Rant

John Bull farting merrily in the face of a portrait of King George III in response to the 1798 suspension of habeas corpus rights in Britain (passed by Parliament to allow the king to order the arrest without evidence for sedition of the members of English Jacobin clubs during the war with France) while a neighbor accuses him of treason, as President Trump accused The New York Times's David Sanger of treason last week for suggesting that Trump's Iran war might not be a brilliant victory, at least not yet. Caricature via Wikipedia by Richard Newton, who was not arrested for the work, though he sadly died that year of typhus, at the age of 21.

JD Vance argues that Democrats don't actually believe in "No Kings" because they didn't protest King Charles 🥴🥴🥴

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 19, 2026 at 2:31 PM

Uh, no. Charles III isn't the kind of king we have in mind. The last time Britain had a king comparable to Trump, particularly in the line of trying to bypass the parliamentary power of the purse and making spending decisions on everything from disaster relief to public architecture without consulting the legislature, especially imposing taxes without their consent as Trump keeps trying to do with his stupid tariffs, they cut off his head. 

Doppelstaat

Memorial tablet in Berlin, at the house where Fraenkel lived before his forced emigration in 1938, via Wikimedia Commons. 

Two or three weeks ago somebody pointed me to a wonderful piece in Mother Jones by Pema Levy, on the "dual state" theory of dictatorial government, created by the German-Jewish jurist, labor advocate, and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel, based on his observations of the Nazi state in Germany from its origins until his escape from Berlin in 1938, according to which authoritarian regimes can survive and even thrive for some period of time as they consolidate their control by maintaining in effect two distinct legal systems in a single Doppelstaat, a "normative state" covering most of the population, in which civil and criminal laws function in normal and predictable fashion, and a "prerogative state" for the unlucky people scapegoated by the regime—in 1930s Germany union members, members of leftist political parties, Jews and Romani of course, homosexuals and the disabled, and so on—where the dictator's will overrides normal legal considerations and he can "do whatever I want" as Trump has put it on numerous occasions, usually applying to some claimed state of emergency. 

In this way life in the normative state does not change much, at least at first, and its inhabitants were enabled to ignore much of what was happening, if they so chose: "I was silent, for I was not a socialist," as Pastor Niemöller wrote. He himself was a national conservative and an antisemite, and when they finally "came for" him it wasn't because there was nobody left to speak for him, it was because he had bravely changed his mind, I'm pleased to say, and helped start up a Lutheran resistance and got sent to Sachsenhausen and Dachau for that, and survived to die in the German Federal Republic at the age of 92, too, may his memory be a blessing.

Fraenkel became part of the discourse on Trump 2.0 in a footnote from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent in the matter of Trump v. CASA, arising from the birthright citizenship case, where the Court decided not to ask whether or not the 14th Amendment means what it says, but did say the judges ought to stop issuing universal injunctions, like maybe birthright citizenship is real in San Francisco (one of the parties in the original suit) but not across the bridge in Oakland and it's none of a federal judge's business to assume that the Constitution is the same all over the country, which is not what they thought during the 19 or 20 universal injunctions issued by federal judges during the Obama administration, the 20 under Trump 1.0, or the 14 in Biden's single term, or at least that when the president is told there's something he's constitutionally forbidden to do in San Francisco that doesn't mean he can't do it in Oakland, as Jackson wrote:

Toxic Work Atmosphere

You know vaguely, if you're like me, about the DOGEboys who have been uploading huge amounts of data from the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, and voter data from some states, and dumping it all into a "data lake" of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Servces at the Department of Homeland Security, where they keep records of interactions between immigrants and the USCIS, information that agencies like ICE, if they wanted to commit serious violations of the governments's privacy rules, could put together and use (for one thing) to geolocate undocumented immigrants and hunt them down, and you've probably heard vaguely about this week's whistleblower complaint from Charles Borges, chief information officer of the SSA, documenting how Social Security data had been illegally uploaded to a cloud server where it could possibly be hacked by who knows what kind of reprobates, though not necessarily any more malign than the Boys who are seemingly authorized to collect it.

Borges has now resigned, and it was his letter that got my attention; it was an "involuntary resignation", he said:

After reporting internally to management and externally to regulators serious data security and integrity concerns impacting our citizens' most sensitive personal data, I have suffered exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear, creating a hostile work environment and making work conditions intolerable....

I have been made aware of several projects and incidents which may constitute violations of federal statutes or regulations, involve the potential safety and security of high value data assets in the cloud, possibly provided unauthorized or inappropriate access to agency enterprise data storage solutions, and may involve unauthorized data exchange with other agencies. As these events evolved, newly installed leadership in IT and executive offices created a culture of panic and dread, with minimal information sharing, frequent discussions on employee termination, and general organizational dysfunction. Executives and employees are afraid to share information or concerns on questionable activities for fear of retribution or termination, and repeated requests by me for visibility into these events have been rebuffed or ignored by agency leadership, with some employees directed not to reply to my queries.

We've seen bunches of resignation letters showing up on social media in recent years, in a pretty regular format ("it has been my honor..."). I've never seen anything like this before. This is the trauma Christian nationalist Russell Vought said last year he wanted to inflict on "the bureaucrats" 

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

and which he is now overseeing as head of the Office of Management and Budget and Elon Musk's replacement as unofficial leader of DOGE; he and the Boys are the newly installed leadership to which the letter refers, along with whoever he has managed to hire in the quest formerly known as Schedule F to replace qualified civil servants with certified Trump loyalists—

Democracy is a Kitchen Table Issue

Photo by Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via NPR.

From the TPM Morning Memo, a little vignette of presidential lobbying:

During an interview with CNBC this morning, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) alluded to an assurance he received from Trump — that the president would fix whatever issues Republicans had with the legislation he wants them to pass via executive action.

“We met with President Trump, and, you know, he did a masterful job of laying out how we could improve it, how he could use his chief executive office, use things to make the bill better,” Norman said Thursday morning. “We accepted the bill as is. What’s different is President Trump is going to use his powers.”

Oh well, in that case. If he's going to use "his powers". Superstrength? X-ray vision? Spidey sense? Can he grow instant wolverine claws? 

I imagine he was talking about Article II of the US Constitution, of which he said during his first term, "I have an Article II that lets me do whatever I want." That's legally as ridiculous as it sounds—the specification of the "executive power" in the oath doesn't really mention powers so much as duties (to "faithfully execute the Office, and "preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution), and the only explicit powers are those of making treaties, naming officers, and issuing pardons, all but the last with the advice and consent of the Senate. There's not even anything in Article II on the veto—that's in Article I, as a check on the Congress, as Article II has a congressional check on the presidency, in the procedure allowing them to be impeached and tried for "high crimes and misdemeanors". The way it really works in the system of checks and balances has traditionally been that each Branch can do whatever another Branch can't stop them from doing—Congress can stop the president through the impeachment process, the Supreme Court can stop him (if somebody sues) by examining the legality of his behavior, including whether it's constitutionally permitted or not. It's infuriating that we should even have to be talking about this, as if there were some possible universe in which Trump's assertion could be correct. But here we are.

Git Along, Little Doges

Watching King Abdullah and Marco Rubio squirm in their seats while Trump continues on about his Gaza plan is quite something.

“We’ll take Gaza, we’ll own it and cherish it” - boy oh boy pic.twitter.com/SLKBWnap5B

— Lani Refiti (@LaniRefiti) February 11, 2025

Wish there'd been more Rubio (or just more cowbell) in the video of that meeting a week ago, which Trump decided contrary to custom not  to hold in private before the photo op and public statements but did all three at once, presumably to prevent King Abdullah from screaming at him; but Rubio's face in this photo reminds me of that lady in the Hermès scarfs who used to watch Trump explaining virology to the nation from the standpoint of his transcendent ignorance—deeply panicked but trying not to show it. I didn't realize until that moment that Trump actually has no idea what the Gaza ceasefire deal (which he has endorsed) entails: the sequence of phase 1, releasing some hostages and prisoners to set the stage for phase 2, negotiating a final disposition of the territory and releasing all the remaining hostages, followed by phase 3, implementing the deal and permanent ceasefire (the Biden deal I've been telling you about for a year), as revealed by Trump's comment,

“As far as I’m concerned, if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o’clock, I think it’s an appropriate time. I would say, cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out. I’d say they ought to be returned by 12 o’clock on Saturday,” Trump said.

No, it's not an appropriate time. Phase 2 hasn't even started yet. It would be nice for the hostages and their families, who I support, and no doubt also nice for Netanyahu, who I don't support, but it has no relation to the agreement painfully worked out over the past year. It's demanding that all the parties trash that agreement and start all over again, which clearly meant it couldn't be wrapped up on Saturday. It's just a completely new idea nobody else has ever heard of, because Trump just made it up on the spot and doesn't know enough about the situation to realize that it can't possibly happen, and there's a reason it can't possibly happen.

It's nothing but a big smelly turd deposited in the Oval Office that is of no relevance to anything, except to Trump's equally irrelevant fantasy of taking control of the Gaza Strip as his own, or Jared Kushner's, development project, with all the irritating Gazans cleared out of the way in Egypt or Jordan (I don't know who he thinks are going to be the housekeepers and waitstaff and caddies, perhaps they'll be imported from the Philippines), in spite of endless attempts by Jordanians and Egyptians and Saudis to explain to His Imperial Stupidity that it can't be done. A turd the existence of which nobody present dares to acknowledge, because Big Donald might get upset (Abdullah did have something to say about it once he got out of there, though he did lower himself to suggesting that the meeting might be described as "constructive"—he's far from the worst king in his neighborhood, not that I support kings, but diplomacy requires some dishonesty).

Things may have marched in a different direction since I started drafting these remarks with the development of a Trump policy on Ukraine, but I think Trump's stupidity remains the main factor. I'm sure I'll get back to that later.

Not Ready for Prime Time

 

Image by Markerarts via Butt Flood Designs.

One thing to remember about Stephen Bannon's celebrated tactical principle of "flooding the zone with shit" is that, in the end, you're landed with a shit flood, which isn't what you really wanted, though that may be OK if what you really wanted was a really big fat tax cut for yourself and your billionaire clientele. Somebody else can try to take care of the backed-up sewage, if they feel like it; you're up on the higher ground of the nice neighborhood, where you hardly even smell it.

I've been thinking of 2017, when the new administration started off with a big bang of regulatory crazy, with executive orders attempting to sabotage the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act on January 20, mandating a 90-day freeze on hiring federal employees, meant to kick off a long-term reduction in the number of civil servants, on January 23, directing DHS to build a Wall of separation between Mexico and the US (they thought it might be paid for with a 20% tariff on Mexican imports) and fast-tracking environmental reviews of infrastructure projects on January 24,  cutting federal funding for so-called "sanctuary cities" that did not cooperate with ICE and banning the EPA from contact with journalists on January 26, suspending the Refugee Admissions Program and barring entry to the United States for citizens of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen (not, of course, Saudi Arabia, UAE, or Qatar) on January 27, and ordering all federal agencies to eliminate two regulations for every new one they proposed on January 30 (when he also installed Thomas Homan as acting director of ICE, without bothering to try getting the Senate to confirm the nomination).

None of these initiatives had any particular consequences, of course. They were ill-conceived, badly drafted, in some cases of questionable legality, or just dumb. The idea of the hiring freeze went back to Carter and Reagan, and it was well known that it had never done any good:

For the Record: Who's in charge here?

Wu Wei, Berlin-based virtuoso on the sheng, or ancient Chinese mouth organ, with the ensemble Holland Baroque, in a version of the Baroque hit La Folía. I was just looking for an excuse for posting it, it's outrageously good.

Mr. Trump, you have informed the public that you know nothing about "Project 2025" and that some of its ideas are "ridiculous". And yet your nominee for Office of Management and Budget is the author of the Project 2025 chapter on "The Executive Office of the President of the United States"...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 9:43 PM

When he ran OMB in your previous term, were his ideas ridiculous? Have the two of you come up with an agreement on whose views are going to be followed? Can you tell us how that's going to work?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 9:45 PM

Did anybody tell you that Russell Vought and FCC chair nominee Brendan Carr and "border czar" Tom Homan were contributors to Project 2025? Now that you know, do you think you should maybe reconsider their nominations? You don't want ridiculous people working for you, right? Are you in charge?

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 22, 2024 at 10:02 PM