There’s a rubric I’ve been using to maintain perspective on President Donald Trump’s second term: Imagine if the dumbest person in the world and humanity’s biggest asshole were the same person, and that guy was president. It’s a pretty simple lens through which to both view Trump’s lawless, Constitution-shredding rampage of revenge and self-enrichment while never succumbing to the idea that what’s happening to the country is somehow within bounds. It is only from this standpoint that one can write the straight story about this administration.

Meanwhile, how are the View From Nowhere folks faring these days? Somehow, in 2025, the media is still struggling with what is plainly in front of its face, demonstrating the same coherence bias that I and others had reason to complain about in the run-up to the 2024 election and its immediate aftermath.

Behold, the “departure.” Back on September 10, The New York Times used the term in their report of the Trump administration’s extrajudicial killings on the high seas. Their sources, per the report, provided “new details about a military operation that was a startling departure from using law enforcement means to interdict suspected drug boats.” More recently, a CNN report on Trump having collected a $130 million private donation to pay military service salaries—a highly impeachable offense for what is a comically paltry sum of money—explained that the move “marks a striking departure from government procedure for funding the military, which traditionally relies on public funds appropriated by Congress.”

Well, let’s give credit where due. The media is at least startled; they are struck. But these actions are not mere “departures”—a term that suggests a slight change of frame; unorthodox maneuvers that are nevertheless within the parameters of acceptable. Behind the sugarcoating are offenses that can be related in plain English, if anyone wants to take a stab at it. Here at TNR, for example, Matt Ford’s piece about how Trump’s military payroll gambit was a baldly illegal seizure of power got this headline: “Trump’s Military Payroll Gambit Is a Baldly Illegal Seizure of Power.” See, folks, it can be done.

Suffice it to say, avid readers of political news should be on their guard for other things Trump does that get labeled as “departures” or otherwise presented in a more anodyne frame. Just as TNR’s Tim Noah instructed that any time the media refers to someone as “fiery” what they really mean to say is “bugfuck nuts,” any time you see the word “departure” invoked, they are referring to a crime. And Trump’s crimes, in particular! I’m not sure you’ll see a bank robber assessed as having made “a startling departure from traditional cash withdrawals.”

It’s been something of a bleak period, watching the press make startling departures from telling the straight story about the Trump administration. TNR contributor Parker Molloy noted that, after Trump responded to the No Kings protest with an AI-generated video depicting him dumping gallons of shit on the protests from a fighter plane, the media was at great pains to sand off the edges of the story. There was a time when even the perception of this kind of antipathy toward ordinary citizens—say, when you label them as “deplorable”?—would invite the fury of the media. (Heck, there was a time when the political media launched a fatwa against Howard Dean for shouting at his own rally.) But this never became much of a scandal—though I will concede that Democrats could have done a better job pushing the issue.

And as we learned this week, pushing the issue can work wonders. Steve Bannon, as is his wont, seeded the media pasture with his announcement that there is a “plan” in place to run Trump for a third term. From there, an entire news cycle blossomed, one in which reporters peppered Trump with questions about his plan to run again, all of which he sidestepped—and so those same reporters told their readers that he is not ruling it out. Perhaps my favorite piece from this “Will Trump do a new crime?” boomlet was a Time magazine piece titled “Why Trump Keeps Talking About a Third Term” that suggested, “Whether Trump actually plans to run again for President, in defiance of the Constitution, merely bringing up the possibility so much, some observers say, may be strategic in its own right.”

The one problem with that contention is that Trump wasn’t bringing it up—a bunch of reporters were, and in so doing turned what should have been a confrontation (“Why do your allies keep saying you plan to abrogate the Constitution?”) into a jocular spitball session where they help Trump go over his options. (We are reliably informed that the president finds the maneuver where he runs as vice president “too cute.”) Trump, for once, seemed to understand what game was afoot. “Am I not ruling it out?” he responded to one inquiry, “I mean, you’ll have to tell me.” And so they did, in the pages of their publications.

If you’re wondering what is causing the media to fall down on the job in this manner, and infect coverage of a constitutional crime wave with limp euphemisms, I think it’s very much akin to the reason Democratic senators keep voting for Trump’s judicial appointments: It’s an act of desperation; a frantic need to suggest that our democratic institutions are still in proper working order and the duly elected president isn’t guiding the ship of state into tyranny. For if the members of the fourth estate were ever forced to report the truth of what’s happening, they would also have to confront how their own neglect helped pave this path. Based on the number of “startling departures” that are piling up, I reckon that day will come soon enough.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

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On Tuesday evening, Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley stepped onto the Senate floor to begin a marathon speech that extended well into Wednesday. The topic of his stemwinder was most urgent: “I’ve come to the Senate floor tonight to ring the alarm bells. We’re in the most perilous moment, the biggest threat to our republic since the Civil War. President Trump is shredding our Constitution.” For Merkley, the matter hit close to home, quite literally: “President Trump wants us to believe that Portland, Oregon, in my home state, is full of chaos and riots. Because if he can say to the American people that there are riots, he can say there’s a rebellion. And if there’s a rebellion, he can use that to strengthen his authoritarian grip on our nation.”

One shouldn’t expect the president to be moved by Merkley’s admonishments. And there are not likely to be many Senate Republicans swayed by his overtures. But there were plenty of people on hand who needed to hear what the Oregon lawmaker had to say—specifically, his Democratic Senate colleagues, who haven’t been singing from the same pro-democracy hymnal lately. Merkley’s oration arrives at a time when some spines need stiffening.

The U.S. Senate: For a long while now, it’s where Democratic Party ambitions, along with democracy itself, have hit the skids. There are structural reasons for that: Far fewer voters are represented by the GOP majority, and this malapportionment problem is exacerbated by changing demographics that could one day allow 30 percent of Americans to elect 70 of its senators. But Republicans learned long ago that their agenda—showering tax benefits on the wealthy and breaking the government—only requires 51 votes most of the time. Democratic governance—which involves building, fixing, regulating, preserving, and improving—requires 60 nearly always.

One might have expected by now that Democrats would have recognized how the Senate filibuster, which requires them to regularly conjure these supermajorities, is something of a suicide pact. Or that it’s a recent innovation that’s easily discarded. Or that it runs so counter to the Founders’ ideals that its very existence should be offensive. But not enough Democrats have made this leap. And the reason is that too many of them suffer from what The New Republic contributor Christopher Sprigman calls “Degenerative Senate Brain.”

Having observed this less than august body operate over the past few years, I think that the main problem with many of our Democratic senators is that they believe their own hype. They all think they’ve signed up for an austere debate club—the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” the “cooling saucer” of government. They don’t seem to have noticed that when it comes to deliberating, or maintaining a reputation for judiciousness and equanimity, everyone has to agree to participate in those ideals. And Trumpist Republicans do not: They’ve shut down the government. They’ve willingly ceded the power of the purse. They rarely if ever question the Mad King’s desires. Do you remember the public agonizing of Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment to Health and Human Services? And then Cassidy ended up meekly endorsing him, to Cassidy’s lasting chagrin? That’s about as robust as GOP deliberations get.

The state of the GOP means that you can’t really have a Senate anymore. Unfortunately, the most Senate-brained Democrats still naïvely believe that they can revive this moribund body, through actions that at best send mixed messages and at worst directly undermine the work of Democrats like Jeff Merkley.

Case in point: This week, amid the government shutdown, 13 Democratic senators joined forces with all but one Republican to advance the nomination of Harold Mooty to a judgeship in the Northern District of Alabama. Some fun facts about Mooty that The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling collected: He has gone to some lengths to dance questions about the January 6 riots and who was culpable; he practically invented new verb tenses to avoid saying directly that Joe Biden was the legitimately elected president.

When it comes to deal-breakers, to each their own, but I find it puzzling that these weren’t some crimson flags for Senate Democrats. But even if they weren’t, everyone should understand that the only role a Republican judicial nominee plays in American life is serving Trump as if he was their personal legal client and backstopping his savage corruption. For that reason alone, there should never be a Democratic name signed to the advancement of Trump’s judges.

Why would 13 Democrats (and Maine independent Angus King, who I find too tiresome to explain to people) do such a thing? My theory is this: In their own skewed, Senate-brained view of the world, taking these kinds of votes helps to bolster democracy. That is to say, any time there is a small window in which they can make a gesture of comity and bipartisanship, they believe the right thing to do is to take it—the better to demonstrate that the ol’ ship of state is still humming along, normal business and regular order is possible, and that we aren’t so far off from recovery. Democrats are leaving the door to deliberation open. They’re keeping that saucer on ice.

Folks, I would love to believe that a small overture might seed a future coming together of polarized parties. But if watching schoolchildren get shot to pieces several times a year isn’t going to foster that fellowship, then we’re definitely not getting there by throwing the other side a bone in the form of Harold Mooty. The government is shut down, there’s a hole in the White House, the president is ordering extrajudicial killings in Latin America as part of some run-up to a regime change war, and citizens are getting snatched off the streets by Brett Kavanaugh–inspired goons. The system so loved by the Senate-brained is currently offline! And these votes to approve the odd judicial candidate are simply small enabling acts that only help to fuel the disorder.

Is democracy in grave danger? This week, it looks like Merkley and his allies agree, and that 13 other Democrats aren’t really ready to believe him. But with midterms looming, everyone in the party has to be of one mind on the matter in order to not sow confusion among critical voters. And if they all truly agree that Trump is some unique threat, we cannot have Democrats in double digits signing their name to support his agenda—not now, not ever.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

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Believe it or not, there was a time when the Supreme Court’s emergency docket rulings did not regularly garner controversy; they were simply the means by which the court could consider time-sensitive legal crises, such as motions related to capital punishment. But a key feature of the Trump era is the transformation of the emergency docket into the “shadow docket”: unsigned rulings that have had a profound effect on the country. Beyond the fact that these rulings have a “heads Trump wins, tails Democrats lose” bent, they are, as Erwin Chemerinsky notes, often proffered without much in the way of jurisprudential explanation while frequently bulldozing precedent. The justices themselves may not like the term “shadow docket,” but they seem to relish operating in the shadows all the same.

But there is one instance in which a justice did attempt to explain himself in a recent shadow docket ruling, only for that justice’s reasoning to blow up nearly immediately after its first encounter with the real world: Brett Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, in which the Supremes stayed a lower court ruling that was specifically impeding the Department of Homeland Security from racially profiling people for immigration stops. The larger court, as is its wont, failed to offer a ruling. But Kavanaugh opted to weigh in all the same. His reward is a heaping helping of infamy in the form of a specific secret police tactic that many have taken to calling “the Kavanaugh stop.”

Here’s the essential background. As The New Republic’s Matt Ford reported after the ruling in Noem was handed down, Kavanaugh’s surprise concurrence went to some pains to “minimize the impact” of a law enforcement encounter: “Importantly, reasonable suspicion means only that immigration officers may briefly stop the individual and inquire about immigration status,” Kavanaugh wrote. “If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter. Only if the person is illegally in the United States may the stop lead to further immigration proceedings.”

As Ford noted, the law enforcement encounters that formed the basis of the case itself could hardly be called “brief.” One of the plaintiffs in Noem testified that his attempt to show valid proof of U.S. citizenship did not make the encounter any shorter, as the agents “refused to believe the validity of his California driver’s license.” As Justice Sonia Sotomayor recalled in her dissent, “The agent said the ID was insufficient, ‘grabbed [his] arm,’ escorted him to a vehicle, and drove him to a ‘warehouse area’ for further questioning.” None of that sounds at all like the quick interaction that Kavanaugh suggested was the theoretical norm. And in practice, the Kavanaugh stop hasn’t hewed to his imagined brief encounter, either.

The quintessential components of a Kavanaugh stop involve a person detained for immigration enforcement specifically, with race a certain or likely factor in the decision behind the stop—the Fourth Amendment’s protections from unlawful searches and seizures be damned. Sotomayor saw a grim future in the court’s decision: “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.”

If the news is any guide, Sotomayor’s fears are now reality. As the* Chicago Tribune* recently reported, Chicago resident Rueben Antonio Cruz, a 60-year-old man originally from El Salvador, was sitting with a friend in Rogers Park when “immigration officers stopped their truck and went straight after them.” What followed was a classic Kavanaugh stop: Cruz and his friend were asked for “papers” proving their citizenship. Cruz, who was not carrying such papers on his person, was then bundled into the agents’ vehicle and interrogated. Cruz was eventually let go, but not before the agents fined him $130 for “not having his papers.” The ordeal left Cruz angry: “It’s not fair because I said, let’s go to my house and I’ll show you my papers. I’m a resident.”

The Tribune notes that while federal law requires registered foreign nationals to carry proof of registration with them at all times, “prior to a second Trump administration, it was rarely enforced.” The detention drew the criticism of the ACLU’s Ed Yohnka: “America has never been a place where people need to ‘show one’s papers.’ Ticketing a lawful permanent resident—and forcing him to appear in court and pay a fine for not carrying their papers—is unnecessary and cruel.” Unfortunately, it’s likely to become commonplace as Trump’s goons, freed from legal obligations by the Supreme Court, make the Kavanaugh stop part of their daily operations.

The possibility that Trump’s ICE agents, who have effectively been given carte blanche to abuse their authority, might simply dismiss their quarry’s valid proof of citizenship appears to have not occurred to Kavanaugh. But it has definitely occurred to the jabronis snatching up brown people in American cities. In a second Kavanaugh stop detailed by the Tribune, a 44-year-old Latina woman named Maria Greeley was out for a jog when she was jumped by federal agents who zip-tied her and detained her despite the fact that she carries her passport with her at all times to prove that she was born in the United States. According to the report, agents remarked that she didn’t “look like a Greeley,” dismissed her documentation, and accused her repeatedly of lying.

One of the most obviously impeachable things about the Supreme Court is that it’s so frequently out of touch with the real world—a perhaps inevitable condition of giving nine people special robes and lifetime job security and then stuffing them inside a sepulchral building to stew in their own partisan juices with no one to answer to. Kavanaugh’s flawed reasoning may simply be the product of profound naïveté. But since this all came about in a shadow docket case in which the Trump administration asked for emergency relief in the form of the permission to racially profile people, I think it’s hardly beyond belief to think that Kavanaugh felt compelled to try to put a good spin on a reprehensible ruling.

That Kavanaugh has to own the Kavanaugh stop is cold comfort. Who knows if it’s even possible to shame or humiliate Brett Kavanaugh anyway? It’s very possible that transforming the United States into a country more reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s “Ihre Papiere bitte” era is precisely the legacy that Kavanaugh sought for himself. We’re the ones who are stuck with the consequences.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

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The popular way of describing what’s going on in Washington right now is to say that on October 1, the federal government shut down as a result of Congress’s inability to pass an appropriations bill to keep it funded. Chief among the sticking points was the fact that Democrats and Republicans could not come to terms on the future of Affordable Care Act subsidies. The Republican bill did not include them; Democrats balked at signing their name to a budget that would cause skyrocketing premium costs for millions of mostly low- and middle-income Americans.

You wouldn’t be faulted if that was your capsule summary of the shutdown. It’s essentially the story to which most of the political press is sticking, and there’s nothing fundamentally untrue about it. It would appear for now, in fact, that the broad public acceptance of this state of play is boosting Democrats’ fortunes in the game of who “owns” the shutdown. CNN’s Harry Enten reported this week that voters blame the GOP more, by an average of 12 points, and he noted that historically speaking, the party blamed at the outset is who gets blamed at the end. (It probably helps Democrats’ cause that those perusing the Obamacare exchanges for plans right now are already seeing the huge spikes in premium costs.)

Still, these facts only tell part of the story. This government shutdown isn’t merely about an appropriations bill, and it’s not entirely about health care subsidies. This shutdown is actually the culmination of a much deeper dysfunction, to which blame can indeed be wholly attached to President Donald Trump and his GOP apparatchiks. But the underlying cause of the shutdown is tricky terrain for Democrats to negotiate, and it calls into question whether they can—or even should—speedily resolve it. And the key to understanding the problem begins with acknowledging that this didn’t start in October. The government shutdown began a few weeks after Trump was sworn in.

Trump’s second term is broadly defined by his monomaniacal desire to either end or fatally impair the federal government. With the help of Elon Musk and Russell Vought, the Trump administration managed to do this in the most alienating possible way. As my colleague Alex Shephard noted this week, the administration’s slash-and-burn speedrun through the civil service has been broadly unpopular. It also probably goes a long way toward making any of the GOP’s rhetoric about Democrats being to blame for this most recent shutdown harder to take seriously.

But the reason things have dragged to a legislative standstill in October is essentially because Republicans in Congress willed it to be so when they returned to Washington to rejoin Trump as devoted supplicants. Their most fateful decision in that regard? Giving up one of the legislative branch’s core functions—the power of the purse. As NPR reported, by the first week of February, Republican lawmakers had already begun to master the art of explaining away why they were happy to surrender the power to appropriate money to Trump.

I characterized this at the time as an escalation in GOP lawmakers’ expansive campaign of self-abnegation. But it has ended up being so much more. The decision to give the White House full power to decide what, when, and how congressionally appropriated money is spent has created an impasse more deep and intractable than the shutdown itself, because the question of how the conflict over Obamacare subsidies gets resolved has become impossible to answer.

Let’s think about it for a minute. The White House’s position, as advanced by Vice President JD Vance and others, is that Senate Democrats should stop filibustering the appropriations bill now, and the matter of the subsidies can be negotiated later. The problem is that it’s impossible for a reasonable person to view that offer as sincere. Sure, Congress can go through the motions: meet in committee, hash out a deal, pass a bill, and send it to Trump’s desk. Trump can even sign that bill. But none of it matters when you know that Trump is likely to simply appropriate or not appropriate that money as he sees fit through pocket rescissions.

What we have here is a fully busted appropriations process; it is impossible to have faith in anything that Trump and his Republican cronies do with taxpayer dollars, even in instances in which bills have been negotiated, agreed to, and passed. And Republicans just keep on tipping their hands that they don’t really care about restoring that faith. This week, the chief way they responded to Democrats’ demands was to threaten federal workers’ back pay, despite the law being very clear that workers are entitled to those wages once the shutdown ends. Here, Democrats should say, “If the Trump administration is willing to break faith, and the law, to not pay you now, there is no reason to believe your steady paycheck is safe under any circumstances.”

So when and how does this get resolved? Knowing of the Trump administration’s faithlessness and the physiological impossibility of him honoring any deal made on Obamacare subsidies—or anything else—it’s not clear that Democrats should even play a role in resolving the matter. As Garrett Graff wrote, “If appropriations bills are not seen as enforceable contracts, why should any Member of Congress vote to fund any part of the federal government under Donald Trump? You’re voting to provide money for lawlessness.” Having once opted to give Trump’s paramilitary forces the money to invade American cities, Democrats should not position themselves to be fooled a second time.

It’s worth pointing out that Republicans have majorities in both houses of Congress, so they can end the impasse any time they want, all on their own. I’ll admit that I do not know what Devil Magic has heretofore kept the GOP from simply nuking the filibuster and getting on with this. Perhaps they desire even the slightest whiff of bipartisan assent for Trump’s designs because of the cover it earns them from the mainstream political media, who are as desperate as ever to find the smallest scintilla of evidence that the American experiment is still working. But from here, the shutdown calculus becomes simple: If Democratic votes are what Trump and his GOP enablers need the most, they must never be provided.

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According to a fresh Gallup poll this week, 43 percent of Americans regard the Supreme Court as “too conservative,” against 36 percent who feel that the Roberts court is an even-tempered administrator of justice. That 43 percent is a new high, per Gallup: “Before the court shifted to a 6-3 conservative advantage after Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg in October 2020, no more than 33% had ever characterized it as too conservative.” But then, that conservative majority started doing things—like gut Roe—and disapproval followed. Don’t expect things to turn around, by the way. As Matt Ford noted earlier this week, the court is expected to take a rightward lurch during its next term.

I got to thinking about the Supreme Court this week after Brian Beutler invited the readers of his Off Message newsletter to engage in a thought exercise: If you could thwart MAGA and the rise of fascism, but only by “turning the Democrats’ ideological clock” back to 2005, would you take that trade-off? Moderating would mean a lot of ideological progress on the left would have to fall by the wayside (Democrats in 2005 weren’t robustly defending marriage equality, and were nowhere near President Joe Biden’s vision of a pro-worker economy). But the idea is tempting—and the Supreme Court looms large. I would not call the high court’s 2005 incarnation “good” by any stretch of the imagination. But during the transition from Chief William Rehnquist to John Roberts, the court came studded with justices—Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Sandra Day O’Connor—who were willing to swing between ideological poles. Going back sure sounds like a good deal.

Alas, the world only spins forward. There’s no “moderation” button that Democrats might press to take us back to a more halcyon era. As provocative as Beutler’s thought experiment is, I’d prefer Democrats to think more deeply about the present moment—and more strategically about getting out of it. I don’t think we escape the fascism trap without Democrats who are willing to spend a lot of political capital, and I think those Democrats will have to commit themselves to some radical thinking along the way.

There is a place, to my mind, where Democrats can and probably should moderate. The big intraparty battles of the pre-Trump era revolved around whether Democrats should go big on policy or stay toward the center; here were the debates over Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and taxes designed to soak the rich. This is, alas, not the moment to revive or promote these ideas—and I say that as a fervent supporter of them. That’s because they don’t stand a chance under this extremist Supreme Court, which must first be dealt with.

I spelled out some of my thinking on this matter back in 2024, at a time when Kamala Harris was being dogged by daily reports of her reversing herself or becoming suddenly noncommittal about policies she once supported in the years prior to her vice presidency. I was fairly sanguine about this state of affairs because the Supreme Court had, by then, entered its Enemy of Liberal Governance Era, and it was quite clear to me that the six-member conservative majority was simply going to stamp a line-item veto over anything a Democratic president or legislature did.

Under this judicial regime, things like Medicare for All are a complete nonstarter. Hell, so is any hyper-timid means-tested bullshit if five justices don’t want Democrats to succeed. As I urged at the time, conflict with “a Supreme Court that’s holding the policymaking apparatus hostage” is inevitable, and it is “not a fight [Democrats] can duck.”

All of which means that while Democrats might be able to pick and choose some avenues of moderation, the task of arresting and reversing the degradation of the Trump era will inevitably require a hard swerve toward a more radical type of political thinking—especially with regard to the Supreme Court. The polite norms around the Supreme Court have been obliterated. This should be apparent to everyone; every one of these shadow docket rulings where the majority semi-anonymously grants a would-be dictator more power to overthrow the Constitution only reinforces the fact that the high court’s age of respectability is over.

The Democrats who want to win back power in 2026, and win the presidency in 2028, need to embrace this conflict and nurture the growing public antipathy toward the Supreme Court. They will also have to do things that the Democrats of 2020—let alone 2005—dared not: Packing the court needs to be on the table. Reforms must be forcefully imposed. The justices need to be brought before Congress and explain themselves in regular reviews. And to get there, Democrats must engage in a content-creation campaign depicting the Roberts court as it truly is: a promoter of political corruption, a despoiler of the environment, an enemy of democracy, an institution that has pilfered wealth right from the people’s pockets.

I feel for Democrats facing this moment. Institutionalism has served them in decent stead in the recent past. But those institutions have been perverted in the Trump era and must be brought to heel and firmly restored to their civic purpose. There’s no purely moderate path to what should be the ideal “moderate” outcome: a restoring of balance to our civic lives.

But rather than look back to 2005 for solutions, Democrats must wind the clock back still further, to 1862, and find their purpose in this passage from President Abraham Lincoln’s second State of the Union address: “We can succeed only by concert.… The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise—with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” The Democratic leaders of the future will be those who disenthrall themselves of the dogmas of the quiet past, and face a moment piled high with difficulty with courage and conviction.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

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As Donald Trump’s goon-squad occupation of the nation’s capital wends its way into its third week, the president is already eyeing the next Democratic stronghold he’d like to strangle with his bruised hands in the name of “fighting crime.” Among the municipalities facing the mad king’s wrath is Chicago, which has loomed in far-right lore as some kind of Third World hellhole. While we wait for many Democratic leaders and media elites to take Trump’s authoritarian spree seriously, TNR editor Michael Tomasky this week urged Illinois officials to steel themselves for what’s to come. “Okay, JB Pritzker,” he wrote, “you’re up.”

It didn’t take long for the reply to come. In a Monday afternoon news conference, Illinois’s Democratic governor joined a slew of state leaders speaking out about Trump’s plan to deploy troops to Chicago. Pritzker has, over the past year, begun to cement his national profile ahead of what many presume to be a presidential run in 2028. He has firmly planted himself in the same “fighter” lane as California Governor Gavin Newsom—the better to distinguish himself from, say, whatever it is that Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer thinks she’s been doing lately.

Pritzker ended up being the headline figure of that Monday news conference, thanks to the simplicity and directness of his message. “Mr. President, do not come to Chicago,” he said. “You are neither wanted here nor needed here.” He offered some satisfying digs at the evident decline of Trump’s mental faculties. He hit many of the right notes for someone who wants to establish himself as a leader of a dissident movement. But Pritzker saved his best for last, when he promised to take the fight against Trump a step farther than most Democrats have allowed themselves.

Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: We are watching and we are taking names.

This is where Pritzker has leveled up over his fellow Democrats, by promising a future of accountability and retribution for the destruction Trump and his minions are doing to the constitutional order and our individual freedoms. As I wrote back in May, the Trump White House and the GOP are no longer a political party by any definition; rather, they are a sort of criminal syndicate with an extensive portfolio of white collar crimes, violent offenses against our civil rights, and an ongoing sort of imposed cultural tyranny that is killing off the well-paying jobs of the future by decimating academia, and literally sparking public health crises at home and abroad through the Lysenkoism of key administration figures like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

As I noted at the time, “There is a certain necessary logic to what has to follow corrupt misrule of this kind: tribunals, trials, punishment, prison, and the running to ground and defunding of the entire Trump syndicate.” The only thing we were lacking then was an ambitious political figure who was willing to say that they were ready and willing to make accountability a key plank in their platform. Pritzker has made a timely arrival.

As Discourse Blog’s Rafi Schwartz points out, this isn’t the only uniquely consequential aspect of Pritzker’s speech. The Illinois governor—channeling the feelings of so many who’ve forewarned of what was to come in a second Trump term—told those assembled, “If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

Pritzker’s willingness to straightforwardly announce the existence of a crisis with “no caveats” and “no conditionals,” Schwartz writes, helps to “[neutralize] the latent anxieties of those worried about coming off as unduly panicked or oversensitive to the political realities around us.” In short, Pritzker allows those so inclined to finally grant themselves the permission to see the fascism that’s on the march, and speak of it out loud.

In the same way, I think that Pritzker has kicked open a door to an alternate future: One in which the restorative work of post-Trump patriots involves accountability for criminals and reparations for the people they’ve harmed. The taking of names and the doling out of punishments: This is now part of the larger political discussion; this is now part of the Democrats’ intraparty debate about What Is To Be Done. By including this as part of his political ambition, and broadly suggesting it may be the major goal of some future Pritzker administration, he allows us to imagine this future and have a hand in creating it.

And it sure sounds like Pritzker wants to put his hands to the task right now. “If you hurt my people,” he said, “nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.” In a week where Beltway Democrats passed their time pointlessly debating whether or not they were using words like “food insecurity” too much, and congratulating each other for calling the D.C. occupation a “stunt” or a “distraction,” hearing a Democratic politician speak in plain English is pleasingly bracing. These are, indeed, encouraging words to hear after Democrats long implored us to “look forward, not backward” and allowed misrule to go unpunished, thereby paving the road for Trump’s fascist second act.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Editor’s Pick

Less than a fortnight into President Trump’s federal takeover of D.C. by the National Guard and an alphabet soup of federal law enforcement agents, Washingtonians have rendered an unsurprising verdict on the president’s latest display of authoritarian corruption: They hate it, in large numbers. And they’re organizing against it: A “Free D.C.” movement has taken root—and taken to the streets—to resist the president’s latest power grab.

The response from political and media elites to this militarized takeover of our capital, however, has been rather limp. As The New Republic’s Monica Potts reports, Democrats apparently have been caught flat-footed by Trump’s maneuver; to the extent that they’ve said anything about it, they’ve largely dismissed it as a manufactured “distraction” rather than loudly calling it what it is: a fascist occupation—and a prelude to worse.

But Trump is getting plumped by some in the media as well: The Atlantic’s Michael Powell idly handwaves the fact that D.C. brought the violent crime rate to a 30-year low in 2024 to admonish Democrats for “downplaying crime.” (In this case, “downplaying crime” means “marshaling statistics demonstrating that the crime rate is trending in the right direction.”) Charles Fain Lehman, also in The Atlantic, goes to similar lengths to dismiss the actual facts to assert that “the reality is more complicated” and that some “deliberate intervention”—atop the one that brought the crime rate to a 30-year-low, presumably—is warranted.

These authors and others are making a profound error from the jump in assuming that Trump sincerely desires to lower the crime rate in D.C. Trump is actually a “blank, sucking nullity” who wants to see himself on television and has decided that his second term in office will be about self-enrichment and revenge. He is inventing a crisis of crime as a pretext for further consolidating his power; this is authoritarianism 101.

Personally, I think downplaying crime in the nation’s capital is not nearly as irresponsible as downplaying Trump’s authoritarianism. But if we must pretend that Trump’s efforts are sincere, then I’d challenge the proponents of his militarized deployments to approach their work with more rigor, and less vibes. Trump has proposed a thesis: Crime in D.C. will go down if masked paramilitaries flood the city and amble about the streets. The task, then, is to see if his theory stands up to the test—to take this seriously.

Trump’s critics do take this seriously, and they have a thesis of their own backed up by data. The District of Columbia had a miserable year in 2023; as crime rates were dropping across the country, D.C.’s were spiking. The New Republic’s Grace Segers took an in-depth look into the phenomenon and reported that the city’s woes stemmed from an interlocking array of local failures, structural problems, and lack of investment. But city officials got busy in 2024 and reversed the trend, achieving a 35 percent reduction in violent crime and the aforementioned 30-year low in the violent crime rate. (Trump is now contending that the city lied about these results. As always, the safe harbor for journalists is to tr