Death by Lightning is a gripping drama about the assassination of President James Garfield, spiced with F-bombs and tawdry sex, not a heavy-handed civics lesson. Yet the four-episode Netflix miniseries is also about the birth of the professionalized federal civil service, with hires based primarily on merit, and the end of a spoils system in which political relationships wholly determine who receives government jobs. Considering that our current president, Donald Trump, is resurrecting what had been left for dead, Death by Lightning provides a valuable service by giving viewers a peek into how government functioned in the bad old days of corrupt, incompetent bureaucracy, if not portrayed with rigorous historical accuracy. 

“Two-thirds of all federal revenue flows through the Port of New York. [Senator] Roscoe Conkling, he controls New York. He’s got the [Republican] party by the balls.” That’s how Treasury Secretary John Sherman introduces the personification of the spoils system during Episode 1 (“The Man from Ohio”).  

Sherman asks then-Representative Garfield to nominate him for president at the 1880 Republican National Convention against Conkling’s choice, former President Ulysses S. Grant. Sherman explains that while he does not expect to win, “we might at least be able to push the party toward reform, lest we yield to the majority view that two terms’ worth of Grant’s grift and corruption merit another.” (So much for Ron Chernow’s labors to cleanse Grant’s reputation.) 

Garfield nominates Sherman with a speech so good it sparks a draft movement for his own nomination that overwhelms Grant and Senator James Blaine of Maine. We learn quickly in Death by Lightning that Blaine and Conkling hate each other, but the script doesn’t bother explaining to viewers that each led a party faction: with Half-Breeds supporting Blaine and Stalwarts behind Conkling. Stalwarts were fervent defenders of the spoils system. Half-Breeds were moderates less attached to the spoils system but not beyond exploiting it.  

Another faction, Reformers—as the name implied—were more committed to civil service reform, and partial to Sherman. In real life (but not in Death by Lightning), Sherman’s Treasury Department in 1877 under President Rutherford B. Hayes led an investigation of the New York Customs House at the Port of New York, which prompted Hayes to replace the collector, Conkling’s right-hand man, Chester Arthur. Hayes nominated Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., whose namesake son would become a reformist President. Conkling and his Senate allies blocked the nomination. Roosevelt died of stomach cancer in 1878 during the stalemate. Still, Hayes was able to temporarily replace Arthur during a Senate recess with another nominee who then remained in the job because Republicans—and Conkling—lost control of the Senate in the 1878 midterms.  

Death by Lightning skips these details in favor of a simpler, fictional narrative in which Arthur is still the Collector—and Conkling is still in the control of the port’s patronage jobs—in 1880. 

So, in the miniseries, once Blaine jumps on the Garfield bandwagon and he and his allies must identify a running mate that can unite the party, Blaine proposes Arthur as he is “the collector for the New York Customs House, through which three-quarters of all federal revenue is amassed,” (the percentage increased between Episode 1 and Episode 2, each being roughly accurate), “negotiates a complex network of job appointments, his generosity repaid in the form of party contributions” and in turn can bring Conkling’s “machine” without putting Conkling himself on the ticket. As Blaine speaks, we see Arthur (played with gusto by Nick Offerman) sampling alcohol that comes through the port, taking an envelope of cash, and ordering goons to beat up an unnamed person who presumably wasn’t towing the party line.  

This paints a harsher picture of Arthur than warranted—I’m unaware of any evidence that Arthur was violent. But, as described in the Arthur biography The Unexpected President by Scott Greenberg, he ignored an early attempt at civil service reform that sought to end mandatory campaign contributions by federal employees and to require new workers to pass civil service exams. Arthur rigged the tests for his political friends and dubiously claimed any campaign tithing was voluntary.  

The collector post was the juiciest plum in the federal government; on top of his salary, he could legally take a cut of any fines levied by his inspectors, who, according to Greenberg, were “frequently overzealous.” In today’s dollars, Arthur took in $1 million annually.  

While Arthur was greedy and corrupt, at least he was competent. Historian C.W. Goodyear, in President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier, noted, “Even reformists agreed Arthur ran a tight—if sleazy—ship.” Despite never having run for elective office, Arthur became Garfield’s running mate, which helped unify the party even though the petulant Conkling wanted Arthur to turn down the offer.  

In Death by Lightning, Arthur convinces Conkling to get over it and support the ticket after Blaine was weakened by a Democratic victory in a September election for Governor of Maine, presenting an opportunity for Conkling to get the credit for a November victory. In real life, Conkling’s allies were placated by a New York City meeting with Garfield in July, after which the Stalwarts believed Garfield would make one of their own Treasury Secretary and give them control of the New York Custom House jobs. But as Goodyear noted, Garfield walked out with a wholly different understanding, writing in his diary, “No trades—no shackles.” 

The importance of the Treasury Secretary is perhaps more crucial than that of the Collector of the Port of New York (which was within the Treasury Department) for understanding the problems with the spoils system. As described in The Presidencies of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur by Justus D. Doenecke, “there were some fifteen hundred patronage posts in the Treasury Department, and [Garfield] did not think that he could cope with a secretary who might be a tool of the Stalwarts. In fact, because of its functions, the Treasury Department was the most important federal agency of all. Its tasks ranged from collecting revenue to regulating the currency, and it daily enforced laws dealing with specie resumption, war debts, and the tariff.” Treasury jobs needed to go to professionals, not hacks, if government was going function at its best.  

In Death by Lightning, once Garfield is elected, he shares with Blaine a “list of appointees” that includes the Mainer for the Secretary of State position. Blaine reacts anxiously, “All the names on your list are, and not one of them is remotely viable. These are all progressives, avowed enemies of the spoils system. They won’t even get hearings. Conkling owns a third of the Senate.” But Doenecke found Garfield’s actual cabinet “remarkably balanced … There was hardly a faction or party leader that was excluded,” with a Stalwart as Postmaster General (albeit one with a good record on using civil service exams) and Blaine as the lone Half-Breed. Moreover, Garfield reappointed five Stalwarts to various New York posts, pleasing Conkling and upsetting Reformers.  

But Garfield moved to replace Hayes’s man at the New York Customs House with a Half-Breed instead of a Stalwart. Again, in Death by Lightning, Garfield is naming a successor for Arthur and, therefore, is taking control of the Port away from Conkling. In real life, Conkling and Arthur had already lost control of the Port, but were hungry to get it back. In both fiction and non-fiction, Arthur publicly broke with Garfield on the record with a reporter. And Conkling and his fellow Republican Senator, Thomas Platt from New York, made the weird choice to resign their seats in protest, believing they would be swiftly re-elected (back then, state legislatures elected U.S. Senators) and infused with additional political strength. The plan backfired, with Garfield’s nominee for collector rapidly confirmed after the resignations, and then Conkling and Platt losing the election. 

Unlike in the fictional portrayal, Arthur did not offer his resignation to Garfield after criticizing him in the press. Nor did Arthur sever his relationship with Conkling after Garfield was shot in July 1861. Nor did Arthur, hours later, tearfully pledge to Blaine and Garfield’s wife Lucretia, to “quit it all,” only for her to slap him in the face and say, “Will you resign like a coward in disgrace, or will you step up and reform?”  

“Reform, ma’am,” blubbers the fictional Arthur, “I’ll change my ways.” 

But the real Arthur did change. 

Charles Guiteau, Garfield’s assassin, told the arresting officer, “I did it and will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be president.” In turn, Greenberger writes that Arthur, “received death threats, and was deeply shaken by the widespread belief that he was complicit in the crime.” Still over the summer of 1861—while an incapacitated Garfield futilely tried to overcome his horrible medical treatment—Arthur stayed in his Manhattan home where he continued to consult with Conkling. (Conkling’s Senate defeat did not happen until late July, after the shooting. A still alive, magnanimous Garfield offered, “I will offer him any favor he may ask, or any appointment he may desire,” but Conkling did not take him up on it.) 

Yet a woman did tell Arthur to reform. But it wasn’t Lucretia Garfield. It was Julia Sand, a 31-year-old stranger who lived in New York City about 50 blocks north of Arthur. Shortly before Garfield’s death, she wrote him a letter:  

The day he was shot, the thought rose in a thousand minds that you might be the instigator of the foul act. Is not that a humiliation which cuts deeper than any bullet can pierce? Your best friends said: “Arthur must resign—he cannot accept office, with such a suspicion resting upon him.” And now your kindest opponents say: “Arthur will try to do right”—adding gloomily— “He won’t succeed, though—making a man President cannot change him.”  

But making a man President can change him! At a time like this, if anything can, that can. Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have lain dormant half a life. If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine. 

Faith in your better nature forces me to write to you—but not to beg you to resign. Do what is more difficult & more brave. Reform! 

Arthur saved the letter. 

A few weeks after Arthur became president, he met with Conkling, who demanded that he remove Garfield’s new man at the New York Customs House. Greenberg writes that “watching Garfield’s long ordeal, and the suffering of the dying man’s family, had greatly affected Chester Arthur.” While he still “valued Conkling’s support and friendship,” Arthur told him he was “morally bound to continue the policy of the former president.” Conkling went back to New York, trashed Arthur as a traitor, and left politics. (In 1882, Arthur tapped him for the Supreme Court, but Conkling refused the nomination.) 

In December, Arthur delivered a message to Congress in which he expressed support for civil service reform. A Democratic Senator introduced a reform bill the same day that went farther than he wanted regarding exams. Sand pressed him, “The vital question before the country today is Civil Service Reform. The vital question before you is how you will meet it.” 

She kept writing the president, toggling between praise and criticism, despite not getting responses. But in August 1882, President Arthur showed up at her house and stayed for an hour. Greenberger recounts, as Arthur was leaving, “Julia asked him whether he had forgiven her for some of the harsh things she had written in her letters. ‘No,’ he said with a wry smile.” But the extraordinary decision by Arthur to visit showed how much he valued her words. 

The legislation was mired for a year, but public support was rising, as evidenced by the Democratic victory in the New York gubernatorial race by the reformist Grover Cleveland. Arthur leaned in with another message to Congress, announcing he would sign the legislation despite the provision about exams. The bill swiftly cleared both chambers. Sand wrote, not with praise, but with an admonishment to carry out the law since “words will never serve you again—actions only will count.” 

Arthur’s signing of the civil service reform law is noted in text at the end of Death By Lightning, but that is the most long-lasting policy consequence of Garfield’s murder, the opposite of what his murderer envisioned. And while that law didn’t professionalize the federal civil service overnight, it began a transformation that vastly reduced corruption and improved government services. 

The spoils system is what Trump is trying to restore with his mass firings of civil servants and his “Schedule F” executive order to end protections for career employees, allowing them to be hired and fired for political, not merit-based, reasons. Civil service reform is an inherently dry subject, but Death by Lightning—with its riveting acting, copious F-bombs, and sprinkling of tawdry sex—is an entertaining reminder of how government shouldn’t work.  

The post Death By Lightning Shows Why a Professional Civil Service Matters  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

President Donald Trump’s comments to White House reporters last week about the proposed Warner Bros. Discovery sale should terrify every American: 

I wouldn’t want to see the same company end up with CNN … I think CNN should be sold because I think the people that are running CNN right now are either corrupt or incompetent … I think any deal should—it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately. 

In separate remarks, Trump said he would be “involved” in the deal, and his loyalist attorney general, Pam Bondi, said the Justice Department’s antitrust division would oversee it. In plain sight, the president of the United States is hijacking federal power to decide who owns the media that covers him. So much for freedom of the press.  

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Instead of raising alarms about Trump’s dictatorial behavior, the leading suitors of Warner Bros. Discovery—Netflix and Paramount—have been currying the president’s favor. Shortly before the preliminary deal struck by Netflix, the company’s co-CEO, Ted Sarandos, met with Trump in the Oval Office, most likely hoping to prevent any interference. But under the terms of that deal, Warner Bros. Discovery would be split, and Netflix would only take over half of the company, the half without CNN. That’s not what Trump wants. 

In response to the Netflix announcement, Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover bid. Paramount was recently bought by multi-billionaire Larry Ellison and his son, David, who added it to their Skydance Media. Back in 2016, Larry Ellison backed then-Senator Marco Rubio in the Republican presidential primaries and Senator Tim Scott in the 2024 ones. Still, like so many CEOs, he has been ingratiating himself with Trump ever since, as detailed in the April 2025 The New York Times article “How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul.”  

When the Ellisons’ Skydance Media snapped up Paramount, it rapidly moved to make its CBS News subsidiary Trump-friendlier by tapping Bari Weiss to run it. (Trump had pressured the previous Paramount ownership under Shari Redstone to cough up $16 million and settle a flimsy lawsuit accusing CBS News’s 60 Minutes of making deceptive edits to an interview with Kamala Harris.) For good measure, the Ellisons bought a piece of the social media powerhouse TikTok.  

Now their eyes are on Warner Bros. Discovery. Unlike with the Netflix proposal, Paramount would not split the acquisition, thereby making CNN its own. The Wall Street Journal reported that “During a visit to Washington in recent days, David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN.” 

Yet Trump is still unhappy, because the Ellisons haven’t made CBS News a full-fledged propaganda outlet. When 60 Minutes interviewed Trump loyalist-turned-critic Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Trump raged on his social media page, “My real problem with the show, however, wasn’t the low IQ traitor, it was that the new ownership of 60 Minutes, Paramount, would allow a show like this to air. THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP, who just paid me millions of Dollars for FAKE REPORTING about your favorite President, ME!”  

So, we have a president asserting he can decide who owns CNN and pressuring both suitors to woo him, which they seem willing to do.  

If we don’t want this craven spectacle to represent the future of American media, then we need to make sure independent media outlets continue to have the resources to operate. That’s why your donation to the Washington Monthly is so critical. 

At the Washington Monthly, we don’t seek the president’s favor, regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. We exist to help you understand Washington better and to help Washington govern better. In the Trump era, we don’t obsess about every bit of Trump rage-bait. We focus on what Trump is doing and how to fix what he’s broken. 

If Trump had his way, independent media would no longer exist. He has used personal intimidation of professional journalists, favorable treatment of propagandists masquerading as journalists, litigation, threats of lost broadcast licenses, and now interference in merger approvals to bend the Fourth Estate to his will.  

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The post Trump Is Trying to Control the Corporate Media. Here’s How You Can Stop Him appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Electorally, Democrats have had a stellar 2025. According to The Downballot, “in more than 60 special elections nationwide, Democrats are outperforming the 2024 presidential results by an average of more than 13 points.” That tailwind has helped Democrats win marquee races like the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial contests (the latter succeeding a Republican incumbent), as well as flip 25 state legislative seats—and shed none—in states such as Pennsylvania, Iowa, Georgia, and Mississippi. 

The blue trend bodes extremely well for Democrats heading into the 2026 midterm elections. Data-cruncher G. Elliot Morris extrapolated, “A swing of 13 points would put Dems over 250 seats in the U.S. House. A more reasonable scenario—say, D+6—still gives them the House, and maybe the Senate.” 

Under these conditions, Democratic control of the House is practically a lock. Since World War II, the average net loss of House seats in midterm elections for the president’s party has been 25. The 21st-century average loss is slightly higher at 31. In 2022, when Joe Biden’s Democrats had a relatively good midterm election, they lost nine seats. In 2026, Democrats only need to flip three seats to claim a majority.  

The Senate, however, is a different story. Democrats need to net four seats, and the average loss for the president’s party—going back either 20 or 80 years—is about 3.5. But the 2026 Senate map is treacherous terrain, with only one Republican-held seat in a state Kamala Harris won in 2024. That puts a premium on candidate quality. 

The immediate problem for Democrats is that there’s no consensus on what makes a good candidate in our polarized, social media-driven era. Some see promise in the moderates with national security backgrounds who handily won their 2025 gubernatorial races—New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger. Others see the future in New York City’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist with no executive experience who deployed a sunny persona, sticky social media content, a sharp focus on the cost of living to deflect attacks on past controversial statements, and galvanized younger voters.  

As a result, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the party’s official Senate campaign arm, is finding it more challenging to consolidate support around its preferred candidates and avoid contentious primaries, because not everybody agrees with DSCC and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on what makes a strong candidate. Last month, The New York Times reported that a rump group of progressive Senators dubbed “Fight Club” is issuing endorsements in the Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota primaries in an unusual open defiance of Schumer’s recruitment efforts.  

This week, Politico picked up on frustration among more moderate Democrats that the DSCC was too weak to prevent “messy” primaries and cut off oxygen to risky prospects. Specifically, when the pugnacious and controversial U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett entered the Texas Senate primary, the Democratic establishment’s disapproval was audible. Not only did the DSCC stay out of Crockett’s way, but according to NOTUS, its Republican counterpart, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, distributed polling data showing Crockett could win a primary and sent pro-Crockett “Astroturf” phone messages to Texas progressives to draw her into the race in the belief that she’d be easy to defeat. 

However, we have examples of candidates who would seem doomed because of baggage and yet prevailed. U.S. Senator Ron Johnson keeps eking out close wins in the purple state of Wisconsin despite his history of pushing far-right conspiracy theories. In 2020, Raphael Warnock pulled off an upset in his U.S. Senate bid in previously red Georgia despite Republicans digging up a sermon in which he said, “America, nobody can serve God and the military.”  

And there’s a guy in the Oval Office known for intemperate remarks and defining deviancy down. In the Trump era, do we even know what offends or entices voters? 

One big test case in 2026 is the U.S. Senate Democratic primary in Maine, pitting the 78-year-old incumbent Governor Janet Mills against a 41-year-old military veteran and oyster farmer with scant government experience, Graham Platner.  

Platner, of course, jumped into the race first in coordination with progressive activists, helping him garner support from the Fight Club renegades. But upon Mills’s entrance, Platner was forced to explain offensive social media posts (which he disavowed) and a tattoo that resembled a Nazi symbol (for which he pleaded ignorance and covered it up). Many assumed his campaign was kaput as he hemorrhaged top staffers. But the first two polls taken after the revelations showed him ahead of Mills among primary voters. And he’s also polling slightly ahead, albeit within the margin of error, against the Republican incumbent Susan Collins. Maybe voters don’t care! 

Or … maybe they do. A third primary poll was released this week with Mills leading Platner by 10 points. If we average the three post-scandal polls, Platner is ahead by 9 points. If we look at the three in chronological order, we see a 44-point swing toward Mills. 

But here’s what we do know: Under the hood of the most recent poll is a massive age gap. Voters 55 and over break for Mills by a whopping 48-point margin, while Platner wins the under-35 set by 39 points, and the remaining middle-aged voters by 20. 

While the top candidates in the New York City Mayor’s race were quite different from those in Maine, the hesitation of some Democratic establishment figures to endorse Mamdani, their party’s nominee, led some to treat Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor, and Democratic primary runner-up competing in the general on a third-party ballot line, as the establishment choice. Election Day exit polls revealed a significant age gap: The more experienced, yet more scandal-tainted, Cuomo won voters 45 and older by 11 points, while Mamdani ran away with the rest by 45 points.  

Platner’s apparently durable appeal with younger voters may be typified by the tattoo artist whom he hired to cover up his Nazi ink, Mischa Ostberg. She spoke with NBC News, which reported that the controversy “solidified why Ostberg supported Platner’s campaign, saying his past mistake reflects that ‘he’s a regular person like all of us’ and hasn’t been perfectly vetted by Democratic leaders.” A voter already skeptical of the political establishment can be drawn to candidates with imperfect pasts precisely because it proves they are not part of that establishment. The broader the skepticism in the electorate, the more potential a checkered anti-establishment candidate has. 

The chronically offensive Trump, in primaries and general elections, did just fine with older voters, who lean conservative and see the establishment as skewed to the left. But in Democratic primaries, older Democrats seem less antagonistic towards their party’s leadership and tougher for unfiltered candidates to impress. If true, that could be a big problem for Platner, as Maine has the highest median age among the 50 states.  

Texas, however, has the second-lowest—a potential benefit for the 44-year-old Crockett in her second congressional term, though her primary opponent, State Representative James Talarico, is 36, even younger, and is not perceived as the establishment-favored candidate (at least not yet). Since Crockett just entered the contest, we don’t yet know how age cohorts will line up.  

But the Maine contest tells us that the Democratic Party’s generational divide—while not detached from policy and ideology—may be more about biography, attitude, and communication style. Traditional signifiers of candidate quality, like government experience and rhetorical restraint, may be becoming less important to voters. 

The post What Maine’s U.S. Senate Primary Tells Us About the Democratic Party  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

President Donald Trump is a convicted white-collar criminal who likes to let other white-collar criminals off the hook. That statement is not a columnist’s vitriol but factually correct. 

Last year, Trump was found guilty of falsifying business records, totaling 34 felonies. After winning the presidential election, he avoided prison time and fines. But the conviction remains on the books.  

In the first week of Trump’s second presidency, he pardoned more than 1500 rioters who stormed the U. S. Capitol on January 6, 2021; Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road internet drug dealer, (whom Trump promised to free during the 2024 campaign), two police officers convicted in a fatal car chase, and 24 anti-abortion activists who interfered with the operation of women’s health clinics. 

After that, he mostly used his authority to pardon criminals and commute sentences to assist his fellow white-collar criminals.  

From February through the first week of December, Trump issued 61 pardons and commutations. Nearly half, 27, benefited white-collar criminals who had committed securities fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, and similar offenses. Two of these clemencies were granted to corporations, not individuals, an unprecedented act. An additional 14 were about political corruption. (Nine others were given to drug dealers and traffickers, some of whom I highlighted in a column last week.) 

Among the white-collar criminals Trump has spared are Ponzi-type schemers David Gentile (sentenced to seven years for defrauding over 10,000 investors out of $1.6 billion) and Marian Morgan (who received a 35-year sentence for defrauding 87 people out of $28 million). Trump has also favored cryptocurrency executives from Binance and BitMEX who didn’t use legally necessary anti-money laundering protocols, creating platforms for criminal activity. BitMEX’s parent company received perhaps the only corporate pardon in history. 

Trump’s clemencies are often seen as self-indulgence, rewarding friends and donors, and furthering fictional narratives of a “weaponized” Justice Department under the Joe Biden administration. But these individual acts of mercy should be viewed alongside Trump’s policies of radical financial deregulation and the ways the 47^th president and his family are profiting from them.  

Trump’s Justice Department completely shut down its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, which was established in the Biden administration. It effectively shuttered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), established by Barack Obama following the 2008 financial crisis.  

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) dropped several cryptocurrency cases. As noted by Americans for Financial Reform, some of the cases were aborted after suspects invested in the Trump family crypto business. 

For example, in 2023, crypto billionaire Justin Sun was charged by the SEC with multiple counts of fraud. Shortly before the 2024 election, Trump and several family members co-founded the World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency company. After the election, Sun invested heavily in World Liberty Financial. Then, once Trump was inaugurated, the SEC shed interest in the Sun case and got it stayed by a judge.  

Additionally, as reported by The New York Times, in December, World Liberty Financial bought $5 million in cryptocurrency from Ethena Labs. A few months later, one of Ethena’s investors—BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes—was pardoned by Trump. 

The apparent quid pro quo lines Trump’s pockets, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us are unaffected. A radically deregulated financial industry driven by reckless crypto bros could lead to another financial meltdown.  

This week, the Times reported that a form of cryptocurrency called stablecoins “exists largely beyond traditional financial oversight” and is funding an estimated $25 billion in illegal transactions worldwide. “As more Russian oligarchs, Islamic State leaders and others have begun using the cryptocurrency,” warned the Times, “the rise of these dollar-linked tokens threatens to undermine one of America’s most potent foreign policy tools: cutting adversaries off from the dollar and the global banking system.” 

Trump signed into law a weak cryptocurrency regulation bill, the GENIUS Act, which (sadly) cleared Congress on a bipartisan vote. The bill did create regulations for stablecoins, but The Atlantic’s David Frum last month explained how the rules fall short: 

The real advantage of stablecoins is that they allow asset holders to enter the U.S.-dollar system (99 percent of all stablecoins are U.S. dollar–pegged) while eluding normal U.S.-government rules, such as the “Know your customer” laws that expose bank depositors to intrusive questions about who they are and how they got their money. The GENIUS Act purports to apply such laws to stablecoin issuers, but only when a stablecoin is first issued in the United States. Once a stablecoin has been issued, however, tracking how it is swapped, and to whom, is difficult. 

… Until now, the inherent dangers of stablecoins have deterred most investors and kept the market relatively modest: about $280 billion to $315 billion, smaller than the 12th-largest bank in the U.S. The entire stablecoin market could go bust tomorrow, and the U.S. financial system would wobble but recover. In light of the GENIUS Act, however, analysts at Citigroup project that the stablecoin market could grow as big as $4 trillion by 2030. A default in a market of that size could create shocks that reverberate through the global financial system. 

Worse, one stablecoin company appears to have taken the federal government hostage. According to the Times: 

Tether, which has over $180 billion worth of stablecoins in circulation, is based in El Salvador and would not be covered by the new rules. The company holds more than $112 billion in U.S. Treasuries, and any law enforcement action against Tether could potentially risk destabilizing important financial markets.  

Still worse, the Trump administration has a massive conflict of interest with Tether: 

The company has close connections to the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who is responsible for restricting exports of sensitive U.S. technology—restrictions that people can try to sidestep by making transactions with stablecoins like Tether. 

These risks to the global economy don’t bother Trump, a white-collar criminal whose policies aid white-collar crime. He does not care that he is undoing years of his predecessors’ regulation of a financial industry that had gone off the rails and sparked a global economic meltdown. When the law ensnares his fellow white-collar criminals, he uses his pardon power to get them off the hook. Trump is driven by what will help himself and his ilk, not his country.  

Trump’s clemency record is a classic tip of the iceberg, an above-the-water indication of a massive half-kleptocracy, half-kakistocracy government that sits below the surface, most of which we have yet to map. 

The post The Main Beneficiaries of Trump’s Pardons? White-Collar Criminals Like Him  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

President Donald Trump, during his December 2 cabinet meeting, spewed among the most hateful remarks publicly uttered by a president, certainly in modern times. 

Referring to Somali immigrants and the Somali-American congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Trump raged, “I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country … We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage; she’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people that work. These aren’t people that say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’ These are people that do nothing but complain.” 

A week prior, in reaction to the shooting of two National Guard members by an Afghan immigrant, the Wall Street Journal editorial board rejected blaming all Afghan immigrants for the actions of one man. The policy architect of Trump’s mass deportation program, Stephen Miller, the obsessively anti-immigrant homeland security advisor, responded on X, “This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” 

These bigoted statements would not have been embraced by the president Miller cites as an inspiration: Calvin Coolidge.  

Full disclosure: I was recently appointed president of the committee that oversees the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum, which is located near my home in Northampton, Massachusetts. (Please visit!) And while I am speaking for myself only here, I aim to fulfill our museum’s mission of providing objective information about the 30^th president and his times.  

Miller’s love of Coolidge is evidenced by a series of emails sent to Katie McHugh in 2015 and 2016, when she worked for Breitbart, and he worked for Senator Jeff Sessions before he became Donald Trump’s first Attorney General. McHugh was fired by Breitbart 2017 for racist social media posts. But in 2019, she leaked the emails to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and gave interviews in which she said she no longer subscribed to “white nationalist, white supremacist” views and Miller—who by then had joined the first Trump administration—was a “white supremacist” and that he had functioned as a Breitbart editor while he worked for Sen. Sessions. 

In one email thread, Miller responds to a colleague who said: “[Conservative radio host] Mark Levin just said there should be no immigration for several years. Not just cut the number down from the current 1 million green cards per year. For assimilation purposes.” Miller chimes in, “Like Coolidge did.”  

In another email, Miller proposes to “expose that ridiculous statue of liberty [sic] myth” about the famous pro-immigrant poem enshrined on the statue’s pedestal that welcomed millions of migrants processed on Ellis Island. But to Miller, “two decades after [the] poem was added, Coolidge shut down immigration. No one said he was violating the Statue of Liberty’s purpose.” 

Miller’s emails mock “diversity” as a “national religion. A news story about 2016 presidential candidate Jeb Bush speaking Spanish is a disturbing sign of “new English.” He recommends the novel Camp of the Saints—a story of French whites being overrun by Indian immigrants who eat human feces, which has been embraced by white nationalists as a cautionary tale. The Duke Law School graduate shares an article from the white nationalist website VDARE to warn about the possibility of Mexican hurricane victims migrating to America and receiving Temporary Protected Status. 

White nationalists have embraced Coolidge for signing the restrictionist Immigration Act of 1924, indefinitely extending and tightening a temporary quota system based on national origins, structured to clamp down on Eastern and Southern European migration associated with anarchy, socialism, and—during the Prohibition Era—alcohol. Much of the anti-immigrant hysteria of the time stemmed from political violence waged by anarchists, including the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley by the son of Polish immigrants, and the wave of bombings tied to an Italian immigrant group. And fear of the spread of Communism following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia tarred Jewish immigrants who supported socialism. During congressional deliberations over the immigration bill, Representative Jasper Tincher of Kansas framed the debate as “On the one side— is beer, Bolshevism, unassimilating settlements, and many flags. On the other side is constitutional government, one flag, the Stars and Stripes, and American institutions.” 

The law also flatly banned nearly all immigration from Asia. The national-origin-based quota system remained in place for 41 years, slashing the share of America’s foreign-born population by more than half. 

Also, as Vice President in 1921, Coolidge made eugenic remarks—common for the time—on race in defense of immigration restrictions, in a 1921 Good Housekeeping article: “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With our races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.” 

But reducing Coolidge’s views on immigration to those two data points—as, in modern times, both supportive white nationalists and critical progressives tend to do—oversimplifies the record. As president, Coolidge did not flog the eugenical statements from his 1921 article, but he did laud immigrants who embraced American ideals.  

Addressing veterans of the Great War at the 1925 American Legion Convention in Omaha, Coolidge praised the diversity that Miller fears: 

The bringing together of all these different national, racial, religious, and cultural elements has made our country a kind of composite of the rest of the world, and we can render no greater service than by demonstrating the possibility of harmonious cooperation among so many various groups. Every one of them has something characteristic and significant of great value to cast into the common fund of our material, intellectual, and spiritual resources. The war brought a great test of our experiment in amalgamating these varied factors into a real Nation, with the ideals and aspirations of a united people. None was excepted from the obligation to serve when the hour of danger struck… 

Well-nigh all the races, religions, and nationalities of the world were represented in the armed forces of this Nation, as they were in the body of our population. No man’s patriotism was impugned or service questioned because of his racial origin, his political opinion, or his religious convictions. Immigrants and sons of immigrants from the central European countries fought side by side with those who descended from the countries which were our allies; with the sons of equatorial Africa; and with the Red men of our own aboriginal population, all of them equally proud of the name Americans. 

We must not, in times of peace, permit ourselves to lose any part from this structure of patriotic unity… Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat. 

One month earlier, Coolidge spoke at a ceremony laying the cornerstone for Washington, D.C.’s Jewish Community Center, which still stands near Dupont Circle. Coolidge celebrated the Jewish contributions to the founding of America and, more broadly, the blessings of diversity: 

If our experiment in free institutions has proved anything, it is that the greatest privilege that can be conferred upon people in the mass is to free them from the demoralizing influence of privilege enjoyed by the few. This is proved by the experience here, not alone of the Jews, but of all the other racial and national elements that have entered into the making of this nation. We have found that when men and women are left free to find the places for which they are best fitted, some few of them will indeed attain less exalted stations than under a regime of privilege; but the vast multitude will rise to a higher level, to wider horizons, to worthier attainments. To go forward on the same broadening lines that have marked the national development thus far must be our aim… 

… Made up of so many diverse elements, our country must cling to those fundamentals that have been tried and proved as buttresses of national solidarity.  

Shortly after Coolidge signed the Immigration Act, he signed the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted citizenship to all Native Americans. Later that year, ahead of a presidential election in which the Ku Klux Klan was an active presence in the Democratic National Convention, Coolidge publicly rebuked, via written correspondence, a constituent who wanted him to prevent a Black Republican congressional candidate from being nominated:  

I am amazed to receive such a letter. During the war 500,000 colored men and boys were called up under the draft, not one of whom sought to evade it. They took their places wherever assigned in defense of the nation of which they are just as truly citizens as are any others. The suggestion of denying any measure of their full political rights to such a great group of our population as the colored people is one which, however it might be received in some other quarters, could not possibly be permitted by one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color…A colored man is precisely as much entitled to submit his candidacy in a party primary as is any other citizen. 

Coolidge’s defense of equal rights and Native American citizenship doesn’t directly relate to immigration, but it shows he was no white nationalist. He would not have smeared an entire African nation in racist fashion as Trump did.  

The thread in Coolidge’s philosophy was a commitment to assimilation. Sometimes Coolidge is knocked for his 1923 presidential address, which sought to shape the pending immigration bill: “American institutions rest solely on good citizenship. They were created by people who had a background of self-government. New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.” Since the final bill Coolidge signed used the bigoted national origin system for its quotas, it’s easy to link Coolidge’s “America must be kept American” statement to bigotry. But that doesn’t align with his later statements, that many immigrants assimilate and embrace American ideals. Coolidge’s conservative biographer Amity Shlaes even argues he “was not a great a fan of quotas as [Representative William] Dillingham” of Vermont, who first introduced the quota concept, temporarily, in a bill vetoed by Woodrow Wilson then signed by Warren Harding. Moreover, writes Shlaes, a Wall Street Journal editorial page veteran, “Coolidge no longer spoke in the racialist tones of the unfortunate articles he had written as vice president. His position now was that he did not like to judge people by their race or creed.” 

Coolidge’s belief in assimilationism and celebration of diversity is starkly different from Miller’s fearmongering that the admission of one immigrant fleeing a troubled country imports “the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” 

Miller also doesn’t understand what the 1924 law did. It did not completely “shut down” immigration. In fact, it didn’t cap any Latino immigration from the entire Western Hemisphere. Furthermore, it did not authorize the sort of mass deportations that Miller has orchestrated at Trump’s behest in hopes of removing more than 10 million predominantly Latino undocumented immigrants and making America less diverse.  

Understanding the full Coolidge record does not obligate anyone to become a fan of Silent Cal. His assimilationist policies can be criticized. For example, some Native Americans opposed the citizenship law to keep their own sovereignty. And of course, whatever discomfort Coolidge had with national origin quotas, he signed them into law, and that had a lasting impact, including the inability of America to accept Jews fleeing Adolf Hitler’s Germany and seeking refuge. (For a deeper exploration of Coolidge’s record on these issues, please see these panel discussions I moderated about the Indian Citizenship Act and the Immigration Act of 1924 sponsored by the Coolidge museum.) 

And if Stephen Miller and his boss are genuinely interested in Coolidge’s views, they will take a look at his complete record.  

The post On Immigration, Stephen Miller Is no Calvin Coolidge  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Before Donald Trump began his second term, we knew he was a hypocrite on crime. He has posed as a law-and-order champion while being a criminal convicted of fraud and found by a jury liable for sexual assault—and overseeing a business convicted of fraud. In his first term as well as his second, he violated established procedures when pardoning unrepentant criminals without proper vetting, some of whom violated the law again. But Trump’s hypocrisy on crime is most jarring when it involves drug trafficking. As I wrote last June during the 2024 campaign, during his first term, Trump proposed giving drug dealers the death penalty, then three months later, he commuted the life sentence of cocaine trafficker Alice Marie Johnson.  

The African-American grandmother was a cause célèbre on the left—a personification of what’s wrought by mandatory minimum sentences and whose freedom was sought by the American Civil Liberties Union and Kim Kardashian. Still, she spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention and, then, about two months before the election, Trump pardoned her. In turn, few contemporaneously complained about Trump’s crass attempt to woo Black voters. But it was a sign that Trump’s anti-drug tirades were insincere. 

An even clearer sign appeared in May 2024, when Trump stumped at the Libertarian Party convention by promising to free Ross Ulbricht, who was serving two life sentences for facilitating over a million drug deals through his Silk Road website. Libertarians—who, unlike Trump, support broad drug legalization—had been vigorously campaigning for Ulbricht’s release.  Once again, Trump was trading the freedom of a drug dealer—the sort of person he claims to believe deserves the death penalty—to win votes.  

The transactional offer appears to have worked. The 2024 Libertarian Party nominee Chase Oliver was shunned some of his own party leaders for eschewing anti-transgender rights policies among other issues, and the party chair openly opined for Trump’s victory. Oliver’s vote share was about one-third of his 2020 predecessor, as Libertarian voters presumably gravitated to Trump. Trump followed through on his convention promise and then some, issuing a full pardon to Ulbricht on his second day back in office.  

Coincidentally, one month after Trump addressed the Libertarian convention, Juan Orlando Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison for using the presidency of Honduras to, in the words of a federal prosecutor, “facilitate the importation of an almost unfathomable 400 tons of cocaine to this country: billions of individual doses sent to the United States…” As reported by The New York Times, “The judge in his case, P. Kevin Castel, had called Mr. Hernández ‘a two-faced politician hungry for power’ who masqueraded as an antidrug crusader while partnering with traffickers.” 

This is the same Hernández whom, on Friday, Trump said he would pardon. 

Trump announced in a social media post that also endorsed Hernández’s ally Tito Asfura in this weekend’s Honduran presidential election. On Sunday, he asserted without evidence that Hernández was framed by a “Biden administration setup.” 

A pardon for Hernández (which doesn’t appear to have been formally issued yet) would be the most glaring and disturbing act of hypocrisy by Trump, especially after 21 military strikes on boats in waters off Central and South America, killing at least 83 people who appeared to be unarmed. Trump has asserted the crews were “narco-terrorists” and “combatants” subject to military force, but has not provided evidence. Several countries, including the United Kingdom, have scaled back their intelligence sharing from the region with the U.S., since they don’t want to be accomplices to illegal murders. 

Even some congressional Republicans are expressing concerns that the strikes amount to war crimes following a Washington Post report that on September 2, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly gave a verbal order to kill all crew members of a boat off Trinidad. This prompted a second missile strike after the first left two survivors. The Republican chair and Democratic ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee released a joint statement announcing they have “directed inquiries” regarding “alleged follow-on strikes” to the Department of Defense. Their House counterparts released a similar statement. Representative Mike Turner, an Ohio Republican, told CBS’s Face the Nation, “Obviously, if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that would be an illegal act.” (On Sunday, Trump aboard Air Force One the president said of Hegseth’s alleged order: “He said he did not say that and I believe him.”) 

But while any spoken order to kill unarmed individuals could put Hegseth at legal risk, let’s not forget that the drug boat strikes are of dubious legality, and Trump’s commitment to them is bone-chilling. 

Presidents often feel compelled to issue military orders killing foreigners, such as to prevent a terrorist attack. Whether any order is truly necessary or legally executed can be debated. But in nearly every case involving previous presidents, the national security concern was genuine or at least plausible. While interdiction is a long-standing way of preventing drugs from entering the country, drug trafficking is not such a severe national security threat that warrants military force risking the murder of innocents who never got due process.  

Even as a crass political matter, Trump’s rationale is inexplicable. One can understand why Trump pardoned Johnson and Ulbricht to peel off African-American and Libertarian votes. But what political profit does Trump reap from killing Latin American boaters? He can’t run for a third term, despite what his merch says. There’s no reason to believe a drug interdiction effort would influence the 2026 midterm election when voters will likely prioritize the cost-of-living. And, as Trump knows well, there are ways to distract voters without deadly force. The boat strikes seem an attempt to paint Venezuela as a narcostate and justify ousting President Nicolás Maduro. While Maduro is no saint, Trump has no more political or moral duty to oust him than the dictators he embraces. 

Perhaps there’s more to Trump’s missile strikes than they appear. But based on what we can see, it seems murderously depraved. It’s sickeningly hypocritical: Trump’s plans to pardon a real narcostate president prosecuted by a Justice Department team that included one of his top lawyers (unlikely to have taken part in a Biden “setup”), and convicted by a U.S. jury.  

Comparing presidential scandals can be a fraught exercise. But a president killing boaters on specious claims of “narcoterrorism” while pardoning major drug traffickers is a scandal bloodier than Watergate. 

The post Trump’s Murderous Hypocrisy on Drug Trafficking Is Bone-Chilling  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Ever since Donald Trump won the 2024 election, I have assumed Ukraine was doomed to fall to Russian President Vladimir Putin since no one would be able to stop the 47^th president ending military support for Ukraine.  

In office, Trump has often mocked Ukraine’s ability to defeat Russia on the battlefield, promoted ceding Ukrainian land to Russia, and threatened to yank support. Last Friday, he gave Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a Thanksgiving deadline to accept a 28-point “peace” plan heavily favoring Russian interests. (Please read Tamar Jacoby’s chilling analysis of what’s in that plan.) 

Then, things got weird.  

On Saturday, Trump said the plan was “not my final offer,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a bipartisan group of pro-Ukraine senators that the plan wasn’t even America’s plan but Russia’s. But late in the day, Rubio posted on X that “The peace proposal was authored by the U.S.” with input from Russia and Ukraine. 

On Sunday, Trump ranted on his social media site about how “UKRAINE ‘LEADERSHIP’ HAS EXPRESSED ZERO GRATITUDE FOR OUR EFFORTS” and “THE USA CONTINUES TO SELL MASSIVE $AMOUNTS OF WEAPONS TO NATO, FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UKRAINE (CROOKED JOE GAVE EVERYTHING, FREE, FREE, FREE, INCLUDING ‘BIG’ MONEY!).” But also on Sunday, U.S.-Ukraine negotiations intensified. On Tuesday, an anonymous American official told CBS News that Ukraine “agreed to a peace deal” with details pending. Other reports were less declaratory, and the Russian foreign minister took a skeptical tone toward the nascent deal. “If the spirit and letter of the Anchorage agreement are erased,” he said, referring to the agreement made between Trump and Putin last August that informed the 28-point plan, “we’ll be in a fundamentally different situation.” The Washington Post reported, “Most analysts think the latest changes will be unacceptable to Moscow.” 

What explains the whiplash-inducing remarks from the White House, and especially from Rubio? Toronto Star columnist Justin Ling, reporting from an international security forum in Nova Scotia, argued that “[Vice President J.D.] Vance and his hard-right janissaries have long wanted Rubio gone ([Ukraine envoy General Keith] Kellogg is already departing.) It seems they out manoeuvred [sic] him by drafting and leaking the plan behind his back, then forcing his capitulation after he denounced it.” 

A New York Times account of the negotiation zigs and the zags is more circumspect but tracks Ling’s analysis: “By any measure, the administration’s rollout of the new plan was maladroit at best. The White House was taken by surprise by the leak of its details … Mr. Rubio downplayed the proposal last Wednesday as ‘a list of potential ideas,’ while Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, embraced it.” European leaders and pro-Ukraine Republicans were horrified by the plan, prompting the series of conflicting White House statements. Still, “by Sunday night Mr. Rubio appeared to have wrestled back control of the negotiations. He excised — for now — sections that would forever bar Ukraine from joining NATO and that banned NATO member states from forming a security force inside Ukraine that would deter Russia from launching a new invasion.” 

But Rubio wouldn’t have the leeway to conduct negotiations with Ukraine without Trump’s permission. Other Trump officials have been sent packing for less subordinate behavior. Why is Rubio still around? 

Granted, Rubio might get fired before this column is published. But assuming he still has his job, I think the answer lies in Ling’s observation that Trump “doesn’t care what happens to Ukraine. He is motivated only by a pathetic and delusional desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize.” 

Trump must know he would never win a Nobel for washing his hands of Ukraine, ending military support, and letting Moscow steamroll Kyiv. Any fantasies of a medal ceremony in Oslo hinge on an actual peace agreement.  

The president’s insatiable thirst for shiny awards and recognition from elites he otherwise disdains gives him reason to grant Rubio latitude to negotiate. Most crucially, it offers Ukraine leverage to resist a bad deal. But it gives Putin nothing. 

The Washington Post recently explored Putin’s endgame: 

Putin is willing to fight on despite the economic pain and stunning casualties that dwarf the losses of the United States in Iraq or the Soviet Union in Afghanistan because he senses U.S. and European weakness and Ukrainian exhaustion, according to analysts.  

For Putin, the cost is worth it because it is not a question so much of conquering land but of reversing the Soviet Union’s loss of the Cold War and reasserting Russia’s status as a global power, said former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev.  

“He’s fighting not for villages in Ukraine. He’s fighting not for territory in Ukraine, not even for rare earths in Ukraine. He is fighting for a much bigger outcome,” he said. “He wants the United States, first of all, and Europe to admit that Russia has its exclusive sphere of influence where the United States and Europe are forbidden to interfere.”  

“It’s not about territory. It depends on how long Ukrainians are going to fight, so his goal is to crush their appetite to resist.” 

If that is true, then what Rubio and Zelensky reportedly are devising—a deal to allow NATO forces inside Ukraine—won’t give Putin an “exclusive sphere of influence” and is unlikely to win his blessing. And Putin has reason to hold out; if the next American president is Vance, who appears more than ready to pull up stakes, then in three years, Russia could be handed Ukraine on a silver platter. 

Fundamentally, the three leaders want different things. Putin wants an exclusive sphere of influence beyond Russia’s borders. Zelensky wants no Russian influence within Ukraine’s borders. Trump wants a medal and a better lead on his obituary than “first president to be convicted of fraud and impeached twice.” These interests do not align. Trump could give Putin what he wants by ending military support for Ukraine, but that’s not going to impress the jurors in Oslo and therefore does not give Trump what he wants. Only a negotiated settlement between Putin and Zelensky would suffice. If a deal just came down to drawing new borders, perhaps a painful but acceptable middle ground, literally, could be found. But if Zelensky wants security guarantees backed up by NATO, and Putin wants NATO out of his backyard, then there’s no middle ground.  

In other words, Trump’s narcissistic and futile compulsion for a Nobel Peace Prize may be what allows Ukraine to fight on. 

The post Could Trump’s Narcissism Save Ukraine?  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Daily insanities from Donald Trump’s presidency have overwhelmed our capacity for outrage. Journalistic investigations of disturbing findings rarely penetrate our collective conscience, as they are overwhelmed by fleeting headlines generated by the president’s latest pronouncements, from annexing Greenland to arresting Democrats. 

For example, two months ago, The New York Times revealed that during Trump’s first term, an elite Navy SEAL Team 6 unit—the one that took out Osama bin Laden—botched a 2019 mission to North Korea aimed at planting a listening device intended to capture Kim Jong-un’s private communications. Scuba-diving SEALs, having reached shore in the middle of the night, panicked upon seeing a North Korean boat and fired on the crew, killing them all. After examining the bodies, the SEALs concluded the dead were civilians diving for shellfish. They punctured the lungs of the corpses, watched the bodies sink, and aborted the mission. The Pentagon reviewed what went wrong, but “the Trump administration never told leaders of key committees in Congress that oversee military and intelligence activities about the operation or the findings,” potentially violating federal law.  

The Times found that the debacle was not unusual because, in fact, “the SEALs have a reputation for devising overly bold and complex missions that go badly.” When Barack Obama was president, he tried to address the problem by “curtailed Special Operations missions late in his second term and increased oversight.” But Trump, upon entering office in 2017, “reversed many of those restrictions and cut the amount of high-level deliberation for sensitive missions.” One of his first acts was authorizing a SEAL Team 6 operation in a Yemeni village where an Al Qaeda leader lived, for which he “skipped over much of the established deliberative process.” The result: “30 villagers and a SEAL dead,” and the loss of a $75 million tiltrotor aircraft. 

As the Times scoop generated nary a ripple in the public discourse, little if any connections have been drawn between Trump’s checkered first-term history of reduced deliberations for sensitive missions and recent operations targeting Central and South American boats, which have killed at least 83 people. The president claims their crews are “narco-terrorists,” but has provided no evidence. According to CNN, “the United Kingdom is no longer sharing intelligence with the U.S. about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in U.S. military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal.” That’s a significant setback to the anti-drug efforts Trump supposedly cares so much about. 

Last Sunday, another Times deep dive tracked how Trump’s Homeland Security Department has funded its mass deportation program by steering resources away from other priorities. For example, “homeland security agents investigating sexual crimes against children, for instance, have been redeployed to the immigrant crackdown for weeks at a time,” and those agents “worked approximately 33 percent fewer hours on child exploitation cases from February through April compared to their average in prior years.” Considering Trump’s blasé attitude towards Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of minors, no one should be surprised that Trump prioritized deporting immigrants over the safety of children. 

More surprising is Trump’s equally blasé attitude towards counterterrorism operations. The Times also reports that a “national security probe into the black market for Iranian oil sold to finance terrorism has been slowed down for months because of the shift to immigration work, allowing tanker ships and money to disappear.” Additionally, “highly trained specialists have been pulled into immigration work, such as analysts who assist in money laundering and counterterrorism cases and agents who investigate the multibillion-dollar black market for looted antiquities, a source of income for organized crime and terrorist groups.” 

But this may be the most disturbing revelation: 

One of D.H.S.’s major functions is distributing intelligence reports about terrorism, active shooter incidents and other threats across government, an attempt to fill the gap in information sharing exposed by the 2001 terrorist attacks.  

But employees at D.H.S.’s intelligence office have been increasingly directed to focus more on supporting immigration enforcement than on other security issues, according to people familiar with its operations. That shift in emphasis has affected the daily intelligence briefings that go to top officials, according to these people.  

And local law enforcement authorities are now receiving far fewer intelligence reports than they normally would, according to people familiar with the reports. One official said the decline in information sharing has amounted to “chipping away at everything that’s been built since Sept. 11.” 

A reminder: The Department of Homeland Security was created because of 9/11 in hopes of preventing another calamitous attack. The idea behind this behemoth was to break down bureaucratic barriers, more easily share counterterrorism intelligence across government agencies, and make that intelligence more readily actionable. Yet because of Trump’s bigoted and myopic obsession with ridding America of immigrants, often based on scurrilous claims that many immigrants are terrorists, Trump is undermining counterterrorism operations. And it just takes one inopportune bureaucratic hiccup to allow a grievous terrorist attack to slip through our defenses.  

I read another deep-dive investigation this week, but this one mercifully reduced my anxiety. Politico’s David Ferris examined the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program that was part of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law signed by Joe Biden. The program became a punching bag. Trump mocked it. Abundance authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson highlighted it as an example of a kludgy liberalism, because the program was designed to yield 500,000 chargers (by 2030), but by March 2024, only seven had been built.  

However, Ferris notes that the program needed to establish smart rules before starting construction in earnest. Existing charging stations, aside from Tesla stations, often didn’t reliably charge cars, and “Biden’s people had an overriding goal: to take the glitchy, frustrating experience of EV charging and transform it into a smooth operation that could supersize across the nation’s highways. To do that, they sought to establish a common set of rules and requirements that would spur the many actors of the charging world to coordinate so that all drivers—not just Tesla owners—could count on a charging experience that, well, works.” And “By that goal, NEVI is working.” 

It’s working because Biden’s Congressional allies wrote thoughtful, durable legislation. Ferris explains, “Congress had written out the program in such specific detail—and had thrust it so deeply into Washington’s core spending programs—that Trump had little room to flout the legislative branch. NEVI not only survived a court challenge but was reluctantly adopted by the administration. While Trump has relaxed some of its most burdensome requirements, the core mission of constructing a federal charging network has endured, shielded by pages upon pages of Democratic legalisms and technicalities.” Thousands of new chargers by the end of Biden’s first term were never realistic, but now many are expected to be built by the end of Trump’s second term. 

Most Americans are coming to see that Trump is both depraved and incompetent; there’s a reason why his job approval is sinking. But because we rate our politicians on superficial measures, our collective understanding of how Trump is failing at policymaking and bureaucratic administration is limited, just like our appreciation for the meaningful and difficult work of his predecessors.  

The post Trump’s Policy Failures Are Even Worse Than We Realize  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Donald Trump has never polled well. While in office, in the Real Clear Politics job approval averages, he has never cracked 50 percent, save for a brief period at the beginning of his second term. His average favorability rating—which, unlike job approval, is measured while out of office—never has at all. 

But in a polarized era, in elections including third-party candidates determined by the Electoral College and not the popular vote, keeping these numbers above 45 percent has been for Trump—shall we say—good enough for government work. About three weeks before his 2024 presidential victory, Trump managed to push his favorability rating above 45 percent for the first time since the spring of 2022. And Trump kept both his job approval and favorability numbers above 45 percent throughout this year. 

Until now. 

Trump’s favorables dipped below 45 percent in August and have tracked around 44 percent since then. More striking is the decline in Trump’s job approval rating since the run-up to the shutdown. Since September 21, the president’s approval rating has declined by four points, from 46.3 to 42.3 percent.  

The low 40s is where Trump was for most of his first term. During the midterm election year of 2018, Trump largely held steady at 43 percent, ticking up to 44 just before Election Day, with his favorability lower at 42 percent. Then Republicans got clobbered in House races, losing 40 seats and control of the chamber. 

Trump actually cleared 45 percent in the spring of 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. But he squandered that goodwill with his response to the murder of George Floyd and his bizarre public health messages, sending his job approval down to 41 percent in July 2020, partially recovering to 44 percent through most of October before losing re-election. (Technically, in the RCP average, Trump passed the 45 percent threshold the day before the November 3 election, but that calculation appears to have been based on a relatively small number of polls sampled in very late October.) 

Of course, with a year before the midterm elections, Trump has time to regain three points or more and give the GOP a puncher’s chance to hold the House next year. And to get there, he’s hardly above gimmicky ideas—recently, he mused about $2,000 government checks sent to most Americans.  

Yet what should unnerve Republicans is that Trump’s second-term agenda is already firmly in place—including tariffs, deportations, civil servant layoffs, and the One Big Beautiful Bill—and the public is unimpressed. Only 36 percent of Americans say the country is on the “right track,” down seven points since June.  

Despite entering office on a promise of cutting prices, the most recent poll from The Economist/YouGov asked voters what their most important issue is and—surprise, surprise—the number one response is “inflation/prices.” Trump may have flinched from his most extreme tariff proposals, but tariff revenue has still more than doubled this year, and that’s a tax hike on us all.  

The next two top issues for voters are “jobs and the economy” and “health care.” The unemployment rate remains relatively low, but concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence on the future of work are widespread. And Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, didn’t help matters on CNBC yesterday when he praised the state of the labor market by claiming, “firms are finding that AI is making their workers so productive that they don’t necessarily have to hire the new kids out of college and so on.” Unlike Hassett, most people think it’s a bad thing that AI is making it harder for college graduates to enter the workforce. 

And then there’s health care, which, as I noted last week, is poised to derail the GOP’s midterms once again. Trump and the GOP hoped voters would applaud the tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill. But its cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act are inflicting real harm on working-class households. Granted, some of these cuts are delayed until after the midterm, but spikes in premiums are already happening. Republican policies are exacerbating the problem, and Republican politicians have no consensus plan that would undo the damage. 

Trump’s best issue in polls is immigration, but that’s only the seventh most important issue to voters. And “best” is relative. According to the RCP averages, approval of Trump’s handling of immigration is slightly underwater. Plus, we have hard evidence of immigration backfiring on Republicans among swing voters. Consider Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 291 votes in 2024. Bolts reported that the incumbent Bucks County Sheriff, Republican Fred Harran, lost re-election this month by 11 points to a Democrat who attacked his eager partnering with ICE.  

We also saw immigration play a big role in the Aurora, Colorado city council elections. Denver’s Fox News affiliate reported, “Aurora has long been led by a conservative-leaning council and has a Republican mayor, but voters in Colorado’s most diverse city, which was thrust under a national spotlight on immigration enforcement, rejected three conservative incumbent council members and elected progressives in their places … One of the [defeated] incumbents, Danielle Jurinsky, had made a name for herself aligning with President Donald Trump on immigration issues, calling attention to what they had called a takeover of the city by Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.” 

That’s what happened downballot this month when Trump’s job approval sank below 45 percent. Without a change in trajectory, expect more Republican carnage on Election Day 2026. 

The post Trump’s Poll Numbers Just Entered the Danger Zone  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The release of Jeffrey Epstein’s email archives by House Oversight Committee members has quelled the upset in Democratic circles over the shutdown climbdown and returned the focus to what President Donald Trump knew about the late financier’s crimes.  

Whether that focus can be sustained is unclear. The House will soon vote to direct the Justice Department to release more Epstein documents, thanks to a discharge petition that collected its 218th vote after four Republicans broke ranks, and Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva of Arizona was allowed to take her seat after a 50-day delay imposed by Republicans.  

However, Senate prospects for an Epstein document dump are murky. Senate Majority Leader John Thune is not obligated to schedule a vote and has not promised to do so. Even if it cleared Congress, Trump would almost surely veto it. 

Democrats could try to make Trump’s Epstein stonewalling a midterm election issue, with promises to subpoena documents if they gain control of one or both chambers. After all, overwhelming majorities want the documents released. But focus on Epstein waxes with new developments in the underage sex trafficking case, then subsides as other stories dominate the news cycle.  

Trump, of course, often creates his own news cycles. He has a bottomless capacity to shock.  

But now he has an opportunity to distract by doing something helpful: alleviating the imminent spike in health insurance costs from the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies. 

Politico reports that “White House officials and Republican lawmakers are cognizant” of how health care concerns helped Democrats take the House in the 2018 midterms and “are looking to coalesce around a plan for the future of the health care system.” 

Just as before the 2018 midterms, which were disastrous for the GOP, that plan doesn’t exist, but Republicans are considering their options. Per Politico, “Options that administration officials have publicly teased in recent days include giving money directly to Americans to cover health expenses, and subsidizing out-of-pocket costs for low-income people enrolled in the ACA.” Among congressional Republicans, some “support depositing funds into Health Savings Accounts, which can be used more broadly on expenses and roll over year to year, while others would opt for Flexible Savings Accounts, which expire at the end of the year and are narrower.” NBC News reports Republicans are nowhere near an intra-party consensus on what to support. Significantly, both it and Politico note that Trump has not “ruled out” what Democrats want, a simple extension of the expiring enhanced subsidies.

When it comes to policy, an extension is the best approach to address the disparate impacts of the expiring enhanced subsidies. CNN explains that “More than 90% of [ACA’s 24 million] enrollees are receiving premium assistance, which, for roughly half of policyholders, reduces their monthly cost to $0 or near $0.” Because Democrats during the Biden administration lifted income caps for the enhanced subsidy program, expiration hits middle-income households especially hard. Moreover, the Trump administration has already made the formula for the remaining subsidy stingier. The health policy analysts at KFF estimate the combined impact of the expiring enhanced subsidies and the new subsidy formula means a 45-year-old individual with an annual income of $20,000 would pay $420 more in health insurance premiums for the commonly chosen “Silver Plan,” while a 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 would pay $22,635 more, more than a quarter of their income. 

Trump can be miserly, as evidenced by the administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court to deny SNAP benefits, but he’s not averse to government largesse when he thinks it serves his interests. He is generally reluctant to do whatever Democrats want him to do. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer already offered a mere one-year extension for a proposed deal to end the shutdown—enough to help Republicans take the issue off the table for the midterm elections—which Trump rejected.  

As he considers his options, Trump must contend with the Republican caucus’s self-styled deficit hawks. They proved willing to rack up more debt by supporting the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill in the name of party unity. (Extending the enhanced ACA subsidies would cost about $35 billion a year over 10 years, while the One Big Beautiful Bill will cost about $330 billion a year.) But undoing cuts to the Affordable Care Act may be more than they would swallow. 

The political crosscurrents make a bipartisan health care deal unlikely. Yet Trump could still use the health care issue to distract from the Epstein emails about him knowing about “the girls” and spending hours with one. He could offer a half-baked plan that wouldn’t mitigate the price spikes but could provide political cover and help shift blame to the Democrats.  

In that scenario, the challenge for Democrats will be to keep it simple. They could argue: Democrats would entirely avert the loss of the subsidies, and Republicans would not. No complex details needed.  

Republicans would then find themselves in the unusual position of having to explain the more complex elements of their proposal, without having earned any credibility from the public as genuinely interested in making health care affordable. Quite the opposite, as the One Big Beautiful Bill was hammered for its sharp health care cuts.  

Of course, Trump could always distract with all sorts of insane executive orders, proposals, and comments. But no matter what happens with Epstein or any other Trump act, more than 20 million people will soon get socked with much higher health insurance costs that they are unlikely to forget in November. What’s really in Trump’s interest, and what would really distract from Epstein, is solving the looming insurance premium hikes. However, neither he nor his party has proven capable of crafting any significant health care policies, 16 years after declaring war on the Affordable Care Act, let alone thoughtful ones. 

The post Trump Could Deal With the Epstein Scandal by Addressing Health Care  appeared first on Washington Monthly.