The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

Today, millions of Americans and their allies turned out across the United States and around the globe to demonstrate their commitment to American democracy and their opposition to a president and an administration apparently bent on replacing that democracy with a dictatorship.

Administration loyalists tried to claim the No Kings protests would be “hate America” rallies of “the pro-Hamas wing and Antifa people.” Texas governor Greg Abbott deployed the Texas National Guard ahead of the No Kings Day protests, warning that “[v]iolence and destruction will never be tolerated in Texas.”

In fact, protesters turned out waving American flags and wearing frog and unicorn and banana costumes and carrying homemade signs that demanded the release of the Epstein files and defended Lady Liberty. They laughed and danced and took selfies and sang. City police departments, including those of New York City, San Diego, and Washington, D.C., said they had made no protest-related arrests.

In Oakland, California, Mother Jones senior editor Michael Mechanic interviewed a man named Justin, asking him if, as a Black man, he had particular concerns about the actions of the Trump administration.

Justin answered: “You know…a lot of times I have a hopeless feeling, but…being out here today just reminds me about the beauty of America and American protests. And, you know, the fact that they tried to…stomp on this, step on this, you know, say it’s non-American, because that’s what I’ve been reading a lot about. No, this is the point of America right here: to be able to have this opportunity to protest…. [This] does not look like Antifa, Hamas, none of this stuff that they’re talking about…. [Y]ou know, this is the beauty of America.”

The No Kings demonstrations ran the gamut from hundreds of thousands of protesters in large, blue cities, to smaller crowds in small towns in Republican-dominated states. Together, they demonstrate that the administration’s claims to popularity are a lie. Such a high turnout means businesses and institutions that thought they must cater to the administration to appeal to a majority of Americans will be forced to recalculate.

And the protests showed that Americans care fervently about democracy.

Today, millions of Americans and their allies turned out across the United States and around the globe to demonstrate their commitment to American democracy and their opposition to a president and an administration apparently bent on replacing democracy with a dictatorship.

‘Empty shelves, higher prices’: Americans tell of cost of Trump’s tariffs
US consumers say price rises caused by president’s tariffs contradicts his promise to make life more affordable

The Corn Laws were tariffs and other trade restrictions on imported food and corn enforced in the United Kingdom between 1815 and 1846. The word corn in British English denotes all cereal grains, including wheat, oats and barley.[1] The laws were designed to keep corn prices high to favour domestic farmers, and represented British mercantilism.[a] The Corn Laws blocked the import of cheap corn, initially by simply forbidding importation below a set price, and later by imposing steep import duties, making it too expensive to import it from abroad, even when food supplies were short. The House of Commons passed the corn law bill on 10 March 1815, the House of Lords on 20 March and the bill received royal assent on 23 March 1815.

Lets hope these tariffs don't last thirty years.

All last week, Republican leaders tried to portray the No Kings protests scheduled for Saturday, October 18, as “Hate America” rallies. G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers partnered with Atlanta-based science newsroom The Xylom to estimate that as many as 8.2 million people turned out yesterday to oppose the Trump administration. The mood at the protests was joyful and peaceful, with protesters holding signs that championed American principles of democracy, free speech, equality, and the rule of law. As the Grand Junction, Colorado, Daily Sentinel put it in a front-page headline: “‘This is America’ ‘No Kings’ protests against Trump bring a street party vibe to cities nationwide.”

Then last night, after the protests, the president’s social media account posted an AI-generated video showing Trump in a fighter jet with “KING TRUMP” painted on the side. The president sits in the airplane in front of something round that could be seen as a halo. He is wearing a gold crown; weirdly, the oxygen mask is over his mouth and chin, rather than mouth and nose.

Once in the air, the plane drops excrement on American cities, including what seems to be New York City. The excrement drenches protesters, one of whom is 23-year-old liberal political commentator and influencer Harry Sisson. Journalist Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who shares media clips that reflect politics, commented: “Trump posts AI video showing him literally dumping sh*t on America.” Historian Larry Glickman noted that media outlets make much of alleged Democratic disdain for ordinary Americans, but have had little to say about the disdain for Americans embodied by Trump’s video.

Several administration videos and images have responded to Americans saying “No Kings” by taking the position “Yes, We Want Kings,” an open embrace of the end of democracy. But they are more than simple trolling. Led by Trump, MAGA Republicans have abandoned the idea of politics, which is the process of engaging in debate and negotiation to attract support and win power. What is left when a system loses the give and take of politics is force.

The idea that leaders must attract voters with reasoned arguments to win power and must concede power when their opponents win has been the central premise of American government since 1800. In that year, after a charged election in which each side accused the other of trying to destroy the country, Federalist John Adams turned the reins of government over to the leader of the opposition, Thomas Jefferson. That peaceful transfer of power not only protected the people, it protected leaders who had lost the support of voters, giving them a way to leave office safely and either retire or regroup to make another run at power.

The peaceful transfer of power symbolized the nation’s political system and became the hallmark of the United States of America. It lasted until January 6, 2021, when sitting president Trump refused to accept the voters’ election of Democrat Joe Biden, the leader of the opposition.

Now back in power, Trump and his loyalists are continuing to undermine the idea of politics, policies, and debate, trying instead to delegitimize the Democratic opposition altogether. Yesterday, during the protests, President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D Vance, and the official White House social media account posted a video of Trump placing a royal crown on his head, draping a royal robe around his shoulders, and unsheathing and brandishing a sword (an image that raises questions about why Trump wanted one of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s swords so badly that he had the museum director who refused to hand it over fired). In the video, Democratic leaders including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and what appears to be Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) first kneel and then bow to Trump.

Administration imagery doesn’t simply insult opposition leaders; it undermines the idea of politics by suggesting that Democrats are un-American. Last night the White House continued its racist crusade against Democratic leaders by posted an AI-generated image of Trump and Vance wearing jewel-encrusted crowns positioned above an image of House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) wearing Mexican sombreros. The caption reads: “We’re built different.”

The administration’s hostility to loyal opposition is translating into direct assaults on our government. House speaker Mike Johnson is refusing to seat a member of the opposition. Voters chose representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) on September 23 to fill a vacant House seat, but Johnson has come up with one reason after another not to seat her. Until she is sworn in, she has no access to government resources and cannot represent her constituents. She also cannot be the 218th signature on a discharge petition that would force a vote on whether to demand the release of the Epstein files, the final signature needed.

Grijalva recorded a video reinforcing the political system, saying: “We need to get to work, get on the floor, and negotiate so we can reopen the government.”

But Republican congressional leaders are refusing even to talk with Democrats to reopen the government, let alone to negotiate with them. They are trying to force Democrats simply to do as they say, despite the fact that 78% of Americans, including 59% of Republicans, support the Democrats’ demand for an extension of the tax credit that lowers the cost of healthcare premiums on the Affordable Care Act markets. Lindsay Wise, Anna Wilde Mathews, and Katy Stech Ferek of the Wall Street Journal reported today that more than three quarters of those who are insured through the ACA markets live in states that voted for Trump.

A video of Trump in a bomber attacking American cities carries an implied threat that the disdain of throwing excrement doesn’t erase. This morning, Trump reinforced that threat when he reminded Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo: “Don’t forget I can use the Insurrection Act. Fifty percent of the presidents almost have used that. And that’s unquestioned power. I choose not to, I’d rather do this, but I’m met constantly by fake politicians, politicians that think that, that you know they it’s not like a part of the radical left movement to have safety. These cities have to be safe.”

That “safety” apparently involves detaining U.S. citizens without due process. On Thursday, Nicole Foy of ProPublica reported that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been detained by immigration agents. She reports they “have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.”

On Friday, the Trump administration pushed its attempt to use the military in Democratic-led cities, asking the Supreme Court to let it deploy troops in Chicago immediately. Chris Geidner of Law Dork notes that four judges, two appointed by Democrats and two appointed by Republicans, have rejected the administration’s arguments for why they must send in troops. Now the Department of Justice has appealed to the Supreme Court, asking for a decision on the so-called shadow docket, which would provide a fast response, but one without any hearings or explanation.

The administration’s appeal to the Supreme Court warned that there was “pressing risk of violence” in Chicago—a premise the judges rejected—and said preventing Trump from going into the city “improperly impinges on the President’s authority.”

How much difference will the No Kings Day protests, even as big as they were, make in the face of the administration’s attempt to get rid of our democratic political system and replace it with authoritarianism? What good is an inflatable frog against federal agents?

Scholar of social movements Lisa Corrigan noted that large, fun marches full of art and music expand connections and make people more willing to take risks against growing state power. They build larger communities by creating new images that bring together recognizable images from the past in new ways, helping more people see themselves in such an opposition. The community and good feelings those gatherings develop help carry opposition through hard moments. Corrigan notes, too, that yesterday “every single rally (including in the small towns) was bigger than the surrounding police force available. That kind of image event is VERY IMPORTANT if you’re…demonstrating social coherence AGAINST a fascist government and its makeshift gestapo.”

Such rallies “bring together multigenerational groups and the playfulness can help create enthusiasm for big tent politics against the monoculture of fascism,” Corrigan writes. “The frogs (and unicorns and dinosaurs) will be defining ideographs of this period of struggle.”

Zero credibility. Cruz really looks like a caricature of an untrustworthy shyster trying to sell you a deficient product or pedal a false tale. Just sayin'...

Over the weekend, as millions of Americans attended “No Kings” protests, President Donald J. Trump’s social media accounts responded by posting images not just of Trump as a king—defecating on Americans, even—but also of Vice President J.D. Vance in a royal crown, suggesting that American democracy has been supplanted by tyranny that will last past Trump into the future.

In the United States, no man is a monarch: the law is supposed to be king. In January 1776, newly arrived immigrant Thomas Paine published Common Sense, explaining to his new countrymen why they should declare independence from the King of England. He called for a new government based not in heritage or tradition, but in the law. “In America the law is king,” Paine wrote. “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.”

But under Trump, the law is under attack.

Last night, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley, Aaron Weisz, Aliza Chasan, and Ian Flickinger presented the story of Erez Reuveni, a former lawyer for the Department of Justice (DOJ) who alleges that the Trump administration is destroying the rule of law in America.

Reuveni was part of the first administration of President Donald J. Trump, where he defended Trump’s travel ban order, prohibiting travelers from Muslim majority countries from coming to the United States. He was so effective, the journalists note, he quickly took on a prominent role in Trump’s second term.

On March 14, the same day he was promoted to become the acting deputy director of the DOJ’s immigration section, Reuveni and others in his section met with Emil Bove, who had once been Trump’s criminal defense attorney and was then the third-highest official at the DOJ. Bove told the lawyers that Trump would invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport more than 100 Venezuelan migrants the administration claimed were terrorists. They would not receive due process.

According to Reuveni, “Bove emphasized, those planes need to take off, no matter what. Then after a pause, he also told all in attendance, and if some court should issue an order preventing that, we may have to consider telling that court, ‘f*** you.’”

“I felt like a bomb had gone off,” Reuveni told 60 Minutes. “Here is the number three official using expletives to tell career attorneys that we might just have to consider disregarding federal court orders.”

The next day, some of the prisoners sued, and U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg called a hearing. Boasberg asked Drew Ensign, representing the DOJ, whether the planes would be leaving that weekend. Ensign said he didn’t know, even though, according to Reuveni, Ensign was at the same meeting with Bove he was. Reuveni called that moment in court “stunning.”

“It is the highest, most egregious violation of a lawyer’s code of ethics to mislead a court with intent,” Reuveni told 60 Minutes.

Boasberg ordered the planes not to leave and ordered the government to return any planes in the air. But instead, more than five hours after Boasberg’s order, the planes carrying the migrants arrived at the notorious terrorist prison CECOT in El Salvador.

“And then it really hit me. It’s like, we really did tell the court, screw you. We really did just tell the courts, we don’t care about your order. You can’t tell us what to do,” Reuveni told “60 Minutes.” “That was just a real gut punch.”

Then it turned out that Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador whose deportation to El Salvador a U.S. court had prohibited, had been rendered to CECOT. Reuveni told CNN that one of his superiors called him and ordered him to say that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang and a terrorist. Reuveni said he couldn’t say such a thing because it was a lie.

“What’s to stop them if they decide they don’t like you anymore, to say you’re a criminal, you’re a member of MS-13, you’re a terrorist,” Reuveni told 60 Minutes. “What’s to stop them from sending in some DOJ attorney at the direction of DOJ leadership to delay, to filibuster, and if necessary, to lie? And now that’s you gone and your liberties changed.”

When Reuveni refused to sign a brief calling Abrego Garcia a terrorist, the administration fired him.

John Hudson, Jeremy Roebuck, and Samantha Schmidt of the Washington Post reported yesterday that the day before Reuveni was promoted and Bove called a meeting with him and other DOJ lawyers to tell them “the planes need to take off, no matter what,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a phone conversation with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. The Trump administration wanted to send hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to CECOT, but Bukele had a price.

Bukele wanted nine leaders of the MS-13 gang returned to El Salvador with the other prisoners. The individuals he wanted had threatened to expose the relationship between Bukele and MS-13. Bukele’s government has allegedly cut deals with MS-13 leaders to reduce the number of “public murders” to make it look as if homicide rates are falling, a development that boosts Bukele’s popularity.

The Washington Post journalists report that Rubio promised to return the MS-13 leaders. But some of those leaders were informants who were under the protection of the U.S. government. For years, U.S. law enforcement had worked first to capture high-ranking members of the deadly MS-13 gang and then to secure their cooperation with the promise of protection by the U.S. government. Rubio told Bukele the U.S. would renege on those agreements and turn the informants over to the government whose corruption they were exposing.

“The deal is a deep betrayal of U.S. law enforcement, whose agents risked their lives to apprehend the gang members,” said Douglas Farah, a contractor who had investigated and helped U.S. officials to dismantle MS-13. “Who would ever trust the word of U.S. law enforcement or prosecutors again?”

The 60 Minutes story noted that the nonpartisan law journal Just Security has discovered more than 35 cases in which judges have said the government is lying to them. One judge warned that “trust that had been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.”

Republicans in the U.S. Senate confirmed Bove as a U.S. appeals court judge in July, although Republican senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joined all Democrats in voting no. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said of Bove: “He has a strong legal background and has served his country honorably. I believe he will be diligent, capable and a fair jurist.”

At the same time the administration undermines the rule of law that the Founders expected would rule the nation, it is illustrating the destruction of the people’s government with a symbolism that is hard to miss.

Although the U.S. government has been shut down now for 20 days, leaving vital public servants without pay, work on Trump’s 90,000-square-foot ballroom has continued. In July, when he announced the project, Trump said: “It won’t interfere with the current building. It won’t be. It’ll be near it but not touching it—and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favorite. It’s my favorite place. I love it.”

Trump’s promise notwithstanding, demolition crews have begun to tear down the East Wing of the White House, the “People’s House.” Jonathan Edward and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post noted that today a backhoe began ripping through the structure. The National Capital Planning Commission, which approves construction of federal buildings, has not signed off on the destruction, but in September, Will Weissert of the Associated Press reported that the Trump-appointed head of the commission, Will Scharf, who is also the White House staff secretary, said the board has no jurisdiction over demolition or site preparation. “What we deal with is essentially construction, vertical build,” Sharf said during the only public meeting about the ballroom.

But White House officials do not appear to want to advertise their destruction of part of the historic building. Natalie Andrews and Alex Leary of the Wall Street Journal reported that officials at the Treasury Department, which has a front-row seat to the demolition, have told employees not to share photos of the grounds. According to Trump, funding for his ballroom has been provided by dozens of companies, including Apple, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, and Coinbase. As of September, the White House had not yet submitted building plans to the National Capital Planning Commission.

The first president to live in the White House after its construction was a contemporary of Thomas Paine, John Adams. When he moved into the house in 1800, Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail: “I Pray Heaven To Bestow The Best Of Blessings On This House And All that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof.”

This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.

On Saturday, perhaps stung by the enormous nationwide “No Kings” protests, Trump posted an A.I.-generated video on Truth Social that inadvertently captured his approach to governing. In it the president, wearing a crown, flies a “Top Gun”-style fighter plane labeled “King Trump” above American cities crowded with demonstrators, dumping gargantuan loads of feces on them. Amplifying it on social media, the White House communications director Steven Cheung gleefully wrote that the president was defecating “all over these No Kings losers!”

It is not at this point surprising that Trump holds half the country in contempt, or that he treats urban America as a group of restive colonies to be brutally subdued. This is a man who told the military it should use our cities as “training grounds” for foreign operations, and who has sent both troops and federal agents to terrorize Los Angeles and other cities. The president’s attempts to demote the residents of blue America from citizens to subjects have become so routine they barely make headlines anymore.

What’s curious, then, is not Trump’s eagerness to degrade us, but his uncontrollable urge to defile himself and his office. Most national leaders, after all, do not willingly associate themselves with diarrhea. Scatological attacks are usually the province of outsiders trying to cut the powerful down to size. (French farmers, for example, have vented their fury at ruling authorities by dumping piles of manure in front of government buildings.) Rulers, by contrast, tend to jealously guard their dignity. But not Trump.

A perverse delight in defilement has always coursed through MAGA circles. Describing the profoundly cynical, curdled atmosphere in which 20th-century totalitarian movements took root, Hannah Arendt wrote, “It seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.” A similar giddy nihilism has long surrounded the president and his devotees, who often treat his unlikely ascension as a world-historical feat of trolling.

There’s a tension, however, when people in power adopt this oppositional stance. On the surface, Trump longs for grandeur. But on some subconscious level he and those around him have a deep instinct for degradation. The administration purports to venerate traditional aesthetics; an August executive order on federal architecture disavowed modernism and called for classical designs that convey “the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of America’s system of self-government.” At the same time, Trump paved over the lawn of the White House Rose Garden to make it look like the patio at Mar-a-Lago. On Monday, The Washington Post reported that his construction crews have begun demolishing the facade of the White House’s East Wing to build a ballroom.

The dominant aesthetic of the administration comes not from antiquity but from A.I. slop, the tackier and more juvenile the better. (Think of the White House’s image of a crying migrant rendered in the style of a Japanese Studio Ghibli animation.) Last week, when HuffPost asked the White House who chose Hungary as the site of an upcoming meeting between Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, responded, “Your mom did.” She was obviously trying to insult and delegitimize a representative of the liberal media. But the result was to reveal herself as a gross parody of a professional press secretary. The administration plans to mark America’s 250th anniversary with a UFC cage fight on the White House’s south lawn, an idea that seems ripped from the scabrous 2006 satire “Idiocracy.”

The Trump gang’s compulsion to debase and cheapen almost everything they touch is far more than a matter of style. Perhaps the most puzzling thing about the second Trump administration has been its attacks on pillars of American strength that pose no challenge to its ideology. It was predictable that the White House would gut support for the humanities, but not that it would defund pediatric cancer research. I expected it to try to eliminate the Department of Education, but not to deliberately wreck the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which helps communities in both red and blue states when they’re beset by disasters.

Some of this slashing and burning can be explained by the old-fashioned small-government fanaticism of administration personnel like Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. But it also seems like a function of Trump’s abusive insecurity. Part of him wants to aggrandize the country to reflect his own inflated self-conception. And part of him seems to want to trash it out of rage at the limits of his dominance.

In “The Emergency,” an allegorical novel coming out next month, the writer George Packer captures some of the lust for desecration animating the Trumpist right. The book hinges on a conflict between self-righteous Burghers, who live in cities, and resentful, paranoid rural people known as Yeomen. In a narrative turn that appears, in light of Trump’s video, quite prescient, the Yeomen make plans to bombard the Burghers’ city with fecal cannons. It’s as if Packer managed, for a moment, to tune into the president’s wavelength.

“There was something so audacious about it, so inventive and barbaric, so low,” he writes, adding, “It would break through the final restraint, and there would be no going back.”

Fights over resources and beliefs can be settled. It’s much harder to imagine rapprochement with those who want, above all, to befoul us.

Posted a Video of Himself Dumping Excrement on Our Cities