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.
Several top members of the Trump administration have been evading constraints on their lawless actions by playing a clever game of feigned ignorance as to the plain requirements of the Constitution and a series of adverse court rulings.
Then there’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose ignorance appears to be utterly genuine.
Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on May 16, 2025
Earlier this week in Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump delivered what the White House billed as a “major address,” which is a long-standing way to signal that a particular speech is meant to lay down a historical marker communicating the president’s values. Or, in this case, the lack thereof. Trump’s message was that, unlike interventionist Americans of the past, he did not take account of democracy or human rights when dealing with foreign states.
A generation ago, the Republican Party’s preferred symbol of government-funded indolence was the “welfare queen,” a quasi-mythical figure who collected checks to sit at home watching television. Today’s GOP has fixated on an even stranger target: unemployed adults who take advantage of the taxpayer by collecting free … health insurance.
The fiscal centerpiece of the “big, beautiful bill” now making its way through Congress is to take Medicaid away from jobless adults.
Of the innumerable insults directed at Donald Trump and his supporters, the one that seems to get under their skin the most is “woke right.” The epithet describes the Trump movement’s tendency to counter left-wing illiberalism with a mirror-image replica. “The woke right,” my colleague Thomas Chatterton Williams explained earlier this year, “places identity grievance, ethnic consciousness, and tribal striving at the center of its behavior and thought.
When Chris Van Hollen travelled to El Salvador to check on the status of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been deported to a notorious prison, the Trump administration erupted in delight. Here was a golden opportunity to accuse the Democratic senator and his party of sympathizing with violent criminals. “His heart is reserved for an illegal alien who’s a member of a foreign terrorist organization,” the Trump adviser Stephen Miller told reporters.
The markets are going haywire, and consumer confidence is nosediving. You might be wondering why the Trump administration decided to burn down the healthy economy it inherited. Is it pure incompetence? Or is there a plan?
The answer to both questions appears to be yes. The incompetence is undeniable. But the administration does have a plan, or at least a vision, for what will spring up from the ashes. The trouble is that the long-term economic program is even worse than the short-term one.
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Only yesterday, President Donald Trump was mocking Republicans nervous about his global trade war as “Panicans.” In a defiant speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee, he insisted, “This time I’m doing what I want to do with respect to the tariffs,” and that only he had the courage to defy “the globalists.
Last November, Republican Representative Troy Nehls of Texas told reporters that “if Donald Trump says tariffs work, tariffs work. Period. Because Donald Trump is really never wrong.” This expression of faith in the great leader is a precept of MAGA-ism. The pigs in Animal Farm had a similar way of thinking: “Comrade Napoleon is always right.
All Donald Trump had to do was start telling people the economy was good now. Take over in the middle of an economic expansion and then, without changing the underlying trend line, convince the country that you created prosperity. That’s what he did when he won his first term, and it is what Democrats expected and feared he would do this time.
But Trump couldn’t do the easy and obvious thing, apparently because he did not view his first term as a success.
Donald Trump’s interest in seeking an unconstitutional third term as president, like many of his most dangerous or illegal ideas, began as a joke. Trump would muse on the stump that he deserved an extra term because he was robbed of his first (by Robert Mueller’s investigation) or his second (by imagined vote fraud in 2020) without quite clarifying his intent.
Elon Musk has promised he would eliminate the nearly $2 trillion budget deficit in year one. Last night on Fox, he predicted he would get halfway there by the end of May. His critics have insisted that his goal is unrealistic, and that he won’t accomplish nearly as much deficit reduction as he claims.
The critics are understating the case. DOGE won’t just fall short of Musk’s deficit-reduction goals. It will, in all probability, increase the deficit. Probably by a lot.
Begin on the savings side.
Last week, Mother Jones reported that Kingsley Wilson, the deputy press secretary for the Defense Department, has posted in recent years a long string of bigoted far-right posts—including endorsing the claim that Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched in 1915 in one of the most ghastly anti-Semitic killings in American history, was a rapist and a murderer.
In light of this disturbing news, the Trump administration leaped into action to combat anti-Semitism … on campus.
Donald Trump’s approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been to root for Russia while pretending he isn’t. Trump just hates killing and death. More than that, he hates sending American money overseas. The claim that he actually agrees with Moscow is a hoax, remember. Trump is all about putting America first. Or so he’s said, and so his mostly non-Russophilic supporters claim to believe.
But now he has flung the mask to the ground.
Of the many bizarre and uncomfortable moments during today’s Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump, J. D.
When he is not sharing memes of himself as a conquering Roman centurion or shrieking while brandishing a chain saw onstage at a CPAC conference, Elon Musk occasionally adopts the pose of a reasonable moderate offering an open hand of compromise that Democrats slap away.
“What @DOGE is doing is similar to Clinton/Gore Dem policies of the 1990s,” he wrote on X last week.
Amid the flurry of changes to the face of American government—the president may or may not have the right to unilaterally eliminate agencies; engaging in insurrection has been decriminalized while prosecuting it has become grounds for termination; wars of conquest are now on the table—you could be forgiven for missing the news that bribery is basically legal now, as long as you support, or are, Donald Trump.
The United States is sleepwalking into a constitutional crisis. Not only has the Trump administration seized for itself extraconstitutional powers, but yesterday, it raised the specter that, should the courts apply the text of the Constitution and negate its plans, it will simply ignore them.
The Trump administration’s attempt to eliminate USAID is many things: an unfolding humanitarian nightmare, a rollback of American soft power, the thin end of a wedge meant to reorder the Constitution. But upon closer examination, it is also an outbreak of delusional paranoia that has spread from Elon Musk throughout the Republican Party’s rank and file.
Several days ago, the administration began promoting the theory that USAID was secretly directing a communist conspiracy of unknown dimensions.
Speaking to the Democratic National Committee, which met to select its new leadership this weekend, the outgoing chair, Jaime Harrison, attempted to explain a point about its rules concerning gender balance for its vice-chair race. “The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced,” Harrison announced.
Shortly after midnight, a few hours after the horrifying collision between an airplane and a helicopter at Reagan National Airport, President Donald Trump felt the time was right for a shocked nation to hear his insights into the tragedy. “It is a CLEAR NIGHT, the lights on the plane were blazing, why didn’t the helicopter go up or down, or turn,” he wrote on Truth Social. “Why didn’t the control tower tell the helicopter what to do instead of asking if they saw the plane.