Sorry, but You Had to Be an Idiot to Believe Trump Could Lower Prices

“Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down, and we will make America affordable again,” Donald Trump told rallygoers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in August 2024. “We’re going to make it affordable again.” He said it over and over and over. “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again. We’ll do that. We’ve got to bring it down,” he told a Wisconsin crowd that October.

Well. Guess what? Prices are up. And they’re not just up, at least in some cases, because of random, impersonal market forces. They’re up because Trump raised them, through his tariffs. But mostly, they’re up because politicians, even presidents, don’t have the power to lower prices quickly and unilaterally.

I thought everyone knew this. I thought everyone was at least sophisticated enough to understand that inflation is kind of complicated and has to do with a number of factors that can’t be easily erased or reversed. I mean, that’s not a particularly advanced political or economic concept. A president can’t just say, “Beef prices, I command thee down!” and beef prices go down. We live in the real world, not some fairy-tale land; there’s no legal limit to the snow here, as there was in Camelot.

And yet—apparently a lot of people did believe him. Well, you know what? I’m not in the habit of calling people idiots. Elected Republicans, yes. A lot of them are idiots, and hypocrites and liars and worse. But regular people—I try to stay away from calling them idiots. They have pressures, they don’t really follow politics, and even in the present case, I understand that a few million voters turned to Trump because Joe Biden seemed to be responsible for inflation (and was, to a certain extent), Kamala Harris didn’t plausibly explain how she’d do things differently, and Trump was the only other entrée on the menu. Those people, I sort of get.

But if you really, truly, deeply believed that Trump would lower prices quickly? I’m sorry. You’re an idiot.

I keep wondering how people could have fallen for this. How could people not know, after living through Trump’s first term, that he’ll say anything—whatever works for him in the moment? Did people really just forget that? Apparently, they did. I have to keep reminding myself: There are a lot of people who pay attention to politics the way I pay attention to gymnastics—for a few weeks every four years. They’ve never understood that Trump is worse—far, far worse—than your average pol in the way he’ll just say whatever sounds good at the time.

Did they think he could fix things because he’s a businessman? You know—a businessman with six bankruptcies? Anyone capable of even a semblance of critical thinking who spent 10 minutes examining Trump’s business career could see that what he mostly did was drive companies into the ground, stiff contractors, fend off lawsuits, and skate through it all because he was a celebrity, which he figured out how to parlay into profit by selling the right to put his name on buildings.

And finally, I suspect a lot of people bought it because a lot of other dishonest people were pushing it. And here, of course, I mean the right-wing propaganda machine—from Fox News to podcasters to the algorithmic narcotics pushers on social media who are rapidly turning half the nation into a bunch of rage-baited nitwits—that helped elect him and that helps keep his poll numbers, anemic as they are, from being even worse.

It’s not as if it was some deeply held secret last year that presidents can’t just lower prices, or that tariffs increase prices. Plenty of people said so and warned that Trump had no answers. But the propagandists drowned the sane voices out.

Imagine that Kamala Harris had said she was going to lower grocery prices immediately, on day one. You know what would have happened? She’d have been laughed off the campaign trail. Mocked relentlessly. And not just by the right wing. By mainstream economic commentators. By liberal pundits. By me.

That’s because we—mainstream commentators, liberal pundits, and the millions of Americans who still do actually read stuff, weigh evidence, connect dots—would have known it was a preposterous and desperate lie. And we’d have said so. She’d have been savaged. She and her people no doubt knew this, which is why she didn’t talk like that.

She did address the issue. She did say she’d bring prices down. But she didn’t say silly things like “from day one,” and she offered some specifics about how she’d try to bring them down. She vowed to go after corporate price-gouging. You’ll recall that she was attacked even for this, on the grounds either that such gouging was allegedly rare or that most states already had laws against it, or it was just more proof she was a not-so-secret Marxist.

Otherwise, her plan to lower prices consisted of the usual dreary, time-consuming, reality-based stuff: expanding the child tax credit to reduce the costs of raising children; expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, to give more money back to lower-income taxpayers; providing housing tax credits to make homeownership more affordable.

Oh, and one more thing: She proposed extending the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies—exactly the hammer that’s about to thwack 20 million Americans over the head because Trump refuses to do this and has ordered the Republicans in Congress to follow suit.

So she put forward some plans. But plans are so ho-hum. Trump, in contrast, promised he’d cut the cost of a new home in half. Half! How? By slashing regulations! What regulations? You know—regulations! The evil, very, very bad ones! Sing along with me, to the tune of “Camelot”: “No regulation ever shall raise prices …”

So he goes back to Pennsylvania, as he did this week, and face-plants at the first MAGA rally of his second presidency by making fun of the whole idea of “affordabili-tee,” even pronouncing the word in such a way as to make light of the idea. Of course he did. He has no idea what to do about all this. So he has to make it sound like a “Democrat” hoax.

Oh—and that “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” he gave himself on the economy in that Politico interview. That’s five pluses. I’ve noticed on cable news a lot of people reducing it to four. Understandable. Four has a more natural rhythm to it, as we know from the world of music. But Trump, of course, had to gild the faux-gold lily and add a fifth. That fifth “plus,” for those attuned to the psychological trip wires that exist in that swampy brain of his, is his secret admission that he knows things aren’t good. Yet he had the gall to lecture his rallygoers: “You’re doing better than you’ve ever done.” Imagine Joe Biden having said that in 2023.

So, to those who voted for TRUMP in the belief that he would “lower prices” on DAY ONE, I ask you: Do you think this man who lives in a Gilded Mansion gets what you’re going through? Do you think he’s EVER been to a supermarket in his life? Do you think he could guess the Price of a Gallon of Milk? A head of his beloved Iceberg Lettuce? I beg of you. PLEASE. WAKE UP!! He is Playing You. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Pete Hegseth is having one of the worst weeks a Cabinet secretary has had in recent American history. It’s very richly deserved. He’s a bombastic idiot. He’s a liar. And he’s a weasel: Under fire for a second military strike on an alleged drug boat, which killed two survivors of the first strike and was possibly a war crime, he has publicly shifted all responsibility to a uniformed Naval officer who cannot defend himself in public. Finally, I’d add that he has utter contempt for the historic rules of honorable military engagement, but the video that emerged this week of him paying rhetorical homage to those rules back in 2016 when Democrats ran the Pentagon proves that he doesn’t even live according to that benighted “principle” and instead operates on the basis of no principle other than the usual Republican ones—political advantage and power.

He’s a disaster as defense secretary. But here’s a question that must be pondered this week: Didn’t we all know this? Wasn’t there ample reason to suspect that a talk-show host would be in way over his head in running the largest corporation in the U.S. government? Could anyone—anyone—look in the mirror back in January and say to themselves: “Yes, of all the possible nominees in this vast country to run the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth is the best possible choice”?

Of course we knew this. And yet, he made it through. Why? I see three reasons, all tangled up with one another, because they all describe different aspects of the total moral decay of the Republican Party.

Let’s start with the most obvious reason: Trump wanted him. In other words, no President Trump, no Secretary Hegseth, not in a jillion years. It took an ill-informed demagogue who dodged the draft and thinks soldiers buried in Arlington Cemetery are “suckers” and thinks cable news is the pinnacle of human endeavor to come up with an appointment like this. And this, as we all know, is why Trump chose him: He was a snarling cable host who looked the part and hated DEI. People knew at the time. Exiled Republican Adam Kinzinger posted last November, when Trump nominated Hegseth: “Wow. Trump picking Pete Hegseth is the most hilariously predictably stupid thing.”

But of course, few Republicans were willing to say so, which brings us to reason two: the total abdication of constitutional responsibilities by Trump’s party. Well, not quite total. Three Republicans did vote against Hegseth: Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell. JD Vance had to hustle up to the Capitol to break the tie.

But what that means is that 47 senators who had to know better (well, Tommy Tuberville excepted) voted for him. Mississippi’s Roger Wicker has been in the news this week because he chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and is thus deeply involved in the question of how Congress will proceed in probing the second strike on that vessel on September 2. And, as Wicker is not tightly identified with the MAGA movement, I’ve seen him referred to this week as a comparative voice of reason.

Really? Go watch his statement back in January explaining his vote for Hegseth to see what a voice of reason he was then. “Admittedly, this nomination is unconventional,” he allowed. But so was Trump, when he flitted down that escalator. “That may be what makes Mr. Hegseth an excellent choice,” he continued. Hegseth would bring “a new warrior ethos” and “energy” and “fresh ideas.” Those descriptors might in fact be accurate, but not in a good way.

Wicker has been around Washington for three decades. He’s a former Air Force officer. There is zero chance he actually believed those words that he spoke that January day. But he spoke them, and 46 of his colleagues mouthed similarly mendacious platitudes.

Those platitudes received endless repetition on Fox News and the other right-wing propaganda outlets, which brings us to the third reason why it’s possible for such an unqualified hooligan to lead the world’s largest military. The right-wing “media” serves as an enforcer in such situations. GOP senators know very well that if they break with Trump on a big vote, the propaganda mill will target them, and that rich agribusiness magnate back home who’s a MAGA fire-breather will primary them next time, and Trump will endorse him, and goodbye Senate.

These outlets also enforce the acceptance of a certain reality among the rank and file—in which, in the current case, all the talk last winter about Hegseth’s drinking problem and his running that nonprofit into the ground were just deep-state lies. They create for the audience a world that is the direct opposite of reality.

Speaking of which … a poll came out this week—commissioned by the conservative Manhattan Institute, no less—that sought to give America a fuller portrait than we usually get of the beliefs and feelings of today’s GOP. The pollster asked a few questions about conspiracy theories. Find your hat, please, and hold onto it.

One-third, exactly 33 percent, think vaccines cause autism. A little more, 36 percent, think NASA faked the moon landing. Also, 37 percent think the Holocaust was “greatly exaggerated.” Forty-one percent think the September 11 attacks were carried out by actors beyond Al Qaeda and were “likely orchestrated or permitted by the U.S. government.” And 51 percent, as opposed to 40 percent who disagreed, believe the 2020 election was stolen. (Interesting side result, on another question: Fifteen percent of the poll’s respondents admitted to being racist!)

I’m not saying we can trace all this directly to Fox News. As far as I know, even Fox isn’t peddling Faurisson-esque Holocaust denialism. But Fox and the others have certainly promoted a milieu in which their consumers are encouraged to question nearly all statements of fact if liberals seem to believe those facts. From there, the algorithms of social media take over, and we’re off to the parallel-reality races.

It’s no wonder in such a world that a man like Hegseth could rise to his current position, sustained and protected by cowardice and lies. And it’s no wonder that he’s ordering the clearly illegal targeting of vessels and making allegations about them without offering any evidence. This is exactly where the moral rot that has consumed the Republican Party in this century was bound to land us.

I’m sitting here early Friday morning with the home pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post up on my screen. The president of the United States, as you know by now, has accused six Democratic legislators of sedition, or, as Donald Trump inevitably puts such things, “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” adding that it is “punishable by DEATH!” He also re-Truthed a comment reading “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”

Trump says a lot of outrageous things, and we know why he says them. First, he’s an unhinged sociopath who knows nothing about American history (George Washington is literally the last person who’d behave as above, more on which later). Second, when he is attacked, as he was here—or as he believes he was; the sextet was actually just stating a fact of American tradition and law—he strikes back in the most juvenile way possible, since his emotional development was arrested at about age 13 (which is perhaps being generous). And third, he’s trying to distract from an otherwise bad week—arguably the worst of his second presidency, as his own party moved essentially in unanimity against him on the Epstein matter (something that, speaking of American history, I’m not sure has ever happened before).

So we know all that about him, and we’ve come to accept it. But come on. Hang them? Elected representatives of the people? Who have all served their country in the armed forces or in risky intelligence work? Not that that last point should matter one way or the other, but it does count for something. Senator Mark Kelly, for example, flew 39 combat missions during the Persian Gulf War. This was around the same time that Trump was working overtime to suppress a documentary about him that showed him to be the gangster and conman we all know him to be today.

But put these personal details to the side, and stick to the mere objective fact: A sitting president of the United States has called for the execution of six legislators. I don’t know this for certain, but it seems nearly impossible that this has happened before. I don’t think Abraham Lincoln did it, and he was dealing with actual traitors. Maybe, you know, Franklin Pierce or James Buchanan did it on a bad day. Or Andrew Johnson. He was temperamentally capable of something like this. But that hardly makes it defensible. As they were three of the worst presidents in U.S. history, that only makes it worse.

OK. Back to the Times and the Post now. How in the world is this not the top story this morning? Indeed: How is it not the only headline above the fold, the kind of headline they usually reserve for world wars?

But it’s not. It’s not even close. On my Post home page around 7 a.m. Friday, you have to spin the scroll wheel on the mouse about seven times even to see the headline and subhed, which do not, incidentally, mention the “death” part at all. (The story did appear on the upper left of the front page of today’s physical paper.) At the Times, I had to give the scroll wheel four spins before I saw the story; the headline does quote Trump’s words “punishable by death.” But the Times didn’t even put it on the front page of their physical paper—there was only a single-sentence reference to the story in a small box titled “More on the White House,” as if this was just more ho-hum news from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

When I peeked at the Times on Thursday night, I noted that the headline did not even mention the death part. It read: “In Outburst, Trump Accuses Democrats of Sedition Over Video to Military.” Sweet Jesus, Times. It’s a small thing, perhaps. But “outburst”?! It’s a telling little example of how mainstream news headline writers continue to try to use the normal conventions of objective journalism style to describe behavior that is an offense against normalcy.

The headline writers at the two papers would undoubtedly snicker at me. I’m being alarmist. Trump says a lot of things. He doesn’t really mean it. Or, even if he does mean it in the moment, it’s not really to be taken seriously. It can’t happen here.

I’m sorry. Those are all the rationalizations of people who have decided that anti-alarmism is the proper, neutral posture toward Trump. I won’t psychoanalyze them and say why, although I have my theories. I’ll just say that they—and many people like them who package mainstream news for tens of millions of readers and viewers and listeners—have shown us time after time after fatiguing time that they believe that Trump’s outrageous remarks need to be “contextualized” and that we shouldn’t get too worked up over them.

Trump said in 2016 that people at his rallies should beat up protesters. Oh, relax—maybe he was joking. He said there was a Second Amendment solution for Hillary Clinton. Well, that was ambiguous. He clearly and repulsively mocked a journalist with physical disabilities. Well, it wasn’t completely clear what he was referring to. Barack Obama was spying on him. Well, there may be no evidence, but that’s Trump being Trump. And so on, times a thousand.

Question: What will it take? Where is the line that Trump must cross for these people to say to themselves, “OK. That’s enough. We are alarmed, and we believe America should be alarmed, and we are going to cover this like it’s the crisis it is.” If calling for six legislators to be hanged doesn’t clear that bar, what will?

These legislators did nothing wrong. They said, “You can refuse illegal orders … you must refuse illegal orders.” This is correct and true. It is what recruits are taught in every branch of the military. It prevents a president from turning the military into his own personal army, and as such, it’s one of the key principles that keeps a democratic republic from careening into dictatorship.

As to why they felt moved to make this video in the first place—well, we don’t really know the answer to that yet, but you don’t have to be George Patton to know that Trump would like to use the military to do whatever he wants it to do. TNR’s Greg Sargent interviewed one of the six Democrats, Representative Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, for his Daily Blast podcast today. Here’s what she had to say:

Sargent: It sounds to me like all of you who have military or intelligence experience are hearing from inside these institutions that there’s real and actual concern, live concern, that people are being asked to carry out illegal orders. Is that what’s going on?

Houlahan: It’s partially what’s going on. It’s also sort of the buildup of the last nine or ten months, where we have watched this president kind of push on every boundary, try to break every circuit, so to speak, and overload us all with attempts to figure out where the lines are in the law. And so it’s not just in the military realm—though of course that’s what this particular podcast or broadcast is about—but it is abundantly evident with more than 149 instances over the last months of the president putting out orders of one form or another that have then been pushed to the courts in some way, shape, or form.

Houlahan went on to tell Sargent that she had “had a few conversations with people who have indicated discomfort with sort of the current state of affairs” and that “I know my colleagues have had similar kinds of conversations.” I would imagine we’ll be hearing more about this.

The country should be thanking these six for making this public warning, both because it described a very real threat to the Constitution and because, in eliciting a crazed response from Trump, the video showed America a new and even more depraved level of his dangerous ignorance. George Washington, please. Washington is the most anti-Trump leader not only in American history but probably in the history of the modern world.

Washington advocated a certain degree of mercy toward prisoners of war. When he captured more than 900 Hessians at Trenton in 1776, he not only didn’t hang them—he ordered that his troops do them no harm. Instead of being hauled off to prisons, they were sent to farms and allowed to work. And, of course, we all know—or I hope we all know—that Washington directly rebuffed his chance to become America’s dictator in 1783. Trump, as usual, hasn’t the slightest idea what he’s talking about.

But Trump himself is only part of the problem here. The other part is a media that collectively thinks we ought to just shrug these things off as Trump being Trump. Yes; it is Trump being Trump. And that’s precisely the problem. Does someone literally have to die before these “outbursts” merit a banner headline? Or even then, will they counsel us not to be alarmed—to consider the context? These people are going to help contextualize us into dictatorship.

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

The key thing about Donald Trump’s presidency, when you examine it alongside the history of every other Oval Office occupant, is that to understand what drives him day-to-day, you have to have a handle on his psychology—all those twisted urges and impulses that twitch through his brain. This is because so much of what he does is by pure instinct—id unchecked by superego; animal urge unmitigated by conscience. That, plus the fact that all he really cares about is how he looks on TV (more specifically, Fox News and Newsmax). Who can doubt that part of what he loves about bombing those boats in the Caribbean is that he loves seeing them go boom on a big screen?

So, when we analyze this administration, we have to look for the psychological “tells” in a way we simply didn’t with any other president, because the other presidents, no matter their politics, weren’t emotional 5-year-olds who lived in an impenetrable image bubble created and maintained by their staffs and their propagandists with press passes. And the psychological tell of the week? Hauling Representative Lauren Boebert into the White House Situation Room to try to break her down and make her change her vote on the Jeffrey Epstein discharge petition.

Think about this purely as a presidential decision. We don’t know whether this was his idea or if an aide hatched this plan and he liked it, but it amounts to the same thing. Yeah, we can picture Trump thinking: the Situation Room; secret, private, all those fancy screens and maps—that’ll intimidate her.

When LBJ had a recalcitrant member of Congress to win over, he invited him up to the Truman Balcony for a bourbon. Trump locked Boebert in the room that’s supposed to be used to monitor military operations. It’s where Barack Obama watched Seal Team Six take out bin Laden. It’s unclear whether Trump was there. One assumes he was. But willing hacks Pam Bondi and Kash Patel showed up. Wait, what? What was their presence meant to imply? Why did the attorney general and the FBI director need to be present on a legislative matter? Was the idea to hint to Boebert that she could face some sort of legal consequences if she didn’t capitulate? On a congressional vote?

Boebert laughed it all off, but she didn’t cave. In fact, the strong-arming apparently left her all the more convinced Trump may be hiding something. Hard to imagine I’d ever be saying this, but: good for her. And for her colleague Nancy Mace, whom Trump simply called, in the old-fashioned way. But both stood their ground, and next week, the House will vote to compel Bondi’s Justice Department to release the files, with possibly up to 100 Republicans voting to do so.

Trump is clearly in a dead panic about this. We saw this week the reason why. Many of the Epstein emails released this week were—at least in the court of public opinion—incriminating to one degree or another; none more so than the one Epstein wrote to an unnamed acquaintance in December 2018, in which he announced: “i am the one able to take him down.” Also: “I know how dirty donald is.” (He was too lazy to hit the shift key, apparently.)

Trump, as always, says it’s all a lie and he did nothing wrong. And a few of the released emails can be read to support this claim. But just stop and think: We are sitting here, in November 2025, in the middle (or the beginning-middle) of a credible investigation into whether the president of the United States engaged in sex acts with underage girls. (And when media allies such as Megyn Kelly publicly try to finesse the differences between having sex with a 5-year-old versus having sex with a 15-year-old, that’s not a good sign.)

There’s still plenty of reason to think we’ll never get a satisfactory answer about Trump’s place in Epstein’s grotesque constellation of decadent elites. Trump still has a number of roadblocks to put in the way of getting to the point of the files being released. First and foremost, there’s the Senate. Because once the House votes to release the files, then the Senate has to. I haven’t seen much handicapping on this yet. But it would have to clear the 60-vote cloture hurdle, meaning that 13 Republicans would have to vote with the Democrats to bring the matter to final passage.

Then, of course, even if it does pass the Senate, Trump can veto it. At that point, two-thirds of each House would be required to override the veto. And even then, if all that happens, there’s still Bondi. She could just say, No, I’m not going to do it. Yes, that would be defying an act of Congress. Do you really have trouble picturing her doing that?

Of course, if this gets to that point, we’ll have a major national scandal on our hands, for one simple reason that will be crystal clear to a comfortable majority of the American people: If Trump and his goons are going to those lengths to keep these files from being made public, then he must obviously have something bad to hide.

That’s what makes this different from every other Trumpian contest of wills. In his battles with Democrats, with woke universities, with liberal law firms, with people he doesn’t like being in America, he’s always had a position that some percentage of Americans found compelling, for whatever reason. That’s why they cheer his bullying and don’t care about his lies.

This, however, is different. He’s not defending anything that could remotely be called a principle, and he’s not slaying any America-hating dragons. He’s just covering up his own potential monstrous crimes. Given the way we’ve already seen this issue divide MAGA land, even some percentage of Trump’s hard-shell base will surely see the difference.

Zohran Mamdani is off to a solid start as mayor-elect. The transition team he named the day after winning has garnered generally positive coverage, from what I’ve seen. It’s anchored by four women, three of whom are City Hall veterans—one comes from the Bill de Blasio administration, while the other two, more intriguingly, served under the very non-Mamdani-like Eric Adams and Mike Bloomberg. The fourth is Lina Khan, who was Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair. She is a hero to liberals and something—well, let’s say—other than that to a lot of capitalist-class types, so her involvement sends a reassuring signal to the base and presumably a healthy little warning shot across the bow of the Good Ship One Percent.

Mamdani will soon have a massive city to run, more than 300,000 employees to manage, and a budget north of $100 billion to execute and carry out. The New York City government is a sprawling Leviathan that’s larger than many state governments—just scroll through this list and have a look-see.

I of course don’t cover all this closely. But I once did, and for a long time, under the mayoralties of Ed Koch (the sunset years), David Dinkins, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Bloomberg. I never had a desk in City Hall’s Room 9, the cluttered squat where the reporters were based, but I spent a lot of time down there and knew dozens of deputy mayors and commissioners and lower-level appointees, and I think I still know a bit about how it all works. In addition, I still remember a thing or two about how the New York media and its tabloid subculture operate.

And on the basis of that, I can offer this educated conjecture with some confidence: Mamdani’s powerful enemies are lying in wait and surely already setting traps for him. Their biggest weapon won’t be anything having to do with socialism or Israel, the two topics that got the most attention during the campaign. It won’t even be crime, unless somehow crime suddenly spikes up, which seems unlikely.

Rather, it will be corruption and scandal. Why? Is it because Mamdani is on the make? No. It’s just a pitfall of big-city government. And New York is the biggest big-city government in the country, by a mile—a place where corruption and scandal are, or would seem to be and usually have been, inevitable. Mamdani and his people need to know this, and they need to build an administration that is as bulletproof against scandal as possible.

That means appointing people to high positions who are competent and honest. Ideology shouldn’t be a factor here. The head of the Department of Sanitation doesn’t need to know the difference between social democracy and democratic socialism. He or she needs to know how to pick up trash and clear snow—especially in the neighborhoods that went for Andrew Cuomo, because if the streets of Bayside or Midwood sit uncleared for a week after a snowstorm, the media, led of course by the New York Post, will rip him to shreds. It’s not fair, but it’s how it is.

Beyond that somewhat obvious example, there are three agencies in particular where I think Mamdani needs to make appointments (assuming he wants his own people) who’ll really mind the henhouse: the Department of Education; the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA; and the Health and Hospitals Corporation, or HHC.

These are all massive, well, corporations in their own right. The Department of Education, which was placed under mayoral control back when I was covering City Hall, is by far the largest: It has around 150,000 employees and a budget of nearly $40 billion and educates more than one million children. NYCHA has north of 10,000 employees and a budget of more than $5 billion and manages 335 properties that serve more than half a million people. The HHC has around 43,000 employees and a budget of $12 billion and runs 11 public hospitals and 30 community clinics.

In the time I covered New York, I saw scandals bubble up from these agencies and swallow mayors whole, at least for a little while. Ed Koch’s HHC guy faked his diploma and continued to lie about it, even at the press conference he called to set matters straight. David Dinkins’s NYCHA appointee spent an insane amount of money redecorating her office; I seem to recall something about a $3,000 sofa.

As for the Education Department, I’ll never forget the way one former schools chancellor, the capable and incorruptible Rudy Crew, once described his job to me (this is a very close paraphrase): Imagine you’re on one of those moving walkways. Then people start shooting arrows at you. Then the walkway starts moving faster and faster and faster. Then those arrows start coming at you much more rapidly, until they’re coming nonstop. That’s the job.

And he was just describing the job of schools chancellor, not mayor. Mamdani’s moving walkway is going to chug along at a ferocious rate from his first hour in office. And the people who want to see him fail are going to be scouring the three agencies I mentioned and others for any hint of scandal they can unearth.

Mamdani also needs to understand, as I hope and assume he already does, the extent to which the right-wing Post drives the entire New York news cycle and has for years. They can have all the fun they want with hammers and sickles, as they did the day after Mamdani won. That won’t really matter that much. But if they can sink their canines into a juicy scandal—especially one that reveals the socialist to be a “hypocrite,” which the right loves more than anything—he’ll have big trouble.

So he needs to do two things. First, appoint honest, competent, no-bullshit people to run these vast agencies, people who’ll keep an eye out for any signs of corruption. Second, devote a decent chunk of every day to monitoring these agencies himself—grilling the deputy mayors who oversee them, calling the agency heads, making unexpected visits to their facilities, communicating that he won’t tolerate corruption of any kind.

And what if one of these spot inspections reveals corruption? My advice: Bring it into the light. Rather than covering it up or quietly moving a bad actor out of their post, get in front of reporters and tell them what you found and what you did about it. Be forthright and take responsibility—because that’s the sturdy foundation of the new brand of politics you want to build.

If Mamdani can demonstrate that a government of the left can be ruthlessly honest and reasonably efficient, he’ll have proven something important and accomplished something big, even if he never opens a single grocery store.

Saturday is November 1—the day open enrollment begins on the Obamacare exchanges, and thus the day that those 20 million people will start learning in specific terms how much their health care premiums are going to increase. It is also the day that the Trump administration will stop paying SNAP benefits, the nutritional assistance program that helps 42 million Americans buy food for themselves and their families, at an average of around $175 a month. It will do this despite the presence of a $6 billion reserve fund to cover food stamp emergencies, which the administration argued in court Thursday it couldn’t or wouldn’t spend because this is not an emergency. Or the right kind of emergency. Or something.

In addition, it will be the thirty-second day of the current government shutdown (the longest was 35 days, during Donald Trump’s first term). It will also mark 51 days since the House of Representatives, under Speaker Mike Johnson, has cast a vote. And it will be 38 days since the election of Democrat Adelita Grijalva to the Arizona House seat held by her father without her yet being sworn in, a situation about which Johnson, who by law must perform the ceremony, has told lie after pathetic lie. He has kept the House out of session and delayed her swearing in for one reason alone, which everyone knows: She’ll be the 218th vote to release the files relating to Jeffrey Epstein.

So these are Mike Johnson’s Christian values, as Paul Krugman put it on his Substack Tuesday: “It sounds crazy to say that Republicans are making children go hungry to protect pedophiles, but it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of the situation.”

It’s a 100 percent reasonable interpretation. If Johnson weren’t paralyzed by the looming Epstein vote, which he wouldn’t have the power to block from coming to the floor, the House could be in session, voting, and it could have done something about getting those SNAP benefits to people. In fact, the only factor that makes Krugman’s interpretation an other-than-reasonable one is that Republicans, given their long-standing and ferocious hostility to food stamps and every program that makes poor people’s burden a bit lighter, might not agree to vote for emergency spending. They’ve been trying and sometimes succeeding at making deep cuts to this program for nearly 15 years.

Many people have pointed out that Republicans are harming their own constituents, since many SNAP recipients are rural and white. People point this out as if the Republicans don’t know this, and telling them would make them go, “Oh, heck, we forgot, thank you, we better go change our ways. Praise Jesus.” News flash: They know. They just don’t care.

And their president certainly doesn’t care. Initially, the Department of Agriculture had said that the emergency fund would be tapped in case November 1 came and went without the government reopening. But then the department reversed course. And so the Trump administration was in court Thursday arguing that the reserve fund was there for natural disasters only.

Funny thing—Trump has moved around hundreds of millions of dollars to pay the troops, which is fine, and to pay the masked and unbadged men rounding up many innocent people for deportation, which is very much not fine. He also sent $20 billion to his neofascist pal in Argentina to help him win an election and prop up his regime—a bailout, The New York Times reported, that will personally benefit at least two friends of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But it won’t use money to feed poor people that is just sitting there for that very purpose.

As for the premiums under Obamacare, we’ve seen a few early numbers. November 1 brings a double whammy: the normal yearly increases as the reenrollment period begins, and the end of extra subsidies passed during the pandemic if Congress doesn’t renew them. The New York Times found a woman in Oregon who has been paying $459 a month and who next year will have to start paying $1,059 a month, with a pulverizing deductible of $7,100. Another woman from California was set to see her costs rise from $865 a month to $1,965.

Not that the Republicans care about this in practice either. But in theory, at least, Mike Johnson could hold votes on this matter too. But that would involve calling the House back into session, which would mean—according to his own worthless promises—that he’d have to seat Grijalva, and that’s a nonstarter. He has to protect those people whose names appear in those files—or at least one person’s. After all, who can forget the imperishable New Testament chapter wherein Jesus said to let the poor children go hungry and the undeserving poor take ill and die for the sake of protecting sexual predators?

These people are beyond immoral.

Inevitably in these situations, there’s a lot of talk about which party is “winning” the shutdown. So fine, let’s play that dull game for a bit. I’ll make two points.

First: I do not understand why the Democrats haven’t been shouting about Grijalva nonstop, making sure America knows how many days it’s been since her election, and why this is happening to her. They do it, sort of, in the same way that they do a lot of things, sort of. Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego did confront Johnson, once, and say, “Stop covering up for pedophiles.” Johnson said, “That’s ridiculous.” But different Democrats should be making Johnson say that every day.

Second, I suspect maybe the Democrats will give in next week. They hope that outrage about the lack of food stamps and especially the exploding health care subsidies will force the Republicans’ hand, and they might be right about that. But more likely, once actual people start actually suffering, it’s the Democrats who will sue for peace, because Democrats actually give a couple of shits about that, whereas Republicans couldn’t care less, because not caring less is their brand (unless those putting in the suffering time include, say, fossil fuel CEOs).

So maybe the Democrats will do that. But I think even if they do, and the shallow Politico “win the day” verdicts agree that the GOP won, Democrats can still win down the road. They fought for lower health care subsidies. They fought for the federal workforce. They fought for hungry families. They fought for the 812,000 residents of the 7th district of Arizona. OK, they lost, in the short term. But they fought.

Three months from now, when millions of Americans’ health care premiums have shot through the roof and millions of others have given up their coverage because they can no longer afford it, well, the Democrats can come back and show voters that this is what “victory” looks like, according to this alleged new party of the working class.

I was going to write one more liberal column expressing outrage about what Donald Trump has done to the White House this week, but then I thought: Why? What would be the point? The people who would agree with me would agree with me, and the people who wouldn’t wouldn’t, and the world would go on its merry way.

Of course the president’s destruction of the East Wing is beyond outrageous. It’s completely illegal and un-American—not just un-American, but anti-American: the unilateral, I-don’t-give-a-fuck desecration of a civic shrine that belonged to all the people. Democracies have appointed bodies that oversee such things. Dictators, actual and aspiring, ignore all that. Call it overreaction if you must, but I’m sure I’m hardly the only American to google “Albert Speer Germania” this week.

And yet, it’s probably only the third-most-outrageous thing Trump has done since Monday. To place, in horse-racing parlance, I’d put the pardon of Changpeng Zhao, who “invested” in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency start-up and who pleaded guilty in 2023 to allowing his Binance crypto exchange to be used—get this now, and imagine a Democrat issuing a pardon to such a person—by, among other unsavories, Hamas’s military wing (not just plain old Hamas—its military wing!).

And taking the gold medal this week would be the $230 million extortion that the sitting president of the United States demanded from the Department of Justice. (I cannot believe I just wrote that sentence.) A Pahlavi-level tacky ballroom can always be torn down; these other corrupt precedents cannot be undone.

No—one more outraged liberal column won’t add much this week. The more interesting thing I’ve been thinking about lately is not the leader who perpetrates these acts but the people who allow them and cheer them. Because this is the truly maddening question, from a small-d democratic perspective. Authoritarian-fascist demagogues come along sometimes; that’s the world. But democratic societies stop them. Why hasn’t ours stopped Trump?

We are cursed with four categories of fascism enablers. The interesting question about each group is not merely what they are doing, but why: What motivates them? Let’s go through them.

First, obviously, are the Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court. Call them 1a and 1b, because I believe they have different motivations. The Republicans in the House and the Senate are mostly just tiny cowards who fear Trump, a possible primary challenger from the right, and most of all the MAGA base. The video clips that I hope they play over and over in future high school civics classes, assuming these thugs can’t fully erase our democracy, will be the ones of GOP legislators scurrying for the elevators as they deny having knowledge of Trump’s latest assault. Against stern competition, House Speaker Mike Johnson, the tiniest coward of them all, is the most pathetic exemplar of this: “I’m not gonna comment on something I haven’t read, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” he told reporters this week when they asked him about the DOJ bribe.

The six conservatives on the Supreme Court, in contrast, aren’t cowards. They know what they’re doing, and they have no voters to fear. We must assume that they are consciously creating the America they want. That’s most true of the two deepest reactionaries, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. But to varying degrees, it’s true of the other four conservatives, John Roberts very much included. The record they are leaving behind of these terse, barely explained pro-Trump shadow docket decisions will be their legacy—of shame, if we manage to restore democracy after Trump, or of glory, if we descend into a Hunger Games society.

Group two consists of the cowards in the corporate and business worlds who surely know on some level that Trump is dangerous. But they stay silent, for, I think, one of two reasons, or some combination thereof. One, they fear Trumpian retribution. Two, they want their taxes cut. Have a gander at this list of donors to Trump’s razing of the East Wing for his ballroom. Talk about a basket of deplorables. Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone. The Fanjul brothers, the megarich sugar magnates and welfare queens. Meta (Mark Zuckerberg). Amazon (Jeff Bezos). Palantir (Peter Thiel). Others are less blatantly offensive but obviously covering their corporate behinds. These are not by and large stupid people. On some level, they see what Trump is doing to this country. They just care more about other things.

Third come the right-wing “media” outlets that serve as Trump’s propaganda arms. Among this group again I think we see dual motivations. The first is the kind of cynicism exposed in those publicly released Fox News depositions relating to the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit: Trump is good for business, so they lie for him to make money. The second motivation is more genuine: They truly despise liberals and liberalism and think we must be stopped at all costs, even when it involves lying to their audiences for a higher purpose. This mixture of the insincere and the sincere may seem incongruous, but actually the two motivations mesh together perfectly: The insincerity ensures that they defend and minimize every single thing Trump does, while the sincerity drives their coverage of Democrats and liberals, although it too is salted with plenty of cynicism, as when they try to persuade their viewers that some kooky neo-Marxist tenured postmodernist professor stands in for American liberalism.

And finally—the MAGA faithful. Here let’s distinguish between the soft Trump supporters and the true red-hots. Of the 40 or 42 percent of Americans who still say they approve of Trump’s job performance, I’m guessing that a third or so are soft supporters. Some are swing voters. Some are evangelicals for whom a Democratic vote is basically out of the question. Some remember the first Trump economy fondly. There are lots of different motivations there, but what they have in common is that they don’t necessarily consider him America’s savior.

But that other two-thirds … I hesitate to say these are bad human beings. But their rage at certain developments in the United States over these last 30-odd years is so overpowering that their civic and small-d democratic instincts have been buried by the antagonisms Trump has brought to the surface of American politics. They once knew, or they know, or a part of them knows, that no actual leader should be calling human beings “vermin.” But that empathic impulse isn’t much match for rage, which can be quite exhilarating and liberating (we all must admit that we know this feeling from personal experience).

How deep does that rage run? We don’t yet know. We have yet to see its bottom. Tearing down part of the White House may lose him a portion of the softs, as polls suggest. But it won’t bother the red-hots, who’ll leap to point out, as I saw some nincompoop do on Newsmax Thursday night, that what Trump did was really no different from Barack Obama ordering the building of his basketball court. The pardon of Zhao is in fact the liberation of the crypto industry from the shackles imposed by Sleepy Joe. The DOJ bribe is money due to Trump fair and square. And so on and so on.

I sometimes wonder what it will take for some of these folks to peel away. What if ICE agents just start shooting people? They already are; but I mean en masse. I doubt even that will change anything. Things will change when the rage stops being exhilarating, and I doubt that happens anytime soon.

It takes all four of these groups to sustain Trumpism. If Republicans in Congress were doing their constitutional job, Trump would still be Trump but the legislative branch would have established the reality of limits. The corporate class could have said to him: We too know that we thrive best under democratic norms, and we cannot tolerate you breaking those. The right-wing media could still be basically pro-Trump while adhering more closely to the principles of conservatism than to genuflection before one man. And finally, his base too could at least from time to time acknowledge error on his part and demand that he adjust course.

But none of these things are happening. And it’s hard to see them happening anytime soon. Bad as this week was, it’s not close to the bottom we’re going to hit.

If you’ve heard any Republicans talk about Saturday’s No Kings marches across the country, you know what they’re calling them. House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday referred to the marches collectively as a “hate America rally.” He continued: “Let’s see who shows up for that. I bet you see pro-Hamas supporters. I bet you see antifa types. I bet you see the Marxists in full display.” Many others on the right have echoed these sentiments over and over, and Fox News and the other state propaganda outlets have followed suit, thus washing the brains of their viewers into accepting, once again, the exact opposite of reality.

You will probably find the occasional Marxist or antifa type or even the odd Hamas enthusiast marching somewhere tomorrow, because this is still a free country, and people aren’t asked a series of litmus-test questions before they’re allowed to join the fray. But overwhelmingly, these are marches of mainstream Americans. These are marches of teachers, lawyers, laborers, service workers, accountants, nurses, Pilates instructors, bank tellers—everyone. These are marches of people who love their country and are horrified at what President Donald Trump and the Republicans are doing to it. These are marches of patriots. The real, actual, thoughtful, quiet, modest, non-flag-hugging patriots (because history teaches us over and over that the people who need to make a show of hugging the flag are often the people who hate a country’s true ideals but need to fool folks into thinking the opposite so they can trample on those ideals and have it called patriotism).

Have a gander at this map of march locations for tomorrow. There are 16 in Wyoming—a state notoriously pulsing with Hamasniks. There are 18 in Oklahoma, that veritable hornet’s nest of antifa hooliganism. There are another 18 in my home state of West Virginia (go, Morgantown contingent!), where Marxism has obviously taken deep root among an unsuspecting populace.

Once again, these are not mere lies from Johnson et alia. I make this distinction from time to time, and it’s worth making again here. A lie is a mere denial of truth—“I never said that” or “No, Mom, that isn’t my pot, I was just holding it for Mark.” What Republicans are doing here, as they do with such regularity, is more than lie. They invert the truth. They say its exact opposite. They do so with two express intentions: to make people believe that their political foes are doing that which they themselves are trying to get away with, and to make it easier to get away with defiling the Constitution.

But don’t ask me. Let’s ask James Madison. Imagine that the chief author of the Constitution and Bill of Rights could watch tomorrow’s events and observe the post-event spin. What would he think? Whose side would he be on? It’s obvious. He’d be with the marchers. And it’s not even close.

How do we know this? For a lot of reasons, but perhaps chief among them is Federalist 47, penned by Madison, which discussed the importance of separation of powers.

One of the hallmarks of Trump 2.0—and indeed, from a constitutional point of view, perhaps the hallmark—is the way that, as Trump has made so many moves to concentrate power in his own hands, the other branches of government have supinely gone along with absolutely everything. Congress under Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune is a joke, and as for the Supreme Court, well, it’s too tragic to be a joke.

We’ve seen many examples of both branches bending over for Trump at every turn, but arguably, the most egregious one just happened: Trump diverting other monies to pay troops during the shutdown. As TNR’s Matt Ford shows here, it’s blatantly illegal. The Constitution says clearly that Congress appropriates such funds. Trump claimed the power to do so as commander in chief, but he has no such power.

The Republican Congress has lain down and said fine. And the really pathetic thing here is that Congress could move a bill directing the payment of troops during the shutdown. It would pass easily. But that can’t happen because Johnson won’t call the House into session, because there’s a new Democrat waiting to be sworn in whose seating has potential ramifications for Trump with respect to the Jeffrey Epstein affair. Again, it all revolves around the wishes and perceived needs of Dear Leader.

As for the Supreme Court, it has given Trump practically everything he’s asked for. It has defied him on a couple of minor occasions, but even on the most notable of those, its holding was vague and pusillanimous: It ruled in early April that the administration must “facilitate” the return to the country of Kilmar Abrego García, but it also held that a district court judge had gone too far in ruling that the administration had to “effectuate” his return (he was finally returned to the United States in June). But on almost all other matters, the court has given Trump exactly what he’s wanted. And this week, during the Voting Rights Act hearings, we saw a court majority working nakedly to advance the partisan goals of one political party and its president.

Now—back to Madison.

Federalist 47 was Madison’s brief to the citizenry in favor of the concept of separation of powers—and his argument to them that powers were sufficiently separated in this new Constitution so as to guard against tyranny. Because tyranny was his great concern. In fact, he wrote: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective [emphasis mine], may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

This accumulation has not, I admit, happened in a legal sense. But in practice, this is precisely where we are today. So had Madison been among us these last nine months to observe what Trump and the Republicans and the court’s majority have done, there is no question that he would say: “Yes. This is tyranny.”

I asked Michael Klarman of Harvard Law School, author of the amazing book The Framers’ Coup about the Constitutional Convention, for his thoughts on the relevance of all this. He emailed back:

Madison and other Framers believed that “ambition would counteract ambition,” by which they meant largely that Congress would check an autocratically inclined executive. Madison and the other Framers were not anticipating the development of a party system, which actually happened quite soon after the founding. Today, all that matters to Republican members of Congress is that they support Trump, whether he is hiding something in the Epstein files, nominating incompetent people to run agencies, destroying congressionally created agencies, murdering people off the coast of Venezuela, or sending troops into American cities to oppress the people. Cowardly, toadying members of Congress are providing no check whatsoever on a tyrannical executive. It is an abandonment of their oaths, really no different from their predecessors who resigned their positions to join the Confederacy in 1860–61.

And the courts? Klarman wrote, “Lower court judges are doing a great job in trying to check that executive. But the Supreme Court—out of some combination of fear, calculated effort not to be defied, and underlying agreement with much of Trump’s agenda—has mostly been complicit in Trump’s authoritarian project.”

This is tyranny. We’re not lurching toward tyranny. It doesn’t loom on some hypothetical horizon. It’s here. Right now.

Madison was right about tyranny. But obviously he was wrong that the Constitution was strong enough to guard against executive accumulation of power. He assumed, as Klarman put it, that the other branches would do their jobs. But Patrick Henry, the noted anti-federalist, turns out to have had the more sober view. In his speech against ratification, he anticipated people such as Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, and John Roberts:

Where are your checks in this government? Your strongholds will be in the hands of your enemies. It is on a supposition that your American governors shall be honest, that all the good qualities of this government are founded; but its defective and imperfect construction puts it in their power to perpetrate the worst of mischiefs, should they be bad men; and, sir, would not all the world, from the Eastern to the Western hemisphere, blame our distracted folly in resting our rights upon the contingency of our rulers being good or bad?

The Americans who are marching Saturday are the Americans who embrace Madison’s principle but have sadly come to acknowledge Henry’s insight. And they—not Trump, not Johnson, not Roberts—are the people who truly love this country.

Johnson also said Wednesday that Saturday’s marchers are “the people who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic, and that’s what we’re here doing every single day.” As ever with these frauds, he was talking about himself. He may be dense enough not even to know it. But Saturday’s marchers know it all too well.

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.