There are many reasons why the second Donald Trump administration has been far more dangerous and destructive than the first. The Heritage Foundation came in ready with a playbook from day one; the tech overlord alliance with the far right infused MAGA with the “move fast and break things” ethic of Silicon Valley; eight years of Trumpification of the GOP ensured far fewer internal hurdles to reckless lawbreaking existed; a much more ideologically aligned Supreme Court paved the way to legalize what previously would have been lawless behavior; and Trump’s popular vote win provided him a greater veneer of institutional legitimacy in 2024 than he had in 2016 when he lost the popular vote. 

But perhaps the greatest boon to Trump’s effort to erect a MAGA autocracy has been the unexpected capitulation of American institutions, especially the traditional media. 

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ABC News and its parent, The Walt Disney Company, could have fought Trump’s weak defamation case over George Stephanopoulos’s technically inaccurate description of the E. Jean Carroll verdict (and very likely won) but instead agreed to pay $15 million to Trump’s future presidential library and another $1 million to his lawyer, while posting a groveling editor’s note and ducking sworn depositions. Soon afterward, Disney and ABC briefly canceled Jimmy Kimmel after Trump officials and right-wing activists demanded his firing, only reinstating him after massive public outcry. The message to the White House was clear: make enough threats and the country’s premier broadcast news brands will fold, not fight. 

CBS and its parent, Paramount, followed the same script. After initially calling Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit over a 60 Minutes Kamala Harris interview an “affront to the First Amendment,” CBS’s owners quietly settled for $16 million (again routed to Trump’s library and legal fees) just as they were seeking regulatory approval for a merger with Skydance. The newly merged company then installed Bari Weiss, a culture warrior with no broadcast journalism background, as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Within days, she was asking 60 Minutes staff why the country thinks they’re “biased,” an echo of Trump’s long-running attacks. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post editorial board has endorsed all but four of Trump’s clearly unqualified cabinet nominees.  

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This media capitulation is partly a story about monopoly and consolidation. Most of these corporate media players want federal approval for mergers and other related business issues. 

But it’s also about attitude. 

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The post Corporate Media? In the Trump Era, We Need Independent Media More than Ever  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

MAGA is going through a rough period. The bitter breakup between President Donald Trump and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene over the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files is roiling the far right, forcing movement conservatives to make uncomfortable choices in the political divorce.  

Trump should, in theory, have a clear advantage. The president commands a loyal army of supporters and the authority of the Oval Office. He has used the executive branch to persecute his opponents and reward his friends. Until now, those who have opposed him in intra-Republican battles have not typically fared well. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her resignation from Congress effective January 5, following a barrage of threats. But it is far too soon to suggest that Trump has won the battle with Greene: indeed, Greene and her allies forced Trump to backpedal on the Epstein files. The House and Senate have both voted for their release, and now the focus shifts to whether and how the Trump administration will meddle with or obstruct the release. 

It also seems more likely than not that Greene is distancing herself from Trump and his allies and waiting for him to fall before making her next move, perhaps in 2028. Indeed, it is shocking that more Republicans have not publicly broken with Trump and taken their chances on better surviving a post-Trump future. 

Never has an American president been embroiled in such a lurid scandal as the Epstein business. Trump was among the best friends of the world’s most notorious convicted pedophile. His name appears more than 1,500 times in the Epstein documents being released, including multiple stories of him ogling young women and girls at Epstein’s residence. In one email, Epstein offered to serve as an intermediary between Trump and Russian government agents. Trump allegedly wrote a salacious and suggestive birthday letter to Epstein, joking that they shared secret interests that “never age,” crudely written over the outline of a female figure that appears less than fully adult, with his signature on the figure’s lower area.  

No other politician would survive this. To be sure, Trump has a Teflon-like aura. His strange combination of shamelessness and scoundrel’s luck has allowed him to squeeze out of every impossible situation. But this? 

Remember, too, that the Epstein story didn’t come out of nowhere, nor was the obsession with it exclusive to the left. It was QAnon and far-right conspiracies about supposed child sexual abuse connections to Democrats that animated much of the Republican base. Trump promised to release the Epstein files; Attorney General Pam Bondi said they were “on her desk” and then made a big show of giving binders of Epstein documents to MAGA influencers, only for them to find they contained publicly available information. Trump’s followers have been primed for years (often by Trump himself) to demand the Epstein files. Now, Trump is flip-flopping: first cajoling members of Congress in the Situation Room to stop them from voting to release the files, then encouraging them to vote to release the files once he knew he had lost that fight, then directing Bondi to open an investigation—but only of Democrats—in a partisan abuse of power. Now it seems the “investigation” may become an excuse to withhold the files, or to release them selectively. 

Which brings us back to Greene, one of Trump’s earliest supporters. She was in the MAGA vanguard, a believer in rightwing conspiracy theories from contrails to Jewish space lasers. Whatever she may lack in critical thinking skills, she makes up for in raw savvy with a particular kind of voter central to MAGA’s rise. And she has long been demanding the release of the Epstein files. 

Is she committing political suicide, or is she again one step ahead of where the MAGA voter is going? 

Trump’s power comes from two sources: first, the presidency; and second, Republicans have a difficult time winning when he’s not on the ballot. The reason Steve Bannon is so keen on finagling a Trump third term as president is that MAGA has no credible, electable heir who can turn out the marginal and unexpected voters that Trump the showman can. 

But Trump’s approval rating has crashed to all-time lows, Democrats just routed Republicans in off-year elections, and his credibility on every issue from the economy to immigration is underwater. He cannot constitutionally appear on the ballot again despite Bannon’s fantasizing; even if he could, he would be in his 80s, older than Joe Biden was in 2024, and showing physical and mental deterioration. Greene understands that the post-Trump era is in the offing, and that even before the fight over the Epstein release, the president did nothing to support her gubernatorial, senatorial, or even presidential ambitions.  

With no chance of being his designated heir, she knows challenging Trump is risky. Still, it’s far more dangerous to shield Epstein associates, perhaps including the president, from their long-overdue consequences. The party got behind her in the lonely crusade to release the files, and a few oft-derided allies, like Representatives Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Thomas Massie, joined her. Eventually, congressional Republicans fell in line, and Trump had to feign at least joining the parade. And having joined the Democratic left in labeling Israel’s war with Hamas as “genocide” and supporting some extension of Obamacare subsidies, she’s shown a kind of ideological shapeshifting that’s positively Trumpian, perfect for today’s GOP and tomorrow’s. 

Democrats are eager for Republicans to launch a full-throated critique of the president. But Republicans, too, may be wise to join with those, like Greene, already looking ahead to a future that doesn’t revolve around Trump. 

The post The Clairvoyant Marjorie Taylor Greene  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As the government shutdown enters its fourth week, the impacts are taking their toll on workers nationwide. The shutdown exacerbates the precarious economic situation for millions of Americans impacted by Trump’s capricious tariff regime. The stock market isn’t yet feeling the pinch, but that is partly because it is buoyed by an AI investment frenzy that looks increasingly like a bubble getting ready to pop. 

Most attention has understandably focused on furloughed government workers, the recently unemployed, and the cruel, partisan cuts Donald Trump’s administration is making in blue states and cities. But another class of workers also suffers greatly from these shocks while receiving little attention: the self-employed. For example, self-employed individuals, small business owners, and their employees make up roughly half of all adults covered by Obamacare, premiums for which are set to skyrocket in January thanks to GOP-imposed cuts that are at the center of the shutdown. As they fight to overturn those cuts, Democrats would be wise to present themselves as champions of these entrepreneurial Americans. But will they? 

According to the last U.S. Census, there are over 16 million self-employed Americans, not including an uncounted number of gig workers and sole proprietors on the economy’s periphery. And as Will Norris wrote earlier this year in a superb piece here at the Washington Monthly, American policy choices seriously disadvantage this large and vital sector of the economy. Gig workers, independent contractors, and other self-employed individuals are subject to punishing monopoly predation and tend to lack employer-provided health care, paid vacations, and other benefits that people who work for larger organizations take for granted.  

They also receive little real support from either political party. Rhetorically, the Democrats pay them little public attention (the 2024 Democratic Party platform mentions “workers” 78 times and “union” 23 times, but “self-employed” workers and “independent contractors” just once each). Meanwhile, the GOP offers them only mendacious lip service. Republicans tend to make massive giveaways to wealthy capital under the guise of helping “small businesses” and “entrepreneurs” who are neither small nor truly innovative. 

Democratic campaigns do sometimes outline policy proposals to spur entrepreneurship. The Harris campaign, for instance, listed a series of proposals aimed at helping small businesses thrive through tax deductions, streamlined regulations, increased access to capital, and so on. But these tend to be small-ball measures with little fanfare that, while potentially effective on the margins, also sound cribbed from a traditional conservative playbook. On the flip side, social Democrats and especially Democratic socialists tend not to emphasize small business and entrepreneurship for obvious reasons. After all, these have long been the darlings of the right, a rhetorical wedge used to increase the power of capital at the expense of labor by putting a mom-and-pop face on big business.  

Democrats could change the script here by offering expansive economic policy on everything from healthcare to housing that Republicans typically decry as socialist, while legitimately pointing out that they are working to benefit actual small businesses, solopreneurs, and the self-employed. It is a dirty secret of economic policy that Republicans explicitly champion an agenda that keeps workers not only less able to organize into a union but also chained to their employers and afraid to strike out on their own, lest they lose access to healthcare, retirement, and other benefits. Since two-thirds of start-up businesses typically fail within ten years, a weak social safety net also jeopardizes the ability of the self-employed to house and feed their family unless they’re privileged enough to have a family trust fund. 

The most obvious place this dynamic appears is in health insurance. One of the most critical functions of the Affordable Care Act was to provide more reasonable healthcare options to the self-employed and microbusinesses. The Republican decision to allow tax credits to expire as part of their big budget bill is the central cause of the shutdown, as Democrats (and even Marjorie Taylor Green!) rightly see it as reckless and inhumane. But Democratic rhetoric on the issue usually—and for good reason—focuses primarily on the most marginalized communities facing disaster, including rural areas typically supportive of Trump. But there is also a wide-open lane here to appeal to around 20 million precarious self-employed Americans paralyzed about what their health insurance options will look like next year, and to do so in a way that could sound equal parts Bernie Sanders and Ronald Reagan. Americans don’t love big business, but they do love hardscrabble microbusiness owners trying to turn a dream into a decent living. 

Trump’s crippling tariffs are perhaps the second most crucial place where Democrats could gain an advantage from a greater emphasis on the self-employed. Consumers feel the pinch from higher prices, and big businesses are hobbled by uncertainty. But microbusinesses and boutiques that rely on low-margin imports are being devastated. Everyone from Etsy sellers to specialized grocers feels the crushing burden of low profit margins flipped upside down by tariffs. And while big businesses can typically wait out uncertainty, many small suppliers and contractors downstream of them are going under as those larger entities put everything on hold, from research and development to distribution. 

The emerging partnership between Trump and corporate oligarchs presents another opportunity for Democrats to stand with small-scale entrepreneurs. The millions of independent merchants who peddle their wares on Amazon have watched in fury as the monopoly platform has raised its share of sales revenue per item from a third in 2016 to 50 percent in 2022, plus additional fees since. Uber drivers have seen that the company increase its take by similar amounts. As Americans have moved from cash to credit cards since the pandemic, small merchants are being eaten alive by high “swipe fees” imposed by the Visa/Mastercard duopoly. By calling for antitrust and other measures to curb this monopoly rent-seeking, Democrats could earn significant goodwill from this suffering class of small entrepreneurs. 

In states and districts where even populist traditional left-liberal rhetoric falls flat, much of the larger agenda of social democracy can be reframed as an engine of real small business and employees without an HR department. More generous social security and pensions are available for those who don’t have the luxury of a large corporate 401(k). Skills training and lower-cost college would allow people who want to pursue their dreams to leave foul and abusive jobs. Subsidized childcare and pre-k make it possible for regular people to be good parents while opening that time-intensive restaurant. And so on. 

Finally, as AI slashes entire professions across the economy and sits on a potentially precarious bubble, even more Americans are likely to try to find independent ways to make ends meet. Conservatives have no answers for them, and Democrats have all too often spoken to the ranks for the current and future self-employed either in the paternalistic language of equity or the arcane white-paper-speak of tax rebates and loan programs. 

There is a better way, a clear policy need, and millions of underserved voters up for grabs. 

The post Government Shutdown Fallout: A Reminder That We Still Need Health Care for Gig Workers, Sole Proprietors  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It’s understandable that many people are despondent about the future of American democracy. Often known as “doomerism” on social media, it is a not-entirely-unearned belief that MAGA has won, that Donald Trump (or his successors) have forever destroyed our constitutional republic, and that authoritarianism is here to stay. Doomers span the political spectrum from exhausted liberals to radical leftists to the broadly disaffected. 

They have ample cause for alarm, of course. The president and his MAGA allies have normalized a variety of once-unthinkable transgressions. Trump is using the Justice Department to go after political opponents. He is deploying the military in American cities and against what the administration claims are drug traffickers in international waters without due process. He is unilaterally (and likely illegally) sabotaging the economy, openly blackmailing corporations and state governments by threatening to withhold media licenses and merger approvals, withholding federal funds, and now shutting down the government. A compliant Supreme Court is stacked in MAGA’s favor, the federal bureaucracy is being hollowed out, and an increasingly gerrymandered Congress is lopsided in favor of GOP constituencies.  

But despair is the wrong choice. Much of Trump’s power is illusory. It depends on the rest of civil society obeying in advance and preemptively kowtowing to his threats. There are good reasons to be hopeful. 

First, from a broad political science perspective, while it is true that American-style presidential systems tend toward authoritarian collapse, most advanced democracies with strong civic institutions and long traditions of capitalist-inflected economies tend to survive attempted takeovers by would-be dictators. Yes, America’s civic institutions have shown more brittleness and willingness to comply with Trump than one might have hoped, but the worst has not come to pass. America is not yet suffering under Russian-style autocracy. 

Second, for dictators to overthrow democracies, they typically must be largely popular and partially solve (or convince people they have solved) deep-seated problems the majority want fixed. The Axis dictators in 1930s Europe were taking over basketcase economies and unstable governments. President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador both became wildly popular by implementing brutal crackdowns on criminal activity that was hobbling their nations. 

Trump has no such claim. Crime in the United States has been falling for decades. While immigration problems did annoy voters, an overwhelming supermajority prefers tightened borders alongside empathetic asylum protections and pathways to citizenship for those already here. Stephen Miller sadistic approach to America’s immigration problem is deeply unpopular. 

Trump was reelected in 2024 mainly on promises to reduce the cost of living. Instead, his tariffs have substantially increased prices. Even MAGA voters have taken notice, and Trump’s handling of the economy is deeply underwater with voters. 

In fact, Trump and his regime are extremely unpopular. His net approval is underwater by 11 points. The intensity gap is worse: The number of voters who strongly disapprove of his presidency is double that of those who strongly approve. Trump’s previously unshakeable hold on non-voters has also slipped. As a lame-duck president, he is in an extremely weak position to attempt to overrun American democracy. With his unique charismatic appeal to lower-information voters, there is no clear successor to take over the MAGA movement. 

Then there is the matter of institutional resistance. History shows that democracies with strong civil institutional resistance to authoritarian hijacking are the likeliest to survive the attempt. For various reasons, American institutions have disappointed on this front, but not entirely. And the balance of power is starting to shift. 

As Greg Sargent notes, Trump is facing increasingly fierce resistance in the lower courts and other sectors of the government. The Supreme Court is giving Trump almost everything he wants, but that process takes significant time to play out, and his gains there tend to be piecemeal. While Trump initially had significant success making state governments bend to his will, Governor JB Pritzker’s resistance in Illinois paid dividends in pushing Trump to partially back off his attempts to use the National Guard to invade the state. A coalition of blue state governments has been successfully defending their constituents via lawsuits and mutual aid actions. The Trump administration initially succeeded in forcing universities to bend their knees by threatening grant funding. Still, Harvard recently demonstrated that educational institutions can emerge victorious by putting up a fight. 

Most recently, ordinary Americans have shown their power through boycotts and the power of the purse. When FCC Chairman Brendan Carr abused his government authority to force ABC and its parent, The Walt Disney Company, to suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show in the wake of his comments in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death. (It was such an overreach that even Texas GOP Senator Ted Cruz voiced his disapproval.) The public outrage was swift. Boycotts of Disney Plus and Disney properties emerged almost spontaneously, and Disney listened. Kimmel’s suspension was lifted, and he was given a ratings boost for his first show back, to boot. Similar boycotts of Target in the wake of its anti-DEI shift led to the resignation of its CEO. America’s monopolized economy makes merger-happy corporations particularly susceptible to threats of government interference, but obeying a regime that is bad for business is increasingly the worst option. 

Many doomers fear that America will never again have free and fair elections. This concern is not unfounded: I myself wrote recently that too supine an approach to Trump’s power grabs by Democratic leaders would risk emboldening Trump to cancel or manipulate the very elections their cautious messaging was designed to win. But even though Trump will likely use government power to intimidate voters at some polling places, there is only so much he can do. America is a large country, and angry voters are resilient voters. Elections still happen in competitive authoritarian systems, and the ruling party often loses them. And Democrats have been significantly overperforming in recent special elections. 

That Trump is pushing states to gerrymander mid-decade is an indication that he both fears the upcoming midterms and expects them to be determined by actual voters. Otherwise, there would be no need to bully Republican governors and statehouses to redraw the lines. 

So yes, there is reason to fear the worst. But as FDR said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Trump’s power is, in many ways, an illusory projection based on our democracy’s willingness to acquiesce. The doomers are wrong. Trump’s power—and Trumpism’s—can and likely will be defeated if we wish it so and work for it. 

The post Quit Being All Gloom and Doom. MAGA Has Not Won appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Donald Trump recently asserted that “a lot” of Americans want a dictator and declared that as president, he (along with the police) has the right to do “anything I want to do.” He is deploying armed soldiers in blue cities, using flimsy “emergency” excuses. He is likely directing the IRS and the Department of Justice to target his political enemies. He is trying to take control of the Federal Reserve and manipulate core economic statistics to hide the damage he is causing with his unilaterally and legally contested tariffs. He targets judges who oppose him and shakes down public and private institutions. His Deputy Chief of Staff and Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller, ranted that the Democratic Party is a “domestic extremist organization.” This is the backdrop for a battle among Democrats and affiliated groups about fighting authoritarianism as the party’s approval hit new all-time lows.

While many Democrats in Congress have ample courage and fiery messaging, the leadership—especially House and Senate Minority Leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer—has been lackluster. California Governor Gavin Newsom and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker have inspired Democrats with trolling attacks and fierce resistance in recent weeks. In Texas, statehouse Democrats showed courage against the GOP majority’s shameless midterm redistricting power play, and the Democratic National Committee under Chair Ken Martin is showing a far stronger spine than it was early in the year. (I’m a DNC member and supported Martin’s bid to be chair.)

Unfortunately, an influential cadre of consulting firms is diluting the Democratic message when it needs to be more potent. These firms have considerable clout in center-left circles and promote a political fallacy that imperils not just elections but the American experiment itself.

Recent cases include memos from an influential consulting firm, Blue Rose Research, which has the ear of House and Senate Democratic leaders and was profoundly influential in the efforts of Future Forward, the widely criticized SuperPAC operating on behalf of Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign. Blue Rose is a strategy and consulting firm headed by David Shor, a Barack Obama campaign alum and one of the most prominent advocates of “popularism,” a philosophy that urges candidates to calibrate their messaging to whatever is most popular in tested messages. Shor and other popularists usually use quantitative survey methods to attempt to discover what is most popular.

The leaked Blue Rose memo states that Democrats should avoid discussing Trump’s authoritarian actions and dismiss them as “distractions” and “stunts.” Instead, the party should refocus on “kitchen table issues” that resonate with voters. Unfortunately, Democratic leaders are listening. In August, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Trump’s vow to place armed soldiers on Chicago streets against the governor’s wishes an “effort to manufacture a crisis and create a distraction.”

Blue Rose’s memo is based on assumptions and even more flawed data from poorly written questionnaires that are often self-contradictory and fail basic empirical principles. Even if you believe that quantitative survey methods can replicate real-world public opinion, it should cause deep concern when your best-performing and worst-performing messages are nearly identical.

More importantly, this methodology elides how voters experience political messaging in the real world. Full disclosure: my work is in qualitative research and focus groups, which also have methodological challenges but tend to replicate the opinion environment better than quantitative surveys. I typically do not work for political clients. My interest here is purely in improving Democratic messaging and winning elections. Also, the point is less about attacking Shor and Blue Rose specifically but rather about questioning the credibility of quant-based popularism.

Even if you could prove superior persuasion effects from a message that unprecedented fascism is merely a distraction from cost-of-living increases, there is no reason to believe voters will listen. In the attention economy, only messages noticed by the lower-information and social-media-attuned voters on which elections depend really matter. And those messages need to excite. Even if you could prove that boring messages resonate better, the problem is that voters usually won’t even see them.

Blue Rose’s flawed methodology also assumes that the words of leaders can’t alter issue salience and popularity. But experience belies such complacency. Trump began the year as prohibitively popular on many issues, including immigration. Now polls show he is deeply underwater, primarily due to pushback. The task before leaders is to use emotional messaging to change public opinion, not to follow it. Minimizing Trump’s shattering of Democratic norms as mere distractions may represent where voters are now, but it does not move them to where they could be. Franklin D. Roosevelt did not dismiss the Nazi threat as a mere distraction from unemployment.

Even if Blue Rose’s approaches had marginally improved electoral effectiveness outside of artificial quantitative survey environments broadly, it would be dangerous for Democrats to embrace them. That is because Trump’s authoritarianism affects voting itself. Without an all-of-society resistance between now and the crucial 2026 midterm elections, the president seems sure to use federal power to intimidate, disrupt, or cancel elections where he can. (If this seems like hyperbole, such a prospect is no more far-fetched than the scenario of a mob storming the U.S. Capitol and threatening the life of the Vice-President to stop electoral certification would have seemed on January 5, 2021.) Minimizing Trump’s imperial ambitions imperils free and fair elections.

All too often, left-leaning voters upset at the Democratic Party assume that donors are directing it to offer a milquetoast response to Republican and corporate power. But the party’s backfooted stances often happen when the House and Senate leadership listen to consultants with wrongheaded notions about how to win.

As Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said at this week’s DNC Meeting in Minneapolis, disagreements among Democrats about strategy pale compared to Trump’s dictatorial ambitions. This is true. But the corollary is that all Democrats, especially those in leadership, must treat the presidential threat as a clear and present danger and communicate that alarm to the American public. Anything less is political malpractice.

The post Fighting Authoritarianism: A Democratic Imperative appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s paramour, fellow sexual assailant and procurer of children for her and Epstein to rape and proffer to other powerful people, has reportedly been made eligible for work release according to an unverified but seemingly credible account. This comes after her being moved to a minimum security prison.  

The recent timeline of events smells heavily of fear and cover-up. For years, Trump and his MAGA base loudly demagogued about the Epstein files and the far-right QAnon cult built baroque fantasies of a global liberal conspiracy of child torture that would be exposed in a second Trump administration. In February, Trump’s attorney general Pam Bondi invited a slew of rightwing influencers to the White House and gave them binders full of documents labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase I,” hinting at much more to come. But it turns out those binders contained very little that wasn’t already public record. Then suddenly Bondi and the DOJ said they would be releasing no further information, that Epstein did in fact commit suicide and that no client list existed. 

We then learned that Donald Trump’s name is, in fact, in the Epstein files. (Elon Musk had already made this accusation publicly on X before deleting the post.) Everyone in the MAGA media sphere who had been so vocal about Epstein leading up to this point suddenly began to clam up. Rumors swirled of major conflicts over the issue between Attorney General Bondi and former MAGA podcaster and Fox News personality Dan Bongino, who had been elevated to Deputy Director of the FBI. This even as new evidence comes to light of discrepancies in the video record suggesting a possible cover-up in the circumstances leading to Epstein’s supposed suicide on Donald Trump’s watch. (Trump officials say there is no such discrepancy, but have not provided direct evidence to the media.) 

Donald Trump then started telling everyone to move on. He berated reporters who dared even ask about it, and even began outlandishly accusing, entirely without evidence, prominent Democrats including Barack Obama of fabricating the Epstein files, including falsely adding his name to them. All of this whiffed of desperation. 

Then Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche scheduled an extremely unusual meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell in the top-security prison where she was being held. These meetings were cloaked in secrecy, without the usual witnesses or any lawyers for the victims allowed to attend. It is notable that this is the same Todd Blanche who had been Donald Trump’s personal attorney defending him from various criminal charges. It is further notable that Pam Bondi was the top prosecutor in Florida when Trump’s former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta reached an incredibly forgiving deal with Epstein that almost kept him out of jail before public outcry prevented it. 

And then suddenly Ghislaine Maxwell was whisked to a much lower-security prison as rumors spread that she would absolve Trump of involvement in the rape and abuse of children by Epstein and Maxwell. If this reads to you like a bad screenplay of a corruption and cover-up scandal that goes all the way to the top, it probably should. Except this is real life. 

Whatever he may or may not have done, Donald Trump and his minions in the Department of Justice are clearly so spooked by what is in the Epstein Files and what Ghislaine Maxwell knows, that they are willing to attempt an absurd and obvious dual cover-up: document suppression to prevent the release of the full files, and what seems to be an astonishingly transparent clemency-for-favors scheme with Maxwell. 

The simple truth is that Donald Trump is a convicted sexual abuser. He has been multiply accused of sexual misconduct by over two dozen women. He is also the longtime associate and friend of the world’s most notorious criminal pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. And no wonder: Donald Trump is a man who bought the Miss Universe organization (really?), is credibly accused of walking in on Miss Teen USA contestants while they were changing clothes. He later bragged to shock jock Howard Stern generally about beauty pageant contestants that he would often walk in on them naked and “sort of got away with things like that.”  And, of course, we all know what he said on the Access Hollywood Tape. He has even said incredibly creepy things about his own daughter Ivanka, including when she herself was a child. 

Trump’s involvement with Epstein goes back for decades. Trump liked to joke about Epstein’s having predilections for women “on the younger side,” with hints of jocular admiration rather than disgust. He said that Epstein was a “terrific guy” and “fun to be with.” When Trump was recently asked why he and Epstein fell out, it wasn’t because Trump was offended by Epstein’s rape and abuse of children, but rather because Epstein “stole” underage female staff from Trump’s employ at Mar-A-Lago. Such conflicts over control of underage women seem to have been common between the two men: one victim, Maria Farmer, said that once when Trump and Epstein were together with her Trump was staring uncomfortably at her legs when Epstein said “no, she’s not here for you.” 

And now, of course, The Wall Street Journal has published a stunning story alleging that Donald Trump sent Epstein a letter on his birthday with a drawn line form of a naked woman and his own signature in the place of pubic hair, a number of suggestive comments and the sign-off “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump has furiously denied writing the letter and levied a lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch and the newspaper, but the Wall Street Journal stands by its reporting. 

There is understandably an environment of fear around the story, and a lawsuit-happy regime wants to intimidate everyone into silence. But all of these stories, while contested, are a matter of public record. And it certainly smells like one of the biggest cover-ups of one of the greatest crimes in American presidential history. 

The post Is Trump Protecting a Child Sex Trafficker?  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

As racial minorities, women, and the LGBTQ+ Americans made social advancements in the decades since World War II, the overt violence of Jim Crow gave way to more hidden structural violence and malign governmental neglect of marginalized communities. If private organizations or foundations wanted to advance social justice, then so be it, but conservatives in government would not help them. 

However, that is no longer true with MAGA and the second Donald Trump administration. The president and his allies are using government coercion to enforce culture-war bigotry even upon private enterprises. The rhetoric coming from federal agencies and spokespeople echoes 19^th-century white supremacist propaganda. 

We’ve become so numb to these displays of government power in service of bigotry that they often escape our attention—especially when there is overwhelming interest in the president’s ties to a notorious child sex abuser and his outlandish accusations against Barack Obama. However, we should still reflect on the lesser but equally alarming abuse of power. 

It is astonishing, for instance, that an American president is threatening to use his power to scuttle a stadium deal with a private National Football League franchise if it does not revert to a long-rejected moniker. Back in 2022, the Washington Redskins changed their name, after considerable pressure, eventually calling themselves the Washington Commanders. Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians did, similarly, renaming themselves the Cleveland Guardians. There was little objection to this at the time. The only people who would still be upset about it are those inhabiting the ugliest corners of the political spectrum. But this rump faction controls the White House’s attention, with the president of the United States claiming that there is a “big clamoring” for reverting the names when there is no such outcry. Besides, owning the libs is as much a motivation as any. 

Even if there was a majoritarian desire for sports teams to restore their racially and ethnically insensitive names, it is wildly inappropriate for the government to threaten legal contracts and stadium deals, especially if the government is in the hands of a party that once championed the Tenth Amendment. If a progressive government forced an anti-racist name change, conservatives would say it was Stalinism. 

On a more consequential note, advances in artificial intelligence may be our era’s most significant development for the economy, America’s position on the global stage, and the future of humanity itself. But instead of figuring out the best course to protect jobs and copyrights, prevent Chinese dominance, and responsibly advance a potential technological bonanza, the Trump administration is hobbling the tech sector with demands that AI align itself with bigoted ideological shackles. Trump’s latest Executive Order demands that AI companies working with the federal government treat obvious realities like unconscious bias as part of a “harmful ideology” that must be excised. Not only is this anti-scientific and morally wrong, but it also hampers AI development itself. As Elon Musk is learning in his attempts to manipulate his own company, xAI’s Grok, when you tell a Large Language Model (LLM) to ignore data-based realities, it begins to break down the system, and the AI itself goes haywire. Such destructive interference from a progressive government would never be tolerated.  

The Trump administration’s abuse and coercion of universities and media companies has settled into an alarming pattern. MAGA ideologues have used funding threats to try to strongarm universities like Harvard and Columbia into betraying core principles of academic freedom under the guise of fighting antisemitism. The irony abounds since Trump is using the Education Department as the tip of the spear as he tries to make academia bend the knee just as he’s dismantling the 46-year-old department. It has used the threat of FCC interference with mergers and other business interests to extort major media companies into settling lawsuits they would otherwise have easily won, in what many would say effectively constitute protection racket payments to the government. Stephen Colbert will be canceled; the Paramount merger is approved with a promise from Skydance, its senior partner, that DEI will be scuttled at the new company.  

Meanwhile, the Republican government’s actions and communications have been dripping with racist contempt. Beyond the horrors being perpetrated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), there are other, smaller, shocking abuses. The White House just rescinded a $20 million grant to provide clean water to central California farming communities where pesticides have so contaminated the groundwater that residents cannot safely drink it. But because those residents are majority Hispanic, the Trump administration clawed back the money, labeling it a “wasteful DEI program.” On the same day, the Department of Homeland Security was approvingly sending tweets featuring 19^th-century images of Manifest Destiny that have long been used in school textbooks as exemplars of white supremacist ideology.  

Trump and his Republican allies are trafficking in the ugliest forms of old-school racism and modern authoritarianism and delighting in it. They are using government power not only to promote bigotry, but to intimidate private institutions into doing the same. When they lose power (as eventually they will), there must be a reckoning for this barbarism. 

The post Forcing Culture War Bigotry on Private Enterprise  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

There is unprecedented ugliness in what Republicans call their Big Beautiful Bill. The budget bill smashes healthcare, imperils rural hospitals, crushes America’s badly needed energy infrastructure, lavishes funding on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to raise a private army and set up ​​detention camps, balloons the deficit, and dispenses tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, exacerbating extreme inequality. If budgets are moral documents, this is a work of cruelty. 

The bill is wildly unpopular, even among Republicans. This is as it should be: even though Republicans have traded their voters from wealthier, more socially liberal suburbanites to more downscale exurban and rural voters, their determination to immiserate the poorest Americans remains unabated. Millions of MAGA voters ​are ​on the Medicaid rolls that the Republican budget would devastate. ​​Even many Republican voters aren’t on board with mass deportations of nannies and hairdressers, to say nothing of most independents and Democrats. Punishing solar and wind generation will devastate energy grids in Texas and other red states. And, of course, Republicans have always paid lip service to caring about deficits, even though in practice they have been profligate since Ronald Reagan. 

​​Perverse incentives have led MAGA Republicans to this point. Yes, the movement is primarily about “owning the libs,” Making America White Again, and cruelty against the marginalized. V​​ibes and culture wars have overtaken materialism as the key drivers of American politics​.​​     ​ ​​​ 

​​I​​​ncumbents ​​suffer ​​when their constituents feel material pain. And this Big Ugly Bill will deliver incredible pain not just to blue states, city dwellers, minorities, ​but​ it will ​also​ devastate the lives of millions of Trump voters who rely on rural hospitals, Medicaid, affordable energy, and SNAP benefits​     ​. 

Yet most Republican pols don’t appear to fear the looming rage. Senator Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican, has hemmed and hawed with some protestations about the cuts​, but finally bent the knee and supports the bill. Alaska Senator Lisa ​​​​​​​​is still trying to wrangle special carveouts for her state, but those remain uncertain. Susan Collins of Maine made the usual timid objections to appear moderate ​​before allowing the bill to move toward a vote. Collins and Murkowski have yet to say how they’ll vote on the final bill. Ironically, the most vigorous opposition has come from the right, where ideologues are making at least feigning opposition to the BBB’s deficit increase. Some House Republicans will balk at the even larger deficit the Senate has dug for the nation, but there can be​​​ little doubt ​that they will fall in line. 

Indeed, the only voter accountability Republicans fear is from the right. The Democrats’ best hope for a Senate pickup in 2026 lies in North Carolina. One might think that Trump and the GOP would have allowed Senator Thom Tillis leeway to protect his precarious seat. After all, Republicans can afford three Senate defections. But, no, when Tillis objected to the BBB’s Medicaid cuts, Trump mocked and threatened to primary him, after which Tillis announced he would not run again next year.  Without an incumbent, the seat becomes much harder for Republicans to hold. But saving Tillis and the Senate was of little concern to Trump and his MAGA. 

This should be raising alarms for Democrats, too. One of two things is true. One is that Trump and wealthy Republicans have abandoned concern for their re-elections, entered a manic state​,​​​ and want to pull off a shameless heist of public resources without care for the morrow. 

But more ominous is that they feel immune to political consequences. They may think their control of the information environment is so complete that they can deflect blame with lies once the severe pain hits. Or they may simply be counting on future elections being delayed or canceled. 

There is not much that Democrats can do for now.​ Their best option is to mobilize constituents to pressure the few vulnerable Republicans who might still feel shame—or electoral consequences—into softening the bill’s most damaging provisions. ​​     ​ 

​​​Moneyed liberals ought to invest in reshaping the media landscape, especially in rural and exurban areas that have become informational deserts.​​​​​​ It would not take an outlandish investment to create local news sources that also told the truth about national events. Localized social media channels could also perform similar roles. And, of course, Democrats must constantly sound the alarm about Republican plans to interfere in free and fair elections going forward. 

Somehow, ​​Republican​​​​​​ legislators must be made to fear electoral consequences. Otherwise, they won’t hesitate to loot the Treasury on behalf of their friends.  

The post ​​​​The GOP’s Cruel Budget and the Authoritarianism Behind the “Big Beautiful Bill”​​​  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Senate Democrats must decide whether to provide the votes to pass a pro-cryptocurrency bill. The measure, the first to regulate the digital currency industry, had been stalled over objections that it would make cryptocurrency too big to fail, enable foreign meddling in American elections, and, in essence, legalize Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency rug-pulling and get-rich schemes. But after negotiators modified it, the bill cleared a crucial Senate hurdle late Monday night as all Republicans but two joined 16 Democrats to overcome cloture. The Democratic supporters included the bill’s co-sponsor Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Mark Warner of Virginia. Senate Democratic leadership, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, did not back the GENIUS bill. Elizabeth Warren took to the Senate floor to denounce the measure: “If this bill passes, Main Street investors will be at greater risk of getting robbed and scammed.” On Tuesday, the Senate continued debate. The measure could pass at any time.  

Cryptocurrency is complicated, and regulating it is even more so. Digital currency began as electronic money that would be anti-inflationary, free from central bank control, tied directly to individuals, and have a permanent transaction record. However, crypto’s utility proved more limited: it is less efficient in almost every case (outside of a limited benefit for the marginalized enduring oppressive regimes) than an actual government-issued currency. As a tool, it is used by international crime syndicates for money laundering. What makes it compelling to so many is its asset value: basically, people buy cryptocurrency not to use it but to assume it will increase in value. The investor wins either by selling their cryptocurrency to another bag holder in exchange for real money before it collapses, or by cryptocurrency literally displacing national currencies. 

In a search for credibility, so-called “stablecoins” were invented. They peg cryptocurrencies to a commodity or currency (typically the dollar). The Senate bill is, in theory, regulating these “stablecoins” to limit money laundering and organized crime, which is why the GENIUS Act stands for the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act of 2025. The crypto industry has spent hundreds of millions lobbying for the bill to bolster confidence in the cryptomarket and encourage more institutions to invest in cryptocurrencies. 

The problem, however, is that the regulatory protections are essentially worthless and riddled with loopholes, as Ryan Cooper explains. The Trump clan would still be free to make billions off crypto and market manipulation schemes; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), recently neutered by the administration, lacks the tools to enforce regulatory protections; and foreign countries could easily bypass the regulations. Worst of all, investment in cryptocurrencies would soar, making the industry too big to fail. In the event of a crypto crash or the failure of giant stablecoin holders, a taxpayer bailout of crypto asset holders might be inevitable. 

So why would any Senate Democrats be open to this, let alone a sizeable contingent? One answer is that the crypto industry has a lot of money to spend on lobbying and campaign donations. Then there’s the fight among Democrats over how to appeal to constituencies where the party has lost ground, especially Silicon Valley types and Trump-leaning young men enthralled by crypto. 

Brian Beutler’s recent piece is essential reading here. Pro-crypto Democrats argue that a regulated market is better than an unregulated one and that this legislation is necessary to woo hostile but persuadable constituencies, for whom crypto is their livelihood, and to convince them that the Democratic Party is not their enemy. But the anti-crypto side notes that the juice here is not worth the squeeze. 

The crypto bubble isn’t just an investment fad. It’s a symptom of rot in an economy that no longer works for millions. Democrats need not cryptopander to persuade these voters; they must communicate clearly about the forces that drove them to digital currency in the first place. Economic despair, wealth concentration, predatory debt, and stagnant wages are problems crypto won’t fix. Progressive policies can address these systemic issues and sway young crypto investors not entirely in the MAGA bubble. 

Democrats should also avoid the temptation to chase the approval of figures like Marc Andreessen, whose flirtation with authoritarianism is a bug, not a feature, of the new Silicon Valley right. The greater opportunity lies in rallying the broader, left-leaning tech workforce, whose values clash with venture capital’s embrace of Peter Thiel and the Dark Enlightenment. By highlighting Trump’s relentless self-dealing and the predatory corruption as intrinsic to crypto, Democrats can peel off tech voters along with democratic values and common-sense economics, not a Ponzi scheme. 

Even though some believe passage of a crypto industry-approved bill can yield political gain, it’s not worth the risk of disaster. The crypto gamble is too dangerous, especially when the president openly wages an economic war on the dollar to make exports cheaper. Many crypto evangelists even dream of destroying the Fed and the dollar. Stablecoins don’t mitigate this threat: they magnify it, inflating the crypto bubble until it inevitably bursts, leaving financial devastation. 

Are temporary political gains worth systemic instability? Is enabling Trump to loot the system and corrupt American foreign policy? If the Democratic Party should fear anything, it shouldn’t be a few billionaires spending against it. It should fear losing an identity worth fighting for or being complicit in the financial corruption that voters expect them to confront. 

Stopping crypto’s metastasis isn’t just sound economics. It’s political survival. 

The post Why Are Some Democrats Making Cryptocurrency Too Big to Fail?  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Imagine that you were a high-ranking official in Donald Trump’s administration. Imagine that you believed in the Dark Enlightenment dream of dismantling liberal democracy itself—of “killing the woke mind virus,” ending birthright citizenship, and using federal power to suppress dissent. Now imagine you’re openly defying the Supreme Court, declaring that protest aids and abets terrorism, directing the FBI and IRS to target political enemies, and seriously considering invoking the Insurrection Act on flimsy pretexts. What would stop you? 

Certainly not impeachment. Not with a compliant Republican Congress. Not with a conservative media ecosystem ready to justify any abuse of power as a patriotic necessity. The only thing that might give you pause is the possibility that Democrats would regain control and then do to you what you’ve done to them. 

That fear of reciprocal power and legal accountability was once enough to preserve American political norms. It was the logic of mutually assured destruction: if you break democracy now, they’ll break you later. That’s how informal guardrails were enforced, even through dark chapters like Watergate or Iran-Contra. But those norms no longer hold because no one believes Democrats will retaliate. 

This is the context for the quiet battle raging within the Democratic Party leadership. A few anonymous but influential centrists are urging party leaders to soft-pedal Trump’s detention of legal residents in foreign internment camps and pivot to kitchen-table economics instead. Even as constituents demand action and donors grow restless, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries still signal caution, urging patience and restraint. 

Meanwhile, the rhetorical vacuum is being filled by some of the most unlikely voices in Washington. Old-school conservatives like Bill Kristol and Jonathan Last are wondering aloud where the “Abolish ICE” movement goes for its apology. David Brooks is quoting Assata Shakur and calling for a civic uprising. The Washington Monthly’s own Bill Scher, hardly a radical, has offered a blistering rebuke to the timidity of the party’s more cautious voices. 

There have been some bright spots. Senator Cory Booker broke Strom Thurmond’s filibuster record in a marathon floor speech denouncing Trump’s abuses. Senator Chris Van Hollen forced a meeting with abducted U.S. resident Abrego Garcia in El Salvador, delivering proof of life and drawing global attention. Senator Chris Murphy’s rhetoric has been sharp and effective. House Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (along with her “anti-oligarchy tour” partner Senator Bernie Sanders), Jasmine Crockett, and Robert Garcia have been doing excellent work. Their energy and determination carry the tacit message that those who broke the law and tried to impose an authoritarian regime on the U.S. will face appropriate justice at the end of the day. Representative Jamie Raskin was explicit about warning El Salvador’s leader: “Look, President Bukele—who’s declared himself a dictator—and the other tyrants, dictators, autocrats of the world have to understand that the Trump administration is not going to last forever,” Raskin said. “We’re going to restore strong democracy to America, and we will remember who stood up for democracy in America and who tried to drive us down towards dictatorship and autocracy.” 

But these have been exceptions rather than the rule. Most Democrats in leadership and positions of power have stayed quiet—avoiding press conferences, shunning symbolic actions, and allowing business to continue as if the country weren’t barreling toward authoritarianism. 

When pressed, party leaders often respond that they can do little substantively. That protests are performative. That voters are tired of drama. But that’s not the point. The point isn’t what Democrats can do today. It’s what they’re signaling they’re willing to do when they return to power. 

If Trump and his allies face no meaningful consequences, they have no reason to stop. If Republicans don’t believe that Democrats will act with equal force to protect democracy—legally, aggressively, unapologetically—then there’s no deterrent to further escalation. 

As Illinois Governor JB Pritzker put it, “Bullies respond to one thing only: a punch in the face.” Democrats don’t need to mimic MAGA’s tactics. But they must prove they have the spine to make authoritarians pay. Otherwise, they’re not a political opposition but a speed bump. 

Republicans have spent decades learning that they can get away with it. Nixon resigned but was pardoned. Reagan’s team sabotaged Carter and lied about Iran-Contra with no consequences. Bush officials misled the country into war, then walked into cushy think tank jobs. Trump’s first wave of cronies—Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon—faced slaps on the wrist. Trump himself walked free after legal institutions dragged their feet for four years. Why should this time be any different? 

MAGA doesn’t fear Democrats because history tells them they need not. They don’t believe that future Democratic presidents will use the IRS to crack down on Project 2025 architects, the DOJ to investigate Christian nationalist groups, or the FBI to follow foreign influence trails back to their political donors. But they should. 

Democrats don’t need to become liberal authoritarians. But they need to show they’re not afraid to use the levers of power to defend democracy, not just in lofty speeches but in institutional terms: subpoenas, audits, investigations, regulation, and prosecution. 

The stakes aren’t just moral. They’re strategic. If MAGA believes it can consolidate power without consequence, then why not roll the dice on permanent minority rule? Why not bet the farm on the Curtis Yarvin/Peter Thiel fantasy of a post-constitutional state run by decree? 

That’s the bet they’re making. The only way to stop it is to convince them it’s too risky to attempt. 

Democrats can’t wait for economic conditions to shift or for voters to come to their senses 20 months from now. They need to act like a party that intends to govern and govern with force when it’s their turn again. The message has to be clear, consistent, and credible: if you break democracy, you don’t get a quiet retirement. You get consequences. 

The post Democrats Need to Make Republicans Fear the Consequences of Attempting a Dictatorship appeared first on Washington Monthly.