A little over a week ago, on Oct. 12, Russia fired several ballistic missiles at Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. I was there, and like other local residents, I was troubled less by the blasts than by the eerie calm preceding them: No siren had cried out. Ukraine’s own radar spotted the missiles only as they closed in on Kyiv, leaving little time to attempt an interception. “We received no early warning from our partners about this strike,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the next day.

Until this month, that warning had reliably come from the United States. America’s space-based infrared satellites detect the heat signatures produced by Russian ballistic-missile launches in real time, giving air-defense crews and civilians time to act.

Then the warnings stopped.

Zelenskyy says Ukraine went three days without a single American warning amid Russia’s ballistic barrage until Washington resumed sharing the data.

On Oct. 14, two days after the attack on Kyiv, Ukraine also lost full use of Starshield, the military version of SpaceX’s Starlink network, which keeps Ukraine’s interceptor drones and front-line strike drones connected. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Oct. 17 that Ukraine does “not have access to it at this moment.”

The Trump administration denies withholding anything, with officials pinning the failure to warn Kyiv on the weather. But Zelenskyy says U.S. military officials had already told Ukraine, “If you will not stop [the strikes], we will block intelligence.” He was referring to Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil refineries, which Trump blames for high diesel prices in America.

If Zelenskyy is right, it means that, shockingly, the Trump administration is using Ukraine’s defenses as leverage in an effort to protect Russian fuel exports. Those exports matter to the White House now because of a crisis of its own making. Fuel prices surged after the United States went to war with Iran and shipping through the Strait of Hormuz was disrupted. Many experts attribute that rise to the Iran war rather than to Ukraine’s drones. Earlier this month, Trump announced a deal for Russia to export up to 4.8 million metric tons of its diesel fuel. Ukraine, the victim of an authoritarian’s war of territorial conquest, is being made to absorb the costs of Trump’s senseless war with Iran.

The White House’s gambit has left Ukraine exposed to missiles and drones it could not see coming. It has granted Russia a breather from Ukrainian attacks just as Russia’s war effort was stalling. And it has shown every ally that U.S. security technology can be switched off when a president needs someone else to blame for fuel prices driven up by his own deeply unpopular war, weeks before the midterms.

What Washington Wants

White House officials have strenuously denied responsibility for the Starshield restrictions. Rubio insisted the slowdown “wasn’t deliberate” and that “nobody ordered that Starlink speed to be slowed down.” Trump’s version was: “I don’t know if it was anybody, because it wasn’t me. And I don’t think it was Elon.”

Let’s take stock of this. We are essentially being asked to accept that restrictions on SpaceX services, imposed close to the interruption of American missile warnings, were an extraordinary coincidence. According to a Reuters story, the order to slow Starshield came from inside the White House. The Telegraph reported that Elon Musk pitched the idea to Trump, who agreed. A bipartisan group of nine senators has asked the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate whether any U.S. officials directed or approved the changes to Starshield and intelligence sharing.

Washington, according to Ukrainian reports, has not made an end to Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure a condition for restraining Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s oil industry. The “energy ceasefire” Trump announced on Oct. 11 was, in one White House official’s words, “refinery for refinery”; protection for Ukraine’s power plants and grid was left for a possible later deal. Kyiv did halt its refinery strikes for three days at Washington’s request. Moscow, of course, kept bombing, and no American missile warnings arrived. The warnings came back only after Zelenskyy declared the pause over. No one is suggesting this is a neat and tidy and linear quid pro quo; nevertheless, there was a threat on record from U.S. officials, and the harms inflicted on Ukraine were the very ones outlined in the threat.

Trump wants Kyiv to spare Russian refineries so Russia can supply diesel. Should Russia (however improbably) ship it, the initial shipment of more than 300,000 metric tons would cover roughly 15 hours of typical American consumption, hardly offsetting the disruption caused by the Iran war. Even the full 4.8 million tons, delivered in phases, comes to less than 10 days’ worth.

In an Oct. 18 social media post, Trump complained that “Zelenskyy is using Diesel Refineries in Russia as a target,” attacks he said were “seriously hurting the world diesel markets, including those in the United States,” even as he touted “great progress” toward peace. Yet weakening Ukraine’s position does not remove Moscow’s demand for domination. Oil revenue helps sustain Russia’s war; sparing its facilities reduces the tactical pressure Ukraine can impose. Bargaining with intelligence and interception capabilities instead puts the lives of civilians at risk.

What Ukraine Loses Without American Intelligence

American launch information passes through ground processing before reaching Ukrainian authorities responsible for air defense and civilian warnings. This American view from space has no immediately available replacement for Ukraine.

Even after the warnings resumed, the gap did not fully close. Overnight into Oct. 19, as Russia fired 16 ballistic missiles at Kyiv and the surrounding region, Ukraine’s air force said no warning arrived before the first strike, though one did before a second wave. On Monday, Zelenskyy cited “delays in certain types of vital supplies at the level of the U.S. Department of War,” and on Tuesday he pressed Rubio on both Starshield and the ballistic-missile interceptors Ukraine needs.

Ukraine has paid for an American intelligence cutoff before. During my visit to the Ukrainian-held part of Russia’s Kursk region in 2024, I saw how intelligence allowed Ukrainian soldiers to monitor Russian movements and conduct deep reconnaissance, helping them keep Russian forces at bay. Despite those months of success, Washington’s March 2025 decision to halt intelligence sharing hastened Russia’s rapid advance, crushing much of the Ukrainian foothold and allowing Moscow to retake the territory. Had Ukraine retained that land, it would have held a powerful negotiating chip in regaining its own occupied territories.

The Connections That Keep Ukraine Fighting

Starlink, SpaceX’s commercial satellite internet network, is used by Ukrainian civilians and military units for communications, reconnaissance, and some defensive drones. Starshield, its government and military version, provides communications service through separate arrangements. Both have defensive applications.

When regular communications are unavailable, Starlink connects dispersed Ukrainian units and lets commanders see real-time battlefield imagery, helping them identify Russian movements and respond to ambushes or advances. Its role extends from battlefield logistics to passing information between front-line units and headquarters in Kyiv. Satellite connections also help Ukrainian aviation respond rapidly to incoming drones. Reconnaissance becomes useful only when it reaches someone able to act before the target moves.

Ukrainian officials say the new restrictions cut off terminals using the affected military service once they move faster than 100 mph. Zelenskyy says the same terminals keep working above 110 mph in neighboring EU countries, a pattern hard to square with a technical glitch. Newer Russian jet-powered attack drones can travel at 250 mph, requiring interceptors to maintain communications well above the imposed limit.

Presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov says the restriction affects some interceptor drones but also helicopters hunting incoming drones. Affected systems cannot operate as intended, leaving civilians and critical infrastructure more exposed.

Beyond interception, the same communications support strikes against Russian ammunition depots, command facilities, and logistics in occupied Ukrainian territory, reducing available Russian supplies for subsequent attacks. Losing a connection can therefore impair both an interception over Ukraine and an operation against Russian forces preparing another attack. The effect was immediate: Ukrainian drone-unit data showed strikes on Russian logistics vehicles fell sharply on Oct. 14, the day the Starshield speed-limit restrictions took effect, a drop the Institute for the Study of War found was “very likely” caused by the restrictions.

Moscow is doing everything on its end to deprive Ukraine of Starlink. An arson attack on a London warehouse storing Starlink’s equipment has been blamed on Russia. Ditto for an attack on a Polish ground station. Now the White House is doing some of that work for Moscow.

Europe’s Eutelsat OneWeb network already offers satellite communications, but Ukraine cannot simply switch the Starlink equipment built into its military operations to that service. Replacement requires different equipment, procurement, installation, and testing. Replacing the battle-tested service around which Ukrainian operations have been built requires more than purchasing another subscription.

Russia’s Rassvet network has demonstrated working communications, but it does not yet give its forces a comparable, fully deployed service. Limiting one of Kyiv’s key advantages now gives Moscow time to catch up with the technology currently favoring Ukraine.

A Winter Without Heat or Water

According to United Nations monitors, Kyiv recorded civilian casualties on 22 of 30 days in September, more such days than in any previous month of the full-scale invasion. Russia’s overnight attack on Oct. 19 alone left more than 500,000 households across Ukraine without electricity, extending the danger to civilian lives beyond those killed or injured in an explosion. Weaker warnings and fewer successful interceptions leave the same infrastructure more exposed to further damage.

Ukraine, like other former Soviet republics, relies heavily on centralized heating, making the plants and pumps serving entire districts a central target for Moscow. Last winter, only about a third of households could adequately heat their homes. With nighttime temperatures falling to 14 degrees Fahrenheit or below, prolonged heating failures can become deadly. Compounding failures further damage an already gutted economy and drive more people to seek refuge elsewhere in Europe.

Intelligence-sharing restrictions lasting days have consequences lasting months when an attack destroys equipment that cannot quickly be replaced. Restoring intelligence or reconnecting an aircraft does not repair a heating plant. Families still face the choice between remaining without essential services and leaving homes they have already spent years struggling to protect.

Europe Pays, Washington Sets the Terms

Military Starshield services operate under Pentagon-administered contracts, but that does not make all of Ukraine’s satellite connectivity a gift from Washington. Poland finances more than 29,000 Starlink terminals and their service, while Germany also contributes; both countries have protested restrictions on services their taxpayers help fund. European subscriptions and American military contracts are different arrangements, but both leave Ukraine dependent on access it cannot independently guarantee.

Europe has no quick fix. The EU’s defense commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, has conceded that the continent is “quite dependent on American space capabilities,” and its planned IRIS² satellite network is years from operating. Why would Europeans trust American technology if access can be granted and withdrawn at the whim of whatever capricious leader next occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.? At this point, it would be strategic negligence for a European country to stake its sovereignty on whatever decision Washington makes next.

An Unearned Reprieve for Moscow

Estimates from Ukraine’s General Staff put Russian casualties, including killed and wounded, above 46,000 in September, averaging 1,541 a day. American intelligence and satellite communications are central to Ukraine’s effective use of drones against Russian forces and to protecting soldiers and civilians from incoming attacks. Reduced Ukrainian pressure gives Russian logistics more room to operate, even without a territorial breakthrough. Supplies and equipment that survive Ukrainian attacks remain available to sustain the invasion and the campaign against Ukraine’s electricity, heating, water, and communications.

My conversations with Ukrainians have revealed less a sense of entitlement to this support than shock at the betrayal of their trust: As Russia tries to stomp out their lives, Washington is withholding the warnings and connections that protect them. They had wrongly believed that their loyalty would be reciprocated. Today, they must prepare for attacks while wondering whether capabilities on which their protection depends will remain available.

By restricting vital intelligence and communications support to Ukraine, Washington has effectively subsidized Russia’s stalling war effort at the expense of the Ukrainian people bravely resisting it. The Kremlin has received an unearned reprieve, while Ukrainians bear the consequences in damaged homes, disrupted services, and, above all, civilian lives lost.

One Last Thing …

Earlier today, senior editor and The Argument’s linked up for an episode of The UnPopulist Live. They talked Mamdani, Russian bots, the shortest White House press secretary tenure in history, and more. Here’s the video for those who missed it live.

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Before dawn last Monday, agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of ICE, entered the Washington home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with a search warrant. They left with her phone, computers, notebooks, and passport. Only she and her husband were in the house. The Justice Department confirmed a court-authorized search in connection with an ongoing criminal investigation and said nothing more. Omar is up for reelection in three weeks.

Search warrants have been served on members of Congress before, usually in corruption cases. Those inclined to minimize what happened to Omar will point to them. But the comparison is a false one. Search warrants involving elected lawmakers can be, and often are, part of the regular, lawful process for investigating felonies such as bribery. This instance is fundamentally different because it represents a dangerous attempt to manipulate the legislature’s qualification rules to oust a congresswoman whom Donald Trump dislikes.

A Pretext for Denaturalization

To start with, the investigation exists because the president has singled out a member of Congress as part of a broader and explicitly racist campaign against Americans of a particular ethnic origin. There is no other way to put it. Last November, Trump announced on Truth Social that he was ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somalis in Minnesota, declared that Somali gangs were “roving the streets looking for ‘prey,’” and vowed to send Somalis “back to where they came from.”

In December, he told a Cabinet meeting that Somali immigrants were “garbage,” that Somalia was “barely a country,” and that “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.” He has posted that she “should be in jail” and “sent back to Somalia.” At the same time, Haitians, whom the president himself accused of eating pets during his campaign, are being stripped of TPS and deported.

Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host Trump appointed as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, where the raid was conducted, once mused whether Omar’s hijab showed fealty to Sharia law over the Constitution. The remark was so egregious that Fox disavowed it and publicly reprimanded her.

The great majority of Minnesota’s Somali community immigrated legally and have become American citizens, or else were born here as citizens.

Trump’s hateful screeds against Somali Americans are not a matter of dog whistles or subtly implied bigotry. This is overt, explicit, virulent racism, without any attempt to pretend otherwise. His obsession with attacking Omar is inseparable from that context.

In September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told an audience that Omar had “married her brother” and that if the government could prove it, “we’ll deport you.” Border czar Tom Homan confirmed days later that HSI had opened a criminal investigation. Grand jury subpoenas went out to her relatives, including her sister—meaning the administration is targeting not only her but her extended family. The raid followed. That same evening, when Trump brought her up at a rally in Ohio, the crowd chanted “deport!” The hostility came long before the investigation, and an investigation was found to fit it.

The investigation’s guiding theory seems to be that Omar’s late father lied that she was 17 instead of 18 when he filed her naturalization papers in 2000 so that she could obtain her citizenship without having to apply separately as an adult. Children under 18 become citizens automatically when a parent naturalizes; adults have to apply on their own. HSI looked at the same allegation under the Biden administration and dropped it for want of any evidence of fraud. DOJ also looked into Omar during Trump’s first term and declined to pursue a full investigation because of insufficient evidence.

Even granting the suspicion some factual basis—and there is none—no evidence of a long-ago paperwork discrepancy was going to turn up in a congresswoman’s townhouse a quarter century later. The government already holds every form she or her father ever submitted.

DOJ claims that its warrant was for a criminal investigation. But the statute of limitations for naturalization fraud is 10 years from the date citizenship was obtained, which in Omar’s case ran out in 2010. And her father, who actually filed the forms in question, is dead. A criminal charge would therefore have to rest on something Omar herself did more recently, such as a false statement on a later passport application or other form, and prosecutors have not said what that would be.

But the purpose of the criminal investigation may not be to pursue criminal charges against her. Rather, it may be a way to advance a civil lawsuit under the denaturalization statute to revoke citizenship. It’s a rarely used law, most famously applied to eject war criminals who had lied about their past. A civil denaturalization suit has no statute of limitations, no jury, and no requirement of a prior conviction. The government still has to prove the original fraud, but it gets to do so in a civil suit, under a lower standard of proof, decades after the fact.

The Wall Street Journal reported, citing administration officials and others familiar with the investigation, that the aim is to build a case to strip Omar of her citizenship and then deport her. She would become the most prominent target of a denaturalization drive that has already produced more than 200 lawsuits since Trump returned to office. The criminal investigation is the pretext that gets a search warrant signed; denaturalization and removal are the goal.

The predawn entry by armed agents into a family’s home may or may not yield evidence of a crime allegedly committed decades ago, but it is a show of force. The administration went out of its way to do it this way, and the only purpose that serves is to intimidate a political opponent.

The raid also sets aside a norm DOJ has maintained for decades. The department’s longstanding practice has been to avoid overt investigative steps against candidates in the roughly 60 days before an election, especially when waiting would not jeopardize the investigation. Searching a candidate’s home three weeks before she stands for reelection is about the clearest example of what the practice exists to prevent. Trump and his lawyers, several of whom now run the department, loudly invoked the same rule in 2024 against the prosecution of Trump himself.

What the House Alone May Judge

All of that would be bad enough if Omar were a private citizen. That she is a member of Congress matters, and it matters in a specific constitutional way that has so far gone mostly unremarked.

Article I, Section 5 provides that each house “shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” The qualifications themselves are fixed earlier in Article I: a representative must be at least 25, must have been a citizen for seven years, and must inhabit the state she represents. Whether a seated member meets those three qualifications is for the House to decide, and not for the president, DOJ, or a district court hearing a civil suit the executive branch has brought.

The administration has not disputed that only the House can make this determination, and for now it does not need to. Its strategy is to change the facts the House would be judging rather than to contest who gets to judge them: make her a non-citizen first, then hand the House the result and demand it comply.

The Framers embraced this rule for structural reasons. A legislature exists to check the other branches, and it cannot do so if one of those branches gets to decide who sits in it. An executive able to remove his critics from the chamber, or to decide which of them were ever entitled to be there, would not face a legislature at all, only a body whose membership he had selected.

The same section of the Constitution gives each house control over its own rules, its own discipline, and expulsion of its own members, and the next section shields members from being questioned anywhere else for what they say in debate. The judgment of qualifications sits among those provisions because it serves the same end. The members answer to their constituents and to their colleagues, and to nobody else.

The House’s control over its own membership does not put members beyond the reach of the ordinary law. A representative who takes a bribe can be investigated, indicted, and convicted like anyone else, and nothing in Article I stands in the way. A conviction is not among the qualifications and does not by itself cost anyone a seat. What is different about the Omar investigation is its purpose. It is not aimed at punishing a crime but at taking away one of the three constitutional qualifications for the office she already holds, her citizenship.

The courts have treated the judging of qualifications as the House’s power to exercise, not theirs to review. When a house decides a contested election or a member’s qualifications, that decision is final, one of the few places where the Constitution makes a branch other than the judiciary the last word on a legal question. Both the House and Senate have considered and decided such disputes, including citizenship qualifications.

A denaturalization campaign against a sitting member is an attempt to get around that power first, and to contest it once the House has been presented with a result. The administration cannot expel Omar from Congress; that takes a two-thirds vote of the House. It cannot refuse to seat her; the House also has the sole power over that. What it can attempt is to go to court, obtain a judgment that her citizenship was procured by fraud, and then declare that she no longer satisfies the citizenship qualification and has to go. Every step in that sequence takes place outside the House. The chamber the Constitution makes the sole judge of its members’ qualifications would be handed a result and told the matter had already been settled elsewhere.

That assumption is already being made on the administration’s behalf. Ilya Shapiro of the right-wing Manhattan Institute told the Daily Caller that if Omar were denaturalized she “wouldn’t be able to serve in Congress and would likely have to leave the country.” He skips the step that matters. A court can rule on her naturalization. It cannot say whether she sits in the House. A civil judgment revoking naturalization is a judgment about immigration status, and nothing in it binds the House on the separate question the Constitution reserves to it, whether she is qualified to keep her seat. The House could examine a denaturalization order obtained by this process, for this purpose, and judge that its duly elected and already seated member remains qualified to serve. That she remains a member is the status quo unless and until the House says otherwise.

The House may have ultimate control over its membership, but the attempt to short-circuit that authority by abusing other processes does real damage. The House would keep its power on paper while being dared to assert it, and to assert her privileges as a member in full standing. That power would not be taken away so much as made beside the point, because the administration would already have decided the question the House is supposed to answer: whether she is a citizen. If the House declined to go along, there is every reason to expect the administration would insist and try to deport her anyway, and the indirect route would become a direct confrontation.

None of this turns on the technicality that the House could decline to go along. Suppose a member really had lied about a disqualifying past on her naturalization papers, a war criminal, say, who had concealed it to get in. That is the charitable hypothetical. DOJ should still follow proper process, free from political interference and partisan bias, including overt racial and religious animus. A more normal DOJ would proceed cautiously, observing the traditional norms to avoid the appearance of interfering in an ongoing election or challenging the House’s own constitutional powers in this area. The Department also knows how to work with Congress when the two are potentially running parallel investigations, or when they have overlapping responsibilities for a topic. This is an expected level of inter-branch comity and cooperation completely absent here.

The actual case is an investigation that began with the president’s public contempt for a member and for the ethnic community she belongs to, built on a claim two earlier reviews found baseless, and pursued with the reported aim of having a court declare a sitting member of Congress a non-citizen and potentially putting her out of the country while she still holds her seat. There is no version of that which avoids a constitutional crisis.

Nor could the administration simply arrest her without violating the Constitution. Until the House says otherwise, she remains a member, and Article I, Section 6 protects members from arrest while Congress is in session and while going to and returning from it, in all cases except treason, felony, and breach of the peace. Normally those exceptions are so broad the protection has little practical effect. But immigration detention and removal are civil proceedings, not criminal ones, and fall under none of the exceptions. An ICE officer who arrested a sitting congresswoman on her way to the Capitol would be doing precisely what that clause was written to prevent.

Reaching Past Congress

There is no reason to suppose Omar will be the last. An executive that can manufacture a disqualification for one member can do it for others, and she is far from the only naturalized citizen in Congress (currently there are 17 in the House and two in the Senate). A president willing to do this three weeks before an election is not going to stop at one.

The pattern is familiar from elsewhere. In Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega first had his electoral council remove 28 deputies from the National Assembly, then in 2023 had a court strip the citizenship of more than 300 opponents, many of them put on a plane and declared traitors. In Russia, the Duma expelled the opposition deputy Gennady Gudkov in 2012 on a pretext about his business dealings. In Hong Kong, Beijing reread the territory’s constitution, the Basic Law, to find that six elected legislators had taken their oaths improperly and so forfeited their seats, then in 2020 disqualified four more by decree. It’s a familiar authoritarian playbook.

What separates the campaign against Omar from the ordinary run of abuses is that it is aimed at the one body with the constitutional means to hold the president to account. Congress can investigate him, subpoena his officials, cut off his funding, and impeach and remove him. An executive that can threaten individual legislators with the loss of their citizenship and their country has found a way to reach past Congress as an institution and into the personal security of the people who make it up.

What one thinks of Omar’s politics has no bearing on any of this. The objection would be identical if the target were a member of the other party.

Our republic has been in an accelerating state of constitutional collapse for some time. But manufacturing grounds to unseat a member of Congress is still a serious escalation and shouldn’t be set aside as merely another Trump effort to punish his critics. It is an attack on the core load-bearing constitutional structure.

Deep Cuts is a weekly column by Andy Craig exploring the constitutional, philosophical, and historical roots of current events and the ongoing crisis of American democracy. To read past entries, go here.

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Book Review

What is the most worrying threat to liberal democracy today? Donald Trump’s kleptocratic, would-be authoritarian presidency? The semi-fascist MAGA movement’s capture of the Republican Party? Both are strong contenders, but my nominee is Alternative für Deutschland. After a recent breakthrough election win in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, this extreme-right party leads the German opinion polls and has a discernible path to national power.

AfD proposes to expel millions of people (including naturalized German citizens), take Germany out of the European Union, side with Russia against Ukraine, crack down on “anti-German” art, withhold state benefits from LGBTQ and other “deviant” families, and reconstruct the state on ethnonationalist lines. “The AfD’s legislators in the new state parliament include a former pornographer convicted of theft and men under investigation for ties to right-wing extremist groups,” writes the Brookings Institution’s Constanze Stelzenmüller in the Financial Times. “The state AfD leadership has consistently refused to disavow staffers with links to a banned neo-Nazi organization.”

That’s right, folks. We are talking about an extreme-right party rising meteorically in Germany.

Given Germany’s geographic and strategic centrality and its not-so-ancient history, can you think of anything quite as disturbing, or as bizarre? After all, Germany today is not the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, where people used wheelbarrows as wallets. Whatever challenges it faces, Germany is a brilliant national success story: rich, secure, strong, democratic, peaceable.

What in the world is going on? Why are Western publics so disillusioned with liberalism? Why gravitate to authoritarian populism, which is invariably corrupt, repressive, and incompetent? Why now, when Western countries are objectively richer and safer than any time before the end of the Cold War—if not ever?

We liberals are rightly obsessed with those questions, and a stream of recent books addresses them. I have reviewed some of them here, here, here, and here. Now come two more, one by a Nobel Prize-winning economist, the other by a British historian. One of them is a tour de force that will change the way you think about the problem. Spoiler: it’s not by the Nobelist.

Daron Acemoglu is an economist at MIT. He and collaborators Simon Johnson (a LibCon2026 panelist) and James A. Robinson won the Nobel in 2024 for their work showing how a “narrow corridor” of institutional arrangements generates conditions for prosperity. In What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, Acemoglu, writing solo, tackles the global political crisis.

In the 20th century, he argues, liberal markets and politics succeeded by dismantling “absolute power of certain groups over the rest,” creating conditions for self-government, and sparking a virtuous cycle in which technological progress, markets, and wage growth bolstered social mobility, economic prosperity, and participatory democracy.

Unfortunately, the cycle went into reverse. What he calls the “industrial compact” (“the combination of industrial-era economics and politics”) struggled while inequality, mass migration, and globalization heightened social tensions. Automation, deregulation, and the decline of unions added to the pressure on working-class well-being; and then, of course, China stormed into world markets.

As if that had not damaged the postwar industrial compact enough, liberalism “completely turned its back on the economic priorities of the less educated and has come to focus on cultural and global issues.” Worse still, liberals lost their “moral fire.” Neglecting their legacy as economic and social reformers, they became a technocratic establishment that was too smug and insular to command a mass following.

So where are we now? “History shows that when liberalism falters, its enemies rush in,” Acemoglu writes. “We are only at the beginning of this unraveling.” In his last chapter, Acemoglu argues that “if liberalism is to endure, it must be rebuilt”—and “it must rise with the working class at its heart.” To that end, he ticks off programs and ideas, such as more apprenticeships, “appropriately targeted” redistribution, “pro-worker AI,” “a common narrative” that can “bring people together,” “renewed understanding of the value of community,” and—I guess you get the idea. Every author dreads the “solutions” chapter, and this grab-bag exemplifies why.

Acemoglu has written a commendable account of the economic changes that have riven and challenged Western societies. Like many liberal critics of liberalism, however, he seems too eager to blame liberalism for—well, everything. “I believe that these noxious [antiliberal] currents are alive only as a result of liberalism’s crisis and weakness.” My italics, because ... only? It’s all our fault?

While no one disputes that liberal governments committed mistakes and oversights, none of their failings explains, much less justifies, the movement of an enviably privileged electorate like Germany’s toward a party like AfD. Up to a point, I’m all for self-critical introspection by chastened intellectuals; but when, one wonders, does self-criticism shade into self-absorption? Sure, liberals need to reform and improve; but when we see a global political wave empowering the worst kinds of opportunists and demagogues, maybe it’s not always our fault.

So it is refreshing and revelatory to turn to The Great Realignment: Why the New Right Is Here to Stay, by Stephen Davies, the author of books about Brexit, economic innovation, and empiricism (and a contributor to The UnPopulist). He, too, tackles the question of why liberalism is under threat everywhere and all at once, but he is most interested in the specific nature of the threat. “The pattern almost everywhere in the developed world is increasing success for a new kind of right-wing politics,” he writes. The question is “why this kind of politics has sprung up now and in so many places” (his italics). That, it seems to me, is the right place to start.

Like Acemoglu, Davies takes note of the disruptions that liberal democracies and markets have struggled to cope with: social media, economic globalization, mass migration, growing gaps favoring big cities over the countryside and college-educated over non-college workers, and anxiety about demographic and cultural change. Also like Acemoglu, he dings liberals for losing touch with ordinary people by prioritizing “ideas and perspectives generated in the academy” that “tended to serve the interests of a class of qualified professionals.” All of that, you’ve heard before.

Davies’ contribution is to put those developments in a much larger context. Where others see a concatenation of mistakes or failures that strained liberal democracies to the breaking point, Davies sees a playing out of political forces that nobody could have prevented or preempted. In other words, even if liberals had done everything right, it might not have mattered.

Why? Davies’ central concept is that of alignment: the organization of politics around issues that define what are usually binary debates. An alignment establishes political alliances and arguments in ways that are more or less stable, often for several generations. During these stable periods, “political identities are known and persistent.” Every so often, however, a defining conflict is resolved or becomes obsolete and a new conflict supplants it. The result is, per Davies’ title, a “great realignment.”

Major realignments have several characteristics, Davies thinks. One is that, after a while, they settle down into predictable political patterns; but in the meantime, they seem chaotic and frightening, especially to those whose mindset is stuck in the old order. For a while, nothing makes sense: radical actors and ideas come out of nowhere and surge from the margins of politics to the center; “friends and allies become enemies while deeply divided opponents suddenly find themselves allied.”

Another characteristic is that major alignments can be delayed or obstructed, but they cannot be prevented. They are driven by structural changes in societies and economies and by tectonic changes in public sentiment—not by the to-ing and fro-ing of everyday politics. When a realignment happens, politicians arise to meet the moment. If not for Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen, someone else like them would have emerged.

Third, and a point Davies is at pains to stress: realignments are not random events or ephemeral disturbances that burn themselves out. They are about something. Even if the disrupters seem disreputable, they speak for millions and represent substantive positions on fundamental issues. Whether or not you like the new combatants and battle lines, they are (as the book’s subtitle says) “here to stay.”

What are those battle lines? Writes Davies:

The core of the present realignment is this. We are moving on from a world in which the aligning issue is how large a role government should play in the economy and in redistributing resources—capitalism versus social democracy or socialism. ... Instead, there is a new one. This is about identity and the nature of governance; the choice now is nationalism versus cosmopolitanism and globalism.

Crediting and extending David Goodhart’s 2017 book distinguishing between localist “somewheres” and cosmopolitan “anywheres,” Davies argues that recent decades saw the world divide into two groups with different sources of identity. On one side are people who see themselves as rooted in their place, nation, job, and faith; on the other, denizens of globally connected metropolises who identify with liberation from local and national constraints. In the United States, he says:

the realignment is complete. Instead of a division between Republicans and Democrats based on support for tax cuts and deregulation and smaller government on one side versus redistribution and more regulation on the other, there is now one between a nationalist party that is conservative on a range of cultural questions and a more globalist party that is more relaxed about immigration and radical on cultural questions.

We see the same divisions everywhere: multilateralism and internationalism versus nationalism; progressive versus conservative values; globalization, free trade, and relatively liberal immigration versus economic nationalism, trade protection, and reduced immigration and even mass deportation. According to Davies, this conflict will frame world politics for decades to come.

His argument, rich and fascinating as it is, has its blind spots. While Davies is right to take populist nationalism seriously as a worldview, he does not take seriously enough the populist threat to the very existence of democracy and the rule of law. (See: U.S.A., January 6, 2021.) He also takes too little account of the fact that the prescriptions of the populist right—such as protectionism, cronyism, nativism, and anti-intellectualism—are ruinous and oppressive. (See: everywhere.) His breezy confidence that “politics is not in chaos” and “will soon stabilize” seems, shall we say, premature.

Nonetheless, the implications of Davies’ argument deserve attention. One is that the conservative-libertarian alliance in support of free markets is dead. “In the new politics the dominant ‘right’ position will be one that combines nationalism and anti-globalism with economic interventionism,” he says. “To be a Thatcherite today is like being a Gladstonian Liberal in the 1920s—charming and admirable but ineffectual and unrealistic.”

Another implication is that the realignment has no reverse gear. Now that it is in place, it has redefined politics and superseded its original causes. As a result, “technocratic economics will no longer work politically.” Fattening voters’ pocketbooks can help win the next election but will not change the fundamental partisan loyalties of voters who are asking not “How am I doing?” but “Whose country is it?”

If Davies is right that the political paradigm has shifted, then it’s no longer the economy, stupid! Building more houses and improving health care, while worth doing, will not catalyze a new majority for Democrats and other parties of the center-right and center-left. Instead, the main battle is over culture and identity. Germany’s AfD is betting on that, and as of now it is winning.

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Executive Watch meticulously tracks and documents presidential abuses of power. 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?

Oct. 15, 2026

Trump’s DOJ Sues California in Latest Effort to Subvert the Midterm Elections
Category: Power Consolidation

With three weeks to go before the midterms, Trump’s DOJ threatened legal action against California’s secretary of state and Los Angeles County’s top election official unless they reviewed a list of supposed noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. The list came on a password-protected thumb drive, and DOJ wanted the mail-in ballots of anyone on that list set aside and left uncounted until their citizenship could be verified. DOJ even supplied a deadline: 48 hours.

The deadline passed with the drive unopened. The county registrar never plugged it in—because he did not consider it secure. So on Oct. 15, DOJ sued California in federal court, asking a judge to order the state to set aside the ballots of more than 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters. It is far from clear DOJ has any authority to make these demands.

NBC News explains:

Justin Levitt, an NBC News contributor who was a Justice Department official during the Obama administration, said the federal government has no authority supporting its demands. “They can send the letter,” he said. “California doesn’t have to do anything about it.” Federal law prohibits systemic list maintenance within 90 days of a federal election. At this point, less than three weeks out from Election Day, the only changes to the voter rolls can come from individualized information, like notification from the Social Security Administration that someone has died. A DOJ spokesperson said the department is asking California to sequester ballots, not change their voter list. ...

Some officials said they fear these actions were designed to set up possible legal challenges after the midterm elections. ... “Are they laying the groundwork to say that voting was fraudulent? Of course they are, 100% they are,” [Levitt] said, referring to the Trump administration. “Is the boy who cried wolf going to cry wolf? Yes, that’s what the boy who cried wolf does.”

This reeks of desperation. Republicans appear to be in deep trouble nationwide heading into the midterms. But California is an odd place to go looking for a stolen election: Trump lost the state by 20 points in 2024, a margin no noncitizen voting ring could manufacture without becoming the most formidable turnout operation in American history. Still, Trump will hold up California’s refusal as one more bit of pretext to cast doubt on the integrity of other elections and to fearmonger about supposed threats to the country.

Oct. 15, 2026

Trump Regrets He Had to Cancel Pete Hegseth’s Plan to Livestream an Execution Due to a Backlash
Category: Power Consolidation

In an interview with far-right conspiracist Jack Posobiec (of Pizzagate fame), Pete Hegseth announced his intention to livestream the execution, by firing squad, of Nidal Hasan. Hasan, who committed the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting that killed 13 people, is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3 at 1 p.m., the hour, Hegseth noted, at which the shooting began. Hegseth told Posobiec he liked “the mentality we had in World War II,” which is also, as it happens, the last time the U.S. military executed anyone by firing squad. The last public execution in the country was in the 1930s.

CNN has the story:

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth told far-right podcaster Jack Posobiec in an interview aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on Wednesday, drawing swift backlash from both sides of the aisle. ...

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis late Thursday called it “beyond disgusting.” He said on X, “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat, is stunned—telling CNN’s Erin Burnett that public executions are “medieval.” “I mean, that’s disgusting, what is he mimicking ISIS executions?” Murphy said. “That’s what America has become? That’s pretty extraordinary.” The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops denounced the plan on Friday calling it a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death.”

Bipartisan opposition eventually led Trump to call it off. On Oct. 15, he announced on Truth Social that the execution “will not be streamed”—a missed opportunity, the president suggested, since it “might have been a strong deterrent.” Trump’s objection, in other words, concerns the optics. That Hegseth floated the idea at all, and that it took more than a week of condemnation from senators of both parties and the nation’s Catholic bishops for the administration to drop it, says a great deal about the people now running the country’s armed forces.

Oct. 14, 2026

Trump’s DHS Raids Ilhan Omar’s Home to Investigate Immigration Fraud in the Latest Weaponization of Government Against His Political Enemies
Category: Presidential Retribution

On Oct. 12, agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington, D.C., home. The government declined to say what prompted the raid, but some sources said it concerns allegations of false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork. The search, conducted just 22 days before the midterm elections, also breaks with a Justice Department norm against taking investigative steps that could affect an election. Donald Trump’s claim that he had nothing to do with the raid, which he managed to undercut in the same breath, strains credulity.

The Guardian explains:

Donald Trump and key allies have accused Omar of fraud related to her family’s immigration history, fantasizing openly about denaturalizing her and expelling her from the country. When asked about the raid on Monday, Trump said he had “nothing to do with it” and the investigation is “up to the DoJ”. “I understand they’re looking at her very carefully,” Trump told reporters. “I’ve always found her to be totally crooked, personally, but that has nothing to do with me.” …

Administration officials, and the president himself, have long hinted at a federal investigation into Omar. “Let’s see what happens,” Trump said at a rally on Saturday after attacking Omar by name, adding that Vice-President JD Vance “and our people are looking at it very strongly”. …

In March, Vance told the rightwing media personality Benny Johnson: “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud” and that he had recently spoken to the top Trump aide Stephen Miller about “what the remedies are”. The homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, told Johnson last month that there was an ongoing investigation and “something’s going to happen”.

Trump and his allies have long been fixated on Omar. He has accused her of marrying her brother, and he has made repeated racist attacks on Somali immigrants in general and on her in particular. Just last month, Mullin came under fierce criticism from the far right for failing to go after Omar. He appears to have taken the criticism to heart. Investigators have also seized Omar’s phone and issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, some of them to members of her family. It is hard to see the raid as motivated by anything other than a desire to intimidate one of the president’s political enemies, placate his critics on the far right, and energize the base ahead of the midterms. Otherwise, it would make little sense to raid a sitting member of Congress’s home three weeks before an election over immigration paperwork that is years old.

Oct. 13, 2026

Trump Defies a Federal Ban on Russian Energy Imports to Let Putin Sell Diesel and Fund His War Against Ukraine
Category: Policy Illegality

Donald Trump took to Truth Social to announce that, after a phone call with Vladimir Putin (no word on whether this one was also a “perfect” phone call), Russia would release 300,000 tons of diesel immediately and millions more over the coming months. To make that possible, the Treasury Department temporarily waived sanctions on Russian diesel, handing Putin a fresh injection of cash to fund his war on Ukraine. Lawmakers in both parties say the deal violates a 2022 law banning Russian energy imports, as Time reports:

Congress four years ago passed the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act, which prohibits U.S. imports of Russian-origin energy products covered by Chapter 27 of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, including diesel. Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas, the bill’s chief sponsor, argued Monday that Trump is “directly violating that law” by “lifting sanctions to permit the first Russian diesel imports into the United States since the law took effect, without satisfying the specific legal conditions it requires.” He suggested the lack of congressional oversight on Trump’s deal with Putin renders it unlawful, and noted how the plan showcases a sharp turn from Washington, as it comes just weeks after Trump signed a sweeping Russia sanctions bill intended to target the country’s financial institutions and the energy industry, which has largely financed the assault on Ukraine. The sanctions bill was named after Lindsey Graham, the late Republican Senator who spent the final year of his life building support for the measure. ...

In a letter sent to Trump on Tuesday, [Republican Sens. Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski] were joined by fellow Republican Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, John Cornyn of Texas, and Alan Armstrong of Oklahoma alongside six Democratic Senators as they told the President the deal “is a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies [and] should be rescinded.” The letter came a day after Trump publicly dismissed the criticism stemming from within his own party. “Well, I think these are Republicans that can’t really be serious,” he told reporters at the White House. “Anything that could help our farmers, our ranchers, I like.”

Trump knows that soaring diesel prices, and their knock-on effect on the cost of nearly everything else, are hurting his popularity and his party’s chances of holding Congress in the midterms. He is already touting the deal as relief for Americans struggling at the pump, even though experts say it will do little to bring prices down. The reasoning behind the deal may be more troubling still. One report reveals Trump made his decision only after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy refused to stop striking Russian oil refineries. Trump then blamed Zelenskyy for U.S. diesel prices and declared that “it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president,” a view the Kremlin has been pressing for years. The farmers and ranchers Trump claims to be helping can expect little relief. Putin, meanwhile, gets a new revenue stream and an American president who has taken up his line on Ukraine’s leadership.

Oct. 13, 2026

Trump Convenes a Handpicked Panel to Manufacture a Case Against Fed Governor Lisa Cook and Fire Her
Category: Power Consolidation

When the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in June that Donald Trump couldn’t fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, some optimistic commentators hoped he might move on to projects less financially ruinous than ending the Fed’s independence. No such luck. The Court held that Trump had not given Cook the procedural protections the law requires, so she remains in her post while her challenge proceeds.

So Trump has now supplied the process: a White House “committee of inquiry,” staffed by his own appointees, that will hold a hearing on Nov. 5 on the same unproven mortgage-fraud accusations and report back on whether there are grounds to remove her.

The New York Times has the story:

The committee set to hear Ms. Cook’s arguments includes Kevin Hassett, the president’s top economic adviser; Keith Sonderling, the acting director of the Office of Government Ethics; and Andrea Lucas, the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The unique nature of the arrangement—and Mr. Trump’s persistent hostility toward the Fed—sparked ire among Democrats in Congress. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, described the entire setup on Friday as a “kangaroo court” of Mr. Trump’s making. ...

… Peter Conti-Brown, an expert on Fed governance at the University of Pennsylvania, said that there was a clear pretense in the president’s renewed efforts to fire Ms. Cook. “There’s no plausible scenario where Lisa Cook is given a fair hearing, because a fair hearing is not what the Trump administration is trying to do,” he said, pointing out Mr. Trump’s oft-repeated desire for lower interest rates.

Trump has not bothered to hide what he holds against Cook. He told reporters that she is “an automatic no vote” on lowering interest rates and “that’s not a good thing.” One of the committee’s three members, Hassett (whom Steve Chapman profiled for The UnPopulist here), has already said the president has cause to fire her, which is one reason Cook’s lawyers called the panel “demonstrably biased” in an Oct. 13 letter.

Trump has, in a sense, given the Court what it asked for: a hearing, before judges of his own choosing, one of whom has already announced the verdict. Whether this is enough process to satisfy the justices remains to be seen.

Oct. 10, 2026

Trump’s DOJ Is Abusing Antitrust Law to Investigate News Networks That Boycotted Pool Coverage After He Banned Outlets He Disliked
Category: Presidential Retribution

Donald Trump’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House prompted the other major networks, Fox News included, to suspend pool coverage in solidarity. An incensed Trump now has his Justice Department investigating the networks for violating antitrust law, as The New York Times explains:

In a statement on Saturday, a Justice Department spokeswoman, Emily Covington, described the five networks as having “proudly boycotted covering White House events.” “Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act,” a core antitrust law, Ms. Covington wrote. ... In its letters on Friday, the Justice Department demanded copies of communications among network officials that concerned pool coverage of Mr. Trump, along with any communications about Mr. Trump’s revocation of CNN’s access to the White House grounds, according to two people with direct knowledge of the documents. ...

Organized boycotts can be considered anticompetitive if they are aimed at achieving commercial objectives, but not if their primary objective is political speech, said William E. Kovacic, a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. “The critical ingredient in successful antitrust cases is to demonstrate that there is unmistakably a commercial motive and that the commercial motive predominates,” Mr. Kovacic said. “And I don’t think they would ever be able to do that here.”

The press pool exists to give the public continuous coverage of the president, which is why coordinated action among the networks that make it up is one of the few tools they have to push back against attacks on press freedom while lawsuits wind through the courts. The last time the major networks banded together this way, back in 2009, the Obama administration quickly reversed its decision to exclude Fox News from a round of interviews. Trump has opted instead to treat the networks’ solidarity as a cartel. The Sherman Act was written to break up the railroad and oil trusts of the Gilded Age. The administration is now wielding it against news organizations that declined to air footage of the president shaking hands with Xi Jinping.

Oct. 9, 2026

Trump Administration Continues its Jihad Against Immigration by Barring Microsoft and Seven Other Companies From Sponsoring Workers for Green Cards
Category: Power Consolidation

The Trump administration’s latest move against legal immigration bars eight companies, Microsoft among them, from sponsoring their employees for green cards. The companies have been suspended from the permanent labor certification process, known as PERM, which is the most common route by which workers on temporary H-1B visas obtain permanent legal status. The administration accuses the companies of abusing the process, a charge several of them, including Microsoft, contest.

Time reports:

Microsoft and software maker Adobe are among eight companies that the Trump Administration will suspend from applying to sponsor employment-based green cards. The other companies are major information technology outsourcing firms: Cognizant; Infosys; Tata Consultancy Services; Wipro; HCL Technologies; and Capgemini. “We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies,” Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said. ...

[Vice President] Vance said the suspensions would last “as long as it needs to.” The Administration is seeking to compel the companies to change their behavior. Vance accused companies of deliberately posting ineffective job ads in order to justify hiring foreign workers. “Maybe they’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that we have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it. And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” Vance said.

If H-1B workers really are indentured servants, the administration has chosen a curious remedy. A green card is precisely what frees an H-1B worker to change jobs and demand higher pay, so blocking companies from sponsoring their own employees for one leaves those workers more dependent on their employers than before.

The Trump administration’s immigration policy has always had two prongs. The first is a loud, public focus on illegal immigration, border chaos, and criminal behavior (real or fictional) by migrants. The second is a quiet, bureaucratic assault on as many pathways for legal immigration as the administration can shut down. At the same press conference where Vance announced the green card suspensions, officials announced subpoenas to nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, over their use of J-1 exchange visas. A day earlier, the Department of Homeland Security proposed charging colleges $70,000 for each student in the program that lets international students work in their field during or after their studies. With the first prong increasingly unpopular in public polling, the administration is leaning harder on the second. Even if Democrats win back power in the midterm elections, they will have a lot of work to do to protect and restore America’s legal immigration pathways.

Oct. 8, 2026

Trump Bought Up to $5 Million in SpaceX Bonds Two Days Before Signing a Space Policy That Benefits SpaceX
Category: Personal Grift

On Aug. 18, Donald Trump’s investment accounts bought SpaceX bonds worth between $1 million and $5 million. (Financial disclosures report each trade only as a value range.) SpaceX is Elon Musk’s rocket company and one of the federal government’s largest contractors. On Aug. 20, Trump signed a national space transportation policy directing federal agencies to speed up launch permitting and environmental review and to open federal launch facilities to commercial operators. The purchase came to light on Oct. 8, when the White House released Trump’s financial disclosure for August. It was one of 517 trades that month, totaling somewhere between $74 million and $273 million, including a purchase of up to $25 million in Meta stock the day after the space memorandum.

CNN reports:

Just two days before launching an effort to slash red tape for commercial space transportation, President Donald Trump last month purchased up to $5 million of bonds issued by SpaceX, a major federal contractor run by Elon Musk, according to ethics filings made public on Thursday.

The White House says the portfolio is run by third-party managers and that neither Trump nor his family can direct or influence any trade. Even if that is true, the problem remains. The president of the United States holds the debt of a company whose business depends on decisions his administration makes, and his administration then made one of those decisions in the company’s favor two days later. Trump has never placed his assets in a blind trust, so the public has no way to know which of his investments are sitting on the other side of which federal policies.

The president is exempt from the federal conflict-of-interest statute that binds nearly every other executive branch official. That exemption exists because the Framers and later Congresses assumed a president would not need the law to tell him to avoid profiting from his own office. Every previous modern president honored that assumption voluntarily, either by divesting or by holding only broad, diversified funds. Trump has not, and the August filing shows what that looks like in practice: a sitting president who is, among other things, a creditor to Elon Musk.

Oct. 8, 2026

Trump’s DOJ Is Punishing Cassidy Hutchinson, the Jan. 6 Witness Who Testified Against Him, by Trying to Indict Her for Lying to Congress
Category: Presidential Retribution

Cassidy Hutchinson was a 25-year-old aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows when she testified before the House Jan. 6 committee in June 2022. She made a number of damning revelations about Trump to the committee including that:

• Trump had been warned that some of his supporters at the Ellipse were armed, but he wanted the magnetometers removed anyway

• Anthony Ornato, then the White House deputy chief of staff, told her that Trump lunged at the steering wheel of his vehicle when his Secret Service detail refused to drive him to the Capitol, where his supporters were marching

Trump has demanded her prosecution ever since. On Oct. 8, Punchbowl News, CBS, and NBC reported that the Justice Department has begun presenting evidence to a federal grand jury in Washington with the aim of indicting her for lying to Congress.

The case rests on a referral from Reps. Jim Jordan and Barry Loudermilk earlier this year. The steering-wheel story was secondhand, and Hutchinson said so at the time. That Ornato and the driver later disputed it is evidence of a dispute between witnesses, not of perjury. Hutchinson sat for more than 30 hours of sworn testimony, and the committee had every incentive to catch her in a lie if there was one. A federal judge noted in a Sept. 24 order that she was already “presently the subject of a criminal investigation.”

What sets this case apart from the administration’s prosecution of James Comey, Letitia James, and others is the choice of prosecutor. False-statement cases are typically handled by U.S. Attorney’s offices, in this instance Jeanine Pirro’s in the District of Columbia. Instead, the matter has been assigned to the Civil Rights Division under Harmeet Dhillon, whose office enforces anti-discrimination law and has no ordinary role in prosecuting congressional testimony.

The Washington Post reported that prosecutors are looking to charge her with a civil rights violation, a theory that would treat disputed testimony about the president as a crime against someone’s rights. Reporting on former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s firing in April described the Hutchinson inquiry as one of her last-ditch attempts to placate Trump. A grand jury may decline to indict. The point is that a president who spent four years calling for a witness’s prosecution now has a Justice Department willing to stretch the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to go after her.

Oct. 7, 2026

Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino Helps Run Trump’s Truth Social Feed and Profits From the Company Behind It
Category: Political Corruption

The president and his family are hard at work enriching themselves, but they’re far from the only ones in the administration cashing in. Take Dan Scavino, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, who reported earning at least $1 million in capital gains last year from his stake in Trump Media & Technology Group, the company that runs the president’s Truth Social platform.

The Washington Sun reports:

Scavino valued his Trump Media & Technology Group stock holding at between $1 million and $5 million, according to his financial disclosure, which he filed last month and the federal Office of Government Ethics released this week. (Government officials are only required by law to disclose stock values in broad ranges.) Scavino joins recently departed White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt among White House officials who reported investments last year in a Trump business venture. Scavino previously directed White House social media efforts. He has continued to play a key role managing Trump’s social media presence, as The Washington Post reported last year, while personally profiting from his stake in Trump’s social media outfit. ...

Scavino’s financial disclosure also indicates that he earned up to $100,000 in capital gains from stock in financial platform company Robinhood Markets, which he valued at between $100,000 and $250,000. Robinhood has partnered with the U.S. Treasury to serve as broker for Trump Accounts, a tax-advantaged government investment account designed to help American children build wealth. The company also contributed $2 million to Trump’s 2025 presidential inauguration. Its stock price is up more than 100% from when Trump began his second term.

Scavino, a longtime Trump loyalist, has served across both of Trump’s terms as director of social media, senior adviser for digital strategy, and deputy chief of staff for communications. Few people understand better how the president uses his online presence, including to make money, as Trump has attempted to do by selling advance access to his posts. Scavino has helped run Trump’s account while holding a seven-figure stake in the company that hosts it, so every post he puts up on Truth Social is, in a modest way, a deposit in his own portfolio. The White House says it has “no further concerns” about Scavino’s holdings, a standard it has applied with admirable consistency to the president’s own business dealings.

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is having a difficult year. He seemed to have consolidated unshakeable control over the world’s largest democracy through a combination of slogans designed to rile up the dominant Hindu majority against Muslims and other minorities, and allegations of corruption and tax evasion against opposition leaders. Even the slowing economy, high unemployment and inflation didn’t make any serious dent in his hold on power.

Over the last 10 days, however, he—and the country—has been jolted by a massive youth movement that is accusing his government of fixing elections through voter list manipulation; it is demanding accountability and insisting on its democratic rights.

Using a cocktail of nonviolent techniques reminiscent of Mahatma Gandhi’s Quit India movement against British colonialists, a Gen Z movement has gripped the country. It has used mass mobilization, loud slogans, civil disobedience, and courting arrest to expose the violent authoritarianism that lurks beneath Modi’s aura of a benevolent and competent strongman. The big difference from Gandhi’s time: digital-age memes, viral videos and flash-mob-style protests.

You could call the protesting youth the “Gen Z Gandhians.”

Revealing the True Face of Authoritarianism

Their immediate demand is the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner of India, a constitutionally independent post held by Gyanesh Kumar, a career bureaucrat considered close to Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Activists and the opposition want him to quit over widespread irregularities in the revision of voter rolls that he oversaw.

The protests were launched by a group that calls itself the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP)—a dark, satirical parody of the ruling party’s name that also mocks a judge’s insult—and have mobilized various shades of armchair activists, academics, liberal Bollywood actors and singers who had previously stayed on the sidelines, unsure or fearing reprisals. Now they have lost their hesitation or fear. But even more significantly, many middle-class Indians, long considered Modi cheerleaders, are now cheering on the protests.

As the demonstrations spread to Delhi from the other parts of the country, the Modi government deployed an estimated 20,000 police, paramilitary troops in military fatigues and plainclothes agents to thwart the CJP. On the pretext of riot-prevention, this mini-army erected iron barricades and openly warned people to stay away from the protests. About 50 subway stations in the capital were shut down to keep people from gathering. The Internet was jammed in central areas for hours. In short, the capital city was placed under a veritable lockdown.

There’s more.

CJP leaders returning to Delhi from Mumbai to lead the protests were accosted by authorities inside their aircraft before they could exit. Dhruv Rathee, a YouTuber with 33 million subscribers who had flown in from Germany to support the CJP, was literally “kidnapped” at 7 a.m. from his bedroom at his parents’ home and taken into detention so that he couldn’t get to the protest site.

Such heavy-handed state action backfired spectacularly. The leaders picked up in aircraft immediately shot a video of themselves taunting the police, cheerfully courting arrest in Gandhian style.

Far from dampening the zeal of the restless youth, the posts energized them. Young people swarmed New Delhi’s central business district and nearby areas with sling-bags, anti-government placards, and water bottles. They argued with police officers, shouting slogans, jumping barricades, and lying down on the streets. Hundreds of activists were whisked off in prison-like vans to unknown destinations and held without charges before the Supreme Court ordered their release. India’s constitution guarantees the right to peaceful protest, but authorities often invoke exceptional provisions for riot prevention and “public order” to ban public gatherings.

Mainstream TV channels, widely regarded as lapdogs of the regime because they depend on ads from the government, the ruling party, and state-owned companies, tried to keep a straight face as they covered the demonstrations. They avoided showing visuals of widespread protests and gave prominence to pro-government narratives even as protesters openly condemned the nation’s election chief and, by extension, Modi and his tough interior minister Amit Shah. But YouTubers, Instagram influencers, and boutique news outlets did not hold back. They captured it all, sending stark images and videos of police violence and arrests in real time, putting to shame any high-rating reality TV show.

For their trouble, they too faced a crackdown. Journalists were herded into police vans without notice or reason. Vigilante goons, claiming to support the government and the Election Commission, also roughed up journalists and beat up protesters unimpeded.

In a desperate, last-ditch effort to thwart the protests, the government stripped Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century astronomical observatory near the national parliament and in the heart of the city, of its three-decade-old status as a designated protest site. It has “designated” three other spots, but they are miles from parliament and the other government offices whose proximity gave the protests visibility. Undeterred, two CJP leaders deliberately courted arrest at Jantar Mantar a day later, marching in to drape the site with the Indian flag as a symbol of democracy. They were hauled away, prompting Abhijeet Dipke to launch new Tiranga—named after India’s tri-colored flag—protests today, leading to his arrest yet again.

The prime minister’s actions are being called an “Undeclared Emergency”—a reference to the dark 21-month period beginning in 1975 when the then prime minister Indira Gandhi suspended civil rights and jailed journalists and opposition leaders on the grounds that they were threatening national security.

One CJP leader called it “the State vs its Citizens.” And he has a point: the state is challenging the most basic democratic right of citizens—to vote and pick their own rulers.

Cockroaches Demanding Their Right to Vote

The immediate trigger of the protests was accusations that Kumar, the election commission chief, had illicitly delisted voters as part of a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls. The SIR was supposed to be routine housekeeping: weed out voters who have died or migrated and add new ones. But unlike the decennial census, which comes after elaborate preparations, this year’s SIR was an opaque, quick-fix operation.

It began in the three eastern states of Bihar, West Bengal, and Assam, landing like a political ambush. All three have sizeable Muslim populations and are located near India’s border with Bangladesh, a staple of the BJP’s anti-“infiltration” rhetoric. On the pretext of rooting out illegal migrants, the commission imposed short deadlines and complicated new forms that left poor voters confused. One form asked voters to identify parents or ancestors to link them to the last revision of the rolls in 2002. Any form that came in late or contained a “logical discrepancy” gave the commission discretionary power to delete or delay the voter. That included arbitrary judgments about age gaps and spelling mismatches! Political agents were allowed to strike off big groups of voters on the ground that they were no longer present. The voters were left to prove their eligibility through a bureaucratized judicial appeal process. Meanwhile, software, introduced quietly, put supervision of the voter lists in federal hands under the election commission, taking authority away from local officials.

The result: More than 10 million voters were deleted in just two states, and many who were eligible could not be reinstated in time to vote. The BJP and its allies went on to win both: Bengal, which had been an opposition bastion for decades, and Bihar, where the BJP had reduced its coalition ally to junior status. Opposition parties see an attempt to disenfranchise poor and Muslim voters considered likely to vote against the BJP. Rahul Gandhi, who leads the Congress Party in parliament, quickly accused the election office of “vote chori” (vote theft).

Then the SIR went national, and about 130 million voters across the country showed up on the suspect list. Even highly educated and celebrity citizens were left groping in the dark about how the process works. Sympathy finally started building for opposition parties campaigning against electoral irregularities.

The stakes are high because India runs a “first past the post” system, in which candidates often win multi-cornered contests by narrow margins. Some analysts, using traditional psephological swing models, argue that the deleted millions let the BJP win close races in some constituencies and pad its margins in others.

Even inside the commission, the process was deeply controversial, as an exposé by the Indian Express, a newspaper known for investigative journalism, revealed. Two of the three commissioners objected on the record at least 14 times, noting that the changes to the voter registration form were “irregular” and questioning the centralization of the voter database. But, it seems, they were steamrolled.

The Supreme Court is hearing several petitions against the SIR, with the modified forms as a key issue.

Gen Z Political Rock Stars

Ironically, Chief Justice Surya Kant, who is presiding over those hearings, is the one who sparked the Cockroach movement in the first place.

In May, Kant remarked during a hearing that certain unemployed youth and online critics were like “cockroaches and parasites” who attack institutions. He later said he was speaking of those who hold fake degrees.

Gandhi famously began his fight against colonial rule after a white railway official in South Africa ordered him out of a first-class carriage even though he held a ticket for it. Similarly, Kant’s remark outraged Abhijeet Dipke, a master’s student in communications at Boston University, who almost overnight assembled an online movement of millions of Gen Z youth to form the Cockroach Janata Party. The CJP now has more than 25 million followers on Instagram.

Significantly, Dipke belongs to the Dalit community of traditional farm-hands, cleaners and other menial workers, considered the lowest in a centuries-old Hindu caste-based social hierarchy. India’s other founding father, Bhim Rao Ambedkar, was also a Dalit leader who studied economics at Columbia. He was inspired by African American activism while in the United States. Ambedkar’s three-point call for Dalit empowerment (Educate, Agitate, Organize!) drew on the thinking of Booker T. Washington.

Ambedkar was the chairman of the committee that drafted India’s democratic republican Constitution adopted in 1950. If Gandhi is the “Father of the Nation,” Ambedkar is the “Father of the Constitution.”

The bearded Dipke arrived back home in India this year, symbolically waving a copy of Ambedkar’s autobiography at the airport.

Dipke’s fellow CJP leader is Ashutosh Ranka, a former McKinsey consultant, and the two have been joined by investigative legal journalist Saurav Das.

The CJP later found an ally in Neha Bora, a feisty PhD student at Jawaharlal Nehru University—India’s Berkeley—which is derided or celebrated, depending on one’s vantage point, as a hotbed of political activism. She is the president of the left-leaning All India Students Association.

These four youngsters, vociferously criticizing and mocking the Modi government, have become something of a political rock band for Gen Z. They also have the backing of Rathee, the 32-year-old YouTuber “abducted” from his parents’ home.

One reason the movement has struck such a chord is that the core CJP leadership of Dipke, Ranka, and Das describes itself as a pressure group that is simply demanding democratic rights and good governance, not as a political party. Hence, the trio can’t be accused of political ambition and can speak to the government’s failures and transgressions without coming across as partisan. Of course, the BJP is trying to depict them as stooges of opposition parties led by the Congress party, but those attacks are not landing.

The CJP’s positioning has already yielded success.

Weeks after being formed, the CJP staged a seven-week-long sit-in near Jantar Mantar. It demanded—and secured—the resignation of education minister Dharmendra Pradhan after tens of thousands of youngsters clashed with police over a leak of questions for a state-managed competitive examination for admissions to medical schools. Having tasted blood, it is now gunning for the exit of the election chief.

The Indestructible Cockroaches

The CJP leaders have injected a jolt of energy into flailing and failing opposition leaders—including Rahul Gandhi of the Congress Party—who are riding piggyback on the CJP. For 12 years now, they have been unable to unseat Modi and the BJP or put them on the defensive in any meaningful way, despite massive abuses of power and policy debacles such as the demonetization of high-value currency notes that failed to suck out black money as intended.

Rahul’s accusations of election stealing were going nowhere until fresh evidence of vote rigging prompted the CJP leaders to embrace the cause.

The CJP activists merrily call themselves cockroaches in everyday conversation, turning the charge that they are pests on its head. Their use of Gandhian methods would have sounded anachronistic and impossible merely a year ago. But coming in a Gen Z package, these tactics are resonating.

The happy warriors of the Cockroach movement are teaching India that safeguarding basic civil rights guaranteed under the Constitution requires eternal vigilance—a lesson that their elders have sadly forgotten.

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On Oct. 8 in New York City, an ICE officer in street clothes approached a stopped car with his gun drawn. When the driver began to pull forward, officers opened fire on the vehicle. Inside were 28-year-old Oscar Belgal and his five-year-old son. One of the rounds struck Belgal in the neck. He survived, and ICE took him into custody.

Two days later, on Oct. 10, footage from a Houston shopping center showed an unmarked ICE vehicle veering across a parking lot in pursuit of Miguel Parra-Hernandez, a 48-year-old Mexican man who was fleeing on foot. The vehicle ran him down, leaving him with fractures requiring multiple surgeries. He wasn’t even the man ICE was looking for; Parra-Hernandez’s family says he has lived in the United States for nearly 30 years and was on his way to work. The local district attorney believes the agent hit Parra-Hernandez intentionally, but the agent drove the vehicle away before its crash data could be examined.

Scenes like these—carried out in broad daylight by armed agents who wear everyday clothes, operate unmarked vehicles, and answer to no local authority—rightly provoke widespread outrage. Far less attention is given to the deaths that happen inside ICE detention facilities, where nobody is filming and where the administration has worked hard to keep watchdogs out.

In March 2025, DHS shut down the two internal offices that investigated detention complaints. It has also repeatedly turned away members of Congress who showed up at ICE facilities for unannounced inspections, even though federal law prohibits DHS from blocking such visits. (When DHS began requiring a week’s notice—which obviously defeats the purpose of a surprise inspection—a federal judge blocked that rule. DHS then quietly reinstated it in a private memo, and the court blocked it again.)

Deaths in ICE custody are now at their highest level in more than two decades. In 2025, at least 32 people died in ICE custody, and 2026 is on pace to surpass that, with more than two dozen deaths by mid-September. One of the most recent was Julian Curo-Churata, a 47-year-old Peruvian man who had lived in Maryland for 17 years. He died on Sept. 29 after ICE found him “in medical distress” at a Louisiana facility.

This spike is not simply a byproduct of ICE holding more people. One report found that the mortality rate in ICE detention—deaths per 10,000 people held on an average day—has more than doubled since Trump’s second term began. An investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle found that 17 of the 32 deaths whose case files it reviewed were the result of delayed or inadequate medical care.

Even these figures are almost certainly an undercount because ICE has changed how it records detainee deaths. In 2021, the Biden administration began requiring ICE to report deaths that occurred within 30 days of a detainee’s release. In June, Trump’s DHS scrapped that rule, and ICE now reports only deaths that occur while someone is in its custody. That means ICE can release severely ill detainees—including those whose illness was caused or exacerbated by detention—shortly before they die and keep those deaths off its books.

There are known cases when ICE has used this tactic. Jose Chajon-Raxon, a Guatemalan immigrant in New Jersey, had a seizure the day after being arrested by ICE. He was taken to a hospital, and after three days ICE released him from custody. He later died, but ICE never disclosed it; his death came to light only weeks later. Rep. Rob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, accused ICE of trying to “wash their hands clean.” Chajon-Raxon was the third death linked to Delaney Hall, an ICE detention center in Newark, where 300 detainees signed a letter alleging that the seriously ill were being denied proper medical care.

Nor do the official figures capture miscarriages. ICE is detaining a record number of pregnant women, and it logged 18 miscarriages in the first nine months of Trump’s second term. Then it stopped counting. After ICE ended its contract with the Veterans Affairs office that handled its medical billing, DHS said it “does not have data on miscarriages from October 2025 through June 2026.”

None of this has slowed the administration’s push to expand detention and put even more lives at risk. The ACLU reports that ICE is converting shuttered federal prisons and leasing warehouse space nationwide, aiming to hold 96,600 people at any given time, up from a record 73,000 in January.

This will almost certainly lead to more deaths in ICE facilities. These deaths fall into three broad categories.

Deaths from Inhumane Conditions

There is ample evidence of inhumane conditions in ICE detention facilities leading to deaths. An investigative report from the office of Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, documented over 1,000 credible reports of human rights violations during the first year of Trump’s second term, including mistreatment of children and pregnant women, sleep deprivation, physical and sexual abuse, inadequate food and water, overcrowding, and exposure to extreme temperatures. Before Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” closed in June, the DHS inspector general made an unannounced inspection. Its report, released months after its closure, found that the facility failed to comply with national standards for medical care, food service, and hygiene, among other violations. At least on one occasion staff held detainees in cages of about 18 square feet, roughly the size of a phone booth, as punishment.

Poor conditions can contribute to rising fatality rates in at least two ways: by creating or exacerbating illnesses that would not have occurred in appropriate conditions, and by contributing to detainee suicides.

At least 10 detainees died by suicide between January 2025 and May 2026, a dramatic spike for an agency that typically recorded one or none per year. An Associated Press investigation found delayed or refused mental health care and inadequate monitoring of detainees. Detainees at Camp East Montana, which is part of the Fort Bliss Army base in El Paso and is the nation’s largest detention facility, have said that squalid conditions and brutal treatment led them to consider suicide. The ACLU is suing over what it calls “a civil rights catastrophe” at the camp.

The tragic case of Brayan Rayo-Garzon, a Colombian military veteran whose death was the first in a spike of detainee suicides, shows how these failures compound. At the Missouri county jail where ICE held him, his initial medical screening took 35 hours. His mental health appointment was canceled twice: first for lack of “mental health clinic time and staff,” then because he had COVID. Moved into an isolation cell, he slid notes under the door asking to call his mother. “I know you have family, and you know that they worry about us,” he wrote to the guards. “God bless you.” He never got the appointment or the call. Within an hour of a guard collecting one of his notes, he was found unconscious in his cell. He died at a hospital in April 2025.

Detention conditions are also spreading disease. ICE returned a detainee with tuberculosis to Delaney Hall without a plan to contain the infection, according to a physician. The New York Times reports unsafe meals, unsanitary food preparation workspaces, and dirty and overcrowded living spaces at that facility. Several other facilities have had outbreaks of tuberculosis. Camp East Montana suffered a measles outbreak that forced 112 detainees to be isolated.

As ICE packs more people into detention and general healthcare conditions worsen, expect more illness and more deaths.

Deaths from Withheld or Delayed Treatment

Consider the case of Fernando Viera Reyes, a 50-year-old man currently being held at the largest immigration detention center in California. He had tests taken during an earlier detention that revealed signs of prostate cancer—but when he asked for pain medication, a doctor prescribed vitamin C and staff told him to buy himself some Tylenol. It took five months to get him a biopsy. Viera Reyes recounted his experience: “For months, I couldn’t move, sleep, or even use the bathroom without being in extreme pain. It wasn’t until we filed this class action lawsuit and had a court order that staff at California City finally got me to a specialist.” When the diagnosis finally came, it was metastatic prostate cancer, meaning it had already spread beyond the prostate. Prostate cancer is curable when caught early, but much less so after it has metastasized, as it has in Viera Reyes’s case. Other detainees likewise report being denied insulin and heart medication to manage chronic conditions. Earlier this year, a federal judge felt compelled to order the government to provide adequate medical care—but several months later, a court-appointed monitor found that ICE still wasn’t complying.

ICE’s own reviewers have reached similar conclusions. In late September, the agency posted internal reviews of 33 detainee deaths dating back to 2019, then quietly pulled them. Of the 31 reviews that reached a conclusion, 27 found that care had fallen outside “the safe limits of practice.” In the case of Marie Ange Blaise, staff monitored her rather than performing CPR, “despite Ms. Blaise’s pulselessness.”

Emmanuel Damas, a Haitian man who came to the U.S. legally during the Biden administration, was taken into ICE custody in September 2025. Months later, he died of a severe tooth infection that a medical examiner’s report stated came from dental cavities and untreated tooth disease. He reported a severe toothache but his brother says ICE did not take Damas’ complaints seriously.

Carlos Josué Marchena-Marchena, from Costa Rica, repeatedly complained of missing insulin shots and meals, as well as insufficient water, to manage his Type 1 diabetes. He died last month.

Ismael Ayala-Uribe, 39, was brought to the United States when he was four years old. ICE took him into custody in August 2025. His requests for treatment of a painful abscess were ignored for days, and by the time he was admitted for sepsis, it was too late. He died the following month. Weeks before he arrived at California’s Adelanto ICE Processing Center, ICE had waived the facility’s requirement that detainees receive a full health assessment within 14 days. An internal ICE review later found that his care “deviated beyond safe limits of practice.”

Homicide Deaths

One death in ICE custody has been ruled a homicide: Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban migrant being held in Camp East Montana, died in January 2026. A fellow detainee reported that Lunas Campos was already handcuffed when at least five guards pinned him to the floor and one put him in a chokehold until he lost consciousness. “The last thing he said was that he couldn’t breathe,” according to the witness. ICE initially reported that Lunas Campos died after “experiencing medical distress,” then changed its story to attempted suicide. The autopsy report classified his death as homicide from asphyxiation to “neck and torso compression.”

Families of other detainees have raised questions about the circumstances of their deaths. Chaofeng Ge, a 32-year-old Chinese citizen and a resident of New York City, was found hanging in August 2025 and the death was ruled a suicide. But his autopsy found that his hands and feet were “hog-tied.” The autopsy also noted signs of defensive trauma, and an internal ICE review found that staff delayed life-saving measures by about five minutes after finding him. His family has filed a FOIA lawsuit seeking further information on his death and the conditions of his detention.

Victor Manuel Diaz, who was also being held in Camp East Montana, was also declared a “presumed suicide” by ICE. But rather than send Diaz’s body to the El Paso County medical examiner, which ruled Lunas Campos’ death a homicide, ICE snuck it to a military hospital that does not publicly release autopsy results. The family wasn’t told about the transfer; by the time their attorney tracked down the body, the autopsy had already been performed. The family learned of ICE’s suicide finding from the news. Diaz’s family members say they do not believe Diaz took his own life, and their attorney is seeking answers.

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In an interview with far-right conspiracist Jack Posobiec (of Pizzagate fame), Pete Hegseth announced his intention to livestream the execution, by firing squad, of Nidal Hasan. Hasan, who committed the 2009 Fort Hood mass shooting that killed 13 people, is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3 at 1 p.m., the hour, Hegseth noted, at which the shooting began. Hegseth told Posobiec he liked “the mentality we had in World War II,” which is also, as it happens, the last time the U.S. military executed anyone by firing squad. The last public execution in the country was in the 1930s.

CNN has the story:

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth told far-right podcaster Jack Posobiec in an interview aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on Wednesday, drawing swift backlash from both sides of the aisle. ...

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis late Thursday called it “beyond disgusting.” He said on X, “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat, is stunned—telling CNN’s Erin Burnett that public executions are “medieval.” “I mean, that’s disgusting, what is he mimicking ISIS executions?” Murphy said. “That’s what America has become? That’s pretty extraordinary.” The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops denounced the plan on Friday calling it a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death.”

Bipartisan opposition eventually led Trump to call it off. On Oct. 15, he announced on Truth Social that the execution “will not be streamed”—a missed opportunity, the president suggested, since it “might have been a strong deterrent.” Trump’s objection, in other words, concerns the optics. That Hegseth floated the idea at all, and that it took more than a week of condemnation from senators of both parties and the nation’s Catholic bishops for the administration to drop it, says a great deal about the people now running the country’s armed forces.

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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With three weeks to go before the midterms, Trump’s DOJ threatened legal action against California’s secretary of state and Los Angeles County’s top election official unless they reviewed a list of supposed noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls. The list came on a password-protected thumb drive, and DOJ wanted the mail-in ballots of anyone on that list set aside and left uncounted until their citizenship could be verified. DOJ even supplied a deadline: 48 hours.

The deadline passed with the drive unopened. The county registrar never plugged it in—because he did not consider it secure. So on Oct. 15, DOJ sued California in federal court, asking a judge to order the state to set aside the ballots of more than 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters. It is far from clear DOJ has any authority to make these demands.

NBC News explains:

Justin Levitt, an NBC News contributor who was a Justice Department official during the Obama administration, said the federal government has no authority supporting its demands. “They can send the letter,” he said. “California doesn’t have to do anything about it.” Federal law prohibits systemic list maintenance within 90 days of a federal election. At this point, less than three weeks out from Election Day, the only changes to the voter rolls can come from individualized information, like notification from the Social Security Administration that someone has died. A DOJ spokesperson said the department is asking California to sequester ballots, not change their voter list. ...

Some officials said they fear these actions were designed to set up possible legal challenges after the midterm elections. ... “Are they laying the groundwork to say that voting was fraudulent? Of course they are, 100% they are,” [Levitt] said, referring to the Trump administration. “Is the boy who cried wolf going to cry wolf? Yes, that’s what the boy who cried wolf does.”

This reeks of desperation. Republicans appear to be in deep trouble nationwide heading into the midterms. But California is an odd place to go looking for a stolen election: Trump lost the state by 20 points in 2024, a margin no noncitizen voting ring could manufacture without becoming the most formidable turnout operation in American history. Still, Trump will hold up California’s refusal as one more bit of pretext to cast doubt on the integrity of other elections and to fearmonger about supposed threats to the country.

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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On Oct. 27, Israelis will go to the polls to decide, among other things, whether their courts can still tell the government no. For nearly four years, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—on trial for corruption since 2020—has presided over an effort to bring Israel’s Supreme Court to heel. In March 2025, his coalition pushed through a law giving whichever coalition holds power more control over the committee that appoints judges—a law set to take effect only once the next Knesset, Israel’s parliament, is seated. If Netanyahu’s bloc wins a majority, it will inherit the very power it has spent years trying to seize.

Israelis are choosing whether their country remains a democracy in which the majority governs within limits set by law—or becomes one in which a majority can do as it pleases.

The overhaul that Yariv Levin unveiled in January 2023, days after becoming justice minister, was pitched by him and Netanyahu as a corrective to an activist judiciary. Its real aim was to build the same kind of “illiberal democracy” that Viktor Orbán built in Hungary and Jarosław Kaczyński tried to build in Poland.

Israeli democracy rests on far thinner institutional foundations than America’s. Its parliamentary system all but guarantees the government a majority in the legislature, and its electoral system gives individual lawmakers little reason to break with their party leaders. There is no second chamber to amend or debate bills, and no written constitution—only quasi-constitutional Basic Laws that a simple Knesset majority can amend or repeal. The only real checks on executive power are the Supreme Court’s authority to strike down laws that violate fundamental rights and the government’s legal advisers, headed by the attorney general, who can block ministerial decisions that break the law.

The overhaul targeted precisely these few limits. Former Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein warned that it risked creating a “democratic dictatorship.” That it has not yet come to pass is owed largely to the extraordinary response from Israeli civil society.

Within days of Levin’s announcement, protesters were in the streets, soon by the tens of thousands. Every Saturday night, towns and cities across Israel hosted mass demonstrations, until the horrors of Oct. 7 brought them to a halt. At their peak, close to half a million people turned out. As a proportion of the population, that’s the equivalent of some 15 million Americans.

In 2023 I interviewed two legal scholars from Hungary and Poland who had recently visited Israel and attended the protests. Gábor Halmai told me that Israeli protesters served as “a model for Hungary. Nothing similar to this happened in my country.” Tomasz Koncewicz said that “[t]he Israelis made this intuitive assertion that following now the path blazed by Poland or Hungary of dismantling the justice system would deprive them of their rights, and undermine the very essence of their democracy. … You may not have a constitution, but people feel loyal, committed, to the constitutional idea.”

To witness the protests was to look out on a sea of Israeli flags. The movement was profoundly patriotic, drawing less on universal or revolutionary values than on the founding values of the state. Protesters objected to more than an affront to their liberal consciences: they saw a government abandoning the standards set by its own Declaration of Independence.

What Israel’s Founders Envisioned

As I lay out in detail in my recent book, though people calling themselves Zionists have taken many different political paths and have acted in different ways—certainly some morally objectionable—essential Zionism is a profoundly liberal idea. From the get-go, the Zionist movement was liberal and democratic, in a way that was really quite extraordinary for the time.

Delegates at the pre-state Zionist congresses were democratically elected, including, of course, from countries that were not themselves democracies, like Tsarist Russia. From the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, women had full equality as voters and representatives, at a time when almost no democracy let women vote and more than two decades before the 19th Amendment did so for American women.

We also know that the founding father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, envisaged something very much like a liberal democracy when he imagined the Jewish state that he hoped would emerge from his tireless diplomacy. He says so explicitly in his 1902 novel, Altneuland, which depicts a Jewish state with equal rights for all its citizens, Jewish and Arab. What’s more, the villain of the story is a racist Jewish candidate who runs for election on a platform of denying non-Jews the vote.

The Zionist leaders who shaped the movement on its road to statehood were a diverse bunch, but the two most consequential were the socialist David Ben-Gurion and the classical liberal Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky—essentially the fathers of what would become the two dominant political factions in the new Jewish state.

Ben-Gurion oversaw the final drafting of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which combined the Zionist raison d’être of a nation-state for the Jewish people in their historic homeland with a commitment to “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Of course, like America’s founders, Ben-Gurion did not always live up to his words. It was he who placed Arab towns and villages in the new state under military rule, treating their residents—now Israeli citizens—as a potential fifth column. Military rule was not lifted until 1966.

Jabotinsky was an ardent admirer of America’s founding fathers and the system of checks and balances they established. He wrote of democracy that it “means freedom”: “Even a government of majority rule can negate freedom. … These contradictions will have to be prevented. The Jewish State will have to be such, ensuring that the minority will not be rendered defenseless.”

His most consequential disciple, future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, took this even further. As early as 1951, he advocated not just for the “rule of law” but for the “Supremacy of the Law” to prevent “an elected parliamentary majority” becoming “an instrument in the hands of a group of rulers … a camouflage for their tyranny.”

One of the ironies of our moment is that the sharpest early warning against unlimited majority power came from Begin, the first prime minister from the Israeli right and a founder of the Likud now pursuing it.

How Netanyahu Turned Against the Courts

Netanyahu was once an avowed defender of the judiciary. Over a decade ago, he used the appointment of a new Supreme Court president to reassure the court that “every time something arrives on my desk that threatens the independence of Israeli courts, I will block it.” But as the investigations into him became indictments, and then a trial, he allowed his party to be hijacked by Orbán-like postliberals, led by Levin.

The coalition he formed after the 2022 election brought in partners with their own reasons to want the courts weakened. One was the far-right religious nationalists, led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir—the latter convicted in 2007 of incitement to racism and support for a terrorist organization—who show an explicit disregard for the rule of law and are bent on expanding Jewish settlement in the West Bank. The other was the ultra-Orthodox parties, with a narrow sectarian agenda: securing public funding for their religious schools and keeping their community exempt from military service. That last goal put them on a collision course with the court. In 2024, the justices unanimously ordered the state to begin drafting yeshiva students, and the fight over exemptions led the ultra-Orthodox parties to walk out of the government in July 2025, though they remain part of Netanyahu’s bloc heading into the election.

All the parties’ varied ambitions required that Israel’s powerful Supreme Court be neutered, and so all were united in their desire to remake the judiciary in such a way that it would be effectively powerless to check or balance the executive.

This is the coalition that will be reconstituted if Netanyahu’s bloc wins a majority on Oct. 27, and it has kept working since the war began. Besides the judicial-selection law, the government voted to fire Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, a consistent opponent of its attempts to subvert the rule of law. When the court unanimously voided the firing last December, with its conservative justices joining the majority, Levin urged the government to “totally reject this unlawful intervention.”

Netanyahu has also refused to set up a state commission of inquiry into Oct. 7, the independent body Israel normally convenes after a national disaster. He wants politicians to pick the panel instead. It’s not hard to see why he’d object to an inquiry he couldn’t control. In the months before Oct. 7, he was repeatedly warned, including by military intelligence, that Israel’s enemies saw the domestic turmoil over the overhaul as an opening. All the main opposition parties have promised an independent commission.

In September, Israel’s Central Elections Committee, a panel of party appointees, voted to bar the two main Arab-led party lists from the ballot, acting on petitions from Likud and Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit. Those lists draw most of their support from Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up about a fifth of the population. On Oct. 2, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the bans. Had the coalition’s original overhaul passed in 2023, it would by now control appointments to the court that issued that ruling.

What Israel Will Decide

With no party capable of winning an outright majority under Israel’s proportional system, everything comes down to coalition arithmetic. Right now, polling puts Netanyahu’s bloc in the low 50s—short of the 61 seats required to govern. If no one can assemble 61, Netanyahu stays on as head of a caretaker government until someone can.

The choice facing Israeli voters is not left vs. right. The Israeli left is associated with a push for territorial withdrawal and a Palestinian state. This had long been a matter of deep ambivalence for most Israelis after what they regard as Palestinian rejections of multiple credible peace offers, typically followed by waves of terror; it was then rendered unconscionable for many after Oct. 7. Just one of the four main opposition parties, the Democrats, is left-wing in any meaningful sense. The opposition’s front-runner is Gadi Eisenkot, a centrist former army chief whose Yashar party has led most recent polls. Two of its other leaders, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, now running on a joint ticket with centrist Yair Lapid, and Avigdor Liberman, have right-wing credentials and records at least as serious as Netanyahu’s—if not more so. Both formerly worked with Netanyahu before going on to lead ultra-hawkish right-wing parties of their own. Both are on record criticizing Netanyahu from the right over his too-cautious approach to Hamas in the years before the Oct. 7 attacks.

The real divide is about competing notions of just what Israel should be: a Jewish nation-state, run according to liberal democratic principles; or a quasi-authoritarian Jewish state where democracy means unchecked majority rule. That does not make the opposition a band of liberal purists. Liberman’s party voted to bar the Arab lists from the ballot, while Bennett has ruled out governing with any Arab party. These can be seen as troubling developments from the standpoint of Israel’s founding commitment to equality, but also reflect the reality of post-Oct. 7 Israel. Most Jewish citizens will not accept a governing coalition with Arab parties unwilling to condemn Hamas without caveats. Ra’am, one of the two lists the committee tried to bar, was part of Bennett’s 2021-22 coalition, and I am one of many who would like to see its impressive leader, Mansour Abbas, back in government. But even though he did unequivocally condemn Oct. 7, his party contains other figures with more ambiguous records in this regard. Unfortunately, that is enough to make the party politically toxic for some.

Nevertheless, on the question at the heart of this election—whether the government will remain subject to checks from the courts and legal advisers—the opposition stands on one side and Netanyahu’s bloc on the other.

Israel’s founding fathers differed profoundly on many things, but none imagined a Jewish state in which an electoral majority could do as it pleased, unrestrained by law or indifferent to the rights of minorities. The hundreds of thousands of Israelis who took to the streets in 2023 understood this instinctively. They were not protesting against their country, but in defense of what it was founded to be. The question facing Israeli voters is whether that founding vision will survive—or whether the country’s leaders will succeed in dismantling it.

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On Oct. 12, agents from the Department of Homeland Security raided Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington, D.C., home. The government declined to say what prompted the raid, but some sources said it concerns allegations of false statements and fraud in immigration paperwork. The search, conducted just 22 days before the midterm elections, also breaks with a Justice Department norm against taking investigative steps that could affect an election. Donald Trump’s claim that he had nothing to do with the raid, which he managed to undercut in the same breath, strains credulity.

The Guardian explains:

Donald Trump and key allies have accused Omar of fraud related to her family’s immigration history, fantasizing openly about denaturalizing her and expelling her from the country. When asked about the raid on Monday, Trump said he had “nothing to do with it” and the investigation is “up to the DoJ”. “I understand they’re looking at her very carefully,” Trump told reporters. “I’ve always found her to be totally crooked, personally, but that has nothing to do with me.” …

Administration officials, and the president himself, have long hinted at a federal investigation into Omar. “Let’s see what happens,” Trump said at a rally on Saturday after attacking Omar by name, adding that Vice-President JD Vance “and our people are looking at it very strongly”. …

In March, Vance told the rightwing media personality Benny Johnson: “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud” and that he had recently spoken to the top Trump aide Stephen Miller about “what the remedies are”. The homeland security secretary, Markwayne Mullin, told Johnson last month that there was an ongoing investigation and “something’s going to happen”.

Trump and his allies have long been fixated on Omar. He has accused her of marrying her brother, and he has made repeated racist attacks on Somali immigrants in general and on her in particular. Just last month, Mullin came under fierce criticism from the far right for failing to go after Omar. He appears to have taken the criticism to heart. Investigators have also seized Omar’s phone and issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, some of them to members of her family. It is hard to see the raid as motivated by anything other than a desire to intimidate one of the president’s political enemies, placate his critics on the far right, and energize the base ahead of the midterms. Otherwise, it would make little sense to raid a sitting member of Congress’s home three weeks before an election over immigration paperwork that is years old.

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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With Democrats seemingly poised to take back control of Congress in next month’s midterm elections, it’s time to start looking at the next question: What will they do with it?

Will they use a new majority to rein in executive power—not just to oppose what Donald Trump is doing now, but to prevent similar abuses by future presidents? Will they make this an Article I election, fought over the constitutional powers of Congress and its ability to check the president? And which Democrats are openly campaigning on that?

That question comes to the forefront after Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff’s fiery performance at a debate last week against Georgia Rep. Mike Collins. Ossoff hammered Collins on his ties to white supremacists, saying that if the civil rights movement were happening today, “Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.” It was a refreshingly clear condemnation of the resurgence of racism in the Republican Party, and Collins is a particularly clear case.

But from the standpoint of restoring the constitutional balance of powers, the more revealing exchange was when Collins insisted that Trump “had every right” to launch the war on Iran without the approval of Congress and defended tariffs the Supreme Court has already struck down as unconstitutional. Ossoff then branded Collins a “Trump-puppet election denier,” a jab at the way Collins has helped cede Congress’s powers to the executive.

This is a theme Ossoff has been highlighting on the campaign trail for months, and more Democrats need to put it front and center in their campaigns, and in their agenda.

Who Imprints the ‘Fabric of America’?

Why should Democrats be campaigning to undo Trump’s expansion and exploitation of presidential power? Partly because conservatives are betting they won’t.

In response to a Washington Post overview of various Democratic proposals to limit presidential power, Heritage Action Executive Vice President Tiffany Justice—yes, a co-founder of the pro-censorship Moms for Liberty, now working with the same organization that gave us Project 2025, Trump’s blueprint for an authoritarian takeover—scoffed, “I don’t think Democrats would ever limit the power of a Democratic president.”

Trumpists are hoping these powers will remain in place no matter what happens so that a future right-wing president can deploy them again. As Trump’s Communications Director Steven Cheung boasted in February, Trump’s approach to executive power “will be imprinted upon the fabric of America and will be felt by every other White House that comes after him.”

Conservatives may be right to bet on that. After all, some Democrats are not averse to using the ring of power for good. There is an important debate about how Democrats can be assertive enough to roll back Trump’s abuses of power and undo his damage to the system, without adopting and ratifying those very abuses. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents the middle of that debate, saying, “We need to put a lot of guardrails back in place” while also insisting that Democrats shouldn’t “handcuff themselves” and should “use the tools of the office that have been provided for and allowed” by Trump and the current Congress and Supreme Court.

Other Democrats, traumatized by seeing their warnings go unheeded in 2024, have decided that these constitutional concerns are not winners at the ballot box, so they should focus exclusively on the economy and “affordability.” Of course, Democrats should be hammering Republicans on affordability. With gas and diesel prices soaring as a direct result of a failed war started by Trump alone, they would be foolish not to hang that around his neck. But if they focus only on affordability and ignore the constitutional issues, they won’t be ready to act on them when they get a majority.

Moreover, there is a lot of reason to believe that this conventional wisdom is wrong. The constitutional issues really are popular, and Trump’s abuses of power are unpopular. A recent poll shows majority support for Congress to cut off funding for a war started by the president without congressional authorization. This is consistent with polls at the beginning of his second term showing that executive power grabs weren’t popular even then. And while soaring gas prices helped tank Trump’s approval ratings over the summer, it’s worth remembering that the other two times his approval ratings have sunk near this level were after he called Nazis “very fine people” in 2017 and after his insurrection attempt on Jan. 6, 2021. In this term, his polls started tanking after federal immigration agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January. On all those occasions, the public reacted specifically against Trump’s attacks on our constitutional order.

All of this suggests that Democrats should be preparing to rein in presidential power—as a matter of principle, as a precaution against the future, and as an issue that can win them popular support.

But who is doing that?

The ‘Solid D’ Reformers

I do not doubt there are many Democrats who will go along with restraining executive power if these reforms are proposed. But who is taking the lead in setting this agenda and making the case for it?

The Washington Post’s overview mentions several Democratic proposals. Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin is talking about “reconstruction,” a callback to the big constitutional reforms of the post-Civil War Reconstruction Congress (a term also favored by The UnPopulist). Along with California Sen. Adam Schiff, Raskin has introduced a bill that would strengthen civil service rules that protect the independence of the federal bureaucracy, ban presidential self-pardons, and attempt to strengthen congressional authority over spending.

Meanwhile, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy has introduced the No Political Enemies Act (NOPE Act). To curb politically motivated prosecutions, NOPE would:

• shift the burden to the government to justify itself once a defendant presents substantial evidence that its case was driven by protected speech or association

• require the government to pay legal fees for defendants who prevail and show they were targeted for protected speech

• let victims sue the federal officials responsible

Washington Rep. Suzan DelBene and Virginia Rep. Don Beyer have targeted the president’s emergency powers with a bill that would require congressional approval when he invokes a “national emergency” to impose tariffs. The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s emergency tariffs in February, a year after he first imposed them, but he promptly imposed new tariffs under a different law, which shows why Congress can’t leave this issue to be dragged out in the courts.

Yet there is a pattern you might notice about these proposals. Murphy and Schiff are not up for reelection this year. Raskin, DelBene, and Beyer—and many others who are backing these proposals—are in safe Democratic districts that are even safer than usual this year. If you want to predict how loud a politician is about proposing bold restraints on executive power, look at who is in the “Solid D” column in the Cook Political Report.

In short, Democrats in competitive races are playing it safe and sticking to the conventional wisdom about affordability and gas prices, while Democrats in safe seats are more likely to talk about big reforms.

‘This Is the Opportunity That We Have’

There is one notable exception: Ossoff, who is running for reelection in Georgia.

Ossoff is not fully a departure from this trend in two respects. First, his seat is still relatively safe, rated “Likely D”—but then again, he’s in Georgia, a conservative-leaning state no Democrat can take for granted.

Second, he has sponsored no specific proposals for policy reforms. Instead, he has made inveighing against Trump’s personal corruption and abuses of power a running theme of his speeches. He has criticized Trump for cashing in on his office with cryptocurrency schemes, for the government-backed deals that enrich his sons, and for his attempt to interfere with the election process in Georgia.

Ossoff has called for a restoration of checks and balances. At a rally this summer, he told voters that the issues in this election are “deeper than the ordinary conflict of policy and ideas between two political parties.” He urged them to

rebuke these presidential abuses so decisively that we don’t just restore checks and balances for the next few years, we send a message so that no president in either party will try anything like this again for centuries, for centuries. That’s the opportunity that we have.

This is exactly the right message and agenda. This is what we need.

The most interesting thing about Ossoff is that he is considered a moderate senator who was expected to tack to the center in a reelection campaign. Vice President JD Vance even predicted last year that Ossoff would begin praising Trump’s agenda. Instead, Ossoff has employed fiery invective against Trump’s abuses to gain support across the board. It’s a message that can unite and energize Democrats across their internal progressive-versus-moderate divide, while also appealing to independents and disgruntled Republicans. He has demonstrated that a campaign against Trump’s abuse of power has broad appeal.

Most interesting of all is that Ossoff was already being widely talked about as a possible Democratic presidential candidate for 2028, even before his recent debate performance. This shows that campaigning against abuses of executive power can become an established lane for ambitious politicians wanting a shot at being elected to wield executive power.

The Boys from Brazil

We are still at the early stages. There are not yet enough specific proposals, and there is a good argument that some of the purely statutory fixes that have been proposed aren’t enough. We may also require constitutional amendments to rein in executive power. But campaigning now on limits to presidential power will at least begin to commit opposition politicians to a reform agenda.

That’s important, because experts, intellectuals, and opinion writers can come up with great reform ideas, but ultimately they make a difference only when actual officeholders see a political interest in championing these ideas—and then translate them into real legislation once they’re in office.

Democrats should heed the warning from the recent election in Brazil, where Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of a former president convicted of plotting a coup, might well be poised to win the presidency. It is a reminder that even as the voters reject Donald Trump, they might swing back again toward a future strongman leader with the same agenda. Democrats need to think ahead and place firm limits on presidential power while they can, making it harder for successors to do what Trump is doing now—even if that means rejecting the temptation to use these illegitimate powers for their own agenda.

The next few elections need to be Article I elections. This is the article in the Constitution that establishes the power and authority of Congress to check the executive branch—powers that have been allowed to atrophy over many decades. We need members of Congress who will prioritize efforts to reassert these checks and use their majority in Congress to reclaim their powers.

Ossoff has crafted the right message for Democratic politicians to use, and we need more of them to follow that lead.

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When the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in June that Donald Trump couldn’t fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, some optimistic commentators hoped he might move on to projects less financially ruinous than ending the Fed’s independence. No such luck. The Court held that Trump had not given Cook the procedural protections the law requires, so she remains in her post while her challenge proceeds.

So Trump has now supplied the process: a White House “committee of inquiry,” staffed by his own appointees, that will hold a hearing on Nov. 5 on the same unproven mortgage-fraud accusations and report back on whether there are grounds to remove her.

The New York Times has the story:

The committee set to hear Ms. Cook’s arguments includes Kevin Hassett, the president’s top economic adviser; Keith Sonderling, the acting director of the Office of Government Ethics; and Andrea Lucas, the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The unique nature of the arrangement—and Mr. Trump’s persistent hostility toward the Fed—sparked ire among Democrats in Congress. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, described the entire setup on Friday as a “kangaroo court” of Mr. Trump’s making. ...

… Peter Conti-Brown, an expert on Fed governance at the University of Pennsylvania, said that there was a clear pretense in the president’s renewed efforts to fire Ms. Cook. “There’s no plausible scenario where Lisa Cook is given a fair hearing, because a fair hearing is not what the Trump administration is trying to do,” he said, pointing out Mr. Trump’s oft-repeated desire for lower interest rates.

Trump has not bothered to hide what he holds against Cook. He told reporters that she is “an automatic no vote” on lowering interest rates and “that’s not a good thing.” One of the committee’s three members, Hassett (whom Steve Chapman profiled for The UnPopulist here), has already said the president has cause to fire her, which is one reason Cook’s lawyers called the panel “demonstrably biased” in an Oct. 13 letter.

Trump has, in a sense, given the Court what it asked for: a hearing, before judges of his own choosing, one of whom has already announced the verdict. Whether this is enough process to satisfy the justices remains to be seen.

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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Donald Trump took to Truth Social to announce that, after a phone call with Vladimir Putin (no word on whether this one was also a “perfect” phone call), Russia would release 300,000 tons of diesel immediately and millions more over the coming months. To make that possible, the Treasury Department temporarily waived sanctions on Russian diesel, handing Putin a fresh injection of cash to fund his war on Ukraine. Lawmakers in both parties say the deal violates a 2022 law banning Russian energy imports, as Time reports:

Congress four years ago passed the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act, which prohibits U.S. imports of Russian-origin energy products covered by Chapter 27 of the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, including diesel. Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas, the bill’s chief sponsor, argued Monday that Trump is “directly violating that law” by “lifting sanctions to permit the first Russian diesel imports into the United States since the law took effect, without satisfying the specific legal conditions it requires.” He suggested the lack of congressional oversight on Trump’s deal with Putin renders it unlawful, and noted how the plan showcases a sharp turn from Washington, as it comes just weeks after Trump signed a sweeping Russia sanctions bill intended to target the country’s financial institutions and the energy industry, which has largely financed the assault on Ukraine. The sanctions bill was named after Lindsey Graham, the late Republican Senator who spent the final year of his life building support for the measure. ...

In a letter sent to Trump on Tuesday, [Republican Sens. Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski] were joined by fellow Republican Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, John Cornyn of Texas, and Alan Armstrong of Oklahoma alongside six Democratic Senators as they told the President the deal “is a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies [and] should be rescinded.” The letter came a day after Trump publicly dismissed the criticism stemming from within his own party. “Well, I think these are Republicans that can’t really be serious,” he told reporters at the White House. “Anything that could help our farmers, our ranchers, I like.”

Trump knows that soaring diesel prices, and their knock-on effect on the cost of nearly everything else, are hurting his popularity and his party’s chances of holding Congress in the midterms. He is already touting the deal as relief for Americans struggling at the pump, even though experts say it will do little to bring prices down. The reasoning behind the deal may be more troubling still. One report reveals Trump made his decision only after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy refused to stop striking Russian oil refineries. Trump then blamed Zelenskyy for U.S. diesel prices and declared that “it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president,” a view the Kremlin has been pressing for years. The farmers and ranchers Trump claims to be helping can expect little relief. Putin, meanwhile, gets a new revenue stream and an American president who has taken up his line on Ukraine’s leadership.

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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Book Review

In the spring of 1778, with the war in America going badly, a member of the House of Lords proposed that Britain withdraw its forces and recognize American independence. Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, was a great-grandson of King Charles II, one of the wealthiest men in the country, and about as well-placed in the British establishment as anyone could be. He was also, for 15 years, its most persistent critic.

Richmond is not a name most Americans would recognize. ’s Radical Duke makes a good case that he ought to be.

Allen is the Harvard political theorist best known for Our Declaration, a close reading of the Declaration of Independence, and that document led her to Richmond. (She was also Ezra Klein’s fireside chat partner at LibCon2026.) Her research team came across a rare parchment copy of the Declaration in a county archive in the south of England. Tracing how it got there took her to the duke’s library, long neglected by historians.

From the late 1760s until the end of the war, Richmond was the leading opponent of the king’s ministers in the upper house of Parliament. He defended newspaper printers prosecuted for criticizing the government, argued that juries rather than judges should decide whether a publication was criminal, supported religious toleration, and backed the American cause openly while Britain was at war with it. Then, in June 1780, in the fifth year of America’s war the name of consent of the governed, he introduced a bill to give the vote to every adult man in Britain. He also required a new election every year, and—most radical of all—divide the country into voting districts of equal population. The House of Lords rejected it the same day.

Britain did not extend the vote to all adult men until 1918. On paper the United States reached that milestone in 1870 with the 15th Amendment, but the reality did not arrive until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But we did not require legislative districts of equal population until the Supreme Court imposed the “one person, one vote” rule in the 1960s under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. Richmond was proposing both ideas more than a century before.

The Same Problem on Both Sides of the Atlantic

The central argument of the book, and its most valuable contribution, is that the reformers in London and the rebels in America were reacting to the same problem, and that the problem was not taxation as such. It was that Parliament had stopped functioning as an independent check on the Crown.

Parliament, and particularly the House of Commons, existed in large part to hold the king accountable, above all by controlling the money. By the 1760s, the king had found a way around this. He could offer members government jobs, pensions, and in some cases outright cash, and he used these to secure their votes. Something like 200 of the 558 members were beholden to him (and, in practice, his preferred ministers) one way or another. The body that was supposed to restrain the king had become an extension of his administration.

There were other grievances. The government was prosecuting publishers, fighting expensive wars for no good reason, and, in the case of a popular radical named John Wilkes, repeatedly refusing to seat a man the voters kept electing. Readers familiar with the Declaration of Independence will recognize the list. These complaints had been circulating in London for a decade before Jefferson wrote them down.

The Americans concluded the system could not be repaired from within—and left. Richmond concluded it could be and had two remedies in mind. The first was to cut off the money. If the king had no secret funds and no jobs to hand out, he could not buy Parliament. A reform along these lines was enacted in 1782, championed by Edmund Burke, the man now remembered as the founder of modern conservatism, though in his day he was a proto-liberal Whig.

The second remedy was more fundamental. Richmond wanted to change whom members of Parliament answered to.

Most seats in the Commons were attached to boroughs, old towns whose boundaries had not changed in centuries, and many had dwindled to a handful of voters. The most notorious of these rotten boroughs, a place called Old Sarum, returned two members of Parliament from a hillside on which nobody lived, and whoever owned the land effectively chose them. Meanwhile new, fast-growing cities like Manchester had no members of their own. A seat like Old Sarum belonged, in effect, to its owner, and was bought and sold for prices vastly exceeding the value of the land itself. Richmond’s answer was to give every man a vote and place every vote in a district of the same size, so that a member would owe his seat to the voters and not to whoever had purchased his borough.

Many parts of the U.S. Constitution read as a reply to the same problem. The Framers had watched the king buy Parliament with jobs, so they wrote a rule that no member of Congress can hold an executive branch job, strengthening the separation between the two branches. They had watched him govern out of a private treasury, so they explicitly reserved the power to spend money to Congress alone. Richmond wanted elections every year; the Framers (in a much more sprawling country) settled on every two. The duke and the Framers were reading the same books and drawing many of the same conclusions.

The exception was equal districts. Allen makes a point about this in an interview that is exactly right. The idea that a country should be divided into districts of equal population, so that every vote counts the same, seems obvious today. In 1780 it was new, albeit with some faintly similar ancient precedents. Somebody had to think of it, and Richmond was among the first.

The Constitution divides House seats among the states by population but says nothing about how they are drawn within a state, nor about how the state’s own legislature is constituted. As a result, the American version of the “rotten borough” persisted. Legislative bodies in which a rural county of a few thousand people carried the same weight as a city of a hundred thousand survived the Revolution by nearly two centuries, until the Supreme Court struck such schemes down in the 1960s. On this question, Richmond’s bill went further than anything the Founders put on paper.

Allen aptly describes representation as a kind of technology, something that can be redesigned when it stops working. Her preferred redesign for the United States is a larger House elected from districts that each send several members, so that a party’s share of seats tracks its share of votes. In short, proportional representation. That is the right lesson to draw from Richmond, and one I have argued for in these pages.

Today, a map can have districts perfectly equal in population but still hand a majority of seats to whichever party draws the lines. Gerrymandering is the rotten borough by another name. There is little doubt Richmond would have recognized the problem instantly, and seen it as what it is: a question of political engineering.

Reform Rather Than Revolution

Once the Americans had gone all the way to revolution, radicals in Britain had to decide whether to follow, fighting to overthrow the monarchy rather than reform it. Richmond decided to follow the latter course, and the vast majority of his fellow travelers in the United Kingdom shared the conclusion. He spent the early 1780s working within the existing constitution, and Allen credits him with helping to lay the groundwork for the arrangement Britain eventually settled into, in which an elected Parliament governs and the monarch reigns. However, Richmond himself drifted from the reform cause after joining Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger’s government.

There is a good deal to be said for that choice, more than admirers of Thomas Paine, the era’s great radical and a critic of Richmond, usually admit. Britain reached universal male suffrage without a revolution and abolished slavery without a civil war. The two countries took different routes out of the same crisis, and it is not obvious, looking at Washington in 2026, that our route ultimately did the job better.

The book’s most striking claim concerns Paine himself. The Letters of Junius were anonymous newspaper essays attacking the king’s ministers, published from 1769 to 1772, and their authorship has been debated ever since. Most historians who have taken up the question have settled on a single author, Sir Philip Francis, a War Office clerk with a grievance against the ministry and a talent for invective. Allen argues instead that the letters were the work of a small group, Paine and Burke among them, organized and financed by Richmond. If she is right, Paine had been writing against the Crown for years before emigrating to America and publishing Common Sense. The two nations’ paths to constitutional democracy shared not just grievances but, quite possibly, an author.

It would also mean that Burke and Paine began as collaborators. Yuval Levin’s The Great Debate casts the two men as the founding antagonists of modern politics, the conservative defending inherited institutions and the radical appealing to first principles. But that quarrel came later. Both took the American side in the 1770s, and it was the French Revolution, nearly two decades after Junius fell silent, that finally drove them apart. Allen would push their alliance back further still, into these pseudonymous pages.

This is also where the book is most exposed. Allen is asking readers to set aside a consensus that has held for the better part of two centuries, and the evidence for group authorship of the Junius letters is circumstantial, as evidence about an anonymous author almost has to be. Readers who come to the book for the duke rather than the detective story may find the case suggestive rather than settled.

Whatever historians conclude about that claim, the 1780 bill stands on its own. Universal suffrage is now the democratic norm and equal representation its accepted standard, and Allen has recovered one of the first men to ask for both. We could do well to follow his example of thinking critically about how to create a more representative and well-balanced constitutional order.

Deep Cuts is a weekly column by Andy Craig exploring the constitutional, philosophical, and historical roots of current events and the ongoing crisis of American democracy. To read past entries, go here.

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Today, we’re sharing the full video and transcript of LibCon2026’s panel “Past Liberal Crises and Lessons: Overcoming Hurdles to Reconstruction,” including the Q&A with the audience that followed. The panel was moderated by McGill’s Jacob T. Levy and featured UConn’s Manisha Sinha, Boston College’s Devin Pendas, and Adam Bodnar, Poland’s former minister of justice. 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.

The transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.

Andy Craig: We’ve talked a lot about what needs to be done in terms of reconstruction and rebuilding liberal democratic institutions, but a key piece of that is accountability for the abuses, for the crimes—not just for the sake of justice, as important as that is, but because it’s important to reestablish deterrence.

I’m a big believer in the value of comparativism, which our moderator will no doubt provide some perspective on. We wanted to look at some of the historical examples that are important, trying to find not just what worked but also what didn’t work, and what is driven differently by the different circumstances we face. Obviously, we’re not entirely in the same situation as all of these historic cases of needing to handle transitional justice and reconstruction, but there are some important principles we can derive and also some important errors to avoid.

In running down that spectrum, the one that obviously comes to mind for Americans—and the word a lot of us have been bandying around—is Reconstruction. To cover that angle, we have Manisha Sinha, the Draper Chair in American History at UConn and one of the foremost historians of Reconstruction. Her most recent book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, extends Reconstruction all the way to 1920, looking at not just the moment we think of in the 1860s and 1870s, but how that whole framework rose and, unfortunately, fell. That speaks to both the things to emulate and, hopefully, the things to avoid as we’re looking forward.

Another big example that comes up, particularly if you spend time on Bluesky instead of Twitter (which is my recommendation), is Nuremberg—what happened in 1945. Obviously, we are not living through, thankfully, something as extreme as that, but there are important lessons. To address that, we have Devin Pendas, professor of history and of law at Boston College and a leading historian of transitional justice. His works include The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial and Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945–1950. I think that’ll be an important perspective for this discussion.

The other big example, of course, is what happened in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism and the Berlin Wall. For one thing, it’s the most recent of these examples, so we have somebody with actual practical experience with it—in particular, with the system of lustration laws that a lot of these countries brought in to provide some measure of accountability for people who were involved in the secret police and the human rights abuses under communism. For that, we have Adam Bodnar, who served as Poland’s minister of justice and prosecutor general from 2023 to 2025 and, before that, as the country’s commissioner for human rights. He has real practical experience in dealing with this.

Last but not least, we have our moderator, Jacob Levy, a good friend of The UnPopulist, the Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill, and, most recently, the author of Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom. He will be leading our discussion. Over to you, Jacob.

Jacob T. Levy: In addition to the three cases that Andy just mentioned, I’m going to hope that our conversation also includes more recent cases in which Adam has direct experience: transitions in the course of competitive authoritarianism. We want to pay attention not just to 1989, but also to the parties that win elections and take power after, or sometimes in between, the terms of authoritarian parties.

One reason in particular for us to spend some time with that is that the other cases on our agenda here—Reconstruction, post-Nazi transitions, and post-communist transitions—all involved a degree of comprehensive defeat, and all involved, in either a positive or withdrawal kind of way, a tremendous external change in the security environment: military defeat in the American South, military defeat of Germany, and withdrawal of Soviet armed support for the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. None of these are on the horizon in any way that is immediately applicable to the U.S.

We’ve been asked throughout this conference to draw attention back to lessons for the United States. So we’re not going to have just an open-ended conversation about lessons for reconstructions and democratic transitions in general. But I’m going to ask our panelists to start off by reflecting on exactly that question: What is it like to be drawing lessons for the United States from the range of cases in which they have expertise? That is to say, don’t start off with lessons. Start off by saying some things about how much or how little you think this kind of reasoning by analogy, this kind of moving toward lessons, is going to help us. For the first question, I’ll start with Dev.

Devin Pendas: That’s always a tricky question, I think, for historians, because historians are committed to the idea that every case is specific, every case is its own thing. The whole point of studying history is to study a given event on its own terms and for its own sake. So this kind of question of drawing lessons from it is always complicated and at least one step removed from the actual research and analysis process that most historians would engage in. But it’s obviously also the thing that makes history interesting to non-historians. So it’s something that, although we might be uncomfortable with it methodologically speaking, we do all the time. We do it in the classroom. We do it when we talk to journalists.

When you were asking me what it’s like to be drawing lessons for the United States from these other transitions from authoritarian rule, the word that leapt immediately to mind was “depressing.” If you had told me 12, 15, 20 years ago that this would be a relevant conversation for the United States, I would have asked you to have your head examined. But it is, I think, a relevant conversation for the United States.

One of the things that I, as a historian—or historians as a profession—can bring to the table is this sense of unpredictability. That’s another thing historians tend to emphasize. Nobody in the past knew what the future looked like; we can only see that in retrospect. And we don’t know what the future looks like. The future is unknown, is unpredictable, is uncertain. So you have to have a really significant degree of modesty, I think, in thinking about what the path forward looks like, because we can’t predict the obstacles. We don’t know what the election in 2028 is going to bring. We don’t even know for sure there’s going to be an election in 2028. That level of uncertainty is something historians try to reconstruct for the past, even when the future is known. And we absolutely need to be aware of it in the present moment.

Manisha Sinha: I want to reiterate the fact that historians get very irritated when people tell us “history repeats” or “history rhymes,” because we are in fact very attentive to the particular moment in history that we study or that we are going through. But I will say that our present is really informed by our past, especially our fraught present today in the United States, where people are shocked to even learn that the U.S. has its own authoritarian tradition. That authoritarian tradition had to be vanquished on the battlefield, but it won the peace for a long time, and we’ve had instances in American history when we have lost our democracy and our rights for a significant period of time.

Those are some of the ideas that I think people need to grapple with today in order to confront the very fraught challenge of the resurgence of authoritarianism, which many times uses symbols from the past, whether it’s Confederate icons or monuments or names, or even ideas of citizenship as being demarcated by race, by ethnicity. And those are the things that Reconstruction, of course, tried to overturn.

I’m one of those people who feel—and this is why, I guess, these amendments and these laws are still being debated today—that if we simply enforced the 14th Amendment and all its sections, our democracy would be in a much more stable position than it is today. The same goes for the first federal civil rights laws—what I call the first hate crime laws—the Enforcement Acts against the Ku Klux Klan. I really think it’s important to understand that the history of American republicanism has not been linear. American democracy needed to be reconstructed, was challenged at different times, and had to be reconstructed again in the 20th century. If you look at the title of the Voting Rights Act, it says its purpose is to enforce the 15th Amendment, which was ratified in 1870. Today, the Voting Rights Act has been gutted.

So it’s not as if the expansion of rights and democracy has marched forward in U.S. history without really strong challenges from reactionary authoritarian forces. And there have been moments when those forces have won. I don’t call Reconstruction a failure, because in fact it succeeded spectacularly. It was literally overthrown by a campaign of domestic racist terrorism, and by really awful decisions by the Supreme Court. I think if we understand historically the various twists and turns in American democracy, we will be better equipped to confront the challenges that we have today.

Adam Bodnar: I think it’s a tricky question, because it was always like this: When Polish people were coming to the United States, or when American experts were coming to Poland or to Eastern Europe, they were there to instruct us on making democratic systems. And we’ve managed to do this. Poland these days is a pretty secure democratic state, with a lot of different problems.

But referring to your question, especially this differentiation between transitional justice after ‘89 and right now, I think I can say one thing: It is not the same. This model from ‘89 does not really fit what you may experience one day. On the other hand, when we are looking at the situation of getting out of a democratic crisis, after a system of competitive authoritarianism, you see a lot of different problems and models that could be used in terms of accountability.

Basically, I represent the side of the discussion that is, on the one hand, trying to look at this from a certain perspective, but on the other hand, I’m a practitioner, observing on a daily basis from the inside what works and what is not working. Moreover, I think history teaches us that when we are talking about those issues, the question is: What are the conditions for transitional justice? And to be honest, it is a different condition when you are just transitioning from one government to the other as a result of typical democratic means.

But note that this transition may also look different, and I think a good example is Hungary, where Péter Magyar not only gained a constitutional majority, but even in his first speech, compared his situation to the Spring of Nations of the 19th century and to [‘56], and said that this date is one of the most important dates in the history of Hungary. So his room for maneuver is much bigger because of the legitimacy that he has for making this transition.

Levy: One of the recurring questions about democratic transitions—including but not limited to what gets called transitional justice—is how to think about and how to treat members of the regime, the party and movements that supported it, after the regime has been defeated or overthrown. There are trade-offs between engaging in retroactive punitive action—whether that be criminal punishment, whether that be expulsions, whether that be purges and lustration—and trying to secure the political stability of the new regime by getting enough buy-in from politically consequential or powerful parts of the old order.

For an extreme case that people here will remember, think about how destabilizing it was for the post-U.S.-invasion Iraqi regime that the army was excluded. The urge to say that Saddam Hussein’s army should have no part in the future state didn’t make all of the armed men go away. It changed their relationship to the new regime.

At the same time, there’s a very powerful urge and demand to take seriously that the defeated regime needs to bear consequences, that those who upheld it should bear at least stigma or moral responsibility or the deprivation of public honors, if not actual criminal punishment. I’m going to ask people not to, at this stage, directly say, “And here’s the lesson for the U.S.,” but give some framing about the cases you know best in these terms. What was it that worked well or badly about the question of how to treat, and whether to incorporate, members of the old and defeated regime and its party and movements? Manisha, could you start this one?

Sinha: If you look at the history of the United States and the history of Reconstruction—and it’s one of the reasons, actually, I expanded the timeline of my book right up to 1920, because I didn’t want to just look at the rise of Reconstruction, but also how that political project was destroyed—it really shows us that the need for reconciliation trumped accountability and justice.

And you can see this with the high command of the Confederacy. This was the American Civil War: More American lives were lost in it than in the First World War, Second World War, Vietnam War, and the Korean War combined, and with a much smaller national population. So it was a huge event. And the high command of the Confederacy was first pardoned by Andrew Johnson, whom I have compared to the current occupant of the White House in a number of op-eds in The New York Times—not to make a straight-out analogy, but to say that when you start pardoning people wholesale for crimes committed and there’s no accountability, it’s a real blow to a functioning democracy.

And we see this during Reconstruction. Even after Johnson, you have the 1872 Amnesty Act that [restores the right to hold office to nearly all] Confederates. As I write in the book, never has the hand of justice in the law been felt so lightly by traitors and by people who really did upend the American Republic. And it’s, again, this need to have reconciliation versus justice in the United States. Had there been an attempt at reconciliation on Lincolnian terms, you would have had a very different scenario.

The 14th Amendment bars anyone who has committed insurrection against the government of the United States, or aided and abetted an insurrection, after having sworn an oath of office to uphold the U.S. Constitution, from running for federal [or state] office. These men were not imprisoned—Davis was for a little while. They did not suffer any grave consequences. They didn’t even lose their right to vote. What they did lose was the right to hold federal [or state] office. And that bar is a constitutional bar. It’s [rarely] been implemented, just like other sections of the 14th Amendment have not been implemented.

And that question came up recently—in the Trump case. And we as historians suddenly find our works being cited and ourselves being asked to join some … my day was made when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited my book in her [opinion]. I was like, oh, okay, it does make a difference to write history.

But I think it is important, actually, to understand that the 14th Amendment bar was a solid bar against those people—unless you’re pardoned by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, which did not happen. And in the Trump case, even the liberal justices sided with the conservatives. It was a 9-0 decision. It was not your typical conservative-liberal split.

I think it’s really important to understand that the lack of accountability is what gives us the era of Jim Crow, disfranchisement, sharecropping, the convict lease system—basically racial apartheid in the American South. And if indeed those provisions had been upheld and Congress had not pardoned these former Confederates, we would not in fact have that era of Jim Crow. You would not have the need even for the civil rights movement, because those very federal laws would have been enforced, those amendments would have been enforced.

And what was worse about these people is that even after having won the peace—this is when all those Confederate monuments go up—they’re not satisfied. You’d think that racist violence in the South would go down. In fact, it ticks up. Things get even worse, even at that moment of the height of Jim Crow and lynching and racist violence.

So I am one of those people who, looking at the history of Reconstruction in this country, believe that without accountability, we have really suffered. And those very people are back in power. The vice president of the Confederacy from Georgia, Alexander Stephens, is back in Congress, and he’s voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which would have outlawed segregation before Southern states actually implemented it. Eventually, the Supreme Court says it’s “unconstitutional,” and that leads straight, of course, to Plessy v. Ferguson.

But again, accountability is really needed in democratic transitions and for any modicum of political justice. I think you can see that at the end of the Second World War; maybe one can see that a little bit with the fall of communism in the East. And then there’s the South Africa pattern, where accountability and reconciliation went hand in hand. And I think it was a really missed opportunity in U.S. history not to hold those people to account. Instead, they came right back holding high office. And in the recent past, of course, we have seen that happen again.

Levy: Manisha, to push on that a bit: Take the Second Reconstruction, the civil rights era, which in some ways launched something that was more durable. It did not last forever, but it lasted longer than the First Reconstruction did, and was accompanied by no accountability for the Jim Crow era. No truth and reconciliation commissions, no criminal trials, no exclusions from office—Strom Thurmond continued in office across the whole transition. Is that a case for, well, you want the old elites to be bought into the system, and you can get more success that way?

Sinha: It’s interesting that you ask that question about the 20th century, the late 20th century, because in a way, Jim Crow was a legally sanctioned system, just as slavery was. And of course, despite “massive resistance” put up by white supremacist groups in the South, you didn’t have anything comparable to the Civil War itself. It would have been interesting for us to criminalize that system in retrospect and say, “okay, these people need to pay a political price for that.”

What I’d like to suggest, though, is that these forces don’t sit back and say, “Oh, okay, the Voting Rights Act is passed, the [Civil Rights Act], and we are done.” They continue to fight. They play the long game. They continue to fight against it. And you’ll see that in the first reconstruction of American democracy and in what I call the civil rights revolution, the second reconstruction of American democracy. That game is a long-term political and legal strategy.

And when the Voting Rights Act was gutted in Dobbs and recently in Callais, as a historian, I’m reminded of the 1870 moment, the 1965 moment, and now this moment that we are living through. It’s really—I’m sorry, I said Dobbs, I meant Shelby County v. Holder. But reproductive freedom is also in my mind, ’cause that also comes from the 14th Amendment.

So I think it’s really important for us to understand that what was needed was maybe not criminal prosecution, the way they attempted with the old Confederacy, but some sort of reckoning with that Jim Crow era. Because you’re right, these people come right back. They go from being Dixiecrats to the Southern strategy of the Republican Party. And it’s pretty brazen. They don’t show any remorse or compunction; they continue to fight.

Levy: Adam?

Bodnar: I think that I will come back to this differentiation between the transition from communist times and contemporary times. Sometimes people ask me why we cannot do things the same way as we did in 1989. First of all, there is no general public support for massive radical changes, because the political world is very much polarized.

Note that in 1989, when the communists lost power, [there] were, as a result of the so-called Round Table Talks, the first free elections. And, as you said, there was the departure of Soviet troops. Interestingly, communists or post-communists were also interested in the process of forming democracy, because they kind of felt guilty, and they thought that maybe they would legitimize themselves and regain some kind of political sympathy.

And it is quite interesting to mention that Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who was president between 1995 and 2005, is still regarded today as one of the best presidents after the transition. But he’s in fact a post-communist. He was a minister in the communist government—the youngest minister in that government—but he managed to get Poland a new constitution and to join NATO and the European Union. Why? Because somehow he felt and he thought that it was good for Polish democracy, for the Polish state, to go together with the Solidarity movement and to make proper changes.

When we look right now at the situation after the elections of 2023, of course those elections were won by the pro-democratic, pro-European majority. But at the same time, you couldn’t feel this omnipresent, general moral condemnation of the previous illiberal regime. Why is that? Of course, this government was risking a lot regarding Polish [EU] membership, regarding relationships with a number of states, regarding protection of the rights of different minorities, vulnerable groups, women’s rights, and so on. So you can make a long list of different abuses.

But from the point of view of a regular human being, we are still in the EU. The United States is a major ally. We are investing in our arms industry, which means that we are becoming more and more secure in this difficult geopolitical situation. But most importantly, there was, more or less—except for the pandemic—economic growth and better social distribution. So the Law and Justice party, which was—and still is—a populist party, was not regarded as some kind of communists, but just as a party that was providing a completely different agenda. So in such a situation, and especially when the victory was just 54%, it was extremely difficult to think about solutions that would resemble the period just after communism.

But I really like your question concerning personal accountability, and maybe I will share with you some of my thoughts. In December 2023, I started my job as minister and attorney general at the same time—we have this combination of those two functions, a little bit like here. So, of course, you start to work with people associated with the previous regime who were contributing to creating the system of illiberalism, and you start to ask yourself: Okay, what can you do with them?

Some of my decisions were pretty easy, because we have this very strange system in which regular judges could be delegated to the Ministry of Justice to work as experts. And the previous government was really using it extensively, because it was about creating bonds of loyalty; it helped with promotion and so on. So it was quite easy for me to basically send them back to the courts, just to cut their delegations. That was a pretty simple decision.

But still, you had this problem that, for example, you have a specialist in a very important aspect of family law, and basically there is nobody else who is an expert in this field. You cannot find a good academic or some other civil servant. So you start to think, “Okay, should I send this judge back? Or maybe she should stay a little bit longer to help me with things.” So you are getting into this dilemma: Okay, how can you work further? How can you steer the ministry in a situation when you might have some people who were compromised?

But maybe just two more points. So that was delegated judges. Another interesting issue was the position of court presidents. In the Polish system, if you are a court president, you have a certain impact on judicial careers, on how a given local court operates. And it is not that easy to dismiss a court president, but it was obvious to a number of people that some of them were politically compromised. So for me, the most important decision was to enter into some kind of local cooperation with the judges sitting in a given court to move forward with the procedure, and altogether I managed to dismiss 120 court presidents.

The trickiest thing was prosecution, because the previous government had passed legislation that prevented almost any individual dismissals in the prosecution service. Under the Polish system, prosecutors have a strong level of autonomy and independence. So even if you are the prosecutor general, you do not have the possibility of dismissing them. They are protected by all means.

I thought that by starting different disciplinary cases against them, somehow we would clean the system of those people who were compromised. But over those eight years of the illiberal regime, the system of promotion, the system of career advancement, was so strong that even today you may feel that prosecutors—some prosecutors, at least—are waiting for [the old] times to come back. So they are using all different possible tricks in order to prolong disciplinary proceedings or to interfere in the administration of the prosecution system.

And here I come to maybe my last point. I thought—and it was also an idea—that disclosing certain facts, certain cases of abuse of power, including by judges, would contribute to changing people’s perspective about them. And of course, people on the center-left side of the political scene have a proper conception of what they did. But interestingly, in this world of polarization, if you disclose different abuses, they become heroes to the right side.

Just to give you one example, we have a judge who was formerly deputy minister of justice, who was responsible for orchestrating a hate campaign against his fellow colleagues, fellow judges. That was a regular campaign orchestrated from the level of the Ministry of Justice to cast a negative shadow on judges. A case against him has started, and he has just been selected by the Law and Justice party, this populist party, as a representative in one of the major constitutional bodies, which is the National Council of the Judiciary.

So basically, from the point of view of this populist party, it is not a sin; it is rather a virtue that he was the one who was serving this political purpose. So of course, polarization is making it much more difficult to pursue accountability for those people who were abusing power for political purposes.

Pendas: Two points to start. One is, I think it’s important to distinguish between what you might call popular authoritarianism and coercive authoritarianism. A military junta that comes to power in a coup is a different kind of authoritarianism than one that’s elected into office by popular vote. And so the question of accountability, I think, has to be treated very differently in those two cases.

So looking now more specifically at the German case: Yes, Hitler never won a majority of the vote—proportional representation, all that. But a majority of Germans in 1932 did vote for parties that were anti-democratic. Between the Nazis, the nationalists, and the communists, a majority of Germans voted for parties whose sales pitch was, “Vote for me and you’ll never get to vote again.” That is a very different kind of circumstance. And the Nazi Party remained deeply popular really right up until the end of the war—despite the bombing, despite the violence, despite the horrors.

So the question of accountability in that context is made difficult by the fact that a majority of the population was in favor of this. You cannot purge a majority of the population in a democracy. And when one of the key swing votes in Germany in the 1950s and 1960s is the ex-Nazi vote, that puts real limitations on how many people you can throw in jail, how many people you can kick out of their jobs, how many people you can bar from university education, all of those kinds of things.

The Allies come in at the end of the war, and initially it’s, “We’re going to throw thousands of people in jail. We’re going to bar hundreds of thousands of people from any kind of public employment. We’re going to extend denazification to the private sector.” It’s just not remotely workable. The country would turn into a failed state, and you would have a massive political backlash.

So in that kind of instance, where you have widespread popular support for the authoritarianism, yes, I think you do need accountability, but I think that accountability has to be very targeted. And it has to be, effectively, at the end of the day, symbolic rather than thorough. You have to find key actors who stand in for a wider set of actors and who can be held accountable, without having to purge literally the entire Justice Department, for example. That’s not feasible practically, for the reasons that you outlined, and it’s also politically suicidal, because it will turn everybody—or not everybody, but a critical mass of the population—against the new democracy.

One of the key things for a democratic transition—especially coming out of popular authoritarianism—is to show that democracy works better than authoritarianism, because the sales pitch that authoritarians often make is, “Vote for me, because voting is actually really messy and it leads to failed governance. If you vote for me, you’ll never have to vote again, but I’ll make the trains run on time.” And you have to show people that democracy can also make the trains run on time, while also throwing fewer people in prison.

Levy: Great, that gets us over the bridge into explicit analogies to a possible future transition and reconstruction in the U.S. With all of the framing that we’ve done now in mind, I’m going to ask each person to name something positive and something negative from the cases you know: lessons about what to do and lessons about what not to do.

In the ways that we’ve now all been talking about, you’re engaged in a transition with people who are still there and are not going away, a transition in a divided and polarized system. You aren’t, for example, Nelson Mandela coming to power in a transition that now makes you the leader of the 85% that had been disenfranchised, able to deal with the 15% or the 12% minority in a different way. Given everything you know, what informed judgments do you bring to the question of what comes next in the U.S.? Adam, start us off.

Bodnar: I will start with the positive ideas and examples, because in my opinion, they were quite crucial in terms of further consequences. What I really respect regarding accountability is that Polish prosecutors during this illiberal period were courageous enough to create their own association and to be involved in criticizing different legislative and institutional changes in the prosecution service, but also in reminding people that prosecution should respond to the basic needs of fighting for criminal justice. And even the name of the association was quite important: Lex Super Omnia, “the law above all.”

Why do I mention them? Because they were risking, to be honest, everything in their lives: If we had lost the elections in 2023, most probably they would not be prosecutors any longer. So that is one lesson. I will come back to this lesson in a minute.

The second one, which is in my opinion quite relevant today, is that there was a really massive effort by all different civil society organizations to document different forms of abuse of power, including international cooperation and cooperation with investigative journalists. My mentor, Wiktor Osiatyński—he was in fact affiliated for a certain period of time with the University of Connecticut—said, when he was still alive, that basically we should be responsible for documenting everything, for [archiving] information, because it may become relevant later on.

And basically this job was done. Later on, after 2023, when we started this process of accountability with quite limited resources, first of all, I could rely on those prosecutors who showed courage in those difficult times. So it was not a question of finding people who would be eager to do this or that case. You had people who had shown courage. It was the sense of their professionalism and integrity to go into this.

But at the same time, interestingly, they were very much—and they still are—against this kind of thinking in terms of political revenge. They keep repeating: We were not fighting for all those eight years for the independence and integrity of the prosecution office in order to serve some politicians and some political interests once again. So here is the important question: What is the purpose of accountability? Is it for the purpose of integrity, decency in public life, equality before the law, or is it just about political revenge?

And the second point refers to those materials, to these archives, because they allowed us to come back to a number of cases—not only the most visible, high-profile cases, but also some tiny cases somewhere in local cities where abuses also happened. So in my opinion, any process of accountability should not be just about the big cases. It should go as a kind of avalanche that brings back justice. What is, in my opinion, a painful lesson, also for me a little bit?

Levy: I do want to note that for all of the ways the Biden administration now clearly represents a failed transition, what we get from the Jan. 6 [committee] and from the indictment documents against Trump across the various Jan. 6-related cases does count as a meaningful building of the historical record, in ways that, in some countries, have taken whole truth and reconciliation commissions to do. And that’s an accomplishment to hold onto. One set of lessons.

Pendas: So I would say that when you’re talking about accountability, especially in a context where it’s on a mass scale—and 95,000 Germans were convicted of Nazi crimes after World War II in various courts, so this is a massive undertaking—it’s most important to go for the top. I think that if you don’t go after senior leadership, if you don’t go after the people who were giving the marching orders, if you create this impression—and this happened in the denazification and the lustration process—that basically the small fry burned while the big fish got away, that’s very politically damaging.

For various reasons we could discuss, the Biden administration was very successful at prosecuting Jan. 6 rioters and very unsuccessful at prosecuting Jan. 6 organizers and instigators. I think that’s really unfortunate. I think that one of the successful things about Germany after the war is that what was left of the senior leadership was prosecuted—mostly successfully. Some of them were even hanged. And yes, a lot of ordinary Germans who committed violent crimes were also prosecuted and were also convicted. But I think it was more important, honestly, what happened with that senior leadership. So I would say, for me, one really crucial lesson is that a fish rots from the head, and therefore I think prosecutions have to start there too.

Sinha: If you look at the case of Reconstruction, I think it’s a bit of a myth that there was some solid white Southern resistance to Reconstruction. In fact, there were many Southern Unionists who joined these Reconstruction governments. There were states like South Carolina, Louisiana, Mississippi that had 50% to 60% Black population. So it was not as if you were suppressing the massive amount of people who actually were supporting the other regimes. I just wanted to get that in, because the authoritarians tend to rely on anti-democratic tactics to win elections. It’s not as simple as, oh, 50% is for this and 50%. … In fact, we increasingly see meddling in elections in illegal, violent, and intimidating ways—and you see that all through the history of Reconstruction.

So what was successful about Reconstruction were these constitutional amendments and those first federal civil rights laws ever passed in the history of this country, so that even in the nadir of American democracy and Black freedom, you could have a Wong Kim Ark, and the very same Court that gave you Plessy would uphold his citizenship. It was important to have those amendments and laws in place. And then, of course, with the civil rights revolution, they could [invoke] that legal structure. I think that’s what was successful.

What was unsuccessful was something very basic, that I think the legitimacy of all governments and states depends on, which is the complete breakdown of the rule of law in the South. You had Senate investigation committees—and this is why archiving is so important; I agree with you—who interviewed former slaves, and today we historians can look at those investigations and quote them just to reveal the extent of racist terror in the South. You had federal prosecutors being sent. The Department of Justice is formed at that time—what’s happening now, I will not comment on—to bring to account these men, and sometimes women, who were literally upending the rule of law and creating a crisis of legitimacy for many of these Reconstruction state governments.

And I think that’s the biggest lesson from the failure of Reconstruction: You have to uphold those basic ideas and uphold what matters in terms of fact—not what the racist demagogues are saying in Congress, but those reports that we still have. I think those are very important steps in trying to create and reinvigorate what we call the second founding, or the second American Republic, constitutional democracy in this country.

And again, it’s not the majority. Lincoln was asked about this: So why not let the people of the state [vote it up or down]? And he said no—when it comes to certain things, like human rights, the white man’s democracy will not decide that up and down. There should be a prohibition on enslaving your fellow human beings. And I think that’s what we need to understand about democracy: It’s, on the one hand, the popular will, the electoral process, but also these safeguards that we have in terms of the Constitution and our legal system. Those need to go hand in hand. Otherwise a majority could …

I think the Germans are actually dealing with this right now with the AfD, the Alternative für Deutschland. I was just in Germany before coming here, and you can see how they are winning elections, but also how the government is trying to figure out what parts of that party actually cross the line in terms of the postwar constitution of Germany. So I think we need to keep all those things in mind. Perhaps the biggest success is not just prosecuting people, but those foundational amendments and laws that were put into place. And the big failure was not just the failure to uphold them, but the complete breakdown of the rule of law in the South.

Levy: Great, thank you to our panelists, and now the microphones are open for questions.

Audience Member: Devin, you’ve talked about the importance of prosecuting ringleaders, prosecuting elites. Looking at the Trump administration, I think you can see several different groups operating there. There’s Trump and his family, who seem to be driving everything, and also engaging in corruption on this kind of immense scale. There are cabinet officers, other appointed leaders, who are driving pretty brutal, murderous, lawless campaigns against Americans. There are corporate leaders who are engaging in or complicit in the other end of this corruption. And arguably, maybe there are other kinds of MAGA politicians or influencers who are engaged in this in some way. Which of those groups do you think we should prioritize? And is there somebody I left off the list? Let’s talk about actual specifics here.

Pendas: So yes, maybe to all of those in some ways. I think it’s going to be very difficult in the American case because of the immunity ruling. I think the Supreme Court preemptively foreclosed a lot of legal remedies for this, quite intentionally. I’m not a prosecutor, but I think the kinds of private corruption we’re seeing from Trump and his family would be hard to place under this penumbra of official acts, and should, I think, still be susceptible to criminal prosecution. I think it’s going to be a lot harder with cabinet officers, for instance, and then there’s, of course, the question of whether Trump issues preemptive pardons. So I think that some of this is going to be very difficult in the American case.

Another thing I would just quickly say about this is I’ve been very struck by the ways in which the fragmentation of the media ecosystem means that the perceptions of this are very different. It’s really important when you prosecute people for authoritarian crimes that the prosecutions themselves be quite fair, scrupulously fair in terms of due process, and be seen to be scrupulously fair in terms of due process. The problem is, if you have a fair trial in a forest and there’s no one there to watch it, did you have a fair trial? If you have a media system where you’re being told, “Oh my God, this is lawfare, this is a witch hunt, this is the evil Democrats out to get us,” it doesn’t matter how scrupulously fair your prosecution is or isn’t. It might not have the intended kind of pedagogical consequences for the public. So I think it’s going to be very tricky in the American case, which is why I think this kind of truth-finding, truth-telling side of things might end up looming larger in the next administration than actual criminal prosecutions.

Audience Member: From your discussion and from the opening video yesterday, it seems like we’re talking about reconstruction this way: There was a First and Second Reconstruction in the United States that were based on race, and now we’re talking about one that would be based more on the attempted destruction of our democracy. But I want to suggest that another way of looking at this is as a third reconstruction based on race. This is white Christian nationalism. This is not just a random attack on our democracy. It’s a very explicit attack on who belongs as an American and who does not. And having just come from the panel on immigration, I’d say this is still anti-African American, but specifically anti-Hispanic American, or anti-anybody who’s not from a white Christian country.

I want to ask the question, but tie it to the last panel on Gen Z. Next year, all Americans under 30 will be roughly 49% European American and 50% non-European American: 25% to 30% Hispanic, 15% African American, and then people from everywhere else. So I just want to ask you, if we’re really talking about reconstruction, and we’re talking about reconstruction as the people who are going to be living that reconstruction imagine it, isn’t it really just as much about race?

Sinha: I think you’re right when you say that the reconstruction of American democracy, from the first after the Civil War to the civil rights era, was prompted by the fight for Black rights, around race. So it’s “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” to quote the exact language. But it was also a real leap for American democracy. So with the First Reconstruction, you get services for poor whites. The South didn’t have a public school system before the Civil War. So it was also the case that Black freedom was tied to the cause of American democracy, including that of immigrants, as the Chinese Exclusion Act was opposed by those who had supported Reconstruction.

Similarly, the Second Reconstruction—I wouldn’t be here as an immigrant, as a naturalized Indian American citizen, without the civil rights revolution and the new immigration act. So I think you’re right, it does begin with race, but it is a broader democratic transformation. And that’s why we call it the reconstruction of American democracy.

And a couple of us besides me have been arguing for a third reconstruction of American democracy, mainly because at this moment, it’s not just Black rights and immigrant rights. And people forget the 14th Amendment. The first section says citizenship by birthright, which we talk about all the time, or naturalization. That’s there too, in the 14th Amendment. So it’s a broader case for the reconstruction of American democracy that we need to be making right now.

There is a concerted attempt, as we know, at what I argue—I’m writing an essay right now—is the dismantling of the Third American Republic, which begins with the establishment of the New Deal state—the administrative state—and then is completed with the civil rights revolution. So even though we see it mainly in racial terms—and I think authoritarians want us to see it only in simple racial terms, because then it is easy to divide and to play up all those old ideas from the early 20th century, the replacement theory, and The Passing of the Great Race and all that—I think we need to, on the other side, make not simply a racial case; we need to make that broader case for democracy.

Audience Member: My question is related to the Second Reconstruction, post-civil rights movement. In the wake of the civil rights movement, we saw a pretty aggressive campaign by federal law enforcement against white supremacist terrorist organizations, like the Ku Klux Klan. What can we learn from what I would describe as somewhat successful campaigns by law enforcement to pursue some of these extremist groups, and how can we do something like that in this media environment, which aggressively normalizes a lot of what I would characterize as racial terrorism?

Sinha: This kind of both-siding when it comes to matters of fact and truth is a problem. I always tell my students you can have your own opinions, but you can’t make up your own facts. I think what we can learn is—and I think that has been mentioned earlier here—that the rigorous prosecution of the first Ku Klux Klan actually killed the Klan. The second Klan that arose in the 1920s was a different organization. But then that enforcement dropped, and then you had the Red Shirts and the White Leaguers and the White Liners come up.

Similarly, with Jan. 6, I think we were playing the institutional game instead of realizing what an existential threat that attempted insurrection, that attempted coup, was for American democracy. Right now, the Department of Justice is so tainted that I can’t even imagine it as the Department of Justice that was formed under Grant. But if we can take any lesson from that, it is that you do need to actually hold people accountable. Now we have wholesale pardons. Many of those people are getting convicted again of all kinds of crimes. So again, the basic idea of enforcement cannot come to pass unless we actually [have] what I would call regime change at this point in the United States.

Levy: Is there anyone currently in line who has a question primarily for Adam?

Audience Member: I’m in my second stage of elderhood, and I’m doing all kinds of things to help voters get smarter about being citizens. In my career of 50 years, I worked primarily on very large-scale change efforts, big corporations, and also in South Africa. I lived in South Africa through all of the ’90s. I worked there for seven years before that and for the 15 years afterwards. I was also the chair of the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation, so I knew the archbishop quite well.

Now, with all that background in mind, I’m looking at this from a little bit different perspective and thinking about two questions I’d like you to consider together. One is that in South Africa, the reconciliation process actually started before Mandela was released. It was a process, and I’m wondering if there’s an opportunity for us in the United States to begin a process of reconciliation now. Why wait? I know there are some groups that are doing that, but I think the population is ready—everybody’s sick and tired of all of this that’s going on.

The second thing is the use of process. In South Africa, there was real use of process—facilitated meetings, underground meetings, people getting together, people coming from all over, bringing ideas and having an open forum. As I look at how our government operates, I think we have very weak and old-fashioned processes. And we don’t have processes at the level of our issues. So I’m wondering how you would react, and what you would see in a reconstruction process that would begin earlier, including now, and that would also begin to bring processes together that are at the level of the problems that we face.

Bodnar: I would like to respond to your question, but to be honest, I would like to give a third example from South Africa, which is very much relevant, in my opinion, to your discussion. Exactly one year ago, there was a big congress in Warsaw, organized by the World Justice Project, the organization that produces the Rule of Law Index. And I had the pleasure to give a short laudatio and to present the award to Judge Raymond Zondo, who was the chief justice of South Africa’s Constitutional Court.

But interestingly, he got this award not for being a justice of the court, but because he became the head of the so-called Zondo Commission, which is a new form, a new structure, for accountability. In short, this commission was about investigating state capture by the president and the presidential administration. It collected thousands of testimonies from witnesses. But interestingly, it was based on legislation and on his personal authority as [deputy chief justice]. So it was not relying on traditional prosecutorial authorities; he employed investigators, journalists, and civil servants who were helping him.

So it is quite an interesting example of how you can respect [fair] trial rules and at the same time create a commission that investigates the institutional capture of the state. And interestingly, the results of this commission were later passed on to the prosecution service, so that on the basis of them, prosecutors could prepare bills of indictment and so on. So South Africa is a good country to look at from the point of view of different solutions for the future.

Levy: With that, we are at four seconds before the end of the session. So please take those seconds to join me in thanking our panelists.

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Donald Trump’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House prompted the other major networks, Fox News included, to suspend pool coverage in solidarity. An incensed Trump now has his Justice Department investigating the networks for violating antitrust law, as The New York Times explains:

In a statement on Saturday, a Justice Department spokeswoman, Emily Covington, described the five networks as having “proudly boycotted covering White House events.” “Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act,” a core antitrust law, Ms. Covington wrote. ... In its letters on Friday, the Justice Department demanded copies of communications among network officials that concerned pool coverage of Mr. Trump, along with any communications about Mr. Trump’s revocation of CNN’s access to the White House grounds, according to two people with direct knowledge of the documents. ...

Organized boycotts can be considered anticompetitive if they are aimed at achieving commercial objectives, but not if their primary objective is political speech, said William E. Kovacic, a former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. “The critical ingredient in successful antitrust cases is to demonstrate that there is unmistakably a commercial motive and that the commercial motive predominates,” Mr. Kovacic said. “And I don’t think they would ever be able to do that here.”

The press pool exists to give the public continuous coverage of the president, which is why coordinated action among the networks that make it up is one of the few tools they have to push back against attacks on press freedom while lawsuits wind through the courts. The last time the major networks banded together this way, back in 2009, the Obama administration quickly reversed its decision to exclude Fox News from a round of interviews. Trump has opted instead to treat the networks’ solidarity as a cartel. The Sherman Act was written to break up the railroad and oil trusts of the Gilded Age. The administration is now wielding it against news organizations that declined to air footage of the president shaking hands with Xi Jinping.

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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Dear Readers:

Saturday is roundup day, and this week’s video roundup is a fantastic one. We have , a dynamic, young content creator, on Trump’s alleged offer—as documented in Executive Watch—to sell American weapons to China’s Xi Jinping, a seriously repressive authoritarian, while Taiwan’s arms package sits frozen.

Also in this roundup is editor-in-chief ’s opening to her Zooming In conversation with in which she reflects on MAGA's attacks on Indian Americans like her. The full episode discussing ICE’s abuses is here.

We also have three special toasts from The UnPopulist’s 5th birthday celebration earlier this week, delivered by Cato’s , Brookings’ , and The Bulwark’s (who is also an ISMA board member). We’re grateful for their glowing words, and for their years of friendship to our project. It’s support like theirs that recharges us when we are down.

Enjoy!

US Weapons for US Enemies, US Snubs for US Friends

MAGA Attacks on Indian Americans Show That Reagan’s America Is Dead

To celebrate our 5th birthday, three longtime friends of The UnPopulist raised a glass to our project. Walter Olson and Jonathan Rauch both used Irving Kristol as a launching point, so it’s fitting that his son, Bill Kristol, rounds out the trio.

The UnPopulist Has Created a Community By Bringing Together the Like-Minded —

The UnPopulist Is an UnApologetic Defender of Liberalism —

The UnPopulist Is the Right Mix of Hope and Alarm —

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The Trump administration’s latest move against legal immigration bars eight companies, Microsoft among them, from sponsoring their employees for green cards. The companies have been suspended from the permanent labor certification process, known as PERM, which is the most common route by which workers on temporary H-1B visas obtain permanent legal status. The administration accuses the companies of abusing the process, a charge several of them, including Microsoft, contest.

Time reports:

Microsoft and software maker Adobe are among eight companies that the Trump Administration will suspend from applying to sponsor employment-based green cards. The other companies are major information technology outsourcing firms: Cognizant; Infosys; Tata Consultancy Services; Wipro; HCL Technologies; and Capgemini. “We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies,” Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said. ...

[Vice President] Vance said the suspensions would last “as long as it needs to.” The Administration is seeking to compel the companies to change their behavior. Vance accused companies of deliberately posting ineffective job ads in order to justify hiring foreign workers. “Maybe they’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that we have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it. And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” Vance said.

If H-1B workers really are indentured servants, the administration has chosen a curious remedy. A green card is precisely what frees an H-1B worker to change jobs and demand higher pay, so blocking companies from sponsoring their own employees for one leaves those workers more dependent on their employers than before.

The Trump administration’s immigration policy has always had two prongs. The first is a loud, public focus on illegal immigration, border chaos, and criminal behavior (real or fictional) by migrants. The second is a quiet, bureaucratic assault on as many pathways for legal immigration as the administration can shut down. At the same press conference where Vance announced the green card suspensions, officials announced subpoenas to nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, over their use of J-1 exchange visas. A day earlier, the Department of Homeland Security proposed charging colleges $70,000 for each student in the program that lets international students work in their field during or after their studies. With the first prong increasingly unpopular in public polling, the administration is leaning harder on the second. Even if Democrats win back power in the midterm elections, they will have a lot of work to do to protect and restore America’s legal immigration pathways.

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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Book Review

“This was the first time I ever voted. And I think I voted because I knew that he was such a good businessman. Like, he owns a lot of things, he’s good with money, and I was thinking that if he got into office, he would help get more jobs.”

“I don’t call it an insurrection. There was a picture of a bunch of people that were walking through the one lobby, and they’re all staying within the velvet ropes walking single file, calm.”

— Justine from Bedford and Nick from Pennsylvania, two voters from separate focus groups conducted by Sarah Longwell

I think of as a kind of political sin-eater. The founder and publisher of The Bulwark sprinkles quotes like the above throughout her new book, a New York Times bestseller, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time. They are a small sampling of her regular focus groups of American voters. She listens to the most infuriating inanities from the world’s most irresponsible voters because the rest of us would be driven to madness from the Lovecraftian horror that is American public opinion.

Longwell uses her vast trove of qualitative voter data and her long experience in Republican communications to end the electoral dominance of her former side and enact reforms long and deep enough to decisively resolve the authoritarian crisis. In her words, “We need to burn MAGA to the ground and then salt the earth so that it’s another century before someone tries to overthrow liberal democracy.”

Amen, Sister!

Let’s address, well, the elephant in the room right at the outset. Isn’t it chutzpah for a former Republican apparatchik to lecture Democrats about politics, many of her leftist critics deride? The NeverTrumpers managed to lose their own party, after all. According to such critics, Longwell and the NeverTrumpers, if not actively sabotaging the anti-authoritarian coalition with antics like getting Kamala Harris to campaign with Liz Cheney and obsessing over Hasan Piker, are trying to drag their new party to the right. On this view, NeverTrump conservatives are welcome to switch sides, but they should do so quietly, beyond perhaps apologizing for the sins of their prior political lives.

I don’t take kindly to such arguments. An anti-fascist, pro-democracy coalition needs to be as broad as possible. And once you’re in a coalition, you have as much right to advance your interests as the next coalition partner. And the evidence from Longwell’s book suggests she is very much a team player who is not trying to move her new party toward her preferred policies by making a tendentious electoral case for them. She even gives a fair shake to the left edge of the party, which might be furthest from her politically. Indeed, the handful of references to AOC and Bernie Sanders in the book are neutral or positive. The half dozen mentions of NYC mayor Mamdani are uniformly positive. Control-F of “Piker” comes up empty.

Principled Pragmatist

I discuss this because one of the most important things in our ongoing constitutional crisis is understanding who is in the democratic coalition—and defending them against infighting. Otherwise, the fragile coalition will fall apart. Longwell is one of the good ones.

Beyond advocating a constant drumbeat of affordability and security, Longwell largely steers clear of specific policy recommendations, recognizing that Democrats in different environments may need to tailor their messages differently. More importantly, her stance is active, aggressive, and authentic. Longwell, who made a career out of developing marketing campaigns for conservative causes pre-Trump, distills the lessons she learned from her Republican communications experience:

• Defense loses over time.

• Be relentless.

• ABC: Always Be Communicating.

When one side finds itself constantly defending, it means it’s responding to a narrative established by the other. Voters internalize the narrative, in this case thinking about issues Republicans want them to think about, even if voters may disagree with Republican solutions. Democrats have to establish narrative dominance so voters think about issues Democrats care about, as Democrats frame them.

One way this narrative dominance is achieved is through relentless repetition, says Longwell. We get tired of making the same arguments over and over again, but different voters tune in at different times and places. “Just because you’ve heard an argument a million times doesn’t mean other people have. Most people aren’t paying close attention. You have to keep saying it.” (emphasis in original)

Constant communication is more important than perfect communication. Longwell gives the familiar criticism of Democrats here: they’re obsessed with message-testing and achieving coalitional buy-in. But by the time the message is polished, the rapid news cycle has already moved on. The communication environment also shifts, with different kinds of communication like vertical shorts emerging while traditional platforms like network news and legacy print media fade into irrelevance.

This ties into the all-important idea of authenticity. Voters can smell message-testing and focus groups from miles away. Authenticity is one thing that Trump has effortlessly mastered, and it was the magic key to unlock the electoral id that is MAGA. Even when voters recognize that Trump is brazenly lying, they know he’s only lying about facts—he’s not misrepresenting who he is or what his values are. If Democrats really want to win, they need to wean themselves off consultants, say what they mean, and fight for what they really believe.

Longwell uses an acronym, FLAGS, to describe the five motivations that work in politics: Fear, Love, Anger, Greed, and Sympathy. Democrats do fine on Sympathy, but Republicans maintain an inherent advantage because they have a virtual monopoly on Fear.

These ideas overlap and interact. Republicans win narrative dominance by repeating their ideas (and lies) across all kinds of platforms (not to mention buying and corrupting platforms like Washington Post and Twitter). MAGA politicians stay on the attack by using fear of immigrants and anger at Democratic-coded “elites” like Hollywood actors, HR departments, and university professors and administrators.

Bordering on Malpractice

How to Eat an Elephant mostly applies these ideas about how to engage with voters to affordability. Affordability is a stand-in for all kinds of issues, because Longwell believes, reasonably enough, that everything ties into affordability. It’s the economy, stupid, and if you’re not tying your pet issue to affordability then you’re doing it wrong. Her advice here feels like common sense. Even her foray into trans rights, where Longwell is noticeably to the right of the average Bluesky anime avatar, seems like a helpful and sympathetic application of her method.

But when Longwell talks about immigration, she reverses course. Digging into the issue is a worthwhile exercise of testing out Longwell’s ideas. She recounts:

Here’s how those conversations typically go: Ask about the border, and someone will very often bring up fentanyl. Ask about crime, and someone will mention “illegals.” Ask about their biggest fears for the country, and terrorism, drugs, gangs, and open borders might tumble out in the same breath—as if they were all the same thing. Because to these voters, they are the same thing. Illegal immigration isn’t a singular threat. It’s an entire threat cluster. (Emphasis in original.)

Trump wins the narrative war by activating fear and anxiety about immigrants and tying the issue (by dogged repetition) to issues of drugs, economic precarity, and crime. Elsewhere, Longwell insists that public opinion is like cement, soft and malleable before it hardens. Yet when it comes to immigration, she seems to believe that American voters intrinsically associate immigrants with danger, disorder, and economic displacement. She even warns against over-interpreting “public opinion swings that result from near-term excesses … and the more durable sentiments on the subject of immigration and the border.”

Instead of attack-attack-attack, forcing Republicans to respond to a Democratic narrative that capitalizes on suddenly malleable public opinion, Longwell advises Democrats to acknowledge voters’ valid concerns about immigration and promise to address them. She offers sample scripts.

“We’re going to secure the border by actually managing it—with technology, with personnel, and with real consequences for crossing illegally. We’re going to fix the broken legal system so people who want to come the right way actually can. And we’re going to deport violent criminals because you deserve to be safe.”

“We know you’re struggling with the cost of groceries, rent, and healthcare. We’re going to make sure American families come first—with good jobs, affordable housing, and real economic security. And we’re not going to ask you to sacrifice while we prioritize everyone else.”

In these examples, the hypothetical speaker confirms the MAGA framing of immigration and then fails to identify how Republicans are the real threat. Immigrants are still associated with “violent criminals” who must be deported. “Dangerous criminals” are “slipping through the cracks,” even though study after study has shown that immigrants, even undocumented ones, have a far lower crime rate than natives. Immigrants are implicitly cast as a threat to jobs, housing, and economic security and “American families” are portrayed as being sidelined for immigrants. Longwell is offering sympathy to American voters and to immigrants, unlike Republicans. But she’s leaving the fear unaddressed.

The Immigration Exception

Longwell offers no explanation for why immigration is a different issue not amenable to the treatment she prescribes for other issues. A script more faithful to Longwell’s method would sound very different:

Donald Trump and his lackeys in Congress are trying to scare you with stories about immigrants in caravans, but we know that immigrants are our friends and neighbors. The real threat is Trump’s masked ICE agents killing American citizens and kidnapping decent people off the streets to send them to concentration camps run by foreign dictators.

Feel free to insert language about Trump using immigration to distract voters from high gas prices and his illegal war in Iran, or from the Epstein files and AI data centers that Trump’s billionaire buddies are shoving down our throats. The point is that in this language, immigrants aren’t for a moment acknowledged to be threats. Trump (at historically low popularity) is bundled together with other unpopular figures and policies, and the voter is quickly reminded of the humanity of immigrants before being redirected to areas where Republicans are weak.

It may be true that human nature means immigration will always be liable to demagoguery, and that Republican advantage will always eventually return after bloody excess. We may never convince the median red state voter that foreigners are just Americans who haven’t arrived yet—although we did for a good long while after Dwight Eisenhower and before Donald Trump, as the rhetoric of every president in between suggests.

But let’s strike while the iron is hot. For at least the next two years, voters will be open-minded to a liberal interpretation of immigration. We can use this time to press our own narrative of America as the Mother of Exiles, and closed borders as the chaotic tool of despots bent on totalitarianism.

Tough Love

How to Eat an Elephant is not always pleasant to read. Longwell has some bitter medicine for Democrats, who have been long afflicted by inauthenticity and an addiction to talking down to voters in baffling academic or social justice language. Her discussion of enemy-controlled social media algorithms and the objective reality-destroying novelty of AI—where voters can now simply choose to believe “evidence” they like and dismiss what they don’t like as fake—is legitimately terrifying. This new reality isn’t Democrats’ fault, but it’s still something they have to deal with.

But Longwell’s counsel is not one of despair. Some Democrats are already learning how to drive the narrative with cascading attacks. Jon Ossoff has been a constant media presence, driving discourse by drawing attention to “Natalie” and his Senate opponent’s “Third Reich“ staffers in a debate yesterday. He has introduced incisive slogans like “Epstein Class.” Angie Nixon, Florida’s Democratic contender for the Senate, has flipped the Democratic liability of “abolish the police” by pointing out she wants her opponent “arrested and in jail for stealing $10 million from sick kids.” Given the rampant criminality of the Trump administration, such a script reversal could be used by every Democrat in every election through 2028. Sherrod Brown, who aims to dislodge Ohio’s Republican Senator, is showing voters how out of touch his opponent is on affordability. Take a listen to his “Listen to this shit” campaign. AOC and Mamdani have mastered the art of forming parasocial relationships with voters.

How to Eat an Elephant is a needed and welcome intervention. The good news is Democrats are poised to listen and already putting its ideas into practice.

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The voters who supported Kamala Harris for president have become markedly more cynical toward America’s elites since 2024, according to the latest populism survey from the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, publisher of The UnPopulist. In ISMA’s previous survey in August 2024, before the presidential election, 59% of those planning to vote for Harris strongly agreed that at least one of six American elites had harmed people like them in pursuit of the elite’s “own selfish interests.” In June of this year, 69% of those who said they voted for her did, a 10-point rise and the only statistically significant shift Harris voters displayed among the four populist attitudes the survey tracks.

On that attitude, the former Harris coalition now rivals Trump voters, 65% of whom say the same, even if the two groups target the various elites at different rates. But the rise has not made more of these Harris voters populists. ISMA counts as populist anyone who holds at least three of four characteristic attitudes. By that measure, 15% of Harris voters qualified in both surveys, well below the current 25% among Trump voters, whose populist contingent has itself, ISMA found, thinned from 36% in 2024. What has grown among Harris voters is a grievance against elites, not the survey’s other three potential populist attitudes: a strong attachment to a political leader, an othering of social outgroups, or a tolerance for the leader’s exceeding limits on his or her power. It is combinations of the four elements that give populism a destructive, authoritarian character.

One note on terminology: “Harris voters” are not necessarily strong supporters of Kamala Harris personally; indeed, only 6% expressed a strong personal attachment to her. Rather, the term simply refers to those who voted for Harris in the 2024 presidential election, the vast majority of whom were Democrats.

What Moved and What Didn’t

The table below shows how Harris voters weighed in on the four attitudes in August 2024 and June 2026. Strong attachment to a leader and antipathy toward outgroups barely moved. Anti-elite sentiment rose 10 points, and support for the leader exceeding legal limits fell seven. But both shifts, it turns out, occurred mostly among voters holding two or fewer of the four attitudes—that is, within the nonpopulist majority. As a result, the share of populists stayed flat.

That stability was hardly guaranteed. Democrats have been shut out of power in the House, Senate, and presidency since January 2025—the kind of situation that can inflame populist sentiment in an opposition party. And that did lead to the significant rise of anti-elite feelings among Harris voters. But that is the only one of the four attitudes on which Harris and Trump voters now look alike: 69% versus 65%, respectively—a gap that’s not statistically significant.

To be sure, this is not the only area of concern with Harris voters. A majority of them, 57%, would accept her exceeding the legal limits on presidential power. That is not a comfortable number for anyone who values constitutional constraints. And while 57% is down from 64% in 2024, the same attitude is down even further among Trump voters—to 49%, from 63%.

Still, even the August 2024 survey indicated that Harris voters were, on the whole, open to accepting renewed limits on executive power. And since then, their tolerance for a leader’s overreach has noticeably declined. Anti-elite sentiment has done the opposite.

Anger at Elites, Aimed Differently

The survey asks, for each of six elites, whether the group has “often harmed the interests of Americans like me in pursuit of their own selfish interests.” The six are national elected officials, unelected federal officials, Christian religious leaders, and elites in the media, in universities and the entertainment industry, and in business and finance. Strongly agreeing about one or more counted as holding the anti-elite attitude.

Some of the rise wasn’t surprising. Given who now runs Washington, Harris voters had partisan reasons to sour on national political and bureaucratic elites, and they have (see table below). But they became more likely to condemn each of the six elites, and every increase but the small one for universities and entertainment was statistically significant.

On political and bureaucratic elites, Harris voters (47% and 37%) are now statistically indistinguishable from Trump voters (43% and 38%). Elsewhere the camps diverge sharply, as the next table shows: Trump voters are far more likely to criticize the media or the universities and the entertainment industry; Harris voters, business or Christian religious elites.

The sentiment’s breadth has grown too. The average Harris voter now expresses strong anti-elite feeling toward 2.2 of the six elites, up from 1.6 in 2024 and about the same as the 2.1 among Trump voters.

Anti-Elite, Not Authoritarian

In ISMA’s model, populism fuses anger at elites with attachment to a leader, hostility toward outgroups, and tolerance for the leader’s breaking legal limits to get his or her way. Among Trump voters, these attitudes are spread more broadly than among Harris voters, for whom unique attachment to their presidential candidate is rare and antipathy toward outgroups is decidedly a minority view. As a result, there are still about five populists in the Trump camp for every three in the Harris camp, even with the decline in the percentage of populists among Trump voters since 2024.

So the distinction is real but not guaranteed. As the congressional election season nears its end, with a presidential one to follow, the many nonpopulist Democratic voters who feel strongly about the failures of America’s elites face a choice: to support norms, structures, and incentives that strengthen the liberal system and curb elite abuses regardless of party, or to take the populist path of letting their leaders weaken legal safeguards to punish and exclude the current elites and the voters who empowered them. Much depends on their decision.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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