We Have the King That Thomas Paine Feared
The rule of law was central to the American experiment. Is it still?
Two big bits of economic news this morning. The jobs numbers came in showing a middling 50,000 jobs created in December. Worse, the report made revisions to the two prior months’ numbers, reducing the estimated number of jobs gained by 76,000.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is widely expected to hand down a ruling this morning on Trump’s massive global “Liberation Day” tariffs. If they rule that Trump exceeded his presidential authority in implementing those tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, it would be a massive blow to the president’s trade policy—but possibly a substantial boost to the economy, if SCOTUS ordered the Treasury to refund nearly $150 billion in collected duties to U.S. companies.
Trump has argued for months that a ruling against him in this matter would be apocalyptic for America, calling it “literally LIFE OR DEATH for our country.” If SCOTUS does strike down the tariffs, he’s expected to try to put them back in place using a different authority. Happy Friday.
Is the Law Still King?
by William Kristol
Two-hundred fifty years ago tomorrow, on January 10, 1776, in Philadelphia, Thomas Paine published his pamphlet Common Sense. Six months before the Declaration, Paine made the argument for independence directly to the people. The pamphlet was a sensation, and seems to have been read and discussed almost immediately and everywhere. The numbers are a bit fuzzy (there was no New York Times best seller list then!), but Common Sense seems to have sold something like 100,000 copies in a few months. In proportion to the population at that time, it may have had the largest sale and circulation of any book in American history.
As a key part of his argument, Paine makes the general case against hereditary or absolute monarchy, and for popular government and the rule of law. Here’s the famous paragraph:
But where, say some, is the King of America? I’ll tell you, friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Great Britain. . . . [T]he world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.
From the beginning, the rule of law has been central to the American experiment in self-government. Obviously in both theory and practice the concept brings with it complications and controversies. But the rule of law has always been seen as a necessary corollary, a central feature, of popular self-government. From Paine on, No Kings has meant that the law is king.
Is the law king in America today? We’re seeing a sustained and conscious effort to undermine the rule of law. From Minneapolis to Caracas, from the White House to the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security, the Trump administration has engaged in what the Declaration called “a long train of abuses . . . pursuing invariably the same Object”—the object of eviscerating the rule of law and reducing us to mere subjects rather than self-governing citizens.
This has been obvious for the past year to all who have eyes to see, or who are willing to let their eyes do any seeing. But the last few days have provided especially clear instances of the assault on the rule of law. Just yesterday, for example, in the wake of the killing of Renee Good, Donald Trump’s FBI told Minnesota’s criminal investigative agency, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) that they were to be excluded from the investigation into Good’s death. The BCA reported that Trump’s FBI would not allow the BCA to “have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation” of this killing in their jurisdiction. That’s because Trump’s FBI isn’t interested in trying to discover the truth. Their orders are clearly to cover up the lawless behavior of federal agents.
Meanwhile Trump confirmed on Wednesday in an interview with the New York Times that in international matters, he respects no legal limits on his power. The only limits he acknowledges are “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” I suppose we should thank Trump for providing a kind of living illustration, a kind of tableau vivant, of the claims of absolute monarchy that Thomas Paine ridiculed and denounced. But Trump’s not a faraway king from whom we’re about to separate ourselves. He’s our president.
And all this while Trump’s Justice Department is routinely ignoring the law that required the full release of the Epstein files by December 19, 2025. Yesterday, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), the lead sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, asked a federal court to appoint “a Special Master and an Independent Monitor to compel” the the Justice Department to produce the Epstein files as the law requires. “Put simply,” they wrote, “the DOJ cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the Act.” Or put even more simply, Trump’s Department of Justice cannot be trusted to follow the law.
Earlier this week, political scientist Jeffrey Isaac addressed the apparent paradox that people who allegedly believe in “America First” have rallied to support Trump’s attack on another country. But as Isaac puts it, at its heart Trumpism is neither isolationist nor interventionist. It’s about authoritarianism: “contempt for the very idea of law” and “an embrace of the power politics of domination and conquest.” It’s a repudiation of democracy and the rule of law, both at home and abroad.
So which is it to be? A stand for liberty in the spirit of Thomas Paine, or acquiescence to the depredations of our own mad King George? The rule of law or the rule of Trump?
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump’s New War for Oil… On Shield of the Republic, Eric and Eliot return from holiday break with a special episode breaking down all things Venezuela.
The Venezuela Raid Has Russian Heads Spinning… The reaction from the Russian press has been amusingly muddled and self-contradictory, writes CATHY YOUNG.
No True Believer…. Margaret Atwood’s memoir shows readers that building and maintaining an independent mind is a full life’s work, reviews RANDY BOYAGODA.
An Age of Cultural Stagnation… On The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, W. DAVID MARX joins SONNY BUNCH to discuss his new book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century.
Trump’s Government Is Treating Courts Like a Joke… On The Illegal News with Sarah Longwell, SARAH sits down with ANDREW WEISSMANN to break down a fatal ICE shooting in Minnesota, shocking detention conditions exposed by a federal judge, and a growing pattern of the government misleading courts and defying judicial orders.
GOP Senators Sure Hope Trump Is Kidding About Invading Greenland… Plus, in Press Pass, JOE PERTICONE reports on the path ahead for the Obamacare subsidies extension bill.
How the Legacy of Iraq Is Shaping the Dem Response to Venezuela… Members of a younger generation of elected officials—including combat vets—have the last war on their mind, reports LAUREN EGAN in False Flag.
Quick Hits
FROZEN ON THE BEACH: Last summer, after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was reportedly frozen out of Donald Trump’s deliberations over bombing Iran’s nuclear program, I wrote that if the president wasn’t interested in listening to her, she should resign or he should fire her:
The position of DNI, the existence of the intelligence community, the very notion of intelligence itself is built on the assumption that the elected leaders of the country—primarily the president—need good information to make good policy decisions. But that’s not how things work in the Trump administration.
Trump’s policies aren’t based on good information. They are based on his whim. And as long as Gabbard is willing to submit herself to his whim, she’s safe in her job(s). But that job is not as DNI. It’s as Trump’s lackey.
It’s since been reported that Gabbard was similarly sidelined from the decision-making process before the Caracas raid. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump had “wanted to limit the number of people who knew about the Venezuela mission” and Gabbard “didn’t need to know about it.” Even more embarrassingly for Gabbard, she spent the days leading up to the operation very conspicuously not participating, instead posting to social media photos of herself doing yoga on the beach and interacting with her fans deep in the replies.
At this point it’s obvious that Trump thinks Gabbard is of no use to him, but it’s increasingly unclear what use he is to her.
—Benjamin Parker
THE MANOSPHERE FROWNS: When Donald Trump was re-elected president in 2024, he was buoyed to victory in party by a strong showing among young, disaffected men. But according to new polling from the major Democratic research project Speaking with American Men (SAM), Trump has already done much to squander that bloc’s goodwill. Puck News reports:
Young men of all races and classes shifted to Trump, hoping that would bring down costs and help them access an economy that felt out of reach . . . But prices haven’t gone down, and the president seems more focused on foreign policy than domestic affordability. In [youth polling expert John] Della Volpe’s polling last spring, Trump’s favorability rating among young men was 56 percent; in his SAM survey shared with Puck, it now stands 46 percent (and a lowly 36 percent among all young people). . . .
The survey also found that “avoiding unnecessary wars and conflicts” is of paramount importance to young men: 78 percent of them said it “matters,” and 68 percent said they’d be more likely to support a candidate who avoids them. Young men also said that Democrats would avoid foreign wars compared to Republicans, by a 5-point margin. Of course, the Trump administration would say that their Venezuela action was necessary, and Trump stressed this week, too, that the United States is not at war with the country. But when your administration forcibly extracts a foreign leader from a heavily fortified compound, killing dozens of people in the process, that might seem like a semantic difference.
Meanwhile, only 27 percent of young men agreed that Trump is “delivering for people like you.” Forty percent said, “He talked big, but let people like me down,” while another 26 percent responded, “He’s made an effort but didn’t deliver.” During the campaign, the president positioned himself as a fighter in campaign ads and at UFC events, but just 22 percent of young men agreed with the question, “Do you feel like Donald Trump is fighting for people like you?” (A combined 50 percent of young men said “no” or “not really” when asked the same question.) When asked to choose a description for Trump’s impact on the political system, only 40 percent of young men said, “He shakes things up and brings needed change.” But 47 percent said Trump “creates chaos and makes things worse.” If young men saw Trump as a change agent last November, it seems they no longer do.
As Semafor’s Dave Weigel pointed out, SAM endured a lot of mockery last year when its existence was first reported: “Democrats are so cooked they need to spend millions on a focus group to understand young men,” and so on. But it’s hard to say they’re not putting out interesting data today! If you happen to be a Puck subscriber, read the whole thing.
BIGGENING AND BIGGENING: Only three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and Donald Trump continuing to soup up his Mar-a-Lago North White House renovation plans. Last month, Trump moved on from the original architect he’d hired to build his new East Wing ballroom, James McCrery; among other points of friction, the architect had reportedly balked at Trump’s desire to keep making the new ballroom bigger and bigger, objecting that too monstrous a ballroom would create a strangely unbalanced White House campus.
Trump’s new architect, Shalom Barnanes, has a different strategy for maintaining “symmetry,” according to reporting from ABC News: Give Trump the ballroom he wants, and then just add a new one-story addition to the West Wing as well to balance it all out. Everything is still in the planning phases; who knows how massive and baroquely tacky the project will be in the end? The 2016 political cartoonists weren’t wrong; they were just a little early.
Cheap Shots
I fear that the most recent ICE shooting event has become a breaking point for many of us in our ability, even desire, to engage with those who disagree with us and try to find common ground upon which we can build. On the surface it is yet another politicized moment in which different people of different beliefs have their say. But scratch that surface and it feels like what is underneath has passed an inflection point at which it still can be formed and shaped into something useful.
I’m no longer concerned about generalizing. The problem has become too big for all of us to worry about someone’s individual sensitivities. Far too many on the political right simply have lost all semblance of human compassion and empathy and understanding of our system of community for it to survive intact, even for our system of laws to be effective. The required element of cooperation and shared standards of decency are no longer in place when something as fundamental as needless loss of life becomes a rallying point for a bloodthirsty culture to promote its agenda of divide and conquer. As usual, social media is where these self-proclaimed patriots and saviors of morality go to say out loud what they do not vocalize openly in public spaces otherwise. It is where their ugliest selves go to find companionship and support for levels of anger and hatred that can have no good end. Suggest that surely we can agree that what happened in Minneapolis should not have risen to the level of a spontaneous death sentence, and get called every profane name and ethnic slur in the book, and then some, as these supposedly fine Christians and parents of impressionable children morph into an irrational, inhuman, threatening life form that argues for a judgment that they should not be walking around loose, outside of a cage. This is the starting point with them. One reasonably fears what they would do upon escalation if they cannot control themselves on such a basic level to start with.
I have stopped trying to reach these people with mature, adult appeals to their better nature and attempts to identify common ground. It has become impossible. And, so, now what? I have never been more cynical about how low our society can and will go, especially when our political leadership practices no restraint anymore and influencers run around unchecked in profiting personally from the strife and discord. I often ask myself what would happen if our nation had to endure another Pearl Harbor or September 11 moment at this point. Historically we have come together at such inflection points. Now I’m inclined to think that 40 percent of our population would simply say that stupid libtards are behind it and Biden, Obama, and Hillary created the conditions for it to happen. Never before have we been so ripe for takeover by foreign governments who rejoice in our inability to have even civil discussions about shared problems. This cannot end well. The only question has become the timing and the depth of how much they can take advantage of the societal suicide of both democracy and mature adult behavior in our nation.
I’m guessing none of our Founding Fathers had any of this on their Bingo cards in the 1770s, if they even tried to envision what America in the 2020s would become, on our watch. Shame on us collectively as we dishonor the yeoman’s work that they did to gift us a nation worthy of our best instincts instead of our worst behavior.
“But 47 percent said Trump “creates chaos and makes things worse.” If young men saw Trump as a change agent last November, it seems they no longer do.”
Sadly, I’m not sure this changes the dynamic. They may not like Trump, but it seems they hate democrats more.
I’ll keep an open mind, but unfortunately, this group is fickle, and are easily triggered; so their opinions can change on a dime! IMHO…:)