When the government stomps on some once-inviolable right, it may be carrying out the next step in a concerted plan, or it may just be stumbling clumsily. The proper response in these moments is not to wax hysterical, but instead to draw clear moral lines. That is especially true for powerful people with the ability to make themselves heard.
On January 6, Donald Trump’s administration published an apologia for the Trump supporters whom he incited to storm the Capitol five years earlier. The next day, Stephen Miller, in response to news that an ICE agent had shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis, lambasted the Democratic Party on X for “inciting a violent insurrection.”
The juxtaposition of the January 6 anniversary and the shooting of Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota the next day is a coincidence of timing.
President Donald Trump’s fans like to cheer on his most audacious moves by declaring, “I voted for this.” It is safe to assume, though, that very few people who pulled the lever for Trump in 2024 expected that he would soon announce that he had seized control over Venezuela. One of Trump’s most popular qualities has always been his supposed opposition to foreign wars, his anti-imperialist isolationism. Yet J. D.
In the opening scene of the black comedy The Death of Stalin, a violinist in Moscow is told her orchestra is giving a command performance for Joseph Stalin, and refuses to play on political grounds. A frantic radio director, fearing he will be arrested or shot if he fails to produce the concert in time, begs her to reconsider, finally prevailing with an offer of 20,000 rubles.
Recently, the Trump administration faced a similar situation.
The year is 2029. President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, having spent years raging against Fox News as a propaganda organ whose very operation is illegal, has found a pressure point to control it. She enables its sale to owners who are friends of hers, and whose business depends on regulatory favors she has made a practice of doling out to allies. As the new editor in chief of Fox News, the owners install Tim Miller, a skeptic of conservatism who has never previously worked in television news.
In rejecting yesterday a redistricting plan backed by President Donald Trump, Indiana’s Republican-controlled senate did not merely deny Republicans two new U.S. House seats in next year’s midterm elections. They also engaged in a mass revolt against the president. The stakes of their defiance reach far beyond the midterms. This vote was possibly the most significant blow yet against the authoritarian ambitions that have defined Trump’s second term.
Every once in a while, a state or city discovers a new and better way to educate poor children. Inevitably, a group of skeptics arises to insist that this new way doesn’t work, that even attempting to shrink the gap between rich and poor students is a fool’s errand.
Strangely enough, these skeptics tend, with increasing frequency, to reside on the political left.
The most recent subject of this recurring dynamic is Mississippi.
A bill in Congress demanding the release of the Epstein files now has the official, albeit reluctant, endorsement of the president himself. And so the question naturally arises: If Donald Trump supports the bill calling on the president (i.e., him) to release the files, why not simply … release them?
Trump reportedly hasn’t given his advisers or allies a rationale for why he won’t do so, leaving them to invent reasons of their own.
This morning, House Democrats released emails from the notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that claim, among other things, that Donald Trump spent hours at Epstein’s home with one of his victims. Later in the day, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt if this was true—that Trump had spent hours at Epstein’s place with a sex-trafficking victim.
“These emails,” she replied, “prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong.
The conventional wisdom about government shutdowns is that they always fail. Senate Democrats probably assumed as much when they shut down the government. Perhaps they thought they were giving partisan activists something to root for, even fleetingly, before eventually caving.
That was a reasonable, if somewhat cynical, calculation.
Zohran Mamdani is an extraordinary political story: a generational political talent, an out-of-nowhere success, and—measured by the number of citizens he will soon govern—the most powerful elected democratic socialist in American history.
But his allies have tried to turn his victory into something different: a model for the national Democratic Party.
The one Republican elected official who has a serious and workable plan to end the government shutdown is, surprisingly enough, Donald Trump. The president’s idea is for the Senate to change its rules to allow the chamber to keep the government open with a majority vote, rather than to permit 41 senators to shut it down.
To be sure, Trump has not always framed his argument in the most cogent way.
The revelation that Donald Trump has demolished the East Wing, with plans to rebuild it at jumbo size with private funds, provoked an initial wave of outrage—followed by a predictable counter-wave of pseudo-sophisticated qualified defenses.
“In classic Trump fashion, the president is pursuing a reasonable idea in the most jarring manner possible,” editorializes The Washington Post.
This week, Politico revealed the contents of Young Republican leaders’ group chats, which were filled with rampant bigotry, endorsements of rape, and praise for a certain fascist dictator (“I love Hitler”).
Some Republicans, including those who have directly employed the people in these chats, condemned these messages. But Vice President J. D. Vance had a different, and more telling, response. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching,” he posted on X defiantly.
Until recently, open support for Hamas in the United States was confined to the far left. The national chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, which circulated talking points supporting the October 7 attacks, has lately declared on Instagram “DEATH TO COLLABORATORS.” But the notorious terrorist organization has found a new defender: President Donald Trump.
Donald Trump likes to say that his campaign of vengeance is only fair. Given that he had to endure years of (supposedly) phony legal claims and censorship on various social-media platforms, Trump insists that he now has the right to retaliate in kind.
“They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!,” Trump wrote in a social-media post last week. “They did it with me for four years,” he told reporters.
The Trump administration’s systemic attack on free speech is hard to defend. The easier move for the president’s apologists is to attack critics for their hypocrisy.
“The left has amnesia when it comes to the cancel culture they perpetuated. It is a game they created with rules they made up. Now they hate that it’s being applied to them,” the USA Today columnist Nicole Russell writes.
Yesterday, Stephen Miller delivered a eulogy for Charlie Kirk that served as a battle cry for the Trump administration’s state-sponsored war on his perceived foes—a war for which Miller is the primary strategist. The speech was a jarring piece of rhetoric.
From the moment an assassin shot Charlie Kirk, my social-media feed began filling up with people decrying the attack. The sentiment of horror—both at the murder itself and at what it portended for American political culture—was overwhelming and cross-ideological.
From the pro–Donald Trump conservatives in my timeline, however, I detected another sort of response.
This story was updated on September 8, 2025, at 8:49pm ET.
When The Wall Street Journal reported two months ago that Donald Trump had written a suggestive letter to Jeffrey Epstein in celebration of the notorious child abuser’s 50th birthday, in 2003, the administration had a choice of available responses. The strategy it went with was indignant denial.
“Democrats and Fake News media desperately tried to coordinate a despicable hoax,” said the White House spokesperson Liz Huston.
Donald Trump is famously reluctant to commit troops abroad but salivates at the prospect of using them against Americans at home. That is the context in which one must understand his takeover of the Washington, D.C., police force; his deployment of the National Guard; and his threats to occupy other cities.
Trump claims that he is acting to quell a spike in violent crime.
Whatever quarrels one might have with Senator Bernie Sanders, his thinking would seem to be immune from medieval anti-Semitic influence. Yet last month, after Sanders denounced “the Netanyahu government’s extermination of Gaza,” the pro-Israel group AIPAC attacked Sanders’s statement as a “hate-filled rant” and “despicable blood libel.
Broadly speaking, Donald Trump’s authoritarian moves come in two flavors. The first is devious plans that help him amass power (say, turning the Departments of Justice and Defense over to lackeys, or using regulatory threats to bully media owners into favorable coverage). The second is foolish impulses that he follows because they make him feel momentarily better.
Last week, the Trump administration made its latest and most comically desperate attempt to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed that she had unearthed bombshell proof of a Barack Obama–era plot to invent the conclusion that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump. Soon after, Trump’s Truth Social account circulated an AI video depicting Obama being led off to prison.
Donald Trump’s ham-fisted reversal on his promise to release a secret list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients has accomplished something long considered impossible by virtually everybody, including Trump himself: He has finally exceeded his followers’ credulity. The Epstein matter is so crucial to Trump’s base, and the excuse offered is so flimsy, that the about-face has raised questions within perhaps the most gullible movement in American history.
The Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” will reduce Medicaid spending by about $800 billion over the next decade by kicking some 8 million Americans off the program’s rolls. That is, if you listen to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the hospital industry, or the basic intuition that any plan to spend drastically less money on giving health care to poor people will result in those people ceasing to have health care.
Not long ago, I ran into an old friend, a well-regarded Democratic intellectual who recently has moved to my right, but who still holds liberal values and is not a Donald Trump supporter. After we commiserated about the excesses of the far left, I mentioned offhandedly that Trump’s maniacal authoritarianism makes the fact that Democrats can’t get their act together so much worse.
He reacted, to my surprise, with indignation.
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In their heedless rush to enact a deficit-exploding tax bill so massive that they barely understand it, Senate Republicans call to mind a scene in The Sopranos. A group of young aspiring gangsters decides to stick up a Mafia card game in hopes of gaining the mobsters’ respect and being brought into the crew.
The Trump administration is carrying out a brazen crackdown on academic freedom: deporting students for writing op-eds, withholding funds from colleges that defy his control, and justifying it all as a response to anti-Semitism. Who is to blame for this? According to one popular theory on the left, the answer is liberals who have consistently supported free speech and opposed Donald Trump.
The logic of this diagnosis has a certain superficial appeal.
A civil war has broken out among the Democratic wonks. The casus belli is a new set of ideas known as the abundance agenda. Its supporters herald it as the key to prosperity for the American people and to enduring power for the liberal coalition.