The law firm thing, along with the revoking of grants that complied with prior administrations DEI requirements, really freak me out, because they set up a Roko's Basalisk situation where even if Trump/MAGA are voted out, people will feel that they have to comply with their perceived dictates, even contrary to the then current administration's rules, lest they face ruinous retribution if and when Trump/MAGA regain power. It risks permanently breaking democracy.
It means that the next Democratic administration can’t be a “let’s get back to normal guys” Biden administration. For this country to be safe again, some people are going to have to get very publicly smashed. (Assuming Trump and Musk fail to build their 1,000 year Reich.)
Yes. Everyone who is not a Trump supporter needs to get comfortable with the idea of using power. If one side is overturning the game board, you can't be standing there wringing your hands about the rules printed in the instruction booklet.
Biden didn't have FOX News and RW media in his corner. The GOP Base literally takes almost everything FOX News, Sinclair, et al say as fucking gospel; and then vote accordingly. And Trump and his party's leadership have drunk so much of the coolaid, they all believe it too. Dems murdering babies after birth. Haitian illegals eating people's dogs and cats. The (non-FOX) media is the enemy of the people.
There can be no *new normal* if/when the Dems ever regain power, unless there's also a "Truth in Media" law. That requires media to be either News or Opinion; and for the former to utilize actual journalistic standards, like 2+ sources for allegations, citations to actual studies, etc. If we can't restore the 4th Estate, our democracy is doomed.
Same for me. The fact that the major law firms didn't band together and agree to fight the EO and help defend Paul Weiss and that clients who wanted to stay with him but felt forced to abandon his firm sends a chilling message to all law firms. We are already seeing representation being denied to those need it for their politics simply because of the threat of being EO'd (likely unconstitutional). When a conservative legal podcast like Advisory Opinions (Betrayal of the Law Firms) raises serious concerns it needs to be taken seriously and it isn't yet.
This is straight out of the authoritarian playbook: using fear to break down trust between groups and individuals who should be natural allies in opposing them.
This is a good article Noah, but why do you continually try to give credence to Trump supporters or try to “hear them out”? I understood this perspective in 2016, and I myself tried to have sympathy and understanding for Trump supporters, but isn’t it clear at this point that his vocal supporters are fundamentally illogical and cruel? There is no hidden logic behind their support, we should take what they say and believe at face value instead of trying to find ways to rationalize them.
You and others do make a good point about reaching out across the aisle and I do appreciate how you try to be constructive instead of just haranguing Trump. In all honesty, I made this initial comment after waking up to more bad news about Trump potentially violating the constitution and weakening civil liberties, so I wasn’t in a very forgiving mood 😅. I guess my response is to say your approach is probably the correct one and we need cool-headed commentators more than ever, but it is sometimes hard to stomach having sympathy/understanding for the other side with what is happening!
I like to think of your post as grounding the conversation in principles deeper than whatever fleeting line currently demarcates the “aisle”. Much appreciated!
My alternative approach is to let these idiots suffer what they voted for. Yeah, everyone will feel pain. But his base will feel it more so than others. There’s no reasoning with sociopaths; they have to be allowed to wallow in their own filth.
This is what happened after 2004, the last time an empirically incompetent Republican got elected.
In 20 years, most of the MAGA base will act like 2004 Bush voters, and pretend they never supported him.
A sizable portion of the people who voted for Trump have done at least one of the following:
1. Supported a different candidate in the primaries at one point or another
2. Voted for a Democrat previously
3. Are not usually politically active but voted for him because they heard he was good for the economy or some other policy they care about
4. Voted for Trump despite disliking him because they thought Harris was worse or because they find him instrumentally useful for some set of policies they like
Many of these people can change their mind and Noah is trying to reach out to them. Saying that all Trump supporters are irredeemable might make the speaker feel good but is inaccurate and is more likely to entrench Trump's supporters in their position rather than actually influence change.
Precisely. I personally was a Romney>HRC>Biden>Harris voter for three reasons:
1. I voted for Romney because I was disillusioned with Obama and the Democratic Congress prioritizing the ACA over larger investments in infrastructure, and “bailouts for banks but not for people,” as well as my agreement with Romney that Russia was an emerging threat.
2. I voted for HRC because Trump is an embarrassment.
3. I voted for Harris, despite my distaste with leftist culture wars/cancel culture/whatever you want to call it, because I correctly predicted that Trump would be far more dangerous this time around, choosing cronies and cranks to surround him, rather than rational actors that would impede his worst ideas and impulses.
Thanks! It’s even worse that he laughed instead of trying the genuine debate the point. It was just totally outside his capacity to consider. That was a problem for a lot of folks who took the wrong lesson from Fukuyama’s “End of History.”
My father claims he voted for Trump because he’s a “one issue voter” and that one issue is Israel. I know many Jews who have used this as justification for voting for Trump but personally I think they’re lying to themselves - they would’ve voted for him either way.
It’s concerning because I personally believe that Trumps economic actions (I struggle to call them “policies”) will lead to real hardships for many Americans and rather than admit their own mismanagement the Trumpists will find a scapegoat. And we all know where, historically, that has always led.
PS - before this I voted for W twice. I guess I take after my mother whose first vote was for Nixon in *1972*. Counterculture my parents were not; maybe that’s why I subconsciously sought out a Burner who was 7 years older than me (though she looks younger than me.)
no, do some research on this, he's not being slow or careful at all. Can't find the link right now but Trump's complete all-in assault on the courts has been compared to that of other dictators who spent years doing the damage he's done in just a few months.
Exactly. This has not been slow, it has been a blitzkrieg. KIt has only been two months and the m number of laws broken and ignored it astounding. And a lot of it is reckless as well. Nor is much of it careful legal parsing. Much of it is just flat out assertion of blatant power with a clear "Who is gonna stop me?" subtext. And threats of investigating, prosecuting, and jailing opponents and or media have been a daily feature.
These people frighten the hell out of me. They fundamentally do not believe in democracy or representation. They know what is best and if they have the power to make it so, they will, damned be anyone who tries stand in their way.
The concept of the consent to being governed means nothing to such people. The deep fallacy and hypocrisy in their world view is lost upon them. They clamor for freedom from the subjugation of wokeism even as they turn around and attempt to subjugate all others.
If this was "Representative Democracy" vs. "The Enlightened Philosopher King", being compared--like some of the Founders did--on their merits, this naked power grab *might* be slightly understandable.
But these are Keystone Cops, that are taking away our civil liberties even as they're actively financially and militarily ruining our country. And with it our livelihoods. Who can't even do war-planning, without fucking it up. Putin and Xi must be laughing themselves silly.
Great analysis, but it's one done in isolation, and the world doesn't stand still. Countries invade, pandemics happen, etc. I worry that while Trump's amassing power for revenge and JD Vance is helping for his own ideological goals, what happens if China takes Taiwan and now controls most of the world's advanced chips (aka, the new oil)? What if Russia attacks a NATO nation? My point is, things can snowball in unexpected ways. This is a five alarm fire, and we're all standing around looking at our shoes.
“Khalil is a Syrian exchange student who led a bunch of Palestine protests at Columbia University. Some of those protests turned violent, possibly with Khalil’s encouragement. And Khalil almost certainly participated in illegal behavior, like taking over campus buildings.”
Now substitute Trump’s name for Khalil and you have a decent description of January 6. But the difference is that people were killed, and Trump said his VP should hang — not what one would term marginal distinctions.
Surely the significance of the two acts is categorically different regardless of the violence used and number of deaths. Jan 6 would be a much more problematic act even if no one died because it’s not just a random act of violence, but an act of violence intended to stop transfer of power to the elected president. By attempting to make elections not count, it attacked the most basic principle of democracy, and thus it was a much more “meta” transgression.
For anyone who thinks "these problems are so severe, we need someone to act like a dictator and break inconvenient laws to address them", there's a key point they're missing: In many of these cases, the president doesn't *need* to break the law, because it's very likely that he could quickly and easily get Congress to change the law. Getting 60 votes in the Senate might be a little difficult, but if Trump really wanted them to, the GOP could exercise the nuclear option (perhaps narrowed to just "emergency" issues) and make that unnecessary.
In most of the cases, especially immigration, Trump doesn't have to break the law, he can change the law. But he's not only uninterested in taking that course, I think he actively wants to break the law, to establish the precedent that he can. So that in the future he can break the law in bigger, clearer ways.
I think it’s less about being a dictator and more about simply looting the government ‘s data, grifting off the base and destroying every ounce of credibility and good will America has built up over the last 80 years out of spite. Donald is just a cranky old man who vomits up his daily word salad which is then translated into something tangible by “SM” and acted upon by his clown show administration. Can’t wait to see what they come up with next.
Big Fan. And please read Anne Applebaum's Autocracy. But for their sheer incompetence and overreaching we are already closer than farther. While America doesn't share many of Europe's historical roots that combined with then significant current events, ie. WWI for Germany, that helped fertilize the growth of mass racist movements, do not mistake the MAGA movement for a fan club. Many of the guardrails against dictatorship have already been captured, MSM, business/corporate leadership, the technocrats, administrative state, or significantly disabled as in the legal system, rule of law. A lot has happened in a short while that points against simple bluster.
I'd love to get a post on civil disobedience and what it looks like in the 2020s. The last time I read the concept was in school and Thoreau, so I am curious to hear your take on it.
> Khalil seems like a fairly bad guy, who abused the privilege of studying in the United States to attack his institution and intimidate innocent Americans.
So if this is what it takes to be a "bad guy", what should we say about the leaders of Israel who decided to murder 50,000 Palestinians?
It's really pathetic that you feel the need, in an article about Trump's increasingly illegal abuses of power, to set aside some time to affirm that a certain ethnic group doesn't deserve to live.
I read that Atlantic article on how the press covered Hitler before his rise to power and it was...insanely scary how comparable it is to how Trump is considered. How both were considered idiotic buffoons barely worth notice, how both had this connection to a (section) of the population, and now how they're pressing their institutions to seize power. Trump is less blatant that Hitler (who always was honest about his goals), but not much friendlier. The other scary part is how many awful people just decided to go along with Trump and protect themselves because it was easy. That reminds me a lot of the modern GOP.
Personally, I simply feel more and more disgust towards my own country and wonder whether it's time to leave. I don't want to be part of a nation which sold itself out for magic beans.
I would argue that the rapid ongoing dismantlement of both the IRS and Social Security are big economic stories with lots of potential economic repercussions.
The law firm thing, along with the revoking of grants that complied with prior administrations DEI requirements, really freak me out, because they set up a Roko's Basalisk situation where even if Trump/MAGA are voted out, people will feel that they have to comply with their perceived dictates, even contrary to the then current administration's rules, lest they face ruinous retribution if and when Trump/MAGA regain power. It risks permanently breaking democracy.
It means that the next Democratic administration can’t be a “let’s get back to normal guys” Biden administration. For this country to be safe again, some people are going to have to get very publicly smashed. (Assuming Trump and Musk fail to build their 1,000 year Reich.)
Yes. Everyone who is not a Trump supporter needs to get comfortable with the idea of using power. If one side is overturning the game board, you can't be standing there wringing your hands about the rules printed in the instruction booklet.
This, of course, was Biden’s great failure.
Biden didn't have FOX News and RW media in his corner. The GOP Base literally takes almost everything FOX News, Sinclair, et al say as fucking gospel; and then vote accordingly. And Trump and his party's leadership have drunk so much of the coolaid, they all believe it too. Dems murdering babies after birth. Haitian illegals eating people's dogs and cats. The (non-FOX) media is the enemy of the people.
There can be no *new normal* if/when the Dems ever regain power, unless there's also a "Truth in Media" law. That requires media to be either News or Opinion; and for the former to utilize actual journalistic standards, like 2+ sources for allegations, citations to actual studies, etc. If we can't restore the 4th Estate, our democracy is doomed.
Same for me. The fact that the major law firms didn't band together and agree to fight the EO and help defend Paul Weiss and that clients who wanted to stay with him but felt forced to abandon his firm sends a chilling message to all law firms. We are already seeing representation being denied to those need it for their politics simply because of the threat of being EO'd (likely unconstitutional). When a conservative legal podcast like Advisory Opinions (Betrayal of the Law Firms) raises serious concerns it needs to be taken seriously and it isn't yet.
This is straight out of the authoritarian playbook: using fear to break down trust between groups and individuals who should be natural allies in opposing them.
This is a good article Noah, but why do you continually try to give credence to Trump supporters or try to “hear them out”? I understood this perspective in 2016, and I myself tried to have sympathy and understanding for Trump supporters, but isn’t it clear at this point that his vocal supporters are fundamentally illogical and cruel? There is no hidden logic behind their support, we should take what they say and believe at face value instead of trying to find ways to rationalize them.
What would be your alternative approach, Pryce?
You and others do make a good point about reaching out across the aisle and I do appreciate how you try to be constructive instead of just haranguing Trump. In all honesty, I made this initial comment after waking up to more bad news about Trump potentially violating the constitution and weakening civil liberties, so I wasn’t in a very forgiving mood 😅. I guess my response is to say your approach is probably the correct one and we need cool-headed commentators more than ever, but it is sometimes hard to stomach having sympathy/understanding for the other side with what is happening!
Did you see this post as an attempt to reach across the aisle?
I like to think of your post as grounding the conversation in principles deeper than whatever fleeting line currently demarcates the “aisle”. Much appreciated!
Agree with David here
My alternative approach is to let these idiots suffer what they voted for. Yeah, everyone will feel pain. But his base will feel it more so than others. There’s no reasoning with sociopaths; they have to be allowed to wallow in their own filth.
This is what happened after 2004, the last time an empirically incompetent Republican got elected.
In 20 years, most of the MAGA base will act like 2004 Bush voters, and pretend they never supported him.
A sizable portion of the people who voted for Trump have done at least one of the following:
1. Supported a different candidate in the primaries at one point or another
2. Voted for a Democrat previously
3. Are not usually politically active but voted for him because they heard he was good for the economy or some other policy they care about
4. Voted for Trump despite disliking him because they thought Harris was worse or because they find him instrumentally useful for some set of policies they like
Many of these people can change their mind and Noah is trying to reach out to them. Saying that all Trump supporters are irredeemable might make the speaker feel good but is inaccurate and is more likely to entrench Trump's supporters in their position rather than actually influence change.
There are Obama>Trump voters. You can’t paint them all with a broad brush.
My own father is an Obama-Hillary-Biden-Trump voter!
Precisely. I personally was a Romney>HRC>Biden>Harris voter for three reasons:
1. I voted for Romney because I was disillusioned with Obama and the Democratic Congress prioritizing the ACA over larger investments in infrastructure, and “bailouts for banks but not for people,” as well as my agreement with Romney that Russia was an emerging threat.
2. I voted for HRC because Trump is an embarrassment.
3. I voted for Harris, despite my distaste with leftist culture wars/cancel culture/whatever you want to call it, because I correctly predicted that Trump would be far more dangerous this time around, choosing cronies and cranks to surround him, rather than rational actors that would impede his worst ideas and impulses.
Shout out for remembering the Romney/Russia thing. It is to Obama’s eternal discredit (and I voted for him twice) that he laughed at that.
Thanks! It’s even worse that he laughed instead of trying the genuine debate the point. It was just totally outside his capacity to consider. That was a problem for a lot of folks who took the wrong lesson from Fukuyama’s “End of History.”
Next you’re going to remind me of Hilary’s Reset button
My father claims he voted for Trump because he’s a “one issue voter” and that one issue is Israel. I know many Jews who have used this as justification for voting for Trump but personally I think they’re lying to themselves - they would’ve voted for him either way.
It’s concerning because I personally believe that Trumps economic actions (I struggle to call them “policies”) will lead to real hardships for many Americans and rather than admit their own mismanagement the Trumpists will find a scapegoat. And we all know where, historically, that has always led.
PS - before this I voted for W twice. I guess I take after my mother whose first vote was for Nixon in *1972*. Counterculture my parents were not; maybe that’s why I subconsciously sought out a Burner who was 7 years older than me (though she looks younger than me.)
Noah: Khalil is a permanent resident, just like Chung, not an exchange student.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/nyregion/mahmoud-khalil-deportation-case-new-jersey.html?
"slowly, carefully"
no, do some research on this, he's not being slow or careful at all. Can't find the link right now but Trump's complete all-in assault on the courts has been compared to that of other dictators who spent years doing the damage he's done in just a few months.
Exactly. This has not been slow, it has been a blitzkrieg. KIt has only been two months and the m number of laws broken and ignored it astounding. And a lot of it is reckless as well. Nor is much of it careful legal parsing. Much of it is just flat out assertion of blatant power with a clear "Who is gonna stop me?" subtext. And threats of investigating, prosecuting, and jailing opponents and or media have been a daily feature.
These people frighten the hell out of me. They fundamentally do not believe in democracy or representation. They know what is best and if they have the power to make it so, they will, damned be anyone who tries stand in their way.
The concept of the consent to being governed means nothing to such people. The deep fallacy and hypocrisy in their world view is lost upon them. They clamor for freedom from the subjugation of wokeism even as they turn around and attempt to subjugate all others.
If this was "Representative Democracy" vs. "The Enlightened Philosopher King", being compared--like some of the Founders did--on their merits, this naked power grab *might* be slightly understandable.
But these are Keystone Cops, that are taking away our civil liberties even as they're actively financially and militarily ruining our country. And with it our livelihoods. Who can't even do war-planning, without fucking it up. Putin and Xi must be laughing themselves silly.
Great analysis, but it's one done in isolation, and the world doesn't stand still. Countries invade, pandemics happen, etc. I worry that while Trump's amassing power for revenge and JD Vance is helping for his own ideological goals, what happens if China takes Taiwan and now controls most of the world's advanced chips (aka, the new oil)? What if Russia attacks a NATO nation? My point is, things can snowball in unexpected ways. This is a five alarm fire, and we're all standing around looking at our shoes.
“Khalil is a Syrian exchange student who led a bunch of Palestine protests at Columbia University. Some of those protests turned violent, possibly with Khalil’s encouragement. And Khalil almost certainly participated in illegal behavior, like taking over campus buildings.”
Now substitute Trump’s name for Khalil and you have a decent description of January 6. But the difference is that people were killed, and Trump said his VP should hang — not what one would term marginal distinctions.
Indeed.
Surely the significance of the two acts is categorically different regardless of the violence used and number of deaths. Jan 6 would be a much more problematic act even if no one died because it’s not just a random act of violence, but an act of violence intended to stop transfer of power to the elected president. By attempting to make elections not count, it attacked the most basic principle of democracy, and thus it was a much more “meta” transgression.
For anyone who thinks "these problems are so severe, we need someone to act like a dictator and break inconvenient laws to address them", there's a key point they're missing: In many of these cases, the president doesn't *need* to break the law, because it's very likely that he could quickly and easily get Congress to change the law. Getting 60 votes in the Senate might be a little difficult, but if Trump really wanted them to, the GOP could exercise the nuclear option (perhaps narrowed to just "emergency" issues) and make that unnecessary.
In most of the cases, especially immigration, Trump doesn't have to break the law, he can change the law. But he's not only uninterested in taking that course, I think he actively wants to break the law, to establish the precedent that he can. So that in the future he can break the law in bigger, clearer ways.
“Trump himself is near the end of his life”
Puts a little spring in my step
“Trump himself is near the end of his life”
From your mouth to God's ear!
I think it’s less about being a dictator and more about simply looting the government ‘s data, grifting off the base and destroying every ounce of credibility and good will America has built up over the last 80 years out of spite. Donald is just a cranky old man who vomits up his daily word salad which is then translated into something tangible by “SM” and acted upon by his clown show administration. Can’t wait to see what they come up with next.
Big Fan. And please read Anne Applebaum's Autocracy. But for their sheer incompetence and overreaching we are already closer than farther. While America doesn't share many of Europe's historical roots that combined with then significant current events, ie. WWI for Germany, that helped fertilize the growth of mass racist movements, do not mistake the MAGA movement for a fan club. Many of the guardrails against dictatorship have already been captured, MSM, business/corporate leadership, the technocrats, administrative state, or significantly disabled as in the legal system, rule of law. A lot has happened in a short while that points against simple bluster.
I'd love to get a post on civil disobedience and what it looks like in the 2020s. The last time I read the concept was in school and Thoreau, so I am curious to hear your take on it.
> Khalil seems like a fairly bad guy, who abused the privilege of studying in the United States to attack his institution and intimidate innocent Americans.
So if this is what it takes to be a "bad guy", what should we say about the leaders of Israel who decided to murder 50,000 Palestinians?
It's really pathetic that you feel the need, in an article about Trump's increasingly illegal abuses of power, to set aside some time to affirm that a certain ethnic group doesn't deserve to live.
I read that Atlantic article on how the press covered Hitler before his rise to power and it was...insanely scary how comparable it is to how Trump is considered. How both were considered idiotic buffoons barely worth notice, how both had this connection to a (section) of the population, and now how they're pressing their institutions to seize power. Trump is less blatant that Hitler (who always was honest about his goals), but not much friendlier. The other scary part is how many awful people just decided to go along with Trump and protect themselves because it was easy. That reminds me a lot of the modern GOP.
Personally, I simply feel more and more disgust towards my own country and wonder whether it's time to leave. I don't want to be part of a nation which sold itself out for magic beans.
Loved the last paragraph! It really brought the whole article together.
I would argue that the rapid ongoing dismantlement of both the IRS and Social Security are big economic stories with lots of potential economic repercussions.