The read you’re getting from most of the commentariat: Iran walked away. The talks failed because Tehran wasn’t serious, because the Supreme Leader’s faction overruled the negotiators, because hardliners saw an opportunity and took it.

That read is wrong. Or rather, it’s incomplete in a way that matters.

The correct read is structural. And it is considerably more disturbing.

What showed up at those negotiations on the American side was not a government. It was an improvisation — a collection of principals who do not share a negotiating framework, do not have a settled position on endgame, and cannot hold an agreed posture across more than two news cycles without someone contradicting someone else in public. The talks didn’t collapse because Iran outmaneuvered us. They collapsed because there was no coherent “us” to maneuver.

This is what institutional decoherence looks like from the outside.

Institutions are coherence machines. They exist to aggregate the preferences of many individuals into a single, durable position — one that can be communicated, negotiated against, and updated through deliberate process rather than by faction. The State Department, at its functional best, was exactly this: a bureaucratic apparatus that translated presidential direction into a consistent foreign policy posture that could be sustained across administrations, personnel changes, and the noise of domestic politics.

That apparatus no longer functions at the level required for sustained diplomacy.

The NSC has been a factional instrument for years — but in prior administrations, factionalism was constrained by institutional norms, career professionals, and the oversight of Congress and the press. Those constraints have been removed. Not by accident. By design. The career professionals who would have enforced continuity in the negotiating position have been replaced or departed. The oversight mechanisms that would have imposed accountability on a broken process have been neutralized.

What remains is a foreign policy apparatus that is responsive to the principal and nothing else — which would be fine, if the principal had a settled, coherent objective.

He doesn’t.

His objective changes with the news cycle, with the last person in the room, with whatever metric he was watching that morning. That is not a negotiating position. It is a weather event.

The Iran talks gave us a real-time case study.

Within 48 hours of reported progress — what multiple outlets described as a framework taking shape, with both sides having discussed the contours of a pause-for-relief arrangement — the American side was issuing statements that contradicted the framework. Not clarifications. Contradictions. The Secretary of State said one thing. The national security apparatus implied another. The principal said a third thing in a context unrelated to Iran, on a platform that is not a diplomatic channel, and it was then treated as official American policy by the other side.

This is not a communications problem. This is a coherence problem.

Iran’s negotiators are not naive. They’ve been doing this for forty-five years. They know what a government that has a position looks like, and they know what a government that is improvising looks like. They walked away — if that’s even the right framing — because there was nothing coherent to walk away from. You cannot negotiate with a faction. You cannot sign an agreement with an improvisation.

The failure is ours. Not because of bad faith, though bad faith is always present in diplomacy. Because the institutional infrastructure capable of sustaining a negotiating position across the duration required to produce an agreement no longer exists on the American side.

This has implications beyond the war in Iran.

Every international engagement that requires America to hold a position — trade negotiations, alliance management, arms control, security guarantees — is now subject to the same decoherence problem. The problem is not this administration specifically. The problem is that the institutional architecture capable of surviving any administration has been compromised. The termites were in the wood before this storm arrived. The storm is simply the first serious test of what remains.

The Iran war continues. And somewhere in the foreign ministries of every country that must make long-term decisions about alignment — about whether to structure their institutions in relation to American power or in relation to something else — analysts are writing memos right now that reach the same conclusion I’m reaching here.

The families who are building jurisdictional optionality, establishing sovereign stacks across multiple legal systems, refusing to let their lives depend on the continued coherence of a single institutional arrangement — they made this calculation before it showed up in the news. They saw the decoherence early. They acted on it early. They were right.

The question isn’t whether American institutions will eventually reconstitute themselves. Maybe they will. The question is: what have you built that doesn’t depend on that reconstitution happening on a timeline that works for your family?

The conventional read on the current administration’s economic and foreign policy: erratic. Ideologically confused. The tariffs make no strategic sense. The war in Iran is being pursued without a coherent framework. The institutional degradation looks almost self-defeating.

Here is a different read.

What if it isn’t confusion?

What if it’s coherent — just in a direction you haven’t been looking?

Every leveraged buyout follows the same basic logic. You acquire an asset using borrowed money. You extract value from it — cut costs, sell divisions, reorganize liabilities — generating near-term cash flows. You socialize the debt onto the acquired entity itself. Then you exit, ideally before the long-term consequences of the extraction materialize. The people who executed the buyout are made whole. The people who remain — the workers, the suppliers, the pensioners, the community that built its life around the business — absorb whatever’s left.

This is not a new model. It is the operating logic of late-stage financialized capitalism applied to the corporate form.

It has now been applied to the American state.

Consider the tariff regime as an analytical object rather than as policy.

Who benefits from a tariff in the near term? Domestic producers in targeted sectors — and, more importantly, the leveraged interests that already hold positions in those sectors when the tariff is announced. The tariff is not primarily a trade policy instrument. It is a wealth transfer mechanism. It moves value from consumers — diffuse, unorganized, absorbing the price increase at the checkout line — to producers and capital holders who are concentrated, organized, and positioned to capture the rent.

The Iran war operates on the same structural logic. Defense contractor revenue has increased sharply since hostilities began. The cost of the war — measured in dollars, in diplomatic capital, in credibility, in the price Americans pay for disrupted energy markets and the supply chain effects that ripple from a hot conflict in the Gulf — is socialized. It lands on everyone. The gain lands on a specific set of interests already positioned to capture it.

This is not incompetence. This is the extraction economy operating at state scale.

The extraction economy thesis, as I’ve developed it in these pages, describes the transition from a productive economy — where wealth is created by making things, employing people, building institutions — to a leverage economy, where wealth is generated by capturing rents, extracting margins, and socializing risk. American capitalism crossed that threshold decades ago. What’s new is that the operating logic has migrated from the corporate sector to the state apparatus itself.

The tell is in the timeline asymmetry.

Every major policy initiative from the current administration shares the same structural feature: the gains are front-loaded, the costs are back-loaded, and the principals will have exited before the costs materialize. The tariff revenue arrives now. The supply chain disruption, the consumer price inflation, the damaged trading relationships — those costs arrive over months and years. The defense contracts are signed now. The strategic consequences of a botched Iran policy — the regional realignment, the credibility deficit, the coalition fracture — those land later.

This is not mismanagement. This is a liquidation with a built-in exit.

Read more

There’s a question floating around — half whispered, half shouted, always dripping with frustration:

Why doesn’t someone do something?

You hear it on cable panels, in Substack comments, in the increasingly unhinged group chats of otherwise functional adults.

The premise is simple enough. The President is, depending on your preferred phrasing, unstable, erratic, reckless, or — if we’re dispensing with euphemism — out of his goddamn mind.

And yet.

No invocation of the 25th Amendment. No meaningful impeachment effort. No quiet midnight meeting where the adults decide, collectively, that enough is enough.

Just noise. Endless noise.

So people ask the question again, louder this time: Why doesn’t someone do something?

It feels like a failure of courage. A failure of duty. A failure of patriotism.

It isn’t.

It’s a failure of coordination under risk. And more precisely: it’s a system behaving exactly as designed — under conditions it was never meant to survive.

The Fantasy of “Someone”

The question itself is the first mistake.

Who is someone?

The Vice President? A Cabinet Secretary? A Senator with a spine and a flair for martyrdom?

The word “someone” does a lot of work. It collapses a distributed system of actors into a single hypothetical hero — a person who can act unilaterally, decisively, and without consequence.

That person does not exist.

There is no red button labeled Fix This. There is only a web of incentives, each one carefully calibrated to ensure that no single actor can move without others moving first.

The Mechanism Everyone Misunderstands

Let’s dispense with the civics-class version of reality.

Invoking the 25th Amendment is not an act. It is a coordinated operation.

You need the Vice President. A majority of the Cabinet. And, ultimately, two-thirds of both houses of Congress (presuming the President objects to being cast as mentally deficient and incapable of his duties).

That is not a decision. That is a multi-stage alignment of elites, each of whom must agree — simultaneously — that the risk of acting is lower than the risk of doing nothing.

But the requirements don’t just describe a high bar. It describes a sequencing trap.

The Cabinet cannot move without confidence that the Vice President will convene them. The Vice President cannot move without confidence that the Cabinet will follow. Neither can establish that confidence without signaling intent — and, in the current environment, signaling intent is itself a career-ending act.

So the “first mover” isn’t one person. It’s a fiction. The mechanism requires simultaneous commitment from actors who cannot safely communicate their intentions to each other in advance.

It was designed as a safeguard. It functions as a deadlock.

The First-Mover Problem

Every individual in that chain faces the same calculus: If I move first — and others don’t follow — what happens?

The answer is brutally clear. You are finished. Your career ends. Your reputation is incinerated. You are cast, instantly, as either a traitor or a fool — depending on which faction writes the first headline. Given Trump’s zeal, there’s a good chance you could wind up dead at the hands of his supporters, at the minimum face death threats, and probably indicted on “something” the Justice Department concocts.

That’s a pretty steep cost curve. You do not get partial credit for trying. You do not get a graceful exit. You get career annihilation, death threats, and possibly prison.

So each actor looks at the others and thinks: I’ll move when I’m certain others will do so first. And each of them, independently, reaches the same conclusion: I am not certain.

And so no one moves. Not because they are cowards. Because they are not suicidal.

Welcome to the Stag Hunt From Hell

This is not a mystery. It’s a textbook problem.

In game theory, it’s called the stag hunt. Two hunters can cooperate to take down a stag — a large, valuable prize — but only if both commit. If either defects, the other goes home empty-handed. Each can also hunt a rabbit alone — smaller payoff, but guaranteed.

Translate that to Washington:

The “stag” is removing a dangerous president. The “rabbit” is maintaining the status quo.

Going for the stag requires deep, mutual trust that everyone will act together. Hunting rabbits requires nothing.

So what do rational actors do in a low-trust environment?

They hunt rabbits. Every time.

Impeachment: The Rabbit With a Press Release

On paper, impeachment looks like action. In practice, it’s theater.

Everyone knows the math: a majority in the House to impeach; two-thirds of the Senate to remove. If the votes aren’t there — and they aren’t — then impeachment becomes a performance with a predetermined ending.

From a purely strategic standpoint, it’s worse than useless. You expend political capital. You energize the opposition. You lose — and in losing, you validate the target.

So Congress does what rational actors do when presented with a high-cost, low-probability move. They talk about it. They signal concern. They fundraise off the outrage.

They do not act.

The Cabinet: Beneficiaries of the Man They’d Have to Remove

The Trump Cabinet was not selected for independence or competence. They were selected for alignment.

Their power flows from the President. Their relevance depends on proximity. Their future — political, financial, reputational — is tied to the very person they would be required to remove.

When you ask why the Cabinet doesn’t act, you’re asking why a group of people whose status depends entirely on the President would collectively choose to destroy themselves on a risky bet that others will join them.

Answer that honestly.

Congress: Profiting From Paralysis

For many in Congress, the current situation is not a bug. It is a business model.

In the opposition: campaign against chaos, raise money off outrage, promise action without delivering it. In alignment: retain access to power, protect your seat, avoid the wrath of your own voters.

In both cases, the incentive is the same. Maintain the tension. Avoid resolution. Because resolution is risky. Stalemate is profitable.

The Real Mechanism

Here is what no civics class ever teaches:

The Constitution didn’t protect American democracy. The behavior of people who chose not to test it did.1

For most of American history, the mechanisms designed to constrain executive power were never actually invoked at scale — not because the design was so elegant that no one could circumvent it, but because the relevant actors operated under a set of informal norms that made circumvention unthinkable. You didn’t challenge election results. You didn’t weaponize federal agencies against political opponents. You didn’t treat the machinery of the state as a personal instrument.

Not because the Constitution prevented it.

Because doing so would have been, in the eyes of everyone whose opinion mattered, disqualifying.

That normative restraint was the mechanism. The Constitutional architecture was the story we told ourselves about why the mechanism worked.

The problem with stories is that they collapse when someone decides to stop believing them.

What we’re watching now is not a failure of Constitutional design. It is the exposure of a design that was always dependent on a condition it could not itself enforce: that the people operating the system would share a baseline commitment to its continuity.

Remove that condition, and the checks don’t check. The balances don’t balance. The carefully constructed architecture of separation and oversight becomes, in practice, a series of escape hatches — each one requiring the very consensus it was designed to produce.

The framers feared coups, factions, and instability. So they built friction.

They did not build a system that could survive a faction that understood the friction and was willing to absorb it.

What Breaks It

Systems like this do not resolve through gradual realization. They resolve through shock.

Not the kind anyone engineers — no one schedules a forcing event. But the kind that arrives anyway: economic crisis, foreign policy catastrophe, something that makes the cost of continued association — for enough actors, simultaneously — exceed the cost of defection. When that happens, things move fast. Not because courage suddenly materializes, but because incentives finally change.

No one can predict when that moment arrives. No one can manufacture it. The people demanding action have no more control over its timing than the Cabinet secretaries quietly waiting for cover that never comes.

The Conclusion You’re Left With

Why doesn’t someone do something?

Because there is no someone. There is a sequencing trap disguised as a mechanism, a coordination problem dressed up as a constitutional safeguard, and a set of incentives that make individual action suicidal and collective action nearly impossible.

The system isn’t stuck. It is in equilibrium — bad, dangerous, but stable by its own logic.

And the thing that made you feel safe inside that system was never the Constitution. It was the voluntary restraint of people who no longer feel bound by it. The norms were always doing the work. The text was always the story.

The story is over.

What you do with that information is a separate question. But it starts with this: stop waiting for the stag hunt to resolve. The actors with formal authority are trapped in a game that makes action irrational for each of them individually, and nearly impossible for all of them collectively. They are not coming.

The readers who’ve already stopped waiting — who’ve started treating their own exposure to this system as a variable rather than a constant, building optionality rather than holding out for resolution — aren’t defeatists. They’re people who did the math before the trap fully closed.

Your first move, unlike theirs, doesn’t require anyone else to follow.

If the Court turns the Fourteenth Amendment to ash—and given its recent habit of treating precedent like kindling, that is no wild speculation—then millions of Americans will discover their citizenship is not a birthright, but a status subject to review.

Ask yourself a simple question:

If tomorrow the only test is whether you are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” do you actually know where you stand?

Not what you assume. Not what you were told in civics class. What you can prove.

Because if the Amendment is gutted, the fallback is blood. Lineage. Paper. A bureaucrat with a checklist asking you to reconstruct your ancestry—on their timeline, to their standard, with consequences for getting it wrong.

Can you do it?

Can you produce the documents that show someone in your chain naturalized—cleanly, properly, in a way the government will accept?

No?

Then your birthplace—“I was born in New York!”—becomes a sentimental detail. The government’s answer will be brisk and unpoetic: irrelevant.

The entire purpose of United States v. Wong Kim Ark was to remove precisely this uncertainty—to establish that birth on American soil, coupled with allegiance, settled the question. Full stop.

For more than a century, that wasn’t debated. It was assumed—like gravity.

Until it wasn’t.

Now people comfort themselves with courtroom theater—who sounded sharp, who asked tough questions, who seemed skeptical.

This is a category error.

This Court does not decide cases based on how oral argument “felt.” It decides based on what it believes the law should produce.

We have seen this movie before.

Roe was “settled law”—until it wasn’t. Every justice nodded solemnly at confirmation, then promptly set fire to it in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Not because of abortion politics—that’s the distraction—but because the reasoning was a wreck. A decision that reads less like law and more like a brief written after the verdict was already chosen.

The pattern holds.

Take Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.—forty years of doctrine built on a simple premise: Congress writes vague laws, agencies interpret them, courts defer within reason.

Functional. Boring. Necessary.

Then comes Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, and the Court decides—on its own authority—that it would prefer to be the policymaker. Doctrine gone. Not refined. Not limited. Erased.

No new coherent framework replaces it. Just the quiet assertion: we will decide now.

Or take the presidential immunity case—where two centuries of “no one is above the law” dissolves into a haze of exceptions so broad they swallow the rule. Even if you could defend the outcome, the Court’s decision to say it out loud—at that scale, in that way—betrays a deeper indifference to consequence.

That is the throughline: when the destination matters, the map becomes optional.

Which brings us back to the Fourteenth Amendment.

If the Court wanted to preserve the existing order, it had an elegant tool: decline to hear the case.

It could have simply said, “Certiorari Denied.” Let Wong stand. Let the executive order die quietly.

Two words. Status quo preserved.

It did not.

And when a Court goes out of its way to pick up a loaded question it could have ignored, it is rarely because it intends to holster the gun.

Do I think Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson buy the attack on birthright citizenship? No.

Do I think Alito, Roberts, Kavanaugh, Barrett, Thomas, and Gorsuch are persuaded by the arguments defending it? Also no.

This is where, I believe, all this commentary on what people saw yesterday is terribly misguided.

The outcome will not hinge on persuasion. It will hinge on preference.

And the preferences here are not subtle.

For decades, there has been a persistent irritation—sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted—about automatic citizenship for the children of non-citizens. Since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, that irritation has matured into an ideology.

The legal question—“subject to the jurisdiction thereof”—is merely the lever.

What I expect is not an outright incineration of the Amendment. That would be too crude, too obvious, too easy to recognize as madness.

Instead, you will get something worse: a narrowing. A qualification. A “clarification” that introduces contingencies where none existed before.

A doctrine that sounds technical and restrained, but functions like a trapdoor.

Citizenship will become conditional—not in theory, but in administration. In edge cases first. Then in broader categories. Then, inevitably, in practice.

And once that door is open, it will not close.

Because the same Court that reimagined administrative law, rewrote privacy doctrine, and flirted with executive impunity is not suddenly going to rediscover judicial modesty when the stakes are higher.

If I’m wrong, I’ll say so gladly.

But if I’m right, the shift will be quiet at first. No mass denaturalizations. No dramatic announcements.

Just a new question, asked more often, in more places—
at airports, at banks, at borders, in courtrooms:

Prove it.

I do not believe in theatrical protest.

I do not believe skipping stores or trending hashtags alters the behavior of a presidency that feeds on spectacle.

Most activism is catharsis.

I do not typically write about “what to do,” despite repeated requests. My work is diagnosis, not mobilization.

But occasionally, there is an action so narrow, so low-cost, and so structurally asymmetric that it could alter incentives at the margin.

This is one of those rare moments.

On February 24, Congress will assemble in joint session for the State of the Union.

I am asking you to contact your Senator and Representative and ask them not to attend.

Not as a stunt.

As an institutional boundary signal.

Why This Moment Is Different

The Supreme Court recently ruled that the President exceeded the statutory authority he invoked to impose sweeping tariffs.

The Court did not eliminate all presidential trade authority. It did not dismantle congressional delegation in its entirety.

It did something simpler.

It said: Under this statute, this justification fails.

In other words: there are limits.

The response was not restraint. It was escalation.

Alternate authorities were invoked. Tariffs were raised further. The rhetoric intensified.

Whether those alternate statutes survive judicial review is secondary.

What matters is the pattern:

Judicial constraint → public defiance → expanded assertion.

That is not a trade policy dispute.

That is an institutional stress test.

Why Tariffs Matter — Specifically

Tariffs are not abstract.

They are taxes.

And the Constitution is unusually clear about one thing: taxation originates in Congress.

When a President stretches emergency or trade authorities to impose sweeping economic burdens across the country — and then responds to judicial limitation with rhetorical dismissal — it lands in two places at once:

It challenges the Court.

And it diminishes Congress.

This is not about liking or disliking tariffs as policy.

It is about whether Congress is comfortable being bypassed.

Tariffs hit constituents directly — manufacturers, farmers, small businesses, consumers. They create price pressure and uncertainty.

Members of Congress feel that pressure in their districts.

Which is precisely why this issue is different from scandal politics or culture-war theatrics.

This one affects re-election math.

And when policy pain intersects with constitutional boundary, leverage appears.

The Political Reality

There are members of the President’s party who privately welcomed the Court’s ruling.

Not because they suddenly rediscovered Madison.

But because tariffs were becoming politically radioactive.

There are others not seeking re-election.

And there are members in competitive districts who cannot afford sustained economic backlash.

Private relief is not public courage.

But courage often begins when risk feels shared.

A visibly thinner State of the Union — particularly if it includes members of the President’s own party — would not end a tariff regime.

It would do something subtler.

It would signal that Congress is not merely a backdrop.

It would demonstrate that judicial rulings are not optional suggestions.

It would fracture the image of unanimous executive dominance.

Presidents who govern by spectacle rely on the optics of compliance.

Remove the optics, and the aura weakens.

Decorum is not attendance. Decorum is respecting institutional limits.

This Is Not About Embarrassment

It is about legitimacy.

The Constitution does not require members to attend a State of the Union in person.

For much of American history, Presidents delivered written reports.

The Republic functioned.

Attendance is ceremony.

And ceremony communicates consent.

If a member believes the President’s recent conduct respects the institutional role of Congress, they should attend proudly.

If they do not, attendance becomes a form of normalization.

Absence is not obstruction.

It is signaling.

If Congress cannot take even this minimal step, that too will be instructive.

The Ask

If you choose to act, keep it short.

Senator/Representative ______,

I am asking you not to attend the State of the Union.

The President’s recent actions regarding tariffs raise serious concerns about Congress’s constitutional role in taxation and the separation of powers.

If you believe this expansion of executive authority is appropriate, then we disagree.

If you do not, attendance signals acquiescence.

The Constitution does not require in-person attendance. Refusal would not impede governance. It would signal that Congress remains an independent branch.

I urge you to hold a town hall in the district instead.

Respectfully,
[Name]

No insults.
No slogans.
No theater.

Just institutional clarity. This message can be sent to either party cleanly. You can call, email, or write. If you don’t know who your members are, or how to contact them: (202) 224-3121. That is the number for the Capitol Switchboard. The US House of Representatives main line is (202) 225-3121.

Find your U.S. Representative (by ZIP code):
👉 https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

Find your U.S. Senators (by state):
👉 https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

From those links, you can find your member’s website page. Each office provides a contact form, and most also maintain district phone numbers.

Call if you prefer. Be polite. Be brief. Be precise.

You are not arguing policy. This is not about winning an argument. You are asking for a small, discrete institutional signal — that judicial rulings matter, that Congress is a co-equal branch, and that ceremony does not override constitutional limits.

Why This Matters

We are not at revolution.

We are at normalization.

Normalization of executive improvisation.

Normalization of rhetorical defiance toward judicial rulings.

Normalization of Congress shrinking itself voluntarily.

Erosion rarely looks dramatic in real time.

It looks procedural.

Polite.

Televised.

Sometimes the most effective response to spectacle is to deny it an audience.

This is not a call to fury.

It is a call to boundary.

The Republic will continue either way.

But occasionally, inches matter.

And this may be one of those inches.

I watched about an hour of the Bondi hearing.

That was sufficient. I’m not a masochist.

Not because it was explosive. Not because it was dramatic. Not because I couldn’t bear the tension. I have sat in that room. I have testified before Congress. I have prepared those who testify before Congress at Bondi’s level (Secretaries and cabinet officials).

I know what the atmosphere feels like when scrutiny is real.

This was not that.

I turned it off because it was obvious.

Everyone knew their lines.

Bondi treated questions as personal affronts. Republicans treated loyalty as a competitive sport. Democrats treated indignation as a performance art. The media translated it all into “heated exchanges,” as if we were watching cable-news boxing.

It was not boxing.

It was ritual.

And ritual is what institutions perform when they no longer intend to correct themselves.

The Great American Fantasy

There is a persistent superstition in this country that the system is noisy but functioning.

Yes, the rhetoric is ugly.
Yes, the politicians posture.
Yes, the hearings are theatrical.

But underneath the circus, we are told, the machinery still works. The guardrails still exist. Adults are still in charge.

What I saw was not adults in charge.

It was professionals in costume.

Oversight has become content. Accountability has become branding. Law is now a prop in a drama whose ending has already been written.

This is not a strained system.

This is a system that has learned how to metabolize its own disgrace.

“We Just Have to Vote”

The civic optimists will insist that this is temporary.

We just have to vote harder.
We just have to protest louder.
We just have to fight.

Fight whom?

The people in that room were not at risk. That is the point. No one behaved as though they feared consequence. No one flinched as though institutional legitimacy were fragile.

In a healthy system, exposure is dangerous. In this one, exposure is promotional.

When hearings become auditions and law becomes narrative management, a line has been crossed.

The line is simple:

A self-correcting system punishes excess.
A self-protecting system rewards it.

Which one did you see?

The Closed Loop

Watch the incentives.

Escalation earns applause.
Restraint earns exile.
Loyalty earns advancement.
Questioning earns branding.

That is not dysfunction. That is adaptation.

And adaptation is durable.

This is how decline looks in a wealthy country: not with tanks in the street, but with well-lit committee rooms where everyone understands the choreography and pretends it is governance.

Nothing collapses tomorrow. The markets open. The planes fly. The restaurants remain booked.

That is what makes it dangerous.

Systems rarely explode without rehearsal.

They rehearse in hearings like this.

The Exposure Problem

Most people consume politics as entertainment. They argue, share, rage, and return to dinner.

But politics is not entertainment if you have assets, children, legal exposure, or time-sensitive optionality.

If the system has crossed from reversible embarrassment into self-reinforcing decay, then time is not neutral.

Every year of full exposure increases the cost of exit.

You can dismiss that as alarmism.
You can label it pessimism.
You can call it melodrama.

Or you can examine whether the corrective mechanisms are functioning.

If the guardrails are intact, show where they are enforced.

If oversight still disciplines power, show who pays a price.

If elections still constrain incentives, show the constraint.

What I saw was not discipline.

It was insulation.

The Banality of the Drift

The headlines after the hearing were predictable:

“Bondi clashes with lawmakers.”

Clashes.

As though we were watching a sporting event. As though the question at stake were who scored points, not whether institutional legitimacy is dissolving in public view.

This is how democracies degrade.

Not with a coup.
With ritual.

Not with martial law.
With framing.

Not with collapse.
With normalization.

The machinery does not stop working.

It simply stops disciplining itself.

Anger is irrelevant to that process. So is outrage. So is optimism.

The reaction continues whether you approve of it or not.

The question is not whether you are upset.

The question is how much unhedged exposure you are willing to maintain to a machine that has entered self-reinforcing mode.

Systems do not send invitations when exit windows begin to close.

They simply stop opening them.

Subscribe now

I’ve read the warrant carefully. (You can read it here as well.)Without access to the supporting affidavit, it is—quite literally—analytically meaningless.

A search warrant is not the signature page. It is the affidavit plus the magistrate’s authorization. Without the factual predicate presented to the court, all that exists here is a claim that “probable cause” was found, without any visibility into why.

What we can evaluate, however, is whether the warrant, as issued, coherently maps onto the statutes it cites.

I don’t think it does.

I’m quite confused (still).

What the Government Appears to Be Alleging

The warrant relies on 52 U.S.C. § 20701 and 52 U.S.C. § 20511.

At a basic level:

• § 20701 imposes a duty on election officials to retain federal election records for 22 months.

• § 20511 provides criminal penalties for knowing and willful violations of election-related provisions in Title 52.

That is the entire statutory framework invoked.

There is no allegation of espionage. No allegation of foreign influence. No allegation of counterintelligence concerns. Thus, why Tulsi Gabbard was there remains a mystery.

Nothing in the warrant suggests why any intelligence or national-security personnel would be involved, because nothing in these statutes implicates them.

This is, on its face, a records-retention theory that appears to be the case. The crimes are procedural crimes. This whole thing makes little sense in the “risk-reward” calculus of using the FBI to seize records from a County office.

The Timing Problem (Which Is Fatal Unless Explained)

The 2020 federal election occurred on November 3, 2020.

The statutory duty to retain records under § 20701 therefore expired in September 2022.

That is not debatable. It is arithmetic.

This warrant issued in January 2026—more than three years after the retention obligation lapsed.

For § 20701 to support probable cause now, DOJ has to be asserting all of the following:

1. That election records were unlawfully destroyed during the retention period;

2. That evidence of that destruction still exists in 2026; and

3. That the appropriate remedy for past destruction is the seizure of remaining original records years later.

That theory is doctrinally weak. Section 20701 is a preservation statute. It does not authorize retroactive evidentiary excavation long after the statutory duty has expired. And again, so what? There’s no remedy that can “undo” any of the harms that Justice might allege, and the “criminals” in this case are best facing a thousand-dollar fine and maybe a year in prison. This is hardly worthy of a massive federal “HANDS UP” guys run in with machine guns and take out boxes of information.

If records were destroyed, seizing what remains does not prove that a crime was committed. If records were preserved, there is no crime. If the records aren’t preserved, you’d have to show when they were destroyed, and you’d have to show they were destroyed BEFORE September 2022.

The statute simply does not support the remedy.

It makes little sense.

The Criminalization Problem Under § 20511

Section 20511 criminalizes knowing and willful election fraud or misconduct.

That normally requires:

• A person,

• A scheme,

• Intent,

• And specific acts.

This warrant names none of those. So, on that basis alone, I’m confused why the writ was issued.

Why? Because the writ authorizes the seizure of:

• All ballots,

• All tabulator tapes,

• All ballot images,

• All voter rolls.

That is not evidence-gathering in support of a defined criminal theory. It is a reverse fishing expedition: seize everything first, decide later what the theory might be. That’s not how warrants are typically issued.

Courts tolerate breadth only when it is anchored to particularized probable cause. Here, breadth appears to substitute for theory.

So again, I’m confused.

The Subpoena Question (Which the Warrant Cannot Answer)

The biggest red flag to me is this: these records could have been obtained by subpoena.

That matters.

A subpoena would have produced copies, preserved state custody, allowed pre-compliance judicial challenge, and maintained institutional comity.

A search warrant does the opposite:

• It seizes originals,

• Transfers exclusive federal custody,

• Eliminates adversarial review beforehand,

• And forecloses independent verification.

The choice of a warrant over a subpoena signals that control of the evidentiary substrate, not mere access to information, was the objective.

That raises a serious question: why was exclusivity necessary?

My answer to that question remains that the Trump Junta wished to preclude anyone else from demonstrating the election was “not rigged” in Fulton County; the conclusion every prior investigation has reached (independently).

Prior Investigations Cannot Be Ignored

Before this warrant issued:

• The State of Georgia investigated the election;

• Fulton County conducted its own reviews;

• DOJ, under Attorney General Barr, examined allegations and closed them.

None of those investigations resulted in findings of ballot destruction or criminal fraud sufficient to support charges. In short, no evidence of Trump, Giuliani, or the other conspirators alleging voter fraud was found. Quite the opposite. Court after court concluded that there was no fraud, that the conspirators had engaged in it themselves. Guilani, in particular, was found liable for defamation of poll workers.

All of the judicial and collateral estoppel claims point to the conclusion that no crime has been committed

Those facts were known. If they were not in the warrant request, then that is likely a material omission. That said, even not being in the request, one would have hoped the Magistrate Judge would have had some cognitive understanding of the history of events in her own state and county.

I guess not.

While legally she doesn’t have to remember facts, history, being educated beyond the level of a turnip, it would have seriously helped here had she been at least a bit inquisitive about “why now” and “why is this the only remedy.”

She wasn’t.

That’s not misconduct or unlawful; it’s unfortunate. The real damage done here was to federalism.

The Federalism Problem

This was not a warrant served on a private business or criminal enterprise.

It was served on a county election authority, exercising state-delegated constitutional functions.

Federal courts are traditionally cautious here. Criminal search warrants against sovereign election infrastructure are extraordinary remedies. That heightens—not lowers—the obligation for precise statutory fit and clear necessity.

Nothing in the warrant demonstrates that level of justification.

The Overlooked Consequence: Interference with State Criminal Prosecutions

There is an additional problem that the warrant does not address at all.

By seizing original election records from Fulton County, the federal government likely impairs the County’s ability to prosecute state crimes—a consequence that is neither incidental nor speculative.

Fulton County does not merely administer elections. It prosecutes crimes. Ballots, voter rolls, tabulator tapes, and related materials are not historical artifacts; they are potential criminal evidence in state election-law prosecutions, forgery cases, false-swearing investigations, and chain-of-custody disputes. Removing those originals from county custody transfers exclusive control of that evidence to the federal government.

That transfer creates immediate legal friction.

First, the chain of custody becomes vulnerable. Once evidence leaves state control, any future prosecution must account for an inter-sovereign custody break—an issue defense counsel will exploit aggressively, regardless of the FBI’s internal handling procedures.

Second, the seizure complicates the County’s discovery and disclosure obligations. Under Brady and its progeny, prosecutors must disclose exculpatory evidence within their possession or control. When original evidence is held by a separate sovereign, questions arise about access, delay, and completeness—questions that courts do not treat lightly.

Third, timing matters. State criminal prosecutions are subject to speedy-trial requirements, discovery deadlines, and statutes of limitation. Federal custody can delay forensic testing, expert review, and court-ordered inspection. If a case fails because evidence was unavailable when required, the harm cannot be undone.

These risks are precisely why subpoenas, not search warrants, are the standard mechanism when federal investigators seek records held by state or local authorities. Subpoenas preserve custody, allow copying, permit pre-compliance judicial review, and avoid disabling parallel prosecutions. A warrant does the opposite.

When the federal government chooses seizure over a subpoena, courts normally expect a compelling explanation for why exclusive custody is necessary.

This warrant provides none.

The result is a remedy that not only strains statutory authority, but also interferes with the ordinary functioning of a co-equal sovereign’s criminal justice system—a consequence that should have factored heavily into any probable-cause determination.

Its absence from the warrant is conspicuous.

Why a Franks Hearing Is the Only Place This Makes Sense

At this point, the only way this warrant becomes intelligible is through the affidavit.

A Franks hearing would test whether material facts were omitted or misrepresented in securing probable cause, particularly facts about:

• The expiration of the statutory retention duty;

• The absence of prior findings of destruction or fraud;

• The availability of subpoenas;

• And the extensive prior investigations already conducted.

If those facts were withheld, the magistrate may have been presented with a distorted picture of criminal necessity.

That is precisely what Franks v. Delaware is designed to address.

Bottom Line

As written, this warrant does not explain itself.

The statutes cited do not justify the timing, scope, or remedy. The criminal theory is undefined. The seizure is maximal. The federalism implications are severe. And the choice of a warrant over a subpoena is unexplained.

Until the affidavit is exposed, the only reasonable conclusion is that the warrant raises far more constitutional and doctrinal questions than it answers.

And that alone warrants serious scrutiny.

Absent a Franks hearing, we’re left to conclude things that are nefarious:

• That the purpose of the warrant was seizure, not discovery, to preclude any meaningful political commentary.

• That it was designed to obstruct the prosecution of the remaining conspirators in the Fulton County Case.

• That it was designed to obstruct the prosecution of the President in that case.

• That it was designed to preclude any meaningful analysis of the vote in that county by outside research or parties

• That it will be leveraged as a piece of evidence to justify unlawful intrusion by the federal government into state and county election processes.

Absent the Franks hearing, we must conclude that all of those goals, and not a lawful inquiry into a crime, were the DOJ’s objectives. That conclusion aligns with why one would go and issue this type of warrant.

What remains is why the Magistrate thought it was reasonable to let the warrant issue.

A curious moral infection has been spreading through Substack, conservative media, and even the more spineless precincts of the mainstream press these past few hours: the claim that Alex Pretti somehow deserved to be shot because he was armed.

This is the consoling myth by which a frightened Republican base reassures itself that power is still benevolent—that the men with guns and badges are acting in its interest, and that any corpse left cooling on the pavement must have been a necessary administrative expense. It’s folded in between the commercials of buying a reverse mortgage and the magic pillows sold by a seditionist. The argument is simple: if the dead man had it coming, then the system remains sound, and no uncomfortable questions need be asked.

This is nonsense, of course—but not the harmless variety. It is the sort of nonsense that anesthetizes conscience, launders state violence, and converts a human being into an unfortunate but acceptable rounding error.

It is repugnant.

Let’s begin with the boring part: the law.

Pretti’s actions appear to have been entirely lawful under Minnesota carry law and core First Amendment protections. He was entitled to be present. Entitled to film. Entitled to assemble. Entitled to carry a firearm. There is no doctrine—statutory, constitutional, or judicial—that says these rights evaporate when federal agents feel nervous.

That idea comes not from law but from a sort of civic superstition: the belief that rights are valid only when exercised quietly, deferentially, and at a safe distance from men with badges.

This is not jurisprudence.
It is etiquette.
And etiquette has never justified killing anyone. Last time I checked, Emily Post didn’t have a “rules to kill someone” for the federal government.

Now, the defenders of the indefensible—those who rush to explain that Pretti should have “known better”—are not wholly wrong about one thing. Legal rights do not magically neutralize how violence behaves in the real world.

Federal immigration enforcement in Minneapolis, operating under the cheery euphemism of Operation Metro Surge, has produced multiple civilian shootings, widespread protest, and a growing archive of video evidence that would embarrass a third-rate banana republic.

In that environment, the risk of death is radically asymmetric. Federal agents operate with minimal oversight, maximal immunity, and a demonstrated fondness for escalation to deadly force.

Civilians absorb the consequences—most often in the form of chunks of lead, cracked skulls, and being bear-maced in the face.

Because of that asymmetry, I would not have injected myself into that situation while armed. Not because it would be unlawful. But because doing so increases the odds of being shot by men who have shown both poor discipline and excellent confidence that nothing bad will happen to them afterward.

That is not moral judgment.
It’s risk analysis.
It’s prudence in the face of asymmetric risk profiles.

But here is where the amateur apologists for state violence perform their favorite sleight of hand. They take this prudential observation—it’s dangerous to be armed near unaccountable agents ready to kill—and retroactively convert it into guilt and criminal accountability upon the State’s victims.

Pretti should have retreated.
Pretti should have stayed home.
Pretti should not have helped a woman being shoved to the ground.
Pretti should not have documented federal agents behaving badly.

In short: Pretti should have known his place.

This is not legal analysis.
It is corpse management.

What matters under our laws is not whether a man failed to make the safest possible choice under stress. What matters is whether officers had a reasonable belief that he posed an imminent threat of death or grave bodily harm.

That is the standard.

And there is no evidence at present that the standard was met.

Pretti was a 37-year-old ICU nurse. A lawful gun owner. No serious criminal history. Family members and eyewitnesses dispute DHS’s claim that he attempted to draw a weapon. Video shows no brandishing, no reach, no muzzle flash, no officers under fire, no public threatened with deadly force.

In plain English, there are no facts that justify killing him.

So when commentators insist that Pretti “brought this on himself,” what they are really saying is not that the law was satisfied, but that unquestioned obedience to any act of the State is now the price of survival. Rights may exist on paper, but exercising them in the wrong tone, posture, or zip code is a provocation that can result in death.

This doctrine—that citizens must preemptively surrender to unlawful behavior to prevent police panic—is not public safety. It is not Second Amendment jurisprudence. It is not consistent with federal deadly-force policy or Supreme Court precedent.

It is permission decay.
And worse, it is moral laundering.

It takes an act that smells suspiciously like a deprivation of civil rights under color of law and perfumes it with range-safety gun-culture aphorisms and counterfactual fantasies. “If only he had behaved differently.” “If only he had been more responsible.” “If only he had known better.”

Yes—if only.

Counterfactuals are cheap.
Accountability is not.

Blaming the victim of unlawful violence for failing to perfectly navigate an asymmetric, unaccountable use of force is how states rot. It is how restraint becomes cowardice, protest becomes provocation, and eventually, violence becomes the only remaining language anyone believes will be heard.

History suggests that when that logic takes hold, things do not calm down.

They explode.

Another life has been extinguished — this time on a Minneapolis street — and once again federal immigration agents stand at the center of it. On January 24, 2026, a man was fatally shot during an ICE/DHS enforcement operation; video circulating online shows agents grappling with him moments before agents discharge their firearms against a man on the ground.

Authorities insist he was armed within seconds after the incident.

Political leaders immediately began disputing narrative and culpability, as if the argument itself were the substance.

This followed the January 7 killing of Renee Good, a 37-year-old American citizen shot by an ICE agent in south Minneapolis — an incident that catalyzed mass protest almost overnight. Together with a third fatal encounter, these deaths form a pattern the federal government appears determined not to recognize.

Predictably, the official apparatus performed its well-rehearsed routine. Federal spokespeople insisted the actions were lawful. Allied commentators rushed to justify the violence. Republican officials inflated threat narratives. Democratic officials offered condolences, condemned the optics, and demanded accountability they lack the power — or will — to impose. This is the choreography of contemporary American crisis: defend the agents, denounce the unrest, disclaim responsibility, and escalate rhetoric in place of policy.

The streets, equally predictably, have responded. Over fifty thousand people participated in mass demonstrations in Minneapolis on Friday, including a coordinated economic shutdown branded the “Day of Truth and Freedom,” closing businesses, universities, and workplaces across the state.

This was not a riot. It was organization.

From that organization, a simple inference follows: the social contract is unravelling. When federal law-enforcement actions reliably catalyze mass civil resistance — and when political elites either sanctify violence or offer procedural regret — institutional legitimacy erodes. This is not rhetoric. It is a historical regularity.

A Crisis of Legitimacy, Not Temper

Two people have now been shot dead by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in a matter of weeks — both of them U.S. citizens. The federal response has been notable not for alarm, but for bureaucratic serenity.

Everything was lawful.
Everyone deserved it.
Case closed.

The machinery hums on.

The Department of Homeland Security responded to public outrage not with restraint but with escalation. Protests were met with expanded deployments and conspicuous shows of force. There have now been at least six recorded incidents of ICE agents threatening or presenting deadly force against unarmed individuals to enter homes, effect arrests, or conduct routine operations.

ICE now claims authority to conduct traffic stops, enter private residences without judicial warrants, and perform so-called Terry stops without probable cause against citizens and non-citizens alike.

This posture has not been disavowed. It has been celebrated. The Secretary of Homeland Security has advised the public to be prepared to “show their papers.” The Vice President of the United States has publicly, and erroneously, asserted that ICE agents have “absolute immunity” in their actions and operations.

What followed was not hysteria but coordination. One killing produced outrage; outrage produced organization. A statewide shutdown followed. A third killing did not shock the public into silence — it clarified the pattern. When violence repeats without consequence, it ceases to resemble misfortune and begins to look like method.

Labor unions, clergy, community organizations, and ordinary citizens now confront armed agents directly, asking — not rhetorically — whether they are next. You’re going to have to kill me. That is not protest language. It is the language people use when they no longer believe authority is constrained by law.

This is not “people being mad.” It is legitimacy collapse — the point at which repeated lethal force, dismissed with official shrugs, convinces the governed that power answers only to itself.

In American history, this is the necessary precondition for insurrection: not rage, but resignation — the quiet conclusion that obedience has become irrational.

The Government Is Accelerating the Spiral

The government’s official framing is not calming the situation; it is accelerating it. Each time federal officials line up to insist the shootings were “legitimate enforcement,” that agents “feared for their lives,” and that protesters are irrational or dangerous, they are not restoring order.

They are advertising indifference to murder.

To people on the ground, this language does not read as reassurance. It reads as a dismissal of the value of their lives. It signals that whatever occurred is irrelevant — that the verdict has already been rendered and no institutional process will meaningfully interrogate it. From the President downward, the message is remarkably consistent: we do not care, you cannot stop us, and there will be no reckoning.

President Donald Trump, January 24th, 2026, at about 1PM Central.
About roughly four hours after the incident.

This posture feeds escalation in two predictable ways. First, it validates the protesters’ central conclusion: that official channels are decorative rather than corrective. When repeated killings are waved away as proper, accountability stops looking delayed and starts looking impossible. Petition gives way to confrontation.

Second, it destroys the signaling value of restraint. If the government insists everything is fine, moderation accomplishes nothing — while escalation carries no additional political penalty. Once that calculus sets in, restraint stops being virtuous and starts being foolish.

Thus, it is the federal government — not the mayor of Minneapolis or the governor of Minnesota — that is accelerating toward rupture.1

Past the One-Trigger Moment

Every regime in trouble insists unrest is an overreaction to a single incident — a bad arrest, a tragic mistake, an isolated abuse. This is not analysis. It is self-exculpation. The “one-trigger” narrative exists to preserve the fiction that the system is otherwise sound.

That fiction has failed before.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, labor unrest followed this exact arc. Individual strikes were dismissed as criminality. Killings by private or state forces were justified as necessary. Courts and executives closed ranks. What followed were general strikes, pitched street battles, and eventually federal intervention — not because workers were “mad,” but because institutions refused correction until confrontation became inevitable.

The pattern repeated itself in the civil rights era. Early police violence was rationalized as crowd control. Federal authorities urged calm while declining to intervene meaningfully. Only after violence escalated — after Birmingham, Selma, and urban uprisings — did legitimacy collapse force federal action. Until then, restraint was rewarded with indifference.

It repeated again in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Campus protests were dismissed as radical theater. National Guard deployments were framed as efforts to restore order. When force finally spilled into bloodshed, the state discovered — too late — that its authority had already decayed.

The lesson is consistent: the trigger never matters as much as the refusal to adapt once the pattern is visible.

Why Minneapolis Is More Dangerous

What distinguishes Minneapolis is not the intensity of anger, but the coherence of mobilization and the explicit collapse of trust in institutional correction.

People are not waiting to see how investigations turn out. They have concluded that the outcome is pre-written. They are not arguing about policy. They are arguing about legitimacy.

That is a far more dangerous dispute.

When people believe the system is biased, they protest within it. When they believe the system is fake, they begin operating around it. This is why rhetoric has hardened. This is why economic disruption has entered the picture. This is why enforcement escalation is backfiring.

The public has already updated its priors.

What Comes Next

History does not guarantee insurrection. It guarantees probability.

If current dynamics persist, several outcomes become more likely: protests become more frequent rather than larger; enforcement grows more aggressive rather than more effective; political rhetoric intensifies while control diminishes; accidents and miscalculations multiply. None of this requires conspiracy. It requires only inertia.

Insurrection does not begin with slogans or weapons.

It begins when obedience stops making sense.

Minneapolis has not reached that endpoint. But it has crossed the threshold where old explanations no longer work — where calls for calm sound like mockery, and assurances that everything is fine read as provocation.

That is not noise.

That is a system entering a legitimacy crisis — and history is unforgiving to governments that mistake that moment for mood.

Today, Trump goes to Switzerland and embarrasses himself.

This follows yesterday, when he spoke for nearly two and a half hours in the press room—rambling, incoherent, unmoored. It follows last week, when he stood up in the middle of a meeting with petroleum executives, wandered to a window, and began musing aloud about a building that does not exist. He writes, in the middle of the night, to the Prime Minister of Norway, apparently confusing it with Denmark, and says, in effect, “since you didn’t give me the Peace Prize, now I’m going to engage in war over Greenland.”

The pattern is not subtle.

And so, predictably, the press wheel turns. Members of Congress begin floating the idea—again—of invoking the 25th Amendment. Cable news panels nod gravely. Former aides and minor figures leak “concern.” Serious faces discuss a mechanism they do not understand.

I’m out of outrage at this point. As an Italian, all my *oah!*s have been used up.

What disgusts me more than the President’s behavior is the ritualized stupidity surrounding it. The press courts the spectacle, then feigns shock. Congress performs helplessness. And the 25th Amendment is wheeled out like a constitutional Ouija board—something to gesture at so no one has to do anything.

Let’s be clear.

The 25th Amendment does not apply here.

It is not a political removal mechanism.
It is not a remedy for authoritarian behavior.
It is not a substitute for congressional courage.

The 25th Amendment is a cabinet-driven incapacity clause. It presumes a functioning executive branch acting in good faith to address physical or cognitive incapacity. It presumes independent actors. It presumes sanity upstream. It presumes that every person on the Cabinet isn’t a sycophantic stooge who appears as mentally incapacitated as the President himself.

None of those conditions exist.

Invoking the 25th in this context is not naïve—it is evasive. It externalizes responsibility. It allows Congress to pretend removal is someone else’s job. It reframes a constitutional crisis as a medical one.

There is only one mechanism for removing a president who is abusing power, destabilizing the state, or acting in ways that endanger the republic:

Impeachment and removal.

That’s it.
No workaround.
No shortcut.
No comforting fiction.

Every time a member of Congress talks about the 25th Amendment instead of impeachment, what they are really saying is this: we don’t want ownership. Impeachment requires recorded votes. It forces alignment. It creates a historical record. It assigns responsibility that cannot later be laundered through concern-trolling and hindsight regret.

The 25th Amendment, by contrast, is risk-free theater. All they need is to troll out Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, pass a joint resolution saying “25th Amendment by the end of the month,” and the formula for Congress to do absolutely nothing of consequence is complete.

At some point, constitutional systems face a “seriousness test.”

Not a legal test. Not a rhetorical one. A practical one.

The question is simple: when the tools designed to stop abuse of power carry real political cost, are they used — or are they talked around?

Invoking the 25th Amendment is what institutions do when they want to appear alarmed without acting. Impeachment is what they do when they are willing to accept consequences.

This is the line between governance and theater. And once it is crossed, it does not quietly uncross itself.

Now consider a counterfactual—not a moral comparison, but a structural one.

Imagine a legislature facing an increasingly unstable executive. Imagine that executive preparing actions with irreversible consequences. Imagine further that the legislature possesses a lawful, explicit mechanism to remove him—not through intrigue or violence, but through its own constitutional authority.

And imagine that the legislature chooses not to use it.

Not because the tool is unclear.
Not because the threshold is unreachable.
But because doing so would be politically uncomfortable, career-ending, or electorally risky.

Instead, they gesture. They express concern. They discuss alternatives that conveniently place responsibility elsewhere. They wait.

History would not say, “At least they were worried.”

It would say: they had the authority—and refused to exercise it.

This is the part modern commentary avoids. Catastrophes are rarely caused by madmen alone. They are enabled by institutions that decide, collectively, that action is someone else’s job.

The lesson here is not that unstable leaders are dangerous. Everyone knows that.

The lesson is that when a legislature with removal authority refuses to use it, it becomes part of the causal chain.

The question is not whether Trump is unfit.

He is.

The past two weeks alone make that clear. He gestures toward open conflict with historic allies—Greenland today, Canada tomorrow, who knows next. He stares out windows talking about buildings that do not exist. He flips through printed PowerPoint slides at press conferences like a man paging through a photo album no one else recognizes.

Whether the president is diminished is not the question. I believe he is.

But even if he’s not, then the situation is even more dire. The President is deliberately placing all the systems that America has relied on for its safety, security, and prosperity at risk. And if he’s not insane, then it is a deliberate act of malice, not stupidity, and not incapacity.

So, whether you think the President is insane or a malicious actor, the question becomes why the people empowered to stop him from harming the United States keep pretending they aren’t.

The Cabinet is not going to remove him.
There is no alternative mechanism.

Congress either acts—or Trump remains.

That is the reality.

We should all stop pretending otherwise.

Earlier today, I wrote that the Republican coalition is no longer stable. It isn’t disciplined. It isn’t even coherent. It’s a spinning top—accelerating, not consolidating—and the faster it spins, the closer it gets to tearing itself apart.

That context matters, because here in Minneapolis, the conversation has shifted from protest management to something more dangerous: invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying special forces troops to our streets.

That is not a show of strength.

The theory behind it is familiar: overwhelming force restores order, intimidates dissent, and reasserts control. But that theory belongs to a different era. This is a permanently recorded environment, where legitimacy is shaped not by official statements, but by cell phone footage.

If federal troops are deployed against civilians, the result will not be unity.

It will be rupture.

Not because Americans are uniquely volatile, but because Republican officeholders are.

The danger here is misunderstood, in part because federal troops have already been deployed domestically without triggering collapse.

But that’s the wrong conclusion.

What we’ve seen so far is static, defensive use of military force: guarding federal property, reinforcing perimeters, operating under tightly constrained rules of engagement. That posture is legible. It is limited. And while controversial, it does not force immediate political clarity.

What is now being discussed is something else entirely.

This is a dynamic form of domestic force projection—military units operating in public spaces, engaging civilians directly, and making split-second decisions normally reserved for law enforcement. Soldiers, not police, attempting to impose order in an open civilian environment.

That shift is not semantic. It is structural.

The moment military forces move from defending federal buildings to controlling the populace, the system crosses a line it cannot easily retreat from. The risk is no longer symbolic overreach, but operational miscalculation—misidentification, overreaction, escalation—captured in real time by hundreds of witnesses.

This is where coalition failure becomes inevitable.

A guarded courthouse with protestors mad outside produces talking points. A military patrol confronting civilians, possibly with deadly force, produces footage. And footage does not respect spin.

The moment a uniformed force is used against unarmed civilians on camera, the coalition fractures along predictable lines. Governors hedge. Swing-district Republicans panic. Media allies splinter. Donors disappear. And every member of Congress is forced to answer a question that they cannot answer:

Was this justified?

Some will try to paper over it with language about “terrorism” or “lawlessness.” That framing only works if the visuals cooperate.

They won’t.

This is the mistake force-first systems make: they assume obedience travels downward faster than legitimacy collapses outward. It didn’t work in Iraq or Afghanistan, but somehow they think it will work in Minneapolis. In reality, we know that legitimacy fails first—and when it does, force accelerates the collapse rather than preventing it. It doesn’t matter if it’s Kabul, Baghdad, or Minneapolis.

You can already see the strain. Figures who once cheered escalation are hesitating. Not because they’ve found principles, but because the cost curve has shifted.

Domestic military deployment, absent a true crisis, is not a display of control.

It is a tripwire.

Once crossed, leadership is left with only bad options: defend the indefensible, or abandon the executive they previously protected. Either choice detonates part of the coalition. There is no third path.

This is why the Insurrection Act is so dangerous—not because it will succeed, but because it cannot be used absent an actual insurrection or invasion. It forces clarity in a system built on ambiguity. And clarity is lethal to coalitions held together by denial and perfidy.

The paradox is simple: the more aggressively force is threatened or used, the weaker the presidency becomes.

If impeachment comes, it won’t be driven by moral awakening. It will be driven by institutional self-preservation. History suggests legislators choose themselves.

Force is not power.

In this environment, it’s exposure.

Washington is a town without pity.

Not because it’s evil—though there’s plenty of that—but because pity is inefficient in systems already under strain. Pity introduces friction. It slows decisions. It complicates blame. And in a political environment spinning too fast to tolerate error, pity is quietly discarded.

This matters because almost everything Americans are told about how change happens right now is wrong.

Protest is supposed to matter.
Voters are supposed to decide outcomes.
Persuasion is supposed to shift the balance.
“Democracy” is supposed to be the mechanism.

None of those claims survive contact with the actual physics of the current system.

I’ve argued for some time that elections no longer function the way people believe they do. That claim reliably provokes discomfort—usually framed as cynicism, abandonment, or partisan pessimism.

But this isn’t about mood or motive.

It’s about pattern recognition.

Despite ineffective protests, Democratic ineptitude, and rising authoritarian fantasy, Washington is likely to change in 2026.

Not because the public demanded it.
Not because leaders rediscovered courage.
Not because the right arguments finally broke through.

Systems that lose coherence do not change gradually. They change when accumulated error outpaces the capacity to correct it. That is what this midterm election is likely to produce.

Think of it as a spinning top. At one speed, the top is gyroscopic. Its angular momentum stabilizes it, making it difficult to tip over or alter its course. Small disturbances are absorbed and corrected.

As the top spins faster, however, those corrections become harder. Minor imbalances—imperfections in mass distribution, construction flaws, material limits—begin to matter. Wobbles that were once damped now persist and amplify.

Eventually, the very rotation that once provided stability generates internal stresses that exceed the system’s ability to hold itself together. The constraints fail. The structure ruptures. The top shatters—not because an external force intervened, but because the system exceeded its own tolerances.

That is the failure mode we are approaching. The GOP is a system accelerating toward the midterms. The question is not whether it wobbles, but how narrow the tolerances have become.

This is not a story about heroism.
Or democracy.
Or freedom.
Or morality.

It is a story about variance.

The Civic Fairytale

The myth of American democracy goes like this: if enough people show up, speak clearly, and vote their conscience, good outcomes will follow. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The fantasy of Hartsfield’s Landing—everyone voting at midnight, one hundred percent participation, the system responding faithfully to the will of the people. Democracy’s mechanisms may be slow and imperfect, but they are ultimately responsive. Pressure accumulates. Leaders adjust. The system returns to equilibrium.

I wish it were still so.

The mistake most people are making right now is not apathy. It is temporal mismatch. They are applying a participation model designed for a lower-stress, lower-variance system to one that has already crossed a different threshold.

In a stable political environment, persuasion matters because institutions have slack. They can absorb noise. They can correct mistakes. They can afford to wait for consensus to form. Voters act as a steering mechanism because the system trusts them to do so.

That trust is now gone.

What replaced it is not authoritarian command, but risk management.

Both parties—and their supporters—now believe the U.S. government is illegitimate.

That is literally the only thing they agree on.

Democrats believe the system is illegitimate because the president violates the law with apparent impunity, the courts no longer function as a meaningful check on executive abuse, and Congress appears permanently unwilling to exercise its constitutional role.

Republicans believe the system is illegitimate as a coping mechanism for political incoherence and material disappointment. They voted for a felon, believing it would lower egg prices. It did not. They are now forced to choose between healthcare and food, food and rent, rent and everything else. To reconcile this failure, they cling to conspiratorial explanations—sex-trafficking Democrats, a malevolent “deep state,” fantasies of enrichment through seizing Venezuelan oil or dismantling Greenland. Whatever the narrative, the conclusion is the same: the system exists to harm them.

That alignment is historically unprecedented. The United States has never had both major parties simultaneously conclude that the entire system is broken, arriving there through incompatible epistemic frameworks.

A democracy was not designed for an electorate that cannot agree whether two plus two equals four. When daily headlines feature mutually incompatible versions of reality, endorsed by institutions and sustained without correction, that is not noise.

It is an epistemic failure.

The top is now rotating at the edge of its tolerances.

Why Protest Feels Satisfying but also Hollow

In high-stress systems, the governing question is no longer “What do people want?” It is “What can still be controlled?” That shift quietly reorganizes everything downstream—campaigns, courts, donors, bureaucracies, and eventually elections themselves.

This is why protest feels hollow.

Not because protests are ignored, but because they no longer target the variables that determine outcomes. Marches produce visibility, not constraint. They signal dissent, not cost. They do not reduce error rates, impose legal risk, or alter institutional tolerances.

Protest still performs a social function. It reassures participants they are not alone. It vents pressure that might otherwise metastasize into violence. But it does not steer a system already oriented around containment.

The same is true of persuasion.

Campaigns still behave as though elections are debates to be won—arguments to refine, narratives to align with voter sentiment. That framing assumes the decisive variable is preference.

It isn’t.

The decisive variable is variance.

In a system under this level of stress, politics stops being about gain and becomes about error control. Less What do we want? More Who is going to screw up less?

Which coalition generates fewer unforced errors?
Which candidates create manageable legal exposure?
Which institutions can still certify outcomes without triggering crisis?
Which donors believe their downside risk remains bounded?
Which party’s elites intervene before tolerances collapse?

These are not questions voters answer directly. They are questions elites answer about voters—often defensively, often late, and often imperfectly.

This is why elections feel both pre-decided and volatile at the same time.

They are pre-decided in the sense that many outcomes are shaped before ballots are cast—through candidate filtration, litigation, procedural maneuvering, and risk hedging. They are volatile because the system has lost tolerance for mistakes. Errors that once disappeared into background noise now decide races.

A missed filing deadline.
A reckless statement.
A fringe primary victory.
A poorly drafted law.
A judge forced to intervene.

None of these are democratic choices in the romantic sense.

All of them now determine outcomes.

If the impulse is to “fight the power,” the counterintuitive reality is this: the most effective posture is not confrontation but error suppression on your own side and non-interference on the other. In a high-variance system, outcomes turn less on initiative than on mistake management. Republicans have become convinced of their own invincibility and indulgent excess, and that conviction reliably produces unforced errors. The critical task for Democrats is not escalation, but readiness—being positioned to recognize those errors, allow them to compound, and convert them into a durable advantage when institutions intervene.

Republicans Will “Break First”

If Washington changes in 2026, it will not be because Democrats suddenly became smarter, more principled, or more competent. There is no evidence for that. Democratic dysfunction remains visible and costly.

The reason change is likely is simpler.

The Republican system is operating at the edge of failure.

This is not primarily a story about ideology. It is a story about velocity.

Over multiple cycles, Republicans have adopted a governing posture defined by acceleration: maximalist rhetoric, maximalist power grabs, maximalist policy swings, open norm violation, and a near-total abandonment of restraint. Each choice increases rotational speed. Each narrows tolerance. Each reduces the system’s capacity to absorb error.

At low speed, abuse can be normalized.
At moderate speed, it can be litigated.
At high speed, it becomes destabilizing.

The GOP is now operating at that boundary.

Unbridled executive authority.
Defiance of courts.
Hostility toward allies.
Policy without administrative capacity.
Legislative brinkmanship that treats paralysis as acceptable collateral damage.
Candidate selection that rewards spectacle over competence.

None of this is disqualifying in isolation. What matters is stacking.

When abuses compound faster than institutions can correct them, the response is not moral outrage. It is containment. Courts intervene. Donors hedge. Bureaucracies slow-walk. Leadership insulates where it can and abandons where it must.

Democratic failures create inefficiencies.
Republican failures create emergencies.

A party can survive being uninspiring.
It cannot survive being ungovernable.

That is why Democrats do not need to be right to win.

They only need to be less destabilizing.

Where Stress Accumulates

If the Republican system is operating near its failure tolerances, then the question is not how to force collapse. Systems under this kind of stress do not need to be pushed. They fail on their own when error outpaces correction.

The relevant question is simpler—and colder:

Where does stress accumulate fastest, and when does it convert into an intervention?

Because not all pressure matters equally.

Much of what people fixate on—protests, messaging, outrage cycles—registers as noise. It may feel intense, but it does not meaningfully alter the variables that determine outcomes. In a high-variance system, pressure only matters when it increases error rates, legal exposure, or containment costs.

Everything else is atmospheric.

The places that matter share three characteristics: they are procedural, boring, and unforgiving.

First: Candidate Quality and Filtration

Failure enters the system early.

Primaries are where instability is introduced, not elections. A fringe candidate does not need to win outright to cause damage. They only need to:

• force resource diversion,

• create reputational spillover,

• or generate legal and procedural complications.

Once ballots are printed, tolerances collapse. At that point, the system is managing damage, not selecting talent.

This is why early filtration matters more than late persuasion—and why parties that reward spectacle over discipline burn margin rapidly.

Second: Legal and Procedural Competence

In a low-stress system, sloppy governance can be papered over. In a high-stress system, it becomes fatal.

Poorly drafted laws invite injunctions.
Careless statements trigger litigation.
Defiant officials force judicial escalation.
Procedural shortcuts create constitutional exposure.

None of this requires ideological opposition to matter. It requires only that institutions still function at all.

When the same coalition repeatedly generates legally unsound actions, the system responds not with debate, but with containment. Courts intervene. Bureaucracies slow-walk. External actors step in.

Each intervention raises the cost of the next move.

Third: Donor and Elite Risk Perception

Money is not ideological. It is actuarial.

Donors tolerate extremism longer than commentators expect—but only so long as it remains containable. The moment a coalition appears uninsurable—legally, reputationally, or operationally—support fragments quietly.

This does not look like dramatic defections. It looks like:

• hedging,

• diversification,

• reduced enthusiasm,

• conditional support,

• and silence where coordination once existed.

That loss of confidence is corrosive because it compounds other failures rather than correcting them.

Fourth: Institutional Fatigue

Institutions can absorb abuse for a long time. They cannot absorb constant abuse without adjustment.

Repeated defiance accelerates fatigue. Fatigued institutions do not collapse heroically. They adapt defensively:

• by narrowing discretion,

• by escalating oversight,

• by preempting risk,

• by treating actors as liabilities rather than partners.

This is how governance slows, hardens, and becomes brittle.

And brittleness is the enemy of coalitions that rely on acceleration.

Where Leverage Actually Exists

If the system is operating near failure tolerance, the task is not to push it over the edge.

It will do that on its own.

The task is not to follow it over the cliff.

Primaries and candidate selection matter more than protest. Early filtration matters more than late persuasion. Discipline matters more than catharsis.

The most emotionally gratifying choices are often the strategically worst ones. Put most bluntly, if it feels good, it’s probably the wrong thing to do.

The task is not to hasten Republican collapse, but to avoid sharing it. They are already operating beyond sustainable limits. The only remaining strategic failure is introducing instability by confusing outrage with leverage.

That is the inversion of modern politics.

And history suggests that once systems reach this phase, they rarely slow themselves down.

If this essay clarified how power actually behaves, The Long Memo is where I continue that work.

Paid subscribers get the full analysis: fewer comforting stories, more accurate models, and a consistent focus on what actually determines outcomes in high-stress systems.

If you’re looking for reassurance, this probably isn’t for you.
If you’re looking to stop wasting time on levers that no longer connect, you know what to do.

Subscribe now

According to the New York Times, it’s no longer enough for the United States to shoot the wounded.

Now we dress up as civilians to do it.

For the moment, set aside the question of whether this is an “armed conflict” at all. I don’t believe the United States is at war with Venezuelan cartels, and I doubt an international armed conflict ever existed beyond the Maduro abduction operation. The existence of an armed conflict matters for many legal questions.

It doesn’t matter for this one.

Because what’s at issue here is perfidy.

Perfidy is the use of deception to induce an enemy to believe you are protected under the laws of war — civilian, wounded, medical, or surrendering — and then killing them once they rely on it.

Perfidy is one of the most serious violations of the laws governing the use of military forces.

Why the Rules Exist (And What Everyone Gets Wrong)

The laws of armed conflict rest on one simple premise:

We have to be able to tell who is a soldier and who is not.

Everything flows from that.

Protection of civilians.
Protection of medics.
Protection of the wounded.
Surrender. Parlay. White flags.

This isn’t about morality. It’s about function.

If shooting the wounded is legitimate, fighting to the last man becomes inevitable.
If medics are fake, medics get shot.
If shooting those under a white flag is ok, every conflict becomes one of annihilation (no one can surrender or negotiate peace).
If soldiers masquerade as civilians, civilians become targets.

That’s why perfidy is prohibited — not to protect civilians, but to protect soldiers.

Soldiers are granted combatant immunity: they are not personally criminally liable for acts that would otherwise be murder, arson, or terrorism. That bargain only works if the rules are followed. Break them, and the system collapses into an endless set of reprisals and annihilation.

The Law Is Not Ambiguous

The letter of the “law” on perfidy is found in the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions. Now, before you object, yes, I understand that the United States is not a party to Additional Protocol I. It has nevertheless repeatedly been stated, by the United States, and I know from having written our manuals, directives, policies, and strategies, that the prohibition on perfidy reflects customary international humanitarian law, is binding as a matter of policy and practice, and that the United States (until apparently now), internalized and followed the protocol. Up until now, the United States military functioned, punished its own, and directed its troops as if the Additional Protocols were U.S. law.

But, for the sake of argument, the US chose to ignore the Protocols entirely; the rule exists in the treaties the U.S. has ratified:

• Hague Regulations (1907): killing or wounding treacherously is forbidden; misuse of a flag of truce is prohibited.

• Geneva Convention I: the wounded and sick must be protected.

• Geneva Convention I: medical personnel and the Red Cross emblem may not be attacked or misused.

• Geneva Convention IV: civilians are protected precisely because combatants are distinguishable.

Feigning civilian, medical, wounded, or protected status to conduct military operations violates these rules. Full stop.

It is never lawful to pretend to be the Red Cross.
It is never lawful to masquerade as civilians to gain a lethal advantage.
It is never lawful to obscure military identity while exercising military force.

In wartime, this becomes a war crime. Outside wartime, it is still a treaty violation. Different labels. Same prohibition.

Identification Is Not Optional — and Not Conflict-Dependent

One point needs to be made explicit, because too many people are pretending it’s debatable, which is why the whole discussion gets “muddled” with this whole “war crime” discussion.

The obligation to properly identify military forces does not arise only in armed conflict. It arises from the fact of being a military force of a nation-state at all.

You cannot function as a state’s armed forces while disguising who you are. Identification is not a tactical preference; it is a condition of legitimacy. The entire treaty framework governing military force — Geneva, Hague, and customary law — presupposes that states will make their forces legible as forces. That obligation exists independent of how, where, or whether those forces are deployed in combat.

To conclude otherwise is absurd. It would mean a state could evade every restraint in the system simply by denying the existence of armed conflict while deploying armed force in disguise. That interpretation would defeat the very purpose for which states entered these treaties in the first place.

Pacta sunt servanda1 cuts both ways.

A nation-state does not get to exercise military power anonymously. If it does, it is no longer operating as a lawful armed force — it is engaging in treachery by design.

The Strategic Consequence Everyone Is Ignoring

The conventions don’t exist because war is humane.

They exist because reciprocity is brutal.

Once the United States normalizes disguising its forces as civilians, every civilian aircraft, vessel, or vehicle becomes suspect. And when one is attacked, the explanation will be simple:

How were we supposed to know?

And it will be acceptable to relax the protections afforded by the laws of armed conflict.

The people who will pay for this aren’t policymakers or television lawyers.

They’re the people in uniform.

We interrupt Pete Hegseth committing crimes to bring you this special bulletin…

DHS is torturing people.

Once again, we are confronted with credible reports that the United States is engaged in the systemic torture of individuals in its custody. And when you set these allegations beside what we now know about the unlawful use of deadly force ordered or enabled by senior leadership at the Department of Defense, the picture is no longer ambiguous.

These are not isolated scandals. These are not “mistakes.” This is the Executive Branch abandoning the rule of law. The wheels aren’t coming off the wagon — the wheels are off the wagon.

I want to be clear about why this matters, and why my perspective on this is not that of a pundit idly speculating about “detention.” I was the original and primary author of the U.S. military annex to the first report the United States submitted to the United Nations Committee Against Torture. I coordinated the contributing departments. I edited the submissions. I analyzed the case law, the operations, the disciplinary records, and the internal investigative materials. And I was part of the team that delivered and defended that report before the UN in Geneva.

For that work, I received the Department of State’s Superior Honor Award—an honor reserved for individuals who perform “a special act or service or sustained extraordinary performance covering a period of one year or longer” in support of U.S. foreign policy and diplomatic objectives. It is one of the few high-tier commendations that non–Foreign Service personnel can receive, and it is awarded only when the U.S. Government concludes the contribution is uniquely exceptional.

I say this not to aggrandize myself, but to make a point about competence and experience: I have sat in the rooms where the legal boundaries of detention, interrogation, and state authority were defined, debated, and defended. I know exactly what the United States has told the world about its obligations under the Convention Against Torture. I know the standards we claimed to uphold. I know how the U.S. government distinguishes abuse from torture, and which acts cross the line under American law, treaty law, and military doctrine.

So when I say that what Amnesty International has described—if true—is not misconduct, and not negligence, but torture, I am not making a rhetorical judgment. I am making a legal one.

And the context in which this torture is allegedly being carried out—civil detention, where punishment is explicitly forbidden at every level of U.S. law—makes it even more egregious.

And I want to stress something else: this statement from Amnesty is unprecedented. Believe whatever you want about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, or the CIA black sites — the UN, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International all condemned those programs in the strongest possible terms. They excoriated waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation, and the rest. They called them cruel, inhuman, degrading, abusive, and potentially tantamount to torture.

But none of them — not the UN, not HRW, not Amnesty — ever accused the United States, point-blank, of torture.

Not during Iraq.
Not during Afghanistan.
Not at Guantanamo.
Not even during the height of the black site program.

They always hedged, because accusing a state of torture outright is a diplomatic and legal nuclear strike. That Amnesty is doing it now — and doing it toward an immigration facility on U.S. soil — is without precedent or peer.

Immigration detention is administrative. No punitive measures are permitted. None. Not as a matter of policy. Not as a matter of statute. Not as a matter of Supreme Court precedent. The reason detainees are not afforded the protections of criminal defendants is that the system is not supposed to punish them at all.

And yet here we are, reading allegations that point to systemic, top-down-directed abuse of people held inside the United States. Abuse that triggers the Convention Against Torture — which is incorporated into the federal code — and the federal criminal statute that implements it. There are no exceptions. No exigencies. No defenses. Torture is a crime.

But none of it seems to matter to the Secretary of Homeland Security or to the President.

Just as the administration appears unbothered by unlawful uses of lethal force at sea, it appears equally unconcerned about unlawful cruelty on U.S. soil. Agencies are operating like autonomous fiefdoms, violating the law as a matter of daily practice, confident that no criminal accountability will ever touch them. Meanwhile, Congress sits, inert and useless.

The result is a picture of governance that should alarm every American. There are no safeguards. There is no internal discipline. There is no functioning chain of lawful authority. A federal government that tortures in administrative custody is a government that has discarded the very idea of legal constraint.

We are not “approaching” authoritarianism.

We are living in its early stage. And while that does not mean you will feel a rifle butt against your forehead tomorrow morning, it does mean the probability of state violence — arbitrary, impulsive, and unreviewable — is no longer theoretical. It is non-zero for everyone, no matter your status, wealth, or citizenship.

The government’s behavior makes one thing unmistakably clear:

It does not care about your liberty, the rule of law, or any principle higher than its own convenience.

So let’s talk about why this is so abhorrent — and what it means for a republic that is no longer operating by its own rules.

Again, Abu Ghraib wasn’t even close to what we’re seeing now (and that’s terrifying)

As terrible as one might contemplate the abuses that occurred during the Global War on Terrorism, no human rights NGO or IGO — not the UN, not HRW, not Amnesty — ever accused the United States point-blank of systematic, national policy, torture.
Not during Iraq.
Not during Afghanistan.
Not during the worst moments of Guantanamo.
Not even with respect to the black sites.

They hedged.
They said the acts could constitute torture.
They said the conduct might amount to torture.
They said the treatment raised serious concerns regarding torture.

They could describe individual acts as potentially torturous, but that is a very different thing from accusing a state of running a torture regime.

No organization ever crossed the line into declaring:

“The United States is committing torture.”

Why?

Because accusing a sovereign state of systematic torture is not rhetorical embellishment. It is a legal and diplomatic nuclear detonation.

Doing so triggers treaty obligations.
It raises jurisdictional issues about international courts.
It obligates other states to respond in some fashion.
It exposes the accusing NGO to catastrophic reputational and legal risk if it cannot substantiate its claims.

And during the post-9/11 era, NGOs recognized that although the U.S. was deeply engaged in abusive conduct, they lacked any clear evidence that the United States had adopted torture as policy.

Let me underline that:

Even at the lowest moral point in recent U.S. history, NGOs believed the situation was ambiguous.

Here’s why:

• The U.S. government maintained that torture was illegal.

• The U.S. maintained that abusive acts were unauthorized deviations.

• And — this part matters — the U.S. prosecuted many lower-level soldiers and officers for detainee abuse.

NGOs criticized those prosecutions as insufficient, said accountability should have reached senior officials, and insisted some punishments were laughably light — but they still acknowledged the distinction that mattered:

The United States did not openly authorize torture.

Fast-forward to today.

Amnesty International — an organization that has spent decades choosing its words with surgical restraint — is not hedging.

They did not say “amounts to torture.”
They did not say “could constitute torture.”
They did not say “raises concerns under the Convention Against Torture.”

They said the word itself:

Torture.
Full stop.

And they said it not about a war zone, or a covert CIA site, or a battlefield interrogation.

They said it about an immigration detention center on U.S. soil.

A civil facility.
Holding people charged with no crime.
In a context where any punitive measure is categorically illegal.

This is unprecedented.
This is seismic.
This is the human-rights equivalent of calling in an airstrike on your own position.

If Amnesty has finally unsheathed this word, it is because no lesser term is honest or defensible.

When I read it, I couldn’t help but agree.

The Devil’s Island Parallel: Descent into madness

When I finished reading Amnesty’s report, I put it down and said:

“Ok, so basically we’re running Devil’s Island.”

Henri Charrière — “Papillon,” named for the butterfly tattoo on his chest — was a man condemned to the French penal colony of Guiana in 1931 for a murder he almost certainly did not commit. His story, later popularized in film, endures because it shows what happens when a state constructs a detention regime intentionally severed from legality, oversight, and conscience.

Papillon endured solitary confinement in pitch-dark cells, starvation diets, brutal heat, untreated disease, total sensory deprivation, and a system explicitly designed to break human beings.

His final confinement was on Devil’s Island — a rock in the Atlantic, a place designed not just for imprisonment, but for obliteration. No one escaped from Devil’s Island. No one except him.

Papillon was supposed to be a cautionary tale.

Instead, the United States appears to have taken it as a template.

Only this time, the island isn’t thousands of miles from Paris.
This one is an hour’s drive from Miami.

On U.S. soil.
Under U.S. jurisdiction.
Operated by U.S. personnel.
Bound by U.S. statute, which the United States is openly defying.

And when you set this alongside the Secretary of Defense (Hegseth) ordering flag officers to “kill them all,” the pattern becomes unmistakable.

You cannot have one cabinet agency normalizing extrajudicial killing and another normalizing torture without recognizing this as systemic behavior.

This is not mismanagement.
Not incompetence.
Not “isolated incidents.”
And not “the fog of a war.”

This is executive-branch fiefdoms acting like autonomous warlords — employing force, cruelty, and punishment without legal authority, oversight, or restraint.

It is the first coherent glimpse of what genuine executive-branch decoherence looks like: chaotic, brutal, unhinged leadership operating outside statutory boundaries.

And I do not make this comparison lightly:

This is what fascism looks like. We saw this behavior from Germany in the 1930s. We saw this behavior in Spain. We saw this behavior in Italy. This is the operational face of fascism: institutions shedding constraint and turning violence inward.

Not metaphorical fascism.
Not the theatrical cosplay kind.
The real thing: state organs severed from the law, governed only by impulse and ideology.

And again, we do not need The Hague or the ICC to tell us this is wrong.

Our own laws already criminalize this behavior.

To understand why Amnesty’s choice of language is so explosive, we have to understand what the law actually requires.

Immigration Detention Is Administrative, Not Punitive

This is the bedrock rule of U.S. law.

Immigration detention is civil, not criminal.
Its purpose is:

1. ensuring the person’s presence at removal proceedings, and

2. facilitating removal if and when ordered.

It is not punishment.

This has been repeatedly affirmed by the Supreme Court:

Zadvydas v. Davis (2001)

The Court held that civil detention of immigrants must be “reasonably related to its purpose” and cannot become indefinite or punitive. Detention must bear a reasonable relation to preventing flight or danger, not punishing past conduct.

Quote (summarized):

Civil detention cannot be used as a mechanism of punishment; once detention stops serving its administrative purpose, continued detention violates due process.

Demore v. Kim (2003)

Even when upholding mandatory detention for certain categories, the Court explicitly reaffirmed the non-punitive nature of immigration detention. The constitutionality of detention rests entirely on the premise that it is administrative, not penal.

The Court’s logic is unambiguous: if conditions become punitive, the detention becomes unconstitutional.

Bell v. Wolfish (1979)

Although not an immigration case, it established the controlling standard: Civil detainees may not be subjected to conditions that amount to punishment. Punishment = unconstitutional. Administrative restrictions = permitted.

Bell gives the exact test:

• If the condition is expressly intended to punish → unconstitutional.

• If the condition is excessive in relation to any legitimate administrative goal → unconstitutional.

• If the condition is unrelated to such goals and inflicts harm → unconstitutional.

This applies directly to immigration detention. This is why the conduct of DHS in these facilities is so patently unlawful. This isn’t a “close case” in any way.

Constitutional Protections Apply Fully to Civil Detainees

People in immigration custody are entitled to Fifth Amendment due process protections, including:

• physical safety

• access to medical care

• reasonable sanitary conditions

• food, water, and shelter

• freedom from arbitrary or abusive treatment

Because they have not been convicted of any crime, they cannot be subjected to restrictions approximating or exceeding penal standards.

In fact, based on the opinions of the Supreme Court, the constitutional threshold for the standards of care and detention of civil detainees is higher than for those imprisoned post-conviction.

Youngberg v. Romeo (1982)

Civil detainees are entitled to “reasonable safety” and “freedom from unreasonable bodily restraint,” reflecting a constitutional obligation to provide “humane conditions.”

DHS is bound by this standard.

Federal Statutes Implementing the Convention Against Torture

The United States incorporated the Convention Against Torture into domestic law via:

18 U.S.C. § 2340–2340A

It is a felony for any U.S. official, contractor, or person acting under the color of law to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering for any purpose, including coercion or punishment.

There are:

• no exceptions

• no national security carveouts

• no affirmative defenses of exigence or necessity.

The statute imposes a test very close to being one of strict liability: If the act is torture, it is presumed to be a felony.

Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act (FARRA, 1998)

Congress explicitly directed that all U.S. officials abide by CAT obligations.

This includes ICE, DHS, contractors, and state facilities acting under federal authority.

Detention Standards in Statute and Regulation

Even ICE’s own standards — which reflect constitutional minima — require:

• access to medical care

• adequate food and water

• sanitation

• temperature control

• non-punitive housing

• mental health protections

• no use of stress positions

• no “disciplinary segregation” for civil detainees

The “box,” prolonged shackling, outdoor cage confinement, and conditions causing physical harm are explicitly banned, even by ICE’s internal Performance-Based National Detention Standards.

And as an aside, even if, en arguendo, I wanted to argue that these individuals were “the enemy” and combatants, the treatment described by Amnesty International’s reports would most certainly constitute grave breaches of international humanitarian law.

There is absolutely no way to slice this where criminal liability is removed.

Conditions of Confinement for Civil Detainees

Courts have held that civil detainees cannot be subjected to:

• prolonged solitary confinement,

• conditions that create physical or mental harm,

• arbitrary use of restraints,

• deprivation of hygiene or medical care,

• unsafe or unsanitary environments.

Examples:

Jones v. Blanas (9th Cir. 2004)

Civil detainees must be housed in conditions superior to criminals or at least not worse. If conditions are worse than penal confinement, the court presumes punitive intent, violating due process.

Brown v. Plata (2011) (though a prison case)

Established that severe overcrowding or denial of medical care violates the Eighth Amendment; civil detainees receive equal or greater protections under the Fifth Amendment.

The Legal Standard in One Sentence

Anyone held by the United States for immigration purposes must be treated humanely, cannot be punished by confinement, cannot be subjected to harmful or degrading conditions, cannot be subjected to ridicule or abuse, and must receive the full application of constitutional protections of civil detainees — because their detention is for administrative, not punitive, purposes.

Any deviation from this is illegal. We have multiple statutes that criminalize these offenses. Again, the Hague is not required. Geneva is not required. U.S. federal law makes every act described in this Amnesty report a federal offense.

Why Amnesty’s Allegations Are Catastrophic Legally

If the allegations are accurate, the United States is violating:

• the Fifth Amendment

• the Eighth Amendment (if we accept the idea of “they’re criminals”)

• Bell v. Wolfish

• Zadvydas v. Davis

• Youngberg v. Romeo

• 18 U.S.C. § 2340A (federal torture statute)

• CAT obligations under FARRA

• ICE’s own detention standards

• basic constitutional due process doctrine

And, most damningly:

The conditions described cannot be justified under any legitimate administrative purpose.

Therefore, they are presumptively unconstitutional, likely felonious, and impart criminal liability for both leadership and those involved in the execution of these acts.

To reiterate, this is not happening in some “far away place,” it’s happening on U.S. soil, at the direction of the senior leadership of the United States, and in contravention of U.S. and international law.

One such event — extrajudicial killing or state torture — would be a catastrophic failure of leadership.

The fact that both the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security are engaged in systemic unlawful conduct? That the Department of Justice does nothing? Neither the Secretaries of Defense nor DHS are facing realistic threats of impeachment? That the President isn’t facing impeachment for catastrophic leadership? That the FBI does nothing? That Congress shrugs?

Demonstrates we’re really up the creek and missing a paddle.

What This Means for the Republic

When executive departments:

• order unlawful lethal force,

• run torture facilities on U.S. soil,

• violate constitutional protections,

• ignore statutory limits,

• abandon administrative purpose,

• disregard their own internal regulations,

• and act with total confidence that no criminal accountability will reach them…

you are no longer dealing with incompetence.

Or negligence.
Or bureaucratic decay.
Or the usual American tragedy of misaligned incentives.

You are dealing with a state apparatus that has severed itself from lawful governance.

This is not “approaching” authoritarianism.

This is authoritarianism.

Not the partisan melodrama version.
Not the Twitter cosplay version.
But the genuine article:

• State violence unconstrained by law.

• State cruelty used administratively.

• State detention operating punitively.

• State agencies operating as personal fiefdoms.

• State actors insulated from accountability.

• A President either unwilling or unable to stop it.

• A Congress too cowed or complicit to intervene.

A republic that tortures where punishment is forbidden is not a republic at all.
That is the operative definition of an authoritarian state.

This reporting is explosive.

It’s actually the one time Aaron Parnas doing his usual “BREAKING” routine and hyperventilating might be justified.

I am an expert on humanitarian law, its normative provisions, and human rights law. And while Parnas is directionally correct about how bad this is, his legal analysis is fundamentally flawed — and it obscures the most important element of the story:

This is so much worse than denial of quarter.

1. IHL vs Human Rights Law: Parnas’ Category Error

Parnas jams international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law (IHRL) into one bowl of soup and calls it “war crimes.”

It happens a lot. I’m going to presume that Parnas is not an international law expert, never had to deal with these things “up close,” and really isn’t being malicious.

But the conflation? That’s not just sloppy. It’s dangerous.

The entire reason the United States ended up outside the Rome Statute system was precisely this problem. Washington pushed and negotiated large parts of the treaty. But when it became clear that the court would blur:

• wartime rules (IHL / law of armed conflict) and

• peacetime rules (IHRL)

in ways that could criminalize lawful uses of force in armed conflict as “human rights” violations, the U.S. concluded it could not square the Rome Statute with our:

• obligations under the laws of armed conflict,

• constitutional structure, and

• existing federal criminal statutes.

So we didn’t ratify. We do not accept ICC jurisdiction.

That was never because the U.S. “doesn’t care” about these norms. Quite the opposite. For decades, roughly 100 people across State, DoD, Justice, and the IC had full-time jobs interpreting and enforcing these rules. The U.S. has:

• refrained from using force because LOAC analysis said it would be unlawful;

• accepted casualties because we waited until hostile intent / hostile act was clear;

• walked away from otherwise tempting operations because they couldn’t be squared with treaty obligations and U.S. law.

This is not a casual obligation. It has real operational teeth.

It may all sound to the outsider like “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and “human rights violations” are interchangeable phrases for bad things. They aren’t. They live in different legal universes, with different triggers and consequences.

And in this case, that distinction matters — because what happened in the Caribbean fits none of these categories. What happened is considerably worse.

2. Before You Get to “War Crimes,” Ask the First Question: Is There a War?

Parnas runs straight to the Rome Statute and denial of quarter.

He skips the threshold question every U.S. JAG and operational lawyer is trained to ask:

Is there an armed conflict?

Here, the answer is: No. Absolutely not.

• There is no international armed conflict (IAC) with Venezuela.

• There is no non-international armed conflict (NIAC) with Tren de Aragua that any serious court would recognize.

• There is no AUMF that authorizes a “war” on drug traffickers in the Caribbean.

If there is no armed conflict, then IHL does not apply.
You don’t get the LOAC toolbox if there is no war.

Instead, two other bodies of law govern:

• International human rights law (right to life; prohibition on arbitrary deprivation of life), and

• U.S. domestic criminal law.

That means the operative legal framework is not “Article 8, Rome Statute.”

It’s:

• 18 U.S.C. § 1111 — Murder

• 18 U.S.C. § 956 — Killing abroad / conspiracy to murder outside the U.S.

• 18 U.S.C. § 2441 — War Crimes Act (which internalizes Geneva when there is an armed conflict)

• 10 U.S.C. § 892 — UCMJ Art. 92 (unlawful orders)

• And the whole doctrine of command responsibility under U.S. military law.

We don’t need the ICC to criminalize what happened.
We already did it, in our own code.

That fact alone makes these orders manifestly unlawful.

The legal stakes are considerably worse than Parnas suggests: this isn’t “maybe a war crime in The Hague.” It is straight homicide under U.S. law.

3. The Secretary of Defense Has No Business Issuing Tactical Orders, “Kill them all,” or otherwise.

Here’s where the entire narrative goes sideways.

Under 10 U.S.C. § 113, the Secretary of Defense is the President’s principal assistant for all matters relating to the Department of Defense and exercises “authority, direction, and control” over the department. That does not make him the tactical commander of SEAL Team 6.

Goldwater–Nichols (1986) rewired the system so that:

• The President gives lawful military orders.

• Those orders are transmitted through the Secretary of Defense.

• They are executed by the Combatant Commanders (COCOMs) under 10 U.S.C. § 164.

• The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs coordinates, but does not command.

The point was deliberate: take operational command out of the hands of whoever wandered into the Oval Office that day and put it in the COCOMs, who actually command forces.

The SECDEF:

• sets policy,

• transmits presidential orders,

• oversees the department.

He is not supposed to be on the headset telling a JSOC strike cell whom to kill.

He has no independent authority to initiate offensive hostilities.
He has no business issuing a tactical “kill them all” order to a specific strike cell.

So even before you get to LOAC, target status, or hors de combat, any direct “kill everyone on that boat” command from Hegseth is:

Unlawful ab initio.
From the moment the words left his mouth.

It doesn’t matter if he thought they were traffickers, terrorists, or Martians.
He can’t give that order.

4. Even If You Pretend There Was a War, the Order Is Still Manifestly Illegal

Let’s be absurdly generous and assume, in extremis, that there was an armed conflict. Let’s further assume the people on the boat were “unlawful enemy combatants,” and that IHL applies in some limited way.

Even under that fantasy scenario, the order is still manifestly illegal.

The relevant law:

• Geneva Convention I, Art. 12 / Common Article 3
  Protects those “hors de combat” — wounded, shipwrecked, or otherwise incapable of defense.

• Geneva Convention II, Art. 12 & 18
  Protects shipwrecked persons at sea and requires their rescue and humane treatment.

• Customary IHL, Rule 47
  Prohibits denial of quarter — no “no survivors” orders.

• 18 U.S.C. § 2441(c)(3) — U.S. War Crimes Act
  Makes grave breaches of Common Article 3 (including murder and intentionally killing persons hors de combat) federal crimes.

Two men clinging to wreckage, burned and shipwrecked, are the textbook definition of hors de combat.

Ordering a second strike to kill them is not “controversial.”
It’s not “pushing the envelope.”
It is the exact scenario the law was written to forbid.

Layer on top:

• they posed no imminent threat;

• they were not in a recognized armed conflict with the U.S.;

• they were physically incapable of mounting any attack.

There is no plausible theory under which that order is lawful — ever.

Every single person in the chain — Admiral, watch floor, targeteers, SEALs — had both a statutory and moral obligation to refuse.

That duty is spelled out in:

• UCMJ Art. 92 — obligation to obey lawful orders and disobey unlawful ones;

• UCMJ Art. 118 — murder;

• UCMJ Art. 919 — war crimes (post-2023);

• DoD Law of War Manual §§ 18.1.3 & 18.3 — clear guidance on unlawful orders and hors de combat protections.

This is LOAC 101. First-week stuff.

That nobody refused is a damning indictment of the culture.

5. This Makes Abu Ghraib Look Like Amateur Night

Everyone got (rightly) outraged over Abu Ghraib.

That scandal was:

• a group of sadistic National Guardsmen,

• in a badly run prison,

• committing criminal acts on detainees in U.S. custody,

• with senior officers asleep at the wheel.

It was horrific. It was also, in a grim sense, “bottom-up” criminality: NCOs and junior personnel abusing detainees with incompetent leadership failing to stop it.

This? This is something else entirely.

Here we have:

• A Cabinet official,

• in Washington,

• allegedly giving a direct kill order.

• A JSOC chain of command,

• at Fort Bragg,

• executing that order on live video.

• A Tier One unit,

• following through with a second strike

• specifically to comply with “kill them all.”

Abu Ghraib was sadism and rot in the middle.

This is rot at the very top, passing cleanly through every level of command all the way down to the trigger-pullers, with nobody saying, “No.”

In that sense, Abu Ghraib is a walk in the park compared to this.

6. The Entire Chain Obeyed a Blatantly Illegal Order From Someone With No Authority to Give It

This should scare the hell out of you.

A civilian political appointee — not a COCOM, not the President — allegedly gave a direct, concrete kill order, and the system complied.

This is exactly the nightmare Goldwater–Nichols was designed to prevent: operational authority hijacked by political showmen.

And yet here we are.

So what’s an unlawful order now?

• “Shoot the survivors”?

• “Shoot the protestors”?

• “Fire on civilians”?

• “Firebomb Chicago”?

Because if the pattern here holds, the answer inside the system is:

“Welp… the Secretary said it. Guess we’re doing it.”

This is how democracies lose control of their armed forces.
Not with a dramatic coup, but with the quiet normalization of blatantly illegal orders being treated as just another day in the SCIF.

7. This Is a Matter for U.S. Courts, Not The Hague

Forget the ICC and the Rome Statute theatrics. They are a sideshow.

The relevant law is ours:

• 18 U.S.C. § 1111 — Murder
  Willful killing of a human being with malice aforethought and no lawful justification.

• 18 U.S.C. § 956(a)
  Conspiracy to kill or maim abroad.

• 18 U.S.C. § 2441
  War Crimes Act — makes grave breaches of Common Article 3 (including killing the hors de combat) a federal crime.

• 10 U.S.C. §§ 918–919 (UCMJ Arts. 118 & 919)
  Murder and war crimes for uniformed personnel.

• 10 U.S.C. § 892 (UCMJ Art. 92)
  Duty to disobey unlawful orders.

And the key Supreme Court and military law precedents:

• In re Yamashita, 327 U.S. 1 (1946) — command responsibility for unlawful killings.

• Little v. Barreme, 6 U.S. 170 (1804) — officers gain no immunity from illegal orders.

• Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866) — limits on military authority where war does not exist.

• Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942) — when and how enemy belligerents may be targeted and tried.

• Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006) — even “unlawful enemy combatants” get Common Article 3 protections; you don’t get to summarize-execute them because you don’t like their status.

• Boumediene v. Bush, 553 U.S. 723 (2008) — reinforces that the political branches don’t get a blank check to define people out of legal protection.

Every single one of these cases cuts against the idea that this strike was lawful.

If the reporting is accurate, this is not just “controversial policy.”

It is a crime.

8. The Question Every Officer Now Has to Answer

Parnas tries to make this about the ICC and denial of quarter.

His heart may be in the right place, but his law is wrong — and the truth is worse.

The real story is:

• The Secretary of Defense allegedly ordered a strike he had no business tactically directing.

• The people on that boat were not in an armed conflict with the U.S., making lethal force presumptively unlawful from the start.

• The survivors were hors de combat, making their killing murder under any legal theory you like.

• The entire chain of command complied.

• The relevant law is U.S. law, not Rome Statute pageantry.

Hegseth shouldn’t just be the subject of angry tweets.
He should be the subject of a serious criminal investigation.

I believe he should be facing potential charges for murder under U.S. law — and every flag officer and operator in that chain should be answering hard questions under oath.

Because in the end, the core issue isn’t the ICC or some abstract “denial of quarter” doctrine.

It’s this:

What orders are you actually willing to refuse?

If the honest answer inside the Pentagon is “none,” then the United States military has already crossed the line from an institution under law, to an institution merely awaiting instruction.

And that should terrify everyone.

I watched, as we all did, the Democrats “run the table” last night.

In the polite precincts of punditry, the champagne flowed like holy water at Lourdes.

Even here in my own backwater, only one MAGA-inspired “nonpartisan” simpleton managed to crawl through the ballot gauntlet — a 99% loss for the burn-all-the-books-I-tell-you-wut brigade.

And so today, America’s emergency rooms are full of the righteous and inebriated, victims of champagne corks and self-congratulation.

The faithful, at long last, are convinced that the Republic has been saved by a handful of governor, mayor, and school board elections — as though Rome might be redeemed by repainting the forum.

Here’s the thing: none of it matters.

With the possible exception of Pennsylvania’s judiciary, none of it mattered strategically.1
None of it mattered electorally.
None of it mattered politically.

There has been no massive shift in priorities.
No massive shift in power.
No massive shift in the direction of the country.

But you wouldn’t know it from your feed — an endless parade of “Democracy Restored!” hosannas, all sung by the same choir of nervous optimists who mistake a flicker for the dawn.

The Off-Year Mirage

Off-year elections are the political equivalent of a funhouse mirror.
They reflect only the people vain enough to stand in front of them.

Turnout hovers around twenty percent — the most conscientious, the most comfortable, and the least desperate.

The mobs who turn rallies into revival tents, who believe Bill Gates controls the weather and the Pope is a hologram, do not vote in off-years.

They don’t even know what year it is.

So Democrats didn’t win because they converted the unwashed.2
They won because the unwashed stayed home.

The MAGA horde isn’t dead; it’s only sleeping — waiting for its prophet to return to the ballot like the second coming of Barnum.

And when he does, all these tidy graphs about “Democratic momentum” will dissolve like tissue in the rain.

The pundits, bless their industrious little hearts, will try to sell you exceptions — a mayoral race in New York, a referendum in Pennsylvania, some heroic Prop 50.

None of it is representative. None of it will survive contact with the general electorate once the circus reopens for business.

Make no mistake: the MAGA faithful — the people who cheer when a child gets punched by ICE and curse when eggs cost nine dollars — will vote.

They will vote not for moderation or sanity, but for vengeance.

They have no other currency left.

They’re not going to start saving money or cutting costs or fixing their own condition.

They are going to buy the same political lottery ticket they’ve bought for eight years — and pray the next drawing pays out in blood.

The Systemic Stalemate

Nothing about last night alters the fundamental truth: America is no longer governed by voters.

It is governed by the machinery that counts them.

Gerrymanders are fixed.
State legislatures are armored plate.
The Senate is a feudal relic.
And the courts — especially the Supreme one — are monasteries for men who think the Enlightenment was a clerical error.

None of that changed last night.

If Democrats were serious, they’d tell every national candidate to pray for rain and plow every dollar into flipping state legislatures.
That’s where the lines are drawn — literally and figuratively.

But they won’t. They never do.

Instead, they’ll spend the next year fundraising on hope, tweeting about fascism, and sending you glossy mailers promising to save democracy one tote bag at a time.

They’re thrilled because they might redraw one map in one state — while six others are being fortified against reality.

The Republicans will sleep like babies. They understand the long game.

Winning a few governorships, legislative seats, or councils changes none of it.

The system is built to absorb and nullify rebellion — to take every cry for change and render it into background noise.

The left mistakes catharsis for change; the right mistakes grievance for power.
Both are wrong.

Both are worshipping at the altar of a machine that no longer believes in gods.

The Real Story

The story isn’t that Democrats “ran the table.”
It’s that there’s no longer a table.

Politics has become ritual theater — a national pageant to reassure the professional class that democracy still functions while the gears underneath grind to dust.

We don’t have elections anymore; we have recurring confirmation ceremonies.

Every cycle, one side declares salvation, the other apocalypse, and the institutions grind on, indifferent to either.

The voters who might once have changed that equation — the dispossessed, the credulous, the angry — are now mere stagehands, brought out for applause every four years and then sent back into the dark.

The Cold Conclusion

So yes, Democrats won last night.

And yes, the good people of polite society will call it proof that sanity still lives somewhere between Philadelphia and Portland.

But if you think that means America is turning a corner, you’re mistaking the echo for the bell.

The Republic’s problems are structural, not electoral — and no number of champagne corks will fix the foundations.

So by all means, drink to the illusion.
Toast the table that isn’t there.

And when the hangover comes — as it always does — remember:

I might be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.

Pour another glass, and prove me otherwise.

PS: I do truly invite readers to “#changemymind” on this. Show me how wrong I am and how democracy, George Washington, James Madison, and John Adams prevailed last night.

Der Führer Adolf Hitler ist tot.
(“The Führer, Adolf Hitler, is dead.”)

That was the message Major Otto Ernst Remer, of the Wachbataillon Großdeutschland, received on 20 July 1944—the signal meant to unleash Operation Valkyrie, the Wehrmacht-led plan to decapitate Adolph Hitler’s government.

Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg would kill Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair, and, in the chaos, Germany’s elite guard units would be turned—unknowingly—against the Nazi regime itself.

Arrest the SS.
Arrest the Gestapo leadership.
Seize Goebbels.
Seize Speer.
Seize all those who were “conspirators” to kill Hitler.
Capture Berlin.
Direct the other military districts to accept the new regime in the name of security and to restore order, proclaiming that the saboteurs and assassins were now captured.
End Hitler’s government in a day.

It almost worked.

It didn’t because the plotters forgot the most basic element of a coup: control the lines of communication. Hitler survived with a few scratches, phoned Berlin, and Remer—realising he’d been drafted into a plot against the Führer—flipped back to loyalty and crushed it. General Fromm shot the conspirators before the day ended.

The Reich endured for another year.

Millions perished.

Every student of history knows the moral: coups are not magic. They only succeed when the military leadership is either complicit or at least neutral. No army, no coup. From Caracas to Cairo, it’s the same rule.

Which brings us to today’s farce.

Enter the Secretary of “War”—the womanizing alcoholic DUI hire with the flag-print hanky, prepared to crank out 100 push-ups, and run laps, to prove how small his manhood is. In an act of stupidity or arrogance (take your pick), every flag officer of the United States military has been summoned to Quantico for a “secret” meeting.

Think about that.

All our admirals and generals in one place, at one time—and the fact publicly known. Not even in the middle of a nuclear strike would we cluster the entire upper brain of the U.S. military in a single, target-rich location. In operational security terms, it’s lunacy.

We lack the capability to securely transport all these flag officers to one location simultaneously. So, we’ll have some of the most senior members of the military doing what? Schlep-rock on Sun Country? Southwest? Delta?

I hope they don’t go through EWR. Or DFW.

And for what?

This isn’t 1945.

We have real-time, SCI-level secure video and audio across every theatre on the planet. For a decade inside the DoD, I sat in those meetings with Austin, Petraeus, Casey, Pace, Meyers, Odierno—you name it—without ever needing to drag them all to the same base. We even held global conferences with every combatant commander, their deputies, the service chiefs, the Joint Staff—all on screen, all live. No airplanes. No flag-waving circus.

So why now? Why this?

Why risk the entire flag corps to watch the “DUI Hire” do push-ups or give a speech?

Well, I’ve spent the better part of two days thinking about it, and talking with former military officers about it.

Unfortunately, none of the answers should give you warm fuzzies.

Why would you want to do this

(if you’re an authoritarian lackey like Hegseth trying to please a wannabe dictator like Trump)

1) Loyalty theater.

You don’t need Quantico to brief strategy; you need it to measure obedience. A mass summons forces every one- and two-star to visibly choose: attend promptly and applaud, or hesitate and self-identify for the purge list. After months of firings and billet cuts, this is the dominance display—“I hold the sword; you hold your tongue.”

2) Purge mechanics disguised as a pep rally.

Centralize the brass, announce “realignment,” then hand out new reporting lines and “acting” appointments. Anyone grimacing at the applause lines gets sidelined by Friday. The recent, highly unusual removals set the precedent; a roomful of careerists under the klieg lights makes the rest easy.

3) Coup-proofing the regime, not the republic.

Authoritarians don’t just seize armies; they coup-proof them—fragment commands, elevate loyalists, and inject political commissars in everything but name. An all-hands conclave lets Hegseth impose a common narrative and loyalty signals across services in one shot, reducing the odds of inter-service slow-roll or quiet resistance. (Note: the administration has telegraphed major structural and doctrinal shifts already.)

4) Paper-trail denial.

If the next orders skirt legal gray zones—domestic deployments, intelligence tasking, rules-of-engagement tweaks—you don’t email them. You deliver “commander’s intent” in person, on a need-to-know whisper track, and let subordinates write the implementing guidance. That keeps the combustible line—the one that later shows up in court—off paper. Reporters can ask why; the transcript won’t exist.

5) Leak trap & map of the resistance.

Announce three innocuous things and one spicy one; then watch which version leaks from which service within hours. Now you have your leaker graph—and your next set of reassignments. The suddenness and secrecy make this easy A/B testing for counterintelligence.

6) Optics for the base; humiliation for the institution.

Trump wants footage that says, “the generals answer to me.” Aerials of motorcades and a sea of stars feed the narrative of conquest over the “Pentagon bureaucracy.” Even the White House’s mixed, minimizing chatter only adds to the mystique: it’s “routine,” until the hand-picked “Secretary of War” commands the Praetorians to assemble.

7) Forcing function on a new doctrine.

If they intend to flip the strategy slider—from Indo-Pacific primacy to a Western-Hemisphere first posture, or some sudden realignment—doing it face-to-face compresses dissent cycles. You don’t debate slides; you nod, salute, and catch your flight. (That rumored doctrinal pivot is already floating in the press.)

8) Message to adversaries (and allies): we can mass on command.

Yes, it’s a security own-goal. But it’s also a televised flex: the system moves when the boss snaps his fingers. Deterrence through pageantry—shaky substance, strong symbolism. Reuters and AP calling it “rare” and “abrupt” is the point, not the problem.

Bottom line: Hegseth gets a loyalty audit, a purge accelerator, and a doctrinal hard-reset in a single spectacle. Trump gets the shot he craves—the generals came when I called—plus a stress test of who might balk when the next order is less photogenic and more unconstitutional.

The Valkyrie Echo

Operation Valkyrie failed because the conspirators underestimated two key elements: the resilience of Hitler's government to assassination and the speed of communication. They thought they could choreograph loyalty; instead, they exposed themselves.

What we are witnessing, most likely, with Hegseth’s Quantico circus is the mirror image. Instead of conspirators trying to turn the military against the regime, the regime is stress-testing whether the military can still be turned against the republic.

This is not about “readiness” or “strategy.”

It is likely about humiliation, obedience, and optics.

Trump wants his money shot: every general in one place, summoned like vassals to court, forced to play audience to the clown prince of pushups.

Hegseth gets his purge-list starter kit.

And the rest of us get a glimpse of just how fragile civilian control of the military becomes when it is staged like loyalty theater instead of assumed as constitutional bedrock.

History teaches that no coup succeeds without the support of the military. The more pressing lesson, watching Quantico, is that no republic survives for long once its army is made to kneel before a tyrant in public.

Trump’s approval rating—after his barking-mad performance at the United Nations—sits at 41%. The polls are everywhere.

The professional optimists on MSNBC pop champagne: “He’s underwater! We’re winning!”

But are we?

The Arithmetic of Entrenchment

Forty-one percent is not weakness. It is not erosion.

It is entrenchment.

That number translates into ~114 million voting-age Americans. And of those, about 80 million—nearly 29% of the entire adult population—aren’t dabblers. They are fanatics. A structural bloc, the size of Germany, larger than France, and more numerous than the voters who put him in office in 2024.

This is not a poll quirk.

This is not a protest vote.

This is a permanent cult, tens of millions strong, eternally convinced their orange idol was sent to save them from modernity. And if not him, then the next “golden calf” will replace him. Ironic, isn’t it, that the self-professed White Christian Nationalists of MAGA cling not to the New Testament’s gospel of love and acceptance, but to the Old Testament’s wrath?

Gimme that old time religion… It’s good enough for me. (Eye roll.)

I hypothesize we are now living a national Scopes Trial, except this time the jury is 80 million strong, the media is complicit rather than critical of it, and the “American Taliban” radical fundamentalists don’t just want biology textbooks censored.

They want the rules of the Constitution rewritten in their image.

What “Approval” Really Means

Approval in this context is not a shrug. It is not a “lesser of two evils.” When the subject is a carnival barker who has:

• tried to overthrow an election,

• whipped up an insurrection like a football coach riling the junior varsity,

• collected indictments the way Boy Scouts collect merit badges,

• and publicly wished harm upon his enemies,

…approval is not passive.

It is an oath of fealty.

It is a cheer from the bleachers as the Republic burns.

These 80 million are not ashamed. They are gleeful.

• Kimmel yanked off the air? They howl with joy.

• Journalists and judges prosecuted? They shout, “About time!”

• Women and children hauled away without due process? They pour another Busch Light.

• Tariffs that sink the economy? They slap their knees and grin, “That’ll show ’em!”

• Rural hospitals shuttered, Medicare gutted, alliances broken? They beam, “Freedom!”

• A president cursing his enemies at a funeral? They stand and applaud like parishioners at a tent revival. TESTIFY! Elmer Gantry had nothing on Donald Trump.

This is not ambivalence.

It is allegiance—the loyalty of a mob that demands cruelty as proof of strength.

The Mirage of “Common Ground”

Polite society clings to fairy tales about “common ground.” Jimmy Kimmel weeps about keeping friends across the divide. Editorial boards preach dialogue, reconciliation, and healing.

And those words and sentiments, it’s hard to actually care, be empathetic, be charatiable, as a person, and not want to embrace that.

I get it. I felt it too.

But not all are deserving of our forgiveness nor our charity.

A “common ground” requires two sides living in the same universe.

What ground is there to share with the Nazi?

The Khmer Rouge?

Pol Pot or Gaddafi or Idi Amin?

With the gulag-keeper or the apparatchik?

There is none.

This isn’t about tax brackets. This isn’t about tone.

It is about a will to dominate, humiliate, and destroy.

That is where I believe we find ourselves with MAGA, Trump, and this third of America hell bent on its destruction.

Why 80 Million Matters

Most democracies can endure a 10–15% fringe. That is the natural tax of freedom. Even H.W. Bush, who was universally admired after the successes of Desert Storm, only hit about 90%.

But when the fringe swells to nearly a third of the body politic, it is no longer a fringe.

It is a counter-nation: hostile, permanent, entrenched.

• Political parties warp themselves to serve it.

• Institutions compromise to appease it.

• Violence becomes normalized because it has a constituency the size of a continent.

• And children raised in its shadow become acolytes, ensuring the bloc survives long after Trump himself is embalmed in spray tan and formaldehyde.

Eighty million isn’t a blip.

It isn’t passing fancy.

It is the structural reality of American politics.

The Cold Warning

Yes, Trump is technically “underwater.”

But mistaking that for political (power) weakness is the smug liberal’s favorite hallucination. It’s in part why I am disgusted with the Democrats. No ideas. No hope. Too afraid to try and possibly lose. Ambivalent in standing by their convictions.

So they cackle at polling and go, “Well, maybe he’ll destroy himself.”

I suppose anything is possible. It’s possible that all of the oxygen in the room I’m presently sitting in could move to one part, and I could find myself suddenly suffocating to death.

It’s just not particularly likely.

So while anything’s possible, it’s more probable that we have a structural problem. One that has emerged from the many economic, political, and educational dynamics I’ve discussed at some length in multiple articles here at The Long Memo.

Forty-one percent is the floor, not the ceiling.

Eighty million Americans have pledged allegiance to a fraud, a mountebank, a cheap vaudeville Caesar—and in doing so have made themselves the greatest structural threat to the Republic since Fort Sumter.

Now, I don’t believe civil war comes in the way we might think this time around. I don’t see us returning to 1861. I don’t see shooting in the streets between factions. I think if that happens, analysis will be irrelevant, as the entire world will descend into nuclear anihilation. No country with the power, size, and scope of international affairs of the United States can go into civil war without the rest of the powers of the world getting “twitchy.” After 20 bombs go off, civilization’s epitaph is written.

But there is a “civil war” in this country between those who want to see its founding, its values, and its heritage destroyed and replaced by some patrimonialist system they hope they’ll benefit under. They want to see a meaner, darker, America. One that punishes the people they think wronged them. They’re ready to trade their liberty and their freedom for a bowl of pottage under a delusion of hope.

This is not a wave to be waited out. It is a sea-change. This isn’t something we’re used to dealing with in our history; this is a unique moment.

In 1925, the fundamentalists lost ground after the Scopes trial. They won the trial, but were ridiculed nationally, reduced in their political power, and ultimately, Darwin, not Bryan, won the day.

I’m not as optimistic about that outcome this time.

With a third of America committed to seeing people denied due process, thrown into cages, and deported to foreign countries to be tortured.

… believing, “they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs.”

… shrugging as the government is unlawfully dismantled. Programs that serve millions destroyed. Support for schools, hospitals, the elderly, and the poor, eliminated.

… applauding as their own farms, businesses, and livelihoods are destroyed as the free trade system we spent four generations building unravels.

… cheering our President giving an unhinged speech before the entire world, making leaders like Pol Pot and Amin seem like statesmen.

… committed to their ideology, enclave of stupidity, and arrogance in the perceived righteousness of their God, their cause, and their actions.

The Scopes Trial may not be the right analogy here. Instead, Gone with the Wind, might be the correct model. To paraphrase Rhett Butler:

MAGA has nothing but grievance, blind allegiance, and arrogance.

Unlike the Confederacy, there will be no Appomattox to end this. The grievance is permanent, and the ignorance is willful.

The question is not whether “we” are winning—but whether “we” can survive sharing a country with them.

As with all things in the carnival sideshow of Trumpism, subtlety is dead and buried. Everything the man does has all the softness of a sledgehammer blow to the marbles without warning, and all the bravado of an Italian man of 1950.

If it isn’t strutting, preening, dick-swinging machismo, it might as well not exist. Defense? Too effete, too bookish. Secretary of War? Too quaint. What this mob of grifters really wants is a Secretary of Kicking the Shit Out of People—a title scrawled in crayon, slobbered over by their Dear Leader while Fox News hoots in the background.

And so they trot out Pete Hegseth—the human DUI checkpoint, the frat-house philosopher king of plastic patriotism—as if this bloated lackey were the second coming of Grant. In reality, he’s a cheap hood ornament on Trump’s rust-bucket jalopy of militarism: shiny enough for the yokels, but hollow tin when tapped.

Here’s the truth, and I say it as someone who’s walked the puzzle palace halls, watched the sausage of war get made, and even sat in the belly of a B-52 that still carries a hole in the ceiling for a sextant: the “Department of Defense” is not some polite euphemism, some pacifist bow-tie flourish. It is the product of generations of blood, bureaucratic warfare, and battlefield lessons burned into the nation’s skull.

America built a machine no one else has—a joint fighting force so lethal and so efficient it scares even its friends. We did not stumble into this. We clawed our way to it, out of the rubble of every botched rescue mission, every communications failure, every inter-service pissing contest that left men dead.

To go back to the “War Department” is not branding—it is brain damage. It is turning back the clock to a time when the Army and Navy could barely share a map, when “jointness” meant whose radio batteries died first.

Trump, the Mussolini of Mar-a-Lago, wants to rip up the wiring not because it will make America stronger, but because it makes for a better chant at his rallies. And Hegseth, that obedient errand boy in a shiny suit who demands everyone love him by doing pushups in the field, will happily carry the torch while the whole edifice burns down around him.

This is not patriotism.

It’s vandalism masquerading as strength.

And if we let them do it, America will not be feared, respected, or even taken seriously—it will simply be pitied, a once-mighty arsenal reduced to the punchline of a two-bit demagogue and his court jester.

A Short and Disgraceful History of the Secretary of War

The title alone told you everything you needed to know about the Republic in its gawky adolescence: Secretary of War. Not “defense,” not “security,” not “protection.” No euphemisms, no lace curtains. Just War—raw, naked, unapologetic. Exactly the sort of thing that makes Trump and Hegseth pop their buttons and squeal like hogs in a feedlot. WAR, BABY! To their kind, subtlety is for eunuchs. So let’s start here.

The United States of America, having barely staggered out of the cradle, was already appointing a man whose sole job was to decide which unlucky bastards got fed into the musket line next.

The post was born in 1789, with the ink still wet on the Constitution, and the first officeholder, Henry Knox (yes, for whom the fort was named), looked like a man carved entirely out of pudding. From there, the job became a revolving door for hacks, halfwits, and political stooges who treated the U.S. Army less like a fighting force and more like a personal employment agency for their in-laws.

For the better part of a century, the Secretary of War was less a strategist and more a glorified quartermaster. He shoveled contracts to cronies, handed out commissions like party favors, and let the actual generals fight over maps, horses, and the privilege of bleeding out on America’s behalf.

In the Civil War, the job became the epicenter of graft—War Department contracts made whole fortunes for the sharpers of the age. Lincoln’s Secretary, Edwin Stanton, at least had the decency to look like a vulture, which suited the carrion he oversaw.

The Spanish-American War finally exposed what a joke the setup had become. Soldiers shipped to Cuba with rotten beef and malaria for dessert, while the Secretary of War, Russell Alger, treated the whole catastrophe like a Boy Scout jamboree. The public outrage was so loud that McKinley had to sack him and invent the modern scapegoat ritual.

By the time the 20th century rolled in, America’s military machine was too big, too modern, and too damn lethal to be left in the hands of a single War Secretary doling out favors like a ward boss. So they split the atom: the Army under War, the Navy off on its own, and the whole system a bureaucratic knife-fight until World War II proved the obvious—that the setup was insane.

It is a miracle bordering on divine comedy that in World War II the United States managed to fight as “cohesively” as it did. And let’s be honest: it wasn’t cohesive at all—it was a lucky brawl, a barroom melee on a planetary scale. In the Pacific, you had the Navy and its pet Marines swaggering about like pirates, blasting apart a sea-borne empire. In Europe, you had the Army and its adolescent Air Corps—later rebranded as the Air Force—slugging it out with Hitler’s legions like a pair of drunks swinging broken bottles. The two “departments” were separated not just by 14,000 miles of ocean but by philosophy, doctrine, and an unspoken hatred of each other’s guts.

Today we talk about “combined arms,” as if the machine were born perfect. In 1944 it was the high-water mark of War Department buffoonery—each service its own kingdom, each general his own god. On one side of the world, Douglas MacArthur, the peacock warlord, strutting about in corncob pipes and sunglasses, styling himself the Caesar of the Pacific. On the other, Dwight Eisenhower, the Midwestern schoolmaster, somehow persuading a gaggle of prima donnas to act like an army long enough to cross the Rhine. And in between them, a constellation of brass-hatted egotists whose chief accomplishment was proving that West Point and Annapolis could mass-produce vanity in bulk.

That we won was not proof of cohesion. It was proof of industrial might, dumb luck, and oceans full of blood to cover the cracks.

Responding to the “lessons learned” from World War II, and all that stovepiping, in 1947, the War Department was finally put down like a rabid dog, its name scraped off the letterhead and replaced with the Department of Defense. A polite euphemism, yes, but at least an honest one about what the machinery was meant to do: coordinate, integrate, and win. The Secretary of War faded into history, a relic of a cruder age—one part Roman circus master, one part ward-heeler, and one part national embarrassment.

Things weren’t hardly fixed, however. What came with the Secretary of Defense was better, but hardly “solved.”

Victory on the Potomac

The Department of War died in 1947, not out of moral enlightenment but out of sheer embarrassment. After two world wars, it was painfully obvious that America’s services could barely tolerate one another. The Army thought the Navy were dilettantes in dress whites. The Navy thought the Army were illiterate grunts who couldn’t find Europe on a map. And the Air Corps? They were teenage hot-rodders with new toys and no supervision.

So the great compromise was born: the National Security Act of 1947. Out went “War,” in came “Defense,” and the Army, Navy, and Air Force were shoved under one roof like squabbling cousins forced to share a bedroom. The Secretary of Defense was supposed to be the adult in the room. In practice, he was a weary referee watching three gangs knife each other for budget scraps.

Through Korea, Vietnam, and half the Cold War, the services fought harder with one another than they did with the enemy. Radios that couldn’t talk to each other. Logistics chains that collapsed at the first pothole. Rescue missions that turned into funerals because Navy pilots and Army Rangers couldn’t agree on which way was north. If the Soviets ever invaded, the Joint Chiefs would’ve strangled each other before they fired a shot.

The nadir came in the 1980s: the Desert One debacle in Iran, where an “all-star” joint force of Marines, Air Force, Army, and Navy managed to crash helicopters into each other in the desert like Keystone Cops with afterburners. Then Grenada in ’83, where Army Rangers and Marine battalions stormed the same island without telling each other, and had to use a commercial payphone to call for naval gunfire. The United States looked less like a superpower and more like a frat party armed with tanks.

Enter Goldwater–Nichols in 1986—a law that finally did what decades of “coordination” could not. It smashed the service baronies, neutered the Chiefs, and crowned the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs as the president’s main military consigliere. Operational power was handed to the Combatant Commanders—men with sprawling fiefdoms like CENTCOM and PACOM, who actually commanded forces across services. And, in a stroke of bureaucratic sadism, officers were now required to do “joint tours” if they ever wanted to make general. Nothing cures parochialism like threatening a man’s pension.

Barry Goldwater was no Caesar. He was a cranky Arizona haberdasher who stumbled into politics the way a man stumbles into a bar fight—loud, angry, and armed with nothing but his prejudices. His foreign policy instincts were equal parts cowboy and crank: nuke Hanoi, privatize the Pentagon, and yell at clouds until someone saluted. But he had one useful trait—he despised the smug little fiefdoms of the Pentagon brass. To Goldwater, watching generals squabble over budget lines was like watching a roomful of divas fight over a mirror.

Sam Nunn and Bill Nichols were no titans either. Nichols himself was a back-bencher so bland he could have been mistaken for the upholstery in his own office. He had the personality of oatmeal and the charisma of wet cardboard, but he did his homework and, unlike most of Congress, understood that jointness mattered. He was the kind of dull man who, out of sheer persistence, eventually beats people far more intelligent than himself.

Together, these men pulled off what Washington had deemed impossible: they beat the generals. Not in battle—that would have required honor—but in committee hearings, memos, and procedural chokeholds. They dragged the Joint Chiefs in front of cameras, forced them to explain why their radios couldn’t talk to each other, and made them look like prize idiots (a rare thing now, despite the surplus of cabinet officials begging for the exercise). It was bureaucratic sadism at its finest: strip the brass naked, poke them with their own failures, and make the public laugh.

The miracle of Goldwater–Nichols wasn’t genius. It was boredom and spite harnessed to lawmaking. A crank, a dullard, and a handful of staffers simply outlasted the Pentagon’s armies of lobbyists. They put into law what every soldier on the ground already knew—that the system was broken, and the only thing worse than fighting the enemy was fighting your own sister services.

And so the United States emerged, finally, with a military chain of command that worked. The Combatant Commanders became the President’s chief warfighters, the Chairman became the president’s one throat to choke, and “jointness” became a catechism every officer had to mouth if he wanted to make general.

Desert Storm was the payoff: a coordinated blitzkrieg so overwhelming that even the Russians took notes.

In 1990, Desert Storm was the proof of concept—a live-fire demonstration that America’s military had finally dragged itself out of the bureaucratic Stone Age. Saddam Hussein’s army looked formidable on paper: the fourth-largest in the world, bristling with tanks, artillery, and men who’d just crawled out of a decade-long meat grinder with Iran. In the old system, the Army would have charged one way, the Air Force another, the Navy would have parked offshore looking smug, and the Marines would have shown up just to prove they existed—the result: chaos, confusion, and a body count.

Instead, thanks to Goldwater–Nichols, the United States fought as if it actually was a single military, not four competing mafias. Schwarzkopf—the Combatant Commander in charge—wasn’t begging the service chiefs for scraps. He had operational control of every Army unit, every Marine regiment, every Air Force wing, and every Navy ship in his theater.

When he snapped his fingers, steel moved. All of it. Not like Ike or MacArthur. He was our first true “theatre commander.”

The air campaign was choreographed like a sadistic ballet. Air Force bombers, Navy strike aircraft, and Marine pilots all fed into one unified plan, rather than three mutually hostile PowerPoint decks. The ground war unfolded like a set piece, with Army heavy armor executing the infamous “left hook” while Marines pinned Saddam’s forces. Communications worked. Logistics worked. For once, Americans weren’t killing each other’s plans with incompatible radios and turf wars.

The whole thing lasted 100 hours on the ground. Saddam’s vaunted army was shattered like a cheap vase. The Soviets—who’d armed and trained him—watched in horror as their client’s force was eviscerated with a precision and speed they couldn’t dream of. Desert Storm was less a war than an advertisement: this is what jointness buys you.

Goldwater–Nichols didn’t just look good in committee hearings anymore. It had given the U.S. military a functional nervous system. For once, the world’s most expensive armed forces were also the most efficient. The victory was so lopsided it created its own myth: that America had discovered a formula for effortless war. That hubris would come back to haunt us in Iraq a decade later—but in ’91, the lesson was clear. The gamble on “jointness” had paid off in spades.

Goldwater and Nichols were canonized as visionaries, but the truth is uglier and more American: the system only changed because two men who had no business running a lemonade stand managed, through sheer accident and bloody-minded persistence, to beat the most powerful bureaucracy on earth. Saints? Hardly. But in Washington, even dullards and cranks can sometimes make history—if enough helicopters crash in the desert first.

The services howled, of course. Admirals warned of tyranny, generals muttered about civilian coups, Air Force colonels threatened the death of air power itself. But within a decade, the howling stopped. By the time Desert Storm rolled across Kuwait, America finally looked like what it pretended to be: one unified military juggernaut, coordinated, lethal, terrifying. Goldwater and Nichols had done what no Soviet army ever could—forced the Pentagon to fight as a team.

It was, in the end, a victory on the Potomac. Not over foreign enemies, but over the baroque idiocies of the U.S. officer corps. And like all victories in Washington, it took dead men, public humiliation, and the gnashing of bureaucratic teeth to make it stick.

Schooling Mr. Pushups

Pete Hegseth loves to flex.

He bangs out pushups or runs laps in front of the cameras on Fox & Friends like a chimp in a zoo—sweaty, loud, and desperate for attention. He mistakes this calisthenic carnival act for military wisdom, as if the real job of the Secretary of Defense were keeping count of reps. It isn’t. The Secretary of Defense is not a warlord, not a cheerleader, not a chest-thumper. The Secretary of Defense is the civilian brain of the most dangerous machine ever built.

The SecDef sits at the nexus of war and statecraft. His job is to tame the services, force coordination, and make sure that when America fights, it fights as one lethal, integrated force. He allocates budgets, balances strategy against politics, and acts as the hinge between the president and the Pentagon. In other words, he is a manager of civilization-scale violence. The office requires sobriety, cunning, and iron discipline—qualities utterly foreign to Mr. Do-Pushups-on-Camera.

And the Department itself? It is neither a gym, a parade ground, nor a set for Fox News cosplay. It is the sprawling nervous system of American power: combatant commands, logistics chains, intelligence networks, nuclear deterrence, cyber defenses, space assets, air, land, sea, and special operations—all fused into one structure that no rival on Earth has been able to match. That unity is why, since the Gulf War, the United States has remained fundamentally safe from foreign attack. The DoD has coordinated everything from storming Baghdad to patrolling the Pacific to hunting terrorists in caves, all without collapsing into the interservice food fights of the past.

Pete Hegseth is not a warrior. He is a cheap GI Joe knockoff, stamped out in Taiwan, sold at a truck stop, and missing half the accessories. He struts around in his Fox News blazer, the sleeves straining from pushups performed for the camera, confusing the sweat of a workout with the blood of a battlefield. His war record is a handful of staff jobs padded with the kind of self-promotion that would make P.T. Barnum blush. He talks like he’s Patton, acts like a frat boy, and has all the “situational awareness” of a mall cop on a creatine binge.

His great act of patriotism?

Not leading men into combat. Not crafting strategy. Not even understanding what the Department of Defense does.

No—his accomplishment is being a professional veteran cosplay artist, hired to grunt on command for the Fox audience, as if biceps were a substitute for brains. He is the perfect mascot for Trumpism: a man who thinks the Secretary of Defense is supposed to look tough on television.

In truth, Hegseth is the most dangerous kind of fraud: the lightweight who believes his own bullshit. He honestly thinks doing pushups and shouting about toughness makes him qualified to direct nuclear policy, global alliances, and trillion-dollar budgets. He would walk into the E-Ring of the Pentagon the way a dog walks into a symphony hall—pissing on the chairs, barking at the violins, and calling it leadership.

Hegseth doesn’t even understand what the office is for. He doesn’t want to. He just wants the title, the photo ops, and the illusion of toughness—while the machine underneath rusts and crumbles. It’s all women, liquor, and pushups to this clown. If Kubrick were making a film, I assure you, Hegseth would be in the war room, and Gen. 'Buck' Turgidson (played by George C. Scott) wouldn’t be comic relief.

Here’s reality: since the Gulf War, no peer adversary has dared to test America head-on. The Soviets folded, the Chinese bide their time, and every tin-pot dictator with dreams of glory remembers the 100-hour war that flattened Saddam. That deterrence did not come from a Secretary doing pushups on television. It came from decades of institutional reform, careful planning, and a civilian secretary who understood his job was to orchestrate—not perform—violence.

Hegseth’s fantasy of being a “Secretary of War” is the exact opposite of what America needs. He wants a mascot. The country requires a steward. He wants a stage. The job demands a chessboard. He thinks the role is about testosterone. In truth, it is about keeping testosterone-addled generals from running the country into the ground. The SecDef exists to corral the Pentagon, not to cosplay as its toughest man.

And so we revert to madness.

And now, in waltz Trump and his house jester Hegseth, babbling about resurrecting the Secretary of War as if changing the sign on the Pentagon would suddenly make America manly again. It is the politics of the locker room—men who never had the stones to fight a war trying to prove their virility by renaming the furniture.

This is not strategy.

It’s dick-measuring with letterhead.

Trump himself is the most cowardly draft dodger ever to mistake a cheeseburger for a Medal of Honor. The man couldn’t march across a golf course without a golf cart, yet he puffs out his chest and imagines himself Caesar. His idea of combat is stiffing contractors and shrieking into a microphone. He loves war the way a drunk loves fireworks: loud, bright, and only fun until someone loses a hand.

We buried the War Department and its approach because it was a failure. We clawed through decades of bureaucratic idiocy to build the Department of Defense and then hammer it into jointness under Goldwater–Nichols. We proved in Desert Storm that unity of command and integration of services was the key to modern victory. That’s the inheritance. That’s the machine. And these carnival barkers want to take a sledgehammer to it for the sake of a rally chant.

“Secretary of War” isn’t a synonym for toughness. It’s regression. It’s nostalgia cosplay for men too insecure to live in the present. It takes a century of blood, humiliation, and institutional reform and throws it away in exchange for a bumper sticker. Trump and Hegseth don’t want a stronger America—they want the illusion of strength, the kind that collapses the moment it’s tested.

To turn back the clock is not to make America mighty. It is to make it ridiculous: a superpower that mistook machismo for strategy, and bravado for victory. In short, a nation led by clowns, cheered on by rubes, and undone by its own insecurity.

This isn’t a return to strength—it’s a return to stupidity, with pushups and slogans for garnish.

Germany did not wake up one day going, “Sieg Heil.”

That’s not how it happened.

People ask me—as if I’m the Oracle of Totalitarianism, perhaps I am—whether America is about to go fascist. Dr. Richardson gets the same question. The implication is always the same: Is it time to leave?

I heckle the Regime in public, tossing around Nazi comparisons and mocking its would-be führers. “Trumpler has only got one ball” (Homan has two, but they’re small. Miller is very simil’r. And that bitch Bondi, has no balls, at all).

(Plus tiny baby hands and a small dick, to hear South Park tell it.)

But the United States is not Nazi Germany.

Nor is our “end state” likely to look like some Obergruppenführer Smith running the “American Reich” à la Philip K. Dick.

Most of humanity lacks the imagination for how fascism works.

I don’t.

And I can tell you: America is headed in the wrong direction—if you care about the founding of the Republic, the postwar order, America’s role in that order, and the trajectory we’ve been on since 1945.

Still: it is not Nazi Germany. Not yet.

There are no torchlit parades. No secret police dragging people from their homes at midnight. No leader’s portrait staring down from every schoolhouse wall. We still have elections worth stealing, courts that occasionally tell a president to shove it, and a press that—though often craven—remains uncaged.

And yet—

The guardrails are melting away. The driver keeps swerving toward the cliff.

At the realization of the horror of the holocaust, the survivors of that brutality encapsulated their exhaustion, rage, horror, grief, loss, and all the emotions that they felt, in a simple expression.

“Never again.”

But “Never again” was not meant to be uttered over the ashes of another atrocity; it was meant as a navigational command: never again should we stare down that road.

And here we are. What was the world’s most successful experiment in democratic self governance, going down the tubes daily.

Every person detained, claiming their right to be here unlawful.

Every person spied upon, claiming the rights of the state take precedent.

Every person’s liberty denied by the pyschophants that occupy the halls of Congress.

We aren’t just staring down that road—we’re walking it.

The Scale

People like tidy binaries.

Is it fascism or not? Yes or no. They want the political equivalent of a pregnancy test: one line, you’re fine; two lines, pack the kids and passports.

Why? Because the vast majority of people in this country aren’t interested in fascism, so they want an indication to tell themself a lie that everything is fine in the United States until the last possible moment.

Until Hitler, I guess, is standing in their fucking living room yelling at them and demanding “Zeig Heil!”

But authoritarianism doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t arrive in a single news cycle, waving a flag and goose-stepping across the lawn, buttstroking your neighbors and hauling off the “undesireables” (although we’re close to that moment, I grant you). It seeps. It accretes. It eats away at the political body until you wake up and realize it’s not the same organism anymore.

If you want to measure where we are — and, more importantly, how fast we’re moving — you need something better than the clickbait panic or the smug dismissal.

This isn’t BREAKING NEWS! And it’s not some phony nonsense from Rachael Maddow blathering about the end of the American democracy, and so by default, clearly it’s Nazism (or fascism).

You need a scale.

Mallen Baker postulated a twelve-point taxonomy of fascist and totalitarian regimes. I think it’s one of the better tools I’ve seen. It’s not “country-centric,” it’s not historically locked to one case, and it sidesteps the usual path-dependency trap. It’s also a lot more useful than the lazy “Trump is Hitler” bumper sticker.

What are his the twelve indicators:

1. Authoritarian leadership — Power concentrated in one leader.

2. Extreme nationalism — The country and its people seen as superior to all others.

3. Xenophobia and racism — Fear and hatred of outsiders or “the other.”

4. Militarism — Glorification of the armed forces and expansionist aims.

5. Crushing political opposition — Using state power to eliminate dissent.

6. Cult of personality — The leader as infallible embodiment of the nation.

7. State control of the economy — Direct political control over economic life.

8. Propaganda and censorship — Media as a tool of the regime.

9. Obsession with national security — Inflated or fabricated threats to justify power.

10. Rejection of democracy — Weakening or dismantling democratic institutions.

11. Emphasis on tradition — Romanticized “golden age” as national goal.

12. Use of paramilitary forces — Violence as a routine tool of political control.

These aren’t on/off switches — they’re dials, from 1 (absent) to 5 (fully maxed). A country that’s all fives is a hardened authoritarian state. A country with a mix of 1’s, 2’s, and a few 3’s might be a democracy under stress.

Even Nazi Germany didn’t start at all fives. In the early 1930s, it was ramping up. By its wartime peak, it was a 55–57 out of 60. Stalin’s USSR was in the low 50s. Modern Russia and China live in the high 40s or low 50s — not quite Hitler’s Reich, but well past the point where any internal opposition can function.

The U.S. today:

• Authoritarian leadership: 3

• Extreme nationalism: 3

• Xenophobia/racism: 3

• Militarism: 2–3

• Crushing opposition: 1–2

• Cult of personality: 2–3

• State control of economy: 2

• Propaganda/censorship: 1–2

• Obsession with security: 1–2

• Rejection of democracy: 3

• Tradition fetish: 4

• Paramilitary use: 1

Call it 25–31 points out of 60. That’s not great.

But it’s not Hitler either.

The danger isn’t that every dial jumps to five overnight. It’s that they keep inching upward while the public argues over whether they should even be looking at the damn panel.

Why the Dials Move

One of the great political delusions is that authoritarianism arrives fully formed — a sudden coup, a midnight declaration, a switch from democracy to dictatorship in the time it takes to refresh your news feed.

That’s just not how it happens. Government is, by its nature, iterative.

Authoritarian movements operate like burglars testing a house. First, they jiggle the windows. Then they try the door. If nobody yells, they come back with better tools. They don’t have to get in the first time. They have to find the weak points and remember them for later.

The Nazis are a case study. They didn’t seize the German state in one clean lunge. They failed thrice before 1933 — once in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, once in the 1926 elections, and again in 1928 when electoral gains evaporated. As a result of the May 1928 elections, Social Democratic politician Hermann Müller became chancellor of Germany, not Hitler.

Those “failures” didn’t destroy the movement. They trained it. The Nazi party learned how to work the courts, how to adapt the propaganda, and Hitler himself learned (and deliberately positioned) to make himself look less like a street thug and more like a statesman. In the wake of economic upheaval caused by the Great Depression, by the end of 1932, the Nazis would be a dominant party. By 1933, Hitler would displace Hindenburg; the last multi-party election in Germany, until its surrender by the Nazis in 1945, would be March 5, 1933. In July 1933, the Nazi Party became the only legal political party in Germany. By April of 1934, Hitler became the Führer.

Each run moved the dials. The rhetoric hardened. The propaganda sharpened. Street violence became more organized. By the time they did take power, the groundwork was so well-prepared that dismantling the Weimar Republic was a matter of months, not years.

The American dials are moving the same way. A failed power grab doesn’t reset them to zero — it shows where the guardrails flex, which ones break, and how to apply more force next time. January 6 wasn’t the Reichstag fire (which is what many of us wondered in that moment). It was a stress test. The lesson authoritarian actors will take from it isn’t “don’t try again,” it’s “next time, do it better.”

And here we are. This is what “better” looks like.

That’s why a score in the mid-20s on the fascism scale shouldn’t comfort you. It’s not a fixed number; it’s a trajectory. And if the last decade has shown us anything, it’s that once the dials start moving, they never drift back down on their own.

Trump and the Third Act Problem

Trump isn’t a genius of authoritarianism.

He’s not a genius of anything. He’s a huckster, rapist, and fraudster who, according to people who have been in his presence, smells like a garbage dumpster behind a McDonald’s next to a pork rendering factory.

He’s not methodical. He’s not disciplined. He’s not building a Ministry of Fear in the basement of Mar-a-Lago. What he is, is a man with vile instincts, incredibly self-centered and piggish, and no patience — a showman who treats politics like a casino floor: loud, distracting, and designed to keep the suckers inside.

But here’s the problem: you don’t have to be a genius to be useful to history. Sometimes all you have to do is prove the rules aren’t as rigid as everyone thought.

Trump has done that in spades. If not an authoritarian himself, he’s pointed the way for someone who is truly willing to walk that path.

He’s shown that you can attack the legitimacy of elections, erode the independence of the judiciary, create a personality cult inside a political party, and float openly expansionist fantasies — and survive.

Not just that. He’s attacked what was “dogma” in Congress for nearly 70 years: attacking social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlements. If Johnson had the “war against poverty,” Trump is engaging in the “war on the poor.” Millions are going to lose benefits, and Trump will undoubtedly just say, “did I do that,” as some kind of Ochre colored version of Eurkle.

All of this points the way for the vile bureaucratic scum of MAGA, now empowered by the federal government’s mantle of power, to indulge in their whims and fantasies of retributive and fascistic governance.

And they don’t have to get everything they want this round.

Authoritarianism doesn’t usually succeed on the first try. As I previously wrote, the Nazis failed twice before they ascended to being the controlling power structure. Each failure was a rehearsal: the rhetoric hardened, the propaganda sharpened, the organization tightened. By the third run, they weren’t just angry street brawlers — they were a machine.

Trump may be America’s second run. The first was the post-9/11 security state: the Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, a culture willing to trade liberty for the illusion of safety. Trump refined the formula — he turned distrust of institutions into a rallying cry, and made contempt for the system a mark of loyalty.

The danger is in the third act.

That’s when someone comes along who understands the machinery Trump banged together — and runs it with competence. A leader who can turn “own the libs” into an actual governing program, who knows how to work the courts instead of just shouting at them, who can build a state apparatus that doesn’t collapse under its own corruption.

Imagine a “smart Trump” who is ruthless. Who doesn’t smell like armpit, french fries, and dogshit. Who isn’t a fraudster who’s bankrupted every business he’s tried to run legitimately, and thus, is now relegated to fraud and hucksterism to stay afloat? Imagine a “Trump” who’s cunning, understands the government well, understands how to manipulate people’s fears well, and builds an apparatus of wealthy and influential people to back him.

He’s out there. Spoiler alert: he’s not JD Vance, or the vile Trump spawn (at least I don’t think so.)1

History Matters

Fascism is not simply the product of one man’s ambition or the charisma of a demagogue.

It feeds on crisis — real, tangible, gut-punch crisis.

Weimar Germany didn’t slide into the Third Reich because the beer halls were especially rowdy. It happened after the Great Depression kneecapped the global economy. The Dawes Plan loans that had been propping up Germany were called in, unemployment exploded, and the middle class — the one thing standing between the street mobs and state power — collapsed. Hungry, frightened people stopped caring about liberal democracy’s ideals and started caring about survival.

The Nazis didn’t create that desperation; they exploited it.

The United States isn’t in that place now. But the appeal of Trumpism doesn’t spring fully formed from cultural grievances alone. Economic precarity is the compost heap where authoritarian politics grows best. Stagnant wages, shredded safety nets, and entire towns left for dead by deindustrialization are not just statistics — they’re lived realities. And when a political movement offers a simple villain and a simple promise, people will grab it with both hands, even if the villain is imaginary and the promise is poison.

If you want to prevent a “Trump III” — or worse, a competent heir to his movement — you don’t just beat the candidate. You solve the conditions that make his pitch attractive in the first place. You fix the rot that convinces a man in a fading factory town that his best shot is to vote for the guy who brags about assault and hires cronies like it’s a blood sport.

The Democratic Party loves to cast itself as the last bulwark against authoritarianism. “We’re defending democracy,” they tell you, usually while fund-raising off the latest outrage from the right. And yet, when it comes to doing the actual hard work of removing the conditions that breed authoritarian politics in the first place, they’ve been asleep at the wheel for decades.

They treat Trumpism like a branding problem, not a structural one. As if the answer to an entire rust belt town that’s been hollowed out for 30 years is a slicker ad buy or a cringe celebrity TikTok.

They’ll give soaring speeches about “our values” while ignoring the lived economic collapse under their feet. Rural hospitals closing? Supply chains pulling good jobs offshore? Rent doubling in six years? Student debt still chaining a generation to poverty? They’ll commission a task force and a logo.

Meanwhile, the right just has to point to someone — immigrants, “coastal elites,” trans kids, whatever the outrage du jour is — and promise the same broken man in the same broken town that they’ll “take his country back.” And because that’s at least a promise, however poisonous, it feels more real than another Beltway symposium on “innovation hubs.”

This is what the Democrats don’t get: You cannot shame people out of voting for authoritarians if their daily reality feels like a slow bleed. You have to give them something tangible — not in 2050, not after another two years of “stakeholder engagement,” but now.

That means:

• Stop fetishizing bipartisanship when the other side is openly authoritarian.

• Stop doing Wall Street donor maintenance while pretending you’re the party of the working class.

• Stop outsourcing “economic policy” to think tanks who’ve never stepped foot in a town with one grocery store and no bus service.

• Start fixing the structural rot: wages, housing, healthcare, infrastructure, industrial policy — all the unsexy work that keeps democracies from rotting out.

Because here’s the ugly truth: the next Trump won’t need to have Trump’s baggage. They’ll be younger, more disciplined, more strategic — and if Democrats keep treating “defending democracy” as a marketing campaign instead of a material project, that successor is going to waltz into office.

And when that happens, all the well-lit speeches about the “soul of America” won’t mean a damn thing.

History’s lesson is ugly but clear: when the economic floor gives way, political gravity takes over. And it doesn’t pull toward the center.

The Direction of Travel

Trump isn’t competent enough to be a fascist. He lacks the discipline, the ideological consistency, and the organizational ruthlessness that history’s great dictators possessed in spades. He governs by impulse, not by plan — and his White House often looked less like the Reich Chancellery than a reality TV green room.

That’s not just luck.

America’s guardrails make consolidation of power difficult even for someone who isn’t a moron. The courts still attempt to block executive overreach. Congress — when it can be bothered — could check a president’s ambitions. The press, however battered and polarized, still publishes without state approval.

These aren’t trivial obstacles. They won’t “save us,” but the dam hasn’t completely burst just yet.

In a truly authoritarian state, they’d already be gone.

Again, in saying these things, I’m not saying, “All is well!”

It is not. But it is worth pointing out these things when others are running around yelling fascism and Hitler.

Trumpler may only got one ball (and tiny hands), but we’re not jackbooting down the street just yet.

The lesson of the last decade is that these guardrails aren’t immovable; they’re permeable. Trump showed that you can pound on the judiciary, delegitimize elections, turn a major political party into a personal vehicle, and flirt with open authoritarianism — and pay no real price within your own coalition. That’s the normalization that matters.

The “playbook” — contempt for institutional limits, loyalty over competence, governance by grievance, the constant testing of boundaries — will outlast Trump. In eight to twelve years, in the hands of someone shrewder, more disciplined, and more strategically cruel, it could become something far more dangerous.

If you want to know when the line has been crossed, there are markers worth memorizing now:

• Abolishing the two-term limit or inventing a pretext to ignore it.

• Purging the civil service and judiciary until only personal loyalists remain.

• Media capture where dissenting outlets are effectively silenced or absorbed.

• Systematic political violence carried out and protected by the state.

Cross those, and it won’t matter who’s driving — the guardrails will be gone, and the road will only lead one way.

What You Can Do While the Guardrails Still Exist

America is not Nazi Germany. Not yet. But if you don’t want to live in the sequel, you don’t wait until the guardrails are gone — you reinforce them now.

Watch the Dials

• Keep the 12-point scale in mind. Don’t just look at the score — watch the trend.

• Memorize the tripwires: scrapping term limits, purging the judiciary, state-captured media, and organized political violence.

• Ignore the circus. The real danger often comes in dull, bureaucratic changes no one tweets about.

Reinforce the Guardrails

• Vote — every election, every level. Authoritarians love low turnout.

• Demand Congress use its spine. “If they choose to” shouldn’t be our only hope.

• Support independent media. If you want a free press, you have to help pay for it. (Subscribing on Substack helps!)

• Back rule-of-law groups that drag power grabs into court.

Attack the Root Causes

• Push for real fixes to economic precarity and civic decay — the soil where grievance politics grows.

• Don’t let scapegoating slide, especially in your own circles. Strongmen feed on “us vs. them.”

• Build local resilience. People with strong communities are harder to frighten into submission.

You’re not just a spectator here. Democracies don’t die on their own — they get murdered, and the weapon is usually public apathy. The good news is that, right now, you can still lock the door.

This is the part where you don’t get to say, ten years from now, ‘Nobody warned me.’

Consider yourself warned.