The Nine Worst Trump Scandals of 2025

As longtime readers may recall, I’ve always wondered if Donald Trump truly intended to win the 2016 election. Howard Stern asked him why he wanted to take the world’s hardest job when he “only had about 10 good years left before he ‘starts to drool’ on himself”—which now seems pretty prophetic. Weeks into his first term, Trump was already giving melancholy interviews about how he missed his old life. It really seemed that his first presidential run was a goof that went sideways, to the detriment of all of us.

But as for his effort to reclaim the Oval Office? I’ve never wondered why he wanted back in. The second time out, he ran on a combination of desperation to avoid jail, a desire for revenge, and unmitigated avarice. He pretty much ran on a platform of looting the country and punishing his perceived enemies. With the gift of immunity from the Supreme Court, he spent the first year of his second term taking bigger swings at double-dealing, committing more brazen acts of corruption. There are far too many examples to do an exhaustive, let alone authoritative, list of crimes. But these are the ones that stuck with me particularly in a year of misrule.

The UAE crypto bribe: It’s not every day one of TNR’s staff writers gets to compare a scandal to Teapot Dome, but that’s how Tim Noah described the shady dealings that went down between Trump and his shadowy backers from the United Arab Emirates, who—in what’s been characterized as the largest cryptocurrency transaction in history—made a $2 billion stablecoin purchase in World Liberty Financial, which is essentially the president’s personal crypto slush fund. With quid like that, you knew that a sizable pro quo was to come. Sure enough, Trump permitted the UAE to import a larger quantity of U.S.-produced AI computer chips than it was allowed under the Biden administration. Simple enough scandal to understand, right? Well, as Noah later noted, the business press seems to not get it.

Plane and simple corruption: So, it’s kind of hard to do the whole “nothing to see here!” routine when the nothing is a luxury 747 that your Qatari friends want to off-load on the president. Trump tried to sell this gift as the new Air Force One, a generous gesture in return for all the money the United States has spent providing security for our nominal Gulf allies. The plane became the subject of a long-simmering dispute, as Democrats have attempted to block it from being used as Air Force One. Regardless, as Alex Shephard noted, the debasement in this arrangement exceeded the mere quid pro quo: “Trump wants to be treated as a king, and Qatar is playing ball.”

Death of USAID: Russell Vought, Elon Musk, and their wrecking crew of DOGE bros spent the first half of the year visiting destruction upon the civil service; the damage done is something we’ll all be feeling for a long time. But the most damnable part of their legacy may be the dismantling of foreign aid agencies like the United States Agency for International Development. A Boston University study found that the agency’s demise had “already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.” “We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” wrote the Harvard School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande.

Bombs over Latin America: It’s giving Wag the Dog, if you ask me. The administration, seemingly hot to bring back neoconservative military conquest, soft-launched its latest regime change war in Venezuela by making indiscriminate attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific waters off of Central America. These attacks, all undertaken without a jot of congressional oversight and on the dubious premise that the boats were packed with fentanyl bound for the United States, were murderous on their own. But the news that the military was ordered to strike an already stricken boat in a “double tap” attack to kill any survivors has raised the specter of war crimes—and in a way that even many Republicans don’t seem ready to countenance.

Trump’s Binance buddy gets a pardon: Changpeng Zhao began this year the disgraced former CEO of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, having done prison time for, as the Biden DOJ put it, “failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program,” violating the Bank Security Act, and allowing money to flow freely to a host of bad actors, including “terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers.” But Zhao, having forfeited the right to run Binance, wanted back in. So he used his connections to Trump’s family and inner circle to secure a pardon that would let him run the show again. In return, Zhao showered his attention on World Liberty Financial—using Binance’s leverage to enrich Trump’s private crypto fund. TNR’s Tim Noah was positively apoplectic about the shady arrangement.

Chips to China: Speaking of Tim Noah and apoplexy: It’s probably not great that one firm, Nvidia, has come to possess such godlike, market-moving power. Its outsize importance to the global economy had Noah fingering it as one of the major pillars to crumble, when he gamed out a potential Trump stock market crash back in October. Trump’s been doing what he can to boost Nvidia’s fortunes, however: This year, the president broke with long-standing national security tradition and announced that he was permitting the firm to sell its H200 chips to China. As The New York Times’ David Sanger noted, the deal—the fruits of “intense lobbying” from Nvidia CEO and White House gadfly Jensen Huang—raised a basic question: “If the chips that power the most advanced technology can be sold to the United States’ chief technological, military and financial competitor, where is the new line drawn?” That’s probably the least of Trump’s concerns, however: The deal also guaranteed that “25 percent of all the revenues from the sales would go to the United States,” in yet another case of this administration’s affection for fascist corporatism.

The continuing January 6 crime wave: Every once in a while, I like to check in with the people who were given presidential pardons by Trump for their crimes of sacking the U.S. Capitol and attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election by force. Here’s one who killed a person in a drunk-driving incident. Here’s another. Here’s the guy who plotted to kill the FBI agents who investigated him for the Capitol riot. Here’s the alleged child molester who tried to buy his victim’s silence with fictitious “January 6 reparations” money. Here’s another alleged child sex predator who at least made no claims about pending reparations. Here’s a man arrested for allegedly threatening to kill Hakeem Jeffries. Here’s the guy who’s inexplicably not yet been arrested for stalking and threatening Jamie Raskin. What’s this? Another alleged child sex predator? This guy who was arrested for absconding with “industrial copper wire valued at tens of thousands of dollars” seems quaint by comparison. Anyway, there are scores of these repeat offenders, so I think we can all agree that these pardons were a spectacular idea.

ICE’s war on U.S. citizens: The administration has coupled its turning loose of January 6 criminals on our streets with the incessant plucking of law-abiding citizens off those same streets. An October report from ProPublica brought the gory details: “More than 170 cases this year where citizens were detained at raids and protests,” including 20 instances in which citizens “reported being held for over a day without being able to call their loved ones or a lawyer.” As I wrote around the same time, Trump shares (dis)credit with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In his concurring opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, Kavanaugh etched his name into infamy by contending, “If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter.” As ProPublica’s Nicole Foy wrote, this “is far from the reality many citizens have experienced”:

Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.

The ultimate symbol of Trumpian corruption: The fact of the matter is that the White House actually could use a ballroom. But what it’s getting, in the form of Trump’s teardown of the East Wing to make way for his planned monument to his bottomless ego, is something that ably sums up the despicable nature of this presidency and its cronies. As TNR’s Matt Ford wrote in a lengthy jeremiad on the topic, “The raw spectacle of Trump tearing a hole in the White House to hang out with his rich friends is already a potent symbol of his presidency.… At every level, the entire project may be the perfect summation of what his administration has been like for the country.” Perhaps the one good thing about the ballroom is that Democratic presidential contenders can compete with one another over who will tear it down best.

I could go on like this: And I probably should. But I would go on forever. There’s Signalgate, the firing of numerous inspectors general, and the extortion campaigns against businesses, universities, and Big Law firms. Robert F. Kennedy’s deadly anti-vaccine policies are a mass-casualty crime in the making. We’re building concentration camps and shipping people to gulags. We’re threatening Canada and Greenland. Trump’s tariffs are ruining Christmas. He stole $230 million for himself. And the only reason I haven’t mentioned l’affaire Jeffrey Epstein until now is that it’s been so ever-present in our lives that I don’t actually need to remind you about it.

But the biggest scandal of all is something Trump didn’t create. It’s this country’s piss-poor legacy of holding the powerful to account—a major factor in both Trump’s rise to power and the foundation of the era of elite impunity in which we are all mired. So whether your favorite Trump scandal made the cut here or not, keep its memory close, nurture your fury, and seek out the future leaders who will not shrink from the task of holding Trump and his enablers accountable for their howling criminality—who will push the envelope to bring retributive justice when their time in power comes.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here. Power Mad will return in 2026.

In case you missed it, President Donald Trump fell asleep on television this week. There he was, in the middle of a meeting with the members of his Cabinet, completely set adrift on memory bliss as the pool cameras rolled, locked on his dozy face. Before you worry too much, rest assured that this wasn’t a meeting in which matters of national importance were discussed, but rather one of those now-regular occasions in which the president’s underlings gather to see who can offer him the most flamboyant praise. Still, it is rather worrying that not even these regular sessions of compliment bukkake can sustain the president’s waking interest.

Or, at least it should be worrying? I really hate to play the “age card,” folks, but back in my day (2023 and 2024), I distinctly recall that a president with apparent mental infirmities was nigh unto scandalous. Biden’s famous struggles were a national catastrophe that led many journalists to come a-ridin’ atop their high horses to bother their readers about how they got caught flat-footed by the fact that President Joe Biden, nominated at the age of 77, somehow continued to age. Why had no one warned them? (Probably because the same media, back when this all didn’t seem to matter, ritually executed the one guy at the Democratic debates who did.)

For a press so dedicated to sanewashing the Trump administration’s open sewer of corruption, the kid gloves treatment still seems the order of the day. This week, The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire published a lengthy exegesis of the “President Trump is increasingly isolated” variety, titled “The Bubble-Wrapped President.” In the piece, Lemire reports that Trump has “dramatically scaled back speeches, public events, and domestic travel compared with the first year of his initial term.” He is described therein as “distracted,” “out of touch,” focused on matters not “high on voters’ minds,” and showing “little willingness to acknowledge” problems gripping the country.   

The piece treats this mostly as some kind of inscrutable mystery, a tale told by the thinking-face emoji. The real story is moving between the lines: The president is fully checked out because he’s old, enfeebled, and his brain is slowly turning into pasta e fagioli. The president moldering in a narcoleptic haze as Marco Rubio yammers away at his side is the same guy who doesn’t seem to remember why he pardoned former Honduran president and celebrated drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández, or what part of his body was recently subjected to an MRI. 

There is plenty of room for the discourse to shift, however—and some evidence that it might. The New York Times treats the matter with somewhat less puzzlement than The Atlantic, noting Trump’s advanced age and planting a few red flags about his health; its piece garnered an outraged Truth Social post from Trump after publication. In one of the few articles to actually take on the matter of Trump’s obvious infirmity frontally, The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt seems exasperated that a president who has obvious trouble “completing a thought” has “largely been saved the same examination” so regularly foisted on Biden.

If The Atlantic limits that examination to a single aside, in which Trump’s lack of acuity is likened to “the same low energy move for which [he] used to mock Joe Biden,” the latter half of the piece does at least present a compelling reason why more attention to a fully noped-out chief executive might be a matter of some alarm: The vacuum Trump is leaving in the White House needs to be filled, and it’s being filled by “enablers” rather than people who might “[moderate] some of his more extreme impulses.” Or, as someone less committed to euphemism euthanasia might put it, it’s being filled by utter ghouls: a Pentagon head who’s in over his head and spiraling out as he commits war crimes, a Health and Human Services secretary who’s bringing Lysenkoism back, an FBI director crashing out because no one brought him a cool jacket to wear—and all the rest hopped up on völkisch nationalism, pulling Black people out of their cars in Minneapolis and warring with Sabrina Carpenter.

In the days leading up to the 2024 presidential election, The New Republic’s Matt Ford tuned in to watch Trump’s campaign event at Madison Square Garden—a gritty reboot of the 1939 German-American Bund rally for fascism—and sounded an alarm about what the next Trump White House was going to look like. “The Madison Square Garden rally,” Ford wrote, “showed how much of Trumpism is about satisfying the basest, crudest, and most hateful impulses in American life—and how much his acolytes can’t wait to wield the federal government to do it.” The issue at hand is no longer one in which we worry there aren’t enough moderating figures in Trump’s life—it’s that all of the monsters Trump brought into his administration now have a free hand to run the country.

Those who served in Biden’s inner circle aren’t going to be remembered fondly, but no matter how enfeebled the president was, the country did not have the same problem we do now. The Biden White House wasn’t packed stem to stern with people dedicated to looting the country, terrorizing children, turning masked goons out onto the streets of American cities, or using the Department of Homeland Security’s social media presence to—as administration sources told Zeteo—“intentionally use popular music from vocally anti-Trump performing artists in order to trigger a negative response from a famous liberal and provide further amplification of neo-Confederate memes.”

Y’all, it really seems like the president sliding sideways into the mud puddle of his few remaining faculties as his frantic acolytes rain down pain and duplicity on everyone is something of a big story. Or at least it used to be. Perhaps one day soon, it will be a matter worthy of attention again. Because the way things are going, I’m expecting him to either fall asleep or wander off during his next State of the Union address.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

This week, we all moved a couple steps closer to finally getting a peek at what’s been the year’s biggest political MacGuffin: the Epstein files. The long-delayed swearing in of Arizona Representative Adelita Grijalva allowed the pro-disclosure caucus in the House to finally hit the magic number of “yea” votes on their discharge petition ordering their release; opposition in the House essentially collapsed after that, and the Senate used its “deem and pass” power to ratify the lower house’s decision in advance. The bill now goes to President Trump’s desk. He is expected to sign it into law and then attempt to use the contents to wage merciless war on Democrats.

All of this may come to nothing. There’s no reason to believe Trump’s Justice Department—which essentially operates as Trump’s own private legal counsel—will treat these materials with judiciousness. Frankly, you shouldn’t be surprised if they contain little in the way of smoking guns. Of Epstein’s culpability there can be no doubt; the rest is just suspicion. Conservatives have darkly warned their liberal counterparts: “Be careful what you wish for; what if this implicates a bunch of crusty old Democrats?”

To which I say, “Don’t threaten me with a good time.” As I’ve watched the Epstein story unravel across the media—through the shouting of lawmakers and the flood of tawdry emails dumped in the press—I’ve not been able to ignore how it’s all one big pile of rot at the center of polite society. My TNR colleague, Matt Ford, expressed similar sentiments in a recent piece, confessing that the truly despairing thing about the Epstein affair was that the whole idea of civic virtue seems to have been murdered, and in its place, a culture of elite impunity has risen.

For my part, I’m less worried about whether some Democratic Party luminary catches an Epstein stray and more concerned about whether Democrats bungle the opportunity to attack these corrupt arrangements and the presidential administration that has made them its North Star. This iron is, at the moment, particularly hot. A fresh Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday found that Trump’s approval ratings had hit startling new lows, with respondents particularly “unhappy about his handling of the high cost of living and the investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”

Epstein and the economy—these are the twin albatrosses around Trump’s neck. The question, however, is whether Democrats will have the stomach and the sense to exploit both avenues to Trump’s ruin. It may not seem like a problem, but Democrats seem pathologically averse to multitasking, which explains why they’re making the salience of grocery prices their priority to the exclusion of all other matters. So monomaniacal is this approach that at various times over the past year, Democratic lawmakers have called other concerns “distractions”—up to and including Trump’s rampaging paramilitary forces.

Let’s give Democrats their due: Their affordability arguments passed electoral tests earlier this month. And the administration is spooked: Trump and his allies are attempting wan affordability arguments of their own. It’s been a while, but Democrats are suddenly calling the tune in Washington.

That the Epstein matter has wounded Trump at the same time is a fortunate coincidence for Democrats seeking a skeleton key to unlock a larger argument about the harm Trump’s done to our republic: The ICE goons on our street, Trump’s White House teardown, the high cost of living, the administration’s various decisions to hurt people during the shutdown, all the weird ghouls occupying executive branch positions that once went to qualified civil servants, and the forever stench of oligarchic swampwater suffusing public life—all of these issues roiling the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people lie at the nexus of elite impunity.

There are no distractions here, no options to weigh; this is all one single story—much like Epstein, powerful plutocratic interests have found their man in Trump, and together, they are driving the country to ruin for their own amusement and self-enrichment. Here’s how Ford captures it:

At its core, Trumpism is a permission structure for evil. It is the abolition of ethical norms and the erasure of moral authority. It defies checks and balances, rejecting the notion that power can be abused or corrupted because it justifies itself. Trumpism is not really about immigration, or inflation, or trade, or draining the swamp, or building the wall—it is ultimately about the dark thrill of abusing those whom its adherents consider to be inferiors, either directly or by proxy.

As I’ve noted before, Trumpism isn’t working, and people are growing angrier and angrier. According to the most recent NPR/PBS News Marist poll, Democrats have attained a 14-point lead over the GOP on the generic congressional ballot. The time to pummel these crooks is nigh, and they needn’t be precious about it. Think of it like this: Trumpism is the culmination of a crooked scheme that began nearly a half-century ago, in which the rich and powerful looted our wealth and tore up the civic fabric of this nation. Yes, like the Epstein affair suggests, it really is one big thieving cabal of plutocratic reprobates that has done us dirty. There is an opportunity now for Democrats with guts to crush these scumbags, and take back what they stole.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

The United States Senate: Can’t live with it, can’t burn it down (or so my lawyers caution me). Recently, I’ve had cause to ruminate on the upper house’s continued existence and the way its workings threaten our own. And then, this week, liberals were given new reason to rue the “cooling saucer of democracy,” as the Democratic Senate Surrender Subcommittee—apparently with the assent of Chuck Schumer—threw the wettest of blankets on a historically great week for the party by caving on the government shutdown, letting a bloodied Trump up off the canvas, and giving Republicans reason to exult.

Those exultations, according to a report from Zeteo, were just as Trumpian as you could imagine, with anonymous White House officials said to be “cackling” and “gratuitously using terms such as ‘losers’ and ‘pussies’ as they reveled in the relief from a shutdown that even President Trump acknowledged was getting Republicans ‘killed’ politically.” It’s a fitting reminder that there are actually two U.S. Senates in America—one that is committed to dismantling democracy, while the other is committed to a functioning government (sometimes to a fault). It’s also worth remembering that the divergent ways that Republican and Democratic senators discharge their duties is hardly a recent development, but rather baked into the two parties’ DNA.

Recent history paints a stark contrast between how GOP senators behave and how they use the Senate to advance long-term right-wing agenda items, and how Democrats approach the same projects. On February 13, 2016, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia slipped this mortal coil, and Democrats salivated at the prospect of President Barack Obama replacing him. These hopes ended up being short-lived, as the Senate was in the hands of Mitch McConnell. The Kentucky senator, who by then had mastered the art of thwarting the president’s ambitions, simply put the kibosh on advancing Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland, in a norm-breaking display of “preferring not to” that would make Bartleby the Scrivener blush.

Republican senators held the line, to the delight of their base, raising the salience of the Supreme Court vacancy in the presidential election. And once Donald Trump signaled that he was willing to simply follow the Federalist Society’s lead on judicial appointments, it became easy for many Republican elites to look past the fact that he was obviously a dumb asshole who didn’t belong anywhere near the Oval Office. Holding out in the face of public pressure helped McConnell secure lasting power for his party, a reward for keen strategic thinking.

As I was reminded this week, the key to unlocking the Democratic approach to the Senate can be found in 2006, when Connecticut voters nominated Ned Lamont to be the Democratic nominee for Senate, seemingly putting an end to incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman’s career. It didn’t go according to plan: With GOP support, Lieberman ran as an independent and won. But when Lieberman returned to the Senate, rather than knock him down a peg for his dalliances with the GOP, Democratic leaders allowed him to remain a senior member in good standing, with all the attendant chairmanships and rewards.

Lieberman repaid this generosity by repeatedly shivving his fellow Democrats—and we’re all still living with the consequences. As The New Republic’s Monica Potts recently detailed, the public option, which died at Lieberman’s hands, might have gone a long way to keeping today’s insurance premiums more affordable. (When you consider Lieberman’s weakening of Obamacare alongside his 2003 effort to create the Department of Homeland Security, there is so much current Trumpian misrule covered in his fingerprints.)

The differences between Republican and Democratic senators are largely reflective of the two parties’ approaches to politics. On the GOP side, you see an utter ruthlessness when it comes to wielding power, no fear of breaking norms or of the stern reproaches from official D.C.’s media nannies, and a complete dedication to long-term right-wing interests. The slings and arrows of denying Obama his Supreme Court nomination are easy to bear when everyone’s eyes are fully on the prize of taking over the high court for a generation.

Taken as a whole, it must be great to be a Republican voter. Their senators are advancing key ideological projects in concert with the conservative movement, pushing the envelope on what’s deemed to be polite, and training their base to expect Beltway norms to be dismantled in pursuit of their agenda. On the Democratic side, well, they’re not beating the charges that they are an insular party fully in thrall to the Iron Law of Institutions, which holds that “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.”

Democrats seem to treasure their tidy little debating society and its traditions and trappings far beyond any other political concern. They constantly undercut the idea that democracy is in peril by working hand in glove with the party that we are told is seeking to destroy the constitutional order. They rise in defense of the filibuster instead of their constituents and their democracy. And they piss away advantages, like a shutdown that was rattling the Trump presidency, instead of thinking strategically about the next step. (If caving was inevitable, why not force Trump to eat the pain of a ruined Thanksgiving, then step in to “save Christmas”?)

The Democratic senators’ faults shone brightly in the wake of the shutdown cave. It’s painfully obvious that the caucus maneuvered to protect its most vulnerable members from the votes to end the shutdown, instead sacrificing eight members who are not up for reelection in 2026. Schumer voted against reopening the government but is fooling nobody, multiple members are feigning anger at the result they actually sought, and no one is capable of telling the straight story of why they did what they did—probably because they are falling back on their one political idea: Let the GOP hurt people, then step in to collect the electoral winnings once the country is traumatized enough.

It’s all kabuki and prevarication, and no one is above suspicion. The Democrats opted to fund Trump’s government under unanimous consent; not one of them stepped forward to debate the merits further or use their beloved privileges to at least throw some sand in the gears. And as The American Prospect’s Whitney Curry Wimbish noted on Tuesday, it only takes one senator to put Schumer’s continued leadership up for a debate. As Daniel Schuman, executive director of the American Governance Institute, told Wimbish, “Most Senate experts would say it’s highly unlikely. But if the members are really pissed off, this is a mechanism they have.” That’s the big takeaway: While some may huff and puff for the cameras and their angry constituents, this caucus is not, in fact, pissed off enough—or at all.

Looking into the future, Republican voters are going to increasingly cherish the Senate, even as the Democratic base’s ire at the institution grows. As I’ve previously noted, the upper chamber’s malapportionment crisis—in which fewer and fewer voters are needed to construct durable Republican majorities—is only going to get worse. One study suggests that changing demographics could one day allow 30 percent of Americans to elect 70 of its senators—a cohort that will skew rural, white, and conservative.

Imagine a GOP-led Senate capable of convicting a Democratic president in an impeachment trial minutes after their being sworn in—this could be reality in some of your lifetimes. Not so much for the geriatric windbags of the Democratic caucus, but they can look into that bleak future and see a perfect arrangement: an inert superminority caucus, with cushy jobs and top-flight health care, Statler-and-Waldorfing their way into decades-long careers as stern letter writers and handwringing concern-havers. Why put up a fight when you’re getting exactly what you want?

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

There’s a rubric I’ve been using to maintain perspective on President Donald Trump’s second term: Imagine if the dumbest person in the world and humanity’s biggest asshole were the same person, and that guy was president. It’s a pretty simple lens through which to both view Trump’s lawless, Constitution-shredding rampage of revenge and self-enrichment while never succumbing to the idea that what’s happening to the country is somehow within bounds. It is only from this standpoint that one can write the straight story about this administration.

Meanwhile, how are the View From Nowhere folks faring these days? Somehow, in 2025, the media is still struggling with what is plainly in front of its face, demonstrating the same coherence bias that I and others had reason to complain about in the run-up to the 2024 election and its immediate aftermath.

Behold, the “departure.” Back on September 10, The New York Times used the term in their report of the Trump administration’s extrajudicial killings on the high seas. Their sources, per the report, provided “new details about a military operation that was a startling departure from using law enforcement means to interdict suspected drug boats.” More recently, a CNN report on Trump having collected a $130 million private donation to pay military service salaries—a highly impeachable offense for what is a comically paltry sum of money—explained that the move “marks a striking departure from government procedure for funding the military, which traditionally relies on public funds appropriated by Congress.”

Well, let’s give credit where due. The media is at least startled; they are struck. But these actions are not mere “departures”—a term that suggests a slight change of frame; unorthodox maneuvers that are nevertheless within the parameters of acceptable. Behind the sugarcoating are offenses that can be related in plain English, if anyone wants to take a stab at it. Here at TNR, for example, Matt Ford’s piece about how Trump’s military payroll gambit was a baldly illegal seizure of power got this headline: “Trump’s Military Payroll Gambit Is a Baldly Illegal Seizure of Power.” See, folks, it can be done.

Suffice it to say, avid readers of political news should be on their guard for other things Trump does that get labeled as “departures” or otherwise presented in a more anodyne frame. Just as TNR’s Tim Noah instructed that any time the media refers to someone as “fiery” what they really mean to say is “bugfuck nuts,” any time you see the word “departure” invoked, they are referring to a crime. And Trump’s crimes, in particular! I’m not sure you’ll see a bank robber assessed as having made “a startling departure from traditional cash withdrawals.”

It’s been something of a bleak period, watching the press make startling departures from telling the straight story about the Trump administration. TNR contributor Parker Molloy noted that, after Trump responded to the No Kings protest with an AI-generated video depicting him dumping gallons of shit on the protests from a fighter plane, the media was at great pains to sand off the edges of the story. There was a time when even the perception of this kind of antipathy toward ordinary citizens—say, when you label them as “deplorable”?—would invite the fury of the media. (Heck, there was a time when the political media launched a fatwa against Howard Dean for shouting at his own rally.) But this never became much of a scandal—though I will concede that Democrats could have done a better job pushing the issue.

And as we learned this week, pushing the issue can work wonders. Steve Bannon, as is his wont, seeded the media pasture with his announcement that there is a “plan” in place to run Trump for a third term. From there, an entire news cycle blossomed, one in which reporters peppered Trump with questions about his plan to run again, all of which he sidestepped—and so those same reporters told their readers that he is not ruling it out. Perhaps my favorite piece from this “Will Trump do a new crime?” boomlet was a Time magazine piece titled “Why Trump Keeps Talking About a Third Term” that suggested, “Whether Trump actually plans to run again for President, in defiance of the Constitution, merely bringing up the possibility so much, some observers say, may be strategic in its own right.”

The one problem with that contention is that Trump wasn’t bringing it up—a bunch of reporters were, and in so doing turned what should have been a confrontation (“Why do your allies keep saying you plan to abrogate the Constitution?”) into a jocular spitball session where they help Trump go over his options. (We are reliably informed that the president finds the maneuver where he runs as vice president “too cute.”) Trump, for once, seemed to understand what game was afoot. “Am I not ruling it out?” he responded to one inquiry, “I mean, you’ll have to tell me.” And so they did, in the pages of their publications.

If you’re wondering what is causing the media to fall down on the job in this manner, and infect coverage of a constitutional crime wave with limp euphemisms, I think it’s very much akin to the reason Democratic senators keep voting for Trump’s judicial appointments: It’s an act of desperation; a frantic need to suggest that our democratic institutions are still in proper working order and the duly elected president isn’t guiding the ship of state into tyranny. For if the members of the fourth estate were ever forced to report the truth of what’s happening, they would also have to confront how their own neglect helped pave this path. Based on the number of “startling departures” that are piling up, I reckon that day will come soon enough.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

On Tuesday evening, Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley stepped onto the Senate floor to begin a marathon speech that extended well into Wednesday. The topic of his stemwinder was most urgent: “I’ve come to the Senate floor tonight to ring the alarm bells. We’re in the most perilous moment, the biggest threat to our republic since the Civil War. President Trump is shredding our Constitution.” For Merkley, the matter hit close to home, quite literally: “President Trump wants us to believe that Portland, Oregon, in my home state, is full of chaos and riots. Because if he can say to the American people that there are riots, he can say there’s a rebellion. And if there’s a rebellion, he can use that to strengthen his authoritarian grip on our nation.”

One shouldn’t expect the president to be moved by Merkley’s admonishments. And there are not likely to be many Senate Republicans swayed by his overtures. But there were plenty of people on hand who needed to hear what the Oregon lawmaker had to say—specifically, his Democratic Senate colleagues, who haven’t been singing from the same pro-democracy hymnal lately. Merkley’s oration arrives at a time when some spines need stiffening.

The U.S. Senate: For a long while now, it’s where Democratic Party ambitions, along with democracy itself, have hit the skids. There are structural reasons for that: Far fewer voters are represented by the GOP majority, and this malapportionment problem is exacerbated by changing demographics that could one day allow 30 percent of Americans to elect 70 of its senators. But Republicans learned long ago that their agenda—showering tax benefits on the wealthy and breaking the government—only requires 51 votes most of the time. Democratic governance—which involves building, fixing, regulating, preserving, and improving—requires 60 nearly always.

One might have expected by now that Democrats would have recognized how the Senate filibuster, which requires them to regularly conjure these supermajorities, is something of a suicide pact. Or that it’s a recent innovation that’s easily discarded. Or that it runs so counter to the Founders’ ideals that its very existence should be offensive. But not enough Democrats have made this leap. And the reason is that too many of them suffer from what The New Republic contributor Christopher Sprigman calls “Degenerative Senate Brain.”

Having observed this less than august body operate over the past few years, I think that the main problem with many of our Democratic senators is that they believe their own hype. They all think they’ve signed up for an austere debate club—the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” the “cooling saucer” of government. They don’t seem to have noticed that when it comes to deliberating, or maintaining a reputation for judiciousness and equanimity, everyone has to agree to participate in those ideals. And Trumpist Republicans do not: They’ve shut down the government. They’ve willingly ceded the power of the purse. They rarely if ever question the Mad King’s desires. Do you remember the public agonizing of Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment to Health and Human Services? And then Cassidy ended up meekly endorsing him, to Cassidy’s lasting chagrin? That’s about as robust as GOP deliberations get.

The state of the GOP means that you can’t really have a Senate anymore. Unfortunately, the most Senate-brained Democrats still naïvely believe that they can revive this moribund body, through actions that at best send mixed messages and at worst directly undermine the work of Democrats like Jeff Merkley.

Case in point: This week, amid the government shutdown, 13 Democratic senators joined forces with all but one Republican to advance the nomination of Harold Mooty to a judgeship in the Northern District of Alabama. Some fun facts about Mooty that The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling collected: He has gone to some lengths to dance questions about the January 6 riots and who was culpable; he practically invented new verb tenses to avoid saying directly that Joe Biden was the legitimately elected president.

When it comes to deal-breakers, to each their own, but I find it puzzling that these weren’t some crimson flags for Senate Democrats. But even if they weren’t, everyone should understand that the only role a Republican judicial nominee plays in American life is serving Trump as if he was their personal legal client and backstopping his savage corruption. For that reason alone, there should never be a Democratic name signed to the advancement of Trump’s judges.

Why would 13 Democrats (and Maine independent Angus King, who I find too tiresome to explain to people) do such a thing? My theory is this: In their own skewed, Senate-brained view of the world, taking these kinds of votes helps to bolster democracy. That is to say, any time there is a small window in which they can make a gesture of comity and bipartisanship, they believe the right thing to do is to take it—the better to demonstrate that the ol’ ship of state is still humming along, normal business and regular order is possible, and that we aren’t so far off from recovery. Democrats are leaving the door to deliberation open. They’re keeping that saucer on ice.

Folks, I would love to believe that a small overture might seed a future coming together of polarized parties. But if watching schoolchildren get shot to pieces several times a year isn’t going to foster that fellowship, then we’re definitely not getting there by throwing the other side a bone in the form of Harold Mooty. The government is shut down, there’s a hole in the White House, the president is ordering extrajudicial killings in Latin America as part of some run-up to a regime change war, and citizens are getting snatched off the streets by Brett Kavanaugh–inspired goons. The system so loved by the Senate-brained is currently offline! And these votes to approve the odd judicial candidate are simply small enabling acts that only help to fuel the disorder.

Is democracy in grave danger? This week, it looks like Merkley and his allies agree, and that 13 other Democrats aren’t really ready to believe him. But with midterms looming, everyone in the party has to be of one mind on the matter in order to not sow confusion among critical voters. And if they all truly agree that Trump is some unique threat, we cannot have Democrats in double digits signing their name to support his agenda—not now, not ever.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Believe it or not, there was a time when the Supreme Court’s emergency docket rulings did not regularly garner controversy; they were simply the means by which the court could consider time-sensitive legal crises, such as motions related to capital punishment. But a key feature of the Trump era is the transformation of the emergency docket into the “shadow docket”: unsigned rulings that have had a profound effect on the country. Beyond the fact that these rulings have a “heads Trump wins, tails Democrats lose” bent, they are, as Erwin Chemerinsky notes, often proffered without much in the way of jurisprudential explanation while frequently bulldozing precedent. The justices themselves may not like the term “shadow docket,” but they seem to relish operating in the shadows all the same.

But there is one instance in which a justice did attempt to explain himself in a recent shadow docket ruling, only for that justice’s reasoning to blow up nearly immediately after its first encounter with the real world: Brett Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, in which the Supremes stayed a lower court ruling that was specifically impeding the Department of Homeland Security from racially profiling people for immigration stops. The larger court, as is its wont, failed to offer a ruling. But Kavanaugh opted to weigh in all the same. His reward is a heaping helping of infamy in the form of a specific secret police tactic that many have taken to calling “the Kavanaugh stop.”

Here’s the essential background. As The New Republic’s Matt Ford reported after the ruling in Noem was handed down, Kavanaugh’s surprise concurrence went to some pains to “minimize the impact” of a law enforcement encounter: “Importantly, reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status,” Kavanaugh wrote. “If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter. Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings.”

As Ford noted, the law enforcement encounters that formed the basis of the case itself could hardly be called “brief.” One of the plaintiffs in Noem testified that his attempt to show valid proof of U.S. citizenship did not make the encounter any shorter, as the agents “refused to believe the validity of his California driver’s license.” As Justice Sonia Sotomayor recalled in her dissent, “The agent said the ID was insufficient, ‘grabbed [his] arm,’ escorted him to a vehicle, and drove him to a ‘warehouse area’ for further questioning.” None of that sounds at all like the quick interaction that Kavanaugh suggested was the theoretical norm. And in practice, the Kavanaugh stop hasn’t hewed to his imagined brief encounter, either.

The quintessential components of a Kavanaugh stop involve a person detained for immigration enforcement specifically, with race a certain or likely factor in the decision behind the stop—the Fourth Amendment’s protections from unlawful searches and seizures be damned. Sotomayor saw a grim future in the court’s decision: “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.”

If the news is any guide, Sotomayor’s fears are now reality. As the Chicago Tribune recently reported, Chicago resident Rueben Antonio Cruz, a 60-year-old man originally from El Salvador, was sitting with a friend in Rogers Park when “immigration officers stopped their truck and went straight after them.” What followed was a classic Kavanaugh stop: Cruz and his friend were asked for “papers” proving their citizenship. Cruz, who was not carrying such papers on his person, was then bundled into the agents’ vehicle and interrogated. Cruz was eventually let go, but not before the agents fined him $130 for “not having his papers.” The ordeal left Cruz angry: “It’s not fair because I said, let’s go to my house and I’ll show you my papers. I’m a resident.”

The Tribune notes that while federal law requires registered foreign nationals to carry proof of registration with them at all times, “prior to a second Trump administration, it was rarely enforced.” The detention drew the criticism of the ACLU’s Ed Yohnka: “America has never been a place where people need to ‘show one’s papers.’ Ticketing a lawful permanent resident—and forcing him to appear in court and pay a fine for not carrying their papers—is unnecessary and cruel.” Unfortunately, it’s likely to become commonplace as Trump’s goons, freed from legal obligations by the Supreme Court, make the Kavanaugh stop part of their daily operations.

The possibility that Trump’s ICE agents, who have effectively been given carte blanche to abuse their authority, might simply dismiss their quarry’s valid proof of citizenship appears to have not occurred to Kavanaugh. But it has definitely occurred to the jabronis snatching up brown people in American cities. In a second Kavanaugh stop detailed by the Tribune, a 44-year-old Latina woman named Maria Greeley was out for a jog when she was jumped by federal agents who zip-tied her and detained her despite the fact that she carries her passport with her at all times to prove that she was born in the United States. According to the report, agents remarked that she didn’t “look like a Greeley,” dismissed her documentation, and accused her repeatedly of lying.

One of the most obviously impeachable things about the Supreme Court is that it’s so frequently out of touch with the real world—a perhaps inevitable condition of giving nine people special robes and lifetime job security and then stuffing them inside a sepulchral building to stew in their own partisan juices with no one to answer to. Kavanaugh’s flawed reasoning may simply be the product of profound naïveté. But since this all came about in a shadow docket case in which the Trump administration asked for emergency relief in the form of the permission to racially profile people, I think it’s hardly beyond belief to think that Kavanaugh felt compelled to try to put a good spin on a reprehensible ruling.

That Kavanaugh has to own the Kavanaugh stop is cold comfort. Who knows if it’s even possible to shame or humiliate Brett Kavanaugh anyway? It’s very possible that transforming the United States into a country more reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s “Ihre Papiere bitte” era is precisely the legacy that Kavanaugh sought for himself. We’re the ones who are stuck with the consequences.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

The popular way of describing what’s going on in Washington right now is to say that on October 1, the federal government shut down as a result of Congress’s inability to pass an appropriations bill to keep it funded. Chief among the sticking points was the fact that Democrats and Republicans could not come to terms on the future of Affordable Care Act subsidies. The Republican bill did not include them; Democrats balked at signing their name to a budget that would cause skyrocketing premium costs for millions of mostly low- and middle-income Americans.

You wouldn’t be faulted if that was your capsule summary of the shutdown. It’s essentially the story to which most of the political press is sticking, and there’s nothing fundamentally untrue about it. It would appear for now, in fact, that the broad public acceptance of this state of play is boosting Democrats’ fortunes in the game of who “owns” the shutdown. CNN’s Harry Enten reported this week that voters blame the GOP more, by an average of 12 points, and he noted that historically speaking, the party blamed at the outset is who gets blamed at the end. (It probably helps Democrats’ cause that those perusing the Obamacare exchanges for plans right now are already seeing the huge spikes in premium costs.)

Still, these facts only tell part of the story. This government shutdown isn’t merely about an appropriations bill, and it’s not entirely about health care subsidies. This shutdown is actually the culmination of a much deeper dysfunction, to which blame can indeed be wholly attached to President Donald Trump and his GOP apparatchiks. But the underlying cause of the shutdown is tricky terrain for Democrats to negotiate, and it calls into question whether they can—or even should—speedily resolve it. And the key to understanding the problem begins with acknowledging that this didn’t start in October. The government shutdown began a few weeks after Trump was sworn in.

Trump’s second term is broadly defined by his monomaniacal desire to either end or fatally impair the federal government. With the help of Elon Musk and Russell Vought, the Trump administration managed to do this in the most alienating possible way. As my colleague Alex Shephard noted this week, the administration’s slash-and-burn speedrun through the civil service has been broadly unpopular. It also probably goes a long way toward making any of the GOP’s rhetoric about Democrats being to blame for this most recent shutdown harder to take seriously.

But the reason things have dragged to a legislative standstill in October is essentially because Republicans in Congress willed it to be so when they returned to Washington to rejoin Trump as devoted supplicants. Their most fateful decision in that regard? Giving up one of the legislative branch’s core functions—the power of the purse. As NPR reported, by the first week of February, Republican lawmakers had already begun to master the art of explaining away why they were happy to surrender the power to appropriate money to Trump.

I characterized this at the time as an escalation in GOP lawmakers’ expansive campaign of self-abnegation. But it has ended up being so much more. The decision to give the White House full power to decide what, when, and how congressionally appropriated money is spent has created an impasse more deep and intractable than the shutdown itself, because the question of how the conflict over Obamacare subsidies gets resolved has become impossible to answer.

Let’s think about it for a minute. The White House’s position, as advanced by Vice President JD Vance and others, is that Senate Democrats should stop filibustering the appropriations bill now, and the matter of the subsidies can be negotiated later. The problem is that it’s impossible for a reasonable person to view that offer as sincere. Sure, Congress can go through the motions: meet in committee, hash out a deal, pass a bill, and send it to Trump’s desk. Trump can even sign that bill. But none of it matters when you know that Trump is likely to simply appropriate or not appropriate that money as he sees fit through pocket rescissions.

What we have here is a fully busted appropriations process; it is impossible to have faith in anything that Trump and his Republican cronies do with taxpayer dollars, even in instances in which bills have been negotiated, agreed to, and passed. And Republicans just keep on tipping their hands that they don’t really care about restoring that faith. This week, the chief way they responded to Democrats’ demands was to threaten federal workers’ back pay, despite the law being very clear that workers are entitled to those wages once the shutdown ends. Here, Democrats should say, “If the Trump administration is willing to break faith, and the law, to not pay you now, there is no reason to believe your steady paycheck is safe under any circumstances.”

So when and how does this get resolved? Knowing of the Trump administration’s faithlessness and the physiological impossibility of him honoring any deal made on Obamacare subsidies—or anything else—it’s not clear that Democrats should even play a role in resolving the matter. As Garrett Graff wrote, “If appropriations bills are not seen as enforceable contracts, why should any Member of Congress vote to fund any part of the federal government under Donald Trump? You’re voting to provide money for lawlessness.” Having once opted to give Trump’s paramilitary forces the money to invade American cities, Democrats should not position themselves to be fooled a second time.

It’s worth pointing out that Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress, so they can end the impasse any time they want, all on their own. I’ll admit that I do not know what Devil Magic has heretofore kept the GOP from simply nuking the filibuster and getting on with this. Perhaps they desire even the slightest whiff of bipartisan assent for Trump’s designs because of the cover it earns them from the mainstream political media, who are as desperate as ever to find the smallest scintilla of evidence that the American experiment is still working. But from here, the shutdown calculus becomes simple: If Democratic votes are what Trump and his GOP enablers need the most, they must never be provided.

According to a fresh Gallup poll this week, 43 percent of Americans regard the Supreme Court as “too conservative,” against 36 percent who feel that the Roberts court is an even-tempered administrator of justice. That 43 percent is a new high, per Gallup: “Before the court shifted to a 6-3 conservative advantage after Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg in October 2020, no more than 33% had ever characterized it as too conservative.” But then, that conservative majority started doing things—like gut Roe—and disapproval followed. Don’t expect things to turn around, by the way. As Matt Ford noted earlier this week, the court is expected to take a rightward lurch during its next term.

I got to thinking about the Supreme Court this week after Brian Beutler invited the readers of his Off Message newsletter to engage in a thought exercise: If you could thwart MAGA and the rise of fascism, but only by “turning the Democrats’ ideological clock” back to 2005, would you take that trade-off? Moderating would mean a lot of ideological progress on the left would have to fall by the wayside (Democrats in 2005 weren’t robustly defending marriage equality, and were nowhere near President Joe Biden’s vision of a pro-worker economy). But the idea is tempting—and the Supreme Court looms large. I would not call the high court’s 2005 incarnation “good” by any stretch of the imagination. But during the transition from Chief William Rehnquist to John Roberts, the court came studded with justices—Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Sandra Day O’Connor—who were willing to swing between ideological poles. Going back sure sounds like a good deal.

Alas, the world only spins forward. There’s no “moderation” button that Democrats might press to take us back to a more halcyon era. As provocative as Beutler’s thought experiment is, I’d prefer Democrats to think more deeply about the present moment—and more strategically about getting out of it. I don’t think we escape the fascism trap without Democrats who are willing to spend a lot of political capital, and I think those Democrats will have to commit themselves to some radical thinking along the way.

There is a place, to my mind, where Democrats can and probably should moderate. The big intraparty battles of the pre-Trump era revolved around whether Democrats should go big on policy or stay toward the center; here were the debates over Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and taxes designed to soak the rich. This is, alas, not the moment to revive or promote these ideas—and I say that as a fervent supporter of them. That’s because they don’t stand a chance under this extremist Supreme Court, which must first be dealt with.

I spelled out some of my thinking on this matter back in 2024, at a time when Kamala Harris was being dogged by daily reports of her reversing herself or becoming suddenly noncommittal about policies she once supported in the years prior to her vice presidency. I was fairly sanguine about this state of affairs because the Supreme Court had, by then, entered its Enemy of Liberal Governance Era, and it was quite clear to me that the six-member conservative majority was simply going to stamp a line-item veto over anything a Democratic president or legislature did.

Under this judicial regime, things like Medicare for All are a complete nonstarter. Hell, so is any hyper-timid means-tested bullshit if five justices don’t want Democrats to succeed. As I urged at the time, conflict with “a Supreme Court that’s holding the policymaking apparatus hostage” is inevitable, and it is “not a fight [Democrats] can duck.”

All of which means that while Democrats might be able to pick and choose some avenues of moderation, the task of arresting and reversing the degradation of the Trump era will inevitably require a hard swerve toward a more radical type of political thinking—especially with regard to the Supreme Court. The polite norms around the Supreme Court have been obliterated. This should be apparent to everyone; every one of these shadow docket rulings where the majority semi-anonymously grants a would-be dictator more power to overthrow the Constitution only reinforces the fact that the high court’s age of respectability is over.

The Democrats who want to win back power in 2026, and win the presidency in 2028, need to embrace this conflict and nurture the growing public antipathy toward the Supreme Court. They will also have to do things that the Democrats of 2020—let alone 2005—dared not: Packing the court needs to be on the table. Reforms must be forcefully imposed. The justices need to be brought before Congress and explain themselves in regular reviews. And to get there, Democrats must engage in a content-creation campaign depicting the Roberts court as it truly is: a promoter of political corruption, a despoiler of the environment, an enemy of democracy, an institution that has pilfered wealth right from the people’s pockets.

I feel for Democrats facing this moment. Institutionalism has served them in decent stead in the recent past. But those institutions have been perverted in the Trump era and must be brought to heel and firmly restored to their civic purpose. There’s no purely moderate path to what should be the ideal “moderate” outcome: a restoring of balance to our civic lives.

But rather than look back to 2005 for solutions, Democrats must wind the clock back still further, to 1862, and find their purpose in this passage from President Abraham Lincoln’s second State of the Union address: “We can succeed only by concert.… The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise—with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” The Democratic leaders of the future will be those who disenthrall themselves of the dogmas of the quiet past, and face a moment piled high with difficulty with courage and conviction.

Donald Trump was lustily booed at the U.S. Open in New York, and his excursion to one of D.C.’s despots’ club restaurants was interrupted by chanting protesters. But the opposition to the president extends well beyond the Acela corridor. As CNN’s Harry Enten noted this week, Trump’s approval rating is plummeting and he’s now “underwater on every issue”—including on crime and immigration, his supposed strengths. Across the board, Trump continues to have a “consent of the governed” problem, and it’s gotten so pronounced that former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is wondering whether “a despised autocrat can consolidate power.”

It’s a question that Krugman ultimately leaves unresolved. “I guess we’re going to find out,” he concludes. But there’s a hint of passivity here, as though the outcome is beyond our control—which could not be further from the truth. There’s a large and growing anti-Trump movement across the United States that is just waiting for powerful allies to join them, and it just so happens that there’s a minority party in Washington that is desperate for ways to exert its power that don’t require controlling the levers of government. It’s a no-brainer for the Democrats, who can keep the public animus toward the president well stoked by turning Trump’s elite enablers and supplicants—not just in the capital but across society, from Silicon Valley to academia—into objects of opprobrium.

We’ve been over this before, but the most important thing to remember about Trumpism is that it doesn’t work as a matter of policy. He doesn’t know how to run the economy anywhere other than into the ground, and with each passing day come fresh harbingers of shocks to those mythical kitchen tables. (According to recent reports, agricultural economists believe prices for a slew of grocery staples could be set to double this winter.)

As Krugman notes, Trump is running the inverse play from the Dictators’ Guide to Consolidating Power: Instead of using his power to shore up a weak economy, Trump is taking a roaring economy and wrecking it. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed: TNR’s Greg Sargent reported on a recent poll that found that “48 percent of overall likely 2026 voters say Trump’s tariffs are hurting their own economic situation, versus only 29 percent who say they’re not having any effect and an abysmal 8 percent who say the tariffs are helping their economic prospects.”

Still, as Krugman writes, Trump is governing like he has “an overwhelming mandate to do whatever he wants,” which raises the question: How is he getting away with it? Part of the answer is that denial has become his administration’s stock-in-trade—like the hilarious claim that the president’s signature does not appear in Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday sex-crime book. But another part of the answer, Krugman continues, “is anticipatory compliance on the part of members of the elite, from corporate CEOs to university presidents to law partners.”

Let’s linger on this a moment: Krugman is correct to note that one of the key forces enabling Trumpism is this grotesque collection of oligarchic weirdos that everybody hates: Big Law goons, Ivy League ivory tower types, corporate predators, and the tech-bro billionaire set. While some of these supplicants are more willing than others, they’re also the only ones receiving—or hoping to receive—some tangible benefit from Trump. Whether it’s Trump’s Silicon Valley dinner party guests or the university president who tried to cut a deal, all of these elites are operating from the same premise: “Maybe if I’m nice enough to Trump, he’ll let me keep the money.”

But the salient point is this: In the not-so-recent past, it would be the GOP endeavoring to paint Democrats as the captive party of America’s economic and cultural nobility. Now Trump has embraced all of these political albatrosses as his boosters. And as fortunes decline for you and me, it’s these already uber-privileged members of society who are staying whole—or getting ahead. The only people for whom Trumpism works, in other words, are the same sort of people who rigged the system in their favor in the first place. The only thing that’s changed is that the new mob boss is demanding a bigger cut.

It may be that the same forces that are enabling Trumpism could enable the opposition to Trumpism, provided that Democrats lose their risk-averse ways and demonize the elites that are now at Trump’s beck and call. And while it’s true that some have bent the knee more readily than others, we must have the stomach to castigate Trump’s allies no matter how willingly they came to his side. For my part, it’s OK with me if Democratic messaging included the line, “While Trump’s Harvard cronies were cutting deals, the cost of your groceries has doubled.”

There are no allies for Democrats to be found in Trump’s teeming hive of enablers. Anyone who might serve the ends of democracy and the rule of law has, by now, explicitly announced themselves as having taken that side. As Jonathan V. Last notes, “Any institution not explicitly anti-Trump will eventually become useful to Trump.” One day, we might need to have a conversation about whether some of these people or institutions should receive a path back to respectability after violating the social compact on behalf of a wannabe fascist strongman. But that’s not the pressing business of the day.

For now, brave Democrats can and should implicate and vilify those who have abetted Trumpian misrule and have, by extension, reaped the fruits of its poisonous economic tree. It may be that one of the keys to denying Trump long-term power is to foment the public’s ire at the company he keeps, paint the whole lot as crooks and brigands who are looting the proceeds of the public trust. The burgeoning anti-Trump movement in the streets will be cheered to hear from some political allies who are promising to name the villains of the Trump era and to crush them in whatever era comes next.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.