What I Wrote
My column this week was on Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, the second time around, and why they are a record of failure, not success.
But as consequential as they have been, and as exhausting as they’ve felt to many Americans, these first months of Trump’s second term fall far short of what Roosevelt accomplished. Yes, Trump has wreaked havoc throughout the federal government and destroyed our relationships abroad, but his main goal — the total subordination of American democracy to his will — remains unfulfilled. You could even say it is slipping away, as he sabotages his administration with a ruinous trade war, deals with the stiff opposition of a large part of civil society and plummets in his standing with most Americans.
On my podcast with John Ganz, we discussed the 1997 political thriller “The Peacemaker.” I also joined the Pizza Pod Party podcast to discuss, well, pizza.
Now Reading
Alan Elrod on American vice, for Liberal Currents.
We have become all too willing to look away today. We accept dishonesty and rapaciousness in public life. We look away from uncomfortable facts and divert our attention with glowing screens and easy entertainment. We walk daily through a miasma of vitriol, ignorance, and petty politics. And, when a man who has shown us time and again who he is promised to make our lives a little easier, we put him back in power.
Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel on the building of an American panopticon, for The Atlantic.
A fragile combination of decades-old laws, norms, and jungly bureaucracy has so far prevented repositories such as these from assembling into a centralized American surveillance state. But that appears to be changing. Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have systematically gained access to sensitive data across the federal government, and in ways that people in several agencies have described to us as both dangerous and disturbing.
Ned Resnikoff on housing and class conflict, for The Nation.
Much of the class conflict in housing politics takes place not between Big Real Estate and local communities but within communities: Affluent homeowners, particularly when they are organized into neighborhood associations, form powerful anti-housing blocs. Political science research has found that the people most likely to speak out against housing development during public hearings tend to be older, whiter, wealthier homeowners. Their opposition to new construction helps ensure the persistence of regional housing shortages, which drives up rents and locks first-time home buyers out of the housing market.
Sean Wilentz on JD Vance’s junk history, for The New York Review of Books.
As has often been noted, Jackson never said the words to which Vance was alluding. The quotation in question — “Well: John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” — was invented and ascribed to Jackson by the New York journalist Horace Greeley (who as a partisan Whig had despised Jackson) in the first volume of his The American Conflict, published in 1864, nearly twenty years after Jackson died. Yet even critics of Vance’s and Trump’s disregard for the rule of law have ignorantly assumed that, although the quotation is made up, the essence of Vance’s depiction of Jackson’s defiance of the Court is valid.
Hadas Thier on the federal workers who are fighting back against the Trump administration, for Hammer & Hope.
But alongside likely historic defeats, stirrings from within the ranks of government employees are providing a spark of hope. As federal unions are engaged in necessary legal battles that may take months or years to wind through the courts, a scrappy but growing Federal Unionists Network has provided a fulcrum for rank-and-file members who don’t want to wait to resist.
