Latest news with #Cassandra-like
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Let's Start Talking About Jail Time for Trump and His MAGA Enablers
What's in the water in the state of Maryland? Whatever it is, it's certainly more invigorating than the sewage that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his grandchildren have been swimming in. A few weeks ago, one of the Old Line State's senators, Chris Van Hollen, dropped his gloves to take on President Donald Trump's unlawful banishment and imprisonment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This week, his House colleague Kweisi Mfume was responding to an administration flirting with suspending the habeas rights of its citizens in stark, but welcome terms. 'It's a damn shame to continue to see what is happening to our nation under the guise of this Trump administration and his Department of Government Evil,' he said. 'He and Elon Musk, really in my opinion, deserve to be arrested and charged with assault on the Constitution.' One of the more unfortunate realities of the Trump era is that to speak the plain truth about it requires you to get over the feeling that you're being shrill or alarmist. 'I know that might sound crazy and ludicrous,' Mfume said, commenting on his call to arrest the president and his pet oligarch. As someone who's spent the past few years issuing Cassandra-like warnings only to watch so many of my ostensible industry peers take a dive, I can relate. But the thing about Cassandra is that she's correct, and so is Mfume. Trump isn't a president. He's the head of a criminal syndicate, and he should be treated accordingly—now and, even more importantly, when he and his accomplices are finally out of power. Trump 2.0 has been a remarkable speedrun into lawlessness, a testament to the fact that there might have actually been some adults in the room during his first term. (During which time he still fomented an insurrection and got impeached twice!) Now, freed from those guardrails that were once upstanding, he's rocketed into a new level of infamy. I once held that George W. Bush's reign was much more costly than Trump's. No longer; his return has truly been a thing apart. As TNR's Alex Shephard documented this week, Trump's trip to the Gulf States has been a vertically integrated grift, in which the president has racked up more corrupt enterprises than most politicians manage in their whole careers. This week's skullduggery is, of course, just one brief crime spree among many. Over at The Nation, Jeb Lund lays down the lengthy rap sheet that Trump has written for himself in his first 100 days. The Trump administration has heisted the private data of millions of Americans, unlawfully terminated thousands of federal employees, extorted law firms and businesses and broadcasters; they're gaming the markets, raking in corrupt money with crypto-tokens, kidnapping people and exiling them to foreign prisons without due process, and much much more. As Lund notes: 'The question is not whether Trump and his people committed a crime while you read that last sentence but how many.' It shouldn't come as any surprise that the Trump administration is canceling the FBI's investigations into white-collar criminals. But if these sorts of crimes aren't dramatic enough for you, we could also simply stick with good old-fashioned manslaughter. As TNR's Matt Ford reported this week, one of the hallmarks of Trump's public health policies is that they will kill a lot of children—probably not a surprise given that the aforementioned Kennedy is well known for directing officials in Samoa to run an open-air eugenics experiment that killed 83 kids. 'The net effect of these policy changes,' Ford writes, 'is to make this country a more dangerous place for Americans to give birth and grow up.' Abroad, Trump administration policies have the same eugenicist bent. As TNR contributor James North chronicled, the gutting of PEPFAR—the Bush-era HIV/AIDS intervention that has saved countless lives in Africa and one of the most highly regarded U.S. policies the world over—'has already sentenced tens of thousands of people in Africa to death, and with each week that passes with the program stuck in limbo, many thousands of needless deaths will follow.' The administration's approach to PEPFAR is of a piece with a range of policy decisions that will, in the best-case scenario, cede soft-power space to China and others to secure the developing world's regard for stepping into a vacuum and providing humanitarian assistance. The worst-case scenario is, naturally, millions of needless deaths. Back in March, The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof attempted to quantify the harms done by the Trump administration's decimation of foreign aid agencies in terms of lives lost. Here are his calculations: 1.65 million deaths from AIDS, 500,000 from lack of vaccines, 550,000 from lack of food aid, and approximately 300,000 each from lack of malaria and tuberculosis prevention, respectively. This all raises an interesting question: How many people have to die before the word holocaust is in play? I'm not gunning for shock value here, at least not solely. I want to suggest that there is a certain necessary logic to what has to follow corrupt misrule of this kind: tribunals, trials, punishment, prison, and the running to ground and defunding of the entire Trump syndicate. It's an undertaking that will require no small amount of courage, and it will break with a long-standing status quo that has favored the absolution of numerous mortal sins, from the Bush administration's unlawful torture network to Wall Street's ruination of the economy to the many costly foreign misadventures that have feathered the nests of the military industrial complex over the years. The 'look forward, not backward' ways etched into the civic firmament have served us poorly; in retrospect, what we had to look forward to was this exact moment with this perfidious administration. Real accountability is not something I expect will be popular with the rotted mass media and its grotesque aversion to good governance or the wholly out-of-touch pundit class, whose opinions on Trumpian corruption tend to lag years behind most functional adults'. This is where the avatars of 'Let the bad guys off the hook and move on' obtained their intellectual cover over the years. Suffice it to say, they'll like a better world wrought from taking these criminals down and locking them up just fine. But those who want to pursue justice for all those wronged by this administration should expect to be branded as heretical. We hear so much about the 'rule of law' these days. So many people are concerned about it! They just don't know what's going to happen to it. Even among the gravely worried, there is this sense that the 'rule of law' is like a machine someone turned on at some point in the past, which runs in the background of American life like some sort of ambient presence. What the rule of law really is, it turns out, is the sum total of our deeds—and our inaction. The rule of law lives or dies on our willingness to act—occasionally with grim resolve. It's time for people who value justice to screw their courage to the sticking place. This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
Yahoo
17-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
George Washington Cut Six Sentences From His Farewell Address. They're Haunting Me Now.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In 1796, George Washington struck six pointed sentences from his Farewell Address. I'd largely forgotten about them—the final address contains enough wisdom to fill volumes—until, on a whim, I revisited the drafts. What I found was revelatory: a chilling prophecy of the constitutional crisis now threatening to engulf our nation. These excised lines from the Farewell Address serve not only as a warning but as a prescient prophecy of the political turmoil and factionalism that would later shape the nation's history. They reveal Washington's deep understanding of the fragile nature of democratic institutions and the ever-present threats of demagoguery and partisan strife. This Presidents Day, these rediscovered warnings serve not as a eulogy for our experiment in self-governance, but as a rallying cry for its reinvigoration. 'In Republics of narrow extent,' Washington cautioned in this purged passage, 'it is not difficult for those who at any time hold the reins of Power, and command the ordinary public favor, to overturn the established Constitution, in favor of their own aggrandisement.' Washington offered the blueprint of the modern demagogue, a Cassandra-like prophecy of executive overreach and populist fervor. His words eerily prefigure the rise of Andrew Jackson's 'spoils system,' Gov. Huey Long's Louisiana fiefdom, and our current era of autocracy amplified by social media. Washington, having spurned a crown himself, recognized the siren song that could bewitch even ostensibly democratic leaders, particularly in polities where checks on power are easily subverted. 'Partial combinations of men, who though not in Office, from birth, riches or other sources of distinction, have extraordinary influence & numerous adherents' would subvert the very foundations of the republic, Washington warned. To become a demagogue, a president would need more than a powerful political party; he'd depend on a cabal of powerful citizens—the wealthy puppet masters, media barons, and shadow influencers—who could provide the scaffolding for a president to dismantle democratic norms. The enablers of tyranny, Washington predicted, wouldn't be public servants, but private citizens who thought nothing of trading constitutional principles for a seat at the table of power. Washington, who transitioned seamlessly from general to president and back to private citizen, could easily imagine a demagogue giving in to the perilous temptation to use martial power as a political cudgel. 'By debauching the military force, by surprising some commanding citadel, or by some other sudden & unforeseen movement, the fate of the Republic is decided,' he warned, intimating that the president could deploy troops for domestic political ends, quelling protests, rounding up people he deems undesirable, and undermining electoral processes. But then, suddenly, there's good news. Washington's analysis in this excised section pivots to a cautious optimism about large republics—at a time when the United States territory extended only to the Mississippi River. 'But in Republics of large extent, usurpations can scarcely make its way through these avenues,' Washington writes to 'Friends & Fellow-Citizens,' in an address that was published in newspapers rather than delivered to Congress. 'The powers and opportunities of resistance of a wide extended and numerous nation, defy the successful efforts of the ordinary military force, or of any Collections which wealth and patronage may call to their aid.' Echoing James Madison in Federalist No. 10, he places faith in size as democracy's invisible shield. The American experiment, sprawling across half a continent, was to be a Gordian knot too complex for any would-be Alexander to slice through. Notably, Washington's emphasis on 'resistance' suggests a populace capable of thwarting tyranny through its sheer diversity and geographic spread—a prescient nod to the grassroots movements and state-level pushback that would often serve as bulwarks against federal overreach in centuries to come. The last line Washington omitted, however, qualifies that optimism with a sobering coda: 'In such Republics, it is safe to assert, that the conflicts of popular factions are the chief, if not the only inlets, of usurpation and Tyranny.' The Achilles' heel of large democracies—their very diversity, if channeled into blind factionalism—could become the instrument of their undoing. Washington had no crystal ball, and yet he vaguely described a country where political tribes hunker in digital bunkers, consuming and creating partisan journalism, lobbing grenades across an ever-widening chasm of mutual incomprehension. Why did Washington strike these pointed lines from his Farewell Address? Alexander Hamilton, by then a New York lawyer who still played the president's éminence grise, wanted Washington to exit as he entered: a unifying figure optimistic about the 'infant nation.' He warned that Washington's draft, tinged with partisan bitterness, would not 'wear well.' In 2025, however, it's clear that Hamilton was being shortsighted. The irony stings: In preserving Washington's unifying legacy, perhaps those words that could have unified Americans in a more important way—against the very factionalism now threatening our republic—were erased. Is it too late? Now that we've unearthed these lines, we can't unsee them. This Presidents Day, Washington's cuts serve as a clarion call, challenging us to prove that a republic can indeed survive the very pluralism that defines it. They demand action: confront divisive rhetoric, safeguard democratic institutions, and remain vigilant against fast and furious authoritarianism. The choice is ours. History awaits our answer.
