The Corporate Miscreants Driving the Affordability Crisis

During his recent State of the Union address, President Donald Trump took a few minutes to talk about the affordability crisis that’s been gripping the nation—which is to say, he threw some balderdash in the direction of Democrats. Blaming the high prices he once referred to as a “hoax” on the “dirty, rotten lies” of the opposition party, he then neatly pirouetted into his next point: declaring the crisis over. “Their policies created the high prices. Our policies are rapidly ending them,” he said. “We are doing really well. Those prices are plummeting downward.”

It’s not hard to understand why Trump wishes this to be true. He is, after all, a one-man driver of the affordability crisis. As we’ve noted before, the mayhem he has unleashed on the streets of cities like Minneapolis is making it harder for ordinary Americans to make ends meet. The American people are bearing most of the cost of his chaotic tariffs scheme. And gas prices are set to spike anew now that he’s launched a war in Iran. Still, as with any problem playing out in the pocketbooks of voters, the president has plenty of company on the wrong side of the fight—like the corporate privateers who are driving the crisis deeper while profiting off of our pain.

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, or IPS, takes a deep dive into the battery of corporations they call the “Low Wage 20”: 20 firms that currently employ 6.7 million people across the United States. The names are familiar—Amazon, Starbucks, FedEx, Walmart, and Tyson Foods are habitual malefactors—but their sins are growing more mortifying by the day.

The most mortal of these, per the IPS, is the way these 20 firms’ “low-wage business models have left many of their workers with no choice but to rely on public assistance.” Fifteen of the companies’ median pay last year was “below the $35,631 income limit for a family of three to be eligible for Medicaid in most states”; at 13 of them, the pay fell short of the “$33,576 threshold for a family of three to be eligible for SNAP.” It’s bad enough when your business model essentially plans for government programs to provide the money you’re not willing to pay. But as TNR’s Grace Segers has relentlessly reported over the past year, the funding cuts and regulatory hurdles embedded in Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” have pushed these programs, and their beneficiaries, into crisis.

The IPS says corporate power is driving the affordability crisis in other ways, as well, including a very basic one: They’re just paying people less. “Half of Low-Wage 20 firms reported a decline in their median pay between 2019 and 2024, after adjusting for inflation,” the report says. “Average median pay for the group dropped 4.6 percent, from $30,474 (in 2024 dollars) to $29,087.” These workers are increasingly getting priced out of the American dream too. All 20 of these corporate miscreants’ reported median pay last year was below the $59,600 needed to afford the rent on a two-bedroom apartment; seven of the firms’ median salaries are lower than the $25,533 average price of a used car.

Meanwhile CEO pay is doing what it always does—driving income inequality. The average CEO pay at these 20 firms was $18.6 million last year, while average CEO-to-median worker pay ratio “stood at a staggering 899 to 1, compared to the S&P 500 average of 285 to 1.” Brian Niccol of Starbucks took home the award for the most nonsensical disparity between CEO and employee income: He earns $95,801,676, while the median salary for a Starbucks employee was a mere $14,674.

There are a slew of policy decisions that can be made to alter this trajectory, from raising the minimum wage to bolstering labor rights to imposing a tax on stock buybacks. The IPS even suggests we adopt the practice of “bad business fees” designed to penalize companies for paying such paltry wages that their employees have no choice but to rely on public assistance to make ends meet. And of course, corporate democracy would go a long way to taming these excesses. As TNR contributor Osita Nwanevu has argued, more worker ownership can help limit income inequality while also providing firms with ballast to survive economic downturns.

It goes without saying that the ideological orientation of the White House and Congress guarantees little progress will be made on any of these fronts—especially with Trump looking backward to blame Democrats for the wreckage he’s meted out. But November’s elections loom—and as TNR contributor Dylan Gyauch-Lewis reported, poll after poll reveals a public hungry for lawmakers to confront corporate power directly, and that “large majorities of Americans blame corporations for their affordability issues.” There’s never been a better time to make some corporate enemies. These 20 will do for a start.

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

This time last week, I had accountability on my mind, and the need for liberal leaders in a post-Trump future to transform frustration into lustration by bringing the agents and enablers of Trumpism to heel and forcing them to pay a price for their misdeeds. One thing I could have been more forthright about is what put me in the mood: It’s the old and ongoing story of the abuse being meted out by Trump’s brownshirts. Whatever you’ve been told about these goons standing down or lowering the temperature isn’t the straight story. Every day there are fresh tales of their villainy.

It may seem overwrought or cartoonish to call these people evil. But the story that recently cemented it for me took place last year at a deportation detention center in Dilley, Texas—which you may be familiar with because among the allegedly dangerous “worst of the worst” people they have in custody is a 2-month-old infant. As NBC News reported, last November the child detainees were sent to the gymnasium under the pretense that after months of eating contaminated food, they would be treated to a Thanksgiving dinner. But after being made to stare at tables stacked for a holiday feast, they were told that the food was for their jailers, not them.

So, yes, this is evil—despicable and Dickensian. But what’s particularly hair-raising is that we’ve only learned a fraction of what’s going on behind the closed doors of what are essentially concentration camps; what we don’t know is much more vast. And with the Trump administration splashing billions of taxpayer dollars to develop a network of these warehouse prisons, this evil may metastasize—and get better at keeping us in the dark.

It can already be said that 2026 is off to a grim start. As the American Immigration Council, or AIC, reported earlier this month, there were six deaths in ICE detention centers across the country in January. This includes the death of 55-year-old Geraldo Lunas Campos, which was ruled a homicide after a medical examiner concluded he’d died of “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.” The AIC noted that while ICE is “legally required to report deaths that occur in its custody, its public disclosures often come late and have little information. Independent investigations frequently contradict these findings later.”

Reporting on what’s going on inside these facilities is notoriously difficult, but sometimes we get a shocking glimpse behind the walls and razor wire. In late January, The New Yorker offered one such look at the kaleidoscopic horror taking place in a detention facility in the Mojave Desert. There, detainees with experience at other detention facilities told reporter Oren Peleg that the California detention center “was unique in its mistreatment of those held in its custody,” with abuses ranging from “extremely delayed appointments with health-care professionals, the denial of medications and treatment, experiences with unsafe and unsanitary living conditions, and a general antagonism by medical staff toward detainees.”

A class action lawsuit filed against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security echoes these accounts. Therein, detainees describe the remote facility as a “torture chamber” and “hell on Earth.” Tess Borden, an attorney at the legal nonprofit Prison Law Office, told The New Yorker that “the conditions at the facility are so terrible that detainees are resigning themselves to self-deportation, instead of pursuing asylum and other immigration cases,” and that others were “also trying to take their own lives.”

If stories of this kind disappear from the news, it won’t be because ICE has reformed itself. Rather, it will probably be the result of a clampdown on information. In mid-February, guards at the Dilley detention center raided the family dormitories to seize and destroy letters and drawings made by the children detained there, after their letters were included in a ProPublica report describing the conditions. And lawmakers seeking to do their own lawful oversight continue to find their access denied. As Senator Alex Padilla mused after recently being denied entry to a detention center in San Diego County, “The big question I come with is, what do they have to hide?”

The other big question is what can be done to thwart the Trump administration’s effort to complete its network of prison camps. While we shouldn’t expect Democrats in the federal government to make headway on this matter anytime soon, we’re seeing a mass movement against these detention centers emerging at the local level. Public protest in Ashburn, Virginia, convinced a Canadian billionaire to scuttle a deal to sell warehouse facilities to ICE. Lawmakers in South Fulton, Georgia, preemptively passed a law banning DHS from acquiring warehouse properties in their jurisdiction.

And ironically enough, local jurisdictions are wielding the tools of proceduralism—the endless array of hoops to jump through that The New Republic contributor J. Dylan Sandifer has indicted as the means by which progress too often gets blocked—to throw a wrench in ICE’s works. State officials in Maryland led by Governor Wes Moore—who, per Sandifer, is a notable skeptic of proceduralism—have filed a lawsuit against ICE and DHS in an attempt to block the agency from transforming warehouses in their state into detention facilities. As The Washington Post reported, the state’s complaint borders on the mundane, but it’s really pulling out all the tricks: “The Trump administration did not conduct an environmental review nor seek public input on the project or provide a reasoned explanation on their decision-making, as required by law.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently fielded a question from a self-described “ordinary citizen” on social media, who asked, “What can we do to get the concentration camps shut down and restore accountability for those imprisoned against the law?” Her answer: “Local zoning is the way! A lot of these are being stopped or stalled by neighborhood organizing. These warehouses often need to be purchased, permitted, approved for occupancy and specs. Each one of those steps can be interrupted.”

One of the people who heartily approved of AOC’s advice was M. Nolan Gray, the author of Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. “As the guy who wrote the book on zoning abolition,” he wrote, “I’d like to go on record as saying: If you can use zoning to stop the concentration camps, fucking go for it.” It’s great to see everyone on the same page.

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

One of the weirder journalistic spectacles of the Trump era has been watching mainstream news organizations parachute into the hinterlands to try to understand the voters who ushered in, and continue to support, this age of cruelty in America. A recent classic was The New York Times’ herculean effort to find one Minnesota diner whose patrons were willing to talk shit about the ICE resistance in Minneapolis. There has not, however, been an equivalent effort to reveal the everyday people who saw the dangers of Trumpism coming. But this week, TNR contributor Toby Buckle returned to these pages to do just that.

I’m petty enough to enjoy a good round of “I told you so.” One of the better value propositions of your TNR subscription is that you’ll more frequently find yourself in the company of writers who recognized the dangers of Trumpism from several miles off and unflinchingly told the truth about it. That’s why Buckle’s warning that a mere election victory won’t be sufficient to right this ship has stuck in my mind: “We must undertake an ambitious program of accountability and reform in order to create liberal democracy in America again.” So here’s something else I’m going to be right about in advance: The failure to hold the malefactors of Trumpist fascism to account will only ensure its return.

This isn’t some loose theory. Perhaps the best proof of this fundamental fact can be found in recent history, as both Trump’s rise and his return were preceded by Democratic administrations that showed little regard for civic accountability. The Obama administration made the conscious decision to make “looking forward, not backward” the order of the day, to the great relief of Wall Street crooks and war-on-terror torturers. Obama extended grace to those who capsized the economy, and kept showing extreme deference to them throughout his administration.

As The American Prospect’s David Dayen reported this week, an email from recently disgraced Goldman Sachs lawyer Kathy Ruemmler to pedo-oligarch Jeffrey Epstein—in which she seeks advice on how to defend Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White from Senator Elizabeth Warren, who’d been stoking outrage about White’s constant granting of deferred prosecution agreements to corporate criminals—is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the Obama administration’s laxity. This vacuum of accountability was filled by Trump’s right-wing faux-populism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Much of this could have been headed off.

And while there were some significant areas in which Joe Biden seemed to learn from his former boss’s mistakes, the need for a more robust campaign of accountability was not one of them. Despite the ample reasons to launch investigations and obtain redress for past corruption, Attorney General Merrick Garland did little more than attempt to radiate an ambient virtue, perpetually endeavoring to shield his agency and the Biden administration from the perception that they were seeking purely political prosecutions. Not that this ever stopped Trump from crying foul about witch hunts! Garland’s first major investigation into Trump’s misconduct wasn’t launched until three days after Trump announced his reelection campaign—the very thing that the Biden administration should have been trying in earnest to prevent after the Senate failed in its duty to impeach him. Once Trump entered the safe harbor of a presidential candidacy, efforts to hold him responsible fizzled—and the Supreme Court all but crowned him king.

As I’ve argued before, these “look the other way and cross your fingers” ways of the past aren’t going to cut it anymore. There shouldn’t be Democrats running for election anywhere who aren’t fully committed to using their regained power to take Trumpism down. That means large-scale investigations and hearings. That means pursuing criminal charges and jail sentences. Yes, that means everyone currently employed by ICE gets a pink slip. And that means doling out punishments to the corporate scofflaws and institutional enablers that allowed Trumpian misrule to flourish.

Axios reported this week that corporate America is being warned that the “subpoenas are coming.” I want that to be true; if we end up with political leaders on the left who are too timid to do what needs to be done, we will fall short. The Beltway-brained are perennially concerned with “political capital,” the allegedly short supply of which creates the perpetual demand for scaling back Democratic ambitions. Future party leaders need to shed these phantasmal fears. And they need to be ready for the political press to lobby hard against these efforts. After all, the sight of so many people being held accountable will raise serious questions of how much went wrong on their watch.

All that said, I continue to be buoyed by the sense that Democratic voters are bent on elevating real fighters—and cheered by the sight of those whom they’ve been elevating repaying that faith. There is already ample material to fuel the ambitions of would-be warriors. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that massive swaths of Americans are using brutal terminology to describe the Trump administration: 47 percent of respondents say they would describe Trump as “racist,” 49 percent would characterize him as “corrupt,” and 46 percent would describe him as “cruel.”

These numbers indicate a very favorable environment for Democrats to attack Trump on these fronts—to explicitly say that Trump is a cruel and corrupt racist who’s enriched himself in office at the expense of the American people while egging on a secret police force that is increasingly evil in the purest sense of the word. It will take effort and commitment to provide real accountability, but the prize at the end of the quest is a democracy with restored resilience and a repellent right-wing movement beaten back into irrelevance. If it’s done correctly, the next time anyone goes looking for the point of view of Trump voters, they won’t be able to find anyone willing to admit they ever supported him.

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

Sunday’s Super Bowl was mostly an exercise in foregone conclusions: Bad Bunny’s halftime show would show off his talent and creativity, the Seahawks would grimly dominate the pitiable Patriots, and I would shout “Get fucked!” at the television when the inevitable commercial for ICE aired. But there was one surprise discussion that sprang to life the morning after the big game—involving lost dogs, the all-encompassing surveillance state into which we’ve gotten locked, and what it means to be a neighbor.

The proximate cause of all this agita was the commercial for Ring, whose doorbell cameras are among the most popular in the country. In their Super Bowl spot, Ring touted a feature called Search Party, a new(ish) AI-enabled “familiar faces” tool that the Amazon-owned company has billed as a way for lost pets to be easily recovered: Just upload a picture of the missing pet into Ring’s database, and it will deploy all the Ring cameras in the area as a dragnet to search for the wayward animal. As Mashable’s Chance Townsend reported in July 2025, these AI tools were the brainchild of recently returned founder Jamie Siminoff—who, perhaps not coincidentally, reversed the company’s previous decision to back away from working hand in glove with law enforcement.

Against that backdrop, it was perhaps inevitable that Ring’s commercial went over so badly with viewers. In fact, one of the few nice things I can say about the ad was that it was the first thing in a long while to invite unified criticism from voices all across the political spectrum. That included Matt Nelson, of WeRateDogs fame, who published a blistering video critique of the ad: “Neither Ring’s products nor its business model are built around finding lost pets,” and even if they were, it’s a job that Ring does very badly: “Ring claims that the ‘Search Party’ feature finds one dog a day,” Nelson said. “This would equate to roughly .03 percent of the over one million lost or found pet reports posted to the Ring app annually.” If this is something Ring is touting as a core competency, it could be that they’re pulling the wool over your eyes.

What Ring is, Nelson observed, is “a lucrative mass surveillance network” that turns “private homes into surveillance outposts and well-meaning neighbors into informants.” Jason Koebler of 404 Media concurs:

With Ring’s recent partnership with Flock, which will further facilitate the sharing of video footage with police, and its new Search Party feature, the message is clear: Ring is still, again, and always will be in the business of leveraging its network of luxury surveillance consumers as a law enforcement tool. After years of saying it wasn’t doing facial recognition and that it was focused more on “object recognition,” it has now explicitly launched “friendly” versions of facial recognition and facial recognition-adjacent technologies.

CNBC reported on Thursday that Ring canceled its partnership with Flock because of the public backlash over this Super Bowl advertisement. The report noted further friction building at other tech companies, with Salesforce employees pressuring company CEO Marc Benioff to “cancel ICE opportunities,” and employees at Google making similar demands that the firm “divest itself from ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”

The transformation of “friendly” tech into tools for the police state has been something of a trend lately. Flock security cameras deployed at schools across the country, ostensibly for the purpose of keeping kids safe, have been used to “assist Donald Trump’s mass immigration enforcement campaign,” according to a recent report from The Guardian. And while firms like Ring and TikTok go to extravagant lengths to say that they do not directly feed your data to law enforcement agencies, the fact is that data originating from these firms can frequently find its way into the hands of partners, data brokers, and other third parties who’ve made no such commitment. From there, as TNR contributor Logan McMillen pointed out this week, the government can simply purchase that data, circumventing your constitutional rights. It’s always best to assume that any technology firm not explicitly against the surveillance state will eventually become a tool of it.

With more and more of us reading stories about ICE’s predations—or experiencing them firsthand—it’s not a surprise that Ring’s happy puppy commercial landed the way it did. As I’ve said before, ICE and Customs and Border Protection aren’t actually doing immigration enforcement. They are a tentacle of the war on terror that’s been turned against the American people, armed with cutting-edge technology. People are slowly waking up to the dystopian nature of these arrangements.

But there’s another awakening happening in the cities and towns currently facing down the threat of state violence and terror. People are rediscovering what it means to be a neighbor and to live in a community. In places like Springfield, Ohio, faith communities are banding together to protect those targeted by Trump’s mass deportation machine. In Minneapolis, neighbors are assisting one another in keeping their kids safe, bringing food to those who fear venturing out, and raising rent money for people who can’t go to work with federal agents lurking around. Here’s a fun fact: This sort of neighborliness is how we used to find lost dogs.

We talk all the time about how Trump and his minions are shredding the fabric of democracy and tearing apart the civic institutions that have served us in good stead. But wherever Trump’s hammer has fallen the hardest, good people have responded by working together as neighbors, to reknit what has been torn asunder and reinforce their bonds to one another and their commitment to our patriotic values. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer observed: “Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about ‘Western civilization,’ while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.”

It’s an auspicious coincidence that Sunday’s Super Bowl offered a counterargument to Ring’s dystopian vision in the form of Bad Bunny’s halftime spectacle, which featured the “La Casita” concept that made his recent San Juan residency so critically acclaimed. In his vision, the front porch isn’t some fortress ringed by fear and suspicion; it’s a window to a wider world of neighbors, community, and joy, all washing up on one’s doorstep, inviting us out.* I know which neighborhood I’d rather live in—and I know which one I’d trust to find my dog, as well.

* This article previously misstated the location of Bad Bunny’s residency.

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

Lately I’ve been wondering what it might be like for the residents of the embattled Twin Cities to receive one of those trademark email solicitations from the Democratic Party. You know the ones: The sender is Chuck Schumer, the subject line reads “THIS IS THE END,” and the body of the email explains how the gyre is widening and the falcon can’t hear the falconer and it’s up to you to send $5 to hold back the blood-dimmed tide. These are annoying during whatever times we might have once considered to be “normal.” With federal agents wilding on the streets and kidnapping children, to hear our problems reframed as something that we can fix by handing the nearest Democrat the change in our couch cushions is anger-inducing.

I’ve heard and read enough accounts from Minneapolitans to know that they’re feeling little connection to Beltway lawmakers, and that by and large they feel abandoned by most Democrats in Washington. This can only go on so long before something breaks: Ordinary people are showing remarkable valor protecting their communities from a corrupt and violent federal presence, egged on by a senescent and (allegedly) incontinent president and his ghoulish hangers-on. Democrats have the power to recognize this effort to protect democracy, provide it with material support and media cover, and thus knit up the fabric between themselves and these brave Americans. 

Let us acknowledge that the answer will not come with a legislative fix. Senate Democrats held the funding of several executive branch agencies hostage over demands to reform the Department of Homeland Security, precipitating a partial government shutdown, but earlier this week a deal was struck to fully fund those other agencies while only keeping the lights on at DHS for another two weeks as lawmakers negotiate reforms.

One Democratic lawmaker to whom Axios granted the veil of anonymity suggested that Democrats expect the base to “get upset” but believes the discontent will wash away because “then you’re going to have the real fight in two weeks.” Whether or not that period ends with any meaningful change in the status quo remains to be seen. Much of what Democrats seek would merely require various federal agents to obey rules and regulations that they’re already supposed to follow as a matter of agency directive—though enshrining these policies as laws would be a step in the right direction.  

That said, there’s still the thorny matter of enforcing any new constraints that are imposed on ICE and Border Patrol. I hope I’m wrong about this, but by the time all is said and done, I don’t expect much in the way of material change where the president’s paramilitaries are concerned. At best, perhaps, people will see the faces of the thugs who are beating them—though not always, if Schumer has his way. 

I think people, by and large, can accept that when it comes to enacting policies, Democrats have little room to maneuver given their minority power. Moreover, the revival of arguments over the party’s unwillingness to use what leverage it has out of fear that closing the government on a long-term basis will lead to larger downside liabilities is, by now, parlor-room talk. Looking toward the future, Democrats must pivot to combat an even greater danger, which Senator Chris Murphy articulated on the podcast of TNR’s Greg Sargent: “I think if people don’t see us fighting on something as existential as whether we condone the federal government murdering our own citizens, then there will be a mass withdrawal from politics altogether.”

Murphy continues:

I do think this is a critical moment. The whole country is seized by what they have seen—the statistics suggest that 80 to 90 percent of Americans have seen these videos—and they desperately want somebody to stand up for the rule of law. So, yes, if we do not make a fight right now, I think it could result in just a massive withdrawal of participation in our civic life. 

And that is how democracies die. Democracies die not often simply by force—it would be totalitarian—but by citizens deciding that there’s no one that is willing to stand up and save them.

Democrats, stymied as they are on Capitol Hill, have a freer hand to act in other venues—to undertake the necessary work of standing up for the people and proving that they are all on the same team. They must fight on these remaining fronts with an eye toward forging a greater connection with the broader civil resistance, providing it with rhetorical and material support. There are a number of ways in which Democrats can interact with those fighting to protect their families and neighbors from Trump’s predations that aren’t subject to a presidential veto.

First and foremost, Democrats should play the leading role in waging a campaign for the truth. In the past two weeks, the media has been suckered into front-running for the Trump administration, presenting a favorable narrative that spins a gauzy story: Forces are being drawn down, and the temperature is being lowered in Minneapolis. None of this is true: Minneapolitans are still living with the same brutal fear they were experiencing before Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino was sent packing. People with legal citizenship are being abducted from the streets of the Twin Cities and sent to Texas, where they are released and abandoned without the means to get home. Democrats are uniquely positioned to echo and amplify the voices on the ground that are simply saying that the Trump administration is lying; that its abuses are escalating.  

Democrats should ignore calls to keep their distance from the people who are impacted by Trump’s mayhem. That doesn’t mean we need every septuagenarian lawmaker in front of Border Patrol truncheons outside Minneapolis’s Seventh Street Entry, but being present and visible in any way makes a big difference. New York congressional candidate Brad Lander trekked to Minneapolis to help locals protect their neighbors in the same way he’s helped those in his home state. Joaquin Castro and Ilhan Omar made personal intercessions to return the abducted Liam Conejo Ramos home. Castro personally made the trip home with the 5-year-old; his efforts garnered a ton of well-deserved positive attention from the media. 

Democrats have able-bodied staff, connections to important and influential people, and a bully pulpit. All of these resources can be mobilized to help embattled citizens survive Trump’s onslaught, whether it’s getting more media attention on the daily abrogations of our constitutional rights, helping organizers on the ground with logistical support, or kickstarting fundraising efforts to help the mutual aid organizations central to the fight. They can also bring these efforts home to their own districts: As TNR contributors Ana Marie Cox and Sarah Jaffe separately reported, Minneapolitans were well positioned to offer a stern resistance to ICE because they’d prepared for it in advance. Knowing that the president views any Democratic district as a potential venue for ICE violence, lawmakers should get their own communities prepared for the worst by building the necessary resilience now. 

This is, of course, a midterm campaign season, and there’s no better way to reconnect with those suffering under Trump’s bootheel than to make the solemn promise to hold him and his cronies accountable; impeach them, remove them, forever discredit them, block their paths to power indefinitely. And look, if you’re a one-note Democratic lawmaker who feels like the only thing you can freely talk about is affordability, you too can suck it up and play a role: ICE violence is currently one of the primary drivers of the affordability crisis. 

Recently, Indivisible’s Ezra Levin said something interesting about the kind of email missives I made fun of at the top of the piece. Today’s “political system,” Levin wrote, “largely treats people like small-dollar ATMs that vote every two years. Everybody gets deluged with emails asking for money. It feeds cynicism and burnout. Rarely do you get a ‘help me organize our community’ email.” To Levin’s reckoning, it may not be the case that Democrats are asking too much, it’s that they are asking for “too little.”  

People under tremendous pressure and mortal fear have spontaneously spun up a vibrant civil resistance that puts the lie to so many of the assumptions upon which Trumpism was built. The democracy movement already has leaders. It would be to the benefit of all if Democrats find new and novel ways to join them.

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

One of the consequences of covering American politics is that it forces you to have frequent close encounters with some of the dumbest people alive and their terrible ideas. Cutting taxes on wealthy people will eventually enrich the middle class. Invading and occupying Iraq will spread democracy throughout the Middle East. Michael Bloomberg should be president. The list goes on. Anyway, here’s the latest, greatest hit from the terminally stupid: We can fix ICE by retraining them.

The idea that a right-wing goon squad can somehow be reformed through the magic of Powerpoint presentations is squarely rooted in the fear among the Beltway-brained that proposing to abolish this rogue agency is going to cost Democrats a winnable election. I’m not sure where these fears find their foundation given that when “Abolish ICE” was in vogue, Democrats did great: They won in 2018 and 2020 and surprisingly overperformed in 2022. Then they got to 2024 and lost, not long after they took a rightward turn on immigration in an attempt to prove that they could be tougher on migrants than Trump was, as if his main failing was that his draconian immigration policies weren’t dressed up in enough management consultant–speak.

The Searchlight Institute, the Beltway consultant class’s latest rebrand of gelatinous centrism, recently released a sternly worded memo tsk-tsking everyone who believes that it was a mistake to resurrect the Stasi and turn it loose to terrorize liberal cities. “Let’s be clear that advocating for abolishing ICE is tantamount to advocating for stopping enforcement of all of our immigration laws in the interior of the United States—a policy position that is both wrong on the merits and at odds with the American public on the issue,” the memo bleated. “Instead, Democrats should embrace an aggressive plan to rebuild ICE based on two concepts: Reform and Retrain.”

This is all written at a significant remove from what’s actually happening in places like Minneapolis or even Washington, D.C.—and it’s no mean feat to be out of touch with a community of which you’re ostensibly a member. To have a real-world understanding of what ICE has been doing makes calls for its reeducation land in the ears with a cloddish thud. These are marauding, fascist thugs who enjoy terrorizing people. They’re in their dream job. They raid churches. They abduct people. They abduct children. They use children to abduct other people. They shot a woman in the face. They tear-gassed a car of children. They grabbed an elderly man from his house and dragged him outside in his underwear in the freezing cold simply because he wasn’t white. They detained a 5-year-old, used him to bait his parents, and then took them all away.

Here’s a disturbing fact: When Minneapolis parents started putting stuffed animals on their dashboards so that kids could identify safe cars driven by the volunteers assigned to ferry them safely home from school, ICE started doing the same thing. What I’m trying to say is that ICE—from Secretary Kristi Noem down to the lowliest desk jockey—really, really has a fixation on abducting children. This is irredeemable beyond measure.

ICE misrule isn’t happening because someone skipped a meeting during their onboarding process. This is a deeply ingrained and incurable corruption—not that anyone at ICE wants to be “cured.” ICE agents already receive comprehensive training, which they comprehensively ignore. In the latest instance, we’ve learned from a whistleblower that agents have claimed the right to break into homes without a judicial warrant, directly countermanding their vaunted legal training. No one can or should trust a retrained version of this agency. A root-and-branch teardown is in order. Mass firings are in order (I guess the leakers and whistleblowers can stay in some capacity). The clawback of billions of dollars is in order. Damnation, in every sense of the word, is in order.

One of the problems with the argument that this mob of sickos can be retrained into something sane and decent begins with the fact that people misconstrue what ICE actually is and does. Searchlight’s statement, for instance, assumes that ICE is performing the task of enforcing immigration law. But ICE is not an immigration enforcement agency. It’s a rotted tentacle of the war on terror that’s been turned against the American people. A real immigration enforcement agency would be operating in places like Texas or Florida, which have large numbers of undocumented immigrants, and not Minnesota, which has relatively few. It also wouldn’t be targeting Minnesota’s Somali population, most of whom are American citizens and thus not subject to immigration enforcement. In addition, a real immigration enforcement agency would have a decent working relationship with local law enforcement. As Brooklyn Park Police Chief Mark Bruley recently explained, ICE is impeding Twin Cities cops from doing their jobs—and harassing them to boot.

The road back to a competent, humane, and lawful immigration enforcement agency necessarily begins with the elimination of the agency that’s absorbed all the money to perform those tasks while putting it toward an army of jackbooted thugs who harm innocent people. Don’t want to call this “Abolish ICE”? That’s fine, I’m invested in action, not slogans. Whatever gets us to the point where we’re firing all of the paramilitaries doing enforcement and removal operations, re-vetting all the people doing laptop jobs so that we can fumigate the agency of all its cryptofascists, and perhaps housing the enforcement agency at the Justice Department, alongside a bunch of other lawyers and bureaucrats working on immigration and naturalization processes—some kind of Immigration and Naturalization Service, maybe?—would do the trick.

Retraining ICE isn’t just a stupid idea from an intellectual or moral perspective. It’s also really bad politics. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that for the first time, a bare majority of respondents—46 to 43 percent—were in favor of abolishing ICE. But what’s more important, from the perspective of Democrats, is that 80 percent of Democrats were in favor of it. That puts “Reform ICE” at the business end of an electoral shellacking. The wine moms Democrats need to win anywhere aren’t having it with going soft on Trump’s hoodlums. If you bring a timid, half-measure response on ICE to the people whose bonds to one another have been forged in the fires of protecting their own neighbors from state violence, I promise: You will eat no small amount of shit.

It’s no wonder that a pretty broad swath of Democratic officials, from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton, have reached the correct conclusion that ICE is beyond redemption. Here we have a simple example of people who have seen what this agency is all about and understand what needs to be done. To be out here making the case that an outlandishly malevolent gang of brownshirts can be reformed will require a lot of explaining. And when you’re explaining, you’re losing.

The salient fact is this: What most of us see in ICE are people who are not fit to serve in any governmental capacity, many of whom should probably be in jail for serial violations of citizens’ constitutional rights and lawless corporal violence on the residents of major American cities. If you want sane and effective immigration enforcement that doesn’t shame the nation on a daily basis—well, ICE is standing in the way of that. They are a force for misrule. I’m not going to entertain the stupid notion that any of ICE’s current workforce can be meaningfully reeducated, and neither should you. It’s like suggesting a rabid dog can be retrained.

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

For as long as Donald Trump has deployed his ICE brownshirts in the “Democrat” cities he so despises, Americans have been out in the streets, confronting his masked goons and making sure the rest of the world sees what’s going on. One of the first witness videos I saw was in Washington, D.C., in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood where my father grew up. A woman espied three Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents loitering in the area, harangued them, ran them off their roost, and then followed them around until they finally piled in their car and drove off.

ICE confrontations have necessarily evolved since then, as agents have become more wantonly violent. The New Republic has been chronicling the community response to ICE, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis. But one thing we haven’t done, and which I feel compelled to do, is simply say this: I think the people risking their lives and livelihoods to protect their neighbors are the best of us, and I feel like we all owe them a debt of gratitude.

I’m thankful for all the people who’ve filmed ICE agents slipping and falling on Minneapolis’s icy streets. Fascism is more a set of aesthetics than it is a legible system of political beliefs, so it actually matters that we make fun of these jabronis—humiliation pushes our lines forward. Creativity is needed, as well. I’ve thrilled to the sight of Minnesotans gathered outside the hotels harboring these hoodlums, banging on drum kits late into the night. And ordinary citizens seem very composed and ready to protect their city. One especially inspiring sight came this week when ICE agents pounded on the door of the Wrecktangle Pizza shop in Minneapolis’s Lyn Lake neighborhood: There’s a “tweet tweet” blast on a whistle, and suddenly scores of people swarm the sorry ICE agents and run them off.

While we should be rightly delighted by these sights, they might be occluding a darker part of this story. The murder of Renee Good has engendered a righteous fury in the people of Minneapolis, but if my friends there are any guide, it’s also sparked genuine sorrow and spiky, persistent fear. People that I know normally to be rocks of confidence are communicating a despair that I’ve never heard them express.

In my group chats, I’ve been told about restaurant workers who’ve disappeared from their workplaces. Those friends of mine with kids have had to go to exhausting lengths to protect them. One told me about how his daughter’s preschool had to close because the Methodist Church that hosted it was tipped off that ICE would be executing a raid on its property that day—the day of the church’s food pantry. And the reason ICE was rumbling Wrecktangle Pizza, I was told, was because the chain raised $85,000 to help area restaurants cope with the strain of their agents’ presence in the city. ICE knows who the most vulnerable Minneapolitans are, and also the ones who’ve done them the most damage, and they are targeting both, with state-of-the-art surveillance technology and the tacit permission of the Trump administration to terrorize.

Minneapolis truly can be likened to a city under siege from a foreign threat. As The Minneapolis Star Tribune recently reported, the Trump administration’s plans to deploy as many as 3,000 ICE or Customs and Border Protection agents to the Twin Cities would make the occupying force “equivalent to five times the manpower of the Minneapolis Police Department.” Moreover, they report, it would be “close to the total headcount of sworn officers among the region’s largest 10 law enforcement agencies and equals nearly one agent for every 1,000 of the Twin Cities’ 3.2 million residents.”

This is an important side of the story to tell for many reasons, not the least of which is that ICE cannot deploy enough people to put every American city in check. So for the moment, Minneapolis is really taking it on the chin for most of the rest of us. The reason the streets of my own dense liberal enclave are not ringing out with shouts and whistles is because Trump’s “day of reckoning” isn’t being fought here—yet. When this fight does come to our own neighborhoods, we will have Minneapolitans—like the Chicagoans, Portlanders, Los Angelenos, and Washingtonians before them, among others—to thank for cheering our hearts, deepening our knowledge of how to fight back, and making these ICE deployments more costly.

The people of the Twin Cities feel isolated and alone; local officials have lamented that they are literally outgunned, and politicians in Washington have offered little respite beyond the occasional galaxy-brained idea. We owe a debt to the people of this besieged city. We should take some time to comfort friends and loved ones who are under fire. We should share their stories, good and bad, widely, with an eye toward building a repository of evidence that a future federal government can use to prosecute lawless ICE agents and those who gave them marching orders. In the meanwhile, to everyone putting your bodies on the line in this fight, you have my thanks. And to the ICE agents out there causing violence and mayhem, let me say—from the heart—get fucked.

For those interested in ways to help the people of Minneapolis, there are a number of organizations to which you can donate. Unidos MN has been helping to train Minneapolitans to observe and report on ICE activity and run the city’s rapid response hotline. Take Action MN is constructing a hub for mutual aid groups in the city. Families Helping Families has organized 120 parents to do grocery and rent relief, student transportation, school patrols, and more. Isaiah is a multiracial organization of faith communities that has organized rallies to remember Renee Good. There are a number of national civil rights organizations operating in the city, including the Immigrant Defense Network, the Council on American-Islamic Relations of Minnesota, and the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee. There are a number of legal aid organizations, as well, including the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund, the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, and the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

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

I think Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch has summed up the past week in American life more succinctly than I ever could: “We are going to look back fondly on 2025 as ‘the sane year’” of Trump’s second term.

Here’s where we left off in 2025: Trumpism isn’t working, ordinary people are being crushed under the wheels of elite impunity, the cost of everything is going up, the administration either has no answers for it or doesn’t care, and the president is deteriorating before our eyes, dogged by obvious health concerns and the slow-rolling Jeffrey Epstein affair. And as the year drew to a close, it looked for all the world that the president—an inveterate telegrapher of his own punches—was about to launch a regime-change war in Venezuela.

When the news finally came, on January 3, that the invasion had begun, it was even more chaotic and loopy than one might have imagined. The U.S. has abducted a head of state on cocaine-trafficking charges, an offense that would not seem to warrant either military intervention or the wholesale destabilization of a state. Trump has given the strong impression that the objective was the plunder of Venezuela’s oil, but that makes very little sense from either a business or an economic perspective—and, in a weird move for an “America First” movement, it will seem to require a pillage of taxpayer money to finance. Meanwhile, the administration’s tantrums have already moved on to other targets—Greenland and Mexico among them.

Just as the nation was contending with the possibility of going to war with another country, one of Trump’s ICE goons gunned down a Minneapolis woman in cold blood. The context of this crime cannot be shorn from all the other aforementioned ones. Everything is connected: Trump’s war machine is seizing territory for his mass deportation scheme (that was another goal in Venezuela); his goons plunder the country’s mineral resources with one hand while abducting our friends and neighbors off the streets with the other (some of them to be sent to Venezuela, presumably). It’s a vertically integrated autocracy—tearing a hole in the heart of the American civic fabric while funneling wealth to his plutocratic masters.

As Trump withers in his dog-wagging fugue, casting about for sundry distractions to occupy our attention while his administration fails to deliver peace, prosperity, or liberty to the American people, the rest of us can cut through the confusion: This administration is a criminal enterprise, first and foremost. These are impeachable offenses, plain as day. They must be treated as such. And a recent report from NOTUS finds that a number of Democrats seem to share this view.

Let’s dispense with the obvious: No, there are not enough votes to convict Trump in the Senate. And it’s a heavy enough challenge to get articles of impeachment out of the House—though the passing of California Republican Representative Doug LaMalfa has shrunk Speaker Mike Johnson’s majority to 218–213, leaving us on the cusp of tantalizing possibilities. But the salient point is this: Given the devotion of Trump’s cult in Congress, there’s no way an impeachment effort will end with the removal of the president.

Do it anyway. The rule of law is meaningless if you only take it up when it’s easy. The point of doing the right thing isn’t to merely experience the catharsis of success—it’s to assert standards, uphold values; to acknowledge the existence of moral authority and answer its call for redress courageously. Trump’s lawlessness has to be opposed, if only because the times demand it. This being an election year, Democrats are in need of some simple ideas on which to anchor a national campaign. “The president is a degenerate criminal, and if you send enough of us to Washington we will bring the madness to an end” is a message Democrats should be sending. Even if an impeachment effort hits the skids, it will signal to voters that Democrats have the political courage to defend our values.

Even a doomed-to-fail impeachment effort offers Democrats some distinct advantages. Remember: Democrats are in a content-creation war with the Trump regime. The news media thirsts for conflict and controversy; Democrats going all in on an impeachment effort sets the table for a feeding frenzy. Frankly, the fact that this is never getting to the Senate for a trial should free Democrats from having to strictly tether a case to statutory realities or tailor it to the austere sensibilities of doddering senators. There’s no reason an impeachment effort can’t be a kaleidoscopic panoply of Trumpian misdeeds presented with an eye toward capturing tabloid headlines.

Regardless of whether Democrats want to pursue the formal impeachment process, the larger idea—to hinder the Trump regime by calling attention to misconduct and lawlessness—is critical to Democrats’ messaging in this election year. Their campaign should be a thorough indictment of the president, the dismantling of his credibility, and the exposure of his every misdeed. Criminality is the Rosetta Stone that translates the Trump presidency, and as I’ve said before, the Democratic leaders of the future should be ready to speak fearlessly about putting the members of this lawless cabal in jail.

So let the prosecution of the president begin today. And if the Democrats, bolstered by that message, win back the House in the November midterms, then they can impeach him in earnest next year. Even Trump himself wouldn’t expect anything less.

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

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.