Well, yeah. But I think there are actually two sides to this coin.
Two Sides to the Coin: Who Will or Won’t Obey Which Orders?
Well may we ask, how do the courts enforce their orders when Trump tells his minions to violate the law?
But, by like token, when Trump tells his team to violate the law, how many of them will actually do it?
Let’s wargame this out.
Some on the Trump team are lawyers—actual members of the bar. Lawyers who engage in contempt of court—not to mention other violations like subornation of perjury or obstruction of justice—face fines, imprisonment, and disciplinary actions up to and including disbarment.
If you are a lawyer, there will probably come a time when a client will pressure you to violate the law or demand that you violate the law. You had bloody well not do it. It’s the wrong thing to do. But even if you don’t give a tinker’s damn about right or wrong, it’s still a really bad idea to violate the law on a client’s behalf.
Now, to push our little thought experiment to the next step: Maybe you are a member of the bar who has drunk deeply of the MAGA Kool-Aid. Maybe you think that a Trump dictatorship would be just fine and dandy. But are you SURE that the leap toward dictatorship is actually going to work?
Because, friend, if Trump doesn’t pull off his dictatorship, then you are going to be left up that famous tributary without a means of locomotion.
If you are a lawyer, you will be subject to disbarment, and will need to find another line of work—animal husbandry, maybe?
If you are not a lawyer, you can’t be disbarred—you were never “barred” in the first place—but there are plenty of other adverse consequences that could ensue.
In short, Conway is surely right as far as he goes: Just because the Supreme Court says “Jump,” that doesn’t mean that everyone in the land will ask “How high, sirs?”
But the same thing goes if and when Trump says “Jump—into defiance of the rule of law!” Lots of people will jump. But how many will not jump?
And Then There are the Knock-on Effects …
As Conway says, when push comes to shove, there will be a lot of folks out in the streets. But it won’t only be folks in the streets. Read the damn WSJ Editorial Board, for example: If the rule of law disappears and it becomes a jungle out there, how the hell can big business enforce its contracts—or have enough certainty to invest and thrive?
What will Trump do when every Fortune 500 CEO comes for him?
… At a Time When There is Massive Pain Throughout Society
If you’re Mango Mussolini and you want to go full authoritarian, maybe you don’t want to pick a time when government breakdowns are hurting your peeps and when trade wars are causing big pain.
Not a Rosy Scenario—But a Damn Uncertain Scenario
No, my name is not Rosy Scenario, and of course I don’t know how all of this is going to turn out. But I do know, to a high level of confidence, that there are a whole lot of moving parts—and a lot of those moving parts may not move in Trump’s direction.
Derek Thompson is the co-author, along with Ezra Klein, of the new book Abundance. I strongly recommend the whole article. If you don’t subscribe to The Atlantic, then you really should.
Here are some highlights:
Donald Trump has promised a “golden age of America.” But for all his bluster about being the champion of an American century, Trump’s actual policies point to something different: not an expansive vision of the future, but a shrunken vision of the present.
The MAGA movement might try to justify its wrecking-ball style by arguing that its extreme approach is commensurate with the level of anger that voters feel about the status quo. But just because Trump is a product of American rage does not mean he is a solution to it.
In housing, for example, Americans have every right to be furious. Home construction has lagged behind our national needs for decades. Today, the median age of first-time homebuyers has surged to a record high of 38. Large declines in young homeownershiphave likely prevented many young people from dating, marrying, and starting a family. Although Trump was swept into office on a wave of economic frustration, his initial foray into economic policy has done little to help the situation. As the National Association of Home Builders pointed out in an alarmed March 7 memo, his persistent threat of tariffs on Mexico and Canada could drive up the cost of crucial materials, such as softwood lumber and drywall gypsum, which are “largely sourced from Canada and Mexico, respectively.” Meanwhile, Trump’s anti-immigrant policies foretell new labor shortages in the construction industry, where roughly 25 percent or more workers are foreign-born.
This is where Democrats should be able to stand up and show that they have a winning response to the less-is-less politics from the right. But in many places run by Democrats, the solution on offer is another variety of scarcity. Blue cities are laden with rules and litigation procedures that block new housing and transit construction. As my colleague Yoni Appelbaum has noted, in California cities where the share of progressives votes goes up by 10 points, the number of housing permits issued declines by 30 percent. Where the supply of homes is constricted, housing prices soar, and homelessness rises. As of 2023, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness were New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington—all run by Democrats.
As the cost of living rises in blue states, tens of thousands of families are leaving them. But the left isn’t just losing people. It’s losing an argument. It has become a coalition of Kindness Is Everything signs in front yards zoned for single-family homes. Liberals say they want to save the planet from climate change, but in practice, many liberal areas have shut down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protested solar-power projects, leaving it to red states such as Texas to lead the nation in renewable-energy generation. Democrats cannot afford to become the party of language over outcomes, of ever more lawn signs and ever fewer working-class families.
If Trump’s opponents are going to win at the polls, they will need to construct a new political movement, one that aims for abundance instead of scarcity. Such a movement would combine the progressive virtue of care for the working class and a traditionally conservative celebration of national greatness, while taking a page from the libertarian obsession with eliminating harmful regulations to make the most important markets work better. It would braid a negative critique of Trump’s attack on the government with a positive vision of actual good governance in America—while providing a rigorous focus on removing the bottlenecks that stand in the way.
Abundance begins with specific goals for America’s future. Imagine much more housing where it’s most in demand. An economy powered by plentiful clean energy. A revitalized national science policy prioritizing high-risk discoveries that extend lives and improve health. And a national invention agenda that seeks to pull forward technologies in transportation, medicine, energy, and beyond that would improve people’s lives. …
I can imagine somebody opposed to the MAGA movement reading all of this and thinking: Why, at a time when Trump presents such a clear threat to the American project, is it appropriate to focus such criticism on the Democratic side?
First, to make the argument for a liberal alternative to Trumpism, Democrats have to show Americans that voting for liberals actually works. …
Second, Americans are furious about the status quo—the youngest voters are “more jaded than ever about the state of American leadership,” according to the Harvard Political Review—and liberals need a new style of politics for the age of anti-establishment anger. The right’s answer to rage is chaos in search of an agenda. MAGA acts like a drunk toddler with a chain saw, carelessly slashing through state programs with a high risk of self-harm. But Democrats should not allow the forces of negative polarization to turn them into the party that reflexively defends the status quo at every turn, even when it means refusing to reform institutions that have lost the public’s trust. Quite the opposite: Abundance should be a movement of proud, active, and even obsessive institutional renewal.
Consider U.S. science policy, an area that is under attack from the right at this moment. As the centerpiece of U.S. biomedical funding, the National Institutes of Health has accomplished extraordinary things; you will have a hard time finding many scientific breakthroughs in the past 50 years—in heart disease, genetics, epidemiology—that were not irrigated by its funding.
But many of the same factors that have infamously plagued our housing and energy markets—paperwork, bureaucratic drift, entrenched incumbent interests—have become fixtures in American science. It is practically a cliché among researchers that the NIH privileges incremental science over the sort of high-risk, high-reward investigations that would likely uncover the most important new truths. Surveys indicate that the typical U.S. researcher spends up to 40 percent of their time preparing grant proposals and filling out paperwork rather than actually conducting science. As John Doench, the director of research and development in functional genomics at the Broad Institute, told me: “Folks need to understand how broken the system is.” …
Today, we seem to be in a rare period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another. This crackup was decades in the making. It started with the Great Recession, which shattered a broad belief in free and unregulated markets. It continued throughout the 2010s, as slow economic recovery fueled public resentment of inequality, and an affordability crisis gathered steam. In 2020, the pandemic obliterated many Americans’ trust in government, or what was left of it. And from 2021 to 2024, inflation brought national attention to the interlocking crises of scarcity, supply, and unaffordability. For years, the boundaries of American politics had felt fixed, even settled. But now they are falling.
“For a political order to triumph, it must have a narrative, a story it tells about the good life,” Gerstle told me. Today’s politics are suffused with pessimism about government because “a way of living sold to us as good and achievable is no longer good, or no longer achievable.” In 2016, the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right revealed how many Americans had stopped believing that the life they had been promised was achievable. What both the socialist left and the populist-authoritarian right understood was that the story that had been told by the establishments of both parties, the story that had kept their movements consigned to the margins, had come to its end.
Political movements succeed when they build a vision of the future that is imbued with the virtues of the past. Franklin D. Roosevelt pitched his expansive view of government as a sentinel for American freedoms: of speech, of worship, from want, from fear. Decades later, Ronald Reagan recast government as freedom’s nemesis rather than its protector. Abundance, too, is about redefining freedom for our own time. It is about the freedom to build in an age of blocking; the freedom to move and live where you want in an age of a stuck working class; the freedom from curable diseases that come from scientific breakthroughs. Trump has defined his second term by demolition and deprivation. America can instead choose abundance.
Notice, please, that the Big Bad Wolf has only two ways of getting what he wants. The first is that he huffs and he puffs and he blows things down.
Huffing and puffing works fine on the First Little Pig, who built his house from straw—and even on the Second Little Pig, who chose wood as his building material. But huffing and puffing has no effect on the Third Little Pig, who used bricks to build his house.
The Big Bad Wolf’s second and last technique is telling lies. We don’t know whether the lies would have worked on the first two pigs, because they succumbed to the huffing and puffing—and got eaten—even before the Wolf had to resort to mendacity.
As to the Third Little Pig, not only does he build a brick house—and thus survive all the huffing and puffing—but he also responds to the Wolf’s bullshit with effective counterstrategy. And, so, at the end of the day, it’s the Big Bad Wolf who gets eaten, not the Third Little Pig.
One might say that the Third Little Pig knows his Sunzi:
Know yourself.
Know the enemy.
Hundred battles.
No peril.
As I said, we know who the Big Bad Wolf stands for.
The First Little Pig stands for the Republican members of the House and Senate. They are afraid of their constituents. Many of them are unintelligent and gullible. The others, the ones who understand what’s going on, do not have the character and moral courage to do their jobs. As the poet said, the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
And so, the house made of straw stands for our first branch of government, the United States Congress.
The Second Little Pig and his house of wood stand for those parts of our institutions that are made of somewhat sterner stuff than the house of straw, but that still succumb to the huffing and puffing. Think of Jeff Bezos as the Second Little Pig and the Washington Post as the wooden house.
The Third Little Pig and his brick house stand for those of us who’re going to survive this shitstorm. We go into battle armed with skill, flexibility, and moral conviction. In the end, it will be the Big, Bad Wolf who winds up in the pot. Not us.
To begin with, and for what little it’s worth, I want to be recorded as deploring the instinct to try to win a difficult argument by resorting to ad hominem slurs—“He’s a coward!”—against folks who disagree with you. It’s entirely illogical. It is an extraordinarily poor way to think yourself out of a hard problem. And it gives aid and comfort to the enemy.
So please don’t do it.
If you think Chuck Schumer’s analysis is wrong, fine, but explain why.
If you think my points are wrong, fine, but explain why. Don’t hurl ad hominem slurs.
Second, as sure as God made little green apples, Trump and his minions would have used those extraordinary powers as tools to wreck the federal government.
Third, and relatedly, the extraordinary legal powers that the law purports to confer on the president during a shutdown would have been used to give what lawyers call the “color of law” to Trump’s wrecking ball. Our side is winning in court on Trump’s abuse of power. We don’t want to give ourselves another legal hoop to jump through.
Fourth, a government shutdown would have supplied Trump and his minions with a splendid “argument” to further confuse an already confused public. “It’s not Trump who’s causing your pain,” they would scream, “it’s those damn Democrats who shut down the government.”
With no government shutdown, ALL THE CHAOS IS ON TRUMP AND HIS ENABLERS.
Fifth, because of points one, two, three, and four, there would be little incentive for Trump and the Republicans to negotiate to get out of the shutdown.
A shutdown is to the Trumpistas as the briar patch was to Brer Rabbit.
Yesterday, I heard a talking head on the internet cite a purported academic study considering who is most likely to survive a catastrophe. Answer: it’s the person who can, most quickly, form an adequate assessment of the actual situation they are in.
Yeah, I heard it on the internet, so it must be true.
By the way, I gave you, above, an accurate character-by-character translation of the famous quote from Sunzi. Some people translate the whole thing to imply that you will win all one hundred battles. That’s a legitimate translation, but, personally, I suspect it’s not quite what Sunzi meant. I think he meant that you may lose some battles but that, after the war has run its full course, if you have been situationally aware, then final victory will be yours.
“‘I don’t keer w’at you do wid me, Brer Fox,’ sezee, ‘so you don’t fling me in dat brier-patch. Roas’ me, Brer Fox’ sezee, ‘but don’t fling me in dat brierpatch,’ sezee.
“‘Hit’s so much trouble fer ter kindle a fier,’ sez Brer Fox, sezee, ‘dat I speck I’ll hatter hang you,’ sezee.
“‘Hang me des ez high as you please, Brer Fox,’ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, ‘but do fer de Lord’s sake don’t fling me in dat brier- patch,’ sezee.
“‘I ain’t got no string,’ sez Brer Fox, sezee, ‘en now I speck I’ll hatter drown you,’ sezee.
“‘Drown me des ez deep ez you please, Brer Fox,’ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, ‘but do don’t fling me in dat brier-patch,’ sezee.
“‘Dey ain’t no water nigh,’ sez Brer Fox, sezee, ‘en now I speck I’ll hatter skin you,’ sezee.
“‘Skin me, Brer Fox,’ sez Brer Rabbit, sezee, ‘snatch out my eyeballs, t’ar out my years by de roots, en cut off my legs,’ sezee, ‘but do please, Brer Fox, don’t fling me in dat brier- patch,’ sezee.
“Co’se Brer Fox wanter hurt Brer Rabbit bad ez he kin, so he cotch ‘im by de behime legs en slung ‘im right in de middle er de brier-patch. Dar wuz a considerbul flutter whar Brer Rabbit struck de bushes, en Brer Fox sorter hang ‘roun’ fer ter see w’at wuz gwineter happen. Bimeby he hear somebody call ‘im, en way up de hill he see Brer Rabbit settin’ crosslegged on a chinkapin log koamin’ de pitch outen his har wid a chip. Den Brer Fox know dat he bin swop off mighty bad. Brer Rabbit wuz bleedzed fer ter fling back some er his sass, en he holler out:
“‘Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Fox—bred en bawn in a brier-patch!’ en wid dat he skip out des ez lively ez a cricket in de embers.”
The Alabama Legislature is worried about your soul.
So it is considering a bill that would hold education for ransom, slashing funding for school districts that don’t start their classroom days with a prayer.
Good bread, good meat, time’s wastin’ let’s eat.
HB231, sponsored by Pike Road GOP Rep. Reed Ingram and a host of disciples, is clear. Your students, no matter their faith, creed or lack thereof, must hear a prayer “consistent with Judeo-Christian values.”
Or risk losing 25% or their state funding. More than $63 million in Jeffco, for instance. Almost $100 million in Mobile. That’s $37 million in Madison County, and $34 million in Huntsville.
Can I get an amen?
So let’s just take a quiz. What prayers might meet that standard?
It is, of course, not as simple as all that. The bill, a constitutional amendment that would require a vote of the people, would withhold the money from school districts that show a pattern of refusing to comply. But the point is very real.
Freedom of religion in Alabama means “our way,” or to hell with you. Literally.
If this bill, this public piety for political purpose is passed, teachers should print that final prayer out and read it every single day in class.
Bow your heads and say it with me.
Oh Lord, help those men and women in the Alabama Legislature. They have taken food from the mouths of children, medicine from the sick and hope from the hopeless. They cast your people into prisons without mercy, rail against the poor and the immigrant. They have seen the sick and the hungry in their own land, and passed by on the other side of the street. They have done it in your name. Have mercy on their souls.
Amen.
Oh. P.S. Help us pass that damn test.
___________
Thanks to old friend and fellow Tuscaloosa High grad WA for sending along the article.
Facing MAGA 