"Washington Week" Profiles Donald Trump's Dark Eminence, Stephen Miller, Friday, February 13

On Friday, February 13 – an appropriate date – PBS’s long-running public-affairs program Washington Week did a show-length profile of Stephen Miller, the dark eminence behind Donald Trump’s jihad against immigrants in general and immigrants of color in particular. Here is a full transcript (done by me, not the network) of a show that dances around the obvious reality that, like his boss, Miller is a thoroughgoing racist and white supremacist who is trying to remake America as a white-dominated Christian nationalist state. As I was preparing this post, news broke that Stephen Miller sent out a memo calling for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to involve itself directly in the 2026 midterm electios, on the pretext that they are hunting down hundreds of thousands of naturalized U.S. citizens whom they accuse of voting before they became citizens. As part of this effort, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said DHS has to make sure “we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country,” a thinly veiled threat to do whatever they can to ensure that Republicans keep control of both houses of Congress despite the growing unpopularity of Trump and the Republican agenda. -- M.G.C., 2/18/26

“Washington Week with The Atlantic” transcript, February 13, 2026

Few people in Washington have more power and influence than Stephen Miller. He’s the architect of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy, and he’s the president’s enforcer. Moderator Jeffrey Goldberg discusses the beliefs and the record of Stephen Miller with Leigh Ann Caldwell of Puck, Zolan Kanno-Youngs of The New York Times and McKay Coppins and Ashley Parker of The Atlantic.

TRANSCRIPT

Jeffrey Goldberg: Few people in Washington today have more power and influence than Stephen Miller. He’s the architect of the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration policy. And he’s the President’s enforcer, making sure that the MAGA elite and the Cabinet stay true to Trump’s vision. Tonight, a close look at the beliefs and the record of Stephen Miller, next.

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Jeffrey Goldberg: Good evening, and welcome to Washington Week. We’re going to do something a little bit different tonight. We’re going to try to understand some of the most important and disruptive Trump policies through the prism of one aide: Stephen Miller. He’s no ordinary aide, as you all know. He’s been with Trump since his improbable run as the 21st century’s most important political leader, and no one seems to understand the President and his impulses better than Miller.

He's also a revolutionary. His ideas come from far outside what we used to think of as the Republican mainstream. And he’s a vociferous, uncompromising advocate for policies that only a few years ago would have been deemed unworkable or extreme.

Joining me tonight are four reporters who have covered Miller for years and know him well. Leigh Ann Caldwell is the chief Washington correspondent at Puck. McKay Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent at The New York Times. And Ashley Parker is a staff writer, also at The Atlantic.

Thank you all for joining me. All of you have covered Miller for years. You’ve written a lot about Miller. Ashley, very recently; Zolan, very recently. But I want to just start at the beginning. McKay, why don’t I just go to you because you wrote a sort of definitive early profile of Stephen Miller in 2018. So where did he come from? Where did his politics develop? Give us a little sense of the forces that created this Stephen Miller we know of today, before he entered the general political consciousness.

McKay Coppins, staff writer, The Atlantic: Yeah, I think the thing that most struck me talking to him years ago when I was profiling him was how much of his political world view was forged in opposition to his upbringing. Right? He grew up in Santa Monica, in a family of very well-off progressive Jewish parents, and was surrounded by what he would describe as “a bubble of progressive affluence,” right?

He went to a high school where they would have, you know, multi-racial retreats and multi-cultural festivals. And his first exposure to conservative politics was actually reading, on a lark, Guns and Ammo magazine, which then led him to people like Rush Limbaugh, Larry Elder, David Horowitz, the kind of prominent conservative talk-radio hosts and polemicists of the time. And you can see from the very beginning, as a teenager in a very liberal high school, him kind of mimicking the political style of those people.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Wait, wait. You mentioned the high school. Just watch with me for one moment a clip of – this is Stephen Miller running for student government. Watch this:

Stephen Miller (high-school clip): Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash, when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?

Jeffrey Goldberg: So, first of all, the Che Guevara look. Really, he doesn’t do that anymore. He’s really into the silk suits now, or something. But you wrote – part of your profile was focused on the fact that he’s an expert troll. And so in your study of him, and your conversations with him back then, was he just trolling his liberal friends, or his liberal adversaries? Or was that something more serious?

McKay Coppins: This was actually the mystery of Stephen Miller to everybody who ever knew him in every stage of his life: in high school. Later at Duke, when he went to college. He was – everyone was trying to figure out whether this was performance art or whether he really believed it. And he would – that was a classic example of teenage Stephen Miller. But he would write columns for the Duke student newspaper picking culture-war fights on campus.

What I think – where I landed, because I asked him about this a number of times – is at first he’d say, “No, no, no, I believe in everything I say.” But then he at one point said, “I do believe in constructive controversy for the sake of enlightenment.” Those were his words. And I think that gets at something fundamental about him, which is he has always believed that there is a role for provocation and performance in politics.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. So, Ashley, let me ask you this: does he go further, rhetorically, than he actually believes? Or, when you’re listening to him, especially in this second Trump term, is what he saying what he actually believes? Is he just trying to provoke, and then he’ll try to bring it back a little bit?

Ashley Parker, staff writer, The Atlantic: Again, I think at this point both things are true. But we have sort of come full circle to where the caricature has become the character, and it’s hard to differentiate. You see in some of these early high-school videos of Stephen Miller, him sort of occasionally break the fourth wall to kind of do a kid-faced toothy grin, or kind of almost smirk at himself as if he can’t believe he said what he just said.

But in reporting my profile, one of the people I spoke with was Steve Bannon, who recounted, I mean, early on Stephen Miller would open for Donald Trump in 2015, in 2016, in that campaign at his rallies. And Stephen – Steve Bannon, who again loves all the incendiary stuff – recalled, saying to Stephen Miller, “Look, the main point of being an opening act is so the main guy doesn’t have to top you, right? You have to stop saying these things, because Trump can’t come out there and beat it.”

And so people have told me in the White House, one of the things they like about him, perhaps counterintuitively, is that he is incredibly dogmatic. That intensity – maybe not the trolling, but that intensity and the passion, is the same behind closed doors and in the Oval Office as you see in front of the TV cameras. And so whether you agree with him or not, you sort of always know where he stands, which is –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Ashley Parker: – on the far extreme when it comes to immigration.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Zolan, you’ve watched this for a while. How has his ideology shifted? And we’ll talk about the linchpins of the ideology in a minute, but has he shifted? Has he become more extreme? Because obviously the second Trump term is very much unlike the first Trump term.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs, White House correspondent, The New York Times: Sure, sure. I actually think from everyone I’ve talked to that Stephen’s ideology has actually been rather consistent. He’s been more visible and more powerful in the second term, you know. In the first term, he might have been limited in many ways to kind of being the architect, overseeing immigration policy in the Department of Homeland Security. And he was a speechwriter, of course, getting involved in comms as well.

Now you have somebody who is taking that ideology, that was formed through his upbringing, through working with Michele Bachmann, now to imposing that on domestic policy [and] foreign policy as well. His role has expanded. If I could also follow up on the previous subject, I think that the rhetoric and the provoking, Stephen also sees that as key to implementing his policy, right? I mean, in the first term –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Shelling the beach in advance of the actual policy roles?

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: And he believes that America – you often hear of America having a role as a sanctuary for immigrants, being a pro-immigrant country. He is trying to change the perception in the nation towards immigrants, to basically make it so that the pendulum of politics shifts, and there’s more of a tolerance towards the policies that he’s trying to implement.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Leigh Ann, talk about – well, we know he was an expert at provocation. He was a serious conservative, more conservative than Republicans at the time as he was growing up. He comes to Washington. Talk about his course through Congress until he meets Trump.

Leigh Ann Caldwell, chief Washington correspondent, Puck: Yes, as you said, he worked for Michele Bachmann, who is this –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Remind us.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: Michele Bachmann is somebody who actually ran for President in 2008. She was a fringe candidate, an outlier, and she was also very provocative. She crashed and burned very quickly. He –

Jeffrey Goldberg: She was a little bit ahead of her time, in terms of Lauren Boebert before, a Lauren Boebert kind of person.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: She was kind of pre-Trump, yeah, absolutely. But then he found a home with Jeff Sessions, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who was also very anti-immigrant. And ideologically, they were on the same page. Jeff Sessions was adamantly involved in [opposing] comprehensive immigration reform during the Bush and early Obama years – the Bush years, really – and trying to kill it. And Stephen Miller was instrumental in that.

He had a reputation on the Hill – he was a comms director at the time – of being way outside the mainstream. He would also, in internal comms meetings with his fellow Republican comms directors, would provocate in the same way he does publicly. People used to just roll their eyes and dismiss him.

Now, he is probably the most powerful non-elected official in this country, and you still see actually that tension on Capitol Hill with Stephen Miller. People remember Stephen Miller then, and there’s a lot of grumbling on Capitol Hill, even among Republicans, who think that Stephen Miller’s policies are going to far and will hurt them.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Ashley Parker: It’s hard just briefly to overstate – I covered the Gang of Eight immigration bill for The New York Times as a Congressional correspondent. And this was sort of the last time that immigration, bipartisan immigration [legislation], had any real momentum, right? You had four Republicans, including Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio; four Democrats.

You had the tentative, cautious, but you had the buy-in of the tech community, the business community, the labor community, the activist community, the Hispanic community. And the reason that bill essentially sank and did not come up for a vote in the House was single-handedly because of Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, working alongside Breitbart News, to kill it.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: And remember, just during the end of the Biden administration, when James Lankford was working on a bipartisan bill to close the borders, and then Trump came in as a potential candidate and killed it. Stephen Miller had a role in that, too.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Well, let’s talk about Sessions and the jump from Sessions to Trump. Obviously Sessions – we don’t have to rehearse this one at length, but [he] was a Trump loyalist and Trump turned on him because Sessions appointed the special prosecutor, etc. How did Miller make the move to the Big Man? I mean, it’s a classic Washington story, also? It’s not that unusual. But did he discard Jeff Sessions when –

Leigh Ann Caldwell: So, so, not yet. What happened is in January 2016 Miller was one of the very first people to come and leave Jeff Sessions’s office and go to Trump’s campaign.

Jeffrey Goldberg: And this is still when Trump was very improbable.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: Yes, very improbable. Before the Iowa caucuses, a good month before then. But Jeff Sessions, a month later, was the very first person, first Senator, to endorse Donald Trump. And so they were still very close, working together to promote this enigma of Donald Trump.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Interesting.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: But, you know, fast-forward to Jeff Sessions being Attorney General; Jeff Sessions recusing himself into the Russia investigation; Jeff Sessions losing his job and being fired because of that; and the person left standing is Stephen Miller, who discarded Jeff Sessions at that moment.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. When you say “discarded,” what do you mean?

Leigh Ann Caldwell: There was no public statement of Stephen Miller supporting or saying anything nice about Jeff Sessions in that moment. And then a person close to Stephen Miller at that time said no one was more furious at Jeff Sessions than Stephen Miller.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I mean, this goes to another question about Stephen Miller and his view of a powerful executive. I want to get to that, but let’s stay on the immigration views. There’s a tweet – and he tweets a lot, as we know, and he tweets very frankly about his views. There’s a tweet:

Stephen Miller [via X, nèe Twitter, December 27, 2025]: Someone should write an alternate historical novel where Americans are the first to master the automobile, the first in flight, the first to harness the atom, the first to land on the moon – but just keep going and never open our borders to the entire Third World for 60 years. For those who don’t know, the U.S. had negative migration for the half-century between the first non-stop transatlantic flight and the moon landing.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Basically, what he’s saying is American innovation all happened because white men – I mean, that’s the interpretation here – did all these things, and then the country lost focus because it started letting in the quote-“Third World.” McKay, come back to California.

McKay Coppins: Because I think that’s crucial to understanding his fixation on immigration.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yeah, because this is all – first, it’s ahistorical. Americans invented plenty of things at the same time as immigrants were coming into the country. In fact, many of the people who were immigrants invented those things, as new Americans. But let’s go back to the visceral feeling against immigrants.

McKay Coppins: Yeah, I mean, obviously none of us can read his mind. But to understand how these views formed, you have to understand the post-9/11 politics on the Right, in southern California in particular. Post-9/11, there was a general rise in xenophobia, fear of Muslims, outsiders, foreigners. We had been through this national trauma. It’s understandable, to a certain extent.

But Miller’s particular fixation on immigration was really born out of the Right-wing media ecosystem in California at the time, which was always rotating around immigration issues. You know, I think if he had been born in Cleveland or Montana or even, you know, Washington, D.C., I think it would have been a very different story.

But the people that he idolized, the local talk-radio people on the Right, the kind of group of conservatives that he fell in with, were always talking about immigration. And so –

Jeffrey Goldberg: Extremely negatively.

McKay Coppins: Of course.

Jeffrey Goldberg: The only reason I say that is because Ronald Reagan, the greatest Republican in the history of California, was not in that camp.

McKay Coppins: No, of course. Right. Something had shifted in the decades after Reagan. Some of it had to do with the Right-wing backlash against George W. Bush’s attempt to find a grand immigration compromise. But because he was always on the far Right of the Republican Party, and because he came from California, immigration was kind of a natural wedge issue that he latched onto.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So what was it? Growing up in southern California, he saw Hispanics, the Latino population, as just too big; trying to dominate white America?

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: There’s sort of two things. You’re talking about the sort of post-9/11 Republican backlash against real efforts to actually have some sort of comprehensive immigration reform. What you saw was sort of a xenophobic view where you generalize to many immigrants coming from the Middle East as national security threats. And you’ve seen that rhetoric replicated by this administration.

But then when it comes to also immigrants coming from Central and Latin America, you’ve had – and this still exists today – this real push by conservatives that these are, this is economic competition with people who are born in the United States. Now, of course, economic studies do undercut that. They show that immigrants broadly actually benefit the economy. But this is a prime example for the white grievance argument.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to stay on that for a second, because Stephen Miller is Jewish, and part of his family came over here 100 years ago as refugees from anti-Semitism in Europe. In your conversations with him, does that ever play into his understanding of the world, and his own background as a great-grandchild of immigrants?

McKay Coppins: I’m going to introduce one data point which may or may not be relevant, but he told me that one of the books that most shaped him was Wayne LaPierre’s book – head of the National Rifle Association (NRA). In that book, Wayne LaPierre makes the argument that the Holocaust and, I think he says Auschwitz, are prime examples of the need for Second Amendment rights.

You know, to make what you will of that argument, but if the Jewish people had been armed, they would have been able to stand up against this authoritarian genocidal regime. I think that he found a way early on to kind of meld his general Right-wing world view with his Jewish identity and background. I think it became a little more strained as he got deeper into Trump-era Right-wing politics and found himself swimming in waters that were, say, a little bit less friendly to Jews.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes, because there is an element of let’s call it the racialist far Right that doesn’t have fond feelings about Jews. Let me make just one brief editorial aside. I’m sorry, but this prompts this thought: I wish that the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto had had more guns back then, but I still think they would not have been able to defeat the German army. I mean it sounds like – it’s just a, like – put that aside from now. We’ll do a special episode about that. I’ll bring it up with Wayne LaPierre the next time he’s on the show.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: But the thing I would just add to that, too, is when you look at Stephen Miller’s comments about immigration, he does have a very narrow sort of view of who – which immigrants are justified to be in the United States. And it’s not – it doesn’t always track with the law. If you go into a legal port of entry at the border, you have a legal process to come into the country.

He pushes back against that. He pushes back against the parole system the Biden administration started. They’ve revamped their refugee program to focus on English-speaking refugees coming into the U.S., and not from African and also Muslim-majority countries, too. So there’s a through-line there of who he thinks is deserving to be in the U.S.

Jeffrey Goldberg: So this is why South African Afrikaners are given privileges, the only people allowed into the country.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: The only refugees that are automatically allowed in.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to talk a little bit about his power in the White House. I came into direct contact with this question last year during the Signal controversy. When I was in that chat, J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, everyone else are in that chat room arguing back and forth about the utility of striking Yemen. And then Miller comes into the chat and writes:

“As I heard it, the President was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement. EG, if Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the U.S. successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost, there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.” (Pete Hegseth replied, “Agree.”)

And it shut down the debate. It shut down J. D. Vance. It kind of made me think, “Well, Stephen Miller is worth a half-hour on Washington Week,” if that’s the case that he’s so powerful. Talk about inside the White House, what kind of power Stephen Miller has.

Ashley Parker: It is kind of hard to overstate his power inside the Trump second term White House, in part because his purview is so much broader than just immigration, although it certainly includes immigration. It includes trade. It includes foreign policy. It includes national security. It includes education. The entire war on the quote-unquote “elite university system” Stephen Miller, in his free time, when he’s not dealing with immigration, is the architect of that,

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right.

Ashley Parker: And also it’s, you know, you were asking earlier about if his views have become more extreme. I think it’s instructive to understand him in some of the same ways we understand President Trump himself, which is that his views haven’t necessarily changed, but he used those – even more than Trump, in certain ways, Stephen Miller used those four years out of power to basically get better, stronger, faster, more ruthless.

And he understood the mistakes he made in the first term. Why the travel ban, you know, he wrote the first executive order, led to chaos at the airports, got struck down in the courts. This time he knows that if you care about being hard-line about immigration, it’s not just important to have your people at the Department of Homeland Security, although that is important.

But there’s certain positions at Health and Human Services where you want a strong ally with your point of view. There are certain jobs at the State Department, in the Western Hemisphere division. So he now knows all the levers of power.

Jeffrey Goldberg: But, Leigh Ann, let me ask you this. Minneapolis, Tom Homan comes in and says, “Well, we’re pulling out.” Obviously, this did not go well, certainly from a public-relations perspective, for the administration in Minneapolis, largely because of the two deaths caused by ICE [and CBP] agents, of protesters. Did he go – did Stephen Miller go too far this time?

Leigh Ann Caldwell: It seems that way. Yeah, I think that, a couple of things. On his standing in the White House, there was – he had a 40th birthday party that his wife, Katie Miller, hosted for him, back in the fall – or the summer, actually. Everybody who attended told me that they had never seen so many people in the administration in one place. It was every single Cabinet member/official, [Trump’s press secretary] Karoline Leavitt. Everyone was there.

Ashley Parker: You needed like a designated survivor to be put in place.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: Exactly, and it was a show of how important he is in this administration. It was also notable that there were no members of Congress there, except for the Speaker of the House. Which gets back to your question, “Did he go too far?” This is something that the President has got a lot of push-back on. Stephen Miller has been criticized very publicly by Democrats, and very privately by Republicans.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Although Senator Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), a prominent Republican, does not like him at all, and has told the President that.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: Despises. Every single time he can publicly say how much he hates Stephen Miller, he does it. He can be talking about something totally different to a reporter, and he will bring up Stephen Miller.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He’s also retiring, which is interesting.

Leigh Ann Caldwell: He’s also retiring, but he does have a line to the President, and he’s told the President many times that Stephen Miller is doing him and the Republican Party no justice.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs: You did see something rare after the [Alex] Pretti shooting from Miller, which was him also sort of trying to clean it up and saying, “Well, look, I was getting information from CBP agents.” There was a period there where they tried to soften that language. That’s rare.

Jeffrey Goldberg: But, McKay, let me ask you this: what does he ultimately want? And, by the way, you have 30 seconds to answer that question.

McKay Coppins: Well, I think that he wants a lot. But I think that when it comes to immigration in particular, I think if you guys are right, he has made it very clear in my conversations that he wants to entirely reframe our understanding of our country as a nation of immigrants.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He’s basically in an argument with Emma Lazarus, in a way.

McKay Coppins: Right. I mean, there’s a key moment in the first term where he was asked about the placard at the base of the Statue of Liberty –

Jeffrey Goldberg: That’s Emma Lazarus. That’s the poem, right.

McKay Coppins: And he completely dismisses it, like disdainfully dismisses it. And I think like that just – that is his ideological project. He – if he leaves – if he can retire in a country that does not see immigrants as being welcome into this country, that does not see immigrants as part of the national story, he will be happy.

Jeffrey Goldberg: He’s a fascinating figure. Obviously, the most powerful non-elected official, I think we can all agree on that. More powerful than a Cabinet official. We’ll talk about him again and again, obviously, but that’s all the time we have for now. I want to thank our guests for joining me, and thank you at home for watching us. You can read Ashley’s profile on Stephen Miller by visiting theatlantic.com. I’m Jeffrey Goldberg. Good night from Washington.

“The Librarians”: PBS Airs a Powerful Documentary about Librarians on the Front Lines of the Culture Wars

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On Monday, February 9 PBS aired a powerful and unflinching 2025 documentary called The Librarians, about how librarians are being dragged into the culture wars being waged by an ascendant radical Right (it’s really a perversion of language to call these people “conservative” when their political, cultural, social, and moral ambitions are anything but “conservative”). Their ultimate goal is to turn the U.S. into a Christian theocracy, and one of their immediate goals is to eliminate any opinions they disagree with from public discourse, including critiques of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

The Librarians, directed by Kim A. Snyder in collaboration with Janique L. Robillard, Maria Cuomo Cole, and Jana Edelbaum, tells the story of how librarians across the country, especially (though not exclusively) in Southern states, have essentially been drafted into the culture war. They’ve been torn between the ethics of their profession, which among other things call them to oppose censoring the content of their libraries simply because other people don’t like certain books; and the increasingly vociferous demands of organizations like the well-funded, powerful nationwide group “Moms for Liberty” which demanded that school libraries in particular censor books with anti-racist or Queer themes.

Moms for Liberty was founded on New Year’s Day 2021 by three Right-wing activists in Florida. They were originally opposed to mask requirements instituted in 2020 to slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, but their agenda soon broadened to include running candidates for local school boards who were pledged to support their racist, anti-Queer agenda. In 2022 their campaigns were successful in 11 Texas school districts, including one in a town called Granbury that became a major focus of the film.

The campaign was started by a Texas state legislator called Matt Krause, who in October 2021 released a list of 850 books he wanted banned from Texas public school libraries. Krause also said his list was not all-inclusive and he reserved the right to add future titles. Krause explained that the books he wanted removed from state school libraries were ones which “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” That seemingly unexceptional statement is actually radical-Right code-speak for anything which “might make white people uncomfortable by pointing out that the U.S. built its prosperity on the backs of enslaved Africans.” (For more information see https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050013664/texas-lawmaker-matt-krause-launches-inquiry-into-850-books.)

Krause included with his blacklist a demand that the Texas Education Agency and school districts throughout the state asking each individual he sent it to whether their schools had any of the books on his list. He also asked for a detailed accounting of where the books were and how much money had been spent on them. Among the books cited by Krause and other would-be Texas censors were Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, Peggy J. Parks’s How Prevalent Is Racism in Our Society?, a picture book put out by Amnesty International illustrating the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and novels like Tim Federle’s The Great American Whatever, Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy, and “Pink Is a Girl’s Color” … and other silly things people say, a children’s picture book by Stacy and Erik Drageset.

One of the key people involved in the radical-Right takeover was successful school board candidate Courtney Gore. She was a prominent activist in the area with solid Right-wing credentials. After the school district removed 130 books from school libraries on grounds they were “pornographic,” Gore did something unusual for someone with her background. Instead of meekly going along with the pressure from her colleagues and funders to ban whole lists of books as “pornographic,” she actually read them and realized they weren’t pornographic at all. Though Gore maintains that she still considers herself a “conservative,” she posted on Facebook in May 2022 that “I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy B.S. I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer, it’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”

Another quirky story told in the documentary concerns Granbury parent Monica Brown, one of the leaders of the book-banning movement. What made her story unusual is that the oldest of her nine children, son Weston Brown, is Gay. When he came out to her at age 23, she immediately and irrevocably banned him from any Thanksgiving dinners and other family functions. Weston ultimately moved to San Diego, found a partner named Andrew, and agreed not to have anything to do with the birth family that had raised him, homeschooled him, and kept him as insulated as they could from any intimation either that Queer people existed or he might be one.

Then he saw Monica Brown testifying before the Granbury school board on a social-media video that had gone viral. “It was one thing when my parents’ beliefs were causing this rift between us and it was just a family matter,” Brown told NBC News. “But seeing now that she’s applying those same views to public activism, at a time when so many basic rights are being challenged, I couldn’t stay quiet about that.” The Librarians includes a scene in which Weston Brown spoke to the Granbury school board and pleaded with them not to ban Queer-affirming books like the one he says turned him around, George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue.

"It’s been nearly five years since I came out to my family,” Weston Brown told the Granbury school board. “I'm not allowed to join in family celebrations or holidays, or be part of my eight siblings' lives, all because I’m not straight. I’m here to implore you to listen to librarians, educators and students, not those speaking from a religious perspective or at the bidding of a political group. If you choose to marginalize differences and remove representation, you will only cause harm.” Monica Brown immediately followed her disowned son to the podium and spewed the usual radical-Right nonsense. She ignored everything her son had said and didn’t have anything to do with him – until the meeting ended. Then, as Weston was being interviewed by a reporter in the parking lot, she walked up to him and started filming the interview herself with her cell phone.

As I’ve noted in previous posts about the American radical Right and its position on Queer issues, one thing most pro-Queer people don’t understand about the radical Right is that it doesn’t believe in the existence of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender people. They believe we are all naturally heterosexual and cisgender, and any people who express themselves as homosexual or Transgender are either deliberately rebelling against God or suffering from “trauma-induced sexual sin.” Weston Brown recalls that when he came out to his parents as Gay, “They thought that I was mentally ill or demonically possessed.” This is the ideology behind so-called “reparative therapy,” the various attempts to “cure” Queer or Trans people from their “trauma-induced sexual sin” and turn them into cisgender heterosexuals.

One thing we’ve learned about the radical Right since its political ascendancy, which predated the Presidencies of Donald Trump but was kicked into high gear by the Trump phenomenon, is the thug-like way they go after their enemies, especially ones like Courtney Gore who were formerly on their side. Gore reported receiving death threats. So did Amanda Jones, a 20-year veteran librarian in Louisiana who in 2021 won the School Librarian of the Year award from School Library Journal. The award was in recognition of an innovative program she devised during the COVID-19 lockdown. She reasoned that as long as students couldn’t go to the outside world, she would use computer technology to bring the world to them by presenting virtual tours of other countries.

Then in 2022 Jones ran afoul of the would-be book banners. In July 2022 she spoke publicly against censorship at a meeting of the Livingston Parish Public Library Board. (In Louisiana, counties are called “parishes.”) As a result, she got viciously attacked by various organizations, including Citizens for a New Louisiana and Bayou State of Mind. Bayou State of Mind accused Jones of "advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” Citizens for a New Louisiana put out a leaflet showing a photo of Jones inside a red circle with a white border, and captioned it, “Why is she fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kids’ section?” She was, of course, doing no such thing, as any member of these organizations who’d actually read the books in question the way Courtney Gore did in Granbury, Texas would have found out.

Since then Jones, who is still a librarian at the same school in Louisiana she attended as a child, has published a memoir called That Librarian detailing her struggle against book-banning and the attempts of the radical Right to turn librarians into censors. She still gets awards, but now they have names like the Association of School Librarians’ Intellectual Freedom Award and the Louisiana Library Association’s Alex Allain Intellectual Freedom Award. When Jones was honored at the National Book Awards in 2023, Oprah Winfrey said, “Amanda Jones started getting death threats, all for standing up for our right to read ... but she's not stopped fighting against book bans, or stopped advocating for access to diverse stories.”

Librarians, especially in schools, have become one of our principal lines of defense against the Radical Right’s depressingly successful campaign to end America’s experiment in self-governance and make the U.S. a neofascist dictatorship. They already control the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court. They also have organized at the state and local levels in ways progressives can barely dream about. They want a world in which Blacks are once again in the back of the bus, women are once again stuck in the kitchen, Queers are still in the closet, Fundamentalist Christianity becomes a state religion, and giant corporations are able to extract maximum surplus value from their workers without any nonsense about health, safety, or decent pay.

The Librarians is a chilling account of how a handful of individuals are courageously fighting an often lonely battle to maintain and expand America’s and Americans’ freedoms in the face of a well-organized, well-funded campaign to destroy them. It deserves to be seen by every American who wants this country to remain a democratic, secular republic.

Trump’s and America’s Thug-Like Behavior, at Home and Worldwide

What, if Anything, Can Be Done to Stop the Psychos Running Our Country?

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On January 2, 2026, President Donald Trump rang in the new year by sending U.S. military forces into Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, to kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The couple were taken to New York City and held in a Brooklyn jail on as-yet unindicted charges of drug smuggling and trafficking. Subsequently Trump went on TV and posted on his social media site that the U.S. would run Venezuela for several months and demand 50 billion barrels of its oil. The money made from selling Venezuelan oil would be controlled, Trump said, by “me.”

On January 8, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross and two of his colleagues shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman and mother of three, right after she’d dropped one of her children off at school. Citing no actual evidence, Trump and his vice-president, J. D. Vance, claimed Good was a “domestic terrorist” and an agent of a vast Left-wing conspiracy who had tried to run Ross over with her car, so he shot and killed her in self-defense.

During the first week of 2026, Trump also threatened the government of Denmark with an invasion by the U.S. military if Denmark doesn’t give the U.S. Greenland, a largely self-governing autonomous territory in the North Atlantic. “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” Trump said, using the thug-like language of which he is so fond. The five political parties in Greenland united to voice their opposition to U.S. conquest and annexation, and so did the Danes. Danish officials warned that an attack by one member country of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on another would shatter the alliance that has helped keep peace in Western Europe since 1949.

These actions, along with others Trump took in late 2025 – including the demolition of the East Wing of the White House to make room for the grandiose “ballroom” he wants to build next to it – make clear that Trump has never wanted to be a powerful but constitutionally limited U.S. President. Instead, he wants to be America’s Führer, its absolute ruler. Trump is making it clear that once he decides he wants something, he will do anything in his power to get it, and so far the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court have essentially done nothing to rein in his claims of absolute power despite the constitutional design of our government as having three co-equal branches that check each other’s power.

Those ICE agents, as well as ones from a dizzying array of other organizations within the Department of Homeland Security, including the Border Patrol and something called Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), were sent not only to Minneapolis but other American cities (all of them with local governments controlled by the Democratic Party) not to support local law enforcement but to act as an occupation force. Various mayors and governors have pleaded with Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and others to withdraw ICE and Trump’s other forces on the ground that they are not making residents safer, but quite the opposite.

Trump’s response has been to “double down,” to use a phrase employed quite often about him. Instead of withdrawing the occupation forces from ICE and the other Homeland Security agencies, he’s sending more of them. His response to criticism of Renée Good’s murder has been to up the ante on the posthumous attacks on her character and reputation. And Vice-President Vance has declared that ICE agents have, not just the “qualified immunity” that has long bedeviled attempts to hold police officers accountable for attacking and killing civilians, but “absolute immunity.”

Think about that. The Vice-President of the United States is telling the citizens and residents of his country that they can be slaughtered at will by agents of the federal government, and nothing can be done either to protect them in advance or to bring their killers to justice after the fact. We are all living at the whim of poorly trained federal agents (Trump stipulated that newly hired ICE, Border Patrol and HSI agents get just 47 days of training, a number he reportedly seized on because he is now the 47th U.S. president) who literally have blanket authority to kill any one of us at any time they feel like it.

Trump also made his ideological project clear on January 7, when he issued an executive order unilaterally withdrawing the U.S. from 66 international agencies, some independent and some affiliated with the United Nations. I won’t bother to repeat the list – you can read it at https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/withdrawing-the-united-states-from-international-organizations-conventions-and-treaties-that-are-contrary-to-the-interests-of-the-united-states/ – but, predictably, among the hardest hit targets are any agencies dealing with the control of human-caused climate change (which Trump regards as a hoax) and any agencies dealing with protecting the rights of women or people of color.

It’s often argued that Trump doesn’t have an ideology, that he acts in a sort of willy-nilly fashion unconstrained by any vision of what he wants the world to be. There’s some truth to that, but Trump definitely has a series of prejudices that determine most of how he governs both at home and abroad. Among them are a pathological worship of “strength” and a consequent denigration of “weakness.” Trump is often accused of lacking “empathy,” but in fact he’s not only consciously worked to rid himself of any consideration for other people, he’s quite proud of that.

Trump also accepts as givens that white people are innately superior to people of color, men are superior to women, and rich people are superior to poor people. Trump believes that women exist mainly to gratify the sexual urges of men, especially rich and powerful men like himself, and to bear their children. That’s one reason why his current Defense Secretary (whose department Trump has unilaterally renamed the “War Department” even though Congress changed the name in 1947 and it would take another act of Congress to change it back) Pete Hegseth fired the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because he was a Black man and the head of the Coast Guard because she was a woman.

Trump’s philosophy was capably explained by Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff – one of the few advisors who’s stayed with Trump through both his first term and his current one. In an interview with Jake Tapper of CNN on January 5, Miller said, “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, couldn’t have said it any better. And late last year Pete Hegseth told Congress that he believed the U.S. military should practice “lethality, not legality” – a blunt promise to the rest of the world that the U.S. would commit war crimes anywhere it fought.

During his first term as President, Trump got tired of having people around him who tried to talk him out of his worst impulses, who kept telling him he couldn’t directly profiteer off the Presidency, he couldn’t deploy the U.S. military on the streets of American cities, he couldn’t snuggle up to dictators like Russian President Vladimir Putin while denigrating the republican governments of the European Union. In his “wilderness years” from 2021 to 2025 he put together a new team whose members he could count on to give him the absolute “loyalty” – not to the U.S. Constitution but to the person of Donald Trump – he demands.

And while during Trump’s first term we were assured by some writers that the U.S. was not in danger of being turned into a fascist dictatorship because Trump was literally too lazy to put in the effort, that’s no longer a reality in his second. He has assembled a set of relatively young, energetic ideologues who are eagerly pitching in and giving his project of the fascist transformation of America the raw energy and influence it needs to succeed.

Donald Trump, George Orwell, and “Doublethink”

On July 18, 2016, while the prospect of Donald Trump as President was still a nightmare rather than an all too grim reality, The New Yorker published an interview with Tony Schwartz, the real author of Trump’s alleged “autobiography” The Art of the Deal (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all). In it Schwartz warned the U.S. and the world about Trump’s cavalier attitude to the whole idea of “truth.” “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”

The moment I read that quote I thought of George Orwell and his final work, the classic dystopian novel 1984. In 1984, the world is controlled by three great super-states, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. All three are ruled by all-powerful dictatorships based on similar ideologies which use technology to maintain total surveillance of their entire populations 24/7. They also are perpetually at war with each other, in various combinations, because, as Orwell put it, “War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”

One of the central tenets of the ruling ideology in 1984 is something called “the mutability of the past.” As Orwell writes, “Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For once it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”

We are now seeing the Trump administration apply this principle in real time in the case of Renée Good. Trump and his spokespeople are repeatedly telling the world that Good was a “domestic terrorist” who was trying to run ICE agents over with her SUV. The fact that widely circulating videos of the incident don’t show anything like that isn’t stopping them. Even the footage shot by Jonathan Ross right before he shot Good shows Good telling him, “I’m not mad at you,” and trying to ease her car out of his way before he draws his gun and fires the three shots that killed her. But, in classic Orwellian fashion, Trump, Vance, and other members of the administration keep repeating the lie that Good was out to kill ICE agents, and Trump’s dwindling number of fanatic followers believe it.

The key technique used by the Inner Party, the ruling elite of Oceania in 1984, is a mental exercise called doublethink, which Orwell described as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. … The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.” Trump, from the start of his political career (and even before that as a businessperson), has been, as Orwell would have put it, a doubleplusgood doublethinker.

It’s why the people who note the contradictions in Trump’s rhetoric and accuse him of hypocrisy are missing the point completely. Trump not only believes in hypocrisy, he wallows in it. As Tony Schwartz told The New Yorker a decade ago, based on his personal experience with the man, Trump has the ability to believe whatever lies he needs to in order to maintain his self-image of being all-powerful. Just after he won back the presidency Trump started wearing a new version of the MAGA baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan, “Trump Was Right About Everything.” It’s a claim of omniscience most religious believers (and one of Trump’s real-world exercises in doublethink is claiming to be a committed Christian while violating just about everything Jesus stood for) would reserve for God.

One of the quirks of the modern world has been that the rise in information technology – in particular the increasing use of digital rather than analog storage to hold our records of the past, and the development of artificial intelligence (AI) – has given modern-day dictators and autocrats much greater power to manipulate reality than Orwell could have imagined. In 1984 Orwell posited that the Ministry of Truth would maintain elaborate networks of minions to destroy surviving records of past events that contradicted the Party’s current version of the past. Today inconvenient records can be erased permanently with the mere push of a button on a control panel. Trump’s officials have already done this with economic statistics, disease progression, and the evidence of human-caused climate change.

Soon the technology will exist, if it doesn’t already, to create or alter videos like the ones shot by bystanders of the killing of Renée Good in whatever shape and form the ruling elite demands. Right now the Trump administration has to keep repeating the Big Lie that Good was trying to kill Jonathan Ross in the face of video evidence to the contrary. In a few years, through AI they’ll have the power literally to remake the video evidence to show exactly what they want it to show. Trump and his supporters have already used AI to respond to last October’s “No Kings” protests against him by creating a video in which he plays a combat pilot literally dive-bombing the protesters with shit.

It’s revealing of Trump’s faith in doublethink and his determination to control reality that he has refused to allow the federal government to share its evidence in Good’s killing with Minnesota state and local authorities. His stated reason for doing so is that Minnesota’s state and local governments are “corrupt,” and he knows this because Minnesota voted against him in all three Presidential elections. Trump insists that he actually did carry Minnesota all three times, and state authorities “stole” the election from him. (In the real world no Republican Presidential candidate has carried Minnesota since 1972.) As with the overall result of the 2020 Presidential election, Trump is remaking history in his own desired image and acting on his delusions.

While there are plenty of things Trump promised in the 2024 campaign to do on “day one” of his return to the Presidency that he hasn’t, including lowering consumer prices and ending the war in Ukraine, the one big thing he did do was pardon all 1,500 participants in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of his election loss. This not only created a cadre of people who had already committed political violence on Trump’s behalf, many of whom went on social media to proclaim their willingness to do so again, it was also a key step in Trump’s Orwellian campaign to rewrite the history of January 6 by casting the rioters as “freedom fighters” and the Capitol police who tried to stop them as agents of an oppressive “deep state.”

The “Unitary Executive” and Trump’s Claim of Absolute Power

One of the key weapons in Trump’s quest for absolute dictatorial power has been the theory of the “unitary executive.” First propounded by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the “unitary executive” theory holds that because the executive is the only branch of the federal government in which the framers of the Constitution vested ultimate authority in just one person, the President, therefore they meant the President to have absolute power. Trump reiterated this claim in a recent interview with the New York Times (a paper he’s suing for $15 billion for allegedly defaming him in 2024) in which he said he had the authority to commit the U.S. military to battle anywhere in the world at any time, and the only limits on this power were “my own morality, my own mind.”

America’s first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, knew better. In 1848 Lincoln, then a first-term Congressmember from Illinois, strongly opposed the U.S.-Mexican War – a position so unpopular it killed his career in electoral politics for the next decade. On February 15, 1848 he wrote a letter to William H. Herndon, his law partner in Springfield, Illinois (https://papersofabrahamlincoln.org/documents/D200458), criticizing then-President James K. Polk’s defense of the war. “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure,” Lincoln wrote. “Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose.”

Lincoln went on, “The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where Kings have always stood.”

Trump has made no secret of his desire to be an absolute monarch, to place himself where kings have always stood. Early in his second term he posted to the official White House Web site a mock cover of Time magazine, with an image of himself wearing a crown and the slogan, “Long Live the King.” When he gave his 2025 State of the Union Address, instead of asking Congress for legislation, he boasted of the number of executive orders he had issued, essentially ruling by decree in classic dictatorial fashion. He told Congress that once they passed the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” making the 2017 tax cuts permanent and decimating Medicare and Medicaid, he needed nothing else from them.

During his 2024 campaign he strongly suggested that it would be the last election the U.S. would ever have or need. He told his supporters at rallies, “Vote for me just this once, and you’ll never have to vote again.” He unilaterally abolished the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) even though it had been established by Congress and therefore, at least in theory, only the Congress had the power to get rid of it. Trump also slapped his own name on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Arts in Washington, D.C. even though the name had been fixed by Congress in 1964 and could not legally be changed without Congressional authorization. And he renamed the Department of Defense the “Department of War” despite Congress having adopted the “Defense” name in 1947.

One of the major tactics of Trump’s second term has been to declare so-called “national emergencies” and claim that these justify his assumption of absolute power. He did that with his tariff policy, beginning his second term by demanding power to fix tariffs of any size on any country in the world at any time. Trump also did that by ordering military action against Venezuela and threatening it against Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, and Iran. Indeed, his Iran policy, threatening retaliation against the Iranian government for the crime of shooting unarmed protesters when Trump’s ICE agents are doing that themselves, is yet another example of Trumpian doublethink.

Trump has recently been dropping hints that he may cancel the 2026 and 2028 elections altogether because of yet another bullshit “emergency.” Never mind that the U.S. held Presidential elections in both 1864 and 1944 despite being faced with genuine emergencies – the Civil War and World War II, respectively – that directly threatened the survival of the nation. Trump will do whatever it takes to stay in power after his current term ends despite the stipulation of the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution that “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

Either he will openly defy the Constitution and run again anyway, declare an “emergency” that requires him to suspend the election and remain in power, or do what Latin Americans call imposición: find a pliant stooge to run in his place and so keep Trump in power through a puppet President. Indeed, I suspect at least part of J. D. Vance’s motivation for giving that chilling speech in which he said that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” was to show Trump his diehard loyalty so he can be elected President as Trump’s surrogate in 2028 instead of Trump throwing him under the bus in favor of someone else, including (as I predicted in 2024) one of his adult children.

The Dwindling Options of Stopping Trump

And the most chilling thing about Trump’s power grab is that his opponents have so few options available to stop him. Democratic politicians and the sort-of Left-leaning hosts of media outlets like MS NOW keep pointing to opinion polls that say what Trump is doing is monumentally unpopular with the American people. They forlornly look to the 2026 midterm elections as a way of putting at least one house of Congress back in Democratic hands and thereby revivifying Congress’s constitutional role as a check on Presidential power. Their hopes for that election remind me of the equally futile hopes of Russian democrats in 1917 that a national election scheduled for 1918 would vote the Bolsheviks out of power. That election never happened because Vladimir Lenin ordered it canceled.

Trump’s behavior during both his first and second terms has made it clear that he doesn’t regard Congress as having any legitimate power to stop him or even slow him down. Either he will refuse to let officials in his administration testify before Congressional committees even when they’re subpoenaed to do so, or when they do show up he will encourage them not only to defy the committees, but to do so in a highly combative fashion that questions the very idea that Congress has a right to question whatever the administration is doing.

Trump is also working industriously to block the media from any adverse reporting on him. When he isn’t aggressively filing multi-billion dollar lawsuits against outlets like the New York Times and the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) to intimidate them, he’s getting his billionaire supporters to buy them out. Already we’ve seen the father-and-son team of Larry and David Ellison buy the parent company of CBS, cancel Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, and install a Right-wing minder at CBS’s once vaunted news department to kill all stories Trump doesn’t want to see aired, including a 60 Minutes report on the high-tech dungeon in El Salvador to which Trump has been sending people he declares as “terrorists” without any due process whatsoever. More recently he’s supported the Ellisons’ hostile takeover bid for CNN’s parent company and has reportedly given them a hit list of CNN anchors he wants them to fire when they take control.

The murder of Renée Good in Minneapolis January 8 and the similar slaying of Keith Porter by ICE agents in Los Angeles eight days earlier (which hasn’t been as widely reported because Good was a white woman and Porter a Black man) are among the salvos in Trump’s attempt to silence protesters against him. In the short term they’re not working – people in Minneapolis swelled the streets in defiance of ICE and literally risked their lives to do so. Trump will likely respond to these protests by upping the ante and ordering either ICE or the U.S. military itself to shoot into unarmed protesters and kill them en masse, and that will quite likely spell the end of major street protests against Trump the way the Chinese military similarly stopped protests against their regime after its 1989 mass murder of protesters in Tiananmen Square.

To quote Orwell again, “All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or they grew too soft. Either they became stupid or arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown, or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force, and once again they were overthrown. They fell, that is to say, either through consciousness or through unconsciousness. It is the achievement of the Party to have created a system of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.”

Trump’s critics frequently point to the example of Nazi Germany as an authoritarian state that proclaimed its destiny to rule for 1,000 years but only made it to 12. But the Nazis didn’t fall because of any internal weakness; they fell because they aroused the enmity of so many other countries they ended up losing the world war Adolf Hitler had started to conquer the world. To defeat Nazism, the U.S. (a representative republic) and Great Britain (a constitutional monarchy) had to ally themselves with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, a dictatorship in its own way as brutal as Hitler’s that probably killed more people than the Nazis did.

Looking over the world, Trump probably realizes that the only countries that could conceivably defeat the U.S. militarily are China and Russia in coalition. That’s one reason why he’s sucked up so heavily to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and dialed back big-time on his confrontational attitude towards Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. Trump’s obsequiousness to Putin has baffled a lot of people, but I’ve long suspected it’s really because he admires Putin and sees him as a role model. Just as Putin successfully crushed Russia’s short-lived experiment with republican governance and re-created the Czarist and Soviet dictatorships, so Trump wants to destroy America’s longer-lived republican experiment and install himself as dictator for life.

That also explains the reason why in December 2025 Trump’s administration issued a new National Security Strategy (NSS) (https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf) that essentially adopted Russia’s talking points on the Ukraine war, including pledging to oppose any further expansion of NATO. “It is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, in order to stabilize European economies, present unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and re-establish strategic stability with Russia,” the document read.

Instead the document bristled with contempt for Western Europe. It read, “The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birth rates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence. Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”

Trump’s general attitude towards the world was summed up in a series of tweets both from him directly and others in his administration justifying the intervention in Venezuela by saying, “This Is Our Hemisphere!” It’s been argued that Trump, who ran as a principled opponent of America’s expansive role in the world and still proclaims himself the “Peace President” while starting or threatening military action in places as diverse as Venezuela, Greenland, and Canada (doublethink strikes again!), believes in the 19th century imperialist vision that divides the world into “spheres of influence.”

Trump sees the world as divided into three broad spheres: the Western Hemisphere, under the suzerainty and control of the United States; the former Soviet Union (and the Czarist Empire before that) and eastern Europe, under Russian control; and an Asia dominated by China. The NSS pays lip service to America’s interest in China and preserving the quasi-independent status of Taiwan, but it’s hard to believe that an administration so wishy-washy on the Russian attempt to conquer and subjugate Ukraine would come down hard on China for doing a similar thing to Taiwan.

Western Europe doesn’t fit snugly into this “spheres of influence” pattern. (In 1984, most of western Europe is part of Eurasia, the super-state formed by the Soviet Union, while Britain is part of Oceania, which had evolved from the United States.) It’s a lot of things Trump hates: confederated, cosmopolitan, relatively tolerant of immigrants (especially immigrants of color), and willing to use the power of government to control what its leaders view as “hate speech” (the real meaning of the passage in the NSS that criticizes Europe for “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition” – Right-speak for keeping far-Right trolls off the Internet).

Trump has made it clear to western European countries that the only way they can redeem themselves in his eyes is if they elect far-Right anti-immigrant nationalist parties whose politics mirror Trump’s own. Among these are the Reform Party in Britain, the National Rally in France, and the effectively neo-Nazi Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany. In both his Presidential campaigns Trump threatened western Europe that the U.S. might not come to their defense in case of a Russian attack, despite our obligation to do so under Article V of the NATO treaty, if Europe’s countries didn’t start spending more money on defense.

Ironically, a number of them are starting to do exactly that – not because they’re meeting Trump’s demands but because the increasing unreliability of America as a security guarantor has led European political leaders of all ideological stripes to realize that they need to protect themselves instead of counting on the U.S. to do it for them. Meanwhile, Trump has asked Congress to increase America’s already bloated military budget by 50 percent – yet another indication that he wants to rule not only the U.S. but much of the rest of the world with the sheer force of U.S. military might.

At the end of William Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, Part 2, the dying King Henry IV tells his son and successor, Prince Hal, to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.” Henry IV had taken power in a coup d’état (as dramatized by Shakespeare in a previous play, Richard II), and his whole reign had been beset by attempted revolutions and civil wars instigated by supporters of Richard’s designated heir. Accordingly, on his deathbed he tells Hal to unite the country by mobilizing it behind a foreign enemy – and everyone in the court knew who the likely enemy would be: France, which Britain had already tried to conquer decades earlier.

Trump is clearly using threats of military action abroad at least in part to unite the U.S. behind him in the face of growing opposition to his policies. While his conduct in office both times has shown he’s never wanted to be President of the entire United States of America – it’s obvious he regards the regions of the country that voted against him as enemy territory he needs to subdue with military or quasi-military force – he wants to forestall domestic opposition by, among other things, keeping America engaged in one military conflict after another. Military action also has the desirable (to Trump) consequence that he can define all domestic political opposition as “treason.”

At this point there seem few, if any, ways to forestall or reverse Trump’s and his minions’ devastating transformation of the U.S. from an imperfect but still vital democratic republic into an authoritarian, or even a totalitarian, dictatorship. One of the major ironies is that this is happening in the year of the 250th anniversary of America’s declaration of independence from kings in general and George III in particular. Just as Richard Nixon planned to use the Bicentennial in 1976 to set aside the 22nd Amendment and run for a third term – which didn’t happen only because the Watergate scandal evaporated Nixon’s political capital – Trump plans to use the 250th anniversary to anoint himself and his movement with absolute power to run the U.S. for however long this nation lasts.

Donald Trump and the Government Shutdown

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

President Donald Trump, who constantly boasts that everything he does is “the greatest the world has ever seen” (and everything someone else does that he doesn’t like is “the worst thing the world has ever seen”), has now presided over a shutdown of the U.S. government that is, you guessed it, the longest the country has ever seen. Not surprisingly, the record this shutdown broke was set in 2018, during Trump’s first term, which lasted 35 days and was over funding for Trump’s proposed 2,000-mile long wall across the entire U.S.-Mexico border.

The main issue that sparked the current shutdown was over federal subsidies for health-care exchanges that provide insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). These subsidies were expanded in 2020 and 2021 to deal with COVID-19, but this year Trump and Congressional Republicans were determined to gut them. So they put into their so-called “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” a provision that terminated them as of the start of the open enrollment period for health-care plans on or around November 1.

Congressional Democrats, though a minority in both houses, were determined to restore these subsidies so people already at lower income levels wouldn’t be hit with health insurance premiums that were double, triple, or even a higher multiple of what they were paying earlier. They apparently thought they could shame Republicans with tales of people on the spot and forced to choose between access to health care and paying for rent and food. They thought wrong. Today’s Republicans are not only against the whole idea of a social safety net, they’re actually proud of their ability to make people starve.

The reason is the modern-day Republican party is dominated by the Libertarian agenda, which holds that it is not only bad public policy but actually immoral to tax rich people to help non-rich people. Libertarianism’s founder, novelist and political commentator Ayn Rand, said in response to a question about whether society had an obligation to take care of people with disabilities, “Misfortune does not justify slave labor.” She meant that taxing the rich to pay for social services for the non-rich essentially turns the rich into slaves.

In 2017, during Trump’s first term as President, I wrote that though he had campaigned for office as a European-style nationalist conservative, pledging to protect safety-net programs like Social Security and Medicare against other Republicans who wanted to cut them (and blaming so-called “illegal” immigrants for the economic crises facing those programs – actually immigrants aren’t allowed to collect Social Security, though they have to pay the payroll taxes that fund it), he was governing as a Libertarian. The reason, I argued, was that Libertarianism appealed to the two most important things to Trump: his bank balance and his ego. Not only does Libertarianism generate public policies that make Trump and other rich people even richer, it assuages his fragile sense of self by telling him that his wealth establishes his superiority to the common run of humanity.

When the Republicans swept the 2024 national elections, winning back the U.S. Senate, keeping the House of Representatives, and winning back the Presidency, Trump and his advisors, including Russell Vought and the others behind the so-called “Project 2025” (a massive 922-page blueprint from the Heritage Foundation for a Right-wing remaking of America), saw the chance for a thoroughgoing Right-wing transformation of America. Among their weapons was the theory of the “unitary executive,” which basically holds that since the executive branch was the only one for which the framers of the U.S. Constitution gave ultimate responsibility to just one person (the President), they meant that the President should have near-dictatorial powers.

Trump expressed this late in his first term, when he said about the Constitution, “There’s this little thing called Article II, which says I get to do whatever I want.” Since he returned to the Presidency on January 20, 2025, he has made it clear that he intends to impose near-absolute one-man rule on the U.S. Among other things, he hired 200 people involved in drafting Project 2025 for jobs in his administration, including Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). (For more information on Russell Vought, see https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/27/russell-vought-profile-donald-trump).

During his first month back in office, Trump unilaterally created a new federal agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and put his chief campaign donor, multibillionaire Elon Musk, in charge of it. Musk and DOGE sent their minions into various government departments and fired employees wholesale. Sometimes they had to hire them back almost as quickly – like when they fired people in charge of securing America’s nuclear weapons or tracking down potential epidemics – and then had trouble reaching them because as part of firing them, they’d canceled their government e-mails and had no other contact information.

Trump also made it clear that he didn’t consider himself bound by any ethical norms against directly profiting from being President. The record of Trump’s second term is replete with deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars Trump has made with foreign governments to invest in businesses owned by himself or his adult children. There’s a clause in the Constitution that is supposed to make this illegal – Article I, section 9, which reads, “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” – but during his first term Trump denounced this as “that phony emoluments clause” and made clear he doesn’t consider himself bound by it.

Trump has essentially recruited private police forces, accountable not to the United States government but to him personally, within the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). He has sent these forces into cities and states whose mayors and governors don’t want them, and he’s also federalized National Guard troops and even sent in U.S. Marines to enforce immigration laws. These have resulted in mass sweeps through areas with large Latino populations, detaining U.S. citizens as well as both documented and undocumented immigrants. Often Trump’s agents wear masks, drive in unmarked vehicles, and literally “disappear” people to unknown locations either in the U.S. or elsewhere. During the 2024 campaign Trump made it clear that immigrants are to him what Jews were to Adolf Hitler – never more so than during his one debate with his major-party opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, when he accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio of eating other people’s dogs and cats.

Trump has also openly expressed his contempt for the constitutional order on numerous occasions. On his way home from a state visit to Japan, he said that once Congress passed his “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” which slashed taxes for the very wealthiest Americans and eviscerated Medicare, Medicaid and other social-service agencies, he needed nothing more from them. (This echoed his statement during the 2024 campaign in which he told supporters, “Vote for me just this once, and you’ll never have to vote again.”) During his 2025 State of the Union Address he boasted that he’d issued more executive orders than any President ever. Clearly Trump intends to follow the classic dictator’s playbook and rule by decree, the separation of powers and the rest of America’s Constitution be damned.

Also Trump has actively sought to silence all public criticism of him. As part of a so-called “budget rescission” bill by which Congress repealed funding they’d already approved, he was able to eliminate federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Trump installed Brendan Carr as head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Carr used that authority to threaten commercial broadcast networks with loss of their station licenses if they aired programming critical of Trump. The firing – blessedly temporary – of ABC late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was just the most blatant instance of Trump and Carr teaming up to silence a prominent critic. And Trump’s friend David Ellison bought Paramount, CBS’s parent company, and canceled Stephen Colbert’s late-night show. Trump responded by putting out an exultant post on his “Truth Social” media site which demanded that NBC similarly fire its late-night hosts, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.

The most bizarre and visible manifestation of Trump’s desire to rule by diktat was his physical destruction of the East Wing of the White House. In late October he called in a wrecking crew with bulldozers to demolish the East Wing, added to the White House in 1902, to make room for the 90,000 square-foot “ballroom” he wants to build on the property (dwarfing the 55,000 square feet of the White House itself). The ballroom is estimated to cost $250 to $350 million, and the money is being contributed by wealthy individuals and corporations (including Comcast, parent company of NBC and Universal, as well as Amazon.com) that want to curry favor with Trump. Apparently this is a classic strategy of property developers – if you’re waiting for approval of a new project, destroy what’s already there to present the authorities holding up your project with “facts on the ground” and leave them with the alternatives of letting you build what you want or leaving an unsightly mess.

More recently Trump not only gutted the White House bathroom adjoining the Lincoln Bedroom, turning it from a tasteful blue-green art deco interior into an expanse of marble that makes it look like a mausoleum, he was so proud of this he posted 25 photos of it to social media. And he’s said in public that getting the ballroom done is his highest current priority – while the government is still shut down and millions of Americans are threatened with losing not only SNAP and affordable health insurance but the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program and Head Start to fund children’s pre-school access. Trump’s bizarre noblesse oblige attitude also led him to host a 1920’s-style “Great Gatsby” Hallowe’en party on his private Mar-a-Lago golf course and resort in Florida on the eve of the demise of SNAP funding. Can you say, “Let ‘em eat cake”?

And Trump has successfully intimidated both the Republicans in Congress and the six-member radical-Right majority on the current U.S. Supreme Court to go along with him and his totalitarian project. (I call Trump a “totalitarian” rather than an “authoritarian” because authoritarians merely want to be obeyed. Totalitarians want to be worshiped.) One of his key strategies was his blanket pardon of all 1,500 people facing criminal prosecution for having participated in his unconstitutional attempt to stay in power after losing the November 2020 election that resulted in a riot in and around the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. This created a cadre of people who not only had committed political violence on Donald Trump’s behalf before, but had gone on social media expressing their willingness to do so again. More recently, when one of the January 6 defendants committed a new crime, Trump fired federal prosecutors for having referenced his January 6 involvement in their sentencing memo.

The Government Shutdown in Context

Both Trump and Republicans in both houses of Congress have made it clear that their price for restoring funding to the federal government is the complete capitulation of Congressional Democrats. The last time they threatened a shutdown, in February 2025, they got their wish. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) got enough Democrats to vote to keep the government funded on Republican terms because, as he said at the time, he feared what Trump and the Republicans would do if they were given blanket authority under shutdown conditions to decide unilaterally which government departments would be considered “essential,” meaning they would be kept open, and which wouldn’t be, which would mean even more mass firings and the permanent ending of many government agencies.

Already Trump has targeted entire agencies for abolition even though they were initially authorized by Congress, and therefore only Congress can get rid of them. Among his targets are the Department of Education, which Republicans have been trying to get rid of since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1981; the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB); and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Trump said he went after USAID because its mission to help alleviate starvation and disease epidemics in Third World countries ran counter to his so-called “America First” agenda – and then he contradicted himself by pledging $40 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money to the government of Argentina to help keep its far-Right President, Javier Milei, in power. Democrats glumly pointed out that $40 billion would have been enough to keep the Affordable Care Act subsidies in place for another year.

The government shutdown reached an acute phase on November 1, when funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, ran out. Trump and Congressional Republicans openly boasted that they were essentially holding SNAP, and the estimated 42 million Americans who depend on it, hostage to get Congressional Democrats to reopen the government on their terms. Already House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), who often seems to be Donald Trump’s Mini-Me, had unilaterally taken the House out of session for a month and a half so Senate Democrats would have no choice but to pass the House’s version of a funding bill if they wanted the government to stay open.

At least two lawsuits were filed in federal court to force the Trump administration to continue to fund SNAP. In one of the cases, judge John McConnell in Rhode Island ordered the government to pay for SNAP using a contingency fund created under the same law that created and sustained SNAP in the first place. On November 3 the Trump administration announced that it would comply with that ruling, but said they would only pay half the regular amount of benefits for November. “Even if we get immediate guidance, it will unfortunately be delayed while States get the money out,” Trump posted on Truth Social, his own site. “If we are given the appropriate legal direction by the Court, it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding, just like I did with Military and Law Enforcement Pay.”

That’s already authoritarian enough – Trump presenting himself as the Great White Father deciding unilaterally who gets paid and who doesn’t – but it didn’t last long. The very next day, Trump did another Truth Social post reneging on his pledge to follow the court order and saying he wouldn’t allow SNAP benefits to go forward until the government reopens: “SNAP BENEFITS, which increased by Billions and Billions of Dollars (MANY FOLD!) during Crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office (Due to the fact that they were haphazardly ‘handed’ to anyone for the asking, as opposed to just those in need, which is the purpose of SNAP!), will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!”

The People Fight Back

Trump’s bizarre attempts to turn himself into an American dictator ruling by decree have generated push-back from millions of Americans. A series of three major nationwide mobilizations, one called “Hands Off” and two called “No Kings,” have taken place. The most recent one, on October 18, drew an estimated 7.5 millions Americans into the streets in all 50 states, including out-of-the-way locations whose citizens had voted solidly for Trump. Trump’s response was to create and post to social media a childish AI video featuring him as a Top Gun-style fighter pilot flying a plane and literally dumping shit on the protesters.

People have also started to fight back at the ballot box. While there aren’t that many U.S. elections held in odd-numbered years anymore, the ones that took place on November 4, 2025 were disastrous for Republicans. Moderate Democrats Alison Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively, beating their Republican opponents by 15-point margins – considerably larger than the last pre-election polls had predicted. New York City just elected its first Muslim and first openly socialist Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, with a shade over 50 percent of the vote in a three-person race against former Democrat Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa.

In an intense victory speech, Mamdani directly attacked Trump by name. (Spanberger had avoided criticizing Trump and Sherrill made just a veiled reference to him.) Mamdani also cited various people as his exemplars, including Eugene Debs, first Socialist Party candidate for U.S. President (he ran five times between 1894 and 1920); Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of an independent India after British colonial rule ended in 1947; and Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s Mayor from 1933 to 1945, whom Mamdani said was his role model for what he wants to do with the office. Mamdani’s most intriguing reference was to a major politician who had said, “You campaign in poetry but you govern in prose.” Though he didn’t name the person he was quoting, it was Mario Cuomo, former New York Governor and Andrew Cuomo’s father.

Later in the evening California voters learned that they had passed Proposition 50, put on the ballot by the California legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom to redraw the state’s Congressional district maps. Newsom intended this as an answer to a similar mid-term redistricting in Texas, where at Trump’s behest the state legislature sought to redraw their maps to add five more Republicans to the next Congress. Proposition 50 was designed to counteract the Texas gerrymander by adding five more Democrats to California’s House delegation. Just as Spanberger and Sherrill did 10 points better in the election than in the final polls, Proposition 50 had been expected to pass by a 10-point margin but the actual tally was nearly two to one.

The next morning, Trump got unexpected resistance from the United States Supreme Court. The Court heard arguments November 5 on two lawsuits that aim to reverse Trump’s unilateral imposition of tariffs on other countries. Trump has claimed the power to enact his own tariffs on any country in the world at any rate he wants for as long as he wants under a 1977 law called the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA). This allows the President to “regulate … transactions involving any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.” There are a few problems with that, including that IEEPA doesn’t mention the word “tariff” and that the Supreme Court has consistently held that the power to “regulate” does not include the power to “tax,” which is reserved to Congress under Article I of the Constitution.

The tariff issue is especially significant because it’s one item on which Trump has not only not embraced the Libertarian agenda, but has gone exactly in the opposite direction from it. While Trump has fulfilled the Libertarian agenda in his attacks on the independence of government workers and in seeking to abolish social-service and regulatory agencies like CFPB and USAID, he’s violated the central Libertarian tenet that capital – and capitalists – should be free to roam the world and invest wherever they like without pesky government restrictions. Trump has also violated Libertarian orthodoxy in insisting that the government take shares in private companies and force major retailers to “eat” the cost increases from his tariffs – which has led the Libertarian Cato Institute to denounce him as a socialist. (He is not; he’s a Vladimir Putin-style “crony capitalist” who uses his power as a national leader to demand deals that will make money for him personally.)

As reported on the Vox.com Web site (https://www.vox.com/politics/467485/supreme-court-tariff-argument-trump-learning-resources-vos-selections), the objections of radical-Right Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Any Coney Barrett (the latter two appointed by Trump in his first term) mirror classic Libertarian notions of the limits of governmental authority in general and Presidential authority in particular. Gorsuch asked Solicitor General John Sauer, who argued the case for the Trump administration, if Congress could delegate to the President other powers the Constitution specifically grants Congress, including the power to “regulate …commerce between the states” and the right to declare war. Roberts said he was troubled that Sauer’s position would give the President the right to impose tariffs “on any product, from any country, in any amount, for any length of time.”

But so far the indications from Trump and his minions are that he’s responding both to the election defeats and the Supreme Court’s skepticism about his tariff authority by doubling down on his positions and policies. Once again he’s insisting that he won’t negotiate with Democrats until they agree to reopen the government on Republican terms. In the meantime, thousands of government employees have either been laid off altogether or “furloughed,” forced to keep working without being paid. We already know from Trump’s experience as a private businessman that his favorite way to employ people is to promise them anything, get what he wants from them, and then weasel out of the bothersome necessity of actually paying them.

Trump has asserted that even after the government reopens, he personally will decide who gets back pay for the shutdown’s duration and who doesn’t. There’s a little problem with this: a law, passed in 2019, that requires that government employees who weren’t paid during a shutdown are supposed to get every dime they’re owed in back pay once it reopens. The President who signed this bill into law: Donald Trump. As the shutdown drags on, Democrats are becoming increasingly worried that Republicans will use it as an excuse to get rid of SNAP and other social programs they’ve never liked, as well as end so many of the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies it will become the Unaffordable Care Act and Republicans will have achieved by indirection what they failed to do both in Congress and the courts.

Trump is also calling on the Senate Republican majority to eliminate the filibuster rule, which requires 60 votes for the Senate to accomplish almost anything. (Exceptions are “budget reconciliation” and “rescission” bills, which can pass with a simple majority.) So far Senate Republican leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) has resisted getting rid of the filibuster for the same reason that the late Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) did the last time Trump got impatient with the filibuster in 2017. Like McCain, Thune reasoned that the Republicans were in the Senate minority before, they might well be again, and when they are they will want the filibuster in place to resist what a Democratic President and Congress might do.

So the shutdown continues, seemingly with no end in sight. We’re heading into the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons, and millions of Americans will have to worry about what air travel will be like over the holidays with air traffic controllers working without pay and frequently calling in sick. The Republicans are increasingly counting on more Democrats to cave until the 60-vote threshold is reached to pass the House’s bill to reopen the government on Republicans’ terms. After the November 4 election, in which voters rewarded Democrats who fought back against the administration instead of yielding to it, this looks even less likely than it did before.