A Failure of Imagination
(All the way around)
Catching up:
Undaunted courage in Moldova: “In defeat for Russia, pro-E.U. party wins Moldovan parliamentary majority.”
How desperate is TrumpWorld to block release of Epstein files? “Mike Johnson Delays Swearing In Adelita Grijalva to Block Final Signature On Epstein Petition.”
“Supreme Court meets to discuss Ghislaine Maxwell appeal.” What could possibly go wrong?
We knew that. “Justice Clarence Thomas says legal precedents are not ‘the gospel’”
Once again, the coverage of one slaughter is interrupted by breaking news of yet another. And our doom-loop of thoughts, prayers, debate, and inertia will start all over again.
NYC’s Trumpy mayor takes a powder. “Eric Adams drops out of New York mayoral race.”
And of course, Trump continues to rewrite the history of January 6… and now seems to be turning on his own hand-picked FBI chief.1
Happy Monday.
Riding the Tiger
There is an old saying (variously attributed to Mahatma Gandhi and others) that “An eye-for-eye and tooth-for-tooth would lead to a world of the blind and toothless.”
That came to mind as I read Peter Baker’s piece in the NYT: “With Comey Indictment, Trump Sets Retribution Precedent That Could Haunt His Allies.”
Indeed, as Trump expands his imperial power, Republicans seem to be suffering from a fatal lack of imagination: What happens if the Democrats use the same powers against them? And why don’t they seem worried about that?
Writes Baker:
There will, presumably, come a time when the Republican Party is no longer in control. A precedent has now been set for prosecuting a former F.B.I. director disfavored by the current administration for allegedly lying to Congress. Democrats already are accusing Mr. Patel of having lied to Congress in his confirmation hearings when he promised not to engage in political retaliation.
Mr. Trump’s campaign to imprison, fire or otherwise punish his political foes and use government power to crack down on free speech he does not like has broken norms that stood for generations.
But it has also established new standards for what a president can do that even some conservatives worry may come back to bite them. Power claimed by one party is then eventually available to the other. Limits ignored by one administration may no longer seem binding on the next.
A few folks on the MAGA-curious right seem to understand this. When Trump used the FCC to cancel Jimmy Kimmel, The Free Press’s Bari Weiss warned: “For those on the right who might like what they’re seeing from this FCC: Remember that Democrats will wield this power again.”
She expanded on that threat in an editorial.
For the MAGA crowd who might like what they’re seeing from Carr: Remember that Democrats will wield this power again. And when they do, they will play by the new rules that Carr and the Trump administration just established.
**
The Democrats’ own failure of imagination should be a cautionary tale. Back in May 2024, our friend Tom Nichols tried to warn the opposition that voters suffered from a “failure of imagination about Trump.”
Americans simply cannot imagine how badly Trump’s first term might have turned out, and how ghastly his second term is likely to be. Our minds are not equipped to embrace how fast democracy could disintegrate. We can better imagine alien invasions than we can an authoritarian America. The Atlantic tried to lay out what this future would look like, but perhaps even words can’t capture the magnitude of the threat.
Nichols tried to sketch out the threat:
Trump’s most alarmist opponents are wrong to insist that he would march into Washington in January 2025 like Hitler entering Paris. The process will be slower and more bureaucratic, starting with the seizure of the Justice Department and the Defense Department, two keys to controlling the nation.
If Trump returns to office, he will not shoot democracy on Fifth Avenue. He and the people around him will paralyze it, limb by limb. The American public needs to get better at imagining what that would look like.
**
But now it’s the GOP that needs to get better at imagining what might happen in the future. Even as they applaud an all-powerful Trump presidency that crushes norms and critics, have they thought through (or do they care about) what happens when the cudgel is in the hands of their enemies?
So perhaps this is a good moment for them to ponder how they would feel about a President AOC who imposes massive new taxes without Congress; or a President AOC who has control over all of the levers of government, including the FCC, the Fed, the SEC, and the FTC. Perhaps they ought to ask themselves what it would look like if a President Gavin Newsom began to rule by decree, and used the Department of Justice and the FBI as his own weapons to rid the country of “right-wing extremists.”
In the Atlantic, Idrees Kahloon sketches out what this doom loop might look like.
When power does return to the American left, what temptations will it face? Would court-packing, already an aim among some progressives, become a major priority for the Democratic Party? Would the Trump loyalists at the Department of Justice be replaced with different partisans, creating a dangerous spoils system? Would the innovations of the Trump administration—the intervention of the FCC on adjudicating acceptable content—be repaid in kind by directly regulating “misinformation” on right-wing networks?
Would a Democratic president use expansive Trump-style declarations of emergency power to bypass Congress’s policy agenda? Would disfavored right-wing groups face concerted state harassment?
**
So why aren’t Republicans more worried about blowback? Why are they acting as if they will never have to hand over these extraordinary powers to the other party? Why are they acting as if they can ride this hungry tiger forever, without worrying that someday it might eat them?
This raises a disturbing question that requires our own exercise of imagination: What if they do not intend to peacefully surrender power?
So far, California Governor Gavin Newsom is one of the few Democrats to raise the possibility that Trump will try to run for an unconstitutional third term.
“I fear that we will not have an election in 2028. I really mean that in the core of my soul − unless we wake up to the code red, what’s happening in this country, and we wake up soberly to how serious this moment is,” he said.
A White House spokeswoman called Newsom’s remarks about the 2028 election “absurd” and a “conspiracy theory.” But TrumpWorld is already selling ‘Trump 2028” hats and his chief fluffer, Lindsey Graham has already embraced the idea. “I hope it lasts forever,” he gushed on Fox News.
Exit take: I’m not predicting this will happen. But it seems naive — and an act of political malpractice — not to begin imagining (and preparing) for what might lie ahead.
Finally
A common dynamic these days is for the president to do something outrageous, and then some lefty rando does something outrageous (in this case whoever runs the Chicago Teachers Union account commemorating a murderer), and I think a lot of people see those two things and think “both sides are equally crazy.”
And here it is:
This seems relevant: Shakur “was convicted of the first-degree murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster during a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. She escaped from prison in 1979.”
FFS.
Monday dogs
It’s not the size of the dog. It’s the size of his heart. And bed.
When the going gets tough, the tough play ball.
Trump posted this rant on Truth Social:
The GOP is busy imagining how to never surrender power even when they lose an election. Mike Johnson is blocking the swearing in of the newly elected AZ Congresswoman to prevent the release of the Epstein files. Actually they are done imagining, they are doing it in broad daylight.
RE: “Indeed, as Trump expands his imperial power, Republicans seem to be suffering from a fatal lack of imagination: What happens if the Democrats use the same powers against them? And why don’t they seem worries (sic) about that?”
I think the answer is pretty clear, and you even allude to it earlier with Johnson refusing to swear in a new Democratic representative:
THEY WON’T ALLOW DEMOCRATS TO WIN. And if they manage to do so anyway, they won’t allow them to take power. It should be noted that all the power agencies work for Republicans.