Do not be overly reassured that:

On October 26, a three-judge panel of the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the Trump Administration from sequestering 20,000 California ballots which the DOJ alleges were issued to noncitizens. The Court acted on jurisdictional grounds, finding that the DOJ jumped the gun in appealing a lack of order by the federal district judge who has the underlying case. But two of the appellate judges, one Trump and one Biden appointee, also expressed doubts about the merits of the DOJ’s demand.

The third judge, Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee, dissented from the 2-1 decision, intoning:

After learning of suspected noncitizens receiving mail-in ballots, California cannot commingle those ballots … Turning a blind eye to aliens voting in federal elections necessarily frustrates Congress’s criminalization of noncitizen voting.

According to the majority, however, California learned of no such thing because the DOJ did not produce persuasive evidence to back up its claim. Notably, as the credulous Judge Bumatay acknowledged, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin first warned California’s Secretary of State in July that over 190,000 noncitizens might be registered to vote there. But by October, the DHS had trimmed this number to 20,000, showing how squirrelly its supposed data is.

In May 2025, the Trump DOJ® began demanding complete, unredacted voter rolls from nearly every state. They were rebuffed by Democratic and Republican officials alike, of all but 13 states. So the DOJ filed 31 lawsuits. But it has already lost 27 of them.

To circumvent this obstacle, Trump Administration officials have been collecting publicly available voter lists, subjecting them to both automated and human analysis, and assimilating them with various third party data. They have been cagey about their sources and methods.

State election officials caution that the data the feds are relying on is old and flawed. In the California case, for example, Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan stated:

The Executive’s own declarations describe a bulk data match that began with a voter roster more than a year old, obtained from an unidentified source, supplemented through an unnamed commercial platform and compared against federal databases.1

Registrar Logan’s office sampled 200 of the feds’ 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters with LA County addresses and found that 38.9% of those who listed a birthplace affirmed they were born in the U.S. Although the DOJ disputed Logan’s assertion, this only underscores the contested nature of the feds’ factual claims.

DHS’s data ‘clean-up’ appears related to the Trump Admin’s dogged pursuit of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. Both the SAVE Act, and its more extreme sibling, the SAVE America Act, would require voters to show proof of citizenship in order to register to vote or update their registration. The proposal may sound relatively benign, but experts warn it would inexorably invite the federal government into historically state-run elections, cause mass disenfranchisement, and sow chaos.

Even though the SAVE Act stalled in the Senate, at least six states have reached out their own legislative hands to meet it, enacting similar laws, consistent with a judicial trend of allowing states to opt into Trump’s voter suppression carnival. This means states are free to rely on a federal purge roster cutely also called SAVE (for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements).

Similarly, in August the Supreme Court left in place an injunction barring the U.S. Postal Service from implementing an Executive Order directing it to park whole lots of mail ballots if even one among them appears on a federal scrub list. At the same time, however, the Court also allowed federal agencies to continue building their lists and systems.

“One thing that I love about numbers, and I love about facts, is they don’t lie,” DHS Secretary Mullin puffed during a Trump press conference in July in which they claimed to have uncovered 250,000 registered noncitizens across California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada, including the 190,000 he initially attributed to California. Except of course Mullin’s and Trump’s numbers do nothing but lie. In Nevada, for instance, DHS claimed to have identified 15,903 noncitizen registrants, but, as in California, it later dropped that number—to 185. Nevada officials subsequently found that all of the 185 likely were citizens.

This trend hasn’t stopped the feds from threatening local election officials with prosecution if they don't scrub their voter rolls in conformity with the Admin’s ever-receding, mirage-like data.

In September, Congressional Democrats surfaced a whistleblower who reported that DHS is potentially mis-branding tens of thousands of voters as ineligible simply because they are unable to verify eligibility one way or another. In these instances, the whistleblower explained, DHS encourages agents to create a “Tecs” record on the voter, utilizing a cross-agency system for screening people arriving into the U.S. at border crossings.

According to the whistleblower, DHS instructed agents how to circumvent state laws in order to obtain registration data, including posing as voters in search of their own records. When agents expressed concerns for their own legal jeopardy, they were assured they were “not personally liable for conducting these searches when done as part of their official duties and properly documented.”

The other day, a friend alerted me that a naturalized U.S. citizen and graduate student he knows was stymied trying to renew her federal financial aid when, suddenly, her citizenship status came back unverified. My information is admittedly anecdotal. But ominously, this follows an October 20 press release by the Social Security Administration boasting that it had “updated approximately 25 million records that previously had missing citizenship information,” with another 8.5 million in progress.

One of the few remaining guardrails preventing the U.S. from veering into totalitarianism is that we don’t have national elections, but state elections for national office. Aware of this roadblock, Trump in February brazenly called for nationalizing elections. We are watching this federal incursion into the states’ traditional election domain play out like a gathering zombie invasion.

Read together, Trump & Co’s pre-midterm maneuvers to implement and enforce aspects of the SAVE Act sub rosa foretell their likely scheme to overturn Democratic victories. Already dealt substantial blows by courts, they have at least as good a chance of failing as succeeding. But we must identify the shape of things to come in order to remain vigilant against it.

“The truth is, this has nothing to do with protecting the integrity of our elections,” California Sen. Alex Padilla cautioned in September. “That’s just a pretext. It’s about the potential of using manufactured evidence to intimidate voters, to disenfranchise eligible Americans and even undermine or challenge this November’s election results, a classic Trump play.”2

Given MAGA Republicans’ strategy of pushing on every door to find which ones open (as a colleague put it), it is at once reassuring and disturbing to see two Ninth Circuit Judges shoot down the DOJ’s preemptive election interference in California—with the third Judge acting as a simple rubber stamp.

On October 28, federal District Judge David Carter denied the DOJ’s request to have the 20,000 disputed ballots set aside on the merits of the DOJ’s case, or more precisely the lack of them, warning:

Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch.

Meanwhile, on October 26, the Trump Reich launched its newest attack—on Washington State’s election—demanding the segregation of ballots it deems suspect there.

Such are our victories and vulnerabilities in this too-close volleyball match.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that if the Democrats win control of both houses of Congress in the midterms, they will hatch a plan with “mainstream Republicans” to impeach Trump, and for the Senate to actually remove him from office, based on articles amenable to sufficient numbers of Republicans.

Trump has been a useful idiot to Republicans and their agenda, not least because he afforded them control of Congress. They have played a dangerous, knife’s edge game risking the survival of western alliances, the security of Europe, and the viability of the republic as we know it in order to maintain power.

Remove control of Congress, and the foundation of Republicans’ Faustian bargain crumbles. An increasingly unstable Trump is finally then just a liability for Republicans too, politically and existentially.

Since Vance will run as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in 2028, they will want to disentangle him from Trump’s disastrous legacy, and to showcase him righting the ship of state—if they can.

No longer shockingly, Trump displays actual fascism in his “final battle” midterm election attack ad, recycling a 2024 rant promising to rout “communists, Marxists[,] fascists [and] the fake news media.”

Trump can’t threaten huge swaths of the American left while wrapping himself in the American flag and convincingly pretend to be pro-freedom—except in the eyes of his thirsty-for-dictatorship MAGA faithful.

His freaky new ad, in severely frowning black and white Mussolini-face, might as well be Democrats’ pro-democracy midterm closing argument instead of Trump’s.

But as a bonus, Trump’s base, which was always as durable as the federal government’s credit rating used to be, is actually shrinking.

MAGAts aren’t only pissed about higher prices and the Iran war (in that order), they’re also confused: How can Trump be so straight when he’s more than a little gay? How can he be such a strongman yet cozy up to socialists like NY Mayor Zohran Mamdani? How can he be so free enterprise when he acts kinda socialist himself, e.g. by semi-nationalizing private enterprises such as Intel? Or by bribing the electorate with $1.3 trillion in handouts (as if) in exchange for leaving Republicans in control of Congress?

Maybe it all coheres in Trump’s exercise of the Christian teaching, love the socialist sinner but hate the sin. (Nevermind that Jesus was essentially Marxist.)

Or perhaps Mary Trump is right, and Donald is desperate to assemble an exquisite cadaver of the loving mother he never had from whatever parts of the body politic will hug him back.

Here is Trump in less vituperative form, captured as a refrigerator magnet for sale by Etsy shop badkittymagnets—re-rendered by me in sepulchral B&W to give him back some edge. (I need him to have edge. I hated it when Darth Vader took off the helmet and just became pathetic.)

If Trump lives long enough after he terms out, he can cruise around NYC honking for attention like one of these guys:

He'll roost in the evenings in front of Gracie Mansion, where Mamdani will deliver him warm milk and cookies.

As I type this, I’m listening to Jake Tapper and a panel of legal experts discuss the ‘merits’ of Trump’s revocation of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico’s White House press credentials.

The mere fact that we are having this conversation is a five alarm fire.

“There is something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely [sic] negative stories,” Trump said Friday after announcing his ban.

Not quite. There is something wrong with a country whose president thinks he can cancel press freedom, a pillar of our constitutional democracy.

Trump’s pet DOJ lawyers are invoking national security in defense of his caprice. The national security threat is Trump himself.

This is not an issue on which reasonable minds can disagree. It’s an issue on which Trump, a fascist, disagrees with democracy.

It is insufficient for the D.C. federal court to order Donald Trump to restore the White House press credentials of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico in their lawsuit against him. Trump knows barring them for their unflattering coverage of him is plainly unconstitutional, and he acknowledges he’ll lose. Just as he has lost prior such attempts, notably against CNN’s Jim Acosta.

The way to stop Trump’s recursive, anti-First Amendment temper tantrums is to sanction him personally in an amount sufficient to deter a person of tremendous wealth and a big mouth(piece).

Trump’s legal flunkies (aka lawyers) should not be heard to complain that Trump has presidential immunity, because Trump’s retaliatory actions are so far beyond “the outer perimeter” of his official duties as to fall in outer space.

More specifically:

• A president is sworn to uphold the Constitution, not defile it like a diaper.

• Retaliating against news organizations because he does not like their “purposely [sic] negative stories” about him is the behavior of a whiny baby, not a president.

• Repeatedly violating the same First Amendment principles, and so soon after getting spanked the last time, is the behavior of a tyrannical tot, not a president—as is making professionals have to keep cleaning up his same legal messes.

• A baby cannot be president. Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution.

• Ergo, Trump, a baby, should not enjoy presidential immunity for his mess now before the Court.

Trump will cry bad judge and possibly sue someone. Let him. For now, courts, like parents, trump Trump.

To my MAGA friends (I’m not sure I in fact have any MAGA friends, but rhetorically speaking):

Both the North Korean and Iranian regimes have long been intensely hostile toward the United States and its Western allies.

In the case of North Korea, Trump’s diplomatic denuclearization pressure failed as of 2019, and he effectively accepted its new ICBM delivery capability against the United States. Trump has not bombed North Korea’s nuclear program, and North Korea has not attacked the U.S.

Conversely, Trump never gave diplomacy a sincere chance in Iran. In 2018, he tore up Obama’s working nuclear deal, and in February of this year he abandoned the Oman-mediated negotiations and began bombing Iran’s nuclear program with Israel, to no proven avail except murder and mayhem.

Iran now has every incentive to race toward completion of The Bomb—as would virtually any country in its circumstances with the resources.

When the dust settles, the United States will likely have the same old foes in North Korea and Iran, each possessing new nuclear capability.

But unlike in North Korea, Trump’s war against Iran will have cost over $44 billion, thousands of lives, massive property destruction (including to U.S. bases and military hardware), and the depletion of U.S. interceptor stockpiles, some of which could have gone to Ukraine to defend its cities and civilians against Putin’s barbarism.

Against these facts, how could one conclude:

• that Trump’s attack on Iran was smart, effective, necessary, worth the human and economic tolls on both sides, or even honestly about trying to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions (as opposed to, say, distracting people from the Epstein files); or

• that any civilian population has been made any safer by Trump’s actions?

MIRI (the nonprofit Machine Intelligence Research Institute) warns that on the current AI trajectory, “the expected outcome is human extinction,” and exhorts that our top priority should be creating an off-switch. The fact that the very captains of AI industry are sounding the alarm lends unprecedented credibility to the dire prediction.

The purpose of this post is to crowdsource development of a literal circuit breaker system designed to trip automatically and cut power to AI compute in an emergency.1

This is akin to a “dead man’s switch,” but designed to trip before we die. It’s different from other proposed ‘kill switches,’ which leave selective action in the hands of government or industry itself.2

I refer to AI (what we have now) and AGI (AI that broadly equals or exceeds human cognition—what we are racing toward) jointly as AI, since the seeds of AGI-generated human extinction (“X-risk”) are already sewn into the AI field.

The idea is this:

• Install dumb, mechanical, decentralized, disconnected-from-the-internet circuit breakers at the power connection point to every data center and other facility operating AI computing resources above a defined threshold, which are

• defaulted to automatically trip and cut power, at the same time once per week the world over, unless the power is affirmatively left flowing by a human systems operator at each facility within not more than three hours before each weekly worldwide shutoff event.

This could:

• Start out as crypographically- protected software switches while a hardware system is built out;

• Be overseen by an international body that sets minimum standards and specs;

• Be implemented country-by-country through law, regulation, and inspection;

• Skirt the problem that AI developers can’t/won’t pump the brakes themselves despite asking to be regulated, because they’re in an international arms race. That is, an AI circuit breaker system wouldn’t in of itself require developers to pause, slow, or do anything differently at all now (but would function like laboratory sprinklers that self-activate unless overridden);

• Become known to AIs themselves, such that they might hesitate before eliminating the hands they need to keep the power on;

• Enable us to focus jointly on a single, simple (by comparison to other approaches), tangible, initial solution;

• Facilitate straightforward inspection and whistleblowing; and

• Serve as an emergency backstop while we continue to discuss and implement other guardrails.

Needless to say, there is no guarantee we would foresee an emergency, or heed it by following the circuit breaker protocol. AIs could conceivably build themselves into corporeal existence in order to prevent the power from being cut, or to turn it back on. But it is farfetched at this stage to imagine they could conceal such a plot from us.

We simply can’t afford to stake our survival on nebulous goals that spawn endless expert debate and depend on levels of idealism that defy human nature and history, such as self-limiting government or industry action, pending more work on alignment between human and AI goals. Before then, we need ways to bottleneck the genie’s escape and vacuum it up the moment it does.

This stop gap proposal need not be perfect to be worthwhile. We wear seatbelts even though they can’t prevent fatalities in sufficiently energetic collisions. Meanwhile, nothing in this proposal prevents us from pursuing more holistic and long term protections—against both AI and tech-capitalism run amok.

Implementing such a circuit breaker system would also require us to:

• Engineer the hardware interrupt switches;

• Develop necessary treaties, conventions, laws, regulations, best practices, and individual facility manuals;

• Keep improving the system;

• Keep pursuing other guardrails; and

• Make sure our older broadcast communications systems work in the event of major internet disruption.

In the best case scenario, we’re facing a massive, chaotic, viral, electronic swarm that will wreak havoc on the internet and world economies and make McAffee and Norton look like two klutzes waving butterfly nets at it.

MIRI points out that AI need not be malevolent to harm us, but simply pursue the tasks we assign it—or its own goals, like resources, efficiency, and survival—according to basic evolutionary principles which render the human race irrelevant, or worse, an impediment.

MIRI warns against the fallacy of thinking we even have a 50 percent chance of survival if we do nothing, likening this to saying, “I’m either going to win the lottery or lose it, therefore my odds of winning [are] 50 percent.”

I suspect that among the reasons we are not united in a frenzy is that this threat arives amidst global conflict, despair, and pre-existing existential challenges which already feel overwhelming. We are living inside of a surreal choose your own apocalyptic adventure game, in which life can feel cheap and expendable. This leaves us somewhat numb to our potential demise, or even feeling like we deserve to be replaced.

Conversely, the upsides of coming together to avert annihilation by AI, on top of continued existence, include a revitalized sense of our human worth, and the potential to bridge divides which pale in comparison to a common alien threat.

Update and bibliography, as of 9/15/26

At least one other person, Jesper L., proposed much the same idea in LessWrong on October 22, 2025 (“Dead-switches as AI safety tools”), which I had missed in my initial research.

See also, “What would an ‘AI kill switch’ do?” by Peter Hall (edited by Eric Sullivan) in Scientific American.

I don’t suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, I tell myself. Mine is a healthy immune response to the malignancy that is this monstrous man. But I do tend to boil over with frothing resentment. This can’t be healthier than it is helpful, and it doesn’t seem helpful. When I really seethe, it feels internally corrosive, like a cytokine storm.

Combined with others’ frothing, the therapeutic effect, if any, is to release pressure onto those nearby, receiving their relieved pressure in return. This creates an excited system, but it also dulls us into thinking this ferment is power in itself, even if we aren’t turning any turbines of change with it.

Trump isn’t just the cause but a symptom of grave sickness in the body politic. He could not have metastasized but for multiple systemic breakdowns, including elitist Democrats’ lack of economic solutions for millions of working people, while presuming their fealty simply because, the insider hectors, ‘the other guy is worse for you.’

To constantly vent our spleens at Trump is to ignore this broader biology and to surrender some belief in our agency to fight wider Trumpism—a project that will be with us after the tumor-man self-excises with age. Spleens, properly channeled, yet have a considerable role to play.

One reason we know our outrage is an insufficient cure for the Trump cancer is that he stokes and thrives on it. His maker scooped everything out of his brain that isn’t marketing savvy to make room for that single (unstable) genius. Among Trump’s mantras, “controversy elevates message.” We feed ourselves like fuel to his propaganda machine by supplying raw rage, which the punditocracy refines into controversy, and Trump burns to amplify his message and sell his power. He operates on the same algorithm as the social media we decry (which happens to be the same algorithm human news programmers employ, but we overlook it because they run on DNA not digital code).

Does this mean we should just tune Trump out? Of course not. We ignore him at our peril, especially the peril of the vulnerable among us on his target list who do not have the privilege of sidestepping him. Clamping the pillow over our eyes and ears until the nightmare ends may itself be a dream because Trump and the Christian Nationalists he is clearing a path for are determined to make theocracy permanent.

But clasping our heads like Munch’s Scream and exclaiming “The Horror!” at every turn is no way to live either. Besides, to a proto-fascist who separates the population into loyalists vs. traitors, and real Americans vs. those unworthy of membership, it hardly matters what Democrats, liberals, socialists, and leftists think of him. We are unlikely to climb out of this totalitarian tailspin unless Trump’s acolytes turn on him too. (Fortunately, there are signs of this. The bankruptcy of his ideas are their own self-destruct mechanism, as his plummeting approval ratings attest, in the wake of attacking Iran to distract us from the Epstein files, which has raised gas prices, inflation, interest rates, and the national debt. To say nothing of mass murder of Iranians, but MAGA minions don’t care about that.)

We can’t deplatform a president, the commander of the bully pulpit and a praetorian police force (ICE), except by methods which have already failed, i.e. not electing him (again) and impeaching/removing him from office.

In short, there is so much to scream about but so little utility to screaming. Is there not a more productive way to rid ourselves of Trumpism: one that is less toxically chemo and more holistically herbal?

For starters, we have a problem with the proportionality of our response to Trump’s provocations. It is natural to assume that the more obnoxious he is, the more shrill and sustained our reaction should be. But the opposite may be true. The more oxygen we expend arguing with crazy, the crazier we make ourselves. Compassionate people feel daily gaslit by a kleptocratic conman who rose to power by dog whistling to bigots, consolidated his grip by siccing us on one another, and maintains control by torching every institution that impedes him—while rebranding his authoritarian flexes (like mass voter suppression) as defense of democracy (“stop the steal”).

As if this weren’t disorienting enough, the fact that we have to scream the obvious to unflinching legions of brainwashed countrymen to (still fail to) break the spells that bind and blind them is dissociating enough to make us wonder if we’re the patients in the asylum.

We generally don’t stop to trade insults with delusional strangers on the street. Parents avoid arguments with toddlers in the throes of temper tantrums. Trump is a tyrannical tot. To pick up the other end of the rope in a tug of war with a malignant narcissist is to reinforce his delusion that he has a rational side to the dispute.1 Trump is a narcissist to the n’th.

Our private eruptions don’t reach Trump, but they do give us heartburn and expel hot gas at our family and friends. Our public outrage, rebroadcast by politicians, pundits, and polemicists, feeds the aforementioned algorithmic loops. It creates ‘respectable’ debates on subjects about which there should be none, from whether undocumented children must be ripped from their immigrant parents and ‘deported’ to countries they barely or never knew, to whether queer people’s civil rights should be abridged, to whether the U.S. has a calling to invade Greenland.

35 years ago, a wise man named Amos Tuckahoe who resided in Berkeley’s People’s Park advised me to “disregard authority, not disobey it.” Tuckahoe was referring to the U.C. Police force’s constant harassment of the houseless. He didn’t mean roll over and take it. He meant, resist strategically, substituting some ass-dragging inertia for direct confrontation. When Herman Melville’s character Bartleby the Scrivener declined to do any scrivening, stating repeatedly, “I would prefer not to,” his employers were vexed trying to justify firing him.

Certainly, resistance demands a diversity of tactics, along with collective expulsion of anger. And collective action supplies both solidarity and security. I’m not here in this essay to judge or rank forms of resistance. But it is worth noting that a lot of oppressive state machinery, which turns on direct disobedience of law and authority, would run low on grist if we practiced more oblique disregard of it—in Amos Tuckahoe’s creative sense of the term.

In a free-ish society, street level revolt nets mostly short jail stints for participants. In a totalitarian one, ordinary activists become convicts and corpses. We’re currently well on our way toward the latter. Witness the federal sentencing of eight ICE detention center protestors in Texas in the Prairieland case to terms of 30 to 70 years for providing material support to a terrorist, aka a ninth person who shot and injured a police officer who himself drew his gun on the group, even though the only other criminal acts alleged involved property damage, and several of those convicted had left the scene before the shooting.

We can’t afford to disregard Trump, but we don’t have to match his vitriol, or take unnecessary chances that make us targets. Whether by design, or unintentionally accruing to the benefit of our overlords, half the controversies we’re at each other’s throats over are abstract to our lives, siphoning attention and energy from the half which deeply affect us. Protesting Trump’s ICE hunts, detentions, and deportations of course matter hugely. On the other hand, endless TV roundtables on his vanity projects and threats to invade allies and annihilate “enemies” just take his bait.

We might try flipping the script and reacting in inverse proportion—in manner, degree, and duration—to how crazy, sensational, and offensive Trump’s behavior is. This means talking under, not over, his tempestuousness. It means meeting his ridiculousness with Situationist absurdism, like Portland’s protest frog ‘ribbitstance’ to ICE and the threatened deployment of National Guard to “protect” them.

It means, in essence, focusing strategically and giving Trump fewer f**ks, because he is a zero and deserves no f**ks at all.

Diverging responses to Trump’s declaration that Lake Ontario is now Lake America illustrate the point: Google and Apple tuck tail and quickly change their maps to comply. Commentators wring their hands for days, amplifying Trump’s insult. But Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney politely and succinctly tells Trump to go f**k himself, schooling him that Lake Ontario has been so-named for 400 years, predating the formation of both countries, and exhorts Trump to “stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough,” and return to the trade negotiation table.

I do have Trump Derangement Syndrome. Not in the sense that Trump isn’t so bad. In the sense that he’s so bad I need to stop inflating him.

This is great news for Steyer and his supporters. Currently running third behind Trump endorsed Republican hopeful Steve Hilton—in a race in which only the top two finishers advance to the general election—the contest will have to be done over. So win or lose in this rigged round, Steyer will get a second chance.

Dum[b]ocrats thank Trump for his objective, calls-it-likes-he-sees it election oversight.

“You have a really rigged vote in California,” Trump clairvoyantly predicted to reporters on May 20. “You have all the mail-in ballots, everything else … If we had Jesus Christ come down and count the votes, I would have won California because I do great with Hispanics.”

Trump did not explain how, as Jesus Himself, he was not able to come down and ensure his own victory in California.

Evidencing California’s rigged count, Democratic contender Xavier Becerra overtook Republican Hilton on June 5, a full three days after election day.

Everyone knows that in a fair system, the candidate who first takes the lead continues on to victory. It's just like in football: the team that puts points on the board first always wins. Duh!-mocrats.

Trump doesn't just admire and seek to copy Putin domestically but also in Iran, where Trump has:

• Started a war of aggression and conquest over resources;

• Pretended it is for humanitarian purposes;

• Branded it something less, i.e. an "excursion" (compare to Putin’s "special military operation”);

• Bombed and threatened to bomb civilian infrastructure and civilians, in flagrant acts of state terrorism and in violation of international law;

• Gotten outwitted;

• Gotten quagmired;

• Covered up the true extent of military losses; and

• Attacked the media for accurately reporting and editorializing on the facts.

Next look for Trump to use the catastophe he created as a pretext to control or suspend the midterm elections.

See Al Jazeera

Do not be reassured that:
Two days after a federal grand jury declined to indict Senator Mark Kelly and five other Democratic lawmakers for putting out a video warning that “threats to our Constitution” are coming “from right here at home”—and reminding service members that they can, and should, “refuse illegal orders” under the Uniform Code of Military Justice—a federal judge rebuked Hegseth for retaliating against Kelly and trampling his First Amendment rights by trying to bust him down in rank from Navy Captain.

The First Amendment is not supposed to have to depend on historically spineless grand juries and nerdy judges (no offense to nerds) to thwart glaring frontal attacks on it.

Worse than exacting political retribution, Trump and Co. appear to be casting about for extrajudicial ways to reduce Democratic numbers in Congress. It's easy to imagine House Republicans following the would-be indictments with resignation pressure on, or outright expulsions of, the four of six targeted Congressional reps.

A few weeks ago, I sought to reassure myself and others that one immutable bullwark of our so-called democracy is that we don't hold national elections, but state elections for national offices.

Then Trump’s DOJ raided the election office for Fulton County, Georgia, reviving bogus claims of election theft, and Trump called on Republicans to “nationalize” elections.

Trump and the Christian nationalist theocrats he's clearing the way for are looking to undermine every institution that stands between them and absolute power. The judiciary may be checking Trump for now, but Trump is checking it—for weakness—as his administration openly flouts court orders.

The federal judiciary is not without enforcement power, but it has the least might of the three branches of government. For coercive effect, the courts depend on the U.S. Marshalls Service—under the command of the DOJ.

Don't rest easy.

I had an extraordinary day in court yesterday, and not as a lawyer.

I was shocked to watch the staff of a major metropolitan traffic division, from the Judge down, treat a large number of defendants with kindness. The staff and the forum shall go unnamed lest I undermine their exercise in decency, since courts are not ‘supposed’ to work this way.

I happened to be visiting a close friend who needed to resolve a moving violation from 2012 to renew her license, in order to get insurance, in order to drive for her livelihood—one of many hurdles to rebuilding her life after years of torment and financial ruin by men. She wasn’t even aware of the citation from that fugue decade until the DMV referred her to the City’s collection agent, who informed her she had a warrant for a failure to appear and fines totaling $3,000.

My friend is white, U.S. born, and earning a good income again. She can manage the sum. I accompanied her to help her angle for a reduction and avoid traps which might compound instead of alleviate her dilemma, such as admitting she’s been driving for years on an out of state suspended license.

I exaggerated a bit above. She mostly works from home and drives for fun. She’s got friends in high places and has subsisted on their largesse and loaner vehicles for years while building herself back up. She’s trying to get clean on paper and legit behind the wheel of her own new car, not just trying to pass go without getting sent straight to jail or thrown off the board entirely.

The stakes were probably higher for her mostly brown-skinned, ESL-speaking (if that) fellow citation holders. For many of them, getting legit on paper is existential. That they even showed up in court says something about their straits, since the system makes it pretty easy to resolve one’s ticket online by paying the full fine. I wondered how many of them had to gamble they wouldn’t run into ICE in the corridor. I can’t imagine the terror of having to seek succor from one bureaucracy while trying to avoid the lions of another.

None of this is new or unusual in our predatory society, in so many ways still a barely civilized jungle. What was novel yesterday is that the court staff clearly understood all of this on a human level, and cared to model something different; something humane. It began with according everyone basic respect and dignity. Inviting and answering questions, not dismissing people with on-high refrains, like ‘you should have talked to a lawyer before you got here,’ or ‘sit down, be quiet, and wait till you're called.’

To be sure, court staff cannot dispense legal advice, nor is there time for such individualized attention. But it was how they declined. I heard the Sheriff’s Deputy/Bailiff gently assure a women, “you’ll be fine.” In a branch of the court where lawyers are seldom scene (the indigent have no right to appointed counsel for mere infractions—the bulk of traffic citations), the Deputy virtually acted as a defense advocate, inquiring just enough into the facts of people’s cases to present the exonerating ones to the Judge (such as, “the red light camera photo clearly does not depict the defendant,” or “he has evidence of his repairs”). The Judge often then would dismiss the case before the Deputy was finished speaking or the defendant could even make it to the podium.

The Deputy informed the crowd that staff wanted to keep it moving, and they did—but opposite from the way I’m used to seeing: not as a greased downhill skid toward convictions and fines, but in a way designed to maximize rights and dismissals.

At that the staff was amazingly well-oiled and efficient. The Deputy re-seated people in the courtroom before proceedings so as to remember and present their particular circumstances to the Judge. The two clerks kept it all straight, making corresponding minute entries in the record and generating the paperwork people needed, and delivering it to them in the hallway after the session ended.

When a clerk promised a defendant who had lost his paper fix-it ticket that she would print a copy for him for a cop to sign off on before he returned to court, I thought to myself, she’ll forget to do that.

She remembered.

The Judge squinted at his computer, scanning for procedural bases to drop cases, because, as he reminded the assemblage, he is not empowered to hear and decide disputed facts at a cattle call arraignment, where the purpose is only to receive pleas and set the “not-guilty” ones for trial.

It clicked: The Deputy had reassured a defendant ‘you’ll be fine’ not to politely deflect her, but because he knew her case would be dismissed. My friend and I joked that we had stumbled into Oprah Court: “....And you get a dismissal, and you get a dismissal...”

This did not mean the Judge cast the law aside. It meant he leveled a courtroom full of defendants who lacked lawyers by supplying for them the sorts of procedural defenses any trained lawyer would know to assert for them. This is not heroics; it’s basic fairness. But in a society in which government is targeting masses of people who are just struggling to survive and keep their families intact—mirroring some of our darkest periods in history—such decency stands out in stark relief.

Beautiful too was that the group of citation holders responded in like kind: civilly, graciously, and by heeding the clear instructions, including to not waste everyone’s time arguing facts the Judge could not consider anyway.

I imagined I was watching a better society take shape in the most unlikely of venues—one I have always associated with the crass authoritarianism of the personalities it typically selects for, namely people who are not only comfortable with, but sometimes sadistically revel in, destroying the lives of others. (Until we treat that basic societal sickness, we will continue to suffer leaders who would sooner commit mass murder than allow the lens to linger on their personal and political failures. But that’s an essay for another day.)

When the one, obligatory, excess oxygen-sucking man clung to the podium to plead the details of his case, getting into more of a tête-à-tête with the Judge than anyone else, I whispered to my friend that this could be good for those who followed him. If you sit through a court session processing a large number of people, you will often see the judge lower the boom on the standout rude or annoying one, then compensate by showing extra solicitude to those who follow. I predicted that the Judge was about to hammer him.

Wrong again. The Judge practically steered the man through his own self-sabotaging minefield and illuminated for him his most promising path forward. (Ironically, he was there to challenge a ticket for having a loud modified exhaust system, and you could just about convict Muffler Man by listening to him exhaust personally.)

I had my friend prepared with scripted and branching notes, ready for various contingencies.

The Judge called a woman forward. As she rose, the Judge said, “You’re case is too old, dismissed.” She thanked him and veered off before even stepping through the gate. Ordinarily, a judge would leave it to a defendant to present that defense at trial, not furnish it to her at arraignment. After all, she might have bumbled into a guilty plea and accepted a hefty fine.

I nudged my friend that she should shoot for the same outcome. The Judge called her case next and promptly pronounced: “Your case is waaaay too old, dismissed!”

I wondered: Is there a natural response to Trump and MAGA cruelty, which our polarizing media algorithms don’t broadcast, which takes the form of decent people exercising some of their privilege and power to ameliorate the suffering of others? It seemed like it in that courtroom yesterday. There was an air of hopeful solidarity.

The world today and all of human history are dominated by stories of ‘tremendous’ assholes. There’s simply no distinction in being another one.

One has to be roasting in Boulder, Colorado on an unseasonably hot winter day as I presently am (what is “unseasonal” any more?) to fully appreciate the outrageous absurdity of dismantling NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, based in Boulder.

But according to stable atmospheric genius Trump’s budget director, NCAR “is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”

In actuality:

NCAR is the birthplace of nearly 60 years of scientific discovery. NCAR scientists built computer models of the individual components of Earth’s climate system. Of the atmosphere and the ocean. Of the land surface and marine biogeochemistry. They coupled those components together in full Earth System Models, which capture many critical features of real-world climate. They democratized climate science by making their computer models freely available to the global research community.

(“Threatening NCAR, Trump administration seeks to extinguish a beacon of climate science,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December 19, 2025.)

It's too bad climate change isn't a precision munition that only targets its deniers.

I met up with an environmental activist friend yesterday, who has been around long enough to have helped levitate the Pentagon. We agreed that a hurricane will probably handle the levitation of Mar-a-Lago for us.

But when it comes to climate catastrophuck, having been correctly alarmist is no solace.

Those with brains and hearts are left waiting for Scarecrow Trump and Tin Man Vance to blow back out of O(z)ffice.

Then maybe in 100 years it will snow reliably in Boulder in the winter again.

He can't legally do it.

He can direct the DOJ to resume the process which Biden lamely began, and expedite it, and maybe even cut some corners off of it.

But Trump does not have the authority to reschedule marijuana with a stroke of his golden pen.

Which doesn't mean he won't do it.

It turns out, we all know now, he can legally do whatever he can't legally do.

The astonishing thing is not that Trump might unilaterally semi-pardon cannabis. It’s that we're so collectively whipped by him that even our news purveyors hardly pause to fact-check whether Trump’s plans for pot might be ultra vires (lawyer-speak for beyond authority).

That or we have such bipartisan munchies for legalization that we light up at this little offering of fragrant fascism.

I'm not refusing the gift, I'm just saying…

What if Trump's Grinch-green present is designed to trick us into conceding he's allowed to rule us by fiat? Or just helps to cement that reality?

Maybe I'm conspira-cizing because of the 2/3-legal weed I vaped tonight. Maybe we'll wake up into a series of sunnier tomorrows—if a bit later each day.

After all, what is fascism if not joint sleepiness? 🤪

UPDATE:

Trump in fact directed the DOJ to resume and expedite rescheduling.

If you've been following the federal courts’ scattershot decisions on Trump's domestic troop movements, you may feel a bit spun around. One week democracy has a good day in some district, then a week later, another jurisdiction starts the military dictatorship juggernaut rolling toward us again.

To an outside observer, the whole spectacle might appear as fickle as the Italian trials and appeals (convictions and reversals) of Silvio Berlusconi and Amanda Knox.

The federal court system is a porous vessel for justice, increasingly cracked by Trump’s appointed flunkies. In this upside down world, leftists are left wishing his picks were real not pretend federalists who placed a true premium on states’ rights.

Cracked but not fully shattered. Even Trump appointed judges are capable of understanding that dictatorship is bad for commerce—and some actually care about civil liberties.

For instance, on October 4, Trump-appointed Oregon federal district Judge Karin Immergut stopped Trump from unleashing the National Guard on Portland, admonishing:

This country has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs. … This is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law.

Thanks and duh! But seriously, thanks, we need some duhs.

On October 20 though, two Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judges of a three-judge panel—also Trump appointees—reversed Judge Immergut and gave Trump his toy soldiers back, ruling: “The evidence the President relied on reflects a colorable assessment of the facts and law within a range of honest judgment.” (Citations and internal quotes omitted.) As if!

The third judge on the panel—Susan Graber, a Clinton appointee—vehemently dissented, writing:

[T]oday’s decision is not merely absurd. It erodes core constitutional principles, including sovereign States’ control over their States’ militias and the people’s First Amendment rights to assemble and to object to the government’s policies and actions.

But another court round is likely coming, and the pro-democracy frogs have better field position heading into it.

Here's why we the frogs are positioned to win the next legal round:

Judge Susan Graber, the Ninth Circuit dissenter, suggested that the whole Court reconsider (rehear) the matter “en banc." That means the Court will now have to decide, by a simple majority vote of its active judges, whether or not to do so.

The standard is high, and the Ninth Circuit rarely grants en banc rehearing. If my (that is, ChatGPT’s) stats are correct, in 2024 the Court chose only 29 times to consider granting en banc review, and elected to do so in only nine cases. In seven of them, the en banc panel modified the outcome of the case.

But a case of this magnitude—a significant match in the wider dictatorship vs. democracy tournament—has a high likelihood of crossing the threshold of en banc rehearing.

The Ninth Circuit Numbers:

• The “whole Court” is not the whole Court. Rather, an en banc panel consists of 11 judges out of the Court’s total active 29.

• If a majority of these 29 judges vote to rehear the Portland Guard deployment case en banc, then 10 randomly chosen ones among them, plus the Court’s Chief Judge, will form the en banc panel.

• The Court's Chief Judge, Mary Murguia, was appointed by Obama.

• Of the Court’s other 28 active judges, 15 were appointed by Democrats, and 13 by Republicans.

• The three Panel judges who sided with Trump in the original decision are excluded from participating, unless any of them is a “Senior Judge,” in which case that judge can choose to remain eligible for random en banc panel selection.

• The two Panel judges who decided the Portland Guard deployment case in Trump’s favor—Ryan Nelson and Bridget Bade—were appointed by him. They are not Senior Judges and are disqualified from sitting on the en banc panel.

• However, the dissenting Judge, Susan Graber, who was appointed by Clinton, is a Senior Judge and therefore may allow herself to remain in the selection pool.

Factoring this all in, there is (according to ChatGPT) an 86 percent likelihood that if the Ninth Circuit votes to rehear the Portland Guard deployment case en banc, the 11-judge panel will feature a majority appointed by Democrats.

That ups Portland and Team Democracy Frogs’ prospects. And as we've seen, even Trump appointed judges (and country music singers bravo!) can align with the Constitution, compassion, and the rule of law.

In addition, the en banc consideration process could take a few weeks to play out, likely staying Trump's boots off the ground for now.

So rejoice! The federal judicial system is no more erratic than a sport in which we the frog people can leap to victory from time to time …

… at least until the Supreme Court cuts our legs out from under us again.

But not today or tomorrow, Satan!

🐸🐸🐸

(Re my collaboration with ChatGPT: Take heart that while it worked for a few minutes total on the tasks I gave it, I spent several human hours writing this piece.)

1. NAME IT:

U.S. Fascism is not sneaking up on us, it is here, manifest in Trump’s authoritarian decrees; mass deportations, firings, and government and military purges; appointment of incompetent loyalists; attacks on free speech; limits on reproductive freedom; subordination of science to religious dogma and crackpot conspiracy theory; and federal invasions of U.S. cities—’justified’ by an onslaught of lies (viz., propaganda), favoring ‘real Americans’ (his supporters) over his perceived enemies (everyone else, especially the undocumented, trans people, ‘the left,’ and late night talk show hosts).

2. RESIST—STRATEGICALLY AND EFFECTIVELY:

Resist every assault on your and others’ liberties, in some manner and to some extent. But do so in ways that do not harm you or your communities, or bind you up in legal chains, sapping the resources of your supporters. Be mindful of surveillance, but don’t snitch jacket your comrades. Don’t unnecessarily paint yourself as a target, or take Trump’s bait. His invasions of U.S. cities are not designed to quell danger but to foment it, in order to manufacture violent flashpoints as pretexts to enact steps in his fascist playbook, toward the declaration of martial law and suspension of elections.

3. UNITE ACROSS IDEOLOGICAL DIVIDES

Make common cause with people you disagree with, emphasizing mutual goals. Now is not the time for sectarianism and purity tests. Build community and bridges of understanding. Yield on issues that are not pertinent to the current struggle, and live to argue the finer points another day. Model tolerance and patience, and give other people the opportunity to evolve toward the principles you hold dear, as you did.

4. INTERRUPT HATE

Terrorizing vulnerable and marginalized people is among the lowest forms of humanity. Today’s xenophobes, transphobes, and homophobes are last season’s racists and antisemites (interchangeably, ad infinitum). Their bigotry may seem fashionable to them now, but history will send them scurrying for the shadows, like Nazi SS officers after WWII. Help them tell on themselves by whispering their names to their descendants. Promise them the long memory of the internet. Live out loud and proud, and normalize diversity and tolerance not supremacy and bigotry.

5. DON’T BE THE ADMINISTRATION’S MOUTHPIECE

In every struggle against authoritarianism, there are those who rebroadcast the oppressor’s condemnations of their fellow resisters, in a futile effort at appeasement. This achieves nothing but to shorten the fascist’s staircase to domination. The ‘liberal’ media’s fawning eulogies to Charlie Kirk garnered no sympathy from Trump; they just helped him launch his wholesale attack on ‘the left’ from an elevated position.

6. SPEND PRIVILEGE; EXTEND COMPASSION

Consider ways of spending privilege (wealth, white skin, cis maleness, citizenship) on behalf of those who have less of it, such as by speaking up on their behalf in the workplace. Go out of your way to extend meaningful support and compassion to Trump’s targets, including especially undocumented immigrants and trans folk.

7. EXERCISE STRENGTH IN NUMBERS

It is more effective for a multitude to resist a little than for a few to resist a lot. If one person steps out of line, they get clobbered. If a few people step out of line, they get arrested. If hundreds or thousands of people step out of line, they move the line.

8. BOYCOTT AND STRIKE

These are time-tested, effective ways to exercise strength in numbers. You may ask, won’t those who prefer dictatorship boycott and strike back? Let them try. There are more of us who prefer democracy. Don’t excuse corporations like Disney who claim to have to make ‘hard’ choices about which customers to appease. There is no hard choice between fascism and freedom.

9. VOTE

There is privilege in pretending voting doesn’t matter, or that the choice is only between Coke and Pepsi. For vulnerable populations in Trump’s crosshairs at home and abroad, his rule is a matter of death, deportation, government sponsored bigotry, Handmaid’s Tale-style patriarchy, sickness without science-based treatment, and even more massive bombing, displacement, and starvation.

A lack of informed ballot exercise got us into this fascist mess and it might get us out—if we have another true national election. Curse the system, curse Democrats, curse older generations, but put checks in the not-fascist boxes—or spend the rest of your life trying to claw back the right to do so.

Though elections are not the end, they are a crucial beginning of civic engagement—especially now that we are on the cusp of losing them.

10. BE PATIENT, WITH YOURSELF AND OTHERS

People are hurting, scared, and confused. The fascists have blueprints (like Project 2025), while resisters have no obvious manual for stopping them—though Filipino Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa’s book How to Stand Up to a Dictator is instructive. We are learning how to navigate this daunting new reality as we go, and we will make mistakes. Adapt and persevere.

11. BONUS: REMEMBER TO DANCE

Make merriment, make art, and have more fun than the frowny fascists. In the (not exact) words of Emma Goldman, dancing draws the revolutionary crowd!

On September 26, Timothy Snyder puzzled over why Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would summon the military's top brass to show up in person from around the world to a murky meeting in Virginia next week (“Hegseth puts us all at risk”):

1. He has some trivial thing to say and does not understand the risks.

2. He wishes to endanger the lives of the generals and admirals.

3. He will stage a purge, perhaps involving a loyalty oath or something similar that requires personal presence.

4. He will tell the commanders that henceforth their assignment will be to oppress American citizens (‘homeland defense’). This could be combined with the third scenario: those who refuse will be fired.

Hegseth’s summons could itself be a loyalty test, designed to sort those who heed it from those who complain or refuse, creating a bootstrapping excuse for the Trump Junta to purge non-loyalists, now or later, based on the “legal” justification that they refused to obey orders.

This on top of any loyalty tests which Hegseth might administer at the Virginia Meeting itself.

Hegseth/Trump need not and probably wouldn’t purge military ranks en masse now. They could simply hold refusals to obey orders now (or outspoken criticism) over the heads of generals later, as a means of manipulating them into doing Trump’s dirty bidding on U.S. soil.

It appears Trump may be rushing to consolidate totalitarian control before the midterm elections--but still going at it stepwise with a patina of legality so as not to awaken too much opposition from Republicans too quickly. (Perhaps he also thinks he can avoid roiling markets.)

Trump’s chilling rhetoric and burgeoning repression against the left, in addition to distracting from his Admin's own perfidies, may help “justify” the declaration of martial law and suspension of elections if/when the backlash grows, at which time Trump will depend on maximum military obeisance.

Look for the Supreme Court to play its rubber stamp part in any purge of the ranks.

Trump is already busy manufacturing pretexts to satisfy steps in the authoritarian playbook, such as broadly targeting his claimed enemies on the left, based unrelatedly and a-historically on the reputed politics of Charlie Kirk’s accused lone assassin.

There's little hope that U.S. democracy, such as it is, will survive this onslaught and capitulation. But identifying Trump's plays before they unfold, to counter his propagandistic narratives, might go some way toward stirring meaningful opposition in Congress and the courts before we kiss 160 years of relative freedom (since the Civil War) good bye.

Update:

On September 27, Trump announced he is dispatching U.S. troops "to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists," and "authorizing Full Force, if necessary." He has not said what kind of troops.

Let's be clear:

• Portland is not "war ravaged;"

• Antifa is not a group, but a political stance meaning "anti-fascist;"

• The Posse Comitatus Act flatly prohibits deploying military as domestic law enforcement;

• Local authorities have not requested and do not want U.S. troops policing Portland streets;

• Trump has no lawful authority to short-circuit the extensive body of law governing police use of force by authorizing federal troops to kill protestors on his say so;

• Trump is heedless of these facts.

That Trump is heedless of these facts is more evidence that he is not reacting to dangerous circumstances but creating them, in a concerted plan to mint himself as the first U.S. dictator.

The only doubt left in Trump's mind is what exact sequence of false flags and engineered flashpoints will pave his way there.