Saturday, September 19, 2026
Defeating the Felon's Effort to Reshape Civil Society
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Since returning to the White House, the Felon - aided by congressional republicans only too happy to prostitute themselves - has perhaps done more damage to America's national security and economic strength than any foreign adversary. Meanwhile, he has ushered in a level of corruption and greed driven self-enrichment never before seen in an American president. The Felon, his family members, and his circle of oligarchs and billionaires have displayed previously unimagined greed and self-dealing, much of it at the expense of the American public (particularly poor children), many of whom will lose health care access, food benefits and subsistence benefits so that the already obscenely wealthy can become even more wealthy. And then there is the gratuitous cruelty in the mass deportation effort where non-criminals immigrants are abused, families separated and de facto concentration camps established. Add in the never ending lies and untruths and slander aimed at critics and we have a scene akin to the early days of Hitler's rise to power. Despite this onslaught of lies, corruption and cruelty, as a column in the New York Times argues, the Felon's grip on society appears to be slipping and more and more Americans are rejecting the Felon's and the ever enabling Republican Party's agenda. Here are column highlights:
The frantic pace of the Trump presidency makes days seem like weeks and weeks like months — if not years. Finding rhyme or reason amid President Trump’s erratic conduct is impossible. Even so, while 2026 has not brought calm, it has brought more clarity.
Twenty months into his second term, Mr. Trump has remade the presidency and changed what Americans will tolerate from their government and from one another. Yet that transformation, sweeping as it is, may prove less important than what Mr. Trump and his allies could not do. They failed at the most ambitious project that they brought to his second term: using the state to remake American society. That failure is a central fact of the past 20 months, and it is why the country is in a less dangerous place than it was a year ago.
When Mr. Trump took office for the second time, he arrived with several overlapping but distinct agendas. The one he cared most about would convert the executive branch to a form of government that scholars call patrimonialism, in which the state is run as the leader’s personal property and family concern. In a patrimonialist system, expert bureaucracies and neutral rules are replaced by — or subordinated to — the head of state’s will. Where they can, patrimonialists personalize and weaponize law enforcement, pardons, programs and grants, appointments, promotions and all the other aspects of state power.
Patrimonialism is manifest in Mr. Trump’s enrichment of himself and his family, reportedly by several billion dollars — and in his effort to extract almost $1.8 billion from taxpayers by means of a sham legal settlement.
He uses his Justice Department to wage personal vendettas and his pardons to indemnify his cronies. He has staffed the department’s senior ranks with his own criminal defense attorneys, and the F.B.I. with a fierce political loyalist whose chief qualification was a career spent attacking the investigators who had scrutinized Mr. Trump. And he has purged the government’s internal checks on corruption, including by firing inspectors general, career prosecutors and F.B.I. agents whose offense was to follow the rules.
The re-norming of political standards is another area in which Mr. Trump has made a lasting imprint. By “re-norming,” we mean the deliberate degradation of what is considered acceptable in American public life.
Examples are far too many to enumerate . . . . Beneath it all is the normalization of lying on an industrial scale: tens of thousands of documented false claims as president, including false accusations against Americans and false representations to courts.
Many Americans are sick of wading through the sludge and understandably want to look away. That is what Mr. Trump is counting on. He wins not by persuading us that the conduct is acceptable, but by wearing us out until we no longer object. Each violation makes the next easier; each unpunished transgression resets the baseline. What is being broken is not this standard or that one; it’s the idea that standards apply. . . . . It is no longer clear what a president could say — about a dead man, about a murdered family, about women he has abused, about incitements to violence — that would cost him anything.
So why, despite all that, does the second year of Mr. Trump’s second term seem less menacing than the first year? Because the patrimonialism and the re-norming, damaging as they are, were only part of what he and his followers set out to do. The largest of their ambitions was something else: the remaking of American society itself.
The Trump administration’s cultural reset was ambitious. While it had the president’s support, it was devised and pursued mostly by people around him. They included top officials such as Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and JD Vance on the inside of the administration, plus Elon Musk for the four months he worked in it; outside activists such as Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, and Steve Bannon of the “ War Room” podcast . . . . This group saw Mr. Trump’s second term as their best chance to block and reverse the left’s takeover and makeover of the country’s culture and institutions. By deploying government power against the commanding heights of the culture, they sought to supplant liberal hegemony not just in Washington but throughout society.
Every administration tries to shape the culture. What sets this one apart is not the ambition, but the means and the scale — not persuasion but coercion, and not on one front but everywhere all at once, in ways that were unprecedented and found by courts to be unlawful. Mr. Trump and his administration sought to bully and commandeer private institutions, to redirect the culture, and to remake society from above by force and fear.
In a few ways, the Trumpian social revolution succeeded: by slowing, and even reversing, the momentum of so-called D.E.I. (diversity, equity and inclusion) in elite institutions and of what conservatives called “gender ideology” . . . . On the whole, though, the administration’s effort to remake the culture in its image has failed.
History may one day judge that the tide turned in Minneapolis. In January of this year, Operation Metro Surge made mass arrests, invaded homes, fired pepper balls and shot dead two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, without plausible cause — and then, after their deaths, defamed them.
The architect of the operation, Stephen Miller, one of the most powerful presidential aides in modern history, was explicit about the method. He ran Operation Metro Surge through daily calls with the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security, wielding the authority of the president — reportedly directing agents to “force confrontations” with protesters to win the “P.R. battle”
The people of Minneapolis answered with disciplined, peaceful resistance: tens of thousands marching in Arctic cold, luminaria spelling “ICE Out 4 Good,” a statewide “economic blackout,” a state lawsuit in federal court, citizen networks that tracked ICE and documented its activities, and a population that refused every provocation.
The administration backed down . . . . By demonstrating that they could face the spectacle of force and win, Minnesotans shook off their despair and found that they were not powerless. The moment became a catalyst far beyond the Twin Cities. The mass public saw what was being done in their name and many were repulsed by it. What they glimpsed was that a country can, in fact, be lost, and that theirs had come nearer the edge than they had believed.
The president and his forces lost other key cultural battles, too. From outside his home country, but speaking pointedly to it, the first American pope not only defied Mr. Trump but transcended him, demonstrating a moral authority against which the president had no power. Within the United States, No Kings marches staged some of the largest single-day protests in American history, deploying anger and humor without fear. Lawsuits on behalf of Harvard, U.C.L.A. and law firms fought and won key rulings. Federal judges, including some of Mr. Trump’s appointees, blocked action after action. Mr. Musk’s demolition crew disbanded in failure and disrepute.
At the same time, and equally important, the president’s approval rating collapsed. Voters wanted an orderly border and criminal immigrants removed, not a culture war waged brutally in the streets. Mr. Trump’s unpopularity — abetted by his twin fresh failures on Iran and high prices — reached near-record lows for a second-term president.
His efforts to bully the culture have not stopped; he is still menacing universities and attacking free speech. No one should be relaxed about that. But his preoccupations have shifted away from intimidating and dominating civil society and toward building monuments to himself.
Revolutions can fail but still scar the landscape. And Mr. Trump, with just under two-and-a-half years left in his second term, might emotionally and psychologically blow apart. But things are different than they were. The 80-year-old president is losing his grip on power and even his own base. The MAGA movement is fracturing. And the president no longer inspires the fear he once did. We know something today that wasn’t altogether clear a year ago: America’s civil society is harder to intimidate and rewire than MAGA’s cultural revolutionaries hoped.
Conservatives have every right to influence and change the culture, as progressives assuredly have done. But they should do it Ronald Reagan’s way: by moral inspiration and persuasion, not force majeure. Progressives have something to learn, too. Mr. Trump and his culture warriors lost by moving too far out of the moral mainstream; Democrats should claim and occupy that mainstream, not lurch well out to the left, as they seem tempted to do.
Those who played a role in Mr. Trump’s rise to power have acted not just unwisely, but culpably. Even so, it is now apparent that many Americans — probably enough Americans — are determined to live within the truth rather than the lie, to fight for their civic and political self-respect, to return a sense of humanity to a nation that has grown too cold, too callous and too cruel.
Friday, September 18, 2026
The Felon: Making America Dirtier, Poorer, and Less Safe
At last week’s GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Vice President Vance painted a bleak picture of American life before the second Trump administration:
“Two years ago, we have to remember, our nation, ladies and gentlemen, was tired. We were tired of seeing our factories close. We were tired of our neighbors dying of drug overdoses. We were tired of not being able to afford anything. We were tired of seeing the cartels and the criminals given free rein over our great country,” Vance said. “And we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.”
Who is responsible for this terrible state of affairs? The opposition party and immigrants, apparently. . . . . But this account represents a preposterous inversion. Almost every problem Vance lists, the Trump administration has made worse.
The administration’s environmental policies have made American water and air dirtier. Its health-care, tariff, and tax policies have worsened inflation and increased the financial burden on most American households, even as incomes have grown. And its public-health policies have led to outbreaks of contagious disease.
The Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump has revoked regulations on air pollution—including those on particulate matter that can cause heart and lung disease—after being intensely lobbied by the fossil-fuel industry. It has repealed limits on “forever chemicals” in drinking water, which are linked to cancer and other health problems. The Trump Justice Department scrapped a settlement compelling Alabama to provide adequate sanitation systems to residents living with raw sewage, describing it as “DEI.”
Although Trump won the 2024 election largely because of Biden-era inflation, he has done everything in his power to make inflation worse. Trump’s arguably illegal and certainly ill-advised war in Iran has led to the closure of strategic shipping waterways, which has provoked a rise in energy prices, which has in turn raised the prices of other goods. Trump’s tariffs worsened inflation by raising the price of imports, and wages seem to be falling behind inflation. To make matters worse, health-care costs are rising rapidly, in part because of the Trump administration’s repeal of Affordable Care Act subsidies in its One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Crime is down. But that’s not because of the Trump administration’s mass-deportation program, whose brutal and indiscriminate tactics have weakened the economy rather than strengthened it. The reality is that immigrants are far less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes, and crime has been falling steadily since the pandemic-induced spike in 2020 and 2021. Absent significant changes to the space-time continuum, Trump cannot claim credit for a decline in crime that began before Trump even took office, . . .
Vance called out two women, one of whom was born in Somalia, who defrauded Medicaid of $46 million. But the Trump administration has been happy to pardon fraudsters such as Lawrence Duran, who was sentenced to 50 years in prison for defrauding Medicare of more than $200 million, or Robert Harshbarger Jr., the husband of Republican Representative Diana Harshbarger, who pleaded guilty to health-care fraud. Last February, Elizabeth Oyer, a former U.S. pardon attorney, told The New York Times that Trump’s pardons had “essentially wiped away about $1 billion in penalties and restitution secured by federal prosecutors in fraud cases.”
the Trump administration has tried its best to make the federal government worse at protecting Americans from foreseeable problems. Cuts to public agencies have coincided with outbreaks of infectious and foodborne diseases, to the point that the administration is trying to manipulate numbers to hide measles deaths. I don’t know about you, but I felt safer when I could eat lettuce without thinking about whether it would make me sick. Or berries. Or beef.
In fairness, however, not everyone is getting poorer—the top 1 and 0.1 percent of American households have seen their income grow considerably, thanks to the OBBBA’s slashing of taxes on the wealthy; the bottom 50 percent, not so much.
To the extent that anyone should be happy with the Trump administration’s policies, though, many of its extremely wealthy backers are getting all they paid for and then some.
As for everyone else? The country is almost certainly dirtier, poorer, less prosperous, and in some ways less safe than in 2024. But that’s not because of Democrats or immigrants. It’s because of the people currently running the place. They’re really hoping you’ll blame someone else.
Thursday, September 17, 2026
The Felon and the End of the American Age
The American age that followed World War II was bound to end eventually. What’s shocking is how suddenly that moment has arrived. In the past six months, America’s power—long exemplified by the world’s best warfighting equipment and most highly trained military personnel, a global network of bases and logistics systems, and military and diplomatic partnerships with all corners of the world—has proved insufficient to defeat Iran, a repressive, economically stagnant regime armed with cheap missiles and drones.
For years, virtually everyone thought that, in a crisis, Washington could draw on deeper reserves of money, troops, munitions, and diplomatic support than any other nation. Even when U.S. forces faced setbacks in conflicts such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, a widespread assumption about America’s fundamental strength reassured allies and deterred foes. Yet that assumption also promoted a complacency that has left the U.S. military exposed now that even inexpensive, mass-produced weaponry can be guided with deadly accuracy.
[The Felon]
President Trumpdid not erode U.S. capabilities on his own. But [the Felon's] Trump’s war with Iran has revealed just how the underlying dynamics of global power have shifted—and just how much American might has decayed.Since Britain’s postwar retreat from the Middle East, the United States has been the most important military power in that volatile region. . . . Until recently, the array of American bases surrounding Iran gave that country’s leaders every reason to fear being overwhelmed militarily if they moved to control the strait. Yet the regime remains intact, even after attacks by the United States and Israel succeeded in killing top Iranian leaders, and its long-range missile and drone attacks managed to elude American air defenses and incapacitated many U.S. facilities. In March, fewer than two weeks into the fighting, The New York Times identified 17 American bases, air-defense installations, and diplomatic facilities that had been hit. Among them were some of the U.S. military’s important staging points: the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain as well as the Ali Al Salem Air Base, Camp Arifjan, and Camp Buehring in Kuwait.
The effect of these losses on U.S. operations was nearly instantaneous. A key reason the Trump administration did not militarily escalate with Iran over the summer, despite all of its threats to do so, was the loss of the base in Bahrain—which the Navy had relied on for decades to resupply ships in the Middle East.
For the moment—and likely for longer—the bases taken out of commission by Iranian attacks have been largely abandoned as operational facilities because of the continuing threat to U.S. personnel and equipment. . . . The vulnerability of U.S facilities near Iran is so great and the prospective cost of repair is so large that, as The Washington Post reported last month, administration officials might not want to rebuild them at all. . . . the basic fact is that defending key facilities against even a less technologically advanced foe such as Iran is not something that the U.S. military can currently do.
The diminution of U.S. strength has a cascading effect. To maintain its military effort against Iran, the United States has had to strip the western Pacific of vital equipment. . . . This desperate move only underscores that American military resources, however enormous relative to most other countries’, are not infinite. The war with Iran has depleted stockpiles of some of the Pentagon’s most important and advanced weaponry. . . . For years, the United States has focused on building so-called exquisite systems—advanced weaponry that is produced in limited quantities at a high per-unit cost. This approach was in part an adaptation to the post-9/11 War on Terror, in which U.S. forces focused on counterinsurgency and fought enemies that lacked the capacity to mount and sustain serious attacks on American logistics. Under those circumstances, the Pentagon built up a broad array of munitions but not deep stockpiles of them.
The erosion of American manufacturing superiority is an old story, but it is a key element for understanding the end of the American age. The U.S. could once outbuild other powers by tapping into civilian production. During World War II, Americans retooled the automotive industry to build aircraft. Today, relative to the rest of the world, the United States does almost no civilian shipbuilding. China, in comparison, makes about 50 percent of the ships in the world and controls about 80 percent of the world’s drone manufacture. Having built its military to prevail in a burst of high-intensity fighting, the United States simply lacks the equipment, stockpiles, and rested forces to engage China for any extended period of time.
In the past, the United States could rely on allies to amplify its own power. Nations that shared values or at least interests with Washington have hosted bases, provided diplomatic support for American initiatives, shared intelligence, and sent troops and equipment to support American-led military operations. Today, traditional allies have capabilities that the U.S. sorely needs. For example, Japan and South Korea are the second- and third-largest shipbuilding powers in the world.
Rather than recognizing that it needs allies more than ever, the current U.S administration perceives governments that have followed American leadership for decades as free riders, annoyances, even hindrances. . . . . in Europe, the U.S. government has distanced itself from long-standing democracies and moved closer to the Russian dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. Since returning to the White House, Trump has scaled back the American provision of security to Europe. . . . Leaders in Europe are taking these moves seriously and are making plans to rely less on the United States. Germany is considering whether to help the U.K. modernize its nuclear weapons so that Europe has a nuclear deterrent if the United States pulls out.
The United States has even begun to alienate Canada. Trump has regularly talked about his desire to incorporate Canada as the 51st state. He has also launched a trade war that, by his own account, will be “devastating” to the Canadian economy. Americans have now twice elected a president who overtly seeks to reframe traditional alliances as zero-sum relationships in which the United States needs to do less and its former partners, more. Leaders and voters in those countries might reasonably conclude that Americans do not know or do not care what they are giving up.
Americans have long benefited from peaceful integration with Canada. The U.S. could go to war with Iran in part because of its large base network in Europe. The disruption of long-standing alliances will be devastating to America’s global position. Other countries are already adjusting to newly revealed American weaknesses. Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—all long-term U.S. partners—recently signed their own defense pact. . . . Even Saudi Arabia, which for decades based its security on massive purchases of U.S. weapons and the hosting of U.S. forces, must reassess its choices after Trump told its de facto ruler that the U.S. will not assist the country in its war with the Houthis.
Meanwhile, South Korea is improving relations with China, and European states are thinking more and more of a European-wide defense association. These are all strong signs that the countries around the world are losing confidence in America’s capabilities—and its intent.
Unfortunately for the United States, the administration seems more intent on hiding problems than correcting them. . . . . Even if the United States tries to revert to more of its earlier way of doing business, recent events suggest that its global reach will decrease. How the rest of the world will adapt to that change is hard to say.
All of history’s previous superpowers have eventually declined. The emergence of East Asia as the center of the world’s economic output was always going to reduce American influence. The transition from one global age to the next is seldom evident in the moment. When Russia invaded Ukraine four and a half years ago, the potential of mass-produced drones had not yet become clear. As recently as February, few experts would have predicted that the United States—a global colossus for more than 80 years—would end up so hamstrung by Iran. But the conflict reveals something important: The American age has come to an end. U.S. global dominance cannot continue without the power sources that brought it about.
Wednesday, September 16, 2026
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