There’s One Thing All Democrats Must Agree On, or They’re Dead in 2028

I started reading the Democratic autopsy of their 2024 loss that was belatedly released Thursday, but I stopped on page eight, when I got to this sentence: “In 1989, after losing three straight presidential campaigns, our party refocused the conversation around policy and purpose to reclaim the vital center of American discourse.” The second I saw that indefensible sentence, I clicked away.

Why? I’ve written this a few times, but I’ll write it again: There is no comparison whatsoever to be made between the Democrats’ situation after the 1988 election and their situation now, post-2024. In 1989, the Democrats had been absolutely pasted in three elections in a row. In 1980, Jimmy Carter lost to Ronald Reagan by nearly 10 points and 440 electoral votes; in 1984, Walter Mondale lost to Reagan by 18 points and 512 electoral votes; in 1988, Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush by 8 points and 315 electoral votes.

Meanwhile, the last three presidential elections have been decided by razor-thin margins. Hillary Clinton lost narrowly, though she won the popular vote by a fairly substantial margin (2.8 million); Joe Biden won; and Kamala Harris lost by a combined 230,000 votes in three states. There is no parallel to 1989.

So why would someone write this? I can think of only two reasons. The first is a combination of historical ignorance and allowing emotion to push aside facts. Democrats were so crushed by 2024 that it kinda felt like 1988. But feeling that without looking at the actual numbers is either dumb or lazy.

The second reason someone might write that sentence is ideological. That is, they are firmly committed to the view that the Democratic Party needs to “move to the center” or even “to the right,” and so they invoke the anemic ghost of 1988 to help them make their case. And if they did happen to stop and look at the numbers from the 1980s and wrote the sentence anyway, well, that would make the writing of it a deeply cynical exercise as well, because the writer would know there’s no truth to the analogy.

That “someone,” by the way, was Democratic consultant Paul Rivera. The Democratic National Committee hired him on a pro bono, part-time basis to conduct the autopsy even though he hadn’t worked on a presidential campaign in more than two decades. Apparently, he never finished the job, as the document released on Thursday was shockingly incomplete. “For full transparency, I am releasing the report as we received it, in its entirety, unedited and unabridged,” DNC chair Ken Martin said. “It does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards, but I am doing this because people need to be able to trust the Democratic Party and trust our word.”

No wonder I couldn’t read it any further. Lazy and inapt historical analogies, and indeed carrying on a detailed argument about why Harris lost, is irrelevant to what’s needed most in this moment:  a discussion of how the Democrats can win in 2028. But before doing that, let me quickly offer three broad reasons why Harris lost:

1. Joe Biden didn’t exit the race in time.

2. Harris didn’t do an adequate job of reminding voters of Trump’s incompetence on a range of fronts in his first term (this is a point the autopsy apparently does make, in fairness).

3. Harris didn’t make a compelling or aggressive enough economic case.

Always in presidential campaigns, there are dozens of factors, but I would hope about 97 percent of us can agree that if Biden had exited in the spring and the Harris campaign had done a better job of 2 and 3, she’d likely have won those 230,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and more. OK? And that’s all the autopsy that’s really needed. (There are separate questions of the ground game and spending and things like that, but those topics are for insiders only.)

The same day the autopsy was released, The New York Times published a poll looking at Democrats’ beliefs and attitudes right now. The poll does say that in some ways, Democrats and “potential Democratic supporters” want the party to move to the center; 52 percent said the party should nominate a centrist in 2028, and 25 percent said it should nominate a more progressive candidate. Respondents thought Democrats should moderate their positions on immigration (specifically the border) and crime. And I think it’s clear to most people, for example, that the 2028 Democratic standard bearer does have to take a pretty stern line on border security. It’s the one promise Donald Trump made that he’s actually delivered on, and the only issue on which he’s above water in polls (this does not include, mind you, wanton deportations by ICE thugs—just the actual border).

So there were things, surprise surprise, that Democrats disagree on. But there was one thing they seemed to agree on: “Still, the economic populism pushed by a growing number of Democratic midterm candidates has found a receptive audience. More than 80 percent of the party’s backers thought the political and economic system should be torn down entirely or needed major changes, and nearly 90 percent called the economic system unfair.”

That’s the secret sauce, right there. That’s the answer. There was one question in the poll that to me was more important than all the others. It was wordy, so bear with me: “Now I’m going to describe two hypothetical Democrats. Tell me which of the two you would be more likely to support in the next Democratic primary for president. A candidate who promises to lower prices by going after corporate monopolies and price gouging. [Or] a candidate who promises to lower prices by making it easier to build housing and expand energy production.”

I’m not quite sure why housing and energy were considered the opposite of monopoly power and price gouging, but hey, I didn’t write it. Anyway: Going after monopolies and price gougers won 67 to 30 percent. It won massive majorities from every category in the cross-tabs. Young people, 75 percent; old people, 68 percent. Men, 65 percent; women, 69 percent. Whites, 70 percent; nonwhites, 65 percent.

Oh. And among which subcategory was the result most lopsided? White noncollege, by 76 to 22 percent. In other words, those magic white working-class voters the Democrats have hemorrhaged, and the media can never stop talking and writing about. The result among nonwhite noncollege respondents was not as extreme as that, but was still a whopping 64 to 34 percent.

The lesson here is obvious. Democrats have to make it crystal clear, unmissably clear, that they are on the side of working people struggling to get by and getting nickel-and-dimed by shifty corporations every day of their lives. That means taking certain policy positions, but it means much more.

“Positions” are close to worthless in campaigns today. What’s needed today is to create emotionally gripping narratives and make them go viral. On this issue, that means calling out the bad actors by name. It means naming villains. It means educating the American public about why they’re paying higher prices for prescription drugs and other forms of medical care, and who’s responsible. Watch this five-minute clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just ever so deftly ripping the eyeballs out of David Joyner, the CEO of CVS Health, earlier this year. Much more of that, please, Democrats.

In the superficial lexicon the political media uses, I suppose this means “moving to the left” on economics. Fine. So be it. But I’d argue it isn’t even “to the left.” It’s moving to where the people are. The people are furious about getting ripped off by corporate actors whom a rigged system will never hold to account. If virtually every demographic in that poll prefers a nominee who goes after monopolists and price gougers by 30-plus points, well, polling doesn’t ever get any clearer than that.

There’s this endless and often boring debate about whether to energize the base or reach out to moderates. As the above poll numbers show, a populist economics that targets bad actors can energize both. It’s only elite moderates who are against this, because they accept money from those sources for their campaigns or their organizations. They don’t actually represent anybody, or they represent a share of the electorate that is shrinking at a lightning pace. They, too, need to get with the program. This is where the people are.

So autopsy, schmautopsy. Stop arguing about 2024, Democrats. Talk about the future. And talk about the bad guys who are making working people’s lives harder. That’s where today’s “vital center” is—they’re sick and tired of getting screwed—and that way lies victory.

Donald Trump says China agreed to buy 200 jets from Boeing. He crowed about it on Fox News Thursday night. But funny thing: A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was asked specifically about the jet deal after Trump spoke, and he said nothing about any such agreement. Wanna take bets on whether it actually happened?

Three points here. First of all, we should stop quickly to note that it’s sad that it’s come to pass that we just automatically believe a foreign government—and China’s no less—over the president of the United States (sad about him, that is, not us). Second, let’s remember that Boeing is an American company in a deep and sustained crisis that was brought on by basic greed: As David Goldstein explained in Democracy journal in 2024, after its acquisition of McDonnell-Douglas in 1997, the historically proud engineering culture at Boeing was destroyed as the company became more anti-union and outsourced more of its production.

And third, assuming that Trump is lying or at least exaggerating, well, we’ve just learned again for the jillionth time that Mr. Art of the Deal is a total fraud. Let’s review.

• Remember how, in his first term, Trump was going to bring North Korea to its knees? Remember how he consistently heaped praise on Kim Jong Un and his “beautiful vision for his country”? Well, it’s not a “beautiful country” to the people who live there, and meanwhile, its nuclear progress has been steady over the last decade—during most of which, of course, Mr. Art of the Deal has been the president of the United States. Experts think the nation has assembled about 50 warheads.
• Remember also that he was going to solve the Russia-Ukraine war on his first day back in office? In late March, a UN expert testified that the violence was “worse than ever.” We—that is, most decent people—are heartened by Ukraine’s resilience and wowed by its innovative drone technology. But that “we” doesn’t include the president of the United States, who obviously is cheering for his pal Putin—over whom he has zero leverage.
• The 2025 tariff war on China totally backfired. China responded to Trump’s tariffs by limiting exports of rare-earth metals, and Trump backed down. Today, U.S. soybean exports to China are down (they peaked during Sleepy Joe’s “disastrous” presidency), as are auto exports. The first Chinese EVs are landing in Canada even as we speak. These are ultra-luxury cars that sell for $10,000 or even $20,000 less than their American equivalents.
• Speaking of Canada, why isn’t it the 51st state yet? And speaking of Northern annexation, why isn’t Greenland part of the United States yet?
• How’s that world-class Gaza resort coming along?
• U.S. relations with Europe are at an all-time low. And it isn’t because of anything Europe did. Last December, the Trump administration released a security strategy paper calling Europe a bigger threat to the United States than Russia or China because of its progressive social and immigration policies, which threatened the continent with “civilizational erasure.”  
• And finally, of course, there is Iran. The economic impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will be felt for months ahead. The latest wrinkle? In India, where they apparently lap up Diet Coke, there’s a shortage of the beloved elixir because there’s an aluminum shortage (Diet Coke is sold only in cans there). The Middle East accounts for 98 percent of the global aluminum supply. Stock up on that Reynolds Wrap. Joking aside: There are and will be dozens of such shortages, some far more serious than Diet Coke. A UN official told AFP in Paris this week that up to 45 million people in the developing world could face hunger or even starvation because of the global fertilizer shortage.  

All the above adds up to this rather grim reality, contained in a survey conducted by the Alliance of Democracies Foundations and unveiled last week. The United States ranked 128th in how it is viewed by survey respondents across 85 countries. We netted out at -16. That’s behind Russia, Syria, and Myanmar, to name a few notables. But hey, we’re ahead of Iran! By a point.

Trump can fool himself, if he wants to, that Xi Jinping was talking about the Biden years when he referred to America’s decline and the suddenly famous “Thucydides Trap.” But everyone knows the truth. He was talking about the United States in general, under both parties—a country that is by now pretty much owned lock, stock, and barrel by a handful of greedy Robber Barons whom the GOP worships and the Democrats haven’t had the stones to stop.

And he was talking about the United States under Trump specifically. Xi may be a ruthlessly immoral tyrant. But one thing he isn’t is dumb. He sees very clearly what the United States is doing to itself, having reelected a low-I.Q. kleptocrat, adjudicated sex offender, and psychologically damaged sociopath who spends the wee hours firing off batshit tweets and obsessing about a ballroom the way the Sun King did over Versailles. That man, not Joe Biden, is why China now tops the United States in global approval ratings.

The United States always led China in those kinds of polls because at the end of the day we could say well, at least we’re a democracy. The way things are going, we’re not even going to be able to say that soon. But hey, he’s a great dealmaker, right?

The self-pity of some people knows no bounds. Steven Roth, the CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, said this week that the phrase “tax the rich” is hate speech on a par with other well-known slurs. “I must say that I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’—quote, tax the rich—when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs and even the phrase, ‘from the river to the sea,’” Mr. Roth said on an earnings call Tuesday, as reported by The New York Times.

Roth was peeved because Mayor Zohran Mamdani filmed a video celebrating Governor Kathy Hochul’s embrace of a tax on pricey second homes in New York in front of a building (developed by Vornado) containing a penthouse owned by hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin. Griffin bought it in 2019 for (sit down) $238 million, which made it at the time by far the most expensive single residence ever bought in New York.

I could maybe see an argument against Mamdani specifically singling out one person in that video. Griffin himself was quick to point out that Hizzoner “seems to have forgotten that the C.E.O. of another American company was assassinated just blocks from where I live in New York,” referring to Brian Thompson of United Healthcare. There are a lot of wackos out there. Although if God forbid someone shot Griffin tomorrow, it would not be Mamdani’s “fault,” any more than right-wing anti-government rhetoric was responsible for Justin Mohn shooting and then decapitating his federal-worker father in 2024. Only killers pull triggers. You’d think the people who preach at us constantly about personal responsibility would agree with that.

But let’s get back to Roth. What a crybaby. What he refuses to understand, or at least to admit, is: Nobody hates him personally. (a) Nobody cares enough about him to hate him personally, and (b) odds are he’s a relatively nice man and a good father and all that. This has nothing to do with hatred of individuals.

What millions of Americans hate is the extreme concentration of wealth and political power in the United States. Back in March, a New York Times analysis of donations in the 2024 election campaign found that just 300 billionaires and their families made a staggering 19 percent of all contributions to federal campaigns. That was more than $3 billion all told, either directly or through political action committees. The money helped elect Donald Trump, of course, but also new senators like Montana’s Tim Sheehy, who raked in $47 million from billionaires in his win over Democrat Jon Tester.

This is sick. This is not democracy. These people have no sense of limits, no sense that democracy requires that restrictions be placed on their power. Or maybe they do recognize that fact and have contempt for it, in which case it makes them opponents of democracy.

“I have the right to spend whatever I choose to promote what I believe,” David Koch once wrote, criticizing the landmark 1974 law that sought to impose caps on campaign expenditures. Fuck you. No you don’t. I mean, you do, right now, under the current laws of the United States, where the Supreme Court has held that money is speech and as such needs to be as “free” as speech is. You may think I’m referring to the infamous Citizens United decision of 2010, but actually the court initially made this holding in 1976’s Buckley v. Valeo, which came long before campaigns were so awash in lucre. That year, the average Senate race cost $595,000. Adjusted for inflation, that would be around $3.8 million now. In 2020, Senate races averaged around $30 million.

Koch is wrong. Money isn’t speech. Money is money. The difference is easily provable with the observation that all of us can speak equally but we cannot spend equally. If Koch and I are standing in the town square advocating for opposing candidates for mayor, I can speak on behalf of my candidate as endlessly as he can. That’s speech. But his ability to hand his preferred candidate $100 bills is rather more infinite than mine. That isn’t speech. It’s money. It corrupts the process. Someday, this will be obvious to a different Supreme Court.

You’d think these people would be satisfied with the way things are, so heavily stacked in their favor. But they aren’t. They want more. They always want more. This year, billionaires who want to keep AI free of any restrictions or regulations are pouring eye-popping sums into the midterms: Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC founded by venture capitalist Marc Andreesson and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, has amassed a war chest of $140 million. Their goal is to defeat candidates like Alex Bores in New York, who vows to lead a charge to regulate AI if he gets to Congress, and to promote candidates who’ll lie back and let them do what they want.

Why are they so hot on AI? Well, it’s pretty simple, isn’t? More AI means fewer human employees, with their oh-so-burdensome salaries and benefits and occasional illnesses. Claude Anthropic can’t agitate for a union. More AI means they get richer. The millions who lose work? Well, that’s progress. If they lose work, it’s what they deserved for not keeping up with the times. (Fancifully, some AI evangelists claim to support universal basic income as a solution to the mass immiseration their products will cause. But we know exactly which side they’ll be on if Congress ever takes up such a measure.)

These people have to be stopped. They need to be taxed at higher rates, of course. And their political power has to be curbed. In fact, that has to be a defining issue in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary race.

Every Democratic candidate needs to be asked: What will you do to rein in the political power of the billionaires? They may not be able to do as much as we’d like, given the Supreme Court, but how they talk about it—whether they’re angry or sanguine, whether they convey alarm or spew out a bunch of stupid happy talk about being able to work with everyone—will tell us a lot about their character and their worldview.

It’s kind of a “price of entry” issue. That is, the price of being taken seriously as a candidate, whatever their other positions, is that they recognize this state of affairs for the five-alarm fire it is. If something isn’t done about this, by 2030, those 300 billionaires will account for 40 percent of all federal campaign spending. Or 50. And what remains of this democracy will be dead.

By the way, the other “price of entry” issue? It’s that the candidates will use every ounce of political capital they have to kill the Senate filibuster if they win control of Washington in 2028. Not reform it. Kill it. The filibuster in any form means continued paralysis, dysfunction, and a certain drubbing in the 2030 midterms that will return control of one or both houses of Congress to the GOP. No filibuster means passing 10 or 15 or 20 bills that make people’s lives better and stop monopolies from being able to rip people off the way they can now. It has the potential to revolutionize politics. Any Democrat who doesn’t see this at this point can’t possibly be taken seriously.

Kvetch away, Steven Roth. But maybe in the meantime, pause and give a little thought to what is required for a healthy democracy to function. Reflect, perhaps, on the fact that this country experienced its greatest growth, its golden era, when a third of the workforce was unionized, when the top marginal tax rate was 90 percent, and when corporations generally understood that they had a commitment not only to shareholders but to community stakeholders.

Finally, as you reflect with justifiable pride on your own success, devote at least a few moments to the elements of public infrastructure—the roads, the rails, the computer networks that were all initially developed by the government—that helped make you so rich. If you and your class don’t want to be hated, stop doing things people hate.

If Chief Justice John Roberts has uttered two quotable sentences in his career that will likely appear high up in his New York Times obituary, they are these. The first comes from his 2005 confirmation hearing: “My job is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.” The line was meant to convey to senators and America that he would be a neutral arbiter of constitutional interpretation, sans ideological agenda. It was later picked up by the entire conservative legal movement and repeated by numerous other right-wing judicial nominees at their confirmation hearings.

It was a lie. He was there, as we have subsequently learned many times, to bat. And not to spray dinky little singles—to swing for the fences. You may recall Jeffrey Toobin’s stunning 2012 article in The New Yorker detailing how painstakingly the chief justice orchestrated the 2010 Citizens United decision to make sure that it went as far as possible in removing limits on the financing of campaigns. The John Roberts of that article was no umpire. He was Mark McGwire juiced up on steroids, trying to smash the ball out onto Clark Avenue.

The subsequent 16 years have shown us the consequences of that decision, which will go down in U.S. history as one of the most corrosive and reactionary holdings of all time—if not right up there with Plessy and Lochner, then awfully close. It has handed our democracy on a silver platter to men who have nothing but contempt for it (Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc.).

The other quote is one that I suspect many people will remember, although they may forget the context: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Ring a bell? He said it early in his tenure, when the Roberts court handed down one of its first major decisions, concerning public school integration efforts in Seattle and Louisville.

The court had already restricted forced integration efforts in a 1991 ruling. Then, in 2007, in two joined cases emanating from the above-named cities, the court went further: It ruled that even voluntary desegregation efforts were out the window. Roberts uttered his famous line while reading his 5–4 majority opinion from the bench.

I remember well the predictions in the decision’s wake. Liberals warned that the public schools would likely resegregate. Conservatives said, Oh pshaw, you delicate little flowers; we’re such a different country from 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Things will be just fine.

Well, guess what happened? In the 19 years since that ruling, the public schools have resegregated. Not to a mild degree. Not to a “concerning” degree. They have resegregated to a shocking degree.

In 2024, Axios published an article based on two recent academic studies and its own review of official data from 1988 to 2022. In the former year, about 7.4 percent of the nation’s schools were “intensely segregated,” meaning at least 90 percent white. By the latter year, that figure had vaulted to 19.8 percent. In addition, Axios’s Russell Contreras wrote at the time, “several states saw about a 20-percentage point or more increase in intensely segregated schools, from 1988 to 2021.”

Mind you, this happened while the racial demography of the United States went from 67 percent white to 58 percent white. In other words, you might have thought that in an increasingly diverse country, the schools would also become increasingly diverse. Instead, the opposite happened.

Now, fast-forward to this week’s Louisiana v. Callais decision on gerrymandering. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the 6–3 majority, assures us that there’s nothing to worry about in the evisceration of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. We’re a different country. We don’t need it anymore. “Vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South,” Alito wrote.

The country has changed for the better in a number of ways, no doubt about that. But has it changed enough that laws to protect minority representation aren’t needed? We’re about to find out.

Consider the following statistics. Mississippi today has a Black population of 38 percent. One of its four congressional districts is majority-minority, for a representation rate of 25 percent. Black Mississippians are ergo underrepresented in Congress. In South Carolina, Blacks make up 25 percent of the population, and one of seven congressional districts was cut for Black representation. That’s 14 percent. So Blacks are underrepresented in that state, as well. And in Tennessee, Blacks are 17 percent of the population but hold zero seats in Congress (0 percent, obviously).

In some other states of the old Confederacy, Black representation is more on par. In Alabama, Blacks are 27 percent of the population and hold two of the state’s seven congressional seats (28 percent). In Louisiana, those population-representation figures are 33 percent and 33 percent (two out of six seats). In North Carolina, they are 21 percent and 21 percent (three out of 14 seats).

Hooray for those three states, I guess. But the question is this: What will those numbers be come 2029, or 2031? It’s hardly going out on a limb to guess that Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina will reduce or even possibly eliminate their majority-minority seats. They probably can’t quite get away with that right now in North Carolina, where there’s a Democratic governor. But Alabama and Louisiana, where the GOP controls the governor’s mansion and dominates both legislatures? Louisiana is already licking its chops: After this week’s SCOTUS ruling, its governor announced he was suspending the House primaries on May 16 so the legislature can redraw districts more favorable to the Republicans. It’s hard to believe they’d really have the gall to cut them down to zero. Then again, a lot of things have been happening lately in this country that once seemed hard to believe.

Speaking of which, I find it kind of hard to believe that Roberts, Alito, and other conservative justices this week did not think back to the aftermath of their fateful 2007 decision on school integration. Can they possibly be unaware that schools aggressively resegregated in the wake of that ruling? That seems impossible. And if I’m right, that leaves only one explanation for this week’s decision. They understand the potential consequences quite fully. They just don’t care. Mark McGwire has hit another one, and the bleak outcome, similar to the one liberals predicted in 2007, awaits us.

This article previously misstated the percentage of North Carolina congresspeople who are Black, the number its congressional seats, and which party controls the state Senate.

As we barrel toward the ninth week of this two- or three-week war, virtually all of the reporting and most of the commentary is focused on the strategery of the moment: who really controls the Strait of Hormuz, when the ceasefire might actually end, what Donald Trump might do next. That’s all understandable. But it also means that this is a good time to take a step back and summarize exactly what Trump has done here, because if we look at it from 30,000 feet, we see exactly what so many of us knew was dangerous about putting this unstable and petty and frankly stupid man back in the Oval Office.

To put it in a phrase: He and he alone created the conditions that made war possible. He and he alone created the chaos that, he then told the American people and the world, made war necessary. Imagine the mayor of a town where there were acute ethnic or racial tensions taking office and inheriting a fragile but holding truce between the antagonistic parties. He then annuls that truce, calling it weak and fraudulent. Tensions, predictably, flare up again. And the mayor sends in armed agents to disarm the minority. And while he’s doing it, he threatens to destroy their entire culture and compares himself to Jesus, while the man in charge of the military operations constantly invokes God and Jesus as being on his side.

That’s what has happened here. Trump backed out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Barack Obama and five other nations had negotiated with Iran. Was it perfect? Of course not. It was a compromise, with an enemy that hates the United States. But it capped uranium enrichment at 3.67 percent—far, far short of the level required to make nuclear arms—until 2030. Most provisions expired in 10 years (2025). Still, that’s not nothing. Experts agreed that it was working, and Iran was abiding by its terms, and it left it for a future administration to pick up the baton.

Trump, far from picking the baton up, threw it in the incinerator. The JCPOA ran to around 160 pages. The chance that Trump actually read it is zero. In fact, the agreement, minus the annexes, was only 18 pages. And still, we know to a 99.55 percent certainty that the chance Trump read even those 18 pages is zero. Those 18 pages were agreed to by Obama. That was all Trump needed to know. So he withdrew from the agreement in May 2018. He imposed stricter sanctions and announced a policy of “maximum pressure.” Oooh, tough! Amurka, baby!

But what happened? The other signatory nations tried to hold things together, but without the United States, everyone knew that was a joke. Iran very quickly increased its enrichment. By 2020, outlets were reporting that “Iran is now enriching more uranium than it did before it agreed to the landmark nuclear deal with world powers in 2015, President Hassan Rouhani said Thursday.” It went from 3.67 percent to 60 percent.

In other words: Trump made this problem. Entirely and solely. By pulling out of the JCPOA in 2018, he ensured that Iran would start breaking the terms of the deal. He’s the one who made Iran strong. Then, eight years later, he comes back to us and says, Bad Iran! They broke the terms of the deal! They’re too strong. We must invade them.

But it’s actually even worse than that. Because we didn’t invade Iran because they broke the terms of the deal. We invaded Iran because Trump, having conquered (in his mind) America, needed to conquer farther reaches. Venezuela got him thinking, Hey, this war stuff is kinda fun. So he figured he’d be the guy who toppled the hated regime. A few bombs. Easy-peasy.

It was only when it became clear that it wasn’t easy that Trump settled on his current rationale for the war (that Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon). Because at first, the rationale was regime change. And we took out the supreme leader, and Trump probably thought well, that was that. But that just handed everything to the supreme leader’s son, who is more radical, and whose father, wife, and son were killed by U.S. bombs. So when it became clear even to Trump that the regime wasn’t going to change, he settled on the rationale about nuclear weapons. And he’s actually been reasonably consistent about it over the last, oh, three weeks or so; shown far more discipline on this one point than he’s ever shown on anything.

It’s a fine rationale. I agree with it, in fact. But there’s a little problem with it. Namely, that Iran is today a hell of a lot closer to nuclear weapons than it was in 2015, after Obama’s deal. So Trump, who created this problem, now tells us that he may have to solve it by eliminating Persian civilization, one of the great civilizations in the history of humanity (these last 47 years, not even a blink of an eye in human history, notwithstanding).

The United States has fought a lot of dumb and unnecessary wars. And it’s fought a lot of wars that cost more lives than this one has so far. But this one has to be the most unnecessary war of all. And now here we sit, the whole world nervously watching the president of the United States, whom everyone in every capital around the globe knows to be impulsive and ignorant and concerned mainly with his vanity, wondering what he’ll do next—hoping that America’s most unnecessary war doesn’t also become its most tragic.

The Great Sphinx of Giza stands 66 feet tall. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is around 180 feet. Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, 164 feet. The Sydney Opera House soars to 220 feet. But all would be dwarfed by the Arc de Trump, whose golden (of course) statues would rise to 250 feet above the entrance to the Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place for 430,000 soldiers who gave their lives for this country. You know them; they’re the ones Donald Trump called “suckers.”

Trump says the arch will commemorate America’s 250th birthday, but let’s be honest: It will commemorate Donald Trump. If this monstrosity ever gets built, no one driving or cycling by it along the George Washington Memorial Parkway will look at it and think of the Declaration of Independence or Ben Franklin or John Hancock. They’ll think of one man. And that’s exactly how he wants it.

The federal Commission of Fine Arts officially gave its approval to the project on Thursday. We’ll come back to that commission—who they are, and the testimony they took before casting their votes. But first, for those of you who live outside Washington, I want to describe this place physically so people understand why this arch would land in Memorial Circle with all the grace of a walrus hogging an ice floe.

On many warm-weather weekends, I go for longish bike rides. Washington is one of America’s great bike-riding cities—it has copious bike lanes and the downtown area is mostly flat and incredibly scenic, with the monuments and all the lovely waterfront parks. (Trump also, by the way, wants to steal East Potomac Park, home to an admittedly down-at-heel but historic public golf course as well as gorgeous picnic and fishing areas, from the people and convert it into, you guessed it, a “world-class” private country club.) Most times, I drive down from my home in Maryland and park (for free, and there’s always a space) at the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, better known as the Iwo Jima Memorial, which is right next to Arlington Cemetery. I circle the memorial and go past the Netherlands Carillon, the modernist bell tower (127 feet high, incidentally) given by the people of that country to the United States for the latter’s role in liberating them from the Nazis.

I then zip across the Memorial Bridge, generally regarded as the city’s most beautiful, with its neoclassical arches, its martial yet tasteful statuary, and its wide pebbled sidewalks, and find myself face to face with the glorious Lincoln Memorial, the reflecting pool, and all the rest. I never, ever do this without feeling grateful to live here and to be able to do something so pedestrian (so to speak) as take a bike ride while being among these and so many other treasures.

I should add a few words about the graceful entrance to Arlington Cemetery. The National Park Service, which owns the land, calls this the Memorial Avenue Corridor. It was designed in the early twentieth century by none other than America’s most famous architectural firm, McKim, Mead, and White, under project architect William Mitchell Kendall, who also worked on the Washington Square Arch (75 feet tall), the Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, and the main New York post office building, now in use as the wonderful Moynihan Station.

When you cross Memorial Bridge from Washington into Virginia, the traffic merges into the GW Parkway via a traffic circle, which is the Memorial Circle where Trump wants to plant his arch. It sits on an island, Columbia Island, which, though closer to Virginia, is actually part of the District of Columbia. Behind the circle, in a straight line from the bridge, is Memorial Avenue, a broad boulevard about 500 feet long that leads to the cemetery entrance. Its distinguishing feature is something the NPS calls the Hemicycle, a half-circle, Beaux-Arts style retaining wall designed in the early 1930s by the McKim firm. It’s all graceful and understated; it announces itself with a humility that is appropriate to so solemn a space. In the words of a 2004 NPS document I fished out: “Arlington Memorial Bridge and its features were intended to be both a monumental entry to the federal city and a formal, processional route to Arlington National Cemetery.”

I should add a word or two on the size of Memorial Circle, which in the coverage I’ve read has gone largely undiscussed. Trump’s arch, at 250 feet (the arch itself would be 190 feet, topped by a 60-foot golden statue of an angel, alongside two shorter statues of golden eagles), would be about as tall as a 20-story office or residential building. For perspective, there is in D.C. no such thing because of its stringent height restrictions. The city’s tallest commercial building is Franklin Square at 13th and K Streets, which is 12 stories and, with its spires, rises to 210 feet. (Its tallest residential building is The Cairo near Dupont Circle, at 164 feet, which was completed in 1894—and caused public backlash that led to the height restrictions that are still in place today.)

A 20-story building requires a certain footprint for the scale to be right. I searched the web in vain to find the exact square footage of Memorial Circle, but it’s small. If you go to Google Maps and move your cursor around, you’ll see that it’s clearly smaller than Dupont Circle; smaller than the circle that surrounds the Lincoln Memorial (99 feet high); much smaller than The Ellipse on the White House grounds; and not large enough to fit, say, the National Air and Space Museum, or the National Gallery of Art.

So to summarize, what Trump wants: would be far too large for the space; would undoubtedly tangle traffic because its mere overwhelming presence would force motorists to slow down; would dwarf everything around it; and would utterly disrupt the “formal, processional route” to the national cemetery.

Those are undoubtedly some of the reasons why the 1,000-odd comments received by the Commission of Fine Arts ran literally 100 percent against the arch, according to The Washington Post. This did not prevent the seven commissioners—all appointed by Trump back in January—from approving the project and heaping the usual sycophantic praise on it (one commissioner did suggest ditching the statues). Here, for the record, are their names. Only one is known to me: Roger Kimball, the longtime editor of The New Criterion. An intelligent and literary fellow, but stridently right wing and MAGA to his core.

It’s a disgrace. Again—whatever they’re billing it as, it’s a monument to Trump, just like he’s trying to turn the Kennedy Center into a monument to Trump (just wait: Today, he shares billing with JFK; there’s no doubt in my mind that plans are afoot to erase JFK from the center entirely). On that now-sad venue, read the blistering piece posted this week at The Atlantic by a former curator there.

God willing, the next president is a Democrat. He or she will have a lot of work to do and much damage to undo. But he or she absolutely must say on day one: We’re tearing down this arch; we’re razing Trump’s ballroom and rebuilding the East Wing mostly as it was; and the Kennedy Center will go back to being the Kennedy Center. Any Democratic president who fails to do these things deserves the nation’s scorn. Washington ceremonial architecture, like the government itself, must be returned to the purpose for which it exists—to promote democracy, not the demented, bruised ego of one sick man.

Hey, Donald Trump, you just launched a war that you’re losing, that’s costing you millions of supporters, that’s tanking your standing among even Republicans, that has the likes of Alex Jones accusing you of contemplating “genocide” and Tucker Carlson labeling your comments “vile on every level.” What are you going to do for an encore?

Hey, I know. How about breaking up NATO and trying for regime change in Cuba?

He may, he may not. Who ever knows with this guy? But both are live possibilities. Trump threw a tantrum about NATO this week, issuing an “ultimatum” to European countries to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz and bellyaching about their general lack of support for his war. Cuba is largely under a U.S. blockade that has resulted in massive energy shortages. A month ago, before the reality of Iran had quite set in, Trump bragged that Cuba was next, saying, “Cuba is going to fall pretty soon, by the way.” Just yesterday, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said he wasn’t going anywhere.

Here’s the important thing to understand about Trump at this particular point in time. He does not think like a democrat (small d). He thinks like a dictator. A democrat who understood his obligations in a democratic system to the voters who put him in office would stop and think: Gee, the people don’t approve of what I’m doing. Maybe I should pull back a little. And who knows—maybe he will. There are peace talks with Iran this weekend in Pakistan, even though Iran is walking into them with a 10-point plan that Trump (and Benjamin Netanyahu) want no part of. But there actually is precedent for Trump seeing that what he was doing was unpopular—the ICE disaster in Minneapolis, most notably—and making a course correction.

Granted, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of other situations in which he’s responded to public opinion. America doesn’t like anything he’s doing, except on sealing the border. Otherwise, he’s in the tank. And by the way, I alluded above to his weak numbers among Republicans: In one recent poll, he’s down to 81 percent among Republicans. That may sound high, but in fact, for that particular category, it’s low. A president’s support within his own party ought to be close to or above 90. Here’s a little context. The 1988 presidential election between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis was a blowout, right? Right. Dukakis got 83 percent of Democrats’ votes. And he got shellacked. That’s what 80-ish percent among your party leads to.

But even as the walls close in on him, Trump is no more likely to think like a democrat. He will think like the dictator he imagines himself to be. He will think, as dictators do, about three things: To the extent that he cares what the public thinks, he will focus his thoughts on how best to distract their attention and get them thinking about something else; he will think about ways to clamp down on dissent (and more specifically in this case, leakers); and finally, and never to be forgotten with this grubby mountebank, how to make a buck off the current mess.

Let’s break these down. The first thought is the one that will carry Trump to try something with Cuba, or to try to bust out of NATO. He needs headlines that aren’t about Iran. But he also needs headlines that start “Trump moves to” and “Trump declares.”

That’s what matters. It scarcely makes any difference whether these moves are popular. Busting up NATO would of course be monstrously unpopular (and the president cannot simply leave NATO, though laws haven’t stopped him before). Toppling the Cuban regime might in fact be somewhat popular, depending on how it goes. But again, we’ll need to see what China and Russia have to say about that before the final verdict is in. It is liable to be more complicated than Trump imagines, simply because these things usually are.

The second thought is one to take very seriously right now. Zeteo’s Asawin Subsaeng reported this week that Trump is directing a furious hunt for people who leaked info to The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for that huge piece about how Trump decided to start this war. The piece is actually an excerpt from their upcoming book, which is expected to contain still more embarrassing details about the Trump regime. “In conversations with close aides and advisers, President Trump has loudly demanded to know who in his Cabinet or his team blabbed” to the reporters, Swin wrote. This is the sort of thing that obsesses dictators.

And finally, never forget that Trump is always on the lookout for his next swindle. Coming up on April 25 is a luncheon at Mar-a-Lago billed as “the most exclusive crypto & business conference in the world.” The announcement of the luncheon jacked up the price of the $Trump meme coin for a minute. It’s not 100 percent certain Trump will be there. But where else would he be? Maybe the golf course.

Consider this week in full. The abominable Easter Sunday social media post that dropped the f-bomb and mocked Islam. The far more abominable post two days later about destroying one of history’s most accomplished civilizations. The complete and utter backing down from it hours later. The phantom ceasefire, which Netanyahu obviously intentionally wrecked. The phony peace plan, on which the belligerent nations are miles apart. Anemic economic growth (0.5 percent, and yes, that’s point-five). Inflation above 3 percent.

And perhaps most of all, Trump’s wife appearing to throw him under the bus. Not that she’s any hero. But she’s pretty clearly preparing for the day when the Epstein files are made public and she may have to cut bait, depending on what’s in them.

To any other president, this would be the time to straighten up and fly right. To this one, it’s the perfect time to blow up the most important and durable military alliance in the history of the human race.

In every age, there are moments large and small that somehow manage to capture the regnant ideology in all its proud and decadent vulgarity. You know these moments when you see them because your first reaction is not intellectual but physical—you feel that involuntary revulsion not in your brain but somewhere down around what they call in the Yiddish language your kishkes. I believe the modern word for it is cringey. It’s like watching the “Dinner Party” episode of The Office, except it’s not played for laughs. Those involved couldn’t possibly be more serious—and oblivious to how they look to the rest of the world.

A lot of important and appalling things happened this week that ought to be preoccupying me, but somehow, I have not been able to free myself from thinking about House Speaker Mike Johnson’s presentation to President Trump of the first annual “America First” award on Wednesday night. Future historians will ask, as many of us have asked in our own time, how this ridiculous cult could have grown around this ridiculous fraud of a man—how these Republicans could have decided that their pride, their virtue, their consciences are so worthless to them that they willingly participate in such staged exercises in hollow flattery.

There are longer clips floating around of Johnson discussing this award and praising Trump, but in the interest of sparing your mental health, I’ll expose you only to the brief, 30-second version here. Trust me, it’s enough to make the point.

“The president has done so much for the American people, and we want to honor him in some small way, some token of our appreciation for his leadership,” Johnson beamed at the fundraising dinner of the National Republican Campaign Committee in Washington. “And so tonight, we have created a new award. We’re going to do something we’ve never done before. We are going to honor him with a new award that we will present annually from this point forward. But he is the suitable and fitting recipient of the first ever America First Award. We can think of no better title for what that is. That’s this beautiful golden statue here; appropriate, for the new golden era in America.”

Disappointingly, the golden statue was not a calf. But these people lack the sense of humor and self-knowledge to have done that. It was, predictably, an eagle—wings spread, talons exposed, prey about to meet its fate. Kind of like Trump imagines himself vis-à-vis Iran, with the difference that eagles have been known to stalk prey for hours, whereas Trump can’t keep any single thought in his head for longer than 10 minutes and has, in the month since the war started, announced about four different rationales for the war and changed strategy roughly every half hour. Any eagle with Trump’s attention span would starve to death in a matter of days.

That aside, there are two points to make about this. The first concerns Johnson’s oleaginous sycophancy. The quote above in print doesn’t quite do it justice. You have to watch it, experience his self-satisfied smarminess, his bottomless self-abasement. Remember, this is a man who has compared himself to Moses. If Moses had behaved toward Pharaoh the way Johnson does toward Trump, his people would have needed to wait for another deliverer.

The second concerns the need to treat Trump like a 5-year-old. It’s a need the corrupt FIFA head Gianni Infantino recognized when he awarded Trump the preposterous FIFA Peace Prize in December, and that Trump’s Cabinet members intuit at those laughable meetings where they try to top one another in offering him false and flatulent praise. It’s hard to know, of course, whether these people have no idea how pathetic they look to the rest of the world, or they do know and just don’t care.

Either way, it’s a sight to behold: the awarding to the president of the United States a series of participation trophies. I thought conservatives hated participation trophies, which derive from that oh-so-liberal instinct to protect children’s feelings. This is one point on which I actually kind of agree with the conservative position. No, every child who participated in the swim meet didn’t win. Someone won. The others lost. The winner should be recognized. And kids are smart; they pretty quickly cotton on to the fact that if everyone is getting the same trophy, the trophy is worthless. Trump is either too vain or too dumb to understand what most 7-year-olds grok after about three swim meets.

We also learned this week that Trump will add his signature to our currency. This comes on the heels of last week’s news that the United States will mint a Trump coin, which the Commission on Fine Arts, a seven-member panel appointed by the president, recommended be made “as large as possible.” Said Vice Chairman James McCrery II: “In terms of the diameter, I think the president likes big things. Generally, I do too.” I’ll let that one pass.

All this is happening, of course, while Trump’s poll numbers are tanking—even over at Fox News—and the country is in collapse. This war is a mess. You’d hardly know it from most news coverage, but Iran’s attacks on U.S. bases across the Middle East have been successful enough that many troops have had to evacuate, working remotely from nearby hotels and office buildings. Trump thought the war would be over by now, but it isn’t, and he’s at sea—tugged in one direction by Benjamin Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Salman to level Iran, and in the other by his desire not to go down in history as the man who brought the world economy to its knees. And then there’s the airports, inflation, immigration, and everything else on which the American people are giving him failing grades.

What a perfect time for a new award! Actually, by fascist logic, it is: As material conditions for the people worsen, the leader must be praised all the more fulsomely, the make-believe enforced all the more vigorously. Will anyone come along to shatter the myth—to be the Jan at the dinner party, throwing Michael’s Dundie against the plasma TV screen? Not likely, anytime soon. Cults only intensify until the moment they explode.

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.