Donald Trump’s decision to put loyalists with little experience or talent in some of the most important jobs in government is beginning to bite him in the ass.

Kristi Noem had no experience running a federal agency or overseeing law enforcement when Trump put her in charge of the 260,000-person Department of Homeland Security. Think about that. The result was the chaos and violence we saw in Minnesota, and Americans hated it.

Tulsi Gabbard had no senior intelligence management experience when she was put in charge of the entire intelligence community. Her short tenure was chaotic.

Kash Patel had never run a major law-enforcement organization when Trump put him in charge of the FBI. Since then, dozens of experienced agents and officials have been fired, including counterespionage experts and people with expertise on Iran that America could desperately use now.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had spent years spreading dangerous misinformation about vaccines. His cousin - Caroline Kennedy - wrote an article to the American people calling him a predator. Trump put him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services. The result has been the largest measles outbreak in more than three decades.

Pete Hegseth is the most extreme example of incompetence. Hegseth had never held a senior Pentagon position, and had only served in the National Guard before being put in charge of the Department of Defense. And right before being appointed, his main job was co-hosting a show on Fox TV. He is now the man making decisions about Iran, force deployment, military strategy, weapons procurement, and nuclear policy.

All of these people have bungled major policies in ways that have hurt Trump. Today, Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 33 percent, his lowest ever.

So why did Trump appoint these people?

It’s the same reason strongmen have been doing it forever.

Strongmen face a fundamental problem if they want to grab control. Political scientists call it the loyalty-competence trade-off.

Initially, strongmen need competent people to help bring them to power and guide them through political systems them may not fully understand. That’s part of the reason Trump appointed highly qualified people in his first term: James Mattis at Defense, John Kelly at DHS, Dan Coats in intelligence, and Gina Haspel at the CIA.

But once a strongman has gained power and experience, those same competent people can’t be trusted to blindly follow the leader down his desired path of authoritarianism and corruption. In fact, they could potentially threaten the strongman’s agenda. They know how the system works. They have networks and outside options. They have the ability to thwart what comes next.

That’s when competence starts to become a liability. At some point, the strongman has incentives to replace competent people with people who will stay loyal no matter what. And the people most likely to stay loyal are often second and third-rate talents - people who would never be able to compete to be secretary of defense or homeland security based on their merits. The only way they are going to get these jobs is to be ass-kissing yes-men. And because they have few better outside options, the strongman has them by the proverbial balls.

General Jim Mattis, when he resigned from Trump’s first cabinet, could return to Stanford’s Hoover Institution and remain one of the most respected military figures in the country. Pete Hegseth, at best, could go back to being a weekend Fox News talking head.

It’s the “I just won the lottery” situation that makes the Hegseths of the world so desperate to keep the strongman happy. Trump, like many strongmen before him, has discovered that mediocrity can be useful.

So what can we expect next?

Historically, here’s what we tend to see:

Shitty policies will proliferate. During Mao’s Great Leap Forward, government officials reported greatly exaggerated harvests rather than admit that Mao’s policies were failing. The result was one of the worst famines in history.

The economy will suffer. Strongmen like to hear that the economy is booming. But this creates incentives for loyal appointees to cook the books and manipulate institutions designed to protect the economy from politics. Trump’s pressure on the Federal Reserve is a real-time example of this.

Corruption will continue to increase. Government jobs become political rewards, giving cronies access to money and opportunities they could never obtain on their own. This corruption serves another important purpose: it binds everyone at the top to the strongman. Once they have participated in shady dealings themselves, they have even more reason to keep him in power. If he goes down, they all go down with him.

Institutions will decay. Loyalists are put in place not to protect the FBI, DHS, intelligence agencies, Defense, or the Justice Department, but to weaken their independent power and remake them as loyal arms of the president.

Major foreign-policy mistakes become more likely. Political scientist Jessica Weeks found that strongman regimes are particularly prone to international conflict and more willing to enter wars they have a relatively low probability of winning. The current war with Iran is a perfect example of this.

Will Trump fire the most incompetent of the incompetents: Hegseth, Patel, Kennedy? He could if they screw up too much or reveal even an inkling of disloyalty. But his deep need for loyalty, especially as his power declines after the midterms, suggests he will simply replace them with more loyalists grateful for jobs they would otherwise never qualify for. Those new appointees might not be as bad as these clowns, but they will be bad.

That means that the terrible decisions and the chaos we have been seeing in Trump’s second term will likely continue until Trump is finally gone.

Ultimately, strongmen who surround themselves with idiots make themselves vulnerable to catastrophic mistakes, whether it is a disastrous economic crisis or a costly unwinnable war. And this, ironically, often leads to their demise.

The problem is that we all pay the price.

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Here’s something I can’t stop thinking about.

The midterm elections are less than three months away. Republicans are in trouble. And Donald Trump keeps doing things that make their biggest problem – the economy - worse.

Americans are going to vote in November based in large part on how they feel about the economy, and right now they don’t feel good.

Sixty-four percent of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of inflation. Democrats lead Republicans by eight points on who has the better plan for the cost of living. And earlier this month, Democrats pulled ahead of Republicans on managing the economy for the first time in a long time.

Normally, this is when presidents start handing out goodies.

In 2022, with inflation high and Democrats heading into a difficult midterm, Joe Biden did everything he could to bring down prices. He released 180 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. He announced student debt relief. He signed legislation designed to lower prescription drug and health care costs. Less than three weeks before Election Day, he released more oil because, as he put it, gas prices were “not falling fast enough.”

This is what presidents do before midterms. They try to make voters feel richer not poorer.

Trump is doing the opposite.

Trump recently imposed tariffs on a huge number of imported goods driving up prices. Last week he imposed 50 percent tariffs on Canadian goods, including wine, furniture, dairy products, and hockey equipment. Canada retaliated with tariffs on American goods, including steel, aluminum, furniture, clothing, cheese, electronics, and machinery. Those tariffs take effect September 8 - two months before the mid-terms. Americans are not going to be happy.

Trump is also removing workers from industries that depend heavily on immigrant labor. Fewer immigrants means slower growth in the labor force and a smaller economy. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Trump’s immigration policies will increase federal deficits by roughly $500 billion over ten years, in part because there will be fewer workers paying taxes.

Then there is Iran.

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran that began in February has helped spike gasoline prices. Gas now costs roughly a dollar more per gallon than it did a year ago. And all this for a war that only 31 percent of Americans support.

Add to that the deficit.

Trump promised to slash government spending. Instead, the Congressional Budget Office projects a $1.9 trillion federal deficit this year. The big tax-and-spending bill Republicans passed last year is projected to add $4.7 trillion to deficits over the coming decade.

This seems crazy right before mid-term elections.

So why is Trump doing this?

I initially thought there must be some larger strategy here. But none of it adds up either economically or politically.

Instead, what makes sense is Trump doing this for personal reasons.

Immigration. Tariffs. Tax cuts. Iran. Lower interest rates. His ballroom. Remaking Washington D.C. These policies look incoherent if you assume Trump is trying to maximize economic growth. But they look much more coherent if you assume he’s trying to maximize the things he really really cares about.

Still, that doesn’t explain the timing.

Why not ease up on tariffs for a few months? Slow down the deportations. Find a way out of Iran. Focus obsessively on prices. Help Republicans win in November. Then go back to them after the election.

I think the answer is fairly simple. Right now Trump has a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican Party that has rubber stamped everything he’s wanted.

That’s likely to end in January if and when the Democrats come to power and Trump knows this. The window to implement his pet projects is closing.

Democrats are likely to refuse to pass new legislation Trump wants. They could turn every major spending bill into a negotiation. And they would control House committees, which means subpoena power, investigations and televised hearings.

Democrats are already preparing for this. They are drawing up plans to investigate Trump’s businesses and financial interests, immigration enforcement, government contracts, and other parts of his administration.

So if Trump wants to lock in the things he cares about, he needs to move fast.

But this creates a paradox.

The harder Trump pushes on tariffs, Iran, immigration, and tax cuts, the more likely Republicans are to lose in November.

So maybe Trump isn’t deliberately wrecking the economy before the midterms. Maybe he understands that Republicans could lose. He just wants other things more.

And that may be the simplest answer to our puzzle for this week.

Trump is racing to use the power he has now to get the things he really wants.

Even if Republicans pay the price.

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I’m going to start with the big picture this week. BIG.

There are lots of things national security experts worry about. War with China. Climate change. Cyberattacks. Autonomous weapons. Terrorism.

But one threat still tops all others: nuclear weapons.

The reason is simple. Nuclear weapons can create more pain with the push of a button than anything else on earth. It’s the reason the U.S. has invested so much in trying to prevent additional countries from getting them.

Today, only nine countries have nuclear weapons. That’s a shockingly small number, especially given that dozens of wealthy, technologically advanced states could build nuclear weapons quickly if they really wanted to. And there are lots of good reasons to want them.

The biggest is survival: once a country has nuclear weapons, it becomes much harder to attack.

Think about George W. Bush’s famous “axis of evil” speech in 2002. Bush singled out three countries: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. One went on to build nuclear weapons: North Korea. Two did not: Iran & Iraq. Guess which two got attacked?

The lesson isn’t hard to understand. If you have nuclear weapons, powerful countries think twice before messing with you.

So, why hasn’t everyone gone nuclear?

One big reason is the United States.

Since WWII, the U.S. has done two things to convince countries not to build them.

First, we promised every NATO member, as well as Japan, South Korea and Australia, that we would help protect them with the full force of our military. They would get the security benefits of America’s nuclear arsenal without building one themselves. Political scientists call this “extended deterrence” and it has been very effective.

Second, we helped build an international system that made acquiring nuclear weapons difficult and costly. We supported international inspections of nuclear facilities. We restricted access to sensitive technology and fissile material. And we imposed crushing economic sanctions on countries such as Iran and North Korea when they pursued nuclear programs.

Together, these policies helped keep the nuclear club amazingly small.

Trump is now messing with both sides of this bargain.

Let’s start with America’s allies.

Trump has spent years suggesting that America’s security guarantees are not guaranteed. In 2024, he told a NATO leader that if his country wasn’t spending enough on defense, he wouldn’t protect it from Russia. In fact, he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want.”

Trump has treated America’s Asian alliances the same way. He often complains about how expensive it is to defend Japan and South Korea and has suggested withdrawing American troops if those countries don’t pay more.

And just this weekend, Trump ordered the Pentagon to substantially reduce military exercises with South Korea - exercises designed to deter nuclear-armed North Korea. Trump called the exercises expensive and “hostile” and said they could be scaled back because of his “very good relationship” with Kim Jong Un.

The take-away for Germany, Japan, South Korea, and our other allies is clear. If you can’t count on America’s nuclear umbrella anymore, your best strategy is to build your own bombs.

But Trump is creating an even stronger incentive for America’s enemies to build.

Think about Iran. Iran signed an agreement with the U.S. and its allies that forced it to dramatically reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium, limit enrichment, dismantle thousands of centrifuges, and submit to international inspections. The agreement made it much harder for Iran to build a nuclear weapon.

What was the result? Trump tore up the agreement and later attacked Iran and killed its leader.

Would Trump have risked that attack if Iran already had the bomb? I doubt it.

North Korea took the opposite path. Kim Jong Un built nuclear weapons and openly tested missiles capable of reaching American territory. And what has the United States done? It’s left North Korea alone. Trump, meanwhile, calls Kim his friend.

The lesson for America’s enemies is: get the bomb.

So here we are in the worst possible situation. Both our allies and our enemies now have greater incentives to acquire nuclear weapons.

And that’s dangerous. Scott Sagan at Stanford spent decades studying nuclear accidents and close calls. His research uncovered a frightening history of nuclear near-misses even in the U.S. The more countries that gain nuclear weapons, the more opportunities there will be for something to go terribly wrong, either on purpose or accidently.

Why, then, is Trump doing this?

I don’t think Trump wants a world filled with nuclear weapons. But I do think his limited understanding of geopolitics - of the BIG picture - leads him to make decisions whose consequences he doesn’t fully understand.

Trump sees the nuclear umbrella as an expensive service America gives away to rich countries. What he misses is what America gets in return: nuclear nonproliferation and peace. That’s worth a lot.

He also seems to think that his personal relationships with dictators can substitute for the alliances and institutions designed to deter them. They won’t.

In the end, Trump doesn’t understand the #1 rule of nuclear proliferation: it’s much easier to convince countries not to build nuclear weapons, than it is to convince them to give them up.

Once a country has these weapons, the game is over.

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Donald Trump is about to start losing power. And history suggests it won’t be pretty.

After the November midterms, Trump will likely face a hostile Democratic majority in the House, and possibly the Senate. Lawsuits challenging his executive actions will continue to work their way through the courts, reducing his influence. More important, the race to replace him will begin. Ambitious Republicans will start running for president. Donors will place bets on who they think can win. The media will start focusing on them, not Trump.

Trump will hate all of this. He will hate that his power is declining, that he is no longer the center of everyone’s universe. And boy, will he hate the term “lame duck.”

Most lame-duck presidents don’t lash out. I expect Trump will.

Americans probably assume Trump will direct his anger at the usual cast of Democratic characters. Instead, I think he will increasingly aim it at his own party and those who try to succeed him.

There is actually quite a bit of research that tells us how leaders like Trump behave when they begin to lose power. Political scientists who study personalistic leaders call it the “successor’s dilemma.”

The problem is simple. Personalistic leaders eventually need successors because they get old, sick, or face term limits. But in order to have a chance to take over, a successor has to develop their own base of power. They need their own supporters. Their own donors. Their own political organization. People have to start listening to them and seeing them as the new leader. But the more successful a potential successor becomes, the more threatened someone like Trump becomes, the more likely they are to try to sabotage the heir apparent.

It’s often the threat from the inside that personalistic leaders fear the most. Viktor Orbán learned this the hard way. Péter Magyar, a former Fidesz insider, broke with Orbán, built a new political movement, and then crushed him in Hungary’s 2026 election. It wasn’t an outsider who took him down. It was an insider.

Trump’s treatment of Ron DeSantis was an early sign of this. After the 2022 midterms, many of the candidates Trump endorsed lost, while DeSantis won big in Florida. Suddenly Republicans were talking about DeSantis as the future of the party.

Trump immediately went after him. He called him “Ron DeSanctimonious.” He attacked his record. And then Trump quickly announced that he was running for president again.

What was so interesting about this was how much Trump was triggered by DeSantis. He wasn’t attacking DeSantis because DeSantis was going to undo Trumpism or MAGA. DeSantis was so threatening because DeSantis was going to inherit Trump’s movement, and Trump couldn’t stand that.

The same dilemma is about to happen, only this time Trump can’t solve it by running for president again. His best option is to keep potential successors weak, play them against one another, and punish anyone who tries to build an independent base of power. The threat isn’t that Vance or Rubio could beat Trump in 2028; Trump knows he can’t run again. It’s that one of them could replace him as the most powerful Republican in America while Trump is still alive to watch it.

So what will the next two years look like inside the Republican Party?

I suspect it will increasingly resemble a middle-school brawl, with Trump going after anyone who gets too close to the Oval Office. Trump will likely give potential successors humiliating nicknames and attack them relentlessly on social media. But we are also likely to see some crazy stuff – like Trump demanding that Republicans refuse to endorse the Republican front-runner, or that donors not give Vance or Rubio money. Trump could also go on the road to promote his own nutty candidate, or even threaten to withhold his endorsement altogether. Republicans will be left scrambling to contain the damage.

Trump will do damage. He will make it harder for the Republicans to keep the White House. But Trump almost certainly doesn’t care. In fact, that might be part of his plan. Trump might very well prefer to see a Democrat win rather than watch another Republican take his place.

Could I be wrong? Absolutely. Trump could embrace the role of kingmaker, choose Vance or someone else, campaign for him, and spend his final years taking credit for anointing the next generation of Republican leaders. But I don’t think that’s what will happen. Trump has spent his political career punishing Republicans who challenged him, from Paul Ryan to Ron DeSantis. Plus, Trump has never shown much interest in building a Republican Party that can thrive without him.

Back in 2016, Lindsey Graham famously warned his fellow Republicans: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed...and we will deserve it.”

Republicans nominated him anyway. Then they spent the next decade accommodating him, defending him, and handing him control of their party.

Now comes the interesting part.

Trump is about to turn on them.

I, for one, will enjoy the show…and hope that the Democrats take advantage of it.

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No post this week. Devoting all my time to finishing up an Afterword to How Civil Wars Start.

But I will leave you with this beautiful San Diego sunset, taken last week while sitting on the beach having a glass of wine with a dear friend.

This week, the New York Times Opinion section posed an unsettling question: are you a sucker or a jerk?

At first I laughed. Then I realized how revealing the question actually was.

When did those become our only two choices?

When did we start believing that every interaction is a contest between the person who gets exploited and the person who exploits? Between the rule-follower and the rule-breaker?

What happened to the third option? The decent person.

This is the person we all used to love: the driver who lets your car merge, the colleague who shares credit, the neighbor who quietly wheels your garbage to the curb. For generations, this wasn’t seen as weakness. It was simply what good people did.

Ask people what they want in a friend, a spouse, or a business partner, and they’ll describe someone kind, trustworthy, and generous. They don’t describe a jerk.

Yet politics and the rest of our culture seems to increasingly reward jerks and look down on everyone else. Drivers cut in line without apology. Executives boast about crushing competitors. Athletes cheat and mock anyone naïve enough to play by the rules. The people who admit mistakes, pay their taxes, tell the truth even when it costs them, or simply play fair are increasingly viewed as suckers.

The problem is that this isn't the kind of society most of us want to live in.

So why is this happening now?

It’s happened because incentives to behave well (and poorly) have changed. Social scientists call it the prisoner's dilemma and we are living through it today.

The prisoner’s dilemma is simple. Imagine two prisoners questioned separately. If both stay silent, both receive relatively light sentences. If both rat each other out, both receive harsher ones. But if only one stays silent while the other talks, the silent prisoner gets the worst outcome of all while the other walks free.

Each prisoner betrays the other because neither can trust the other to stay silent. They avoid the risk of being the sucker but both end up worse off than if they had simply trusted each other. The tragedy is that rational, self-interested behavior by each individual produces a worse outcome for everyone.

Healthy societies escape this trap of assholeness by punishing bad behavior, which then makes good behavior the rational strategy. But take away enforcement, and the smart move flips. Following rules you believe everyone else is breaking is no longer rational. You, too, become a jerk.

So why does this feel increasingly familiar in America?

Part of the answer is social media. Americans under forty now spend roughly three hours a day on social media. They see an endless stream of people lying, cheating, humiliating strangers, breaking rules, and being rewarded with money and attention. Ordinary acts of decency almost never go viral. It’s easy to conclude that the world is full of jerks getting away with murder and nobody wants to be the last sucker standing.

But people don’t just learn from what they see online. They also learn from the people at the top and what they are willing to enforce. When presidents, CEOs, and other public figures lie, cheat, and pay no price for it, they don't just get away with it - they change what everyone else believes is enforceable. Watch enough wealthy people dodge taxes, enough politicians escape accountability, enough CEOs enrich themselves without consequence, and cooperating starts to look like the sucker's payoff.

This is why healthy democracies devote so much energy to enforcing rules fairly. Independent courts, ethics laws, inspectors general, watchdog agencies, and equal justice under the law are what make cooperation rational. When people believe cheaters will be held accountable, they’re far more willing to cooperate themselves and society is better off as a result.

Most people are aren’t inherently jerks or suckers. They’re what social scientists call conditional cooperators.

They’ll play fair, but only if they believe enough other people will play fair too.

The New York Times gave us two choices: be the sucker or be the jerk.

Game theory offers a third and better option.

Build a society where decent people don’t finish last.

When you do that, most people will choose decency.

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Here’s a challenge.

I suspect every one of us - even those who oppose Donald Trump with every cell in their body - can identify at least one policy or decision of his that we think was a good idea. Maybe it was eliminating the penny. Maybe it was pushing NATO allies to spend more on defense. It doesn’t have to be a big issue. Just one.

Now ask yourself a second question.

If you can think of one, why haven’t you ever said so publicly?

Political scientists and social psychologists have studied this phenomenon for decades. Human beings are extraordinarily sensitive to social approval. We routinely censor ourselves when we think our views might provoke criticism from our friends or threaten our standing within a group. Researchers call this preference falsification; people privately hold one opinion while publicly expressing another. Others describe it as the spiral of silence: when individuals believe their view is unpopular, they keep quiet, making that opinion seem even rarer than it actually is. In environments where people are polarized on an issue, the costs of being honest increase. Silence is the safer strategy.

But there are real consequences to this. When everyone hides the opinions that don’t fit their political tribe, we develop a badly distorted picture of one another. We begin to believe that the other side agrees with nothing we value and that our own side agrees with everything we do. Both beliefs are false. This silence deepens polarization, increases mistrust, and makes compromise seem impossible because we stop recognizing the areas where common ground actually exists. Democracies depend on citizens having an accurate picture of the public’s real opinion. Preference falsification and spirals of silence hide it.

The United States today is a textbook example of this in action. We have sorted ourselves into political tribes that reward loyalty and punish non-conformity. Admitting that Trump or Biden got anything right, if you are a member of the other party, can feel like an act of betrayal. But it isn’t. It is an act of intellectual honesty. In fact, a democracy becomes healthier when citizens feel they can speak out without being censored. If we can’t acknowledge that our opponents occasionally have good ideas, we have crossed an invisible line from independent thinking into tribal thinking. And that’s bad for democracy.

So here’s my mid-summer request.

Leave a comment below naming ONE Trump policy or decision that you think was the right call. You don’t have to defend his presidency. You don’t have to change your vote. You don’t even have to explain yourself. Just identify one thing you think he got right.

If enough of us do that, we'll have taken one small step toward rebuilding something that has become dangerously scarce in American politics: magnanimity. A healthy democracy requires two different capacities: the moral clarity to recognize real threats when they are happening, and the intellectual honesty to acknowledge truth no matter who speaks it. Losing either one is dangerous. My hope is that this small experiment helps us recover a bit of the latter.

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One of the most robust findings in the social sciences is that relationships matter.

Researchers have tracked thousands of people over years and lifetimes. They’ve analyzed their education, intelligence, income, professional success, marriage, health, and wealth. In the end, they always reach the same conclusion.

People with strong relationships are healthier. They live longer. They are less depressed. They are more satisfied with life. Life is really all about relationships.

This finding won’t surprise many of you. What’s surprising is how little we live it.

If relationships are so important, why do so many of us (Americans) invest so little in them?

Americans devote enormous amounts of time and energy to other parts of life. We work long hours. Obsess over our finances. Track our sleep, count our steps, optimize our diets, and monitor our productivity. We drive our children from activity to activity. We spend hours scrolling through social media. We do all of this because we think these things will improve our lives.

But all of this comes at the expense of our relationships.

Americans now spend less time with friends than they did a generation ago and they are increasingly lonely. In fact, loneliness has become so widespread that the U.S. Surgeon General has called it a public health epidemic.

I’ve been thinking about this puzzle for years, in part because I struggle to make enough time for relationships myself, and in part because I’ve seen people in other cultures do it much better.

In all my travels, some of the kindest and most generous people I have ever met have lived in the toughest, most precarious places.

Years ago, my family traveled deep into the Ecuadorian Amazon to visit the Huaorani tribe. Their chief, Moi, was fighting both the Ecuadorian government and multinational oil companies to prevent drilling on tribal land. He wore a crown of toucan feathers and lived in a simple hut in the rainforest. He had every reason to focus on his own problems.

Instead, he spent hours teaching my young daughter about the plants, animals, and insects of the jungle.

I’ve seen similar generosity elsewhere. Laborers in Laos welcoming us into their village for an evening of music after a long day cutting sugar cane in the fields. Bedouin shepherds in Jordan inviting us into their tents for rest and some tea. A Palestinian man in the West Bank who, after describing some of the most painful experiences of his life, carefully wrote down the names of his favorite lunch spots so we could enjoy them too.

Perhaps people living with greater uncertainty understand more viscerally that life is fragile. Perhaps strong relationships become more important when institutions are weak and resources are scarce. Perhaps they simply spend more time together.

I don’t know which of these explanations is right. My own guess is the first one: when you know how easily things can be taken from you, you don’t dare let a relationship slide the way we do, assuming there will always be another dinner, another visit. The stakes of any one relationship feel higher, so people invest more in them.

Whatever the explanation, I kept encountering the same thing: people with very little often invested heavily in one another. The opposite also seems to be true.

I think people who live in more precarious circumstances understand something that many of us forget. Life is fragile. And when you understand that, relationships start looking like one of the most important investments you’ll ever make.

Most of us don’t live with that kind of fragility. Which is exactly why we have to choose it on purpose - to treat a friendship like it matters before life forces the point.

Which brings me to summer.

Summer is one of the few times of year when many of us briefly loosen our grip. The days are longer. The pace slows.

So here’s my suggestion.

Go play.

Call a friend you’ve been meaning to call. Invite someone to lunch. Take a long walk with your spouse. Sit on the porch with a neighbor. Have people over for dinner even if the house isn’t perfectly clean and you’re a terrible cook. Stop to talk with a stranger. Because these are the things that really matter.

I have a list of dear friends to whom I owe a phone call. So consider this a note to both of us.

It’s July.

The work will still be there tomorrow.

Go call a friend.

I’m taking a break for the holiday and hoping to spend it exactly as the founders intended: on a boat, with a margarita in hand, ignoring my inbox.

I’ll be back next week.

Have fun, and thank you for reading.

Barbara

Every morning I read the Wall Street Journal.

It took me a while to see the pattern, but now I can’t unsee it.

Most of the articles celebrate extraordinary wealth. Big money. At first I thought it was entertaining, now I think it’s something deeper.

Look at the headlines on any given day. Earlier this month, one celebrated another record high in the stock market. Another profiled the biggest winners from the SpaceX IPO. Another featured a $53 million mansion in Los Angeles. Others have tracked the whereabouts of Bezos’ and Zuckerberg’s mega-yachts. The details change from day to day but the message stays the same: wealth is the only measure that matters, and wealth is what we should admire.

But tucked between the stories of crazy wealth are stories of government contracts being awarded, media deals being struck, special access to the President being granted, regulatory favors being dispensed, and investigations quietly disappearing.

At first glance, these seem like separate stories. They’re not. They’re all part of the same story - about power, and how Americans are being conditioned to see all of this as normal.

Last week, Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire.

Most people can’t distinguish between a billion and a trillion dollars because both are huge sums. But a trillion dollars is quantitatively different than anything we’ve ever seen before - especially for one human being.

A billion seconds is about 32 years. A trillion seconds is more than 31,000 years.

This is not generational wealth. This is control-the-universe wealth.

Musk isn’t simply a richer billionaire. He’s a private citizen who has the wealth of governments. His fortune is nearly four times the size of the second-richest person on earth. It is larger than the GDP of most countries.

Many Americans see this as a success story and in one sense, it is. Musk helped build extraordinary companies. Millions of people buy his products and use his services.

But democracies aren’t judged by how rich their richest citizens become. They’re judged by whether political power remains with the people. And here in the United States, both money and political power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a very few.

Political scientists call this oligarchy.

Most Americans imagine oligarchies as something that exists in Russia, Nigeria, and the Philippines. But when one man is worth $1.1 trillion and spent the last two years helping design the regulatory environment in which his companies operate, oligarchy has emerged here as well.

The research on what happens next is not encouraging.

Citizens in high-inequality countries are much less likely to believe that institutions are fair, that their neighbors can be trusted, that the system is designed to work for them. Unequal societies are also less stable. More polarized. Less mobile.

There’s also a strong and consistent relationship between extreme inequality and democratic backsliding. When wealth concentrates, the people who hold it tend to want to keep their wealth. Democracy - a government by the people and for the people - will want to redistribute it and so the very wealthy have incentives to get rid of any institution that could lead to redistribution: the regulatory agencies, the independent courts, the free press, the electoral rules. The more money a small subset has, the more incentive they have to fight democracy to protect their advantage.

But oligopoly can be reversed, and it has been before.

After the Gilded Age, starting in the 1930s, America built institutions specifically designed to prevent the emergence of a permanent aristocracy: strong unions, aggressive antitrust enforcement, steeply progressive taxation, and broad investment in public education. The result was the most broadly shared period of prosperity in American history. True democracy.

It didn’t happen by accident. The Great Depression exposed the price America would pay for the unchecked concentrated of wealth and the lack of regulation. World War II then required ordinary Americans to give their lives for their country, and when they returned they demanded to be treated well as a result. Together these two shocks - a major economic crisis and a major war - created the political conditions for the New Deal. FDR delivered these much-needed reforms to average Americans and the privileged class called him a traitor.

For the first and only time in American history, a large share of the population could realistically expect their children to live better than they had.

We have since dismantled much of what that era built. Union membership has collapsed. Antitrust enforcement has become toothless. Tax rates on the wealthy have plummeted. And Citizens United opened the floodgates to unlimited political spending by the very people with the most to gain from even more inequality. The result is wealth-concentration not seen since the Gilded Age.

The question facing Americans today is not whether Elon Musk deserves his fortune.

The question is whether democracy can survive when private citizens become powerful enough to rival the state itself.

Democracy rests on a simple idea: no citizen should become powerful enough to dominate everyone else.

Not a king.

Not a president.

And not a trillionaire.

Let’s not hope it will require another depression and war to reverse.

(Also…I never want to read about another multi-million dollar home in the newspaper.)

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For most of my life, I’d never heard of Juneteenth. I didn’t know it existed.

I grew up in America. The Northeast. I attended American schools. I earned a PhD and became a professor. I spent my career studying history, politics, and democracy.

And yet somehow I made it into my fifties without learning about one of the most important days in American history. June 19, 1865.

What does it say that the day America freed its slaves isn’t celebrated as one of America’s biggest, proudest moments?

The day was huge. HUGE. And yet most of us don’t know about it.

This really bothers me.

Juneteenth commemorates the day Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas and announced that the last enslaved people in the Confederacy were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued more than two years earlier. But it was on Juneteenth, that the promise of emancipation finally reached everyone.

When Americans think about the defining moments in our history, we usually think of the discovery of America by Europeans, the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, the Civil War, or defeating Hitler and Japan’s emperor in World War II.

Juneteenth should be on that list.

America was never going to grow into a truly democratic country as long as slavery was allowed, tolerated, defended. Juneteenth was the moment the United States took a decisive step toward becoming the country it claimed to be.

Yet for much of American history Juneteenth remained largely unknown outside Black communities. It became a federal holiday only in 2021. But even today, many Americans struggle to explain what it is.

That tells us something important. It tells us that we are are still unwilling to fully reckon with the darkest parts of our history. And because of that, we do not truly wish to become our best version.

Every country has chapters of history that are shameful. Can you imagine being Germany and having to reckon with starting WWII and the Holocaust? The question is not whether those chapters exist. It’s whether citizens are willing to confront them honestly.

Some countries do. Germany is now the poster child for how a country can confront its past and emerge stronger because of it. Germans have built museums, memorials, educational programs, and public rituals that forced citizens to confront the horrors of Nazism. Many Germans didn’t want to hear it. For the first two decades after the war, perpetrators stayed in positions of power, as judges, professors, politicians. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when a younger generation began demanding answers from their parents, that the real confrontation began. It was fought for, against significant resistance, over decades. But it worked. Germany is now one of the healthiest, most durable democracies in the world, built explicitly on the refusal to look away.

Other countries choose to deny their past or ignore it. They minimize atrocities. Rewrite textbooks. Remove uncomfortable facts. Encourage citizens to remember only the whitewashed parts of their national story.

But the research tells us that this is destabilizing in the long run. Countries that deny or suppress difficult histories remain trapped by them. A country that learns to look away from one form of extreme inequality develops the habit of looking away from other forms of inequality. The muscle of denial, once built, gets used again.

Here in the United States, we are moving in the wrong direction. Political leaders on the right have spent years arguing that teaching slavery, segregation, and discrimination makes Americans feel guilty. That guilt, they say, is un-American.

So they are erasing our history instead.

Schools have been threatened with the loss of federal funding if they teach that slavery was central to America’s founding. The 1619 Project - the Pulitzer Prize winning curriculum that tried to do exactly that - has been called “toxic propaganda.” In January 2026, the National Park Service removed a slavery exhibit from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. Trump signed an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” that put the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture under review. The museum’s “Slavery and Freedom” exhibit - one of the most powerful in the country - is being rewritten.

This is what a policy of denial looks like and it’s terrible for a country.

No one wants to believe that the country they love committed terrible wrongs. But the strongest countries are built on the willingness to look directly at what they did.

That is what Juneteenth asks of us. It asks us to recognize both what America did wrong and what Americans eventually did right. It asks us to celebrate freedom while remembering how hard freedom was to achieve. And it also reminds us that progress is possible.

The story of Juneteenth is a story about a nation struggling, imperfectly and painfully, toward a more equal future.

That is not a Black story.

That is an American story.

And it deserves to be celebrated by all of us

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The World Cup starts Thursday. Half the planet is losing its mind with excitement, including my husband, who’s been counting the days.

I asked him if it bothers him that FIFA is deeply corrupt. He didn’t want to talk about it. He knows about the bribery scandals, the vote-buying, the kickback schemes, the officials who treated FIFA’s treasury like a personal ATM. Right now he doesn’t care.

That got me thinking. Why does the world accept the terrible organization that is FIFA? And what does it teach us about how societies learn to live with endemic corruption, including our own?

FIFA’s corruption isn’t subtle. In 2015, U.S. prosecutors described decades of racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering that went all the way to the top. Officials accepted bribes for the right to host the tournament. Marketing executives paid kickbacks. Qatar and Russia bought their way into the World Cup. The U.S. Department of Justice called it a “culture of corruption” that’s lasted over four decades.

So why does corruption like this survive?

Two reasons: monopoly and the removal of oversight.

FIFA is the only governing body for international football. There is no competing organization, no alternative World Cup, no exit for fans who love the game. If you want to watch the World Cup, you need FIFA.

That monopoly insulated the organization from accountability. Sponsors grumbled but stayed because FIFA controlled the product. Governments objected but complied because their citizens demanded participation. Fans kept watching because the game itself is beautiful and what happened on the field was much cleaner than the rot at the top.

Plus, monopolies are powerful and hard to defeat. In 2021, twelve of Europe’s biggest clubs tried to break free and announced a rival Super League. FIFA and UEFA threatened to ban every player who joined the new league from the World Cup and the European Championships. The clubs folded within 48 hours. FIFA survived because it controlled something people couldn’t live without and destroyed anyone who threatened that control.

The federal government, under Trump, is starting to work the same way.

Political scientists have long found that corruption does well when leaders control valuable resources, have discretion over how those resources are distributed, and face little oversight. That was FIFA’s formula for getting silly rich. It appears to be Trump’s formula as well.

The federal government controls trillions of dollars in contracts, grants, subsidies, permits, regulatory exemptions, prosecutions, pardons, and enforcement actions. Since returning to office, Trump (with Congress’ complicity) has done everything he could to bring more of those resources under his direct control. That’s a lot of power.

At the same time, he has weakened many of the institutions designed to constrain what he can do. In January 2025, he fired at least 17 inspectors general. His administration stopped enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, weakened parts of the federal anti-corruption apparatus, and took authority away from the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, the unit created after Watergate to investigate political corruption.

Once the formula was in place - control over resources, discretion, limited oversight - corruption exploded. Since returning to office in January 2025, Donald Trump has pocketed billions from his business enterprises. His family has taken in hundreds of millions more.

So why aren’t Americans more outraged?

Because corruption normalization follows a predictable path. What matters is not the scale of the corruption but whether ordinary people feel it in their daily lives. If the economy appears stable, if paychecks arrive, if grocery stores are stocked, citizens will tolerate what would have seemed unimaginable a few years earlier. They adapt. They rationalize. They learn to live with it.

Once that happens, it becomes nearly impossible to get rid of. The people with the power to change the system are the people who benefit most from keeping it intact. Congressional Republicans benefit. Donors benefit. Contractors benefit. No one has an incentive to change it.

This is the lesson of FIFA. The organization was not corrupt because soccer attracts dishonest people. It became corrupt because it developed the exact institutional conditions that allow corruption to thrive: monopoly control over a valuable game, no oversight, and a public too attached to the product to walk away.

Which raises the only question that matters: how does corruption like this end?

It happens from the outside. With FIFA, it required American prosecutors working beyond the organization’s reach. The DOJ indictments of 2015 came from the United States - a jurisdiction FIFA couldn’t control.

With corruption in the United States, that outside pressure has to come from citizens. It means speaking out against presidential money grabs (the $1.8 million slush fund, the foreign government payments, the family deals struck in plain sight). It means Congressional Republicans refusing to hand the President unchecked discretion over the budget. It means law firms refusing to pay tribute, business leaders refusing to trade favors for regulatory relief, and countries reciprocating tariffs rather than absorbing them in silence. Every time someone refuses to play along, the racket gets a little weaker.

But all of that requires solving the hardest problem in politics: collective action. A corruption racket survives because each senator, each firm, each player calculates that compliance costs less than resistance. In order to break a racket, enough people have to decide, at roughly the same time, that fighting it makes more sense.

My husband will watch the World Cup this week. So will billions of others. They know what FIFA is. They know what it has done. They have decided the spectacle is worth it.

The question is whether Americans are beginning to make the same calculation about our government - deciding that watching the spectacle is easier than confronting the corruption behind it.

Something big happened this week. Senate Republicans - the same people who have rubber-stamped almost everything Trump has asked for since January 2025 - finally stood up to him. Under no circumstances would they support his $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. Nyet.

The Republicans finally confronted their bully and he backed down. Quickly.

So what does this mean? For Trump, for his party, and for the rest of us?

This was a good week for America and for the Republican Party. It was bad for Trump.

The “anti-weaponization” fund was brazen. But Trump has done a lot a brazen things with no pushback from Republicans. (Remember: he pardoned all 1,500+ January 6 defendants on his first day in office.)

But this fund was a step too far. First, it was crooked to the core. Trump sued the IRS over leaked tax returns and then settled the lawsuit with himself, through his own attorney general, for a huge sum. Taxpayers would foot the bill. This was pure kleptocracy; shamelessly pillaging any state coffer he could find.

Second, Trump could use this slush fund any way he wanted, and he was going to use it to pay the people who have been most willing to defend him, violently and treasonously. The January 6^th defenders could potentially each get over $800,000. It was not only a reward for people willing to use violence to keep Trump in power in 2020, but a signal that those willing to fight for him in 2028 would also be taken care of.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, it did. Buried in the settlement was a provision shielding Trump and his family from future IRS scrutiny of their tax returns. He didn’t just take the money. He made sure no one would ever be allowed to come looking for it.

This was the straw that broke Republican Senators’ backs.

Why This Time Was Different

This time was different because this deal was going to cost them personally. Voters hated this bill. Republican senators, including ones from deep red states heard from their constituents. Rich people and business leaders hated this bill. Trump was asking his senators to fall on their swords for his own personal enrichment, and they looked at their 2026 reelection prospects and said no.

For the first time, siding with Trump was more likely to get them thrown out of power by Republican voters back home, then keep them in power. How do you explain to your constituents that the people who attacked law enforcement on January 6^th deserved to be rewarded? How do you tell that to the cops? Turns out there are limits even MAGA voters won’t cross.

The First Crack and Why More Are Likely to Follow

So what does this mean for Trump moving forward? In the literature on authoritarian politics, autocrats survive because elites stay in line. The moment political leaders, business leaders, media leaders feel it’s more costly to continue to support a leader, they start to say no. This week is the first sign of elite defection since Trump returned to office.

I think the defections are going to continue and here’s why.

The scholarly research tells us that defections tend to cascade if four conditions exist:

1. Early defection is public and includes many people. A single senator grumbling anonymously to Politico changes nothing. This week’s defection of Republican senators was public and substantial. Trump can primary one or two senators but he can’t primary all of them simultaneously.

2. The leader doesn’t punish the defectors. The moment the leader lets defection go unpunished, every other potential defector in the building updates their math. Trump backed down faster than anyone thought.

3. The issue has staying power. Voters must care about corruption and continue to pay attention. We now know that even voters in deep red states are deeply uncomfortable with Trump’s corruption, especially at a moment when food and gas prices remain so high. That combination is politically dangerous because people are unlikely to forget it anytime soon.

4. The regime no longer controls enough spoils. Levitsky and Way’s research shows that as long as the leader can credibly promise rewards for loyalty (jobs in his administration, contracts, protection, endorsements) defection stays costly. When the spoils dry up, the rats jump ship. And if the Democrats gain one or both houses of Congress, the spoils will dry up.

What Usually Happens Next

Aspiring autocrats who suffer a first visible defeat will often try to strike back hard. Trump will likely try to hurt those Senators when they seek re-election in the fall. But those Senators see something that most Americans don’t yet see – Trump is likely to be significantly weaker in the fall than today. More elites are likely to defect between now and then because the conditions that encourage defection are there.

Of course, much will depend on the economy and on whether Democrats can field candidates and a vision that voters actually want to support. But right now the economy doesn’t appear likely to improve dramatically before the midterms. And if Democrats can get organized and disciplined quickly, Republicans may decide that tying themselves to Trump is becoming more dangerous than breaking from him.

We just heard the first shout from Republicans that Trump has no clothes. After November, this could cascade quickly.

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Donald Trump is giving Democrats gift after gift after gift, and they’re blowing it.

Seventy percent of Americans think Trump is handling the economy poorly. Gas is up more than 50 percent since February. Inflation is damn stubborn. And Americans still have no idea why we are at war with Iran, and they hate it.

Under normal political conditions, the Democrats should be flooded with new members.

And yet Democrats still seem oddly incapable of turning Trump’s vulnerabilities into a coherent strategy.

Political scientists who’ve studied how oppositions defeated strongmen in Hungary, Brazil, Poland, and Chile have identified what works and what doesn’t. Their findings read like a checklist of everything Democrats are currently doing wrong. Yes, Republicans have spent years tilting the electoral playing field. But even accounting for that, Democrats should be running away at the polls right now. They’re not. And that’s on them.

Here’s what the research says the Democrats should be doing:

1. Unite early. The most consistent finding in the research is simple: divided oppositions lose, united ones win. In Poland, the opposition finally won when liberals, conservatives, and farmers who couldn’t stand each other agreed to run on one proposition: this has to stop. The Democratic Party is currently doing the opposite- the Hogg-Martin feud, eight candidates refusing to clear the field in California, an autopsy of its own failures that its own chair refused to endorse. They’re a mess.

2. Move fast to stop the backsliding. The window for stopping an aspiring autocrat is shorter than most people realize. Once the executive gets control of the courts and the legislature, U-turns back to healthy democracy are rare. Today, Democrats still have functioning courts, a competitive electoral calendar, and a free press but they have to be willing to fight to keep them and so far they’re not.

3. Build a coalition bigger than your base. Most voters in America are moderates and sit in the middle of the political spectrum. If the Democrats are going to win they will need to appeal to the small-business owner in Phoenix. A Catholic union worker in Pittsburgh. A suburban mom in Georgia. Not the base of hardcore liberals on either coast.

4. Don’t just protest - peel people away. Large crowds at protests matter, but they’re not what finishes the job. What finishes the job is when key supporters decide to stop supporting a President. Milosevic fell when Serbian business leaders stopped bankrolling him. Marcos and his regime collapsed when Philippine generals withdrew their backing. Protests signal discontent. Defections end regimes.

5. Give people something to vote for, not just something to vote against. Most voters already know Trump’s dangerous. What moves swing voters and new voters is the feeling that the opposition is actually a better choice and will run the country better. If you want to defeat Trump, you have to give voters a new vision of government they trust and believe in.

The Democrats Have Failed Every Test

The Democratic Party isn’t doing any of these things. It’s not united. It has no clear leader - only an aging leadership with no obvious successor. It has no message, only a divide between progressives and moderates that has festered since 2016. And it has no party infrastructure capable of imposing discipline on either faction.

The autopsy of the 2024 election tells you everything you need to know: a 192-page report that its own chair refused to endorse, containing no mention of Gaza, no mention of Biden’s age, and no mention of his decision to stay in the race - the three issues most Democrats consider central to why they lost. Less than six months before the midterms, the Democratic Party cannot even conduct a competent internal review of its own failures.

It’s no surprise Americans are wary. Only 16 percent of voters say Democrats provide strong leadership. The Democrats’ own research found voters describing the party as “weak,” “out of touch,” and “woke.” Democrats are leading on the generic congressional ballot by six to eight points but in conditions like these, with a president this unpopular, they should be leading by double digits.

So why can’t the Democrats seem to get their shit together?

According to the management literature, organizations optimized for one environment become structurally incapable of responding to a new one, because every incentive in the institution rewards doing what worked before. The people running the DNC aren’t idiots. They’re rational actors who don’t want to change a system that threatens the people in charge - themselves.

In large failing organizations, the first visible signs of real change almost never come from the top. They come from the middle - the regional managers who are closest to the customer and can see the gap between what leadership is saying and what’s happening on the ground. Today, real change is coming from a new generation of politicians - the James Talaricos, Mallory McMorrows, Graham Platners, and Zohran Mamdanis of the world. These are the people the institution is currently ignoring - which is exactly what failing institutions do to the people who will eventually replace them.

In business, boards eventually fire bad CEOs but it’s usually too late. That’s because board members are themselves embedded in the institution and share its incentives. When they do act, it’s usually after a devastating public failure: a catastrophic quarter, a scandal that can’t be managed, a stock price collapse that threatens everyone in the room. The Biden succession debacle should have been the Democrats’ Waterloo, but instead the establishment holds on. If the Democrats lose California’s governorship, or dramatically underperform in the midterms that might be the shock that finally forces them to clean house.

Every Turnaround Needs an Outsider

Finally, the management research on successful corporate turnarounds finds that genuine reform almost always requires someone from outside the existing hierarchy - someone who doesn’t owe their position to the current arrangement and isn’t invested in protecting it. Lou Gerstner at IBM. Alan Mulally at Ford. Gerstner was IBM’s first-ever outside hire, chosen over the furious objections of insiders who believed only a computer industry veteran could save it. The Democratic Party equivalent doesn’t yet exist - there is no figure with the cross-factional credibility and the independence from the current system to play that role. Yet.

But Talarico is running ahead in Texas. Platner is leading Collins in Maine. McMorrow is outraising every candidate in Michigan. Mamdani won New York City on a platform of hope and affordability and beat the entire establishment to do it. The outsiders are arriving. It’s time for the old guard to step aside.

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California is one of the most reliably Democratic states in the country. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly 2-to-1. And yet, right now, there’s a real chance California ends up with a Republican governor in 2027. Here’s why and what you can do about it.

The Jungle Primary Trap

California uses what’s called a “jungle primary”: every candidate from every party runs on the same ballot in June, and the top two vote-getters - regardless of party - advance to the November general election. This sounds fair and democratic. It can also elect someone who most people don’t want.

Here’s how. Right now, there are two serious Republican candidates in the race - Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco. Their Republican voters are motivated, and they tend to consolidate. Meanwhile, the Democratic vote is being split among roughly half a dozen candidates, including Xavier Becerra, Tom Steyer, Katie Porter, Matt Mahan and others.

Run the numbers and a nightmare scenario emerges: each Republican gets, say, 17-18% of the vote. The six Democrats each get 10-12%. The two Republicans finish first and second. Every Democrat is eliminated. In November, California - California - has no choice but to vote between two Republicans.

Where Things Stand Right Now

As of mid-May 2026, Xavier Becerra has moved to the front of the Democratic pack, leading the field at 19% in the latest Emerson/Inside California Politics poll (the first time he’s topped an Emerson survey) with Hilton and Steyer close behind at 17% each. The race is volatile and very much in play.

What Strategic Voting Looks Like

If you’re a Democrat, here’s how to think about your vote:

Watch the polls in the final weeks. If no Democrat is clearly locked into the top two, vote for the leading Democrat whoever it is. Full stop. Don’t vote your heart. Vote to keep a Democrat in the race in this Democratic state.

Here’s my plan: if it looks uncertain whether any Democrat will make the runoff, I’ll vote for whichever Democrat is polling highest. That’s it. Simple, strategic, effective.

Enough with the Vanity Candidates

Let’s be honest about what’s happening here. Several people running for governor have lots of money, huge egos, and essentially no path to winning.

Running a long-shot campaign that could hand the governorship to a Republican isn’t bold or brave. It’s narcissism dressed up as civic engagement. These candidates know they can’t win. Their donors know it. Their consultants know it. But the checks keep coming and the egos keep growing.

Don’t let someone else’s delusion become California’s problem. Wait for the late polls, then vote smart

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Primary Election Day is June 2, 2026. Check polls in the final week before you vote.

Everyone I talk to these days says the same thing.

“I can’t stand to read the news anymore.”

“Every day feels insane.”

“I don’t know how to process all this.”

I feel the same way. And I’m a political scientist who studies instability for a living.

Every morning brings a new constitutional challenge, a shocking court ruling, another attempt to expand presidential power, ever-more corruption scandals, and a war no one understands. By the afternoon, half of it has already disappeared beneath the next horrible news cycle. It feels like chaos.

The chaos is not a coincidence. It’s part of a larger MAGA strategy.

The Strategy is Exhaustion

Steve Bannon described it openly in 2018. The way to defeat the opposition is to “flood the (media) with shit.”

Political scientists have been studying versions of this shit-flooding strategy for decades. Researchers Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman call today’s strongmen “informational autocrats.” Unlike twentieth-century dictators who relied heavily on terror and censorship to subdue populations, modern autocrats manipulate the information environment instead. They flood the public sphere with so many scandals, executive orders, conspiracies, culture wars, performative cruelty, and nonstop outrage that ordinary citizens stop being able to process what matters.

This confuses and exhausts citizens. It also normalizes behavior that would otherwise trigger public outrage. The first attack on a court or threat against political opponents feels shocking. But when citizens are hit with ten more controversies every day, public attention splinters and emotional exhaustion sets in. What once felt unthinkable starts to feel routine.

Research on authoritarianism shows that this strategy is especially important in countries with long democratic traditions. In democracies, citizens are used to having a voice. They expect their participation in politics to matter. They are used to protesting, organizing, voting, criticizing leaders, and demanding accountability from public officials.

That makes democratic populations especially dangerous to would-be strongmen: how do you transform active citizens into exhausted spectators?

One answer is overload: you generate so many controversies, emergencies, and spectacles that citizens become emotionally reactive instead of politically strategic.

Human beings have limited cognitive and emotional bandwidth. When people feel they have little control over events, many begin to disengage psychologically. Psychologists call this learned helplessness.

This strategy becomes especially powerful when leaders are trying to transform a political system quickly. If citizens are focused on five simultaneous crises, they often miss the one institutional change that matters most.

That’s where the United States is today. And why so many of us feel overwhelmed.

What Should We Do?

History suggests two things:

First, attention discipline. No human nervous system can absorb twenty-four-hours of political emergency indefinitely, and trying to consume everything is not the same as being informed. Choose a small number of trustworthy sources. Read deeply instead of constantly. When a breaking story feels urgent, wait a day until the dust settles and the best analysts address it. You will read a lot less but be much harder to manipulate.

Second, visible engagement. Research on democratic resilience consistently finds that regimes backslide fastest when citizens quietly retreat from public life. Authoritarian movements benefit when people become exhausted, isolated, and passive.

That’s why continuing to participate in civic life matters. Voting, organizing, attending meetings, protesting peacefully, staying connected to other people - these are exactly what authoritarians are trying to suppress.

But public engagement does something else as well. It changes the information environment itself. When citizens organize, protest, and refuse to stay silent, they signal to millions of other people that each of us is not alone in our thoughts. And once citizens realize that large numbers of other people share their concerns, the psychology of chaos and isolation begins to break down.

The exhaustion you are feeling is not an accident. It’s the intended result of a strategy built around distraction, overload, and learned helplessness. The goal is not to make you angry. It’s to make you passive.

Remember: you are not powerless. You are just temporarily tired.

Those are not the same thing.

Donald Trump fears Americans in the streets more than anything else. Millions of them, day after day, peaceful and ungovernable. It is one of the only things that can threaten his continued hold on power and the hardest to neutralize.

So he’s trying to criminalize it before it happens.

Last week, the producer of Amanpour and Co. reached out about my column “Political Violence Is Here to Stay.” One of her questions was simple: should we be worried about the recent rise in left-wing violence?

It’s the right question, but not in the way most people think. Most people are worried that two sides arming up can lead to civil war. What I worry about is something more immediate: that the small recent rise in left-wing violence will be weaponized to justify mass repression.

Last week I argued that political violence is here to stay, possibly for decades. That’s because none of the underlying conditions will be easy to change - democratic reform, gun control, and social media regulation are not coming quickly.

That’s the surface story. Beneath it runs a second, more dangerous, story. As violence continues, MAGA will try to use every act of left-wing violence, however isolated, to justify suppressing any opposition.

What the Numbers Actually Show

Here are the facts that make that second story so alarming.

Right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for approximately 75% to 80% of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001. Charleston. Pittsburgh. El Paso. Buffalo. Most of those attacks were related to America’s white supremacy movement, with a smattering of anti-federal government attacks in between. For almost two decades, that has been America’s real domestic terrorism problem. It’s been almost all on the right, not on the left.

Then, in 2025, the numbers shifted.

2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that far left terrorist attacks outnumbered those from the far right and a big reason for this is that far right attacks declined in 2025. But MAGA is presenting these attacks as evidence that America now has a left-wing terrorist problem.

The numbers tell a very different story.

In the past decade, right-wing attacks have killed ten times as many people as left-wing attacks (112 versus 13). And within 48 hours of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Department of Justice removed its own study from its website - a study whose very first paragraph stated that far-right extremists have committed “far more ideologically motivated homicides” than any other group.

The far-left and the far-right in this country are not equivalent. The far left has no organized infrastructure for seizing power. No militia movement. No paramilitary networks. No coordinated plan. What it has is a collection of angry, isolated individuals who are dangerous, but a categorically different threat from the organized right-wing groups that spent years preparing for armed conflict against minorities and the federal government.

Right-wing violence is declining in part because the far-right now controls all the levers of power - they’ve won the whole kit and caboodle. But they are organized in a way that would allow them to return if they again feel threatened.

When someone tells you America has a left-wing violence problem, ask them why they are not talking about the right. They will probably say that there is no problem on the right. But that’s simply not true.

The Infrastructure for Repression Has Already Been Built

Trump is not just changing the narrative about who is a terrorist, he’s building the infrastructure to arrest those he includes in this category. Here’s how he’s doing it.

Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 - a presidential directive that for the first time appears to authorize law enforcement measures against Americans based not on whether they are planning to commit violence but on their political or ideological beliefs. It identifies anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity as potential terrorism red flags - language so broad that rights groups warn it risks sweeping in protest movements and critics of the administration. Stephen Miller stated that merely calling the administration “authoritarian” - as Gavin Newsom did - “incites violence and terrorism.” The Joint Terrorism Task Force can now investigate Americans for their beliefs rather than their actions. Civil liberties lawyers say the closest analogies are Nixon and the Red Scare.

The means to arrest people is already up and running. ICE - effectively a private police force answerable only to Trump - has been deployed to domestic protests. Detention facilities capable of holding large numbers of people have been built or expanded. Taken individually, each move can be explained away. Taken together, they form a system designed to have everything ready should Americans take to the streets to protest a contested or suspended an election.

That is the scenario Trump is building towards.

What Orban Learned and What Trump Hasn’t. Yet.

History suggests that massive numbers of voters or protesters are the one thing authoritarians can’t neutralize. Viktor Orbán discovered this in Hungary. The vote against him was so enormous that he was powerless to stop it. Trump can arrest dozens of citizens, but he can’t arrest millions. He can call protesters “terrorists”, but he can’t make that label stick when the protester is your neighbor, your doctor, your kid’s teacher, half the country standing in the street.

Trump may have ICE. He may have detention centers. He may have the legal framework to call you a terrorist for disagreeing with him. But Americans have the numbers. And if they choose to use them - peacefully, persistently, and in overwhelming force - no executive order can make that disappear.

Orbán learned it the hard way. So will Trump, if Americans decide to show up.

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Every time someone tries to kill the president, or a public figure like Nancy Pelosi’s husband or Charlie Kirk, my inbox overflows with the same set of questions:

• What does this say about political violence in the United States today?

• Is it increasing?

• What can we expect in the future?

Here are my answers, dear readers:

YES VIOLENCE IN INCREASING AND SHOWING NO SIGNS OF STOPPING

Let’s focus on the most recent data.

In 2024, the United States saw a surge in politically motivated attacks and plots, including an attempted assassination of Trump and dozens of other violent incidents. One count identified at least 51 incidents between January and October 2024, the highest level in decades.

In 2025, that trend accelerated. Data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism show that terrorism and targeted violence events increased by more than 30% from 2024 to 2025. Another analysis found over 520 plots and violent incidents in just the first half of 2025, roughly a 40% increase over the same period in 2024.

At the same time, threats also surged. The U.S. Capitol Police reported that threats against members of Congress rose by more than 50% in 2025 compared to 2024, reaching the highest level since tracking began.

In 2026, the pattern has continued. The year has already included multiple high-profile attacks and assassination attempts, including a third attempt on Donald Trump, along with continued threats against public officials and politically motivated violence across the country.

But the most important shift is the type of violence we’re seeing. Violence is becoming more decentralized, more personal, and more frequent: assassination attempts, targeted killings, threats, harassment, and lone-actor attacks are all on the rise. These types of violence are much more difficult to detect, deter and prevent, which is why they tend to increase if the conditions are right. And the conditions are right.

AMERICAN HAS ALL THE UNDERLYING CONDITIONS FOR VIOLENCE

We know many of the factors that make political violence more likely. They’ve been studied in hundreds of countries. (Others - especially the role of unregulated social media - are newer but increasingly well documented.) The U.S. has them all:

A weak, rapidly declining democracy. Stable democracies almost never collapse into violence. Neither do hardened autocracies. The danger zone is the unstable middle between them - what political scientists call anocracy. That’s where violence is most likely and that’s where America is now.

Every major democracy dataset now classifies the United States in the middle zone. The Polity Project reclassified the United States as an anocracy in October 2025, just nine months after Donald Trump returned to office. In 2024, V-Dem Institute, the most comprehensive dataset in use today, revealed that the U.S. experienced the fastest period of autocratization ever recorded among established democracies. Today, it places it squarely in the middle zone. And Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die, argues that the United States is now a “partial democracy”. The U.S. is now in the zone where most violence tends to occur.

Political parties divided along identity lines. Violence becomes more likely when political parties divide along racial, ethnic, or religious lines. At that point, politics stops being about competing policies and becomes a battle over identity - over who belongs and who will ultimately dominate.

That shift has happened in the United States.

Party affiliation in America is now closely tied to race and religion. Black voters remain overwhelmingly Democratic. White voters are much more likely to identify with the Republican Party. Religious divides are just as stark: secular Americans lean Democratic, while white evangelical Protestants are one of the Republican Party’s core constituencies. This is classic identity polarization, and it’s much more dangerous than any other type of polarization.

Leaders who tolerate or encourage violence. Research across hundreds of cases shows that when elites normalize political bloodshed rather than condemn it, violence rises. Elite cues matter. If leaders signal that violence is acceptable (which Trump and MAGA do all the time), troubled people in society are much more likely to see it as justified.

Unfettered access to weapons. Research has shown that gun deaths are higher where guns are more available. Not only do Americans own more guns per capita than any other country on earth, but gun ownership in the US has increased in recent years.

After decades in which fewer households owned guns, that trend reversed sharply after 2020. Nearly 30 million Americans acquired firearms between 2021 and 2024, including millions of first-time owners. Today, roughly a third of American adults report personally owning a gun, and about four in ten households have one. Sales have leveled off slightly since 2024, but ownership remains elevated and it is spreading to new groups, including women and minorities. The United States is not just heavily armed. It is becoming more broadly armed and this is unlikely to change anytime soon since members of Congress won’t touch it with a ten foot pole.

Unregulated Social Media. Most domestic terror today is perpetrated by lone actors who have been radicalized online. Social media platforms amplify outrage, reward extremism, and connect individuals in ways that were impossible a generation ago. As long as Congress refuses to regulate social media and the algorithms that disseminate divisive, hate-filled, extremist material, the internet will continue to be a pathway to additional violence. And Congress has shown absolutely no interest in doing this because the 5 biggest tech companies in the world are American companies and they have used their billions of dollars to keep Congress quiescent (see also gun control above).

WHAT TO EXPECT IN THE FUTURE

All of these conditions exist today and there are no signs they will improve.

Given this, the United States is likely entering a prolonged period - 10 to 20 years - of elevated instability and political violence. Even if Trump and MAGA exit the stage (which is a big if), the underlying conditions that fuel violence are increasingly difficult to change.

The only way this trajectory reverses is if we change those conditions.

Demand significant political reform to strengthen our democracy.
Demand leaders who refuse to tolerate violence.
Demand limits on access to weapons.
Demand that tech companies face the same rules against harm that every other industry faces.
And demand that money can no longer buy political influence and silence.

Nothing else will work.

Because the only way things get better is if we stop tolerating the politicians and the system that keep these conditions in place.