Month: August 2025

[Trump cabinet meeting – screen grab from AP video]

It was a cabinet meeting unlike any other in American history. It was very long — all three hours and seventeen minutes of the spectacle were televised — and brimming with extravagant praise for the MAGA leader. While such stuff would not be at all unusual in foreign regimes headed by dictators, this one was all American. In the Cabinet Room of the White House.

The Washington Post observed:

The meeting … bore similarities … to meetings of ministers in other countries where leaders have sought to exert strong, personal control over large stretches of national life, scholars said, including in Russia and Turkey. . . .
“It is definitely a widespread phenomenon with a lot of these personalist leaders,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, the director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security and a former intelligence analyst in the first Trump administration focused on Russia. 
. . .
Nearly all presidents receive some flattery from their subordinates. The profuse nature of the praise for Trump, however, bore similarities to other countries where public displays of obedience are prized above all, Kendall-Taylor said.
Trump “is like the great puppet master that’s making all the things dance and therefore work for the country,” she said. “This is just such a clear display that loyalty and fealty is the number one currency.”

The New York Times observed:

There in the Cabinet Room — which is starting to take on the gilded-cage look of Mr. Trump’s Oval Office — all of the president’s men and women took their turns, each working a little bit harder than the last to offer Mr. Trump praise and to assure him that they were working to tackle his long list of grievances.
That list is as ever-growing as it is specific to Mr. Trump’s pet peeves and political ambitions. It includes preventing “transgender for everybody” in American sports; using a heavy hand — perhaps the death penalty, the president said — to crack down on violent crime; the ongoing threat of windmills; the foul state of traffic medians; the speed with which water flows; and the attempts at securing peace deals for as many as seven international wars, a number that seems to grow by the day.

Jan Psaki featured two minutes of the flattery (beginning at 1:38 when she says), “This is one of those things you really have to see for yourself.” See for yourself:

Henry Farrell, drawing on the work of another political scientist, Xavier Marquez (who coined the term “inflation flattery”), observes “Grotesque self-abasement can be entirely rational.” Farrell (with quotations from Marquez):

Marquez suggests that flattery becomes increasingly ridiculous when competition for rewards intersects with the dynamics of signalling personal loyalty.

loyalty signaling typically emerges when there is common knowledge that there are rewards or punishments arising from credibly and publicly recognizing (or failing to recognize) the leader’s exceptional qualities

If you are in a cult of personality centered on someone who has power, you want to reap the benefits of connection rather than suffering the penalties of disfavor. So how do you show your loyalty? By paying the costs of humiliation. The more grotesquely over the top your praise, the more credible it is as a signal of support for Dear Leader.

Voluntarily engaging in behaviours that incur peer disapproval or loss of dignity can credibly indicate one’s loyalty, as when people repeat obviously absurd flattery of the leader in public.

Apparatchiks’ willingness to degrade themselves will hurt their reputation with other people. But for exactly that reason, it serves as proof of loyalty to the one man who counts, Donald Trump. The more appalling the self-abasement, the more effectively it will serve this purpose.

All hail the transformational president

Trump’s “big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor.”

The man (if we can believe what we hear) has made Americans safer and America more secure. He has brought the American dream back to life, revived all industries that were once lost, will save the whale on the East Coast, and has already saved college football. Huzzah!

• “You have brought us back from the edge. You have the overwhelming mandate from the American people.”
• “This is the greatest cabinet working for the greatest president.”
• “There’s only one thing I wish for—that the Nobel committee finally gets its act together and realizes that you are the single finest candidate since this Nobel award was ever talked about. Your success is game-changing out in the world today, and I hope everybody wakes up and realizes that.”

This is flattery hyperinflation. In Donald Trump’s executive branch, it is not knowledge or competency or a commitment to serving the country that matters — but loyalty to one man.

The folks in his cabinet know what’s up. Like presidents, prime ministers, diplomats, and CEOs across the globe, they know how susceptible to fawning flummery Donald Trump is. They understand the man. They understand the MAGA base. They understand the Republican media bubble. They are more than willing to play their parts.

And they will say just about anything to establish their loyalty.

Donald Trump expects no less.

[For those interested: a simple Google search brings up links to free PDFs of The Mechanisms of Cult Production by Xavier Márquez.]

That’s the judgment of Garrett Graff. Whether or not we agree with his argument (which I’ll return to in future posts), he makes a compelling case for the conclusion he draws. He continues:

Everything else from here on out is just a matter of degree and wondering how bad it will get and how far it will go? Do we end up “merely” like Hungary or do we go all the way toward an “American Reich”? So far, after years of studying World War II, I fear that America’s trajectory feels more like Berlin circa 1933 than it does Budapest circa 2015.

He points out (what many have noticed) that the mainstream media, doing its best to avoid stating this conclusion straightforwardly, softens its coverage of Trump with euphemisms. (He noted back in February this reluctance to report plainly and clearly what we have been seeing.)

The most powerful argument he offers for the loss of our democracy is a simple recitation of what we’ve all witnessed:

As the armed occupation of the District of Columbia continues, Trump, “exercising emergency powers in a moment where the only emergency is his own abuse of power,” has mused about sending troops to Chicago and other blue cities.

There’s much more in Graff’s commentary. Corporate overlords paying tribute to Trump; the kidnapped and disappeared exiled to overseas prisons, while concentration camps are reopened at home; purges of folks with fidelity to the rule of law.

“It looks like a country where Trump assumes he can control and dictate our history, what books we read, our arts, and even our sports heroes. He assumes there is no line between his taste and our nation.”

It has been abundantly clear for a while that the democracy we had on January 19 is long gone.

“We’ve slid into some form of authoritarianism,” says Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard, and co-author of How Democracies Die. “It is relatively mild compared to some others. It is certainly reversible, but we are no longer living in a liberal democracy.”

That was April. The evidence is much stronger now and Trumpist authoritarianism appears much less mild than it did a mere four months ago.

Political scientists who study democratic backsliding and authoritarianism may prefer competitive authoritarianism or personalist autocracy to straight up authoritarianism or fascism to describe the U.S.A in August 2025. But for small-d democrats, the direction we’re headed in and much of the damage we’ve already witnessed are unmistakable. Unlike the elite mainstream media, we need to be clear-eyed about it.

And as Graff concludes, though our success is hardly guaranteed, we must be prepared to fight back.

[August 28: mangled word choice in penultimate paragraph revised for clarity.]

Although the United States Constitution has been in place since 1789, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act ended Jim Crow and brought us into a new era, as noted by Jamelle Bouie in a column (anticipating the Roberts Court’s killing off the VRA).

This was an American republic built on multiracial pluralism. A nation of natives and of immigrants from around the world. Of political parties that strove to represent a diverse cross-section of society. Of a Black president and a future “majority-minority” nation. There was an ugly side — it’s no coincidence that state retrenchment from public goods and services followed the crumbling of racial barriers. But for all its harsh notes and discord, this was the closest the country ever came to the “composite nation” of Frederick Douglass’s aspirations: a United States that served as home to all who might seek the shelter of the Declaration of Independence and its “principles of justice, liberty and perfect humanity equality.”
It’s this America that Donald Trump and his movement hope to condemn to the ash heap of history. It’s this America that they’re fighting to destroy with their attacks on immigration, civil rights laws, higher education and the very notion of a pluralistic society of equals.

Destruction of this America is the Trump/MAGA/Project 2025 agenda, embraced by a Republican Party in control of all three branches of the federal government.

An authoritarian regime

Daniel Ziblatt (coauthor of How Democracies Die) has observed

There is no question that American democracy faces its most severe test in my lifetime. The scale, scope and speed of the onslaught within the first year (of Trump’s second term in office) is like nothing I have seen among the similar recent cases of democratic backsliding that I have researched — Hungary, Turkey, Poland or India. The degree of lawlessness of America’s current democratic decay is particularly striking.

Ziblatt has affirmed a critical role of civil society, which has

the civic resources to confront this challenge. America’s vast civic infrastructure includes labor unions, religious organizations, business, universities, the nonprofit sector, not to mention an opposition party that is better organized and more well financed than opposition parties in other 21st-century cases of democratic backsliding.
Yet I worry. The question is not whether these groups exist but rather whether civic leaders will develop the courage to work collaboratively and effectively to reverse America’s authoritarian turn.

We have every reason to worry. The failure of civic leaders has been astonishing, not the least leadership of the Democratic Party.

The opposition party

On January 22, Josh Marshall wrote:

Right now Republicans control Washington. They’re going to push through their nominees. They can pass a lot of laws. The only sensible and dignified course of action is to accept that Republicans are in charge and to focus in on making their unpopular actions as painful as possible. Every Republican member of the House owns all the pardons. Susan Collins owns all the pardons.
Not complicated. It’s sitting right there. There’s no need for one big strategy. Everyone should be doing everything, always on the attack. We live in an era of a thousand cuts. The job of the opposition is quite literally to oppose. Get to it.

Yes. The job of the opposition is quite literally to oppose. And without any power in Congress, that means to accept that Republicans are in charge and to focus in on making their unpopular actions as painful as possible.

Democrats’ belated recognition

Yet, seven months later, it is clear that the opposition party, living now in a fundamentally different regime than before, has been slow to recognize the new reality. Democrats cling to procedures, norms, rules that signal legitimacy, as Julia Azari suggests.

Since January 2025, American politics has shifted decisively away from being based on legitimacy, and is instead now mostly a game of power. In other words, the Trumpist GOP – which controls the federal government and much at the subnational level – uses whatever power is available to them, without much concern about legitimacy. Typically, in a democracy, uses of power would be limited by what can be justified in terms of democratic values, accepted practices, and norms like reciprocity. This viewpoint about how politicians treat power in a democracy builds on some of what Levitsky and Ziblatt argue about forbearance and mutual toleration. In the pieces I’ve written on democratic values, I’ve emphasized the importance of recognizing legitimate opposition – similar to Adam Przeworski’s definition of democracy as a system in which “parties lose elections.” We’re all saying different versions of the same thing.
Democratic rhetoric plays an important role in a politics that is based on legitimacy. Politicians justify their actions in terms of shared values and practices – not by vilifying their opponents, or, by the righteousness of their cause.
Much of this has gone by the wayside as the Trump administration asserts its right to – for example – reinterpret the 14^th amendment by fiat, undermine due process, and ask states to redistrict to gain more Republican seats.

And that’s hardly the complete list of transgressions. This context, for Azari, explains why governors (J.B. Pritzker, Gavin Newsom) are better positioned to step up to the challenge than members of Congress. Governors wield power independently of the federal government. And they are freer from the constraints of representatives and senators.

Josh Marshall has noted that the states are “a sovereign authority that is separate from the hierarchy of federal power even as its law is inferior to federal law.“

As the courts now interpret the law, the president is an absolute monarch within the federal government. He can fire anyone at will. He can set aside statutes under the guise of enforcement that is “aligned” with administration “vision” and policy. No one anywhere in government that is plausibly part of the executive branch can enter into a contest or struggle with the president. If they do, he simply fires them, sends them to the ersatz constitutional cornfield as the boy Anthony did in that famous dystopic Twilight Zone episode.
But the president can’t fire governors or mayors or secretaries of state or anyone else in a state government.

Historically unpopular president

The basic task for the opposition remains constant: to make MAGA’s unpopular actions as painful as possible. Whether from the vantage point of a member of the House or the Senate — with limited formal power, or a governor or state attorney general — who can command the levers of power.

Trump won the 2024 election, but he and the bitter disorder he has brought us are highly unpopular. There are millions of Americans who won’t get fooled again.

The task is to blame Trump and his enablers for the ugly, dispiriting reality he has created. To pin Trump’s rampages, from the cruelty and greed of the Big Beautiful Bill to the hateful militarization of immigration policy, on the Republicans who have enabled him and his agenda.

We no longer live in the democratic America of 2024. MAGA is an antidemocratic movement. We have fewer freedoms, shrinking rule of law, and less security than before. The American regime in 2025 is competitive authoritarianism.

The Democratic Party supports democracy, in contrast to MAGA Republicans. It is the role of the opposition to oppose. Every day. As persistently and strategically as possible. With an eye toward winning elections in 2026 and 2028.

In a broader sense … today’s ruling is of a piece with this Court’s recent tendencies. “[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,” the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible. This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.

This is from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association: a 5-4 decision staying an appellate court ruling to restore NIH funding withheld by the Trump administration.

The judgment regarding the corruptly partisan Republican justices comprising the Supreme Court’s majority is hardly confined to this case. This majority, discarding the Constitution (along with the rule of law, separation of powers, history, precedents, and any semblance of judicial restraint) has supercharged the authoritarian rampage of Trump’s second term.

The MAGA Republican Party dominates all three branches of the federal government. Without that total domination, our democratic institutions would not be so highly vulnerable now. And note well: John Roberts, though dissenting in this instance, has paved the way for the wannabe strongman in the White House going back more than a decade — that is, even before Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator.

Thank you, Justice Jackson, for clearly and plainly expressing the depth of this court’s lawless corruption.

Texas Republicans (after getting their mid-decade gerrymander) will “owe the Supreme Court a debt of gratitude,” notes Adam Liptak.

In the two decades Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has led the Supreme Court, the justices have reshaped American elections not just by letting state lawmakers like those in Texas draw voting maps warped by politics, but also by gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and amplifying the role of money in politics.

And, as Liptak explains, the court has signaled that there’s more to come — through more gutting of the VRA and further undermining the Fourteenth Amendment, which struck with a vengeance in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. This and other decisions represent a power grab by the Republican majority on the high court to deny Article I authority of the most democratic branch of the federal government to enact legislation to protect voting rights. John Roberts has made a career out of the Republican Party’s opposition to the VRA — beginning with a stint as a 20-something attorney working for the Reagan Justice Department. A key battle he lost then, he reversed three decades later with the Shelby decision.

In 2019 in Rucho v. Common Cause the Republican majority struck down lower court rulings that restricted gerrymandered redistricting schemes and, further, forbade federal courts from consideration of constitutional violations in such cases. The chief justice, after a bit of handwringing about the unfairness of the schemes and dithering about why the courts couldn’t possibly adjudicate notions of fairness, sided with the schemers. Justice Elena Kagen was unmoved by the reasoning:

For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.
And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters’ preferences. They promoted partisanship above respect for the popular will. They encouraged a politics of polarization and dysfunction. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.
. . .
Maybe the majority errs in these cases because it pays so little attention to the constitutional harms at their core. After dutifully reciting each case’s facts, the majority leaves them forever behind, instead immersing itself in everything that could conceivably go amiss if courts became involved.

The Republican majority on the Roberts Court, after trampling on voting rights, supercharged extreme gerrymandering — landing us in an undemocratic partisan battle, which will harm voters in every state that enters the fray.

The Republican justices — acting with more fidelity to the agenda of the Republican Party than to the plain text of the Constitution and the separation of powers that grants Congress the authority to legislate — are deciding cases based on political preferences or feelings or, as Leah Litman puts it, vibes. From Chapter 3 of her book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes:

Vibes don’t have to, and shouldn’t, cannibalize the law entirely. What has been happening over the last decade and change differs, at least in degree, from what was happening before. Voting rights decisions have become more nakedly partisan as more recent Republican appointees have more reliably reflected Republicans’ pro-minority-rule and anti-voting-rights agenda. There are no more John Paul Stevenses or David Souters who aren’t into nullifying voting rights protections because they think voting rights are too woke. They Rehnquist Court had its lawless moments, such as the remedy in Bush v. Gore, which ordered  a state to cease and desist its efforts to accurately count ballots. Over time, more and more decisions have looked like that. Between misleading ellipses, recycled political talking points, letting feelings matter more than whether people’s votes are counted, and inventing prohibitions on voter discrimination into protections for voter discrimination (just to name a few), the Court has descended into no law, and just vibes. 

Welcome to MAGA America courtesy of the Roberts Court. It began paving the way for the wannabe authoritarian in the White House even before Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator. And the Republican justices are still at it.

Photo from Donald J. Trump Truth Social.

He has paved over the Rose Garden, erected a pair of 88-foot flagpoles, and plans a $200 million 90,000-square foot project to place a ballroom atop the East Wing — almost doubling the size of the White House. And there’s more gold by the day.

Update: A May 27 op-ed by Emily Keegin in the New York Times (“Trump’s Oval Office Is a Gilded Rococo Nightmare. Help.”) offers more substantive commentary, history, photographs, and even a six-second GIF from a movie featuring Trump’s apartment.

In 2017 the journalist Peter York called Mr. Trump’s aesthetic “dictator chic,” likening his New York penthouse to Muammar el-Qaddafi’s homes. Others have looked further back in history for an analogue. Many concluded not only that Mr. Trump’s style is the stuff of kings and despots but also that it’s French.
On one level, they aren’t wrong. The decoration Mr. Trump has splattered across the Oval Office is inspired by European Baroque and Rococo of the 1600s and 1700s, when power was shown through ornate displays of grotesque abundance. Gold leaf moldings and large mirrors filled Baroque palace walls from Versailles to the Peterhof Palace. But in the early 1700s Rococo, an even gaudier style distinct for its asymmetry, swirling tendrils and gilded seashells, was born. Often criticized for being purely decorative and intellectually vacuous, it would become a perfect visual metaphor for the European royal courts of the 18th century: unserious people draped in gold baubles and ruffled pastels.