Post-Trump priorities (6): Green New Deal

The sixth of the ten points that Dan Froomkin (1) has proposed as guidelines for a restoration of democratic governance is:

Restart the Green New Deal and restore environmental protections.

The Trump cult is devoted to the idea that global warming is a hoax.

But it’s real. And we – the US and the whole world – need to be doing a lot more to reduce the problem, which is primarily caused by fossil fuel usage.

The Sierra Club gives this explanation of what a Green New Deal should be:

The status quo economy leaves millions behind. While padding the pockets of corporate polluters and billionaires, it exposes working class families, communities of color, and others to stagnant wages, toxic pollution, and dead-end jobs. The climate crisis only magnifies these systemic injustices, as hard-hit communities are hit even harder by storms, droughts, and flooding. Entrenched inequality, meanwhile, exacerbates the climate crisis by depriving frontline communities of the resources needed to adapt and cope. (2)

We can put our hands over our eyes and say, “It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real.” But that won’t fix the very real problem.

Michael Mann in a 2019 review of a book on the Green New Deal Idea by Naomi Klein looks at the relationship of one of the biggest problems in US democracy, which is the enormous role that money plays in the US political system: (3)

Progress will probably demand laws that force special-interest money — including that from the fossil-fuel industry and undisclosed, untraceable ‘dark money’ — out of our politics. It will also probably involve promoting fossil-fuel divestment by public and private institutions; conducting campaigns to pressure media outlets to refuse fossil-fuel advertising money; and removing the social licence currently given to polluters, by publicly calling out their behaviour. These things, in turn, aim to create a risky financial atmosphere for fossil-fuel companies, encouraging them to leave their primary assets in the ground, and investors to put their money elsewhere. [my emphasis] (2)

This is a complicated issue and the Democrats will need to find ways to dramatize this in specific instances (fires, floods, tornadoes, etc.) and all message it a lot. People who are open to voting for Democrats care about the environment. The Democrats need to do a much better job of messaging it. The jobs created with green energy projects is a good way to do this. But it has to be highlighted more by, for instance, dramatizing how many jobs are created by solar panels and windmills.

And, of course, advocates for a Green New Deal also have to push back against lies and distortions by the well-funded fossil fuel advocacy operations.

2019 generated discussion and attention about the Green New Deal approach to environmental protections because … two well-known Democrats highlighted it! Branko Marcetic wrote at the time:

[I]t’s not [the] litany of alarming studies and developments that have some liberals and centrists terrified. Rather, since the unveiling of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey’s Green New Deal resolution, they’ve been more worried about the potential solution.

Terry O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA), accused the lawmakers of “attaching a laundry list of laudable proposals” to “the sails of fantasy,” and called the resolution an “unrealistic manifesto.” He warned that it “threatens to destroy workers’ livelihoods, increase divisions and inequality, and undermine the very goals it seeks to reach,” concluding that “it is a bad deal.” (The pro-fossil fuel LIUNA, like a number of other unions, fears the job losses that could come as a result of the Green New Deal, despite the fact that the resolution features a federal job guarantee and universal basic income for that very reason).

Preeminent liberal columnist Jonathan Chait echoed these words, calling it a “bad idea” filled with “empty sloganeering,” and chiding the lawmakers for putting in “unrelated proposals” for free college and a job guarantee. Chait argues that the resolution was simply thought up by “people who believe capitalism is the root of all problems,” and urges the Democrats to “com[e] up with some better climate change plans, fast.” Chait’s solution is to “look at building on and scaling up Obama’s successful green reforms,” a solution that falls far short of what scientists say needs to be done. [my emphasis] (4)

AOC explains in this 2024 video how the politics of the Green New Deal wound up producing some real advances for green energy projects in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.(5)

It is possible to make progress on climate issues. In the US, it is still very much the Democrats who have the responsibility for pushing the issue politically. Because the Republicans are too much in love with fossil fuels to do anything significant and constructive about it.

Notes:

(1) Froomkin, Dan (2025): Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration? Heads Up News 06/30/2025. <https://www.headsupnews.org/p/is-it-time-to-start-planning-a-post> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).

(2) What Is a Green New Deal? Sierra Club n/d <https://www.sierraclub.org/trade/what-green-new-deal> (Accessed: 2025-25-08).

(3) Mann, Michael (2019): Radical reform and the Green New Deal. Nature Sept 2019. <https://michaelmann.net/sites/default/files/articles/Mann_KleinReviewNature19.pdf>(Accessed: 2025-25-08).

(4) Marcetic, Branko (2019): The Green New Deal Is the Only Realistic Option. Jacobin 02/21/2019. <https://jacobin.com/2019/02/green-new-deal-aoc-markey-climate-change> (Accessed: 2025-25-08).

(5) 5 Years of the Green New Deal. Alexandria Occasion-Cortez YouTube channel 02/09/2024. <https://youtu.be/yDxbTNl4AVI?si=mQpEKuBA6Nrd6KK5>(Accessed: 2025-25-08).

A worthwhile warning on conflict with Venezuela

Alexander Vindman is warning about the risks to both US military preparedness and to the risk of unnecessary war involved in the current Trump policy toward Venezuela. So far as we know, the Peace President’s military actions against Venezuela seem to consist of murdering passengers of Venezuelan fishing boat, which the Peace President claims were smuggling drugs. Actual proof of those claims so far is sadly lacking in the public record.

Vindman distinguished himself during the Trump 1.0 when he was an official in the National Security Council because he obeyed the law and complied with a Congressional subpoena:

I am deeply concerned about the growing pretext for attacking Venezuela. Trump’s first administration included prominent Venezuela hawks and saber-rattling was a recurring theme. The signals coming from the White House today suggest a return to that playbook with talk of air and missile strikes couched in the language of counternarcotics operations, yet carrying an unmistakable undertone of regime change. [my emphasis] (1)

That’s an important reminder that Trump's record in his first term did not offer substantive reasons to see him as a “Peace” President. And his cult followers get fired up by rehetoric against Latin American regimes they don’t like. And the rightwing Venezuelan and Cuban immigrant factions in Florida and elsewhere in the US regard Maduro as a bogeyman. He’s not much of a “leftist” by most standards. But he’s friendly to the BRICS group and Nicagua and Cuba.

The administration is attempting to justify potential attacks on narcotraffickers by designating them as terrorists, but this rationale is legally dubious at best. Drug trafficking, even when conducted by violent criminal organizations, falls into a different category under international law and stretching the definition of terrorism to cover these actors sets a dangerous precedent. This opens the door for any administration to invoke “counterterrorism” authority for military action in virtually any context, eroding the checks and balances meant to restrain the use of force.

Equally concerning is the strategic recklessness of escalating against Venezuela under these terms. Caracas remains deeply unstable, with a collapsing economy and a population already suffering from food shortages, mass emigration, and political repression. A U.S. military strike framed as counternarcotics interdiction could trigger a wider conflict in the region, drive Maduro closer to Moscow and Beijing, and invite asymmetric retaliation across the hemisphere. Worse, it risks entangling the United States in yet another open-ended campaign without clear objectives or an exit strategy. ...

In short, the Venezuela option reflects both the erosion of legal guardrails and the corrosion of strategic judgment. By conflating law enforcement with national defense, the Trump administration is undermining the legitimacy of U.S. power abroad and exposing the nation to long-term strategic costs that far outweigh any tactical gains. [my emphasis]

California Sen. Adam Sciff is calling the strikes illegal, which they are:

Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California said he's drafting a war powers resolution aimed at preventing U.S. troops from engaging in further strikes until formally authorized by Congress.

Schiff said he was concerned "these lawless killings are just putting us at risk" and could prompt another country to target U.S. forces without proper justification.

"I don't want to see us get into some war with Venezuela because the president is just blowing ships willy-nilly out of the water," Schiff said. (2) [my emphasis]

The Wall Street Journal sketches out the situation: (3)

Notes:

(1) Vindman, Alexan09/der (2025): On Venezuela and the Risks of an Overstretched Military. Why It Matters 09/06/2025). <https://www.avindman.com/p/on-venezuela-and-the-risks-of-an> (Accessed: 2025-08-09).

(2) Associated Press (2025): Trump says the U.S. military targeted a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela. NPR 09/16(2ß25. <https://www.npr.org/2025/09/16/g-s1-88985/u-s-military-again-targeted-boat-carrying-drugs-venezuela> (Accessed: 2025-17-09).

(3) How Trump’s Strikes on Venezuelan Boats Could Spark Armed Conflict. Wall Street Journal YouTube channel 09/16/2025. <https://youtu.be/mdcfccvfaPs?si=6AlKxton7JsoV1lo> (Accessed: 2025-17-09).

Post-Trump priorities: Invert Trump's tax changes (5)

The fifth of the ten points that Dan Froomkin (1) has proposed as guidelines for a restoration of democratic governance is:

Invert Trump’s tax changes, to increase taxes on the rich and lower them on the middle class.

Because the Democrats are currently so beholden to wealthy donors and have been addicted to neoliberal thinking on economic policy, including the chronic austerity economics symbolized by Maggie Thatcher’s famous TINA motto: There Is No Altervatuve.

But there are alternatives to austerity economics. And there is no law of nature, and little if any actual experience, to show that simply freeing the wealthiest segment of society from any obligation to pay taxes to support their country produces optimal economic results.

Even putting it in terms of little evidence is giving too much credit to the notion. It may optimize the desires of the One Percent. But societies just don’t work that way.

By contrast, the historical record tells us clearly that the state can wield its power to discipline capital and meet existential threats. As talk of a Green New Deal evokes, the state successfully redirected the productive capacity of the U.S. economy under FDR [1933-1945]. During World War II, the state engaged in even more direct economic planning, using instruments such as price controls and rationing. And the U.S. state has a long and creditable—though sometimes underappreciated—history of nationalizing politically obstructive capital interests. Similar moves were achieved in Britain under Clement Attlee, with steel and coal nationalization as well as the creation of the National Health Service. The point is that democratic governments have exercised sufficient power in the face of grand challenges in the past, and they can do so again. [my emphasis] (2)

No billionaire TechBro that I know of is likely to admit to seeing things that way.

But the biggest is not metaphysical but political. Guinan and O’Neill look at the problem from a progressive perspective:

So what’s the path forward? The electoral defeats of [Jeremy] Corbyn [in Britain] and [Bernie] Sanders [in the US]—and the intense hostility that they encountered from the political center—show that it is not enough to articulate a viable economic strategy when the balance of political forces is so solidly arrayed against it. Large chunks of the liberal, centrist camp are simply not willing to work as junior partners in a left-led political alliance, even if the cost is electoral losses to the neopopulist right. The left must face this fact head on as it builds a strategy to win. The task constitutes a generational challenge, but it must be done. [my emphasis]

And in this context, the political center in the US is not some bipartisan blob. The Republican Party is thoroughly Trumpified and completely in thrall to the sort of corrupt kleptocracy that Trump 2.0 represents. The Democratic centrists, or ConservaDems as they are sometimes called, will have to be willing to wrench themselves away from austerity economics and get behind a new edition of New Deal/Great Society economics.

In conjunction with embracing a more social-democratic or welfare-state approach, the next Democratic Administration has to stop playing dumb games that pay homage to austerity-economics notions. Like passing programs that go into effect immediately and yield visible result to large portions of the public, rather than backload the benefits to meet the Democrats’ self-imposed pay-as-you-go requirement that no actual voters care about or understand – nor should they understand anything about pay-go except that it’s a public-relations scam. We’re seeing that now with Biden’s successful Build Back Better program, whose benefits was backloaded over just that PR schtick. Now Trump 2.0 is sequestering the funds and lots of people will have the impression that Build Back Better was just a big bad flop.

Notes:

(1) Froomkin, Dan (2025): Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration? Heads Up News 06/30/2025.

(2) Joe Guinan, Joe & O’Neill, Martin (2024): No Substitute for State Power. Boston Review Spring 2024. <https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/climate-state-and-utopia/no-substitute-for-state-power/> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).

More on the Republicans’ current favorite martyr Charlie Kirk’s death and legacy

Branko Marcetic in the social-democratic Jacobin has an essay on political violence in the aftermath of the assassination of far-right hatemonger Charlie Kirk by another hard-right obsessive from the Trump cult.

He states this democratic principle:

This is the way democracy and a free society work: We accept that we have to tolerate hearing things we vehemently disagree with, because it guarantees our own right to speak and act freely in ways that others might vociferously detest.

But there is something dishonest and slightly absurd going on right now in the collective reaction to Kirk’s murder. Because rather than simply restate and defend this principle — you have a right to air your views without fear of violence, even if your views suck — a variety of prominent voices are now rewriting Kirk’s history to present him as someone who wasn’t an implacable foe of this very value. (1)

At this point it’s important to remember that the liberal democratic notions of tolerance and freedom of speech developed from a long period of social clashes and civil wars. Rainer Forst described that process well in Toleranz im Konflikt (2003), English translation: Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present (2013), Toleration was a radical oppositional demand of the democratic movements.

(By the way, if the word “Jacobin” gives you the heebee-jeebies because guillotines and stuff, it’s worth noting that the latest Republican saint and martyr, Charlie Kirk, thought televised beheadings would be a good thing for American to stage. Just last year, he had a friendly discussion with other public-execution fans about how old should children be before they are allowed to watch the public beheadings on TV.) (2)

The liberal-democratic idea of free speech is primarily about protecting speech from government suppression. But in the democratic concept of the rule of law, government also has an affirmative obligation to ensure that private actors are not suppressing free speech either. Bad actors like Ku Klux Klan and “patriot militia” types.

The principle of free speech could be described as the idea that things work out best when everyone is free to say any dang fool thing they want, so long as a everyone else is free to say what a dang fool thing it was.

This doesn’t mean that there are no conEvsequences for speech that is libelous. Or for speech intimately connected to a criminal action. For instance, if a New York Mob boss – like one of those who Trump’s political mentor Roy Cohn advised and represented – tells one of his lieutenants to knock somebody off, that is an integral part of a criminal act. So he can’t claim that was protected free speech.

But part of the “dang fool thing” definition of the concept also assumes that other people call out the dang fool things that, say, a white supremacist hatemonger like Charlie Kirk spews out. Evan when talking about his legacy which the Trump cult has been celebrating. It also means calling out cynical and dishonest uses being made of Kirk’s murder by his admirers. As Matt Gertz puts it:

The ideology of people who attack political figures doesn’t always map neatly onto a political party, in no small part because the assailant typically suffers from some form of mental illness. But Democrats have certainly been the targets of political violence in recent memory: In October 2022, a man broke into the home of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seeking to kidnap her, and brutally assaulted her husband, Paul. In June, an assassin allegedly murdered a Democratic state legislator and her husband and wounded a second and his wife in Minnesota. Last month’s lethal attack on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by someone who authorities say “wanted to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines” should also be placed in this category. [my enogasus] (3)

And Marcetic writes:

As plenty of people have pointed out by now, Kirk held and espoused a variety of ugly views and regularly insulted and demonized whole groups of human beings just trying to get on with their lives: not only trans people, whom he was falsely blaming for mass shootings at the precise moment he himself was shot (by a nontrans man, based on what we now know) but also Jews, Muslims, immigrants, black people, homosexuals, federal workers — the list goes on. That of course doesn’t mean he deserved to be killed, but it is dishonest — and actually detrimental to the defense of free speech — to pretend these weren’t his core, heartfelt beliefs.

Kirk held and espoused a variety of ugly views and regularly insulted and demonized whole groups of human beings just trying to get on with their lives.

But it’s not even really Kirk’s bigoted social attitudes that are the point. More important is that Kirk was very much on board with the political violence that is now rightly being decried in the wake of his murder. [my emphasis]

He goes on to give examples of how Martyr Kirk viewed those he considered political enemies:

He called Democrats “maggots, vermin, and swine,” charged that the party “hates this country” and that “they wanna see it collapse.” He told rural white voters that the party hated them in particular and has “a plan to try and get rid of you” and that they “won’t stop until you and your children and your children’s children are eliminated.” Kamala Harris “wants to see the elimination of the United States of America,” he claimed last year, and her election would mean “a pagan regime basically permanently engulfing the country.” [my emphasis]

Wajahat Ali and Danielle Moody discusses the far-right political environment in which the accused assassination of Kirk immersed himself. (4)

Notes:

(1) Marcetic, Branko (2025): Political Violence Is Wrong. Charlie Kirk Didn’t Think So. Jacobin 09/13/2025. <https://jacobin.com/2025/09/kirk-posobiec-political-violence-far-right>(Accessed: 2025-14-2025).

(2) Charlie Kirk fantasizes about children watching televised executions: “At a certain age, it's an initiation”.Media Matters 027272024. <https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-fantasizes-about-children-watching-televised-executions-certain-age-its> (Accessed: 2025-15-2025).

(3) Gertz, Matt (2025): On the killing of Charlie Kirk, political violence, and the right’s response. Media Matters 08/12/2025, <https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/killing-charlie-kirk-political-violence-and-rights-response> (Accessed: 2025-15-2025).

(4) "One of Us": The Murder of Charlie Kirk and the Mirror America Refuses to Face. Wajahat Ali YouTube channel 09/13/2025. <https://youtu.be/byiKZoANKMs?si=1nwo8OuDs8Goonfk> (Accessed: 2025-14-2025).

Post-Trump priorities: restoring “foreign aid” programs (4)

The third of the ten points that Dan Froomkin (1) has proposed as guidelines for a restoration of democratic governance is: Dan Froomkin, fourth goal: Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration?

Restart international aid.

“Foreign aid” is a constant gripe of conservatives, not just in the US but in European democracies as well. In opinion polls, the public typically assume that “foreign aid” as a percentage of the national budget at vastly higher than it actually is.

Early in the Trump 2.0 regime, the Administration cancelled numerous US humanitarian programs for other countries:

[The Trump 2.0 Administration] completely ended nearly 10,000 aid programs in one fell swoop — including those they had granted waivers just days earlier — saying the programs did not align with Trump’s agenda. The move consigns untold numbers of the world’s poorest children, refugees and other vulnerable people to death, according to several senior federal officials. Local authorities have already begun estimating a death toll in the hundreds of thousands.

Part of the problem is that people know that the US is involved in supporting all over the world with huge military expenditures. But military support - whether it is the stationing of US troops, ships, and aircraft, or military aid given directly to other countries - is not officially considered “foreign aid.” And the disbursement of what is officially foreign aid is closely controlled and audited. (I’ll make a wild guess that such controls over those programs will be much weaker to nonexisstent under Trump 2.0)

Georg Ingram compiled a list several years ago for the Brookings Institution of typical criticisms based on misconceptions of “foreign aid”: (2)

Myth #1: America spends too much on foreign aid

Myth #2: Others don’t do their fair share

Myth #3: U.S. foreign aid is mainly backed by Democrats

Myth #4: Foreign aid goes to corrupt, wasteful governments

Myth #5: Foreign aid goes to autocratic governments

Myth #6: Foreign aid is wasted, inefficient, and produces no concrete results

Myth #7: Foreign aid is for the benefit of foreigners and not aligned with U.S. interests

Myth #8: Foreign aid is unpopular

Ingram summarizes the strange dilemma for supporters of actual foreign-aid programs:

While the term foreign aid is not popular and polling reveals that some feel our foreign policy is overextended, Americans support U.S. active engagement in the world. A substantial majority of those polled support working collaboratively with other nations.

Assistance for humanitarian purposes receives overwhelming approval, and support is strong for specific purposes such as improving people’s health, helping women and girls, educating children, and helping poor countries develop their economies. What receives less support is assistance for strategic purposes.

To change this situation, Democratic leaders and politicians will have to start highlighting specific programs and make a show of fighting to protect them so they can reframe the whole category of “foreign aid.”

In a 2024 update of the article, Ingram explains, among other things, “At $63 billion for fiscal year 2023, foreign aid is around 1% of the federal budget.” In that report, he notes:

The Marshall Plan in the early 1950s played a critical role in reviving the economies of Europe following World War II and is credited with helping to fend off communism in Western Europe.

The Green Revolution for which foreign aid in the 1960s financed agricultural research that produced new varieties of seeds, increased use of fertilizers, and improved farming practices that expanded agricultural output in developing countries, including moving countries in Asia from periodic bouts of hunger and famine to being agriculture exporters.

The U.S. PEPFAR program in a period of 20 years (2003-2023) has saved 25 million lives from HIV/AIDS and enabled 5.5 million babies to be born HIV-free. (3)

“Foreign aid” programs are an essential piece of US “soft power.” This doesn’t mean that they are never used for dubious purposes, which can and often does detract from their positive value. But programs that are sponsored and funded by the US that visibly save lives and improve people’s prospects in life are far cheaper and far more effective than, say, invading Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Venezuela or whoever Trump is threatening with military attack on any given day.

But “Peace President” Trump is far more committed to funding genocide in Gaza than reducing the spread of AIDS in Africa.

Notes:

(1) Froomkin, Dan (2025): Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration? Heads Up News 06/30/2025. <https://www.headsupnews.org/p/is-it-time-to-start-planning-a-post> (Accessed: 2025-03-08). (Accessed: 2025-03-08).

(2) Ingram, George (2019): What every American should know about US foreign aid. Brookings Institution 10/02/2019. <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-every-american-should-know-about-u-s-foreign-aid/> (Accessed: 2025-03-08). The bullet points here are direct quotes.

(3) Ingram, George (2024): What is US foreign assistance? Brookings Institution 09/12/2025. <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/what-is-us-foreign-assistance/> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).

Post-Trump Priorities

The US had major challenges in reconstructing the national political system after the Civil War. Americans in the North experienced that as such a was a cataclysmic event that they were willing to have Congress go a long way in making former slaves citizens and, at least for a while and to some extent, integrating African-Americans into American society in the South, where most of them lived at the time.

We’ve collectively stumbled pretty badly on taking responsibility and correcting wrongs committed by the government, often with majority support among white men. (Universal suffrage including for women was not established nationally until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, though a number of states had previously adopted full or partially women’s suffrage.)

The treatment of Native American peoples is a spectacular example of events and actions now generally recognized as wrong. (Though not among Trump cultists.) Suffrage for Black Americans was not nationally established until the Civil Rights Act of 1965, The rightwing Supreme Court has drastically restricted those laws, and the Republican Party gives a high priority to Jim-Crow-style shenanigans to block African-American citizens from voting. And formal acknowledgment of US government wrongdoing in the detention of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War was also a long time coming.

And the need for the rule of law, including government officials being required to follow the law, is a major deficiency. Though violations of law by the military and often by intelligence officials has been prosecuted at times. William Calley, for instance, did stand trial and was convicted over the My Lei Massacre of 1968. But wars and foreign subversion (such as the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratic government Chile in 1973) have had a major effect on diminishing the rule of law in the United States. Presidents and other government officials have to be held accountable for breaking the law in their official positions.

Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon after he resigned the Presidency, illegal domestic espionage against civil-rights and antiwar activists, and the serious erosion of personal rights that often took place in the name of the endless War on Terror for which al-Qaida’s 2001 attacks provided the nominal justification have all involved a loosening in practice of legal constraints on government officials.

Trump’s abuse of the pardon power during his first term and his staging of the Jan. 6, 2021 violent insurrection at the US Capitol were very serious crimes. And now the Trump 2.0 Administration is implementing authoritarian rule – yes, “fascist” is the right word to describe it,

The Obama Administration was more scrupulous about the rule of law in domestic affairs, though his and Biden’s continuation of foreign assassinations were a dangerous erosion of the rule of law, as well.

And Obama’s refusal to prosecute crimes committed by the Cheney-Bush Administration, followed later by Biden’s limited success in prosecuting the January 6 crimes in n particular, i.e., not prosecuting senior officials in charge of it, were also major blows to the rule of law. So now we have a Republicans Party ready to commit all sorts of illegal actions without trying to hide them. And a big part of the reason is that Obama and Biden showed limited willingness to hold Bush and Trump officials responsible even for very serious violations of the law.

The Supreme Court’s irresponsible decision in Trump v. United States ranks with the Dred Scott decision as one of the worst and most damaging actions the Supreme Court has ever taken. As Samuel Breidbart wrote in 2024:

The ruling in Trump v. United States is an affront to democracy and the rule of law, forfeiting critical checks on executive power. It undermines criminal accountability for presidents if their law-breaking occurs in the course of “official” conduct, and it endangers democratic accountability by potentially shielding presidents from prosecution for trying to overthrow elections. By inserting this opinion into a world where impeachment is no longer a viable option, the Supreme Court is licensing future presidents to subvert our democracy at will — and protecting a past president, Donald Trump, who attempted just that. (1)

BBC News reported the decision this way: (2)

Any new Democratic Congress and Administration have a giant responsibility to take appropriate action to rein in these breaches of the rule of law. And it will be a Democratic effort, because we see clearly now that Republicans in Congress are completely supportive of Trump’s criminal actions. There may be a few Republicans in a post-Trump Congress who will vote for such measures. But it will not be a bipartisan effort, even if a few Republican stragglers decide to “reach across the aisle” to support basic rule of law.

The Democrats will make a huge mistake if they try to frame such an effort as a kumbaya moment to let Republicans off the hook for their collective support for lawlessness. I’ll be happy, hopefully someday, if the Republicans actually do switch to supporting the rule of law and are willing to block even Republican Presidents from illegal action. And are willing to take appropriate remedies against renegade Supreme Court decisions to exempt Presidents from the obligation to follow US laws.

Getting there will take a while, even if there is a Democratic President elected in 2028 along with clear Democratic majorities in Congress. If 2028 brings us another Democratic President who wants to “look forward, not backward” when it comes to prosecuting Republican officials who use their positions to break the law – it will likely take at least two decades to fully repair the damage already done.

Democracy Now! reported last month on the kind of criminal behavior that does need to be prosecuted. And it gives another example of how military operations can normalized criminal behavior by senior officials: (2)

Notes:

(1) Breidbart, Samuel (2025): Notes: The Supreme Court’s Presidential Immunity Ruling Undermines Democracy. Brennan Center 10/01/2024. <https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/supreme-courts-presidential-immunity-ruling-undermines-democracy> (Accessed: 2025-24-08).

(2) US Supreme Court: Trump has “absolute immunity” for official acts. BBC News YouTube channel 04/02/2025. <https://youtu.be/cwWP0-QFYBo?si=OJOjLDoCX6_ZNaBy> (Accessed: 2025-24-08).

(3) The Fort Bragg Cartel": Book Exposes U.S. Special Forces' Involvement in Drug Trafficking & Murder. Democracy Now! YouTube channel 08/14/2025. <https://youtu.be/zxbW0CCuT7E?si=jNWDAer08BlGbNwR> (Accessed: 2025-24-08).

Post-Trump priorities: the civil service

The third of the ten points that Dan Froomkin (1) has proposed as guidelines for a restoration of democratic governance is: Stop mass deportations.

Dan Froomkin, third goal: Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration?

Revive the civil service.

This is a wonky topic but an important one. To convert it into a partisan political issue favoring the Democrats shouldn’t be difficult. Except the Democrats have become so addicted to trying to sound “reasonable” and “moderate” – which means in practice : (1) trying to pander to wealthy donors; (2) repeating lists of poll-tested issues until their audiences begin to nod off; (3) constantly reviving old favorites like “bipartisanship” and “reaching across the ”aisle” as though there is a single voter out there whose vote could be changed by hearing it – that they’ve gotten serious rusty on framing an issue to their favor.

Delaware Sen. Chris von Hollen showed how framing and issue to the Democrats’ advantage when he went to El Salvador to check on an immigrant in his district who had been illegally kidnapped by ICE goons and illegally deported from the country and stuck in a concentration camp run by the Salvadoran dictator. He reframed this issue in a dramatic way that quickly shifted public opinion on the immigration issue from favoring Republicans to favoring Democrats.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom seems to find the role a bit awkward. But he seems to have realized, at least for the moment, that what voters prefer to see from the Democratic Party is a competent group of people who fight for their own side, not ones who try to split the difference with Republicans extremists all the time.

When it comes to the civil service, the key to making it a fighting issue for the Democrats is to stress some form of the notion that government needs to function well. Even on a issue like policing, Joe Biden’s ridiculous “fund, fund, fund the police” mantra, the Democrats never converted that into identifying themselves as making government work well, which most people also understand as working efficiently and legally. Only sadistic MAGA chuds actually get off on a scene like four cops strangling George Floyd to death on a public street. And all the people who do support that? That all vote Republican!! Pandering to those voters just makes it easier for Republicans to win.

No one but mobsters and corrupt sleazebags can support something like the Night Riders gang that operated for years inside the Oakland Police Department, for instance. (2)

Despite chronic cynicism about public employees, most people want the city water supply to function properly. The water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi in 2022 (3) – which took place when Biden was still President – could have been dramatized nationally as a case of a Republican Governor and Republican legislators hanging their own capitol city out to dry because it’s a majority-Black city. But Biden was still waiting for “the fever to break” in the Republican Party so that we could go back to some imagined Good Old Days of holy bipartisanship.

That would have been an excellent concrete situation for the Democratic Party to use to paint the Republican Party as the people who don’t care if you and your children and your neighbors don’t have clean water to drink. That’s the Republican Party, not just “MAGA” and not just those mostly imaginary Republicans who were not on board with Trumpism. We’ve seen very dramatically in 2025 already how mistaken a notion that was.

The Idea of “Civil Service”

One of the innovations of Andrew Jackson’s Presidency was the widespread use of the “spoils system,” i.e., appointing partisans to government jobs. In 1833, this meant in practice that the small-d democratic movement the Jackson represented – obligatory reminder here that the US in 1933 (and long after) would not count as a “liberal democracy” at all by 2025 terms, it was a long process of development and expansion – was able provide material awards to local party activists and thereby to strengthen grassroots political organizing.

But most civilian public jobs in 1833 were things like postmasters and toll collectors. There weren’t hordes of tax officials – there’s wasn’t even and income tax yet – or scientists, or food inspectors, or statisticians, or intelligence officials, or public parks to manage, or federal, state, and local health departments.

As the economy developed, not only in the US but in Europe and the rest of the world, the need for reliable public services staffed by people with often substantial educational qualifications that would be managed according to the law and not controlled by partisan political decisions or corruption. More broadly speaking, a competent, professional, and well-managed public sector with civil-service hiring procedures and insultation from petty and/or corrupt outside interference.

Broadly speaking, in the world of the 20th and 21st centuries, competent and professional public services are part of the necessary infrastructure for all kinds of economies.

The pro-democracy, anti-authoritarianism civil society group Protect Democracy points out the problem with government agencies making critical technical decisions based on corruption or purely ideological assumptions:

One agency that illustrates how a politicized civil service could impact the American people is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is charged with ensuring the safety of many foods, medicines, medical devices, and other products.

A well-functioning FDA ensures that Americans can trust the safety of FDA-regulated products, which, according to the agency, “account for about 21 cents of every dollar spent by U.S. consumers.” The capacity of the FDA is also a main factor in determining the speed at which new medicines become available, and in ensuring sufficient public confidence such that companies that develop medicines and medical treatments choose to do so in the United States rather than taking jobs and medical innovations overseas.

However, the FDA’s work is difficult; it requires a highly trained workforce composed of expert doctors, statisticians, biologists, and others, many of whom could easily obtain high-paying jobs in the private sector. Already, there are concerns that the number of departures and early retirements that occurred during the Trump Administration have damaged the FDA’s capacity. (4)

Democrats can politicize the idea that we need professional institutions of government and that it can be done by the Trump process of trying to staff agencies with flunkies, hacks, grifters, and ideological crackpots.

But they can’t do it by doing politics according to the principle of “when they go low, we go high.” Or by talking constantly about “bipartisanship.” They have to dramatize it, fight for it, and make it clear that the Republicans – not just “MAGA” - want only bad and incompetent government.

Notes:

(1) Froomkin, Dan (2025): Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration? Heads Up News 06/30/2025. <https://www.headsupnews.org/p/is-it-time-to-start-planning-a-post> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).

(2) Piper, Franch (2023): Oakland’s “Riders” Scandal and the Fraught Road to Police Reform. Bolts Magazine 01/13/2023. <https://boltsmag.org/oakland-police-riders-scandal/> (Accessed: 2025-19-08).

(3) Klasing, Amanda (2022): Mississippi Water Crisis a Failure Decades in the Making. Human Rights Watch 09/02/2022. <https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/09/02/mississippi-water-crisis-failure-decades-making> (Accessed: 2025-19-08).

(4) Tausanovitch, Alex (2024): The civil service, explained. Protect Democracy 06/11/2024. <https://protectdemocracy.org/work/the-civil-service-explained/> (Accessed: 2025-19-08).

Charlie Kirk’s death and the politics of assassination

"We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country." – Ex-President and once-again-Presidential-candidate Donald Trump in 2023. (1)

ABC News reported that year:

Trump's denial that he had read Hitler's memoir [Mein Kampf] came after he has made a series of incendiary remarks in recent weeks referring to his political opponents as "vermin" and saying illegal immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country." ,,,

This was the first time Trump had invoked Hitler's name and the title of his memoir at a political rally, but there have been multiple reports over the years of Trump expressing a keen interest in, even admiration for, Hitler's rule over Nazi Germany. ...

There's no question that language echoes that Hitler used to describe his enemies, but there may have been some question about whether Trump knew he was using the same words Hitler used to justify his murderous and genocidal rule of Nazi Germany.

Now, after backlash that his words echoed Hitler's, however, there is no doubt.

"They said Hitler said that," Trump said Tuesday after he again told the crowd in Iowa that immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of America.
After insisting Hitler used the words "in a much different way," Trump went on to make the "blood" reference again. "It's true. They're destroying the blood of the country, they're destroying the fabric of our country, and we're going to have to get them out." [my emphasis] (2)

It is possible to talk about political violence and assassination without staying stuck in “thoughts and prayers” mode. But would require the Dems not to go into their reflexive duck-and-cover mode and saying things like, to take a random example, “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work.” Which Gavin Newsom did, (3) reminding us all that despite his enthusiasm for trying to mimic Jerry Brown or FDR in how he fights Republicans, his commitment to progressive political positions – or even centrist Democratic ones – is not always clear.

When it comes to talking about “political violence,” the stock vocabulary about the whole thing is more than a little bizarre. The Republicans celebrate the unlimited right of guns to reproduce without limit along with encouraging far-right political militias and idolizes the January 6, 2021 storm on the US Capitol as high patriotism, including the cop-killing involved. How many times a day do we hear Republicans say that the unlimited right to have any kind of gun available to kill, kill, kill anyone who you think looks threatening is the absolute foundation of all Liberty? Although their idea of liberty is not exactly democracy and the rule of law.

And all the while, they want to demonize Democrats for saying even obvious things about their own selected martyrs for the Trumpista cause, their present-day versions of Horst Wessel. (4)

So, I feel like for the moment just restating some fairly commonplace realities about political violence.

One, war is political violence. It just is. You don’t have to dig deep into Carl von Clausewitz’ theories (the idea that war is the continuation of politics of which Vladimir Lenin was particular fond of emphasizing) to figure that out.

Second, the consideration of whether particular war or just and therefore moral or unjust and therefore immoral goes back in “the West” to Augustine of Hippo (354-439 CE). And there were other versions of such moral considerations relating to war around even earlier, and not just in what we know claim as Western tradition. Muslim theories of jihad are a version of that, too, however little Islamophobes may dislike hearing that.

Third, genocide, a relatively recent term formally defined by the Genocide Convention of 1948 is not a theory of just conduct, it’s a legal definition of what is generally considered the most heinous kind of crime. Ask looking at how many members of Congress (or, better said, how few) are demanding immediate cessation of US aid to Israel’s real-time genocide in Gaza, to get a sense of how acceptable to a depressingly large number of people even the officially worst crime of taking lives really is. And we see it in real time.

Fourth, the fact that mass killing is going on someone – even in a Just War – is not condone individual murders. The Talmudic saying, “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire,” (the Schindler’s List English version) is in part a recognition of that concept.

Assassination

Targeted assassination is unfortunately a standard tool of US foreign policy now. Barack Obama himself (in)famously bragged on the number of targeted drone assassinations he had carried out as President: “Turns out I'm really good at killin’ people."

“Peace” President Trump is also down with the practice. He bragged in 2020 during his first Presidency, “Last night, at my direction, the United States military successfully executed a flawless precision strike that killed the number-one terrorist anywhere in the world, Qasem Soleimani.” (5)

The discussion of political assassination has moral, legal, and practical aspects. For admirers of the Confederacy and its thoroughly white-racist and anti-democracy principles considered John Wilkes Booth a hero for assassinating Abraham Lincoln. Supporters of democracy an enemies of slavery found his act despicable. It was certainly illegal because states seek to maintain a monopoly on violence internally as assassination is today. But a moral and practical understanding of the act and its consequences is essential to evaluating its significance.

The two most famous assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler

A carpenter named Georg Elser tried to kill Hitler in Munich in 1939, planting a bomb under the stage on which the Führer was scheduled to speak. But Hitler left the building earlier than scheduled. “Elser was held as a prisoner for over five years until he was executed at the Dachau concentration camp less than a month before the surrender of Nazi Germany.” (5) Eight people were killed in the bombing and several dozen were injured.

The most famous of the attempts was the officers’ plot against Hitler that is particularly identified with Claus von Stauffenberg. It was an illegal act, and Stauffenberg was executed for it, as were numerous other participants. Stauffenberg and his fellow plotters are widely celebrated in Germany and abroad, and honored for their attempt even by the German armed forces, as described in this Deutsche Welle report from 2020: (6)

Charlie Kirk was obviously not Adolf Hitler, so there is no direct comparison to be made. The point is that political violence – presuming the motive in Kirk’s murder was political – is a political event as well as a crime and an act of violence. Whatever uses the Trump cult makes of his death, and however they try to exploit it as some kind of further justification to dismantle democracy, those are things US citizens and the Democratic Party will have to engage as those emerge. Gavin Newsom’s bizarre call to “continue” Charlie Kirk’s “work” – which was the work of rightwing and racist hatemongering – is just so clueless it makes me a bit embarrassed that I praised some of Newsom’s genuinely decent efforts this year to challenge Trump’s misrule.

Notes:

(1) Kurtzleben, Danniele /2023): Why Trump's authoritarian language about 'vermin' matters. NPR 11/17/2023. <https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213746885/trump-vermin-hitler-immigration-authoritarian-republican-primary> (Accessed: 2025-10-09)

(2) Karl, Jonathan (2023): Donald Trump's history with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi writings: ANALYSIS. ABC News 12/21/2023. <https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trumps-history-adolf-hitler-nazi-writings-analysis/story?id=105810745> (Accessed: 2025-10-09).

(3) Mazza, Ed (2025): Gavin Newsom Names 'Best Way To Honor' Charlie Kirk After 'Senseless Murder'. HuffPost 09/11/2023. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gavin-newsom-charlie-kirk-honor_n_68c24056e4b02e75fd409f2f> (Accessed: 2025-12-09).

(4) Remarks by President Trump on the Killing of Qasem Soleimani. Trump White House Archives 01/03/2020. <https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-killing-qasem-soleimani/> (Accessed: 2025-12-09).

(5) Assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler. Wikipedia 08/23/2025. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Assassination_attempts_on_Adolf_Hitler&oldid=1307381529> (Accessed: 2025-12-09).

(6) Commemorating WWII hero Claus von Stauffenberg. DW News YouTube channel 07/20/2020. <https://youtu.be/K42a6XoroCk?si=umtXlz9NoUHpIJPe> (Accessed: 2025-12-09).

Post-Trump priorities: stopping mass deportations

The second of the ten points that Dan Froomkin (1) has proposed as guidelines for a restoration of democratic governance is: Stop mass deportations.

His list of measures of this point include: “Defunding ICE, closing concentration camps, restoring temporary protected status, respecting asylum claims, ending to the harassment of people on visas, and welcoming more international students.”

The Democrats managed to mangle the political advantage they gained in 2020 by highlighting the issue of violent police misconduct. And they accepted the Republican framing on what “defund” means.

ICE as it currently exists is a highly problematic function, and it needs to be reformed thoroughly, i.e., defunded in its current state. The Democrats themselves pushed the idea of creating a Department of Homeland Security as a large umbrella authority after the 2001 “9-11” attack. And in its current form it’s a highly questionable entity, especially the way ICE is operating.

The concept of “governmental reorganization” is not a great applause line for politicians. It sounds vague, bureaucratic, and boring. But a message of “Law enforcement of all kinds have to do their jobs in a professional way. And having masked goons with no identification as police on their uniforms or their vehicles kidnapping people off the street is the opposite of legitimate policing” – that is something that voters can understand. And the Democrats can dramatize this in a variety of convincing ways.

Froomkin’s point of “closing concentration camps” can also be used straightforwardly as an issue. Particularly when highlighted in connection with ICE’s goon-squad-style operations. The Democrats are sadly out of practice in stressing abuses like this. But they need to learn it again, and fast.

Froomkin’s other four actions in this category are part of arguing for a sane, legal, and decent immigration system. The Kamala Harris approach to this issue was essentially to say: Look, we Democrats want to be much tougher in keeping out those scary immigrants out of the country but the Republicans won’t let us!

We have plenty of experience from American politics, European politics, and xenophobic demagoguery in other parts of the world that when the center-right and even center-left parties try to mimic the far right on immigration hysteria, it consistently strengthens the far right. Because they are accepting the framing of the far right.

And in the Trump 2.0 era, we see that Trump has been using the immigration issue as its main excuse for arbitrary policing and getting people accustomed to goon-squad raids cruelty in their treatment as its main tool to undermine democracy and the rule of law. And to accustom people to an attitude of respectable callousness toward The Others. And the scope of who counts as The Others keeps getting bigger and bigger.

The Democrats can’t coopt xenophobic politics away. They have to challenge it very directly. And to highlight the outrageous nature of the Trump regime’s actions on that front. In the early months of the current administration, Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen did just that with his trip to El Salvador this year to verify that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, arrested by ICE goons and illegally deported by the Trump regime. (2) And the publicity that he created brought not only attention to the issue, it was a key factor in swinging public opinion away from preferring Republicans on immigration to preferring Democrats. It’s possible to do this right.

But they can’t do it by reciting lists of issues that campaign consultants have elaborately vetted for their popularity. Which they do all too often.

And they have to show that they are willing to fight the Republicans over them. Constantly saying the word “bipartisan” and pretending that somehow Trump and MAGA are something other than the Republican Party won’t accomplish this.

Federico Finkelstein, a leading scholar on fascism, notes how the designating of enemies as deadly threats. Which is what Trump 2.0 is doing to immigrants and Latinos more generally. Finkelstein wrote in 2024:

Only when people are turned into “mortal enemies” does true fascism emerge. Making these enemies living subjects that can be victimized becomes its practice. Thus, when the concept of the enemy is projected onto the victims, when it becomes a concrete manifestation of the fascist politics of extreme hatred and xenophobia, fascism is able to turn propaganda into reality. Enemies are no longer an idea; they become real people, victims of fascist ideology. (3)

The Trump regime’s definition of the internal Enemy will continue to widen. Trump has already been ranting about how Democratic mayor nominee in New York City, Zohran Mamdani, calling a Communist, an label he uses loosely for Democratic opponents. It’s a circular definition, to be fair: Trump Republicans – and are there really any other kind of Republicans today? – regard democracy and Communism as more-or-less equivalent.

David Kurtz made an important point in a column last month about how the brutal ICE actions are also part of a larger white supremacist project:

I usually cast President Trump’s anti-immigrant mass deportation agenda as a rule of law story. But it is of course so much more than that. It is fundamentally a story about racism, xenophobia, and othering. It’s about preying on our fears, differences, and prejudices to create a villainous foe whom he can easily vanquish in repeated set-pieces. It’s about letting loose the worst of our impulses to heighten and sustain divisions among us.

The mass deportation agenda is just one part of a larger agenda in which white Americans are fronted as the real America and everyone else is second-class, unless they individually demonstrate in lavish ways a high enough degree of fealty to Donald Trump. [my emphasis] (4)

Notes:

(1) Froomkin, Dan (2025): Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration? Heads Up News 06/30/2025. <https://www.headsupnews.org/p/is-it-time-to-start-planning-a-post> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).

(2) Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen on why he went to El Salvador and what's next. GZero World with Ian Bremmer. <https://www.gzeromedia.com/podcast/gzero-world-podcast/maryland-sen-chris-van-hollen-on-why-he-went-to-el-salvador-and-whats-next#toggle-gdpr> (Accessed: 2025-143-08).

(3) Finkelstein, Federico (2024): The Wannabe Fascists: A Guide to Understanding the Greatest Threat to Democracy, 94. Oakland: University of California Press.

(4) Kurtz, David (2025): Trump Pushes White Nationalist Agenda Across Multiple Fronts. TPM 08/20/2025. <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/trump-pushes-white-nationalist-agenda-across-multiple-fronts> (Accessed: 2025-21-08).

Twenty-four years after “9/11”

Today is the 24th anniversary of the “9/11” attacks by Al-Qaeda that brought down the Twin Towers in New York, damaged the Pentagon, and took many lives.

The Pew Center in 2021 gave this summary of US reactions to the attacks:

The enduring power of the Sept. 11 attacks is clear: An overwhelming share of Americans who are old enough to recall the day remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. Yet an ever-growing number of Americans have no personal memory of that day, either because they were too young or not yet born.

A review of U.S. public opinion in the two decades since 9/11 reveals how a badly shaken nation came together, briefly, in a spirit of sadness and patriotism; how the public initially rallied behind the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, though support waned over time; and how Americans viewed the threat of terrorism at home and the steps the government took to combat it.

As the country comes to grips with the tumultuous exit of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan, the departure has raised long-term questions about U.S. foreign policy and America’s place in the world. Yet the public’s initial judgments on that mission are clear: A majority endorses the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, even as it criticizes the Biden administration’s handling of the situation. And after a war that cost thousands of lives – including more than 2,000 American service members – and trillions of dollars in military spending, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that 69% of U.S. adults say the United States has mostly failed to achieve its goals in Afghanistan. (1)

The Cheney-Bush Administration used the occasion to launch two disastrous wars.

The process that led to the authoritarian Trump 2.0 Administration was greatly influenced by the Cheney-Bush Administration’s reactions to the 9/11 attacks.

The legacy of the programs of torture and illegal detention set up by the Cheney-Bush Administration continued long after they were gone. Karen Greenberg wrote in 2023, during the Biden Administration:

Thirty men remain in custody at that infamous American prison at GuantánamoBay. Sixteen of those detainees have finally been cleared for release; they are, that is, no longer subject to criminal charges or considered a potential danger to the United States, and yet they still remain behind bars. Three other prisoners have never either been charged with a crime or cleared for release. Ten more are still facing trial, while one has been convicted and remains in custody there. For the APPG, the release of those sixteen cleared detainees is a paramount goal. (2)

In fairness to the facts, Greenberg notes that the Biden Administration, not the look-forward-not-backward Obama Administration and certainly not Trump 1.0, did at least allow access to a UN special representative to investigate directly the Guantanamo concentration camp:

A notable distinction between this report and those that preceded it is the access the special rapporteur was granted by the Biden administration. It was, in fact, the first visit ever to Guantánamo by an independent UN investigator. Aft er two decades in which administration aft er administration placed severe restrictions on journalists as well as nongovernmental and international organizations when it came to covering that prison, the Biden administration granted [Special Rapporeur] Ní Aoláin remarkably full access “to former and current detention facilities and to detainees, including ‘high value’ and ‘non-high value’ detainees.”

Winning de facto acceptance by Congress, by the Republican Party, and by subsequent administrations for this and other forms of lawlessness and authoritarian conduct were essential elements on the road to today’s scenes of masked ICE goons rounding up Latinos and Trump militarizing law-enforcement in Democratic cities.

This is important for thinking how to restore the rule of law after the Trump Administration. Those administration officials that have committed crimes must be investigated and, when appropriate, prosecuted by a justice system with its independence and professionality restored. The Obama Administration failed at this. The Biden Administration failed at this. The next pro-Constitution and pro-rule-of-law Administration can’t afford to make that same mistake.

Notes:

(1) Two Decades Later, the Enduring Legacy of 9/11. Pew Research Center 09/02/2021. <https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/09/02/two-decades-later-the-enduring-legacy-of-9-11/> (Accessed: 2025-23-08).

(2) Greenberg, Karen (2023): Two Decades After 9/11, the Horrors at Guantánamo Bay Continue. Jacobin 08/01/2023. <https://jacobin.com/2023/08/guantanamo-bay-prisoners-torture-abuses-war-on-terror-fionnuala-ni-aolain-report> (Accessed: 2023-02-08).

Post-Trump priorities: War and the rule of law

Continuing the theme of the last post, restoring the rule of law in the US, it’s important to remember that violations of international law by the US often – even inevitably – spill over into domestic practices. There was some real pushback and reform in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency.

Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) was a well-known liberal historian who had a passion for seeing current politics through liberal Enlightenment values. He was a prominent and outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and the rank criminality of the Nixon Administration. In the introduction to a 1974 book collecting several of his essays, he gives a scathing description of the blundering recklessness which so often characterized US policy up to that point in the Cold War. Much more cutting criticism than we normally see today, especially in legacy media. The period of post-1989 Cold War triumphalism invited people to shift their focus away from what was often the (literally) bloody mess of US policy during those years.

Commager says there of the US role in the Vietnam War, “Rarely before in history had a great nation drifted so mindlessly into catastrophe.” (1)

His 1974 description of US policy in Latin America brings to mind the old saying, the more things change, the more they stay the same:

Just as earlier Presidents intervened in the affairs of Venezuela, Mexico, Nicaragua and the islands of the Caribbean, so their present-day successors intervene in Guatemala, Cuba, Santo Domingo and, through the Central Intelligence Agency, in many other South American nations.

Mexico and Venezuela are still on the Trump 2.0 regime’s hit list. And, of course, the US collectively has never forgiven Cuba for the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Prompted in no small part by the US contempt for international law in dealing with Cuba’s revolutionary government.

And he noted how a nationalistic myth of American goodness and purity provided a convenient cover for actions that were anything but pure:

When, in the last war [he means the Second World War], Germans destroyed villages because they had harbored snipers, we were justly outraged; but any Vietnamese who so much as fires a gun at one of our planes invites the instant destruction of his village by our outraged airmen. We looked with horror on the concentration camps of the last war; but we set up ''refugee" camps in Vietnam which are, for all practical purposes, concentration camps. And we have driven as large a proportion of the Vietnamese people from their homes, destroyed as much of their forests, their crops, their dams, their villages, as did the Germans in the Low Countries or in France in the last war.

Early Cold War obsessions about Communism led to the many domestic legal excesses of what we now remember as the McCarthy period. The “loyalty oaths” that many universities and colleges required back then were about swearing not to be Communist. The Trumpian versions today are about swearing to not criticize genocidal actions by Israel, armed and funded by US support. In international law, other countries are obligated not to support a nation committing genocide.

And he makes the connection between government lawlessness toward its own citizens and residents and the widespread tolerance of barbaric and criminal behavior in foreign policy:

As we have greater power than any other nation, so we should display greater moderation in using it and greater humility in justifying it. We display neither moderation nor humility, but immoderation and that arrogance of power which Senator Fulbright has so eloquently denounced. In the long run, then, the abuse of the executive power cannot be separated from the abuse of national power. If we subvert world order and destroy world peace, we must inevitably subvert and destroy our own political institutions first. This we are now [1974] in the process of doing.

And when it comes to official dishonesty, the Vietnam War and other US adventures in war and subversion were a major stepping-stone to the post-truth era of today, where the Trump cult defines reality as whatever words are coming out of the mouth of the Orange Leader. Commager notes in the book, “Never before in our own history has government employed so many methods for manipulating and distorting the truth as during the past decade, not even during the First and Second World Wars.”

The domestic lawlessness of Trump 2.0 in such things as turning ICE agents into a masked Gestapo that illegally kidnaps, imprisons, and deports people including American citizens is very much connected to that disregard for law we have had for a long time in foreign policy. Someone who can cheerfully defend the US funding the deliberate mass killing and deliberate starvation of Palestinians in Gaza will most likely to be cheering for US concentration camps like Alligator Auschwitz in Florida.

Speaking of concentration camps and foreign policy corrupting the domestic rule of law, we have recently had a dramatic reminder of the famous saying by Gavin Stevens, a character in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1951): “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.”

USA Today’s Bluesky image for An August 23 story: (2)

Notes:

(1) Commager, Henry Steele (1974): The Defeat of America. New York: Simon & Schuster.

(2) Cuevas, Eduardo & Villagran, Lauren (2025): Army base used for WWII Japanese internment will be nation's largest ICE detention center. USA Today 08/23/2025. <https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/08/23/texas-army-base-japanese-internment-ice-detention/85767850007/> (Accessed: 2025-25-08).

Post-Trump priorities: the rule of law

I’m giving attention in a series of individual posts to the ten points that Dan Froomkin (1) has proposed as guidelines for a restoration of democratic governance after Trump leaves power. Whenever that may be.

First point: Restore the rule of law. This includes rebuilding a devastated and defiled Justice Department, prosecuting the rampant law-breaking of the Trump era, and expanding the Supreme Court.

Bill Astore recently wrote about the current situation of authoritarianism and militarism in the US:

All leaders, military and civilian, must remember their oath: loyalty to the Constitution, not to any man. Illegal orders must be resisted. Congress must impeach and remove a president who acts unlawfully. It must also reassert its distinctly lost authority to declare war. And it must stop taking “legal” bribes from the lobbyists/foot soldiers who flood the halls of Congress, peddling influence with campaign “contributions.” (2)

Before going into more nerdy descriptions, this parody song from the British family singing group, The Marsh Family, is an excellent glimpse at what the loss of the rule of law looks like in the US: (3)

This is an explainer by Robert Reich on one of the basic elements of the rule of law, “due process”: (4)

This is a podcast by Ben Meiselas of MeidasTouch about Justice Department career attorneys resigning because they are afraid working in Pam Bondi’s operation will ruin their reputations and/or get them disbarred from practicing law. (There’s an ad in the middle that is easy to fast-forward past.) (5)

A basic thing about “rule of law” is that it is an essential part of democracy. Democracy and the rule of law are overlapping concepts. But we can’t have either of them without the other. (Though insisting on elements of the rule of law for currently non-democratic regimes can be an essential feature of moving toward democratic rule.)

Masked goons with no identification as politic or government officials kidnapping people on the streets or at their homes without warrants and sending them to prison or to a domestic or foreign concentration camp with no due process of law is not part of the rule of law. Trump’s ICE thugs who have been doing just that are a direct threat to the rule of law.

Rule of law is not rule by law. Any dictatorship can have laws that it enforces. Even Hitler’s dictatorship that began in 1933 actually used laws to justify its actions inside Germany until the “Kristallnacht” pogrom in late 1938. Though the courts themselves had been deprived of their independence – and independence of the justice system from arbitrary and/or crassly political, or corrupt motivations - an essential elements of the rule of law.

This is a definition of the general concept from the United Nations:

For the United Nations (UN) system, the rule of law is a principle of governance in which all persons, institutions and entities, public and private, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards. It requires measures to ensure adherence to the principles of supremacy of the law, equality before the law, accountability to the law, fairness in the application of the law, separation of powers, participation in decision-making, legal certainty, avoidance of arbitrariness, and procedural and legal transparency. (6)

The hopelessly respectable Encyclopedia Britannica has its own definition of the concept, authored by Noami Choi. (7) But her description fails to address clearly the essential connection between democracy and the rule of law. That’s partially nondemocratic government also claim that rule of law is the same as rule by law. She alludes here to the distinctly democratic concept of rule of law:

For the majority of modern democratic societies, however, the rule of law’s requirement that both rulers and the ruled be accountable to the law is of unquestionable value. To be sure, in the modern world, it is the liberal tradition that values the rule of law most highly. Liberals who are concerned with ways of protecting (and realizing) liberty in some form and averting threats to it view the rule of law as an overarching source of security. Nonetheless, there is substantial disagreement even among liberals over what exactly counts as a faithful application of the term and, even when that is pinned down, how it is to be accomplished. [my emphasis]

Claire Gardner has a more specific definition of the democratic concept of rule of law:

The Rule of Law is closely linked with the ideals of democracy. A democratic state under the Rule of Law is a state where citizens elect their own leaders, and the government itself is bound by the law, while also helping to ensure that the law is respected among the citizens of the state. Democracy cannot exist without the Rule of Law, especially the rule that dictates who should occupy public office given the results of elections. However, only supporting the Rule of Law during an election season is not enough. Democratic stability depends on a self-enforcing equilibrium. In other words, political officials must respect democracy’s limits on their actions, particularly regarding the rights of citizens. Institutions that are self-perpetuating and do not operate based on individuality of single actors are powerful actors stabilizing that equilibrium. In a stable, self-perpetuating institution all conflicts are solved according to the institutional rules, and therefore, the Rule of Law stabilizes the democratic society. Rule of Law in a democratic institution allows governments to work their will through general legislation, and then to be subject to that legislation themselves. [my emphasis] (8)

The 1950 European Convention on Human Rights gave a clear statement of the mutual dependency of democracy and the rule of law, which also recognizes that rule of law is critical to adequate protection of basic human rights:

Reaffirming their profound belief in those fundamental freedoms which are the foundation of justice and peace in the world and are best maintained on the one hand by an effective political democracy and on the other by a common understanding and observance of the human rights upon which they depend;

Being resolved, as the governments of European countries which are like-minded and have a common heritage of political traditions, ideals, freedom and the rule of law, to take the first steps for the collective enforcement of certain of the rights stated in the Universal Declaration [of Human Rights]. [my emphasis] (9)

Froomkin expands on his rule-of-law point with this short list: “This includes rebuilding a devastated and defiled Justice Department, prosecuting the rampant law-breaking of the Trump era, and expanding the Supreme Court.”

It’s also important that Democrats magnify the points that Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has been stressing for years now, which is the corruption of the Supreme Court including monetary “gifts” from clients who have cases before the Court. People understand that it subverts the justice system to allow judges to take bribes. Pursuing that route would be good and necessary policy, and it would also play well as a political issue.

Notes:

(1) Froomkin, Dan (2025): Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration? Heads Up News 06/30/2025. <https://www.headsupnews.org/p/is-it-time-to-start-planning-a-post> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).

(2) Astore, William (2025): America the FUBAR: An Ailing, Flailing, Failing Empire Lashes Out. TomDispatch 08/05/2025. <https://tomdispatch.com/america-the-fubar/> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).

(3) "Pamela Bondi" - Marsh Family parody of "The One and Only" sung by Chesney Hawkes (by Nik Kershaw). Marsh Family YouTube channel 05/16/2025. <https://youtu.be/yYfWkPekNTI?si=j9AEjMKkSH4JSXvM> (Accessed: 05/15/2025).

(4) What is Due Process? Robert Reich YouTube channel 08/12/2025. <https://youtu.be/metN4EiDtmQ?si=N8PSrY6RDOtHhxyS> (Accessed: 2025-08-08).

(5) Trump IN PANIC as MOST DOJ Lawyers SUDDENLY QUIT. MeidasTouch YouTube channel 080/07/2025. <https://youtu.be/-QUXtxLBQ5E?si=Pfbi8Hv4orqtajzl> (Accessed: 2025-08-08).

(6) What is the Rule of Law. United Nations website n/d. <https://www.un.org/ruleoflaw/what-is-the-rule-of-law/>  (Accessed: 2025-13-08).

See also: New Vision of the Secretary-General for the Rule of Law (2023). United Nations website n/d. <https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/tools-and-resources/secretary-generals-new-vision-rule-law> (Accessed: 2025-13-08).

(7) Choi, Naomi (2025): Choi, Naomi. "rule of law". Encyclopedia Britannica 08/05/2025. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/rule-of-law> (Accessed: 2025-13-08).

(8) Gardner, Claire (2021): Democracy and the Rule of Law. William & Mary Law School (Summer 2021). <https://law.wm.edu/academics/intellectuallife/researchcenters/postconflictjustice/internships/internship-blogs/2021/claire-gardner/democracy-and-the-rule-of-law.php> (Accessed: 2025-13-08).

(9) Quoted in: Tomuschat, Christian (2013): Democracy and the Rule of Law. Oxford Academic 12/16/2013, <https://doi.org/10.1093/law/9780199640133.003.0021>

Post-Trump planning – and why Democrats need to fight for their own side

Dan Froomkin in July came up with ten points that could be used for a post-Trump reconstruction. Or, as he put it in the title of his piece, Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration? (1)

I’m going to take off on those suggestions for separate posts on each.

My concern for the Democrats in 2026 and 2028 is that the need to get away from the rut they’ve been in at least since 1996. Obama’s election in 2008 showed that they could do it. Unfortunately, Obama’s far-too-cautious neoliberal approach to policy and politics didn’t take their politics further.

John Ganz gives us this look at the Democrats’ problem:

Supposedly, the way you make a successful political campaign is that you go out and you ask people what they want, and then you make your message based on that. Except that’s bullshit. It doesn’t work. Politely put, the data-based approach to politics is based on a fallacious understanding of the world. Not so politely put, it’s a racket for political consultants so they can scam hapless hacks and wealthy donors. (2)

In theory, polling had advanced far enough at least by the mid-1990s that it was possible to target voters by issues and the priority they put on issues and use that to compile a majority in the election. But that is not the same as having a mandate for any one of those issues. For a mandate, the candidate has to build a broader narrative to generate a wider loyalty to the candidate’s general political program.

This is part of what George Lakoff has been stressing for years with his emphasis on the need for the Democrats to have better framing of their politics and politicians. In an interview in 2014, Lakoff described the concept with this example:

Oil companies – our wealthiest corporations – are destroying the planet for their short-term profit. Corporations govern your life by putting hidden carcinogens and other poisons in your food, cosmetics, furniture, etc. for their profit, not your health. ... These are facts. In isolation, one-by-one, they are just a laundry list. Isolated facts don’t help. Together they tell a truth: Corporations govern your life for their profit not yours, in all those ways. Name it. Repeat it. We need reform at the deepest level. (3)

Democrats often get caught in a defensive mode. The Republicans always come up with a moral-panic issue with which to smear the Democrats. Recently it has been the supposed “transgender” menace and trash the Democrats for supporting The Menace. They also boiled it down to boys-playing-in-girls’-sports. Since the Republicans show again and again in states like Missouri that they are basically hostile to public education in general, no one who is not a Trump cultist will find it hard to believe that that Republicans care about anything to do with public education.

But instead of sticking it back down the Republicans’ throats and attacking them for lying and fear-mongering and general careless as well as the total disregard for schools and the rights of women and girls, Democrats are all-too-tempted to show their “centrist” respectability by mealy-mouthing about how they have doubts about “girls in women’s sports.” Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, and Elissa Slotkin have been playing that game even in 2025.

Lakoff famously calls this the don’t-think-of-an-elephant-problem. If you tell someone, “Don’t think of an elephant,” it immediately makes them think of an elephant. His point was the Democrats need to avoid reinforcing the Republicans’ partisan framing. This is an important part of Democrats fighting for their own side – which they often seem shockingly unwilling and/or unable to do!

Issues are important. And it’s often remarked that the public tends to agree much more with Democrats on major issues than with Republicans – but that lopsided support is very often not reflected in election results. Because Democrats need to do a far better job of highlighting issues (not just reciting laundry lists of them), frame them within a distinctive Democrats (and preferably progressive!) narrative that defines Democratic identity, and show there are willing to fight for their own side!

John Ganz cites a great example recently provided by Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen on immigration, even though he doesn’t mention how Van Hollen framed the Trump kidnap-and-deport program as bad and un-American when he took a potentially risky trip to El Salvador to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia in the torture gulag in El Salvador to which the Trump-Vance Administration had illegally sent him:

Look at immigration. The numbers supposedly favored Trump so much that it was a mistake to attack him about the manifestly cruel process of deportations under his regime. Polling and punditry conspire to create one of those situations where “it would play into their hands.” On paper, you can see why: A majority of Americans once said they wanted less immigration and even to deport all illegal aliens.

Now, Trump is underwater on immigration. What happened? Well, people saw what actually existing Trumpism looks like, and it’s ugly. It looks like a police state, because it is.

And this brings us to the problem with issue polling. When you ask someone in a survey, "Should we deport illegal immigrants?" they are going to hear the word “illegal” and reason, “Well, yes, they did something wrong, it’s not fair.” On a very abstract level, it’s almost definitionally correct, tautological in its rational soundness: a person who is not supposed to be here should not be.

Then come the actual images of what it looks like to realize that abstract equation, and people go, “Oh, no, this is awful.” Now the public likes immigrants again and wants them to have a path to citizenship rather than repression. (To make a grumpy point for wokeness or political correctness, this is why people wanted to say “undocumented” rather than “illegal,” because it suggests an administrative problem, not broad-based criminality.) [my emphasis in bold; paragraph breaks added]

There has been massive resistance to Trump’s ICE policies and the masked goons who enforce it. But Van Hollen’s brave action early on was a very important moment in that process. He showed he was willing to do something to support one of his constituents in trouble, even though Abrego Garcia was not yet a naturalized citizen who could vote for him. He took an action that put himself at potential physical risk in El Salvador. He was able to confirm for the first time since Abrego Garcia’s arrest that he was actually still alive. And it dramatically illustrated that Trump’s policies were both cruel and illegal. Van Hollen’s actions and the subsequent protests framed the issue for the public in a pro-democracy, pro-rule-of-law manner. And the process shifted the public perception on the immigration issue more generally because Van Hollen, some other Democratic leaders, and grassroots activists fought politically for their own side.

Compare that to this June speech speech Michigan Sen. Slotkin, who Chuck “oh-no-we-can’t-fight-for-our-own-side!” Schumer selected to give a response in March gave to Trump’s pseudo-State-of-the-Union address: (4)

Brian Taylor Cohen and Mehdi Hasan discussed how the Democrats can learn something from Republican practice about keeping their issues and their framing in the public eye. (5)

Tomorrow I’ll start discussing Froomkin’s “restoration” goals individually.

First goal: Restore the rule of law. This includes rebuilding a devastated and defiled Justice Department, prosecuting the rampant law-breaking of the Trump era, and expanding the Supreme Court.

Notes:

(1) Froomkin, Dan (2025): Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration? Heads Up News 06/30/2025. <https://www.headsupnews.org/p/is-it-time-to-start-planning-a-post> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).

(2) Ganz, John (2025): Against Polling. Unpopular Front 08/06/2025. <https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/against-polling> (Accessed: 2025-06-08.

(3) Lakoff, George (2025): George Lakoff: In Politics, Progressives Need to Frame Their Values. Georg Lakoff website 11/24/2014. <https://george-lakoff.com/2014/11/29/george-lakoff-in-politics-progressives-need-to-frame-their-values/> (Accessed : 2025-07-08).

(4) Slotkin delivers speech on her Economic War Plan. Sen. Elissa Slotkin YouTube channel 06/25/2025. <https://youtu.be/pbFiKN48UxI?si=SSSPDteVTQYiMs8I> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).

(5) GLOVES OFF: Mehdi Hasan deals MUST-SEE BLOW to Trump. Brian Taylor Cohen YouTube channel 08/07/2025. <https://youtu.be/2K5h2dSDUts?si=rcrf-zUR3LEizk1L> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).