In all the news stories about the FBI raid on John Bolton’s house, I haven’t seen any mention of a warrant. You’ll remember that when the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago they got a warrant from a judge first. Nor have there yet been any announcements that the FBI found anything that would get Bolton into trouble, but I’m sure they’ll comb through whatever they removed and then apply their imaginations.

This was nothing but political targeting, of course. See Greg Sargent on the several people being targeted. The FBI used to target a lot of people back in J. Edgar Hoover’s day. During the Joe McCarthy reign of terror Hoover used to send McCarthy the names of people he didn’t like so that McCarthy would “investigate” them. No real dirt was ever discovered, of course. But the point is that Hoover mostly functioned independently of the White House, I believe.

I dimly remember that Dick Nixon did have Hoover do some political work for him, such as wiretap surveillance of journalists and government officials Nixon suspected of leaking things he didn’t want leaked. But I don’t recall Hoover ever raiding the home of anyone on Nixon’s Enemies List. And there were lines Hoover would not cross, even for his close friend and long-time ally Nixon. That’s why Nixon organized his own clandestine organization, known as the Plumbers. Who got caught. And FBI investigations brought the details into the open.

I don’t know if the presidents Hoover served under before Nixon — Calvin Coolidge to Lyndon Johnson — used him to do any dirty work. I don’t know if any presidents were involved in, or even aware of, Hoover’s infamous COINTELPRO scheme. I think it’s safe to say that what the FBI is doing now on behalf of Trump is unprecedented.

In other news — all the recent high-level theatrics over the war in Ukraine achieved absolutely nothing. See Trump’s peace bid flops as Kremlin says no plans for Putin-Zelenskyy summit. Trump still can’t seem to grasp that Putin doesn’t want peace. He wants Ukraine. And then he probably wants more. Zelenskyy surely wants peace, but not a peace that leaves Ukraine vulnerable to the future Russian invasions that will surely come. And not a peace that doesn’t return the children the Russians stole from Ukrainian parents.

But Trump’s admiration for Putin is unabated. Now Trump wants to invite Putin to the FIFA World Cup.

In more Trump tired of winning news — he doesn’t understand his own trade agreements. I’m not even sure the agreements are real agreements.

Seventeen days ago, President Donald Trump made a dramatic claim in an interview on the business news channel CNBC. As part of his July trade agreement with the European Union, he said, the EU gave the United States a $600 billion present he could spend however he wanted.

“They gave me $600 billion. And that’s a gift,” he said. “That’s not like, you know, a loan, by the way. That’s not a loan that, oh gee, three years comes up, we have to pay it back. There’s nothing to pay back. They gave us $600 billion that we can invest in anything we want.”

A CNBC journalist said she appreciated the information, since they had been trying to figure out the details surrounding the $600 billion. Trump responded: “There are no details. The details are, $600 billion to invest in anything I want. Anything. I can do anything I want.”

And, of course, nobody agreed to any such thing. There’s some language from the EU that private sector EU companies are expected to invest $600 billion in the U.S. through 2028 as they see fit. This may be what EU companies invest in the U.S. pretty much every year, as far as I know. But there are no commitments, and this money is not going to Trump or anyone else in the government. Trump thought he got a big concession, and he got nothin’.

In even more Trump winning news, see Paul Krugman, Kilowatt Madness. trump’s policies are driving energy costs through the roof.

And it’s going to get worse, Krugman says. This is being driven by the huge power consumption of AI data centers, and possibly also crypto centers, or “mines,” or whatever generates crypto, whatever that is. See Wired, AI Is Eating Data Center Power Demand—and It’s Only Getting Worse.

Even so, I know you’ll be excited to see how the Rose Garden renovation turned out.

I’m surprised Trump didn’t put in a pool and a bar. Or at least some soft drink vending machines. I got the photo from USA Today, which doesn’t explain exactly what the tables and chairs are for, especially if there is no food or drink service available. I have a hard time believing this will be open to the public. Maybe the White House staff can eat their brown bag lunches outdoors when the weather is nice.

Update: The DoJ has released a tape and transcript of the two-day interview with Ghislaine Maxwell. Big surprise — she doesn’t incriminate Trump.

Some days I just want to crawl into a hole and take a nap until Trump is gone. This is one of those days. There’s a cool rain here, which I assume was pushed here by far-away Hurricane Erin. Great napping weather. But the world is still too much Trump.

I don’t have to tell you that the Trump Administration is a rolling atrocity. So let’s look at this atrocity from a different angle. See Rex Huppke, Trump is wildly unpopular and losing ground fast. Why is anyone afraid of him?

In my memory, whenever a president is seriously hemorrhaging public support a “blood in the water” phenomenon takes hold. News media become more critical; press conferences, when they happen, become more acrimonious. The president’s party may not disown him, but it may stop going out of its way to defend him and create a bit of distance. That was true of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter and even George W. Bush after Katrina.

And maybe eventually that will happen with Trump, but it’s not happening yet. And I think it’s not happening because of the radicalization of the Republican Party. These people are not Dick Nixon’s “respectable cloth coat” Republicans, from his Checkers speech. These are hard-core ideologue true believer wackadoos who are ready to sell out everything the U.S. achieved in the past century to go back to when the Klan was considered a respectable Christian organization. And Trump is their North Star. They aren’t going to bail on him as long as he’s breathing.

But Rex Huppke points out that Trump is now so unpopular there is no risk in standing up to him. Most people who voted for Trump thought he would be good for the economy. Most people are going to notice as the economy erodes. Knowledgeable economists are talking about stagflation.  See also Paul Krugman, ICEing the U.S. Economy. Prices will go up.  A lot of small businesses will fail. Jobs will be lost. People notice this stuff.

But then there are the Democrats. The New York Times released a report today saying the Democratic Party is “bleeding support.” Fewer new voters are choosing to register as Democrats. “Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot,” it says. Me, being grumpy — yes, if the new folks have  no idea what you stand for, why would they want to join? This is from Rolling Stone:

There’s plenty of data to explain why people aren’t exactly thrilled about giving their hard-earned money to the Democratic Party. Barely a week after Quinnipiac found that only 19 percent of registered voters approve of the job Democrats are doing in Congress, The Wall Street Journal released a survey finding that 63 percent of voters have an unfavorable view of the party, the lowest number since 1990. A few days later, Rolling Stone published a poll from liberal watchdog End Citizens United which found that voters in key congressional districts believe Democrats are more corrupt than Republicans.

See also How the Democrats Became the Party That Brings Pencils to a Knife Fight by Jia Lynn Yang and The Democratic Establishment’s Shunning of Mamdani Is Disqualifying by Perry Bacon. Too many Dems are stuck in their own long-held orthodoxies about how politics are supposed to work and haven’t adjusted to the shifting political landscape. And their worship of some concept of “centrism” that never made any sense to me has been slowly strangling the party for a long, long time. When a nominee is not as progressive as some voters like, the admonition is “vote blue no matter who.” But as Perry Bacon points out, this slogan seems to be only respected by one side.

And here we are.

I don’t know what went on in the meeting — which I understand just ended — but I just saw this in the New York Times:

Tomorrow Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be in Washington to meet with Donald Trump. And so will a lot of other people.

Leaders from Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Finland are rallying around the Ukrainian president after his exclusion from Trump’s summit on Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Their pledge to be at Zelenskyy’s side at the White House on Monday is an apparent effort to ensure the meeting goes better than the last one in February, when Trump berated Zelenskyy in a heated Oval Office encounter.

“The Europeans are very afraid of the Oval Office scene being repeated and so they want to support Mr. Zelenskyy to the hilt,” said retired French Gen. Dominique Trinquand, a former head of France’s military mission at the United Nations.

“It’s a power struggle and a position of strength that might work with Trump,” he said.

Those expected to show up with Zelenskyy include European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, and  secretary-general of the NATO military alliance, Mark Rutte. My understanding is that this entire crew are adamantly opposed to a peace deal that depends on Ukraine giving up any territory taken by Russia since the February 2022 invasion. National borders are not to be changed by force. They also want a cease fire asap, before there are any more talks.

I assume this meeting will be televised. I might actually watch this one.

Update: Interesting article in Mediaite about the big fail in Alaska.

MSNBC host Antonia Hilton claimed Saturday that President Donald Trump’s aides appeared “frightened” by their experience at the Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin.

“A lot of the press corps that was there, they reported in the minutes and hours after the presser that they saw members of the administration, like Karoline Leavitt, look ashen, almost frightened after what they had seen behind closed doors. 

And then there are some remarks from  former Russian ambassador Michael McFaul, who shows up on MSNBC from time to time. And he says, in effect, that the way the staff has been talking to the press indicates that the meeting was a disaster.

Michael Wolff has reported that a White House staff member texted him after the meeting. He texted the adjective form of the F word — “F–ked.”

A couple of days ago, Andy Borowitz published a “report” headlined Russian Lures Confused Old Man to Alaska in Elder Scam. That turned out to be prophetic. Trump’s display of fawning obsequiousness to Vladimir Putin was a national embarrassment. And in the end, Trump got nothin’.  It reveals big time that Trump has no clue how international relations work. He seems to think he was buttering up somebody to make a real estate deal.

One of the best things I’ve read about yesterday’s debacle — although I don’t agree with it entirely — is at Daily Beast, by David Rothkopf, Why Trump’s Latest Reality TV Show Is a Flop. I disagree with Rothkopf that the summit was primarily a distraction from the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein mess. Trump is obsessed with getting a Nobel Peace Prize. He’s making a fool of himself over it. There are reports he even cold-called the Prime Minister of Norway to ask about it. A cease-fire in Ukraine would give it to him, he surely believes.

But I agree with Rothkopf that Trump was more interested in getting validation from Putin than with doing anything for Ukraine.

His most important long-term goal was closer to his heart and addressed issues much more deeply meaningful to the president. He wanted to get Russian president Vladimir Putin to publicly support a series of lies that are now crucial to both Trump’s own deluded sense of himself and to his fake public narrative about who he is.

Watching Trump during the event, you could see his palpable satisfaction as Putin, understanding Trump’s psychological and political needs completely, fulfilled the role he was asked to play. Trump smiled and clapped like a little boy about to get to sit in Santa’s lap at the mall as Putin approached him on the red carpet at the beginning of the day’s events. Message sent to the world: Trump’s still got juice with the world leaders that really matter to him.  …

… Later, even though Trump often appeared exhausted during the event, he would light up or nod approvingly when Putin spoke the words Trump had most hoped to hear. They weren’t about peace in Ukraine, of course. That was a secondary consideration. For this president, whose foreign policy is more driven by vanity rather than U.S. interests, they were a validation of long-standing, if demonstrably false, Trump claims. Putin said during the post-summit press conference that he wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if Trump were the president. He went along with Trump’s assertions at the same event that what Trump called the Russia hoax was a distraction. (Never mind that this was yet another documented instance of Putin stepping in to support Trump and of Trump showing a completely inappropriate closeness to Putin that was damaging to U.S. national security.) According to Trump, in a post-summit interview on Fox, Putin even agreed with Trump that the 2020 election was rigged, stolen from Trump.

And here I’m going to skip over to Marcy Wheeler, Steamrolled: Vladimir Putin Shares an Existential Secret with Trump and You Just Saw the Result. Putin is the one person in the world who could absolutely blow apart the ur-mythology upon which Trump built his power — that it was Hillary Clinton who created the “fake” Russia scandal to try to steal the 2016 election from Trump. Putin knows the truth. And Trump knows Putin knows the truth. And it wouldn’t do any real harm to Putin to reveal the truth. But it would be a huge blow to Trump. Putin will keep the truth to himself as long as Trump is useful to him.

“For Trump, this meeting was about sustaining the lies on which all his power is built: it’s not that Putin put him in charge because he would sell out America. Rather, he’s the victim. And by sustaining that lie, he renewed Russia’s great leverage over him,” Wheeler writes.

And Putin got what he wanted — a U.S. president’s doting subservience, on camera. Putin didn’t even stay for the whole meeting. We know the plans, because Trump’s incompetent staff left them in a photocopier in an Alaska motel. The meeting was supposed to go on for four hours and include a “working lunch” of salad, a “duet” of filet mignon and halibut olympia, and crème brûlée. And then on to the joint press conference. But the meeting was cut short and the lunch was skipped. And while Putin seemed upbeat and reasonably jovial at the “press conference” that didn’t include questions, Trump to me seemed a bit subdued, like he was still processing what had just happened and wasn’t sure he was happy about it

(I had to look up “halibut olympia.” AI says  “It typically features halibut fillets baked on a bed of savory onions and topped with a creamy mixture, often including mayonnaise, sour cream, and sometimes other flavorings like cheese or herbs, then finished with a crunchy breadcrumb or cracker topping.” Seems a bit fussy. But I assume this meal was cooked and the kitchen staff got to enjoy it.)

Trump went into the Alaska theatrical with higher expectations. .

Trump went into Friday’s meeting in Anchorage with the goal of securing a ceasefire, telling reporters on Air Force One, “I want to see a ceasefire rapidly. I don’t know if it’s going to be today, but I’m not going to be happy if it’s not today.” Putin has resisted calls for a ceasefire, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, along with other European leaders, have stressed the importance of a commitment to stop fighting in order to begin negotiations for a lasting peace deal. On Wednesday, Trump promised “very severe consequences” if Putin did not agree to a ceasefire.

After the meeting with Putin, Trump backtracked on the idea of a ceasefire entirely on Truth Social. “It was determined by all that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which often times do not hold up,” he wrote.

The Guardian: is now reporting that “At the Alaska summit, Putin demanded Ukraine withdraw from Donetsk and Luhansk as a condition for ending the war, but offered Trump a freeze along the remaining frontline, two sources with direct knowledge of the talks told the Guardian.”

WaPo:

Hours after Trump and Putin met Friday in Alaska, Trump said Ukraine and Russia should go straight to negotiating a settlement, a split with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European allies that aligns the United States with Putin….

… After the summit, Trump told Zelensky and other European leaders that in addition to land Russia has seized in the war, Putin wants all of Donbas in exchange for a promise to end the war, according to four people familiar with the discussion. All spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

In years of fighting, Russia has been unable to seize all of Donbas. Russian forces occupy almost all of the Luhansk region of Donbas but only part of the strategic, fortified Donetsk region.

In the phone call, Trump conveyed that he was shifting away from the ceasefire demand and toward reaching a swift deal, which could make the Russian proposal the starting point for talks, two of the people said.

Putin and Trump are meeting in Anchorage as I write this.

The NY Times is reporting that “The initial meeting between Putin and Trump will now include the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, according to the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. An expanded bilateral meeting a short while later will include not only Rubio and Witkoff, but also Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.” Did somebody think Trump and Putin meeting one on one by themselves was a bad idea?

A bit of housecleaning — yesterday the NT Times had a story about the real reason Billy Long was fired from the IRS.  And, as I suspected, it had nothing whatsoever to do with a failure to supply names from IRS files to Homeland Security, as had been reported earlier. The real reason was that Scott Bessent wanted him out. Long was absolutely useless at the IRS. He never finished college and has no formal education in taxes or economics. He had no management experience and no experience working in a large multi-level organization. He chaffed at having to run everything he wanted to do past Bessent. He made some gaffes in public statements. In short, he was even more in over his head than the rest of the administration.

Good article by Ryan Cooper at The American Prospect — Why Republicans Are Terrified of Nonexistent Crime.  It begins:

Among the favorite pastimes of Republican men, two stand out: first, boasting about what strong, courageous, hypermasculine operators they are; and second, publicly melting down about how pants-pissingly terrified they are of American cities.

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) is the latest in a long line of conservative men expressing delirious panic about an American city, in this case Washington, D.C. “I drive around in Washington, D.C., in my Jeep and, yes, I do drive myself. And I don’t buckle up,” he said on Fox News recently. “And the reason why I don’t buckle up, and people can say whatever they want to, they can raise their eyebrows at me, again, is because of carjacking.” Consider my eyebrow raised.

I grew up in an all-white rural-ish small town. I know the drill. Cities are full of nonwhite people. More crime is assumed. And most cities in the U.S. are governed by Democrats, because cities really have to have a government and not just a committee of good old boys thinking up ways for there to be more guns and fewer abortions.

The irony is that while not-city folks associate cities with crime, high crime rates are not limited to cities. See The Hidden Truth About Rural Crime Rates. Further, red states have higher rates of gun deaths than blue states (guess why). There are some random rural counties with unusually high homicide rates.

Axios just came out with a report that the highest crime rates are in blue cities in red states. “Eight of the top 10 cities with the highest murder rates and populations of at least 100,000 were in red states — Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee, Ohio and Louisiana, Axios found.” The highest rate is in Jackson, Mississippi, with a homicide rate of 78 per 100,000 residents. The most recent homicide rate for New York City I could find was 4.1 per 100,000 residents. Yet the whole time I was living in Missouri people asked if I was glad to be away from all the crime in New York. It’s just stamped into their belief systems that those great big cities are hellscapes.

The Axios article doesn’t mention gun control, or the lack thereof, but I’m sure that the Missouri legislature’s permissible gun laws — carry whatever you want just about anywhere you want, no license, no permit, no training — is a big part of St. Louis’s homicide rate of 69.4 homicides per 100,000 people.

Ryan Cooper continues,

This seems to be a core emotion of modern conservatism: wallowing in terror of largely imaginary dangers. But there is a very real project behind their trembling cowardice—the violent subjugation of liberal cities. Today, D.C. is the target. Trump has seized control of the D.C. police department, deployed FBI agents to wander around peaceful D.C. parks, and authorized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to send in National Guard troops.

Cooper continues, “for anyone who has lived in any big American city, these Republican men are almost indescribably pathetic.” But of course it’s not really about crime, is it?

There’s another interesting piece by Brian Beutler, The Bad Math Driving Democratic Infighting. This is about the “we must be moderates to win elections” argument. One point is that the model long used by Democratic strategists to determine which candidate might best win an election is possibly all wrong. There’s a new model that shows moderation is less of an advantage than the old one does. I’ll let him explain the math part.

Beutler also makes the interesting point that perceived moderation is not necessarily about policy positions.

You can campaign comfortably along almost any part of the Democratic ideological spectrum, while developing a moderate image, by, e.g.:

*Describing your agenda as “common sense” rather than revolutionary;

*Being white and/or male rather than black and/or female;

Being “folksy”;

*Having good propaganda, and good responses to oppositional propaganda;

*And, yes, emphasizing heterodoxy on an issue or a small number of issues.

Voters perceived Joe Biden to be more moderate than Donald Trump, whom they perceived to be more moderate than Hillary Clinton, even though Biden ran to Clinton’s left, and Trump is a fascist who feigns heterodoxy on a small number of issues.

All of which raises the question: If the dividend of issue moderation is so easily overwhelmed by non-substantive factors and tactics, what is the point of all this factional war?

I keep going back to the pleasant but utterly bland Democrats I saw running for office in Missouri. They were so careful to not come across as anything but moderate that they didn’t come across as much of anything at all. I look at Mamdani’s Master Class on How to Talk to Voters, and I think any candidate can do something like this. Bring up an issue that lots of people can relate to. Explain why it’s a problem. Say how you will address it, specifically. You don’t need to present a 48-point plan. But instead of something too general — “We need a better way to do this” —  but more like “we must eliminate bottlenecks created by X so that we can do Y.” And then put out different ads addressing several positions.

Well, it sounds like the big summit meeting is over. And there’s no deal. That’s probably for the best. I’m sure more details will come out over the next several hours.

This must be the press conference from Monday that everyone said was batshit crazy. Try to grasp what he’s saying here. You can skip the first minute or so to get the the part that completely goes off the rails.

When I first heard this I thought he was confusing NATO with the EU and claiming NATO was now paying tariffs.  But it’s possibly just his old mistaken idea that NATO is a protection racket that pays the U.S. to protect Europe. (See an old post from 2018, Trump: International Man of Derp.) He’s now saying that the U.S. will not pay NATO anything any more, and NATO countries have to pay us or he won’t come to their aid. NATO countries never paid us for protection and are not supposed to.

The U.S. and other NATO countries committed long ago to paying a certain amount to maintain NATO headquarters in Belgium and a few other things, and this isn’t a huge amount and it’s not tied to military defense. Is he saying the U.S. will default on its obligations? Or is he confusing it with something else? I can’t tell.

And then if you go on just a bit longer, he starts talking about how great oceanfront property is, and how Ukraine is “a thousand miles of ocean,” by which I infer he means Ukraine has a thousand miles of oceanfront. But it doesn’t have any oceanfront. It has 1,056.5 kilometers (656.5 miles) of Black Sea coastline, which may be where Trump got the “thousand” figure. But his property swap plan fundamentally makes no sense.

So why aren’t all the nation’s media headlines about how Trump has oatmeal for brains? This isn’t just misspeaking, or using the wrong name or word. This is fundamentally misunderstanding what’s going on. And the NATO confusion really isn’t new. He seemed to think NATO paid us to protect Europe in his first term.

And where does this leave us with NATO? I don’t think anyone knows.

Stuck in the 1980s — I take it Trump chose the Kennedy Center honorees this year. Kiss, Sylvester Stallone, Gloria Gaynor, Michael Crawford, a country singer named George Strait. A 1980s give or take crew if their ever was one.  People who know Trump all say his cultural references are all stuck in the 1980s, back when he was a (relatively) young hotshot and regular at Studio 54. See also How Trump’s economic thinking got stuck in the 1980s from WaPo.

See also Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times, Why Trump Always Wants a Crisis.

Some insightful commentary from various people:

Paul Waldman, Trump isn’t the solution to the “crisis of manhood,” he’s the problem.

Spot on. Just a sample: “And men suffer because the messages they get from the right are so contradictory. Is a man supposed to be strong and stoic, or such a whiny, insecure baby that the mere sight of a transgender woman sends him running to get his AR-15 to pump some lead into a bunch of beer cans?”

Paul Krugman, Trump Plays the Carnage Card.  Krugman wants news media to clearly say Trump is lying about a rise in crime. Good luck with that.

Related — this is something to watch. Rachel Maddow explains why Trump doesn’t give a hoo-haw about crime.

Chris Hedges, The Rule of Idiots.

“The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable.”

Hmm, sounds like … ?

I missed Trump’s press conference because I was having my annual physical (I’m expected to survive, apparently). Although I probably wouldn’t have watched it anyway. I’m told Trump came across as one who has lost his last marble.

I know that D.C. is not a “standard” sort of city, but where the bleep does the Constitution give Trump the authority to “federalize” police? The D.C. police are not connected to the Department of Defense. This is from NOTUS:

“Other cities are hopefully watching this … and maybe they’ll self-clean up, and maybe they’ll self-get rid of the cashless bail thing and all the things that cause problems,” Trump said, suggesting the administration would be “taking a look” at other cities like New York City and Chicago if they “don’t learn their lesson” and study the actions Trump is taking in Washington.

City officials have pointed out that violent crime dropped last year after a spike in 2023. It was at its lowest levels in more than 30 years, according to data released by the Department of Justice in January.

It’s unclear how long the takeover will last. Trump said in a memo that National Guard troops will remain until he determines “that conditions of law and order have been restored in the District of Columbia.”

He predicted it wouldn’t take long: “Fixing the crime is easy.”

Trump always thinks fixing problems will be easy until he tries to fix them. In 2016 he thought fixing health care would be easy. More recently he thought ending the wars in Ukraine and Gaza would be easy. He still seems to think tariffs are an easy fix for the economy. Now he’s going to “fix”  urban crime. We’re bleeped. And if he tries that in Chicago or NYC it’s likely going to get violent. Oh, and homelessness. He’s ordered homeless people out of DC. He wants them “far from the capital,” because a problem doesn’t exist if he can’t see it. He’s also indicated he wants the homeless rounded up and put in detention camps. As far as he’s concerned, that solves the homeless problem.

Trump 2.0 has mightily underscored the degree to which the constitutional system worked because most people in power respected it and took it seriously. Trump not only does not respect it; I doubt he understands it. The Constitution is a meaningless abstraction to him. And that’s true for his followers, including the ones who appeared to worship it not that long ago. His followers throw around the words “freedom” and “liberty,” but what they mean by them is privilege and license. They don’t understand actual civil liberty and have no respect for it. And I doubt the majority of U.S. adults have ever given any of this serious thought. They just took it all for granted.

And if enough people with political power realize they can just ignore the constitutional system, and get away with it, then it’s gone.

See also Josh Marshall, Some Thoughts on the Consent of the Governed; and Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, the New Republic, Trump Warns Fascist D.C. Takeover Is Just the Beginning.