Stephen Miller Wins This Week’s Stalin Prize for Totalitarian Flattery

We don’t really learn anything new about Donald Trump anymore. He’s the same old liar and buffoon he’s been for 50 years. But sometimes we relearn the stuff we already knew in ways that are so shocking that we have to pause and take stock.

One of the old lessons we relearned this week has to do with Trump’s adolescent need for constant praise, and the abject willingness of his sycophants to provide it without his having to ask—even, or especially, when the reality screams for rebuke.

This is a crucial point that needs to be widely understood, and will be by those with a living memory of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. The operating principle of such regimes was this: The worse actual conditions were, the more fulsome the propaganda had to be. The crops yields were excellent, comrades! Our cars are far superior to the capitalists’! Prisons? What prisons?

Which brings us back to Trump’s America, which isn’t so different in key respects from Enver Hoxha’s Albania. Here we have a week when Trump’s bumbling, his stupidity, his willed ignorance of history, and his utter refusal to think through policy have never been more fully on display. With all this tariff flip-flopping, he very nearly launched a global economic crisis. As it is, he personally—no one else—cost investors, from large institutional ones to you and me, trillions of dollars. And the lower tariff rates he announced Wednesday as the bond market was about to explode are still the highest since the infamous Smoot-Hawley years.

It was a disaster in every way. And as such, it required an especially intense degree of obsequiousness.

Bill Ackman: “This was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump. Textbook, Art of the Deal.”

Karoline Leavitt (to White House reporters): “Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.”

And the winner of this week’s Stalin Prize, Stephen Miller: “You have been watching the greatest economic master strategy from an American President in history.”

For good measure, not exactly on the topic of the tariffs but nevertheless a Stalin Prize contender, we had Pam Bondi at a Cabinet meeting on Thursday: “President, we’ve had some great wins in the last few days. You know, you were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority.”

Wait, what? “President”? Not “Mr. President”? Why? Because it’s a little closer to “El Presidente”? For the record, Trump won a plurality, not a majority, and he got four million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020. But there’s more: In her next sentence, Bondi invoked “U.S. Americans.” I haven’t heard that one since Miss Teen South Carolina in 2007.

If these people are right that Trump was acting the whole time with great intention, then we must seriously consider the allegation that he was manipulating the market with his Wednesday morning social media post about now being “A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” If he knew that morning that he was going to announce a pause that afternoon—an announcement that he had to know would send the market skyrocketing—then there’s little question that his post constituted market manipulation. The best argument in Trump’s defense here is a pretty pitiful one: that he’s so incapable of thinking more than 15 minutes ahead that it’s hard to believe he knew in the morning what he was going to do in the afternoon.

Regardless, we’re in an unprecedentedly chilling era in American politics. Literally never in American history have presidential aides and supporters spoken quite like this, employing the kind of flattery one usually sees in totalitarian regimes (which are a couple ticks worse in general than authoritarian ones).

What does it tell us about the future? Trump is going to get worse. I think we can say that with confidence. Each week so far has been worse than the last, in terms of the assaults on democracy. His executive order this week concerning Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs is terrifying—perhaps the most frightening thing he’s done yet in his war on political enemies. Telling the Justice Department to investigate specific individual Americans because of their political activity arguably goes further in turning the state into an instrument of his personal will than anything else he’s done.

Bondi said we should rest assured that the Justice Department alone will make any prosecutorial decisions. But the mere fact that Justice is going to use resources to investigate these two men, who are guilty of nothing more than political advocacy Trump didn’t like, has terrifying implications for every U.S. American out there.

So, yes, things will get even worse. And as they do, the sycophancy will grow ever more insistent and unapologetic. That’s how it works. These attempts to win the Stalin Prize are so pathetic they’re almost funny—but each one of them is also another assault on democratic values and customs. We can’t forget this.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

You remember the Brady Bunch movies of the 1990s, whose ingenious conceit was that television’s archetypal late-1960s sitcom family was transported to the ’90s but still lived in their oblivious 1969 bubble of bell bottoms and groovy chicks and Davy Jones fandom? That’s how I’ve been thinking of Donald Trump this week, except that he’s living in an 1890s bubble that no one around him is willing to puncture but that everyone else in the world, probably including those now-famous penguins on that one island, knows is utterly insane.

There’s a lot to say about these tariffs and how destructive they are, and most of it has been said. My colleague Timothy Noah wrote about the stupidity of tariffs as policy and how Trump has already cost him personally thousands of dollars. But I want to focus on something different here. I want to focus on Trump’s understanding of history. It’s so shockingly dumb—yes, even for him—that it’s hard to believe that we have a president of the United States who is this ignorant.

Here’s what Trump said the other day, and he has said versions of it a number of times: “In the 1880s, they established a commission to decide what they were going to do with the vast sums of money they were collecting. We were collecting so much money so fast, we didn’t know what to do with it. Isn’t that a nice problem to have?”

OK. First of all. Nobody can tell what commission he’s talking about. President Chester Arthur empaneled a commission that recommended reducing tariffs by 20 to 25 percent, going hard against the conventional wisdom of the day. But Congress defied him, lowering tariffs by just an average of around 1.5 percent (and yes, that’s another thing—Congress is supposed to set tariffs, not the president, making this move, among other things, an impeachment-worthy “abuse of power,” a phrase invoked by The Wall Street Journal editorial board Thursday).

But more importantly, there’s this. Allow me to put this as Trump himself might on Truth Social: THE MAN IS AN IDIOT!!!

It is true that tariffs were the chief source of federal government revenue for most of the country’s history until the twentieth century. Tariffs and excise taxes, which are taxes on specific goods—gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol, certain amusement activities. And for a spell, a modest income tax, which President Lincoln imposed during the Civil War and that lasted through 1872. But broadly speaking, tariffs were the ball game.

Even so, they were always a political hot potato because there were powerful interests that supported them (steel, iron, and wool) and other powerful interests that opposed them (wheat, cotton, tobacco). Tariffs were at the center of some of the most heated debates of the nineteenth century.

But here’s the thing you need to know that the president of the United States does not: Tariffs supported most of what the federal government did in the 1800s because the federal government didn’t do much of anything. The government did about four things. It recruited and paid an army. It delivered mail. It ran some courts of law. And it collected duties and tariffs. That was about it. There was no need for much federal revenue.

Today, liberals and conservatives argue over what might constitute an optimal number for federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product. Generally speaking, liberals want that number to be up around 25 percent, which indicates a robust welfare state. Conservatives prefer that it be down closer to 15 or so.

Here are some numbers from the St. Louis Fed, which go back to the Great Depression. During the New Deal, as Roosevelt was just constructing the first iteration of the American welfare state, federal spending as a percentage of GDP got up to around 10 percent. During World War II, when the government took over a number of industries, it shot up to around 40 percent. In the postwar era, it has indeed hovered around 20, indicating the liberal-conservative tug of war over federal spending. Interestingly, it rose a little under Ronald Reagan (military spending), and it reached its highest postwar point, 30.7 percent, under … Donald Trump, during the pandemic.

So that is where federal spending as a percentage of GDP has been for nearly a century—17 percent, 22 percent, 30 percent in a crisis. Want to take a guess as to what it was in 1900? Maybe 11 percent? Nine percent? Seven? Try 2.7 percent.

In other words—tariffs could cover the cost of what the federal government did because the federal government didn’t do anything!

Now, there will of course be those who say, “Well, good! We need to go back to that!” OK. Let’s go back to no Social Security. Let’s go back to no Medicare. Let’s go back to senior citizens having to fend for themselves and move in with their kids (if you’ve never seen Make Way for Tomorrow, please watch it this weekend). Let’s go back to no environmental regulation, no food inspection. Let’s just have no airline safety regulations. Flying would be so much more interesting that way! And finally, I say to those conservatives who think they want a 1900-style government, let’s go back to an army of 25,000 personnel.

So in sum, Trump is fantasizing about some America that no one, literally not a single American, wants to return to. Poverty was through the roof. Health care was abysmal. People had seizures from toothaches. Most people didn’t even use toilet paper yet (it wasn’t “splinter-free” until the 1930s!).

One more idiotic Trump quote, if I may: “Then in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government.”

What?! Well, here, we encounter a very interesting history that maybe 1 percent of Americans know. As I noted, Lincoln imposed an income tax, which disappeared in 1872. There was no income tax for 20 years. Then there was a big depression in 1893, and Congress imposed a tax on high-income people for two years. Then it went away again.

Come the twentieth century and the Progressive era, and the demand for the government to do things like inspect meat and enforce child labor laws, and liberals began pushing for an income tax. Conservatives, of course, were opposed.

So in 1909, progressives attached an income tax plank to—guess what? A tariff bill. Conservatives counterproposed that an income tax be the subject of a constitutional amendment, confident that they’d fixed the progressives’ wagon because there was no way three-quarters of the states would approve such jackbooted madness. Then they sat and watched slack-jawed as state after state approved it! In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment took effect.

Is it Trump’s secret plan to do away with the income tax? Actually, it’s not secret at all. He has said it many times. He’s going to raise $6 trillion from tariffs and abolish the IRS.

OK. We’ll see. Even putting aside the downsides of tariffs (most obviously, higher prices), economists see nothing close to $6 trillion in revenue.

Trump is blowing more smoke out his you-know-what than a decade of California wildfires could produce. Read this, from CBS.com: “In a recent news conference, White House staff secretary Will Sharf estimated that Mr. Trump’s 25 percent tariff on vehicles and auto parts imported into the U.S. could raise ‘roughly $100 billion in new revenue.’ At the same news conference, Mr. Trump claimed moments later ‘anywhere from $600 billion to $1 trillion will be taken in over the relatively short-term period, meaning a year from now.’”

The aide says $100 billion. Trump casually ups it to a trillion. Billion, trillion; who knows. Well, even I know: A trillion is a thousand billions. That’s like the difference between 10 and 10,000. Pretty vast, in other words. But Trump knows that nobody really thinks about the difference between a billion and a trillion, so just say a trillion.

Finally, before I let you go: How much do tariffs bring in now? Around $80 billion. Sounds like a lot, and it is. But take a guess as to how much total revenue the federal government takes in, from (1) income taxes, which is half of all revenue, (2) payroll taxes, (3) excise taxes, and (4) corporate taxes.

It’s around $4.7 trillion. Know what percentage of $4.7 trillion $80 billion is? About 1.7 percent. That’s how much of our current federal revenue comes from tariffs.

Going from 1.7 percent to 100 percent sounds, um, like something that will cause vast, unknowable dislocations; and more to the point, like the fantasy of a stupid man who’s never read a book and has no effing idea what he’s talking about.

Or as Gary Cole’s Mike Brady might have put it: “Donald, when you’re trying to fool other people, you’re really only fooling yourself, and who’s the real fool then?”

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

Madness everywhere. Just glance at the headlines leading The New York Times this morning:

A Disregard for Rules Trickles Down From Trump to His Aides
Trump Takes Government Secrecy Seriously. But Only When it Suits Him.
10,000 Federal Health Workers to Be Laid Off
President Trump Moves to Punish the Law Firm Where Robert Mueller Worked

There’s more, but you get the picture. The Washington Post adds a hot scoop: Internal White House document shows agencies preparing to cut between 8% and 50% of staff.

That’s a lot of mayhem, and it barely scratches the surface. The Social Security Administration is being destroyed. ICE is throwing people out of the country for what look to be obviously political reasons, notably a scientist at Harvard Medical School who was detained in Boston and told she’s being sent back to her native Russia. She protested Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion and called for his impeachment. Wonder what’s in store for her.

Across human history, fascism has been imposed upon democracy mostly in one of two ways. First, by brute force—a military coup, that sort of thing. Second, a bit more stealthily, and legally—through legislation, executive decrees, and court decisions that hand more power to the leader.

Donald Trump is inventing a new way. Call it chaos fascism. Destroy the institutions of democracy until they’re so disfigured or dysfunctional that a majority no longer cares about them.

That’s exactly what’s happening with Social Security. The Washington Post reported this week that the SSA is breaking down: Its website “crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts.” A Wall Street multimillionaire who probably doesn’t need his Social Security check and who has pledged that he will “100 percent work with DOGE” has already cut around 12 percent of the staff and doesn’t look like he’s stopping there.

In other words: Start by lying about the agency, with absurd and false claims about 140-year-olds cashing checks. Then wreck the agency so that its service becomes crap. Let public anger at it build. And in time, they can just dismantle it and privatize the greatest social insurance system ever devised by this government and put people’s financial fate in the hands of rich cronies. If that’s not chaos fascism, I don’t know what is.

Trump probably doesn’t have some secret plan. As we know, he doesn’t think far enough ahead. Elon Musk, however, probably does. It’s no accident he called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” That statement either (1) reflected his ignorance of how both Social Security and Ponzi schemes work or (2) was made in full knowledge of how both work—that is, he knew it was nonsense, but he said it anyway because his goal is to destroy Social Security.

This applies to just about everything Trump and Musk are doing.

It applies even to Signalgate. Trump has contempt for rules and procedures, and so he appoints unqualified stooges like Pete Hegseth to run the world’s largest military, who share that contempt—who think being tough means showing the world that they can do anything they want with no consequences. Again—ignore the law, trash the rules, establish that procedure is whatever you say it is. Chaos fascism.

And it will almost certainly go unpunished. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Thursday that the Justice Department wasn’t the least bit interested in looking into it. Some GOP lawmakers are making noises about the need for an investigation of some kind. But really—are the GOP’s leaders in Congress, Senator John Thune and Representative Mike Johnson, really likely to green-light an investigation? Seems pretty unlikely to me, unless it’s done with the secret, express goal of exonerating all involved.

Some senators say the Pentagon inspector general should conduct a probe. OK, we might get that. But remember that Trump has already fired 17 inspectors general, so who’d really care if he fired one more? Break the rules, and then ensure that there’s no accountability. Chaos fascism.

And if you want an image, just one image, that absolutely screams chaos fascism? Feast your eyes upon this photo of Department of Homeland Security Secretary and noted dog killer Kristi Noem at that notorious El Salvador prison this week, the prison where the Trump administration sent a couple hundred alleged Venezuelan gang members. They positioned her in front of prisoners behind bars, most of them bald and tattooed as if extras in a dystopian sci-fi movie, warning others that what happened to those Venezuelan men could happen to you. It’s a chilling photograph—to think that this is now the kind of image the United States wishes to project to the world.

And remember—those men are being held in that notorious prison in defiance of a federal court order. Wreck the rules. Chaos fascism.

Where in the world will we be six months or a year from now? What shape will Social Security be in? Veterans Affairs? What will be the impact of all these tariffs? Trump thinks he’ll force American companies to build factories here, and no doubt a few will, enough that Pravda (Fox News) can promote them as “proof” that the tariffs were a miracle. But most economists predict—well, chaos.

Trump will orchestrate no military coup. The Republican Congress will probably pass no laws that make Trump president for life. That would be too obvious. What they’ll do is make stealthier moves across the board that discredit and destroy our democratic institutions until he and his billionaire friends can strip them for parts. Chaos fascism is here to stay.

Think we’re not in a constitutional crisis yet? We’re not. We’re in several.

One involves Elon Musk and DOGE, barging their way into the United States Institute for Peace, created by Congress under Ronald Reagan, with DOGE staffers apparently ripping the organization’s logo off the wall. DOGE is not an arm of the government. It’s a quasi-private goon squad taking a machete across Washington, D.C., at the personal whims of two men. Any non–ideologically zealous court would toss its actions in five minutes—as indeed at least one already has, with respect to USAID.

There’s so much more. The revocation of birthright citizenship. The attempted federal spending freeze. The attempted firings of agency heads. The ordered removal of federal employees with civil service protections. That birthright citizenship order—contravening the plain text of the Constitution—was issued on Donald Trump’s very first day in office. Arguably, the constitutional crisis started right then and there. Since, three different judges have blocked the order.

But shocking as all that has been, nothing touches what Trump is trying to do to Judge James Boasberg over those three planes full of alleged Venezuelan gang members. The administration’s latest legal gambit, to invoke the state secrets privilege in an attempt not to have to disclose any information about the detainees or the flights, amounts to an effort by Trump to say that he can take any action against anyone he deems a danger to the state. That’s an attempt at dictatorship.

Let’s go back in time. First of all, what was the Alien Enemies Act, whose authority Trump invoked to detain the Venezuelans? It was part of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, passed by Congress under President John Adams. If you learned high school history the way I did, you were told that passage of that law was, to put it mildly, not one of America’s finer moments. Passed as the young United States stood on the brink of war with France, with various French nationals milling about our cities, it gave the president extraordinary emergency powers. The next president, Thomas Jefferson, allowed all aspects of the broader law to expire except for the Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to declare certain unnaturalized persons “alien enemies.”

It’s been invoked only three times, all during wartime. It does include language referring to “any invasion or predatory incursion,” which is what Trump is claiming. But Georgetown law prof Steve Vladeck told NPR: “No one has tried to argue that that ‘invasion or predatory incursion’ language could be used in any context other than a conventional war.” That is, until last week.

Meanwhile, the state secrets privilege has its roots way back in Aaron Burr’s treason trial, when the government suppressed a letter from a colonel to President Jefferson on the grounds that the letter contained state secrets. The Supreme Court didn’t speak on this until 1953, in United States v. Reynolds, which saw the first formal recognition of the privilege: namely, that evidence in court proceedings could be excluded if the government says its disclosure would reveal state secrets. It was invoked a few times by George W. Bush after 9/11.

Now Trump wants to use it to bar federal Judge James Boasberg from seeing specific information about two Saturday night flights to El Salvador with the Venezuelans aboard (what time they took off, where they were when Boasberg issued his initial order, etc.). Attorney General Pam Bondi (remember how she was supposed to be so much better than Matt Gaetz?) and her deputies argued that Boasberg’s requests for this information constitute “grave usurpations of the President’s powers under the Alien Enemies Act and his inherent Article II powers.”

Simultaneously, of course, Trump is demanding that Congress impeach Boasberg, calling him a “radical left lunatic” and a “local, unknown” judge. He’s the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He was originally elevated to the federal bench by George W. Bush. John Roberts appointed him to a term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He once ruled against Hillary Clinton in a case involving her emails. And: He once ruled for Trump in a case involving his tax returns.

So now we can summarize Trump’s position here. He invoked an ancient (and often criticized) law during non-wartime, which no president has ever done. A federal judge said, Hey, wait a minute and ordered the action ended (that is, he ordered those airplanes turned around). Trump ignored that order; the planes flew on. Now Trump’s attorney general has invoked yet another obscure and controversial law in an effort to shut the judge up. And finally, Trump now demands that Congress impeach the judge because of his refusal to accept the laws of the land.

It wasn’t some lefty who said, of these breaches, that Trump “has declared war on the rule of law in America.” That was conservative retired Judge J. Michael Luttig.

Let us recognize the stakes: Today, it’s noncitizens who are the victims of Trump’s lawlessness. Maybe Trump will stop there. But if this gets to the Supreme Court and a majority there upholds Trump’s position, do we really think Trump won’t at least be sorely tempted to galumph his way through that open door? What will happen when a future roundup includes naturalized citizens? Or even birthright citizens, a category we know Trump wants to eliminate? And what happens when it simply becomes anyone who the president doesn’t like?

And if the House votes to impeach Boasberg, do we really think that won’t chill and intimidate other judges? We don’t have to wait for Trump to defy the Supreme Court to think it’s a constitutional crisis. We are in crises, plural, right now. And it’s only been two months.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

You may have seen the headline Thursday that two federal judges ordered the Trump administration to reinstate thousands of fired government workers. This was, certainly, a defeat in court for President Trump and Elon Musk. But it was a lot more than that.

It was a royal spanking. One judge in particular shredded the administration’s arguments and humiliated the lawyer who was arguing the government’s case, all but openly calling her a liar. And it was something else too: a great example of the opposition working for the millions of people who are counting on it.

Let’s start with the sum and substance of the judges’ orders. Some 25,000 federal employees will be back at work Monday. One judge’s order covers the employees at the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs. The other covers those at Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the General Services Administration, the Small Business Administration, and USAID.

I’m not exactly sure which employees that leaves out. But the two injunctions leave in a hell of a lot of people, people despised and excoriated by Trump and Musk and idiots like Linda McMahon, who called her terminations at the Education Department “a humanitarian thing” and says she took care to keep “the good people.” She has no business running this department—she once lied about having a bachelor’s degree in education. (Remember when that might have mattered to a few U.S. senators? Remember when a president wouldn’t even have nominated such a person?)

The judges’ rulings leave in the people McMahon heave-ho’ed. They leave in the people at the agency (USAID) Musk called a “criminal enterprise.” They leave in everyone at the hated consumer protection bureau. They leave in everyone at the IRS (under the Treasury Department). All of them were unfairly mocked and marginalized, and all of them are back on the job.

Granted, these are temporary injunctions, which last just a couple weeks. We’ll have to see where it goes after that. But if the way the arguments unfolded Thursday is any indication, especially in Judge William Alsup’s San Francisco courtroom, the administration has a long way to go in making arguments the court will find credible.

Alsup more than once called the government’s arguments a “sham.” At one point, he said to Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelsey Helland: “I tend to doubt that you’re telling me the truth.” At another, observing that Helland had no witnesses testifying in support of his case, Alsup said: “You will not bring the people here to be cross-examined. You’re afraid to do so, because … it would reveal the truth. This is the U.S. District Court.… I’ve been practicing or serving in this court for over 50 years, and I know how we get to the truth.”

It was no picnic for the administration in the other courtroom, either. Judge James K. Bredar in Maryland quoted Musk’s line about moving fast and breaking things, saying: “Move fast? Fine. Break things? If that involves breaking the law, then that becomes problematic.”

Complete repudiation. And it’s hardly in just these two courtrooms. Earlier this week, a third (!) federal appeals court ruled against the administration’s efforts to end birthright citizenship. And this week isn’t unusual. On February 25 alone, the administration lost three cases: on the attempted freezing of federal grants and loans, on the payment of foreign-aid-related money to government contractors, and on refugee admissions and funding.

Spank, spank, spank, spank, and spank. The law is kicking their asses. And it’s happening because a lot of people are standing up and making it happen. With respect to the cases heard by Alsup and Bredar, it’s Democratic state attorneys general who brought these suits.

When liberals take the measure of the opposition, they tend to zoom their mental camera in to a very narrow field of view. There’s a lot of complaining right now about Chuck Schumer’s decision to let the House GOP’s spending resolution have the eight Democratic votes it needs to pass the Senate.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Schumer made the wrong decision—a defensive and feeble decision of the sort I’ve seen Democrats make far too many times in my life. They’re always thinking of reasons why they shouldn’t throw caution to the wind and try something bold. Blocking the resolution would have carried risks, and yes; a shutdown might have resulted in even more harm to the American people. But rank-and-file Democrats are pretty tired of watching their party’s leaders mothball their fortitude like this.

The good news, though, is that the resistance isn’t limited to what happens in the halls of Congress. It’s in the hands of those attorneys general. It’s in the hands of governors (at least those who aren’t inviting Steve Bannon onto their podcasts). It’s in the hands of a range of nonprofit litigators who are in many cases, trust me, probably risking their funding and/or their 501(c)3 status, considering who’s in charge of the IRS.

And it’s in the hands of millions of people who are enraged. If you’re not watching Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC these days, you should. Every night, toward the beginning, she offers a sampling of that day’s protests and actions around the country—of which there are many all over the country, including in red states and towns. People are registering their shock and disgust at what’s going on.

Cast your gaze a little more widely. The resistance is, in fact, strong, and as the madness multiplies, it’s just going to get stronger.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.