Il Duce Ha Sempre Ragione

Trump’s Mussolini moment.

We are bleary-eyed scribes this morning in the aftermath of last night’s Game 3 between the Dodgers and the Blue Jays. Okay, who are we trying to kid—we made it to inning 13. And we’re not apologizing for stopping there, since there were five more innings to go. A Freddy Freeman walk-off home run won the game for the Dodgers in the 18th, giving them a 2–1 series lead.

It will go down as one of the most riveting World Series games of all time—a game filled with incredible defensive relays, some very close warning track flyouts, and another otherworldly performance by Shohei Ohtani, who homered twice and reached base NINE times (five via walks). It got us thinking: How rare a sports moment is this, to be able to watch someone who has so clearly perfected their craft? It’s MJ in the mid-’90s, Tiger in 2000. Is it how folks in Vienna felt when a young Mozart burst on the scene? Ohtani takes the mound tonight. Happy Wednesday.

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(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The Self-Radicalization of Trumpism

by William Kristol

Revolutionary movements are dynamic. And their dynamic often moves in the direction of increased radicalism, ever-greater extremism, and even all-out fanaticism.

This phenomenon has been long understood and well observed. Back in 1790, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke anticipated the extraordinary radicalization that would mark the French Revolution over the next few years. In 1938, in The Anatomy of Revolution, an American historian, Crane Brinton, looked back at four great revolutions and compared their course to the progress of a fever that intensifies before breaking—if it eventually breaks at all.

The American Revolution of 1776, with its moderate revolutionaries and its outcome in a stable constitutional government, is famously an exception that highlights this rule. Today’s Trumpist revolution, in many ways, has so much more in common with the authoritarian revolutions of the last century than with the liberal revolution of 1776. Its spirit is not the “let facts be submitted to a candid world” of the Declaration of Independence. It is far closer to the “Il Duce ha sempre ragione” of Italian fascism: “The Leader is always right.”

The Trumpist revolution seems to be following the common and destructive path of its authoritarian predecessors. The radicalization is as obvious as it is striking.

From the Department of Homeland Security to the Department of Defense, from the way in which it’s carrying out mass deportation at home to the way it’s committing murder on the high seas, the Trump administration has already gone beyond what even the alarmists among us forecast. But it turns out that hasn’t been enough.

So we learned last night that the administration has launched a mass purge of the mass deporters, with at least five ICE field office directors being removed. As the immigration policy expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick put it, “BIG changes happening – ICE leadership is being purged tonight. The old guard, which prioritized targeted enforcement operations aimed at people with criminal records, is being replaced with Border Patrol and Gregory Bovino’s ‘Midway Blitz’ style.”

Meanwhile, the Defense Department seems to have abandoned any pretense of the need for congressional authorization for the use of military force or the acceptance of legal constraints on the use of that force. And the Pentagon is now moving an aircraft carrier to the Caribbean, presumably to escalate a war with Venezuela that Congress has never debated and that the administration has never sought to justify.

Over at DOJ, the gloves have come off. The political prosecutions of those against whom Donald Trump seeks retribution are only the tip of an iceberg that is bearing down on the rule of law. It is the abandonment of the pretense that governing is anything more than an expression of Trump’s personal will.

The Republican party is engaged in its own authoritarian accelerationism. Old-fashioned norms like confining redistricting to once a decade, or swearing in a newly elected representative, are simply ignored.

And in the broader Trumpist movement, the mask has increasingly come off. The racism and misogyny, the Christian nationalism and great replacement theory, are out there in broad daylight. One has to really want not to see what’s happening in order to deny what’s taking place all around us.

But the entire Republican party seems to want to live up to Orwell’s prophecy that rejecting the evidence of their eyes and ears would be the party’s final, most essential command. Once powerful institutions seem determined to provide fresh examples for historians who have chronicled elite capitulation to and collaboration with authoritarian takeovers. Clever apologists seem to be writing a new chapter in Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals.

In the midst of all this, all the talk of guardrails and obstacles and constraints can seem futile, even quaint. Successful resistance to radical movements can seem difficult, even hopeless.

But, in fact, as Brinton points out in The Anatomy of Revolution, the extremism and fanaticism of the destroyers is often ultimately self-destructive. It also opens up opportunities for counter-attack. And so history is not just a tale of self-destructive revolutions. It’s also a story of successful resistance to the forces of destruction, and impressive reconstruction after they have temporarily prevailed. It would be good to relive that history.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• The ‘Transactional’ Trap… America’s partners shouldn’t think they can deal their way out of Trumpian chaos, warns DALIBOR ROHAC.

• The Civil War Over Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Has Gotten Even Uglier… In False Flag, WILL SOMMER reports that right-wing personalities are feuding over a lot of things, including the decision to invite Tucker Carlson to TPUSA’s annual confab.

• Trump Picked the Least Qualified Person He Could Find… GEORGE CONWAY explains to SARAH LONGWELL Lindsey Halligan’s bizarre texts, the illegal U.S. boat strikes in the Caribbean, Trump’s $230 million claim against his own government, and the ACLU defending a man arrested for playing the Darth Vader theme.

• We’re Unraveling at Light Speed… On the latest Mona Charen Show, MONA CHAREN and Financial Times columnist ED LUCE discuss how Trump’s second term has gone from chaos to control—from a fake war in Venezuela to the culture of fear in Washington.

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Quick Hits

SCALING UP THE MAYHEM: As Bill noted above, the White House, apparently unhappy with the pace of deportation numbers, moved last night to shake up ICE leadership around the country, with the Washington Examiner’s Anna Giaritelli reporting that many regional ICE chiefs are likely to be replaced by Border Patrol officials.

Here’s Fox News’s Bill Melugin with more:

Border Patrol officials taking over ICE leadership positions would be extremely significant, as Border Patrol and ICE do different things. . . .

Generally speaking, ICE typically conducts very targeted operations, largely going after criminal illegal aliens or those with deportation orders, but almost always knowing who they are targeting for arrest, often conducting surveillance to learn their schedules before and waiting hours before arresting them if needed.

Border Patrol, under Trump 2.0, while sometimes doing their own targeted operations, has been extremely aggressive and has been at the forefront of some of the most controversial immigration enforcement operations we’ve seen so far, carrying out roving patrols in Los Angeles, Chicago, etc, often at Home Depot, car washes, flea markets etc, leading to a handful of federal judges around the country issuing injunctions against them. A majority of the viral videos you see online are Border Patrol agents, including the use of a Trojan horse style Penske moving truck at a Los Angeles Home Depot, an operation organized by Bovino.

The bottom line: Whatever it’s been, it’s about to get worse.

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THE THIRD-TERM FLIRTATION: The Canadian YouTuber J.J. McCullough had a thought-provoking take yesterday on Trump’s constant flirtations with the concept of running for a third term. “I think there’s a problem with the way the press frames this,” he wrote on X. “They always ask him ‘are you going to run’ like it’s his choice. I feel a better framing would be like ‘do you understand this is illegal?’”

Honestly, this got at something we struggle with ourselves. Donald Trump has spent so many years flouting every rule that’s supposed to restrain him, and yet a bewildering number of people still seem to be caught totally by surprise every time it happens. So it sometimes seems analytically wise to start from the premise that Trump is likely to behave this way—and that there’s a pretty good chance nobody will stop him.

But maybe this cedes Trump too much ground. The fact of the matter is that the Constitution does explicitly forbid the president from running for a third term, whether he’d like to or not. Maybe he will try anyway, attempting either to bulldoze the courts or to juke them with some silly maneuver like becoming JD Vance’s running mate in 2028.¹ But if he does, he’ll be declaring war on something real and solid: The open-and-shut language of the U.S. Constitution. We shouldn’t lose sight of that fact.

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FEET FIRST INTO HELL: What if we are governed by the most psychotic twelve-year-olds on the planet? It’s a question we’re forced to contemplate after another day of lunatic posting from various official social-media accounts of the U.S. government—this time about video games.

It started with a tongue-in-cheek press release from the retailer GameStop, announcing the end of the decades-long “console wars” between Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation.² The White House’s official account responded with an AI-generated image of a saluting Trump dressed as Halo protagonist Master Chief. Okay, White House! Whatever gets your rocks off!

But then the Department of Homeland Security’s social-media team decided to get in on the fun. “DESTROY THE FLOOD. JOIN.ICE.GOV,” its post read over an image of an all-terrain vehicle with a mounted machine-gun turret.³

This was, uh, a darker turn. In Halo, the Flood is a hive-mind alien parasite bent on drawing all other life under its control. It’s a force of pure chaos and entropy and a grave threat to all civilization. That’s what illegal immigrants are like, the Department of Homeland Security “joked.”

If you ran a video game company, you might wince at the government using your IP to advance propaganda casting immigrants as invading subhuman parasites that need to be met with violence. But this particular video game company is owned by Microsoft, a mega-tech conglomerate with a nontrivial financial stake in staying on the president’s good side. Asked by reporters what they made of it all, representatives for Microsoft yesterday declined to comment.

Cheap Shots

1. Although it’s worth noting that he dismissed that latter possibility, which some of his acolytes have suggested as One Weird Trick to Get Around the 22nd Amendment: “I would rule that out because it’s too cute.”

2. The joke was that the latest title in the Halo series, one of Xbox’s flagship franchises, will be playable on PlayStation next year. Now you know!

3. A Warthog, for the Haloheads following along.