The scale of corruption is astounding, so I guess it’s maybe why you left out other major scams Trump did - pardoning various violent and nonviolent criminals for cash payments, pumping and dumping his own meme coins, selling access for donations, getting licensing fees for the airport that got named for him in Florida, as well as the Trump Library, which will cruelly be a hotel, forcing companies to give him stock for government bailouts, steering DoW contracts to his sons’ companies, using his son and law to do diplomacy which include side deals for his own business and much more.
It's a tough call, and maybe won't hold up against whatever we learn of hext, but for me personally the most enraging so far is the outright selling of pardons.
And not a peep about this from his own party. Or more importantly, FOX News.
Add Pedophile Protection to the corruption scandal. Trump2 + GOP are also blocking the release of the Epstein Files, of which something like 2.5 million documents remain.
Even on the left, all these deeds will be forgotten, and Bernie Sanders will tell us the real problem was the tech billionaires controlling the government (even though the tech billionaires are broadly against these immigration changes and tariffs).
The left is keeping records. The issue is going to be the cries of "lawfare!" and "we should look forward, not backwards" when we try to deal with them en mass.
A two-party state is the closest type of democracy to a one-party state, and exhibits a lot of the same flaws, including the fear that if your opponents get into power, "woe to the vanquished", which then inspires blind loyalty out of self-preservation.
Change the voting system and introduce something different. There are options. Each has its downsides, but they allow for more flexibility and don't harden the political field into two rocks banging against each other forever.
I don't think you're going to solve a cultural and economic problem with a mechanical voting change. I'm happy to consider alternative mechanical solutions, but they should be aimed at solving mechanical election problems.
These aren't completely independent phenomena, though. The current US mechanism wastes a lots of votes, thus creating a huge community of people who feel themselves effectively disenfranchised, especially in the states where the balance of parties exceeds some 40:60.
Majoritarian voting systems are, in general, practical for the politicians themselves, but at the cost of many people not being represented by someone who is at least approximately politically close to them.
So you're advocating a massive government change like a parliamentary system? That's not a voting mechanics or voting system change. That's a completely different kind of government. It solves some problems while creating others.
I was talking about a voting system change. Yes, the Congress would look different. It might also be revived a bit. As of now, it barely does what it was intended to do - act as a check on executive power.
The likeliest avenue for additional parties is RCV, which is already legal in many states. That instantly solves the "spoiler" effect and would let additional players join.
Nope, Ranked Choice Voting (more properly called Instant Runoff -- there are half a dozen other ways you could count ranked ballots) _does not_ solve the spoiler problem. It is only safe to vote for your "true favorite" candidate over your "lesser evil" candidate so long as your true favorite _is not competitive_. The moment your true favorite starts to stand a chance of actually beating the lesser evil, the spoiler problem returns, with a vengeance.
To understand this, consider a toy example. Say there is a town with 100 voters. It's election day, and so far the ballots look like this:
35 Right > Center > Left
16 Center > Right > Left
16 Center > Left > Right
31 Left > Center > Right
Right now if you tally the votes under IRV, Left gets bumped off, then Center wins in a landslide, with around two thirds of the vote (63-35).
But wait, that's only 98 votes. The last two voters show up, and they vote with the Left camp. So now Center gets bumped off, because he's still at 32, to Left's 33. And then when you split Center's votes... Right wins, 51-49. But the only change was a few more people trying to vote maximally against Right! Those last two voters would have been happier with the outcome if they had simply stayed home. What's more, it's still true that two-thirds of voters preferred Center over Right.
This kind of "Center Squeeze" election would be a fairly regular thing. Burlington, VT adopted IRV, immediately had a squeeze election, and then the ~60% of voters who had voted for the loser repealed the reform. (Then they recently adopted RCV/IRV _again_, because apparently nobody has any imagination.) We saw this kind of center-squeeze logic in play in the Louisiana primary where the moderate Republican got squeezed out between a prolifically corrupt Dem and David Duke, and actual KKK leader, in 1991. It's also how Mary Peltola ended up winning in Alaska, which led Alaskans to come within a couple tenths of a percentage points of abolishing their system. ( https://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_Ballot_Measure_2,_Repeal_Top-Four_Ranked-Choice_Voting_Initiative_(2024) ) We also had a near miss in San Francisco a few years back, where if the leftiest candidates had gotten just a couple dozen more votes over the center candidate, the election would've been thrown to the most-moderate candidate, exactly as in the toy example.
And then on top of that, ranked ballots get spoiled at a WAY higher rate than any system where your vote for each candidate is independent of your votes for the other candidates. Like, 10x worse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdPIauxbTtI
There are better options, like Approval (which was adopted in Fargo and Saint Louis, and is under consideration for the whole state of Maryland), or STAR Voting. Every election method requires some strategery, but not all are subject to the kind of dramatic, voter-enraging failure we get with IRV.
Yes, we need to adopt proportional representation wherever we can, to give alternate parties the possibility of gaining a toehold and seriously competing with the duopoly.
Personally I'm a fan of Sequential Proportional Approval voting, though I understand people don't love Approval ballots because they're not as expressive as ranked ballots. I think a good option might be to do SPA for a primary, and then for single-winner races do STAR Voting for the general. (Range/rating ballots are _even more_ expressive than ranked ballots, but have various practical and theoretical benefits.)
Hear what you're saying about "the vanquished," but actually multi-party systems that give proportional seats enable undue power to small parties, in order for the largest vote-getting party to rule via coalitions. For now, I don't see a good alternative to the two-party system.
At this point Trumps political capital lies in ruins. He is below 40% approval rating, only about 22% strongly approve, close to 50% strong disapprove, the Dems have an 81% chance to take the house despite all the gerrymandering, and the senate is now in open rebellion due to corruption and vindictive endorsements. I don’t think Trump is popular in any sense of the word.
What’s sadder to me is that many Americans seem numb or unsurprised by his behavior and have adopted a view that everything was corrupt and stupid anyway. Any accusation thrown at Trump as particularly inept or corrupt they will shrug and say “well Bush started dumb foreign wars anyway and he gave all my money to Wall St too, and America only cares about oil and corporations anyway and Biden made inflation bad” etc etc. As blatantly stupid and corrupt as Trump is there is a sizable portion of the U.S. population that doesn’t see this as a break from the norm but just the logical conclusion of what they saw as a corrupt system anyway. Many of my friends were convinced that major corporations were running the country under Biden through secret Washington slush funds and pressure campaigns. For them Trump has simply made the implicit explicit.
What we need to realize is that many Americans now no longer love or trust their country. They don’t look at the U.S.’s many incredible accomplishments or just the fact that we are a non ethnic creedal nation of yes immigrants. We don’t trust the words of Reagan anymore about who can become an American (anyone) and we don’t believe in our good nature. The right wing staffers have marinated in a soup of online extremism but the average American has marinated in a soup of mainstream negativity for decades. Endless stories of incompetence, corruption, and exploitation. Progressives are taught that America has always been a cruel empire extracting wealth from the world…Trump is no different he just doesn’t do it nicely but Bush was just as bad! This is of course nonsense but once you are convinced that everyone is lying and everyone is corrupt and everyone is out for themselves it’s hard to convince people anything is different. To combat Trump we must rediscover our own moral righteousness. We have to remind people what the U.S. did and should stand for not what it currently is acting like. That shining little city on a hill is worth fighting for but people have to believe it’s still there.
There’s an HST quote that applies here, only swapping out Nixon for the far more corrupt Trump: “the tragedy of all this is that … George McGovern, for all his mistakes, understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. “
I believe that you left out a very important set of policies that will immeasurably weaken and impoverish the US in the future. I'm referring to the near shutdown of biomedical research in this country. This had been a field where we where clearly the world leader. Combining that with the quack based attacks on the efficacy and safety of vaccines will permanently weaken the United States and make the population much sicker.
AI is one of the two areas of technology that I'm most skeptical of. The other is fusion. Both have been promised as imminent since I was a teenager in the 1960s, also flying cars. Biomedical research has experienced an actual revolution over the past thirty to forty years. That's why I thought it should have been more prominently in your excellent piece.
However, what should Democrats do if they manage to get in power.
Biden put in Merrick garland who did absolutely nothing to prosecute trump for January 6th.
You wrote a previous post about how Obama couldn't have gone after the bankers harder after the 2008 crash because they hadn't broken any laws.
The Supreme court has said that nearly everything Trump is doing is "legal".
Should a Democratic administration wait years to get a new supreme court ruling and then spend the next decade putting in little case after little case against various Trump officials.
Or...
Should they do some Lincoln era, "We need to save the Republic" and start throwing people in prison?
Trump and company's corruption needs to be front and center and visibly punished the moment Democrats take office.
(I also worry what is to be done about the various billionaires who gleefully helped Trump burn down the country in exchange for a promise to punch hippies and fat tax cut.)
Of course Obama could have gone after bankers harder in 2009. They were insolvent and needed cash. In the private sector, getting bailed out of bankruptcy comes with loss of control, including promised bonuses. Practically no real penalties were enacted against the companies that got the Great Recession bailouts.
Yes they should throw people in prison. Every other country does. We loose our legitimacy a little more every time we don’t. Billionaires included if they broke laws.
If, on the other hand, they actually did a good job governing, they could prevent Trump and his people from getting back into power. They never would have got there in the first place if the Democrats were half way competent. But we all know they won't do that, so it's going to be a typical 3rd world put your opponents in jail for doing the same things that we do contest.
Yes, I know there is a thin veneer of institutional legitimacy over the obvious handout to political allies. I just don't care. I bet you think that the Clinton Foundation is an actual charity too.
You seem to be under the impression that I care about the Clinton Foundation. I can understand how, when you turn politics into a "team sport", you might develop the mistaken impression that others think that way too.
You seem to be missing the context here in that this comment chain is about the Democrats locking up Republicans for corruption. That is turning politics into a team sport. So we're already there whether you like it or not. Unless, of course, the Democrats were actually not corrupt themselves, but I doubt the public would agree with your position that calling it a "non-profit" makes it not corrupt.
If you actually read my initial reply, you would know that what I am recommending is that the Democrats should ignore the past corruption by the other side and move on with governing. In other words not "turn politics into a team sport." And I warn that if they do choose to go after the Republicans it will just bring more attention to their own corruption and hypocrisy and lead to this back and forth. And I think I am vindicated by your responses.
edit: And if you think I'm saying the recent Democrat corruption is as bad as Trump, I'm not. Trump is worse by a massive margin. But if you want to prosecute the other side for being corrupt and not have it look like you are just locking up your enemies, you have to be squeaky clean, and they are not. "I'm a thief, but they stole more than me" is not a very convincing argument.
Bush only engaged in the tolerated type of light corruption that Obama / Clinton did too. So of course he didn't prosecute. But if he had, this would not have stopped Trump. It would have helped him. The Trump admin is not a partial continuation of the Bush admin in the way that successive presidencies of the same party typically are. Trump is the leader of an insurgent faction that had to defeat the establishment wing of the party that Bush was a part of. Prosecuting the Bush admin would have been clearing the field for Trump and backing up his populist argument that the establishment are all crooks.
Petraeus giving up classified info is the only executive branch conviction under Obama, I'd argue that the exception proves the rule. People under W Bush were (amazingly, from our current perspective) largely prosecuted by W's justice department.
And the utter lack of prosecutions over the financial crisis under Obama, as well as rights violations justified by "national security" by the W admin, are why people are cynical about not prosecuting again.
Thanks Noah - this is a long and depressing list. There are so many problems in American politics right now, but the deepest one is the negative polarization that explains the MAGA devotion to Trump. The problem is that Trump’s first term created a permission structure for Democratic overreach under Biden that then paved the way for Trump 2.0. In a binary political system, if one party becomes extremist, it encourages the other party to become extreme as well. And it is increasingly difficult for centrists to campaign in primaries facing base voters in both parties. We are living in an incredibly dangerous time, with elites who are completely unqualified for the jobs they hold, with a few exceptions. My one bright spot is that everyone who voted for Trump thought they’d get the crazy rhetoric/mostly sane behavior of the first term, which was always wishcasting, but there is a major backlash brewing…but the Democrats need to tack to the center, or they will risk elevating the Rs again in 2028.
I am an Australian and a longtime believer in the USA as perhaps the most benevolent superpower in history. The bar was set low as history is littered with so many brutal, imperious regimes that routinely killed, looted and pillaged. Often their own people.
Today I look at the USA under Trump with utter disbelief.
Your post is a good read all in all. I like the careful way you have, of not making a claim/statement, that is really a claim/statement based on the evidence is classic.
Eg : The Faux-Manchurian Candidate
What you do leave out though in this section is the Israelis' where you talk about Russia and China Not having Trump in their back pocket.
That surprises me and feels like something of an omission considering the "actual actions " you refer to.
No one really seems to be able to figure out how the Israelis' could get Trump to start the full blown Iran war with them in the first place. Considering there seems to have been no strategic rationale.
Trump appears to only respond to opportunity to enrich himself and his family, bragging rights, or some form of coercion he is suffering from another party.
As opposed to the strategic rationale of threatening to invade Greenland, or the strategic rationale for removing Maduro? They convinced an impulsive man to be impulsive in a way he's always leaned. It's not some huge mystery.
There's plenty of rationale for removing Maduro. They are a Russian and Chinese ally. Annexing Greenland, on the other hand, is the single stupidest idea I have heard out of a politician in my lifetime.
My support for Democrats is also contingent, but I'll sit out before I ever support the charlatans, cranks and religious fanatics who control the contemporary GOP.
It is undoubtedly true that thieving on as large a scale as Trump manages is debilitating. How rich is America that it can afford to double its national debt in a year. Here in Britain we have problems with competence. Not a single water reservoir built in 50 years despite the population growing by millions. The power distribution system known as the National Grid has to pay millions of £s to stop Wind Turbine installations producing electricity because they already have a contract with power stations powered by gas, the most expensive fuel ever to power anything. The problem we have is that 40% of voters have been convinced that all our problems are caused by illegal immigrants. On top of that, the same people who propogate the lies about immigrants also caused us to leave the EU, a European organisation with which we do 40% of our trade using full membership of the Customs Union and the Single Market.
If you find a solution to Trump we would appreciate hearing of it. It is certainly true that this problem is going to be with us until a considerable majority of voters have access to an acceptable standard of living and prepared to accept the means by which it is provided.
You may want to consider comparitve timescales: Pyrrhus's "Pyrrhic war[s]" was six years long my friend, Roman conquest of Epirus was about a decade after.
Trump's not even 2yrs in, not that I would take a tongue in check poke at So Much Winning as some kind of analytical statement....
Pyrrhus didn't have paved roads and deuce-and-a-half transport. The pace of warfare on foot, and with bad roads that turned to mud half the year, was glacial. The Romans had to first crush Taranto, and then accumulate a tiny navy before Epirus was within reach.
The Romans were also still decades away from adapting the Maniple system--where they ditched Greek Hoplite-like spear formations for the gladius--the short stabbing sword.
But I envy the Brits and others with Parliamentary systems, where an incompetent executive who royally screws the pooch can be quickly shown the door. Instead of having to wait for four years.
In 2024, most Americans cared less about freedom than I did. I told myself it was because they cared about the economy. Now in 2026, thats not a valid reason to support Trump. Hes been bad on freedom, the economy, and now foreign policy too. And on foreign policy, as well as freedom, he is in "worst ever" territory.
And the thing is, Republicans have been worse on foreign policy and tbe economy for the last 34 years. For anyone to say "democrats would be worse," they cannot witj a straight face be talking about freedom, american power, or prosperity. They are talking about social issues - gay marriage, abortion, and immigration.
So now and likely in 2028, the question is, do you care about freedom, the economy, or the free world and american power less than the hard line republican position on gay marriage, abortion and immigration? If you care more about freedom, prosperity, the deficit or keeping america out of wars, then there's 34 years of trends that Democrats are in fact better. The only reason to vote for republicans is "social" issues.
MAGA voters have shown they will vote to be materially worse off, as long as they feel they get the cultural wins, get their preferred and perceived social hierarchy that includes owning the libs. I never thought I'd see the day where 35% of Americans would vote and be content to be materially worse off, as long as they got to rough up brown people on the street, hurt trans people, or just ruin all relationships with our foreign allies.
Regarding Trump's Iran war fiasco, I'm recalling General H. Norman Schwarzkopf famously dismissing Saddam Hussein's military capabilities, famously stating: "As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he's a great military man". Swap in Donald J. Trump for Saddam Hussein and here we are.
Schwarzkopf had something like 500,000 US and Allied troops on the ground, with additional huge air and naval assets. Papa Bush was nothing if not competent in his war preparations.
Even Dubya/Cheney, after bringing in nearly another 1000,000 troops during the Surge, backed off their possible ground invasion of Iran after oil futures hit $150/barrel. Because they--and the rest of the world--knew that Iran would interdict the Straits.
But Trump launched his little war with just two Carrier groups, and NO operational minesweepers or Marine EG's in theater. He was simply completely unprepared for Iran's closure of the Straits, and for Iran's punishing attacks on our Gulf bases, and the oil infrastructure of our allies.
In addition to that, the Trump admin and Hegseth also promoted people that aren't qualified, which makes sense because they themselves aren't qualified for their roles, and with all the money and missiles we wasted, we still haven't achieved any real military victory in Iran. It's absolutely insane.
David French on the NY Times actually had a good article about it today:
I’m already tired of the next progressive era the Antizionist Socialists (FKA “Democrats”) will unleash. I’m not alone - there’s a reason your favorite party polls lower than Trump at his lowest.
I’d support them again if they were moderates, but they aren’t and weren’t under Biden nor would be under Harris. For now I’ll vote for any moderate I can find, without prejudice, which means zero progressives.
You’re the corrupt extremist. Platner, Mamdani, Wilson, Raab, Galindo, are the products of deranged Antizionist Socialists. Tired of you and yours, and not going to vote for 'progressive' Democrats that enable them.
Everything he has ever touched dies. Everyone with a brain saw this. The difference between the first and second term; this time the people who knew he would do their bidding came with a manual, Project 2025.
You recently re-posted that Obama was a good president. Youre now highlighting Trump's failures, and if anything udnerstating them. Iran, corruption and Jan 6th in isolation would put him in the conversation of "worst president ever." Combined and adding in everything else and he is clearly the worst.
I guess Im confused as to how there's any debate over whether Dems are better or worse than the party of Trump. You start this piece off with aome apparent doubt about that. W wasnt this bad but was a bad president. Biden wasnt good but his manufacturing and china policy did make us stronger. Yes he was a bad president but just so far superior to W who was so far superior to Trump. Youre about my age I think, and it is truly hard to imagine why I would ever vote Republican.
Pretty clearly, Obama's America, which gave us the optimism to see "Hamilton" in droves and continued to have us leaders of the free world, is a better model and vision for our future than anything Republicans have offered since George Bush I.
I think people who are of Noah's age, perhaps don't see the Democratic party as the same one Obama led in 2008. That party was centrist and pragmatic, and willing to talk about fiscal responsibility (which progressives derided with the term 'catfood commission'). It was a very different time.
But I agree with you, there's no way I could ever pull the trigger for a Republican in this day and age. In state races perhaps I would abstain from voting, but I can't see a single instance where it would be preferable federally.
Thanks that is helpful. It still seems off to me - AOC and Mamdani may have bad ideas but they seem like good people who want what is best for the country, as opposed to Trump and his ilk...also theyve not taken over the Democratic party, and as bad as their economic ideas may be, clearly the Trump economy is just as bad, at least.
But ay least that kinda explains it. I think it is wrong but it is explicable.
The scale of corruption is astounding, so I guess it’s maybe why you left out other major scams Trump did - pardoning various violent and nonviolent criminals for cash payments, pumping and dumping his own meme coins, selling access for donations, getting licensing fees for the airport that got named for him in Florida, as well as the Trump Library, which will cruelly be a hotel, forcing companies to give him stock for government bailouts, steering DoW contracts to his sons’ companies, using his son and law to do diplomacy which include side deals for his own business and much more.
Yep, I only have room for so much in one post. It's a DDOS; next week there will be something else that would end any other presidency.
It's a tough call, and maybe won't hold up against whatever we learn of hext, but for me personally the most enraging so far is the outright selling of pardons.
So far, sigh
And not a peep about this from his own party. Or more importantly, FOX News.
Add Pedophile Protection to the corruption scandal. Trump2 + GOP are also blocking the release of the Epstein Files, of which something like 2.5 million documents remain.
Even on the left, all these deeds will be forgotten, and Bernie Sanders will tell us the real problem was the tech billionaires controlling the government (even though the tech billionaires are broadly against these immigration changes and tariffs).
The left is keeping records. The issue is going to be the cries of "lawfare!" and "we should look forward, not backwards" when we try to deal with them en mass.
+ Coercing media/tech companies to give him multi million settlements for empty lawsuits
The list is quite astounding for just 18 months of government! You almost have to respect the work ethic when it comes to grift.
And a jet! It really is astounding.
And the crypto stuff doesn't even rise to the level of corruption. It was just a pure play scam. He is just a criminal.
A two-party state is the closest type of democracy to a one-party state, and exhibits a lot of the same flaws, including the fear that if your opponents get into power, "woe to the vanquished", which then inspires blind loyalty out of self-preservation.
Change the voting system and introduce something different. There are options. Each has its downsides, but they allow for more flexibility and don't harden the political field into two rocks banging against each other forever.
I don't think you're going to solve a cultural and economic problem with a mechanical voting change. I'm happy to consider alternative mechanical solutions, but they should be aimed at solving mechanical election problems.
These aren't completely independent phenomena, though. The current US mechanism wastes a lots of votes, thus creating a huge community of people who feel themselves effectively disenfranchised, especially in the states where the balance of parties exceeds some 40:60.
Majoritarian voting systems are, in general, practical for the politicians themselves, but at the cost of many people not being represented by someone who is at least approximately politically close to them.
So you're advocating a massive government change like a parliamentary system? That's not a voting mechanics or voting system change. That's a completely different kind of government. It solves some problems while creating others.
How did you read that in my comment?
I was talking about a voting system change. Yes, the Congress would look different. It might also be revived a bit. As of now, it barely does what it was intended to do - act as a check on executive power.
The likeliest avenue for additional parties is RCV, which is already legal in many states. That instantly solves the "spoiler" effect and would let additional players join.
Nope, Ranked Choice Voting (more properly called Instant Runoff -- there are half a dozen other ways you could count ranked ballots) _does not_ solve the spoiler problem. It is only safe to vote for your "true favorite" candidate over your "lesser evil" candidate so long as your true favorite _is not competitive_. The moment your true favorite starts to stand a chance of actually beating the lesser evil, the spoiler problem returns, with a vengeance.
To understand this, consider a toy example. Say there is a town with 100 voters. It's election day, and so far the ballots look like this:
35 Right > Center > Left
16 Center > Right > Left
16 Center > Left > Right
31 Left > Center > Right
Right now if you tally the votes under IRV, Left gets bumped off, then Center wins in a landslide, with around two thirds of the vote (63-35).
But wait, that's only 98 votes. The last two voters show up, and they vote with the Left camp. So now Center gets bumped off, because he's still at 32, to Left's 33. And then when you split Center's votes... Right wins, 51-49. But the only change was a few more people trying to vote maximally against Right! Those last two voters would have been happier with the outcome if they had simply stayed home. What's more, it's still true that two-thirds of voters preferred Center over Right.
This kind of "Center Squeeze" election would be a fairly regular thing. Burlington, VT adopted IRV, immediately had a squeeze election, and then the ~60% of voters who had voted for the loser repealed the reform. (Then they recently adopted RCV/IRV _again_, because apparently nobody has any imagination.) We saw this kind of center-squeeze logic in play in the Louisiana primary where the moderate Republican got squeezed out between a prolifically corrupt Dem and David Duke, and actual KKK leader, in 1991. It's also how Mary Peltola ended up winning in Alaska, which led Alaskans to come within a couple tenths of a percentage points of abolishing their system. ( https://ballotpedia.org/Alaska_Ballot_Measure_2,_Repeal_Top-Four_Ranked-Choice_Voting_Initiative_(2024) ) We also had a near miss in San Francisco a few years back, where if the leftiest candidates had gotten just a couple dozen more votes over the center candidate, the election would've been thrown to the most-moderate candidate, exactly as in the toy example.
And then on top of that, ranked ballots get spoiled at a WAY higher rate than any system where your vote for each candidate is independent of your votes for the other candidates. Like, 10x worse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdPIauxbTtI
There are better options, like Approval (which was adopted in Fargo and Saint Louis, and is under consideration for the whole state of Maryland), or STAR Voting. Every election method requires some strategery, but not all are subject to the kind of dramatic, voter-enraging failure we get with IRV.
Yes, we need to adopt proportional representation wherever we can, to give alternate parties the possibility of gaining a toehold and seriously competing with the duopoly.
Personally I'm a fan of Sequential Proportional Approval voting, though I understand people don't love Approval ballots because they're not as expressive as ranked ballots. I think a good option might be to do SPA for a primary, and then for single-winner races do STAR Voting for the general. (Range/rating ballots are _even more_ expressive than ranked ballots, but have various practical and theoretical benefits.)
Hear what you're saying about "the vanquished," but actually multi-party systems that give proportional seats enable undue power to small parties, in order for the largest vote-getting party to rule via coalitions. For now, I don't see a good alternative to the two-party system.
Proper Congressional Apportionment would fix a lot of issues imo.
At this point Trumps political capital lies in ruins. He is below 40% approval rating, only about 22% strongly approve, close to 50% strong disapprove, the Dems have an 81% chance to take the house despite all the gerrymandering, and the senate is now in open rebellion due to corruption and vindictive endorsements. I don’t think Trump is popular in any sense of the word.
What’s sadder to me is that many Americans seem numb or unsurprised by his behavior and have adopted a view that everything was corrupt and stupid anyway. Any accusation thrown at Trump as particularly inept or corrupt they will shrug and say “well Bush started dumb foreign wars anyway and he gave all my money to Wall St too, and America only cares about oil and corporations anyway and Biden made inflation bad” etc etc. As blatantly stupid and corrupt as Trump is there is a sizable portion of the U.S. population that doesn’t see this as a break from the norm but just the logical conclusion of what they saw as a corrupt system anyway. Many of my friends were convinced that major corporations were running the country under Biden through secret Washington slush funds and pressure campaigns. For them Trump has simply made the implicit explicit.
What we need to realize is that many Americans now no longer love or trust their country. They don’t look at the U.S.’s many incredible accomplishments or just the fact that we are a non ethnic creedal nation of yes immigrants. We don’t trust the words of Reagan anymore about who can become an American (anyone) and we don’t believe in our good nature. The right wing staffers have marinated in a soup of online extremism but the average American has marinated in a soup of mainstream negativity for decades. Endless stories of incompetence, corruption, and exploitation. Progressives are taught that America has always been a cruel empire extracting wealth from the world…Trump is no different he just doesn’t do it nicely but Bush was just as bad! This is of course nonsense but once you are convinced that everyone is lying and everyone is corrupt and everyone is out for themselves it’s hard to convince people anything is different. To combat Trump we must rediscover our own moral righteousness. We have to remind people what the U.S. did and should stand for not what it currently is acting like. That shining little city on a hill is worth fighting for but people have to believe it’s still there.
There’s an HST quote that applies here, only swapping out Nixon for the far more corrupt Trump: “the tragedy of all this is that … George McGovern, for all his mistakes, understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon. “
If we want to change that we need to punish the corrupt and expell the venal. That's what was missing since Reagan.
I believe that you left out a very important set of policies that will immeasurably weaken and impoverish the US in the future. I'm referring to the near shutdown of biomedical research in this country. This had been a field where we where clearly the world leader. Combining that with the quack based attacks on the efficacy and safety of vaccines will permanently weaken the United States and make the population much sicker.
Oh yes. I left out TONS of stuff. That's the point; there's far too much bad stuff to fit in even a very long blog post.
AI is one of the two areas of technology that I'm most skeptical of. The other is fusion. Both have been promised as imminent since I was a teenager in the 1960s, also flying cars. Biomedical research has experienced an actual revolution over the past thirty to forty years. That's why I thought it should have been more prominently in your excellent piece.
Great post, and this all needs to be said.
However, what should Democrats do if they manage to get in power.
Biden put in Merrick garland who did absolutely nothing to prosecute trump for January 6th.
You wrote a previous post about how Obama couldn't have gone after the bankers harder after the 2008 crash because they hadn't broken any laws.
The Supreme court has said that nearly everything Trump is doing is "legal".
Should a Democratic administration wait years to get a new supreme court ruling and then spend the next decade putting in little case after little case against various Trump officials.
Or...
Should they do some Lincoln era, "We need to save the Republic" and start throwing people in prison?
Trump and company's corruption needs to be front and center and visibly punished the moment Democrats take office.
(I also worry what is to be done about the various billionaires who gleefully helped Trump burn down the country in exchange for a promise to punch hippies and fat tax cut.)
Of course Obama could have gone after bankers harder in 2009. They were insolvent and needed cash. In the private sector, getting bailed out of bankruptcy comes with loss of control, including promised bonuses. Practically no real penalties were enacted against the companies that got the Great Recession bailouts.
Yes they should throw people in prison. Every other country does. We loose our legitimacy a little more every time we don’t. Billionaires included if they broke laws.
They should fix the problems and ignore Trump. If they go after him for corruption, their own corruption will just be highlighted. And if you think it's not there, then let me introduce you to the $20 billion Democrat slush fund paid for out of our paychecks: https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/biden-administration-gave-billions-to-green-groups-founded-shortly-before-report-says
If, on the other hand, they actually did a good job governing, they could prevent Trump and his people from getting back into power. They never would have got there in the first place if the Democrats were half way competent. But we all know they won't do that, so it's going to be a typical 3rd world put your opponents in jail for doing the same things that we do contest.
“let me introduce you to the $20 billion Democrat slush fund paid for out of our paychecks”
I’m thinking about writing a bot just to fact check the stuff you post, kind of a “community notes” for right wing talking points. Here’s a ChatGPT summary: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a159f06-0078-83ea-be3a-893b110446ce
Yes, I know there is a thin veneer of institutional legitimacy over the obvious handout to political allies. I just don't care. I bet you think that the Clinton Foundation is an actual charity too.
You seem to be under the impression that I care about the Clinton Foundation. I can understand how, when you turn politics into a "team sport", you might develop the mistaken impression that others think that way too.
You seem to be missing the context here in that this comment chain is about the Democrats locking up Republicans for corruption. That is turning politics into a team sport. So we're already there whether you like it or not. Unless, of course, the Democrats were actually not corrupt themselves, but I doubt the public would agree with your position that calling it a "non-profit" makes it not corrupt.
If you actually read my initial reply, you would know that what I am recommending is that the Democrats should ignore the past corruption by the other side and move on with governing. In other words not "turn politics into a team sport." And I warn that if they do choose to go after the Republicans it will just bring more attention to their own corruption and hypocrisy and lead to this back and forth. And I think I am vindicated by your responses.
edit: And if you think I'm saying the recent Democrat corruption is as bad as Trump, I'm not. Trump is worse by a massive margin. But if you want to prosecute the other side for being corrupt and not have it look like you are just locking up your enemies, you have to be squeaky clean, and they are not. "I'm a thief, but they stole more than me" is not a very convincing argument.
Lol. That's what Obama did. It got us Trump.
Bush only engaged in the tolerated type of light corruption that Obama / Clinton did too. So of course he didn't prosecute. But if he had, this would not have stopped Trump. It would have helped him. The Trump admin is not a partial continuation of the Bush admin in the way that successive presidencies of the same party typically are. Trump is the leader of an insurgent faction that had to defeat the establishment wing of the party that Bush was a part of. Prosecuting the Bush admin would have been clearing the field for Trump and backing up his populist argument that the establishment are all crooks.
You forget what actually happened. W Bush admin had 2/3 as many criminal convictions as Trump.. Obama had 0.
But then it sounds like Obama actually did prosecute criminals in the Bush admin? Also Obama didn't have 0. Here are lists under Bush and Obama, though they have varying degrees of actual relation to the presidential administration (one is for shoplifting, LOL!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_federal_politicians_convicted_of_crimes#2001%E2%80%932009_(George_W._Bush_presidency)
Petraeus giving up classified info is the only executive branch conviction under Obama, I'd argue that the exception proves the rule. People under W Bush were (amazingly, from our current perspective) largely prosecuted by W's justice department.
And the utter lack of prosecutions over the financial crisis under Obama, as well as rights violations justified by "national security" by the W admin, are why people are cynical about not prosecuting again.
Thanks Noah - this is a long and depressing list. There are so many problems in American politics right now, but the deepest one is the negative polarization that explains the MAGA devotion to Trump. The problem is that Trump’s first term created a permission structure for Democratic overreach under Biden that then paved the way for Trump 2.0. In a binary political system, if one party becomes extremist, it encourages the other party to become extreme as well. And it is increasingly difficult for centrists to campaign in primaries facing base voters in both parties. We are living in an incredibly dangerous time, with elites who are completely unqualified for the jobs they hold, with a few exceptions. My one bright spot is that everyone who voted for Trump thought they’d get the crazy rhetoric/mostly sane behavior of the first term, which was always wishcasting, but there is a major backlash brewing…but the Democrats need to tack to the center, or they will risk elevating the Rs again in 2028.
No. You need to pick a side and win. You aren't going to address any of these issues as long as you try and maintain the illusion of continuity.
I am an Australian and a longtime believer in the USA as perhaps the most benevolent superpower in history. The bar was set low as history is littered with so many brutal, imperious regimes that routinely killed, looted and pillaged. Often their own people.
Today I look at the USA under Trump with utter disbelief.
Your post is a good read all in all. I like the careful way you have, of not making a claim/statement, that is really a claim/statement based on the evidence is classic.
Eg : The Faux-Manchurian Candidate
What you do leave out though in this section is the Israelis' where you talk about Russia and China Not having Trump in their back pocket.
That surprises me and feels like something of an omission considering the "actual actions " you refer to.
No one really seems to be able to figure out how the Israelis' could get Trump to start the full blown Iran war with them in the first place. Considering there seems to have been no strategic rationale.
Trump appears to only respond to opportunity to enrich himself and his family, bragging rights, or some form of coercion he is suffering from another party.
As opposed to the strategic rationale of threatening to invade Greenland, or the strategic rationale for removing Maduro? They convinced an impulsive man to be impulsive in a way he's always leaned. It's not some huge mystery.
AIPAC is also a supremely skilled and extravagantly funded DC lobbying organization, that works hand in glove with Bibi Netanyahu.
The Saudis and other Gulf States were also horny to see Iran bloodied.
There's plenty of rationale for removing Maduro. They are a Russian and Chinese ally. Annexing Greenland, on the other hand, is the single stupidest idea I have heard out of a politician in my lifetime.
Fair enough. I hope we don't decide to go after Cuba or Nicaragua next.
Smart money says Cuba to distract from the loss of face in any Iran deal.
Don’t count the Saudi’s out of your mystery equation.
My support for Democrats is also contingent, but I'll sit out before I ever support the charlatans, cranks and religious fanatics who control the contemporary GOP.
It is undoubtedly true that thieving on as large a scale as Trump manages is debilitating. How rich is America that it can afford to double its national debt in a year. Here in Britain we have problems with competence. Not a single water reservoir built in 50 years despite the population growing by millions. The power distribution system known as the National Grid has to pay millions of £s to stop Wind Turbine installations producing electricity because they already have a contract with power stations powered by gas, the most expensive fuel ever to power anything. The problem we have is that 40% of voters have been convinced that all our problems are caused by illegal immigrants. On top of that, the same people who propogate the lies about immigrants also caused us to leave the EU, a European organisation with which we do 40% of our trade using full membership of the Customs Union and the Single Market.
If you find a solution to Trump we would appreciate hearing of it. It is certainly true that this problem is going to be with us until a considerable majority of voters have access to an acceptable standard of living and prepared to accept the means by which it is provided.
I am promoting a new term: Trumpian Winning, the modern Pyrrhic Victory (Pyrrhic w/o the self-realisation).
The "victories" of Pyrrhus at Asculum and Heracleia led to his later annihilation. Soon after, Rome went further, to conquer all of (Greek) Epirus.
Trump may have seriously damaged the US. But he has not yet led his party into the dustbin of history.
You may want to consider comparitve timescales: Pyrrhus's "Pyrrhic war[s]" was six years long my friend, Roman conquest of Epirus was about a decade after.
Trump's not even 2yrs in, not that I would take a tongue in check poke at So Much Winning as some kind of analytical statement....
Pyrrhus didn't have paved roads and deuce-and-a-half transport. The pace of warfare on foot, and with bad roads that turned to mud half the year, was glacial. The Romans had to first crush Taranto, and then accumulate a tiny navy before Epirus was within reach.
The Romans were also still decades away from adapting the Maniple system--where they ditched Greek Hoplite-like spear formations for the gladius--the short stabbing sword.
But I envy the Brits and others with Parliamentary systems, where an incompetent executive who royally screws the pooch can be quickly shown the door. Instead of having to wait for four years.
In 2024, most Americans cared less about freedom than I did. I told myself it was because they cared about the economy. Now in 2026, thats not a valid reason to support Trump. Hes been bad on freedom, the economy, and now foreign policy too. And on foreign policy, as well as freedom, he is in "worst ever" territory.
And the thing is, Republicans have been worse on foreign policy and tbe economy for the last 34 years. For anyone to say "democrats would be worse," they cannot witj a straight face be talking about freedom, american power, or prosperity. They are talking about social issues - gay marriage, abortion, and immigration.
So now and likely in 2028, the question is, do you care about freedom, the economy, or the free world and american power less than the hard line republican position on gay marriage, abortion and immigration? If you care more about freedom, prosperity, the deficit or keeping america out of wars, then there's 34 years of trends that Democrats are in fact better. The only reason to vote for republicans is "social" issues.
MAGA voters have shown they will vote to be materially worse off, as long as they feel they get the cultural wins, get their preferred and perceived social hierarchy that includes owning the libs. I never thought I'd see the day where 35% of Americans would vote and be content to be materially worse off, as long as they got to rough up brown people on the street, hurt trans people, or just ruin all relationships with our foreign allies.
Regarding Trump's Iran war fiasco, I'm recalling General H. Norman Schwarzkopf famously dismissing Saddam Hussein's military capabilities, famously stating: "As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he's a great military man". Swap in Donald J. Trump for Saddam Hussein and here we are.
Schwarzkopf had something like 500,000 US and Allied troops on the ground, with additional huge air and naval assets. Papa Bush was nothing if not competent in his war preparations.
Even Dubya/Cheney, after bringing in nearly another 1000,000 troops during the Surge, backed off their possible ground invasion of Iran after oil futures hit $150/barrel. Because they--and the rest of the world--knew that Iran would interdict the Straits.
But Trump launched his little war with just two Carrier groups, and NO operational minesweepers or Marine EG's in theater. He was simply completely unprepared for Iran's closure of the Straits, and for Iran's punishing attacks on our Gulf bases, and the oil infrastructure of our allies.
In addition to that, the Trump admin and Hegseth also promoted people that aren't qualified, which makes sense because they themselves aren't qualified for their roles, and with all the money and missiles we wasted, we still haven't achieved any real military victory in Iran. It's absolutely insane.
David French on the NY Times actually had a good article about it today:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/opinion/trump-iran-war.html?unlocked_article_code=1.l1A.BM47.Yi60irgu20IS&smid=url-share
Great piece Noah!! I’ve had all these same thoughts that you wrote about swarming around in my head. Thanks for writing.
I’m already tired of the next progressive era the Antizionist Socialists (FKA “Democrats”) will unleash. I’m not alone - there’s a reason your favorite party polls lower than Trump at his lowest.
I’d support them again if they were moderates, but they aren’t and weren’t under Biden nor would be under Harris. For now I’ll vote for any moderate I can find, without prejudice, which means zero progressives.
And thus, you will continue to get corrupt extremists.
You’re the corrupt extremist. Platner, Mamdani, Wilson, Raab, Galindo, are the products of deranged Antizionist Socialists. Tired of you and yours, and not going to vote for 'progressive' Democrats that enable them.
Everything he has ever touched dies. Everyone with a brain saw this. The difference between the first and second term; this time the people who knew he would do their bidding came with a manual, Project 2025.
You recently re-posted that Obama was a good president. Youre now highlighting Trump's failures, and if anything udnerstating them. Iran, corruption and Jan 6th in isolation would put him in the conversation of "worst president ever." Combined and adding in everything else and he is clearly the worst.
I guess Im confused as to how there's any debate over whether Dems are better or worse than the party of Trump. You start this piece off with aome apparent doubt about that. W wasnt this bad but was a bad president. Biden wasnt good but his manufacturing and china policy did make us stronger. Yes he was a bad president but just so far superior to W who was so far superior to Trump. Youre about my age I think, and it is truly hard to imagine why I would ever vote Republican.
Pretty clearly, Obama's America, which gave us the optimism to see "Hamilton" in droves and continued to have us leaders of the free world, is a better model and vision for our future than anything Republicans have offered since George Bush I.
I think people who are of Noah's age, perhaps don't see the Democratic party as the same one Obama led in 2008. That party was centrist and pragmatic, and willing to talk about fiscal responsibility (which progressives derided with the term 'catfood commission'). It was a very different time.
But I agree with you, there's no way I could ever pull the trigger for a Republican in this day and age. In state races perhaps I would abstain from voting, but I can't see a single instance where it would be preferable federally.
Thanks that is helpful. It still seems off to me - AOC and Mamdani may have bad ideas but they seem like good people who want what is best for the country, as opposed to Trump and his ilk...also theyve not taken over the Democratic party, and as bad as their economic ideas may be, clearly the Trump economy is just as bad, at least.
But ay least that kinda explains it. I think it is wrong but it is explicable.