Jack Forbes / NY Post Design

But what he said in early 1993, right after Clinton took office and was preparing to unveil his economic policy, was arguably more telling:

“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 baseball hitter,” Carville said. “But now I would want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”

The bond market, of course, is not a zombie, but its role in the economy is to reflect the views of a myriad of lenders, setting long term borrowing costs and ultimately serving as a constraint on government fiscal and monetary policy. Back then, Democrats were hoping to make up for 12 years out of power in the White House with a host of long-awaited domestic spending programs. But the so-called bond vigilantes forced Clinton’s team to be more restrained, while also raising taxes (almost exclusively on the rich) and trimming military spending.

As it turned out, that policy was highly successful, leading to nearly a decade of low inflation and robust growth and ultimately even ushering in a few years of budget surpluses after decades of chronic deficits.

Well, the bond market is stirring once again – interest rates on 30-year Treasury bonds are at a 19-year high – but this time we’re not likely to be as lucky as we were in the 1990s.

I originally started worked on this post more than two weeks ago, but I got interrupted by an surgical operation and a subsequent illness. Back then, I would have been at least modestly ahead of the curve, but now that the New York Times has led its print edition on the bond market’s current woes (and Sam Sifton has devoted The Morning newsletter to the same subject), I can’t make any claims to foresight.

But stick with me here. You may think the bond market is boring (and usually it is) but this is one of the times when it is sending a clear signal not only that U.S economic policy is on the wrong track, but that the there’s no sign that anybody is prepared to do anything to fix it.

You’ve probably read that the national debt hit $40 trillion last month. That’s a big number! But the volume of total debt, which exceeds the US annual economic output of about $33 trillion, is not the actual problem.

Writing in The Atlantic, Will Gottsegen gives some excellent insight into why it’s time for you to start worrying about the bond market tremors.

One camp of economists has been warning about the perils of high debt for years: Budget hawks predicted that if the country kept spending and didn’t raise taxes enough to keep pace, the resulting fiscal crisis could be devastating. But others—the doves—have brushed it off. Their perspective was that as long as the U.S. GDP was growing faster than the interest rate it was paying on its debt, the Treasury would be able to keep rolling over its bonds without too much of a problem. For much of the 2010s, this was essentially the status quo, and debt panic was muted.

We’re nowhere near a complete failure of the Treasury market, and yet, over the past couple of years, some economists who were once more dovish have switched teams. Martha Gimbel, the executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale and the author of a recent Atlantic story on this issue, told me that part of the reason these economists are pivoting is that they’re starting to realize that interest rates are “probably going to be elevated for quite some time.” The average interest rate on U.S. debt—that second variable the doves look at—has been relatively high for several years now, and it’s only growing. It was hovering around 1.5 percent in 2021, and it’s now roughly 3.4 percent. The yield on the 30-year Treasury bond has more than doubled since 2021. “I was not a deficit hawk, and that reflected the dynamics” of the 2010s, when rates were lower, Gimbel told me. Now, she said, “the environment has changed.”

Why are rates rising? The Fed’s reaction to inflation is one reason. It may also have something to do with the extreme investments being made in AI, and these companies’ demand for credit. And it’s likely connected to the deficit panic—concern about the expansion of the national debt and the government’s ability to sustain it. Investors are starting to think of long-term Treasurys as riskier than they once did, and they’re demanding more money in exchange for taking on America’s debt. At the same time, the federal government has shown no real appetite to pull its two main levers for reducing the debt: cutting spending and raising taxes.

Jared Bernstein, the former head of Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in The Atlantic a few months ago that he’d “flipped from dove to hawk”—and told me this week that it was partly the government’s complacency on this issue that spurred this change. “Neither side seems particularly motivated to do much of anything about this,” he said. Rather than attending to the debt problem, politicians of both parties have instituted major tax cuts and increased spending over the past 25 years. The U.S. had its credit downgraded by a major ratings agency last spring, in part because of rising debt. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add an estimated $4.7 trillion to the deficit through 2035, and Donald Trump’s efforts to decrease immigration will add another half a trillion to that number over the same period, per the Congressional Budget Office.

That’s the larger context, but there’s a more immediate – and even scarier – reason that the bond market is erupting now: The money world is increasingly doubtful that the three men presiding over US economic policy – and by extension the global economy – are up to their responsibilities. That starts, of course, with the impulsive President Trump, but Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, is losing his reputation as the one adult in the room, and, perhaps most critically, newly installed Federal Reserve chairman Kevin Warsh is off to a very rocky start.

Let’s start with Warsh. I don’t think it’s merely a coincidence that bond market turmoil has increased rather than decreased ever since Warsh took over the Fed chairmanship in May from the long trusted Jay Powell. I really like something that Brad DeLong, the highly acerbic and deeply insightful economist at the University of California at Berkeley, recently posted on his Grasping Reality substack.

My theory of Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh is this: he is way out over his skis, having gotten the job by promising Trump that he would lower inflation and lower interest rates, while reassuring the bond market that he was really a hard-money guy. Now he is stuck trying to create strategic ambiguity. I said this in June, and I said this in May. Having arrived at the top of the greasy pole, Warsh has discovered that the only move available to a man who has told incompatible things to incompatible audiences is to say as little as possible, for as long as possible. That is not a communications strategy. It is a hostage situation, and the hostage is the standard of value.

I have seen nothing to challenge that theory.

Thus, in my view, people who want to understand Warsh need to start with he is trying to create strategic ambiguity to avoid a full-fledged fundamental break with either Semi-Senile Chaos-Monkey Trump on the one hand or Demoiselle Marchée Financiere on the other. If they don’t start there, they wind up confused.

And then there’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Since we’re in an acerbic economist phase, I can’t do much better than bringing the Nobel Prize-winning Paul Krugman on stage. Here’s Krugman, writing last month on his Substack, about Bessent’s attempt to gaslight the bond market with an obvious – and, it turns out, counterproductive – effort to bring down long-term Treasury rates.

In office, Bessent has been a consummate Trump sycophant. For example, in March 2026 the Treasury announced that henceforth Donald Trump’s signature would appear on paper currency — a first for any sitting president. Bessent’s prepared remarks ran as follows:

Under President Trump’s leadership, we are on a path toward unprecedented economic growth, lasting dollar dominance, and fiscal strength and stability. There is no more powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country and President Donald J. Trump than U.S dollar bills bearing his name, and it is only appropriate that this historic currency be issued at the Semiquincentennial.

This kind of “Dear Leader” rhetoric coming from the nation’s top economic official is far worse than just embarrassing. In times of crisis, the Treasury secretary’s credibility is a critical asset for dealing with financial markets. So when Bessent talks like a love-struck Natalie Harp, it carries the potential for enormous financial and economic costs for the country. . .

But Bessent’s betrayal of the trust that was placed in him by the American public to be a competent steward of the nation’s economy goes beyond public pronouncements. Something very troubling is happening inside the Treasury department as well. According to the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan watchdog, 7 out 16 Trump Treasury appointees confirmed by the Senate — that is, the very top Treasury officials — have left since the start of Trump II. That’s 44 percent, an astonishingly high percentage. According to NOTUS, which reported on the study,

NOTUS quotes Mark Mazur, a former senior Treasury official, who suggests that some of the departing officials may be leaving rather than commit illegal acts:

And aside from apparently demanding that Treasury officials act in ways that would put them in legal jeopardy, Bessent has been deploying the financial resources of the Treasury in ways that have little relationship to U.S. national interest, but are clearly in the service of Trump’s political goals.

So why is the Treasury engaging in an end run around the Fed, conducting its own de facto expansionary monetary policy?

The answer is clearly political: High long-term interest rates are an embarrassment for the Trump administration, and Bessent is trying to make the picture look prettier, even though this means undermining the people who are supposed to be making monetary policy.

The maneuver is failing: 30-year yields fell briefly on Wednesday [Aug. 19], when the policy was announced, but bounced back on Thursday and were higher as I write this than they were a week ago. — clear proof that you can’t gaslight the bond market.

So Bessent, a former bond trader himself, has squandered all of his credibility with his sycophancy, his apparent demands that top officials engage in unethical and probably illegal conduct, and his abuse of the Treasury’s financial power for clearly political goals.

And his ruined reputation will be a real problem if and when, like many of his predecessors, he encounters a crisis in which we really need a credible Treasury secretary with competent subordinates.

Where does that leave us? The US economy is remarkably resilient and it takes a lot to crack the relentless accumulation of wealth and the momentum of an ever-growing output of goods and services. So I wouldn’t panic just yet. But strap in: I remember being petrified as a 10-year-old at Disneyland on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Well, Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride is about to get a lot bumpier.

I’m certainly not the first person to ask that question – and people a lot smarter than me are deeply divided on the issue.

Getty Images

Now I know you’re used to hearing from me about Donald Trump and threats to democracy – my usual obsessions for this newsletter – but given how much of our economic growth is relying on building the infrastructure to support AI programs, I’ve been scratching around trying to find some answers. And even though financial engineering is one of those classic MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) subjects, I think it’s worth a little of your time to follow along with me.

That’s particularly true because, lo and behold, this Sunday morning, I opened up Barry Ritzholtz’s website, The Big Picture, and the alarm bells went off. Ritzholtz is one of the most insightful investment advisors (and certainly the most accessible) that I know. He’s a smart, energetic journalist, too, and his daily newsletter, known as Ritzholtz’s Reads, inspired the title for my own (far less frequent) Redburn Reads chronicle.

And what was the very first item Barry chose to list on Sunday, Aug. 2? A piece on Substack that I had just finished reading on my own, headlined The House of Ellison is on the Brink. The long essay, by Mike Brock, who writes Notes from the Circus for Substack, starts out with a warning that Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world as founder and principal owner of the data management company Oracle, is starting to get in all kinds of trouble. You also may have heard of Ellison’s son, David Ellison, who is the owner of Paramount Skydance and the man who put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News.

But enough about the Ellison’s.

The main point of Brock’s piece is a warning that the AI boom is simply unsustainable – yet the companies behind it are trying to keep it going as long as possible by investing in each other. It is very reminiscent, Brock and others are pointing out, of the way the energy trading firm Enron engaged in a whole host of artificial transactions with a variety of special entities it set up itself before it collapsed in a spectacular failure in 2001.

The analysis is elaborate, but here’s what I see as the essence of Brock’s bearish argument:

AI is a bubble. Everybody knows it’s a bubble. The market is running on magical thinking. AGI is a fever dream. And LLMs shouldn’t even really be considered AI.

Calling it a bubble, though, flatters it. A bubble at least requires strangers — a crowd of outside buyers chasing an asset they don’t understand. The AI economy stopped depending on strangers some time ago. Its largest transactions now run between a handful of related parties who invest in one another, sell to one another, and book one another’s money as growth. Bloomberg built a map of these deals, and the map is a circle. Yesterday, reporting on the newest wave of Nvidia commitments — more than $750 billion — Bloomberg‘s headline said the deals revive fear of AI circular financing. The fear is the correct response. . .

Enron‘s signature device was the special-purpose entity: partnerships the company capitalized with its own stock, so it could trade with itself and call the results revenue. The structure had one fatal property — it worked only while the stock went up. When the shares fell, the entities that depended on the shares failed, and the failures dragged the shares down further, a machine that ran in both directions. The AI economy has rebuilt the reflexive machine — vendors capitalizing their customers with equity, buying back their unsold capacity — at a thousand times the scale and put it inside the S&P 500. . .

Jim Chanos, who saw Enron before anyone else did, calls the AI financing complex, with its generous GPU depreciation schedules at CoreWeave and Oracle, a confidence game. For scale: Enron‘s entire final-year revenue was about $100 billion; the Oracle–OpenAI contract alone is three times that. Enron‘s peak market value was roughly $70 billion; Nvidia‘s is five trillion. The Bank for International Settlements — an institution constitutionally incapable of hyperbole — compared the AI buildout to canal mania, railway mania, and the dot-com bubble, and observed that “these episodes ended with an eventual reversal in investment, inducing economy-wide recessions.”

And wouldn’t you know it, Ritzholtz also highlighted the Bloomberg Tax piece Brock mentions, which was written by Amanda Iacone. Tagged a “Deep Dive,” it’s even more technical than Brock’s analysis, so I’m going to rely on Barry Ritzholtz to summarize it:

• Big Tech AI Spree Revives Accounting Devices That Toppled Enron: Enron Corp. exploited US accounting rules to hide from investors and lenders hundreds of millions in debt it had bundled into off-balance sheet entities — obligations that contributed to one of the biggest corporate collapses in US history. Twenty-five years later, new risks have emerged as some of the world’s most valuable companies create similar financing vehicles that can mask how much debt they’re taking on, as the technology industry looks to spend more than $3 trillion to power artificial intelligence systems. Off-balance-sheet entities are back. Twenty-five years after Enron, tech giants are using strikingly similar structures to hide the debt financing their AI data center buildouts.

I still think AI is likely to have a profound effect, not just on our economy but also on the way our society is organized and the future of the human race. But in the meantime, it could be a very rough ride getting there.

For a broader, level-headed perspective on AI and other economic issues, I often turn to Derek Thompson, a journalist who recently left The Atlantic to start his own Substack. His most recent piece, headlined The Four Horsemen of the AI Bubble Apocalypse, aims at being (slightly!) reassuring for the future of AI, at the same time providing a very helpful analysis of what could go wrong. I can’t go into the detail Thompson does (so you should read his full piece), but here’s a quick mind grab:

AI is doing so many things at once that it’s hard to follow the plot. . .

If I had to shove all of these developments into one sentence, I might pick this one: The capabilities of AI are becoming more powerful, while the economic underpinnings of the AI buildout—and, as we’ll discuss, the political support for AI—are becoming more vulnerable.

Beyond the headlines, I see four main categories of risk facing AI, or four horsemen of the potential AI bubble apocalypse. They include spending risk, revenue risk, political risk, and technological risk. In today’s essay, I’m going to break down each risk and—because in this field, nothing is certain—I’ll offer my favorite counterargument to each. This way, you’ll get a sense of both why the market seems to be souring on parts of the AI megaproject and what the market and its interpreters might be missing. . .

Bottom line: We are witnessing several paradigm shifts that should shake anybody’s confidence that they know exactly what’s coming next.

I envy the certainty of the AI Advocates, who know that artificial intelligence will change the world exclusively for the better, and the Bubble Boosters, who are certain that we are in the midst of an industrial mirage. Instead of certainties, I see opportunities and risks. The quadruple-headed risk hydra that I see today is that (1) the hyperscalers are taking on hundreds of billions of dollars of debt (2) to build a profit-challenged product whose extraordinary level of international competition could continue to compress margins, while (3) the political backlash against the technology grows despite AI’s centrality to overall US growth, and (4) we possibly stand on the cusp of a technological leap that, having no precedent in human history, is practically impossible to model as a political or economic event.

All I can add for now is that AI is raising huge challenges at a time when it hard to have any confidence in either our tech overlords or the politicians we have elected to oversee it on behalf of the American public.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty

The obvious choice is Donald Trump, but I’m doubtful. For one thing, his efforts to restrict voting and undermine the midterms elections keep coming up snakeeyes. His primetime speech moaning, yet again, that he won the 2020 election was a bust. He’ll keep trying and his minions will continue to do great damage to our institutions and the public safety that helps sustain lives and health. But his blunderbussing incompetence keeps getting in the way – and his hold on public office is coming to an end.

Vladimir Putin, by helping elect Trump in 2016, and Mitch McConnell, by refusing to support his conviction for high crimes and misdemeanors after the House impeached him, certainly played a role in weakening our nation, but they are no longer capable of doing any serious damage.

And Elon Musk and his tech billionaire buddies who would love to usher in a true right-wing oligarchy, are certainly throwing around enough money to put a thumb on the scale in our political system.

But, as Paul Krugman argues in a recent Substack post, Musk is doing more to undermine his cause than to advance it.

Billionaires have had immense political power for decades, but they chose to exercise that power from the shadows, veiling their actions through patriotic sounding right-wing PACs and think tanks. Only political junkies understood what was going on underneath the surface.

Today, however, the new generation of the hyper-wealthy are out there and in your face, flaunting their influence rather than concealing it. And the poster child for this change is, of course, Elon Musk. . .

So surely part of the reason a majority of Americans now say that democracy is being undermined, that billionaires are running everything, is that the billionaires themselves are out there boasting about their influence.

And their brazenness is actually doing the rest of us a favor. Mobilizing against the oligarchic threat to democracy was hard when the oligarchs were operating from the shadows. It’s easier now that some of them are out in the open.

Elon Musk makes an unlikely hero of populism. But his odious and unbridled narcissism may very well help save the American republic.

So who’s left? Well, as you probably already figured out from the photo at the beginning of this dispatch, my prime candidate for Public Enemy #1 is John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Mr. Balls-and-Strikes who just calls ‘em like he sees them? How can that be? Well, I would argue that under the mild-mannered demenor is a man determined to overturn the constitutional order that is supposed to limit the power of the High Court.

I’m going to devote the rest of this newsletter to laying out the case, largely relying on journalists who are experts on the Court – and ending with a far-reaching reform proposal that may be the only way to curb the corruption and overweening arrogance of Roberts and the majority he controls.

Writing for The Atlantic, Aziz Huq argues that the Court’s latest term, despite a couple of ruling against Donald Trump, actually illuminates the Court’s underlying agenda.

The lesson for the White House from this term is not that the Court is suddenly an adversary. It is that the justices have little patience for impulsive, erratic swerves by a president who will be gone in three years, especially when accommodating his whims undermines their longer-term constitutional vision.

For the American public, the lesson is more ambiguous. The Court’s project cannot be described as an originalist one. It would take bottomless credulity to justify with history a First Amendment right to buy politicians, an equal-protection clause that mainly benefits white people, or an executive power to summarily dismiss bureaucrats who follow the law but defy the president.

Neither is the Court’s vision a democratic one, even if it comes wrapped in the bluster of free speech and evenhandedness. Instead, it is one in which elections are hollow exercises, thanks to gerrymandering and the political power of money; racial minorities are relegated to the economic and political margins; and high-dollar donors jockey to urge the White House to ignore statutes that Congress has enacted. This is a project intended to protect those in power—especially those whom the justices agree with politically.

It is the fate of this project, and not just the flash-in-the-pan cruelties of the second Trump administration, that will shape the coming century, and so determine whether the notion of an American democracy is a living fact or an object of wistful nostalgia.

Perhaps the greatest change in our system the Court imposed in its latest term was the decision to allow the White House to fire any member of an independent regulatory agency (except the Federal Reserve) without cause. David Graham, writing earlier this month in The Atlantic, explains the significance of the case.

Last week, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, a case that concerned whether the president had the power to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission, one of the federal bodies known (now anachronistically) as independent regulatory agencies. In 1935, the Court ruled 9–0 in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that these officers could be fired only for cause. In Slaughter, the justices cashiered that precedent.

This is a major change in executive power, giving the president greater ability to fire officials with whom he disagrees politically and to treat these agencies as extensions of his political project. The Atlantic has run excellent articles on how the ruling is a triumph for the unitary-executive theory and a betrayal of originalism, but it’s easy to lose sight of the real-world implications. . . .

What Slaughter means for most people is that the president now has much greater control over many of the parts of the government that affect us most directly. In other words, partisan politics will start infringing on areas of life where they have hitherto been remote or absent. Seeking the overturning of Humphrey’s Executor was a goal laid out in Project 2025, the policy plan that has become a road map for the Trump administration. Project 2025 seeks not just a much more powerful president but a reshaping of American society at a fundamental level, instituting a traditionalist and Christian regime. Control of these agencies is one method to achieve that.

Under the direction of Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and another Project 2025 author, the administration has frozen the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in place and tried to strip nearly all of its funding. The CFPB was established by Congress to protect Americans from predatory lenders, debt-relief companies, for-profit colleges, and the like, but Vought has effectively nullified Congress’s passage of the law.

In a poll released last week, Politico found that six in 10 Americans feel “like politics are everywhere these days where it does not make sense for things to be political.” Slaughter all but guarantees that the problem will get worse soon.

Michael Waldman, writing for the valuable Brennen Center for Justice in his Briefting newsletter, expands the argument for the importance of the Slaughter case among the spate of other damaging rulings.

How will we remember this Supreme Court term? For Louisiana v. Callais, which demolished the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For near misses, too, as when the Constitution’s plain-language guarantee of birthright citizenship was recognized by only a bare majority of the justices. (As JD Vance crowed, that core protection is now “hanging by a thread.”)

I think the term may be remembered most as a time when the supermajority of very conservative, very pro-business justices bent the shape of American government. It was a power grab in legal garb, undermining Congress, granting presidents more authority, but with key decisions ultimately in the hands of the nine unelected officials now redesigning government.

In 2005, The New York Times Magazine published a story about a cadre of intense anti-government legal activists. They bemoaned “the Constitution in exile,” what they saw as an epic wrong turn in the 20th century. That was the era when Congress and presidents created expert independent agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, to police Wall Street, and the Federal Trade Commission, to protect consumers. To most Americans, that was how we grew a modern, fair, prosperous economy. To those activists, it was all a terrible mistake.

One of the few adherents of this eccentric theory, the Times reported, was an unknown young federal judge named John Roberts. Soon he would become chief justice. . .

Let’s not forget Donald Trump is a lame duck. (He is! Really!) A future president may be a populist progressive, now with new levers of power to address climate change or boost union power. To quote Justice Brett Kavanaugh, “What goes around comes around.” Of course, this Court has also invented tools to stop policies it doesn’t like, such as the “major questions” doctrine it used to block Biden-era climate change rules. Stay tuned.

But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that [the Slaughter ruling] will make government less effective, more chaotic, and more driven by politics and personality — steered there by a Supreme Court with too much power, now in thrall to an obscure and dangerous philosophy.

And here’s one more very smart analysiss of the case, from Peter Shane in The Washington Monthly.

The Supreme Court’s June 29 decision upholding President Donald Trump’s firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter is being widely and accurately reported as portending a huge expansion of presidential control over the administrative state. For once, Trump’s social media post calling Trump v. Slaughter the Supreme Court’s “biggest and most consequential” decision this term is not an exaggeration.

What is equally important, however, is that Trump v. Slaughter arrogates to the Supreme Court power that the Constitution vests in Congress, not the judiciary. In that respect, it is of a piece with other Supreme Court decisions under Chief Justice John Roberts that diminish Congress’s constitutional role and instruct it on how it may exercise whatever legislative power the Court is willing to acknowledge. . .

Democracy is served when agencies are required to receive and respond to public input and, as required by law, publish their proposed regulations. Democracy is served when courts review agency administrative output to ensure that the bodies have remained faithful to their democratic mandate. American democracy is not simply a matter of presidential plebiscite. . . .

Under the Roberts Court, however, Americans surely have lost liberty if executive power means what the Slaughter majority tells us it means. And if Congress decides to do something about it? Congress will have to get around the Court’s view that determining what is “necessary and proper” belongs to judges, not legislators.

Finally, I’d like to quote extensively from Josh Marshall, the creator of Talking Points Memo and a long-standing critic of the Roberts Court. First, he puts the latest cases in historical perspective, and then, in a separate take,, lays out the case for reform.

The gist is basically this: judicial review goes back to Marbury v Madison and you can argue (how well is up for debate) that it was always implicit in the constitutional structure. But judicial supremacy — the idea that the Court (and inferior courts) have sole responsibility for interpreting the Constitution and in effect can’t be questioned — is very new. It is certainly new as a consensus across the political spectrum. . .

The American right — or the more conservative and reactionary elements of American politics — had always been most friendly to judicial supremacy. They got about as supremacist as possible under Lochner [which sought to undermine FDR’s New Deal]. And then you get the Warren Court, which suddenly and unprecedentedly makes the Court a vindicator of individual rights. The left decides judicial supremacy is pretty cool after all. And with that switch, suddenly you’ve got a right-left consensus in favor of judicial supremacy. . .

Once you get a judicial supremacy consensus, the whole fabric of U.S. politics becomes distorted. Every confirmation becomes life or death because we’re basically appointing a guardian council. We have Mitch McConnell type power plays. We need to get new justices on the Court by the time they’re in their late 20s if at all possible. The success of the Federalist Society and the conservative legal movement generally is the first sustained effort to pack the Supreme Court to achieve the kind of unbridled power we see today. The Warren Court was genuinely liberal in key ways. But that was partly fortuitous and far more something that grew organically out of the political culture of the New Deal and the early Cold War.

In any case, the salient point of the whole discussion is that until fairly recently it was believed that all the branches of the government — and critically, the people acting through those different branches — had an equal responsibility to judge what the Constitution says and what it requires. The Court can reject a law on constitutional grounds. But that doesn’t settle the matter. It doesn’t mean that’s what the Constitution says. It’s what tCourt claims and they have certain powers to make good on those claims. But they don’t have unlimited powers, and the other branches have their own. The Congress says what it thinks is constitutional when it passes a law (or that should be what passing a law means). If the other branches think the Court is wrong there are checks and balances to push back on incorrect decisions — adding new justices, removing the Court’s jurisdiction over certain questions, yanking back the Court’s budget.

Given the Court’s claim of overweening power, Marshall maintains that nothing less than a root-and-branch reform is necessary.

Let’s begin with the threshold issue. Regardless of the details of reform, I have seen no reform proposal that is at all serious which doesn’t include immediately adding new seats to the court. A total of 13 would have one justice per federal circuit court. There’s a logic and a history to that. But I’m not sure 13 is enough. In any case, there’s no serious reform that doesn’t first include adding justices because that is the only immediate way to break the corrupt power of the current majority.

The key additional reform would be to have cases heard by randomly selected panels of judges. So perhaps there are 20 justices on the Court and cases are heard by panels of seven. It’s a bit like how it works on the appellate courts, but there would be no en banc review.

Why would this be good? It’s critical to make the outcome of cases less predictable. At the moment, the right knows they’ve got five or six “sure thing” votes for basically anything they want that isn’t completely absurd on its face. Meanwhile, the corrupt justices know they are entirely insulated from any accountability. This uncertainty about who will hear a case reduces the incentive to game the process with concocted cases. More importantly, I think it creates an incentive for justices to render opinions which are at least facially reasonable and rooted in law and history. Otherwise a different panel might come back a year or two later and just undo your decision.

Just as appellate judges don’t want to be overruled by the Supreme Court, I think this creates a similar incentive. If your decision is well-reasoned, responsive to Constitution and precedent, it’s more likely that future panels will at least operate within the structure of your decision even if they don’t simply rubber stamp it. On both fronts, these kind of randomly selected panels create a benign uncertainty and reduce the incentives for corrupt actions.

An additional advantage to this is that it reduces to at least an extent the problem with repeated Court expansions. If you’re dealing with panels of 7 or 9 or whatever number, it matters less if repeated expansions get the total number of justices to some crazy high number. I also think that this panel approach will be harder or less likely to undo. It goes without saying that a future Republican trifecta would likely add its own justices. I think the panels would be more likely to be enduring.

Two other reforms seem important. The first is some kind of term limit or mandatory retirement age. I’ve seen differing arguments about whether this is constitutional. This piece from The Brennan Center says the Court has already ruled that “senior status” for judges over a certain age is constitutional.

Finally, along with some sort of term limits or mandatory retirement age we should probably shift from a set number of justices to just every president (or perhaps every term since in rare cases two presidents can serve during one term) gets two Court seats. Combined with limits on the back end of service, this gets us out of the macabre and increasingly extreme death watch and 28-year-old justices system we’re currently in. It removes some of the randomness and game playing.

If you don’t begin with an immediate increase in the number of justices, it’s not serious. Because you end up with a reform which might have a meaningful impact in 10 or 20 years and might never even properly come into effect.

The ultimate goal is to reduce the overweening power of the Court and the individual justices which make it up and thus reduce the incentives to corrupt it in the first place. There’s no perfect solution but these are a range of reforms which limit in significant ways the incentives for judicial corruption and abuses of power while providing immediate relief to the Court’s current corruption.

Final point: I’ve tried to sketch out broad brush reforms. People raise constitutional objections to one or more of them. That’s fine. Assume that I am anticipating fine-tuning these proposals to meet technical or constitutional concerns. I’m confident that they can be fine-tuned in ways to meet any substantive constitutional objections.

Fine-tuned to overcome constitutional objections, perhaps, but capable of being adopted as law under our current political order? Well, that’s a far greater hurdle. But Marshall’s proposal at least helps in understanding the ultimate challenge we face in attempting to restore a representative system of (small d) democratic rule.

P.S. I’m back from my break, but will probably only post sporadically until the election season heats up after Labor Day.

I’m taking a summer break from Redburn Reads for about a month. If you are a paid subscriber and would like a refund for the month, let me know and I can arrange a Venmo payment. Sorry for any inconvenience, but I’m just not feeling very inspired at the moment and hope that taking some time off will help recharge my batteries.

All the best,

Tom

Which is why his henchmen are doing everything they can to try to win their war against our republic.

(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty)

You may have noticed that Trump lost a war he started – unnecessarily – and is lashing out at everyone he blames for the fiasco, even saying he will hold Vice President JD Lance responsible if the cease fire agreement his best buddy and his son-in-law worked out with the Iranian regime doesn’t succeed in improving his political standing.

You may have noticed that Trump’s effort to repair the Reflecting Pool has turned into another fiasco – creating, with the help of a no-bid contract given to his cronies for the job, the perfect metaphor for his second term. He managed to produce an algae-filled swamp in the center of the nation’s capitol where he once promised to drain the swamp of corruption. .

And speaking of corruption, the New York Times has the latest example in yet another expose, written by Paul Sonne and Eric Lipton, of Trump’s self-enrichment of himself, his friends and his family.

When Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Kazakhstan’s president at the St. Regis Hotel last September in New York, President Trump jumped in by phone as the men sealed a deal on a top priority for Washington.

During the call, Mr. Trump and his team won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods.

Ahead of the deal, the Trump administration approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources, which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.

It was not only Mr. Trump and Mr. Lutnick who saw an opportunity.

Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history.

So while Trump may be losing the support of all but his most loyal MAGA followers and lashing out at those who have deserted him, he’s devoting much of his time and attention to making more money.

But back to losing it. Writing in The Atlantic, Jonathan Lemire and Russell Berman recently summed up Trump’s latest outbursts in response to his failures.

A desultory, grievance-filled speech on what should have been a joyous occasion. The last-minute cancellation of a rare bipartisan bill signing in favor of yet another push for doomed, unpopular legislation. A loud confrontation with members of his own party followed by sneering remarks about some of the nation’s oldest allies. And a nonsensical accusation that, if we have it right, blames the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool not on his rushed renovations but on knife-wielding vandals … and maybe Barack Obama.

And that was just yesterday.

For President Trump, things aren’t going great. He normally thrives in chaos, reveling in unpredictability to keep his opponents off-balance. But right now, he’s just flailing. Despite his long-standing superpower of knowing how to control the national conversation and quickly change it, he has been unable to shake the consequences of a war with Iran that increased prices for Americans and weakened the country’s standing in the world. Trump’s poll numbers have plummeted. Republicans fear a November wipeout. Members of a panicked, fed-up GOP are beginning to defy their president. Trump, whose political image revolves around strength, finds himself diminished. . .

As part of his expansive effort to remake Washington in his own image, he took on a project to fix up the Reflecting Pool. What he got instead was an on-the-nose metaphor for the state of his presidency: a no-bid contract to a crony that went over budget, ended in failure, and resulted in the pool being policed by federal troops. The pool’s liner has come apart, and the water has turned a brilliant, stubborn green—far from the “American-flag blue” that Trump intended. But rather than take responsibility, Trump has veered into conspiracy theories.

He has, predictably, turned America’s birthday into a commemoration of himself. Plans for a concert on the National Mall to kick off the festivities turned into a pro-Trump rally, and most of the music acts backed out once they realized how partisan the event had become. Trump went ahead anyway, making himself last night’s centerpiece with a few C-listers as his opening acts. But his heart didn’t seem in it as he delivered a short speech that included some nods to the republic’s founding and plenty of grievances. He spoke from behind bulletproof glass, and the crowd was small by Trump’s standards. Social-media footage showed many people leaving while he was still speaking.

Trump, ever attuned to what is trending, posted on social media today that he had a massive crowd and that “everybody stayed right until the end of my Speech.”

But much as I want to celebrate Trump’s collapse in public support and his decline into a failed presidency, it is that very failure that makes him even more of a threat to our nation and the world.

Writing in The Bulwark, long-time neoconservative William Kristol – now one of the leaders of the Never-Trump faction – warns that Trump has a coterie of Administration officials who are eager to carry out his schemes to turn the United States into an authoritarian state.

Donald Trump is 80 years old. He’s lost a step. He’s even more willful and erratic than he once was. His self-indulgence and narcissism are even more out of control.

And it’s only getting worse. This may be in part because, to adapt Andrew Marvell’s famous lines a bit,

At his back he always hears

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.

A sense of impending mortality seems to be making our president even more unhinged than ever.

So you look at him, and you try to reassure yourself: He doesn’t really have the patience to carry out a thoroughgoing subversion of the rule of law, of our political and civil liberties, or of our elections. He doesn’t really have the ability to execute a full-scale authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government.

On the other hand, there’s no doubt he would like to see such a takeover.

And he does have young men with a lean and hungry look in positions of authority and power in the executive branch who are committed to making his dream of power without limits a reality.

Some of the men running the key national security agencies in the U.S. government are more competent than others. But they all have lots of energy. They’re all young men in a hurry to reshape our government and our country.

Bill Pulte, the new acting director of national intelligence, is 38. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is 40.¹ Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, and FBI Director Kash Patel are all 46. OMB Director Russell Vought is 50. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is 51.

They’re young, but they’re as determined as the old man they work for not to hand their positions over to anyone other than fellow loyalists after their terms in office, if they intend to leave office at all. They’re as determined as the old man they work for not to step aside from their powers and allow political opponents to look into what they have done. And like the old man they work for, they aren’t committed to the peaceful and democratic transfer of power after an election, or to the political norms or lawful procedures of a liberal democracy.

None of these men should be in a position of power and authority in the government of the United States. Yet here they are, hiring and firing at will, abusing their authority and politicizing their agencies in unprecedented ways. . .

Pulte officially became acting director of national intelligence last Friday, June 19. Yesterday, June 22, as one source told CNN, “The deep state firings have begun.”

And so Pulte has begun to follow in the footsteps of what Hegseth has been doing at the Pentagon, and Blanche at Justice, and Patel at the FBI. Looking at their purges along with the mass hirings at ICE, one sees that we’re entering a period of maximum authoritarian threat, one that makes Watergate look like child’s play. And we’ll be in that era of threat for the next two and a half years.

Two and a half more years of this? Maybe so. But maybe not – if Democrats can win both the House and the Senate in the mid-term elections. That’s what Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson fear the most. And with the help of their billionaire backers and Republican leaders in states they control doing everything they can to tilt the election landscape in their favor, that’s what they are singlemindedly trying to prevent.

Will there ultimately be an honestly conducted and counted election? And if so, can the Democratic party overcome the long odds? That’s what we will find out on November 3, only a little more than four months from now.

Most of it is worth cheering: The stunning 4-1 U.S. victory over Paraguay in the opening round of the World Cup! The shocking last second comeback for the ages by the New York Knicks at the Garden to take a 3-1 lead over the San Antonio Spurs!

And then there’s the UFC cage matches on the White House lawn to celebrate Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.

Credit: Justin Metz for the New York Times.

Let’s start with the good stuff. There are all kinds of reasons to despite FIFA – the corrupt organizing body that oversees the World Cup – but the once-every-four-years, month-long spectacle is here in the United States, Mexico, and Canada and Americans are about to celebrate the world’s most popular sport – by far – along with every other corner of the globe. The last time the United States hosted the World Cup – a generation ago in 1994 – was very different.

Writing an opinion piece for the New York Times, Jody Rosen argues that loving “soccer” has become as American as apple pie.

One thing is certain: We have traveled far from 1994, when the United States first hosted the World Cup, and pundits greeted its arrival with incomprehension and scorn. “World Cup soccer is coming to the United States and I don’t care. Soccer is un-American,” proclaimed the syndicated columnist Charley Reese. In a much-discussed article written in advance of the tournament, USA Today’s Tom Weir compared the case made by soccer’s boosters to “what the Russians told us about Communism.” Weir assured readers they needn’t feel bad about their soccer-phobia: “Hating soccer is more American than Mom’s apple pie.”

Of course, it is literally true that soccer is un-American, and there are interesting things to say about the difference between its rules and rhythms and those of football or basketball. But soccer’s critics preferred crude culture-war framing. Back in 1986, during a House debate on a resolution to support the U.S. bid for the 1994 World Cup, Jack Kemp, a New York Republican and former N.F.L. quarterback, condemned soccer as “European socialist.” . .

In fact, the United States was already a global power, in women’s soccer. The passage of Title IX in 1972 and the underdevelopment of the women’s game in traditional soccer nations gave the States a leg up. The U.S. Women’s National Team won the inaugural FIFA Women’s World Cup in 1991, and went on to take the competition three more times, including in 1999 — a victory sealed by Brandi Chastain’s instantly mythic shirt-off celebration. . .

Soccer is a scrambler of geography. A teenager in Houston might pledge allegiance to Barcelona or Liverpool; his sports idol might be Galatasaray’s striker Victor Osimhen, a Nigerian star of a Turkish team. Many soccer obsessives are only secondarily interested in the (as it were) IRL sport: their focus is EA Sports FC, one of the best-selling video games in the United States and a key soccer entry point that has schooled countless young people in the intricacies of transfer markets, promotion and relegation, and other arcana. . .

The scale of U.S. soccer fandom is inseparable from the country’s enormous Latin American, African, Arab and Asian diasporic populations, whose roots span nearly every major soccer-playing region of the world.

In short, American’s soccer fans may well more accurately reflect the nation’s demographic future than fans of other sports. To put the matter another way: the soccer fan base looks a lot like the future that the sitting U.S. president and his supporters have vowed to eradicate. One surprising development of the run-up to the World Cup was how little anti-soccer hysteria bubbled up from the MAGA bog lands. On the contrary, in December, President Trump went so far as to say that the N.F.L. should rename American football, since the real football, clearly, is the game where you kick the ball around.

That may have been a brief moment of lucidity for our president, but it was mostly because FIFA’s president had just presented him a consolation trophy after his disappointment over not winning a Nobel Peace Prize. But let’s be grateful for small favors. As is Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, writing in the NYT together with two other authors from the host nations about why the World Cup is worth enjoying despite all its problems.

In 2026, the world doesn’t look like we hoped it might from the sunny vantage of the early 1990s, when history still felt like it was moving in a positive direction. The United States, which seemed destined to be increasingly open-minded, is more closed off. But the return of the World Cup, a competition founded in the same era as the League of Nations and involving a sport that Americans have now learned to love, will still channel conflicts between countries into “peaceful contests in the stadium,” as Jules Rimet, the man who masterminded the competition, once put it. As important, it will offer us all a chance to experience, even if just for a moment, a mighty form of communion. . .

Now the World Cup is back. Since 1994, the reputations of both the United States and FIFA have taken some profound dings. FIFA’s corruption was never exactly a secret, but has now been exposed to the world. President Trump’s contempt for the rule of law and international norms has done vast damage to America’s global standing and American society alike. . .

The reason FIFA’s flagship event has returned to the world’s richest country, this time sharing hosting duties with our North American neighbors and cosignatories to NAFTA that Mr. Trump loves to hate, is the same reason that Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s unctuous current head, expanded this World Cup from 32 nations to 48: cash.

This is the world as it is. But we’ll be watching regardless. In 1994, we thrilled to Romario’s balletic goals for Brazil; in 2026, we’ll wonder if Kylian Mbappé’s mercurial French team can pull together and if the great Lionel Messi of Argentina has one more “mundial” in him. We’ll cheer along for smaller nations, from Haiti to Jordan to Cape Verde, hoping they can notch even a single, glorious win.

This year’s final will be staged on July 19 in New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, whose turf played host in 1994 to a memorable match between Italy and Ireland. It was filled to bursting with immigrants’ kids bellowing their love for the old countries in the new one where they’d made good.

We tuned in then, and we will tune in now — to over a hundred matches across the continent. And we’ll know that what happens on their fields will model, as only a World Cup can, the world as we want it.

By contrast, the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s seven-fight card, to take place in a cage mounted above the White House South Lawn on Sunday, will be watched mostly by MAGA fans. I don’t think even they see the UFC as a model for the world as we want it to be. Or maybe some of them do – the UFC is not so much a sport as much as a spectacle of violence as entertainment.

But with the event, supposedly a key element of America’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, taking place on Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, it’s symbolism is hard to miss.

Here’s Jamelle Bouie, one of my favorite opinion writers for the NYT, putting the UFC event in a larger context.

To put the country and its people at the forefront of the occasion is to honor the democratic spirit of the founding of the United States. To put oneself at the forefront, as Trump has, is to discount and strip away that democratic content.

Sunday’s U.F.C. fight is not just a garish spectacle; it is an expression of the president’s contempt for the ritual and symbolism of American democracy — which is just another way to say, his contempt for democracy itself.

I live in New England, where hatred of the Yankees runs in the bloodstream and contempt for the hapless Knicks over many years of Celtics’ success runs in the bloodstream. But I didn’t grow up here and I’ve been caught up in the excitement over the Knicks extraordinary NBA playoff run. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, is a long-time Knicks fan. He’s always worth reading. And his instant reaction -– written in the early morning hours after the game — is no exception.

Went to bed at one. Impossible to sleep. Still vibrating from the Knicks’ impossible comeback against the Spurs in Game Four. If this persists, schedule an EKG. Got up at three to check the truth machine to see if this had really happened. Down twenty-nine points. At the brink of seeing the series tied at two games apiece, with all the momentum on San Antonio’s side. Disaster is so easy to envision, especially for a catastrophist: Wemby hoisting the trophy after a Game Seven (or worse—after a Game Six at the Garden!). And, considering how young the Spurs are, we could be watching them (or O.K.C., for that matter) collecting trophies in a rain of confetti for a decade to come. This was our time! Our shot! Had we, after opening the series with two wins on the road, blown it?

And yet sleep is not easily given to the nerve-jangled fan. Even listening to Brian Windhorst’s post-miracle pod did little to settle the mind. Nor did my usual late-night remedy: a cup of coffee. (That’s a story for another day.) Instead, I had what all fans have in these moments. Thoughts. Theories. Here are some which I inflict on you before sleep overtakes me: . . .

OG Anunoby’s tip for the win was the greatest shot in Knicks history. Boomers will point to Willis Reed’s two game-opening jumpers from midrange to open the decisive game in the finals, against the Lakers, in 1970. And, although some scholars will argue that Reed was playing with a leg shot up with painkillers, he did not exactly win the game. He stole the Lakers’ self-confidence from the jump, that is true, but it was Walt (Clyde) Frazier who really brought the victory home with a gaudy thirty-six points and nineteen assists. OG’s shot was what believers would call a miracle. And yet, he was characteristically calm. “It feels cool,” he allowed after the game. “I mean, everyone’s pretty excited.” Pretty excited? OG, they are filling the streets and jumping on top of trucks across the city! “The ball went over my head, so I really couldn’t dunk it,” he went on calmly. “So I tried to tip it in softly, and it went in.” Yes, it did. . . .

But mostly fandom is a matter of patience. Dynasties are freak occurrences in history. Such dominance might be pleasurable, but it does not encourage good character. Real fandom is about endurance and waiting. (At times it feels like waiting for the Messiah.) Knicks fans have endured. As Landry Shamet, the always energizing and often deadly bench player, put it recently, “Y’all know, Knicks fans are a specific species of human that should be studied.” . . .

Keep Donald Trump away from the Garden, please. The only comeuppance for his insane city-disrupting, boo-inducing, utterly unwanted appearance at Game Three was the clip of his granddaughter poking him to wake him up as he snoozed during the action. Way to go, Kai! Run for the hills while you still can! . . .

It ain’t over till it really is. Fandom is patience. See you Saturday, couchside.

I’ll be watching, too – even it its only for the 2nd half after attending a previously scheduled play in Boston. And I’ll be thinking about my mother, who was born on this day 97 years ago and died six years ago.

I can already see your eyes glazing over. But wait here for a minute. Even though I’ve noticed that readership of my newsletter has leveled off lately, falling short of some of the more popular subjects I’ve written about in the past, I’ve decided to take on this issue anyway.

Why? Because many of the economic thinkers I respect who once dismissed fears over the federal deficit and overall borrowing are suddenly starting to raise alarms. And while almost everybody I know is mostly worried about the risks of AI, we’re more likely to suffer an economic crisis from a bond market revolt triggered by growing recognition of the unsustainable fiscal path our government is following.

How did we get here? The usual way of framing this issue is that Democrats won’t cut spending on entitlement programs for the poor and elderly and Republicans keep cutting taxes on the wealthy. But in fact, if you look at what Republicans actually do when in power, they keep cutting taxes – and don’t really cut spending, either. That’s because just about everything the federal government spends money on is politically popular pretty much across the board. The answer, in truth, now lies mostly in raising taxes. But whose taxes?

Democrats recognize that raising taxes is political poison, so they first vowed not to increase them on American households earning less than $250,000 – and more recently have raised the ceiling to $400,000. That’s a mistake.

It’s true that you could go a long way toward resolving the debt dilemma simply by increasing taxes at the top. But over the longer run, the amount you can realistically raise from the rich won’t be enough to support the kind of government spending needed to finance a decent society. So, despite the understandable reluctance to add anything to the burden of ordinary Americans at a time when “the affordability crisis” is at the top of the agenda, if Democrats regain enough power in Washington after Trump’s tenure is over, they will have to look deeper.

Perhaps there is a potential solution, though, which lies in the fact that Trump has already raised taxes (by imposing tariffs on imports) and the burden of those tariffs already lies most heavily on everybody but the rich. Replacing the tariffs, which cost Americans over $300 billion a year, with a 5 percent value-added tax (VAT) on most consumption (exempting food, housing and medical spending) would raise about the same amount in a fairer, less arbitrary way. And if the VAT, which is the kind of consumption tax that just about every other affluent country in the world relies on, were raised to 10 percent and combined with higher income taxes on the wealthy, the federal government could not only support a decent social democratic state but do so in a way that doesn’t keep adding to the national debt.

So, if your eyes haven’t glazed over by now by some heavy economics, let me offer some commentary from other analysts on why this approach might actually make political sense, too.

First, here’s Matt Yglesias, in a Substack post on why he thinks it’s time to “freak out” about the national debt.

A key point is that while ideological progressives hate the idea of fiscal discipline, Democrats have traditionally benefited from debates over the deficit because those debates tend to highlight their most popular ideas and Republicans’ most unpopular priorities. . .

Compared to pre-Covid conditions, the interest rate you’d pay on a mortgage or an auto loan has gone up a non-trivial amount. That not only burdens potential homebuyers, it depresses new construction. It also tends to deter people with older, cheaper mortgages from moving, even when moving would have other upsides, and that creates deadweight loss for the economy.

The scale of these interest rate problems is not large enough to fully explain the bad vibes, but these are genuine problems and they’ll obviously get worse if we keep cutting taxes in the face of an aging population.

Because the macroeconomic situation changed fundamentally in 2021–22, those of us who care about things like inflation, interest rates, and unemployment have changed our tune. But at this point it’s become hardened conventional wisdom on the Democratic side that deficit politics is a loser.

I think that this is wrong, and the fact that most Democratic Party politicians think it’s wrong reflects a stealth ideological makeover of the party. What is definitely true is that if you accept the premise that the economic-policy goal of the Democratic Party is to transform the United States into a Nordic-scale welfare state, acknowledging deficit concerns makes that harder. The basic issue is that raising taxes is hard, and even when you have a popular tax-policy idea (like taxing a small number of very rich people), there’s a lot of pressure to use the ensuing revenue on middle-class tax cuts. Putting deficit reduction “ahead in line” of welfare state expansion makes that Nordic dream even more difficult.

But is that the right premise?

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama governed on the more restrained premise that the economic goal of the Democratic Party is to generate broadly shared economic prosperity. They both enacted policy measures to lift up the poor, they both increased taxes on the wealthiest, and they both centered fiscal discipline in their politics. In the context of these relatively restrained policy goals, a fiscal-policy debate played into the hands of Democrats rather than Republicans.

Conservatives like to argue that the United States has a “spending problem” rather than a “revenue problem.” You can characterize it that way if you want, but the “spending problem” turns out to be a “paying people the Social Security and Medicare benefits they were promised” problem, and defending the existing social safety net is an extremely popular economic-policy objective.

If you can drag the conversation back to the deficit, then you get to do the good kind of economic populism where you say, “Yes of course we should tackle wasteful spending, but we also need to make good on our commitments and that means asking for a larger financial contribution from the people who’ve benefited from an incredible generation-long winning streak for the owners of financial capital.”

Of course, plenty of rich people will never support a political party that wants them to pay more, no matter what you say. And that’s fine. A center-left political party is never going to be the natural home for the majority of rich businessmen.

But a center-left political party that’s talking about taxing the rich in the context of a sober-minded and balanced approach to the budget deficit — the way Clinton-era and Obama-era Democrats were — doesn’t need to gratuitously insult successful entrepreneurs. That kind of party can make voters see the risks of turning the economy over to a Republican Party that is heavily focused on the most crass and short-term interests of the people who need the least from the government.

But why worry about the debt at all? Haven’t folks been warning for decades about the dangers of excessive borrowing–and haven’t we survived just fine anyway? Yes they have – and yes we’ve survived so far.

But the situtation has changed, so I’m turning to Justin Wolfers, a popular economist at the University of Michigan who has recently started his own Substack newsletter called Platypus Economics (after his birthplace in Australia), for background on what’s different now. He recently conducted a video conversation with Derek Thompson, an economics journalist. To accompany it, he wrote a post, which – because I’m running out of steam and I want to turn this over to someone smarter than me – I’m going to extensively quote below.

Back in 2009, we were each trying to impress on people a sense of urgency that if the government didn’t act decisively to put the economy back on track, it might leave scars that would last for years.

Sadly, we turned out to be right. The recovery from the Great Recession was remarkably slow. Remarkably painful. The Obama recovery plan was intended to be a first step: do something pretty large now, see how the economy responds, and go back to Congress if more was needed.

More was needed. But fiscal politics got weird. The Tea Party wave arrived. Partisan divisions hardened. And the deficit hawks — folks who warned that America simply couldn’t afford a bigger recovery effort — played a deeply unconstructive role.

Their argument was simple, and it sounded responsible: Debt is rising. Fiscal crisis is coming. We must tighten our belts.

But in that moment, it was mostly a bad argument, often offered in bad faith. Many of these so-called deficit hawks were less interested in fiscal responsibility than in preventing the government from doing more. The deficit became a respectable cloak for a much older instinct: they wanted smaller government, and if that sentenced a generation to joblessness, them’s the breaks.

The economics didn’t support their moral panic. Government debt was — by today’s standards — remarkably low. Interest rates were low. The urgent danger wasn’t that the United States would borrow too much to support recovery. The urgent danger was that it would borrow too little.

That formative experience made this week’s conversation feel so odd.

Nearly two decades later, both Derek and I find ourselves saying something that sounds uncomfortably close to what the debt scolds used to say. Each of us is concerned that our fiscal path might lead to a painful adjustment. (That’s a polite euphemism because I don’t want to sound too dramatic.)

So the question I kept asking myself was: Did I change, or did the economy change?

Did I get older and grumpier? Did I drift right without noticing? Did I catch whatever bug makes middle-aged economists start muttering about bond markets at dinner parties?

Here’s the first answer: the economy changed.But debt is only half the picture. The other half is the deficit — how much we’re adding each year.

Today’s deficit would have looked extraordinary to pre-crisis America.

This is the part that would have blown young Derek’s and young Justin’s minds. If you had told us back then that the United States would be running a deficit of roughly 5.8 percent of GDP outside a world war, outside a financial collapse, outside a pandemic, we wouldn’t have believed you. And the idea that this would occur under a Republican House? Well, that’s crazy talk.

Today that enormous budget deficit barely gets a mention.

And so as the debt and deficit have changed, so have my concerns. When debt-to-GDP was much lower, I felt confident saying a fiscal crisis wasn’t coming. Now? As I said to Derek, “I am humble and I don’t have a clue.”

But that’s actually a thing: I have lost all confidence that I know a reckoning isn’t coming. Sorry for the double negative, but that’s how I got here. My conclusion — written in the positive voice — is that there’s a very real possibility that such a reckoning is just around the corner, a decade or two away, further off, or maybe it’s never coming. Derek is even more worried than I am.

I don’t want to oversell this. There’s no fiscal pumpkin that appears when the debt-to-GDP ratio hits 100 percent. What matters is the interaction between debt, interest rates, deficits, and trust.

Those are the big ideas. The video has the details. . .

We can’t do everything. We can’t have everything. Magical thinking is the disease, not the cure. And we can’t dismiss the arithmetic just because some of the people who used to talk about the arithmetic were using it as a dodge.

That’s why I’m proud of this conversation. I think it’s a genuinely useful place to start our fiscal debates — not because Derek and I solve the problem, but because we begin in the right place.

The deficit hawks were wrong then.

The debt is worrying now.

Those two sentences are not in tension. They’re the same framework applied to a different world. If you want to understand that world, start there.

Donald Trump’s crass corruption knows no bounds. It is so outrageous that even some of his most loyal Republican supporters in Congress are showing signs of distress. Will it finally sink his Presidency?

That will largely be determined by the voters at the mid-terms in November. Trump, the Supreme Court and his Republican allies in statehouses around the country have done just about everything they can to corrupt our elections, too, tilting the playing field in favor of the GOP. But I’m starting to believe that Trump’s massive self-enrichment and his many failures in office – the Iran war and his striking ability to worsen living standards for the vast majority of Americans are just the tip of the iceberg–are becoming so evident that they will fail in that effort and that the end of the Trump era is within sight.

Newspaper editorials, usually written in a “voice of God” tone and famous for striving mightily to be fair-minded, are rarely much fun to read. But the recent work of the New York Times editorial board, under the relatively new leadership of David Leonhardt, is now on my must-read list for its compelling arguments and innovative forms of presentation. It’s latest statement, on Trump’s corruption in office, is an outstanding example.

Has there ever been an episode of presidential corruption so blatant and threatening to constitutional order? Certainly not in modern times. President Trump’s Justice Department is using taxpayer money to create a $1.8 billion political slush fund. Ostensibly set up to compensate those who the department claims have “suffered weaponization and lawfare,” it will in fact reward loyalists willing to defy the law and commit violence on behalf of the president.

The fund manages to combine three of Mr. Trump’s most alarming behaviors. One, it is an obvious form of corruption, coming from a president who has used his office to enrich himself, his family and his allies. Two, the fund continues his pattern of using the Justice Department as an enforcer to punish his perceived opponents and protect his friends and allies. Three, the fund is his latest attempt to rewrite history about the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.

It is worth pausing to put the fund into the larger context of Mr. Trump’s political project: He is destroying pillars of American democracy to empower himself. He claims elections are legitimate only if he wins. He uses federal law enforcement to investigate and prosecute his perceived enemies. He purges his party of officials who defy him. He describes members of the other party and civil society as traitors and enemies. He incentivizes his supporters to break the law on his behalf and rewards them when they do. He directs his allies to change election rules to keep his party in power. . .

After President Richard Nixon’s abuses in the Watergate scandal, Congress and the executive branch built rules and traditions to ensure that federal agencies, especially the Justice Department, operated in the public interest, rather than that of the president. Mr. Trump has tried to break this system. Once he is gone, it will need to be rebuilt, and better than before. He has exposed and exploited its flaws and gaps. Unless they are filled, Mr. Trump’s corruption and perversion of justice risk becoming the norm.

In the meantime, Americans should be cleareyed about what the president is doing. He is taking their money and showering it on criminals.

The corruption/affordability theme – Trump enriches himself and his family while dismissing economic pain among ordinary Americans as not worth his attention – is the single most persuasive political argument Democrats will have to offer this year. I only hope they hit it relentlessly from now until November.

Noah Smith, writing a long Substack post headlined Are You Tired of the Trump Era Yet?, has a quick checklist on Trump’s latest money grabs.

So basically, Trump:

1. Uses the government to interfere with specific companies,

2. Trades those companies’ stocks in advance, knowing how his own government interference will affect their prices,

3. Sues his own government for billions and then orders his government to settle the lawsuit,

4. Gives the billions of dollars of taxpayer money to his own activist thugs and cronies, and

5. Has the government promise never to prosecute the Trump family.

Nothing in U.S. history even comes close to this level of corruption. Trump is simply using the powers of the presidency to extract billions of dollars from stock owners and taxpayers — i.e., from you and me — and to put that money into his own pocket. Compared to this, the famous Teapot Dome land scandal in the 1920s was nothing. The total amount of money involved in Teapot Dome — just a few million of today’s dollars after adjusting for inflation — was tiny compared to the billions Trump is looting.

If that’s too much shorthand for you, I can recommend Peter Baker’s unusually blunt news analysis that recently led the New York Times’ print front page on Friday, for helping to put the scale of Trump’s corruption in historical perspective.

President Trump has used the federal government to advance his own personal interests and those of his family and allies more expansively and openly than any past occupant of the White House. Any review of history would suggest that it is not even close. . .

But as Mr. Trump, the only convicted felon ever elected president, heads deeper into his second term, he seems even less inhibited by the rules, written or unwritten, that governed his predecessors. While deeply unpopular with the general public, he has demonstrated as recently as this week that he remains the undisputed master of his own party, and therefore appears to feel that he can do as he likes without fear of Congress standing in his way. . .

Mr. Trump has so blurred the lines between his financial interests and his public office that it is hard to define where the lines lie anymore, or if they still exist. He, his family and his friends have made a fortune in the 16 months since he returned to power in ways that once would have been seen as conflicts of interest and possibly generated investigations.

“Presidents have had corrupt, even criminal, family members,” said Barbara A. Perry, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, citing, among others, Hunter Biden. “But none of them succeeded to the extent of the Trump family in the level of graft achieved.”

His family has profited enormously off his new cryptocurrency business at the same time the president has rolled back regulation of the industry. Mr. Trump pardoned the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, which was involved in helping the Trump family build its crypto start-up. Jeff Bezos, whose businesses receive federal contracts and depend on U.S. Postal Service rates, approved paying an estimated $28 million to Melania Trump, the first lady, for a self-promotional film streamed on Amazon.

Even the most notorious presidential financial scandals in history — Credit Mobilier during Ulysses S. Grant’s administration, Teapot Dome during Warren G. Harding’s presidency and Watergate during Richard M. Nixon’s tenure — did not come close to the money swirling around the Trump family during his second term.

“Not only do the three most infamous previous presidency financial-political scandals seem minor compared to Trump’s,” said Ms. Perry, the presidential scholar, “but none of the three presidents — Grant, Harding, Nixon — padded their own bank accounts.” People around Grant and Harding traded public policy for money, but there was no evidence that the presidents themselves profited. And the money raised by Nixon’s team went to his campaign dirty tricks slush fund and hush money for the Watergate burglars, rather into the president’s pocket. . .

As of Wednesday, Forbes magazine estimated Mr. Trump’s net worth at $6.1 billion, up from $5.1 billion last year and $2.3 billion in 2024.

While Trump gets even richer, vast numbers of Americans are struggling with higher gasoline prices, creeping inflation, higher interest rates and stagnating paychecks. That’s why more analysts are starting to predict that the public has — finally — had enough. Here’s Mona Charon, a long-standing conservative, writing for the “Never Trump” outlet The Bulwark.

Why then do I say that we may be nearing a turning point? Any country that could passively accept the UAE gift, the Qatar plane, and the January 6th pardons is beyond caring, no? We’ll see. My theory is that two things must be present for people in a free republic to turn a blind eye to corruption: 1) Their personal bank accounts must be flush, and 2) they must believe that most of the corruption stories are just partisan attacks.

The American economy was very strong in the 1990s, and though Bill Clinton behaved in an abominable fashion toward women, people were willing to overlook it. Similarly, voters in 2024 made a bargain: Though they knew Trump was corrupt, they bet that he would bring them the kind of economy they’d enjoyed in 2018. This isn’t an admirable trait, but there is good reason to think it’s the way many voters operate.

Trump has not delivered on the bargain. On the contrary, economic conditions are now worse than they were in 2024. Nor can Trump rely on partisanship to come to his rescue because it isn’t the Democrats who are making the case about corruption, it’s Trump himself and his allies. It is Trump who used the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to make the case for his garish ballroom. It is Senate Republicans who are adding the insult of demanding taxpayers pay $1 billion for this monument to Trump’s ego. It is Trump, not his opposition, who instructs voters that they should be happy with fewer dolls at Christmas. It is Trump who accepts gold bars from the Swiss delegation and adorns the Oval Office in a style that could be called neo-Saddam.

The corruption never seemed to matter much to the American people before, but when gas prices are near $5 a gallon, groceries have only gone up, and the economy is skidding toward recession, the gold leaf becomes not an eccentricity but an indictment. The worm has turned.

There is good reason to believe that, finally, Trump’s unprecedented corruption is going to bite him in the ass.

In a similar vein, my friend Jim Fallows identifies the apparent backlash among Senate Republicans last week against both Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund and his $1 billion White House ballroom as a sign that even some of most loyal allies are slipping away and that the post-Trump era is beginning.

People may look back on this past week as a milestone in political awareness. It’s not only that public opinion keeps turning against Donald Trump. That’s been evident for months in plummeting approval ratings, for all the obvious reasons: Tariffs, brutal ICE raids, blatant self-dealing, needless and unpopular wars.

The real milestone, it seems to me, comes in signs of dawning awareness, crucially among some GOP forces who have enabled Trump, that he won’t be there forever. They’re already hearing from constituents that they don’t like soaring gas prices and an open-ended war. Eventually there will be questions about why their representatives turned a blind eye to these abuses for so long.

As everyone except Trump himself seems to realize, the primary-election results of this past week only make his impending lame-duck-hood seem more real. He keeps showing tighter and tighter control, over a smaller and smaller pure-MAGA cult base. He can still rally his loyalists to knock off any Republican who has displeased him. But the obvious cost is smoothing the path for Democrats in the fall.

This week’s mini-rebellion by Republicans in the Senate, refusing to rubber-stamp Trump’s stupid ballroom and corrupt slush-fund deal, is an early sign. He might still manage to pacify them and make a “deal.” But this little crack in previously solid GOP support is like the first mocking laugh in The Emperor’s New Clothes, or the peek behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. The magic cloak of invincibility has slipped off, revealing the enfeebled man inside. . .

Next week will bring some new chaos. Rabid-raccoon style, Trump becomes ever more dangerous as he goes down. But people can see him sinking now, and are recalculating how to save themselves.

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The anti-democratic (small D) impulses of Roberts and his cohorts have become even less constrained in recent years. And the Court’s conservative Justices no longer seem shy about displaying their pro-Republican (capital R) bias.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The decision last month to gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and allow Louisiana’s Republican-dominated legislature to redraw the electoral map in a way that will leave the state’s Congressional delegation with just one Black representative (a Democrat) accomplishes both goals. It is the culmination of Robert’s relentless attack on the multiracial democracy that the Voting Rights law enabled. It will open the door to a wave of such moves in several Southern states. And the conservative majority on the High Court, by refusing to set even minimum standards curbing partisan gerrymandering, has heavily put its thumb on the scale in favor of the Republican Party.

The Roberts Court is not just a conservative-leaning body. As Josh Marshall writes in his Talking Points Memo you can’t have both democratic self-government and a venal, overtly partisan Court.

It is possible to have more liberal or conservative jurisprudences, loosely tethered to the progress of presidencies and senates. The Roberts court is a different beast. It is the product of a decades-long effort to corrupt the federal judiciary. That degree of corruption first came into full view in the second decade of this century when the Court openly began to do three closely interrelated but conceptually distinct things.

First, The Meaning of Words is For Little People.

The Court has, with increasing boldness, manufactured new doctrines and text out of the constitution which simply do not exist in the document. Often they are implicitly or even explicitly ruled out by the plain text itself. The greatest example is the 2024 presidential immunity decision, a ruling contradicted by all the history of the document as well as its clear language. . .

Second, The Choose Your Own Adventure Constitution.

Closely related to point one, the Court no longer has any consistent or even comprehensible jurisprudence. It simply has political goals it seeks to achieve – presidential immunity, an increasingly absolute right to firearms, a 14th amendment focused primarily on race not actually existing. Arguments are chosen by convenience simply as backfill to arrive at the desired end.

Third, Political Power is For Republicans Only.

While the corrupt majority has consistently advanced and enforced an ideological vision of how the country should be run it has another simpler brief: not allowing Democrats to govern when they are in power. When Republicans are in power the powers of presidency are almost limitless; when it’s Democrats the office is feeble and hemmed in by a cobweb of invented doctrines. We had the ironic benefit of two Trump presidencies sandwiching a Biden presidency to make this principle of action crystal clear. Quite simply, the corrupt majority ensures that only Republicans actually get the fruits of political victories. . .

The Supreme Court is given specific powers to achieve specific ends. Over the last 15 years it has assumed vast new powers and used them consistently for anti-constitutional ends. Far from interpreting or defending the constitution it is at war with it. . .

The key point is that democratic self-government in the United States is simply not possible with this level of corruption so deeply embedded into the architecture of the federal government. You can’t have meaningful elections if the consequences of elections are routinely tossed out by what amounts to an unaccountable Guardian Council controlled by one political party.

Roberts himself seems offended that so many Americans now see him as a partisan hack. “I think at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, [that] we’re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides,” Roberts said in a recent forum. “I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do. I would say that’s the main difficulty.”

Kenny Holston/The New York Times

But, to me and many other observers, that is actually a quite accurate understanding. Here’s Steve Benen, a producer of the Rachel Maddow show on MSNOW, writing on the MaddowBlog.

Why does the public see the justices, as Roberts put it, as “political actors”? It might have something to do with far-right justices issuing regressive and reactionary rulings. And far-right justices getting caught up in indefensible ethics controversies. And far-right justices elevating the presidency above the law.

But I suspect one of the main reasons so many people see justices as “political actors” is the frequency with which they act like political actors. Right around the same time that the public was learning about Roberts’ remarks, Justice Neil Gorsuch, who has a track record of chatting with conservative media personalities, appeared on a conservative podcast, talking about his belief that “young conservatives must have courage to stand by their beliefs.”

And there is no longer any doubt that the Court has chosen sides. Elie Mystal, writing in The Nation, notes that the Supreme Court didn’t just allow Southern states to redraw their election maps to undermine Black representation and help elect more Republicans, it encouraged them to do so as fast as possible.

People say that the wheels of justice turn slowly, but the Supreme Court’s Republican supermajority has shown time and again that it can act with great alacrity when it wants to crush the civil and political rights of Black citizens. When the court wants to participate in some racism, it can move like Sonic the damn Hedgehog.

The Supreme Court accelerated to ramming speed yesterday when it decided to forgo its normal procedures and fast-track its April 29 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which effectively demolished the Voting Rights Act. Normally, the court waits 32 days after issuing an opinion before finalizing its ruling by submitting it to the lower courts. ..

But instead of actually using the waiting period as was intended, the Republican supermajority issued an unsigned, one-paragraph order getting rid of the waiting period. In addition, Justice Samuel Alito (joined by justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch) saw fit to write a concurring opinion, in which he explained that keeping the waiting period in place “would require that the 2026 congressional elections in Louisiana be held under a map that has been held to be unconstitutional.”

This is rich coming from Alito and his fellow conservatives. That’s because, just a few years ago, they did in fact “require” a state to hold a congressional election using a map that was unconstitutional. It’s just that the map was an unconstitutional violation of Black voting rights, so the Republicans were cool with getting at least one more election out of it. . .

I initially thought that the court would stop redistricting efforts that weren’t already underway before Callais because of the Purcell Principle, but now I think that I was wrong. This court wants to take away Black voting rights now, not in 2028, not in 2030 after the next Census—now.

The way the Court has proceeded doesn’t just tilt the playing field in favor of Republicans, it also undermines the very foundations of self-government by creating more and more one-sided Congressional districts and making it increasingly difficult for the changing will of the voters to be reflected in the actual composition of Congress. Mark Novikoff, writing in The Atlantic, explains how the Court’s actions encourage extreme partisanship and discourage Congress from dealing with emerging issues and responding to the changing desires of the public as expressed in genuinely fair elections.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, the gerrymandering wars, already awful, are poised to get even worse. Democrats will respond to the Republican response to Callais; Republicans will respond to the response to the response; voters will lose in the process. In a few years, almost every seat in the House of Representatives could be safely occupied by a hyper-partisan incumbent, beholden only to primary voters. The chamber could become something like the Electoral College: Whoever wins a state gets all of its representatives, and the winners are there just to vote for or against the president. . .

Whichever party ultimately gains more seats from the gerrymandering wars, the loser is clear: American democracy. In a maximum-gerrymandering scenario, more than 400 seats in the House could be safe and essentially uncontestable, delivering to voters year after year an unresponsive and unimpeachable class of lazy representatives with little incentive to represent them.

At a high-enough level of abstraction, the way out is simple: Congress could enact a federal law prohibiting partisan gerrymandering. The details are not quite as straightforward. One major impediment is, simply, that Republicans have never expressed much interest in ending gerrymandering. As each state gerrymanders, moreover, it sends ever more partisan representatives to the House—the exact representatives least likely to mutually disarm and end the practice that brought them there.

After Donald Trump leaves office, we’ll still be left with our largely unaccountable Court. It may seem academic and abstract, but difficult as it may be, it now looks like Democrats have to start making the case for reforming the Supreme Court when they take power in Washington again and making clear that it should no longer have the power to blithely overturn the will of Congress and the majority of citizens with its tortured anti-democratic reasoning.

Here’s Jamelle Bouie, writing in his New York Times opinion column.

It took more than half a century after Plessy v. Ferguson to get a court that was willing to enforce the Reconstruction amendments and use them to expand the substance of American freedom, not curtail it. For all our current setbacks, however, we live in a very different world than we did in the past. We do not need to wait a lifetime for change.

If the Supreme Court is going to act as a partisan institution — as a super-legislature whose judgments override the decisions of voters on the thin basis of ideology — then the only path worth taking is to discipline and transform the court with all the tools Congress has at its disposal under the Constitution.

Beyond court reform, Americans have to reacquaint themselves with constitutional thinking — with the idea that we, the people, make constitutional meaning. To the extent that the Supreme Court claims broad authority to say what our Constitution means, it is in large part because we have given this authority to the justices through our indifference.

It may be that the first step in truly reining in the court is to remember that the Republic — and the Constitution that brought it to life — is meant for us. It is ours to interpret and ours to transform.

In short: No to Kings. Yes to Citizens.

Credit: Tom Redburn

There’s a place in Charleston, South Carolina, called Philadelphia Alley, where you can see the finger marks of enslaved people – some of them children – in bricks that were laid down there in the early 1800s.

There’s a museum in Selma, Alabama, dedicated to the voting rights campaign of the 1960s. It displays the footprints of numerous people cast in plaster who were part of the army of mostly unknown citizens who marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 with Martin Luther King, John Lewis and many other civil rights leaders to help bring that basic right to countless Black Americans.

Earlier this month, Lisa and I, together with our friends Tom and Renee from Los Angeles, visited both of those sites on our own odyssey, following part of what is now known as the Civil Rights Trail. We didn’t leave a mark, but those two commemorations of the long journey by countless Black people from centuries of enslavement to fighting (during my lifetime) for a measure of freedom and dignity made a deep impression on me. I’m glad we made a trip of remembrance.

We traveled in comfort from our home in Plymouth, Mass. – often thought of as the birthplace of the American experiment – to Washington, where we started with the National Museum of African American History and Culture. From there, we drove to Charleston, picked up our friends at the airport, and went on to Savannah, Selma, Montgomery, and Atlanta.

The highlight of the trip was visiting Montgomery, wherev Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative have built the Legacy Sites, which are largely known as a monument to the victims of lynching. But that is only one element of the powerful story of suffering embodied in the whole experience conveyed by the Legacy Museum and the separate National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.

Many of you have probably visited the Smithsonian museum dedicated to the African American experience, but it doesn’t quite have the impact of the unyielding impression we left Montgomery with of how much exploitation, hate, prejudice and pain Black people have endured since their ancestors were brought to the New World in a slave ship in 1619. If you want to know the full history of our country that Donald Trump and his acolytes are hoping to whitewash, then there is no better place to visit than Montgomery. Besides the Legacy Sites, Montgomery also holds a thoughtfully designed museum dedicated to Rosa Parks, whose decision to stay in her seat on the bus helped launch the modern civil rights museum.

Credit: Tom Redburn

The culmination of that struggle, at least on the legal front, was the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, which played such a crucial role over the decades in blocking racial justice until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, is once again in the process of reasserting its traditional reactionary stance by its systematic dismantling of that historic achievement.

A piece in the New York Times yesterday, by Audra D.S. Burch and Emily Cochrane, on the Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais captured the indifference of the conservative majority to the experiences of Black people over much of U.S. history.

Dr. Leslie B. McLemore remembers the fear that simmered in the air as he went door to door as a young college student working to register Black voters in rural Mississippi in the early 1960s. The threats. The gun brandished in his face by a patrol officer along a highway.

It made the celebration even more joyful as he joined other students crowding around a television when the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965. On Wednesday, he grappled with different emotions after the Supreme Court dealt it its latest blow.

“I just never in my wildest imagination ever dreamed that we would be, in 2026, where we are now, based on what happened in 1965,” said Dr. McLemore, 85, one of the few surviving veterans of the civil rights movement. “It’s a historic, sad day.”

Given the Supreme Court’s conservative majority and other rulings that had chipped away at the Voting Rights Act over the years, Wednesday’s decision did not entirely surprise voting rights groups or Black leaders across the South, where the landmark law has led states to create several majority-Black voting districts.

But Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in writing for the majority, took some aback with his assertion that the nation had undergone “vast social change” since the law’s passage. He pointed in part to increased voter registration and turnout by minorities.

“Discrimination that occurred some time ago, as well as present-day disparities that are characterized as the ongoing ‘effects of societal discrimination,’ are entitled to much less weight,” he wrote. . .

“He can write those words,” said Dr. McLemore, who pledged to keep talking about the struggles that civil rights veterans had endured to secure passage of the Voting Rights Act. “But he has no idea and no appreciation for what Black people and what people of color have gone through in this country.” . . .

Press Robinson, an activist in Baton Rouge, La., who was involved in challenging past congressional maps, said he feared the ruling could have ramifications not just for the makeup of Congress, but for all levels of government.

“Judges, school board members, councilmen — doesn’t matter, it will affect them all,” he told reporters in a news conference on Wednesday.

Mr. Robinson, who grew up in South Carolina during segregation, predicted that the Republicans who control the government in Louisiana — and in nearly every other Southern state — would move aggressively to reshape the political landscape from the local level on up, wiping out Black representation.

“They are determined to see to it that we don’t have a voice at all,” he said.

But reminding ourselves that the legacy of racial discrimination continues today shouldn’t mean a reflexive insistence on what Steven F. Wilson, writing in The Atlantic, calls “the self-defeating condescenion of an anti-racist education.”

I’m not necessarily convinced by Wilson’s argument that charter schools are the only way to achieve academic excellence but the “idelogical purity spiral” he highlights in his piece is not the answer, either.

Then, just as the charter sector was posting striking results, many school networks strayed from their commitment to academic excellence. Staff-led demands for social justice convulsed the schools. “Anti-racism” and “equity” displaced effective instruction as their top priority. Indeed, I experienced the period’s fervor firsthand in Ascend, the charter network I founded in Brooklyn. In a 2019 blog post, I expressed concern that training teachers to recognize “worship of the written word” as “white supremacy culture,” as many equity trainers urged, could alienate students of color from school. A firestorm followed, and I was asked to stay home. I was never to return. At many networks that served students of color from low-income families, academic performance plummeted—and has scarcely recovered.

Although the fervor for performative anti-racism has subsided, Black and Latino children continue to suffer its consequences. Misguided reform wiped away some of the greatest progress that modern educators have made toward racial equality. Today, the average Black 12th grader scores lower than about 75 percent of his or her white peers.

Yet certain charter schools rejected staffers’ demands and kept their focus on academic excellence, continuing to report exceptional results for disadvantaged students, even through the pandemic. They show the charter sector how to rebuild what was lost—and point the way to closing the achievement gap in America’s schools. . .

In 2021, California’s Department of Education sought to make math “relevant” by inflecting every unit with social-justice themes and providing students with a “toolkit and mindset to identify and combat inequities.” The same year, the National Education Association, a teachers’ union representing 3 million members in more than 14,000 communities, pledged to equip schools with a study that “critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.” In 2022, the National Council of Teachers of English announced that the time had come “to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education,” in an effort to “disrupt the inequalities of contemporary life, including structural racism.”

To accelerate these changes, school districts across the country enrolled staff in anti-racist trainings. A mainstay of these programs was a pamphlet called “White Supremacy Culture” written by Tema Okun, an equity trainer and self-described spiritual coach. Okun, who is white, identifies 15 “characteristics of white supremacy culture,” including “objectivity,” “perfectionism,” and a “sense of urgency.” In 2019, the New York City Department of Education, which educates 900,000 children across some 1,600 schools, held a mandatory anti-bias training for all administrators. Okun’s document took center stage. Participants completed a personal scorecard of their “white privilege.” As an adviser to the department explained, “Having to talk about someone’s own whiteness is a requirement for them to become liberated.”

At the heart of the new social-justice education was “trauma-informed teaching.” Equity consultants instructed schools to undertake a program of healing, beginning with staff members of color, who bore the trauma inflicted by not only their school but also their country. White staff, meanwhile, had to “interrupt” their complicity in the racism in which they were acculturated. Teachers were encouraged to act as therapists and relax rigor, ease grading, and lessen homework. Student achievement was, for now, a distant concern. . .

Social-justice education is harming the very students it was meant to help. America’s most marginalized children are being left less educated, more excluded, and more vulnerable. The country owes every child the kind of schooling that, not long ago, its best charter networks sought to provide: an expansive liberal-arts education. In this model, teachers systematically build their students’ knowledge in the traditional disciplines of history, science, mathematics, and literature. So equipped, children are prepared to think for themselves and spar with ideas not their own. Such an education feeds their curiosity, safeguards their intellectual humility, and develops their capacity for empathy. Their teachers see them not as representatives of intersectional identities but as unique individuals, each with his or her own heritages, curiosities, and passions—each child to be cherished and known.

Will we ever reach that “promised land?” We didn’t in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s lifetime, and we won’t in mine. But as the child of two Los Angeles public school system teachers, and the father and father-in-law of two more public school teachers in Brookline, Mass., I believe it’s worth striving for.

A protester participates in a sit-in at the segregated Glen Echo Amusement Park. Courtesy of Kim Dixon

Thanks to all of you who read my civil rights post today — and even more so to those who responded with comments and likes.

And for those of you who got far enough to notice the reference to the documentary film on the Glen Echo desegregation campaign, you might want to know that “Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round” is available now for online rental and streaming, along with access to a Zoom Q&A with the director and two experts. Just hit the link, which will take you to a site with all the information.

I grew up in the civil rights era and some of my early memories are of the TV scenes of the Montgomery bus boycotts, dogs attacking protestors on the streets of Birmingham, Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, and President Johnson delivering his “We Shall Overcome” address to Congress.

Activist Rosa Parks sitting on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 1956.

But when I was 14 the Watts riots occurred only a few miles from my home and it made me angry, sad, and, I confess, scared. Los Angeles was not the South, but where I grew up was deeply segregated, too – and the racial divide led to fears I had to struggle to overcome.

I am just one of tens of millions of Americans who came of age during an era of history that — like the Civil War, Reconstruction and Jim Crow — the Trump administration is officially trying to whitewash. Will it succeed?

I don’t think so, in part because so many good people are doing everything they can to preserve the truth. And that’s one of the reasons that Lisa and I are about to embark on a three week road trip through the southeastern U.S., stopping along the way at many of the places identified as part of what is now called the Civil Rights Trail.

We’re also looking forward to seeing a number of friends, and enjoying wonderful meals and fine spring weather while the vestiges of winter linger here in our home in Massachusetts.

Our federal government’s museums have long played a crucial role in telling our national story, warts and all. That is changing, as Parker Molloy wrote last year in her Substack.

At least 32 artifacts have been quietly removed from the African American History Museum recently. Gone. Harriet Tubman’s hymn book that she used while leading enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad? Not on display anymore. Frederick Douglass’s autobiography? Pulled.

These aren’t controversial items. A hymn book. An autobiography. But somehow they don’t fit the vision of “American exceptionalism” anymore. . .

This is happening because the Trump administration is conducting what they call a “comprehensive internal review” of Smithsonian museums to make sure exhibits “celebrate American exceptionalism” and remove “divisive or partisan narratives.” Those are their actual words. They put them in a letter.

You want to know what actual government censorship looks like? It’s not people getting mad on Twitter. It’s not someone losing a book deal. It’s the federal government walking into museums and demanding they rewrite history to make the president look better. It’s erasing impeachments. It’s declaring that examining how art was used to promote racism is somehow anti-American.

They’re doing exactly what they accused everyone else of doing, except they have the actual power of the federal government behind them. And they’re doing it while claiming they’re “restoring truth.” . .

Imagine walking through these museums where all the uncomfortable parts have been sanitized. Where you can see the lunch counter but not learn about why Black college students sitting at it was revolutionary. Where you can see beautiful 19th-century sculptures but not learn about how some of them were designed to celebrate slavery.

That’s not history. That’s propaganda.

You want to know the real kicker? This is all being done in the name of fighting “divisive narratives.” As if there’s anything more divisive than the government deciding which parts of history count and which parts get erased. As if pretending racism didn’t shape American institutions will somehow make people less divided about racism.

Trump doesn’t want to just erase the uncomfortable parts of our history, he wants us to celebrate those who sought to ruin our nation. Here’s Ed Kilgore, writing in New York magazine about the administration’s efforts to restore Confederate monuments.

Since Donald Trump returned to office, his administration has been working to put the names of various Confederates who tried to destroy the United States to preserve slavery back in positions of honor. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s most recent effort in this crusade is particularly egregious:

Hegseth’s post links to an opinion piece in The Blaze touting the Moses Ezekiel monument as a testament to the “national healing” between north and south that was taking place when it was built in 1914.

The monument is actually a prime example of an attempt to revise and sanitize the actual history of the Civil War. As Arlington National Cemetery’s own website explains (in text which may well soon be scrubbed by Hegseth’s commissars), it presents a “mythologized vision of the Confederacy”: . .

Nothing has happened to rebut that argument in the ensuring years. It makes you wonder if the real “lemmings” here are the people who want to engage with actual history or MAGA zealots like Hegseth, who want to spend $10 million in taxpayer dollars to continue whitewashing it.

In signing an executive order last year titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” Trump claims to be countering “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” In fact, he is doing exactly that himself.

For example, at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, according to the Center for American Progress, the White House removed information about abolitionist John Brown’s raid and flagged more than 30 signs for removal that mentioned racial discrimination and white hostility toward formerly enslaved people. The National Park Service also removed the iconic “Scourged Back” photograph — showing the scarred back of an enslaved man — from exhibits at Fort Pulaski National Monument in Georgia, erasing one of the most visceral pieces of evidence documenting slavery’s brutality.

In January 2026, the Trump administration ordered the removal of slavery-related interpretive panels at the President’s House Site within Independence National Historical Park. A federal judge sided with Philadelphia’s request to restore the panels, but the Interior Department said it disagreed with the ruling and planned to appeal.

In the meantime, the administration is not just rewriting history but turning justice on its head, halting or cancelling thousands of civil rights investigations — particularly claims of racial discrimination — while prioritizing new investigations for supposed discrimination against white people.

To be sure, as the Black historian and language expert John McWhorter writes in a thoughtful opinion piece for the New York Times, not everything contemporary historians are saying can stand up to honest scrutiny, either. But that didn’t stop McWhorter from celebrating the displays of tragedy and triumph that he witnessed last year on his first visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

I think Mr. Trump’s presidency is a national tragedy. But a stopped clock is right twice a day, and I have some sympathy for the concerns he raised about the agenda of much historical thinking these days. Too often it indulges in sloppy and even childish stereotypes, depicting America’s past as one extended hit job.

The boldness of the American experiment, the emergence of the Constitution, the evolution of public schooling, the expansion of the right to vote, the rise of the conservationism and the flourishing of our diverse cultural life — reducing all of this to the machinations of a sinister white cabal is, like the 1980s power ballad, seductive but vapid. . .

But what most struck me about the museum was its dazzling abundance. There is so much to see, hear and read that the museum would require multiple visits to fully take in, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Want to learn about Elizabeth Keckly, Mary Todd Lincoln’s seamstress who was also an activist and memoirist? Or the gustatorial splendors of Dooky Chase’s Restaurant in New Orleans? Although he was a Harlem phenom in the 1910s and 1920s, did you happen to know who the radical orator and pamphleteer Hubert Harrison was? I have always wished Spike Lee would do a movie, with the cinematography in slightly faded Kodacolor to summon the era, dramatizing the National Black Political Convention of 1972 in Gary, Ind., and learning about it at the museum, you get an idea why.

The 1972 issue of Delegate magazine focused on the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana.

Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

None of this is divisive; it’s delicious. Having so very many artifacts, photographs and recordings gathered in one place brings the past to life more vibrantly than books alone could. The museum’s teachings are never strident or rhetorical. One example that struck me: an exhibition text that stated that starting in the 1950s, when Black people moved into previously white neighborhoods, white flight “often” ensued. Often, rather than always. That kind of nuance is all too rare in discussions of morally and emotionally charged issues. But in such situations, it’s all the more valuable. . .

When I was a kid in Philadelphia, my mother once or twice took me to the Black history museum there. This was the late ’70s, and at least in those days, the museum was a determinedly gloomy experience — to a grade schooler, at least, seemingly all slavery and snarling police dogs and despair. Nothing made me feel truly connected to the material. I wished instead that we were at the city’s Academy of Natural Sciences museum, or anywhere that was about wonder, creation, something more positive than just misery and name-checking the accomplishments of occasional isolated figures such as George Washington Carver. The Black Smithsonian would not have left junior me feeling that way. It would have inspired me, and awakened a new understanding of my people and their journey. I wish I could have experienced it way back then, but it was worth the wait.

On our own journey this month into the past, we are hoping to be inspired, too. Lisa’s family was deeply involved in the civil rights movement: she attended the March on Washington in 1963 and her local community of Bannockburn joined with students from Howard University to lead the protests that forced the segregated Glen Echo amusement park not far from their home in suburban Maryland to open to Black people in 1961. There’s a great documentary film about that largely forgotten episode called “Ain’t No Back to a Merry-go-Round.”

We are starting in Washington, with the Black history museum, then driving to Charleston, which was a major slave trading port, where we will meet our best friends from Los Angeles. We are planning to visit the International African American Museum there and then travel with them to Savannah, where the city has preserved the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters. From there, we intend to visit Selma and Montgomery. I am particularly looking forward to the anti-lynching memorial and museum in Montgomery known as the Legacy Sites. Also in Montgomery, Troy Unversity has made sure the site where Rosa Parks was arrested isn’t forgotten with a museum there in her honor. We will continue on to Atlanta, to visit a new civil and human rights museum and the National Park Service’s historical site dedicated to MLK Jr. (Has anything changed there since Trump returned to office? We’ll see.) On our way back to Plymouth, we’re looking forward to staying with a handful of friends along the way.

Our trip, which starts next week, is expected to last nearly to the end of April, so this is probably the last Redburn Reads I’ll write for a while. I’m sure you’ll survive just fine without my missives.

But before I end this post, I can’t ignore the fact that the bloody battles of the civil rights era are being fought again today, this time with the power of the federal government on the other side of the barricades. Lisa’s sister Polly and her partner Peg have been active in the anti-ICE protest movement in Minneapolis and personally helped out sheltering the children of an immigrant mother who was detained for days and then afraid to return to her home for weeks.

And just yesterday, the Trump administration argued before the Supreme Court that the 14th amendment to the Constitution does not grant the birthright citizenship it so clearly gave not only to the formerly enslaved but to just about everyone born in the United States, whatever the status of their parents. So let me close with this brief excerpt from Jamelle Bouie’s NYT opinion piece this week.

The evidence in favor of the traditional view of the citizenship clause is overwhelming. To rule otherwise is to say, in essence, that two plus two equals five. Which is to say that if the Supreme Court decides in favor of Trump [ed. note: Fortunately, all indications are that it won’t], it will have less to do with law or history than the political power of the president and his movement.

Trump v. Barbara, then, is a stark reminder that the struggle over constitutional meaning involves the entire nation. The revisionist case rests less on new evidence than it does on Trump’s claim to embody the nation and its desires. If he is ascendant, then the people must want a closed, cloistered society.

We know this isn’t true. The task ahead for the president’s opponents is to recover the egalitarian substance of the 14th Amendment and wield it against his narrow and exclusive vision of American society. This is the work of history, it is the work of law and it is the work, as always, of politics.

Amen to that.

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But while Donald Trump has failed to offer a clear explanation of why he attacked Iran, the rest of his administration continues to quietly carry out a different kind of assault on the foundations of American society – undermining public health and safety, rewarding friendly companies and criminal donors with favors and pardons, and easing regulations in ways that threaten the climate and run the risk of another financial crisis.

Credit: CNN

We’ve got three more years of this. Perhaps the only hope is that Democrats wrest control of at least one house of Congress in November and bring much greater attention to the efforts of the hardy band of journalists within major news organizations like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and independent outlets like ProPublica and Critical Resistance who are exposing the corruption and abuses of the Trump family and the MAGA cronies the White House has installed throughout the government.

Examples abound; let me cite just a handful or so that haven’t received the attention they deserve.

The food we eat, particularly imports, is less safe. From the start of the Trump administration, according to the Food Safety newsletter, safety inspections by the FDA have fallen to record lows after budget cuts and mass layoffs. Compared to previous years, monthly food inspections at foreign sites were, on average, 30 percent lower last summer than in previous years. More than 15,000 USDA employees accepted resignation offers, including hundreds of food safety inspectors and technical experts.

Our air and water are dirtier. Six power plants that received presidential pollution exemptions collectively increased their sulfur dioxide emissions by 48 percent last year, according to the NRDC. Meanwhile, Trump signed an executive order allowing 47 companies operating 68 coal-fired power plants to delay compliance with rules requiring tighter limits on mercury and other toxic substances they pump into the air and leak into our water. A report from the Center for American Progress found that Trump’s environmental rollbacks will expose more than 2 million children to pollutants linked to cancer, asthma, and ADHD.

All in all, according to a new report from the Environmental Protection Network – a group formed by hundreds of former EPA staff members who have been fired or who resigned – the Trump administration has eased limits on at least 12 different pollutants, including mercury, which damages the brains of children, hormone-disrupting phthalates, cancer-causing PFASs, along with lead, arsenic, benzene, and formaldehyde. And the EPA, according to a piece on the group from the invaluable Inside Climate News, has reversed efforts to reduce the tiny particles in the air that cause soot and smog, increasing risks of heart and lung disease.

Essentially, the EPA, instead of continuing to protect the health and safety of the public from harmful pollutants, has become an arm of the companies and industries that produce them.

Meanwhile, one of the great accomplishments of our time was the creation of medications that protect victims of H.I.V. from dying prematurely from the disease. But writing for the New York Times opinion section, Maia Szalavitz identifies one of the hidden consequences of the budget and tax bill Republicans pushed through Congress last year. The piece, headlined Do We Really Need a Reminder of What the AIDS Crisis Was Like? focused on Florida but drew a broader picture.

On March 1, Florida cut off access to H.I.V. medications for some 10,000 to 16,000 residents whose prescriptions are paid for by a federal program called the AIDS Drug Assistance Program, or ADAP. Federal funding for the program has not kept pace with costs, so Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration decided to make fewer people eligible, changing the cap on incomes qualifying for assistance from 400 percent of the poverty level (an income of around $64,000 for an individual) to 130 percent (an income of around $21,000). . .

This man-made public health crisis goes far beyond a single state. ADAP also helps pay health insurance premiums under the Affordable Care Act for people with H.I.V. who otherwise could not afford coverage. However, the program’s funding has not increased, despite rising premiums after federal subsidies were not renewed by Congress. Consequently, around 20 states, including Rhode Island, Kansas and Delaware, have started or are considering reducing ADAP eligibility or access to certain medications. Pennsylvania, for example, plans to cut off some 1,600 people.

If action isn’t taken by state legislators, this could bring thousands of Americans back to the days when AIDS was a merciless killer.

These changes that states are considering are incomprehensibly cruel — and they won’t even save money. New H.I.V. cases will increase. Sick patients will eventually be admitted for care that is far more expensive than taking daily preventive medication.

And then there’s Trump’s infamous dismissal of the problems of affordability. We’ve all read about how the Justice Department has gone from an agency mostly dedicated to the independent administration of justice to an arm of the White House committed to carrying out Trump’s personal agenda and vendettas. But writing a guest essay last week for the NYT opinion section, Noah Shachtman, a former editor of Rolling Stone magazine, calls our attention to how the Justice Department has backed away from one of the few promises Trump made to help Americans save money.

For a hot second there, it looked as if the government might pry loose Live Nation’s chokehold on the American concert business. Live Nation Entertainment is the company that brought you $5,000 Springsteen tickets and V.I.P. packages at Beyoncé concerts with $550 in fees alone, and it did it by controlling every aspect of live music, from the tickets sold, to the artists promoted, to venues themselves — an over-$20 billion-per-year global empire spanning 54,000 events a year and 394 halls as of late 2024. . .

In office, President Trump signed an executive order to crack down on price-gouging by ticket resellers, and looked on as Kid Rock said that Ticketmaster, Live Nation’s selling platform, was “going to lose some money.” Most important, the Trump Justice Department pushed ahead with a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation that had been filed in 2024 by the Biden administration and ultimately joined by 39 states and the District of Columbia.

Which is why it came as such a shock when, just a week after the case went to trial, the Justice Department announced it was all but surrendering, folding its case with a settlement tilted far in Live Nation’s favor. Negotiations between the two sides had been underway for weeks, but the outcome was so abrupt that the state attorneys general who had brought the suit were taken by surprise; so, too, apparently was the lead lawyer arguing the case for the Department of Justice.

Judge Subramanian called the department’s actions “mind-boggling.” In many ways they were: If a deal’s on the level, you don’t need to cut out the lead players on your own side, as the Justice Department did with its lead lawyer and the states’ attorneys general. But it was just the latest example of the Trump administration granting special favors to corporations that work their way into the president’s good graces.

Having previously attempted to shut down TikTok in the United States, Mr. Trump instead engineered the sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations to an investor group including one of the world’s wealthiest men, Larry Ellison, a deal that came with a $10 billion bonus for the administration. Mr. Trump blessed the merger of Skydance, a Hollywood production company run by Mr. Ellison’s son David, with Paramount studio. When Paramount Skydance sought to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, a rival company, Mr. Trump at one point strongly implied there might be consequences if Warner Bros. chose another suitor.

One of the people expected to testify against Live Nation was Tim Leiweke, the former chief executive of a company that Live Nation initially viewed as a rival but that, according to the antitrust suit, described itself as a “pimp” for the concert giant. Mr. Leiweke was facing his own criminal indictment in a separate matter, a fact that gave him an incentive to cooperate in the Live Nation case — until Mr. Trump pardoned him, after Trey Gowdy, a former Republican congressman and Fox News personality, put in a good word following a round of golf with the president.

It also couldn’t have hurt Live Nation’s prospects that the company had added Richard Grenell, a former acting member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet, to its board of trustees. Nor that the company brought on Kellyanne Conway, Mr. Trump’s longtime adviser, to meet with top officials in the Justice Department. According to reporting by Bloomberg, Ms. Conway was involved in discussions surrounding the settlement, and the White House was kept in the loop.

One more example, from the Substack outlet Critical Resistance, a collective group of writers and activists. A recent post focused on the various ways the Trump administration has undermined government regulation of the financial system, reversing all the positive measures introduced since the 2008 financial collapse caused by the bursting of the housing bubble.

In January, I wrote that the dismantling of America’s financial oversight was entering its final phase. The FDIC had been hollowed out. The CFPB had been shuttered. And the Federal Reserve — the last major independent financial institution standing — faced criminal prosecution of its chairman over a building renovation.

The question then was whether the weakened system would be tested before the damage became irreversible.

Two months later, we have our answer.

On February 28, U.S. and Israeli forces began strikes on Iran. Oil spiked to $100. Core inflation hit its worst reading in two years. GDP growth collapsed to 0.7%. The word “stagflation” returned to mainstream financial discourse for the first time since the pandemic.

And the institutions meant to identify problems, protect depositors, and maintain confidence in the system? They’re operating at their weakest point in decades — by design.

This is the stress test nobody ordered. It’s happening now. . .

What’s new is the complete collapse of federal consumer enforcement capacity. The remaining litigation was transferred to DOJ in November 2025. The companies that spent years fighting CFPB enforcement have won — not in court, but through the simple expedient of an administration that refused to prosecute.

The erosion of our government, of course, runs even deeper than the actions of the Trump regime. Now writing for Substack, Jared Bernstein, a long-time economic adviser to Joe Biden, offers some historical perspective on how we got here.

I’m sorry (not sorry) to be repetitive, but the blame here lies not solely with Trump, but with those who are responsible for the “fully unchecked” descriptor above. When this is over, if we don’t hold them accountable, we have every reason to believe that they or their counterparts will be back soon.

How did it come to this?

That’s a book length question, and I try to keep these missives under 1,000 words. Also, there are political science scholars who know this history better than I do.

But that said, I’ve long had a theory that dates back the Gingrich revolution, circa mid-1990s, when (for you kids out there) Republican House Leader Newt Gingrich orchestrated and weaponized government failure as a political tool. I would carbon date our current, vicious, scorched-earth partisanship, where beating the other side, vs. governing, is the paramount goal, back to then.

That is, the Republican message was, at its core, the gov’t is broken (the out-loud part) and they were going make damn sure it stayed that way (the quiet part).

In this model, dysfunction, gov’t shutdowns, reckless fiscal policy accompanied by threats to default on the debt, upward redistribution, degrading gov’t services—all underscore the claim that gov’t is broken. The only solution is to cut taxes, deregulate markets, shrink gov’t. Any initiative to boost “civil society”—a term Gingrich used—must be the business of local communities and their churches.

The goal was to undermine trust, and thereby, investment in the federal gov’t. Such disinvestment freed up tax cuts and deregulation on behalf of the donor class. And it worked. Though there was a spike up around the 9/11/01 attacks, trust in gov’t has trended down since the 1990s. . .

There is, however, a fatal flaw in the “gov’t’s broken—vote for me and I’ll make sure it stays that way!” strategy. The flaw is so obvious, so right-in-front-of-your-face, that it may be hard to see, though once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it. In fact, I’ve described its latest symptoms at the beginning of this piece.

In a complex society wherein 340 million people inhabit a $30 trillion dollar economy within a complex, intertwined world, it is glaringly obvious that we need a functional, democratic federal gov’t. Because our economy is powerful, self-generating system—production generates incomes, which are used to create more demand, which create more jobs, production, incomes—all of the chaos I’ve described can demonstrably (see real GDP growth cruising along at trend) exist withing a good macroeconomy with relatively low unemployment.

But “GDP growth at trend” is not the definition of a sound society, characterized by inclusive growth and broad opportunity, wherein everyone has a chance to realize their economic, intellectual, and spiritual potential.

The events in the papers are telling us that we have seriously lost our way. From long experience—I’m entering my 8th decade—I can assure you that part of the way back is restoring trust in a democratically-elected gov’t that doesn’t just promise to pursue the bold (in both senses) words above, but convincingly explains how they’re going to get us from here to there. And then they must deliver.

I well know that’s way, way easier to write down than to accomplish. Remember, I’ve worked at the highest levels of federal gov’t, and I’ve got the scars to prove it. I know how tough it is to craft, legislate and implement the policies that could help to restore trust in gov’t.

But everyday we’re seeing the alternative, and it is not sustainable.

Not to be Pollyannish or anything but the death and destruction Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are wreaking in the Middle East is sparking at least a glimmer of hope that higher energy prices might drive more people and policy makers to seek out alternatives to fossil fuels.

Credit: Green Energy Images

After all, as the valuable publication Inside Climate News reported this week, “the Iran war’s disruption to the global energy market should be a wake-up call for countries that continue to rely on fossil fuels.”

That was the message from the United Nations climate chief, Simon Stiell, in a speech in Brussels on Monday. “Climate cooperation is a cure for the chaos of this moment,” Stiell said. “This is completely delusional. History tells us, this fossil fuel crisis will happen again and again.”

That’s true, but turning this crisis into an opportunity for progress on the world’s greatest long-term problem isn’t so simple. Writing in a newsletter for The Economist, Gavin Jackson, noting that “oil prices are once again surging as the passage of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz have been choked off,” asked the question: “What is the likelihood that this decade of energy shocks becomes another turning-point?”

James Hamilton, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, argues that oil shocks should be understood through the lens of sudden shifts in consumer behaviour. He gives the example of Americans’ taste in cars. When the 1970s oil shocks hit, American drivers swapped big gas-guzzling vehicles for smaller, more efficient ones. Big truck factories were mothballed and workers sent home. They became, in the phraseology of the energy transition, stranded assets.

If the current shock persists, as it looks likely to, we should expect a similar shift away from oil and towards efficiency. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 choked off natural-gas supplies and prompted a surge in renewable investment across Europe. The current crisis affects oil as well, so we should expect it to affect the automotive industry and electricity generation. That should help manufacturers of battery-powered vehicles at the expense of their internal-combustion-engine peers.

But if this oil shock leads to a faster transition to renewables, expect it to be disorderly and unjust. Rising oil prices incentivise oil and gas exploration as well as energy-saving. After the 1973 oil shock America’s Congress approved an Alaskan pipeline that had previously been held up by environmental objections. Today there is an active debate in Britain about scrapping limits on oil exploration in its ageing North Sea fields. Others may keep coal power going for longer: switching to gas looks less appealing than it did a few months ago.

And the current energy crisis will most hurt poorer countries which cannot afford to compete with richer Western ones for the marginal molecule of fossil fuels. Fertiliser plants are closing across Asia, which will inevitably drive up food prices for millions of people. In India, where I live, restaurants and hotels are shutting this weekend as the government tries to prioritise its reserves of natural gas for use by households and fertiliser manufacturers. The clouds on the horizon may have a silver lining, but a storm is nevertheless approaching.

Catherine Rampell, who recently began bringing her economic perspective to The Bulwark, digs into another unexpected, but related, reason for not getting our hopes up.

TRUMP’S WAR OF CHOICE with Iran has many costs—in dollars, munitions, lives. But you could imagine at least one possible upside: climate.

This global oil crisis has again highlighted the riskiness of dependence on fossil fuels and the relative resilience of renewable energy. After all, naval blockades can stop oil tankers from traversing a narrow strait but they can’t keep the sun from shining or the wind from blowing.

We’d be more economically insulated if our country had built out more utility-scale solar projects, wind farms, batteries, and all the other clean-energy infrastructure that then-President Joe Biden subsidized and that Trump subsequently killed. Maybe this war will finally build more political will for green investment—not for bleeding-heart, tree-huggy reasons, but for our national and economic security.

You might assume all this. I initially did.

But, at least in the short term, it’s likely wrong. Instead, a sustained oil disruption could end up shattering the world’s attempts to curb climate change. That’s because it’s screwing up Europe’s ambitious climate plans, which are A) much more important than anything the United States is doing, and B) basically holding the global climate effort together. . .

Europe’s cap-and-trade system was already scheduled for a review this summer. And even before we started dropping bombs in Iran, politicians in Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere were arguing for loosening emissions restrictions because they were worried about both European industrial competitiveness and high energy costs for consumers.²

Then, after the war began, pressure to weaken the system grew. Politicians have called for freezing benchmarks, extending free emissions “allowances,” and pausing large parts of the decarbonization agenda. Italy’s populist-right prime minister has been loudly agitating for suspending the carbon cap-and-trade system entirely. When the populace is complaining about high prices and prospective job losses, saving the planet can feel like an elitist luxury.

While the war in Iran makes it even more obvious that we’d all be better off with less dependence on fossil fuels and more renewable-based infrastructure, it takes a long time to build up those substitutes. We can’t do it immediately. Meanwhile, the pain of higher prices is already biting, so it becomes politically easier to just kick the can down the road.³

But if the European carbon-pricing system falls apart, all those other countries that have been nudged to create or expand their own carbon pricing schemes may get wobbly, too. That is to say, if you pull one thread in Europe, the whole sweater could unravel.

Like my former NYT colleague Catherine Rampell, I really hoped, for once, to find something positive to write about amid all the chaos Trump is creating around the world. No such luck. So I guess it’s back to my usual doubts and despair.

Yes, and not just because (as Ernest Hemingway never actually told his frenemy Scott) they have more money. They also have much more political power, which they are able to use in American society to help them keep nearly all their wealth intact.

Photo Credit: New York Times

“We sell hundreds of millions of dollars of real estate every day, and it’s not taxed,” said Jonathan Schechter, a Jackson town council member who has a think tank that studies growth and sustainability.

I’m going to devote this newsletter to the longer term question of taxing the rich, but it also seems that Fitzgerald’s lament in The Great Gatsby about “careless people” is particularly apropos to the more immediate consequences of the way Donald Trump and his coterie of incompetents have waded into war with Iraq. We’re already seeing it in the deaths of school children in Iran and the price of gasoline at home. We’re inundated by news of the war, much of very well done, but for an even deeper insight into that subject, grounded in 45 years of reporting on war and peace, I can think of nothing better right now than Jim Fallows’ latest Substack posting, titled “The Arrogance of Ignorance.”

You really should read the whole thing, but here’s his conclusion:

The strongest leaders in our history have projected strength through control and calm. Think of John F. Kennedy, during the world’s closest brush with nuclear annihilation, the Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962. Think of Martin Luther King Jr’s bearing, as his influence expanded and the mortal threats to him increased.

Then think of the clowns and posturers who now have the controls. They don’t know what they don’t know. They have no idea what they are unleashing. It took years for the United States to get into its quagmire in Vietnam. It took many months to prepare the groundwork for the disaster in Iraq.

These people have changed the world, for the worse, in just nine days. And none of us knows how it will end.

But back to my subject. The New York Times kicked off a new series, Billionaire Boom, with a stunning piece by Katie Benner, Steven Rich, Mike Baker and John Branch on how the wealthy have transformed Jackson, Wyoming. into not just a playground and haven for the rich, but into a community that no longer pays attention to the fate of others simply struggling to make a living amid the splendors of one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

The Jackson Hole region has long been a refuge for the rich, but an explosion of new affluence has allowed a growing cadre of extraordinarily wealthy people to dominate both the local economy and Wyoming state politics.

Teton County is not merely the richest county in the country, per capita, by far; it is a window into America’s near future, as the country enters a new gilded age, one in which millionaires are turning into billionaires overnight.

A New York Times analysis shows the stunning velocity at which the fortunes of the 1 percent have increased across the country since President Trump first took office in 2017. The richest Americans saw their net worth soar 120 percent between 2017 and 2025, a colossal leap from the 45 percent growth they had seen over the previous nine years.

The number of U.S. billionaires jumped 50 percent by some estimates between 2017 and 2025, to more than 900 people.

The minting of dozens of new billionaires occurred in the immediate wake of the 2017 tax cuts championed by Mr. Trump at the beginning of his first term, the nation’s biggest tax overhaul since 1986. The legislation, which slashed personal income taxes and doubled the estate tax exemption, was billed by Mr. Trump as “tax cuts for American families.” But the Times analysis, backed up by a range of new studies, shows that it disproportionately benefited wealthier taxpayers. . .

Most important, it cut the corporate tax rate and laid the groundwork for a surge in stock prices — creating a phenomenal accretion of wealth. The coronavirus pandemic intensified the dynamic. Tech prices soared as employees geared up to work at home and inflation tripled, weighing on the middle class and devastating the poor.

While the rich have been getting richer at a fairly steady pace over the years, the analysis shows that the net worths of those who were already billionaires experienced a pronounced shift after the tax cuts were signed into law, growing by 49 percent over eight years. . .

One of the central quandaries the country now faces is how to govern in an era when such vast wealth both controls a large part of the economy and is increasingly used to access political power.

The Economist magazine, still gamely defending the neoliberal order, argues that the wealthy are already taxed enough, warning of the dangers of what it calls the “Robin Hood state.”

The “Robin Hood” state, which takes from the rich to give to the poor, has obvious appeal. Governments across the developed world are strapped for cash. Budgets are burdened by legacy debts, ageing populations and the need to spend more on defence. But few politicians will countenance raising broad-based taxes at a time when voters, scarred by the high inflation of the early 2020s, are worried about affordability. Booming stock markets, meanwhile, have reinforced the idea that inequality is too high. And it always sounds good to say someone else will foot the bill. . .

You might think that the one unassailable argument for taxing the rich would be fairness. But even that idea is dubious. The presumption that governments have failed to ensure taxes on the rich keep up with their income is mostly wrong. The rich world does more redistribution than ever. In Britain, France and Japan income inequality has fallen after taxes and spending. Since 1990, America has offset much of the rise in pre-tax inequality with more redistribution. Taxes on the top 1% are higher, and spending on the poor, such as on health care, has grown. Besides, fairness is not just about making incomes equal. A fair system would also respect property rights, be reasonably predictable and allow people to reap the rewards of their efforts and risk-taking. . .

At a time of rising public spending, it is dangerous to suppose that the rich can always just pay a little bit more. Yet most left-wing governments would gladly embrace their inner Robin Hood and raid away. When pressures on the public purse are great, it is tempting for leaders to reach for ways to raise revenue that, in the short term at least, impose the least political cost. Taxing the rich will wreak economic and political damage in the long term, however—and will fail even to bring in the revenue that governments need. Emulating Robin Hood and his merry men might look tempting. But it is a trap.

There’s some truth to this argument, but upon closer inspection, its flaws are even more evident. That’s largely because the anonymous authors of The Economist’s editorial focus on redistributing income, while ignoring the much greater disparities in wealth – nearly all of it untaxed – between the richest Americans and everyone else.

To their credit, the editors of the magazine invited a critic, Ray Madoff, to weigh in on the other side of the debate. Ms. Madoff, the author of The Second Estate: How the Tax Code Made an American Aristocracy, offers a compelling argument that taxing transfers of wealth would raise a lot more revenue than the conventional wisdom supposes.

The rich, argues The Economist, are already paying more than their fair share, and any attempt to tax them more would be both futile and harmful to the economy. When it comes to America, however, this argument is built on premises that don’t hold up.

Whereas this publication describes current taxation of the rich as the “Robin Hood state,” in America a more apt analogy would be the Second Estate. The Second Estate was the aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France, who were exempt from paying almost all taxes. Because aristocratic status could be achieved by purchase as well as birth, one contemporary economist described the arrangement as follows: in order to become noble, it is sufficient to become rich; and to cease paying taxes, it is sufficient to become noble; so there is only one way of escaping taxation, and that is to make a fortune.

So it is in America today. Whereas workers—especially high-paid workers—pay significant taxes on their earnings, those who have made a fortune can live a largely tax-free existence. This is the result of a fundamental failure of the American tax system to impose taxes on the most common sources of money for the very rich: investment gains and inherited wealth.

How can this be true in the face of the statistic, offered by The Economist, that “America’s top 1% enjoy a fifth of the economy’s income and pay nearly a third of its federal taxes”? The answer lies in that ambiguous term “top 1%”. Those with the most income and those with the most wealth are not always the same people. The top 1% of income-earners—highly paid businesspeople, lawyers, doctors and others—do indeed pay the most income tax. But this says nothing about the top 1% of wealth-holders, who can arrange their affairs to legally pay nothing.

This is not just theoretical. Although an individual’s tax liability is generally protected by strict privacy rules, a leak of Internal Revenue Service data revealed that many of America’s richest people—including Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg—have been able to pay little or no income taxes in certain years. They break no laws to do so. Rather, they simply use the tried-and-tested tactics of the tax-avoidance playbook: avoid salaries, avoid selling and inherit wealth.

Even if the very rich are paying little in taxes, would changing that actually make a meaningful difference to the budget? Or is it the case, as The Economist argues, that “there are simply not enough fat cats to fund welfare states by themselves”?

A look at the numbers in America suggests that The Economist is too pessimistic about the money that could be raised by taxing their wealth. In 2025 the federal government raised $5.2trn from all sources—including corporate, income, payroll, estate and gift taxes, as well as tariffs—and spent about $7trn, creating a $1.8trn shortfall that was added to the national debt. At the same time, the amount of wealth owned by the richest 1% stood at a whopping $55trn. Although we can’t know the exact figures it is likely that a significant portion of that wealth represents investment gains and inheritances that have never been subject to American taxes. Requiring gains to be recognised whenever property is transferred (whether by sale, gift or at death), like in Canada, and bringing inheritances into the income-tax system, would probably make a big difference in covering this $1.8trn shortfall.

There is, moreover, a reason to reform these rules that goes beyond revenue. To quote The Economist itself: “Broad-based taxes do not only raise much more money. They are also politically healthier.” The same is true here. A tax system that treats its richest citizens like the Second Estate of yore is not just bad for the public purse. It is bad for democracy.

Which brings us back to the political challenge of raising revenues – period. Not only will the rich adamantly bring all their resources to bear against any effort to tax them more adequately. At the same time, most Americans, while generally favoring taxing the wealthy, are so cynical about politics in general that they are reluctant to support the Democratic politicians who might actually carry out the effort.

There are lots of reasons why voters distrust Democrats (too many to go into right now in what is already a fairly long post), but perhaps an unexpected one is identified by Matt Yglesias in a recent Slow Boring post on Substack arguing – against the conventional wisdom – that Democrats don’t need more big ideas, but fewer ones.

We see from ballot initiatives that even in blue states raising taxes is hard. Illinois voters rejected the idea of adding more tax brackets, only saying yes when a separate initiative specified that the money would be used to cut property taxes.

This is not to say that Democrats shouldn’t run on any new ideas. But in terms of optimizing both the political message and what can realistically be done, the important task here is to edit the list down. They need to come up with one midsized or two small-bore ideas that are really good on the merits, poll well, and that they can talk about a lot and make sure people hear about.

Of course, that could mean a brand new idea that someone dreams up. But realistically, Democrats have a huge policy wishlist already sitting on the shelf. They need to read what’s on that shelf and think about what they can discard, not what they can add.

My call to promise less and have fewer ideas cuts against the burgeoning conventional wisdom that the American people are mad as hell and fed up with the political establishment.

I think it’s important to accept that, yes, Americans are mad as hell and they are fed up with the political establishment, but this just does not mean that they are eager to embrace large-scale shifts in public policy.

My go-to talking point on this is that we can clearly see the political success of governors like Phil Scott, Andy Beshear, Laura Kelly, and Josh Stein who face opposition-party legislatures and as a result do not have large policy accomplishments to boast of. . .

This is not to say that Democrats should run a 2028 presidential campaign based on telling people the status quo is great or defending the establishment.

But it means that you quite literally want to nominate someone who has some kind of outsider anti-establishment vibes, deliberately plays those vibes up, expresses a lot of negativity about the status quo, and promises to shake things up and bring new people into the corridors of power without committing yourself to a laundry list of specific ideas. Remember the message of Stealth Democracy: Voters view the existence of partisan conflict over policy as per se suspicious and really like bipartisan deals. . .

But elected officials should not allow activists and policy entrepreneurs to hornswoggle them into believing that there is a strong political argument in favor of promising enormous policy changes.

Right now, there is a mismatch between the volume of stuff that mainstream Democrats would broadly like to do and the volume of taxes that mainstream Democrats feel comfortable raising. When planning for 2029, the substantive challenge is shrinking the list to fit the budget constraint so you can make sure that some things (ideally the best and most important things) are actually accomplished, rather than ending up with a confusing logjam that halts all progress.

Easier said than done, I’m afraid. And worth exploring in more depth in future Redburn Reads.

The parallels to today are so obvious that even Donald Trump must be aware of them. Indeed, only a couple of hours after posting his video announcing the attack on Iran by the United States and Israel, he delivered a Truth Social screed justifying starting the war by accusing the Iranian regime of interfering with the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden. Hell of an argument, right?

Credit...

Ioulex for The New York Times

Truth is, of course, that Trump has a lot more than the Epstein pedophile scandal to worry about. There’s his failure to deliver any improvement in the economic conditions of ordinary Americans (tax and business benefits for billionaires are another matter altogether.) In fact, his tariffs are making life worse for just about everybody, hitting hardest at those with only modest incomes.

His roundups, incarceration and disappearance of tens of thousands of immigrants (many of them in the United States legally) has sparked a political backlash. His incompetent FBI chief Kash Patel, Pentagon head Pete Hegseth, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin and MAHA cheerleader Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are doing everything they can to undermine the institutions they lead.

Trump knows he is in political trouble, as is evident by his repeated statements that the coming Congressional midterms are rigged against him, making clear that he will attempt to subvert free and fair elections from taking place. So why not try to rally the nation behind a war to overthrow the Iranian mullahs?

I’ve been on vacation the past week in Curacao, managing to escape the Northeastern blizzard that dropped 30 inches of snow on my home in Plymouth, Mass., cutting off power for days and shutting down the schools in town for a full week. But even from afar, I can see that Trump’s latest gambit almost certainly won’t work the way he imagines.

But that won’t stop him from trying.

Writing in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols argues that the war is a gamble with little chance of success.

This is not a preemptive war. It is a war of choice, a discretionary war. It is a war for regime change. Many of Iran’s 92 million people want the regime removed. But it is far from certain that this will be the outcome.

To think about the possible courses of this war, we should start by clearly understanding three realities: First, Iran is a terrible regime that deserves to fall. The regime recently murdered thousands of its own citizens who were seeking freedom from their oppressive rule, and no one should be shedding tears for the mullahs hiding in their bunkers.

Second, “success” is not impossible—if by “success” we mean the fall of the ayatollahs and the rise of a better, more humane, pro-Western government that does not seek to destabilize the Middle East; dominate Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen; and eradicate Israel.

But the path to that success is exceedingly narrow and mined with significant hazards. Destroying the regime’s capabilities is relatively easy, but nothing permanent—as Americans learned in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—is achieved by bouncing rubble and piling up bodies. Destroying the regime itself is a far trickier business; dictatorships have a high pain tolerance, especially when the hapless citizens, not the leaders, bear the brunt of that pain.

Third, the president has not offered a strategy, or identified any conditions that would signal that U.S. goals have been achieved. . .

When the 2003 war with Iraq ended, U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine said that when American diplomats embarked on reconstruction, they ruefully joked that “there were 500 ways to do it wrong and two or three ways to do it right. And what we didn’t understand is that we were going to go through all 500.”

Trump, who has not consulted Congress, has done little to explain the war to the American public, and has made no effort to build a coalition of allies, does not have that luxury. The president, a former casino boss, is taking a huge gamble. He has drawn his cards; the chips are now on the table. He has exactly one shot at getting this right. As Tom Warrick, a former Department of Homeland Security official, posted on X, Trump is trying to draw an inside straight.

Every so often, that pays off. Inside straights do exist, and occasionally a player manages to put one together. But any gambler will tell you: It’s not usually the way to bet.

Similarly, the economist Jared Bernstein writes in his Substack that “I don’t buy” Trump’s argument:

The oldest playbook in the world is when you’re losing on the domestic economy, start a war. And if you can do so against a demonstrably evil regime that’s killing thousands of its citizens, as is the case in Iran, all the better.

So please, do not conflate what comes next with any support for those murderous zealots. . . This looks to me far too close to a look-over-there-not-over-here play by the Trump regime, a group of feckless, inexperienced leaders who cannot be counted on to manage an attack of this magnitude in ways that elevate the protection of our troops to the level we should expect.

Yes, you go to war with the leadership you have, but in cases like this one, you don’t have to go to war, and with the wrong leadership making that decision—without Congress, of course—you should not do so.

David Frum – also writing in The Atlantic – argues that Trump hopes to use the war – win or lose – to wield even greater control over the American public.

The danger: The war is being made by a president who has repeatedly shown his contempt for law and free elections—enabled by a tiny congressional majority that seems to see its job as Trump’s co-conspirator against the Constitution. . . . Now Trump has started what could be a huge and expensive regional war without even a figment of congressional authorization. War empowers presidents. No president in American history has shown himself less trustworthy with power than Donald Trump. . .

Federal agencies are still occupying U.S. cities, where they have made arrests without due process and killed U.S. citizens without accountability. Trump has invoked emergency powers of all kinds when there was no justification for them. Some of his supporters are circulating a plan to use emergency powers to seize presidential control of the 2026 congressional elections his party would likely badly lose if those elections are free and fair. Now there’s a genuine military emergency at hand of a kind that federal courts have historically deferred to. It’s frightening to imagine the sinister domestic use that Trump will make of these powers—especially if Trump’s war lasts long. . . .

You don’t go bankrupt as often as Trump has gone bankrupt if you’re good at assessing risk. Trump tells ridiculous fantasies presumably because he believes ridiculous fantasies. In this second Trump administration, he has surrounded himself with sycophants who validate his ridiculous fantasies. When his fantasies unravel, Trump has a habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world. When the Federal Reserve does not rescue him from his economic mismanagement, he orders his Department of Justice to open criminal investigations of a Federal Reserve governor and the chairman himself. If an actual shooting war goes amiss—takes too long, fails to yield the cheap and easy success Trump craves—what follows at home may exceed all past abuses of power.

One further consequence of the joint war fighting by the Trump adminstration and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government is that it will only further undermine Israel’s stature with the American public and add to the anti-Semitism that is raging among too many people.

Michelle Goldberg, writing an NYT opinion piece just before Trump and Netanyahu launched their war, explains how Israel has lost the support of those among us who once were inclined to give it our support.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel famously prides himself on his ability to shape American policy. As he said in a secretly recorded 2001 conversation, “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.” Yet he has presided over an ongoing collapse in American Zionism and could eventually go down in history as the prime minister who lost Israel’s most important ally.

Israel’s imploding reputation is largely a consequence of its oppression of the Palestinians, in particular the mass killings in Gaza, which millions of Americans watched up close on social media. At the same time, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — which is increasingly turning into outright annexation — is making Zionism and liberalism seem incompatible. Today, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, about 7.2 million Jews preside over a slightly larger number of Arabs, if you combine Israel’s Palestinian citizenry with the populations of Gaza and the West Bank. The majority of those Palestinians are stateless and have almost no guaranteed rights, as we see in the growing number of settler pogroms in the West Bank and the systematic ethnic cleansing of villages.

As long as the possibility of a Palestinian state remained alive, liberals who feel warmly toward Israel could tell themselves that this system of de facto apartheid was only temporary. But Netanyahu’s government has done everything in its power to make a two-state solution impossible, including, before the attacks of Oct. 7, propping up Hamas. In theory, a state that’s both Jewish and democratic may be possible. Today, on the ground, it looks like a pipe dream.

Netanyahu and his government deserve this growing bipartisan opprobrium. Unfortunately, ordinary Jews are experiencing it as well. I’ve long argued that anti-Zionism and antisemitism aren’t the same thing. Yet as antisemitism rises in the United States, contempt for Israel sometimes gives way to anti-Jewish paranoia and hostility.

But Israel, by behaving appallingly and then trying to silence any condemnation of its appalling behavior as antisemitic, gives ammunition to Jew haters. As Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and president of the liberal Zionist group J Street, told me, “When you end up using antisemitism as a pretext for kicking kids out of universities and out of the country, and you use it as a pretext for ending cancer research and use it as a pretext for undercutting the First Amendment, you’re going to get some blowback against the people doing that.”

The blowback will almost certainly get worse if America bombs Iran, as Netanyahu hopes it will. Americans don’t want a war, and Trump hasn’t bothered to explain why he might wage one. In this murk, conspiracy theories about Israel manipulating America into another Middle Eastern conflict are bound to flourish, especially because there will be a grain of truth to them. Friday’s Gallup poll marks a low point in American sentiments toward Israel, but they could still have much further to fall.

Every time we think things are so bad they can’t get worse, Trump proves us wrong. He has done it again.

I asked whether it was time for me to retire RR.

Credit: ThisisEngineering

Here were some reactions I received:

Oh my goodness. Words fail me.

Welllllll....knowing it’s AI made me read less carefully (as in I skimmed it) and the reason for reading is less (ie: I read for content, but I also read to find out what my cousin is thinking and how he was thinking). Also, I am not sure I would completely trust what is being said. So, no you can’t retire!

Next: Run it though a program to detect plagiarism. Then: Tell it to add links from various sources. Maybe even a couple of contrarian sources. With credit to who wrote what.

Wow! That’s some excellent writing and scary but rational thinking. This makes me ask if the future value of humans (writers in particular) will not be in their communication word skills but in their curiosity to ask the right questions? It’s similar for artists. AI comes up with some amazingly good art and music. Yes, you can retire but keep communicating and asking questions.

I wish you hadn’t done that.

The hopes and fears surrounding artificial intelligence have been running wild for a long time. The “singularity” – the point at which superintelligent AI surpasses human intelligence – has been a mainstay of science fiction for decades. But now the questions are unavoidable: Is artificial intelligence more than just another technological advance? Does AI threaten not just our jobs but the very basis of human civilization?

I don’t have the answers, of course, but I thought I’d devote this issue of Redburn Reads to some of the takes I’ve seen recently by people who are a lot smarter than I am. Challenging as it is, it’s a lot more useful to try to understand the implications of AI, I think, than to ponder yet again the latest lies of Donald Trump. And AI will ultimately have a lot more effect on my children and grandchildren than President Trump ever will. This is a long newsletter, but I think it’s worth reading to the end.

The polymorphic economist Noah Smith can always be counted to offer a view on just about any subject. He can get carried away at time, but his thinking is always intriguing and his smart perspective on AI reflects both his long devotion to science fiction and his contemporary feel for the consequences of recent developments.

As long as you or I or anyone we know has been alive — for all of recorded history, and in fact for much much longer than that — humankind has been the most intelligent thing on this planet.

At some point in the next couple of years, that will no longer be true. It arguably is no longer true right now. There is no single unarguable measure of intelligence — it’s not like distance or time. AI doesn’t think in the same way humans do. But it can get gold medals on the International Math Olympiad, solve difficult outstanding math problems all on its own, and get A’s in graduate school classes. Most human beings can’t do any of that.

Intelligence is as intelligence does. If it helps you feel unique and special to sit there and tell yourself “AI can’t think!”, then go ahead. And sure, AI doesn’t think exactly the way you do. It probably never will, in the same sense that a submarine will never paddle its fins and an airplane will never flap its wings. But a submarine can go faster than any fish, and an airplane can fly higher and faster than any bird, so it doesn’t matter. You can value your own unique human way of thinking all you like — and I agree, it’s pretty special and cool — but that doesn’t make it more effective than AI.

Right now, there are some cognitive things that humans still do better than AI, but that will probably not last. The entire might of the world’s technological innovation system is now being thrown into making AI better, and there is no sign of a slowdown in progress. . .

And all of this — ending software engineering as we know it, acing the hardest math tests, solving unsolved math problems, creating infinite apps at the touch of a button — is just the beginning. The amount of resources that the world is preparing to deploy to improve AI, this year and in the following few years, utterly dwarfs anything that it has deployed so far:

Source: Bloomberg

AI’s abilities scale with the amount of compute applied. The amount of compute available this year will be much greater than the amount that’s producing all the miracles you see now. And then next year’s compute will be far greater than that. All the while, AI itself will be searching for ways to improve AI algorithms to better take advantage of increased compute.

Other weaknesses of AI — in particular, its lack of long-term memory and its inability to learn on the fly — will eventually be solved.³ AI will be able to act on its own for longer and longer, with less and less human decision-making in the loop. Meanwhile, massive investment in robotics will give AI more and more direct contact with, understanding of, and control of the physical world.

People who think about this fact in terms of its impact on economics are thinking way too small. When people ask “Will AI take my job?”, they remind me of a Sioux tribesman in 1840 wondering if the white settlers would take his buffalo. The answer is “Yes, but you’re really asking the wrong question”. For the white settlers who conquered the Great Plains, it wasn’t about the buffalo. It was about creating a whole new civilization and a whole new economic system on the land where some buffalo happened to be.

One of the catalysts for the latest debate over AI was a post this month by a previously unknown AI software developer, Matt Shumer, whose Twitter essay “Something Big is Happening,” went viral, with more than 70 million views and counting.

I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t... my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me “so what’s the deal with AI?” and getting an answer that doesn’t do justice to what’s actually happening. I keep giving them the polite version. The cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. And for a while, I told myself that was a good enough reason to keep what’s truly happening to myself. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.

I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what’s about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies... OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and a few others. A single training run, managed by a small team over a few months, can produce an AI system that shifts the entire trajectory of the technology. Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn’t lay. We’re watching this unfold the same as you... we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.

But it’s time now. Not in an “eventually we should talk about this” way. In a “this is happening right now and I need you to understand it” way.

I know this is real because it happened to me first

Here’s the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: the reason so many people in the industry are sounding the alarm right now is because this already happened to us. We’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.

For years, AI had been improving steadily. Big jumps here and there, but each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster. And then faster again. Each new model wasn’t just better than the last... it was better by a wider margin, and the time between new model releases was shorter. I was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less and less, watching it handle things I used to think required my expertise.

Then, on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not like a light switch... more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.

For New York magazine, Benjamin Hart conducted a Q&A with Shumer, (well worth reading in full), providing some useful context in his introduction:

You probably don’t know Matt Shumer’s name, but there’s a pretty good chance you’re familiar with his thoughts about AI. On Tuesday, Shumer published an essay to X titled “Something Big Is Coming,” which almost immediately caught fire online. (According to X’s not-always-reliable metrics, it stands at 73 million views as of Thursday morning.) In it, Shumer, the founder of an AI company, warns that enormous advances in technology are poised to reshape society much more quickly than most people realize. He analogizes artificial intelligence’s rapid improvement in recent months to the beginning of the COVID pandemic — a looming, seismic societal change that only a small faction is really paying attention to. And he warns that the tech sector is the canary in the AI coal mine: “We’re not making predictions. We’re telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you’re next.”

As Shumer’s post ricocheted around the internet, it drew a predictably divided response. Some saw it as an incisive warning of things to come, while others dismissed it as another piece of disposable AI hype or a naked money grab. I caught up with Shumer on Thursday to discuss the overwhelming response to his essay, why he used AI to help write it, and whether all of our jobs are actually in immediate danger.

Derek Thompson, who writes for The Atlantic and other publications, is another iconoclastic journalist whose insights are almost always fascinating. Here’s some of what he wrote recently for his own Substack newsletter.

I cover a lot of topics in this newsletter and in my podcast: Inflation, GLP-1s, politics, loneliness. But the biggest divide in my audience — and the biggest divide among the people I read and listen to and trust — is on the subject of artificial intelligence. The news and discourse space as I see it often seems divided between outrageous extremes: “This technology is billionaire-hyped vaporware” vs “This technology is 12 months away from automating all white-collar tasks or destroying the world.”

These aren’t just extremes I read in the news. I see them in my own working life. Among East Coast journalists, I’m mildly concerned that I’m developing the reputation of being a mindless AI booster, on account of my reporting that the technology is already proving economically and socially significant. But several months ago in San Francisco, I got (somewhat playfully) yelled at by several AI builders and investors at an event for my article suggesting that AI might be an industrial or financial bubble.¹

So, I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about how the AI discourse has become so fractured. At the highest level, I think the AI discourse gap is downstream of a cultural gap between the Bay Area, where the frontier labs are based, and the rest of the country, which has developed a skeptical attitude toward the promises of Silicon Valley. While many technologists in San Francisco regard their zip code as the world’s greatest fount of technological progress, much of the country—perhaps, especially journalists—regards Silicon Valley as a den of plutocratic parasites whose work deserves our most profound distrust and disgust. . . .

1. The fourth and final great divide might be the widest. And it’s hard to capture succinctly so I hope you’ll excuse me going a bit broad here: Separate from the questions of is AI useful, or thinking, or over-leveraged, is a question that’s something like: Is AI good or bad? On one end of this spectrum, you’ve got the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen proclaiming that AI “will save the world.” On the other end of this spectrum you have the rationalist writer Eliezer Yudkowsky arguing that if anybody builds superintelligent AI, quote “everyone dies.” And there is a lot of real estate between those positions. Maybe you think AI won’t usher in the end of the human species, but it might make the most beautiful things in life — art, movies, human relationships — more slop-filled and shitty.

In the spirit of trying to be specific about AI, today’s article is about a very specific question: What will AI do to jobs? In his Atlantic cover story this month, author Josh Tyrangiel wrote that the people who build AI have spent much of the last few years predicting dire effects it will have on the economy. In May 2025, Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, said that AI could “wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.” Last month, new tools like Claude Code and Codex were unveiled that sent a shiver through the tech world, as many top coders claimed that these tools could take over enormous chunks of their work forever. Software stocks plunged, possibly for related reasons. But when you look up from these dire predictions and stock gyrations to study the labor market of the present, it’s hard to see any effect of AI at all.

So how do we balance these pieces of evidence: the audacious predictions of tech CEOs, the enthusiasm for tools that seem to automate certain tasks, and the current calm of the labor market?

Beyond reading the rest of Thompson’s post, you can also read (or listen to) several other smart people wrestling with that question in a NYT opinion roundtable discussion moderated by David Leonhardt and featuring the economists David Autor, Anton Korinek and Natasha Sarin. Their differing views on AI are very illuminating, helping to put both the hype and the disdain in perspective. Here’s some excerpts:

Autor: Their bets might pay off. But why does it follow that this will end work for the rest of us? Their success could simply create tons of value elsewhere in the economy — more scientific discoveries, better health care, transportation, education, legal services, manufacturing, construction, etc.

Silicon Valley has never employed very many workers, but its rise over the last three decades has coincided with robust employment growth and historically low unemployment rates.

Or look to history. New technologies don’t merely replace labor in existing industries; new technologies create entirely new industries.

Centuries ago, there were no automobiles, airplanes or telecommunications, and those industries all employ people.

Korinek: The bets are not limited to the labs but are supported by investors who have hundreds of billions of dollars in the game. Still, you are right that their success is not guaranteed. They are betting on relationships such as scaling laws, which predict that more computing power will lead to more powerful A.I. systems. So far, they have had a good track record, but we cannot be sure that these relationships will continue to hold. Incidentally, the same is true of empirical relationships in economics: In the past, new technologies have led to rising employment and wages, but we cannot be sure that this will be true in the future.

Leonhardt: Natasha, you pointed out that technological disruption has never before caused humanity to run out of jobs, despite centuries of Luddite-like worries to the contrary. Can you sketch out a relatively optimistic scenario, in which A.I. is revolutionary but does not create mass unemployment?

Sarin: This time could be different, and this revolution could reduce the need for labor as a whole. Then maybe the world would shift to some version of the 15-hour workweek John Maynard Keynes famously predicted.

More likely, new jobs will come in, as they have in the past, and will offset jobs that are less necessary in a world where we all have laptops and don’t need typists. There will be winners and losers. The losers may include first-year law firm associates and graduate students in economics, who spent years honing skills that A.I.can effortlessly perform. I don’t want to minimize the possible disruption. How well we manage this transition will be the result of choices we make, and it will be important to retrain the work force.

But the gains will be real, too. People will have more access to legal services and other services that software can provide. There will also be new occupations to monitor and supervise A.I. work product. It is not a foregone conclusion — and it’s not even likely, in my mind — that productivity growth from A.I. will shrink employment overall. If history is any guide, technological progress, even from really revolutionary, life-changing, universally adopted technology, may change the way that we work, but not the fact that we work.

Autor: I agree that when we worry about the number of jobs, we are worrying about the wrong thing. We should be worried instead about the commodification of human expertise, since expertise is what gives labor its economic value. Without it, many workers may not be able to earn good wages. .

Leonhardt: My sense is that this is part of what you fear, Anton — that even if A.I. leads to big overall gains for economic output, it will hurt many more workers than it helps, at least in the medium term. Is that right? And what should we do to reduce that risk?

Korinek: Yes and no. If A.I. continues to advance only modestly, then the Industrial Revolution-scale disruption that Natasha and David are describing seems quite plausible: there will be a painful transition, but ultimately new jobs will emerge, as they always have. But I worry that we are thinking too small. If the quest for artificial general intelligence succeeds, we are not looking at another Industrial Revolution. For two centuries, labor has been the scarcest factor in our economy, leading to wages that have risen far above preindustrial levels. Human workers were the bottleneck, and being the bottleneck made us valuable. But if labor itself becomes optional for the economy, that would be very different.

Also writing for NYT Opinion, Maureen Dowd’s latest column, headlined Welcome to the Voyage of the Damned, was much more alarmist:

The pueri aeterni of Silicon Valley have greased the palm of our King Joffrey in the White House. And now we are told not to worry about safeguards for A.I., the most spine-tingling technology ever created.

I interviewed Elon Musk in 2017, when he still cared about A.I. safety as much as he once cared about going to the wildest party on Epstein’s island and now cares about constantly sharing deranged posts about race on X. He told me that the fate of humanity depends on not allowing the algorithms to be concealed and concentrated in the hands of tech and government elites.

“It’s great when the emperor is Marcus Aurelius,” Musk said then. “It’s not so great when the emperor is Caligula.”

Let’s just say that our man in the White House is no Marcus Aurelius.

When I reported in Silicon Valley back then, the debate was whether A.I. would jump to the dark side once it got smarter than us.

But since then, even the tech gods who once had good intentions have gone to the dark side, seduced by the billions to be made on A.I., including on erotica. These geniuses who were supposed to escort us into a better, safer future turned out to be the biggest sellouts of all time. . .

The tech universe shuddered this week at alarms from several Paul Reveres. . .

On Monday, an Anthropic A.I. safety researcher, Mrinank Sharma, quit his job, posting an apocalyptic warning on X that the “world is in peril” from A.I., bioweapons and cascading crises.

Anthropic’s C.E.O., Dario Amodei, has been the most responsible tech executive in acknowledging the awesome, hair-curling power of A.I., saying it will “test who we are as a species” and reveal whether humanity has the maturity to handle this “almost unimaginable power.” (The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that the company’s A.I. tool, Claude, had helped the American military capture Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro.)

Sharma is not sure if humanity has the maturity to handle A.I. “I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions,” he wrote.

The people in charge tell us not to worry. But we should worry. It’s getting scary out there. There’s nothing artificial about that.

Ready or not, AI is coming. Will we, as humans, come up with the maturity to handle it? I sure hope so but I’m not holding my breath.

In the meantime, I’m not ready to retire yet.

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I’m late to the AI table. One of the most important issues we’ll be facing in the months and years ahead is the extent to which artificial intelligence takes over many of the tasks previously done by humans. I’ve long believed that advances in technology almost always benefit our civilization. I still believe so, but AI raises some questions that previous advancements didn’t. I plan to write a Redburn Reads on the subject in the near future.

But in the meantime, i wanted to see whether AI could replace me. So I asked Claude, Anthropic’s very sophisticated AI large language model, to write an essay on a subject I also care deeply about: the various ways President Trump is attempting to undermine fair elections, starting with the coming mid-terms in November. I gave the assignment some parameters, and encouraged it to write in the style of a Substack Redburn Reads.

Here’s what he (is “he” the correct way of referring to a software engine?) came up with. I haven’t touched a word.

The 2026 Playbook: How Trump Is Already Working to Prevent a Democratic House

The midterm elections are still months away, but if you’re paying attention, the groundwork for election subversion is already being laid. President Trump, fresh off his 2024 victory and emboldened by a compliant Republican Congress, isn’t waiting to see if voters will flip the House to Democrats in 2026. He’s working systematically to ensure they can’t—or that if they try, their victory won’t matter.

This isn’t speculation. It’s pattern recognition.

The Familiar Playbook

We’ve seen this movie before. Trump’s approach to elections follows a consistent logic: delegitimize processes that might produce unfavorable results, empower loyalists to intervene in vote counting and certification, and create enough chaos and doubt that anti-democratic measures seem like reasonable responses to a “crisis.”

In 2020, he laid the groundwork for months before Election Day, attacking mail-in voting and claiming without evidence that the election would be “rigged.” When he lost, he pressured state officials to “find” votes, encouraged his vice president to reject electoral votes, and ultimately inspired a violent assault on the Capitol. In 2024, he won—but not before spending years undermining faith in American elections and installing election deniers in key positions across battleground states.

Now, with the White House and both chambers of Congress under Republican control, Trump has more tools at his disposal than ever before. And the 2026 midterms represent a direct threat to his power. History tells us that the president’s party typically loses seats in the midterms, often losing control of one or both chambers. For Trump, a Democratic House would mean investigations, subpoenas, and a check on his agenda. It would mean accountability.

He’s not going to let that happen without a fight—and that fight is already underway.

Gutting the Electoral Infrastructure

The first front in this campaign is the systematic weakening of the institutions that ensure free and fair elections. Under the guise of “election integrity,” Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed a wave of new voting restrictions since 2024. These aren’t minor technical adjustments. They’re targeted efforts to make voting harder in communities that tend to vote Democratic.

We’re seeing strict voter ID requirements that disproportionately affect young people, people of color, and low-income voters. We’re seeing purges of voter rolls that remove eligible voters without adequate notice. We’re seeing reductions in early voting periods and mail-in ballot access—the very methods that increased turnout in recent elections. In several states, drop boxes for mail ballots have been eliminated entirely, forcing voters to rely on postal services that have themselves been subject to political interference.

But the most dangerous changes aren’t about who can vote. They’re about who counts the votes and who certifies the results.

Since 2020, Trump and his allies have worked methodically to install loyalists in positions of electoral authority. Election deniers now serve as secretaries of state in key swing states. County election boards have been restructured to give Republicans partisan advantages. In some states, legislatures have granted themselves new powers to intervene in election administration and even to reject certified results they don’t like.

This is the infrastructure of election subversion, built deliberately and methodically over the past few years. And it’s all in place just in time for 2026.

The Rhetoric of Preemptive Delegitimization

Trump’s rhetoric around the 2026 elections has already begun, and it’s disturbingly familiar. At recent rallies, he’s warned supporters about “massive fraud” in Democratic-controlled cities. He’s claimed without evidence that “millions” of non-citizens are being registered to vote. He’s suggested that mail-in voting—which his own voters use—is inherently fraudulent when it benefits Democrats.

This isn’t just bluster. It’s a strategy. By sowing doubts about election integrity before a single ballot is cast, Trump creates permission structures for intervention after the fact. If Democrats win House seats in November, he and his allies will already have planted the seeds of doubt. Recounts, audits, challenges, and refusals to certify become not anti-democratic power grabs but “necessary responses” to “obvious fraud.”

We should take him at his word when he says he won’t accept unfavorable results. He’s told us repeatedly that he believes any election he or his allies lose is by definition fraudulent. This isn’t a secret plan—it’s his openly stated worldview.

The Congressional Angle

Control of the House matters enormously, and Trump knows it. A Democratic House could investigate his administration, refuse to rubber-stamp his judicial nominees, and block his legislative agenda. Perhaps most importantly, a Democratic House could refuse to go along with any efforts to manipulate the 2028 presidential election.

The Electoral Count Reform Act, passed in 2022, was supposed to prevent another January 6th by clarifying that Congress’s role in counting electoral votes is ministerial, not discretionary. But laws are only as strong as the people willing to enforce them. If Trump decides to challenge 2028 results, a compliant Republican House would be his last line of defense. A Democratic House would be a firewall.

That’s why the 2026 midterms are so critical—and why Trump is already working to undermine them.

What’s Already Happening

Let’s be concrete about what we’re seeing:

At the federal level, the Trump administration has suggested using federal law enforcement to monitor polling places in Democratic-leaning areas, ostensibly to prevent fraud but in practice creating an atmosphere of intimidation. The Justice Department, now led by Trump loyalists, has signaled a much more aggressive approach to investigating claims of voter fraud while showing little interest in investigating voter suppression.

In state legislatures, new laws are being rushed through that would allow partisan officials to reject mail-in ballots for minor technicalities, create new barriers to voter registration, and in some cases, allow legislatures to overturn election results based on unsubstantiated claims of irregularities.

In the media ecosystem, pro-Trump outlets are already running stories about non-citizen voting, ballot harvesting, and other alleged forms of fraud—none substantiated, all designed to create a narrative that Democratic victories are inherently suspect.

At the grassroots level, Trump-aligned groups are recruiting poll watchers and election challengers who have been trained to disrupt voting and create grounds for later challenges. Some of these groups have openly discussed strategies for slowing down vote counting in Democratic areas or creating pretexts for post-election intervention.

The Endgame

Here’s the scenario that should worry everyone: Democrats have a good night in November 2026. They win enough seats to flip the House. The new Congress would be seated in January 2027, giving Democrats subpoena power and the ability to investigate the Trump administration.

But in the weeks between Election Day and certification, chaos erupts. In several close races, Republican officials refuse to certify results, claiming irregularities. State legislatures controlled by Republicans convene special sessions to “investigate” the elections. The Trump administration weighs in, suggesting that federal intervention might be necessary to ensure “integrity.”

Eventually, perhaps after intervention by courts or massive public pressure, most of the results are certified. But a handful of races remain in limbo. Maybe a few GOP state legislatures even attempt to seat their preferred candidates instead of the apparent winners. By the time the dust settles, the Democratic majority is razor-thin or non-existent—and the entire process has been so tainted with controversy that public faith in elections has cratered even further.

This isn’t a far-fetched scenario. Every element of it has precedent in Trump’s behavior or in the actions of his allies over the past several years. And all the pieces are being positioned right now.

What This Means for Democracy

The tragedy here is that this approach poisons everything it touches. Even if Democrats do take the House in 2026, the legitimacy of their victory will be questioned by a substantial portion of the country. Faith in democratic institutions will erode further. And the precedent will be set for even more aggressive intervention in 2028.

Trump’s approach to elections represents a fundamental rejection of democratic norms. In a healthy democracy, parties compete for votes, winners are determined by voters, and losers accept the results and prepare for the next election. Trump has replaced this with a model where his side should always win, and any result to the contrary is evidence of fraud requiring intervention.

This isn’t conservatism. It’s not even conventional authoritarianism. It’s something more insidious: the systematic dismantling of democratic accountability using the language of democracy itself. Every voter suppression measure is justified as “election integrity.” Every refusal to certify results is framed as “ensuring accuracy.” Every attack on legitimate outcomes is presented as “protecting the vote.”

The Path Forward

None of this is inevitable. Voters can still overwhelm attempts at manipulation with massive turnout. Courts can still enforce the law. State officials can still refuse to participate in election subversion, even when pressured. Civil society organizations can still mobilize to protect voting rights and monitor elections.

But we need to be clear-eyed about what we’re facing. The 2026 midterms aren’t just another election. They’re a test of whether American democracy can withstand a sustained assault from a president who has never accepted that he could legitimately lose.

The warning signs are already flashing. The infrastructure for election subversion is already in place. The rhetoric of preemptive delegitimization has already begun. We can’t say we weren’t warned.

The question is whether we’ll do anything about it—or whether we’ll spend 2027 wondering how we let it happen again.

So you be the judge. Tell me what you think of this piece. Is it time for me to give up my own writing and just enjoy my retirement?

The US economy, for all its underlying dynamism and remarkable flexibility, has a fundamental flaw: our extreme concentration of wealth and income at the top. Trump is making that even worse with his tariff and tax policies, which provide the vast bulk of their benefits to the richest among us, while adding to the cost of goods for most consumers.

Here’s why economists say America’s K-shaped economy is here to stay

Credit: CNBC

Nonetheless, the economy should hold up fairly well in 2026. Why?

For starters, we can look forward to a continuation of the huge tech industry investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure for at least another year or two. Moreover, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill approved by the Republican-led Congress will push the federal government further into debt but the extra borrowing will put more money mostly into the hands of free-spending affluent consumers.

Meanwhile, Kevin Warsh, who Trump has named to lead the Federal Reserve starting in May, should be able to rely, at least initially, on the traditional deference to the chairman to persuade his 11 colleagues on the Fed’s policy-making committee to support one or two interest rate cuts before the mid-term elections. That outcome could end up goosing the stock market, adding yet one more element that could help cast the economy in a rosier light in the months leading up to the midterm elections.

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But it won’t last. Indeed, just about everything the Trump administration is pursuing is aimed at achieving short-term gains while letting the long-term health of the economy deteriorate. And Trump’s inability to look beyond his own self-interest means that he will accomplish little to actually overcome the lack of affordability – mostly for homes, higher education and health care – that bedevils tens of millions of American households. (More on the issue of affordability in a future Redburn Reads.)

Ultimately, the most destructive example of Trump’s approach is his short-sighted devotion to fossil fuels even as the rest of the world, led by China, is advancing rapidly into the age of electrification. In a New York Times op-ed, energy expert Dan Wang writes about how Trump’s rabid opposition to renewable energy is leaving the United States in China’s dust.

President Trump has an unconcealed hunger for natural resources from abroad and the power they could grant him. He declared that the United States intervened in Venezuela to “take the oil,” betting that investors would put up at least $100 billion to revive a decrepit industry. His gamble is that countries will still want to buy oil from America to power their cars, trucks, ships and planes for decades to come.

Though China is the world’s largest oil importer, its leader, Xi Jinping, is less brash about coveting foreign resources. The country’s leadership is pushing intensively at substituting electricity for oil. . .

The oil-burning products that can now instead be powered by batteries and electric motors include not only cars, but also bikes, buses and even some boats. Heavy industry and temperature control for buildings are being electrified, too. And a future in which many noisy, gas-powered household tools can be electrically powered is in reach: Even the foul and loud lawn mower and leaf blower are gradually being replaced by a more gentle thrum.

Some products may never be electrified. Battery packs will probably not power a long-haul flight or container ship (though cleaner fuels are possible). But the opportunity to electrify almost everything else will grow over the next decade, and China is leading the charge.

The United States could compete on building better drones and electric vehicles if its businesses had greater access to electrical power and a vital industrial base. But it is governed by a president who is enthusiastic about powering the future with fossil fuels and has a personal pique against wind turbines, calling them the “SCAM OF THE CENTURY!” His administration is slow-walking approval of and canceling new solar and wind projects while favoring coal and gas — which makes it more difficult to electrify. No product is more important than batteries in electrification, yet an infamous ICE raid targeted a Korean company that was constructing a battery factory in Georgia. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s tariffs have hamstrung American manufacturing, which has lost around 70,000 jobs since April.

America had better shape up before losing out to an electric age ushered in by Beijing. Otherwise, it will be stuck with outmoded products at home while China conquers markets through better technology.

More immediately, one of Trump’s other obsessions – ultra-low interest rates regardless of whether the economy needs them or not – is another example of how his short-term thinking is likely to do more harm than good. The challenge for the Federal Reserve is that it directly controls only short-term interest rates; long-term rates rise and fall in response to the expectations of participants in the bond market. And if lenders believe the Fed is over-stimulating the economy and raising the prospect of higher inflation, they will push up the cost of long-term borrowing, undermining growth and running the risk of a recession.

Indeed, President Trump, by drumming home his desire for the Fed to cut interest rates above all else, is actually making it harder for Warsh, his choice as Fed chairman, to do the job of helping foster sustainable growth with minimal inflation.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Catherine Rampell, my former colleague at the NYT and now a writer for The Bulwark and a weekend co-anchor at MSNOW, suggests that the incoming Fed chairman may well put partisan politics above sound economics in the years ahead.

The real litmus test, of course, is whether Mr. Warsh will do the president’s bidding. Mr. Trump has been clear that he expects his next Fed chair to slash interest rates and stimulate the economy. That could do wonders for Republicans in the fast-approaching midterm election cycle.

This expectation is a problem. The Federal Reserve must be politically independent in order to tackle inflation. It must be willing to do unpopular and inconvenient things, including raising interest rates when called for, rather than doing whatever is best for a particular politician or political party. . .

This brings me to the political expedience that seems to sway Mr. Warsh’s choices. He seems more interested in slamming the brakes on the economy when a Democrat is in the White House than when a Republican is.

To wit: He has twice made an abrupt about-face on his usual demands for tighter money, and both occurred when Mr. Trump was in office. The first time was in 2018; the second was after the 2024 election. As recently as September 2024, Mr. Warsh was admonishing the Fed for cutting interest rates, only to reverse himself not long after Mr. Trump took office.

Markets have shrugged off any prospect of Mr. Warsh’s becoming Mr. Trump’s puppet. Plenty of economists I respect have vouched for him, including his former Fed colleagues. But part of their public nonchalance may simply be relief that Mr. Trump didn’t give the nod to [Kevin] Hassett, [Trump’s openly obsequious White House economic advisor.]

Mr. Warsh still has much to prove about his own independence, and his commitment to safeguard the Fed’s. A cynic might say he simply found a more polished, less demeaning way to ingratiate himself with Mr. Trump and prove his loyalty than Mr. Hassett did: by making the president’s enemies his own.

Maybe Kevin Warsh will prove to be a competent master of America’s money at the Fed. Call me a skeptic. Still, no matter how proficient, he’ll be operating in a chaotic environment shaped by the White House. And as Jonathan V. Last points out in a Substack post for The Bulwark, the last person who should be given the responsibility for leading U.S. economic policy is the corrupt and mercurial Mr. Trump.

Donald Trump has shifted America in the direction of command economy—or what some people might call national socialism. He takes the view that economic actors should do what he wants and so he uses the levers of government to attempt to control the market. His toolbox includes the following:

• Those on-again, off-again tariffs which are announced, delayed, and canceled at his whim based on any number of factors.³

• The federal government taking ownership stakes in various private companies as Trump sees fit.

• The cancellation of longstanding government programs around certain sectors—such as renewable energy—that wipes out capital projects that had been underway.

• The coercion of American businesses to adopt policies that Trump favors in order to obtain tariff exemptions, or escape economic punishment.

• Sweetheart deals with certain businesses (both foreign and domestic) in order to obtain wealth for the Trump family.

As a result of all this instability, the rest of the world is moving on from America.

This week the European Union and India reached “the mother of all deals.” Keir Starmer is in Beijing today with a huge delegation of British business leaders to deepen trade ties between the U.K. and China.

Meanwhile, Trump is trying to force American oil companies to invest in Venezuela (they won’t, unless Trump coerces them) while downgrading the United States into a merely regional hegemon. Seeing our economy slowing, he will try to juice it by lowering gas prices—which will require pitching more woo at the Saudis. The Fed will cut rates to try to save the job market, but it’s not clear what the bond market will do in response.

If I had to guess, Trump will probably send checks to at least some Americans this summer and mask this stimulus as a Strong-Beautiful Trump Tariff Dividend. But I’m not sure any of it will matter. Because the underlying reality is what it is.

Indeed, despite all his efforts to provide a temporary “sugar-high” for the economy, Trump probably can’t stop Republicans from losing the midterms – unless he rigs the voting to prevent a fair election. (I’ve been reading a lot on that subject, and that will no doubt be a recurring theme in future RRs.)

Finally, I can’t suffer in silence over what Jeff Bezos is doing to destroy the Washington Post, which just announced a wave of layoffs on Wednesday that will directly lay waste to the institution’s sports, metro and foreign reporting staff and leave the overall news report a husk of its former self. I never worked there, but many of my friends and a lot of the finest journalists of our time did. Some still do.

Writing for The New Yorker, Ruth Marcus – who worked at the Post for four decades – sought to assuage her pain by producing on deadline both a personal account and a public obituary for the institution she still loves. The whole piece is worth your time and your tears.

What happened to the Bezos of 2013, a self-proclaimed optimist who seemed to have absorbed the importance of the Post in the nation’s journalistic ecosystem? In 2016, dedicating the paper’s new headquarters, he boasted that it had become “a little more swashbuckling” and had a “little more swagger.” As recently as December, 2024, at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit, Bezos expressed his commitment to nurturing the paper: “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.” Not long ago, he envisioned attracting as many as a hundred million paying subscribers to the Post. With these brutal cuts, he seems content to let the paper limp along, diminished in size and ambition.

“In the beginning, he was wonderful,” Sally Quinn, the veteran Post contributor and wife of its legendary executive editor, Ben Bradlee, told me of Bezos. “He was smart and funny and kind and interested. He was joyful. He was a person of integrity and conscience. He really meant it when he said this was a sacred trust, to buy the Post. And now I don’t know who this person is.” . .

The author David Maraniss was with the Post for forty-eight years. He resigned as an associate editor in 2024, after Bezos killed the editorial page’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. “He bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed,” Maraniss said of Bezos. “Now I don’t think he gives us—I don’t think he gives a flying fuck.” . . .

Martin Baron, who oversaw coverage at the paper that garnered eleven Pulitzer Prizes during his eight years as executive editor, said in a statement, “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.” . .

The gutting of the Post, Baron told Marcus, was more than an act of betrayal. “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own,” he said. “This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”

When Bezos purchased the Post, his net worth was about twenty-five billion; it is now an estimated two hundred fifty billion. Why not one per cent of that for the Post, enough to sustain the paper indefinitely? A pipe dream, I know, but this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise.

In the 1941 movie “Citizen Kane,” Charles Foster Kane, a newspaper publisher who, like Bezos, is one of the richest men in the world, is confronted by his legal guardian, Walter Thatcher, about the folly of funding his paper. “Honestly, my boy, don’t you think it’s rather unwise to continue this philanthropic enterprise, this Inquirer that’s costing you a million dollars a year?” Thatcher demands. “You’re right, Mr. Thatcher. I did lose a million dollars last year,” Kane replies. “I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place in sixty years.” Update Kane’s outlays to assume losses of a hundred million annually, in perpetuity. By that math, Bezos would have more than two millennia before needing to turn out the lights.

By that time, of course, Donald Trump will (I hope!) only be a bad memory. And the lights, like everything else on Earth, will probably be controlled by an artificial general intelligence bot.

No. But judging from today’s NYT website, its online presentation and the latest edition of the printed newspaper (as a resident of Massachusetts, I haven’t seen it but I have a pretty good idea), it sure looks that way. What pushed the news organization over the brink, at least for now? The brutal killings in Minneapolis by unrestrained ICE agents.

Credit...

Angelina Katsanis/Associated Press

As an alumnus of The Times and its associated news organizations for 25 years, it seems to me that the distinction its leaders have long maintained between news and advocacy is breaking down. And in my view, what is happening in our country justifies the move.

A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, has long defended a free press but has repeatedly sought to draw a line between independence and opposition. Here’s how he put it in a speech he delivered in May.

Let me pause to say plainly that as a champion of independent journalism, I believe our job is to cover political debates, not to join them.

We’re not the resistance. We are nobody’s opposition. We’re also nobody’s cheerleader. Our loyalty is to the truth and to a public that deserves to know it. That is the distinct role that independent news organizations like The Times play in our democracy.

That means we will cover the Trump administration fully and fairly, regardless of what attacks it sends our way. We will continue to provide unmatched coverage of its abuses and failures. We will also cover its successes and achievements and explore its support across a large and diverse swath of the country.

Holding fast to our independence in the face of intimidation is not appeasement or acquiescence, as some would suggest. It’s certainly not a form of complicity. It’s a refusal to allow ourselves to be pressured by anyone into distorting our mission to follow the facts and bring the public the full story.

Marty Baron, when he was the editor of the Washington Post, put the same thought even more succinctly: “We’re not at war,” he said. “We’re at work.”

But at times like these, the line between war and work is hard to draw. What follows are headlines and excerpts from four of the most prominent articles displayed by the NYT today.

Here is the lead headline and summary:

Videos Contradict Federal Accounts of Fatal Shooting

LIVE

5m ago

Agents Kill 37-Year-Old Man in Minneapolis

Officials said the man was armed and sought to portray him as a terrorist, but videos emerged that appeared to directly contradict their account of the shooting.

See more updates ›

A Visual Timeline Shows How the Shooting Unfolded

As of Sunday morning, the next article on the website is a coming piece from the New York Times Magazine. The magazine allows its authors greater freedom to express their opinion. But the vast majority of readers don’t know the difference between the news pages and the magazine, and online presentation doesn’t really make any meaningful effort to differentiate them.

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My cut-and-paste abilities are limited, but here’s roughly how the piece by Charles Homans was presented.

Charles Homans, who is from Minnesota, is a political correspondent for The Times. He spent 10 days in and around Minneapolis observing clashes between federal agents and city residents and interviewing immigrants, activists and the mayor.

• Jan. 25, 2026

Donald Trump’s most profound break with American democracy, evident in his words and actions alike, is his view that the state’s relationship with its citizens is defined not by ideals or rules but rather by expressions of power, at the personal direction of the president. That has been clear enough for years, but I had not truly seen what it looked like in person until I arrived in Minneapolis, my hometown, to witness what Trump’s Department of Homeland Security called Operation Metro Surge.

And then Homans went on to describe a blurring that applies equally to the citizens of Minneapolis and the journalists at The Times.

In the heightened atmosphere of the moment, the lines between documentation and confrontation had grown blurry. ICE officers, when they stuck around anywhere for more than a few minutes, were likely to be met by not just one or two camera-wielding observers but many, and observation inevitably turned into protest. The latent combustibility of these encounters was visible in the footage that bystanders had captured of an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, fatally shooting a resident, Renee Good, in her car on a snowy street in South Minneapolis on Jan. 7. That combustibility would be visible again in the fatal shooting on Jan. 24 of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old V.A. hospital registered nurse, by Border Patrol agents.

Shock over the violence of the deployment quickly gave way to redoubled anger. Within minutes of the city’s X post on Jan. 14, a crowd of perhaps a hundred people from all over the metro area had assembled at the location, in the Hawthorne neighborhood on Minneapolis’s north side, where, according to an F.B.I. agent’s affidavit, an ICE agent had shot an undocumented immigrant in the leg after being attacked with a broom during an arrest. When I arrived, several blocks were cordoned off with crime-scene tape, and milling around in the darkness beyond it were federal agents in balaclavas and tactical gear, most of them identified by their patches as members of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations unit.

Also on the Times website were two profound pieces by journalists working for the Opinion section run by Kathleen Kingsley, which is distinct from the news pages under executive editor Joe Kahn. Both of them report directly to Sulzberger.

But despite their separate responsibilities, the work appearing within their operations are pretty much ending up in the same place.

Here’s what M. Gessen, who grew up in Russia, wrote about what is happening in America today.

Opinion

M. Gessen

State Terror Has Arrived

After the past three weeks of brutality in Minneapolis, it should no longer be possible to say that the Trump administration seeks merely to govern this nation. It seeks to reduce us all to a state of constant fear — a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our new national reality. State terror has arrived. . .

We don’t focus on these details in order to justify the federal agents’ actions, which are plainly brutal and unjustifiable; we do it to force the world to make sense, and to calm our nerves. If we don’t talk back, if we alter our routes to avoid protests, if we are lucky enough to be white, straight, natural-born Americans — or, if we are not, but we lie low, stay quiet — we will be safe. Conversely, we can choose to speak up, to go to protests, to take a risk. Either way, we tell ourselves, if we can predict the consequences, we have agency.

But that’s not how state terror works.

In the 1990s, when I talked to people in the former Soviet Union about their families’ experiences of Stalinist terror, I was repeatedly struck by how much people seemed to know about their circumstances. Time and time again, people would tell me exactly what had led to their family members’ arrests or executions. Jealous neighbors had reported them to the authorities, or colleagues who had been arrested named them under duress. These stories had been passed on from generation to generation. How could they come to know so much, I wondered. They couldn’t. People crafted narratives out of suspicions, rumors and hints, to fill a desperate need for an explanation. . .

The toolbox isn’t particularly varied. President Trump is using all the instruments: the reported quotas for ICE arrests; the paramilitary force made up of thugs drunk on their own brutality; the spectacle of random violence, particularly in city streets; the postmortem vilification of the victims. It’s only natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we are seeing. There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror.

Gessen’s piece was just one of several focused, one way or another, on the stupidity and brutality that Trump has unleashed on our country and much of the rest of the world.

I was particularly struck by how Tom Friedman, who has often been too cutesy and off-putting, has woken up and started writing much more bluntly about what is happening today.

Every day now, I sit at my computer and ask myself: What is there left to say about the two news stories I care about most? One is unfolding in my hometown, on the banks of the Mississippi River; the other is unfolding on the West Bank of the Jordan and on both banks of the Wadi Gaza.

Which video should I linger on longest? The footage of Renee Good, shot in the face by an ICE officer in Minneapolis while she was clearly trying to evacuate the scene? Or the video from Saturday of federal agents shooting Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an intensive care nurse, after he tried to help a woman who was being pepper-sprayed? Or perhaps the video from Wednesday showing the aftermath of Israeli strikes that killed three Palestinian journalists, among others, in Gaza? The journalists had been working for a committee providing Egyptian aid and were documenting its distribution at a displacement camp. Or perhaps the videos of Hamas executing rivals and refusing to yield, despite the fact that the war the group ignited on Oct. 7, 2023, has resulted in nothing but catastrophe for Palestinians?

These stories have much more in common than you might think. All are driven, in my view, by terrible leaders who prefer easy, violent solutions to the hard work of negotiated problem-solving. These leaders see an iron-fisted approach as the best way to win their next elections: President Trump in the 2026 midterms; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who is expected to call elections around the same time; and Hamas, in its desperate effort to lead the Palestinian movement in the postwar era, despite having lost the war.

Hamas and ICE also share one very visible trait that I never thought I’d see in the United States: Almost all of their foot soldiers wear masks. My experience as a reporter in the Middle East taught me that people wear masks because they are up to something bad and don’t want their faces captured on camera. I saw it often in Beirut and in Gaza; I never expected to see it in Minneapolis. Since when have America’s domestic policing forces, charged with defending the Constitution and the rule of law, felt the need to hide their identities? . . .

Trump seems to believe the chaos in Minneapolis will work for him in November — even though polls show a majority of Americans disapprove of ICE’s tactics. He is betting he can run on a “law and order” platform fueled by anti-immigration sentiment.

There is, however, another view inside the White House. Vice President JD Vance visited Minneapolis last week to urge local officials to cooperate with federal agents to “lower the temperature and lower the chaos.” Suddenly, the cynical Vance — of all people — was the voice of calm and reason. I suspect he was channeling the fears of Republican lawmakers who worry that ICE’s activities could lead to an electoral disaster in the midterms.

I no longer work for the New York Times. So I can say plainly what I think: I hope it does.