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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
This Is What Trump Does When His Revolution Sputters
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Revolutions have a logic. The revolutionaries start with a big, transformative, impossible goal. They want to remake society, smash existing institutions, replace them with something different. They know they will do damage on the road to their utopia, and they know people will object. Committed to their ideology, the revolutionaries pursue their goals anyway. Inevitably, a crisis appears. Perhaps many people, even most people, don't want regime change, or don't share the revolutionaries' utopian vision. Perhaps there are unplanned disasters. Smashing institutions can have unexpected, sometimes catastrophic, consequences, as the history of post-revolutionary famines shows very well. But whatever the nature of the crisis, it forces the revolutionaries to make a choice. Give up—or radicalize. Find compromises—or polarize society further. Slow down—or use violence. The bloodiest, most damaging revolutions have all been shaped by people making the most extreme choices. When the Bolsheviks ran into opposition in 1918, they unleashed the Red Terror. When the Chinese Communists encountered resistance, Mao sent teenage Red Guards to torment professors and civil servants. Sometimes the violence was mere theater, lecture halls full of people demanding that victims recant. Sometimes it was real. But it always served a purpose: to provoke, to divide, and then to allow the revolutionaries to suspend the law, create an emergency, and rule by decree. I doubt very much that Donald Trump knows a lot about the methods of Bolsheviks or Maoists, although I am certain that some of his entourage does. But he is now leading an assault on what some around him call the administrative state, which the rest of us call the U.S. government. This assault is revolutionary in nature. Trump's henchmen have a set of radical, sometimes competing goals, all of which require fundamental changes in the nature of the American state. The concentration of power in the hands of the president. The replacement of the federal civil service with loyalists. The transfer of resources from the poor to the rich, especially rich insiders with connections to Trump. The removal, to the extent possible, of brown-skinned people from America, and the return to an older American racial hierarchy. [Juliette Kayyem: Trump's gross misuse of the National Guard] Trump and his allies also have revolutionary methods. Elon Musk sent DOGE engineers, some the same age as Mao's Red Guards, into one government department after the next to capture computers, take data, and fire staff. Trump has launched targeted attacks on institutions that symbolize the power and prestige of the old regime: Harvard, the television networks, the National Institutes of Health. ICE has sent agents in military gear to conduct mass arrests of people who may or may not be undocumented immigrants, but whose arrests will frighten and silence whole communities. Trump's family and friends have rapidly destroyed a matrix of ethical checks and balances in order to enrich the president and themselves. But their revolutionary project is now running into reality. More than 200 times, courts have questioned the legality of Trump's decisions, including the arbitrary tariffs and the deportations of people without due process. Judges have ordered the administration to rehire people who were illegally fired. DOGE is slowly being revealed as a failure, maybe even a hoax: Not only has it not saved much money, but the damage done by Musk's engineers might prove even more expensive to fix, once the costs of lawsuits, broken contracts, and the loss of government capacity are calculated. The president's signature legislation, his budget bill, has met resistance from senior Republicans and Wall Street CEOs who fear that it will destroy the U.S. government's credibility, and even resistance from Musk himself. Now Trump faces the same choice as his revolutionary predecessors: Give up—or radicalize. Find compromises—or polarize society further. Slow down—or use violence. Like his revolutionary predecessors, Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization, and he is openly seeking to provoke violence. For the moment, the administration's demonstration of force is mostly performative, a made-for-TV show designed to pit the United States military against protesters in a big Democratic city. The choice of venue for sweeping, indiscriminate raids—Home Depot stores around Los Angeles, and not, say, a golf club in Florida—seems orchestrated to appeal to Trump voters. The deployment of the U.S. military is designed to create frightening images, not to fulfill an actual need. The governor of California did not ask for U.S. troops; the mayor of Los Angeles did not ask for U.S. troops; even the L.A. police made clear that there was no emergency, and that they did not require U.S. troops. [David Frum: For Trump, this is a dress rehearsal] But this is not the final stage of the revolution. The Marines in Los Angeles may provoke more violence, and that may indeed be the true purpose of their mission; after all, the Marines are primarily trained not to do civilian crowd control, but to kill the enemies of the United States. In an ominous speech at Fort Bragg yesterday, Trump reverted to the dehumanizing rhetoric he used during the election campaign, calling protesters 'animals' and 'a foreign enemy,' language that seems to give permission to the Marines to kill people. Even if this confrontation ends without violence, the presence of the military in Los Angeles breaks another set of norms and prepares the way for another escalation, another set of emergency decrees, another opportunity to discard the rule of law later on. The logic of revolution often traps revolutionaries: They start out thinking that the task will be swift and easy. The people will support them. Their cause is just. But as their project falters, their vision narrows. At each obstacle, after each catastrophe, the turn to violence becomes that much swifter, the harsh decisions that much easier. If not stopped, by Congress or the courts, the Trump revolution will follow that logic too. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
2 days ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
Trump's Revolutionary Logic Meets the California Protests
Revolutions have a logic. The revolutionaries start with a big, transformative, impossible goal. They want to remake society, smash existing institutions, replace them with something different. They know they will do damage on the road to their utopia, and they know people will object. Committed to their ideology, the revolutionaries pursue their goals anyway. Inevitably, a crisis appears. Perhaps many people, even most people, don't want regime change, or don't share the revolutionaries' utopian vision. Perhaps there are unplanned disasters. Smashing institutions can have unexpected, sometimes catastrophic, consequences, as the history of post-revolutionary famines shows very well. But whatever the nature of the crisis, it forces the revolutionaries to make a choice. Give up—or radicalize. Find compromises—or polarize society further. Slow down—or use violence. The bloodiest, most damaging revolutions have all been shaped by people making the most extreme choices. When the Bolsheviks ran into opposition in 1918, they unleashed the Red Terror. When the Chinese Communists encountered resistance, Mao sent teenage Red Guards to torment professors and civil servants. Sometimes the violence was mere theater, lecture halls full of people demanding that victims recant. Sometimes it was real. But it always served a purpose: to provoke, to divide, and then to allow the revolutionaries to suspend the law, create an emergency, and rule by decree. I doubt very much that Donald Trump knows much about the methods of Bolsheviks or Maoists, although I am certain that some of his entourage do. But he is now leading an assault on what some around him call the administrative state, which the rest of us call the U.S. government. This assault is revolutionary in nature. Trump's henchmen have a set of radical, sometimes competing goals, all which require fundamental changes in the nature of the American state. The concentration of power in the hands of the president. The replacement of the federal civil service with loyalists. The transfer of resources from the poor to the rich, especially rich insiders with connections to Trump. The removal, to the extent possible, of brown-skinned people from America, and the return to an older American racial hierarchy. Juliette Kayyem: Trump's gross misuse of the National Guard Trump and his allies also have revolutionary methods. Elon Musk sent DOGE engineers, some the same age as Mao's Red Guards, into one government department after the next to capture computers, take data, and fire staff. Trump has launched targeted attacks on institutions that symbolize the power and prestige of the old regime: Harvard, the television networks, the National Institutes of Health. ICE has sent agents in military gear to conduct mass arrests of people who may or may not be undocumented immigrants, but whose arrests will frighten and silence whole communities. Trump's family and friends have rapidly destroyed a matrix of ethical checks and balances in order to enrich the president and themselves. But their revolutionary project is now running into reality. More than 200 times, courts have questioned the legality of Trump's decisions, including the arbitrary tariffs and the deportations of people without due process. Judges have ordered the administration to rehire people who were illegally fired. DOGE is slowly being revealed as a failure, maybe even a hoax: Not only has it not saved much money, but the damage done by Musk's engineers might prove even more expensive to fix, once the costs of lawsuits, broken contracts, and the loss of government capacity are calculated. The president's signature legislation, his budget bill, has met resistance from senior Republicans and Wall Street CEOs who fear that it will destroy the U.S. government's credibility, and even resistance from Musk himself. Now Trump faces the same choice as his revolutionary predecessors: Give up—or radicalize. Find compromises—or polarize society further. Slow down—or use violence. Like his revolutionary predecessors, Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization, and he is openly seeking to provoke violence. For the moment, the administration's demonstration of force is mostly performative, a made-for-TV show designed to pit the United States military against protesters in a big Democratic city. The choice of venue for sweeping, indiscriminate raids— Home Depot stores around Los Angeles, and not, say, a golf club in Florida—seems orchestrated to appeal to Trump voters. The deployment of the U.S. military is designed to create frightening images, not to fulfill an actual need. The governor of California did not ask for U.S. troops; the mayor of Los Angeles did not ask for U.S. troops; even the L.A. police made clear that there was no emergency, and that they did not require U.S. troops. David Frum: For Trump, this is a dress rehearsal But this is not the final stage of the revolution. The Marines in Los Angeles may provoke more violence, and that may indeed be the true purpose of their mission; after all, the Marines are primarily trained not to do civilian crowd control, but to kill the enemies of the United States. In an ominous speech at Fort Bragg yesterday, Trump reverted to the dehumanizing rhetoric he used during the election campaign, calling protesters 'animals' and 'a foreign enemy,' language that seems to give permission to the Marines to kill people. Even if this confrontation ends without violence, the presence of the military in Los Angeles breaks another set of norms and prepares the way for another escalation, another set of emergency decrees, another opportunity to discard the rule of law later on. The logic of revolution often traps revolutionaries: They start out thinking that the task will be swift and easy. The people will support them. Their cause is just. But as their project falters, their vision narrows. At each obstacle, after each catastrophe, the turn to violence becomes that much swifter, the harsh decisions that much easier. If not stopped, by Congress or the courts, the Trump revolution will follow that logic too.
CNA
09-05-2025
- Politics
- CNA
Taiwan denounces Russia, China for distorting World War II history
TAIPEI : Taiwan's government on Friday (May 9) criticised Russia and China for distorting World War II history, saying Chinese communist forces made "no substantial contribution" to fighting Japan and instead took the opportunity to expand their own forces. Taiwan has since the start of this year sought to cast the war as a lesson to China in why aggression will end in failure, remind the world it was not the government in Beijing that won the war. The Chinese government at the time was the Republic of China, part of the US, British and Russian-led alliance, and its forces did much of the fighting against Japan, putting on pause a bitter civil war with Mao Zedong's Communists whose military also fought the Japanese. The republican government then fled to Taiwan in 1949 after finally being defeated by Mao, and Republic of China remains the democratic island's official name. was won under the leadership of China's communist party, Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council said it was the Republic of China government and people who fought and ultimately won. "The Chinese communists only took the opportunity to expand and consolidate communist forces, and made no substantial contribution to the war of resistance, let alone 'leading' the war of resistance," it said. China's Taiwan Affairs Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Los Angeles Times
01-04-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Chinese military launches large-scale drills around Taiwan
TAIPEI, Taiwan — The Chinese military announced large-scale drills in the waters and airspace around Taiwan on Tuesday that include an aircraft carrier battle group, as it again warned the self-ruled island democracy against seeking formal independence. The joint exercises involve navy, air-ground and rocket forces and are meant to be a 'severe warning and forceful containment against Taiwan independence,' according to Shi Yi, a spokesperson for the People's Liberation Army's Eastern Theater Command. No operational name for the drills was announced nor previous notice given. China considers Taiwan a part of its territory, to be brought under its control by force if necessary, while most Taiwanese favor their de facto independence and democratic status. Any conflict could bring in the U.S., which maintains a series of alliances in the region and is legally bound to treat threats to Taiwan as a matter of 'grave concern.' Taiwan's Presidential Office posted on X that 'China's blatant military provocations not only threaten peace in the #Taiwan Strait but also undermine security in the entire region, as evidenced by drills near Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, the Philippines & the SCS. We strongly condemn China's escalatory behavior.' The SCS refers to the South China Sea, the strategic waterway that China claims almost in its entirety. China's navy also recently held drills near Australia and New Zealand for which it gave no warning, forcing the last-minute rerouting of commercial flights. Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense said it had tracked 19 Chinese navy vessels in the waters surrounding the island in a 24-hour period from 6 a.m. Monday until 6 a.m. Tuesday. It added that the Shandong aircraft carrier group had entered into Taiwan's air defense identification zone on Monday, a self-defined area tracked by the military. Beijing sends warplanes and navy vessels toward the island on a daily basis, and in recent years, it has stepped up the scope and scale of these exercises. Taiwanese officials have recently warned that China could launch a sneak attack under the guise of military exercises. 'I want to say these actions amply reflect [China's] destruction of regional peace and stability,' said Taiwan's Defense Minister Wellington Koo. Taiwan has set up a central response group to monitor the latest exercises, Koo said. On the streets of Taipei, people said the atmosphere was tense, but they were more concerned about the economy and developments surrounding the administration of President Trump. 'The Chinese Communists spend so much time and effort on these things, but most people don't pay much attention,' said Lin Hui-tsung, a noodle seller in the city's Tiananmu district. China's Xinhua News Agency said the Eastern Theater Command on Tuesday conducted 'multi-subject drills in waters to the north, south and east of Taiwan Island.' The theater command 'organized its vessel and aircraft formations, in coordination with conventional missile troops and long-range rocket launching systems, to conduct drills of air interception, assault on maritime targets, strikes on ground objects, and joint blockade and control,' Xinhua quoted the command as saying. The exercises were 'aimed at testing the troops' capabilities of carrying out integrated operations, seizure of operational control and multi-directional precision strikes, the command said. 'The PLA organized naval and air forces to practice subjects such as sea and land strikes, focusing on testing the troops' ability to carry out precision strikes on some key targets of the Taiwan authorities from multiple directions,' said Zhang Chi, a professor at China's National Defense University in an interview with Chinese state television. China's Coast Guard also announced it was conducting a 'law enforcement patrol' on Tuesday around Taiwan, its spokesperson, Zhu Anqin, said. The drills come just two weeks after a large-scale exercise in mid-March, when Beijing sent a large number of drones and ships toward the island. China's Taiwan Affairs Office said the exercises were directed at Lai Ching-te, Taiwan's strongly pro-independence president. 'Lai Ching-te stubbornly insists on a 'Taiwan independence' stance, brazenly labeling the mainland as a 'foreign hostile force,' and has put forward a so-called '17-point strategy' ... stirring up anti-China sentiments,' said China's Taiwan Affairs Office in a statement on Tuesday. 'We will not tolerate or condone this in any way and must resolutely counter and severely punish these actions.' In mid-March, Taiwan's Lai put forward a 17-point strategy aimed at shoring up Taiwan's national security. The points include allowing espionage cases to be tried by military courts and making immigration rules stricter for Chinese citizens applying for permanent residency. Lai's words and actions appear to have especially angered Chinese leader Xi Jinping, whose previous attempts at intimidation have had little effect on the Taiwanese public. Those have often been timed in response to expressions of Taiwanese independence, including a visit by then U.S. House leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). China's PLA also released a series of videos to publicize their military exercise, including one in which they depict Lai as a green parasite 'poisoning' the island by hatching smaller parasites. The video shows Lai's head on the body of a bulbous green worm, with a pair of chopsticks picking him up and roasting him over a flame set over Taiwan. Taiwan and China split amid civil war 76 years ago, but tensions have risen since 2016, when China cut off almost all contacts with Taipei. In the Philippines, military chief Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. asked Filipino forces to prepare to rescue Filipinos working and living in Taiwan if China invades the island, speaking during a ceremony marking the founding anniversary of the military command that secures the Philippine region closest to Taiwan. 'If something happens to Taiwan, inevitably we will be involved. There are 250,000 overseas Filipino workers in Taiwan and we will have to rescue them,' Brawner said. Wu and Lai write for the Associated Press. Wu reported from Bangkok. Christopher Bodeen in Taipei, Taiwan, and Jim Gomez in Manila contributed to this report.
Arab Times
01-04-2025
- Politics
- Arab Times
Chinese military launches large-scale drills around Taiwan
TAIPEI, Taiwan, April 1, (AP): The Chinese military announced large-scale drills in the waters and airspace around Taiwan on Tuesday that include an aircraft carrier battle group, as it again warned the self-ruled island democracy against seeking formal independence. The joint exercises involve navy, air ground and rocket forces and are meant to be a "severe warning and forceful containment against Taiwan independence,' according to Shi Yi, a spokesperson for the People's Liberation Army's Eastern Theater Command. No operational name for the drills was announced or previous notice given. China considers Taiwan a part of its territory, to be brought under its control by force if necessary, while most Taiwanese favor their de-facto independence and democratic status. Any conflict could bring in the US, which maintains a series of alliances in the region and is legally bound to treat threats to Taiwan as a matter of "grave concern.' Taiwan's Ministry of National Defence said it had tracked 19 Chinese navy vessels in the waters surrounding the island in a 24-hour period from 6 a.m. Monday until 6 am Tuesday. I t added that it had been tracking the movement of the Shandong aircraft carrier since Saturday and that its carrier group had entered into Taiwan's air defense identification zone, a self-defined area tracked by the military. China regularly dispatches military assets into the zone, which China does not recognize, but Taiwanese officials have recently warned that China could launch a sneak attack under the guise of military exercises. "I want to say these actions amply reflect (China's) destruction of regional peace and stability,' said Taiwan's Defense Minister Wellington Koo. Taiwan has set up a central response group to monitor the latest exercises, Koo said. On The streets of Taipei, people said the atmosphere was tense but they were more concerned about the economy and developments surrounding the administration of US President Donald Trump. "The Chinese Communists spends so much time and effort on these things but most people don't pay much attention,' said Lin Hui-tsung, a noodle seller in the city's Tiananmu district. China's Coast Guard also announced it was conducting a "law enforcement patrol' on Tuesday around Taiwan, its spokesperson Zhu Anqin said.
