A Prayer for Our Country
And a reminder that here on earth, ‘God's work must truly be our own.’
Hope you’re ready for another day of wild Russ Vought shutdown-slashing announcements. In a Truth Social post yesterday morning, Trump said he would shortly meet with Vought—“he of PROJECT 2025 Fame”—to get Vought’s take on “which of the many Democrat Agencies” should be temporarily or permanently cut. “I can’t believe the Radical Left Democrats gave me this unprecedented opportunity,” the president gloated.
Then, last night, Trump posted an AI-generated video parody of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” proclaiming that “Russ Vought is the reaper. He wields the pen, the funds, and the brain.” Which is one of the truer things Trump has written on Truth Social recently, actually. Happy Friday.
One Day Out of the Fray
by William Kristol
Yesterday, at Yom Kippur services, we, like many congregations, read a prayer for our country. It’s a slightly edited version of a prayer composed in 1927 by Professor Louis Ginzberg, rector of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the flagship educational institution of the Conservative movement of American Judaism.
There had previously been a tradition of Jews offering a prayer for the well-being of the kings or rulers under whom they lived—often as a beleaguered minority dependent on a fearsome and unaccountable authority. But here in the United States, as George Washington wrote to the Newport, Rhode Island, Hebrew Congregation in 1790, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”
It seemed wrong to Ginzberg that Jews should continue to appeal, as it were, to a government of strangers for kindness. But it also seemed appropriate to pray for our country. For even though we were a free and democratic country, we could and would go wrong. We needed guidance. We needed to recognize that we needed guidance.
Here’s the prayer we read together in synagogue:
Our God and God of our ancestors: We ask your blessings for our country—for its government, for its leaders and advisors, and for all who exercise just and rightful authority. Teach them insights from Your Torah, that they may administer all affairs of state fairly, that peace and security, happiness and prosperity, justice and freedom may forever abide in our midst.
Creator of all flesh, bless all the inhabitants of our country with Your spirit. May citizens of all races and creeds forge a common bond in true harmony, to banish hatred and bigotry, and to safeguard the ideals and free institutions that are the pride and glory of our country.
May this land, under Your providence, be an influence for good throughout the world, uniting all people in peace and freedom—helping them to fulfill the vision of Your prophet: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they experience war any more.” And let us say: Amen.
I should note that this isn’t a special prayer for the High Holy Days. It’s read every Saturday at services, so it’s familiar, and I can’t say I particularly focused on it yesterday. I’d add that the name of our current president, or the names of any serving in his administration or in Congress or active in politics, weren’t mentioned at services. So yesterday provided a welcome break from the news.
It was only this morning, when I was forced to catch up with the torrent of illegality and unconstitutionality that we are facing, and with the acts of injustice and cruelty that are being done in our name, that the prayer for our country came back to mind. One can’t help but be struck that from the seas off Venezuela to the streets of Chicago, from the podium at the White House to the out-of-office voicemail messages at the Department of Education, the government we elected is not administering “affairs of state fairly, that peace and security, happiness and prosperity, justice and freedom may forever abide in our midst.”
One also couldn’t help but be struck that this failure isn’t happening simply because of the wishes or orders of one man. Many, many individuals are acting to effectuate these injustices and abuses. Many others are supporting their efforts in various ways. Many more are going along. And many millions more are cheering them along.
Yom Kippur is the culmination of the “days of awe.” It’s a day that emphasizes our dependence on a higher power. But it’s also a day that emphasizes our own responsibility, that we can and must try to do better. Its spirit seems to me, perhaps surprisingly, not that distant from John F. Kennedy’s remark that “here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”
It was good to have a day away from politics. But it’s also good to get back in the arena, trying to do what one can “to safeguard the ideals and free institutions that are the pride and glory of our country.”
Hey, Where’s MY Based Policy Bonanza?
by Andrew Egger
Pro-life conservatives are in an uproar. Yesterday, news broke that the Food and Drug Administration had this week quietly approved a second generic version of mifepristone, a drug frequently used in chemical abortions. According to the administration, it had been powerless to do otherwise: “The FDA has very limited discretion in deciding whether to approve a generic drug,” Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement. “By law, the Secretary of Health and Human Services must approve an application if it demonstrates that the generic drug is identical to the brand-name drug.”
Sen. Josh Hawley called the approval “shocking.” Former Vice President Mike Pence called it “a complete betrayal of the pro-life movement that elected President Trump.” But the most interesting quote on the matter came from Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America: “‘Powerless’ is an adjective no one uses to describe this administration when facing trouble.” You can sort of see what she means!
You can just do things. That’s a popular meme phrase among the MAGA political class these days, one that sums up the second-term Trump ethos well: Who cares about triangulating for popular policies? Who cares about making sure whatever you want to try is legal? You’ve got the power now, baby—just use it, and figure the rest out later. So it’s with some justification that abortion opponents wonder: Trump is hard at work making all the other right-wing policy groups’ wildest dreams come true. So where’s the policy Festivus for us?
They may well get their wish in at least one area. HHS is in the midst of a review, long promised by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, of mifepristone’s original FDA authorization. This review ostensibly exists to double-check that the pill is safe for a woman who takes it, but its more obvious possible consequence—as abortion-access advocates accuse and abortion foes don’t really deny—is to make it more difficult for anyone to get a chemical abortion, particularly by getting pills through the mail.
Still, the episode is a reminder of how far pro-life advocacy has fallen down the pecking order of favored right-wing groups since the electoral backlash that followed the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade. In last year’s Republican primary, Donald Trump hit Ron DeSantis on abortion policies from the left, arguing that Florida’s six-week abortion ban had been a “terrible mistake” and waving off calls for him to pledge to fight for a national ban. Coming from any other Republican, this would have been enough to provoke a declaration of war from groups like Dannenfelser’s. Instead, resigned to the fact that Trump looked inevitable in that primary, they settled for staying on his good side and taking what they could get.
At least this week, “what they get” turns out to be procedural excuses for making abortion drugs easier to access. No wonder they’re steamed.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Questions After Quantico… U.S. military commanders around the world will be working to provide steady leadership after Pete Hegseth’s bravado and Donald Trump’s bluster, writes GEN. MARK HERTLING.
Washington’s Problems Might Be Too Big for the Problem Solvers Caucus… The bipartisan group is on the sidelines while negotiations sputter, reports JOE PERTICONE in Press Pass.
The White House’s Goal Is Enacting Pain… On the flagship pod, MSNBC’s SYMONE SANDERS-TOWNSEND joins TIM MILLER to talk about the shutdown fight and whether the president has overplayed his hand, plus how Democrats can eventually win back seats in the Senate.
James O’Keefe, Of All People, Won’t Let Trump Skate on Epstein… That’s in WILL SOMMER’s latest edition of False Flag, along with a look at Candace Owens’s increasingly far-fetched speculations about the Charlie Kirk assassination.
Trump’s Corruption Is as Stupid as It Gets… GEORGE CONWAY joins SARAH LONGWELL to talk over all the (il)legal news as Trump’s authoritarian playbook ramps up with the politicization of the military, attacks on free speech, and the prosecution of enemies.
Walking Away From Omelas… Looking at a novella that riffs on Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous short story, essayist BILL RYAN kicks off his annual pre-Halloween series on horror fiction.
Quick Hits
OVERCOMPENSATING MUCH?: When FBI Director Kash Patel was confirmed for the job, the two chief criticisms he faced were that he was a lackey for the president and that he had no actual experience in the field. Patel has tried to overcome the latter through what a therapist might call overcompensation. He’s posted videos of his workout routine. He hands out “challenge coins” that say “Ka$h Patel” on them. And now, reportedly, he’s going after the gays—or, rather, people supportive of them. From MSNBC’s gangbuster new duo, Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian, comes this dispatch:
FBI Director Kash Patel on Wednesday fired an agent in training for displaying a gay-pride flag on his desk while appointed to a field office in California last year, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The trainee, who previously worked as an FBI support specialist in Los Angeles, received a letter—dated Oct. 1 and signed by Patel—claiming he had displayed an improper “political” message in the workplace during his assignment in California under President Joe Biden, according to a copy of the letter shared with MSNBC.
It’s one of the endless bizarre tensions of the second Trump term. On one level, this is the most gay-friendly version of the GOP that’s ever existed, with a significant number of openly gay men—the “A-Gays of Washington,” as the New York Times notably put it this summer—staffing the top echelons of the administration. On the other, the administration is openly, nakedly hostile to anything it perceives as left-coded speech, including, apparently, a gay-pride flag that a trainee used to display. You can be gay, apparently, but being proud about it is where they draw the line.
THE SAME PAGE, NOT ON IT: Senate Majority Leader John Thune had a message yesterday for those Democrats complaining that the White House—in an act of brazen partisanship—was axing projects in blue states to punish them for the shut down: Just fund the government.
“It’s very simple: You avoid this by just voting to keep the government open,” Thune told NBC News.
That would be news to the administration. In a separate interview on CNN, Energy Secretary Chris Wright insisted that the cuts being overseen by OMB chief Russ Vought to green energy projects are both irreversible and totally unrelated to the current funding standoff.
“No,” we won’t restore those contracts, Wright said. He insisted the calls from Vought were months in the works. “These decisions are made, business decisions, on whether it’s a good use of taxpayer money or not. So, no, these projects will not be restored.”
EYE ON THE PRIZE: We wrote yesterday about how hamfisted the White House’s shutdown strategy seemed to us, in that they were trying to bring Democrats to heel by actively making the economy worse. After all, a president typically tends to want fewer people unemployed and the nation’s main economic corridors thriving. But what do we know, we’re mere newsletter scribes.
A few hours after we published, a new CBS/YouGov poll came out showing just how precarious Trump’s standing is on the economy even before this stuff takes effect. In the survey of American adults, 59 percent of respondents said the U.S. economy is getting worse right now, a steady increase from July (54 percent) and September (56 percent). Even worse for Trump, 67 percent of the respondents said they expected prices to go up in the next few months.
Against that backdrop, you’d probably think twice about firing thousands more federal workers and pulling tens of billions of dollars of investment out of the U.S. economy. But this group of political wizards has somehow concluded that if you just target states with Democratic senators, it will all be self-contained.
Cheap Shots
This stratagem contains the seeds of its own catastrophic flowering. Once you've established that threatening mass harm to civilians is acceptable political leverage, that federal workers can be casually discarded, that essential services can be arbitrarily shuttered, that human consequences are merely bargaining chips, you've irreversibly poisoned the well.
Trump's gleeful proclamation that Democrats "gave him this unprecedented opportunity" is the confession of a hostage-taker who's discovered his captors care more about the hostages than he does.
What we're witnessing isn't merely aggressive governance or hardball politics. It's the construction of a doomsday device wired directly into the administrative state, with Republicans holding the detonator while betting, devastatingly, that Democrats will sacrifice policy priorities rather than let it explode.
The cynicism is breathtakingly horrific. We know you won't let the government collapse. We know you won't let federal workers starve. We know you care about functional institutions, and we will exploit that decency until you capitulate or break.
The myopic sadism of this approach is catastrophically shortsighted. What happens when Democrats inevitably regain power and inherit this framework? That will obviously depend on the type of democrats who take power, but there are only two paths.
Path one is reciprocal Radicalization. Democrats, brutalized by years of watching their commitment to governance weaponized against them, finally internalize the lesson their opponents have been teaching. They return to power not as administrators but as avengers. Every precedent Republicans established becomes a loaded gun pointed back at red America.
Its not hard to imagine the reciprocal response. A Democratic president shuttering the Department of Defense's procurement offices in Republican-heavy districts. Threatening to furlough Border Patrol agents in Texas unless the GOP agrees to comprehensive immigration reform. Holding disaster relief hostage to climate policy concessions.
"We're just following the Vought precedent."
This is how democracies enter death spirals. Each party, when it gains power, escalates slightly beyond what was previously unthinkable, justifying their actions by citing the opposition's last atrocity. The ratchet only turns one direction: toward chaos. The Overton window doesn't shift, it shatters, raining shards of broken norms onto an increasingly ungovernable republic.
Path two, alternatively, Democrats retain their commitment to responsible governance, continuing to staff agencies properly, fund essential services, and treat government as something other than a bludgeon for partisan warfare. They remain the adults in the room, and Republicans, recognizing this exploitable weakness, simply repeat the playbook every time they regain power, only more aggressively, more comprehensively, more cruelly. The shutdowns become longer. The mass firings become more extensive. The hostage-taking becomes more baroque. Democrats' continued commitment to functional government transforms from virtue into fatal vulnerability, a pressure point to be squeezed in perpetuity.
This pathway leads to a peculiar form of political subjugation. One party governing, the other demolishing, with the electorate ping-ponging between brief periods of attempted recovery and extended sieges of deliberate destruction. Government becomes less an institution and more a patient repeatedly admitted to the ICU, stabilized by Democrats, then deliberately re-injured by Republicans, in an endless cycle of trauma and triage.
The truly horrifying reality? Both outcomes are civilizational backslides. Both pathways terminate in a place where American democracy, as conceived and cultivated over two and a half centuries, ceases to meaningfully exist.
In the first scenario, we get government-by-vengeance, where whichever party holds power uses it not to govern but to punish, where federal authority exists solely as an instrument of retribution against the opposing coalition. Essential services become bargaining chips. Bureaucratic continuity becomes obsolete. Every election becomes an existential crisis because losing means your community might be deliberately targeted for administrative cruelty.
In the second scenario, we get an asymmetric oligarchy, where Republicans have discovered they can systematically dismantle responsive government whenever they hold power, while Democrats can only partially rebuild during their brief windows of authority. Over time, the state itself withers, not because of any coherent ideological conviction about small government, but because one party has realized that destruction requires no coalition-building, no compromise, no competence. Just malice and a majority.
Bill's meditation here on the Yom Kippur prayer, beseeching leaders to "administer all affairs of state fairly, that peace and security, happiness and prosperity, justice and freedom may forever abide" reads like an epitaph for an expiring ideal.
The prayer assumes leaders who seek guidance, who recognize their need for wisdom beyond partisan advantage, but what happens when leaders actively glory in their role as "the reaper"?
When they parade their demolition of "Democrat Agencies" as entertainment, as an AI-generated music video set to "Don't Fear the Reaper"? When the cruelty isn't incidental but central, when the cruelty is the entire operating system?
Then the prayer becomes not a supplication but an indictment. A reminder of how far we've fallen, how completely we've abandoned even the pretense that government exists to serve rather than to subjugate.
A reminder that America chose one of the least capable, least competent humans on the planet to be its destructor.
Let's be perfectly honest about what Trump is doing. Will wrote a whole piece about Trump and how his behavior as a sexual predator is his modus operandi. Trump believes that you, me, and everything inside of America's borders are his to do with as he pleases. He and his partners in fascism are the guys that just tell the woman they are raping to stop fighting, just let it happen and it will be over faster. We were all forced into an abusive relationship with those who do not understand the meaning of consent, and if I'm being blunt, don't want it. They want the fight. They want the violence. They want the trauma.