And Trump will have it once his term ends.
Don't cherry pick facts favourable to your narrative.
Look at the whole truth.
Something you have never done.
If it had been given to Joe Biden or Barak Obama...Brandon would have no trouble whatever in seeing that it is bribe.
MAGA is a cult of hypocrites and morons.
(But at least he's not an anti-vaxer, an antisemite, or a gun nut.)
On May 8, political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt published an op-ed in the New York Times reminding readers that most modern authoritarian leaders are elected. They maintain their power by using the power of the government—arrests, tax audits, defamation suits, politically targeted investigations, and so on—to punish and silence their opponents. They either buy or bully the media and civil society until opposing voices cave to their power.
Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt call this system “competitive authoritarianism.” A country that has fallen to it still holds elections, but the party in power has so weighted the system in its favor that it’s virtually impossible for it to lose.
The way to tell if the United States has crossed the line from democracy to competitive authoritarianism, the political scientists explain, is to see if people feel safe opposing those in power. Can they safely protest? Publish criticism of the government? Support opposition candidates? Or does taking a stand against those in power lead to punishment either by the government or by government supporters?
Looking at the many ways the Trump administration has been harassing critics, law firms, universities, judges, and media stations, they conclude that “America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.”
Since they made that observation less than a week ago, there has been more evidence of the administration’s attempt to consolidate power.
After the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the nation’s top body for analyzing intelligence, produced a report that contradicted President Donald J. Trump’s assertion that the Venezuelan government was directing the actions of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired acting NIC chair Michael Collins and his deputy, Maria Langan-Reikhof. The administration used the claim that Venezuela was working with TdA as justification for invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to render migrants from Venezuela to El Salvador.
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said: “The Director is working alongside President Trump to end the weaponization and politicization of the Intelligence Community.”
Department of Justice leaders are also consolidating power under the claim of ending weaponization. In a dramatic reversal of Department of Justice policies, Trump loyalist Ed Martin said yesterday that when the department finds it does not have the grounds to charge political opponents with a crime, it will “name” and “shame” them, attempting to convict them in the court of public opinion rather than a court of law. Trump initially nominated Martin to be the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, but Martin’s extremism convinced Senate Republican Thom Tillis to vote with Democrats on the Judiciary Committee to stop his nomination.
So Trump put him at the head of the Justice Department's "Weaponization Working Group,” allegedly designed to ferret out the weaponization of former president Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, but clearly intended to use the Justice Department to advance Trump’s interests.
A federal grand jury in Wisconsin yesterday indicted Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan, charging that she tried to help a man evade agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Dugan permitted an undocumented immigrant to leave her courtroom and enter the public hallway by the jury door rather than the public door. A week later, federal officials arrested her at the courthouse, photographed her in handcuffs, and spread the news of her arrest on social media, and Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters that Dugan’s arrest was a warning to others. A bipartisan group of 150 former federal and state judges wrote to Bondi to protest both Dugan’s arrest and the administration’s threats against the judiciary.
Today, U.S. Circuit Judge Amy St. Eve and Judge Robert Conrad, both of whom were appointed by Republican presidents, asked the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government to increase funding for judges’ security. David Gilbert of Wired reported today that calls for impeachment and violent threats against U.S. judges on social media have gone up by 327% since last year.
In a piece in The Atlantic today, respected conservative judge J. Michael Luttig noted that for all of Trump’s insistence that he is the victim of the “weaponization” of the federal government against him, “it is Trump who is actually weaponizing the federal government against both his political enemies and countless other American citizens today.”
Luttig warned that Trump is trying to end the rule of law in the United States, recreating the sort of monarchy against which the nation’s founders rebelled. He lists Trump’s pardoning of the convicted January 6 rioters (which he did with the collusion of Ed Martin), the arrest of Judge Dugan, which Luttig calls “appalling,” the deportation of a U.S. citizen with the child’s mother, and the “investigation” of private citizen Christopher Krebs.
“For not one of his signature initiatives during his first 100 days in office does Trump have the authority under the Constitution and laws of the United States that he claims,” Judge Luttig writes. Not for tariffs, not for unlawful deportations, not for attacks on colleges and law firms, not for his attacks on birthright citizenship, not for handing power to billionaire Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency,” not for trying to end due process, not for his attempts to starve government agencies by impounding their funding, not for his vow to regulate federal elections, not for his attacks on the media.
The courts are holding, Judge Luttig writes, and will continue to hold, but Trump “will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, “No more.”
And rising up they are.
The chaotic cuts of the Department of Government Efficiency soured people on billionaire Elon Musk and on government cuts. Yesterday, Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) told Ben Johansen of Politico that while Republicans claim the House DOGE caucus, created to work with Musk to audit the government, is “just getting started,” Moskowitz says it is “dead…defunct…. We only had two total meetings in five months.”
Currently, Newark Liberty International Airport is serving as an illustration of the effects of DOGE’s cuts. On Monday the airport was supposed to be staffed with 14 air traffic controllers but was down to just three, causing delays of up to seven hours. As Ed Pilkington of The Guardian reported, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy assured the public on Sunday that it was safe to fly out of the Newark airport, but on Monday told a podcaster that his wife was supposed to fly out of Newark but he had switched the flight to one out of New York’s La Guardia.
Recent polling shows that Trump is underwater in polling—meaning that more people disapprove than approve of his actions—even on his core issues of immigration and the economy. Many Trump voters apparently believed he would deport only violent criminals and are now shocked to see masked officers breaking car windows to arrest mothers with children. The rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador without due process and through what the administration initially called “administrative error” has caused such an uproar that, as Adrian Carrasquillo of The Bulwark noted today, the White House is working aggressively to try to recover control of the narrative by smearing the Maryland father as a member of the MS-13 gang, a human trafficker, and a terrorist with no evidence.
The administration has also lost credibility on the economy. Jeff Stein, Natalie Allison, and David J. Lynch of the Washington Post reported today that since he took office, Trump has changed his tariff policies at least 50 times. Some didn’t last a day. After insisting that his high tariffs would bring manufacturing to the United States, Trump’s administration on Monday announced it would reduce Trump’s 145% tariff on goods from China to 30%. China said it would correspondingly lower the tariff it had put on U.S. goods in retaliation for Trump’s tariff.
“It’s been completely insane,” economist Michael Strain, from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute think tank, told the Washington Post reporters. “When I step back from the euphoria over easing tariffs with China, what I see is the tariff rate is five times as high as when Trump took office. And we seem to have gotten nothing out of it at all.”
Evidently concerned that Trump’s economic agenda is so unpopular it will fail in Congress, Trump’s political operators have spent in the “high seven figures,” Alex Isenstadt of Axios says, to run ads in more than 20 targeted congressional districts to push lawmakers to get behind it. “Tell Congress this is a good deal for America,” the ad says. “Support President Trump's agenda to get our economy back on track.”
As the American people have turned on Trump, Democrats have been standing against him and members of his administration. Yesterday’s discussion of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” the Republicans are trying to get through Congress sparked dramatic pushback. The measure cuts taxes for the wealthy and corporations and helps to offset those financial benefits at the top of society with cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which used to be known as food stamps, as well as a bevy of other programs that help ordinary Americans.
When the House Committee on Energy and Commerce began to debate their piece of the bill yesterday, there were protests within the hearing room and in the hallway outside. After ten hours, the committee still had not gotten to the Medicaid cuts, which Democrats suggested was intentional. Representative Troy A. Carter Sr. (D-LA) recorded a video at 1:00 this morning noting that “Republicans want to do this in the dead of night…and not let the American people see.” He continued: “Shame on you…. The people deserve to see the actions that you’re doing to them by cutting Medicaid in favor of the richest rich for tax breaks. Hashtag, WeWontLetYou.”
The fireworks in two other hearings today rivaled the fights in the hearing over cuts to Medicaid. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified today before the House Homeland Security Committee. But she refused to answer Democrats’ questions about the deportation of U.S. citizens, the reality that the “MS13” on a photograph of Abrego Garcia’s hand was photoshopped, or that the Supreme Court has unanimously ordered the administration to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. Instead, she simply kept talking over the members of Congress, reiterating administration talking points.
“Your department has been sloppy,” Representative Seth Magaziner (D-RI) said. “And instead of focusing on real criminals, you have allowed innocent children to be deported while you fly around the country playing dress-up for the cameras. Instead of enforcing the laws, you have repeatedly broken them. You need to change course immediately before more innocent people are hurt on your watch.”
Democrats also challenged Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when he testified for the first time today before both the House Appropriations Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee to promote Trump’s budget. Kennedy seemed angry at being questioned and, like Noem, repeated debunked lies. He angrily claimed he had “not fired any working scientists” and was “not withholding money for lifesaving research,” although during his tenure, 20,000 people—one quarter of the health workforce—have lost their jobs and the administration has cut $2.7 billion in research funding for the National Institutes of Health.
Memorably, Kennedy told Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI): “I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.”
Judge Hannah Dugan herself pushed back against the administration today when she moved for an order to dismiss her indictment. Her motion called the government’s prosecution “virtually unprecedented and entirely unconstitutional.” The government cannot prosecute her, she argued, because she “is entitled to judicial immunity for her official acts.” As precedent she cited Trump v. United States, the July 2024 Supreme Court decision protecting Trump from prosecution for crimes committed as part of his official acts.
Voters in Omaha, Nebraska, last night dramatically rejected Trumpism when they elected Democrat John Ewing as their new mayor over Republican incumbent Jean Stothert. Ewing served in the Omaha Police Department for almost 25 years before becoming Douglas County treasurer for 17 years. He will be Omaha’s first Black mayor.
Perhaps in frustration, this season’s writers of the saga of American history are making their symbolism increasingly obvious.
Today the story broke that a long-neglected document held by Harvard University Law School, believed to be a cheap copy of the Magna Carta, is in fact the real document. More than 700 years ago, the Magna Carta, or Great Charter, established the concept that kings must answer to the law.
King John of England and a group of rebel barons agreed to the terms of the document on June 15, 1215, at Runnymede, a meadow a little less than an hour from London near the River Thames. After the king had raised taxes, barons rebelled, insisting that he was violating established custom. There were rumors of a plot to murder the king, and the barons armed themselves.
Those two armed camps met at Runnymede, where negotiators for the king and the barons hammered out a document with 63 clauses, mostly relating to feudal customs and the way the justice system would operate. But the document also began to articulate the principles central to modern democracies. The Magna Carta established the writ of habeas corpus—a prohibition on unlawful imprisonment—and the concept of the right to trial by jury.
Famously, it put into writing that: “No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.” It also provided that “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.”
The Magna Carta placed limits on the king’s ability to tax his subjects and established the law as an authority apart from the king. Anticipating the idea of checks and balances, it set up a council of barons to make sure the king obeyed the charter. If he did not, they could seize his lands and castles until he made amends.
The original charter did not last. King John convinced the pope to declare the document illegal because it circumscribed the power of the monarch, and in reaction, barons fought for the rights outlined in the Magna Carta. After the death of King John in 1216, the Magna Carta was confirmed and reissued, becoming an accepted part of the understanding of British rights. In 1297, and then again in 1300, King Edward I reissued the Magna Carta and confirmed that it was part of England’s law.
The copy in Harvard’s possession is from 1300. Harvard bought the document after World War II for $27.50, about $500 today. It is one of seven original copies of the 1300 Magna Carta, and in the United States of America in 2025, it is priceless.
In the early 1600s, King James I and King Charles I both reasserted the power of the king. Jurist Sir Edward Coke used the Magna Carta to insist that longstanding English customs guaranteed liberties to British subjects and required the king to comply with the law. There were limits to a king’s power to tax his subjects and his power to punish them.
This legal struggle was unfolding just as British subjects were colonizing the North American continent, and the charters of the new colonies echoed Coke’s arguments. The 1629 charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company, for example, established that colonists and, crucially, the children they might have in the colony, “shall have and enjoy all liberties and Immunities of free and naturall Subiects.”
As constitutional scholar Mary S. Bilder notes, lawyers and political figures put into the documents of the early British settlement of North America the belief that liberties were the birthright of English subjects. That belief informed colonists’ opposition to the 1765 Stamp Act, which imposed a new tax to which they had not given their consent and called for those who violated the law to be tried not by a jury of their peers but rather in admiralty courts. The Massachusetts Assembly declared the Stamp Act to be “against the Magna Carta and the natural rights of Englishmen, and therefore, according to Lord Coke, null and void.” British politician William Pitt told Parliament: “The Americans are the sons not the bastards of England.”
In September 1774, as tensions between the king and the colonists intensified, the first Continental Congress met in Philadelphia and wrote a declaration of rights and grievances, claiming the liberties guaranteed by “the principles of the English constitution, and the several charters or compacts.” Showing the unity of the colonies, the Congress published an image of 12 arms holding a column crowned by a liberty cap and resting on the words “Magna Carta.”
In 1776 the colonists threw off the monarchy to establish a government based on the idea that all people must answer to the law. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense: “in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” In 1776 the new states were writing their own constitutions that defended their liberties, including their protection from loss of life, liberty, or property without due process of the law.
That concept went directly into the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known collectively as the Bill of Rights. The Fifth Amendment provided that no “person shall be…deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment applied that principle to the states as well as the federal government, saying: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
The Harvard document is not the only Magna Carta in the U.S. In 2007, philanthropist David Rubenstein bought a 1297 copy of the Magna Carta from former presidential candidate Ross Perot. It was the only copy in the U.S., and Perot had permitted the National Archives to display it. Rubenstein bought the document for $21.3 million, hoping to keep it in the U.S. “to ensure that Americans could continue to see it, and to thereby be continuously reminded of its importance to our country.” He promptly lent it to the National Archives for public display, “as modest repayment of my debt to this country for my good fortune in being an American.”
And yet the fundamental principles on which the government of the United States is based are under attack. In an interview that aired on Sunday, May 4, President Donald J. Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker that he “didn’t know” if persons in the United States had a right to due process. When Welker reminded him that the right to due process is written into the Fifth Amendment, he said: “I don’t know. It seems—it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or two million or three million trials.”
Musician Bruce Springsteen has no doubts about those rights, embedded as they are in the country’s DNA. At a concert in Manchester, England, yesterday, he warned: “In America, the richest men… [are]... abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons. This is all happening now.” He criticized lawmakers who have “no…idea of what it means to be deeply American.”
And yet, Springsteen told the crowd: “The America that I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and, regardless of its faults, is a great country with a great people, so will survive this moment.”
MAGA world is performing over-the-top outrage over a photo former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey posted on Instagram, where he has been teasing a new novel. The image shows shells on a beach arranged in a popular slogan for opposing President Donald J. Trump: “86”—slang for tossing something away—followed by “47”, a reference to Trump’s presidency.
Using “eighty-six” as either a noun or a verb appears to have started in the restaurant industry in the 1930s to indicate that something was out of stock. It is a common term, used by MAGA itself to refer to getting rid of somebody…until now.
MAGA voices are insisting that this image was Comey’s threat to assassinate the president. Trump got into the game, telling Brett Baier of the Fox News Channel: "that meant assassination. And it says it loud and clear.... [H]e's calling for the assassination of the president...that's gonna be up to Pam and all of the great people.... He's a dirty cop.” Trump’s reference to Attorney General Pam Bondi and law enforcement paid off: yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the Department of Homeland Security and the Secret Service are investigating Comey. He showed up voluntarily at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., today for an interview.
In the past day, Trump’s social media account has also attacked wildly popular musical icons Bruce Springsteen and, somewhat out of the blue, Taylor Swift. Dutifully, media outlets have taken up a lot of oxygen reporting on “shellgate” and Trump’s posts about Springsteen and Swift, pushing other stories out of the news.
In his newsletter today, retired entrepreneur Bill Southworth tallied the times Trump has grabbed headlines to distract people from larger stories, starting the tally with how Trump’s posts about Peanut the Squirrel the day before the election swept like a brushfire across the right-wing media ecosystem and then into the mainstream. In early 2025, Southworth notes, as the media began to dig into the dramatic restructuring of the federal government, Trump posted outrageously about Gaza, and that story took over. When cuts to PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and the U.S. Agency for International Development threatened lives across Africa, Trump turned the conversation to white South Africans he lied were fleeing “anti-white genocide.”
Southworth calls this “narrative warfare,” and while it is true that Republican leaders have seeded a particular false narrative for decades now, this technique is also known as “political technology” or “virtual politics.” This system, pioneered in Russia under Russian president Vladimir Putin, is designed to get people to vote an authoritarian into office by creating a fake world of outrage. For those who do not buy the lies, there is another tool: flooding the zone so that people stop being able to figure out what is real and tune out.
The administration has clearly adopted this plan. As Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post noted in early March, the administration set out to portray Trump as a king in order “to sell the country on [Trump’s] expansionist approach to presidential power.”
The team set out not just to confront critics, but to drown them out with a constant barrage of sound bites, interviews with loyalists, memes slamming Democrats, and attack lines.
“We’re here. We’re in your face,” said Kaelan Dorr, a deputy assistant to the president who runs the digital team. “It’s irreverent. It’s unapologetic.” The White House brought right-wing influencers into the press pool, including at least one who before the election was exposed as being on the Russian payroll. Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung, who before he began to work for Trump was a spokesperson for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, said their goal was “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”
Dominating means controlling the narrative. That starts with perceptions of the president himself. Trump’s appearances have been deeply concerning as he cannot follow a coherent thread, frequently falls asleep, repeatedly veers into nonsense, and says he doesn’t know about the operations of his government. Yesterday, after journalist S.V. Date noted that the administration has posted online only about 20% of Trump’s words, Cheung told Date “You must be truly f*cking stupid if you think we’re not transparent.”
The White House also pushed back dramatically against a story that appeared in Business Insider Monday, comparing Donald Trump Jr. to former president Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The White House suggested it would take legal action against Business Insider’s German parent company.
Controlling the narrative also appears to mean manipulating the media, as Russians prescribed. Last month, Jeremy Kohler and Andy Kroll of ProPublica reported that Trump loyalist and political operative Ed Martin, now in charge of the “Weaponization Working Group,” in the Department of Justice, secretly seeded stories attacking a judge in a legal case that was not going his way. Martin has appeared more than 150 times on the Russia Today television channel and on Russian state radio, media outlets the State Department said were “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem,” where he claimed the Democrats were weaponizing the court system. Now he is vowing to investigate Democrats and anyone who criticizes the administration.
As Trump’s popularity falls, Trump’s political operators have spent in the “high seven figures,” Alex Isenstadt of Axios says, to run ads in more than 20 targeted congressional districts to push lawmakers to get behind Trump’s economic program. “Tell Congress this is a good deal for America,” the ad says. “Support President Trump's agenda to get our economy back on track.”
In their advertising efforts, Musk’s mining of U.S. government records is deeply concerning, for the treasure trove of information he appears to have mined would enable political operatives to target political ads with laser precision in an even tighter operation than the Cambridge Analytica program of 2016.
The stories the administration appears to be trying to cover up show a nation hobbled since January 20, 2025, as MAGA slashes the modern government that works for ordinary Americans and abandons democracy in order to put the power of the United States government into the hands of the extremely wealthy.
Trump vowed that high tariffs on goods from other countries would launch a new golden era in the United States, enabling the U.S. to extend his 2017 tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations, some of which expire at the end of this year. But his high tariffs, especially those on goods from China, dramatically contracted the economy and raised the chances of a recession.
His constant monkeying with tariff rates has created deep uncertainty in the economy, as well as raising concerns that at least some of his pronouncements are designed to manipulate the market. Today, Walmart announced it would have no choice but to raise prices, and the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to its second lowest reading on record.
Trump insisted earlier that other countries would come begging to negotiate, but now appears to have given up on the idea. “It’s not possible to meet the number of people that want to see us,” he said, announcing today that he will simply set new rates himself. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump argued that other countries would pay high tariff duties, helping the U.S. Treasury to address its high deficits at the same time the wealthy got further tax cuts.
Over the course of this week, Republicans tried to push through Congress a measure that they have dubbed “One, Big, Beautiful Bill,” a reference to Trump’s term for it. The measure extended Trump’s tax cuts at a cost to the nation of about $4.6 trillion over ten years and raised the debt ceiling by $4 trillion. At the same time, it cut Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and a slew of other programs.
The Republicans failed to advance that bill out of the House Budget Committee Friday afternoon. Far-right Republicans complained not that it cut too much from programs Americans rely on, but that it cut too little. Citing the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. and the uncertain outlook for the American economy, Moody’s downgraded the credit rating of the country today from AAA to AA1.
Since Trump took office, the “Department of Government Efficiency” also claimed to be slashing “waste, fraud, and abuse” from government programs, although actual financial savings have yet to materialize. Instead, the cuts are to programs that help ordinary Americans and move money upward to the wealthy. News broke today that cuts of 31% to the enforcement wing of the Internal Revenue Service will cost money: tax evasion among the top 10% of earners costs about $700 billion a year.
The cuts were driven at least in part by the ideological extremism of Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought was a key author of Project 2025, which calls for decimating the federal government.
Vought talked about traumatizing federal workers, and has done so, but the cuts have also traumatized Americans who depend on the programs that DOGE tried to cut. Cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) meant about $2 billion less in contracts for American farmers, while close to $100 million worth of food that could feed 3.5 million people rots in government warehouses.
Cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration have left airports without adequate numbers of air traffic controllers. After two 90-second blackouts at Newark Liberty International Airport when air traffic controllers lost control with airplanes, yesterday the air traffic controllers at Denver International Airport lost contact with planes for 2 minutes.
Cuts to a program that funds the healthcare of first responders and survivors of the September 11 World Trade Center terror attacks are leaving thousands of patients unclear whether their cancer treatments, for example, will be covered. Yesterday, acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) David Richardson told staff that FEMA is not prepared for hurricane season, which starts on June 1, and will work to return responsibility for the response to emergencies to the states. A document prepared for Richardson and obtained by Luke Barr of ABC News said: “As FEMA transforms to a smaller footprint, the intent for this hurricane season is not well understood, thus FEMA is not ready.”
Yesterday, news broke that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has been in talks with the producers of the reality show Duck Dynasty for a new reality show in which immigrants compete against each other in cultural contests to win the chance to move their U.S. citizenship applications ahead faster. It is made-for-TV, just like so many of the performances this administration uses to distract Americans from the unpopular policies that are stripping the government of benefits for ordinary Americans and moving wealth upward.
Such a show might appeal to confirmed MAGA. But it is a profound perversion of the American dream.
The ruling Fidesz party, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has proposed a law that could be used to ban political parties and media outlets.
[...]
According to the bill, threats to national sovereignty comprise the violation of the values and provisions of the Hungarian constitution, as well as the negative portrayal of these or the support of any attempt to undermine them. The constitutional values are described as including the unity and cohesion of all Hungarians, Hungary's Christian culture, marriage as being understood exclusively as a union between a man and a woman, or the pursuit of peace and cooperation with other peoples and countries.
The bill describes organizations to be all legal entities, registered or not. Activities that "influence public life" can include those that "try to influence any decision-making process or the will of voters."
If the law is adopted, the Hungarian Sovereignty Protection Office, created in early 2024, will be given the power to classify all organizations as receiving "foreign support," regardless of the amount and without a lower limit, if they receive any donations or gifts from abroad. That means a book would fall into this category, as would EU funding.
[...]
In summary: If the law is adopted, Orban will be able to use it to criminalize and ban anyone or anything that criticizes him and his regime, from websites to political parties.
This weekend there are two major anniversaries for the history of civil rights in the United States. Seventy-one years ago today, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. It overturned the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision handed down 129 years ago tomorrow. On that day, May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court declared that the Fourteenth Amendment allowed segregation within states so long as accommodations were “equal.”
The journey from Plessy to Brown was the story of ordinary people creating change with the tools they had at hand.
Recently, scholars have shown how, after the Plessy decision, Black Americans in the South used state civil law to advance their civil rights. Insisting on their rights in the South’s complicated system of credits and debts, they hammered out a legal identity. Denied justice under criminal law, they sued companies, primarily railroad companies, for denying them equal protection against harassment. And, according to historian Myisha S. Eatmon, they often won these civil suits, even at the hands of all-white juries.
It was on these grounds that Black lawyers won discrimination suits over public schools early in the twentieth century. They relied on the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that allowed “separate” accommodations for Black and white Americans so long as they were “equal.” They would point out how much poorer the conditions in Black schools were than those in white schools, proving those conditions violated the “separate but equal” requirement in the decision condoning racial segregation.
Legal challenges to segregation were only one tool in the workshop of those trying to dismantle the system. After the organizers of the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 caricatured Black Americans, Black educator and suffragist Mary Burnett Talbert reached out to sociologist and writer W.E.B. DuBois to call for a movement to advance equal treatment.
In 1905, thirty-two Black leaders met in Fort Erie, Ontario, and launched the Niagara Movement to call for equal justice before the law and economic opportunities, including the right to an education, equal to those enjoyed by white men. A year later, journalist William English Walling joined the group. Walling was a well-educated descendant of a wealthy enslaving family from Kentucky who had become a social reformer. Another well-educated social reformer, Mary White Ovington, also joined. And so did their friend Henry Moskowitz, a Jewish immigrant from Romania who was well connected in New York Democratic politics.
A race riot in Springfield, Illinois, on August 14 and 15, 1908, sparked a wider organization. The violence broke out after the sheriff transferred two Black prisoners, one accused of murder and another of rape, to a different town out of concern for their safety.
Furious that they had been prevented from vengeance against the accused, a mob of white townspeople looted businesses and burned homes in Springfield’s Black neighborhood. They lynched two Black men and ran most of the Black population out of town. At least eight people died, more than 70 were injured, and at least $3 million of damage in today’s money was done before 3,700 state militia troops quelled the riot.
Walling and his wife visited Springfield days later. He was horrified to find white citizens complaining that their Black neighbors had forgotten “their place.”
Walling reached back to the principles on which the nation was founded. He warned that either the North must revive the spirit of Lincoln—who, after all, was associated with Springfield—and commit to “absolute political and social equality” or the white supremacist violence of the South would spread across the whole nation. “The day these methods become general in the North,” he wrote, “every hope of political democracy will be dead, other weaker races and classes will be persecuted in the North as in the South, public education will undergo an eclipse, and American civilization will await either a rapid degeneration or another profounder and more revolutionary civil war….”
In January 1909, leaders from the Niagara Movement met in the Wallings’ apartment in New York City to create a new civil rights organization. Sixty prominent reformers, Black and white, signed their call, and the next year an interracial group of 300 men and women met to create a permanent organization. After a second meeting in May 1910, they adopted a formal name, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born, although they settled on the centennial of Lincoln’s birth as their actual beginning.
It was no accident that supporters of the project included muckraking journalists Ray Stannard Baker and Ida B. Wells, as well as Du Bois, for a vibrant Black newspaper culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was central to spreading knowledge of the atrocities committed against Black Americans, especially in the South, and of how to sue over them. In 1910, Du Bois would choose to leave his professorship at Atlanta University to become the NAACP’s director of publicity and research. For the next 14 years, he would edit the organization’s flagship journal The Crisis.
While The Crisis was a newspaper, a literary magazine, and a cultural showcase, its key function reflected the journalistic sensibilities of those like Baker, Wells, and especially Du Bois: it constantly called attention to atrocities, discrimination, and the ways in which the United States was not living up to its stated principles. At a time when violence and suppression were mounting against Black Americans, Wells, Du Bois, and their colleagues relentlessly spread knowledge of what was happening and demanded that officials treat all people equally before the law.
That use of information to rally people to the cause of equality became a hallmark of the NAACP. It took advantage of the skills of women like Rosa Parks, who after 1944 was the secretary of the NAACP’s Montgomery, Alabama, chapter. Parks investigated sexual violence against Black women and compiled statistics about those assaults, making a record of the reality of Black Americans’ lives.
It was NAACP leader Walter Francis White who in 1946 brought the story of World War II veteran Isaac Woodard, blinded by a police officer and his deputy in South Carolina after talking back to a bus driver, to President Harry S. Truman.
Truman had been a racist southern Democrat, but after hearing about Woodard, he convened the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, directly asking its members to find ways to use the federal government to strengthen the civil rights of racial and religious minorities in the country. Truman later said, “When a Mayor and City Marshal can take a…Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out…his eyes, and nothing is done about it by the State authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.”
The committee’s final report, written in the wake of a world war against the hierarchical societies of fascism, recommended new federal laws to address police brutality, end lynching, protect voting—including for Indigenous Americans—and promote equal rights, accounting for the internment of Japanese Americans as well as discrimination against Black Americans. It called for “[t]he elimination of segregation, based on race, color, creed, or national origin, from American life” and for a public campaign to explain to white Americans why ending segregation was important.
The NAACP had highlighted that the inequalities in American society were systemic rather than the work of a few bad apples, bearing witness until “the believers in democracy” could no longer remain silent.
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, an all-white jury acquitted the police officers who blinded Woodward. Presiding judge Julius Waties Waring, the son of a Confederate veteran, was disgusted at the jury’s decision and at the crowd that cheered when it heard the verdict. He began to stew on how to challenge racial discrimination legally when white juries at the state level could simply decide to nullify the law.
In 1940, Black NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall had founded the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., in New York City. Six years later, civil rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley joined him. He would go on to become the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. She would become the first Black woman to argue before the Supreme Court and the first Black woman to become a federal judge. They were a powerhouse team.
In 1952, with the support of Judge Waring, Marshall and Motley and their collaborators took a new tack to oppose segregation in public schools. Rather than resting on the idea that poorly funded Black schools were not equal to white schools as Plessy required, they argued outright that racial segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the same argument the Supreme Court had rejected in Plessy. This formula would enable the federal government to restrain white juries at the state level.
Truman had desegregated the military but had not been able to move civil rights through Congress because of the segregationist southern Democrats. After he took office in 1953, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower took up the cause. He appointed former California governor Earl Warren, a Republican known as a consensus builder, as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Warren took his seat in October 1953, as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, a group of cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, was before the court.
The court’s decision, handed down on May 17, 1954, explicitly overturned Plessy, saying that segregated schools denied Black children “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The decision was a long time coming, even though Justice John Marshall Harlan had anticipated it almost 60 years before. Harlan wrote a dissenting opinion in Plessy harking back to the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision in which the Supreme Court denied that Black Americans could be citizens and said they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The American people had emphatically overruled that decision by adding the Fourteenth Amendment—on which Brown v. Board was based—to the U.S. Constitution.
“In my opinion,” Harlan wrote in 1896, “the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case.”
