they're going in on her early, just in case. Speaking of which, I wonder: Has Trump moved too early in his war on the justice system? Arguably not. The honeymoon period is when a president should be bold, one might say, as he's unlikely to ever again be as popular as he is now. His immigration policies are especially popular, which gives him even more political capital to spend on confronting the judiciary over due process on deportations. If he's going to turn up the heat on America's boiling frogs by normalizing the idea of flouting court orders, this is the moment. But then I think of the market correction we just experienced, and of tariff mayhem, and of the ongoing disorientation over which nations are allies and which are enemies. That's a lot of chaos for Americans to swallow, and much more is coming in a few weeks. Civic degenerates on Twitter with a jones for banana Republicanism might be spoiling for a fight with the judiciary but the average joe could find another destabilizing move so soon too much to take. At that point Trump wouldn't be gradually inching up the heat on a boiling pot; he'd be turning up the burner all the way. What if the frogs jump out? You know me: I think they're already boiled. But it appears we're going to find out sooner than we thought.
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Tea for Two
From the Boiling Frogs on The Dispatch Even when he's right, it's hard to sympathize with Chuck Schumer. And I do think he's right on the merits to steer Democrats away from a government shutdown. They 'don't have the cards,' to borrow a phrase from another recent national fiasco. It isn't just the ideological differences I have with him that make sympathy difficult. It's the fact that he's terrible at retail politics. He's taken a bad situation for his party and made it worse. On Thursday he published an op-ed explaining why he'll support the House GOP's bill to fund the government through September. It's awful, awful, awful legislation, he assured his base, but the alternative would be worse. If the government shuts down, Elon Musk and his flying monkeys will have a pretext to DOGE-ify the entire federal bureaucracy by shuttering the left's favorite agencies and furloughing thousands of workers. And when the shutdown ends, they'll get to decide who comes back to the job and who's permanently expendable. A shutdown standoff would also be a gift to Donald Trump by diverting public attention from the dumbest trade war in history. 'Right now, Mr. Trump owns the chaos in the government,' Schumer wrote. 'He owns the chaos in the stock market. He owns the damage happening to our economy. The stock market is falling, and consumer confidence is plummeting.' We've all heard the old saying about what to do when your enemy is making a mistake. Well, Trump is making a mistake by tariff-ing global investors into a panic. Schumer is acting accordingly. Besides, if Democrats did shut down the government, we all know Trump would eventually convince 50 percent of the country that doing so somehow caused the market correction that's already happened. I think Democratic voters might have grudgingly tolerated a capitulation by their leader in the Senate if Schumer had been clear about his intentions all along. But he wasn't, because he's terrible at politics. Literally one day before announcing his support for the Republican legislation, he was heard telling reporters that his caucus was 'unified' in supporting a 30-day funding alternative instead. Nor did he show his cards when the GOP's bill came up for a floor vote in the House, despite the fact that numerous Democrats from reddish Trump-friendly districts were preparing to risk their necks by opposing it. Imagine casting a vote in the name of party solidarity that you know will be unpopular back home—only to find out that doing so was pointless because the Democratic leader in the other chamber was planning to help Republicans pass their bill anyway. Having opposed the GOP funding legislation almost unanimously, House Democrats are now a little miffed at Schumer. And by 'a little miffed,' I mean 'thinking of marching into the Senate to confront him and lining up primary challengers for his next election in New York.' Social media on Friday was a volcano of grassroots outrage at his betrayal after he raised their hopes that the party was about to fight, fight, fight by forcing a shutdown on a president they despise—and then wimped out. Every conservative of a certain age who's watching this play out is thinking the same thing: I've seen this movie before. Former Republican strategist Rory Cooper is one such conservative. On X on Friday, he summarized the current Democratic disarray with sarcasm: 'A political party divided over shutting the government down, and the base of the party doesn't think leadership is fighting hard enough, and leadership has almost no options. First time?' It's not his first time, nor mine. This is the stuff of which Tea Parties are made. Many left-wingers who are furious today at Schumer are leaning into the parallel. 'I would not be surprised to see, if not quite a Tea Party equivalent, a wave of challengers against old Democratic incumbents in particular,' the leader of one progressive activist group warned the New York Times. 'It is not going to be ideological. It's going to be style.' Search Twitter and you'll find angry commentary about the Democrats' Senate surrender littered with similar references. The analogy is obvious. In 2008, burdened by an unpopular president and economic turmoil, Republicans lost the White House and both houses of Congress. The party was left with an identity crisis and a morale problem. Bushism was exhausted and discredited, and a charismatic 'transformational' president from the other party looked poised to make the GOP a minority indefinitely with the new coalition he had built. The Tea Party was the right's solution to the morale problem. Lacking a national political leader, it fomented an angry populist backlash to the president's agenda. In doing so it eased the Republican identity crisis for a while, as Barack Obama's agenda polarized Tea Partiers into Reaganesque demands for smaller government and 'constitutional conservatism.' Only later, in 2016, would it become clear how threadbare and opportunistic that identity was. What was novel about the Tea Party was that it blamed its own side's 'out of touch' political establishment for America's failures as much as it did the other's. Because the right's reaction to Obama cosplayed as an ideological reawakening, congressional Republicans were derided as turncoats and deemed part of the problem if they strayed toward the center on policy. But in reality, populist venom for moderate 'Republicans In Name Only' was as much a reaction to style as substance. Conciliatory GOPers who preferred to work with Democrats instead of confronting them aggressively—who weren't willing to 'fight'—were marked for political death via primary challenges. They would be replaced in time with uncompromising obstructionist blowhards who set unachievable goals and then, once elected, duly failed to achieve them. If you followed politics between 2009 and 2015, that's the movie you watched. Today it feels like we're watching the sequel. In 2024, burdened by an unpopular president and economic turmoil, Democrats lost the White House and both houses of Congress. The party has been left with an identity crisis and a morale problem. Culturally progressive educated-class neoliberalism, as embodied by Kamala Harris, seems exhausted and discredited. A charismatic 'transformational' president from the other party aims to make Democrats a minority indefinitely with the new blue-collar coalition he's building—or, perhaps, by accruing autocratic power incrementally until the constitutional order disintegrates. Into that crucible walks the Senate Democratic leader, the very face of the liberal establishment, declaring that he won't use the one bit of leverage his party still has over federal policy. He prefers to work with Republicans, however reluctantly, instead of confronting them aggressively in the name of achieving some goal that not only won't be achieved but that no one seems able to define. The left is spoiling for a fight to solve its morale problem, and Chuck Schumer won't give them one. The 'out of touch' Democratic establishment begins to look like as much of a problem as Republicans are. (The numbers don't lie!) To force that establishment to take a more combative attitude toward the enemy, the base reasons that it may have no choice but to primary Schumer. We've seen this movie before. There are other symmetries. Angry audiences at congressional town halls? The original Tea Party had plenty of those. So does the new one. Performative outbursts during presidential addresses to show defiance for the cameras? Tea Party 1.0 and Tea Party 2.0 have that in common as well. Scapegoating a Senate leader as the establishment villain-in-chief? The original Tea Party had that. Ditto for Schumer and the new version. Orchestrating a government shutdown that won't accomplish anything useful except to show how angry the out-party is? The first Tea Party gave us that in 2013 and it ended up making a national figure of one ambitious populist. The new Tea Party wants another with a hero of its own. The Tea Party of 2009 to 2015 didn't crave more conservative government. It craved resistance. It was born in a spirit of resistance and thus it expected its representatives to resist always and everywhere. It was an expression of populist id, and so naturally it came to despise the institutional superego in all forms. Its core belief was that politics is a matter of will: All it had to offer was will, therefore every political problem became a test of conviction. In time it betrayed everything it claimed to stand for and, in its current decrepit authoritarian form, has driven the country to the brink of economic and civic ruin. Can you sense how excited I am to see the Democratic analogue? In fairness, it isn't a perfect analogue. One difference between the old Tea Party and the new one is the circumstances of its birth. Unlike in 2008, the losing party wasn't bludgeoned at the polls last November and relegated to a filibuster-proof rump in the Senate. The president may be under the impression that he won the biggest, strongest, most beautiful landslide ever, but the hard truth is that he failed to reach 50 percent against a lackluster opponent who was saddled with inflation and a dead-weight incumbent. Democrats have real policy failures to address, starting with their negligence on the border and their indulgence of 'woke' shibboleths that many Americans find alienating. But unlike the GOP 17 years ago, they have nothing on the order of the Iraq war, the Hurricane Katrina debacle, or the financial crisis to answer for. Because they're not as desperate for a radical change in direction as the original Tea Party was, their new Tea Party might not be as radical in nature. A second difference, related to the first, is that Democrats seem to understand that they need to move to the center. That wasn't so for the first Tea Party. The swerve back toward Reaganite conservatarianism in 2009 was driven by a sense that Republican leaders had too often painted in ideological 'pale pastels' instead of the 'bold colors' that the Gipper endorsed. George W. Bush was a center-right establishment dynast, son and heir to a 'pale pastel' president, and his job approval stood at 25 percent on Election Day 2008. The GOP's candidate on the ballot that year was John McCain, a soft-on-immigration Senate dinosaur, and his opponent ended up winning the largest number of popular votes in American history to that point. Then, in 2012, with the Tea Party dominant, Republicans somehow nominated a former governor of Massachusetts(!) who had pioneered a health-insurance reform that inspired Obamacare. Right-wingers could look at Bush, McCain, and Mitt Romney and reasonably surmise from election results that centrism was a loser. Bolder ideological colors of the sort that produced midterm landslides in 2010 and 2014 for the Tea Party were the trick. And so, in 2016, Republican voters chose bolder colors. Boy, did they ever. The lessons are different for modern liberals. Joe Biden was a 'pale pastel' compared to the boldly colored Bernie Sanders and not only did he defeat Trump, he set a new record for popular votes in doing so. Meanwhile, below the surface, blue-collar voters who had dependably voted Democratic in the past were beginning to drift right, scared off by creeping left-wing radicalism about open borders, defunding the police, and transgenderism. That nearly cost the party a victory in 2020 and quite possibly did cost it a victory in 2024. The sense that Democrats have moved too far left is shared by Democrats themselves. Last month Gallup found that the share who believe the party should become 'more moderate' had jumped since 2021, rising from 34 percent to 45 percent. The share who said that it should become 'more liberal' declined over the same period, from 34 percent to 29. Even if a new left-wing Tea Party gets off the ground, political reality should make it less likely to radicalize than its right-wing forebear. To win a Democratic primary, a Tea Party candidate will presumably need to meet the growing demand for moderation among the party's voters that was absent in the GOP circa 2009. As the progressive activist I quoted earlier told the Times, the new movement 'is not going to be ideological. It's going to be style.' It's a nice thought, at least. Others seem to share it. I hope it works out for them! But I don't think it will. I find it hard to believe that an insurgent political movement bent on dethroning its party's establishment can be aggressive 'stylistically' without becoming aggressive ideologically too. The fact that the primary challenger of choice for Chuck Schumer looks to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proves the point. If all liberals are looking for is a pugnacious contrast in 'style' with the senator, it seems weird that they're rallying behind the most prominent young socialist in the country, no? The nature of a Tea Party points remorselessly toward policy radicalism. Imagine how absurd it would be if Schumer's challenger declared during a primary debate, 'I agree with him on everything, except that we really need more shutdowns.' Try as one might to be radically combative about tactics yet substantively moderate about policy, the ethic of 'fighting' on which such movements are founded—especially fighting members of their own party establishment—will inevitably encourage 'fights' over policy as well. Inevitably, the challenger's need to distinguish himself as a 'bold' alternative to the incumbent will lead him to endorse bolder colors on policy as well. And if you end up getting elected for your willingness to 'fight,' you can't be a voice of restraint in Congress without betraying your mandate. That probably explains why so many right-wing Tea Partiers slid easily from 'constitutional conservatism' into whatever the hell Mike Lee is now. Trump's politics work just as well as Reagan's if all you're looking to do is fight, so it was easy for Tea Party populists to shift from one to the other despite the ideological incongruity. When you're in Congress to stick it to the enemy, the important thing is to stick it to them; it doesn't much matter what shape the stick happens to take. So if Republicans propose a reasonable-ish compromise in some policy dispute that establishment Democrats are inclined to accept, a Tea Party Democratic congressman sent to Washington to 'fight' will reflexively conclude that that compromise is a nonstarter. The ethic of resistance becomes an end in itself. After 16 supremely moronic years, I think our country has had more than enough of it. Combative contrarianism wouldn't be the only radicalizing influence on a Democratic Tea Party either. Age gaps will also be a factor. Given the public's post-Biden disquiet about American gerontocracy, it's a cinch that left-wingers recruited to challenge figures like Schumer will be much younger in order to underline how 'out of touch' the current Democratic leadership is. Young politicians aren't prone to restraint and moderation in the best circumstances, but the age difference will further encourage them to offer fresh, daring, exciting ideas on policy in contrast to the elderly incumbent's pale pastels. And then there's Trump. Fundamentally, the left's desire to oust Schumer is driven by the sense that, like Michael Corleone, they need a 'wartime consigliere.' Trump is waging a war of sorts on the federal government and will wage one in due course on the entire constitutional order, and an old man who feebly chants 'we will win!' yet shirks from the first opportunity for battle just ain't gonna cut it as commanding general. Even more so than in his first term, Trump is destined to negatively polarize liberals against his policy positions. Which means that a Tea Party candidate will have cover to tack to the left in a Democratic primary—and possibly even an incentive to do so—despite any early vows of moderation. 'Is this a crisis or not?' a frustrated David Graham wrote of Schumer's decision to oppose a shutdown. That's the unofficial motto of any insurgent political movement that prioritizes 'fighting' over the goals it's ostensibly fighting for. And the thing about a crisis mentality is that, once you adopt it, every form of radicalism is justified in the name of ending the crisis, including radicalism on policy. You would think Americans would have learned their lesson by now, but evidently not. Here we go again.
