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For Trump, Deprofessionalizing Government Is a Feature

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Ted Rall
The killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in a Minneapolis suburb has prompted a familiar debate over civil disobedience and government policing of the sort that typically follows these incidents, in which justification of the use of force, or lack thereof, depends on your political stance. There is, however, an aspect here that everyone ought to be able to agree about regardless of where they stand on the libertarian-to-authoritarian spectrum: ICE behaves highly unprofessionally. All you have to do is look at them. Cops wear matching uniforms. So do soldiers. Cops identify themselves and drive clearly marked vehicles. Soldiers even identify themselves to the enemy if they’re captured in battle. ICE agents—assuming the unidentified, masked dudes terrorizing cities are actually ICE and not rapists and kidnappers masquerading as government deporters—wear a hodgepodge of off-the-shelf vests and insignia, cruise around in rented vehicles, and illegally change their license plates daily to avoid accountability. ICE’s defenders argue that Jonathan…
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Checks and Balances Are Dead

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Ted Rall
Checks and balances, our teachers taught us, were America’s ace in the hole. Human beings are highly fallible and easily corruptible. Because the Founding Fathers knew that—“The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted,” James Madison warned— they crafted the three branches of the new federal government as counterweights in which the natural impulse of officials to jealously preserve their power and prerogatives was accepted as a given rather than as an evil to be controlled. Accepting human nature as it was formed the basis of what was credited as one of the most ingenious systems ever created in the West. Checks and balances, it turns out, are bullshit. Because sometimes, like now, the desire to accrue and preserve personal and organizational power takes a back seat to sycophancy and cowardice. The 25th Amendment created a mechanism for suspending the authority of a physically or otherwise unfit president. Those who drafted it invested that power in…
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Democrats, Don’t Claim a Mandate

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Ted Rall
There is, at this writing, a better-than-even chance that Democrats will recapture the House of Representatives. They also have a shot at the Senate. If either or both happens, Democrats will declare victory. That’s fair. They will claim a mandate. They will describe their win as vindication of their candidates and their ideas. Unfair. And dumb. About “mandate” and “vindication”: As Inigo Montoya famously says in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” To be fair to the future probably-victorious Democrats of mid-November 2026, both parties overstate the extent to which voters want them to aggressively promulgate their policy agenda. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump declared after winning the 2024 election after winning 49.7% of the popular vote. Biden claimed “a mandate for action” while the 2020 votes were still being counted. “I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I…
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The Lazy Left

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Ted Rall
Through the Sixties, when I was a single-digit child, people knew that revolution was hard. Those who committed to revolutionary change understood that the elites who control the levers of power, institutional inertia and the broken spirits of those they sought to emancipate comprised barriers that were nearly impossible to overcome. They knew that for every triumphant revolution in France, Russia, China and Cuba, there were hundreds of uprisings smothered in their cribs—and that even those turned sour. As Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground put it, the path of the revolutionist leads to victory, prison or death. Odds of victory were long. An ethical leftist would willingly shoulder the burden of class struggle nevertheless. They resolved to work tirelessly to organize at the grass roots. They took professional and legal risks and sacrificed security and respectability. They put everything on the line. Because nothing less than the future of humanity and whether our species would live as slaves or…
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We’re Workers Too

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Ted Rall
From an economic standpoint, governments look at citizens as workers, consumers or both. Most people, of course, are both: we work and earn, and we spend. Our dual economic roles inform the core of the affordability discussion at the center of current politics. For as long as everyone but the oldest of us can remember, both major parties have focused on and messaged to the individual as homo consumerus. Clinton promised that tariff-eliminating ‘free trade’ pacts like NAFTA and the WTO would improve our living standards by making imported goods cheaper. On that point, if the prices of imported stuff at Wal-Mart is a good indicator, he seems to have been mostly right. But Clinton had no good answer to protectionists who worried about offshoring the good manufacturing jobs that propped up the economy of the industrial Midwest. Cheaper prices are well and good, but the unemployed can’t buy anything. Trump promised to and claims to have reduced not only…
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Everyone Must Get Droned

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Ted Rall
The Achaemenid Persian Empire. Byzantium. The Ottomans. Ancient Rome. All these regimes wielded immense power relative to their contemporaries. They dominated militarily, economically, culturally and globally in ways comparable to the United States’ current superpower status. All collapsed or were destroyed. We Americans often forget that nothing lasts forever. And we always ignore the playwright Wilson Mizner’s advice to be nice to people on your way up because you’ll meet them on your way down. I am terrified of what will happen to us on the way down. Whether or not you approve of U.S. actions overseas, there’s little dispute that our policymakers routinely flout international norms, violate treaty obligations and ignore the law—our own and those of other countries. We have provided billions in military aid and weapons to Israel despite its documented violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza, making us complicit in war crimes and violating the Leahy Laws, which prohibit aid to entities guilty of gross…
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The Charmed Caste

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Ted Rall
Americans know that they discriminate against one another by race, sex, religion, looks, income, etc. Yet they’re unaware that the United States has a caste system every bit as rigid and objectively odd as India’s—and it’s so subtle that almost no one notices it. None of this is to say that the forms of bigotry that journalists and lawmakers focus upon aren’t real. It’s easier to be able-bodied than not, college-educated rather than not, straight instead of gay, have a clean record as opposed to appearing in a police database of a “gang affiliate.” Those drags on equity form a race-based U.S. caste system, which is bad for human beings and ought to be redressed. But they’re not the whole picture. Missing from every analysis of Otherizing is the caste that walks among us unidentified while in plain sight: the Charmed Ones. Take two people from the same socioeconomic cultural class. Outwardly, they seem to sit exactly at the same…
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The Death of the Landline Will Kill You

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Ted Rall
When you visit Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, you may be told about his telephone. It was one of the first phones in the country, so he could neither call nor be called. He had faith in a phone-ful future. Also, he had invested in AT&T. Someone had to be first. Alexander Graham Bell—Twain’s buddy—was American. The international calling code for the U.S. is 1. The phone was ours. So it was startling to learn recently that, if you want an old-fashioned copper-wire landline phone (also known as POTS—Plain Old Telephone Service) installed in your home in the country that gave the world the telephone, there’s a high chance that you won’t be able to find a telecommunications outfit willing or able to fill your order. AT&T says it will kill off POTS by 2029. New homes are no longer automatically built with the requisite wiring. Networks are getting ripped out. In older houses, the wiring is degrading and, once…
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Shutdown Surrender Is Political Suicide for Democrats

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Ted Rall
Democrats think they run against Republicans. Republicans think they run against Democrats. When swing voters existed as a significant segment of the electorate, that was at least partly true. In our age of polarization, there are too few swing voters to determine the outcome of most races. Elections are won by the party that most motivates its base. When turnout is king, a party’s biggest enemy isn’t the other party. It’s apathy. These days, each of the two parties runs against itself. Every race is an intra-party contest between novelty, which can generate excitement but also fear of the unknown, and establishmentarianism—the tendency of institutions to revert to their historical inertial center. Establishmentarianism makes its strongest case when people feel good about their job, their finances, their communities, and thus institutions like political parties and government. Americans haven’t felt happy about the economy or much else for at least the past decade or two. Which is why every election, even…
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What To Do When Your Country Sucks

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Ted Rall
In a New York Times op-ed titled “How to Be a Good Citizen When Your Country Does Bad Things,” M. Gessen asks: “When your country pursues abhorrent policies, when the face it turns to the world is the face of a monster, what does that say about you?” I applaud Gessen for raising this question and an otherwise stiflingly establishmentarian newspaper for publishing it. Still, it’s a bummer that the piece is primarily notable for raising an ethical quandary that older Americans believed to have been fully and correctly settled at least as far back as World War II. Gessen is concerned with the current American dilemma. What should we do as the United States “builds more cages for immigrants, deploys military force against civilians in city after city, regularly commits murder in the high seas and systematically destroys its own democratic institutions?” There is no explanation for why, but Gessen traveled to Israel to ask Israelis opposed to their…
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