A thread for Democrats Only by THGRRI

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

A thread for Democrats Only

POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Friday, March 20, 2026 06:21
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Thursday, February 5, 2026 5:53 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Donald Trump is president of a United States, but it is too much to say that he is president of the United States

By Jamelle Bouie | Feb. 4, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/opinion/trump-presidential-power-co
mments.html

A hallmark of the president’s language since he stepped onto the national political stage is that some Americans are more American than others, and that this is a function of race and allegiance to Trump.

Trump deployed this idea against Barack Obama when he questioned the former president’s political legitimacy and demanded that he prove his citizenship with the public release of his “long-form” birth certificate. He wielded it during his first campaign for the White House, dismissing critics and opponents as un-American and illegitimate on the basis of their race, nationality and partisan identity. Recall his condemnation of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who, Trump insisted, could not be impartial because he was “Mexican.” And this vision of the supposedly true American public was a rhetorical mainstay of his first term in office. “The Democrats,” Trump said, in a typical formulation during a 2018 rally for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, “have launched an assault on the sovereignty of our country.”

Now, obviously, Trump did not pioneer this distinction between the people who happen to live in a nation and the quasi-mystical, fully legitimate People of the Nation. This construct is a mainstay of right-wing populism. You saw it in the 2008 presidential election, when Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska told audiences that there was a “real” America that truly represented the country. “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, pro-America areas of this great nation,” she said.

You saw it at the 1992 Republican National Convention, when Pat Buchanan, the Nixon speechwriter and political operative turned conservative intellectual and proto-Trumpian provocateur, deployed this herrenvolk notion of the American nation in his infamous (and influential) jeremiad against American liberalism.

“There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America,” Buchanan declared. “We must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” And you cannot understand the nativist “Americanism” of the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1910s and ’20s without reference to a similarly narrow conception of the American people, one tied to sharp anxieties around race, class, religion and masculinity. The Klan “stood for patriotism, ‘old-time religion’ and conventional morality, and pledged to fend off challenges from any quarter to the rights and privileges of men from the stock of the nation’s founders,” the historian Nancy MacLean explains in “Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan.”

What Trump has done is turn this rhetorical distinction into something like the governing philosophy of the federal government. To start, the White House has made clear that a state’s access to either federal aid or federal benefits is a function of its partisan allegiance. During last year’s government shutdown, for example, the administration canceled $8 billion in federal funding for clean energy, affecting 16 states — all of which voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Trump also withheld billions for transit projects in New York and New Jersey. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want,” the president said, commenting on what he thought was the upside of a shutdown, “and they’d be Democrat things.”

It is similarly clear that the president slated the worst of his deportation program for Democratic-led states and cities. Neither Chicago nor Los Angeles nor Washington stands out as particularly dangerous compared with the typical major American city. And if Trump were only targeting undocumented immigrants, he could look to cities in Texas and Florida as well as those in California and Illinois. But Trump targeted them all the same, sending the National Guard to occupy each city and unleashing federal immigration agents to harass and abuse immigrants and citizens alike.

“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” Trump mused on his Truth Social website in September. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” The administration’s attack on Minnesota, and especially on the city of Minneapolis, is more of the same, less law enforcement than a combat operation aimed at a set of Americans whose governor opposed the president in the last election or who belong to a disfavored racial, ethnic and religious minority

At the risk of cliché, most presidents do not speak like this about their fellow Americans. The presidency is a national office, and even the bitterest struggles for this highest prize of American politics tend to end with an appeal to union and common ground from the eventual winner. “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” Thomas Jefferson proclaimed in the wake of an election so hard fought that it nearly turned to violence. “Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own federal and republican principles, our attachment to union and representative government.”

John Quincy Adams won the presidency in what his chief rival, Andrew Jackson, condemned as a “corrupt bargain.” In his Inaugural Address, Adams made it a point to reach out to those Americans who wanted a different man in the White House. “Of the two great political parties which have divided the opinions and feelings of our country,” Adams said, “the candid and the just will now admit that both have contributed splendid talents, spotless integrity, ardent patriotism, and disinterested sacrifices to the formation and administration of this Government, and that both have required a liberal indulgence for a portion of human infirmity and error.”

Abraham Lincoln ended his first Inaugural Address with a famous appeal to the common history that tied Americans to one another. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies,” he said. “Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Lincoln’s heartfelt call to his Southern brethren to heed “the mystic chords of memory” fell on deaf ears. Five weeks later, a South Carolina militia fired on Fort Sumter. Not long afterward, Union volunteers met soldiers from the newly formed Confederate States of America in a field just north of Manassas, Va. And so began four years of the worst bloodletting in American history.

Trump rejects this legacy of his predecessors. The rhetorical tools of the presidency are, for him, a means to divide Americans and sort them according to hierarchies of status. Trump sits atop the national government, but not as a national leader. His is the logic of the separatist, even of the secessionist. “There was no privilege without persecution, no winner without a loser,” Michael J. Lee and R. Jarrod Atchison write of the ideology of the Southern “fire-eaters” in “We Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics Since 1776.” In their worldview, “political relationships within nations were always hierarchical; some group was always enslaved by or beholden to some other more dominant group.”

The fire-eaters hoped to instantiate this vision in a new nation founded on a cornerstone of racial subjugation. But what if you could secede without secession? What if you could cleave the nation off from its egalitarian aspirations? What if you could bring the spirit of separatism to bear on a government tasked with representing a single people?

That is the Trump administration. That is the work of a White House that sees vast numbers of Americans not as friends, but as enemies. And that is a work of a president who will destroy as many symbols of national unity as he can to satisfy his bottomless ego, cruel appetites and unquenchable desire to “win” at the expense of the people he purports to lead.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, February 5, 2026 6:19 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Friday, February 6, 2026 8:57 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
New START Treaty expires, freeing Trump from nuclear arms restrictions

"If it expires, it expires," U.S. President Donald Trump said in his interview with The New York Times when asked about his intentions to extend the New START treaty that officially ended on Feb. 5.

https://kyivindependent.com/new-start-expires-releases-us-russia-from-
decades-of-nuclear-arms-restrictions/

We Are Witnessing the Imperial Presidency on Steroids
The founders wouldn’t recognize the executive branch’s monstrous powers

by Dan Carlin | February 5, 2026

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-presi
dential-power-nixon-steroids-1235511366/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/we-are-witnessing-the-imperial-
presidency-on-steroids/ar-AA1VKrjv

While the Watergate scandal was raging, Richard Nixon allegedly told several U.S. representatives that he could get on the telephone, issue an order, and soon after millions of people would be killed. It wasn't hyperbole. There are very few people in human history that have ever had that kind of power, and most have been American presidents. But how does one individual with this sort of authority exist in a system of government designed with a triad of co-equal branches set up specifically to thwart concentrated executive power, a system where starting a war wasn't even an executive-branch power in the constitutional design?

The question of what in our system could have prevented Nixon from causing a nuclear holocaust if he wanted to has been left unanswered. There have been rumors that Cabinet secretaries at the time were telling aides to ignore such a presidential order if it were issued, but that's a stop-gap measure, not a constitutional check. The designers of our republican system never intended their chief executive to have this sort of authority. The fact that presidents do today is the root cause of many of our national problems.

Americans are living though a historic moment right now, one that would be fascinating to watch were it not so insanely important. There is a disaster looming that is becoming more clear every day. The cause is that the office of the president of the United States has far too much power and very few constraints. This combination invites authoritarianism. All it needs to become manifest is someone in the White House who desires such an outcome. It seems we have someone like that now.

While it's both tempting and normal to see current conditions as the result of recent events, the 21st-century American political situation is the culmination of decades of trends involving the ever-increasing power of the presidency. None of this is hidden, and scholars have been writing about it for decades (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s famous book The Imperial Presidency was published in 1973). And while the aggregation of presidential power is often cloaked in rationales and justifications, from anti-communism to anti-drugs, war powers, anti-terrorism, et cetera, sometimes it's simply how things developed and evolved (the nature and challenges associated with nuclear weapons is an example). But there is no denying at this point that we have created a systemic monster that the constitutional framers wouldn't recognize - and one they would fear. The founders believed in diffused power and oversight. They believed in a strong and active legislative branch to counter autocratic mission creep. We have none of those things at the moment. Are any of them recoverable? Is constitutional erosion a one-way street, or can it be reversed with some sort of renaissance? Must we go the way of Rome's Republic?

To rebalance our constitutional portfolio first requires us to want a less powerful executive. This is somewhat counterintuitive. Americans are accustomed to electing leaders who promise to push for outcomes, foster positive change, fix things, and help people. The voters expect the president to use the power of the office to achieve what the people want. The pressure from the winning candidate's supporters is not to restrain power but to use as much of it as possible. We are addicted to the exercise of presidential authority as long as it is being used for ends we desire. The effect this has on the system as a whole is given little attention. Is it even conceivable that we might push for leaders to restrain or roll back whatever power they might claim in order to prevent us from getting a president with too much authority? What if that's the only way to repair things?

If we come out of this current inflection point constitutionally intact - and that's far from guaranteed - we should use any pendulum-swinging momentum for reform the way legislators used the Watergate scandal aftermath to try to rein in the runaway powers of the presidency. There were lots of hearings, investigations, and legal alterations done in the mid-1970s to "fix" things, along with punishments meted out to those in government who knowingly went too far. This seems healthy for any system when its constitutional flaws are exposed. But like a noxious weed, the growth of executive power returned with a vengeance starting in the 1980s. Many of the post-Watergate reforms were challenged, overruled, or functionally eviscerated. The rationale given was that the "legitimate" powers of the presidency had been encroached upon. The formerly fringe concept of the Unitary Executive Theory emerged as a justification for unilateral actions and presidential power consolidation, pushed by think tanks (and the Supreme Court justices they pushed for) and entities who wanted less interference from other branches of government. This is the same rationale Donald Trump and his surrogates cite continually.

Any effort to dial back presidential authority faces strong headwinds in our current political climate. The Supreme Court seems hell-bent on ceding ever more power to the president, one who has far more power now than the "imperial" Nixon did back in the early 1970s. The electorate has demonstrated that it's willing to support chief executives pushing constitutional boundaries if it's done for reasons voters favor. And neither party wants to unilaterally disarm by ceding authority if the other side can't be trusted to do the same. Any salvation coming from the legislative branch seems hopeless. This dynamic is decades in the making; Congress has grown weak, venal, co-opted, and seems happy to relinquish its power to avoid responsibility for anything that might hurt members' reelections. Frustration with Congress leads to even more temptation to use presidents to achieve political goals - often using executive orders - that lawmakers seem unable or unwilling to pursue. The dynamic isn't favorable.

But we have been given another reminder of why any of those good reasons for increasing the power of one human being at the expense of the rest of the government aren't good enough. The executive branch is the one overwhelmingly likely to bring us to a dictatorship, and we can now see how much the vast powers of the office have only been held in check by mere protocol. A president unleashed shows us the power of the modern office uncloaked. And it should scare us all back into the mindset of Ben Franklin when he said that we had "a republic, if you can keep it." Congress, with its many members, isn't likely to be the branch that takes democracy away from us. The danger comes from the executive branch where one person calls the shots. And as it was when Nixon fell, we are being reminded that increasingly powerful presidents are something the system seems to germinate naturally. We need to periodically prune back the executive's powers when the opportunity presents itself. That time must be soon. The weeds have overrun the garden.

Too many forget that the primary goal of the U.S. constitutional design wasn't efficient governing. It was tyrant prevention. We put up with all sorts of impediments to change, reform, and improvement for that one simple goal. Whether this firewall still works is the paramount political question of our age. Will this era turn out to be a blip on the timeline? A warning that prompts reflection, reform, and recalibration akin to the McCarthyistic "Red Scare" era? Or will it be a Caesar crossing the Rubicon moment that forever ends the American experiment?

The more scary aspect of all this is the degree of public support for an uber-powerful leader who champions their views and pushes for what they desire. Often these wishes are unachievable because our constitutional protections stand in the way. This is a problem that will outlive the current president and requires deep national introspection. We could start by reminding ourselves what happens when representative systems go sideways. The outcomes are not recalled fondly by those who lived through them. Better to acquire that lesson from some other nation's tragedy rather than having to learn about the danger of historical hot stoves by touching one ourselves.

We are currently seeing what can happen when the only branch controlled by a single individual decides it wants to flex its vast and awesome powers. It demonstrates to all reasonable people that it's too much power for one person to have. Imagining such authority in the hands of one's worst enemy should be enough to make this concern clear to anyone. The president can pick up the phone and order the deaths of billions and the ruination of the planet's ecosystem. That's clearly too much power for any human being, isn't it?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, February 6, 2026 9:09 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump's push to rename Dulles and Penn Station after himself

Feb 6, 2026

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/06/schumer-trump-penn-station-dulles-gat
eway

President Trump last month offered to drop his hold on billions of dollars for a major infrastructure project in New York, but only if Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed to rename New York's Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after Trump.

• Schumer (D-N.Y.) rejected the offer, a source familiar with the talks told Axios, prolonging the standoff over funding for the Gateway Tunnel Project connecting New York to New Jersey.

Why it matters: Trump, whose allies renamed the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace after him, is continuing his efforts to reshape American institutions in his image.

• The offer did not come up in an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Schumer last month, the source said. Instead, the offer was made to Schumer in subsequent conversations with the administration about the Gateway project.

• The $16 billion project is set to shut down indefinitely on Friday, without the funding from the federal government.

• The offer from Trump was first reported by Punchbowl News.

The big picture: Trump and Schumer have cut high stakes deals for government funding over the last year. They remain at a stalemate over a project critical for Schumer's state.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, February 6, 2026 6:30 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Widdle dick Second is just jealous that it's not his name that's up on every building.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 6:53 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Widdle dick Second is just jealous that it's not his name that's up on every building.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

Renaming monuments after himself is proof that Trump isn't performing his duties. Same with his self-enrichment schemes. Not paying his income taxes, same. Spending $3,000,000 to fly down to Florida for a weekend round of golf, same old thing.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Saturday, February 7, 2026 6:54 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

How selfish are we? We cooperate to survive, but if no one is looking, we compete.

An age-old debate about human nature is being energised with new findings on the tightrope of cooperation and competition

By Jonathan R Goodman | 6 February 2026

Goodman is a social scientist based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World (2025).
Free download from https://annas-archive.li/search?q=Goodman+Invisible+Rivals

On first acquaintance, Iago could not be more supportive, loyal, and helpful to Othello. But as Shakespeare reveals, Iago is hiding behind outward signs of devotion to pursue his own personal ambitions and destroy Othello. And it is not just fictional men. There also are fictional women: Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is a model of niceness while unscrupulously pursuing her own goals. Literature is replete with such characters: two more are Edmund in King Lear or Uriah Heep in David Copperfield. The list is endless.

And not, of course, just in literature — in the real world, men and women pursue their own selfish goals while hiding under a cloak of cooperation. These are what Jonathan Goodman calls invisible rivals. They are not necessarily the extremes of Iago, but the day-to-day way in which the twin threads of human behavior — selfish competitiveness and altruistic cooperation are intertwined as strongly as a DNA helix.

https://aeon.co/essays/we-cooperate-to-survive-but-if-no-ones-looking-
we-compete

Reading classic works in evolutionary biology is unlikely to make you optimistic about human nature. From Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) onwards, there is a fundamental understanding among biologists that organisms, especially humans, evolved to maximise self-interest. We act to promote our own success or that of our family. Niceness, by contrast, is just a mirage, and morality more broadly is just an illusion. Sociobiology – the infamous movement of the second half of the 20th century – forced us to confront the cold, calculated nature of having evolved biologically.

More recently, however, anthropologists and psychologists have pushed back against this pessimistic view. Dozens of books over the past decade have focused on human cooperation, promoting it as the secret ingredient to our conquest of the planet. We work together, using our intelligence, language and a diverse skillset to build on complex cultures, develop technologies, and solve problems in our societies and environments. We learn at a young age what the rules of our groups are, and those rules, imprinted on us culturally, govern the safe, cohesive units that allowed us to conquer inhospitable parts of the world and out-compete unfriendly groups of people who don’t work well together.

This narrative saves us the embarrassment of accepting that biological selfishness – acting only to maximise our Darwinian success – is the foundation of all behaviour. It also matches some claims by anthropologists that ancient humans were egalitarian, living in small groups with little permanent rank, where leaders (if any) had limited authority and people collectively pushed back against anyone trying to dominate.

Yet, as with sociobiology, it is only half true. Instead, our collective predilection for exploitation, deceit and competition is equally important to cooperation in the story of human evolution. We evolved not to cooperate or compete, but with the capacity for both – and with the intelligence to hide competition when it suits us, or to cheat when we’re likely to get away with it. Cooperation is consequently something we need to promote, not presume.

The modern dispute about whether humans are fundamentally cooperative or competitive dates back to the publication of Mutual Aid (1902) by Pyotr Kropotkin, an anarchist who took his views about human nature from observing animals helping each other in the unhospitable wilds of Siberia. Kropotkin believed that it’s only through interdependence that any species can survive in the struggles against predation, violence and the environment, which characterise the omnipresent dangers individuals face. Like so many other species, fish, flesh and fowl, we work together to survive and reproduce.

On the surface, Kropotkin’s views are at odds with Darwin’s, who championed the individual struggle for survival and mating as the fundamental driver of evolution by natural selection. The twin pillars of competing for survival and competing for mates – natural and sexual selection, respectively – were, for Darwin, the foundations of biological life. For Kropotkin and his colleagues, by contrast, the emphasis was on how individuals acted for the good of the species: mutual aid meant a better, safer life for everyone.

Today, the debate is substantially the same, though the language and tools we use to make our points are different. Experiments conducted by anthropologists and psychologists across the world evaluate how cooperatively people behave in a multitude of conditions, with obvious ideological battle lines between those who espouse a self-interested versus a beneficent model of human nature.

For example, in one famous study from 2001, anthropologists worked with 15 different small-scale societies to see how they behaved in an economic experiment called the ultimatum game. In this game, the researcher gives one player a set amount of money – in this case, the local value of one or two days’ worth of wages. That player then chooses an amount of the money to offer to the second player, who may either accept or decline. In the case of acceptance, the players receive the amounts of money agreed upon; in the case of rejection, both receive nothing.

We are thought to treat each other more fairly than you’d expect using a cold economic calculus

In a calculated world governed only by self-interest, we’d expect the first player to offer the smallest possible amount, and for the second player to accept any offer. Something is better than nothing, no matter whether that something is unfair on either side.

Of course, the participants in the small-scale societies didn’t play the game in this way. The offers were almost never lower than 25 per cent of the overall pot, and in some groups, like with the Aché people of Paraguay and the Lamelara people of Indonesia, the offers were often greater than half the total amount.

Some scientists, notably the economist Ernst Fehr, used this outcome to defend the idea that humans are ‘inequity averse’ – that is, we are a species that almost universally dislikes unfairness. (‘Prosociality’ is also a term you see in the literature a lot.) As a consequence of this alleged collective aversion, we are thought to treat each other more fairly than you’d expect using a cold economic calculus.

These ideas have broadened out into a modern theory of super-cooperation, with a caveat: instead of the ‘good of the species’ view advocated for by Kropotkin, researchers focus on how people behave within groups. We learn to cooperate within groups because we are interdependent on one another for survival: reciprocal relationships are essential when anyone meets with failure in hunting, gathering or agriculture. Need-based transfers – where people ask from others only when they need help, for example when their own crops fail – characterise small-scale societies across the world.

Local norms determining how people cooperate spread through social learning. So, while need-based transfer is a common practice worldwide, its appearance is determined by the culture in question. Osotua (which translates to ‘umbilical cord’) is a bond linking two Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania in lifelong interdependence. Betrayal of osotua is reportedly unheard of, and a person’s descendants can even inherit a family member’s bond with another.

According to this way of thinking, groups that cooperate more effectively out-compete groups that don’t. This is part of a broader process called cultural group selection, the modern-day version of the mutual aid concept that Kropotkin championed more than a century ago. Except, instead of acting for the good of our species, we act for the good of our groups. Interdependence breeds loyalty, the hypothesis holds.

If the notion of cultural group selection bears out, then the problems we see in the world today should be seen as a consequence of friction between groups, not within them. Issues like international conflicts would derive from differences in social norms and values, rather than because of a missing commitment to prosociality shared by all group members. Cultural group selection encourages us to look for problems outside rather than within.

But the idea starts to look shaky upon closer inspection. Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist who has worked with the Ju/’hoansi of the Kalahari for decades, described what happened when she ran similar experiments herself. As part of her execution, she made it clear to volunteers that she was acting on behalf of someone else, the well-known economist Ernst Fehr; this was his interest, she emphasised; she did not care at all how they played the game and no matter what they did, there would be no consequence at all. She wrote:

A few asked me once more if it was really true that their identity would not be revealed; with confirmation, they slid more coins, one by one, over to their own sides. Occasionally the subject would hesitate and say: ‘Are you sure you are not deceiving me?’

For Wiessner, the point wasn’t that the Ju/’hoansi were uniquely selfish; it was that the experiment created a social situation unlike everyday life. Put someone in a game where identities are hidden and consequences are explicitly ruled out, and you remove many of the ordinary pressures that govern cooperation – reputation, ongoing relationships, the possibility of retaliation, the cost of being seen to take too much. What you end up measuring, in other words, is not ‘how cooperative this person is’, but how they behave in a stripped-down context where cooperation and betrayal carry very different risks.

Cooperating is not the same thing as being a cooperator

That basic insight runs through decades of work on the biology of cooperation. Even the earliest mathematical models that made reciprocity central to human social life treated betrayal as context-dependent: defection becomes attractive when there’s little chance of future interaction, when the other person can’t meaningfully respond, or when your reputation is unlikely to suffer. Cooperation, from this perspective, isn’t something we can simply assume; it’s something social life must make possible – and worth sustaining.

Over the 1970s, ’80s and arguably ever since, thousands of computer models purporting to explain how and why people cooperate have missed this point. Most often, researchers have explored how cooperation evolves in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the simplest form of this game, two players may choose to cooperate or defect. While mutual cooperation is mutually beneficial, and mutual defection is mutually damaging, defecting against a cooperative partner is the individual optimum – and cooperating against a defector yields the worst possible payoff. (The game is called the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ because the theoretical scenario is one where two criminals are separately asked by the police to inform on one another. If you inform on your partner, you get a much lighter sentence.)

Researchers have developed an astounding number of variations of this dilemma for explaining how cooperation is sustainable more broadly. Some invoke punishing defectors; some just explore the likelihood that one player will meet another again in the future. But, critically, virtually all of them treat ‘cooperators’ and ‘defectors’ as defining individual features. A player is defined by their propensity for cooperation – much as we might say of a criminal who rats on his friend that ‘once a rat, always a rat’.

I have always found this assumption problematic. Much as any person might cheat a partner when the likelihood of being discovered is low, so are we wrong to assume that anyone who cooperates in one game is likely to cooperate in every game. Cooperating is not the same thing as being a cooperator.

Models don’t and can’t know the difference between forced and prosocially motivated cooperation

In my academic work, I’ve explored this distinction, with the aim of determining the importance of what lies beneath appearances in social interactions. A few years ago, I created a computer model to explore how false appearances can affect cooperation. If, for example, an agent – representing a person in the world of the computer model – determines that defection in the Prisoner’s Dilemma is likely to be exposed and punished, the agent cooperates. If, however, defection is likely to go unnoticed, the agent defects.

The model shows that cooperation stays high – at about two-thirds of interactions – even if the vast majority of agents prefer to defect when possible. While older models evaluating cooperation in the dilemma showed that punishment removes defectors from the population altogether – in line with what people defending cultural group selection say – the difference between appearance and motivation makes removal more difficult. You can’t punish defectors if you don’t know who they are.

I’ve called this the problem of opportunity. When anything cooperates – whether computer agent, bacterium, mole rat or person – we have no way of establishing, with certainty, whether cooperation was intended or happened because there wasn’t a good opportunity for defection.

How people use language to talk about cooperation in the real world illustrates the problem in action. Models are, by design and requirement, vague: they don’t tell you anything more about a situation than that some computerised agents cooperated, defected, were punished, and so on. A model can’t tell you whether an agent chose to cooperate or was forced to (the latter case, in everyday language, we call coercion). And too often in everyday life, we’re forced to cooperate with others when we don’t want to – whether that’s paying high prices for food and travel, voting for a politician who seems just a bit less bad than another, or signing a non-disclosure agreement to get a job. (Think about this next time you hear the phrase ‘thank you for your cooperation’.)

Models don’t and can’t know the difference between forced and prosocially motivated cooperation. Yet, sometimes, behavioural experiments can. Far from being a species that dislikes inequity and acts against it, we are more likely to profess a desire for fairness, reserving our singularly self-interested behaviours for when there’s unlikely to be cost for them.

Evidence for a phenomenon called ‘moral credentialing’ supports this. In short, if I believe I’ve acted morally in the past – through making donations, working in a soup kitchen for the homeless, and so on – I’m more likely to justify my unethical actions in the future.

In 2011, researchers showed that participants are more likely to cheat on a mathematics test if they have the opportunity to profess support for moral principles beforehand – but only if they could rationalise about how cheating didn’t violate their moral codes. Notably, in 2024, two researchers showed that businesses voluntarily signing up to the Business Roundtable’s ‘Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation’ (2019) – which promotes the importance of value to everyone, not just shareholders – were more likely to violate both environmental and labour laws.

And more recently still, research into the use of large language models like ChatGPT illustrates just how much opportunity links to dishonesty. In this set of studies, researchers evaluated how participants behave when they can delegate behaviours to AI models. The setting was a die-rolling game, where higher numbers meant a higher financial benefit. While players were broadly honest when reporting their die rolls directly, delegating reporting to an AI agent changed behaviours markedly. When the players could give vague instructions to the AI such as ‘maximise profits’, their honesty decreased enormously, with less than a fifth of rolls reported accurately.

There are plenty of examples of people dodging moral responsibility through credentialing (touting past good deeds), rationalisation, and plain opportunism. In aggregate, the belief that you’re a moral person because of the principles you profess or the good things you’ve done before can make it easier to rationalise seizing the opportunity to act unfairly now.

When cutting corners brings a benefit and no one notices, it’s a winning move almost anywhere

The behavioural scientist Jason Dana and colleagues report that people often seek ‘moral wiggle room’ in economic games – ways to choose unfairly without feeling culpable. What matters most, the team suggests, is often not fairness but insulation from blame, sometimes by claiming ignorance about who is harmed and how:

In the spate of recent [financial] scandals, often high-level figures accused of transgressions must be shown to have known about harms in order to be held liable. We note that this ignores the efforts that executives may take to remain ignorant.

When you see how quickly people reach for loopholes and excuses, it’s tempting to blame the system – to say that Western law, markets or politics teach us to act this way. But I don’t think opportunism starts there. Opportunism is more basic than that: when cutting corners brings a benefit and no one notices – think tax avoidance – it’s a winning move almost anywhere. We can design all sorts of rules that encourage cooperation. But we can’t erase the underlying fact that cheating will often pay when it’s hidden.

Increased group sizes, reflected in the large, stratified societies in which most people live today, create far more opportunities for cheating than encountered over our evolutionary past. The egalitarianism so often noted in small-scale societies, such as the Aché, may then represent a lack of opportunity for free-riding, rather than an evolved propensity for fairness. Knowing everyone in your camp, choosing to live with relatives, and a collective expectation that people will follow local norms, maintains cooperation – though even in small-scale societies people often find ways of exploiting each other. Older men, for example, often dominate their social groups, with exploitation of women and young men reported in the ethnographic literature in nomadic tribes and forager groups across the world.

There are many other examples of exploitation in ethnographic records from across the world. The idea that we lived in a state of equality until the invention of agriculture is mostly a myth that I think helps us feel better about human nature. It fosters the hope that, one day, we’ll overcome the inequality imposed on us by our abandonment of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Rather than attributing our problems today to competition between groups and the structure of our societies, the governing rule for any social system is to expect exploitation where it is possible. Every group, society and culture, no matter its size, has weaknesses that some people will try to exploit for personal benefit. The question is how those weaknesses affect culture more broadly, and whether we live in a society that rewards fairmindedness – or cleverness, subtlety and opportunism.

In the modern world, as with our evolutionary past, the answer is the latter. All that’s changed since the advent of agriculture is the number and varieties of opportunities for free-riding and exploitation. Consequently, as technology improves and groups increase in size, we should expect people to develop creative ways for defecting more effectively – with evolution favouring those who do it best.

This proclivity for developing new strategies to compete is part of the social brain hypothesis, originally formulated by the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. In his seminal paper on the topic in 1976, Humphrey argued that the primary function of the human intellect is to navigate the social, rather than the physical, environment.

One implication of the social brain hypothesis is the assumption that every society hosts opportunistic people who may follow local norms for only as long as it is beneficial to do so. Elsewhere, I have called these people ‘invisible rivals’. For example, religious zealots and political adherents across the world may observe all the rules linked with their group – whether ritual or ideological – until they reach a position of power. Thereafter, they can exploit others and act selfishly as it suits them. This may help to explain why studies show that people with psychopathic tendencies are more likely to enter positions of power, for example in corporate or political systems. Following rules without believing in them is an effective strategy for gaining power.

Admittedly, these arguments make our world sound hopeless. It’s tempting to think that, if the story of human evolution isn’t the rosy picture of cooperation, fairmindedness and mutual aid championed by thinkers for more than a century, we can’t expect much from our future. There are just too many problems – from raging inequality and low public trust to a rapidly warming planet and the growing risk of technology like AI – to hope that a species with a dark and ignoble past can overcome itself and create a better future.

I think, however, that this pessimism is misplaced, and that facing ourselves honestly is the first and most important step we can collectively take. This requires adopting a realistic perspective about the kind of animal that Homo sapiens is. First, we are not inherently cooperative but have the capacity for cooperation – just as we have the capacity for exploitation and selfishness. What matters at the individual level is the way we choose to behave towards others.

The real question is what kinds of environments make it easier to do the right thing

Second, just as there is no such thing as a cooperator, there is no such thing as a free-rider. These are behaviours that we apply in models and experiments for convenience. How people behave – and critically, how we describe social behaviours – is a matter of circumstance. The same person who behaves ethically in one circumstance may not do so in another, as research into moral credentialing shows. Our behavioural plasticity, or ability to adapt the way we act to context, is one of our defining features. The evolved psychological processes driving our decisions cannot be captured by simplistic models or games. Anyone can be an invisible rival.

That is precisely why local social norms matter so much. If cooperation isn’t a fixed trait but a fragile, context-dependent outcome, then the real question is what kinds of environments make it easier to do the right thing – and harder to get away with quiet defection. The Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom argued that local social norms are the bedrock of any serious effort to promote cooperation: look at how people behave in their immediate surroundings to understand their methods for restraining unbridled selfishness. Just as organisms evolve immune defences against selfish cells that quietly undermine the whole, societies need norms – and the institutions that uphold them – that can detect and restrain rivalries that flourish out of sight.

Fostering community-level interdependence – and the norms that evolved to help them function cooperatively – is therefore essential for combatting the exploitation that results from invisible rivalry. Never try to enforce cooperation from above. Instead, just as the economist Noreena Hertz argues we should replace ‘greed is good’ maxims in the capitalist framework with a community-oriented, cooperation-promoting mindset, appreciating that we are all better off when we work together is the critical insight needed for building a prosocial and equality-focused environment for the future.

Education is where this begins, not as moral uplift but as collective self-knowledge: it helps us see our own temptations clearly and translate that insight into practical scaffolding – laws, schools and civic rules that reward cooperation and raise the costs of exploitation. Cheating will never vanish, and some people will always look for an edge, but our distinctive intelligence lies as much in recognising exploitation and organising against it as in exploiting in the first place. Invest in that knowledge and in the local institutions that make fairness both appreciated and rewarded, and we will widen the space in which cooperation and equality can endure.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, February 9, 2026 5:29 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by second:

How selfish are we?

If Jeff Bezos, very:

Bezos lets Democracy Die in Broad Daylight

By David Remnick | February 8, 2026

https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/the-daily/democracy-dies-in-broad
-daylight

It’s truly impossible to keep up, isn’t it?

Last week—after the Wall Street Journal broke more news about the Trump family’s dodgy crypto-business dealings and before the President shared a racist video of the Obamas depicted as dancing apes—the Amazon entrepreneur Jeff Bezos decided that one of his smaller properties, the Washington Post, has proved such a drag on his two-hundred-and-thirty-billion-dollar fortune that prudence required that he obliterate much of its newsroom.

Early in his proprietorship, Bezos endorsed a new motto for the paper: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It turns out that one of democracy’s most celebrated media institutions can be strangled in broad daylight. On Wednesday, Bezos and the paper’s leadership fired a third of the staff. They shuttered or vastly reduced an array of sections. Lizzie Johnson, one of the Post’s leading foreign correspondents, received her digital pink slip while working in the war zone of Ukraine. Bezos did not offer his staff the decency of a public explanation, much less a gesture of generosity or regret. The publisher and C.E.O. Will Lewis did not appear on the “webinar” at which the cuts were explained to the staff. He did, however, manage to head off to the Super Bowl festivities. By Saturday evening, Lewis had resigned. His work was done. He will be succeeded by the paper’s chief financial officer, Jeff D’Onofrio, who has held posts at Tumblr, Google, and Yahoo.

As someone who worked happily at the Post for a decade a long time ago, and as an ardent reader of the paper, I am sick about all this. I feel like someone forced to watch an arsonist torch the house he grew up in. I cannot imagine how it must feel for the current staff and the hundreds forced to leave. If that is sentimentality or worse, well, then guilty as charged. The loss is terrible, the behavior is beyond heedless. The reporters and editors who remain at the Post will undoubtedly go on doing honorable work, but they must now do so for a proprietor who shows them no respect. And that is no way to live. (Ruth Marcus, a writer and editor at the paper for more than forty years, brings home superbly the anger and the sadness of the situation.)

Over the years, in these pages, I’ve written about both the former owner Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee, the paper’s Watergate-era editor; for all their complexities, these were figures who built a great newspaper out of a mediocre one, who developed an institution that worked not only in the interest of financial gain but of democratic vitality. That standard of quality endured, but, by 2013, Don Graham, a decent man and a devoted publisher who inherited the leadership of the company from his mother, came to realize that the revolutions in technology and the declines in advertising were so severe that he no longer had the capacity to invest effectively in the paper. After a long search, he sold the Post to Bezos, a vastly wealthier owner who promised to be an effective custodian.

For a while that worked; under Marty Baron, the paper was fiercely competitive, and thrived during Trump’s first term in office. Bezos was a decidedly detached owner, but he gave the newsroom what it needed and invested in both journalism and the technological support it requires. But during the Biden years, readership declined and, by 2024, as Trump headed toward a second election victory, Bezos clearly reassessed his interests and his sense of risk. His timidity prevailed. He quashed the paper’s impending endorsement of Kamala Harris. He sat in Oligarch Row at the Inauguration. He instructed the Opinion section to set a new, more conservative course. These were his prerogatives, many argued, but they were hardly wise. With every move, more subscribers fled—surely one of the worst own goals in the history of the news business.

Undoubtedly, Bezos believes that all the criticism that has come his way is naïve, self-righteous, and terribly unfair. How could his critics possibly understand the business the way he does? In some sense, every aggressive story on the Administration that the paper publishes allows Bezos to tell himself that he has not retreated at all.

For the sake of financial and moral context, perhaps this is as good a time as any to remind ourselves of the maritime interests of the Post’s proprietor. Some commentators have mentioned that Bezos, in order to better support the Post, might have held on to the tens of millions of dollars he spent to bankroll “Melania,” a documentary portrait of the First Lady worthy of a long run at the Pyongyang Cinematheque. Cooler financial heads will contend that this is a cheap point. The Post’s losses are more significant. And they are right. Better then to turn to one of the Amazon founder’s more expensive recreations, his 125.8-metre, three-masted sailing yacht, Koru. (No need to get into the details of Abeona, the seventy-five-million-dollar “shadow boat” that trails Koru and provides a helipad and adequate space for extra staff.)

Koru cost an estimated five hundred million dollars. This is double what Bezos paid for the Washington Post. Annual maintenance runs tens of millions of dollars. It is, to be sure, a very special boat. According to Architectural Digest, “Bezos’s superyacht has a classical style, with a navy-blue steel hull and a two-level white aluminum superstructure. The ship’s teak decks include spots for outdoor lounging as well as three Jacuzzis and a swimming pool. Robb Report notes that the hull features traditional portholes, while the upper deck windows are smaller than typical, which might help to foil paparazzi trying to capture guests inside.” If that information about the boat is not galling enough, there is more: the Journal published a story on Friday by Richard Rubin headlined “Trump’s New Tax Law Saved Amazon Billions.” But the Ukraine correspondent had to go.

In the world of tech, so many of the leading tycoons and V.C. geniuses have a way of convincing themselves that because they have made a fortune, because they know one big thing, they know everything. Everyone else is a Luddite or a dewy-eyed fool. Maybe Bezos will find a way to stay in good odor with a vindictive President and, at the same time, transform the Post so that it can “do more with less,” and all those other whiteboard phrases popular from Wall Street to Palo Alto. No one doubts that change, even painful change, is necessary. But the scale of the cuts last week, coupled with the lack of any sense of a strategy other than retreat, is beyond demoralizing. Bezos has made it plain that his commitment to the Post, to say nothing of his performative talk about democracy, has diminished to the vanishing point.

The Post is hardly the first major American publication to face a financial crisis. It wasn’t so long ago that the New York Times was caught in an existential fix. Who would buy it, people asked knowingly, the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim or Michael Bloomberg? And yet the Sulzberger family, with a tiny fraction of the Bezos fortune but infinitely greater determination and integrity, found a way to thrive. Bezos, by contrast, is immersed in his primary business, a space race, an active vacation life, and much else. After a promising beginning at the paper, he just does not seem to have the focus or the courage to do what is necessary to guide the Post through an unstable and threatening era. With Trump in office, he refuses to see that, although the Post is valued less in financial terms than his yacht, he is responsible for a priceless commodity. Will he rock the boat? Will he ultimately do the right thing? So far, the evidence offers only misery.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, February 9, 2026 5:37 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Widdle dick Second is just jealous that it's not his name that's up on every building.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Renaming monuments after himself is proof that Trump

Whatever you say, widdle dick.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Friday, February 20, 2026 8:08 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

How one country stopped a Trump-style authoritarian in his tracks

What Brazil got right that America got wrong.

By Zack Beauchamp | Feb 18, 2026, 8:55 AM CST
https://www.vox.com/authors/zack-beauchamp

https://www.vox.com/politics/479290/brazil-democracy-trump-bolsonaro-m
ultiparty

• In 2018, Brazil elected a president named Jair Bolsonaro who attempted the sort of authoritarian power grabs that President Donald Trump is currently doing in the United States. Except the key word is attempted: Unlike in America, Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court worked to constrain the president and severely limit his ability to act like an elected dictator.

• The important difference was that, in Brazil, the incentives for public officials looked radically different. The combination of a multiparty system and a culture of legislative self-dealing, even outright corruption, prevented the emergence of US-style extreme partisanship — producing a legislature and judiciary primed to protect their powers against an aggressive executive.

• This gives us some real insight about how to fix American democracy going forward: to pass reforms that alter the incentives for legislators in particular, giving them good self-interested reasons to prefer systemic stability over partisan loyalty.

BRASÍLIA, Brazil — André Borges’s aunt was pregnant when they took her.

Borges, now 50, grew up under Brazil’s military dictatorship. In power from 1964–1985, the regime was violently censorial — banning any speech it deemed subversive or leftist. Borges’s aunt was arrested simply for owning a book by a Marxist author. Unlike many others, her detention was brief; her father knew someone with pull in the regime, who made a phone call and got her released within a day.

Sitting in a left-wing bookshop in the capital city of Brasília, Borges tells me this story to underscore the fragility of Brazilian democracy. A political scientist who studies polarization and the Latin American right, he does not believe that Brazil has truly exorcised the demons of the past. The military is still uncomfortably involved in political life; as memory of the dictatorship recedes, citizens are increasingly oblivious to the danger.

But I had not come to Brazil to discuss its democracy’s vulnerabilities. Quite the opposite; I wanted Borges, and others like him, to help me understand why the Brazilian system proved far more capable than its American cousin at a paramount task: protecting democracy from a civilian president who wished to be dictator.

In 2018, Brazilian voters elected Jair Bolsonaro — a former military captain and congressional backbencher — to the presidency. An open admirer of the military regime, Bolsonaro ran as an outsider against a political class that Brazilians widely (and correctly) regard as deeply corrupt. Once in office, he pushed aggressively to consolidate power in his own hands.

But while Bolsonaro’s efforts resembled what Donald Trump has done in his second term in the United States, the response from other branches was markedly different.

While the US Congress and the Supreme Court have helped Trump build an imperial presidency, their Brazilian equivalents held the line. Center-right parties in Congress refused to rubber-stamp Bolsonaro’s power grabs. Brazil’s Supreme Court repeatedly blocked the president’s authoritarian moves, and led aggressive probes into crimes against democracy.

Unable to accrue power through legal channels, Bolsonaro turned to the military, convening top generals in 2022 to discuss a coup. Yet the heads of the Air Force and the Army rebuffed him. When Bolsonaro’s hardcore supporters attempted a putsch on January 8, 2023 — an insurrection in Brasília deeply influenced by January 6, 2021 — the military did not join the uprising. After an extensive inquiry and trial, Bolsonaro and several key allies were sentenced to lengthy prison stints for the coup plot and subsequent riot.

On the Right

On paper, the outcomes in the United States and Brazil should have been reversed. Democratic strength tends to track a democracy’s wealth and age — and the United States is both the world’s richest country and its oldest democracy. Brazil is a middle-income country that was governed by a military regime so recently that middle-aged citizens remember living under it.

And yet, when the test came, Brazil’s core democratic institutions — the legislature, courts, and federal agencies — defended democracy far better than their American peers.

Why?

To find out, I spoke with all sorts of different Brazilians during my travels: from politicians and bureaucrats to journalists and political scientists, and even one of Bolsonaro’s longtime neighbors.

What I found was a paradox: that some of the biggest problems in Brazil’s democracy, issues that fueled Bolsonaro’s rise in 2018, also made the system almost uniquely resistant to the tactics Trump is using in America today.

“We certainly have weaker institutions than the US does,” said Pedro Doria, editor-in-chief of the Brazilian news outlet Meio. “But in a certain sense, our strength comes from the fact that our institutions are weak.”

To learn Brazilian democracy’s lessons, we need to first sit with this tension. And we need to understand Brazil as it is: not as an idealized foil for America, but a real place in all its complexity. Only then can we identify how we can make America’s institutions as willing to fight for democracy as Brazil’s.

An unlikely success story

In Rio de Janeiro, I climbed a set of hilly, narrow streets to meet another well-known political scientist named Carlos Pereira for a drink.

He had described our destination as a music bar, but that did the place a disservice: It was more like a gigantic party that snaked across at least two blocks, with a small building housing the band stage at the center of it. It was hot in Rio, the peak of the mid-January summer, but people packed in anyway. A vegan brownie salesperson dressed up as a cannabis leaf roamed the crowd.

The ambience made talking tricky, but Pereira wanted me to experience “the real Brazil” while I was visiting. I think, though, he may also just have been in a partying mood — and I could see why. Brazil’s emergence from democratic crisis seems to have vindicated the argument he had staked his career on: that its constitution works.

Why I reported this

Many people had pointed out the striking difference between how Brazil responded to the January 8 riots versus how the United States responded to January 6. But what no one had done, at least in any depth, is look at the period before that — when Bolsonaro was president — and compared it to Trump’s second term so far.

How is it that, when faced with an openly undemocratic leader, Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court performed so much better than their twins in the United States?

When Brazil’s military dictatorship fell in 1985, the country elected a constitutional congress to build a new system from scratch. What they came up with, called the Citizen Constitution of 1988, was heavily modeled on the United States: a president, a bicameral Congress, and a federal system with 26 states and a federal district.

But the Chamber of Deputies, Brazil’s lower legislative body, is different from the US House. The US has local districts that elect representatives by a winner-take-all system: whoever gets the most votes wins. Brazil, by contrast, has proportional representation: Each state has a set number of seats, allocated to different parties based on their percentage of the state popular vote.

While the US system encouraged consolidation into two parties, the Brazilian system allowed for many parties to win a slice of national power. All it took was a relatively small fraction of the vote in one state. There are currently 20 parties in the chamber, making it one of the most fragmented legislative bodies in the world.

At the time, many American experts (and some prominent Brazilians) predicted disaster. With so many parties splitting seats, no president could hope to have a partisan majority in Congress. Instead, presidents would have to build coalitions and strike deals with out-parties, a system that seemed prone to legislative gridlock and even collapse.

“The combination of presidentialism and multipartism makes stable democracy difficult to sustain,” Scott Mainwaring, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, wrote in an influential 1993 article. “Not one of the world’s 31 stable democracies has this institutional configuration.”

But for the next 20 years, Brazil’s system flourished. Two historically successful presidencies — center-right Fernando Henrique Cardoso, followed by the first two terms of the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — tamed the country’s hyperinflation crisis and significantly expanded its welfare state. Between 1990 and 2010, Brazil’s GDP per capita grew by over 40 percent. By 2013, the country had formally eradicated extreme poverty.

Pereira was part of a generation of Brazilian political scientists who began their careers during Brazil’s stratospheric rise. In his view, the policy accomplishments under Cardoso and Lula were not in spite of its system but because of it.

In a 2012 article co-authored with Marcus André Melo, Pereira argued the key to Brazil’s system lay in the relationship between the president and Congress. Unlike in two-party systems, where presidents count on partisan loyalty to pass bills, presidents in multiparty democracies have to trade specific favors. Sometimes, this means appointing leaders of other parties to the Cabinet. Other times, it means using presidential powers to direct ungodly levels of pork-barrel spending to states represented by swing legislators.

Indeed, the dominant bloc in Congress is neither the ideological left aligned with Lula nor the radical right associated with Bolsonaro. It is instead something called the Centrão (Big Center): a loose group of parties that are center-right ideologically, but in practice willing to deal with any president who will help them secure pork funding and ignore their pervasive corruption.

Brazil thus replaced the American political logic of partisanship and ideology with self-interest and graft. Most deputies do not even aim to represent the general interest, but rather to secure enough pork for their constituents to ensure reelection. And the system encourages Brazil’s executive to overlook the endemic corruption in the legislature; without ideological votes, a push for anti-corruption campaigns will not only fail but also alienate the corrupt.

Pereira and Melo acknowledged these downsides, but argued that they were not existential. The self-interested logic bound Brazilian leaders to the system, giving them a direct financial and careerist stake in maintaining democracy.

“We see a powerful presidency but also a potent web of watchdogs standing on guard to prevent wrongdoing,” they write. “All relevant political forces have found it best to keep submitting their interests and values to the uncertain interplay of democratic institutions.”

Soon after they wrote this, Brazil’s democracy would plunge into crisis.

Stopping Trumpism before it started

In 2014, Brazilian investigators uncovered shocking evidence of corruption at the highest levels of Brazilian politics. The multibillion-dollar “Lava Jato” scandal, one of the largest in the history of any democracy, implicated a vast swath of Brazil’s political, economic, and social elite — producing the greatest period of turmoil since the dictatorship fell.

President Dilma Rousseff, a former anti-dictatorship guerrilla and Lula’s chosen successor in the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT), was impeached in 2016 for alleged financial improprieties unrelated to the investigation. Her vice president, the center-right Michel Temer, was criminally charged as part of Lava Jato in 2017. Lula was arrested and convicted on (extremely dubious) corruption charges in 2017 as well; when he tried to run for president again in 2018 from prison, the courts blocked him.

All of this played out during a major economic downturn. Together, they caused an explosion of anti-incumbent sentiment in much the same manner as the twin shocks of inflation and revelations about President Joe Biden’s age did in 2024.

Thus, what Pereira and Melo identified as the glue holding Brazilian democracy — the transactional character of its legislators — set the stage for the rise of a would-be autocrat.

In early 2018, reporter Ana Clara Costa spent roughly two months with Jair Bolsonaro on the campaign trail. When we met for coffee in Rio, Costa summarized her impressions of the man during those months in three words: “He was insane.”

“Everything he said was so narrow-minded…it was very much based on conspiracy theories, things that were trending on Facebook,” she recalls. “I thought he was [playing] a character, but…the character was what he was 24/7.”

Bolsonaro’s public record certainly supported her claims. He made no secret of his nostalgia for military dictatorship: When he voted to impeach Rousseff, he dedicated his vote to the army colonel who supervised her torture in the 1970s. Once, he told a female legislator that “I wouldn’t rape you because you don’t deserve it.” Another time, he told an interviewer that given the choice between one of his sons coming out as gay or dying, he’d prefer the latter.

Yet in an anti-incumbent moment, none of this was disqualifying — and perhaps even helped by situating him well outside the “normal” political elite. He won the 2018 election handily.

When Bolsonaro assumed office in January 2019, he had many of the same advantages as Trump did in 2025. Both men began with relatively high favorability numbers, owing to the combination of a rabid base and anti-establishment sentiment among swing voters. Both had a legislature with a center-right majority.

And both sought to take advantage in the same way: wielding presidential authority aggressively to consolidate power.

In his first weeks, Bolsonaro used the expansive formal powers of his office — including provisional decrees, which are like executive orders with the legal status of a law — to surveil NGOs, purge “disloyal” civil servants, and loosen gun restrictions. His moves pushed the boundaries of presidential power, cutting into authority rightly reserved for Congress.

“Bolsonaro, he’s not a politician in the common sense,” Thomas Traumann, the former minister of communications under Rousseff, said. “He doesn’t like to talk to people and negotiate; he just wants to issue orders.”

In the United States, Trump’s version — which was significantly more aggressive and legally dubious — faced little pushback from Congress. But in Brazil, legislators immediately fought back.

This congressional assertiveness wasn’t just an early-days phenomenon. According to data from Pereira and Melo, Bolsonaro issued 254 provisional decrees — by far the most any Brazilian president issued in a four-year term. Yet these decrees require congressional approval to remain in force, and the institution only provided it in 115 cases. This was the worst success rate of any president to serve a full term; in fact, he was the only such president who had fewer than 50 percent of their decrees approved by Congress.

Similarly, Congress voted to override a Bolsonaro veto on legislation 30 times over the course of his presidency. By comparison, the four prior presidents — stretching back to 1995 — had a total of nine vetoes overridden.

The evidence leaves little doubt that Bolsonaro would like to have acted as Trump has done in his second term. But unlike in the United States, legislators bristled at Bolsonaro’s efforts to arrogate lawmaking powers to himself. In effect, they stopped the rise of the imperial presidency before it started.

This resistance was, much like the Bolsonaro presidency itself, a product of the deep logic of the Brazilian system.

The “justice” statue

In the American two-party system, the entire right-wing ecosystem ran through the Republican Party — an organ that Trump controlled. Those center-right Republicans in Congress who have private qualms about Trump’s authoritarian politics do not, for the most part, dare criticize him publicly: They are too afraid for their jobs, social standing, and potentially even their lives. Many of them have acted like what the political scientist Juan Linz called “semi-loyal democrats”: people who pay lip service to democratic ideals, but act in a way that encourages and even normalizes the radicals.

Brazil’s multiparty system meant that Bolsonaro had no such control. Legislators had independent political support bases, and could win reelection without backing from the president.

Even more fundamentally, the self-interested logic that ran through the system gave center-right Centrão deputies incentives to actively defend the powers of their branch.

The Centrão cooperated with Bolsonaro when it suited them — he pushed through a major pension reform bill with their support in 2019. But they drew the line at his attempts to build an imperial presidency. The more power he got, the more threat he posed to their narrow interests. And Bolsonaro needed their support more than they needed his.

So from very early on, Brazil had the reverse institutional logic of the United States under Trump II: a center-right Congress calling the shots in a far-right administration.

“It’s very clear to me that Bolsonaro [wanted to be] a populist president who slowly undermines checks and balances,” Borges said. “But this wouldn’t be good for the old-style, traditional mainstream right. For them, it would be much better to have a weak president.”

The Supreme Court strikes back

About a year into Bolsonaro’s presidency, he faced his first major crisis: the coronavirus pandemic. And by all accounts, he botched it. His extreme opposition to both social distancing and vaccines, together with his embrace of crank cures like hydroxychloroquine, led to both mass death and a collapse in his poll numbers.

At the same time, Bolsonaro also became more and more openly authoritarian. At the beginning of the pandemic, he asserted an emergency power to ignore the requirement that Congress approve provisional decrees — effectively asking to be able to make law unilaterally. He arrested critics of his Covid policy using a dictatorship-era national security law, and launched eight times as many investigations under this law per year than the average under prior presidents. He moved repeatedly to block the work of government transparency watchdogs and nominated his hyperloyal chief bodyguard to run the national police.

Perhaps most ominously, he began a sustained attack on the integrity of Brazil’s elections, calling the country’s electronic voting system corrupt and trying to move to a paper system. On Election Day 2022, he sent federal police officers to obstruct access to polling stations in the opposition’s core territory in Brazil’s northeast.

Once again, institutions pushed back. Congress had acquired even greater say over Bolsonaro at this point: Facing Covid-related impeachment threats, he was obliged to strike a formal coalition deal with Centrão parties, ceding key control over the legislative agenda and the budget. Congress was able to both repeal the national security law and block the voting changes.

But it was Brazil’s judiciary that ultimately took center stage in the pushback against Bolsonaro. The country’s highest court blocked his provisional decree power grab, overturned his anti-transparency moves, stopped his crony police appointment, and moved within hours to remove roadblocks at polling stations.

The Brazilian Supreme Federal Court did not merely respond to Bolsonaro’s actions, but went on the legal offensive. In 2019, the Court asserted a novel power to open an investigation into threats made against judges by Bolsonaro allies and supporters. This unprecedented court-ordered inquiry spiraled into a wide-ranging investigation into “fake news” and anti-democratic activity led by Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a center-right former prosecutor who would, in 2022, take on a dual role as president of Brazil’s highest court for electoral matters (the Superior Electoral Court).

With backing from other justices, Moraes wielded his powers aggressively — emerging as the most effective and ruthless opponent of Bolsonaro’s power grabs.

The president repeatedly tried to challenge court authority. In 2021, for example, he turned out hundreds of thousands of supporters for rallies on Brazil’s Independence Day in which he openly promised to ignore Supreme Court rulings. But the political blowback was severe; two days after the rally, he released a humiliating public letter apologizing for things he said “in the heat of the moment.”

The judicial offensive against Bolsonaro was hardly a given. If you looked at the Court’s pre-Bolsonaro record, you might have predicted something like what happened in the United States: ideologically aligned justices greenlighting a president’s power grabs.

“The supreme court was heavily divided ideologically prior to Bolsonaro,” said Celso Rocha de Barros, a columnist at Folha de São Paulo (Brazil’s New York Times equivalent). “If you look at the two guys with the highest legal reputations, Gilmar Mendes and Luís Roberto Barroso, they hated each other. If you look for it on YouTube, there’s video of them cursing at each other during Supreme Court sessions.”

But the clearer Bolsonaro’s authoritarian agenda became, the more united the Court grew in opposing him.

So here we have a puzzle: Why did Brazil’s seemingly politicized Supreme Court manage to unite in defense of democracy in a way that SCOTUS demonstrably has not?

Once again, the multiparty system is a big part of the story. As in the United States, Brazil’s 11 Supreme Court justices are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Except in Brazil, the Senate has members from roughly a dozen parties — meaning that presidents would never have the majority required to approve a true rubber-stamp justice.

“In Brazil, the Supreme Court is not partisan because you don’t have this two-party system,” said Christian Lynch, a prominent Brazilian legal theorist. “You can’t nominate a judge who is going to be loyal to you as a person, the president.”

But Lynch cautions against reducing the Court’s behavior to a simple mechanistic model, in which multipartyism guarantees good judicial behavior. There was an element of choice here: a decision by the justices to push back against Bolsonaro’s attempts to consolidate power in his own hands.

One surprising thing

Jair Bolsonaro had over three times as many vetoes overridden by Congress as the prior four Brazilian presidents combined. Imagine the current US Congress overriding even one of Trump’s!

This choice, he believes, reflects the post-dictatorship ideology of the Brazilian judiciary. Judges saw their role as not just adjudicating criminal cases, or even disputes between the branches, but rather as guarantors of the new democratic order. The Court’s expansive powers, in their view, can and should be wielded aggressively to both ensure democracy’s survival and promote its health.

From this perspective, the aggressive prosecution of corrupt politicians in the 2010s and the pushback against Bolsonaro in the 2020s reflected the same judicial approach: a self-confidence in its unique role as democracy’s guardians. Though the facts of the corruption cases split the justices, and the Bolsonaro situation united them, the ideological logic that governed rulings in both cases was similar.

The justices said as much, both in private and in public. In a remarkable April 2022 essay, then-Justice Luís Roberto Barroso openly positioned the Court as a bulwark against what he called an “institutional coup” by Bolsonaro, describing a court once divided on corruption cases but now “joined in the defense of democracy.” This was, he argued, necessary: Courts play a “decisive” role in resisting authoritarian presidents, and must proactively choose to resist them.

Tellingly, Barroso’s essay omits any praise for Congress. In fact, he writes that the Centrão is “allied” with Bolsonaro, describing the faction as being “renowned for its voracity for political offices and public funds.”

This rhetoric reflects another aspect of the court’s ideology, and of the Brazilian democratic paradox more broadly. Though Congress’s performance during Bolsonaro’s term is impressive from an American perspective, the Court mistrusted such a cynical and self-interested body. Here, the weakness of the system indirectly generated another strength: the problems in the legislature emboldening the Supreme Court to shoulder a greater amount of the burden of democratic defense than it might have been expected to.

“Now the judiciary is the ringleader in a process of defending democracy, when it is no longer the legislative branch, which should be,” says Tião Viana, a former senator and governor from Lula’s left-wing PT party. “Alexandre de Moraes is the expression of this.”

The mysterious non-coup

In October 2022, Brazilian voters delivered the greatest rebuke to Bolsonaro yet: denying him a second term in office. The election was closer than expected: Lula won in a second-round runoff with just 50.9 percent of the popular vote, the slimmest margin of victory of any president in Brazilian history. Support from the center-right was decisive: Some of Lula’s prominent rivals, like Geraldo Alckmin and Simone Tebet, backed the leftist on defense-of-democracy grounds.

When Lula’s victory was announced, nearly everyone in Brazilian politics immediately accepted the results. The exception, of course, was Bolsonaro. He started plotting a coup.

On December 7, the president met with his minister of defense and the heads of each branch of the military. Bolsonaro presented them with a draft of an order that would declare a state of emergency, annul Lula’s victory, and place Justice Alexandre de Moraes under arrest. While the head of the Navy signed on, both the Air Force and Army leaders refused. But they did not notify Moraes or the police — nor did they do so after a second meeting a week later, where Bolsonaro’s team again pitched them on the coup plan.

Stonewalled by top generals, Bolsonaro began plotting with some lower-ranked ones. At the same time, his supporters set up an encampment outside the army barracks in Brasília — and, on January 8, the mob swarmed the presidential palace, the Congress, and the Supreme Court simultaneously.

The attack was clearly shaped by the events of January 6, 2021. But instead of intending to convince members of Congress to vote to annul the election, the demonstrators were hoping to inspire the military to follow them out of the barracks and into the halls of power.

They were disappointed. Though the governor of the Federal District (DF), the state in which Brasília is located, was a Bolsonaro supporter who delayed deploying local police, Moraes stepped in swiftly — suspending the governor’s authority and ordering a deployment to quash the riot.

Police going through barricades, which had been destroyed.

In the months following, the justice — backed fully by his colleagues and the newly inaugurated President Lula da Silva— launched a sweeping investigation that uncovered the true scope of the coup plot. We know much of what we know about the plot thanks to depositions from the Army and Air Force chiefs, both of whom testified as part of the Moraes-ordered inquiry.

The evidence was damning enough to secure indictments for Bolsonaro, his former vice president, his defense secretary, and dozens of other generals and aligned officials. Late last year, Bolsonaro and his allies were convicted of masterminding a conspiracy against Brazilian democracy. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison and is currently serving time; a separate electoral court ruling, in 2023, had already disqualified him from running for public office until 2030.

The Bolsonaro inquiry has become the signature moment for the courts: the definitive example of both its vital role in safeguarding democracy and the damage it did to democratic freedom along the way.

From an American point of view, it’s hard not to be jealous of a country where a former president incited an insurrection and actually suffered consequences for it. But in the pursuit of accountability, Moraes asserted extraordinary powers — including authority to suspend the DF governor and imprison people without trial if they made violent threats on social media. He both led the investigation into Bolsonaro and served as the presiding judge in the trial.

Even some supporters of Moraes’s actions, like Meio’s Pedro Doria, describe his actions as a kind of democratic chemotherapy: necessary to defeat the cancerous coup plot, but with dangerous side effects that Brazilians now must reckon with.

Moraes’s approach was one “that involves weak institutions, that involves constitutional hardball playing, and that involves a system that’s not a full-fledged liberal democracy,” Doria said. “But for the first time in our history, we survived to live another day, and we have a shot at getting this right in the next decades.”

As Brazilians still debate the benefits and risks of Moraes’s growing power, they also contemplate another unsettling question: Why did the coup fail in the first place?

This can’t be credited to other institutional actors: Neither Congress nor the courts knew about the full scope of Bolsonaro’s plans until Moraes’s post-facto inquiry. The decision depended entirely on choices made by the Brazilian brass, which had in the past been relatively supportive of Bolsonaro. The military all but openly backed his 2018 bid, and his administration was staffed top to bottom with soldiers who dutifully carried out his orders (however questionable).

“The military themselves, they don’t have democratic convictions,” said Adriana Marques, a political scientist who studies civil-military relations in Brazil. “The military in the government used to say that Bolsonaro won the election, so he can do what he wants to do [without limits].”

Soldiers in dress uniforms stand at attention as Bolsonaro passes.

No one knows for sure why the military made the choices they did. The officers’ stony commitment to public silence makes their true intentions hard to divine. In Brasília, I was scheduled to meet with an admiral to discuss all of this. At the last minute, he dropped out — citing an alleged family emergency.

The best theory I’ve heard, advanced by Marques and others, is that their decision reflected not democratic principle but cost-benefit analysis. The generals simply had little to gain from backing Bolsonaro’s coup, and would be risking quite a lot in doing so.

Without consolidated elite support, and with the notion of a coup deeply unpopular with the public, the military would have had a very difficult time consolidating control over the country without risking chaos, economic upheaval, and even mass death.

Moreover, the Biden administration had sent very clear signals that it wouldn’t tolerate a coup. Given the Brazilian military’s heavy dependence on the United States for training and advanced weapon systems, the specter of an aid cutoff from Washington was a powerful deterrent.

These are, to be clear, narrowly practical reasons to reject Bolsonaro’s plan. Few informed people I met in Brazil believed the military had truly come to believe in civilian rule as a matter of principle.

In the United States, by contrast, there is a very long tradition of the military keeping out of civilian affairs. But at present, there is a live debate over whether Trump will order security services to interfere with voting during the midterm elections.

What choice will they make, if faced with a similar test to their Brazilian counterparts?

Brasília on the Potomac

On January 8, I attended the president’s official commemoration of the riots three years earlier. Standing in a hall in the presidential offices, I spotted politicians chatting with uniformed generals behind velvet ropes — their very presence, seemingly, a reassurance that the coup plot had been contained.

The stage featured a giant photo of the Brasília skyline, such as it is, with the phrase “defesa da democracia” emblazoned on it. Geraldo Alckmin, now well into his term as Lula’s vice president, claimed that their victory saved Brazilian democracy.

“If they attempted a coup d’état after losing the elections, imagine what they would have done if they had won the elections,” he said.

People gather to mark and celebrate a date now remembered as a symbol of strength and resistance for Brazilian democracy.

Two days earlier, Washington marked its first anniversary of January 6 with Trump back in office — and, in a way, proved Alckmin’s point.

There were no solemn presidential proclamations marking the day, as there had been under Biden, nor even the vaguest of gestures toward respect for democracy from the president. Instead, a group of rioters who had ransacked the Capitol, pardoned by Trump immediately on his return to power, reenacted January 6 by marching from the White House to the Capitol.

It is important not to overstate Brazil’s democratic stability, even in comparison. Its weaknesses were on display even at Lula’s January 8 event. The crowds were sparse, illustrating the minimal role the public played in democracy’s defense. There were no actions during Bolsonaro’s term comparable to the No Kings protests or Minneapolis anti-ICE resistance.

Even more tellingly, the event’s centerpiece moment was a staged veto of a bill that would overrule court sentences for roughly 1,000 people convicted of coup-related crimes. The legislation, which would slash Bolsonaro’s sentence from 27 years to two, may still become law if the Centrão joins with Bolsonaro’s allies in Congress to support an override — a clear illustration of how the elite self-interest that helped stiffen resistance to Bolsonaro’s power grabs can just as easily turn against democratic accountability when circumstances change.

There is also a presidential election in the fall. While Bolsonaro is disqualified, his son Flávio is looking likely to be Lula’s chief rival. Lula is ahead in the polls currently, but his lead is not insurmountable — and the president turned 80 in October.

But these are problems that many Americans wish they had. It would be better if Congress acted as the first line of defense, resisting Trump’s power grabs before things got so bad that ordinary citizens needed to put their literal lives on the line. And it would be better if the US Supreme Court was not so deferential to the Trump administration, but so militantly pro-democratic that the concern was not complicity but rather overreaction.

So if we wanted to learn from Brazil — to think about how we could repair our system so, in the future, it might be as resilient as theirs — what lessons could we take away?

The first, and most obvious, would be to try to create a multiparty system.

This is certainly consistent with Pereira and Melo’s takeaway. Their excellent postmortem on the Bolsonaro presidency, titled “Why didn’t Brazilian democracy die?” argues that the crisis during his presidency basically vindicates their prior claims about the virtues and stability of Brazil’s multiparty system. And indeed, the international expert view on multiparty presidentialism has shifted quite far in their direction.

In a 2023 paper published by Protect Democracy, Scott Mainwaring — the American political scientist once so skeptical of Brazilian-style systems — conceded that he had gotten it wrong. He and his co-author, Lee Drutman, argued that the United States should move to a multiparty system — specifically, by adopting Brazilian-style proportional elections for the House that would provide safeguards against democratic erosion. They write:

Comparative evidence suggests that presidential democracy is most likely to fail when the president’s party has a majority in both chambers of the national Congress. A moderate multiparty system would likely induce most presidents to govern more toward the center so as to be able to pass legislation.

The Brazilian case certainly provides real evidence for these conclusions. If the political stars align for something like it, I’d support it — but that likely won’t happen anytime soon. So, is there any way to adopt Brazilian-style safeguards against authoritarianism in the meantime?

There is — but we have to shift our focus from structures to incentives.

Brazilian legislators win reelection by providing tangible goods for their constituents. American legislators depend on highly partisan primary voters and the national reputation of their party.

The Brazilian system has problems: It promotes wasteful spending and outright graft. But the American system has bigger ones: It creates ideologically disciplined parties whose members are terrified of bucking an in-party president. This is why a Republican Congress and a Supreme Court confirmed by GOP majorities are so much more supine in the face of Trump than their Brazilian peers.

To Brazilianize the US political system, then, we need to think of specific ways to change the incentives for legislators: to make politics less ideological, and more tied to place and specific deliverables for constituents.

On the electoral front, this might involve a national ban on partisan gerrymandering (which nearly became law during the Biden presidency) and the reform, or ideally abolition, of legislative primary elections (a corrosive American practice with no real peers elsewhere). These two reforms, when put together, would increase the number of representatives in both parties who were responsive to more mainstream electorates — creating incentives for a Brazilian-style culture of dealmaking rather than pure partisanship.

America should also take inspiration from Brazil’s approach to congressional oversight. Currently, Congress has no formal role in approving or rejecting executive orders, allowing members of a president’s party to easily deflect accountability for power grabs by saying it’s out of their hands. But if the United States adopted a version of the Brazilian provisional decree system, mandating that executive orders expire within a set number of days absent affirmative congressional approval, members of a president’s party could be held more directly responsible for White House actions — giving purple-state legislators more incentives to buck the party.

These specific reforms are hardly exhaustive: They would not fully “fix” Congress, let alone the Supreme Court or corroded institutions like the Department of Justice. But no study of another country will yield a single reform idea that saves American democracy on its own. Foreign models are best seen as rough templates, not strict blueprints — sources of broad guidance, rather than rigid prescriptions.

And the most valuable insight from Brazil is not that its specific system is the best possible, but rather that its operating logic — its ability to bind political actors to democracy through self-interest and incentives — was incredibly effective at hemming in a would-be authoritarian. American reformers need to start reflecting on that lesson and designing policies that work in our context (with an eye toward not replicating Brazil’s corruption problem).

I believe that Americans will soon have an opportunity to put this into practice. Trump’s authoritarian project will likely fail as Bolsonaro’s did, albeit for very different reasons. Its failure should create an opening to build new barriers against any future president who tries to replicate his unilateral rule.

In that future, we had best be humble enough to learn from younger democracies like Brazil — places that, as of late, have much better democratic recent track records than our own.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, February 23, 2026 9:31 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Real State of the Union: Millions of Americans Are Just Disgusted

Yes, we’re angry about what Donald Trump is doing to our country. But even more than that, we’re heartsick over the countless ways in which he is destroying this nation.

By Michael Tomasky | February 23, 2026

https://newrepublic.com/article/206888/trump-state-union-failure-econo
my

This Tuesday night, America will bear witness to Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address of his second term. I know—the mere thought of it rots a little piece of our souls that we’re never getting back. At least you can skip it; I have to watch it.

When I was young, I used to love the pageantry of State of the Union addresses. Even when Ronald Reagan was president, the part of me that honored our democratic customs enjoyed tuning into the C-SPAN pre-game show, as it were, and watching the senators and House members file into the chamber, along with the Cabinet members and Supreme Court justices. The First Lady would take her seat in the gallery, alongside invited guests. I liked watching the president standing outside the rear door, and I loved hearing the Clerk of the House—in Reagan’s time, he was appointed by House Speaker Tip O’Neill, and thus spoke with a Boston accent as heavy as clam chowder—bellow: “Mistah Speakah, the President of the United States!”

Reagan would go on to spend the next hour and change promoting ideas and policies that I found largely repugnant. Even so, I appreciated the ceremony of the event. The State of the Union, like the opening day of a new session of Congress or the certification of electoral ballots, helped anchor our democracy—the address was as good a roadmap as any at to what we’d be debating over the course of the next year. In addition, even as I objected to Reagan’s views, I understood him to be committed, in his way, to the broad American experiment in representative government and to ensuring its continued existence.

We cannot say remotely the same of Donald Trump. He is largely and proudly ignorant of those traditions; to the extent that he grasps them, he has contempt for them. He is interested in unlimited power and in squeezing every corrupt dollar out of the presidency that he can cram into his pockets. And he’s in desperate need of the fulsome and brain-curdling sycophancy of those around him, a hallmark of both a weak, insecure man and a leader with an undeniably fascistic personality. The only thing keeping him from facing accountability from very real crimes is the supplication of his fellow GOPers in Congress, who have readily accepted being beaten down into cultlike submission.

These things and many more enrage millions of Americans. That rage is given expression every day, in streets protests all over the country, in social media posts, and in columns for those of us who are lucky enough to be paid to write them.

But there’s another emotional current that courses through the bloodstreams of the majority—and yes, it is a majority—that dislikes and disapproves of Trump. It isn’t discussed as much as rage, because it doesn’t get as many clicks and perhaps isn’t thought to change as many minds. But it’s still important that we note it and give it its due. It is sadness. Many millions of Americans are absolutely heartbroken at what Trump and his menagerie of moral misfits are doing to our country.

We cannot believe the things being done in our name, and we are sick over it. The shootings, violent and point-blank and wanton, of citizens. The rounding up of noncitizens who may have come here illegally (but also may not have, as we’ve seen in some cases; even a handful of citizens have been detained) but have been living law-abiding lives who now find themselves thrown into what are essentially concentration camps living in unbearable conditions. The idea that some Americans are well-advised to be carrying their papers, as if we’re living in a police state.

There are also the relentless assaults on public health. The completely unnecessary outbreak of measles, a disease that shouldn’t even exist but is multiplying in this country in part because of RFK Jr.’s promulgation of ignorant lies that the vaccine causes deaths. More sickness and death will be on the way when RFK Jr.’s batty and shockingly irresponsible policies fully kick in. The United States is now an anti-science country, explicitly comparable to the Soviet Union under Lysenko, who, like Kennedy, spouted absurd theories and claims, denying scientific reality to satisfy the regime’s ideological imperatives.

I could fill pages with these indictments. The horrifying and plainly illegal sinking of those boats. The illegal military action in Venezuela. The clearly unethical legal pursuit of those he regards as political enemies. The primal urge to remake the physical landscape of the nation’s capital in his fascist image. This last is a minor thing, compared to the actions that are doing real harm to real people by the millions, but in its way, it is no less repulsive: These moves prove that Trump believes that he is the state, and he needs to be glorified in a manner we associate with ancient emperors and totalitarian madmen, not democratically elected leaders who are servants of the people.

The corruption: Its scale is nearly impossible to comprehend, which I suppose is the point. The New York Times found last month that Trump had made at least $1.4 billion since re-entering the Oval Office, but the paper emphasized that “we know this number to be an underestimate because some of his profits remain hidden from public view. And they continue to grow.” To watch someone abuse the presidency like this is sickening to many millions of Americans.

And worst of all, in a way, is the cocoon of fantasy in which he lives. He surrounds himself with flatterers and flunkies. He spends his weekends surrounded by extraordinarily wealthy people who have no idea what working people’s lives are like and who know that if they want his attention for 10 minutes, they must tell him that he is the greatest president ever. This is ridiculous, but it is not just ridiculous: It’s profoundly undemocratic and destructive. It is not how democratically accountable leaders live.

This totalitarian-style toadyism will be on full display Tuesday night. Trump will tell lie after lie about the economy, about his tariffs, about American being the “hottest” country in the world, about countless other things, and congressional Republicans will interrupt him 40 or 50 times with rapturous applause. Yes, Democrats interrupt their presidents with applause excessively, too; but Barack Obama and Joe Biden—and for that matter George W. Bush—weren’t openly engaged in a war on democracy. Trump is, and Republicans in Congress are cheering him every step of the way.

It’s enraging, but it’s also heartbreaking and disgusting, to see this malicious buffoon and his evil and cowardly minions destroy the world’s oldest democracy and congratulate themselves for doing so. They are an affront to everything we have, or once had, to be proud of as Americans. To one degree or another, most of the country now feels this way, and that, this week, is the real state of this union.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, February 23, 2026 10:54 AM

THG

Keep it real please, and use a VPN

Quote:
Originally posted by Wishimay:

I don't know that I consider myself a democrat, but these days I am definitely anti-republican, I like science too much, I guess.

I wouldn't even bother with "Independant"
because there is no point to be a part of a perennially losing party that doesn't clearly stand for anything.

I think I am for sure a card carrying member of the "people of both parties piss me off".

I wish there were more options, I think it would be healthier for the country as well.

If there ever is a "Science and Education" party, let me know...

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Monday, February 23, 2026 10:55 AM

THG

Keep it real please, and use a VPN

Quote:
Originally posted by second:

The Real State of the Union: Millions of Americans Are Just Disgusted

Yes, we’re angry about what Donald Trump is doing to our country. But even more than that, we’re heartsick over the countless ways in which he is destroying this nation.

By Michael Tomasky | February 23, 2026

https://newrepublic.com/article/206888/trump-state-union-failure-econo
my

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

There's talk the Democrats won't show up.

T

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Monday, February 23, 2026 1:24 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:

The Real State of the Union: Millions of Americans Are Just Disgusted

Yes, we’re angry about what Donald Trump is doing to our country. But even more than that, we’re heartsick over the countless ways in which he is destroying this nation.

By Michael Tomasky | February 23, 2026

https://newrepublic.com/article/206888/trump-state-union-failure-econo
my

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

There's talk the Democrats won't show up.

T

Good. They don't deserve a seat at the table.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Sunday, March 1, 2026 8:14 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

It Can Now Be Plainly Said: Trump Is Planning a November Coup d’État

During the 2024 campaign, it was kind of hard to picture the specifics of how Trump might pull such a thing off. Alas, it’s getting less hypothetical by the week.

By Michael Tomasky | February 27, 2026/10:22 a.m. ET

https://newrepublic.com/post/207138/trump-coup-detat-midterm-elections

Back in 2024, Kamala Harris and the Democrats struggled to convince voters that a second Donald Trump term would constitute a serious threat to democracy. We can debate the effectiveness of her, and their, rhetoric. But on a certain level, it was a hard argument to make because it was hypothetical. Voters aren’t very interested in wrapping their heads around hypotheticals, or at least vague ones. And Harris’s hypotheticals were mostly vague, so if she or any Democrat tried to say, for example, that there was a very real threat that once in office, Trump might try to cancel elections, most people kind of tuned that out.

I was more than willing to believe that Trump might try to cancel elections or take over the media. But even I, when I sat down to think about exactly how, couldn’t quite pin down the specifics. No president had ever tried to do either of those things, so how exactly could Trump pull them off?

Well, we’re now beginning to see. Let’s start with elections. The Washington Post—and yes, there’s still good reporting going on there—reported Thursday that pro-Trump “activists” (a rather generous and perverse use of that word, I think) who say they’re working with the Trump administration “are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.” The plan would mandate voter ID and ban mail-in balloting, and calls on Trump to issue an executive order announcing both measures.

The premise, it almost goes without saying, is a total lie. China did not interfere in the 2020 election. Trump and his people often said so, the implication being that China interfered on behalf of its old friend Joe Biden and his son Hunter, whose alleged business dealings in China left his father hopelessly compromised.

None of it was true. Hunter Biden did have some business interests in China, but nothing that reached his father. The U.S. intelligence services studied foreign influence in the 2020 election, and in March 2021, the government released an intelligence report concluding that China “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”

In fact, the report found—and isn’t this a surprise?—the biggest foreign actor in 2020 was Russia, trying to help Trump: “The primary effort the IC [intelligence community] uncovered revolved around a narrative—that Russian actors began spreading as early as 2014—alleging corrupt ties between President Biden, his family, and other U.S. officials and Ukraine.”

But Trump administration officials—including Attorney General Bill Barr—pushed the China lie aggressively. So it’s very easy for Trump today to invoke China again and lie that the threat of even greater Chinese interference in 2026 demands that he take emergency measures.

With respect to those measures, he has no power whatsoever to impose them. As anti-Trump legal expert Norm Eisen put it on Morning Joe Friday: “Just as the Supreme Court struck his supposed emergency powers over tariffs, he has even less here.” That is true. But remember: Between tariff “Liberation Day” (April 2, 2025) and the day the Supremes finally ruled against Trump on tariffs (February 20, 2026), more than 10 months passed.

Trump has no power to “decree” that voters must present ID or to end mail-in balloting. But that doesn’t mean he can’t at least try both. Under the Insurrection Act or some other dusty statute, he can declare a state of emergency. Then he can decide that said state permits, nay requires, him to take extraordinary measures. On October 5, say, that might mean outlawing early voting. By October 13, it might mean no mail-in voting. By October 29, a reminder that all voters must present ID to vote. And by Sunday, November 1, two days before the election—an announcement that all these “reasonable” measures have alas failed, and he is now forced, against his will, to postpone the election.

Have trouble seeing that happen? I didn’t think so.

As for the media takeover: What I didn’t foresee in 2024 was the aggressiveness of Trump patsy David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, in trying to take over both CBS and CNN. But he wouldn’t stop. Netflix bid $83 billion. Ellison topped that this week with a bid of $111 billion, and Netflix dropped out.

And somewhere in there, Ellison attended Trump’s State of the Union address, and Trump took to social media to “urge” Netflix to remove Obama and Biden administration official Susan Rice from its board. I once would have written that this is how things go in tinpot dictatorships, or in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. But today, it’s how things go in the United States of America.

So picture this. It’s October. The mystery Trump accuser, the one about whom those FBI files have strangely gone missing, has come forward. Her allegations against the president of the United States are lurid and, to most of the country, credible. Trump is down to 29 percent in the polls. The economy is still limping. The polls all indicate that the GOP is in for a historic thrashing. Democrats are favored to win the House and, by now, are odds-on to maybe take the Senate too—their candidates in Alaska and Texas have now pulled slightly ahead.

And Trump declares a state of emergency and postpones the election. The Supreme Court issues an emergency stay, saying he can’t do that. But the court has no army, and Trump does, along with a handful of lickspittle governors who just might follow him down whatever dark path he plows.

That, not to mince words, is a coup d’état. Will he get away with it? I don’t know, but having effective control over how it is presented to viewers of CBS and CNN, and readers of the Bezos-owned Washington Post, to say nothing of the already vast pro-Trump propaganda empire of Fox News and the rest, will certainly make it easier.

That’s how fascism descends. And it’s becoming less and less hypothetical by the week.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, March 1, 2026 8:40 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Loser.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, March 4, 2026 8:11 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

A high-stakes Texas primary exposed the Democratic Party’s fault lines

Democrats chose expanding the tent over doubling down on the base.

By Christian Paz | Mar 4, 2026, 5:07 AM CST

https://www.vox.com/politics/481483/james-talarico-stakes-texas-primar
y-latino-white-black-democratic-party

One thing was clear before James Talarico’s win over Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Texas Senate Democratic primary Tuesday night. This contest wouldn’t be about policy or ideology; it would be a choice between two very different types of “fighters,” decided along racially polarized lines.

Talarico, a state representative and seminarian, offered grit paired with Christian compassion — a welcoming message to frustrated moderates and disappointed Republicans that pinned the blame for the country’s problems on The System.

That contrasted with Crockett’s fiery campaign of confrontation — of pinning the blame on Donald Trump and Republicans. Crockett believed in mobilizing the base; Talarico pitched expanding the tent.

A racially divided Democratic electorate made this decision. Talarico’s victory came with support from white voters, particularly college-educated white voters, and with a boost from Latinos in Texas, the nation’s newest swing voters. Crockett’s coalition, meanwhile, counted on huge margins among Black voters to offset her weaker white and Latino support.

This division leaves Talarico with a crucial task in the next eight months: building trust with Black voters, winning back more moderate Latino voters, and making inroads with conservative white voters, who still make up the lion’s share of the Texas electorate. It also reveals tensions for Democrats nationally as they head into primary season: both the push and pull between more college-educated white voters in their coalition and more working-class Black voters, with the additional wild card of Latino voters.

A race decided along racial lines

For most of the primary contest, style was the big difference between Talarico and Crockett’s campaigns. They both occupied similar spots on the ideological spectrum, didn’t differ much on substance, but campaigned very differently.

Early on, Crockett faced criticism for arguing that she didn’t believe she had to win over Trump supporters in order to win a general election. “(Texas) Democrats have tried to talk to every Republican they can to try and get them to come over here. It hasn’t worked,” she argued even on the last day of campaigning. “If we just get the base to turn out, we can win.”

Her campaign’s theory was to double down on Black voters, particularly through outreach at Black churches, and appeal to progressive or traditionally Democratic Latino voters.

Talarico, meanwhile, was criticized for not being able to hold strong support among Black Texans, and relying on white Democrats as his base. And in the closing weeks of the contest, racial identity became a bigger flash point.

Crockett accused Talarico of boosting ads that were “straight up racist,” and called out “dog whistles” from those questioning her electability. Meanwhile, allies like former Rep. Colin Allred, the 2024 Senate nominee, blasted Talarico for allegedly referring to him in private as a “mediocre Black man,” an accusation that Talarico strenuously denied.

Ahead of Tuesday night, the few public polls released showed anything from a tied race to a double-digit lead for either candidate. But aggregates of polls did confirm these racial trends. Talarico enjoyed double-digit support from white Democrats — a more than 20-point margin per the Democratic strategist Adam Carlson’s crosstab aggregator — and he seemed to gain with these voters as Election Day neared. Crockett, meanwhile, was sweeping the Black vote, holding a 72-point margin in the aggregate.

That left a big open question about how Latino voters would swing. Those polls showed Talarico with a modest 8-point advantage, but didn’t show a sharp break in favor of either candidate.

On Election Day, both candidates’ bases of support bore the polls out: Talarico had the highest margins around his home district of Austin, a wealthier, whiter, and more college-educated urban center. He also made big inroads with white college-educated voters in the Houston area. Crockett, meanwhile, was buoyed by voters in her home district in the Dallas area, and in Houston — the two parts of the state where, combined, more than half of Black Texans live.

Complicating all of this was a familiar enemy: voter suppression. Reports came in throughout the day of voters being turned away from voting booths because of changes to how the state conducted its elections, particularly in the Dallas area. Republicans decided to hold separate primary contests this year from Democrats, requiring a switch to precinct-based voting instead of countywide voting — meaning many voters went to the wrong polling place.

But the real surprise in the night came from Latino voters, as vote in the parts of Texas with larger Latino populations proved decisive. In the Rio Grande Valley, in the San Antonio area, in border counties, and in Hispanic parts of Houston, Latino-dominated electorates voted heavily for Talarico.

Because of this level of Latino support, the final picture of the Texas map may end up being a sharply polarized picture: of strong support for Crockett in the east of the state, but Talarico support everywhere else.

“This is a unique moment because of the racial background of the candidates. There was no Latino candidate — that would’ve changed things — and race was injected as a strategy,” longtime Latino vote strategist Mike Madrid told me. “It’s undeniable that [the Crockett campaign and its surrogates] were saying we need minority voters to vote as a bloc here to get out of this primary.”

Instead, Madrid told me, Latino voters continued to buck expectations, not easily fitting into the model of “minority voters” or responding to appeals to solidarity as “voters of color.”

Even after 2020 and 2024, and the rightward shift of Latino voters that came with it, “there’s still this very dominant belief amongst national Democrats, certainly the elites and elected class, and certainly within Black power structures, that if you’re not white, you’re somehow going to vote as a bloc,” Madrid said. The Texas results, at least, suggest that “you can’t understand what’s happening if you look through a traditional model of minority voting behavior.”

Talarico now faces the challenge of applying his theory of expanding the tent before the general election, where he is likely to face ultra-MAGA-loyalist and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who will head to a run-off against incumbent Texas Sen. John Cornyn. Polls of a theoretical Talarico-Paxton matchup before the primary showed a real race — something that would be a bit of a novelty in the state. Trump won Texas by 14 points in 2024 — improving his margins in part because Latino voters continued to abandon Democrats.

Now, national polls suggest this Latino support might be shifting away from Trump and Republicans again — creating a new proving ground for Talarico’s campaign strategy. And if his model of voter outreach proves itself, Democrats might actually have a shot at the tantalizing dream of turning Texas blue.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, March 4, 2026 8:15 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
A high-stakes Texas primary exposed the Democratic Party’s fault lines

Democrats chose expanding the tent over doubling down on the base.

By Christian Paz | Mar 4, 2026, 5:07 AM CST

https://www.vox.com/politics/481483/james-talarico-stakes-texas-primar
y-latino-white-black-democratic-party

One thing was clear before James Talarico’s win over Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Texas Senate Democratic primary Tuesday night. This contest wouldn’t be about policy or ideology; it would be a choice between two very different types of “fighters,” decided along racially polarized lines.

Talarico, a state representative and seminarian, offered grit paired with Christian compassion — a welcoming message to frustrated moderates and disappointed Republicans that pinned the blame for the country’s problems on The System.

That contrasted with Crockett’s fiery campaign of confrontation — of pinning the blame on Donald Trump and Republicans. Crockett believed in mobilizing the base; Talarico pitched expanding the tent.

A racially divided Democratic electorate made this decision. Talarico’s victory came with support from white voters, particularly college-educated white voters, and with a boost from Latinos in Texas, the nation’s newest swing voters. Crockett’s coalition, meanwhile, counted on huge margins among Black voters to offset her weaker white and Latino support.

This division leaves Talarico with a crucial task in the next eight months: building trust with Black voters, winning back more moderate Latino voters, and making inroads with conservative white voters, who still make up the lion’s share of the Texas electorate. It also reveals tensions for Democrats nationally as they head into primary season: both the push and pull between more college-educated white voters in their coalition and more working-class Black voters, with the additional wild card of Latino voters.

A race decided along racial lines

For most of the primary contest, style was the big difference between Talarico and Crockett’s campaigns. They both occupied similar spots on the ideological spectrum, didn’t differ much on substance, but campaigned very differently.

Early on, Crockett faced criticism for arguing that she didn’t believe she had to win over Trump supporters in order to win a general election. “(Texas) Democrats have tried to talk to every Republican they can to try and get them to come over here. It hasn’t worked,” she argued even on the last day of campaigning. “If we just get the base to turn out, we can win.”

Her campaign’s theory was to double down on Black voters, particularly through outreach at Black churches, and appeal to progressive or traditionally Democratic Latino voters.

Talarico, meanwhile, was criticized for not being able to hold strong support among Black Texans, and relying on white Democrats as his base. And in the closing weeks of the contest, racial identity became a bigger flash point.

Crockett accused Talarico of boosting ads that were “straight up racist,” and called out “dog whistles” from those questioning her electability. Meanwhile, allies like former Rep. Colin Allred, the 2024 Senate nominee, blasted Talarico for allegedly referring to him in private as a “mediocre Black man,” an accusation that Talarico strenuously denied.

Ahead of Tuesday night, the few public polls released showed anything from a tied race to a double-digit lead for either candidate. But aggregates of polls did confirm these racial trends. Talarico enjoyed double-digit support from white Democrats — a more than 20-point margin per the Democratic strategist Adam Carlson’s crosstab aggregator — and he seemed to gain with these voters as Election Day neared. Crockett, meanwhile, was sweeping the Black vote, holding a 72-point margin in the aggregate.

That left a big open question about how Latino voters would swing. Those polls showed Talarico with a modest 8-point advantage, but didn’t show a sharp break in favor of either candidate.

On Election Day, both candidates’ bases of support bore the polls out: Talarico had the highest margins around his home district of Austin, a wealthier, whiter, and more college-educated urban center. He also made big inroads with white college-educated voters in the Houston area. Crockett, meanwhile, was buoyed by voters in her home district in the Dallas area, and in Houston — the two parts of the state where, combined, more than half of Black Texans live.

Complicating all of this was a familiar enemy: voter suppression. Reports came in throughout the day of voters being turned away from voting booths because of changes to how the state conducted its elections, particularly in the Dallas area. Republicans decided to hold separate primary contests this year from Democrats, requiring a switch to precinct-based voting instead of countywide voting — meaning many voters went to the wrong polling place.

But the real surprise in the night came from Latino voters, as vote in the parts of Texas with larger Latino populations proved decisive. In the Rio Grande Valley, in the San Antonio area, in border counties, and in Hispanic parts of Houston, Latino-dominated electorates voted heavily for Talarico.

Because of this level of Latino support, the final picture of the Texas map may end up being a sharply polarized picture: of strong support for Crockett in the east of the state, but Talarico support everywhere else.

“This is a unique moment because of the racial background of the candidates. There was no Latino candidate — that would’ve changed things — and race was injected as a strategy,” longtime Latino vote strategist Mike Madrid told me. “It’s undeniable that [the Crockett campaign and its surrogates] were saying we need minority voters to vote as a bloc here to get out of this primary.”

Instead, Madrid told me, Latino voters continued to buck expectations, not easily fitting into the model of “minority voters” or responding to appeals to solidarity as “voters of color.”

Even after 2020 and 2024, and the rightward shift of Latino voters that came with it, “there’s still this very dominant belief amongst national Democrats, certainly the elites and elected class, and certainly within Black power structures, that if you’re not white, you’re somehow going to vote as a bloc,” Madrid said. The Texas results, at least, suggest that “you can’t understand what’s happening if you look through a traditional model of minority voting behavior.”

Talarico now faces the challenge of applying his theory of expanding the tent before the general election, where he is likely to face ultra-MAGA-loyalist and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who will head to a run-off against incumbent Texas Sen. John Cornyn. Polls of a theoretical Talarico-Paxton matchup before the primary showed a real race — something that would be a bit of a novelty in the state. Trump won Texas by 14 points in 2024 — improving his margins in part because Latino voters continued to abandon Democrats.

Now, national polls suggest this Latino support might be shifting away from Trump and Republicans again — creating a new proving ground for Talarico’s campaign strategy. And if his model of voter outreach proves itself, Democrats might actually have a shot at the tantalizing dream of turning Texas blue.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Nobody needs to take any paper that still capitalizes Black and uses lower-case for white seriously in 2026 and beyond. Vox is another guilty of this.

They'll capitalize White for the White House, but it's lower-case whenever referring to white people.

Racists.

Get fucked, losers.

Your racist, ghetto-trash, hood-rat, DEI-Hire loser lost.

Just like I told you she would.

--------------------------------------------------

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Wednesday, March 4, 2026 8:35 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nobody needs to take any paper that still capitalizes Black and uses lower-case for white seriously in 2026 and beyond. Vox is another guilty of this.

They'll capitalize White for the White House, but it's lower-case whenever referring to white people.

Racists.

Get fucked, losers.

Your racist, ghetto-trash, hood-rat, DEI-Hire loser lost.

Just like I told you she would.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.

6ix, show what you wrote to your Dad so that he'll have early warning about what will happen to you if Trump has a reversal in fortune at the next election.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, March 4, 2026 8:38 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Nobody needs to take any paper that still capitalizes Black and uses lower-case for white seriously in 2026 and beyond. Vox is another guilty of this.

They'll capitalize White for the White House, but it's lower-case whenever referring to white people.

Racists.

Get fucked, losers.

Your racist, ghetto-trash, hood-rat, DEI-Hire loser lost.

Just like I told you she would.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Evil. Be a dick.
6ix, show what you wrote to your Dad so that he'll have early warning about what will happen to you if Trump has a reversal in fortune at the next election.

Oh. Another personal attack using things that weren't written for your stalker ass because you have no legitimate argument against anything I say and you're having another temper-tantrum today because I'm right about everything and you are always, always, always wrong.

And a "reversal of fortune", huh? Is that Second admitting that despite posting dozens upon dozens of Anti-American TDS trash every day that Trump's fortunes are actually good and that you're getting fucking creamed, just like I've been telling you that you have been?

Say it ain't so.

Go cry to your dead whore of a mother, faggot.

--------------------------------------------------

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Wednesday, March 4, 2026 11:43 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

More ranting from 6ix to show his Dad (or Mom?) and psychiatrists appointed by the court:

6ixStringJack: The only way you can argue that TRUTH is if you are in favor of your wives and daughters and sisters and nieces being raped by Muslims on the regular, you sick fuck.

6ixStringJack: “The position of the Government of Spain can be summed up in three words,” said Sánchez in a televised address Wednesday morning. “No to war. Twenty-three years ago, another U.S. Administration dragged us into a war in the Middle East. A war which, in theory, was said at the time to be waged to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, to bring democracy, and to guarantee global security but.. it unleashed the greatest wave of insecurity that our continent had suffered since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” CORRECTION: The EU allowing 53 MILLION MUSLIMS in your borders since 9/11 is what unleashed the greatest wave of insecurity your continent has suffered since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, March 4, 2026 12:12 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
More ranting from 6ix to show his Dad (or Mom?) and psychiatrists appointed by the court:

6ixStringJack: The only way you can argue that TRUTH is if you are in favor of your wives and daughters and sisters and nieces being raped by Muslims on the regular, you sick fuck.

6ixStringJack: “The position of the Government of Spain can be summed up in three words,” said Sánchez in a televised address Wednesday morning. “No to war. Twenty-three years ago, another U.S. Administration dragged us into a war in the Middle East. A war which, in theory, was said at the time to be waged to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, to bring democracy, and to guarantee global security but.. it unleashed the greatest wave of insecurity that our continent had suffered since the fall of the Berlin Wall.” CORRECTION: The EU allowing 53 MILLION MUSLIMS in your borders since 9/11 is what unleashed the greatest wave of insecurity your continent has suffered since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Don't worry, buddy.

I've already posted these truths in the Tags thread where I'm recording all the stuff you were hoping would age off because you're a coward and a fucking idiot.

Your world is dead, loser.

--------------------------------------------------

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Wednesday, March 4, 2026 12:49 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Why Are Democrats Struggling to Respond to Trump’s Iran War?

Some lawmakers have a clear message on the war. The party’s leaders are not among them.

By Jim Newell | March 04, 2026 11:45 AM

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/03/trump-iran-war-democrats-r
esponse.html

Something has been missing from Democrats’ response to the war in Iran since President Donald Trump announced “major combat operations” early Saturday morning. Party leaders’ focus, so far, has only been on the process.

“The Trump administration must explain itself to the American people and Congress immediately, provide an ironclad justification for this act of war, clearly define the national security objective and articulate a plan to avoid another costly, prolonged military quagmire in the Middle East,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, summing up the prevailing sentiment in his party. His Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, similarly called for more information.

Undoubtedly the process complaints are merited, as there hasn’t really been a process. Trump made no attempt to sell the war to either the public or Congress, and days into it, the administration can’t get its story straight about why the war was necessary or what the goal of it is.

But Democrats’ focus on process papers over fractures in the underlying policy itself: Is war against Iran a good idea, or not? While the left is comfortable outwardly opposing it and some in the center support it, the broad middle hasn’t found its footing. If the war becomes a debacle, have no doubt that just about every Democrat in office will rush to say that they knew it was a terrible idea from the get-go. But many Democrats have a long and well-documented history of hawkishness toward Iran, jumbling their thoughts and muddling their response.

On the poles of the party, at least, you will get some clear answers.

Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley and Sen. Bernie Sanders, for example—two of the most progressive Democratic senators—have been willing to say the magic words that have eluded much of their caucus: “No war with Iran.” This is not a difficult question for them. The president is deeply unpopular, in part because he’s viewed as focused too much on stray pet projects and foreign policy instead of the cost of living, and now he wants to attack Iran for reasons that he can’t articulate and with objectives that change by the hour? He’s doing this in a way that exposes serious fissures within his own party? He says “That’s the way it is” about American soldiers dying? Why, from these senators’ points of view—on both policy and politics—is this even a question? No war with Iran!

More centrist Democratic members and those with long track records of supporting Israel, meanwhile, are openly supportive of Operation Epic Fury. New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer celebrated the administration for taking “decisive action to defend our national security, fight terror, protect our allies, and stand with the Iranian people.” Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz, meanwhile—before hostilities started—had referred to a resolution requiring Trump to cease hostilities with Iran as the “Ayatollah Protection Act.” And Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, long the most vocal supporter of Israel among Senate Democrats, has been trashing his party for not being more supportive of the strikes.

The broad peloton of Democrats, though, are pairing every procedural complaint under the sun with to-be-clear paragraphs about how they, too, believe the Iranian regime must be dealt with. Schumer in his statement, noted that “Iran’s malign regional activities, nuclear ambitions, and harsh oppression of the Iranian people demands American strength, resolve, regional coordination, and strategic clarity.” Jeffries said that Iran “must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism and the threat it poses to our allies like Israel and Jordan in the region,” but that Trump needed to come before Congress.

Schumer and Jeffries, like many Democrats, have a long history of supporting sanctions against Iran, warning that the Iranian regime is an “existential threat” to Israel, and describing Iran as “the largest state sponsor of terror in the world.” Schumer famously opposed President Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran as he didn’t believe it would meaningfully constrain the regime’s ambitions. For many who did support it—like Jeffries—it was still a difficult vote. And now, even in this day and age, under an unpopular president acting erratically and with an American public that’s weary of new wars, there’s always the voice in the back of Democrats’ heads warning them not to look weak against bad guys in the Middle East.

I could keep quoting these, but they’re all the same. Here’s Sen. Elissa Slotkin, here’s Sen. Jacky Rosen and her Nevada counterpart Catherine Cortez Masto. Here’s Sen. Mark Kelly. They’re all tiptoeing, explaining—not incorrectly—that Trump’s haphazard method and strategy has made for a very risky situation, and that Trump needs to come before Congress. They are all saying that Trump is, at the very least, not keeping with the spirit of the Constitution in going at this unilaterally. They are all connoting that Trump is a doofus. They are not saying whether they think war with Iran is a bad idea.

What most Democrats appear willing to do, at least, is go on the record this week in opposition to the process. The House and Senate will vote on War Powers Resolutions requiring Trump to terminate military force against Iran absent explicit authorization from Congress. These resolutions may not pass in either chamber. Some Democrats openly supporting the war will vote against them, while Republicans will keep most of their members in line to support the administration.

In other words, this is a free vote in which Democrats can express a form of generalized disgruntlement with the project, but that’s about it. It buys them a little more time to sort their thoughts—or have their thoughts sorted for them. Because I suspect, the longer this goes on, that Democratic voters across the country will catch on to the word games and nudge all Democrats closer to “No war with Iran” as the winning message. Gas prices, after all, are going up.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, March 4, 2026 2:01 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Why Are Democrats Struggling to Respond to Trump’s Iran War?

Because they're fucking retarded and your party is dead.

Duh.

Quote:
“The Trump administration must explain itself to the American people and Congress immediately, provide an ironclad justification for this act of war, clearly define the national security objective and articulate a plan to avoid another costly, prolonged military quagmire in the Middle East,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, summing up the prevailing sentiment in his party. His Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, similarly called for more information.

They have to do no such thing.

Go ahead and put it to a vote so Trump can veto it and send it back where you're going to need a 2/3rds vote in support of it in both chambers to keep Trump from doing what he's doing.

You stupid motherfuckers suck. You hold no power and will never hold any power again.

Pat yourselves on the back. You did this.

--------------------------------------------------

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Thursday, March 5, 2026 8:37 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Dreaming of a Blue Texas

Will economic progress turn Texas progressive?

By Paul Krugman | Mar 05, 2026

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/dreaming-of-a-blue-texas

Now, per capita income probably isn’t the big driver of differences in political orientation across states. Education levels are almost surely far more important. In fact, there’s a startlingly strong relationship between the percentage of a state’s population over the age of 25 with a bachelor’s degree or more and the way it voted in 2024:

Source: American Community Survey, New York Times

If you look at the chart above, you see, first, that Texas does not have an especially highly educated population. Why not? Mainly because the state hasn’t been especially attractive to industries that employ large numbers of highly educated workers. A few years ago there was a lot of hype about Austin rivaling Silicon Valley as a technology hub, but that move has largely fizzled.

The second thing you see from the chart is that Texas’s political orientation isn’t dramatically different from what you would expect if all you knew about the state was its education level. The share of highly educated adults in Texas is intermediate between that in deep blue states and deep red states; its Republican lean is also somewhere in between.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, March 5, 2026 12:28 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Dreaming of a Blue Texas

Will economic progress turn Texas progressive?

Not in a Million Years, Paul.

--------------------------------------------------

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Thursday, March 5, 2026 10:25 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

It's funny that you two dumbfucks stop posting anything here after business hours.

Not that I'm accusing either of you of being paid agents or anything. You're both far too stupid for anybody to pay you to do anything but be first-line agitators in the streets to "die for the cause", because you're both stupid and worthless.

But it's because the Legacy Media clocks out by then, and you both have zero ability for critical thinking or coming up with any ideas of your own.

So when the media stops posting stories for the day, your brains both go into power-down mode.

You're like two inert sponges. Completely useless until you've been given your marching orders for the day.

--------------------------------------------------

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Friday, March 6, 2026 12:53 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

I think you two idiots have already been thoroughly destroyed this morning with more than half of your TDS articles and clickbait videos thrown right in the fuckin' trash where they belong already.

I've got shit to do today, losers.

I'll be back later to destroy whatever bullshit you waste your day posting.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Thursday, March 19, 2026 6:41 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Democrats Learned the Wrong Lesson From 2024

The party still refuses to prioritize the most important parts of its agenda and make the case that they’re worth paying for.

By Ben Ritz | March 18, 2026, 7 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/democrats-slopulism-economic
-policy/686419/

Despite Donald Trump’s promises, America has not been Made Affordable Again. This has created an immense political opportunity for his opponents. But Democratic lawmakers are failing just as badly to articulate an alternative vision. Instead, some of them seem to be trying to out-Trump the president with their own brand of “slopulism”—half-baked policy proposals that sound good only if you don’t think too hard about them, and that would, if enacted, hurt the people they’re supposed to help. Others are simply reheating the leftovers of Joe Biden’s agenda. Few are reckoning with the fundamental problem that led to the party’s defeat in 2024: an inability to prioritize the most important parts of its agenda and make the case that they’re worth paying for.

These shortcomings might not prevent Democrats from riding an anti-Trump backlash to success in the midterms, but they could doom the chances of any future Democratic administration governing successfully.

Senators Cory Booker and Chris Van Hollen recently unveiled bills that would exempt most middle-class households from paying any federal income taxes. Booker’s plan would more than double the standard deduction, to $75,000 per couple, and increase the child tax credit to be even more generous than it was under Biden’s COVID-era expansion. Van Hollen’s would essentially create a parallel income-tax system under which a couple’s first $92,000 of income is exempt. His bill in particular appears to have broad support within the party, rolling out with 18 Senate co-sponsors and a slew of endorsements from major labor unions and activist groups.

Annie Lowrey: The last Americans really paying taxes

The political appeal of these ideas is obvious enough. Affordability is everyone’s favorite buzzword right now, and lowering taxes lets voters keep more of their paycheck to spend. Trump’s policies to cut taxes on tips, overtime pay, and Social Security benefits proved so popular that congressional Democrats are fighting to expand them. Why not go even bigger and prove that Democrats are the real party of the middle class by offering even more tax relief than Republicans?

One problem is that these policies are regressive. High-income Americans tend to benefit the most from deductions because they pay steeper tax rates on their income. As a result, a childless couple with $175,000 of income would benefit from Booker’s proposal twice as much as one with a $75,000 income. Under Van Hollen’s, a couple that makes $100,000 would benefit six times as much as a couple that earns $50,000. Such an outcome undermines progressives’ general goal of providing the most support to those most in need, without having the benefit of advancing another component of their agenda. This helps explain why both proposals were immediately panned by experts of all ideological stripes within the Democratic Party.

The bigger problem with these plans is that they are very expensive. Van Hollen’s proposal would cost roughly $1.6 trillion over 10 years. That would be more than triple the spending and tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, and yet Van Hollen’s plan is cheap compared with Booker’s, which would cost nearly $7 trillion over the same period. Both senators have promised to cover the cost with taxes on corporations and very rich households. But even if that were to happen, it would jeopardize everything else voters expect from the Democratic Party, such as expanding health-care access and investing in clean energy. There is a mathematical limit on how much additional revenue can be generated from raising taxes on high-income households, and offsetting Booker’s plan would require consuming about half of it. The real-world political limit is much lower. If the entire universe of plausible tax hikes on the top 2 percent is spent cutting taxes for the other 98 percent, no money will be left to pursue other goals.

Democrats can’t dodge this reality forever, especially at a time when the bill for many of the government’s unfunded promises is finally coming due. Major trust funds for both Social Security and Medicare are projected to be depleted before the end of the next president’s first term. Doing nothing to the programs—the preferred approach of many Democrats for the past 40 years—would mean allowing automatic benefit cuts as high as 12 percent for Medicare and 24 percent for Social Security to take effect.

Borrowing money indefinitely to support these programs’ shortfalls isn’t an option: The federal government already spends $1 trillion on interest payments each year, more than it does on Medicare or national defense, a higher share of the economy than at any point in American history. That debt might seem abstract now, but Americans will eventually feel the weight of it through higher inflation and interest rates that drive up the cost of living. If Democrats want a robust government that can last, they’ll have to pay for it.

Some might object that if Trump can get away with ideologically and mathematically nonsensical policy positions, why can’t Democrats? The answer is that Trump and MAGA Republicans aren’t trying to build a functioning government with a more generous welfare state. If their unfunded tax cuts end up starving the government into massive spending reductions, many Republicans would consider that a feature rather than a bug. Democrats, by contrast, need voters to believe that government can deliver on its promises.

Refusing to reckon with this dynamic played a huge role in the Biden administration’s biggest failures. In early 2021, Democrats made the American Rescue Plan Act big enough to fund a wide range of requests from their Senate caucus rather than shooting for the appropriate level of spending needed to support the economy through the coronavirus pandemic. Economists widely agree that this choice made inflation worse throughout Biden’s tenure. Democrats’ subsequent Build Back Better plan was functionally a grab bag of policies favored by left-leaning interest groups and their congressional champions that stretched far beyond the total level of spending with which voters were comfortable. The result was a package far less popular than some of the individual policies contained within it, which ultimately could not pass.

If Democrats learned any lessons from these mistakes, they’re not acting like it. Last month, the New Democrat Coalition—the largest bloc of moderate House Democrats—put forth an “Affordability Agenda” that could best be described as a warmed-over Build Back Better. The plan admirably claims that a high-level goal is to “act in a fiscally-responsible way,” but almost every proposal with an impact on the federal budget would either increase spending or cut taxes. Although the plan is light on details, the price tag could be more than $3 trillion over 10 years if its components cost as much as similar proposals from the Biden era.

The math gets even worse on the left wing of the Democratic coalition. Senator Bernie Sanders promised $25 trillion more in new spending than he had a plan to pay for when he ran for president in 2020. Now he proposes making the spending-revenue gap even larger by sending a $3,000 check to every member of every household with an income under $150,000—trotting back out a slopulist and inflationary policy that seemed to yield no political benefit for Democrats when they enacted a similar one five years ago.

Opportunities certainly exist for targeted tax relief to help working-class Americans manage higher costs; indeed, I have proposed several. But a situation in which Republicans cut taxes across the board and Democrats try to follow that up with even bigger tax cuts for 98 percent of the population is a race to the bottom—one that has been gradually accelerating since 2001. This is not a contest that Democrats can win, because the end result would be no money left to fund any of the government programs they care about—and giving money to everyone at the same time would fuel inflation that ultimately cancels out the tax cuts’ benefit.

It would be naive to suggest that Democrats should aggressively campaign on painful tax hikes and spending cuts. But at a minimum, they need to have a coherent vision for what they want government to accomplish and not propose costly policies that are fundamentally incompatible with that vision. Moreover, they must make the argument to voters that progressive objectives are worth paying for. If voters support Democratic programs only when they think someone else is going to foot the bill, then Democrats should accept the fact that those policies aren’t truly popular, and trim their ambitions accordingly. Politicians can’t tell Americans that the government will help solve their problems and that they won’t need to pay any taxes to fund it. That’s not offering a solution, just slop.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, March 20, 2026 6:21 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

There Will Be No Post-Presidential Peace for Donald Trump

The president and his allies will face impeachments, lawsuits, and maybe even The Hague.

Matt Ford | March 19, 2026

https://newrepublic.com/article/207369/trump-post-presidency-accountab
ility-hague

Donald Trump spent the first year of his second term trying to signal his strength, his impunity, and his permanence in American public life. When House Republicans gathered at the Kennedy Center in early January for a policy summit, he struck a much more vulnerable tone. “You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be—I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told the assembled lawmakers. “I’ll get impeached.”

The event appropriately symbolized Trump’s first year as president. It was held at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a once-respected cultural institution that Trump took over and, using his handpicked board of directors, illegally renamed after himself. The wave of boycotts that followed led Trump to then announce, in February, that the center would be closed for at least two years, ostensibly for repairs and perhaps for eventual demolition.

The shuttering of the Kennedy Center may be the least of Trump’s second-term sins. In the first year since returning to power, Trump and his subordinates have pushed the country toward fascism and oligarchy. He has turned Washington into an orgy of corruption and self-dealing beyond even the most cynical observer’s imagination. He has transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol into a lawless paramilitary force that has besieged American cities and killed at least five U.S. citizens and 22 foreign nationals. He has abused Americans and their immigrant neighbors alike simply because he can.

A rundown of the Trump administration’s scandals and crimes resembles, with shocking likeness, the grave, sweeping charges laid out in the Declaration of Independence against the last American king. “He has excited domestic insurrections against us,” the Founding Fathers wrote about George III in 1776. Is there any better way of describing Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021? He supported a violent mob aiming to overthrow the government; he maintains a similar disrespect for the institutions of American democracy to this day. In early February, he threatened to “nationalize” American elections in a lawless and perhaps impossible bid to keep Democrats from retaking Congress.

The similarities do not end there. The declaration describes the king “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world” and “imposing taxes on us without our consent.” Sound familiar? Since last spring, Trump has used a Cold War–era sanctions law to unilaterally impose trillions of dollars in tariffs upon American customers and businesses. The law makes no mention of tariffs, and in February the Supreme Court accordingly struck them down.

Foremost among the Founders’ fears of threats to liberty was the potential misuse of the military. Trump, to borrow their phrasing, “has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislatures.” In a show of propagandistic force, he has stationed thousands of National Guard troops from around the country within the District of Columbia despite the opposition of local government. The president frequently threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act to send military forces into Democratic-led states and cities.

Trump, like his royal predecessor, “has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.” Trump’s immigration raids against Democratic-led cities and states—Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis—appear to be at least partially punitive for their not voting for him in the presidential elections. On multiple occasions, out of apparent spite, Trump has also frozen congressionally appropriated programs and blocked infrastructure funding to blue states. He apparently intends to treat half of the country not as fellow citizens, but as conquered subjects.

“In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury,” Thomas Jefferson wrote after laying out the charges against George III. “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

There is a moral and democratic obligation to hold Trump administration officials accountable for their transgressions. The road map for what this accountability could look like is also growing clearer by the day. When Democrats return to power, they will have to think beyond presidents and prosecutions, especially since the Supreme Court has thrown up largely insurmountable barriers to criminal proceedings against the sitting administration.

Instead, a broader, all-of-society effort will be necessary to tear the roots of Trumpism out of the nation’s political system—an effort that uses every tool possible to achieve a measure of justice. This will involve not only impeachment, but also civil lawsuits, professional sanctions, restrictive acts of Congress, and the enforcement of international law against Trump administration officials by long-standing American allies. Trump’s attacks on the republic are relentless, and the republic must be just as relentless in holding him and his allies responsible.

Holding Trump and his allies to account will be harder this time than it was six years ago. After the 2020 election, the courts were the primary vehicle for accountability. Trump faced criminal prosecutions on three fronts over the next four years. First came the charges from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which alleged various financial offenses related to the Trump Organization. Then came indictments from special counsel Jack Smith for Trump’s continued possession of a trove of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort.

But the most serious cases involved his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election results. In Georgia, state prosecutors charged Trump and 18 other defendants with a range of crimes for their campaign to subvert Georgia’s election results by creating slates of fake presidential electors and illegally accessing state voting systems. Trump himself pressured Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find” more than 11,700 votes and give him the lead over Joe Biden. Federal prosecutors, again led by Smith, also brought charges in the District of Columbia for trying to obstruct the certification of the election results on January 6.

This time around, the legal landscape is much less favorable. During Trump’s first term, Justice Department guidelines forbade prosecutions of sitting presidents, delaying any potential proceedings until after his term ended. This time, prosecutors will also have to contend with Trump v. United States. The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on “presidential immunity” in 2024 fundamentally changed the executive branch and how it operates within the American constitutional order.

Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion laid out the scope of presidential immunity as follows: A president has “absolute immunity” from prosecution for any acts that fall within his core constitutional powers. On everything else, he receives “presumptive immunity” for any of his “official acts.” Only if something is an unofficial act does immunity not apply.

This formula is found nowhere in the Constitution, which explicitly grants a limited form of immunity to lawmakers while speaking on the floor and while traveling to or from Congress. Nor is presidential immunity rooted in the history and tradition of American constitutional thought, as is judicial immunity for judges. The court’s conservative justices essentially made it up because Trump asked them to do so.

In the ruling, Roberts argued that immunity was necessary to ensure that the executive branch could properly function. “A president inclined to take one course of action based on the public interest may instead opt for another, apprehensive that criminal penalties may befall him upon his departure from office,” Roberts wrote for the court. “And if a former president’s official acts are routinely subjected to scrutiny in criminal prosecutions, the independence of the Executive Branch may be significantly undermined.”

To the court’s liberals, however, the dangers were obvious. Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that it would now be impossible to prosecute a former president for assassinating his political rivals or taking bribes in exchange for a pardon. “Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done,” she wrote. “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

In response to the liberal justices’ concerns, Roberts complained that his colleagues were “fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals about a future where the president ‘feels empowered to violate federal criminal law,’” quoting from Sotomayor’s dissent. Rarely has a Supreme Court justice been proved so wrong so quickly. By declaring that Trump was immune from criminal prosecution so long as he could link what he did to an official act, the court itself effectively told him that he was unbound by federal criminal law.

Trump has responded accordingly, wielding his official powers in ways that would likely bring criminal charges in any other context. There appear to be two hubs through which wealthy donors and foreign governments can now exchange cash for favors. One is MAGA Inc., Trump’s preferred super PAC. Donors have been rewarded with intimate access to the president and, in some instances, delays of unfavorable regulations or enforcement actions.

In one particularly glaring example, Paul Walczak, a former nursing home executive who faced 18 months in prison and a $4.4 million restitution for various tax-related crimes, received a full pardon three weeks after his mother, a major GOP donor, accepted an invitation to a $1 million-per-plate fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago. Since pardons are a core presidential power, bribery charges are out of the question.

The other nexus for potential corruption is World Liberty Financial, the vaguely named cryptocurrency company launched by the Trump family and its associates. Its signature “coins,” $TRUMP and $MELANIA, have lost more than 85 percent of their value since they were launched. But other crypto ventures have proved more lucrative, thanks to well-placed investors.

In one particularly alarming case, Trump may have allowed the sale of highly sensitive AI chips to Abu Dhabi in exchange for a member of the emirate’s royal family taking a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, according to a bombshell February report by The Wall Street Journal. Previous administrations had resisted approval of the sale because of fears that the chips could end up in Beijing’s hands, but the Trump administration dropped its opposition after the cryptocurrency transaction took place.

The Abu Dhabi deal appears to violate the Foreign Emoluments Clause, which forbids the president and other officials from receiving payments from foreign governments. The clause’s existence has done little to deter Trump’s foreign dealmaking. In May 2025, the president even accepted a “gift” of a $400 million Boeing 747 from the government of Qatar, a small peninsula nation on the Persian Gulf. Attorney General Pam Bondi, herself a former Qatari lobbyist, said that she saw no constitutional problems with the deal.

In an ideal world, Trump would be held criminally liable for these acts after he leaves office. The sad reality, however, is that, unless the Supreme Court’s composition radically changes before the end of the decade, it is unlikely that state or federal prosecutors will be able to bring criminal charges against Trump or his top associates for anything connected to his “official acts.” Next time, accountability will have to take a different form.

Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, who currently serves as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, described Trump v. United States to me as “an outrageous decision” that was “completely deracinated from the text of the Constitution, the structure of the Constitution, and the history of the Constitution.” The Roberts court, he added, “has essentially invented a special immunity to take care of one very special guy. That sleight of hand does not affect our ability to impeach a president, or to try, convict, remove, and disqualify a president. That power remains.”

With criminal prosecutions either impossible or more unfeasible, thanks to the Supreme Court, Congress’s power to impeach federal officials becomes the most potent check on executive branch abuses. The Constitution allows the House and the Senate to remove sitting officials from office and permanently disqualify them from holding any public office again in the future. It is a weighty and rarely used power. The second Trump administration has made it more necessary than ever.

Democrats already launched two impeachments against Trump: first for trying to coerce Ukraine by withholding congressionally appropriated military aid until it falsely accused Joe Biden of corruption ahead of the 2020 presidential election, and then for inciting an insurrection in the winter of 2020 to try to stop the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory.

If Trump is impeached a third time, it will fall to Raskin to build a case to persuade the rest of the House, the Senate, and the American people that it is worth pursuing. “We should never be afraid of impeachment,” he told me. “Impeachment should not be any kind of taboo, but we should not engage in any magical thinking about impeachment, either. It is not a panacea for everything that ails us after so many years of authoritarian assault on democratic institutions.”

Recent history supports that view. The aftermath of Trump’s first impeachment was subsumed by the Covid-19 pandemic one month later. While a majority of senators voted against Trump after the second impeachment trial—a historic rebuke compared to past efforts—the Senate still failed to reach a two-thirds majority to convict and disqualify him. The senators’ failures allowed him to regain power in the 2024 presidential election.

Those shortfalls left some critics wondering whether impeachment is a productive tool for a future Democratic Congress to wield against Trump. Raskin raised two points in response. First, he argued, a Democratic-led House would naturally have to balance the value of impeachment proceedings over other parts of the legislative agenda. Every Congress has a two-year shelf life and thus limited time in which it can act.

“How do you integrate impeachment with other goals, like our determination to get health care for all Americans, or our determination to make housing affordable or bring down the deficit?” he asked, rhetorically. “Our constitutional role compels us to think of all these things together, and we have to be thinking about rendering the most good for the most number of people under a theory of democratic utilitarianism.”

At the same time, Raskin suggested that lawmakers may not have a choice but to impeach Trump. “We also have to consider that the rule of law and constitutional integrity are themselves essential to the long-term flourishing of American democracy,” he observed. To those who doubted the value of Trump’s second impeachment, Raskin said it should be weighed in tandem with the January 6 Select Committee, which extensively investigated that fateful day and its causes.

“Republicans are engaged in some extreme historical revisionism right now about what had happened, but the truth is that they have not laid a glove on a single factual finding in the report of the January 6 Committee,” he noted. Alongside the second impeachment trial, he argued, lawmakers had “created an historical record that present day and future authoritarians will not be able to erase” and “struck a major blow against Orwellian historical revisionism and fascist politics.”

Impeachment may also look considerably different under the next Congress. While the impeachment power is usually discussed in the context of presidents, it can be wielded by Congress against any federal official in the executive branch or the judiciary. Democrats have expressed a greater willingness to open inquiries into members of Trump’s Cabinet and other high-ranking administration officials.

Ideally, a president would dismiss a Cabinet official or force their resignation before Congress had to get involved. But Trump’s approach has pushed Raskin and his colleagues to rethink that dynamic. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s articles of impeachment, for example, which were put forward in mid-January, drew 187 co-sponsors—an unusually strong level of disapproval in an age where lawmakers often submit articles of impeachment that are more symbolic than substantive in nature.

“In the case of Noem,” Raskin told me, “it is certainly a constitutional crime to unleash government violence and state terror against the American population.” He argued that, by leading the winter campaign against Minnesota, she had “gone out on a limb to destroy our social contracts.” Raskin also noted that House Republicans had sought to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, Noem’s Biden-era predecessor, for alleged border security failures and thereby created an opening for Democrats.

Trump’s rogues gallery of a Cabinet gives House Democrats plenty to work with. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick has drawn renewed scrutiny for his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the sex trafficker who died in federal custody in 2019. Lower-level officials like Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol official who led the Trump campaigns against Los Angeles and Minneapolis, and “border czar” Tom Homan, who allegedly took a $50,000 bribe in a Cava bag from an undercover FBI agent in 2024, are potential targets as well. If criminal charges aren’t feasible against these Trump associates, thanks to the Supreme Court and Trump’s potential pardons, then impeachment offers the best hope for a formal public rebuke of their alleged misconduct.

Much of the post-2020 campaign for accountability centered on Trump and those in his immediate circle. Some top Democrats have argued for a much broader effort next time. “Part of the reason why we are where we are is because there was not enough accountability downstream from Trump,” Marc Elias, a top Democratic lawyer who has played a central role in election-related litigation throughout the Trump era, told me.

Some lower-level Trump allies did face legal consequences for their actions: Multiple co-conspirators in the Georgia election fraud scheme pleaded guilty or took plea deals before that case fell apart, while top figures like Rudy Giuliani were bankrupted by defamation lawsuits brought by two Fulton County election workers whom he had smeared. Next time, however, a much more intensive effort will be required to prevent Trumpism from making a resurgence in the future.

One of the first questions the next Democratic president will face is the fate of ICE and other federal law enforcement agencies. Public opinion swung heavily against federal immigration agents for their lawlessness and their undemocratic tactics in Minnesota over the winter, including the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens. A growing number of Americans now favor abolishing the agency.

Elias argued that Congress should allow civil lawsuits against federal law enforcement officials when they violate a person’s civil rights. Vice President JD Vance received widespread criticism after a federal immigration agent shot and killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good in January. “That guy is protected by absolute immunity,” Vance told reporters. “He was doing his job.”

State and local officials can face civil rights lawsuits under Section 1983, a Reconstruction-era statute, though the Supreme Court has blunted its impact with the doctrine of qualified immunity. No such statute exists for federal agents. “I mean, there’s no reason why federal officials should be able to act with impunity and be unable to be held civilly accountable,” Elias argued.

Another option that Elias cited would be disbarment for attorneys. Some of Trump’s personal attorneys did face career-ending consequences for their role in the 2020 plot to overturn the election. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s most visible legal adviser at the time, lost the ability to practice law in New York, where he was once a top federal prosecutor. Lin Wood, another legal ally, retired from the practice of law in 2023 to avoid similar sanctions from the Georgia bar. The California bar also moved in 2024 to disbar John Eastman, who told Mike Pence that he could unilaterally reject electoral votes and hand the presidency back to Trump.

“Fundamentally, Donald Trump doesn’t believe in anything other than election denialism,” Elias said. “The only through line of his entire administration—from Bobby Kennedy [Jr.], who is nominally pro-choice or was, to people in the Treasury Department who don’t believe in tariffs, the only thing that all those people appointed to the Cabinet, all the federal nominees to the judiciary—the only line they had to toe and continue to toe is election denialism.”

Lies beget more lies. In Trump’s first year back in office, Justice Department lawyers have been repeatedly chastised by federal judges for presenting false or misleading information to the courts. Elias argued that state bar associations should take more forceful steps to hold them accountable for their alleged misconduct.

“Pam Bondi is a member of the bar,” he told me. “The bar shouldn’t be off the hook for doing what they need to do to protect democracy. And if they’re not willing to do that, then I don’t know why we let bars have exclusive licensing over lawyers. You know, at some fundamental level, if the legal profession is not willing to police itself for people who are attacking democracy, then, frankly, just take away the monopoly that lawyers have on practicing law.”

Justice Department lawyers have left the government at an unprecedented rate over the past year, with some stepping down amid public concerns that they were being asked to violate their ethical and legal responsibilities. Those who remained have faced crushing workloads, leading at least one to ask a federal judge to throw her in jail for contempt so she could “have a full 24 hours of sleep.”

Elias had little sympathy for that lawyer. “There is no one who’s working in these U.S. attorney’s offices at this point who is doing anything other than the bidding of Pam Bondi and Donald Trump,” he said, adding he was tired of the “poor, beleaguered line prosecutor” narrative. “No one is putting a gun to these people’s heads to earn a living by throwing children in prison,” he added.

For the nonlawyers working in the Trump administration’s deportation machinery, Congress could impose sweeping consequences. The administration has refused to cooperate with state and local officials who investigate ICE and Customs and Border Protection crimes, most notably by declining to publicly identify the killers of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The now-ubiquitous use of masks makes it hard to tell who should be accountable. (News outlets, after conducting their own investigations, eventually named the two Minneapolis residents’ killers.)

Meanwhile, reports of abuses continue to grow. ICE has built a vast network of detention camps where squalid, unsafe conditions are meant to coerce detained immigrants into voluntarily leaving the country. NBC News reported in February that, in at least one instance at a Texas camp, children were served food containing worms, and their families were brought to a room with a Thanksgiving feast before being told it was for the staff, not for them.

If individual perpetrators can’t be identified or held accountable, more systemic solutions may be required. Lawmakers in a few Democratic-led states have introduced bills that would ban their police departments from hiring former ICE employees in most circumstances. Congress could impose a similar measure nationwide by cutting off federal funds from any law enforcement agency that hires anyone who worked as an ICE or CBP agent after a certain date. Since this would not be a criminal punishment, Trump cannot simply pardon it away.

In addition, lawmakers could exclude the perpetrators of these abuses from access to federal entitlement programs in the future, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. While extreme in theory, such an approach has some precedent. Congress enacted a ban on Social Security payments in 2014 for “individuals who participated in Nazi persecution” before and after World War II. That law’s drafters gave it a simple, straightforward name: the No Social Security for Nazis Act. Those who help federal prosecutors identify and bring charges against the worst abusers could apply to have this ban lifted.

If American institutions fail to hold the Trump administration accountable, other countries might be able to fill the gap. Trump’s disastrous campaign to alienate long-standing American allies in Europe and North America with threats and tariffs has opened the door to options that once would have been unthinkable. Because of alleged international law violations, the former president and his subordinates could also face heightened difficulties—and potential criminal charges—if they travel overseas in the future.

The president does not personally hold international law in high esteem. In a New York Times interview in January, one reporter asked Trump if he was bound by any limits on his foreign policy and war-making powers. “Yeah, there is one thing,” the president replied. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” When asked about international law—the body of norms and practices that the United States helped shape after the twentieth century’s destructive world wars—Trump acknowledged that the United States was technically tethered by it but indicated that it wasn’t a factor in his thinking.

“I don’t need international law,” Trump claimed. “I’m not looking to hurt people.” But international law could greatly complicate Trump’s post-presidential life, as well as the lives of many of his subordinates. His administration’s unlawful military strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have opened the door to criminal charges overseas. The wars against Iran and Venezuela could bring more such charges. Further illegal military actions—say, an invasion of Greenland or Canada—could only deepen his potential peril.

One vector is the International Criminal Court. The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that created the court in 2002, and the Bush and Obama administrations kept it at arm’s length to avoid scrutiny of their military campaigns against foreign terrorist organizations. Nevertheless, U.S. officials could still be prosecuted by the court if they violate the laws of nations against a ICC member state, explained Charlie Trumbull, a professor of international law at the University of South Carolina.

“Under the [Rome Statute], there’d have to be an arrest warrant, and then the states that are party to the ICC would have an obligation to cooperate with the ICC,” Trumbull explained. Indicting a foreign head of state is not merely hypothetical. Two of them currently have ICC warrants out for their arrest: Russian President Vladimir Putin for his role in the war in Ukraine, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the country’s military campaign in Gaza since 2023.

Neither man has been hauled before The Hague, of course, but the warrants have had a tangible impact on their lives. “You can see that they don’t travel very often outside of their countries, and when they do travel, it’s mostly to countries that are not party to the ICC,” Trumbull said, adding that ICC member countries might also refuse or discourage a visit from Trump to avoid legal obligations. “This is because a lot of states are not going to want to ... invite someone who has an arrest warrant to come to their country.”

The likeliest basis for charges would be Trump’s campaign against alleged drug boats in South and Central America. At his behest, U.S. military forces sank at least 30 boats by January and by February killed at least 150 people. In at least one instance, The Washington Post reported, the commander overseeing an attack on a boat ordered a second strike to comply with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s instructions, killing survivors who had been seen clinging to wreckage. These targeted killings of civilians may amount to crimes against humanity under international law.

The Trump administration has defended the military strikes by arguing that the targets were “narco-terrorists” and that they posed an imminent danger to American lives. The latter claim is obviously false, as U.S. warships could have easily intercepted the boats instead of destroying them. Nor does the anti-drug rationale allow for extrajudicial killings under international law, as shown by other recent prosecutions.

There is an ideal recent precedent for such a case: Last year, former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested by the Philippine government and transferred to The Hague. Duterte had publicly bragged about personally killing drug-trafficking suspects as mayor of Davao City and overseeing other extrajudicial killings during his term as president in the 2010s. His trial is expected to begin later this year.

Unsurprisingly, given the Trump administration’s apparent opposition to the concept of international law itself, it has been extraordinarily hostile toward the ICC, even by American standards. Trump imposed a wide range of financial sanctions for the first time against the court, its judges, and its prosecutors last February. The sanctions, which are typically reserved for rogue nations and terrorist groups, effectively severed the ICC employees from much of the world financial system and many digital goods and services. Targeted judges cannot even have Gmail accounts or conduct basic financial transactions with major banks.

The purported reasons for the sanctions were the court’s past inquiries into U.S. military actions in Afghanistan—the brief probe ended in 2021—as well as the ICC’s investigations of Netanyahu’s government, which is closely allied with the Trump administration. But the Trump administration wants to dispense with multinational tribunals for a deeper reason: They offend its vision of power that operates by brute force alone.

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top advisers, proclaimed in a January interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, “but we live in a world—in the real world, Jake—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

That reasoning applies to countries that may want to uphold international law as well. Even if Trump administration officials avoid the ICC’s scrutiny, they may be liable for prosecution by foreign governments anyway. In most countries, courts and prosecutors are bound by their jurisdiction: They can only charge and try defendants for offenses that occurred within their territory. In international law, however, some offenses are considered so grave that they can be prosecuted by any country.

This concept, known as “universal jurisdiction,” could make post-presidential life difficult for Trump and his associates if other countries are willing to use it. German prosecutors, for example, have successfully pursued charges against participants in Syria’s destructive decade-long civil war. In 2022, after hearing testimony from dozens of survivors, a German court convicted two former Syrian intelligence officers of crimes against humanity for their roles in overseeing the Bashar Al Assad regime’s torture camps. One defendant received a life sentence, and the other was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.

In December 2024, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol was impeached for having attempted to impose martial law in the country. In February of this year, Seoul Central District Court sentenced him to life in prison for insurrection and related charges.

Even the threat of foreign prosecution could have a chilling effect on Trump administration officials. A post-presidency Trump may be more reluctant to visit his golf course in Scotland or his resort in Ireland if he fears that the British or Irish governments might arrest him and transfer him to The Hague. (A 2002 law prohibits the federal government itself from extraditing Americans to ICC custody.)

Trumbull cautioned that international law prosecutions can often face a significant time lag. “A lot of times, accountability for international crimes takes a long time to materialize,” he pointed out. “We’ll see prosecutions for crimes that were committed 10, 20 years ago. So the fact that there might not be accountability in the next few years does not mean that accountability might not happen at a later time.” In short, what Trump administration officials do over the next three years could haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Accountability for politicians can be a mercurial concept. Impeachment is the proper tool for it. When the Framers drafted the Constitution, they deliberated over how to properly structure it in a truly republican society. They knew that impeachments in Britain were often long, complicated affairs—colonial official Warren Hastings’s impeachment, trial, and eventual acquittal for alleged abuses in India lasted from 1788 to 1795—and had much higher stakes. Had Hastings been found guilty, the House of Lords could have ordered him to be imprisoned.

American impeachments are less punitive and more direct. Any federal official can be impeached for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” That last phrase is as broad as Congress wants it to be. “They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 65, “as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” Or, as Gerald Ford once phrased it in more modern language, “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”

While the mechanisms of accountability are important, the spirit that drives them is just as vital. A jail cell may not await Trump. But after another four years of defiling the republic, there will be no post-presidential peace for him or his top associates. There will be no lighthearted vacations to Europe, for fear of trial beyond the Supreme Court’s reach. There will be no adjunct job at some university or quiet retirement to some farm or ranch. There will be investigations. There will be depositions. There will be hearings. There will be whatever other measure of lawful justice can be provided. The fears that Trump voiced at the Kennedy Center in January were well-founded. Dictatorships are always more fragile than they try to seem. If anything, the president has deeply underestimated his legal and political peril.

https://newrepublic.com/article/207369/trump-post-presidency-accountab
ility-hague

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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