With clear eyes, hard facts, critical thinking, new political strategy, empathy, and a soupçon of Schadenfreude
Category: Situational Awareness
Posts about the situation we are in–the good facts, the bad facts, and the terrible facts. Facts that, if taken on board, will let us “know ourselves, know the other side” and go on to win those hundred battles.
I recently shared some observations about the Supreme Court’s shadow docket (here and here). In brief, the Supreme Court has been catching serious flack for
ducking hard questions in its many shadow docket decisions involving the Trump Administration, and, generally,
letting the Administration get away with murder pending some final resolution of the legality of Trump’s usurpations—a resolution that, it appears, might come around the Twelfth of Never.
But in Trump v. Illinois, in a short, unsigned 6-to-3 decision, the Court majority ruled that, pending trial and appeal, Trump had to get the National Guard the hell out of Illinois, because Trump had identified no proper legal authority to send them there in the first place.
For a few days, people wondered whether Trump and his merry band of legal geniuses would either (i) tell the Supreme Court to go stick it where the sun don’t shine or (ii) claim authority under the Insurrection Act, even though there was and is no insurrection.
Trump did neither. Instead, he TACOed, surrendering in his legal attempts to keep federal troops in Los Angeles and announcing that he would withdraw the National Guard from Illinois, Los Angeles, and Portland.
So … what does it all mean?
I don’t know, and I won’t pretend to pretend that I know.
And yes, very assuredly, one swallow does not a summer make. But it cannot be a bad thing that …
… faced with a clear loss in the Supreme Court on one of his several signature issues—sending federal troops into the big cities—Trump has unambiguously backed down,
… Trump has elected, at least on this one occasion, not to put to the test whether “his” troops would or would not obey illegal orders, and that …
… a six-person majority of the Supreme Court bit the bullet, dared Trump to defy them, and came away with a famous victory.
The bet paid off.
May that trend long continue.
And this final word of speculation: as Justice Holmes said so long ago, the Court reads the newspapers. I think Chief Justice Roberts, along with his sidekicks Justices Coney Barrett and Kavanaugh, probably read the newspapers, where they grasped, one, that Trump is circling the drain, and two, that people are getting sick and tired of the Supreme Court’s fecklessness.
It has been a gruesome year for those who see Donald Trump’s kakistocracy clearly. He returned to office newly emboldened, surrounded by obsequious tech barons, seemingly in command of not just the country but also the zeitgeist. Since then, it’s been a parade of nightmares — armed men in balaclavas on the streets, migrants sent to a torture prison in El Salvador, corruption on a scale undreamed of by even the gaudiest third-world dictators and the shocking capitulation by many leaders in business, law, media and academia. Trying to wrap one’s mind around the scale of civic destruction wrought in just 11 months stretches the limits of the imagination, like conceptualizing light-years or black holes.
And yet, as 2025 limps toward its end, there are reasons to be hopeful.
That’s because of millions of people throughout the country who have refused to surrender to this administration’s bullying. When Trump began his second term, conventional wisdom held that the resistance was moribund. If that was ever true, it’s certainly not anymore. This year has seen some of the largest street protests in American history. Amanda Litman, a founder of Run for Something, a group that trains young progressives to seek local office, told me that since the 2024 election, it has seen more sign-ups than in all of Trump’s first four years. Just this month, the Republican-dominated legislature in Indiana, urged on by voters, rebelled against MAGA efforts to intimidate them and refused to redraw their congressional maps to eliminate Democratic-leaning districts.
While Trump “has been able to do extraordinary damage that will have generational effects, he has not successfully consolidated power,” said Leah Greenberg, a founder of the resistance group Indivisible. “That has been staved off, and it has been staved off not, frankly, due to the efforts of pretty much anyone in elite institutions or political leadership but due to the efforts of regular people declining to go along with fascism.”
In retrospect, it’s possible to see several pivot points. One of the first was a Wisconsin Supreme Court race in April. Elon Musk, then still running rampant at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, declared the contest critical and poured more than $20 million into the race. Voters turned out in droves, and the Musk-backed conservative candidate lost by more than 10 points. Humiliated, Musk began to withdraw from electoral politics, at one point breaking with Trump. The tight bond between the world’s richest man and the most powerful one was eroded.
In June, Trump’s military parade, meant as a display of dominance, was a flop, and simultaneous No Kings protests all over the country were huge and energetic. A few months later, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, a tragedy that the administration sought to exploit to silence its opponents. When the late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a distasteful comment on ABC that seemed to blame the right for Kirk’s killing, Disney, the network’s parent company, gave in to pressure to take Kimmel off the air. It was a perilous moment for free speech; suddenly America was becoming the kind of country in which regime critics are forced off television. But then came a wave of cancellations of Disney+ and the Disney-owned Hulu service, as well as a celebrity boycott, and Disney gave Kimmel his show back.
Trump has thoroughly corrupted the Justice Department, but its selective prosecutions of his foes have been thwarted by judges and, more strikingly, by grand juries. Two grand juries refused to indict Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, whom the administration has accused of mortgage fraud, with no credible evidence. After Sean Dunn, a Justice Department paralegal, tossed a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer during a protest in Washington, the administration sent a team of agents in riot gear to arrest him. But grand jurors refused to indict him on a felony charge. Dunn was eventually charged with a misdemeanor, only to be acquitted by a jury. Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News personality whom Trump made U.S. attorney in Washington, tried three times to secure a federal indictment for assault against a protester who struggled while being pushed against a wall by an immigration agent. Three times, grand juries refused.
Granted, all these grand juries were in liberal jurisdictions, but their rejections of prosecutors’ claims are still striking, since indictments are usually notoriously easy to secure. “I think you’re seeing reinvigorated grand jury processes,” said Ian Bassin, a founder of the legal and advocacy group Protect Democracy. “Nobody actually knows what’s going on in those grand juries, but the outcome of them seems to suggest that people are actually holding the government’s feet to the fire and being unwilling to simply be a rubber stamp.”
Trump ends the year weak and unpopular, his coalition dispirited and riven by infighting. Democrats dominated in the November elections. During Joe Biden’s administration, far-right victories in school board races were an early indication of the cultural backlash that would carry Trump to office. Now, however, Democrats are flipping school board seats nationwide.
Much of the credit for the reinvigoration of the resistance belongs to Trump himself. Had he focused his deportation campaign on criminals or refrained from injuring the economy with haphazard tariffs while mocking concerns about affordability, he would probably have remained a more formidable figure. He’s still a supremely dangerous one, especially as he comes to feel increasingly cornered and aggrieved. After all, by the time you read this, we could well be at war with Venezuela, though no one in the administration has bothered to articulate a plausible rationale for the escalating conflict.
But it’s become, over the past year, easier to imagine the moment when his mystique finally evaporates, when few want to defend him anymore or admit that they ever did. “I think it’s going to be a rocky period, but I no longer think that Trump is going to pull an Orban and fundamentally consolidate authoritarian control of this country the way that it looked like he was going to do in March or April,” said Bassin, referring to Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. If Bassin is right, it will be because a critical mass of Americans refused to be either cowed or complicit.
A federal grand jury has declined to indict Letitia James, the New York attorney general, on mortgage fraud charges for the second time in a week, according to a person familiar with the matter, in an embarrassing blow to the Trump justice department as the president has sought retribution against one of his political rivals.
The department has attempted to twice file new charges against James after a judge dismissed an indictment against her after determining the prosecutor handling the case had not been properly appointed.
A decision [not to indict] by a federal grand jury is extremely rare. Only prosecutors appear before a grand jury and defendants do not to offer evidence in their support of their case. There is a legal axiom that “any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich”, underscoring the power prosecutors have over grand juries.
The justice department declined to comment.
“For the second time in seven days, the Department of Justice has failed in its clear attempt to fulfill President Trump’s political vendetta against Attorney General James. This unprecedented rejection makes even clearer that this case should never have seen the light of day,” said Abbe Lowell, a lawyer representing James. “This case already has been a stain on this Department’s reputation and raises troubling questions about its integrity. Any further attempt to revive these discredited charges would be a mockery of our system of justice.”
James was charged with one count of bank fraud and one count of making a false statement in connection with a home in Norfolk, Virginia in 2020. Prosecutors say James committed a crime because she indicated on mortgage paperwork that the purchase would serve as her second home, but then rented it out. James denies wrongdoing and experts have said the allegations are thin. The New York Times reported James’ niece lives in the home.
Career prosecutors did not think there was sufficient evidence to file charges against James and were subsequently fired. The initial case was personally presented by Lindsey Halligan, a Trump ally installed to be the acting US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia. In November, a federal judge dismissed the case after ruling that Halligan was improperly appointed to the post. The criminal case against James Comey, the former FBI director, was dismissed on similar grounds.
Nothing prevented the justice department from trying to refile the case and they did so last week before a federal grand jury in Norfolk. A career attorney brought in from Missouri to work on the case, Roger Keller, handled that presentation, which was rejected. The office could again seek to refile charges against James with a different grand jury.
So … What is Trump Thinking?
It’s an important question.
Some folks sanewash Trump by claiming that he’s retaliating against his enemies by forcing them to spend time and resources to establish their innocence.
I don’t think that’s a logical explanation of his thinking. Mainly because, by doing the same thing over and over, he his making himself and his team look like the idiots they are.
No, I think it’s a lot worse than just an intention to misuse his office.
Trump does not understand that there are good legal arguments and bad legal arguments. To him, all legal analysis is a buzzing, booming confusion. Like some mad King Canute, he thinks he can bend reality with his magical bullshit. He does not understand that actions have consequences, and he is unwilling to accept advice from professionally competent individual who could correct his misunderstanding and help him to predict what the consequences of his actions will be.
The distrust goes way beyond the economy. Over these last few weeks, ever since the government shutdown, it’s finally begun to sink in on people that Trump and his entire administration are a bunch of raging ideologues or incompetents or both, peddling a fantasy version of their strength that people no longer buy. There’s no longer any doubt about it: The MAGA crack-up has begun.
Look at a few things that have happened in just the last week:
• Trump tried to sell Ukraine down the river to Putin. The howls of outrage were instant, loud, and bipartisan to some extent. The administration backpedaled. Or appeared to. But then, on Tuesday, we got the leaked transcript of the phone call between envoy Steve Witkoff and a top Putin aide in which Witkoff offered tips to the Kremlin to help sweet-talk Trump. (Remember: Our ally here is Ukraine!) The fact that something like this was leaked, whether by someone inside or outside the United States, is a clear sign that people aren’t afraid of this administration the way they might have been six months ago.
• Trump, bumbling around on domestic policy because he knows nothing, desperately said he was considering extending the Obamacare coverage subsidies on Monday. Congressional Republicans were up in arms. It would actually be a sane thing to do, but it would never get through Congress, and he sounds ridiculous, considering that he just kept the government shut down for 43 days over this very issue.
• Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth’s push to reinstate Senator Mark Kelly as an active-duty soldier (he’s 61!) so they can court-martial him is quickly turning into one of the leading disasters of this administration. There is no chance they’re going to convince a majority of Americans that a guy who flew 30-something combat missions is a disloyal American. Hegseth’s tweets chastising the Arizona senator for the state of his uniform only drew attention to Kelly’s heroism—and made the defense secretary seem ridiculous and the whole saga seem petty. Kelly and the other five Democrats who made that video advising troops not to follow illegal orders no doubt have surprised Trump & company by not taking this lying down. The revenge crusade is crashing and burning.
• It was a disastrous week for Attorney General Pam Bondi as she stood there watching a federal judge dismiss the laughable indictments she directed against James Comey and Letitia James. And she stood up there, in perfect East German Communist Party circa 1957 fashion, repeating the assertion that everyone knows to be a lie, that Lindsey Halligan is “an excellent U.S. attorney.”
• FBI Director Kash Patel somehow had a worse week than Bondi. He acknowledged that the Epstein files may never be released in full. He took more stick for spending taxpayer dollars providing his country-singer girlfriend with security and then exploded when he learned they ditched her right before she was set to sing the national anthem at an NRA convention in Georgia. They’re now openly leaking that Patel is on the way out. He’s been every bit as horrible as many people predicted he would be.
• Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was revealed by a Justice Department court filing to have personally ordered the continuation of those flights to Central America after a federal judge said they had to stop. This involved, you may recall, loading 261 people onto three planes and sending them to El Salvador, many to the notorious CECOT facility where they endured subhuman conditions. Noem, in other words, directly violated an order from a federal court. This is illegal. It could lead to contempt of court charges—and fines and even imprisonment.
I could go on. RFK Jr.’s been on a pretty bad streak too. There was the Olivia Nuzzi stuff, which was titillating even if perhaps not of overwhelming public interest—except that it might indeed be a matter of public interest if Nuzzi is correct that the ex-junkie in charge of the nation’s health is still using drugs, which she writes he admitted to her. And before that, he took the country further into dangerous surreality on vaccines and autism.
That’s pretty much the whole murderers’ row of Trump’s awful appointments (well, the top-tier ones). All except Tulsi Gabbard. Wonder what happened with her. Surely she did something stupid too. It just hasn’t been reported. (Actually, surprise surprise, she did do something pretty weird.)
Everywhere you look, in other words, Trump and his people are wrecking the country. He doesn’t know what to do about the economy. Presidents don’t have a ton of power to lower prices in the first place, and people are now understanding that fact, and that Trump swindled them last year. He’s going to give Putin most of what he wants. His pursuit of his perceived political enemies is going to be massively unpopular and drive his numbers down into the mid-30s before too long if he keeps it up. And all these incompetent and corrupt henchpeople aren’t helping. The movement is collapsing.
And this will embolden both Trump’s opponents and those he’s had in his gunsights. Seven months ago, law firms and universities were terrified of Trump. I bet not so much now. It’s been so inspiring and important to see citizens in Chicago and Evanston and so many other places rise up to oppose Trump and his masked agents in their roundups. It was gratifying to see Zohran Mamdani run circles around him, and Trump’s passive demeanor that day was telling. Even the Beltway Democrats, or some of them anyway, are showing some game.
People may not hate incompetence. They may not hate corruption. And they may not hate extremism. But all three at once? It’s getting to be too much for people, and it’s a great way to close out the year.
Facing MAGA 