The Roberts Court has demonstrated, systematically over many years, a corrupt devotion to advancing the agenda of the contemporary Republican Party, while disadvantaging the Democratic Party and its constituents. As I have argued, a string of decisions related to campaign finance, voting rights, and gerrymandering have served to make it tougher for Democrats to win elections.

Moreover, in a playbook employed by Viktor Orbán, the high court has proscribed public policies and practices favored by Democrats. In case after case, the Republican majority has precluded the give and take of politics — when Democrats win elections and put their favored public policies in place — by undermining the ability of Congress to work its will.

Jan-Werner Müller, in his book What Is Populism?, describes this authoritarian scenario:

The Hungarian government . . . essentially designed what a former judge on the German constitutional court, Dieter Grimm, has called an “exclusive constitution,” or what one might also term a partisan constitution: the constitution sets a number of highly specific policy preferences in stone, when debate about such preferences would have been the stuff of day-to-day political struggle in non-populist democracies.

That’s exactly the pattern followed by the Republican-appointed justices — through their rulings from the bench — who comprise the court’s majority. And when the two parties are most sharply at odds, it is partisanship — not adherence to originalism, or textualism, or strict constructionism, or any other feigned judicial-ism — that carries the day.

In July 2024 the Roberts Court, in a decision untethered from — and in defiance of — the United States Constitution, careened off the rails in Trump v. United States. With this ruling, the Republican majority decreed one man exempt from the rule of law. As Justice Sonia Sotomayer observed in her dissent: “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

In April 2025 we’re living with the inevitable consequences of that reckless ruling. The Supreme Court won’t check Donald Trump because the Republican majority has deliberately paved the way for Trump’s lawless assault on our democracy. Trump is the “bold and unhesitating” president this court has lionized.

SCOTUS can let Trump break the law

Cue Josh Marshall, who points to “the conservative legal movement, embodied in the Federalist Society.” Yes, this fraudulent, results-driven doctrine, conjured up to advance the interests of the Republican Party, is antithetical to the Constitution as written and as envisaged by the founders.

I’ve taken the justices who comprise the Republican majority to task. Marshall focuses on the doctrines, weaved out of whole cloth by the Federalist Society, to give cover to this partisan majority.

The Supreme Court might allow Trump to break the law. But that will be what it is – allowing him to break the law. We will collectively have to grapple with that reality. But it will still be illegal. The Court can say up is down but up will still be up.
. . .
Trump is hungry to walk through this door of lawless autocracy. But it is the conservative legal movement, embodied in the Federalist Society, organized by Leonard Leo and others who opened the door. They manufactured the fraudulent idea that presidents cannot be constrained by the law. They imported it from abroad, from the degenerate ideologues of autocracy. They did this. They created the current moment in which a renegade President can simply start chainsawing through the legal fabric and do anything he wants and we, the citizens of the country, must wait in anxious expectation to learn which if any of the laws turn out to be real. That’s not how the rule of law works. It’s not a game of Magic Eight Ball, built by design on inherent suspense and uncertainty. It’s nature is its clarity and fixity, especially during arduous times of tumult and fear.
Yes, I am fully versed on the theory of purported unitary executive power. It’s a fraud, literally a foreign imposition.

Marshall continues:

We can talk endlessly about whether we’re still in a democracy or whether Trump wants to be or is acting like a dictator. We can debate words ‘fascism’ that were unknown before a century ago. But what we are seeing right now is the definition of tyranny, a half-archaic concept the founders of the American Republic were very familiar with. Trump’s rule is both lawless and arbitrary. He has taken the bundle of powers the constitution provides him to govern and defend the constitution and turned them to an entirely different and corrupt purpose: using them as weapons to attack the people and institutions he deems his enemies.
. . .
The President is no King; he is subject to the law. And yet here we are. And it is the fraudulent doctrine of unitary executive authority which is walking before him like a statutory bushwhacker, clearing a path for him through every law and restraint. As I wrote above, this doctrine is based on theories and philosophical principles totally unknown to the architects of the constitution. 

I concur.

The Trump-Supreme Court battle is not really the crisis.
The crisis is here now. Trump is enacting an insidious coordinated attack on our institutions of democratic accountability, designed to crater democracy before next fall. — Senator Chris Murphy

That crisply and clearly describes the situation we’re in. Here and now. While Congressional Republicans decline to offer opposition, much less to take a meaningful step to stop what’s going on; while Democrats are locked out of power and, mostly, uncertain about what to do: the Senator from Connecticut is on the case.

Senator Murphy explains:

While I recommend clicking through the thread on Bluesky, here’s a text version (with the links Murphy places on several posts):

The Trump-Supreme Court battle is not really the crisis.
The crisis is here now. Trump is enacting an insidious coordinated attack on our institutions of democratic accountability, designed to crater democracy before next fall.
1/ A long 🧵to explain the plan & how we stop it.

2/ First, just know that MAGA has given up on democracy. Wish it weren’t true but it is. They would rather MAGA rule forever than run a fair election where a Democrat might win.
This isn’t some vengeance campaign. It’s a brazen effort to end democracy.

[Link to book excerpt in Rolling Stone: Inside the Anti-Democratic Movement That Restored Trump to Power]

3/ MAGA doesn’t want democracy because they want power forever. But also to get away with the thievery and corruption.
A true democracy would hold Trump accountable for the mass scale corruption – the crypto coin, the insider trading, the Musk self dealing etc.

4/ The modern, time-tested way to destroy a democracy is NOT a coup or burning down the Parliament or a public confrontation with the judiciary.
It’s a slow methodical campaign to weaken the structures of accountability necessary for the political opposition to win elections.

5/ ELEMENT 1: The Legitimization of Political Violence
Every good authoritarian uses the threat of violence to keep critics silent. That’s what the Jan. 6 pardons are about.
Lisa Murkowski’s public worries this week about “retaliation” are chilling.

[Link to Anchorage Daily News: ‘We are all afraid’: Speaking to Alaska nonprofit leaders, Murkowski gets candid on upheaval in federal government.]

6/ ELEMENT 2: Silence the Press
Trump does this in two ways. First, co-opt the owners of the press (Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, etc.).
Second, through harassment (eg AP and “Gulf of America” or FCC investigations).

[Link to National Catholic Reporter: Editorial: Trump leads a deliberate and dangerous assault on the free press]

7/ ELEMENT 3: Silence the Protectors of the Rule of Law.
In free societies, lawyers guard our rights. Despots can more easily trample our rights if the lawyers are silenced. That’s why Trump is forcing the big firms to sign effective loyalty oaths.

[Link to New York Times: Law Firms Made Deals With Trump. Now He Wants More From Them.]

8/ ELEMENT 4: Silence the Universities
Two things happen on university campuses: youth protest and the guarding of objective truth. Neither are allowed in an autocracy. Thus, Trump’s illegal campaign to force campuses to crush dissent.

[Link to Axios: How Trump wants to assert control at Harvard and elite colleges]

9/ ELEMENT 5: Silence the Private Sector
The tariffs are a means to force every business to get on Trump’s good side (ie zero public dissent) in exchange for relief. The withholding of federal funds from non-profits forces these orgs to stay quiet too.

[Link to Truthout: Trump’s Tariffs Are a Ploy to Further Consolidate Power, Says Sen. Chris Murphy]

10/ ELEMENT 6: Cut Off Funding for the Opposition
Autocrats like Orban allow the opposition to exist, but starve it. Trump is moving to shut down non-profits and donor collectives that oppose his policies; and ActBlue, the way $$ flow to Democrats.

[Link to AP News: Core Democratic groups are preparing to be targeted by the Trump administration]

11/ This is all happening so fast it’s hard for the public to see it all as part of one plan. But it is.
And the press, lawyers, colleges and opposition political groups don’t have to be DESTROYED in order for this plan to work.

12/ They just have to be weakened enough so the tools of accountability don’t work anymore.
The press can’t tell enough truth. The lawyers won’t protect our rights. Campus protest disappears. Opposition funding dries up.
We still have elections. But the regime always wins.

13/ How do we stop it?
First, though solidarity. Each set of institutions can’t let the regime pick one off from each others. The legal profession failed miserably at this this, but the universities can model a collective strategy to fight back and win.

14/ Second, through mass mobilization. When hundreds of thousands of people rally against this kind of assault on democracy, history shows it works. There is a strange, magic power to mass activation which makes supporters of the regime start to jump ship.

15/ Third, through risk taking by political leaders. No citizen will take the risk to mobilize if leaders are playing it safe.
This means speaking daily truth to the regime and taking tactical risks (like voting against the CR or boycotting the SOTU would have been).

16/ I believe those three steps, taken together, will arrest Trump’s assault. But if it doesn’t, then civil disobedience. And this conversation will need to happen sooner than we would like. We still have the power, but we have less time than most think.

After days of insisting he would absolutely not change course regarding his imposition of reciprocal tariffs, Donald Trump caved this afternoon — empty handed, without a deal in sight. (David Graham notes, “I’ve written previously that Trump, despite his obsession with strength, almost always folds. He’s actually not much of a negotiator at all, and can be induced to back down pretty easily.”) What’s going on?

A. After Donald Trump’s 2016 election, there was much talk – based on The Art of the Deal (amplified by “The Apprentice”) – about Trump’s purported skill at negotiation.

In October 2017 at Calculated Risk, Bill McBride distinguished between two different types of negotiation: distributive (win-lose) and integrative (win-win). Trump regarded himself as skillful at win-lose negotiations, which are characteristic of selling a used car or real estate. The relationship is over after the sale and so it’s easier to get away with zero-sum bargaining. (Once.) But Trump had no experience with integrative negotiation, which is critical when doing diplomacy, because trust is central to maintaining ongoing relationships. Mexico and Canada and other countries aren’t going anywhere. Trashing them is a fool’s errand.

Watching Trump boast, bluster, and finally blink over the past week confirms that he has learned nothing about negotiation over the past eight years.

B. In October 2019, just after the House began an impeachment inquiry of President Trump, George Conway made the case for Trump’s psychological incapacity to fulfill the duties of the presidency.

“Trump’s erratic behavior has long been the subject of political criticism, late-night-television jokes, and even speculation about whether it’s part of some incomprehensible, multidimensional strategic game. But it’s relevant to whether he’s fit for the office he holds. Simply put, Trump’s ingrained and extreme behavioral characteristics make it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires.”

Among the duties of a president, as stated in Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, is that “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” In other words, the president – in order to perform the duties specified in the Constitution – must act as a fiduciary on behalf of the country. Conway (relying on the president’s publicly observable behavior) argued convincingly that Trump’s distinctive psychological characteristics – which Conway finds correlate with two personality disorders, narcissism and sociopathy – render Trump incapable of serving as a fiduciary, who must pursue the public interest, not self-interest; that is, put the country first, rather than himself.

C. There is much evidence that Trump’s perception — what he grasps — is constricted, not as robust as in other people, as illustrated by Jeffrey Goldberg’s account of a visit that President Donald Trump made with his Chief of Staff John Kelly to Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day 2017:.

The two men visited Section 60, the 14-acre section that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars (and the site of Trump’s Arlington controversy earlier this year). Kelly’s son Robert, a Marine officer killed in 2010 in Afghanistan, is buried in Section 60. Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” At first, Kelly believed that Trump was making a reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand nontransactional life choices. I quoted one of Kelly’s friends, a fellow retired four-star general, who said of Trump, “He can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself. He just thinks that anyone who does anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker.” 

For most people, even folks who lack courage or patriotism or haven’t the least interest in a military career, it’s hardly mysterious why someone might choose to become a soldier without regard to self-interest, understanding that military service may require sacrifice. It’s shocking that a Commander-in-Chief would fail to comprehend or appreciate this.

D. In today’s New York Times, writing about Trump’s tariff misadventures (before Trump caved), Jamelle Bouie offers perceptive observations about the president:

Yesterday, acting on an emergency appeal by the Trump administration, the Supreme Court vacated a pair of restraining orders issued by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg. This unsigned opinion in Trump v. J.G.G, in which the five Republican men on the court comprised the majority in the 5-4 decision, gave a green light (at least for now) to Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1789 to permit continuing deportations of Venezuelans alleged to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

There’s lots of messiness surrounding the deportations, the presidential proclamation (announced after a day’s delay), the evidence for gang membership, the back and forth in courtrooms, and even challenges to the legitimacy of the judiciary to weigh in on the controversies. Leaving all that aside, I wish to highlight a couple of commentaries since the high court’s ruling.

Adam Liptak, in this morning’s New York Times, begins his commentary with these words (my emphasis added):

The court led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. over the last two decades has not been known for its modesty or caution. Its signature move has been bold assertions of power backed by sweeping claims about the meaning of the Constitution.
It gutted campaign finance laws and the Voting Rights Act, overturned the constitutional right to abortion, did away with affirmative action in higher education and adopted a new interpretation of the Second Amendment that protects an individual’s right to own guns.
But as the first wave of challenges to President Trump’s blitz of executive orders has reached the justices, a very different portrait of the court is emerging. It has issued a series of narrow and legalistic rulings that seem calculated to avoid the larger issues presented by a president rapidly working to expand power and reshape government.

Yesterday, in his newsletter Steve Vladeck began his commentary with these words:

As regular readers of this newsletter know, I tend to preach caution before folks read too much into what the Supreme Court does through its rulings on individual emergency applications—given that these rulings tend to be rushed, under-theorized, and, even when we actually get majority opinions, under-explained. Thus, I’ve always thought the real takeaways are to be had from the patterns of the Court’s decisions, not any one ruling.
But the more I read the Court’s Monday night ruling in Trump v. J.G.G., in which a 5-4 majority vacated a pair of temporary restraining orders entered by Chief Judge Boasberg in the Alien Enemy Act case, the more I think that this ruling really is a harbinger, and a profoundly alarming one, at that. To be clear, it’s not a sweeping win for the Trump administration; the Court did not suggest that what Trump is doing is legal, or, just as bad, that it might not be subject to judicial review. Indeed, the Court went out of its way to emphasize that individuals detained under the Act are entitled to due process, including meaningful judicial review.
But much like last Friday’s ruling in the Department of Education grants case, it’s still a ruling by a Court that seems willing to hide behind less-than-obvious legal artifices to make it harder for federal courts to actually restrain conduct by the current administration that everyone believes to be unlawful. As in that decision, here, a 5-4 majority has made it much harder for litigants to bring systemic challenges to what the Trump administration is doing. And especially in the broader context in which the Alien Enemy Act litigation, specifically, has unfolded, the justices in the majority got there by burying their heads in the sand.

The Roberts Court

I’ve been watching the Supreme Court — as an American citizen, not an attorney — for more than half a century. My understanding of the judiciary has been informed by the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, two undergraduate college courses in constitutional law, majority opinions and dissents of the court, and law review articles. I also follow legal and constitutional questions as reported in newspapers, journals, online commentaries, and books.

It doesn’t take a constitutional scholar to recognize that the Roberts Court is corruptly partisan to the core. The five men on the court have all served, in various roles, as operatives of the Republican Party. This defining characteristic is central to understanding how and why the court’s majority acts as it does.

On February 19, I wrote a post titled, “The courts will not stop Trump and Musk from trashing the federal government,” in which I predicted flatly that there was no way the Supreme Court would stop Musk’s rampage. I didn’t address arrests by masked agents, deportations to Salvadorian prisons, bad faith appeals to national security, or denial of due process. But I’m consistent: the Supreme Court will not protect us from this rampage either.

As I wrote then: “The Republican majority on the Supreme Court ran roughshod over the Constitution to grant presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for laws intended to apply to everyone. This court will not stop Trump from his campaign of destruction, which no Republican dares question publicly.” And: “It is preposterous to think that the Roberts Court, after giving Trump immunity from criminal prosecution — including for ordering the nation’s military to assassinate a political rival — would stand in the way of mass purges of civil servants and shuttering departments and agencies. That’s a nonstarter.”

In recent years, I’ve watched and read smarter people than I am, and certainly well-informed constitutional lawyers, make predictions about what the Roberts Court would do. In recent years, these predictions have been less and less reliable. By July 2024, with the immunity decision in Trump v. United States, the gap between expectation and outcome had become vast.

The subhead of Adam Liptak’s NYT piece reads: “In a series of narrow and technical rulings, the justices have seemed to take pains to avoid a showdown with a president who has challenged the judiciary’s legitimacy.” I predicted in my February post that Roberts would take pains not to stand in Trump’s way. I suggested that we might see “feeble roadblocks (which will invite workarounds) to Trump,” but no significant — Stop right there — challenges from the court to Trump. The Republican majority on this court is on board with Trump and, moreover, pragmatic enough not to stand in his way.

Professor Vladeck quotes from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent — “The Government’s conduct in this litigation poses an extraordinary threat to the rule of law. That a majority of this Court now rewards the Government for its behavior with discretionary equitable relief is indefensible. We, as a Nation and a court of law, should be better than this.” — before commenting:

That the Court is not, in fact, “better than this” may come as little surprise to folks who have come to view everything this Court does with cynicism. For as harsh a critic of the Court as I’ve been, especially with respect to its behavior on emergency applications like these, it still surprises me.

Habits, including intellectual and professional habits, die hard. The professor’s surprise is understandable. It is one thing to ascribe injudicious impulses to one or two justices (say, Thomas and Alito) on the court without deciding that the whole enterprise has become corrupted. But for a number of years (before Trump), in a range of cases, decisions have become increasingly results-driven. Partisanship has become a much better predictor of the outcome of cases before the court than original intent, or stare decisis, or any other conservative legal principle or practice.

As the Roberts Court’s majority has increased, the Republican-appointed justices have become bolder, less restrained in their decisions. And the partisan corruption of the court has become more extreme.

We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the United States. And the Republican majority on the Supreme Court, in a series of decisions predating Trump’s ride down the golden escalator, has deliberately paved the way. Look again at the list of sweeping rulings by the court in Litptak’s second paragraph. I regard the campaign finance, voting rights, and gerrymandering decisions, aimed squarely at disadvantaging the Democratic Party and its constituents in campaigns and elections, as especially noxious. Much else has happened along the way. And by July 2024, we arrive at the immunity decision.

This perspective is not cynicism; this is just the way things are. All three branches of the federal government are controlled by an authoritarian political party. Our liberties, checks on presidential power, the rule of law — all of this stands in the balance. It’s past time for an unflinching look. The Roberts Court will continue to pave the way for Donald Trump.

[Note: the final paragraphs were revised for clarity on April 9.]

The New York Times notes that the president was doubled-booked this weekend (“Trump Family’s Cash Registers Ring as Financial Meltdown Plays Out”). All quotations (apart from Trump’s Truth Social account) are from the NYT :

“The Trump family monetization weekend” featured:

At the Trump National Doral resort:

• a Saudi Arabian backed LIV golf tournament (the fourth LIV tourney at Trump’s course), which feature all-day parties with food, music, wine and beer
• a full house at Trump’s 643-room hotel (featuring suites at up to $13,000 a night and a stakehouse bar with $130 porterhouse steaks)
• an American Patriots Gala fundraiser
• three merchandise shops, hawking $3 Sharpies (similar to the one Trump uses to sign his executive orders) and “everything from a $550 Trump-branded crystal-studded purse to $18 Doral-branded paperweights made in China”

At Mar-a-Lago:

Another in a series of $1,000,000-a-head dinners, benefiting Trump’s MAGA, Inc. (“as corporate interests and others seek to get access to the president or make amends for perceived slights”). The program goes like this:

Roughly 20 people gather around a candlelit table with big white flowers in the club’s “White and Gold Room” after a photo session. Mr. Trump speaks, then listens to the guests discuss their businesses, one by one. In just an hour or two, he can raise as much as $20 million — a great return on his time investment, associates say.

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO GET RICH, RICHER THAN EVER BEFORE!!!” the president proclaimed on Truth Social.

Grifts Я Us

What is undeniable is the golden opportunity for corruption. The power to enact tariffs is in the hands of a single man who always has his hand out — a man who has shown himself to be influenced by flattery and tribute, and willing to exact retribution against anyone who defies him. Whatever the impact of tariffs, it is abundantly clear that the million-dollar dinners invite what is indistinguishable from bribery. Easy money.

Congress has granted the power to impose tariffs on the president. The Supreme Court that has made the president virtually immune from prosecution for criminal activity. So much for checks and balances. This is a setup for the perfect grift at the highest level of government.

And regarding the world economy, Trump’s infliction of global pain provides a compelling incentive for the powerful who can pay him protection money. How convenient. Trump re-posted this message on Truth Social: “Trump is Purposely CRASHING The Market.”

Don’t miss previous posts on Trump’s cashing in on the presidency (which began even before he was sworn-in for his second term):

• Donald Trump’s Christmas message, a second look (December 22)
• Billionaires, corporations, lobbyists, et al. offer tribute to incoming president (January 6)
• Transactional Trump continues to set records for raking in money (January 19)
• Trump meme coin is “the most brazen act of corruption of the modern presidency” (February 21)

[Images from my neighborhood this afternoon.]

After Senator Corey Booker’s 25-hour indictment of the Trump administration, Ed Kilgore observed:

Booker didn’t concentrate on Trump’s potential Medicaid cuts, illegal deportations, cruelty to public employees, abandonment of Ukraine, violations of civil liberties, reckless tariffs, usurpations of legislative powers, rampant corruption, or thuggish threats to federal judges. He talked about all this and more as a way to dramatize the ongoing assault on both democracy and the well-being of poor and middle-class Americans.
It’s the sheer avalanche of bad policies, bad administration, and bad faith that makes the current situation such an emergency. 

At the beginning of last week, Jonathan V. Last shared a recent insight. He explained that he had been “wrong about one big thing in 2024.” He had regarded the Republican Party’s surrender to Trump as due to failings unique to the party and so he did not anticipate the rapid capitulation after the election of institutions in sector after sector. Media, law, business, higher education, tech — institution after institution folded. How quickly they’ve rushed to accept the yoke! All turned out to be weak-kneed when confronting an authoritarian administration.

Last continued:

Any institution not explicitly anti-Trump will eventually become useful to Trump. I originally thought this would apply only to media orgs. Turns out that it applies to everyone and everything. From Ross Douthat to John Fetterman, from Paul Weiss to Facebook. All of our institutions are the Republican party now.
This is an extraordinary moment and it requires extraordinary vision and actions. We must stop viewing political life through the lens of American politics as we have known it, and adopt the viewpoint of dissident movements in autocratic states.
The Democratic party has more to learn from Alexei Navalny or the protesters in Serbia than it does from Chuck Schumer or strategists obsessing over message-testing crosstabs. This battle is half mass mobilization and half asymmetric warfare. Over the next year those tactics will matter more than traditional political messaging as it has been practiced here in living memory.

No institutions, Last argues, not business, not the courts will protect us. Only people power can achieve this.

The Democratic party won’t stop them, either. If the authoritarians can be stopped then the Democratic party will be the vehicle through which people wield power. But the Democratic party, as an institution, is too weak and desiccated to stage a real fight against Trumpism. It will have to be pushed into fighting by a mass popular movement.

Today — with the Hands Off! protests — we saw the beginnings of what could be a successful democratic movement. We’ll see. America is at a fork in the road. An authoritarian party controls every branch of our national government and many state governments; small-d democrats are losing ground. Our liberty, the rule of law, and a government that serves working- and middle-class Americans are being lost. The elites making deals with Trump sure aren’t looking out for us. Nor are the Republicans. The Trump train is quite comfortable enough for well-off people who don’t give a fig about our democratic institutions and have no concerns for folks less well-off than themselves.

I agree with Last that while the opposition party will be “the vehicle through which people wield power,” the Democratic Party cannot be counted on to act decisively on its own initiative. Or reliably to act on our behalf.

Last concludes: “The movement must be, at some level, oppositional to the status quo. It cannot only be a defense of democracy and our institutions, it must be a challenge to them.”

This effort can’t help but be an uphill battle. Or rather, a winning campaign will require fighting many uphill battles extending over a number of years. But we don’t have a choice if we wish to preserve American democracy.

From Senator Chris Murphy via Bluesky, an explanation of Trump’s anti-democratic powerplay (my emphasis):

Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive.
No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief.

1/ A 🧵 to explain his plan and how we fight back.

2/ This week you will read many confused economists and political pundits who won’t understand how the tariffs make economic sense.
That’s because they don’t. They aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool.

3/ You see, our founders created a President with limited and checked powers. They specifically put the power of spending and taxation in the hands of the legislature.
Why? Because they watched how kings and despots used spending and taxes to control their subjects.

4/ British kings used taxation to reward loyalty and punish dissent.
Our own revolution was spurred by the King’s use of heavy taxation of the colonies to punish our push for self governance.
The King’s message was simple: stop protesting and I’ll stop taxing.

5/ Trump knows that he can weaken (and maybe destroy) democracy by using spending and taxation in the same way.
He is using access to government funds to bully universities, law firms and state and local governments into loyalty pledges.

6/ Healthy democracies rely on an independent legal profession to maintain the rule of law, independent universities to guard objective truth and provide forums for dissent to authority, and independent state/local government to counterbalance a powerful federal government.

7/ But the private sector also plays a rule to protect democracy. Independent industry has power.
The tariffs are Trump’s tool to erode that independence. Now, one by one, every industry or company will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief.

8/ What could Trump demand as part of a quiet loyalty pledge?
Public shows of support from executives for all his economic policy. Contributions to his political efforts. Promises to police employees’ support for his political opposition.

9/ The tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship. Why? So that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry.
As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears.

10/ And once Trump has the lawyers, colleges and industry under his thumb, it becomes very hard for the opposition to have any viable space to maneuver.
Trump didn’t invent this strategy. It’s the playbook for democratically elected leaders who want to stay in power forever.

11/ The tariffs aren’t economic policy. They are political weapons.
But as long as we see this clearly, we can stop him. Public mobilization is working. Today, a few Republicans joined Democrats to vote against one set of tariffs.
The people still have the power.

[End of thread.]

= = =

Trump’s plan, thus far, is working. The appearance of chaos here-there-and-everywhere has obscured the significance of a relentless crusade against our democratic government. Many people are just starting to pay attention. No one has managed to slow things down. And, for the most part, Democratic leaders have been caught flatfooted.

So, better late than never, what’s the Democratic plan to push back?

Congressional Democrats are locked out of power — a result of losing elections in November 2024. Governors, attorneys general, and other state and local officials have only limited means to block federal policy. What the opposition party has is a challenge — an opportunity — to change public opinion.

The plan for Democrats is to communicate as effectively as possible to Americans about what is going on. Donald Trump is waging a savage assault on American democracy and on the wellbeing of working- and middle-class folks across the country.

In a matter of months the consequences will be clearer, but we can’t afford to wait months. It’s on Democrats — and not just those in Washington or in office — to get the attention of folks who haven’t been paying attention. To speak persuasively to people who haven’t yet caught on to the damage that’s being directed by Trump and company. (Addendum: Let’s say, rather, it’s on democrats to persuade others. We can work through a political party, even though we can’t rely on the Democrats to lead the way. See the following post.)

At this stage, we still possess an arsenal of freedoms. While billionaires, CEOs, law firms, universities, media companies, and others are bending the knee — and paying tribute to Trump — it’s up to the rest of us who don’t want to live in an autocratic version of America to push back.

Not the plan you wanted? Sorry, but there’s no magic bullet. Welcome to our imperfect democracy, which will be preserved — if at all — by the efforts of those of us who treasure it. By raising our voices, individually and collectively.

Fox6 – Milwaukee:
Election Results — Wisconsin Supreme Court:

Susan Crawford ………………………………………1,301,128 (55%)
Brad Schimel ………………………………………….1,063,244 (45%)

Precincts reporting: 99%

Voters in Wisconsin, the swingiest of swing states, are not so different from voters across the country. Millions of folks have had enough of Elon Musk’s antics.

But not all. He is still popular among the fanboys on X (though not as popular as the hijacked algorithms would suggest). Lots of Congressional Republicans still covet his money. The Project 2025 radicals are swooning over DOGE’s destructive assault on federal departments and agencies.

And then there are Trump’s most devoted sycophants:

JD Vance is spouting lies. We haven’t seen evidence of fraudulent grants, or 150-year-old Social Security recipients, or SSI fraud approaching 4-percent, much less 40-percent.

The vice president could be, if he chose to be, in a position to make knowledgeable assessments about this stuff. But he’s not even trying. It’s just lie after lie after lie.

When elected officials and a political party must lie to make the case for their agenda — that’s a tell. That’s a sign that their objective is, as Vance put it, to “thwart the will of the American people.” Of course loyalty to their leader is the guiding principle for Republicans today. The lies follow from this imperative.

The New York Times reported this morning: “The Trump administration laid off thousands of federal health workers on Tuesday in a purge that included senior leaders and top scientists charged with regulating food and drugs, protecting Americans from disease and researching new treatments and cures.”

While Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suggested that eliminating 10,000 jobs would relieve the budget deficit, health personnel make up less than 1% of HHS spending; most funding goes to hospitals, doctors, and nursing homes.

Last Friday, the FDA’s top vaccine scientist, Peter Marks, resigned under pressure. Marks accused the secretary of trafficking in “misinformation and lies” in his campaign against vaccines, adding, “This man doesn’t care about the truth.”

Unfortunately, Kennedy, who has promoted vitamin A to ward off measles, has a following among parents who take him seriously.

The partial quotation in the headline above this post is from Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. From Nature: “This will go down as one of the darkest days in modern scientific history in my 50 years in the business. These are going to be huge losses to the research community.”

And Americans will suffer and die as a consequence. This policy is worse than senseless. It is recklessly, callously harmful. All because Donald Trump craves attention and deference and the Kennedy aura, and Robert Jr. — after being rebuffed by Kamala Harris — offered his support for Trump’s campaign in August 2024.

Politics is often transactional. But seldom as stupid and destructive as Trump has made it. For years to come, Americans who could have lived and thrived, will be struck by diseases and many will die as a result of Trump and Kennedy’s misrule.

In 2023, 107,500 people — mostly children — lost their lives to measles, a highly contagious respiratory virus. In 2025, kids in Texas and New Mexico have died from measles. Yet the disease was considered eliminated in the United States in 2000 as a result of the MMR vaccine and high vaccination rates. Vaccine skepticism, now boosted by the nation’s cabinet official overlooking the health agencies, is taking a toll, as vaccine rates plummet.

And of course the harm of the misinformation and lies extends much further and wider than measles, a single infectious disease.

Whatever Make America Great Again conjures up for the true believers, this can’t be it, can it? A return to the good old days (before the vaccine became available) when there were tens of thousands of hospitalizations due to measles in the U.S. and hundreds of Americans, mostly children, died from the infection each year?

For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.  

This quotation is often attributed to strongman Oscar R. Benavides, who rose from Field Marshal to President (1933-1939) of Peru. We North Americans (in the United States) are seeing a version of this in the second presidential administration of Donald Trump, but it’s not exactly a law and order regime that we’re watching.

Conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig recently wrote:

President Trump has wasted no time in his second term in declaring war on the nation’s federal judiciary, the country’s legal profession and the rule of law. He has provoked a constitutional crisis with his stunning frontal assault on the third branch of government and the American system of justice. The casualty could well be the constitutional democracy Americans fought for in the Revolutionary War against the British monarchy 250 years ago.

Obviously, the law reserved for Trump’s enemies veers sharply from the rule of law envisaged in a constitutional democracy. A recent discussion by Aziz Huq of The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, written by Ernst Fraenkel more than eighty years ago, suggests a critical distinction.

Fraenkel observed firsthand the erosion of constitutional and legal foundations of Germany and the rise of strongman rule under Hitler. But, in Huq’s words, “the Nazi regime managed to keep on track a capitalist economy governed by stable laws—and maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens—while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence in order to realize its terrible vision of ethno-nationalism.”

As Fraenkel explained it, a lawless dictatorship does not arise simply by snuffing out the ordinary legal system of rules, procedures, and precedents. To the contrary, that system—which he called the “normative state”—remains in place while dictatorial power spreads across society. What happens, Fraenkel explained, is insidious. Rather than completely eliminating the normative state, the Nazi regime slowly created a parallel zone in which “unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees” reigned freely. In this domain, which Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” ordinary law didn’t apply. 

Trump and his administration, prominently including his DOJ, have created the prerogative state right before our eyes. It is a lawless zone where resentment and grievance rule, retribution is directed at enemies, while friends and family are rewarded and corruptly acquired payoffs buy immunity from the feds.

This is a perversion of a democratic America. For most folks, life can go on more or less as normal (though we have lost an ample measure of our freedom and security) — unless we attract the ire of the strongman or his lieutenants. Then, we may find ourselves subject to unlimited arbitrariness (and in some cases violence) — as thousands of people (civil servants, university and medical researchers, students receiving financial aid, demonstrators whose viewpoints offend MAGA, Democratic law firms, families with transgender kids, legal immigrants, et al.) have experienced in the first two months of rule by the Trump 2 administration.

This (hardly exhaustive) list will keep getting longer.