Much about our current political era feels unprecedented, especially the sense that the government is targeting people for their political beliefs. In December, President Trump’s Department of Justice ordered the FBI to drastically escalate surveillance of leftist groups. News has also broken that the Biden administration collected data, without a warrant, on Republican senators’ phone calls as part of Jack Smith’s criminal investigation of Jan. 6, taking advantage of inadequate legal protections for data privacy. Republicans and Democrats alike routinely express concern about “lawfare,” the use of unjustified investigations and prosecutions to harass whichever party is out of power.

Americans hoping for a deescalation of lawfare should seek to recover the forgotten legacy of the Constitution’s Framers: the safeguards those patriots who knew what it was to be hunted designed for times like these. The rise and fall of that original criminal legal system can be recounted at every stage of a case—together with ways to revive its promises.

The Scope of Criminal Law

Over the past century, criminal prohibitions have routinely been used to address all sorts of behaviors that used to be left to other kinds of social regulation. It is true that, even at the Founding, some communities closely policed consensual sexual activity, and the tyrannical systems of racial surveillance and control that marked slavery were already developing. But in an age when prisons were a new idea and there were no professional police forces, there were limits to criminal law’s reach.

That changed drastically in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the rise of Jim Crow laws and the prohibition of alcohol. American governments started trying to use sweeping criminal laws to sanitize society and uproot various perceived cultural ills. Professional police forces started hauling people off to jails for “loitering” and “vagrancy,” while vice squads blurred policing and espionage in their wars against the manufacture, transportation, sale, and consumption of alcohol. The traditionally limited range of criminal law gave way to the enthusiastic embrace of “police powers.”

While modern criminal law no longer prosecutes adult beer drinkers, its growth has continued. An omnipresent criminal law, meant to be flexible enough to punish every social ill, contains thousands upon thousands of offenses found only buried deep within codebooks and regulations, many written so vaguely as to depend almost entirely on the discretion of the prosecutor. That enables lawfare: A government with an axe to grind against a critic can almost readily dream up ways to excuse undotted i’s on President Donald Trump’s mortgage applications while federally prosecuting uncrossed t’s on those filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Looking to the criminal law to do far too much means those with the power to wield it can always come up with some charge, however contrived, conceivably covering something done by an opponent. And the current president, who claims victimization by this system, is actively training it on his political opponents in unprecedented ways.

Legal reforms are within sight. The House of Representatives recently passed the bipartisan Count the Crimes to Cut Act, which would direct federal agencies to identify every criminal prohibition they’ve enacted and consider eliminating them. Importantly, these were not laws passed by Congress. Instead, Congress delegates to executive branch agencies carte blanche to pass regulations carrying penalties—thus surrendering the key principle that criminal law should be enacted by the people’s elected representatives. The proposed act would build off an executive order against overcriminalization Trump issued last May.

The proposed Mens Rea Reform Act, meanwhile, would set a baseline intent requirement for crimes—stipulating that unless a law specifically said otherwise, no one could be convicted without at least being reckless toward the law, rather than simply negligent or ignorant through no fault of their own. Americans should also question whether to continue using criminal laws, especially federal ones, to address issues such as drug use. For instance, when Biden’s Justice Department prosecuted his own son Hunter for making false statements about drug addiction and gun ownership, Trump excoriated prosecutors for seeking “a traffic ticket instead of a death sentence.” He recognized the power to selectively punish people afforded to officials by rarely used laws like the one Hunter was convicted of violating.

The Fourth Amendment

Moving from the substance of criminal law to criminal procedure, the limits the Framers placed on investigations have been severely undermined. During the colonial era, British investigative invasions of privacy inspired waves of outrage. Americans were shocked by the English case Entick v. Carrington, where officials searching for pamphlets critical of the government ransacked a publisher’s house, tearing into every container and seizing every document they came across.

On this side of the sea, the British habitually used “general warrants” and “writs of assistance”—expansive legal orders allowing them to rake apart buildings and belongings looking for evidence. Anti-smuggling enforcers abused the rights of shippers, including leading Patriot James Otis. With these abuses fresh in mind, the Framers enacted the Fourth Amendment, strictly limiting warrants and providing that the people would be protected against lawless “searches and seizures.” These terms had plain meanings: to search meant to intentionally uncover hidden information, while to seize meant to restrict someone’s liberty of movement.

These straightforward definitions were corrupted during the 20th century. The trouble began with a well-meaning effort to keep the Fourth Amendment relevant to changing technologies. Faced with the issue of police wiretapping of telephone lines, the Supreme Court held that a “search” should be defined in terms of “reasonable expectations of privacy”: investigators trigger Fourth Amendment protections once they pass too deeply into some matter that most people would deem private. Though this test led the court to limit wiretapping itself, it has proven maddeningly vague and been applied illogically. The court has held that police can rifle through garbage bags people leave in their trashcans for collection. It has also held that because, technically, airspace is open, police can fly a helicopter 400 feet above someone’s backyard and photograph it without intruding upon any reasonable expectations of privacy—prompting Justice Neal Gorsuch to skeptically quip, “Try that one out on your neighbors.”

Ironically, the modern test’s failure to keep up with the times heightens the risk of lawfare. The Supreme Court has yet to say whether the following count as a search or seizure for Fourth Amendment purposes:

• Collecting data about every call made to or from a number, as the Biden administration did to Republican members of Congress;

• Pulling data identifying every single person who visited a place or attended an event over the course of hours upon hours;

• Spying into bedroom windows using cameras on telephone poles;

• Following someone’s every public move using military-grade Predator drones, as the Department of Homeland Security recently did at anti-ICE protests—or possibly even Gorgon Stare drones, which can record entire cities from 25,000-feet in the air;

• Demanding bank and internet records without notifying the person under investigation;

• Telling protest observers: “we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that,” as an ICE officer did to a Maine woman; and

• Demanding that Google hand over internet records and deploying investigators to the homes of critics, as the DHS did to a Pennsylvania retiree who emailed in support of an Afghan refugee.

At least as far as the public can tell, not all of these measures have been used for lawfare yet. But on December 4, the DOJ ordered the FBI to make an unprecedented list of organizations it considers “domestic terrorists” who are advancing allegedly anti-American agendas, then create a bounty system to reward tips. The Trump administration is also creating a previously unheard-of “reaction force” of National Guard troops to combat “civil unrest.” And it has vowed to “disband and uproot networks, entities, and organizations that promote organized violence, violent intimidation, conspiracies against rights, and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of a democratic society.”

It is hard to imagine any such campaign being executed without the accompanying whir of drone blades, the silent transfer of gigatons of data, and the adding of names to rights-restrictive lists. At the Founding, these measures would have qualified as searches and seizures, subject to constitutional requirements. Recovering those standards in lieu of the flimsy modern approach would go a long way toward protecting Americans of every persuasion from illegal lawfare.

Plea Bargaining

The Framers did not only limit what the government criminalized or how it investigated crimes. They also set strict limits on how people could be convicted. Many of the basic requirements for a conviction remain familiar: the government needed to secure a proper indictment, a defendant was protected against compelled self-incrimination and was guaranteed the ability to be represented by counsel, and a 12-person jury needed to assess the case.

Yet there was a profound difference in how these rules were imposed, as detailed in a new Harvard Law Review article by Emma Kaufman. These requirements were not individual rights that defendants could waive. Instead, they were the legal foundation for criminal courts’ jurisdiction. As Kaufman discusses, this framework shifted in the late 19th and into the 20th centuries. Rather than being seen as the public’s non-negotiable demands for its system of criminal justice, these rules become mere bargaining chips that defendants would trade to the government in exchange for more lenient punishment. Kaufman notes that courts made this shift in favor of plea bargaining in order to accommodate the huge increases in criminal cases during that time period.

This change has led to the virtual extinction of the criminal jury trial, with 94% of state criminal convictions and more than 97% of federal ones resulting from guilty pleas. These outcomes are not the result of genuinely equal and voluntary negotiations. They represent the extraction of individual liberty through extremely unbalanced power. Prosecutors decide the “price” the defendant must pay. If no “deal” emerges, the prosecutor can drastically increase the penalty by adding or enhancing the charges. Information disparities exist, too: defendants who waive their right to discovery of the government’s evidence receive better terms. No wonder respected federal District Court Judge Jed Rakoff reports: “We have hundreds, or thousands, or even tens of thousands of innocent people who are in prison, right now, for crimes they never committed because they were coerced into pleading guilty.”

Plea bargaining is a means of conducting lawfare. It lets prosecutors make defendants complicit in the violations of their rights and in their unjustified criminal convictions. Of course, lawfare is possible through trials as well—but plea bargaining lets it take place behind closed doors, hemmed in by fear of government reprisals rather than open to public scrutiny. Restoring the historically understood role of constitutional rules for criminal cases would make them stronger barriers to lawfare.

Recovering Original Protections Against Lawfare

The Constitution’s Framers knew what it was like to be the targets of lawfare. They committed the ultimate political crime, treason against the Crown—but even before that, they knew the oppression of having their homes, ships, and papers scoured through lawlessly by government agents. They designed laws and procedures that they meant to be tyranny-proof.

America abandoned many of those protections during the 20th century, hoping to use drastic criminal laws, rigorous investigations, and mass adjudications to engineer a more orderly society. But the weakened legal foundations that remain are proving vulnerable to the very sort of political manipulation the Framers sought to banish.

As some of these examples illustrate, technicality-driven lawfare can undermine accountability for powerful people who have arguably committed genuine crimes. Instead of pursuing and proving only legitimate charges, prosecutors instead go after process crimes, stretch rarely used statutes, select targets based on biased criteria, and so give the impression of obvious political motives. Such prosecutions don’t bolster accountability, they undermine it by giving the appearance that federal criminal “justice” is a politicized sham. In some cases, senior politicians and officeholders really should face a jury of their peers—but for cases built on substance, not due to a broken system churning out dubious convictions.

The originally designed criminal legal system’s scope and methods may not be able to achieve all that the Republic’s social reformers have always dreamt of—from anti-alcohol crusaders a century ago to drug warriors today. But recovering its protections may help preserve the Republic itself for generations to come.

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The cult of personality has always been central to Trumpism. Now it is the official policy of the United States government. Donald Trump’s name has been affixed to the Kennedy Center. The U.S. Institute of Peace, without any irony, has been renamed after him. His face hangs in enormous banners on the facades of the Departments of Justice, Labor, and Agriculture. His portrait appears on National Park passes. His signature will appear on dollar bills, and coins bearing his likeness are being planned. Government programs carry his name: “Trump Accounts,” “TrumpRx,” the “Trump Gold Card.” A new class of Navy warships will be “Trump-class,” with concept art featuring his image on the hull. The Air Force’s new sixth-generation fighter jet has been designated the F-47, named for Trump, the 47th president.

The sheer volume of it can make the eyes glaze over. That is part of how it works. Each item taken alone might seem like an obnoxious but relatively minor show of vanity. Taken together, they amount to something that the American constitutional tradition has guarded against for a quarter of a millennium.

Americans do, of course, name things after presidents. Airports, aircraft carriers, federal buildings, highways. Arguably a bit too much: the insistence on almost every modern president getting an aircraft carrier gives us the absurdity of a USS Bill Clinton and USS George W. Bush. But this is done after a president leaves office, and usually after he is dead or at least elderly. The honor reflects the judgment of posterity. It is bestowed, not seized.

Gerald Ford vetoed a bill to name a courthouse in his own hometown after him, writing that naming federal buildings after sitting presidents was not a precedent he wished to establish. Harry Truman explicitly declined to have roads or buildings named for him. George Washington refused to have his face put on coinage.

This norm is not a minor point. The symbolism matters. It is an expression of the foundational distinction between republican and autocratic government. In an autocracy—most vividly in overt monarchies but also many modern dictatorships—the state is embodied in the sovereign ruler. Their face is on the money; institutions and governments are denominated “royal”; infrastructure projects are named in their honor; and their birthdays are public holidays. The nation is, quite literally, theirs. “L’État, c’est moi.”

To be sure, for our cousins under the British crown and other constitutional monarchies, this is a tradition they have successfully adapted to democratic norms. The role is explicitly ceremonial, stripped of any real political power, harmless in its impotence. Charles III is not Charles I. But in the United States, we did not tame monarchy, we abolished it.

A republic, with symbolism tracing back to antiquity, deliberately inverts these trappings of personal rule. The institutions belong to the public—res publica, in which all have a stake. The people, and not the rulers, are sovereign. The officeholder is a temporary steward, not a proprietor. When a president stamps his name and likeness on federal buildings and government programs and the national currency, he is asserting the monarchical claim: that these things are extensions of himself.

This is not something to be shrugged off as incidental. It is corrosive of America’s fundamental principles.

Dictator Perpetuo

That understanding did not originate in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. It goes all the way back to Rome. Like America, Rome was a people consciously rooted in having overthrown a monarchy. In 44 BC, Julius Caesar had his portrait placed on the coinage of the Republic. It was a shocking statement. Roman coins had never before carried a living man’s portrait at the Rome mint. Much less one bearing his newly claimed, unprecedented title: dictator perpetuo, the dictator for life. To put your face on the money was to claim a status above that of a citizen, to assert that you were not first among equals but something closer to a sovereign. It was emblematic of his concentration of power, consolidating his rule into an open autocracy. Within weeks of issuing the “CAESAR DICT PERPETVO” coin, he was assassinated.

Though the Roman Republic fell, the ideal survived. Public institutions exist apart from the men who lead them, and conflating the two is the hallmark of tyranny. That ideal profoundly shaped the generation that designed the American constitutional order. The Founders created a Senate, placed it on a “Capitol Hill,” and embraced neoclassical architecture. They modeled their concept of civic virtue on Cincinnatus, the farmer-general who, having defeated a foreign invader, relinquished his dictatorial powers after just 15 days and went home. The Federalist Papers were published under the pseudonym “Publius,” while others posed as “Cato” or “Brutus.” Washington’s voluntary departure from the presidency after two terms, and his earlier resignation of his military commission, were modeled on that Roman example.

When Congress debated the Coinage Act of 1792, an initial version of the bill called for the president’s portrait to appear on U.S. coins. Washington rejected the idea, and James Madison successfully had it removed, arguing that stamping the president’s head on the money was un-republican. British minters had already struck pattern coins featuring Washington’s portrait in hopes of winning a contract, but Washington refused those, too.

It was a distillation of the republican tradition he and his contemporaries cared about deeply and considered a core value of the American Revolution. The whole architecture of the presidency—limited terms, enumerated powers, an oath sworn to a document rather than a dynasty—was designed to ensure that the office would never become a vehicle for the personal glorification of its occupant.

Now, the treasury secretary proclaims “there is no more powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country” than putting Trump on our dollars and cents. That elision—between the nation and its leader, between public accomplishment and personal vainglory—is precisely what constitutional republicanism aims to prevent.

Every program that carries the president’s name sends a message that the benefits of government flow from him personally. Not from Congress, or the Constitution, or our collective project of self-governance. When Americans were asked about “TrumpRx” without being told its name, support ran nearly three to one. When they were told the name, support collapsed. The polling makes the purpose plain: the program exists to attach his name to a benefit, not to deliver one. In the State of the Union he boasts about “Trump Accounts” and “TrumpRx”—then implausibly adds “I didn’t name it.” The disavowal is a page straight from the modern dictator’s playbook. No matter how transparent the ruse, the official line is that this must all appear spontaneous, as though the country simply could not help itself. The adulation must seem organic and authentic even when it is fabricated from above.

The banners on the federal buildings are the most vivid example. A president’s face, stories tall, draped across the Department of Justice. It’s not yours, it’s his.

Seizing the Symbols

Some might argue that the symbolism is entirely beside the point—that a president could plaster his face on every federal building and still faithfully execute the laws. The flipside, the argument goes, is also true: a president can govern with solemn—even monastic—modesty all the while systematically dismantling every check on his power. But this view relies on the mistaken idea that symbolism is merely decorative, when it is actually one of the primary ways regimes legitimate themselves, and it is how citizens come to understand what kind of government they live under.

In the hierarchy of threats to the constitutional order, this is admittedly not the most urgent. The weaponization of the Justice Department, the evisceration of congressional spending authority, the assault on the rule of law and civil liberties—these are graver and more immediate crises. Nobody is going to restore the Republic by passing a law about signs and coins. But reversing the drift will require many reforms to executive power, the electoral system, and all the institutional checks that proved too brittle under stress. This is one of the smaller ones. It also happens to be one of the easiest, the low-hanging fruit of repudiating Trumpism.

The SERVE Act, introduced in January, would prohibit naming federal buildings or land after a sitting president. The Change Corruption Act, introduced last December, would codify in law the longstanding norm against living presidents appearing on currency, extending it explicitly to coins.

Congress should enact a law that categorically prohibits, for any sitting president or even for any living ex-president, the use of the president’s name, image, likeness, or signature on federal buildings, programs, websites, currency, military assets, or public lands, and prohibit the expenditure of any federal funds for such projects. It should apply retroactively, a wholesale revocation of all Trump’s improprieties. The reasonable exceptions should be narrow and strictly defined, such as publishing documents and photographs through the Executive Office of the President (that is, “the White House” as such). And it should be written broadly enough that future presidents, of any party, cannot find novel ways around it.

Symbolism matters for any form of government. It’s not just platitudes and manners. It’s how we affirm the values we care about, how we embed a reminder of the virtues we choose to aspire to. Despots do not adopt cultish, personalist symbolism out of simple egomania but because they know it is the basis of their regime. Republics must do the same, adopting a coherent sense of civic imagery if they are to survive.

Ultimately, laws must be backed by norms and Trump should be roundly shamed for his brazen aggrandizement. Presidential hopefuls should pointedly reject Trump’s vulgar displays and pledge to restore class and gravitas to the office through personal austerity.

The institutions of self-government do not belong to the person who temporarily leads them. The Founders understood this. They had read their Plutarch. They had lived under a king. They built an entire constitutional system on the premise that it would not happen here. Where norms and basic decency have failed to maintain this principle, we should write it into law, and hold accountable those who break it.

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Shikha Dalmia: We are here today taping a segment of Zooming In with my friend, . We’ve known each other for a very long time, but somehow haven’t been on a podcast together. You have written for The UnPopulist. You are an economist. You work with the Mercatus Center. You and I were colleagues for a while. It’s great to have you.

Let me start at the outset by asking you one question that I get asked a lot, especially by our center-left friends, which is: There were many right-wingers who supported Trump the second time because they thought, compared to any establishment alternative, he was going to be anti-war. And this was always mind-boggling to most people who had watched him in his first term, because he was not lacking in belligerence. I had actually written a piece about how he had vastly expanded America’s military footprint when it came to drone warfare.

You’re not a military expert, but there is an analogy in economics here, and especially for those who advocate free markets like you: many people voted for Trump because they thought he would be less meddlesome in markets than the alternative, in this case Kamala Harris. But how are they feeling in the second year of Trump’s first term? How are you feeling?

De Rugy: Well, I don’t know how they’re feeling, but I can tell you how I’m feeling. For sure, I knew he wasn’t going to be what I wanted, but I didn’t actually expect he would be as bad as he is. A lot of people who voted for him thinking he would be great on economic issues assumed that he would be the same Trump as in the first term. Obviously there were a lot of things that were really bad in the first term, even on the economic stuff in particular, like spending. It was bad. He just doesn’t care about this.

But people liked the tax cuts and they looked much more like the regular kind of Republican-type tax cuts. Tariffs were going to be bad, but I don’t think anyone could have actually foreseen just how remarkably worse he turned out to be. It’s just the scale, but also the breadth of the stuff he’s done on economic issues.

Now, if you’re asking me about the people who voted for him, I assume that there’s enough good that they can actually continue justifying it. [They] just tell themselves: “Kamala would not have done this.” And they’re right.

So I think with every president and every administration, you can find something that conforms to your views and make yourself feel better, tell yourself you never make any mistakes in your judgment.

Dalmia: Okay, yeah, you can tell yourself a story. I agree with that. And you would have to cherry-pick a whole lot of facts to make Trump’s economics look good. But let’s just look at the record here. I mean, in his first term, he was no slouch when it came to spending. And what’s interesting about Democrats is that they tax and spend. He was more tax-cut-and-spend, right? Like he cut taxes and then he raised spending.

De Rugy: In that sense, he is very much like a regular Republican, in my opinion.

Dalmia: Right. And the only time you actually get any spending cuts or deficit reduction is when you have a Democrat in the White House and a Republican Congress. The last time we had any kind of a federal surplus was under Clinton. And those days are long gone.

But this time it was very interesting because he came in with Elon Musk, who was not confirmed by the Senate. He appointed him czar of government-cutting through the DOGE program. And yet, one year after he’s been in office, there’s been a 4% increase in spending.

Forget debt, forget deficits—just plain spending has gone up 4%. And he released a budget which has a 42% surge in defense spending. That’s outside of the $200 billion that he’s asking for the Iran war as part of supplemental emergency spending. How is this sustainable? How is this not a black mark on him already?

De Rugy: Well, first, none of this is sustainable. But actually, I think you’re too generous with Trump when it comes to the spending. Because one of the things that I think we can say about him is that, while I said in his cut-taxes-and-increased-spending he looks like other Republicans, at the very least other Republicans paid lip service to small government and to cutting spending. He doesn’t care about this. He just doesn’t care about it.

While a lot of the debt increase during his first term came because of COVID—he grew the debt by over $7 trillion and more than half of that was the COVID increase. But in the pre-COVID era during the first term, deficits were about to reach a trillion dollars while the economy was growing, with no emergency. I remember writing columns about how this is insane. And part of this was entitlement spending driving most of the deficit spending. But nonetheless, he just did not care about it.

This was not an issue in the first term, which is crazy precisely because he liked to brag about how the economy was doing great. But there’s no better time to actually pursue a reduction in deficit spending than when the economy is good—especially with wages growing. So he does not care about this.

During his entire campaign, there was none of this on the menu. And then all of a sudden Elon Musk said he was going to cut a trillion, $2 trillion of the deficit.

I fell for it a little bit. You know that. There was a little piece of me that thought, wouldn’t that be great? It turned out it wasn’t great at all. It didn’t materialize. It was going to cut two trillion, then one trillion, then $150 billion, and in the worst possible way. This budget is again talking about how it’s going after “woke” and DEI programs. It’s not going to scratch the surface of what we need to be doing to be fiscally responsible.

And you mentioned the new program. So, [the budget] raises defense spending by over $400 billion—I think it’s $445 billion—and they’re cutting non-defense discretionary spending by $73 billion. It’s not even trying—it’s barely trying—to offset any of the defense ramp-up. I assume there’ll be no meaningful offsetting of the $200 billion supplemental, either. And if it goes through reconciliation, it’s likely going to be much bigger. Because either way, you need to get it through Congress, which means there’s going to be some bargaining. And the final point is that the One Big Beautiful Bill had some really good features, but—I will give credit to some Republicans who demanded some level of offsetting—it was almost nothing. So you’re giving too much credit to the president. The president does not care about spending at all.

Dalmia: You said a part of you was happy—you allowed yourself to be slightly hopeful—when Elon Musk came along. I actually credit him for the opposite with me. I never cared for the Department of Education. And I suddenly started caring about it. Partly because of the way they were going about it. This was done completely unilaterally through executive action. Even though I really wish for the size of government to be much smaller, I don’t want Congress to become a completely neutered body. And yet that’s what happened. They did it through executive action. They did it through a guy who was not confirmed through the normal congressional process. And they caused a lot of disruption.

To me, they actually discredited the cause of limited government. That is a bigger problem. And what you have right now is a very, very weird situation where you arguably have a smaller government because there are fewer federal departments, some agencies have been cut and completely slashed—and yet it is more expensive. So, to me, they have maximized the damage on all ends.

De Rugy: Yeah, and they’ve really slashed very little. I mean, what they’ve mostly done is fire or let go—at great cost—some federal employees. I want the government to be really small, but that’s not the way to go about it. It was actually kind of an interesting exercise. When DOGE was announced, I had this little bit of excitement and thought, my God, maybe they’re going to reach out and we’re going to tell them how we think about how we should be going about this. And there was really none of that. They started just doing the stuff where they were going after the DEI line items and canceling grants and firing people and telling people to take a package. But there was no guiding theory. If I wanted to get to the world I wanted—I’m not saying there wouldn’t be a lot of chaos and discomfort and anxiety—but at the very least, I would want to be able to express the guiding theory behind what we’re doing. For instance: “This is not the role of the federal government; instead, it’s the role of the private sector or state and local government.” Or: “This is a government-granted privilege for companies.” There was none of that going on. So you just had the chaos and the feeling that it was politically targeted.

And while some of the stuff they were cutting overlapped with some of the stuff that would have been on my list for cutting, it was done in such a way that you would have none of the benefit.

Dalmia: The record of populist figures is always that they never cut spending. It’s just so much easier to throw subsidies and money at people and call it a day. So it’s very rare that spending goes down under populist leaders, which is one ...

De Rugy: ... It’s actually very rare that spending goes down.

Dalmia: Well, under populist leaders, it usually goes up many times over, because it’s a cheap way to buy votes. Which is another reason why I could never understand why the free-market side was even the least bit enamored of him. And the other problem—which we’ve touched on and which I want you to elaborate on—is that he’s been hyperactive in using executive authority. I mean, he has passed over 200 executive orders already, which is the most of any president in this century. I think FDR passed more than he did, but in this century at least, he’s really up there. And if he can do what he is doing to the budget through executive orders, how does he embolden future Democratic presidents?

De Rugy: My fear of his presidency is not just through the budget. It’s through literally everything he does. He’s opened doors that people did not open before. What they’ve done is emulate some of what the Democrats were doing, while pushing it to a place the Democrats didn’t actually ever dream of going. My fear across the board—whether it comes to the use of emergency powers or executive orders—is the attitude of “let’s do it and let the courts stop us.” It worries me on many levels.

Dalmia: Moving into slightly more positive territory—as you said, people can tell themselves a story about the good he has done. So talk to me about some of the more positive things that have come out of this administration on economics.

De Rugy: Some of these things are not really my area of expertise, so I’m basically reporting what I’ve read from other people. There is somewhat of a consensus that some of what he’s doing on AI is actually really good and important. Same for the agenda of energy abundance, which is important—the permitting reform, freeing energy supplies. Now, the way some of it is done is very Trump-like, where some of the stuff is good—all forms of energy are welcome—and then the other stuff is like, “Yeah, but we hate wind, so we’re going to go after that.”

But the administration’s basically liberated the crypto industry, for instance. The SEC is putting out actual clarifying rules around crypto that seem like they’re going to be important for the future of the technology. So there’s just been a lot of things for what will be a really important source of growth in the future. I think that’s pretty clear. And there are some efforts to rule out waste and abuse in Medicare and in healthcare. We’ll see. But those things are clearly happening. That’s not what most people talk about because that’s not the stuff he talks about. That’s done really in the background.

Dalmia: Right. And he may have deregulated the energy sector, but here we are with almost $5 a gallon in gas prices, because his populist instincts are manifesting themselves in Iran right now.

De Rugy: Well, I think this is the reason why we’re not going to know for a long time whether any of these very positive efforts pay off. Because the stuff that they’re trying to do that is good, from my perspective, there’s still always an odor of cronyism and favoritism to it. It’s always: “The companies that I pick are the ones who get to do things.” But the important deregulation—the permitting reform, the better permitting processes—it takes time to do well. Are they going to be able to finish the job and really deliver on this agenda? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

That’s always been my concern with him: the good stuff he wants to do is hard and takes a long time. It requires Congress for a lot of it, and he just doesn’t want to go through Congress. Meanwhile, all the really bad stuff he wants to do, he can do very easily. And this is why it’s all we ever see nonstop. And there’s also the fact that he likes to put himself at the center of the news at all times.

Dalmia: That’s a really good point. I mean, to take what he’s doing on AI, I’ve read a few pieces, which sounded pretty positive. One thing he’s doing is setting up a national AI policy so that you don’t have 50 states with 50 standards that are a hodgepodge of regulation that AI companies have to negotiate. And I think America is the world leader when it comes to AI partly because it has a somewhat more rational regulatory regime than European countries.

De Rugy: And he’s really doing it in a very different way than the Biden administration was, which was going the European way with a very precautionary principle [approach]. And that was going to be bad. We don’t know whether he’s going to deliver on the good, but we know for a fact that the Democrats would have done it the European way.

Dalmia: But then on the other hand—and here is where his authoritarianism comes in—Anthropic says that it has some problems with certain provisions in its contract [with the federal government] when it comes to surveillance, and he declares them a national security threat. He tries to destroy the company completely. He threatens to invoke the Defense Production Act to basically commandeer the company at the same time as he’s declaring them a national security risk.

And that goes to what you were saying earlier, which is that Democrats do industrial policy ... they’ve got this sense of: “We want to build these industries and we are going to use government subsidies and other incentives to do that.” Trump has taken that and gone so much further. He used the CHIPS Act—which is an act meant to subsidize our semiconductor production because apparently we’re losing manufacturing supremacy to Taiwan—to give Intel large sums of subsidies. And then in exchange, he does something that no president has ever done, at least not in non-emergency times: he demands an equity share in the company. He’s essentially partially nationalizing the company. So what he is doing is not industrial policy but “company policy.” He goes company by company, and if he likes a company, he will give it money and try to commandeer it. Or he will try to destroy the company, as he tried to do with Anthropic.

De Rugy: I think it’s state capitalism. So, take the CHIPS Act—all sorts of subsidies through the form of credits and loans and grants. Intel was getting an enormous amount of money: $8.9 billion. He doesn’t seem to be bothered by what usually bothers free-market people like me, which is that when you pick winners and losers by giving subsidies to some, often you extend subsidies to companies that were already in the process of doing what you’re now giving them subsidies for. That doesn’t bother him. He’s like: “If you’re going to get $8.9 billion from the government, I better get something out of it, and I’m taking a share.”

And the Democrats—Biden would have never dared doing this. You know who was calling for this? It was Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. That branch of the Democratic Party. And Trump’s just doing it. He’s also taken shares in, I think, 14 or 15 other companies. He has effectively partially nationalized the steel industry. When Nippon Steel wanted to buy U.S. Steel, the Biden administration very stupidly said no. Well, Trump comes and also says “no,” but in addition basically says, “Here’s what I’m going to do for your troubles”—and takes a golden share in U.S. Steel [that gives him a veto over the company’s decisions], something that, honestly, many Democrats would have loved to do but would have never even dared doing. And it sets a precedent.

He’s basically doing the same thing in mining. On the issue of rare earth, there’s a real regulatory problem. The way they’re going about addressing this problem is taking shares in some mining companies, clearly giving them a leg up over other mining companies, setting floor prices, setting up a stockpile that is going to benefit some companies. It’s very obscure who the benefiting companies are and whether everyone will have access to the stockpile—but I don’t think so.

Dalmia: Right. And that’s my concern. So, he may have deregulated the AI industry or pursued relatively rational regulation. At the same time, he’s interfering and literally nationalizing major industries and companies. So what is to stop the next Democratic president from undoing whatever good he’s doing on AI using the exact same means—executive power, subsidies, nationalization, takeover—that he’s engaging in?

So, he came in as a right-wing populist. And Orbán came in as a right-wing populist. But if you examine the kinds of policies that right-wing populists engage in, they are actually indistinguishable from those of left-wing populists on economic issues, whether it is Hugo Chávez or Nicolás Maduro.

They want to court consumers too, [not just interfere with the production decisions of companies]. Trump’s making Elizabeth Warren-style moves to that end: capping interest rates on credit cards, telling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy mortgage securities to lower interest rates. Orbán did all of those things, as did Maduro and Chávez. So, at some point, the horseshoe really does converge.

De Rugy: Yeah, no, it really does. And this is why I always have a really hard time when people say, “Who do you think is worse and would have been worse?” Obviously, we don’t know what Harris would have done had she been president. I assume it would have been, from my perspective, things I didn’t like. And when I think of Trump, there’s basically all this stuff I hate—stuff where it would have been quite similar but on steroids.

But even the good stuff, the things you can say are objectively good from a free-market perspective—sometimes it’s done the wrong way, because it’s done through executive orders, so it can be reversed. But in the end, economic growth and freeing markets are not the only things that matter, right? We care about institutions. And on that perspective, you can’t help but look at the damage being done, and it is really, really significant.

Dalmia: Well, let’s talk about the institutional damage. This is another thing all populists have in common. They want to control executive agencies absolutely. They don’t believe in internal checks and balances. They don’t believe in watchdogs. One of the first things Trump did when he came in was fire all the inspectors general who keep an eye on public corruption and waste, fraud, and abuse in agencies.

De Rugy: And by the way, the Vault project, the rare earth project—they created this and gave, or want to give, a $10 billion direct loan from the Export-Import Bank, the largest in its history. And it has no inspector general.

Dalmia: Yeah, that’s interesting. And what he has done when it comes to federal economic agencies, whether it’s the Federal Reserve or the Bureau of Labor Statistics ... he has been interfering in their independent functioning.

All presidents are unhappy with the Federal Reserve chair, want certain monetary policies. But we have an independent Federal Reserve for a reason. We don’t want it to get politicized precisely because the benefits it can give are short-term but the damage is long-term and not on a president’s watch. Every president has been unhappy with the Fed. I remember George H.W. Bush actually said Alan Greenspan was responsible for his losing a second term because he wouldn’t lower interest rates.

And yet they kind of whispered about that behind the scenes. But Trump has not only openly berated a sitting Federal Reserve chair, but actually opened an investigation into him based on completely trumped-up, baseless charges. How do markets function properly when they cannot depend on an impartial and stable rule of law, based on sound, rational economic principles rather than the whim of one president?

De Rugy: Markets like stability, they like certainty. If they’re uncertain, it leads to a lot of paralysis. It’s not good. And we really can’t overstate how incredible what he’s done with the Federal Reserve is. I’ll temper it slightly by noting that the Federal Reserve is not entirely politically independent—it is created by Congress, the Fed chair is appointed by the president, and the chair has to appear before Congress. But traditionally, what independence means is that it doesn’t take orders from the president, and certainly not when the president is bullying the Fed chair into lowering rates.

We talk about fiscal dominance, making the Fed subservient to fiscal needs. This is the casebook version of that—the president literally saying “lower interest rates” for no other reason than wanting interest payments on the debt to go down—and then launching that investigation. Do you remember when he got a tour of the Fed with Chairman Powell, and then he was railing against him, and you had Powell standing next to him, clearly embarrassed, thinking, “I cannot believe I’m in this situation”? It’s crazy, and it is not good for markets.

Chaos is a feature, not a bug [of his governance]—he actually thrives on it. He wants to be in the middle of all the news. If there’s a little bit of calm, he’s going to say something really outrageous just to get attention back on himself. Look at the way he’s done tariff policy. The policy itself is bad enough, but the way he’s implemented it has been the most insane, erratic, economically damaging approach—precisely because you can’t count on anything.

Dalmia: Yeah, that was my next question—actually on trade policy and precisely how he has gone about conducting it. China is a bad actor on the world stage—a bit of a rogue regime. It violates intellectual property rights, it coerces technology transfers from companies. So there are real problems there.

But the problem Trump was focused on with China was the trade deficit. He declared an economic emergency based on the deficit that the U.S. runs with various countries and the world. Deficits—the whole argument that exports are good and imports are bad—was debunked by Adam Smith in 1776. Yet we are seeing a resurgence of really retrograde economic thinking. But the bigger problem, as you said, is that he has imposed these blanket tariffs on the world using his emergency powers, and then given selective reprieves to various countries and industries.

De Rugy: The tariff stuff is the perfect illustration of pretty much everything that is wrong with Trumponomics. First, the rationale for the intervention is insane, right? Do you remember Liberation Day tariffs? The calculation that went into what tariff each country got—I mean, the idea that actual economists put that together is just plain insane. It’s like a five-year-old with crayons.

There’s a lot of defenders of Trump—especially around the one-year anniversary of Liberation Day—saying the economists were wrong, that we haven’t had the economic impact they predicted. And that’s actually nonsense, because the reason some of the predictions about Liberation Day tariffs didn’t materialize is that we are not actually living under a regime of Liberation Day tariffs. When he put them on, markets went nuts. There was one theory floating around among those who were pushing him to do tariffs—that it was going to reduce interest rates because of a flight to safety into Treasuries. That didn’t happen because people had to rebalance their portfolios and were selling their Treasuries. So it was catastrophic. And then Kevin Hassett and Scott Bessent managed to get him in a room without Peter Navarro and got him to actually remove the worst of the Liberation Day tariffs.

But it was just so random—bad economics, completely demented, lots of tariffs on our friends for bad reasons. Then he removes them. He wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and says, “You’re going to get a tariff.” He sees an ad in Canada he doesn’t like that uses President Reagan’s image, and says, “Here you go, tariffs on Canada.” And then removes them.

He’s literally destroying the world trading order. The rules that existed relied on the principle that if you put a tariff on something, you have to put it on everyone—you can’t just pick and choose. He just trashed all of that. He was using emergency powers that he arguably did not have, but again his approach was: “I’m going to do it. Let’s try to see if they stop me.” And if the Supreme Court says, “You can’t,” he says, “Well, I’m going to do something else using a different statute.”

It encapsulates literally everything that is wrong with this president’s approach to economics, to dealing with people, to dealing with our friends, dealing with our enemies. In the first term you could say he was at least thinking about how to deal with China. Can we really say that in the second term, when he actually allows export of Nvidia chips to China in exchange for a kickback?

Dalmia: I grew up in socialist India, which was the king of protectionism. We had this import-substitution approach that kept the country known as the economic basket case of the world for like five decades after Independence. But now India has formed a free trade deal with Europe, and Mercosur countries have as well. And Canada is now integrating itself into what it calls a coalition of mid-tier powers. And ultimately, I think that’s where the reform currents are going to come from. The U.S. is going to start losing markets to other countries, and will either have to clean up its act or just face lower economic growth. Either way, it’s not going to be the champion of free trade as it has been. I think that has just gone permanently, or for a very long time.

De Rugy: Right. Instead, he went and basically bullied and belittled all of our trading partners as if they were worse than China and Russia. And now he’s also paying a price because he’s concerned that they’re not coming to his aid with the war in Iran.

Dalmia: Let me ask you the toughest question so far. As we’ve been talking, Trump’s blown up the rules-based trading order. He has politicized the Federal Reserve. He has replaced impartial regulatory enforcement with his personal discretion, which is common to populist authoritarians. He has done enormous institutional damage that makes markets less functional, because they rely on a stable, neutral, impartial rule of law. But here’s the question: What has been striking is that the economy hasn’t done poorly under him, and it’s possible he has made some positive structural changes to it—in terms of AI regulation, energy deregulation. But for those of us who approach markets from an ethical standpoint—we are free-market advocates not just for instrumental reasons, because markets produce prosperity for all, although they do, and that’s a big reason to be pro-market—but because they are a species of human freedom. They are an arena in which people engage in voluntary exchange.

And people produce what they want to and trade what they want to and are not trying to fulfill a broader social collectivist goal or live by the edicts of an authoritarian. But if Trump’s formula of this draconian statism on trade and immigration—and immigration to me is partly an economic issue; it goes to the free flow of labor across borders—if this combination of draconian statism combined with deregulation in other areas leads to actually positive net economic growth, is that an advance for free markets or is it not? And if it is not, how will we make the case for free trade and more open immigration policies going forward?

De Rugy: I mean, this is actually the real damage for us. There’s the objective damage done to the country, but the damage to the reform cause, to the free-market cause, is real. The way DOGE went about cutting spending—it just makes the job so much harder for us to say, “No, no, no, there’s actually a good case to be made.” Who’s going to listen to us?

But I think you said something really important, which is that markets are not merely instrumentally valuable because they produce prosperity—though they do. They’re a form of human freedom. And it is true: The arena where people engage in voluntary exchange based on their own goals, free from coercion and free from the discretion of whoever holds power, is something we deeply value. And we are now in a regime that is basically the most permission-slip-type of regime there is.

You’re saying the market is doing well. But even when you really look at the sources of growth, it’s all in very narrow areas. And by the way, by its own stated goals, the administration is falling short—manufacturing is doing worse than it was. Those tariffs are not helping. Manufacturing jobs are going down. There’s a lot of frozen investment in these areas. But there’s enormous tariff exemptions for all things electronic and computing in order to serve AI. So those sectors are growing.

Can you say that ultimately, on net, we’re doing better? I don’t know. I think if this administration is going to be seen as having done anything positive down the road, it will be if it manages to actually set some frameworks for very important things—energy abundance, an AI framework, things like that. But right now, you can’t say the economy is doing so well. It’s not. There are areas that are just booming, but there are many others that aren’t.

Dalmia: I think what we’ll have to do—and primarily by “we” I mean you’ll have to do—is argue based on the opportunity cost of what we are losing. How much more our growth might have been, how much freer we might have been, had he not engaged in the selective deregulation on one side and over-regulation and draconian controls on the other. And it’s always a hard case to make because of the seen and the unseen problem. The economic growth that’s happening now—people can see that. What is missing, what doesn’t materialize because of his demented policies—people can’t see that. So to make that visible somehow.

De Rugy: Yeah. I mean, a lot of us are trying to make the case: He set goals for manufacturing and for what tariffs would achieve, and we can show that actually the opposite has happened—they’ve certainly not delivered on those goals. The goal of affordability: he’s failed on this and he’s doubled down with the war. Even before this, it wasn’t looking good because tariffs are an engine of raising prices in manufacturing, because most of what we import are inputs used in production.

And I think the case we also have to make is about what is lost when the government becomes really entangled with the private sector. Cronyism in the form of subsidies and loan guarantees and regulatory privilege is bad enough—I hate it, I’ve been fighting against it my whole life. But this is next-level. When the government actually takes ownership stakes [in companies], it changes fundamentally the nature of the country you live in. The compact that exists between government and the private sector changes entirely.

You guys ran a piece a while ago by Rachel Kleinfeld which showed that when you have a populist like this, especially one doing this kind of state capitalism, you get an artificial boost at the beginning, but it never lasts. And unfortunately, when you have that entanglement, the cost of extricating and separating the two becomes even harder, and the political feasibility of doing so becomes even more remote.

The government has always propped up a lot of companies, given a lot of tax credits and subsidies for this and that. But this is a step above and beyond. And it is not going to be a good outcome. It changes something fundamental about the nature of America. And there is no boom in the stock market that can compensate for that, in my opinion.

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In a recent essay here at The UnPopulist, Harvard’s vividly describes American democracy as a bear caught in a trap, with wolves circling and wildfire approaching. The metaphor captures the sense of urgency that many Americans feel about the state of the country’s politics. Congress struggles to govern, partisan conflict dominates public life, and a growing share of voters say neither party represents them well.

Allen’s proposed solution is to reform primary elections by opening them to all candidates, and all voters, with the top finishers advancing to a final round. In other words, all-party primaries or the “Top Two” system in versions where that many candidates advance regardless of party. The idea is intuitive: if candidates must appeal to a broader electorate earlier in the process, they will have incentives to moderate and cooperate.

The problem is that the evidence from states that have tried similar systems suggests that all-party primaries do not reliably produce the desired outcomes.

The dysfunction in American politics runs deeper than the mechanics of nomination contests. The United States operates under an unusually rigid two‑party system that compresses an enormous range of political views into two increasingly polarized coalitions. Adjusting the rules of primaries may change how candidates are nominated, but it does little to change the incentives created by the larger political environment.

If American democracy is a wounded bear, then the trap is only part of the story. The animal is also injured, starving, and surrounded by a damaged ecosystem.

Releasing the trap alone will not restore its health. What is needed instead is a broader rehabilitation of the political system itself—one that allows more parties, more coalitions, and more pathways for representation.

Why Primary Reform Falls Short

All-party primary reform is often presented as way to reduce polarization. The argument is straightforward. Because many congressional districts lean heavily toward one party, the decisive contest takes place in the primary rather than the general election. These primaries often attract relatively few voters, which means that candidates must appeal to a small and highly engaged electorate. Opening the process, reformers argue, would force candidates to compete for a broader coalition of voters and therefore encourage moderation.

Yet states that have adopted Top Two or similar primary systems offer little evidence that this dynamic works in practice. California and Washington have both used top‑two primaries for more than a decade. Louisiana has long operated under a version of the same structure. If top-two systems reliably moderated politics, these states should display less ideological polarization among their elected officials. They do not.

The political science literature on top-two primaries is extensive and remarkably consistent. For example, McGhee and colleagues, in a 2014 study published in the American Journal of Political Science, analyzed all 99 state legislative chambers and found that primary system openness has “little, if any, effect on the extremism of the politicians it produces.” The effect sizes for top-two systems were trivial—a few hundredths of a point on ideology scales where the partisan gap is nearly a full point.

A follow-up study by McGhee and Shor looked specifically at California and Washington. The findings were unflattering. In Washington, Democrats actually became more liberal after Top Two, the opposite of the predicted effect. In California, there was modest Democratic moderation, but it disappeared once the researchers controlled for a confounding factor: California adopted independent redistricting at the same time. This resulted in relatively more districts that are competitive between Republicans and Democrats in general elections. The moderation levels advocates might attribute to primary reform could equally follow from redistricting reform.

Alaska’s Top Four system, where four candidates advance from an all-party primary to a general election using ranked choice voting, is too new to evaluate rigorously, and the results are confounded by Lisa Murkowski’s unique circumstances. She won her Senate seat as a write-in candidate in 2010, after losing the Republican primary, a feat of personal brand-building that preceded the electoral reform by a decade. And while Democrat Mary Peltola managed to win a single term in the House in 2022, this was because her leading opponent was the exceptionally unpopular Sarah Palin. But Palin still won the most Republican votes in the primary and so would have been the Republican nominee under the more traditional system. In the general election, the more moderate Republican, Nick Begich (who would go on to claim the seat two years later and vote like an ordinary Republican in Congress), was in third place and so was eliminated ahead of Palin in the ranked choice tabulation, producing in effect the same Peltola vs. Palin contest in the end.

As the 2023 American Political Science Association report on political parties concluded, there is no statistical relationship between state primary rules and state legislative polarization. Closed primary states are, on average, no more polarized than all-party primary states.

Why don’t these reforms work as expected? One reason is that the theory rests on assumptions about voter behavior that do not consistently hold up. Primary voters are often portrayed as dramatically more ideological than general‑election voters, but research finds that the differences are usually modest at best.

Even when turnout expands under new rules, the ideological composition of the electorate often remains similar. Additional voters tend to resemble those already participating rather than forming a distinct moderate bloc that reshapes the results. To be sure, under the combination of the two-party system and single-member districts, the result is that most seats are safe seats for one party or the other to begin with. This means that a smaller subset of the electorate is in effect choosing the winner in the primary, rather than in the November general election when more people vote. But it is not the case these primary voters are generally choosing more ideologically extreme candidates. That theory might be intuitive, but it does not match the data.

Then there’s the question of which candidates even want to run. Political scientist Andrew Hall shows in his book, Who Wants to Run?, that a large share of the polarization we observe in American politics stems from candidate self‑selection. The people who enter races are increasingly partisan fighters, not cross-partisan compromisers.

Moderates are not simply losing elections—they often never run. Research by Danielle Thomsen in Opting Out of Congress likewise finds that politicians who fall between the parties’ ideological camps frequently choose not to pursue congressional careers because they expect to have little influence within highly polarized party caucuses.

If the candidate pool is already polarized, opening the rules of nomination contests cannot fundamentally change the options voters face.

But here’s the deeper problem, and it’s one that cuts against the entire all-party primary reform theory: even if voters wanted to select moderates, they would struggle to identify them. Colao, Broockman, Huber, and Kalla’s 2025 panel study of over 31,000 voters across 27 congressional districts found that primary voters know significantly less about candidate positions than general election voters. Why? In general elections, party labels do the work—you know roughly where a Democrat or Republican stands on the issues. In primaries, because every Republican wears the Team Red jersey and every Democrat Team Blue, voters can’t distinguish candidates from the party’s reputation. The information environment is too poor.

Cohen’s 2024 experimental work confirms this from a different angle: even when voters are given information about which candidate is more electable, they don’t vote strategically. They vote for who they like and use electability as post-hoc rationalization. Provide information that their preferred candidate is unelectable, and they double down rather than switch.

I’ve looked for peer-reviewed research, not funded by advocates pre-committed to any particular reform, demonstrating that all-party primaries produce more moderate or compromise-oriented legislators. I haven’t found it. And I’ve looked at a lot of research.

So we have a puzzle. The theory is intuitive. The mechanism is plausible. Yet it hasn’t worked.

The Real Drivers of Polarization

The forces that drive polarization lie deeper in the structure of American politics.

The most powerful force is the nationalization of politics. In earlier eras, congressional elections were often influenced by local issues and candidate reputations. Today those factors matter much less. Voters increasingly interpret politics through a national partisan lens, and election outcomes closely track presidential voting patterns. Presidential vote share now explains 98% of House outcomes, up from roughly 50% in the 1970s. (Even in non-presidential years, the pattern holds.)

When the partisan identity of a district largely determines the outcome of an election, individual legislators gain little advantage from cultivating cross‑party cooperation. Instead, they face tremendous pressure from both donors and fellow partisans to be good team players, which means not muddying the party brand and fighting the true enemy—the other party.

Geographic sorting reinforces nationalization. Over time Americans have increasingly clustered into communities where their neighbors share similar political views. Cities tend to lean strongly Democratic, while many rural and exurban areas lean Republican. Research on political geography, including work by political scientists such as Jacob Brown and Robert Enos, shows that this sorting has intensified over the past several decades.

Though many reformers want to blame gerrymandering for this problem—and gerrymandering is indeed a problem—the reality is that most congressional districts are politically homogeneous regardless of how district lines are drawn. Even without aggressive gerrymandering, large numbers of seats are naturally safe for one party. Redistricting reform can, at most, affect the competitiveness of only a handful of races. This might tip which party takes the majority in a congressional chamber in a close election, but it has only a marginal effect on the composition of each party’s elected members, because the overwhelming majority still represent red or blue safe seats.

Taken together, these forces create a self‑reinforcing cycle. Geographic sorting produces safe districts. Safe districts encourage ideological candidates. Nationalized politics rewards partisan loyalty. And polarized institutions discourage moderates from entering the system at all.

In this context, the fear of incumbents losing a primary is real but can be overblown. It’s still a rare occurrence: only about 2% of incumbents actually lose primaries, according to calculations by Robert Boatright. The advantages of incumbency are still immense, which is why the vast majority of members of Congress are first elected to open seats, not by defeating an incumbent.

Changing the format of primary elections does little to interrupt this cycle because the underlying incentives remain the same.

Building a Better Party System

If the real problem is the rigidity of the American two‑party system, then the goal of reform should be to expand the range of viable political choices rather than simply adjusting how candidates from the two major parties advance to the November election.

One promising reform is fusion voting. Under fusion systems, multiple parties can nominate the same candidate and appear on the ballot alongside one another. Votes cast on each party’s line are counted separately and then aggregated for the candidate’s total. This arrangement allows smaller parties to organize around distinct priorities while still cooperating with larger parties in elections. Or they can, if they choose, punish a major party that spurns their policy priorities, by instead withholding their nomination and running their own candidate. By putting a bloc of votes in play outside the usual strict Republican/Democratic binary, fusion can expand the number of competitive races.

Fusion voting has deep historical roots in American politics and still exists in places such as New York. In those contexts, smaller parties can influence policy by making their endorsement valuable. Candidates seeking office must negotiate with these parties, which represent organized constituencies with their own agendas. Even though fusion is primarily used by ideological “flank” parties on the right (Conservative Party) and left (Working Families Party), the overall effect is that Republicans and Democrats are more moderate than in states like California.

This structure encourages coalition building, while allowing voters to signal not only which candidate they support but also which political movement they want that candidate to represent. Rather than trying to artificially force outcomes to the center, fusion allows a positive sum game. More ideological voters can focus on their priorities—a progressive party might condition its support on increasing the minimum wage, for example, or a conservative party might prioritize its opposition to tax increases— while the two major parties can better balance these competing interests in their respective coalitions. Instead of trying to create a system where more ideologically motivated voters are marginalized, fusion allows all voters to be more accurately counted in the game of coalition-building.

Proportional representation would go further by transforming how legislative seats are allocated. In the current system of single‑member districts, representation is determined through winner‑take‑all contests. When voters with similar views cluster geographically, this structure translates that clustering into large numbers of safe seats.

Proportional systems allocate seats based on a party’s share of the vote rather than on which candidate wins each winner-take-all district. This makes it easier for new parties to gain representation and ensures that votes translate more directly into political power. The evidence for proportional representation is strong, and there is growing scholarly support, as indicated by the recent American Academy of Arts and Sciences report, as well as growing interest among policymakers and groups such as the American Bar Association.

Multiparty systems created by proportional representation also tend to produce more fluid coalitions. Parties can cooperate in different combinations depending on the issue or election cycle. Voters whose preferred party does not win overall majorities would still see their views represented in the legislature, which can help sustain trust in democratic institutions.

The United States would not need to abandon parties to achieve a more flexible system. On the contrary, a multiparty system would likely produce stronger and more responsive parties. Though the two-party system may feel like the “natural” American system, this is only because most Americans are ignorant of history. Prior to bans on fusion and other laws hostile to third parties (such as burdensome ballot access petition hurdles, which should also be relaxed), the United States long had a proliferation of electorally successful parties beyond just the top two.

Advocates of all-party primary reforms want the same thing as I do: a democracy that works. We’ve all watched Congress calcify, the parties polarize, voters grow alienated and distrustful, and the doom loop tighten. The instinct—to open the primaries, to let more voices in—comes from the right place.

Metaphors matter. They determine what solutions we can imagine. Allen’s bear-in-a-trap image is vivid. But maybe the trap isn’t the problem. Maybe the problem is the forest. A metaphor that turns politicians into wolves has already given up on democracy. Politicians are our representatives. If they are devouring us, it’s because the entire ecosystem has broken down. What we need is a bigger, more diverse forest, one where more species can live in interdependence. Diverse forests resist fire. Monocultures burn. So do two-party systems.

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Dear Readers:

This week’s video roundup covers Hungary’s remarkable repudiation of Viktor Orbán—and why liberals shouldn’t mistake a historic election victory for the hard institutional work that still lies ahead. On the economic front, we look at how the Republican turn toward protectionism has created both an opening and an urgency for Democrats to stop apologizing for free trade and make an affirmative case for it. And finally, we bring you a conversation between Andy Craig and Bill Kristol on why impeachment—long dismissed as a dead end after Trump 1.0—is now back on the table.

For more videos from The UnPopulist, go here: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram.

Hungary’s Rejection of Orbán Is Just the Beginning

Hungary ended Viktor Orbán’s 16-year grip on power in a decisive repudiation of his model of illiberal democracy—and liberals have been in celebration mode since.

But, as video contributor reminds us in the following video, “defeating an authoritarian at the ballot box is the beginning of the real work, not the end of it.”

Poland is the most instructive recent case. Donald Tusk returned to power with a mandate to restore the rule of law, and two and a half years later the courts are still packed, reform legislation is still being vetoed, and his coalition has at times resorted to the very executive overreach it was elected to reverse. Hungary must take care that its explosion of reformist energy does not get quieted in this way.

What makes Hungary different is that Magyar won a supermajority—something Tusk never had. So the authority exists. Whether the political will is there to use it is the only question left.

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Democrats Must Answer the Right’s Protectionist Turn With a Full-Throated Defense of Free Trade

For decades, progressives in America have treated free trade as something to apologize for rather than defend. That defensiveness has become a kind of trap for them now. Democrats are pushing back against Trump’s tariffs, but mostly on tactical grounds—without also making the affirmative case that the moment actually calls for.

As argues in these pages, for any movement centered on liberal principles, reclaiming a commitment to free trade is critical—and the necessary foundation of any forward-looking Democratic governing project. The UnPopulist’s video editor, Jacob Repkin, presents Kaneene’s argument in this clip.

Why Impeachment Is Back on the Table

Fifteen months into Trump’s second term, the question of removal is no longer a niche concern or a fringe pursuit.

In this next clip, which is taken from a longer conversation between The Bulwark‘s and The UnPopulist‘s , Kristol argues that impeachment—even without a conviction-ready Senate—is the constitutionally appropriate response to a president who is not merely malign but increasingly unhinged.

Fundamentally, impeachment is back in play because, without the internal guardrails that constrained him in his first term, Trump is as reckless as he wants to be. And Kristol points to more paths to making removal mainstream—Cabinet resignations, a potential Greenland invasion, the slow fracturing of Republican loyalty—than conventional wisdom would suggest.

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For the first time in history, the pope is American—and he is rightly appalled by what his countrymen in the White House are doing. Pope Leo XIV—born Robert Prevost on the South Side of Chicago—has called for peace, as popes often do. After he denounced a “delusion of omnipotence” following Trump’s unhinged, disproportionate, and indiscriminate threat to Iran, President Trump responded by posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus and attacking the pontiff as “WEAK on crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” Although there is plenty of room in the church for prudential disagreement about the war (though not Trump’s indiscriminate threats), Vice President JD Vance—a Catholic convert—went so far as to instruct the pope to “stick to matters of morality,” apparently unaware, or unconcerned, that war (and the treatment of migrants) are precisely that.

This is not a minor ecclesiastical spat, and it is not primarily about Trump, whose relationship to Christianity has always been transactional. It is more about Vance and the enabling role he is playing in this administration. He came to the Catholic faith voluntarily as an adult, and now invokes its theological vocabulary only when it serves him, prompting a rare public rebuke by two popes on the content of his own faith.

Careless Catholicism

“For what?” That’s how Vance responded when asked whether he owed the family of Alex Pretti—the nurse killed by federal agents at a Minnesota protest earlier this year—an apology for reposting Stephen Miller’s unconscionable smear of Pretti as “a would-be assassin” who had “tried to murder federal law enforcement.” Even as the administration’s narrative collapsed under the weight of video evidence, Vance saw no need to apologize, dismissing Pretti as “a guy who showed up with ill intent to an ICE protest.”

“I don’t really care.” That’s how Vance answered a question about refugees. It’s also how he described his attitude toward Ukrainians, telling Steve Bannon, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other.”

If there is anything that defines Vance’s public persona, it is this attitude of cynical indifference to anything that is not of obvious benefit to his base. This goes along with a tendency to see the world in zero-sum terms: immigrants, he says, take homes that belong to Americans and foreign aid takes dollars that belong at home. As observed in a prior profile of Vance in these pages, his conception of politics is explicitly Schmittian—a conflict between friends and enemies rather than a cooperative enterprise among people with competing interests. Perhaps most concerningly, he appears to believe that the suffering of people beyond our borders—even in cases where the suffering is to some appreciable degree caused by the actions of his own administration—is simply not his problem.

This callousness is at odds with much of America. The death of Alex Pretti struck many as a tragedy caused by the administration’s draconian immigration enforcement—a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll found that 65% of Americans believed ICE went too far—and public outcry compelled Trump to at least embrace a less performatively cruel approach.

But the American public is not the only audience that has noticed. Vance is also out of step with his own church—whose last two leaders have spoken out on Ukraine, on immigration, and on the dignity of every person his administration has chosen to disregard. On Ukraine, both popes advocated for the Ukrainian people in their plight against an unjust aggressor. Pope Francis called Russia’s invasion a “painful and shameful occasion for all of humanity” and expressed “solidarity with the martyred Ukrainian people.” Pope Leo, speaking before his election, described Russia’s act as “a true invasion, imperialist in nature, where Russia seeks to conquer territory for reasons of power.” As pope, Leo renewed his appeals for peace in Ukraine, insisting that the international community must not look away from the suffering caused by war.

The divergence between Vance’s posture and the church’s teaching is perhaps sharpest on immigration. Last November, Pope Leo endorsed a statement by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, hardly a far-left voice, expressing that they were “disturbed” by a climate of fear surrounding immigration enforcement, and affirming that human dignity and national security are not in conflict. The USCCB has also filed an amicus brief opposing the administration’s position on birthright citizenship, grounding its argument in the theological dignity of all persons. These are not the interventions of a church dabbling in politics; they are the application of principles the church has long stood for—principles Vance claims as his own inheritance. Yes, there is room for disagreement about their application (one need not oppose stricter border security or enforcement), but any faithful application should plausibly respect these principles. Vance’s nativist rhetoric, and lack of concern for migrants, is difficult to square with them.

Out of Order

The public record is clear. But the theological case against Vance goes deeper.

Elie Wiesel is often credited with the observation that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Indifference is clearly not morally neutral. To respond with indifference when love and concern are due is a sign that something has gone wrong—whether it’s a voluntary fault and thus immoral, or something involuntary and inculpable. But indifference in such cases is never something to praise or, worse, advocate for. Yet that is just what Vance consistently does. He is not alone in this. A growing current on the right has explicitly reframed indifference as a virtue—denouncing empathy toward immigrants, refugees, and foreign peoples as “suicidal,” manipulative, or simply naive.

When Vance invoked the theological principle of ordo amoris—“the order of love”—to justify his indifference to those outside his base, the response from his own church was notable. Then-Cardinal Prevost reposted two articles rebuking his interpretation, including one under the headline “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.” Pope Francis, in a letter to U.S. bishops, rejected what he saw as an implausible application of the principle. Months later, just before the pope’s passing, Vance visited Francis on Easter Sunday. Days after that, he presented the newly elected Leo XIV—the first Augustinian pope in history—with two works by St. Augustine: The City of God and On Christian Doctrine.

The idea of an “ordered love” is uncontroversial within Catholicism, with love of God taking priority and generally greater obligations to those closest to us. We owe more of our personal time, energy, and resources to our children than we do to a stranger. But the challenge of the Gospel is to extend our charity as far as possible. To the question “who is my neighbor?” Jesus famously challenges his disciples to be a neighbor to others—presumably as much as one can. To appeal to ordo amoris as justification for a self-centered, or even nationalistic, indifference to foreigners is to get a key aspect of the faith deeply wrong.

The context matters, too; this wasn’t some abstract philosophical point Vance was making. His invocation of ordo amoris came at a time when the Trump administration had frozen PEPFAR funding for Africans—including women and children—who needed HIV therapy, disrupting care for millions before partially reversing course under political pressure; it was also in the process of stripping legal status from refugees across the country.

Vance’s indifference is also at odds with another pillar of Catholic social teaching: solidarity, or social love. In this tradition, solidarity is articulated as a response to the interconnectedness and interdependence of all human persons, generating moral obligations to all others. Pope Francis stressed the connection between solidarity and Catholic “incarnational” theology. Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution, teaches that “a special obligation binds us to make ourselves the neighbor of every person without exception and of actively helping him when he comes across our path, whether he be an old person abandoned by all, a foreign laborer unjustly looked down upon, a refugee, or a stateless person.” It is difficult to see how Vance’s indifference coheres with this principle.

Faithful Catholics have wide latitude for applying principles like solidarity, subsidiarity, justice, and the common good to specific political policies. Some favor strong welfare states; others prefer voluntary charities and freer markets. Popes, bishops, priests, and laity frequently—and legitimately—debate these matters. But Vance’s indifference goes beyond any of those disagreements. Contrary to Vance’s claims, Pope Leo wasn’t attempting a political refutation—the pope’s rejection of this indifferent outlook to migrants wasn’t some sort of encroachment into the policy space. Pope Leo was rebuking literal bad faith.

What Catholic Teaching Demands

What makes this moment historically distinctive is not simply that a pope is criticizing an American politician. What sets it apart is that the critic is himself an American—one who grew up in Chicago, who knows this culture from the inside, and who cannot be dismissed as a distant voice failing to understand the complexities of American life. When Leo says the church stands with migrants, he is saying it in the same cultural idiom as the people he is addressing. Vance has no buffer to hide behind—no distance, no language barrier, no claim that the pope simply doesn’t understand America.

That matters because the Catholic tradition, properly understood, contains intellectual resources that are not merely critical of the Vance worldview but the source of a genuine alternative to it. The concept of solidarity is not a soft sentiment; in Catholic social teaching it is a structural claim about the moral weight of human interdependence. The principle of subsidiarity insists that problems be solved at the most local level that they can be effectively handled—but it does not license indifference to suffering that local communities cannot address alone. The tradition’s account of human dignity, sharpened at the Second Vatican Council in direct response to the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, undergirds the very liberal democratic commitments that Vance and his allies seem increasingly willing to treat as optional. Vance did not have to become Catholic. He chose to. That choice carries obligations—not just to the parts of the tradition that are useful to him, but to all of it.

The theological case against Vance’s indifference is not a close call. There is no serious Catholic debate about whether we should support Ukraine’s sovereignty or condemn Russia’s aggression. Given the publicly known facts, there is no serious debate about whether Pretti’s killing was unjustified. About these and other matters, JD Vance should know better. Although the Iran War is more complicated (and a discussion for another time), indiscriminate threats are not.

So, Vice President Vance, you asked, “For what?” Why should you care? If nothing else, for your own soul.

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Today is the 150th anniversary of the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument (also called Emancipation Memorial) which stands in Washington D.C.’s Lincoln Park, although activists sought to remove it in 2020. To those activists, the monument, which depicts Abraham Lincoln, the emancipator, towering over a kneeling, half-naked, just-freed Black man, memorializes freedom slavishly. As a widely-circulated petition puts it, the monument’s message is that Black people “are beneath white people and should simply be grateful for the scraps that have been thrown [their] way.” The attack on the Freedmen’s Monument was part of a broader and longstanding antiracist effort to cast tainted heroes and sanitized traitors out of the circle of honor. 2020 also featured a recommendation from the “District of Columbia Facilities and Commemorative Expressions Working Group,” formed by Mayor Muriel Bowser, to “remove, relocate, or contextualize” the Washington Monument.

The conservative backlash was fierce. For Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw and others, those bent on removing the Freedmen’s Monument were bent on “erasing America itself.” As Alice Butler Short, founder of Virginia Women for Trump, put it at a demonstration against the removal proposal: “It’s not just about statues. It’s about protecting our history, our way of life, our heritage.” In other words, the defense of the statue, which also attracted learned and nuanced support, was absorbed into broader and longstanding anti-woke efforts to take back the American historical narrative, an effort that culminated in state laws and federal pressure against the teaching of “divisive concepts” in American schools.

On the occasion of the unveiling of the monument, the abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass gave the main address in memory of Lincoln. That address was calculated to satisfy neither those, like today’s progressives, who think an indictment was in order, nor those who, like today’s conservatives, think that white Americans should be shielded from anguish over the historical failures of a white-dominated America. Instead, Douglass assessed Lincoln and the America he embodied in a manner consistent with his obligation to the truth and to the dignity of Black people.

Douglass’ Dispassion

Douglass’ Freedmen’s Monument address is not as famous as the 1852 jeremiad, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, a staple of anthologies and syllabuses. I suspect that it owes its neglect to its equanimity at a time when the Reconstruction was unraveling. Historians mark 1877 as the final end of that project, but the North’s will was already broken when Douglass spoke. In 1876, as the historian, Philip Foner, observed, “the Negro people in the South were being beaten to their knees by armed ruffians. And the “Republican Party … was doing nothing.” Nonetheless, Foner says, Douglass, “overwhelmed by the honor” of top billing on such an occasion, barely implied this betrayal. The radical spoke too tamely. He avoided “divisive concepts.” This is a conclusion that young progressives seem to share. In a class I gave on the address, about four months after George Floyd’s killing, a student opened the discussion this way: “It’s trash,” she said referring to Douglass’ speech. She had something like Foner’s complaint in mind: How could Douglass waste the opportunity to denounce an America that richly deserved it?

But to charge Douglass with being overcome by the moment is to ignore that the address, in fact, interprets the moment.

First, some of the context surrounding the moment. It was clearly seen at the time to mark something, well, momentous. The monument was, apart from a pedestal Congress funded, paid for entirely by Black people, who also organized the unveiling. Congress declared a “general holiday” for D.C. public employees to attend. President Ulysses Grant came with members of his Cabinet, Supreme Court justices, congressmen, and foreign dignitaries. A disproportionately Black crowd of 25,000, according to The New York Times—and over 100,000 according to the chief organizer’s estimate—gathered to hear Douglass’ oratory, along with a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. As Douglass said, for the “first time” in American history, Black people assembled, with the nation’s approval and attention, to “do honor to an American great man.”

Douglass draws attention not only to this audience but also to the telegraph wires putting him and the freedmen “in instantaneous communication” with “loyal and true men all over the country.” The unveiling of the monument is a “national act, an act which is to go into history.” Since Lincoln’s death, Douglass had been thinking about how to meet the moment.

In 1865, Douglass had rejected a request to lend his name to a different monument project led by his fellow Black abolitionist, Henry Highland Garnet, who hoped to honor Lincoln by founding a school for Black people, partly funded by white philanthropists. In response to an invitation to serve as an officer of Garnet’s Colored People’s Educational Monument Association, Douglass argued that mixing commemoration with solicitation would put the Black man in the position of a “beggar,” invite the charge of “turning the nation’s veneration for our martyred President into a means of advantage,” and “place us before the country in an attitude derogatory to genuine self-respect.” A monument financed by Black people, Douglass said then, would better “express one of the holiest sentiments of the human heart … free from all taint of self-love or self-interest.”

Reading Douglass Between the Lines

The Freedmen’s Monument was a fulfillment of that hope. And Douglass in his oration echoes this description of gratitude, a sentiment he regards as “one of the noblest.” But the gratitude he expresses on behalf of Black people was, very purposefully, compatible with their self-respect and agency in bringing about their own Emancipation. Douglass’ thanks are delivered in the “spirit of liberty.”

Douglass’ critics wish he had shown a little less gratitude, or at least that he had used Lincoln, as he did the Founders in his Fourth of July speech, to highlight the hypocrisy of his white contemporaries. In that speech, Douglass, without fully embracing the revolutionaries of 1776, contrasted their bravery and patriotism to the cowardice and greed of his contemporaries, who refused their generation’s task to take the logic of the Revolution to its antislavery conclusion. Similarly, though Douglass could not avoid praising Lincoln on a day devoted to honoring him, he could have used Lincoln’s courage to highlight the cowardly Northern retreat from the Reconstruction effort to protect Black Southerners from their former masters. It’s not like Douglass didn’t know how to criticize white Republicans. Indeed, he did so later that year: “You turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated masters.”

But in this speech, he does something even more radical. For nearly a quarter of the address, Douglass ignores the white luminaries altogether, speaking solely to Black people. He distinguishes between “our white fellow citizens and ourselves.” He congratulates his Black “friends and fellow citizens” (when he later addresses the entire audience, he speaks only of “fellow citizens,” as if to say that whites will have to prove themselves reliable friends) on a change that they, as well as Lincoln, caused. Their freedom, secured in part by Black soldiers, is “blood-bought.”

Viewed in this light, Douglass seeks less to evade hard truths about the failures of the North than to assert an inspiring and necessary truth, that Black people act, and are not merely acted on, in history. In other words, if Blacks were commemorating Lincoln through the statue, Douglass was commemorating them.

In that sense, Douglass slips the grasp of progressive critics.

Unsparing But Not Unkind or Unfair to Lincoln

But as author and UnPopulist contributor argues, he also defies conservative appropriators who want to depict Lincoln as the symbol of the greatest triumph of America and brush away the horror of slavery. Douglass says, “Abraham Lincoln was not … our man or our model” because “in his prejudices, he was a white man … entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.” Douglass is thinking of Lincoln’s willingness to let slavery persist indefinitely, so long as it is set on a course of ultimate extinction. Yet he knew or should have known, as Jefferson did, that slavery was a “bondage … one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression” the patriots of 1776 were impatient to end.

This deflation of Lincoln has two purposes, both of which serve to project and encourage Black self-respect. First, he wants to keep the record straight as to what the true cause of the war was. The criticism of Lincoln in question occurs in the only part of the speech in which Douglass directly addresses “my white fellow citizens.” They may be tempted to consider Black people the cause of a war that took hundreds of thousands of lives. Lincoln himself once told a Black delegation, Douglass reminds them, that “but for your race among us there could not be war.” But, as Lincoln had also said, in his 1854 Peoria Address and elsewhere, the South’s insatiable desire to spread slavery and compel the North to accept its moral permissibility threatened liberty altogether and therefore threatened the Union. Douglass reminds his white audience, who may have come prepared to accept gratitude on Lincoln’s behalf, that Lincoln had to act and did act to save them. That is why it “especially belongs” to them “to sounds his praises” and to “preserve and perpetuate his memory.”

Second, Douglass wanted to ensure that Black people were seen as capable of taking “a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln”—understanding his greatness even though he was not motivated primarily by their interest. Despite Lincoln’s frustrating hesitations, Lincoln remained “near and dear to our hearts in the darkest and most perilous hours of the Republic,” Douglass says—and not from “blind and unreasoning superstition” but from reflection on “the stern logic of great events.” Douglass suggests that Black abolitionists knew something Lincoln didn’t know, that merely restoring a compromise that checked the spread of slavery could not secure peace. But they also knew that Lincoln, who “in his heart of hearts loathed and hated slavery,” was on a path that would eventually bring him to their conclusion. As Douglass had repeatedly argued, including in his 1862 speech, “The War and How to End It,” to leave slavery in its place would be to ensure that “the same elements of demoralization which have plunged this country into this tremendous war will begin again to dig the grave of free Institutions.” The impulse to check the spread of slavery could safely end only in emancipation.

When Lincoln started moving in that direction in 1862, urging Congress to support gradual and compensated emancipation, Douglass predicted: “Time and practice will improve the President as they improve other men. He is tall and strong but he is not done growing.”

Criticism Without Malice

Therefore, Douglass said in the Freedmen’s Monument oration, Black people could see in Lincoln “the head of a great movement, which, in the nature of things, must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished.” Later in the speech, Douglass credits Lincoln with knowing Americans “better than they knew themselves.” Lincoln, through his attentiveness to public opinion, did what no abolitionist could do, namely bring Americans gradually along to abolishing slavery. In this essential matter, Lincoln judged better than Douglass and other abolitionists. But in understanding that Lincoln’s work would necessarily end in emancipation, Black people, Douglass claims, knew Lincoln better than Lincoln knew himself.

In asserting the right and ability of his people to take a comprehensive view of Lincoln and insisting that their gratitude was anchored in a self-respecting regard for the truth, Douglass offered the greatest tribute to Lincoln I know. That tribute, Douglass’ left-wing detractors notwithstanding, is the opposite of self-abasing and, Douglass’ right-wing appropriators notwithstanding, unfriendly to those who bristle at the idea that Americans should be made to feel responsible for their history—including the disgraceful parts. The only words of Lincoln that Douglass directly quotes in the Freedmen’s Monument Address are from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge
of war will soon pass away, yet if God wills it continue till all the
wealth piled by two hundred years of bondage shall have been
wasted, and each drop of blood drawn by the lash shall have been
paid for by one drawn by the sword, the judgments of the Lord are
true and righteous altogether.

Far from divisive, this sentiment, which, without apportioning blame equally between the North and South, fixes the sin of slavery on the nation as a whole can—to quote a line of the Second Inaugural that Douglass does not—”bind up the nation’s wounds.”

“Truth,” Douglass says, is “proper and beautiful at all times,” even when harsh, and, he shows, compatible with gratitude. That, and not petulant self-congratulation, is a remembrance worthy of a great country.

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Seventy years ago, Hungarians rose against Soviet occupation, tore down a statue of Stalin, and freed themselves—however briefly—until the Soviet tanks returned to crush the uprising. When the Red Army returned, nearly a quarter of a million people fled the country. The hole protesters cut in the center of the Hungarian flag—excising the communist coat of arms—became the image of a nation that had learned, at great cost, what it meant to have its sovereignty sold.

Fidesz, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s party and Hungary’s governing force since 2010, had spent 16 years curating that memory—making March 15, Hungary’s national holiday, Orbán’s personal stage, and the language of sovereignty his personal property. Péter Magyar had once been a true believer: as a boy, he put a photo of Orbán on his bedroom wall after Hungary’s first democratic elections in 1990 brought Fidesz into parliament.

Magyar went on to become a government insider, serving on the boards of state companies while his then-wife Judit Varga rose to become Orbán’s justice minister. He broke publicly with the system in February 2024 after a presidential pardon scandal—Varga was forced to resign over her role in pardoning a man convicted of covering up child sexual abuse. Magyar then turned his rupture into a political movement expressly dedicated to ousting his former hero and Fidesz from office. He arrived at every rally holding a Hungarian flag, an argument conducted without words: the country belonged to its people, not its government. Yesterday, he won a resounding victory.

The Battle for Hungary

On Friday, two days before the election, more than 100,000 people filled Heroes’ Square for a seven-hour concert, many waving Hungarian flags with the hole cut in the middle—the 1956 symbol, reclaimed. Magyar had already packed the same square on March 15 while Orbán’s events drew crowds elsewhere. He reminded the audience of Orbán’s own words from 1989—“That politician who demanded Russian troops should leave Hungary now is the most loyal ally of the Kremlin.” The crowd chanted “Ruszkik haza”—Russians, go home!

Hungarians gave Magyar’s Tisza a two-thirds constitutional supermajority, 138 seats in Hungary’s 199-seat National Assembly that Magyar accurately called the largest mandate any Hungarian party has ever received in the democratic era.

Tisza’s slogan was “Most vagy soha”—Now or Never—drawn from Sándor Petőfi’s revolutionary poem of 1848. Independent polling, attacked throughout the campaign by government pollsters as “abusing” public opinion research and carrying out “foreign assignments,” proved not merely correct but slightly conservative on Tisza’s chances. That Orbán conceded quickly will be taken by some as evidence that the threat was always overstated. The structural record suggests otherwise. The margin was, in the end, simply too large for even a rigged system to absorb.

Orbán accepted the result, calling it “painful but clear.” But he did not step down as Fidesz leader. The neo-fascist Our Homeland Movement, whose MPs approvingly unveiled a bust of Miklós Horthy—Hungary’s wartime regent and Hitler’s ally—in their parliamentary offices, is likely to once again clear the 5% threshold that’ll give it a presence in parliament. This is a reminder that forces Orbán cultivated do not automatically vanish with his defeat.

Standing before thousands on the banks of the Danube, Magyar quoted John F. Kennedy. Addressing Fidesz voters directly, Magyar expressed that the victory belonged not only to Tisza voters but to every Hungarian. He thanked the young people who had driven the campaign, and older voters who turned out for change despite everything they had been told to fear. The crowd chanted “Európa”; for a country that had spent 16 years being told by its own government that Brussels was the enemy, that the EU was a colonial imposition, and that Hungary’s sovereignty depended on resistance to the West, the chant was anything but incidental.

Magyar’s first trip as prime minister-elect would be to Warsaw, followed by Vienna, and then Brussels. He has stated that Hungary would be a strong member of the EU and NATO and the last stop is meant to underscore that. The military, the secret services, and the police would work for Hungarians. Corruption would have consequences. Leaders of captured state agencies should consider their positions. In other words, this was not simply an election, it was a mandate for regime change. The two-thirds supermajority—the same constitutional weapon Orbán had wielded since 2010 to rewrite Hungary’s basic laws, pack its courts, and redesign its electoral system—now belongs to Magyar. With this advantage in parliament, his government can amend the constitution, reverse Orbán-era legislation, and begin the work of institutional restoration that a simple majority could not. It is, in the most literal sense, the key to the system Orbán built to be unbreakable. The only barrier to overturning Orbán’s repressive edifice is Magyar’s own steadfastness—his ability to stay the course.

Throughout the campaign, Magyar had told crowds across the country: “Hungarian history is not written in Washington, not in Brussels, not in Kyiv, not in Moscow, and not in Serbia—but instead in Hungary. Hungarian history is written by Hungarians.” The quote, circulated widely in a campaign video, sounds simple. But in context it was a surgical strike. Orbán—a man who had spent 16 years telling Hungarians their sovereignty was under threat from Brussels, Soros, migrants, Ukraine—had, according to a leaked phone call, assured Russian President Vladimir Putin: “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.” In that conversation, Orbán even invoked a Hungarian fable about a mouse that frees a lion caught in a net, which reportedly made Putin laugh. The man who had built a political career on the language of Hungarian sovereignty was, in a private call with Moscow, auditioning for the role of the mouse.

Too Big to Rig

Magyar’s victory was not supposed to be possible. Orbán was not supposed to lose his grip on power. How, exactly, did Orbán fail to steal the election?

The structural advantages were real and formidable. The gerrymandered electoral map had delivered Fidesz 135 seats on 54% of the vote in 2022. Campaign spending limits had been abolished. Fidesz and its proxies outspent Tisza 11 to 1 on advertising. A documentary released weeks before the election estimated that up to 500,000 votes could be influenced through coordinated vote-buying schemes—Átlátszó, one of the few independent publications that survived, documented more than 11 tons of food distributed to communities through Fidesz-linked organizations in the days before the vote, and 444.hu, another digital publication, on election day filmed supermarket gift cards given to Roma voters who voted for Fidesz and withheld from those who did not. Russian intelligence ran active interference operations across social media—the same disinformation playbook deployed against elections in Moldova, Germany, Romania, and the United States. The Washington Post reported that Russian intelligence had drawn up a plan called “the Gamechanger”—a staged assassination attempt on Orbán designed to move the election away from economics and toward security.

Part of the answer is that the EU held its ground. The €19 billion in frozen funds—suspended over rule-of-law violations—became a material argument that Orbán’s system carried a direct cost for ordinary Hungarians. Hungary had entered a technical recession in late 2024. GDP growth in 2025 was 0.4%. Household purchasing power stood at 70% of the EU average. Lőrinc Mészáros—the former gas fitter from Orbán’s hometown who became Hungary’s richest man and credited his fortune to “God, luck, and Viktor Orbán”—had a private zoo with zebras while pensioners waited years for routine medical examinations. The EU’s institutional pressure had not, on its own, changed the government. But it had made the cost of the government legible.

What Fear Runs On

But the larger answer, put simply, is bravery. Autocracy runs on fear—on the assumption that enough people, confronted with sufficient consequences, will decide that compliance is safer than truth. What dismantled Orbán’s operation was the accumulation of individual decisions to the contrary.

The investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi of Direkt36 and VSquare spent months documenting Russian interference, revealing that Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó had been briefing Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, on confidential EU meetings in real time. The government filed espionage charges against Panyi and had the Sovereignty Protection Office smear him publicly. Panyi, previously targeted with Pegasus spyware in 2021, kept reporting. When Serbia announced explosives near the TurkStream pipeline six days before the vote, it was Panyi who immediately identified it as a likely staged provocation—an assessment security experts widely shared.

Direkt36’s separate investigation into the intelligence operation targeting Tisza—what Magyar quickly dubbed “Hungary’s Watergate”—only reached the public because Captain Bence Szabó, the cybercrime investigator sent by Orbán to execute the raids on fabricated charges, concluded the operation was corrupt and blew the whistle on the government instead, his 90-minute interview garnering 2.6 million views the day his home was searched.

Another hero, Captain Szilveszter Pálinkás—the former public face of Hungary’s military recruitment campaign whose face had been on government billboards—gave his own interview to Telex describing collapsing morale, political interference, and allegation that Orbán’s son had pushed for a deployment of Hungarian soldiers to Chad, which was accused of fueling migration, while telling officers to expect 50% casualties.

These were not random acts of conscience. They were what happens when an authoritarian system reaches a critical mass of internal contradiction—when the people operating it begin to understand that they are not serving just governance but are instruments of a political party. The system did not simply fall apart because it was attacked from outside. It fell because people inside it, seeing it clearly, chose to say so.

The 2026 U.S. midterms will be fought on familiar terrain—one side outgunned on spending, a media landscape tilted against independent journalism, electoral maps drawn to discount votes. The lesson from Budapest is not to match the machine. It is to show up anyway, name what is happening, and trust that enough people will decide that fear isn’t worth it.

What comes next for Hungary will not be easy. In the run-up to the election, I warned that even a Tisza supermajority has to grapple with a state that was deliberately built to resist reform from within—loyalist judges, captured regulators, a media infrastructure that does not dissolve because its patron lost an election. Orbán has not left the stage; he still leads Fidesz, now the biggest opposition party. He is not without tools. The outgoing parliament retains its two-thirds majority for several weeks yet, long enough to entrench loyalists deeper into the courts and constitutional oversight mechanisms that a new government cannot easily dislodge. Beyond Hungary’s borders, the nationalist leaders in Moscow and Washington who backed Orbán openly have strong incentives to see the Magyar government fail—and the means to make its path harder. Seventy years ago, Hungary’s moment of liberation lasted 12 days before the tanks returned. What matters now is that this time, they don’t.

By 5 p.m., two hours before polls closed, Hungary had already broken every turnout record in its post-communist history. Magyar was right. The election was decided—by Hungarians.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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Andy Craig: Welcome to Zooming In. I’m Andy Craig. Over the past week or so, there’s been a lot of chatter about removing our floridly insane president from office. Between the Iran war and his threats and his ever crazier rants, it’s getting more discussion than it has at any point so far in the second term.

To discuss that, we’re joined by , a man who needs no introduction but who is best known, no doubt, as the former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle. These days, he’s the editor at large at The Bulwark.

A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.

Craig: So, it’s been a bit of a wild week, even by Donald Trump standards. One thing I wanted to talk with you about—you wrote about it on Monday and a lot of us have been talking about it more this past week—is: How are we going to get this guy out of office? Because we cannot realistically stand to wait and just ignore that question until January 2029. Aside from all the crimes and bad things he’s doing, he’s just manifestly insane. What are your thoughts on broaching that conversation and really putting it front and center going forward?

Bill Kristol: Good to be with you, Andy, and good to be with The UnPopulist team.

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, people have underestimated how dangerous the [full] four years [would be]. That includes, obviously, the public in general, but it also includes a lot of our friends and allies who assumed, “Well, the worst part is the early part. He’s going to start with a bang—DOGE, mass deportations—but he’ll retreat from a lot of this, and we’ll get back to something vaguely resembling normalcy.” I think a lot of people have had that implicit assumption, even if they wouldn’t quite put it that way. Or maybe I’m overstating it a little bit—not quite “normalcy,” but a manageable situation. If Democrats win the House, or both houses of Congress, they can check him some. I just thought that four years of this is terrifying and genuinely dangerous.

So I waited to see, as we all did. And I think 15 months in, we can say that while he adjusts a little bit to political and economic reality on tariffs or to some degree on mass deportation, he’s also gotten more unhinged—certainly in foreign policy, in his willingness to take risks and be reckless, in his rhetoric about genocide of an entire civilization, and in his actual policies. He’ll probably stay at the current level of recklessness, at minimum. Generally, authoritarian movements get more radicalized, not less, as they move forward. And someone like Trump gets more unhinged, not less, as it all goes to his head—either as he feels success and the rush of excitement that comes from that conquest (like in Venezuela, blowing up fishing boats) or as he feels cornered and that he’s not succeeding and has to be more desperate in what he does.

Either way, I think there’s a reasonably good chance things get worse, not better. And it’s foolish to sit around and accept the notion that we’re stuck with him for four years. That’s the American system, that’s the downside of not having a parliamentary system, and we may end up having to manage around that.

It’s worth giving a lot of thought, as you have, to what Congress can do, what others in the executive branch can quietly do to slow things down, what the courts can do, what citizens can do. All that is very important. But for me it was the genocidal comments about the Iranian civilization, and the general conduct of the war, that really made me think we should open up a conversation—which you’ve actually been opening up a little before me.

It’s silly that we’re all looking at workarounds because we were told, not unreasonably, that another impeachment would be impossible in the current situation with Republicans controlling Congress; [that another impeachment would be] unwise to talk about, because the first two didn’t work out so well, and Democrats want to run on other issues, and no one wants to just put Democrats in power so they can start impeaching again, allegedly. So people have been shying away from talking about it.

But it’s kind of crazy not to put it front and center and to say: “We’re not fated to this. We do have a whole provision of the Constitution set up for this, basically.” It won’t, unfortunately, put someone we like in office. It’ll put JD Vance in office. It’s not as if we’re cleverly replacing Trump with an anti-Trump Republican. It’s just to get a guy who’s increasingly unhinged and dangerous out of office. So I think it’s very much worth pushing for impeachment.

Craig: Yeah, and on that note, I was writing about it last year, and I also talked to some members of Congress—backbenchers, essentially—wanting to file impeachment resolutions, and I discussed with them the procedural rules and how to draft them. But it was very striking—this was about a year ago now, last spring—Al Green did an attempt, Shri Thanedar did an attempt. There’ve been a few others who’ve talked about it here and there. But the House Democratic leadership came down pretty hard against that. There was very much this conventional wisdom that we don’t want to talk about it, for all those reasons you were going through.

This idea that the past two impeachments had backfired in particular, I think, is part of it. But there’s just not really any good evidence of that. Both times—particularly the second one, but it’s true the first one as well—majorities wanted him convicted. Impeaching was never unpopular. It didn’t get to two-thirds, obviously, in the Senate. But I don’t think there are a lot of voters out there who are parsing their disapproval of Trump but think impeachment would be going too far. I think that’s a very inside-the-bubble D.C. way of overthinking it.

Kristol: I think that’s right. And also, even if the first one backfired—I don’t know, there’s no evidence of that—Trump lost the 2020 election after he’d been impeached at the very end of 2019, beginning of 2020. He was set back by the impeachment. Unfortunately, there was a failure to convict in 2021, but it took him a while to reestablish his control of the party. It’s a tragedy for the country that he succeeded in doing so, but it wasn’t really the fault of impeaching him. So I agree with that. But even if those had backfired, it doesn’t prove the next one would.

Now, just to be clear, I’m not saying that every Democrat running in 2026 has to spend all their time talking about impeachment. I don’t think that. And if some of them are in districts where they think they don’t need to focus on that, but just out of more common-sense, modest—“We’re going to check Trump, we’re going to stop the mass deportations, we’re going to stop the stupid and unauthorized wars, we’re going to stop all kinds of other things. We’re not going to confirm his judges or some of his Cabinet officials (so we don’t have the Hegseth, Bondi, Noem type insanity anymore)”—[type considerations], that’s fine.

We’re in the business at The Bulwark, and you’re in the business at The UnPopulist, of saying what we think. Some politicians can’t quite say what they fully think, and that’s okay with me. We’ll have to have a real debate in January if Democrats have the House, which I expect they will, about whether to move ahead or not. But for now, it’s more of a rhetorical thing, I suppose. And therefore, as I say, I’m not insisting that everyone politically emphasize it as much as I would right now. But I think it’s important to lay the groundwork for why it really is the right thing to do.

Craig: Yeah. There has been a bit of the dam breaking. I think the Iran genocidal threat was definitely a big part of it. [He just] posted a snuff video of that woman getting murdered. His rants every day are unhinged. To what degree should we think about this as—yeah, he’s malign, he wants to do bad things, he commits crimes, and that’s not entirely new, but it does seem like his mental and physical health are in decline in a way that’s maybe accelerating. He’s becoming even more unhinged in a detached-from-reality sort of way. Is that to some degree maybe an easier case to make, or is it just true on the merits that he’s getting crazier?

Kristol: I think it’s true on the merits. I’m curious about your thoughts on this because you’ve been laboring in these vineyards maybe a little longer than I have, or more actively, on the impeachment side of things. I think if he were malign but stable, people would say, “Well, people voted for him and he’s doing what he said he would do, and majorities in Congress are going along with it, so you don’t like it but you can’t really impeach someone for that.” And if he were simply wacky and rhetorically crazy but it wasn’t resulting in real policies, one might also say, “It’s unfortunate that we elected someone who’s a little unstable, but the system is kind of constraining him.” But I do think it’s the combination that’s really, really dangerous, right? The malignity plus the unhinged character of not just his personality, not just what he says, but his actual behavior in office.

We’re now watching him in real time becoming obsessed both about both silly things and the grandiosity, the megalomania you see—the Kennedy Center, the Arc de Triomphe, all that. It’s not as important as going to war, one could say, but it matters.

And again, none of this excuses Congress for not stopping him from doing certain things, but they didn’t, and he’s done them, and they should stop him in the future. But they should also remove him from office. I do think the unhinged and chaotic character of it might be a little easier to bring home, at least to some people, or at least worth stressing in addition to the malignity. What do you think?

Craig: I think that’s right. He’s not just bad, he’s crazy. And I think this is one of those things that’s part of the surreal moment of this whole era. To a degree, people can say he’s always been nuts. But I do think it’s undeniable that he has been getting worse in a way that’s accelerating.

It’s also obvious that they’re not being honest about his health. The deal with him disappearing for a few days every month and coming back with his hand bruised—he’s obviously getting some kind of IV medical treatment, and we have no idea what that might be. It could be something relatively mundane, but there are other possibilities. You’ve been in the White House before—usually the president’s health is something there’s a lot of transparency about (previous president excepted). There’s a lot of being at pains to say the president had his physical, and this is what they found, and these are what meds he’s on, and all that. And now we’re going on a decade with presidents either in or pushing their 80s, and all of a sudden that kind of information is not out there. I think it hits a certain narrative. It offers a permission structure for people to say, “You know, I voted for him three times, but now he’s in his 80s and he’s got health issues.” So maybe that is a bit of a door opening.

Kristol: Yeah, and I think [it’s] also [worth] reminding people that he [would] be succeeded by JD Vance. It’s not something I [would] particularly relish doing, but it’s a true statement. We’re not talking about a coup. We’re not keeping a party in power in the way Trump tried to stay in power when the other party had won the presidency. We’re not proposing he be replaced by whoever the Democratic nominee might be in 2027 or 2028. We’re actually acting against our electoral interests in the sense that an incumbent President JD Vance could well be a stronger candidate in 2028 than a VP who’s been loyal but also has been somewhat deferential.

That’s always a tough thing to pull off, succeeding a president. So it’s not even in the Democrats’ short-term interest really to move ahead on removing Trump, you might say. Let it just get worse and worse under him and let it drag Vance further and further down. But it is really too risky for the country.

And I read something this morning—maybe it was a little bit of wishful thinking—interpreting Melania’s bizarre appearance [in which she threw] Trump under the bus. It’s all about how she’s not guilty of anything with respect to Epstein, she’s being unfairly maligned, she didn’t ride on the plane, she didn’t know him well at all. She never defends her husband. It’s really striking. She’s literally speaking in the White House, in the Cross Hall, which is where presidents often speak and where they often deliver quite important addresses. It’s where Trump spoke a week ago on Iran. She has the seal of the president of the United States up on the lectern. And she’s just defending herself. She didn’t just put out a statement, she didn’t give an interview to a friendly reporter. She gives this formal address and goes out of her way to defend herself, and never defends Trump, her husband. She mentions him two or three times really in passing, as in we went to parties that everyone went to in Palm Beach, and that’s how she met Donald. It wasn’t through Epstein. But she never says, “By the way, he’s also being slandered here, he’s innocent, he didn’t do anything wrong.” Literally not a word. It really does invite people to think, “Well, I guess she’s defending herself. She doesn’t feel confident or comfortable defending her husband.” Maybe she knows too much to do that.

Craig: It was really bizarre. And it could be that she was trying to get in front of something—that’s the reasonable implication. It could also be ... these people just do stuff that doesn’t make sense all the time. She’s been threatening lawsuits and that kind of thing. But it was definitely notable that she did that kind of weirdly formal, almost presidential address-style thing, and then flat zero defending him directly.

One thing that’s come up and been a little bit frustrating this past week is that there’s been a lot of members of Congress calling for removal, but a lot of them are talking about the 25th Amendment. That makes sense—if you’re going to focus on the “he’s crazy” angle, then in theory that’s what the 25th Amendment is for. But it’s also a little frustrating. We saw this after Jan. 6, too, when the House passed a resolution asking Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment before they moved to impeachment. Congress has its own responsibility and its own power with impeachment. And for those who don’t have their pocket Constitution memorized: the 25th Amendment is harder—it takes the vice president, a majority of the Cabinet, and then two-thirds in both houses to keep the president out. As opposed to impeachment, which is a simple majority of the House and two-thirds in the Senate.

Am I being a little too pedantic about this? Are they getting at the gist of the right idea? Or does it feel like a bit of a dodge, because calling for the 25th Amendment doesn’t put the onus on them to actually do something, to initiate it in the House?

Kristol: I agree that in that respect it is a dodge, and that’s why they like to call on other people to do it rather than necessarily stepping up to the plate themselves. Having said that, it’s also kind of useful for them to do it, in a way, because it does put removal on the table and it lets us say, “Well, wait a second, don’t you have the constitutional power to do it yourself?” The 25th Amendment was really put into the Constitution because of presumably presidential illness or debility. I think it came up after there were a couple of days when Reagan had operations and was sort of out of it, and there was this awkward question of who was in charge exactly. And I think it tried to routinize that, and then also address the question of what if the president is just not up to it anymore, which the Cabinet and vice president would see much more closely and clearly than members of Congress. You could imagine something like President Woodrow Wilson’s situation being hidden away. So I’m not against invoking it, but it’s less appropriate here.

Impeachment is broad. I mean, it’s been a little misunderstood. “High crimes and misdemeanors” sounds kind of legalistic, but as I understand it—and you may have looked at this much more recently and closely than I have—the original understanding was that “high crimes” just meant crimes in the broad sense against the state. That’s what made them “high,” as opposed to pickpocketing or something. And “misdemeanors” is even broader—in the legal system, misdemeanors are less important than felonies, but using that term in this context conveys all kinds of actions against the public interest.

Now, the Founders didn’t want it to be used cavalierly. It hasn’t been in the U.S. system. Quite the contrary, it’s been rarely invoked. So it’s perfectly appropriate to use it here. And the Federalist Papers have quite a long defense of why the House would do the impeaching and the Senate would do the convicting. Two-thirds of the Senate, to make it not just an easy thing to do. I think it’s absolutely the right thing. We should call for it now and push for it now. Maybe four House Republicans will join the Democrats to call for it. There’s a crew of House Republicans who love getting on TV to be somewhat critical of the president but are very unwilling to pull the trigger on the War Powers Act, on impeachment, or on most other things. I guess the Epstein vote was one of the rare exceptions. But the rubber will really hit the road, I think, in January, when Democrats win the House. I can see that they won’t want to begin with impeachment—they have their own agenda—and there are ways to do it where it doesn’t take up the entire legislative calendar. Other legislation can move simultaneously and probably should. But I just think it will be irresponsible not to move on it early in 2027, don’t you think?

Craig: Absolutely. “Misdemeanor” actually really illustrates it here, because that was not necessarily the petty crime sense of it. It’s a more literal sense of misbehavior. He’s not acting appropriately in a public trust, even if it’s not in a strict sense a legal violation you can point to. I think all you have to do is put up his Truth Social feed on the projector and the case kind of makes itself.

The thing is that, when we get there next year, I don’t think there’s much of a realistic possibility that they won’t impeach him. I don’t think they will be able to resist the pressure, the demand, the base. The situation is going to keep getting worse. His approval ratings are going to continue to tank. They’re already generally well below where they were during the first term. And so, if he’s got an approval rating of 30% or something like that, and the outrages just keep continuing, the almost more interesting question is: Impeach him for what? Because there’s such a litany.

When I helped with the draft, we had seven articles in it, and that was like three months into when he was back in office. A lot’s happened since then. So what do you think? If Hakeem Jeffries is getting dragged into this against his will, and you’ve got to pick something—and, of course, who knows what crazy new thing could happen between now and then—but from what’s on the table now, should they throw the kitchen sink at him? Should they try to pick some really specific thing they can hammer home?

Kristol: Well, one thing to say is that this would be 10 months from now, so things will happen and this has to be adjusted to see what the actual truth of the situation is then. Also, what has been highlighted in the election campaign, we’re all assuming the Democrats will have won the House, and I’m assuming that if they go ahead with this, they will have won it in a pretty big victory. So a lot of the impeachment would be shaped by what they ran on, so to speak. I mean, it’d be a little weird if no Democrat running for the House against Trump ever mentioned issue X and suddenly issue X is front and center in an impeachment. There’s a bit of an electoral reality that kicks in, what is it that people have been voting on?

You’re also not running against the will of the voters then. You’re carrying out their most recently expressed will. Not that that’s everything, there may be issues voters aren’t quite as alert to but that are very important. And the opposite: there are issues they are alert to, like gas prices, that he shouldn’t be impeached about. So I don’t think that should be dispositive, but I think it’ll color the way people think about it.

I really am not sure. I wasn’t sure back in 2019 and 2021 how to frame the impeachment resolutions, and I’m not sure now. I think this is one reason this should be broadly discussed, and we should talk more about it, actually. What would different things look like, and what precedents are there for more general rather than more particular articles? I think people can get a little legalistic in this, and think we have to have this and that particular charge. That was the case with Nixon and Clinton. There were particular things that people thought crossed the line and were therefore listed. The Nixon one also has broader statements about abuse of power. But I can make the case that a broad statement of abuses of power, of violations of the rule of law, of the politicization of everything in the executive branch in inappropriate ways would make more sense—with some supporting evidence as subtitles, perhaps—than going excessively narrow.

One thing to think about—and I haven’t quite figured out what to make of this—is that the corruption is so insane and on such a scale that we’ve never seen before ... that [it] does seem like a classic thing people get impeached for, even just at the state level (judges and so forth). The bribery over pardons, but also the incredible corruption of the executive branch ... that can’t be the whole thing, but it should certainly be part of it. That’s something we should think about. And again, they’re not going to think a whole lot about it on the Hill—maybe a couple of staffers and some senators. Some people like Jamie Raskin will be thinking about it, and we can talk to them. But it probably is worth doing some thinking on their behalf beforehand about what would be the best way to do it. And by best I mean not just politically, but in a serious constitutional way, really laying out for the history books why this exceptional remedy had to be pursued at this time.

Craig: And we just ran a piece by making the case that even if we don’t get to two-thirds in the Senate, it’s exactly that point—it’s making the statement for history that all this stuff did not pass unremarked and unopposed and quietly accepted. The corruption is part of it. There’s lots of bona fide crimes. We’ve talked about the War Powers violations, the ICE stuff, which I think would probably be in the mix. All sorts of things—the boat strikes in the Caribbean.

But it matters. One thing I think of—there was a point in Son of the Century, about Mussolini’s rise to power, which is really good—and this is a real thing that happened. They show the scene where he shows up in Parliament and challenges them to impeach him. This was after there’d been a political murder that he was implicated in. He was in office, but it wasn’t quite yet a total dictatorship. And he showed up and challenged them to impeach him, and they didn’t. And that was kind of the tipping point, when it became a fully entrenched authoritarian dictatorship. That kind of thing matters for history’s sake.

The impeachment process also unlocks investigative tools, legally, that the courts have allowed broader scope on than in other cases. But also—realistically, what else do you do for these two years that you have Democrats controlling the House, with pretty good chances of taking the Senate too? Even if you take as your working assumption that we’re not going to get to 67 votes—which I don’t think we should completely write off—impeachment is like having hearings on steroids. It’s a way to make a big public show centered on his wrongdoing and his abuse and say: “We are doing the thing we can do about it.” Whereas, what else are you going to do? You can’t override a veto—that’s harder than impeachment, it takes two-thirds of both houses. You’ll have some back-and-forth over funding bills and probably shutdown standoffs, but you’re not going to pass big substantive legislation to rein him in as long as he’s there, because he’ll just veto it.

Kristol: Also the executive is just powerful. It’s gotten much more powerful than it should have in the last 30, 40 years. And he’s expanded its powers hugely and without much opposition. Congress needs to rein that back in and start imposing some checks and guardrails if possible. But having someone that reckless with the power the American president has—even if it were somewhat more constrained than it is today, God knows how with such a compliant Congress—that’s too risky. You can’t assume that all these other guardrails you can put in place will work with this guy as president. In that respect, I think the impeachment is actually the easier argument to make. The other stuff’s more in the realm of policy questions. It kind of gets back to our earlier conversation—just the craziness and the recklessness is pretty good ground for it. I’ll have to look up that Mussolini thing. Should I watch Son of the Century?

Craig: Yes, it’s Italian language, but it’s subtitled. It’s good.

Kristol: I wasn’t aware that he actually dared the Parliament to do it. That’s very interesting.

Craig: And of course, they were all threatened and knew they would have been dragged out. It wasn’t a free vote in that sense by that point. But he did make a show of it, and that was kind of his claim to legitimacy, that they refused to impeach him.

Kristol: Yeah, I think this is a problem. You and I can go and talk about executive abuses of power and executive authority, and there is another branch, the Congress, that could stop a lot of this. They could defund things. They could limit things. They can make Trump much more visibly ignore the law instead of ignoring some previous statutes that he’s now redefining, while Congress does nothing to uphold them. The courts are doing a little, but if Congress doesn’t act, it makes it much harder to explain to people that what he’s doing really is outrageous. Because, hey, if it’s so outrageous, there’s this other branch that could be stopping a lot of it. Right now it’s a Republican Congress. Even that begs the question of why they’re all such utter party loyalists and Trump slaves that they just go along with everything—and the answer, unfortunately, is yes. I’m just saying, it’d be crazy if Democrats won one or both branches and then let him go on doing this. I mean, what are you there for?

Craig: Then you can put pressure on the Republicans. They should be denounced for it. We shouldn’t just take it for granted that they’ll never do it. It might be that they’ll never do it, but that should be something—they have agency, they are in a position of responsibility, too. If you’re going to go out there and condemn them for enabling all this insanity, you really have to put them on the spot. You can’t condemn them for something you’re not willing to advocate and vote for yourself.

One thing I’ve heard, as a bit of pushback from folks more on the left is—we touched on this [earlier]—how it would be Vance who succeeds. There are people who say Vance is worse. He’s deep in the weeds, an ideologue on all this postliberal right-wing nationalist ideology in a way that Trump only has a kind of inchoate mood-ring affiliation with. In a sense, Vance is smarter than Trump, he knows this stuff in a way Trump doesn’t. But I think that hits exactly the right point. I would take Vance over Trump. And it’s because, as much as I disagree with him on pretty much everything, Vance is not day-to-day erratic. He’s not chaotic in the way that Trump’s insanity is.

Kristol: Yeah, look, he’s very bad in my opinion, but in a couple of ways. And this is why it’s so obvious that the recklessness is really important, both the recklessness and the megalomania. Vance might have decided—I don’t think he would have, in fact—to bomb Iran, but he wouldn’t have done it in the way Trump did, as recklessly. It’s revealing that Vance’s guy at the Pentagon is [Secretary of the Army] Driscoll. I’m sure I wouldn’t agree with him and he’s probably not a trustworthy character either, but he’s not Hegseth. The recklessness that Trump encourages in subordinates, and in the party in Congress to some degree, and therefore permeates out to the public, is so dangerous. Dangerous at home with ICE in particular, but really abroad. Here we are talking about life and death, nuclear weapons, war and peace. It was striking when Vance was defending Trump, I guess after Trump’s genocidal comments—Vance was abroad, in Hungary actually, helping another authoritarian who hopefully is going to lose this Sunday.

Craig: He was in Hungary of all places. Speaking of wildly improper things to do.

Kristol: Having said that, if you actually watched Vance defend it, he didn’t quite want to go where Trump went. He didn’t repeat what Trump said about wiping out a civilization. He said it was an effective bargaining technique. I’m not sure the whole system would survive Vance either, don’t get me wrong, but the risks with Trump, the risks of the megalomania and the craziness, are just too great to tolerate.

Craig: It’s the narcissistic personality disorder. Vance would not be having his name chiseled on the Kennedy Center. And for all his issues, it does seem clear Vance was on the more reluctant side of not wanting to do the Iran war, or at least not do it in the way they went about it.

One thing about going forward is that I do think there are a lot of Democrats who are going to have to get over that conventional wisdom narrative that [impeachment] will backfire, or that if it fails—if he’s not convicted—it was a waste of time and we look bad and weak. A lot of that is overlearning the lesson of Clinton, because that was an impeachment that did backfire. Clinton’s behavior certainly didn’t age well in retrospect, but that was a case where it was at the time unpopular and Republicans had a bit of a backlash over it.

But that seems like a totally different universe than where we are now. Trump does not have 60%-plus approval ratings the way Clinton did. And whatever you think of these things, these are not small charges in the way that was able to be shrugged off. That he was just covering up an affair, and that’s seedy, and he did commit perjury, but these are core offenses. He’s destroying the constitutional system. He is endangering national security and all the rest of it. It’s hard to shrug that off as no big deal.

Kristol: No, I very much agree with that. And I actually haven’t heard the Clinton comparison that much, maybe for that reason. At the end of the day, there are things a president could do personally that don’t really endanger the system but are so reprehensible that he should be impeached. With Clinton, it wasn’t just the sexual conduct—it was the lying and the perjury—but whatever, without relitigating that, maybe it was unwise or a closer call. It’s nothing like what Trump has done.

With Trump, it’s more like the first term Trump situation, but much, much worse. He was impeached on Ukraine, but actually the internal guardrails were strong enough that he was stopped from doing what he wanted to do with Ukraine. He had to use Giuliani, who was outside the government. John Bolton and [other] people objected. Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman, all these people we’ve come to know since—everyone forgets they were actually in the White House. There’s no one like that in the White House now. There’s no Bolton, no Pence, no Vindman, no Fiona Hill. They’re all going along, and Trump is much crazier. So the combination is very, very dangerous.

That’s again where Congress has to step up, because you can’t assume Jim Mattis and John Kelly and John Bolton and Mark Esper are going to at least slow it down enough. Now it’s as risky as Trump wants to be, and Trump wants to be riskier and more unhinged than he was five or six years ago.

I totally agree: The substantive case needs to be made. But I think people are seeing it. The public is clearly seeing it. That’s why his numbers are changing. But it’s worth making the case robustly over the next several months, so that Democrats don’t come in and suddenly seem like they’re springing a surprise on people. As I say, that doesn’t mean every Democratic candidate has to talk about it that much, but those of us who believe this need to make this case pretty robustly over the next six, eight, 10 months.

Craig: Having it out there in the discourse is going to be part of what moves them, because they are people who operate in their social media feed like everybody else. They see what people are talking about, and it makes a difference if they see people talking about this. The other thing that would probably be useful—I don’t run a polling firm, but there have been a few polls on this, very sporadic, over the past year. The question of, “Do you support impeachment?” was already over 50% last year. I think being able to show them how closely that tracks with disapproval could matter.

Now, on the constitutional merits, it’s not the case that Congress should impeach the president any time he’s underwater on approval ratings. That’s where Congress is supposed to be the representative government and a check on popular passions. But it does kind of disprove this notion that there would be some backlash against us. Being able to show them: “No, this is actually what the voters want” [matters].

The swings we’re seeing in the special elections are just insane—we’re talking about 20-point swings in some of these races. It won’t quite be that much in November, but it’s going to be a healthy Democratic landslide almost certainly. And midterms are, as we hear constantly, a referendum on the incumbent president. So when the incumbent party not just loses but kind of gets dramatically wiped out—when they flip the Senate even though it’s a very unfavorable map for them this year, it’s a steep climb in terms of which states they have to win—I do think that’s going to have momentum to it. And so, exactly that: there needs to be the groundwork laid that this is not something coming out of nowhere come January.

Kristol: I think that’s the key, to lay the substantive groundwork as we’ve been trying to do in what we’ve written. Because obviously there were massive landslides in ‘94 and 2010, and no one thought the guy should be impeached the next month—not in 1995 with Clinton, not in 2011 with Obama. They were just policy referenda on healthcare and other issues, and a little bit on the personal behavior of the president in some cases. So I think it’s important. The election needs to be a big Democratic victory, but that’s necessary and not sufficient, and shouldn’t be sufficient really. The job some of us have in the outside world is making the substantive case for why it’s so important that it be done.

Craig: One question to wrap up on is: we’ve talked about all the reasons we should do it anyway, even if they won’t convict him. But is there a path actually, particularly if events take a dramatic turn or if there’s some particular scandal that comes out, or because he’s a lame duck? There were—I forget how many, it was like seven or so—Republican senators who voted to convict him last time. You’ve got to get to the ballpark of 15 or 20, depending on the election results. But it’s actually not that huge a leap from the high watermark of the last impeachment. Is there a conceivable scenario where you flip not just Murkowski but some of the more center-of-the-caucus Senate Republicans?

Kristol: Yeah, I think so. Maybe. It’s one of those things where either the dam will break or it won’t. Either it’ll be the Democrats plus one or two or three Republicans—in the Senate, because the party’s gotten so Trumpy, everyone’s been elected as a Trump loyalist these days—or there’ll be a mass defection in the sense that this can’t be tolerated. So much depends on what happens in the next six, eight months. I don’t think it’s out of the question that people in the administration would even speak up. Cabinet members might resign in protest if Trump’s asking them to do illegal things, generals might resign if he tries to follow through on some of those kinds of threats he made last week with respect to the war in Iran. What if he tries to invade Greenland? There are a lot of things that could make it much more mainstream. And a lot of the stuff therefore becomes: Does the Republican Party liberate itself from its total self-enslavement to Trump and act differently?

So yeah, I don’t think ... I mean, it could be a case where it gets to 64. I kind of think it’s more likely to be either, I don’t know, 53 votes for conviction or else it’s 88. We’re so used to—and right to be used to, and assume it’s the default setting—that the party is utterly and totally in Trump’s control. But it’s utterly and totally in Trump’s control until it isn’t. And when it isn’t, we don’t quite know what that looks like because we haven’t gone through this experiment. So that’s where I do think it could be quite dramatic.

Craig: That was exactly how the Epstein bill went. Once they tipped over into having a majority to pass it, it was everybody, let’s rush it through unanimously. So yeah, that could entirely be it. I think Greenland is actually a good thing to flag as a possibility, because there are still enough Republicans who seem to care about NATO more than maybe some of these other issues.

Kristol: You just can’t literally invade a country with which we have zero issues. I mean, with Iran there were some. There’s a huge stretch to say this war didn’t need to be authorized, but we had been in conflicts with Iran in the past, obviously. With Venezuela, Maduro had been indicted. There were things you could sort of tell yourself, not accurately, but it’s enough. With Greenland, there’s just no cover at all. And I don’t think the military would obey that order—at least large parts of it wouldn’t, and some of the senior officers would resign. If you get that kind of sense that he’s genuinely now beyond all the normal deference to the president as the commander in chief, that would be a situation where it might really happen. But who knows? We’ll know much more as we go forward. But I’m glad you’ve been emphasizing this.

Craig: And the military is another example of when the dam breaks, it goes hard. They won’t be refusing orders quietly, but when it happens, it will be a big break. That’s a whole other discussion about if and when that will happen. But I think there are a lot of things where it’s that dynamic … it’s brittle, and when it goes, it goes.

Well, thank you very much for joining us. It’s good to chat with you, as always, and looking forward to seeing all the good stuff at The Bulwark going forward. And we’ll of course continue to cover all this here at The UnPopulist.

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We launched Executive Watch, a real-time tracker of presidential abuses of power, early in Trump’s second term. Since that time, it has been meticulously documenting the illicit actions emanating from the White House.

Below is our biweekly selection of new entries posted in Executive Watch. You should bookmark this page that contains a chronological scroll of the abuses and this post that sorts and lists them under our 5 P categories:

• Personal Grift

• Political Corruption

• Presidential Retribution

• Power Consolidation

• Policy Illegality

After reading this roundup, tell us in the comments: Which of these abuses is the most troubling, and why?

April 8, 2026

The Administration Threatened the Pope With Dire Consequences if He Didn’t Back Off His Criticism of Trump’s Wars
Category: Presidential Retribution

The Trump administration’s professions of religious piety have always been repeated with greater vehemence than credibility, but it is still shocking to see a new report claiming that in January, top officials at the Pentagon attempted to strong-arm Pope Leo XIV for refusing to lend his moral authority to Trump’s wars.

The normally Trump-friendly outlet The Free Press couldn’t pass up the scoop, but if you don’t want to cross their paywall, The New Republic has a summary:

Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World speech, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting for a bitter lecture.

“The United States,” Colby said, according to a blistering new report by The Free Press, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the 14th century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon, a region inside France. …

The Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s warning that Pope Leo cancelled his plans to visit the U.S. later in the year, reported Hale, who noted that “many in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.”

As appalling as this is, it is also somewhat comical, and not just for the hypocrisy given the administration’s loud appeals to Christian traditionalism. It raises the Trump administration’s attempts to persecute and intimidate his critics to the level of insane hubris, targeting an institution so large and powerful that it has humbled kings centuries before Trump came along.

April 7, 2026

Trump Threatens CNN for Allegedly Fake Reporting About His Iran Cave-In
Category: Presidential Retribution

Trump and his loyalist FCC Chairman Brendan Carr keep threatening to abuse their power to punish Trump’s political enemies. They just did it again, threatening CNN for posting “fake news”—when it was simply reporting a real announcement from the Iranian regime that contradicted Trump’s claims.

Deadline reports:

About 90 minutes after announcing a two-week ceasefire in the war in Iran, Donald Trump was irate over CNN’s reporting of a statement issued by the country’s Supreme National Security Council, declaring victory and averting the president’s threat to launch attacks on civilian infrastructure.

Trump posted on Truth Social at 8:01 p.m. ET, “The alleged Statement put out by CNN World News is a FRAUD, as CNN well knows. The false Statement was linked to a Fake News site (from Nigeria) and, of course, immediately picked up by CNN, and blared out as a ‘legitimate’ headline. The Official Statement by Iran was just released, and posted on TRUTH, below. Authorities are looking to determine whether or not a crime was committed on the issuance of the Fake CNN World Statement, or was it a sick rogue player? CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible ‘reporting.’ Results of the investigation will be announced in the near future.” …

CNN is defending its reporting on the statement. A spokesperson said, “The statement in question was obtained by CNN from Iranian officials and reported on multiple Iranian state media outlets. We received the statement from specific official Iranian spokespeople who are known to us.” …

Other outlets, including The New York Times and PBS, reported on a statement similar to the one that CNN did. …

Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, also weighed in on Trump’s post attacking CNN.

Carr wrote, “More outrageous conduct from CNN. Fake news is bad enough for the country, but pushing out a hoax headline in such a sensitive national security moment as this requires accountability. Iran put out an official statement that simply cannot be squared with the one CNN’s false headline attributes to them. Time for change at CNN.”

The Justice Department is currently reviewing Paramount’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN.

Carr has no direct authority over CNN, because it broadcasts on cable TV, not over the airwaves. But Trump has a history of abusing the extensive powers of the executive branch, including using antitrust regulations to block planned mergers, to shake down media companies and intimidate them into providing friendlier coverage.

April 5, 2026

The President Uses the Threat of War Crimes Against Iran as a Negotiating Tactic
Category: Policy Illegality

Donald Trump has raised, then dropped, multiple different strategic objectives for his war against Iran. But he has been consistent about America’s tactics. He has repeatedly announced a contempt for international law and a fascination with indiscriminate destruction that crosses the line to war crimes.

The New York Times reports on his latest threats:

Power plants, desalination stations, oil wells, roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

They are the foundations of civilian life in Iran, and their destruction by American and Israeli forces would cause widespread suffering among the country’s 93 million people—and in most cases would be considered a war crime under international law.

Yet President Trump has repeatedly threatened to do exactly that, with the aim of sending Iran “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong,” as he put it in a speech on Wednesday. …

International laws aimed at preventing the horrors of total war are codified in a series of agreements, including the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles and the United Nations Charter. Deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure violate those. So does pillaging a country, which Mr. Trump has suggested he might do by taking Iran’s oil. …

During a standoff with Iran in his first administration, Mr. Trump threatened to destroy 52 cultural sites in the country. Mark T. Esper, then the defense secretary, acknowledged that hitting such sites would be a war crime and said the Pentagon would not do it.

The second Trump administration has taken a different approach.

Then he went further, posting: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” basically a warning that he is prepared to use nukes to commit genocide on a mass scale to try to win an illegal war with no clear purpose.

Basically, what this suggests is that unless something stops him, there is no limit to the cruelty he will unleash to get his way.

April 4, 2026

The DOJ Declares the Presidential Records Act Unconstitutional to Give Trump Cover to Destroy Evidence of Presidential Corruption and Illegality
Category: Political Corruption

Donald Trump’s theory of presidential power is that it is a grant of absolute authority vested in one man, answerable to no other institution. It isn’t even subject to questioning or scrutiny, which is why his Justice Department has now declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional—laying the legal groundwork to destroy records of his presidency and refuse to hand them over when he leaves office.

Politico reports:

The Trump administration’s abrupt declaration that the federal law governing presidential records for the past 48 years is unconstitutional is creating confusion about access to records of past presidencies, including documents that are on the verge of public release.

The Wednesday memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which challenges the Presidential Records Act, appears intended to give President Donald Trump the legal leeway to destroy White House records from his current term. It also gives him legal backing to refuse to hand over any remaining records to the National Archives and Records Administration when he leaves office in 2029. …

[T]he Archives received more than 200 requests for White House records from Trump’s first term after the legal window for such requests opened on Jan. 20. The future of those requests now appears to be up in the air.

Kelly McClanahan, a lawyer pursuing several lawsuits seeking copies of records Trump took to Mar-a-Lago during his first term and the White House’s handling of several national security-related controversies, said he was incensed by the new opinion and fears the administration could begin to destroy records at any time.

To be sure, anyone as neck-deep in corruption, abuses of civil rights, and the mass killing of civilians as the Trump administration would certainly want to be able to destroy all official records of their actions. But a free society, which holds its leaders accountable, demands that they be prevented from doing so.

April 3, 2026

Trump Issues an Executive Order to Dictate the Rules for College Football and Enforce Them by Cutting Federal Funding
Category: Policy Illegality

Donald Trump views executive orders, not as mere directives for the administration of the government, but as edicts expressing his demands for control over all parts of society, as if he were an absolute monarch entitled to have the final say on everything. That now includes the internal rules of college football.

CBS Sports reports:

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order of “urgent national action to save college sports,” an intervention at the highest level aimed at federally regulating NIL collectives, limiting transfer movement, capping player eligibility, and enacting funding requirements for the Olympics and women’s sports, the White House announced Friday.

Trump’s recommendation includes strict guardrails on player transfers and even mentions the return of the NCAA’s “one-time” transfer rule, with an exception for grad transfers. …

Trump’s order includes a provision to review federal government grants and contracts for schools and potentially cut funding if they fail to comply with NCAA rules, according to the fact sheet released by The White House. …

Many of those in attendance at Trump’s gathering last month favored the SCORE Act, first introduced in July 2025 by members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Backed by the NCAA and the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, the SCORE Act aims at regulating payments made to collegiate athletes, but has not passed.

This is another attempt by Trump to weaponize federal funding to impose his edicts on universities. And note that this is not just a grab for direct presidential control over NCAA rules. It is also an attempt to use executive decrees to bypass Congress entirely.

April 2, 2026

Hegseth Blocks Merit-Based Promotion of Women and Minority Servicemembers and Fires Decorated Generals For Insufficient Loyalty
Category: Power Consolidation

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has begun an unprecedented intervention in the promotion system in the U.S. military, blocking candidates with excellent records recommended by promotion boards. His overall pattern is to block promotion of women and minorities—but also to purge officers with suspect political loyalties.

NBC News reports:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has taken steps to block or delay promotions for more than a dozen Black and female senior officers across all four branches of the military, some of whom are seen as having been targeted because of their race, gender, or perceived affiliation with Biden administration policies or officials, according to nine U.S. officials familiar with the process.

The process within the Army, the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines is structured to ensure the most qualified officers get promoted. Hegseth’s decision to intervene in the process has raised concerns among some officials within those military branches and the White House, the nine U.S. officials familiar with the situation said. …

On Thursday Hegseth fired the Army chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, whose term was expected to be four years ending in September 2027. George, the Army’s top officer, was senior military assistant to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin during the Biden administration.

By law the president has the most authority to block a military promotion, either an individual recommendation or a name on a list. If a recommended promotion is pulled before it is transmitted to the White House, a reason must be provided, such as an ongoing investigation or an allegation about an officer’s conduct, and the defense secretary typically does not make those decisions. Candidates for promotion have been removed in the past if there were allegations against them or military investigations into them. The people removed from promotion lists did not have open investigations against them, U.S. officials said.

When we connect this with the administration’s ongoing commission of war crimes, its threats to commit more war crimes, and Donald Trump’s repeated threat to deploy troops to suppress political protest at home, this suggests the kind of political purge of the military necessary for a dictator to ensure unquestioned obedience and consolidate absolute power.

April 1, 2026

The White House Let Kristi Noem’s Corruption Slide For Over a Year Before Allowing an Investigation
Category: Personal Grift

One of the hallmarks of the Trump administration is its open and spectacular political corruption—often conducted under protection from the very top. But now that Kristi Noem has taken the fall for the bad press from executing Trump’s policies at the Department of Homeland Security, investigators are beginning to dig into the corruption there.

The New York Times has an overview:

The focus of the investigation by the inspector general, Joseph V. Cuffari, who was nominated to his post by President Trump in his first term, reflects the widening fallout from Ms. Noem’s rocky tenure. Mr. Trump abruptly fired her last month amid criticisms of an expensive advertising campaign that prominently featured her. The inquiry deepens the questions about the latitude she granted to Mr. Lewandowski, a special adviser who was not an official government employee and was supposed to serve in a limited capacity. …

Mr. Cuffari, who was confirmed to his position in 2019, is one of the few remaining inspectors general after Mr. Trump fired or demoted many of them in his second term.

Mr. Cuffari clashed with Ms. Noem when she was leading the department, and he told Congress earlier this year that D.H.S. officials had blocked him from accessing critical information and databases needed for his investigations. Ms. Noem said at the time that Mr. Cuffari was seeking overly broad access to department information. …

The inspector general’s inquiry is intensifying the spotlight on the tight grip that Ms. Noem and Mr. Lewandowski had on contracts inside the agency, and the concerns among homeland security officials that Mr. Lewandowski was trying to enrich himself through his role, as The Times previously reported.

The question is why this investigation is only happening now. After more than a year of persistent reports of corruption at DHS, it seems the few remaining inspectors general are only permitted to do their job once the president has stopped running interference for one of his loyalists.

April 1, 2026

Trump Threatens to Withdraw from NATO, an Illegal Act Without Congressional Approval
Category: Policy Illegality

Donald Trump likes to go around claiming the power to rule by his personal whim, asserting authority the president simply does not possess under the U.S. Constitution. He has already started a war without approval from Congress, and this has emboldened him to talk about withdrawing from NATO—and its underlying treaty—also without approval from Congress. But this is expressly illegal.

CNN reports:

Trump told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper in an interview published Wednesday that he would reconsider the US’ NATO membership. He later doubled down, telling Reuters he was “absolutely” considering withdrawing from the alliance. …

Yet despite Trump’s claims that he can withdraw the United States from the alliance, a law passed by Congress in 2023 says the move would require the advice and consent of the Senate, with two-thirds of senators in agreement, or an act of Congress. …

The requirement for congressional approval means that even if all Republicans voted with Trump to withdraw the United States from NATO, it would require several Democrats—at least 14 if all Republicans are present—to join them to pass the legislation.

That’s unlikely to happen, as Sen. Thom Tillis, the top Republican on the bipartisan Senate NATO Observer Group, has warned against damaging the military alliance.

Tillis said in a March interview with ABC’s “This Week” that it is “factually not true” that Trump can pull out of NATO without Congress.

The 2023 law is redundant. NATO was formed by the North Atlantic Treaty, and under the Constitution, treaties are made with the approval of Congress and then become the law of the land—which implies that a treaty cannot be dissolved without the approval of Congress, either.

March 31, 2026

Trump Issues an Unconstitutional Executive Order Asserting Control over Voting Lists and Mail-In Ballots
Category: Power Consolidation

Donald Trump is desperate to disrupt this year’s midterm congressional elections, which are almost certain to wipe out his party’s majority in Congress and lead to increased congressional resistance to his agenda. He has already attempted once to exert direct presidential control over the election process, and now he’s making another try.

A British newspaper, The Guardian, is somehow far more forthright about how this contradicts the U.S. Constitution than most American outlets:

Donald Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to compile a national voter file and to restrict the use of mail-in ballots, an unprecedented move that is probably unconstitutional.

The executive order directs the Department of Homeland Security to work with the Social Security Administration to compile a list of verified US citizens who can vote in every state. It also directs the United States Postal Service (USPS) to begin rule-making on a process that would require states to notify the agency of voters who intend to receive a mail-in ballot and prohibit them from receiving one unless they are on a USPS-approved list of eligible voters.

Trump repeated a series of falsehoods about voting before signing the order in the Oval Office on Tuesday. …

“There’s not a single provision in here that will withstand judicial review. This is a wholly unconstitutional EO,” said David Becker, the executive director for the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a non-profit.

The US constitution gives the president no authority over elections and expressly authorizes states to set election rules.

The Constitution’s dispersal of voting administration to the states is intended to prevent exactly what Trump is trying to do. But the goal of this executive order is not just to get away with a presidential takeover of the process. It is also laying the groundwork to challenge the legitimacy of any vote that doesn’t follow Trump’s rules—and to try to overturn it.

March 31, 2026

Hegseth Stops Investigation of Apache Pilots Who Conducted Unscheduled Flybys Over Kid Rock’s House During No Kings Protests
Category: Power Consolidation

Is the U.S. military intended to be used to protect American citizens and secure our national interests—or is it available as an extremely expensive way to provide free publicity for politically connected celebrities? The Trump administration is treating it as the latter, in the case of a helicopter flyby used to create social media content for a pro-Trump, has-been celebrity.

The Washington Post reports:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday nullified an Army investigation into the unauthorized helicopter flybys of musician Kid Rock’s estate and anti-Trump protests in Tennessee over the weekend, announcing the move just hours after military officials opened their disciplinary review of the soldiers involved.

“No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, Patriots,” Hegseth wrote on social media.

Kid Rock, whose legal name is Robert Ritchie, is an enthusiastic, longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, and he is widely admired among the president’s political base. Hegseth’s swift intervention in the case raised immediate questions about whether the military can hold its own accountable for actions that Hegseth may deem politically favorable. …

Earlier Tuesday, Army officials had said the Apache pilots were suspended while officials investigated the incident.

“The Army takes any allegations of unauthorized or unsafe flight operations very seriously and is committed to enforcing standards and holding personnel accountable,” it said in a statement.

This is another example of Pete Hegseth turning the U.S. military into a political instrument by sabotaging its internal institutions and overruling the decisions of independent and nonpartisan boards.

March 30, 2026

Stephen Miller Ordered ICE to Provoke Violent Confrontations With Minneapolis Protesters that Led to the Execution of Two Americans
Category: Policy Illegality

The killings of observers at immigration raids in Minneapolis early this year were no accident. We now have confirmation from insiders at the Department of Homeland Security that this was the result of a deliberate policy out of the White House to initiate violent confrontations in order to deny opponents of mass deportations the appearance of a public relations victory.

The Daily Mail has the scoop behind a paywall, but it is summarized by The New Republic:

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s outrageous order to immigration officials may have sparked the confrontation that killed an American citizen.

During one of his many furious morning calls with immigration enforcement officials, Miller demanded that federal agents be dispatched to certain areas of Minneapolis in order to “force confrontations” with anti-ICE protesters, two senior DHS sources told the Daily Mail.

Miller repeatedly urged federal agents to engage with protesters in order to win a “PR battle,” one official told the outlet.

He told officials that anti-ICE could not be viewed as successful, and repeatedly said that demonstrators “need to be vanquished by any force necessary,” another DHS source told the Mail.

Miller is the architect and instigator of Donald Trump’s militarized mass deportation policy, and he is the one person who has not been thrown under the bus by Trump and still retains his full backing. But he is responsible for the policy that triggered the murder of bystanders for exercising their First Amendment right to observe their government.

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On Tuesday morning, the president of the United States threatened to massacre millions of people to open up a shipping lane. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” The world has become inured to Trump’s bluster, so many people treated this monstrous threat as a bluff—yet another entry in the growing list of TACO (“Trump always chickens out”) moments.

That’s the wrong way to look at it. What Trump’s statement revealed was not just a negotiating tactic but something more disturbing: a president who recognizes no legal, constitutional, or moral limits on his conduct. He is unfit for office and should be removed immediately. Not because of this one threat alone—but because there is a pattern that has become impossible to ignore.

Trump’s Civilizational Threat

Two implications of Trump’s statement are difficult to avoid. First, this was a nuclear threat. Only nuclear weapons have the destructive capacity to wipe out a “whole civilization” in a single night; there is no other way to accomplish this goal. He wasn’t threatening to launch a long and arduous military campaign, allowing for the discrimination between combatant and civilian. He was threatening to inflict apocalyptic devastation on the whole country all at once.

Second, Trump’s rhetoric was genocidal. The definition of genocide outlined in the Genocide Convention (which was ratified by the U.S. Senate) encompasses “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Intent is one of the most difficult elements of genocide to prove, but if Trump had followed through, his own words would condemn him. His statement wasn’t just a declaration of intent to destroy a particular group—it was a threat to kill every member of diverse national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups as part of a larger cultural whole. Trump promised that the civilization belonging to these groups was “never to be brought back again.”

Ten hours after Trump issued his threat, he announced that a Pakistani-brokered two-week ceasefire would take immediate effect. Oil prices plunged, stocks rose, and Trump’s defenders crowed about the “art of the deal.” Even objective observers gave Trump credit. The New York Times’ David Sanger observed that his “tactic of escalating his rhetoric to astronomical levels certainly helped him find an offramp he had been seeking for weeks.” Katherine Mangu-Ward, the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, dismissed Trump’s threat to kill millions of people as “some colorful language” and preemptively declared that “no one seems to have the stomach” for an impeachment fight.

This is how the ratchet of normalization works—Trump makes the unthinkable thinkable, and when the worst-case scenario doesn’t come to pass, we all breathe a collective sigh of relief. But it’s time to stop seeking refuge in the familiarity of this pattern. Trump threatened to commit genocide in the context of an illegal war. It would be fantastically irresponsible to retreat to comfortable rationalizations about “TACO” or how Trump should be taken “seriously” instead of “literally.” We can’t be expected to know the inner workings of Trump’s mind, but even if he was faking it, the terror for Iranians of the mere hint of nuclear annihilation was all too real. That matters.

It’s true that the most parsimonious explanation for Trump’s Tuesday statement is that he’s a reckless actor who didn’t consider the full implications of what he was saying. Would he actually nuke Tehran? Could he really try to extinguish a “whole civilization”? These questions have no completely reliable answers—which is itself the problem. He has long adopted maximalist negotiating positions in search of better deals. But the past few months have shown that it has never been more dangerous to concoct benign explanations for his behavior. Since the overthrow of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in January, Trump has become increasingly unconstrained. He recently declared that the only limits on his power are “my own morality” and “my own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” He said, “I don’t need international law.” And he also doesn’t respect American law, as he has repeatedly demonstrated.

Unchecked, Unauthorized, Unbound

Article I, section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress the sole authority to declare war. While the president is Commander in Chief of the armed forces and has some limited authority to authorize military actions, it’s extremely difficult to find a legal justification for Trump’s war in Iran. For example, the Trump administration has argued that Iran was planning to launch imminent attacks on the United States, but it produced no evidence for this claim. The admission came from Secretary of State Marco Rubio himself: the United States struck preemptively. This was not because Iran had attacked or was about to, but because Israel was planning to strike and American officials feared Iranian retaliation against U.S. forces. There was no imminent threat to the American homeland. There was no attack to respond to. Washington simply got there first without exploring alternative defensive measures to protect its troops on overseas bases.

Trump had an opportunity to present his case for attacking Iran during his State of the Union address, delivered just four days before he launched the war, but he declined to do so. He could have asked Congress for a joint resolution to authorize the war, but he did not.

In an address on March 31, Trump claimed that the nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration—which Trump shredded during his first term—would have “led to a colossal arsenal of massive nuclear weapons for Iran. They would have had them years ago, and they would have used them. It would have been a different world. There would have been no Middle East, no Israel right now, in my opinion, in the opinion of a lot of great experts.” Which experts would those be? Although he declared that the United States “obliterated” the Iranian nuclear weapons program last summer, he said Iran was on the verge of building a “nuclear weapon like nobody has ever seen before.” He said Tehran “would soon have had missiles that could reach the American homeland, Europe, and virtually any other place on earth.” The intelligence community reported that Iran did not have missiles capable of reaching the United States.

When the Bush administration justified the Iraq War with faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, it was an epoch-defining scandal. But when Trump lies about Iran’s capabilities to sell a destructive war of choice, we barely notice. This numbing of our collective critical faculties and indifference toward democratic procedure and the rule of law is a disastrous precedent that should no longer be allowed to stand. At this stage, impeachment is not merely about accountability for a rogue president, but an assertion of our own moral limits—a reminder to ourselves that some things should still remain beyond the pale.

No Plan, No Endgame

It’s clear that Trump expected the war to be brief and relatively painless, like the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites last summer or the Maduro operation. His national security team didn’t expect Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, and Trump has constructed an echo chamber within the executive branch that makes it impossible for dissenting voices to get through. Trump’s rationale for the war has shifted by the day. He called upon the Iranian people to overthrow their government, then demanded total surrender. Having launched the war to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, he now says “I don’t care” about the country’s stockpile of enriched uranium because it’s “so far underground.” In other words, he was threatening to nuke Iran and commit genocide for a non-threat?

Trump says Iran’s new peace plan is a “workable basis on which to negotiate,” even though it reads as a maximalist wishlist. Tehran has maintained its control over the Strait of Hormuz (which it is using to stop oil shipments in retaliation of Israel’s attack on Lebanon after the ceasefire was announced) while demanding guaranteed uranium enrichment, removal of all primary and secondary sanctions, elimination of all U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) resolutions targeting Iran, war reparations, withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the region, and a ceasefire across all fronts—including Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Trump’s willingness to accept these conditions as the basis of ongoing negotiations demonstrates that he has reversed his core war aims in a matter of days. In other words, he’s improvising. He never had a plan for a war that didn’t magically end with the toppling of the Iranian regime overnight.

That itself ought to be impeachable.

But consider the foreign policy implications of a president who has shredded his own credibility. If Trump were to threaten China with a massive retaliation in the event of an invasion of Taiwan, would Beijing take him seriously, literally, or neither?

Those mindlessly crediting Trump’s ability to successfully negotiate an “offramp” with “escalating” rhetoric send him exactly the wrong message: genocidal threats are effective, so use them more frequently. This message will only encourage Trump to take the world to the brink over and over again with no certainty that we’ll be able to pull him back. This doesn’t just make those abroad whom Trump is threatening helpless, but Americans too. He is acting in their name—yet they are unable to stop him.

A president who deploys the threat of civilizational destruction as a negotiating tactic—and is rewarded for it—is exactly the sort of ruler the removal mechanisms were designed to address. That the worst didn’t happen this time is not an argument for patience. It is an argument for urgency. At this stage, it is a matter of Americans taking back control of their own fate—as well as the fate of all those whose lives Trump treats as a bargaining chip.

Dozens of members of Congress have called upon the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. We should harbor no illusions about whether any effort to remove Trump is politically feasible. Even if his Cabinet determined that he’s unfit to serve—an unlikely outcome given the loyalties Trump has cultivated within the executive branch—two-thirds of the House and Senate would have to override him if he disputed this conclusion. This is an even higher burden than impeachment, which only requires a simple majority in the House to impeach and a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict.

Still, calling for Trump’s removal is the right thing to do. This is not the time to worry about the political optics of invoking the 25th or pushing for impeachment. The attempt alone sends a message and establishes some limits, and reining in a dangerous president isn’t just a political choice—it’s a constitutional obligation.

As Trump’s approval rating plummets and a midterm rout looks increasingly likely, he will likely get more desperate. His actions first in Venezuela and then in Iran show that his conduct abroad is getting more erratic and extreme and he’ll go to any lengths—including threatening genocide and a nuclear holocaust—to exert power in the areas where he still wields it. Now is the time to stop this madness. The longer we wait, the more normal it becomes.

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The Trump administration’s professions of religious piety have always been repeated with greater vehemence than credibility, but it is still shocking to see a new report claiming that in January, top officials at the Pentagon attempted to strong-arm Pope Leo XIV for refusing to lend his moral authority to Trump’s wars.

The normally Trump-friendly outlet The Free Press couldn’t pass up the scoop, but if you don’t want to cross their paywall, The New Republic has a summary:

Days after Pope Leo XIV delivered his State of the World speech, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s U.S. representative, to a closed-door Pentagon meeting for a bitter lecture.

“The United States,” Colby said, according to a blistering new report by The Free Press, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

One U.S. official present at the meeting brought up the Avignon papacy, a period in the 14th century in which the French monarchy bent the Catholic Church into submission, ordering an attack on Pope Boniface VIII that led to his downfall and subsequent death and forcing the papacy to relocate from Rome to Avignon, a region inside France. …

The Vatican was so alarmed by the Pentagon’s warning that Pope Leo cancelled his plans to visit the U.S. later in the year, reported Hale, who noted that “many in the Vatican saw the Pentagon’s reference to an Avignon papacy as a threat to use military force against the Holy See.”

As appalling as this is, it is also somewhat comical, and not just for the hypocrisy given the administration’s loud appeals to Christian traditionalism. It raises the Trump administration’s attempts to persecute and intimidate his critics to the level of insane hubris, targeting an institution so large and powerful that it has humbled kings centuries before Trump came along.

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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There is an irony buried in Hungarian political history. Fidesz—the Viktor Orbán-led party that has ruled with a supermajority for the last 16 years, reshaping Hungary’s constitution, packing its courts, weakening its free press, and gradually hollowing out most institutions that might check its power—is an acronym in Hungarian for “the Alliance of Young Democrats.” Founded in 1988 by students who gathered in clandestine groups to resist a communist government, Fidesz was initially conceived as a direct challenge to authoritarian rule. Orbán, one of its founders, even accepted a fellowship from George Soros (a man he would later demonize) to study civil society at Oxford.

On April 12, Hungarians will go to the polls to take part in what is shaping up to be the most consequential election the country has seen since its democratic transition in 1990—one that could end Orbán’s long grip on power. Recent polling shows just one in five voters under the age of 40 backing Fidesz. Orbán has been reduced to pleading with parents on the campaign trail to drive home the stakes to their adult children. Fidesz is no longer in any meaningful sense an “Alliance of Young Democrats”—and hasn’t been in a long time. In fact, it has become the very political machine it was originally created to dismantle.

Orbán’s tenure has evolved into an experiment in illiberalism within the European Union—an “illiberal state,” in his own words—that he has sought to export as an election-proof model for nationalist allies like Donald Trump. But the experiment may be about to blow up, and the consequences could extend far beyond the borders of this small central European country.

A Perilous Pardon

The deepest single wound to Orbán’s political standing—whether or not it ultimately proves fatal—was self-inflicted: a presidential pardon. In February 2024, the Hungarian investigative outlet 444 revealed that Hungarian President Katalin Novák—whose role in national politics is largely ceremonial—had quietly freed a man convicted of helping cover up systematic child sexual abuse at a state-run orphanage. The pardoned man, a deputy director of a children’s home, had pressured victims to retract their testimonies against the institution’s director, who was convicted of abusing at least 10 children between 2004 and 2016. Novák had granted the pardon in April 2023 and kept it secret.

The public reaction was volcanic. Protests erupted in Budapest demanding Novák’s resignation, with an enormous demonstration on Heroes’ Square called the “Monsters Walk Outside Protest.” Also implicated was Judit Varga, a key Fidesz figure who had certified the pardon as Hungary’s then-minister of justice. She had been expected to lead Fidesz’s list for the European Parliament elections; Orbán himself had called her a “born talent” who “possessed everything required for somebody to take charge of a country.” Both women resigned within days.

The scandal was revealing in multiple ways. Here was a government that had built its entire political identity on the defense of Christian families and the protection of children, and it had quietly freed a child abuse accomplice. But equally significant was what happened next: Varga’s ex-husband, a Fidesz insider named Péter Magyar, went public. In a bombshell interview with the independent Hungarian media outlet Partizán that reached nearly 2.7 million views, Magyar described the government as a “political facade” designed to conceal the machinations of those in power and amass vast fortunes for them. He then organized a rally on March 15, 2024, attended by tens of thousands.

From that moment, Hungary had a proper opposition. Magyar wasted no time converting popular rage into institutional power. Just four months after announcing his party, Tisza won nearly a third of the vote in the June 2024 European Parliament elections, securing seven seats, the highest share won by any non-Fidesz party since 2006. Fidesz, meanwhile, took under 45% and 11 seats, its worst-ever performance in an EU election. The result gave Magyar members of the European Parliament (MEPs), resources, international credibility, and a platform in Brussels that previous Hungarian opposition parties had never possessed. It also confirmed something more fundamental: that Tisza was not a protest movement but a political party capable of competing in elections.

Appeasement Tour

Central to modern Hungarian politics is Orbán’s relationship with Hungary’s neighbor, Ukraine. Orbán has staked his reelection on passionate opposition to Western aid for Ukraine, personified by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom Fidesz billboards have plastered across the country with the slogan “Don’t let Zelenskyy have the last laugh.” Orbán claims EU alignment would bankrupt Hungary and send its young men to die. Hungary has been the only EU member state to refuse to allow weapons bound for Ukraine to transit its territory, and Orbán has repeatedly blocked and delayed EU sanctions packages and military aid.

The most brazen move came in July 2024, days into Hungary’s rotating presidency of the Council of the EU. Without consulting EU partners, Orbán flew to Kyiv, then Moscow to meet Putin, then Beijing to meet Xi Jinping, a self-proclaimed “peace mission” in which Putin suggested that Orbán was representing the European Council. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen dismissed it as “nothing but an appeasement mission.” In an unprecedented rebuke, EU member states refused to attend a strategic summit Hungary was scheduled to host, holding their own separate meeting instead.

Kleptocracy

Behind the geopolitical theater lies the economic reality that is making ordinary Hungarians increasingly furious. After contracting by 0.9% in 2023, Hungary’s economy grew by only 0.5% in 2024 and was projected at 0.4% in 2025, slower than the EU average, while the budget deficit is projected at 4.6% in 2025 and is expected to increase to 5.2% in 2026, significantly exceeding the EU’s 3% target. By some metrics including household consumption, at just 72% of the EU average, Hungary has become the poorest country in the bloc.

The figures are not abstractions. The village of Felcsút, population 1,800, is Orbán’s childhood home, which has transformed since 2010 into a personal fiefdom. Its soccer club, the Puskás Akadémia, has received hundreds of millions in state support through subsidies, tax schemes, and public sponsorships, despite average attendances of around 1,500 per match. Its stadium holds nearly twice the population of the town. EU funds also financed a 6-kilometer tourist railway between the stadium and a neighboring arboretum, declared a national priority investment, which has lost money every year since it opened. In other words, Orbán’s economic model is reminiscent of Third World potentates who’d rather shovel money into wasteful projects for favored constituencies and supporters rather than productive endeavors that benefit all Hungarians.

Then there is Lőrinc Mészáros, a former gas fitter and Orbán’s childhood friend, who rose to become Hungary’s wealthiest man, his fortune built almost exclusively on public contracts. Adjacent to his private estate sits a zoo—with zebras, antelopes—that became a national symbol of the ruling elite’s extravagance. In the summer of 2025, former Fidesz MP Ákos Hadházy organized public “safari tours” to the estate, as a form of protest—thousands of Hungarians came, in lines of cars stretching kilometers, to see for themselves what their taxes had built.

At the same time, approximately 19 billion euros in EU funds sit frozen over rule-of-law concerns—money that could have built hospitals and schools, locked away while the men around Orbán keep getting richer.

Spies, Secrets, and Sovereignty

The architecture of control did not stop at media—which Orbán coopted by placing loyalists in key positions across the country’s news outlets—or at money, which he shoveled to favored constituencies and cronies. In December 2023, Hungary passed the Sovereignty Protection Act, creating an office with sweeping powers to investigate any individual or organization receiving foreign funding deemed threatening to national sovereignty: targeting nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), journalists, academic institutions, and LGBTQ+ groups. Critics immediately compared it to Russia’s foreign agents law. The office’s first report named journalists from The New York Times and CNN alongside Hungarian NGO staff as threats to Hungarian sovereignty, prompting the European Commission to launch infringement proceedings against the law.

The proceedings were hardly overreach. The law’s purpose became even clearer on March 24 of this year. Hungarian investigative outlet Direkt36 reported that a covert operation had been run against Tisza’s IT infrastructure ahead of the election. Magyar called the scandal “Hungary’s Watergate” and a police detective publicly corroborated elements of the account. The government scrambled to offer a counter-narrative, claiming the IT specialists were Ukrainian agents who had infiltrated Tisza. But the explanation had an obvious flaw: if Ukraine was spying on a Hungarian political campaign, embedding agents in the party more sympathetic to Ukrainian interests was a peculiar way to do so.

Two days prior to the Direkt36 report, The Washington Post reported that Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó had been regularly briefing Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during breaks in Council of the EU meetings, passing live reports on closed-door discussions about sanctions and Ukraine aid. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the revelation “shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.” Szijjártó confirmed regular contact with Lavrov, framing it as normal diplomacy.

The Autocrat’s Network

For 16 years, Orbán has presented himself as the great protector of ethnic Hungarian minorities living beyond Hungary’s borders. The 1.2 million Hungarians in Transylvania have delivered near-unanimous support for Fidesz in Hungarian elections. But in 2025, that bond was tested. Orbán backed Romanian ultranationalist George Simion, even though he had led attacks on a Hungarian military cemetery in Transylvania and described the ethnic Hungarian party as a “hideous, chauvinistic creature”—likely calculating that a Simion presidency would pull Romania away from its staunchly pro-Ukraine, pro-NATO course and toward the Moscow-friendly axis Orbán had been cultivating. The response was telling: ethnic Hungarians voted overwhelmingly for Simion’s liberal opponent, Nicușor Dan, contributing decisively to his margin of victory. The communities Orbán claims to champion repudiated him—or at the very least declined to follow his lead after 16 years of doing so.

Internationally, Orbán’s camp has leaned into a broad coalition of nationalist allies. Endorsements arrived from Marine Le Pen, Alice Weidel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Javier Milei. Vladimir Putin’s state media openly backs him. Trump has called Orbán “a great man” and today, JD Vance arrived in Budapest for a two-day visit—following Marco Rubio’s own trip in February—making the administration’s investment in an Orbán victory unmistakable.

The Washington Post also reported in March 2026 that Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service had internally proposed staging a false-flag assassination attempt on Orbán to improve his electoral odds. Then, with the election less than a week away, Serbian authorities announced the discovery of explosives near the Balkan Stream pipeline carrying Russian gas to Hungary. Orbán convened an emergency defense council and, while stopping short of a direct accusation, said the incident fit “into the chain” of Ukrainian actions against Hungarian energy supplies. But Magyar claimed to have seen it coming; posting on X that for weeks he had been receiving warnings that Orbán—with Serbian and Russian assistance—“may be planning to cross another line.”

What Comes Next

With the election mere days away, Politico’s Poll of Polls shows Tisza outpacing Fidesz by 10%. Late-deciding voters, who broke for Fidesz in 2022, now appear to be shifting toward Tisza. Partizán’s election meter, which aggregates multiple polls, projects a 78.5% chance that Tisza gains the majority.

But thanks to Fidesz’s self-serving electoral reforms that removed the ceiling on campaign spending and gerrymandered more than a third of electoral districts, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace estimates that an opposition party may need around 55% of the popular vote to secure a simple parliamentary majority; Fidesz could potentially win a supermajority with as little as 45%.

It is by no means certain, therefore, that Orbán will be defeated. Still, the question hanging over Hungary in the final week is one that would have been unthinkable two years ago: What happens if Orbán loses, and what if he refuses to leave? He is not Lukashenko or Maduro. Hungary remains an EU member state with international monitors and a business class with too much invested in European markets to stomach outright election theft.

But he is not without options. Fidesz has already amended electoral law twice since Magyar emerged, and more likely than outright refusal is that Orbán would use the outgoing parliament’s remaining weeks—in which his two-thirds majority still allows constitutional amendments—to lock Fidesz loyalists into the courts, regulatory bodies, and constitutional oversight mechanisms that no simple parliamentary majority can dislodge. That would effectively ensure that, even in opposition, Orbán’s system survives him.

The man who built Hungary’s system of illiberal democracy, gerrymandered constituencies, bought media empires, rewrote the constitution, turned EU funds into patronage, and expelled a Western university while welcoming a Chinese one in its place is discovering that systems of control have limits. Scandal after scandal—a pardoned child abuser, a spying operation against the opposition, NATO secrets passed to Moscow—might each have been managed in isolation. All of this, combined with an abysmal economy, has produced something Orbán’s machine was not designed to handle: a population that has simply stopped believing him.

If Orbán does lose, it will signal that there are limits to the ability of authoritarians in power even after they have consolidated their hold and rigged the playing field. The opposition faces an uphill task, but it can prevail with the right leader with a smart strategy. If the Hungarian opposition wins, it will offer hope and lessons to liberals world over engaged in a struggle against authoritarianism.

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Trump and his loyalist FCC Chairman Brendan Carr keep threatening to abuse their power to punish Trump’s political enemies. They just did it again, threatening CNN for posting “fake news”—when it was simply reporting a real announcement from the Iranian regime that contradicted Trump’s claims.

Deadline reports:

About 90 minutes after announcing a two-week ceasefire in the war in Iran, Donald Trump was irate over CNN’s reporting of a statement issued by the country’s Supreme National Security Council, declaring victory and averting the president’s threat to launch attacks on civilian infrastructure.

Trump posted on Truth Social at 8:01 p.m. ET, “The alleged Statement put out by CNN World News is a FRAUD, as CNN well knows. The false Statement was linked to a Fake News site (from Nigeria) and, of course, immediately picked up by CNN, and blared out as a ‘legitimate’ headline. The Official Statement by Iran was just released, and posted on TRUTH, below. Authorities are looking to determine whether or not a crime was committed on the issuance of the Fake CNN World Statement, or was it a sick rogue player? CNN is being ordered to immediately withdraw this Statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible ‘reporting.’ Results of the investigation will be announced in the near future.” …

CNN is defending its reporting on the statement. A spokesperson said, “The statement in question was obtained by CNN from Iranian officials and reported on multiple Iranian state media outlets. We received the statement from specific official Iranian spokespeople who are known to us.” …

Other outlets, including The New York Times and PBS, reported on a statement similar to the one that CNN did. …

Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, also weighed in on Trump’s post attacking CNN.

Carr wrote, “More outrageous conduct from CNN. Fake news is bad enough for the country, but pushing out a hoax headline in such a sensitive national security moment as this requires accountability. Iran put out an official statement that simply cannot be squared with the one CNN’s false headline attributes to them. Time for change at CNN.”

The Justice Department is currently reviewing Paramount’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of CNN.

Carr has no direct authority over CNN, because it broadcasts on cable TV, not over the airwaves. But Trump has a history of abusing the extensive powers of the executive branch, including using antitrust regulations to block planned mergers, to shake down media companies and intimidate them into providing friendlier coverage.

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

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Today, we are delighted to bring you the full video and lightly edited transcript of a brilliant conversation between of Liberal Currents—a sprightly, interesting publication that you should subscribe to—and constitutional lawyer Robert Black on the historical origins and present crisis of limited government in America. They cover the historical exigencies and the philosophical breakthroughs that caused an idea that emerged in Europe to be planted in America, where the soil for it has become suddenly inhospitable.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Samantha Hancox-Li: Today, I want to talk about limited government, a phrase you often see thrown around in connection with liberal democracy, with modern liberal theory. I want to talk about what it means and where it comes from and why it’s important, which I think is especially relevant as we live through what very much feels like an unprecedented assault on the idea of limited government in America. To help me talk about these questions, I’m very excited to have Robert Black on the podcast. Robert is a constitutional scholar, and the author of the Evening Constitutional.

Robert, thanks so much for coming on. To start: What is limited government?

Robert Black: These questions basically all go back to the 17th century. To some extent, you can think of it as a conversation between John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, the two great progenitors of the social contract theory. The idea of limited government is something that emerges out of Locke’s idea of the social contract in particular. Before these ideas start coalescing, there isn’t really any coherent concept of limited government. There are kings, and in the nature of being king, you can basically do whatever you want. The idea that there are things that the government cannot rightfully do gets invented, basically as part and parcel of social contract theory, and in particular the liberal version of social contract theory, which we associate with Locke.

In slightly more concrete terms, you see it in constitutional bills of rights. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. That’s a limit on what Congress can do. It is, in theory, a legal limit on what Congress can do. Our Constitution has a bunch of these limits. and most modern constitutions that have been adopted in the wake of the Second World War have also had limits like this on what the government can do. In a lot of ways, the experience of that war convinced people that this was a necessary thing.

Hancox-Li: I want to get back to Locke, and absolute monarchy, and the historical roots of all this. But to put it in context for everyone, I said that we’re living through an unprecedented assault on the idea of limited government. Do you think that’s true? And if so, what are the big symptoms here?

Black: Yeah, I do. A thing that I found myself saying a lot the last eight, nine months is that it feels like the Madisonian constitutional order—James Madison, the key architect of the U.S. Constitution, and in many ways, one of the key theorists of American limited government, which we’ll get to—is in the process of being supplanted by a Schmittian order. Carl Schmitt is essentially the core philosopher of the Third Reich, the original Nazis. Schmitt’s theories are all about unlimited, arbitrary power. Schmitt thinks there must exist, somewhere, a power that cannot be constrained by law. This is the famous line, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” It’s this idea that at some point you run into a question that the law cannot answer. And whoever is in charge of answering that question is ultimately the sovereign and has effectively unlimited power.

This is a deeply un-American idea in a very literal sense. Our entire constitutional history, our entire constitutional and political tradition, is all about rejecting this idea. Watch the way that people talk about Donald Trump, the way that people react to Trump—this year in particular, less in his first term. Essentially, he has been imbued with the powers of a Schmittian dictator. Even Schmitt agrees that the sovereignty belongs originally to the people, but he says there’s this transcendental moment in which the people imbue their sovereign power in this single figure: the dictator. And that’s how people talk about and react to Donald Trump this year, to an astonishing degree, given how completely outside the bounds of anything in American legal and political culture this is.

You read these New York Times headlines about, “It’s unclear if Trump has the authority to murder random civilians off the coast of Venezuela because he feels like it.” No, it’s not unclear at all. There’s a law that says that he can’t. “It’s unclear if he can put his face on the money despite not being dead.” Well, no, it’s not unclear. There’s a law that says it.

But what’s become unclear at this point is, does the law limit Donald Trump? Is Donald Trump forbidden from doing things just for the puny little reason that they’re illegal? I think 2024, and to some extent the whole Biden presidency, was a contest over this question. And Trump’s basically winning right now. He’s at least threatening to win in a way that’s really scary. And yes, I think completely unprecedented.

Hancox-Li: It’s interesting you brought up Schmitt and this idea. The Führer, in Nazi ideology, was meant to be like the avatar of the folk; he had a kind of democratic legitimacy by embodying the people’s will. But he wasn’t actually constrained by democratic elections. So there’s this mismatch between the institutional and the ideological. People talk about Trump in very much the same way. I think that’s a really interesting comparison.

But I also want to go back farther. In some ways, it sounds like Schmitt is recreating some of these ideas that the monarchists had.

Black: Absolutely. Recreating them for a democratic age, you could say.

Hancox-Li: That’s right. In a democratic age, an age of mass politics. There are a number of theorists of absolute monarchy. One of the ones that I know better is Robert Filmer, the author of Patriarcha.

Black: And is the antagonist of John Locke’s treatises of government.

Hancox-Li: Right. He says that the king owns the state like a father owns his family. The parallels are striking these days. (There’s a lot of gender going on here!)

Black: Oh, yes. It is genuinely fascinating, to your perennial obsessions, that this is literally the argument that John Locke’s great antagonist is making: everything is gender.

Hancox-Li: Yes. It turns out I didn’t have to make that up. They just said it. They said it was all gender themselves. But these are societies that have laws. They have legal systems. They have courts. There is the administration of justice, after a certain fashion. But there’s this vision of law as a tool in the king’s hands. The law doesn’t constrain the king; the king uses law to constrain other people. And so the great problem for limited government is, how do you bind the king’s hands?

Black: This is, philosophically speaking, the problem. I just want a brief digression because, as you were saying, the concept of the rule of law is older than the concept of limited government. The concept of the rule of law doesn’t really take root immediately, but you can trace it back to some of these judicial reforms in England by King Henry II in the late 12th century. Nobody has an idea of limited government at this point, but this is when the idea of a professional judiciary is starting to emerge. Before this, judgment is made by the king personally. This is a fact that’s sort of hiding in plain sight, in the word “court.” Why do we call judicial institutions “courts”? Well, originally it was literally “king’s court,” curia regis. People would go to the king’s court and ask the king for judgment. And the king, in dispensing judgment, was exercising this arbitrary power that is the nature of kingship. Kings can just do whatever they want. So you go to the king, you say, “I’m having this dispute with my neighbor about this piece of property,” or whatever it is. “Here’s why I think I deserve to win.” And if you convince the king, then the king writes out a writ that says, “Give this guy the property.”

This is not fundamentally any different from absolute arbitrary authority. For various reasons, many of which are practical, Henry II creates all of these professional judicial institutions. Over the next several centuries they coalesce more concretely, more stably. A thing that happens when you have people who are not the king’s own person making these judgments—even though they are making these judgments in the king’s name using power that the king gave them, which is by its nature the same unlimited power—people start getting a notion that it would be nice if the judges didn’t just apply their own whim to decide the present case. Because, in theory, that’s something that the king has a right to do. And the king isn’t literally in the room. The king has a right to rule according to whim. The judge has the same power that the king has, but they don’t have the king’s whims in the room with them. And so this idea that the way you’re supposed to decide a case, if you’re one of these professional judges, is by saying, “Well, we did the same thing in this other case that was similar,” begins to emerge.

From this, you get all of these rule of law notions about reasoned decision making, consistency, treat like cases alike. The system of judicial precedent emerges. Despite the fact that, conceptually, this is still like the arbitrary power of an absolute monarch. But this idea that, although the king has this arbitrary absolute power, he, through his judges, is supposed to rule according to law with this kind of consistency, that emerges way before the idea of anything like actual limited government—which is kind of interesting because this rule of law stuff ends up becoming absolutely essential for doing limited government. But that wasn’t the context in which it emerged.

Hancox-Li: I think it’s important to recognize some of the historical contingency lying behind what has come down to us as “the liberal package.” How it came to be is a very interesting question, full of some strange twists and turns and accidents.

We have this idea: we don’t just want the whims of a lot of different people pretending to be one person. We want a clear and consistent set of principles. They’re articulated, they’re known, they’re intelligible. The rulings of different judges are reliable.

But there’s still another step from the idea of clear and consistent legal principles to binding the king personally, that the law starts to stand above the king. And this emerges in the context of English history over a series of well-known struggles and events. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Black: Yeah, you have all of these rule of law norms. It’s still the case that the king can in principle upend any of this at any moment if he wants to. He just doesn’t, because he’s a nice guy and he’s busy hunting or whatever. That’s the status quo ante. Then, in the 17th century, we get this series of conflicts where Charles I, who takes the throne in the 1620s, gets sick of having to consult with Parliament for everything that he does.

Parliament is another one of these cases, in its origins, it is just the king’s council. It’s just, again, absolute monarch, unlimited arbitrary power. But he needs to learn something about the realm so that he can know how to impose his taxes; he needs to know where the money is so he can know how to tax it. So, he summons a Parliament from across the realm to help advise him on how to do that. A couple centuries pass, and this idea that the king has an obligation to rule through Parliament, at least in regard to certain matters like taxes—internal taxes specifically—begins to get kind of entrenched.

Charles I says, “This is actually kind of a drag. I can get money my own ways through various arcane financial devices that are purely at the king’s discretion. I don’t need to call Parliament.” And he doesn’t call a Parliament for years and years. This is the period of so-called personal rule. Finally, in 1642, when his ability to fund his various activities—largely wars, which is the main government expense in these days—runs out, he has to call Parliament now.

It turns out Parliament is not best pleased. And this leads to what we call the English Civil War. Parliament immediately makes a bunch of assertions of its own rights, privileges, prerogatives, which of course the king can’t accept. Eventually this leads to literal civil war: partisans of the king, partisans of Parliament, field armies, they meet in the field. As the Monty Python song will tell you, the king loses these battles, and therefore finds himself in a position to be tried by the Parliament—the Rump Parliament at this point, which has been purged of supporters of the king for tyranny—and he gets his head cut off. This is an earth-shattering event. The idea of divine right of kings—which is what our friend Filmer is all about—isn’t very consistent with this representative assembly, that was summoned as a king’s council in its origins, deciding, “Hey, dude, you’re a tyrant” and cutting your head off.

The next 40 years are spent, in a way, consolidating the implications of this. You have this period where Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the parliamentary faction, effectively makes himself king in the aftermath. He doesn’t call it that—he calls it, “Lord Protector.” But it’s effectively king. And then he dies, and everyone’s a bit adrift. This whole project of setting up a commonwealth—the word they use for it—is sort of running aground. In 1660, they say, “What if we just had an actual king again? What if we invite the son of the previous king, Charles II, to be king again?”

But there’s an interesting wrinkle, which is that if Parliament is inviting somebody to become king, it doesn’t seem like the idea that their kingship rests upon divine right—divine anointment, they have a personal right to it, in this Filmer way—is what’s going on here. Parliament was originally the king’s council, but now it’s Parliament deciding they want to have a king. Something has changed. Charles II, and especially James II who succeeds him, spend a few decades chafing against the implications of the restoration, that it turns out that at this point you, the king, are a creature of Parliament rather than the other way around.

This culminates in what we call the Glorious Revolution of 1689, where James II, having antagonized his entire country, gets deposed by William of Orange, who comes over from the Netherlands on a bunch of ships. One of the people on those ships is John Locke, who has been in exile this whole time writing up his theory of government, which in the end becomes basically the official philosophical justification for the Glorious Revolution and really, ultimately, the English state in the wake of the Glorious Revolution.

Hancox-Li: This is a really interesting history, and one of the things that I think is so interesting is that it starts off with a conflict over finance. It’s primarily about the king and Parliament wrestling over who controls money, because the king wants to fight all these wars, the wars are very expensive, he wants to raise more money, and he can do it for a little while. But that’s the great question that comes up a lot in this period: Who is controlling taxing and spending? But also the question of debt comes up.

One of the ways to extract money from people is to be the king and ask them for a loan. You say, “I promise, I’ll pay you back.” ... and then you take all their money, you spend it on a war somewhere, you have no money afterwards. And they say, “I would like my money back.” And you say, “I’m the king. No money for you.”

Black: “No money for you, I have sovereign immunity from being sued to collect the debt.” Yeah, turns out you are out of luck.

Hancox-Li: One of the things that is really interesting and paradoxical about what we see happening here is that it starts off as a conflict over finance. The king wants more money. Eventually, Parliament wins the battle: they slap down the kings repeatedly and eventually establish parliamentary supremacy. You have limited government. And the net effect of this is that kings get way more money for war—or the state, effectively, gets way more money for war. And this is one of the reasons that the English are able to win the Napoleonic Wars. They are able to take out enormous loans to finance their fleets, their blockades, the many different armies that are fighting on the continent. These are all paid by English debt, basically. And because the state is constrained by law, people are willing to lend to the state on very favorable terms.

You can see the contrast with other monarchs on the continent who are nominally unlimited. They can do whatever they want, but they can’t get people to loan them money at a reasonable interest rate, because everyone knows they’re not really good for it. So, your interest rate goes up and up. Whereas the English state is far more constrained, and yet that also gives them far more power.

Black: Yeah, and you see this today with U.S. government debt, because it’s the safest investment in the world. You know for certain that the government is good for it. The U.S. government can borrow on the best terms of anybody in the world, until they mess it up.

What we think of as limited government—legal limits on the scope of the legislative power in particular—still doesn’t exist in Britain as of the time of the Glorious Revolution, and indeed doesn’t really exist in Britain today. As you were saying, parliamentary supremacy in Britain—they have the idea that Parliament has theoretically unlimited power and can do anything it wants.

But you do have these “rule of law” notions. And one thing about rule of law that is a big part of the historical story is that it’s very good if you are a merchant sort. It’s very good for a commercial society to have the rule of law, to have this predictability of business transactions, that you can carry on your business affairs against the backdrop of predictable legal rules. And if you’re doing business with the state, that includes predictable legal rules that bind the state.

I read a book once by a law professor named Jed Rubenfeld, who is kind of a character and has various controversies in his own way. But this book was really interesting. It’s called Freedom and Time. One of the points he’s making is that there are a whole bunch of situations in which it is to a person’s benefit—in a way it increases a person’s sphere of action—to be able to bind themselves in a way that they will not be able to get out of later. The example that you’re giving is exactly one of those. “I need money to fight my wars. People have cottoned on to this thing I keep doing, of saying, ‘Oh, yeah, you lent me that money, but I’m the king, so you can’t actually get it back.’ They won’t lend me any more money. I’m going to lose my war if I don’t fix this somehow. I need to credibly commit. I need to irrevocably commit to, ‘No, I’m actually going to pay back.’” These rule of law institutions help with that a lot.

Having that kind of democratic taxing legitimacy helps with that, too. This is a big part of the logic of the U.S. Constitution: we have these soldiers, they need paying. We have these debts, they need paying. We don’t have money. We don’t have money because the Articles of Confederation government doesn’t have a taxing power. We need the federal government to have the ability to tax people, in order for it to have that power under these, again, old principles of the English constitution that really predate anything like limited government in the modern form. You can’t tax somebody without their consent. So, we need to tax people—that means we need them to be represented in the government directly, which they’re also not under the Articles. Akhil Amar, one of my teachers in law school, says teasing out this logic gets you 95% of the structure of the 1789 Constitution. Basically, we need taxes in order to not lose all our wars; therefore, we need to have representative government.

Hancox-Li: Schmitt says the sovereign is whoever decides on the exception. In the English system after the Glorious Revolution, who decides on the exception? It’s Parliament. You’ve gone from a system where you have an absolute monarchy to a system where you have an unlimited Parliament, that the Parliament can make whatever law it wants. It’s not constrained by any written constitution or any other institution, because it creates all the other institutions.

So, on one perspective, you don’t have limited government at all. But on the other hand, it clearly does seem like something has changed. And that is very visible, like I said, in the interest rates paid on state debt before and after this transition. In the behavior of the state in general, it acts a lot like a limited government. So what’s going on there? Did or did not a limited government get established here?

Black: What’s happening is that limited government in essentially the American sense, in the modern sense, still doesn’t exist, still hasn’t been invented. In fact, orthodox British political thought in the 18th century basically holds that it’s impossible. The limits that exist on the British state in the 1700s, in the Glorious Revolution model of the British state, are basically political limits that Parliament—or at this point they’re still probably saying the king in Parliament—is absolute, is unlimited; but constitutionally, in one of these older senses of the term, by its nature, is limited to act in certain ways.

One of the things that you get from an elected legislature instead of a single monarch is just stability, because there’s a bunch of them. It’s not just one person whose whims can change on a dime—it’s a few hundred people whose actions are determined by averaging out all of the views of the different members and finding, if not a consensus, at least a median or whatever. And there’s considerably more stability to the laws that you’re going to get out of Parliament than out of a personal-rule monarch. That’s part of it. There’s the fact that they are answerable to constituencies at election.

It’s not really democratic because Britain in the 18th century is malapportioned. There was this borough called Old Sarum that had been a Neolithic hill fort or whatever. But by the 18th century, literally nobody lives there anymore. It is uninhabited. It has zero population ... and two members of Parliament. And those members of Parliament are, in fact, chosen by the people who own the land. They don’t live there, but somebody nominally owns the land, and they choose the members of Parliament. So it’s hideously undemocratic in that sense. But there’s still constituencies, some even popular constituencies. I think basically everyone within the political class, the class that has political rights, gets to vote for Parliament, albeit on these very unequal terms. The House of Lords obviously is a continuing body. It’s not answerable to anyone—they just stay there for life. That’s what being a member of the House of Lords means.

So Parliament in a lot of ways constitutively, characteristically, is a very stable body compared to what kings were like when they were ruling by themselves. But it’s still true that we’re not quite at limited government yet. It’s this weird transition phase.

Hancox-Li: I actually have a hypothesis about this. There’s one perspective on limited government that we get from John Locke, who has come up in the background of the story several times, and is clearly one incredibly strong influence on the American Constitution. Jefferson lays out the Lockean theory as clearly as can be in three sentences: We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men. We have this concept of individual right that is prior to the state—prior to society, actually. It is a divine right that you just have, inalienable; and the purpose of government is just to secure those things. So if government is trespassing beyond those bounds, it’s inherently illegitimate. There are limits to government that are set on a moral, philosophical level that transcends all possible law. That’s a Lockean idea.

But then you get this question of how you actually make a government that does that. There’s the philosophical limitations on government, but how do you actually constitute a government that will do this? And now we need to talk about the French; we need to talk about Montesquieu, who is another enormous influence, not on Jefferson but on Madison and on the eventual structure of the Constitution. So what does Montesquieu have to say about this idea of limited government, or have to teach us about limited government?

Black: There’s a bunch of ideas associated with Montesquieu. The characteristic one is this idea of the mixed republic. There’s this line of thought going back to classical antiquity, going back to Aristotle, that there’s three forms of government. There’s monarchy, where one person rules. There’s aristocracy, where a few people rule. There’s democracy, where “the many” rule. One of the strands of thought about the British state that emerges, principally in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, is that it subverts this classical scheme in this interesting way. It combines all three of these into a single structure: there’s still a king, there’s still an element that is monarchy, that is “the one.” You have the House of Lords, which is “the few.” And there’s the House of Commons, which is “the many.” And the sovereignty in this era of the British state is said to belong to the king in Parliament. It’s all three of these estates, as they’re sometimes called, coming together into a single institution. This is referred to as a mixed republic, and there’s this idea that this is good. This works well at avoiding the degeneracies of any one form by itself. There’s thought going back to classical antiquity about how any of these forms will degenerate, will go bad, will become what Madison would call factional rule where you’re not ruling in the interest of the whole people, you’re just ruling in the interest of the ruling faction, whether that’s the one or the few or the many.

So there’s this idea, you set them all in equipoise and you protect against this kind of factional rule in this way. Montesquieu also is the first theorist of the modern understanding of separation of powers. Locke talks about the legislative power and the executive power, but that’s not how we talk about it today. There’s a third one and that’s the judicial power, which for Locke is a part of the executive power. There’s no real ambiguity. The thing we think of as the judicial power, Locke knows about it. He’s actually very concerned with it. It’s kind of key to his whole system. He just thinks of it as part of the executive power. The guy who begins to draw those apart theoretically is Montesquieu.

So you have these two overlapping triangular systems: you have the Crown, the Lords, the Commons, keeping each other in check. You also have the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary, keeping each other in check. And obviously this influences Madison enormously, although Madison’s ideas are different from Montesquieu’s in some interesting ways. Montesquieu still basically believes in legislative or parliamentary supremacy. The idea of separation of powers that you get following the Montesquieu tradition—which is what continental Europe mostly did up through the Second World War, when it backfired a bit—separation of powers means that any kind of real policy-making power, being legislative in nature, is separated from anything that isn’t the legislature. That’s legislative supremacy. It’s inconsistent with things like the presidential veto of legislation. It’s inconsistent with Montesquieu’s version of separation of powers. It’s obviously inconsistent with judicial review, because that’s judges taking up power that rightfully belongs to the legislature. The powers of the executive and the judiciary are much more subordinate, are much more just carrying into effect what the legislature has decreed.

But there is still this idea that that separation creates these spaces for liberty in interesting ways; that having it be the same person who writes the laws, who enforces the laws, who adjudicates the laws, creates this possibility for tyranny. This is something that Rousseau, who we haven’t really mentioned yet, is obsessed with: this idea of general lawmaking, that the legislature’s role is only one of creating general laws. The execution of the laws belongs to the executive. So a general law says, “murder is a crime,” and we write that law before you know anything about who we’re going to charge with breaking this law. In a way, it’s the Rawlsian veil of ignorance making an appearance a couple centuries early.

Hancox-Li: It’s in the American Constitution. The prohibition on bills of attainder is: you can’t make laws that name specific people. They have to be general laws.

Black: Right. And certainly today we would view these as rule of law principles. We talk about the principle of legality, which means you can’t be charged with a crime, subjected to criminal punishments, except for violating a criminal statute that already existed at the time you did the thing. No ex post facto laws. And what this is meant to ensure is that the laws have this general form. In the ferment leading up to the American Revolution, a lot of these ideas about the structural guarantors of liberty—the way you can design the government so that, even though its powers are not formally limited, it is going to respect the liberties of the people—is very important in the grievances that they have about Parliament. If you look at things that are being written in like 1774 by people like James Wilson and Alexander Hamilton, part of the problem with the situation where the Westminster Parliament—which is elected by the people of Great Britain—is governing for the colonies is they’re not subject to the same laws as us. In all of these ways, it violates these rule of law principles that are meant to make the legislature have the people’s interests at heart in the right way when they’re legislating.

So that’s very much a part of the primordium, but is still a little different from limited government in the modern sense. We want the government, which is still not really limited, but we want to design it in such a way that it’s going to use its powers in a way that’s nice, that’s respectful, that’s not oppressive and tyrannical. And we think we can do that, and there’s a bunch of ways that we think we can do that. The British experience is really a story of all of those ideas working astonishingly well.

Hancox-Li: There’s a lot to talk about here. For us, the idea of separation of powers is totally natural. It’s like the air we breathe. Obviously there are courts and that’s one thing, and there’s the executive and that’s a different thing, and there’s Parliament and that’s the legislature and that’s a different thing. This feels very natural. But I think it’s worth casting our minds back to the age of kings where the kings don’t see it—at least at some point the kings don’t see any of this—as separate, because there’s just stuff the king says. There’s just rulings the king is making.

To go back to these familial metaphors, if you live with a father who thinks that the house is his kingdom, he doesn’t separate out his edicts into like general laws and applications and executions, he just says stuff and then you’re supposed to do it. So the Montesquieu innovation is to start to see different aspects of governance, to disentangle all these different threads that go into effective governance. And then in the American system, we actually institutionalize that. We don’t just philosophically separate out all these strands of monarchical power—we’re going to make it fundamental to the structure of government that these are done by different people, who are appointed or elected in different ways, who have different rights and responsibilities. This is in some ways fundamental to the system of limited government in America.

Madison is consumed by the problem of faction. He’s consumed by this idea that we can write out all these laws that say the government shouldn’t do this and shouldn’t do that and shouldn’t trespass on these rights—but what happens when a group of people comes into power and they have all the power and they just don’t want to do it? This brings us back to the very problem of binding the sovereign’s hands. How do you actually make it work? Part of the American answer was the famous Madisonian phrase: ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

Black: For kings, none of the stuff is separate. As I’ve alluded to, in their origin that’s what courts and legislatures were, at least in English constitutional history. In antiquity there’s some different stuff going on. But Parliament is the king’s council. It exists by the king’s will. The judges are the king’s judges, created, imbued with this power to carry out the king’s business in his name.

Fast forward a few centuries and we’ve gotten very used to these things having a life of their own. And then, as you’ve said, the American Constitution is not like this. The president isn’t created by Congress. Congress isn’t created by the president. The Constitution creates both of them. Legislative power is vested in Congress. Executive power is vested in a president. Judicial power is vested in the courts. Well, vested by whom? And now we’re circling around actual, factual limited government. You were saying, well, we can write down all of this stuff about the government can’t do this and can’t do that. But that’s still an innovation. No one’s done that yet, until the Americans. You have bills of rights. You have the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which is basically the settlement of the Glorious Revolution. That’s technically an act of Parliament. You have, going back even further, Magna Carta. But that’s a compact between a king and his people. It’s an agreement by the king: “I will forbear to do these things.”

Hamilton makes this point in The Federalist Papers where he’s basically defending the fact that the federal Constitution doesn’t have a bill of rights. He’s saying we don’t need a bill of rights. Bills of rights are for people negotiating with a monarch and getting the monarch to say, “I’ll be nice, I promise.” The whole Constitution is a bill of rights. The structure of the thing is going to make it friendly to the people’s liberty. But is it, though? In fact what you get in the American context is this fusion of these Montesquieuian ideas about separating out the different powers of government—playing them against each other in the Madisonian example so that they check each other’s power—with this idea of limited government power.

In British political thought in the 18th century—I mentioned this already—this is thought to be conceptually impossible. Locke already exists. Government is instituted to secure these rights. It is limited by this purpose. If government exceeds what is necessary to vindicate the people’s rights, it has gone beyond the power that is allotted to it by the social contract. That all exists. But British political thinkers and statesmen believe in a basically Schmitt-like idea that there must necessarily always be, somewhere in any system of government, a final absolute power. Someone, when push comes to shove, has to have final authority. This authority is the sovereignty, and it cannot be divided. This is an axiom of British political thought in the 1700s. There’s this phrase, imperio in imperium, which is how they mock the idea of limited government or formally divided power, that if you try to set up a division of government powers you are creating kind of a state of war. You have these two different sovereignties within the same country.

This is a very Hobbesian idea. Hobbes thinks that the only solution to the problem of people at each other’s throats—people are always going to be fighting, trying to take each other’s stuff, no one’s going to have security, it’s not just war it’s the war of all against all—is this single absolute sovereign who can just lay down the law and keeps everyone in fear of violating the law. And the law says, “Don’t go around killing each other.”

The cover of Leviathan is itself one of the most famous works of political philosophy—this big guy made up of all these little guys, this idea of the people of the nation coming together into this abstract entity which is the sovereign, which in principle is probably the king. So it’s this very Hobbesian idea that if you divide the sovereignty, all you’re doing is making the Leviathan not actually work. You’re going to get a war between these competing mini-Leviathans, and it’s going to mess up the whole project.

So the Americans, in trying to set up a state on these Lockean grounds, have to wrestle with this.

They have this idea that says there are these inalienable rights. That’s actually a post-Locke innovation—the concept of “inalienable”—but it fits nicely. For anyone listening who doesn’t know the technical meaning of inalienable—it’s kind of an unfamiliar word—to alienate means to give up, to give away. You alienate your property. When you buy groceries at the store, you alienate the money that you used to pay for it. You owned it and now you don’t: you alienated it. Inalienable means “unable to be given up,” and this matters because in the social contract theory, government power comes from the people. It is given by the people to the state. But if some of the natural political authority that people have over themselves is actually inalienable—cannot be given up—then it can’t be given by the people to the state, and that entails that the state’s power must be limited.

But that’s this contradiction. That’s imperio in imperium. We have a problem. The Americans need to solve this problem, and they do solve it. The way they solve it is largely by taking up the tools of corporations law, which exists in not really a modern form yet but a primordial form, and agency law more broadly. Agency law is the law of, “I authorize so-and-so to act on my behalf in this matter,” which comes up a lot in commercial affairs. It’s what lawyers basically are. The word attorney actually means agent. And there’s a whole body of law about this stuff that the Founders are all very familiar with.

The British colonies in North America are corporations. That’s technically what they are. They have these corporate charters, they’re colonial charters. They’re similar to the East India Company, the West India Company, that sort of thing. The king authorizes this group of people to go colonize Virginia or whatever. And there’s an idea that’s sort of limited government that emerges from this. Because when the king creates a corporation, or when I hire someone as my lawyer, I give them some powers that had previously belonged to me, but not all of the powers that previously belonged to me. I make you my lawyer, you can represent me in some matters, but it’s not just an open-ended, complete alienation of every power I possessed.

So they draw on some of these ideas and say, “You’re right, actually, that sovereignty can’t be divided.” Sovereignty can’t be divided, but sovereignty never moves. Sovereignty starts in the people, and it stays there. The sovereignty itself is never transferred. Limited portions of the sovereign authority of the people gets transferred to particular government entities. The government is not sovereign. No part of the government is sovereign. In Britain, is it Parliament that’s sovereign? Is it the king? You can’t have multiple different sovereigns within the government. The Americans are saying you have no sovereigns in the government. None of the government is actually sovereign. It’s just an agent of the people. The people are the true sovereign. And an agent can be given a limited set of powers. Indeed, it’s inherent in an agency relationship that the agent’s powers are limited. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be the agent, they would be the principal.

Hancox-Li: So there’s this important philosophical question about where is sovereignty? Is it in Parliament, or the king, or perhaps the people? And we say sovereignty is in the people, it never leaves. But what, in practical terms, does this mean about the structure of the American government and the American Constitution?

Black: It means that if government is agents of the sovereign like this, then you can say, “This one has these powers, and this one has these powers, and this one has these powers.” None of them has all the power. And indeed, even taken together, they don’t have all the power. Some of the power is reserved to the people.

In the modern context we think of constitutional rights as limits on government. But in this early-modern context, one way of understanding what something like the First Amendment is doing is saying, “The power that people naturally have in this pre-political state to govern themselves, legislate for themselves in a way, the legislative power is understood as being derivative of the power that we each have to basically like decide what to do at any given moment.” And it’s when you delegate and pool that authority that you get the legislative power in this political sense. But some of that legislative power just remains with the people. The power that I have in the state of nature to decide what I’m going to say, I don’t give up. I retain it. I never give it to the government. The government doesn’t have the power to tell me what to say because I retain it.

But also, even of the powers that are given to the state, they’re not all given to one body or one institution. And this isn’t like this contradiction, this imperio in imperium, because the people are the ultimate judge of everything. There’s this idea: ambition must be made to counteract ambition; the branches are to play against one another. But an important idea is that when the branches are fighting—when they’re fighting about what the Constitution means, when they’re fighting about the scope of their various powers—ultimately these disputes are to be resolved by the people, who are the principal.

You see something like this in the election of 1800, where actually all three branches of the federal government have basically conspired in upholding the Sedition Act, which says you can’t criticize the president or the Congress. (You can criticize Vice President Jefferson, though; we don’t much like him.) Congress passes it, President Adams signs it. It doesn’t ever go to the Supreme Court, but Supreme Court justices sitting on lower courts (in the way that was done in those days) uphold it basically as a matter of course. But a lot of people think this is actually unconstitutional, this is tyrannical. And Jefferson, largely on a platform of “the Sedition Act is outrageous,” wins the election of 1800. And this is seen as the people playing this role as the final arbiter of their own Constitution, saying, “You all are agents, you got it wrong. This thing that you all did, actually, you didn’t have the power to do it. We’re going to step in and sort this out.”

It’s very common in political theory circles, and in constitutional law circles, to see democracy and limited government as opposed to one another. I think this has to do with what, to my mind, is a slightly naive understanding of what democracy is: “Democracy means the majority gets its way.” There’s a lot of people who think if you tease out the implications of “the majority gets its way” seriously, you end up basically at Schmitt. You end up at something like, “The majority can do whatever it wants; there can be no limits on its power.” But actually, this is going to consume itself.

I very much have come to the belief that limited government and democracy both need each other at an extremely deep and intimate level. You can’t have democracy without limited government, because if the government has unlimited power then it can say you can’t criticize the president. And now you have elections, but nobody can criticize John Adams so your elections aren’t so meaningful anymore.

Conversely, this thing you’re saying about how you bind the king, it’s an aspect of imperio in imperium that I haven’t stressed—this idea that there can be no law against the lawgiver. If the law comes from the king, then how can it limit the king? So in order to make limited government real, you need it to be this act of self-limitation, of the people limiting themselves. The government is an instrument through which the people act, but the people—wishing to preserve their own liberty, mindful of all of the ways that unlimited majoritarian power can consume itself—say, “We’re going to create these limited institutions, and through that, we’re going to limit ourselves. We’re going to limit our own ability to act, by this legality principle.” The people can only act to put somebody in jail by having this one agent called Congress write a law first, and then this other agent called the president do an investigation through the Department of Justice, and this other agent called the court saying, “Yes, this person was duly convicted.” The people are powerless to say, “We don’t like that guy, throw him in jail.”

Hancox-Li: I really like this point that limited government and democracy are in tension but need each other. I think it gets to a deeper point about what this thing called limited government even is, and how it can possibly work. Because there are all these arguments that you see from guys like Schmitt—imperio-imperium stuff—that the idea of limited government is incoherent. Rousseau, I think, believes this as well. It’s an old tradition. What falls out of this is that limited government is partly a matter of the internal structure of government. But it’s not just a matter of the internal structure of government. It’s about the structure of the society that that government is a part of. Ultimately, I think it comes back to the idea of an open society.

One of the features of an open society—here I’m drawing on North, Wallis, and Weingast, in their book Violence and Social Orders—is that in the monarchical system, all the threads of power are totally intertwined, and all social structures and all forms of social organization are kind of intertwined. What an open society does is crack all that open. If you’re excluded from one form of social participation, if there’s some kind of horrible economic situation—you’re in economic oppression or a monopoly, or someone just has too much economic power and they’re messing up your day with it—you’re not locked out of political power. You’re not locked out of associational power to go out and meet other people and organize with them. You are not locked out of the ideological arena, because you can go out and talk and spread your ideas. And so there’s oppression here, there’s some kind of exclusion; we don’t like it, but you can counter-mobilize against it through this other form of social organization.

That’s a kind of limitation of power that goes far beyond the internal structure of government but is something that encompasses the whole of a society. That prevents different hierarchies from wrapping all around each other and becoming one big, stratified system that controls society. That just breaks that up and makes ambition to counteract ambition, not just within government, but within all of society.

Black: Absolutely. I think a lot about this—the way that you could airdrop the U.S. Constitution into a lot of societies and it’s not going to work the way we like to think. It has largely worked in the American context. There are all these examples—the Soviet Constitution, famously a glittering, liberal-democratic document that wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these questions because they’re the question facing us now. We still have our nice, liberal, limited constitution, and it doesn’t seem to be doing the thing anymore. For me this has taken the form of trying to think very deeply about what is democracy, actually. “The majority gets its way,” I think, is a naive understanding of, “What is democracy?” The better, truer, more sophisticated version of the story is that democracy is fundamentally about the basis on which power is exercised in society. Democracy is the condition of, “power is exercised on equal and reciprocal terms, such that no one person rules over anyone else.”

What can prevent a formally very nice constitution from actually working is when you have social power hierarchies that are so well entrenched that creating the layer of equal political power on top of them just won’t take, in a lot of the same ways as, “Well, you can’t criticize John Adams, so we don’t really have a democracy.” If you have a system where wives are subordinated to their husbands in all sorts of ways—backed by threats of violence, patterns of social coercion and conformity—you’re not going to have a real democracy, either, because democracy requires that everyone be free to act as an agent in the political arena, having agency, having free will.

If there are social systems that make it difficult for some people to act as authentic political agents, the whole thing just can’t “take,” because those people are in a state of unlimited subjugation, even if it’s not by the state exactly.

Another insight of democracy is: the state is just people. So if you’re being subjugated by your husband, then at least past a certain point, you’re still being subjugated. And having the limited government ... well, government doesn’t need to do anything for you to be subjugated. This is why I’ve adopted the saying, “Anarchy is tyranny and tyranny is anarchy.” Because one thing that I think a lot of anarchists miss—and anarchy has this sort of attraction to it, that if government power is this thing that we’re worried about, why not just get rid of it—is that government power isn’t that special. It’s just power, and if there’s no government power, well, there’s still power, and people are still going to use power over other people.

Hobbes is largely an antagonist in these conversations, because he does not believe in limited government, but I think there’s a lot to the idea of the Leviathan. There does need to be a common power that is keeping everybody in awe and is saying, “You can’t do that to people.” Now, the Leviathan doesn’t need to be—and in fact, can’t be—absolute in the way that Hobbes thinks it has to be. It has to be limited and democratic in these ways; but you need something with the power of a state that is able to say, “People can’t keep other people in their basements, literally or metaphorically,” in order to have any kind of free society. So it’s this seeming paradox where in order for people to be free from rule and dominion and whatever, there’s actually a minimum degree of state power that you need, as well as a maximum.

Hancox-Li: I think that’s quite right. You can look in parts of the world that have gone through significant state collapse, and the people there do not seem like they are more free. They seem like they are more subjugated, often by their neighbors with guns.

Black: You get warlords, and what happens is the warlords are not limited.

Hancox-Li: Exactly. The warlords aren’t limited. They’re just petty kings who haven’t quite established a dynasty yet. So I think there is this way in which, for a long time now, liberals have been overly enamored with formal rights, without recognizing the importance of a certain equality of power that is necessary for free society, that is necessary to make an open society work. There’s this famous line from George Washington, “Each man shall have his own fig and his own vine, and no one shall make him afraid.” And the fig and the vine part is important, actually—having your own little bit of wealth and property and security is part of why no one can make you afraid, whether they’re from the government or anywhere else. And so I think that’s there’s that aspect to it.

But I also want to focus on another part of what we’ve been talking about, which is this idea that the Constitution is not self-enforcing. And we see that very visibly right now—there are people in power in the government who are like, “What if I just didn’t?” But this is the thing: the Constitution was never self-enforcing. It’s never been true that it just kind of magically makes people conform. To it to the extent that it has ever worked, that we’ve ever had limited government in America, it’s because “we the people” continue to exercise our unalienated political power to ensure that we have limited government.

Black: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s that story of the 1800 election. People, I think, will often refer to the idea of the Constitution as self-executing as “lawyer brain.” But to some extent that’s not right: a lot of lawyers, legal theorists, constitutional theorists—we’ve known this forever. This is not actually a surprise to any of us. There’s this famous speech by Judge Learned Hand—from 1944, I think—called the “Spirit of Liberty” speech, where he’s asked to give some talk about the spirit of liberty or whatever. And he says this famous line, the spirit of liberty “lies in the hearts of men and women.” When the spirit of liberty dies in the hearts of the people, “No law, no court, no constitution can even do much to help it.”

Going back to how the 18th-century British system succeeded in the way that it did, there’s a dimension of all of this, that if people in power are seen to be trying to transgress the limits that the Constitution has set upon them, they lose elections. The people don’t reelect people who are a threat to the constitutional scheme. That is an indispensable part of making the whole thing work. And when it goes away, you have a problem.

To me, this was one of the absolutely infuriating things about last year. Trump was running on a platform of, “I am going to be king.” He was very unsubtle about it.

Hancox-Li: I mean, he just said it, right?

Black: He said it again and again and again and again. And the idea that the central point of the campaign against him should be, “This man is going to make himself king,” was seen as naïve, like, “Oh, ordinary people don’t care about these sort of abstract constitutional questions.” Do you realize how doomed we are if that’s true? The entire system of government depends on that not being the case. It depends on the people [being] committed to their Constitution and vigilant against threats to it and who will, through elections, defend the country against would-be tyrants.

I wrote a piece for my newsletter a few months back where I said: What’s missing with the American Constitution right now? What’s wrong with the American Constitution? Well, what’s wrong is that nobody cares about it. What it’s missing is a constituency. What it’s missing is anybody to give a damn that the things that are happening are not lawful. And I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush here: there are plenty of people in America who do care about this, and are taking action, such as they can, to try to defend it. But when you just had an election where the idea that the people were going to punish somebody who was saying openly in so many words—it was basically his entire campaign platform, he did not talk policy—all he talked about was, “I am going to make myself paramount over the law.” And nobody thought that the people were capable, really, of giving a damn about it.

Were they right, or was it sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy? I don’t know. But when that happens, and then that guy wins the election, everyone is going to say, “Yeah, this guy’s king now.” That’s where this Schmittian order comes from, this idea that the people aren’t really capable of acting as a Madisonian sovereign. They’re not really capable of: “We are the principal, the government is our agent, we’re going to police what they do on our behalf.” All they are capable of is saying, “This is what we want, and we’re going to imbue this guy with total arbitrary sovereign power to go pursue it.” If that’s true, we’re doomed. I hope it’s not true. If it is true, we need to make it stop being true. There is no way out that doesn’t run through getting a people who give a damn about holding their government to its own limits.

Hancox-Li: As Abraham Lincoln put it, as a nation of freemen, we will live for all time or die by suicide. All the wise pundits, the wise pollsters, don’t really like this idea, that actually it’s really important to campaign on the idea of freedom, on the idea of a limited government under the Constitution. But without that, we are going to lose all the rest of it. We are going to be sliding progressively back into a form of government that, as we discussed, is inefficient, that is corrupt, that is tyrannical, that will undermine whatever possible good you wanted out of it. This spirit of limited government and of freedom needs a party that will campaign for it.

An earlier version of this conversation first ran in Liberal Currents.

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Donald Trump has raised, then dropped, multiple different strategic objectives for his war against Iran. But he has been consistent about America’s tactics. He has repeatedly announced a contempt for international law and a fascination with indiscriminate destruction that crosses the line to war crimes.

The New York Times reports on his latest threats:

Power plants, desalination stations, oil wells, roads, bridges and other infrastructure.

They are the foundations of civilian life in Iran, and their destruction by American and Israeli forces would cause widespread suffering among the country’s 93 million people—and in most cases would be considered a war crime under international law.

Yet President Trump has repeatedly threatened to do exactly that, with the aim of sending Iran “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong,” as he put it in a speech on Wednesday. …

International laws aimed at preventing the horrors of total war are codified in a series of agreements, including the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, the Nuremberg Principles and the United Nations Charter. Deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure violate those. So does pillaging a country, which Mr. Trump has suggested he might do by taking Iran’s oil. …

During a standoff with Iran in his first administration, Mr. Trump threatened to destroy 52 cultural sites in the country. Mark T. Esper, then the defense secretary, acknowledged that hitting such sites would be a war crime and said the Pentagon would not do it.

The second Trump administration has taken a different approach.

Then he went further, posting: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” basically a warning that he is prepared to use nukes to commit genocide on a mass scale to try to win an illegal war with no clear purpose.

Basically, what this suggests is that unless something stops him, there is no limit to the cruelty he will unleash to get his way.

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

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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When asked this January what was standing in the way of a Ukraine peace deal, President Trump gave a one-word answer: “Zelenskyy.” The Kremlin immediately and approvingly agreed. It was a telling moment—not just as a diplomatic embarrassment, but as a window into how thoroughly the blame-Ukraine narrative has migrated from academic theory into live policy. The theory in question is University of Chicago political science professor John Mearsheimer’s brand of “realism” within international relations.

Ideas really do have consequences. That claim may seem obvious to many, but its rejection is a core component of Mearsheimer’s brand of realism, and central to one of the most glaringly erroneous accounts of why Russia attacked Ukraine. Many realists—Mearsheimer chief among them—repeatedly insist that Russia is the victim of bullying by liberal democracies. They claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a defensive response rather than an act of imperialist aggression and have rushed to “explain” Russia to the rest of us. That blame-Ukraine narrative not only naively mirrors Kremlin propaganda; it is wholly at odds with reality.

Such downplaying of the relevance of ideas in the international arena has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, as well as of its implications. The core error: by treating states as unitary actors (“billiard balls” in his words) pursuing clear geopolitical interests, Mearsheimer cannot see that Putin is not acting in Russia’s interest—he is acting in his own, and a democratic Ukraine threatens his grip on power.

In a 2014 essay in Foreign Affairs titled “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” published after Russia annexed Crimea, Mearsheimer wrote that “Moscow’s position ... and the logic behind it” are “Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory” and that the liberal democracies “added fuel to a fire waiting to ignite.” After mischaracterizing the democratic uprising against the pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych as an “illegal overthrow” and a “coup,” he argued that Putin (“a first-class strategist”) invaded Ukraine “as a spontaneous reaction to Yanukovych’s ouster.”

Yanukovych was not “ousted”—he abandoned the country and fled to Russia. And before his removal was formalized soldiers, trucks, and other equipment—with no markings identifying them as Russian military forces—were already conveniently present in Crimea. The Kremlin initially denied that the invading troops were Russian forces and called the question itself a “provocation.” Putin insisted that they were local “self-defense” forces who obtained their Russian uniforms in a “store.” They also carried Russian-made machine guns and grenade launchers. It wasn’t until the next year that Putin said, “I gave orders to the Defense Ministry—why hide it?—to deploy special forces of the GRU (military intelligence) as well as marines and commandos there under the guise of reinforcing security for our military facilities in Crimea.” Putin even later denied that he had denied that the Russian army had invaded, admitting that “The Russian Army was always there.” On the specific claim of a spontaneous reaction, the record is unambiguous: Mearsheimer was wrong.

Mearsheimer’s fallback argument is that NATO and the European Union were “expanding,” and the Kremlin feared they would “expand” into Ukraine. What might “expansion” mean? Russia, both past and present, expands in a very direct way: Russian armies conquer territories, torture and murder local opposition, import Russian colonists, deport local people by the thousands and millions, and inflict state terror on them. But NATO “expansion” is quite a different matter. All post-Soviet memberships have resulted from extended debates within democratic nations—all with multi-party systems, contested elections, and free media—after which their governments asked to be admitted to the defensive alliance.

That historical record of democratic deliberation and freely chosen partnerships hasn’t stopped Mearsheimer from referring to the European Union and NATO as “marching eastward,” or from insisting that Putin ordered the invasion in 2014 and the escalation in 2022 because Russia felt threatened. Rather than provide any evidence of the said threat to Russian territory, he instead tells us that “it is the Russians, not the West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them.” In other words, if Putin says it’s a threat, then it’s a threat that justifies conquest—no other evidence is offered or required.

No reasonable person believes that NATO was likely to invade or to annex Russian territory. But if there is no territorial threat, what threat is there? Here Mearsheimer again completely misconstrues Kremlin policy. He laughably insisted in 2014 that Moscow clearly has “an interest in having a prosperous and stable Ukraine on its western flank” and that Ukraine’s allies should “work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten Russia and allows the West to repair its relations with Moscow.” In what other cases has the Kremlin sought to have “prosperous and stable” neighbors?

A peaceful and prosperous Ukraine is inherently a threat, not to Russia, but to Putin. The danger to Putin’s personal hold on power is posed by the example—the mere existence—of a prosperous, stable, democratic, and free neighbor. Ukraine has “provoked” Putin by not being Belarus: an impoverished, rickety, and weak state ruled by a dictator obedient to Putin.

Why the Invasion and the Erasure of the Ukrainian People?

The real reason for the invasion is not that NATO is threatening Russia, that Ukraine is dominated by “Nazis,” or that “Russophobia” in Donbas “looks like genocide”—all of which Putin claims without proof. Instead, as Putin told us clearly in 2021, he views territorial expansion as necessary to defend the “Russian World” while asserting that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people.” It doesn’t matter what the Ukrainians themselves think about that, because they are to have no say in the matter.

This notion of the “Russian World” has been key to Putin’s foreign policy as far back as 2005, when Putin called the collapse of the USSR “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century,” and complained that “Tens of millions of our co-citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory.”

Addressing Russian ambassadors in July 2014, Putin offered an expansive definition of who belongs to the “Russian World”: “When I speak of Russians and Russian-speaking citizens I am referring to those people who consider themselves part of the broad Russian community, they may not necessarily be ethnic Russians, but they consider themselves Russian people.”

In Putin’s logic, the invasion of another country is defending the “Russian World.” In 2022, Putin even compared himself to Peter the Great, whose wars of conquest against Sweden meant that, “On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it … He was not taking away anything, he was returning. […] He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing. Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well.” Last June in St. Petersburg he explained, “I’ve said it before, Russians and Ukrainians are one people. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours. There’s an old rule that wherever a Russian soldier sets foot, that’s ours.”

Putin argues that Russians and Ukrainians share a common medieval baptism at the Dnieper River and a common religion, language, and culture, before conceding magnanimously that “the Ukrainian culture, Ukrainian language, dances, and music are wonderful. I for one always admire it.” Ukrainians are merely Russian subjects who have colorful dances and music. The ideological claim precedes the military one: to assert that Ukrainians and Russians are one people is already to erase Ukraine as a nation before a single soldier crosses a border.

That is the point Mearsheimer’s theories cannot reach: Putin considers an independent, democratic, prosperous, and stable Ukraine to be a threat to his personal hold on power. As Wladimir Klitschko wrote in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in May of 2022, “For the Russian imperialist regime, our very existence is a provocation because we are a democracy.” That’s precisely why Putin called for the “denazification” of Ukraine, the neighboring country whose Russian-speaking Jewish president was elected in a contested election over an Orthodox Christian. (“Nazism,” for the Kremlin, means simply not submitting to Russian conquest.)

What ‘Realism’ Cannot Realize

How did an intelligent man get this so wrong? The answer involves two distinct analytical failures. The first is methodological. Mearsheimer’s “realist” theory describes international relations as “a state of relentless security competition, with the possibility of war always in the background.” He insists that states do act in what they perceive to be their interests, but also that they “should always act according to their own self-interest.” The attractiveness of the theory lies in the robust claim that states always act in certain ways. But introducing the normative claim about what they “should” do is a telling sleight of hand. Moreover, the theory leaves little to no space for ideas or values—except as factors to be tossed aside when liberal democracies are involved.

Mearsheimer considers “liberal institutionalism” as a competing theory of international order and rejects it—without considering it thoroughly. Central to liberal institutionalism is the peaceful interconnection among nations through freedom of trade, which is borne out by abundant evidence: the massive growth of international trade has coincided with a steep decline in war among nations whose economies are entwined, as political scientists such as Erik Gartzke and Patrick McDonald have robustly demonstrated. But—and this is the distinction realism cannot make—the pacifying effect of trade holds among liberal market economies, not among state-dominated ones. Putin’s Russia is the latter: Putin’s own gas station with a flag and an army.

However, the “liberal” in liberal institutionalism matters even if Mearsheimer regards liberal principles such as democracy, pluralism, and free trade as beside the point, because “as an analytical matter, realism does not distinguish between ‘good’ states and ‘bad’ states, but essentially treats them like billiard balls of varying size.” In realist theory, all states are forced to seek the same goal: maximum relative security. Mearsheimer defends that simplification by insisting that “realism merely seeks to explain how the world works.” In doing so, however, he closes his eyes to the role of ideology in determining what counts as an interest: states have pursued racial purity and imperial destiny as readily as security and wealth—sometimes over security and wealth, as Putin is doing right now. Surely Russians would be better off on both counts if he had refrained from invading Ukraine. Mearsheimer’s so-called realism is deeply unrealistic.

The second failure is more specific and more consequential. By positing that states are unitary actors always acting to secure “their” interests, realism blinds itself to dynamics within state structures. States are not solid billiard balls; they are complex assemblies of persons, powers, and relationships, more like interacting clouds of interests, some of which are aligned and some of which conflict. By ignoring the interior of the “ball,” Mearsheimer fails to account for the divergence of interests between a ruler and a state.

Putin has made it clear through both words and deeds that he sees no “interest in having a prosperous and stable” neighborhood; the view that Putin has such an interest is a preposterous fantasy entirely of Mearsheimer’s creation. Putin’s ideology of the “Russian World” explains why he has flagrantly broken international treaties, including the 1994 Budapest Memorandum to Ukraine’s accession to the International Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, in which Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons in exchange for a Russian guarantee “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.”

A prosperous, democratic Ukraine on Russia’s border is not a military threat to Russia, but it is an exemplary threat to Putin personally: evidence, visible to ordinary Russians, that a neighboring, predominantly Slavic and Orthodox nation can choose liberal democracy and make it work—which is fatal to the authoritarian regime that Putin has fastened on the Russian people.

What Is at Stake

What we are witnessing is not merely a clash of billiard balls but also of fundamental values and principles; the realist framework cannot see that, because it is designed not to. A hyper-nationalistic dictatorship has attacked a pluralistic democracy, not because the dictator feared any loss of territory or any threat to the security of the country he effectively owns, but because he perceives the existence of that liberal democracy as a threat to his own personal hold on power.

The stakes of his misreading of recent history are not merely academic. If Mearsheimer’s framework cannot explain why this war happened, it cannot reliably predict what comes next—or identify which democracies are next in line to be designated as threats. Any democracy, under Mearsheimer’s account, can threaten an autocracy merely by existing successfully, wherever it might demonstrate to a captive population that another way of organizing political life is possible.

Prudence in how democracies respond to Russian aggression is entirely warranted—reasonable people can and do differ on questions of strategy, risk, and response. Such prudence, in turn, requires clarity about what is actually happening, and attaining such clarity is precisely what Mearsheimer’s unrealistic theorizing prevents.

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Donald Trump’s theory of presidential power is that it is a grant of absolute authority vested in one man, answerable to no other institution. It isn’t even subject to questioning or scrutiny, which is why his Justice Department has now declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional—laying the legal groundwork to destroy records of his presidency and refuse to hand them over when he leaves office.

Politico reports:

The Trump administration’s abrupt declaration that the federal law governing presidential records for the past 48 years is unconstitutional is creating confusion about access to records of past presidencies, including documents that are on the verge of public release.

The Wednesday memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which challenges the Presidential Records Act, appears intended to give President Donald Trump the legal leeway to destroy White House records from his current term. It also gives him legal backing to refuse to hand over any remaining records to the National Archives and Records Administration when he leaves office in 2029. …

[T]he Archives received more than 200 requests for White House records from Trump’s first term after the legal window for such requests opened on Jan. 20. The future of those requests now appears to be up in the air.

Kelly McClanahan, a lawyer pursuing several lawsuits seeking copies of records Trump took to Mar-a-Lago during his first term and the White House’s handling of several national security-related controversies, said he was incensed by the new opinion and fears the administration could begin to destroy records at any time.

To be sure, anyone as neck-deep in corruption, abuses of civil rights, and the mass killing of civilians as the Trump administration would certainly want to be able to destroy all official records of their actions. But a free society, which holds its leaders accountable, demands that they be prevented from doing so.

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

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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One year ago today, Donald Trump unveiled the most aggressive protectionist agenda the United States has pursued in more than a century. He promised it would make Americans wealthier, return factories to American soil, and bring down the cost of living. It was a fantasy dressed up as policy, and a year’s worth of evidence has thoroughly exposed it as such.

Protectionism has always worked the same way, delivering a visible benefit to a concentrated few while quietly taxing everyone else. The winners get a press conference; the rest of us pay more at the register.

Liberation Day followed that same logic, just at a scale and with a level of chaos that had no precedent in modern memory. As explained, Trump’s second term represented an appreciably bigger and more radical departure from free trade norms than even his first.

In my latest video for The UnPopulist, I trace the real-world damage across American household budgets—from supermarkets to car dealerships to nurseries—and examine why the promised industrial renaissance never materialized.

The Supreme Court eventually stepped in and struck down the legal basis for the tariffs. But the economic wreckage those tariffs left behind won’t get cleaned up by a court order—and Democrats would do well to treat this moment as an opening to make an affirmative case for free trade rather than simply opposing whatever Trump does next.

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Last week, reported for The UnPopulist on how Texas Republicans moved from Islamophobic rhetoric to the systematic use of state power against Muslim citizens—designating a major civil rights organization as a terrorist group, excluding Muslim schools from a voucher program open to every other faith, and banning a Muslim residential development while leaving a comparable Catholic project untouched. In this clip, The UnPopulist’s new video editor, Jacob Repkin, presents Chapman’s argument.

(Don’t forget to pair that with The UnPopulist’s other report on this theme, published earlier this week by Andrew Lewis and Steve Grand of First Five Freedoms, specifically on how Georgia is fighting its Islamophobic leaders.)

Chapman’s piece shows that what distinguishes this moment from ordinary bigotry is that it has reached the politically actionable phase with Texas enacting actual legislation against Muslims. But when a government can strip one minority of its constitutional protections without consequence, every other minority should be asking who’s next.

One more thing from the editors…

We held our first-ever Substack Live yesterday. Senior editor invited Northwestern Professor of Law to discuss birthright citizenship as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments.

Don’t forget to check out Paul’s piece, published earlier this week in our pages: “Every Argument Against Birthright Citizenship Is Hollow.”

Here is a clip from last night’s conversation:

To watch the full conversation, go here.

This is a format we’re just getting started with. Look for more soon.

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The night after the arguments, The UnPopulist Senior Editor welcomed Northwestern Law Professor to the inaugural edition of The UnPopulist Live. Andy and Paul had an hour-long conversation that went well beyond the courtroom. The two traced the history of the 14th Amendment, dissected John Eastman’s arguments for reinterpreting the citizenship clause, and assessed what the oral arguments revealed about where the court is likely to land.

Here is Paul’s piece from earlier this week that gets into a lot of that:

And for those who missed the live stream, we’ve got you covered in this post. We present to you the full conversation between Andy Craig and Paul Gowder on birthright citizenship. Give it a watch.

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