It’s a well-known truism: “A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.”

If the power of the state goes after someone, this saying emphasizes, it is sure to get an indictment. After all, a grand jury hears just one side: Only the prosecutor presents an argument and calls witnesses during the proceeding.

(I have long wondered: Why a “ham sandwich?” Didn’t N.Y. Court of Appeals Judge Sol Wachtler, who reportedly came up with this line in 1985, ever eat tuna fish? Or maybe pastrami? Would either be harder to indict?)

Yet, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, under Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, seems to have lost the plot when it comes to working a grand jury. No matter how strongly Justice asserts it has a solid case, today’s grand juries often don’t agree.

In myriad filings, it appears there’s no there there. (Yet another saying — this one about Oakland, courtesy of Gertrude Stein.) Even as Blanche contorts the department to serve as Trump’s strong arm of retribution against those the president feels wronged him, it hasn’t worked out that way.

Consider what happened this week in the Justice Dept.’s case against Cassidy Hutchinson. This young woman emerged as a powerful witness during the bipartisan congressional committee’s investigation into the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Her testimony proved particularly damning against Trump. On Oct. 27, grand jurors rejected Justice’s accusations that she had done something wrong in the process.

The New York Times explains:

The rejection of the indictment — known in legal circles as a “no true bill” — was the latest extraordinary setback in Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging campaign to go after his political opponents. The Justice Department has repeatedly failed to build criminal indictments against the president’s rivals. …

It was once rare for grand jurors to rebuff prosecutors and turn down a request for an indictment, given that the Justice Department has traditionally sought criminal charges only in cases it expects to win. But such failures have become more common for the department under Mr. Trump, who has pushed prosecutors to seek indictments even in cases in which evidence is lacking.

Politico’s astute legal affairs columnist, Ankush Khardori, offers a savvy explanation for why this is happening. The key problem is not that Blanche has distended the role of the Justice Department in his efforts to service Trump – though this is true.

It’s that Blanche is incompetent.

Khardori, a former DOJ federal prosecutor, presents his case in a terrific July 31 New York Times opinion piece: “There Are So Many Reasons to Reject Todd Blanche. Here’s Another One.” It’s yet another terrible Times opinion hed (journaleze for headline) since it neglects to point out the piece’s most crucial point: Blanche is “embarrassingly bad at lawyering.”

Yes, as a lawyer — or is the proper term “attorney?,” as Trump’s five-day-wonder of a press secretary, Katie Zacharia, might ponder — Blanche appears to be a nincompoop.

Khardori carefully lays out his analysis:

The quality of the department’s work has sharply deteriorated under his leadership, in high-profile cases and in routine, low-level matters. The result has been a crisis of confidence that is draining the Justice Department’s legitimacy with the courts and the public ….

During Mr. Blanche’s tenure as deputy to Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and as acting attorney general following her departure from office in April, federal judges across the country have in effect accused department attorneys of squandering the trust and credibility their predecessors had built up over decades. Justice Department lawyers have had to correct factual misrepresentations they made to judges, apologize for failing to meet deadlines and retract their own legal positions. Last week, a judge forced federal prosecutors to withdraw subpoenas issued to four New York Times journalists after finding that they had made serious errors.

A lawyer’s official role is to present accurate and true information to the court. This is, however, no longer the case where Justice Department lawyers are concerned. It might be the reason so many judges and state Supreme Court justices now regularly express irritation and even disdain when presented with the Trump Justice Department’s legal arguments.

The same day as the department’s failed attempts to indict Hutchinson, for example, a federal judge sharply criticized other Justice arguments — this time involving a Washington golf course that Trump talks frequently about overhauling. Without warning, over a holiday weekend, the administration had chopped down more than 400 trees. An incisive Politico reported piece, “Judge bars Trump admin from further tree-felling, closures, at golf course,” provides details:

Judge Ana Reyes, in a lengthy, cutting opinion, found that the president’s public statements were at odds with the administration’s assertions in court that the felling of more than 400 trees earlier this month was routine maintenance and not preparation for the president’s grand vision for East Potomac Golf Links.

“Rarely, if ever, has the United States Department of Justice urged a federal court not to believe the sitting President,” she wrote. “And yet, here we are.” …

“The Court earlier stated, ‘I am not the Lorax. I do not speak for the trees,’” Reyes wrote to close out her opinion. “The Court still does not speak for the trees. It speaks only for the rule of law.”

Even as Justice under Blanche is ardently obeying Trump’s orders in striving to gain control of the impending mid-term elections, the arguments it has been presenting in states across the nation are riddled with errors and misstatements.

Trump actually said that one pre-emptive suit about Alaska’s Senate election results was filed at his insistence. This one was well before the explosive NYTimes Oct. 28 investigation into Democratic strategists’ early efforts to subvert that campaign.

Since judges are likely to throw out many of DOJ’s campaign-related filings, critics insist, the department is disgorging every possible obstacle to create questions about election integrity. Trump himself has long been regarded as the master of the nuisance law suit. He delights in legal delays through seemingly endless series of frivolous legal arguments. The president might see no problem with “his” Justice Department filing multiple sloppy suits — for Trump it’s always been quantity, not quality.

Consider this embarrassingly lame excuse from the Justice Department for faulty reasoning when it sought to force a NY Times freelancer to identify sources. The judge swiftly shut it down:

… [I]n federal court in Manhattan, a judge sharply criticized prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office for apparently failing to follow the law and the department’s internal rules for conducting leak investigations.

Prosecutors denied intentionally flouting the law or regulations, but admitted making mistakes, which they attributed to not knowing the relevant case law before they demanded the reporters’ data. The judge in that case, Arun Subramanian, has ordered the Justice Department to turn over internal emails leading up to those actions.

Clearly, judges are finding it increasingly difficult to accept the department’s word on just about anything. It has lost a key asset: trustworthiness.

Yet, even amid this destruction of a storied government institution, Khardori manages to see some hope in the offing — post-Blanche and, specifically, post-Trump. Scores, even hundreds of former Justice Department lawyers, Khardori writes, remain ready to return to the department they fled or were fired from. They want to be part of the rebuild.

He details the coming struggle to re-establish the department’s lost integrity in his Mar. 23 Politico column, “Prepping Has Begun for the Post-Trump DOJ.” Here’s a quote:

“We’re in the middle of a full-scale assault on the Justice Department,” said Stacey Young, a former Justice Department litigator and the founder of Justice Connection, a group that has become a critical organizing and messaging hub for career lawyers who have left the department under Trump or who are otherwise worried about the direction of the DOJ. “Restoring what we’ve lost and ensuring the department is more durable than it was will be essential, and it will require far more time and imagination than it’s taken to tear it down.”

Khardori, in recent television and cable interviews, clearly thinks this is possible.

We’ll see how it all plays out.

Dept. of Dirty Tricks

We are down to the wire in the mid-term elections.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had long trafficked in a Texas brand of bare-knuckled politics, was a maestro at being more-than-prepared for whatever sort of dirty tricks emerged.

In every campaign, LBJ kept a special cache of money in reserve for the last, desperate moments. He called it his “pig-fucking money.”

It was vital to have this, LBJ insisted, to be prepared when your rival was throwing everything possible against the wall -- in hopes something particularly nasty might stick. So, when the nominee you are confronting declares: “My opponent fucks pigs,” you use that reserve cash to pay for an all-points-bulletin response: “I don’t fuck pigs.”

Usually, you don’t repeat a slur when refuting it. But in this case, no rules apply — which very much seems to be the case these days. Why else would that horrific ad against Democrat Amy Acton have appeared in the Ohio governor’s race?

There are some people who tell this story and assert Johnson was a maestro at doing just this.

But LBJ orchestrated passage of both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. So, I prefer my version.

I have long felt my journalistic timing is exquisite. Some might describe this as the opposite of good luck — but not where journalism is concerned.

When I was founding editor of the pioneering webpaper, The Washington Independent, I regularly asserted: When the shit hits the fan, journalists are as happy as a pig in shit.

I still believe this is true.

I was in Los Angeles, running The Los Angeles Times Sunday “Opinion” section, during the 1992 civic uprising after the Rodney King decision and then the 1994 O.J. Simpson trial. I was in Washington, running “Opinion” for Politico, during the rise of the Republican Tea Party and the brutal fight over Obamacare. I was Reuters Executive Editor of Opinion during the emergence of Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Oh, I was also in New York City, as a relatively new Articles Editor on The New York Times “Week in Review” just in time for Sept. 11.

These are the sort of news events your entire career seemed a preparation for. I am still proud of the pieces I commissioned for 9-11, because they helped set a key part of the public debate for the unsettling time that followed.

Linda Greenhouse, the New York Times reporter who had spent decades meticulously covering the U.S. Supreme Court for the paper, quickly grasped what the impending legal battles were likely to be about. Even as the toxic dust first settled over New York City, she foresaw that a fierce face-off between national security and civil liberties loomed.

In her Sept. 16 piece, “War Zone: What Price Liberty?; The Clamor Of a Free People,” Greenhouse deftly laid out the deeply disturbing problems that lay ahead:

As the country struggles for its footing in the aftermath of terror, the process of resetting the balance will also be a process of national self-definition. If the idea takes root that civil liberties should not be permitted to stand in the way of a war on terrorism, at what point do security measures start to corrode the very society they are designed to protect?

Her piece essentially predicted the encroachment on liberty to come and the fraying of our democratic fabric:

… the balance between security and liberty, throughout American history a reliable barometer of the public’s mood and collective self-confidence, will now be recalibrated to reflect both new realities and new perceptions. …. Times like these — times of deep insecurity, grief and anger — in fact have often evoked the worst of our national instincts.

Sadly, she got it right. Prescient as usual!

On the subject of the Twin Towers, the architectural historian Michael J. Lewis, who had written for me often in Los Angeles, nimbly depicted just what the World Trade Center meant to New York — and the nation — in: “Before & After; In a Changing Skyline, A Sudden, Glaring Void.”

He set the stage memorably:

The World Trade Center towers never inspired the loyalty and affection of New York’s great skyscrapers of the past. A spectacular site but a lackluster performance, …ran the consensus. …

But in imagination and memory they now occupy a site greater than the prow of Manhattan. With their cheeky brashness, standing pugnaciously apart from the gregarious huddle of skyscrapers at Midtown, they were the apotheosis of American capitalism. In them, all the elements of American skyscraper tradition converged: colossal ambition and ego, the eager embrace of the newest technology, the inspired real estate gambit and the frank recognition that a skyscraper is not so much a work of art as a work of advertising.

Lewis then effortlessly captured what the Twin Towers had come to mean:

It is not only the site in space that made the World Trade Center towers a monument, but their site in time. They stood near the historical epicenter of American capitalism, just outside the wall that contained the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. This was the one great American city dating from the 17th century not founded as a haven from religious persecution; it was based on profit rather than salvation. …

But the site had more to it than nostalgia value. Once enterprising New Yorkers built the Erie Canal, establishing a link to the Great Lakes and Mississippi River, the port was linked to the interior. The wealth of the continent was collected, as if in a giant funnel, which channeled its goods along the Hudson River. For the first time there was a national market, and a national economy. That the World Trade Center arose at … the very spout of the funnel — is symbolism of the highest order.

Lewis noted that the terrorists who sought to take down the towers appreciated their powerful symbolism — even if many New Yorkers at the time did not.

A Day of Vivid Blue Skies — Then Darkness

Like many people, particularly those in New York, 9/11 still stands out vividly to me. I remember I was getting dressed, listening to NPR, as I often did in the morning then, when I heard about the first plane.

My phone rang. It was my pal and longtime contributor Bill Schneider, who was then CNN’s pollster and political analyst. He sounded shocked as he talked about the plane hitting the World Trade Center. I remember I asked him if it was like the little plane in the 1933 version of King Kong, which hit the Empire State Building amid the fight against Kong, and then dangled off it. “We hear it’s big,” Schneider said. “It’s in the building.”

As we talked, I heard the NPR announcer say that another plane had hit the World Trade Center. I interrupted Schneider to tell him what NPR just reported. He had been chatting with me, so he had looked away from the CNN monitors.

“My God,” Schneider said, “Who would do this?” My thoughts had already gone to Al Qaeda’s virtually simultaneous August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in the capitols of both Kenya and Tanzania, hundreds of miles apart — a terrorist attack that required intricate and sophisticated planning and timing. “Arabs,” I answered, before I hung up the phone. I had no idea how right I was.

I quickly put on my shoes and rushed to the Union Square subway station. The nearly cloudless sky was an amazing shade of crisp cerulean blue. What’s known in L.A. as “earthquake weather.”

Off in the distance, however, I could see two dark gray plumes of smoke rising as I ran down the subway steps.

I realize I’ve been AWOL in recent weeks. I am in the process of selling my apartment near Gramercy Park in New York and moving far uptown to Hudson Heights. It feels like a pastiche of New York City, almost like “The Land That Time Forgot.” Some days I feel like I’ve somehow walked into a roadshow production of “Music Man” — with an extremely diverse cast.

As President Donald Trump nominated his stunningly unqualified Cabinet choices, critics predicted the nation was headed for serious trouble. The nominees’ chief attribute appeared to be devout loyalty to Trump rather than any professional credentials or even related experience. The resulting Senate confirmation hearings presented an early taste of just how low senators were willing go in kowtowing to the man in the Oval Office.

They ultimately confirmed a rogues’ gallery of Cabinet secretaries: From conspiracy-focused anti-vaxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr at Health and Human Services to the second-string Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth, whose boxcar of baggage included significant drinking problems and well-documented misogyny, at Defense. The new attorney general, Pam Bondi, one of Trump’s defense lawyers during his first impeachment trial, had regularly provided helpful services to the Mar-a-Lago owner when she served as Florida’s attorney general.

So it was big surprise when one of the most toxic trouble-makers in Trump’s second administration held the anodyne title of Federal Housing Finance Agency director.

Bill Pulte, a real-estate nepo baby appointed head of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, managed to weaponize obscure mortgage paperwork, often decades old, in pursuit of Trump’s enemies. Pulte seems to have spent most of his time at the job examining their mortgage documents — rifling through ancillary paperwork, often for second homes or housing secured for relatives.

Public officials Trump had long targeted for revenge — including New York State Atty. Gen. Letitia James, who convicted Trump on fraud charges, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who played a key role in the Trump’s two impeachment trials — suddenly found themselves confronting charges of mortgage fraud.

Though none of these unproven allegations led to a conviction, Trump looks to be pleased as punch with this unexpected avenue of vengeance against those he asserted had persecuted him. After all, just defending against these sorts of charges eats up a great deal of time and money. Trump himself built a reputation as the maestro of the nuisance suit, entangling unpaid contractors or rivals in endless, niggling legal bouts.

Now, Trump has rewarded Pulte by naming him Director of National Intelligence. Sitting atop all America’s 18 spy organizations, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, Acting-Director Pulte has endless reams of data and documents to rifle through.

As Puck’s Julia Ioffe reports in her discerning piece, “Trump’s New Rules for Radicals,” Pulte will now also have exponentially greater power to hound and punish Trump’s enemies.

Consider, the State Department spent last week striving, Ioffee perceptively lays out, to convince diplomats that “antifa is the new Al Qaeda.”

The White House is seeking to shift the nation’s anti-terrorism focus away from the networks of domestic right-wing paramilitary groups and white nationalist extremists to what the administration asserts is the far greater danger coming from the left. The fact that there is no actual “antifa” organization, that it has no official leadership or membership rolls, has not deterred the president.

The State Dept. leadership organized a large symposium at the newly renamed Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace about the “Rise of Far-Left Political Terrorism” as a “clear and present danger.” Ioffe sees this as a key component of an administration plan to greatly expand the reach and power of the National Intelligence Director:

The Institute of Peace event was part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to reorient the counterterrorism machinery of the U.S. government … toward fighting left-wing extremists … — a threat, they believe, … ignored by previous presidents. It’s all nonsense, said a former Biden senior counterterrorism official: “We acknowledged violent far-left organizations, but the reality is they are minuscule compared to the far right.”

But elements within the Trump administration see something more sinister. “There are people in the C.T. structure who genuinely believe there’s this giant conspiracy funded by Soros and that no one’s been paying attention for ideological reasons because it’s the deep state,” said one recently retired counterterrorism official.

…[T]he administration … added antifa as a top counterterrorism concern to the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, a classified document that tells the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies where to direct their focus. But critics fear the move is less about national security than weaponizing the intelligence community against Trump’s ideological opponents. …

[T]he State Department has designated several small and obscure left-wing groups as foreign terrorist organizations and instructed U.S. embassies to gather information on any connections they might have to U.S. citizens back home. Americans enjoy constitutional protections for freedom of speech and association, but providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization is, in fact, a crime. And many counterterrorism and civil liberties experts worry this is the Trump administration’s one neat trick to sidestep those legal protections, and to target American citizens it disagrees with. …

That this entire argument is based on a complete chimera — a manufactured fantasy about left-wing terrorists that has no basis in fact — does not appear to be slowing down the administration.

Meanwhile, the actual network of battle-hardened right-wing terrorists gets some breathing room to regroup.

This includes of sizeable portion of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the session and hunt down public officials before they could certify the 2020 presidential election results.

These are the very people Trump seems so intent on rewarding with gobs of money from his proposed $1,776-billion slush fund. As we have now heard in several recent interviews, Trump is still holding firm to this shady scheme — amid mounting public outrage and even resistance from some Republican officials. Though, as the midterm elections approach, we’ll just how many actually stand up to him.

The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last, with his usual gimlet eye, astutely explains why Trump can’t quit this idea. Last lays out why this slush fund remains vital to Trump in his recent post “Trump’s Slush Fund Is a Multitool. And we’ve all been missing its most important functions.”:

[Trump] should encourage anyone and everyone to apply for compensation. And then he should wait. Because open applications give him leverage over people. … If Trump starts paying people right away, the fund gets drawn down and people start to realize that maybe they won’t get anything from it.

But if the nut is largely intact, everyone in MAGA world can dream. Trump can pass out tens of billions of dollars worth of promises — Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you; you just have to wait a little bit longer — with everyone thinking that, since he’s going to pay up at the very end, there’s enough cash for them to get theirs.

Second-term presidents become politically weak when members of their party realize that their incentives are diverging from the POTUS. Maybe the POTUS is becoming unpopular, so candidates need to distance themselves from him. Maybe party elites are thinking about the future and how to take over once the old man is gone.

The slush fund is a tool to fix that problem. It’s the promise of a tangible reward for Republicans to stay on his side. Be nice to him. Do what he asks. … And maybe there’s a pot of gold for you at the end of the rainbow.

Trump is always about power and leverage. It is the dynamic he knows and understands best. This is one key reason why that $1,776-billion fund is so hard for him to give up on.

So, expect it to keep coming back!

Why Unions Matter

I’ve been watching an amazing and too-little-known 1963 Marcello Mastroianni movie called “The Organizer.” Mastroianni pays the title character, a poor, mild-mannered high-school professor traveling across late 19^th century Italy to help rally Turin’s factory workers, who are striking against harsh 14-hour workdays and dangerous conditions. It’s a vital reminder how crucial unions were in the battle against the then-standard brutal work conditions and how hard-fought even the most minor improvement was.

It is terrific!

Mastroianni is brilliant — playing deftly against type. The screenplay was rightly nominated for an Oscar and the black-and-white photography is beyond gorgeous.

It’s streaming on Criterion right now. You can rent it, though, from the New York Public Library. Maybe your local library can get it for you as well.

It’s definitely worth the effort!

First Lady Melania Trump has a byline on a curious Mother’s Day opinion piece for The Washington Post, “Mothers are America’s strength.” Motherhood, Trump asserts, is the key component of the nation:

“The love between mother and child has helped shape America’s identity since the nation’s founding 250 years ago. … America’s strength is closely tied to the role mothers play in shaping character, education and moral order within families. … The household is our nation’s smallest institution, yet it is the foundation of all others, including democracy itself.

The first lady concedes that, for many women, having a job outside the home might be critical. Yet, she insists, family must always remain the priority. As she notes: America can restore the honor of motherhood after years in which feminism often placed career above family, with consequences to our nation.

Even as Trump’s piece appears, however, The Devil Wears Prada 2 has reigned at the box office for two weekends — and is sending the opposite message. It’s all about how women can feel fulfilled and rewarded when successful at their jobs — just as Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) and Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) are throughout the movie. These talented journalists, as New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg astutely points out, do everything they can to keep doing the work they thrive on and love.

I am still puzzled by Trump’s decision to whip up a full-scale media announcement — complete with her introductory catwalk strut — to declare that she did not meet her husband through Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sexual predator, and she had never been aboard the financier’s jet or visited his private island.

When she decided to do this, the Epstein story had actually faded from the top of the news because there was so much else in motion. The first lady put it back up there. Her timing raised more questions than answers. Beginning with: Did her husband know what she planned?

Yet, one thing that the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown did in her powerful 2018 investigative series, “Perversion of Justice: Jeffrey Epstein” — which she finally won a much-deserved special Pulitzer Prize for this month! — is she ensured his victims’ voices were fully heard. Brown made these survivors and the many injustices they confronted real for millions of readers. The young women have since proved eloquent on many news shows and speaking before congressional Democrats.

Amplifying the words of sexual assault survivors is now a vital component of the public debate. It seemed key in the stunning New York Times investigation into United Farm Workers co-founder Caesar Chavez’s grooming and sexual abuse of young girls. A saddening and maddening story.

The hed [journalese for “headline”] immediately establishes the story’s complications, “Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years” — for Chavez is indeed a civil liberties legend. He was considered vital to the entire United Farm Workers movement — one likely reason these terrible stories were hidden from the public for decades.

The thing is, though, I keep waiting for other stories like this to emerge. For abuse of young children happens far more often than people would like to think.

Sigmund Freud originally theorized this was true, as Lynn Stuart Parramore, a smart and talented writer, wrote for me at NBC News THINK.

Parramore’s remarkable piece, “HBO’s ‘Allen v. Farrow’ suggests Woody Allen took America for a ride on the Gaslight Express,” laid out Freud’s shape-shifting decision:

Freud developed a highly controversial view of childhood sexuality that can provide cover to abusive adults. In a now widely criticized shift, the Viennese doctor abandoned his early revelation of how often kids are sexually abused and offered instead a theory about how they wish to have sex with their parents — a.k.a. the Oedipus complex.

In the mid-1890s, Freud presented papers on cases of patients, mostly female, with hysterical and neurotic symptoms, finding one thing in common: damaging childhood sexual experiences, often at the hands of fathers. …

Later, however, Freud flipped the script. These patients were troubled, he decided, not by real experiences, but by fantasies — forbidden desires for their own parents. Some speculate that Freud changed his position because as creepy as the Oedipus complex is, it was still better than imagining so many upper-middle-class adults preying on their own children.

Freud wrote his colleague Wilhelm Fliess of his discomfort with the notion that there could be “such widespread perversions against children.” Freud was particularly nervous about the charge against fathers — including his own, whom he described as a pervert who abused Freud’s siblings.

That final detail is a killer.

President Donald Trump is so last century. And it looks like he wants to drag the entire country back there with him.

The president is pressing archaic military tactics abroad and antiquated views of society at home. It’s a major shock to the American system.

Trump’s battle tactics against Iran, for example, seem obsolete. Ukrainian drones are regularly cited as the future of warfare. Front-line troops give technicians direct input so that drones’ capabilities are reworked in real time, ensuring Ukrainian operations are ever more nimble — and cheaper.

Across the Middle East, the U.S. military is launching $4-million Patriot missiles to take down Iran’s $35,000 drones. This war is costing Washington roughly $1-billion a day, according to reported estimates. Trump is also talking about creating behemoth Trump-class battleships. Muscle-bound is the opposite of agile.

Meanwhile, Iran presents a far more onerous challenge than Afghanistan or Iraq.

As a fledgling reporter, longtime New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd covered President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to address the 1979-1980 Iranian hostage crisis — when the relatively small Persian nation fiercely gripped Washington in its talons, wringing out concessions while thwarting the administration’s every turn. As Dowd notes in her Apr. 25 NYT opinion piece, “Trump, Iran’s Newest Hostage,”

I had a front-row seat to the Iranians’ jujitsu tactics, using 52 Americans in our embassy to gain leverage over Carter’s presidency, reputation and re-election.

She turns a gimlet eye to the current situation:

Now that Iran has flexed power in the strait, Trump has to bargain with it to get back to where things were before. … Trump, who grew overconfident after his adventurism in Venezuela, is being driven to distraction.

Trump has now sent more than 50,000 young Americans to the Middle East on this “excursion,” as he labels it. He keeps declaring that the United States has won and Tehran is desperate for peace.

The thing is, the Iranians don’t see it that way. They are like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Conceding defeat is not part of their playbook.

Former Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III lays out an updated rule book of war in his Apr. 6 NYTimes opinion piece, “Now We Know What a Modern War Looks Like”

The Iran war is a real-time case study in the changing character of modern warfare. It shows that the lessons of Ukraine were not an anomaly. Making the institutional changes to learn these lessons will be hard — but as the Iran war has already demonstrated, doing so is not optional.

For the Iranian battle dynamic is indeed askew. Tehran can wreak havoc across the region by launching thousands of inexpensive drones at targets selected with the help of Russian intelligence. The response, Washington’s Patriot missiles, are too much bang for too much buck.

As Austin explains:

… the cost exchange remains way out of whack: The advanced interceptors we use to fend off these drones cost vastly more than the weapons they defeat, and take far longer to produce.

… We need a truly layered defense, one that begins with disrupting drone supply chains and factories, and then uses electronic warfare to stymie drones from afar, deploys interceptor drones and other solutions to defeat drones at a lower cost and reserves pricey advanced missiles for the threats that truly demand them. …

[T]he Iran war has quickly demonstrated that the economic dimension of modern conflict cannot be treated as secondary.

Ukraine is now serving as a military testing ground — much like the Spanish Civil War was for the Nazis and the Communists in the late 1930s.

Moscow has been pelting Ukrainian cities with Iran’s Shahed drones for three years. Ukrainians, in turn, have developed extraordinary drone technology by building-out off-the-shelf devices.

The Ukrainians advanced warfare skills are in demand. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy just toured Middle East capitals, setting up lucrative military consulting agreements. European leaders, as The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote in his new column, are also eager to learn from the battle-hardened Ukrainians.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues fighting on myriad other fronts: Paired with these archaic military tactics abroad, Trump is pressing antediluvian social attitudes at home. For him, making America great again means restoring old white men to power. (More on the U.S. Supremes’ significant help in a future column.)

The president contends women and people of color have only advanced because of affirmative action programs. He declares that D.E.I. efforts for “diversity, equity and inclusion” are destructive to the nation and appears intent on restoring a long-outdated patriarchy.

Joanne Lipman, an influential journalist who ran USA Today and The Wall Street Journal “Weekend Journal,” wrote a powerful New York Times opinion piece about this, “I’ve Covered Women in the Workplace for 15 Years. Something Alarming Is Happening.”

She opens it with a bang:

“Believe women” was the defining message of the #MeToo movement. Today, there’s a new one: Erase women.

The Trump administration’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion has rolled back decades of progress for women. …

… Trump’s allies have questioned whether women deserve a place in the work force at all. … Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is purging the military of senior female officers after complaining that the armed forces had become “effeminate.”

Lipman’s argument pivots off a big NYTimes take-out, “A Clash Over a Promotion Puts Hegseth at Odds With His Generals,” about the Defense secretary’s continuing efforts to block advancement of women and people of color, as well as those deemed “disloyal.”

I keep thinking about Trump’s supremely unqualified Cabinet. Among a motley crew that includes Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the first people he chose to get rid of are all women. Hmmmm.

Whenever I hear people carp about DEI, I think back to my time running The Los Angeles Times Sunday “Opinion” section. Los Angeles has long been a majority-minority city, with Latinos the largest demographic. Including Latino contributors was the appropriate way to reflect the city as a whole — as well as building the paper’s multi-dimensional readership. We featured many women writers for the same reason. This was a conscious decision — which I still feel is the best way to ensure this happens.

One of my favorite contributors was Richard Rodriguez, a lovely writer and a subtle, thoughtful essayist. I once called him (this was in the “before times,” when opinion editors regularly talked to contributors) about doing a piece focusing on tobacco and cigarette restrictions. He asked me why I wanted him to do it and I was stunned – and appalled — when he said this was the first time an editor had asked him to write about something non-Latino related.

I realized that I had often asked him to write about Latino issues — we always needed them addressed and analyzed in “Opinion.” Yet, how could such a terrific and stylish essayist be limited in such a way?

He ended up writing a swell piece — as expected: “A Dance with Death: The Fallacy of the Smoking Ban Is that It’s a Futile Attempt to Avoid the Inevitable.” Here’s a sample:

Earlier in this century, some Americans tried to keep other Americans from alcohol. Within the fierce Puritan moralism of the temperance movement, one, nonetheless, sensed a generous notion of commonwealth -- fear that alcohol was bad for the entire society. Today’s civic morality is different to the degree that it seems justified by self-concern: “I don’t care what some jerk does to his own lungs. Just don’t expect me to breathe his secondhand smoke.”

He led the section that week. As usual.

News keeps happening at such a furious pace that it leaves you breathless.

One of President Donald Trump’s key skill sets is manufacturing swirling, transgressive dramas, yet his capricious war against Iran still manages to stun. The administration has now proffered so many different reasons for initiating the attack — including an argument (which Trump first suggested and now denies) that Israel’s intent on striking Iran forced Washington’s hand. The ultimate tail wagging the dog story — as opposed to a Wag the Dog story. (We’ll get to Jeffrey Epstein later.)

Amid a slew of pieces now written about this, Politico’s Alex Burns delivers a humdinger: “Trump Buries the 20th Century.” Burns displays a tough-minded realpolitik as he lays out facets of our current situation with a gimlet eye:

He is burying the 20th Century: Its villains, its alliances, its political norms and ceasefires. And he is unleashing a future of uncertainty and disruption with no new equilibrium in sight.

Across both his terms as president, and in so many different areas of policy and governance and culture, his signal achievements have been acts of demolition.

Burns ticks down the list – and each point is a jaw-dropper. Here are a few: Trump’s tariffs and trade threats have shattered 50 years of global commercial agreements and diplomatic relations; his America First policies are shoving NATO, the most powerful military alliance in history, toward the ash heap; his focusing the Justice Department on retribution against his enemies combined with zeal in pursuing personal enrichment and corporate favoritism have wiped out post-Watergate legal and ethical presidential norms.

In each case, too, Trump is tearing down old structures and systems without a vision for replacing them. …

It is not likely that before he leaves office we will see a stable global trade order … or a post-NATO order of international security that reflects America’s overdue destiny as a Pacific nation.

Burns aims to close on a positive note — saying this offers both a challenge and an opportunity to the president who follows Trump. But the demolition he describes looks devastating to our nation.

Reading this, sadly, brings to mind W.B. Yeats masterwork “The Second Coming.” For it too often seems that Trump has again unleashed chaos upon the world — much as Yeats experienced in the brutal wake of World War I, which had immolated so much of the old order:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

It could be that Trump has proved so effective at this because he simply has no regard for what came before. As a sui generis leader, history appears to have no lessons and no meaning for him. Burns writes:

Trump’s opponents have often criticized him for his vacant sense of history …. This philistinism and historical ignorance was at the heart of Joe Biden’s case against Trump. Biden deplored Trump as an insult to the American political tradition and promised to make Washington work, repair broken norms and turn over power to the next generation. His slow-moving, self-admiring, politically dysfunctional administration achieved none of these things.

I sure don’t agree with Burns’s description of Biden’s presidency. His infrastructure bill remains a long-awaited and powerful achievement, as were the lower drug prices and the first new gun regulation laws in decades — to name only a few big successes. But the shadow of Trumpism loomed over his presidency. The fact that Trump never stood trial for his Jan. 6 insurrection is a clear case of justice delayed being justice denied.

David Sanger, a stalwart and long-experienced New York Times reporter, has an informative news analysis about how Trump’s decision to attack Iran was made, “Trump Follows His Gut. His National Security Advisers Try to Keep Up.”

… Trump’s determination to cut out the bureaucracy, to reduce his advisers to a tiny, leakproof few and to trust instinct over intelligence briefings applied as he made the gravest decision any commander in chief can make. …

when debates take place, the number of players often shrinks to a tiny group. In the Iran case, Mr. Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, C.I.A. director John Ratcliffe, the four-star head of Central Command, Brad Cooper, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine. …

Not much leaks from those sessions…

As I read this, I thought of a story President Ronald Reagan’s former Director of Communications, David Gergen, told me in the last century. I was at The Los Angeles Times Sunday “Opinion” section, when I heard Gergen was leaving the White House. So, I quickly called and asked him to write for me. He was soon contributing a piece every month, and we had many conversations in the process.

One tale about the Reagan White House that I vividly remember was they were growing ever more concerned, almost paranoid, about myriad leaks revealing their decision-making process. The administration kept tightening and tightening the circle of officials allowed to attend critical meetings — from nine to four, for example. Finally, when three people together seemed unreliable, he said, they got down to a group of two — this felt safest. At that point, I had never even heard of a group of two!

Meanwhile, Trump’s war of choice in Iran regularly invites chattering class speculation as to just why the president decided to start it now. Josh Marshall, the founder and Grand Pooh-Bah of Talking Points Memo, offers an intriguing explanation in his piece, “Let’s Face Facts: This Isn’t Going Well (Iran War Edition)”:

I think we’re in this war because the Venezuela operation went pretty well for Trump, certainly in the short-run. That was fun. So why not do it again in Iran? And he’s escalating abroad in general because escalation, vast expression of power and violence, amount to a kind of psychological compensation for loss of power and popularity at home. It’s a kind of presidential self-care making use of the prerogative powers of the American presidency.

This sort of thing is not uncommon, since the attack on Iran as well as Trump’s Venezuela adventure and the brutal ICE and Border Agent attacks in Minnesota are all regularly cited as efforts to shift public attention from the Epstein files.

Jeffrey Epstein: Insidious Connector

But the Epstein news seems unstoppable. The newest horror story involves a woman who talks in her 2019 FBI interview about being raped repeatedly by Epstein back in the early 1980s, when she was age 13. Then, she ties her abuse to Trump — a first for the Justice Department’s entire files release.

She told the FBI that Epstein introduced her to the future president, “who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit. In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.”

That the FBI ultimately conducted four interviews with this woman implies they took her seriously. Why else keep going back? The conversation ultimately stopped because she cut it off — not because the bureau did.

Yet this very specific Trump story, as well as roughly 50 pages of notes from three of the FBI’s four interviews, did not originally appear in the masses of released files. On Thursday night, however, the documents were suddenly posted online. A note said they had been mistakenly classified as duplicates. Hmmmm.

In fact, we only knew about her story before this because an intrepid journalist, Roger Sollenberger, who formerly worked at The Daily Beast (where he did crackerjack reporting), and now writes a Substack, “The Memo,” figured out it was missing by working back from one index.

It was also reported that, though the Justice Department didn’t at first let the public see this, Ghislaine Maxwell already had. It was included in material released to her before her trial.

The reams of released documents also reveal far more details about how Epstein managed to sidle into so many people’s lives.

He functioned as an almost insidious connector. I have long felt many people are bored in their daily lives, circumscribed within their social silos. (That’s one of the psychic rewards of journalism — you can reach out to anyone you want and ask them virtually anything you want.) In Epstein’s emails, he continually entices people by offering something far beyond their usual sphere. His proposals present an intriguing frisson, essentially “coolness” by association. Big Business people are offered dinner with celebrities, intellectuals are offered dinner with the outrageously wealthy (and possible donors), moviemakers sit down with esteemed scholars, financial savants meet famed models and all bask in the beauty of many young women — we now know how very young. Everyone is getting something out of it — except, of course, the girls who are being abused.

This facility to connect people — to cross-pollinate between social groups — can be an amazing asset. Decades ago, the erudite New Yorker writer Malcom Gladwell wrote a remarkable piece, “Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg.” It has stayed with me over the years. (And not just because I know her son, Jacob.) Weisberg, as profiled by Gladwell, genuinely likes and befriends many, many different sorts of people — as opposed to collecting them, the way Epstein did.

Gladwell describes this Chicago woman as an extraordinary example of an essential component of our society:

in a very down-to-earth, day-to-day way, they make the world work. They spread ideas and information. They connect varied and isolated parts of society. … Lois is far from being the most important or the most powerful person in Chicago. But if you connect all the dots that constitute the vast apparatus of government and influence and interest groups in the city of Chicago you’ll end up coming back to Lois again and again. Lois is a connector.

Epstein functions along these same lines — if in a calculating and manipulative fashion.

Even after Epstein was convicted in Florida and served a jail sentence, his allure drew people in. That is why one story in particular stands out. In 2016, Epstein proposed funding a documentary about the much-lauded talk-show host, Dick Cavett. But when PBS documentary producers looked into this, they turned Epstein down. After doing a background check, the public television producers decided they didn’t want him involved.

Why could they see this when so many accomplished and storied people couldn’t? Is it because they have a public responsibility and other people only have self-interest?

We’ll see how it all works out…

The randomness of ICE and Border Patrol violence in Minnesota is one of the agencies’ most effective tactics.

The video of Alex Pretti’s murder presents stunning proof. He had been using his cell phone to film protestors scuffling with ICE and Border Patrol agents. Then, swiftly, what begins with Pretti helping a woman whom federal agents had pushed down and targeted with pepper spray, escalates to the agents pinning him to the ground and then firing 10 shots. Agents had already found and appropriated a gun — which the young ICU nurse for Veteran’s Affairs had a legal permit to carry — before they shot their first bullets at him. There was a similar randomness to the Renee Good murder: Soon after Good assures one ICE agent, “I’m not mad at you,” she ends up with a bullet in her brain.

The New York Times columnist, M. Gesson, who grew up in Russia, thoroughly understands the terror whipped up by random violence. This is clear in Gesson’s brilliant Jan. 18 opinion piece, “State Terror Has Arrived”:

… randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive. Even in brutally repressive regimes, including those of the Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe, one knew where the boundaries of acceptable behavior lay.

Open protest would get one arrested; kitchen conversation would not. … editing underground journals would get one arrested; reading these banned works and quietly passing them on to friends probably would not. A regime based on terror, on the other hand, deploys violence precisely to reinforce the message that anyone can be subjected to it.

When we think of the terror regimes of the past, it is tempting to superimpose a logical narrative on them, as though totalitarian leaders had an extermination to-do list and worked their way through it methodically. This, I think, is how most people understand Martin Niemöller’s classic poem “First They Came.” In reality, though, the people living under those regimes never knew which group of people would be designated an enemy of the state next.

It is this gimlet-eyed understanding of state terror that made Gesson’s gripping New Yorker pieces about Russian President Vladimir Putin such critical reading in 2023 and 2024. Her recent post carries the same power:

… In 1934, Adolf Hitler had an estimated 150 to 200 members of the SA’s own leadership arrested and its top generals executed in the ultimate demonstration that no one was immune from the state’s deadly violence. Stalin regularly carried out similar purges. Terror itself was not the end goal of those regimes, but nothing that followed would have been possible without it.

The toolbox isn’t particularly varied. President Trump is using all the instruments: the reported quotas for ICE arrests; the paramilitary force made up of thugs drunk on their own brutality; the spectacle of random violence, particularly in city streets; the postmortem vilification of the victims. It’s only natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we are seeing. There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror.

Though federal authorities have vehemently resisted and locked out any state efforts to investigate these murders, two leading legal scholars, Barry Friedman and Stephen I. Vladeck, lay out how state and local authorities could hold the Trump administration accountable. As they explain in their Jan. 26 New York Times opinion piece, “This May Be the Only Path to Accountability for the Minneapolis Shootings”:

… state and local prosecutors can prosecute federal officials for violating state criminal laws. Prosecutors should be gathering and securing evidence and seriously considering filing charges — sooner rather than later.

The legal experts admit that these actions may prove difficult, but they press local authorities to make every effort:

Not every prosecution will succeed, and all will face obstacles that are built into our legal system. But critically, bringing these state and local prosecutions could produce deterrent effects that are so desperately needed now. …

If federal officers understood that they could and might well be held liable for outrageous conduct, they might think twice before engaging in it. The ultimate goal is bringing to justice those who have engaged in blatantly unlawful and unconstitutional conduct. But what is needed immediately — urgently — is deterring such conduct from happening going forward. …

We are arguing only for compliance with the Constitution.

Friedman and Vladeck make a point of emphasizing that Trump does not have the power to pardon people convicted by a state.

Yet, the Trump administration must grasp that the seeming randomness of its violence is the most effective way of spreading mass terror.

Years ago, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott wrote an astute and erudite opinion piece about this topic for me when I was an editor on The NY Times “Week in Review.”

Scott’s piece, “True Horror: When Movie Violence Is Random,” was pegged on the slew of Oscar nominations for director Roman Polanski’s remarkable 2002 film The Pianist, set during the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II. Polanski lived through this harrowing oppression starting at age six. He was orphaned and struggled to survive, alone in the countryside, from age 10 on. Polanski saw and experienced the sheer randomness of the Nazi terror — German soldiers, for example, once used him for target practice.

In the film itself, as Scott details in his moving piece, the director grapples with how to present such all-encompassing terror:

Polanski’s subject, the Holocaust, still seems to defy all representation. Its horror is so total as to exist beyond the reach of imagination, only to be diminished by attempts to bring it to life. So Polanski chooses instead to suggest the scope of Nazi cruelty by zeroing in on its particular effects.

The violence in the film is not just particular, but random. Workers in the Warsaw ghetto are selected for execution for no clear reason; an old man in a wheelchair is thrown from his apartment window.

The survival of the protagonist comes to seem equally random, and the pianist himself, played by Adrien Brody in the year’s single best screen performance, is not just a being whose physical existence is in peril, but an individual consciousness terrified of being snuffed out. The audience’s dread at witnessing something horrible combines with a more elemental fear, of its own nonexistence. And this interior state of feeling, more than any spectacle of cruelty, brings an unimaginable experience home.

The Pianist won three Oscars that year, including Best Actor for Adrien Brody. Roughly 15 years before the #MeToo movement brought home the serious problem of sexual abuse and rape culture in Hollywood, Polanski won Best Director for his masterful production — though he could not attend the ceremony since he had fled the country in 1978 after raping a 13-year-old girl.

The Trump administration now seems to be seeking to ease the ever-mounting public protests, which are spreading across the nation, by changing out its top representative in Minneapolis. Trump even had what he described as “very good phone calls” with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.

The Trump administration has not, however, called off its current criminal investigations into both men.

We’ll see how this all plays out…

On Using Profanity

Some have commented on the profanity commonly used by many protestors today. This is, they assert, unlike protests of years past.

Hmmmm

One esteemed New York Times reporter, who was a good friend of mine, years ago told me a story about covering anti-war protests during the 1960s and early 1970s. Amid one big protest, a flock of nuns appeared, marching along as a group.

On cue, they started chanting: Agnew, Fuck You!

This was something, he told me, that he could not report accurately. That sort of profanity was then not considered news “Fit To Print.”

I somehow doubt it made it onto broadcast news either.

News keeps happening at a ferocious pace. If you thought last year was dizzying, so far, this year has been a head-spinning swirl. From ICE-induced havoc on the streets of Minneapolis, Minn., to Europeans rushing NATO troops to defend their ally, Greenland, against their other “ally,” the United States. President Donald Trump seems intent on transforming America from the most steadfast of allies to the most perfidious.

But let’s take one step back to President Donald Trump’s Jan. 3 military incursion into Venezuela and seizure of its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia.

In the run-up to this surprise kidnapping, Trump’s issues with Maduro were continually shape-shifting. Curiouser and curiouser, just about every week Trump cited a new reason to act: Maduro was a big-time drug trafficker, shipping boatloads of cocaine; or he was supplying masses of lethal fentanyl; or he was an international criminal flouting laws around the globe; or he was spreading terror through gangs he controlled, or he was destroying his nation and betraying his people. Trump was even triggered by the way Maduro seemed to mock the U.S. president’s dance steps.

Now we know it was always about the oil. (Consider how Trump has taken to citing himself, saying he always insisted that we were wrong not to have seized the Iraq oil fields when we invaded early in this century.)

Here is how The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins laid out Trump’s capricious reasoning in his terrific new profile of the secretary of state, “How Marco Rubio Went from ‘Little Marco’ to Trump’s Foreign-Policy Enabler”:

At a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, the morning after the attack … Trump boasted of “an assault like people have not seen since World War II,” and said, “We’re a respected country again . . . .” But his account of the motivation for the attack shifted. For years, he and his supporters have maintained, with little public evidence, that Maduro was a narco-trafficker on a global scale, bringing vast amounts of cocaine into the U.S. From the podium, Trump insisted that Maduro had “waged a ceaseless campaign of violence, terror, and subversion against the United States,” adding that he was responsible for hundreds of thousands of American deaths. Though Trump spoke of America’s interest in safeguarding “the good of the Venezuelan people,” he mentioned the country’s oil reserves — the largest in the world — no fewer than 20 times. The infrastructure needed fixing, he said: “… We’re going to be replacing it, and we’re going to take a lot of money out so that we can take care of the country. Yeah.”

As is so often the case with this president, he has devised a network where he wields powerful control. Trump now regularly declares that he plans to “run” Venezuela, keeping the remnants of the Maduro regime as long as they do as he wishes. The money from oil sales is being sent to special offshore accounts in Qatar, sequestered from possible U.S. legal challenges and evading full transparency. He casually dismissed the legally elected Venezuelan opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, as lacking stature – though he was more than ready to accept her 2025 Nobel Peace Prize when she offered it last week.

Now, we are also reading that Rubio, a longtime Cuba hawk whose parents fled the island’s Communist dictatorship and whose roots are in Miami’s Cuban exile community, aims to use this Venezuelan action to destabilize the Havana regime. For him, it seems, this was always about Cuba.

The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last noted this almost as an aside in his Jan. 15 opinion column:

I’m almost impressed by Rubio’s long game. He figured out that he could hurt the Cuban regime by promising Trump Venezuelan oil money, if only the president would use the U.S. military to swap out one dictator for another.

Filkins’s crackerjack reporting fills in crucial details:

When Rubio first spoke with Trump about serving as Secretary of State, he said that he wanted to be the main driver of policy in Central and South America. …

For Rubio, who grew up among Cuban immigrants in Florida, hostility toward leftist governments in Latin America was a kind of birthright. As recently as 2023, he had warned of “the horrors occurring not far from our shores.” People who know him say that this was not just rhetoric. “He really believed that Venezuela and Argentina and Brazil and Colombia should be great countries, and that they should be staunchly anti-Communist,” the former U.S. official said. “They should be the engines of a reinvigorated South America.”

Rubio has a special loathing for Nicolás Maduro, whose regime devastated Venezuela’s economy and sent millions of citizens streaming out of the country. Maduro was aided substantially by Cuban intelligence officers, who helped root out threats to his rule. As part of the alliance, Venezuela sent Cuba about 50,000 barrels of oil a day, propping up an otherwise desperate economy. In Florida, the expat community has long dreamed that if Maduro fell his allies in Havana would follow. “If Rubio took down Maduro and the regime in Cuba, he’d be a hero in Miami forever,” a former Florida politician who knows Rubio told me. A successful intervention could also build support in his base for another run at the White House. …

“The people around Trump decided that the only way to get the American public’s attention was to press all the right buttons,” Phil Gunson, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, in Caracas, told me. “Trump is not interested in human rights and democracy. If you can present a plausible case that Maduro is a narco-terrorist invading the U.S., which is total bullshit, then you can move forward. Rubio used that to mount his military campaign.”

This key backstory to Washington’s lawless take-down of a foreign leader reveals a wide-ranging U.S. geopolitical strategy — and reminded me of Mark Danner’s remarkable 2002 New York Times opinion piece, “The Struggles of Democracy and Empire.” It was written in the wake of 9/11, just before U.S. troops moved against Iraq. In that op-ed, Danner also laid out a transformative U.S. agenda — this one aimed at remaking the entire Middle East.

With the Trump administration’s wide array of reasons for attacking the Venezuelan leader, I’d actually been thinking of Danner’s piece ever since the news broke about Maduro’s seizure. Not just because Danner is a terrific writer and an astute and subtle thinker. The reason the piece made such a lasting impression is that Danner’s reporting was eye-opening.

At the time, I was an editor at The New York Times “Week in Review” and reading, what I thought, was everything possible about the U.S. plans to invade Iraq. Yet, Danner’s op-ed was the first piece I read diagramming this unified field theory about why the United States was so intent on invading Iraq.

It was not, as I had been reading, because of President George W. Bush’s Daddy issues as he attempted to achieve what his father hadn’t in vanquishing Iraq. Or his strong desire to follow Vice President Dick Cheney’s lead.

Instead, Danner revealed, the Iraq invasion was about something far more expansive. He sets the stage with great care at the top, quoting from Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’s celebrated 1821 speech to Congress. (Though Adams later had an embattled presidency, his tenure as secretary of state was much lauded and included crafting the Monroe Doctrine thesis for his boss, President James Monroe.)

Danner writes:

“That America, despite its great power, ‘goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy’’ has been a cherished truism of our foreign policy, central to how Americans look at themselves and at their role in the world.”

Then, Danner laid out the Bush administration’s jaw-dropping international strategy:

Behind the notion that an American intervention will make of Iraq ‘’the first Arab democracy,’‘ as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz put it, lies a project of great ambition. It envisions a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq — secular, middle-class, urbanized, rich with oil -- that will replace the autocracy of Saudi Arabia as the key American ally in the Persian Gulf, allowing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the kingdom. The presence of a victorious American Army in Iraq would then serve as a powerful boost to moderate elements in neighboring Iran, hastening that critical country’s evolution away from the mullahs and toward a more moderate course. Such an evolution in Tehran would lead to a withdrawal of Iranian support for Hezbollah and other radical groups, thereby isolating Syria and reducing pressure on Israel. This undercutting of radicals on Israel’s northern borders and within the West Bank and Gaza would … lead eventually to a favorable solution of the Arab-Israeli problem.

This is a vision of great sweep and imagination: comprehensive, prophetic, evangelical. In its ambitions it is wholly foreign to the modesty of containment, the ideology of a status-quo power that lay at the heart of American strategy for half a century. It means to remake the world, to offer to a political threat a political answer. …

For America, the great risk of this new crusade is that the political will might be lacking to carry it out — that … the occupation will grow unpopular and that even those in the administration whose vision is not so ambitious will want to cut and run, leaving ruin once more in America’s wake. …”

Danner was clearly prescient in his 2002 piece.

We’ll see how this new escapade plays out…

Republican women leaders increasingly see their party’s overarching patriarchal attitude for what it is: endemic sexism — if not outright misogyny.

This phenomena is now being talked about much like Claude Rains, as Capt. Louis Renault, announcing he is “shocked!, shocked!” that gambling is going on at Rick’s Café Américain in the 1942 movie classic Casablanca. Renault pronounces this just before he is handed his nightly winnings from the gaming tables.

New York Times Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg does not mince words in her Dec. 9 piece, “Republican Women Suddenly Realize They’re Surrounded by Misogynists.” She details the current political landscape:

Not long ago, most Republicans at least pretended to accept liberal premises about human equality …. Today, however, Republicans are much less defensive about being the party of chest-beating patriarchy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has purged women from the highest ranks of the military. [House Speaker Mike] Johnson has attributed school shootings to the “amoral society” wrought by “radical feminism” and the sexual revolution and has said Americans should strive to live by “18th-century values.” Vice President JD Vance is famously contemptuous of women without children.

The lower levels of the administration are littered with defiant chauvinists. Paul Ingrassia, 0whom Trump recently made deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration, … reportedly intervened during a federal investigation on behalf of the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate — who is his former client and has been accused of sex trafficking — … and he called opposition to women’s suffrage “very based,” a term of high praise on the right.

The GOP has long desired that American women accept and re-assume their “traditional” role — leaving the workplace to return to the home. This dovetails neatly with the party’s decades-long effort to overturn Roe v Wade, the Supremes’ 1973 ruling that established national abortion rights and ensured women’s economic freedom.

For, as the cultural economist Lynn Stuart Parramore, who has written for me often over the years, explained in her smart 2019 NBC News THINK opinion piece, “Abortion restrictions cost all Americans, not just women. (And we mean that literally.)”:

Releasing women from the perpetual cycle of pregnancy and childbirth is one of the great achievements of the 20th century. All society gained when women were freed to pursue their education and then bring their valuable skills to the workplace. With medical advances like the birth control pill, approved by the Federal Drug Admin. in 1960, and legal abortion, American women were able to participate fully in society for the first time in history.

Indeed, women denied abortion rights fall behind economically, Parramore shows, and never catch up:

… women who are denied abortions — often known as “turnaways” by researchers — suffer more economic instability and poorer physical health compared to women who were able to get abortions. A five-year longitudinal study, for example, found that the women denied abortions who gave birth had increased rates of poverty six months after denial, compared to those able to have the procedure. The turnaways’ hardship was long-lasting: They were more likely to be living in poverty four years later. …

Researchers have found that years down the road, turnaways are more likely to be living in homes lacking sufficient money to cover food, housing and transportation. Their previous children tend to do worse in achieving key developmental milestones, such as language expression. “Diminished resources,” note the researchers, “may lead to slowed development” in existing children.

But not just women — the entire economy suffers. Parramore underlined this earlier that year in a NBC News THINK piece, “America’s middle class is deteriorating. The death of Roe will make it worse”:

The end of Roe v. Wade will only exacerbate instability — not just for women, but for the economies that rely on them. … Policies that inhibit women’s labor participation, International Monetary Fund research has shown, hamper innovation and productivity in the whole economy. …

The economy cannot thrive without women. “The income gains middle-class households have made over the past 45 years are almost entirely attributable to women,” notes the World Economic Forum

The NYT’s Goldberg builds her op-ed column on Annie Karni’s robust Dec. 3 reported piece for the newspaper, “Republican Anger Erupts at Johnson as Party Frets About Future, which focuses sharply on the House speaker.

Some of them said privately that the speaker had failed to listen to them or engage in direct conversations on major political and policy issues, suggesting that doing so was a cultural challenge for Johnson — an evangelical Christian who has often voiced firm views about the distinct roles men and women should play in society. In a recent podcast interview, for instance, he said women were not able to compartmentalize their thoughts, and that the member whom he would trust most to cook him Thanksgiving dinner was Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan.

This last point clearly rankled Republican Rep. Nancy Mace, who notes in her Dec. 8 NYTimes opinion piece, What’s the Point of Congress?”:

Women [in Congress] will never be taken seriously until leadership decides to take us seriously, and I’m no longer holding my breath. Since 2013, the Republican conference chair position has gone to a woman. It’s the token slot, the designated leadership role for the top woman in the conference, while the real power lies in other offices.

I’m sure Lisa McClain, the current chair of the House Republican Conference, is a wonderful cook. I’d wager she’s an even better legislator. But we’ll never know, because that’s not the box she’s been assigned.

Strong Washington Post reporting also lays out the GOP leadership’s sexist biases. As Kadia Goba and Liz Goodwin write in their Oct. 14 article, “Marjorie Taylor Greene, tearing into her own party, says GOP men in Congress are ‘weak’”:

Greene’s sharpest attacks also reflect some disillusionment with how she and other conservative women in Congress have been treated in recent months. She said she sees a pattern of unfair treatment in which competent and tough women such as herself and Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) have been punished or ignored while “weak” Republican men are rewarded. …

Greene said, “There’s a lot of weak Republican men and they’re more afraid of strong Republican women. So they always try to marginalize the strong Republican women that actually want to do something….”

In the House, only one Republican woman chairs a committee…. In contrast, five women are the top Democrats on committees.

Goldberg closes her column describing the women who can succeed in Trump’s administration:

There are still plenty of opportunities in the MAGA movement for women who embody Trump’s preferred style of hyper-femininity, espouse traditional gender roles or both. Indeed, the president’s obsession with aesthetics can open doors for women who might otherwise never have careers in politics. Many Republicans like having beautiful women around, and they appreciate being able to put a feminine face on their culture war crusades. But as some women in the party are realizing, there’s a big difference between being useful and being respected.

The high price of being “useful,” now appears to be dawning on Republican women. By supporting policies that allow men to wield power over a woman’s choices, they have forfeited control over their own bodies. Instead, they are serving as token females in a party that regularly undermines and undervalues modern women.

A reality check might prove difficult, even soul-crushing.

We’ll see how this all plays out…

For all President Donald Trump’s preternatural understanding of modern social media, much of his persona reflects the last century — specifically the late 1970s and 1980s. He thrived amid the louche, pungent seediness that permeated the New York City of that era. After all, Trump first reached heights as a real-estate developer as his hometown was falling apart around him.

Trump came into his own during those chaotic and desperate times. How else could he have created his origin myth of a self-made, successful real-estate mogul when basic reporting would have punched gaping holes in this?

Many of the president’s attitudes date from that era. Today, Trump continues bopping to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” (1979) or Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Broadway musical Phantom of the Opera (1988). These songs, along with Les Misérables (1985 and at Trump’s Kennedy Center in June and July 2025), top his go-to playlist.

As we have seen, Trump also can’t let go of the slights he experienced then — or the ideas that resonated. For him, they are never outdated.

It turns out Trump’s energy model dates from the 1970s and ’80s, as Noah Shachtman reveals in his smart New York Times Opinion piece, “The Real Reason Trump Is Fawning Over Saudi Arabia’s Ruler.” (Yet another of the paper’s banal heds — journalese for headline — weighing down an intriguing article.)

Though the news peg is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to Washington, this astute foreign-policy writer uses it to help explain Trump’s overarching energy policy. Shachtman lays out a savvy “unified field theory” — a writing trope I have long been a sucker for:

Trump’s political instincts were formed in the 1970s, when Saudi Arabia and the rest of the OPEC cartel cut production and brought the world economy to its knees. For decades afterward, he expressed a mixture of admiration and resentment of the kingdom’s resource wealth. “Saudi Arabia is a money machine,” he told Larry King in 1987. … Four years later, when the future president was in financial trouble, he sold his yacht to Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia.

Over time, Trump called for America to amass its own fossil fuel arsenal. “Take the Oil,” a chapter of his 2011 book “Time to Get Tough,” argues that the United States should seize fossil fuel assets from Iraq, all while increasing production at home. …

Plenty of U.S. presidents have talked about freeing America from its dependence on foreign oil and keeping foreign petrostates from messing with our economy. That’s what “drill, baby, drill” was all about. This is something different. Now America is the planet’s leading producer of oil — and natural gas, too. And instead of trying to separate from the Persian Gulf petrostates, Mr. Trump is reshaping America to look more like them: top-down, iron-fisted, resource-rich and more than willing to flash those resources as weapons.

Like the leaders of oil-rich Persian Gulf kingdoms, Trump demands total deference. He openly uses his position to enrich America’s ruling clan — his family — with one billion-dollar deal after another. His Justice Department has all but abandoned the fight against corruption — unless it serves the president’s purposes. He’s authorized billions of dollars for America’s internal security services. He regards critical news coverage of him as “really illegal” and political opponents as terrorists. …

Trump is also ordering the government to take an ownership stake in key companies, a classic strongman tactic…

Trump’s designs on energy involve far more than rehabilitating and wooing MBS, as Shachtman makes clear. Consider, candidate Trump’s promised oil and gas executives in 2024 that he would ease regulations and cancel renewable energy programs in exchange for sizeable campaign contributions.

This fossil fuel extraction energy policy is not the only 1980s throwback that engages Trump.

As recently as last year, for example, Trump again asserted the guilt of the “Central Park Five,” the young Black and Latino teenagers wrongly accused and convicted of attacking and raping a young white female jogger in 1989. The five exonerated men — one of whom is now a New York City Council member — are suing him for defamation. Trump has been unsuccessful in his appeals to have the case thrown out.

Like so much that shaped him a century ago, Trump seems unable to let this go. After the brutal attack, Trump paid for a full-page ad in The New York Times and other major New York newspapers demanding the return of the death penalty for those responsible. (Maybe the fact that he likely paid a great deal for these ads has something to do with his retention here.) In 2002, the actual rapist, in prison for other serious crimes, confessed. With that, and new DNA evidence, the five men were released and their convictions vacated. For those many wasted years, New York City had to pay them a $41-million settlement.

Yet, Trump continues to insist the five men are guilty. During the 2024 presidential debates, Trump said they had pled guilty and had even killed someone. Both untrue.

There is one thing from the last century, however, that Trump would be thrilled to forget about: his long friendship with the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. No matter what the president has tried to shift the public’s attention, it won’t disappear.

For one thing, there are just too many photographs and videos of the two men palling around at parties, dating back to the last century — at least to 1987. Trump is also on record praising Epstein. The real estate developer told New York magazine in 2002, for example, that the financier was “terrific,” noting he favored women “on the younger side.”

The continuing fierce battle over releasing the Epstein files is even partly due to Trump’s own actions: He vowed to release them all when in the Oval Office.

The thing is, Trump had long fed his MAGA base’s desire to prove there exists a vast elite network of child sex traffickers — largely made up of Democrats and the Deep State. Remember PizzaGate? Like so many conspiracy theories, it was kept alive on the internet. Elon Musk even helped nurture it.

Then, once the GOP gained control of the White House and Congress, it again exploded into reality. The bipartisan House effort to push through a discharge petition for all the Epstein files proved implacable. Only when Trump realized he was about to lose the battle bigly, did he run to the head of this parade — saying Republicans should support it.

The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire recounts these myriad twists and turns in his incisive reported piece, “Epstein Returns at the Worst Time for Trump”:

Trump’s own efforts to manage the story have only fed it. His account of why he and Epstein had a falling-out two decades ago has shifted multiple times. His aides have advised him to stop saying that he has the right to pardon Epstein’s former partner Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking and related offenses. (Maxwell was transferred to a cushier prison in Texas over the summer after an unusual one-on-one meeting with Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer.)

The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait offers an armchair psychiatrist approach in “Trump’s Toddler Response to the Epstein Saga.” He suggests Trump, like many young children, might have “oppositional defiant disorder” — and just dislike being told what to do.

Trump can still reportedly continue blocking the release by demanding his attorney general open new investigations into Democrats mentioned in the files. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi swiftly did as ordered. Despite that fact that she had said months ago that there was nothing to see here.

We’ll see how it all plays out…

Meanwhile, I am now reading the book I wrote about, The Radical Fund, by John Fabian Witt. It is an amazing tome, jam-packed with vital information. So worth the read!

A big plus it that it offers a positive antidote for these dire times: America has confronted serious problems like this before, Witt argues, and look, we got through it.

I am inhaling it!

Maybe that’s also why I enjoyed The Seat of Our Pants, a new musical version of Thorton Wilder’s swell 1942 play, The Skin of Our Teeth, now premiering at The Public Theater in New York City. After all, if the Antrobus family of New Jersey can make it through the Ice Age plus dinosaurs (Act 1), The Flood (Act 2) and brutal, all-consuming war (Act 3) — what we are facing right now should be a cinch.

Why can’t Democrats just take the win?

The Democratic Party pulled off what amounts to a blow-out on Election Day — achieving stunning victories across the nation: In Blue States (New York City’s mayoral race and California’s redistricting referendum), Swing States (Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court justice retention) and Red States (Georgia’s statewide policy offices).

Yet, the news, post- and pre-election, has been awash with tales of a Democratic civil war — the classic “Dems in Disarray” hed (journalize for “headline). Though arguments about woes of the “Democratic” brand get some attention, the ferocious battle royale between Democratic centrists and the progressive left remains the primary focus. Consider the hed atop The New York Times front page today: “How the Elections Intensified the Fight Over the Democratic Party.”

Josh Marshall, founder and Grand Pooh-Bah of Talking Points Memo, for one, declares he has had more than enough of this in his post, “A Few Day-After-the-Election Thoughts”:

A number of morning-after reviews I’ve seen say that the Democrats had had a great night but still hadn’t addressed their “civil war” — the battle over whether to run “moderates” or “progressives.” Is it a future of [Abigail] Spanbergers or [Zohran] Mamdanis?

That doesn’t seem quite right to me. They have a pretty good model: find candidates suited to their constituencies and focus on cost-of-living issues and opposition to Donald Trump’s autocracy. Full stop. It’s not more complicated than that. That’s your opposition message. To the extent there are big operative questions, they turn on how to use political power to battle encroaching autocracy. At least in the near term that’s separate from the hot-button policy questions that ordinarily divide centrists, liberals and progressive Democrats. … [T]hat simple program outlined above is more than adequate now and for the next year.

The week of the election, New York magazine devoted essentially its entire issue to its cover story “The Fight for the Future of the Democratic Party.” The pieces are smart, by talented writers and presented as an astute package: “Abundance Bros vs Bernie Bros” and “The Olds Who Won’t Quit” are two components.

Reading it, however, you would have had no inkling of the remarkable wins in the offing.

Even after the Democratic wins, many political analysts saw only looming problems. As Atlantic Assistant Editor Marc Novicoff wrote in “Democratic Momentum Could Be a Mirage”:

In the Trump era, Democrats have routinely dominated low-turnout elections. … Getting the highly engaged to vote blue has never been the problem. Democrats’ weakness manifests in presidential elections, in which more people vote …. Persuading an ever more engaged slice of the electorate to vote for you by an ever-higher margin is better than nothing, but it does very little to help rebuild a party at the national level….

Since Trump was first elected, the Democratic base has gotten older, whiter, richer, more female, and more highly educated. For decades, those have been the voters that most consistently head to the polls. Early data do suggest that a small but meaningful portion of Democratic voters on Tuesday were Trump voters in 2024. That’s an encouraging sign for Democrats if true. But it is also consistent with the possibility that the party has increased its lead only with highly engaged voters, without having fixed its irregular-voter problem.

The thing is, however, that the voters who turned out for Democrats on Tuesday were not primarily “older, whiter, richer.” Bill Schneider, the savvy former CNN political analyst who wrote for me regularly at The Los Angeles Times Sunday “Opinion” section as well as at Politico and Reuters, dissected Tuesday’s turnout in his new Substack post, “Trump Trounced”:

Just half of New York City voters were white. … Mamdani got his margin from minority voters (56 percent for Mamdani) and from young voters (voters under 45 years old were 70 percent for Mamdani, those 45 and older voted 51 to 40 percent for Andrew Cuomo). … The Nov. 4 voters looked like a new New York – young, heavily non-white, mostly born outside the city and only 16 percent Jewish. …

The biggest danger to President Donald Trump is the prospect of a coalition between two sources of discontent: working-class voters angry over lack of “affordability” and educated upper-middle-class voters angry over threats to democracy (the “No Kings” marchers). Put those two groups together and you have the prospect of a fierce anti-Trump backlash. Just like we saw on Nov. 4.

Ron Brownstein, who displays his deep understanding of the U.S. political landscape with every article, also sees the possible emergence of a robust coalition in his Bloomberg “Opinion” column, “Election Day Sent an Unmistakable Warning to Republicans”:

With resounding wins in Tuesday’s Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, Democrats substantially repaired the most important cracks that President Donald Trump made in their coalition in the 2024 election. That gives Democrats reason for optimism — though not yet certainty — that they are on track for a solid recovery in the 2026 midterm election.

Democrats Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia regained significant ground among two groups where Trump made noteworthy advances last year: working-class people of color and young people, according to both media exit polls and county-by-county election results. The two Democrats also improved among college-educated voters, essentially matching the party’s 2024 showing with White voters and improving among non-White voters with a four-year degree…

Even the most optimistic Democrats don’t contend that Tuesday’s results prove the party has solved its problems with those voting blocs. … But the Democratic wins do signal that exuberant Republican predictions after 2024 — that Trump had engineered a durable realignment, particularly among working-class Hispanic, Black and Asian American voters — were premature. … Moreover, the same economic frustrations that boosted Trump among those groups last year are buffeting him, and other Republicans, now.

TPM’s Josh Marshall has been lamenting for a while now that some news reporting sounds too close to GOP talking points. Here’s how he reworked that idea after the election in his post, “The Insider Politics Sheets Are Scurrying for New Conventional Wisdom” :

This morning’s Punchbowl newsletter runs with the headline “Political winds whip the MAGA movement.” The movement is rocked by an argument about anti-semitism, good or bad? Trump’s tariffs, his central policy, are on the rocks. Trump’s out of sync with the congressional Republicans on the shutdown. Republicans are losing the shutdown. He’s unpopular. Their policies are unpopular. Costs continue to rise. It all sounds pretty bad, and the Punchbowl editors add in the bad election night too. What’s notable though is how much of this was the case before Wednesday morning, before which they were generally saying that things were going great for Trump and the GOP.

That overstates it a bit. But not much. It’s no surprise that political observers’ sense of what’s happening, the big picture, would shift after an election night in which Democrats are widely perceived having exceeded expectations. What’s notable is that this new sense of the big picture is explained by things that were already the case before Election Day!

Dumping the Filibuster

We know President Donald Trump has a twisted relationship with dogs – Phil Rucker, while on The Washington Post, wrote a memorable 2018 piece, “‘Like a dog’: Trump has a long history of using canine insults to dehumanize enemies.” Yet, on certain topics, Trump himself acts like a terrier with a bone: He just can’t let it go.

You might think he’s forgotten all about something and moved on. But certain things — his fascination with military parades, for example, or his thirst for revenge against former FBI Director James Comey and New York State Atty. Gen. Letitia James, or his desire for Greenland — just keep coming back. If the Democrats get lucky, Trump’s call to abolish the Senate filibuster, which he has now cited several times, will be added to this list.

Political scientists acknowledge that the filibuster is a key contributor to Senate dysfunction. As former Rep. Chris Shays wrote in The Hill, “If you believe in democracy, we must get rid of the Senate filibuster.”

Some have talked about tinkering with it. Tim Miller, a Bulwark standout, wrote back in 2022, Bring Back the Talking Filibuster. Miller understands the problems this parliamentary tactic creates: we now have more filibusters in a year than they did in the entire 1800s. And Congress is stuck in a permanent L.A.-rush-hour-level gridlock.

The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait lays out what disappearing the filibuster would mean in his new piece, “How Trump Wants to Help Democrats.” He presents an astute argument:

Support for the filibuster used to be thoroughly bipartisan. In recent years, Democrats have mostly abandoned it, even as it retains its Republican backing. The reason for this is simple: Republicans have fewer ambitions for government, and most of the things they want the Senate to do — confirm judges and appointees; cut taxes and spending — can already be done with 51 votes.

Of course, the filibuster is not completely useless for Democrats in the minority. They are using it right now to shut down the government in order to force Republicans to extend health-insurance subsidies. But over the long run, the filibuster does more to impair Democrats, the party of expansive government, than Republicans.

The reason Trump has turned so vociferously against the filibuster is that he doesn’t care about the long run. Right now, with his party in control of the Senate but lacking 60 votes, the filibuster does nothing to help him.

So, two questions: 1) Will Trump keep up his anti-filibuster trash talk? and 2) If he does, will Republicans give in to him on this — as they have on so much else?

We’ll see how it all plays out…

I’ve always been a sucker for a salient historical analogy. When done right, they just can’t be beat. Incisive historical parallels offer fresh perspectives on current events. They sharpen readers’ focus while offering a deeper understanding of what’s happening.

That’s one reason I am smitten by Yale Prof. John Fabian Witt’s recent New York Times opinion piece, “How to Save the American Experiment.” Hidden behind this sadly anodyne hed (journalese for “headline”) is a brisk, smart analysis that presents an original take on how to deal with the cascading dangers now threatening U.S. democracy and civil rights under President Donald Trump. We made it through something akin to this, Witt’s argument demonstrates, and we can again.

Many problems today vividly mirror the woes that buffeted America during the Jazz Age. Witt’s historical analogy is far more apt — and perceptive — than the one now regularly cited: Germany’s Weimar Republic.

The fate of U.S. democracy, Witt details, looked similarly dire in the 1920s. To combat this, the new American Fund for Public Service — dubbed the Garland Fund after its founder, a wealthy scion named Charles Garland — helped bolster key components of a functioning democracy.

The fund’s savvy board of directors, which deftly allocated the money, made a big difference in keeping America’s democracy on track. It shored up essential democratic fundamentals, ensuring society’s myriad moveable parts could work together smoothly and effectively.

Witt swiftly lays out his historical analogy: During the syncopated, frenetic Jazz Age, he explains, new technologies brought disruptive social change and harsh new immigration laws supported waves of deportations. While the stock market boomed, racial violence erupted, along with political assassinations. Dissenting voices were brutally silenced. Meanwhile, stringent public health regulations developed to combat the 1918 influenza pandemic — which killed more Americans than World War I — had sparked widespread distrust of government.

Not just these troubled social conditions, Jazz Age politics also mirrored today’s. In the 1920 presidential election, an ill and aging Democrat, President Woodrow Wilson, was replaced by an enormously popular young(er) Republican, Warren Harding, who pledged an enticing “return to normalcy” — and the public glommed onto this made-up word (the correct term was “normality”). This gave the GOP control of all three branches of government. For, as Witt points out: Courts offered no relief. Until the early 1930s, the Supreme Court had never once used the First Amendment to block the imprisonment of dissenters.

Garland had decided to give away his million-dollar inheritance — which increased geometrically as stocks soared. In today’s terms, Witt estimates, it came to roughly $800 million. Garland sought counsel from Roger Baldwin, the civil rights advocate and a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Upton Sinclair, a muckraking journalist whose 1904 novel, The Jungle, about brutal conditions in the meatpacking industry, changed labor laws and led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. These two men assembled a board filled with canny labor leaders and influential social thinkers.

Witt lays out how the fund set about dispensing money:

It invested in causes designed to spark democratic renewal in America. Dozens of ambitious 1920s start-ups received precious incubator funding. Beneficiaries included heterodox unions, innovative publishers and media outlets, as well as iconoclastic civil rights organizations. The fund sponsored research, education and news sources that would be outside the influence of the wealthy few. It supported Black civil rights, helping to start the campaign that culminated decades later in Brown v. Board of Education [the U.S. Supreme Court case that ended segregation in public schools].

…[It supported] an emerging new model of economic organization — the industrial union — to connect large numbers of Americans to power and prosperity in the mass-production economy.

Sidney Hillman, a Jewish political refugee from the Russian Empire, … served on the fund’s founding board. He saw how companies … had deskilled the production process and broken down the power of old, guildlike unions. Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers union responded with a relatively new organizational structure, … one big union, not many unions divided by trade, task or occupation. …

Fund-supported labor intellectuals and organizers spread the gospel of the industrial union to fast-growing sectors of the economy, such as automobile manufacturing….

The same industrial democracy laboratories that helped develop new civil rights efforts also crafted efforts to democratize information flows in the press. … It was one thing to have a legal right to speak, but it was also vital that the vehicles of communication convey truth instead of lies.

This speaks to America today far more than these myriad comparisons to the Weimar Republic. Granted, in Weimar Germany between the world wars, what looked like a modern, robust, tolerant democracy imploded. In the process, political extremes gained sway, as Nazi Fascists and Communists both attacked centrist Social Democrats in the streets and at the ballot box. Powerful industrial magnates submitting to extreme political demands. Meanwhile, political leaders labeled the “enemy within” — Jews as well as Communists and Socialists — as “vermin” and “less-than-human” before ultimately stripping them of their civil rights and legal standing. The court system caved.

The thing is, however, that the Weimar Republic is in no way analogous to the United States. Germany had no history as a democracy. Its various states had never been cited as “laboratories of democracy.” Germany’s most recent iteration was as an empire, under Kaiser Wilhelm II of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Its thoughtful new constitution was regularly labeled as “a constitution without a country,” because it did not reflect the facts on the ground in post-World War I Germany. The country was a nascent, unstable democracy, dating from 1918-19, not a time-tested vibrant republic dating from 1789.

One key destabilizing problem in Weimar Germany was that arch-conservative military officers and diplomats refused to accept the reality of their nation’s defeat in World War I — and the caustic and humiliating peace agreement Berlin was forced to sign. The Die Zeit opinion writer Jochen Bittner astutely lays out how Trump’s “Stop the Steal” efforts after the 2020 presidential election echoed this.

The far right insisted the vaunted German army did not lose the war. Instead, they laid blame on the liberal Social Democrats, who had signed the peace terms and led the new Weimar Republic built on the wreckage of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s empire. They also robustly blamed Jews and Communists, who played a leading role in society. The right constructed the theory of Dolchstosslegende, or the “stab-in-the-back” myth. The people responsible for this were the “enemy within.” So they were also to blame for the rocketing inflation rate that left the German economy in tatters throughout the 1920s.

Given all this, it seems bizarre that the Trump administration is now seeking to present itself as fighting the anti-fascists or “antifa,” as historian Timothy Snyder points out in his recent Thinking About… Substack post. Team Trump is insisting that the protesters who gather to demonstrate against its policies are actually all members of the radical, far-left “antifa.” So this would mean that the Trump administration is … (wait for it!) the fascists. Strange, no?

In addition, as Jonathan V. Last lays out in his smart new Bulwark piece, “Are YOU Antifa”:

“There is no Antifa ‘organization’ There are loose associations of people who consider themselves to be part of an anti-fascist movement. But ‘Antifa’ is not like the Oath Keepers. There is no leader, no membership roster, no organization

There is a far more adroit analogy to the Weimar Republic: Russia under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. Russia during Glasnost had the exact same relation to democracy as Germany in the 1920s: None.

Liesl Schillinger, a talented and thoughtful writer, devised this clever comparison in 1993 and I snapped it up while I was running The Los Angeles Times Sunday “Opinion” section. Her piece, “Weimar Moscow: Life Is a Cabaret, Comrade!” is still a worthwhile read. She deftly lays out the parallels:

Consider Weimar Germany. Consider what happens to a big country that loses a big war, and has a hard time getting back on its feet. What happens when a country whose state hood and borders erode; whose image of itself is destroyed, and whose currency and economy become valueless overnight. What happened in Weimar Germany was a period of decadence and exaggerated separation of rich and poor — which led eventually to the rise of a furious Volkspartei — or people’s party. What happened after the rise of that party, we all know.

This scenario sounds much like what has been happening in Russia in the two years since Boris N. Yeltsin gave capitalism permission to tromp unchecked through the former Soviet Union. Many Western observers have noted that Russia, at least its biggest cities, had come to resemble the set of “Cabaret” a la russe.

I have long been obsessed with the Weimar Republic — and not just because I saw the original Broadway production of Cabaret during its closing week when I was 12. I still feel Schillinger’s is the most astute of Weimar comparisons.

There is a quote of President Harry S Truman’s I often cite: “The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.” I was reminded of it as I read about the Garland Fund in Witt’s insightful piece. I can’t wait to read his new book, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.

The Right’s Long Tradition of ‘Vengeance Politics’

So now the fight is about freedom of speech.

That’s about as basic as it gets in the fundamentals of America: It has its own specific clause in the First Amendment.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s comments on free speech after the killing of Charlie Kirk helped ignite this current fierce struggle. She sought to make a distinction between “free speech and hate speech,” and said her Justice Department was ready to “go after” people by “targeting anyone with hate speech.” She quickly sought to take a step back from this — since it is likely unconstitutional. But her service seems to be to Trump, not the nation.

The thing is that Kirk was himself no friend of the freedom of speech. The New York Times Opinion columnist Jamele Bouie explains this in a recent column, “Charlie Kirk Didn’t Shy Away From Who He Was. We Shouldn’t, Either”:

Kirk’s eulogists have praised him for his commitment to discourse, dialogue and good-faith discussion. Few … mention the fact that Kirk’s first act on the national stage was to create a McCarthyite watchlist of college and university professors, lecturers and academics. Kirk urged visitors to the website to report those who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.

The list, which still exists, is a catalog of speech acts in and outside the classroom. The surest way to find yourself on the watchlist as an academic is to disagree, publicly, with conservative ideology, or even acknowledge ideas and concepts that are verboten among the far right. And the obvious intent of the list is made clear at the end of each entry, where Kirk and his allies urge readers to contact the schools and institutions in question. Targets of the watchlist attest to harassment and threats of violence.

The New Yorker’s Louis Menand, whose most recent book is The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, expands that point as he emphasizes the hypocrisy underlining all this in his recent essay, “Where the Battle Over Free Speech Is Leading Us”:

The United States is in a speech war. … People’s lives are being damaged and sometimes destroyed not for something they did but for something they said. We live in a society of doxing, trolling, cancelling, sanctioning, slandering, deplatforming, defunding, persecuting, prosecuting, firing, and sometimes killing over the expression of an opinion. A big part of the craziness is that some of the people going to war over words are casting themselves as champions of free speech. It’s the people they are trying to silence, they claim, who are the enemies. …

As many people have rightly remarked, the response to Kirk’s murder is emblematic of the current hypocrisy. Kirk is being celebrated as a champion of free speech who was willing to debate anyone anywhere and who was killed by someone who could not tolerate his views. At the same time, Kirk’s admirers are campaigning to get people who make negative comments about those views — which are, after all, highly controversial and designedly so — fired from their jobs. And many have been. The attorney general initially suggested that Kirk’s detractors could be prosecuted for hate speech (which happens to be constitutionally protected). Evidently, saying racist things is not hate speech, but calling someone out for saying racist things is.

The compact that the Trump administration has now issued to nine leading U.S. universities, which New America’s Kevin Carey ominously labels “an offer they can’t refuse” in his Atlantic piece, “A Deal That Would End Universities’ Independence,” also aims to restrict freedom of speech. Carey explains the edict’s demand that “all university employees, in their capacity as university representatives, will abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events” is a “blatantly unconstitutional speech ban” essentially “a ban on speech with which the White House disagrees.”

Many on the right now insist this tactic is merely conservatives response to the left’s “wokeness” and its potent “cancel culture.” This, they claim, is the real culprit.

Vanderbilt University Prof. Nicole Hemmer adroitly corrects this myth in her New York Times opinion piece, “We Have Seen the ‘Woke Right’ Before, and It Wasn’t Pretty Then, Either.” Hemmer, who focuses on conservatives and the conservative media, is director of the Rogers Center for the American Presidency at Vanderbilt. She details how the right was the original purveyor of “vengeance politics.” This was not developed, as conservatives profess, as an effective, strategic tit-for-tat against the left:

“That argument rests on a flawed premise: that the right had been devoted to open debate and restrained government power, only reluctantly abandoning these principles to counter left-wing illiberalism. But the right did not learn cancel culture from the left; the modern right in America emerged as a censorious movement. …

The conservative movement that arose at the start of the Cold War readily married government power and private efforts to crack down on its political opponents. Take the case of “Counterattack,” the newsletter of an anti-communist organization…. In 1950, “Counterattack” published a lengthy pamphlet called “Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television.” … [It] contained 151 names of people and a list of their suspected connections to communism … target[ing] people for their involvement with unions, civil liberties groups and Black civil rights activism. …

The blacklisting of the 1940s and 1950s comprised both public and private efforts. “Counterattack” began publishing just a few months before the first Hollywood blacklist began in the midst of a House Un-American Activities Committee investigation. Sen. Joseph McCarthy announced his dubious list of 205 communists in the State Department a few months before the publication of “Red Channels.”

Leaders in higher education, film, broadcasting and government used mass firings, loyalty oaths and censorship to purge both supposed and actual leftists from their institutions over the next several years — a reminder that ostensibly liberal industries quickly came to the aid of largely right-wing censors. …

For the right, this crackdown was … the proper role of government: to police public life to make sure it conformed to conservative values. Communists remained a constant target, as did people who broke from traditional gender and sexual norms. …

Groups like the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation … built on decades of right-wing list-making and firing campaigns.

As of now, even in the middle of a government shutdown, it looks like the list-making and firing is primed to continue.

We’ll see how it all plays out...

President Donald Trump seems most in his element when roiling the nation. Established practices are upended with stunning velocity as Trump propels Project 2025’s sweeping far-right agenda.

Vestiges of long-accepted scientific expertise, legal precedent, diplomatic tactics and even enlightenment reasoning litter our civic landscape. Issues considered settled and over now rise again. No wonder tales of zombies and vampires deluge the cultural zeitgeist. As William Faulker foretold in writing about the South, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

One serious wound now re-opened involves racial equality. It was, sadly, only within the last decade that a public consensus finally acknowledged the casual cruelty inflicted by the myriad Confederate statues across the nation. We achieved a key cultural tipping point in deciding to remove them. Throughout the advances of the Civil Rights movement, these statues made a mockery of it -- saluting a society predicated and built on slavery.

The monuments had largely been erected as harsh Jim Crow segregation laws took hold across the South. The whitewash continued even through the Civil Rights era, however. Consider, a 1963 McLane, Va., law decried that all streets running north-south must be named after Confederate military leaders.

Real advances have been made in removing this blight on the U.S. landscape. Not just the grand, larger-than-life statues, but streets, schools, military bases and civic buildings named for treasonous Confederate leaders are being re-christened.

Trump, however, is now sharply reversing this crucial progress. He engineered the return of two Confederate statues to the nation’s Capital and resurrected the discredited military base names honoring Confederate leaders. A portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee, featuring his slave leading his horse, has just been reinstalled at West Point.

Trump’s Mar. 28 Executive Order, designed to rewrite wide swaths of American history, is responsible for this regurgitation of the nation’s original sin. In addition to demanding that Smithsonian museums remove all "divisive race-centered ideology,” Trump calls for restoring public monuments, statues and other markers removed or changed since 2020.

That date is not arbitrary. In early 2021, a Republican-controlled Congress, overriding Trump’s veto, created the Naming Commission. It charged the Pentagon with removing “all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America.”

As Cornell American Studies Prof. Glenn Altschuler, writes in his 2021 Hill opinion piece, “Removing Confederate statues remains a monumental challenge,”

“Confederate statues and symbols do not preserve American history. They distort the past by promoting the myth of the South’s “Lost Cause” and honoring secessionists who waged war against the United States to preserve slavery and white supremacy, using the pretext that they were defending states’ rights. Moreover, many Confederate monuments were erected in the 1890s and the first two decades of the 20th century -- an era in which segregation was codified as law in Southern states, the Ku Klux Klan was revived, poll taxes and grandfather clauses prevented African Americans from voting and lynchings occurred just about every week.

Black Lives Matter protests -- re-ignited in the early days of the Covid pandemic by the 2020 Minneapolis police murder of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd -- finally succeeded in building strong support to root out many of the more than 1,700 remaining Confederate monuments. For too long, they presented a false version of the American story, a U.S. history manque.

The Los Angeles Times art critic, Christopher Knight, a pal of mine since I worked there, writes about the removals in his smart June, 2020 critique, “Confederate monuments institutionalize racism. Take them all down. Now”:

Alexandria’s effigy of a Confederate warrior was erected in 1889 to tell white Virginians that they might have lost the Civil War, but they still held the reins of power.

And it told black Virginians — in no uncertain terms — to know their place.

Intimidation was one objective of every such sculpture or plaque, the assertion of white privilege another. … The production of hundreds of Confederate monuments gave visual form to Jim Crow’s rise…To police civil society, silently but inescapably, is such a sculpture’s job.

A statue like Alexandria’s marshals a symbolic eternity, signaled by enduring bronze. It is lifted onto an immovable soapbox, chiseled from stone or cast in concrete. It commands a public space, pressing a metaphorical knee into the back of any citizen who might dare to object.

The 2021 commission quickly set about renaming the nine major U.S. military bases that honored Confederate generals and also called for removal of the Arlington Confederate Monument, which had loomed over the national cemetery since 1914.

Now, after Trump’s Executive Order, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has set aside $10 million to restore that work.

Retired Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule, who served as vice chairman of the Naming Commission and is former history department head at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, is furious about this cultural regression. He explains why in a Aug. 10 opinion piece for The Hill, “Hegseth subverts Congress by ordering racist Confederate monument’s return to Arlington”:

I study Confederate commemoration. This structure is one the cruelest, most racist monuments in the country, and its location at the sacred ground of Arlington National Cemetery makes it even more offensive. The monument clearly commemorates the Confederacy and its purpose — chattel slavery.

It depicts a tearful, overweight enslaved woman, a “mammy,” cradling the child of her Confederate enslaver, supporting him as he departs for war. The monument portrays faithful slaves and kind white masters, a historical lie. Slavery featured legal rape, torture and selling husband from wife, child from mother. …

Hegseth … declares that the monument was done in the spirit of reconciliation. He gets his history grossly wrong. … In 1914, the Arlington Monument celebrated not reconciliation, but the victory of white supremacy. …

Reconciliation did not include 9 million African Americans in the South who lived in a racial police state without voting rights enforced by a terror campaign of lynching. In 1914, the NAACP’s Crisis magazine counted 55 African Americans lynched. …

Commemoration should inspire us. Who we commemorate should reflect our values. … we should commemorate the 1,800 United States Colored Troops and thousands of other U.S. Army Civil War soldiers buried in Arlington who helped destroy chattel slavery, freed 4 million men, women and children from human bondage, protected democracy and saved the United States of America.

By ordering the monument back, Hegseth is … telling us that the values of 1914, white supremacy and Jim Crow are this country’s — and the Army’s — values. …

It had taken far more than Floyd’s murder, though, to achieve this progress. Earlier violent racist incidents helped focus public attention on the Confederate monuments. Black Lives Matter demonstrations were first sparked by a series of police killings of young unarmed Black teenagers, beginning with a Florida community watch guard’s 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin and the Ferguson, Mo., police murder of Michael Brown in 2014.

Rutgers Law Prof. David Dante Troutt, an astute legal scholar and longtime contributor of mine, wrote about these terrible incidents. First, on Martin in Politico, “Stand Your Ground tramples justice,” then on Brown in Reuters, “Less than human: Do some police take a step beyond simple prejudice?”

These and other stark tragedies, many of which had been captured on bystanders’ cell phone cameras, culminated in a horrific 2015 massacre when a white gunman killed eight Black parishioners and their pastor during a Bible study group at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. Princeton Prof. Wallace Best, an authority on African American religious history, provided astute context in his Reuters opinion piece, “Why the AME church massacre is an assault on the fabric of Black life.” The church’s Black survivors stunned the nation when they publicly extended forgiveness to the avowed racist murderer.

Then, in 2017, a “Unite the Right” rally of white nationalists raising tiki-torches and neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us,” paraded through Charlottesville, Va., to oppose removal of a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee. A young woman who supported the removal was killed.

It took these cascading brutal incidents to finally catalyze public action and ignite a national conversation.

Jack Hitt, a Charleston native son who deftly tackled many complex cultural problems for me over the years, offers a compelling idea about what to do with the Confederate statues in his ingenious 2015 Reuters opinion piece, “Don’t tear down Confederate monuments – do this instead.”

Hitt is by no means saying all the statues should stay – he clearly draws the line at ardent racists like Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the KKK’s first Grand Wizard. But to enhance the public debate, Hitt calls for additional statues and memorials honoring African Americans, to counter this Confederate-centric version of U.S. history:

Why not simply add more statues? The best thing about parks is that there’s always room for one more bust. Having grown up in Charleston, I know there are many African American heroes from this period who have gone unacknowledged.

Denmark Vesey was one of the early 19th century’s most astonishing slaves. He bought his freedom after winning a lottery — seriously. …

But Vesey also foresaw the basic need for an African American right to assembly — the first step that would eventually march to 1964 and the landmark Civil Rights Act. So he helped found an all-black church, Emanuel AMC on Calhoun Street — the very one Dylann Roof entered on June 17. An attempt not long ago to have a statue of Vesey stand near [Sen. John C.] Calhoun’s in the prominent Marion Square failed, and his statue was marooned uptown at Hampton Park. Let’s rethink that decision.

Similarly, why eliminate street names that tell one part of Southern history when we can amplify them to tell even more of it? … So instead of erasing Calhoun Street, let’s amplify it: Smalls-Calhoun Street.

Robert Smalls was, in brief, a great American. He was a slave in 1862 when he hijacked a Confederate ship in Charleston harbor and cunningly outsmarted numerous Confederate ships and Southern fort commanders to slip out until he found refuge with the U.S. Navy. His audacity forced President Abraham Lincoln to advocate for deploying African-American troops in the war. …

Smalls-Calhoun Street would be an avenue for cars, sure, but also for history. Every mention of the street would be an invitation to understand the narrative of a place that for too long told only one revisionist half of it.

Josh Marshall, founding editor and Grand Poohbah of Talking Points Memo, offered a brilliant summing up of the statue dilemma in his 2017 piece. Some Thoughts on Public Memory. Marshall leaves little doubt that we must trash all the statues:

It has always been a canard to claim that anyone is banishing history with these changes. But public memory isn’t simply history. It is a public recitation, often written onto the landscape, about what we revere and what we regret about who we are and what we come from. None of this is to say that [Gen Robert E.] Lee’s battles aren’t of interest. Nor is it to say what Lee was like as a private person. But neither is why he is celebrated in cast metal statuary across the South. There’s one reason. And by any measure for us today it is a bad reason. It is not even close.

Art critic Knight of The Los Angeles Times, offers an intriguing alternative in his 2017 piece, “What to do with Confederate monuments? Put them in museums as examples of ugly history, not civic pride.”

Knight cites Memento Park, an exhibition outside Budapest, Hungary, that’s essentially a salute to failed dictatorships. It displays decommissioned Communist sculptures erected when the Soviet Union held sway over Hungary behind the Iron Curtain. This remains one of my favorite museums, only partly because of its somewhat random collection of bulky, Brutalist statues. The descriptive labels are not to be missed – repeatedly slamming the work of untalented “hacks,” who likely got specific commissions because of their Communist Party brown-nosing.

We’re actually going to see an innovative variation on this theme at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in October. The exhibition, “Monuments,” curated by MOCA, The Brick, a L.A. contemporary art space, and the artist Kara Walker, will bring together decommissioned Civil War statues and new artwork specifically commissioned for the show, as well as other contemporary art. It will feature statues removed from Charlottesville, Va., Baltimore, Md., Mongomery, Ala. and many other cities across the nation.

This exhibit might help restore a sense of urgency to this long-aborning, enlightened effort to remove Confederate statues. Our continued pursuit of a more perfect union demands it.

We’ll see how it all plays out…

An overarching surreality appears to have taken hold in President Donald Trump’s second term with the continual talk of his robust tariff policy.

Serious political analysts and journalists now spend time covering chimeras. For Trump’s major trade policy is being built on shifting sands, no matter how many leading commentators present it as standing on solid ground.

The U.S. Constitution specifically gives Congress control over tariffs. Though it has passed a few trade laws granting the president a role in certain limited circumstances, this does not begin to approach the sweeping powers Trump now asserts he can use.

Even as two strong legal challenges rise through the courts, media coverage now attests to Trump’s trade successes. Consider The New York Times’s Ana Swanson’s recent reported analysis, “Trump Is Winning His Trade War. What Will That Mean for the Economy?” She lays out the policy at the top:

Formidable economies like the European Union and Japan have abruptly made peace with higher tariffs on their exports, acquiescing to President Trump’s demands in order to avoid damaging trade wars and to coax even steeper U.S. duties down just a little bit.

As major economies fall in line to sign agreements that include the highest tariffs in modern history, the president’s vision for global trade is rapidly being realized. … The outcome has seemingly proved Mr. Trump right that his tariff threats are a powerful bargaining tool.

Though she describes the actions as “drastically different and largely untested” in her lead (“lede” in journalize), at no point in this roughly 1,400-word piece does the word “unconstitutional” appear.

CNN Business Executive Editor David Goldman also heralds the tariff program’s success in his recent analysis, “How Trump turned the tide in his trade war”:

President Donald Trump has pulled off an impressive feat: He is raising tariffs on some of America’s most important trading partners, and the world is largely cheering the agreements as victories.

Placing historically high taxes on imports from around the world … marked one of Trump’s boldest gambles of his presidency. Trump was largely elected on his pledge to fix Americans’ finances. Economists have widely shunned his trade policy, which is expected to raise costs for businesses and consumers.

But Trump zagged when everyone was zigging, and — so far — the bet has paid off. He achieved that with some old-fashioned psychology: setting the bar so high for potential tariff pain that anything that has come below that bar appears like a win.

Again, the word “unconstitutional” does not appear.

The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Russell Mead, who wrote for me regularly back when I ran The Los Angeles Times Sunday “Opinion” section, is an esteemed foreign policy analyst who has no truck with folderol. Yet, even he focuses on Trump’s many trade wins in a recent opinion column, “Trump’s Trade Deal Triumphs.”

True, Mead sets up the impending serious dichotomy in his very first sentence:

In the past 10 days, President Trump has nailed down deals that, unless the courts judge his assumption of sweeping trade powers unconstitutional, will stand as his most consequential achievements to date. In the deals with Japan and the European Union, major trading partners and key security allies made significant concessions to the administration’s demands—without extracting equivalent concessions from the U.S. problems. [Boldface type is mine.]

Mead then spends the next six paragraphs deftly laying out all the remarkable wins Trump has pulled off. The “Global Affairs” columnist does imply, though, that the president’s well-known “impulsiveness,” might undercut his actions. (This was before Trump declared on Aug. 1 that he was firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after July’s low jobs report and the downgraded revisions of May and June numbers.)

Not until the seventh graph does Mead circle back to that pesky issue of “unconstitutional”: Challenges to the unconstitutionality of the administration’s use of emergency powers to justify massive shifts in tariff policy are making their way through the courts.

Ankush Khardori, a former Justice Department federal prosecutor who writes the “Rules of Law” column for Politico Magazine, meanwhile, focuses squarely on the grave legal challenges ahead in his Aug. 1 piece, “Why Trump’s newly announced tariffs aren’t a done deal.” This posted on “Liberation Day” redux, when Trump finally enacted his sweeping tariffs on countries across the globe.

Yet, Khardori points out:

The announcement came on the same day that an appeals court grappled with the question of whether Trump’s tariffs are even legal. Indeed, there is a strong argument that the tariffs are illegal and unconstitutional. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which on Thursday held oral argument on two major tariff challenges — one from a group of small businesses and the other from a coalition of 12 states led by Oregon Atty. Gen. Dan Rayfield — seems like it may ultimately agree.

As Khadori explains, this looks likely because:

[T]he statute that has actually been invoked by the Trump administration — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — has never been used to impose tariffs over the course of the nearly half-century that it has been on the books, and it makes no mention of tariffs in the text. It was, in fact, passed to limit the president’s emergency economic powers. On top of that, the key case cited by the government in its favor does not actually support their position (usually a bad thing).

In addition, Khadori speculates, this could be one time where the Supremes won’t issue a tortured decision supporting Trump.

In mid-June, the two businesses that prevailed in federal district court in Washington asked the Supreme Court to short-circuit the appeals process and take the case up immediately for review. …

The companies’ request was far from crazy, particularly given the fact that the conservative justices have moved quickly in a variety of major court challenges to the Trump administration’s actions since Trump’s inauguration.

Three days later, however, the Supreme Court denied their request, with no explanation.

Perhaps not coincidentally, those expedited rulings have favored the Trump administration, while in the case of Trump’s tariffs, a critical mass of conservative justices may ultimately be compelled to rule against Trump — if, that is, they actually adhere to the interpretive and constitutional principles that they claim to follow.

Meanwhile, many legal scholars are lamenting the fact that the Republican majority in both houses of Congress continues to abdicate its constitutional duties. Former New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano, for one, deems a critical line has been crossed. As he wrote in his July 31 USA Today Opinion piece, “Can the president impose taxes? No. Trump is still trying to”:

When Congress looks the other way as its powers are usurped by the executive, we are witnessing the systematic erosion of basic constitutional norms. The same DOJ that has made the absurd arguments in favor of presidentially imposed tariffs has defended masked men in the streets arresting folks without warrants, incarcerations without due process, and deportations without hearings — without a peep from Congress.

There was a time when the DOJ, covetous of its reputation … and cognizant of how future generations might rely on its arguments for precedent, would have declined to make arguments that are contrary to the plain meaning and historical acceptance of the words in the Constitution. But the present DOJ has eschewed professional independence for presidential loyalty.

There was a time when Congress maintained independence and steadfastly guarded its constitutional prerogatives.

There was a time when presidents enforced constitutional provisions even if they disagreed with them.

Those times are history.

We’ll all see if they really are.

It looked like cause for jubilation last week, when the Pentagon announced on July 15 that it would partially ease its occupation of Los Angeles. As a former L.A. resident, seeing pictures of heavily armed troops in the streets of the City of Angels has been heartbreaking.

The Trump administration said it was removing 2,000 of the 4,000 National Guard troops it had federalized and sent to Los Angeles in early June, along with 700 Marines. The White House had decreed this troop surge was an appropriate response to large public protests against the Trump administration’s harsh immigration crackdown.

There is little cause for celebration, however, because there is no relief from the cadres of heavily armed and masked ICE agents, who refuse to identify themselves even as they grab L.A. residents off the streets and force them into unmarked vehicles. With these fierce, seemingly random sweeps, the Department of Homeland Security shock troops are spreading fear and despair across the Southland.

Los Angeles is serving as the test case for a nexis of potentially calamitous national policies. Yet, far too many people are no longer paying attention. The public — and the news media — are now riveted by the newest bright shiny object, the Jeffery Epstein file. The L.A. story has fallen not just “below the fold” on the front page — to use now-archaic journalism terms — it has been relegated to the back pages.

I know what it’s like to walk out of your office and see Army tanks sitting across the street. I ran the Los Angeles Times Sunday “Opinion” section during the 1992 civil uprising after the Rodney King decision. California’s elected officials had asked for troops that time. As a journalist, I could ignore the citywide curfew. So it was after dark when I walked out of the landmark Los Angeles Times building, positioned catty-cornered to City Hall, and, looking across the street, saw what looked like a baby sitting atop a tank. As I got closer, I could see it was a somewhat nervous, very young man, decidedly dwarfed by the dimensions of his hulking tank.

Right now, if ICE can take down and handcuff Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) while ignoring his attempts to identify himself, arrest a Midwestern judge in her own courtroom and imprison high-ranking civic officials, what chance does a hardworking Encino gardener or long-serving Hollywood Hills housekeeper have?

Linda Greenhouse, the smart, former New York Times reporter, who won a Pulitzer for her coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court, now has a home in Los Angeles and wrote a powerful NY Times Opinion piece, “We Will Regret Not Standing Up to This Venomous Cruelty.” She deftly captures the current surreality of life in Los Angeles:

I was taking an early morning walk in my neighborhood when a black S.U.V. with tinted windows slowed to a stop a half block ahead. I considered: If this is ICE coming to take someone, should I intervene? Start filming? Make sure the victims know their rights? Or just keep walking, secure in the knowledge that no one was coming for me? The car turned out to be an airport limo picking up a passenger, and I was left to ponder how bizarre it was to feel obliged to run through such a mental triage on a summer morning on an American city street.

Something beyond the raw politics of immigration lies behind the venomous cruelty on display, and I think it is this: To everyone involved, from the policymakers in Washington to the masked agents on the street, undocumented individuals are the Other — people who not only lack legal rights as a formal matter but also stand outside the web of connection that defines human society. Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, refers to undocumented immigrants as “the got aways,” the ones we didn’t catch.

Back when I ran The L.A. Times “Opinion” section, Mike Davis, one of the most incisive of social critics and civic observers when it comes to Los Angeles, wrote a brilliant piece for me, “Why L.A. Is a Synonym for Disaster,” explaining how “immigrants” morphed into fearsome “aliens.” There’s a reason he deserved the MacArthur “genius” award:

… the abiding hysteria of Los Angeles disaster fiction, and perhaps of all disaster fiction -- the urge to wipe out an entire city and its inhabitants -- is rooted in racial anxiety. In the United States, more than in Europe, the disaster novel remained fixated on the specter of subversive immigrants and nonwhites. From the earliest 19th-century examples of the literary destruction of New York, to the latest survivalist fantasies about Los Angeles, white fear of the dark races lies at the heart of such visions. It is this obsession, far more than anxieties about earthquakes or nuclear weapons, that leads us back to the real Los Angeles as well as to the deepest fears of our culture.

If race ultimately unlocks the secret meaning of Los Angeles disaster fiction, its apparitions have changed over time. In novels written before 1970, when Los Angeles was still the most WASPish of large U.S. cities, racial hysteria was typically expressed as fear of invading “hordes” — variously yellow, brown, black, red or their extraterrestrial metonyms. After 1970, with the rise of a non-Anglo majority in Los Angeles County, the city turns from an endangered home into the Alien itself; and its destruction affords an illicit pleasure not always visible in previous annihilations.

… In the shadowlands of white anxiety, the distinction between the images of space alien and illegal alien was subjected to repeated elision. Immigration and invasion, in a paranoid register, become synonyms.

This view of immigrants as the Other, as “aliens,” as less than human, helps grant ICE broad license for its actions.

Now, thanks to the megabill that President Donal Trump orchestrated — which GOP majorities in Congress passed and he then signed on July 4 — the power of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is about to increase exponentially. For the bill pumps more than $170 billion into the agency.

The New Republic’s Felipe De La Hoz provides details in his astute column, “The Worst Part of Trump’s Big Bill Is Getting Almost No Attention:

The bill is effectively a blank check, funding pretty much every aspect of the administration’s ramp-up of enforcement, detention, and surveillance: hiring nearly 20,000 additional immigration agents across Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, constructing more border walls, building detention facilities for tens of thousands of additional people, and so on. It would take everything we’ve seen so far — the targeting of activists for their speech … ramping up detentions — and crank it to 11.

Yet, we heard far too little from Democrats about this ominous component of the bill during the run-up to passage. They most often cited an estimated 11.8 million Americans who could lose health insurance, for, as De La Hoz speculates:

… Democrats are used to their Republican counterparts (and some within their own ranks) pushing for increased “border security” and immigration enforcement funding during budget negotiations and think the public will view it as old hat.

Democrats know polls regularly showed that much of the public supported Trump’s talk about deporting undocumented immigrants. It’s one policy he actually campaigned on — and seems most intent on delivering to his base. As the nation watches ICE in action, however, this support has declined. One June Gallop Poll shows Trump’s support for “handling the immigration issue” now stands at 35 percent. (Though that number incorporates the 85 percent of Republicans who still back him on this.)

Many political commentators openly worry that Los Angeles is now serving as a template for similar federal actions in other major metropolitan areas -- particularly in Blue states. Josh Marshall, founder and grand poohbah of Talking Points Memo, lays it out in his savvy essay, “ICE’s Penumbra of Abuse”:

The LA example looks to be a prototypical case. ICE orders a wildly militarized and aggressive series of raids. That triggers fairly spontaneous and overwhelmingly peaceful protests. In response, the president orders in the federalized state National Guard and then the Marines. In every case, we can see a ratcheting process in which ICE’s actions create a climate of protest or disorder or simply disagreement which prompts newly aggressive actions or assertions of power.

The additional factor is the open-ended and general nature of immigration enforcement. ICE’s brief isn’t for discrete crimes or really any crimes at all. It’s for people without permission to be in the United States or anyone who complicates or gets in the way of how it defines its mission. ICE has a broad latitude to question people about their immigration status, especially within 100 miles of an international border, a limit which includes the areas where a surprisingly large percentage of Americans live. It’s an expansive brief which creates a penumbra of chaos and tension which ICE can then (and already has) used as the pretext for more assertions of power. The federal government is thus allowed to determine what constitutes civil order and choose to impose it wherever it decides it doesn’t exist.

ICE indeed seems like an ideal instrument for Trump, allowing him to bend norms and turn the “unprecedented” tactics of street sweeps and masked federal agents into standard operating procedure. Jonathan V. Last, the editor of The Bulwark, explained why this could be possible in his terrific essay, “The American Police State Is Here,”

… I suspect that in a year we will consider this legislation to be the moment that Trump created his own internal security apparatus: His goal is to have ICE supplant the FBI in national law enforcement.

This is a big deal. Because the FBI is a professionalized organization with strict standards and a well-defined mission while ICE is more or less a national brute squad.

The Trump administration realized that corrupting the FBI would be a tall order. So while they’re certainly trying to do that, they put most of their chips on a different number: Reinventing ICE as the primary instrument of internal state power.

Garrett Graff, former editor of Politico Magazine who now writes the substack Doomsday Scenario, spent many years reporting out the starkly different standards and training between the FBI and immigration enforcement. He details them in his recent post, Four Fears About ICE: Trump's New Masked Monster, demonstrating why ICE agents could prove easily malleable in serving Trump’s purposes:

FBI special agent requirements include a bachelor’s degree and two years of professional experience (or an advanced degree, often a J.D. or accounting degree for the bureau), be at least 23 years old, pass a Top Secret security clearance background check and then special agent candidates undergo 20 weeks—five months—of training at the academy at Quantico.[Basic training in the Army is only 10 weeks.] ICE officers do not have a basic educational requirement (they can use three years of work experience instead), pass only a Secret level security clearance background check, and go through just 13 weeks of training (plus a five-week Spanish course).

Graff emphasizes that, though the megabill’s stunning funding infusion propels a powerful buildup in enforcement, there is scant comparable increase in the immigration system’s judicial infrastructure:

We know that this giant increase in detention facilities and officers isn’t meant to actually work with the existing immigration system because compared to the rest of the bill, there’s only the most modest of modest increases to the number of immigration judges in the country — a rise from 700 to 800, an increase so out-of-scale to the problem that we could have used those extra 100 to work through the existing backlog from the Biden years. If the Trump administration had any plan to balance civil rights and due process with its giant new hiring and construction spree, it would be also tripling or quadrupling or quintupling the new immigration judges. The fact that it's not makes clear that the Trump administration, DHS and DOJ have no intention of normal due process.

Another serious problem, Graff reveals, could be that this sort of warp-speed build-up often distorts and distends a U.S. policing agency. After 9/11, for example, the Bush administration sought to quickly ramp up the Border Patrol by flooding it with funding. Graff spent more than five years investigating the resulting chaos and corruption that riddled the agency:

What happens when a law enforcement agency at any level grows too rapidly is well-documented: Hiring standards fall, training is cut short, field training officers end up being too inexperienced to do the right training, and supervisors are too green to know how to enforce policies and procedures well. …

As I totaled up in 2014, “there were 2,170 misconduct arrests of Customs and Border Patrol officers and agents — ranging from corruption to domestic violence from 2005 through 2012 — meaning that one CBP officer or agent was arrested every single day for seven years.” Even by 2017, a decade after the hiring surge, CBP was still seeing an agent or officer arrested every 36 hours.

Graff’s adroit arguments show that problems created by pouring money into ICE would not be a case of “unintended consequences.” Rather, these terrible consequences would likely be very much intended.

Mike Davis, again, provides vital perspective. With his usual prescience, he wrote that Los Angeles’s woes might not even trouble the rest of the nation:

The City of Angeles is unique not simply in the frequency of its fictional destruction, but the pleasure that such apocalypses provide to readers and movie audiences.

No other city seems to excite such dark rapture. … The destruction of London — the metropolis most persecuted in fiction between 1885 and 1940 — was imagined as horrifying, equivalent to the death of Western civilization. The obliteration of Los Angeles, by contrast, is often depicted as a victory for civilization.

Thus, in “Independence Day,” … devastation wreaked by aliens is represented first as tragedy (New York) and then as farce (Los Angeles).

A true farce, however, would not feel so heart-rending.

L.A.’s iconic Capitol Records Tower is destroyed by a tornado in The Day After Tomorrow (2004). Photo: 20TH CENTURY FOX

I already miss the pope.

Pope Francis’s inclusive, loving message offered an antidote to some of the darkness we are all experiencing.

So I intend to watch his favorite film, Federico Fellini’s La Strada.

Soon after he was elected pontiff, Francis talked about this in an interview. It was a surprising choice. The Church had spoken out against Fellini’s early masterpiece when it was released in 1954. The film’s powerful message won moviegoers over, however, and it was awarded the first Foreign-Language Film Oscar.

La Strada presents a sad tale of marginalized people: Gelsomina, a simple young woman (played by Fellini’s wife, the luminescent Giulietta Masina) from an impoverished family, is bought by a traveling circus strongman (Anthony Quinn) to be part of his act. Despite his inhumane treatment and casual brutality, she grows to love him.

In one moving scene, which Francis later noted was his favorite, the circus tightrope walker, known as The Fool (Richard Basehart) tells a despairing Gelsomina that everyone and everything has value, has a purpose. “Everything in this world is useful for something,” he insists, “Here, take that pebble, for example. … If this is useless, then everything is useless: even the stars. And even you, you are also useful for something.”

I now realize La Strada embodied so many values that Francis stood for: optimism and joy in the face of cruelty and oppression, compassion and empathy that extended to all people, no matter how disdained and forsaken. He knew one serious problem of modern life was loneliness. Maybe that is why, throughout his life, he kept reaching out to the dispossessed and discarded — inspiring them to see the beauty around them.

When I first read the pope’s early interview, I was Executive Editor of Opinion at Reuters. So I immediately called my former film professor at Yale, Annette Insdorf, who now teaches at Columbia University, to help explain why this might have been his favorite.

“The pontiff's favorite choice,” she wrote, “crystallizes his embrace of the fallible and the marginalized.”

Here’s a link is the entire piece: “Why Fellini's films speak to the pope”

La Strada’s message continued to resonate with Pope Francis. Indeed, on the film’s 70^th anniversary in 2024, he issued a video statement: “It has stayed in my heart.

Why not see the film? It’s streaming right now on many different services.

Though I always feel that watching Masina’s stunning performance on a big screen can’t be beat.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “unprecedented.”

In the before times — before Donald Trump entered the political scene and the coronavirus pandemic swept the globe — it was used sparingly. As a longtime opinion editor, I approached it with caution and took to adding qualifiers: “Virtually unprecedented” was my go-to trope. All too often, something cited as unprecedented had happened before.

Since Trump entered the 2016 presidential campaign, however, “unprecedented” has become ubiquitous. From slamming military heroes to decrying America, Trump seems to delight in the “unprecedented.”

Right now, the deeply unsettling standoff between the Trump administration and the federal courts could well result in an unprecedented result: Judges holding Justice Department lawyers in contempt of court.

The White House’s likely impending faceoffs with the U.S. Supreme Court are approaching unprecedented as well. For the administration is playing fast-and-loose with the Supremes’ recent unanimous decision — “pretending it is complying,” as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer writes, “while refusing to do so.”

Serwer lays it all out in his newest smart piece, “The Constitutional Crisis Is Here”:

Since last week’s Supreme Court directive, Trump officials have harped on a line stating that the lower court should clarify its “directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” Officials including [Stephen] Miller and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have interpreted that to mean that they do not have to follow the order at all. During the Oval Office meeting, Rubio chimed in to say that “no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.”

In other words, the administration is following the Supreme Court’s ruling by ignoring it completely.

Meanwhile, Trump keeps asserting that the Supremes ruled 9-0 in his favor.

This fierce fight was ignited by the administration’s unlawful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who, as a teenager, had fled the terrors of El Salvador for the United States in 2011. He now has an American wife and child as well as steady employment. In addition, an immigration judge ruled in 2019 that Abrego Carcia had the legal right to remain, since he feared prosecution in his native land.

The Trump administration admitted in court that grabbing Abrego Garcia was an error. There seems no solid evidence that he was part of the violent Salvadoran gang MS-13.

Yet, he was sent to El Salvador’s infamous prison, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, after being swept up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, who abducted him in front of his young autistic son.

Trump officials, like Homeland Security Adviser Miller, continue to insist — outside of court — that this deportation is no error. They have strong support from many GOP members of Congress, who declare: “While Democrats are fighting on behalf of illegal criminals on your dime, Republicans will continue [to] fight for the safety of American citizens.”

Things got even more surreal when El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, during his Monday Oval Office visit, played an elaborate game of Alphonse and Gaston with Trump as they discussed Abrego Garcia. Each insisted that the other had custody.

It would have sounded less spurious if Washington wasn’t paying El Salvador to keep planeloads of people in prison. And Trump hadn’t said he was open to sending U.S. citizens to foreign prisons.

The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last viewed this scene in stark terms:

Congressional Democrats should do the job that Justice Department lawyers, in contravention of the Supreme Court, are refusing to do. They should take it upon themselves to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia. …

This will require a paradigm shift for Democrats. They will have to act less like an American political party and more like Solidarity in Poland in the 1980s or Alexei Navalny’s People’s Alliance over the last decade.

But they should be under no illusions. The old American order is dead. It ended on April 14, 2025, when a Latin American strongman sat in the Oval Office and discussed sending U.S. citizens to foreign concentration camps with the American president while they jointly defied the Supreme Court.

Josh Marshall, the astute founder and overarching editor of Talking Points Memo, cuts to the heart of the matter:

We can talk endlessly about whether we’re still in a democracy or whether Trump wants to be or is acting like a dictator. We can debate words such as “fascism” that were unknown before a century ago. But what we are seeing right now is the definition of tyranny, a half-archaic concept the founders of the American Republic were very familiar with. Trump’s rule is both lawless and arbitrary. He has taken the bundle of powers the Constitution provides him to govern and defend the Constitution and turned them to an entirely different and corrupt purpose: using them as weapons to attack the people and institutions he deems his enemies.

This kind of creature is precisely what the core architects of the constitutional order said the document could never be used to create. The President is no King; he is subject to the law. And yet here we are. And it is the fraudulent doctrine of unitary executive authority which is walking before him like a statutory bushwhacker, clearing a path for him through every law and restraint.

Meanwhile, Federal District Court Judge James Boasburg is threatening the administration with contempt charges because of its “willful disregard” of his order to halt deportation flights. The Executive Branch has until Apr. 23 to clear up who is responsible for sending more than 200 people to foreign prisons despite Boasburg’s orders not to.

In another extremely fraught case, District Court Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland, is still trying to assess the administration’s level of compliance with the Supremes’ ruling that it must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to U.S. soil. Contempt charges are again being mentioned.

When the U.S. government sought to appeal her actions, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals smacked down the administration’s arguments with surprising alacrity. Judge Harvie Wilkinson, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, was having none of it. He did all he could to fend off what he noted others might view as a constitutional crisis:

“Facilitate” is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear. The plain and active meaning of the word cannot be diluted by its constriction, as the government would have it, to a narrow term of art. …

“Facilitation” does not permit the admittedly erroneous deportation of an individual to the one country’s prisons that the withholding order forbids and, further, to do so in disregard of a court order that the government not so subtly spurns. ... Allowing all this would “facilitate” foreign detention more than it would domestic return. It would reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood. …

It is, as we have noted, all too possible to see in this case an incipient crisis, but it may present an opportunity as well. We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.

This degree of government non-compliance with court orders is indeed — you guessed it — unprecedented.

As the nation is now experiencing, some things are better off being “precedented.”

What’s not unprecedented, however, are terrifying secret sweeps by government agents. The United States has been-there-done-that as far these are concerned.

Consider the Palmer raids, which the Justice Department launched in October, 1919, in response to a series of bombing incidents and labor strikes across the nation — regularly tied to the Bolsheviks who had recently seized power in Russia. The raids continued into 1920, as Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer sought to arrest and deport a wide cross-section of the radical left.

The Palmer raids were actually orchestrated by a young Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover, whom Palmer had appointed head of the department’s Radical Division. Squadrons of federal agents seized not only notable political radicals, including Communists and anarchists, like Emma Goldman, but also union members, immigrants — particularly Italians and Eastern European Jews, progressive leaders and influential writers.

More than 6,000 people were arrested. These undemocratic sweeps led to the creation of the American Civil Liberties Union — which we saw swing into action again on Friday. The Supremes were responding to an ACLU appeal when they blocked more deportations early Saturday morning.

On the Palmer raids’ 100th anniversary, back in 2019, the historian and journalist Adam Hochschild wrote a terrific commentary for The New Yorker, “When American Tried to Deport its Radicals.”

Hochschild details one exchange between Goldman and Hoover, after his agents had picked her up and were taking her on a tugboat to the ship for deportation. Goldman, of course, gets the last word:

“Haven’t I given you a square deal, Miss Goldman?” Hoover asked, as they steamed toward Brooklyn in the darkness.

“Oh, I suppose you’ve given me as square a deal as you could,” she replied, two hours away from being ejected from the country where she had lived for 34 years and found the voice that had won her admirers around the world. “We shouldn’t expect from any person something beyond his capacity.”

Unfortunately for Hoover — and Palmer — a man named Louis F. Post was then acting Labor Secretary. Before entering public life, Post had been a crusading journalist, writing editorials that defended labor unions, advocated women’s rights and slammed immigration restrictions. Post saw the raids as a witch hunt and, as acting Labor Secretary, he was able to quash roughly 3,000 arrest warrants after he learned that many raids were conducted without warrants, or using warrants based on faulty information. He lowered bail for many others.

Hochschild lays out how Post was able to halt the deportations — though only after the first ship had left port. Palmer’s fury over Post’s actions actually resulted in what Trump often threatens: impeachment.

The Attorney General condemned Post’s “habitually tender solicitude for social revolution and perverted sympathy for the criminal anarchists.” Privately, Palmer suggested that Post was “a Bolshevik himself.” Palmer and Hoover sought to discredit Post and get him impeached by Congress. A 350-page file on Post attempted to tarnish him with evidence about everything from contacts with I.W.W. members [Industrial Workers of the World, known as Wobblies], to his advocacy of divorce reform. The House Rules Committee, supplied with this file, called Post in for 10 hours of testimony. But he acquitted himself brilliantly, and the committee could find no grounds for impeachment.

As for impeaching a judge — which Trump regularly demands — in the 15 times it has occurred in U.S. history, it has been for crimes or corruption while on the bench.

I don’t think that includes issuing opinions that anger a president.

Plus: Seeing Lawlessness as Strength

MEANWHILE, Trump has long maintained a quizzical attitude when it comes to the rule of law. He can, it seems, take it or leave it.

He is abetted in this by his base. The president rarely receives a rebuke from his supporters when trash-talking a judge or smacking down a court ruling in the most derisive terms.

There is an acute danger in this. As the incisive law professor, Aziz Huq, recently explained to The New York Times:

Usually, voters won’t reward their elected leaders for violating norms, disrupting a stable constitutional order or taking actions that are intrinsically unlawful, said Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago and co-author of the book “How to Save a Constitutional Democracy.”

But that calculus may not apply to Trump, who has based his political appeal on gleefully flouting sacrosanct norms. Refusing to accept courts’ authority may actually appeal to the president’s base, Huq said, if they take it as evidence of strength rather than lawlessness.

Trump had caught on to this skill set early on. Consider his startling assertion during the 2016 presidential campaign: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

He leaned in on this as well with his persistence in maintaining the false claim that he won the 2020 presidential campaign.

At this point, more than half the nation is wondering if Trump’s supporters will ever grow significantly disenchanted.

We’ll see how it all plays out…

One word regularly used to describe President Donald Trump is “mercurial.”

His decision-making process does indeed seem swayed by myriad whims and impulses. Just ask Canada.

But don’t be fooled. Trump has proved highly capable of playing a long game — particularly when it comes to punishing his perceived enemies and rewarding his friends.

The former includes the entire Deep State — not just the Justice Department, which is now the focus of so much ire. Most of the federal government bureaucracy, simply by heeding accepted practices — and knowing basic rules and regulations — essentially stood in Trump’s way for much of his first term. As the nation is now seeing, thanks to Project 2025, he is making sure that won’t be happening again.

Let’s also not forget the man Trump likely regards as the instigator of his first impeachment: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump obviously hasn’t.

As for aiding his friends — this category looks a bit more fluid. Many might assume it includes those who are ever-ready to kiss Trump’s ring. (Or other parts of his anatomy.) Right now, this cadre features the president’s newest best buddy, Elon Musk, the capo dei capi of billionaires. But it just might be what the Chinese call “a group of one”: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In tackling the Deep State — and striving to fire boatloads of federal employees — Trump and Musk, his gadfly enforcer, have triggered ferocious battles that continue to roil the nation. Even many who support their effort to root out the much-touted trifecta of government waste, fraud and abuse were troubled by this wholesale chainsaw approach. The president has now taken to using the word “scalpel.”

In any case, the potential cost to American society could prove devastating. For Trump is seriously undermining the widespread trust in government that has been a key attribute throughout U.S. history — yet another example of America reaping the whirlwind with Trump’s 2024 win.

Trump’s efforts eat away at our nation’s vital “civic capital,” as Dartmouth Sociology Prof. Brooke Harrington lays out in her smart New York Times opinion piece, “Trump Is Like F.D.R. — Only in Reverse.”

She explains just how much is at stake:

It’s as though the current administration is running Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days in reverse: Instead of rebuilding institutions and public trust at a moment of national peril, it seems to be trying to unravel both — and is creating a moment of national peril.

This threatens to destroy what’s left of Americans’ faith in government. Moving fast and breaking things — the Silicon Valley motto that appears to inspire Mr. Musk and his DOGE initiative — is “potentially wreaking havoc” … on federal systems that ensure our physical and economic survival.

… [O]ne of our country’s greatest and least-appreciated assets has been public faith and trust in a variety of highly complex systems staffed by experts whose names we’ll never know. In fact, high levels of trust used to be one of our superpowers in the United States: specifically, that meant trust in our government to operate with reasonable competence and stability and without the kind of corruption that has hobbled other societies.

… That is what is now at risk. Just before Mr. Trump took office the first time in 2017, Transparency International ranked the United States among the top 20 countries in the world for least corrupt government. Now the United States has plunged in those rankings to its lowest level ever. We now have the same ranking as the Bahamas, an offshore financial center rocked by recurrent fraud and corruption scandals (like the 2022 collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange).

Trust in government to do what is right, at least most of the time, is a form of wealth — call it civic capital — that breeds prosperity on many fronts. Anything that threatens that trust weakens our society and economy.

True, Republicans have been trash-talking government for decades. Consider one of President Ronald Reagan’s most celebrated quips: “I always think the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.” For a politician acclaimed for radiating geniality, Reagan was remarkably adept with a shiv.

The continual GOP drumbeat about extensive government incompetence has already made a big impact: Many North Carolinians, for example, whose lives and livelihoods were decimated by hurricanes last year, so mistrusted FEMA that they would not apply for much-needed aid.

Yet Trump’s affinity for mayhem is — to use another one of the words he regularly evokes — unprecedented.

Plus: Rewarding his Friends

MEANWHILE, The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last raises an intriguing point when discussing Trump’s decision to cut off Ukraine from crucial U.S. military aid – including all intelligence. In his recent post, “Intel,” Last assumes one possible next step: Washington is now likely sharing intelligence with Moscow.

What was once deemed unthinkable is now quite possible. It’s all, as Last suggests, part of Trump’s long-range efforts to normalize relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin — another long game:

Would it surprise you if the United States was now informally sharing intel with Putin’s people, through back channels or informal networks?

It would not surprise me. If I were a NATO member state, I would probably assume it.

That’s what this is really about: NATO.

If the United States doesn’t want to support Ukraine for its own reasons, so be it. But U.S. foreign policy should take into account that Ukraine is an important strategic concern to our allies and that our relationships with these allies are valuable and should be tended.

Stopping U.S. military aid to Ukraine is one thing. America could plausibly claim that this choice is about internal politics, America First, or whatever. We could finesse that decision with the Europeans if we were so inclined.

But cutting off intel sharing cannot be interpreted by our allies as anything other than an attack on their interests. It is America actively taking sides with Russia, against NATO. And attempting to dictate to a NATO member (Britain) what it can and can’t do with intelligence products we share.

Somewhere in his lizard brain Donald Trump intuits that it will be harder to turn America into an autocracy if we are allied with democracies. Like seeks out like.

He is working to break NATO so that when the United States opposes our former democratic friends and is allied with authoritarian Russia, authoritarianism will seem more natural for us.

The Yale historian Timothy Snyder, in his Substack, “Thinking About…” offers additional astute context for Zelensky’s reactions during that fateful Feb. 28 Oval Office meeting. Snyder, who focuses on Russia and Eastern Europe, sees coded anti-Semitism in that conversation — which mirrors Putin’s often overt anti-Semitism. Snyder lays out what he believes could be the Russian leader’s likely thought process:

Ukraine is artificial and can exist thanks to the Jewish international conspiracy. The fact that a Jew leads the country confirms — for Russian fascists — both the unreality of Ukraine and the reality of a conspiracy. This Russian regime perspective is implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) antisemitic. Russian propaganda treats Zelensky as obsessed with money and as subhuman. Zelensky was elected on a peace platform in 2019, but Putin did not want to talk to him, in part because he did not think that Zelensky showed him enough deference.

Deference is something Trump — and Vice President JD Vance — demand as well.

That Trump could be engaged in a sophisticated diplomatic chess game to normalize relations with Putin shouldn’t be all that surprising. Trump’s expressed admiration and support of the Russian autocrat has been the one consistency throughout the former real estate developer’s political career. He has a pattern of playing the long game when the stakes are highest.

Consider Trump’s efforts to label the press as the “enemy of the people” — one of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s most “terrifying” slurs, according to the Russia scholar Nina Khrushcheva. (She wrote a swell piece for me about this, “Donald Trump's not quite Joseph Stalin. But his 'Fake News Awards' should scare us.” at NBC News “THINK” during his first term.)

Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Trump had regularly smeared the “fake news” reporting. Soon after his victory, Trump revealed his intended goal to “60 Minutes” correspondent Leslie Stahl. He bashes the media, Trump told Stahl, to “demean” and “discredit” reporters — largely so that the public will not believe “negative stories” about him,

It's likely a plus for him that there is a psychological tendency, known as “continued influence effect,” where incorrect and outdated information will continue to influence people’s beliefs — even after it’s been corrected. (Hello, Bobby Kennedy Jr. and his conspiracy theories that childhood vaccinations cause autism.)

Madeline Jalbert, a postdoc scholar at The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, unpacks this in her smart Seattle Times opinion piece, “Why bad information can linger in your brain”

Jalbert notes that studies show this most often happens when the correct data later appears with little context. So, the backstory of the original misinformation is never fully erased from people’s memories.

It seems extremely good luck for Trump that it’s getting ever more complicated for many Americans to decipher truth from lies.

We’ll see how it all plays out…

If the first full week of President Donald Trump’s flood-the-zone second term left you breathless, just wait. All Americans should be preparing to reap the whirlwind with his re-election.

Consider, an executive order Trump signed on the seventh day essentially ignited a constitutional crisis. The nationwide uproar built until he rescinded the order two days later.

Even Trump’s Jan. 20 Inauguration ceremony proved head-spinning — displaying a stunning tableau of the Broligarchy, influential tech and financial bros. This remarkable array of tech plutocrats, the 0.001 percent, were seated center stage, right behind the new president.

This might not have been all that surprising: After all, they had bought and paid for the party — contributing a substanial portion of the $250 million in donations. So, the Broligarchy held pride of place, seated in front of Trump’s proposed Cabinet members. For even the wealthiest Cabinet in U.S. history, worth an estimated $7 billion, couldn’t compare to the Broligarchy’s assembled wealth.

It was a plutocratic who’s who: Trump BFF Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s Tim Cook, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and many more. These are the people who create reality for so many Americans today. Just the first three combined are worth more than $1 trillion.

Steve Bannon might assert that the billionaires were on the scene as supplicants, seeking even less regulation and even more tax relief from Washington. But what Bannon deemed a “surrender” felt more like a power play. Something Trump understands.

This tableau reminded me of Kevin Phillips astute 2002 book, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. Though written before today’s mountains of tech and financial wealth piled up, Phillips lays out how, throughout U.S. history, wealth has worked at powerful cross-purposes to democracy — plutocrats’ self-interest regularly distended the U.S. government’s democratic practices and patterns.

Political analysts today, particularly after seeing the Inaugural tableau, have been quick to label this a second Gilded Age. Phillips details what this actually means.

First off, the “Gilded Age” label was coined by the masterful wordsmith Mark Twain, and his co-author Charles Dudley Warner, for their 1873 novel, The Gilded Age, a ferocious take-down of late 19^th-century America. The nation’s glittering gold surface, they asserted, masks only worthless base metal — just as the shimmering fortunes of robber barons like Andrew Carnegie (steel), John D. Rockefeller (oil) and Leland Stanford (railroads) pulled attention away from the harsh sinews of poverty that gripped so many Americans. The gleaming Industrial Age wealth also covered up the extraordinary corruption and chicanery coursing through the U.S. government.

For one thing, plutocrats and their corporations had managed to gain control of a key component of the federal government. Before the 17^th Amendment passed in 1913, state legislatures were in charge of appointing their senators to the U.S. Congress -- and plutocrats wielded robust power over statehouses across the nation. “I think I can say with pride,” Twain wrote, “that we have legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.”

Phillips vividly sets the scene:

From Jackson, Miss. to Columbus, Ohio, from Madison, Wis. to Dover, Del., when U.S. Senate vacancies were to be filled, capital after capital became a cross between a carnival and a feeding trough. Satchels were filled with crisp new currency, brothels were rented for entire weeks….

State governments would often fall under the sway of ruthless corporations. In Montana, for example, the copper company Anaconda, a division of Standard Oil, called the shots. Legal scholar Adam Skaggs, who was then at the Brennan Center for Justice, laid it out in an insightful piece he wrote for me at Politico:

Montana’s history demonstrates the corruption that blooms when corporations can spend without limit to capture government. … Montana voters adopted the Corrupt Practices Act [in 1912] at a time when national copper mining companies were running roughshod over the state government. “Bribery of public officials,” the Montana Supreme Court explained in its ruling, “and unlimited campaign spending by the mining interests were commonplace and well-known to the public.”

The Stanford history professor emeritus, Richard White, a leading authority on the Gilded Age, detailed striking similarities to contemporary politics when he wrote about a Newt Gingrich financial scandal for me more than a decade ago at Politico. As White detailed in “Lobbyist? Newt’s Gilded Age ‘friend’ ”

Since we are bringing back so much of the Gilded Age — corruption, shocking inequities of wealth and financial scandal — it would be helpful to bring back the era’s artful language. … The Gilded Age, after all, invented the corporate lobby…

In the Gilded Age, political and corporate “friends” with connections did favors for each other, working toward common goals. They shared bonds of sympathy, reciprocity and a presumption of mutual independence. Friends were loyal — up to a point. And loyalty, friends noted, could not be bought — though it could be rewarded.

Corporate friends had financial information and favors they shared with political friends. Their political friends, in turn, had access to people who controlled crucial legislation….

Friendship then was a sort of code: a network of social bonds to organize political activity. Affection was not necessary. The Gilded Age elimination of affection from corporate and political friendship was its genius. The men who created the networks of friendship that linked politicians — in and out of office — with journalists, bankers and plutocrats had stumbled, like so many vampires, on a cultural form (friendship) drained it of its lifeblood (affection — since they often hated each other). …

[T]he corporate lobbies of the Gilded Age changed the nature of U.S. governance. They did far more than petition and advocate. They turned Congress into the site of competition between corporations themselves. Lobbyists gave us modern U.S. government, in which the public good can sometimes matter less than advancing large private interests.

A major study conducted a decade ago proved this: American government actions and policies, it revealed, are much more responsive to the sentiments of the wealthy than the majority. In the years since, it has only increased.

As the Trump tableau showed, the wealthy play an ever more powerful role.

Yet, Phillips could see this coming back in 2002. He foretold, for example, the likelihood of political contributions being regarded as protected expressions — and extending to corporations, which the Gilded Age U.S. Supreme Court had already ruled to be people. The 2010 Supremes’ Citizens United v FEC decision, which resulted in money flooding U.S. elections, did just that. (This prescience continued a pattern set by Phillips, a historian and brilliant political analyst, who foresaw The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969 and the onset of the GOP’s Southern Strategy in Richard N. Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. Oh, and he coined the term “Sun Belt.”)

All these Gilded Age woes are far tooclose to economic conditions today: The richest 1 percent of Americans hold roughly 31 percent of total U.S. wealth, while the bottom 50 percent of Americans hold 2.4 percent, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve. Others cite different statistics when analyzing the nation’s staggering economic inequity: The wealth of the top 20 precent richest Americans increased the most between 1990 and 2022. In the final quarter of 2022, this group held 71 percent of the nation's wealth — up from 61 percent in 1990.

Two nights before Trump’s Inauguration, Peter Thiel, an influential member of the Broligarchy and one of Trump’s earliest supporters in Silicon Valley, hosted an exclusive fete at his Washington mansion. Thiel, who spent his formative years in South Africa, has been a longtime mentor and employer of JD Vance, and provided key financial support when he ran for the Senate from Ohio in 2022.

Thiel and his co-host David Sacks, another Broligarch and close friend since their Stanford days, brought together leading players from across the tech world and Washington. The celebration featured a juggler, various food stations and food delivery from McDonald’s. But there was no hint of Thiel’s longtime credo, which Dartmouth Sociology Prof. Brooke Harrington often cites: “ freedom and democracy are incompatible

Remember McKinley!

MEANWHILE, you might have noticed that William McKinley is Trump’s newest favorite president. He looks headed for a tussle with Alaska, since Trump insists on restoring McKinley’s name to the highest mountain in North America — and removing one long used by the region’s Indigenous people. (This sounds like a twofer for Trump.)

McKinley’s strong advocacy of tariffs is likely the key reason for Trump’s fervent support. White, the Stanford historian, however, essentially dismisses McKinley with a wave of his hand. He focuses instead on President Theodore Roosevelt, who did so much to combat Gilded Age corruption by initiating civil service reforms. As White laid out in a recent CNN interview:

Really, the reason we remember William McKinley is that he’s the president whose assassination made Theodore Roosevelt president. Theodore Roosevelt really was the president who begins to initiate a full-scale bureaucratic state in the United States. He’s a reformer, and McKinley himself would have gone that direction, but not with the same enthusiasm that Roosevelt had.

These are the very sorts of reforms that Trump is now so intent on undoing.

We’ll see how it all plays out…

The L.A. fires have been heart-rending to watch and read about.

Many writers are citing Mike Davis’s 1998 book, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, particularly its third chapter: “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn.” Davis makes a powerful argument: Rich people built hillside homes where they shouldn’t have, he insists, and the city is paying millions of dollars to protect them against the region’s natural environment

Readers today are still shocked by the blunt force of this thesis. But Davis essentially laid out the template for his argument in The Los Angeles Times earlier in the 1990s. He was a frequent contributor when I ran the Sunday “Opinion” section there.

One early iteration, “Building Homes Amid a Landscape of Fire Ecology” appeared when the embers had barely cooled from the fierce 1993 Topanga Fire, which burned through 16,000 acres in Malibu and destroyed 359 homes. Three people died.

Davis pulls no punches. Here’s how it opens:

[Gov.] Pete Wilson is right. There is an army of arsonists lurking in our foothills. But they are called wealthy homeowners.

Southern California is a fire ecology in the same way it is a land of sunshine. Our natural landscapes — coastal sage, oak savanna and chaparral — have co-evolved with wildfire. Periodic burning is necessary to recycle nutrients and germinate seeds.

The native Californians were skilled fire farmers. They used fire to cultivate edible grass, increase browse for deer and produce better basket stalks. Their annual burning prevented fire catastrophe by limiting the accumulation of fuel.

Efforts to appease these wealthy homeowners, Davis explains, instead creates a dangerous fire trap:

The deadly foothill firestorms are the ironic consequence of massive expenditure on fire suppression.

In a famous study, a botanist once compared the fire histories of San Diego County and northern Baja California. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on fire suppression in San Diego’s urbanized backcountry, while a natural fire cycle has been tolerated in Baja’s wild hill areas. As a result, only San Diego County has had catastrophic fires.

Preventive burning has been successfully practiced in local national forests for decades. It is precluded in most of our foothills by the sheer density of housing, and the threat of lawsuits from powerful homeowners’ associations. They are the principal political constituency for the continuation of costly and quixotic efforts at “total fire suppression.”

Davis finds it even more infuriating that the entire city foots the bill for these wealthy enclaves:

Moreover, society as a whole must pay the huge costs of defending hillside developments from inevitable natural hazards. … There has been no comparable investment in the fire and earthquake safety of the inner city. Indeed, we tolerate two systems of hazard prevention, separate and unequal.

Davis displayed a stunning skill in piercing through the myriad layers of L.A culture and society. Critics declare his 1990 book, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles, indispensable if you want to fully understand L.A. He was indeed a brilliant writer, a winner of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” award.

Harold Meyerson, a talented reporter and opinion essayist who grew up in Los Angeles, living through countless earthquakes and fires, also cites Davis when writing about the conflagration for The American Prospect, where he is editor at large. Meyerson opens his Jan. 9 piece, “The L.A. Apocalypse Was Entirely Predictable” with inimitable finesse:

It is a truth almost universally denied that the apocalyptic fires engulfing Los Angeles — my hometown — are merely a magnified version of the normal.

Meyerson has “been there, done that” too many times before.

Remembraces of Malibu Past

MEANWHILE, James Rainey, the smart Los Angeles Times investigative reporter, has written a lovely salute to the raggedly bohemian Malibu where he grew up. In “In the ruins of Palisades fire, confronting my elusive Malibu life,” Rainey writes that he rarely admits his past ties to the area — since it is now regarded as an exclusive enclave of the super-wealthy.

The Malibu of Rainey’s childhood, however, sounds idyllic:

When we moved to Carbon Canyon in 1969, central Malibu boasted not much more than a lone supermarket, a couple of gas stations and a lumberyard. No liposuctioned influencers or over-groomed pets. No City Hall. No city, actually, prior to the 1991 incorporation.

An easy, boho charm prevailed. I recall young women riding their horses, bareback, to pick up snacks at Market Basket. Surfers wandered the grocery aisles barefoot, sometimes shirtless. PCH felt like Main Street, not the driving death trap it would become.

His parents paid $70,000 for the hillside ranch house and one acre of land. That likely wouldn’t cover re-tiling the front hallway in one of the billionaires’ mansions that fill Malibu today.

The house Rainey grew up in was designed by Clifford May, which is pointed out almost as an aside in one caption. A newer Malibu resident might have led with this, though, because May is a seminal California architect. His work defined the low-slung ranch house — key to Southern California’s casual, indoor-outdoor lifestyle.

Rainy writes of his pilgrimage to the site of his house. All that’s left is an “ashy void.” The two chimneys, which his parents had relied on for heat, remain like “a pair of tombstones.”

He knows he is lucky, since they had recently emptied the house as part of a plan to sell it. Still, all the memories, particularly of his late mother and father, remain vital. He closes with just about the perfect ending — quoting lines from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a play his father had once starred in as the Stage Manager:

We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars … . There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.

Reflecting on Malibu, I have also been thinking about Ross Thomas, a writer of terrific political thrillers, who lived in the hills above the beach. A crackerjack writer, Thomas knew far too much about goings-on at the CIA for someone who insisted he had never belonged to it. (Particularly since his early PR work sent him to Nigeria and Italy, both places where the CIA is known to have played a role in domestic politics.)

Ross and his wife, Rosalie, had a picture-perfect house — cozy, slightly ramshackle, filled with books and remarkably inviting. It was so ideal that I felt it was almost a parody of a writer’s home.

I called Thomas just as news broke about the winds whipping a fire through Malibu in 1993. Of course, I wanted him to write about it. He said they were actually in the middle of packing to leave. They were heading to a hotel to escape the impending flames.

He told me he wouldn’t have a typewriter with him — so I said we could messenger one over. I was only partly joking.

But his loss during that fire was terrible: When his house burnt down, Thomas lost the early drafts of all his novels. There was no storage in the cloud at that time — much less computer flash drives.

I wanted Thomas to write about the fire because he was an amazing raconteur. LA Times Editor Shelby Coffey III was also a big fan of Thomas, and had featured his writing years before in The Washington Post “Style” section. At Thomas’s memorial a few years later, Coffey told a swell story: Thomas was in New York when his first book was sold. He gathered up all his friends, hired a big limo and went to 21 to celebrate.

Once seated, Thomas ordered his usual martini. “Do you want an olive with that?,” the waiter asked, “Or a twist?”

“We’ll order food later,” Thomas replied.

Bond couldn’t have said it better.