Looking out from the safety of Indiana, I see all too much that displeases me, that feels like a creeping end to America. What seems to be coming is a country recast in the image of Donald J. Trump. I do not understand what MAGA, or its friends, see in Trump's desire to be King of America that benefits them. For we are seeing the receding of American politics to that of Charles I of England - a king that controls all the power, who will wage war against the people.
Trump Is Steadily Pushing the Republic Toward the Edge of Oblivion (The New Republic)
It is well past time to connect the dots. The Trump administration’s assault on democracy has entered a new and dangerous phase. Trump is doing exactly what he said he would do, and what many of us warned was coming. He is at the head of a political movement that has long aimed to demolish American democracy, and he and his inner circle of supporters are now backed into a corner where they have few options but to double down. In the next phase of this corrupt takeover of America’s governing institutions, the Trump administration is certain to expand on its already substantial control of both the system of justice and the corporate media, and it will use this control to suppress dissent and spread still more disinformation. Whether the GOP’s plan to destroy American democracy for good will succeed can’t be known. What those who still believe in the promise of America should do is clear.
Dot number one is the conversion of federal law enforcement and the system of justice into an instrument for punishing enemies of the regime and its leader. The indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, just days after President Trump said that Attorney Pam Bondi should prosecute him along with other political adversaries, takes us a giant step toward this objective. This radical action is not surprising for a man who appointed many of his own personal defense attorneys to top positions within the Department of Justice. It really doesn’t matter that the case against Comey is unlikely to result in a conviction. Trump’s adversaries will have already gotten the message that federal law enforcement is now a thoroughly political instrument of the leader and the ruling party. That is how corrupt autocracies work.
Dot number two: the executive order declaring “Antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization.” As an article published on the website of the libertarian Cato Institute pointed out, “antifa” is not a formal organization but rather “an idea”—the way Taoism or Crossfit or “going keto” are ideas—and it declared the move “idiotic on multiple levels.” The point of the order is to follow through on the hateful rhetoric with which Trump and many of his followers responded to the horrendous murder of Charlie Kirk. The administration intends to use the coercive power of federal law enforcement to attack all those who disagree with its political views on the pretext that to disagree with the ruler is to invite “terrorism.” With the administration’s attack on the Soros-funded Open Society Foundation, this weaponization of the DOJ and FBI is already well underway.
Dot number three is the deployment of the U.S. military against (so-called) domestic enemies. This began with the deployment of the National Guard and now includes various orders and declarations that make clear that Trump expects to use the military to apply coercive pressure against large sectors of the American population. The transformation of ICE into a federal police force largely outside of traditional law enforcement is a connected part of this project.
Trump will send in troops, arrest and even kill people based on lies (Bulwark)
First, last Tuesday, more than 300 federal agents conducted a late night raid on an apartment building in Chicago on South Shore Drive. This raid involved heavily armed agents in Blackhawk military helicopters lowered onto the roof, stun grenades, drones and military-sized vehicles.
As Chicago media outlets reported, armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down apartment doors—some using flash grenades. The agents then pulled men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked. Before the raid concluded, agents had knocked on doors or entered nearly every apartment in the five-story building.
Numerous U.S. citizens were swept in this clearly illegal raid. One was 67-year-old Rodrick Johnson, who said agents broke through his door and dragged him out in zip ties. Johnson told the agents he was an American citizen and “asked if they had a warrant, and I asked for a lawyer. They never brought one.” After three hours of being under arrest, they finally released him.
Another U.S. citizen, Pertissue Fisher told the media how federal immigration agents burst into her apartment, immediately putting a gun in her face as another placed her in handcuffs tight enough to leave bruises. Fisher –who was only released after being under arrest for hours—stated, “I want answers. I have kids, I have grandkids, and if I would have [gotten] killed, who gonna answer for it? Nobody,”
Ebony Sweets Watson, who lives across the street, said she saw agents dragging residents, including kids, out of the building without any clothes on and into U-Haul vans.
The Supreme Court Is Creating a King (The New Republic)
Congress is barely functional these days. One reason is that Republicans control both chambers and are consciously ceding their power to President Donald Trump. Other structural factors, like gerrymandering and the constant fundraising churn, have weakened Congress’s ability to pass laws and—as shown by the ongoing shutdown—to keep the government open. But perhaps an even more significant reason is that the Supreme Court’s rulings have rendered it a largely vestigial organ in American governance. With last week’s decision to allow the Trump administration to block $4 billion in appropriated foreign aid, the conservative justices effectively transferred Congress’s spending power to Trump.
The ruling was easily overlooked, one of myriad court decisions this year related to Trump’s norm-smashing, lawbreaking rule. But it’s worth considering the ruling’s ramifications more deeply, as it represents a crippling blow to the American constitutional order—and the further empowerment of Trump as a de facto king.
Data? What Data? (Sheila Kennedy)
Trump constantly says bizarre and unsupportedd things about crime–at least, in cities run by Democrats. He claims violence is surging although it’s decreasing, actually, in some places, at historic rates, He constantly blames immigrants, although relatively little crime is committed by immigrants, and he and MAGA are now trying to blame mass murders on transgender Americans, despite the fact that only 0.1 percent of mass shootings are committed by transgender people—and very few murders of any kind.
Are these and multiple other assertions inconsistent with the data? Well, there’s an easy “fix” to that–stop gathering and reporting the data.
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When every day brings a new assault on our constitution and the rule of law, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that data, research, and facts are dangers to authoritarian regimes. Trump doesn’t know much, but he does understand that “data provides the basis for arguments, and he does not want any arguments. He also understands that facts and knowledge can only be nourished and sustained by institutions and experts, so he is destroying those institutions and pink-slipping those experts.”
Military officials told Illinois National Guard leaders Sunday that as many as 300 members would be called into service under federal leadership for a two-month period, records show.
No riots have been reported in Chicago, even as protesters have been tear-gassed and shot with pepper pellets by federal agents outside an ICE processing facility in west suburban Broadview.
Federal officials have only a “flimsy pretext” to deploy military officials to Chicago, according the lawsuit. Deploying National Guard troops to Chicago “will cause only more unrest, including harming social fabric and community relations and increasing the mistrust of police.”
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U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, ruled late Saturday the president’s claims of daily unrest in Portland were “untethered to facts” and risked violating the U.S. Constitution by imposing military rule.
Immergut blocked federal officials from deploying the Oregon National Guard to Portland for 14 days. After her ruling, federal officials ordered members of the California National Guard to Oregon prompting Immergut to amend her order late Sunday to block federal officials from deploying any National Guard troops to Portland.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom called Trump’s effort to send California National Guard troops to Oregon a “breathtaking abuse of power.”
Nor will Trump and/or MAGA make us safer vis-à-vis the wider world: What happens if Russia attacks Nato after Ukraine? (The London Times).
Masala argues that after Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014 and — in his imagined future — a victory in Ukraine this year, Narva would be the Kremlin’s next move and that Nato will fail to deter that or further aggression by Russia as it works with China to overturn the US-dominated liberal world order.
But how realistic is his doomsday scenario?
The past week’s events do not augur well: On Tuesday, Donald Trump stunned European capitals by declaring on social media that Kyiv could win all its land back with the help of the EU. He said he would continue supplying weapons to Nato, which it could “do what they want with” and then added: “Good luck to all!”
For the historian Sir Niall Ferguson, this was a clear sign of America disengaging from the war. “My reading of that was, ‘So long suckers, I gave it my best shot, I tried but [Russia’s President] Putin let me down’,” he told The Sunday Times.
Masala agrees. Trump, he believes, has disengaged from Ukraine in an act of “blame-shifting” that will leave European leaders responsible — rather than him — if Kyiv falters in the war or runs short of cash. So is Europe capable of taking on this burden?
But: Young Trump voters detail frustration with him on the economy and immigration in new focus groups (NBC News)
A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0 (The Guardian)
The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as a problem of social systems rather than individuals, as André Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional”, a feature of how organisations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences.
Yet it’s hard to identify anything functional about Trumpian stupidity, which is less a form of organisational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things – universities, public health, market data – that help make the world intelligible. Trumpian stupidity isn’t an emergent side-effect of smart people’s failure to take control; it is imposed and enforced. This needs to be confronted politically and sociologically, without falling into the opposite trap of “sanewashing” or inflating strategic cunning to the point of conspiracy theory.
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Arendt argued that there was a second human faculty, in addition to judgment, that allowed understanding to progress to a truer grasp of meaning: imagination. Imagination, for Arendt, is the uniquely human capacity to grasp truth via speculative leaps, drawing on empathy and creativity in the process, as opposed to scientific methods. Politics requires us to navigate situations which are incomparable and immeasurable, because they are genuinely new. This in turn requires something closer to aesthetic judgment than to scientific judgment.
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But if our only alternative to stupidity is to reinstall the “preliminary understanding” of expert orthodoxy (welcome as that might be in some areas), then there will be no reflection on the wider historical conditions of stupidity, nor on the extent of stupid policy and process not only tolerated but valued by contemporary capitalism. The outsourcing of judgment to financial markets, digital platforms and fusions of the two is also an invitation for people to behave stupidly, albeit within systems that are governed by some esoteric form of mathematical reason. It would be absurd to seek hope in Trump and Trumpism, but perhaps stupidity on such a world-historical level can at least offer an opportunity for “true” understanding. Nothing – markets, bots or machines – can rescue us, except our imagination.
Human judgment and imagination as antidote to the stupidity of Big Data and the neoliberal idol called the market? I would take a chance on that.
sch 10/6
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