Yes, Trump Derangement Syndrome Exists; but It’s Among His Supporters

I don’t understand why everyone is so upset about Donald Trump’s invocation of Pearl Harbor during his tête-à-tête with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. I mean, we learned that Trump actually knows who bombed Pearl Harbor. Shouldn’t we just take that W?

All right. Yes, it was a mortifying moment on so many different levels. A Japanese reporter asked him why he didn’t inform U.S. allies before starting the Iran war. Trump muttered a couple sentences about the element of surprise and then said: “Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”

First, of course, is how deeply offensive this was to an ally of 80 years—an ally that lived under American occupation, albeit in a comparatively benign form, for seven years. Takaichi said nothing, and indeed later in the day she flattered Trump in the appallingly fulsome way world leaders have learned they need to do, as with a small child. Reaction in Japan seems to be what we’ve come to expect: a combination of outrage and resignation that the president of the United States is both an idiot and a moral eunuch, from whom such simultaneously tedious and offensive bilge is expected.

For my money, one word in particular jumped out: “me.” Really? On December 7, 1941, Trump was four and a half years short of being born. But that small detail didn’t prevent him from conflating himself with the state. Someone else once did that. The Parlement of Paris contested certain royal edicts in 1655, and that’s when Louis XIV supposedly delivered his famous “L’état, c’est moi”; we knew that Trump believes he is the state, but he’s never expressed it quite so nakedly.

Then there’s the fact that the United States wasn’t an ally of Japan in 1941. Kind of an important difference. But most of all, in likening the U.S. attack on Iran to the Japanese attack on Hawaii, Trump was saying it was a good thing that the United States emulated the actions of a fascist regime that had killed millions and raped infants in China. Still, the details of history mean nothing to Trump. History is only about great men, and whether they win or lose.

Speaking of which: Trump’s reliably windy and adipose rhetoric notwithstanding, this war is not going amazingly well. The American and Israeli militaries are good at what they do. We know that. But what, exactly, are they doing? And are they actually seeking the same objective? Trump doesn’t have a plan. Benjamin Netanyahu does, and it likely involves occupying big chunks of southern Lebanon and toppling the Iranian regime, which will almost surely require the ground troops Trump has gingerly begun to mention.

The potential lack of coordination between these two armies and their governments opens the way for some huge problems ahead. Israel’s strike on Iran’s South Pars gas field provoked a rare rebuke from Trump because Iran responded to the strike by hitting Qatari natural gas facilities. The attack wiped out 17 percent of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas export capacity for the next five years. Experts say this is likely to impact many kinds of energy-related expenses, and for a lot longer than three months.

Look: For the sake of the people of Iran, I hope Trump’s gamble ends up paying off. But history tells us that all kinds of unexpected things happen in war. That’s why democratically accountable leaders generally don’t launch them without having really thought matters through (that the United States has defied this dictum twice in this century will linger as a dark stain on this country’s reputation for many decades to come).

Trump doesn’t think of himself as democratically accountable (and we can thank the Supreme Court for furnishing jurisprudential backing for that belief). The state, it is he. Any hope that he might learn something from history is of course delusional; to learn from history, he’d have to care about it. So he believed, or was convinced—and with the flattery that undoubtedly accompanied the advice he was getting in mid-February, it surely didn’t take much convincing—that he, the mighty Trump, the god-king, the Jesus-touched general in the Armageddon war against lunatic Peter Thiel’s Antichrist, could topple a government by sheer dint of his will.

That’s precisely the kind of thing you come to believe when you’ve cheated your way through life and never been caught; when you’ve fleeced hundreds of people and gotten away with it, with prosecutors deciding, as longtime Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau did, that you’re too powerful to indict; when you’ve lied habitually and seen that lying, far from imposing any price of social ostracism, actually works to your benefit virtually every time; when your social world consists solely of flatterers who marvel over your tacky taste and congratulate you when you insist your triple bogey was a par; when the founder of a leading network in a multibillion-dollar media apparatus essentially acknowledged under oath that said network’s stars lied on your behalf about a matter as consequential as a presidential election result; and when you and this armada of sycophants have duped millions of people who checked their common sense at the door that you have the unilateral power to lower gas and beef prices.

Am I overstating things? Do I suffer—gasp—from Trump Derangement Syndrome? Elsewhere today on this site, Simon Lazarus issues a sharp and necessary reminder to liberals not to get overly obsessed with Trump himself—to bear in mind the movement and the intellectuals that support him.

He’s right about that. At the same time, though, I’d say that we shouldn’t even accept the presumption that Trump Derangement Syndrome applies to people like us. It does not. The people who suffer from TDS in this country are the ones who support him. And it’s getting worse: This week, Nate Silver found Trump’s approval slipping into uncharted territory, and approval of the war generally polls in the 30s—but at the same time, an NBC News poll discovered that among self-identified MAGAs, Trump’s approval stood literally at 100 percent to zero.

They’re the ones with TDS. You and I have Trump Awareness Syndrome. We see his un-thought-out war—and by the way, if it’s almost over, why is he asking Congress for $200 billion?—and we hear him utter vacuous and offensive statements like the Pearl Harbor remark, and we know all too well what he’s doing to this country. Awareness is a far heavier burden than derangement.

You’ve surely seen or read about the video the White House put out last week that interspersed bombing footage from Iran with punishing hits from NFL and college football games, over AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” You can see it here. You will also see that it was posted on X from the official White House account, which added one word to the visuals: “Touchdown.”

Football can be an ugly business, but it does not as yet involve the bombing of schools and the killing of innocent schoolgirls. Fortunately, several of the players highlighted in the White House post have decried the use of their images in this way. Former Baltimore Raven Ray Lewis told HuffPost: “I did not approve my image or football highlights being used to compare football to war. The game I love is about discipline, brotherhood, and respect. War is something entirely different. Lives are at stake. God bless our troops and their families.” His old teammate Ed Reed, after being alerted to the use of his image by journalist and Ravens fan Ben Jacobs, wrote on X: “I do not approve this message.” And former Nebraska Cornhusker Kenny Bell told The Washington Post: “For that play to be associated with bombing human beings makes me sick. I don’t want anything to do with images like that.” The cowardly NFL has yet to speak.

You may say it’s just a 30-second video and it’s about what we’d expect from these people. And you’d be right on both counts. But it seems to me this video is worth a little more exploration than that because it reveals a lot about what these apes are doing to our country. Actually, that’s insulting to apes, who live in quite sophisticated and empathetic societies. Let’s just call them vermin, although that’s probably insulting to rats too, but since it’s one of their favorite insults, let’s just turn it around on them.

Imagine being the juvenile White House staffer who came up with this idea. Imagine thinking that that was cool. How can that even happen? You have to have a love of gladiatorial violence. You have to believe that the lives of the people you’re killing have no value whatsoever. You have to revel in causing death. You have to see it all as a big joke. And you have to subscribe to a view of the world in which power, the ability to dominate and to rain down violence in extreme cases, is the only thing that really matters. And then you run it up the flagpole for approval, and everyone else thinks it’s cool too. How did we get here?

This has been the Trump ethos from the start. It would be funny, coming from such a weak and sad man: a draft dodger, a serial abuser of women (and maybe girls), a nonstop liar who’s spent 40 years hiding behind slick lawyers. But this weak and sad man, who probably couldn’t do five pushups if he had a gun held to his head, has convinced a third of the country that he’s a tough guy, and his propaganda outlets and the even weaker and sadder men in his party (the disgraceful Senator Lindsey Graham) have reinforced this hideous image.

Democracy is supposed to exist in conjunction with certain moral values. One core idea is that might does not make right. This is an old, old notion that goes all the way back to Plato’s Republic. The Sophist Thrasymachus argues that justice is nothing more than “the advantage of the stronger.” Plato has Socrates responding that this is wrong and defining justice in the ways most of us understand the word today—as believing and doing the right thing, irrespective of power relationships. Remember: This is the foundational text of Western philosophy. Thrasymachus was the bad guy. There’s a reason history has chosen to venerate Plato and Socrates, and not him.

You don’t need me to tell you which regimes in the history of the world have subscribed to Thrasymachus’s definition. It’s an ugly roster—to which we must now add the government of the United States of America.

The Trump regime has proven over and over that this is its morality. The DOGE cuts that have resulted in the deaths of poor children in Africa (as many as 700,000 a year). The repulsive cruelty that Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Tom Homan and ex–Border Patrol head Gregory Bovino have imposed upon people living law-abiding lives. The lawless and amoral murders of the people on those boats in the Caribbean.

And now, the prosecution of this war. It’s not that so far, we’ve killed “that many” civilians—around 1,300, although the killing of those schoolgirls will be a historic blot on this country’s escutcheon for the ages. It’s the certain knowledge that this crew will do anything it decides it needs or wants to do because, for them, justice is exactly the advantage of the stronger; nothing more and nothing less. And that’s how people can decide that war has no more gravity to it than a football game, and that equating the two is funny. What a sick bunch of people.

Back in 2024, Kamala Harris and the Democrats struggled to convince voters that a second Donald Trump term would constitute a serious threat to democracy. We can debate the effectiveness of her, and their, rhetoric. But on a certain level, it was a hard argument to make because it was hypothetical. Voters aren’t very interested in wrapping their heads around hypotheticals, or at least vague ones. And Harris’s hypotheticals were mostly vague, so if she or any Democrat tried to say, for example, that there was a very real threat that once in office, Trump might try to cancel elections, most people kind of tuned that out.

I was more than willing to believe that Trump might try to cancel elections or take over the media. But even I, when I sat down to think about exactly how, couldn’t quite pin down the specifics. No president had ever tried to do either of those things, so how exactly could Trump pull them off?

Well, we’re now beginning to see. Let’s start with elections. The Washington Post—and yes, there’s still good reporting going on there—reported Thursday that pro-Trump “activists” (a rather generous and perverse use of that word, I think) who say they’re working with the Trump administration “are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.” The plan would mandate voter ID and ban mail-in balloting, and calls on Trump to issue an executive order announcing both measures.

The premise, it almost goes without saying, is a total lie. China did not interfere in the 2020 election. Trump and his people often said so, the implication being that China interfered on behalf of its old friend Joe Biden and his son Hunter, whose alleged business dealings in China left his father hopelessly compromised.

None of it was true. Hunter Biden did have some business interests in China, but nothing that reached his father. The U.S. intelligence services studied foreign influence in the 2020 election, and in March 2021, the government released an intelligence report concluding that China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”

In fact, the report found—and isn’t this a surprise?—the biggest foreign actor in 2020 was Russia, trying to help Trump: “The primary effort the IC [intelligence community] uncovered revolved around a narrative—that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014—alleging corrupt ties between President Biden, his family, and other U.S. officials and Ukraine.”

But Trump administration officials—including Attorney General Bill Barr—pushed the China lie aggressively. So it’s very easy for Trump today to invoke China again and lie that the threat of even greater Chinese interference in 2026 demands that he take emergency measures.

With respect to those measures, he has no power whatsoever to impose them. As anti-Trump legal expert Norm Eisen put it on Morning Joe Friday: “Just as the Supreme Court struck his supposed emergency powers over tariffs, he has even less here.” That is true. But remember: Between tariff “Liberation Day” (April 2, 2025) and the day the Supremes finally ruled against Trump on tariffs (February 20, 2026), more than 10 months passed.

Trump has no power to “decree” that voters must present ID or to end mail-in balloting. But that doesn’t mean he can’t at least try both. Under the Insurrection Act or some other dusty statute, he can declare a state of emergency. Then he can decide that said state permits, nay requires, him to take extraordinary measures. On October 5, say, that might mean outlawing early voting. By October 13, it might mean no mail-in voting. By October 29, a reminder that all voters must present ID to vote. And by Sunday, November 1, two days before the election—an announcement that all these “reasonable” measures have alas failed, and he is now forced, against his will, to postpone the election.

Have trouble seeing that happen? I didn’t think so.

As for the media takeover: What I didn’t foresee in 2024 was the aggressiveness of Trump patsy David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, in trying to take over both CBS and CNN. But he wouldn’t stop. Netflix bid $83 billion. Ellison topped that this week with a bid of $111 billion, and Netflix dropped out.

And somewhere in there, Ellison attended Trump’s State of the Union address, and Trump took to social media to “urge” Netflix to remove Obama and Biden administration official Susan Rice from its board. I once would have written that this is how things go in tinpot dictatorships, or in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. But today, it’s how things go in the United States of America.

So picture this. It’s October. The mystery Trump accuser, the one about whom those FBI files have strangely gone missing, has come forward. Her allegations against the president of the United States are lurid and, to most of the country, credible. Trump is down to 29 percent in the polls. The economy is still limping. The polls all indicate that the GOP is in for a historic thrashing. Democrats are favored to win the House and, by now, are odds-on to maybe take the Senate too—their candidates in Alaska and Texas have now pulled slightly ahead.

And Trump declares a state of emergency and postpones the election. The Supreme Court issues an emergency stay, saying he can’t do that. But the court has no army, and Trump does, along with a handful of lickspittle governors who just might follow him down whatever dark path he plows.

That, not to mince words, is a coup d’état. Will he get away with it? I don’t know, but having effective control over how it is presented to viewers of CBS and CNN, and readers of the Bezos-owned Washington Post, to say nothing of the already vast pro-Trump propaganda empire of Fox News and the rest, will certainly make it easier.

That’s how fascism descends. And it’s becoming less and less hypothetical by the week.

At moments of massive social breakdown, when we are in the process of discovering to our horror that something evil has been going on in our society that much of the elite class was in on and that regular people were not told about—and this is surely such a moment—it’s a first and natural reflex among the people who are paid to ponder these things to ask where “we” went wrong. How can “we” have allowed this? And more importantly, how, knowing what we know today, can “we” be anything less than zealous in our pursuit of the whole truth?

Well, I say, excuse me, but who is this “we”? I’m not part of that “we.” You’re not part of that “we.” That “we” is a very specific “they”: It’s elites who believe they live in some atmospheric level beneath which the law and morality evaporate. With respect to Jeffrey Epstein, this elite, so perfectly dubbed “the Epstein class” by Senator Jon Ossoff, included representatives of both political parties: You had Bill Clinton and Larry Summers along with Donald Trump and Howard Lutnick. We don’t know exactly what these men did and did not do, and we need to be careful about such speculation, even with respect to Trump. But at bottom, they and many others consorted with someone they had to know was evil.

Now, finally, we are in the phase where we’re searching for answers. But again, with that last sentence, the “we” problem arises again. What “we” is searching for answers? That “we” includes me; and, I presume, you; and most of the media; and a sizable majority of the American people; and it includes Ro Khanna and a number of congressional Democrats and one admirable congressional Republican, Thomas Massie.

But by and large, it does not include the people who lead the Republican Party. It does include—credit where it’s due—many rank-and-file conservatives, who kept this issue bubbling on right-wing podcasts and in chat rooms. But it doesn’t include their leaders. In fact, their leaders—following their infallible Dear Leader—are actively blocking the search for answers. So, no—“we” haven’t lost our sense of shame. Trump and Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and James Comer and dozens of other Republicans who have the power to dig for answers have lost theirs.

Trump, obviously, wants the issue to go away so badly that he now may even start a war to distract us from anything Epstein-related. Bondi, the most cowardly and corrupt attorney general in modern history (yes, worse than John Mitchell!), presumably knows the truth and obviously doesn’t want it out. Ditto Patel.

And as for Comer, neither he nor any other Republican member of the House Oversight Committee bothered to show up for former Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner’s closed-door testimony this week. Comer topped that by telling Sean Hannity Thursday night: “What we have seen from the millions of documents that have been released is that Donald Trump is completely exonerated in the whole Epstein saga.” And although nearly all GOP House members voted for that Epstein transparency act, no Republican in either the House or the Senate besides Massie has shown the slightest interest in unearthing the facts.

So that’s the “we” here who have no sense of shame. Not us. It’s just Republicans, who obviously are either terrified that there’s something appalling in those files about their president or know it already.

I remember when Republicans used to lecture us all the time about the disappearance of shame in our culture. Newt Gingrich did it, while he was cheating on his second wife. Reagan education secretary and national scold Bill Bennett did it constantly, pumping out bestselling books about how liberalism had destroyed shame through its pernicious celebration of individual difference. Then we learned that the quality of shame completely eluded him every time he walked through the doors of a gambling casino, and that kind of finished him off as an arbiter of social morality.

Today? They’re the ones with no shame. Many have observed, in the wake of the amazing arrest in the U.K. of the sybarite formerly known as Prince (Andrew), that accountability seems to exist everywhere except the United States. Some observers also point to the sentencing this week in South Korea of former President Yoon Suk Yeol, whose demise Americans would do well to pay attention to.

On December 3, 2024, accusing the opposition party of engaging in “anti-state activities,” Yoon declared martial law. He suspended political activities, including convenings of the national and local legislatures, and he placed restrictions on the press. Fortunately for South Korea, it was all over within days: Yoon was impeached on December 14, arrested the next January 15, and on Thursday he was sentenced to life in prison.

How did South Korea manage to deliver justice so swiftly? Because a number of members of his own party opposed him. On the night Yoon declared martial law, the leader of the National Assembly called an emergency session; a quorum quickly gathered, and the assembly voted to condemn Yoon’s declaration. The vote of 190 members that night was unanimous, and it included 18 members of Yoon’s own party.

Once upon a sweet old time, it was utterly impossible to imagine such a political crisis in the United States. Today? Alas, the only part of the South Korea story that’s hard to imagine in the United States is 18 members of Trump’s Republican Party opposing him.

That’s the “we” that those of us who love this country—in the only meaningful sense, of wanting it to live up to its potential and its highest ideals, including holding everyone equal before the law—need to be wary of. They will always put Trump before country. And certainly before the girls, now women, so viciously violated by Epstein and whatever members of his “class.” Shameful indeed.

During and right after Pam Bondi’s House testimony Wednesday, I flipped on Fox News and Newsmax to see how they were covering it. I was expecting to see a celebration of how the attorney general really put those America-hating libs in their place. To my surprise, I did not. I saw mostly ads, to be honest, but the little programming I did catch was devoted entirely to the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping story.

Disappointed, I flipped back to MS NOW and didn’t think much of it. But Wednesday evening, The Daily Beast reported that my experience was not aberrational: Bondi testified for about five hours, and Fox News ran roughly 10 minutes of it live.

It’s an old, old Murdochian ploy: When there’s news that doesn’t suit the agenda, just ignore it. I’ve seen this movie many times. Back in a different era, Rupert’s favorite politician was Al D’Amato, the hacky and corrupt Republican senator from New York. Whenever there was a new allegation about D’Amato’s ethics, or a Senate report reviewing same, it would be on the front page of The New York Times and get prominent play in the Daily News—and in the New York Post, there usually wasn’t a word.

Fox’s near silence on Bondi is an admission that the hearing was an indefensible horror show. And it gets worse if you really think about it for a few minutes. Think of all the planning and strategizing that went into that performance. Employees of the Department of Justice, working on our dime, spent hours prepping Bondi on exactly how to insult each and every Democratic member of the committee. They came up with the idea of requiring each House member to have an individual log-in to peruse the Epstein files so the DOJ could spy on them. They spent hours assembling Bondi’s little burn book. She had to have been coached for hours about exactly how to ignore the questions and try to turn the tables on her interrogators. In other words: Her aides, whose salaries we pay, probably thought this would be great. That she’d walk away with a catalog of sound-bite knockout punches.

Instead, Bondi walked away with the image that will haunt her for the rest of her life: her back turned to those Jeffrey Epstein victims as Representative Pramila Jayapal asked them to stand and raise their hands “if you have still not been able to meet with the DOJ”—and they all raised their hands. That image looked horrible Wednesday; as more and more details about the Epstein story leak out in the coming weeks and months, it’s only going to look worse.

And yet, for all this? In substantive terms, her performance at that hearing may not even have been the worst thing Bondi did this week! The morning after the hearing, she fired Gail Slater, the head of the department’s antitrust division. Slater actually had a decent reputation—she was part of the populist-MAGA anti-monopoly movement, and she brought a high-profile case against Google over its monopolization of the ad tech market.

Many progressive anti-monopolists were cheering for Slater. Said Senator Elizabeth Warren upon hearing this news: “A small army of MAGA-aligned lawyers and lobbyists have been trying to sell off merger approvals that will increase prices and harm innovation to the highest bidder. Every antitrust case in front of the Trump Justice Department now reeks of double-dealing—Ticketmaster’s stock is already surging.” That last sentence is true. If you’re interested, you can read here about why this is so bad. The bottom line is that Bondi’s firing of Slater is a big nail in the coffin of the idea that Trumpian right-wing populism is willing to take on powerful interests. It may—but only as long as they’re designated enemies of Trump.

To circle back to Fox News: If they’re going to follow the old Murdoch edict of ignoring all bad news, pretty soon they’re going to be reduced to airing nothing but scare stories about woke Olympic athletes and Spanish-speaking superstars.

It’s not even clear Bondi had the worst week among Trump Cabinet officials. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth got seriously pulverized twice this week. First, when a grand jury refused to indict six Democrats for their earlier video reminding soldiers that they had a duty to disobey illegal orders; as Chesa Boudin and Eric Fish point out in a Times op-ed today, grand juries convened by the mighty Justice Department almost never fail to return an indictment. Second, when a federal judge blocked Hegseth from punishing one of the six, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, writing that Hegseth had grossly violated Kelly’s First Amendment rights. “Rather than trying to shrink the First Amendment liberties of retired servicemembers, Secretary Hegseth and his fellow Defendants might reflect and be grateful for the wisdom and expertise that retired servicemembers have brought to public discussions and debate on military matters in our Nation over the past 250 years,” Judge Richard Leon wrote. “If so, they will more fully appreciate why the Founding Fathers made free speech the first Amendment in the Bill of Rights!”

And Kristi Noem had to endure the indignity of seeing rival Tom Homan, the border czar, make her ICE-men goeth out of Minneapolis. Thursday night, The Wall Street Journal posted a long and devastating story about the mayhem at the Department of Homeland Security under Noem and her rumored lover, Corey Lewandowski. It’s the kind of Washington story that appears only when inside sources decide to start running to reporters to spill saucy details they once sat on—a clear sign that no one is scared of her anymore.

None of these people, of course, belongs in a high position in the federal government. They’re psychopathic monsters. There’s no doubt Bondi and her advisers think she knocked a home run on Wednesday. But one day, we’ll all learn what she’s hiding about the Epstein story. Can’t wait for that hearing.

By far the most widely read piece I’ve written in my time at The New Republic is this one, which I wrote right after the 2024 election and headlined “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” My answer to that question was the media—specifically, that an avowedly right-wing media, which existed not to report the news but to elect Republicans and turn liberalism into a grotesque and indefensible caricature of itself, had grown and grown since the 1990s, finally by 2024 reaching the point where it was more powerful and more agenda-setting than the mainstream media.

I wrote: “Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC.… Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.”

Here we sit, 15 months later, and 13 months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, and what’s changed? What’s changed, predictably, is that the landscape is even bleaker. CBS News, now run by Bari Weiss, has become part of that agenda-setting right-wing media—which includes Fox News, Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, and more. And so has The Washington Post, whose rightward turn on its editorial page started becoming apparent late last year.

And this week, Bezos moved to assert his personal control not just over the opinion pages. Now he’s decided to start dismantling the news side, with the 300 layoffs he ordered Wednesday. As you’ve no doubt read by now, the Post has suffered admittedly massive losses lately—$100 million in 2024. But as you’ve also surely read, Bezos could cover those losses if he wanted to with what he makes in a few days. If he wrote a check tomorrow to cover those losses, his net worth would drop, as Truthout’s Sharon Zhang observed, from the current Forbes-estimated $248.7 billion—all the way down to a worrying $248.6 billion.

So why did he decide not to write that check? I don’t know the man, and of course on some level, rich men hate writing such checks. But if he actually believed in the value of journalism’s role in sustaining democracy, as he appeared to for the first few years after he bought the paper in 2013, he’d have written it happily.

So the question arises: What are we to conclude from his refusal to do so? There’s only one conclusion. He doesn’t care about democracy. He sees no vital role for a vigorous free press in sustaining it. And he wants The Washington Post not only to be a right-leaning libertarian newspaper, which, as many have observed, is his right. He wants it to be a lousy newspaper. A weak simulacrum of what it was once and should be. A newspaper that cannot play its time-honored role as a check on abuses of power.

I note here, as others have, that the Post still has 500 journalists, which is a lot, and that the layoffs largely didn’t touch the national reporting teams. That’s all good, I guess. But just wait. The guillotine will start finding those necks eventually. Why? Because these layoffs won’t staunch losses over the long haul. Indeed, they may make them worse. More subscribers who decided to give the paper one more chance after Bezos pulled the Harris endorsement will jump ship (in my anecdotal experience, that’s happening to a considerable degree already). Losses will continue. And one day, the Post’s publisher—this horror-show hack named Will Lewis, this meretricious mountebank who was too cowardly to join the staff call announcing the layoffs but who was spotted at a glam Super Bowl–related event in San Francisco the very next day—will announce that more belt-tightening is required.

And I submit to you that Bezos at best doesn’t care and, at worst, actually wants this on some level. Once upon a dear old time, he seemed to want a real newspaper. But after he threw in his lot with Trump (or Trumps, plural, given his financing of this embarrassing piece of Melania agitprop), that changed. It’s axiomatic: It is impossible to believe simultaneously in a vigorous press and in the success of Donald Trump. The latter, which is based on the smashing of democratic laws and customs, cannot succeed if the former exists. And, on an emotional and psychic and most certainly pecuniary level, Bezos has made his choice.

Rich liberals, I beg of you: Do something. Step in to save The Washington Post. Maybe there’s not a single one of you who has the money to swallow $100 million in annual losses. But maybe five or six of you together do. And by the way: If you do it right, and you hire the right editors and rehire some of the old columnists and do some intelligent modernizing around video and podcasts and are willing to be an unapologetically liberal newspaper, you’ll find an audience again.

You’ll be doing a lot more than saving some jobs. “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost,” Thomas Jefferson wrote a friend in 1786. A news outlet isn’t a shoe store. It’s a guardrail against tyranny. It shouldn’t surprise us that a man worth a quarter-trillion dollars, whose wealth has increased tenfold in the last decade, doesn’t care about this. Democracy, tyranny … makes no difference to him. In fact, to the extent that democracy makes room for his employees to try to join unions and so forth, democracy is an inconvenience. So is a free press.

So take it off his hands. Make Bezos the proverbial offer he can’t refuse. He may actually refuse to sell to a liberal consortium—his preference for tyranny may now be that stark. But it can’t hurt to try. Your accountants might grouse, but there is no question that history will reward you.

It was already a pretty weird week, what with Tulsi Gabbard—the official in charge of gathering foreign intelligence—showing up at a Georgia election office for an FBI raid. But then, on Thursday, the president of the United States filed a lawsuit that is an obvious shakedown of the government he runs. Donald Trump, his two older sons, and their business are suing the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion for allowing a government contractor to gain access to their tax filings (the contractor later leaked the files to the press). It reads like a transparent attempt to steal a few billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury while he can get away with it.

It’s an interesting twist of fate that the Gabbard raid and this lawsuit both dropped in the same week, because they actually go together quite well in the Venn diagram of Trumpian iniquity. Both developments prove a core point about our system that everybody had better learn and be prepared to act on after Trump leaves office (assuming that happy day comes): namely, that Trump has shown that a conscienceless and corrupt person can pollute the system in endless ways because previous generations never anticipated that someone this comprehensively conscienceless and corrupt could win high office. There simply aren’t laws that prohibit much of what he does because it never occurred to anyone that a holder of high public trust would ever even try such stuff.

Let’s look first at this IRS suit, beginning with a little historical background. First of all, as The New York Times reported when it got the leaked documents, Trump paid no federal taxes in 10 of 15 years from 2004 to 2019. We don’t know that that was a crime; maybe it was just fancy accountants. But one way or the other, it sure isn’t right.

But OK, they got leaked. That’s against the law. Of course, one could argue that the only reason they had to be leaked was that Trump refused to release his tax returns publicly, making him the first presidential candidate since Richard Nixon not to do so. Had he complied with that honorable custom—one that requires that people adhere not to a law but to a democratic norm of behavior—there would have been no leak.

But fine. They were leaked. That’s illegal. And guess what? The guy who did it is in prison! He started serving a five-year sentence in May 2024. We can debate whether, in breaking that law, Charles Littlejohn in fact performed a public service (historical fact of note: Nixon’s returns also were leaked, and for that crime, no one was ever indicted). But Littlejohn broke a law, and he was convicted. The system, on paper, worked.

For normal human beings, that would have been enough. Justice was served. But not for the Trumps. The slightest whiff of an opportunity to scam someone or someones—in this case, the taxpayers he was elected to serve—gets them salivating like hyenas over a springbok carcass. So now we have the unprecedented and frankly insane circumstance of the sitting president of the United States suing the government of the United States, over which he himself presides, trying to use his office to line his pockets. They’ll pick that carcass to the bone if they can.

Now you might ask: Shouldn’t there be some kind of law preventing the president of the United States from suing the federal government, at least while he’s in office? I’m not a lawyer, so maybe there is some such law from 1856 or whatever, and someone will discover it. But assuming there’s not, I can tell you why there’s not: It never occurred to people that a president could be so petty and venal as to do something like this!

Now let us turn to Gabbard. She has been sidelined for some time, ever since she made the error, fatal in Trumpworld, of saying something true to the factual record—that U.S. intelligence services saw no evidence that Iran was building a nuclear weapon. “I don’t care what she said,” Trump said at the time, “I think they were very close to having one.” More recently, she was frozen out of the action on Venezuela.

So, needing a way to get back in Dear Leader’s good graces, she boned up on a topic that she knew would demonstrate her value: the “fraudulent” 2020 election. How can she possibly claim jurisdiction over this obviously domestic matter, many have been asking since this week’s raid? Well, she can’t, on real Earth. But on Trump Earth, you might recall that back in 2020, there were some wild conspiracy theories that involved foreign governments and intelligence agencies.

Remember “Italygate”? I thought you might not. It never really gained traction among us flat-earthers. But it was a QAnon favorite for a while there, and it held that an Italian aerospace company and an Italian Army general worked with the American Embassy in Rome to use Italian satellites to remotely switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden. Yes, that is what they believed.

Then there’s the China angle, which Trump was touting on social media just the other day. In case the Italygate story isn’t ominous enough for you, Trump tossed China into the mix. “China reportedly coordinated the whole operation,” he posted. “The CIA oversaw it, the FBI covered it up, all to install Biden as a puppet.” This is the stuff of mad dogs and March hares, to put it mildly. But if you’re Tulsi Gabbard, it’s ample reason to claim that a conspiracy this immense not only allows for the nation’s chief intelligence officer to be involved, it veritably demands it!

So now we are about to launch—at the expense of the same taxpayers whose pockets la famiglia Trumpa is trying to pick in the IRS suit—into an investigation into “crimes” that are more than five years old (and thus likely beyond the statute of limitations) and were never committed anyway. But Trump wants people to go to jail, and Gabbard and Pam Bondi—who meanwhile is 41 days late delivering the Epstein files and thus in clear violation of federal law—will move heaven and earth to make sure someone does. (Note: Bondi released more than 3 million Epstein-related documents today, just a couple hours after I wrote this.)

Again, we might ask: Why is there no law preventing a president from using his government to pursue such obviously baseless revenge lawsuits? Because no one imagined a president would behave so sleazily. Or they thought that, if one did, surely Congress, regardless of party loyalty, would step up and assert its constitutional authority and make an unequivocal statement about what is right and wrong in a democratic society. Yeah. Right.

So this is where we stand, as we begin this second year of the second Trump presidency. Three more years of this. It’s getting harder and harder to see how we survive it, but if we do, Congress is going to have to pass a bunch of laws that were never thought necessary until we elected a gangster as president.

Most of the obvious reactions to Jack Smith’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday have already been delivered, and I agree with them. It’s hard to imagine what on earth Chairman Jim Jordan—and hearing his whiny, tinny, angry, lying voice awoke involuntary physiological reactions I’d spent years trying to vanquish—and the Republicans thought they were accomplishing. To any non-Kool-Aid-drinking American, they looked ridiculous. Smith was calm. The Republicans were jumping out of their skins competing to get their sound bite featured on Fox News. All they managed to do was to remind people that Donald Trump is a criminal and that in a sane world, the Senate would have convicted him on the second impeachment (the January 6 one) and barred him from holding federal office for life.

I want to focus on one matter I’d forgotten all about. I’m thinking maybe you had too. That’s the question of this second volume of Smith’s report on Trump’s crimes, which focuses not on January 6 but on Trump’s theft of those classified documents he took down to Mar-a-Lago. It was written by Smith and his team back when the investigation was active. It is generally presumed to contain details about the matter that are heretofore unknown. Its release to the public was blocked by—speaking of memories I’d successfully repressed—Florida Judge Aileen Cannon.

I trust you remember her track record here. She tossed the classified documents case in July 2024, ruling that Smith had been improperly appointed to his position as special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland. From the moment the case landed on her docket, Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, barely concealed her obvious partisanship in her actions, which brought her some jaw-dropping reprimands from the Eleventh Circuit Court, which employs her. She was a judicial joke.

But she didn’t stop during the campaign. No! Once Trump was safely back in the White House, she ordered, on the second day of Trump’s second presidency, that the Department of Justice could not release the second volume of the Smith report (the first part had been released by Garland’s Justice Department the week before, in the waning days of Joe Biden’s presidency).

A couple of nonprofit legal outfits sued. Cannon dragged her feet. She spent 2025 ignoring petitions from the two nonprofits that were seeking to get the volume released. Finally, last November, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit—which, by the way, included one Trump appointee—chastised Cannon’s delays and gave her 60 days to do something.

The 60 days came and went at the beginning of this month, and—shocker—nothing happened. Then, as fate would have it, just this Monday, three days before Smith’s public testimony, the matter of the second volume vaulted back into the news as a lawyer for Trump filed a motion asking Cannon to permanently block the Justice Department, “as well as its current, former, and future officers, agents, officials, and employees” (note well: future officers!), from making the second volume public.

Two points here. First, we have the rather odd spectacle of Trump, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney put it on Bluesky, “litigating in his personal capacity against the Justice Department he runs.” But of course the key word in the motion, as noted above, is “future.” If Cannon grants this motion and a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, even that future attorney general won’t be allowed to release Volume II.

Second—about Trump’s lawyer. We’ve seen the basket of deplorables Trump has hired to defend either him or his government in court: Alina Habba, illegally installed as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey, who resigned after a court disqualified her; Todd Blanche, still the number two at Justice, famous for his softball interview with Ghislaine Maxwell and for defending moving her to a cushier prison; Emil Bove, who while at Justice ordered the sleazy dropping of all charges against then–New York Mayor Eric Adams, which led to nearly a dozen resignations.

Now we must add to that sorry menagerie a certain Kendra Wharton, who filed this week’s motion to Cannon. Who is Wharton? She was a white-collar criminal defense attorney in 2023 when Blanche announced that she and Bove would be joining Trump’s legal team to defend him against Smith’s charges. Later, when Trump took office the second time, he tapped Wharton to serve as the Justice Department’s senior ethics official. The prior one resigned after he was reassigned to a unit charged with cracking down on sanctuary cities. “Trump ethics official,” one suspects, is all we need to know about her.

So let’s take a step back. Trump took thousands of documents, more than 300 marked classified, with him to Mar-a-Lago in 2021. For months, he rebuffed polite requests by the FBI to cooperate with an inquiry. Finally, they raided the place. Naturally, Trump turned this into a deep-state persecution, and his willing propagandists complied in pushing that lie.

Then the roulette wheel of fate gave the case to the hackiest federal judge imaginable. She tossed the case. And she has spent her time since then making sure that the public never learns any more details about what Trump did. Next up, she’ll surely agree to the motion filed by a lawyer who played a willing role in helping Trump and Pam Bondi wreck the Justice Department.

And even if somehow Cannon denies the motion and Volume II somehow gets released? Well, it’s Bondi who’ll decide how much of it we get to see!

The Epstein files were supposed to be released in full on December 19. Bondi has done nothing. Volume II by rights should have been released some time last year. But Cannon did nothing. This is banana republic democracy, hiding corruption from public view while the president they’re all protecting seeks to destroy NATO and boost Vladimir Putin, and as he sends a quasi-gestapo force of ill-trained goons out into the streets of our cities to shoot people. And doing all they can to play along, as they showed us Thursday, are House Republicans, who’ll never stop debasing themselves in the race to prove to Trump which among them can be most servile.

Next up for the very fine people of Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Maine. President Donald Trump, in his speech in Detroit Wednesday, signaled that the Pine Tree State was in his sights. Why? Well, no doubt partly because he’s never won the state in three tries (although he has carried the rural 2nd district each time, and Maine is one of two states that awards electoral votes by congressional district). But mainly because Maine has something notable in common with Minnesota. Can you guess? Yep: a sizeable Somali population.

“They’re scammers,” Trump said, just putting the plain old racism out there for all to see. “They always will be, and we’re getting them out. In Maine, it’s really crooked as hell, too.” In response, Democratic Governor (and Senate candidate) Janet Mills released a video in which she made her position plain: “To the federal government, I say this: If your plan is to come here to be provocative and to undermine the civil rights of Maine residents, do not be confused. Those tactics are not welcome here.” The key word there, of course, is “residents” (as opposed to “citizens”).

The several thousand Somalis who have settled in Maine since the 1990s are based chiefly in Portland and Lewiston. They’ve been on alert since at least mid-December, when Trump referred to Somalis as “garbage.” Hundreds of Mainers gathered at a December 15 rally in Lewiston to support the Somali population—who were notably absent from the rally because, in the words of one Somali resident, “people were afraid of, ‘OK, what if somebody shoots us, or something happens?’”

As Americans, our minds are trained by involuntary habit to assume, when we see excess and violence, that the government will step in and bring order. Things get a little crazy at a protest, the cops break it up. Yes, there have been times when it’s the cops themselves who incite violence, like in Chicago in 1968. But when that has happened, the state has usually seemed at least a little sorry afterward.

Certainly, there were and always are reactionary forces working to throttle such examinations, and sometimes they succeed. But at least the impulse to investigate has generally been there. Indeed, a government commission appointed after the ’68 confrontations between cops and protesters during that year’s Democratic convention had a staff of 200 conducting thousands of interviews; in its report, it actually used the phrase “police riot.” That’s how things work in the United States—there exists a shared assumption that violence of that sort is undesirable, and that when it happens, some gesture toward accountability is what a democratic society requires.

Well, there existed such assumptions. All that’s out the window now. Now the federal government is the unapologetic bringer of violence. And it’s further important to understand: No amount of criticism, no amount of forensic or video evidence, no poll expressing mass public disapproval will change this. In fact, precisely the opposite. Any and all criticism will just be taken by Trump and MAGA world as further proof that they are right. Evidence will be dismissed and countered with fake “evidence,” like the video Vice President JD Vance trumpeted that purported to show that Renee Nicole Good had it coming. Bad-news polls will be dismissed as fake. The Trumpian state will dig in its heels. The only question Stephen Miller will ask himself will be: How can we turn up the heat?

This is what makes what’s happening in this country today different. The state is the perp. The government is beyond the law. The United States is now closer to Bashar Al Assad’s Syria, or perhaps even today’s Iran, than to anything we recognize as fitting within the understood norms of American history. That’s a pretty big statement, I realize, but it is not an exaggeration.

True—the Trump administration isn’t killing people by the thousands. It isn’t dropping those hideous barrel bombs on its own people. But mentally, psychologically, we as a country are edging in that direction. Until Minneapolis, I would have told you that as bad as Trump is, he’s not capable of ordering ICE agents to shoot people (citizens or not) at random, and that as bad as ICE is, they’d refuse such orders. Now I no longer believe either of those things. This man and his government are clearly capable of mass violence against immigrants and all who support them. It seems only a matter of time now before some of these thuggish ICE agents, under orders from the thug president, shoot some people down.

Remember, ICE is still on a hiring spree. And it’s not simply that ICE is recruiting—it’s how they’re doing it, and what kind of recruits they’re targeting. Earlier this week, The Intercept reported that just two days after Jonathan Ross executed Renee Good, the Department of Homeland Security posted a recruiting effort on Instagram using the phrase “We’ll Have Our Home Again.” The background music in the post was a song of the same name by a group called Pine Tree Riots. The song’s lyrics, the story reported, have been cited by extremists and neo-Nazis in the past. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Pine Tree Riots “is a little-known a cappella group affiliated with the Mannerbund, which the [SPLC] has previously listed as a white nationalist group.”

The Pine Tree Riot was an uprising by some New Hampshire colonists against the British in 1772. The Pine Tree Flag has recently been linked to Christian nationalism, and at least one was carried by January 6 insurrectionists. And more recently—just so you know how deeply MAGA marinates in this stuff—an official at the Department of Education had one set up outside his office. It’s also the same flag that was spotted outside Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s vacation home a few years ago. And now, ICE is using if not the flag itself then the same far-right sentiment it evokes to recruit people to whom it is, after the most minimal training possible, handing masks and Glock 19s.

And Trump himself? Soon, in Minnesota or somewhere, he will invoke the Insurrection Act against the will of local elected officials and send in the military. It’s hard to say where that will lead. But no place good. Again—all evidence that it isn’t working will be rejected as fake, and Americans who disapprove will be dismissed as having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a phrase that allegedly describes people like you and me.

We’re the sane ones. The only Trump Derangement Syndrome is that of Trump himself, and his supporters, and it is destroying the country we thought we knew. 

On January 3, four days before the horrific killing of Renee Nicole Good, the Department of Homeland Security put out a press release. The headline bragged: “ICE Announces Historic 120% Manpower Increase, Thanks to Recruitment Campaign That Brought in 12,000 Officers and Agents.”

The statement went on to boast (bolded language in the original): “After receiving more than 220,000 applications to join ICE from patriotic Americans, ICE blew past its original hiring target of 10,000 new officers and agents within a year. In fact, we have more than doubled our officers and agents from 10,000 to 22,000. With these new patriots on the team, we will be able to accomplish what many say was impossible and fulfill President Trump’s promise to make America safe again.”

It appears that Good’s executioner—and it’s hard to think of a more apt word for someone who fires three point-blank shots at the head of an obviously unarmed civilian who is trying to drive away—was not one of these “new patriots.” The incident his defenders have taken to invoking, in which he was dragged by a car and ended up with 33 stitches, reportedly happened last June, before the hiring spree. But even that raises the obvious question: If he was injured, if he was “traumatized” by that event, as Vice President JD Vance said Thursday, what in the world was he doing still out in the field?

An investigation may answer that question (or, since it’s going to be led by Kash Patel’s FBI, maybe it won’t). But our common sense, and what we have learned in the last year about these people, tells us that he was still in the field for the same reason that ICE has hired 12,000 people in six months, recruiting specifically for people with an enthusiasm for guns and the military. The Trump administration wants to force showdowns that lead inevitably to what happened in Minneapolis Wednesday.

Take a look at the recruitment social media post that DHS placed on X last August: “Serve your country! Defend your culture! No undergraduate degree required!”

Let’s break that down. “Serve your country.” OK, nothing objectionable about that. But then we take a very Trumpian-Millerian turn: “Defend your culture.” Who is that aimed at? What set of emotional reactions is that command supposed to fire, and in whom? What “culture,” precisely, is it referring to? And finally, the reassurance that the job is open to practically anyone.

Well, anyone of a certain mindset, that is. On New Year’s Eve, ICE announced that it was initiating a new $100 million recruitment campaign that it referred to as a “wartime recruitment” strategy. The campaign, as The Washington Post put it, will target people “who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts, or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear.”

Any organization that goes from 10,000 to 22,000 in six months has hired some very unqualified people. If that organization is, say, the Candy Stripers, that might not be much of an issue. But if the organization is one that gives its employees badges and masks and riot gear and SIG Sauer P320 semiautomatic pistols (or maybe a Glock 19, to which the agency began transitioning last year), you’ve got a problem.

That’s exactly what Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Corey Lewandowski (whose exact role at DHS is the focus of many questions) have done. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill passed last July, you might recall, tripled ICE’s budget, from around $10 billion a year to close to $30 billion. All told, as Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center pointed out last year, the bill “allocates more than $170 billion over four years for border and interior enforcement, with a stated goal of deporting one million immigrants each year. That is more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States.” She added that “the largest percentage increase goes to finding, arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants already living in the U.S., most of whom have not committed a crime and many of whom have had lawful status.”

It’s clear what all this adds up to. There will be more Renee Goods. And they will all be smeared and trashed by Trump and his followers. Vance said Thursday, as have any number of MAGA-ites on social media, that she was driving right at the shooting officer. Proof of this, they say, lies in the fact that first bullet hole went through her windshield.

Yes, it did. But look at where it went through the windshield. It’s all the way over to the right, just a couple of inches from the driver’s-side pillar. If she was driving right at him, wouldn’t that bullet hole be closer to the center of the windshield? The video shows clearly that she was turning the car to the right. But even if there is ambiguity about the first shot, there is no ambiguity whatsoever about the second and third.

Good was executed. And now her reputation and life and values are being killed. Perhaps taking cues from Noem, who accused Good of an act of “domestic terrorism,” Vance referred to the victim as part of a left-wing conspiracy. A reporter asked him to amplify on that, and he couldn’t. He also said Good represented a “lunatic fringe.”

No, Mr. Vice President. Renee Good represents tens of millions of honest, decent, and patriotic Americans. Tens of millions of us who want to live in a humane and compassionate multiracial democracy where citizens, even if they are trying to obstruct a law enforcement action they object to (there is still some question whether Good was doing this), are subjected to the legal process and given their rights and not shot point-blank, where people who aren’t citizens but are otherwise law-abiding don’t have to live in fear, and where the “culture” we “defend” is a culture based not on blood and soil but the rule of law.

The real lunatic fringe in this country is the one that sanctions the execution of a citizen and then spends days smearing her and that imagines itself to be at war with its own people and precipitates these kinds of confrontations in the first place. That fringe is doubling down, and hiring and hiring and hiring. This is going to get much worse.