Yes, things are pretty bad now
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edit: They took down the paywall so here's the link: https://www.readtangle.com/yes-things-are-pretty-bad-right-now/?ref=tangle-newsletter )
OP
From Tangle:The fundamental promise of this news publication is viewpoint diversity.
I built Tangle because I wanted a place where conservatives, liberals, and everyone in between could gather under one roof and trust the news they were reading. In an era when media trust is at an all-time low, polarization is increasingly extreme and so few people seem capable of talking to each other across the partisan divide, this North Star has always served us well.
In order to serve this mission, to earn the trust of the biggest Trump supporters and the most progressive leftists and all the people who land somewhere between them, we offer some simple promises: chief among them is viewpoint diversity in our content. Most days, this is “What the left is saying” and “What the right is saying,” though sometimes we’ll offer pieces that counter each other (for instance, a Tangle staff member is working on a piece responding to what I’m writing here today). We also lean into transparency in how we work by featuring corrections prominently and sharing (and explaining) our editorial policies. Finally, we try to show that we’re fallible humans who can make mistakes, learn and change their minds, rather than pretend we comprise a flawless high-minded institution (we regularly feature reader criticisms, and I encourage anyone who disagrees with today’s piece to write in or comment so we can consider your thoughts).
We’re not perfect, obviously. Our system has flaws. The left–right dichotomy in which we sort arguments is not always clean or appropriate. Some people skip to “My take” without reading the different perspectives we share. Readers of various political persuasions unsubscribe every day, upset that they don’t find their views represented the way they’d prefer in our coverage. We recognize these flaws and are always trying to improve.
Yet, I promise that whenever I write my opinions, I will always be honest. That I will share my view in the most fair and straightforward way I can. When I feel strongly about something I will say so, regardless of which political tribe that view aligns with. When I don’t know something, or don’t have a fully formed opinion, I’ll admit that, too. And my promise, when I’m sharing my view, is to do so regardless of the landmines I may step on or the people I may upset.
So, today, I want to share my perspective on the moment we are living in. And the honest truth, as I see it, is that things are actually pretty bad right now. Nearly everything in the political arena — the candidates, the policies, the extremism, the AI slop, the punditry, the writing, the thinking, the principles — it all seems to be getting worse in basically every meaningful way.
And, to me, one of the driving forces behind all of this is the Trump administration. Nine months into his presidency, I think the bad things Trump is doing vastly outweigh the good. Rather than pretending I don’t feel that way, I’m going to step forward and flatly make my case. Again, I say all this as an independent-minded thinker with no loyalty to any political party. I say it as someone who has published countless pieces criticizing excesses and failures on the left (including the media). I say it while holding a set of political views that I believe are decidedly middle-of-the-road in sum and all over the place from issue to issue.
So here’s the truth as I see it: If, on the day Trump was inaugurated, I had warned readers that in a few months law enforcement officers would be rappelling from helicopters like soldiers into civilian apartment buildings in Chicago; the military would be extrajudicially killing Venezuelans for alleged drug dealing; Americans would be getting arrested while being falsely accused of being here illegally; the Justice Department would be prosecuting the president’s political foes at his direction; and legal U.S. residents would be getting arrested, detained, and deported for protected speech; I would have been accused of having a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Yet nine months into this presidency, all of those things are happening. This isn’t hyperbolic fear-mongering — it isn’t sensationalist, or exaggerated. It’s literally just a list of the things the president has done, things I’m obligated to speak plainly about. Trump has, thankfully, largely obeyed court orders so far, but that may not be the case going forward — he’s gotten a lot of what he wanted from the courts so far, and he’s resisted or delayed obeying the major rulings that have gone against him.
The resistance libs, whom I’ve derided for hyperventilating about hypotheticals and living in a constant state of terror, have gotten a lot of things right about the contours of Trump’s second term.
And for conservative readers who may be sympathetic to Trump’s more extreme actions, I think it’s important to put it into terms that I hope clarify the issue. Hypothetical analogies are never perfect, but some of these frightening possibilities are legitimately much more plausible if we accept what Trump has done:
Imagine President Biden had won his election on a fundamental promise to end gun violence in America. So, in turn, he claims he has a “mandate” to send the National Guard into the three states with the highest rates of gun violence: Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. The troops converge on small rural towns to round up gun owners suspected of violating a range of firearm laws. Gun shops are raided and trashed by federal agents; tables are flipped over, desks are emptied, customers inside are zip-tied and dragged onto the street in front of onlookers without any reasonable suspicion of having committed a crime. Helicopters buzz overhead as back-up. The agents don’t flash warrants or ID themselves; in fact, they’re all masked and it’s not always clear what agency they are with. They demand identification and proof of firearm licenses from everyone present. All the customers are detained without due process until the agents are sure they haven’t committed a crime. Local police and politicians try to intervene, but they are ignored and forced out of the way. Federal courts stacked with Democratic-appointed judges greenlight the troops’ actions. Then imagine a handful of the customers inside one of these shops ends up being guilty of something, and those people are pointed to as justification for the entire raid.
Even if you knew some of those people broke the law, would you trust this kind of power in the government’s hands? What would you do if that was your store, your community, or your due process rights being run over?
Here’s another: Every year, millions of pro-life activists descend on Washington, D.C. for the March for Life. Imagine President Barack Obama responding to the March for Life rallygoers by framing them all as anti-abortion “radical” extremists and terrorist “lunatics,” and then deploying the National Guard to protect federally funded facilities offering abortion services in Republican-led states. Imagine that when this move draws blowback from the protesters — and Republicans, and conservative media — Obama responds by having the troops tear gas crowds, incite violence, and then arrest anyone who fights back for assaulting police.
Or remove any living president from the picture and imagine a president-yet-to-be — perhaps a very progressive anti-Zionist like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Zohran Mamdani. Imagine this president decides that pro-Israel activists are a threat to the security of Muslims in America. So, exercising power the same way Trump has, they deploy ICE agents to snatch up Israeli immigrants in the country on green cards for opinion pieces they wrote defending Israel from claims of genocide in their university newspapers. While trying to deport them, this hypothetical president ships them off to a prison thousands of miles away from where they were arrested on the grounds that they support a racist, colonial, terrorist state called Israel.
These are not identical to the things Trump is doing, but they’re all similar to what Trump is doing now — just with the script flipped. As hypotheticals, they are also now far more possible with the precedent Trump is setting.
The central difference is that Trump is targeting the people many of his supporters want targeted. But Trump won’t be president forever, and what we deem acceptable now will — as it always does — come back to haunt us in the future.
What’s happening right now.
As I write this piece, Trump is deploying National Guard troops to American cities against the wishes of those cities’ and states’ elected officials. It was good to see Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, take a principled stance against this obscene overreach, saying, rightly, “Oklahomans would lose their mind if [Gov. JB] Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”
Last week, after one of the president’s extrajudicial strikes on a boat off the coast of Venezuela, two survivors were found. This was a pretty interesting development, because these strikes have killed dozens of alleged drug smugglers about whom we know next to nothing.
And then something odd happened: Instead of charging the recovered survivors with the alleged crime the Trump administration tried to kill them for — narcoterrorism — they allowed the men to be repatriated to their own countries. This is, in some ways, standard procedure: People who are arrested in international waters are often sent back to their countries to face charges.
One of the most alarming aspects of this situation was that, in the case of at least one of the men who was killed in the strike, some evidence emerged that he was a fisherman. One of the survivors of the recent strike did have a prior record of trafficking drugs, but the other man, from Ecuador, was released by his country and won’t be charged because they said there was no crime to charge him with. In other words, it’s possible that the Trump administration just killed at least one innocent person. At the very least, they declined to detain and charge someone on U.S. soil they just got done trying to kill extrajudicially.
That this administration had not been fighting narcoterrorists but actually killing innocent fishermen off the coast of Venezuela was already something a few journalists had theorized. When Colombia’s president condemned the strikes, Trump pulled U.S. aid to the country, rather than admit a potential mistake.
The president is now entertaining strikes on Venezuela’s mainland, just as he has approved a $40 billion bailout for Argentina’s economy, funded by U.S. taxpayers. The price tag on that bailout, as we discussed this week in Tangle, is far greater than the combined savings from DOGE’s hamhanded operations early this year and the cuts to the budget of USAID. By the way: New reporting from The Associated Press is showing how children in Myanmar are starving due to those USAID cuts.
Other actions are less likely to spark a constitutional crisis or a new foreign entanglement, but are still indignities against the office that we now just accept. For example, here are a few lowlights from the Trump administration in just the last few weeks:
Trump said he would have the final say on whether the Justice Department pays him $230 million for damages related to charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election and other investigations.
Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance who has spent the last several months promoting Trump’s crypto company.
Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself dumping feces onto protesters in American cities.
Trump suggested U.S. cities should be “training grounds” for our own military.
Trump’s press secretary claimed, “The Democrat Party’s main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals,” a comment that was then echoed by House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The White House communications director called Kamala Harris’s husband a cuck.
Trump’s press secretary responded to a reasonable question from a reporter by saying, “Your mom did.”
The official Department of Homeland Security X account now openly and frequently traffics in genuinely racist far-right imagery and terminology.
Senate Republicans posted an AI-generated video of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
New reporting emerged that the Trump administration engaged in a quid pro quo deal with El Salvador to send informants from MS-13 back to the government they had been confidentially leaking information about.
Each of these, on their own, might have constituted weeks-long scandals for past administrations. But now? They are barely blips on the news radar.
What this could mean for the future.
And there are far more worrisome things on the horizon. Yesterday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals greenlit Trump’s National Guard deployment in Portland. One of the judges on the circuit put forward a concurrence that headlined a radical view of Trump’s power: Trump could deploy National Guard troops anywhere he wanted across the country, and the judiciary cannot intervene. This position introduced a new theory of executive power that sidelines the courts, essentially makes Trump’s authority totally unchecked, and opens the door to a slew of frightening new hypotheticals where the National Guard could be deployed any time the president wants to make a show of force.
At the same time, the president is openly considering invoking the Insurrection Act because he thinks governors and mayors are allowing their cities to turn into “war zones.” The law, signed in 1807, was designed to quell any “insurrection” against the United States. It would hand Trump extraordinary power to tap troops from any state he’d like and then send them into Democratic-run cities and states. It would allow him to command U.S. soldiers to begin policing American citizens all across the country.
Of course, there are no insurrections in our major cities. There is some crime, yes, but nobody is trying to foment an organized overthrow of the government. Trump’s declaration would actually vastly increase the likelihood of violent clashes between citizens and law enforcement — just as his troop deployment has in Portland, where protests had mostly fizzled out before Trump sent federal troops in and sparked a whole new wave of clashes. All of this amounts to shoving us ever closer to the kind of red-versus-blue civil clash that seemed unfathomable just a few years ago.
Simultaneously, ICE is ramping up its surveillance power to target illegal immigrants and now “antifa,” a conveniently undefinable group of left-wing activists and radicals. ICE has purchased technologies like iris and face scanners, as well as spyware that can remotely hack smartphones and cellphone location data typically only accessible with a warrant. This is happening right now — for an agency that received tens of billions of dollars in additional funding when illegal border crossings are at an all-time low (which, in fairness, is a major success of the Trump administration).
Trump is obliterating the Overton window before our eyes. Whether it’s normalizing U.S. troops patrolling U.S. cities or pretending a press secretary responding to a journalist’s questions with “your mom” is a really funny joke, the administration continues to degrade the public discourse and normalize extreme and juvenile behavior. Again: it just feels like nearly everything in the political arena — the candidates, the policies, the extremism, the AI slop, the punditry, the writing, the thinking, the principles — is all getting worse in basically every meaningful way.
It isn’t hard to imagine a future, not so distant from now, where a half dozen Democrat-run American cities are being occupied by the National Guard against the wishes of the leaders and citizens of those cities. It isn’t hard to imagine Trump deploying National Guard troops to polling locations in swing states under the guise of “preventing voter fraud,” successfully suppressing the vote during the 2026 midterms. It is, actually, reasonable to envision a future where potential 2028 Democratic presidential nominees end up facing flimsy criminal charges from the Justice Department. Steve Bannon is now openly and directly suggesting that Trump will be president after the 2028 election and saying there are ways around the 22nd Amendment (to be announced later).
I know all of this sounds like Trump Derangement Syndrome, and if you had said it to me a few months ago, I may have even accused you of that. But now? After watching this administration for nine months? I’m honestly not so sure.
And it’s really hard to capture it all in one piece of writing. I’m roughly 3,000 words in, and I’ve said nothing about the threats to press freedom: ICE detaining a reporter on trumped-up charges, the new Pentagon press rules that nearly every news publication rejected, or the lawsuits against major media outlets. I’ve said nothing of the grift: the Trump family’s crypto wealth exploding to the tune of $5 billion while he’s in office, an unprecedented scheme to profit from the presidency, a Fox News host literally becoming a business partner with the president’s son. I’ve said nothing of the prosecutions: John Bolton, James Comey and Letitia James, only one of which seems to have any real chance of succeeding. I’ve said nothing of the laundry list of fraudsters and violent rioters who have now been pardoned by the president, or Trump’s border czar allegedly receiving $50,000 in cash in a bribery sting operation and it barely constituting a news cycle.
And we’re only nine months in.
Things worth remembering.
At the risk of doing too much hedging and throat-clearing, I want to make myself perfectly clear: None of this is to suggest there aren’t problems on the left, or that Democrats haven’t grossly abused executive power or acted in unconstitutional ways. Of course they have. I was one of the people criticizing Letitia James for her case against Trump, because I thought it was an inflated charge that would lead to the retribution we are seeing today. I was one of the people criticizing Biden for collaborating with social media companies to silence dissent during the pandemic, because I worried about the threat of executive power on Americans’ free speech. I was one of the people who hammered Hunter Biden for his shady dealings abroad, because it reinforced the idea that it’s okay for the president’s family to profit off the office. And even before Tangle, I was one of the people who criticized President Obama for spying on journalists, because I recognized the threat it posed to press freedom.
But Democrats aren’t the party in power right now — Trump and Republicans are. They have a governing trifecta, the Supreme Court on their side, and they very much appear to be drunk on that power. And, candidly, the issues we saw under the last administration — the free speech threats, the expansion of executive power, the corruption — were orders of magnitude less dangerous and extreme than what the Trump family and his administration are doing now.
It’s also not to suggest there isn’t any nuance or aren’t complicating factors to any of these stories. Trump’s troop deployment to Portland, for example, is more complicated as a legal question than many people think. One could easily make the argument that a lot of these problems would be solved if Democratic leaders did a better job quelling protests and civil disobedience on their own. Even the rappel-from-the-helicopter raid of the Chicago apartment building, however surreal and alarming, was a response to a complex situation that genuinely needed intervention. The New York Times’ reporting on the raid made it clear that the building in question was a den of crime occupied by many unauthorized migrants, which posed real threats to the community. One resident quoted in that story said they were hopeful the raid would offer the building and its residents a fresh start.
But these complexities shouldn’t obscure the full picture — the totality of what is happening, what Trump is normalizing, and what it might portend about the future. Every presidential administration has wins. Biden had wins, Trump 1.0 had wins, President Obama had wins, and even President Bush — the least popular president of my lifetime — had wins. But presidents are often judged by their biggest failures and their biggest scandals, not their biggest wins. Bush was ultimately judged by 9/11 and the disastrous wars in the Middle East. Obama was judged by a failed foreign policy and the bank bailouts in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Trump 1.0 was judged by the failed pandemic response and the January 6 riots. Biden was judged by inflation and the cover-up of his mental fitness.
Trump 2.0 already includes some wins, but his presidency will ultimately, like any other, be defined by the scandals, failures, and the legacy of the condemnable behavior he normalizes. And that list is growing fast.
In the spirit of fairness, I should, at least, acknowledge an alternative possibility to all this: Perhaps what looks to me like authoritarian drift is, in fact, a necessary course correction after years of drift in the opposite direction. I know plenty of conservatives who would argue that the institutions I cherish — the courts, Congress, our media — have not always served the country well. Many Americans believe they’ve been scorned and unfairly targeted by the very elites now crying foul about “norms.” They see Trump’s willingness to bulldoze bureaucracy as overdue disruption, not authoritarian behavior.
The National Guard deployments that alarm me might strike others as an imperfect but justified response to chaos Democratic leaders refused to confront. The strikes abroad, the hard line on immigration, even the prosecutorial zeal — supporters would say these are the predictable fruits of an electoral mandate, exercised through legitimate executive power, checked by courts that are still functioning as they always have but finally ruling in ways Democrats loathe.
They might also argue that my tone is itself a symptom of the privilege of stability. Maybe this administration’s rawness, its norm-breaking, and its bluster are expressions of the raw language of power, the only things capable of shaking complacent institutions and re-centering the forgotten Americans. Perhaps, in ten years, historians will say Trump 2.0 forced a reckoning we actually needed, that nudged us in a direction which ultimately bore far more positive fruit than I can imagine right now.
And to all of this I would just say: I hope they’re right. I’d welcome the humbling. Because the only thing worse than overreacting to a false alarm would be under-reacting to a real one, and I’d much rather discover that my fear was misplaced than that my silence was.
When the world wearies and society ceases to satisfy, there is always the garden - Minnie Aumônier
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That’s quite a list.
He's been busy, hasn't he?
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edit: They took down the paywall so here's the link: https://www.readtangle.com/yes-things-are-pretty-bad-right-now/?ref=tangle-newsletter )
OP
From Tangle:The fundamental promise of this news publication is viewpoint diversity.
I built Tangle because I wanted a place where conservatives, liberals, and everyone in between could gather under one roof and trust the news they were reading. In an era when media trust is at an all-time low, polarization is increasingly extreme and so few people seem capable of talking to each other across the partisan divide, this North Star has always served us well.
In order to serve this mission, to earn the trust of the biggest Trump supporters and the most progressive leftists and all the people who land somewhere between them, we offer some simple promises: chief among them is viewpoint diversity in our content. Most days, this is “What the left is saying” and “What the right is saying,” though sometimes we’ll offer pieces that counter each other (for instance, a Tangle staff member is working on a piece responding to what I’m writing here today). We also lean into transparency in how we work by featuring corrections prominently and sharing (and explaining) our editorial policies. Finally, we try to show that we’re fallible humans who can make mistakes, learn and change their minds, rather than pretend we comprise a flawless high-minded institution (we regularly feature reader criticisms, and I encourage anyone who disagrees with today’s piece to write in or comment so we can consider your thoughts).
We’re not perfect, obviously. Our system has flaws. The left–right dichotomy in which we sort arguments is not always clean or appropriate. Some people skip to “My take” without reading the different perspectives we share. Readers of various political persuasions unsubscribe every day, upset that they don’t find their views represented the way they’d prefer in our coverage. We recognize these flaws and are always trying to improve.
Yet, I promise that whenever I write my opinions, I will always be honest. That I will share my view in the most fair and straightforward way I can. When I feel strongly about something I will say so, regardless of which political tribe that view aligns with. When I don’t know something, or don’t have a fully formed opinion, I’ll admit that, too. And my promise, when I’m sharing my view, is to do so regardless of the landmines I may step on or the people I may upset.
So, today, I want to share my perspective on the moment we are living in. And the honest truth, as I see it, is that things are actually pretty bad right now. Nearly everything in the political arena — the candidates, the policies, the extremism, the AI slop, the punditry, the writing, the thinking, the principles — it all seems to be getting worse in basically every meaningful way.
And, to me, one of the driving forces behind all of this is the Trump administration. Nine months into his presidency, I think the bad things Trump is doing vastly outweigh the good. Rather than pretending I don’t feel that way, I’m going to step forward and flatly make my case. Again, I say all this as an independent-minded thinker with no loyalty to any political party. I say it as someone who has published countless pieces criticizing excesses and failures on the left (including the media). I say it while holding a set of political views that I believe are decidedly middle-of-the-road in sum and all over the place from issue to issue.
So here’s the truth as I see it: If, on the day Trump was inaugurated, I had warned readers that in a few months law enforcement officers would be rappelling from helicopters like soldiers into civilian apartment buildings in Chicago; the military would be extrajudicially killing Venezuelans for alleged drug dealing; Americans would be getting arrested while being falsely accused of being here illegally; the Justice Department would be prosecuting the president’s political foes at his direction; and legal U.S. residents would be getting arrested, detained, and deported for protected speech; I would have been accused of having a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Yet nine months into this presidency, all of those things are happening. This isn’t hyperbolic fear-mongering — it isn’t sensationalist, or exaggerated. It’s literally just a list of the things the president has done, things I’m obligated to speak plainly about. Trump has, thankfully, largely obeyed court orders so far, but that may not be the case going forward — he’s gotten a lot of what he wanted from the courts so far, and he’s resisted or delayed obeying the major rulings that have gone against him.
The resistance libs, whom I’ve derided for hyperventilating about hypotheticals and living in a constant state of terror, have gotten a lot of things right about the contours of Trump’s second term.
And for conservative readers who may be sympathetic to Trump’s more extreme actions, I think it’s important to put it into terms that I hope clarify the issue. Hypothetical analogies are never perfect, but some of these frightening possibilities are legitimately much more plausible if we accept what Trump has done:
Imagine President Biden had won his election on a fundamental promise to end gun violence in America. So, in turn, he claims he has a “mandate” to send the National Guard into the three states with the highest rates of gun violence: Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. The troops converge on small rural towns to round up gun owners suspected of violating a range of firearm laws. Gun shops are raided and trashed by federal agents; tables are flipped over, desks are emptied, customers inside are zip-tied and dragged onto the street in front of onlookers without any reasonable suspicion of having committed a crime. Helicopters buzz overhead as back-up. The agents don’t flash warrants or ID themselves; in fact, they’re all masked and it’s not always clear what agency they are with. They demand identification and proof of firearm licenses from everyone present. All the customers are detained without due process until the agents are sure they haven’t committed a crime. Local police and politicians try to intervene, but they are ignored and forced out of the way. Federal courts stacked with Democratic-appointed judges greenlight the troops’ actions. Then imagine a handful of the customers inside one of these shops ends up being guilty of something, and those people are pointed to as justification for the entire raid.
Even if you knew some of those people broke the law, would you trust this kind of power in the government’s hands? What would you do if that was your store, your community, or your due process rights being run over?
Here’s another: Every year, millions of pro-life activists descend on Washington, D.C. for the March for Life. Imagine President Barack Obama responding to the March for Life rallygoers by framing them all as anti-abortion “radical” extremists and terrorist “lunatics,” and then deploying the National Guard to protect federally funded facilities offering abortion services in Republican-led states. Imagine that when this move draws blowback from the protesters — and Republicans, and conservative media — Obama responds by having the troops tear gas crowds, incite violence, and then arrest anyone who fights back for assaulting police.
Or remove any living president from the picture and imagine a president-yet-to-be — perhaps a very progressive anti-Zionist like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Zohran Mamdani. Imagine this president decides that pro-Israel activists are a threat to the security of Muslims in America. So, exercising power the same way Trump has, they deploy ICE agents to snatch up Israeli immigrants in the country on green cards for opinion pieces they wrote defending Israel from claims of genocide in their university newspapers. While trying to deport them, this hypothetical president ships them off to a prison thousands of miles away from where they were arrested on the grounds that they support a racist, colonial, terrorist state called Israel.
These are not identical to the things Trump is doing, but they’re all similar to what Trump is doing now — just with the script flipped. As hypotheticals, they are also now far more possible with the precedent Trump is setting.
The central difference is that Trump is targeting the people many of his supporters want targeted. But Trump won’t be president forever, and what we deem acceptable now will — as it always does — come back to haunt us in the future.
What’s happening right now.
As I write this piece, Trump is deploying National Guard troops to American cities against the wishes of those cities’ and states’ elected officials. It was good to see Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, take a principled stance against this obscene overreach, saying, rightly, “Oklahomans would lose their mind if [Gov. JB] Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration.”
Last week, after one of the president’s extrajudicial strikes on a boat off the coast of Venezuela, two survivors were found. This was a pretty interesting development, because these strikes have killed dozens of alleged drug smugglers about whom we know next to nothing.
And then something odd happened: Instead of charging the recovered survivors with the alleged crime the Trump administration tried to kill them for — narcoterrorism — they allowed the men to be repatriated to their own countries. This is, in some ways, standard procedure: People who are arrested in international waters are often sent back to their countries to face charges.
One of the most alarming aspects of this situation was that, in the case of at least one of the men who was killed in the strike, some evidence emerged that he was a fisherman. One of the survivors of the recent strike did have a prior record of trafficking drugs, but the other man, from Ecuador, was released by his country and won’t be charged because they said there was no crime to charge him with. In other words, it’s possible that the Trump administration just killed at least one innocent person. At the very least, they declined to detain and charge someone on U.S. soil they just got done trying to kill extrajudicially.
That this administration had not been fighting narcoterrorists but actually killing innocent fishermen off the coast of Venezuela was already something a few journalists had theorized. When Colombia’s president condemned the strikes, Trump pulled U.S. aid to the country, rather than admit a potential mistake.
The president is now entertaining strikes on Venezuela’s mainland, just as he has approved a $40 billion bailout for Argentina’s economy, funded by U.S. taxpayers. The price tag on that bailout, as we discussed this week in Tangle, is far greater than the combined savings from DOGE’s hamhanded operations early this year and the cuts to the budget of USAID. By the way: New reporting from The Associated Press is showing how children in Myanmar are starving due to those USAID cuts.
Other actions are less likely to spark a constitutional crisis or a new foreign entanglement, but are still indignities against the office that we now just accept. For example, here are a few lowlights from the Trump administration in just the last few weeks:
Trump said he would have the final say on whether the Justice Department pays him $230 million for damages related to charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election and other investigations.
Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance who has spent the last several months promoting Trump’s crypto company.
Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself dumping feces onto protesters in American cities.
Trump suggested U.S. cities should be “training grounds” for our own military.
Trump’s press secretary claimed, “The Democrat Party’s main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals,” a comment that was then echoed by House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The White House communications director called Kamala Harris’s husband a cuck.
Trump’s press secretary responded to a reasonable question from a reporter by saying, “Your mom did.”
The official Department of Homeland Security X account now openly and frequently traffics in genuinely racist far-right imagery and terminology.
Senate Republicans posted an AI-generated video of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
New reporting emerged that the Trump administration engaged in a quid pro quo deal with El Salvador to send informants from MS-13 back to the government they had been confidentially leaking information about.
Each of these, on their own, might have constituted weeks-long scandals for past administrations. But now? They are barely blips on the news radar.
What this could mean for the future.
And there are far more worrisome things on the horizon. Yesterday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals greenlit Trump’s National Guard deployment in Portland. One of the judges on the circuit put forward a concurrence that headlined a radical view of Trump’s power: Trump could deploy National Guard troops anywhere he wanted across the country, and the judiciary cannot intervene. This position introduced a new theory of executive power that sidelines the courts, essentially makes Trump’s authority totally unchecked, and opens the door to a slew of frightening new hypotheticals where the National Guard could be deployed any time the president wants to make a show of force.
At the same time, the president is openly considering invoking the Insurrection Act because he thinks governors and mayors are allowing their cities to turn into “war zones.” The law, signed in 1807, was designed to quell any “insurrection” against the United States. It would hand Trump extraordinary power to tap troops from any state he’d like and then send them into Democratic-run cities and states. It would allow him to command U.S. soldiers to begin policing American citizens all across the country.
Of course, there are no insurrections in our major cities. There is some crime, yes, but nobody is trying to foment an organized overthrow of the government. Trump’s declaration would actually vastly increase the likelihood of violent clashes between citizens and law enforcement — just as his troop deployment has in Portland, where protests had mostly fizzled out before Trump sent federal troops in and sparked a whole new wave of clashes. All of this amounts to shoving us ever closer to the kind of red-versus-blue civil clash that seemed unfathomable just a few years ago.
Simultaneously, ICE is ramping up its surveillance power to target illegal immigrants and now “antifa,” a conveniently undefinable group of left-wing activists and radicals. ICE has purchased technologies like iris and face scanners, as well as spyware that can remotely hack smartphones and cellphone location data typically only accessible with a warrant. This is happening right now — for an agency that received tens of billions of dollars in additional funding when illegal border crossings are at an all-time low (which, in fairness, is a major success of the Trump administration).
Trump is obliterating the Overton window before our eyes. Whether it’s normalizing U.S. troops patrolling U.S. cities or pretending a press secretary responding to a journalist’s questions with “your mom” is a really funny joke, the administration continues to degrade the public discourse and normalize extreme and juvenile behavior. Again: it just feels like nearly everything in the political arena — the candidates, the policies, the extremism, the AI slop, the punditry, the writing, the thinking, the principles — is all getting worse in basically every meaningful way.
It isn’t hard to imagine a future, not so distant from now, where a half dozen Democrat-run American cities are being occupied by the National Guard against the wishes of the leaders and citizens of those cities. It isn’t hard to imagine Trump deploying National Guard troops to polling locations in swing states under the guise of “preventing voter fraud,” successfully suppressing the vote during the 2026 midterms. It is, actually, reasonable to envision a future where potential 2028 Democratic presidential nominees end up facing flimsy criminal charges from the Justice Department. Steve Bannon is now openly and directly suggesting that Trump will be president after the 2028 election and saying there are ways around the 22nd Amendment (to be announced later).
I know all of this sounds like Trump Derangement Syndrome, and if you had said it to me a few months ago, I may have even accused you of that. But now? After watching this administration for nine months? I’m honestly not so sure.
And it’s really hard to capture it all in one piece of writing. I’m roughly 3,000 words in, and I’ve said nothing about the threats to press freedom: ICE detaining a reporter on trumped-up charges, the new Pentagon press rules that nearly every news publication rejected, or the lawsuits against major media outlets. I’ve said nothing of the grift: the Trump family’s crypto wealth exploding to the tune of $5 billion while he’s in office, an unprecedented scheme to profit from the presidency, a Fox News host literally becoming a business partner with the president’s son. I’ve said nothing of the prosecutions: John Bolton, James Comey and Letitia James, only one of which seems to have any real chance of succeeding. I’ve said nothing of the laundry list of fraudsters and violent rioters who have now been pardoned by the president, or Trump’s border czar allegedly receiving $50,000 in cash in a bribery sting operation and it barely constituting a news cycle.
And we’re only nine months in.
Things worth remembering.
At the risk of doing too much hedging and throat-clearing, I want to make myself perfectly clear: None of this is to suggest there aren’t problems on the left, or that Democrats haven’t grossly abused executive power or acted in unconstitutional ways. Of course they have. I was one of the people criticizing Letitia James for her case against Trump, because I thought it was an inflated charge that would lead to the retribution we are seeing today. I was one of the people criticizing Biden for collaborating with social media companies to silence dissent during the pandemic, because I worried about the threat of executive power on Americans’ free speech. I was one of the people who hammered Hunter Biden for his shady dealings abroad, because it reinforced the idea that it’s okay for the president’s family to profit off the office. And even before Tangle, I was one of the people who criticized President Obama for spying on journalists, because I recognized the threat it posed to press freedom.
But Democrats aren’t the party in power right now — Trump and Republicans are. They have a governing trifecta, the Supreme Court on their side, and they very much appear to be drunk on that power. And, candidly, the issues we saw under the last administration — the free speech threats, the expansion of executive power, the corruption — were orders of magnitude less dangerous and extreme than what the Trump family and his administration are doing now.
It’s also not to suggest there isn’t any nuance or aren’t complicating factors to any of these stories. Trump’s troop deployment to Portland, for example, is more complicated as a legal question than many people think. One could easily make the argument that a lot of these problems would be solved if Democratic leaders did a better job quelling protests and civil disobedience on their own. Even the rappel-from-the-helicopter raid of the Chicago apartment building, however surreal and alarming, was a response to a complex situation that genuinely needed intervention. The New York Times’ reporting on the raid made it clear that the building in question was a den of crime occupied by many unauthorized migrants, which posed real threats to the community. One resident quoted in that story said they were hopeful the raid would offer the building and its residents a fresh start.
But these complexities shouldn’t obscure the full picture — the totality of what is happening, what Trump is normalizing, and what it might portend about the future. Every presidential administration has wins. Biden had wins, Trump 1.0 had wins, President Obama had wins, and even President Bush — the least popular president of my lifetime — had wins. But presidents are often judged by their biggest failures and their biggest scandals, not their biggest wins. Bush was ultimately judged by 9/11 and the disastrous wars in the Middle East. Obama was judged by a failed foreign policy and the bank bailouts in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Trump 1.0 was judged by the failed pandemic response and the January 6 riots. Biden was judged by inflation and the cover-up of his mental fitness.
Trump 2.0 already includes some wins, but his presidency will ultimately, like any other, be defined by the scandals, failures, and the legacy of the condemnable behavior he normalizes. And that list is growing fast.
In the spirit of fairness, I should, at least, acknowledge an alternative possibility to all this: Perhaps what looks to me like authoritarian drift is, in fact, a necessary course correction after years of drift in the opposite direction. I know plenty of conservatives who would argue that the institutions I cherish — the courts, Congress, our media — have not always served the country well. Many Americans believe they’ve been scorned and unfairly targeted by the very elites now crying foul about “norms.” They see Trump’s willingness to bulldoze bureaucracy as overdue disruption, not authoritarian behavior.
The National Guard deployments that alarm me might strike others as an imperfect but justified response to chaos Democratic leaders refused to confront. The strikes abroad, the hard line on immigration, even the prosecutorial zeal — supporters would say these are the predictable fruits of an electoral mandate, exercised through legitimate executive power, checked by courts that are still functioning as they always have but finally ruling in ways Democrats loathe.
They might also argue that my tone is itself a symptom of the privilege of stability. Maybe this administration’s rawness, its norm-breaking, and its bluster are expressions of the raw language of power, the only things capable of shaking complacent institutions and re-centering the forgotten Americans. Perhaps, in ten years, historians will say Trump 2.0 forced a reckoning we actually needed, that nudged us in a direction which ultimately bore far more positive fruit than I can imagine right now.
And to all of this I would just say: I hope they’re right. I’d welcome the humbling. Because the only thing worse than overreacting to a false alarm would be under-reacting to a real one, and I’d much rather discover that my fear was misplaced than that my silence was.
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From a foreign viewpoint, believing & electing a convicted felon as President when he is already known to be a contemptible misogynist & chauvinist, was asking for trouble.
But has been said, its like his first term was a humourless pilot tv sitcom; whereas this time you voted yourselves to watch the dvd boxed set of 'Twat'
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From Tangle this week:
Dear readers,
Last week, I penned a piece titled “Yes, things are pretty bad right now.” It has become one of the most read pieces ever published in Tangle — it went viral on X and was reshared and aggregated by several other outlets. It also drove over 1,400 comments (and counting) on the Tangle website and led to hundreds of new paid subscribers and thousands of new readers. I’m proud of the praise the piece garnered — I felt like I made a good argument that was honest and fair, and I’m happy when that work is rewarded.
However, thousands of Tangle readers also unsubscribed after the piece came out, and hundreds more canceled their subscriptions. I presume that many of those readers were conservative or Trump-supporting readers. Quite a few wrote in expressing their displeasure at our decision to publish the piece, accused me of various pernicious biases, and said my writing was captured by a liberal audience
I am, obviously, disappointed (if not a tiny bit alarmed) by this response. As I made quite clear in the piece itself, we were always planning to a) Publish a response piece from a staff member who disagreed with some of what I wrote, and b) Share criticism of the piece from readers (which we still plan to do). My hope was that more of the people who didn’t like what I wrote would stick around for that, but I’m worried that isn’t happening.
To reiterate: I was speaking solely for myself and not Tangle as an institution (despite being its founder). I was expressing my personal opinion. I was analyzing the situation as I honestly see it. And I’m open to being proven wrong — in fact, I said in closing, I want to be proven wrong.
Today, we are going to fulfill the promise we made with a criticism of what I wrote, penned by Associate Editor Audrey Moorehead. Audrey is a fantastic writer, great thinker and awesome colleague, and I enjoy debating with her as much as I do anyone on staff. I’m proud to publish her piece here in Tangle as a continued commitment to self-reflection and viewpoint diversity as an organization.
As always, thanks for reading.
Best,
Isaac
Here is the rebuttal piece, written by another member of the Tangle team:
I found Tangle in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
At the time, I lived in deep-red Lynchburg, Tennessee, and my community was awash in anger and speculation about a “stolen election.”
I was alarmed by the various theories in my conservative media bubble, but the concept of a massive conspiracy to obstruct democracy was too much to take at face value. A stolen election would completely alter the way I saw the country I love. I knew these were serious accusations, and I didn’t want to trust them blindly. To my chagrin, when I tried to seek out different sources, most of the mainstream media seemed far too dismissive of fraud claims, treating them as self-evidently ridiculous and anyone who believed them — like my family and friends — as ignorant or stupid. I was predisposed to distrust these outlets, and they weren’t doing themselves any favors.
Luckily, I came across Isaac’s excellent work chronicling most, if not all, of the major election-fraud claims. Instead of starting from a place of complete skepticism and dismissal, Isaac presented the strongest arguments in favor of fraud — and then used evidence to prove them wrong. He had won my trust and piqued my interest in his product: Could I really see both sides of the conversation in one place, alongside fact-based reporting and Isaac’s take, which promised to be nuanced but honest?
Fast forward to now, and I’m pleased to report that reading — and working for — Tangle has challenged and invigorated me. I’m grateful to be exposed to alternate viewpoints; sometimes I’ve changed my mind, while other times I’ve learned how to better articulate my beliefs in the face of opposition. I truly think Tangle’s culture and approach are a model for bridging the partisan divide, and I feel honored to spend every day doing such important work.
When we were preparing last week’s Friday edition, the team (as usual) engaged in lots of debate. And while I absolutely believe Isaac was right to voice his concerns about the direction he thinks we’re headed, I also thought his piece wasn’t properly attuned to the conservative perspective on modern politics. I wanted to offer a counterpoint to his perspective, to explain how Trump isn’t the only one to blame for the erosion of our political institutions, and why so many in the conservative movement are willing to stomach Trump or even fully embrace him.
To be quite clear at the top: I’m not speaking for all, or even most, conservatives. For one thing, I have never been a fan of President Trump, and my trepidation has only grown over the course of his second term in office. In fact, I commend many of the principles Isaac was vouching for, and some developments in the modern conservative (or MAGA) movement alarm me, as a young conservative, even more than they do him. For example, the recent texting scandals and the subsequent intra-movement discourse worried me far more than they worried Isaac when he wrote about them. White supremacist extremists have been part of the right throughout my lifetime — just as communist, anti-American revolutionaries have been a fixture of the left — but those extreme views are clearly growing more influential in the GOP, and I felt like Isaac’s take on the leaked texts underrated those dangers.
Furthermore, I’m much more in line with old-school American conservatism, uplifting the benefits of traditional social structures (like the family and religious communities) while also emphasizing a limited federal government and personal freedoms. I think sincere religious faith and family formation are the keys to living a good life, but I think the law should allow you to disagree with me and live the life you want to live, so long as you’re not overtly harming yourself or others. Yet rising stars of the GOP seem to reject this religiously informed tolerance in favor of coarser Barstool conservatism, abandoning traditional social values in favor of uninhibited personal freedom, forgetting about the social harms that can follow, or more overtly religious postliberalism — enforcing narrow (often specifically Catholic) values by outlawing other lifestyles. As such, while I’ve never felt wholly at home in the Republican Party, I’ve begun to feel that it has completely cast me out.
And yet, despite being disturbed by what I see as a shift in the party’s ideology, I can still understand my friends and family who find the Trump administration the “lesser of two evils” — I myself even felt that way during the election. While I think major players in the Trump administration are acting in openly authoritarian ways, I don’t think all or even most of the GOP base supports this approach to government. In fact, I think their support of Trump and the GOP is driven by conservatives’ sense that the left has been trending toward authoritarianism. Understanding this feeling — even if you think conservatives are wrong to feel that way — is essential to moving forward from the moment we’re in, and reuniting our increasingly divided nation around the same common ideals.
I contend that the left has similarly eroded political norms and overstretched its power — if less extensively than Trump, still more than is acknowledged in the mainstream media and even by many Tangle readers who wholly endorsed last week’s piece. Furthermore, the left has been uniquely capable and effective at using its dominance in our cultural institutions to attempt to enforce ideological uniformity socially, and the backlash against this hegemony has led so many to Trumpism.
The governance.
Democrats’ erosion of our political norms may seem irrelevant compared to what we’re currently experiencing now, but analyzing their actions allows us to understand this administration. Democrats have paved the way for contemporary politicians to increasingly take advantage of slim electoral majorities and dubious presidential powers to attempt actions that, in previous years, might have been unthinkable.
Our modern politics have been embittered for decades, going back to Newt Gingrich’s culture war of the 1990s. But Democrats set off the erosion of governmental norms that they now blame Republicans for with the abolition of the filibuster for presidential nominees. You may know the story: Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), upset at Republicans blocking Obama’s nominees for executive positions and federal judgeships, spearheaded an effort to remove the filibuster for the nomination process. But after using the SCOTUS filibuster to block Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, Senate Republicans responded in kind, removing the filibuster for SCOTUS nominees to ensure a conservative supermajority on the court for the foreseeable future. When Democrats have held the presidency or congressional majorities, they’ve championed ending the filibuster completely, but as conservatives and even other Democrats have pointed out, they have not made the same call from the minority. And if you ask most conservatives, Democrats started the tit-for-tat hollowing out of the filibuster that has led us to where we are today.
Additionally, Democratic presidents haven’t exactly been bashful about using sweeping executive power. They may not have been as aggressive as President Trump, but that is typically how the Overton window moves. One side advances, and then the other side responds in more extreme fashion.
Democratic presidents’ use of the office has certainly been enough to constitute a “lead up” to the current administration. Both Presidents Clinton and Obama used executive orders more aggressively than their predecessors. And President Biden was responsible for several overreaches of power: his student loan forgiveness plan, his eviction moratorium and his employer vaccine mandate, to name a few. While the courts struck down these actions — and President Biden obeyed the orders, just as Trump (begrudgingly) has so far — they still attempted to use the executive branch to unilaterally impose controversial policies, bypassing Congress to do so.
These examples might not seem as expansive as, say, Trump’s tariffs and attempts to end birthright citizenship, but that’s kind of the point. Student loan forgiveness, Covid-era eviction bans, and vaccine mandates felt like shocking overreaches to most conservative Americans (and many independents, too), in ways that motivated an equally shocking response (electing Trump). And even if you supported those Biden policies, the former president still pursued them from the top down and without Congressional debate or judicial approval.
To put it more directly, Trump is obliterating the Overton window. But Biden shifted it himself during his term, and against warnings that doing so might tee up a future leader like Trump to go even further.
On an even more sobering note, Democrats haven’t eroded just domestic policy norms. As Managing Editor Ari Weitzman made clear a few weeks ago, Trump’s extrajudicial strikes on Venezuelan drug boats follow precedent set in the Obama administration. Obviously, extrajudicial actions can be traced back to U.S. involvement in Vietnam or even further, and more recently through President Bush’s post-9/11 actions. But the justifications for President Obama’s extrajudicial drone strikes are eerily similar to the Trump administration’s arguments about its rights to strike the Venezuelan boats. The Obama administration argued that it didn’t have to provide evidence to courts proving its targets were guilty of terrorism in order to carry out strikes, just as Trump has not presented evidence to the public that the boats he’s struck were carrying drugs. While declaring these individuals as “narcoterrorists” is novel, it’s only an escalation of the philosophy President Obama used in the Middle East.
Each of these examples highlights how Democrats before Trump started to play faster and looser with longstanding traditions of governance and military power. Any of these individual actions might feel justified by anyone supporting the Obama or Biden or Trump administration’s goals — but as we’ve seen, no party has yet retained complete control over the government in perpetuity. When each party governs like it’ll never lose again, it only becomes easier for the other side to do the same — and the constant erosion only makes the slope more slippery.
The issues.
So much of what Isaac focused on in his piece was the ways in which Trump is eroding institutional norms or pushing the boundaries of the law. But he did very little grappling with the Democratic politics of the last two decades, which have enabled Trump to violate those norms with little political blowback.
Democratic cultural and policy positions in recent years have increasingly alienated moderate and conservative voters, who perceive these stances as shifting too far to the left. In response, these voters have lost trust in broader institutions, even those that should be neutral — which is why we now have RFK Jr. running the CDC and the Trump administration cutting grants to higher education. While moderate and conservative voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on a host of issues, a few are more salient than others: immigration and the “wokeness” movement on gender and race.
Immigration.
Perhaps the most sweeping, consequential actions from the Trump administration have been through its immigration enforcement, which is genuinely the set of actions that worries me most. Even so, I think it’s important to remember exactly how we got to this place — and to keep our heads about the real possibilities of escalation.
Isaac has pointed out before that the Biden administration’s immigration policy really did contribute to a crisis: Biden oversaw an unprecedented wave of immigration, and his policies directly contributed to the rise in both total border encounters and the number of unauthorized migrants entering and staying in the country. As a result, local governments were overwhelmed in communities suddenly inundated with so many new people, and that influx sparked alarm on the right about a loss of national identity or cohesion.
This massive and unmitigated immigration required a response. Obviously, ICE agents wearing masks on the streets, rounding people up indiscriminately and catching U.S. citizens and legal residents during that response is terrifying, and it’s easy for me to imagine this enforcement quickly being turned into a much more sophisticated operation to take down political enemies. Furthermore, it’s quite clear that White House immigration policy is being set by actors like Stephen Miller, who are using real anxieties about illegal immigration to push a far more insidious agenda directly connected to the rise of adherence to white nationalist views like the Great Replacement Theory.
Obviously, a reaction to immigration often carries with it allies to the cause motivated by racism or nativism. I’m reminded of the controversy during the leadup to the election last year over the influx of Haitian migrants to Springfield, Ohio: Bad actors used that situation to levy baseless claims against a vulnerable group, trying to stoke nativist sentiments. Yet the presence of bad actors shaping policy shouldn’t obscure the fact that, broadly, deporting illegal immigrants (regardless of their criminal record) remains a popular position, held by about 54% of Americans. This position in and of itself isn’t born out of the same racial animus that motivates the worst on the right; it’s driven by legitimate worries about overwhelmed social structures, as well as the effects of rapid cultural change in small communities that are most impacted by the influx of immigrants.
For many people, the question is not a judgment on “is Trump acting legally?”, but “would I rather have what we had under Biden or what we have now?” It’s unchecked illegal immigration versus unchecked executive power. And for many who were so alarmed by Biden, the latter is preferable to the former. A hardline stance on immigration to temporarily stem the flow and remove unauthorized migrants — especially those who have committed crimes, even if that number is small — could be a necessary response to the excesses of the Biden administration. And by and large, the public perceives the Trump administration’s policies as getting us closer to a sustainable immigration system than Democratic policies have.
Wokeness.
Perhaps the most important social and cultural event that drove people to Trump was the acceleration of identity politics in the early 2020s. In his piece, Isaac spent almost no time reflecting on why moderates and conservatives might be willing to abandon longheld principles in this specific political moment. After years of watching Democrats place too much emphasis on issues of identity compared to issues like immigration and the economy, Biden’s term ushered in an identity-focused era, employed through institutional power, which began to sow distrust among many moderates and conservatives in the institutions themselves.
The most overt politicized use of institutional power is the handling of the Covid pandemic, where CDC guidance was at first uniformly strict. Of course, Covid broke out during the Trump presidency — but the actions that most eroded conservative trust were carried out by state governments and prominent scientists. The rapidly changing guidance on masking was controversial, but that could have been chalked up to our evolving understanding of the virus; however, the rise of the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd threw a wrench in the gears.
Prominent scientists argued that social distancing and lockdowns were secondary to the project of racial justice. This immediately caused concern and skepticism among moderates and conservatives: Why were these protests — which caused $1–2 billion in property damage — acceptable, but churches were advised not to meet and schools in blue states remained closed for over a year? To many critics, Democratic state governments were openly showing lopsided ideological favoritism to a form of politics whose premise many found unconvincing.
Another wedge issue for Democrats is gender. Pew Research polling from February shows that a majority of Americans favor allowing trans individuals to play only on sports teams matching their biological sex and banning gender transition care for minors, while a plurality of Americans oppose insurance paying for gender transition care and support requiring trans people to use bathrooms matching their biological sex and banning elementary schools from teaching about gender identity. Notably, though, most Americans still believe that trans individuals should be protected from workplace discrimination.
With the rise of the transgender movement came the refrain that not allowing young people to medically transition would increase suicidality — but science has not yet been able to prove that claim. And research backs up the existence of complications and risks of gender transition care that many Americans likely find alarming to expose children to when the benefits are not as certain. As far as exposing children to teachings on gender identity goes, detransitioner word-of-mouth and recent studies suggest that at least some of the rise in gender-nonconforming identities may have been the result of social contagion. But rather than trying to take honest looks at the evidence, Biden administration officials tried to suppress scientific recommendations that countered its political views on trans care for minors.
You might be thinking, “What do debates around gender have to do with fighting Trump’s authoritarian tendencies?” The answer is that the conservative movement feels burned by American institutions — academia, the sciences, the courts, the media — and that feeling creates distrust, which also manifests as a desire to see someone “fight back.” So when Trump fights our institutions of higher education, conservatives see it as a war against decades of entrenched liberal bias at these institutions. When Trump connects on an issue like gender, he looks more credible when he tries to extort these institutions into abandoning their previously held biases. But it also makes him look more credible any time he challenges any of these institutions: When he questions the crime data in Washington, D.C. (which looks quite suspicious!) and advocates for deploying National Guard troops, many people are more willing to listen.
It’s not a coincidence that the most effective ad in the 2024 race was Trump’s ad attacking Kamala Harris using previous statements about providing transition treatments to prisoners; voters perceived her statement as wildly out of touch, proposing using tax dollars to fund medical procedures for a small percentage of the population. Harris didn’t make this statement during the campaign, but she never publicly denounced it either. And prominent Democrats still aren’t listening to voters on issues like women’s sports — AOC’s recent attack on Riley Gaines is proof of that. While I don’t think anti-trans activists like Gaines are acting in good faith, AOC’s line of attack is insensitive to the concerns of many Americans about the purpose of women’s sports giving women, as a biologically disadvantaged class, a chance to excel.
Many of the most progressive social views on race and gender aren’t shared by the majority of the public at the moment, and this is even more pronounced for committed conservatives who actively reject these ideas. But conservative views aren’t well represented in traditional cultural and institutional power centers, and the 2020s marked a shift where conservatives began to feel not only that they were underrepresented, but that they were actively being ignored and repressed by the establishment. They felt that liberals weren’t trying to advocate for social progress by bringing ideas to public square debates, but that they were trying to enforce the adoption of these positions undemocratically. And the lack of trust in the establishment that this seeded comes with consequences: the rise of the antivax movement, the dismissal of ex-military generals’ warnings about Trump’s actions, or the complete disregard for liberal media institutions’ claims of fascism.
When people are told, repeatedly, that their opinions and viewpoints are irrelevant or wrong, or that the causes they care about are less important than other causes, they become jaded and angry — and they turn to a strongman leader who will crush the opposition.
Actions and reactions.
For almost every issue Isaac covered in his piece, I could tie it to a Democratic action that motivated a Republican reaction. I’ve already talked about Trump’s mass-deportation effort being a backlash to Biden’s immigration policies, and the binary choice conservative voters feel like they are left with (mass immigration or executive overreach). But consider the others:
Acceptance of striking purported drug smuggling boats off the coast of Venezuela is a whiplash response to the perception that Democratic-run cities — and liberal culture more broadly — have normalized drug use or crime. “Destroying the narcoterrorists” cannot be divorced from “safe injection sites” and abolishing cash bail. The choice conservatives recognize isn’t between legal, congressionally authorized strikes and what Trump is doing, it’s between “allowing drugs to flow into the U.S. without repercussion” and “punishing the smugglers.”
Acceptance of National Guard troops being deployed to Los Angeles or Portland is not about a conservative desire to give a president limitless power to use the military against civilians, as Isaac framed it. It’s a whiplash response to the belief that Democratic leaders have failed to protect or support federal law enforcement while they enforce the law — it’s a blowback to “sanctuary cities” that protect lawbreaking migrants from being detained and deported. The choice, again, isn’t between federal troops in major cities and no federal troops in major cities, it’s between allowing our cities to outright endorse illegal behavior or greenlighting an expansion of executive power to crack down on that behavior.
Even the overt profiteering from the office that the Trump family is engaged in is a whiplash response. Democrats, and their allies in the media and cultural apparatus, spent years framing inquiries into the Biden family as “conspiracy theories.” Stories about Hunter Biden were literally throttled by the biggest social media companies in the world. The insulting way President Biden, his allies in the media, and even our intelligence agencies lied to us about Hunter’s corrupt entanglements enraged conservatives. And it all culminated with a far-reaching, sweeping pardon of the president’s son. Now, when the Trump family profits from the presidency in openly corrupt ways, many Trump supporters easily shrug it off by saying, “At least they aren’t lying to us about it.” The choice isn’t between a president’s family profiting off the office or not, it’s about punishing this president’s family for something the last president’s family got away with.
Examples like this, which apply to much of what Isaac brought forward, abound. Prosecuting Letitia James comes after she promised to prosecute Trump as part of her campaign platform. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt framing Democrats as “Hamas sympathizers” and “illegal aliens” comes after Trump and his followers were described as “Nazis” and “fascists” for years on end. A Fox News host going into business with Trump’s son comes after decades of Democrats’ top operatives making conspicuous pivots into “news analysts” after leaving government.
The solution to all of this — what I think it will take to curb the rise of authoritarianism, to return to a place where left and right alike can understand each other, live in national harmony, and defeat the threats to our national order — is for both sides to be willing to police their own and consider the future they might be creating once they are (inevitably) again in the political minority.
I’ll reiterate: I am alarmed by the actions of the Trump administration and the rising ideologies on the right. I understand and share the impulse of Isaac, many moderates, and the broader left to call out the issue and fight back in any way possible — I think Trump’s executive overreaches represent the greatest threat to our country’s governing institutions in my lifetime. But at the same time, I fear that in the quest to vanquish Trumpism and postliberalism on the right, the left might try to throw out earnest conservatism, too.
And I don’t think that fear is unfounded, nor even a response to Trump. In fact, if I were to trace the right-wing backlash at the foundation of Trumpism to a single founding moment, it would be the media treatment of Mitt Romney during the 2012 election. Romney was a rather milquetoast conservative Republican, and yet he was maligned as a “race-mongering pyromaniac” who wanted to roll back women’s rights. This media treatment of Romney made Trump’s brashness appealing to an electorate who had seen their chosen candidate unfairly maligned: finally, right-wing interests had someone to fight for them. And as Trump’s personality began to garner strong loyalty, much more insidious actors saw him as an opportunity to make their more exclusive ideals — of a white, Christian nation — rise to prominence.
I am a conservative because I believe deeply in the fundamental promise of the American project: I think that the ideals set forward in the Declaration of Independence represent the best founding ideals of any nation. And while we’ve never fully lived up to those ideals, I think our national history is the story of taking steps forward (and sometimes backward) on the path to the total fulfillment of that vision of a nation built upon the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Pursuing that progress is essential to fulfilling our national promise. But it is equally essential not to sacrifice our morals on the path towards the future.
While I understand that not everyone is going to agree with conservatism as a project — and I welcome that debate — these ideals appeal to half the country, and I think ignoring, underrepresenting, and even demonizing conservatism enabled the rise of Trump and the slide into authoritarianism that Isaac outlined in his piece. If we want to combat authoritarianism, we need to lay aside hyperpartisan fearmongering and engage with ideas individually. We need to police our own sides and do our best to recognize those among us who want the best for the country, but disagree about what that is, because only then will we be able to accurately call out and combat the truly dangerous.
