Memo to Future Historians: This Is Fascism, and Millions of Us See It

David Axelrod is far better known these days for occasionally wagging his finger at his fellow Democrats than for breathing partisan fire, so it caught my eye when he posted this on X Wednesday: “So far, the ICE gang has shot & killed an unarmed man & lied about the circumstances; shot a woman 5 times for obstructing their vehicle; roughed up elderly women and zip-tied small children; shot a clergyman in the face with a pepper ball; marched through downtown Chicago, masked and armed. And they’re not going after the ‘worst of the worse,’ [sic] as promised. Most of the people they’re snagging have clean records. Some are citizens. To be clear: This is NOT making Chicago safer. It’s state-sponsored mayhem; dangerous political theater calculated to provoke.”

Historians sometimes say that when societies are descending into fascism, it can be hard for the people to notice it in real time. Well, historians of the future, I’m here to tell you: We are noticing. Millions of us are noticing. And we are horrified and enraged. We are well aware: We once lived in a country that, for all its frequent imperfections, was a place where the rule of law was a broadly shared value and where leaders acted with democratic restraint. We now live in a country where there is no rule of law; where leaders, especially the president but also others who support him, spit on the idea not only of democratic restraint but of democracy itself; and where the timorous first reflex of nearly every member of one of our two political parties is, at virtually all times, to do precisely what the leader wants.

That’s fascism. It may be—for now—a comparatively mild form of fascism. Political opponents aren’t being jailed or shot, opposition media outlets aren’t being shuttered, and books aren’t being burned. But a lot of things are happening that are terrifying. And last year, we lived in a country where the three scenarios I just listed were barely conceivable. Today, we live in a country where they are more likely only a matter of time.

Let’s go back to Axelrod, and specifically, his use of the phrase “state-sponsored mayhem.” That is exactly what President Trump is imposing upon Chicago. To take just one of the incidents Axelrod cites: Pastor David Black of the First Presbyterian Church was with a small gaggle of protesters outside a Chicago ICE facility. Three agents stood on the roof of the two-story building as Black and the others stood on the sidewalk maybe 15 feet away from the building. Black raised his arms to the sky, as if in prayer. Someone who appears to be a fellow protester approached Black to confer with him. Next thing you see in this video is a considerable puff of smoke explode from Black’s forehead as he falls to the ground. That’s a clergyman. Exercising his First Amendment right (he’s fine, and he’s suing). Black later told CNN: “We could hear them laughing.”

Shooting an unarmed and peacefully protesting pastor is by definition an act of state-sponsored mayhem. State-sponsored mayhem starts at the top, with the president’s thuggish, lawless threat to imprison the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago (by the way—Greg Sargent speaks to said governor, JB Pritzker, on his Daily Blast podcast today). From there, the people with the uniforms and the badges and the guns get the message, and they go out and do the things Axelrod listed above.

Administration officials pile lie upon lie upon lie. With respect to Portland, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refers preposterously to “the radical left’s reign of terror” there. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declares antifa to be “just as dangerous” as ISIS, which was killing perceived apostates by the thousands at its peak and raping little girls. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, rants nightly about armed confrontations that either don’t exist or exist solely because the administration creates them so it can have the footage that will air over and over on its propaganda network, Fox News. It’s all toward the purpose of erasing dissent, erasing democracy. As Zeteo’s Kim Wehle put it last week, reporting on two Trump-issued “national security” directives: “The president is taking steps to criminalize being anti-Trump in America.”

When a president and his aides are doing that, it’s no longer America.

When masked government thugs take potshots at a priest, it’s no longer America.

When a handpicked hack prosecutor with no prosecutorial experience indicts two honorable American citizens within a month of the president ordering their prosecutions, and when two real prosecutors quit rather than pursue these obscenely political prosecutions, it’s no longer America.

When the third-ranking official in the country, the speaker of the House of Representatives, delays the swearing-in of a duly elected member of that body because he knows she will vote to release files that potentially may shed light on unsavory behavior by the president, it’s no longer America.

When the presidential administration announces that it’s going after nonprofit charitable groups that have operated unmolested in this country for decades under Democratic and Republican administrations because they donate to causes the president disfavors, it’s no longer America.

When naturalized citizens are canceling overseas trips because they can’t be certain they’ll be welcomed back to their own country upon return, it’s no longer America.

When the Department of Education is bullying universities into agreeing to a “compact” under which they’ll promise not to “belittle” conservative ideas, it’s no longer America.

When the president and his family have used his office to enrich themselves to the tune of $3.5 billion in nine months, and when the Congress, controlled by the president’s party, refuses to do a thing about this rancid, dictator-level corruption, it’s no longer America.

When the Supreme Court of the United States has sold its soul to all this barbarity, it’s no longer America.

And when this thuggish dictator-wannabe is also a buffoonish man-child who sits there in his breathtakingly tacky Oval Office with his fake face and fake hair next to another head of state (the president of Finland) as he boasts yet again about passing a simple dementia test that a 10-year-old could ace, and we realize that this man-child is the sitting president, it’s no longer America, at least for anyone who cares about how we look to the rest of the world.

Historians of the future: Rest assured, millions of us know all this in real time. We are horrified, shocked, enraged, and ashamed. We are acting, in a thousand ways, to oppose it. This cannot, and will not, be how the United States ends.

President Donald Trump has finally told the truth about something. He’s embraced Project 2025. Anyone who believed his disavowals last year during the campaign is, of course, a fool. And the media, reporting those disavowals, looked foolish. Trump knew, as he has known all his life, that all you have to do is lie about something, and the press, following the rules of objectivity, will report straightforwardly what you said. So he largely got away with it. The Kamala Harris campaign tried to tie Trump to the project, as in this ad; but it didn’t manage to convey the project’s extremism with any force.

And now? The Democrats have another huge opportunity to hang Project 2025 around Trump’s neck. It should be easier now, for two reasons. One, it’s not purely hypothetical anymore. According to the Project 2025 Tracker, a community-driven initiative, the Trump administration has already checked off 48 percent of the project’s goals. Two, Trump and OMB Director Russell Vought’s open promises to shred the federal bureaucracy give Democrats a huge target. The question is, do they have the skill—and the guts—to hit it?

Alas, that question, as usual with the Democrats, should have a clear answer but doesn’t. The obvious strategy is to call all hands on deck and, now that Trump has said what he said, make this shutdown about not only Obamacare subsidies but two other things: about the looming job cuts themselves and about Vought personally because his name and his extremist, un-American goals to remake the United States as a Christian nation should be known to every American.

The first message should be simple: What Trump and Vought are about to do here is the second coming of Elon Musk and DOGE. The DOGE effort was not exactly popular: Last spring, poll after poll, like this one, showed that while the general concept of cutting the size of the federal government had appeal, people really didn’t like the way Musk and his minions were going about it. This time around, Democrats can plausibly say that it’s going to be worse. DOGE staffing cuts came to around 300,000. An estimated 750,000 federal employees are being furloughed due to the shutdown. Vought probably thinks most of them are expendable. It shouldn’t be hard to make these cuts deeply unpopular.

Second, tell Americans who Vought is, what he believes, the things he has said. He’s a Christian nationalist who believes Trump is “God’s gift” to America and wants the U.S. to be “a nation under God.” These are of course completely un-American ideas. Article 6 of the Constitution contains the “no religious test clause,” which applies to holding a public office or trust in the U.S.; but beyond that, the Founders were crystal clear that American citizenship and civil rights were open to all—as Thomas Jefferson once put it, citing John Locke, neither “Pagan nor Mohametan [Muslim] nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth [of Virginia] because of his religion.” George Washington said that “religious controversies are always more productive of acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause,” and therefore each should be left to worship (or not) as he or she saw fit. I could go on and on and on.

Making these two arguments requires the Democrats to take two moral and unambiguous stands. The first is in defense of an activist federal government. The second is in defense of the religious pluralism upon which this country was founded.

I’d love to be able to write with confidence that I think they’ll do it. Odds are they won’t. Most of them shy away from moral arguments. They’re afraid—not all of them, but most of them—to go toe to toe with Trump on a topic like religion. There is utterly no reason for this. Most Americans agree with them. Polls will often show that a disturbingly high percentage of Americans want this country to be a Christian nation, but when you look at crosstabs, you see quickly that the number is high because among Republicans it’s around 75 percent. It’s well under 50 percent among independents, which is the number that matters. Still, the Democratic Party has trained itself over the years to stay away from such matters.

They also just don’t speak with one voice and hold together. Right now, the only poll I’ve seen on the shutdown looks very good for them. A Washington Post survey found that respondents blamed Trump and Republicans over Democrats by 47 percent to 30 percent. Interestingly, independents blamed Republicans over Democrats by 50 percent to 22 percent.

You’d think and hope that would gird Democrats’ loins. And maybe it will. But remember: Three Senate Democrats voted for the Republican version of the bill to reopen the government. Four more need to cave for the Republicans to get their bill through. Democratic senators are heading back to their states this weekend, where they’re going to hear from furloughed federal workers about how they need their paychecks.

In a sense this is understandable and defensible. Democrats tend to care about these people’s actual lives, whereas Republicans don’t give a crap about them since they’re just a bunch of deep-state Trump haters anyway. Also, Democrats genuinely don’t want to see hundreds of thousands of federal employees lose their jobs, both on a simple human level and because Democrats believe these people are doing important work.

So that’s all nice. But at the same time, the Democrats could win this fight. If the Post poll is right, they’re already winning. And now that Trump has introduced the unpopular Project 2025 into the equation, the door is open for the Democrats to make Trump’s posture here even more unpopular. Also, I’d argue that to the extent the shutdown will result in chaos, well, people understand that it’s Trump who is the sower of chaos in this country. Majorities are far more likely to blame Trump for chaos than Democrats.

So the Democrats can win this. They need to stand together and stick to principles. I just wish history suggested they were better at this.

The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel was about the 2,786th objectionable thing this second Trump administration has done. Many of its attacks on the American way of life have been utterly horrific—some have been direct assaults on the rule of law, others have sent completely innocent human beings to detention camps. So why does an action taken against a late-night host stand out?

It’s a frontal attack on the one element of our social contract that nearly everyone, from left to right, agrees on and values more than anything: freedom of speech. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787 decided against including a Bill of Rights, confident that everyone would understand that the federal government would exercise only the powers enumerated in the document itself. But many critics, mostly those known as the anti-Federalists, insisted that that wasn’t enough. They said: Add a list of specifically enumerated rights, or we’re not ratifying.

And so, James Madison, who had been a strong opponent of such a list in 1787, turned around and, as a member of the first U.S. Congress representing the fifth district of Virginia, drew up the list the critics demanded. His original list included 17 rights. Congress passed 12, and the states ratified 10.

There was never any question as to which right would be enumerated first. The First Amendment concerns both religion and speech, but over the centuries, freedom of worship has grown less contested, and it has been the cause of free speech rights for which people have fought and gone to prison. Historically, most attempts to suppress speech have come from those in power trying to silence various forms of protest or dissent (hence, from the right, generally speaking). Recent years have seen the emergence of a small but vocal anti–free speech left, whose presence is mostly limited to social media and college campuses, and which is about to make Bari Weiss a very rich woman.

But the vast majority of us agree: Free speech is inviolate and applies to all of us, even those with noxious views. A poll last year found that 63 percent of Americans considered free speech “very important.” It was second only to inflation and ahead of crime, health care, immigration, and seven other issues. Not bad for an abstract idea.

But abstract ideas last only as long as those who have power—political and financial power—agree that they should last. James Madison couldn’t have contemplated Donald Trump. And he never would have imagined Perry Sook and Chris Ripley.

Wait, who are Perry Sook and Chris Ripley, you ask? They are the men, Sook in particular, who made this Kimmel cancellation, this direct attack against free speech, happen. Their names don’t appear in many news stories. More people need to know who they are.

Sook is the CEO of Nexstar Media Group. He started the company in the 1990s with one local television station, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Today, Nexstar owns 197 stations. It also operates NewsNation, the cable news channel trying to compete with Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. NewsNation is where disgraced CNN anchor Chris Cuomo landed, and its “talent” is somewhat ideologically mixed. But Sook, 66, has dropped broad hints in past interviews about his own leanings. Last November, he expressed the hope that “fact-based journalism will come back into vogue, as well as eliminating the level of activist journalism out there.” You might think that by “activist journalism,” he means, you know, the cable news network that paid a $787 million settlement to a private company to avoid being forced to admit that it told lies about the 2020 election. But you’d be wrong. On Wednesday, he showed us what and who he means by “activist journalism”: Jimmy Kimmel, over one comment that right-wing social media went to town on.

Chris Ripley is the CEO of the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair is better known than Nexstar. It vaulted to public prominence after that chilling 2018 video went viral of dozens of local Sinclair anchors reading from the same Orwellian script about “fake news.” Sinclair is more avowedly right-wing than Nexstar. But they both passionately share and are pursuing one central right-wing goal: the end of media regulation in the United States. Under FCC rules, no single owner can reach more than 39 percent of households.

These kinds of regulations go back to the 1920s, when radio first hit the scene, and they were designed to make sure that Americans heard a range of voices. No one on either end of the political spectrum challenged them for decades. In the late 1960s, a Pennsylvania right-wing radio preacher (why is it always people like this?) went on air to smear a local journalist who had attacked Barry Goldwater. The matter went up to the Supreme Court, which held—unanimously, left to right—that the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine was consistent with the First Amendment: That is, the court said, yes, the exposure to opposing viewpoints was an essential part of democracy.

Traditional news and speech values, imperfect though they were, held for about six decades. Then merger mania hit in the 1980s, and we began to understand that media companies were companies—were interested in profit more than civic ideas such as truth and free speech. At the same time, the Reagan administration started going after the Fairness Doctrine. Later came Rupert Murdoch and Fox. Then came merger after merger after merger. Sad to say, it was Barack Obama’s FCC, under Chair Julius Genachowski, that finally killed off the Fairness Doctrine officially, but it had been long since functionally dead anyway.

Right now, Sook awaits FCC approval of a merger that will allow Nexstar to be in more than 39 percent of American homes. And Sinclair wants to grow and grow. And that is what happened Wednesday night. Sook announced that his 32 ABC stations would not broadcast Kimmel’s show. Sinclair, with its 30 ABC affiliates, made a similar announcement shortly thereafter. And ABC—or really, Disney—caved.

Even so, this might not have been quite the crisis it is with someone else in the White House. Under President Kamala Harris, for example, would Sook and Nexstar even be petitioning a Democratic FCC for this merger? Probably not. The current Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, has clearly stated her opposition (to TNR’s Greg Sargent, among others) to what Chairman Brendan Carr did in threatening ABC and Kimmel. Recent Democratic FCC Chairs Jessica Rosenworcel (Biden) and Tom Wheeler (Obama) have been strong voices for media diversity. It seems to me a safe bet that under President Harris, none of this would be happening.

But she is not in the White House. Donald Trump is. And a right-wing hero was just assassinated. Trump and his movement will use Charlie Kirk’s murder to justify any number of unconstitutional and illegal actions. And it filters down from them. Clemson University has fired five faculty and administrators. Teachers are losing their jobs over their social media posts about Kirk. And it sure isn’t Trump firing them. He has created an atmosphere of fear that many, many others on down the right-wing food chain, from Sook and Ripley to local school administrators, will zealously enforce.

And that’s why this week is different. It pitted a near-universally cherished American value against a combination of corporate power and authoritarian contempt for that value—and the value was smashed to pieces.

If you’re terrified of where all this may end, you are right to be. Stephen Colbert is gone; Kimmel, possibly gone for good (I hope not). CBS is becoming conservative. Skydance, the company handing CBS to Bari Weiss, may be about to take over CNN. The Washington Post is cracking up. The New York Times faces another one of Trump’s $15 billion lawsuits. In this next year or two, we may well be counting on the Times to do what CBS and ABC have refused to do and fight this battle to the bitter end.

The text of the First Amendment was edited down from Madison’s original language. His first-draft passage on speech and the press said: “The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.”

I wish that language had remained—it’s clearer and more emphatic, especially that “inviolable” part. It might have stiffened the backs of the people we’re going to be counting on to preserve free speech in this country and made it harder for right-wing federal judges to chip away at these rights. It would not, alas, make any difference to tyrants, and as of Wednesday night, it’s clearer than it ever was before that tyranny is where we’re headed.

I will admit that I learned some useful things about Charlie Kirk this week. I learned that he commanded a unique respect and even ardor on the MAGA right. Old high school friends who are MAGA pop up regularly on my Facebook feed, and they were distraught, several to the point of tears. They had him pegged for a future president, which sure had never occurred to me, but which made sense after I gave it some thought. He was young, articulate, nice-looking; possessed of a certain kind of charisma. He had an instinct for how to connect with young men emotionally. I’ve also read some liberals who knew him saying in these last couple of days that he was, in person, unfailingly polite, and that matters. This is the Kirk the right remembers: someone who engaged in civil debate and persuasion and who infuriated liberals only because he was smart and he usually won.

Kirk’s most ardent fans can, and will, believe what they want. The truth is that he infuriated a lot of us because he spread toxic lies across this country like a blanket of Agent Orange (David Corn and Joan Walsh iterated a number of them this week). And while he often had an impressive battery of facts at his command, his manner of debating involved a lot of dishonest rhetorical legerdemain. I watched a clip Thursday in which he challenged a young white male student somewhere: “What can a white man do in this country that a Black man can’t do?”

It’s a very clever question. That framing—the use of the verb “do”—reduces racism to matters of the freedom to move about in society. And in that sense, what’s the problem? Yes, we once had white and “colored” waiting rooms down South, but these days, a Black father can take his kids to a ballgame just the same as a white father can. But a real conversation about racism means talking, for example, about the historical legacies that have resulted in white households owning on average $250,400 in wealth and Black households $24,520. That’s a direct result of Blacks not being allowed to buy houses in most neighborhoods in this country until relatively recently. In addition, there is still tons of discrimination in mortgage lending. That’s what racism is, and the fact that Black men can “do” a lot of what white men can “do” in this country does nothing to mitigate these persistent facts—facts that only liberals, by the way, have ever had the courage to try to change.

Was Kirk’s assassination a tragedy? It was absolutely a tragedy. Whether the killer had a political motivation or not, the silencing of a voice, even a toxic voice, in that fashion is ghastly. If you spend enough time online (and here’s a good reason why you shouldn’t), you’ll be able to find people, seemingly somewhere on the left of the political spectrum, chortling over Kirk’s death. It’s an understatement to say that this is very bad form. But you’ll struggle to find any prominent liberal leaders or elected Democrats saying anything like, oh, for example, the insanely irresponsible things Mike Lee—a U.S. senator!—said when Minnesota Democrat Melissa Hortman and her husband were executed by a right-wing extremist.

Here’s what I have seen, though: I’ve seen a number of figures on the right saying, instantly and well in advance of an assailant being identified (news that the alleged gunman was arrested didn’t break until Friday morning) that “the left” was responsible for Kirk’s death. Dozens of them, from Donald Trump on down, jumped immediately to this conclusion.

They did this to a ferocious degree after both assassination attempts on Donald Trump’s life. Especially after the first one, many prominent figures on the right started pointing fingers at people and organizations on the broad left (The New Republic included) for having Trump’s blood on their hands. This was relentless for about three days; I remember it very well. Then it turned out that would-be assassin Matthew Crooks in fact had no particular political motivation—he was a bullied loner probably seeking notoriety. But during those first days, it was taken as a given on the right that Crooks was a Trump-hating leftist.

The second attempt on Trump’s life came a scant two months later. You might have thought, given how wrong they were the first time, they would have waited. But again, many figures on the right rushed to say Ryan Routh was a registered Democrat, which he once was but hadn’t been for a long time. This time, in fairness, figures on the left pointed to other evidence saying Routh had Republican sympathies. But it turns out that he is just a confused man, as he proved this week in (as fate would have it) Judge Aileen Cannon’s courtroom where he is on trial for the assassination attempt—and where his rambling opening statement touched on Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford, and the Wright brothers.

The right always jump to such conclusions, and to talk of revenge, not justice. The biggest jumper of all is Trump himself, who delivered an absolutely chilling address Wednesday night from the Oval Office. He said his administration would ferret out “those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

If another president had said something like that, we could take it as playing to his peanut gallery. But when Trump says it, we should assume that he and his movement mean it. “Those who contributed to this atrocity” could mean thousands of people and organizations, and “other political violence” can mean anything Trump and Stephen Miller want it to mean. They will use this tragic event to try to bully non-Trump America into submission.

Some people on the right are genuinely in mourning. They may choose not to see the sides of Charlie Kirk they don’t wish to see (and I’m still having trouble understanding how spewing such hatred and provocation is consistent with the teachings of Jesus Christ), but that’s what grieving human beings often do—right, left, and in between. Let them mourn in peace.

But Trump and many leaders on the right are vowing to use this tragedy to do what they’ve always wanted to do anyway: to make this a more authoritarian society in which blunt criticism of the regime becomes redefined as incitement to violence and even terrorism. On Thursday, the State Department warned immigrants not to mock Kirk’s death. In Trump’s America, we can be sure it’s not going to stop there.

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.