To Be Or Not To Be Equal Before The Law

"Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.

At least some people understand this. The president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey, received a standing ovation when he said to a room full of his fellow union workers: “We need to make our voices heard. We’re not red, we’re not blue. We’re the building trades, the backbone of America. You want to build a $5 billion data center? Want more six-figure careers with health care, retirement, and no college debt? You don’t call Elon Musk, you call us!... And yeah, that means all of us. All of us. Including our brother [International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers] apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who we demand to be returned to us and his family now! Bring him home!”- Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American Historian

Fifth Amendment: "nor shall any person be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"

Note, "person," doesn't have to be a "citizen." If the Grump admin ignores the law, as they are doing now, make no mistake everyone not wearing a red Maga hat is vulnerable. It is family separations all over again but scaled up now by Project 2025's culture war doomsday agenda. It starts with illegal deportations to notoriously brutal gulags in El Salvador, without any due process. We're all just supposed to go on Grump's say-so: they're all "terrorists and violent criminals," which he can't even say without an evil cartoon sneer. 

And now these degrading shit-shows in the WH are apparently going to become part of regular Trump 2 programming. Maga kayfabe. The inner circle braintrust lounging uncomfortably on couches; Grump and his guest in individual chairs, repartee so painfully awkward and smarmy and insulting I can't even watch it straight through. A gaggle of reporters on the side, the doofus chorus in The Thucydides Trap. The scene is the same as the embarrassing ambush of Zelensky a few weeks back. But this time the leader of El Salvador, Bukele, is more like a scary smart powerful drug lord in the Netflix series Narcos. Grump's new global dictatorship alliance: Russia, El Salvador, Israel, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, etc. Trump jokes with Bukele about building more prisons for our "homegrown" criminals, otherwise known as American citizens, but at this point Grump's slinging around charges of criminality at anyone or anything that opposes him. Owning the libs is everything for these guys. 

Even if the regime keeps to illegal disappearances of non-citizens we're still already living in a fascist dictatorship, and will be until further notice. The ruling regime refuses to submit to judicial review and in an aggressively dictatorship way. They could get back Abrego Garcia, of course, they admit they apprehended him mistakenly but they don't want to be told what to do by the court. We are now living under Trump's version of the "Unitary executive theory." It's like Trump still insisting on the guilt of the Central Park Five after they'd been exonerated by DNA evidence. Deporting people, anybody, citizen or not, without due process rights, is authoritarian; targeting and scapegoating groups, DEI, immigrants, women, Trans people, liberals, is fascist. Firebombing political enemies is fascist. Impeaching judges and punishing law firms that challenge your lawlessness is fascist. Courts and media and universities covering for this fake news BS is fascist. 

(As I've said before, Grump didn't invent fake news but he is its greatest practitioner. Certainly the biggest in my life time and has to be on a short list of the biggest liars in US political history.) 

Turns out it not only can happen here but is happening here right now and will go on happening until something stops what to this point has been, with the brief interruption of the Biden admin, an unstoppable force. We're now painfully dependent on the law to at least slow down his lawlessness but the law as an institution, Robert's Court, is probably more responsible for our corrupt police state trajectory than anything else, save the boss himself. 

Resistance is growing but Trump's illiberal reaction has control of crucial legal and media power centers. Most pundits insist now it comes down to the people, most of whom are too busy working and supporting families and trying to keep up with the bills to go on a general strike. But this stuff is so bad, slashing government services, slashing scientific research and education; snatching people off the streets, trampling human rights with sadistic glee. It's so bad people are already protesting in impressive numbers but what about the silent majority, the people whose politics are basically anti-politics?

It's grim but if you're a real glutton for this kind of punishment-- I am but there are much bigger gluttons, of course, real pros--consider this NY Times survey of 13 "independents" about how they think Grump is doing so far. Trigger warning: unbelievably depressing. 

I paraphrase: 

Trump is doing what he promised. At least he's doing something, Biden wasn't doing anything. Illegal immigrant violent gang members and criminals ought to be deported. But shouldn't courts confirm that those picked up are in fact violent criminals or here illegally before they are deported? Isn't due process a basic human right? These questions aren't brought up by the interviewers or the voters surveyed. Trump can be trusted on this is the confident vibe conveyed. 

Same goes for tariffs and Doge. Maybe they are going too fast but Trump is just trying to bring back good manufacturing jobs and Musk just trying to eliminate waste in government. The background historical rationale appears to be foreign countries have been ripping the US off since WW2; and business men are all government efficiency experts. As I've mentioned before, these are wildly popular sentiments with the working classes and go back to at least to the mid-20th century; even if never true and never less so than now. 

(And this isn't to suggest their aren't really foreign countries competing with the US for their own economic advantage. It goes both ways, all the time. It isn't crazy for Grump to try to get the US a better deal. It is dumb and destructive beyond belief if, however, Grump single-handedly gets countries to turn away from US trade and the dollar. And I'm not saying that there aren't foreign countries hostile to the US that have to be watched and checked by intelligence and diplomacy. But, point of fact, Trump is actually best buds with the foreign leader most hostile to the US!) 

But Trump wouldn't let Musk screw up Social Security, one of the focus group members concludes. You were not born yesterday, right? That Trump and Musk are actually destroying departments of government that protect consumers and labor or have already removed government officials whose job it is to reduce corruption and self-dealing in government, the kind of stuff the independent voter above is sure Grump would never do, gets not a peep, again, from the NY Times or any of these 13 "independent" voters.     

Trust in Trump prevails. Biden was a do-nothing and Harris a "joke." Russiagate, denying women and immigrants basic human rights, the reckless endangerment of public health, extorting Ukraine to cheat in an election, fake electors, Jan 6, selling out to Musk and billionaires, all just fake news attacks by Democrats trying to bring Trump down.

If these "independent" voters aren't cult members they are encased in a cult world, Trump World, and a conservative stranglehold on media and the courts bares much responsibility for this sorry state of affairs. Anyway, direct contact like this with Trump World can be despairing or I find it so anyway but a couple, hopefully comforting, reminders:  

1) Trump actually won by only 1.5% of the vote, and that was with a bunch of voter suppression and Musk's billions. Less than half of the electorate endorsed this tyranny and fewer still support it now. 

2) None of the stuff they are actually doing polls well; from deporting people without due process, abandoning Ukraine and Nato, trash talking our neighbors, to trade war tariffs and more tax cuts for the rich. Clear majorities oppose this stuff. Unfortunately, it appears most voters will never even realize and/or believe any of this is going on until it explodes in their faces. 

3) One voter attributed much of the current crisis to a civil war between elites, leaving the rest of us on the sidelines. This is especially true in the sense that there are many economic elites, republicans, billionaires that supported and voted for Trump, for reasons we don't need to go into here, that are waking up to a realization that Trump's control of the economy, erratic unilateral trade wars, threatening to take over the Fed, is potentially a catastrophic threat to US leadership in the global economy. (See Krugman's recent interviews with financial infrastructure super nerd Nathan Tankus.) 

Truly Trump 2 has the potential to turn into one of the biggest imperial faceplants in history. Grump is stress testing the US's super privileged and lucrative role of playing the reliable and trustworthy house banker to the global economy. He's counting on the dominance of the American economy forcing US trade partners to submit to his Snidely Whiplash/Mr. Potter machinations. We'll see. 

In the meantime, I do still also find some comfort in books, novels, memoirs, that resonate with the present. During Trump 1 I especially enjoyed Albert Camus's The Plague and Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. And I'd still recommend them. But I've come across nothing that resonates with Trump 2 so far as well as Butler's second book in her Earthseed series, Parable of the Talents. Published in 1998 it's a post-collapse America with an uncanny Trump-like potus character. 

The countervailing positive force to the illiberal catastrophe unfolding around people in Butler's America is spread by protagonist Lauren Olamina in her writings, Earthseed: Books of the Living, and her itinerant teachings, like this snatch of epigrammatic wisdom:

God is change, 

God prevails,

Kindness eases change,

Love quiets fear,

Sweet and powerful,

positive obsession blunts pain, 

diverts rage,

and engages us in the most intense of our chosen struggles. 

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. 

Takeover: How to Destroy Trade Alliances and a Boom Economy

"Musk is unelected, and it appears that DOGE has no legal authority. As political scientist Seth Masket put it in tusk: “Elon Musk is not a federal employee, nor has he been appointed by the President nor approved by the Senate to have any leadership role in government. The ‘Department of Government Efficiency,’ announced by Trump in a January 20th executive order, is not truly any sort of government department or agency, and even the executive order uses quotes in the title. It’s perfectly fine to have a marketing gimmick like this, but DOGE does not have power over established government agencies, and Musk has no role in government. It does not matter that he is an ally of the President. Musk is a private citizen taking control of established government offices. That is not efficiency; that is a coup.”

Letters from an American Historian

"Move fast and break things." The Tech Bros, Bro culture, mob, and "Groypers" all big fans of "manly energies" and the "animal spirits" and "techno-optimism" love this stuff, right? It's like that "We're an empire now" quote from a Bush official, while the rest of us try to figure out WTF these insane office space jocks are doing they are history's imperial actors creating their own realities. And this is also hacker chic in its decadent imperialist phase, right? Makes Mr. Robot seem both overly serious and silly by comparison. 

Now, of course, if we were a functioning democracy with laws and real law enforcement these reckless loons would be locked up and an investigations into their obstruction and security breaches begun immediately. But we don't so they won't be, is my cynical hunch.

Stephanie Kelton, the deficit myth economist, makes what's going on at Treasury semi-legible to me: 

One, stopping payment on monies already authorized by congress is illegal; against an impoundment control law from 1974 (enacted after Nixon tried to pull something like this). Two, giving an unelected chaos monkey and his band of merry hackers access to the private information of citizens is reckless endangerment; giving it to the guy who just turned a major social media platform into a Neo-Nazi dumpster fire is a coup, an insurrection, an invasion of the basic rights of all Americans. 

Call the cops! Call the feds! Freeze his meddling, impound his stolen files, investigate his security breach. SCOTUS did this, allowed this coup and constitutional crisis. They had accomplices and partisan support, sure, but they allowed the coup and constitutional crisis.  

Oy! And then if this were not enough some of Grump's performative art-of-the-deal-making....

"Today Trump was clearer: he posted on social media that without U.S. trade—which Trump somehow thinks is a “massive subsidy”—“Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada—AND NO TARIFFS!”

Yeah, meanwhile, Justin Trudeau, Claudia Sheinbaum, Larry Summers, various industry and academic experts, and everybody on substack is trying guess and respond to the cracked logic of Grump's tariff scheme and, for Canada anyway, we now get the scoop: Canada's economy is completely dependent on our markets, Grump figures. (No one else wants their oil or maple syrup?) Grump figures Canada will have to pay whatever he charges them in trade tariffs. And if they don't want to pay tariffs then they can submit to annexation as the 51st state in the US. 

The belligerent disregard for Canada's national independence is stunning, if again probably thrilling to the hardcore bully Bro culture mob on X/Twitter. 

And there are actually some good reasons, it should be noted, for tariffs; for examples, to protect domestic industries important to national security or to protect the infant development of domestic industry from foreign competition. And all developed rich countries have used tariffs at one time or another, including the US, for these purposes. Economist Ha-Joon Chang argues tariffs are essential to developing economies, to protect them from the growth stunting impacts of large-scale dominating foreign competition, contrary to the insistence of neoliberal free traders. And, historically, to effectuate these goals tariff rates have reached as high as 50% or even 70%. 

But none of these reasons, zero, apply to raising tariff rates on Canada or Mexico. 

For Grump, none of these reasons for tariffs need apply. He's simply imposing them as a shakedown of our closest neighbors. This is "common sense" to super predator Grump; this is his win/lose domination-or-bust economic model. He reasons Canada and Mexico need US markets, this is his leverage, so screw them. Utterly belligerent monopoly imperialism, without really any discernible America First goals other than dictatorship and, one would think, economic crisis, which is the weirdest part in this whole game. Grump needs to deliver something on the economy (beyond tax cuts) and this is not likely to do it. Quite the contrary. 

Tariffs won't increase trade but just make it more expensive for consumers. But his people love the tough-guy bluster, he's fighting for them, he says, they hope, and, well, we're all find out soon enough. 

It's a big colossal clusterfuck of bad and what all the billionaires and bigots voted for, no getting around that. Fascism can happen here and is coming for your government services, probably many we never realized were so important until they are gone. 

Romanticizing any of this as a risk-taking unleashing of the "animal spirits" for innovation and economic growth and expansion, Techno-Optimism, is pathetic. It's a Big Tech yuppie redux and I'm betting they won't even get that far before blowing everything up. Musk is guy whose biggest tech dream is colonizing Mars because he doesn't think human life on earth will last and now he's in charge of making our government more "efficient." He has no idea, obviously. 

USAID is NOT a "criminal organization," which anyway sounds like an over-heated online troll twist on an Israel talking point. USAID provides aid to people around the world contending with impoverished crisis conditions; it makes up less than 1% of the US budget. Targeting it is beneath contempt, and back to their "cruelty is the point" thing. 

One of my tired refrains of late, and feeling it again now, is that one about how the Republicans are always insisting the government doesn't work and then get elected and prove it.