READING LINCOLN'S LYCEUM ADDRESS TODAY

On January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln was a twenty-eight year old lawyer and member of the Illinois House of Representatives.  That night, he spoke before the Young Men's Lyceum in the state capital of Springfield. 

Lincoln titled his speech "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions."  

He began optimistically, explaining that "In the great journal of things happening under the sun," his America was in great shape. It stood, he said, "on the fairest portion of the earth . . . under . . . a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us." 

He admitted that he and his fellow citizens had not produced these "fundamental blessings". 

"We toiled not," he said, "in the acquirement or establishment of them." 

Rather, he continued, they were a "legacy . . . bequeathed . . . by a once hardy . . . and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors."

The passing of those ancestors worried him.

For two reasons.

One based on the passions of the ambitious.

The other based on the passions of the people.

As a student of history, Lincoln recognized that the half-century survival of "our political institutions"  would, for many, create a presumption they must continue.  "Have we not preserved them for more than fifty years," they would ask, "And why may we not for  fifty times as long?" But Lincoln was also a student of human nature and a thinker -- like Madison before him -- with an acute understanding of human psychology. 

So, he thought . . .

"That our government should have been maintained in the original form from its establishment until now is not much to be wondered at. It had many props to support it through that period, which are now decayed and crumbled away."

The first was the Revolution itself.

Which drove the ambitious to fulfill its aims and make it a success.

"Through that period," he explained,  "it was felt by all to be an undecided experiment". As a consequence, he continued, "all that sought celebrity and fame, and distinction, expected to find them in the success of that experiment. Their all was staked upon it."

"Their ambition aspired to display before an admiring world a practical demonstration of the truth of the proposition which had hitherto been considered at best no better than problematical; namely, the capability of people to govern themselves."

"If they succeeded, they were to be immortalized."

They did.

And they were.

"But," he warned, "the game is caught".  

The Revolution's "field of glory" had been "harvested . . . [T]he crop  . . . already appropriated."

And he knew the ambitious among them, himself included, would not stand still

"[N]ew reapers will arise," he explained, "and they, too, will seek a field."

"And when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have done before them."

"The question then is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others?"

 "Most certainly," he thought,  "it cannot."

As Lincoln looked at his fellow political travelers, he noticed "Many great and good men . . . whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or presidential chair".

But he also noticed an underside.  

Those who belonged  "to the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle."

"[T]hink you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon?" he asked

And then answered in one word:

"Never!"

"Towering genius," he concluded, "disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story upon the monuments to fame erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen."

And so . . . 

In the second half of the American republic's first century . . .

This was Lincoln's first fear:

The destructive passions of the ambitious man who . . . 

With "nothing left to be done in the way of building up . . .

Would set boldly to the task of pulling down."

His second fear was the passion of the people themselves.

Because they too were no longer moored to the Revolution.

As Lincoln put it to the Lyceum:

"Another reason which once was, but . . .  is now no more, has done much in maintaining our institutions thus far." This was "the powerful influence which the . . . the revolution had upon the passions of the people as distinguished from their judgment."

"By this influence," he explained, "the jealousy, envy, and avarice incident to our nature . . . were, for a time . . .  smothered and rendered inactive, while the deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of revenge, instead of being turned against each other, were directed exclusively against the British nation. And thus, from the force of circumstances, the basest principles of our nature were either made to lie dormant or to become the active agents in the advancement of the noblest cause -- that of establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty."

"This state of feeling," he realized, had "faded with the circumstances that produced it."

"At the close of the struggle, nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of the scenes. The consequence was that of those scenes, in the form of a husband, a father, a son or brother, a living history was to be found in every family . . . But those histories are gone . . . They were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now that they have crumbed away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason."

"Passion has helped us," Lincoln concluded, "but can do so no more."

"It will in the future be our enemy."

In the years that followed, Lincoln's fears proved prescient.  The passionately ambitious sought to extend the south's slavocracy to the west, preserving it forever in the form of additional slave states that would make it impossible for the nation as a whole to ever end slavery constitutionally through an amendment, and the Supreme Court in 1858 strengthened their hand by making citizenship solely a function of state law and by turning slaves into property even in places where they could not be slaves. Shortly thereafter, and unwilling to run the risk that Lincoln's presidency would thwart their ambitions, the southern plantation aristocracy embraced and excited the racist passions of its poor whites to fight and die for those aristocrats in the Civil War.

In neither case did law or reason prevail.

And today we seem to be on the same path.

Among the many emerging disasters in these nascent days of the second Trump administration, the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the worst.  

On March 15, 2025, the Trump administration's ICE agents illegally seized Garcia and sent him to a terrorist prison in El Salvador.  At the time, he was here legally, a federal immigration judge having held that he could not be sent to El Salvador because he might be tortured there if he was. After his seizure, which the administration immediately conceded was erroneous, a federal court ordered the government to "facilitate and effectuate" his return to the United States by "11:59 pm on April 7". On the morning of April 7, the Supreme Court stayed that order, but on April 10 it affirmed it. Since then, Trump has refused to honor it. 

On Friday in Court, when the judge asked what the government had done to return Garcia to the United States, the DOJ attorney said he had no knowledge . On Saturday, Garcia's lawyers asked the Court to compel the administration to "ensure [Garcia's] safe passage to the aircraft that will return him to the United States" and suggested the Court order the government's lawyers to show cause why they should not be held in contempt.  On Saturday, in a statement that would have made the Soviet politburo proud, the administration said Garcia was "alive and secure" in the El Salvadoran prison to which he had been sent and was "detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador". On Sunday in a filing, DOJ argued "The Court should . . . reject [Garcia's] request for further intrusive supervision of the Executive's facilitation process beyond the daily status reports already ordered," to which in any case Trump's lawyers also objected.

So . . .

Here is where we are:

Trump is claiming he can seize anyone for good reason, no reason or even a mistaken reason; send them to a foreign prison without any due process whatsoever; and then assert (i) the courts cannot tell him otherwise without interfering with his conduct of foreign policy and (ii) even if they could, the prisoner is now subject to a "sovereign, domestic authority" over which neither they nor Trump have any control.

This follows his extortion of big law firms forced to pay tribute to remain in business; his attack on academic freedom as he arbitrarily withholds federal grants from Ivy League and other elite universities he dislikes; his illegal invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against individuals from a nation with which we are not at war; his incoherent and chaotic on-again, off-again tariff policy against allies and enemies alike that has roiled markets, imperiled America's status as a safe haven, gutted 401k's and made business planning impossible; the investigation at his urging of Christopher Krebs because Krebs told the truth in 2020 that Trump had actually lost the presidential election that year; his summary firing by DOGE of thousands of federal employees; an incipient measles epidemic his HHS secretary cannot contain and whose advice has actually made worse; the almost complete abandonment of Ukraine; and his continued devotion to Vladimir Putin.

In his Lyceum Address, Lincoln asked:

"At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?"

"Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow?"

 "Never," he responded.

"All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasures of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years."  

The question therefore remained:

"At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected?"

He then looked in the mirror.

And told the truth.

"If it ever reaches us," Lincoln said, "it must spring up amongst us.  It cannot come from abroad.  If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and its finisher."

"As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."

In case you're wondering . . .

We're there.

BY THE NUMBERS

Dow Close on January 20, 2021 -- 30.930.52.

Dow Close on January 20, 2025 -- 43,487.83.

Dow Close on April 4, 2025 -- 38,314.84.

COREY BOOKER

He came.

He spoke.

He conquered.

MARCH MADNESS

March 1 -- Trump signs an Executive Order to make English the official language of the US, reversing President Clinton's order requiring assistance for non-English speakers. 

March 2 -- Trump creates a US crypto reserve.

On the same day, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy. Jr. writes in an opinion piece that studies showed Vitamin A "dramatically reduces measles mortality" and that the use of the steroid budesonide, the antibiotic clarithromycin and cod live oil also produces "good results".

March 3 -- The Senate confirms Linda McMahon as Secretary of Education. She claims her mission is to end the Department of Education (DOE)

March 4 -- Trump delivers joint address to Congress. He speaks for one hour and forty minutes.

March 5 -- Trump postpones auto tariffs for 30 days.

On the same day, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) announces plans to cut its workforce by 80,000.

March 6 -- Trump delays imposition of tariffs on Canada and Mexico until April 2. 

On the same day, he issues an Executive Order against the law firm Perkins Coie restricting its access to government buildings and federal contracting work on the grounds that the firm had previously worked for Democrats and clients that opposed the administration; he had previously issued a similar order against Covington Burling based on the fact that it represented Jack Smith, the Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney who prosecuted Trump in connection with the J6 insurrection and the separate classified documents case. 

Also on March 6, Trump demands federal courts impose costs and damages on those who seek injunctions against the federal government that are later reversed.

March 7 -- Trump signs an Executive Order that revokes Public Service Loan Forgiveness to organizations that advance "public disruptions".

On the same day, the administration -- through the Department of Education (DOE), the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) -- informs Columbia University that it would be pausing or terminating over $400 million in federal funding.

Also on the same day, the Department of Defense tags tens of thousands of on-line photos and posts for removal in order to comply with Trump's demand to eliminate DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs. One of the photos is of the "Enola Gay", the aircraft from which the first atom bomb was dropped on Japan. It appears to have been tagged because it contains the word "Gay".

March 11 -- The House of Representatives passes -- in a 217-215 vote -- an entirely partisan Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the government through September 30.  The House CR proposes $2 trillion in spending cuts and allows for $4.5 trillion in additional spending to pass Trump's proposed tax cuts.

March 12 -- Trump meets Irish Taoiseach Michael Martin and repeats the claim that the European Union (EU) was designed to take advantage of the US.  

March 13 --  In a follow-up to its March 7 letter to Columbia, the DOE, GSA and HHS send a second letter setting forth the demands Columbia University must meet to avoid losing federal funding. Among the demands are that Columbia place its department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies under academic receivership for five years.  On March 25, the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming the administration's "threats and coercion" against Columbia "are part of a huge authoritarian playbook meant to crush academic freedom and critical research in American higher education."

March 14 -- The  Senate passes the House CR to fund the government through September 30. Ten Democrats vote with fifty-two Republicans to avoid a filibuster.  

On the same day, Trump gives a speech to attorneys at the Department of Justice in which he says those who oppose him in court "are horrible people. They are scum."  

Also on the same day, he issues an Executive Order against the law firm Paul Weiss restricting its access to government buildings and federal contracting work. The basis for this order is that a former Paul Weiss partner assisted the NY County DA in its prosecution of Trump in connection with his creation of fraudulent business records to hide his affair with Stormy Daniels.

And also on the same day, Trump issues an Executive Order shutting down Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Marti. The federal courts block the order later in the month

March 15 -- Trump uses the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to unilaterally arrest and deport 261 individuals he claims are members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. US District Judge James Boasberg issues a temporary restraining order (TRO) blocking the action.  In a later opinion denying the Government's motion to vacate that TRO, Judge Boasberg explained that plaintiffs had a right to contest any claim they were members of the gang and the right to contest their removal to El Salvador given evidence that it would subject incarcerated plaintiffs to torture.

March 16 -- Trump violates Judge Boasberg's order and deports the 261 individuals anyway, sending them to a prison in El Salvador. None had the opportunity to contest the claim they were gang members.  For many, there is evidence they were not.

March 18 -- Trump calls for the impeachment of Judge Boasberg. Chief Justice Roberts says impeachment is not the proper response to disagreement with judicial rulings.

On the same day, Trump removes two commissioners from the Federal Trade Commission. The removed commissioners -- Alvara Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter -- were Democratic appointees.  The law forbids their removal other than for cause. This follows equally partisan removals from the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. On March 27, Bedoya and Slaughter filed a law suit challenging their removals.

March 20 -- Trump signs an Executive Order calling for the dismantling of the Department of Education (DOE). On March 11, in anticipation of this plan, DOE issued a reduction-in-force directive to place 50% of its employees on administrative leave.

On the same day, the law firm Paul Weiss cuts a deal with President Trump agreeing to provide $40 million in pro bono legal services in exchange for Trump rescinding his March 14 Executive order against the firm.

March 21 -- Trump revokes the security clearances of President Biden, Fiona Hill, Alexander Vindman, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Antony Blinken, Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney and  seven others.

On the same date, and pursuant to the DOE's March 11 reduction-in-force directive, 50% of its employees are put on administrative leave.

Also on the same day, Reuters reports that the “FBI has cut staffing in an office focused on domestic terrorism and has scrapped a tool used to track such investigations”, both of which, it reports, “are an indication that . . . investigations . . . involv[ing] violence fueled by right-wing ideologies” may be “less a priority”.

March 24 -- Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz and Vice President Vance participate in a group chat on Signal, a commercial app, that includes journalist Jeffrey Goldberg and includes and discusses imminent plans to bomb Houthi rebels. In addition to being absolutely forbidden in communications involving classified documents and information, Signal allows chats and shared documents to be later destroyed and can be used to violate the Federal Records Act.

March 25 -- Trump signs an Executive Order demanding that, in federal elections, all votes be received by election day and all voters provide proof of US citizenship.

On the same day, the Washington Post reports that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has hired a long-standing vaccine skeptic, David Geier, to conduct its study on whether vaccines cause autism.

Also on the same day, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrest Rumeysa Ozturk, a Fulbright Scholar and Tufts University graduate student legally here on an F-1 student visa since 2018. When asked about her case, Secretary of State Rubio claimed her activities "would compromise a compelling US policy interest" and that “if you apply for a visa . . . and tell us that the reason why . . .  is not just . . .  to write op-eds, but . . . to participate in . . . vandalizing universities, harassing students, [and] taking over buildings, . . . we're not going to give you a visa." In fact, however, the only thing Ozturk did, according to her lawyers, was write an op-ed. Although a Massachusetts federal judge ordered that she not be removed from the state, ICE claims it had already flown her to a detention facility in Louisiana  before the order was issued. She has not been charged with any crime.   

March 26 -- Trump imposes 25% tariffs on all automobile imports, effective April 2. Automobile stocks plummet.  

On the same day, he also issues an Executive Order against the law firm Jenner & Block restricting its access to  government buildings and federal contracting work.  The basis for this order is that Andrew Weisman had worked on Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team in connection with the investigation of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016 and was later hired by the firm after that investigation ended.  The investigation concluded there was not sufficient evidence to find the Trump campaign had conspired under federal law with Russia but also specifically concluded that it could not exonerate Trump from claims he had obstructed justice in connection with the investigation.

March 27 -- Trump issues an Executive Order against the law firm Wilmer Hale restricting its access to  government buildings and federal contracting work. The basis for this order is that Special Counsel Mueller was allowed to return to the firm as a partner after his investigation of Trump ended. A federal court issues a TRO blocking that order; another issues a similar order blocking the March 26 order against Jenner & Block.

On the same day, RFK Jr. announces that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will cut 10,000 employees and blames the department's 82,000 workers for the decline in the nation's health.

Also on the same day, NBC News reports that "the State Department has revoked 300 or more student visas, as the White House increasingly targets foreign-born students whose main transgression seems to be activism."

March 28 --  Vice President Vance and his wife visit Greenland. The trip was originally planned as a visit by Vance’s wife to Greenland’s capital. That was changed when it was made clear she would be met by streams of protesters who oppose Trump’s designs on the island. So instead the pair visited a US Air Base  in the north.  At the base, the Vice President said Denmark is not protecting Greenland. The only threat Greenland faces, however, is from Russia, a threat NATO protects it against but Trump continually weakens. As for Denmark, in the wake of 9/11, the only time NATO’s mutual defense obligation was ever invoked, Denmark lost more soldiers per capita than the US in the Afghan war.

On the same day, Trump announces that the law firm Skadden Arps has agreed to provide $100 million in pro bono legal services to avoid the adverse orders he has issued against other firms.

Also on the same day, Dr. Peter Marks, the top vaccine official at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the official who spearheaded the Warp Speed drive that led to the Covid vaccine, resigns. In his resignation letter, Dr. Marks states “The ongoing multistate measles outbreak . . . reminds  us of what happens when confidence in well-established science underlying public health and well-being is undermined.” As to RFK Jr., his letter states “I was willing to work to address the Secretary’s concerns regarding vaccine safety and transparency . . . However, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” 

Also on the same day, the stock market caps three days of losses in response to Trump’s imminent tariffs and declining consumer confidence. The Dow was down another 1.69%, the S&P 1.97% and Nasdaq 2.7%.

March 29 — As of this day, there are 483 cases of measles spread over twenty states.  The largest number is in Texas with 400 cases. It spread there in the largely unvaccinated Mennonite community.

March 30 — In an interview on NBC, Trump refuses to rule out running for a third term.

CENTURIES

Centuries, it turns out, are weird things.

In the strictest sense they are numbers, one-hundred year increments. They start at a certain point and end at an equally certain point. The 20th began on January 1, 1901 and ended on December 31, 2000. And for the entire common era, you can count nineteen more of them.

And twenty-four plus years in a 21st.

Pretty simple stuff.

Not so fast, however, say the historians.

For them centuries are not mere slices of time. 

Instead, they define changing epochs. 

They can be longer or shorter than ten arithmetic decades. 

And they can begin or end in years other than the first or the hundredth. 

According to British historian Eric Hobsbawm, the "long nineteenth century" lasted 125 years. It "began",  he says, with the French Revolution in 1789 and "ended" with the start of World War I in 1914. Its defining trait appears to have been the Treaty of Paris in 1815 that set Europe upon a century-long period of balance of power politics.  In that regard, therefore, claiming the beginning as the French Revolution looks out of place.  Not to worry, however, because others argue that before it -- the long nineteenth, that is --  there was a "long eighteenth".  It began, they say, in 1688 with England's Glorious Revolution and ended in 1815 with the Napoleonic Wars, thus nicely book ending that 127-year century as a revolutionary one, are own included. This, of course, complicates Hobsbawm's long nineteenth. If it only ran from the end of Napoleon to the start of the First World War, it now becomes a slightly shorter (but still erratic --1815 to 1914) one. Shorter, however, seems to be his trend. Because Hobsbawm insists that his (not that) long nineteenth century was followed by a "short twentieth". He starts the latter with World War I and ends it with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. 

My own view is the 20th century was not that short. 

In fact, it was a bit long.

In my mind, it started in 1917 when the United States entered and then changed the outcome of World War I from a stalemate to an Allied victory. It continued through the interwar years, World War II, the post-war rules-based international order, the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the follow-on neo-liberal period of globalism. 

It was a period of American hegemony.

Economic and political hegemony to be sure.

But also and most importantly . . .

Moral hegemony. 

Alone among history's hegemons, the United States in the wake of World War II chose to share both its power and its wealth. It created the United Nations as a forum for discussion and (it hoped) a peace preserved on the basis of a rules-based order and the development and respect for universal human rights. It drew red-lines that could not be crossed by authoritarian communists in a Cold War President Reagan correctly predicted it would (and did) win.  Some of those lines were well considered (in Berlin in 1948-49 and Korea in 1950, for example); others, not so much (in Vietnam in the '60s and in Chile in 1973). With its victor's purse, it funded the Marshall  Plan that re-built war-torn Europe. With its rule of law, it globally turbocharged capitalism. With its idealism, it launched  President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress and USAID and W's PEPFAR. 

Always imperfect but never truly (or perhaps only rarely) imperious, its ultimate aim was a free world.

The freedom it sought, however, was freedom in the fullest (and therefore truest) sense of the word. 

It was a "freedom from" the fascists and communists and assorted authoritarians who would otherwise enslave their victims or subjects.  

But it was also, in the words of Yale Prof. Timothy Snyder, a much larger "freedom to". The positive freedom to choose, to adapt, to move, to understand. The "five forms of freedom'', as he puts it, that recognize our "sovereignty, or the learned capacity to make choices; unpredictability, the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes; mobility, the capacity to move through space and time following values; factuality, the grip on the world that allows us to change it; and solidarity, the recognition that freedom is for everyone."

That century -- the American century -- ended last week.

It did not have to.

Indeed, because the work of freedom -- and especially the work of positive freedom or "freedom to" -- is a lived project, it was supposed to be an on-going one.

But it ended anyway.

Donald Trump killed it.

I am at this point guilty of some overstatement.  

It is not the case that Donald Trump killed the American century all in the last week.  

In fact, he has been working on the execution for the now almost ten years of his political life and for most of his personal life.  

He does not believe in freedom.  He certainly does not understand that it comes as a positive manner in the five forms outlined by Prof. Snyder.  His pathological lying and aversion to any notion of factuality leaves him without any grip on the real world, enthralled as he is to the created and false reality he manufactures and then acts upon on a daily basis. A slave to lying is not free. Nor does he recognize that freedom includes "the capacity to move through space and time". To the contrary, he has harvested thousands of votes demeaning the freedom of migrants for whom mobility is a matter of life and death, and now wants to issue a Gold Card that makes entry to and citizenship for immigrants available to those willing to pay $5 million.  Freedom, however, is not a product for the rich; it is a right of all. 

I chose last week, however, because his conduct in that period capsulized in such a complete way how he has so thoroughly orchestrated the killing over the life of his presidencies and over the course of his personal  life.

On Ukraine, he has decided to surrender to Vladimir Putin.  

Even before last Friday's disgusting ambush of Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, Trump told the world that Ukraine would have to give up all or most of the land Putin illegally seized in 2014 (Crimea) and after Russia started the war in 2022 (large parts of the eastern Donbas). He has also said America would provide no security guarantees of any peace deal and that Ukraine would never be admitted to NATO.  He has falsely claimed that Ukraine started the war and falsely characterized Zelensky as a dictator. 

In last Friday's meeting, after Zelensky asked Vice President Vance what sort of diplomacy Vance was advocating given that Russia has violated every agreement struck on past ceasefires, Vance accused him of being "disrespectful" (ostensibly for "litigating" in front of the media) and not sufficiently thankful (although Zelensky has literally thanked America more times than anyone can count, Vance -- in full asskissing mode -- was claiming Zelensky had not personally thanked Trump at the meeting). Accusing him of "gambling with World War III", having "no cards" to play, and demanding that he either "make a deal or we're out", Trump then kicked Zelensky out of the White House. 

In the days since, Trump has suspended the continued provision of military equipment and critical intelligence to Ukraine.

Trump and the entire GOP are pretending this is all part of an effort to get Putin to the negotiating table and are claiming there can be no peace if there is no parley.  In truth, however, all Trump is doing is telling Putin he can have everything he has already seized, along with the promise that Ukraine will not be in NATO and America will not guarantee that he, Putin, adheres to any deal. Waiting, therefore, has been a great deal for Putin.  

Every day that passes, Trump gives him something else.  

Before last week, it was the concession that Ukraine could never expect the return of its illegally seized land. Last Friday it was the dressing down of Zelensky (loved by the Russians, whose lickspittle President Medvedev praised Trump for "slap[ping] down" the "insolent pig" Zelensky). Over the weekend and on Monday and Wednesday it was the cessation of military and intel support. Not surprisingly, Russia's response to those moves was to say it intended to inflict "maximum damage" on Ukraine and to call Zelensky a "parasitic" and "flea-ridden dog".

Europe's reaction to all of this has been sheer disgust.  The Germans are now revisiting fiscal policies they have followed for decades in an effort to fund the military and France is saying it will utilize its nukes to protect Europe.  The entire continent is backing Ukraine and praying some form of American support remains.  They are also rapidly planning for a free world which they -- and not the United States -- lead.  

The notion that Russia intends to stop with Ukraine or part of it is fantasy. Putin has been clear that his plan is to reconstitute the old Soviet Union under the Russian flag.  That means he intends to control or dominate at least the old Soviet Republics in Europe, the Balkans, and southeastern Europe and Poland,  and wants to checkmate France , Germany and the rest of western Europe. It is basically the reverse of what Hitler intended in the 1940s.  Trump is fine with all of this. He owes the continuing financial viability of the Trump Organization to Russian money and thinks fascist or authoritarian rulers are fine. 

In fact, he aspires to be one.

Which was the second thing made clear in this death-of-the-American-century week.

On Tuesday, Trump gave a joint address to Congress.

It was a combination of lies, smug arrogance, contempt and wishful thinking. 

He lied about who is getting Social Security, the amount the US has spent in Ukraine, the number of illegals who entered the country the past four years,  the state of the economy both now and prior to January 20, the ostensibly huge and unfair gap between foreign tariffs and ours, the rise in military recruitment, and -- almost comically --  mice supposedly being transgendered. 

The arrogance was evident in his pretense that "America is back" (when he is actually authoring its decline); in his demand that we "enhanc[e] protections for America's police officers" (whose "protections" he absolutely destroyed in pardoning the J6 insurrectionists); in the assertion that he will get Greenland "sooner or later" or is now "taking back" the Panama Canal (neither will happen); or in the renaming ("Gulf of America") no one takes seriously.

Then, of course, there was the contempt (in particular for the infinitesimally small number of transgendered Americans, or for anyone who actually believes diversity, equity and inclusion are good things, or for the laws he violated and the indictments only his election suspended), and, finally, the wishful thinking. Those tariffs, he said,  will cause only "a little disturbance", a prediction he keeps abandoning as the deadlines for them approach, the stock market tanks, and a magical "pause" is announced. 

Apparently, his own portfolio cannot suffer "a little disturbance".

The speech lasted an hour and forty minutes -- the longest ever in the history of joint addresses. It followed six weeks of near constant televised comments from Trump.  He thinks he is flooding the zone and in fact he is. 

In doing so, however, he is imitating the conduct of history's authoritarians on that score as well. 

Fidel Castro routinely spoke for three and four hours at a time. Venezuela's Madura spoke for four hours at his second inauguration. China's Xi went on for three and a half hours at a recent communist party congress speech. 

Stalin and Khrushchev were also long winded. 

As were Hitler and Mussolini.

The idea is to talk so much, so often, and so dishonestly . . .

That either no one else can . . . 

Or no one else is heard.

Since taking office on January 20, Trump has done all in his power to insure Russian victory in Ukraine and its later dominance of Europe in a non-NATO balance of power world where might makes right. He has also continued his assault on truth and structured the executive branch to guarantee its loyalty to himself alone and not the Constitution.  His political party stands mute in the face of this assault.  Indeed, to the contrary, and as was evident last Tuesday, his party applauds it.

None of this is consistent with the world FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon created and then managed in the American Century 

Nor is it consistent with the Cold War victory Reagan predicted and then helped orchestrate in that same period. 

Or the vision of Constitutional government without monarchy the Founders created years ago.

Trump has repudiated all of that.

Epochs can end.

The American Century just did.

SPEECH 

What is "speech"?

The dictionary defines it as "the expression of or the ability to express thoughts and feelings by articulate sounds"; "the communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words"; "exchange of spoken words: conversation"; "something that is spoken: utterance"; "a usually public discourse: address"; and "a formal address or discourse delivered to an audience".

What does it mean to say something is "free"?

The dictionary defines that as "not costing or charging anything".

If you put the two together, "free speech" would be the "cost" free "expression of thoughts or feeling by articulate sounds" or "cost" free "spoken words", "conversation", "utterance[s]", "public discourse[s] or "formal address[es]".

Costs, of course, are two-way streets.  

Generally speaking, a cost is what an actor is charged for the privilege of doing or buying something. If he is charged nothing, he is doing or buying something for free. Costs, however, are also the charges imposed on others by our acts. In that sense, one's acts are free only if, in addition to not requiring payment by us, they also do not impose costs on others.

In the United States, conservatives like Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk claim to be "free speech absolutists". But they really aren't. A free speech absolutist would protect speech if it was both cost free to the speaker and cost free to the receiver.  If that speech imposed costs or burdens on the receiver, he would be open to mitigating or eliminating those costs or at least balancing them against the cost-free rights of the speaker.  

Vance and Musk, however, are not free speech absolutists in that sense. 

Rather they are "cost-free-to-the-speaker speech" absolutists. 

The costs imposed on all others are ignored. 

Last week in Munich, Vance upbraided Europeans for violating his version of speech absolutism.  

Given its Nazi past, Germany's penal code makes it illegal to publicly deny the Holocaust, prohibits the dissemination of Nazi or neo-Nazi propaganda (including sharing swastikas and wearing SS uniforms), and criminalizes hate speech that assaults individuals based on their race or national, ethnic or religious background. 

Also in response to that fascist past, Germany's two major political parties -- the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and Christian Democratic Union (CDU) -- have for years adhered to a policy of not aligning with far-right parties like the current AfD (Alternative for Germany) to form any national government.  

This so-called "firewall" against AfD participation  has been erected in response to AfD's extremism. That extremism includes state party leaders who have embraced Nazi slogans, minimized Germany's Nazi past and trivialized the Holocaust. It also includes AfD's participation in a secret conference in 2023 in Potsdam that was attended by at least one Austrian neo-Nazi and called for the mass deportation of "non-assimilated" Germans. In 2017, ten AfD-ers were part of  a Facebook group that posted a meme of Anne Frank's face on a pizza box labelled "oven fresh". 

In his speech in Munich last week, Vice President Vance criticized Germany for refusing to listen to or allow participation in its affairs by right wing groups like AfD and specifically said "there's no room for firewalls."

The immediate reaction to his speech  from Germany was . . .

Disgust.

As The New York Times reported, German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz "accused Mr. Vance of effectively violating a commitment to never again allow Germany to be led by fascists who could repeat the horrors of the Holocaust."  As Scholz put it, "A commitment to 'never again' is not reconcilable with support for AfD". He was then joined in his criticism by Friedrich Merz, the CDU's candidate for Chancellor.

For Germans, any speech flirting with its Nazi past, minimizing the Holocaust or allowing its national government to include parties that associate with neo-Nazis is not free.  Contrary to Vance's claim that democracy requires space and respect for AfD, Germans understand that the kind of thought and speech either accepted or even tolerated by AfD could ultimately kill the post-Nazi democracy they have carefully created and preserved over the last now almost eighty years. 

They understand this because, in the 1920s and early 1930s, this was the kind of speech Hitler and his supporters used to create the political foothold that ultimately resulted in the Weimar Republic appointing him Chancellor.  

It was also the kind of speech that destroyed that republic once the Nazis assumed power.

Democracies can commit suicide.

In the 1930s, Germany's did.

And for that reason, today's Germans do not permit speech that could resurrect that atrocity.

Closer to home, Vance’s demand that Germany remove its restraints on AfD has been seconded by Elon Musk . . .

Who . . .

When not taking an illegal blowtorch to either federal employees or Congressionally sanctioned spending . . .

Has actually endorsed the AfD in its campaign to win Germany’s current federal election. 

This, however, is just another manifestation of Musk’s one-way version of free speech. 

And like Vance’s, it is a version that ignores the costs it imposes on the rest of us. 

In October 2022, Musk acquired Twitter.

Within hours of doing so, he reinstated the suspended account of the Great Britain's  neo-Nazi Britain First party. He also reinstated the account of Donald Trump . . .

Which Twitter's prior owners had suspended in the wake of the January 2021 insurrection and Trump's attempted coup.

For Musk, this was just the beginning.

After he purchased Twitter in 2022 and re-branded it as X in 2023, the amount of disinformation and hate speech  on the site went up dramatically. Hate speech went up by half, transphobic and homosexual slurs by more than 60%. There are now three times more anti-Black tweets than there were pre-Musk. In November 2023 the EU stopped advertising on the site given the rise in hate speech on it, and in Ireland, as other social media took down hate speech that X refused to eliminate, the Prime Minister called for incitement to hatred legislation. 

In response, Musk said "the Irish PM hates the Irish people." 

Musk's one way view of free speech is enhanced in his specific case with the "more for me but not for thee" bonus that comes with being the billionaire owner of a large social media platform.

In July 2024, Musk endorsed Trump for president. In November, a study by the Queensland University of Technology in Australia found that, after that endorsement, Musk's posts on Twitter received 138% more views and 238% more retweets. Because these increases "outpaced the general engagement trends observed across the platform" (or, in other words, were much higher than any trend then associated with Trump or Musk generally), they suggested "algorithmic bias" (a suggestion confirmed by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post). The only thing that made this bias suggested rather than proven was the limited data to which the research team had access.

"More for me but not for thee" is the bonus awarded speech by those with money.  

It was created in 1976 when the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo equated money with speech and was enhanced in 2010 when the Court in Citizens United eliminated the ban on corporate campaign contributions. Together, these two decisions have resulted in speech monopolies. Corporations and the billionaires that own Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and major mainstream media outlets like The Washington Post get to buy or control as much speech as they want.

The rest of us get to buy only as much as we can afford.  

The First Amendment to the Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." 

Though America (unlike Germany and many other European countries) takes an expansive view of the kind of speech protected, and a more or less total view of the kind of political speech protected, the Founders did not necessarily accept that view. During the Revolution, James Madison promoted the prosecution of Loyalists and the burning of their pamphlets, and while Madison was generating the Bill of Rights, Thomas Jefferson wrote him proposing this for the First Amendment:

"The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write or otherwise to publish anything but false facts affecting injuriously the life, liberty, property, or reputation of others or affecting the peace of the confederacy with foreign nations."  

This would have imposed a limitation on the scope of protected political speech.

One reason this limitation did not make it into the actual text of the First Amendment was Madison's fear that moving beyond a statement of  "simple, acknowledged principles" would have made ratification more difficult. Madison wanted to avoid disputes that might arise later (and presumably be resolved later as well). 

Another reason, however, is that the architecture of political speech in the 18th century was relatively simple. There were printing presses, pamphlets, some newspapers and public meetings or assemblies. There wasn't telegraphy, television or the internet and the cost of participation was de minimis.  Simple principles would do because the universe of likely speech was relatively small and monopolized by no one.

None of that is true today. 

In fact, the contrary is the case. 

The philosophical foundation for America's expansive view of free speech is the view that truth and falsehood compete in a marketplace of ideas for which no regulation is needed and any imposed likely to do more harm than good.  Vance and Musk support that view and believe (falsely) that it is (or should be) shared by western democracies generally. 

In truth, however, instant mass communication through the internet on various social media and other platforms is now routine and a handful of billionaires (among them, Musk himself)  control those outlets. And the consequence of their world of one-way free speech and the Supreme Court's of monetized speech is a uniquely dysfunctional marketplace of ideas. 

The speech protected is largely the billionaire's own, whether that billionaire is Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg . . .

Or Donald Trump. 

And truth does not always get to compete in that marketplace.  

In fact, as the accession of Trump . . .

The debased acquiescence of Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos. . . 

And the historic example of Weimar Germany . . .

Prove . . .

It can easily be overwhelmed.

CHAOS, COMEDY AND CORRUPTION IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AMERICA

The political hills and valleys of the last twenty-five years have been a confusing sight to behold.  

Today is February 5, 2025.

It is also my 25th wedding anniversary.

As it turns out, things have worked out better for me than for the country.

On February 5, 2000, Bill Clinton was President and Al Gore was Vice President. The country was at peace. the economy was humming, there was no deficit,  the right to choose existed and peace in the middle east was still possible. Among the actual "firsts" the year would occasion, there were -- in addition to my second marriage (which can only happen once) -- the following:

The first NYC subway series (between the Mets and Yankees) since 1956; 

The first civil union law protecting same sex couples (kudos to Vermont); 

The first patient receiving a totally artificial heart that beat and pumped blood (the Jarvik heart); 

The first crew visiting the international space station; and 

The first presidential election since 1888 in which the winner (George W. Bush) received fewer votes than the loser (Al Gore).

That last first was a precursor of sorts.

A warning of the darker days that would emerge over the course of the next quarter century. 

In 2000, Bill Clinton's extracurricular activities were among the reasons Bush II was able to claim the moral high ground and beat Al Gore. Sixteen years later, however, X-rated bragging about grabbing was ignored by the voters. And eight years after that, not even an adjudication of sexual assault could get in the way of Trump's return to the White House. 

In that same period, a similar hypocritical path was travelled on the issue of voting.

Or, more precisely, on the issue of vote- counting.

In 2000, America's electorate did not decide the presidential election. Instead, in stopping the vote count in Florida and enjoining that state from manually curing an almost certain undercount for Gore, the Supreme Court did. In 2020, by way of contrast, America's electorate did get to decide the election. This time, however, the party that stole the election  through litigation in 2000 tried to steal it through insurrection in 2020. 

History tells us this effort failed.  

The insurrection was stopped.

Biden won and took office. 

But did it fail? 

For four years, the principal insurrectionist lied about the result.

In 2024, that insurrectionist was allowed to run again. 

This time he won.

Do the voters care that their president is a sexual predator?

Do they care that their president is fine with coups in his favor?

Some do. 

More than half apparently do not.

Or, at the very least, they do not care enough.

Because they have allowed it.

When I was young and overwhelmed, I made lists. I tucked them in books and from time to time unfolded them to either check off an item or cross one out. I checked off the items on the list which amounted to chores or jobs I had completed. I crossed out those which had resolved themselves -- those irrational fears that had evaporated . . . 

Or even the rational ones which good luck or a generous friend (or God) had miraculously resolved.

Sometimes the list was short.

Sometimes it was long.

If America made such a list today . . .

It would be long

Here it is.

1. J6 Pardons 

2. Fired J6 Attorneys

3. Investigating the FBI's J6 investigators.

4. Fired Inspectors General.

5. Impoundment.

6. Federal Employee Buy outs.

7. Musk's Digital Coup.

8.The End of USAID.

9. Greenland.

10. Panama.

11. Tariffs.

12. Gaza

13. The Cabinet of Fools

This is a baker's dozen of problems and potential catastrophes.

All crying out for confrontation on any citizen's to do list.

I'm one of the 75 million Americans who voted for Harris and can confidently say . . .

We are already tired of  this shit.

What to do?

In my list-making days, I discovered there was utility in paring the list down, in reducing it to a more manageable size. I also discovered there are a number of ways to do this. One is to know when your problem has really become someone else's.  Another is to recognize general solutions that solve a number of problems. A third is to laugh.

For purposes of relief, let's start with the comedic stuff.

Over the weekend Trump threatened 25% tariffs against Mexico and Canada and on Monday, as the actual point at which they were to take effect was about to arrive and markets were tanking, Trump caved and postponed them for thirty days. Both Canada and Mexico had made it clear they would respond with their own tariffs on American imports. And Trump's plan was universally derided for the significant inflation it would cause . . . 

And the unnecessary ill will it immediately bred.

(At an NHL game in Ottawa over the weekend, fans booed when the Star-Spangled Banner was sung. At an NBA game in Toronto, they did the same. Canada is the country that saved Americans who otherwise would have been taken hostage by Iran in 1979 and then secreted them to safety. It's pretty much impossible to piss Canadians off. Trump, however, managed to do so.)

Like all bullies, Trump punches down. 

He only picks fights with those who are weaker. 

Canada is causing America no problems at all. Contrary to Trump's claim, the amount of fentanyl passing through Canada is negligible; you could fit it in one suitcase. For its part Mexico is aggressively trying to combat the problems that pass through its borders and over ours. Nevertheless, and true to form in this case, two of our friendliest allies and biggest trading partners were to be saddled with 25% duties while China, which is causing problems ranging from the widespread theft of intellectual property to the illegal production of all the precursor chemicals needed to manufacture fentanyl, and against whom strategic tariffs have bipartisan support, was slapped with only a 10% surcharge.

Like most confronted bullies, Trump also (and usually) loses.  

In this case, he packaged his last-minute decisions to pull back as the result of concessions made by Canada and Mexico.  Those putative concessions, however, had nothing to do with his tariff threat. Mexico said it would deploy troops to its northern (our southern) border it had promised to send in 2021 and are already there, and Canada promised to implement a border plan it had approved back in December.  

In short, Trump got nothing.

This will likely be a recurring theme in Trump 2.0, a reprise perhaps of the various unfulfilled "infrastructure weeks" in his earlier term.  To this, however, must also be added Trump's twitter-visions on Greenland and Panama and Gaza.  None of them will become American states or territories or (in the case of Gaza) latter-day occupation zones (`a la Berlin after World War II) in the next four years. Nor will Trump use military force against a NATO ally (Denmark, which owns Greenland) or a party to a treaty we signed decades ago (Panama) or in Gaza (which would be insane). 

Trump is barely willing to fight wars that need fighting and do not cost American lives (e.g., Ukraine).

I doubt he will fight ones that are unnecessary and would be costly in ways that can't be counted.

That does not mean he will not forever tweet and boast and threaten.

He will.

Empty rhetoric is his specialty.

So just laugh

Call it Greenland week.

Or Panama week.

Or Gaza week

Or better yet . . . 

Granaza week.

That leaves two sets of problems on the list that cannot be laughed away (2 through 6 and 7 through 8) and two items (1 and 13) which will plague MAGA more than the rest of us going forward.

The solution to the first set is litigation on the one hand and mobilization on the other. Any civil service employee who is fired can sue the government.  I expect many will. Some already  have (see below). Similarly, impoundment, buyouts, ending the Agency for International Development, or any refusal to cut Treasury checks, sharing of personal identifying information or use of digital access to abolish statutorily established and sanctioned departments, divisions or expenditures is illegal. 

In her Letters From an American on Tuesday, Heather Cox Richardson noted that Trump's billionaire apparatchik, Elon Musk, has "taken control of the US Treasury payments system" and "claims to have been cancelling those transactions he thinks wasteful." According to Richardson, he then "went on to the General Services Administration" and told "regional managers . . . to begin ending the leases on federal offices."  SBA employees report Musk has "gotten into that agency's human resources, contracts and payment systems" and, says Richardson, "By this afternoon Musk people were digging into the data of the Department of Education with an eye to dismantling it from the inside". This morning, Richardson's Letter cited  a report that one of Musk's 25-year-old engineers "had the privilege to write code on the programs for the Bureau of Fiscal Services that control more than 20% of the US economy".

What could possibly go wrong?

All of this is more than suspect.

Most of it is also illegal.

And the lawsuits have already begun.

Last week, the National Treasury Employees Union filed suit to stop  Trump's Executive Order removing federal employees from civil service  protection.  On Monday, Trump's initial spending freeze or impoundment was enjoined by the federal District Court in DC as that case proceeds through the courts. Also on Monday, three employees unions sued Trump for violating federal privacy laws by allowing the Treasury to share data with Musk and his twenty-something data nerds, and eleven state attorneys general warned federal employees not to take Trump's buy-out offers seriously. As they put it, the "offers are nothing more than the latest attack on federal workers and the services they provide" and "are not guaranteed". On Tuesday, anonymous FBI agents filed a class action to stop Trump from publicizing their names and firing any agents who investigated the J6 cases. Previously, state AGs had also sued to stop Trump's spending freezes and a Rhode Island federal judge had granted a temporary restraining order doing so.

Trump, the so-called disrupter who now runs the second branch of government, has created the impression of endless action over the course of the first two weeks of his latest presidency. 

Given his moves, however, the busiest branch over the next four years will not be the Executive.  

It will be the Judiciary.

There are those who think judicial decrees will not matter, that Trump will simply ignore them. Maybe so (at which point revolution will be the only alternative). But he hasn't in the past. He has been contemptuous of courts and used either the office he held or was running for to protect that contempt from the consequences it would otherwise meet.  But he hasn't ignored the orders and the greater threat is that the Supreme Court will endorse his dictatorial impulses. Two weeks ago, I asked The New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger if he thought New York Times v. Sullivan would survive this Supreme Court. His laconic "we'll see" was not inspiring.  

Stay tuned. 

In the meantime, two problems will not go away and will plague Trump 2.0 every day going forward.

The first is the pardons issued the J6 insurrectionists.

The second is his Cabinet of Fools

Two-thirds of Americans despise the J6 pardons. Every time Trump yells law and order, we will yawn.  He is and forever will be the guy who pardoned cop killers.  He is also the only president who orchestrated an attempted coup, pardoned his fellow coup-plotters, and then (eventually) fired the patriots who prosecuted the coup in the first place.

That will never change.

Meanwhile . . .

Bobby Kennedy still thinks vaccines may cause autism.

Tulsi Gabbard cannot recognize a traitor.

Kash Patel's enemies list is in print.

And sooner or later . . .

You just know . . .

Pete Hegseth will take a drink.