Last month, we posted our episode of Zooming In recorded on site at LibCon2026. It featured Liberalism.org’s Aaron Ross Powell as host, and panelists Jamelle Bouie and David French, both of The New York Times, and Harvard’s Danielle Allen, for a sweeping conversation on which institutions of American life need to be torn down, which need to be rebuilt, and whether liberalism can offer something as compelling as the utopian visions its illiberal rivals are pushing.

While we were recording our episode, Yascha Mounk and the Persuasion team were recording their own, The Good Fight Club, at the hotel, offering LibCon attendees an embarrassment of good choices.

Mounk was joined by three LibCon2026 speakers—Stanford’s Francis Fukuyama, Renew Democracy Initiative’s Linda Chavez, and the Up and Up’s Rachel Janfaza—for a conversation on Gen Z’s political instincts, what liberalism needs to reclaim from the republican tradition, and AI’s effect on liberal culture.

The transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Persuasion

The Good Fight Club: Refounding Liberalism, Gen Z's Political Instincts, and a Watergate Ghost Story

In this week’s episode of The Good Fight Club, Yascha Mounk, Francis Fukuyama, Linda Chavez, and Rachel Janfaza explore whether Gen Z’s political instincts are genuinely liberal, what a renewed liberalism needs to reclaim from the republican tradition, and how to rebuild a culture of public-spiritedness in an age of anti-establishment politics…

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2 months ago · 4 likes · Yascha Mounk

Yascha Mounk: Welcome to this live episode of The Good Fight coming to you from the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. I am joined today by Rachel Janfaza to my right. She is the founder of Up and Up.

I’m joined by my good friend and colleague Francis Fukuyama, who is of course the founder of our co-conspirator American Purpose, among many, many other things. Welcome, Frank.

And I’m joined by Linda Chavez, who is the vice chair of the Renew Democracy Initiative, which was founded by our good friend Garry Kasparov. Welcome.

So we have serious things to talk about today, but before we get to those serious things, Linda, you told me that you just ran into somebody interesting in the lobby of what I will remind listeners is the Watergate Hotel.

Linda Chavez: The Watergate Hotel, and who did I run into but Roger Stone. Now, Roger Stone and I go back many, many years because, as you know, I was a Republican and served in the Reagan administration. But when I was younger, in my twenties, I actually worked here at the Watergate for the Democratic National Committee, which was headquartered here. And I think it was my birthday in 1972. I actually ran into the Watergate burglars in the afternoon when they were trying to tape open the doorway up to Larry O’Brien’s office, which they were going to go into and steal secrets from later in the day. I didn’t know it until I opened the papers, I think it was a Sunday morning, and saw the fellow I had run into, who looked very shocked when he saw me.

So I told Roger that story, but I also reminded him that he was at CREEP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President. He was, you know, the bad boy for Richard Nixon. And among my nefarious deeds as a young person, I stole the plaque from CREEP off the offices. Unfortunately I was not able to keep it. It probably would be quite valuable today. Someone stole it from me. So I reminded him of that, and we said hello to each other.

Mounk: Was it cordial?

Chavez: Yes, cordial. He knows I’m an anti-Trumper, but he also remembers me from the Reagan years, probably.

Mounk: I love that Washington, D.C. is obsessed with these acronyms—the SAVE Act, the USA Act, whatever. I like that the Committee to Re-Elect the President is CREEP.

Chavez: Very appropriately named.

Mounk: Well, thank you for reminding us at the beginning of this conversation that threats to the rules and norms of liberal democracy are not entirely new in this town. But today I want us to think about what the nature of the threats to liberalism are today and, more importantly, how liberalism can try to refound itself.

Liberalism from its inception was always a radical ideology. Liberals wanted to abolish the Corn Laws, to fight against discrimination against so many groups in society, to fight for the equality of women. They had a vision of society that was radically at odds with the society in which they lived. And in large part liberals succeeded. The world we live in today is not perfectly liberal, but it has very deep liberal elements which help to explain some of the things that are good about our society.

But I think that also creates a danger—the danger that we become too invested in the status quo, where we try to keep everything as it is rather than continuing to have that mission of making the world align more closely with the ideals we have. And so we want to talk today a little bit about areas from culture to immigration to AI, and envisage what a radical liberal agenda, a philosophical liberal agenda, might look like.

Let’s start with culture. Rachel, I’m wondering how you’re seeing this. You are a little younger than the rest of us on the panel. More importantly, you work a lot with young people, trying to understand the political opinions of members of Gen Z. Is Gen Z horribly illiberal, and do we have to be very grouchy and afraid of the future, or can you bring us some good news?

Rachel Janfaza: Well, first of all, Yascha, thank you so much for having me. And it’s an honor to be here with you, Linda and Francis. No, I don’t think that there is grave cause for concern, and that might be controversial compared to some of the headlines that we read about young people and their political beliefs. But when I look at it on the whole, and I hold focus groups with Gen Zers across the country, they reject labels altogether. They’re a very ideologically independent group of young people.

When it comes to the question of liberalism, if you look at the core values that matter to young people in this country—and I think this really started to bubble up during the pandemic—it’s things like freedom of speech, individual rights and autonomy and agency, and those are all liberal ideas, liberal values. And so the jargon might go one way or another in the words that we use to describe it, but on the whole, this generation is rejecting those labels outright and really just is honing in on what they believe. And I think ultimately I’m hearing a lot recently that they want to live in a society where it is okay to hold some parts of one party’s platform to be true and at the same time other parts of the other party’s platform. And they reject the fact that that has not been the norm for their entire adult life. So I think it actually is in the culture of Gen Z to be liberal, lowercase-L liberal.

Mounk: So when you get the impression that half of young people are fans of democratic socialists and the other half are fans of men’s rights activists and so on, is that a complete misunderstanding of where most young people are? Is this just a small section of very political people? Is it that they sometimes like quite extreme people, but it’s because those people come across in positive ways that aren’t ultimately related back to those ideologies? Not to compare Zohran Mamdani to the people we just talked about, but when a lot of them like Zohran Mamdani, is it that he’s a very committed democratic socialist, or is it that they just think, you know, he seems honest and seems charismatic and seems like he’s trying to do something good, and they don’t actually buy into the ideology that may in fact be driving him?

Janfaza: So I’ve been asking this very question over the past few weeks in focus groups. First of all, I’ve been asking, who’s a candidate who you think is doing a good job in the country right now? Young people from across the country will name Zohran Mamdani as someone. And then I ask, what is it about him? They say things like hope, change—he is bringing a fresh take. The anti-establishment sentiment is real, but it’s not that they are socialists. So then I ask, how many of you consider yourself to be a democratic socialist? I have not yet found one person who considers themselves to be a democratic socialist. And I have taken a step further and said, can you tell me what it means to be a democratic socialist? I think part of the reason why they’re rejecting this is because they reject labels outright, going back to my earlier point, but they appreciate what he has brought: the energy, this sort of hope-maxing vibe that he campaigned on and is now serving with, and the fact that he campaigned on a vision and is governing with a vision at a time when so many politicians are all about being the opposite of someone else. So I think that is what is resonating from these democratic socialist candidates across the country. It’s in a vacuum of vision from other types of leaders. They are able to share what they do stand for, and not only what they stand against.

Mounk: Frank, what does it take to build a sufficiently liberal culture for democratic norms to persist? If young people have, as Rachel is saying, basically liberal instincts without necessarily having the language to articulate it, if they might be drawn to some politicians who may not be fully liberal but for reasons that aren’t deeply illiberal—how concerning is this? What kind of understanding of liberalism do we actually need to anchor in the wider culture for liberalism to persist through this day?

You could think about two very different positions on this. You might say: if people don’t have a genuine understanding of the logic of our institutions, they’re not going to be able to defend them, and we’re going to abandon them. Or you could say: perhaps it’s fine that people don’t really understand what it is, but as long as they have the instinct that if something is illiberal, if something seems unfair to them, that’s not right—that may be enough to preserve that culture and those institutions.

Francis Fukuyama: Well, I think that there’s an important cultural change that needs to take place, which has to do with the question of virtue. Liberalism is built around a theory that there’s no overarching dominant idea of virtue or the good life—as you’ve explained to Curtis Yarvin and characters like that. This arose out of the wars of religion in early modern Europe, and the fact that people couldn’t agree on what virtue or the good life was, and so you settle for life itself—that we should be able to live in peace and tolerate other people.

But this creates a kind of vacuum that has been felt by many people. Your liberal society tells you to be endlessly tolerant, don’t be judgmental. If you say something’s better than others, or you criticize somebody on moral grounds, you’ll find some liberal scold saying, don’t be like that. What makes you think you’re so important or great that you can actually judge people? And I think that that is a misunderstanding of liberalism, because liberalism does not require that you abandon all of your moral priors. And in fact, a healthy liberal society is built around people who do have moral priors. They may not be the same, defined, let’s say, in religious terms—you tolerate people who differ from you, but you don’t say, well, anything goes, I’m just fine with anything.

But it still leaves a kind of hole for people, because they really want something to believe in, and some core that can be the source of community for them. I think that there is an older tradition, older actually than liberalism, that influenced the Founding Fathers quite strongly, which is the tradition of small-r republicanism. Our friend J.G.A. Pocock wrote a whole book about how this idea in a way begins with Machiavelli, and it develops in Europe in early modern times and then crosses the Atlantic and affects the American founding fathers.

What a small-r republican, as opposed to a liberal, believes is that there is such a thing as virtue, and that virtue is public-spiritedness—that you have to be oriented towards the public good, and that your life is not going to be fulfilling if all you care about is your friends and family and your little closed-in world. And it seems to me we’ve kind of lost that sense. I certainly see it in my students—very few of them actually want to go into public service, although that may be changing. I think that could be changing just in the past couple of years. Really, since the 1980s, they’ve been told that the government is terrible, it’s corrupt, it’s captured, and so they want to stay away from it. If they’re publicly oriented, they’ll go to work for an NGO or a public interest law firm and spend their lives suing the government to stop it from doing bad stuff.

I think that in a way we need to recapture a different kind of culture, where public service is actually seen as a virtue. For the generation that brought about the New Deal and then went on to win World War II, that was a very strong feeling. You had all these very public-spirited people who created the basic institutions that then persisted into the postwar period, and you have very few of them right now. So one of the things that a reconstructed liberalism needs to do is to reorient people towards the idea that there is a greater good. People are always complaining: I’m pursuing this life as a consultant with Arthur Andersen or whatever company, working for OpenAI, but my life doesn’t have any meaning—it’s a good career, my parents are happy that I’ve got a job, but what’s the greater purpose?

I think that one of the ways to reinstill a sense of purpose and meaning is to reimbue people with the idea that we are in a common political project. What a liberal democracy is, is not just having the government leave you alone to do whatever you want. It’s also a public project where we want to actually do things in common. That leads in all sorts of different directions. I’m a big fan of abundance. I think that we ought to have a government that can build things—we ought to have high-speed rail in California. But it’s still related to culture, because I think the idea of building public things is really about reorienting people towards that public-facing orientation, where they’re not just trying to figure out how to maximize their incomes, but they’re saying: what is the public good that we are trying to do? How do I participate in the formulation of these projects? How do I help to implement them?

So I do think that culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum where it’s just a bunch of ideas that float around in the air and one of them lands on your head and all of a sudden you have different ideas. I don’t think you build a spirit of public-spiritedness unless you actually are active in public affairs.

Mounk: One of the really striking things when you look at polling of young people—and perhaps you’ll correct me in a moment—is that the values that they have have really changed. For example, we are now at the absolute top of how much young people care about making money and having not just professional success, but really financial success. And they give relatively less importance to things like personal relationships or making a contribution to a community, and so on. That’s a really striking change that we’ve seen over the last decades.

Now, I think there’s a kind of post-liberal critique, which I think you’re sort of implicitly responding to, Frank, which is saying that perhaps liberalism has always been parasitic on a deeper set of virtues—that liberalism was a response to a very traditional society, and perhaps it had some good contributions to make, but it worked because there was that older set of virtues of duty and of caring about the common good, and that it slowly has eroded them. Now we’re left without any of them, and that’s why liberalism goes so terribly wrong. I don’t believe that. I don’t think anybody on this panel believes that. But what is the response to that, Linda? Is there a way of talking about public-spiritedness, about virtue, about, as John F. Kennedy would have put it, “ask not what the country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” that still respects the limits on liberalism—which is that the state shouldn’t tell you how to live, and shouldn’t tell you what moral virtues to have, and shouldn’t tell you what religious convictions to have?

Chavez: Well, I actually do believe that for a functioning democracy, you have to be steeped in certain civic virtues. You do have to believe in a sense of duty or loyalty. You have to believe that there is objective truth. You have to be able to feel compassion. A society doesn’t work without people who do not just think in selfish terms.

And when you think back about our society—I’m not a political philosopher, I didn’t even study political philosophy in school—but when I think about our founding, or even liberalism writ large, I think about my own sense that free market economies have produced more benefit, more good, for greater numbers of people than any other. I think back to Adam Smith, but I remember that Adam Smith didn’t think Wealth of Nations was his most important book. He thought The Theory of Moral Sentiments was his more important book.

And I do think that you need that kind of basis, and I think we’ve lost that. It began to unravel, I think, in the sixties, and certainly progressed all the way through to the present. It’s not taught in school anymore. It isn’t just that we don’t teach basic civics—how the government operates, what branches there are, the Constitution, the Declaration. Those things depend on certain moral sentiments. And we’re loath to do that. I think liberals in particular are loath to do that, because they don’t want to acknowledge that there is at least a universal set of moral sentiments or values that are conducive to liberal democracy, and that without those, you don’t have the building blocks.

Mounk: Rachel, I’m struck by the debate that we had ten or so years ago when Jordan Peterson became a huge shooting star and attracted a lot of young followers, and was vilified in all kinds of ways for it. It always struck me that, in a sense, his rise—which I did see with some concern—was broadly our fault, the fault of us liberals, because he was speaking to young people, giving them a vision of how to lead their lives, which is not my vision, but which was a substantive vision, which made a real offer to them. And I think a lot of people who are more moderate, a lot of people who are philosophical liberals, didn’t do that. We didn’t say: here is a really deep, meaningful, ambitious way to lead your life, formulated from that kind of liberal perspective.

So do you think that young people have models for how to lead their lives that are in tune with the kind of liberal virtues that Linda just spoke to, or do they have to look to looks-maxxers or various other interesting figures, to have some kind of vision of how to lead their lives?

Janfaza: That’s a great question. I think the reality is that the social media ecosystem is so saturated that there is no one visionary leader for anybody, because there are just too many people whom someone can listen to. Micro-influencers who don’t have many followers might be the most followed person by one individual, and so it’s very messy. But I think when I ask young people, who do you most look up to and respect when it comes to values and who you want to build your life based off of, most of the time they say someone who they have an intimate relationship with—whether it’s a teacher, professor, a parent, a grandparent, a friend, someone in their community.

I think there’s a real opportunity there to make that more mainstream, that those are the people who young people are looking up to. I think we tend to sensationalize and focus on the fact that yes, there are very popular social media content creators, streamers, influencers who have very loud voices and very big followings, but even if they do have a huge following, they are not followed by all young people, and yet every young person does have someone in their life whom they have modeled themselves off of. So when it comes to the values that are most important, and where young people are getting their inspiration from, I just think it’s not monolithic. There is no one clear answer right now, in part because their entire childhood and adult lives have been shaped by so many different voices. There’s no one source of information, and Linda mentioned the need for objective truth, and that is really hard to find right now.

Mounk: Frank, if I locked you into a room and forced you to write a book called Twelve Rules for Liberal Life, that was meant to give young people guidance about how to lead a meaningful life, written from a broadly philosophically liberal perspective, what would you tell them?

Fukuyama: Well, the first thing they’ve got to do is figure out how to get out of that room.

Mounk: Well, you’re in the room, they’re not in the room. You’re in the room until you’ve given them that advice.

Fukuyama: I don’t know about twelve virtues. I do think that there’s a particular problem with young men right now, and it is really true that they don’t have appropriate role models. I think those exist in the literature. Harvey Mansfield, who was my teacher at Harvard, wrote a book on manliness. And it was widely derided by the usual suspects as being a kind of celebration of a bad kind of masculinity. But it wasn’t. It really derives from Machiavelli’s understanding of virtù, which Machiavelli himself understood as a masculine virtue, but it was very, very different from the kind of toxic masculinity that is out there on the internet right now, because it had to do with ideas of virtue, of service, of nobility, of the ability to be courageous and use your strength, but to use it for public purposes—because Machiavelli was indeed one of the founders of the theory of modern republicanism.

I think that if there is a way of reviving that understanding among young men about how to be both male but also virtuous in that Machiavellian sense, I think that would be very good. Take something like risk-taking. This is something I wrote about—my least-read book, called The Great Disruption, which I published in 1999, is actually all about gender relations. I didn’t realize it at the time how important this was. There are substantial differences between men and women. For example, young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five commit eighty percent of all the crimes in the world. And this is culturally invariant, right, so it does seem to be rooted in biology, where young men are programmed to take risks. If you think about human evolutionary history, there’s probably a good reason for that—if you’re hunting mastodons or saber-toothed tigers or whatever, you’re going to have to take certain kinds of risks that women are not going to have to take, raising young people. And you can’t have a society in which you don’t have people who are willing to do that kind of risk-taking.

So you don’t want to breed it out of human beings, but you have to orient that risk-taking towards things that are actually socially constructive. I think that articulating what a model of that would look like is important. The traditional understanding, for example, of a citizen soldier embodies something like that—that you would take up arms and risk your life on behalf of the whole community, but it was a very pro-socially oriented kind of thing, and we have somehow lost any sense that that’s a virtuous kind of life to live. Now, how you recover that, I think, is difficult, because you’ve got a lot of competing gods out there. But at least as a model of what you would want a virtuous person in a liberal republic to look like, I think that would be something like it—at least for part of the population.

Mounk: Linda, shifting the ground somewhat—we’ve been talking, in a sense, about who we should be at the deepest level, in terms of how we identify ourselves, what our values are, what we might have in common in a society that is meant to be deeply fragmented and diverse in terms of our ideas and our religions and our origins, but that perhaps could be united by some kind of common virtue. The other question is about who we are in a more literal sense—who is here in this country, who should be here in this country, who should not be here in this country. How should we treat people who have been here for a long time, who perhaps make real contributions to the country but who don’t have a legal title to be here?

So how should we think about reaching a settlement on this question of who we are, on this question of immigration, at a moment when we seem to be more divided about it than ever?

Chavez: Well, I think this has been a big divide for a while now. Immigration clearly is the driving factor in populism, not just here but around the world. I think immigration as an issue is quite different in the United States than it is in Europe. First of all, we are very fundamentally an immigrant nation, more than any other country I can think of. There are a few other examples—Argentina, Israel in a certain sense, where it’s an ingathering that creates the nation—but this has defined us from the beginning. And we did quite well for 150 years with open borders. We basically let anybody come, and we were eager to expand territorially and to create a sense of nation. We were willing to welcome all comers.

We didn’t really start seeing pushback until first against Asians, specifically the Chinese, but then in the early twentieth century, a push against Southern and Eastern Europeans. And that’s when we began to restrict immigration. So in 1965, we dramatically loosened the laws that had been put into place in the early twentieth century, and we became much more welcoming again.

But because the numbers of people we were bringing in were fixed and pretty static—they were based on family reunification, so they expanded a little bit—it wasn’t a rational system in the sense that we didn’t look at the country’s needs. There are times when you need more people, times when you need less, and we didn’t have to really deal with that, because there was a kind of flow of people that met the market but came illegally, that didn’t go through the system of legally immigrating to the United States, mostly from Latin America. Obviously, we share this big border with Mexico, and it worked for quite a while.

But starting really in the 1990s, we started to see a kind of nativism rising up again against this flow of mostly Latin Americans. And it was driven, as all of these periods have been, toward restriction, by the fear that these people were not really going to become Americans. I love to talk to audiences and hear people say, well, my grandparents came from Italy the right way. And they came before 1924, and the right way was: we had open borders. People don’t understand that. They were all Sicilian peasants, and the gap between them and the population at the time was actually greater than that of Mexican immigrants who came. So the point is, we had a market, and it worked because of illegal immigration.

Some of us, including myself, thought, well, we really need a revised legal immigration reform. We need to revise our law, make it more rational, look at skills in addition to family reunification. But unfortunately the nativist antagonism that built up—and these weren’t nativists in the sense of people who trace their family back to Jamestown or Plymouth Rock, these were people who came in the early twentieth century, but they were very fearful.

And then I think what dramatically affected this was the Biden years. I remind people that in 2015, when Donald Trump descended the escalator and talked about rapists and murderers, all these bad people coming in from Mexico, “not sending its best,” we were actually at a 50-year low in illegal immigration. The flow was not great at that time. It actually got much worse later. But I think a lot of liberals, including myself, underestimated the fear that the chaos at the border, which occurred particularly during the Biden presidency, generated. And that gave Donald Trump his opening. Sure, the economy was a big factor, and people were hoping they’d see an economy like that of 2017, 2018, the pre-pandemic economy. But fear about immigration was a large driver in this election.

So now we’re at a point where we have to make a decision, we have to do something. Trump got elected saying he was going to deport people, deport everybody. And basically what we’re seeing now is people being shot in the streets—people who are here legally, US citizens, being shot by ICE. I think there’s a kind of revulsion at that. But we still haven’t seen, out of Congress, which is where this has to happen, Democrats who are willing to sit down with Republicans—because they’re fearful too—and come up with a rational immigration policy that takes a look at what our needs are. Because we’re heading into a birth dearth—we have a birth dearth already, but by 2056 the US population would begin to shrink in absolute terms, and this is going to be dramatically bad for the people who live here now.

Fukuyama: Linda, tell me if I’m wrong, but another thing that happened in that decade of the 2010s was that a lot of the people coming into the country discovered the asylum law.

Chavez: Yes, absolutely. I had sort of hoped that in the last year of the Biden administration we could see some fixes on asylum law, because it was being exploited. People were coming for economic reasons, and that’s a perfectly good and valid reason—we need to figure out a way to legally admit those people—but it’s not what the asylum laws were made for. I initially thought that the way Biden handled it—let’s take all of these asylum seekers, give them a path to come in, have their interview, and then wait their turn for their immigration court hearing—that that would work. But it didn’t. What it did is that Governor Abbott and others, shipping all of these asylum seekers to cities like Chicago and Denver and New York, was brilliant. It made even liberals and liberal politicians say, wait a second, we can’t deal with this.

Mounk: So we talked about the United States and immigration in a way where the case should be somewhat easier in the United States, because the country has such a long history of immigration. I do think that most Americans recognize at some level that immigration is in the country’s DNA. The case that immigration is the key driver of the rise of populism is probably even stronger in countries in Western Europe, for example, where that really is at the very top of the political agenda.

One of the strange things is that there’s a lot of cycling in political and public opinion about immigration. You see in the United States that in 2015 there is a strong anti-immigrant mood, and that’s part of what gives Donald Trump the opportunity for his political rise. When he comes into office, you have the kind of thermostatic counter-reaction to that, and opinions become more pro-immigration. The Biden administration goes in and hugely misunderstands that mandate, loosens rules in such a way that you’re going to have an unprecedented number of people coming across the border, and then opinion swings right back. And now, going back to that liberal instinct, seeing the way ICE is operating in American cities, with agents that don’t identify themselves, that carry out often arbitrary stops and in many tragic cases end up killing people, you see opinion become very pro-immigration again.

One way I think about this, Frank, is that perhaps what most citizens want is something that is very reasonable. I think what large majorities of democratic citizens want is often reasonable, but it’s just impossible for governments to deliver. They want real control of a border, they don’t want illegal immigration, they want us to be able to set the rules for who comes in when, which is a perfectly legitimate set of aspirations to have for your country. And at the same time, they don’t want state cruelty. They don’t want to see people in Maine or in Texas or in other parts of the United States shot by ICE agents. They don’t want little children to wash up on the European shores of the Mediterranean because they were trying to come across. And it’s very hard to do both of those things at the same time. So when governments are overly lenient, they say, hang on a second, look at this chaos, we don’t want that. And when governments crack down, whether in the gratuitously cruel way of a Trump administration or even in a smarter, more targeted way, they say, well, look at all these cases of injustice, that doesn’t seem fair, let’s loosen up. That’s why we keep going back and forth. Is there some kind of principled solution to this?

Fukuyama: Look, as Linda knows well, there was a principled solution to it. It involved a trade where you would exert real control over the borders so that people could not simply come illegally. You really had to do that with a national ID card of some sort, because so many of the undocumented people actually weren’t crossing the border—they were visa overstayers—and you had to have a way of catching them. So on the one hand, you have real control over the border, but for the people who had come in earlier years and had built families and were not criminals and were hard-working people, you had to give them a path to citizenship. I think every major comprehensive immigration reform proposal over the past several decades has involved that trade: you really control the border, but you also have a path to citizenship. And the path to citizenship was just an absolute no-go for Republicans.

Chavez: I think that’s correct. By the way, even though philosophically I’m opposed to the idea of having a class of people who are not able to become citizens, I think as a one-time compromise, if it was what was needed in order to get real, serious immigration reform and give legal status to the people here, that’s something that ought to be at least debated.

Give people legal status. I would not want to see this be an ongoing process. I would want to see it much like the ’86 amnesty was a one-time deal—that if the price of getting Republicans to go along with giving legal status is that you’ve been here a certain number of years, and a majority of people who are undocumented in the United States have lived here more than a decade... The guy who was killed in Texas last week had lived in the United States for thirty-five years. And that’s not unusual. That’s actually quite common. There is a concept in the law of desuetude, where a law that is not enforced and is ignored for many, many years should pass away and become ineffective. That’s sort of where we were with legal immigration. We’ve known for decades how many people we had here, more or less, and how long they’ve been here, and we did nothing about it. So this idea that suddenly, in one year, we’re going to start deporting people, rounding up two thousand people a day, which is Stephen Miller’s quota—and, you know, as a former Republican who was opposed to quotas, I’m fascinated that quotas are the big thing in this administration, all sorts of quotas, including quotas for deporting people. So that would be one compromise that I think liberals have to at least consider, if it could be an honest deal that would give people some sense that we could have a path for legalization, if not citizenship.

Mounk: Rachel, is there any more agreement among Gen Z Americans about immigration than there is among older Americans? And how do you think we can talk in a broader sense about what borders mean in a country, and how to treat people who are in this country, in a way that might be able to forge some kind of consensus?

Janfaza: I think part of why we saw young people swing to the right in 2024 was because of immigration, and young men in particular—that was a top issue, along with the economy. The way this is manifesting as a political issue for young people, it is an economic issue, because young people are scared of one thing, and it’s not having a job. So for them it’s very much—there was very much a buy-in to the fear-mongering around the idea that immigrants are taking jobs that would be yours otherwise. I think this is very much related to the conversation around AI too, and how that is now an anxiety-producing issue, because it goes back to the same idea of jobs.

So I think the issue is intersectional with a lot of other political issues for young people. But then again, Yascha, you brought up before that there has been this action, reaction, culture, counterculture that has brewed throughout history, but especially in the past ten years, very quickly, back and forth.

Mounk: Do you think social media is speeding that?

Janfaza: That’s exactly where I was about to go with that—young people move at the speed of the internet, and nothing stays a trend for more than literally twenty-four hours or less. That is translating into their politics. I think it’s why this generation is as swingy as it’s shaping up to be. The immigration conversation is a part of that too, because we saw this movement to the right in 2024, and many of the young men who voted for Trump, with immigration as a core concern, saw what happened in Minnesota with ICE shooting American citizens and said, hey, that’s not what I voted for. When did that become okay? That’s part of the reason why they’ve retracted and are moving away from him.

Mounk: Just to stay on that theme for a moment—imagining that Democrats win in 2028, and perhaps they even have a trifecta—do you think there’s a danger that an incoming Democratic administration, both in immigration and more broadly, is going to overstate its mandate, is going to think, look, we’ve always thought that young people are naturally progressive, and there was a weird moment in 2024 when they helped elect Donald Trump, and perhaps we’ll deny and ignore that a little bit, but now they’ve swung back to being progressive, and whatever we do, they’re going to be on our side. Then, by the summer of 2029, they’re going to be swinging back to the other side.

Janfaza: Well, I don’t think that defection away from Trump is automatically a swing towards Democrats from young people. Democrats are not doing well with young people right now, and even if young people aren’t in favor of Trump, it does not mean they’re suddenly progressive again.

Mounk: But I think a lot of Democratic consultants believe that, even if you’re rightly pointing out that it’s not the case.

Janfaza: Yes. When it comes to the mandate that a 2028 candidate needs to govern with, but also needs to campaign on, it’s just more practicality, more willingness to actually work with the other party. Part of the frustration and the distrust in government from young people right now is because they don’t see any meaningful action. Where we see glimmers of hope and trust in elected officials is at the local level, where young people can feel the intimate effect of actions being taken, whether it’s regarding city infrastructure or housing policy or education. This might sound totally out of tune with the trope about young people, but this is what I’m hearing, and it’s where they’re actually able to see effective government. So I think there’s a lesson there that any candidate in 2028 needs to learn from, and this is actually something young people are asking for: to make their life meaningfully better, to make it feel like there’s progress happening. They just don’t see that happening right now at the national level.

Mounk: Frank, Rachel mentioned the fear that some young people had that immigrants might take their jobs. That’s an actual bridge to the last topic that I wanted to touch on. Yuval Harari said recently that in a way AI is the ultimate immigrant—which is to say that if the role of the immigrant in political discourse is that he might take your job, the role of artificial intelligence today is that artificial intelligence might take your job.

I think AI also poses a kind of deeper challenge to parts of liberal self-conception. We were talking about this at an event recently. I wonder whether part of the liberal ethos derives from a particular answer to the question of “what is man, that thou art mindful of him?” And that is that human beings, men and women, are able to write poems and compose songs and paint beautiful pictures—that we’re able to do forms of creative expression that are unique to the human species. And AI is perhaps undermining that uniqueness in ways that might really lead to a long-term change in how we think about what we are as humans, and therefore what makes us unique as individuals, and therefore why we need to protect the individuality of humans. Do you think that AI is going to be a challenge to liberalism?

Fukuyama: Yeah, I think anybody that doesn’t think it’s going to be a challenge is really crazy. You just have to look at what’s going on. The thing that makes it very different from immigration is that the kinds of human capacities it’s displacing are not very low-skill—being a maid in a hotel or a busboy or whatnot. It’s replacing people with education, who’ve learned to be computer programmers or financial analysts or whatnot. So it’s threatening a much higher socioeconomic sector.

Mounk: It’s really striking to me that when we first shared certain panels and were at the same conferences ten or so years ago, the received wisdom was that truck drivers are going to lose their jobs, so go learn those kind of jobs, go become a coder. Today the received wisdom is, well, if you’re a coder you’re probably screwed, but go become a plumber and you’re going to have a great future.

Fukuyama: I think that’s pretty clear. I had a student who just went to work for an AI company in healthcare. He is developing systems that will replace the back office of medical doctors. My doctor, who I’m going to see tomorrow morning, has five people working in her office, and I would say that this student of mine—his company is going to destroy their jobs over the next couple of years. So it is going to lead to a really big disruption.

Now, the more philosophical question is what is a human being, the one that you were raising—at what point do we actually accord some kind of idea of personhood to a machine made of silicon? That would have seemed like a ridiculous question even a couple of years ago, but with agentic AI, where you really do not know why the machine is responding the way it is, just the way we don’t quite understand why our friends think what they think, you’re really eroding the boundary there. But you’re the one writing a book about this.

Mounk: Well, I’ll share my views on all of this in due time, when my book is out. Rachel, there’s a lot of media coverage of the sort of turn against AI. There have been a few graduation speeches at various universities where sometimes speakers mention AI as this great, wonderful, exciting thing, and sometimes when it’s mentioned just in a neutral context, there are loud boos from the audience.

What do you think is going to be, not just the view among young people, but more broadly the kind of partisan politics of artificial intelligence? Is it going to be a big topic in 2028? At the moment it feels like it’s just around the corner as a huge topic, but it somehow doesn’t really exist yet as a topic in day-to-day politics. Is that going to change within the next two years, and what are the fronts likely to look like?

Janfaza: I see it showing up in a few different ways. AI touches every single political issue, because AI is literally going to be everywhere and already is. It is, interestingly enough, something that is a shared enemy of young people on both the left and the right. When we talk about the things that young people on the far left and far right have in common, a fear or even hatred of AI is one of those shared common beliefs. It’s manifesting in disagreements and debates over data centers in communities, and we’re certainly seeing 2026 candidates having to confront that. I expect we’ll see more of that in 2028.

I also expect there will be a bigger conversation around the role of education in the conversation around AI—what should schools, both K through twelve and institutions of higher education, be teaching when it comes to AI? And then also, how should employees be expected to use AI, but also what will they get back from their employers if and when their job is eliminated because of AI?

And then, lastly, I would say there is a conversation—and this goes back to something that Francis was saying earlier about purpose—and I think when you think about not just young people, but all people, in their relationship to AI, it comes back to a question of purpose: what is my purpose? This is a generation, when I think about Gen Z, that has grown up really searching for purpose and meaning. They came of age during social media. They spent years of their lives locked down, living only with a few people around them. And now many young people are graduating, either from high school or from college, into a world where they don’t know what the future of their work—which is traditionally a place where people derive purpose—is going to look like. So it’s a big question mark. I think ultimately that boils down to the root of the anxiety, and this is something they are looking for elected officials to be addressing and to be creating a vision around.

Chavez: So I am new to the AI world. I’ve just recently hired my new research assistant, Claude, and he’s pretty good, but he’s not great, I have to tell you. Depending on the kinds of questions you frame, you get a certain amount of information.

But I have to say that when I was writing books—my first book, about Hispanics in the United States, or my book on labor unions—I did my own research. For the first book, there wasn’t really an internet, so I had to go to the library and comb through the shelves, but I was able to find what I wanted. Early on in the world of the internet, particularly with LexisNexis, I could find articles that I knew I had read, a fact that I only half remembered—I was always able to find it. Now, through Google, which used to be very useful to me, it’s not very useful. It never finds what I’m looking for. It finds whatever has been on the internet in the last two weeks and nothing more. If I’m looking for an article that appeared in 1987, even if I know the publication, it can’t seem to find it.

When I’ve used AI in a more personal capacity—I’m very interested in literature, and I’m constantly, I’m in my Balzac phase right now, so I’ll be researching more about Balzac, his life, his writing, the critical reception. I don’t get the actual documents, I just get this synthesis, and it’s usually not adequate. Even in doing preparation for a podcast, again, it’s all synthesized. It’s not so much a question of accuracy, but a question of it being very superficial.

Now, obviously I’m not that sophisticated, I’m not a coder, but what I worry about, and it really goes to some of what Rachel was talking about—I see my grandchildren, and they can’t go anyplace without putting in the address and being given directions to get there. I refuse to do that unless I’ve never been somewhere before. I think it’s really important for the human mind and the brain to keep it—I’m seventy-nine years old, so I have to worry about these things—that if I want to keep my brain working, I’ve got to call on those capacities. And I worry about this generation. I worry about math skills, I worry about reasoning skills, and I worry about the next generation. It’s not even so much that jobs are going to be replaced by AI, but that human beings aren’t going to learn in the way they did, and their own capacity is going to be diminished rather than expanded. That’s my biggest worry.

Mounk: We’re nearly at the end of this conversation. I want to ask each of you to say something, thirty seconds or less, about how we can fight for a philosophically liberal culture. How can we help reinvent how liberalism shows up and presents itself in this very fraught political moment—either in terms of rethinking the tradition, in terms of arguing for these ideas, in terms of inspiring liberal values—how can we bring what we’ve talked about in this conversation into the world? Rachel?

Janfaza: I think that there are a lot of lazy narratives about Gen Z and misconceptions, and it is really important to push beyond those, and to also push young people who have had a lot of crutches around them their entire lives. They can decide not to have a conversation by going on mute, or turning their camera off, or simply not responding to a text. I think it’s very critical that we push them to have those conversations, and that that is an expectation and a norm in our society, and we don’t just give in to this trope that they’re not willing to have the conversation, and so it doesn’t need to be had.

Chavez: I’m very involved in civic education, and I work with a group called the Jack Miller Center that helps teach college professors and graduate students, and tries to promote civic learning at the college level and at the secondary school level. From my own sense, if we want to preserve a liberal democracy, we must pass on an understanding of our founding documents, of our history, and we have to see this as a positive good. So, in terms of my own sense of how to save liberalism and save liberal democracy, it is through education, and revamping our education to go back to teaching the things that have been pushed to the side in order to teach computer science, or in order to teach other kinds of skills that are more based on what kind of job you can get than what kind of person, or what kind of citizen, you are going to be.

Fukuyama: Well, my answer is very simple: the illiberal politicians need to be voted out of office.

This conversation first appeared in The Good Fight in Persuasion.

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Trump has ordered the United States Postal Service to obstruct the delivery of postal ballots in the upcoming midterm elections. With a variety of bureaucratic pretexts, USPS has obliged. So far, despite an unhelpful but ultimately irrelevant procedural intervention from the Supreme Court, the scheme remains blocked by court order, and by the simple reality that neither the states nor USPS have time to implement it at this late date.

Panic is not necessary, as I’ve previously argued. Trump’s scheme is almost assuredly not going to work. But things are getting more serious. And to shrug off the damage the attempt could inflict would be a dangerous error. An incumbent president is seriously trying to interfere with the casting and counting of votes in an election that will decide whether his party keeps Congress. That he is unlikely to succeed does not change what this is: a shocking, criminal assault on the electoral process. He is, in effect, once again trying to steal an election, and this time with years rather than weeks remaining in his own term.

Why the Scheme Will Fail

The executive order, signed March 31, does two things.

First, it directs Homeland Security, working with the Social Security Administration, to compile a “citizenship list” for every state out of federal immigration, naturalization, and Social Security records, and to send it to each state’s chief election official 60 days before every federal election. The list has no legal force of its own, but it comes paired with a directive that the attorney general prioritize prosecuting election officials who issue ballots to anyone “not eligible,” along with the printers and shippers who help them. They are trying to send a message to every county clerk, but the courts will only be able to step in if the administration actually prosecutes anyone.

Second, the order commands the Postal Service to rewrite the rules for postal ballots. Every outbound ballot would have to travel in a USPS-approved envelope carrying a unique barcode. Each state would have to tell USPS, 90 days before an election, whether it intended to use mail ballots at all (every state does, and for some categories is required to do so by federal law). And if so, whether it would hand over, 60 days in advance, a list of every voter to whom it planned to send one. Then the operative clause: USPS “shall not transmit” a mail ballot from any voter not enrolled on such a list. The list is nominally voluntary. But a state that declines to submit one has no enrolled voters, and therefore no ballots the Postal Service will carry back to be counted. The impossible choice offered to the states is to give the federal government their voter files or watch their citizens’ ballots go undelivered.

Given that the midterm election is Nov. 3, the first ballots will be mailed in a matter of days. Federal law requires states to begin mailing ballots to military and overseas voters 45 days before the election, in mid-September, and some states start mailing to everyone sooner than that. Even if this scheme were more reasonable and legal (and it is neither), there is not even remotely enough time for states to overhaul their systems, redesign ballot envelopes, train their employees, and do everything else USPS is now demanding. It’s unlikely USPS itself has managed to build and implement the system at such breakneck speed.

Election bureaucracy is not a nimble enterprise. These things take months and often years to build out, and USPS is demanding it in just a few days.

Whack-a-Mole Disenfranchisement

The litigation has not gone well for the administration, a procedural reprieve from the Supreme Court on Aug. 24 notwithstanding. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia sued when Trump originally issued his executive order, and on June 25 Judge Indira Talwani in Boston held the order’s provisions unconstitutional, blocking them for the November election. The First Circuit upheld her ruling in late July, finding the order directed “unprecedented levels” of federal involvement in how states run elections.

Separately, on Aug. 11, Talwani, in a case brought by voting rights groups, stopped or enjoined the order’s core provisions that directed USPS not to carry ballots from voters missing from a state-submitted list. She also barred the agency from finalizing its rule to implement the rules pertaining to this provision. USPS finalized the rule anyway 10 days later, in direct violation of her injunction, she found.

What the Supreme Court did on Aug. 24 was narrower than has been widely characterized, it is still unhelpful. Six justices stayed the June injunction by Judge Talwani as premature. There was nothing to sue over as no “final rule” had been issued at the time of the filing, the majority reasoned. The executive order had only directed agencies to act and the states were required to do nothing until they did. The unsigned order said nothing about the merits of the executive order. However, it did suggest that its implementation might be unlawful. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a 23-page dissent, objected that the majority had produced a “Catch-Me-If-You-Can” regime in which election challenges are premature until they are too late. She was right.

The Supreme Court’s intervention was made pointless almost immediately, because the final rule the majority said the states had to wait for had already been issued three days before the justices ruled. Talwani first vacated her own Aug. 11 injunction, since the same ripeness reasoning applied to the voting rights groups’ case. However, on Aug. 27, she blocked the final rule itself with a 14-day temporary restraining order. On Aug. 31, refusing to lift that order, she also rejected the administration’s argument that the Supreme Court’s ruling meant any challenge was now too late, calling that a “cynical interpretation” that the justices had not endorsed.

The administration has appealed to the First Circuit, which has already shown its hand, and Talwani heard argument on Sept. 3 on a longer-lasting injunction. (In the federal system, temporary restraining orders last for up to two weeks, preceding a possible preliminary injunction, which can last until the case is decided.) The ripeness objection, that the states sued too early, is gone, and now the case can be considered on its merits—which are not close.

Executive Ordering Illegality

Trump’s order originally directed USPS to check every mail ballot against a government eligibility list before being delivered to the voter, and withhold ballots from anyone not on it. This “verify and withhold” provision is the most aggressive piece of the order. But it is also not in the final rule the Postal Service actually issued. Moreover, ahead of the Aug. 24 ruling, the Department of Justice told the court that USPS “will not perform any verification of voter eligibility or the like.” It also won’t refuse ballots returned by voters missing from a state’s list. USPS’s rule echoes that and claims that the agency will play no part in determining eligibility either of who will receive the ballot.

But disclaiming eligibility checks doesn’t mean no checks at all—the obstacle has simply moved to the other end of the process. Under the final rule, USPS will carry a state’s outbound ballots only after the state gets its envelope design approved, enrolls voters in a new “federal ballot mail portal,” and delivers each ballot batch to a post office, where an election official uploads a manifest—list of packed contents—so that it can be checked against the portal. A sample of barcodes will get scanned to verify the physical ballots match the manifest and portal data. USPS would also hand those voter lists and barcode data to federal law enforcement.

State election administrators already verify voter rolls on both the front end (who they send ballots to) and the back end (verifying a ballot is to be counted when it is received). Introducing an additional, and completely unnecessary, federal step adds nothing to that verification. It only adds a new place for ballots to be rejected, which is the point of this sleight of hand.

But it gets worse. A whistleblower disclosure to Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s office, made public Sept. 1, reports that the agency has internally adopted a “zero percent failure rate” policy: if a single ballot in a batch fails to match the portal—a barcode that will not scan, a voter who recently married or moved—the entire batch is thrown out, returned to the state to start over. In other words, one mismatch in a mailing of 10,000 ballots would mean 9,999 ballots get sent back without being delivered to voters to cast. The portal itself, the whistleblower says, is untested, was built in a rush, is still not operating, and was kept in development in defiance of court orders.

This is a blatant attempt at mass disenfranchisement by bureaucratic obfuscation.

If one bad barcode can effectively toss out an entire batch of ballots, there’s a theoretical possibility that Trump could use this scheme to target key swing districts and tip control of Congress toward his party. But nothing we’ve seen so far suggests the administration could secure for itself the secrecy needed to pull that off. When USPS kept building its verification portal in defiance of a court order, as the whistleblower alleges, it was able to hide that work until the whistleblower spoke up. Tossing out ballots weeks before a national election is a completely different story. It would do great damage to whichever state had its ballots hit, and it would happen in front of courts that have already ruled against this administration numerous times.

So the possibility that the administration would actually succeed in throwing out ballots and depress voting is remote, though not zero. It is hard to quietly steal an election through a channel this exposed. As for the portal itself, Talwani’s Aug. 31 restraining order does not stop USPS from building it, or states from volunteering to use it. What it stops is USPS making any of that a condition of carrying ballots, and that holds unless the First Circuit or the Supreme Court lifts it.

The Post Office Is Not a Gatekeeper

Trump’s order and USPS’s implementation of it have no basis in the Constitution, in federal statute, or in two centuries of postal practice. The Elections Clause gives the regulation of congressional elections to state legislatures, subject to override only by Congress. The president has no role at all. Nor does USPS, which Congress made an independent establishment in 1970 precisely to keep it out of presidential hands, have any authority of its own to condition delivery of ballots on anything.

Federal law does not treat mail delivery as a courtesy. Obstructing the mail is a crime for anyone, and for a postal employee it is a felony to destroy, detain, or delay mail entrusted to him. This is the statute used, for example, against carriers who dump mail rather than do their job of delivering it. Alongside it sit duties of universal service and nondiscrimination among users of the mail. Mail lawfully goes undelivered only when Congress itself has declared a category nonmailable, and Congress has never said any such thing about ballots. Its only legislation on the subject runs the other way, requiring states since 1986 to mail absentee ballots to service members and citizens overseas.

Americans have voted by mail since Union soldiers voted from the field in 1864. The history of the postman as censor is ugly, and Congress has firmly rebuked it. In 1835, a Charleston mob seized abolitionist pamphlets and burned them. Andrew Jackson’s postmaster general, Amos Kendall, let Southern postmasters refuse to deliver such mail, writing that they owed a higher obligation to their communities than to the law. But when Jackson asked Congress that December to ban these “incendiary” publications from the mail, and John C. Calhoun produced a bill to do it, the Senate voted it down. The postal act that passed the following summer went the other direction, making it a crime for a postmaster to detain deliverable mail. This is the ancestor of the felony still on the books.

The mail is a common carrier, not a chokepoint. A postal employee who tossed a tray of ballots in a dumpster would be prosecuted, and rightly so. The order directs USPS to do the same to millions of ballots at once. This is a criminal conspiracy as presidential policy, not just metaphorically but literally. Conspiring to keep eligible citizens’ ballots from being delivered and counted is what the Reconstruction Congress criminalized in the Enforcement Act of 1870, as a conspiracy against the free exercise of the right to vote. Issuing it on White House letterhead does not launder it. Trump’s Justice Department will bring no such case, but the five-year statute of limitations outlasts this administration.

Why Vigilance Is Necessary

But just because the scheme is illegal, unconstitutional, incompetent, and unlikely to succeed in disenfranchising voters does not mean it won’t do damage. Judging it by its competence rather than its character undersells it.

Writing in the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie traces the play: lose in the lower courts, stall, then declare the results in noncompliant states fraudulent, so a new Democratic majority takes office under a manufactured cloud. On that reading, the chaos and collapse are not the plan’s failings, they are the real purpose of it. Nor is it an isolated action. On Aug. 31, DHS opened a parallel “voter fraud surge,” sending immigration agents into nine states, several of them battlegrounds, through mid-October.

In 2020, Trump tried to overturn an election after the votes were cast—pressuring officials, recruiting fake electors, summoning a mob against the certification—because the presidency had no lever over the ballots themselves. There’s still a live chance he’ll try something similar to prevent the new Congress from being seated on Jan. 3. He would claim that given all the invalid ballots that were counted, the election outcome itself is invalid and therefore should not be certified and the new members of Congress not seated. That would ultimately fail too, even if a lame-duck Speaker Mike Johnson goes along with it, as I explained. But anything that adds disorder and confusion helps such an attempt, and that is what the mail scheme is for.

The courts will probably hold, and that is a comfort of a sort. Trump cannot count on the Supreme Court to go as far as he wants. The same order that stayed Talwani’s initial order took care to say it was not blessing whatever implementation might follow. The court’s own rule against changing election procedures on the eve of voting cuts against changing them. In general, while the court will go very far, it has not blessed anything so insane and chaotic, and on its own terms is unlikely to do so.

But having a president so willing and ready to subvert the law, Constitution, and citizens’ rights is still an extraordinarily serious matter. Even if the institutions hold for now, Trump’s actions could well sow the seeds for another crisis, especially since he has already pardoned the last insurrection’s violent offenders and the Supreme Court has told him he is immune for his own official acts.

This attempt to destroy electoral democracy must carry serious consequences, or the next attempt will not be so inept. The main remaining remedy is congressional action, and the next Congress will imperil the country if it shies away from it. Subpoenas and hearings for the postal officials who carried this out, a statute declaring ballots mailable and forbidding any condition on their delivery, are the obvious places to start.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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A New York Times investigation a few weeks ago found that Muslim institutions across Texas are facing an escalating campaign from officials and political figures who question whether Islamic practice deserves the label “religious” at all. The easy way to read this is as a story about prejudice against one religious minority: ugly, worth condemning, but ultimately a narrative about how one group is being treated. That reading, though true, misses the bigger issue at stake.

The Texas campaign is not simply discrimination against Muslims; more fundamentally, it is a demonstration of a mechanism that, once normalized, threatens the religious liberty of every American. Put simply: Once Texan officials or any other anti-Muslim agitator hands government a power liberal constitutionalism was built to deny—the power to decide which religion counts as “religion”—that power can be used against Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion.

The Texas Playbook

The specifics matter. Last year, Texas designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations, a label with no basis in federal law but real consequences for how the state treats Muslim civic and religious institutions. This summer, the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport dropped a modest plan to add foot-washing stations used for purification by Muslim travelers after Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to withhold funding, framing a routine accommodation of religious practice as itself a form of discrimination. At the state Republican convention in June, nearly every speech touched some version of anti-Muslim rhetoric. Combating the alleged threat of Sharia law was adopted as a top legislative priority. Lawmakers are now drafting bills for next year’s session to regulate or prohibit specific Islamic practice. These proposals include restricting hijabs and other Islamic dress, closing Islamic charter schools, withholding professional licenses from Muslims, and criminalizing advocacy or implementation of sharia law. The Republican Party of Texas has also called for legislation or constitutional amendments to declare Sharia law seditious and a “competing enemy” of the state and federal constitutions.

Even more startlingly, some Texan officials are pursuing something more direct: a legal definition of Islam as a political movement rather than a religion. That last move has a history. I traced its lineage in my 2019 book, When Islam Is Not a Religion, through decades of American law and politics finding ways to discuss Muslim belief without calling it belief: a security threat, a foreign ideology, a geopolitical system, anything but a faith entitled to constitutional protection. The clearest early instance came in 2010, when opponents of a new mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, sued to block construction on the theory that Islam was not a bona fide religion but a scheme to install Sharia law, and asked a sitting judge to rule on the question.

Texas in 2026 is updating that argument for a new audience, in the same year the country marks the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, the event that gave this style of reasoning its modern American shape.

What the Law Actually Asks

Consider the process of adjudicating a religious claim: Ascertaining whether a practice is in fact “religious” is just the beginning of the analysis. Typically, the claim reaches a court because a person or religious organization has challenged a law, regulation, or government action as burdening religious exercise. The court must first determine whether the asserted practice is religious, though in most cases the government concedes that point. It then asks whether the government has adequately justified the burden.

The government can still restrict a religious practice, but it must clear a high bar: a genuinely serious reason, not just an official’s discomfort or a neighbor’s complaint, and proof that there was no gentler way to achieve that same goal without burdening someone’s faith. (This legal standard is known as “strict scrutiny.”) Cases spanning across diverse facts, from a Muslim prisoner denied a religious diet, to a Christian baker asked to violate his conscience, to a Sikh soldier ordered to shave—they all go through roughly the same analysis. In each case, the question goes well beyond whether the religious practice inconveniences somebody. It is whether the government’s reason for restricting it is strong enough, and whether there was a less burdensome way to get there.

The legal burden on the government is heavy, but even then, not every practice invoking a religious imperative wins. Courts have upheld restrictions when the government’s interest was serious enough, denying parents the right to withhold life-saving blood transfusions from their children on religious grounds, for instance, or requiring a driver’s license photo despite a religious objection to being photographed without a veil. Religious organizations remain bound by generally applicable law like everyone else.

What the Texas campaign does, and what the Murfreesboro lawsuit did before it, is avoid this analysis rather than lose it. If a practice is not religious to begin with, the government never has to justify restricting it, never has to show a serious interest or a lack of alternatives. It only has to win an argument about labels.

Courts can reject this move, but the tactic can still impose years of litigation and practical burdens before that happens. In Murfreesboro, a Tennessee court ultimately found the claim that Islam was not a religion groundless, yet the dispute continued over the mosque’s approval and occupancy before federal intervention helped clear the way.

Importantly, Texas’ current effort remains a political and legislative campaign rather than an accomplished legal redefinition, which means there is still time to defeat it through litigation, public advocacy, and political organizing before it becomes entrenched in law.

One Case Becomes the Next

Religious liberty cases do not stay in their own lane. A Texas legislature can rebrand Islam a political ideology, but that does not make it so as a matter of constitutional law. Courts have their own standards for determining what counts as religion, and there is good reason to think that, at least in the near term, they would reject an attempt simply to strip Islam wholesale of its status as a religion. The opponents of the Murfreesboro mosque tried precisely that argument more than 15 years ago and failed.

But failure in court does not make the gambit harmless. We saw a version of this during the anti-Sharia movement that swept state legislatures beginning around 2010. Oklahoma voters approved a constitutional amendment expressly forbidding state courts from considering Sharia law; federal courts blocked it. Other states adopted facially neutral restrictions on the use of “foreign law.” In Kansas, one such law soon surfaced in the divorce of an Iranian Muslim couple, where a wife sought enforcement of the mahr in her Islamic marriage contract. The court refused to enforce the agreement on several grounds, invoking the new foreign law statute as part of its reasoning and suggesting that a Kansas court could not enforce an agreement arising from a legal system it regarded as inconsistent with gender equality.

The larger point is that a campaign does not have to succeed in persuading courts that Islam is literally “not a religion” to alter Muslims’ legal position. Its premises can work their way into legislation, administrative decisions, licensing rules, land-use disputes, and ordinary litigation, requiring Muslims to defend practices and institutions that would otherwise enter the legal system as recognizably religious. In other words, instead of proceeding directly to the question whether the government may lawfully burden a protected religious practice, Muslims must first meet the threshold burden of establishing that their practice is religious—and therefore entitled to religious-liberty protection at all.

And while the immediate targets of these ominous measures are Muslims, it is important for all Americans to pay attention to what happens in these cases because religious-liberty law does not develop separately for each faith. The rules courts develop in cases involving one religious community become the rules available to—or imposed upon—the next.

Take, for example, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the 2014 case in which the Supreme Court sided with a Christian family business that objected to paying for certain contraceptives on religious grounds. The appeals court ruling that got them there relied heavily on the 2010 Abdulhaseeb v. Calbone case in which a Muslim prisoner had been denied a halal diet. The court reasoned that just as the government had wrongly forced that prisoner to choose between his faith and eating, it was wrongly forcing the Hobby Lobby owners to choose between their faith and millions of dollars in fines. A Muslim prisoner’s win became a Christian company’s precedent.

The chain runs the other way too. In Employment Division v. Smith, the Supreme Court ruled in 1990 that Oregon could deny unemployment benefits to two Native American men fired for using peyote in a religious ceremony. Decades later, that loss became a central precedent in Stormans v. Wiesman, when Christian pharmacists in Washington State argued they should not be forced to dispense a drug that violated their beliefs. The pharmacists lost, in part because of what had already been decided against a different faith practiced by a different, and far less politically powerful, minority.

A win for a Muslim prisoner or a Native American congregant tends to become ammunition the next litigant can use, whatever their faith. A loss becomes a weapon used against someone else entirely. Groups like the Becket Fund, generally associated with conservative Christian clients, have also represented Muslim prisoners, Jewish congregations, and Sikh soldiers for exactly this reason: the law that protects one faith protects all of them, and the law that fails one eventually fails everyone.

What Liberalism Actually Protects

The First Amendment’s religion clauses do not protect Christianity specifically, or the religions practiced in America in 1791, or the religions a given legislature happens to find familiar. They protect religion as a category, applied without regard to whether the state or an electoral majority finds a particular faith popular or convenient. That was the point of taking religious liberty off the ballot: to guarantee that no believer’s rights could be revoked by a vote they lost.

But attempts to strip a faith of protection by relabeling it as ideology, culture, or security risk, rather than by showing that a specific practice fails the standard courts apply, turns religious liberty on its head. The right stops functioning as a right and starts functioning as a grant, extended to whichever faiths the current majority recognizes and withdrawn from whichever faith next falls out of favor.

Liberals of every faith, and none, have reason to take the Texas campaign seriously on these terms. A constitutional order distinguishes itself from a majoritarian one by protecting rights the majority might prefer not to honor. The test of any right is not how easily it is granted to a group everyone already likes, but whether it holds when the claimant is unpopular, unfamiliar, or politically inconvenient. That is precisely the position American Muslims occupy in Texas today.

Religious liberty that bends the moment a faith becomes disliked enough is not religious liberty. It is a license, revocable by whoever currently holds the pen. Every religious minority in this country, not only Muslims, is one relabeling away from finding out what that license was worth, and given how tightly these cases are bound together, so is every faith that has ever borrowed another’s precedent to win its own case.

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In America’s recent experience, the first six months of a war are the best ones. Six months after the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. was setting up a provisional government in Baghdad and hunting down Saddam Hussein. Six months after the invasion of Afghanistan, with the Taliban shattered and Osama bin Laden on the run, combat was winding down. Six months after the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. troops had withdrawn, victorious, from Iraq. Even the Vietnam War looked eminently winnable six months after U.S. Marines landed at Da Nang.

But the war with Iran is different. What began on Feb. 28, a massive joint U.S.-Israeli aerial bombardment coupled with a decapitation strike that killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, may have looked promising at first. But six months in, the spectacle of failure has become dismally obvious. A hardline government in Tehran continues to function and fight. It closed the Strait of Hormuz to shipping. The revolt the Trump administration hoped would topple the mullahs hasn’t happened. U.S. bases in the region have been badly damaged by Iranian missile and drone strikes. Eighteen American service members have been killed and more than 750 have been wounded—a number the Pentagon keeps adjusting upward even during the war’s quieter stretches.

The result is an uneasy stalemate that Donald Trump has found no way to break. He began the war, egged on by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, assuming it would be a simple duplicate of the U.S. strike that toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and installed a puppet government in Caracas. But the Iranian regime is a far more formidable adversary.

Trump now finds himself in a cruel trap of his own making, desperate to find an exit he can call a victory. On Aug. 24, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a slate of new economic sanctions that he described as “a sustained campaign to collapse every last option for Iran.” Trump called it “an economic D-Day.” But to expect success from imposing economic sanctions on a country that has spent the last 47 years enduring and evading economic sanctions is a triumph of hope over experience. The Wall Street Journal noted, “Unmentioned in Scott Bessent’s speech announcing ‘Operation Economic Outcast’ was the country that has enabled Iran to withstand years of American pressure: China.”

In June, Trump signed a Memorandum of Understanding to begin a ceasefire and end the war, which had at least two conspicuous flaws: it required Iran to open the strait for only 60 days, and it soon disintegrated because its terms were ambiguously worded and unenforceable. After a series of strikes by each side, Trump declared the ceasefire “over” and called Iran’s rulers “scum.” On Sunday, after weeks of inaction on either side, the U.S. struck targets on an island in the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran responded with missile attacks on an air base in Jordan.

Trump has vacillated repeatedly between threats to obliterate Iran and claims that yet another deal to end the war is about to be reached. But no deal has materialized, and Iran hasn’t backed down. On Aug. 8, as The New York Times reported, the regime demanded that the U.S. “lift its naval blockade and sanctions on Iran, withdraw the U.S. military from around Iran, pay war reparations and release frozen Iranian assets, as well as end attacks on Iran’s allies in the region and threats against the country.” Otherwise, it would keep the strait closed.

The fact that no one can decisively establish whether the strait is even open or closed is a sign of how things have gone. If it’s too early to say that the U.S. has lost the war—there is always a chance, however slim, that the Iranian regime will collapse—it is certainly losing. Operation Epic Fury has become Operation Epic Futility. Trump’s ill-considered war has not only failed but backfired.

Trump’s Objectives? Not Met

The administration launched the war with several stated objectives. Not a single one has been achieved.

Denying Iran the means to build a nuclear weapon?

It retains all the enriched uranium it had when the war began, as well as enhanced incentives to pursue the bomb. David Albright, a former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency—which carried out regular monitoring of Iran’s nuclear facilities under the deal reached by the Obama administration—says that even after this war, Tehran could probably build a nuclear weapon in a year or so.

The U.S.-Israeli attacks will only strengthen Iran’s incentive to acquire the ultimate deterrent. Likewise with the Trump administration’s agreement to provide Saudi Arabia with a civilian nuclear energy program and possibly facilitate a uranium enrichment facility. The deal creates a real risk of helping Riyadh, a longtime enemy of Iran, to build a nuclear arsenal.

Destroying Iran’s navy and missile capability?

Some 120 Iranian warships have been sunk or put out of service, the White House says, but the regime has speedboats and drones that it has used to harass shippers and strangle traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

Tehran has also carried out attacks on targets throughout the region using ballistic missiles and drones. The Washington Post reported in May:

Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery. … The threat of air attacks rendered some of the U.S. bases in the region too dangerous to staff at normal levels, and commanders moved most of the personnel from these sites out of the range of Iranian fire at the start of the war, officials have said.

Ending the threat posed by Iran’s proxy forces, known as the “axis of resistance”?

In recent weeks, the Houthis in Yemen have attacked Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, as well as targets inside Saudi Arabia. Shortly after the war began, Hezbollah launched attacks on Israel. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia also carried out strikes in Iraq against Iran-backed Shiite militias, which had mounted drone attacks on American forces and Saudi infrastructure.

Trump has groped to find a face-saving way out. “For weeks, President Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory in the Iran war should Tehran fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, even floating the idea privately to senior aides that he’s willing to walk away without a nuclear deal, U.S. officials said,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Orchestrating regime change?

This was always high on Trump’s list of goals. In January, he commended Iranians who were protesting against their government and posted on Truth Social, “HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” On the first day of the war, he urged them to rise up and topple the regime. But no help was on the way. Not only did the regime survive Khamenei’s assassination, it actually entrenched itself further by installing his son, widely seen as even more hardline than his father, as the new Supreme Leader. Meanwhile, the repression has intensified: the government has resumed public executions, now totaling more than two dozen people allegedly tied to the January protests.

The Counterproductive Consequences

The Strait of Hormuz, one of the most important shipping lanes on the planet, remained open and unobstructed through decades of war and upheaval in the Middle East. The most immediate result of Trump’s decision to go to war was to provoke Iran to block passage of ships through the waterway. The cutoff of oil shipments has reduced global supplies, pushing up the price of crude as well as gasoline, which in the U.S. has jumped from a national average of less than $3 per gallon to more than $4. Shipments of such vital commodities as liquid natural gas, helium, urea, and sulfur have likewise gone missing. “The most immediate, long-term economic danger lies not in fuel prices themselves but in rising food costs and disruptions to the production of advanced technology,” says the forecasting service GIS. “The blockades of container vessels and the destruction of energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf have severed supply lines for materials that modern industry and agriculture take for granted.”

Last week, Iran and neighboring Oman reportedly reached an economic arrangement over the strait (though, officially, Iran’s government insists the strait remains closed). After American military officials said the strait’s waterways were clear of mines, Trump declared: “That sucker is open.” Traffic has in fact resumed, though at only half its pre-war volume.

In launching the war, Trump expected to be able to dictate a more agreeable future for Iran and the Middle East. Instead, he’s been trying to reach a settlement that would merely restore the status quo ante of unrestricted transit through the strait. So far, it’s eluded him. Having proved the potency of this leverage, the Tehran regime can now wield it as needed, putting at risk the economies of its neighbors, the U.S., and the rest of the world.

Before the war, the United States had a network of military installations in such countries as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman that gave Washington the capacity to project power throughout the Middle East. But what had been regarded as a strategic asset has become a strategic vulnerability. Says retired Marine Corps General Frank McKenzie, a former commander of U.S. Central Command, “No one in their right mind would ever put the CENTCOM forward headquarters … 100 miles away from Iran, [in Qatar], yet that’s where it is.”

Now the administration faces the choice of repairing these damaged bases, at a cost of $5 billion or more, or abandoning them. “They’ve already pushed us out of the Persian Gulf effectively in terms of usable military power,” said Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East Program at Defense Priorities.

The Damage is Global

But the outcome has been much more than a mere military defeat. It has been a comprehensive debacle, with consequences far beyond the Persian Gulf.

The toll has not been limited to American personnel, assets, and international standing. The bombing campaign has killed Iranian and Lebanese civilians in the thousands. Military losses on all sides—American, Israeli, Iranian, and allied forces participating in the conflict—run even higher.

In the immediate sense, the war has seriously eroded American military might—the simple capacity to fight enemies and support allies in meeting threats. The administration has used up two-thirds of its stockpile of Patriot missiles and half of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile interceptors. The dwindling supplies of these and other weapons have reportedly constrained Trump from carrying out attacks. The U.S. Navy has come under severe strain.

Iran is not the only adversary that benefits. The Pentagon “can’t make up this deficit for years,” said Phillips Payson O’Brien, a security scholar at the University of St. Andrews. “So the United States cannot fight China. It simply can’t do it.” Ukraine, on the other hand, is suffering, because Washington can ill afford to send Patriot interceptors at a time when Kyiv has exhausted its arsenal.

National security hawks have often justified U.S. wars as essential to preserve our credibility. But this one has dealt it a devastating blow. Jacqueline Hazelton, a former U.S. Naval War College professor who wrote Bullets Not Ballots, a study of what actually makes U.S. military interventions succeed, told me directly: “It has shown, after Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, that the United States speaks loudly and carries a little stick.” The war certainly raises questions about how effective the U.S. military would be in coming to the aid of Taiwan, Japan, or NATO countries if they were attacked.

Trump has done his best to alienate our European allies, greatly discouraging cooperation with Washington on matters important to us. In April, after most NATO members declined to join the offensive against Iran, the Trump administration was already discussing withdrawing from the alliance altogether. Officials floated a “naughty list” of countries to punish over this episode. Trump even canceled one long-running military exercise with South Korea and scaled back another, after its government declined to help in the war effort. Don’t think Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping haven’t noticed.

Trump and the Authoritarian Need for Dominance

Why did Trump start the war? Iran has been a fierce and dangerous enemy for decades, and the temptation to eliminate the problem is not new. In his 2002 State of the Union address, the first after 9/11, President George W. Bush portrayed Iran as part of the “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea. Shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, an anonymous senior administration official was quoted: “Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran.” But bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, neither Bush nor his successors had the appetite to attack Iran. President Obama sought to address the danger it posed by forging a historic agreement to block Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Trump, however, disdains the prudence of his predecessors. In his first term, he renounced the nuclear accord, deeming it “a horrible, one-sided deal.” And his rapid takeover of Venezuela fed his always formidable hubris. His grandiose building projects in Washington stem from his insatiable hunger to glorify himself for decades to come. It’s not hard to imagine the glory he anticipated as the president who finally smashed an enemy that had long bedeviled the United States.

But the war also reflects his obsession with demonstrating dominance, which to the authoritarian mind is the key to success. In his second term, Trump has threatened to annex Canada, seize Greenland, and carry out a “friendly takeover” of Cuba. He managed an unfriendly takeover of Venezuela. Secretary of State Marco Rubio “now effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government,” The New York Times reports.

To put the U.S. in charge of Iran would have been an earthshaking achievement, dramatizing Trump’s power and reach far beyond our shores. To a president bent on controlling everything he possibly can, it must have been an irresistible fantasy. Instead, the war illustrated a chronic weakness of autocrats and would-be autocrats—their inability to get or absorb honest information from subordinates and experts who can point out the hazards of various ambitions. Trump is notorious for his boredom with intelligence briefings. Maybe some aides tried to warn him how a war with Iran could go wrong. But even if they were so bold as to broach the truth, they had to know that he is largely deaf to unwelcome information.

Now, the unwelcome information comes direct from Tehran, and it can’t be ignored. Trump obviously hoped this war would be a monumental event that would define his presidency and cement his legacy. It is—but not in the way he expected.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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We launched Executive Watch early in Trump’s second term, and it has been meticulously documenting this White House’s illicit actions ever since. Below is our biweekly selection of new entries. Bookmark this page, which contains a chronological scroll of the abuses. And also this post, which sorts and lists them under our 5 “P” categories:

• Personal Grift

• Political Corruption

• Presidential Retribution

• Power Consolidation

• Policy Illegality

After reading the following entries, tell us: Which of these abuses is the most troubling, and why?

Aug. 28, 2026

Hegseth’s Pentagon Secretly Employed a MAGA Influencer Who Was Attacking His Critics
Category: Power Consolidation

Pete Hegseth has spent over a year restricting the Pentagon press corps. All the while, he’s been quietly running a covert messaging operation on the side. Jennica Pounds—better known to her nearly one million X followers as “DataRepublican”—has been secretly working as a special government employee at the Pentagon since July, even while publicly attacking Hegseth’s internal rivals and critics without disclosing she was on the department’s payroll.

Mediaite reports:

Pounds’s Pentagon employment came to light after a bizarre incident in which she claimed she was being “set up” by the deep state—but it was revealed she merely botched a “scoop” she was being handed by a State Department official. Up until June, Pounds was a member of the credentialed Pentagon press corps. She had not disclosed her new gig with the Pentagon. … CBS News’ National Security Coordinating Producer Jim LaPorta also confirmed, “DoD: ‘Ms. [Jennica] Pounds serves at the Department of War as a Special Government Employee and is no longer a credentialed journalist at the Pentagon. Her PFAC (press credential) expired in June 2026, and she did not seek a renewal. She began working for the Department in July 2026.’”

IBTimes UK reports that Pounds isn’t the only Hegseth-friendly account facing scrutiny:

The episode has also renewed scrutiny of Adam D’Ortona, an active-duty Army lieutenant colonel with more than 100,000 followers on X who has criticised congressional Democrats and backed Hegseth’s push against diversity and inclusion programmes at the Pentagon.

D’Ortona was reported last September to be working inside Hegseth’s office. However, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said at the time he was not an adviser or spokesperson for the department. D’Ortona denied this week that the Pentagon pays anyone to “post stories,” and both the Army and Hegseth’s office declined to answer further questions about his role.

This is not a simple undisclosed-conflict story. Pounds used her platform to take shots at Hegseth’s own internal critics—including Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, with whom Hegseth has openly clashed—all while hiding that she was on his department’s books. Throttling access for actual reporters while secretly employing an “independent” influencer to fight his personal and political battles—that’s the Hegseth way.

Aug. 26, 2026

Wyoming’s Republican Governor Says DOJ Election Monitors Were ‘Aggressive’ and Exceeded Their Authority
Category: Power Consolidation

Trump’s electoral intimidation rollout is well underway. During Wyoming’s primary, two DOJ officials showed up at Laramie County polling places without notifying state or local election officials. They asked questions poll workers say went well beyond their legal authority, and they tried to examine vote tabulators and interview voters inside polling places.

WyoFile reports:

The chief election officer for Wyoming’s most populous county, Clerk Lee … voiced concern about the DOJ’s presence in the Laramie County polling places she oversees.

“Two individuals, identifying themselves as DOJ election monitors, informed our poll worker that they were here to monitor Wyoming’s Primary Elections,” Lee said. … “They did not offer their credentials until I requested they do so.” …

The monitors arrived at a busy time and asked questions, according to Lee, that appeared “outside the scope of federal voting rights laws. They included questions about the nature, length, and timing of poll worker training. Monitors requested training guides, asked how our new election equipment was acquired, and wanted to examine our tabulators.” When she learned that the monitors also planned to interview voters “to assess compliance with federal civil rights and voting rights law,” she denied that request. “We do not allow interviews to be conducted in polling places,” Lee said. “This was a poorly managed exercise and one that showed complete disregard for our state laws and administration of our elections,” her statement concluded.

Gov. Mark Gordon—a Republican certainly not known for reflexive skepticism of Trump’s DOJ—went further, saying the observers’ conduct “seemed to exceed” the authority Congress gave them and that he’s asked the state attorney general to look into it. Even Wyoming’s own U.S. Attorney reportedly wasn’t looped in ahead of time.

If this is the dry run for the 1,000-monitor midterm rollout, the DOJ’s claim that this is all about “promoting transparency” is already being undermined.

Aug. 25, 2026

The DOJ Threatens to Demolish the Kennedy Center If a Judge Won’t Let Trump Rename It After Himself
Category: Presidential Retribution

President Trump will do anything to get his name on the Kennedy Center. A federal judge blocked Trump’s audacious push to put his name on it earlier this year, ordering the signage removed. Now, the administration is making another attempt. During a mid-August meeting, the Trump-appointed board voted in favor of adding the phrase “Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump” to the end of the center’s formal name, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and moved to rename the physical site as the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”

This attempt has been challenged before the same court. But to ensure this time that the court rules in its favor, the DOJ is raising the stakes, essentially telling it: “approve the renaming, or watch it get demolished.”

CBS News reports:

The Trump administration said it may need to demolish the Kennedy Center if a plan to close the building for two years as part of a controversial renovation project pushed by President Trump and the organization’s board of trustees is blocked by a federal judge. In a Tuesday court filing, the Justice Department said the center’s “dangerously dilapidated, outdated, and decrepit” conditions, in addition to millions in financial losses, put the living memorial to President John F. Kennedy in a “financial and structural death spiral” that will require it to close for renovations. The filing suggested that if the current renovation plans don’t move forward, the center could ultimately be replaced with something like “a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years.” … “This is a not-so-subtle threat to demolish the Kennedy Center if the President doesn’t get his way,” said attorneys Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky. “This is unconscionable, it is unbecoming of the Department of Justice to even put this in a filing, and we will answer in court.”

CNN adds a key detail on the money angle DOJ is leaning on:

An order blocking the Board from appropriately recognizing President Trump will cause donors to flee, financial contributions to dry up, and structural rehabilitation to stop. … There will simply not be the expertise or funding necessary to rebuild and renovate this decimated structure. The Trump Administration is ready to go but, without it, the Kennedy Center cannot be saved.

Translation: Nice Kennedy Center you got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.

Aug. 21, 2026

Pentagon Fires Stars and Stripes’ Top Editor and a Reporter for Defending the Paper’s Editorial Independence
Category: Power Consolidation

Stars and Stripes, a U.S. military newspaper meant to give news about the service to military families and personnel, has had its editorial independence backstopped by Congress since 1991, when lawmakers created an ombudsman position that would report directly to lawmakers. This was specifically meant to safeguard the paper from Pentagon interference.

Unsurprisingly, that hasn’t stopped Trump’s Pentagon from … interfering.

Editor-in-Chief Erik Slavin and reporter Lara Korte were fired for “insubordination” weeks after telling CBS News that censoring the news U.S. troops receive represents a red line they would not cross. Max Lederer, the publisher who had just announced his retirement, was also pushed out. An active-duty Navy officer who Hegseth likes better has been installed in the newsroom’s senior leadership.

The Associated Press reports that this wasn’t the first time this year the paper’s independence took a hit:

[Slavin] received a notice of separation, as did publisher Max Lederer—who had just announced his upcoming retirement—and Middle East reporter Lara Korte, Slavin said. … In April, the Pentagon fired Jacqueline Smith, ombudsman for the newspaper, whose job had been to safeguard editorial independence.

Slavin should be applauded for sticking up for the publication’s independence, which isn’t a courtesy that the department extends whenever it’s convenient, but a legal obligation it is currently violating by its actions.

Every such act of “insubordination” exposes this administration’s authoritarianism and moral bankruptcy. We need more of them.

Aug. 21, 2026

Trump Threatens a $5 Billion Defamation Suit Against a Think Tank Whose Report Exposed That the National Guard Has Failed to Lower Violent Crime
Category: Presidential Retribution

The Center for American Progress, a left-of-center think tank, published a report in July finding “no evidence” that Trump’s National Guard deployments have reduced violent crime. It also projected that deployments would cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion if extended through the end of the calendar year. The Trump administration’s response wasn’t to dispute the data but to threaten CAP with a $5 billion defamation suit unless it retracted the report and apologized to Trump personally.

The New York Times notes:

The threats against the think tank, the Center for American Progress, were Mr. Trump’s latest effort to use the legal system to punish critics for voicing unflattering facts and opinions generally protected by the First Amendment. …

On Monday, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Alejandro Brito, wrote a letter to the center warning that he would file the lawsuit if the group did not fully retract the report, which was published on its website on July 13. The letter … was addressed to the group’s president and chief executive, Neera Tanden. … Mr. Brito claimed that the report about the National Guard was full of malicious and false statements. He gave Ms. Tanden and members of her board until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract it and apologize to Mr. Trump. Ms. Tanden pushed back, saying in a statement that the center would “neither cower nor bend in the face” of legal action.

Whatever ultimately happens with the lawsuit, it has already performed its messaging function: it has sent a warning to other think tanks that reaching unflattering conclusions about the administration’s efforts can now mean a significantly costly legal and financial fight.

Aug. 21, 2026

The Trump Administration Is Using Taxpayer Money to Fund Anti-Immigrant ‘Independent Journalism’ in Europe
Category: Power Consolidation

Back in July, we flagged the Trump administration’s nearly $5 million grant program to bankroll far-right causes in Europe. The scheme has only grown: the State Department has now made more than $7.9 million available for the effort, including a new $1 million grant to build an “independent journalism consortium” that will produce U.S. taxpayer-funded, government-shaped coverage of European immigration policy.

To truly understand what the administration’s idea of “independence” is, read this Talking Points Memo reprint of a story from The Redoubt:

As part of a grant opportunity posted Aug. 18, the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor announced it was looking for a partner—possibly including “[f]or-profit organizations or businesses”—that could help it “develop an independent journalism consortium in Europe.” According to the listing, the grant, valued at $1 million, will be awarded as part of a “cooperative agreement” just two weeks after the funding opportunity was first publicized. … However, a review by The Redoubt shows that the State Department has now made more than $7.9 million in such funding available, including a grant worth almost $2 million … for an analysis of how “foreign governments and their proxies weaponize migration.” …

The State Department envisions close collaboration between the Trump administration and the recipients of its largesse. Should the money be offered as part of a “cooperative agreement,” the department would insist on “substantial involvement” in the project, including the right to “approve key personnel.” … “The administration prioritizes democracy and freedom of expression,” the spokesperson said, “in the European region.”

In other words, the administration is dressing up state propaganda as press freedom. This is nothing less than an attempt to manufacture and amplify pro-Trump messaging and to help far-right parties like Germany’s AfD.

Aug. 20, 2026

Navy Weighs Stripping a Black Pearl Harbor Hero’s Name From a New Aircraft Carrier to Honor Trump, a Draft Dodger
Category: Power Consolidation

The future USS Doris Miller was supposed to become the first aircraft carrier named after a Black sailor and an enlisted service member. It was supposed to honor the heroic mess attendant who grabbed an anti-aircraft gun he’d never been trained to use during the Pearl Harbor attack, becoming the first Black American to receive the Navy Cross. Now the Navy is thinking of stripping his name from the ship and replacing it with Trump’s, which would represent the first time in history a Navy vessel has been named for a sitting president—not to mention a draft dodger who got a family doctor to certify that he has spurs in his heels and is therefore medically unfit to be deployed in Vietnam.

CNN reports:

The US Navy is working to rename an aircraft carrier under construction that was set to honor a Black sailor hailed for his heroic actions during the attack on Pearl Harbor, three sources familiar with internal discussions told CNN. During President Donald Trump’s first term, the Navy announced that the Ford-class carrier would be called the USS Doris Miller, recognizing an enlisted sailor who helped defend US forces from Japan’s attack.

It’s unclear what the Navy is seeking to change the name of the carrier to, though two of the sources said there have been internal conversations about renaming it to honor Trump. …

The Navy convened a renaming commission in 2025 under former Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, to review how ships and other military assets were named. Phelan believes aircraft carriers specifically should be named only after presidents, Navy admirals, and consequential Navy battles, a person familiar with his thinking said. … The Navy commission came amid broader efforts in the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to remove names selected for what the administration considers diversity, equity, and inclusion purposes.

The Navy says Miller may get a Medal of Honor upgrade and have a different ship named after him. But there is no way to soften the blow: Miller, a Black war hero, is being asked to give way to a sitting president obsessed with naming monuments after himself.

Aug. 18, 2026

Trump’s DOJ Weaponized Baseless Allegations of Antisemitism to Target Universities, Whistleblower Confirms
Category: Presidential Retribution

A judge shot down the Trump administration’s lawsuit against Harvard, rejecting the government’s bid to withhold grant funding on grounds that it discriminated against Jews. Now, a DOJ whistle-blower has exposed what we frankly already knew: that the attack on Harvard and other universities was motivated by political animus rather than genuine concern about antisemitism.

MS NOW has the story:

The Trump administration’s findings that three Ivy League schools violated civil rights law by tolerating antisemitism were predetermined by political priorities that blew past the evidence and cast aside standard investigative procedures, according to a whistleblower account provided to Congress.

The disclosure, by Haley Van Erem, a veteran Justice Department civil rights attorney, involves investigations into whether Harvard, Brown and Columbia universities broke the law by allowing antisemitism to flourish on their campuses. … The complaint said that after being informed that there was no evidence to support a finding of a Title VI violation based on antisemitism at Brown, a senior Trump administration official at HHS, Daniel Shieh, agreed that there was “not a Title VI violation,” but told Van Erem and other DOJ team members at the meeting that “there’s no way we’re going to get a letter of no violation cleared.” … “Hundreds of millions of dollars were suspended from these universities prior to the completion of Title VI investigations and the investigative team’s conclusions were frequently disregarded,” the complaint says.

If the administration were interested in fighting antisemitism, it could speak out against the right-wing media ecosystem, where raw hatred against Jews is par for the course. But it would rather launch a baseless and politically motivated harassment campaign against universities to titillate its base and bring critics to heel.

Aug. 18, 2026

Trump’s DOJ Refuses to Give Up its Persecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia
Category: Presidential Retribution

Back in May, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, concluding that the government was engaged in vindictive prosecution after Garcia successfully challenged his wrongful deportation to El Salvador’s CECOT torture prison. But the DOJ is unwilling to accept defeat and let an innocent man return to his life. It is appealing the decision.

The Guardian reports:

In a filing to the US sixth circuit court of appeals, the justice department insisted that human smuggling allegations against Abrego are genuine—and not retaliation for challenging his wrongful deportation to El Salvador in March 2025. …

[The judge in the case, Waverly David] Crenshaw said the indictment’s timing, statements made by the recently confirmed attorney general, Todd Blanche, and sustained oversight by other top US justice department officials, had “thoroughly tainted” the case. In its appeal … the justice department accused the judge of “an unwarranted intrusion” into the government’s power—and demanded the appellate court reverse it.

“The evidence in the district court proved that charges were brought against Abrego Garcia because, in the view of career prosecutors, the evidence conclusively established that he had committed a serious crime, and not for any vindictive motive,” the justice department statement said. … Attorneys for Abrego told CBS News that the justice department’s appeal was “flat wrong.” In a statement, they said: “The indictment and prosecution of Abrego Garcia was, in fact, vindictive; the evidence before the district court established just that; and the proof was clear notwithstanding the DoJ’s refusal to call the actual decision makers, including AG Blanche, to testify under oath.”

What is truly chilling about Garcia’s persecution is that there is no political upside to it. He is not a critic of the administration or engaged in political activism. He is simply an ordinary man trying to make a living. But he is part of a scapegoated outgroup against whom Trump has declared a jihad and nothing will stop the president from using the full force of the state to make his point.

Aug. 17, 2026

The Trump Admin Plans to Send Out 1,000 ‘Election Monitors’ to Try and Access State Voter Rolls
Category: Power Consolidation

There are a lot of things Donald Trump won’t do to help his party win the 2026 midterm elections: he won’t direct his attention to improving the economy, he won’t stop using tariffs that make the economy worse, and he won’t get us out of his disastrous war of choice with Iran. But what he will do is continue to spread lies about election integrity and use the federal government to engage in a variety of election interference efforts.

The latest comes from Assistant AG Harmeet Dhillon, who announced that DOJ would send out 1,000 election monitors for the midterm elections, while also complaining about their failed efforts to access state voter rolls.

Democracy Docket reports:

“We began our election security work almost as soon as I was sworn in last April. This is an ongoing duty and obligation,” Dhillon said. “The United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has sent monitors to election hot spots, polling places to increase voter confidence to troubleshoot problems and we are doing that now. We just did it in the primary. We’re going to do it to the tune of approximately a thousand election monitors in the November election, and this is just something that DOJ does.” … Dhillon’s comments come as the department refuses to retreat from its sweeping voter roll campaign despite a steady stream of losses in federal court. DOJ has lost all 23 district court cases in which judges have ruled on its effort to use Title III of the Civil Rights Act of 1960 to force states to provide their full statewide voter-registration databases, including sensitive information such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has also rejected DOJ’s position, and on Friday the full appeals court declined the department’s request to rehear the case. Dhillon suggested the Supreme Court could be next. …

Dhillon also made sweeping claims Monday about what DOJ says it has found in states that have cooperated with the department’s voter roll efforts. “We don’t know the scale of this problem because two-thirds of the states are refusing to cooperate with the Department of Justice’s efforts to help them clean up their voter rolls,” Dhillon said. “In the states that have cooperated with us, there are hundreds of thousands of dead people on the voter rolls, and there are tens of thousands of people who are not citizens on the voter rolls.” Dhillon did not identify the states or provide evidence supporting those figures during the interview. She also acknowledged that DOJ must conduct further verification before determining whether anyone actually voted illegally.

Election monitors are a good thing under any normal administration. But this one is a different story. Its relentless effort to push a voter-fraud narrative that it can’t back up with evidence—in court or anywhere else—is meant to subvert an election outcome it does not like. It wants not to fix existing problems but to create problems where none exist.

Aug. 17, 2026

Trump-Appointed Regulators Have Cleared His Crypto Business to Become a Bank Allowing Him to Further Line His Pockets
Category: Personal Grift

In the latest episode of Trump’s endless self-dealing, his crypto-friendly regulators have provided conditional approval for World Liberty Financial—the crypto firm that is the joint project of the Trump family and the Witkoff family—to become a trust bank. While a trust bank isn’t able to engage in the kinds of banking activities—taking deposits, issuing loans—it will be able to directly issue “stablecoin,” enabling the Trump family to earn even more on top of the fortune it’s already made: Trump personally earned more than $526 million last year from selling World Liberty-linked crypto tokens, plus another $263 million from selling equity in the firm to a group of investors led by a royal from the United Arab Emirates.

CNN explains that now he can go further to line his pockets:

World Liberty is celebrating the major milestone, while critics worry this is a new wrinkle on the classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse that will give corporations and foreign actors a new way to stealthily curry favor with the White House. Trump, his sons and other investors started World Liberty weeks before winning the 2024 election. After taking office, Trump appointed crypto-friendly regulators—some of whom have now blessed the firm’s plan to become a bank.

“Bank failures can be catastrophic, as we found out in 1929 and again in 2008,” Richard Painter, the top ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, told CNN. “It is quite precarious to have the president and his family invested heavily in one of our most important regulated industries at the same time as he has the power to hire and fire the regulators.” … “President Trump is now the first President in history to approve, operate and supervise his own bank,” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee, said in a statement. “This is the most brazen act of self-dealing our financial system has ever seen.”

Even before this decision, the Trump family crypto business was a profitable way to cash in on the willingness of Trump’s most gullible fans to splurge on Trump-branded projects, as well as a pipeline for political corruption on a massive scale. Until now, World Liberty has relied on a third party, BitGo, to issue and custody its stablecoin, splitting the proceeds. The trust charter lets the firm cut out that middleman and keep the revenue for itself.

Aug. 16, 2026

Trump Is Trying to Screw Up the Census Yet Again to Disadvantage Blue States and Minorities
Category: Power Consolidation

Back in July, we flagged that the Trump administration would try to redefine who “resides” in the U.S. for census purposes, excluding certain immigrants from population counts used for congressional apportionment. Now there’s an actual draft rule in the works: Talking Points Memo has obtained the Commerce Department’s draft, which confirms the plan. The rule hasn’t been formally proposed yet, but the draft removes any doubt about what’s coming.

Talking Points Memo reports:

Lawful permanent residents, “approved asylees” and “approved refugees” would still be counted at their defined U.S. residence. “All other citizens of foreign countries,” the draft states, would not be counted at all.

Redistricting Online, covering the same document, adds that the rule would also ban questions about race and ethnicity:

Ending collection of race and ethnicity data would remove the block-level demographic detail used to draw districts and to litigate claims under the Voting Rights Act. The Commerce Department submitted the underlying rulemaking request in June 2026, and the proposal remains in White House review. ... The rule has not been published in the Federal Register, and no public comment period has opened.

Excluding millions of immigrants from the count used to allocate congressional seats and federal funding would be an unprecedented break from two centuries of census practice. And stripping out race and ethnicity data would gut the tools courts and researchers use to detect discrimination in redistricting. Both changes happen to serve the same partisan interest to shift political power away from the diverse, immigrant-heavy states and districts that tend to vote against the president’s party.

Aug. 13, 2026

Trump’s Treasury Department Is Deleting an Anti-Corruption Database, Making it Harder for Future Administrations to Go After Pardoned White-Collar Criminals
Category: Policy Illegality

Donald Trump’s second administration has already turned into a paradise for financial crime; he cut back enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and has pardoned plenty of white-collar criminals. But the president is clearly not content with turning a blind eye to corruption while he is in office. Now his Treasury Department is shutting down a registry of shell-company ownership to make future enforcement efforts by local law enforcement or future administrations much more difficult.

The Bulwark reports:

This is an anti-corruption database that Treasury is by law required to maintain, so that law enforcement can more easily “follow the money” when investigating crimes. Even worse, the Trump administration will also destroy all the data it has already collected, so that no future presidential administration or local police department can use it, either. “It’s like Trump ordering the deletion of the FBI’s entire fingerprint database,” former congressman Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), a champion of the 2021 law that created the corporate registry, told The Bulwark. …

The result, financial experts say, is that law enforcement officials will have fewer leads available when tracking down fraudsters and cartels. “Before today, bad actors probably thought that there was still a chance of being caught by the reporting,” said Richard Berner, codirector of New York University’s Volatility and Risk Institute and former director of Treasury’s Office of Financial Research. “Now there’s zero chance.”

Presidential pardons don’t cover civil actions or state prosecutions. With this action, Trump will make it even harder to pursue future consequences for business crimes committed by corporations, individuals, or rich families (once they are out of power).

Aug. 13, 2026

Trump’s DHS Investigates the Protesters, Not the CBP Agents Who Killed Alex Pretti
Category: Presidential Retribution

Just days after CBP agents taking part in the out-of-control immigration enforcement “Operation Metro Surge” shot and killed Alex Pretti, DHS opened investigations—not into the murderers but into local organizations opposing Trump’s inhumane deportation agenda.

The New York Times has the story:

The target was not the Border Patrol agents who had killed Mr. Pretti, a 37-year-old government nurse, in late January. Instead, it was several left-leaning political organizations — labor unions, a climate change group, socialist collectives — that investigators believed had provided help and money to what they described as the “violent opportunists and agitators” on the street, according to newly released government documents.

As part of their inquiry, the documents show, homeland security officials used an array of invasive tactics during the first half of this year to gather information on many groups and individuals who were never accused of crimes, crossing the line that has traditionally stood between investigating criminal activity and political dissent. … The documents further detailed an expansive covert surveillance operation in which undercover agents spied on protesters and organizers at meetings held online, as well as in libraries, parks and churches, taking down not only what they said, but also their names and sometimes license plate numbers. The undercover agents also infiltrated group chats on Signal, listening as activists discussed coming demonstrations and their political opinions.

The administration’s refusal to investigate the masked killers in their employ, together with their obstruction of state and local investigations, was already bad enough. But now it is using Stasi tactics to go after citizens exercising their constitutional rights. There is a name for such a government, and it starts with “A.”

Aug. 12, 2026

Trump Wants the DOJ to Again Prosecute the Reflecting Pool ‘Vandal’ After His Own U.S. Attorney Conceded That a Crony Contractor Botched the Paint Job
Category: Presidential Retribution

At the end of July, it looked as if the saga of Trump’s repeated claims of vandalism at the reflecting pool had finally come to an end, as even Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney and his lackey, admitted that the government’s own evidence showed that the peeling paint was caused not by vandalism but by the shoddy quality of the work by a contractor who was picked without any competitive bidding. But the president, it appears, is not tired of embarrassing himself yet.

CBS News reports:

White House officials have asked the Justice Department to weigh whether it is possible to bring a new criminal case against David Hearn, the former Olympian who was accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool, after federal prosecutors moved to dismiss the indictment against him earlier this month, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, had charged Hearn with felony destruction of government property, accusing him of causing more than $1,000 in damage to the sealant that was recently installed at the bottom of the Reflecting Pool.

Earlier this month, however, federal prosecutors moved to dismiss the indictment without prejudice, meaning the case could be brought again, citing new information that the damage was caused by a “botched installation” by a contractor, not vandalism. President Trump criticized the decision, writing on Truth Social that there “may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS!” “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” Mr. Trump wrote. “I don’t know what she was thinking?”

Perhaps the only thing in DC more tattered than the poorly installed pool lining is the president’s ego when he can’t get his insane conspiracy theories validated in court.

Aug. 10, 2026

The DOJ Dropped Its Corruption Case Against an Indian Billionaire After Trump’s Personal Lawyer Dangled a $10 Billion Investment
Category: Political Corruption

During the Biden administration, the Department of Justice brought charges against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani for wire fraud and securities fraud in connection with a foreign bribery scheme. That legal case survived into the Trump administration … until Adani hired a new legal team headed by one of President Trump’s personal lawyers. That team made a pitch to DOJ lawyers to drop the case that, shockingly, included reference to a proposed investment in the U.S.

The charges were dropped soon after. Though DOJ and Adani have denied any direct exchange, the judge assigned to the case tore into the dismissal process as irregular and unusually opaque.

CBS News reports:

In a scathing 47-page ruling, Garaufis took aim at Trent McCotter, the principal associate deputy attorney general, who he said bears sole responsibility for trying to dismiss the case. “The irregularities in the decision to dismiss the indictment are concerning,” Garaufis wrote. “On the current record, McCotter appears to have eschewed the professional opinions of innumerable officials from various federal offices and replaced them with his singular judgment. The fact that McCotter came to this decision largely in collaboration with defense counsel, and seemingly without input from the FBI and SEC agents who investigated the alleged misconduct, or the attorneys from the Department, SEC, and U.S. Attorney’s Office who brought the case, appears to be highly unusual.” … McCotter made the determination after he and other government officials met with McDonald, Giuffra and Andrew DeFilippis of Sullivan & Cromwell, sources previously told CBS News. McDonald has since been nominated by Mr. Trump to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Two career prosecutors who were involved in the case withdrew from the matter after the motion to dismiss was filed. Additionally, politically appointed officials—the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York and McCotter—were the only signatories on the motion to dismiss. McCotter initially pushed back when Garaufis first started raising questions about the motion to dismiss the case, prompting the judge to order Adani last month to provide answers to the court on whether there was any sort of quid pro quo arrangement. Adani ultimately told the judge no such arrangement existed.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this story isn’t the dismissal itself. It’s the fact that a billionaire’s lawyer was confident enough in the lawlessness and corruption of the current administration to feel comfortable openly making this kind of offer. (Bribery and obstruction charges against five other defendants in the case remain pending; the judge has ordered DOJ to justify those dismissals separately.)

Aug. 10, 2026

Trump Orders National Guard to Stay in DC Through End of Term Ignoring the Tab to Taxpayers and Lackluster Crime Reductions
Category: Power Consolidation

One year on from Donald Trump’s initial decision to put thousands of National Guard troops on the streets of the capital, the president has decided to extend their stay for the entire duration of his time in office. The federal government has much more direct control over the DC National Guard than that of other states.

The New York Times has the story:

The National Guard deployment, now 4,636 troops from 23 states and territories, has been extended until President Trump’s last day in office. A $292 million federal contract was recently awarded for building “apartment-style lodging units” for the troops. … The National Guard, the operation’s most visible component, is also almost certainly the most expensive. According to data that the Trump administration gave Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the deployment is expected to cost $1.4 billion from October 2026 until the end of the president’s term—on top of the hundreds of millions of dollars that have already been spent.

The effectiveness of the deployment is less straightforward. A June report from the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank, found that the Guard had likely contributed to a decrease in property crimes—motor vehicle theft, for example, is down more than 50% year to date. But the deployment seemed to have barely any effect on violent crime, which includes murder, robbery and assaults with weapons. Robbery and homicide declined at roughly the same rate before and after the Guard arrived. This year, violent crimes in Washington are slightly above this point in 2025, driven up mostly by a large increase in assaults.

In other words, at best this is an expensive, unnecessary and useless move since it does nothing to protect Washingtonians from violent crime. At worst, it turns the Guard into a militarized force at Donald Trump’s disposal to mobilize for dangerous and antidemocratic purposes.

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Pete Hegseth has spent over a year restricting the Pentagon press corps. All the while, he’s been quietly running a covert messaging operation on the side. Jennica Pounds—better known to her nearly one million X followers as “DataRepublican”—has been secretly working as a special government employee at the Pentagon since July, even while publicly attacking Hegseth’s internal rivals and critics without disclosing she was on the department’s payroll.

Mediaite reports:

Pounds’s Pentagon employment came to light after a bizarre incident in which she claimed she was being “set up” by the deep state—but it was revealed she merely botched a “scoop” she was being handed by a State Department official. Up until June, Pounds was a member of the credentialed Pentagon press corps. She had not disclosed her new gig with the Pentagon. … CBS News’ National Security Coordinating Producer Jim LaPorta also confirmed, “DoD: ‘Ms. [Jennica] Pounds serves at the Department of War as a Special Government Employee and is no longer a credentialed journalist at the Pentagon. Her PFAC (press credential) expired in June 2026, and she did not seek a renewal. She began working for the Department in July 2026.’”

IBTimes UK reports that Pounds isn’t the only Hegseth-friendly account facing scrutiny:

The episode has also renewed scrutiny of Adam D’Ortona, an active-duty Army lieutenant colonel with more than 100,000 followers on X who has criticised congressional Democrats and backed Hegseth’s push against diversity and inclusion programmes at the Pentagon.

D’Ortona was reported last September to be working inside Hegseth’s office. However, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said at the time he was not an adviser or spokesperson for the department. D’Ortona denied this week that the Pentagon pays anyone to “post stories,” and both the Army and Hegseth’s office declined to answer further questions about his role.

This is not a simple undisclosed-conflict story. Pounds used her platform to take shots at Hegseth’s own internal critics—including Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, with whom Hegseth has openly clashed—all while hiding that she was on his department’s books. Throttling access for actual reporters while secretly employing an “independent” influencer to fight his personal and political battles—that’s the Hegseth way.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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Today, we’re sharing the full video and transcript of LibCon2026’s kickoff panel, “The State of the Union: Authoritarian Consolidation in the U.S.”—including the Q&A with the audience that followed. The panel was moderated by Michigan State’s Erica Frantz and featured Princeton’s Jan-Werner Müller, Stanford’s Francis Fukuyama, and The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer. You can find every LibCon2026 session on our YouTube channel, and we’ll continue posting the videos and full transcripts right here at The UnPopulist.

We hope you find the conversation informative and insightful. The transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.

Shikha Dalmia: The first panel is a situational assessment of the state of American democracy. I covered much of the ground, in my opening speech, about what we are going to talk about: the abuses of executive power, the attacks on civil space, abuse of prosecutorial discretion, and many of the things we’ve been horrified by over the last few years.

We have here with us Princeton’s Jan-Werner Müller, who wrote one of the defining tracts on populism, called What Is Populism?, which has been deeply influential to me as I’ve thought about populism and actually set up my institute. I’ve been trying to get him for LibCon for the last three years, but have been thwarted by his spam filter. But this time, I’m very glad I was able to reach him.

We also have here Adam Serwer of The Atlantic. Adam is one of the most incisive observers of our current political moment. He wrote an essay in 2018, during the first Trump administration, called “The Cruelty Is the Point,” and the essay went viral because it made sense of something that seemed absolutely senseless to all of us, from both a political and moral standpoint. He subsequently turned it into a book, which became a New York Times bestseller.

Frank Fukuyama is a veteran of LibCon, and no LibCon is complete without him. He has a problem that none of us in this room will ever have, which is that his book, The End of History, was such a global sensation that he winces every time it is mentioned now. That’s just intel for his panelists, if you bring that up. Frank has been doing, as usual, the most thoughtful yeoman’s work on defending liberal democracy, and he makes me think more clearly every day. So I’m very grateful to have Frank, not just at the stage, but on our side in this very crucial battle.

We also have here Erica Frantz, who is the moderator of the panel. Erica is a professor at Michigan State University. She has done work on authoritarianism all across the world. She’s not just a brilliant scholar, but also a brilliant teacher. She received the Michigan State University Social Science College’s Outstanding Teaching Award a few years ago. But, honestly, her most outstanding trait is that she and my husband were colleagues at Michigan State. Take it away!

Erica Frantz: Thanks so much for the wonderful introduction. And thanks, everyone, for being here. It’s a treat to be a moderator and not answering the questions, and I’m very much looking forward to this discussion.

So, we are the kickoff panel, and the goal of this panel is really to make sense of what the state of American democracy is. The title of our panel is “The State of the Union: Authoritarian Consolidation in the U.S.” We’re going to go through a number of things, covering how democracy is doing in the U.S., how we got here, what the path forward might look like, and then—where possible—get some insights from comparative cases.

I have three pretty incredible experts on the stage with me, which is very exciting. Each of them offers a very unique lens for making sense of our current political moment.

I wanted to start with a question for each of you—really, the big question for our panel: How do you rate the state of democracy in the U.S.? I’m particularly interested in what sort of things factor into your assessment. What are the big red flags for you in terms of assessing how we’re doing? Why don’t we start with Jan and then make our way forward?

Jan-Werner Müller: Thank you. So, as you’ve already hinted, we’ve had many comparisons between the U.S. and other cases where so-called aspiring autocrats try to consolidate—sometimes helpful, sometimes not so helpful. Maybe not everybody here agrees, but I think one of the most important recent contributions by colleagues in social science to understand autocracy is the book by Daniel Treisman and Sergei Guriev called Spin Dictators. If you’ve read the book, you know they draw a contrast between what they call “fear dictators” in the 20th century—who were openly repressive, didn’t have any hesitation to commit mass human rights violations—and “spin dictators” in the 21st century, who want to keep up the facade of legality, democracy, and so on.

I think that diagnosis to some degree also applies in the U.S., where the regime has been practicing what colleagues in law now tend to call “autocratic legalism.” Which is to say, pass laws in a way that is procedurally correct—the egregious SAVE Act being an obvious example, but also we’ve now learned, I think the hard way, that Trump has spent the years ‘21 to ‘25 digging up preexisting laws that would give the executive maximum power. So all that applies here as well.

But there’s one important difference that is both structural and also has something to do with the person of the president: the fact that unlike in all these other cases, the government is prepared to do things which are openly illegal. And it’s obvious to everybody from the get-go.

The structural reason is that people like Orbán had to care about international public opinion, German public opinion, “What does Brussels think?,” et cetera. He had to do what he famously called “the peacock dance” to convince people that things were still okay. In this country, international public opinion, international institutions [don’t function as constraints], so for structural reasons, the government is much more unconstrained.

And then there’s the person of the president, who’s now doing government the way he’s always done business, way back in the ‘70s already: do something totally illegal, create facts on the ground, and then see what happens. Maybe the other side settles out of court; in any case, you’ve done something. You’ve sometimes done things which are simply irreversible.

So that’s the reason why I’m worried that if we simply go through the usual indices, if we simply say, “oh, compared to Turkey, Hungary, etc., we know what’s going on,” all that is not sufficient to orient ourselves because—trying to finish on an optimistic note, but I can’t—this case is different.

Frantz: Thank you. Adam?

Adam Serwer: Well, I would describe what’s happening the way that my colleague Fred Kagan once described it: this is an aspiring autocratic regime that is attempting to consolidate itself. And it has had some success in certain areas and has been pushed back in others. The Trump administration has lost a lot of cases in the lower courts, even against judges that it appointed. Now, these are lower court judges, so they try to apply the law. They’re not the Supreme Court, which can just decide to ignore 150 years of American law because they feel like it. But the lower court judges are willing to apply the law. So that just tells you: in every place there is a sort of optimistic sign.

I think there is a culture of republican civic virtue in the United States—but there is also a culture of tyranny. And that is tied to the nature of the founding of the United States, which is this liberal democracy that is founded on slave labor. So you inevitably have a hybrid regime that is part tyranny and part democracy. And those tendencies are still with us today. On some level you can see this rebellious refusal to accept what people believe is unjust. You can see it in Minnesota. You can see it in protests all over the country. But on the other hand, you can also see, I think, a significant strata of America’s elite class, its leadership class, that is simply willing to roll over for a bully.

Now whatever culture we created that selected for putting these people in leadership, that culture was not conducive to resistance to a strongman. And you could see that, to give another example, in Congress. To a certain extent what we’re dealing with is not simply a legal problem—it’s a cultural one. Congress is willingly giving up its power to the president. The president is ignoring congressional appropriations. He’s trying to shut down departments that Congress didn’t authorize him to shut down. He’s ignoring black-letter laws about not putting the president’s face, a living president’s face, on currency.

The thing that is supposed to check that, in the Founders’ design, are the other branches of government. But what do you do when the other branches of government are controlled by people who simply do not have that kind of civic virtue within them, to engage in that kind of defiance? I don’t know the answer to that question. I think, on the one hand, the Trump administration has faced a tremendous amount of resistance from ordinary people. But it has not faced the kind of resistance that I believe we should expect it to face from people who have been given the responsibility to check that kind of power grab. And I think that’s really disappointing.

The other thing to understand is that this time around, much more than in the prior administration, there is an attempt to change and to silence that culture of civic republicanism. They’re trying much harder with this now, in terms of Brendan Carr jawboning networks about airing criticisms of Trump or comedians who make jokes about Trump, about trying to have allies of the administration buy media companies to make sure that those companies produce media that changes Americans’ view of the administration—there is much more attention paid to altering the culture, American culture, in a way that it’s much more obedient and subservient to the cult of personality that is the Trump administration.

So I think we’re in a very dangerous moment. For a lot of reasons, and for some of the ones that Jan just mentioned, it’s very hard to look abroad at examples of other countries, because the structure of our government is different and because we have things that are culturally specific to United States. But again, I would describe us as being in a very pivotal moment, and I think it’s not clear how successful the Trump administration is going to be in consolidating itself as an authoritarian regime. But I think it’s very clear that it has allies in places that perhaps we did not expect.

Frantz: Frank, I’d like to hear your take.

Francis Fukuyama: So I agree with Adam and Jan-Werner that this is an aspirational authoritarian regime. We can get into all the checks and balances, and which ones are working and which ones aren’t. But I want to add one thing to this [profile], which is: an unbelievable level of incompetence. In a certain sense it makes the authoritarianism a little bit less bad, because the authoritarian doesn’t actually understand how to carry out policies correctly. There are various illustrations of this: it’s been remarkable that a whole bunch of grand juries all over the country have failed to return indictments from federal prosecutors. It’s unheard of. The saying was that you can indict a ham sandwich in front of the grand jury and it’ll work, but actually a ham sandwich was rejected in one of those famous indictments.

Where it’s really worrisome, however, is when you have this kind of incompetence at the top of the world’s most powerful country. I think that we are seeing the results of this right now in this war with Iran. President Trump has a lot of self-confidence about his own judgment. I was talking to an old friend of mine who worked for him in his first administration and sat across the table from him in the Situation Room and that sort of thing. I said, “well, what’s it like to talk to President Trump?” And he said, “well, the first thing is he doesn’t listen.” He will try to explain a complex situation in another part of the world, and the president will immediately interrupt with his own opinion about what’s going on in that part of the world. He does not read memos. He does not read briefing books. And he has really hollowed out a lot of the diplomatic corps, intelligence agencies, the national security establishment. So he is not getting good information about what’s going on in the world. And so you can make a decision like, “well, let’s join Israel in attacking Iran, and we will get it over with in 24 hours the way we did in Venezuela,” … and there wasn’t anybody in his circle to say, “Mr. President, maybe there’s this thing called the Strait of Hormuz that you might want to think about before you engage in this.” It just doesn’t happen.

So when the world’s most powerful country is led by somebody who completely dispenses with procedure, any kinds of constraints that are not necessarily to stop dictatorship, but just to make good policy decisions based on good information, that leads us to the situation that we are now facing in the Persian Gulf.

So to all the other indictments, I would add this one of just sheer personalistic, incompetent decision-making at the top.

Frantz: So, not really a rosy portrait of the state of affairs in the U.S. Jan, I’ve also struggled in similar events to find an optimistic note to end things on. But zooming out, in terms of your expertise of other cases, how does the U.S. compare with these other backsliders in the news? Is there—you got into this a little bit—something distinctive about our method of democratic erosion that sets us apart, or are we just part of the broader global pattern?

Müller: So I think within this general framework of illegality I was talking about, the administration has developed four governance techniques, which on the one hand can help consolidation, but which also create unique vulnerabilities. Number One, we’ve learned the hard way that one scandal per year can be politically deadly; 10 scandals a day, nobody seems to care. At the same time, you never know whether eventually there might [come] the one thing that symbolically condenses everything that is wrong with a particular regime. It might be the reflecting pool—it might be something else. But it’s the kind of thing that eventually happened to Viktor Orbán: there was one particular scandal, and all of a sudden all the other dissatisfaction crystallized around that, and then an opposition party was able to link the scandal to people’s daily experience of increasing poverty, failing public services, and so on.

Secondly—not new exactly, Frank has already alluded to it—for every aspiring autocrat there’s a trade-off between competence and loyalty. I don’t need to explain to you which side has been picked by this administration. On the one hand, it consolidates autocracy, but it can also create unique vulnerabilities if things really, really go wrong.

Thirdly, the corruption is obviously out of control. As in other cases, it can help to consolidate a particular regime. I would say that here, yes, it’s systemic by now. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like they’re building a system in the way that others had a long-term plan and they said, “OK, even after four years, this is going to work.” In the Hungarian case, that ended up being called a mafia state, which had a—it pains me to say this—certain internal coherence. Whereas here [in the U.S.]—again, I’m not telling you anything new—it just feels like everybody is grabbing whatever they can on any particular day, with any insider trading, whatever they can get away with on any particular day. It doesn’t feel like somebody is building a system. And that maybe conveys a certain nihilism, a certain expectation, that, actually, this is not really going to last and it’s not meant to last.

And lastly, not to coin a phrase, but the cruelty is the priority in the sense of, “yes, we need to show people these scenes.” It’s so telling that Trump personally says, “no, we have to do these vehicle stops because we need to produce these images that are going to put fear into people in a certain way.” Again, on one level that’s consolidating the regime; on another level—given that, as we’ve all also learned, these scenes are really not popular with the American people in general—it’s also clear that it creates a certain vulnerability.

I think this finally allowed me to say something slightly more optimistic in the sense that, yeah, this is happening, it has a certain analytical structure, it’s not all random stuff. At the same time, it does create particular weaknesses for this regime.

Frantz: So, Adam, I wanted to dig into, a little bit, your take on how the architecture of our political system might either contribute to consolidation or make it more difficult. As kids, when you learn about the American political system, you hear that there are all of these checks and balances built in: we have the Senate, we have federalism, we have the courts. And in theory, this should make us more protected from executive power grabs. So, from your perspective, in what ways does this counter-majoritarian architecture that we have either prevent or open the door for consolidation of power?

Serwer: I think there are certain places where it does one, and there are other places where it does the other. For example, the fact that we have 50 states that run their own elections makes it very difficult—and Trump has failed so far at trying to do this—to nationalize the elections in a way that he feels like he can control the outcome. He’s losing in the courts because of this, in part because, again, even the judges that he appointed see this as lawless.

On the other hand, you look at something like the Supreme Court … I think Jan is right about the Trump administration’s myopia as an organization—but the Supreme Court, I don’t think, is myopic at all. I think this court actually has a very long-term view of what it wants the country to look like. You can see it in some of the recent decisions that have been made. When you look at Louisiana v. Callais, the undoing of the Voting Rights Act, those laws were passed because multiracial democracy in America didn’t really exist until 1965. It’s actually very young. So when you take away those guarantees of multiracial democracy, you reshape the electorate in such a way so as to make certain politicians unaccountable to the groups that they are trying to oppress. If you look at the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments, the point of those amendments was to prevent white supremacy from reasserting itself in the aftermath of the Civil War. It did not work, so we had to have a second reconstruction in the 1960s.

That second reconstruction put in place these safeguards to prevent the very culture of tyranny that has been a part of America since its founding, that culture of racial stratification, of a kind of color caste system, from reasserting itself. We see the Supreme Court removing those safeguards because an electorate without those safeguards—and you can see this with the end of Reconstruction—becomes an electorate that doesn’t question certain premises. It’s conservative in nature—and I don’t mean conservative as in republican, as in the sort of standard conservatism, but in the way that it preserves this regime of racial injustice. The Republican Party was the party of Black rights until Black people could no longer vote, and then there was no constituency for Black rights. So the party begins to move away from defending democracy, multiracial democracy in a broad sense, the second that disenfranchisement in the South is complete. We cannot forget that that happened, or the way that that happened, because without that, we are unable to see the obstacles ahead of us in the future.

So I think there are things that are slowing down authoritarian consolidation, but there are other things that are accelerating it, and they are accelerating it with a view towards the long term even if the Trump administration itself does not have that long term view. I think it goes back, to a certain extent, to the erosion of this culture of republicanism. When the people who are leading the institutions that are supposed to push back against authoritarian consolidation decide that they’d rather kiss the president’s rear end, then those antibodies are being compromised.

Frantz: So I think a lot about how personnel choices make really big differences, in that your checks and balances are only going to serve that capacity if the people in those positions use that tool. And you mentioned Congress rolling over and giving away its powers. So, somewhat relatedly, Frank, I’d like to hear your thoughts on whether, as observers of democracy, we are missing something in terms of our assessments of how things are going.

Fukuyama: Sure, there’s a lot of things that fly under the radar. My long-term concern has been the state of the American state, that is, the federal bureaucracy. And a lot has been going on in that sphere that people are not aware of. So, for example, everybody knew about DOGE when Elon Musk was appointed to rampage through the American bureaucracy, fire people arbitrarily, close down entire agencies. Everybody understood that that was happening, and that was wrong. But there’s a longer-term effort to take control of the entire executive branch under this doctrine of the unitary executive.

Now, I actually think that the value of that doctrine is a little bit ambiguous, because there are good reasons for actually thinking that in a democracy no part of the federal government should be beyond democratic control. On the other hand, I actually think that the executive branch needs an internal separation of powers in order to protect expertise. You see this in the exception that the Supreme Court just made in its recent decision to rescind Humphrey’s Executor—the [1935] decision that had protected senior members of the bureaucracy. They made an exception for the Federal Reserve, because they figured even the most diehard Trumpists wouldn’t want the Fed to lose its independence. But that’s not the end of the story.

I think that you can make a case for getting rid of Humphrey’s Executor: the president can fire the head of an agency that has a single head, so why shouldn’t he be able to affect the leadership of a multi-member commission? It’s not that big a difference in terms of the way things are managed. If you go back to the intellectual origins of this, it lies in Project 2025. There’s a very long section on the federal bureaucracy. To me, somebody that’s looked a lot into the history of our bureaucracy, it’s kind of mind-boggling. So, in the 19th century, we had this thing called the patronage system, where virtually every federal official was the result of a political payoff to a politician. No standards for education, for expertise, in the federal bureaucracy. So that document, Heritage’s Project 2025, actually praises the patronage system, says, “oh, it wasn’t so bad. Democracy was able to control who worked in the federal government.” And that shoe hasn’t dropped yet.

But they are not going to stop there. They published an executive order at the end of the first Trump administration that created a Schedule F—it’s now been resurrected as a Schedule P/C—that would then give the president the authority to fire every single federal official all the way down to your local postmaster. And They’ve now replaced Schedule F with something they call Schedule P/C. And I guarantee you, in the next year or two, they are going to unroll this thing, where the several tens of thousands of people who work for the federal government are going to be replaced by political appointees. And so, we’re going to really be set back to the period before 1883 and the passage of the Pendleton Act. It’s part of a much broader politicization of the entire executive branch.

Another thing that flew under the radar was an OMB directive that was issued about two or three weeks ago, where every single federal grant cannot go through unless it is approved by a political appointee. So scientific grants at NIH, defense contracts for complex weapons systems, every single one of them has to be vetted by a politically loyal person. This is not going to be good for expertise in our government. This is an ongoing agenda of this administration and it’s going to lead to very bad government.

Frantz: I wanted to shift gears slightly. The rest of this conference is going to be on reconstruction, we know that pushing back against authoritarianism is really challenging, but there are cases where civil society and pro-democracy groups have been successful. So, Jan, thinking from a comparative perspective, what insights can we learn from other cases of when these sorts of mobilization efforts have been successful, and could they potentially work in the U.S.?

Müller: So on April 13th this year, the day after the elections in Hungary, we saw an avalanche of op-ed pieces that were a little bit like these cheap ads you get on the internet: “just do this one weird trick and autocracy will magically disappear.” And in particular people went for this narrative that said, “oh, look, the center right can defeat the far right, because look, the candidate for prime minister stayed away from the pride parade in Budapest and was tough on immigration and was a little bit Euroskeptic and so on.”

I think these are all, with all due respect, the wrong lessons. That one case wasn’t about policy content. It was about two other things. Number one, as old-fashioned as it sounds, it was about retail politics. Péter Magyar went to 700 towns and villages, often several times, to talk to people. Now, obviously that lesson doesn’t easily translate to a country of a very, very different size. Nevertheless, it’s no different from the Mamdani lesson, you might say: It really matters to have an incredible army of volunteers and to establish a certain on-the-ground credibility in the face of a profoundly hostile media system—which, however, was also, tiny footnote to that, slightly changing. I think it’s too early to draw grand lessons from this, but it seems that in Hungary people eventually really tired of the government propaganda. Nobody was watching the news channels anymore, and instead a number of basically independent YouTube channels became very, very important. I don’t want to be rosy-eyed about this, but I think in the end, colleagues in social science will find it did matter.

And the second lesson is that in terms of content, what was really crucial was the ability to connect the incredible corruption to people’s everyday experience, and say these two things are not dissociated. We’ve had many, many other cases where corruption was very, very obvious, and you would have thought as a naive observer, “look, these populists very often run initially on an anti-corruption ticket and then they get into power and it turns out they are ten times as corrupt: Jörg Haider in Austria, Erdogan in Turkey, et cetera, et cetera.” But it’s only when you manage to connect the corruption to people’s experience, and when the rival narrative—which is, “oh yeah, but they did it for us, they do speak for a certain part of the country that was neglected and dismissed, etc., before, and it’s OK if they get a little bit as well”—if you break through that and the narrative becomes different, then all of a sudden the game changes profoundly.

Again, I don’t want to say that we can generalize from one case, a country of 10 million people, where it’s easy to get around and speak in 700 villages. But I think that’s ultimately the lesson. It’s about political methodology and less about specific policy ideas.

Frantz: So, looking forward, what to you stands out as really important, something that we should all be paying attention to, in terms of what could potentially steer the trajectory of democracy in the U.S. in one direction or the other? What are you thinking of as something we should all really be attuned to? Let’s start with you, Frank, and then hear from the others on this.

Fukuyama: I think one of the big questions that will have to be addressed by a successor regime is really about the limits of executive power—because that’s the thing that has been the most challenged by Trump. They came into office thinking that they had to consolidate power, not just within the executive branch but within the White House, and then control the rest of the sprawling executive. Now, quite frankly, some of those powers actually needed to be consolidated, because one of the problems—the American bureaucracy was not working all that well before the rise of Trump in his second term, and there are certain things that need to be corrected—it was actually extremely hard to remove a poorly performing bureaucrat. There’s too many rules and protections. But one of the decisions that’s going to have to be made by the next administration is which of those consolidated new executive powers do you actually want to keep?

Now, nobody would recommend being lawless and just simply ignoring statutes, but to what extent do you actually want to be able to reshape the government to do good things, as opposed to simply kill undocumented migrants and so forth, because a future president actually has to have a positive agenda. I personally am all in favor of the Abundance agenda—America needs to get back to building things. But in order to do that you actually are going to need a little bit more consolidated authority when you’re doing something like planning an infrastructure project. And so that’s something I think is really important to think through ahead of time rather than, for example, just going back to the old status quo ante.

Frantz: Adam?

Serwer: I think one of the most important questions is to what extent the free-for-all that we’ve been seeing, particularly with regards to corruption and self-dealing, is going to be held accountable. And I think if you do not do that, you incentivize a similar thing to happen again. We all saw Jan. 6—we all saw what happened. There was no accountability for that, and now we are back here. And precisely because of the absence of accountability there, this administration has been acting as though the law doesn’t matter—because they’ve gotten away with everything.

So I think a big question is: To what extent are the people who commit crimes on behalf of this administration going to be held accountable for those crimes? And if you don’t hold people accountable for that—and I don’t mean necessarily prison time; whether it’s civil suits, clawbacks, whatever, there has to be some kind of accountability for people who broke the law in service to an administration that was attempting to end American democracy—they’ll keep trying again very soon.

Müller: I’m glad we have three hours left because I’ve prepared a list of 47 things for this occasion. I’ll just agree very much with what Adam just said. There needs to be a way of dealing with what has become a real culture of impunity, where the president already promises everybody around him, “just do it, I’ll pardon you in good time.” Obviously, that has a systemic quality. If you go back to the Federalist Papers, of course they were worried about the situation of a bad president, but at the time, they assumed there weren’t going to be political parties. So they said, “before that can even happen, this person will be impeached, and it’s going to be game over for a bad president of this sort.” So we need to find a way of dealing with that scenario. Other countries really don’t allow a single head of state to have that level of concentrated power which can be abused to create this kind of culture of impunity. So as you can see I don’t have a solution, but we have two days left.

Frantz: I noticed that none of you mentioned the upcoming midterm election. Does that mean that you’re fairly optimistic that it will be freely and fairly run?

Fukuyama: Well, we’re going to have a [Trump] speech tonight, right? That’s going to lay out an agenda for how to subvert that election within the bounds of possibility, so we’ll have to wait and see. I think that the one good thing about the nature of the country is it’s very big, and especially in terms of election administration it is incredibly decentralized, and therefore it is difficult to manipulate a midterm election compared to a presidential election. But they are trying to do everything they can to make sure they don’t lose in the midterms. And that’s going to require a lot of vigilance and a lot of pushback on the part of all of these decentralized authorities that actually make elections in this country run.

Serwer: I was discussing earlier about how the majority on the Supreme Court is operating on a long-term agenda to reshape the electorate to be more conducive to Republican goals, and we’ve already seen that. They break their own rules when there’s an opportunity for the Republican Party to take advantage in the redrawing of districts, even if they are drawing those districts deliberately to disenfranchise Black Americans, who they don’t think the party should have to be accountable to. But to be honest, I didn’t mention the midterms because I don’t know what’s going to happen. And I think an electorate that elected Donald Trump twice … I don’t know what that electorate is going to do. And, obviously it’s a different electorate every time, but I just don’t want to make any assumptions about how Americans are going to vote come November.

Müller: That’s why I don’t do predictions, especially not about the future. But I think, again, there might be a larger structural point here, and that is about decentralization. This is something we’ve learned the hard way also over the last 10 years, maybe also particularly on the left, where federalism was of course often seen as simply a shield of racist practices from the federal government: all of a sudden people realize, look, when the chips are down, this actually gives you some institutional foothold, some focal point for resistance for opposition.

I think other countries are learning that lesson, too. Some have learned that if you have a highly centralized country—again, forgive me for bringing in Hungary one more time—it’s much easier to consolidate autocracy. Other countries which used to slightly be dismissive of federalism—example, Germany, where federalism is actually in the so-called eternity clause in the constitution, something that can never be amended, together with democracy and basic rights—people sometimes said, “Oh, come on, federalism. If Bavaria disappears tomorrow, there will be less folklore or less Oktoberfest stuff, but it doesn’t really matter.” Now all of a sudden people realize when the chips are down, it’s very important that there is that wider structure that allows an opposition, that allows a resistance to do things. So I would agree with what Frank said earlier: decentralization on the whole is on the side of preserving democracy on this occasion.

Frantz: We have time for Q&A. Anybody who would like to come up to the mic, go ahead.

Audience Member: You’ve really covered the waterfront as far as all the ways the regime is trying and failing, but the subject that hasn’t come up is the subject of capital. And the thing that’s been most concerning to me, being involved in the capital markets and finance and things like that, is: Trump got put in with the support of capital, in the same way Putin did and the same way Hitler did. What is the plan to make that stop? And what is the role of capital and capitalists in withdrawing consent from this regime?

Serwer: I think the problem is that there are so many different things that you need to do with capital. If you want to prevent its ability to influence American politics in this way from coming back, it’s not just one thing. I think we should probably ban prediction markets and online gambling completely. I think that we should probably make it easy to make direct auto sales, to put all the auto dealers out of business. There’s a number of things we could do. I think we should probably break up a lot of these big internet companies. I don’t think that one company should be able to own CNN, Paramount, CBS, all that stuff, at the same time. It’s just too dangerous. So I think to some extent you can do things with antitrust, you can do other things with regulation. But I think the bigger problem is, liberal American democratic capitalism has been very good for these people, and yet they have all conspired to help destroy it in pursuit of short-term profits. I think people have to take the lesson from that, and protect the capitalists from themselves. Doing that is a very complicated project that requires more than doing one thing, or one weird trick.

Audience Member: I wanted to go back and ask about a strategic posture that Shikha mentioned in her speech, which is the dilemma of when faced with authoritarianism, does one work through the system—when it’s been abused by the authoritarian and the authoritarian may once again easily beat the system working against him or her—or does one fight fire with fire? There are many people who will tell you they’re a liberal and they say, “no more Mr. Nice Guy. We absolutely have to be Trump-like to get rid of Trump.” I’m just curious, and I’m sure we’ll come back to a version of this question in these two days: What’s your gut stance about that question? Is the system strong enough to be worked with to overturn what we have, or will some non-constitutional ways be required?

Serwer: Yes.

Fukuyama: No, I don’t think so.

Serwer: To be clear, my answer was yes to both questions.

Fukuyama: Just following up on what Jan-Werner said, you look at the example of Hungary. If you’ve got a system where you can actually have a reasonably free and fair election, that is the route you need to take. You need to do all the hard, boring work of mobilizing people, making arguments like the ones we’re making in this room, getting people to vote, building coalitions, making compromises in order to make that possible. That’s the way you stop it. You don’t go to illegal methods if you still have the kind of democratic system that I believe we still have in this country.

Serwer: I will disagree with that in the sense that I think voting is necessary, but I don’t think it’s sufficient. And I think when you look at some place like Minnesota, defiance of the law in some cases is justified and necessary. ICE is sitting there trying to do deportation operations, and there are people following them around with whistles and sometimes these people are getting killed because they’re risking their lives to protect their neighbors. Now, when you say extra-constitutional, I suppose for some people that means violence, but I’m not talking about violence. I am talking about defiance of the law. There have been times when activists in the past, American activists, have been proudly celebrated for being willing to defy unjust laws. There are going to be times when an aspiring authoritarian regime is going to attempt to prevent people from exercising their constitutional and lawful rights, and that is going to be seen as criminal, but I don’t think we should see it that way. So that’s why I say it’s not either/or. You have to work through the system, and you have to use methods that are outside of the system, but that are still appropriate.

When people say you have to act like Trump, I don’t believe that. I don’t think what you want is a liberal ICE walking around en masse and gunning people down. No, that’s obviously what people are fighting against. But I do think that it’s not enough to say you can only work through the system.

Müller: So, far be it from me to sing the praises of game theory, but there’s a reason to think that, at least sometimes, tit for tat can work. It doesn’t happen in isolation, though. So if you break the rule in response to other rule breaking, you have to explain what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And if you convince your audience that this is a one-off to get the other side to play properly again, that’s different from simply saying, “oh, now all bets are off.” The problem, of course, with this lesson is that it depends on the other side having a long-term horizon. And one of the things that, of course, again, is so peculiar about the situation we’re in is that we have a leader who doesn’t even care about his own political party in the way that normally somebody would say, “look, I have a program, a long-term set of ideals, I want to survive for this project, beyond particular elections.” In that sense, it’s also very risky because all bets are off in terms of what would really incentivize other people to go back to the rules.

Audience Member: I think there’s a temptation sometimes to see authoritarians as kind of stupid, and acting according to an unchanging nature of “what do authoritarians do?” But I think it’s helpful to see them as adaptive, as trying to learn from successes and failures either here or elsewhere, and to try to improve their regime’s ability to do authoritarianism. So my question for the panel is, do you see that in the Trump administration? Do you see them trying to learn and adapt their authoritarian aspirations over time? Are there places that they failed and they’re trying to come back in a new and different way, and how should that impact how we see their future trajectory?

Müller: That’s a very good, difficult question. I agree that we should never underestimate autocrats. I think one of the great illusions of the 1990s—don’t worry, I’m not going to say “the end of history”—was precisely to say that, “okay, all autocrats end like the Soviet Union. They don’t understand their own societies, they don’t learn anything, et cetera.” And clearly, we’ve seen a lot of learning across borders in the last couple of years. And the fact that so many autocratic systems, so many playbooks and scripts, look similar is not because of the fact that all the underlying causes of these autocrats coming to power are similar—is it immigration, is it the working class, or whatever—it’s because they constantly learn from each other. So it’s a very important point, I think in general, to bear in mind.

To actually answer the question, I think they are trying very hard to learn in terms of PR—to make certain things look more palatable. I think that was, just to use an obvious example, the recent move in terms of DHS leadership: continuing to do the same thing, but don’t produce images all the time that make it look like, OK, she’s going to a horrible place, a gulag in El Salvador, and is being filmed and produces images that are really going to be putting people off big time. So I think they’re trying. But I would not say that, systemically, there really has been a lot of learning. And I would go back to the earlier point that it doesn’t look like there is any real long-term system building in the way you would have seen it in other countries in terms of, yes, there really is a long-term plan. Of course there is Project 2025, but in terms of structures being put in place that show that kind of learning, I’d be more skeptical.

Serwer: I would say the focus on control of the media is an indication that they have learned from the last time around. Again, they are really trying to reshape American culture to be more pliant, more obedient, more accepting of authoritarianism as something natural and homegrown and just. And I don’t know if that’s going to work. These things don’t always work out the way people plan to. But I would say the focus on reshaping the media in their image, as opposed to just having powerful media outlets like Fox News on their side, does indicate that they’ve learned some lessons from last time around, where I think they felt like they lost control over the narrative, particularly around COVID and the protests over the George Floyd killing.

Fukuyama: Yeah, I don’t think they’ve been successful at all. If you look at the more than 70 million people who voted for Trump in 2024, it was a coalition. He’s got these hardcore MAGA people that will vote for him no matter what. But if he wanted a successful presidency, he would have to focus on those groups that voted for him that didn’t vote in the previous election. And he’s done absolutely nothing to win those people over. He’s done everything he can to alienate … there are African American men, there are Hispanics, there are a lot of groups that were skeptical of the Democrats and they were willing to take a chance with him, and I don’t think he’s done really much of anything to convince them. This is a typical strategy of a learning autocrat, a would-be autocrat—to move to the center and try to convince people that you’re actually a moderate while keeping your autocratic aims. I just don’t see that he’s pulled anything like that off.

Audience Member: I study how the American tech industry, and in particular the tech oligarchs associated with the idea of effective accelerationism—like Musk, Andreessen, Thiel, etc.—contribute to democratic regression and to authoritarian consolidation. And I’m curious how each of you thinks about this issue.

Serwer: I think the return of turn-of-the-century race science is in large part something that the tech oligarchs have embraced in order to justify their outsize wealth and power and influence over the American system. I think it’s in some sense ironic because a lot of the people who support that racial pseudoscience don’t understand that it applies to them as well, in the minds of the oligarchs who are using them. But I do think these are people who have decided that liberal democracy did not give them enough and they are hoping for a type of government that makes them even more unaccountable than they already are.

Fukuyama: So, I wrote an article a few years ago called “Silvio Berlusconi and the Decline of Western Civilization,” and I updated it with a new version about Elon Musk and the decline of Western civilization, because I really do think Berlusconi was an oligarch that invented something new. He realized that he had a business empire, but if he used that to buy a media empire, he could get political power. And once you had political power, you could use that to protect your business empire. There are a lot of oligarchs in Eastern Europe who did something very, very similar to that. All these old media properties, TV, newspapers, were declining because of the internet—they snapped them up. Not because they’re valuable but because you could get political influence through them.

That’s what Elon Musk did with Twitter, and that’s why … Adam made a comment about antitrust, but I think that one of the most important areas where you have to apply competition laws is in the media. You should not allow any company to amass the kind of concentrated media power that we’ve seen. Now you’ve got Paramount as a competitor, another big oligarchic empire on the right, and I think that’s really what’s dangerous and what we ought to focus on.

Audience Member: My question is related to what Frank just said, which is: Given that the current media environment has been driven by a kind of public psychosis that’s been driven by algorithms that select for sensationalism rather than mundane truth, and given the robust protections of the First Amendment, is there a viable solution to fixing the problem of sensationalist media creating wholesale parallel realities that drive a lot of these autocratic delusions about the state of our politics?

Serwer: Well, look, to give an example, Elon Musk has monetized racism and misogyny and antisemitism on Twitter. To some extent, I think the First Amendment is a pretty insurmountable obstacle in terms of trying to define the limits of free speech on some of these platforms, because whoever owns the platform has a right to define what that space is like. That’s a First Amendment right. But I do think you can deal with the problem to some extent if, as Frank said, you break some of these companies up so that they don’t control like five social media companies that gives them outreach to a billion people and controls whatever they happen to see whenever they open their phones.

And at the core of what you’re talking about, that incentive towards extremism on social media, there’s a data economy underlying that. The more time you spend on your phone, whether it’s getting angry or laughing at something or whatever, the more money that they make by mining your personal habits and then selling them. So they have a bottom line that relies on people being hypnotized by their devices. But their ability to influence American politics relies in part on being able to control what you’re seeing on those devices at all times. And the fewer people have that kind of control over that many different outlets, the less of a problem I think it ends up being—it’s always going to be something of a problem. Propaganda was a problem when we only had newspapers, so there’s no getting around the fundamental human nature of wanting to believe things that aren’t true about people we don’t like. But I do think that you can get rid of a situation where a few people who want to kiss up to a head of state have the power to control everything that we see and hear.

Müller: Just one pedantic footnote to that: I think it’s important to resist the temptation of a certain kind of technological determinism. So, it’s always possible to tell a story that is basically a mono-causal explanation of certain political pathologies: printing press invented, boom, next thing we see is wars of religion; radio invented, Hitler; TV, McCarthy; and so on. This is not totally wrong, but it’s clearly also far too simplistic. Some of us might be old enough to remember a time, 10 years ago, when everybody said, “Oh, filter bubbles, echo chambers,” and so on. And now we know a little bit more about what actually happens. We have understood that, actually, no, that wasn’t really the problem. And in fact we were all, in a certain way, in an echo chamber about echo chambers, because we all told ourselves the story that this explained the catastrophes of 2016, Brexit, Trump, et cetera. And it’s really important to be much more precise about what the truly novel thing might be.

So just as one thought in this context, you might say that the one thing that social media really has contributed is a new form of political mobilization. Because up until now, we only had to, put it bluntly, clientelism—vote for me, I promise you benefits, bureaucratic favors, and so on—or the great invention of the 19th century, the bureaucratic mass party. Now you can have somebody like Bolsonaro, who for a while, when he was president, didn’t even have a party and had been switching parties eight or nine times, but initially, he was able to stand in his backyard with a not-even-particularly-good phone and was able to mobilize people. Then, of course, Brazilian business also swung behind him, so that made, in the end, the difference.

Nevertheless, that is something new. But that is not the same as populism. That does not predict automatically autocracy. The only thing that might be associated with it structurally is that if this is your only way of mobilizing people, you always have to rile up people more. You always have to say, “this is the election where everything is at stake, they’re trying to take the country away from us, you must come out,” and so on. So in that sense, there might be a somewhat inbuilt radicalization dynamic. But that’s really not the same as saying, “oh, social media is fascism” in the way that some of our colleagues have actually said in various op-ed pieces.

Frantz: We have time for one last question.

Audience Member: Jan-Werner, I wanted to thank you. I think you captured the essence of liberalism, which is to not fall prey to the one-weird-trick thinking that seems to be the increasingly American way of approaching things. And I want to ask you, all of you, about the example of Humphrey’s Executor. So if you had asked any administrative lawyer over the last several years, none of them would really have been surprised that the Supreme Court decided the case of Slaughter exactly the way it did. I think they would all be frustrated that the discourse, since that decision, has been people throwing their hands up to complain that the court got it wrong—people who frankly know nothing about the underlying law—and then to suggest that all we have to do is somehow reverse the Supreme Court decision, instead of having the much more difficult conversation about how we create other mechanisms for overseeing the way that these administrative agencies exercise their powers. How we, for example, rewrite the Administrative Procedure Act, the way that was done after the Second World War, how we examined the mistakes and abuses of the Nixon administration … those are hard questions. And my question for you is, how do we epistemically reshape American politics so that there’s a will to get into those hard questions, so that there’s a political willingness to invest time and effort into the work … Congress has to be actually writing real legislative reform, examining the abuses of this government, trying to reshape the media, etc., trying to reinvent the administrative state.

Fukuyama: So that’s a big question, one that I’ve been giving a lot of thought to in recent years. I think your point about Humphrey’s Executor is right. There was a panic reaction to it, which I don’t think was justified by the underlying decision. As you said, it’s been in the works for a long time. And there’s a real, I think, legitimate argument in favor of abolishing it, which I try to explain in terms of multi-member commissions and so forth. I think that the administrative state needs to be rethought. I’ll just state this, an argument I’ve been trying to make in a lot of different fora: I think the conservative view of the deep state is 180 degrees wrong. That narrative says “bureaucrats are unelected, and they are out of control, they all have left-wing opinions and are pushing policies that the American people would never agree with.” I think it’s 100% wrong, because I think actually the problem with our bureaucrats is they are over-controlled.

The burden of proceduralism lies the heaviest on any federal agency that actually wants to try to do something, and the reason we don’t get good outcomes is that they have to follow too many rules, like the Federal Acquisition Regulation if you want to buy an office desk in a federal agency. And actually, if you want to rethink the administrative state, what you’ve got to do is figure out how to deregulate it and allow actual authority: people can use their judgment, they can use discretionary authority, within legal limits, to actually focus on outcomes and not the following of procedures. That is the way that you really get at the core of what is wrong with today’s administrative state.

Frantz: I want to thank the panelists for a really thought-provoking and great kickoff to this conference. Thank you so much.

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Dolly Parton spent her life showing up. She showed up for her fans, giving over 1,000 public concerts and recording over 45 studio albums. She showed up for her home state, spearheading the Dollywood theme park that’s the largest employer in Sevier County, Tennessee. She showed up to do good works, distributing hundreds of millions of children’s books around the world, funding medical research, and supporting disaster relief.

But when it came to being honored, rewarded, or asked to get involved in politics, she made herself scarce. She declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom three times—twice from Donald Trump, once from Joe Biden. When the Tennessee state legislature wanted to erect a statue in her honor she declined. “I don’t think putting me on a pedestal is appropriate at this time,” she said. “I hope, though, that somewhere down the road several years from now or perhaps after I’m gone if you still feel I deserve it, then I’m certain I will stand proud in our great State Capitol as a grateful Tennessean.”

With Parton’s passing earlier this week, it’s time to give her the honors she earned and remember the nationally unifying presence she created as, arguably, the last universally admired person in the United States.

Dolly Parton was one of the most accomplished people of her generation. Her personal life—she was happily married to a non-celebrity for 59 years—seems beyond reproach. Billboard magazine ranks her the number one country star ever. Songs like “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” rank among America’s most recognizable and beloved hits. Her philanthropy—not only books but also the early research behind the Moderna Covid vaccine—reached a scale almost no private citizen has matched. She used her brand, business skills, marketing savvy, and sense of humor to build an entertainment empire and provide jobs in a place that desperately needed them. She became very wealthy in the process—her net worth has been estimated at around $500 million—and her legacy seems certain to have an enduring impact on her home region.

Doing even one of these things would have earned her a place in history. She did all of them.

Donald Trump may have broken precedent by ordering flags to fly at half-staff for a week in her honor—only a handful of private citizens have ever gotten that honor and apparently none for as long—but he was justified in doing so. Trump, to say the least, shows a high level of self-regard but it’s instructive that he’s ordered a greater honor for someone who never endorsed him (or any other political candidate) than he did for his most ardent political supporters.

None of this is to say that Parton never took a position. She told Billboard, in the summer of 2020, that “of course Black lives matter,” while noting that she had not joined the marches. She welcomed gay and lesbian fans. And in 2018 she dropped “Dixie” from the name of her Stampede show, after Charlottesville made the word’s Confederate associations impossible to ignore.

It is tempting to call these safe positions. But a truly safe remark does not run as national news, and hers did. The Billboard comment was a headline on NPR and CNN within a day, precisely because a country star saying it was so unexpected. What separated her was not the content of what she said but that she had never allowed herself to be placed on anyone’s “team.” She offered neither contrition nor defiance about the Stampede: she said that she hadn’t known the term would be offensive, changed the name, and moved on. Even as politics have intruded on everything from supermarket purchases to streaming video choices, Parton kept herself out of the red vs. blue color wars that characterize so much of American life and yet stick up for her beliefs and values.

Since Parton turned down honors during her life but said they were fine after she was gone, there is no reason not to take her up on this. Trump should posthumously grant her the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congress should award her the Congressional Gold Medal. She deserves the nation’s two highest civilian honors as much as anyone ever has. The Tennessee state legislature should also go forward with the plans for a statue she put on ice and then go further.

One particular step is especially fitting: giving her a place in the National Statuary Hall Collection of the United States Capitol. The collection, consisting of two sculptures selected by each state’s government, was created in 1864 under legislation proposed by Congressman Justin Morrill of Vermont to present Americans who are “deem[ed] to be worthy of this national commemoration.”

Her home state of Tennessee currently has two statues in the collection: President Andrew Jackson, who was also a major general in the War of 1812 against the British, and John Sevier, the first Tennessee governor. Sevier helped win a crucial battle in the Revolutionary War but otherwise his accomplishments were meager. Replacing little-remembered politicians like Sevier with popular figures has recent precedent—Arkansas replaced former Governor James P. Clarke with singer Johnny Cash in 2024, making him the first musician admitted to the collection. That swap took five years from state legislation to unveiling, which is a good argument for beginning now.

Jackson certainly made a significant impact on history but he’s a deeply problematic figure who wrecked the economy and brutalized Native Americans. Likewise, Sevier was no friend of the native Indian population whom he displaced with white settlers. Replacing Sevier’s statue could present a fitting continuity. Parton’s home county, a place she transformed for the better, is named for Sevier and, thus, any moderately complete recitation of her impact necessarily mentions his name. In other words, there’s a good case for swapping out either of them.

The Statuary Collection is not, finally, for the people in it: Morrill meant it as a room of examples. And the case for putting Parton in that room is not a matter of paying a debt to a woman who gave freely in every way. It is that a country with less and less in common ought to keep what remains of it in the room where we take the schoolchildren.

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Trump’s electoral intimidation rollout is well underway. During Wyoming’s primary, two DOJ officials showed up at Laramie County polling places without notifying state or local election officials. They asked questions poll workers say went well beyond their legal authority, and they tried to examine vote tabulators and interview voters inside polling places.

WyoFile reports:

The chief election officer for Wyoming’s most populous county, Clerk Lee … voiced concern about the DOJ’s presence in the Laramie County polling places she oversees.

“Two individuals, identifying themselves as DOJ election monitors, informed our poll worker that they were here to monitor Wyoming’s Primary Elections,” Lee said. … “They did not offer their credentials until I requested they do so.” …

The monitors arrived at a busy time and asked questions, according to Lee, that appeared “outside the scope of federal voting rights laws. They included questions about the nature, length, and timing of poll worker training. Monitors requested training guides, asked how our new election equipment was acquired, and wanted to examine our tabulators.” When she learned that the monitors also planned to interview voters “to assess compliance with federal civil rights and voting rights law,” she denied that request. “We do not allow interviews to be conducted in polling places,” Lee said. “This was a poorly managed exercise and one that showed complete disregard for our state laws and administration of our elections,” her statement concluded.

Gov. Mark Gordon—a Republican certainly not known for reflexive skepticism of Trump’s DOJ—went further, saying the observers’ conduct “seemed to exceed” the authority Congress gave them and that he’s asked the state attorney general to look into it. Even Wyoming’s own U.S. Attorney reportedly wasn’t looped in ahead of time.

If this is the dry run for the 1,000-monitor midterm rollout, the DOJ’s claim that this is all about “promoting transparency” is already being undermined.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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President Trump will do anything to get his name on the Kennedy Center. A federal judge blocked Trump’s audacious push to put his name on it earlier this year, ordering the signage removed. Now, the administration is making another attempt. During a mid-August meeting, the Trump-appointed board voted in favor of adding the phrase “Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump” to the end of the center’s formal name, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and moved to rename the physical site as the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”

This attempt has been challenged before the same court. But to ensure this time that the court rules in its favor, the DOJ is raising the stakes, essentially telling it: “approve the renaming, or watch it get demolished.”

CBS News reports:

The Trump administration said it may need to demolish the Kennedy Center if a plan to close the building for two years as part of a controversial renovation project pushed by President Trump and the organization’s board of trustees is blocked by a federal judge. In a Tuesday court filing, the Justice Department said the center’s “dangerously dilapidated, outdated, and decrepit” conditions, in addition to millions in financial losses, put the living memorial to President John F. Kennedy in a “financial and structural death spiral” that will require it to close for renovations. The filing suggested that if the current renovation plans don’t move forward, the center could ultimately be replaced with something like “a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years.” … “This is a not-so-subtle threat to demolish the Kennedy Center if the President doesn’t get his way,” said attorneys Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky. “This is unconscionable, it is unbecoming of the Department of Justice to even put this in a filing, and we will answer in court.”

CNN adds a key detail on the money angle DOJ is leaning on:

An order blocking the Board from appropriately recognizing President Trump will cause donors to flee, financial contributions to dry up, and structural rehabilitation to stop. … There will simply not be the expertise or funding necessary to rebuild and renovate this decimated structure. The Trump Administration is ready to go but, without it, the Kennedy Center cannot be saved.

Translation: Nice Kennedy Center you got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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To close out a wildly successful LibCon2026, ISMA board member Bill Kristol reflected on the last 18 months of authoritarian consolidation. He lauded the resistance effort to Trump that has held up far better than he expected it to, offering hope that American liberal democracy will survive this moment.

Below is the video and a lightly edited transcript from Bill’s address.

For more from LibCon2026, check out our YouTube channel, and this playlist in particular.

Bill Kristol: I’m Bill Kristol. I’m at The Bulwark. I’m also a board member of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, which put on this conference. I’m really proud to be associated with ISMA. I think being a board member’s good, but you don’t have to do very much work. Shikha does all the work, and the others who work there and volunteer there do the work.

We should thank them for putting on a really terrific conference.

We should also thank the excellent panelists. I had a talk in Chicago last night that I couldn’t get out of, so I flew in this morning pretty early. But then I ran into some of the people I knew, or knew of, or followed on Twitter, or where they followed me, or they didn’t know me but were interesting … that I ended up spending much of the conference in the hall, which is good, actually, and cheered me up. Because it seemed like things had gone very, very well here, just judging from their conversations. And part of the point of this, obviously, is to let people meet each other and talk and exchange ideas informally, as well as the panelists. But I do want to thank the panelists—so many of whom came from far away and have really contributed a lot. And thank all of you for coming.

I’ve been to too many conferences over the years, and I’m a little bit of a conference skeptic, I’d say, generally. So when Shikha three, four years ago said, “I want to do this annual conference,” I was a little, “Eh, The UnPopulist is great … podcast is great. Why don’t you just keep on doing that?”

But I was wrong.

I mean, the human contact—in real life, as they say—really matters. And I think Shikha’s certainly been vindicated in her vision for this. So again, thank you all for coming.

Fear not, I am going to be very brief. There’s been a lot of talking that you’ve been subjected to, and it’s getting kind of late. Shikha asked me to reflect on where things stand in a very, very brief wrap-up. Then I’ll say a word about why I actually do feel cheered up by the conference.

The way things stand, I think the authoritarian threat is a little worse than I expected, or has progressed further than I expected. And I was pretty pessimistic in the second term! So I think the notion that, because Trump’s approval numbers are down—which is good—and because they’ve messed up various things—which is good—and because he’s 80 years old and is narcissistic and kind of foolish about various things, and indulges in various conceits, which probably don’t help him in his project—that’s good.

But all in all, the threat is real. I think there’s a bit of a tendency in some of our circles to miss the forest for the trees on this, and think that, because [Trump’s] speech last night [about China’s alleged interference in the 2020 election] was kind of a bust, it doesn’t mean that it’s still not one step in an attempt to subvert our elections. And that attempt is broad and deep.

When I was in government, there was this phrase that had recently become fashionable: We need to address this with an “all-of-government policy,” “all-of-government solution.” And it doesn’t mean anything except we, all parts of the government, should work together on rebuilding Kuwait after the 1990-91 war, or helping Eastern, Central Europe after the Cold War. That’s how long ago I was in government.

Now, Trump has flipped that, though. They have an all-of-government assault on liberal democracy: on democracy, on respecting election results, on the rule of law, on political and civil liberties, on telling the truth about our history. And it’s happening all over the place.

The truth is, the federal government is powerful. The executive branch is powerful, especially when Congress doesn’t check it, when the president controls entirely the party that, for now at least, is the majority in Congress. Courts can do some good, and are doing some good, especially at the district court level, but that’s reactive and limited in all kinds of obvious ways. Just the body weight of the authoritarian effort worries me—having the Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security, and parts of the Department of Defense, and everything down to the United States Postal Service and the Federal Communications Commission, and all these kind of not-important or not-central parts of the government, but they’re all on board, and they’re all doing their bit. And it adds up. And the amount of actual oppression—but also intimidation, and sort of second-order effects of suppressing opposition and dissent and challenges, shouldn’t be minimized.

So I’m, on the one hand, worried about the real threats to our freedoms and to our democracy. But again, we shouldn’t exaggerate it. They’re not 10-feet tall. They’ve had setbacks, but we should be concerned.

I would also say, just outside of government, they’ve been pretty shrewd about co-opting huge institutions—especially businesses, but also parts of the media. Also, intimidating institutions that they thought would be hostile, and were hostile, like universities, and made them much less forceful, I would say, in many cases, in standing up against the administration’s efforts. Or where they stand up, they do it quietly—who needs to be the first to pick a fight?

And, look, I respect that—these people have their own institutions to worry about. But the net effect of that is that the authoritarianism is both deeper within the government, broader across the government, but also comes out from the government and affects many other institutions in this country.

So in that respect it’s been a bad 18 months. We’ve never seen anything like this in modern America. We’ve seen it at the state level, obviously, in the South, especially on race, but not as a national, all-purpose kind of assault on our liberties.

The final point I would say that’s worrisome is that while the public has reacted against it in the second term, in an important way (I’ll come back to that in a second), elites have not really reacted particularly forcefully, in my opinion. I don’t see a heck of a lot of people who say, “I tried to get along with Trump early on, but I can’t deal with him now.” There’s a little bit of that—a few law firms worried, but they’re not willing to be quoted on the record. Maybe some businessmen that were so great to give millions of dollars to every stupid project to try to curry favor [are] privately a little uncertain. But mostly, they seem to be continuing to do that.

Elites were worse than I expected, I’d say, in America. The public was—is actually— okay.

Trump won 50% of the vote—18 months later, he’s got 40% approval, basically. So that’s 10% out of 50%—losing that, that’s a lot. One in five Trump voters, almost by definition, disapproves of what he’s done as president in the second term. Now, there are other things they’re upset about besides democracy, obviously: prices, the war, and all that. But I think people underestimate how much the underlying anti-democratic, anti-liberal, but also just anti-the-basic-virtues Danielle [Allen] was talking about, like honesty and decency … how much that has led to that erosion of Trump’s support among the public.

Ranging from issues like immigration, ICE, where Trump was so strong allegedly at the beginning … and I remember being at all these events a year ago speaking to Democratic donors—not the people I hung out with for most of my political life—and they were being told by these operatives, “Okay, we gotta stay away from the immigration issue” early on. That was when Trump was getting the money for ICE and announcing the crackdowns, but stuff hadn’t happened yet the way it has now. “That’s not a good issue for us.” It was really such a childish view of politics, first of all. And I remember having to explain to them: “You know, if Trump starts at 60% on an issue and you knock him down to 50%, that’s as important politically as finding an issue where he starts at 45% and you knock him down to 35%.” It’s maybe not quite as important for various reasons of what issues people vote on, but it’s not unimportant.

Karl Rove—whom I otherwise am not on great terms with—used to say this: “You should go after the opponent’s strongest issues as well as his weakest issues. It’s important to reduce his strength on the issues where he is strong, as well as to exploit his weaknesses.” And that’s something that Democrats, for whatever reason, were very scared of after ’24.

I think we’ve seen that on other issues as well. But I think there, Democrats did step up—events happened, people saw what was happening, and they didn’t want it. So I think the public turns out to be a little more democratic, a little more liberal, a little more interested in decency and honesty and basic liberties than I feared. I wish it were more than 60% of the public, but at least 60 is better than 50.

If you wanted to do a thought experiment: What if Trump’s approval were 55% now? Which, incidentally, is not a ridiculous proposition. The economy’s been decent for his presidency. We fought a very stupid war in Iran, but the military casualties have been minimal across his presidency. It’s not like we’re in the middle of Vietnam, or even Iraq, right? And yet the country—most people aren’t being bothered too much, in their day-to-day lives, by all the things that bother people in this room quite a lot. And yet 10% of the public, 20% of his supporters—10% of the public—has deserted him. What if they hadn’t? I mean, we would really be in trouble.

The other thing I would say—this sounds impolite, but I’m not Danielle [Allen], I can say this—we’re lucky that Trump is 80 years old. Really! I mean, if Trump were 55 years old, it would be very, very, very, very different. There’s zero chance he wouldn’t run for a third term. There’s zero chance the Republican Party would deny it to him—I think there’s a limited chance the courts would actually step in forcefully, or Congress, for that matter. And then we’re in a whole different—Orbán (Orbán 2014, not Orbán now) or Putin (in the early part of the century)—type situation.

I’m not sure he won’t do it or try to do a version of it with family members and others who are totally indebted to him, and some are semi-controlled by him—but I think it’s harder just because of his age. So that’s kind of one piece of good luck we have, in what hasn’t been a great 10 years of good luck.

But having said all these somewhat depressing things, such as that the authoritarianism is strong—the resistance is also strong. I mean, the way I think of it is both forces have been stronger than I expected. The authoritarian effort has been stronger, and the popular liberal-democratic resistance has actually been stronger. The main evidence for that is obviously the polls, but there’s plenty of actual empirical evidence—ranging from popular mobilization, No Kings sorts of things, to conferences like this, the more elite efforts, if you want to call it that, to revive liberalism, people coming together from different past persuasions in a pretty good way, honestly, a pretty seamless working together, at least in the things I’ve been involved in, but also a certain amount of arguing, which is totally good and legitimate.

I don’t think you look at this opposition and think, “Oh my God, they’ve become Trumpy in their opposition”—mostly you don’t think they’ve become too dogmatic or unwilling to criticize each other. It’s good, actually, that there remains that willingness to do that. So I think, in that respect, the opposition has a fair amount to be proud of, actually.

This conference has been about the reconstruction side of things, which is awfully important, and really has to be addressed side by side with the resistance side of things. But I would say that, on the resistance side, there is a tension: resistance is where the rubber hits the road, and where you can’t give up your principles, and even your views and preferences about policies. On the other hand, you do have to work together in constructive ways. And that’s been true of resistances throughout history, and it’s always been a challenge.

The reconstruction stuff, in a way, is not easier—in practice it could end up being even harder—but I think it’s psychologically easier to get into that kind of thing. It’s fun: Here’s my pet proposal for reforming health care. Here’s my YIMBY housing thing, or whatever—and that’s great, and I’m going around pushing it. It’s sort of an upbeat thing to do. Resisting, one after another, these authoritarian thrusts and efforts, and doing so in alliance with people you didn’t know well a few years ago, and you disagreed with on a bunch of things, and you still find slightly odd sometimes when you work with them, and they find you odd, and your work habits and assumptions and stuff. The resistance has been an impressive thing.

So the authoritarianism is more dangerous than I expected. The resistance has been more impressive, honestly, than I expected. And here we are. I don’t know where this all ends up. I’m moderately, mildly optimistic, but I don’t want to also sugarcoat it.

I thought I would end by actually reading something. So, on this question of the resistance—well, just one word: really, this kind of conference, with people from different backgrounds, of different views and different generations, genuinely trying to think—to argue—both to be tough in terms of what we oppose, but to be constructive in terms of what we would like to see, and to be willing to argue with each other and among each other—but also have these arguments in a civil way—make clear that there’s a bigger picture in which we are not united exactly, really but are part of a coalition of resistance and opposition that cares a lot about the fundamentals of this country and of liberal democracy … I think that’s awfully important and impressive. I personally have been buoyed and cheered up by being here. And that’s not nothing when engaged in these struggles.

I thought I’d read something that captures, I think, both what I feel, but also what I think we all should feel. James Carville wrote a piece for The Bulwark. Because I know James, and I’ve known him a long time, he called up and said, “I want to write a piece.” It was October 2020. It was his idea. And he wrote it in his voice. The Bulwark was much smaller than it is now, and he wanted to put it in The Bulwark, not because he had to—obviously James can get a piece into The New York Times, or wherever he wants, basically, at any time—he wanted this to be in The Bulwark.

And the first part, which I won’t bother you with, is sort of … “it’s great that all these people I’ve debated for years, like Kristol and everything, and disagreed with, and fought against in election campaigns—it’s great that we’re all working together.” And that’s all true and fine. But then James goes on to say—let me find this here—he talks about the movement of the moment, why, for him, this has been such an important moment.

And he says: “What this moment has done for all of us—for all of us who maybe have never been presented with such a grave threat as we now see—is that it has given us, for this moment we’re living in right now, a sense of common purpose. Common purpose”—and then it gets a little florid, but still, nice—“common purpose of which we will be able to recall forever that when our country and our republic were on the brink of collapse, when our fellow Americans needed us, we took a blowtorch to our past differences, our former conflicts, and our old rivalries, and we fought together.”

And then James continues: “In less than two weeks, I will be 76 years old”—a little older than I am—“I was a boy raised near some of the poorest banks of the Mississippi River.” (I was raised near the banks of the Hudson River—very similar background, really.) “And I’ve now had the overwhelming honor,” James says, “to help elect senators, governors, my friend Bill Clinton as president of the United States. I’ve seen my face flash across the silver screen, and I’ve flown around the world practicing the profession I love.” And he’s got this nice ending: “All of this was wildly unimaginable,” he says, “to that little boy skipping rocks in Louisiana 70 years ago. But as I sit here, wonderstruck in retrograde, I can say, with certainty, that in all my years, joining in this crusade to take America back from the brink of destruction is the greatest thing that I have ever been a part of in my life. This crusade is something noble.”

I remember how moved I was when I saw the piece. I remember thinking: You know? That’s right—we’ve all been involved, and some of us who are older have been involved, and some of you who are younger will be involved in interesting things, and we hope important things, meaningful things … but I really do feel like this moment—the fight we’re in at this moment—is, as James says, a noble crusade.

And we should be proud of it. Thank you all for coming.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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Back in July, we flagged the Trump administration’s nearly $5 million grant program to bankroll far-right causes in Europe. The scheme has only grown: the State Department has now made more than $7.9 million available for the effort, including a new $1 million grant to build an “independent journalism consortium” that will produce U.S. taxpayer-funded, government-shaped coverage of European immigration policy.

To truly understand what the administration’s idea of “independence” is, read this Talking Points Memo reprint of a story from The Redoubt:

As part of a grant opportunity posted Aug. 18, the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor announced it was looking for a partner—possibly including “[f]or-profit organizations or businesses”—that could help it “develop an independent journalism consortium in Europe.” According to the listing, the grant, valued at $1 million, will be awarded as part of a “cooperative agreement” just two weeks after the funding opportunity was first publicized. … However, a review by The Redoubt shows that the State Department has now made more than $7.9 million in such funding available, including a grant worth almost $2 million … for an analysis of how “foreign governments and their proxies weaponize migration.” …

The State Department envisions close collaboration between the Trump administration and the recipients of its largesse. Should the money be offered as part of a “cooperative agreement,” the department would insist on “substantial involvement” in the project, including the right to “approve key personnel.” … “The administration prioritizes democracy and freedom of expression,” the spokesperson said, “in the European region.”

In other words, the administration is dressing up state propaganda as press freedom. This is nothing less than an attempt to manufacture and amplify pro-Trump messaging and to help far-right parties like Germany’s AfD.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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The Center for American Progress, a left-of-center think tank, published a report in July finding “no evidence” that Trump’s National Guard deployments have reduced violent crime. It also projected that deployments would cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion if extended through the end of the calendar year. The Trump administration’s response wasn’t to dispute the data but to threaten CAP with a $5 billion defamation suit unless it retracted the report and apologized to Trump personally.

The New York Times notes:

The threats against the think tank, the Center for American Progress, were Mr. Trump’s latest effort to use the legal system to punish critics for voicing unflattering facts and opinions generally protected by the First Amendment. …

On Monday, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Alejandro Brito, wrote a letter to the center warning that he would file the lawsuit if the group did not fully retract the report, which was published on its website on July 13. The letter … was addressed to the group’s president and chief executive, Neera Tanden. … Mr. Brito claimed that the report about the National Guard was full of malicious and false statements. He gave Ms. Tanden and members of her board until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract it and apologize to Mr. Trump. Ms. Tanden pushed back, saying in a statement that the center would “neither cower nor bend in the face” of legal action.

Whatever ultimately happens with the lawsuit, it has already performed its messaging function: it has sent a warning to other think tanks that reaching unflattering conclusions about the administration’s efforts can now mean a significantly costly legal and financial fight.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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Stars and Stripes, a U.S. military newspaper meant to give news about the service to military families and personnel, has had its editorial independence backstopped by Congress since 1991, when lawmakers created an ombudsman position that would report directly to lawmakers. This was specifically meant to safeguard the paper from Pentagon interference.

Unsurprisingly, that hasn’t stopped Trump’s Pentagon from … interfering.

Editor-in-Chief Erik Slavin and reporter Lara Korte were fired for “insubordination” weeks after telling CBS News that censoring the news U.S. troops receive represents a red line they would not cross. Max Lederer, the publisher who had just announced his retirement, was also pushed out. An active-duty Navy officer who Hegseth likes better has been installed in the newsroom’s senior leadership.

The Associated Press reports that this wasn’t the first time this year the paper’s independence took a hit:

[Slavin] received a notice of separation, as did publisher Max Lederer—who had just announced his upcoming retirement—and Middle East reporter Lara Korte, Slavin said. … In April, the Pentagon fired Jacqueline Smith, ombudsman for the newspaper, whose job had been to safeguard editorial independence.

Slavin should be applauded for sticking up for the publication’s independence, which isn’t a courtesy that the department extends whenever it’s convenient, but a legal obligation it is currently violating by its actions.

Every such act of “insubordination” exposes this administration’s authoritarianism and moral bankruptcy. We need more of them.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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The future USS Doris Miller was supposed to become the first aircraft carrier named after a Black sailor and an enlisted service member. It was supposed to honor the heroic mess attendant who grabbed an anti-aircraft gun he’d never been trained to use during the Pearl Harbor attack, becoming the first Black American to receive the Navy Cross. Now the Navy is thinking of stripping his name from the ship and replacing it with Trump’s, which would represent the first time in history a Navy vessel has been named for a sitting president—not to mention a draft dodger who got a family doctor to certify that he has spurs in his heels and is therefore medically unfit to be deployed in Vietnam.

CNN reports:

The US Navy is working to rename an aircraft carrier under construction that was set to honor a Black sailor hailed for his heroic actions during the attack on Pearl Harbor, three sources familiar with internal discussions told CNN. During President Donald Trump’s first term, the Navy announced that the Ford-class carrier would be called the USS Doris Miller, recognizing an enlisted sailor who helped defend US forces from Japan’s attack.

It’s unclear what the Navy is seeking to change the name of the carrier to, though two of the sources said there have been internal conversations about renaming it to honor Trump. …

The Navy convened a renaming commission in 2025 under former Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, to review how ships and other military assets were named. Phelan believes aircraft carriers specifically should be named only after presidents, Navy admirals, and consequential Navy battles, a person familiar with his thinking said. … The Navy commission came amid broader efforts in the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to remove names selected for what the administration considers diversity, equity, and inclusion purposes.

The Navy says Miller may get a Medal of Honor upgrade and have a different ship named after him. But there is no way to soften the blow: Miller, a Black war hero, is being asked to give way to a sitting president obsessed with naming monuments after himself.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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In 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, was in the throes of its infamous witch trials. In courtroom scenes which seem so inexplicably absurd to us, human beings were sent to the gallows on the basis of “spectral evidence”—invisible proof of alleged witchcraft that only the accusers, mostly young girls, could see or experience. Many would collapse into screaming fits in front of the judges, alleging that they were being tormented in that very moment by the bewildered defendants. But not all such accusers were impressionable children, as it’s often remembered. One was a woman around the age of 40.

Bathshua Pope, sometimes referred to by her maiden name of Folger, lived with her husband and mother-in-law at a sawmill in Salem. When the mill suffered some kind of mechanical breakdown in 1692, it was attributed to supposed dealings with the devil. Bathshua was among the accusers, ultimately providing “evidence” that helped send at least three people to the hangman’s noose. One of the accused was Martha Corey, whose husband, Giles, became the hysteria’s most memorable victim when he refused to enter a plea and so was crushed to death with rocks, defiant to the end. Aside from being older than most of the accusers, Bathshua was a fairly unremarkable figure in the whole bloody melodrama. She doesn’t feature prominently in most histories.

Within a few years, the backlash to Salem became a cause célèbre in Massachusetts. It was the last time people were officially executed in colonial America for alleged supernatural crimes. In part, this was thanks to a new medium (no pun intended) coming into form on the fringes of the British empire. America’s first newspaper, with the unwieldy name Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, was printed in Boston in 1690 before being promptly shut down by the royal authorities.

But the idea couldn’t be suppressed for long, and by the early 18th century, mass consumption newspapers were all the rage in a colony that almost certainly had the highest literacy rate of anywhere in the world at the time. Treatises and pamphlets were also published, denouncing both the theological and legal errors of the witch trials. Official exonerations and compensation to the victims were passed by the colonial assembly in 1711.

In the meantime, in 1706, Bathshua’s younger sister, Abiah, gave birth to a son. Bathshua died in 1726, three years after her restless teenage nephew left Boston to seek work as a typesetter in Philadelphia, betting his future on the burgeoning industry of the printing press.

As far as we can tell, he never mentioned his aunt. The historical record has no trace of her own thoughts about what she had done. But when he was growing up nearby, the two undoubtedly interacted. Perhaps they gathered for a thanksgiving meal, or crossed paths at weddings in the extended family. The woman who had participated in actions scarcely distinguishable from human sacrifice, and her nephew, the boy whose name would echo through the ages as a harbinger of modernity: Benjamin Franklin.

The Spark of Progress

Those who lived in the 19th, 20th, and now 21st centuries would become used to seeing massive changes in society and technology over the course of a single lifespan. But Benjamin Franklin, whose life stretched from 1706 to 1790, was perhaps one of the first people who experienced something recognizable as substantial moral and material progress. And he not only witnessed it, but in numerous ways helped bring it about.

The very concept of progress was something novel to Franklin’s era, one of the heady ideas swirling about in the intellectual effervescence of the Enlightenment. For most of history, change was something to be feared. When scraping out a subsistence existence, anything that upset the apple cart was likelier to kill you than improve your lot in life. The charge of “innovation” had been leveled not as a compliment but as a damning accusation from ancient Rome to the Reformation-era wars of religion.

Franklin’s apprenticeship in Philadelphia placed him at the heart of an information revolution. Cheap pamphlets turned taverns into debating halls and stitched the colonies into a republic of letters long before they became a republic of laws. Superstition thrives in darkness; movable type flooded the room with daylight. Where his aunt’s generation saw devils, Franklin saw the power of reason.

The spread of newspapers did more than record events; it created a feedback loop of criticism and correction. Bad ideas didn’t just linger as if they were sacred scriptures—they were answered, revised, or discarded in the flood of public discourse. That iterative churn laid the groundwork for modern science, modern politics, and the modern habit of expecting tomorrow to be better than today. It is no coincidence the first lightning rod and the first colonial political cartoon share the same author.

By mid-century, Franklin’s printing house was issuing newspapers, essays, and his famously witty almanacs. Each sheet of paper was a small act of rebellion against inherited authority, announcing that ordinary readers could weigh evidence and reach conclusions without a priest or a magistrate whispering cues. Where Salem had demanded faith in invisible afflictions, Franklin demanded proof—and supplied it, most famously with a key, kite, and a thundercloud.

Self-Evident Truths and the Modern Mind

Many years after the massacre at Salem, but when it was still within the outer reaches of family memory, Franklin gathered with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson to review the latter’s draft of one of the most monumental documents of all time.

“We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable…” Jefferson had written. On this “original rough draft” of the Declaration, now on display at the Library of Congress, Jefferson’s delicate cursive is aggressively crossed out by heavy lines. Ever the wordsmith, Franklin (to whom the change is usually attributed) insisted this talk of sacrality should be jettisoned. Something more modern, more rational, more secular was instead laid as the cornerstone of the new republic: self-evident. There would be no spectral evidence offered here.

We are used to reflecting, and rightly so, on all the many ways that the Revolutionary generation did not live up to its noble creeds. While witch trials might have been left in the past by 1776, the horrors of chattel slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans, and the subjugation of women were all still practiced. Franklin’s own attitudes varied even as one of the more progressive figures on the scene; he was one of the earliest abolitionists, to his credit, but also peddled anti-immigration tropes foreshadowing later waves of nativism. Radical as he was, he’d hardly pass for woke.

But it’s also worth appreciating just how much of a quantum leap Franklin and his contemporaries made from what had come before, and not that long before. We do not speak of the Founders as medieval figures, lost in the stagnant barbarism of ignorance and superstition. We condemn their sins largely in their own terms, often in language they first articulated and ideas they implanted into our historical consciousness. They were early modern figures, but they were undeniably modern, grappling with concepts which continue to shape our very sense of morality to this day.

Franklin’s life offered a parable in miniature of that modern mindset. At 23, he was the publisher of his own newspaper. At 30, he organized America’s first volunteer fire department. At 33, he attended the famous Great Awakening revivals of George Whitefield, not for religious fervor but to conduct experiments about sound and the human voice. At 46, he installed the first lightning rods. At 48, he proposed the first plan for a union of the American colonies. In his 50s and 60s, he was the celebrity representative of the colonies in the imperial metropole. At 70, he cast off that empire and proclaimed a new nation. At 76, he brokered peace in Paris. At 81, he participated in the constitutional convention. And in his dying days, the onetime slaveowner petitioned Congress for abolition, and his last published work was a scathing satire mocking the irrationality and hypocrisy of the institution’s defenders.

Franklin assumed problems could be solved and progress could be made because he’d spent a lifetime doing so.

And in an age of electronic wonders, we owe substantial debt to the man who demonstrated how the seemingly inexplicable forces of electricity were not magic but laws of nature. How lightning, long seen as the paradigmatic example of the unpredictable caprice of divine will, could in fact be tamed and made safe with a simple metal rod diverting its bolts safely into the ground. We could understand it, and shape it to our ends, by the same laws of nature from which flowed individual rights and liberal government—products of reason, of our ability to perceive self-evident truths, and to build on them a better world.

As we reflect on a quarter millennium since Franklin’s memorable line-edits of the Declaration of Independence, we face our own moral panics and arbitrary oppressions. Communities torn apart by fear and accusations, the heat of protest and suppression, a mockery being made of due process of law, and a gloomy sense of foreboding in which the entire project of Enlightenment liberalism can feel lost. So many of the charges once levied against King George III are now ominously echoed in the rampant misconduct of our own head of state, from having “sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people” to “quartering large bodies of armed troops among us” to “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world.”

But still, we are not doomed to dark times any more than Franklin was consigned to live out his life in the world of witch trials and theocracy. Progress is possible. Freedom can advance. Our ideas about how to treat each other justly can improve. It’s worth pondering: In 20, or 50, or 80 years, what will we look back on in the same way Franklin might have thought of Salem? And what will we have done to put those errors on the same ash heap of history?

© The UnPopulist, 2026. A previous version of this essay was published in our pages in 2025.

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As we move toward the end of the Trump era, we need to reckon with the changes his administration has wrought in the American system of government. The most significant is the enormous concentration of power, not just in the executive branch as a whole, but in the office of the president. Any successor administration, Republican or Democratic, will inherit these powers, and will have to decide how it wants to define the limits of executive authority in the future.

The U.S. Constitution limits presidential power in a number of ways. Article I says that laws and budgets are made by Congress, and Article II says the president’s chief duty is to see that the laws are “faithfully executed.” He can choose his own Cabinet officers, but they must be confirmed by the Senate. The president has more discretionary authority with regard to foreign policy and national security, where he is designated commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Yet even in this sphere, the right to declare war and ratify treaties is given to Congress.

Donald Trump has tried to expand executive authority in any number of ways. From Day One of his second administration, he has issued a blizzard of executive orders that have in effect usurped Congress’s legislative powers. In some cases he has acted under obscure legal powers, many of which were later found by the courts to be inappropriate. In other cases he has simply acted illegally or unconstitutionally. Among the many examples are:

• Ending birthright citizenship;

• His failure to spend money appropriated by Congress;

• The closing of entire departments, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, that had been established by Congress;

• Attempting to assert federal authority over election administration;

• Using emergency powers to impose tariffs in an arbitrary and discretionary manner;

• Firing federal employees protected by statute;

• Launching a major war without seeking authorization from Congress.

The lower courts have blocked many of these initiatives, and the Supreme Court has reversed both the birthright citizenship order and the tariffs imposed last year under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

However, the Supreme Court has not yet ruled on many of the other cases, and in one case clearly ruled in favor of the administration. That was Trump v. Slaughter, decided last month, which overturned an earlier Supreme Court decision called Humphrey’s Executor. That precedent, set in 1935, upheld the right of Congress to impose limits on the president’s power to change the composition of the boards of supposedly “independent” multimember regulatory agencies like the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.

The Slaughter decision may seem technical, and has received relatively little public attention. The one multimember federal agency that the public (and more importantly the markets) care about is the Federal Reserve Board, where Trump had already tried to fire one member, Lisa Cook. The Supreme Court exempted the Fed from its general evisceration of Humphrey’s Executor, arguing somewhat speciously that the Fed has a different historical status from other agencies and therefore its board could remain protected from political interference.

The Slaughter decision, however, has huge implications for the way America will be governed in the future, and it is only the first shoe to drop in a long-term conservative effort to remake the federal executive. Humphrey’s Executor had been the long-term target of conservatives under a doctrine of the “unitary executive.” They argued on originalist grounds that the Constitution gave executive authority to the president alone, who, as a democratically legitimated official, could not be restricted by Congress in his control over the executive branch.

There is a certain logic to this position, one that has been supported not just by conservatives but by certain progressives as well. Most prominent in the latter camp was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in the 1930s sought to remove William Humphrey (who was accused of blocking FDR’s legislative agenda) as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Humphrey’s removal was overturned by a conservative Supreme Court.

To this one could add the following argument. No one questions the right of the president to appoint, with the Senate’s approval, Cabinet secretaries and other senior officials, or to unilaterally remove them. The president’s right to appoint or remove the heads of agencies led by a single individual, like the CDC or NASA, is not contested. So why should those with multimember boards be treated differently?

The argument I would make against the theory of the unitary executive is not based on any originalist reading of the Constitution. It is rather based on a pragmatic observation. Today’s executive branch is so large, sprawling, and powerful that there needs to be a separation of powers within the executive, and not simply between the executive and the other two branches of government. The chief argument in favor of such a separation has to do with the preservation of the expertise that is necessary to run a modern state.

We see this most clearly in the case of the Federal Reserve, which in the Slaughter decision was somehow exempted from political control. Painful experience with inflation has taught the United States and other countries around the world that central banks must be made independent. The incentives of politicians are almost always short-term and aimed at their political self-interest. The independent structure of the Fed and its multimember board protects it from politicization and enhances its ability to operate according to the judgment of the experienced professionals who run it—i.e., PhD economists and practitioners with deep experience with financial markets.

The Incompetence Problem

Quite apart from the illegality and unconstitutionality of many of the Trump administration’s actions, there is also its incompetence.

That incompetence has been on display since the beginning of the second term, when Trump appointed a series of individuals with no expertise in the agencies they were to run: Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, TV commentator Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services, and podcaster Kash Patel as head of the FBI.

The consequences are clear: by sidelining regional experts throughout State, Defense, and the intelligence community, for example, there was no one to warn the president that launching a massive air assault on Iran might lead to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.

The Justice Department likewise has been diverted from its role as impartial enforcer of the law to being an instrument for Donald Trump’s personal revenge campaign. By forcing out career prosecutors, the department found its cases susceptible to being overturned by the courts and indictments rejected by grand juries across the country.

Underlying the theory of the unitary executive is a flawed concept of hierarchical organization that is as incorrect as it is widespread. “Principal-agent theory” is commonly used by economists and other social scientists to understand the dysfunctions of hierarchies. All authority lies with the principal; agents are simply expected to carry out the wishes of the principal and problems arise only when the agents follow their own agenda.

As Nobel laureate Herbert Simon pointed out many years ago, this is not how real-world organizations work. Agents, including front-line workers at the bottom of hierarchies, often have more expertise and local knowledge than the principals who give them orders. As a result, authority in many organizations flows from the agents to the principal. This is a truth understood in well-functioning militaries, which give their junior officers substantial authority and advise senior commanders not to micromanage.

So too in the U.S. government. The knowledge of how to deal with an airline accident, or a sudden disease outbreak, or indeed a financial crisis, will not lie with the democratically elected politician at the top of the hierarchy, but rather with the experts who have the training and experience to act. A well-designed government needs to have mechanisms for protecting that expertise.

Multimember commissions are a very imperfect means of doing this, but they do at least make it more difficult for an incompetent president to do his destructive work. There are other important protections for expertise as well, such as requirements for “for cause” removals, which protect officials from arbitrary firing. Such constraints have been a clear target of the Trump administration.

Another critical protection for expertise lies in Senate confirmation: in most administrations, the Senate will simply not confirm blatantly unqualified people for senior positions. One of the greatest failures of the current Congress is its unwillingness to exert this authority in so many prominent cases.

Reviving the Spoils System

The Trump administration’s war on expertise has only just begun. Greater political control over senior officials in multimember commissions will have limited day-to-day impact on most citizens. But believers in the unitary executive want to extend that control to the whole of the federal government, such that every government worker, down to your local postmaster, will be subject to removal by a political boss.

This assertion of executive authority was attempted at the end of the first Trump administration with an executive order creating a new “Schedule F” employment designation into which the whole of the civil service could be moved, and then fired or replaced at will. Schedule F was rescinded by the Biden administration, but has re-emerged in the second Trump term as “Schedule P/C.”

This is not a casual innovation off the top of Donald Trump’s head. The authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 spent their four years out of office designing a policy that would allow them to radically reshape the entire federal bureaucracy, and to eliminate the checks and balances that Congress had inserted over the years to limit the president’s power. The overturning of Humphrey’s Executor is only part one of this plan; the administration’s war against the “deep state” also seeks to invalidate the 1883 Pendleton Act, which first created a merit-based civil service. This will return the United States to the 19th-century spoils (or patronage) system, whereby not just top policymakers but all government officials were put in place by a politician in return for political loyalty.

The spoils system was known for its corruption at all levels of government, from Crédit Mobilier to Tammany Hall. Today we have massive corruption at the top levels of government, beginning with Donald Trump and his friends and family. But the elimination of a professional civil service will open up vast new areas for corrupt behavior in every city and county in the United States. Project 2025 is unapologetic about this, arguing that the patronage system was unfairly criticized.

What the Next President Inherits

The next president—and there will be a next president—will have to confront the question of how much of the authority claimed by Donald Trump he or she will want to retain. This is a complicated question, because the status quo ante was very problematic. As I’ve argued in previous articles, the government really has become over-constrained in its ability to take action. A new president will face many obstacles to implementing their desired agenda, and will be strongly tempted to use the kind of executive power claimed by Donald Trump. The next president needs to come into office not just with new policies, but with clear plans for how to use the mechanisms of government to get them done.

The time to start thinking about these questions is now: we cannot put this off until Jan. 20, 2029, when a new president will be facing immediate political pressures to act. The Republicans spent their four years out of power coming up with clever strategies to get their way, which they have been implementing in the second term. Those backing a post-Trump administration need to do the same.

An earlier version of this article was first published in Persuasion.

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Back in May, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, concluding that the government was engaged in vindictive prosecution after Garcia successfully challenged his wrongful deportation to El Salvador’s CECOT torture prison. But the DOJ is unwilling to accept defeat and let an innocent man return to his life. It is appealing the decision.

The Guardian reports:

In a filing to the US sixth circuit court of appeals, the justice department insisted that human smuggling allegations against Abrego are genuine—and not retaliation for challenging his wrongful deportation to El Salvador in March 2025. …

[The judge in the case, Waverly David] Crenshaw said the indictment’s timing, statements made by the recently confirmed attorney general, Todd Blanche, and sustained oversight by other top US justice department officials, had “thoroughly tainted” the case. In its appeal … the justice department accused the judge of “an unwarranted intrusion” into the government’s power—and demanded the appellate court reverse it.

“The evidence in the district court proved that charges were brought against Abrego Garcia because, in the view of career prosecutors, the evidence conclusively established that he had committed a serious crime, and not for any vindictive motive,” the justice department statement said. … Attorneys for Abrego told CBS News that the justice department’s appeal was “flat wrong.” In a statement, they said: “The indictment and prosecution of Abrego Garcia was, in fact, vindictive; the evidence before the district court established just that; and the proof was clear notwithstanding the DoJ’s refusal to call the actual decision makers, including AG Blanche, to testify under oath.”

What is truly chilling about Garcia’s persecution is that there is no political upside to it. He is not a critic of the administration or engaged in political activism. He is simply an ordinary man trying to make a living. But he is part of a scapegoated outgroup against whom Trump has declared a jihad and nothing will stop the president from using the full force of the state to make his point.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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A judge shot down the Trump administration’s lawsuit against Harvard, rejecting the government’s bid to withhold grant funding on grounds that it discriminated against Jews. Now, a DOJ whistle-blower has exposed what we frankly already knew: that the attack on Harvard and other universities was motivated by political animus rather than genuine concern about antisemitism.

MS NOW has the story:

The Trump administration’s findings that three Ivy League schools violated civil rights law by tolerating antisemitism were predetermined by political priorities that blew past the evidence and cast aside standard investigative procedures, according to a whistleblower account provided to Congress.

The disclosure, by Haley Van Erem, a veteran Justice Department civil rights attorney, involves investigations into whether Harvard, Brown and Columbia universities broke the law by allowing antisemitism to flourish on their campuses. … The complaint said that after being informed that there was no evidence to support a finding of a Title VI violation based on antisemitism at Brown, a senior Trump administration official at HHS, Daniel Shieh, agreed that there was “not a Title VI violation,” but told Van Erem and other DOJ team members at the meeting that “there’s no way we’re going to get a letter of no violation cleared.” … “Hundreds of millions of dollars were suspended from these universities prior to the completion of Title VI investigations and the investigative team’s conclusions were frequently disregarded,” the complaint says.

If the administration were interested in fighting antisemitism, it could speak out against the right-wing media ecosystem, where raw hatred against Jews is par for the course. But it would rather launch a baseless and politically motivated harassment campaign against universities to titillate its base and bring critics to heel.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.

Today, we’re pleased to share exiled Hong Kong democracy advocate Nathan Law's thoughtful dinner keynote at LibCon2026. (If you missed last year's similarly moving address by Vladimir Kara-Murza, you can watch or read it here.) Below is the video, followed by the full transcript: ’s introduction, Nathan Law’s remarks, and the Q&A that followed. For more from LibCon2026, visit our YouTube channel—this playlist contains every session in one place.

Berny Belvedere: Good evening. When Shikha bestowed on me the honor of introducing our dinner speaker, it meant a lot to me. It meant a lot because of who the speaker is. I’ve been thinking a lot about liberal courage, a term that, in most of the places where liberalism has taken root, can seem almost ill-fitting. Don’t get me wrong, liberalism has obviously faced down real enemies, fascism chief among them. But in the places where it has won, it won so completely that courage stopped being a muscle that it felt it needed to cultivate. To invoke David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water,” our perspective—the broadly liberal perspective—became the water that we all swim in. Most people can affirm its values and principles, but they also didn’t know any other [social configuration]. That meant they didn’t know how to defend it. They didn’t know what was at stake. They didn’t know what to do when a rival ideology comes along—because, for decades, nothing seriously required them to defend it. It was just the status quo. That’s actually not a weakness in liberalism, but rather evidence of its success. But it means courage is a virtue that liberalism, for long stretches, simply hasn’t had to practice.

Nathan Law, our dinner speaker tonight, is a liberal hero. He’d never describe himself that way, but I’m the one with the microphone, so he’s going to have to take it.

In 2014, Hong Kong police fired tear gas and pepper spray into a crowd of student protesters. They were merely demanding the right to elect their own leaders. These protesters raised umbrellas to shield themselves. The standoff that followed became known as the Umbrella Movement. Nathan, a college student then, became one of the student representatives chosen to sit down with the government officials on TV and make the protesters’ case. He didn’t even tell his own family he was involved. His mother found out he’d been arrested when she looked up at the TV and saw her son taken away.

Two years later, he turned that fight into a political movement. He co-founded a new pro-democracy party and ran for Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. He actually won. At 23, he became the youngest lawmaker ever elected in Hong Kong’s history. But of course, the Chinese government—famously tolerant of people asserting their rights, just super chill and relaxed whenever anyone says that state repression is bad—of course the Chinese government was going to respond the way you predicted they would. Within a year his seat was stripped from him, and it got worse: he was imprisoned for the same 2014 protests that made him a leader in the first place. Hong Kong’s highest court did overturn that [prison sentence], but the message had been sent.

Now, most people watching their movement become steamrolled by the state would have taken the hint and gone quiet. Honestly, it gives me no joy to admit, amidst a room of people I admire and look up to, that in that situation, I might have taken just that course. I might have shrunk back from that moment. But Nathan Law went all in.

In 2020, Beijing imposed a sweeping new security law on Hong Kong. Nathan left for London rather than wait and see what that law would do to him. The state put a bounty on his head and officially branded him a fugitive for life. That bounty hasn’t shut him up. Police raided his family’s home. They brought his parents and his brother in for questioning. But Nathan is still speaking out, still writing, still insisting that the Hong Kong he grew up in is worth returning to and that one day it will be free.

In the liberal tradition we have some heroes in this vein, but not enough. We have brilliant thinkers. We have commentators. We have coalition builders. We even, God help us, have influencers. But we also have a natural skepticism of canonization, of Mount Rushmores, of Pantheons, which admittedly can be a healthy thing. But for the same reason that my faith tradition has the concept of a cloud of witnesses—made up of those who lived a life of faith in a way that can inspire others—and for the same reason that, more secularly, Aristotelian ethics, or virtue ethics, talks about moral exemplars being critical to our moral actions, we in the liberal tradition can do a better job of—need to do a better job of—valorizing and lionizing our liberal heroes.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about liberal courage. My eldest daughter is 17, my son is 15, and my deepest parental desire is that they grow up understanding, and then living out, what really matters. And one of the first people I think of when I think about what that looks like for a young person is Nathan Law. He has fought, and he is still fighting, for a free and open society against authoritarian repression. When the moment asked everything of him, he leaned in. Please join me in welcoming a man who chose exile over silence: Nathan Law.

Nathan Law: Good evening, everyone, and thanks so much, Berny, for the very touching and overwhelming introduction. It also encapsulates what a lot of friends call me—they call me a man against the currents. I have led one of the largest civil disobedience movements in Asia. I was elected member of the Hong Kong Legislature at the age of 23. I was unseated and jailed and served prison time in a big cell with 20 other people. And I fled to the U.K. to be able to speak again as a political refugee. Because of my activism I’m wanted under a heavy bounty by the Hong Kong government.

I’ve been fighting against one of the most powerful dictatorial regimes in the common pursuit of democratic freedoms with many other Hong Kong people. Hong Kong saw more than a quarter of its population—two million people—march for their rights to elect their leader, and self-determination, at the peak of the 2019 protest movement. Eventually the government cracked down on the protest and turned close to 2,000 people into political prisoners. I would be one of them if I decided to stay. I’m truly lucky and grateful to be speaking to you all in Washington, D.C., the capital of the U.S., where democracy—against all odds and challenges—still persists.

Democracy should be a system where people elect their leaders, criticize the government without fear, and live with dignity. These are ideals pursued by people around the world, throughout history, in one form or another. When I think about that, I think of my father, who also fought against the current to survive—but in a literal sense. He escaped China to Hong Kong in the late 1970s. Before the Chinese Communist Party decided to open up the country and gave up the economic communism project, the people and the country were torn apart and suffered severely from political and economic turmoil. The magnitude of death and misery was beyond imagination.

The Great Leap Forward movement initiated by Mao Zedong—the dictator who killed more people than anyone else in human history, responsible for at least 20 to 30 million deaths of Chinese people—destroyed the country’s rural economy and led to great famine in the late ’50s. After a round of political reshuffling, Mao then started the Cultural Revolution in 1966 as a means to regain power. He destroyed the best part of Chinese culture and artifacts, as well as generations of the bravest and the brightest. Southern China saw some of the worst factional violence in the country that lasted until the late ’70s.

My father lived through the development of the Cultural Revolution and the horrors of life under extreme conditions. This experience led to his conviction that escaping to Hong Kong—by then one of the fastest growing and most prosperous Asian cities—was the only hope of putting food on the table and having a future. It was a popular, yet dangerous, move. Somewhere between several hundred thousand to two million people attempted to escape in similar situations from the 1950s to the 1970s. Estimates of death in the water, from sharks, drowning, and other risks, run into tens of thousands. My father’s experience echoed that statistic. He told me that every young man in his village wanted to leave, and he saw many floating bodies on the open sea.

Eventually, as you’ve guessed, my father was among the lucky ones. His comrades from the same village assembled a rough raft with materials from their homes. For example, their blankets were woven into sails that led them through the treacherous and dangerous water. After three days of sailing, with only a few jars of peanuts to be shared by roughly a dozen people … in order to hide from water patrol, all passengers had to jump out to the water and swim for hours to reach the shore in the dark. He practiced swimming for years before he made a move. He swam against waves and waves of currents, those glittering on the open sea, and those assigned to him for being born in a Chinese peasant family in the early 1960s.

He eventually found a place where his kids could grow up with a free mind and a future, none of which would have been possible had he stayed in China. When he got his residency in Hong Kong in the late ’70s, he worked as a construction worker earning more in a day than in a whole year in mainland China, which was still torn by political violence and instability.

Decades later, the story turns out to be a historical irony. His son had to leave the city that once granted him refuge, and become a refugee in another part of the world.

I grew up in a public housing unit, blue-collar household with what I called refugee mentality. My parents always taught me to “keep my head down, don’t rock the boat.” My life goal, as they taught me, was to be a good student, get into a good college, find a good job, and climb the social ladder. Being as rebellious as I am today most certainly contradicts what my parents expected of me. In fact, these actions had tangible consequences for them. They were both questioned by the police after I was wanted based on the draconian Hong Kong National Security Law.

These collateral punishments are used to silence critics. Many Hong Kong activists’ families have been harassed, or even jailed, simply for being connected to the loved ones that a government calls “troublemakers.” The collateral punishments we once thought only happened in China have already extended to Hong Kong. In recent years, the party’s machinery of repression has migrated wholesale from the mainland to the city I love.

Just days ago came another vivid example. Police raided two independent bookstores and arrested five booksellers for selling seditious books. Reportedly among the seized titles is Let Only Red Flowers Bloom by NPR’s China correspondent Emily Feng, a book that tells the stories of people crushed by state repression in mainland China. A book about repression is now is a casualty of repression it describes. The regime has done what no other reviewers could do: proven every page true.

As long as the dictatorial country is powerful, it is contagious. It needs to expand, not only in territorial terms but also in ideological terms, to maintain control and superiority over its people. At the international level, it needs allies who adore and legitimize it. It also needs countries, on the facade of international collaboration and national interests, that choose to not criticize it. More and more countries nowadays are falling into that category, and it has material impacts on the advocacy work that we are advancing, because more and more countries try not to upset the BRICS brothers anymore.

That seems to be the world that we, as freedom and democracy activists, are swimming in. Some people are joyfully riding this trend: demagogues in both democracies and autocracies who aim to secure their power by attacking political pluralism, moral universalism, checks and balances, and the importance of ethical leadership. For now, I don’t feel as supported in the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong and China because of that. This sentiment is shared by the larger activist community in the world.

The narratives that bind democratic fighters and democratic countries together—the idea that we all deserve freedom, liberties, and individual rights, and that strengthening democratic traditions around the world has intrinsic merit for the most powerful democratic countries—these narratives have been shaken.

My father and I both swam against currents stirred up by the same communist regime eager to exert maximum control and stay in power. And the story of Hong Kong shows how quickly freedoms can be lost if an unchecked power acts freely. When I boarded the flights from Hong Kong to London six years ago, I wept at the sight of the most gorgeous city nightscapes I’ve ever seen, not knowing when I would see them again. I did not expect I was about to swim into a rising tide of illiberalism.

The room to hold diverse political beliefs, engage in open conversations, and reason our way to making informed decisions is so important to the health of democracies. But with the evolution of clickbait, the attention economy of social media, backlash against globalization, revival of nationalistic politics, and the impulse of labeling in debates, in public discussion, the platform that holds these liberal tenets has been destabilized.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” And “everything flows—the only constant is change.” Perhaps I was so naive that I thought my only mission as an exile activist was to campaign against the authoritarian expansion of the Chinese regime, but now I am also in the fight to build the foundations that keep liberal democracy thriving. I want to reflect on my experience in movement building and campaigning to help this magnificent and important work.

I realized that even though we are in a world of intense political polarization, I still believe in the power of persuasion and the power of human connection. The only Chinese Nobel Peace Prize awardee, Liu Xiaobo, whose books I learned a lot from, famously said, “I don’t have enemies.” He did not hate people who hold different opinions, or even those who enabled the brutalities of the Chinese Communist regime. He fought against the regime, and the ideologies that enabled the violence. In the face of the illiberal waves, I want to re-conceptualize the idea to address the challenge that we all face. The enemy is not the political opposition. The enemy is apathy. It’s the state where people don’t care, live in their half-baked stereotypes about the world, and stop thinking deeply about anything.

A few months ago, I had my knee ligament surgery. I ruptured the ACL playing football—I mean, soccer, the sport that everyone’s watching now. Movement and water are good for my rehab for my knee. So I recently got into swimming. I actually never learned to swim before—I learned it in a swimming pool at my gym a couple weeks ago. Kudos to my patient partner who taught me about that. Learning to swim was about persistent practice, like everything else in life. You need to keep finding the right stroke, rhythm, and courage to fight off the fear of drowning. Trust me, for someone who’s not particularly into water, it is not easy. The same truth applies to how we change politics. We need to strengthen our muscles when swimming against currents.

In terms of fighting for political ideals, that is the ability to persuade. To others who don’t care about politics or are disengaged from public life, or whose life experience led them to different conclusions, or those who are just upset about their surroundings, we need to engage in difficult conversations, not to pursue gotcha moments, but to continue refining your stance to make your arguments able to pierce through ideological lenses. We don’t have the luxury of believing that the world is bending to our way, or being too self-righteous—that drives people away.

Even if it means that you are going to be attacked, traumas will be exposed, stress is piling up, and you’ve already suffered a lot and feel like the world is so unfair: I’m sorry. If you choose to hang on and engage in these conversations, it is our responsibility to go through these tiring rehab sessions, and grow our muscles, persuade people, and grow our camp—not just talk to the most hardcore supporters.

Next year, I will be able to obtain my British citizenship after six years in asylum as a political refugee. Living in Europe and occasionally traveling to the U.S. for all sorts of events, I’ve come to the conviction that my fight is not only for the freedom in Hong Kong and China, but also for the democratic institutions in the West. I have put my thoughts into action.

I learned from reports and studies that young people are becoming more detached from democratic and social norms, and are more dissatisfied with the state of democracy worldwide. Last year, I founded a democracy education project called Civic Square, which brings refugees and immigrants who fled from three countries into the U.K.’s classrooms. I believe in the power of storytelling and in driving impact by building interpersonal connections. There is so much potential we can activate through the marriage of these two.

I invited a North Korean defector who now works at a Korean restaurant in Chinatown in London to share his journey crossing mountains in China to reach the immigration facilities in Thailand. I invited a Myanmar refugee whose father remains in military captivity to share his stories of being smuggled out of the country. I saw the immediate impact these stories and connections had on the students, and the students’ reflection on their own privilege and rights.

Many people, especially young people who have never been through big moments of democratization, lack the imagination to see what could go wrong, what could be—and is—at risk. Now, when students think of North Korea after they heard about the stories, they may stop thinking of Kim Jong-un as just a cool dude who talks to Donald Trump and plays with nuclear weapons, but as a dictator who executes the families of someone that they know, and many other innocent North Koreans.

This is what we, the people who successfully obtain safety here, can offer using our stories to protect the democracies here. I don’t think there are better people than those who truly fled political violence to remind everyone how terrible authoritarianism could be, and why democratic institutions are so important. We are in this together. It is time to take action and support people who are building these relationships and the trust needed to make change happen.

For anyone who is upset about the situation now, just go out there and put yourself in a position where you will face pushback, challenges, uncomfortable conversations, but reason with compassion and grace. We have an active duty and responsibility to persuade more. Freedom is not free; the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. May we all find the ways to navigate these currents and reach the shore we are promised. Thank you so much.

Audience Member: Thank you, Nathan, for that very compelling and moving account. You keep in touch with folks back in Hong Kong, even though your whole family—immediate family—has now moved to London. Tell us about how day-to-day life in Hong Kong has changed after the takeover by the Chinese authoritarian government.

Law: It is a very difficult question to answer. There are still economic activities, people live their lives. Many friends who travel there came back to me and said, “Oh, it is still a vibrant city, good for tourists.” But I know that, and many other Hong Kong people know that, the soul of the city has already been sucked up.

There were a few interviews by international media based in Hong Kong. They wanted to ask people on the streets about their impression of the politics and the draconian Hong Kong National Security Law. The reactions of the people were … they don’t want to answer that. They just flee the scene. They told the journalists that they were unable to talk about it. The same scene that you would see in China, in Russia, in other authoritarian places, happens in Hong Kong.

A lot of my friends … they have to live their life. They have to sort of go back to the normal. But I think the things that are so fundamental in the city have already changed. It’s very difficult, and very dangerous as well, to do any political stuff or voice opinions that are different from the government, and, as I said, there are close to 2,000 political prisoners in Hong Kong. That sheer number matches some of the most authoritarian countries around the world. So, it has become something that is strange that not that many Hong Kong people recognize.

Audience Member: Thank you, Nathan, for that wonderful speech. I’m wondering, so you talk to young people in rich democracies, and you introduce them to stories of people who have lived in autocratic countries or dictatorships. You’re talking to a generation who are in many ways open to anti-democratic ideas, who are blasé, who take for granted the benefits of democracy. What kind of stories do actually change their minds? What’s the thing that they hear that makes people think, “hey, you know what, actually liberal democracy is something we should care about and try to preserve?”

Law: Yeah, the largest [group] I work with is North Korean defectors. And they share about, from their growing up, they learned at school that Kim Jong-un was pretty much like a god. Like he could drive a tank at three, and he invented the hamburger, all sorts of mythical stories about him. And then those high school students, they are in the education system and they start questioning what it would look like if they were to live in those systems.

I think there are a lot of parallels in these stories—elements these high school students, in their formative years, are going through, which I think has an impact on them. And the way that we approach it is to just ask questions, or ask them to reflect on the rights and privilege that, to be honest, they’re born with. I think there’s value in just putting someone, a real person, to share their own stories, and to have that interpersonal connection. It turns abstract theories real. And, as I said, whenever someone sees news about North Korea, it is no longer something that is so far away and just happening in the other half of the world, it’s something that their friends have been through.

We talk about the importance of persuasion—it is very difficult. And I think one of the first steps is to just build that connection, to build that resonance and trust so that we have more impact to help people to overcome the apathy of politics and to invite them to think and reflect.

Audience Member: Nathan, thank you for this wonderful message. As you know, one of the programs for the World Liberty Congress is to try to support dissidents in exile. And for many, many years, exile has been seen as a defeat. When a dissident, a pro-democracy activist, a political leader, is forced into exile, some people think that that’s the end of their journey. But you are a wonderful, inspiring example that exile can be another frontline to promote freedom. What message can you give to the millions of activists from around the world that have been displaced, forced into exile? Nothing wrong with driving Ubers, by the way—we were just talking about wonderful activists from many parts of the world who are forced into exile and have to look for a way to live and, if not, they cannot continue what they do. But you’re a successful case. Some practical advice for democrats in exile?

Law: So first of all, thank you so much, Félix [Maradiaga], for your contribution, courage, and bravery on your journey and for your own country. I think there are a thousand faces of how exiled activists and refugees could live their own lives. One of the big mottos in the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement is “be water”—a quote from the master, Bruce Lee. Water takes different shapes and forms; it can be air, it can be solid, it can be liquid, in reaction to different circumstances and different situations. Exiled activists are facing a lot of different difficulties and circumstances. Sometimes their host country puts a lot of restraints and difficulties; sometimes their personal conditions are not optimal, and they have to figure out a lot of questions by themselves. Being adaptive is really important.

I’ve lived in London for almost six years. Gradually, I have grown an attachment to the country, to the city, and I’ve also felt there’s another set of responsibilities and obligations that I have to follow. I think having that recognition is really important. It helps you be more settled and helps you think more not only on doing the activism that you’ve been doing and you’re supposed to do and people expect you to do, but elevating it into something that you can also help your host country. You can also be part of the larger struggle on the common pursuit that everyone is asking for.

So I think, for me, I don’t have good advice, but I’m the kind of person that, as I also quote, “the only constant of a river is change.” The world is changing and we just have to be adaptive. I also really do feel it’s time for people who have really fled political violence to step up and be visible.

There are so many narratives describing people who fled to other countries that suggest they did it for economic reasons. These are untrue. There are [such] really strong and good liberal traditions that these countries decided to have a system that helps people who fled, not only because they have a certain obligation, but because people who fled political violence, they indeed are sharing the same mission and same belief that all these countries are pursuing. So I think having these programs to make them more visible, having them to really say that they’re here not for any other reason but to flee political violence and they’re very grateful to the safety that we see, I think it is a great project to help combat some of the really nasty narratives that are in these countries.

Audience Member: Thank you for your speech and your activism. I’m an American, and we live in a very unsettled time. So, forks in the road are on my mind a lot these days: possibilities, contingencies. I wanted to ask you, the crackdown in Hong Kong was pretty horrible, horrific, really. But there are also many years between the crackdown and the handover. Do you feel that what happened was always coming? Or do you think that the trajectory or the nature of China changed in that time?

Law: It is a really good question. I think you can look into the development of Hong Kong politics through many different lenses. Some may be very critical about the world leading China, or having that wishful thinking that, China was stepping into the classic modernization path, where it would get wealthy, the middle class would grow, and then it would ask for rule of law and property rights, and democracy would emerge.

So that was in the ’80s, in the ’90s, there were people who were proponents of engaging with China, and that was wrong. That was wrong. They have used their power, the growing economy, to consolidate their dictatorship. And they used Hong Kong as a facade of also playing into the narrative that they are opening up, they’re becoming more politically liberalized, et cetera. So, I would say that there was an element that the Chinese Communist regime always had plans, and they have always been trying to move Hong Kong into a more authoritarian direction.

But on the other hand, there are also elements that Xi Jinping has changed the game a little bit. After he came into power, he drastically shrank the civil space in mainland China and also started to intervene in Hong Kong more and more. The confidence that he developed in China’s system, the ideology that he encoded in the constitution, really [fueled] a lot of repression in Hong Kong. So I would say that it comes both ways. It was a long trend and then there is still a dictator that accelerates everything.

Audience Member: I appreciate the work you do with young people specifically. It’s really needed and I’m curious, I think a lot of people don’t realize that for anyone under 35, “liberal” has become a derogatory term on the internet. If you’re called a liberal, that’s a bad thing. And I’m curious what you think maybe both the old guard and the spare few young guard of liberalism can do to undo that narrative, and remind people of the beauties of liberalism as a concept and a movement.

Law: I think definitely there are people much more qualified than me to talk about that in this room. My two cents, and this was also conveyed in my speech, is just … don’t have that complacency that believes the world is bending towards us, towards liberalism. In fact, it is not. It is a hard-won fight, and the fight does not come with just sitting there or being mad at people, it comes with reaching out, having difficult conversations, having the courage and having the patience, compassion, and grace to engage in these conversations, try to convince, and try to build a relationship.

I do feel like there was a period of time these virtues have been lost in the public discussion, for many different reasons. And I think that is something that each of us can contribute, and start our own projects, and start doing that.

Audience Member: There was always, in the West, a lot of fatalism about Hong Kong’s ability to ultimately resist the domination of Beijing. Were there occasions when things could have unfolded differently, when resistance could have succeeded, are there opportunities that were missed in the West that would have changed the trajectory, or was this unavoidable in your view?

Law: It is an excruciating question, and I don’t have a good answer for that. I think there are many times in the history of Hong Kong we can ask, “What if?” What if the British government, when they were planning the retreat from Hong Kong, had been more forceful and asked for larger autonomy, self-determination rights in Hong Kong? What if Western governments had been more forceful with the Chinese regime after the Tiananmen massacre, and pushed harder to incentivize China toward democratization or at least liberalization?

I don’t have a good answer. I think a lot of people also turn to the idea that, “oh, the whole protest accelerated the whole takeover thing, and then it contributed to the severity of the crackdown.” And as someone who organized, who built a movement, a lot of these things are actually difficult to control. This is an explosion of public anger, and this is something that is not engineered. And I think this is also—for people who haven’t had the experience working with the people—this is a rather important lesson to learn, which is: we have to meet them where they are, we have to have the instinct and the capacity, and we have to step up when the time comes.

It’s very difficult to say when or whether or what if Hong Kong could change. I am not a very optimistic person about these things, so my answer would lie on the spectrum of, yeah, there are a lot of moments that we didn’t really have any choice or capacity to change the situation in its entirety. But I think what we can do, if we truly believe in what we are pursuing and we truly uphold those values, there are difficult times when we knew that there will be an explosion of anger, there will be an explosion of people going down to the streets, push something very far, we will still be there for them in one way or another. And I think this is probably something that, as an activist or a type of leader, we need to have that instinct and have the capacity to do. Thank you so much.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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