Over the past few years, I have spent a lot of time countering pro-Kremlin propaganda designed to exonerate Russia for its genocidal war on Ukraine.

It is not Russia's fault, we are told; the West provoked it to invade. Later, those same Western powers pressured Kyiv to reject Moscow’s peace overtures and keep fighting. And so on and so forth.

It is all bullshit. But it can be hard to see through it without having prior knowledge of the subject. As someone who has studied Ukrainian politics for nearly three decades, I have done my best to expose the lies.

At its worst, such propaganda veers into atrocity denial. I have repeatedly had to debunk conspiracy theories that attempt to blame Ukraine for Russia’s crimes. Whether it is the execution of non-combatants, the bombing of civilian targets, or the mass-abduction of Ukrainian children to Russian “reeducation” camps, none of these things happened, insist Russia's apologists. Or, if they did, they were staged by Ukraine to frame Russia.

Nowadays, one sees a similar surge in atrocity denial on Israel’s behalf. While hardly new, it has reached a fever pitch over revelations of an Israeli-engineered famine in Gaza.

The whitewashing bears striking resemblance to the sort that tries to absolve Russia of its own crimes. There is no starvation, we are told. To the extent that there is, it is the doing of Hamas and the United Nations—anyone but Israel, really. And if it was caused by Israel, it was not part of a deliberate plan.

As we will see, these claims are demonstrably false.

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While certain actors—namely, the Israeli government—are intentionally lying, I do not believe that most of those spreading the misinformation are doing so knowingly.

Either way, there is a need to correct the record. We cannot blind ourselves to human suffering or the criminals responsible for it.

Yes, Hamas has also committed atrocities—above all, its massacre of innocents on October 7^th and its mistreatment of the hostages it continues to detain.

Still, Hamas’s crimes, evil as they are, do not grant Israel a free pass to commit its own. But this is exactly what Israel is doing, as a mountain of evidence confirms. The violations include mass-executions; the rampant, arbitrary, and intentional killing and maiming of civilians, including preteen children; and the rape, torture, and starvation of detainees, many of whom are held without charge.

There is a reason why collective punishment is banned under international law. Inflicting harm on children and the elderly for other people’s misdeeds is reprehensible no matter which side is doing it.

The Fourth Geneva Convention and the UN Genocide Convention, which together form the core of international humanitarian law, were adopted largely in response to the Holocaust. But here we are, 75 years later, as Israel trashes those agreements in the name of the Jews.

How Israel Implicates Itself

Maybe you doubt the World Food Program when it says that starvation in Gaza is “unlike anything we have seen in this century,” on par with the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s.1

Maybe you distrust the more than one hundred doctors and health professionals who say that “our Palestinian colleagues—doctors, nurses, and first responders—are all rapidly losing weight due to forced starvation at the hands of the Israeli government.”

Maybe you are skeptical of the hundred-odd international organizations who contend that “the UN-led humanitarian system…has been prevented from functioning” due to “Israel’s restrictions, delays, and fragmentation.”

To be clear, there is no valid reason to dismiss these findings. But even if you do, it just so happens that Israel’s leaders, officials, and soldiers affirm them.

Let's take a look.

Yes, there is a famine, and Israel is to blame.

On July 25^th, news outlets around the world published a photo of a skeletal Palestinian child as evidence of the severe hunger afflicting Gaza. It later emerged that the boy had congenital health problems which might have partially accounted for his appearance.

Pro-Israel commentators seized on the revelation, arguing that claims of famine were exaggerated or false. (In truth, children with certain preexisting conditions are more vulnerable than others to malnutrition, and the boy in the picture was indeed malnourished.)

Contested photos aside, Gaza is indeed experiencing acute hunger, and Israeli policies are the cause.

To avoid widespread malnutrition, the UN estimates that Gaza needs a minimum of 62,000 tons of food per month. But Israel decides whether and how much food can enter Gaza, and in ten of the 22 months since the war began, deliveries fell below that minimum level.

The data behind this claim comes not from the UN but from Israel itself—in particular, COGAT, the defense ministry unit that oversees the territory. Each month, COGAT calculates the amount of food that is brought into Gaza.

As you can see, in October 2023 (far left), almost no food at all was allowed to enter. The reason was the total blockade that Israel imposed that month in response to Hamas’s attack. The restrictions were eventually relaxed, but only under American pressure.

By the start of 2024, food deliveries began to pick up. Still, in February, September, and October of that year, they failed to meet the minimum UN threshold. Later, during the ceasefire of January and February 2025, supplies increased dramatically.

It would not last, however. In early March 2025, Israel initiated another blockade. “Prime Minister Netanyahu has decided that, as of this morning, all entry of goods and supplies into the Gaza Strip will cease,” read a March 2^nd press release from his office.

For the next 78 days, Israel prevented all humanitarian assistance, including foodstuffs, from entering Gaza.

Predictably, the blockade led to a crisis. By mid-May, COGAT, the defense ministry agency, was warning the government that Gaza was on the brink of famine.

According to officials interviewed by the New York Times,

Israeli military officers who monitor humanitarian conditions in Gaza have warned their commanders in recent days that unless the blockade is lifted quickly, many areas of the enclave will likely run out of enough food to meet minimum daily nutritional needs.

…The officers…privately briefed senior commanders on the worsening situation, warning with increasing urgency that many in the territory were just a few weeks away from starvation. An Israeli general briefed the cabinet on the humanitarian situation in Gaza last week, saying that supplies in the territory would run out within a few weeks, according to an Israeli defense official and a senior government official.

It was in response to the briefing, the officials confirmed, that the government lifted the blockade.

Problem solved, right? With no more blockade, the impending emergency which defense officials warned about would be avoided, would it not?

Nope.

Far from it, in fact, because even after lifting the blockade, Israel continued to maintain severe restrictions on the food entering Gaza.

As the table above shows, food deliveries in May, June, and July remained well below the level required to prevent malnutrition.

According to COGAT, the government allowed only 19,900 metric tons of food to enter in May and another 37,800 tons in June. This, combined with the zero tons it authorized in the two preceding months, adds up to 57,700 metric tons of food over a four-month period.

Compare that to the 62,000 tons the UN defines as the minimum amount needed each month to stave off malnutrition.

In other words, in the four months between March and June, Israel allowed in less than the bare-minimum amount required for a single month.

That is why the crisis became as severe as it did, and that is what explains the ubiquitous photos of walking skeletons desperate for food.

So, yes, of course Gaza is suffering an acute malnutrition crisis, and of course Israel is responsible. How could it not be? The defense ministry’s own data proves it! Simply put, Israel is not letting nearly enough food to come in.

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But don’t Hamas and the UN bear most of the responsibility?

Israel blames the crisis on other actors—in particular, the UN, which is ineffective and does not prevent Hamas from stealing the aid. But, it says, they then turn around and pin the blame on Israel.

This is bullshit. For one thing, we already saw that Israel’s restrictions alone were more than sufficient to cause the crisis.

Still, is it not possible that Hamas and the UN are making it worse?

The answer is no—and, once again, it is Israeli officials who confirm it.2 At a cabinet meeting in March, the New York Times reports, the military presented evidence that it

never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.

In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.

Not only did the UN system work, but it was set up in a way that prevented Hamas from diverting the aid:

The military officials who spoke to The New York Times said that the original U.N. aid operation was relatively reliable and less vulnerable to Hamas interference than the operations of many of the other groups bringing aid into Gaza. That’s largely because the United Nations managed its own supply chain and handled distribution directly inside Gaza.

Hamas did steal from some of the smaller organizations that donated aid, as those groups were not always on the ground to oversee distribution, according to the senior Israeli officials and others involved in the matter. But, they say, there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the United Nations, which provided the largest chunk of the aid.

In sum, Israel’s policies are exclusively responsible for the hunger crisis. Contrary to Israel’s official stance, moreover, neither Hamas nor the UN are making it worse; Israeli military officials said so themselves.

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No, Israel does not merit special praise for feeding Gaza.

“Israel is the only country that has ever fed an enemy population in a time of war.” So goes a common refrain by Israel and its supporters. In fact, they argue, far from condemning Israel, we should applaud it for allowing in any food at all.

This is nonsense. Imagine if the US government laid siege to Detroit and established tight control over the city’s land, sea, and air access. Under these conditions, nobody would be able to bring anything, including food, into the city absent the express authorization of the federal government. Unless Washington allowed food to come in, Detroit would starve.

That is the situation in which Gaza finds itself. Given its small size—it has about the same area as Detroit, only with a higher population density—there is no way that Gaza can support the agricultural base required to feed its two million inhabitants. As a consequence, it is almost entirely dependent on the import of food and other essential supplies.

But without Israel's approval, it cannot import anything.

While Israel formally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it continued to exercise extraordinary control over anything and anyone moving across its borders.

Israel has long controlled access to Gaza by land, sea, and air. This includes Gaza’s border with Egypt. Past agreements with Cairo granted Israel indirect control over the movement of goods and people through the Rafah crossing that connects the territory with Egypt. In the wake of Israel’s May 2024 Rafah offensive, its control became direct and absolute.

For this reason, even after the 2005 withdrawal, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) continued to regard Israel as an occupying power under international law. An ICJ advisory opinion from July 19^th, 2024, states that

Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip [in 2005] has not entirely released it of its obligations under the law of occupation. Israel’s obligations have remained commensurate with the degree of its effective control.

When it comes to food, specifically, the court ruled that Israel’s status as an occupying power gives it “the continuing duty to ensure that the local population has an adequate supply of foodstuffs, including water.”

It is very simple: Unless Israel allows food to come in, Gaza starves. To the extent that Israel does permit food to enter, this is not an example of its benevolence; it is its minimum obligation under international humanitarian law. Israel does not deserve special credit for that.

Not that it complied with its obligations in the first place. Even before October 2023, it intentionally kept food imports to a minimum. “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet,” a government advisor wryly remarked in 2006, “but not to make them die of hunger.”

Official documents released under court order in 2012 show the meticulous calculations Israel used to determine the least amount of food needed to keep Gaza’s inhabitants from falling below international malnutrition thresholds. COGAT, the Israeli defense agency cited above, referred to these minimum requirements as “red lines.” In practice, actual food deliveries fell far short of these levels, according to UN data.

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Intent to Starve

As we saw earlier, the restrictions became even more severe after October 7^th.

But not only did Israel limit the amount of food that entered; in recent months, it started sabotaging the distribution of the food that did arrive.

After lifting its blockade in May of this year, Israel drastically scaled back the UN’s role in allocating food aid. Under the new plan, the UN and its partners would receive only half the food entering the territory. The other half would be distributed by the now-infamous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Explaining its decision, Israel claimed that the UN network was ineffective and that it failed to stop Hamas from stealing the aid.

But that was a lie. The Israeli military admitted it, as we saw earlier.

Recall what a group of military officials told the New York Times. At a March meeting, they informed Netanyahu's cabinet that the UN was “largely effective” at handing out food and that there was no evidence that Hamas had stolen from the UN on any significant scale. That is because the system was set up in a way that minimized the possibility of Hamas’s interference.

The government nevertheless rejected those findings and proceeded with its plan. From now on, the GHF, an Israeli- and USbacked outfit run by American evangelists and private equity executives, few of whom had any prior experience in the aid realm, would take over much of the UN’s role.

Not only was the new arrangement unnecessary; the Israeli government knew it would fail. At the same March meeting, military officials expressed serious doubts about the GHF’s capabilities. But the government dismissed their concerns.

In place of the hundreds of aid distribution points operated by the UN, the GHF established four—yes, four—all of which were located in the middle of active combat zones.

The result was chaos, hunger, and death.

Starting in late-May, thousands of desperate Palestinians would regularly descend on the handful of GHF distribution sites.

Crowd control was achieved by launching artillery shells into crowds of hungry civilians—a fact confirmed by officers at a meeting of the IDF Southern Command. According to one attendee,

[IDF commanders] talk about using artillery on a junction full of civilians as if it's normal. … What concerns everyone [at the meeting] is whether [the use of these weapons] would hurt our legitimacy to keep operating in Gaza. The moral aspect is practically nonexistent. No one stops to ask why dozens of civilians looking for food are being killed every day.

IDF soldiers interviewed by Israeli news outlet Haaretz describe how they were ordered to fire on unarmed civilians lined up to receive food and who posed no danger. As one soldier recounts,

When we asked why [soldiers at an aid distribution point] opened fire, we were told it was an order from above and that the civilians had posed a threat to the troops. I can say with certainty that the people were not close to the forces and did not endanger them. It was pointless—they were just killed, for nothing. This thing called killing innocent people—it's been normalized. We were constantly told there are no noncombatants in Gaza, and apparently that message sank in among the troops.

Sorry, but you do not lie your way into depriving millions of people of food, while also putting them in mortal, unnecessary danger, unless you intend to starve and kill them.

Going by the public statements of Israel's leaders, in fact, this would appear to have been the plan. Consider just a few of the many examples:

Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, July 24^th, 2025:

No nation feeds its enemies. Have we gone crazy? Should we bother with this? They should return the captives, they should return the hostages, they should stop fighting us. Should we bother with their hunger? This discourse is simply crazy.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, May 6^th, 2025:

[The Palestinians] will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.

Former Military Intelligence Directorate chief Aharon Haliva, who stepped down in April 2024:

For every victim of October 7^th, 50 Palestinians had to die. No matter if they are children.

Israeli security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, November 12^th, 2023:

We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba [Nakba is the word Palestinians use to describe Israel’s ethnic cleansing policies since 1948]. From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war—as the IDF seeks to do in Gaza—with masses between the tanks and the soldiers.

Galit Distel Atbaryan, a lawmaker from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, November 1^st, 2023:

Erase Gaza from the face of the earth. Let the Gazan monsters rush to the southern border and flee into Egypt, or die. And let them die badly.

Netanyahu, January 13^th, 2024:

We provide minimal humanitarian aid. … If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid.

These sentiments, it is worth noting, are not those of a rogue government that is out of step with mainstream opinion. As a recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute reveals, 79 percent of Jewish Israelis are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by “reports of famine and suffering” in Gaza.

Other surveys find that anywhere from 53 to 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. According to a February poll, 64 percent agree that "there are no innocent people in Gaza.”

In sum, one need not rely on the UN, foreign NGOs, or anyone else to tell us that Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians. Israelis admit it themselves:

• Yes, there is a famine, and Israeli policies are to blame. The defense ministry’s own data proves it, and military officials confirm it.

• Neither Hamas nor the UN have been systematically withholding aid from Gaza’s inhabitants, Israeli officials acknowledged to the New York Times.

• The UN-led food distribution system was mostly effective before Israel replaced it, those same officials admit.

• Israel’s leaders knew that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation would fail its stated mission of feeding Gaza’s inhabitants; the Israeli military warned the government about it.

• Israeli soldiers were ordered to shoot civilians at GHF distribution sites despite the fact that they posed no threat, as the soldiers themselves attest.

• The Israeli government is deliberately imposing mass-suffering on Gaza’s civilian population. It says so publicly.

• A majority of Jewish Israelis either support these policies or are unbothered by them, opinion polls show.

  ---

These are the facts.

Make of them what you will.

But do not deny them.

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Share The Detox with Neil Abrams

Last week, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote a piece entitled, “No, Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza.” In it, he offers one fatuous claim after another to absolve Israel of a charge that is increasingly leveled against it.

The amount of bad faith, intellectual laziness, and sheer incompetence on display is hard to overstate. But as we will see, there is a reason why Stephens decided to write this column now. It is a reason that he did not wish to reveal, since doing so would have raised uncomfortable questions about his credibility and agenda.

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But first, let us go through his argument point by point, if only to show the nonsense of it.

Consider his opening salvo:

The first question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: Why isn’t the death count higher? The answer, of course, is that Israel is manifestly not committing genocide.

This is a silly and misleading statement. As anyone familiar with the subject can explain, a finding of genocide has nothing to do with the number of victims affected but rather hinges on the intent of the perpetrator.

Under the terms of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, genocide refers to any of five acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” The five acts include (1) killing members of the group; (2) inflicting serious harm, whether mental or physical, on members of the group; (3) imposing conditions of life intended to destroy the group in whole or in part; (4) attempting to prevent births within the group; and (5) forcibly transferring the group’s children to another group.

Acts such as killing and inflicting bodily harm do not by themselves imply genocide. Only if they are undertaken with the intent to destroy one of the designated types of groups do they qualify.

Stephens, it turns out, is well aware of this fact. After spending the first 30 percent of his essay arguing—erroneously—that Israel has not killed enough people to warrant the charge of genocide, he then proceeds to explain—correctly—that “genocide does not mean simply ‘too many civilian deaths’…[but instead] means seeking to exterminate a category of people for no other reason than that they belong to that category.”

Doing It Half-Assed

Things do not get much better from there. In the remainder of the piece, we are treated to a mix of facile excuses, fallacious assertions, and more frivolous “gotchas” in a hollow effort to exonerate Israel.

If it really were genocide, Stephens asks, why does Israel offer evacuation warnings before bombing a given area? (It frequently does not, and many of the warnings it does provide are impossible to heed).

If it were really genocide, he continues, why would Israel put its own ground forces at risk instead of obliterating Gaza from a safe distance? (The use of ground troops does not somehow rule out the possibility of genocide.)

In any event, Stephens reminds us, all wars are destructive, so why single out Israel? (No, not all wars are this destructive).

As for all the genocidal statements of top Israeli leaders, we are told, these were but “furious comments in the wake of Hamas's Oct. 7 atrocities.” Were they not allowed to blow off a little steam?

And let us not forget Hamas's refusal to release the hostages, he says, not to mention its other war crimes (as if either of these things grant Israel a free pass to violate International Humanitarian Law).

Besides, he concludes, we should be more cautious about employing so incendiary a term as genocide lest it be “used by anti-Zionists and antisemites…to license a new wave of Jew hatred.”

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The Third Man

Amidst all the evasions and non sequiturs, Stephens was too busy to mention the elephant in the room. That elephant is Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian who serves as the Dean's Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.

One week to the day before Stephens wrote his Times column, Bartov penned a 3500-word essay in the very same paper accusing Israel of genocide. This explains why Stephens published his apologia in the first place and chose to do so now.

“My inescapable conclusion,” Bartov writes,

has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.

In making his case, Bartov cites the steady stream of eliminationist rhetoric from top Israeli leaders, the systematic destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure (“a policy aimed,” he says, “at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely”), and the infliction of death, starvation, and other forms of deprivation on a massive scale.

He also takes Holocaust experts to task for their conspicuous silence, arguing that it has caused a rift with the “wider community of genocide scholars” that is coming “ever closer toward a consensus over describing events in Gaza as a genocide.”

Still, despite transparently responding to Bartov, Stephens does not dare mention his name. The reason why is obvious. Had Stephens acknowledged the essay’s existence, he might have caused readers to wonder what qualifies him, of all people, to contradict a leading genocide expert. He might have also run the risk of inadvertently prompting people to go and read it, thereby enabling them to contrast Bartov’s reasoned judgment with Stephens’s frivolous deflections.

As Bartov notes, he is hardly alone among human rights experts in accusing Israel of genocide. The ranks of those who have joined him include international organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Israeli organizations like B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and official bodies such as the International Court of Justice and the United Nations Special Rapporteur.

Dozens of individual specialists agree, including Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars; Amos Goldberg, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Hebrew University; Daniel Blatman, a professor in the same department as Goldberg; William A. Schabas, a professor of international human rights law at Middlesex University; Luis Moreno Ocampo, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court; Aryeh Neier, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch; Shmuel Lederman, a research fellow at the Weiss-Livnat International Center for Holocaust Research and Education at the University of Haifa; Martin Shaw, a sociologist and genocide expert at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals; and Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University.

On the one hand, then, there are legions of human rights specialists, organizations, and agencies that contend that Israel is at least plausibly guilty of genocide. On the other hand, you have Bret Stephens—someone who, notably, is not a human rights expert and who for some reason chose to “examine” the issue without acknowledging, much less engaging with, the dozens of actual experts who have made the claim.

If you want your readers to take you seriously on an issue, it might help if you take it seriously yourself.

It may well be possible to dispute Israel's culpability for genocide in a way that is evidence-based and intellectually honest. But this ain’t it.

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Equality For Some

Thought experiment: How would Stephens respond if somebody treated Hamas's terrorist attack on October 7^th, 2023 with the same glaring omissions and lazy excuse-making that he applies to Israel's crimes? What if they took his words and turned them around to describe Hamas?

Consider the following statements, all of which are adapted from Stephens’s own:

• “There are important questions to be asked about the tactics Hamas has used…[but] hardly any movement in history has pursued decolonization without at least some of its soldiers committing war crimes.”

• “Trigger-happy militants or strikes that hit the wrong target or movement leaders reaching for vengeful soundbites do not come close to adding up to genocide. They are decolonization in its usual tragic dimensions.”

• “Israel’s tactics, which are war crimes in themselves, make it difficult for Hamas to achieve its military aims: a Palestinian state and the elimination of the Israeli state so that Palestinians may never again be threatened with more indiscriminate attacks.”

• “While some pundits and scholars may sincerely believe the genocide charge against Hamas, it is also used by racists to equate Palestine with Nazi Germany.”

Leaving aside the factual inaccuracies and selective omissions they contain, such statements are morally reprehensible. They excuse Hamas’s crimes, obscure its eliminationist goals, and discount the lives of its victims—just as Stephens does when using those very same words to defend Israel.

It would be one thing if Israel, unlike Hamas, were not intentionally targeting civilians. But Israel clearly is targeting civilians and doing so on an enormous scale—by its own admission, too. As such, it would be wrong to describe the above as an exercise in false equivalence.

There is a term for the failure to afford others the same dignity one demands for one’s own community. That term is dehumanization, and it is exactly what Stephens is doing in his column. His strained rationalizations derive from the same impulse behind the genocide itself, one which carves out exceptions in the granting of basic humanity to certain groups for the sake of bestowing eternal innocence on others.

In this respect, Stephens’s evidence-free whitewashing of Israel’s genocide is indistinguishable from that of the ostensible leftists who excuse Russia's genocide against Ukrainians. Both suspend the privilege of humanity for whole groups of people whose only crime is to be victimized by the wrong offender.

For Stephens, as for his pro-Russian counterparts, the obligation to exonerate a favored perpetrator outweighs his professed commitment to universal equality.

Stephens would never accept such doltish apologias on Hamas’s behalf, which begs the question of why he finds it acceptable to do the same for Israel. The inescapable conclusion is that he assigns less value to the Palestinians than he does to other communities.

Either we are to recognize the universal equality of human dignity or instead maintain that some people have less dignity than others. It is clear where Stephens stands. It is high time that the rest of us made our choice.

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Share The Detox with Neil Abrams

Last week, we looked at the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts and, in particular, its relentless assault on prevailing Constitutional law. At nearly every turn, he and his fellow rightwing jurists have sought to beat back the cause of equality and fairness—original intent, past precedent, and statutory text be damned.

And that was before the start of Donald Trump’s second term. In the months since, the Court has enthusiastically enabled his authoritarian project.

However flagrant the egregious distortions and motivated reasoning behind the Court’s illiberal turn, one would be mistaken to see it as an anomaly. Except for a brief period in the mid-20th century, the Supreme Court has always been reactionary, attacking America’s vulnerable and debasing the ideals of its founding documents.

Even when more expansive interpretations were available, the Court has time and again adopted a maximally restrictive view of the Constitution, one which benefits the rich, the white, and the powerful at the expense of everyone else.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the post-Civil War era. This period, known as Reconstruction, saw three Constitutional amendments adopted that, for the first time, applied the Bill of Rights to all citizens regardless of race.

Permitting such extraordinary change was the combination of the Union victory and the awarding of the franchise to the newly-emancipated Black freedmen. During Reconstruction, African-Americans allied with radical Republicans in Congress—some of whom were Black themselves—to transform the republic into something approaching a multiracial democracy, at least for men (women of all races would have to wait until the 20th century).

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Still, it would not be long before aggrieved Southern whites, with the acquiescence of their Northern counterparts, returned power to themselves through a campaign of ruthless lawfare and violent intimidation. For decades thereafter, African-Americans in the South and beyond were relegated to a system of apartheid which rendered them second-class citizens.

Although the sordid history of racial segregation is widely known, less understood is the pivotal role the Supreme Court played in bringing it about. The partisan tactics and strained, self-serving rationales it employed bore striking similarities to the ones the Court uses to strip away rights today.

The story of the Reconstruction Court lays bare just how unexceptional its modern counterpart is. As it bolsters Trump's authoritarianism and eviscerates long-established rights, the Roberts majority borrows from an old playbook, one conceived by the white supremacists who presided over the same body in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Read more

As another Supreme Court term comes to an end, it is hard to decide which of its abominable decisions was the worst. Which entailed the most egregious assault on rights? Which involved the most dishonest reading of the law? Which displayed the most contempt for the separation of powers?

Was it Trump v. Wilcox, in which the Court blessed President Donald Trump's dismissal of two senior officials without cause in blatant disregard of past precedent and statutory law?

Was it United States v. Skrmetti, in which the conservative majority pretended that explicit discrimination on the basis of sex is not, in fact, discrimination on the basis of sex?

Maybe it was Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D. which authorizes the administration to deport noncitizens to violent, repressive countries without any opportunity to contest the decision before a judge?

Fortunately, D.V.D. does not permit the deportation of just anyone; it only applies to people whom a judge has already deemed eligible for removal.

Nevertheless, judges often decide that deportable persons cannot be transferred to their countries-of-origin due to the threat that they might face torture.

According to the Supreme Court’s ruling in D.V.D., however, the government can still deport such individuals to a third country—without allowing them to challenge that decision. It can do so even if the country in question is one where the defendant might conceivably endure mistreatment and was chosen for that purpose to fulfill Stephen Miller’s weird psychosexual fantasy.

Deporting people to places where they are likely to endure human rights abuses violates the Convention Against Torture, an international treaty which Congress ratified decades ago and whose implementation it passed numerous laws to facilitate. Thanks to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is now free to ignore it.

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Suspending the Constitution

But perhaps the Court’s most reprehensible decision of late was Trump v. CASA. In this case, the Roberts majority looked at the birthright citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and decided, “nah.”

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the US. Its language could not possibly be clearer. It states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Enacted after the Civil War, the amendment’s immediate purpose was to grant automatic citizenship to the formerly enslaved. Nevertheless, its framers were explicit that the right applies to anyone born in the US, African-American or not.

In line with his aim to remake America as a white nation, Trump signed an executive order the very day he was inaugurated that declared the birthright citizenship clause null and void.

Given the order’s blatant unconstitutionality, three different federal judges subsequently issued nationwide injunctions barring it from taking force.

The administration then appealed to the Supreme Court, where it can expect a sympathetic hearing on any action, however illegal, which shits on the rights of Brown people.

To be clear, there was nothing stopping the Court from ruling on the legality of Trump's order. Still, it chose not to. For that would have put the Republican justices in a bind: Either affirm the Fourteenth Amendment, which they have long endeavored to undermine, or pretend that it does not say what it plainly does, thereby debasing themselves before the entire legal community.

To avoid this tradeoff, the majority decided that it would say nothing about the order’s constitutionality, at least for now. Instead, it would rule only on whether federal judges have the authority to enact nationwide injunctions of the kind that had prevented the order from going into effect.

One could make a valid case that such injunctions should be disallowed. But as Sherrilyn Ifill explains, the Court chose a hell of a time to do it.

Ifill, a civil rights attorney who heads the Fourteenth Amendment Center for Law and Democracy at the Howard University School of Law, cannot see any legitimate basis for

this majority’s extension of the executive’s power to allow the President to flagrantly violate express guarantees of citizenship under the Constitution. I say “this” President, because the Court’s hands-off approach to nationwide injunctions issued against Biden Administration initiatives (student loan forgiveness, moratorium on new oil and gas leases) makes clear that it is only Republican Presidents—or maybe only President Trump— who the conservative justices believe must [be] free from the constraints of district court orders.

In other words, the same justices who were fine with nationwide injunctions under President Biden suddenly discovered they were unconstitutional the minute they constrained Trump from doing a racism.

Fancy that.

The CASA ruling permits the Trump administration to disregard a fundamental Constitutional right. To be sure, it cannot deny birthright citizenship throughout the land. It can only do so to noncitizens who have not filed suit against the administration and to the residents of states whose (Democratic) governments have not challenged the executive order in court. For all other noncitizens, however, birthright citizenship no longer exists.

Are you a baby born to a noncitizen family in California? You are in luck, as you will receive automatic US citizenship just as the Fourteenth Amendment requires. That is because the State of California has already sued to stop the order from taking effect.

Were you instead born in Texas, whose attorney general is a Republican prick who endorses Trump's vile bigotry? If that is you, I am sorry to tell you that you are fated to grow up stateless, without any of the privileges that the Constitution affords to citizens. You can even be deported, at least until the Roberts majority gets around to deciding that Trump's unconstitutional order actually is unconstitutional.

As you might imagine, the Court’s liberal justices pulled no punches in condemning the decision. “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” proclaimed Sonia Sotomayor in a withering dissent. CASA, she wrote, “renders Constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only.”

Ketanji Brown Jackson was equally unsparing, warning that the ruling “is an existential threat to the rule of law.”

Ifill, of Howard University, concurs, while also highlighting how the Roberts majority is facilitating Trump's lawless, authoritarian behavior. The administration, she observes, “is pretty flagrantly playing in the face of district court judges, defying orders, subverting the district court, and lying to district courts. The Supreme Court is aware of all this and they seem not to be bothered by it.”

“Time and time again,” notes Madiba K. Dennie of Balls & Strikes, “a district court judge orders the Trump administration to follow the law, the administration asks the Court to let it keep breaking the law, and the Court grants the administration’s request.”

In sum, at the same time that it has ignored the Constitution and disregarded statutory law, the Roberts majority has selectively hobbled Democrats while enabling Trump and his party to destroy the republic.

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No Confidence

Legal scholars are having a tough time explaining to their law students why they should lend the Supreme Court any credibility at all. This is not a new development. In 2008, Larry Kramer resigned as Dean of Stanford Law School in response to the Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller.

Heller amounted to a wholesale rewriting of the Second Amendment. The amendment grants the right to bear arms not to anyone who wants a gun but only to the members of a “well regulated Militia.” Heller ignores this text, along with decades of judicial precedent, and grants the right of gun ownership to anyone who meets the regulatory requirements of their state.

“I couldn’t stand up in front of the class and pretend the students should take the court seriously,” Kramer said of the decision.

But that was almost twenty years ago. Now, a growing number of scholars are at their wits’ end. “While I was working on my syllabus for this course, I literally burst into tears,” Rebecca Brown of the University of Southern California recounted. Brown, who has been teaching law for 35 years, “couldn’t figure out how any of this makes sense. Why do we respect it? Why do we do any of it?”

“Flat-out bonkers,” Sandy Levinson, a professor at the University of Texas law school, remarked on Clarence Thomas’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen. Bruen went even further than Heller by effectively banning all laws restricting gun ownership. “I try to imagine, what if this were a seminar paper?” he said of Thomas’s distorted reasoning.

Lee Epstein, of the University of Southern California, agrees. “It sounds almost crazy when you put it that way, doesn’t it?” he said of Bruen. He was referring to Justice Thomas’s historically illiterate effort to identify a precedent for the decision in English common law. “It’s made-up history. No sense of judicial humility.”

The general public might lack these scholars’ expertise. But it can still recognize the Court’s unapologetic hypocrisy, glaring dishonesty, and shameless corruption for what it is.

Over the past few decades, Gallup has surveyed respondents in more than 160 countries on their views of their judicial systems. A December poll found a stunning drop in public confidence in America’s judiciary, which declined a full 24 percentage points from 2020 to 2024, down from 59 to 35 percent.

Only nine other countries in the entire history of the poll have experienced sharper falls than the US.

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Annals of Disgrace

The shameful record of the Court in its most recent term is consistent with its equally ignominious decisions in previous years.

One of many such examples was its evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, the most important legislative act in American history. Its passage in 1965 marked the fulfillment of the Constitution’s century-old promise of multiracial democracy.

Alternatively, consider the Court’s decision in Trump v. United States (2024). By granting Trump a get-out-of-jail-free card for his many crimes in his first term, it repudiated the core principle underpinning the American experiment: that the people shall not be subject to elected kings.

Or take Dobbs v. Jackson (2022), which ruled that people who become pregnant do not enjoy the rights that the Constitution plainly affords them.

It is evil enough to force those who consented to have sex give birth against their will. But consigning them to die preventable deaths by bleeding out in hospital parking lots? Or making child rape victims carry their assailants’ offspring to term? That is downright barbaric.

The extraordinary burden pregnancy imposes on a person, much less that involved in raising a child, makes abortion bans impossible to defend—at least if one accepts that women are actual people as opposed to “incubators with mouthparts,” to borrow Elie Mystal’s eloquent framing.

In Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution, Mystal, the justice correspondent for The Nation magazine, argues compellingly that forced birth is indefensible under any circumstances. It is indefensible on moral grounds. It is indefensible on “originalist” grounds, meaning as a doctrine that the Founders would have endorsed. And it is indefensible on Constitutional grounds.

Contrary to the conceit of Republican Supreme Court justices, Mystal says, one cannot possibly argue that the Constitution’s drafters somehow valued the lives of the unborn:

Don’t you dare fix your lying mouth to tell me that these people who condemned their own progeny to bondage and torment, for the sin of being conceived in the womb of a colored woman—a woman they would continue to work and rape while she was pregnant with their child—gave one damn about the health and safety of “the unborn.”

But that is not all. For not only are abortion bans inconsistent with the Founders’ priorities; they violate the Constitution itself. Forced birth, by any reasonable standard, flouts the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. It likewise contravenes the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on forced labor.

And let us not forget the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equality under the law. If, again, we accept the principle that women are people, as men are, Mystal contends, then we can hardly deny reproductive freedom to one of those categories while affording it to the other.

We Don’t Need the Supreme Court

Most Americans, especially those who came of age during the late twentieth century, view the Supreme Court as an important, if flawed, guarantor of individual rights. But this perception stems from a relatively brief period in the middle of the century when the Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, actually fulfilled its liberal, egalitarian potential.

This era, which lasted from 1953 to 1969 and also encompassed a handful of years that followed, was the one that gave us such hallowed decisions as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which ended racial segregation; Loving v. Virginia (1967), which legalized interracial marriage; and Roe v. Wade (1973), which made abortion the law of the land.

But as we will see next time, the Supreme Court did not advance freedom and inequality during the rest of its history. Far from it, in fact; it enabled the powerful and abetted their assault on human dignity.

In this regard, the Roberts Court has further—and radically—brought the judiciary back into line with its sordid past. It has taken the promise set forth in America’s founding documents and made a mockery of it.

Those of us who take this promise seriously are under no obligation to respect a reactionary judicial cabal that pisses on it year after year. By enabling Trump’s bid for dictatorship, the Court’s rightwing majority has relinquished any legitimate claim to rule over us.

Fortunately, there are remedies that can check its excesses—ones that will not only prove effective but, in a post-Trump world, become increasingly realistic. Next time, we will consider what these remedies are.

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Timothy Snyder, for Thinking About…, on how concentration camps and slave labor might be coming to America.

John Ganz, for Unpopular Front, on the implications of Trump's attack on birthright citizenship.

Anne Applebaum, for The Atlantic, on what happens when Trump's revolution runs into obstacles.

Spencer Ackerman, for Zeteo, on the racist moral panic over New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdami.

Robert McCoy, for The New Republic, on the astounding expansion of ICE that is in store now that Trump's budget bill has passed.

When an incumbent leader is unpopular, the opposition usually reaps the dividends. This is not happening for the Democratic Party, however. The reason is obvious: In the face of an unprecedented authoritarian power-grab, the party is widely—and correctly—perceived as not putting up a fight.

The stunning victory of Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, in New York City’s mayoral primary last week is just the latest example. The significance of his triumph is hard to overstate.

Despite suffering an extreme disadvantage in funding and an all-out assault from the party establishment, wealthy donors, and prominent news outlets, he still won—and won decisively. He did so on the back of a multiracial, cross-class coalition that extended to places where one would not expect a far-left politician to succeed, such as Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side and working-class neighborhoods in Queens.

Mamdani’s victory is not an outlier. From the start of Donald Trump’s second term, the Democratic rank-and-file has been in open rebellion against a feckless party establishment that is seemingly oblivious to America’s new authoritarian reality.

When an opposition party suddenly faces a would-be dictator who is upending the constitutional order, it can take a while to find its bearings. Having studied similar situations in other countries, however, I do understand how it works.

To be sure, authoritarianism poses serious obstacles for the opposition. But it also creates opportunities—especially when the authoritarian leader in question is an incompetent, self-aggrandizing nitwit with no impulse control.

At the same time, if the opposition is too slow to adapt, it can find itself overtaken by events. This, unfortunately, is the path the Democrats are currently on. Absent a fundamental rethinking of their approach, they run the risk of being left behind by the movement they are supposed to lead.

The warning signs are everywhere. But so are the solutions.

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And so it happened. On Saturday evening, President Donald Trump announced that American forces bombed several Iranian nuclear sites.

For the past week, Israel has been carrying out its own airstrikes in the country, targeting nuclear facilities, assassinating regime figures, and destroying apartment buildings.

The ostensible purpose of Israel’s attacks was to damage Iran’s nuclear program and enlist America's help in doing so. It might well have succeeded, too.

But a closer look suggests that this was not the intention after all. If the goal was to undermine Tehran’s nuclear capabilities, for example, why the need to obliterate civilian apartment complexes?

Not only that, but there is no evidence that Iran was any closer to developing a nuclear weapon yesterday than it was one year, two years, or three years ago. In fact, it has been on the cusp of acquiring such a weapon for the past sixteen years—which is another way of saying that it was not on the cusp of doing anything.

Iran could build a nuclear weapon if it wanted to. It could have built one as far back as 2009 had it been so inclined. And yet, it did not.

Note the date on the following headline:

So ludicrous are the rationales put forth by the war’s proponents, and so disastrous the potential consequences, that two things are clear.

First, the people who have been urging a US attack are full of shit.

Second, the only ones who stand to benefit are Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the war serves as a personal vanity project and legal defense tactic, and the various warlords who would emerge in the wake of the Iranian regime's collapse.

How do I know this, you ask? Let's take a look.

To start with the obvious, nobody, including the United States, is going to invade and conquer Iran.

An invasion from the east is impossible, as it would have to be launched from Afghanistan and in turn require the cooperation of the Taliban. Even then, the US would have to move an army across the eastern mountains and then through the vast deserts of Dasht-e Lut and Dasht-e Kavir.

Invading from the west is just as implausible, as it would mean traversing the towering Zagros mountain range. Those mountains, along with others, protect Iran’s Persian Gulf Coast stretching southeast toward the Gulf of Oman.

Meanwhile, the one part of the country that is not buffeted by mountains is comprised of impenetrable swampland.

Even if American forces somehow made it through Iran's imposing exterior, they would find an interior dominated by uninhabitable desert plateaus.

That is not to mention the challenges of invading and pacifying a country three times as populous as Iraq and with a territory larger than France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands combined.

All in all, it would necessitate a force of 1.6 million troops. By comparison, the highest number of US troops that were ever present in Iraq was 180,000.

In other words, an invasion is not happening.

Nuclear Resilience

If a ground invasion is out, that leaves an aerial assault like the one we just witnessed as the only option. But no such attack could permanently eliminate Iran's nuclear capability. While American bombs might have destroyed its existing nuclear infrastructure, the country still possesses the technological know-how to revive the program within a few years.

“Even if there was a complete destruction of all of Iran's enrichment capability,” explains Joe Cirincione, an expert on the country’s nuclear program, “when the war was over, Iran could start building it back up again.”

In fact, Trump's military intervention makes it more, not less, likely that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. The only reason the regime has not done so already is that it decided that the costs outweighed the benefits. Its goal all along was not to acquire a weapon but to be perpetually in the process of acquiring a weapon. This, as far as the regime was concerned, gave it the most leverage to compel America to remove sanctions while minimizing the possibility of a US attack.

But now that America has (supposedly) destroyed its nuclear facilities—a move which, again, only amounts to a temporary setback—the regime’s calculus will likely change. Since the US would not make a deal, Iran’s leadership might decide that the way forward is to obtain actual nukes.

This fact should be obvious to any reasonably intelligent and informed observer—someone, in particular, like Benjamin Netanyahu. And it probably is. Yet, he nonetheless went ahead with a plan that undermines his country’s national interests.

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Collapse and Civil War

Another potential outcome of the war, especially if Trump launches more attacks, is the end of the Iranian regime. This would appear to be Netanyahu’s real aim.

But contrary to what Israeli and American officials would like you to believe, bringing down the regime would not benefit either country. While Trump might be too stupid to understand this, Netanyahu is not.

After all, we have a recent example of an American war that successfully brought about regime change in a Middle Eastern country. The 2003 invasion of Iraq did not produce a new and stable US ally but instead resulted in its violent collapse and the eventual rise of ISIS.

There is no reason to think that the attack on Iran will turn out any better. Far from it, in fact; the consequences might be orders of magnitude worse. The toppling of Saddam Hussein resulted in prolonged and violent conflict among Iraq’s Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish communities. Iran is divided along similar lines, with a Shia majority concentrated in the country’s center, a Sunni minority in the north, west, and southeast, and a Kurdish minority in the west and northeast.

But it gets even more complicated than that. In addition to those three groups, Iran is host to a number of others as well, including Azeris in the northwest, Arabs in the southwest, and Baloch in the southeast, to name a few.

Many of these minorities are resentful toward regime policies which have long favored the Shia Muslim and ethnic Persian majority at the expense of the others. Hence, if the regime does collapse, expect a complex and brutally violent civil war to break out as most if not all of these groups have a go at independence.

In a society as divided as Iran's, the collapse of the state can result in staggering levels of death and destruction. The reason is that rival communities start operating according to a “kill them before they kill us” logic.

That is not all, however. Aside from sectarian and ethnic violence, the country could witness a separate war between rival elite factions from the old regime.

Nor would the effects of a civil war be limited to Iran. Such conflicts tend to destabilize neighboring countries, too. For one thing, they trigger the large-scale exodus of refugees. For example, as Shia refugees pour into Iraq, it would upset that country’s own sectarian balance and tip it back into civil war. The same could happen if masses of ethnic Kurds take refuge in Turkey and Iranian Azeris move into Armenia and Azerbaijan.

But refugee crises are not the only way in which an Iranian civil war would affect its neighbors. The sight of ethnic and sectarian bloodshed in Iran would cause dangerous tensions between the same groups in other places.

If Kurds and Azeris start killing each other in Iran, it could lead to revenge killings between Turkey’s Kurdish and Turkish communities, the latter of whom regard Azeris as their own. Violence among Iran’s Sunnis and Shias could have the same effect in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, all of which feature sectarian conflicts of their own.

Moreover, if the collapse of Iraq gave us ISIS, what new barbaric terrorist organization would Iran’s disintegration produce?

Oh, and let us not forget the hundreds of pounds of highly enriched uranium that could be sold on the black market in the event of a regime collapse and civil war.

Nice, huh?

What makes America's intervention even more destabilizing is its likely impact on the global supply of oil. One reason the US never attacked Iran before is the likelihood that the regime would retaliate by shutting down the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz— the 34-kilometer-wide waterway that connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and through which travels fully one-quarter of the world’s oil supply.

Which of these myriad disasters are you most looking forward to? An emboldened regime that doubles down on its quest for nuclear weapons? A collapsed regime that unleashes war, instability, and black-market uranium on the rest of the region? The oil shock that ensues either way?

Finally, would any of these things somehow further the national interests of America or Israel?

The question answers itself.

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Damsel In Distress

There is only one person who will actually benefit from Trump's attack, and that is Benjamin Netanyahu.

You see, Netanyahu is in trouble. He has two problems, in particular. The first is his ongoing corruption trial, the outcome of which he wants to delay for as long as possible. The best way to do that is by staying in power, and to stay in power, he must keep initiating new crises and new wars—wars like the one he started with Iran.

Netanyahu's dependence on new wars stems from his second problem: October 7^th, 2023. That day, as Hamas militants stormed out of Gaza and massacred scores of Israelis, the entire security paradigm he had painstakingly built throughout his time in power collapsed.

In the years leading up to the attack, he and his allies shifted their focus to annexing the West Bank, having convinced themselves that they had successfully pacified Gaza. This was a grave miscalculation on Netanyahu's part, one which put his legacy in jeopardy and raised the question of why he should remain prime minister at all.

To save himself, he needed redemption. His genocidal assault on Gaza’s Palestinians was one way of achieving this. More than a year and a half later, however, he is no longer getting the same mileage out of it that he once did.

In the meantime, he faces sagging approval ratings and rising opposition from within his ruling coalition. As a result, he stands on the precipice of losing power once again—or at least he did before he attacked Iran. Now, with his approval picking back up and his opponents rallying behind him, he might yet survive.

If the US intervention succeeded in destroying Iran’s nuclear assets and ends up bringing down its regime, Netanyahu might finally redeem his earlier mistakes and salvage his reputation.

This, after all, is the only reason we even got to this point—well, that and a weak American president who can be easily manipulated into doing stupid things. Let us hope that the worst fails to happen.

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In the midst of an unprecedented military crackdown on Los Angeles protesters, 75 House Democrats voted Monday in support of a GOP resolution thanking the very agency that the city’s residents were protesting against.

The resolution “expresses gratitude to law enforcement officers, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel, for protecting the homeland."

I never thought I would have to say this, but you do not, in fact, have to hand it to the government jackboots remaking America in the name of white power.

The episode offers further confirmation that most Democrats relinquish any role they might play in the shaping of public opinion. They accept that Republicans can do it but see themselves as powerless to do the same.

In the Democratic mindset, Trump and his party are narrative-makers while they are narrative-takers. All they can do is accept how Republicans frame the world and respond to it on Republican terms—regardless of how outrageous and divorced from reality the GOP story is. Once Republicans say it—"Immigrants are a threat!”—it gets baked into public opinion, forcing Democrats to affirm it before staking out a position of their own.

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As the incompetence and depravity of Donald Trump's second term plumb ever-further depths, revelations that once would have saturated media coverage for years are now forgotten within hours. Trump has not shifted the Overton window; he has smashed it.

On the one hand, he is taking everything that is bad about America, such as structural racism and neglect of the poor, and making it official policy.

But he is not simply magnifying the bad parts. Every single policy, institution, and ideal which has served some positive end is being turned on its head and replaced by its opposite.

The examples are as numerous as they are shocking. They also carry implications for the Democratic Party and the effort to bring down his regime.

Let’s take a look.

Rights are now privileges: Rights, by definition, are universal. If a right is not universal, it is not a right; it is a privilege reserved for some and denied to others. What makes things like due process and freedom of speech rights is that they are guaranteed to everyone.

The reality is a bit muddier, of course. Black and Brown people do not receive the same due process as others, for instance. There is nothing new about that.

Still, the Trump administration has taken it to a new level. Trashing Constitutional rights has now become official policy. Immigrants and even US citizens are getting plucked off the street and deported, deprived of their right to have their case heard before a judge.

The First Amendment has itself become a privilege. Many of those who are detained are targeted not because they are present in the country illegally—they frequently do have legal status—but rather for saying things that Trump dislikes. Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk was whisked into an unmarked van and held for weeks in what a federal judge deemed a “violation of her first amendment rights.” Her offense was having co-authored an editorial in the student newspaper that criticized the university’s response to campus protests.

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Last week, three eminent scholars of authoritarianism appeared in a New York Times video entitled, “We’re Experts in Fascism. We’re Leaving the U.S.” In it, Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore, and Jason Stanley, who previously taught at Yale, explained why they are leaving for Canada, where they will teach at the University of Toronto.

The tone of the video is undeniably fatalistic. “Toni Morrison warned us,” declares Stanley, quoting the esteemed novelist: “The descent into a final solution is not a jump. It's one step. And then another. And then another.” He goes on to add that “we are seeing those steps accelerated right now.”

Shore, for her part, is all but ready to throw in the towel. “The lesson of 1933 is that you get out sooner rather than later,” she affirmed before likening today’s America to the sinking Titanic.

The experts above might know more about Nazi Germany than I do. But I am familiar enough to recognize an overwrought comparison when I see it.

This matters. For if the coming years are likely to witness anything like Nazi Germany, then you probably should flee the country. If it will be something less than that, then resistance might really make a difference.

America has become an authoritarian regime. This is a point I have stressed repeatedly in this newsletter. Not only that; it will almost certainly get worse in the coming years.

But at no point in the foreseeable future will authoritarianism rise to the level of an outright dictatorship like that of Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, or Putin's Russia. It will not even approach Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, whose regimes, while authoritarian, are not dictatorships in which all dissent has been effectively stamped out.

To see why, consider the advantages those leaders held—advantages that are not available to Trump.

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Welcome back, folks.

Before we get to today's topic, I have some important news.

As previously discussed, The Fix, my new weekly supplement, is now moving behind a paywall. While my regular deep dives in The Detox will remain free of charge, I am offering The Fix as an added incentive to become a paid subscriber.

But that is not all that a paid subscription will get you. In total, paid supporters of The Detox will now receive the following package:

• The Fix: a weekly installment that ties current events to the big picture

• Monthly ask-me-anything calls on Zoom

• A subscriber-only chat thread

• Early access to the free deep dives

Because a paid subscription now includes quite a bit more than it did in the past, I am increasing the price to $6.99 monthly or $69 annually. If you are interested, please sign up.

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With that out of the way, let us move on to more pressing business. Previously, we considered how to stop the Republican coup attempt that will inevitably ensue in the event of a Democratic election victory in 2028.

What we have not yet examined is the possibility that the Republicans will continue trying to overthrow the republic in the years that follow. One can easily envision a scenario in which democratic forces must somehow keep the specter of Republican tyranny at bay indefinitely.

However daunting it may seem, I think it is possible. Below, I will explain how.

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In the last issue of The Fix, we saw how Trump is setting the stage for his own demise through his wanton authoritarian overreach. By targeting so many potential opposition centers at once, he has unwittingly brought into being a sustained mass resistance movement (albeit not on a scale that might directly threaten his regime just yet).

And we are barely four months in.

But there is another aspect of his recklessness which we have not yet considered, and that is his laughably egregious corruption. Trump’s first administration was already the most corrupt in U.S. history to that point—by a long shot, too. His second promises to exceed it.

I wrote my PhD dissertation on elite corruption in Eastern Europe. With the exception of Estonia, every place I visited featured a stunning amount of graft. In one key respect, however, Trump’s illicit conduct is worse than anything I observed in the countries I researched—not in terms of scale (this would be hard to pull off in four months) but certainly in its flagrancy. In Eastern Europe, elites hid their dealings behind complex webs of offshore entities. Trump and his allies are just doing it out in the open.

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Up the Creek…

While Qatar’s personal gift of a new Air Force One has garnered the most attention, it is only the tip of the iceberg.

Take the numerous dinners Trump has hosted featuring “donors” who pay millions of dollars a plate. The funds’ reputed destination is his presidential library which, thanks to legal loopholes, in practice operates as a personal slush fund.

Trump is helping out his friends, too—and his most special friend, in particular. The administration has applied relentless pressure on foreign countries to buy Elon Musk’s Starlink technology. Look beyond the multi-billion-dollar business and complicated technology involved and you will find an elementary mafia protection racket. There are no shell companies concealing the names of the beneficiaries—indeed, there cannot be, since we know who owns the company that sells the product.

Also happening in public view is Trump’s crypto corruption. To be sure, such schemes benefit from a certain degree of obscurity since most people are not familiar with how these transactions work. Well, I do know how they work, and I can assure you that the grifting on display is ludicrous.

For starters, Trump and his family have issued their own crypto coins, which offer the possibility of rent-seeking on multiple levels. Before the coins go on the market, a select few insiders have the opportunity to buy huge amounts for practically nothing. Then, as soon as the coins launch, the insiders watch as the value of their holdings soar by ten, twenty, or even fiftyfold. Nor is that all, because Trump earns a transaction fee every time somebody buys or sells a coin, a benefit which has likely made him hundreds of millions of dollars thus far.

In sum, when we see these multimillion-dollar purchases of $TRUMP coins—and we can literally observe the transactions in real time (though not the identities of the buyers and sellers)—we are watching people stuff cash into the president’s pockets.

As if to underscore the blatant influence-peddling at the racket’s core, Trump introduced the $TRUMP coin just a few days before taking office. As of mid-March, his crypto assets were worth an estimated $2.9 billion.

And that was before the launch of his stablecoin. Unlike conventional crypto coins, whose values fluctuate widely, stablecoins are designed to maintain a constant value of $1, similarly to a money market fund. They are (wrongly) considered “safe” vehicles which can be used for storing cash or conducting large crypto transactions. For instance, people might purchase $TRUMP coins using stablecoins instead of cash or, in the event that they are selling their $TRUMP coins, accept payment in stablecoins.

But here is the catch: When investors buy a stablecoin, the stablecoin’s issuer can invest the money elsewhere and keep any profits those investments yield.

Normally, this does not pose ethical concerns. But when the stablecoin’s issuer also happens to be the president of the United States, it does. In late March, World Liberty Financial, a firm effectively controlled by the Trump family, issued its own stablecoin to great fanfare. Since then, wealthy individuals and foreign countries have been lining up to purchase billions of dollars-worth of it. By doing so, they are flat-out bribing the world’s most powerful head of state.

Having spent years immersed in a cesspool of post-communist graft, I must say that watching government officials and their relatives publicly announce their corruption at staged media events is a first for me. These people are making no attempt to hide their self-dealing. There are no anonymous bank transfers or smoke-filled rooms; it is just a bunch of idiots accepting bribes and bragging about it to the rest of us.

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…Without a Paddle

Corruption involves a trade-off. On the one hand, it enriches you and your friends. On the other, it makes everyone else mad. In this way, the benefits come along with costs.

In Eastern Europe, the way in which those costs manifested themselves depended on the type of regime in which the corruption was occurring. In democracies, corruption scandals routinely brought down governments through no-confidence votes and election defeats. Whenever a government fell, in fact, corruption—not the economy or foreign policy—was far and away the most likely culprit.

Corruption is not as costly for authoritarian rulers because they insulate themselves from public backlash. Accomplishing this takes work, however. In particular, it requires creating structures and institutions that are capable of taming civil society.

Establishing control over the media is the bare minimum prerequisite in this regard. Before turning his country into a cash register for himself and his oligarchic clients, Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán made sure to rein in the press. He withdrew public advertising from critical media outlets, which is a big deal in Hungary since the state accounts for nearly all media spending. He created a new agency to regulate the media which is empowered to impose fines and revoke licenses. He enacted a law requiring journalists to reveal their sources for any story related to national security or “public safety.” He pressured domestic media owners to sell their outlets to his cronies. And he did all of this within a year of taking office.

Other autocrats went further. In his first decade as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin did not face much in the way of societal resistance. While he did rule as an autocrat, you could still sit outside at a bar and discuss politics without looking over your shoulder. You could also find plenty of independent press coverage—not on TV but certainly in print and online.

Only in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election did Russian civil society start to mobilize in earnest. In response, Putin began work on a vast system of repression. Within a few years, he would have under his personal control a half-million-strong National Guard force (Rosgvardia) tasked with suppressing protests.

Today in Russia there is no longer anything resembling a civil society. Every single opposition figure is either dead, imprisoned, or exiled while ordinary Russians face long prison terms for errant social media posts. The upshot is that Putin and his ruling clique can engage in the most brazen corruption imaginable without fear of public backlash.

Trump is putting none of these measures in place. He is certainly trying to subordinate the media and in a few cases has had some success. But even outlets which have capitulated to him continue to put out critical coverage. This is not to mention the plethora of independent media organizations, NGOs, and watchdogs that have not given into his pressure and never would. Repressing them all would be impossible even for a competent authoritarian. Trump, needless to say, is not a competent authoritarian.

As for building organs of repression, he has barely even begun. His executive order directing federal resources to state and local police departments is a start but is a long way from a Russian-style Rosgvardia. He could try to use the army for this purpose, but can he really count on professional soldiers to beat and murder peaceful protesters—and on a scale that would have the requisite deterrent effect? I seriously doubt it. Regardless, no matter what type of force he manages to construct, it would never be sufficient to crush a nationwide civil resistance movement.

Sowing the Seeds

Thus, at the same time that Trump is publicly flaunting his graft, he lacks the necessary coercive apparatus to subdue the resulting backlash. Like his other weaknesses, this one can be used against him.

Still, when it comes to quashing dissent, he is certainly trying. In addition to his efforts to intimidate everyone and their grandmother, his unabashed corruption is one more manifestation of his authoritarian overreach.

Corruption is dangerous; it triggers an innate sense of unfairness in a way that, say, the improper use of the Justice Department does not. People who are not necessarily moved by the sight of immigrants getting rounded up might well lose their patience when they see a president openly raking in bribes.

Representative democracy and individual rights are not intuitive to the human mind. More than six thousand years of civilization elapsed before philosophers even discovered the concepts. But when those in power hoard for themselves what should rightfully belong to everyone, the inherent injustice of it is something a five-year-old can understand.

Astoundingly, it can even make Chuck Schumer bristle. The same guy who sat idly and watched as the president burned the republic down has suddenly perked up in response to the Qatari plane scandal, announcing that he would block any further Trump nominees to the Justice Department. (Trump was doing things in January which would have warranted this, but whatever.)

In fact, the Qatar affair marks the first time that Trump’s misconduct has prompted opposition from his own allies. If he keeps upping the ante—and it is reasonable to expect that he will—his ballooning corruption could help forge a nationwide civil resistance movement that is powerful enough to do him in. But it will not happen on its own; it will instead require coordinated messaging and activism on the part of civil society, with the Democratic Party taking the lead.

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Notwithstanding our current authoritarian dystopia, I am growing more optimistic by the week, albeit cautiously so.

My reaction might seem odd—you know, what with the shocking assault on American democracy unfolding before our eyes. It is true; while plenty of democracies have given way to authoritarianism in recent decades, Trump’s power-grab is unprecedented in its speed and breadth.

Still, a course this brazen cannot proceed without consequences, one of which is that Trump is alienating everybody under the sun. “At nearly every turn,” writes Zack Beauchamp of Vox, “key alternative power centers are standing up and fighting.”

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Though not widely reported, American civil society has been mobilizing in a big way. According to data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, the number of protest events since the start of Trump’s second term is more than two-and-a-half times the corresponding figure from his first administration. As he continues to ramp up his abuses, civil society resistance will only grow.

This would be a problem for any aspiring autocrat. For Trump, it is especially serious. That is because America’s civil society is stronger, more diffuse, and better-resourced than that of any other country which has ever transitioned to authoritarianism.

Below is a chart comparing the U.S. to other cases of autocratization. It is based on V-Dem’s Civil Society Participation Index. The index measures civil society’s strength in every country of the world on a scale from zero to one, with higher scores indicating a more vigorous civil society. Each country’s rating below is taken from the year before their respective autocrats came to power.

If America reaches the point where millions of people are protesting while also organizing strikes, boycotts, and other forms of nonviolent civil resistance on a national scale, Trump will be finished. It might take a stolen election or the shooting of protesters to trigger it. But mobilization on that scale would be nearly impossible to suppress. It would likely mean the end of his regime.

Welcome to the Resistance, Jeff Bezos?

Thus far, most of the resistance from civil society has come from the grassroots. Civil society’s elites—universities, religious leaders, and private sector firms—were until recently missing in action. Many had opted to try and appease Trump instead of pushing back.

A number of experts are skeptical about the wherewithal of civic leaders to resist. Last week, in The New York Times, Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt, all of whom are prominent scholars of authoritarianism, expressed dismay at the underwhelming response of civic elites to the new regime. “Strategies of self-preservation have led too many civil society leaders to retreat into silence or acquiesce to authoritarian bullying,” they wrote.

That is not what I am seeing. From what I can tell, the elites are beginning to fight back. Following Columbia University’s shameful capitulation, hundreds of universities signed a statement vowing to preserve their independence from presidential encroachment. Prominent religious leaders (outside of the Republicans’ white protestant base) have issued similar proclamations. Even more surprisingly, major law firms have forcefully rejected the way of their spineless peers and refused to sign instruments of surrender with a tinpot dictator. The firms that did cave are witnessing an exodus of talent.

America’s leading companies and the oligarchs1 who run them remain the missing piece. This matters, since the business elite as a whole is by far the most well-endowed segment of civil society. A nationwide campaign of civil resistance could probably sustain itself without their support but would obviously be more effective with it.

If he were trying to unite the oligarchs against him, he would be doing nothing differently than he is.

This reluctance to get involved is predictable. Corporate elites might be civil society’s most powerful element. But they are also its most cowardly. While one would think that having a ton of money makes one less fearful, it evidently has the opposite effect. When it comes time to choose between resisting authoritarianism or capitulating to it, the rich would much prefer to capitulate.

America’s oligarchs are not unique in this regard. Autocrats who play their cards right and employ the right mix of coercion and rewards can usually tame the major holders of wealth. Leaders who pulled this off include Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, among many others.

The preeminent example, of course, is Vladimir Putin. When Putin first came to power, Russia’s economy and state were dominated by the country’s oligarchs. Upon his inauguration as president in May of 2000, bringing them to heel was his first order of business.

The following month, Russian authorities arrested Vladimir Gusinsky, a media magnate who had opposed Putin’s election. In exchange for his freedom, he would sell his empire and leave the country. Weeks later, Putin summoned the remaining oligarchs to Stalin’s old dacha outside of Moscow. The choice of venue was intended to reinforce the message that Putin delivered: If they wished to keep their ill-gotten wealth, their freedom, and their very lives, they had better kiss the ring.

The strategy worked. But the reason why it worked was that Russia’s oligarchs were few enough in number that they could actually be assembled in a single room. This phenomenon is typical of most authoritarian regimes, being that they tend to arise in low- and middle-income countries with relatively little economic diversification and low levels of wealth. If only a few individuals reside at the summit of business, they are easier to control.

But the Fortune 500? Forget about it. For now, America’s oligarchs are staying silent. But if the dam breaks and enough of them start pushing back, Trump will not be able to intimidate them all.

His unchallenged power cannot last. One day, it may well be him who is besieged.

If he were smart, he would take the cautious and incremental approach of his peers, singling out a select few victims so as to signal to the remainder that they should avoid rocking the boat.

But Trump is not smart. He is also a megalomaniac who is congenitally incapable of understanding the consequences of his actions. Many of those he has surrounded himself with are similarly predisposed.

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Masterful Gambit, Sir

The oligarchs would like nothing more than to keep their heads down and muddle through. Only Trump is seemingly hellbent on alienating them. Let us count the ways:

• Tariffs: By far the most idiotic of his economic policies, it is difficult to identify a business sector that would not be harmed either directly or indirectly. Recent reporting suggests that America’s executives are mightily pissed. They are staying quiet for now. Expect that to change once the cargo ships stop coming in.

• Attacking the Federal Reserve. Trump has repeatedly vowed to shitcan Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell if he refuses to tailor monetary policy to the president’s liking. Threatening the independence of the one central bank responsible for overseeing the world’s reserve currency requires a level of undeserved arrogance and oblivious stupidity that I cannot possibly comprehend. The potential ramifications of such a move—a flight from U.S. assets followed by a ghastly recession—would not endear Trump to the corporate elite.

• Politicized investigations: The day after taking office, Trump ordered federal agencies to investigate America’s biggest companies for their Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (D.E.I.) practices. Soon afterward, Attorney General Pam Bondi instructed the Justice Department to sue and even criminally prosecute firms on these grounds. If this nonsense starts having tangible effects, the oligarchs are going to lose their patience.

• Deportations: While most coverage of Trump’s lawless deportations has rightly focused on the human toll, one should not underestimate the potential economic fallout. To be sure, the administration’s goal to deport all eleven million undocumented immigrants is a pipe dream that would be impossible to implement. But if deportations really begin to pick up speed, entire economic sectors are going to revolt. Of the three states where the backlash would be fiercest, two of them—Texas and Florida—are GOP strongholds.

• General economic uncertainty: If there is one thing that business owners detest, it is uncertainty. But this is exactly what Trump’s batshit policies are unleashing. Privately, many oligarchs are fuming. As things get worse, their discontent might well begin to manifest more overtly.

Trump cannot continue on this course without provoking a major backlash among the business establishment. If he were trying to unite the oligarchs against him, he would be doing nothing differently than he is.

It might take a stolen election or the shooting of protesters to trigger it. But mobilization on that scale would be nearly impossible to suppress. It would likely mean the end of his regime.

Most corporate elites probably voted for Trump. So excited were they at the prospect of saying “pussy” out loud in business meetings that they blinded themselves to the economic policies he was explicitly promising to carry out. Now that he is delivering on those promises, they are shocked. The fascism, it turns out, was the only part of his message that registered with them. The repeated vows to tariff the known universe into oblivion apparently flew over their heads.

The oligarchs are not going to take this lying down; they literally cannot afford to. Soon enough, they will be itching to see him gone, and we can reasonably expect a substantial number to act on it. If and when they start lending support to the grassroots movement, the conditions will be present for a nationwide civil resistance campaign, one which could conceivably end Trump’s regime.

“So Say Goodnight to the Bad Guy!”

At the moment, Trump is living large. He has ushered in authoritarianism with stunning speed and has done so in the United States of America, of all places. I do not want to overdo the Scarface references, and I promise this will be the last one for at least another week. But if we were to map the film’s storyline onto Trump’s political career, we would currently be in the “Push It to the Limit” montage.

Remember “Push It to the Limit?” Al Pacino as an ebullient Tony Montana, making money hand over fist? The duffle bags full of cash moving through the bank’s front entrance? The chained tiger pacing back and forth on his luxury estate? That montage is where Trump is right now. He is large and in charge, and everyone is afraid of him.

But recall what happens next: Tony rushes headlong to his demise as a federal probe and an aggrieved supplier descend on him. By the film’s end, we see him hunkered down before a mountain of cocaine machine-gunning his enemies as they approach the door. Only the attackers are too strong and too many, and he is doomed.

Unfortunately for Tony, the “Push It to the Limit” sequence is not where his story ends. Nor is it likely to be the end of Trump’s own story. His unchallenged power cannot last. One day, it may well be him who is besieged. Only when the time comes, he won’t have the balls to fight off his assailants at the door.

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“I have talked to the president about Asian carp.”

—Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, shunting aside such trivialities as “democracy” in favor of the really important stuff.

It seems like ages ago, but it was only February. Elon Musk’s unprecedented attack on the federal government was fueling a media freak-out over America’s impending slide into oligarchy.

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I wrote a piece at the time explaining why I thought this view to be misguided. Musk’s influence, while extraordinary, masked his extreme vulnerability. “His immense wealth matters little when up against the guy who can wield the Justice Department as his personal bludgeon,” I argued.

The reason lay in the nature of the system that was emerging—not oligarchy, as many believed, but authoritarianism. Despite appearances to the contrary, Trump was the one in charge, not Musk.

Here we are two months later, and Musk has been pushed out. His ouster was not accompanied by the multiple F.B.I. probes that I predicted. But he is gone, nonetheless.

Nor is Musk the only business leader who has been forced to reckon with their newfound subservience. Last week, Taylor Lorenz described the rude awakening confronting America’s rich after getting into bed with Trump:

100 days in, tech leaders' unabashed support for Trump is blowing up in their faces. Their plan to cozy up to the president and receive favorable treatment has backfired, and the CEOs have been left reeling as they attempt to navigate the chaos the administration has wrought on their businesses.

Tesla’s stock has cratered. Zuckerberg is fighting an existential antitrust battle. Amazon and Apple are reeling from tariffs and supply chain disruptions, forced to pivot costly manufacturing operations out of China.

Media owners, universities, and law firms are also coming to grips with authoritarianism. Many have adopted a strategy of appeasing the king (spoiler alert: it is not working). Others are hunkering down in what are sure to be long, drawn-out fights against an administration that is being weaponized against them. One way or another, all have had to reconcile themselves to democracy’s extinction.

Ordinary Americans too are increasingly acknowledging the new authoritarian reality. The millions of people who have engaged in protests, boycotts, or other acts of civil resistance in the months since Trump’s inauguration are a testament to this. To date, such events have more than doubled their number from the same period of his first administration, according to Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium.

Still, one particularly important group has mostly remained oblivious to the change of regime. I am referring, of course, to the Democratic Party. To be sure, a few prominent Democrats see Trump for what he is and are conducting themselves accordingly. Some names that come to mind include Senators Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Chris Murphy, and Chris Van Hollen; House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Maine Governor Janet Mills; and Illinois Governor Jay Pritzker.

But most of the party, especially its leading figures, continue to act as if democracy will continue operating indefinitely.

It will not.

Authoritarianism and All That

Last week, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer greeted Trump with a hug as he touched down in her home state. She was there to grovel and beg the president for federal funds to expand a local military base. This came on the heels of her White House visit early last month, when she stood at his side as he finished drowning the republic in the bathtub.

“I had to be there because this was a big, important thing for the state of Michigan,” she explained, defending her choice to appear at the Michigan event. “Now, he is going to go off to the rally and say a lot of things I disagree with, that I’ll fight against, and that’s fine.”

For many Democrats, including Whitmer, authoritarianism, while noteworthy, is but another issue among many others the party should address. There is Medicare, prescription drug prices, tariffs, the economy, and—oh, right—the country’s descent into an authoritarian abyss.

If anything, they believe, authoritarianism is a distraction from these other priorities. Sure, it might be of interest to activists. But the true-blooded American whose vote the party is really after? Somebody whom mainstream Democrats seemingly imagine as the cowboy hat-wearing, lasso-wielding hunk from a Ford Raptor commercial? What this guy really wants to talk about is the health insurance premium tax credit, not the foreign black sites to which his farm laborers are getting hauled off in violation of their Fifth Amendment right to due process.

An exchange between Whitmer and Pod Save America host Jon Favreau encapsulates the absurdity of this worldview:

Favreau: Trump is currently investigating Michigan colleges and universities for their diversity policies. He's already tried to kick dozens of Michigan foreign students out of the country. He's threatening to unlawfully freeze federal funding for Michigan public schools, as he's already doing in Maine, because Governor Mills spoke up in a meeting. Have you asked the president to stop targeting people and institutions in your state?

Whitmer: You know, I have talked to the president about tariffs, which obviously we don't agree on. I have talked to the president about Asian carp that pose a real threat to the Great Lakes. I have talked to the president about ice storm victims in northern Michigan, who I’m hoping we can get some help from FEMA to support. I have not had that direct conversation on this subject yet.

Democrats love “issues.” They love them so much that they pay consultants vast sums to divine the particular issues with which the public is most concerned. They then try to fine-tune their messaging to convince voters that they too are prioritizing those issues. For the past fifty-odd years, this has been the party’s core strategy.

Even in normal times, it is a terrible and self-defeating approach. As Democrats jump from one issue to the next, changing their stance according to latest poll results, they end up looking like shifty, vacillating wimps too afraid to say what they really think.

Now that they constitute the only functional opposition in an authoritarian regime, it is even worse. Treating “democracy” as but a single issue among a bundle of others distracts the party from the one thing they need to focus on, which is ending authoritarianism. Unless democracy is restored, there is precisely zero chance that Democrats will ever make progress on their beloved “kitchentable concerns” such as healthcare and the economy.

In the next few years, a mass movement against Trump’s regime is almost certain to emerge. One way or another, it will gain leaders. Whether or not current Democratic incumbents end up receiving those leadership roles is largely up to them.

Whitmer is far from the only Democrat who has failed to grapple with authoritarianism. For most of her colleagues, Trump, while loathsome, is just another Republican serving out his term. He might be threatening democracy, to be sure, but hardly to the point that the Democrats need to do anything differently than they already are.

The notion that the GOP might succeed in overturning an election is not something most Democrats appear to take that seriously. Consequently, the fate of democracy, though a concern, is merely one issue of many, and certainly not as important as Social Security.

Consider Gavin Newsom, who runs a podcast that might as well be called “Things About Fascism that I, Gavin Newsom, Can Really Get Behind.” In it, the California governor finds areas of agreement with his repulsive MAGA guests despite whatever quibbles he might have about their lust for dictatorship.

Then there is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer who, when asked by a CNN host whether he would back a Democratic initiative to impeach Trump, could not bring himself to say, simply, “yes.” “Our goal is to show the American people over and over again, whether it’s the economy, whether it’s tariffs, whether it’s Russia and overseas, and whether it’s the rule of law, how bad he is,” Schumer replied, glancing down at a crib sheet of “issues” some staffer had put together in advance.

With so many “issues” to cover, you see, it can be hard to keep track of them all.

Hakeem Jeffries, Schumer’s counterpart in the House, takes a similar line. In an interview with Greg Sargent of the New Republic, he was asked if “Democrats could be doing more to draw public attention to the lawlessness of Trump, the ripping up of the constitutional order, the dismantling of the rule of law, and fundamental betrayal of our country that’s at the core of all these abuses of power.”

Sure, Jeffries replied, of course he is concerned about the trashing of democracy. But that is only one of the many issues the party wants to address, including:

the economic well-being of the American people; defending Medicaid and health care; defending [against] the assaults on Social Security; making sure they can’t take food out of the mouths of children [italics included], which is what they’re trying to do with this reckless Republican budget to pay for tax cuts for Elon Musk and their billionaire puppet masters. That’s crazy. This is what they are trying to do right now in real time. So we’re going to have to continue to stand up to all the things—and that, of course, will include protecting the rule of law.

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Elections and All That

This phenomenon, in which Democrats talk about authoritarianism not as the existential threat that it is but rather as an “issue,” is predicated on another outmoded assumption: that election victories are the only thing they need to win power.

This was a reasonable assumption back when America was a democracy. But it is not a democracy anymore; it is an authoritarian regime. Elections will indeed remain critical going forward. But they will not be sufficient on their own to remove Republican incumbents—not unless they are accompanied by massive, nonviolent civil resistance.

At the current rate, moderate Democrats are going to four-dimensional-chess their way into a Republican coup d'état in 2029.

Some Democrats, like Pritzker, are starting to understand this. But most continue to see the median voter as the ultimate fulcrum of American politics. That is no longer true (to the extent that it ever was). As long as authoritarianism prevails, it is the median protester, not the median voter, whom the Democrats must make the primary target of their appeals. That protester is more likely to be motivated by the attack on human rights than the price of eggs.

Most Democrats have yet to realize this. Consider a few examples:

“It doesn’t win elections to just speak to the base of the party,” declared Senator Elissa Slotkin. Whether or not it wins elections, it does bring people into the streets, an imperative the Democrats had better start prioritizing.

There is nothing self-described “moderates” in the party detest more than the mild scent of enthusiasm. Take Matt Bennett, a vice president at Democratic think tank Third Way, who threw cold water upon the astoundingly successful rallies led by Bernie Sanders and AOC. “Crowd size is the worst metric in American politics,” he remarked.

Correction: Crowd size was the worst metric in American politics. Now, it is the most important metric.

As long as many Democrats continue to regard winning elections as their only job, they will keep up their fixation with the “median voter.” In Democratic Party mythology, the median voter is a white Iowan farmer who thinks of nothing other than Medicare Part D and gets offended whenever someone has the gall to mention the ongoing evisceration of free government. His preferences can only be divined through a ritualistic ceremony involving essential oils, incense, and opinion polls. But if the polls suggest that he does care about the preservation of the republic, Democrats should not believe it; instead, they must continue talking only about the pocketbook issues which really motivate him.

This fetishization of the median voter helps explain some otherwise bizarre reactions of late.

It explains, for instance, one anonymous House Democrat’s quip that Senator Van Hollen’s visit to El Salvador was distracting Democrats from “talking about the tariff policy and the economy.” Even though Van Hollen’s trip managed to place the outrageous and illegal renditions at the center of national attention for days, the Democratic representative pooh-poohed the deportation issue as a “soup du jour.”

It likewise explains Hakeem Jeffries’s desire to pretend that the deportations do not exist. Asked whether Democrats should continue pushing the issue, the House speaker could not even bring himself to mention it: “Our reaction,” he declared, “is that Donald Trump has the lowest approval rating of any president in modern American history,” as if there is some magical threshold of public disapproval that would compel Trump to leave office voluntarily.

This compulsive aversion to controversy is often rationalized by the presumption that shining a light on Trump’s abominations somehow plays into his hands. In the words of one Democratic staffer, the Congressional trips to El Salvador are “fodder for the National Republican Campaign Committee to start using it against other Democrats.”

How, exactly, would bringing attention to Trump’s repugnant cruelty play into his hands? Good question! I, for one, have no fucking idea.

But leading Democrats do, and they ask us to trust that they know what they are doing.

Maybe, however, they do not know what they are doing. Maybe the problem is Trump’s relentless onslaught against constitution and country, not the few Democrats who criticize him for it. Maybe the only way that Democrats really can play into his hands is by refraining from calling him out.

Most of the party, especially its leading figures, continue to act as if democracy will continue operating indefinitely. It will not.

The problem with overthinking everything like most Democrats do is that the entirety of their elaborate mental calculations only ever converge upon a single strategy: hiding under the bed whispering “kitchentable priorities” in hopes that somebody might actually hear it.

At the current rate, moderate Democrats are going to four-dimensional-chess their way into a Republican coup d'état in 2029.

Many Democrats see a tension between the concerns of mainstream voters and the party base. Issues like democracy and human rights might appeal to leftwing activists, they believe. But they go over the heads of ordinary voters who are more preoccupied with putting food on the table than the right to due process.

To the extent that this tension was ever real, it will soon cease to exist. Authoritarianism is here, and it is going to get much, much worse. Once Trump begins detaining political subversives by the thousands and crushing protests with military force, his brutal, criminal rule will likely become the single defining issue in American politics. When it does, expressing unrelenting outrage at his autocratic excesses will become a prerequisite for any Democrat to gain—or retain—office. Doing so will not only achieve election victories but bring out the protesters who will stop those victories from getting overturned.

In the next few years, a mass movement against Trump’s regime is almost certain to emerge. One way or another, it will gain leaders. Whether or not current Democratic incumbents end up receiving those leadership roles is largely up to them. Without the support of the Democratic establishment, the movement will struggle. With the party’s support, it will become unstoppable.

There is no need to overthink the matter. Democrats could do worse than to follow AOC’s lead. Back when the controversy erupted over Elon Musk and Steve Bannon’s Hitler salutes, she responded simply and directly: “In this country, we hate Nazis.” That is really the only posture the Democratic Party needs to take. Do it, and the American people will get behind you.

Alternatively, keep talking about Medicare as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening.

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Share The Detox with Neil Abrams

At least once a week, I come across some piece of news or writing that I find especially interesting and want to discuss further. It might be something that illuminates the bigger picture. Or it simply pisses me off. Quite often, it combines both of these elements.

Instead of haranguing my Shih-Tzu or ranting to my wife and kid, it occurred to me that this newsletter might be a more appropriate forum. Thus arose the inspiration for The Fix, a weekly reflection of my thoughts on a given event, trend, book, article, or anything else that happens to drift through my transom (the name implying, rather pretentiously, that readers are getting their “fix” of me, Neil Abrams.)

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In time, and if I can keep it up, I might turn The Fix into a regular paid feature. While The Detox has grown substantially in recent months, the number of subscribers who have signed up for the paid option remains pretty scant (about 40 out of 7000-plus).

Considering the relative infrequency of my posts compared to other writers, this is understandable. Yet, as someone who would eventually like to make a living from my writing, it is unsustainable.

This is where The Fix comes in. The Fix will be free for now until I can prove to myself that I can actually put it out every week. If it turns out that I can, I will probably paywall it. Not to worry; my regular posts in The Detox will continue to be offered free of charge.

Just to avoid any confusion, let me reiterate that no matter what becomes of The Fix, The Detox itself will remain as it always has; I will continue publishing my free posts at least as often as I do currently. For free subscribers, in other words, nothing will change. The only change under consideration is the addition of a separate weekly feature—The Fix—that is exclusively for paid subscribers. But even The Fix will stay free for the time being.

Coward-In-Chief

With that out of the way, let us get down to business. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo had a piece out a few days ago about Donald Trump’s increasing tendency to shrink in the face of backlash:

It’s no accident that the trade woes coincide with reverses on other fronts, in Trump’s war with universities, backtracking on some of his more drastic reorganizations of departments, with the Supreme Court. I don’t want to overstate this. Trump and those working for him continue to impose drastic changes on the federal government. They have the power. Lots of things are happening in the background. But that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that in a series of high profile confrontations he’s retreating.

I think Marshall is onto something. Trump has displayed a proclivity to back down when challenged. But it is also surprising. Trump, after all, has a long record of doing batshit-crazy things with nary a concern for the inevitable repercussions. Normally, people who act without regard to consequences are unlikely to reverse course once said consequences present themselves, right?

Not Donald Trump, apparently. Consider the following list of his recent climbdowns, practically all of which, for a normal person, would occasion extreme humiliation.

The minute people start resisting, they often find Trump’s wherewithal to be lacking.

Early this month, Trump slapped arbitrary tariffs on every country and penguin-occupied rock in the cosmos and vowed to boot that “MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE.” A week later, on April 9th, he largely abandoned the policy, instituting a 90-day pause on tariffs for most countries. The reason? The markets started to panic, and Trump became frightened.

Last week, financial markets again demonstrated their ability to push him around. What spooked traders this time were his musings about firing the chief of the Federal Reserve. This was classic Trump: Say something totally insane while remaining oblivious to the likely response of powerful constituencies. What he was oblivious to in this instance was the market’s reaction to the prospect of abolishing the independence of the central bank that oversees the world’s reserve currency. So, as soon as the markets started to look askance, he immediately retracted his previous statements and assured everyone that he had “no intention” of dismissing the fed chair.

So scared was he that he simultaneously announced his readiness to lower the absurd 145 percent tariffs he recently imposed on China. In fact, his administration declared, the two countries were already in the process of negotiating the matter, to which Beijing replied, “no, we are not.”

The markets are not the only thing that has brought forth major policy reversals over the past few weeks. On some issues, it seems, even the mildest pushback can bully Trump into capitulating.

After beating Columbia University into submission in March, Trump turned his attention to Harvard, figuring he could get away with imposing even tougher conditions on America’s oldest and most esteemed educational institution. Contrary to his expectations, Harvard basically told him to get fucked.

How did Trump respond to such insolence? Did he escalate his demands? Did he dispatch federal agents onto Harvard Yard? He did nothing of the sort. Instead, he offered to negotiate—and in rather desperate form, too. According to CNN:

The Trump administration appears open to negotiations with Harvard, even after America’s most prestigious university sued the federal government – setting up a clash over academic freedom, federal funding and campus oversight.

Last week, administration officials reached out to Harvard representatives three times in an effort to restart talks, a person familiar with the outreach told CNN. The nation’s oldest university indicated it was not interested in negotiating, the person said.

I do not want to overstate the case here; Harvard’s recalcitrance has brought it a world of pain including the impending loss of billions of dollars in federal research funds. On the other hand, unlike Columbia, it retains its institutional dignity and remains a university worthy of the name.

The list of actors that have successfully resisted Trump’s incursions extends well beyond the country’s top universities. Earlier this month, DOGE conceived the brilliant idea of ending the processing of Social Security benefits by phone. This would have required untold numbers of American retirees to visit Social Security Administration offices in person. But following a public outcry from advocacy organizations and Democratic lawmakers, the Trump administration had a revelation that maybe the old way of doing things existed for a reason. It duly backtracked and announced that the changes would not go into effect.

Once his regime reaches a critical juncture—in particular, when he or his successor try to remain in power despite an election loss or when his agents start mowing down protesters in the streets—it might not take as much as people think to force him out.

The courts are likewise beginning to chalk up victories against the president. A few weeks ago, ICE terminated the records of thousands of foreign students in moves that would have brought about their expulsion from the country. Its actions were flagrantly illegal and led to over 40 federal court orders to restore the records. Late last week, the agency relented, pledging to return the students to active status.

Even the Republican majority on the Supreme Court is starting to lose it with Trump’s bullshit. After weeks of defying federal court directives to halt deportations without due process under the Alien Enemies Act, the administration pulled off the remarkable feat of turning four of its biggest Supreme Court enablers against it. When reports emerged of Venezuelan nationals getting bussed to Texas in blatant violation of multiple court rulings, a 7-2 majority led by Chief Justice John Roberts ordered the administration to bring them back. Amazingly—and contrary to my prediction in a previous post—it complied.

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Seeing Through the Mirage

Trump’s assault on democracy has been nothing short of stunning both in its speed and magnitude. Even many leading experts on authoritarianism have been shocked at how far and fast he has gone. Trump has run roughshod over so many laws, agencies, and rights and brought so many prominent actors to heel that the autocratization of the country might seem impossible to reverse.

But the examples above are enough to cast doubt on such fears. In many ways, Trump is the runaway authoritarian train he is depicted to be. The sheer onslaught of his daily attacks on democracy could easily overwhelm his opponents. This is exactly what they are designed to do, and in large part they have succeeded. But this is only true insofar as the targets let it happen by rolling over at the first sign of impending attack.

One of the more puzzling aspects of Trump’s first hundred days is the number of prominent actors and organizations who appear to think that relenting to his outrageous demands will somehow make him leave them alone. Despite the fact that accommodating fascist regimes has never worked for anyone anywhere, a hell of a lot of Americans have convinced themselves that surely this time, in my case, it will.

Hence, Columbia agreed to his conditions. A half-dozen law firms signed agreements with the administration in hopes of fending off further indignities. And, lo and behold, Trump did not back off. Assured of their weakness, he escalated and is now bidding to extract more.

But the minute people start resisting, they often find Trump’s wherewithal to be lacking.

Trump’s tendency to fire off the most demented, unhinged opening salvos only to reverse course at the slightest pushback carries important implications. We should not be fooled by the shock and awe he tries to instill and should instead see him for what he is—your typical schoolyard bully who cowers the moment somebody punches back. In this way, the copious amounts of makeup he applies to conceal the pasty, ashen carcass underneath is a metaphor for how he rules—all appearance and no substance.

Make no mistake; things are going to get very ugly in the coming years. That is the nature of his blitzkrieg approach: Start out with the most insane move imaginable in hopes that the target will lie down and take it before he proceeds to the next victim. This part of Trump’s playbook portends some truly frightful developments—think the mass disappearance of political subversives and the shooting of demonstrators with live ammunition.

But once his regime reaches a critical juncture—in particular, when he or his successor try to remain in power despite an election loss or when his agents start mowing down protesters in the streets—it might not take as much as people think to force him out.

Trump, in other words, is no Bashar al-Assad. He is not the type to go to war against his own people. Nor is he the sort to barricade himself in the Oval Office behind a wall of Depends diapers machine-gunning intruders like some elderly Tony Montana. By the time the American people reach their breaking point and start filling the streets by the millions, Trump may well be on his way to permanent exile in Moscow.

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