Trump is not interested in governing a republic of equal citizens. To the extent that he’s even dimly aware of the traditions of American democracy, he holds them in contempt. What Trump wants is to lord over a country whose people have no choice but to show fealty and pledge allegiance not to the nation but to him.
What was it Trump said about Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator, during his first term in office? “Hey, he’s the head of a country. And I mean he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different,” Trump said in 2018. “He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
He wants his people to do the same.
What I Wrote
My column this week was on the importance of political leadership and political ambition in challenging tyranny.
For as much as Trump tried to project himself as an unstoppable force, the truth is that he is as vulnerable as he’s ever been. All it took was real political leadership to demonstrate the extent to which the Trump White House was more of a paper tiger than it might have looked at first glance.
Now Reading
Catherine Rampell on Trump’s war on America’s children, for The Washington Post.
It’s been largely lost in the cacophony over President Donald Trump’s tariffs and vendettas against universities, but administration officials have been gutting services that keep children alive and well. These include programs that feed kids, teach them the alphabet, provide them medical care, guarantee their rights and shield them from abuse.
Derek Guy on the evolution of the alpha male aesthetic, for Bloomberg.
This new wave of hypercurated masculinity is a backlash against a cultural landscape shaped by gender fluidity, body positivity and an ongoing renegotiation of gender roles. As celebrities like Harry Styles and Lil Nas X pose in dresses and blur the traditional lines between masculine and feminine, another current rushes in to reassert the old order. It pulls from earlier models: The mythic strength of Sandow, the beachside bravado of the Venice bodybuilders, the greed-soaked tailoring of 1980s finance and the tightfitting clothes once labeled metrosexual. Today’s fixation on muscularity, discipline and traditional masculine aesthetics feels like a new chapter in that same historical cycle.
David Cole on Harvard’s defiance of Trump, for The New York Review of Books.
Had Harvard acceded to those demands, it would have given up not just its autonomy but the most fundamental principle of academic freedom. Instead Harvard chose to fight for that principle. As Garber put it on Monday in his letter announcing the school’s decision, “no government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” The outcome of the university’s struggle with a sitting president is likely to determine the future of academic freedom in the United States.
Adam Serwer on the present crisis, for The Atlantic.
The Trump administration is defying a Supreme Court order to retrieve a man it marooned in a gulag abroad, while pretending to comply with it. What it could do to him, it could do to anyone. More significantly, if the Trump administration can defy court orders with impunity, and Congress is unwilling to act, there is no reason for it to respect the constitutional rights of American citizens either. The Roberts court will now have to decide whether to side with the Constitution or with a lawless president asserting the power to disappear people at will. This is not a power that any person, much less an American president, is meant to have.
Moira Donegan on right-wing natalism, for The Guardian:
It is not interested in making pregnancy safer, or in making child rearing less damaging to women’s careers. It is not interested in these because all of these pursuits are in fact antithetical to the movement’s real agenda, which is to encourage primarily white births, to enforce regressive, highly hierarchal and stratified social roles, to push women out of the public sphere and to narrow women’s prospects for social, professional and intellectual life to little more than pregnancy, childbirth, child rearing and housekeeping — or, as the Collinses might put it, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche.”
