Auspicious Omens and Excellent Insubordination

I started this out as a letter to a friend who's feeling down about where we as a nation are at in this moment, and I am still learning how this newsletter thing works so thought I could use the newsletter template to produce a private document, maybe a PDF, full of screenshots instead of emailing her, but it doesn't work that way. So I decided that more than a few friends and lovely strangers might like a pep talk that is really a round-up of a lot of signs of our strength and their weakness (in a format a little less essayistic and a little more choppy than what I usually deliver here).

The most essential thing about the Trump Administration right now is that it is weak, chaotic, and wildly unpopular and doing everything it can to make itself more so. Unfortunately it's taking the nation and to some extent the world with it, but if you want to see the administration as the drunk driver, more and more people are getting out of the car, or trying to turn it around (and take the keys away). Congress could do it, but Mike Johnson and John Thune won't let that happen (while everyone is focused on Trump, the fact that Congress has immense powers that have been sabotaged or surrendered could use a lot more attention and maybe a campaign to shame the party in charge).

The hideous crimes of Trump's ICE in the present and the revelations about the hideous crimes of the past that implicate so many rich and powerful white men, including Trump and his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, are together a sort of pincers move. They corral the administration from two angles, clarifying its utter disregard for the human rights of, well, everyone but powerful white men.

All this is turning away longtime Trump supporters (and what the hell ever happened to the party of family values, the rule of law, and fiscal and personal responsibility? – I know, Trump happened). Nothing will distract the public for long from the Epstein files, and the dribble of releases with the obvious suppression of stuff that is legally required to be released, and the clarity about who is being protected (powerful men) and who is not (abused children), furthers the case against the administration.

The congresspeople examining the unredacted files and reporting back to us are the next phase of a story that has been unfolding for years now. Congressman Jamie Raskin told Axios that Trump's name is in the Epstein files more than a million times. Senator John Ossoff just coined the term "the Epstein class" for the elite who cavorted and chummed around with Epstein even after he was a registered sex offender whose crimes against children were covered in the national news. The Daily Beast recently reported, "Trumpy MMA [mixed martial arts] fighter Sean Strickland says he’ll pass on President Donald Trump’s upcoming White House birthday brawl because hanging out with 'the Epstein list' doesn’t appeal to him." The report says of the former ardent Trump supporter, "As one of the country’s top male fighters and a former middleweight champion, Strickland’s role in the MMA world domestically is not to be understated."

Trump's most recent outburst of extreme racism, directed against the Obamas, generated a backlash too. It's typical Trump to fail to understand that we live in a world where causes have effects, and the effects were for tons of people to praise the Obamas to the skies while sharing photographs of them looking gracious, dignified, and beautiful while describing Trump as gross; even some Republicans felt compelled to denounce him. Trump himself appears to be falling apart mentally, physically, and politically.

Meanwhile, Vance has had a Year of Boos. They boo'd him in Vermont almost a year ago when he tried to ski there, they boo'd him in Greenland, they boo'd him here, they boo'd him there, they boo him, boo him everywhere. They boo'd him big at the Olympics in Italy last Friday where he tried to glom onto the glory of the country's top athletes, poor things. Vance is supernaturally unlikeable and he does a lot to maximize that quality with his sneers, hate speech, and lies. It's said that Trump skipped the Super Bowl because he couldn't face the booing. And the Super Bowl was barely the Super Bowl; it was the most widely watched halftime show in history, in which a beautiful repudiation of Trump values was enacted with verve and generosity, and most of us barely noticed there was also a sports event.

I've been saying for a while that their theory of power is that they have it all and no one else matters, which is a stupid theory of power. Political power is relational; it's in the ability to get and keep support, alliances, connections, to be at the heart of the kind of systems (like NATO, like trading partnerships) they keep destroying (while Vance in particular goes out of his way to insult constituencies he should maybe cultivate). When they do stuff that makes everyone hate them, they seem to operate on the premise that they have absolute and total and final power, even as the judges rule against them, MAGA falls out with them (remember Marjorie Taylor Greene?), and the public rallies against them in unprecedented numbers (#nokings) and ways, including those amazing networks of cross-racial solidarity we have not really seen since the Underground Railroad – well okay, at least since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s with Freedom Summer (is Minneapolis Freedom Winter?). Saner Republicans see a bloodbath coming in the midterms (which of course the Trumpists are gearing up to try to steal or delegitimize, which you can take as a sign they do not think they can win fairly). Last week's state senate election in a Texas district Trump won by 17 points was won by fourteen points – a 31-point shift – by a Democrat who was outspent twenty to one.

In the New Yorker, Jelani Cobb compared what ICE is doing to the Fugitive Slave Act of the antebellum era, which he notes politicized and mobilized a lot of Americans to defend their neighbors agains the slavecatchers and pushed the nation toward the Civil War as the institution of slavery became illegitimate, immoral, intolerable to more and more of the public. In other words the act backfired, just like the hateful pictures of the Obamas did, just like the public brutality against people going about their daily lives and jobs has, just like the mishandling of the Epstein files has.

Meanwhile, this nice item popped up the other day: "Comedian-turned-MAGA bro podcaster Andrew Schulz has gone viral after sharing during a conversation on The Brilliant Idiots with Charlamagne Tha God that ongoing ICE raids were his "breaking point" with President Donald Trump and that liberals were right about the threat Trump poses to democracy in the U.S. Schulz previously played a significant role platforming Trump, who appeared as a guest on the Flagrant podcast in October 2024 during his presidential campaign, an episode that racked up 9.6 million views." ICE agents are not so happy either, according to Wired, which got into a forum where 5000 users claiming to be ICE or Border Patrol talked about how discontented they are with what their jobs have become. Presumably they're the ones who didn't actually aspire to be the Gestapo.

Also we have God on our side, and I say that without sarcasm. That amazing show of clergy in Minneapolis late last month. The way the Catholic church is coming out strong for immigrants. Episcopalians! Methodists! United Church of Christ! All the progressive Protestant denominations, along with rabbis, imams, and those Catholics (who seem to demonstrate that Pope Francis was quietly rebuilding the leadership in his own image, appointment by appointment). In Springfield, Ohio, the Guardian reports, churches are at the heart of community response against the Trump Administration threats against Haitian residents, and across the country churches are becoming meeting places, training grounds, and organizing networks for immigrant solidarity work.

Those Buddhist monks on pilgrimage blow me away – they were just out there walking week after week for peace, implicitly saying "we are nonwhite non-Christian immigrants," and crowds across the south were literally joining them. They arrived today at the National Cathedral and the end of their peace walk, and that they were received there says a lot.

Based on what I'm seeing at No Kings and the other protests, I believe progressives are reclaiming the flag and patriotism. There's a whole new wave of progressive Christianity or rather an old presence become more visible and impactful (including some candidates for Congress who are preachers or can talk about God and Jesus in ways aligned with progressive values and against white nationalism).... Also Bruce Springsteen is practically a human American flag and his "Streets of Minneapolis" song hit #1 in a bunch of countries.

Look! Just below: a Brigham Young University anti-ICE protest. And don't you love all those high school students all over the country walking out of class in protest of ICE? The Louisville, Kentucky, Courier Journal reports, "Hundreds of students across Louisville walked out of class Feb. 6 to protest the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that have sparked nationwide demonstrations.At duPont Manual High School, students held signs that read “ICE kills” and chanted “ICE out.”."

They are losing the culture wars. The Grammies and then Bad Bunny's halftime show were demonstrations of opposition – and all Turning Point USA could muster as a counter-spectacle was Kid Rock, a minor has-been who seems to be the entertainer the right trots out over and over because they don't have a lot of other choices. It's been the case for decades that the right doesn't have a lot of impressive artists on its side. Last week, the Trump-controlled Kennedy Center announced it's closed for two years – to cover up that almost no one wants to perform at or attend the corrupted, debased institution Trump smeared his name on. The performers' cancellations have come one after the other.  Athletes, including Olympians, clergy, artists are all coming out against the administration.

Trump is so fixated on getting and owning that he does not understand the shiny gold thing is not the Nobel Prize and the building that housed the Kennedy Center is not the Kennedy Center, which was all its people and performances and systems and standing in the world, its meaning and honor and dignity he can never have. He is a deteriorating man living in a wrecked White House trying to shore up his defense against mortality and awareness of mortality by sticking his name on things and grabbing things and screeching things and proclaiming his own greatness. I see him as a falling man grabbing at everything he can on the way down, from buildings to medals to very large islands, but they cannot stop his fall, and a lot of them are slipping through his grasp.

And he's losing as he goes:

A lot of people have been framing different scraps of news with WE ARE GOING TO WIN.

As for the issue of the midterms, the estimable Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo writes: "There are few things that the Constitution is more clear on than the fact that states administer our national elections. Congress has a significant but still limited ability to set uniform ground rules and standards for those elections. But states administer them. The federal government has only a very limited ability to get its hands into that process and it goes through the courts. This is a textbook instance where the subordinate but separate sovereign authority of the states comes so powerfully into play. They are separate sovereignties, the states and the federal government. There just aren’t levers or tethers connecting them to each other in this sense. For all his vast powers, a president can never order a governor or mayor or, for that matter, a dog catcher to do anything. He can’t fire them. They are part of a separate sovereignty. And it’s driving Donald Trump completely up the wall. Great! Let him suffer. Glory in it. And most of all lean into it. Trump’s supporters are abandoning him. He’s getting less popular. He’s losing. So he wants his Republican friends to start counting the votes. So he can win and feel less sad. Big loser energy! Thank you for your attention to this matter."

The New Republic's Greg Sargent notes, "But a funny thing has happened with Miller’s authoritarian fever dreams. As plans for these new detention facilities have become public, they’re encountering opposition in some very unlikely places. Notably, that includes regions that backed Trump in 2024.  Which in turn captures something essential about this moment: The public backlash unleashed by Trump’s immigration agenda runs far deeper than revulsion at imagery of ICE violence. It’s now seemingly coalescing against the goal of mass removals as a broader ideological project." Locals defeating attempts to build immigrant gulags is one way this is manifesting.

You're probably tired of me saying we're going to win. So here's Ross Douthat of the New York Times saying the right and Trump are going to lose.

He writes: I want to tell you a secret. One that most conservatives on the internet don’t want you to know. A year into his second presidency, Donald Trump has lost the country. “The majority of voters believe the country is worse off today than it was a year ago.” “Approval rating at 37 percent, the lowest of his second term.” “A failure. Fail, fail, fail.” And the grand coalition that he united to defeat Kamala Harris has evaporated. And all of this was predictable. From the first days of DOGE through the debacle in Minneapolis, the Trump administration has consistently governed as if swing voters aren’t part of its coalition. And now, guess what? They’re not. ... There’s no one to point out the bleeding obvious: that the Trump administration is failing because it is making many millions of normal Americans feel totally freaked out. “I regret voting for Donald Trump.” “So I work on my family’s farm, and we’ve lost our best hands because of Trump’s deportations.” And the conservatives who are willing to say that are the kind of people who are easy for parts of the right to dismiss. New York Times conservatives. Trump skeptics rather than true believers. But damn it, I’m right. I was right when I warned liberals in the Biden era that they were losing the country and enabling Donald Trump’s return. And I’m right when I tell conservatives and populists the truth that they don’t hear enough of on right-wing media: that unless the administration finds a way to seem a little bit more moderate and just a little bit more normal, there isn’t going to be any Trump legacy at all.

Oh yes there will be, just not like you thought it would be or, seriously, what did you think? What did you think this adjudicated rapist, serial bankrupt, pathological liar, slob, and all-around idiot was going to do? Did you think, Ross the Douthat?

Meanwhile they're panicking.

I see an intransigent, never-surrender spirit across the land. I see bold solidarity. I see an insurgent ethic of solidarity and a magnificent boldness in its realization as practical action. I see another USA swimming into focus, from Bad Bunny in California to the Buddhist monks arriving today in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., from the solidarity networks of Minneapolis to those of New Orleans. It gives me hope. I believe in the American people, insofar as I see that we are diverse, scattered across vast amounts of space, from inner city to wilderness, with centuries behind us of believing in and fighting for and expanding our rights and demanding a limit on authorities' ability to tell us what to do, backed by a surly insubordination that is a beautiful thing in this moment.

One of the observers in Minneapolis – those people who follow and document ICE there, at considerable risk – told journalist Jon Collins at MPR News, “I think they’re getting angry that we’re winning and the country is rallying around us. We’re so organized and we act with such integrity. They don’t want to admit they feel threatened by us.” Journalist Jon Collins concludes, "It's more soccer moms than hardcore activists, they said. But the challenging conditions have brought them closer together. After knowing each other for just weeks, they feel like they’d give their lives to protect one another if necessary." The woman Collins quoted told him she says to her family: “If I am killed doing this, throw my body at the White House, martyr the shit out of me and raise hell. Do not be sad. Do not think I would do anything differently. I would do it over and over again — this is too important to sit down and shut up and not do anything.” When people feel like that, they are very hard to defeat, and the momentum is on their side. Her daughter understands, she says, because she is learning about Martin Luther King, Jr., in school.

Recently I read something by a consummate Washington insider recently, a high-profile journalist who sounded a lot more pessimistic than me about where this country is headed. It might be because she focuses on what elected politicians and officially powerful people do and sees them as shaping our destiny, and i they're not shaping it very well right now. But they're not the only ones shaping it. I focus on culture and the power of ideas, on ordinary people, grassroots movements, and the power of civil society when individuals come together, and that gives you a very different view of what power is and how it shapes history. When you look at those sectors, you see something building, and you see momentum.

We should be heartsore at all the suffering and destruction, we should be anxious about what's coming next, and about the huge job of rebuilding a functioning de-corrupted federal government after that. I texted another friend who was in a state of dismay that I believe we are winning but a lot of ugliness and brutality will transpire before the verb tense becomes past tense: won. Winning will become won, if it does, through our unflagging efforts, our solidarity, our commitment to our deepest values, and to each other.

p.s. This seems to have a higher number of editing errors than my usual (I do all my own editing/proofreading, and it's often in incomplete revisions that I make a mess of things). Apologies to all; I'm just back from travels and fairly exhausted....