Last week, I wrote part one of an essay called “How to Fix America” and promised part two to follow. It’s in the pipeline. But important developments in Trump’s idiotic, self-destructive war on Iran—and a brief hiatus for me that looms next week—compel me to address that issue first.

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Last week, I wrote about the stark need to face just how badly the United States is damaged after one-and-a-half Trump presidencies, atop deep-seated systemic problems that long pre-dated his arrival.

About a month prior to that, we looked at ways to oppose Trump and try to bring him down.

This week, we look ahead—with uncharacteristic, non-King’s Necktie-like optimism—to consider the things we will need to do to rebuild the republic if and when we are finally rid of this cancerous would-be despot and have sufficiently suppressed his hideous political movement, assuming we can do so before the damage is irreparable. (Some of it may already be. But not all.)

It should go without saying that before we can focus on rebuilding, first we have to depose Trump—presumably, at the polls two Novembers from now, or less likely, through impeachment or the 25th Amendment. We should never lose sight of that or get ahead of ourselves. After 2024, I don’t think overconfidence is our problem—more the contrary, really—but I do think we on the left get easily discouraged and distracted.

But at the same time, it’s worth thinking ahead, both to get a jump on that daunting task and to buoy our spirits. Because there are things we can do. Many of them should have been done during the Biden administration but were not, for various reasons, including the naïveté of the institutionalists who wanted to believe (and wanted us to believe) that Donald was just an aberration and not a symptom of a deeply flawed system in desperate need of repair.

Even when Donald is dead and gone and his name but a half-remembered obscenity, the reactionary strain in this country that gave rise to him will remain, and we cannot give it fertile soil in which to take root again and grow, nor allow its ruthless and immoral adherents to exploit our political system the way they’ve done over the past decade.

So let’s look at the specific, concrete things we can change in order to prevent the far right from perverting the American experiment any further, should we manage to evict them from power.

Many of the prescriptions that follow come from my 2024 book Resisting the Right, in which they were presented as things a Democratic administration could do before that year’s election. Now the order has reversed, and they are presented here as things a credible, pro-democratic administration should do after it takes power. Because, as some wit said, “win every election” is not a strategy for defeating fascism.

TO-DO LIST FOR DEMOCRACY

ABOLISH ICE. Operating in order of urgency, this task does not address the most fundamental long-term threat to the prospect of democracy in the United States—those come next—but it is the most visceral, violent, and pressing one.

In case you missed it, we have an almost completely unaccountable, masked secret police force of underqualified (if not totally unqualified), poorly trained, incoherently led individuals—many of them recruited specifically because they are keen to commit reckless acts of violence—turned loose to terrorize vulnerable populations in this country, very much including children, in order to advance the political agenda of this regime and satisfy the sadistic desires of its demographic base. This organization has already murdered two innocent American citizens in cold blood, and subjected numerous others to incarceration in what can only be called concentration camps, and/or to extraordinary rendition, often to despotic foreign states.

That has to stop immediately. Then we can move on to other more expansive matters.

REIN IN THE PRESIDENT. Once the gestapo is disbanded, the next most urgent task is to install rigorous restrictions to stop the abuse of the office of the presidency that has driven so many of our current ills.

We need to clarify and put teeth into the Emoluments Clauses, so that a president cannot wantonly engage in corruption, insider trading, war profiteering, and generally treat the White House as a means to enrich himself at the expense of the American people. We need legislation requiring that the president disclose his or her tax records. (A requirement that includes presidential candidates, if there is a legal way to mandate that, would be even better.) We need legislation putting teeth into the War Powers Resolution so that the president cannot wage war without Congressional consent, and we need rules preventing him or her from using “acting” appointees to circumvent the constitutionally mandated Senate confirmation process. It wouldn’t hurt to find a way to put a brake on executive orders either.

We also need mandatory physical and mental health checks for the president, with the results transparently available directly to the people, and we need to revise the 25^th Amendment to make it easier to remove a president who is, by consensus of non-partisan medical experts, mentally and/or physically unwell and unfit for the job.

I realize that the Republican Party is dedicated to the exact opposite goal toward which all these proposals aim, per its hard-on for the Unitary Executive Theory, and would like to make the president a king. But that is not what this country is supposed to be about.

Will those reforms by themselves stymie a future despot on the order of Trump (or worse) and the cretins who would prop him up? No, but they’re a start. When the Founders wrote the Constitution—and indeed right up until the arrival of the current president of the United States—no one thought there was a need for such basic guardrails, because no one—except H.L. Mencken—thought the people of the United States would ever elect such a venal, openly criminal, wholly unprincipled and disgusting character. But we did—twice. Now we have to re-write the rules to rein in any future monsters.

REFORM THE SUPREME COURT. DRAMATICALLY. With its lifetime appointments, its lack of oversight, its fanatic ideological fervor, and its long-term decision-making impact, the current Supreme Court may be the single most damaging and dangerous institution threatening American democracy today, even more so than Trump’s imperial presidency.

Not long ago, the Supreme Court was the governmental institution that Americans held in the highest esteem. No more. A Pew Research poll in September 2025 found that the Court’s favorability rating with the American people had plummeted from 70% to 48% over the preceding five years. A Gallup poll the previous month had the Court’s approval rating at its lowest point—39%—in the quarter-century history of that survey. Just a wild guess, but that may because the archconservative supermajority on the Roberts Court has obliterated the illusion that it’s an unbiased, non-partisan entity calling “balls and strikes,” as John once claimed, and not a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the Republican Party.

Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society spent four decades carefully orchestrating the right-wing capture of the American judiciary, with the Supreme Court as its crown jewel. That supermajority has wasted no time in flexing its muscles in a series of decisions that fly in the face of the prevailing desires of the American people: on abortion, on guns, on religious freedom, on the environment, on affirmative action, on voting rights. Given that abuse, and the fact that three—count ’em, three—of the six justices that comprise that supermajority, fully a third of the entire Court, were put there by Donald Trump, the most openly criminal president in US history, severe changes are in order.

(In case you really want a chilling thought to keep you up at night, bear in mind that Trump may yet get another two or three lifetime-tenured SCOTUS picks before his term is over, if Alito and Thomas can be persuaded to play ball and step down.)

Expanding the Court—“packing it,” in the pejorative, New Deal-era term—is an obvious solution. The Constitution does not mandate the number of justices, which has varied from as few as five to as many as ten over the course of American history. The right shrieks in outrage at the very thought. But no thinking person can doubt that, were the situation reversed, a Republican president would not hesitate for a moment to add four or more new justices to the Court, public outcry, opposition, and optics be damned. Yes, expanding the Court also risks an arms race between the parties. But not taking aggressive steps simply because we fear the Republican countermeasures is a self-destructive kind of timidity. The GOP has already destroyed the Supreme Court as we once knew it. Efforts we now take to reform and salvage it will not make matters worse.

There are other proposals to address the rot. The US is the only advanced democracy whose Supreme Court justices are subject to neither term limits nor a mandatory retirement age. New means of selecting the justices, rather than presidential appointment, also make sense, and while many of the proposed methods are convoluted, they all feel preferable to the current hyperpartisan arrangement and the toxic environment in which it operates.

Also very much in order is the establishment of a binding code of ethics, something lower court judges operate under—as do employees of almost every other federal agency—but which the Supreme Court has never had, or needed. But as reported in ProPublica, Samuel Alito’s undisclosed fishing vacations and trips on the private jet of a billionaire Republican donor, and Clarence Thomas’s similarly undisclosed ties to another billionaire Republican benefactor who paid his grandnephew’s tuition and bought his mother’s house, and John Roberts’ conflict of interest involving his wife and the tens of millions of dollars she has earned, all make it clear that adult supervision is badly needed. Let’s not even get into Ginni Thomas’s role in trying to overturn the 2020 election even as her husband ruled on cases related to it.

As AOC wrote of the Court on Twitter way back in 2022, “We need to reform or do away with the whole thing, for the sake of the planet.”

REPAIR OUR ELECTORAL SYSTEM. As I have repeatedly stressed in this blog, the Republican Party—which already has an unfair structural advantage in our electoral system—is actively and aggressively trying to undermine the US electoral system in order to give itself unchallengeable, permanent control of American governance. It’s been at that for years, but the process accelerated dramatically under Trump. If they succeed, there may still be elections in the US, but they won’t matter.

There are numerous subsets of this broader goal, including addressing the Electoral College, gerrymandering, campaign finance reform, and more, all of which I will get into shortly. But there is a vast array of other reforms that could be put in place, beginning with restoring the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which means reversing the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder and its more recent 2026 ruling in Callais v. Louisiana. Also: instituting same-day registration at the polls, online registration, automatic “motor voter” registration, and pre-registration of those about to turn eighteen; expanding voting by mail and early voting; instituting penalties for voter intimidation, caging, roll purging, and the spread of disinformation; mandating the use of paper ballots to preempt hacking and facilitate recounts; changing the composition of the FEC to reduce gridlock; and ending felony disenfranchisement.

DISBAND THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE. The most glaringly anti-democratic aspect of our political system is the Electoral College. The EC was anti-democratic even in 1789, when the most populous state at the time, Virginia, had only thirteen times as many residents as the least populous, Delaware, according to the first US Census, taken the following year. Today, the biggest, California, has sixty-seven times as many as the smallest, Wyoming, giving the residents of that ruby red state vastly more say in American politics than those in the Golden State, to cite just one example. Twice in the past six presidential elections the results of the Electoral College have contradicted the popular vote, both times benefitting Republicans. Not surprisingly, the GOP is very keen on maintaining this patently unjust system. (Even though it disenfranchises many of their voters too. A vote in South Dakota, for example, counts approximately twice as much as one in Texas in presidential races, and a whopping twenty-eight times as much when it comes to the Senate.)

On that front, the right stands sanctimoniously on the idea the Founders must have chosen the current system for a reason. That is true…but the reason is vile. The Founding Fathers, for all their undeniable vision, were all white aristocratic men very much of the century in which they lived, leery both of the hoi polloi and of a homegrown tyrant. To that end, they limited the vote to white landowning males, but even that worried them. The Electoral College was therefore deliberately conceived as a way to minimize the power of the people and maintain the power of the economic elite. Like many aspects of the new United States, it was also a compromise over slavery.

But the Republican appeal to the wisdom of the Founders is dishonest in any event. As The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last writes, one suspects that if the twisted arithmetic of the Electoral College somehow favored Democrats, any right-wing devotion to the Founders would rapidly evaporate, and Republicans would long ago have been out in the streets with torches and pitchforks demanding its abolition.

As it is unlikely that any of the small, right-leaning states will ever voluntarily surrender their unfair advantage, another solution is to be found in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which you can read about here.

END GERRYMANDERING. David Daley, author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count (2016), notes that the US is “the only democracy in the world that allows the politicians to draw their own lines and essentially choose their own voters.”

The GOP has been actively trying to get a chokehold on the electoral map since the 2010 midterms, with a program called REDMAP (the Redistricting Majority Project), and they have very much succeeded, with the enthusiastic help of an openly biased Supreme Court. In July of last year Trump actively called for Texas Republicans to resdistrict mid-decade to grab five more seats because Donald believed his party “deserved” them, setting off a rabid competition among states both red and blue, by way of fighting fire with fire. Predictably, the courts have largely allowed red states to do so, while blocking blue ones. With the Supreme Court’s decision last month in Callais—marking the final gutting of the Voting Rights Act—red states have accelerated their effort to wipe out Democratic-leaning districts at warp speed, sometimes even disrupting ongoing elections in order to do so. And the Court, which historically had prevented Democrats from instituting new voting maps too close to an upcoming election, has eagerly made it easier for the GOP to do that very thing.

The right’s wanton, shameless perversion of Congressional districts to its benefit has to be halted once and for all.

KILL THE FILIBUSTER. In the same way that no other country lets legislators draw their own districts, there is no other advanced democracy where a tiny sliver of radical legislators is allowed to hold the entire nation hostage the way that the filibuster allows US Senators to do.

The Republican use of the filibuster to kill protections for voting rights in 2022 was only the latest in a long, disgraceful tradition attached to that device. The filibuster was used by segregationist senators in the 1930s to stop anti-lynching legislation, and later to block civil rights bills. Still, the use of the filibuster was relatively rare until 1970. After the ascent of Barack Obama in 2009 and the fanatic right-wing opposition to him, Mitch McConnell and the GOP made it standard operating procedure. Without that maneuver, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett would not be on the Supreme Court today. For Republicans the technique also has the added advantage of allowing it to create chaos that feeds its preferred narrative that government is inherently dysfunctional and “bad.”

But the filibuster is not a core aspect of American democracy. (In fact, there is some evidence it arose accidentally.) The Nation’s legal correspondent Elie Mystal calls it “a rule invented by senators to make their institution even less democratic than the Constitution requires it to be.” Accordingly, the diehard, pry-it-from-my-cold-dead-hands loyalty to it so ostentatiously displayed by any number of politicians, valued above democracy itself, is contemptible, particularly as they have been plenty willing to make exceptions when they feel like it.

At a bare minimum, an end to the two-track system and a return to the old-fashioned “talking filibuster” would be a step in the right direction. But ending it altogether would be even better.

ABOLISH THE SENATE. Speaking of the Senate, these days it hardly resembles its self-flattering title of the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” though it is in the running for “greatest collection of fucking cowards ever gathered in one room.” While he adamantly opposes the filibuster, Mystal doesn’t believe that reforming or even eliminating it would address what he calls “the rot at the heart of the Senate.” Instead he calls for the dissolution of that chamber altogether.

An upper house of the legislature where each state is equally represented irrespective of its population represents another inherently undemocratic mechanism, more reflective of a confederacy than a federal union. Like the Electoral College, this arrangement too was a compromise, again designed to strengthen the power of the slave states. By definition, the smaller, less populated states—again, typically in the West, and again, typically Republican—have an unfair advantage in the Senate, and it is only going to get worse. In 2017, David Birdsell, dean of the school of public and international affairs at Baruch College, noted that “by 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states. They will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them.”

If abolition is off the table, introducing proportional representation—allocating senators based on population—might help make the Senate marginally more just. Under numbers compiled in 2017, this system would give twenty-six states a single senator apiece and twelve other states two each. Eight more states would have three or four, while Florida and New York would have six, Texas nine, and California twelve. But advocates of abolishing the Senate altogether, like Mystal, make a fiery case that an “institution that is so profoundly antithetical to democracy cannot be ‘reformed’…simply by changing the method of picking its antidemocratic leaders.”

EXPAND THE HOUSE. Unlike the Senate, reform of the House calls for just the opposite: expansion. As political theorist and Harvard professor Danielle Allen explains, until 1929 the size of the US House of Representatives was adjusted with each decennial census, a system provided for by the Founders themselves. However, that year it was capped at 435, meaning that representation in that body has grown increasingly disproportionate with each passing year. As a result, the slight edge that the Constitution originally gave less populous states has turned into a significant one, and the chances of a disconnect between the popular vote and the Electoral College have risen. It’s no coincidence that of the five times that this has happened, two have been in the past twenty years. And that imbalance will only worsen going forward.

The new number of House seats Allen proposes is actually quite modest—585—with future expansions pegged to the cube root of the national population. To blunt gerrymandering would require a simple tripling of the current number of seats, to 1,305. Each party would also have representatives from every state, which is not the case now, making for healthier and fairer deliberation.

Almost all other advanced democracies adjust the size of their parliaments periodically, and many have larger legislative bodies than we do, even though they have smaller populations. Expanding the House would address all these issues in one elegant swoop.

OVERTURN CITIZENS UNITED AND ENACT CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM. Money was poisoning American politics long before Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, but that 2010 ruling, decided 5–4 by the Supreme Court’s Republican majority, opened the door to an unprecedented deluge of money in US politics and the corrupting influence that comes with it. Along with Shelby and Dobbs and Callais, it may have been one of the worst and most damaging decisions handed down by the Court in the postwar period.

Both parties have long been beholden to wealthy and powerful private interests, but only the Republican Party has made a religion of it, fervently arguing that “corporations are people” and that “money is speech.” But even if one accepts that, there must be reasonable restrictions. Just as one cannot shout “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater, it would be foolhardy to let a certain kind of political speech—which is to say, money—run rampant out of some misguided First Amendment absolutism.

But of course, the GOP is not really interested in free speech, only in a bright green light for officially endorsed graft and corruption.

Election-related spending from super PACs and other independent groups reached $4.5 billion over the decade that followed Citizens United, a twelve-fold increase over the previous twenty years. And not surprisingly, as Open Secrets reports, “The candidate with more money wins more often than not.” When it comes to making one’s voice heard, the wealthy will almost always be louder than anyone else. But to allow the rich to use their money to influence the electoral system in the most extreme and obscene manner, and to buy the loyalty of the so-called public servants who arise out of it, is a recipe for democratic suicide.

FORCE FAIRNESS ON THE MEDIA, KIND OF. Like the flood of money into politics, the rise of hyperpartisan news is a blight on society, and its destructive effects are self-evident.

A start would be restoring the Fairness Doctrine, which was abolished in 1987, and once required TV broadcasters to offer opposing views on issues deemed in the public interest. Although there is of course some subjectivity in play, the rule nevertheless prevents television networks from becoming unconstrained propaganda machines, and its restoration would radically reshape American broadcast journalism for the better.

But of course, when it comes to the power to manipulate minds, today we also must contend with the Internet, a Charles Atlas that makes TV look like a ninety-eight-pound weakling brushing sand off its face. No Fairness Doctrine could possibly police the net, whose sheer scope allows us to wallow in the warm bath of partisan discourse without the pesky bother of opposing views, not to mention the weaponization of social media to target any given population—or individual—with relentless, incredibly sophisticated, granularly tailored propaganda and disinformation, relying on data harvested from tens of millions of largely unwitting citizens. The human brain is simply not evolutionarily wired to withstand this onslaught, and it’s doubtful any adaptation is happening fast enough.

There is little agreement on the kind of governmental regulations that would make the web a better place without destroying what is unique and socially beneficial about it, and without infringing on freedom of expression. In that sense, the toothpaste is out of the tube, the genie out of the bottle, and humanity shit out of luck. But for a start, tech companies must dispense with their disingenuous, shoulder-shrugging abdication of responsibility for the content they allow on their platforms and cease serving as breeding grounds for hate speech, incitement to violence, and cyberattacks from hostile foreign actors. Ironically, this is one of the few areas in which left and right find some common ground, even though each thinks the other is the beneficiary of Big Tech’s bias.

MAKE NEW STATES. If the Electoral College and Senate are not going to be eliminated, statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are only logical in order to give proper representation to almost four million American citizens who currently have no voice in Congress.

Another proposal is for populous blue states to split, like a blackjack hand. If a reliably Democratic state like California were to break in two, it would double its number of senators, and gain two electoral votes in the process. (And if California, Oregon, and Washington were all to split, they would have twelve senators among them rather than six, and their collective seventy-four electoral votes would become eighty.) Of course, red states could also split and increase their representation in the same way. Before long an arms race would likely ensue, resulting in a country of hundreds of states, some with smaller populations than a Taylor Swift concert. But it’s still an idea worth considering. And if someday Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia turn red and tilt the Senate and EC to the GOP, so be it: that is how democracy is supposed to work.

ELIMINATE THE DEBT CEILING. Once a routine rubber stamp authorizing the United States to pay its bills, the congressional vote to raise the debt limit has been seized upon by the GOP as a means of blackmailing Democratic presidents. Get rid of it, either by legislation, or by invoking Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law…shall not be questioned.” Will Republicans throw a hissy fit and mount legal challenges to that effort? You bet. Let them. We have lawyers too.

MAKE ELECTION DAY A HOLIDAY. At the very least, can we give folks time off to vote? In most countries, election day is a national holiday, or at least held on the weekend. In America, however, one of our two political parties is dedicated to making it harder for people to vote. Shouldn’t be hard to change that, right? Let the GOP explain why it professes to be in favor of democracy when all it does is try to make it as hard as possible to go to the polls.

CHANGE THE PRIMARY SYSTEM. Primaries have only figured prominently in US presidential elections since 1968, and do not have to operate the way they currently do.

As Fareed Zakaria writes, unlike a general election, where candidates must appeal to the widest possible swath of the electorate and moderation is typically an asset, “primaries ensure that the candidates chosen are selected by slivers of the parties—around 20 percent of all eligible voters, often far more extreme in their views than run-of-the-mill registered Republicans or Democrats.” Thanks to gerrymandering, those candidates are also frequently in safe seats, where the opposing party has virtually no chance of winning, and “the only threat to them is a primary candidate who is even more extreme.” That dynamic is particularly dangerous in states without open primaries, even though open primaries themselves invite mischief.

A simple and elegant solution would be ranked choice voting, in which voters list candidates in order of preference, thereby minimizing the impact of extremist and spoiler candidates, reducing toxic campaigning, and delivering results more representative of the will of the electorate than a “first past the post” system. In 2022, for example, Alaska’s first foray into ranked choice voting resulted in the Democratic candidate for governor beating both GOP opponents—including Sarah Palin—in a state that for its entire history had been as Republican as any in the Union. Instituted nationwide, ranked choice elections might remake the face of American politics dramatically.

HONOR THY FATHERS

OK, deep breath. That is but a small sample of some of the most obvious systemic fixes that we could institute to shore up American democracy…or more critically, to put us on the path toward it for the first time.

In their 2023 book Tyranny of the Minority, Levitsky and Ziblatt note that over the past century, almost every other advanced democracy has instituted many of these exact kinds of reforms, including proportional representation in parliament, dissolution of the upper chamber, an end to the filibuster, judicial term limits, abolition of an electoral college. Part of the problem, they note, is that the US Constitution, the first of its kind, served as a model for the rest of the world, but is also one of the hardest to amend—especially when certain powerful folks don’t want to. “With the Republican Party’s transformation into an extremist and antidemocratic force under Donald Trump, the Constitution now protects and empowers an authoritarian minority.”

All the more reason to fix it.

(The mirror image of this idea—the right-wing push for a new Constitutional convention that would likely throw out everything democratic about the current one—is a danger to be highly vigilant against in its own right.)

It’s easy to anticipate the obvious objection to many of these changes, which is the anguished cry that they would violate the intentions of the Founding Fathers. That may be so—and we should welcome it. The implication is that the centuries-old wisdom of these men and the Constitution they drafted is sacrosanct, and that we are somehow foolish or disloyal for daring to tinker with it. A better question would be why any of us feel biblically bound to a verbatim reading of a 234-year-old document drawn up at a time when women were chattel, child labor was routine, and leeches figured heavily in medicine.

The Founding Fathers did not intend to create a true representative democracy as we now conceive of it. What the Founders envisioned, and established, was a patrimonial oligarchy ruled by white, male, Christian, property-owning elites—many of them counting human beings among the property they owned—the legacy of which remains with us to this day. It’s no wonder contemporary right-wingers deify them without qualification.

Even the Founders themselves did not claim godlike powers of omniscience or accord themselves the infallible, deity-like status that modern conservatives do. Understanding that any viable political system has to be flexible with the capacity to adapt over time, the Founders built in methods for so doing. They certainly did not intend to create a permanent system, calcified in the year 1789, like Moses descending from the mount, tablets in hand, no matter how much conservatives would like those tablets displayed in public school classrooms. They were complex and flawed figures who bequeathed us a complex and flawed country. It’s up to us to make it better.

Let’s honor them, if that’s our goal, by doing that.

********

Next week, in part two of this essay, we look at deeper, more substantive—if abstract—fixes, like addressing economic inequality, and combatting racism, misogyny, and the general strain of reactionary ideology that feeds right-wing politics in America.

Illustration: Sage Advice

In a recent blog listing the concrete things that we can do to fight Trumpism, I argued that, first and foremost, the electoral process is still in effect—albeit besieged—and that surrendering to fatalism plays right into Republican fascist hands, giving our foes an all-too-easy victory they do not deserve.

Still true a month later. But asserting that “elections still matter” is by no means a report of a clean bill of political health.

I was reminded of that by an article in The Guardian by Dr. Eric Reinhart, a psychiatrist and political anthropologist with an MD in the former from the University of Chicago and a PhD in the latter from Harvard. In nine years of reading and researching and writing this blog, it’s one of the most astute, piercing, and clear-eyed articles of any kind by any writer that I’ve come across.

Reinhart’s piece is titled, “Americans Aren’t Facing a Democratic Collapse. We’re Living In Its Aftermath,” and that is a pretty tidy summary of what he has to say. His thesis is that the familiar, almost tedious refrain that “democracy is on the brink” is flat-out wrong…not because it’s alarmist and hyperbolic, but because it’s like crying, “Look out for that iceberg!” when the Titanic is already glug glug glugging to the bottom of the North Atlantic. (My cheesy metaphor, not his.)

By now we are all accustomed to the daily “what fresh hell” dread that characterizes life in post-2015 America; to being deluged with fundraising emails from the Democratic Party on the theme of “saving democracy;” and to waiting for the shoe to drop that will finally mark the end of the republic.

“This state of permanent panic,” as Reinhart calls it, rests on the Freudian definition of an illusion, “a belief embraced not because it reflects reality, but because it satisfies a psychological need.”

The illusion in this case is that the United States still has a democracy to lose. The more unsettling truth is that Americans are not living under threat of future democratic breakdown; we are living inside the aftermath of one that has already occurred.

For tens of millions of people, democratic life has been absent for decades as they endure precarious housing, inaccessible healthcare, unchecked policing powers, debt servitude, vanishing public goods, and near-total exclusion from meaningful formal political power.

These are not signs of a democracy under threat. They are symptoms of one that eroded—if it ever existed—long ago.

Reinhart frames this disconnect in psychoanalytic terms of “fear of breakdown,” as formulated by the psychologist D.W. Winnicott—that is to say, the dread of some event that has in fact already occurred. (And no, I never heard of Winnicott either. Maybe he’s psychology’s Sir Douglas Quintet to Freud’s Beatles. But his theory makes a lot of sense.)

What’s left, Reinhart writes, quite poetically, “is the echo of that unlived event in the guise of a future threat.”

Although formulated to describe individual psychopathology, the “fear of breakdown” applies collectively as well, as “(n)ations too generate defenses against reality: denial, idealization, displacement, projection, regression, collective forgetting.”

America’s fixation on democracy’s perpetual near-death is one such defense; it’s also a political strategy. It allows liberal politicians, institutions, media and elite universities and professional groups who have benefited from longstanding inequalities to avoid confronting a more uncomfortable truth: the decline of democracy did not begin with Donald Trump but unfolded gradually across decades, including under the stewardship of the Democratic party leaders who now brand themselves as democracy’s last line of defense.

Reinhart takes pains to specify that this assessment in no way minimizes the threat that Trumpism represents, only allows us to frame it effectively “rather than remain caught in the loops that immobilize the country’s elite political class that is refusing to confront its own complicity.” The wealthy and politically connected, he argues, may not be subject to the privation and pressures that affect most ordinary Americans, but at best are only tenuously insulated from them, “with a constant need to rationalize the deprivation of others upon which their power is predicated and to disavow any responsibility for it.”

Their story is mired in nostalgia, insisting that the US had a functional democratic order that is now suddenly slipping away under the threat posed by a singular, unprecedented figure—an aberration in American history rather than its reflection or culmination. The solution, in this telling, is preservation: defend institutions, restore norms, shore up checks and balances.

“But to what democracy, exactly, are we trying to return?” Reinhart asks. “One built on settler colonialism, slavery, and the genocidal dispossession of Indigenous nations that continued—as explicit policy—well into the 20th century? One that excluded women until 1920, Black citizens until the 1960s, and trans people—with many liberal politicians and pundits’ backing—still today?”

He notes that the de jure expansion of formal rights in the form of women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was cynically offset by policies like “mass incarceration, voter suppression, racialized wealth extraction,” and “corporate capture of public institutions and elections,” enthusiastically abetted by a Supreme Court carefully packed with far-right ideologues hostile to the very ideals on which our country claims to be founded. Are we trying to go back to a “democracy that bailed out bank and auto executives while millions of working-class people lost their homes, jobs and retirements due to corporate crime, sending suicide, addiction and despair to historic levels?” Or to a “political system that has—under Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Trump alike—presided over the fastest growth in economic inequality and anti-democratic concentration of power in history while doubling down on a domestic police state and imperial violence?”

To that end, he suggests that too many progressives—to say nothing of anti-Trump conservatives—are longing for a return to an idealized state of affairs that never really existed “and prevents us from building the future we need.”

Genuine democracy is built and sustained by the everyday public infrastructures that allow people to rely on one another: thriving public housing, childcare, schools and libraries, universal healthcare, unions, public media, real community safety, and public health as direct social care. Where these institutions wither, democratic imagination withers—and fascist fantasies thrive. Where they are valued and invested, democracy becomes a lived practice rather than an anxious memory.

The United States has long been an oligarchy; that is one thing that cannot be said to have begun with Donald Trump in January 2017. And recognizing that is a non-negotiable pre-requisite to fixing it. Reinhart indicts deregulation, privatization, union-busting, and the hollowing out of social services, along with the transfer of power from the people “to corporations, unelected judges, and billionaires,” and notes that this was a bipartisan process. While I would offer the caveat that, for what it’s worth, one party was considerably more aggressive than the other, Reinhart rightly excoriates Democratic Party leaders for their timidity amid the rise of fascism in the United States. Luckily, “many ordinary Americans have stopped waiting for them.”

Across the country, including in my Chicago neighborhood, people have begun organizing among themselves to protect our immigrant neighbors and friends from state violence enacted by ICE, with measures including rapid-response phone trees, volunteers monitoring ICE and vulnerable neighborhood areas, mutual aid funds for detained neighbors, and community groups sharing legal resources and safe shelter.

These efforts are emerging not because the Democratic party has suddenly discovered courage and principle, but precisely because it has not. People are stepping in where their political representatives have cowered, choosing to defend their neighbors directly rather than waiting for permission from institutions that have proven unwilling to act.

These acts, Reinhart writes, “reveal something essential: democracy does not begin with politicians and institutions that promise to save us. It begins when people decide they will not abandon one another.”

Good government, he writes, “grows from the bottom up rather than the top down.”

CAN I GET A SECOND OPINION?

That is bracing and inspiring stuff. And Dr. Reinhart is not alone in his diagnosis.

In its most recent annual report, Sweden’s non-partisan V-Dem Institute, widely considered the world’s leading authority on the health of global political systems, bluntly stated that the US no longer qualifies as a democracy.

“Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country,” says Staffan Lindberg, founder of the institute, as reported in The Guardian. And “once the democratic backsliding begins, it’s often hard to stop.”

In fact, the institute concluded that the US is moving towards autocracy faster even than widely recognized strongman states like Turkey and Hungary. (The report was issued before the latter’s most recent elections.) V-Dem declares that “the speed with which US democracy is being dismantled is unprecedented in modern history,” with Trump concentrating executive power at near-dictatorial levels, the Supreme Court enabling him, and Congress abdicating its role as a check on the presidency. (Well, we do like to be number one.)

“For Orbán in Hungary, it took about four years, for Vučić in Serbia, it took eight years, and for Erdoğan in Turkey and Modi in India, it took about 10 years to accomplish the suppression of democratic institutions that Trump has achieved in only one year,” Lindberg says.

US democracy is now back at the worst recorded level since 1965, when US civil rights laws first introduced de facto universal suffrage. All progress made since then has been erased, according to the report.

Apropos of the opening paragraph of this piece, V-Dem specifically notes that the US still has free and fair elections—the “single bright spot,” according to The Guardian—and that the electoral system “remains stable for now.” But even that is in danger.

“It should be obvious by now that Trump is aiming for dictatorship,” Lindberg says.

Others, too, have pronounced the corpse cold. On LinkedIn (yes, LinkedIn), a South African businessman and academic named Herman Singh wrote the following. (I came across it via a Facebook user named Oliver Kornetzke.)

The United States, as a civilization grounded in a functioning democracy with real checks and balances, is effectively dead. When someone like Donald Trump can continue a pattern of destructive, criminal, norm-breaking behavior without any meaningful accountability, it signals clearly that the system has abandoned even the basic expectations of a healthy society: the rule of law, equal accountability, institutional integrity, and a shared commitment to truth over power.

In a genuinely free, open, and democratic system operating as intended, a “presidency” like this would not drag on for years. It would have been stopped, decisively, by the very mechanisms designed to prevent exactly this kind of failure.

When you put it like that, it’s hard to say he’s wrong. In fact, I won’t try. I think he’s right.

One of the reasons many Americans cling to this delusion of democracy-on-the-brink, rather than seeing the situation with clear eyes as Reinhart outlines it, is that they desperately want to believe that Trump was just an anomaly and not a bright red, pustulent symptom of a deep, deep sickness in the body politic of this country. (Joe Biden certainly felt that way, with tragic results.) For many, it is simply too painful—and for some, congenitally impossible—to think of America as that inherently bad.

Way back in 2020, at the time of Trump’s initial ouster, The Washington Post’s Monica Hesse wrote about that view, which was and remains pervasive among the white liberals who write to her:

Surely, they insisted, what had happened in 2016 was a blip. Hillary Clinton had been uniquely flawed, the country uniquely complacent, Donald Trump uniquely novel. The results didn’t really reflect America. Black women would save the party; Black women would save us all.

She contrasted that with what she heard from Black people—Black women especially.

To them, 2016 didn’t feel like a blip. It felt like the America they’d already been living in for decades was finally made visible to the rest of the country. Yes, it had always been racist. Yes, it had always been sexist. Yes, yes, yes. If you, like Biden, have had the recurring privilege of sadly shaking your head and saying, “This isn’t who we are,” what you really meant was, “This isn’t who I’ve ever had to see us be.” What you really meant was, “This isn’t my America…Crap, is it yours?”

Or as Reinhart writes, “if your neighbors are not living in a democracy, then neither are you.”

(For more on that, see a piece I wrote for this blog in November 2025 called “White Fright.”)

In self-defense, I have consistently said—both in this blog and in my 2024 book Resisting the Right—that our goal in opposing Trump is not merely to restore the status quo ante but to create something better. But Reinhart goes further, stressing the sheer linguistic error in speaking about “defending” democracy, arguing that the very premise is incorrect and misleading and therefore unhelpful. Words do matter, and so does how we think about what we’re doing. As the good doctor writes:

As long as we imagine democratic collapse as something still to be prevented, we will remain politically paralyzed, clinging to norms, leaders and procedures whose authority has evaporated. We will fight to restore a pre-Trump order that provided the fertile ground out of which far-right politics continues to grow.

So I personally consider myself duly scolded. I’m going to endeavor to keep this in mind and frame my pontification differently going forward.

FASCISM COMES ON LITTLE CAT FEET

In this discussion it helps to have a working definition of “democracy.” Many political scientists speak of “illiberal democracy” and “competitive authoritarianism,” which describe political systems with some trappings of democracy—including elections, or at least the Potemkin charade of them—but that don’t fully meet the standard of a just and free form of governance. A great many contemporary countries fall into this category—Orbán’s Hungary was often cited as the ur-model—without being stereotypically jackbooted police states. The US is now inarguably one of them.

In other words, the quality of a given democracy or quasi-democracy is a fluid matter.

My point in my essay of May 8 was that we should use the electoral process to try to oust, hinder, and otherwise combat these assholes; it was not an argument that American political process is at all healthy. Very much the contrary, in fact, or we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. The esteemed foreign policy pundit Robert Kagan believes America has already descended into dictatorship and that we’ve seen our last free election, and he’s convincing. But if participatory democracy in America was truly dead and buried, we wouldn’t be having this discussion either.

At a minimum, democracy in America has been badly damaged in unique ways unprecedented in our history, to the point where even outside observers and objective political scientists with no dog in the fight, using fancy book-learnin’ metrics, rank the US as having fallen out of the category of true democracies. But the good news is that democracy can be recovered, using many of the methods I discussed in May, including what remains of the democratic process itself. And there are others which I will detail in an upcoming blog, which will continue this theme.

The issue is similar to the way that many people choose not to apply the word “fascism” to what we are experiencing, for lack of the three a.m. knock on their own particular door. (Even as those knocks are indeed coming for others.) But the modern autocracy is often subtler than its forebears, though no less anti-democratic.

Like that much-debated definition of fascism, and the question of whether it has descended upon the US (spoiler: it has), we need not quibble over whether democracy is dead or merely dying because here is where the metaphor falls apart. In the same way that we can speak of “illiberal democracy” or “competitive authoritarianism,” the mortality of the American republic is not a binary matter, nor the status permanent, whatever it is or what we choose to call it. Even if democracy in the US has indeed expired, it can come back to life. In some ways, then, it could be said that what we have in the United States right now is a Schrödinger’s democracy, in which our republic is simultaneously alive and dead.

Which one prevails is up to us.

RINSE AND REPEAT

Again: I strongly recommend reading Dr. Reinhart’s piece in full, and I am repeating the link here for that reason.

In closing, I’d like to cite the last words in Resisting the Right, which I will now quote at length (because it’s my blog and I’ll bloviate if I want to):

The fundamental paradox of America remains the same as it was when Tocqueville visited these shores in the nineteenth century. The first nation on Earth to attempt to form a true representative democracy was also founded on twin crimes: the genocide of its original inhabitants and the abduction and servitude of enslaved people brought here by force to build that new nation.

Can a country with that history shed the damage of its past and remake itself to be true to the values on which it was founded and continues to espouse? Can we make a second American Revolution, a slow and nonviolent one that acknowledges and repudiates that blood-soaked past and lives up to the lofty ambitions and ideals of our founders, flawed though they were? Are we going to face at last the sins of our past and the bitter paradox at the very core of our country’s origin, and strive for the ideals we claim to revere, rather than ignore the ways we have fallen short, or flatter ourselves that we did not fall short at all? Are we going to care for the hungry, the poor, the ragged and the hopeless, the motherless children, the broken, the suffering and oppressed yearning to breathe free, the ones filled with righteous anger, the dreamers who came here seeking a new life in a place dedicated to freedom and democracy, or will we turn our backs and prove ourselves hypocrites? Are we going to be true to the notion of a nation founded on the equality of all people, or is the contradiction that those words were written by a slaveholder, however brilliant, too damning?

Ultimately, we are not just trying to stave off an autocracy, or resist it should it arise. We are trying to build a true democracy in a form that our country has never fully been able to mount, despite the best intentions of some, the opposition of others, and our collective delusion about how well we live up to the lofty principles which we claim to hold dear. It is impossible to achieve that goal if we are not clear-eyed about the past or the current state of play.

If we can fulfill the promise of the much-vaunted American experiment, we will earn the flattery we regularly dole out to ourselves, and all that poetry that makes our hearts swell. Naively or otherwise, I believe all that is within our capability as a people, even a people who so recently saw fit to elect as our leader Donald Trump.

It’s in our hands.

*******

Illustration: Diagram of “Schrödinger’s cat“ thought experiment. Credit: Wikipedia.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a big football fan*, and have written about the sport in these pages a fair bit. Four years ago, during the weird wintertime World Cup in Qatar, I wrote about the sad spectacle of Brazil’s beloved side becoming a pawn of the country’s right wing (partially willingly, which only made it sadder). More recently, I wrote about FIFA’s loathsome president Gianni Infantino giving Trump the newly made-up, first-ever “FIFA Peace Prize” live on global TV during the two-hour live draw last December, a surreal, televised travesty that made the Eurovision Song Contest look demure, and could have come out of the head of Terry Gilliam.

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I don’t want to be a scold or a buzzkill on a long weekend. I love the beach and a barbecue on Memorial Day, and the beginning of summer full stop. But when I was a young man, just starting out in my own adult life, my dad used to say to me, almost offhand, “Hey, if you can, always try to go to the cemetery on Memorial Day.”

On the morning of November 15, 1965, a ferocious wave of infantrymen from the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front—the NVA and the Viet Cong, as Americans called them—slammed into the perimeter of the rifle company my father commanded in a river valley of the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. The fighting was brutal, and at such close quarters that it was carried with small arms, grenade, bayonet, and even hand-to-hand. When it was over, Charlie Company 1/7^th Cavalry (Airmobile) ceased to exist as a combat-effective unit—in the parlance of the US Army—because so many of its members were dead. My dad was among the gravely wounded dragged to a casualty collection point.

But the American line had held.

The enemy withdrew and, despite three days of fighting, never did penetrate of the perimeter of that encircled American battalion in a firefight that saw some of the most hellacious combat of the entire war, including the first use of B-52s in a tactical role against ground troops, and resulted in the awarding of three Medals of Honor.

I am not here to debate the strategic implications of that misbegotten Southeast Asian war, or to engage in bullshit Rambo revisionism of “do we get to win this time?,” a mentality that even now continues to poison our foreign policy and lead us into further wrongheaded military misadventures. None of that changes the personal courage or the astonishing valor of the men who fought that day, under either combatant’s flags.

But I am here to say that, on this Memorial Day, let’s remember.

The thirty years that passed after that battle was a dark period in which Vietnam was an open wound in the American psyche. Many veterans never spoke of their experience, even to each other, or were in touch with comrades who had fought there. So when the veterans of that battle first gathered for a reunion, in 1992, after the publication of a powerful book about it, it was a remarkable experience.

I went to that event with my dad, and when he walked into that hotel ballroom in northern Virginia, his soldiers looked like they were literally seeing a ghost, because for almost thirty years they had thought he was dead. They had no reason to think otherwise, since there was no network of vets to which they belonged, and the last time they saw him, he was badly shot up—presumably fatally—and being dragged to the triage point.

(There he was indeed left among those deemed too far gone to save, until another officer begged the helicopter pilots to throw him on with the other wounded they were about to fly out, which they did. Those were “lift” pilots, by the way, ferrying out the wounded in the same blood-soaked Hueys in which they brought in fresh troops, the landing zone being too hot for “dustoff”—medevac—choppers to come in. His life was saved at a field hospital, along with others treated by the battalion’s lone doctor and his medics working under fire at the aid station in the middle of the fight.)

Even that 1992 reunion now seems like a long time ago, never mind the battle itself.

Since then, the cultural landscape in America has changed quite a bit as regards how we treat the military, largely for the better, but not entirely. There’s a lot of “thank you for your service” and honor guards at NFL games and exploitation of the profession of arms for partisan political purposes, often highly cynical ones. What has not changed is that only a small segment of our populace bears the burden of fighting this country’s wars. And what has undeniably gotten worse is that the powers-that-be have gotten far better at disguising their foreign misadventurism, at manufacturing consent, at blocking journalistic inquiry, and at carrying on endless wars without much public buy-in, sacrifice, and sometimes even simple awareness.

Now we have a leader who is himself a shameless draft dodger, and far worse than that, has a long history of openly insulting and deriding those who served or are still serving. Who has as his Secretary of War Defense a callow drunk and marital abuser who fancies himself a Knight Templar and openly encourages war crimes and gleefully bombs elementary schools without a shred of regret. Who has dragged us into a pointless, counterproductive war of choice and aggression against Iran. Who publicly scoffs at the deaths of the 13 Americans thus far who have given their lives in that war. And who is likely not done dealing death in his role as commander-in-chief.

Is this America? Fuck no, to put it in infantryman’s parlance. But I guess it is, under these cretinous leaders.

Please, on this Memorial Day, let’s pause to remember those of our countrymen and women who have paid the ultimate price when we called upon them; the soldiers they fought against who were patriots for their own cause; and the innocent noncombatants killed in the catastrophic process. And let’s take common cause against the monstrous cowards who continue to lead us down this path.

********

Photo: Funeral detail of the Old Guard—the US Army’s 3^rd Infantry Regiment—conducting a military burial for Sergeant Willie Rowe in Arlington National Cemetery, VA, August 8, 2017.

Let’s jump right in here. This week, we saw the most blatant example of presidential corruption in American history, when Donald Trump brazenly stole almost $1.8 billion from the US Treasury—which is to say, from US taxpayers.

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One of the most maddening things about Donald Trump—and there’s a huge menu from which to choose—is his lifelong ability to manipulate and bulldog and otherwise abuse the American legal system to his advantage, getting away with a lifetime of fraud, malfeasance, corruption, perfidy, and outright theft, from stiffing contractors in Atlantic City to making false statements about his wealth to obtain loans, to engaging in racially discriminatory practices as a landlord, to, oh, I dunno, stealing top secret documents and mounting a violent attempt to overturn a free and fair election. A history of sexual assault very much figures in that ignominious laundry list too. (He’s openly bragged about it, as you may know.)

But one person has beaten Donald Trump in court not once but twice…and not just beat him, but thrashed him to the tune of at least $88 million in damages. That person is a journalist named E. Jean Carroll. If you don’t know her name—and tens of millions of Americans don’t, because they only consume right-wing media, which would prefer you never learn her story—you would do well to go see a new feature documentary called ASK E, JEAN, which is having its theatrical premiere at the IFC Center in New York City on Friday May 22, and will roll out to LA, San Francisco, and other cities near you in the following weeks.

(Check out the trailer here.)

If there is any justice in the world—and the evidence suggests there is not—the film will be seen widely, particularly by the tens of millions of benighted, facts-starved Americans who don’t know this story, or the fact that the President of the United States has already been found liable for sexual abuse in a civil proceeding. At a time when the Epstein files are very much at the forefront of the national conversation, and when so many powerful people and institutions have willingly crumbled before incipient American fascism, this is the story of a woman who boldly stood up to the most powerful man in the Western world (maybe the whole world, depending on Putin’s mood), who is also a notoriously vindictive bully. As the legal analyst Dina Doll writes on Meidas+, the law firms folded, the media companies caved, the tech oligarchs bent the knee, but E. Jean Carroll stood and fought.

It’s as inspiring a story as you will find in these dark times.

THE WOMAN FROM FT. WAYNE

“E. Jean is bigger than life,” ASK E. JEAN’s director Ivy Meeropol told me. “She’s the kind of character that documentary filmmakers dream of.”

A native of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, raised in the pre-feminist Fifties of the whitebread Midwest, Elizabeth Jean Carroll first came to prominence as a beauty queen and cheerleader at Indiana University in the early 1960s; in fact she won the national title of Miss Cheerleader USA in 1964. (By contrast, IU’s football team didn’t win a national title until last year.)

After marrying and moving to Montana, E. Jean doggedly pursued her dream of becoming a writer; she was 36 when her first piece was published, in 1979—a tongue-in-cheek quiz about Hemingway and Fitzgerald—plucked out of the slush pile at Esquire. Like Bob Dylan or Satchel Paige, she never looked back.

“It’s fascinating because she started out as a girl who did all the ‘right’ feminine things,” Ivy says. “Beauty queen, sorority sister, cheerleader, get married very young and go off with her husband. He’s gonna be the writer.” (E. Jean’s first husband was also an aspiring journalist, Stephen Byers, who became editor-in-chief of Outdoor Life. Her second was the New York City anchorman John Johnson, of WABC-TV.) “But then she sells this story to Esquire and takes off for New York.”

As a freelance journalist over the next two decades, Carroll deployed her bracing prose, her fearlessness, and her 10,000-megawatt personality on behalf of periodicals like Esquire, Outside, Playboy (where she was its first female contributing editor), Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Playgirl, and others in a golden age of magazine writing. (Among her most famous pieces was a cover story for Outside for which she took Fran Lebowitz camping.)

From 1986–87 Carroll was a comedy writer for Saturday Night Live. For several years she was also romantic partners with Hunter S. Thompson, about whom she published a biography in 1993, and whose gonzo style influenced her own. (In a 1981 piece, The New York Times called her “feminism’s answer” to him.) In short, as Rachel Baker and Maggie Bullock of The Spread recently put it, in an interview with E. Jean in collaboration with Magazeum and the podcast Print Is Dead: “E. Jean is a goddamn swashbuckling magazine-world legend: a writer of such style, wit, and sheer ballsy joie de vivre that she carved out a name for herself in the boys club of New Journalism.”

But despite her success, Carroll still faced the hideous hypocrisy of a misogynistic culture, both in her industry and in society at large, one that put her looks foremost while also scorning her for them at the expense of her talent. (Not to mention the shadow of Hunter.) Yet even in that He-Man Woman Haters Club, she prevailed.

Carroll had already made her bones and then some when she accepted an offer to become the advice columnist for Elle, fulfilling a lifelong dream, and following in the footsteps of her idols Dear Abby and Ann Landers (who were identical twin sisters, by the by—fun fact). She wrote that column for an astonishing 27 years. In the mid-‘90s she expanded to a TV talk show—also called Ask E. Jean—on the new America’s Talking network, the precursor to MSNBC, started by Roger Ailes. (Yes, that Roger Ailes; it’s a whole nother story.)

ARE YOU BEING SERVED?

It was during that period that Carroll met Donald Trump by chance outside the fabled Manhattan department store Bergdorf Goodman, at a time when Trump was still just an obnoxious real estate developer and minor celebrity who desperately craved the limelight.

“Oh, hey, you’re that advice lady,” he said, recognizing her from TV. (Trump is not known to be able to read.)

Watch Ivy’s film to get the whole story, but I’ll cut to the chase, as they say in showbiz: that afternoon, within minutes of meeting, Trump sexually assaulted Carroll in a Bergdorf’s dressing room.

More than 20 years went by before Carroll went public with the story of that crime, which had understandably traumatized her. She told Baker and Bullock: “I was never going to reveal it. Never. Because it would have shattered my reputation. I would have been fired. Roger Ailes would have fired me on the fucking spot. Nobody would have believed me. Nobody would have believed me. So there was no way. “

Carroll has said that it was the Harvey Weinstein story, which began to break in 2017, and the parade of other women who had been sexually abused by powerful men and were now coming forward, that made her realize she could no longer stay silent.

In 2019, Carroll published a non-fiction book called “What Do We Need Men For?—A Modest Proposal, including a piece called “The Most Hideous Men of My Life,” a list of 21 men who had committed sexual assault, harassment, or abuse toward her. Trump was one of them. (Also on the list: Les Moonves and Roger Ailes himself.)

That piece was published as a cover story in New York Magazine in June of that year, kicking off a huge public brouhaha, and prompting Trump—by then well into his first term as President of the United States—to vehemently deny the charge and to viciously slander E. Jean, calling her a liar and a “whack job” on national television and deny that they had ever met. (He was later presented with a photo of them together, with their then-spouses, at a formal event in the 1980s.)

Carroll responded with a civil suit alleging sexual assault and defamation, under New York state’s Adult Survivors Act. (The statute of limitations on felony rape allegations had passed, taking criminal prosecution off the table.)

Regarding why she waited so long to come forward—the sneering question every Trump supporter immediately leveled at her—Carroll wrote in that piece that she dreaded the public opprobrium and abuse that awaited:

Receiving death threats, being driven from my home, being dismissed, being dragged through the mud, and joining the 15 women who’ve come forward with credible stories about how the man grabbed, badgered, belittled, mauled, molested, and assaulted them, only to see the man turn it around, deny, threaten, and attack them, never sounded like much fun.

She was spot-on, as all that abuse has rained down on her ever since. And it wasn’t just the far-right fanatics who attacked her. Once her allegations against the president came out, the cowards at Elle Magazine fired her, at Christmastime 2019, after almost three decades as their advice columnist, and didn’t even have the guts to say why, offering instead a transparently lame excuse about cutbacks.

But Carroll won that civil suit. In May 2023 a jury of twelve New Yorkers agreed with her description of events and awarded her $5 million in damages. Incredibly, the very day that verdict came down, Trump again slandered her on national television, calling her a “whack job” for a third time, a level of entitlement and arrogance that is almost impossible to fathom. In addition to using that slur when Carroll first made her allegations, and again during his deposition itself, this time he did it in a disgraceful CNN town hall hosted by Kaitlin Collins.

But Trump, of course, is also on tape literally bragging to a giggling Billy Bush about the exact thing he was found liable of doing to E. Jean (and to god knows how many other women), which is to say, grabbing them “by the pussy,” as he put it. For all we know, Trump was thinking of that incident at Bergdorf’s when he made that boast to the host of Access Hollywood. Or maybe he’d done it so often, they all ran together for him. Because “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”

Carroll and her attorney, the legendary Robbie Kaplan, sued again and again they won, in January 2024, this time with a judgment of $83M, a steep price hike intended to force Trump to shut his trap. Which he has more or less done, for now, leaving it to his overworked, revolving door of a legal team to do the talking.

Trump, as is his habit, has had that team drag both cases out on appeal, in hopes of having the verdicts overturned and avoid paying up. But after more than two years since the $83 million judgment, and despite regaining the presidency, he has lost at every level of the judicial system and all but exhausted his legal options. All that remains is for the Supreme Court to decide whether or not it will hear his appeals. (There are two separate applications, one for each case. SCOTUS has been sitting on the first petition for months. The second petition has not yet been filed, though as of just this past Tuesday, the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals—which has upheld the award—has allowed Trump to again delay paying it until the Supreme Court weighs in, or declines to.)

I don’t want to make any predictions about what the Roberts Court will do.

Along the way, Trump has also repeatedly tried to have the Department of Justice substitute itself as the defendant—a so-called Westfall Act substitution (similar to the Reverse Cowgirl)—so that the case would become United States vs Carroll rather than Trump vs. Carroll. Arguing that Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he call Carroll a “whack job” and denied that he raped her? Yeah, sounds like official presidential business to me.

Meanwhile, in case you are curious, E. Jean has not yet received a penny from Donald. The $88M is being held in escrow, and accruing interest; should she prevail, E. Jean stands to receive over $100M, as of this writing. She has said she will use the money to set up a non-profit foundation to protect reproductive rights and to fund law school scholarships for women.

JOURNEY THROUGH THE JUSTICE SYSTEM

All this and more is covered in the powerful ASK E. JEAN. The film had its world premiere at the prestigious Telluride Film Festival in September 2025, followed by a festival run including DOC NYC in New York, the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize for Best Documentary, and many others. (Full disclosure: my wife, Ferne Pearlstein, edited and wrote the film with Leah Goudsmit, and was the story producer on it.)

Ivy Meeropol, the director and producer of ASK E. JEAN, knows about notoriety, persecution, and demagogues. She is the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed by the US government for the crime of espionage in 1953, in a scandalous case that mixed selective facts with rabid anti-communism and antisemitism. Her first feature documentary was 2004’s Heir to an Execution, about her grandparents. (Ivy is the daughter of Michael Meeropol, who along with his younger brother Robert was adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol after their parents went to the electric chair. Abel, a songwriter and poet, is most famous for writing “Strange Fruit,” maybe the most powerful and haunting protest song in the entire American songbook.)

Ivy first reached out to E. Jean in 2019, when Carroll’s bombshell piece in New York magazine was published. Initially Carroll was not interested in being the subject of a documentary, having already been contacted by a number of high-profile filmmakers. But a mutual friend convinced her to watch Meeropol’s 2019 HBO documentary Bully. Coward. Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn, which won her over.

Cohn, if you’ve blocked him out of your memory (I don’t blame you) was the vicious young McCarthyite attorney with dark secrets of his own who was the engine behind the execution of her grandparents, Ethel in particular, in an unsuccessful attempt to leverage Julius to name names. In the 1970s, Cohn went on to become a mentor to another brash young New Yorker similarly unencumbered by morals named Donald Trump, as memorably captured in Ali Abbas’s The Apprentice (2024).

“Roy Cohn was monstrous, but he also created a monster,” says Ivy. “He’s really a small fry today, compared to what Trump is doing.”

Indeed, Cohn is an almost Shakespearean character, the missing link from the Red Scare to the AIDS crisis (to which he ultimately succumbed; see Angels in America) to our current neo-fascist nightmare under the aegis of his grotesque protégé. Cohn is also the subject of a forthcoming biography called American Scoundrel by Kai Bird (with Sue Goldmark), the Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author, with the late Martin Sherwin, of American Prometheus, on which the multiple Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer was based.

But even after E. Jean agreed to participate, the prospects of making a movie involving Donald Trump, who was still president at the time, were dicey. “I don’t think I’m naive,” Ivy told me, “but I really thought, ‘Oh, I’ve been at this a pretty long while; I’m sure I’ll have plenty of offers from streamers.’ But nobody wanted it. There was Trump fatigue, and people were afraid of him, and nobody wanted to do a #MeToo story.”

Even after Ivy got development money, from Concordia, there were obstacles. “Once the trials began, I was told that I couldn’t film anymore—not only in federal court, but also recording audio, or even just talking to E. Jean. So I was completely shut out for a while.”

The film looked as if it were dead in the water. “There were times when even E. Jean herself was saying, ‘Give it up, Ivy. Nobody wants to hear this story.’ But then Laura Bickford came in and brought a chunk of money to get us going, and then when Impact Partners came onboard we were off to the races. But we still had to raise a lot more, and it was really challenging.”

Fundraising was one obstacle, but almost all filmmakers encounter that (except Christopher Nolan). The threat of physical danger was quite another.

Ivy’s name came up in court in the first trial, when a lawyer on E. Jean’s team deliberately mentioned her in order to pre-empt Trump’s lawyers, who were trying to suggest—despicably—that E. Jean was somehow profiting off her allegations. As if having a global spotlight shined on you and the full force of a vindictive US presidency and the violent MAGA cult and a vituperative misogynistic society more generally is something one would want to bring on. (It’s also ironic that people think that a documentary film is some big cash cow. I’ll give you my accountant’s email and she can disabuse you of that notion.)

“In court, E. Jean had to say my name,” Ivy recalls, “and it was read into the record. Then the court reporter said, ‘Can you please spell that?’ ‘M-E-E-R-O-P-O-L.’ I was absolutely terrified.”

And it wasn’t like Ivy’s family has a good history with the American judicial system. In fact, the trial in Carroll vs. Trump took place in the very same courthouse were her grandparents were convicted and sentenced to death.

Even after Ivy had most of the financing, unforeseen challenges remained. After five years, the filmmakers had only just completed work when Trump won re-election in November 2024, scaring off a whole raft of festivals, distributors, streamers, and potential financers whom they were wooing for finishing funds. There were worries about legal challenges and even spurious criminal prosecution. When the Trump DOJ was going after Comey, James, Powell, Kelly, Lemon, and others, it was far from implausible.

“Things got so scary that some people who were already involved were pulling their names off the film,” Ivy says. “I understood why: different people have different vulnerabilities and they have to protect themselves—for instance, if they were getting pressure from an institution that they were attached to, or if they were a green card holder and were afraid of getting deported.”

Over a movie, I’ll remind you.

“But other people did step up.” Those brave people included festivals like Telluride, DOC NYC, and Hot Springs, and the distributor Abramorama which ultimately picked up the film and is putting it in theaters.

IT’S JUST A SHOT AWAY

Let’s pause here to talk about the word “rape.”

Trump’s defenders have always been keen to claim that the jury in the Carroll case did not find that he had committed that crime, but only (only!) “sexual abuse.”

“This was a rape case all along, and the jury rejected that—made other findings,” said Trump’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina, as if his client had been exonerated, channeling Bill “No Collusion” Barr. But the judge in the case, Lewis Kaplan of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, took pains to disagree—in writing. Writing in The Washington Post in 2023 (before Jeff Bezos neutered it), in an article titled “Judge Clarifies: Yes, Trump Was Found To Have Raped E. Jean Carroll,” Aaron Blake reported:

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan wrote. He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

Kaplan said New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”

“The jury’s finding of sexual abuse therefore necessarily implies that it found that Mr. Trump forcibly penetrated her vagina,” Kaplan wrote…He added that the jury clearly found that Trump had “ ‘raped’ her in the sense of that term broader than the New York Penal Law definition.”

But Donald has always been very sensitive about the “r” word, which is interesting in itself.

His own ex-wife, Ivana, stated in a 1989 deposition as part of their divorce proceedings that Donald had once raped her during their marriage, though she later denied that she meant it in the commonly accepted definition of the word. The statement was revealed in the 1993 book Lost Tycoon by Harry Hurt III. Jane Mayer of The New Yorker reported:

Before Hurt’s book came out, Trump’s lawyers pressured the publisher, W. W. Norton, to paste a clarifying statement from Ivana into the flyleaf of every copy. In it, she confirmed that she had said in a deposition that her husband had “raped” her, but added that she did not want those words to be interpreted in “a literal or criminal sense.” She also said, “As a woman, I felt violated.” Hurt said that he considers the note a non-denial denial, and believes that Ivana agreed to amend her words in order to secure the divorce settlement, in which she reportedly received fourteen million dollars in cash.

Later still, Ivana fell down a flight of stairs to an untimely death in her own home.

After George Stephanopoulos said on the air in March 2024 that Trump had been “found liable for rape” and for “defaming the victim of that rape,” Donald freaked the fuck out and sued ABC. The network cravenly caved, agreeing to donate $15 million to the Trump presidential library (plus pay a million in his legal fees), even though many legal experts questioned Trump’s chances of winning that suit. But undoubtedly the network wanted to curry favor with the newly re-elected president—a horrible precedent. But ABC didn’t consult with me.

Clearly, the word hits a nerve with Donald.

“I COULDN’T LET IT STAND”

Apart from a political climate that was literally life-threatening—a challenge most documentarians don’t usually face if they’re not in a war zone—there were other filmmaking obstacles facing ASK E. JEAN.

Because Meeropol was not allowed to film the trials themselves, gaining access to the videotaped depositions that Trump and E. Jean gave was cinematic gold.

“I just started asking, ‘Were these depositions videotaped?’” Ivy told me. “And Robbie said, ‘Oh yeah, they were.’ We were able to get Trump’s deposition because it had been entered into evidence. Trump’s team never wanted E. Jean’s depositions entered into evidence, but Robbie and E. Jean gave them to me because they had the authority to do that. That was the greatest gift.”

Nobody outside of the people involved in the trials had ever seen those E. Jean depositions, and nobody would have, if Ivy and her team hadn’t made this film. “It makes me think about all the other depositions that are sitting in vaults somewhere.”

Among the most poignant moments in the documentary is E. Jean expressing regret over the sometimes cavalier advice she gave other women who had survived sexual assault during her years as an advice columnist and TV host, before she gained a brutal first-person understanding of it. “She wanted to look at herself and the advice she had given with clearer eyes and from a different vantage point,” Ivy says. “And I found that really admirable.”

One of the most memorable parts of the story is Trump infamously insisting he couldn’t have assaulted Carroll because she’s “not my type,” a claim he made several times, including in the deposition. (He also detoured to talk about the other women present in the courtroom who were also not his type.) The moment is so shocking that E. Jean made it the title of her subsequent book. Apart from the commonplace but woefully mistaken presumption that rape is a crime of sex and not violence, his remark is absurd, given his parade of wives and mistresses who are all in the same “thin, beautiful blonde” mold (but without a scintilla of E. Jean’s soul). On that front, the film also contains a jaw-dropping, real-life Perry Mason moment on the witness stand that no one would ever believe if it were in a fiction film.

But even in her deposition, Carroll’s looks—like any woman’s—were central to the case, unjust as that is. In the film, she and Robbie Kaplan describe how she had to resemble how she looked more than twenty years before, so that her “attractiveness” to a predator like Trump would be clearer to the jury. (They use an earthier word for it.) Carroll, again speaking to Baker and Bullock:

When a woman walks into the court, what is she judged on? How she looks. And what she has on. Particularly in a sexual assault case—what she has on, what she looks like. It was essential. The body is always the center of a rape case. Always.

And you can hear Trump’s attorney, the odious Alina Habba, whom he later tried to install as the US Attorney for the District of New Jersey before the courts shot her down, grilling E. Jean with insulting questions about her sex life, her underwear, and whether she’d ever had acting lessons. No woman could be blamed for wanting to avoid that, even at the price of letting her attacker go free. Carroll herself cops to feeling that way for many years, until she couldn’t keep mum any longer while watching other brave women come forward. Asked by an incredulous Habba why she took on Trump, a man known for dragging his opponents through the mud, an intrepid Carroll replies:

“Because he called me a liar. And I couldn’t let it stand.”

AMERICAN TRILOGY

ASK E. JEAN is seen by some as the third in a triptych of documentaries by Meeropol, beginning with Heir to an Execution, then Bully. Coward. Victim., and the new film closing the loop. Ivy insists she did not consciously set out to make a trilogy, but inevitably the films do present that way because they all tell the same story of America. What happened to her grandparents does not have anything to do with Trump per se, and Roy Cohn died before E. Jean came forward with her allegations, but Donald Trump is part of that same continuous, deadly strain in our national bloodstream, with Cohn as the toxin that links them all together, even if his presence in the third film is only subtextual. That is very much why folks in that retrograde right-wing movement do not want you to see this film or hear this story, even as they are spending heavily to promote certain other women and their stories.

Reviewing the recent Melania documentary for The Atlantic, Sophie Gilbert began her piece with these paragraphs:

Recently, I watched a new documentary about an enigmatic woman of notable charm and courage preparing for one of the most momentous events in her life. That woman is E. Jean Carroll, and the movie is Ask E. Jean.

But very few people have seen Ask E. Jean or even heard of it. Streaming platforms and distributors have steered absolutely clear of a movie that so plainly impugns the president, regardless of its obvious relevance and engaging portrait of Carroll, whose decision to come forward was resolutely in spite of everything she knew she’d face as a result.

“We all have a lot at stake here. This lawsuit is not just for me; it almost has nothing to do with me,” she explains in one scene to the director, Ivy Meeropol. “It’s for, really, women across the country.”

“One of the big takeaways is let’s listen to women,” Ivy told me. “That’s why I love the title. Ask E. Jean. Just ask her. Because she can tell you the story. By the end of the film, you’d have to be pretty brainwashed not to say, ‘Okay, she’s telling the truth.’”

“I feel so much braver and hopeful just being with her and Robbie. I want the film to do that for audiences. If we can get this out widely, I think it’s going to bring people together around something that’s really inspiring, when you watch someone do something so brave. E. Jean didn’t have to do what she did and call the president out. She could have stayed quiet. But she didn’t.”

E. Jean Carroll is a badass, and so are the people who worked so hard to bring us her story. I encourage all Americans to go see it.

********

ASK E. JEAN is premiering at the IFC Center in NYC on Friday May 22, 2026, and rolling out to LA, San Francisco, and other cities in the following weeks. Check the schedule of locations and dates here.

Read E. Jean Carroll on Substack. Her new book: Not My Type: One Woman vs. a President is out now, from St. Martin’s Press.

Photos:

· Top: E Jean in 2006. Credit: julieannesmo/Wikipedia.

· “Jeannie” Carroll, as she was then known, Miss Cheerleader USA, at Indiana University, cover of the Indianapolis Star Magazine, January 1965

· October 1983 issue of Outside Magazine, with E. Jean’s cover story about taking Fran Lebowitz camping

· E. Jean at home in Ennis, MT, 1979. Credit: Outside Magazine.

· E. Jean in her freelance journalist years

· E. Jean around 1994; framegrab from her TV show Ask E. Jean on the America’s Talking cable network

· L to R: Donald Trump, E. Jean Carroll, her then-husband WABC-TV anchor John Johnson, and Ivana Trump, at an NBC party around 1987

· January 2019 issue of New York magazine with cover story, “My List of Hideous Men,” by EJC

· E. Jean leaving the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan with her attorneys, Shawn Crowley (left) and Roberta Kaplan (right) after winning her second judgment against Donald Trump, January 2024. Credit: Brendan Mcdermid/Getty Images.

· E. Jean outside the federal courthouse, January 2024. Credit: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images.

· R to L: Ivy Meeropol, E. Jean, and her friend, the former TV host Carol Martin, at the Montclair Film Festival in NJ, October 2025. Credit: Neil Grabowsky.

ASK E. JEAN (91 min)

An Impact Partners Film. Featuring E. Jean Carroll, Robbie Kaplan, Lisa Birnbach, and Carol Martin. Directed and Produced by Ivy Meeropol. Produced by Laura Bickford and Annabelle Dunne. Executive Producers: Graydon Carter, Ruth Ann Harnisch, Geralyn White Dreyfous, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, Sheila Nevins, Jenny Warburg, Alexia Blaze, Jenny Raskin, Mitch Solomon, Emily Lansbury, MKR Sternlicht. Cinematography by Martina Radian. Written by Ivy Meeropol, Ferne Pearlstein, and Leah Goudsmit. Edited by Ferne Pearlstein and Leah Goudsmit. Story Producer Ferne Pearlstein. Score by Laura Karpman, Amelia Allen, and Elena Pinderhughes. “Get Things Done” Written by Joe McGinty, Performed by the Joe McGinty Seven and Paige Siegwardt.

ASK E. JEAN is distributed by Abramorama

For press inquiries contact Falco Ink

For The King’s Necktie, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Consultant: Eloise Edwards

A few years ago, in September 2022, I wrote a blog called “Once You Have the Courts.” It took its title from a quip by Jason Stanley, a philosophy professor at Yale, and the author of How Fascism Works, who said: “Once you have the courts you can pretty much do whatever you want.” How right he was, as we were reminded this week by twin legal decisions, both egregiously favoring the GOP: one by the US Supreme Court in gutting the last remnants of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the other by the Virginia state Supreme Court in striking down a referendum on congressional redistricting that would have helped Democrats counter aggressive redistricting by Republicans in other states.

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I’m of a certain age—and demographic—so my favorite Bruce records are the early ones, particularly Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ and The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, both from 1973. Notwithstanding the greatness of later LPs like Darkness or Nebraska, I’m stuck on the sprawling, jazz-inflected pop operettas of his early years, with songs full of Dylanesque wordplay and singalong backing vocals, like “Incident on 57^th Street,” “Spirit in the Night,” “For You,” “New York City Serenade,” “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City,” and “Thundercrack,” to name just a few. And of course “Kitty’s Back,” whose tag bleats:

Oo-woo, what can I do? / Oh-whoa, what can I do?

I hear that chorus in my head when I ponder—or hear others ponder, ruefully—what we can do to push back against the monstrous dictator manqué whose presence has afflicted us for almost a decade, and against the straight-up fascist movement he sits atop. (Hey, I’m an old white dude—of course I’m gonna go to Bruce for my internal soundtrack. Oo-woo, what can I do?)

But the question is a good one. We can yell and scream, and that has value—a lot of value, in many ways. But people also rightly crave actual, concrete actions that we can take. It’s all the more fitting that Bruce should be the playlist when I think about that (and I think about it all the time), because few public figures have been as vocal in their objection to our hideous fake president than he has, and few have done more to rally popular opposition.

So in keeping with recent inspirations from the likes of activists Susan Wagner and Micah Sifry, who encourage us to be aggressive and proactive and not just wallow in doom and lamentation, let me briefly sketch out a variety of things we can do across a broad spectrum of action. Many of these ideas are drawn from my own 2024 book Resisting the Right, from OR Books, and the research that went into it. The categories discussed in that book cut across the whole range of human activity: political, economic, informational, religious (and nonreligious), technological, artistic, scientific, sociological, and interpersonal, to name but a few.

At the macro level, of course, when it comes to summoning a movement to oppose a right-wing regime in the United States, it is not necessary for us to reinvent the proverbial wheel. There is no better example of a successful pro-democracy struggle than the Civil Rights Movement, itself the heir to the abolitionist movement that predates even the founding of the US. The antiwar movement of the 1960s is another natural example to follow, as are the feminist, gay rights, and AIDS activism movements. Like the Civil Rights Movement, these were vast, multi-layered, highly disciplined movements that demonstrated incredible tenacity, patience, and determination over many, many years. And they are not outliers. Throughout its history, American life has been shaped by determined dissident movements. Overseas, we can look to Solidarity in Poland, the People Power movement in the Philippines, and the global anti-apartheid movement, to name but a few.

But we need not think of resistance as some gargantuan political thing, intimidating in its size and scope. The 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa has spoken of democracy dying the death of a thousand cuts, but autocracy can be brought down in the same way. Many of those thousand cuts are in the seemingly small, quotidian actions of ordinary citizens like you and me.

ELECTIONS STILL MATTER

First and most pressing, the electoral system is still operating in the USA, even if it is under unconscionable attack. With crucial midterms only six months away, it is all hands on deck to retake the House (and ideally the Senate as well), along with state and local offices, and to put a brake on this reckless, criminal regime.

A few weeks ago I wrote a whole blog about Hungary, whose citizens recently shocked the world by voting out their strongman Viktor Orbán after 16 years of what looked like unshakable rule. That was a deeply entrenched authoritarian regime that was a model for aspiring American fascists. Many—even in Hungary—never imagined that it could be dislodged at the polls, given how successfully Orbán had put a chokehold on their electoral system. And yet it was. We can do the same with our dickhead overlords.

Please note: voter turnout in the Hungarian elections was 74%, the highest in the country’s postwar history. As Arlo Guthrie told his audiences during the anti-Vietnam war movement, “Ya gotta sing loud if ya wanna end the war and stuff.” And you gotta actually go to the polls if you wanna vote the bastards out. So when we talk about how to defeat Trump, let’s start with that.

I know that some people—many of whom I deeply respect—scoff at the idea that we can vote our way out of this crisis, arguing that our democracy is already effectively dead and that clinging to old-fashioned electoral politics as a way out is naïve and foolish. I am sympathetic to that argument, but for now I don’t think it’s correct. A lot of people thought that about Hungary, too—including Viktor Orbán himself—and wound up surprised. To presume that US elections are already compromised is tantamount to surrender. Right-wing gaslighting is deliberately aimed at making us throw up our hands, so let’s not deliver the GOP an easy victory it does not deserve.

“Call me old-fashioned, but we still have an electoral system in this country, with all its imperfections,” the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jon Else told me for Resisting the Right. Else was a young volunteer in Mississippi in 1964 and ’65, registering voters as what he calls a “lowest level pavement pounder” in SNCC, and was on the steps of the courthouse in Selma, Alabama, when the racist sheriff Jim Clark went berserk in front of the national press. Now a professor emeritus at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, Else was series producer and cinematographer for Eyes on the Prize, the landmark 1987 PBS series on the Civil Rights Movement.

“What I do is voter registration. I was dipped into that by my heel in Mississippi in the 1960s, and that’s what I can do most effectively. I go out into the rural parts of California every election cycle, and I find some key congressional race, and I walk the precincts, and I’m in the parking lot at Walmart with my clipboard registering voters. And it’s frustrating: you may spend a whole day and register three voters. But we actually flipped the district out there a couple cycles ago, where 55,000 people voted in the midterm election, and the Democratic candidate ousted the Republican by nine hundred votes, and he’s now in his third term. As long as we have an electoral system, that’s where I put most of my energies.”

Over the past year, Democrats have been winning special elections all over the country, even in deeply red regions that went for Trump by double digits in 2024. Control of the House is well within reach, which would enable us to choke off the money to the administration’s initiatives, launch investigations, and even impeach him yet again, although I am not arguing that that’s advisable. (Third time lucky!) The Senate is a longer shot, but the highly regarded Cook Political Report recently moved four Senate races toward the Democrats, for a net gain of anywhere from one to three seats.

It’s also true that the “why bother?” argument gained credence last week when the six white-robed black-robed, right-wing Supreme Court justices finished gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That decision immediately prompted numerous states of the former Confederacy to begin redrawing congressional districts, even halting primary elections where early voting was already underway in order to do so. (And with SCOTUS breaking its own norms to facilitate it.) Democratic chances to re-take the House undeniably took a hit, but the House’s cake is already largely baked. The GOP is likely to gain a few seats, though it could backfire in the long run, with tit-for-tat from blue states whose Democratic leaders have recently re-discovered their balls. But the newly resurgent, shameless zealotry of the Old South in trying to suppress the power of Black people and the anti-Trump coalition more broadly—and not even trying to hide it but gleeful about it—is all the more reason we have to redouble our electoral efforts. Even with the SCOTUS decision and subsequent Republican skullduggery, we are still likely to win the House (and the Senate is unaffected by gerrymandering). It will be tight, but that is all the more reason for us to pull out all the stops.

If you think voting makes no difference, ask yourself why the other side works so hard to keep you from doing it. When we vote, we win.

THE SOUND OF MARCHING, CHARGING FEET, BOY

While pursuing an electoral solution à la the good people of Budapest and vicinity, getting out into the streets in protest is another front-of-mind way we can apply pressure to the Trump regime.

Trump’s first term, of course, began with the stirring, pink pussy-hatted spectacle of the Women’s March in cities around the world, some five million people in the streets of the US alone, the largest single-day protest in American history. In his second term, the No Kings marches—three so far—have taken up the mantle. I’ve participated in them, as have the vast majority of my pro-democracy friends all over the country, in cities and towns big and small. They are inspiring to our side, and a statement of commitment and defiance to the administration and to the whole country.

That said, a great many veterans of the Civil Rights, anti-war, and feminist movements with whom I spoke took pains to say that “the big march” in and of itself is not sufficient. In the view of both Jon Else and the legendary civil rights activist Zoharah Simmons, the marches, rallies, and demonstrations of the Civil Rights Movement mattered mostly in speaking to policymakers in ways that moved them to action. With an administration like Trump’s that is openly nihilistic, the effect of a big march is minimal, at least insofar as spurring legislative or executive action, though it still puts it under pressure in other ways. (The White House certainly responded to palpable public outrage over the murderous actions of ICE in Minneapolis, for instance, even if it was just to be more discreet in those despicable efforts.)

In a recent paper titled “The Electoral Effects of Social Protests in the Trump Era,” the political scientists John Holbein of the University of Virginia, Kevin Reuning of Miami University of Ohio, and Cynthia West and Hans Hassell of Florida State University found that, in the current climate, the electoral effects of most public protests have been largely insignificant. The exception is what they call “confrontational” protests, “comprising fewer than 2 percent of all protest events” that they studied, in which the authors observed “both a modest Democratic donation surge and, in subsequent elections, a 1–2 percentage point increase in Democratic vote share.” That’s not much, but it’s something. “In a deeply polarized era,” the authors write, “it is opposition protest, not co-partisan activism, that moves the needle: making backlash, not mobilization, the mechanism when protest matters at all.”

In other words, it’s not necessarily the protest itself that makes the difference, but the regime’s harsh reaction to it. That was also true in the Civil Rights Movement, whose leaders knew that the optics of vicious dogs and firehoses being turned on peaceful demonstrators would horrify the public (and in those days, some lawmakers too). This is not to say that they were trying to provoke brutality, or that we should do so today; we hardly need to, as our current government is grotesquely keen to use violence without provocation. But that all-but-inevitable draconian response by the Trump administration is likely to harm its cause and lend protest some power.

I also spoke with Rev. Dr. Norvel Goff Sr., a presiding elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, including Emanuel AME in Charleston, SC, commonly known as Mother Emanuel, a house of worship with a long history of civil rights organizing. (It was also the scene of the horrific 2015 shooting in which nine parishioners were killed by a white supremacist, which Rev. Goff survived.)

“I still think everything is local,” Rev. Goff told me. “It’s one thing to march and to protest. But after you’ve done that, how do we go beyond the protests? In my belief, you must have a diverse coalition of persons who believe in human worth and human dignity and the respect of all communities to come together to bring about positive change. We start organizing, house by house, block by block, community by community, to push back on a daily basis at all levels. Sometimes it’s a very slow process, but you still must stick with it. Because change will come if you keep pressing forward.”

IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID

What else can we do? One of the most impactful forces, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, is the power of the purse. The flow of money is a chokepoint at which the mechanisms of autocracy are most vulnerable. Strikes, slowdowns, boycotts, and the like not only raise public awareness, but are concrete, specifically targeted actions that prevent those mechanisms from operating as they normally would.

Grassroots boycotts of companies complicit in the Republican regime are a direct way to inflict pain, confronting them with the full force of public disapproval in order to compel them to change their behavior. That was the case with Toyota when it was revealed that it was one of the major corporate donors to pro-insurrectionist politicians, or with AT&T when it was shamed into dropping the far-right One America Newsfrom its platform (albeit not as fully as it claimed). This economic pressure can be as simple as not buying products from Amazon or using its Prime Video streaming service, owned as they are by the dogshit-awful billionaire convert to Trumpism Jeff Bezos. CBS and other Paramount properties owned by nepo baby and right-wing toady David Ellison and his company Skydance are another good target for starvation of your consumer dollars, especially the once-proud Tiffany Network’s pathetic “news” division, where Bari Weiss now eagerly bends the knee to the Dear Leader. (Gee, maybe somebody will erect a statue to her someday.)

Trivial gestures, you say? No. I refer you back to Maria Ressa and her thousand cuts. Not everyone can put their body on the gears of the machine in protest or go to jail for their beliefs. But everyone can vote with their dollars.

One of the great advantages of this tactic is that it requires no propagandizing, or argument, or appeal to the foe’s better angels, if it has any. It is purely transactional, with the targeted companies made to feel the consequences of their collaboration.

Sometimes it is easy to identify a target, such as Goya, whose CEO was (and remains) a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, or Chick-fil-A, whose fundamentalist Christian owners have donated significant sums of money to anti-LGBTQ+ causes. Other times it can be hard to disentangle the ownership, in the complex web of multinational global corporations. But even when the financial impact of a boycott is negligible, the symbolic impact can be significant in terms of consciousness-raising, and in putting these companies on notice that their behavior is neither invisible nor acceptable.

Saul Alinsky championed another market-based technique, which he called “shareholder activism,” which involves the stockholders of public companies organizing to put pressure on management, an approach that has been more effective than you might think, and was employed in the campaign to force divestment of US investment in South Africa, particularly among colleges and universities.

The right often gripes that this sort of economic pressure is a kind of “censorship”—or even less generously, blackmail—even though right-wingers readily engage in it themselves. (See Bud Light, Target, and others.) The former accusation is empirically incorrect, the latter hypocritical. Only the state can censor, whether it’s speech or economics. By contrast, when consumers make choices, for whatever reason, that is the very exercise of free speech, and the market operating as it is intended to do, which is the very heart of capitalism. And economic suffering is one of the few pressure points that are unambiguously at our disposal: witness the GOP’s current woes re high prices at the gasoline pump, a purely self-inflicted wound thanks to Trump’s moronic and criminal war on Iran.

Boycotts like the ones described above leverage the power of the consumer; slowdowns, stoppages, and strikes marshal the power of the producer to force the powers that be to the bargaining table, win concessions, and even topple them entirely. “Supply side” economics, it turns out, goes both ways.

A general strike represents a dramatic escalation from the ordinary, more limited kind, as well as the most blunt possible demonstration that political power ultimately resides with the people. The plebeians of Rome mounted what were essentially general strikes—probably the earliest example in recorded history—as early as 494 BCE. Gandhi made use of the hartal, a temporary general strike, in the Indian independence struggle. In more recent times, the events of May 1968 in France present the most prominent example of the tactic, stretching from the factories to the universities to the streets of Paris and other major cities. Shutting down the entire economy and bringing American life to a halt would be a reminder that, ultimately, no regime, not even the most authoritarian, can rule without the consent of the governed, even when tyrants try to assert otherwise. In the Trump era we have yet to see a sustained, nationwide general strike of more than a day (which has happened twice, on February 28 and on May 1). But it is certainly on the table, if we can marshal sufficient support.

But the kind of broad-based discipline required for a general strike cannot be accomplished without granular organizing, which traditionally has been provided by unions…one of many reasons why the Republican Party and the plutocratic interests it represents have traditionally worked overtime to try to destroy them. (Overtime? I hope they got time-and-a-half.) The defense of unions and the union movement is therefore a key aspect of the fight to defend democracy, and one of our strongest means to restore it from the damage it has already suffered.

You want to fight Trump? Join a union.

PLEASE LISTEN CAREFULLY, AS OUR MENU OPTIONS HAVE CHANGED

Speaking of work, there are also things you can do that are pegged to your job, depending on what it is. The legal community has been at the forefront of the resistance, fighting ICE, mass deportations, family separation policy, and more. Public health workers and organizations are also on that front line, defending abortion access, vaccines, and even science itself. Teachers too are in the trenches, protecting critical thinking and pushing back against an Orwellian right-wing movement that wants to re-write history, ban books, and both starve and control young minds.

And it can get bigger from there. Federal bureaucrats can thwart administration policies by putting a stick in the gears, while state, county, and municipal workers can participate in—and advocate for—legal countermeasures to nullify or at least balance out damage done by federal policy. If you’re a member of the media in any way, even with a blog like this one, or at the local level, let alone with a bigger megaphone, I don’t need to explain what you can do.

None of those apply to you? No problem: there are lots of things that you can do that are not work-related.

Religious institutions can stand up against this tyrant and many have bravely done so; if you are a believer, your house of worship can play a role and you can be part of that effort. The arts are a bedrock of political resistance, and both making it and supporting it is a revolutionary act. That goes for celebrated work that hangs in museums and gets performed at Lincoln Center (but not the Trump/Kennedy Center) to more populist forms like graffiti and standup comedy. We can take special inspiration from politically-minded art collectives like the Good Liars, the Yes Men, and Guerrilla Girls. ACT UP—not an arts organization per se, but one that used street theater to devastating effect—was a particularly sterling example.

And there’s more that’s even simpler. Give of your money and your time. Get involved in mutual aid groups. (If you’re unfamiliar with the term, read more about it here.) Work at a food bank. Seek out and support local and independent journalists and pro-democracy organizations. Support your friends and neighbors and refuse to obey in advance. Run for office yourself, if you have the stomach, and/or support pro-democracy candidates who do. Put decals on your car and signs in your windows. Small beer, you say? Maybe. I’m not arguing that that’s going to bring Donald down all by itself, but it’s an announcement to everyone who sees those signs that we are not onboard with this travesty. And a sign in every window sends a very loud message indeed.

All this falls under the general rubric of “community organizing,” a term Rudy Giuliani snickered at when describing then-candidate Barack Obama’s CV back in 2008. But we can see the divergent ways that history has treated Rudy and Barack, respectively. We saw how effective community organizing was in resisting the homicidal thugs of ICE last winter in Minneapolis. Neighbors came together with mobile patrols, phone trees, whistles, and a general determination to protect one another—native-born and immigrant alike—against a lawless secret police force that didn’t think white Minnesotans would care about a bunch of brown people, even though they lived next door. Similar efforts went on during the ICE surge in Los Angeles, though the two high-profile murders in Minneapolis drew more attention to resistance efforts there. That fight is far from over, as Miller and Homan and Mullin and ICE have merely regrouped, but the pro-democracy cause bloodied their nose, and they felt it.

Want to get really creative? On its website, the nonprofit group Nonviolence International offers a menu of three hundred tactics, ranging from nonviolent land seizures to hitting autocrats in the face with a pie, mock trials and elections, postal bombardment (like the human hair animal rights activists mailed en masse to Harrod’s in 2012), leafletting from the air, the overloading of the administrative system, the Lysistrata strategy, boat blockades, public art, the renouncing of honors, flash mobs, teach-ins, rent withholding, dissemination of fake money, and many more. In Small Acts of Resistance (2010), Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson detail eighty historical examples of innovative defiance: Polish people ritually taking their television sets for a walk in baby strollers to protest state-run TV news; Uruguayan soccer crowds mumbling the national anthem but for the line “may tyrants tremble!”; Iranian cab drivers who refused to pick up religious clerics; a walkout by vote counters in the Philippines who declined to falsify election numbers; packs of dogs sent into the streets of Yangon bearing photos of Than Shwe (the leader of Myanmar’s military junta) and the subversive graphic designer who designed that country’s new paper currency to resemble the forbidden image of dissident leader Aung San Suu Kyi, rather than that of her father. The possibilities are nearly infinite.

Simply keeping up morale—cheerleading, if you will—is a task whose importance is not to be underestimated, as a huge part of any resistance movement hinges on communing with like-minded individuals. (Like this blog.) If you’re really bold, you can even try reaching across the aisle to that tiny sliver of ideologically slippery, non-diehard Trump voters who are now having buyers’ remorse of the leopards-eating-people’s-faces variety. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think this is a big group, or one worth wasting a lot of time on. I have long become convinced that some 30% of our fellow countrymen are beyond help, and would not only forgive Trump shooting someone on Fifth Avenue (and everything else he has actually done, some of which is arguably worse than a single murder), but would even follow him into genocide and nuclear armageddon if he said so. But we all have family members, friends, and colleagues who might be amenable to common sense, if tactfully delivered. If you can reach them and make them see the light, do so. (For much more detail on how to approach that fraught task, see Chapter 18, “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” in my book.)

THE DOGS ON MAIN STREET HOWL

In short, the battle is joined. The forces arrayed against us are no joke, but we are far from powerless.

If the 2026 midterms prove to be a farce, or if Trump and the GOP substantively undermine them, there may come a time when we have to go further: not to violence, which plays into the right wing’s hands (I want to be very clear about that), but to active noncooperation and civil disobedience, including not only a general strike but a tax revolt and other measures. This essay will not concern itself with those courses of action, which are a topic for another—darker—day, one I hope we never reach.

But we need not go to the worst case scenario, because there’s plenty that can be done right now.

I know the daily onslaught of shit is exhausting—the bad guys want it to be so. We all get fatigued and discouraged; it’s only human. But we can catch our breath and then plunge back into the struggle. As I have tried to outline briefly in this essay, no matter who you are or where you live or what you do for a living, there are things that each of us can do, both individually and collectively, to oppose this fascist regime. Each action is valuable and contributes to the whole. Don’t think for a moment that it does not.

Let’s give the last word to Bruce, and the speech he has been using to introduce his shows of late, including the current US tour that kicked off—not by accident—in Minneapolis at the end of March:

The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock & roll in dangerous times. We are here in celebration and defense of our American ideals: democracy, our Constitution, and our sacred American promise.

The America that I love, the America that I’ve written about for 50 years, that’s been a beacon of hope and liberty around the world, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless, and treasonous administration.

Tonight, we ask all of you to join with us in choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawless, ethics over unbridled corruption, resistance over complacency, unity over division, and peace over war!

Right on. Because we can, in fact, take this moment into our hands.

********

Photos: A true American patriot and champion of humanity full stop. 1974 Bruce: Tom Hill/Getty Images. 2026 Bruce: Shirlaine Forrest/Getty Images.

When Cole Allen attempted to kill Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner last Saturday night, the most interesting aspect of the incident was the widespread suspicion—broadly shared across diverse demographics and even somewhat across partisan political lines—that it might have been faked.

In the not-too-distant past, that sort of conspiracy-mongering was the exclusive province of tinfoil-hatted nuts. (I’m using the approved American Psychiatric Association definition here.) Going all the way back to the Kennedy assassination, behavior like poring over the Zapruder film and the Warren Commission report as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls was the sort of thing in which only the cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs lunatic fringe engaged. The sort of thing comedians made fun of, giving us the familiar stereotype of a basement-dwelling obsessive who could connect Lee Harvey Oswald to everything from UFOs to Bigfoot.

Now that sort of thinking—and behavior—has gone completely mainstream.

In the wake of this most recent attempt on Trump’s life (getting to be tedious, aren’t they?), skepticism about whether that had, in fact, been a real murder attempt or something Team Trump cooked up to bolster his sagging poll numbers, or distract from his disastrous war on Iran, or from the Epstein files, or just help get his idiotic ballroom built (take your pick) was rife. Indeed, the speculation was positively nonchalant, bandied about by everyone from housewives to college students to TV pundits to the man-on-the-street, and without much alarm either. Not that all these folks were convinced, but they were certainly willing to entertain the possibility without fear of being branded kooks. On the contrary: it was those who took events at face value who were ridiculed as naive.

When that is the default mode in American life, what does that say about us as a nation? And what does it bode for political discourse going forward?

Among the conspiracy theories that immediately popped up was the claim that people in Israel were doing Google searches on Cole Allen’s name before the attempted assassination even took place. (Easily explained. With the time difference, the assassination happened earlier in Israel before it happened here. Duh.) Another was that there was a photo of Allen on social media—subsequently deleted—in which he was wearing an IDF sweatshirt. (And the entertainer at the correspondents’ dinner was an Israeli mentalist….coincidence????) Yet another was a video purporting to show Allen with J.D. Vance’s wife Usha at an event in 2017, later revealed not to be Usha at all. And I’m sure there are others that I don’t know about or that have yet to emerge.

The point is, Occam’s razor now seems to cut toward conspiracy as its default mode. Who here remembers Bob Roberts, the 1992 Tim Robbins film about a right-wing politician who fakes an attempt on his life? Meanwhile, in real life, as we discussed last time, the SVR actually proposed such a ruse just a few months ago to help the flagging fortunes of Viktor Orbán in the recent Hungarian election. Hell, Trump’s own base increasingly thinks the most serious of the three attempts on his life, the one at a campaign rally in Butler, PA in July 2024, where he was (allegedly) grazed on the earlobe by a bullet fired by an assassin who was himself immediately shot dead by a Secret Service countersniper, was staged.

Of course, there are lots of difficult questions to reckon with before we conclude that any of these events were fake, like the photograph of a rifle round in mid-air whizzing past Trump’s head in that first attempt on his life. (But that could be fake too!). Even more complicated is the question of the people who were actually killed in Butler, including both the shooter and a rallygoer named Corey Comperatore, not that Team Trump would hesitate to sacrifice anyone, even its own supporters, to raise Donald in the polls even by a measly point. But there are also lots of troubling inconsistencies that bolster the arguments for fakery. (I dunno: do you believe in ears that magically heal overnight with no scar tissue? I’ve had zits that left more of a mark than that rifle round.)

And by the way, if Oz the Mentalist was the entertainer performing at the correspondents’ dinner last Saturday night, shouldn’t he have known there was about to be an attack?

OTHER THAN THAT, MRS. LINCOLN

There were lots of other interesting aspects about the incident at the correspondents’ dinner, of course.

• There’s the fact that this was the third serious assassination attempt on Trump’s life, making him the new titleholder among the US presidents when it comes to would-be killers who actually pulled the trigger or were very close to so doing. Donald now eclipses Gerald Ford, who had two attempts against him, although Gerry still merits special mention as both his were in the same week and one involved a former member of the Manson Family.

  Personally, I like presidents who don’t get shot.

• There was the spectacle of Republicans falling over themselves to praise the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies for thwarting the attempted murder, and fair enough, even though the other way to look at it is that the entire fiasco was a massive security failure.

  “He barely broke the perimeter, and by barely, I mean by a few feet.” So said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Trump’s personal attorney, with gaslighting characteristic of his boss. The truth is that revelations of the poor security at the Washington Hilton that night—some of them revealed by the would-be assassin himself—were shocking. This gathering of every macher in DC was not even treated as a top-level, Designated Survivor-style security event? Irrespective of what you think of the man currently in the White House, can we just candidly acknowledge that there have repeatedly been huge security screwups regarding the protection of the president and senior administration officials and anyone who happens to be around them?

• There’s the fact that the President of the United States himself was the first to post an images and a video of the attack and the attacker, because he’s really nothing more than a showman who has openly said he treats every day of his presidency like an episode of TV show and cares only about stagecraft and ratings…all the more reason people suspect him of faking these things.

• There was the mainstream media’s knee-jerk reaction, predictable as clockwork, claiming that “Trump stood tall,” that he was presidential, et cetera, et cetera ad nauseam, and I do mean nauseam. Has the press learned nothing in the last ten years? One does not have to believe that this assassination attempt, or any of the others, was fake to understand that the GOP will furiously try to exploit it for partisan gain, confident that the ever-gullible press will cooperate. Even if the assassination was in fact real, all Trump had to do was let himself be shoved to the ground by the Secret Service—literally stumbling offstage—and not vomit or shit himself in public to earn plaudits as being among our greatest presidents ever!

• There was Trump, the day after the event, losing his shit on Norah O’Donnell of 60 Minutes, calling her “horrible” and a “disgrace,” and insisting “I’m not a rapist,” words that will go down alongside Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” except even worse. To be clear, O’Donnell was not accusing Donald of those crimes, merely reading what the would-be assassin had written, and we already know that that guy wanted to kill him. Yet Trump freaked out anyway, furious just to have those words spoken. Hit a nerve, I guess.

  The fascinating thing, of course, was even without having his own name mentioned, Trump understood that he was the person being accused of being a rapist and a pedophile…you know, the way that people use Kleenex™ or Xerox™ or Thermos™ when they mean facial tissue, photocopy, or vacuum bottle.

• There was Melania, who you may know from her super-successful Amazon documentary, railing sanctimoniously about Jimmy Kimmel making a joke about her being a widow-in-waiting. (Factcheck: Kimmel made the joke before the assassination attempt, not after it, and presumably it was premised on Trump’s visible aging and obvious ill health, not the idea that a gunman was going to try to kill him.)

  On that count, Mel is today’s poster child for People With No Discernible Sense of Irony (or Shame), given the way her husband gleefully and publicly reveled in the actual death of Robert Mueller and the grisly murders of Rob and Michele Reiner, to name just two. But the Charlie Kirk murder already taught us about Republican hypocrisy when it comes to respect for the dead (to say nothing of the not-dead-at-all).

  The statement on Twitter from Einstein visa recipient Melania Trump née Knauss read:

  “Kimmel’s hateful and violent rhetoric is intended to divide our country...his words are corrosive and deepens the political sickness within America. People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.”

  Must I say it? Even setting aside his hideous personal attacks on the likes of Mueller and the Reiners, no one has done more to spread “hateful and violent rhetoric” or used “corrosive” words that “deepen the political sickness” and “divide our country” than her own husband—not a mere comedian, I’ll reminder you, but rather, the most powerful person on the planet, who commands the attention of the whole world almost all the time.

  But as usual with these monsters, every allegation is a confession, and the first rule of fascism remains to accuse your enemies of your own crimes.

BALLROOM BLITZ

The most prevalent conspiracy theory about the correspondents’ dinner had to do with the new White House ballroom. Because there was Trump, still in his tux, within minutes of the attempt on his life, addressing the press from the White House briefing room and pivoting to his demand that he be allowed to build this massive new $400 million monstrosity (which the US military, he claims, has been “demanding” for 150 years). At first, watching him do so, I thought it was just the usual short attention span madness: the Weave, as he calls it. But soon, like many, I was forced to question whether this entire incident had been engineered for precisely that reason. We know he cares more about that ridiculous ballroom than almost anything else (except the Nobel Peace Prize.) And look at MAGA World amplifying his claim the morning after:

I mean, no matter how sober and cool-headed one imagines oneself to be, one has to wonder, right? A federal judge tells Donald he can’t build his grotesque ballroom unless it’s for national security reasons. The next thing you know, he announces he will attend the WHCD, which he has angrily boycotted in every previous year of his two presidencies. And then, by sheer coincidence, in front of all the senior members of his administration and a great many of the major figures in the American press, there is an assassination attempt at that very dinner, immediately after which he is standing in front of the cameras declaring that this is why he needs his $400 million ballroom where the East Wing used to be.

Rather convenient, no?

It should go without saying that the idea that this shooting justifies that moronic new edifice is risible. As every single person on the Internet quipped, if it were true that ballrooms prevented gun violence, that would be a good argument for building $400 million ballrooms at every elementary school in America, yes? (Don’t hold your breath on that.) I mean, Donald Trump can go to a UFC match and be mobbed by the hoi polloi, yet he needs a bunker when he eats dinner? (Actually, I am kind of onboard with the symbolism of Donald in the bunker, and how that played out previously.)

Just a thought, but if we’re worried about the president’s security, instead of building a grotesque $400 million ballroom that dwarfs the White House and also functions as a slush fund through which he can receive bribes, maybe just secure the hotel where he’s having dinner and put the metal detectors a little further out?

But even to address the issue dignifies it in a way that it does not deserve. The idea that Trump faked another attempted murder to help grease the wheels for the approval of the ballroom is actually more plausible than his reasons why he needs the ballroom in the first place.

THE BIG LIE

Even if the assassination attempt was not staged, it’s clear that the administration is trying to exploit its aftermath in other ways, like the latest laughable indictment of Jim Comey, this time for the crime of arranging seashells on the beach, which the administration would have us believe was a call for murder deserving of imprisonment. (No shock: right-wingers like Pete Hegseth and Jack Posobiec posted the same “86” meme re Joe Biden, not to mention Trump’s own explicit calls for the executions of Mark Milley and Liz Cheney.) Clearly, Todd Blanche is trying to avoid the fate of his predecessor Pam Bondi by aggressively prosecuting his boss’s enemies, though we’ll see how Donald feels when this one goes no further than the DOJ’s previous ham sandwich indictments of Comey and others on the Enemies List. (There is in fact a criminal FBI director out there, but he’s busy guzzling beer.)

As with the murder of Charlie Kirk, Trump and the Republicans also want to use this as an excuse to crack down on free speech in general, and particularly from the left, claiming that it leads to this sort of violence. Of course, as we noted over the Melania/Kimmel dustup, no one has incited more violence than Trump has, created more division, or more recklessly fomented a poisonous political climate in our country. But that has not stopped the mainstream media from helpfully echoing Donald’s dangerous and dishonest claims.

It was repulsive to listen to CNN’s Dana Bash suggesting to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), on air, that Democrats are somehow partially responsible for the attempts on Trump’s life because of their verbal attacks on him. By that logic, one should never call a criminal out. “Yeah, why are you calling John Dillinger a bank robber? Calling John Dillinger a bank robber will only encourage John Dillinger to rob more banks!”

(Raskin rightly refused to dignify that absurd non-logic and deftly jiu-jitsu’d it back at Bash.)

Bash is far from alone, of course. Witness right-wing commentators like the odious Scott Jennings (or as he modestly calls himself on Twitter, “America’s favorite pundit”), the last line of what passes for a credible, in-his-right-mind conservative commentator who will still defend Trump, sanctimoniously promoting the fairy tale that the left are the great purveyors of political violence in the US who must be stopped by any means necessary. But Bash’s very credibility as a respectable journalist (it’s a sliding scale) sanewashes and normalizes the right-wing gaslighting. It’s one thing when a partisan hack like Jennings or Marc Thiessen or Mark Levin makes a claim like that; quite another when Bash does it.

So much for CNN as part of the so-called “liberal media.” And this is before David Ellison takes it over.

The false equivalence here is in the conflating of legitimate, deserved criticism and wild-eyed slander. The attorney Andrew Weinstein, formerly US public delegate to the UN, effectively dismantled that ploy, writing on Twitter:

The administration is now trying to blame Democrats for the current volatility, using a well-worn strategy of weaponizing victimhood to deflect responsibility. Political violence is absolutely unacceptable, and we must reject it. But we must also reject the cynical attempt to use this tragedy to escape accountability for the climate they have manufactured.

Criticizing an administration’s policy or warning against threats to democracy is the work of a healthy opposition. Labeling the press “the enemy of the people” and calling political opponents “evil” or “Satanic” is the work of an accelerant. One is advocacy, the other is dehumanization.

But Republicans’ cynical and dishonest response is also reflective of an “IOKIYAR” mentality in which they, as Real ‘Mericans, are allowed to spew the most vile and slanderous invective at will, but their foes are not allowed even to make perfectly defensible and well-supported criticisms, like pointing out that Donald Trump is a rapacious cretin who has undermined American democracy, consorted with sex traffickers, and tried to overthrow an election, to name just a few of his greatest hits.

Anyone want to challenge the factual veracity of those claims?

JUST THE ALTERNATIVE FACTS, MA’AM

But let’s get back to the presumption of deceit and deception that have become commonplace in American public life.

What does it mean when we live in a world where cynical disbelief is the norm? I’m not talking about a healthy skepticism or critical thinking: I’m talking about the automatic, lazy, but somewhat justified presumption that we can’t believe what we see and hear with our own eyes and ears, having been so frequently lied to by our leaders, by the corporate world, by the media, by advertising, and on and on. This is the same jaded attitude that one finds in authoritarian states like Soviet-era and post-Soviet Russia and is prevalent throughout the Arab world. With all due respect to those cultures, that is not a critique, only evidence of decades of political repression in which misinformation and disinformation and conspiracy theories are ubiquitous. At the risk of going down yet another rabbit hole of exactly the type we have been discussing, we are forced to ask: cui bono?

That’s a bigger question, one that we may not be able to untangle just yet; in fact, it may be that even the purveyors of disinformation themselves periodically suffer repercussions from it. (More on that in a moment.) But I think we can say with confidence that two worrying phenomena have combined to drive us into this new normal: Trump’s lies and the rise of AI.

Let’s take them in order.

For a decade now, we in the United States have been grappling with a powerful and insidious political movement that dispenses with objective reality altogether, that deals in “alternative facts,” and relies on a blizzard of bullshit, gaslighting, and general perfidy as part of its authoritarian project. That destruction of the truth is central to tyrannical regimes, as Mr. Orwell taught us. We’ve always been at war with Iran, amirite? Or was it Iraq? I can’t remember.

Trump learned his craft at the knee of Roy Cohn (for whom kneeling was important in many ways). He learned never to admit wrongdoing or defeat, and to relentlessly hammer his preferred narrative even if it was a lie—especially if it was a lie—secure in the knowledge that no matter how outlandish, with sufficient repetition, it would take root in the minds of many of his listeners, like POWs subjected to brainwashing. And the bigger the lie, the more the need for insistence and persistence. It worked for the Nazis with the Dolchstoßlegende—the “stab-in-the-back myth“ of the interwar years—and to some extent with the Big Lie that the Holocaust never happened, and it worked for Trump with January 6, enough to vault him back into the White House.

The chess grandmaster and political thinker Garry Kasparov observed way back in 2016: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Sixty-five years earlier, in 1951, Hannah Arendt crystallized that same idea in The Origins of Totalitarianism:

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that…one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. The result…is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

Bizarrely, that modern incarnation of propaganda and disinformation has its origins in the Russian avant garde, as described in HyperNormalisation, the 2016 film by the great British documentarian and chronicler of political skullduggery Adam Curtis. The leaders of the early Soviet Union, and the highly aggressive intelligence services that ministered to them, quickly recognized the potential of such techniques and employed them to befuddle the people preparatory to the manipulation (or simple elimination) of the popular will. In the post-Soviet era, that tradition has enthusiastically been continued by Vladimir Putin, who, lest we forget, was a KGB/FSB lieutenant colonel. The Kremlin has proven to be expert at sowing doubt and confusion that exhausts one’s ability to think critically, at clouding reality with a fog of disinformation, and at generating cynicism that causes the average citizen to simply give up. Or, in the earthier terms of Steve Bannon, “flooding the zone with shit.”

Trump is among the many despots and would-be despots who have eagerly adopted this strategy, and one of its most effective (and therefore disgusting) practitioners.

OK, that’s the first part of it. But we are especially unlucky that this relentless attack on objective reality coincides with technological developments that also call into question presumptions about reality that are as old as humankind and were heretofore rock solid.

In the past two years, the rise of artificial intelligence and widespread appearance of hyper-realistic faux imagery has accelerated at a dizzying pace that is impossible to ignore, unless one is living under a rock, or if T-Mobile is your Internet provider. The prevalence of “deepfake” videos—the ubiquity of which is already such that the term itself may soon vanish—is making us question everything we see. It is now so easy for a public figure caught on tape (what’s “tape”?) doing something incriminating—like taking a bribe, or beating his wife, or kissing his mistress on the Jumbotron—to simply contend that it’s not real. And as the technology gets better and better, that excuse will become only more common. Like many, I have long been anticipating the day when AI will be so realistic that a video of a person robbing a bank will be no more persuasive in court than a drawing of them doing so. If that day is not already here, it will probably arrive within the week.

The political applications of generative AI video are self-evident, and terrifying, and it’s a safe bet that the worst political actors will be the most aggressive in employing them. (The recent satirical HBO film Mountainhead, while otherwise pretty uneven, did a nice job of portraying how AI-driven disinformation might fan the flames of a global crisis even more so than it already does.) Even one of the first photos of Cole Allen under arrest, one that Trump himself posted (!), showing him face down and shirtless on the floor of the hotel, was widely rumored to be AI. Since then, the Internet has been flooded with fake AI images of Allen, including the IDF sweatshirt one noted above.

Let’s go the videotape indeed.

THE MOON, THE JUICE, AND THE TINFOIL

It is the confluence of these two phenomena—Trump’s never-ending avalanche of disinformation on the Putinist model and the rise of hyper-realistic AI-driven deepfakes—that has created a brave new world in which skepticism, disbelief, and conspiracy-mongering are the norm, not the exception. And what of the younger generation, like my 15-year-old daughter and her Gen Alpha cohort, that has never known anything other than this so-called “post-truth” environment?

The process of neutering objective reality is generally assumed to benefit the regime, and generally it does, or they wouldn’t engage in it. But there are side effects that even a grifter of Trump’s world-beating degree cannot avoid, boy-who-cried-wolf-style. When we become inured to the idea that this administration lies to us with every breath it figuratively takes, we descend into a post-modern Foucauldian world: one where a Sharpie can re-route a hurricane, where the J6 insurrectionists are heroes and the police are criminals, where a rapacious serial adulterer and sexual abuser who can’t name a single Bible verse is a champion of Christendom. But that also means that we stop believing Trump and his minions when they have a narrative that they do want us to swallow.

In other words, when you immerse yourself in the ocean of lies, not even the strongest swimmer is immune to the effects of the undertow.

But you might say: so what? Are there any practical impacts of this normalization of conspiracy theory? Turns out there are. In The Guardian, Rachel Leingang reports:

Extreme rhetoric, which often accompanies conspiracy, has been normalized amid a rise in political violence, said Clionadh Raleigh, founder of Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a non-profit that tracks violent events globally.

“The US is facing a particularly volatile mix: widespread access to firearms, persistent lone-actor threats, and an increasingly hyper-radicalized political culture,” Raleigh said in a statement. “Disorder in the US is decentralized, opportunistic, and difficult to predict. And the risk extends across the political spectrum, to anyone in public office.”

Long ago, I happened to spend a fair amount of time with one of the pioneers of the contemporary conspiracy movement, the late Bill Kaysing, the former technical writer for Rocketdyne who started the now-popular urban myth that the Apollo moon landings were faked. (In fact, I made a student film about him in the mid-‘90s.) Bill could tell a tale, and was expert at weaving disparate strands into a unified field theory of crazy. The time we spent together was around the time of the OJ Simpson murders, and Bill had a whole theory about how the movie Capricorn One was a government-sponsored project to protect the Apollo hoax. Because who was one of the stars of Capricorn One? That’s right: OJ. Who, in Bill’s telling, was threatening to spill the beans, and that’s why the government framed him for murder. Ahem.

But Bill also admitted to me that he had started the whole we-never-went-to-the-moon thing (as described in his self-published, very accurately titled book We Never Went to the Moon) as a joke. It was only after the notion took hold in the public imagination that he talked himself into actually believing it. I was floored to hear him say that, and so casually. And yet, years later, after he had made it his life’s work, he still had the distance and presence of mind to remember that he had done that, and was willing to confess it to a documentary filmmaker, and with utter nonchalance and no concern about how that undermined everything he had done and continued to do.

That is a subject for a PhD dissertation for someone in a doctoral program in psychology to write.

After ten years of Trump, this assassination attempt, more than almost any other event except perhaps the revisionism around January 6, starkly shows the devastating impact he has had on our collective belief in objective reality. In some ways, that is to be expected, when we’ve had a con man at the helm for most of the last decade. I’m just not sure how we go forward in a world where nobody believes nothin’ anymore, and the lie becomes the truth.

********

Photo: “There is no spoon.” Keanu Reeves as Neo in the Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999), which made a generation of moviegoers question “the desert of the real.” Cinematography by Bill Pope. Distributed by Warner Bros, which is now owned by Trump ally David Ellison.

This week I was going to write a blog surveying the ways we can push back against American fascism, in answer to all those who justifiably continue to ask: “Beyond just bemoaning and lamenting, what can I do to help stop Trump?”

That piece is still on deck. But part of the answer begins with simple electoral politics. And when the stunning results of the Hungarian election became clear on April 12, they presented such an important case study on that front that it could not be mentioned only in passing, but demanded its own standalone essay. So as they say in Budapest: et voilà.

Be forewarned: I doubt I have much new to say on the topic that hasn’t already been said, but as is the longstanding policy of this blog, I’m gonna say it anyway. I’ll try to slip in something approaching some new insights near the end, for those with that kind of patience. (A man’s got to know his limitations.)

HUNGARY’S LAST TOP MODEL

For the past sixteen years, Viktor Orbán has been the very model of a modern autocrat to whom Trump and the Republican Party have looked, even more so than Putin, Erdoğan, or other title contenders. His autocratic makeover of Hungary was the explicit example the GOP wanted to emulate, to the point of fetishizing Orbánized Hungary, with its barely camouflaged neo-fascist government and retrograde culture war, raving about it endlessly on Fox News, and even holding editions of CPAC there five years in a row. (The man who ousted Orbán this month, Peter Magyar, has asserted that Orbán even used Hungarian treasury funds to pay for those conferences, though that claim has not been substantiated, yet.)

Over the years, Republican luminaries like Marco “Lil Marco/Big Shoes” Rubio, former White House Chief of Staff and presidential pardon recipient Mark Meadows, and post-Trump presidential hopeful Tucker Carlson made pilgrimages to Budapest to promote the Orbánist vision for the USA (with Tucker twice broadcasting his show to his millions of viewers from the Hungarian capital.) In 2024, in a video message at CPAC Hungary III (Electric Boogaloo), Steve Bannon called the country “an inspiration to the world.” The folks at the right-wing Claremont Review of Books are superfans, too, arguing that Orbán is “blessed with almost every political gift—brave, shrewd with his enemies and trustworthy with his friends, detail-oriented, hilarious.” And the love affair went both ways. In 2024 alone Orbán also made at least two visits to Mar-a-Lago to commune with Trump, and in 2022 spoke at that year’s flagship CPAC conference, in Dallas.

So why the mutual admiration society? It’s simple.

Orbán is often described as the first and/or most effective proponent of “illiberal democracy,” sometimes called “competitive authoritarianism” (although political scientists can quibble about the differences between the two). In their broad strokes, both terms describe a kind of soft autocracy—as opposed to outright totalitarianism—that maintains the veneer of participatory democracy atop what is really state control (of elections, of the media, of the judiciary, and so on). Often—as in Hungary, Turkey, the Philippines, or the US—that system is paired with a cult of personality. Putin runs that kind of show, too, though he is not averse to showing his claws when he’s cranky. But as astutely observed by The Atlantic‘s Anne Applebaum, Orbán “was the first person to do it from within a democracy and to do it while bragging about it.”

The key factor in an illiberal democracy is that there are still free elections, just ones that have been so perverted that opposition parties really have no chance of dislodging the ruling power. That part of the scam is not new—even the worst tyrants hold brazenly farcical elections, often winning 99.9% of the vote—only the sophistication with which it is executed. What distinguishes a modern illiberal democracy from old-fashioned jackbooted regimes is that the means of suppressing the opposition is better camouflaged and less ham-handed, offering semi-plausible cover for those inclined to give the regime the benefit of the doubt. Which the Republican Party has a habit of giving.

Applebaum—an expert both on autocracy and on Eastern Europe (and a part-time resident there, as her husband is a Polish politician)—neatly summarizes Big Vik’s “achievements”:

After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages. During the coronavirus pandemic he gave himself emergency powers, which he has kept ever since. He has aligned himself openly with Russia and China, serving as a mouthpiece for Russian foreign policy at EU meetings and allowing opaque Chinese investments in his country.

Pointedly, Hungary remained a member of both the EU and NATO even as it functioned as an Arrested Development-style model home for modern fascism and a reliable surrogate for Moscow.

So how did Orbán and his party Fidesz (an acronym for Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége, or Alliance of Young Democrats), pull that off? It wasn’t easy, but that’s precisely why the GOP held him in such high esteem. Here’s The Atlantic’s Zack Beauchamp in a piece titled “Make America Hungary Again,” published in July 2024:

In theory, Hungary should have been rocky soil for authoritarianism to flourish, given its decades-long, bitter experience with communism. But the reactionary spirit—the impulse to turn to authoritarianism as a means of staving off social change—remained a powerful lure for sectors of its society. Orbán skillfully manipulated this sentiment to build support for his political project and hid his assault on democracy behind subtle, legalistic maneuvering. He devised a playbook for paying lip service to democracy while hollowing out its institutions until an incumbent basically can’t lose. The Republican Party’s chorus of praise for this project is revealing, to say the least.

Orbán and his allies approached the project like lawyers—altering the Hungarian legal code in ways both bold and devious. Many of their tactics passed below the radar of all but the most attentive experts and activists. Over time, the combined weight of them made Fidesz extremely difficult to dislodge through electoral means.

Sound familiar?

One aspect of that effort was changes to how Hungarian elections were conducted, with what amounted to super-charged gerrymandering, and new rules that marginalized opposition parties, often buried in or attached to unrelated legislation. “Each was incremental, and potentially even defensible in isolation,” Beauchamp writes. “But in combination, the laws erected extraordinary barriers that would keep opposition parties from winning elections.” Kim Lane Scheppele, a Princeton professor who is an expert in Hungarian law, called it “autocratic legalism,” with laws that allowed Fidesz “to maintain a democratic veneer—and plausibly say that it’s standing up for freedom while actually restricting it.” Essential to that task, Beauchamp notes that Fidesz counted on the public to be bored and confused by the minutiae, and to tune them out until it was too late.

With the judiciary, Orbán forced judges into retirement and filled the hundreds of vacancies with his own toadies. He expanded the power of the constitutional court to rule in his favor and even created a whole new court system—one also stacked with Fidesz loyalists—to oversee election law and adjudicate corruption cases (or not). Leonard Leo would have doffed his toupee in respect.

Fidesz engaged in a similar process to bring public media under government control, firing independent reporters, and punishing dissenting voices. One of its chief techniques was simply to starve opposition (or neutral) media outlets of financing while underwriting friendly ones. A study at Central European University “found that, by 2017, roughly 90 percent of all media in Hungary was directly or indirectly controlled by the government, and the proportion has only grown since.” Here’s Applebaum and her colleague Hanna Rosin on that topic on the podcast Radio Atlantic:

Rosin: It wasn’t exactly like a takeover of the Hungarian media. It wasn’t literally controlling what people can and can’t see on the internet. A lot of it was more rich allies buying up media companies.

Applebaum: Absolutely, and the media is another area where I am 100 percent certain (the Republicans) are directly copying what Orbán did. They’re using their friends in business to buy up media—whether it’s CBS or whether it’s CNN—in order to shape it so that it’s more aligned with what the Trump administration wants it to be…

That control of the media came in handy when the Hungarian people did, on occasion, notice what Orbán’s was up to, forcing him to justify it with some time-tested gaslighting of a sort that might also sound familiar. Applebaum:

He told Hungarians they were under threat; they were in great danger. Initially, it was from immigrants, who were supposedly diluting the blood of the Hungarian nation. Later, it was from the degenerate gender policies of the West. And he created this idea that he was fighting against some kind of modernity.

Across the board, Orbán’s chutzpah was astonishing…and Orwellian. Speaking to CPAC Dallas in 2022, he argued that it was the left that used “liberal institutions, concepts, and language to disguise their Marxist and hegemonist plans.” Therefore, the right was justified in fighting back—as the saying goes—by any means necessary.

THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY

The appeal of Orbán’s Hungary to American right-wingers is obvious. Even before Trump re-took the White House, Beauchamp observed:

Trump’s admiration for autocrats is no secret, but Orbán represents something particularly insidious. Hungary has become an authoritarian beachhead in the heart of Europe by custom-building its quasi-dictatorship to survive and even thrive in a place where most people believe in democracy. Orbán has created a system that can pull the wool over his citizens’ eyes, making them feel as though they have power over the state even as the state exerts power over them.

Orbán’s autocratic legalism is designed to create the appearance of democracy, supplying plausible deniability to the project of democratic dismantlement. This is the playbook to watch for when Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and many other prominent Republicans cite Hungary as a “model.”

But the Republicans didn’t just fanboy; they slavishly imitated. Orbán, The Atlantic’s Jacob Heilbrunn wrote way back in 2022, “made Hungary a laboratory for the conversion of a liberal democracy into an authoritarian state,” and that, Applebaum notes, “is precisely what Bannon, (Heritage Foundation president Kevin) Roberts, and others admire, and are indeed seeking to carry out in the US right now.”

As Applebaum told Rosin, Orbán “was an open source of ideas for the illiberal and even autocratic part of the American MAGA movement.” Indeed, “many aspects of what the second Trump administration did were copied from the Hungarians.”

(T)he most obvious one is the takeover of the bureaucracy, the firing of state employees, the conversion of state employees from neutral people who are promoted based on merit to party hacks, which is part of what Trump and his people are trying to do, most obviously in the Justice Department and the FBI, but in all branches of government. This was a direct copy of what Orbán did.

Project 2025, of which the Heritage Foundation’s Roberts was a chief architect, was chock-a-bock with ideas lifted directly from the Hungarian model. The attack on the federal bureaucracy and civil service system—that is to say, the replacement of 50,000 federal bureaucrats with Trump-aligned ideologues, as Beauchamp describes it—is another campaign laid out in that blueprint, and with explicitly Orbánist inspiration. The destruction of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, whose budget Heritage fellow Mike Gonzalez described as “half a billion dollars squandered on leftist opinion each year,” and which was also specifically laid out in Project 2025, was another direct lift from the Orbán playbook. The same with the scheme to install Trump loyalists atop “every office and component across the department—especially in the Civil Rights Division, the FBI, and the Executive Office for Immigration Review.”

To grasp just how closely the American fascist movement mimicked Orbán, observe how Rosin starts the story on her podcast:

The leader of a democracy overpowers many of the country’s institutions that could oppose him: the media, the universities, the courts. He encourages rich allies to buy big media companies and hobble independent journalism. In its place, he tells the population lies, about immigrants, the economy, and who their real enemies are. He does all of this openly and proudly, prompting other aspiring autocrats to emulate him.

Get it?

Not long ago, observers like Beauchamp and Applebaum were pretty pessimistic, both about the prospects for the return of democracy in Hungary, and about the chances that the United States could resist going down that same dark path. And in both cases, the regime’s ability to prevent electoral defeat was the crux of the dilemma.

Here’s Beauchamp, again writing in the summer of ‘24: “Today Hungary is in the grips of a near-perfect system of subtle authoritarianism. Elections do not need to be nakedly rigged, in the sense of falsifying vote counts, because the deck is so stacked against the opposition that winning is functionally impossible.” As proof, he reports that in the 2022 elections, even when the opposition parties united on a single ticket, with carefully selected candidates, that anti-Fidesz coalition was crushed, because it was “(f)inancially hobbled, fighting on a gerrymandered map, and unable to get its message out because of government control of the press.”

A year later, in the spring of 2025, when Trump was early in his second term and he and his flying monkeys were especially emboldened, Applebaum wrote a piece for The Atlantic called “America’s Future is Hungary.” Published as it was pretty much at the height of Trump’s initial blitzkrieg against everything decent and good and functioning in America, that assessment, too, was fairly glum:

As Elon Musk, a government contractor, sets fire to our civil service and makes decisions about the departments that regulate him; as the FBI and the Justice Department are captured by partisans who will never prosecute their colleagues for corruption; as inspectors general are fired and rules about conflicts of interest are ignored, America is spinning quickly in the direction of Hungarian populism, Hungarian politics, and Hungarian justice. But that means Hungarian stagnation, Hungarian corruption, and Hungarian poverty lie in our future too.

But almost accidentally, Applebaum also offered what turned out to be an optimistic vision of what would soon happen to Orbán—and maybe now, is happening to Trump as well—in that her description of his corruption predicted what would bring him down.

That corruption had a terribly damaging effect on the broader Hungarian economy. As Applebaum explains it, about 20% percent of Hungary’s companies were operating not on market principles, but on loyalty to the despot, companies “designed not for efficiency and profit but for kleptocracy—passing money from the state to their owners.”

“But the truth is not hard to perceive for anyone who cares to look, because the beneficiaries of this corrupt system are not shy about showing off their wealth.” (Pointedly, this crony capitalism on Orbán’s part also featured naked nepotism, such as favoring an energy company co-owned by his son-in-law Jared Kushner—er, I mean István Tiborcz.)

And the Hungarian people did take note.

Orbán’s opponent Peter Magyar ran a kitchen sink campaign about the economy, health care, education, and fighting that sort of corruption. Orbán, by contrast, ran a demagogic one centered on fearmongering and the laughable notion that a cocaine-crazed Volodymyr Zelenskyy was going to attack Hungary. Apropos of Ukraine, the Hungarian public’s awareness of Orbán’s coziness with Moscow also hurt him. (Wouldn’t it be something if the American public had that same response to Trump’s?) Hungary also had a stalwart resistance movement that never lost faith, as depicted in Connie Field’s acclaimed 2024 documentary Democracy Noir.

As the economy faltered and the corruption within the Orbán regime became glaringly obvious, the opposition gained strength. The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz observed:

Business élites started to signal dissatisfaction with Orbán. Whistle-blowers emerged from the military and the police. Orbán’s grip on power, unquestionable for a decade and a half, suddenly looked vulnerable. (Even he seemed to know it: at a joint press conference with Vice-President J.D. Vance, who’d come to Hungary to stump for him, Vance said, “Viktor Orbán is going to win the next election,” and Orbán made a tentative so-so hand gesture that immediately became a meme.)

Another parallel: it was reported that the Russian security services (specifically, the SVR) proposed faking an assassination attempt on Orbán to boost his “heroic” image and help him in the race. Hmmm.

THE GREAT PSYCH-OUT

One of the most remarkable takeaways from Magyar’s surprising victory, as Applebaum and Rosin point out, is that it was a stark defeat for propaganda, which aims to make an oppressed population feel helpless, and create the illusion that the ruling junta cannot be beaten, so why try?

Like Trump, Orbán dealt in what Applebaum calls “post-reality,” which is a fancy way of saying disinformation, lies, and other bullshit. In The New Yorker, Marantz reported that even on the eve of the election, dozens of Hungarians, some of them highly informed (even professionally so), told him that they could not imagine Orbán losing, even though all objective signs pointed to that outcome. (Like Democrats in the US, they had been burned before in prior elections when rising hopes were dashed. Déjà vu all over again.) These folks, Marantz reports, were worried that even if Orbán lost, there would be “some sort of legal trickery, or last-minute intervention by the Russians,” or simple violence. “The only scenario that seemed impossible to contemplate was a clear win for Magyar, a quick concession from Orbán, and a moment of national catharsis.”

But that’s precisely what happened.

In this election, Orbán found his usual gaslighting a tougher row to hoe, particularly with the hard-to-sell fantasy that Ukraine was a belligerent threat menacing the Hungarian nation, even after going to such lengths as deploying Hungarian soldiers to guard power stations against an entirely mythical Ukrainian attack. And the same may prove true for Trump, with his disastrous war on Iran and an economy in freefall, both things that are very hard to hide (and which, of course, are connected: check the prices at your local pump). Not to mention the looming specter of Epstein and his own increasingly self-evident mental decline.

Last year, the Hungarian political philosopher Zoltán Miklósi had warned Marantz about the kind of defeatism that suggests that “once authoritarianism takes hold, there’s no way out.” “It’s understandable,” Miklósi said, “after so many years of setbacks and humiliations, but it’s one of the biggest dangers, because it deprives you of political agency. Defeatism breeds defeat.” Marantz went on to quote Miklósi, writing in a recent piece for the American Journal of Political Science called “Perversity, Futility, Complicity: Should Democrats Participate in Autocratic Elections?”

The outcome of autocratic elections, despite the immense advantages of the ruling party, is not entirely predetermined. Electoral autocracies are unique among autocracies in that their ruling party can, though rarely, be defeated by an opposition that plays within the autocrat’s own formal rules of the game.

And Hungary is no outlier, only the latest example. A little over two years ago, I wrote an essay for this blog called “The Guatemalan Model,” about the triumph of an unlikely pro-democracy movement in that country, which had been under the heel of a brutal, kleptocratic right-wing regime for 27 long years. As I wrote at the time, one of the key things that Guatemala’s pro-democracy movement did was not “give in to a feeling of powerlessness, resignation, or despair. And perhaps above all, it did not surrender to its enemies’ self-serving and deceptive presentation of themselves as invincible.”

(After the Guatemalan Model and the Hungarian Example, next up we have the Irish Backstop, which contrary to popular belief, is not a sex act involving a pint of Guinness and an enema. And the less said about the Croatian Somersault, the better.)

The point is, autocrats want you to feel helpless, as they prefer a populace that feels resigned to its fate and doesn’t resist at all, rather than one they have to actively beat at the polls. It’s within power to show them otherwise, just as the good people of Hungary and Guatemala did.

THE BOY WHO CRIED “RIGGED!”

It’s early days yet, and there are lots of obstacles ahead. Applebaum predicts that this retreat by Viktor (doesn’t he have to stop using that name?) may be merely a strategic withdrawal, as he and his allies look for another way to return to power. For one thing, Orbán and Fidesz still control Hungary’s judiciary and its intelligence services, which presents an institutional problem for Magyar’s new government, just as was the case in Poland after the right wing Law and Justice Party (PiS) was finally ousted in 2023, and is ongoing in Guatemala even now.

I am also slightly skeptical of Magyar himself, who was a loyal member of Fidesz until recently reinventing himself. (Orbán himself had started out as a reformer candidate after the fall of the communist regime in 1989.) Marantz writes that Magyar “ran as a Hungarian Everyman, dodging divisive policy questions and preferring to speak about the most universal issues in the broadest possible terms: rooting out corruption, restoring power to the people.”

This was, of course, an astute political strategy. It also makes him something of a cipher. He has the square jaw and coiffed blond hair of an action figure. Magyar, in Hungarian, means “Hungarian.” (Imagine a strapping guy named Joe America, running as the nominee of the Freedom and Grilled-Meat Party, and you won’t be too far off.)

During the campaign Magyar even attacked Orbán from the right on some issues, including immigration, claiming, for instance, that Filipino immigrants to Hungary were stealing and eating ducks and goldfish from a zoo. (In the UK, Nigel Farage has made that claim about immigrants and swans, while in the 2024 US presidential race JD Vance alleged that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating geese and ducks from local parks in Springfield, Ohio, part of his more famous lie that they were “eating the cats and dogs,” which his boss picked up.)

So Magyar may yet turn out to be a Fetterman. But even if he does, that does not in any way detract from the fact that a pro-democracy candidate—or at least one who appeared that way—was able to oust one of the most legendary strongmen in the whole of Europe. If Donald Trump is sleeping at all these days, that fact should scare him out of his Depends, and take away whatever few minutes he’s able to rest at all.

And though it may not always feel like it, our beleaguered democracy is in better shape than Hungary’s was. (Rosin’s podcast episode is called “If Hungary Can Do It,” which is what I would have called this piece if I’d thought of it first.) In the US over the past year, we have seen one special election after another won by Democrats, often in deep red districts. Just last week, voters in Virginia backed an unapologetically partisan ballot measure involving redistricting that will likely give Democrats up to four more seats in the US House, a tit-for-tat counterattack after Texas Republicans started this gerrymandering arms race. (Even though a Republican judge, who is totally not one of those activist judges that conservatives hate hate hate, immediately overturned the vote. Virginia’s Democratic AG is appealing.)

OK, you say, but won’t Trump still declare any election he or his party loses as fraudulent by definition, as he did (with even less cause than usual, which is to say, less than zero) with that ballot measure in Virginia last week, before that friendly judge came to his aid? Yes, certainly: it has long been clear that Trump will do that. In The Bulwark, Andrew Egger writes:

What Trump and his allies have created over the years is a self-sustaining and self-reinforcing base of electoral nihilists. In past cycles, convincing such people that the fix was in usually required the mass propagation of specific lies: rigged voting machines from Venezuela, 2,000 Mules-style ballot-stuffing operations, batches of phony ballots snuck into the count by dastardly poll workers. But now this crowd’s cynicism has achieved orbital velocity; it no longer requires additional thrust. When Trump points at any given election and shouts “rigged!”, he no longer needs anything resembling a smoking gun: A giant chunk of the electorate is ready to go along.

But the majority will not go along, and that drains his ruse of its power. In other words, Trump’s clockwork reliability is producing diminishing returns and starting to be self-sabotaging thanks to that exact predictability. That is an advantage for our side, as it pre-emptively prepares the American people (the thinking segment of it, anyway) to disregard his claims.

What’s all the more remarkable is that Orbán—supposedly a more nakedly authoritarian than Trump—did not challenge his electoral defeat, but quickly conceded. Applebaum cops to being “extremely surprised” that he went without a fight:

Even on the day of the voting, people around Orbán in the government were warning of terrorism. They were talking about threats. They were talking about violence. They were talking about the election being stolen. They were preparing verbally, and in terms of propaganda, to announce that the election was false or would be falsified.

People were ready for all kinds of different outcomes—that the election would be challenged—and there were lawyers who were prepared for that. Just like in the US, people were prepared for a challenge, and they were prepared to fight it.

Don’t quote me, but it just may be that knowing his foes were going to fight back is part of what dissuaded Orbán and his allies from trying to claim that the vote was rigged. The other factor that made it hard for him to do that was the sheer numerical size of Magyar’s victory.

So maybe voting does matter after all. Who knew?

IT CAN HAPPEN HERE (GOES BOTH WAYS)

So here is the big takeaway from the Hungarian election: one of the most deeply entrenched and high profile autocrats in the entire developed world, the very man American right-wingers revere like a demigod and to whom they have long looked for example and guidance, got kicked out of power by his own people, with a vengeance, and by normal electoral means no less. The margin was so big, and his defeat so obvious, that even his formidable propaganda machine could not spin it, and he did not dare question the vote. And like Joe Frazier in Kingston in 1973, down he went.

Other tyrants who seemed invincible have been similarly overthrown, from Marcos to Duvalier to Honecker and more. Marantz one last time:

Even under competitive authoritarianism, politics is still politics. Viktor Orbán was a politician—a ruthless, cunning one, unusually capable of bending and breaking the rules of liberal democracy—but not, in the end, an invincible superhero. He did what he could to lock in his power, but he couldn’t manufacture popular support simply by willing it into existence. (Neither, it’s worth reminding ourselves, can Donald Trump.)

I genuinely believe that overreach, greed, corruption, and incompetence always bring these bastards down, and maybe that happens faster in the US, on both ends. Like Trump, Orbán had two distinct turns in power—1998-2002 and 2010-26—separated by a spell in the wilderness during which he nurtured his grievances and honed his method. It was really in the second go-round that he carried out his autocratic project. It took Orbán about a decade to consolidate power and 16 years to fall. Trump made the US into an autocracy in nine months, and has stumbled just as quickly. After starting with a vengeance in the early months of his second term, the wheels are now visibly coming off the Trump train. Not to get out too far over my skis, as they say, but I am beginning to be guardedly hopeful that 2025 and early 2026 will prove to be the peak of Trumpian madness—which is to say, the low point for us on the side of democracy—and that we now have momentum on our side.

So going forward, let us remember that this was not the “fall” of Orbán , as some would have it. He was PUSHED, by his own people. And we can do the same to our own monstrous, tinpot would-be dictator.

*******

Photo: Another big fat loser. Credit: Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images.

The Ship of Theseus, if you’re unfamiliar, is a thought experiment that posits a wooden sailing ship that over time has all its parts methodically replaced, one by one, and asks: at what point—if ever—is it no longer the same ship?

Read more

In part one of this series we looked at Trump’s corrupt self-enrichment over five-plus years in the White House thus far. In part two, we examined the prevalence of what is almost certainly insider trading within the administration, to include obscene profiteering off US military operations. Now, in the concluding installment, we turn to one very specific driver of those ill-gotten gains, which is new in his second term.

CRYPTONITE

In “The Number,” his towering August 2025 piece for The New Yorker, David Kirkpatrick estimated that Donald Trump has exploited his office to the tune of about $3.4 billion dollars so far. And that was eight months ago: the number is certainly higher now. Of that, Kirkpatrick calculated that Trump’s conventional influence-peddling schemes, real estate deals, branding, licensing, and just plain bribery added up to a little over a billion dollars. That’s a lot of simoleons. But in this case, it’s just chump change. The bulk of Trump’s recent, newly-gained wealth—about $2.37 billion—has come from cryptocurrency, which, increasingly, has supplanted real estate, golf courses, and slapping its brand on everything from Chinese-made neckties to sneakers to assassination attempt-themed Christmas ornaments as a chief income source for the Trump family. Which tracks perfectly both with the family’s sordid history and the shady, hard-to-understand nature of crypto itself.

Chart of crypto as a proportion of Trump’s new wealth, by Francesco Muzzi for The New Yorker

Kirkpatrick writes that “criminals love crypto” because its decentralized nature—sometimes likened to a “spreadsheet in the sky, maintained by a vast network of computers, (that) makes it difficult to hold anyone accountable for unlawful transfers.” I don’t even pretend to understand it or how it works. But it is unsurprising that it has become the Trumps’ preferred conduit for corruption.

Trump himself initially railed against crypto as a scam (he’s the expert), but he quickly became a convert after he began receiving big crypto contributions during his 2024 campaign. Soon, Kirkpatrick reports, he was selling an NFT that “depicted him as a muscled superhero in a cape, a guitar-wielding biker, and so on,” promoted on Truth Social for “only $99 each!”

His next step in an attempt to legitimize crypto came almost immediately after re-taking office, when in January 2025 he pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, which Kirkpatrick describes as “a bitcoin-enabled black market in narcotics, hacking services, and other illicit transactions.” At the time, Ulbricht was ten years into a life sentence in federal prison for drug distribution, money laundering, and other crimes, along with a financial penalty of $183 million.

Since then, the sky has been the limit for the Family Trump with this particular con, as Don, Don Jr., and Eric have all become enthusiastic promoters of snake oil crypto. Kirkpatrick writes: “At a recent bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, Donald, Jr., implored every ‘average American’ to ‘buy as much as you can. He and Eric promised the public that even the smallest amount of bitcoin would soon be worth ‘an absolute fortune.’”

This is traveling preacher / tent revival-level behavior, the oldest of old school grifts, even if it turns on the newest of high tech flimflammery.

The Trumps currently have multiple crypto ventures, including American Bitcoin, the Trump Media & Technology Group, a joint venture with Crypto.com, an energy infrastructure company called Hut 8 Corp (which owns 80% of American Bitcoin), and Donald’s and Melania’s meme coins. The value of all of these products are predicated on nothing more than their association with Trump himself.

One of the family’s most lucrative crypto ventures—around $412.5 million since its launch last year by Kirkpatrick’s estimation, and closer to $500 million by Reuters’—came from a crypto outfit called World Liberty Financial in which Don Jr. and Eric figure prominently. Barron Trump, a college freshman when the company was launched, is also involved, along with two sons of Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. The company openly bills itself as the only one in its field “inspired by Donald J. Trump.” A photo of Trump with fist raised—à la Tommie Smith—was on the company’s website, where he was also listed as “chief crypto advocate,” and he was part of a livestream announcing the company.

But that’s penny-ante compared to Trump Media’s crypto speculation, which Kirkpatrick estimates has netted a profit of about $1.3 billion all by itself. (Again, I don’t begin to understand how that works, but I trust Kirkpatrick. Read his article and see if you do better than me. Reuters’ long piece on the Trumps’ crypto ventures is also an excellent explainer.)

Then there’s American Bitcoin Corp, a company in which Don Jr. and Eric have a 20% stake. Last September, Reuters reported that American Bitcoin doubled its value on the day it debuted on the stock market, with the Trump brothers’ share estimated at over $1.5 billion. (Even Bruno Ganz is dunking on the Trump boys for their shameless obviousness.)

But here’s the genteel way that Reuters reported the controversy surrounding that:

The Trump family’s forays into crypto have drawn criticisms from Democratic lawmakers and government ethics watchdogs about conflicts of interests. Critics say the Trump family is profiting from crypto at the same time when the president is easing regulations and enforcement on the industry.

May I suggest that a better lede would be: “Donald Trump and his family are robbing America blind. Do you give a shit?”

But Reuters reports that Eric Trump “dismissed such criticisms on Wednesday as ‘insane’.”

“My father has absolutely nothing to do with this venture,” Eric Trump said. “He’s running a nation. He’s not involved in our businesses in any way, shape or form.”

Remember how Trump used to talk about “the Biden crime family,” evoking images of the Families Gambino, Bonanno, Genovese, et al? Just remember, with Donald and his followers, every accusation they make is really a confession.

Even if Eric’s risible assertion were true, which it patently isn’t, family members of a sitting president enriching themselves in this way is itself howlingly corrupt, and once upon a time used to generate outrage among the American people and press. Ask Donald Nixon or Billy Carter. Next month, for no defensible reason, Eric and his wife Lara will accompany dear old dad on a state visit to China. (The New Republic reports that in Trump’s first term, Beijing and state-owned Chinese entities spent more at Trump family properties than any other country by far—around $5.5 million.) The Trumps currently have no business deals with China, but I have a feeling they soon will—this after years of angrily accusing Hunter Biden of profiting off his father’s position by making business deals in China and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the notion that Trump is too busy “running a nation” to run his corrupt business empire is also laughable, unless there’s a typo there and that first “n” in “running” was supposed to be an “i”.

AMERICAN HUSTLE

A couple of these crypto-related ventures bear exploring in depth.

The first is the origin of American Bitcoin, which centers on a man named Kyle Wool, a Gordon Gekko-style former stockbroker known to golf at the Trump club in Jupiter, Florida, and who has a history of allegations of sketchy financial dealings. Per Kirkpatrick, Wool had opened a brokerage firm called Dominari Holdings that rented office space in Trump Tower, and for whom he was the CEO of its core business, Dominari Securities. In February 2025, Don Jr and Eric were made members of its board and given a six-million-dollar stake in the company.

In the days before this was announced, Dominari’s share price doubled, to six dollars—it’s not clear why—and afterward it doubled again, giving the Trumps a sizable paper profit. On February 18th, Dominari and the Trump brothers announced a new joint venture—a third of it owned by Dominari, virtually the rest by the Trumps—which would invest in AI data centers.

“A month later,” Kirkpatrick writes, “they sold most of that nebulous partnership, at a windfall profit, to Hut 8, a publicly traded bitcoin miner (which) had agreed to buy eighty percent of the Trump-Wool partnership. As payment, it contributed to the new company almost all of its mining operation—including equipment that, according to a press release, was worth a hundred million dollars.”

The Trump boys own about 13% of the new company, the one that took the name American Bitcoin, which equates to about $13 million dollars at the moment. Experts estimate that when American Bitcoin goes public, as it plans to do, its value will be about $610 million, raising the Trumps’ stake to roughly $79 million. Molly White, whom Kirkpatrick describes as “a software engineer and a prominent skeptic of digital finance,” told him that:

(M)any people in the industry believe that, to a crypto company like American Bitcoin, “the Trump name alone is worth thirteen million.” Investors would bid up the company’s price purely “because it is associated with the President,” she argued.

In a press release, Hut 8 said that Eric Trump would be American Bitcoin’s “chief strategy officer,’” and praised his “commercial acumen, capital markets expertise, and commitment to the advancement” of crypto.”

But here on Earth 1, Dominari’s willingness to pay the Trumps so much for no discernible contribution on their part can only be explained by one thing: the perceived value of being in the good graces of a dictatorial president by showering his sons with cash.

In other words, a bribe.

VERY STABLECOIN GENIUS

You may say to yourself: “OK, so the Trump family is exploiting Donald’s name and position for profit. Not super noble, but everyone does it. What’s the harm?” Well, apart from fostering a system in which political influence at the highest level is for sale to anyone with enough cash, the gravest harm is in the national security exposure that the United States suffers as a result.

On that front, another story that merits more explication has to do with a so-called “stablecoin” known as USD1 that World Liberty brought out in March 2025. This cryptocurrency, of a sort popular (I am told) with money launderers and Ponzi scheme perpetrators, “offered the special credibility of a Presidential endorsement, and promised to be backed with short-term US Treasury bills.” In May, a company owned by the UAE’s ruling family became USD1’s first major customer, buying two billion dollars’ worth, which as Kirkpatrick points out, is already an outrageous conflict of interest. But it gets worse.

The Emiratis used USD1 to buy a stake in Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, whose controlling shareholder, Changpeng Zhao—widely known as C.Z.—pled guilty in 2023 to evading US sanctions and violating money-laundering laws. Per Bloomberg News, that means Binance accounts for 90% of the USD1 in circulation. Kirkpatrick picks up the tale:

(C.Z.) served two months in prison and Binance agreed to pay $4.3 billion in fines and forfeiture, and to submit to government monitoring. Binance will now determine when to cash in the two billion dollars in stablecoin from the Emiratis, thus controlling World Liberty’s ability to collect interest on it. That gives C.Z. leverage over the Trumps at the same time that government-appointed monitors are supervising Binance.

In May, C.Z. acknowledged on a podcast that he’d applied for a pardon. Binance has reportedly also sought to have its monitoring withdrawn.

World Liberty stands to make more than $280 million in interest fees if C.Z. holds onto his USD1 until the end of Trump’s term, which he is highly incentivized to do. When he sells, the Trump sons are likely to make about $168 million. Even as I write this, WLF is embroiled in infighting, with one of its biggest investors, the crypto billionaire Justin Sun, attacking the company for what he calls “one of the most absurd governance scams I have ever seen.” I say again: a crypto billionaire said that.

Two weeks after World Liberty’s announced the $2 billion UAE investment, Trump made a curious announcement of his own that I am sure was In No Way Related.

Trump declared that the US would provide the UAE with advanced technology for a joint ten-square-mile artificial-intelligence data center. This decision overrode long-standing American concerns that the UAE’s close ties to China made it vulnerable to espionage and to the theft of sensitive technology. Some news outlets have reported that those security concerns might yet stop the project; but, if completed, it could vault the tiny monarchy to the forefront of the AI race—and lock the US in to dependence on Abu Dhabi.

While that data center is awaiting final approval, Kirkpatrick reports that “a shadowy new Emirati fund, the Aqua 1 Foundation, announced on June 26th that it would buy a hundred million dollars in World Liberty voting tokens…to participate in governance of the decentralized finance platform inspired by President Donald J. Trump.”

That equates to a sweet $75 million dollar profit for the Trumps; together with the C.Z. interest, that’s a total of $243 million. The only people who will benefit more are a Chinese criminal and money launderer and a medieval Gulf region monarchy that will hold American national security by the short hairs.

What is wrong with Republicans—the self-described party of American national security—that they think this is OK?

TWO COINS IN THE FOUNTAIN

Lastly, let’s look at the digital tokens $TRUMP and $MELANIA, and the ways that Trump is shilling for them. These are nothing more than novelty meme coins which don’t even exist in physical form, only as an idea in cyberspace, or as Kirkpatrick writes, “a bit of fun—the fun, for those who enjoy it, of paying Donald Trump.”

In introducing these cash cows, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!”…“GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.” The sale of these coins to dumbass suckers eager Trump supporters netted the family $350 million dollars in just three weeks. By selling 200 million of them, the 800 million more that the Trumps still hold are worth several billion dollars, at least on paper.

But “cons” are called that because they hinge on the (ill-advised) confidence of the marks. In May 2025, when the meme coins began to look wobbly, Don announced that he would host an exclusive dinner for the 220 people who held the most $TRUMP. (Shouldn’t that one be Melania’s?) The top twenty-five would also get a tour of the White House. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) called the dinner “the Mt. Everest of corruption.” Which I guess would make Donald the Sir Edmund Hillary of grifters and Melania the Tenzing Norgay.

But the scheme worked, as the value of the coin rebounded, earning Trump still more trading fees that went straight into his pocket. Thus far, the two meme coins have amounted to a total profit of roughly $385 million. Kirkpatrick:

White House officials defended the dinner by noting that Trump had held it at his golf club in Virginia, not at the White House, as though crypto traders would have paid millions of dollars each to have dinner with a former reality star. In a statement, Karoline Leavitt told me, “The claims that this President has profited from his time in office are absolutely absurd.” She contended that Trump had sacrificed “hundreds of millions of dollars” that he could have made if he had devoted himself to his business instead of serving in the White House, and that “the American people love him precisely because he is a successful businessman.”

Here’s a deep irony that Kirkpatrick points out: “Nobody can say that Trump has failed to disclose his recent money-making; he might as well have shouted about $TRUMP from the White House roof.” For Trump’s fans, that is reason to cheer along. A crypto trader named Brian Ng, who attended that dinner at Mar-a-Lago, summarized the standard MAGA mindset when he told The New York Times, “Everyone is out for themselves,” but “at least Trump is out in the open.”

But with all due respect to Mr. Ng, I am not sure that being openly criminal, rather than doing it in secret, is better. In fact, uh, it’s worse, no?

In two weeks’ time, on April 25, another such event is being held at Mar-a-Lago, one that is being promoted as “the most exclusive crypto & business conference in the world,” and teasing the possibility that Trump himself will attend. (Is that supposed to be a sweetener? I guess so, in the same way that some people like the taste of battery acid.) In any case, as Michael Tomasky of The New Republic reports, the announcement of that event briefly caused the price of the $TRUMP meme coin to rise, which was the whole point.

The president of CREW, Noah Bookbinder, told Kirkpatrick:

“When you’re talking about making billions in cryptocurrency, people’s eyes glaze over.” But he said he still believed that “the American people ultimately don’t like people using public office to enrich themselves. It’s like a President turning a national park into his summer home—and, in this case, maybe building a skyscraper there.”

Oh God, please don’t give him any ideas.

THE BEEP BEEP BEEP OF A REVERSING BRINK’S TRUCK

“I was struck by the frantic, almost desperate pace of the Trump family’s efforts,” Kirkpatrick writes at the end of his epic New Yorker piece, “as though they’re afraid to miss any opportunity.”

The family isn’t just passively accepting the Saudi private-equity investments, the Persian Gulf licensing deals, and Justin Sun’s millions for digital tokens. They’ve sought those payments eagerly, and at a speed suggesting that they badly want—or need—the money. The family’s thirst for cash makes questions about conflicts of interest all the more pressing.

For me, Trump’s tawdry money-grubbing raises the same questions I have when I see Oscar-winning movie stars doing commercials for telecom companies, or banks, or home coffee machines, behavior that was considered hopelessly gauche just a few decades ago. (You couldn’t make Lost in Translation today. Now we all live in Japan.) But at least I kinda get that. When an advertising agency backs a Brink’s truck up to some superstar’s house for all of two hours’ work, said A-lister almost can’t say no. But Trump’s relentless pursuit of the almighty buck is weirder. It was one thing when he was just a real estate huckster selling everything from Trump-branded vodka to steaks to board games to bottled water to fake university educations. Now, after ten years at the white-hot center of American life, with two presidencies and multiple billions in the bank, does he really need to do stuff like this?

But I suppose “need” doesn’t enter into it, and that’s why Trump is a multibillionaire and I may have to spin a sign at the local chicken place to pay my rent.

As Kirkpatrick reports:

Among the Trump Store’s wares: a red “Gulf of America” baseball hat (fifty dollars), a pair of Trump beer koozies (eighteen dollars) and Trump flip-flops (forty dollars). Trump’s most recent disclosure form also listed licensing income of $1.1 million from a Trump guitar, $2.8 million from Trump watches, $2.5 million from “sneakers and fragrances,” $3 million from an illustrated book called “Save America,” and $1.3 million from a “God Bless the USA” Bible.

Check out the Trump merch store and see for yourself. And still it carries on:

In June, Donald, Jr., and Eric celebrated the tenth anniversary of their father’s first Presidential run by announcing yet another licensing deal: they sold the Trump name for use on a mobile-phone service, which Donald, Jr., said was “building on the movement to put America first.” Dial 888-TRUMP45 to sign up, and pay $47.45 a month.

Don’t Trump’s own fans resent this abuse of power, particularly the aspect of it in which Donny treats them like suckers? But I suppose, as the line from The Magnificent Seven goes, if God didn’t want them to be sheared, He wouldn’t have made them sheep.

Perhaps this insatiable avarice is part of Donald’s pathology. I have often said that one of the few things that gives me comfort, after a decade of having this motherfucker looming over our lives day in and day out, is knowing that he is a seething ball of rage 24/7, 365 days a year, no time off. He is never truly happy, is he? Not even for a moment. (Have you ever really seen him smile? And no, that teeth-gritted rictus he occasionally puts on for the cameras does not count.) He simply cannot stop moneygrubbing, even when it no longer serves any rational purpose.

But this is not simply a matter of the tastelessness of a hopelessly tacky and venal US President, but of the corrupt debasement of the very office, which undermines democracy itself, and puts American security at risk.

THE UNICORN FROM HELL

By way of wrapping up the three parts of this lengthy essay, let me go again to the eminently respected ethics watchdog Fred Wertheimer, who told Kirkpatrick that “when it comes to using his public office to amass personal profits, Trump is a unicorn—no one else even comes close.”

The Nation’s Jeet Heer concurs, writing: “The sad truth is that Trump is corrupt on a scale that dwarfs anything ever seen in an advanced democracy.”

Heer goes on to remind us of Trump’s claim that “nobody cared” about the corruption in his first term—delivered less as a boast than a mere statement of fact, like his famous line about getting away with shooting someone dead in the middle of Fifth Avenue. Heer notes that the phrase “could serve as the epitaph for the Trump era and might also, if Trump goes unpunished, be the epitaph of American democracy.”

People tend to hide their darkest behavior. So think of all the terrible things we know that Donald Trump has done. Now think of all the even more terrible things we DON’T know that he has done: financially, militarily, sexually, foreign collusion-wise, and beyond. They will all come out eventually.

As with many of these hideous things, the question is whether this kind of corruption will be a permanent change to the norms of the presidency, or is there any chance that sanity, decency, and justice might someday resume their rightful place. If the former, it will be a big fat middle finger to the Founders whom the same right-wingers who support Trump ceaselessly claim to revere. But just as the endgame for Donald Trump remains to be seen—but cannot come soon enough—it remains to be seen if he has permanently perverted the presidency for all eternity, such that using it as a license to steal becomes the new normal, or if some semblance of integrity and principle can someday be clawed back. But certainly not before the name “Donald Trump” is but a half-remembered obscenity.

********

Photo: Anti-Trump billboard in Phoenix, AZ, March 2017, created by the artist Karen Fiorito. Credit: Patrick Allen Traylor / Trayart Media & Production Services.

Chart of crypto as a proportion of Trump’s new wealth by Francesco Muzzi for The New Yorker.

Those of a certain age will recognize the reference in the title of this essay. These days, American fascists—and nazis—don’t even feel the need to hide it.

Last week, in part one of this essay, we looked at the sheer scope of Trump’s corrupt self-enrichment as president. This week, we drill down on from where that new wealth came, particularly in his second term, and the insider trading that almost certainly attends it.

THEY’RE IN THE MONEY

Let’s begin with where the Trumps are drumming up their ill-gotten gains.

In August 2025, in a juggernaut piece titled “The Number,” The New Yorker’s David Kirkpatrick estimated that Donald Trump has increased his personal wealth by about $3.4 billion since taking office in January 2017. (That’s “billion” with a B, which rhymes with G, and that stands for graft.) And I would remind you that that piece came out only six and a half months into his second term; we are now 14 months into it, so the number is surely higher now.

In his epic article, Kirkpatrick expertly walks the reader through how that worked in Donald’s first term, as we discussed last week in these pages. (All three of the essays in this series draw heavily on Kirkpatrick’s work, which I encourage everyone to read.) But it turns out that was just an hors d’oeuvre.

Kirkpatrick goes on to describe the Trump family’s conscious decision to abandon what passed for “restraint” in its patriarch’s first go-round in the Oval Office, during which, he writes, the Trumps “pledged to abstain from any new deals overseas.” Now, in his second administration, “That’s out the window.”

I would argue that even that characterization is overly generous. While it’s true that the Trumps made that pledge, it is not true that they abided by it, as they both took in foreign money hand over fist (through the now-defunct Trump International Hotel in DC, for example), and cultivated new overseas ventures, involving countries as diverse as India, Indonesia, China, and Scotland. But it is undeniably true that they are no longer even pretending to play by any rules in his second turn in the White House. Mr. Kirkpatrick:

The Trumps are now cashing in on five major deals in the Persian Gulf alone. Donald, Jr., on a recent visit to Qatar, said that the family’s restraint during the first Trump Administration had not stopped his father’s critics from constantly accusing the family of “profiteering.” So the Trumps would no longer lock themselves in “a proverbial padded room, because it almost doesn’t matter—they’re going to hit you no matter what.”

Kirkpatrick calculates some of those new profits as follows: $320 million from deals with various Gulf state royal families; another $105.8 million from various real estate projects (including golf courses) in the Gulf; $125 million from memberships and events hosted at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, FL; a $40 million deal for Trump hotel in Hanoi (so Trump will go to Vietnam after all, haters!); $25 million from Truth Social; and $127.7 million from campaign funds siphoned off to his hotels and resorts and reimbursement for his own private 757, known as Trump Force One, prior to the new jet he received as a gift from the Qataris. That last number also includes Trump’s bottomless fleecing of his own supporters with his online merch, the purchase of which goes into his pocket, not his campaign as many of them assume. Trump also found a loophole that let him convert a campaign fund into a PAC, which lets him use campaign donations to pay his personal legal bills, to the tune of more than a hundred million dollars thus far, including his expensive legal defenses against charges that he raped the writer E. Jean Carroll in the ‘90s and subsequently defamed her (he lost both cases she brought), and that he paid hush money to the porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign (which resulted in 34 felony convictions against Trump), as well as the January 6 and Florida documents cases which were dropped when he won re-election.

The Trump family’s exploitation of the presidency is not limited to blood relatives, either. The poster child there is Trump’s odious son-in-law Jared Kushner, a dilettante who, in his father-in-law’s first term, was given responsibility for solving incredibly complex and violent millennia-old sectarian problems in the Middle East. (And he did a heckuva job, Brownie!) No matter that Jared has extensive business ventures in the region involving various Gulf potentates. So does Trump’s other equally unqualified Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who like Donald and Jared, is a real estate developer by trade, not a diplomat. What could go wrong?

In 2021, Kushner got the Saudi sovereign wealth fund to invest two billion dollars in Affinity Partners, a private equity firm that he was founding. Initially the Saudi board balked, in part because Jared wanted an excessive management fee amounting to about $25 million a year. The deal was so blatantly corrupt that, reportedly, even the board of the Saudi fund worried that it might look like a payoff. The Saudis thought that! But the board was overruled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, with whom Jared is said to have a close relationship—ya know, prince-to-prince. (In 2024, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland tried unsuccessfully to get the Biden administration to appoint a special counsel to investigate whether Kushner was illegally acting as an unregistered foreign agent.) Additional money came from Terry Gou, the Taiwanese businessman and politician who founded Foxconn and is tight with Beijing, and another person for whom Jared had done favors in Trump’s first term. Emirati and Qatari investors ponied up additional hundreds of millions, with another $1.5 billion later coming in from the Qatar Investment Authority and the Abu Dhabi-based asset manager Lunate just as Trump was poised to return to the White House. The timing was coincidental to say the very least.

Kushner and Witkoff are currently supposed to be negotiating with Iran for an end to hostilities in Donald’s war of choice against the Tehran regime. But The New York Times reports that, at the same time, Jared is also trying to raise another $5 billion for his fund, even as MbS, his main investor, has been pressuring Trump to keep attacking Iran.

No issues there, I’m sure.

INSIDE OUT, BOY YOU TURN ME

Since most of this graft hinges on access to power, it’s not surprising insider trading appears to be rampant in Trump’s inner circle, judging by repeated spikes in suspicious market activity just before important policy announcements by this administration.

To cite but one example by way of prologue, in early April 2025, Trump announced a round of punitive tariffs on dozens of foreign countries that sent the stock market into freefall. Just before he did so, the late, unlamented Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million in shares of Trump Media, a transaction that benefited massively from the subsequent announcement. (Just another coincidence, I’m sure.) And she was the Attorney General at the time, in charge of the Department of Justice, which prosecutes crimes like that. Of course, she has since been fired (by a convicted felon, which has got to hurt) for whom her greatest crime—like the similarly shitcanned Kristi Noem—seems to have been the poor judgment not to have been born with a penis.

But Bondi’s suspicious trade was only a harbinger. In The Wall Street Journal, Alexander Osipovich and Jack Pitcher recently cited five subsequent incidents that have caught experts’ attention, with Douglas Gillison, Saqib Iqbal, and Anirban Sen of Reuters also doing excellent reporting on those same incidents. I will intertwine the two accounts to try to paint a thorough picture.

The first was on April 9, 2025—just a few days after Bondi made her trade—when at 1:18 pm ET, Trump announced a 90-day “pause” on his idiotic tariffs, causing the market to rise again, at least briefly. According to Reuters, “options traders made millions in late-breaking bets in the minutes before Trump announced a pause on his blanket ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, sparking a 9.5% jump in the S&P 500.”

The Journal picks up the tale:

Market watchers zeroed in on trading activity from just after 1 pm ET in options tied to a popular exchange-traded fund that tracks the S&P 500, known by its ticker SPY. The trades were in short-dated, bullish call options that would pay off only if the index closed sharply higher that afternoon. “Insane, someone knew” tweeted Unusual Whales, a data provider whose X account often highlights activity with hallmarks of potential insider trading.

The second suspicious incident came on October 10, 2025, when Trump went on Truth Social and threatened to levy an additional 100% tariff on China. The Journal:

Stocks slid. This time, well-timed trades took place on Hyperliquid, a cryptocurrency exchange. Ahead of the selloff, two accounts placed enormous bets that bitcoin and ether would fall. By day’s end, the positions were closed for $160 million in profit. The last of those trades was placed just one minute before Trump’s post, prompting speculation that somebody had been tipped off.

Gee, ya think?

The third was on January 2 of this year, when at 10:46 pm ET, Trump ordered the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro by the Tier 1 US special operations unit Delta, along with airstrikes on that country, in hopes of fomenting regime change. (PS: It failed.) The Journal writes that “a series of Polymarket trades raised suspicions that someone cashed in on advance knowledge of the operation.”

In late December and early January, a mystery trader placed about $34,000 on Venezuela-related bets, mainly on contracts that would pay off if Maduro lost power by the end of January. The final wager was placed at 9:58 p.m. ET on Jan. 2, less than an hour before Trump’s order. The trader walked away with more than $400,000 in profits. Their identity remains unknown.

Reuters adds that the anonymous account had been created only a month before.

Fourth: Soon after February 28, when Trump and Netanyahu began their war on Iran, “blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps identified a group of ‘suspected insiders’ who made a fast profit by wagering on a US strike,” again through Polymarket. The WSJ:

Most of the accounts had bet on a strike by Feb. 28, which turned out to be the exact date of the operation, Bubblemaps said. The firm later found evidence linking one of them to another Polymarket account that had made profitable bets on the US striking Iran’s nuclear facilities last year.

Reuters adds: “Bubblemaps identified six accounts that made a combined $1.2 million profit from Polymarket bets that were funded in the hours immediately before the US-Israeli attacks that killed (Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei.”

I’m willing to concede that those could be macabre speculators who got lucky, though the timing remains very suspicious. (Hell, I used to be in a “dead pool” myself in the ‘90s, but just for fun, not for money. The stubborn resilience of Courtney Love drove me out of it.) But were those six bettors guys sitting in a pub? Or is it more plausible that they were White House or Pentagon or IC insiders who knew what was about to happen? (Strokes chin thoughtfully.)

The last and most recent suspicious trade came just over two weeks ago, on March 23, when Trump declared via Truth Social that he was postponing his announced strikes on Iranian power plants. (#TACO.) The Journal:

About 15 minutes before the post, a sudden burst of activity hit the oil-futures market. During the two-minute period from 6:49 a.m. to 6:51 a.m. ET, more than $760 million worth of Brent and West Texas Intermediate oil futures changed hands, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

The Journal reports that “a similar burst of activity took place at the same time in S&P 500 futures,” though “burst of activity” is putting it mildly. Noting that $1.5 billion in S&P futures was purchased in the five minutes before Trump made that announcement, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) asked on Twitter: “Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer? This is corruption, Mind-blowing corruption.”

And it is not just Trump-haters like me and Democratic politicians like Murphy raising allegations. “Given their timing and size,” Reuters reports that these trades, which involved various markets and assets, including options, commodities futures, and predictions, “warrant scrutiny to ‌ascertain if they were based on inside government information” according to “experts, who include a former enforcement director for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and three academics who have studied insider trading.”

Some of the experts said the sheer size and binary nature of some of the bets raised the possibility that people may have had advance knowledge. Monday’s $500 million oil market trade, for example, indicates extreme conviction as well as deep pockets, some of the experts said.

“When you’re dealing with bets on unique events and things like that, those do raise a lot more suspicion that somebody has some specific inside information,” said David Rosenfeld, former co-head of enforcement at the SEC’s New York office.

As long as we’re making bets, I’ll wager that Mr. Rosenfeld is a strong candidate for 2026’s World Champion Grandmaster of Understatement, Deadpan Division. But he might get some competition from Andrew Verstein, an expert in insider trading at UCLA School of Law:

“It looks deeply suspicious,” said (Verstein), adding that while the examples are limited in number, they show patterns you “would expect to see if there were informed trading by government officials and their friends.”

And then there’s Aitan Goelman, a former CFTC enforcement director and former federal prosecutor, who said such trading would normally draw scrutiny, adding that the CFTC and DOJ would typically find trades like this “anomalous.” But you’ll be shocked to hear that, as Reuters reports, “many lawyers, investors and other observers say regulators have taken a softer enforcement stance during Trump’s second administration.”

One begins to get the feeling that these experts are parsing their words very carefully to avoid outright accusations without evidence to back them up. Totally understandable. Indeed, various innocuous explanations have been offered for all these coincidences, usually by people keen to defend Trump. The Journal’s own article is cannily framed with a pro-Trump bent, stressing that there is no evidence to suggest insider trading (uh, except the curious coincidences that it is reporting in that very article). Even its choice of background terms is slyly pro-Trump, such as the assertion that “Trump de-escalated tensions with Iran with a Monday morning post on Truth Social,” which is a generous way of putting it, considering who created those tensions in the first place.

The SEC declined to comment on the Reuters story and the DOJ didn’t respond at all. A White House spokesman named Kush Desai responded by email, writing: “Any implication that Administration officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible.” Please note: that is a classic answer, complaining about the extremity of the allegation, but not technically a denial that it happened.

So does this mean Trump & Co. and/or people affiliated with them are engaging in insider trading? OF COURSE they are! It beggars credulity even to imagine that they are not. Proof is required for criminal prosecution, of course, but there is no reason to believe that sufficient access and investigation would not uncover it. Trump is motivated only by ego—more specifically, a sadistic urge to dominate—and greed. That’s the full list. He is not constrained by morality, nor, in this second term, by any practical constraints. So if he and his wife and children and friends and associates can line their pockets by means of illegal business activities that flow from his privileged position, they are absolutely going to do that. There is no universe in which they do not. Period dot.

The real problem is that we have a political system—and therefore, a criminal justice system—that refuses to even look into it, let alone hold him accountable, because of the number of people within it who receive ancillary benefits, monetary and otherwise, from his corruption. Chief among these people: the Republican Party.

Talk about trickle-down economics.

BLOOD AND TREASURE

The most disgusting influence-peddling by members of the Trump family and its associates has been connected to US military operations, a dubious distinction that applies to three of the above five examples of likely insider trading as well. That sort of war profiteering is particularly despicable. But since we know that Trump has a longstanding contempt for the military and an utter disregard for national security, it’s no surprise that this arena has been exploited in his quest for filthy lucre.

Not only has Donald used a controversial image of American war dead being returned to the US (a so-called “transfer ceremony”) in his fundraising emails, he’s also offered a “National Security Briefing Membership” to people who donate to his campaign, promising “private national security briefings” and “unfiltered updates on the threats facing America.” Meidas News reports that the fundraising message, dated March 12, “urges recipients to ‘claim your spot’ in an ‘elite group’ that will receive the ‘inside scoop’ directly from Donald Trump on foreign adversaries, border threats, and what he describes as ‘deep state sabotage.’”

The Trump sons are even more shameless. The Guardian reports that last month, right after Trump started his needless war on Iran, a Florida-based company called Powerus that makes military drones and drone interceptors brought Don Jr. and Eric onboard with what were said to be “sizable equity stakes,” and began pitching their products to various Gulf states to help protect themselves from Iranian drones. As The Guardian neatly summarizes, “Their father, as commander-in-chief, launched the strikes with Israel against Iran over a month ago that began the war, the impetus for why these Gulf countries now need protection.” The Guardian also reports that Powerus is aiming to get a piece (or all) of a $1.1 billion dollar fund earmarked by the Pentagon “to build up a US manufacturing base for armed drones to fill a hole left when the Trump administration banned such imports from China.”

And then there’s Secretary of Being an Incredible Douchebag Pete Hegseth.

The Financial Times reports that in February, shortly before the Don and Pete started their war on Iran, Hegseth’s broker at Morgan Stanley reached out to BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, about making a multimillion dollar investment in a publicly traded fund whose holdings include the major defense contractors Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. Given that Hegseth—as the head of the Pentagon—knew that a war was coming, this is the very definition of insider trading and conflict of interest. (The FT reports that “The inquiry on behalf of the high-profile potential client was flagged internally at BlackRock.”)

Hegseth’s spokesperson Sean Parnell issued a denial on social media, and demanded a retraction from the FT, adding: “This is yet another baseless, dishonest smear designed to mislead the public. (Hegseth and the DOD) remain unwavering in their commitment to the highest standards of ethics and strict adherence to all applicable laws and regulations.”

If you say so, Sean. (The FT had three unnamed sources for its reporting, which it stands by.)

Hegseth’s broker ultimately did not go through with the deal, but not for ethical concerns, only because it was not yet available for Morgan Stanley clients. (According to the FT, “It is not known whether Hegseth’s broker subsequently found an alternative defence-focused fund to make the investment.”) Ironically, had the investment gone through, it would have lost the SecDef money, because the war to which its performance was pegged has been such a shitshow. Al Jazeera reports that “While the iShares Defense Industrials Active ETF has risen more than 25 percent over the past year, it has fallen nearly 13 percent since the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28.”

It should go without saying that our civilian leaders trying to personally profit from the wars into which they drag the American people is grotesque beyond words. But it is even more bitterly ironic when that attempt to profit is predicated on their arrogant delusion that they are going to kick ass, rather than screwing the pooch as bad or worse than any foreign policy misadventure in recent memory. Kinda makes me wish Pete had been able to go through with his investment after all, and thrown his money away,

IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLE

Why do we not care about this stuff, which in any previous administration would have led to screaming headlines, weeks of investigative reporting by journalists with dreams of Woodward and Bernstein in their heads, and likely the appointment of special counsels and eventually even the handing down of prison terms? Plenty of people do care, but it is not translating into concrete consequences.

Trump’s followers, of course, forgive everything. In fact, they usually don’t even see anything he does as in need of “forgiveness.” On the contrary: many openly profess admiration for what they claim is his “business savvy.” (Thanks, Mark Burnett!) But they damn sure wouldn’t admire it if it were Barack were doing it. Or Hillary. Or Joe. Or Zohran.

When it comes to the assertion that Donald is a “great businessman,” I got a news flash for you, MAGA Nation: he ain’t. Almost the polar opposite, in fact, given his history of failure and bankruptcy. But he is inarguably a world-class con man. Indeed, the eminently respected ethics watchdog Fred Wertheimer has said “He may be the greatest con artist in American history.” After the past ten years, no rational person can seriously cling to the “great businessman!” argument, unless they are willfully deluded or a con man themselves.

But what of regular, still-in-their-right-mind Americans? Are we just inured to the corruption and impervious to outrage? Maybe. Part of Trump’s MO is to commit his crimes in the open, as if they’re not crimes at all, in hopes that people will think they’re not. How could they be, if he doesn’t even try to hide them?

Yeah, well, I was born at night. Wasn’t last night, though.

Next week in the concluding part of this essay, we look at one very specific, very modern aspect of the Trump family’s vast corruption—the one that has now become the engine of their grotesque pocket-lining.

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Photo (top): An argument for why many species eat their young. Taken outside the NASDAQ building after ringing the opening bell to celebrate one of their ongoing robberies of the American people, New York City, August 13, 2025. Credit: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters.

Second illustration: Fundraising email from the Trump campaign.

This blog has spent surprisingly little time on the wanton corruption of Donald Trump and his family over two administrations. I’m not sure why that is. In part, it might be because the corruption has been part and parcel of broader crimes, like Ukrainegate or the theft of top secret documents. In part, it has been overshadowed by even bigger outrages, like January 6 and the Big Lie, or the borderline crimes against humanity of the COVID-19 non-response, or the creation of a massively funded masked secret police force and attempt to establish a gulag archipelago in the United States. You know: normal stuff in a US presidential administration.

But the shameless kleptocracy of this administration has lately reached such a staggering level that it cannot go uncommented upon—at least not by someone like me who has Comment Upon Compulsion Disorder. (For those who read my recent post which promised more attention to positive, morale-boosting aspects of the pro-democracy struggle, what can I say? I yam what I yam.)

So this is the first of a three-parter in which we will look first at the sheer scale of Trump’s self-enrichment, then at its sources and the extent of insider trading in Trump World, and finally, at the newfound role of crypto in the family’s corrupt schemes.

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE KING

Historically, one of the chief perks of being a despot has been the opportunity to enrich oneself hand over fist—if one was not already rich—either by plundering the nation’s treasury, or inheriting the wealth of your ancestors who already did that, or engaging in corrupt practices that use your power to ensure the flow of cash into your pockets, or all of the above. As a head of state and aspiring despot, Donald Trump is not only no exception, but probably the best example in modern times.

But never let it be said that I am unfair to Donald J. Trump: David Kirkpatrick of The New Yorker writes that the terms “oligarchy” and “kleptocracy,” which I throw around a lot in this blog, including in this very essay, are incorrect. Unlike a Putin or a Najib Razik, the former prime minister of Malaysia, Trump does not simply funnel the national treasury into his Chase personal checking account. (Open one today and get a free toaster.) What he does instead, which is slightly more complex, is leverage the power of his office to solicit de facto bribes, sweetheart deals, and other pocket-lining schemes not available to people who aren’t, you know, the President of the United States.

Like that’s better.

But since everything Trump does comes down to money and/or ego (which is to say, a psychopathic need to dominate), almost all his behavior ultimately has some financial motive at its core, or at the very least attached to it.

Kirkpatrick quotes Gary Kalman, of Transparency International, an NGO that tracks political corruption globally, as saying “that Trump’s profiteering resembles that of an Arab monarch: he treats his public office as personal property, as an asset that is his to exploit as if he owned it.” But this is the crucial distinction that is being obliterated before our eyes. As Kalman says: “One of the differences between a monarchy and a democracy is that the President should not start to view the Presidency as his personal fiefdom.” This is the exact kind of corruption in a head of state that the Founders feared, and against which they erected (some) impediments. But as we have seen, visionary though they were, they failed to foresee a US president as gobsmackingly, mind-bogglingly, dogshit immoral as Donald J. Trump.

So in order to truly comprehend Trump’s moneygrubbing, we need to step back briefly and understand where his wealth came from before he got into politics.

Donald Trump likes to portray himself largely as a self-made man, one who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, with no more assistance than what he described as “a small loan” from his dad: a million dollars. Setting aside the tone-deafness of belittling a million dollars, and how that sounds to the average American, the truth is rather different.

As the financial journalists Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig wrote in their Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 article for The New York Times, which became the basis of their 2024 book Lucky Loser, over the course of his lifetime, Trump was the beneficiary of about $413 million from his Klan-loving dad Fred. (That’s almost half a billion for those of you scoring at home.) But by 2015 he had squandered it and was almost broke, until he was rescued by Mark Burnett and The Apprentice, only the latest of numerous bailouts. Although Trump was putatively a real estate developer, as Kirkpatrick writes, that show’s “glamorizing effect allowed him to make money without buying or building anything, just by licensing his name and selling endorsements. Nearly all the real-estate projects he announced during this period—from Hawaii to Israel—were licensing deals. Licensing and endorsements made him $103.2 million in riskless profit.”

(Ironically, the “Trump” name—which is the source of most of his wealth, as part of that licensing strategy—will eventually be as cursed by history as the names “Adolf,” “John Wayne Gacy,” and “Milli Vanilli.”)

That was more or less the paradigm Trump continued during his first administration. It’s impossible to summarize all of the corruption that has gone on at Trump’s direction and in his name since 2016, but I’ll hit a few lowlights, more or less chronologically.

+ Even before he was elected, when he was still a candidate, Trump infamously broke with tradition and refused to release his tax returns so the public could get a full accounting of his finances, deploying a flimsy, factually irrational, and easily disproven lie about an audit. That should have been a bellwether for us. (He has still never released them.)

+ Also during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump claimed to have no business interests in Russia, even as it was later revealed that he was actively negotiating to build a dumbass ”Trump Tower” in Moscow. By contrast, he openly boasted of having sold condos to Saudis: “They buy apartments from me. They spend forty million, fifty million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.” Trump has also licensed his name to real estate projects in Turkey, India, South Korea, the Philippines, Uruguay, and Dubai.

+ Once elected, and again breaking with the tradition of all previous presidents, Democratic, Republican, and otherwise, Trump refused to truly divest himself of his business interests to avoid conflicts of interest. But he did make an ostentatious claim he had done so, at a televised press conference where he displayed reams of paperwork that allegedly outlined this divestment, but that were visibly blank. (And a hundred thousand professional satirists hung up their pens and retired.) The most Trump did on that front was, ostensibly, put Uday and Qusay—er, I mean, Don Jr. and Eric—in charge of his business interests. Which is like Edgar Bergen saying he’s turned the family business over to Charlie McCarthy.

+ At that same January 2017 press conference, one of Trump’s tax lawyers, Sheri Dillon, floated the theory that Trump had to retain ownership of the Trump Organization specifically to defend the honor of the presidency. Otherwise, “a buyer might overpay in order ‘to curry favor with the President,’ or, just as worrisome, might demean the highest office in the land by crassly cashing in on the President’s name.” Per Kirkpatrick “Trump and his family, Dillon declared, would never do anything that might ‘be perceived to be exploitive of the office of the Presidency’.”

+ By that time Trump had also opened a hotel in downtown DC, in the Old Post Office Building, a place that went on to become a 24-hour ATM for interests both foreign and domestic to deposit bribes into his pockets, or what the watchdog group CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) called “a sinkhole of corruption.” One emblematic example, via Kirkpatrick:

In 2018, when T-Mobile was seeking regulatory approval to acquire Sprint, John Legere, then T-Mobile’s chief executive…and other company executives spent nearly two hundred thousand dollars at the hotel; Legere denied any scheme to influence the White House and said he was a “longtime Trump-hotel stayer.” (The merger was approved.)

That would become a regular pattern for those seeking preferential treatment from the US President. Special interests, foreign governments, and domestic PACs all patronized Trump properties, firehosing cash into Donald’s coffers, with the very reasonable expectation of a return on their investment. A quid pro quo, you might say.

+ Donald also had the US Secret Service occupy rooms at his DC hotel (and other properties, like his Turnberry golf course in Scotland), charging the USSS—and by extension the US taxpayers— triple the going rate, more even than it charged foreign governments. Meanwhile, Eric Trump was going around saying that the family let the Secret Service “stay at our properties for free.” (The Trumps sold the DC hotel in May 2022, netting a $100 million dollar profit.)

+ Trump also used his position to directly funnel taxpayer dollars into his personal businesses, in the brazenly rapacious, Putin/Razik manner described at the top of this essay. CREW again:

Conducting presidential business requires significant resources, and Trump has no problem charging taxpayers for the services his properties provide, even though the only reason they’re needed is because he insists on spending all of his free time there. During his first term, Trump’s constant trips to his properties forced the Secret Service to spend nearly $2 million in taxpayer money at his properties, and it was certainly not the only agency he forced to pay up.

I could go on, but it turns out that time and space are finite after all, even if Trump’s greed and shamelessness, evidently, aren’t. To put it in a nutshell, during his first term, Trump monetized the presidency and engaged in highly questionable (if not openly illegal) business schemes both foreign and domestic that were driven by the office he held. CREW compiled a list of more than 3,700 conflicts of interest from 2016 through 2020, most of which it characterized as “egregious,” and “arising from his decision not to divest from his real estate empire.”

In fact, after winning the presidency but even before taking office, Trump suggested—Nixon-like—that the whole idea of a “conflict of interest” was a logical impossibility for the president, exploiting the Founders’ naïve failure to include the head of state in the Emoluments Clauses, presumably because they didn’t think any American president could possibly be that immoral. And some of those guys owned other human beings. Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization told Kirkpatrick “that it employs an outside ethics adviser—currently, Karina Lynch, a lawyer and a lobbyist who previously worked as a Republican Senate staffer and has represented Donald, Jr.—to ‘avoid even the appearance of impropriety.’” (She’s doing a heckuva job, Brownie.)

TRUMP 2.0: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO

I think I’m going to institute a standing feature in this blog called “Imagine if a Democratic President.”

Here’s the first entry:

Imagine if a Democratic President…had done any of the things I listed above. The GOP, Fox News, and the rest of right-wing America wouldn’t just be screaming bloody murder, they’d be in the streets with their AR-15s and their bear spray and hockey sticks and Confederate flags, storming the White House and erecting a gallows in what used to be the Rose Garden.

So Trump’s first term already established a new low in American presidential corruption. But in his second term—still just over a year old—Donald has taken that graft to an exponentially more outrageous level, one that is almost not to be believed.

In The Nation, Jeet Heer writes, “Donald Trump is not given to regret, but he does get rueful when he thinks about how modest his corruption was in the first term.”

When he was first elected as president in 2016, Trump was primarily a real estate magnate and television personality who licensed his brand for money. He held on to both his properties and his branding practices in his first term…Though both practices clearly violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, the bribery went on with impunity during Trump’s first term; predictably, the Supreme Court refused to review the matter.

It’s now clear that, in the grand scheme of things, Trump’s first-term corruption was penny-ante, involving tens of millions of dollars rather than billions. It’s not that Trump was less greedy; he simply lacked the imagination and connections to realize how the presidency could really be milked on a grand scale.

Speaking to The New York Times last month, Trump bemoaned the missed opportunities to exploit the presidency in his first term, when—by his account—he was playing by the rules. Now he’s wised up. “I found out that nobody cared,” he said. “I’m allowed to.”

Quick factcheck, for those who are interested: He is not allowed to. But he’s half right, because not enough people care, or at least not enough people with the power to stop him, like the leaders of his party, or the supermajority on the Supreme Court, six of whose members are right-wingers of varying degrees of fanaticism, and three of whom owe their seats to Donald.

Heer neatly summarizes how his four years out of office allowed Trump “to remake his business empire, moving into realms like social media (with Truth Social) and cryptocurrency,” which we will examine in forthcoming parts of this series. “During these years,” Heer writes, “the Trump family also deepened its ties to the wealthy elites of Middle Eastern petro-states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These shifts allowed Trump to move from being a relatively small-scale con man to his current position as perhaps the most corrupt elected official in human history.”

CREW reports how “this trend of taxpayer money being funneled into Trump’s pocket continues in his second term.”

In his first 365 days back in office, Trump visited his properties 198 times, and visited his golf courses 116 times, sending a message to those looking to influence his administration that his properties are open for business. Foreign government officials visited his properties 55 times, pouring money into Trump’s pockets, and special interest groups held 57 events at them. Trump and his family profit financially. Special interests benefit. Foreign governments benefit. And everyday Americans come last.

Can I just pause here to note that the racist old man who complained that Obama golfed too much has himself played golf—at his own courses—almost one day out of every three that he is supposed to be serving the people?

CREW has also “continued tracking Trump’s conflicts in his second term, and the level of corruption and profiteering has already far surpassed the already ignominious standard he set in his first term.”Forbes estimates that Trump’s net worth has more than doubled since taking office a second time, which, again, I hasten to remind you, is barely over a year ago. Some lowlights:

+ Trump accepted a $400 million dollar 747 jet from the government of Qatar to serve as his presidential plane—a personal gift to Trump, not to the US Air Force. (The security concerns of that are a whole separate blog.)

+ His son-in-law sought—and got—a $2 billion dollar investment from a fund controlled by the Saudi crown prince and murder-by-bonesaw enthusiast Mohammed Bin Salman. (More on that next time.)

+ His sons started an exclusive social club called Executive Branch that charges a half-million-dollar initiation fee and is lousy with Cabinet officials.

+ As in his first term, Trump continued selling access to the levers of government. The Campaign Legal Center writes that “Trump has made clear that favorable treatment from his administration is available for a price—and wealthy individuals, companies and special interest groups have lined up to pay.”

A defining feature of the Trump administration is that those who pay get to play: Multimillion-dollar political donors have been rewarded with prominent government positions and the power to financially benefit their own bottom lines; seven-figure corporate donations have translated to executive branch support for legislative and policy positions; major media companies seeking to stay in the administration’s good graces have paid Trump millions of dollars to settle meritless lawsuits; federal investigations and enforcement actions have dissolved for the right price.

This is not just abnormal—it defies any semblance of integrity or ethics in government.

In the most infamous example, Elon Musk contributed more than $290 million to help put Donald back in the White House and was handsomely compensated for it, including the dismissal of numerous federal investigations into his businesses; the awarding of lucrative government contracts and subsidies for Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink; and of course the chance to root around inside the inner workings of the entire federal government and sabotage them to his benefit via DOGE. Pretty good ROI, no?

+ Trump filed a civil suit demanding $10 billion in damages from the US government (which is to say, the taxpayers) for his alleged mistreatment in the various investigations into him and the leaking of some of his tax returns. Just to be clear: that’s the President of the United States demanding a $10 billion dollar payment from the government that he leads.

(As of this writing, the DOJ is paralyzed, trying to figure out how to handle this ahead of a looming April 19 deadline, with Pam Bondi now looking for work at Dunkin, and another of Trump’s former defense attorneys, Todd Blanche, now in charge of deciding whether to pay his boss the $10 billion or not. Anyone care to wager what Todd will decide?)

+ Similarly, Trump is busily extorting media corporations every time the chance arises, to the tune of an estimated $91 million thus far. The game here is to file frivolous lawsuits—like the one against ABC and George Stephanopoulos—and then bludgeon the corporation in question to settle out of court and pay Trump off, instead of fighting. Meta, X, and CBS News settled similar suits. “None of these companies would have settled if Trump weren’t President and wielding power over mergers and regulations and government contracts,” Susan Seager, a First Amendment lawyer and professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, told Kirkpatrick.

+ Also on the media front, there was the $75 million Bezos spent on the idiotic Melania documentary, a pure bribe aimed at currying favor with the White House. (That figure includes $40 million for the rights and another $35 million to promote it. Melania’s cut is said to be about $28 million.)

Again, I could go on, but you get the idea. For a deep dive, if you have the stomach, the Campaign Legal Center has compiled a living document called Trump’s Corrupt Transactions, tracking what it calls Trump’s “unabashed political corruption” and what individuals and corporations have most benefited from it. (House Democrats also have a rolling ticker called the Trump Family Digital Grift Wealth Tracker.)

But the corruption is not limited to people with the surname Trump. It is endemic throughout his administration. ProPublica reports that Donald has consistently appointed officials with deep and lucrative financial entanglements in the industries they are charged with regulating, like Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg at the Pentagon, who until recently ran Cerberus Capital Management, which owns four of the companies recently awarded DOD contracts to build a “missile shield” for the United States (ha!); Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who was previously a lobbyist and member of the board for advisors for BGR Group, which has been paid more than $1.8 million by 19 clients as of September 2025 to reach out to their good friend who now runs DOT; Attorney General Pam Bondi, who spent six years as a partner at Ballard Partners in DC, where she chaired the firm’s corporate regulatory compliance practice, focusing on Fortune 500 companies, before taking over the Justice Department that now makes critical decisions about those very companies; and two high-ranking scientists at the EPA who previously held senior positions at the chemical industry’s leading trade group, to name just a few examples cited by ProPublica. That sort of revolving door between the public and private sectors is nothing new in Washington, but the Trump administration has taken it to a whole new level.

MONEY DOESN’T TALK, IT SWEARS

Ironically, before he was president, there used to be a lot of well-founded skepticism about whether Trump really was a billionaire, as he incessantly boasted. Now—bitterly—there can be no doubt.

The easiest way to measure how Donald has illegally and/or immorally profited from his presidency is to look at how much his personal wealth has grown relative to other presidents in the modern era. And the easiest way to grasp that is visually. There are many such charts on the web, but most have flaws, so I constructed my own.

The numbers at far left—culled from various estimates—show the rough total of new wealth that each president in the 20^th and 21^st centuries accrued from the time of their election through the end of their life, or the present, whichever is appropriate. A conservative estimate is that Trump has added a little over $3 billion (billion!) to his personal wealth since first winning the White House in November 2016. No other president comes remotely close to that kind of gain, with Bill Clinton a distant second, having earned less than a sixth of Trump’s haul. And from there it drops off even more precipitously.

But even this chart is slightly misleading, in that it is calculated in period dollars, and not adjusted for inflation over 120 years, as I don’t know of any studies that have done so. (A 1901 dollar is worth about $37 at the current value.) Such a chart would be mildly less extreme: the $3 million that Ike earned, for instance, would be a little bit longer line relative to more recent presidents (though Biden’s would not), but not a lot. Teddy Roosevelt’s $4.7 million gain, for example, would be about $175 million today.

In some ways, Trump’s financial gain is hard to estimate because of what The New Yorker’s Kirkpatrick calls the “opaque ownership structure of the Trump businesses” and because so much of the gain is amorphous. How do you assess the intangible value of the presidency on the valuation of the many things he owns? But that very blurriness, Kirkpatrick argues, “is why ethics experts say that any outside business can pose a conflict of interest and may open a conduit for bribery.” It’s also true that much of Trump’s wealth is purely theoretical and could vanish into thin air: Truth Social for instance, a media company whose value is based almost entirely on Trump lovers’ attachment to the man, which is abstract at best and could disappear in a moment, were he to disengage from the platform.

In fact, another thing the chart doesn’t show is that Trump is also the only US president in modern times to lose money as a result of the presidency, down anywhere from $700 million to $2.3 billion at the end of his first administration. Because his wealth is so tied to the market, the global downturn in that first term—largely as a result of the pandemic, which he treated with criminal negligence, Trump lost lots of money in 2020, giving him the dubious distinction among US presidents of being both the biggest greedhead and the biggest loser at the same time.

But any way you slice it, Trump’s moneygrubbing simply dwarfs all his predecessors put together, in a way that is almost impossible to comprehend.

Even more interesting is how Trump made that money. Hint: It wasn’t through sound, scrupulously ethical investing. Next time, in part two of this essay, we drill down on that, and in particular, the shocking prevalence of what is almost certainly rampant insider trading.

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Illustration (top): Found on Etsy. From what I can tell, whoever made it did so in a celebratory mode, not a critical one.

Chart showing increase in wealth for modern presidents by The King’s Necktie

Well, I had a whole, long-in-the-works, two-part essay on Trump’s vast corruption all locked and loaded and ready to go tomorrow, but as that topic is anything but perishable, I’m going to postpone it briefly to address a more pressing matter.

I will try to keep this relatively short, by my usual Russian novel standards.

RALLY ROUND THE FLAG, MOTHERF%CKERS

We all know that starting a war is a time-tested strategy for a floundering head of state to try to distract an unhappy public from domestic troubles. Focusing on a foreign enemy—almost any one will do—is particularly handy around election time: patriotism, as they say, is the last refuge of a scoundrel, and an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles. (Perfect for a disreputable developer like Trump.) And Donald has lots of domestic troubles he’d like us to turn away from: chief among them, his neck-deep implication in an epochal sex trafficking, sexual abuse, and pedophilia scandal that goes by the name of the Epstein files.

This war, however—the one Trump is senselessly waging against Iran—is not going very well, for reasons that I’ve elucidated in recent posts. Therefore the administration is beginning to panic. A sex scandal is bad, but a sex scandal, a losing war that was supposed to distract from that sex scandal, and an economy in freefall brought on by the war, are really unwelcome.

But war also figures heavily in scenarios in which Trump seizes some sort of unprecedented emergency powers to suspend or otherwise undermine the upcoming elections this November and in 2028. And the worse the GOP’s fortunes look, especially ahead of those upcoming midterms, the more likely that something like this will happen.

I can sense the eyes glazing over.

But in 2020, many similarly scoffed at the idea that Trump would attempt a coup (looking at you, Ross Douthat) and I think we all know how that turned out. So I think it would be willful ignorance of a Bush-like “fool me once” variety to think he won’t do it again. Especially since he got away with it the last time.

As the esteemed historian Timothy Snyder (formerly of Yale, now at the University of Toronto) writes: “A coup attempt is not at all unthinkable; Trump has done it before, and he makes it very clear that he is thinking about it now.”

Trump is said to be eager to get out of this war of aggression that he started, and that is understandable, as it is backfiring badly on him…so badly that even he can’t help to notice it, despite being surrounded by an all-star collection of yes men, sycophants, toadies, lickspittles, ass-kissers, and brown-nosers. (Did I cover itall?) For that reason, it’s difficult to imagine that the Iran war will still be going on two and a half years from now, when the presidential election rolls around. But it is easy to imagine that it will still be going on in November when the midterms happen.

And it is that danger that makes this past week’s firing of four-star General Randy George, the US Army’s highest-ranking officer and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so alarming. Hegseth also fired two other Army generals, one the commander of what used to be called TRADOC (the Training and Doctrine Command), the other the Army’s senior chaplain. I repeat: an alcoholic wife abuser with a Crusader tattoo on his chest fired the Army’s top chaplain.

Purging your top generals when you’re in the middle of a war that you boastfully claim to be winning is not a great look. Indeed, it would be alarming all by itself, let alone coming as it does atop the wholesale removal of more than 20 US military flag officers over the past eighteen months and the blocked promotions of others. That by any reasonable definition is a purge, and history tells us that purging the military leadership is one of the telltale signs of an impending or unfolding…(say it with me):

Coup.

BINGE AND PURGE

Pete Hegseth began his unaccountable tenure as Secretary of Defense by firing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, USAF General Charles Q. Brown Jr. (who is Black); the Chief of Naval Operations (General George’s counterpart as the highest-ranking officer in the US Navy), Admiral Lisa Franchetti (who is a woman); and the Commandant of the Coast Guard, USCG Admiral Linda Fagan (also a woman). The administration also quickly purged the Pentagon’s Inspectors General, who are its in-house watchdogs, and its Judge Advocates General, the senior lawyers for each armed service. That alone should have sent a collective chill down the American spine. This recent spate of targeted pink slips only accelerates that deeply worrying trend.

Today in his Substack, Prof. Snyder has a piece called “The Next Coup Attempt and How to Stop It” about how this purge relates to the possibility of an upcoming coup. And when I say “upcoming,” I mean “already in its early stages.” And like cancer, it’s always best to catch it early.

Snyder writes:

We are seven months away from the most consequential midterm election in the history of the United States. Meanwhile, we are fighting a war. These are the structural conditions for a coup attempt in which a president tries to nullify elections and take permanent power as a dictator. If we see this, we can stop it, overcome the movement that brought us to this point, and make a turn towards something better.

By way of supporting his thesis, Snyder—author of the influential 2017 book On Tyranny—notes that this is hardly a secret, as Trump “regularly declares his intention to meddle in the elections” and that “(h)is party backed a bill which would have turned elections into a sham.”

When we think about it now, about how it might take shape, we make it less likely; indeed, we deter it. Knowledge of history can change the future. If we remember what history shows us is possible, we can prevent a coup from succeeding—and turn any such attempt against its instigator.

Snyder observes, for instance, that Trump wants to increase the defense budget by nearly 50%—to $1 trillion dollars without much on offer in the way of detail, except a pay raise for servicemembers, which should be “understood as a payoff for the men who, as he imagines, will help him install a dictatorship.” These are people Trump “has openly disrespected his entire life, people whose funerals he treats as an opportunity to sell his own branded merchandise—to assist him in a coup against Americans.”

“Hegseth is meanwhile purging the highest officer ranks of people of principle.”

Snyder suggests five scenarios by which he thinks Trump will exploit the Iran war (or, as he points out, the next one). But I must say, four of the five are more campaign strategies than schemes for a coup d’état (or autogolpe), except insofar as Trump would fall back on them to rationalize why he has to cancel or radically undermine elections. On that front, I don’t think we need to spend a lot of time analyzing what lie Trump will use, as everyone—including his supporters—by now fully understands that he is going to lie. The specifics of the actual lie itself are almost irrelevant.

The one scenario Snyder describes that is most pertinent is that of a terrorist attack—real or faked—that Trump will try to exploit to justify the imposition of martial law, invocation of the Insurrection Act, or something of that sort. Anyone old enough to remember 9/11 can understand how susceptible the American people are to that sort of thing. (Not that 9/11 was fake: only that the just-add-water instant jingoism that Bush 43 & Co. were able to summon in the immediate aftermath of those attacks was stunning, as was the disastrous path down which it led.)

If Iran, for whatever reason, declines to provide a suitably convenient terrorist attack, I have no doubt that Trump would gladly gin one up under a false flag, the blame for which he would then allocate evenly between Tehran and the “Democrat Party,” which he will somehow blame for America’s “weakness” despite it not being in power. As Snyder notes, Trump’s dreamy man-crush Comrade Putin did that very thing with the 1999 false flag “Chechen terrorist attacks” in Russia, actually carried out by Russia’s own secret services including the FSB, “which began a chain of events that allowed Putin to begin his march towards dictatorship.”

“Self-terror is a Putinist strategy, and it worked,” Snyder writes. “This means that it can be presumed to have been considered by Trump, Putin’s client in the White House. Putin is one of the people to whom Trump listens.”

Knowing this, Snyder argues, we should be prepared to greet any terrorist attack, real or not, with a grain of salt and resist Republican attempts to turn it into a bloody flag waving us down the path of domestic democratic catastrophe.

BREATHALYZER PETE

Although Trump has already demonstrated his eagerness to put military personnel into the streets, I’ve long been of the opinion that the military will not be central to any coup in the United States, and I’ve only become more convinced of that as I have watched him stand up a new, hyperpartisan paramilitary secret police force and turn it loose on the American people. As we have noted previously, ICE is now funded more lavishly than any other federal law enforcement agency (so-called) and more so than the armed forces of all but a few sovereign nations.

That said, having a compliant military led by lackeys rather than men and women of principle would certainly be helpful to an aspiring tyrant, even if they don’t play the central role in his plans.

As a military man myself, I have long been appalled by Trump’s despicable lifelong behavior toward the armed services, and it has never been worse than under “Dumb McNamara.” Per above, Pete Hegseth has removed more than twenty generals and admirals during his brief tenure, an appalling number that has shocked and disgusted even a great many within the American military culture, irrespective of politics. A disproportionate number of those sacked were women and/or people of color. Just recently it has emerged that Hegseth ordered four full colonels—two of them Black and two of them women—removed from the promotion list to brigadier general for no justifiable reason, and well after their promotions had been approved within normal channels, pending only the White House’s rubber stamp. One, Major General Antoinette R. Gant, was slated to become commanding officer of the Military District of Washington, with lots of ceremonial duties involving the President. Randy Buria, Hegseth’s chief of staff, reportedly told Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the Army, that Trump did not want to stand next to a Black female general at public events.

Driscoll and General George reportedly refused to carry out Hegseth’s order, which seems to be at the center of George’s unceremonious dismissal, not anything to do with the Iran war, with Driscoll tipped to follow the general out the door any day now. New reporting just emerging now indicates that the scope of this outrageous behavior is far wider than first thought: that Hegseth has interfered in the promotion of more than a dozen senior US military officers, in an effort to advance his vision of a white, male, fundamentalist Christian military.

But Hegseth has long borne a grudge against Big Army for shitcanning him from the National Guard as a dangerous fanatic; now he is getting his revenge. In addition to his attempts to remake the US military in the image of the Confederacy (or the Wehrmacht), we cannot underestimate how his howling unfitness is influencing the conduct of a war we should never have started in the first place. As Snyder writes, “Hegseth’s particular combination of strategic incompetence and Christian nationalism (must) seem like a God-given enemy for the regime in Tehran.”

Hegseth is far and away the worst member of Trump’s Cabinet (as David Corn writes), beating even RFK Jr. and his brain worm, despite being outnumbered two-to-one. The only thing that’s saved him from getting fired, given his numerous public screwups, is that he had the good sense not to have a vagina.

In the same way that I have never been able to grasp how we made a sub-moronic, sociopathic game show host our president, I cannot get my head around how a preening Fox News mannequin (let alone one who’s also a drunk and a Christian nationalist) is in a position to end the careers of these distinguished career public servants on the basis of his own bigotry, pettiness, and twisted vision of America. I get the civilian control of the military, but we are in what I long ago dubbed a “reverse Strangelove” position. (Check your Kama Sutra.)

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

In short, when you see an autocrat purging his own generals to eliminate anyone with a backbone who might oppose the next stage in his usurpation of power, it’s time to get ready to get on the barricades.

Snyder one last time:

We are not spectators of this unfolding drama. We are actors inside every scenario. And “we” means journalists who report, judges who follow the law, servicemen and servicewomen who follow the Constitution, and above all citizens who organize, protest and vote. If we know the coup scripts in advance, we know when to take the stage—and where to take the rage.

***********

Photos: General Randy George, the US Army Chief of Staff, at a Medal of Honor Ceremony at the White House, March 2, 2026, and his erstwhile boss, an oxygen thief by the name of Pete Hegseth. Credits: (top left) Win McNamee/Getty Images; (top right) Will Oliver/Epa/Bloomberg via Getty Images. Handshake photo: “Here’s your hat—what’s your hurry?” Credit: AFP.

Before we begin, we have to acknowledge the passing of Pam Bondi, which is ironic AF—but also deeply disturbing. Here was the most vicious, disgusting, toadying Trump loyalist not named Miller, a person who followed the Dear Leader’s orders with Nuremberg-like fervor and who turned the DOJ into his personal police force and law firm, yet even that was not enough for Donald. Good riddance to her, though I shudder to think who will come next. For now it’s Todd Blanche—like Bondi, formerly one of Trump’s personal lawyers. But ultimately maybe it will be Lee Zeldin, who I hear is tipped for the job, and who is also a POS, but one that Pammy would have chewed up and shat out without so much as a wrinkle of her Botoxed brow. I think Matt Whitaker will also be available, when NATO collapses. Or has Matt Gaetz’s time finally come? Greg Bovino anyone?

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In August 1974, a twenty-year-old Black woman named Joan Little, who was incarcerated in the Beaufort County jail in rural North Carolina, was attacked by a white guard named Clarence Alligood, who tried to rape her. But this was not Clarence’s day: Joan Little killed him in self-defense and escaped from the facility.

Joan (pronounced “Jo-Ann”) turned herself in after a massive weeklong manhunt. She was tried for murder, but—miraculously—acquitted on the grounds of self-defense, the first time in the United States that a woman of any race was found not guilty of killing her rapist (or would-be rapist) on that basis.

The case, which was a cause célèbre at the time, has now been largely forgotten by the general public. But that may be about to change, as it is the subject of a gripping new documentary short called Free Joan Little, directed by the acclaimed filmmaker Yoruba Richen. After having its world premiere at DOC NYC in November 2025, the film will screen at the Maysles Documentary Center in New York City on Thursday April 2 and the River Run International Film Festival on April 19 and 23.

I spoke with Yoruba about the film, Joan’s legacy, and the implications of the case at a time when racism is resurgent in the US, when mass incarceration is having a moment, and when reactionaryism (and worse) is trying mightily to roll back hard-won civil rights in America.

REBELLIOUS LIVES

THE KING’S NECKTIE: The film is so good, Yoruba. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know the story—and especially embarrassed because I lived in that part of North Carolina right around then. I was only eleven, but the culture that’s described was very familiar to me.

YORUBA RICHEN: Many people didn’t know the story. It was one of those news stories that was very well-covered at the time, as the film shows, even internationally, and then kind of got lost in the sauce for many people. A Black woman killing a white prison guard in self-defense is not the narrative that this country wants to highlight.

TKN: How did you end up getting involved in the movie?

YR: I discovered this story when I was making my film The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. And one of the things that we really focused on in that film was Rosa’s radical activism that she had practiced all throughout her life, and her quest to highlight sexual violence against Black women, starting in the 1940s. The most famous case that she investigated was Recy Taylor, who was a Black woman in Alabama who was raped by white men who threatened to kill her if she ever said anything. But she did tell her story, and she did try to get justice, and a whole community—both African-Americans and whites, communists, civil rights activists—came together to fight for justice for Recy for many, many years. And it never happened; she never got justice. But 30 years later, when Rosa Parks heard about Joan’s case, she started the Free Joan Little Committee in Detroit. So when I was making the Rosa Parks film, and looking at all this footage, I got obsessed, because I did not know this case either. As you know, you can’t tell everything in a given film, so rather than being part of the Rosa Parks documentary, it became its own documentary short.

TKN: And was it the same team that had worked on Rosa Parks?

YR: No. I did ask my producer, Christalyn Hampton, if she wanted to join me on this journey and she immediately said yes, but she was the only other person besides me that was on both projects. But I had worked with Retro Report before, on a previous film that we made for Frontline called American Reckoning, so knowing what they’re interested in, I also went to them very early. They co-produced Free Joan Little and Bonnie Bertram of Retro Report is a producer as well. I could not have done this without their support.

TKN: It’s so interesting that this started with Rosa Parks, because I think in the popular imagination—especially among white people—she’s just thought of as this nice old lady who wouldn’t give up her seat on the bus, and not as the longtime activist that she really was. (laughs) I’m telling you what you already know much better than me, but for the sake of our readers…

YR: Exactly, and that’s why we made the film. That film was based on a book by Jeanne Theoharis called The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, who actually was crucial in giving us this information about the radical work Rosa had done, and the Joan Little case as well. To that point, I was screening the Rosa Parks film in a college class in North Carolina, and I asked the students, “Who’s heard of Rosa Parks?” They all raised their hands. So I asked, “What do you know about her?” And this one sweet young woman says, “I know that she sat on the bus for years and years and years, and she wouldn’t move for years.” (laughs) And it’s not just white people: that’s how she has been frozen in the imagination, which obviously really defangs her and her radical work over the course of decades, including cases like Joan Little’s.

TKN: I think it changes the way people think about protest and resistance. They think it was anecdotal or sporadic: this one lady did this one thing. No. It was a targeted action as a result of this iceberg of planning.

YR: Yeah, absolutely. And in the case of Joan Little, the other thing that really moved me was that these diverse groups came together. We talk about the left now and how we’re at each other’s throats and can’t get along. It was the same thing in the 1970s. The Black Power folks, the white feminists, the Black feminists, the gay power movement, the labor unions…but they came together to demand justice for Joan.

Some people today do know the case, of course. I asked E. Jean Carroll when I met her the other night, and she remembered it. (Note: Yoruba and I spoke after a festival screening of another upcoming film about sexual violence, Ivy Meeropol’s Ask E. Jean, about E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued Donald Trump for sexual assault and defamation of character.)

TKN: Well, it’s funny you mention that. Of course, I thought, these two films are like companion pieces: both about high-profile rapes in which the woman is villainized. Obviously, E. Jean was a privileged white woman who had a TV show and was a celebrity and got raped in Bergdorf Goodman’s, and Joan was in jail for a series of minor property crimes…

YR: But it shows that this kind of stuff happens at all echelons. And it doesn’t matter the race or economics. Sexual assault is sexual assault.

JUSTICE BY AND FOR THE PEOPLE

TKN: Can you talk a little bit about the challenge of getting the white feminist movement—and these other groups—to take up Joan’s cause, back in 1974?

YR: Well, Larry Little—no relation to Joan—talks about it in the film. He said that they went to the white feminists, like Ms. Magazine—Angela Davis actually wrote an article for Ms. about the case—but they also went to some local feminist organizations in North Carolina, and they said, “Are you going to stand up for this Black woman, or is this issue of sexual abuse and assault exclusively for white women?” And the white feminists came to the table.

I think it was one of those cases or events that move so many people. You could see it happen with the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Because it touched on racism and sexism and prison reform and sexual assault and rape, it was able to bring all these voices who could see the concerns of their own movement in this case.

TKN: In the film, Larry says that Joan’s case was the first time in the history of the United States that a Black woman was prosecuted for the murder of a white law enforcement officer who was raping her, and wound up being acquitted.

YR: Right. I actually think it’s the first time any American woman was acquitted of murder on the grounds of self-defense in a rape case. Any woman, Black or white.

TKN: And there’s a book about it, but the film is not based on the book, is that right?

YR: It’s not based on the book, but we did interview Christina Greene, who wrote the book, Free Joan Little, and she’s in the film.

TKN: Just to talk filmmaking for a minute, I love the way that we don’t see the interviewees for most of the film. It’s just audio until they come on camera very near the end.

YR: That was my vision, because I really wanted to immerse the viewer in the archive, and so I was figuring out how to do that. We were able to find this incredible archival footage, some of which had never been seen before. There was a volunteer with the Black Panthers in Wake Forest, North Carolina, who had shot all of this organizing footage, and his stepdaughter found that footage, like, in the drawers, and was the one who said, “Oh, my gosh, this is incredible.” Then her stepfather digitized it, and it showed at a local Black Panther festival. I read about it in The Independent; I don’t even know how—maybe I had a Google Alert for “Joan Little” or something. So we contacted him and that’s how we got that footage that no one had ever seen before.

TKN: Did you commission the black & white drawings of the courtroom?

YR: Yes. We knew we had to figure out how to show these courtroom scenes, which were so important to understanding the courage that it took for Joan to testify. There were no cameras in the courtroom, obviously, so we brought on a graphic artists to help us dramatize those.

TKN: The film really has like the DNA of a crime thriller or a legal procedural—very edge-of-your-seat. It’s gripping.

YR: There are those conventions of a crime thriller, yes. The odds were so against this woman getting acquitted. The trial was in 1975. North Carolina. She’s a poor Black woman, 20 years old when it had happened, who kills her rapist, who was a white prison guard. At the time, most women who had been raped did not even testify in their own cases. Even today, the conviction rate for rapists is very, very low. So talk about the odds being stacked against her!

(NB: Many sexual assaults go unreported, of course. Of those that are reported, only about 7-8% lead to a felony conviction, and an even smaller percentage result in incarceration of the rapist.)

So that is really what I wanted to convey: that this victory was completely unexpected, and that it happened because of the devotion of her lawyers, and of the public. Joan says it in one of the archival clips in the film. “It was the people that set me free.”

EMMETT’S FOOTSTEPS

TKN: When Joan is on the run after killing Alligood, it looks like a slave patrol is after her.

YR: Exactly like that. As Larry says, there was a bounty on her head.

TKN: And there’s the story of how the bloodhounds were actually standing on the mattress that she was hiding under?

YR: Yeah, exactly.

TKN: How did they not find her? They must be the worst dogs ever.

YR: Well, she was very small. That’s the other thing: she was not only young, she was very small.

TKN: One thing I didn’t understand was how she was able to escape from jail in the first place.

YR: We don’t know exactly how it happened, but we do know that she took refuge in the Black neighborhoods and was hiding out there for a week. And one of the local activists who had heard about the case, and I think kind of knew her, got in touch with Jerry Paul, who went on to be one of her pro bono defense attorneys.

Jerry Paul is a very interesting character. At one of our screenings, somebody raised their hand and said she had been a mentee of Jerry’s—who was a white, southern man, in the 1970s—and that he hasn’t gotten enough credit for being such a civil rights activist. After the case, he got death threats, his family turned against him…He really put himself on the line around this case. Jerry was known in the Black community as an ally and someone who worked with and for Black freedom. So they got Jerry, and then Jerry brought on Karen Bethea Shields, who had just graduated from Duke Law School.

They knew they had to create a movement around the case. And these things cost money to put on: all that organizing for her case that was happening all over the country, and eventually all over the world. So I think it was a legal strategy and an organizing strategy that led to victory.

TKN: Joan’s voice is so moving and so calm and so believable—especially for someone who was barely in her twenties at the time. But the film also makes the point that the prosecution shot itself in the foot because they were so snide and so racist.

YR: Over the top, yeah, absolutely. The genius of Karen Shields—and maybe it’s obvious—is that she got the trial moved out of Washington, North Carolina, which is the county seat for Beaufort, and held in Raleigh instead, where she was able to get a more open-minded and racially mixed jury.

TKN: So before Karen got the venue changed, was Joan looking at having an all-white, or all-male—or all-white male—jury?

YR: I don’t know the exact racial dynamics, but Raleigh was then and still is today more open-minded and you’re more likely to get a mixed jury. So she knew she had to get out of Beaufort.

TKN: And Joan was facing the death penalty, yet insisted on going to trial.

YR: Exactly. And the thing that I’m always taken aback by, and that I find incredible, is that she was offered the chance to leave the US. Remember, this was a time when people under indictment for politically-related crimes were escaping. Assata Shakur was in Cuba. Karen says in the film that Joan was offered the chance to leave the country and she said, “No, I want to tell my story.“

TKN: I’m sure that the white community, much of it, was just viciously against her. It reminds me a little bit of Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose story is still controversial in Philadelphia—I mean, it happened 45 years ago, and there are still posters about it up at Geno’s cheesesteaks. In Philly, a lot of white people still believe he’s guilty no matter what the evidence, or even if he isn’t, they just don’t give a shit.

YR: We weren’t able to include it—obviously, we can’t include everything—but because the case was so well-covered, there was news footage from North Carolina after Joan was acquitted where they asked regular white folks—just in the grocery store or whatever—what they thought of the verdict. And most of them said that they agreed with it, that they believed she deserved to be found not guilty. Obviously, I’m sure there was a sizable number of white people who disagreed, but Joan garnered a lot of support, even from white people. And it was a mixed jury, Black and white, too, that rendered that verdict.

As I said, I do think sometimes there’s an event that captures the imagination. We saw it with George Floyd.

TKN: It’s ironic, of course: The same conservatives who are very big on stand-your-ground laws and want to be able to shoot you dead if they feel like it, suddenly they’re not so keen on self-defense in this case.

YR: Of course. If you look at stand-your-ground laws and who is prosecuted under them and who is able to use them to their benefit, it also breaks down along racial lines.

(NB: Per Everytown for Gun Safety, “Homicides in which white shooters kill Black victims are deemed justifiable five times more frequently than when the situation is reversed.” For another gripping perspective on that, I recommend the Oscar-nominated 2025 documentary feature The Perfect Neighbor, directed by Geeta Gandbhir.)

PLUS ÇA CHANGE

TKN: So despite those white folks who took Joan’s side, there’s this moment in the film where Karen Shields says that the prejudice in that North Carolina county, Beaufort, was so extreme that a lot of people thought there was no way a Black woman could even get raped. Help me understand that.

YR: That’s right. Angela Davis talks about it, too. From the time that we were brought here as slaves, sexual violence was used as a way to control the whole community. So sexual violence and rape were commonplace and were justified by the myth that Black women were over- sexualized and were seductresses seducing the white master. It’s a whole trope from the time of colonialism and slavery. It was especially seen that way at that time in the South. And we still contend with those kinds of tropes today.

Then, of course, the media coverage was about whether Joan was a “jailhouse whore.” Even in the dramatization we show in the film, the prosecutor says to her: “He didn’t hit you. He didn’t slap you. You didn’t slap his hand away. All he wanted to do is have sex with you.” And that’s part of what motivated people to get involved in the case at the time, in the 1970s, when feminism was just coming to the fore in this new way, Black Power was coming to the fore in this new way, Angela Davis had just been acquitted maybe a year before this case. So this kind of stuff was in the zeitgeist.

TKN: As we sit here talking now, looking back from 50 years later, it sounds backwards, that sort of thing, as well as other aspects. They weren’t allowed to have expert witnesses? Oral sex was not considered sexual activity or rape? But then at the end of the film, when you bring it to the present day, and you have the footage of formerly incarcerated women speaking, it hasn’t changed that much.

YR: Yeah, exactly. We know that sexual abuse in prisons is still quite rampant, and is still something that women deal with, and men as well. I think that the legacy of Joan’s case is that she spoke out, and was one of the first to do so, and really brought this issue to the attention of the public. So we still have a long way to go, but I do think what we can learn from her courage and her legacy is to speak out when this kind of abuse happens.

TKN: And what was the trajectory of her life after she was acquitted?

YR: She did have to serve the initial time that she was in jail for. According to Karen Bethea Shields, who went on to become a judge, and who has been in touch with her, and Christina Greene as well, Joan ended up raising an extended family, and Karen says that she has lived a good life and is happy.

TKN: Has she seen the film?

YR: She has not seen the film yet. We did try to reach out to her over the two years that we were making it, and asked her if she would be interested in participating, so she knew it was happening. But she hasn’t spoken publicly in 30 years. But Larry is very excited and is a line of communication with her. I would love for Joan to see the film. So I am hopeful that she will.

TKN: I totally understand why she would want to remain private.

YR: Yeah, exactly. Karen talks about that, too. After being traumatized like that, reliving it is not something one necessarily wants to do. So I totally respect that.

TKN: And she’s done her bit.

YR: And she’s done her bit.

TKN: And what has the reaction to the film been?

YR: The reaction has been wonderful. We premiered at DOC NYC last December, and we screened for No Kings Day as well. We’ll be screening at the Beyond the Bars conference at Columbia University at the end of March, at Fordham Law School and Maysles Center here in NYC in April, and at a number of festivals and community screenings this spring and fall.

TKN: I would think it would have a robust life in the educational circuit, in law schools…

YR: Yes. And our partners at Retro Report are really helping us make those inroads.

TKN: What about distribution and streaming?

YR: We’re waiting to see. You know how it is. Obviously, our industry is a little topsy-turvy right now, but we have some people looking at it, so I’m hoping that it will continue to screen at festivals and that it will get some kind of distribution. Somehow, someway we will get it to the people!

What I love, as I said, is that it gives us some hope in some dark times. The story of an unlikely win like this is a boost that can be really helpful and inspiring.

TKN: Oh, super inspiring. What could be longer odds than Joan Little getting acquitted? I think it’s the very last line in the film, when Larry says, “We don’t get all that we fight for in America, but we have to fight for all that we get.“

YR: Yeah, that’s the kind of line where, when you’re making the film and you hear the interviewee say that, you’re like, ”Okay, that’s got to be the ending of the film.” It can’t not be, right?

It can’t not be.

**************

Free Joan Little (2025)

Directed by Yoruba Richen. Produced by Christalyn Hampton and Bonnie Bertram. Cinematography by Keith Walker, Corey Richardson, Joseph V. Lingad, and Tijana Petrovic. Edited by Hannah Vanderlan. Score by Reggie Dokes. A Production of Promised Land Films and Retro Report Photo: Yoruba Richen, by Paul Stremple

Yoruba Richen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has been featured in multiple outlets including Netflix, MSNBC, FX/Hulu, HBO, and PBS. Her film The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, won a Peabody Award, and is currently streaming on Peacock. Other recent work includes the Emmy-nominated films American Reckoning (Frontline), How It Feels to Be Free (American Masters), The Sit In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show (Peacock), and Green Book: Guide to Freedom (Smithsonian Channel).

She directed an episode of the award-winning series Black and Missing for HBO and High on the Hog for Netflix. Her film The Killing of Breonna Taylor won an NAACP Image Award and is streaming on Hulu. Her previous films, The New Black and Promised Land, won multiple festival awards before airing on PBS’s Independent Lens and POV.

Yoruba is a Guggenheim and Fulbright fellow; a winner of the Creative Promise Award at Tribeca All Access; a Sundance Producers Fellow and Women’s Fellow; and a recipient of the Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Filmmaker’s Award. She is the founding director of the Documentary Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and founded Promised Land Films, which focuses on producing nuanced, compelling documentaries that illuminate issues of race, space, and power.

In the first part of this essay, we examined how and why Donald Trump is losing his war on Iran, and his limited options for getting out of it. In part two, we look at how much political damage that war is likely to do to him, and whether it might—finally—be the long overdue political death blow we have been desperately awaiting for ten years, and that he so richly deserves.

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I’ve rarely been so happy to turn the page on a calendar.

I’m aware that our measurement of time is an artificial construct. I know that, in reality (or is it Reality?) the sun that sets on the evening of December 31, 2020 and rises on the morning of January 1, 2021 is the same star. I am also aware that even the idea of a sun “rising” and “setting” is an anti-Copernican illusion.

In other words, the line dividing 2020 from 2021 is a purely imaginary one.

But as long as we are maintaining arbitrary allegiance to the Gregorian calendar, this New Year’s Day merits an assessment of the past 366 rotations of the planet.

They sucked.

There have been some other very bad years, of course. Just confining ourselves to the United States in the 20th century, there was 1963, from Birmingham to Dallas. There was 1968, from Memphis to Chicago to Saigon to the Audubon Ballroom in New York to the Ambassador Hotel in LA. There was 1980, from the Iranian hostage crisis to the murder of John Lennon to the election of Ronald Reagan.

Reaching further back, needless to say, there was 1941, 1929, or—as some have noted—any year of the Civil War that you care to name. And all those were years of specifically American tragedy. Other nations have their own dark memories. Ask your Armenian friends about 1915, or your Rwandan ones about 1994.

But 2020, by contrast, offered an ongoing catastrophe on a global scale, one that enveloped the entire planet in a rare communal crisis, and for that it is destined to stand out.

It’s not alone in that league either, of course. The obvious precursor was 1918, which featured the emergence of the last global pandemic, one that killed 50 million people worldwide, as well as the final year of the war to end all wars (spoiler alert: it didn’t), an event that did, however, succeed in profoundly shocking Western civilization with its first taste of industrialized slaughter on a mass scale. It’s proven to have remarkable staying power.

Here in America, our experience of this latest grim plague was made infinitely worse by the criminal malevolence of our monstrous rulers, bringing on wholly unnecessary attendant suffering—physical, psychological, and economic. That part of the catastrophe was anthropogenic, which is a fancy way of saying man-made, and not a bougie retailer that sells pashminas and pre-distressed housewares…exactly the kind of business that COVID-19 killed.

I HEARD TELEPHONES, OPERA HOUSE, FAVORITE MELODIES

2016 wasn’t a great year either. It began with Bowie dying, followed soon after by Prince, and it was just getting started.

For me, that year was terrible on a very personal level. In July 2016 my mother Nancy died at the age of 78 after battling ALS for almost two years.

When she was first diagnosed the doctors told us she had about five years to live, which we knew was only a guess, and we were naively optimistic that she would last much longer. But the opposite proved true, and her decline was much swifter. My father and brother and I watched this kind, loving, beautiful, artistic woman suffer and degrade under the crushing force of this unbearably cruel disease until she was gone.

We buried her at Arlington, amid the acres of identical white tombstones, dress right dress, the military compulsion for order even unto death, as some poet once said. My father put on his dress blues for only the second time in three decades, the previous one being my wedding fifteen years earlier.

There are two kinds of people in the world, so they say: those whose mothers have died and those who have no idea what is coming. Even for an adult, the death of a parent leaves a gaping hole, and not only for the lucky ones like me who came from loving families. Those unfortunate souls who had absent or malignant parents merely suffered that loss sooner. In the familiar phenomenon, for months afterward I would catch myself—for instance, when my five-year-old daughter would do something wonderful and my first instinct would be that I must tell my mom, quickly followed by the cold slap of remembering. It still happens to me once in a while, even now.

I was still adjusting to this new, gray-toned world when we were all bludgeoned by a second tragedy a few months later, with the election of the most criminally unfit man ever to occupy the Oval Office. It is awkward to speak of these two events in the same breath, as each seems to dwarf the other in its own way: one so intimate that to measure it against something like politics feels insulting, the other so global and vast that it feels solipsistic to suggest that any personal tragedy compares. But that very contrast made it feel like a sadistic one-two punch.

Even then, I had no idea how bad the next four years were going to be; few of us did. And that was before the plague.

FROM THE BRIM TO THE DREGS

Inarguably, amid all the terribleness, there were two good things that happened in 2020. Loyal readers of this blog, I bet you can guess what they were.

The first was the resounding defeat of Donald Trump, presaging his imminent eviction from the White House, a verdict delivered in no uncertain terms by a majority of the American people. Yes, he still poses a danger, and so do his bigoted, benighted followers, and yes there is much work left to do. But his defeat is cause for rejoicing, and for hope that repairs can now begin. Can you imagine how dark this New Year’s would be if November 3rd had gone otherwise?

The other good thing was the beginning of what my friend the filmmaker Peter Nicks calls the Awakening: a watershed moment in America’s long, slow, often grudging reckoning with the inherent racism that is in our country’s DNA. Tragically, that belated awakening was triggered by the unconscionable torture and murder of one of our countrymen over a period of eight minutes and 46 seconds, by an officer of the law no less, a crime that was only the latest in a long, horrific parade of such crimes. The anger and outrage and demands for justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd were wrenching, but long overdue, and therefore not something to lament. They are a battle cry that ought to stir our hearts. The challenge now is to keep that passion up and carry it forward, and not let it be a moment, but a movement.

Let me add another good thing that 2020 brought, amid all the shite. That was the consistent demonstration of human kindness and compassion at its very best, as displayed by people all over the globe—health care workers, first responders, essential workers, and ordinary people of all stripes who rose to the occasion during the calamity of the pandemic. In that regard, 2020 was a crucible that revealed both the worst and the best of humankind, as adversity tends to do.

So good riddance, 2020. Your successor promises to bring pain and suffering of its own, but also the promise of rehabilitation, and therefore cause for optimism. Here in America, we will soon be under new management, with adult supervision for the first time in four years. The rollout of the vaccine brings the end of this ordeal within sight, and our return to competent leadership makes me believe that recovery is possible. But we will have to fight for it.

The one thing we’ll never say about this year is that it wasn’t memorable. Which isn’t a compliment when it’s something you’d rather forget.