I decided to keep a record of my thoughts as events transpire, a diary. I have read several reactions by Germans to the rise of Nazism and I was struck by their difficulty to understand where the daily events they lived through could or would lead. In retrospect, we will know, analyze, and make sense. In retrospect everything will have been determined. We may conclude, as did Amos Alon (The Pity of It All) that what did transpire was not inevitable, that history may have taken a different course. But prospectively we can only fear or hope and we do not know which. I have dark premonitions but this is all I have. So my purpose is only to inform the future retrospect by providing a record of my gut reactions to the daily events, as they happen.
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
I have spent a good part of my life, 50 years, thinking about political regimes, categorizing them, studying their dynamics, and their effects. And I find myself at a loss. I am trying to find categories in which to place the current situation and historical precedents from which one could draw some enlightenment. I fail in both.
Trump was elected in fair elections, having actually won a majority of votes. Perhaps to the surprise of some of his supporters, he is implementing his campaign promises. He continues to be supported by a narrow majority in the polls, as are most of his announced measures. Hence, nothing he has done thus far disqualifies the current political regime in the United States as democracy. At the same time, tens of his measures, some only announced but several already implemented, violate the extant laws. Moreover, the government is pursuing some of them even if they have been temporarily stopped by the courts. I am not the only one who does not know what categories to apply to it: Paul Krugman thinks it is an "attempt at an autogolpe," Le Monde, in an editorial of today, sees it as "Imperial Presidency." The word "personalistic" has been used by political scientists to categorize autocracies, but not democracies.
The measures, announced or already adopted, add up to a revolutionary change of the relation between the state and society. The immediate aim of Trump's administration is to reduce the size of the government and to use loyalty as the exclusive criterion of public service: total control of the State apparatus, by the way, is the instrument of all revolutionary governments. The second aim is to drastically curtail the scope and the magnitude of government services to private institutions and individuals. These two offensives are to serve the goal of reducing taxation without increasing government deficit. I cannot find a historical precedent of a transformation of this scope resulting from elections. I thought of Thatcher, who succeeded in decimating unions, but even she did not reduce social expenditures. Milei, in Argentina, is another candidate and he may be closer.
Over the years, I developed a theory of the conditions under which democracies process whatever conflicts that arise in society in liberty and peace. Indeed, my name is associated with one sentence I wrote some 35 years ago, namely that "democracy is when parties lose elections." The conditions, I thought, required for elections to peacefully process conflicts are that elected governments do not make the electoral defeat too costly to temporary losers, so that they are "moderate," and that they do not foreclose the possibility of being removed in elections, so that losing is temporary. Elections fail to maintain peace when they generate revolutionary transformations and, as the absence of precedents indicates, they never do. Unless the government use physical force, that is.
There is also statistical research which shows that democracies survive in countries with high per capita income and countries accustomed to peaceful alternation in office through elections. When I apply this statistical model to the US, with its income and its past 23 partisan alternations in the office of the president, I find that the probability that democracy would die in the US is 1 in 1.8 million country-years, zero.
Hence, neither my analytical nor statistical results equip me to understand the events that unravel hour-by-hour. I just cannot think of either some theoretical framework or of historical precedents that could serve to form expectations about what is about to happen. Is democracy dying in the United States?
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
The core of the American self-perception about its political system is that it is a country obeying "the rule of law." Conceptually, it is a shaky construction. As Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca observed, "The law cannot rule. Ruling is an activity, and laws cannot act." "Rule of law" can only mean that everyone, government included, obeys it.
The relation between democracy and the rule of law is one between two populated institutions: governments and courts. It is a relation contingent on the expected electoral consequences. Governments may obey judges because they fear that otherwise they would lose elections, so that the law rules. But governments may believe that they would win elections when they disobey judges, when a majority does not want governments to listen to what judges tell them they can or cannot do. The rule of law is then violated but as long as government's actions are motivated by the fear of losing elections, the system is still democratic, "illiberal" but still democratic.
Now, all laws leave some margin for interpretation but in the United States there is no law that would regulate in a stable and predictable manner the scope of presidential powers. The Constitution is almost silent about them, restricting the president's role to taking "Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Yet over the two and half century, presidents used several instruments of ruling: executive orders, proclamations, memoranda, national security directives, and presidential signing statements. Their constitutional status is not defined, so that the only barriers to their use are court rulings or actions of Congress. Presidents are free to try whatever they think they could get away with and what they do get away with depends on political circumstances. This system is neither stable nor predictable. Its consequences can perhaps be analyzed using game-theoretic tools but cannot be deduced from any written norms. This is not a "rule of law" by any stretch of imagination.
As of today, the harbinger of things to come is the issue of the freeze of the NIH funding for the already awarded research grants. Given so many transgressions of laws by the government, it may not be the most important one. But this is the issue where the Trump's administration respect for the judicial rulings will be perhaps first revealed. The government not only announced limiting all indirect costs to 15%, an action which is patently illegal, but also froze the disbursement of all the already allocated research funds. This freeze was itself frozen by a temporary restraining order, the government withdrew its announcement, but it did not stop the freeze. The judge who issued the original restraining order found that the government is in violation of this order, the government appealed, and lost. Some universities are banking that the government would comply but some are already taking precautionary that assume it would not. Here is where "the rule of law" is as of this moment.
As vice-president Vance already observed, the courts have no instruments to enforce their rulings. This is why Montesquieu thought the judicial power is the least effective one. Ezra Klein had a long podcast about this possibility and several journalists already jumped in. But all the legal scholars arrive at is that if the government does not obey the courts we will face a "constitutional crisis." Indeed, we will. But then what? Moving against "elite" universities is popular and probably electorally costless, if not advantageous. So will they brazenly ignore the courts?
Changing the topic. The Democratic Party has been almost mute during the past few weeks. It acts as if nothing big were at stake. Moreover, except for Elisabeth Warren, their gut reaction was to come out in defense of the least popular government policy, namely, foreign aid. But they are in a difficult predicament. Republicans just won an election, they are implementing their electoral program, and thus far the public opinion has not turned against them. Resisting every new policy may appear anti-democratic: after all, the government is just doing what newly elected governments have the prerogative to do. When people in Turkey came out to the streets when the newly elected Erdogan government authorized the use of Islamic scarves in public institutions, the government easily suppressed the protests and was supported by the public opinion. Hence, Democrats need to tread carefully. They need to focus exclusively on the issues on which the public is most likely to be swayed. The role of Musk is a good one at this moment, which is perhaps why Trump sought to institutionalize it by an Executive Order yesterday. But to have a strategy, any organization must be able to discipline its members and the Democratic Party does not have this capacity.
Some street protests are popping up but, given the Nixon experience, I do not know how to think about their effects. My fear is that unless they are truly massive, they will only serve as a pretext of selective repression, confirming Trump's language of "enemies from within." Moreover, they may lead to the rise of decentralized violence that would be condoned by the FBI and the DOJ. Note that as of now, these organizations are just being purged and reorganized. But I cannot help but expect that the worst is still to come, namely, that they will energetically engage in repression of political opponents.
The best bet against Trump is that the fanatics will show themselves to be incompetent and will lose popular support as the economy and government services crash. Inflationary pressure is increasing, with new evidence as of today. The tariffs, whatever their scope will end up to be, will increase inflation. Reduction, and in some areas elimination, of public services will hurt some people who voted for Trump. I am yet to find an economist who thinks inflation will be curtailed and some think that the combination of Trump's policies plus deregulation of financial markers will lead to a major crisis. Interestingly, Bloomberg is in the forefront of government critics. So there are reasons to think that people would turn against Trump on purely economic grounds already two years from now.
Whether this is a good bet still depends, however, whether the people in power are willing to be defeated in a fair election. I do not think they are but the question is what can they do. Given the class composition of the electorates of the two parties, measures aimed at restricting voting rights do not seem to have a clear partisan bias. I may lack imagination but I cannot envisage legal measures taken before the mid-term election that would guarantee Republican victory. This is not necessarily an optimistic thought because it implies that the only way to avoid electoral defeat is to engage in violence.
Thursday, February 13, 2025
I cannot figure out what his happening with NIH disbursements, which I think is the litmus test of the government's strategy vis-a-vis the courts. According to a website, Popular Information, some high officials within the NIH recognized yesterday that the institution must obey the court rulings and announced that it would continue to disburse grants "according to the previously approved negotiated indirect cost rates." I see no echoes of this internal memo in the news today and I do not know what is in fact happening. But the statement of a White House spokesman, cited in today's NYT, is ominous: "Each executive order will hold up in court because every action of the Trump-Vance administration is completely lawful. Any legal challenge against it is nothing more than an attempt to undermine the will of the American people." It seems to indicate that Trump decided that he can get away with ignoring the courts. If this is true, the last institution that could peacefully regulate conflicts is muted.
Some thoughts about the anti-immigrant offensive. Before Trump took office, I thought as many others did, that his announcements were just a campaign strategy. Given the dependence of several sectors of the US economy on immigrant labor and given the costs and the logistics of massive deportations, I expected Trump to perform some highly visible stunts and stop at that. I now think that I may have been too optimistic. The administration is in fact changing legal provisions and building the infrastructure for a long-term, systematic campaign. So far, the numbers are not large but everything indicates that they are about to grow.
I am trying to stay away from emotional reactions but I cannot avoid this one. I know a family which immigrated from a Latin American country two decades ago and now has kids born in the US. [ I described all the nuances of their immigration status in the original draft but I was advised to remove the potentially identifying details.] They all live in terror. Every day as the father leaves for work, his children give him a big hug, fearing he would not return home. Kids in New York City schools are taught what to do if they return home and do not find their parents there. I am an immigrant, now for several decades a US citizen, but I went through some of the same, having been refused at two moments the right to remain in the country and, after I left, to return. I know in my gut what it feels like, even if my misadventures pale in comparison to the terror experienced by millions of people at this moment. It is just impossible to lead a comfortable everyday life in the world of ICE.
The big item on the agenda for the coming weeks is the budget. I have been reading what there is and talking to economist friends but nothing is clear as of now. The deficit for 2024 was around 6%. The task facing Republicans is to reduce taxes (the aim is by 10T over the next 10 years) without increasing the deficit. So for the next year they must find about 1 Trillion, about 3.3% of GDP, by reducing government spending or in additional revenue. Projected increases of the military and border control expenditures add another 0.3T or 1% of GDP. Given 6.9T in 2024 government expenditures. they must somehow save 19%, about a fifth. Tariffs, even if implemented, will bring next to nothing. Reducing government employment, the cost of which is about 6% of government budget, even by a half, would save 3% of expenditures. If the tariffs and government employment cuts generate 5% of current expenditures, 15% still remains to be cut.
This will not be an easy task. They may have trouble even in the House. The remnants of the Tea Party will resist any increase of the deficit and perhaps the debt ceiling. Expenditure cuts will hurt districts controlled by Republicans, so electoral considerations will come into play. And their margin is narrow, so they cannot tolerate defections.
Tax cuts favor the rich, program cuts hurt the poor. If they cut the federal work force by a half, that will add up to about 1.5 million people. Moreover, while in the past people who left government service after elections found jobs in think tanks, universities, and NGOs, their budgets will also suffer. So the ranks of unemployed educated people will swell. All of this augurs badly for the Republican electoral support, so the fundamental issue is what will happen in the election two years from now.
Friday, February 14, 2025
No update on NIH disbursements and the stance of the government vis--a-vis the courts in general.
Trump announced a new tariff policy, "reciprocal." It was sharply attacked by an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, "Reciprocal Tariffs Make No Sense." The subtitle explains why: "How is it in American national interest to let other countries decide what duties we pay." Bloomberg, FT, and WSJ all seem to be skeptical about Trump's economic policies but the stock market remains flat. I find it puzzling.
Returning to the budget. According to Politico today, "Johnson's most immediate problem comes from swing-district Republicans who believe that the steep spending cuts across Medicaid, food assistance and other safety-net programs for low-income Americans could cost them their seats. Moreover, the plan to raise the debt ceiling by 4T is deeply controversial among Republicans, some of whom never always voted against it.
Now let me plunge into something perhaps ill-conceived. I do not know anyone, anyone, who I know to be a Trump supporter. This obviously says something about me, perhaps about the country, and probably about both. The effect is that I never had a chance to engage in a conversation with a reasonable Trump supporter. So I can only imagine what he or she would say. Let me try to guess:
(1) The government is inefficient. This argument is twofold. The services it renders could be delivered at a lower cost. Some of the services are unnecessary and subject to abuse.
(2) The DEI policies are harmful. They promote to positions people who are unqualified to perform their jobs and they are costly.
(3) Some people are naturally more intelligent than others and they should be the ones who decide.
(4) Reduction of government spending will lead to higher economic growth.
Of these arguments, only the first two could lead to a conversation. Point (1) stands: Anything can always be done at a lower cost, and government services are not an exception. I am sure that privately delivered health care could be delivered at a lower cost: it is sufficient to look at international statistics. Internet connection costs about 50% more in New York City than in Paris and the speed in higher in Paris. I thus imagine that US private firms are highly inefficient and the reason is that many markets are oligopolistic, if not monopolistic at the local level. Now, government is a monopoly with regard to most services, so there are reasons to think that it could be made more efficient. In fact, government efficiency has been a concern for several administrations, Republican and Democratic. Moreover, several institutional decides were built into federal bureaucracy to monitor efficiency: government inspects, who Trump just fired, were among them. But my argument would be that to stream the government one should use clippers, not chainsaw ("motosierra," the favorite instrument of Javier Milei). Cutting without knowing what one is cutting does not seem to be an efficient operation.
As for what should be cut, ideological differences are too big to lead to a reasoned discussion. I believe that the "welfare functions" of the government are essential, Trumpyists believe that everyone should be left to their resources. This chasm cannot be breached: this is kind of conflicts that is processed by elections, in which I was on the losing side.
My views about DEI are much more mixed, so a conversation is perhaps possible. A large part of the US society, particularly the more educated and the very young, has embraced a project of expiating for all the sins and horrors committed by their forefathers. The horrors were there, as is systematic discrimination in everyday life. Recognizing them can be salutary for every society even when it is extremely polarizing, as it is in the US. This project is selective: violence against workers is not a part of this list of deadly sins, even though for every race riot, there was deadly repression of unions: between 100 and 300 Black people were killed in the race riot in Tulsa in 1921 but the same year between 50 and 100 striking miners were killed in Ludlow County, WV. But what always undermined my confidence in this project is that it is expiatory rather than remedial. And the expiatory measures are mainly symbolic: censorship of the language in which we refer to one another, of art generated by men who led unsavory lives, removal of offending monuments. This is not a project to restructure the society so that everyone, independently of their skin color, gender, or class could lead a decent life, with secure incomes and social services.
I think I understand the appeal of Trumpism to white males. The vision of society in which people of European origins are all oppressors just makes little sense. Tell this to a fifty year old white man who cannot find a job after the only factory closed in his town. Tell this to millions of white males who survive day to day at the minimal wage. Tell them that "they" are responsible for the past racial injustice. Who are the "they"? Their grandfathers who immigrated from some forsaken European village to pave the streets on which we now walk? Their grandfathers who were being killed for union organizing? Their offspring, who desperately try to escape the fate of their fathers? Are "they" responsible?
I was thus never taken by the vision of society that generated the DEI policies. But Trump's attack on them, the vituperative language, the rancor, reminds me of my life under communism. When I was living in Poland, the communist government censored the words "elite" (because it was used by Milovan Djilas to criticize communist parties) or "bureaucracy" (because it was used by Leon Trotsky about the Bolsheviks). Now US government agencies generated long lists of words that disqualify research grants. My favorite is "unbiased," on the list issued by the NSF, as in BLUE, "Best Linear Unbiased Estimator." Perhaps 100% of statistical papers are thus disqualified.
It is clear that Trump cadres feel that they must move immediately and indiscriminately. They are not open do any discussion. And they are willing to use the power they have without any scruples.Where this will lead remains to be seen. Thus far, the instrument of coercion has been money. Will they use political repression?
Saturday, February 15, 2025
Time bomb? For as long as I remember, going back to an essay by Edward Shils in the 1960s, high unemployment among young educated people was seen as a mine that could blow up any regime. The Trump administration just fired, indiscriminately across all agencies, federal employees who were hired within the last two years. Their number is estimated at 200,000. The administration also fired more selectively employees of the NIH and CDC. In addition, 75000 federal employees accepted to retire. Finally, while I find it difficult to find exact information, there are stories that FBI will fire all those who were in any way involved in January 6 investigation, about 6,000 people.
I have no idea what the reduction of the federal labor force will do to the operation of the government and to the delivery of its services. I am thinking only about the political consequences. The projections about the ultimate scope of the firings vary, all the way from 10 to 50 percent. Hence, somewhere between 300,000 and 1,450,000 educated, mostly young, people will lose jobs. They include not only FBI and Homeland Security agents but also veterans, some of whom were employed by the Veteran Administration and the US Forest Service. In the past, a few thousand people who left the government when a new president was elected found jobs in the think tanks, universities, or the NGOs. Now their numbers are of a different order and all the institutions in which they found exile in the past are under financial pressure. Obviously one question is what will happen to them. But the politically explosive question, I think, is "What will they do?"
Sunday, February 16, 2025
Following the news as they pop up with a blistering rhythm takes a psychological toll. I was going to take a pause today, read a novel and watch soccer, escape from the world. But it is not possible.
When I read a couple of years ago an article on the "ceasarist" ideology propagated by some people I did not know of, I dismissed it as a fringe. But today was shaken by Trump's echoing what was supposed to have been proclaimed by Napoleon: "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
My immediate reaction is to think the nineteenth century Latin American dictatorships: "Whether sincere or deliberately deceptive, the documents of the period always employed expressions suggesting a crisis: liberator, restorer, regenerator, vindicator, deliverer, savior of the country, and so on. Somebody was constantly having to 'save' these countries...". ( from the historian Fred J. Rippy). But this is a long story, going back to Ancient Rome, where dictators were "saviours" whose prerogatives, however, were minutely regulated and restricted to restoring the Roman salus publica. The crucial between Rome and Latin America was that, although dictators almost always insisted that they are performing a task authorized by a constitution, their mission to save the country was unilaterally undertaken by force. Nevertheless, dictatorships were seen in Latin America as something exceptional and something to self-dissolve when the situation is restored to normal. They were "commissarial" in the language of Carl Schmitt.
"Ceasarism" is a concept that emerged in reaction to the regimes of the two Napoleons in France. The phenomenon of grabbing power by a coup and then elaborately institutionalizing the new regime was unprecedented and the contemporaries were at a loss where it belonged in the extant political categories. The first labels attached to these regimes bear witness that it was seen as new: "Bonapartism," "Napoleonism," "Imperialism" (from the "Emperor"). But then an analogy was found in Ceasar's attempt to establish a permanent new regime, so they became instances of "Ceasarism." In Schmitt's distinction, such dictatorships were "sovereign."
What survives from these conceptual debates is the idea that there are times when the only way to save the country is to delegate unrestricted power to someone who enjoys popular support and who would use it, relying on force if need be, not to restore the status quo, but to found a new system that would be impervious to the threats that caused the crisis to the begin with. Too much is at stake -- the very survival of this or that: the country, the nation, the traditional way of life, religion -- to be squeamish about legal niceties.
If this is truly the ideology of the people around Trump, there is nothing they will stop short of, particularly if conflicts spill to the streets.
On a lighter note, I cannot stop myself from quoting in full this Press Release:
Washington, DC -- Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (NY-24) today introduced the Trump's Birthday and Flag Day Holiday Establishment Act to officially designate June 14 as a federal holiday to commemorate President Donald J. Trump's Birthday and Flag Day.
Born on June 14, 1946, President Donald J. Trump's birthday coincided with Flag Day, which is observed annually and recognizes the anniversary of the adoption of the Stars and Stripes as the official US flag in 1777. This legislation would permanently codify a new federal holiday called "Trump's Birthday and Flag Day" on June 14 to honor this historic day.
"No modern president has been more pivotal for our country than Donald J. Trump. As both our 45th and 47th President, he is the most consequential President in modern American history, leading our country at a time of great international and domestic turmoil. From brokering the historic Abraham Accords to championing the largest tax relief package in American history, his impact on the nation is undeniable. Just as George Washington's Birthday is codified as a federal holiday, this bill will add Trump's Birthday to this list, recognizing him as the founder of America's Golden Age. Additionally, as our nation prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, we should create a new federal holiday honoring the American Flag and all that it represents. By designating Trump's Birthday and Flag Day as a federal holiday, we can ensure President Trump's contributions to American greatness and the importance of the American Flag are forever enshrined into law."
Monday, February 17, 2025
I have not been able to do any academic work last week but today I had a zoom meeting with collaborators on a game-theoretic model of democracy. At many moments in the past I was able to escape from unpleasant events into mathematics and it worked today again, but only for a couple of hours. But there is little new.
One comment that attracted my attention is by Pete Buttigieg, someone I very much respect. He said "If you wanted to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, you would empower the inspectors general," rather than fire them. This is obviously true but I was struck that this is not the scale of the Trump's or Musk's offensive. They are out to destroy the government, not tweak it by institutional reforms. Is this the scale at which the Democrats see the issues?
Several street demonstrations are currently taking place all over the country. I wonder whether Trump will react to them and, if yes, how?
Wednesday, February 19
The purge continues: Federal Housing Administration, several institutions under Health and Human Services, NSF, IRS, Federal Aviation Administration. I still cannot find out whether the NIH is disbursing funds for the already awarded grants, in compliance with a court order. There is only gossip.
I am puzzled why Trump and his acolytes, yesterday Senator Ted Cruz, refer to their target as "Neo-Marxist Class Warfare Propaganda." They obviously have no idea what "Marxist" or "Neo-Marxist" might conceivably mean. "Class warfare" would be Marxist. But "Neo-Marxist" is not about class but about race and gender. The ideological enemy which Trump, Putin, and the Polish PiS party share is "genderism."
Other than for reducing the role of the State, it is difficult to identify the ideological blueprint of Trump's revolution. Perhaps the most explicit statement of it is the first Executive Order, issued on January 20:
Section 1. Purpose and Policy. The previous administration has embedded deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices within every agency and office of the Federal Government. The injection of "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) into our institutions has corrupted them by replacing hard work, merit, and equality with a divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy. Orders to open the borders have endangered the American people and dissolved Federal, State, and local resources that should be used to benefit the American people. Climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.
To commence the policies that will make our Nation united, fair, safe, and prosperous again, it is the policy of the United States to restore common sense to the Federal Government and unleash the potential of the American citizen.
To be "hegemonic," in Gramsci's sense, an ideology must claim that the interests of those who rule coincide with the interest of everyone. "Trickle down" is the mechanism which makes the interests of the rich compatible with those of everyone else in the neo-liberal ideology. But Trump ideologists are strangely silent even about trickling down. They identify their adversaries but seem unable to offer a forward looking blueprint of a prosperous society free of conflict. "Unleashing the potential of the American citizen" is a paltry vision of the collective future. "Again" is the key to MAGA: all it offers is a return to some mythical past. Identifying enemies is often a successful ideological operation but it is not enough to build a lasting popular support.
Even more puzzling is a question which pops incessantly in private discussion ever since 2016. What does Trump want? I am yet to hear or read a convincing answer. Perhaps this is a source of his strength. Ezra Klein observed in one of his podcasts that Trump lacks inhibitory mechanisms that qualify others as politicians. Some people complain that he lies but this seems to be epistemologically inaccurate: "lying" assumes that someone knows the truth but communicates falsehood. Trump just bursts out with whatever comes to his mind at a moment. He demonstrates his political strength by not censoring himself: "I can say that Zelinsky has only 4 percent support among the Ukrainians (while he enjoys the support of 57 percent) and who is going to contradict me?" His strength is perhaps due to being unpredictable, to uttering in public things that no politician concerned with electoral consequences would say. So a lot of people see him as telling "the truth," while other politicians professionally hide or lie. Perhaps he is purely reactive, spewing at random but listening to the noise of the crowds, and repeating the messages that evoke louder applause?
But it still remains undecipherable what he wants, what he is trying to accomplish. Is his objective to get personally rich? Is it to annihilate those he perceives as enemies? Is he just listening to the applause? Perhaps we should take him by his words, in which he declared himself "The King" (in yesterday's tweet about a traffic zone in New York City). In this interpretation, Trump's objective would be to establish a complete personal control over the government, at all levels. The willingness to obey is the only criterion required of the government personnel. Whatever he happens to want at any moment, is implemented by government agencies, without hindrance by the Congress or the courts. His power is absolute.
Obviously, this is just a guess. As someone with game-theoretic instincts, I desperately need to understand what Trump wants and this is the only conjecture that seems plausible to me.
I try not to seek analogies in Hitler but find them hard to avoid. (I rely here on historians but this is not an academic paper, so I just cite their names but do not provide exact references.) According to Hans Frank, head of the Nazi Lawyers Association, "Constitutional Law in the Third Reich is the legal formulation of the historic will of the Führer." Richard Evans comments that "Hitler's word, ..., was thus law, and could override all existing laws." When a German court found Pastor Niemöller not guilty, Hitler had him rearrested by the Gestapo, announcing that "this is the last time a German court is going to declare someone innocent whom I have declared guilty." According to Wikipedia, "As early as 1935, a Prussian administrative court had ruled that the Gestapo's actions were not subject to judicial review. The SS officer Werner Best, one-time head of legal affairs in the Gestapo, summed up this policy by saying, 'As long as the police carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally'." Still according to Evans, Hitler "insisted repeatedly that if state institutions proved ineffective in implementing the Party's policies, then 'the movement' would have to implement them instead'," declaring that "The battle against the inner enemy will never be frustrated by formal bureaucracy or its incompetence." So this is what absolute power looks like.
Yet even if a dictator disciplines the State, the government remains a complex organization,.while multiple groups always compete for resources and for political influence. The will of the Leader is supreme but the Leader cannot list every detail. His subordinates have to often guess what the Leader wants and their guesses may differ, so at some times the Leader has to intervene. Exercising absolute power still consists of arbitrating conflicts. According to Martin Broszat, "Hitler practiced no direct and systematic leadership but from time to time jolted the government of the Party into action, supported one or the other initiative of Party or department heads and thwarted others, ignored them or left them carry on without a decision." According to Ian Kershaw, "Hitler was content, indeed wanted, to keep out of wrangles among his subordinates, had little interest in participating in the legislative process -- especially in areas of peripheral concern -- except where his own authority was directly invoked, and actively furthered rather than tried to hinder the government chaos on occasion ...." At the same time, he was extremely intolerant of any signs of disloyalty and intervened freely, capriciously, and unpredictably whenever he sensed a danger to his popularity or his image. The same was true of Mussolini, who would complain "If you could imagine the effort it cost me to search for a possible balance in which you could avoid collisions between antagonistic powers touching side by side, jealous, distrustful of each other: Government, Party , Monarchy, Vatican, Army, Militia, prefects, federal ministers, Confederations and very big monopoly interests, etc."
Trump's claim to legitimacy of all of his actions is that he won the election and continues to enjoy popular support. So was Mussolini's, who claimed in retrospect that "strictly speaking, I was not even a dictator, because my power to command coincided perfectly with the will to obey of the Italian people" (a note to a journalist, Ivanoe Fossani, in March 1945). The limits to power can be institutional or only electoral. In spite of his claim, Mussolini was not willing to face a competitive election. Trump seems willing to ignore institutional barriers. Is he willing to obey the verdict of the polls?
Thursday, February 20
To take stock of where I think we are, I need to organize my hopes and fears.
Hopes first. I was never a believer in the politique du pire, the idea that if things get sufficiently bad, something good will happen. But here goes another of my principles: I now hope that the economy tanks. The inflationary pressure is unabating. Tariffs -- who knows if, when, and on what? -- would add to it. So would tax cuts. The stock market remains an enigma but I am struck that Bloomberg, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal oppose Trump's economic plans.
Bad economic performance combines with the erosion of public services must reduce popular support for Trump. And then there is a ticking bomb to which I referred earlier: some hundreds thousands of government employees who will have lost their jobs.
Internal dissensions. If the economy takes a downturn, dissensions will flourish. The role of Musk may be the first object of contention. The Trump-Musk alliance cannot be stable, so a conflict between them, with Vance on the side of Musk, is likely to erupt. I am not sure who would win.
Note that I have no hopes about the Congress or the courts, so my hopes concentrate on the mid-term election. Here come my fears.
The Democratic Party is extremely unpopular and it is divided about which strategy to adopt. But suppose that a majority is willing to vote for Democratic candidates, just to oppose what is going on. A small shift is sufficient to change the control of the House and only a slightly larger one of the Senate. So I return to the questions that haunt me: Are the people around Trump willing to hold a clean election? If not, what can they do to assure themselves of victory no matter what?
We have not seen political repression yet but it may be "yet." Patel has not been confirmed as of today and the Department of Justice is still ridden with dissensions by brave public prosecutors who resist its political instrumentalization. But once Patel assumes office and cleans the FBI of anyone who might be disloyal and once the DOJ is purged to serve Trump's political objectives, these institutions will be ready to launch repression of political opponents, individual and institutional. Repression, however, may not be electorally sufficient. Congressional elections are local, so one must conjure what may happen at the local level. I do not know enough about US electoral politics, so these are just uninformed fears: gerrymandering, selective disqualifications of categories of potential voters, violence at the polls exercised by local militias, outright fraud in vote counting condoned by local authorities. Their combinations may just work. Note that the pardon of those convicted of violent acts of January 6 is a signal that the administration will not persecute political violence in its favor.
This is where I am today. Not reacting to the news, which are replete with disasters, but thinking about the future. I grew up under a dictatorship but could never imagine I would die under one. Today I entertain this possibility.
Friday, February 21
Writing these notes is becoming too depressing. Moreover, it is freezing and gray outside. But there are some harbingers of hope.
Opinion polls. According to the latest Gallup poll, Trump's overall approval margin (approve-disapprove) is at -6 points, on immigration -6, on foreign affairs -9, and on the economy -11. CNN reports that the difference between "gone too far" and either "about right" or "not far enough" is 5 points about "Using the power of the presidency and executive branch," while the difference in favor of "not enough" is 77 points about "Trying to reduce the price of everyday goods." According to 538, as of yesterday 48.2 of respondents had an unfavorable and 46.5 percent favorable opinion of Donald Trump. Another poll: 84 percent of respondents, including 79 percent of Republicans, say that the Trump administration should follow federal courts rulings.
I was going to continue about positive signs but then this left me speechless: A letter dated February 17, 2025 threatening Representative Robert Garcia for something he said in a CNN interview, signed by Edward Martin Jr., US Attorney for the District of Columbia, gave Mr. Garcia a week to respond to the charge of threatening "Mr. Musk -- an appointed representative of President Donald Trump."
So I am obsessively wondering about the same: Which is the harbinger? Falling support or increasing repression? Or perhaps both?
I am beginning to understand what is happening with the NIH grants. According to Nature, yesterday, they are still frozen. A separate article explains how the government can evade court orders without defying them openly:
"To gain approval, research-grant applications are considered in two steps, by two separate panels at the NIH. The first is a study section, which is a group of independent scientists who convene to score applications. The second is a meeting of the agency's advisory council, which is a separate group of external and internal scientists that acts as a final check on an application before a funding decision is made.
To run either of these grant-review sessions, the agency must post its meeting plans at least 15 days in advance on the Federal Register, which is the official daily publication of the US government. Trump's team has barred NIH officials from making these posts, according to e-mail correspondence that Nature has obtained. The NIH has posted zero notices on the Federal Register since Trump took office; during the same period in 2024, there were more than 150 notices posted by the agency."
Saturday, February 22
Every time I promise myself to lead a normal life, I fail. Today I was going to read a novel and watch some soccer. But the pace of news is overwhelming. I cannot keep up
I am just copying some headlines. The bombshell is the replacement of the Joint Chief of Staff. In all, six Pentagon officials were fired, including Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy; Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force; and the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force. Patel was confirmed. The Dow took a plunge of 700 points. Spouses of the military lost their jobs. Democrats expect the inflation to rise but Republicans do not. Trump to shut down all 8,000 EV charging ports at federal government buildings. Trump Plans to Use Military Sites Across the Country to Detain Undocumented Immigrants.
A conversation I had yesterday about the potential scenarios:
(1) Trump does whatever he wants. His popular support does not decline. Republicans win both Houses in 2026.
(2) Trump does whatever he wants. The economy tanks. Public opinion turns against the Republicans. Republicans win both Houses in 2026.
(3) Trump does whatever he wants. The economy tanks. Public opinion turns against the Republicans. Dissensions within the government flare up; Trump enters into an open conflict with Musk. Republicans lose at least one House in 2026.
The odds?
With a warning from Olen Steinhauer (The Cairo Affair): "he was primed to find connections where others wouldn't be looking, and his enthusiasm sometimes meant that he found connections where they didn't actually exist." Hitler yearned for lebensraum, wherever he could find it. Mussolini wanted to conquer Ethiopia. Trump is after Greenland, Panama, Gaza, and Ukrainian natural resources. Coincidence or pattern?
I am wondering what will happen in the stock market on Monday. If it continues falling, it will be a signal Trump understands. Is the stock market the place where the opposition first becomes visible?
Sunday, February 23
I had a long discussion over zoom with two friends. They both believe that institutional barriers, systems of separation of power whatever they are, cannot prevent an executive who seeks to monopolize power from succeeding. I was reminded of something the late Guilllermo O'Donnell said forty years ago in a seminar we taught together: "One cannot stop a coup by an article in the constitution." But if this is true, why are "executive takeovers," autogolpes in Spanish, so rare? Why do chief executives restrain themselves in their quest for power? Why do they respect institutional norms?
This is a theme about which I thought many years and wrote several articles, ranging from game-theoretic models to exegeses of texts by prominent theorists of democracy. Indeed, during recent years it has become somewhat of an obsession for me. My gut intuition is to invoke "need for cooperation." This need is twofold: all rulers need compliance on the part of people whose actions implement government policies and the cooperation on the part of people whose actions determine the success or failure of government policies.
All rulers must delegate, so they must choose their agents. In this choice they confront a trade-off between loyalty and competence. Loyal agents are not necessarily the most competent ones. In China, where this choice has been the subject of an extensive literature, it was summarized as "Red versus expert." "Reds" blindly execute orders. Example: the Secretary of Agriculture just cancelled a conference on biodiversity because "diversity" is DEI related. But sometimes they need to make decisions, which they are incompetent to make. Relying on loyalty alone generates bad performance.
Even "predatory rulers," those who seek to maximize rents from holding office, may be better off with a smaller share of a larger pie than a larger share of a smaller one. Hence, they need to induce cooperation of all those who contribute to make the pie larger: bankers and firefighters, scientists and bricklayers. And to induce it, they must restrain their predatory instincts. They have to moderate themselves.
These are the barebones of why, I think, most rulers, democratic and autocratic, stop short of a quest for absolute power. As all theories, my explanation may or may not be true. But the question that it poses is "Why now?" Whatever one thinks of the US institutional system, it has survived 250 years. So has something broke down now? No more "need for cooperation"? Or have these people just gone crazy?
I have no answers to these questions but it may have something to do with the dominance of the tech bros. I am told that they believe that medical research is not necessary because drugs can be invented by using AI, on the basis of what we already know. This would certainly explain the dismantling on the NIH. Perhaps the technocrats believe that the cooperation of the bankers and firefighters, scientists and bricklayers is no longer necessary. They are self-sufficient.
Enough theorizing. I am promising myself to stick to the news.
Monday, February 24
The chaos is becoming overwhelming. Musk issued a dictat requiring all government employees to list in five bullet points what they did last week, with a deadline tonight under the threat of being fired. The DoD, HHS, State Department, Veterans' Administration, and the FBI instructed their employees not to respond. The DOJ joined somewhat later. Looks like the beginning of a power clash.
The victory speech of the prospective German prime minister, Friedrich Merz, stopped everyone's breath: "I am communicating closely with a lot of prime ministers and heads of EU states and for me it is an absolute priority to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible, so that we can achieve independence from the United States ...." Coming from a France it would have been a yawn, but from Germany it is an epochal shift. There go eighty years of the Atlantic alliance. On the same theme, the US voted against the UN resolution demanding Russia to withdraw from Ukraine. The vote for 93 for, 18 against, 65 abstain. On a lighter note: Cuba abstained, so now Trump can increase the sanctions because it is not sufficiently pro-Russian.
A lesson from Poland. Once everything becomes politicized, restoring democratic institutions becomes difficult. When Law and Justice (PiS) was in power in Poland, it stuffed all institutions, including the courts and the media, with its supporters. When it lost the election, everyone was partisan, so finding non-partisan competent people was difficult, and the new government again could only fill all institutions with its supporters. When loyalty becomes the only criterion, even competent people become partisan.
I am beginning to think that Trump forgot that he has to govern. He seems to be playing golf, delivering long speeches about himself, and spewing inane messages on his website. His mind races in disparate directions. It must be difficult for his acolytes to guess what he truly wants. So far, the governing is all done my Musk. But the time is arriving soon to adopt a budget, raise the debt ceiling, and avoid government shutdown. These issues require some coherent approach. Is he capable of it?
Stock market: S&P down 0.5%, Nasdaq down 1.2%, Dow up 0.08%. Looks jittery.
Tuesday, February 25
From Politico: "A group of prominent military contractors, including former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, has pitched the Trump White House on a proposal to carry out mass deportations through a network of "processing camps" on military bases, a private fleet of 100 planes, and a "small army" of private citizens empowered to make arrests." Armies of private citizens scare me the most.
Yet another interpretation of Trump is that he is ruling the country as if it were a private domain. The term "partrimonialism" is due to Max Weber and its application to Trump to a book by Hanson and Kopstein. Removing everyone in position to monitor corruption is certainly evidence in favor of this view.
Stock market: S&P down 0.47%, Nasdaq down 1.35%, Dow up 0.37%. I follow stock indices because I still have the intuitions that the first effective opposition may come from stock markets.
Wednesday, February 26
The House passed a budget resolution. The vote was 217-215, with one Republican voting against. The budget calls for 4.5T in tax cuts and 2T in expenditures cuts over 10 years. So now the big issue is the debt ceiling. It may be more difficult to pass and we may have a government shutdown. Coming in two weeks.
The person who is in charge of the DOGE, the Acting Administrator, is Amy Gleason, described as having a background in consulting and the medical field. This is all I could learn about her. About a third of DOGE personnel resigned in opposition to the cuts of federal personnel.
I am finding it difficult to understand the deal about Ukrainian rare earths, the details of which I could find thus far only in the Polish sources. I suppose that the Ukrainian idea is that if the US has an economic stake in Ukraine, it will defend its property against Russia. But all this is still too vague to figure out.
From Bloomberg: "America is in the midst of a record-breaking bird flu outbreak that's affected dozens of cattle herds along with poultry flocks nationwide. While human cases have been rare, the virus has caused deaths in the past, and experts are concerned it could become more transmissible and dangerous. Some recent developments do not bode well. But on Wednesday, it was revealed that the Trump administration has decided to reevaluate a $590 million contract for bird flu shots the Biden administration awarded to Moderna, known for its highly successful Covid-19 shot."
From Bloomberg: "Measles Is Killing Americans Again."
Thursday, February 27
Today I feel exceptionally scared.
An addition to yesterday's news: the FDA meeting scheduled to determine the 2025-26 influenza vaccine composition was cancelled.
Between the bird flu, measles, and influenza, the specter of a health disaster becomes tangible. Indeed, some biologists and epidemiologists I follow on social media are in a panic. The government is dismantling all institutions the role of which has been to prevent or control epidemics. Scary.
Last week I cited a plan to have a "'small army' of private citizens empowered to make arrests" (of immigrants). An article in today's Guardian reports that some Republicans are afraid to come out publicly against Trump because they fear violence against themselves or their children. Jackets bearing the ICE sign are a best-selling item on the Amazon.
I may be just paranoid, having read too much history and having lived through some dark moments, but what scares me most is the specter of decentralized violence. Threats of violence against Congressional representatives opposing Trump's budget proposals, people buying ICE jackets, organized para-military militias are at this moment only vague indications. But history bodes badly. Decentralized private violence was used by Fascists in Italy and Nazis in Germany to squash all opposition, before repression became institutionalized. The fasci di combattimento and the S.A. (Sturmabteilung, literally "Storm Division" or "Storm Troopers") played an important role in electoral victories of the Fascists and the Nazis. What will happen in the elections two and four years from now? Will violence decide their outcomes if public opinion turns against Trump?
Between the specter of an epidemic and of violence, this is not a good day.
Friday, February 28
I was going to stay away from theorizing, but cannot resist. Four years ago I published an article which began with "The puzzle entailed in erosion of democracy by backsliding --- a process in which the incumbent government takes every opportunity to reduce citizens' ability to remove it by democratic means --- is how a catastrophic situation can be gradually brought about by steps against which people who would be adversely affected do not react in time." The analogy is with a frog which is placed in water the temperature of which increases gradually, until the frog is boiled and can no longer jump out. There were actual experiments with it but the frogs did jump out before it was too late. Why wouldn't we?
The structure of this situation is one in which it is too early now but too late when we would think the time has come. It may be too early because resisting the newly elected government may appear anti-democratic. I recall something said by John McGurk, the chairman of the Labour Party, in 1919: "We are either constitutionalists or we are not constitutionalists. If we are constitutionalists, if we believe in the efficacy of the political weapon (and we do, or why do we have a Labour Party?) then it is both unwise and undemocratic because we fail to get a majority at the polls to turn around and demand that we should substitute industrial action." In essence, "If you participate in elections and lose, you do not go to the streets to protest the policies of the electoral winner." There are obvious counter-arguments: the election did not give the winner the mandate for the policies it adopts; the winner is violating norms, not only constitutional but also customary. Certainly, no election gives the winner the mandate to undermine democracy. But all this implies that the Democratic Party must tread carefully. Opposing some of the policies of the new government is normal in a democracy. But when to oppose it outside the institutional framework, on the streets and by other forms of civil disobedience, is a difficult strategic decision. It may too early now and at some time it may be too late.
Some Republicans also oppose some of Trump's policies. Their problem is that whoever sticks her or his head first may be targeted by punitive sanctions. Hence, everyone waits for someone else to move first and no one does. And by the time everyone would be willing to join, it is too late. This seems to be the calculus of the potential Republican opponents of Trump's budget proposals, but also of the universities trying to avoid becoming the targets of the administration, and of the media which settle frivolous suits against them which they would have won.
Saturday, March 1
I had to interrupt writing the Diary because I participated in a small meeting of political scientists. I learned some interesting facts: (1) College students are willing to tolerate restrictions on the freedom of speech if the speech harms Blacks, Jews, or Muslims. While protecting Blacks is most widespread, Jews and Muslims should enjoy equal protection according to students. (2) Before the election, Republican primary candidates at local levels, expected on the average to lose about 11 percent of the vote if they spoke against Trump. (3) Faced with a candidate of one's own party who violates some democratic norms, voters are more likely to abstain rather than switch parties. The effects, however, are quite small: partisanship matters much more than observing democratic procedures. (4) There is a quack going around the country spreading conspiracies about election fraud. His audiences consist of those already convinced but their mobilization makes the work of election officials next to impossible. So I feel I learned a lot. It was a fruitful meeting.
A propos the college student survey: DOJ is sending task forces to 10 universities to investigate antisemitism.
Sunday, March 2
The fiasco of the meeting between Zielinsky and Trump made it apparent to the Europeans that they must do something. A Polish journalist, Sŀawomir Sierakowski entitles his column "America is Gone. Europe Must Replace it." A Bulgarian journalist, Ivan Krastev, writes "Europe should hijack Trump's revolutionary plans for the world." But the conundrum is, in the words of the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, that "Today, the matter is complicated because while standing on Ukraine's side in the interest of our national security, at the same time we, Poles, are staunch supporters of the closest possible alliance between Poland, Europe and the entire West with the United States." Trump's anti-Europe and anti-NATO rhetoric appears to leave Europeans no choice but whether Europe can stand militarily on its own is doubtful. Le Monde reports that President Macron wanted to convince Trump that abandoning Ukraine would be a "huge strategic mistake" for the US and that "it is in his interest to work with the Europeans at this time." "If you let Ukraine be taken by Putin, Russia will be unstoppable for the Europeans [because it] will take back Ukraine and its army, which is one of the largest in Europe, with all our equipment, including American equipment." He failed. So what now? The decision, to be made perhaps within the week, will be historic. It may reshape the world for decades to come.
According to Fortune, "The Atlanta Fed's GDP tracker now indicates that the economy is headed for a 1.5% contraction in the first quarter, after showing 2.3% growth just days earlier. That also marks a sharp reversal from the fourth quarter, when GDP expanded by 2.3%. Several economic indicators have been raising alarms as consumers and businesses brace for Trump tariffs and federal job cuts." The late economist, J.K. Galbraith once remarked, "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." So they should be taken with a grain of salt. But this is the first rumbling about an economic downturn. Between predictions of persisting or even increasing inflation and now this forecasts about GDP downturn, the obvious question is why would they pursue policies that will make the economy tank. Are they not afraid of electoral effects?
In a similar vein, I just cannot understand why the government is dismantling the National Institute of Health. They want to cut government expenditures, by reducing federal employment and eliminating some programs. If they cut support for theoretical physics, one could just think that they have no faith in science and do not understand that basic science has potential downstream effects. But health? Are they not concerned about their vulnerability to cancer, about the health of their spouses, children, or parents? According to The Hill, NIH supported 354 out of 356 drugs approved from 2010 to 2019. Every dollar spent in publicly funded research yields $8.30 after 8 years. I calculated that if the financial geniuses who are cutting these expenditures returned 10 percent every year, and none of them do, the return in 8 years to a dollar invested today would have been $2.14. And yet, they are targeting the NIH. Perhaps I am wrong: they are not targeting anything but using the chain saw indiscriminately, with no view, not even an analysis, of the consequences. A joke from communist Poland seems perfect: A rabbit is running in a panic. Another rabbit asks why. The first one exclaims, "The Planning Commission is coming! The Planning Commission is coming! They cut every fifth leg." "But we have only four legs," the second rabbit observes. "Yes, but they cut first and count later."
The question whether the US will hold competitive elections erupted on Bluesky, with political scientists willing to place bets on either side.
Monday, March 3
According to the New York Times yesterday, IRS is being pressured to reveal the identity of about 700,000 tax payers who have a Tax Payer Identification Number but not a Social Security Number. These are immigrants who have been paying taxes, many with the hope that it would facilitate their legalization. Releasing their identity would contravene the current law.
Musk on X: "The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges."
English to be the official language of the United States. Perhaps inconsequential but the first time in 250 years.
Trump just announced that there is no room for negotiations left and the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico will go in effect as of tomorrow. Being Trump, he may still change his mind. But the Dow went down 650 points, -1.48%, S&P -1.76%, Nasdaq -2.64%. All the headlines attribute the plunge to the announcement of tariffs.
The translator of Mein Kampf into French, Olivier Mannoni, on similarities between Hitler's and Trump's rhetoric (in Le Monde): "the use of incoherence as rhetoric, of extreme simplification as reasoning, of accumulations of lies as demonstration, of a reduced, distorted, manipulated vocabulary as language."
Tuesday, March 4
Suppose that Trump reduces the federal government to "functions related to public safety, immigration enforcement, or law enforcement," in the language of Executive Order of February 11 on "workforce optimization." Everything else is gone: no weather service, no vaccines, no health research, no income support for the indigent, no nuclear safety, no consumer protection, perhaps no public retirement insurance. Even neoliberals think that the government must enforce contracts. Even Chicago economists think it should regulate natural monopolies. Even Harvard economists think it should undertake investments complementary to private investment. And almost all economists think it should correct for market failures: externalities, public goods, and infrastructural investments. I cannot imagine what the country would look like, so I have been searching for novels that conjure this dystopia, but could not find one thus far.
Trump ordered a pause to all military aid to Ukraine. Europe just committed itself to spend 800 billion Euros on military expenditures. But is it to spend it on buying arms from the United States? Europe has no capacity to produce 800 billion worth of arms.
All my intuitions lead me to expect massive political repression. Still, I am surprised that it could be so naked. Here is Trump a few minutes ago at @realDonaldTrump: "All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested." When David Cameron, then the UK Prime Minister, repressed protests, he took care of declaring first that protests are legitimate under democracy and only then condemned them as "violent." Trump did not bother to say even that. I remember arriving at the Warsaw airport a few weeks after transition to democracy in 1989 and seeing a sign at the customs that specified some rules and then announced "All violators will be punished and prosecuted." I took it as an indication that the Poles did not yet understand that punishment can result only from prosecution. It is hard to see one's nightmare scenarios coming to life.
The only way I can escape from the bombardment of terrifying news is to watch soccer. Fortunately, there are Champions League games today, so I went to a bar to watch Arsenal. For the first time ever, my friends talked politics during the game. There is no escape any more.
Stock markets took another tumble today.
Wednesday, March 5
Trump's two-hour rally in the Congress was exceptionally aggressive, both internationally and domestically. The lines picked by the media focus on the Panama canal -- "We're taking it back" -- and Greenland -- "I think we're going to get it, one way or the other we're going to get it." But the line that struck me most was domestic: "The media and our friends in the Democrat party kept saying we needed new legislation, we must have legislation to secure the border. But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president." I interpret it as saying "Who cares about the Congress?"
Trump's performance is not going to affect public opinion one way or another. But I wonder about the price of eggs. Trump had one line about it: "Joe Biden especially let the price of eggs get out of control. The egg price is out of control, and we're working hard to get it back down." But how? I have been trying to understand the economic vision of the government. Trump did spell it out to some extent. Here are some excerpts from his speech: (1) "A major focus of our fight to defeat inflation is rapidly reducing the cost of energy." (2) "To further combat inflation, we will not only be reducing the cost of energy, but will be ending the flagrant waste of taxpayer dollars." (3) "I want to do what has not been done in 24 years: balance the federal budget. We are going to balance it. With that goal in mind, we have developed in great detail what we are calling the gold card, which goes on sale very, very soon. For $5 million, we will allow the most successful job-creating people from all over the world to buy a path to U.S. citizenship." (4) "And the next phase of our plan to deliver the greatest economy in history is for this Congress to pass tax cuts for everybody." (5) "If you don't make your product in America, however, under the Trump administration, you will pay a tariff and in some cases, a rather large one."
I am yet to read or talk to anyone who thinks that reducing energy prices will lower the price of eggs, who thinks that cutting government waste and selling US residence permits for $5 million dollars will cover the additional deficit generated by the tax cut, who thinks that tariffs would not increase inflation. The most one can find are people who want to just wish it away: here is Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase: "If it's a little inflationary but it's good for national security, so be it. I mean, get over it." So the question is whether Trump believes what he said. The numbers just do not add up: 4.5 trillion in tax cuts, 2 trillion is savings and additional revenue, leave an enormous gap that will have to be deficitary. Even eliminating Medicaid, Pell Grants, food stamps, foreign aid, and some smaller programs altogether will not cover the gap. Did he ever use a calculator?
I have to digress about calculators, because using them seems above the skills of the DOGE cutters. According to the NYT today, "Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has deleted hundreds more claims from its mistake-plagued 'wall of receipts,' erasing $4 billion in additional savings that the group said it had made for U.S. taxpayers." Billions and millions have the same number of zero's for them. They do not know the computer code for missing data and interpret it as fraud. They claim to have eliminated programs that expired long time ago. They double- or even triple-count the same items.
The effect of increasing deficit, combined with the tariffs, must be increased inflation. About this much, I believe, all economists will agree. One can still, however, envisage several scenarios. In one, the economy will be growing with inflation persisting or accelerating. In the second, the economy will take a dip, demand will fall and inflation will subside. In the final one, the economy will take a dip and inflation will persist: stagflation. I pushed some economist friends to make predictions but all I got was "Who knows?"
To finish, we need to get back to politics. It may be that the people around Trump truly believe that their policies will generate growth and reduce inflation, so they do not need to be concerned about electoral constraints. But it may be that they just do not care about elections.
WEEK 4
Thursday, March 6
I am asked by some friends why I am keeping this diary. My original motivation was to prevent the omniscient retrospect. In retrospect we will not only know what had occurred but we will also understand why it occurred. In retrospect, the United States in 2025 or 2026 will become just a data point to be included in historical analyses. and we will be able to calculate how likely it was that things would have turned out the way they did. But if we would be so wise ex-post, why are we so uncertain ex-ante? If we had a good theory, we would not have to wait for the conclusion until the current events become the past. But we are uncertain what the future will bring. At this moment, we are not even certain what the retrospect will be. It may be that Republicans will lose an election and peacefully recognize its result. It may be that they will decide to rule without holding competitive elections, by force. It is unlikely, but possible, that they would keep winning competitive elections indefinitely, so the retrospect will never come. Ex-ante we cannot tell which of these possibilities would materialize.
We do know something. Historical patterns show that a collapse of democracy is extremely unlikely in a country with the income and the history of democracy of the United States. So if democracy does collapse, one can just conclude that it was a highly unlikely random fluke. Alternatively, one can think that our statistical analyses do not consider all the possible combinations of the factors that shape the outcomes and the current combination of them was extremely unlikely, perhaps unique. But one can also consider the possibility that all the historical patterns we discovered depend on something we have never considered. Some people, however, think that the historical patterns will hold and democracy will not collapse in the United States.
There are also theoretical analyses which lead to the conclusion that democracies survive only if results of an election do not make a big difference for the winners and the losers. Given the revolutionary scale of Trump's policies, this conclusion leads to the pessimistic prediction that democracy will collapse.
On a different topic but important for the prospects. I could not envisage any federal law that would tilt elections in favor of Republicans. But it seems that I was wrong. These is a bill pending in the House, the SAVE Act (H.R. 22) that would require all Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or one of a few other citizenship documents every time they register or re-register to vote. According to survey data, more than 21 million American citizens don't have these documents readily available. I did not think this bill would skew the electoral chances in a partisan direction because I was thinking in terms of income and education, not in terms of gender. The bill would disproportionately affect voters who changed their name, which means predominantly married women. Survey data on voting by gender and marital status are not very reliable -- the proportions vary from survey to survey -- but they agree that married women are somewhat less likely to vote Republican than men, married or not. Hence, while the effect of disenfranchising married women who changed their name and cannot provide the required documentation may not be large, it may still matter.
Something a friend said over lunch struck me as profound: Western Europe was the first wealthy part of the world in history that was not militaristic. In the past, wealthy countries -- from Ancient Rome, through the UK, to the US -- relied on military strength. But the European Union was formed to avoid all future wars. This was perhaps possible because, through NATO, the European countries could rely on the military capacity of the United States for their protection. But no one imagined the possibility of yet another war on the European continent, so the culture that developed was oriented toward welfare not warfare. If this is true, then Europe is experiencing a "watershed," "defining moment," "breakthrough," "turning point," as various headlines have it. President Macron's speech last night and the Russian response to it, explicitly recognized the possibility of war, for the first time since Krushchev. A collapse of democracy in the United States is difficult to imagine but the prospect of German troops marching through Poland to fight against Russia is beyond imaginable.
On a humorous note. Asked on C-SPAN why the stock market tumbled this week, Trump responded "I think it's globalists that see how rich our country's gonna be and they don't like it."
Friday, March 7
Federal employees are fired and rehired. Federal building are put for sale and withdrawn from the market. Numbers about Musk's cuts are announced and corrected. Tariffs are solemnly proclaimed and postponed the next day.
First rumblings about dissensions. According to Politico yesterday, Trump told his Cabinet that they, not Musk, are in charge of their departments. Musk is empowered to make recommendations but not make decisions on staffing and policy.
Malleability of public opinion. I was shocked already in 2016 how Republicans turned on a dime from free traders to protectionists. Support for same-sex marriage fell from 55 to 24 percent among Republicans in the last four years. 48% of Republicans now agree that "women should return to their traditional role in society," up from 28% in 2022. The support for Ukraine among Republicans tumbled within a few recent days. Are the Republican supporters so manipulable? Don't they have any stable values?
A rally "Stand Up For Science" is planned for today in several US cities. Protests are a complicated issue. General protests against a government can be interpreted as anti-democratic and they are interpreted as such by governments. Governments are in office because they won an election and, as long as the current losers are not denied a chance to compete in the next one, they must accept that they lost. But in elections voters have only one instrument, the vote, to decide between entire packages of policies. It may well be that, faced with a dichotomous choice, a majority of voters supports a combination of policies offered by a party but a majority still opposes a particular policy. So it is only normal that people would want to signal their support or opposition to a particular policy, such as with regard to science.
The data on demonstrations we have show that countries persistently differ in their propensity to hit the streets. Demonstrations are rare in Norway and frequent in France, rare in Costa Rica and frequent in Argentina. In Paris demonstrations used to take place almost every Saturday, sometimes just with a handful of people but sometimes with millions marching from the Place de la Republique. Few demonstrations result in changes of government policy but some do. If one thinks in game-theoretic terms, one would expect that governments would change their policies in response to protests if they fear that otherwise they would suffer electoral costs. But governments can also successfully repress protests: Nixon, for example, was successful in appealing to "hard hats" with the argument that the protesting students are just spoiled brats and squashing their demonstrations by force with a majority support.
Support for science seems quite high in the United States. Among the 68 countries where people were asked whether they have confidence in scientists, the US came ninth (from an 2025 article in Nature; surveys conducted between November 2022 and August 2023). According to the most recent survey by Pew, 76% of Americans had "fair or great amount" of confidence in scientists. According to 2024 article published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science), "Confidence in science is high relative to nearly all other civic, cultural, and governmental institutions for which data are collected...." So this may be the issue where even a majority of Republicans disagree with Trump's policy: Pew reports that 66% of Republicans have confidence in scientists. Obviously, the electoral effect depends on how salient this issue is relatively to other issues. Prices of eggs may be more salient. But if any protests against Trump's policies can be successful, "standing up for science" is a good candidate.
About prices of eggs. As a French journalist Florence Aubenas astutely observed, having talked to people who participated in the Yellow Jackets protests, "they watch the prices at the pomp in the same way as rich people follow the stock market." I am always struck by the prominence of stock market indices in the US media. This is the only economic indicator that is omnipresent, the only indicator of the state of the economy which people get on a minute-to-minute basis. Even a three-minute news summary on the radio always contains an update on the stock market. Now, while over 60% of Americans own some stocks, top 1% own more than half of all stocks and bottom 50% own less than 1%. So prices at the pomp affect economic welfare of most Americans more than prices of stocks. Yet according to political science research even people in the bottom 20% of income recipients read the state of the economy by looking at incomes of the top 20% during the six month preceding an election.
Executive Order issued yesterday:
"By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Purpose. The dishonest and dangerous activity of the law firm Perkins Coie LLP ("Perkins Coie") has affected this country for decades. Notably, in 2016 while representing failed Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS, which then manufactured a false "dossier" designed to steal an election. This egregious activity is part of a pattern. Perkins Coie has worked with activist donors including George Soros to judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws, including those requiring voter identification."
Saturday, March 8
The attack on Columbia -- immediate freeze of government grants -- is patently illegal. I wondered yesterday whether "the Constitution and the laws of the United States of the United States of America" give the President the authority to move against a law firm that acted against him in an electoral campaign. Interestingly, in some executive orders Trump cites the laws which he thinks enable him to take the particular action but in some he does not. I suppose it is because there are no laws he can cite.
There seem to be over 100 legal cases against the government, with several injunctions. (A great website, JustSecurity.org, traces them.) To my best knowledge the government has ignored most if not all of the court rulings. Lawyers are sounding alarms. More than 500 law school deans and professors, law firm partners, and former judges have signed a letter calling on all government officials --- including President Trump --- to obey judicial decisions. I thought that the crunch would come with regard to the NIH, but the government seems to have gotten around the court decisions. But the crunch will come with regard to something and we will have a "constitutional crisis," which is as far as lawyers' imagination goes.
To ward it off, the government is trying to make it more difficult to sue it. According to Reuters (March 6), "President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order aimed at imposing potentially steep costs on parties that seek to block his policies in court. The order said U.S. Justice Department lawyers must now ask judges to require plaintiffs to pay the government's costs and damages if it is forced to hold off on implementing a policy that is ultimately found to be lawful. The money would need to be posted up front as a bond, the order said."
There is a sense of intimidation in the air. People I know are removing all personal information from the web. NPR fears losing all federal funds. ABC closed its site tracking presidential approval, 538. Several media outlets are settling frivolous suits. According to Wall Street Journal, "Fear of Trump Has Elite Law Firms in Retreat." Columbia University decided not to contest an obviously illegal action of the government in the courts. Given that the government disregards laws and shows no apparent concern over future elections, this is perhaps the safest behavior.
Today is the International Women Day. Trump wants women to celebrate it from the kitchen.
Sunday, March 9
I think the situation is too dangerous for us to be diverted by moral outrage. Outrage is cathartic but rarely productive. I just read an opinion piece in The Guardian comparing Trump to a mafia boss. It made me feel good but it would have been useful only if it helped us to predict Trump's actions, and it does not. Outrage is a popular reaction: "How terrible is this or that action of Trump!" Yet while moral outrage can motivate us, it should not guide us because without an impassioned analysis it leads to actions that are counterproductive.
All this just says that I do not know what anyone can do. The Democratic Party cannot act because it is not a party but a bunch of individuals. Street protests, like the one yesterday defending science, may have an effect if they are directed against specific policies. At this moment, I believe, the breaks on Trump are most likely to arise from the stock market and from internal dissensions. But there is little I see that we, "we," can do. I began this Diary with Haffner's sense of the futility of resistance. I share it.
Peter Hayes, a Northwestern University historian, while rejecting some parallels with fascism, still finds that Trump "has made repeated statements against the 'enemies within' who must be eliminated from the body politic, and he displays, like Hitler, an absolute certainty about his own genius, coupled with a ruthless determination to eliminate any obstacle to the achievement of his aims. And, lately, he has combined extreme nationalism with an appetite for expansion that he had not shown before." "An absolute certainty about his own genius, coupled with a ruthless determination to eliminate any obstacle to the achievement of his aims" may be the key to understanding Trump.
There is a growing movement to boycott American products in Europe. In Sweden, where the Model Y was the most purchased car in 2024, sales of Teslas fell by 44% in January, compared to 2024. In Norway, they fell by 38% and by 70% in February. In France, 68% of survey respondents are disposed to boycott US firms and products, with a majority across the entire political spectrum.
Listening to the NPR, I was reminded that this is not the first time the functions and the size of the federal government are being reduced. According to the Wikipedia, in March 1993, President Bill Clinton stated that he planned to "reinvent government", declaring that "Our goal is to make the entire federal government less expensive and more efficient, and to change the culture of our national bureaucracy away from complacency and entitlement toward initiative and empowerment." Headed by Al Gore, the National Partnership for Reinventing Government eliminated over 100 programs, cut 250,000 federal jobs, and consolidated over 800 agencies over four years. It was broadly viewed as a success. The Congress played an active role in the reforms, invalidating some of executive actions and passing some enabling legislation. The reform was based on the New Management ideology, according to which employees of bureaucracies, private and public, should not blindly follow rules but should be given discretion and be guided by incentives. The difference between then and now is thus not the intention or the scale but the manner in which the reform is implemented. The current reform is delegated to a private actor, without congressional authorization or oversight.
Monday, March 10
A Lysenko moment? Kennedy launches a study of the relation between vaccinations and autism, long refuted by science.
The kidnapping by ICE of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia Palestinian student, is a qualitatively new step. Firing government personnel, eliminating government programs, withdrawing money from selected universities, targeting law firms raise all kinds of legal issues but do not effect physical integrity. This is different. Khalil is a green card holder, hence a legal resident in the United States. He enjoys all the rights of citizenship except the right to vote, including habeas corpus, the foundation of the rule of law. As of this moment, he was taken into custody and disappeared. Moreover, Rubio announced that "We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported." While the State Department can revoke visas, stripping someone of a green card is done by DHS (not the State Department) and requires filing formal charges alleging a violation of immigration law and a removal hearing in front of an immigration judge.
Department of Education announced today that 60 universities are currently under investigation for "antisemitic discrimination and harassment." When only a few of them were targeted, I feared that other universities would use this opportunity to steal their faculty and students. But if 60 universities are attacked, they may have no choice but to present a united front.
All stock market indices are tumbling. Trump announced that it is only temporary. The question is how long will his supporters believe it.
Tuesday, March 11
Eggs are up, stock market down, federal employees lose jobs, several agencies rendering services to citizens are eliminated, universities are under fire, and all this before budget cuts. All I can think is that Trump believes that his base is safe. He may be right. Earlier surveys showed that many people thinks he is doing too much in some areas and not enough about the economy, but his general support remains steady. March 4 Reuter/Gallup poll show that 44% approve of Trump, the last 538 aggregation had his approval at 47.6%, and The Economist poll reported 46% in favor and 50% against. He is generating many enemies but these numbers do not indicate any erosion of his support among Republicans.
I just read a review of the new book by Richard J. Evans, Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich, about the support of ordinary Germans for Hitler. I found it frightening but have no nerve to go there.
Correction: Having read https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/131-five-questions-about-the-khalil, I see that I may have been too cavalier about the legal status of the Khalil case. As often, the law is more ambiguous than I imagined.
Wednesday, March 12
According to Karoline Leavitt, Trump's spokeswoman, "We are in a period of economic transition. We are in a period of transition from the mess that was created by Joe Biden and the previous administration. Joe Biden left this country in an economic disaster." How long will this be credible among Republicans?
Recent polls show that Trump's overall approval is at 45%, with 54% disapproving. Only his immigration policy is supported by a majority but approval for most other policies hovers just below 50%. I was struck by the headlines: CNN's title is "Americans are negative on Trump's handling of the economy," Fox title is "Americans have clear opinions on Trump's performance in his first 50 days. Americans appear divided on the job President Donald Trump is doing in the White House, according to the latest polls." So basically, public opinion does not move and neither do the spins on it. I wonder though what we will happen when the measles epidemic explodes, as I am told by people who know, it will.
Trump on Fox: "Schumer is a Palestinian as far as I'm concerned. He's become a Palestinian. He used to be Jewish. He's not Jewish anymore. He's a Palestinian." I was going to dismiss it as inane but then started to think it reveals something. Is "Palestinian" an epithet for an enemy? Is it a signal to Republicans that if Schumer votes against the Continuing Resolution, it is because he has become a "Palestinian"? So much of what Trump spurts out seems just inane but it still has effects Trump intended. He is highly effective in orienting his base and attaching epithets to enemies is one of his methods.
WEEK 5
Thursday, March 13
What strikes me is that the WSJ joined the ranks of enemies. Bloomberg is aggressively anti-Trump, now so is WSJ. These are the mouthpieces of the American business establishment. Trump's anger seems to be spinning out of control. I am still desperately trying to see some strategy in his actions and I just fail.
Just in on @realDonaldTrump: "No person who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can EVER be allowed to become President of the United States." If this means what it says, it is the most ominous signal of his intentions to date. Imagining nightmares is not good for one's sanity, so instead of thinking about it I am going to watch a soccer game.
Friday, March 14
The item that attracted my attention in the ultimatum issued by multiple government departments to Columbia University is this: "Begin the process of placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years. The University must provide a full plan with date certain deliverables, by March 20, 2025, deadline."
All this is too much to bear, so I am going to take a plunge. Here is the nightmare: Trump declares emergency, justifying it by the invasion of the country by immigrants allowed in by the Biden administration, with vaguely specified powers but authorizing actions against people responsible for the "violence and terror" inflicted on the country. The Congress either remains mute or approves: the German Reichstag in 1933 and the French parliament in 1940 consented to extraordinary powers demanded by Hitler and Petain. Some federal judges somewhere object to no avail. Department of Justice persecutes people who served under Biden, those who "betrayed" Trump during his first terms in office, members of Congress who are vociferous in opposition, and federal judges who rule against it. The midterm election is either postponed or Republicans prevail by a combination of violence and fraud. The Fat Lady sings.
This is obviously on a limb but the question I am asking myself is who or what can prevent it from happening. Everyone I talk to or read has given up on the Congress and the courts. The scenario in which they put hope is that the public opinion would turn sharply against Trump and either he would moderate or lose the midterm election. I read what he said about Harris, the threats against judges who rule against him, the threats against Congressional representatives of both parties, suits against newspapers, what he is doing to Columbia as revealing his intentions. As someone observed, Trump's proclamations may not predict what he will do but they do reveal what he wants. I think he wants absolute, unconstrained power and I do not see what can stop him.
Post-script. Trump speaking at the DOJ about an hour ago: "I believe that CNN and MSNDC [sic], who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democratic Party. And in my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal. What they do is illegal." In my nightmare scenario, this is a prelude.
Saturday, March 15
All the news pale in importance after I spelled out my nightmare scenario. I am still trying to persuade myself that it will not materialize. My bet is on internal implosion. The Trump-Musk alliance cannot be stable given the ego's involved and the negative view of Musk and his role in the public opinion. At some time, Musk will become a convenient scapegoat. Moreover, the relation between Trump and the oligarchs seems tenuous and potentially conflictive. As I noted before, both the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are aggressively hostile to Trump's economic policies, the stock market has a downward tendency, and tariffs are intensely divisive. Once the signs of economic failure become palpable, mutual blaming will erupt. Hence, the executive may become incapacitated by internal conflicts. This is my hope.
Having said this, the support of Democratic senators for the budget bill has been extremely controversial. I trust Warren and do not trust Schumer but I could not make up my mind about what Democrats should have done. Some sign of opposition from the Democrats is desperately needed. But the timing is problematic: it may be too early now and by September it may be too late. It looks like a classic backsliding dilemma of how to oppose backsliding. It may also well be that Democrats cannot pursue any strategy. The late Italian sociologist, Alessandro Pizzorno, once remarked that "organization is a capacity for strategy." They may just not have this capacity: Republicans, disciplined by Trump, are a party; Democrats are a coalition.
The Wizard of the Kremlin, a novel by Giuliano da Empoli, is a fictionalized biography of Vladislav Surkov. Surkov was the leader of the sloviki ("canaries") faction within the Kremlin, fighting for influence against the siloviki faction. "Canaries" wanted to persuade. Siloviki believed in using force, "sila." But the originality of this book comes from its portrayal of Putin as someone who sees his mission as restoring the "rightful historical place" of Russia in the world. His obsession is to Make Russia Great Again, to recuperate from the debacle of the early 1990s, for which he blames on the United States. If this portrayal is accurate, it is difficult to see Putin stopping short of restoring the borders of the Soviet Union. His ultimate goal is unswerving. I am thinking of this because it implies that any kind of a compromise over Ukraine that Trump may achieve will be only temporary.
Sunday, March 16
Trump issued an Executive Order which invokes the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify detaining and deporting without legal proceedings members of a Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. It makes me wonder why an EO, long and elaborate, is needed to order something so narrow in scope. My suspicion is that it may be a trial balloon for using the 1798 much more broadly in the future. If the courts, up to the Supreme Court, rule this EO to be legally valid, with all the complexities spelled out by Steve Vladeck, the floodgates will be open.
The executive just closed the Woodrow Wilson Center, established by an act of Congress in 1968. The Center played an important role in thinking about bringing down dictatorships. In November 2022, the Russian government labeled it an "undesirable organization" and prohibited it's activities in Russia. Now it is undesirable here.
A shock. I was listening to a radio story about technologies that recover unreadable old manuscripts. Suddenly it hit me hard. There are fascinating scientific discoveries, there is music, poetry, paintings, novels; truth and beauty. And I am mired in a world of barbarism. Is there a way to escape it?
Monday, March 17
In an article published in 2001, Georg Vanberg argued that there are two conditions for government to obey court rulings: "(1) There must exist sufficient public support for the court generally (or for its particular decision) to make an attempt at noncompliance unattractive. (2) Voters must be able to monitor legislative responses to judicial rulings effectively and reliably." I have been wondering for some time what will be the issue with regard to which the Executive will openly disobey courts. Originally I thought it would be the NIH funding but it seems that the current leadership of the NIH found ways to avoid an open confrontation without quite complying. Now it seems to be arrests and deportations of immigrants. One can expect, however, that if this issue goes to the Supreme Court, it will prevaricate, given that this is the issue where public opinion supports the government. I am sure such a moment will come but cannot think over what and with what consequences.
Here is a more complex issue, which I must introduce by admitting my limited competence about it. There is a proposal to limit the power of federal judges in issuing staying orders that extend beyond their districts. Under different political circumstances I would have favored it: I always thought that the power of any of the seven hundred plus federal judges to paralyze actions of both the legislature and the executive made governing next to impossible. But given the current political context, such a limitation would greatly extend the period of time during which the executive could act with impunity, until the Supreme Court pronounces itself one way or another.
Support for the Democratic Party is at its lowest since 2007.
I did not know: 85% of federal employees are located outside the DC region. Every Congressional district has at least 3,000 federal government employees.
Tuesday, March 18
The word "disappeared" has entered the American political vocabulary. It means what is says: people are just disappearing and their families desperately try to find out what happened to them and where they are. Perhaps no other word can be as chilling. The numbers of "desaparecidos" added up to thousands under the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. I had friends among them and, from the safety of being abroad, participated in campaigns to save them, in several cases unsuccessfully. Until today, their families search for their disappeared children and spouses.
On "too early now, too late then." Questioning the legitimacy of a government newly elected in clean elections appears to be, and is, anti-democratic. Still, when public opinion turns sharply against it, say the approval ratings fall below 40%, it becomes clear that the government no longer enjoys majority support. But by that time, the government would have taken measures which render its tenure in office independent of public support. It is too late. This seems to be a generic dilemma of the opposition against backsliding governments.
A striking survey answer on Ezra Klein show with David Shor: 78% of respondents think that "Delivering change that improves American lives" is more important than "Preserving our institutions."
Wednesday, March 19
I am off to France and England this afternoon, curious about reactions to our turmoil.
I may try to get away from daily news and take a pause.
finding this really interesting and thoughtful--also, I wonder if you are keeping it elsewhere? The internet is ephemeral and if the US is headed in a dire direction, I have to wonder about the stability of these platforms or their willingness to oblige or resist those in charge--we've already seen most platforms be happily supportive of the regime...
I appreciate your work to document your intelligent reflections as things occur. It may be grandiose for us to aspire to provide primary sources to future historians, but the process is nevertheless instructive. Thank you.