You Think the Bari Weiss–CBS News Story Is Bad? No—It’s Much Worse.

More ghastly, parallel-universe news this week. The man in charge of America’s public health said he didn’t know how many people died of Covid and added, despite his ignorance, that he is certain that the Covid vaccine has killed more people than Covid itself did (all this while he’s denying Americans access to the Covid vaccine). We committed a probable act of war against Venezuela. The president of the United States was mocked by the leaders of China, Russia, and India. And as of Friday, the Department of Defense is apparently going back to the future and becoming the Department of War, I guess because “defense” is too passive a cognomen for the real men of MAGA-land.

But maybe the most ominous development of the week doesn’t concern the Trump administration at all. It’s the news that Bari Weiss is apparently about to become the head, or something, of CBS News. This is bad for CBS, sure. But it’s a lot bigger than that: It is the securing for the right wing of another key beachhead in the American media landscape, which, as I’ve warned repeatedly, will within a generation (or sooner) consist of a lot of large, noisy, avowedly right-wing outlets and a small handful of mainstream outlets that are too weak and feckless to defend what remains of our democracy—and will thus be acting as the handmaidens of their own destruction, if they aren’t already.

This is certainly an “only in America” story, but I do not mean that in the normal, heroic sense. I mean it in the creepy, corporate, it’s-all-about-profit sense. CBS began life in 1927 as a radio network, expanding into television as that medium grew. It had entertainment and news divisions, and later sports; its news division was considered the best in the United States, and, along with the British Broadcasting Corporation, a model for mainstream media standards in democracies. It wasn’t being “liberal” when Edward R. Murrow helped take down Joe McCarthy. It was acting in defense of democracy against a sinister and dishonest demagogue.

Over the decades—and this was a natural-enough progression—CBS became a huge corporation, expanding into movies, amusements, even musical instruments (it was said to have ruined Fender guitars for about 20 years, although today those guitars—I own one—are considered vintage, go figure). But even this wasn’t so horrible, until the age of megamergers brought on by what was essentially the end of antitrust enforcement in the U.S. Fade in, fade out: CBS formed Viacom, then they split, then they remerged. Paramount, which had owned part of CBS back in the 1930s, came back into the picture. In 2009, Paramount announced a partnership with this new thing called Skydance, which had been created in 2006 by David Ellison.

In July 2024, Skydance and Paramount, now CBS’s parent, announced their intention to merge. You will recall what happened next. That fall, as the merger was under governmental review, and during the presidential campaign, 60 Minutes broadcast an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. With no evidence, Donald Trump charged that it was edited to make Harris look good.

And so, exactly 70 years after CBS (and Murrow) took down one demagogue, it cowered and crumbled when confronted by another. The reason was obvious: Ellison and others wanted Trump’s Justice Department to approve the merger. In other words, profit was put ahead of the journalistic reputation of CBS News’s crown jewel program. CBS—actually, Paramount Global—decided to pay Trump $16 million (toward his “library”). It was an implicit admission that maybe Trump was right; that their most venerated news program perhaps was guilty of liberal bias, even though Trump never produced one lick of evidence that 60 Minutes had done anything wrong, anything that wasn’t part of standard broadcast practice. But Trump was clearly appeased, and, lo and behold, two months ago, the Trump administration approved the merger.

On August 7, Ellison gave a press conference in New York, where he swore that no favors had been promised Trump. “We are not going to politicize anything today,” Ellison said. “We want to entertain first.”

One can call Bari Weiss many things, but “apolitical” is not among them. She’s undoubtedly smart, and, with her wildly successful Substack publication The Free Press, she cunningly saw a market niche in identifying private-school wokery—rather than, say, the fact that one of our two major political parties is descending into fascism—as the gravest threat to the American way of life. I readily concede that what we call “wokeism” contains some excesses, some illiberal manifestations that run counter to the values of tolerance and open-minded debate. But the idea that students and administrators at a handful of universities are a bigger danger to democracy than Donald Trump and JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is absurd and dangerous.

That is the view, however, of a certain slice of the American elite: wealthy people who tend to have gone to those schools, or who send their kids to them, and who, while not openly racist or sexist in most cases, nevertheless get the heebie-jeebies from all those Black and brown and trans people screaming about their rights—and who, more than anything else, in fact far more than anything else, want their tax cuts. And soon, CBS News will reflect their priorities and tell them the stories about the threats to the U.S. that they want to hear.

In doing so, it will join not only Fox News and Newsmax and Sinclair, which increasingly controls local media. The Washington Post too appears to be traveling in that direction. In a few years, there just won’t be much mainstream media left.

And I hate to say this, but that is partly their fault too. Weiss first became famous at The New York Times, when she expertly parlayed a hullabaloo over a controversial op-ed by GOP Senator Tom Cotton into a victimhood narrative about left-wing intolerance. She published a resignation letter that was praised by Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump Jr., among others. All that attention led to her getting the funding to launch and grow The Free Press, for which David Ellison is now reportedly paying her at least $100 million, maybe more.

An American success story, I suppose. But here’s the thing. The Times never should have been hiring someone like Weiss in the first place. She was at The Wall Street Journal editorial page before. Ask yourself: Has the Journal opinion page ever hired a liberal away from the Times? Maybe, although I can’t think of one. But in 2017, after Trump won, the Times hired both Weiss and Bret Stephens from the Journal. And at some point in there, the Times hired yet another young right-winger, Adam Rubenstein, who was the primary editor of the Cotton op-ed.

Well, a Times defender would say, the liberal Times is more committed to diverse viewpoints than the conservative Journal, and that is a good thing. Up to a point, that’s true. And once upon a dear old time, a newspaper like the Times could hire, say, William Safire—hack and propagandist though he was—as an act of magnanimity to give a prominent platform to a conservative voice because conservative voices were indeed underrepresented in the media at the time. But that is hardly the case now. It brings to mind that old joke about some liberals being so open-minded that their brains start falling out of their ears.

That open-mindedness, to circle us back to where we started, is on regular display at the Times these days, as I noted a month ago. The RFK Jr. Senate hearing Thursday was a shitshow. He obfuscated, he lied, he evaded, he humiliated himself. He is dismantling his agency and destroying public health. People will die because of his decisions, if they aren’t already. All of this was on horrid display Thursday.

And the Times’ original headline on its account of the hearing? “A Defiant Kennedy Defends Vaccine Changes and C.D.C. Shakeup.” Great. Kennedy was savaged by senators of both parties for his lies and for shredding American public health to pieces, and the Times rewards him with the adjective “defiant.”

Be assured that Bari Weiss’s CBS won’t be guilty of such equivocation in the name of “fairness.” That’s the difference, and that’s a big part of the reason why this democracy is dying.

Donald Trump has, of course, done a lot of shocking things as president, things even previous Republicans wouldn’t have done. We focus most of our coverage on those things, and rightly so. But on one issue, he’s been a pretty standard Republican president, which is to say to say he’s been horrible and wicked in the standard way. The issue is guns. Before the Minneapolis shooting fades out of the news cycle, let’s look at the grisly Trump record, which has largely passed under the radar.

We begin with his February 7 executive order called “Protecting Second Amendment Rights.” It stated in the opening paragraph: “Because it is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans, the right to keep and bear arms must not be infringed.” It then directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to review existing laws and regulations and so on “to assess any ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens.”

This has led to a process that seeks to restore the gun rights of convicted felons. And so, on July 18, the Justice Department published a rule to that effect. The press release’s opening sentence reads: “President Trump directed the Department of Justice to address the ongoing infringements of the Second Amendment rights of our citizens—all of them.” Further down, the release quotes Ed Martin, the administration’s pardon attorney and a MAGA extremist whose nomination for a U.S. Attorney position was withdrawn because he probably couldn’t get the votes: “General Bondi’s support of the rebooted 925(c) program is consistent with President Donald J. Trump’s promise to the American people to support the beautiful Second Amendment.”

So that’s number one: The DOJ is going out of its way to restore gun rights to convicted felons—a category, of course, that includes Donald Trump himself. But the EO and other actions by the administration go a lot farther. Trump ordered a review of every gun-regulating move made by the Biden administration. For example, on April 7, Bondi revoked a Biden-era rule that allowed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to rescind the licenses of gun dealers that break the law by falsifying records. Ponder that: Businesses that knowingly break the law now have immunity from federal oversight.

There’s plenty more. On May 16, the administration agreed to a settlement of several lawsuits under which the Justice Department would no longer enforce machine-gun ban laws (which date to the 1930s) against guns with forced-reset trigger (FRT) devices. An FRT, which is a recently developed technology, allows the shooter to fire at an increased rate. The NRA and manufacturers say it’s no big deal, the shooter still has to fire each shot separately; gun-safety advocates counter that by mechanically resetting the trigger position after a shot is fired, FRT’s still dramatically increase the fire rate, essentially turning some semiautomatic weapons into machine guns. So these will now be sold again. FRT’s have been after-market devices, but now, they might be installed at point of sale.

The Republicans’ big, ugly budget bill factors in here, too. A transfer tax on silencers has been part of U.S. law since 1934. The tax was imposed for the obvious reason that silencers tended to be used by the bad guys. You don’t need silencer to shoot a grouse or defend your family from an intruder. It was paid by either the buyer or seller and was set at $200. In all those decades, it was never raised ($200 then would be close to $4,900 today). But at least it existed. As of next January 1, it will be $0.

This is who Trump is: a cynical and strictly transactional person who, once upon a time, spoke reasonably sensibly about guns, but who realized once he entered politics that anyone who wants the GOP presidential nomination has to sell his soul to the NRA, so he sold his (probably wasn’t expensive). This is another thing we kind of stopped paying attention to, because he does so many other things that are, or appear to be, so much more outrageous. But I take note every year of what Trump tells the NRA. In the summer of 2024, he spoke to the group in person and said, among other things:

• “Let there be no doubt the survival of our Second Amendment is very much on the ballot. You know what they want to do. If they get in, our country’s going to be destroyed in so many ways. But the second Amendment will be … It’s under siege. But with me, they never get anywhere.”

• “If the Biden regime gets four more years, they are coming for your guns, 100% certain. Crooked Joe has a 40-year record of trying to rip firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens.”

• “They’re going after the ammunition. When the radical-left Democrats tried to use Covid to shut down gun sales during the China virus, I proudly designated gun and ammunition retailers as critical infrastructure so they couldn’t touch it.”

This April, the group convened in Atlanta, and Trump addressed the assemblage via video, bragging about all the above and more, saying: “There is much more to come. Americans are born free, and under the Trump administration, we will live free—always live free. With me in the White House, your sacred rights will not be infringed.”

Now, after Minneapolis, Vice President JD Vance and Melania Trump are out there trying to shift the topic from guns to mental health. It’s a total dodge, an attempt to talk about anything but guns; but okay, we have an obvious five-alarm mental healthcare crisis in this country, so to the extent that this administration really wants to do something about that—great.

But as usual, the rhetoric is completely the opposite of the reality. The drastic Medicaid cuts in the big, ugly bill will impact mental health services in a vast array of ways. MindSite News, which covers mental health policy, wrote after the bill became law: “The previous five years—including the final year of Trump’s first presidency—had seen the renewal of a federal commitment to mental health. Over those years, federal funding for mental health services increased. New programs like the 988 hotline were created and funded. Funding streams were established to boost crisis response services and to support school-based mental health. Tough new health insurance regulations were enacted to improve access to coverage for mental health services.”

That last point is especially key. Insurers don’t cover mental health the way they cover physical health (this, by the way, is an issue the Democrats should seize; mental health doesn’t interest the media much, but I guarantee you it is of keen interest to parents everywhere, of all political stripes). But this bill, the site notes, signals that “the days of a federal commitment to addressing the U.S. mental health crisis are essentially over.”

So they’re even hypocrites on the one issue on which they’re showing “concern.” But let’s conclude by going back to gun policy.

The guns purchased by the Minneapolis shooter were bought legally. Press accounts note this and then quickly move on, as if to say there’s no point in discussing gun laws here. But there is. There always is. Authorities haven’t revealed what kinds of guns, beyond saying there were three—a shotgun, a rifle, and a pistol. Maybe they’re not even in the categories of weapons we debate. I’d still like to know how someone with such obvious mental health issues passed the background checks. Minnesota strengthened its background check law under Governor Tim Walz in 2023, but someone somewhere still decided that Robin Westman could own guns responsibly, and we deserve to know more about who and why.

In the meantime, Trump 2.0 so far shows every sign of doing anything the NRA wants it to do. They can offer all the thoughts and prayers they want, and they can prattle on about mental health until the sun sets. But it’s their actions that matter, and their actions say they’re perfectly content to let more children die.

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

You may not know the name Lindsey Halligan. She’s not a scholar. Not a Ph.D. She hasn’t written any books on history. She has, however, worked as an insurance claims lawyer. Her most celebrated achievement, apparently, was defeating a 2019 claim seeking $500,000 in damages from her client over a damaged roof. How she managed to join Trump’s defense team remains unclear, but she was called to Mar-a-Lago the day the FBI came in with its warrant to collect those classified documents. Once on the team, she did what they all do, namely, grovel—she made an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast where she vowed to sue CNN for claiming that Trump was lying about the 2020 election results. Trump sought $475 million in damages in that case, but in July 2023, a federal judge dismissed it.

Today, Halligan holds something few others in government probably do: a very fancy title that runs to a full 19 words (Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Associate Staff Secretary). She is overseeing the … what’s the right word here? There are so many to choose from … “reimagining” of the Smithsonian Institution. That’s right. An insurance claims lawyer is now in charge of making sure that the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, 21 libraries, 14 research centers, one zoo, and 157 million items and artifacts are brought into line with the wishes of the Mad King.

I see, looking back over them, that the tone of the above two paragraphs is a bit jocular. But this is no laughing matter. Forget Halligan. Maybe she’s smarter than I think, maybe she’s not. Maybe she’s a hardcore racist, maybe she’s not. But she’s not the point. The point here is Trump. He is not smarter than I think. I suspect he’s never read a history book in his life, and chances are pretty decent he’s never been to a museum, except to galas Ivana dragged him to back when. And about his hardcore racism, there is utterly no question.

But we don’t talk about it enough. Trump long ago established to the satisfaction of everyone outside of MAGA world that he’s a racist to the bone. He and his father wouldn’t rent to Black people. He said those sick things about the defendants in the Central Park jogger case (they weren’t guilty). He said, “Laziness is a trait in Blacks.” He said some white supremacists in Charlottesville were “very fine people.” I could go on and on.

Being long-established, Trump’s racism is not “news.” Regular readers of mine will know this is one of my longtime complaints about the nature and structure of the media. There are lots of things that aren’t “news,” per se, but are true, important, and defining of our reality. Trump’s racism is one of those things. It hovers over everything. It defines nearly everything he does. And it is making the United States of America a cruel, sick, mean place.

His racism is what’s propelling this edict over the Smithsonian. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was,” he whined Tuesday on Truth Social. When he talks this way, he’s sending a much broader message that is widely understood, by both his political foes and (especially) his supporters. Each group knows it’s part of a broader attack that is designed to keep certain Americans “in their place.” It’s just that the latter group approves.

His racism is what’s driving the presence of these National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. His motorcade, traveling from the White House to his Virginia golf club, passes a small greensward along what’s called the E Street Expressway where there are (or were) a few tents, and that’s probably how he got his entire impression of D.C. crime, along with the background knowledge that D.C. is a heavily Black city (Black residents are no longer a majority, but still a plurality). The troops aren’t even fighting actual crime. They’re mostly around the National Mall, where it’s as safe as Mayberry in the 1960s. The troops are just a symbol for white MAGA world that he’s cracking some Black heads.

His racism is behind this sick redistricting madness in Texas. Nonwhite people make up 60 percent of the state’s population. By the time the Texas legislature is finished, the Texas congressional delegation will likely be more than 70 percent white and Republican. In Missouri, the redistricting under consideration would slice a Black Democratic district in Kansas City into maybe three different pieces. Republicans have done this sort of thing long before Trump, but under Trump, of course, it’s being taken to extremes because Republicans now know that anti-Black extremism on such matters is the only thing that gets the boss’s attention.

His racism is behind his talk about mail-in ballots and early voting and all his phony allegations about fraudulent voting. Everybody knows very well what, and whom, he’s talking about when he talks about such things. He means Black and, to a slightly lesser extent, Latino people.

His racism is the fundamental reason for these mass detentions. Would Trump, and the right wing in general, be this worked up about illegal border crossings if it was mostly white people doing it? Of course they wouldn’t. There would be no rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the nation.

Finally—although surely there’s more—it’s racism that animates a lot of his rhetorical attacks on individual Americans. It’s no accident that his recent targets prominently include Oprah Winfrey, Gayle King (her close friend), Beyoncé, Al Sharpton, Letitia James, and Charlamagne tha God. He goes after lots of people of all races, but Black people are disproportionately targeted, and it’s not an accident.

I have no idea where Lindsey Halligan fits in here. She’s spent most of her adult life thinking about hurricanes. She’s interchangeable with any other Mar-a-Lago sycophant who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

But the fact that Trump put someone in charge of remaking the Smithsonian who’s totally unqualified is what’s important here because it tells us that the person is there solely to follow his orders. Trump’s orders will be based on his worldview. And his worldview is the most blatantly and openly racist worldview that’s been held by an American president since Woodrow Wilson. We need to remember this—even, or especially, when the media forgets.

Republican Representative Bryan Steil thought it would be a good idea to go have a meetup with constituents Thursday night in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Steil represents Paul Ryan’s old district and in fact used to work for Ryan. He’d had a rocky week: A few days before, some protesters plopped some flowers and a coffin on the doorstep of his Janesville home, an act meant to symbolize the ill effects of the Republicans’ big, ugly bill on the most vulnerable.

Things didn’t get much better Thursday night. Steil was booed repeatedly, particularly on immigration, with one woman saying, with reference to Alligator Alcatraz: “The difference between a prison or a detention center and a concentration camp is due process.” Asked another, about ICE agents, to robust applause: “Why are they wearing masks, and why are they unidentified?”

Congress is in recess now for the new month, so we can be sure that Steil’s fellow Republicans took note and will spend the month hiding from constituencies and hanging out at country clubs where tax cuts for the rich are popular and nobody needs Medicaid (or at least they think they don’t).

Donald Trump, it is said, is frustrated. He wonders why he’s not more popular. He complains, we read, that he’s accomplished a great deal and that he’s keeping his campaign promises, and looked at a certain way, these statements are true, to a point. So he can’t figure out why he’s at 37 percent.

I could tell him why. Two reasons, and they’re both obvious. First, his policies are horrible, and people don’t like them. If you’re “accomplishing” things that large majorities of people don’t want, do they count as accomplishments? Film director Uwe Boll somehow manages to keep making movies. But he’s a punch line. Most of his movies have been commercial flops and critical train wrecks—a career so lame that he once promised to quit the business if a petition demanding that he do so garnered a million signatures (alas, it fell short).

That’s Trump: the Uwe Boll of policy.

The recent polls have told us over and over and over. The big, ugly bill—unpopular. Rounding up poor guys hanging out at Home Depot looking for work—unpopular. Putting people in, yes, concentration camps—unpopular. Cutting his Palm Beach pals’ taxes—unpopular. Imposing these absurd tariffs—unpopular. I could go on. There is literally not a single important item on the Trump domestic agenda that polls well.

Then there are the promises he’s broken. He said he’d lower prices on day one. Which, you’ll recall, was the same day on which he was going to end Russia’s war on Ukraine. And bring peace to the Middle East. It’s a pleasant surprise here lately that he’s talking smack about Putin and Netanyahu because they’re gumming up his glide path to the Nobel Peace Prize. But his criticisms don’t change the fact that the crises in both Ukraine and Gaza have gotten worse, not better, since he took office. Look, I’m glad that he’s flip-flopped on aid to Ukraine. But still, it’s a flip-flop. I remember when Republicans thought flip-flopping on a matter of war and peace was a sign of weakness.

So that’s number one. He has either (1) executed his policies as promised, but people hate them, or (2) blown them off or reversed himself, exposing his campaign statements as nonsense. That the Harris campaign couldn’t figure out how to mock his obvious bullshit—don’t get me started. One thing I’m not celebrating this summer is Kamala Harris’s reemergence on the public stage, and I pray she’s not delusional enough to think she ought to run again in 2028.

Number two is also simple. He’s a sleazeball, and more and more people are finally coming to realize it. The Jeffrey Epstein matter is Exhibit A, of course, but there is much more. The way he and his family are getting rich from the presidency is just obscene. Have you ever gone to TrumpStore.com? If not, have a look. It’s relentlessly garish, of course, but more than that, it’s relentlessly and proudly, defiantly overpriced. Yet these idiots buy this crap by the millions.

But it’s Epstein that is catching up with him. And that story is a long, long way from being over. We cannot of course at this point state that Trump is guilty of anything. But allegations are out there. Have you read the testimony of “Katie Johnson”? You might want to familiarize yourself with it. Obviously, I have no idea whether it’s true. If a third of it is, and it’s ever corroborated, it will be by far the biggest presidential scandal of all time.

And even if none of it is true, we’re still dealing with a president of the United States whose best friend for 15 years was a serial child rapist. Let that sink in. Again, why the Democrats couldn’t make this an issue last year—aarrgh. I know. I’m sure they have all kinds of reasons. But you know what? If Donald Trump were running against someone whose best friend for 15 years was a serial child rapist, he’d have made sure America knew. In any case, they’re figuring it out now. And if he pardons Ghislaine Maxwell or commutes her sentence or anything like that, millions of Americans will jump to the obvious conclusion.

It all leaves Bryan Steil and his GOP congressional colleagues ducking their constituents, because God forbid they have to explain to voters why they voted for a sick bill that punishes working people and lines the pockets of the megarich and will shove many billions of dollars into the creation of a police state no one wants. That would be accountability, which would be uncomfortably close to democracy. Can’t have that.

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

So Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime abettor of dead pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, is meeting Friday for a second time with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. OK, first of all, let’s just stop right there. Why Blanche? Well, gosh, you say, he’s a deputy A.G.; seems legit. Actually, no, not by a long shot. Blanche was Trump’s personal defense attorney—on a sex case. (Technically, it was a hush-money case—the one involving adult film actress Stormy Daniels, which Blanche and Trump lost—but it was really about sex, in this case between consenting adults.)

So, no—Blanche, whose actual job entails the day-to-day running of the department, is absolutely not the appropriate person for this task. Wait—let’s stop right there again. Is this “task” even legitimate? Under certain circumstances, it might be. Let’s say a mobster is in the can for some felony. Prosecutors believe he has information about a different crime. So they go to him to see if he’ll talk, and they offer him a deal.

If that’s what’s going on here, maybe it’s OK—although alas, we stop again to ponder the morality of offering a deal to a child sex trafficker (hey, right wing, I thought this was a moral line in the sand for you?). This is not a mobster rat whose information could bring down another made man or even a whole family. This is a woman who was convicted of conspiring to groom minors for Epstein’s pleasure and who, according to at least one witness at her trial, participated in the sex.

So the whole thing shouldn’t even be happening. She was tried, she was convicted, and that’s that. But: If it had to happen; if we are to concede that questioning her at this point is a legitimate enterprise, shouldn’t it be done by a line attorney who is familiar with the details of the case? Of course it should. Someone like, oh, Maurene Comey. Oh. Wait. They fired her last week.

I hope you’re putting these puzzle pieces together with me as we go. The bottom line here is obvious. Donald Trump, I believe, wants to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for her silence. Note I said wants to. He might not. A pardon would rip his base in two. He may grasp that and not do it.

But I say there can be little question that he’s thinking about it. In fact, on the White House lawn Friday morning, a couple hours after I wrote this column, he was asked about a possible Maxwell pardon, and he said: “I’m allowed to do it.”

I’m not the only one who smelled this possibility coming. Dave Aronberg, who worked as the Florida drug czar under U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi when she was the state attorney general, made some interesting comments on CNN the other day.

First, he observed how weird it was that Blanche was conducting these interviews: “I can’t overstate it, Brianna [Keilar]. It’s as if the number two executive at CNN was conducting this interview with me instead of you. Like, what? It never happens.”

Then he connected the political dots: “But there are others who could do this, which makes me believe this is a lot about perhaps some politics involved, like maybe to protect the president, to get a deal with Ghislaine Maxwell that she would get some immunity now and maybe a hidden pardon in the future, some sort of implication that she would be pardoned in the future if she comes out and says that the president was exonerated, not involved in any criminal activity.”

Of course, we do not know whether Trump committed these heinous crimes. Like any American, he is entitled to the presumption of innocence. But the mere fact of these interviews being conducted the way they are raises certain obvious suspicions.

Maxwell and her lawyers surely know all this. She has a lot of incentive, in other words, to say what Trump and Blanche want her to say. Oh, and by the way, let’s stop here again. Why should we believe a word she says? There is much-documented evidence of Maxwell showing a “significant pattern of dishonest conduct,” as Merrick Garland’s Justice Department put it in 2022. They spared her (and themselves, and their finite resources) a perjury trial because she’d already been convicted of the big stuff.

Even assuming Trump is personally innocent, he still has a motive to cut a deal with Maxwell that leads to an eventual pardon. She might name prominent Democrats or other people to whom Trump is hostile. Her “pattern” suggests she’ll say anything Trump wants her to say.

If you think Trump wouldn’t do this, that pardoning a child sex trafficker is a bridge too far even for Trump … honestly, wake up. I bet you also thought he’d never pardon 1,200 anti-American insurrectionists.

If Trump is innocent, there’s one simple thing he should do. Order the release of all the Epstein files. Ah, but now we know that his name appears in them “multiple” times and that he lied earlier this month when asked about it. (The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Bondi told him about the multiple mentions of his name back in May.)

How would MAGA world receive a possible pardon by their hero of a woman who did the things Maxwell did? Some percentage, maybe even a substantial percentage, would throw in the towel, finally. But I doubt a majority. They’ll find an excuse. Child rape is bad, sure, but it’s really only bad when Democrats do it. Trump was sent by Jesus, after all, and Jesus teaches us to forgive, so Trump’s joined-at-the-hip, 15-year friendship with Epstein was about as Jesus-like as you can get, right? The sad thing about that joke is that, if it’s ever revealed that Trump did unspeakable things, one of those sick “Christian” preachers will probably say this in all seriousness.

The administration’s handling of the Epstein scandal and the likely coming indictment of Barack Obama, which I’ll write about next Monday, take us to depths we never, ever imagined we could reach in this country. Trump is the law, the law is Trump. I’ve always thought that, as horrible as everything is, if there’s an election in 2028 and the Democrat wins, we can get back to normal fairly quickly. As of this week, I’m not so sure.

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

So this is the thing about stories like the Jeffrey Epstein saga: There’s always new stuff waiting to come out. The explosive story that The Wall Street Journal dropped Thursday evening about Donald Trump’s alleged note to Epstein in a “birthday book” compiled for the child molester in 2003 by Ghislaine Maxwell was bound to come out. And if other things are out there about Trump’s history with Epstein—as there almost certainly are—they’re bound to become public someday, too.

That’s the first reason Trump needs to be worried. Even if his name does not appear on some master list created by Epstein with a heading like “Good Friends of Mine Who Raped Underage Girls With Me,” it still has to be the case that there are emails, photographs, and other material that at the very least won’t look good. (I couldn’t help wondering what Maurene Comey, the sex crimes prosecutor in New York’s Southern District who was fired by Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday, knows about Epstein and Trump.)

And here’s the second and more interesting reason. These cracks in the MAGA coalition right now are only that—cracks—but time may prove this week to have been a pivotal, even decisive, moment in MAGA history.

On Monday, several voices in MAGA world (Charlie Kirk, Laura Ingraham, Megyn Kelly) were outraged over the administration declaring the Epstein matter closed. On Tuesday, a lot of those same voices said okay, nothing to see here, time to move on. Then, on Wednesday, they pivoted back to outrage, suggesting that on this one matter, social-media marching orders from Dear Leader could not staunch the blood flow. And Thursday night, the Journal story broke.

We don’t know yet what the impact of the Journal story will be in MAGA world, though it seems to be rallying some of his Epstein critics to his defense. So it might be that the story allows Trump to play victim and blame the fake news. Trump denies that he wrote the greeting and, as usual, has vowed to sue, which means he’s suing none other than Rupert Murdoch, who quite interestingly—if Trump’s Thursday night rant on Truth Social is to be believed—turned down the chance to use his power to kill the story.

Or it might edge some to start coming to grips with the fact that their hero is not the valiant knight they imagined him to be. To a certain kind of person who consumes a certain kind of media, Trump is a sea-green incorruptible: the man who quite literally risks his life (the two assassination attempts) to slay the debauched and ossified dragons that have been perverting America for decades and keeping the decent God-fearing people of “normal” America down.

Now? As I said, we can’t make any conclusions just yet. But this is the week the pixie dust didn’t work. Maybe it’s a one-time thing. On the other hand, maybe it’s not.

Before we get to all that, let’s do a quick deconstruction of what the Journal reported. There was a drawing of a naked woman (and why the Journal hasn’t posted an image of this thing is weird). Inside the drawing was a typewritten imagined dialogue between Trump and Epstein:

Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything.

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

Obviously, the key line here is Trump saying “enigmas never age.” I have to say I give him credit for seeming to know what the word “enigma” means. In fact, the use of “enigma” is the one piece of evidence that suggests that maybe this wasn’t Trump!

But “never age.” And Epstein replying that this fact was “clear to me the last time I saw you.” That’s clearly a reference to a specific event. If you want to believe it refers to that time they bought Girl Scout cookies together, be my guest.

If this is a genuine article, well, it’s very rare in this life that things like that card exist in isolation. The two were joined at the hip for 15 years. There will almost certainly be new explosions in the coming weeks. They probably won’t emerge from the grand jury materials whose release Trump authorized in the wake of the Journal scoop. We can presume that material has been vetted to exculpate Trump. But maybe there were things that the grand jury didn’t see. As The Washington Post noted Friday morning, “the grand jury testimony would constitute only a fraction of the evidence amassed by federal authorities.”

But back to that pixie dust. That’s the story here. Every single thing Trump has done for 10 years—every outrage against decency, every crime, every incitement to violence, all the rest—have been justified in MAGA world because Trump was doing all these things for them.

And he was supposed to blow the lid off this whole Epstein thing for them, too. Instead, he’s covering up for himself. The order to Bondi about the grand jury material just looks like the kind of ass-covering bullshit move any politician would make. Members of the r/Conservative subreddit on Friday morning were definitely not appeased.

Most of MAGA will continue to believe. Some people will need a photograph of Trump in flagrante delicto with a 12-year-old before they reconsider. And even then, they may insist the photo is fake.

But others are already starting to question the whole enterprise. If Trump loses just 15 percent of his hard-core supporters, that’s huge; electorally, it’s potentially decisive. If we put his hard-shell supporters at 30 or 35 percent of the country, well, 15 percent of that is 4 or 5 percent. In a country this narrowly divided, that’s a lot to lose—a lot of midterm voters who decide the hell with it, I’m staying home.

And finally, let’s not forget what this is about. Epstein did literally the sickest things a human being can do. Even if Trump didn’t do them, if he was that close to Epstein for that long, there’s roughly zero chance he didn’t know something. Is that what supposed Christians want in a president of the United States? Some of them are already wondering. As other shoes drop, more will.

Senate Republicans have no “big, beautiful” bill. It isn’t close to finalized. The Senate parliamentarian, combing through the details and determining which provisions will need a supermajority to pass, is hammering them. They’re locked in ferocious internal debate about the cuts to Medicaid. They haven’t held a single hearing on the bill in any committee.

And they say they’re going to start voting on it tomorrow.

Even worse is the complete hypocrisy of the thing, which has been true of every Republican tax bill going back to 1981. Ever since Arthur Laffer sold the GOP on his ridiculous curve, they’ve been lying to the American people about how their tax cuts will produce more revenue. It has never happened. Ever. Some of the dumber Republicans may believe this, but the smarter ones know Laffer’s theory is a lie, and they say it anyway.

And so we watch as Senate Republicans argue about the degree to which they want to destroy Medicaid. You’ve been reading and hearing about this, I’m sure, and you may even have become familiar with the phrase “provider tax.” Journalistic shorthand usually does a poor job of explaining what that actually is. Bear with me for this brief explanation, because it makes clear how cruel and deliberate these cuts are.

Health care services that are reimbursed by Medicaid are, well, provided by a range of different “providers.” Chief among these are hospitals, but the category also includes nursing homes, other long-term care facilities, doctors, physical therapists, even chiropractors: all sorts of people. But the big money revolves around hospitals, and specifically rural hospitals, which rely heavily on Medicaid dollars because they are poorer on balance than other hospitals. They tend to be run on a nonprofit basis. They are less likely than urban or suburban hospitals to have commercial insurance, and they’re more dependent on Medicaid revenue because their client base tends to be poorer. There are about 1,800 rural hospitals in the United States. Here’s a map.

OK. Starting in the 1980s, during an earlier funding crisis, Congress allowed states to start taxing providers. In many states (this gets very complicated, and I’m not going to go into it that deeply), the cap on the tax that states can charge hospitals is 6 percent of the patient revenue money (it’s called the “safe harbor maximum” in wonkspeak). The Senate bill seeks to lower this cap over a few years to 3.5 percent.

To make a long story short, when you reduce a tax, you reduce the amount of revenue it brings in. It’s also worth bearing in mind here that Medicaid reimbursements rarely cover the cost of care to begin with, so these cuts will make an already dire situation much worse. Governors and state legislatures will be staring at a quite substantial reduction in Medicaid tax revenue. They will then be faced with three choices: one, raise some other sort of tax; two, cut some other state service, like education; three, cut Medicaid services.

As congressional Republicans well know, most states are going to choose number three, because it’s the easiest path. And that brings devastation. If you want to see why Republican Senator Thom Tillis is so freaked out, click on that map above and zoom in on his state, North Carolina. You’ll see in detail how many rural hospitals there are operating at a loss, and how many have already closed.

So this is what Republicans are debating—and deliberately and dishonestly telling the American people that it’s a simple case of cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” as if they have no choice in the matter.

It’s a monstrous lie.

They have a choice. But of course it’s a choice they’ll never make. What is that choice? They could, in theory, reduce the tax cuts to the rich. The problem would be instantly solved.

The proposed Medicaid cuts come to around $800 billion. The cost of making the 2017 income tax cuts permanent is around $2.2 trillion. So in other words, canceling the tax cuts would more than cover the proposed Medicaid cuts. In fact, the Republicans could leave nearly two-thirds of the tax cuts intact, and just pare them back, and leave Medicaid untouched.

In a fantasy world, they could, dare I say it, eliminate the tax cuts altogether. They’d have $2.2 trillion to play with, and they could expand rural health care—you know, actually do something of substance for all the people who vote for them, besides scaring them into thinking that Democrats want to steal their guns and neuter their children.

But you notice: No one ever, ever, ever discusses the tax cuts. No one. None of the, ahem, moderates—not Senator Susan Collins, not Representative Mike Lawler (at least that I’ve heard). Tax cuts aren’t written in ink and on paper, to Republicans. They’re written in lightning on tablets from Mount Sinai. They cannot be discussed.

And these aren’t just your usual, run-of-the-mill GOP tax cuts. They’re worse. They’re the most redistributive tax cuts in modern American history, and by redistributive, I don’t mean from the top down. I mean to the top from the rest of us.

Here are a few facts about the House’s version of the bill, from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, or ITEP:

• The richest 1 percent of Americans would receive a total of $121 billion in net tax cuts in 2026. The middle 20 percent of taxpayers on the income scale, a group that is 20 times the size of the richest 1 percent, would receive less than half that much: $56 billion in tax cuts that year.
• The $121 billion in net tax cuts going to the richest 1 percent next year would exceed the amount going to the entire bottom 60 percent of taxpayers (about $79 billion).
• The poorest fifth of Americans would receive less than 1 percent of the bill’s net tax cuts in 2026, while the richest fifth of Americans would receive 70 percent. The richest 5 percent alone would receive 45 percent of the net tax cuts that year.

There’s a lot more. The richest 1 percent ($916,900 and above) will get an average cut of $68,430, or 2.5 percent. The poorest 20 percent (up to $27,000) will get a whopping cut of $30, or 0.2 percent. In percentage terms, the cut for the rich is 10 times the cut for the poor.

But wait—incredibly, it gets worse. ITEP estimates that when you throw in the costs of Donald Trump’s tariff proposals, the net impact on the bottom 20 percent will be a tax increase of 2.2 percent. The tariffs aren’t finalized, of course, so we can’t really know the hard number, but as a general rule, tariffs cost poorer people more since they’re spending a far higher percentage of their income on imported necessities.

The whole thing is just a disgrace. A policy disgrace. A moral disgrace. Rural hospitals will close, and working-class people will die so that Trump’s golf buddies can get tax cuts of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The American people don’t know all the above facts and figures, but they do seem to know in their bones that this bill is a heist. It’s deeply unpopular. But even so, the Democrats could be doing much more here. Why don’t they fan out across the country one day next month and have events at money-losing rural hospitals that face potential closure? Back in the spring, when they did those anti-DOGE events in Republican districts, it seemed to have an impact. At least they were visibly doing something. There are rural hospitals in every state. Democrats could do a lot worse than to try to show rural Americans that they care.

But it’s like Jon Lovitz, playing Michael Dukakis, said on Saturday Night Live back in 1988: I can’t believe we’re losing to these guys. If Democrats were more aggressive, this bill would kill Republicans off in 2026 and 2028. It’s that cruel, it’s that stupid, it’s that inept. Democrats need to find dramatic ways of saying so.

I’ve been just staggered this week to hear some people—in a few cases, the exact same people—repeating the lines we heard so often in 2002 and 2003: how the situation was intolerable, how the country in question posed a direct threat to the United States, how action was morally and strategically imperative, and how easy it would all be.

Here was freshly minted Republican Senator Lindsey Graham in 2003: “It’s long past time for Saddam Hussein to be replaced. President Bush used the only reasonable option available to him and our nation.” 

And here was an older and no wiser Graham, having descended into the age of the lean and slippered pantaloon, earlier this week: “It’s time to close the chapter on the ayatollah and his henchmen. Let’s close it soon and start a new chapter in the Mideast: one of tolerance, hope, and peace.”

You could sense the fever rising midweek, when it felt like Donald Trump just might pull the trigger and unleash his—actually, our—B-2 bombers on Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility. In 2002–03, as the editor of The American Prospect, I watched slack-jawed while the propaganda machinery of official Washington (and Beltway outlets including The New Republic, where dissenters were few) geared up for a war that was cooked up on specious grounds and during which, alas, Iraqis did not lay rose petals at our soldiers’ feet. Because once George W. Bush made up his mind, the Washington foreign policy establishment decided collectively that when a president wants to launch a war, there’s nothing to be gained by opposing him.

On Wednesday, I smelled the same sulfurous odor in the air. I simply couldn’t believe that just 22 years after we waltzed into Iraq, we were going to do … not the same thing, but something eerily similar with potentially similar consequences.

Then, on Thursday afternoon, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the world that the boss wanted two weeks. If the boss were a deliberative, rational, mature man, we could welcome this as reassuring news. But as the boss is Donald Trump, it means nothing. Two weeks to the day from Leavitt’s announcement, as fate would have it, will bring the Fourth of July—a good day for a peace deal but an even better day to go bombs away! Imagine Trump, after that bust of a military parade, having strafed Iran during the day and sitting back and watching all those fireworks displays at night. Strength!

Trump 2.0 has ranged from being a disaster to a comedy, a tragedy to a farce. But the one development that I’ve watched with quiet curiosity—the one matter on which, if asked, I’d have told a pollster I actually approved—was that Trump was seriously negotiating with Iran. I did not, of course, approve of his abandoning the Obama-era nuclear deal during his first term, but it was interesting that he was now pursuing diplomacy. It was very interesting that he appeared to be willing to get crossways with Benjamin Netanyahu. Until early this month, when Ayatollah Khamenei refused the latest U.S. offer, it really looked like we were on track for a deal (the sticking point was whether a proposed international consortium for civilian uranium enrichment be based within or outside Iran).

That was June 4. As everyone now knows, talks were scheduled for the following Sunday, but that preceding Thursday night, Israel started bombing, and Trump woke up Friday, turned on Fox, saw them slavering over Bibi’s macho dice rolling, and the talks were dead. They might be back on now. However we feel about Trump, that would be a very good thing.

So: What is Trump going to do? Given the apparent truism that Trump talks to different people, agrees with the last person he talked to, reads nothing, and makes an instinctual decision at the last second, it’s worth running down the people he’s talking to and what they’re probably telling him:

• Steve Witkoff. Trump’s Iran envoy’s qualifications for his position are that he’s Trump’s old real estate and golfing buddy. His batting average so far isn’t great—he was supposed to secure a ceasefire in Gaza. Who knows, maybe he’ll prove to be a modern-day Bishop Talleyrand on the diplomacy front. Or maybe he won’t. But at least he’s surely telling Trump to give talks a chance.
• Bibi Netanyahu. We know what he’s saying. He’ll be sharing Israeli intelligence aimed at telling Trump that a Fordo hit can be clean, quick, and low risk. And it should be noted that there will be wealthy, right-wing Jewish Americans who may have the president’s ear who’ll reinforce this message (Miriam Adelson, Bill Ackman, etc.).
• Dan Caine, Michael Kurilla, and John Ratcliffe. Respectively, they’re the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, head of the U.S. Central Command, and CIA director. Trump loves Caine, whose made-up middle name is “Razin,” because he’s out of “central casting” and because of his role in defeating ISIS. Of Kurilla, an Israeli news outlet in April said he was “the U.S. general Israel doesn’t want to strike Iran without.” Of Ratcliffe, CBS News reported Friday that he “has said in closed-door settings that Iran is viewed as being very close to possessing nuclear weapons,” which is at least slightly at odds with the less alarmed intel assessment Tulsi Gabbard has been touting. Sure sounds like on balance, this group will be urging that things go boom.
• Steve Bannon. We know that his is the most prominent voice urging Trump to slam the brakes. He and Trump had lunch Thursday. Hard to know how seriously Trump takes him. But his view does reinforce what appears to be Trump’s gut instinct toward noninvolvement.
• Fox News hosts. Don’t we kinda feel that when all is said and done, it comes down to what they’re saying on Fox News at decision time? Since odds are strong that whoever Trump is watching is likely to be rattling the saber to one extent or another, this isn’t the most comforting thought in the world.

One last point. The Guardian reported Wednesday that some in the U.S. military aren’t sure that our conventional bunker-buster bombs could really do the job at Fordo and that only a tactical nuke could do it but that Trump isn’t considering such a possibility. To which a Fox News White House correspondent rejoined: “I was just told by a top official here that none of that report is true, that none of the options are off the table, and the U.S. military is very confident that bunker busters could get the job done at Fordo.”

No options are “off the table” is standard lingo in such situations. Still, even before I read about this, I had been wondering. The United States reportedly possesses nuclear warheads as small as eight kilotons (and as large as 300 kilotons). The bomb we dropped on Hiroshima was 15 KT. Can’t you just hear someone saying to Trump: “Mr. President, it’s really just a teeny little bomb—enough to do the job without question, but not enough for the world to get into a big tizzy about”?

Of course you can. And this is the point: Trump, no principled pacifist, is literally capable of anything, from peacemaking to nuking. His “opposition” to the Iraq War, somewhat ginned up after the fact, had far less to do with principle than with some tortured combination of risk aversion and his commitment to macho stagecraft (meaning that if you’re going to do something, do it big—take their oil, level their cities, etc.).

Those two impulses exist in tension within him. But no one should think for a second that any of it amounts to principle. One or the other will win, based on his mood that day. And so I may be sitting here a month from now, slack-jawed once again as the Washington foreign policy establishment decides collectively that when a president wants to launch a war, there’s nothing to be gained by opposing him. 

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

In May 1856, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner took to the floor of the Senate to deliver a speech denouncing slavery. Sumner was a fiery abolitionist; in his maiden speech on the floor of the Senate four years earlier, he had called for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, which an Alabama senator disparaged thus: “The ravings of a maniac may sometimes be dangerous, but the barking of a puppy never did any harm.” Sumner continued to inveigh against slavery and its apologists throughout his first term. Clearly, he suffered from Pierce Derangement Syndrome (Franklin).

Among those Sumner attacked directly in his May 1856 speech was his Senate colleague Andrew Butler of South Carolina. His words were, to be sure, impolitic: “[Butler] has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery.”

Two days later, in one of the most infamous incidents in American political history, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, a first cousin once removed of Butler’s, walked over to the Senate chamber, waited until no women were present in the gallery (Southern chivalry!), and attacked Sumner on the Senate floor with a metal-topped cane, beating him within an inch of his life.

Alex Padilla, the Democratic California senator, did not bleed Thursday. He wasn’t even hurt. But the sight of a U.S. senator being manhandled by FBI agents was shocking enough. Lawrence O’Donnell said Thursday night that Padilla was the first senator in history to be so accosted by law enforcement officials. I don’t know for sure that that’s true, but (1) I suspect if there were another, we’d know about it, and (2) even if he’s the second or third, that wouldn’t make how he was treated any better.

The incident didn’t last that long. But the real damage came after, when the lie machine reliably revved itself into action. It started with Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary whose press conference Padilla had interrupted. She went on Fox News within the hour to say he “burst in” and was “lunging” toward her and “did not identify himself.”

All lies. As anyone can see from the video, he was a good 10 feet away from Noem. But even if he had lunged—and even if he were not a senator but a mere citizen, or really any human being who is not threatening violence—this is how Donald Trump’s FBI treats such people? Escort them away—OK. But push them to the ground and cuff them, when they’ve left the room and are no longer in any way a plausible “threat”?

And it was in that moment—the decision by the agents to take the matter to a totally unnecessary, completely gratuitous extreme—that we find lurking the essence of Trumpism.

The essence of Trumpism is just this: Dig in the heel of the boot; step on the enemy’s neck; determine in any situation the action that would be appropriately small-d democratic, and then do the opposite—go intentionally overboard, do something that shocks and offends the democratic sensibility. And then lie about it and try to reverse reality—to convince America that it didn’t see what it just saw. That truth is not what it seems.

A few Republican senators, and I mean a precious few, responded appropriately. Like, one: Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski said, “It’s horrible. It is shocking at every level. It’s not the America I know.” Susan Collins emitted the usual timorous excretion. Otherwise? Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said on Morning Joe Friday that he and colleagues Cory Booker and Brian Schatz waited on the Senate floor—who knows, perhaps not far from Sumner’s Desk 29, occupied today by New Hampshire Democrat Jean Shaheen—for their GOP colleagues to appear and denounce what happened. Not only did they not do that, Murphy said: “They basically said he deserved what he got simply because he was disrespectful to the president.”

But Trump was surely most pleased by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who put all the blame on Padilla and called on the Senate to censure him: “I think that that behavior at a minimum rises to the level of a censure. I think there needs to be a message sent by the body as a whole that that is not what we’re going to do; that’s not what we’re going to act.” Note the “at a minimum,” which leaves dangling the insane possibility that Padilla should … what? Just be expelled? Again, the essence of Trumpism is found in those three words.

This is what they do. All the time. Trump federalizes the National Guard and sends in the Marines; he crows that if he hadn’t acted, Los Angeles would have been “completely obliterated.” Think about the scale of that lie, referring to protests in a four- or five-block area in a city of 500 square miles. He told it over and over in various forms, as did Noem and others. The behavior has its precedents in the United States: Southerners accused Sumner of faking his injuries. They argued that the cane was not heavy enough to cause severe injury. Others, more direct about matters, piped up that Sumner deserved a caning every day.

And the right-wing media, like the Southern press in the 1850s, reliably echoed every word Trump, Noem, and the others said. Meanwhile the mainstream media failed dramatically this week by accepting the lazy frame that immigration is a “winner” for Trump. Two polls came out—this one and this one—showing this emphatically not to be the case. The second poll, from Quinnipiac, was bleak for Trump across the board. Only 27 percent of the country supports the big ugly bill. That’s not even all of MAGA America. People are beginning to understand that they indulged themselves last year in some fantasy projection of “Donald Trump.” They’re seeing the real article now, and they’re remembering his viciousness, his ignorance, his incompetence, and his lawlessness.

And it’s going to get worse. Trumpism proceeds by the successive breaking of taboos. Each time a new one is broken, the previous one is normalized, made to look not so bad by comparison. The cuffing of Padilla was a red-line moment. And yet: There’s plenty of reason to worry that in four months, we’ll look back on it as a moment of comparative innocence.

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

So Donald Trump got a temporary win Thursday when a federal appeals courts stayed the decision from the International Court of Trade, which ruled that his tariffs were illegal. Trump aides went on Fox News to crow about their big victory, but they may be back to eating crow soon: The stay was granted on an administrative basis only. In addition, a second federal court has also issued a ruling blocking the tariffs.

Meanwhile, the administration suffered another huge legal setback this week when a different federal judge ruled that Harvard University can keep admitting foreign students for the time being, overruling the administration’s efforts to derail the university. Naturally, the attack on Harvard is just phase one in Trump’s attempt to Orbánize, if I may put it that way, American higher education. It’s a nakedly ideological and authoritarian attack, for which the administration—while asking to see the coursework of every international student—is presenting to the courts no actual evidence of wrongdoing, and it will lose.

This is the week that TACO—or “Trump always chickens out” —became a thing. The phrase was coined in early May by a Financial Times writer. It has since spread to Wall Street, where traders mock him for always reliably backing down on his most extravagant trade war proposals. A White House reporter asked Trump about his new nickname. Little Donnie got very mad.

It’s funny. But it’s worth noting that he doesn’t always chicken out. Most of the time, he just loses.

The New York Times keeps a running tab of the number of court cases that have gone against the administration. As of May 29, the number of losses clocked in at 181. And in her Substack on Tuesday, Heather Cox Richardson cited research by the political scientist Adam Bonica of Stanford, who found that the administration suffered a 96 percent loss rate in the courts in May.

The administration is losing these cases for a simple reason: They’re breaking the damn law. They’re invoking old and obscure laws and insisting that they confer upon them the authority to do things they don’t have the authority to do. They’re trying to stretch other laws and regulations to suit their authoritarian purposes.

God knows they’ve done a lot of damage. But it’s also been heartening to see that, thanks to the courage and commitment of a lot of people who care about democracy and the law and are putting themselves on the line to defend them, they’re seeing that limits do exist in this country that should prevent them from imposing full-on fascism.

But all of this assumes that the Trumpies will obey the law. That is not an assumption we can make. This week we have Stephen Miller calling the trade court’s ruling a “judicial coup”—remember, it was delivered by a three-judge panel; two were Republican appointees, and one of those an appointee of Trump himself—and saying: “We are living under a judicial tyranny.” Likewise, we have tariff consigliere Peter Navarro saying, in essence, To hell with the law. “You can assume that even if we lose, we will do it another way,” Navarro told reporters Thursday.

With respect to the Harvard case, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that “if these judges want to be secretary of state or the president, they can run for office themselves.” And the Times reported that lawyers at the Department of Homeland Security “hinted that the Trump administration was pursuing other ways to bar international students from enrolling at the Ivy League university.”

In other words: They’re going to continue to break the law. Or maybe they’re going to have young graduates of Ave Maria law school scour the books and find weird 1846 statutes under which they can exercise their authority to deport people for writing newspaper op-eds. The day is going to come, perhaps soon, when Trump just says openly of a major court decision that the decision is illegitimate and he will not obey it. (They’ve flouted court decisions, as in the refusal to comply with the Supreme Court’s order on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but they’ve generally done so without trying to provoke direct confrontation.)

None of this is an accident. Trump and Miller want this fight. As retired conservative federal Judge J. Michael Luttig told the Times: “This was a planned war that he had been planning since he lost the last election. From Day 1, the president, the vice president, and then eventually his entire Cabinet have been attacking the courts and the judiciary because they knew to a certainty that the courts would strike down his initiatives.”

In other words, these initiatives and the way the Trump administration is going about them—using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as ostensible legal cover for obviously illegal deportations—are part of a larger plan. There’s a particular assault on immigrants, another particular assault on standing trade law and congressional (rather than executive) authority, another particular assault on higher education, and more. They’re all real, and they’re all frightening.

But they’re all just smaller parts of a broader assault on the rule of law itself. They’re pieces of a puzzle, and the puzzle, once filled in, will show a Republican-dominated legislative branch that has willingly conceded most of its authority, a judicial branch that has been stripped of its own, and a unitary executive—King Donald—with all the power in his hands.

Ah, you say, but Trump has always said he’d obey the Supreme Court. True. He has. And that means … what, exactly? Who’s gullible enough to take that seriously? All it means is that he’s at least smart enough to know that he has to say that for now.

So Stephen Miller is right, in a way. There is a judicial coup going on in this country. It’s just that it’s being waged by Trump, Miller, and their gang of rogues against the judges, not the other way around.