One last thought: The reality of Trump’s lies is that they worked. Enough voters believed him to put him over the edge. There is no doubt that we can blame some of this on an overall information environment that is saturated with propaganda, misinformation and, well, fake news.
What I Wrote
My column this week was on Elon Musk as an unofficial co-president and how that breaks the constitutional system. (It also included a quick refutation of the “unitary executive” theory.)
Trump may be working from an expansive theory of executive power, but in delegating so much of his authority to Musk — in creating a de facto co-president — he is both undermining that power and demonstrating Hamilton’s real insights about the importance of a singular executive.
Now Reading
Gabriel Sherman on the threats of political violence that have shaped Republican behavior in Congress, for Vanity Fair.
Senate and House Republicans know Trump will orchestrate the running of a primary challenger backed by Elon Musk’s unlimited resources if a member defies him. But this is not the whole story of Republican subservience to the president. In private, Republicans talk about their fear that Trump might incite his MAGA followers to commit political violence against them if they don’t rubber-stamp his actions.
Jack M. Balkin on Trump’s executive power grab, for his blog.
These actions seek not just radical changes in policy but also a fundamental change in the constitutional order. The president is triggering a constitutional moment in the purest Ackermanian tradition more clearly than at any time since the dawn of the Civil Rights Era.
Johann Neem on the state of the American Republic, for his Substack newsletter.
We are in frightening times. Even writing these words gives me significant pause because they enunciate clearly what we would all rather avoid saying out loud. It requires seeing what our eyes do not want to see, what they would rather refuse to see. We are no longer living under the protection of the Constitution. We may be subject to force — from the government or from extralegal actors — designed to silence us. Our lives, our families, our liberties, our property are subject to the arbitrary will of a man who has demonstrated his capacity for capricious and vengeful action.
Adam Serwer on the Trump administration’s effort to resegregate America, for The Atlantic.
For all the big talk about putting an end to “social engineering,” the Great Resegregation is itself a radical attempt to socially engineer America to be poorer, whiter, less equal, and less democratic. Much as the old Jim Crow measures kept many Southern white people impoverished and disenfranchised alongside the Black Southerners they targeted, the Great Resegregation will leave wealthy white elites with a firmer grip on power and the working classes with fewer opportunities and a weakened social safety net. The only people left with more will be those who already had more than they needed to begin with.
Moira Donegan on Andrea Dworkin, for The New York Review of Books.
When she was still alive, Dworkin was often criticized as hyperbolic and unnuanced. But Trump, with his hatred, vulgarity, and love of force, seems to offer up an awful confirmation that what she saw was really there all along. His politics confirm her analysis of everyday misogyny: he has a reverence for domination and sadism, a cruel and peevish enforcement of hierarchy, an egotism that feeds, with an almost erotic enthusiasm, on the pain and humiliation of others.