The 47th President and the Post-Biden World 2.0

The ongoing battle over funding Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents at U.S. airports gives a detailed view of Republican governance in this era.

Republicans hold a majority of seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. They also hold the White House. On paper, this control makes it look as if Republicans should be able to put anything they want into law. But the reality is that the extremism of President Donald J. Trump and the MAGA Republicans is so unpopular that those clinging to it are making it impossible for the Republicans to govern.

The fight over TSA funding is a case study of this dynamic. When Congress passed the appropriations bills necessary to fund the U.S. government for 2026, Republicans in the House passed funding for the Department of Homeland Security with a simple majority vote and sent the measure off to the Senate.

But in the Senate, the minority can stop a measure from coming up for a vote unless sixty members agree to move it forward. With this leverage, provided by the so-called filibuster, Democrats refused to give more money to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the parent agency for Border Patrol. Border Patrol is the law enforcement agency of CBP that has been in the news as its agents assault undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.

Back in July 2025, when they passed the budget reconciliation law they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans provided $170.7 billion in additional funding for immigration and border enforcement activities by DHS, as well as for the presence of soldiers with the Defense Department on the border. That money included $29.9 billion for ICE, with funding for an additional 10,000 officers. The law gave ICE a lot of leeway in spending that money. The law also included $7.8 billion for CBP with funds to hire 3,000 new Border Patrol agents.

With White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller directing immigration policy, alongside then–Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and her associate Corey Lewandowski, ICE and Border Patrol agents terrorized people in American cities. Their regime eventually led to the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Daniel Lippman of Politico reported today that the stress of his job—including dealing with Miller’s tirades—has led the acting head of ICE, Todd Lyons, to be hospitalized at least twice in the past seven months.

As the White House pushed ever-increasing numbers of arrests and as videos circulated of ICE and Border Patrol agents beating individuals up, Americans turned against Trump’s handling of immigration. A survey out yesterday from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization researching popular opinion on topics that touch the intersection of religion, culture, and politics, showed that just 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, while 61% disapprove. An even lower number—33%—hold favorable views of ICE officers, while 67% like their local police officers.

Fifty-seven percent of Americans think sending ICE officers to places like Minnesota is making those places less safe, while only 38% disagree. And only 36% of Americans want Congress to give ICE more money, although 76% of Republicans favor increased funding for ICE.

Public opposition to more funding for ICE and Border Patrol without significant changes to their behavior has put Democratic senators on solid ground to oppose funding all of DHS without a promise of those changes. “In the wake of the murder of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, Democrats made it clear, no blank check for ICE and Border Patrol,” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) explained. Senate Democrats repeatedly tried to pass a measure to fund all of DHS except ICE and Border Patrol, which were already funded with that huge pot of money under the budget reconciliation bill of last July.

But Republicans, under pressure from Trump, repeatedly voted down the Democrats’ attempt to fund the rest of DHS, including TSA, without funding for ICE and CBP, instead demanding Democrats pass the package the House had, the one with full funding for DHS, including for ICE and CBP.

Then, on Sunday, Trump demanded the Senate add to the funding plan the so-called Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE America) Act, a bill that would require people to show not just ID but also proof of citizenship to register to vote and to vote and would severely restrict mail-in voting. It would also require states to hand over their voting lists to the federal government for processing through a government database used to screen for noncitizens applying for federal programs—confusingly also called the SAVE system, although it stands for “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements”—even though that procedure has a rate of false positives as high as 14%. The Brennan Center estimates that the SAVE America Act would kick at least 21 million Americans off voting lists.

To that legislation, Trump has also added provisions targeting transgender Americans, apparently to appeal to his faltering base and pressure Republican senators to vote in favor of the measure.

In order to get his wish list, Trump has called for Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) to get rid of the filibuster, enabling Senate Republicans to push through whatever they want without any Democratic votes, as the Republican majority in the House can do. Yesterday, Trump posted: “When is “enough, enough” for our Republican Senators. There comes a time when you must do what should have been done a long time ago, and something which the Lunatic Democrats will do on day one, if they ever get the chance. TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, and get our airports, and everything else, moving again. Also, add the complete, all five items, SAVE AMERICA ACT items. Go for the Gold!!! President DJT”

Meanwhile, some TSA agents, unpaid for over a month, began to quit. Others called in sick. And lines in airports began to grow longer and slower. So, apparently on a whim designed to pressure Democrats, Trump sent ICE agents into fourteen airports in eleven cities, where without training to do security checks, they did little to relieve congestion. The contrast of ICE agents standing around collecting paychecks while TSA agents were working without them ended up pressuring Trump, rather than the Democrats.

Then, yesterday, Trump suddenly announced he would sign an emergency order to pay TSA agents, suggesting he could have done so all along, although it is not clear where the money will be coming from or whether moving money in the way he suggests is even legal.

As soon as Trump said it would be okay to pay TSA agents, Senate Republicans agreed to pass the measure that was essentially what the Democrats called for (remember, only 36% of Americans want Congress to give ICE more money). At 2:00 this morning, they unanimously passed a measure that funds every part of DHS, including TSA agents, but does not give more money to ICE and Border Patrol until Democrats and Republicans agree on reforms, although Thune vowed that he would see to it that Democrats don’t get the reforms they want.

The Senate passed the measure and left for a two-week break, sending their bill to the House, which could have passed it and then gone home.

But…

As Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) explained, members of the far-right Freedom Caucus took a stand against the bill, apparently because they want more money for ICE and Border Patrol, want the SAVE Act, and want Trump’s approval. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) could ignore them and pass the measure with the votes of all the Democrats and most Republicans. But Johnson depends on the far right to maintain his speakership, so he says he will refuse to pass the Senate’s measure and instead get the House to pass a 60-day continuing resolution to fund DHS at its current levels.

But the Senate fight has shown that Thune does not have the votes to fund ICE and Border Patrol without reforms. Schumer has said a continuing resolution would be dead on arrival, and right now the Senate is on break, meaning TSA agents are facing two more weeks without paychecks. Olivia Beavers of the Wall Street Journal reported that when a representative asked Johnson if the Senate had agreed to come back to deal with a new measure from the House, Johnson answered: “The Senate went dark and did not communicate with us.”

“It’s so maddening,” Casten wrote on social media. “Government workers should be paid. You shouldn’t have to wait on lines in airports, or worry about Coast Guard preparedness, or whether FEMA can handle the next disaster. But you do because of the utter lack of character in [Republican] leadership.”

“What the hell are you guys doing?” Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) asked Republicans on the floor of the House. Everyone knows the bill could pass with a large majority if Johnson would bring it to a vote, he said. Freedom Caucus members “don’t care about governing,” he said. “They only care about writing another blank check for ICE…or getting a shout-out on some batsh*t crazy right-wing podcast.”

And so, TSA agents will not get paid unless Trump’s executive order goes into effect, taking the power to appropriate funds, a power that the U.S. Constitution gives to Congress alone, and handing it to the president.

For years, the far right has insisted that it and only it knows how to govern because its ideology is the only legitimate way to look at the world. The fight over funding for TSA illustrates on a micro level how lawmakers who ignore the real world to cleave to an ideology strengthen authoritarianism.

But these days, the dangers of clinging to the far-right ideology are around us at the macro level as well. We are almost four weeks into a war with Iran, started without input from Congress by a president who is now contemplating sending soldiers to fight in a conflict he is eager to put into the rear-view mirror. Trump “is getting a little bored with Iran,” a senior White House official told Jake Traylor of MS NOW. “Not that he regrets it or something—he’s just bored and wants to move on.”

As the strangling of the Strait of Hormuz sends oil prices skyrocketing, though, the global economy is not moving on. Today another dramatic drop in the stock market put the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 10% since February and the Nasdaq 100 down more than 10%, while the S&P 500 is shaping up to have its worst month since 2022.

Almost exactly a year ago, on March 27, 2025, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The order asserted that “[o]ver the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

The order claimed, as Trump did in his first term, that “historical revision” was reconstructing “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness…as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” Trump has claimed since his first term that a “left-wing mob is trying to demolish our heritage, so they can replace it with a new oppressive regime that they alone control.” He told his followers that they are in “a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country.”

Embracing the idea that there is a perfect past currently being destroyed, Trump echoes twentieth-century fascists who promised to return their country to divinely inspired rules that, if ignored, would create disaster.

Trump’s order called for putting his ideology in place, turning federal historic sites, parks, and museums into “solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”

The order directed the Secretary of the Interior to “determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology,” to restore their previous content, and to make sure that they “do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.”

Setting administration officials’ eyes on the Smithsonian Institution, it said: “Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” Trump’s order named a three-person team to review the Smithsonian’s museums, including his Florida criminal defense attorney Lindsey Halligan, who joined his team from the field of property law and who, as legal analyst Anna Bower observed, “didn’t like some of the museum’s exhibits when she visited after the inauguration so she convinced Trump to sign an executive order putting her in charge.” Also on the team is Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a key author of Project 2025.

Since then, Trump’s people have tried to rewrite American history according to their ideology. Revealingly, one of the first things the administration did to alter the past was to remove from a U.S. military cemetery in the Netherlands two displays that recognized Black soldiers who helped liberate Europe from the Nazis.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued his own order on May 20, 2025, also titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” He told officials at all National Park Service sites to make sure information in the park adhered to Trump’s demands and to ask the public to let them know if they had “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.”

By July 2025, National Park Service teams were trying to figure out what the vague order not to “inappropriately disparage Americans” meant, flagging exhibits on sea level rise due to climate change at Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina, human enslavement at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, and the imprisonment of Seminoles, Cheyennes, Araphaos, Kiowas, Comanches, Caddos, and Apaches at the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in Florida.

On August 12, 2025, Trump’s Smithsonian team wrote to Dr. Lonnie Bunch, the historian who serves as the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, informing him they intend to review museum exhibitions, curatorial processes, planning, the use of collections, and artists’ grants in order to make sure they align “with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”

They said they were focusing on the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

On December 18, 2025, they wrote to Bunch again to complain he had not provided as much information as they had requested. They expressed concern “that the museums of the Smithsonian Institution be well positioned to play an important role during the historic yearlong celebration of our Nation’s 250th birthday that is fast approaching. We wish to be assured that none of the leadership of the Smithsonian museums is confused about the fact that the United States has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world,” they wrote. “The American people will have no patience for any museum that is diffident about America’s founding or otherwise uncomfortable conveying a positive view of American history, one which is justifiably proud of our country’s accomplishments and record.”

At about the same time, Trump unveiled that the history he intended to see shared was one that remade the U.S. by destroying its complicated history of struggle toward multicultural democracy and rewriting it as a dictatorship.

In mid-December the White House revealed that Trump had attached partisan descriptions of previous presidents on the “Presidential Walk of Fame” at the White House, calling Democratic president Barack Obama “one of the most divisive figures in American History,” and Joe Biden “by far, the worst President in American History.” “Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States,” it continued, “Biden oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction.” Trump described himself, though, as the architect of “the Greatest Economy in the History of the World.”

Then, on the fifth anniversary of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the White House unveiled a new website blaming the Democrats for the attack and saying Trump had “corrected a historic wrong” by pardoning the rioters. Under pressure from the White House, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery removed text by Trump’s portrait that referred to Trump’s two impeachments, as well as his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

In January the National Park Service took down displays about the enslavement of nine Black Americans at the home of President George Washington and First Lady Martha Washington in Philadelphia, and the city sued. In February, U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, ruled that the materials must be put back as the case works its way through the courts. She began her order with a quotation from George Orwell’s 1984, a novel based on the premise that an authoritarian regime constantly rewrote history for its own ends.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the erasure of American history in favor of a whitewashed authoritarianism. The American people began to preserve the truth of who we have been.

Volunteers worried at the potential loss of National Park Service information created the Save Our Signs project, a crowd-sourced archive of photographs from National Parks. Historians appalled by changes to the Smithsonian created Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, similarly documenting changes to the Smithsonian. One of its leaders, James Millward, is a scholar of Chinese history and is concerned that “history being snipped and clipped and disappeared” looks a great deal like the methods of the Chinese Communist Party. Sitting next to Trump’s portrait in the Portrait Gallery, he handed visitors copies of the old text until guards closed the exhibit.

At the Organization of American Historians, the History, Archives, and Records Preservation Project (HARPP) is made up of historians, archivists, librarians, and their allies, who are recording “changes since January 2025 that threaten the historical record.”

Even more dramatically, though, today’s Americans are demanding the preservation not just of who we have been, but of who we are. Far from accepting the administration’s whitewashed assertion that the nation has an “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness,” we are remembering our complicated history of community struggle and mobilizing to protect our right to govern ourselves against those who would take that right from us.

Millions of Americans and their allies turned out today for more than 3,100 “No Kings” events in all 50 states, U.S. territories, Washington, D.C., and towns and cities around the world in what appears to be the largest one-day protest in American history.

Instead of accepting the destruction of the true lessons of our past, we are bringing them back to life.

47,900,000 Americans went hungry last year. The USDA counts a household as food insecure when its members cannot reliably access enough food to eat. In 7.2 million of those households, someone skipped a full meal or went an entire day without eating because there was no money. 14 million of them were children.

On February 28th, the United States and Israel bombed Iran.

Within 48 hours, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, a 21-mile-wide channel between Iran and Oman through which 20 percent of the world’s oil travels every single day.¹ A third of the world’s fertilizer travels through that same strait.² And it needed to arrive this month. The planting window does not wait so timely delivery is unwaveringly critical within the planting window.

Here is what nitrogen does to a corn plant. Applied at the right moment in the growing cycle, it drives the plant to produce grain. Cut the application in half and you do not get half a crop. The corn plant runs out of nitrogen mid-growth and stops producing. Farmers across the Northern Hemisphere are making their nitrogen purchases right now, ahead of spring planting. The ships carrying that nitrogen are anchored on the wrong side of a closed strait, or rerouting around the southern tip of Africa, adding weeks to delivery schedules and close to a million dollars in additional fuel costs per voyage.³

Urea, the most widely traded nitrogen fertilizer, cost $475 per metric ton at the Port of New Orleans the week before the war started. It cost $683 the following week.⁴ That is a 44 percent price increase in seven days. The American Farm Bureau, which does not typically use alarm language, called it a “double whammy” and warned that if farmers cannot get fertilizer in time, we will see reductions in planted acreage and lower yields across the country.⁵

There is no strategic reserve for fertilizer. The United States maintains a Strategic Petroleum Reserve for oil. There is no equivalent for nitrogen.⁶ When the supply runs short, farmers absorb the price, reduce their application, or switch crops. The harvest pays for it in the fall.

In 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted grain exports from one of the world’s largest wheat-producing regions. That disruption, which hit grain rather than the inputs that grow grain, produced 13.5 percent grocery inflation at its peak in the United States.⁷ Bread up 13 percent. Dairy up 12 percent. Meat up 10 percent. MST Marquee’s head of energy research has called the current disruption three times more severe than the 1973 Arab oil embargo.⁸ The 1973 embargo removed 5 percent of global oil supply. This one removes 20 percent by closing the Strait entirely, and it does so while simultaneously severing the fertilizer supply for the spring planting season, during the deepest cuts to American food assistance in the program’s history.⁹

Simon Johnson, MIT economist and 2024 Nobel laureate, put it plainly: “There is no excess capacity anywhere in the world that can fill that gap.”¹⁰ Maurice Obstfeld, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, said the effects will be most devastating in low-income countries where agricultural productivity is already challenged, and that adding this cost component produces “the prospect of significant food shortages.”¹¹

Obstfeld was talking about the world. He could have been talking about the U.S.

We don’t actually know how many Americans are food insecure right now. The USDA published its annual food security report every year for three decades. In September 2025, the administration cancelled it.¹² The last official number, 47.9 million, describes conditions in 2024. That was before new SNAP work requirements began removing people from the program. Before the deepest cuts to food assistance in the program’s history cleared Congress. Before the first bomb fell.

Purdue University’s Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability ran its own survey in November 2025. It found food insecurity at 16 percent of the population, roughly 54 million people.¹³ That is the number we are working from. And 2.4 million of the people currently receiving SNAP benefits are projected to lose them entirely in 2026.¹⁴

When food prices go up, food insecurity goes up in a predictable ratio. The Food and Agriculture Organization has documented that a 10 percent increase in food prices produces a 3.5 percentage point rise in food insecurity.¹⁵ In the United Kingdom between 2022 and 2023, grocery inflation reached 19 percent. In one year, 2.5 million more people became food insecure and food bank parcel distribution rose 37 percent.¹⁶ In the United States in 2008, grocery inflation of 6.6 percent pushed 4.1 million more Americans into food insecurity, and SNAP enrollment climbed 57 percent, from 25.7 million to 40.3 million people.¹⁷

We are looking at grocery inflation of at least 20 percent. We are starting from a baseline of 54 million people who already cannot reliably eat. And we are cutting the safety net rather than expanding it. The cross-national evidence puts the number of food-insecure Americans, under those conditions, between 75 and 90 million.

The standard research finding on food shocks and political stability holds that high-income countries don’t destabilize over food prices. The International Monetary Fund found no significant effects on democratic institutions in wealthy nations when food prices spiked.¹⁸ That finding has been cited as reassurance. It shouldn’t be. It described a pattern of government behavior, not a geographical fact.

In 2011, food prices spiked across North Africa and the Middle East. Morocco and Syria both felt it. Morocco’s government responded immediately with constitutional reforms, expanded subsidies, and direct cash transfers to families who could not absorb the price increases. The country stabilized.¹⁹ Syria’s government did not respond. What followed was a civil war that killed half a million people and displaced half the country’s population. The food shock was the same. The difference was what the government did next.

A review of 60 peer-reviewed studies found that food price shocks produce political instability when they land on top of economic desperation, pre-existing grievances, and eroding institutional trust.²⁰ A single standard deviation increase in domestic food prices raises the odds of civil unrest by 75 percent. The IMF’s reassuring finding assumed a country with the capacity and the will to catch people when they fell. We entered this moment with debt exceeding GDP, inflation already above the Federal Reserve’s target, a housing crisis, and a government actively removing people from food assistance. The research assumed room to absorb. We spent that room.

Congress passed the deepest cuts to SNAP in the program’s history. The administration cancelled the only federal report that would have measured the damage. An administration official called concern about food insecurity fear-mongering.²¹ Then, on February 28th, the bombs fell. The grocery prices have not moved yet.

This is what the country looked like the day before they did.

771,480 people slept on the street or in a shelter on a single night in January 2024. That is the highest number ever recorded. 150,000 of them were children.²²

There are 7.1 million fewer affordable rental homes in this country than there are people who need them. Nearly two thirds of working-age renters cannot pay for food and healthcare after they pay rent.²³

9.3 million Americans worked more than one job in November 2025, the highest number in 25 years. Half of them have college degrees.²⁴

One in three Americans skipped or delayed medical care in the past year because they could not afford it. 20 million people carry medical debt right now.²⁵

American households owe $18.8 trillion. More than half of credit cardholders are carrying a balance to cover groceries and utilities, not vacations.²⁶

8 percent of the workforce is underemployed. That means millions of people who want full-time work and cannot find it, or who are working jobs that do not come close to paying what they need.²⁷

Federal employment is down 330,000 jobs since October 2024. Those are the people whose job it was to run the programs that hold all of the above together.²⁸

Every single one of those numbers gets worse when grocery bills go up 15 percent. The family that was barely making rent stops making rent. The person carrying medical debt on a credit card to buy groceries now has less credit and higher prices. The underemployed worker who needed full-time work faces a labor market contracting under inflationary pressure. The crises don’t sit beside each other. They feed each other, all at once, with the same shock driving all of them simultaneously.

Four days before the bombs fell, a new 10 percent tariff on most imports from all countries took effect. Steel and aluminum already carried tariffs of up to 50 percent. Chinese goods carried tariffs ranging from 7.5 to 100 percent depending on the product.²⁹

We started with 47.9 million people who could not reliably eat. That was before the tariffs. Before the SNAP cuts. Before the strait closed and the ships stopped moving and the farmers started changing their planting decisions in real time.

We are eleven days in. The planting window is barely open. The ships are still anchored. Six months of this, maybe less, and we are looking at the total collapse of the United States.

Here is a metaphor to help illustrate the situation.

The ship had holes in it. They fired the maintenance crew. The lifeboats were then lit on fire. And then they drove into an iceberg. At full throttle.

RELEASE THE FILES !
START THE TRIALS !
LOCK UP THE ' PHILES !

Re: blatham (Post 7418711)
Good to have you back again, hoping, you're well and contributing more often!

Like a lot of other Americans, I’ve oscillated in these dark times between two emotional poles. At points, I tell myself that Donald Trump is a uniquely malevolent figure who has seized levers of power that no previous president had ever dared to grasp. The story doesn’t stop state violence in the streets or illegal military operations abroad. Yet it has its comforts. Once Trump passes from the scene — as the laws of nature, if not politics, require — some kind of restoration of the American democratic and constitutional project can take place.

On darker days, I find myself turning to a more thoroughgoing narrative: that Trump is the fulfillment of what America has always been — a self-satisfied nation, granted license by its myths about providence and exceptionalism to do whatever it wants. Trump didn’t come from nowhere, after all. His two victories were forged by choices made by Americans and the leaders they elected. If he had not existed, history would have invented someone like him. This explanation offers its own consolation. At least it is something a rational mind can grasp.

This oscillation can feel a bit like whiplash. Trump’s loss in 2020, interventions by the courts to block some of his most brazen moves and the prospect of a Democratic romp in the midterm elections sustain the aberration theory. But other developments — Trump’s popular-vote triumph in 2024, the near total submission of the Republican Party to his will and the Supreme Court’s grant of sweeping immunity to Trump for potentially criminal acts committed as president — suggest the opposite.

The war in Iran has shattered this binary. It is, to be sure, the product of Trump’s unique recklessness, as he plunges heedlessly into a conflict his predecessors had been wise to avoid. Yet it is also the logical terminus of decades of American history — the country’s addiction to technological wizardry to wage war at a distance, the blinkered belief that it could shape events in faraway places by force, the steady whittling away of constitutional limits on the presidency.

Is Trump a freak of history or its fulfillment, an aberration or a culmination? The answer, surely, is both. But in the course of his presidency, Trump has revealed a much older malady: America’s unshakable faith in its ability to shape the world to its liking, indifferent to what others might want and supremely confident that its plan is the right one. Beyond Trump, it’s this disfiguring mentality we Americans must face.

In December 1952, a Scottish scholar named Denis Brogan published a remarkable essay titled “The Illusion of American Omnipotence.” Writing as the United States was emerging as the world’s pre-eminent power, Brogan diagnosed a peculiar feature of the American mind. The United States, fueled by its myths and unswervingly certain of its vision for the world, could not see difficulty, much less defeat, as a reason to question its aims. Failure was never brought about through the strength or power of rivals. It came, instead, through blunder and betrayal.

“Very many Americans, it seems to me, find it inconceivable that an American policy, announced and carried out by the American government, acting with the support of the American people, does not immediately succeed,” Brogan wrote. “If it does not, this, they feel, must be because of stupidity or treason.” An admiring but canny observer of the country, Brogan captured something essential. America, in its own imagination, could never fail; it could only be failed.

In its struggle against global communism through the Cold War, the country had ample opportunity to show off the reflex. When China’s insurgent communists triumphed, Brogan wrote, it was widely understood as a result of American bungling or treachery. China, a vast and ancient civilization, was seen as something for America to win or lose. That failure helped give rise to the paranoia of McCarthyism. Korea, Vietnam and more covert disasters were further tinder to recrimination, long after the senator had gone. Failure could come only from internal betrayal, an idea that paradoxically bolstered the illusion of omnipotence.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, America had the chance to experience the full weight of its might. It had defeated the evil empire and stood alone as the most powerful nation the world had ever known, its former failings folded into a story of success. America’s swift and decisive victory in the gulf war that year was a showcase of the superpower’s military prowess. The United States would become the world’s policeman, putting its soldiers on the line to protect a rules-based order it led.

Yet it didn’t take long for the old pattern of failure followed by recrimination to re-emerge. America persuaded a rapidly growing China to further liberalize its economy, confident that it would become something more like America — an open and free society. When this gambit produced the China shock, hollowing out American manufacturing as China grew richer, more powerful and more autocratic, Americans would cry betrayal by their political leaders. China and its leaders hardly featured in the narrative.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001, shattering the fiction of American invulnerability to attack. There was plenty of blame to go around. Yet George W. Bush transformed the grievous wound into extraordinary power. He took America to war in Afghanistan and Iraq with an absurd plan to turn them into liberal democracies. His administration argued that in Iraq, a country with no role in the attack on America, the crisis was so urgent that the constitutionally mandated role of Congress in declaring war could be abandoned. After Sept. 11, constraints on presidential power themselves were identified as potential betrayers and stripped away.

It didn’t work, of course. The wars dragged on, killing thousands of American service members and hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis. Afghanistan today is ruled by the same movement that sheltered Osama bin Laden, the Taliban. Iraq is an exceedingly fragile and divided nation. The war gravely destabilized the Middle East, giving rise to fearsome new terrorist groups like the Islamic State and setting off a bloody civil war in Syria.

The election in 2008 of Barack Obama, a critic of the post-9/11 wars, seemed to be a moment of reckoning with American illusions. But Obama was soon bogged down by the conflicts and a global financial crisis to boot. Notwithstanding his feints toward American humility in the world, he embraced many of the outsize powers he inherited to make high-tech war in distant places with little oversight. America continued to act unbounded.

Striding onto the national stage in the aftermath of these disasters, Trump tapped into an old American story. America’s elites had betrayed the American people, he declared. Trump’s whole life was a dress rehearsal for this moment: constantly imposing his will, wriggling out of scrapes, never held accountable, born on third base and thinking he’d hit a triple. He was the American illusion of omnipotence incarnate.

Trump collapsed the distance between his personal will and American will, declaring as he accepted the Republican nomination in 2016 that “I alone can fix it.” Like America, Trump cannot fail; he can only be failed. Everything is always someone else’s fault. Handed the tools of the imperial presidency, he clearly regards America as identical with his person. He jettisons all pretense of constitutional order. He will know in his gut when wars are won, he’s said, and the only limits are his own sense of morality.

In the Persian Gulf, that illusion has come face-to-face with material reality. Trump’s hope of a rapid collapse of the Iranian regime was always fantastical. Geography is having its revenge: The oil and gas that power so much of the global economy pass through a narrow strait that Iran effectively controls. A ground invasion on its vast and forbidding terrain could far exceed the Vietnam quagmire. The Iranian regime, ruthless to its neighbors and its own people alike, appears unshaken by Israel and America’s relentless assaults. It seems dug in for a long war.

Yet Trump seems unable to conceive of a force immune to America’s omnipotent might. And he cannot imagine that a distant war could possibly harm America, blessed with bountiful land and natural resources, separated from the troubled world by two oceans. But soaring gas prices, rising interest rates and the prospect of a stock market collapse have put paid to any delusions of splendid isolation from the global economy. If this war grinds on, Americans will suffer greatly.

There has been plenty of suffering already: More than 58,000 names are etched onto the black granite of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington. As yet, there is no national memorial for the so-called forever wars, but over 7,000 Americans died serving in them. In those wars, there was at least a veneer of American idealism, as thin and self-deceiving as it may have been. Trump has dragged America into a war completely unmoored from any pretense to virtue. It is a naked exercise of power with no cloak of providence or moral superiority. In its brazenness, it is almost bracing.

Writing at the same time as Brogan, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr published a short book called “The Irony of American History.” A favorite of Obama’s, it is a call to Christian humility in world affairs, addressed to Americans who misunderstand their virtue. “Man is an ironic creature because he forgets that he is not simply a creator but also a creature,” Niebuhr writes.

That line made me realize the folly of my own oscillation: Both views — Trump as aberration or Trump as history’s fulfillment — had America as the protagonist of its own story, with the world as a stage. I needed a wider frame, an honest engagement with history and a willingness to admit that America is, like any other nation, just one place in the world.

America does not know how to exist in a world it does not control. Since its inception, America has assured itself it was simply too big, too far away and too richly endowed to suffer any serious consequences for its actions. But there will be no escaping the cataclysm in Iran. In its wake, there is a chance to recognize our place in an interconnected world and see ourselves clearly. The way out of the cycle of failure and betrayal is to shed our illusions, once and for all.

Showing reporters on Air Force One a series of posterboard images of his new ballroom last night, Trump told them: “I thought I’d do this now because it’s easier. I’m so busy that I don’t have time to do this. But, ah, I’m fighting wars and other things. But this is very important ’cause this is going to be with us for a long time and it’s going to be, I think it’ll be the greatest ballroom anywhere in the world.”

At 7:26 this morning, about two hours before the stock market opened, Trump’s social media account posted: “The United States of America is in serious discussions with A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran. Great progress has been made but, if for any reason a deal is not shortly reached, which it probably will be, and if the Hormuz Strait is not immediately ‘Open for Business,’ we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalination plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’ This will be in retribution for our many soldiers, and others, that Iran has butchered and killed over the old Regime’s 47 year ‘Reign of Terror.’ Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”

When he decided to go to war with Iran, Trump apparently fantasized that the operation would look like his strike on Venezuela, in which a fast attack enabled U.S. forces to grab Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores, leaving behind Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who appeared willing to work with the Trump administration, in power. The initial strikes of Israel and the U.S. on Iran did indeed kill that regime’s leadership, but officials simply replaced that leadership from within the regime, making Trump’s claim of regime change as imaginary as his claim that the U.S. and Iran have been at war for 47 years.

More shocking in this statement, though, is that Trump appears to be trying to force his will on the Iranians by threatening to commit war crimes. International law recognizes attacks on civilian infrastructure—like those Russian president Vladimir Putin has been carrying out on Ukraine for years—as war crimes. The Geneva Convention specifically prohibits attacks on drinking water, so Trump’s threat to attack the desalination plants that make seawater drinkable is, as Shashank Joshi of The Economist notes, not only stupid because Iran could do the same to other Gulf states, but “also, quite obviously,...very illegal.”

Joshi notes that “[Arizona Democratic senator] Mark Kelly et al were right to warn of illegal orders,” and Charles A. Ray of The Steady State explains that not just Trump but anyone carrying out these orders would be implicated in potential criminality. Trump’s threat comes the day after Christiaan Triebert and John Ismay of the New York Times reported that on the first day of attacks, U.S. forces hit not just the girls’ school we knew about, but also, in a different city, a sports hall used by civilians and a nearby elementary school, killing at least 21 people.

Trump apparently had no plan B for what to do if the initial plan to strike Iran and knock out its leaders failed, and is now flailing. His repeated assurances that talks with Iran are making “great progress” contrast with Iran’s insistence it is not engaged in talks with the United States. Trump entered the war with vague promises of “regime change” and promises to guarantee Iran never developed a nuclear weapon but now is reduced to hoping for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, putting the U.S. in the odd position of fighting a war to achieve the conditions that existed before it started the war.

On Sunday, Trump told the Financial Times that “my favorite thing is to take the oil in Iran” as the U.S. did when it took control of Venezuelan oil fields. This sounds like bluster, but he is also massing U.S. troops in the region.

Meanwhile, the price of oil rose to $116 a barrel after strikes against Israel by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen. The Houthis have the potential to disrupt yet another key strait, the Bab el-Mandeb, through which tankers carry about 10% of the world’s oil out of the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and into the Arabian Sea, from where it can go into the Indian Ocean and to the rest of the world.

In the 1980s, a faction of the Republican Party that was determined to cut taxes and regulations and to get rid of programs that benefiting racial minorities and women went to war against the federal government. Those so-called Movement Conservatives—“movement” because they were a political movement, and “conservatives” because they wanted to take the U.S. back to a time before the New Deal—became increasingly radical over time. Some, like activist Grover Norquist, wanted to take the government back even further, to the time of the robber barons in the 1890s, before “the socialists took over” with the Progressive Era and its income taxes and regulation.

But Americans liked the programs that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, protected equality before the law, and provided international security, so Movement Conservatives focused on taking power away from Congress, where the people’s voices could be heard, and centering power in the president.

Now we are seeing what that sort of a government, devoid of experts and beholden to the whims of a single man, looks like. After a year in power, Trump’s administration has embroiled the U.S. in a war of choice that has created an extraordinary global energy crisis, inflation is rising, job growth is down, and Republicans in Congress have abdicated their authority to oversee the war or other government agencies, or even to fix a problem of their own making in a partial government shutdown. Instead, they are seemingly content to let Trump do whatever he wishes.

Trump’s imperial presidency has demonstrated the country’s need for the allies he has disdained, as he has been forced to beg for their help. They have generally refused to get involved in a war Trump started without consulting them; today Spain’s defense minister said Spain has closed its airspace to U.S. planes involved in operations against Iran.

Trump appears to be turning not to the gutted State Department, but to his usual cadre of billionaires to help him figure out a way forward. Edward Wong, Theodore Schliefer, Tyler Pager, and Ryan Mac of the New York Times reported that when Trump talked to Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India last Tuesday, billionaire Elon Musk took part in the call, although the readouts from both the U.S. and the Indian government did not mention his participation.

Now, with Congress out of session until April 13, Trump is putting the people and matériel in place to escalate the war. And yet, as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, the new goal of freeing traffic in the Strait of Hormuz leaves the Iranians rather than the U.S. in control of the terms of declaring victory. An Associated Press–National Opinion Research Center (AP-NORC) poll from March 25 shows that 59% of Americans think the U.S. has gone too far in Iran, with only 13% supporting escalation. Sixty-two percent oppose sending ground troops into Iran, while only 12% favor the idea.

Even so, as David Kurtz wrote today in Talking Points Memo, “There’s no telling what President Trump will resort to doing to save face, create the mirage of victory, and extricate himself from the box canyon into which he so triumphantly galloped.”

What we do know, though, is that Trump is extraordinarily unlikely ever to do anything that will conflict with the wishes of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Trump has blockaded Cuba, strangling its energy sector by blocking off all oil tankers from the island. Although he has stopped Venezuelan and Mexican tankers, today he permitted a Russian-flagged tanker to get through the blockade to sell oil that will help fund Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Asked why he permitted that tanker through, Trump answered: “He loses one boatload of oil, that’s all it is. If he wants to do that, and if other countries want to do it, doesn’t bother me much.” World affairs journalist Frida Ghitis commented: “When Mexico tried to send oil to Cuba, Trump immediately threatened to impose crushing tariffs on it, or on any country that broke his blockade of the island. Now Russia is sending Cuba oil and Trump says it’s fine, no problem. The mystery continues.”

We can also be sure that Trump will find time to keep attacking those he perceives to be his enemies. As J.D. Wolf of Meidas News reported today, Trump has posted about continuing to try to prosecute New York attorney general Letitia James fourteen times in the past five days. James successfully prosecuted Trump, some of his children, and the Trump Organization for fraud. Trump has tried unsuccessfully and repeatedly to charge her with mortgage fraud or insurance fraud.

Peter Sullivan of Axios reported today that to pay for the war and find more money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Republicans are considering making cuts to federal health care spending. House majority leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) told Sullivan that they were looking at areas of “waste and fraud and abuse.”

As the administration flails, insiders are leaking about some of the administration’s most powerful individuals. Two senior sources from the Department of Homeland Security leaked stories about White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to the Daily Mail, a tabloid out of the United Kingdom. They claimed Miller demanded agents in Minneapolis be sent to areas where DHS knew there would be a lot of protesters because he wanted to “force confrontations” between agents and protesters that would enable the administration to “win the ‘PR battle.’” They echoed others in suggesting that Miller, not the president, was in charge of immigration policy.

Yesterday Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post reported that former high-ranking military officials, experts on religion and law, and veterans groups, as well as current Pentagon staff and officers, have expressed deep concern over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s extremist evangelical worship services and his casting of the U.S. military as a force for Christian holy war. Last Wednesday he prayed for U.S. troops to assert “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” saying: “We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”

G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers and Fifty Plus One reported today that Trump has hit a new approval low among all American adults, with 58.1% disapproving of his job in office and just 37.6% approving, an overall difference of -21 . A University of Massachusetts Amherst poll has Trump’s job approval rating at 33%.

Tonight Trump’s social media account posted an AI-generated video of a future President Donald J. Trump Presidential Library. To triumphal music, the video features a gleaming skyscraper containing what appears to be the airplane the president pressured Qatar into giving him, along with what seems to be a replica of the Oval Office…and a model of his anticipated ballroom.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday found that a Colorado law banning conversion therapy for gay and transgender minors likely violates free speech, the latest in a string of decisions by the high court rolling back protections for LGBTQ+ people and expanding the rights of the religious.

In an 8-1 ruling, an ideologically diverse majority ruled for an evangelical therapist who argued the state prohibition infringed on her First Amendment rights. Kaley Chiles said she wanted to counsel religious teens dealing with sexual orientation issues and gender dysphoria in ways consistent with biblical teachings.
[...]