The Not-So-Secret Impulse Behind The Felon's Vulgar Birthday Party

The Felon seems to have three main motivations: (i) ever enriching himself, (ii) bolstering his insecure masculinity and appearing "tough", and (iii) satiating his narcistic vanity.  All three, of course inter-relate. His vulgar and unseemly birthday celebration schedule tomorrow which includes a UFC fight match in forecast 94 degree temperatures with forecasts of possible severe thunderstorms likely plays to all three, but particularly his insecure and toxic Masculinity.  Only 16% of Americans support the gladiatorial like event with the Felon playing the role of a modern day Nero or Caligula - which means event a good chunk of the MAGA base finds the event repellant. Meanwhile, for the 39th time the Felon is claiming a deal with Iran is "close" although details are fuzzy and his deal with likely make the one Barack Obama brokered look absolutely amazingly good in comparison. In some ways garishness and unseemliness of the costly event is appropriate for the 80 year old convicted felon who views himself I suspect as America's Caesar even as much of the world loathes and laughs at him. Perhaps the only one truly grinning is Vladimir Putin as he surveys the immense damage the Felon has done to American power and prestige as well as the American economy.  A piece in the New Republic looks at the vulgar event, Here are excerpts:

The president turns 80 on Sunday, and, as with everything pertaining to Donald Trump, his need to place himself at the center of our attention is pathological. He could not just have a dinner at the White House, or a party at Mar-a-Lago. No; he had to build a massive arena on real estate that belongs to the people of the United States to host a vulgar, garish event that is one of the most violent forms of spectacle available to the human race today. Trump will be sitting there like some Roman emperor at the Colosseum watching enslaved men try to stave off lions. The man who wanted law enforcement to shoot protesters “in the knees” is probably bummed he couldn’t just replicate that.

But if you can’t have lions, six UFC fights are the next best thing. . . . I’ve also read that its popularity may have peaked; here’s a 2025 piece by a sportswriter who has followed “combat sports” for 15 years, showing that the number of matches is in steep decline.

But guess what’s strikingly, the event is overwhelmingly not popular? The idea of hosting such fights at the White House, on grounds we tend to associate with understated, democratic solemnity. A poll released Thursday found that just … wait for it … 16 percent of Americans considered it appropriate to hold MMA cage matches on the White House grounds. Meanwhile, 46 percent opposed. Even among Republicans, only 31 percent considered it appropriate. Yet a narrow plurality of Republicans in the survey backed the event, by said 31 percent to 22 percent.

Democrats opposed it by huge margins, 75 to 5 percent. Independents were strongly against it too, by 45 to 11 percent. So once again, it’s Republicans—no; specifically, it’s MAGA Republicans, because they’re undoubtedly that 31 percent—who are way out of step with what real Americans think. Yet they—Trump, his lackeys, and all those Soviet-style propagandists on Fox and Newsmax and One America and elsewhere—will of course spend the entire weekend equating men beating each other to a pulpy mass on hallowed civic ground with “real” patriotism.

It’s sickening. Oh—and it’s also, as we’ve come to expect with Trump, deeply corrupt. First of all, the cost of constructing the arena is around $60 million. Supposedly UFC is picking up that check, but with Trump, who really knows? We taxpayers will undoubtedly be on the hook for something. Meanwhile, the chief sponsor—surprise, surprise!—is Crypto.com.

Out in the real world, Trump is being reduced to impotence by a bunch of dictators who are even more reactionary than he is. He’s about to cut a “deal” with Iran that sounds like it will be little more than an extended ceasefire. It will, many experts fear, compare unfavorably to Barack Obama’s 2015 accord, which Trump tore up in 2018. Trump may achieve what Obama achieved, in terms of getting Iran to agree not to enrich uranium at anywhere close to weapons-grade levels. But as I’ve noted several times, the thing to watch is how much money Trump agrees to transfer to Iran. Which in a sense is fine; it’s Iran’s frozen money. But when Obama agreed to give Iran $1.7 billion, right-wingers screamed that it was capitulation and even treasonous. Iran now wants up to $24 billion. We’ll see how Mr. Art of the Deal fares.

But even if he does strike a decent deal, he’s already done enormous damage to the U.S. economy, the global economy, and American prestige and power projection. To sane observers in the United States and across the world, he looks like exactly what he is: a weak and hollow and insecure man who started a needless and counterproductive war out of nowhere because it looked “tough.”

But inside his little MAGA cocoon on Sunday night, he’ll be a manly man, presiding over watching other manly men spill each other’s blood for the leader’s greater glory. It’s the most undemocratic pageant one could imagine, a fact that—given that scant 16 percent support—the people know in their bones. In fact, this is exactly what fascism is: grotesque, violent spectacle that repulses most of the population but drives the fervent worshippers to a frenzied state and tries to bully its way into being synonymous with what it means to be a real American.

It’s all made worse by the fact that Dear Leader will be embarking upon his ninth decade of life that night, and that six in 10 Americans believe he lacks the mental sharpness to serve as president. So that’s the not-so-secret meaning of this event.

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Republicans Thought They Owned "Values." Not Anymore

For years the Republican Party and the "Christian Right" - which is neither truly Christian or morally right - have claimed to be the protectors of "family values" and "values" in general.  Other than pushing a hate-filled, racist and anti-LGBT Christian nationalist agenda now fully embodied in Project 2025, these claims were never true given the way the GOP constantly pushes a reverse Robin Hood agenda that takes from the poor and gives to the obscenely wealthy as self-styled "Christians" aligned with the GOP utterly ignoring Christ's social gospel message and resembling the Pharisees Christ condemned in the gospels.  Now, with the GOP little more than a cult of the Felon - a man who is the embodiment of virtually everything a true Christian should find disgusting and reject - the claims of supporting "values" are even more empty and filled with hypocrisy.  True, the Christian nationalists and their minions in the GOP continue their same old tired attacks on gays - they are labeling Pride month as "Family and Morality month" implying gays are immoral - blacks and a host of others, given the abject moral bankruptcy of the Felon, Ken Paxton, and much of the every greed driven billionaire class (think Elon Musk), the messaging is hollow and has provided Democrats with an opening to crusade as the true defenders of families, the working class and those who do believe in Christ's social gospel message.  A column in the New York Times looks at this reversal who are the protectors of family and moral values. Here are highlights:

The values voter became a hot political commodity some two decades ago. A catchy rebranding of the religious right, the label was inspired by a controversial exit poll question in the 2004 presidential election finding that 22 percent of voters cast their ballots on the basis of “moral values” and 80 percent of them supported George W. Bush. The assumption took hold that Americans who cared about values were conservatives animated by opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

The 2026 campaign is reminding us that this narrow view of how voters think about values is out of step with a long American tradition that gave rise to moral appeals for improving society as a whole, particularly at times of great economic and technological change. We are witnessing the return of a politics of morality organized around the injustices of the economic system and an array of related problems: the costs of technological change, the unraveling of community, civil rights, and financial and work-balance issues confronting families.

These themes are powerful in the campaigns of Democrats this year across the party’s philosophical spectrum — and it’s about time. . . . Georgetown professor Michael Kazin argues that “the most fruitful strategy for Democrats over time” has involved criticizing the failures of the status quo in the name of an alternative “moral capitalism.”

Moral engagement with the economy, social justice and technological revolution has deep American roots, both secular and religious. At the high tide of the Progressive Era, Walter Rauschenbusch, a Protestant pastor and theologian, gave voice to the social gospel movement in his 1907 book, “Christianity and the Social Crisis.” The civil rights movement of the middle of the 20th century, like the abolitionist movement before it, highlighted the moral urgency of equal rights and linked their defense to religious values.

In 2026 the resurgence of a Christian left is most explicit in James Talarico’s Senate campaign in Texas. Mr. Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian, speaks often about his faith and regularly invokes Scripture. He is inspired by Jesus’ overturning of the money changers’ tables outside the temple, described in all four Gospels. The top of his campaign website features Mr. Talarico’s signature line, “It’s time to start flipping tables.”

His campaign against the Republican nominee, Ken Paxton, will provide the starkest contest between the old values debate and the new one. Mr. Paxton has denounced Mr. Talarico’s theology and issued familiar attacks from the religious right, notably around trans issues. The scandalous personal baggage weighing down Mr. Paxton will complicate his talk about morality.

The list of possible 2028 presidential contenders who make religiously inflected arguments for social change is long. It includes both of Georgia’s senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock (Mr. Warnock is a Baptist minister); the former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg; Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania; and, increasingly, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. In September, Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky will publish a book about faith, “Go and Do Likewise,” with a title and message inspired by the parable of the good Samaritan.

Mr. Trump’s corruption and self-dealing have provided a new foundation for arguments inflected by appeals to values. The president’s close (and often remunerative) ties to some of the nation’s wealthiest individuals and interests lead naturally to a broader assault on oligarchy — a word popularized from the left by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but now in common use across the party.

The closest thing to a manifesto for the Democrats’ new values offensive is Senator Chris Murphy’s book published last month, “Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America.”

Defeating Mr. Trump is necessary, Mr. Murphy argues, but the president’s rise is also a symptom: “A deeper rot festers in the American soul.” Its elements, he writes, include “a callousness toward our neighbors” and “a me-first selfishness,” along with what he sees as the worship of “false cults,” among them “profit at any cost, consumerism instead of citizenship” and “a blind faith in technology.”

The Democrats’ new moral language suggests an understanding that the backward-looking “again” in Mr. Trump’s MAGA slogan was about more than a return to reactionary approaches to race and immigration. It also spoke to many who yearned for, as Mr. Murphy put it, “a time when Americans felt more connected to community and neighbor.”

Former Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat running for a Senate seat in North Carolina, is one candidate who has translated these larger ideas into the shorthand of the political spot, narrating an ad about his childhood on a family farm. . . . “I grew up working on this farm,” Mr. Cooper says. “Mom was a teacher. Dad, a small-town lawyer and farmer. Fridays were football. Sunday was church. I’m Roy Cooper. Life felt easier back then. I’m running for the Senate to make life easier today, to go after insurance companies ripping you off, to make sure you can retire with dignity and to build an economy that finally values working people.”

Mr. Ossoff, who is the only Democratic senator up for re-election in a state Mr. Trump carried in 2024, called down the judgment of the prophet Amos as Mr. Ossoff addressed “the political and moral crisis that we face in our nation” at Elizabeth Baptist Church in Atlanta last month. “Amos attacked the moral corruption of his time,” he declared, adding that “the people struggled to survive while the wealthy and the powerful lived in luxury and opulence.”

Americans have quarreled over Prohibition, birth control, abortion, sexuality and other aspects of individual behavior. But we have also confronted the corruption of political and economic systems and our responsibilities to put things right.

We are in a transition in how we talk about values because now is a moment to tend to the demands of our common life — and our obligations to one another.

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Prediction: Iran is “Trump’s Vietnam”

Having been in Paris for eight days and then boarding the Queen Mary 2 in Le Havre heading to New York (with stops in Cherbourg and Southampton) along with many French, Danish, British and other European passengers.  One thing is very clear, the Felon is deeply loathed by most in Europe, but the animosity does not extend to individual Americans especially if one is polite and friendly.  The reception is even better if one makes it clear you loathe the Felon as much or more than they do,  We have had particularly interesting conversations with four Danish citizens onboard the ship.  The other things that are notable are (i) that Europe is all in on green energy and in each port we passed through we saw materials for constructing wind turbines, and (ii) Chinese electric cars are making inroads - up close, they are stylish and seem popular.  Of course, in America, the Felon has attacked both green energy development and subsidies to support a robust electric car industry.  The over arching issue, however, is the Felon's disastrous war of choice against Iran and the adverse impact on both the European economies and global economy.  While the Felon has claimed again that a peace deal is close - for the 37th or 38th time - no end to the war is in sight and all such pronouncements do is offer insider trading opportunities for the Felon, his sleazy family, and his billionaire buddies.  A piece at Salon looks at what some experienced government officials see as the parallels between the Felon's misbegotten war and the Vietnam debacle. Here are excerpts:

Leon Panetta has been in politics as long as any of us can remember. . . . and for his final chapter in government served as Barack Obama‘s CIA director in the first term and defense secretary in the second. To say he’s got extensive experience would an understatement.

Panetta has always been a centrist, and I’ve been critical of his “maverick” track record over the years — he’s had a tendency to burnish his own reputation to the detriment of those he works for. But at age 87, from his perch as the head of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy, it’s hard to imagine he now thinks he has anything left to prove. So when Panetta appeared on CNN to talk about the Iran war, a subject he is well qualified to discuss, and says that it’s shaping up to be “Trump’s Vietnam,” you can’t help but be a bit startled. If anyone still in public life knows how much freight that phrase carries, it would be him.

That comparison might sound hyperbolic . . . . But Panetta drew the comparison based on the argument that Donald Trump‘s war was an equally terrible miscalculation of the adversary’s resilience and commitment, where we’re dealing with misinformation and propaganda coming from the U.S. administration and an untrustworthy negotiating partner on the other side.

In other words, Americans have once again overestimated their own prowess and underestimated their enemy; our own government is constantly lying about the war, and the Iranians are unlikely to stick to any deal without solid verification, which is going to be difficult to manage at best. To state the obvious, the U.S. under Trump is equally untrustworthy, having torn up the hard-fought nuclear agreement negotiated under Obama, which by all accounts the Iranians had been honoring.

We can add another dimension to this misadventure that makes it much more complicated than Vietnam. That war had a dreadful human cost but it did not threaten the entire world economy the way this one does. The protracted and unresolved dispute over the Strait of Hormuz and the enormous amounts of crude oil that travel through it is pretty dire, and not likely to get better anytime soon.

Fuel prices have spiked around the world since the war started, for obvious reasons. But in fact, they haven’t gone up quite as precipitously as we might have expected, considering that about 25% of the world’s oil supply has been bottled up in the Strait of Hormuz for the past few months. That respite is about to end. Last week, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said that the “buffers and the shock absorbers” in the global petroleum market “are being steadily drawn down, and the ability for the market to absorb this imbalance is drastically diminished today versus where we started.”

According to Politico, industry executives have been privately warning the White House that prices are about to surge dramatically over the next month. but Trump officials claim they haven’t heard a thing about it. In fact, they insist there’s no supply problem and that as soon as the strait is open, fuel prices will go back down to where they were in February and everything will be hunky-dory. Anyone who buys that line is going to be very disappointed. One expert told Politico, “I’ve never seen inventory numbers fall so much so quickly. It is stunning.”

There are other reasons why the prices haven’t risen more sharply, one of which is arguably a huge positive for the long term. As Ryan Cooper writes in The American Prospect, one surprising factor that’s keeping the supply somewhat steady is been green energy. Since much of fossil fuel energy can be replaced by solar power, wind power and battery-powered electric vehicles, Cooper reports, “Chinese exports of solar and EVs are soaring, and even very poor countries are buying in bulk.”

In countries like Egypt, where sunlight is ample and the price of oil has created a massive burden on consumers, renewable energy is an absolute necessity. It’s a godsend that many of these new technologies are available off the shelf right now, and this crisis will likely speed up the energy transition all over the world. Sadly, the U.S. is likely to be left behind, both in consumption and in manufacturing, since our government has perversely placed all its chips on fossil fuels. This week, Trump pledged $700 billion to reinvigorate the dirty, failing coal industry and he’s been halting renewable energy projects left and right, . . . So the U.S. is already well behind the curve, and that’ll get worse if the Iran war turns into the Vietnam-style quagmire that Panetta predicts.

Trump’s antiwar stance was always a joke. But a lot of his followers believed it, and along with the economic stress it’s causing, this “excursion” — in his infelicitous phrase — is creating a new set of calculations for Republicans.

It’s hard to imagine that this GOP will muster the courage to confront Trump directly, but then this war has been massively unpopular from the get-go as well as extremely costly. Everyone who’s been paying attention knows it was a huge mistake made by a president who refused listen to those around him who knew this would probably happen and tried to warn him off, even if many of those people won’t admit it now. We’ve been here before: That sounds an awful lot like Vietnam, which was an epic disaster that the country has never really gotten over.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take 20 years to end this war, but there are no signs that it’s going to be over anytime soon, whether Trump declares victory or not. Panetta says he thinks America will be back fighting Iran again in a few years, no matter what happens now. Donald Trump has started another forever war, which was exactly the thing he promised he would never do.

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Putin and The Felon: Both Trapped in Losing Battles Against Reality

The Felon is a huge admirer of Vladimir Putin - perhaps in part due to Kompromat Putin has on him - but also because in many ways the two man are narcissistic megalomaniacs cut from the same cloth who view themselves as smarter and more able than those around them. Both also seem to embrace a toxic view of masculinity as they malign and denigrate - or, in Putin's case, murder - those who oppose them  The Felon's temper tantrum on Meet the Press where he walked off when Kristin Welker refused to accept his lies demonstrates both the fact that he is not as strong as he pretends and that he lives in his own false reality.  These shared personality traits, delusions and refusals to accept objective reality are on display in the wars of choice both launched against Ukraine in the case of Putin and Iran in the case of the Felon.  This inability to accept objective reality and the fact based advise of counselors and others have put both men in situations where their wars that they boasted would result in quick victories are dragging on with no victorious end game in sight.  A piece at The Guardian looks at the traps of their own creation and their inability to find a "win" to save face.  Here are excerpts: 

The strongman president, self-styled redeemer of national glory, is trapped in a conflict he can’t win but doesn’t know how to end without looking like a loser. A cult of infallibility prevents the leader admitting a strategic blunder even to himself. It could be Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin; Iran or Ukraine.

The conflicts and the regimes involved are also dissimilar in important ways. Russia’s campaign to eradicate a neighbouring democracy is nastier in conception and bloodier in execution than the bungled US effort to dislodge a dictatorship in Tehran. It has also gone on much longer. The first world war was shorter than a “special military operation” that was supposed to capture Kyiv within weeks. The Soviet Red Army repelled Nazi invasion and marched on Berlin in less time than it has taken Putin’s forces to occupy a tranche of eastern Ukraine, and they are not making any significant advances. The war has burned trillions of rubles and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives for no discernible dividend in national greatness.

The failure is too big for the Kremlin’s propaganda machinery to hide. Civilians hundreds of miles from the frontline see the plumes of black smoke from the oil refineries struck by long-range Ukrainian drones. They feel the depletion of their wages by inflation. They noticed how last month’s Victory Day parade, the high holy day of Russian militarism, was strangely modest.

Official opinion polls have shown a drop in support for Putin, albeit from impossible heights to improbable ones. Since the data-collecting agencies are under state control, the blip is best interpreted as a symptom of factional jostling for influence within the regime. Pragmatists in the civilian administration might have flashed a glimpse of presidential vulnerability as a warning to hardliners in the security apparatus that their approach isn’t working.

Any internal Russian lobby for ending the war runs into the problem that Putin sees the conflict as an existential struggle to avenge national honour against the perfidious west. He casts himself as the incarnation of national destiny, reaffirming Russian civilisational supremacy over borderlands to which it is historically entitled. Such a man doesn’t easily accept the prospect of dealing with Volodymyr Zelenskyy on equal terms as legitimate president of an independent country.

Trump’s worldview is less cluttered with antique mythology, more pumped with celebrity narcissism, but the effect is the same. He shares Putin’s concept of alpha powers whose interests override any sovereignty claims of lesser nations in their neighbourhoods. He was easily persuaded that Ukraine’s cause was hopeless and that Putin held all “the cards” because it would have offended his own sense of majesty to believe that someone in Zelenskyy’s geopolitical class could be a winner.

If the US president had been interested in the reality of Ukraine’s defensive campaign he might have observed the levelling effect of drones, allowing a smaller force to thwart an apparently overwhelming onslaught. He might even have considered the relevance of that asymmetry when judging whether Iran could be bombed into unconditional surrender. He might then have taken advice from people in the state department and CIA who had war-gamed an all-out campaign against the Islamic Republic under previous administrations. They concluded that regime change couldn’t be achieved from the air and that closure of the strait of Hormuz was a viable Iranian countermeasure with devastating economic consequences.

That would have required a capacity for strategic analysis that recognised practical constraints on what the US can achieve. Since Trump sees no boundary between himself and his country’s power, and treats every interaction in zero-sum terms, factoring Iranian advantages into the military equation would be like admitting limits to his personal potency. Intolerable.

Like Putin, Trump is marooned on an island of autocratic delusion, surrounded by advisers and ministers who are too cowardly or too blinded by ideology to survey the distant shore of reality and suggest a way back. For the Russian president there might be some compensation in seeing the US humbled in the Middle East, but the gains are fewer than they appeared at the start of the war. The revenue boost from higher oil prices has been largely cancelled out by the costs and logistical impediment of Ukrainian drones landing on industrial infrastructure.

Meanwhile, a Trump administration bogged down in negotiations with Tehran has no bandwidth for Ukraine. That shifts the odds against Putin in his bet that Zelenskyy can be bullied by the White House into conceding territory that Russian soldiers haven’t been able to seize on the ground. It also creates a space for more proactive involvement of Ukraine’s European allies. They feel the need to check Kremlin aggression more urgently than anyone in Washington.

That agenda has become easier to pursue since Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungarian elections earlier this year. The removal of Putin’s favourite spanner from the European works led to a prompt unblocking of aid to Kyiv. There are signs of momentum behind a Europe-led peace initiative. At a recent meeting of EU foreign ministers there was discussion of candidates to lead negotiations with Moscow. This week, Keir Starmer hosted Zelenskyy, along with Germany’s Friedrich Merz and France’s Emmanuel Macron for a summit in Downing Street.

It still isn’t clear what a “coalition of the willing” would really be willing to do to keep the peace in Ukraine without the US. But Putin’s confidence that the decadent west would not stay the course when confronted with Russia’s inexhaustible supply of manly valour has also not been vindicated.

This is something else he has in common with Trump, or that Russian ultranationalism shares with Maga mania. Both movements view Europe as a decrepit civilisation in the death throes of cultural suicide by overdose of immigration and liberal degeneracy. It is a diagnosis repeated by many nationalists and mainstream conservatives across Europe, assisted on their ideological journey by campaigns of overt and covert online influence originating in Russia and the US.

It is also an underestimation of liberal democracy’s defining strength, which is the resilience afforded by pluralism and institutional acceptance of legitimate opposition. The authoritarian strongman, seeing no difference between his will and the nation’s destiny, treats dissent as an assault on his authority, tending towards treason. He sits atop an edifice of power that promotes loyalty at the expense of truth, until reality itself is banished from his court.

In the US that process can still be corrected by constitutional checks and balances, fair elections, a free press and independent courts. Not in Russia. That is why European democracies must prove that their system of government is not only better in principle, but stronger in practice. And the way they do it is by embracing Ukraine’s struggle as their own.

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The Supreme Court Has Invented a Right to Discriminate

The overarching agenda of Project 2025, the Felon's regime, and the extremist majority on the United States Supreme Court ("SCOTUS") is to restore white supremacy and the primacy of right wing Christianity.  This past week's ruling by SCOTUS in favor of Alabama's redrawn congressional voting districts that erased a majority black district (in a state where 26% of the population is black) has in effect created a right to racial discrimination as longs a fig leaf of partisan purpose can be fabricated.  Meanwhile, the "Department of War" announced the reduction in the number of religious affiliation categories for service members from over 200 down to 31. While the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a/k/a Mormon church, is included as a religious category on the updated list, it is not included in the list of faiths labeled “Christian.” The take away is that the goal of evangelical "Christians", many of whom are blatantly racist, to have the right to discriminate against anyone they choose, be they black, gay, non-Christians, and even women is well on the way to fruition.  The situation ought to terrify thinking Americans because once the rights of others can be erased or marginalized, the rights of many are put at risk. One need to look at Nazi Germany to see how this can progress. A piece in The Atlantic looks at SCOTUS's frightening ruling. Here are excerpts:

This week, the Roberts Court made clear that when it comes to drawing congressional districts, Black voters have no rights that anyone is bound to respect.

For years, Alabama, where a quarter of the population is Black, had defied federal court orders, including one reaffirmed by the Supreme Court itself in 2023, to create a second majority- or plurality-Black congressional district. Alabama’s reasoning for not doing so was simple: Its Republican legislators didn’t want to, and they didn’t believe that the Roberts Court would make them. “The Supreme Court ruling was 5–4,” State House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter said about the 2023 decision. “So there’s just one judge that needed to see something different.”

The state was making a gamble that the Roberts Court was more partisan than sincere. And it paid off: On Tuesday, the Court allowed Alabama to proceed with a map that diminishes Black voting power to the advantage of Republicans. For all the Court’s pretenses—all of its insistence on the rule of law, precedent, and good faith—many critics and supporters of the Roberts Court see the institution as an appendage of the Republican Party.

“Alabama willfully drew a map that flouted the District Court’s preliminary injunction and hoped that this Court would eventually see things its way,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “After today, it is hard to call Alabama’s cynical gambit anything other than a success, and the Court’s rewarding of Alabama’s behavior anything other than a blow to the rule of law.”

The majority opinion was unsigned. In it, the judges argued that the lower court had “failed to follow our instruction” in ordering the creation of the new district. This was a reference to the April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, in which Justice Samuel Alito announced that “race and politics are so intertwined” that there are almost no circumstances under which the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination in voting actually applies.

Now here was an example of exactly what Alito was talking about. “States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests,” the justices wrote this week. If a Republican legislature decides that a redistricting plan to suppress the power of Black voters is “in their best interests,” they may proceed.

The implications of this case go far beyond one congressional district in one state. In Callais, Alito issued a classic Alito disclaimer: insisting he was not doing the thing he was about to do. The Court, he wrote, was not effectively nullifying Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when it determined that Louisiana drawing a second majority-Black district (out of six total, in a state that is one-third Black) was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” This week’s ruling on Alabama makes explicit what was merely implied in Callais. The Court’s logic may apply only to districting for now—but there is no obvious reason to limit its application to that. The Roberts Court has replaced the Fifteenth Amendment’s ban on racial discrimination in voting with a right to engage in racial discrimination in voting.

Theoretically, Callais was a statutory case about the Voting Rights Act’s ban on voting provisions that have the purpose or effect of discriminating against Black voters. That test, adopted by Congress in the 1980s (and opposed by Chief Justice John Roberts when he was an attorney for the Reagan Justice Department), was meant to prevent discrimination by actors careful enough to hide their intent. In Callais, the Court ruled that discrimination was fine because Louisiana argued that its purpose was partisan and not racist.

But in the Alabama case, the federal-district-court panel, which included two Trump appointees, had already determined that lawmakers had intentionally discriminated against Black voters. . . . Alabama’s plan was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination,” the district court found, and the legislature was attempting to “rob Black Alabamians of an equal opportunity under the law to elect candidates of their choice.”

Fortunately for those legislators, the justices were waiting to drive the getaway car. . . . This week’s decision is important because intentional discrimination is banned, not just by the Voting Rights Act, but by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. When the Roberts Court says that the lower court’s ruling “failed to follow our instruction,” it is referencing Alito’s argument that partisanship cannot be separated from race. Even if a court finds evidence of intentional discrimination, therefore, the Supreme Court may simply ignore it on the grounds that the discrimination in question is merely partisan and therefore acceptable. This turns Callais into something much broader than it purported to be: a finding that the Constitution permits not only unintentional racial discrimination but intentional racial discrimination, as long as there is also a partisan pretext for engaging in that discrimination.

The Court’s ruling amounts to a total inversion of the Civil War amendments, which make no such exceptions for racial discrimination in the name of partisanship. . . . . Race and partisanship were even more intertwined then than they are today, given that the Democrats were then the party of the defeated Confederates. If the Fifteenth Amendment did not bar partisan-motivated disenfranchisement, the amendment would not have changed anything at all. Indeed, the entire purpose of the amendments was to ensure that Black people could use the ballot as a means of self-defense against politicians who would deny them their basic, fundamental constitutional rights if they did not have to answer to them as a political constituency. The Roberts Court has thus rewritten the Civil War amendments to include a constitutional right to discriminate against Black people.

The Court has invented a right to discriminate—as long as you provide a political pretext—that not only does not exist in the Constitution, but is explicitly prohibited by the Constitution. . . . This logic would not have barred any of the Jim Crow voting devices that the Roberts Court frequently congratulates itself and the nation for overcoming. In the aftermath of Reconstruction, white-supremacist Democrats imposed superficially race-neutral requirements such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. The approach taken by Alito and the Roberts Court would have found all of these measures constitutional.

[T]he Constitution has few defenses against a majority of justices willing to ignore it or twist it to its exact opposite purpose.

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