Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, is about to become the latest example of what you might call the Trump Boomerang Effect.

Shortly before airtime on Sunday night, Weiss pulled a piece by 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi about Venezuelan migrants being sent to CECOT, a brutal Salvadoran prison. The ostensible reason was that Stephen Miller—Donald Trump’s Joseph Goebbels—was not in the piece. But CBS News, which thoroughly vetted Alfonsi’s work, had repeatedly asked the Trump Administration to provide an official to be interviewed for their side of the story.

Alfonsi wrote in a note to the staff on Sunday night that the decision was “political” and if not reversed would give Trump veto power over 60 Minutes:

If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient.

Big props to Alfonsi for standing up.

Here’s what I’m confident will happen next: Weiss will scramble to protect her reputation. This piece will run soon—probably next Sunday—and will get monster ratings. Weiss will then learn the lesson that Bob Iger absorbed when ABC briefly bent the knee to Trump, who wanted to kill Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Trump’s intimidation boomeranged and made Kimmel bigger than ever. Just as Trump can no longer mess with late-night, he won’t be able to force Weiss to kill stories he doesn’t like. She will continue to be careful about CBS News’ coverage of Trump, but won’t want to be seen as caving again.

The Trump Boomerang Effect extends widely and will be even more powerful after he leaves office. Consider the preposterous, embarrassing, and illegal re-naming of the Kennedy Center as “the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” To get a sense of how crazy that is, consider that there was never a Stalin-Bolshoi Ballet or a Mussolini-La Scala Opera House. It’s clear that four or eight years from now—whenever Democrats make it back to the White House—this desecration will be removed. The same goes for “The Trump Institute of Peace” and the other government buildings he’s plastering his name on. A few years ago, tenants in a New York apartment successfully had his name removed from their building. We’ll see that in Washington.

Trump Tower will remain, of course, and he’ll eventually have his name on his presidential library and maybe a few other places that he and his family personally pay for. But even with their new billions, the Trumps are too cheap to shell out much on something that doesn’t go into their own pockets. Most of the Trump “friends” who are helping pay for the White House ballroom and other projects in exchange for government favors will disappear once pay-to-play ends. Every time he names something for himself, he’s tossing a boomerang—and lessening the odds of others naming something for him after he’s gone.

Maybe Israel, where some call him Cyrus the Great, will name a street for him. Or Russia. Or Hungary. El Salvador could rename CECOT in his memory. But that’s about it. Without the leverage of the presidency, it will take only a few determined opponents to stop something, even in red states. Is it possible we’ll see some MAGA cultist propose a “Donald J. Trump Elementary School” somewhere? Sure, but the school board will have a slight problem explaining why he’s a good role-model. Richard Nixon carried 49 states in 1972, and he had only three schools to show for it—in Iowa, New Jersey, and Liberia. All were named for him when he was still in office.

The best comparison might be to Senator Joseph McCarthy, who died in 1957. Just as “the McCarthy Era” entered the language, “the Trump Era”—the one we’re living in now—will be remembered for decades, maybe centuries. But there is nothing named for McCarthy in his hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin, where even MAGA Republicans have no interest in honoring him. At his peak, McCarthy stood at 50 percent in the Gallup Poll, higher than Trump has ever been. Then he fell. History always gets the last laugh.

Percy Bysshe Shelley got it right in his 1817 sonnet, Ozymandias, right down to the sneer:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

This piece appeared originally on the Subtack, Old Goats with Jonathan Alter

The post The Trump Boomerang Effect: Bari Weiss, Meet Ozymandias appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Like many of you, I’m terribly upset about the deaths of Rob Reiner and Michele Reiner at the hands of their mentally ill son. I knew and admired both of them and treasure our interactions over the years. They were fine human beings who are being properly eulogized by those who knew them better.

But let’s talk for a minute about President Trump’s reaction to Rob’s death.

This morning, while Rob and Michele were still at the morgue, Trump posted that Rob “passed away reportedly, [I’m not sure where he got that “reportedly”], due to the massive, unyielding and incurable affliction called Trump Derangement Syndrome.” In other words, Trump is saying that Rob died because he was a critic of Trump.

Think about that for a second. That’s not just the kind of malignant narcissism and sociopathic behavior that should lead (but won’t) to using the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. It’s a level of cruelty that is almost beyond imagining.

Now remember, this is the President who said that anybody who criticized Charlie Kirk should lose their job, or worse. And at the time, it really was wrong to attack Charlie Kirk when he was fresh in his grave.

So if anybody who criticized Charlie Kirk in the days after his death deserved to lose their job, why doesn’t Donald Trump deserve to lose his?

Finally, there’s a potential now for a little posthumous justice that Rob and Michelle would have appreciated. This is a chance to hold Republicans at least a bit accountable for enabling Trump’s depravity. So every reporter covering any Republican in any state needs to ask that Republican what he or she thinks of what the president said about Rob Reiner, and we’ll see how they answer.

We’ll see whether these Republicans can utter even the most minor criticism of the indecency of the man they consider to be their master.

I think Rob and Michele would have liked the question.

The post Trump’s Sickening Sociopathic Shots at Rob Reiner appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Pardons go back to ancient Mesopotamia, 4,000 years ago, and they haven’t improved with age. I’m currently writing a book about Julius Caesar, who employed “clementia”—clemency—extensively in the closing days of the Roman Republic. After Caesar’s civil war, he pardoned two guys named Brutus and Cassius, and we know how that worked out.

Caesar pardoned enemies to get them to his side. I’d be shocked if Trump has ever read anything about Caesar, but he’s taking a leaf from him. Witness Trump’s anger at Representative Henry Cuellar, indicted on federal bribery charges, when Cuellar wouldn’t switch parties. “Such a lack of LOYALTY,” Trump posted, suggesting that the congressman didn’t seem to understand that he was expected to uphold his end of a blatantly corrupt deal aimed at holding the GOP’s narrow House majority, which may be imperiled even before the midterms.

In the (good) old days, that kind of quid pro quo would have landed Trump in hot water, but it is almost quaint in the context of the 1600 pardons Trump has granted since 2017, including his appalling decision to free the convicted January 6 insurrectionists. More than a dozen of these gentlemen have since been convicted for offenses ranging from homicide to child sexual abuse. The blood of the victims of those crimes is on the hands of the Orange Monster.

Those pardons—as sickening as they seem—were mostly about owning the libs; Trump’s more recent pardons are about owning a yacht or an estate or an island, thanks to a huge payday for someone that we can’t see. With Trump, it’s always about the Benjamins.

But some form of accountability is coming. House Democrats are likely to take power about a year from now. They’ll hold hearings that at least try to get to the bottom of Trump’s pardons-for-profit crime syndicate.

We can expect to see scorching oversight hearings that explore Trump’s pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had pleaded guilty to facilitating money laundering on the crypto exchange. Families of October 7 victims are suing Binance over use of this money by Hamas. Then there’s Trump’s commutation of the seven-year sentence of former private equity CEO David Gentile, who served only four days in prison before Trump sprung him.

I heard from a good source that the House might subpoena Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan of Pronomos Capital to hearings about the case of “JOH”—John Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, whom Trump pardoned this week. There’s nothing that can be done to send Hernandez back to jail, where he served less than four years of a 45-year sentence on charges of aiding drug traffickers. The pardon power is in the U.S. Constitution and not subject to reversal.

But think about where we are now. Trump’s policy in Latin America is cognitive dissonance on steroids—pardoning drug traffickers from one country (Honduras) while waging war on drug traffickers from another (Venezuela).

A little background on the Hernandez brothers at the center of this scandal. The story starts not with JOH’s brother, Tony, who took a million dollar bribe from “El Chapo,” ordered assassinations, alerted drug traffickers to U.S.-led nighttime raid, and pumped drug money into his brother’s presidential campaign, as prosecutor Emil Bove convincingly explained in his closing argument (Yes, that Emil Bove, who defended Trump in the Stormy Daniels trial, wrecked a strong case against New York Mayor Eric Adams for crass political reasons and got a federal judgeship out of it.).

In truth, the greed at the heart of this case begins in 2017 with the establishment of Prospera ZEDE, a charter city on the island of Roatán, Honduras.

What’s a charter city? It’s a libertarian nirvana—a free-enterprise zone that operates under its own legal and regulatory system, insulated from nearly all national oversight. Prospera is a small, unfettered, autonomous capitalist kingdom that’s free to regulate itself—or not—as it pleases.

Who’s behind it? Ridiculously wealthy and arrogant broligarchs who are using cryptocurrency and crony capitalism to write their own rules while steamrolling anyone who stands in their way. You almost certainly know something about Andreessen, a true internet entrepreneur (Netscape, anyone?) who put his once-liberal principles in a blind trust and went over to the Trumpian dark side, and Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder who is J.D. Vance’s mentor and once said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Balaji Srinivasan, the former chief technology officer of Coinbase, is less well-known but possibly even more dangerous. Srinivasan, who believes that the tech industry should move abroad, wrote in an email to the self-described monarchist Curtis Yarvin, “If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment [Yarvin] audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to their advertisers/friends/contacts.”

As you might imagine, these crypto-colonialists are not exactly popular in Honduras, where the enabling law for Prospera ZEDE (one of several charter cities) was repealed in 2022. For years, the company’s biggest Honduran champion was none other than John Orlando Hernandez.

Fast forward to November 30, when Honduran voters went to the polls in an election where Prospera was a top issue. Election authorities cited incidents of “manipulation and sabotage” and the results are not yet final, though former Tegucigalpa Mayor Nasry “Tito” Asfura of the conservative National Party —JOH’s party—holds a narrow lead.

Trump, who backed Asfura, told Politico he pardoned Hernandez because his conviction was “an Obama-Biden-type setup.” He said he had been “told” this by someone. That turned out to be Roger Stone, whom Trump pardoned in 2020. Stone wrote that pardoning former president Hernandez would energize the National Party before the election, which he cast on his Substack as an ideological showdown between leftists and Trump’s authoritarian friends in Latin America, Javier Milei of Argentina and Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, who are strong backers of Prospera.

Sure, Trump likes libertarian thinking—on everything except the libertarians’ core issues of open immigration and reproductive rights. But this struggle isn’t blue vs. red; it’s green, as in money, not environmentalism. Prospera is a more opaque Cayman Islands—a place for Trump, his family, and his thuggish friends to feed at the trough without anyone knowing.

It’s no coincidence that this is all taking place in the Western Hemisphere. Trump, Xi, and Putin are carving up the world into spheres of influence, where strongmen can have their way in their own neighborhoods. The headlines in the stories about last week’s new national security doctrine focused on U.S. warnings of “civilizational erasure” if Europe didn’t control immigration. But the real takeaway is that the U.S. doesn’t even see China and Russia as adversaries anymore; they are barely mentioned. That’s how much their might-makes-right attitude has seeped into our own government.

The United States once stood for freedom. Now it stands for freedom to steal.

The post Trump’s Secret Pardon-for-Profit Racket appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Of the five big news stories of last week, which one will be most remembered by historians? Let’s rank them from least likely to most likely.

“Quiet, piggy”

That was a horrible thing for the President of the United States to say to a [Bloomberg] reporter. If anyone else—from a First Grader to a CEO—said something so vile, there would be consequences. Yes, presidents sometimes snap at reporters. Franklin Roosevelt once told someone to go sit in the corner with a dunce cap. But FDR was usually nice. Trump is usually mean, especially with women reporters. It was outrageous for him to threaten ABC News reporter Mary Bruce with lifting ABC’s license just for asking a question about the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was, according to the CIA, cut up with a bone saw on orders of Mohammed bin Salman, the man sitting at Trump’s side.

“You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial,” Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question.”

Disgusting. Bloomberg and ABC News issued statements backing their reporters, but that’s not enough. When something like this happens, reporters and their news organizations should get together and demand an apology. If Trump refuses, they should boycott the news conferences. And one of them should say something in real time, rather than just stand there silently. How about: “Why are you so rude, Mr. President?”

Trump needs the legacy media more than people realize. He doesn’t want to just be talking to Fox, Breitbart News, and Newsmax. These bigger news organizations have the leverage that they need to start using. Media is his oxygen, and if he’s denied it, he’ll fold.

Mamdani meeting

Trump is a master programmer, and he understood that flipping the script on the man he routinely called a communist would be good TV. But it was also kind of logical when you think about it. They need each other. Mayor-elect Mamdani needs Trump because he has to have money from Washington, or New York City will be thrust into chaos. And Trump needs Mamdani to latch onto the affordability agenda, which he has to start identifying with if he’s going to have any hope at all in the midterms. Besides, they both genuinely love New York. My guess is that in private, Mamdani learned the Zelensky lesson (adopted by every leader who meets with Trump) and found something to praise, perhaps the Trump family’s record on building middle-class housing.

Even so, I expect this agreement to last less time than the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact—the fascist-communist pact, to put it in the context of this strange White House meeting, which ended with Trump telling Mamdani in front of the press that it was OK to call him a fascist. (Mamdani did not give Trump permission to call him a communist.) The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, by the way, broke down in less than two years, and I give Mamdani and Trump about six months before Trump finds some excuse to go after the new mayor.

In the meantime, if Mamdani can somehow convince Trump not to send ICE and troops onto the streets of New York City, maybe we can avoid the prospect of some knucklehead throwing a Molotov cocktail at someone, which would give Trump an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and plunge the nation much deeper into crisis.

Ukraine deal

Speaking of the Russians, this so-called peace plan that Steve Witkoff wrote with the Russians—there’s actually Russian language in there—is a nonstarter. It demands that Ukraine give up territory that Russia took by force and reduce the size of its army in exchange for the kind of vague security guarantee that Russia has repeatedly violated. I don’t think it will be remembered by history because it’s just the opening move in what will likely be an unsuccessful peace effort. If Trump were ever able to ram a treaty down Ukraine’s throat, you can expect that Ukrainian partisans would continue to resist. Trump is making Neville Chamberlain look like Winston Churchill.

The Epstein files

Yes, this scandal will bedevil Trump to the end of his term, but it’s important to remember that there’s not likely to be evidence of law-breaking by Trump, or by anybody else, because the FBI has had these files for a while. If somebody needed to be prosecuted, the way Ghislaine Maxwell was, that would have happened under Biden.

So what we’re likely to see is highly embarrassing material, not just about some people we may not have heard of much yet, but about Trump. That’s why he has been so desperate not to release the files, and why he and Mike Johnson will do anything they can to find loopholes in the new law and otherwise delay things. Trump always says Nixon should have burned the tapes, but destruction of evidence is much harder to do here, fortunately, without some career official (or IT guy) leaking it.

My guess is the big news will most likely involve what Michael Wolff says was called “The Pussy Committee,” which the mainstream media will have to find a euphemism for. (I wish Wolff and I had discussed it here, though we covered a lot of what he knew long before most of the press started paying much attention). “The Pussy Committee” was Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein’s jokey interest in pimping for Prince Andrew—finding him women so they could social climb. When the files come out, get ready for Trump to be called “President Pimp.”

“Punishable by death”

The story of this week that I think is most likely to leave a lasting impression when historians write about the Trump Era is that the President of the United States threatened members of Congress with execution for their “seditious behavior” in telling the military that they are not required to carry out unlawful orders. They aren’t. That’s the law. It’s also the right of these members to say so under the Constitution. Real sedition is what happened on January 6.

I’m a little unsure about their timing. Why now? But this was nonetheless an important thing for Senator Mark Kelly, Senator Elissa Slotkin, Representative Jason Crow, and other fine legislators (all veterans of the armed forces or the intelligence community) to get out there. It put down a marker. Conscientious members of the military now understand that if they are asked to do something illegal off the coast of Venezuela, say, or in another context, they can go to Congress for help.

The larger point is that we have never seen anything approaching this in American history. Even the worst despot does not publicly threaten his critics with death. Of course, the story will be infinitely worse if the death threats that these members of Congress are now receiving were to end in violence. But even if they don’t, Donald Trump trying to back off a bit on a rightwing radio show doesn’t cut it. He should be censured by the Senate and the House for what he said.

The post The Most Historic Trump Story of Last Week appeared first on Washington Monthly.

I first met Paul Starr in the summer of 1978 when I was working as a college intern in the speechwriting office of Jimmy Carter’s White House. I remember thinking how smart he was, and sure enough, a few years later in 1984, he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Social Transformation of American Medicine. That book is so important that you cannot understand the history of medicine in the United States without it. He did something similar with The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, and he’s written a ton of other insightful stuff from his perch as a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton. In between, he co-founded The American Prospect. Starr’s new book is American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now. It offers a significant and convincing new theory of how we have come to this sorry pass in American public life.

Note: This interview originally ran on the Substack Old Goats with Jonathan Alter with no paywall. Subscribe to Old Goats to support Jon’s work.

***

JONATHAN ALTER: Thanks for doing this, Paul. First, how do you describe what you call “the American Contradiction”?

PAUL STARR: The title works two ways. First, it’s about the contradiction between the America of Obama and the America of Trump. The subtitle of my book is “Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now.” The first half covers what I call the American revolutions of the 20th century. Where we are now is the politics of revenge—the negation of many post-World War II changes in race, rights, and gender.

On a larger scale, though, the United States was born in the contradiction between freedom and racial slavery. Throughout history, this underlying conflict has shown up in many forms. The argument of my book is that the struggle against the legacies of slavery—against Jim Crow—became the point of departure for a series of movements, from civil rights, to feminism, to gay rights. The Black struggle set a paradigm for legal, cultural, and economic claims, and other groups picked up those models. The reaction against them has been formative for the country, and we’re now in the throes of the most radical reaction yet.

JONATHAN ALTER: Let’s dig into that. Clearly, we’ve never had a reaction of this type from the very top. That’s what’s different: Trump is president. In the past, right-wing demagogues didn’t have that much power. But some people say American history is like a sine curve—periodic ups and downs—and extrapolating from the present ignores that pattern. So, shouldn’t the cyclical nature of our history make us more hopeful? Think of the Palmer Raids and the KKK resurgence after WWI, but then FDR helped the country recover from that.

PAUL STARR: Parts of the past are encouraging, and you’re right, with Roosevelt, we recovered from the reaction in the 1920s you mentioned. But we were lucky. It didn’t have to turn out that way. I like Larry Bartels and Chris Achen’s book Democracy for Realists—it shows recovery depended a lot on who happened to be in power during the Depression. Luck played a role. There’s no guarantee the sine curve always brings us back; we don’t know that things must ultimately be progressive. What I do believe is that the threat to the Republic is now the most serious since the Civil War.

JONATHAN ALTER: So, your view is that when King or Obama said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” they were being idealistic?

PAUL STARR: It’s a happy illusion—useful as inspiration for presidents or movement leaders. But I don’t think analysts should assume any inevitability about it.

JONATHAN ALTER: I don’t assume inevitability, but I look at places like the Philippines, Brazil, or even Hungary today [Orban is very unpopular]—where eventually the worm turns, even where democratic traditions are weaker than they are here. In South America, 50 years ago all but Venezuela were dictatorships; today all but Venezuela are democracies in some form or other. Things aren’t fated to recover, but neither are authoritarian takeovers fated to last.

PAUL STARR: Absolutely. There are lots of countries oscillating between authoritarianism and episodes of democracy. Our history’s been mainly positive, with strong institutions. But one lesson from Trumpism is that those institutions aren’t as strong as we thought. Trump has trampled checks and balances, the courts haven’t always upheld rights as we assumed, and that’s different. The real danger is not just Trump’s attitude toward democratic norms, but also the Supreme Court, which lately has embraced radical changes enabling more presidential power. The threat is the combination of an unchecked president and a willing Court.

JONATHAN ALTER: Let’s go back—you use the metaphor that America isn’t a city on a hill, but a city on a fault line. What do you mean?

PAUL STARR: It’s in contrast to the “city on a hill” image, which Reagan popularized. There’s a big underlying rift—an unresolved contradiction—that periodically quakes our society. It’s as if America were built on a geological fault. We have tremors and the risk of an earthquake that could reduce [the Republic] to rubble. That’s the danger we’re facing, in ways most didn’t think possible.

JONATHAN ALTER: Like what? What did you not think would happen?

PAUL STARR: I didn’t expect the federal government would send troops into American cities on false pretenses of disorder—that’s happening now. We used to have presidential restraint—for example, with the unqualified pardon clause. Presidents used it within limits. Trump, though, uses it without restraint, and with loyalists placed into the DOJ, FBI, and now the government has the potential to work for personal vengeance. And Trump can always pardon more before leaving office.

JONATHAN ALTER: I’ve written about this as an extortion racket—and we’ve seen a totally corrupted DOJ. But we had that with Nixon, and the scale of things like COINTELPRO’s spying [FBI surveillance in the 1960s and 1970s] was worse. But Ed Levi [Gerald Ford’s attorney general] restored integrity to the DOJ under Ford within a year. So when people say the damage now can’t be fixed for generations, isn’t that historically shortsighted?

PAUL STARR: This isn’t Watergate or post-Watergate. During Watergate, Congress still worked as a check.

JONATHAN: But how strong was that really? Most Republicans stuck with Nixon until it wasn’t politically possible anymore. After the final tape, and with Senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott counting heads, they finally told Nixon he had to resign. Was there really this brave Republican stand?

PAUL STARR: The major difference now is that Trump has a movement, the MAGA movement, disciplining the GOP and discouraging dissent. He retaliates. That structure—a leader controlling both a movement and a party—gives far more personal control than presidents usually have. Congress and the party lack the institutional independence we traditionally expect.

JONATHAN: But isn’t that also because, during Watergate, Democrats controlled Congress? There was institutional balance.

PAUL STARR: Yes, but today’s Supreme Court is another major difference. Nixon lost the tapes case, and even his appointees ruled against him. Today’s Court is far more partisan and much more aligned with Trump. It’s not comparable to what existed before.

JONATHAN: I’m not arguing that things aren’t worse now, just about our powers to recover. Do you think recovery is possible?

PAUL STARR: I think we can recover. But it will take both new popular movements and institutional reforms.

JONATHAN ALTER: You end your book with that hope. Is relying on that a long-range project, or do you see changes we could make in the near term?

PAUL STARR: We need both. I lay out some changes in an American Prospect called “The Premature Guide to Post-Trump Reform,” which I’ve joked could be called “the premature, over-ambitious, and yet inadequate guide to post-Trump reform.” But both popular movements and institutional changes are required—though I don’t have a detailed prescription.

JONATHAN ALTER: Let’s get to the history. You draw a line from the Lost Cause idea, as Southerners described the Civil War, through to MAGA. Some Republicans would object [and say] that’s a cheap shot. They’re not segregationists.

PAUL STARR: I’m not equating the exact pasts, but there is a vision of a lost America Republicans are referencing. For many, it means the 1950s—the “normal” world after WWII. That’s why that era starts my book. I cite a poll: two-thirds of Democrats say post-1950s changes made America better; two-thirds of Republicans say the opposite. The 1950s became the benchmark for normalcy, especially for people who grew up then and later felt jarred by subsequent change. For some, liberation and civil rights were positive. For others, it felt like the loss of moral clarity and consensus. We had this “area of American agreement,” as one NBC executive called it—a consensus politics, which never included everyone, but nonetheless felt solid. Now, people pine for that, and the loss contributes to polarization.

JONATHAN ALTER: Even historians like Louis Hartz in the 1950s developed what was called a “consensualist” school. That said, there was the George Wallace line and also economic nostalgia, like for the 1970s, before deindustrialization. How do you separate resentment about a changing America from the economic anxieties?

PAUL STARR: It’s a tragic coincidence: social movements overturned traditional hierarchies—white over Black, men over women, straight over queer—while economic shifts from technology and policy (free trade, deregulation) undermined manufacturing jobs and economic security in areas built on them. Both threatened the position of working men in different ways. It’s understandable that some felt Democrats weren’t looking after their interests on issues like trade and immigration, and resented the simultaneous social changes. That’s how the working-class political shift happened.

It’s understandable that some felt Democrats weren’t looking after their interests on issues like trade and immigration, and resented the simultaneous social changes. That’s how the working-class political shift happened.

JONATHAN ALTER: You don’t use “neoliberal” much in your book. I have a question about that term and its application to Carter, for example. Carter never deregulated Wall Street.

PAUL STARR: Look in my footnotes—I push back on Gary Gerstle’s Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism narrative. I don’t say neoliberalism caused everything. The term is used too broadly and often isn’t clear.

JONATHAN ALTER: I saw a great piece by David Greenberg about how “neoliberal” is used as a slur, rooted in misunderstandings. It unfairly slanders people like Charlie Peters [my mentor], Gary Hart—people committed to liberal ends but with different means.

PAUL STARR: There’s American “neoliberalism” à la Charlie Peters, and the European variant, which has a different background. I use it in a narrow way: the effort to bring back what used to be called “laissez-faire.”

JONATHAN ALTER: The broad use of “neoliberals” slimes all kinds of Democrats unfairly as if they supported the whole right-wing deregulatory agenda, which they and we at the Washington Monthly never did. The word should be retired.

PAUL STARR: I once ran The American Prospect from Princeton. In our second issue, Bob Kuttner criticized neoliberalism, which our co-founder Bob Reich read as an attack on him. Now he attacks neoliberalism.

JONATHAN ALTER: It shows how careers and positions change. Back to your book. You reminded me that, for long periods, a partisan press didn’t undermine democracy—maybe the fragmentation and intense opinion journalism isn’t as big a problem as it seems. In a way, Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” pamphlet was basically a Substack newsletter. In that sense, the postwar “Cronkite consensus” was unique but maybe the return of the partisan press itself might give us new institutions and movements.

PAUL STARR: In my research, I argue the 1830s penny press—much more partisan—was part of a robust democracy, letting parties communicate with their supporters and drive higher voter turnout. Earlier historians called it the “Dark Age” of journalism, but I saw it as a free market of ideas.

Fact-checking today is much higher than decades ago, but it’s not balanced: one side honors facts; the other, less so. Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” are a symptom. Yochai Benkler’s Network Propaganda tracks stories—on the left, falsehoods rarely reach the major news media like The New York Times; on the right, they often do reach Fox. The media ecosystems work differently.

JONATHAN ALTER: You make a distinction in your book, especially about Latinos, between identifying as and identifying with. What do you mean?

PAUL STARR: Most people think of identity as a matter of identifying as Black, Latino, or white. But “identifying with” means immigrants may aspire to be like successful white Americans, believing in the land of opportunity. Many Hispanics identify as white on the Census—racial categories don’t predict assimilation or political behavior clearly. Hispanic political patterns fluctuate a lot—2024’s vote for Trump isn’t necessarily a trend. There’s been a category error—a POC “illusion”—merging groups that don’t share political trajectories. That worked during the Obama era, but isn’t stable.

JONATHAN ALTER: That suggests Latinos might be becoming more like the Irish, Italians and Jews. Fascinating. Let’s look ahead—what’s the best way forward for Democrats?

PAUL STARR: Progressives and centrists have to find common ground. Old policy arguments—affirmative action, free trade—are moot. New challenges like AI and economic turmoil may require limiting great wealth and monopoly power. Both sides should find common ground on immigration. Most Americans actually favor immigration when managed properly, but Biden’s team squandered early goodwill by failing to control the border and losing public confidence.

JONATHAN ALTER: What about the “popularist” view—crafting positions based on what polls say the base wants, or do you favor bold, even unpopular stances?

PAUL STARR: Popular positions are better, but Democrats need to break stereotypes. New candidates must demonstrate they’re not the “same old” Democrats. Whether it’s progressive or moderate, it has to be a big-tent hybrid. The party can’t succeed if factions turn on each other. Democrats will need someone who’s not strictly in either camp—someone who can balance concerns, even on sensitive issues like trans rights or border enforcement.

JONATHAN ALTER: On immigration, for example, some Latino groups were labeled “pull up the ladder” types if they wanted more enforcement, but the administration missed deeper currents about values and fairness.

PAUL STARR: That backlash even came from other immigrants, pointing out unequal treatment. Immigration has been a social triumph, but the [Biden] administration lost control of the narrative. Many Americans, after Trump, were ready for sensible reform, but Biden’s team missed the moment.

JONATHAN ALTER: Thanks, Paul.

Note: This interview originally ran on the Substack Old Goats with Jonathan Alter with no paywall. Subscribe to Old Goats to support Jon’s work.

The post What Is the “American Contradiction”? appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Amid the barrage of scary news, some Americans are trying to think through what might be possible in a post-Trump era. One idea favored by both parties is a fresh version of expanded national service. The Carnegie Corporation, and the indefatigable Alan Khazei, gathered a bipartisan group in New York last week to explore how to move national service from “nice” to “necessary”—from activities that help the poor to workforce readiness and a lifeline for the Anxious (and soon-to-be-unemployed) Generation, a way to get young people out from behind their phones to meet face-to-face, work together for decent pay on vital projects, and turn down the national temperature.

Most people don’t know that we already have national service. It’s called AmeriCorps, and more than 1.4 million Americans have served in it over the last three decades. AmeriCorps is so popular that when President Trump tried to defund it this year, many Republicans at the state and local level (where the decentralized programs are run) joined Democrats to save it.

Even so, the national service movement needs a shot in the arm. Students from elite colleges are no longer clamoring to join Teach For America, and exhortations to serve can sound musty, especially with so many poorly-designed mandatory community service projects in high schools.

Participants in last week’s Carnegie Summit on National Service—including high-ranking former military officers (e.g., former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin) and Republican governors (e.g., Utah Governor Spencer Cox)—gathered in New York to discuss how to perk up the movement. The preliminary goal is to establish one-year paid “Service Year Fellowships” with a certified non-profit, school, or public agency. Young people between the ages of 17 and 25 would experience a new rite of passage, with a “cultural expectation” that everyone serves.

Carnegie President Louise Richardson suggested that 2028 presidential candidates in both parties “compete creatively” with their national service ideas. That seems doable if the press can start pressing politicians about this with the same consistency they apply to, say, health care plans. Among potential candidates, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (who says “service can save us”) and Vice President J.D. Vance (a believer, at least in his Hillbilly Elegy days) could set the pace. One can envision a shapeshifting Vance using service to scale back his current nastiness and show, as Vice President George H.W. Bush did when running for president in 1988, that he was “kinder and gentler” than his predecessor. Opportunism in the service of service is no vice.

I’ve been attending “service summits” since the 20th century, and this one was a mix of movement veterans from the 1990s and inspiring young activists, united by a belief that a year of service could help unite—or at least de-polarize—the country. And there’s another agenda now, with a welcome unsentimental edge. Much of the focus this time was on national service as an economic pathway. With Gen X, Gen Z, and Generation Alpha (born after 2010) likely to face searing double-digit unemployment by the end of the decade, thanks to AI, national service might return to its roots as a jobs program in the 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt brought the military and government agencies together to put three million young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

The politics of national service were daunting then, and they’re more so now. Spencer Cox, a good man and important supporter of the movement, warned that service cannot be “left-coded,” noting that Climate Corps, a small AmeriCorps project, wouldn’t fly in conservative Utah. Mandatory service, unfortunately, won’t fly anywhere.

But the broader economic and cultural context is well-suited to a revival of the service movement. The most sobering statistic I heard at the summit was that AI might soon cost the economy five million entry-level jobs. Employers will find that young people who have had a service year are a step ahead in sharpening their emotional intelligence and learning the good work habits and people skills they will need in the workplace. With only 2 percent of Gen Z possessing the values that employers want, according to a recent survey published to great consternation in the Wall Street Journal, Service Year Fellowships could play an important role in bridging the gap between what young people want (pleasure, helping others) and what companies need (hard work, achievement).

The good news is that national service is powerfully connected to today’s national conversation, even if it’s not yet part of it. Jonathan Reckford, who runs Habitat for Humanity, recalls Protestants and Catholics building houses together during “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland:

“When people work together, they focus on shared values and create the space for conversation.”

It seems as if the only thing both parties can agree on these days is banning cell phone in schools. Jonathan Haidt, author of the bestseller The Anxious Generation, says in speeches that he doesn’t even have to convince parents that their kids need more IRL human connections that ease loneliness and the burgeoning national mental health crisis: “It’s like pushing on an open door.” A year of service might be just what the doctor ordered.

To get there, colleges have to play a more active role, as John King, leading the way as president of SUNY (which has 370,000 students in New York), explained. Papia Debroy of Opportunity@Work introduced me to the concept of “the paper ceiling,” where applicants lose opportunities because they don’t have the right credentials. I was surprised to learn that only 12 percent of today’s college students live on campus; the rest—mostly at state and community colleges—are juggling work and other responsibilities and could use a paid service year as a bridge from school to work.

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, described a “false dichotomy between skills training and academic learning,” and explained that Brandeis now has two transcripts—one for academics and one for skills. Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America and Teach for All, said that corporate recruiters on campus must be compelled to compete on a more level playing field with those offering service jobs.

Secretary Austin, who sees service in a small-d democratic context (“What strengthens our democracy strengthens our national security”), argued that military recruiters should also present civilian options for those who don’t meet their physical and test-score standards, a much larger group than one might imagine. And the faith community has a natural connection to service. Cox, who says his Mormon mission changed his life, suggested that Charlie Kirk’s assassination “could be a tipping point. People are desperate for something different.”

To get to Khazei’s goal, a million Service Year Fellowships a year by 2030, the non-profit sector needs some re-structuring. Community foundations, many of them extraordinarily well-endowed, should move toward a Rotary Club International model, where thousands of young people are sent abroad on traveling fellowships. These foundations could start underwriting Service Year Fellowships for work at home. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, in outlining his surprisingly successful efforts to confront homelessness, says he has many job openings (with decent pay) in city support services. Bringing organized labor aboard, especially in heavily-unionized states, will be a challenge, as it was to FDR in establishing the CCC, but not an insurmountable one. And the marketing of national service needs an overhaul, with new strategies for tapping influencers. This, too, would be a good project for a foundation.

Retired Col. Robert Gordon, a former aide to Colin Powell and movement pioneer, laid out the challenges of scaling from the roughly 75,000 AmeriCorps service members to the millions necessary to change the country. But scale we must.

Khazei ended the summit with a quote from Margaret Mead that sounds Pollyannish in these grim times, but is indisputably true if one studies the history of social movements:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. It’s the only thing that ever has.”

The post How National Service Can De-Polarize America appeared first on Washington Monthly.

One of my happiest memories as a journalist is traveling with John McCain on “The Straight Talk Express” during the 2000 Republican primaries. McCain let a half dozen reporters ride around with him all day on a small bus. As we crossed rural New Hampshire and later South Carolina, we could ask him anything, and he answered with brutal honesty.

I thought of this the other day when Trump went after one of my Straight Talk seat mates, Jonathan Karl of ABC News. Karl has done a good job pressing Trump about championing free speech in his Inaugural Address, but now saying that it doesn’t extend to his critics. When Trump endorsed Attorney General Pam Bondi’s outrageous claim that “hate speech”—that is, anything critical of Trump—isn’t protected by the First Amendment, Karl asked him about it. Trump said:

“You have a lot of hate in your heart and maybe they’ll have to go after you.”

This struck me as yet more confirmation that this country is no longer in danger of transforming into an authoritarian state, but has now become one, with more bad news ahead. It reminded me of McCain’s line, “Sometimes it’s darkest just before it’s pitch black.”

McCain got a laugh every time with that, but it was a set-up for a surprisingly sunny take on why, if he was elected, things would get better. I’m a thousand miles from sunny now, mostly because we have more than a thousand days before this monster leaves office. (And leave he will, even if he wants to stay). But I’m beginning to feel that we’ll walk through this storm with our heads held high.

Why? Because this was the week when the worse things got, the easier it was to see a few rays poking through the clouds.

On Sunday, Stephen Miller, speaking at Charlie Kirk’s jam-packed Phoenix funeral/rally, said: “The storm whispers to the warrior that you cannot stand my strength.” In other words, the storm is coming, which just happens to be the title of a speech that Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, gave in 1932 when he used the killing of a young Nazi named Horst Wessel by Communists to propel Hitler to power. “The Horst Wessel Song” became the Nazi anthem.

Miller gives new meaning to the Yiddish phrase shanda for the goyim, a Jew whose shameful behavior makes all Jews look bad to non-Jews. He said that anyone who calls Trump a fascist will be investigated and possibly prosecuted, only to find that his repeated use of the word in reference to his enemies was everywhere on social media.

It was gratifying to see Miller himself get shamed in Phoenix by none other than Erika Kirk, whose moving and historically important expression of forgiveness for her husband’s killer—in the spirit of Pope John Paul II forgiving his assailant in 1983—dissipated much of MAGA’s pent-up fury for revenge.

“I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it is what Charlie would do,” Erika Kirk said. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the Gospel is love and always love.”

The president spoke next, and he said, “I am sorry, Erika. He [Charlie Kirk] did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie.”

Classy eulogy, Mr. President. It’s not that hate had no place in State Farm Stadium, but blaming Democrats and the trans community for Kirk’s assassination just isn’t working. While Trump doesn’t have a clue who Horst Wessel was, he and Miller had hoped Kirk’s martyrdom would become a permanent hate delivery system. Thanks in part to Erika Kirk, that does not appear to be underway. Kirk’s memory will power rightwing activism, especially on campus, and purges of Kirk critics will continue for a little while. But longterm, any time someone uses the memory of Charlie Kirk to despise rather than just disagree, someone else is sure to trump local Trumpsters by invoking his widow.

This welcome turn of events came in the wake of what may some day be seen as the most consequential foreign trip of the Trump presidency. King Charles, recognizing that Trump has long been a sucker for royalty, rolled out the red carpet for him. But the ailing king had an agenda: To turn Trump around on Ukraine after he kissed Vladimir Putin’s ass in Alaska. I’ve always liked Charles, who has a social and environmental conscience and was right in much of his criticism of modern architecture. Now he has cancer, and sees it as his role to explain to Trump the elementary history of how England and the U.S, stood strong together against aggression in World War II. The king succeeded in his mission and Trump is now tilting against Russia; officials on all sides are crediting Charles with a diplomatic tour de force.

I know, I know. Mad King Donald is way crazier than Charles’ great, great, great, great grandfather, Mad King George III, and Trump can easily flip-flop. But if he does, Charles, as long as he’s alive, can be counted on to do his duty and invite Trump back for more royal stroking. God Save the King!

Back across the pond, the week started off badly on Monday with Trump’s batshit crazy press conference with RFK Jr., in which both dangerous jerks pretended to be doctors. But if they hoped to convince pregnant woman to avoid Tylenol, they failed. Even MAGA mamas will listen to their physicians.

On Tuesday, Jimmy Kimmel returned to the air and delivered an inspiring rebuke to Trump’s attempts to silence him. More than 30 million Americans watched, either live or on social media and YouTube, a huge number. The Trump stooges at Sinclair and Nextstar didn’t carry Kimmel, and it seemed for a couple of days that his fate was still up in the air. But then these rightwing affiliates relented, a big victory for free speech.

My guess is this happened for two reasons. First, Disney/ABC was holding more cards than anyone realized. The repugnant wannabe censor Brendan Carr, chair of the FCC, infamously told affiliates, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Disney CEO Bob Iger said essentially the same thing to them, though it wasn’t offensive because he doesn’t work for the government: “Nice Monday Night Football we let you air in your markets. Pity if something should happen to it.”

The second reason is that Iger, whose wife Willow Bay is a journalist and dean of the USC Annenberg School of Communication, was afraid of being blamed for America’s slide toward censorship. A longtime benefactor of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Iger got called out publicly by his mentor, Michael Eisner, and basically everyone else he respects. Did he want to tell his grandchildren that he helped kill free expression? So he reversed course. This will have the effect of undercutting all of Trump’s other assaults on the media. Trump will continue to threaten and sue networks and news organizations, but it won’t be nearly as scary.

Also on Tuesday, Trump brought his clown act the United Nations, where he told delegates and fellow heads of state, “Your countries are going to hell.” This was interpreted in some quarters as a threat to the global order but in truth was actually just more unhinged bloviating from an American president who has long since ceased being the leader of the free world. The depressing speech has already been forgotten, except for the hissy fit Trump threw over the stopped escalator and malfunctioning teleprompter, both of which were the fault of White House employees.

On Wednesday, we found out that not only had Border Czar Tom Homan taken $50,000 in cash in a CAVA bag from undercover FBI agents during the transition, but he kept the money. In any other administration, Homan would already be gone. In this one, he’ll stay, which on one level is reprehensible. The silver lining is that it makes a joke of his argument that immigrants should be ripped from their families for overstaying their visas or receiving a couple of traffic tickets. Homan’s hypocrisy will handcuff him on TV as he tries to rationalize ICE cruelties.

On Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey was indicted on felony charges of making a false statement to Congress. This was a sickening abuse of power. Trump moved from threats of retaliation to directly ordering an indictment, as only despots do. Even Andrew McCarthy, a retired rightwing judge who wrote a book critical of the Russiagate story, told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo that Comey didn’t lie to Ted Cruz and the case should be thrown out.

I argued on Harry Litman’s podcast, Talking Feds, that Trump’s rank corruption of the Justice Department closely resembles the abuse of power that forced Richard Nixon to resign in 1974. But I don’t think we have “crossed the Rubicon,” as some have suggested. As bad as things are at the now-dysfunctional DOJ—so bad that the FBI may not be able to connect the dots on the next terrorist attack—none of it is irreversible. After Watergate, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter moved quickly to restore the integrity of the department and a Democratic president can do the same in 2029. In the meantime, if Democrats win the House next year, they should impeach Trump in early 2027 and try him in the Senate even if he’d likely win acquittal again. His victory in 2024 does not remove the need for some sense of constitutional accountability. The 2019 and 2021 impeachments were not futile exercises; they put down historical markers establishing that Trump’s behavior is unAmerican. The next impeachment would do the same.

In the short term, as Trump starts indicting others who have done nothing wrong, he should be forced to explain why he isn’t going after the treasonous criminals who stole the election from him in 2020. I thought he wanted to “stop the steal.”

My sense is that Trump is headed toward choppy political waters, and not just because he will mismanage the government shutdown, as I argued in The New York Times. The next “No Kings” rally will take place on October 18 at hundreds of sites around the country. This will likely be larger than the one on June 14, which was the biggest one-day protest in U.S. history. A storm may be coming, Stephen Miller. But it’s not the one you had in mind.

The post Good News in a Bad Week appeared first on Washington Monthly.

We all know that it’s only a matter of time before a significant number of children in this country start dying of entirely preventable infectious diseases. That’s what happened in American Samoa in 2019, when 83 people, mostly children, died of measles after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. convinced authorities there to be skeptical of the vaccine.

Now Bobby’s bringing his rancid act from the island to the mainland, and it’s no coincidence that measles cases are up nearly fivefold so far this year over 2024. With Kennedy gutting the CDC and imposing his anti-vax views, we can expect to see more outbreaks. When Roald Dahl’s seven-year-old daughter died of measles in pre-vaccine Great Britain in 1962, it was a tragedy; today’s unnecessary deaths are more like sins.

Sins are moral failings that go beyond kookiness and unintentionally destructive idiocy. As I’ve written before, RFK Jr. is—like his boss—a person of poor moral character. He’s a serial liar, as senators conned by Kennedy at his confirmation hearings now seem to understand. But it’s a little more complicated than that. Kennedy’s mendacity—again, like Trump’s—is powered by projection.

In Thursday’s hearing, Sen. Maggie Hassan, who has a 36-year-old son with severe cerebral palsy, grilled Kennedy over his claim that everyone can get the COVID-19 vaccine. She noted that if the CDC doesn’t recommend a vaccine, most insurance companies won’t cover it. “Everybody can get the vaccine,” Kennedy insisted, though he admitted elsewhere in his testimony that it depends on which state you live in. Then, with Trumpian flair, he added: “You’re just making things up to scare people, and it’s a lie.”

Hassan didn’t miss a beat: “Sometimes an accusation is a confession.”

Touché. But amid all the acrimonious back-and-forth, ordinary Americans could be excused for not knowing who was lying. That’s intentional, and right from the Roy Cohn playbook that Trump learned decades ago. Cohn worked in the early 1950s for Senator Joseph McCarthy, as did a young and, at the time, conservative Robert F. Kennedy, whose namesake was born in 1954, the year of the Army-McCarthy hearings. That’s when the junior senator from Wisconsin was exposed by an attorney named Joseph Welch as a liar and creep, lacking any decency.

The RFK Jr. hearing had no such historic takedown. Our politics are too fraught for that. But there was one exchange when even an anti-vaxxer could see for sure that Kennedy was full of shit.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren was grilling him on why he fired CDC director Susan Monarez after saying a month ago that she was “unimpeachable” and highly qualified for her job.

Kennedy replied: “I told her that she had to resign because I asked her, ‘Are you a trustworthy person?’ and she said no.”

Warren was incredulous: “This is not what she has said publicly. So you’re saying she’s lying?”

Kennedy: “Yes.”

So let’s get this straight. Kennedy is saying that Monarez admitted to him in—what?—some kind of confession session that she was a really bad, untrustworthy person. He adds that Monarez then lied by writing in The Wall Street Journal that she was fired for refusing to go along with the recommendations of an advisory panel that Kennedy stacked with anti-vaxxers after firing the real scientists.

Whom to believe? Hmm…tough call.

Mark Twain once said that a lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on. Nowadays, it’s not just specific lies, but the shameless Trumpian pride in lying—the toxic projection of it onto innocent parties—that is metastasizing.

Senators in both parties grilled Kennedy not just because he’s harming public health. They resent him staining their institution with his disdain for them and for the truth.

Unfortunately, this may be the wave of the future. While Democrats, including members of Kennedy’s family, are calling for his resignation, polls of Republicans show that RFK Jr. is Trump’s most popular Cabinet secretary. He’s “tanned and jacked,” as an admiring Jesse Watters said on Fox last week, and almost certain to try again for the presidency.

In the 2028 GOP primaries, Bobby could do well against J.D. Vance, who is also a serial liar but lacks RFK Jr.’s bad-boy glamour and appeal to former Democrats. He’s also a tool—“Trump’s angry intern with a Wi-Fi connection,” as Brian Krassenstein, whom Vance cursed out on X, put it. You can bet that Trump—if he’s blocked from running himself, per the Constitution—will create mischief by toggling between them. That should be fun to watch, though it means that if the Democrats don’t get their act together, our long national nightmare may be only beginning.

The post RFK Jr.’s Lies Stain the Republic appeared first on Washington Monthly.

A couple of weeks ago, I was fatalistic about the outrageous Epstein cover-up. As the story faded from the headlines, it looked as if Donald Trump’s patented combination of delay, distraction, and denial would work once again. Aargh!

No more. Now I think Trump is scared, and the Epstein story is like a bad case of herpes that lies dormant for weeks but doesn’t go away for a long time. Why else would he pull out all the stops with House Republicans and warn that anyone pushing for the release of the Epstein files would be seen by him as engaging in a “very hostile act”?

The New York Times reports that efforts to circumvent House leadership with a discharge petition and bring this matter to the floor have “stalled” two votes shy of the six Republicans needed. So maybe Trump’s thuggish threats have once again bought him some breathing room. As Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern told the New Republic, “The Rules Committee Republicans are scared shitless of Donald Trump, to put it bluntly.”

But the politics of the Epstein story remain treacherous for Trump. Instead of the usual partisan lines, the MAGA base is split over it, with nut job Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene demanding the release of the files and nut job presidential adviser Laura Loomer manning the X barricades for her man:

Over at Project Veritas, rightwing provocateur James O’Keefe assigned one of his undercover subordinates to surreptitiously tape a DOJ official saying that the department will redact the names of Republicans and release the names of Democrats implicated in the files. O’Keefe may have wanted to expose the longtime “deep state” official and it will surely cost him his job. But the tape also reflects O’Keefe’s criticism of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s conduct.

If that wasn’t tricky enough for Trump, there’s a new potent force in this story: Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, who have turned from terrified 14-year-old “Jane Does” into intrepid and hugely sympathetic warriors for transparency and justice. Wednesday, September 3, 2025, the date of their news conference in front of the Capitol, may be remembered as the beginning of the first real accountability of Trump’s second term.

One after another, the women struck exactly the right tone in asserting themselves and placing the responsibility for squelching the files where it belongs. “I’m no longer weak. I am no longer powerless, and I’m no longer alone,” Anouska De Georgiou, a former teen model, said. “President Trump, you have so much influence and power in this situation. Please use that influence and power to help us, because we need it now, and the country needs it now.”

Trump’s response? He called the news conference, sponsored by the mind-bending coalition of Greene, progressive Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, and brave Rep. Thomas Massie, part of a “Democratic hoax.” The whole thing is “irrelevant,” he said.

That’s Trump’s line, and he’s sticking to it, just as Roy Cohn taught him. The problem for him is that it isn’t convincing, even to much of his hardcore base. While some of his sycophants closed ranks behind him on Wednesday, other MAGA influencers—worried that their followers weren’t cool with trashing Epstein’s victims—began backing away, more fearful of losing their social media meal tickets than of Trump. Cover-up options that seemed viable just a few days ago—like pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell—now seem dead.

House Republicans, assuming their MAGA supporters are stupid, thought they could get away with another document dump—this time, 33,000 pages of files meant, like previous “releases,” to put the story to rest.

Nope. Pre-AI, it would have taken days to confirm that only three percent of the documents (mostly meaningless ones) had anything new in them. Now, Democrats and the media could do this within minutes, and no Republicans contested it.

Beyond “irrelevant” and “Democratic hoax,” Trump and the Republicans are trying to claim that the privacy of the young women will be jeopardized if the full Epstein files are released. But the women themselves have refuted that. And Trump’s line that other innocent people will be hurt if he does what he promised isn’t washing, either. The White House has told Republicans on the Hill that those “others” who sexually abused young women are not just Democrats—as Trump alleged during the 2024 campaign—but GOP donors. Trying to protect them from embarrassment is not a sustainable damage control strategy.

So what happens now? Maybe nothing at first, as Trump muddles through. But eventually, Massie’s call for constituents to demand action will at least result in meetings between the Epstein victims and the 31 GOP House members who are women. The meetings may not yield results. Rep. Nancy Mace fled a House Oversight Committee closed-door meeting with victims, tweeting that she was having “a full blown panic attack” and “GOD BLESS ALL SURVIVORS,” then went out of her way to defend Trump.

But I still think more women will now step forward, and their stories will condition the debate over releasing the files. Someone at the news conference used my new favorite line: “Courage is contagious.”

House Republicans, led by despicable Oversight Chair Rep. James Comer, still have various ways to pretend to be investigating while trying to run out the clock. But there’s plenty of time on the clock before the midterms for the herpes to re-surface. “This is not going to go away,” McGovern said. “Sooner or later, we will get those extra two Republicans that would force a vote on the Massie-Khanna bill.”

When that happens, the bill will almost certainly pass, as will a similar measure in the Senate, where Republicans don’t carry quite as much water for Trump as the House ‘fraidy cats do. Republicans in both chambers will be loath to tell these victims that what they suffered is “irrelevant.”

Trump will then be faced with the question of whether to veto the bill. I think he will, out of fear of what’s in the files about him. If he didn’t fear their release, he wouldn’t have had FBI Director Kash Patel tell his people go through the files to flag his name.

Vetoing that bill will be very bad for Republicans in the midterms. And it’s even possible that to save their skins, Republicans in both houses will vote to override it. Call me naive, but do not rule that out.

At the news conference, we heard from a relative of Virginia Giuffre, whom Epstein had hired away from Mar-a-Lago and then abused. She kept a journal that was found after her suicide:

I look forward to the day when money and power do not stop the truth from coming out, and the righteous from prevailing.

That day may be coming.

The post Epstein Files Are Herpes For Trump appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Dictator or mob boss? President Trump seems to be leaning into “dictator,” but I’d argue that Al Capone and John Gotti fit better than Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Of course, Trump could squeeze into their brown and black shirts, too, or at least Herman Goering’s.

On Monday, Trump told reporters, “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator.” And on Tuesday, in that endless Cabinet suck-up show, he doubled down on the d-word: “The line is that I’m a dictator, but I stop crime…So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.’”

Twice, Trump used his patented, “A lot of people say….” This is his way of signaling that the public supports him as he prepares to do something awful. And sometimes it does. During the 2024 campaign, he said he wanted to be a dictator just on “Day One,” which millions of gullible voters bought. Now, “a lot of people are saying” he can be a dictator for all 1,460 days of his presidency because crime hasn’t come down enough. Will that one fly, too?

I don’t think so. Trump is a talented bully, with mad skills at sensing weakness, whether the target of his intimidation is a political party or a person who has dared to cross him. And if Americans have to choose between a firm hand and crime, they choose the firm hand. Crime is only down if it feels that way where you live.

But if the choice is between a true dictator and maybe, possibly reducing crime a bit, and it’s all argued about in an obviously political context? Then the calculation that Trump says the public is making may come out in a different place. Trump is historically ignorant and doesn’t get that the word “dictator” has had a pejorative connotation in the public mind since before World War II.

Americans didn’t sign up for a police state. Voters wanted a secure border but weren’t expecting masked agents to be spread-eagling brown-skinned shoppers at Home Depot. Trump’s numbers on immigration are way down. Now it appears that the same thing is happening with crime. A Reuters/Ipsos poll shows only 38 percent support for sending the National Guard into Washington, D.C., which is almost exactly where Trump’s anemic approval ratings stand.

Trump has convinced himself that he’ll be greeted with hosannas on the South Side of Chicago. But there’s no sign amid $800 million in cuts to successful crime prevention programs that “African-American ladies, beautiful ladies, are saying, ‘Please President Trump, come to Chicago, please,’” as Trump implausibly claimed last week.

“Do not come to Chicago,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker warned in an impressively defiant speech.

If Trump does send in troops, he shouldn’t expect anything good to come of it for him, as the deployments this summer to Washington and Los Angeles suggest. National Guard forces, by law, must leave Washington, D.C. by September 6, and they will likely do so with little to show for their presence beyond picking up some trash. The 60-day occupation of Los Angeles ended with a whimper in July.

Trump may be hoping for a 1968-style confrontation to exploit in Chicago, but he won’t likely get his wish. Pritzker, who is popular on this issue, has told the public — unified and disciplined in its resistance to military occupation — that any Guardsmen who do appear from other states are just doing their jobs and could be court-martialed for disobeying orders. So they should not be harassed.

Can this refusal to be baited by Trump hold not just in Chicago but in other cities in blue states (no red ones, of course, with much higher crime rates) where even one incident could lead Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act? Not clear, but the future of the republic could turn on the answer.

In the Cabinet Room, Trump boiled down his view of the Constitution he took an oath to uphold:

“I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it.”

Having just said he has the power of a king, Trump then tried to take a little of the dick out of dictator: “But it would be nice if they called and said, ‘Would you do it.’”

This latter line sounds as if he’s just responding to the people he is serving. But it’s really the kind of “nice” talk that often precedes a gangland-style execution.

We know that Don Vito Trump learned his knee-capping at Roy Cohn’s knee. Cohn often represented mafia clients (Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, John Gotti), and he passed on some of their charming customs to his protege, who also no doubt learned from The Godfather, the quintessential movie for men of his vintage.

And of course, Trump, like his father, used intermediaries for business relationships (often involving concrete and other building materials) with mobsters in New York and Atlantic City, as I’ve explained.

Trump’s demand for loyalty and vig for his family are familiar from the underworld, but so is his model for running the government. Consider what mob bosses actually do all day. Whacking people is a small part of the job. Mostly, they run rackets. That’s why the use of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act of 1970 has crippled organized crime.

Rackets are managed through extortion, which is a threat that something ruinous will happen if you don’t capitulate. It’s more menacing than mere “leverage,” the word that MAGA types (and even some traumatized victims) like to use for Trump’s shakedown operation. Leverage is when Trump’s Big Ugly bill says that states will get more money for education if they choose to “buy in” to a new education voucher program, but won’t be penalized if they don’t. Extortion (generically, not legally) is when your funding for university cancer research will be killed if you don’t pay up. Or your law partners won’t be able to enter federal buildings to appear in court if you don’t pay up. Or your merger won’t go through the FCC if you don’t pay up. Or your tech CEO will be publicly humiliated if you don’t pay up.

Extortion is Trump’s modus operandi, and the “muscle” he uses to back up his shakedown outfit starts with Maoist public denunciations that carry a menacing message: If you have wronged me in the past or don’t bend the knee now, I’ll not just savage you on Truth Social, I’ll make you spend millions of dollars in legal fees defending yourself.

The weapon of choice is not the garrote or the gun hidden behind the toilet but the threat of investigation. Recall how Trump in 2011 falsely claimed to have sent private investigators to Hawaii to find President Obama’s birth certificate. He was impeached the first time in 2019 for asking Volodymyr Zelenskyy to announce that the Ukrainian government was “investigating” his presumed 2020 rival, Joe Biden. Now, Trump is using that weapon on anyone who dares criticize him. Even if Christopher Krebs, Jack Smith, and John Bolton are never prosecuted, he’ll keep sliming them in the guise of old-fashioned law enforcement. Of course in the old days—i.e. as recently as last year— government officials didn’t comment on pending DOJ investigations; it would violate basic fairness. Now they’re proud to do anything they can to satisfy the boss’s thirst for revenge.

That requires a new, expanded Trump crime family. Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard are using the vast power of the federal government to harass the “enemies at home” that Trump says are more threatening than anything overseas. Bill Pulte is abusing his position as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to malign Adam Schiff, Letitia James, and now Lisa Cook. They’ve all been accused of mortgage loan application fraud without any findings of fact. No matter. It’s just another day at the slime factory.

None of this will change until Trump dies or is forced to leave office. Until then, we should be “going to the mattresses,” as Clemenza tells Michael Corleone, to fight with any (non-violent) weapons at hand. Capiche?

Courage is Contagious.

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