It’s Getting Worse.
The Trump administration’s assault on the rest of us is intensifying.
It’s a big day for election law at the Supreme Court, where justices will hear a case today that Republicans hope will provide an occasion for eliminating the last major provision of the Voting Rights Act, which in turn would make it possible for the GOP to pick up even more seats through even more radical gerrymandering across the South. Keep your head on a swivel. Happy Wednesday.
Antifa Signs, Freshly Painted
by William Kristol
It’s getting worse.
I mean this neither as an expression of hyperbole nor a cry of alarm. I mean this simply as a factual statement about where we are, less than a quarter of the way through the second Trump administration.
The fact is that Trump’s authoritarian apparatchiks are tightening their control over the key power ministries of the federal government. And they are getting more aggressive in asserting their power over the private sector and civil society.
So in the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have abandoned all pretense that they are interested in something so old-fashioned as the rule of law. They are directing that individuals against whom the president has a grievance be criminally prosecuted. And when told by subordinates—whether career lawyers or political appointees—that sound grounds for legal action don’t exist, they fire those honest attorneys and go ahead with the prosecution.
It’s not just the prosecutions of former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, and the firings of attorneys in the Eastern District of Virginia who refused to bring those cases. It turns out that the U.S. attorney in the Western District of Virginia, Todd Gilbert, a longtime Republican state legislator in Virginia until he was appointed by Trump in July, was forced to resign within a month of his appointment. Why? Because he refused to overrule a career prosecutor who found no justification for criminal charges against those in the FBI who had looked into Russia’s attempt to help Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
But the administration is also moving well beyond targeting individuals against whom Trump has a grievance and those who won’t help the president act on those grievances. Any and all critics of the administration are now at risk of legal assault. Following up on their earlier executive order and national security memorandum, the administration and its allies routinely claim that peaceful protests are controlled by “antifa”—which they in turn claim is a criminal and terrorist conspiracy. And they assert that such speech is a cover for and an incitement to violence. The administration is thus laying the groundwork for subjecting speech critical of it to suppression and prosecution. There are indications that new crackdowns on dissent, on dissenters, and on the institutions that employ them and their funders, are imminent.
It’s of course comical when President Trump says, as he did yesterday, that
You see people holding this gorgeous sign with beautiful wood, beautiful cardboard, wood, everything, everything’s perfect, paint job, and they’re all the same. There are thousands of them, you know, that they weren’t made in the basement out of love. They were made by anarchists.
Beware of the well-organized anarchists at work!
But what’s not comical, what is in fact sinister, is the assumption here that there would be something wrong if protest signs weren’t being made in basements but in print shops; and that it would be wrong to attempt to organize others who agree with their message. This is all protected speech. But the president and his administration barely conceal any longer that they want to suppress both free speech and free political activity.
Meanwhile, the Defense Department continues to kill unidentified people on the high seas while providing neither evidence nor legal justification for doing so. And beginning today, media access to the Pentagon will be radically limited.
So the Trump administration is becoming both increasingly aggressive and increasingly unaccountable.
Which brings me to the “No Kings” protests planned for Saturday. Several old friends have been amused that I seem to have become a defender and advocate of popular mobilization against the government. And several new friends have commented on the irony that I was a supporter of policies they protested in earlier times.
Fair enough. But we’re beyond irony and amusement. The administration’s campaign against a free society is intensifying. Congress, controlled by the Republican party, is acquiescent. The Supreme Court so far hasn’t been much of a barrier. And elites outside government are increasingly finding reasons to go along and get along.
The Founders tried to construct a government that featured all kinds of guardrails to protect liberty: separation of powers, federalism, and checks and balances. They didn’t want to count too much on uncommon courage or wisdom from the people. As Federalist #51 puts it,
A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs…These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.
But the “auxiliary precautions” that were to supply “the defect of better motives” haven’t proved, in this crisis, up to the task. We do ultimately depend on the common sense and common courage of the people. “No Kings” is an expression of protest. But it is also an affirmation of responsibility. We the people ordained and established our free government. It’s up to us to keep it.
The Kids Aren’t All Right
by Andrew Egger
The Young Republicans are in a bit of trouble: Their group chat just went public. Yesterday, Politico reported on months of private messages in a single Telegram chat among a number of state leaders in the prominent national youth organization. What they found may have shocked a lot of people. But the truth is, it’s what you’re likely to find among any group of baby MAGAheads talking amongst themselves in private about politics today: pure nihilism, obscene racism, a constant barrage of slurs, a nonstop battery of shock-jockery whose only goal is to OFFEND, OFFEND, OFFEND.
Just a tiny sample: one member, then–New York State Young Republicans Chair Peter Giunta, was whipping votes as he ran for chair of the national Young Republicans. “Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber,” he wrote in the chat. Told that another state’s delegation would vote for “the most right wing person” running, Giunta replied: “Great. I love Hitler.” Pretty awful. But that’s not all. Here was a smattering of the language he used for members of his organization who supported another faction for chair: “Minnesota - f----ts. Arkansas - inbred cow f-ckers. . . . Maryland - fat stinky Jew . . . Rhode Island - traitorous c---ts who I will eradicate from the face of the planet.”
I’ll leave it at that, although depending on your tolerance for pure grotesquery you may want to read the whole thing. Again, this is just one person in the chat, and just a few of his choice comments. Not great!
The Young Republicans are, of course, in full damage control mode, trying to write off the chat’s participants as a few bad apples. “The Young Republican National Federation condemns all forms of racism, antisemitism, and hate,” YRNF chair Hayden Padgett—who ultimately triumphed over Giunta—said in a statement. Such behavior, he said, “has no place within our organization or the broader conservative movement.”
But reading over the chats, what I was struck by is just how self-evidently wrong Padgett’s claim was. The views expressed were particularly vile. But they weren’t out of step with the broad strokes of public MAGA discourse. Instead, they seemed to exist where a lot of young Republicans are today: at the nexus of the coarse and cruel public discourse modeled by Donald Trump and his movement and the maximum-shock style common among the young and Extremely Online.
This behavior is abominable, but it’s also unsurprising. Today’s young (and not so young) Republican politics prizes two things that are in conflict: absolute conformity to Donald Trump and his project, and an absolute rejection of the idea that you are conforming to other people’s political standards at all. (You’re supposed to be a based free thinker!) How do you reconcile the two? By backing Trump’s project to the hilt while posturing rhetorically that if you do have a disagreement it’s that he doesn’t go far enough. You prove it by the theatrical rhetorical embrace of slavery, Hitler, racial slurs, and so on.
This is what you get after a decade of Trumpism’s ascendance: a young-activist base that has self-selected for the most amoral and psychotic political strivers, and has held them up as a professional ideal for the young people coming up behind them to copy and emulate. This is what they know as the ticket to power. It’s MAGA gone metastatic. Trump could have a radical conversion tomorrow, resign the presidency to enter cloistered religious life, and never speak in public or tweet again: The whole system that has oriented itself around him would remain—the system that is the future of Republican politics.
That these chats surfaced at all is notable. The leak seems to have been an attempt by someone to punish a rival in an internecine GOP conflict. The participants are certainly embarrassed, offering mealy-mouthed half-apologies after the story broke. But because everyone involved is still MAGA in good standing, it seems far from clear that anybody’s career is really over here. Already, the main reaction from the top ranks of the party is a determination to avoid the whole thing. Vice President JD Vance scoffed off the story, saying that “I refuse to join the pearl clutching”—after all, Democrats like Virginia’s Attorney General nominee Jay Jones are worse.1 He was far from alone.
All over the country, young Republicans are likely doing the very sort of thing Politico unearthed—yukking it up in the vilest ways with their fellow-travelers. And they’re doing so with reasonable confidence (too much confidence, in some cases!) that those fellow-travelers won’t leak their worst behavior out of a sense of mutually assured destruction. Even if they do come out, the party’s reaction will likely be a collective shrug.
But that impunity holds only as long as people stay onside. Do we think JD Vance would show the same grace to a person trying to leave MAGA altogether?
AROUND THE BULWARK
Like Living in an Authoritarian Regime… Gov. JB PRITZKER and FRANKLIN FOER join TIM MILLER on the flagship pod as a court blocked deployment of guard troops in Chicago and ICE ramps up its operation outside of Chicago churches.
Trump Is Worrying About the Afterlife. Thank Heaven… If the prospect of that reward can motivate him to do his best, or at least limit his worst, writes WILL SALETAN, let’s go with it. Heaven help us!
9 Stupid Things People Are Saying About Antifa… A terrorist organization? A fiction? All Democrats? None of the above, reports CATHY YOUNG.
There’s Something Weirdly Familiar About This New GOP Argument… In The Breakdown, JONATHAN COHN explains why Republicans’ latest attempt to win the shutdown fight shows they still don’t get it on Obamacare.
‘No Kings’ Has Republicans in Disarray… Why GOP lawmakers are spreading fear about the upcoming rally, JOE PERTICONE reports in Press Pass.
Quick Hits
WHAT THE ZUCK: To hear Mark Zuckerberg tell it, one of the great offenses that Joe Biden committed was the use of the government to suppress speech. The Meta CEO had a specific bone to pick: that the Biden administration had pressured his company to take down posts about vaccine safety and efficacy during the height of the COVID pandemic. But he cast this moment as an almost spiritual awakening. Donald Trump, he argued, would get the government out of the content moderation business. He, himself, would never allow Meta to be jawboned again.
“I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any administration in either direction,” Zuckerberg declared. “And we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
Few people thought this was sincere. Zuckerberg, after all, needed to find a way to ally himself with Trump that didn’t seem totally craven. So he projected the 47th president as a free speech absolutist who wouldn’t do to him what Biden had done.
And then Trump did. And Zuckerberg went along. On Tuesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi tweeted that her office had reached out to Facebook and gotten the platform to remove a “large group page that was being used to dox and target” ICE. Bondi was well within her right to do this—as was the Biden aide who pushed Facebook to drop the COVID vaccine entry. Government offices reach out to publications ALL THE TIME to make these requests. But the outrage that Republicans had over the Biden revelations (there were, quite literally, congressional hearings) were absent Tuesday. And the only comment Facebook would offer was: “This Group was removed for violating our policies against coordinated harm.”
Reasonable enough. So too is the case, made by a DOJ official, that their request to Facebook was more grounded than the one from the Biden aide. But, in the end, this proves that there are occasions when content moderation lines can be drawn and that there are instances when “pressure” from an administration can be tolerated. Zuckerberg isn’t a principled actor, he’s a calculating one. Glad we’ve cleared it up.
—Sam Stein
FOX NEWS WITH THE ANGELS: Pete Hegseth’s new press clampdown at the Pentagon has been going over like a lead balloon among military reporters left, right, and center. And now the king of right-wing media, Hegseth’s old employer, Fox News, is joining the ranks of the protesters. “Today, we join virtually every other news organization in declining to agree to the Pentagon’s new requirements, which would restrict journalists’ ability to keep the nation and the world informed of important national security issues,” read a joint statement released Tuesday by Fox News, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and CNN. “The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections. We will continue to cover the U.S. military as each of our organizations has done for many decades, upholding the principles of a free and independent press.”
The way things are going, the only “journalists” that will soon be permitted to cover the Pentagon from the Pentagon are the throne-sniffers at One America News Network. If Hegseth holds firm on kicking out reporters that decline to sign his new policy, those one-on-one press conferences should make for appointment viewing—the dumb sad spectacle of MAGA talking to itself. That is, if they ever bother to hold a press conference at all.
BLUE PAIN: Donald Trump’s targeting of Democratic areas for economic pain during the government shutdown hasn’t been exactly subtle. It’s exactly what they said they were going to do, after all. Still, this New York Times analysis showing the extent of the financial retribution is striking. Of the nearly $28 billion in grants the administration has frozen or canceled during the shutdown, $27.24 billion—97 percent—was for projects in Democrat-led congressional districts. The Times goes on:
In New York, the administration stopped the delivery of about $18 billion in pledged investments for two major projects: the Second Avenue subway, which traverses the east side of Manhattan, and the Hudson River tunnel, which serves as the primary rail route through New York City and along the northeast corridor. Funding for the tunnel, in particular, came only after years of wrangling, as New York officials and their counterparts in New Jersey looked to repair a roughly 115-year-old passage from damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy while improving rail capacity.
In Chicago, the Trump administration said it paused about $2.1 billion in money pledged for the city’s own transit upgrades, including an extension of its rail system into the South Side. Groundbreaking was expected to begin in 2026 after years of work to shore up federal funding for the expansion.
In both cases, the White House said it was pausing the delivery of federal dollars so that it could review the cities’ contracting policies. The administration sought to determine if leaders had made construction-related decisions on the basis of race, diversity or inclusion. The moves came at a moment when the president was at war with key leaders from those states.
Cheap Shots
A particularly gross ongoing storyline in right-wing discourse journalism is how much vile anti-Indian racism Vance, whose wife Usha is Indian, is prepared to swallow and excuse. Another moment from the Young Republicans chat involved participants mocking a mutual friend who had “dated this very obese Indian woman for a period of time.” Giunta disagreed: She “was not Indian.” “She just didn’t bathe often,” another participant—a Vermont state senator, as it happens—responded.
"And several new friends have commented on the irony that I was a supporter of policies they protested in earlier times."
I do confess to sometimes feeling like Gimli from Lord of the Rings
"Never thought I'd die fighting side by side with a neocon."
"What about side by side with a fellow American?"
"Aye, I could do that."
Bill, while my heart is heavy for the future of our beautiful melting pot of a country and its rule of law-as an American, USAF retiree, woman, and caregiver-my heart is grateful beyond words for all that you and your colleagues are doing. I'll sport my sign and my Bulwark No Kings t-shirt on Saturday! Thank you for standing up!!