“Donald Trump’s presidency, not yet ten weeks old, has already coerced powerful institutions like Columbia University into abandoning their values. From canceling $400 million in research grants to forcing out professors and banning student groups, Trump’s threats reveal an authoritarian style that stifles freedom, echoing McCarthyism—but with far less resistance.”
We Are the Fourth Branch of Government
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In high school, when we studied the separation of powers, I asked my civics teacher: “What happens if the executive branch ignores the judiciary?” He didn’t have much of an answer. It has happened before. One famous case was President Andrew Jackson’s refusal to enforce a Supreme Court ruling overturning Georgia’s seizure of Cherokee lands. “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it,” a defiant Jackson supposedly said. Georgia expelled the Cherokees in an act of ethnic cleansing known as the Trail of Tears. Lincoln shrugged off a federal judge’s habeas corpus order to release a Confederate sympathizer. The administration of George W. Bush defied the Supreme Court’s ruling in Rasul v. Bush (2004), ordering Guantánamo prisoners be given access to U.S. courts for habeas petitions. Still, presidents usually respect the courts. The Constitution’s checks and balances have mostly held up over 236 years. But there’s another factor—one that political scientists and teachers like mine…
Read MoreWhen Presidents Clashed with Allies: Trump, Zelensky, Roosevelt, and de Gaulle in Historical Context
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“The public display in the Oval Office was unprecedented and bizarre: Trump dressed down Zelensky, echoing Roosevelt’s contempt for de Gaulle during WWII. From plans to seize France’s empire to tensions over Ukraine’s war, history reveals startling parallels in how U.S. presidents handled beleaguered allies.”
The Russians Are Coming? Not Really.
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Trump’s interest in rapprochement with Russia and his annoyance with Ukraine, embodied by last week’s Oval Office shouting match, has corporate pundits and politicians freaking out. Trump’s former national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, said Trump’s dressing down of Volodymyr Zelensky made him “ashamed for my nation”—something he’s never said about Guantánamo or torture or invading Iraq or even racism. Whenever U.S. support for Ukraine gets questioned, count on militaristic whores to drag out cut-and-paste fearmongering from the Cold War era. Putin aims to “absorb Ukraine, all of it, and likely the other former states of the Soviet Union, too,” the editorial board of Canada’s Globe and Mail claimed in 2022. “Putin’s Ukraine invasion is the first time in 80 years that a great power has moved to conquer a sovereign nation,” Mitt Romney wrote in 2022. Um—Afghanistan? Iraq? Panama? “It echoes Hitler’s absorption of Czechoslovakia and his lust for Poland. But even more, it reflects Putin’s drive…
Read MoreThe Incredible Vanishing Liberals
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For this essay, let’s not debate the pros and cons of our new old president. Detailing specific reasons that many Americans are upset with/scared of/annoyed by Donald Trump and the Republican Party would be a distraction from a point that desperately needs to be made. Suffice it to say, millions of people are angry, disappointed and would prefer entirely different political policies and priorities out of Washington. The fact that we should linger upon is this: Many, many liberals feel very, very impotent. And this should be a major cause of concern. When Republicans celebrate their win by mocking their opponents, they’re whistling past the small-d democratic graveyard of history. Winning an election is good. Crushing your opponents’ political will to live is dangerous. For liberals, there is a lot not to like about politics since January 20th. Trump has signed a blizzard of sweeping executive orders on a myriad of controversial issues. His administration is attempting a radical…
Read MoreA Movement Beats a Party Every Time
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As Democrats continue to deconstruct the root causes of their recent defeat and attempt to regroup for next year’s midterm elections, they might want to consider a new factor in American politics: the seductive power of a movement compared to a boring old party. On the surface, the 60th American presidential election was the usual two-way contest between the Democratic and Republican parties. But, as Democrats tried their best to run as normal and competent a campaign as they could despite Biden’s ill-timed withdrawal, Trump had re-branded and re-organized the Republican Party as a vessel of his MAGA movement. A movement is dynamic. Its number-one goal is building excitement and a sense of belonging. A party strives for constancy. It represents a set of principles through thick and thin. All things being equal, a movement beats a party. “The difference between parties and movements is simple,” the progressive pundit David Sirota wrote back in 2009.…
Read MoreResistance to Memory
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When I was young, I knew a lot about old people. Especially about old people I knew personally: members of my family, my mother’s contemporaneous older friends, teachers, clients on my paper route. It wasn’t a choice. When I was young, no one asked whether I was interested about events that significantly preceded my birth. They just talked. My mom told me countless detailed stories about her childhood growing up during the Nazi occupation of France; many if not most of these tales of woe were repeated despite my reminders that I was already familiar with them. I was expected to listen as the schoolteacher got shot, the cat was abandoned and the Allied tanks rolled in. Children, teenagers and young adults were expected less to be seen and not heard than to listen politely nodding their heads as their elders described watching the Beatles arrive at Idlewild (on black-and-white TV with rabbit ears, natch), where they…
Read MoreI Have Been Un-personed by ChatGPT
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I’ve been unpersoned. Here, in the United States of America. The censor? OpenAI, the huge tech company run by Sam Altman, famous for creating ChatGPT. Open ChatGPT and ask it: “Who is Ted Rall?” ChatGPT will answer: “I’m unable to produce a response.” Unable? Unwilling is more like it. ChatGPT had all sorts of things to say about me a few years ago. Asked to describe my supposed trip to Uganda, ChatGPT falsely offered: “Ted Rall, an American political cartoonist and writer, visited Uganda in 2006 as a journalist. He went to the country to report on the conflict between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group accused of widespread human rights abuses, including the use of child soldiers.” I’ve never been to Uganda. I also asked ChatGPT: “What is Scott Stantis’ relationship to Ted Rall?” Scott, the conservative editorial cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune, is my best friend. ChatGPT, however, had…
Read MoreDemocrats Want a Divorce
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When a marriage is in crisis, a point often occurs when constant bickering, arguing and fighting yields to detachment and hopelessness. The yelling stops. It’s quiet. But it’s not peace. Exhausted, dispirited and contemptuous, one or both partners give up trying to convince the other that they’re wrong or ought to change. They accept that improvement is highly unlikely and check out emotionally. Some psychologists call this uneasy calm a “silent divorce.” Dr. Ridha Rouabhia describes a silent divorce as “a state of being legally married but emotionally disconnected from one another, thus carrying within it a relational breakdown that is very often imperceptible but deeply damaging.” By the time you and your spouse are fighting your own personal cold war, odds of divorce are high. Couples who fall in love and dedicate themselves to long-term committed relationships tend to fit into one of two categories. There are the soulmates who share important values and personality traits. Then there…
Read MoreTrump Grabs at a Presidency of Intentionality
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There are two kinds of leaders: managers and revolutionists. Most American presidents are managers. Managers have small ambitions, often so small as to be immeasurable. They may or not think that the organization that they’re taking over requires a few nips or tucks, but they believe that the fundamentals are sound. The main ambition of these incrementalists is to attain their position. The moment their buttocks sink into the big chair behind the big desk, they have fulfilled their biggest goal. It is easy to identify a managerial president during a time of crisis. No matter how bad things get and how angry voters become, managers are loathe to change much. They govern as though continuity were a given. Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, both consummate technocrats, assumed the nation’s highest office during periods of economic upheaval. Yet they did not follow the example of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a revolutionist, by introducing major plans or anti-poverty bills to try…
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