Wednesday, April 30, 2025
We are witnessing slow constitutional collapse in the US Moira Donegan
We are witnessing slow constitutional collapse in the US | Moira Donegan
“The Trump administration’s disregard for checks and balances, coupled with a weakened Democratic Party and a judiciary increasingly ignored, suggests a constitutional collapse in the US. The erosion of Congress’s power, coupled with the judiciary’s overreach, has led to a dangerous concentration of power in the executive branch. The future of American democracy remains uncertain.
It’s possible that later, when we know more about how the Trump regime reshapes the US and about how it ultimately comes to an end, we will look back at this moment in 2025 and conclude that we were already living under an autocracy. Checks on executive power seem to have all but vanished; the Trump administration is not acting like either the courts, the judiciary or the people have any prerogatives that they must respect.
Science is suffering: massive cuts to federal funding of research into medicine, climate change or anything that might include a word on a long list of banned ones – like “transition” – has decimated research, made the US a global laughingstock, and set the cause of human thriving back by years. The economy is in chaos, and the bribery is all but out in the open; it no longer seems to occur to many Americans that their politicians should not be on the take.
Immigrants appear to have lost the entitlement to due process, and the administration appears to be trying to deport as many of them as possible, paying smaller countries in the American sphere of influence to imprison them at forced labor camps from which they have no means of petitioning for their own release. Dissidents are being captured on the streets, kidnapped from their homes and arrested in the courtrooms they preside over as punishment for their speech. In light of all this, even without the benefit of hindsight, it is already becoming more difficult to speak of American “democracy” with a straight face.
Which is not to say that the developments of the past few months are unprecedented. In many ways, the first 100 days of Trump’s restoration are much like the first 100 of his initial term, in 2017: they are marked by a dizzying whirlwind of scandals, so numerous and preposterous as to be difficult to keep up with; by a cartoonish incompetence; and by public displays of aggression, cruelty, malice and dominance – be it over the federal workforce, his political rivals, foreign leaders, major institutions or the American people themselves.
But the second Trump term has also been more reckless, more focused and more frictionless in its work to consolidate power and cut off its political opposition. Long gone are the first-term administration staff members who sought to have some sort of moderating influence on Trump – the bureaucrats and institutionalists who thought they could slow him down with procedure, the more cynical Republican opportunists who thought they could bend his charisma to their own ends. What is left in Trumpworld are only the true believers, or those with the zeal of converts. They are no longer being slowed down from the inside.
Nor are they being opposed much from without. In 2017, when liberal Americans could still comfort themselves with the notion that Trump’s election was an anomaly, and in the early months of Trump’s first term, an uncharacteristic level of civic engagement and pride sprang up. The Women’s Marches attracted millions, and crowds swarmed the airports to lend support to travelers from the countries that Trump had targeted with his Muslim ban. But while the early resistance movement had tremendous amounts of feeling, it ultimately lacked direction: all that outrage did not find a useful place to go, and eventually it ebbed. It is hard to find hopefulness, now, among American liberals, and the Democratic party is showing few signs of life. On the Sunday talkshows last week, the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer was asked about the administration’s attacks on institutions of higher education, which have lost federal funding as the regime attempts to restructure their curricula and faculties. Schumer replied that he had sent a strongly worded letter.
The United States has long been in a state of constitutional erosion. The role of Congress, the most representative of the federal branches, has been dwindling for decades, as gerrymandering and malapportionment have made its two chambers less competitive and more partisan, leading to permanent gridlock and dysfunction. Congress was once endowed with both the power of the purse and the sole power to declare war; it has largely handed the latter off to the executive, endowing the president with broad powers to use the US military abroad even without congressional approval and has not seemed interested in taking that power back.
Now, the Trump administration seems to have also usurped Congress’s power of the purse for the executive, declaring that the president may refuse to appropriate congressionally allocated funds by personal fiat. This is a profound constitutional change, one that shifts a massive power into the hands of one man; and again, Congress does not seem to be interested in this assault on its own prerogatives, with even many Democratic leaders seemingly preferring to have less power – and, hence, less responsibility.
For a long time, the decline of Congress meant the ascent of the federal judiciary, which appropriated large swaths of de facto policymaking authority to itself in light of congressional paralysis. This was already a degradation of democracy: the unelected judges came to have far too much influence over federal policy. And the judges were not the neutral, non-ideological referees that they claimed to be: many interpreted the law to be maximally deferential to the whims of the powerful and only minimally respectful to the rights of the less powerful.
The US supreme court, in particular, seemed to change its doctrine almost as whim based on whatever outcome would best serve conservative priorities. Indeed, the judiciary itself seemed more than willing to share in democratically unaccountable power with the president, so long as that president was a Republican: it declared last year that the executive was immune from almost all criminal prosecution, thereby carving out a category of person – Donald Trump – to whom federal criminal law mostly does not apply. But even this wildly partisan federal judiciary does not seem to be good enough for the restored Trump regime, which wants to eliminate all possibility that its agenda might be checked by the courts: JD Vance, the vice-president, has taken to complaining in public when judges rule against the administration, claiming, falsely, that they do not have the authority to check the executive. But such petulant little demonstrations may not long be necessary: increasingly, the Trump regime is simply ignoring judicial orders that it does not like.
Critics of the Trump administration have called this state of affairs a constitutional crisis. I have come to think of it more like a constitutional collapse: long vacant, the vestiges of the US’s democracy are crumbling to the ground, falling like an empty tent. We don’t yet know what, exactly, will be erected in its place.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist“
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
How Photography From the Vietnam War Changed America
“The images changed how the world saw Vietnam, but especially how Americans saw their country, soldiers and the war itself, which ended 50 years ago this month.
By The New York Times
Text by Damien Cave
Damien Cave covers global affairs and is based in Ho Chi Minh City.
There are so many ways to describe what photography from the Vietnam War captured and revealed, but maybe it boils down to what Tim O’Brien shared in “The Things They Carried.”
“I survived,” he wrote in one of the book’s stories, “but it’s not a happy ending.”
The war, which formally concluded on April 30, 1975, still elicits grief for all that was burned into memory and reinforced on film.
The most memorable photographs of that era, with its grisly, muddy, cruel jungle war, were shot by a brave global crew with a wide range of political views and backgrounds.
Dickey Chapelle, the first female photojournalist to die in Vietnam, was a Midwesterner who could barely contain her anti-Communism. Tim Page was an irreverent dope-smoking Brit; Henri Huet was French and Vietnamese, and known for his humor and kindness.
Together, their images and those of many others changed how the world saw Vietnam, but especially how Americans saw their country, soldiers and war itself.
The first American troops landed on Red Beach in Danang on March 8, 1965. Photographers were there.
Even before U.S. troops arrived, Vietnam’s internal strife commanded attention. Malcolm Browne, then an Associated Press correspondent, won awards for his images from 1963 capturing a Buddhist monk setting himself ablaze in Saigon.
Vietnamese troops did most of the fighting and dying. Around 58,000 American soldiers were killed. The Vietnamese military death toll far surpassed one million.
In this photo, South Vietnamese troops asked a villager around 1961 near Tay Ninh where he last saw Viet Cong soldiers.
Washington said it could bolster South Vietnam and rapidly defeat the North with superior firepower.
U.S. Marines, above in 1967 near the Demilitarized Zone, learned that nothing would come easy or fast.
The Tet offensive — a series of surprise attacks by Northern forces in early 1968 — changed the course of the war. Photographers, highlighting intense combat day by day, punctured the U.S. government’s optimistic claims about the enemy being on its last legs.
They were aided by new technology. Cameras had become smaller, and film could be developed and transmitted over phone lines or via satellite, reaching audiences more quickly than during any previous war. Here, a Marine threw a grenade during the Battle of Hue, part of the Tet offensive, in February 1968.
Policy mattered, too. In Vietnam, freelancers were easily accredited and could just show up for a helicopter trip to the front lines, photographing wherever they wanted, publishing whatever editors would approve, including this image of an American unit in February 1967.
When I covered the war in Iraq, journalists could embed with troops only after agreeing to strict rules: no photographs of Americans killed in action; images of wounded Americans could be published only if the injured agreed in writing.
There was less censorship in Vietnam because the United States never officially declared war and officials believed that greater access would lead to favorable coverage.
It was also a guerrilla war, with blurred front lines. Before long, photographers zeroed in on its greatest moral and military challenge: separating friend from foe; civilian from combatant.
In the image above, American soldiers moved a captured Viet Cong fighter through shallow water.
With photographers beside them, U.S. soldiers called in heavy fire often while wondering if they were hitting an actual enemy target. Here, an American soldier contacted base camp while South Vietnamese troops burned a suspected Viet Cong hide-out.
Pentagon leaders promoted the idea of a high-tech battlefield, with aircraft carriers, like the one above in 1971, and laser-guided bombs. The pilots never saw the faces of those they killed.
On the ground, “search and destroy” missions, like this one near My Lai in 1967, were intimate and frightening. After men were killed, women and children would be rounded up.
“Basically, all we did is we would walk around and wait for somebody to shoot at us,” Bill Lord, an Army radio operator in Vietnam between 1966 and 1968, said in an oral history tied to the war’s 50th anniversary. “And then we would try and catch them. I mean, we were basically bait.”
For the United States, Vietnam became a mind-bending wake-up call: America’s immense power was deadly, technologically superior — and not enough to subdue a resistant nation. Here, an American plane fired down on Vietnam during a night mission in 1966.
For Vietnam, the war felt endless, as when Saigon’s central market burned in late 1971.
As Le Ly Hayslip wrote in her memoir, “When Heaven and Earth Changed Places,” its relentlessness taught Vietnamese “how to be strong while we are weak, how to be brave when we are afraid, how to be wise in the midst of confusion, and how to let go of that which we can no longer hold.”
Many photographers experienced the same trauma as combatants. Here, an American soldier lay dead in January 1967 amid Viet Cong fighters.
Even in Saigon, home base for journalists, safety was elusive. The destruction shown here came in early 1968.
Combat camaraderie offered comfort. Here, soldiers refilled their canteens with rainwater during the Battle of Saigon.
But the risks were real.
More than 100 photojournalists died from the mid-1950s to 1975 in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, including Robert Capa, one of World War II’s most admired figures, and Larry Burrows, a photo-essay pioneer during the Vietnam War.
In the photo above, a helicopter crew chief shouted to his crew as a wounded pilot lay dying beside him in March 1965.
Photojournalists also dealt with “moral injury,” long-term psychological distress that comes from witnessing actions that violated their moral beliefs. Here, wounded families in Hue in 1968 sat and tried to recover after U.S. Marines dropped hand grenades into their shelter.
Many held in mind the worst fighting, especially the Tet offensive, above.
Some barely escaped alive, including Tim Page, who captured this battlefield scene in 1968 and was a model for the wild, stoned photographer played by Dennis Hopper in “Apocalypse Now.” But his images pointed to bravery and humanism.
“Page’s photos had impact because he got close — too close on at least three occasions when he was badly wounded,” said Ben Bohane, a friend of Page’s who is writing his biography.
“It was the visceral nature of his pictures, unflinching photos of the dead and wounded on both sides, Vietnamese mothers in tears, children screaming, Catholic nuns walking past lime-caked dead bodies, grunts in the mud at Khe Sanh — you can almost smell the scene.”
Over time, the combat that photographers documented daily served an important purpose.
It prevented the public from forgetting the human toll, as during this fierce firefight south of the DMZ in October 1966.
There were fewer critics of journalism and photography back then. Political bias was not assumed; disinformation streamed mostly from military briefings in Saigon that reporters called “the five o’clock follies.”
The photo crew’s commitment continued as American generals and presidents doubled down, expanding their military campaign beyond the Vietnam-Cambodia border.
Kyoichi Sawada, a Japanese photographer, won the Pulitzer Prize for this photo of women and children fleeing American bombs in Quy Nhon in September 1965.
All the while, the dead piled up. Saigon’s fire department had the awful job of collecting the fallen, including this girl who had been killed by U.S. helicopter fire in 1968. Her brother found her in the back of this truck.
Helicopters brought both death and life, with medical evacuation. Here, a paratrooper guided a medical evacuation chopper into a gap in heavy foliage in April 1968.
The need to get in and out of impossible terrain was a defining feature of the war.
In this photo, a U.S. soldier awaited transportation away from the front line during the Tet offensive in 1968.
Though it was mostly an American and Vietnamese affair, other countries played a role — including South Korean troops, pictured here, in 1966, after a violent firefight in Quang Ngai.
The war also spurred waves of displacement. The Cam Lo camp held 20,000 refugees in 1967.
Photos of individuals were the most politically potent. Eddie Adams’s picture from the Tet offensive of a general from the South executing a Viet Cong officer (who had killed the family of one of the general’s deputies) ran on front pages worldwide and is now considered one of the most influential photos ever taken.
The most gut-wrenching images fueled an antiwar movement that considered the war unwinnable and unjust. Here, an American soldier read a letter from home in March 1971.
“Those pictures, all of those pictures — how many hundreds of times have they been shown and they still bring me to tears,” Craig McNamara, an antiwar activist and the son of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, an architect of the war, told me. “They were singular.”
Sheer exhaustion — with fighting, with South Vietnam’s squabbling government and the North’s stubborn resilience — weighed on the Americans sent to war.
In this image, troops from the First Marine Division carried wounded comrades in October 1966.
Above, a wounded woman during the Battle of Saigon in 1968.
Four years later, President Richard M. Nixon escalated the fighting yet again.
Hoping to push Hanoi into a peace deal, he told his advisers: “The bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to be bombed this time.”
It did not work out as planned. The Americans handed over military responsibility to the South and pulled out all U.S. troops in 1973.
Northern forces gained ground quickly. By early 1975, as seen above in Vung Tau, families were fleeing.
The fighting dragged on and spread to Cambodia, where Communist and anti-Communist forces fought a related proxy war that killed scores of civilians. This photo of a dead civilian by a roadside was taken in 1974.
Life in Vietnam had become precarious. Markets, like this one in 1972, moved beneath trees in the North to avoid being spotted by indiscriminate American bombers.
The dead haunted the living. In Hue in April 1969, this South Vietnamese woman mourned her husband, one of 47 people who had been found in a mass grave.
The U.S. military’s spraying of Agent Orange and other defoliants, as in this image from 1965, still causes birth defects in affected families.
Smaller cities, such as Hue, shown in May 1968, were nearly flattened by the war. Even now, bullet holes mark some buildings there.
The North declared victory on April 30, 1975, after tanks seized Independence Palace in Saigon.
Far more than the gritty photos shot for Western outlets, these are the kinds of images well known among the Vietnamese.
“We think everybody has the same image in their head,” said Quang Lam, an artist and archivist in Ho Chi Minh City. “That’s not true.”
In the most famous photos, like the image above showing the final evacuation of a building in Saigon where the C.I.A. and U.S.A.I.D. shared offices, Americans have tended to see the elusive ideal of objective truth.
They saw a war that America entered with hubris and departed in humiliation.
For veterans, just the chance to return home felt like a win — especially for prisoners of war like Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm, greeted by his family in March 1973 at Travis Air Force Base in California.
But many also faced mistreatment and disrespect, on top of combat trauma.
The war — and its images — changed America, aggravating divisions, exacerbating distrust and making it harder for the country to agree on America’s historical and future role in global affairs. We are all living, in some ways, in Vietnam’s shadow.
Perhaps that confirms the relevance of Mr. O’Brien’s point in “The Things They Carried.”
Long after wars cease, the happiest ending you can hope for is survival and the continued search for understanding.
As Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Vietnamese American author, wrote: “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”
Monday, April 28, 2025
Live Updates: Mark Carney Wins New Term as Canada’s Prime Minister on Anti-Trump Platform
“Canada’s Liberal Party won Monday’s national elections with voters giving a new term as prime minister to Mark Carney, according to the national broadcaster CBC/Radio Canada, choosing a seasoned economist and policymaker to guide their country through turbulent times.
The full results were likely to be available by Tuesday. But the voters’ decision sealed a stunning turnaround for the Liberal Party that just months ago seemed all but certain to lose to the Conservative Party, led by the career politician Pierre Poilievre. Mr. Carney has been prime minister since March, when former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stepped down.“
Democrats in Congress warn cuts at top US labor watchdog will be ‘catastrophic’ | Business | The Guardian
Democrats in Congress warn cuts at top US labor watchdog will be ‘catastrophic’
"Musk’s Doge targets National Labor Relations Board with cuts and terminated leases as union speaks out
Democrats have warned that cuts to the US’s top labor watchdog threaten to render the organization “basically ineffectual” and will be “catastrophic” for workers’ rights.
The so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has targeted the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for cuts and ended its leases in several states.
Representatives Bobby Scott, Mark DeSaulnier and Greg Casar have written to NLRB’s chair, Marvin Kaplan, and the acting general counsel, William Cowen, requesting answers on the cuts.
“If the NLRB reduces its workforce and closes a number of regional offices, it will render the NLRB’s enforcement mechanism basically ineffectual, thereby chilling workers from exercising their rights to engage in union organizing and protected concerted activities,” they wrote.
The letter noted the NLRB has already been suffering from drastic understaffing and budget constraints, while caseloads have increased. NLRB field staffing has declined by one-third in the last decade, while case intake per employee at the agency grew by 46%.
“The harm to America’s workers by potential directives to reduce this independent agency’s workforce cannot be overstated,” the letter added. “Any NLRB reduction in force (RIF) or office closures would be catastrophic for workers’ rights.”
The representatives also requested all information related to Doge’s role at the NLRB, including all communications Doge had with employees at the NLRB or regarding the NLRB with other agencies.
Doge is led by billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk. Musk’s SpaceX has challenged the constitutionality of the NLRB. A whistleblower at the NLRB told NPR earlier this month that Doge accessed sensitive data at the agency and took steps to cover their tracks in doing so.
The National Labor Relations Board Union, representing workers at the agency, reportedlast week that Doge cancelled the NLRB regional office’s lease a year early in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ending it in August 2025.
In March 2025, Doge terminated the lease for the NLRB regional office in Memphis, Tennessee. In February 2025, Doge terminated the leases for NLRB offices in Buffalo, New York; Puerto Rico; Los Angeles, California; Overland Park, Kansas; and Birmingham, Alabama.
“The NLRB is an agency that has been starved of funding and resources for over a decade. We have seen massive staffing cuts simply from attrition. There is no need for any austerity measures with our operations; Congress has already done that to us.” the NLRB Union stated on social media.
The NLRB declined to comment."
Opinion | If You’re a Voter Reading This, This Essay Is Not About You - The New York Times
If You’re a Voter Reading This, This Essay Is Not About You
By Rob Flaherty
"Mr. Flaherty was a deputy campaign manager on Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign and served as assistant to the president and director of digital strategy in the Biden White House.
The conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart observed that politics is downstream from culture — that voters are more influenced by what they watch, listen to and like than by actual politicians. As a Democrat who works on presidential campaigns, I think Mr. Breitbart was spot-on, and I’d torture the metaphor further: Democrats today are rowing upstream against powerful new cultural currents, while Republicans are working relentlessly to dam the river itself. The G.O.P. is focused on achieving long-term cultural change. We’re focused on short-term political gain.
Today’s culture is no longer a creation of executives in New York City and Los Angeles. Thanks to algorithms and an endless set of media choices, what you see, read and hear is a personalized reflection of your own interests. It’s like a city with a lot of different neighborhoods. You might live in the personal fitness neighborhood or the parenting neighborhood, but you’ll never cross over into the equine science neighborhood or, say, the politics neighborhood. So if you don’t care about politics — or more precisely, don’t trust our politics — you don’t have to hear about it at all. A voter can turn on, tune in or opt out.
It was these voters — opt-out voters — who decided the 2024 election. It’s these same voters Democrats are struggling to reach today.
At their core, opt-out voters generally don’t trust politicians or the mainstream media. Many assume the system is rigged, the media is biased and neither party is actually fighting for them.
But opting out of politics doesn’t mean never hearing about it. Opt-out voters aren’t watching CNN or paying for news subscriptions, but they still get a lot of information from social media, friends and family. Politics, for them, tends to show up as cultural drift — bits of stories, values and secondhand outrage shared online by friends, influencers and nonpolitical creators. It’s ambient, not deliberate. It’s culture, not news. A young dad scrolling Instagram for parenting tips stumbles across a clip about “traditional family values.” A small-business owner watching finance videos gets fed posts about why “woke policies” are destroying the economy. A 25-year-old gym enthusiast on TikTok starts seeing content about masculinity, personal responsibility and — soon enough — right-wing politics.
This is the fundamental challenge for Democrats.
If you think the system is broken, we’ve been the ones defending it.
If you don’t trust the mainstream press, we’re not for you — because it’s the only way we know how to reach people.
If you’re looking for fast relief, we’ve got a white paper to explain our phased-in tax credit through the fiscal year 2030. Sorry, am I boring you?
Right now we win opt-in voters: people who read the mainstream press, who see themselves as part of the civic process, who believe the basic institutions of society still work — even if imperfectly. People who are likely well educated and well off, perhaps for whom inflation is less of a concern. People who show up for obscure, off-year elections in swing states. People who read, say, navel-gazing guest essays about the future of the Democratic Party in The New York Times. Hello there.
In style, substance and communication, Democrats have become an opt-in party in an opt-out country.
Now, at this point I should be clear: When I say “Democrats,” I mean me, too.
I was deputy campaign manager on Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign. I’ve come up through a party that clings to TV ads and news releases, holding onto a media environment that stopped existing a decade ago. A party that thought Barack Obama’s cultural cool would last forever, and that young voters were table stakes. A party fundamentally mismatched with the task at hand. While we prattle on, concerning ourselves with those who already agree with us, the right has built an information machine aimed squarely at opt-out voters — people sick of traditional politics.
Right-wing partisans, much like opt-out voters, don’t trust the mainstream media or Hollywood. They seek out alternatives. This helps generate demand. This demand is met with supply: a network of influencers, personalities, podcasters and TikTokers who both inflame their bases and push messages into nonpolitical subcultures. It’s sustainable and wide-reaching: It’s generally profitable to be conservative online.
It gives them a huge advantage: They present right-wing cultural narratives on every issue set — and push messages into nonpolitical subcultures. They reach opt-out voters directly. They test messages, see what works, and then it all jumps from their online ecosystem into speeches from the president.
Meanwhile, the center-left’s attention and viewership is generally pointed squarely at the traditional press. Opt-in voters are more likely to trust mainstream institutions, after all. This leaves us relying on a news media industry that is neither a partisan ally norreaches the voters we need. Our online ecosystem can’t sustainably thrive. So we’re stuck: We’ve got opt-in media for an opt-out electorate. At a time when many Americans don’t trust the mainstream press or Hollywood, the left owns where voters used to be. The right owns where voters are going. It leaves Democrats unable to influence the culture that really matters today, which leaves us unable to make our case to the voters we need.
Opt-out voters don’t buy what we’re selling — and even if they did, we’d have a hard time reaching them.
Part of that is, of course, infrastructure. We need to do the work the right has done to build our own ecosystem, but it won’t scale until it’s profitable. It won’t be profitable until the audience moves there, and that audience won’t move until they’ve got somewhere to go. The campaign donors who now flow money to TV ads and an army of press secretaries need to invest in getting this started, and they will need capital to keep it going. There’s plenty of smart creators in this swimming pool already, but they need resources to create, experiment and grow.
It’s also not enough to build our corner of the cultural honeycomb. We need to build pipelines to everyone else. The right has moved beyond the so-called manosphere. It’s targeting parents, runners and health influencers. If the left isn’t contesting these spaces with voices that resonate, we’ll never reach the people we need.
But we just can’t shake our brand problem: None of that infrastructure will matter if we don’t have anything to say when we get there.
Whether we’ll admit it or not, Democrats have mortgaged our support with opt-out America to win a greater share of opt-in America. We’ve got to flip this calculus: Opt-in Republicans who vote with us are with us for a reason. They’re making a nuanced calculation about the state of America’s politics and the protection of our institutions. They’re not with us because they believe everything we believe; they’re with us because Donald Trump was an existential threat to our democracy.
The good news? We have an opening. In this Trump era — where working people foot the bill for Elon Musk and Mr. Trump’s self-dealing while the government gets further into people’s bedrooms — we have a chance to offer something different. Not a return to normal, but a vision for a better future. A government that roots out corruption, checks runaway corporate power and works — for the love of god, works. A country where you don’t go broke when you get sick, where you’ll be left alone if you’re not hurting anyone. We should help people believe in better. If we’re not hope merchants, we’re nothing at all.
If there is any lesson I gleaned from the 2024 campaign, it’s that winning opt-in voters is about facts. (“Inflation is among the lowest in the world!”) Winning opt-out voters is about attention. (“I am taking a shift at McDonald’s because I understand you.”) Success in communicating online most often has less to do with social media trends and tactics and more to do with doing the right thing offline. We watched a few weeks ago as Senator Cory Booker reaped the benefits of this approach: He gave a big, bold 25-hour speech on the Senate floor that captured attention, gave people hope, drove conflict and generated the first bona fide social media moment of this iteration of the resistance.
The supporters of “fight, not flight” defy ideology: Bill Kristol, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former Representative Conor Lamb, and Senator Bernie Sanders are all pushing for a more aggressive posture toward the administration. It’s a coalition that acknowledges that campaigning through culture is as much about style as it is substance. Mr. Sanders holds big rallies, but he also goes viral at Coachella. It is perhaps the case that leaders who don’t live in this media environment can’t possibly understand it, but it’s no excuse for denying what’s in front of us. One of the deeper political challenges with former President Joe Biden’s age was not the number; it was the fact that voters believed his age meant he couldn’t understand them. We are now seeing a generation of 70-year-olds who called for the departure of an 81-year-old fail to understand how anyone under 60 gets information about their world.
Conflict drives attention. Attention drives reach. Reach drives votes. Call out the corruption, the hypocrisy, the fraud. Take big, countervailing stands. Make it visceral. Make it personal. Make it fun — the kind of thing people want to be a part of. We are just coming off a campaign cycle where failing to do this cost us: On our worst issue — inflation — Democrats from the White House on down never convincingly named a villain. Republicans and then voters happily made the villain us.
The fight shows we care. It shows that maybe, just maybe, we might even deliver on what we say. If we can’t show people we believe in something enough to fight for it, we shouldn’t be surprised when they stop believing in us. It’s the authenticity, stupid.
A winning presidential coalition needs broad swaths of voters who have opted in — and opted out. Until we learn to wield attention and influence culture, we’ll be adrift. While we struggle, the right will be upstream, defeating us before we can even start."
Sunday, April 27, 2025
Opinion | Donald Trump Is Selling the White House to the Highest Bidder - The New York Times
Trump’s Biggest Beneficiary:Himself
"Mr. Rattner, a contributing Opinion writer, was counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration.
No presidential administration is completely free from questionable ethics practices, but Donald Trump has pushed us to a new low. He has accomplished that by breaking every norm of good government, often while enriching himself, whether by pardoning a felon who, together with his wife, donated $1.8 million to the Trump campaign; promoting Teslas on the White House driveway; or holding a private dinner for speculators who purchase his new cryptocurrency.
Mr. Trump’s blatant transgressions have swamped those of any modern president and even those of his first term. Remember the outrage when he refused to divest his financial holdings or when he used a Washington hotel he owned as a kind of White House waiting room? Those moves seem quaint in comparison.
In his trampling of historically appropriate behavior, Mr. Trump appears to be pursuing several agendas. Personal enrichment stands out: Imagine any other president collecting a cut of sales from a cryptocurrency marketed with his likeness. There is the way he is expanding his powers: He has ignored or eliminated large swaths of rules that would have inhibited his freedom of action and his ability to put trusted acolytes in key roles. And then there’s rewarding donors, whether through pardons or favors for their clients.
I was working in the Washington bureau of The Times when Richard Nixon resigned, and even he — taken down by his efforts to cover up his misdeeds — did not engage in such a vast array of sordid practices.
The corruption of Trump 2.0 has not gotten the attention it deserves amid the barrage of news about Mr. Trump’s tariff wars, his attack on scientific research and his senior appointees’ Signal text chains. But self-dealing is such a defining theme of this administration that it needs to be called out. Like much that Mr. Trump has done in other areas, it announces to the world that America’s leaders can no longer be trusted to follow its laws and that influence is up for sale.
Just as in the post-Nixon era, when guardrails were established to prevent transgressions, the next president could decide to restore some of the sound government practices that Mr. Trump has trampled on. But the damage he has inflicted by, say, pardoning his donors or lining his own pockets is irreversible.
The below represents just a sampling of what’s transpired these past 100 days.
He Eliminated Guardrails
He turned a legitimate federal employee designation into a loophole. By giving senior officials such as Elon Musk the title “special government employee,” Mr. Trump avoided requirements that they publicly disclose their financial holdings and divest any that present conflicts before taking jobs in the administration.
He ended bans that stopped executive branch employees from accepting gifts from lobbyists or seeking lobbying jobs themselves for at least two years.
He loosened the enforcement of laws that curb foreign lobbying and bribery.
He Fired Potential Resisters
He dismissed the head of the office that polices conflicts of interest among senior officials.
He jettisoned the head of the office that, among other things, protects whistle-blowers and ensures political neutrality in federal workplaces.
He purged nearly 20 nonpartisan inspectors general who were entrusted with rooting out corruption within the government.
He Rewarded His Wealthiest Donors
Rewarding donors is part of any presidential administration. Every president in my memory appointed supporters to ambassadorships. But again, Mr. Trump has gone much further.
Jared Isaacman, a billionaire with deep tentacles into SpaceX, gave $2 million to the inaugural committee and was nominated to head NASA — SpaceX’s largest customer.
The convicted felon Trevor Milton and his wife donated $1.8 million to the campaign and Mr. Milton received a pardon, which also spared him from paying restitution.
The lobbyist Brian Ballard raised over $50 million for Mr. Trump’s campaign, and Mr. Trump handed major victories to two Ballard clients. He delayed a U.S. ban on China-owned TikTok his first day in office and killed an effort to ban menthol cigarettes, a major priority of tobacco company R.J. Reynolds, on his second.
Mr. Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire who spent $277 million to back Mr. Trump and other Republican candidates, requires his own category.
As a special government employee, Mr. Musk is supposed to perform limited services to the government for no more than 130 days a year. By law, no government official — even a special government employee — can participate in any government matter that has a direct effect on his or her financial interests. That criminal statute hasn’t stopped Mr. Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency from interacting with at least 10 of the agencies that oversee his business interests.
He installed a SpaceX engineer at the Federal Aviation Administration to review its air traffic control system. The F.A.A. is reportedly considering canceling Verizon’s $2.4 billion contract to update its aging telecommunications infrastructure in favor of a SpaceX’s Starlink product. (SpaceX has denied it is taking over the contract.)
SpaceX is a leading contender to secure a large share of Mr. Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense project, an effort that could involve billions of revenue for the winner.
X, Mr. Musk’s social media outlet, has become an official source of government news. The White House welcomed a reporter from the platform at a recent briefing, and at least a dozen government agencies started DOGE-focused X accounts.
As Mr. Musk’s political activities started to repel many potential customers of Tesla, his electric vehicle company, Mr. Trump lined Tesla vehicles up on the White House driveway and extolled their benefits. Then Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged Fox News viewers to buy Tesla shares.
DOGE nearly halved the team at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that regulates autonomous vehicles. The agency has been investigating whether Tesla’s self-driving technology played a role in the death of a pedestrian in Arizona.
He Went All In on Cryptocurrency
Critics of crypto argue that it has demonstrated little value beyond enabling criminal activity. Despite this, Mr. Trump has wasted no time eliminating regulatory oversight of the industry at the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department, even as his family grows ever more invested in it.
By enabling money to be delivered anonymously and without any bank participation, crypto offers the possibility for any individual or foreign state to funnel money to Mr. Trump and his family secretly. Moreover, Bloomberg News recently estimated that the Trump family crypto fortune is nearing $1 billion.
On the eve of his inauguration he released $TRUMP and $MELANIA memecoins — a type of crypto derived from internet jokes or mascots. Next, the S.E.C. announced it would not regulate memecoins. Then last week, Mr. Trump offered a private dinner at his golf club and a separate “Special VIP Tour” to the top 25 investors in $TRUMP, causing the price of the currency to surge and enriching the family. (That tour was initially advertised as being at the White House. Then the words “White House” disappeared, but the rest of that prize remained.)
The S.E.C. eliminated its crypto-enforcement program, ending or pausing nearly every crypto-related lawsuit, appeal and investigation. That includes the civil suitagainst Justin Sun, a crypto entrepreneur who had separately purchased $75 million worth of tokens tied to Mr. Trump’s family after the election.
The S.E.C. also suspended its civil fraud case against Binance, the huge crypto exchange that pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations and allowed terrorist financing, hacking and drug trafficking to proliferate on its platform. Soon after, the company met with Treasury officials to seek looser oversight while also negotiating a business deal with Mr. Trump’s family.
World Liberty Financial, a crypto company that Mr. Trump and his sons helped launch, said it had sold $550 million worth of digital coins. A business entity linked to him gets 75 percent of the sales.
The Trump family has said it will partner with the Singapore-based crypto exchange Crypto.com to introduce a series of funds comprising crypto and securities with a made-in-America focus.
The federal government’s “crypto czar,” David Sacks, Mr. Lutnick and Mr. Musk all have connections to the market. (Mr. Musk named DOGE after a memecoin.)
He Is Always Closing
Mr. Trump is reportedly on his way to raising $500 million for his political action committees — highly unusual for a president who cannot run for re-election.
A new Trump Tower is underway in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second largest city, with plans for two more projects for the kingdom announced after Mr. Trump’s November election victory, all in partnership with a Saudi company with close ties to the Saudi government.
Mr. Trump’s team asked about bringing the signature British Open golf tournament to his Turnberry resort in Scotland during a visit of the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, to the White House.
He posts news-making announcements on Truth Social, the company in which his family owns a significant stake.
It’s all a sorry and sordid picture, a president who had already set a new standard for egregious and potentially illegal behavior hitting new lows with metronomic regularity."