Paul Krugman

Power and Geopolitics After Trump

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4 days ago · 1097 likes · 248 comments · Paul Krugman

What Krugman Got Wrong About Why We Lose

This piece started as a response to something Paul Krugman wrote about Iran, drones, and the four-million-dollar missiles we’ve been using to shoot down thirty-five-thousand-dollar ones. It’s turned into something bigger than that, so let me walk you through where it’s headed before I ask you to come along.

Earlier this year I wrote a seven-part series called The Puritan Spine, about how the moral bones of New England’s first settlers never really left American life, they just stopped announcing themselves. The need to sort the elect from the damned. The itch to put a face on disorder. The habit of reading every outcome as a verdict instead of an accident. That series was history, four hundred years of it, and it ended on a hard question, whether a country built to police individuals can ever learn to look at its systems instead.

This piece is about watching that same old habit at work right now, in the writing of a Nobel laureate, over a war most of us are still trying to wrap our heads around.

Here’s where I land. Krugman’s right that Trump and Hegseth are vain, boastful men running a war machine neither one understands. He’s wrong that they’re the disease. They’re the fever, the part you can see, showing up once something underneath has already broken down. The system that let four-million-dollar interceptors chase thirty-five-thousand-dollar drones for a decade wasn’t built by either man and won’t get torn down by whoever comes next either. We built it. People like us, voting like us, looking away like us, generation after generation, because a villain was always easier to find than a mirror. And it won’t get fixed by blame. It gets fixed, if it ever does, by folks refusing to let their representatives off the hook, again and again, long after the news has moved on to the next name. That’s my case. Let me walk you through it.

The number that should embarrass everyone

Start with the number Krugman ran. Four million dollars to shoot down a $35,000 drone. That ratio isn’t a fluke. It’s the Patriot missile system, and it’s been the Patriot missile system for years, through administration after administration, through secretaries of defense who came and went, through congressional oversight committees that had the data sitting right in front of them and renewed the contracts anyway.

In any sane system, a weapons program that costs that much against a target that cheap gets killed, or at least gets seriously reworked. Somebody loses a job. A line item gets cut. That’s not what happens here. It never happens here. The cost overrun gets read as seriousness. The years of delay get read as rigor, proof the engineers are being careful instead of proof the program’s failing. A budget that keeps ballooning past every projection becomes its own evidence the work must matter, the same way a rising GDP number gets treated as a sign of national health no matter who it’s actually reaching or what it’s actually measuring.

Nobody in Washington has to defend the Patriot system on what it does. Its budget is the defense. Sit in on next year’s appropriations hearing and you’ll watch it happen live. Some senator looks down at a line that’s tripled since the last markup, nods, and votes yes, because a number that big has to mean something’s working. Nobody at that table asks about the kill ratio. The question never on the floor is whether this still makes sense against a $35,000 drone. The question is how much more it needs.

Spending as sacrament

Here’s where the older pattern shows up, the one I spent seven essays chasing back to its root. Once you secularize moral judgment, prosperity starts looking like worthiness and poverty starts looking like failure instead of bad luck. The market becomes the new courtroom. The same logic that decides whether a person deserves what they’ve got eventually decides whether a program deserves what it’s been given. A defense budget that keeps growing doesn’t read as a problem. It reads as proof the program’s doing something right, because in this country, growth has always run awfully close to grace.

That’s not corruption in the simple, somebody’s-stealing sense. It’s a religion working exactly the way it was built to work, where spending is the sacrament and growth is the proof, and asking whether the thing being funded actually does its job starts to feel a little like asking whether the bread on the altar really transforms. You don’t interrogate a sacrament. You take part in it or you don’t, and refusing is what marks you, not the sacrament itself.

That’s also why almost nobody in either party will say out loud, on the record, that the whole acquisition system is broken. Not because they don’t know. The folks inside that system know better than anyone how badly the math fails. They don’t say it because the system’s been built, contract by contract, hearing by hearing, to make saying it feel like an attack on something sacred instead of an observation about a spreadsheet.

Why criticism reads as betrayal

There’s a second layer that makes this even harder to say out loud, and it’s not about money. It’s about the flag.

Defense spending doesn’t sit in the same bucket as farm subsidies or highway funding. It’s wrapped in patriotism so tight that questioning the program can feel, to plenty of folks, indistinguishable from questioning the soldier standing next to it. Support the troops turns into support the contract. Nobody planned that on purpose, most of the time. It just happened, the way sacred things pick up protection without anybody ever formally voting on it.

That’s the trick that lets a senator who privately knows a weapons program is obsolete vote for it anyway. Not because the senator’s corrupt, though sometimes that’s also true, but because killing the program reads, to a base watching for betrayal, like turning your back on the military itself. You can’t audit a symbol. You can only honor it or get accused of dishonoring it, and most politicians, like most of us, pick whichever option doesn’t get them called a traitor on cable news.

So you end up with a defense budget guarded by two kinds of reverence at once. One says the spending itself proves the program’s sound. The other says any challenge to the spending is a challenge to the country’s honor. Squeeze between those two and there’s almost no room left for the plain, boring, necessary question of whether the thing actually works.

The instinct underneath the instinct

Here’s the part that took me longest to see clearly, even after seven essays circling it. There’s a difference between moral accounting and moral policing. Accounting asks how we’re doing. Policing asks who failed. The first one leaves room to grow. The second wants a verdict, and wants it now.

This country was built by people running a moral accounting system, watching for signs of grace, reading outcomes as evidence. Somewhere along the way, watching curdled into something harder. Once moral order becomes a thing that has to be guarded instead of grown, disorder stops being a question. It’s a threat now. Correcting it quietly isn’t enough anymore. Somebody has to be seen paying for it, or the whole order feels shaky.

That’s the same shift sitting underneath every defense hearing where the spending gets protected and every newspaper column where the blame lands on one man instead of the machine he inherited. Disorder doesn’t stay nameless for long around here. It gets a face, fast, because a face is something we know how to deal with, and a forty-year procurement culture isn’t.

Why Krugman, of all people, missed it

Here’s what makes this worth chewing on instead of filing away as one more broken system among the rest. Paul Krugman’s spent a career, a Nobel-Prize-winning one, explaining that systems behave according to their incentives and their structure, not according to the personal virtue or vice of whoever’s currently running them. That’s the whole discipline, stripped down to the studs. Incentives over individuals. Structure over story.

So when he looked at the most expensive, most embarrassing military failure in a generation and reached first for Trump’s vanity and Hegseth’s costume warrior routine, it’s worth asking why he didn’t reach for the explanation his own training would normally favor. I don’t think it’s because he doesn’t know better. I think it’s because the villain explanation is the one his readers, and most readers, actually want.

A villain can get voted out. A forty-year procurement culture, propped up by sacred spending and sacred symbolism both at once, can’t be voted out. It can only be slowly, expensively, unglamorously rewired, with no triumphant headline waiting at the end of it. That doesn’t satisfy the part of us still listening for a verdict. It never has, not since the first sermon about who’d fallen from grace and who hadn’t.

The mirror

Here’s where this gets uncomfortable, and not just for Krugman.

If you read his piece and nodded along at Trump’s name, you weren’t doing anything different than what folks did for generations before you with whatever name fit the moment. You wanted the villain too. The villain comes with an exit. Vote him out and the story’s got an ending you can point to. Diagnose a forty-year disease running through a procurement system, a defense lobby, and a culture that can’t tell spending from virtue or criticism from betrayal, and there’s no ballot box waiting at the end of that sentence. There’s just the slow, unglamorous work of agreeing the thing’s broken at all, and most of us would rather have the verdict than do that work.

I’ll put myself inside that sentence before I stand outside it pointing fingers. My four decades in military and civil service taught me the same lesson over and over, that it’s a lot easier to find the one bad actor in a broken system than to admit the system was built to produce him. A bad actor can be removed, publicly, with consequences everybody can see. A system that keeps producing bad actors has to be rebuilt from the studs, and rebuilding doesn’t come with a perp walk waiting at the finish line. It comes with years of unglamorous work nobody writes a victory lap column about.

So when I say Krugman left something on the table, I’m not standing apart from the habit he’s working inside. I’ve caught myself reaching for the individual instead of the institution plenty of times, because the individual was right there in front of me and the institution was hard to see whole, scattered across decades and committee rooms and budget lines that never make the evening news. The pattern doesn’t spare the person pointing it out. That’s exactly what makes it a pattern instead of just somebody else’s mistake.

Now what

I don’t have a program to hand you here, and I’d be the first to question anyone who claims they do. This isn’t a problem ten thousand people fix by showing up at the right rally, and it isn’t a problem one good president fixes by signing the right order. Eisenhower warned us about this exact machine in 1961, on his way out the door, and we didn’t listen then either. The system we’re talking about has had sixty-some years to root itself deeper since that warning, one quiet decision at a time. It’ll take something close to that long to unbuild, if it ever gets unbuilt at all.

We don’t need less moral seriousness about how this country spends its money or fights its wars. We need to quit confusing the spending itself with the virtue, and quit treating every failure like a character flaw looking for a face to wear. That’s not throwing the whole inheritance overboard, not the seriousness, not the discipline, not the conviction that got us this far in the first place. It’s learning to carry all of that without needing it to end in somebody’s perp walk. And it means calling your representative often enough, plainly enough, and persistently enough that ignoring the question costs more than answering it.

“The nation” isn’t some separate thing waiting on somebody else’s reform. It’s the running total of what each of us is willing to look at honestly and what we’re not. A nation that keeps choosing the villain over the diagnosis is just a pile of individual readers choosing the villain over the diagnosis, one column, one comment section, one dinner table argument at a time. That includes me, writing this. It includes you, reading it. The only discipline either of us actually has is refusing to let the name be where the thinking stops.

Somewhere, a long way from any appropriations hearing, taps is playing. Not for a soldier this time. For the system that called his death the cost of doing business, and for a country still too busy naming villains to bury it.

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Further Reading:

Some of my conclusions in the above article were drawn from The Puritan Spine.

I wrote this as a follow-on commentary after watching ’s and ’s interesting video. Find it at:

The Inside Outsider

The People Who Broke American Politics Are Finally Leaving. Now What?

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9 days ago · 8 likes · 8 comments · Melissa Amour and Matt Robison

I spent many decades in federal service watching safeguards slowly gutted. Not from the top. I was a national security analyst, a supervisor, a mid-level manager. I witnessed the machinery of government from close enough to smell the gear oil, but nowhere near the controls. What follows comes from that vantage point.

What I think I saw, over all those years, was a system that ran on trust. Institutional trust. The kind that says we’ve all agreed, more or less, that there are rules, and that the rules apply to everyone including the people in charge. What the Trump administration revealed (I say revealed rather than created because I believe the vulnerability was always there) is that a remarkable amount of what we called checks and balances was in fact just good manners. Shared behavioral conventions with no real enforcement behind them. Norms dressed up as guardrails, painted on the wall, if you will, to look protective.

The inspector general, for instance. The idea that a president couldn’t simply fire the people whose job is to watch him wasn’t a law with teeth. It was an understanding. A gentleman’s agreement. And it turned out that when the gentleman left, the agreement did as well.

Did Congress know?

Of course they did. Hell, if I could see it so could everyone else.

Every member of Congress who has served any meaningful length of time understands how the system actually operates. They’ve watched administrations of both parties push against norms. They’ve seen inspectors general get pressured and slow-walked and ignored. They knew the guardrails were painted on. This wasn’t ignorance. It was a choice, made deliberately, by people who understood exactly what they were leaving in place.

And they left it that way on purpose. Both parties. I want to be specific about that because the easy version of this argument blames one side, and the easy version is wrong. Democrats weren’t rushing to constrain emergency powers when Obama was using them. Republicans showed no interest in limiting executive authority when Bush was expanding it after September 11th. Each party looked at the presidency as a prize they expected to win again, and neither was willing to tie the hands of their future selves.

A politician’s first calculation is always about themselves. Not maliciously, not in some mustache-twirling way. Just structurally. It’s the nature of the job. Codifying everything, making consequences automatic, removing discretion, closing the wiggle room, sounds like good government in the abstract. In practice it means accepting constraints that might one day apply to you or to someone you support. The senator who could have pushed to codify inspector general independence in 2005 or 2015 looked at that proposal and thought, somewhere in the back of their mind: but what if my president needs to remove an IG who’s causing problems? The norm served them well enough. Why make it a law that binds everyone forever, including us?

The outrage being expressed now by many current and former lawmakers rings a little hollow. They had years, decades in some cases, to fix this. They knew it was broken. They chose flexibility over the safeguard because the flexibility might one day be theirs to use. They built the system the same way people leave emergency exits with the alarm off. Not because they intentionally planned to misuse them, but because they wanted the option at need. The Trump administration walked through every unlocked door in the building.

That’s not a partisan observation. It’s an indictment of a political class that valued its own room to maneuver over the integrity of the institution it was sworn to protect. Both parties built this. Both parties are indicted.

Why reform is hard, before we talk about reform.

I want to say something uncomfortable before getting to what I think should change, because skipping it would make everything that follows sound more optimistic than it deserves to be.

No structural reform survives total institutional capture. If the president controls Congress, the courts, and the enforcement mechanisms simultaneously, the constitutional system has already failed and no office or statute anywhere fixes that. If Speaker Johnson controls the House and the Supreme Court has demonstrated comfort with expansive executive authority, an independent watchdog drawing its power from Congress and the courts is a watchdog on a leash held by the people it’s supposed to watch. That’s not cynicism. That’s really just the math.

So why propose reforms at all?

Because total capture is a moment, not a permanent condition. What these reforms are designed to do is raise the cost of getting there, document what happens while you’re there, and preserve enough of the record that accountability becomes possible when the moment passes. They’re not a wall. They’re a cost, a record, and a foundation. That’s worth building even when it isn’t sufficient on its own.

With that said plainly, here’s what I think needs to change.

The enforcement problem nobody talks about

The whole constitutional architecture assumes a neutral executor. The DOJ enforces federal law. The FBI investigates. The executive branch implements court orders. But all of those functions report to the same person the law is supposed to constrain. When that person corrupts the enforcement mechanism, the circuit breaks. There’s no automatic backup. The founders didn’t build one, either because they didn’t believe a president would actually do this, or because they trusted Congress would stop him if he tried.

Congress didn’t stop him.

The Supreme Court has no army. Andrew Jackson reportedly understood this, which is why he felt comfortable ignoring John Marshall. The Court rules. Implementation depends entirely on the executive branch acting in good faith. What we watched instead was what legal observers started calling legalistic noncompliance: using legal language and procedure to perform compliance while defying the substance of court orders entirely. The administration would file the right paperwork, mouth the right words, and continue doing exactly what the court told it to stop. Pursuing contempt against a sitting president routes back through the DOJ, the same DOJ the president controls. The snake eats its own tail, and the rule of law sits on the sidelines.

So who enforces the law when the chief law enforcement agency is the problem?

Under the current structure, nobody. There’s no automatic transfer of authority. No independent body with statutory power to step in. No trip wire that fires when the person responsible for executing the law becomes the person subverting it. The founders left that gap because they assumed institutional shame, congress would grow a spine, or electoral consequence would fill it. Two of those three have proven unreliable. The third comes too late to matter in real time.

This isn’t a technical failure. It’s a design failure that everyone could see and nobody fixed because fixing it meant giving up something they might want later.

An office that doesn’t answer to the president

What I think is needed, and what I haven’t seen proposed with enough specificity anywhere in the current conversation, is a permanent, independent constitutional compliance office. Not housed in the DOJ. Not subject to executive removal. Funded directly by Congress, reporting directly to Congress, with a mandate that can’t be suspended or dissolved by the person it exists to watch.

Its job would be narrow and specific: monitor compliance with federal court orders across the executive branch, investigate credible claims of noncompliance, and refer violations to Congress and to the judiciary with a documented evidentiary record. It wouldn’t prosecute. It wouldn’t legislate. It would watch, document, and report, and its findings would carry legal weight that triggers automatic congressional review rather than waiting for the majority party to decide whether it’s politically convenient to care.

The constitutional challenge will come. Article II gives the president broad authority over the executive branch, and an office that can’t be removed by the president will face serious legal attack. Good. Design it hardened against that challenge from the start. Anchor it in Congress’s oversight authority under Article I. Give it civil rather than criminal jurisdiction to avoid the separation of powers problems that plagued the old independent counsel statute. Let the courts rule on it with the full record of what happens when no such office exists. That record is now extensive.

The special counsel model is broken for the same underlying reason. A special counsel who serves at the pleasure of the attorney general isn’t independent by any honest definition. The old independent counsel statute had real problems. Ken Starr made sure everyone remembered them. But the core idea was right: an investigation triggered automatically by specific statutory conditions, with a reporting line to Congress rather than the White House, insulated from removal except by congressional vote. The lessons of the 1990s aren’t a reason to abandon the concept. They’re a design brief for getting it right.

What happens to the record during capture

This is a question that doesn’t get asked nearly enough; it needs to be understood before implementation. If this office exists and the executive moves to shut it down, what stops them from erasing everything it built?

In the current structure, honestly, not much. Funding gets cut if Congress is captured. Staff gets reassigned or pressured out. Records get classified or buried in litigation. We’ve watched this happen in real time with less controversial institutions. An independent compliance office wouldn’t be immune.

But records are harder to erase than institutions, and that distinction is the whole design principle.

The office’s findings, if properly structured by statute, would flow simultaneously to multiple repositories the moment they’re produced. Both chambers of Congress, including the minority. The federal judiciary. The Government Accountability Office. The Library of Congress. And by statutory requirement, the public record, published in real time rather than archived internally where they can be quietly buried. Eliminating the office doesn’t eliminate what it already documented, any more than firing an inspector general erases reports already filed. The corruption of the institution and the corruption of the record are two separate operations, each requiring its own visible act of bad faith, each documentable in its own right.

You can shut the office down. Doing so in the middle of an active investigation is itself evidence. Attempting to scrub the public record afterward is a second act of evidence. Pressuring the Library of Congress, the GAO, and minority leadership simultaneously, across party lines, in full public view, is a third. Each act of erasure is harder and more visible than the one before. That doesn’t make erasure impossible. It transforms what might have been a single quiet act of executive discretion into a prolonged, multi-front, publicly documented assault on the record itself. That’s a different political and legal animal entirely.

Then there’s dispersal. If the office’s records are distributed by statute to state attorneys general across all fifty states, the act of erasure becomes a genuinely different order of difficulty. You’d have to simultaneously capture or intimidate dozens of state-level officials across both parties, in states with their own constitutions, their own courts, and their own electorates, many of whom would have every political incentive to preserve and publicize exactly what the federal executive was trying to erase. Red state attorneys general during a Democratic capture. Blue state attorneys general during a Republican one. The dispersal doesn’t have to be perfectly resistant. It has to be resistant enough that the cost of erasure exceeds the benefit, or visible enough that the attempt becomes the story.

This is the most important structural idea in the piece. The founding design protected rights through separated powers: give different institutions competing authority and let them fight it out. The dispersal model applies that same logic to the documentary record. Don’t protect it in one place. Spread it across enough competing jurisdictions that no single act of political will can reach all of it at once.

Other things that need fixing

The independent compliance office matters most, but it doesn’t stand alone.

The inspector general statute needs actual teeth. Firing an IG should require congressional approval, or trigger automatic judicial review on a fast timeline that doesn’t depend on the DOJ to bring the case. The 2022 strengthening of that statute was a genuine step forward. The administration treated it as decorative. A law that gets treated as decorative needs consequences that attach automatically, not ones that wait for someone to decide to pursue them.

The impoundment problem is real and under-discussed. The president doesn’t get to decide not to spend money Congress has authorized. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was supposed to settle this permanently. It didn’t. It needs sharper language, automatic judicial triggers, and penalties that don’t require the executive to enforce them against itself. Any reform requiring the wrongdoer to police their own wrongdoing isn’t a check. It’s a damn suggestion.

The pardon power needs constraint. The founders designed it as a mercy mechanism. It’s been used as a corruption shield, a witness-silencing tool, and a blanket immunity operation for political allies. Pre-emptive pardons of people not yet charged should be barred by statute. Pardons in cases where the president has a direct personal interest, meaning cases touching on the president’s own conduct or associates, should require a review process that operates outside the executive branch entirely. This will be challenged in court. Good. Let the full record of how the power has been used be part of that argument.

Emergency declarations need automatic sunset provisions requiring affirmative congressional renewal, not just a joint resolution the president can veto. The current structure lets a president declare an emergency, access sweeping statutory powers, and sustain them indefinitely as long as a third of one chamber stays loyal. That’s not emergency authority. That’s the legislative process wearing a costume.

Schedule F deserves more attention than it gets. The executive order reclassifying tens of thousands of career federal employees as at-will political appointees was revoked by Biden on day one and reinstated by Trump on day one. The professional civil service, the people who actually know where the files are, how the systems work, and what the law requires, can be dismantled before lunch by someone with a pen and no interest in what gets lost. These aren’t political operatives. They’re the accumulated institutional knowledge of a government that took two and a half centuries to build. Their independence needs to be in statute, with real removal protections and real penalties for circumventing them, not in norms that dissolve the moment someone decides they’re inconvenient.

The emoluments clause prohibits a president from receiving financial benefits from foreign governments. It turns out the prohibition is essentially unenforceable without a willing DOJ and a Congress prepared to act. The clause needs a private right of action, the ability for Congress or citizens to sue directly without routing the complaint through the executive branch. A constitutional right with no enforcement mechanism isn’t a right. It’s a sentiment.

The honest accounting

The system didn’t fail because the laws were wrong. It failed because too much depended on voluntary compliance, and the people with the power to fix that preferred the wiggle room. They looked at themselves first, then at the offices they might one day fill, and decided that an inescapable consequence for abusing power was a worse outcome than the risk of someone else abusing it. That calculation was cynical. It was also, by the narrow logic of political self-interest, rational. And it left the rest of us inside a structure that worked fine until someone decided it didn’t have to.

The reforms I’ve described are achievable. Every one of them has a legal and legislative path. What I’m genuinely less sure about, and I say this as someone who spent a career watching political will climb and collapse, is whether the people who’d need to enact these changes have learned anything from watching the system fail. Or whether they’re already looking ahead to the next election, deciding quietly that they’d rather keep the doors unlocked.

Because here’s what I know from my perch. Political will is a renewable resource only when the cost of inaction becomes undeniable. We may not be there yet. But we’re closer than we’ve ever been, and the question of whether that’s close enough is one that history, not I, will answer.

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Further Reading:

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." — Joan Didion, The White Album

The Believer

She did everything right.

She showed up in 2016, stunned like the rest, and decided never again. She donated in 2018, canvassed in 2020, hosted phone banks in her living room in 2022. She followed the right accounts, read the right newsletters, shared the right articles. When the 2024 numbers started coming in, she was watching with friends, a bottle of champagne open, cautiously hopeful because the people she trusted had told her to be. The models looked good. The enthusiasm gap had closed. The nonvoter pool was finally, finally going to show up.

It didn’t.

She’s every third person you know who took this seriously, who put in the hours, who believed that sufficient effort plus sufficient information would produce a different result. She believed it because everyone she read told her it was true. The wave was coming. The numbers supported it. Democracy, battered but not broken, would self-correct because that’s what democracies do.

What nobody told her, what the newsletters and the podcasts and the monetized outrage machine carefully avoided telling her, is that the numbers didn’t actually support it. Not if you read them honestly. Not if you asked what the nonvoter pool really looked like once you opened it up, or what history says about electorates that choose this way twice with full information, or what structural interference does to a polling model built for a level playing field.

She was failed. Not by her own effort or her own intelligence. By a press ecosystem with a powerful financial incentive to tell her the wave was coming, because the alternative, telling her the truth, doesn’t retain subscribers. Outrage keeps people engaged. Hope keeps them paying. An honest account of the actual terrain does neither.

The Math Nobody Wants to Read

Start with the numbers, because the numbers are where the fiction begins.

Donald Trump received 77.3 million votes in 2024. Kamala Harris received 75 million. The gap between them, the actual margin of this supposed mandate, was roughly 2.3 million votes out of 155 million cast. That’s not a landslide. That’s a country almost perfectly divided, with a handful of states tipping the arithmetic one way. Some mandate.

Then there are the 89 million.

That’s approximately how many eligible Americans didn’t vote. And for years, the Democratic recovery narrative has treated that number as the solution to every problem it can’t otherwise solve. Sufficient motivation, sufficient organizing, sufficient get-out-the-vote machinery, and those 89 million become the wave. They’ve been the theoretical wave for three election cycles now. They didn’t show up in 2016, or 2020, or 2024, but the theory persists because the theory is useful. It gives the fundraising email a reason to exist. It gives the podcast a note of hope to end on. It keeps the whole operation running.

Here’s what the theory requires you not to look at. In 2024, nonvoters split 44 percent preferring Trump and 40 percent preferring Harris. That’s not a Democratic reserve army waiting to be mobilized. That’s an unmotivated electorate that mirrors, almost exactly, the motivated one. And it’s a reversal. In both 2016 and 2020, nonvoters leaned Democratic. Something shifted. The people who couldn’t be bothered to vote used to break toward the left when anyone asked them. Now they don’t. That shift is not a footnote. It’s the story.

There’s a framing I find useful here, even if it’s meant to be hopeful. The Environmental Voter Project calculated that if “Did Not Vote” had been a presidential candidate in 2024, they would have beaten Donald Trump by 9.1 million votes and carried 265 electoral college votes. People cite this as evidence of the untapped pool. I’d argue it’s evidence of something else entirely: that the pool exists, that it’s large, and that it has repeatedly and consistently declined the invitation. At some point the question stops being how do we motivate them and becomes why haven’t we been able to, across multiple cycles, with increasing stakes, and what makes anyone think 2026 or 2028 will be different.

The pool exists. It’s been asked, repeatedly, with increasing urgency and increasing stakes. It has consistently declined. At some point that’s not a mobilization problem. That’s an answer.

The Lock

If the nonvoter pool is the first comfortable fiction, Republican voter loyalty is the second. And it’s harder to dislodge because it isn’t really about politics anymore.

The assumption baked into most Democratic recovery thinking is that Trump voters who privately regret their choice will eventually act on that regret. That sufficient economic pain, sufficient policy failure, sufficient visible chaos will peel enough of them away to shift the math. It’s a reasonable theory. It’s also largely wrong, and the reason it’s wrong has less to do with politics than with identity.

Voting Trump in 2024 wasn’t just a political act for most of his coalition. It was a declarative statement about who they are, delivered publicly to everyone around them. Their family. Their neighbors. Their coworkers. Their church. They didn’t just pull a lever in a private booth and go home. They put up yard signs and wore hats and had Thanksgiving arguments and told anyone who pushed back exactly what they thought of the other side. The vote is now part of their self-presentation in ways that make reversal enormously costly, independent of whether the policy outcomes justify it.

Private regret, and there is some, doesn’t translate to changed votes. It translates to silence. To not bringing it up. To quietly adjusting the internal story so that whatever went wrong is someone else’s fault, the Democrats, the media, the global economy, anyone but the choice itself. The psychology here isn’t unique to Trump voters. It’s how humans handle the social cost of being wrong publicly. The difference here is that the cost of being wrong isn’t abstract. It’s showing up in grocery receipts and pharmacy bills and shuttered local offices.

This is why the “sufficient pain” theory only works under a very specific condition. The pain has to be severe enough, personal enough, and clearly enough attributable to the choice itself that the social cost of staying silent exceeds the social cost of changing. That’s a very high bar. People lose their homes and blame the bank. People lose their jobs and blame immigrants. The human capacity for motivated reasoning under conditions of identity threat is not a marginal factor. It’s the dominant one. We are very good at not seeing what we can’t afford to see.

There’s a third possibility worth naming, because readers will reach for it and deserve an honest answer. Some of the people who voted Trump and now feel the burn of that choice won’t vote Republican again, but they won’t vote Democratic either. They’ll just stay home. Silent. Too proud to switch, too disappointed to repeat. And on the surface that looks like it helps. One fewer Republican vote is one fewer Republican vote.

Most people don’t think through the arithmetic. Abstention and a vote are not the same thing. A Republican staying home removes a vote from one column. It doesn’t add one to the other. The Democrat still has to get there. In a close district, a wave of soft Republican abstention only moves the needle if the Democratic candidate is already within range, which in a gerrymandered map is far less often true than it should be. Abstention is a gesture. It’s not a vote. And in the specific structural conditions we’ve been describing, gestures don’t flip seats.

There is one segment where movement is possible. College-educated suburban voters, particularly women, who went to Trump in 2024 on economic anxiety but don’t have deep tribal investment in MAGA as an identity. They voted Trump the way you might try a new doctor. Transactional, not devotional. Their vote wasn’t a declaration of who they are. It was a calculation about what might work. Calculations can be revised when the outcomes disappoint.

That’s the real margin. Not the 89 million. Not the persuadable progressive who stayed home. Not the silent Republican nursing buyer’s remorse on the couch. A relatively thin slice of soft Republican suburbanites whose relationship to this vote is transactional enough that a different calculation is still possible. It’s a small target, and the recovery narrative doesn’t like small targets because they don’t fill arenas or drive donation spikes or make for rousing newsletter copy. But it’s the honest one.

Pain Made Attributable

The soft Republican suburbanite is the real margin. But knowing that doesn’t give you a program. It gives you a condition to watch for.

The condition is this: economic pain, personal and undeniable, that can be traced back to a specific set of decisions made by people she voted for. Not pain in the abstract. Not GDP figures or deficit projections or think-tank models about long-term structural damage. The kind of pain that arrives in an envelope, or a pink slip, or a conversation with a doctor about what the insurance will no longer cover. The kind that is impossible to intellectualize away because it is sitting across the breakfast table from you every morning.

That kind of pain exists. It’s coming in waves for a lot of people who voted Trump in 2024. Tariffs are not an abstraction to a small manufacturer in Ohio who just watched her input costs jump thirty percent. The dismantling of federal agencies is not an abstraction to a nurse in a rural county whose clinic just lost its federal funding. The pain is real and it is landing on real people, some of whom pulled the lever for this. They just don’t necessarily know that yet.

The question is whether they’ll connect it to the cause. And that’s where the administration has been genuinely skilled. The recovery narrative mostly doesn’t credit that, because crediting your opponent’s competence is its own kind of uncomfortable. But it should, because the blame displacement operation running out of this White House is not accidental. It’s a strategy, executed with real consistency. The price increases are the fault of corporate greed. The job losses are the fault of the previous administration. The clinic closures are the fault of wasteful government bureaucracy that needed cutting anyway. Every arrow that should point toward a policy choice gets redirected before it can land.

The information ecosystem that a significant portion of the Trump coalition lives inside is specifically designed to intercept that arrow mid-flight and send it somewhere else. And it has a powerful ally: a press that this audience has been trained for years to distrust. So the pain lands, and the alternative explanation arrives almost simultaneously, and for many people the suffering becomes evidence of the other side’s failures rather than this one’s.

For attribution to work, the pain has to break through all of that. It has to be personal enough that no alternative explanation quite fits. It has to arrive faster than the counter-narrative can be constructed. And it has to land on people whose identity investment in the choice is low enough that reconsidering doesn’t feel like self-annihilation.

That’s a narrow window. It may open. The economic trajectory of the current administration’s trade policy alone could force it. But it’s not something that can be organized or scheduled or turned into a canvassing operation. It either happens in the lives of enough of the right people, in enough of the right districts, before November 2026, or it doesn’t.

The woman with the phone bank couldn’t control that. Neither can you. What you can control is whether you’re honest with yourself about what you’re actually waiting for.

The Press in the Silo

I want to be precise about what I’m accusing the press of, because it isn’t lying. I want to be clear about that before anyone gets their back up.

The journalists covering this moment are, by and large, working hard and working honestly. They’re documenting the executive overreach, the court defiance, the dismantling of institutional norms with skill and at genuine professional risk. The reporting exists. The facts are available. Nobody is making them up.

What’s being made up, or made comfortable, is the frame around the facts. The recovery narrative. The implicit promise, embedded in the outrage, that the outrage is productive, that it’s building toward something, that the documentation of damage is also, somehow, the beginning of repair. That promise is not supported by the evidence. But it’s the promise that keeps the audience engaged, and an engaged audience is the only thing standing between a publication and irrelevance.

This is not a conspiracy. It doesn’t require editors in a room deciding to mislead their readers. It requires only the incentive structure that actually exists. Digital media runs on engagement. Engagement runs on emotion. The two emotions that drive the most consistent engagement are outrage and hope, and the most powerful combination is outrage with hope attached, the sense that the terrible thing you just read about is also, if you stay engaged and donate and share and show up, defeatable. Remove the hope and you have outrage with nowhere to go. Readers don’t renew subscriptions for that. Donors don’t respond to fundraising emails that end with “and frankly we’re not sure any of this will work.”

So the hope stays. The specific vessel keeps changing because it keeps failing to deliver. But the hope itself is non-negotiable because the hope economy requires it. The next thing is always coming: the midterms, the court case, the special election, the poll showing the Republican incumbent underwater. When one vessel fails, another appears. The model depends on it. The subscribers depend on it. And so the circle goes.

What gets quietly left out is what we’ve been discussing in this essay. The 44/40 nonvoter split. The identity lock on Republican voters. The structural interference that polling models aren’t capturing. The fact that what political scientists who study democratic recovery already know requires conditions not currently present. None of that makes the newsletter. Not because the journalists don’t know it, some of them do, but because there’s no way to package it that serves the model. Honest diagnosis without a treatment plan is not a product anyone has figured out how to sell.

I’m writing this in a publication that has its own incentives, its own audience, its own relationship to the hope economy. I’m aware of that. The difference I’m trying to maintain, the only one that matters, is between writing what the audience wants to hear and writing what the evidence actually supports. Those two things have been drifting apart for years. This essay is an attempt to say so plainly, which means it will probably be shared approvingly by people who agree with it already and ignored by everyone the argument most needs to reach.

That’s the silo. I’m in it too. We all are.

The Midterm Mirage

The number making the rounds in Democratic circles right now is 70 percent. That’s the approximate probability, according to several prominent forecasting models, that Democrats retake the House in November 2026. It gets cited in newsletters and shared on social media and offered as evidence that the correction is coming, that the system is working, that the accountability moment is just a cycle away. People say it with relief in their voices.

The underlying fundamentals the models are measuring are real. Presidential approval ratings at this level have historically predicted significant House losses for the incumbent party. The generic congressional ballot favors Democrats by margins that, in past cycles, would comfortably translate to a House majority. The models are reading real signals.

What the models are not reading is the condition of the playing field itself. Models are built on historical data. What’s happening now has limited historical precedent, and the precedents that do exist aren’t comforting.

Start with voter rolls. Systematic purges of voter registration databases, justified under the language of election integrity, have been accelerating in competitive states. The people most likely to be purged are younger voters, renters, and voters in majority-minority districts, demographics that break Democratic. A purge doesn’t show up in a generic ballot poll. It shows up on election night, when people who believed they were registered discover they aren’t.

Then there are the district lines. Gerrymandering works by packing opposition voters into a handful of unwinnable districts while spreading your own voters across many winnable ones. The result is a map where a party can lose the popular vote and still hold a majority of seats, by design. The post-2020 redistricting cycle produced exactly those maps, giving Republicans a structural advantage in the House independent of vote share. They haven’t changed. A Democratic wave in the popular vote doesn’t automatically translate to a Democratic majority in seats when the geography has been engineered to prevent it.

Ballot access compounds all of it. Restrictions on early voting, mail balloting, and drop box availability hit Democratic-leaning voters hardest, particularly in the states where House seats are actually competitive. These restrictions have been expanding, not contracting.

None of the forecasting models account for what happens between elections either. Democratic recoveries require resources. Organized opposition requires funding, institutional infrastructure, the kind of civic machinery that takes years to build and can be dismantled considerably faster. The systematic redirection of public wealth, the defunding of agencies and programs that might otherwise generate organized resistance, the concentration of economic power in fewer hands aligned with the current order, none of that shows up in a generic ballot poll. But it makes reversal progressively harder with each passing month, regardless of what the polls say. The playing field doesn’t just tilt on election day. It tilts every day in between.

Then there’s the question nobody in the forecasting business wants to ask directly. The administration has floated the idea of posting military or law enforcement personnel at polling locations under the banner of election security. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits using the military domestically for law enforcement purposes. But enforcement of that prohibition runs through the Justice Department, which is no longer operating as an independent institutional actor. A legal barrier without an enforcer is just a sentence on a page.

What happens if the results are contested? The infrastructure for challenging, delaying, and selectively certifying election results was built and tested in 2020 and 2022. It didn’t succeed then. It’s more developed now, better staffed, better legally theorized, and operating in an environment where the Justice Department’s posture toward election interference investigations has changed considerably.

There’s a reason the opposition has never quite caught its footing through any of this. The administration understood from the beginning that the normal legal and legislative metabolism of American government is slow. Federal rulemaking takes months. Litigation takes years. The response to that reality was volume. One hundred and forty-three executive orders in the first term alone. Agencies dismantled, workforces slashed, programs halted, all faster than any single legal challenge could keep pace with. You can’t block 143 executive orders with the same political bandwidth you’d use to fight three. The opposition's exhaustion isn’t a side effect. It’s the strategy.

Political scientists who study democratic backsliding have a name for where this leads. They call it dirty democracy. Elections still happen. Both parties retain a feasible prospect of winning. But the rules of the game are no longer mutually accepted, and the competition has been transformed in ways that drain elections of what they’re supposed to mean. The term is clinical. The condition it describes is not. And it’s the condition you’re living in when you look up one day and realize the flag you’ve been saluting has fewer stars than you remembered.

A 70 percent probability assumes a game being played by the rules the game has historically been played by. That assumption gets less safe every month. The playing field was surrendered, and the models haven’t caught up to that yet.

The Founders’ Flag

There’s an image from Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale that keeps returning to me as I write this. In the television adaptation, a small American flag hangs in what appears to be a government office in Canada. It shows two white stars and the faint outlines of 48 others, the ghost shapes of states that have fallen to Gilead, present enough to see, drained of everything that made them real. Not a symbolic reduction. An actual count of what remains. The flag doesn’t mourn what’s missing. It simply represents the new reality as though that reality was always the destination.

That flag isn’t Gilead’s flag. Gilead has its own: a red field with a black sun and a yellow dove carrying an olive branch, peace symbolism pressed into the service of a theocratic state, with no irony about what it destroyed. Gilead didn’t drape itself in a diminished version of what came before. It burned the before entirely and built something unrecognizable in its place.

Atwood didn’t predict this moment exactly. Nobody did. But she understood something about how democratic erosion works that doesn’t announce itself as destruction. It announces itself as preservation. And that’s precisely what makes the two-star flag the right image for where we are, not because America is Gilead, it isn’t, but because we are somewhere in the long quiet middle, watching the stars disappear one at a time while the people removing them insist the flag has never been more whole.

That’s the mechanism she understood most clearly, and the one the current moment keeps confirming. How quickly the unthinkable becomes an administrative routine. How collaboration happens not through dramatic conversion but through incremental accommodation. Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to accept the unacceptable. They accept something slightly uncomfortable, and then something slightly more uncomfortable than that, and at each step the previous position has already been absorbed into the new normal. The cliff edge that looked like solid ground from a distance looks like solid ground from up close too, because you arrived there one small step at a time. And voila!

What makes this moment genuinely strange is the iconography the people doing the removing have chosen to drape themselves in. The founders are invoked constantly by this movement. Reverently. Almost liturgically. The Constitution is held up as sacred text by people actively concentrating the exact power the Constitution was architected to prevent. The founding documents are quoted in defense of positions the founders would have recognized as the tyranny they spent their lives designing against. My god, the irony would be funny if the stakes weren’t what they are!

The cynics among them know what they’re doing. The founders are useful cover. Wave the flag, cite the framers, and the machinery of what you’re actually building gets mistaken for restoration rather than demolition. That’s a strategy and it’s working.

The true believers are the more consequential phenomenon, and the harder one to reckon with. They’ve arrived at a place where they simultaneously worship the founders and support everything the founders feared, and they cannot see the distance between those two positions. The fracture isn’t hidden from them. It’s invisible to them. They haven’t suppressed the contradiction. They’ve genuinely resolved it, through a process that feels like patriotism from the inside. You can’t argue someone off a cliff they don’t know they’re standing on.

The erosion didn’t start with Trump. He is the most visible symptom of a process well underway before he arrived, arguably for decades. The systematic defunding of public education. The collapse of local journalism, which was the connective tissue of civic life at the community level. The replacement of political disagreement with political identity, the shift from “I vote differently than you” to “I am a different kind of American than you.” The deliberate construction of parallel information ecosystems so sealed that shared factual reality became optional. The decades-long project of making government fail so that government failure could be cited as evidence that government shouldn’t exist. None of that is Trump. Trump is what came through the opening those processes created.

And then there is the trap I can’t write around without dishonesty. If an honest majority of Americans have concluded that the founders’ America no longer serves their interests, then I am bound, as someone who believes in democratic self-governance, to honor that majority’s right to say so. The mechanism I believe in has produced a majority that is using that mechanism to dismantle the mechanism. My integrity requires me to acknowledge their right to do it, even as it ends something I love.

Madison was obsessed with the tyranny of the majority. It’s why he built counter-majoritarian institutions into the constitutional architecture, the Senate, the courts, the Bill of Rights, protections meant to be beyond the reach of any majority however large. Those protections are now being dismantled by the very majority they were designed to restrain. He saw this coming. For all the good it did, apparently.

I count the stars. There are fewer than I remembered. I can’t quite recall when that happened. And the people around me insist I was always miscounting.

What Clarity Costs

She’s still out there, the woman who did everything right. She donated again last month, because the email said the stakes had never been higher and she believed it, or needed to, which may be the same thing at this point. She’s following the forecasts. She knows about the 70 percent. She doesn’t know about the 44/40.

Nobody told her.

The nonvoter pool that isn’t blue. The identity lock that converts private Republican regret into silence rather than changed votes. The soft suburban margin that is the only real target and can’t be reached by canvassing or donation drives. The playing field that was surrendered while the models kept assuming level ground. The press that is working honestly within an incentive structure that makes honest diagnosis commercially nonviable.

None of it adds up to a program. I want to be direct about that. If you’ve read this far looking for the actionable conclusion, the thing you can do that the recovery narrative has been too timid to name, I don’t have it. I wish I did. The variables that matter most right now are not in your hands or mine. They’re in the lives of people in suburbs we don’t live in, making calculations we can’t control, in an information environment specifically engineered to prevent the kind of attribution that would change their minds.

What I have instead is an argument for clarity as the only honest starting point.

Acting from inside a fiction is expensive. Eight years is a long time to spend on a theory of change that the data doesn’t support. That’s real time and real money and real emotional labor spent on something that has failed repeatedly and will likely fail again for reasons that have nothing to do with effort or commitment. She deserved better information. The people selling her the hope economy knew, or should have known, that the theory was thin. They sold it anyway because the alternative didn’t have a business model.

Clarity doesn’t fix the structural problems this essay has described. The playing field stays surrendered whether you know about it or not. The identity lock holds whether you understand the psychology or not. The hope economy keeps running whether you’ve named it or not. Knowing the actual terrain doesn’t change the terrain.

But it changes what you do on it. Knowing the nonvoter pool isn’t a reserve army means you stop spending money on mobilization efforts targeting people who have declined the invitation three cycles running and start thinking about where effort might actually move something. Understanding the identity lock means you stop trying to argue Trump voters out of positions that are no longer really about policy and start paying attention to the thin slice of transactional voters in specific districts where the margin is real. Naming the hope economy means you stop mistaking the outrage cycle for political progress and start asking harder questions about what progress would actually require.

Small adjustments. Nowhere near sufficient. I know that. But they’re adjustments made from solid ground rather than from inside a story that keeps promising a wave that the math doesn’t support.

The fifty-star flag is still flying. For now. What this essay is really arguing is that the removal is already underway, slow enough to be deniable, quiet enough that most people can’t name the moment it began. Atwood’s two-star flag isn’t where we are. It may be where we’re going. And the people taking the stars are doing it while insisting, with considerable conviction, that they’re the ones keeping the flag whole.

We can at least refuse to do that. We can count accurately. We can say what we see. We can stop calling the diminished thing whole just because calling it whole is more comfortable than the alternative.

Clarity won’t save the flag. But nothing else even starts without it.

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Further Reading:

Paul Krugman published a piece this week called “The Dumpster Fire of the Vanities,” and I believe it’s worth your time. He’s sharp, he’s well-sourced, and his central observation (that Trump’s catastrophic failures and his cabinet’s nauseating flattery are not in tension but are actually feeding each other) is one of the more honest things written about this presidency. I’d call it a doom loop, and so does he. The sycophancy isn’t incidental to the failure. It’s carrying the whole point.

But Krugman stops short of the hardest question, and he knows it. He actually tells you he’s stopping short. Why has the American right been so willing to do this? “Good question,” he writes, “and one I’ll try to answer another day.” On Memorial Day. In an essay about the structural collapse of republican governance. I’m not criticizing Paul. He’s earned the right to pace himself. But “another day” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and I think the question is too important to leave on the shelf.

I’m not Paul, but let me try anyway.

The easy answer is that Republicans are cowards. And some of them are. But cowardice alone doesn’t explain what we’re watching. Cowards hedge. Cowards stay quiet. What we’re seeing in Trump’s cabinet isn’t strategic silence. It’s an active, competitive genuflection. These are people tripping over each other to heap praise on a man who has lost every trade war he started, cratered consumer confidence, and managed to turn the nation’s closest allies into reluctant adversaries. You don’t do that out of mere cowardice. You do it because the institution you serve has changed its purpose, and you’ve changed with it.

He’s right that the cult of personality around Republican presidents didn’t begin with Trump. Reagan’s canonization started while he was still in office. The “Mission Accomplished” carrier landing for George W. Bush was staged political theater on a scale that should have embarrassed everyone involved. These were real events, and the right’s willingness to treat its presidents as near-mythic figures has a long pedigree.

But I’d argue those were qualitatively different things, and the difference matters more than it might seem.

Reagan-era hagiography was, in the main, political branding. It was the party selling an image to the country. Bush’s carrier stunt was a communications strategy, badly conceived and worse executed, but still aimed outward, at voters. The flattery was performative, yes, but it was performing for an audience beyond the room. What Krugman documents in Trump’s cabinet meetings is something else. One in every six sentences in those meetings either flatters Trump, credits Trump, or attacks his opponents. That’s not messaging. That’s ego maintenance. The audience is one person, and the goal is to keep that one person stable enough to get through the week.

That shift, from outward-facing political theater to inward-facing emotional management, tells you something important about how the institution has changed. A political party that uses flattery as a branding tool is still, at some level, accountable to voters. A governing apparatus that uses flattery as a management technique has collapsed the distance between the institution and the man. The party no longer contains Trump. Trump contains the party. And everyone in that cabinet knows it.

Which brings me to the structural piece, the part I think deserves more attention than it usually gets.

What we’re watching isn’t just a personality cult. It’s a personality cult that has been formalized into law. The Roberts Court’s immunity ruling didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened after thirty years of conservative legal theory moving, with some consistency, toward the idea that executive power should be concentrated, insulated, and largely unchallengeable. “Unitary executive theory” sounds like a term a law professor invented to bore students, but its implications aren’t boring at all. It holds that the entire executive branch answers personally to the president: not to Congress, not to independent statute, not to tradition. To the president. One person.

Roberts hasn’t fully endorsed that theory in so many words. But the immunity ruling puts the sitting president above criminal prosecution for official acts. And Roberts’ own language, describing the president as “the only person who alone composes a branch of government,” is doing a lot of constitutional work in a very small space! Combined with a Congress that has, for practical purposes, abdicated its oversight function, you don’t need to formally declare a monarchy. You just need enough pieces in place that the king can govern like a king regardless of what the paperwork says.

The question Krugman defers is the one that actually matters: why did the right let this happen, and why did they build the legal architecture to make it permanent?

I’ve spent time in federal government, and I’ll keep repeating what I think I learned there, for whatever it’s worth. Large organizations don’t abandon their principles all at once. They do it through a long series of small accommodations, each of which seems defensible in isolation. You let one thing slide because the stakes seem low. You rationalize the next one because you already let the first one go. By the time you’re deep enough in that the pattern is visible, you’ve already made too many accommodations to reverse course without indicting yourself.

The Republican Party has been making those accommodations for decades. They started by tolerating Nixon’s abuses, then Reagan’s Iran-Contra, then Bush’s post-9/11 executive overreach. Each time, they found a rationale. National security. Party unity. The greater good. And each time, the institutional muscle that might have said “no, this is too far” atrophied a little more.

There were people inside those institutions who knew better. Some said so, quietly, and were sidelined. Most didn’t say anything at all. The personal calculus kept coming up the same way, the cost of resistance exceeded the benefit, and the institution seemed large enough to absorb the damage without their help. That calculation was wrong every time someone made it, and the cumulative error is what you’re looking at now.

By the time Trump arrived with his particular combination of shamelessness and appetite for power, the resistance infrastructure that should have been there simply wasn’t. Not because Republicans are uniquely evil, but because they’d spent forty years dismantling the habit of saying no to their own side.

Krugman calls the current situation “the culmination of decades of right-wing sabotage of everything that made America great.” I think that’s right, but I’d add one thing: it wasn’t always conscious sabotage. A lot of it was drift. Willful drift, yes, but drift. The people who built those accommodations early on probably didn’t imagine they were building a ramp to authoritarian rule. They thought they were being pragmatic. That’s what makes it so hard to stop. You can fight a conspiracy. It’s a lot harder to fight a culture.

What Krugman calls a doom loop, I think of as a ratchet. Every turn makes the next turn easier and the reverse harder. Trump demands more deference because he keeps failing. The deference ensures he keeps failing. And the legal architecture built around him makes it progressively more difficult for any institution to apply a corrective brake. Congress won’t. The Court has signaled it won’t. That leaves the voters, and you can see from the polling that a significant part of the country is paying attention. But polling and governing are different things, and right now, the mechanisms that translate public opinion into institutional correction are under considerable strain.

Paul asks the right question. He just doesn’t answer it, and I understand why. The answer is long, and it’s not flattering to anyone, including those of us who watched it happen and didn’t raise the alarm loudly enough or early enough. The rot didn’t happen in the dark. It happened in front of us, incrementally, and most of the country, myself included, kept hoping the system had more tensile strength than it did.

The honest reckoning is that we kept grading on a curve. Every new outrage was measured against the last one rather than against any fixed standard of what a republic requires. And so the bar moved, quietly, year by year, until we looked up and realized the bar was gone.

It turns out a republic is only as durable as the people inside it who are willing to defend it. And for a long time now, the people with the most to lose from defending it have been the ones with the most power to do so.

The cabinet meeting flattery Krugman documents is almost beside the point now. It’s the visible symptom of something structural. You fix symptoms by treating the disease, and the disease is that we’ve built, piece by piece and accommodation by accommodation, a system in which the people who are supposed to check power have every personal incentive to ratify it instead. Until that changes, the doom loop keeps looping, and the ratchet keeps turning.

I’m sure that’s not a comfortable thought for anyone. But comfortable thoughts sure as hell didn’t get us here, did they?

Friends, if my writing has been worth your time, buy me a one time ko-fi below. It goes a long way toward keeping the writing free for everyone.

Here is Paul Krugman’s inspirational post:

Paul Krugman

The Dumpster Fire of the Vanities

Busy day, so brief post…

Read more

a month ago · 2886 likes · 638 comments · Paul Krugman

Further Reading, anyone?

"The majority does not need to threaten. It leaves the body alone and goes straight for the soul." — Alexis de Tocqueville

There’s a meeting most people have sat through at least once. The problem in the room is obvious. The senior person present is wrong. Everyone knows it. Nobody says so. Not because the facts are unclear, not because the evidence is thin, but because the math got run under the table before anyone pulled out a chair, and the answer came back the same for everyone: not today, not here, not worth what it’ll cost. So the meeting ends. People file out. In the hallway, in pairs, in voices dropped just enough, the true assessment finally gets made.

Too late to matter. Right on time to become habit.

Wendy Lawrence wrote a sharp piece about how Republican governance became a method of deliberate institutional decay, and how Trump’s specific contribution was to make what had been carefully managed impossible to ignore anymore. She’s right, and I’d encourage you to read her full argument. Link at the bottom. What her piece sent rattling around in my head was a question she raises but doesn’t quite land on: why didn’t the institutions hold? Not just the Republican Party. All of them. The agencies, the military commands, the Senate, the inspector general apparatus, the whole immune system of a republic under stress. Why the quiet?

The political economist Timur Kuran spent a career mapping what he called preference falsification, which is a clinical way of describing something most of us have done by Tuesday morning of any given week. When telling the truth is expensive and silence is cheap, most people stay quiet. They don’t announce the decision. They don’t experience it as cowardice, usually. They call it reading the room. Picking their battles. Being strategic. The expressed beliefs of any group under sufficient pressure end up bearing almost no relationship to what that group actually thinks, because everyone is running the same silent calculation and arriving at the same answer. And because everyone is performing, everyone assumes the performance around them is genuine. The manufactured consensus looks real because everyone is manufacturing it at the same time, each person convinced the others mean it.

My god, does that sound familiar.

If you’ve spent years inside large federal bureaucracies or military commands, you know exactly what this feels and sounds like. It’s the report that is technically accurate in every particular and completely misleading in its overall impression, because the overall impression was the part nobody could write down. It’s the after-action review that catalogs every failure except the one that would have implicated someone still in the building. It’s the briefing that gets pre-filtered through three layers of staff before it reaches the principal, each layer trimming a little more of the uncomfortable truth until what arrives is a polished, warm version of what the principal already believes. Nobody lied. Nobody told the whole truth either. And everyone went home feeling more or less okay about it, which is perhaps the most damning part.

Tocqueville was circling this when he wrote about the tyranny of democratic majorities. His specific worry wasn’t the strongman or the mob. It was quieter than that: in democratic societies, he thought, the anticipation of disapproval becomes so thoroughly internalized that open coercion grows unnecessary. People silence themselves before anyone asks them to. He called it a tyranny that leaves the body alone and goes straight for the soul. Accurate as far as it goes. But Tocqueville was describing organic social pressure, the kind that grows up naturally in any community with strong norms.

What the Republican Party built over thirty years was something more intentional than that. The think tanks, the donor networks, the primary threat, the media apparatus that would end a career before the Sunday shows if someone broke script: none of that is ambient cultural pressure. It’s infrastructure. Deliberately constructed with a specific product in mind. And the product was a party full of people who knew better and said nothing, not because they lacked the information, but because the consequences of having it out loud had been made crystal clear.

Jeff Flake knew. Mitt Romney knew. There were dozens of others, and their silence wasn’t private. It was load-bearing. It held the fiction upright at exactly the moments when the fiction was most exposed and fragile. A political scientist observing from a safe distance calls that preference falsification. Someone who’s watched it operate from inside a hierarchy recognizes something older and less academic. It’s what happens when an institution stops protecting the people who tell the truth and starts, quietly and efficiently, protecting the people who don’t.

Kuran’s most unsettling finding is that preference cascades, when they finally tip, are almost impossible to predict in advance. Because private doubt is invisible, the threshold at which it becomes public expression is invisible too. Systems that look impregnable come apart with a speed that startles everyone, including the people who wanted them to collapse. The East German government fell in weeks. The Soviet bloc unwound in months. Each had looked, from outside and from inside, like a structure with years left in it. What it actually had was a population that had been falsifying its preferences for so long the habit had become identity.

Watch the current Republican Party with that in mind. Watch the silence of the people who know. Count the former officials who discovered their conscience approximately six months after leaving the room where it would have made a difference. Read the memoirs. The memoirs are the after-action reviews of people who couldn’t tell the truth while the situation was still live. There’s a word for that in certain professional cultures, and the word isn’t heroism.

Which brings me to the booth.

We are born alone. We die alone. In a democracy, we vote alone too, and that last one doesn’t get said nearly enough. The voting booth is the one place in civic life where the entire apparatus of manufactured consensus cannot follow you. Party pressure stops at the curtain. The donor network has no sight line past it. The memory of what happened to Liz Cheney exists in public space, not in that small private one. The booth was designed as a sanctuary, the one moment where the gap between public performance and private belief can close without cost to anyone.

And yet most people don’t experience it as sanctuary. They experience it as exposure. As the particular loneliness of possibly being wrong and outnumbered at the same time, with no one to confirm you made the right call until the tabulations come in, if then. The preference falsification that ran in every public space before election day doesn’t evaporate at the curtain. It follows people in. Voting your private conviction when everything around you has been broadcasting a different consensus takes something that doesn’t get acknowledged honestly in a country that likes to believe its citizens vote their conscience as a natural matter of course.

Many don’t. Many vote the performance they’ve been rehearsing in public because the performance has become the belief, or near enough that the distance stopped feeling meaningful. That’s not stupidity. That’s the specific gravity of manufactured consensus doing exactly what it was built to do, all the way into the one room it was never supposed to reach.

The Senator who flies home rather than casting the hard vote and the citizen who votes the party line rather than the private judgment are making the same calculation at wildly different scales. The cost of honest expression feels prohibitive. The warmth of the expressed consensus feels like safety. Neither of them is wrong about the short-term arithmetic. Both of them are catastrophically wrong about what it costs a republic when enough people run the same numbers simultaneously.

Now. The after-action review and the battle damage assessment are cousins people routinely confuse, and the confusion matters. The after-action review happens when you’re back at base, the shooting has stopped, and the organization has the breathing room to ask honestly what went wrong and how to do it better next time. It’s a learning tool. It assumes there’s a next time. The battle damage assessment is a different animal entirely. You run it while the situation is still live, under bad information, with one question on the table: what’s still standing, and what do we do about it right now. Not next quarter. Not after the midterms. Now.

The reason that distinction belongs in this conversation is that America has been trying to conduct an after-action review of its democratic institutions while those institutions are still taking fire. The courts, the press, the civil service, the inspector general apparatus, the electoral machinery: all of it under deliberate and sustained pressure while the commentary class writes careful retrospectives about how we got here. You don’t get to write the thoughtful post-mortem while the building is still coming down. The after-action report is a luxury. Battle damage assessment is what the situation actually calls for, and the first finding of any honest BDA is this: the damage is still compounding, and debating the methodology is not the same as stopping it.

That changes what’s being asked. The ask is to speak now, in the room, at the table, before the meeting ends and everyone migrates to the hallway to say in lowered voices what they wouldn’t say out loud. The ask is the vote that doesn’t falsify anything. The memo that says what it means in the first paragraph. The testimony that doesn’t trim itself for the principal’s comfort before it arrives.

Civic courage has never been abstract. It’s always been a specific person in a specific room deciding whether to say the true thing when silence is cheaper and safer and considerably warmer.

The quiet in the room has a cost. We’ve been running that tab for decades. Everyone pays it eventually. The ones who stayed quiet just get to pay it last, and privately, and with the particular weight of knowing the bill was theirs to begin with.

Friends, if my writing has been worth your time, buy me a one time ko-fi below. It goes a long way toward keeping the writing free for everyone.

Further Reading:

Glass Empires By W. A. Lawrence

The Damage Republicans Never Thought Trump Would Reveal

Thomas Cole, The Arcadian or Pastoral State (1834). A nation remembers what wise stewardship once made possible…

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2 months ago · 63 likes · 14 comments · W. A. Lawrence

"The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He's a wonderful man."

There is a particular comfort in the dementia explanation. I understand why the opposition landed there and why it stuck. It arrives pre-loaded with a kind of moral softening we extend almost instinctively to people whose minds appear to be failing. The word salad, the repetition, the apparent confusion, the Hannibal Lecter endorsements delivered with genuine warmth at campaign rallies. “He’s a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner.” It’s easier, emotionally, to file that under cognitive decline than to sit with the alternative.

The alternative is harder. It requires us to say the quiet part out loud, in print, under our own names.

Wendy Lawrence did exactly that this week. Her piece ( see below) is the clinical argument the opposition has been too comfortable to make, and I want to extend it, not because I have the professional credentials she brings to the page, but because the pattern she identified deserves more voices willing to follow it to its conclusion. I’m a former federal analyst, not a clinician. What I bring is two decades of reading complex records carefully and a tolerance for conclusions that make people shift in their seats.

So let me tell you what the record shows, read against the clinical framework Wendy established.

The dementia frame rests on a category error. Wendy’s piece draws the clinical distinction precisely: degenerative disease progresses through structural collapse, neurons die, connections fail, the decline is directional and irreversible. What the observed behavioral record describes is a different mechanism entirely. Stimulant exposure, chronic sleep deprivation, long-term pharmacological disruption of prefrontal function. The symptoms can look similar from the outside. Word salad is word salad. Repetition is repetition. But the mechanisms are nothing alike, and the distinction isn’t academic.

Degenerative disease erases a person. Stimulant-driven disruption amplifies one.

Martha Stout, the Harvard-trained clinical psychologist whose work on sociopathy remains a foundational text in the field, defines the condition as the complete absence of conscience operating alongside predatory social intelligence. Not diminished conscience. Absent. The configuration generates sustained, calculated harm without internal restraint, and it does so across time, not in episodes, not in clusters of bad years, but as a consistent operating architecture. When you run stimulant disruption through that foundation, with the prefrontal brakes already compromised and the dopaminergic system running hot, you don’t get deterioration. You get amplification of what was already there.

That’s the argument Wendy makes. I believe she’s right. And the evidentiary record across decades, not the last few years of political life, supports it with a consistency that deterioration cannot explain.

Start with what’s sworn. A 1990 divorce deposition placed allegations of physical aggression, coercion, and forced sexual contact into the legal record. Contemporaneous reporting carried those claims into public view. Whatever subsequent clarifications addressed in terminology, the underlying description remained in sworn testimony, placed there by a woman under oath. That’s 1990. Whatever cognitive decline the opposition wants to date the onset of, it wasn’t 1990.

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Move forward to the Howard Stern appearances, documented across recordings from 1993 through 2015. Explicit commentary about a daughter’s developing body. Comparisons between avoiding sexually transmitted infections and the experience of combat. Sexual boasting delivered without hesitation or social filter across more than two decades of appearances. These aren’t episodes of confusion. They’re a behavioral signature, consistent, unguarded, and repeated across an enormous span of time.

The DSM-5 criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder include persistent disregard for the rights of others, deceitfulness, impulsivity, irritability, aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the safety of others, and consistent irresponsibility. The clinical literature is careful to note that a formal diagnosis requires professional evaluation. I’m not offering one. What I’m offering is the observation that a documented record spanning thirty-plus years maps onto those criteria with a consistency that a reasonable person can identify without a medical license.

In 2023, a federal jury found liability for sexual abuse and defamation in Carroll v. Trump. The court affirmed conduct consistent with rape under common understanding. This wasn’t a political finding. It was a civil jury evaluating evidence and reaching a conclusion. Add it to the ledger.

Then there is the Jane Doe complaint. Filed in federal court in 2016. Alleging that Donald Trump raped and physically struck a thirteen-year-old child at parties connected to Jeffrey Epstein, a financier federal prosecutors would later characterize as operating a systematic sex trafficking enterprise constructed to isolate minors from every institution capable of protecting them. The complaint alleged not a single act but a sustained campaign: binding, striking, explicit death threats delivered to a child to ensure her silence. A second minor alleged to have been present and subjected to the same conduct. The complaint was withdrawn before adjudication. No court evaluated the evidence. No findings were issued.

I want to be precise about what that means and what it doesn’t. It means no court resolved the question. It does not mean the complaint evaporated. It exists in the federal record. And a child too frightened to proceed, in a documented pattern that includes NDA-enforced financial settlements, litigation threats against adult accusers, and decades of applied financial pressure against women who spoke publicly, is not the same as a complaint without weight. The withdrawal fits the pattern as cleanly as everything else in the record.

Read together, these data points don’t describe a man whose mind is going. They describe a man who has operated this way across his entire adult life, inside whatever thin constraints wealth and lawyers and enforced silence provided, until the constraints were removed entirely. The stimulant disruption Wendy documents doesn’t explain the 1990 deposition. It explains why the volume is higher now. The brakes were cut. The engine was always this.

Which brings me to what the dementia frame costs the opposition, and this is the argument I don’t think has been made clearly enough.

When you locate the problem in biology, you imply that a younger, healthier version would have been acceptable. You shift the accountability from the man to the mechanism. You extend, however unconsciously, the same moral softening we give to people whose minds are genuinely failing them, to a person whose record suggests something categorically different. The dementia frame isn’t just clinically imprecise. It functions as a partial exemption. And the opposition has been handing it out for years while calling it analysis.

The frame also let the rest of us off the hook for having chosen it. The depositions were reported. The Carroll verdict was front page. The Jane Doe complaint was filed in federal court and covered by journalists who understood exactly what they were reading. None of this was hidden. We reached for the dementia frame because the correct one made demands we weren’t prepared to meet. It implicated the party apparatus that rationalized him, the media organizations that covered the word salad and left the depositions in the archive, and every one of us who looked at the record and decided the discomfort of the truth was someone else’s problem to carry. We chose the frame that cost us the least. What it cost us was the reckoning.

On April 1, 2026, Trump delivered a primetime address fusing claims of resolution with explicit escalation threats, asserting unilateral authority over the use of force, presenting closure as imminent while preserving every option for immediate expansion. “We are very close to finishing this, but if they move even slightly, we will hit them harder than ever before.” That’s not confusion. That’s control, performed for an audience, calibrated to the moment. The accordion hands Michael Cohen identified across years of direct proximity as the physical tell of active deception were presumably present. The performance was intact.

Wendy closed her piece with the line that should be posted above every editorial desk covering this story. The grip tightens while misdiagnosis holds the door open.

The door has been open a long time. Wendy’s right that misdiagnosis held it there. What she’s too generous to add is that a lot of us felt the draft coming through and called it weather.

Federal lawsuit filed: June 20, 2016. Withdrawn: November 4, 2016. Four days before the election. No court evaluated the evidence.

Friends, if my writing has been worth your time, buy me a one time ko-fi below. It goes a long way toward keeping the writing free for everyone.

Further Reading:

Glass Empires By W. A. Lawrence

The Dementia Narrative Covering a Lifetime Record of Sociopathy

Close-up of Donald Trump on April 1, 2026. Mouth contorted mid-speech. Eyes narrowed. Expression strained under harsh lighting, frantically gripping a microphone. Photo credit Getty Images file photo…

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3 months ago · 138 likes · 38 comments · W. A. Lawrence

The Existentialist Republic

Qatar Officially Leaves Iran War, Boots US From Biggest Middle East Base in Historic Contraction of American Global Military Power

Ten subscribers per article. That’s what keeps this publication, this legislation, and this organizing community alive. If this helps, help back. BuyMeACoffee.com/TheER…

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3 months ago · 139 likes · 21 comments · Christopher Armitage

What Chris Armitage Got Right, What He Left Out, and Why the Harder Question Is in Korea

Qatar’s own government announced last week that the Gulf security arrangement is broken. Not a critic, not an adversary. The government. On the record. Dr. Majed Al-Ansari, Advisor to Qatar’s Prime Minister and Official Spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said it publicly, and Chris Armitage built a piece around it that’s worth your time. The facts he marshals are solid. I checked them. The dual evacuations of Al Udeid happened. The THAAD ( Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, the U.S. Army's ballistic missile interceptor system, known as THAAD) redeployment from Korea happened. The Saudi-Pakistan mutual defense treaty happened, signed in September 2025, eight days after Israel struck Hamas officials in Doha and Gulf states started doing math they’d been putting off for years.

Where Armitage and I part ways isn’t on the facts. It’s on what the facts mean, and more than that, on what they’re being asked to prove.

He ends with an epitaph. 1945-2026, RIP US Geopolitical Military Dominance. Clean line. Gets shared. And I think it’s doing the work of a verdict where the honest thing is still a question, a harder, less satisfying question that doesn’t fit a bumper sticker but matters more if you actually want to understand what’s happening and what comes next.

So let me try to ask it.

The Qatar Story Is More Complicated Than Armitage Tells It

Armitage frames Qatar as a country putting distance between itself and American military presence because that presence stopped meaning safety and started meaning target. That’s partly right. What he skips is what Qatar’s own government said it wants instead.

Al-Ansari, the same official Armitage quotes about the breakdown of Gulf security, called explicitly for what he named a “US-plus” posture. His words: Qatar does not move away from the United States. It diversifies alongside the United States. He said it in a public webinar, two weeks ago. Qatar spent this war shooting down Iranian aircraft, dismantling IRGC spy cells inside its own borders, and asking Washington to help defend its territory. That’s a country trying to rewrite a contract while the building’s on fire. It is not a country walking out.

The distinction matters more than it might seem. Collapse and renegotiation point toward completely different futures and require completely different responses. If the arrangement collapsed, the question is what fills the void. If it’s being renegotiated, the question is who holds leverage, what terms the host nations will demand going forward, and whether Washington has the political will to show up for that conversation. Armitage’s epitaph framing, dramatic as it is, lets everyone off the hook from figuring out which problem they’re actually dealing with.

Qatar’s Prime Minister said this war must stop because everyone knows who the biggest beneficiary is. That’s not a country exiting an alliance. That’s a country telling its ally, loudly, publicly, with real anger, that the terms need to change.

What makes that renegotiation harder to manage than Armitage’s epitaph suggests is that Qatar isn’t the only one doing it. The same calculation, driven by the same root cause, is playing out simultaneously on a peninsula 5,000 miles away. And that simultaneity is what tells you this isn’t a regional story.

The Korean Peninsula

The Korea piece of this story gets a paragraph from Armitage. It deserves more, because it isn’t a subplot. It’s the same story playing in a different theater, against a different adversary, inside a different alliance, at the same time.

Here’s what actually happened. The U.S. started 2025 with roughly 600 THAAD interceptors in its total inventory. During twelve days of the June 2025 conflict with Iran, American forces fired more than 150 of them, about 25% of the entire stockpile, defending a single theater. By March 2026, with a new Iran war burning through what remained, the Pentagon began pulling THAAD components out of South Korea to cover the shortfall.

South Korea’s president said publicly he opposed the removal.

He also said the reality is they cannot fully impose their position.

Sit with that. An American treaty ally, facing an active nuclear threat from North Korea, with 28,500 U.S. troops on its soil, watched its missile defense get shipped out for a war it didn’t choose and couldn’t stop. Its president’s public response was to acknowledge he lacks the standing to prevent it. That’s not a footnote about force posture. That’s an ally telling you, out loud, what the alliance actually costs them and what they can’t do about it.

And while that THAAD was being crated up and loaded onto C-17s at Osan Air Base, North Korea was conducting missile launches at a pace that hadn’t been seen before, including systems specifically designed to defeat the kind of high-altitude interception THAAD provides. Pyongyang ran more than twenty launches in 2026 alone. The threat the system was pulled from was actively getting harder to stop, not easier. Seoul knew that. Washington knew that. The hardware left anyway.

A crisis passes. A structural condition doesn’t. When every theater simultaneously demands what was promised, and the promises exceed what any military can deliver across all of them at once, you’re not managing a bad month. You’re looking at a problem that predates the Iran war, will outlast it, and belongs to whoever sits in the Oval Office when it fully ripens.

That moment arrived on this administration’s watch, and this administration made specific choices that made it worse. That’s the charge, and it’s documented.

What This Administration Chose, and What It Cost

The June 2025 strikes on Iran were launched with Qatar actively lobbying against them. Not quietly expressing concern through back channels. Actively lobbying, publicly warning of exactly the retaliation that followed. The administration launched anyway. Qatar absorbed the consequences: an attack on Al Udeid, and months later an attack on Ras Laffan that destroyed 17% of its LNG export capacity, cost $20 billion in annual revenue, and will take three to five years to repair. The decision to strike may have been defensible on its own terms. What isn’t arguable is that the costs landed on the host nation, not on Washington. Qatar paid the bill for a decision it opposed and couldn’t stop.

The THAAD burn rate from those twelve days in June 2025 was known inside the building. The stockpile depletion was known. The decision to go back into active conflict with Iran in February 2026, with inventories already stressed, South Korea already watching, host nations already recalculating, was made by an administration that had all of those numbers in front of it. Going in blind would be one thing. Going in with the June 2025 readiness picture already on the table is another.

The structural overextension Armitage describes, too many commitments and not enough hardware to honor all of them at once, is not a Trump creation. Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, Obama, Biden. Every administration added obligations. Almost none subtracted them. Nobody designed the 750-base global presence. They accumulated it, obligation by obligation, across forty years, until the whole structure required more than any country can deliver when all of it comes due at once.

What’s different is that this administration inherited a structure already under stress, was handed the June 2025 readiness numbers showing exactly how fast that stress could become a crisis, and chose to go back in. The overextension predates Trump. The acceleration of its visibility, and the specific decisions that left Qatar holding the bill and South Korea watching its missile defense leave on a cargo plane, those belong to this term. Own the cause or not. You own the consequences either way.

Something real shifted. Host nations that spent decades treating American military presence as an asset are now calculating its costs in ways they weren’t before. That calculation is happening in Doha and Seoul simultaneously, and the fact that it’s happening across theaters at the same time tells you this isn’t regional. It’s structural.

The nations doing that math right now aren’t going to stop when this administration ends. The next president inherits a Gulf shopping for a “US-plus” arrangement, a Korean peninsula that watched its THAAD leave while North Korea was running twenty-plus missile launches to exploit the gap, and an interceptor stockpile that’ll take 18 months or more to rebuild even after the shooting stops. Those are the conditions on the ground. They don’t reset on Inauguration Day.

Armitage wrote an epitaph. What he actually documented was a renegotiation in progress, conducted by the host nations, without much input from Washington, while missiles are still flying. Renegotiations have outcomes. Some of them are worse than what they replaced.

The question isn’t whether the old arrangement is gone. The question is whether anyone in Washington is paying enough attention to shape what replaces it. Everything this administration has done so far suggests the answer is no.

Friends, if my writing has been worth your time, buy me a one time ko-fi below. It goes a long way toward keeping the writing free for everyone.

Further Reading:

Opening Orientation

There’s a particular quality to a Friday when the republic is fighting a war it didn’t fully explain, watching a government shutdown drag into its forty-first day, and waiting to find out whether Denmark’s government is going to survive the week. Things keep moving. Courts file rulings. Legislatures meet. Agencies process. But something’s different about this Friday, and it has to do with how much is being held in suspension at once.

The war with Iran, now in its twenty-seventh day, is the dominant fact in the American environment right now. It’s shaping everything else in ways that aren’t always visible. Wars of this scope eat public attention. They reshape the political calendar. They create room for exceptional measures that would face much harder scrutiny in quieter times. The DHS shutdown’s been going on for six weeks. TSA workers have missed multiple paychecks. The Minnesota Legislature is moving bills in a tied chamber. None of that has gotten the sustained attention it would’ve commanded four months ago.

Abroad, Europe’s doing something that deserves careful watching: declining American military demands in public, spending more on its own defense than it has in decades, and acting on a conclusion it drew quietly over time, that American leadership can’t be assumed. Denmark held a general election this week. The result was inconclusive. And the campaign, remarkably, wasn’t really about Greenland. It wasn’t about an American president who threatened to take Danish territory. It was about drinking water and pensions. That tells you something real about how Europeans are processing the last two years.

This edition tracks the perimeter across all its sections. The Iran war is the frame around everything, but the sections themselves hold the detail. Read carefully. The week’s been loud. Loud weeks are when the quieter architecture tends to shift.

Federal

The DHS shutdown is now in its forty-first day. It started February 14 after negotiations collapsed over immigration enforcement reform, in the wake of the January killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The Senate’s most recent cloture vote, on March 12, failed 51 to 46. No new votes are scheduled. The administration says the standoff is Senate Democrats’ fault for prioritizing, in its words, illegal aliens over public safety workers. What’s factually established: 272,000 DHS employees, including TSA officers, CBP agents, Coast Guard personnel, FEMA staff, and CISA workers, are doing essential work without full pay.

The administration’s also managing a war. U.S. and Israeli forces launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28, striking Iranian military infrastructure, leadership compounds, and command-and-control systems. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in the opening Israeli strikes. His son Mojtaba was elected as successor on March 8. The war’s now in its fourth week. Iranian missile and drone launches are down roughly 90 percent from peak levels, according to the Pentagon, which says that’s because Iran’s stores are depleted. Iran says it’s rationing for a longer fight. Somebody’s wrong, and it matters which one.

On March 21, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the administration was considering winding down military efforts. On March 27, he extended a pause on strikes against Iranian energy infrastructure by ten days, citing talks he described as ongoing. Iran’s foreign minister rejected the framing of active negotiations while acknowledging indirect messaging through intermediaries. The administration sent a 15-point plan through Pakistan. Iran called it maximalist and unreasonable and offered a five-point counter. The Strait of Hormuz is still effectively closed. About 3,000 vessels are stranded in the region. The administration temporarily lifted sanctions on some Iranian oil at sea through April 19, trying to take some pressure off the energy shock.

The DOGE court record continued developing this week. Twenty-three hours of testimony produced a detailed picture of how DOGE operated in its early days, described by one official as feeling more like a club than a government agency. Testimony showed DOGE personnel using Signal for official communications, switching between personal and government devices, and sharing sensitive information in ways that records-retention law exists to prevent. A whistleblower complaint alleged that a database of Social Security information for more than 300 million Americans was uploaded to an unsecured server. The SSA confirmed in January that DOGE staffers had access to that information.

The administration says DOGE’s cuts eliminated waste without hurting government capacity. Former officials and current and former agency personnel have told reporters a different story: that cuts to the State Department, FEMA, CDC, and counterterrorism units have slowed evacuation operations, domestic emergency response, public health monitoring, and counter-Iran work. Congress is talking about supplemental defense funding. The shutdown and the DOGE cuts together have produced a compounding institutional stress whose full shape won’t be visible for months.

State and Federal Tension

The word that most honestly describes the current federal-state relationship isn’t conflict. It’s divergence. States aren’t simply resisting the federal government. They’re building parallel legal architectures, some to protect their residents from federal enforcement, some to invite it. And the divergence is speeding up.

The 287(g) program, through which state and local law enforcement enter formal agreements to participate in immigration enforcement, kept growing during the shutdown. The number of signed memoranda hasn’t gone down just because DHS is operating without full appropriations. That infrastructure embeds quietly. It doesn’t need ceremonies to expand.

At the same time, legislatures in Minnesota, Illinois, New York, Colorado, and Oregon are pushing laws that would allow civil suits against federal agents. Minnesota’s bills are up against a tied House. Illinois’s law is already in federal court, with the administration suing to block it. Maine cities are passing ordinances that go further than state law requires. We’re sorting ourselves, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, into two different relationships with federal immigration enforcement.

California

The administration’s suit against California’s electric vehicle mandate is still in federal court. It’s the clearest current test of how far federal preemption can go against state environmental authority. The legal theory is different from prior challenges, and the Supreme Court’s current makeup is different from the one that previously upheld California’s authority. This case will move through courts for years, and what it decides won’t just be about cars.

California’s still the largest single node in the multi-state legal network pushing back against the administration’s enforcement posture across immigration, environmental standards, and civil rights. That position has costs. It also has weight. Nothing in California’s posture this week broke from established pattern.

Minnesota

The Minnesota Legislature is in session, and the bills it’s working with are a direct accounting of what Operation Metro Surge left behind. Democrats introduced legislation to let Minnesotans sue federal agents in state court, to ban law enforcement from entering homes or schools for civil immigration enforcement without a judicial warrant, and to study the economic impact of the surge. The warrant bill was killed in committee on a 7-to-7 party-line vote on March 10. The bill creating a cause of action for civil rights violations against federal officials got six DFL votes, not enough. Nothing DFL-backed can pass without bipartisan support in a chamber tied at 67 to 67 with a Republican speaker.

On March 18, a motion to recall HF16, a Republican bill mandating local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, failed on a 67-to-67 tie. The chamber’s locked. Neither side has the votes to pass its priorities without convincing at least one person from the other side.

What’s changed is the legal record. A federal judge ruled in March that there’s troubling evidence ICE agents in Minnesota stopped people based on racial and ethnic identity. The judge didn’t issue an injunction. Documentation without remedy is still the pattern. Chief District Judge Schiltz previously found ICE violated at least 96 court orders in Minnesota since January 1. Judge Blackwell stated in February that the overwhelming majority of immigration cases before him involved people lawfully present in the United States. Those findings are in the record now. The bills may stall. The record doesn’t.

The contempt proceeding against the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota for ICE’s violation of court orders is still live. Governor Walz proposed a $10 million relief package for small businesses whose customers and workers were displaced during the surge. Minneapolis reporter Georgia Fort, charged for her coverage of a protest at a church where an ICE official served as a pastor, entered a not-guilty plea this week alongside Trahern Crews of Black Lives Matter Minnesota. Fort said publicly that the prosecution is an attempt to prevent reporting on one of the most historically significant stories in the state’s history. I believe her.

Maine

Maine’s Legislature is doing what legislatures do after a federal operation they didn’t invite and couldn’t stop: it’s building the legal structure for the next confrontation. The confrontation hasn’t ended. It’s changed form.

Lewiston passed a city ordinance on March 18 banning city employees and resources from helping federal immigration enforcement except where legally required, identical in scope to an ordinance Rockland passed in December. Both go further than the statewide law Governor Mills allowed to become law without her signature this winter. That law takes effect 90 days after the Legislature adjourns, scheduled for mid-April.

A bill advancing in the Legislature, sponsored by Senator Rachel Talbot Ross, would clarify that local jails aren’t required to hold people arrested on civil immigration charges, distinguishing civil from criminal detention. The bill came out of real confusion at Cumberland County Jail, whose commissioners deferred a decision on their ICE contract because of ambiguity in a 1964 state law that was written to solve a completely different problem. The law’s legislative history contains nothing suggesting it was meant to mandate cooperation with federal authorities. Talbot Ross put it plainly: reading a narrow 1964 fix as a mandate that local jails now must accept all federal detainees is a strained reading at best.

Maine State Police Col. Bill Ross testified to the Legislature in February that during the January federal operation, ICE and CBP didn’t communicate their plans to local law enforcement. ‘If you’re going into Portland or Lewiston, you have to communicate with the law enforcement officials on the ground,’ he said. That’s both a factual account of what happened and a marker for what the state’s trying to build: a system where future federal operations require local coordination, even if they can’t legally be blocked.

Canada

The trade relationship between Canada and the United States kept restructuring this week, against the backdrop of the Iran war, which has changed both countries’ negotiating positions in ways neither fully expected.

About 76 percent of Canada’s goods exports are still going to the United States, but the trend’s been moving steadily downward. Prime Minister Carney reached a deal with China lowering Canada’s 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles in exchange for China lowering tariffs on Canadian canola. It drew domestic criticism and Trump’s public anger. Carney’s team read that anger as proof of leverage. An Angus Reid poll released March 11 found 51 percent of Americans think there should be no tariff on Canadian goods, up from 42 percent in October 2024. Seventy-three percent of Americans have a favorable view of Canada.

The Court of International Trade ruled in February that the IEEPA-based tariffs on Canada were illegal. The administration responded by imposing a 10 percent worldwide tariff under a different statutory authority the ruling didn’t reach. The legal tools change. The pressure doesn’t. Canada’s challenged the Section 232 tariffs at the World Trade Organization. The CUSMA six-year review is scheduled for July 1. That’s the clock that’ll eventually force decisions neither side wants to make under pressure.

The oil price shock from the Strait of Hormuz closure changed the short-term economic math for both sides. Canada’s position as the largest single supplier of crude oil to the United States is more visible now than it was in January. Whether the administration uses that visibility as a reason to negotiate or a reason to press harder isn’t clear yet.

Greenland

Denmark held its general election on March 24. Prime Minister Frederiksen’s Social Democrats won the most seats, 38 in a 179-seat parliament, but their vote share, 21.9 percent, was their worst showing since 1903. Neither the left nor right bloc won a majority. Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen’s centrist Moderates, with 14 seats, ended up as kingmaker. Coalition talks opened March 25. Frederiksen was appointed formateur by King Frederik X and said she’d try to build a coalition with left-bloc parties.

The election campaign wasn’t really about Greenland. Despite Trump’s annexation threats, the sovereignty crisis that dominated January and February, and Frederiksen’s visible role in rallying European allies behind Danish territorial integrity, voters focused on domestic economic issues: drinking water, animal welfare, pensions, cost of living. Greenland didn’t figure largely, analysts said, because there’s broad cross-party agreement that sovereignty isn’t negotiable. That’s a remarkable fact when you think about how much diplomatic energy the crisis consumed.

The Davos framework from January, in which NATO Secretary General Rutte proposed updating the 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement, adding Golden Dome infrastructure, and strengthening Arctic security without transferring sovereignty, is still the operational diplomatic structure. The U.S. hasn’t formally accepted it, and the administration has kept engaging Greenlandic officials directly, cutting out Danish government intermediaries. Denmark’s objected to that approach. Hundreds of elite Danish soldiers trained in Arctic warfare are still deployed to Greenland, a deployment described as likely to stay for one to two years.

What the Danish election tells the perimeter is this: a government that stood up to American territorial pressure, won international praise, and summoned European solidarity around its position didn’t turn that moment into electoral dominance. The day-to-day questions outlasted the geopolitical drama. That’s a realistic assessment of democratic attention spans, and it matters for how governments in similar positions calculate the returns on principled resistance going forward.

Europe

NATO Secretary General Rutte released his annual report this week. European allies and Canada increased defense spending by 20 percent in 2025 compared to the year before, in real terms. Rutte called on allies to show a credible path toward the 5 percent GDP target at the next NATO summit in Ankara.

That increase is happening against a backdrop of European refusal to join American military operations in Iran. Mid-March, Trump asked NATO allies to send warships to help secure the Strait of Hormuz. European leaders said no, publicly and in coordination. German Foreign Minister Wadephul said the conflict has nothing to do with NATO. British Prime Minister Starmer said joining a mission in the Strait wasn’t and had never been envisioned as a NATO mission. Greece, Italy, and Estonia echoed similar positions. Trump called the refusal a very foolish mistake. Then, hours later, said the United States doesn’t need anyone’s help.

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas accused Russia of providing intelligence support to Iran to target Americans. The EU pushed for coordinated pressure on Moscow. Germany’s Wadephul called for a common NATO position before a G7 meeting. What you see when you put it together is European countries trying to thread multiple obligations at once: support for Ukraine, collective defense commitments, alliance solidarity with the United States, and their own publics’ deep opposition to a war they didn’t choose and weren’t consulted about before it started.

The Iran war hasn’t strengthened the transatlantic alliance. It’s revealed, in ways that diplomatic communiques won’t paper over easily, a real divergence in strategic interests and risk tolerance. The EU approved a 90 billion euro loan package to sustain Ukraine’s war effort through 2026 and 2027. France, Germany, the Nordic states, and the Baltics are moving fastest on defense spending. Twenty-two NATO countries are committed to the coalition supporting Ukraine, which runs with a permanent headquarters in Paris and doesn’t need American leadership to operate. That coalition didn’t exist three years ago. Its existence now is itself an answer to a question the alliance has been asking since Trump’s first term.

No Material Change

No confirmed CDC national policy shift surfaced in this scan at a scale that changes the perimeter’s condition.

No confirmed Treasury action beyond sanctions activity related to the Iran war and standard liquidity management rose to perimeter-level weight this cycle.

No new Inspector General report or Office of Legal Counsel opinion surfaced this week that changes the legal picture beyond the DOGE court testimony already covered in the Federal section.

What to Watch Next

Watch the DHS shutdown for any sign of movement. The combination of TSA workers missing multiple paychecks, spring break travel strain, and an ongoing war still hasn’t produced a deal. The political incentives on both sides are locked. Watch whether the Iran situation produces a ceasefire in the next ten days, and whether that frees up Senate attention and changes the shutdown pressure.

Watch the Minnesota Legislature through its committee deadlines. The bills that’ve failed on party-line votes in committee aren’t necessarily dead. They can be revived through Rules or floor procedures. The contempt proceeding against the U.S. Attorney is still live. Watch whether a court order produces remedy where documentation hasn’t.

Watch Denmark’s coalition talks. The outcome will shape how effectively Denmark can hold its current position on Greenland sovereignty, manage the updated defense agreement negotiations with the U.S., and keep leading European coordination on Arctic security. A weak or unstable government in Copenhagen changes the diplomatic math.

Watch the Iran ceasefire negotiations. The administration’s 15-point plan, transmitted through Pakistan, was rejected as maximalist. Iran offered a five-point counter. The gap on sanctions relief, missile limits, and Strait of Hormuz control is wide. A ceasefire matters directly for oil prices, global shipping, European economic stress, and the domestic political picture in the United States. Trump’s wind-down framing creates a timeline pressure that may produce either a deal or an escalation before April 6.

Watch Canada’s CUSMA review preparations. The July 1 deadline is the clock that’ll eventually force decisions. Carney’s China canola deal and his government’s public framing of American reliability as genuinely in question represent a real shift in how Canada’s presenting itself to its own citizens and to other trading partners. Watch how the administration responds to Canada’s oil position as the Hormuz situation evolves.

Developments to Monitor

These are credible early-stage developments that haven’t yet changed the perimeter but could reshape it if they grow. They’re tracked for the patterns they may represent, not for the immediate weight they carry.

The DOGE court record is producing a documented picture of how the initiative operated: pressure campaigns, records destruction, interagency access without statutory authority, and personnel placed in agencies with minimal accountability. The question now is whether courts or Congress will treat that record as a basis for structural remedy, or whether it becomes another archive of documented conduct that produced no consequence. We’ve seen that archive fill up before.

Maine’s jail bill, LD 2058, distinguishes civil immigration detention from criminal detention in state law. If it passes and survives federal challenge, it creates a model for other states that want to limit local participation in civil immigration enforcement without the legal exposure that comes from explicit sanctuary designations.

The public opinion polling on the Iran war deserves attention. Fifty-nine percent of Americans say the decision to use military force was wrong. Fifty-four percent of registered voters oppose it. Opposition’s been stable for several weeks. Wars that are unpopular among majorities before their fourth week are historically hard to sustain politically. The administration’s wind-down framing, suggesting the war’s objectives are nearly met, is responding to that pressure, whether or not conditions on the ground support the claim.

Where This Leaves Us

I’ve watched institutions under strain long enough to know that the most consequential moments aren’t always the loudest ones. This week’s been loud. A war is ongoing. A shutdown’s in its sixth week. A close ally held an election where the central political drama of the year wasn’t the main issue. The loudness can hide the architecture.

What the perimeter shows this week is a republic managing multiple compounding stresses at the same time, none of which has resolved, and each of which is being used to make the others harder to address. The DHS shutdown has workers absorbing costs the institution promised to pay them. The Iran war makes the shutdown harder to focus on. And the shutdown, combined with DOGE’s cuts, has already hampered the government’s capacity to respond to the war itself, according to people who worked in those institutions before they were reduced.

Europe’s spending money it would rather spend on other things because it’s drawn a conclusion about American reliability. Denmark’s voters chose drinking water and pensions over the sovereignty crisis, not because they don’t care about sovereignty but because they trust their government’s position on Greenland is settled across every viable coalition, and they know that the bread-and-butter questions will outlast any particular confrontation with Washington. That’s a sophisticated democratic judgment.

Minnesota’s trying to convert documentation into law in a chamber that can’t pass anything on a party-line vote. Maine’s trying to clarify a 1964 statute so that jails aren’t forced to hold people arrested for civil violations the facilities were never designed to hold. Canada’s using the canola deal to remind the Americans that being unreliable has costs.

None of that is collapse. Republics don’t collapse on a Friday in March while the Senate’s deadlocked, the House is tied, and three thousand ships are waiting in a closed strait. They erode. Through accumulated tolerance for exceptional measures. Through institutions that find the troubling evidence and stop short of ordering the remedy. Through workers who keep showing up because they believe in the work, even when the institution’s stopped paying them on time.

What we owe those workers, and what we owe the record, is attention. Not alarm but attention. That difference still matters.

The perimeter holds. Keep an eye open.

Friends, if my writing has been worth your time, buy me a one time ko-fi below. It goes a long way toward keeping it free for everyone.

Further Reading:

I’ve been on Substack for about a year now, and I want to tell you something honestly: I’ve been watching how this place works, watching how I work inside it, and I’ve decided to make a change that feels overdue.

I’m no longer accepting new paid subscriptions. All my writing goes free. Every piece, every time, for everyone.

If you’ve been a paid subscriber, thank you. That’s not a small thing and I don’t take it lightly. I encourage all who have a paid subscription to Light Against Empire to cancel. I want you to know the reasoning isn’t careless. It’s considered.

Why I’m Doing This

A subscription is a contract. Pay me monthly and I’ll deliver. The problem is that contracts rewards regularity more than quality, and I’m not always equally good. Some pieces earn your attention. Some don’t. A flat monthly charge asks you to subsidize my off weeks the same as my best ones, and that’s not a deal I’m comfortable asking you to honor anymore.

What I’d rather do is let you decide, piece by piece, whether the work earned something from you. That feels more honest on both sides.

But there’s a second reason, and it matters more to me than the money question.

I’ve noticed something troubling in the year I’ve been here. Substack, for all its virtues, tends to reward writers who build tribes. Gather your people, serve their priors, confirm what they already believe. That’s the model that converts readers to subscribers and subscribers to income. I understand it. I’ve felt the pull of it. And I don’t want it.

Light Against Empire was never meant to be a silo. I write about power, about civic life, about what this country is and what it still might be. That subject requires me to listen across disagreement, not just to the people already nodding along. If I’m going to write about reunifying a fractured people, I can’t build a wall around my readership and charge admission to cross it. That’s a contradiction I’m not willing to live with.

Someone who disagrees with me should be able to read me without paying me for the privilege of being challenged. That’s not charity. It’s just the logic of the thing.

There’s also the plain fact that people are drowning in subscriptions right now. Seven dollars here, twelve there, it adds up fast and the guilt of canceling things you barely read adds up too. I’d rather remove myself from that pile entirely. Come when something I write is worth your time. Don’t come when it isn’t. That’s a healthier arrangement.

And honestly, there’s an older tradition I want to align with here. The pamphleteers, the essayists, the writers who put their ideas into the public square because the ideas belonged to the public. Writing meant to help people think shouldn’t have a cover charge. I’m not Thomas Paine and I know it, but I can at least try to hold to that spirit.

What’s Coming Instead

I’m setting up a Ko-fi page. If you read something here that you think was worth a few dollars, you can go there and leave one. Completely voluntary. No obligation, no guilt, no monthly clock ticking. You decide what the work earned, when it earns it.

I’ll include a link at the bottom of pieces when I remember to, and I’ll probably forget sometimes. I’ve never been good at asking for things. My mother would confirm this without hesitation.

The writing comes first. It always has.

One Last Thing

I want readers who are here because the writing is useful to them, not because they once clicked a button and forgot to cancel. I want people who disagree with me to feel as welcome as people who don’t. I want the work to earn its keep one piece at a time.

That’s the whole of it. Thank you for reading. Thank you for a year of it. I hope you’ll keep reading, freely, on your own terms. Oh, and just because I am turning off my subscriptions, well, I’m still choosing to pay for the good writing of others.

Dino

Further Reading:

WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN If you've ever stayed inside something longer than you should have, a church, a community, a political tribe, because the cost of leaving felt too high, this essay names that experience without judgment. It doesn't ask you to leave anything. It asks you to look honestly at why you walked in, and what that tells you about the person standing across from you who hasn't left yet. Written from a life of successive departures, it's the most quietly political thing on this page, and it never mentions a party once.

Light Against Empire is free for all. I write on American foreign policy, political accountability, and the lies of “Empire.” If my words have value to you and you’re in a position to help, you can chip in with a monthly or yearly donation. It takes time, energy, and resources to keep Light Against Empire running. Your support keeps the writing alive, the lights on, and the fire burning. Thanks!

Subscribe now

Further Listening:

"I live my life in widening circles that move out over the things of the world." — Rainer Maria Rilke

The American Legion bar is the civilian cathedral for the military mind. The same people occupy the same stools with the quiet authority of pew holders at Sunday mass. The bartender presides from behind the rail, confessor and oracle in equal measure, reading the room the way a good chaplain reads a congregation. Officers drift in and out checking the temperature of their flock. The place doesn’t feel happy exactly. It feels safe. And I sat there long enough to understand that those aren’t the same thing, that safety without honesty is just a more comfortable cage, and that I’d spent a significant portion of my life building and then vacating exactly these kinds of structures, each one promising connection, each one delivering belonging of a kind, the kind that requires you to check most of yourself at the door.

My life has been about the lessons of leaving. The Catholic Church first, in my early teens, when the doctrines began to feel like walls rather than windows. Then the bright, seductive world of 1970s spirituality, channelers and spirit guides and the palpable evidence of the afterlife, which I’ll return to in a moment because it deserves more than a sentence. Then a Protestant church in the 1980s. That one I entered not from conviction but from need, which is the most honest thing I can say about it. I knew something of what I was walking back into. I went anyway, because the need doesn’t negotiate with what you know, and because there’s a particular loneliness in having left one shelter without yet understanding that you’re capable of standing in the open. And finally the Legion, after twenty years of military service left me standing in civilian life looking for something that could hold what the military had held, and finding only an imitation of it, a costume worn in the shape of the real thing.

The need for belonging doesn’t care what you know. It doesn’t negotiate with your skepticism. It simply persists, and it’ll accept almost any vessel that presents itself, because the need itself, and this is what took me decades to understand, is the one thing that never betrays you. Not the church. Not the channeler. Not the post, with its bar and its officers and its careful simulation of mission. The need is faithful even when everything built to answer it is fraudulent.

But I want to tell you about the channeler, because that story contains everything.

It was the early 1970s. The room was dim enough that you could see the outline of the man but not much more. He sat in a chair, body occasionally seized by spastic movements meant to signal a spirit taking physical hold, and from that chair he channeled a Native American chief, wise and gently humorous, who addressed people directly, calling them out for their value, locating something in each person that felt specific and true. When he turned his attention to my mother and told her that her son had been a great chief in a former life, I felt the words land in her before they landed in me. I watched something in her face open with a pleasure that was entirely about love for me and nothing else. I was perhaps fifteen. That was the hook. Not my vanity but hers. Not my need to be special but her need for me to be.

A year or two later, older and quieter in my conviction, I sat in another dim room and heard a different channeler say the same words to a different mother about a different child. The rose colored glasses didn’t fade. They shattered. And what I understood in that shattering I’ve spent the rest of my life learning to say plainly: we’re most completely captured not when someone flatters us, but when they flatter us through the people we love. Every institution worth its salt knows this. The church knew it. The Legion knew it. The dim room knew it. You’re never just a member. You’re a son, a father, a veteran, a believer, and leaving means dragging all of those identities toward a door that was never built wide enough for all of them.

Every room I’ve ever left was full of people doing exactly what I was doing when I walked in. Looking for cover. Not cover from enemies or hardship or the specific difficulties of a life, but cover from the exposure of being fully known and still accepted. We dress it differently depending on the room. We call it faith, or fellowship, or patriotism, or enlightenment. But underneath every banner and every doctrine and every dimly lit room is the same animal need. We’re afraid. Not just of dying, though that too, but of the smaller deaths that arrive daily. The social death of being seen without your costume and found wanting. The spiritual death of admitting that the map you’ve been following was drawn by someone who needed you dependent. The moral death of admitting you stayed longer than you should have, and that the room changed you in ways you’re still accounting for.

We’re all, every one of us, negotiating the distance between who we actually are and who the room requires us to be. And we’ll pay almost any price to avoid closing that distance, because closing it means standing in the open with no banner between you and the next person, nothing to hide behind, nothing to hide behind them either. Just two human beings attempting to see each other clearly across a space that’s never been as wide as we’ve made it.

I’m not a young man anymore and I no longer have the patience for the banner or the bar stool or the dim room. But I haven’t lost my patience for the need that drove me into all of them. That need isn’t weakness. It isn’t gullibility. It’s the most human thing about us, more human than our politics or our doctrine or our tribe, because it precedes all of those things and will outlast them. The person on the other side of whatever divide you’re contemplating right now walked into their room for the same reason you walked into yours. They’re warm inside it, as you were warm inside yours. They’re afraid of what leaving costs, as you were afraid, as I was afraid, every single time.

You can’t argue someone out of a room they entered through need. You can only stand outside it, in the open, and refuse to pretend you were never inside one yourself.

In the end, our soul is the only sanctuary we can afford.

Light Against Empire is free for all. I write on American foreign policy, political accountability, and the lies of “Empire.” If my words have value to you and you’re in a position to help, you can chip in with a monthly or yearly donation. It takes time, energy, and resources to keep Light Against Empire running. Your support keeps the writing alive, the lights on, and the fire burning. Thanks!

Subscribe now

Further Reading:

She spoke to the FBI four times. That’s not an allegation or an inference. It’s documented in an FBI Serial Report and in the Maxwell discovery material logs, both of which are in the public record. She was approximately thirteen years old when the incident she described occurred. The year was 1983. The FBI took what she said seriously enough to forward the lead to its Washington headquarters, to include her account in an internal slide deck circulated among investigators under the heading of prominent names. Four interviews. Fifty-three pages of documents and notes, tracked through serial numbers stamped on the government’s own filing system.

Only the first interview is in the public database. That interview doesn’t mention Donald Trump.

The other fifty-three pages aren’t there.

You were promised those pages. Here’s what happened to them.

June 2024. Fox News. Rachel Campos-Duffy asks Donald Trump directly whether he’ll release the Jeffrey Epstein files if elected president. He says yes. September 2024, Lex Fridman’s podcast, a larger audience, the same question. He says it again. These weren’t vague campaign promises. They were specific commitments, made on camera, to an electorate that wanted those files by margins that cut across every partisan line in American politics. Seventy-four percent of Republicans. Seventy-eight percent of independents. Nine in ten Democrats. The promise wasn’t risky. It was the easiest thing he said in the entire campaign, because the hunger for it was genuine and broad and the powerful men whose names were in those files couldn’t exactly campaign against it.

He won. He came back to power. And then the management began.

To understand what happened to the Epstein files, you have to understand what the files actually are, and what they were always understood to contain.

Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted sex offender who ran a trafficking network that moved underage girls to powerful men across three decades. He operated properties in Manhattan, Palm Beach, New Mexico, and two private islands in the US Virgin Islands. He built relationships with presidents, princes, financiers, academics, and heads of state with a patience and specificity that wasn’t accidental. He kept records. He kept photographs. He kept flight logs. He kept the kind of documentation that powerful men in his position keep because documentation is collateral, and collateral was the currency he actually traded in.

He died in a federal facility in August 2019, one month after being indicted, under circumstances the official record describes as suicide and a large portion of the American public has never fully accepted. The men who’d used his network were, with one exception, never charged. The one exception was Ghislaine Maxwell, his primary enabler, now serving twenty years. The men themselves walked.

The files that accumulated across two decades of federal investigation into Epstein and Maxwell represented the closest thing to a full accounting that existed. Survivors’ attorneys had described, in specific terms, FBI interview memorandums in which their clients named the men they’d been trafficked to. Flight logs. Financial records. Email correspondence. The infrastructure of a network that the government had investigated for twenty years and prosecuted almost nobody for.

This is what Trump promised to release. This is what 74 percent of his own voters wanted to see.

What they got requires some patience to describe, because the mechanism of what happened is the story.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House of Representatives 427 to 1. The Senate passed it unanimously the same day. The lone dissenting vote was a Republican congressman from Louisiana whose reasoning he didn’t explain publicly. Every other elected member of the United States Congress, from both parties, voted to force the release of the files. Trump signed the bill into law the following morning. He did it without reporters present.

The law was explicit in language that deserves quoting directly because the gap between the language and what followed is the whole essay. No records were to be withheld or redacted on the basis of, and these are the statute’s words, embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary. The law gave the Attorney General thirty days. December 19th, 2025 was the deadline.

What arrived on December 19th was this: heavily redacted documents, hundreds of pages entirely blacked out, including a consecutive 255-page series and a 119-page grand jury transcript. Within hours of posting, sixteen files disappeared from the public website without explanation. They couldn’t even hide what they were hiding without people noticing. Members of the public discovered within days that copying and pasting the blacked-out text into other applications revealed what officials had intended to conceal. What spread across social media was information about the trafficking network’s members and methods that the Justice Department had specifically decided you shouldn’t see.

The failures ran in both directions simultaneously, which tells you something about the priorities at work. Perpetrators were shielded. Survivors were exposed. Forty-three victims’ full names appeared unredacted in the files. Home addresses were visible in keyword searches. Attorneys for survivors called it the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in American legal history. The Justice Department had been given a list of 350 victims on December 4th, three weeks before the release, specifically so their names could be protected. It didn’t perform a basic keyword search to verify that it had done so.

The men whose names were in the files as potential perpetrators were redacted. The women whose names were in the files as victims weren’t. That asymmetry isn’t an accident of bureaucratic sloppiness. It’s a set of choices made by named people with legal authority over a defined process. Someone decided which names needed protection. The decision they made is documented in the output.

By early January 2026, less than one percent of the files had been publicly released, according to a DOJ letter to Congress. The administration that had promised transparency was administering a document management process that was, by the government’s own accounting, 99 percent incomplete five weeks after the legal deadline had passed.

Then came the releases in waves, a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, culminating in a January 30th dump of over three million pages that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced at a press briefing with language worth examining. The department had complied with the act, he said. There was no protecting Trump. When asked directly whether the files had been managed to shield the president, he said: “I think that there’s a hunger or a thirst for information that I do not think will be satisfied by the review of these documents. And there’s nothing I can do about that.”

Read that sentence again. The deputy attorney general of the United States, at a press briefing about the release of files documenting decades of child sex trafficking, told the American public that their appetite for accountability was a problem he couldn’t help them with.

He also wasn’t telling the full truth about the three million pages. The DOJ acknowledged that six million pages potentially qualified as responsive to the law. It released half. Nearly three million pages were withheld, the department said, for stated reasons: the presence of child sexual abuse material, the obligation to protect victims’ rights, ongoing investigations, foreign language documents, and materials sealed by judges.

Each of those is a legitimate category of exemption. Here’s the problem.

The specific serial numbers stamped on the documents in the Epstein files database don’t lie. And NPR, tracking those serial numbers through FBI case records, Maxwell discovery logs, and the files themselves, found the gap I described at the start of this essay. A woman had accused Trump of sexually abusing her when she was approximately thirteen years old. The FBI interviewed her four times. Only the first interview, which doesn’t mention Trump, is in the public database. Fifty-three pages of interview documents and notes, catalogued by the Justice Department through its own filing system, aren’t there.

The law said no records withheld for political sensitivity including to any government official. The President is a government official. The fifty-three missing pages contain interviews about allegations against the President. The law that the President signed said those pages couldn’t be withheld for his protection.

They were withheld.

Now watch what the Attorney General said about it.

February 11th, 2026. Pam Bondi sits before the House Judiciary Committee. Representative Ted Lieu shows video footage of a younger Trump at a party alongside Epstein. He asks whether underage girls were present. Bondi says: there’s no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime. Not no verified evidence. Not no charges have been brought. No evidence. Full stop, under oath, before Congress.

At the moment she said it, the FBI files under her authority contained four rounds of interviews with a woman who said otherwise. Three of those interview sets were offline. The first, which doesn’t mention Trump, wasn’t. Bondi told Congress there was no evidence. The evidence was in her building. The serial numbers that would let you find it were in documents her department had already released.

Two Democratic congressmen, Ted Lieu and Dan Goldman, sent a formal letter to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche calling for a special counsel investigation of Bondi for perjury. The letter cited the specific 21-page internal DOJ slideshow summarizing witness testimony that had already been released, testimony that directly contradicted the statement she’d made under oath.

Bondi didn’t retract the statement. She doubled down.

The House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena her. The vote was 24 to 19. It passed with Republican support, including a motion brought by Republican Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who said publicly that the Epstein case was one of the greatest cover-ups in American history, that videos were missing, audio was missing, logs were missing, and that the DOJ was more focused on shielding the powerful than delivering justice. These aren’t the words of a Democrat looking for opposition ammunition. They’re the words of a Republican member of the House Oversight Committee describing her assessment of a Justice Department run by a Republican Attorney General serving a Republican president.

Then there’s the detail that requires its own paragraph because it’s not a secondary fact. It’s the thing that tells you what the architecture is.

When members of Congress visited secure DOJ facilities to review the unredacted Epstein files, the Justice Department was logging their search history. Representative Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, went public with it. The department under review was recording what the reviewers were reading.

Garcia also called for Bondi to resign after learning that the same release that withheld fifty-three pages of interviews about allegations against the President had exposed the identities of dozens of survivors who’d never been publicly linked to Epstein. He described it as doxxing. The attorneys who’d spent years protecting those women used the same word.

Here’s where a fair reader pushes back, and the pushback deserves its full hearing.

The allegations against Trump in the Epstein files are, as the Justice Department correctly notes, unverified. The FBI marked most tips from its National Threat Operations Center as unverifiable or not credible. Trump’s never been charged with any crime related to Epstein. He’s denied knowledge of Epstein’s criminal conduct. His name appears thousands of times in the released documents, and the large majority of those appearances are references in news articles, gossip emails, and political commentary, not criminal allegations. The women who’ve gone public as Epstein survivors haven’t accused Trump of wrongdoing.

Go further. Grant the argument its full weight. The DOJ was managing an archive of six million pages, under extreme public pressure, on a deadline that gave them thirty days for a job that would reasonably take years. Redaction errors at that scale aren’t automatically evidence of intent. The department was simultaneously trying to protect victim privacy and meet a statutory deadline and respond to congressional oversight and manage an unprecedented document release. Institutional chaos produces exactly the kind of asymmetric errors, perpetrators protected here, victims exposed there, that appeared in this release. The chaos explanation isn’t nothing.

What the chaos explanation can’t account for is the serial numbers. The way NPR tracked the missing pages didn’t depend on the content of the allegations. It depended on the government’s own filing system. The gap exists whether the underlying allegations are true or false. You can explain away redaction inconsistencies as sloppiness. You can’t explain away a sequential gap in a federal filing system as anything other than a decision. Someone decided those fifty-three pages stayed offline. The law said that decision was illegal if it was made for political reasons. The pages that are missing are the pages about the president. Those two facts sit next to each other in the public record and they don’t resolve into coincidence no matter how long you look at them.

The question was always who decided what you were allowed to see. And what they decided is in the arithmetic.

The receipt arrived on schedule.

The Iran war started February 28th, 2026. The Epstein files had been the dominant accountability story of January and February. NPR’s investigation into the missing pages published February 24th. The Bondi subpoena passed March 4th, six days into the war, when the American news cycle was entirely occupied by missile strikes and Khamenei’s death and regional escalation. The hearing that would’ve put the Attorney General under oath about what she withheld and why had to compete with a shooting war for oxygen. It didn’t win that fight.

The sequence is: investigation published February 24th, bombs fall February 28th, subpoena passes into a news cycle that can’t hear it on March 4th. Make of that sequence what you will. What I’ll tell you is that it worked.

The communications of Bondi, Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel are almost entirely absent from the Epstein library. All three spoke extensively and publicly about the Epstein files before and after taking their positions. Their internal communications about the case should, under the broad scope of the law, appear throughout the database. They don’t. A formal watchdog complaint reached the only conclusion the evidence supports: those communications have been withheld, destroyed, or redacted beyond traceability.

The people who managed the release of the files aren’t in the files.

A thirteen-year-old girl in 1983. A woman who told that story to federal investigators four times across four separate interviews. An internal government slide deck that treated her account seriously enough to circulate it under the heading of prominent names. Fifty-three pages the government’s own filing system says exist and the public database says aren’t there.

She’s the human center of what this essay is about. Not the serial numbers. Not the subpoena. Not the perjury accusation. Not the search history surveillance. Those are the mechanisms. She’s the reason the mechanisms matter.

The men whose names were in those files were protected. Her name, and the names of dozens of women like her, weren’t. The department doxxed the survivors and sealed the perpetrators and told Congress under oath there was no evidence and logged the search histories of the people who came to check.

You were promised the files. You got half of a six million page record, managed by the people whose names should’ve been throughout it, redacted by a process that protected the powerful and exposed the powerless, overseen by an Attorney General who told Congress under oath there was no evidence while the evidence sat in her building.

The man who made the promise is the reason you don’t have them.

The asymmetry is the message. Perpetrators redacted. Survivors exposed. Fifty-three pages missing. One woman, approximately thirteen years old, in 1983, who told the FBI what happened four times and whose words the government of the United States decided you weren’t allowed to read.

That decision was made by someone. That someone works for the man who promised you the files.

The receipt is still coming. When those fifty-three pages surface, in a courtroom or a contempt proceeding or a leak or a subsequent administration, the question attached to them will be the same question it’s always been.

Not just what’s in them.

You already know who decided you couldn’t see.

Light Against Empire is free for all. I write on American foreign policy, political accountability, and the lies of “Empire.” If my words have value to you and you’re in a position to help, you can chip in with a monthly or yearly donation. It takes time, energy, and resources to keep Light Against Empire running. Your support keeps the writing alive, the lights on, and the fire burning. Thanks!

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Further Reading:

This is a companion piece to “Relax, its Just Another War” (attached at bottom)

Start with the children, because that’s where the accounting must start.

By the time the Iran war consumed the world’s attention in February 2026, more than 50,000 Palestinians were confirmed dead in Gaza. The actual number was almost certainly higher. Bodies were still under rubble that hadn’t been cleared. Hospitals that might have counted them had been bombed. Among the dead: Hind Rajab, six years old, killed in her family’s car while calling a Palestinian Red Crescent dispatcher for help, surrounded by the bodies of her relatives. The dispatcher kept the line open for hours after she went silent. The United Nations called it one of the fastest accumulations of civilian death in the post-World War II record. Entire family lines had been erased. Aid workers. Journalists. Doctors. Children who hadn’t learned to read yet.

Then the Iran war started. And Gaza left the front page.

That’s not an accident. Here’s why.

To understand what happened in Gaza, you must start not in Gaza but in an Israeli courthouse in 2023, and with a man who needed a war more than he needed almost anything else.

Benjamin Netanyahu was on trial. Three separate corruption cases, charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, were grinding through the Israeli legal system. His governing coalition was the most far-right Israel had ever produced, held together by ministers who had publicly called for the annexation of the West Bank and described Palestinian civilians as legitimate military targets. The streets of Tel Aviv had been filling every Saturday for months with the largest protests in Israeli history, hundreds of thousands of people opposing his judicial overhaul, a plan critics said was designed to give a sitting prime minister the power to escape legal accountability. A quarter of Israeli military reservists had threatened to stop reporting for duty. His approval ratings were in collapse.

He was a man whose grip on power was loosening in ways that no amount of political maneuvering was going to stop. The legal machinery was patient. It would eventually reach its verdict.

Then October 7th happened.

Twelve hundred Israelis were killed in a single day. It was the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust. Hamas’s attack was real, its horror was real, and Israel’s right to respond was broadly recognized internationally. Nobody who looks honestly at October 7th can pretend it was a manufactured pretext. It was a massacre.

What happened afterward is where the questions live.

The military response that followed exceeded any proportional security objective within the first weeks and kept escalating for over two years. The death toll crossed 20,000, then 30,000, then 50,000. The majority were civilians. Gaza’s hospitals were struck. Its water infrastructure was destroyed. Its universities were rubble. The World Food Program described famine conditions. The International Criminal Court opened criminal investigations and issued arrest warrants for individuals, Netanyahu among them. Separately, the International Court of Justice, which hears cases against states rather than individuals, began proceedings under the Genocide Convention brought by South Africa. Both the man and the country he led were being held to account in two different courts under two different bodies of international law simultaneously. Dozens of countries filed supporting briefs. European governments moved toward recognizing Palestinian statehood. Arab American voter registration surged in Michigan and Minnesota. Democratic incumbents faced primaries over their votes on military aid. American public opinion, particularly among voters under forty, was shifting in ways that hadn’t cost politicians this kind of concrete electoral price since Vietnam.

Netanyahu’s corruption trial, meanwhile, was repeatedly disrupted and delayed by wartime emergency provisions.

Hold that fact a moment.

A man on trial for corruption, who needed the legal proceedings against him suspended, found himself leading a war that suspended them. He needed that war to keep running long enough for the political and legal terrain to change around him. And the war kept running.

This is where the second man enters.

Donald Trump in 2023 was facing 91 felony counts across four separate criminal indictments. The January 6th case. The classified documents case. The Georgia racketeering case. The New York business fraud case. He was the most legally exposed presidential candidate in American history, trying to return to the most powerful office on earth. He needed foreign policy wins. He needed to look decisive and indispensable on the world stage. He needed allies who understood the particular pressure of being a powerful man with the legal system closing in, and who would act accordingly.

Netanyahu was one of the few world leaders who understood that pressure from personal experience.

Their relationship predated October 7th by years. Trump had moved the US embassy to Jerusalem. He’d recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He’d withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal. He’d brokered the Abraham Accords. Each of these was a gift with limited American strategic justification and enormous personal value to Netanyahu. The relationship wasn’t standard diplomatic alliance. It was ideologically fused and personally reinforcing in ways that blurred the line between national interest and individual survival.

When Trump returned to office in January 2025, Netanyahu had an American partner who didn’t ask inconvenient questions about civilian casualties and who shared a specific interest in keeping Iran in the news and Gaza off it.

Watch what followed.

June 2025. The Twelve-Day War. A joint US-Israeli operation that struck Iran’s nuclear facilities and severely damaged its proxy network. It degraded Hezbollah. It weakened Hamas’s resupply lines. It hit the Houthis. Each Iranian-aligned force that had given Gaza any regional diplomatic leverage was methodically reduced. The strikes were framed as anti-proliferation operations. They were also the military preparation for what came next.

Late 2025 into early 2026. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly acknowledged that Washington had engineered a dollar shortage in Iran, deliberately crashing the rial and stoking the protests that killed thousands of Iranians in January 2026. That acknowledgment came without apparent embarrassment. Economic warfare against a civilian population, designed to generate internal unrest, stated openly as policy.

February 6, 2026. Iran and the United States sat in Oman for indirect nuclear talks. Iran’s foreign minister called a deal within reach. A second round was scheduled in Geneva. Then on February 23rd, Netanyahu called Trump personally to tell him where Khamenei would be meeting his senior advisors and what time.

On February 28th, the bombs fell. Khamenei was killed. The Iran war started. And Gaza, the ICC proceedings, the genocide case, the shifting public opinion, the concrete electoral costs of supporting Israel’s conduct, all of it got swallowed by a regional war that reframed every subsequent Palestinian death as collateral in an existential conflict against Iran.

The ICC arrest warrants got quieter. The European governments that had been moving toward harder positions pulled back. The protest movement lost oxygen to the larger war. The Palestinian reckoning that had been building across three years of documented atrocity got administratively buried under new geography and new urgency.

Two men, each facing political death by different instruments, produced exactly the war that saved both. Netanyahu’s trial was suspended the same day the bombs fell. Israeli courts closed under emergency orders on February 28th, and as of this writing not a single hearing date has been rescheduled. Trump was a wartime president rather than a man whose name appeared in three million pages of sex trafficking documents. Israel was fighting for its existence against Iran rather than answering to international courts. The Epstein files vanished from the American news cycle the morning after the first strikes.

And there’s more to the Netanyahu legal story than suspension. Even before the war gave him a clean halt, February 2026 had been a graveyard of canceled hearings. The first week of that month: scrapped because Netanyahu flew to Washington for Iran talks with Trump. The third week: canceled when the presiding judge’s mother died. The final week: postponed for a state visit, followed by claims of unavailability for “security consultations” that were almost certainly final planning sessions for the attack itself. The trial had been made effectively impossible before the emergency orders made it officially so.

Then came the parallel maneuvers. In November 2025, Netanyahu formally requested a presidential pardon without admitting guilt. The Justice Ministry’s own review found the request “extremely problematic” and recommended against it. Netanyahu ignored the recommendation. On March 12, 2026, eleven days into the Iran war, he held his first press conference since the bombing began and called the trial an “absurd circus,” urging the Israeli president to “do the right thing.” Trump amplified the pressure directly, telling Axios he wanted Netanyahu to “focus on the war and not on the f*cking court case,” and calling the Israeli president who held pardon authority “disgraceful” for not acting. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s coalition advanced legislation to repeal the fraud and breach of trust charges he faced entirely, charges that appeared in all three of his cases.

Foreign Policy reported on March 10th that the driving force behind the Iran war was, and had always been, Netanyahu, observing that if the conflict ended well, he might avoid prison and cling to power through Israel’s fall 2026 elections. Former Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, not a man given to hyperbole, warned that Israel was “sliding toward dictatorship,” describing a strategy of flooding democratic institutions with so many simultaneous crises that gatekeepers exhaust their capacity to respond.

Here’s the strongest counter to everything I’ve written, because it deserves its hearing before I set it aside.

Iran’s nuclear program wasn’t imaginary. October 7th was not staged. Hamas did what Hamas did, and Israel was genuinely attacked. The proxy network was real, patient, and had been firing into Israeli territory for years. There are military planners, intelligence officials, and foreign policy analysts who had been arguing for years that Iran’s regional architecture needed to be confronted and that the window for doing so was closing. Some of them aren’t cynics. Some aren’t profiteers. Some are people who looked at the map and reached an honest conclusion that force was the only remaining language.

Grant them that. Grant them the full threat, the honest fear, the military logic.

What they can’t grant back is the trial postponements. The targeting phone call. The pardon pressure running parallel to the bombing campaign. The timing of the Iran war against the timing of the Epstein files and the House Oversight Committee summons. The way each military escalation served both men’s personal survival with a precision that legitimate security interests alone can’t fully explain. The fact that the people dying in the largest numbers weren’t the people who posed the threat.

The ICC case rested on a specific legal argument: that the conduct of the war, the targeting of civilian infrastructure, the blocking of humanitarian aid, the scale of civilian death relative to any plausible military objective, met the threshold of the Genocide Convention. That case was built from evidence, not politics. What happened to it wasn’t a legal rebuttal. It was a regional war that made the question feel smaller than the new emergency.

That’s not how justice works. It’s how justice gets buried.

The shovels were American.

The United States vetoed ceasefire resolutions at the United Nations. Not once. Repeatedly. American weapons were in the strikes that killed the civilians the ICC was counting. American diplomatic cover was the reason Israel could say, at every international forum, that the world’s most powerful democracy stood behind its conduct. American taxpayers funded it. American politicians calculated their positions in real time against their donor bases and their district demographics and their own career interests, and most of them kept writing the checks.

The American public, in documented polling, opposed the scale of civilian casualties. Majorities, sometimes large ones, said the war had gone too far. Protests filled American campuses and city streets for months. And then the election came, and the voters who said they opposed it returned to office the people who funded it, because they were also the people managing their tax rates or their immigration concerns or their own particular fear, and the Palestinians in the rubble got weighed against those things and lost.

That weighing happened in millions of individual minds, in the privacy of a ballot box, across the most powerful democracy on earth. It’s not a comfortable thing to name. It’s the thing that needs naming.

There’s a question I can’t stop returning to. When a government kills people in your name, with your money, over your stated objections, on a legal theory that the world’s courts found credible enough to investigate, and you return that government to power anyway, what exactly is the word for your relationship to what they did?

Not ignorance. We had the images. We had the casualty counts. We had the ICC warrants. We had Hind Rajab’s name. Six years old, calling for help from a car surrounded by her dead family, a dispatcher keeping the line open for hours after she went silent because there was nothing else left to do. We had her name and we knew exactly what it meant and we went back to our lives.

Not helplessness. We had votes. We had the ability to make politicians pay costs they didn’t pay.

The word sits just out of reach because we’ve spent a long time building a vocabulary designed to keep it there. We call it complexity. We call it geopolitics. We call it the lesser of two evils. We call it the necessary cost of regional stability.

Two men, each running from accountability, found one war that covered both their tracks. The dead were the price of that cover. And the rest of us paid the bill without being asked, then looked away before the receipt arrived.

The receipt is still coming.

Light Against Empire is free for all. I write on American foreign policy, political accountability, and the lies of “Empire.” If my words have value to you and you’re in a position to help, you can chip in with a monthly or yearly donation. It takes time, energy, and resources to keep Light Against Empire running. Your support keeps the writing alive, the lights on, and the fire burning. Thanks!

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Further Reading:

This is essay is the last part of Life After Leaving Church, a series focused on practical ways to rebuild meaning, structure, and care after stepping away from organized religion. You can find the audio in the podcast.

There’s a version of yourself you couldn’t have pictured when you left.

Not the version that was raw, that sat in the car outside the last service and felt the strange weightlessness of a decision finally made. Not the version that argued at family dinners or rehearsed old grievances alone on the highway. Not the version that tested every new friendship with questions that were really confessions.

I mean the version that woke up one ordinary Tuesday and realized the rebuilding had become, quietly and without announcement, a life.

You didn’t notice when it happened. There was no ceremony. One day the wound was still tender and the next you pressed on it and found something firm there instead. Not the absence of feeling. Something more like scar tissue, which is to say: healed, changed, and yours.

This is the last essay in this series. Nine essays brought us from the first disorientation of leaving to the slow, patient work of rebuilding what the institution once held for us. Rhythm. Ritual. Community. Conscience. The capacity to face mortality and raise children and belong to other people without a creed standing between us and them.

This one doesn’t ask you to rebuild anything.

It asks you to look at what you’ve already built and recognize it for what it is.

What the Anger Gave You, and When It Was Done

I stayed angry longer than I needed to.

I don’t say that as confession requiring absolution. I say it because I suspect you know the feeling, and because naming it honestly is more useful than pretending it didn’t happen.

The anger was real and it was earned. When a structure that shaped your identity, your calendar, your understanding of your own goodness turns out to have required more from you than it deserved, anger is the appropriate response. It does necessary work. It separates the harmful from the good. It names what was taken from you. It builds the case for having left, which you need in the early years, because the doubt comes in the night and it needs an answer.

But I noticed, eventually, that I was still building the case long after it was closed.

I was still correcting people who hadn’t asked. Still monitoring the religious language in a room the way you monitor a smell you distrust. Still organizing my identity around the departure rather than the destination. The church had stopped being my home. It had become my opponent. And an opponent still requires your attention. An opponent still shapes your days.

The moment I knew the anger had run its course was quiet. Someone mentioned their parish warmly, a small thing, a fundraiser or a music program, and I felt nothing in particular. Not the old sharpening. Not the need to qualify or correct. Just a person talking about a place they loved.

That neutrality was not indifference. It was something I hadn’t expected to feel and couldn’t have rushed.

It was the beginning of being free.

The Life That Grew While You Weren’t Watching

There was a fear underneath the leaving that I didn’t fully name at the time. The fear that without the structure, the community, the framework of meaning, there would simply be less. Less warmth in the week. Less weight to ordinary days. Less of whatever it was that made a life feel like it was going somewhere.

Parts of that fear were accurate. The early years are thinner. The rhythms disappear before you’ve built new ones. The people recede before you’ve found others. The language for what matters gets stripped away before you’ve grown your own.

But while you were doing the patient work this series asked of you, something else was happening.

The relationships that had been mediated through shared belief became something more honest. You stopped performing certainty for people you loved. You stopped managing the distance between what you said out loud and what you actually thought. And in that honesty, some of those connections went deeper than they ever could have inside the institution, where what you believed was always quietly on trial.

The practices you chose freely took on a weight that obligation never carried. A walk you protect. A meal you prepare with care. A Sunday morning that belongs to you. These don’t carry the authority of the sacred calendar. They carry something the sacred calendar couldn’t give you: your genuine, uncoerced presence.

And meaning, the thing you feared losing most, turned out to be less fragile than the framework that claimed to contain it. It was in the people you loved. In the work that required your full attention. In the ordinary acts of care and repair that fill a life and rarely get named but accumulate, over years, into something you could reasonably call a good way of being in the world.

The church said it owned these things.

It never did.

What You Chose to Keep

Leaving is not the same as discarding. That distinction took me a while to understand.

When we leave an institution we associate with harm, the first instinct is to put distance between ourselves and everything it touched. The language. The rituals. The habits of reverence. The moral seriousness. We suspect them all of being contaminated.

But contamination isn’t what happened. What happened is that a structure claimed ownership of things it didn’t create and couldn’t possess. Compassion doesn’t belong to any church. The hunger for community doesn’t belong to any creed. The desire to mark time, to let some moments be different from the ordinary stream, to sit with mortality honestly, to raise children with care and conscience, these are older than any institution and will outlast all of them.

What you’ve discovered, if you’ve done the work of these ten essays, is that you get to hold these things now without anyone’s permission. Not because a tradition handed them down. Not because an authority certified them. Because you looked at them honestly and decided they still served the life you want to live.

That is a different relationship to your own values than most people have. Most people inherit their moral lives without ever choosing them. You lost that inheritance, which was painful, and then you built something in its place, which was hard, and what you have now is yours in a way that given things rarely are.

That is not a small inheritance. It is the only kind worth having.

Who You Are Now

At some point, without your quite noticing, the story changed.

You are no longer someone who left church. That is not your defining characteristic, the headline of your self-description, the wound you lead with. You are a person living a life. A person who came to their values through a particular passage, as everyone comes to their values through particular passages, and who is now occupied with the ongoing, ordinary, serious work of living by them.

The people who love you have mostly stopped asking. The ones who couldn’t accept your leaving have either come around slowly or receded. What remains are the relationships that wanted you rather than a version of you that still fit the old mold, and those relationships have a quality that the others, for all their warmth, never quite managed.

If you have children, they know you as someone who takes goodness seriously without requiring their agreement. They’ve watched you sit with difficult questions and refuse to pretend to answers you don’t have. They’ve seen you act from conscience in the absence of supervision. Whatever they make of faith or its absence in their own lives, they’ve been shown that a serious life is possible without an authority certifying it. That will stay with them in ways you’ll never fully see.

And you yourself, in the honest accounting of a quiet hour, would probably say this: what you have now is not a diminished version of what you left. It’s a different life. Harder in some ways. More exposed. But more genuinely yours.

You traded certainty for honesty.

Most days, that trade holds up.

Practice

This is the last practice section in the series, and it asks something a little different from the others.

Set aside one quiet hour. Write, walk, or sit in silence. Choose one.

Bring these three questions with you, not to answer quickly, but to stay alongside:

What has changed in me since I left, and which of those changes do I want to carry forward?

What did I choose to keep, and does it still serve the person I am becoming?

What would I say to someone standing at the beginning of this journey, in the first raw season of the leaving?

You are not required to share any of this. The hour is yours.

When it ends, close it deliberately. Step back into your life.

That life is waiting. It’s the one you built.

* * *

Coda

I wrote this series because I know what it costs to leave.

Not in the abstract. In the particular. The specific Sunday morning when the calendar first opened up and felt wrong instead of free. The first Christmas that required invention rather than repetition. The first time a child asked a question about death and you had no borrowed answer to offer, only your own.

I know what it costs and I believe it was worth it.

Not because the life on the other side is easier. It isn’t. Not because the questions resolve. They don’t. But because there is a particular dignity in living a life that is actually yours. In holding your values by choice rather than by inheritance. In being honest with the people you love about what you believe and what you don’t. In standing in front of your own conscience without an intermediary and answering for yourself.

That dignity is the whole point.

It is, I would argue, everything the institution was trying to point toward and sometimes failed to reach.

If these essays gave you company in a passage that can feel very solitary, they did what they were meant to do. If they gave you language for something you were already living but hadn’t named, even better. If they sit on a shelf unread except for the one essay that found you on the right day, that is enough.

You don’t need a series to tell you how to live.

You’ve been figuring that out all along.

Be well.

Light Against Empire is free for all. I write on American foreign policy, political accountability, and the lies of “Empire.” If my words have value to you and you’re in a position to help, you can chip in with a monthly or yearly donation. It takes time, energy, and resources to keep Light Against Empire running. Your support keeps the writing alive, the lights on, and the fire burning. Thanks!

Subscribe now

Further Reading:

If you’ve been doing the work this series asked of you, this essay is where you stop rebuilding and start recognizing what you’ve built.

It doesn’t ask anything of you. It doesn’t offer another tool or practice or reframe. It simply stands beside you and says: look at what you’ve done. Look at who you are now. Look at how far the leaving actually was from where you are standing.

It’s for anyone who left church for serious reasons and stayed serious afterward. Anyone who traded certainty for honesty and has spent years finding out whether that trade was worth it.

Light Against Empire is free for all. I write on American foreign policy, political accountability, and the lies of “Empire.” If my words have value to you and you’re in a position to help, you can chip in with a monthly or yearly donation. It takes time, energy, and resources to keep Light Against Empire running. Your support keeps the writing alive, the lights on, and the fire burning. Thanks!

Subscribe now

Further Listening:

I wanted to believe this one was different.

The nuclear threat was documented. The International Atomic Energy Agency had spent years filing increasingly alarmed reports. Iran’s proxy network, Hezbollah threading rockets into northern Israel, the Houthis closing Red Sea shipping lanes, Iraqi militias picking off American personnel in ones and twos, was real, patient, and methodical. Ali Khamenei had spent thirty-five years building a regional architecture designed to make Iran untouchable by making everywhere else unstable. The case for action existed. I could see it. I gave it its due.

Then the bombs fell on February 28, 2026, and within forty-eight hours I recognized every single thing I was watching. Not from analysis. From memory.

I’d seen this before. We all had. That’s the problem. The problem with memory, though, is that most Americans have decided it’s optional. So let me use mine.

There’s a factory that builds American wars, and it’s been running without interruption since 1950. The product changes. The branding changes. The factory does not.

Korea was sold as a police action with defined UN objectives. It ended in a stalemate at roughly the same geographic line where it started, 36,000 Americans dead, and no peace treaty. That document still doesn’t exist seventy-five years later. Vietnam was sold as a firewall against communism, a necessary domino theory made real. The Pentagon Papers, leaked in 1971, proved the government had known for years the war was unwinnable and prosecuted it anyway, feeding body counts into a bureaucratic machine that needed the war more than it needed the truth. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, the trigger that opened the floodgates of full American involvement, was, in any honest accounting, fabricated. Fifty-eight thousand Americans died downstream of a lie told on a Tuesday in August 1964.

Iraq in 2003 brought the weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there, the al-Qaeda links that didn’t exist, and a PR campaign so polished that a seasoned secretary of state sat before the United Nations Security Council and presented satellite photographs as proof of a threat his own staff had doubts about. The Downing Street Memo, a classified British intelligence document that surfaced in 2005, recorded that Washington had decided on war and was “fixing intelligence around the policy.” Not the other way around. Afghanistan ran for twenty years, ate through trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, and ended with the Taliban back in Kabul, in possession of American military equipment, looking at cameras. The Afghanistan Papers, the government’s own internal interviews obtained by the Washington Post in 2019, showed officials privately admitting they had no idea what winning looked like while publicly insisting progress was being made.

Each of these wars came wrapped in urgency. Each had a villain we could picture. Each had a moment of national feeling, a rally, a resolution. Each one eventually revealed, at whatever cost, that the public justification and the actual machinery behind the decision were two different things operating in two different rooms.

Iran walked through the same door wearing the same coat. The only thing missing was the pretense of surprise.

Watch the sequence carefully, because the sequence is the argument.

On February 6, 2026, Iran and the United States sat down in Oman for indirect nuclear negotiations. Iran’s foreign minister described a “historic” agreement as within reach. A second round of talks was scheduled in Geneva. Diplomacy, for the first time in years, had real momentum. Then on February 24, two days before the bombs fell, Trump stood at the State of the Union and accused Iran of reviving its nuclear weapons program. American intelligence reports at the time assessed that long-range Iranian ballistic missiles capable of threatening the US were at minimum nine years away from development. The Pentagon later admitted Iran had moved much of its enriched uranium before the strikes even began. The Defense Intelligence Agency, in what the administration called a “political leak,” assessed the strikes set Iran’s nuclear program back by months, not years. The CIA director, a political appointee, then said the damage would take years to repair.

Two intelligence assessments. Directly contradictory. The more alarming one coming from the person whose job depends on the president’s confidence. Students of Colin Powell’s 2003 UN presentation will feel a familiar chill.

The war cost $11 billion in its first six days. Not over its lifetime. In its first six days. Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman: the weapons systems consumed across twenty distinct categories are their products, their contracts, their shareholder value. Defense contractor stocks moved accordingly the morning the bombs fell, as they always do, because the market understands the factory’s business model better than most voters care to.

Congress was notified shortly before the strikes, not consulted before them. The distinction matters constitutionally and was apparently irrelevant practically. A war powers resolution died in the Senate 53-47, along party lines, with one Democratic defection. The House rejected its version 219-212. Analysts noted the administration was treating old Iraq and Afghanistan AUMFs, authorizations passed in the aftermath of September 11, as blank checks for any military action any future president chose to take. As one legal scholar put it, Congress has ceded so much authority over war that it no longer knows how to reclaim it.

Trump said the conflict would last four to five weeks. Then he said he was prepared to go “far longer than that.” He said he’d know the war was over when he felt it “in his bones.” Fifteen days in, he’d bombed Kharg Island, through which most of Iran’s crude exports pass, and was openly threatening the island’s oil infrastructure if Tehran interfered with Hormuz shipping. The Strait was already effectively closed. At least sixteen oil tankers had been attacked. Gas prices hit a twenty-two-month high. The IEA released a record 400 million barrels of crude to stabilize global supply.

Four to five weeks. Right.

Now the part that the careful and credentialed are reluctant to say plainly, so I’ll say it plainly.

The day the House Oversight Committee called for Donald Trump to testify about his documented connections to Jeffrey Epstein, the bombs fell on Tehran.

That’s not an allegation. That’s a sequence of events.

In January 2026, the DOJ released over three million pages of Epstein-related documents under a transparency act Trump himself signed into law, in what now reads as a catastrophic miscalculation. The files implicated figures across governments and industries, reached into the British royal family, caused arrests, resignations, and international scandal. Documents in the release included a woman’s FBI statement describing assault by both Epstein and Trump when she was between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. Another account placed underage girls at a Trump golf course. The administration redacted names it was legally prohibited from redacting. It released roughly half the estimated total pages. Senator Merkley, whose bill created the transparency act, called the release a violation of its own law.

Google searches for “Epstein files” collapsed the day the war started. A poll of 1,272 likely voters, conducted March 6 through 8, found 52% believed Trump was at least partly motivated to attack Iran to distract from the Epstein scandal. Among independents, 52%. Among Democrats, 81%. Among Republicans, 26%. One in four members of his own base looked at the timing and drew the same conclusion.

Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, not a man given to Democratic talking points, called the strikes “acts of war unauthorized by Congress” and stated directly they were a distraction from the files. “Bombing a country on the other side of the globe,” he wrote, “won’t make the Epstein files go away.”

A former Israeli diplomat and strategic analyst told Al Jazeera that Trump’s approval ratings were the worst of his presidency, that the economic signs were darkening, and that the Epstein exposure was the most politically dangerous thing he’d faced. “He really needs a distraction in the form of a war,” the analyst said. “And if you look at searches on Google for the Epstein files, they’ve plummeted since this started.”

While the cameras pointed at Tehran, something else was disappearing from view. Gaza, which had been approaching a genuine international reckoning, with ICC proceedings building, global protest sustained, and public opinion in Western countries shifting in ways that were starting to cost politicians their seats, got absorbed into a wider regional war narrative that reframes every Palestinian death as collateral in an existential conflict. Netanyahu, facing elections potentially as early as June, called Trump personally to tell him where Khamenei would be meeting his advisors. The Israeli prime minister supplied targeting intelligence for the assassination of a sitting head of state to the American president. Two leaders, each in serious domestic political trouble, each needing a larger fire burning, produced exactly the larger fire they needed. That story has its own full telling and it’ll come. For now, note the timing. Note the beneficiaries. The factory’s always known how to run this play too.

Here’s where the honest case for this war lives, and it deserves a hearing before I dismantle it.

Iran’s nuclear program wasn’t imaginary. Its proxy violence wasn’t imaginary. Khamenei’s regime had spent decades making clear its intentions toward Israel, toward American influence in the region, toward any Arab government that moved toward normalization. The Twelve-Day War of June 2025 wasn’t manufactured. The protests Iran suppressed violently in January 2026, killing thousands of its own citizens, were real. There are serious people, not all of them cynics or profiteers, who believed military action was necessary and had believed it for years before the first bomb fell.

Grant them everything. Grant them the full threat assessment, the honest strategic rationale, the belief that diplomacy had run its course.

What they can’t grant back is this: the American public was owed a congressional debate and didn’t get one. It was owed coherent intelligence and got two contradictory assessments from a politicized process. It was owed stated goals with measurable endpoints and got “I’ll know it’s over when I feel it in my bones.” It was owed transparency about what it was paying for, $11 billion in six days on a trajectory of one to two billion dollars daily, and got press briefings.

The threat may have been real. The process was the same broken factory it’s always been.

As of this writing, at least 1,444 people are confirmed dead. The youngest was eight months old.

Which brings me to you. To us.

I’m not going to call us stupid. That’s too easy and it’s not true. Something harder is true.

We’re fluent in this now. We recognize the pattern while it’s happening. Fifty-two percent of likely voters looked at the Epstein timeline and the bombing timeline and reached their own conclusion without any journalist telling them what to think. Massie named it on day one. Merkley named it on day one. The Google search data named it in the aggregate behavior of millions of ordinary people who knew, on some level they couldn’t quite articulate, that something had just been switched off.

We saw it. We knew.

And the war powers resolution died 53-47.

That’s the number I can’t get out of my head. Not the casualty count, not the dollar figure, not the intelligence contradictions. Fifty-three senators, representing millions of people who in documented polling believed this war was at least partly a distraction from a child sex trafficking scandal, voted to let it continue without debate, without authorization, without an articulated endgame. No open oversight hearings were held. No public accounting was demanded. The Republican majority didn’t need the public’s permission, and the public didn’t make them pay for not asking.

We’ve passed through the phase where we’re deceived. We’re in a different phase now. We watch the mechanism operate, describe it accurately, commission polls about it, and then return the people who run it back to their offices with reliable regularity. We’ve decided, collectively and in practice if not in stated preference, that the cost of sustained political resistance is higher than the cost of the war. We’ve been making that calculation since Korea.

The factory that builds American wars doesn’t run on government appropriations alone. It runs on our willingness to be temporarily outraged and then permanently tired. It runs on the next news cycle and the one after that, our own exhaustion weaponized against us with a precision that by now should be called what it is: expertise.

At some point the question stops being “why do they keep doing this to us” and becomes something we’re less comfortable asking.

Why do we keep letting them?

The Iran war isn’t a failure of government. It’s a report card on us. The grade isn’t stupidity. It’s something closer to trained hope, the belief renewed every few years at a ballot box that this time the machine will behave differently. It never does. We keep believing it will. The people who run the factory have always known that. They built the factory around it.

Relax. We’ve seen this before. We’ll see it again.

Light Against Empire is free for all. I write on American foreign policy, political accountability, and the lies of “Empire.” If my words have value to you and you’re in a position to help, you can chip in with a monthly or yearly donation. It takes time, energy, and resources to keep Light Against Empire running. Your support keeps the writing alive, the lights on, and the fire burning. Thanks!

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Further Reading:

Opening Orientation

There is a particular quality to a Friday when the government has been partly shut down for twenty-seven days and the people who screen your luggage have not received a full paycheck. The machinery keeps moving. The conveyor belts run. The agents show up because they are classified as essential, and because most people who have spent a career in public service do not easily abandon their posts. But something has changed in the relationship between those workers and the institutions they serve, and it does not repair itself the moment a continuing resolution passes.

We are at one of those moments when what is visible and what is consequential are not the same thing. The visible story is the shutdown, the stalled Senate votes, the spring break lines at airports. The more consequential story is quieter: the accumulating precedent of what a federal government can ask its own workers to absorb, what it can ask the states to tolerate, and what it can do in American cities before the courts find a remedy that actually holds.

I have spent enough time watching institutions under pressure to know that the damage rarely announces itself cleanly. It arrives through erosion: a court order violated here, a contempt proceeding opened there, a funding stream withheld, a body camera never required, a shutdown extended one week past the point where everyone assumed reason would prevail. The perimeter exists because these accumulations matter, and because by the time they are visible to everyone, they have already reshaped the ground.

This edition tracks that ground across thirteen sections. The federal-state relationship over immigration has entered a new phase, not the surge phase, but the aftermath phase, which in some respects is harder to read and more durable in its effects. Canada is back at the trade table for the first time since October, but the table has changed. Greenland is no longer a provocation; it has become a negotiating position. And Europe is spending money on its own defense at a pace that suggests it has drawn conclusions about American reliability that no diplomatic communiqué will easily undo.

Read carefully. The week has been quieter than most. Quiet weeks are often when the architecture shifts.

Federal

The Shutdown at Twenty-Seven Days

The Department of Homeland Security has been operating under a funding lapse since February 14. The cause is not complicated: Senate Democrats refused to pass DHS funding without reforms to immigration enforcement, following the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, two American citizens shot by federal agents in Minneapolis in January. Republicans have resisted nearly every proposed reform. The Senate voted on a funding bill March 5. It failed, 51 to 45. Senator Fetterman of Pennsylvania was the only Democrat to cross over. The House passed a funding bill a second time, 221 to 209, then adjourned. Senate Republicans left for their annual policy retreat in Florida.

TSA workers are missing their first full paycheck today. They have been working throughout, classified as essential, required to show up, not required to be paid until the lapse ends. Union leadership has warned of call-outs. Spring break travel is underway. Airport wait times at major hubs have already surged. FEMA’s disaster relief funds are running low. The Senate Majority Leader acknowledged that from the floor last week. Global Entry, suspended February 22, was reinstated March 11, a concession designed to reduce public friction without resolving the standoff itself.

The White House has characterized the shutdown as the fault of Senate Democrats, framing the conflict as a choice between illegal aliens and public safety workers. That is the administration’s position, offered in its own language. What is factually clear is that 272,000 DHS employees are working essential functions without full compensation, that the impasse has outlasted most predictions, and that neither side has yet moved enough to produce a deal.

Executive Actions

A March 6 executive order directed the Justice Department to prioritize prosecutions of cyber-enabled fraud and transnational criminal organizations, and created a coordination cell within the National Coordination Center. A presidential memorandum was issued March 11. The FEMA Review Council was extended through March 25. No major new executive order had been confirmed as of this morning.

DOJ — Enforcement and the Courts

The Justice Department filed suit this week, alongside the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, against California’s electric vehicle mandate. The administration is using federal litigation to challenge state environmental authority across a broad front; this case will move through courts for years and will test the outer limits of federal preemption doctrine in ways that extend well beyond automobiles.

In Minnesota, the U.S. Attorney for the district, Daniel Rosen, was summoned to federal court in early March to show cause why his office and ICE should not be held in civil or criminal contempt for continued violations of court orders related to immigration enforcement. That proceeding is still active. The DOJ Civil Rights Division opened an investigation into Alex Pretti’s death. It has not opened one into Renée Good’s. That asymmetry has not gone unnoticed by her family, by the courts, or by the public record.

State and Federal Tension

The word that describes the current federal-state relationship most honestly is not conflict. It is divergence. The states are not simply resisting the federal government. They are building parallel legal architectures, some to protect their residents from federal enforcement, some to invite it. The divergence is accelerating, and it is doing so in ways that will be difficult to reverse when the political weather changes.

The 287(g) program, the formal mechanism through which state and local law enforcement agencies enter agreements to participate in immigration enforcement, stood at 1,519 signed memoranda as of March 12, spread across 39 states and two territories. That number is not in the headlines. It is in the infrastructure. It grows steadily, mostly without ceremony. This is how federal enforcement creeps into local enforcement. What about your county?

At the same time, legislatures in Illinois, New York, Colorado, and Oregon are advancing laws that would allow residents to bring civil suits against federal agents operating in their states. Illinois already has such a law on the books; the Trump administration has sued to block it. In Tennessee and Kentucky, legislatures are moving to make ICE cooperation mandatory rather than voluntary. The country is sorting itself, state by state, into two different relationships with federal immigration enforcement, and neither side is waiting for the other to finish.

A federal court ruled this week that there is troubling evidence ICE agents in Minnesota stopped people based on racial and ethnic identity. The court declined to issue an injunction halting those practices while the lawsuit proceeds. That ruling, finding the evidence troubling, stopping short of a remedy, is a precise measurement of where the law currently stands. Concerned. Documented. Not yet decisive.

California

The administration’s suit against California’s electric vehicle mandate is the most structurally telling federal action in the state this cycle. It is not primarily about automobiles. It is about the question of whether a state can set environmental standards more demanding than the federal floor, a question California has litigated and won before, and which the current administration is reopening with a different legal theory and a different Supreme Court.

California’s broader posture remains one of active legal resistance across multiple contested domains, funding conditions, immigration enforcement limits, environmental standards, and civil rights litigation. The state functions as the largest single node in the multi-state legal network pushing back against the current federal enforcement posture. That position has costs. It also has weight.

Minnesota

Operation Metro Surge is over. Border Czar Tom Homan announced the formal drawdown in mid-February. ICE is now down to 47 deportation officers in Minnesota, focused through the Criminal Alien Program on people with criminal records in jails and prisons. Customs and Border Protection pulled its last supplemental personnel on February 23. At the height of the operation, more than 4,000 federal agents were deployed across the Minneapolis region. They made approximately 4,000 arrests over two months.

Governor Walz said in February that the road back will be long. He said the trauma inflicted, across immigrant communities first, and then across the whole of the state, was unlike anything Minnesota had witnessed. That assessment is not rhetorical. Federal agents used tear gas, pepper spray, flashbangs, and long-range acoustic devices against protesters. Journalists were arrested at protest scenes. Dozens of those arrests were subsequently reduced to misdemeanors or dropped entirely, a pattern former federal attorneys described publicly as designed for intimidation rather than prosecution.

The Minnesota Legislature is returning to session. Democrats are preparing bills that would allow Minnesotans to sue federal agents in state court and protect renters whose households were disrupted by immigration enforcement. The racial profiling ruling this week adds documentation to the legal record without yet producing remedy. The contempt proceeding against the U.S. Attorney is live and moving. Chief District Judge Schiltz previously found that ICE violated at least 96 court orders in Minnesota since January 1. Judge Blackwell stated in early February that the overwhelming majority of immigration cases brought before him involved people lawfully present in the United States.

Those findings are in the record now. They were generated by the enforcement posture the federal government chose. Whatever comes next in Minnesota will be built on top of them.

Maine

Operation Catch of the Day ended in January. Senator Collins announced its conclusion. ICE quietly withdrew all immigration detainees from Cumberland County Jail and from Two Bridges Regional Jail around the same time, without explanation to either facility or to the press. DHS has not answered questions about why. The Trump administration has largely pulled back from using Maine as a detention center, though the underlying contracts with several facilities remain in place.

The Maine Legislature is now doing what legislatures do in the wake of a federal operation they did not invite and could not stop: it is building the legal structure for the next confrontation. A bill establishing state-level protections around sensitive locations, schools, churches, hospitals, courthouses, advanced in February. A proposed ban on local-federal immigration contracts was rejected this week by the Judiciary Committee, but only because the committee voted unanimously that the bill was unnecessary. A law Governor Mills signed last year, taking effect this summer, already does what the bill would have done. That law was cited by DHS when it launched the January operation, as a reason to come now, before the restriction takes effect.

As of yesterday, the ACLU of Maine filed suit against the City of Sanford for refusing to produce public records about local police cooperation with ICE and CBP under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act. One hundred and twelve other Maine agencies complied with identical records requests. Sanford did not. The suit was filed in Cumberland County Superior Court.

Maine holds its gubernatorial election this fall. Governor Mills has governed from a position of principled restraint, state-level limits on federal cooperation, public defense of due process, a refusal to characterize Maine as hostile to law enforcement while being unambiguous about what kind of law enforcement the state will not host. That position will be tested at the ballot box.

Canada

Trade talks between Canada and the United States resumed on March 6, the first face-to-face meeting between negotiators since October, when the Trump administration canceled talks over a Canadian government advertisement that used Ronald Reagan’s voice to argue against tariffs. The irony of that cancellation has not been lost on Canadians. The talks’ resumption is a fact. Whether it represents a change in underlying American posture is a separate question.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has said publicly that tariffs will be part of any eventual deal. The Supreme Court struck down the administration’s IEEPA-based tariffs on Canada in February. The administration responded by imposing a ten percent worldwide tariff under a different statutory authority the Court’s ruling did not reach. The tools change. The pressure does not.

Prime Minister Carney is simultaneously in Asia this week, India, Australia, Japan, pursuing the trade diversification his government began treating as a national priority when it became clear the old relationship with the United States could not be assumed. The U.S. share of Canadian goods exports fell to 71.7 percent in 2025, the lowest level since the early 1980s, before the original free trade agreement existed. Auto production dropped 5.4 percent last year. Both numbers will likely worsen before they improve.

An Angus Reid poll published March 11 found that 51 percent of Americans believe there should be no tariff on Canadian goods, up from 42 percent who said the same during the 2024 presidential election. Seventy-three percent of Americans hold favorable views of Canada. The gap between what the American public appears to want in this relationship and what the administration is doing with it is real, and it will be a factor in the midterm elections this fall.

Greenland

The January crisis has de-escalated. The framework discussed at Davos between President Trump and NATO Secretary General Rutte, Arctic security cooperation, an update to the 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement, a possible Golden Dome installation, remains the diplomatic structure in play. Two sources briefed on Rutte’s proposal confirmed at the time that it does not include sovereignty transfer. Rutte himself said that question did not come up in the meeting. Trump said the framework ‘gives us everything we needed.’ Those two statements cannot both be fully accurate, and both parties know it.

Denmark and Greenland have maintained a consistent position since January: everything is negotiable except sovereignty. Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen has called it a red line. Denmark has deployed elite combat soldiers trained in Arctic warfare to the island, with the Chief of the Royal Danish Army among them. The deployment is described as likely to remain for one to two years.

NATO members are now in active discussions about establishing a permanent Arctic mission — Arctic Sentry — modeled on the Baltic Sentry operation established in response to Russian pressure in the Baltic region. Germany proposed the structure. The conversation has moved from crisis response to institutional design. That is a change worth marking.

U.S. Special Envoy Jeff Landry has signaled he is engaging Greenlandic officials directly, bypassing Danish government intermediaries. That approach is consistent with the administration’s broader posture of treating Danish legal sovereignty over Greenland as a formality to be worked around rather than a political reality to be respected. The Greenlandic government has not asked for that approach. The Danish government has objected to it. The administration has continued it.

Europe

At the Hague Summit in June 2025, NATO allies agreed to a new spending commitment: 3.5 percent of GDP for core defense by 2035, with an additional 1.5 percent for broader security-related investment. Five percent total. The number would have been politically unreachable four years ago. It is now a formal commitment, submitted in annual plans, with the understanding that the American security guarantee cannot be assumed at the scale it once was.

The 2026 U.S. National Defense Strategy made explicit what the Hague commitment implied. Europe is no longer a priority theater for American conventional military primacy. The United States will remain in NATO, maintain its nuclear deterrent role, and provide high-end enabling capabilities. It will not underwrite European conventional defense by default. The strategy’s text spent more time describing internal European threats, EU overregulation, what it called civilizational erasure, than it did describing Russian aggression, which drove most of the European defense spending surge after 2022 and is largely absent from the document as a named concern.

Europe read that document. The response has not been public protest. It has been spending. France, Germany, the Nordic states, and the Baltics are moving fastest. Twenty-three of NATO’s 32 members now meet the older 2 percent threshold, a number that took a Russian invasion of Ukraine and years of American pressure to achieve. The current pace of change is faster, and the motivation is different. Countries are spending not because Washington asked them to, but because they have concluded that waiting for Washington is no longer prudent.

The coalition supporting Ukraine, started as a British and French initiative, now including 26 countries with a permanent headquarters in Paris and a coordination cell planned for Kyiv, has become the clearest expression of European security action that does not require American leadership to proceed. That coalition did not exist three years ago. Its existence now is itself an answer to a question the alliance has been asking since Trump’s first term.

No Material Change

No confirmed CDC national policy shift surfaced in this scan at a scale that alters the perimeter’s condition.

No confirmed Treasury action beyond standard sanctions activity and liquidity remarks rose to perimeter-level weight in this cycle.

No new Greenland-specific escalation in the last 48 hours beyond the diplomatic posture described above.

No new Inspector General report or Office of Legal Counsel opinion surfaced this week that alters the legal landscape described in recent editions.

What to Watch Next

Watch the DHS shutdown for the first signs of movement. The missing TSA paychecks today are the first concrete financial consequence the public feels directly, not as an abstraction, but as a longer line at the airport during the first week of spring break. If walkouts materialize, the pressure on the Senate changes in ways that may shift the vote count. If they do not, the standoff continues on its current terms.

Watch the Minnesota Legislature as it returns to session. The bills introduced in the first weeks will signal whether this session produces durable structural change, civil suit authority against federal agents, renter protections, accountability for racial profiling, or whether it produces legislation that passes one chamber and stalls. The contempt proceeding against the U.S. Attorney is live and could produce a ruling that matters before any bill does.

Watch the Canada-U.S. trade talks for any movement toward specifics. Greer has said tariffs are part of any deal. Carney’s simultaneous Asia tour signals Canada is not waiting for American goodwill to materialize. The CUSMA six-year review, now underway, is the clock that will eventually force decisions neither side wants to make under pressure. Watch what each side says publicly about what they need from the other.

Watch whether any court moves from finding troubling evidence of racial profiling in Minnesota to actually granting injunctive relief. The step from documentation to remedy is where the legal architecture of the last two months either begins to hold enforcement accountable, or confirms that documentation alone is not enough.

Watch the European defense spending commitments through the first annual reporting cycle. NATO allies agreed to submit plans showing a credible path to the new benchmarks. The first cycle of reports will separate the countries that backed their commitments with budgets from those that offered political declarations and moved on.

Developments to Monitor

Developments to Monitor includes credible early-stage developments that have not yet altered the perimeter but could reshape it if they grow. These items are tracked for the patterns they may represent, not for the immediate structural weight they carry.

State legislatures in New York, Colorado, and Oregon are advancing laws that would allow civil suits against federal agents, similar to the Illinois law the administration has already sued to block. If two or three of these laws are enacted and survive early legal challenges, the map of where federal enforcement faces civil liability will shift in ways that change agent behavior before any court issues a final ruling.

The DOJ and NHTSA lawsuit against California’s EV mandate is the clearest current test of how far the administration will push federal preemption of state environmental authority. The outcome will affect not just California but the scope of what any state can do on emissions policy for years to come.

The question of whether a SAVE Act attachment, requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, gets folded into any eventual DHS funding deal has not been settled. If it is attached to a spending package rather than brought to a standalone floor vote, it becomes law through the back door of appropriations. That path is worth watching.

Where This Leaves Us

I have watched institutions under strain long enough to know that the hardest moments to read are not the dramatic ones. They are the quiet Fridays, when nothing has broken but everything is being tested, when the courts are finding evidence without ordering remedies, when workers are showing up without full pay because they believe in the work, and when governments abroad are drawing conclusions about American reliability that they are not yet saying out loud.

This is one of those Fridays.

The perimeter holds. The DHS shutdown enters its fourth week. The Minnesota Legislature returns to session carrying the weight of two American citizens shot by federal agents in its largest city, court orders violated by the dozen, and an immigrant community that was told, in effect, that the rule of law applies to them differently than it applies to everyone else. Canada is back at the trade table because diplomacy requires presence, but Carney is in Asia because a serious government does not put all of its weight on a relationship that has proven unreliable. Europe is spending money it would rather spend on other things, because the lesson of the last two years is that waiting for Washington to recommit to the alliance is not a strategy.

None of that is collapse. Republics do not collapse on a Friday in March while the Senate is in recess and spring break travelers are checking their bags. They erode — through accumulated tolerance for exceptional measures, through institutions that find the troubling evidence and stop short of the remedy, through workers who keep showing up because they believe in something larger than the dysfunction around them.

What we owe those workers, and what we owe the record, is attention. Not alarm but attention. The difference matters. Alarm narrows. Attention widens. And in a week like this one, the wider view is the more honest one.

The perimeter holds. Keep an eye open.

Light Against Empire is free for all. If my words have value to you and you’re in a position to help, you can chip in with a monthly or yearly donation. It takes time, energy, and resources to keep Light Against Empire running. Your support keeps the writing alive, the lights on, and the fire burning. Thanks!

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Further Reading:

Why You Should Listen

Some elections are routine. Others feel like history holding its breath.

This essay uses the ancient myth of Pandora to explore a modern fear: what happens when citizens begin wondering whether voting still matters. With dark humor and philosophical reflection, it examines the danger not just of political power run amok, but of something quieter and more corrosive, civic exhaustion.

Democracies rarely collapse overnight. More often they fade when people decide participation is pointless.

Pandora’s jar reminds us of the real question facing the next election: not simply who wins, but whether citizens still believe the act of opening the ballot box matters at all.

Please Support the Work

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Subscribe now

Further Listening:

“Hope did not escape the jar. It waited to see if anyone would come looking for it.”

We’re staring at the jar again.

Everyone knows what escaped from it. Everyone’s got an opinion about what crawled out first. Some swear it was cruelty. Others insist it was arrogance. A few claim it was simply ambition wearing louder clothing.

Whatever the order, the contents are now running loose across the public square, shouting into microphones and arguing on television panels.

And here we are.

Staring at the jar.

Wondering whether there’s still anything inside worth reaching for.

Let’s begin with two facts that are about as subtle as a marching band in a library.

First, a very large number of Americans now view the current administration as rapacious, vindictive, self aggrandizing, and unusually relaxed about the old fashioned concept of human rights. Its interpretation of national prerogative often resembles the behavior of someone who’s just discovered the lock on the liquor cabinet was decorative and that international diplomacy can apparently be conducted with the tone of a late night argument in a sports bar.

Second, for many of those same Americans the administration represents something deeper than a bad government.

It represents the contents of Pandora’s box.

Rage.

Contempt.

Vengeance.

Vanity.

Cruelty.

Opportunism.

And the unsettling realization that the guardrails of a republic sometimes turn out to be made of plywood and crossed fingers.

Those perceptions are now circulating widely through the American bloodstream.

Because they exist, the next midterm elections have acquired a gravity midterms almost never possess.

Most midterms revolve around turnout models, suburban drift, and whether voters are irritated about inflation, gasoline prices, or the mysterious cost of eggs. Political consultants stare at spreadsheets with the intensity of medieval astronomers. Candidates practice smiling as if they genuinely enjoy county fairs and ribbon cuttings.

That’s not the emotional atmosphere this time.

For many citizens the coming elections feel less like routine maintenance and more like an emergency brake.

They see the ballot as the remaining lever of correction. Not the only one, of course. Democracies still contain other instruments of repair. Courts still exist. Legislatures still exist. Civil society still exists. A determined grandmother with a clipboard has saved more local democracies than most textbooks will ever admit.

But elections remain the largest lever placed directly in the hands of ordinary citizens.

Which brings us to Pandora.

The ancient Greeks had a remarkable talent for telling stories that feel disturbingly current. Their myths weren’t bedtime stories. They were warnings disguised as entertainment.

Pandora received a sealed jar from the gods. Inside it lived every misery humanity would one day encounter. Curiosity did what curiosity always does.

She opened it.

Out flew sickness, envy, cruelty, resentment, greed, violence, ambition, and several other emotions now commonly observed on political talk shows.

But something remained inside the jar.

Hope.

The Greek word was elpis. It didn’t mean cheerful optimism or motivational posters involving sunrises over mountain ridges. It meant the expectation that the future could still be shaped.

Hope remained inside.

Scholars have argued about that detail for centuries. Some think the gods left hope trapped as a final cruelty. Others think it remained available if humanity chose to reach for it.

Either way the myth carries a lesson.

When darker forces escape into the world, the survival of a society depends on whether citizens still believe their actions matter.

Which brings us back to the ballot box.

Democracies possess their own version of Pandora’s jar. It sits quietly in school gyms, courthouse basements, church halls, and county election offices that smell faintly of toner, paper, and civic obligation.

The ballot box.

Most years it behaves like an ordinary administrative device. Voters arrive, check their names, fill in a few circles, and leave with a sticker that implies democracy has just completed a cheerful arts and crafts project.

Ballots get counted.

Someone wins.

Someone loses.

Life continues.

But occasionally the ballot box becomes something else.

Occasionally it becomes mythic.

That’s where the country now appears to be drifting.

Across the United States a powerful narrative has taken hold. For millions of Americans the next midterm election has become the container of hope itself. It’s the moment when the forces they believe escaped Pandora’s jar might finally meet resistance.

If the administration they fear is restrained or replaced, the system will have corrected itself.

That’s the hope.

But there’s another possibility now circulating quietly beneath the public conversation.

What happens if the election doesn’t behave as expected?

What happens if the machinery of elections becomes contested territory?

What happens if results are delayed, disputed, or simply dismissed by those currently holding power?

These questions no longer belong only to political theorists or anxious graduate students. They now appear in ordinary conversations between neighbors, coworkers, and people standing awkwardly together in grocery store checkout lines.

The fear isn’t merely that one side might lose.

The fear is that the ritual itself might fracture.

And here the situation becomes almost darkly comedic.

The American republic was constructed specifically to prevent that outcome. The founders didn’t assume the country would be governed by angels. They’d spent far too much time around ambitious men to indulge that fantasy.

Instead they built a system designed to survive ambition, ego, corruption, and the occasional flamboyant narcissist who believed the entire government existed to narrate his personal greatness.

Checks.

Balances.

Courts.

Federalism.

Regular elections.

It was a remarkably durable design.

But even the most sophisticated political machinery depends on one ingredient that doesn’t appear anywhere in the Constitution.

Participation.

The system assumes citizens will keep showing up.

They’ll vote even when they’re tired.

They’ll vote even when candidates disappoint them.

They’ll vote even when politics resembles a traveling circus run by amateur jugglers, three rival prophets of doom, and one extremely angry goat.

In other words, the system assumes citizens will resist the most dangerous temptation in politics.

The temptation to opt out.

Authoritarian movements rarely succeed because they persuade everyone. That’s the dramatic version taught in history books. In reality they succeed through exhaustion.

They flood the public square with chaos.

They normalize behavior that once would’ve ended careers.

They make truth negotiable and outrage routine.

Eventually large numbers of citizens begin to feel a quiet corrosion in their civic spirit.

Why bother?

Why bother voting?

Why bother protesting?

Why bother defending institutions that appear already broken?

Why bother caring about the America of the founders when the present version sometimes resembles a reality show filmed inside a constitutional convention?

That quiet sentence has ended more republics than any invading army.

Why bother.

History is full of republics that didn’t fall with a bang. They faded. Citizens withdrew from public life. Politics became something ugly that happened somewhere else, to someone else, by someone else.

And power, once abandoned by the public, never stays empty for long.

And here the satire becomes unavoidable.

American politics has grown so theatrical that both sides now behave as if the republic will certainly end the moment the other party wins the next election.

One side shouts that democracy will die if their opponents remain in power.

The other side shouts that democracy will die if their opponents gain power.

Cable news shouts.

Social media shouts.

Everyone shouts.

Everyone predicts the apocalypse.

It begins to resemble two doomsday prophets arguing over who gets to set the alarm clock.

Meanwhile the most dangerous possibility slips quietly past the noise.

Citizens grow so tired of the shouting that they disengage altogether.

Which would be the final historical punchline.

After centuries of constitutional argument, revolution, civil war, civil rights movements, and millions of citizens participating in the experiment of self government, the American republic wouldn’t end solely through tyranny.

It would end through civic exhaustion.

Pandora’s jar wouldn’t need opening again.

We’d close it ourselves.

So the real test of the coming midterm elections isn’t simply who wins.

The deeper test is whether citizens continue believing participation matters even under conditions of fear and uncertainty.

Because hope in a democracy doesn’t arrive automatically.

Hope is manufactured through civic behavior.

You vote.

You organize.

You speak.

You refuse the seduction of despair.

The founders didn’t design a system that guarantees wise leaders or virtuous rulers. They designed one that allows citizens to correct mistakes.

That distinction matters.

A republic survives when its people treat the ballot box not as a magical device that fixes everything, but as a ritual that preserves the possibility of correction.

Pandora’s myth leaves us with an uncomfortable truth.

The darker forces of politics will always escape into the world. Human ambition guarantees that. Every generation produces individuals who believe power exists primarily to enlarge their own reflection in the mirror of history.

What determines the fate of a democracy is how citizens respond.

With vigilance.

With stubborn participation.

Or with withdrawal.

If the coming elections proceed normally, the republic will experience the familiar mixture of disappointment and celebration that accompanies democratic change.

If the elections are manipulated, contested, or ignored, the test will become far more severe.

At that moment Americans will face the choice hidden inside Pandora’s jar.

Whether hope remains something we keep alive through action.

Or something we leave sealed inside while we quietly walk away.

The ballot box, like Pandora’s jar, is a container filled with uncertainty.

But the greatest danger isn’t what may emerge when it opens.

The greatest danger is deciding it’s no longer worth opening the jar at all.

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Further Reading:

Leaving church often raises a quiet question many people hesitate to ask out loud: If the old beliefs are gone, what gives life meaning now?

This essay explores that question with honesty and calm clarity. It shows that meaning was never locked inside religious institutions. It has always lived in the way we love, care for others, build communities, and choose how to live.

If you’ve stepped away from faith and wondered whether life still holds purpose, this piece offers a reassuring perspective: the world is not emptier outside the church. In many ways, it is wider.

Please Support the Work

Light Against Empire is free for all. If my words have value to you and you’re in a position to help, you can chip in with a monthly or yearly donation. Your support keeps the writing alive, the lights on, and the fire burning.

Subscribe now