Fossil Fuels And The Bulk Freight Market (And More)

Executive Summary

Fossil fuels account for 40% of ocean freight, 51% of train freight, and 56% of barge freight. 

New technologies in renewable energy, nuclear energy, electric vehicles, batteries, and heat pumps, could dramatically reduce the importance of fossil fuels in the global economy, eliminating the need for this bulk freight. 

This shift away from fossil fuels would also greatly reduce pollution, slow or stop climate change, improve workplace and transportation safety, strengthen democracy in the world's most authoritarian states and far-right domestic politics, and reduce economic vulnerability and military logistics vulnerability to unrest and military activity in countries that produce oil and gas.

How Are Fossil Fuels Used? What Substitutes Are Available?

The predominant use of coal is to generate electricity and its market share of electricity generation is plummeting, mostly to renewables like solar power and wind power, and to a lesser extent to tidal, geothermal, hydropower, and biofuels like corn based ethanol and biodiesel made mostly from restaurant waste fats. Nuclear power provides a significant share of non-fossil fuel electricity and has been pretty stagnant, neither growing nor shrinking in market share much for decades, although new advances are poised to tweak up nuclear power use in some niche applications. A very small share of coal is used for making steel, for purifying water, and in other industrial applications. Coal can also be industrially transformed into a liquid petroleum fuel substitute or a natural gas substitute when oil and gas prices are high enough for this to make economic sense, which is rarely and too briefly to justify building the infrastructure to do it.

The increasing affordability of renewables combined with environmental regulation are making coal obsolete for electrical power generation which is its predominant use.

The predominant use of oil is as a transportation fuel and its market share of vehicle fuel types is also steadily losing ground to electric vehicles (and to a tiny extent, other non-fossil fuel powered transportation modes). 

Oil is used for electricity generation in Alaska, in Hawaii (which has fairly low per capita electricity demand), during disasters and at construction sites, for heating oils (mostly in the Northeast U.S.), for fertilizers, for lubricants, and to make plastics. But all of these non-transportation fuel uses collectively are a much smaller share of oil consumption than as transportation fuels. 

There are good alternatives to oil to generate electricity in Alaska and Hawaii. Better batteries can limit the need to fossil fuel electricity generation in natural  disasters, in remote locations, and at construction sites. Organic farming and eliminate the need for petroleum based fertilizers (and pesticides). Non-plastic materials can be substituted for plastics in many cases. Heating oils can be replaced by natural gas furnaces or heat pumps (which are powered by electricity).

Natural gas (and other gas state hydrocarbons like propane) is predominantly used for space heating and water heating and as a greener alternative for generating electricity on demand at power plants compared to coal or oil. But very small shares of natural gas use are also used for cooking, ornamental lighting, and as a niche transportation fuel (especially for United Parcel Service trucks, and to a lesser extent, other fleet vehicles). Electrically powered heat pumps, electrically powered evaporative coolers, electric cooking appliances, electric water heaters, and electric vehicles are the main alternatives to direct natural gas use, and renewables (paired with utility scale batteries) and nuclear power are the main alternatives to natural gas for electricity generation.

Fossil Fuels And The Bulk Freight Market

 

The 40% breaks down as roughy 7-8% of total global ocean-going deadweight tonnage and vessel count (there are about 770 active LNG carriers in the world, which are specialized ships necessary to carry liquid natural gas) and about 32%-33% of total global ocean-going deadweight tonnage for coal and oil.[1] Natural gas is primarily transported on intra-continental pipelines, however, with some last mile transportation by truck, rather than by ships, trains or barges.

The numbers are similar for freight transported by freight train (51% of train freight is coal and oil) and over rivers and lakes by barges (56% of barge freight is coal and oil).

As of December 2009: "About 49% of rail freight is coal and another 2% is oil. About 10% consists of grain and grain products. Wood and paper account for 4%. About 10% of loads are non-petroleum chemicals. Stones, gravel, sand, clay and glass account for about 10% Most of the rest (13%) consists of other food products, metals and metal products, motor vehicles, waste and scrap materials."

As of September 2024: "In 2007, coal was the primary commodity moved by barge, accounting for 29% of all tonnages. Petroleum was the second largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 27% of all tonnages. Crude materials, such as forest products, sand, gravel, ores, scrap, and salt, were the third largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 18% of all tonnages. Food and farm products were the fourth largest commodity group in 2007, accounting for 12% of all tonnages."

Oil and gas firms accounted for 13.3% of U.S. capital expenditures in 2015, but only about 0.13% of U.S. employment (about 180,000 people); while in the same year the coal industry accounted for 0.16% of U.S. capital expenditures and 0.05% of U.S. employment (about 68,000 people) (and the coal industry has significantly contracted by more than 20% since 2015). By comparison, the retail trade industry accounts for 5.2% of U.S. capital expenditures in 2015 but 11.3% of U.S. employment. Wal-Mart alone employs about six times as many people as the entire oil and gas and coal industries combined. The U.S. oil and gas industry is important to Wall Street, but accounts for less than one in 500 U.S. jobs.

Fossil Fuels and Democracy

The share of an economy that comes from oil, gas, and coal is a good indicator of how authoritarian and far-right wing its politics are likely to be. The absence of production of these fuels in an economy, or reduced reliance of fossil fuel production, favors more democratic and more liberal government.

All of the world's remaining absolute monarchies (as opposed to merely symbolic constitutional monarchies) are in economies dominated by oil and gas revenues. Just one of the 36 countries with oil revenues as more than 2% or more of GDP has a healthy democracy (the outlier is Norway at #28 with 4.8% of its GDP from oil revenues is Norway). Norway's relatively healthy non-fossil fuel economy and democracy is in part due to the fact that it developed its oil and gas resources (mostly in the North Sea) fairly late in the history of these industries.

Among U.S. states ranked by fossil fuel production per capita, the only blue state in the top 8, is New Mexico (where it is 21% of GDP and which at #4 has all sorts of demographic and economic characteristics typical of red states, but votes blue because New Mexico has large Hispanic and Native American populations who are not welcome in the Republican party). Purple Pennsylvania at #9 and Colorado at #10 (each at about 5-6% of per capita GDP) are the only other blue states in the top 18 by fossil fuel production per capita. California at #19 has only $323 per capital of fossil fuel production (about 0.5% of per  capita GDP) and 17 states have no appreciable fossil fuel production per capita.

Environmental and Climate Harm

Coal and oil are probably the biggest drivers of air pollution and global climate change. They are also responsible for the workplace and transportation accidents associated with their extraction, delivery, and use. They are a very significant source of water pollution (including ground water pollution) and a major source of toxic and radioactive waste (coal has somewhat more than trace levels of radioactive elements in it). And, the extraction process destroys otherwise pristine open space and agricultural land, with coal being particularly damaging.

National Military and Economic Security

Reliance on fossil fuels, especially oil in the U.S., and both oil and natural gas in Europe, is also a major national security and economic stability risk, that subjecting economies that consume them to supply interruptions and risks caused by global military unrest associated with the authoritarian regimes that oil production based economies are so prone to be (e.g. unrest in the Middle East, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Russia). 

The Ukraine War has illustrated how vulnerable Russia has been to attacks on its oil and gas industry, which is not easy to defend, how dependent modern militaries are logistically on oil, and how dependent Europe and other world economies are on Russian oil and gas.

Reduced reliance of ocean shipping of fossil fuels also makes naval warfare and military control of seaways at choke points like the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, the Bight of Benin, the Panama Canal, the Strait of Malacca, the Bosporus Strait, the Strait of Gibraltar, and the Baltic Sea much less important and much less tempting for states that want to flex their military power and pirates.

References

[1] According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) in an entry about Liquefied natural gas made on June 21, 2024, and a report by Fortune Business Insights, Report ID: FBI103940 updated August 17, 2026 entitled "LNG Bunkering Market Size, Share & Industry Analysis, By End-User (Tanker Fleet, Bulk and General Cargo, Offshore Support Vessels and Ferries, Other) and regional Forecast, 2026-2034.

In A Nutshell

 

A Fire ICE Act

ICE is rotten to the core. Basically everyone who works for it is a corrupt, racist, bad cop, with no regard for the rule of law who lacks moral character.

Democrats in Congress should sponsor the Fire ICE Act. This would:

1. Immediately terminate the employment of every single employee and contractor working for ICE.

2. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from working for any federal government agency or any federal government contractor in any capacity, even as an unpaid volunteer or as prison labor.

3. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving security clearances.

4. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving federal financial aid for higher education.

5. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from eligibility for SBA loans.

6. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from serving as a sponsor for any immigrant.

7. Retroactively downgrade every former ICE employee who is a military veteran to dishonorably discharged status.

8. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving federal farm aid.

9. Permanently bar every former ICE employee from receiving federal housing or disaster assistance, including FHA and VA loans.

10. Revoke all non-vested employee benefits of the ICE employee from any federal government employment.

11. Extend the statute of limitations for civil liability and criminal liability committed in connection with service as an ICE agent to 50 years.

12. Create a private cause of action, including minimum statutory damages of $50,000 and attorneys' fees, for any violation of federal law committed by an ICE agent while employed by ICE or a contractor for ICE. This would include any wrongful deportation and any detention made without probable cause. And, allow any vested retirement funds or homestead property to be used to satisfy any such judgment even if it would otherwise have been exempt from creditors. Make any such debts non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.

13. Bar all companies that provided deportation transportation services to ICE from all future government  contracts.

14. Make all former ICE employees ineligible to serve on the board of any 501(c)(3) organization, or as an officer or paid employee of any such organization.

15. Revoke the visas of any ICE employee who is not a U.S. citizen.

16. Prohibit former ICE agents from owning or possessing firearms.

17. Bar former ICE officers from making new applications for federal disability benefits.

18. Prohibit federal civilian employees and federal government contractors hired in any law enforcement role from wearing masks, or enforcing the law in unmarked cars, subject to very narrow exceptions that are heavily reported upon, required all sorts of red tape, and are limited to circumstances that never include immigration enforcement.

19. Create a list of places like hospitals, court houses, churches, and immigration offices, where immigration enforcement is not allowed.

20. Allow any state or city to prohibit federal immigration enforcement from taking place in their jurisdiction, subject to very narrow exceptions for people convicted of serious felonies within the last five years.

21. End all grounds for denaturalization and punish people who secured U.S. citizenship by fraud with criminal penalties that do not revoke their U.S. citizenship.

22. Place former ICE agents at the bottom of the priority list to receive organ transplants, at at the end of the line for any Medicaid, Medicare, or VA medical benefit for which there is a waiting list.

23. Prohibit former ICE agents from receiving any honor or recognition from the federal government and revoke any honor or recognition that the former ICE agent was previously awarded by any federal government entity, military or civilian.

24. Deny former ICE agents any benefit of U.S. international child custody treaties.

25. Prohibit former ICE agents from notarizing any document used in the federal courts or submitted to a federal government agency.

26. Make former ICE agents ineligible for all federal licenses, including but not limited to, patent examiners, SEC licenses, BLM grazing permits, FCC licenses, interpreter qualifications, pilot's licenses, federal firearms dealer's licenses, and federal fishing or hunting licenses.

27. Prohibit former ICE agents from being buried in military cemeteries.

28. Prohibit former ICE agents from being granted patent or trademark applications.

29. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving as officers of any federally recognized employee unions.

30. Prohibit former ICE agents from attending any federal educational institutions.

31. Prohibit former ICE agents from making mining claims.

32. Impose a 50% excise tax on any vested, deferred compensation payable to former ICE agents on top of any other applicable taxes.

33. Enact a rebuttable presumption in any federal discrimination case that a former ICE agent intended to engage in illegal discrimination.

34. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving a registered lobbyists.

35. Require former ICE agents to disclose their employment with ICE to all future employers, in any commercial contract, in any campaign for public office, and prior to being issued a marriage license.

36. Make status as a former ICE agent an aggravating factor under the federal sentencing guidelines.

37. Prohibit former ICE agents from entering federal parks and federal landmarks.

38. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving as officers or directors of any publicly held company.

39. Prohibit former ICE agents from purchasing cyptocurrencies or selling crypocurrencies that were not owned prior to the enactment of the law.

40. Prohibit former ICE agents from obtaining any federal loan or bailout of any kind.

41. Disclose all internal ICE records and a list of all former ICE agents to the public on a publicly available database that disclosed all internal affairs information, all service information, and all contract information of former agents.

42. Immediately release everyone in ICE detention who isn't an undocumented immigrant convicted of a crime within the last five years that is a felony or worse. Transfer the rest to the federal Department of Corrections.

43. Ban all future private prison contracts of any kind.

44. Deny all de minimis tariff exemptions for former ICE agents.

45. Formally authorize private sector employers and state and local government employers to discriminate against former ICE agents.

46. Give cases in which former ICE agents are plaintiffs, the lowest scheduling priority in federal court.

47. Require disclosure of former ICE agent status in every lawsuit filed by a former ICE agent, and as part of the witness testimony of every former ICE agent in any federal court or federal administrative agency proceeding.

48. Prohibit former ICE agents from participating in clinical trials for new drugs and medical devices.

49. Prohibit former ICE agents from receiving any new federal tax credits.

50. Prohibit former ICE agents from serving as employees or unpaid volunteers in federal funded schools at any level.

If this bill is introduced as a bill in Congress, and secured enough co-sponsors in the House and Senate to have some credible chance of being seriously considered, it doesn't even matter if it passes. 

It will still powerfully discourage people considering employment with ICE from doing so. Every if some provisions are subsequently invalidated by the courts and are severed from the larger bill, the uncertainty would seriously chill anyway from applying to work for it.

Dreaming About A Better Future: Beliefs, Culture, And Political Economy Edition

It doesn't hurt to image a better future, even if you have no way of getting all of the way there very quickly at the moment. Technologically driven change is more powerful, more inevitable, and more common, but beliefs, culture, and political economies can progress as well.

Wouldn't it be great to live in a world without the beliefs held by flat earthers, creationists, anti-vaxxers, evolution deniers, ancient astronaut believers, believers in lost high technology civilizations, faith healing believers, people who believe that demons are real, people who believe in possession by evil spirits, people who think that dinosaurs and humans co-existed, anti-fluoride activists, human caused climate change deniers, people who deny that men walked on the moon, and the pseudo-scientific beliefs of adherents to other forms of pseudo-science? Wouldn't it be great to live in a world where we didn't have elected officials and politically powerful individuals who took absurd conspiracy theories like government weather manipulation, Jewish space lasers, sex trafficking dens hidden by pizza parlors, 2020 U.S. Presidential election results denial, and Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating cats and dogs seriously? This isn't impossible. There are many parts of the world, and there are large subcultures in other parts of the world, where these beliefs are vanishingly rare and no one of consequence holds them.

Wouldn't it be great to live in a world where the vast majority of people saw the metaphysical worldviews of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism as myths akin to the predominant view held by modern people today about the pagan religions of the pre-Christian Phoenician, Greek, Roman, and Norse people This isn't impossible either. There are parts of the world where this is the predominant worldview, even if there are fairly small minorities of true believers and many people still acknowledge cultural identities with roots in religion.

Wouldn't it be great to have a world where there was no place where women were denied access to more than rudimentary education? This is already true in most of the world. But it is not true yet Afghanistan, in much of sub-Saharan Africa, in tribal societies in parts of Southeast Asia and the Amazon, and in some Islamic countries (or at least parts of them). Historically, women (and for that matter, almost everyone) was denied access to more than rudimentary education. But most of the world has moved beyond that situation and it isn't impossible to change that in the last remaining hold out societies.

Wouldn't it be great to live in a world free of misogyny and bigotry towards foreigners, non-white people, and LGBT people? This is possible too. There are, at a minimum, large subcultures in many places in the world where this is the overwhelming the case among members of that subculture.

Wouldn't it be great to live in a world that is profoundly less corrupt? This isn't impossible either. There are multiple countries, and there are more subcultures within other societies, where this has been accomplished at well.

The way that a world like this arose would matter, of course. I am imagining a path that would primarily involve gradually converting people to new worldviews, not a path with mass slaughter or one secured with fear or harsh repression, although it wouldn't necessary be completely voluntary either.

Once achieved, this cultural change could be stable. There isn't anything inherently wrong, for example, with the people in Red State America. They just have a culture and belief system the remains in place due to cultural inertia, that in the context of a modern, scientific informed, technological culture with a strong state, is dysfunctional and undermines their own well-being (in addition to making the world worse for everyone who shares the flawed democracy that is the United States with them, and everyone who is subjected to American power in its foreign and military affairs).

John Lennon's song "Imagine", however, wasn't right. We wouldn't live without war in peace and harmony even without religion, countries, and possessions. 

Life without religion can work, but isn't a panacea. Life without countries and possessions, where people just share everything and live as a brotherhood of man, doesn't work. Countries and reasonably regulated ownership of possessions are necessary conditions to peace and a decent life for ordinary people. 

Life without countries promptly leads to anarchic warfare, violence, and warlords. It looks like Somalia over the last few decades, not the garden of Eden. Indeed, well run countries, and systems of strong nation-states in the context of a well-organized international community with widely agreed upon borders, tend to suppress military conflicts, which are resolved by politicians, diplomats, and lawyers instead. 

The last time U.S. states were at war was one hundred and sixty years ago, in 1865. The last war in the U.S. with American Indians ended more than a century ago in 1924 and was followed by legislation that gave Native Americans who were parts of Indian tribes full U.S. citizenship. If the part of North America that is now occupied by the U.S. had been made up of many different independent countries, there would almost surely have been more international wars in this territory in this time period. 

We could also have a global system that somehow prevented psychopaths and authoritarian dictators from gaining control of, or holding onto control of, nations. Some of the worst wars and circumstances for people on Earth exist as a result of a handful of authoritarian leaders and their inner circles of advisors. 

We could have international institutions that could discourage wars. We could have global institutions that prevented the injustices, corruption, and incompetence of national leaders and oligarchs from persisting and triggering insurgencies, violent coups, and civil wars.

All past attempts at life without possessions in the Soviet Union, in communist regimes in Asia, and even in large-scale communes, failed. And, their disavowal of property, and of any meaningful level of inequality, was an important cause of their own collapse. It wasn't just that communism wasn't done right in these cases.

The transitions to Communism in Russia, China, and other places like Cambodia, were some of the worse catastrophes and epic scale tragedies of human history.

In the former Soviet Union and former Warsaw Pact, communism just died, producing a variety of successor regimes, none of which significantly disavowed large accumulations of possessions. Communist Asia has kept their Maoist style one party political systems, but they didn't keep its extreme prohibitions on private ownership of property to the point where it has the toxic concentration of extreme wealth associated with "late stage capitalism" despite being nominally communist. Communist regimes in Africa have had a similar fate. Communism is Cuba has been most of the most successful attempts at it, but has been seriously flawed and authoritarian nonetheless, and communism in Venezuela has been an unmitigated disaster. But we could significantly reduce poverty and other failures of capitalism without abolishing possessions and property and market based economic systems entirely.

It is possible to have a world that is peaceful, sane, rational, believes in science, with diverse populations, that is economically fair. The culture and worldview of Star Trek's society (although, of course, not all of its technologies), is not beyond the realm of possibility at a global level in the real world. Proof of the concept exists in multiple places. Expanding this set of beliefs and worldviews, and creating laws and institutions that support these kinds of societies is difficult but not impossible. 

Just because we failed to secure "the end of history" at the historical moment when it had seemed to pundits to be just around the corner, doesn't mean that this objective is fundamentally unattainable. Most great cultural and political revolutions have taken multiple attempts to finally gain hold.

France eventually secured a republic, despite the fact that it reverted to monarchy after the French Revolution and after some subsequent republics. The anti-monarchist uprisings of 1848 mostly failed, but a coupe of generations later, Europe was made up almost entirely of republics and constitutional monarchies in which the remaining monarchs were basically symbolic figureheads. Almost every newly independent country has coups and/or civil wars at some point fairly early on after gaining independence (the U.S. included). Some European countries have experienced coups and civil wars in the 20th century. A united India only lasted a few years before its Muslim territories were partitioned, the Muslim part was split by a civil war within a generation after that, and the Muslim successor states, between them have had multiple coups. A handful of monarchies transitioned peacefully into democratic countries, but these have been the uncommon exceptions and not the rule.

Why should securing the "end of history" be any easier? It isn't. But that doesn't mean that it can't be done.

Why Is David Brooks Wrong About Why People Admire Donald Trump?

Brooks On Why People Admire Trump

David Brooks, a pundit who also writes for the New York Times, who is a former conservative who later in his career transitioned to being a moderate, has a new article today in the Atlantic magazine, entitled "Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?" that is also an engagement with the life work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who recently passed in May at the age of 94.

MacIntyre argued that from at least the time of the classical period, communities ("a dense network of faily, tribe, city, and nation") created duties and expectations about how to live your life and act morally according to your social role ("soldier, farmers, merchants" and mothers), which people generally accepted and made it their life's work to live up to as well as you could. Judaism, Christianity and Islam tweaked these duties and expectations to give greater weight to compassion and humility, but through the Middle Ages maintained the same social structure in which morality and your duties in life were societally imposed. The wars of religion at the end of the Middle Ages convinced people that maybe religion was not the best thing to organize societies upon and in reaction to that came the Enlightenment period of the 18th century centered upon reason and science, and relegated morality to a matter of individual choice.

MacIntyre argued that this produced a decline in shared morality, although Brooks himself would put this moment in the mid-1960s. The narrative continues with Nietzsche famously saying that "God is dead" because we'd killed him and made ourselves our own gods. In this narrative, Hilter, Lenin, and Mao fill that moral vacuum with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism, "and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease."

At this point it becomes less clear whether it is MacIntyre or Brooks talking. But the two solutions to a moral vacuum that Brooks presents are coercion or manipulation. Either coerce others to believe what you believe, e.g., with corporate DEI, or manipulate people with the kind of lies and sleaze that Trump and Fox News are known for utilizing. The battle of these methods in the 1980s and 1990s "looks like a golden age of peace and tranquility compared to today", Brooks argues, because in the last thirty years people have sought righteousness instead through their political identities and politics permeates everything.

Without a firm universal ground in "the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness", "People are rendered anxious and fragile" and without a moral foundation, they "fall apart when setbacks come."

He sees Trump as a man "who doesn't even try to speak the language of morality", doesn't care about weakening "our shared moral norms" with his example, speaks a language of preference "I want" and a language of power "I have the leverage", and a language of self, of gains of acquisition, of benefitting himself, instead.

Brooks argues, within the framework of MacIntyre's philosophy that Trump is "just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create." He also argues (inaccurately, in my view) that if Trump was on their team, most Democrats would like him too, and that you're lying to yourself if you deny it.

Brooks argues that pluralism is the answer to to resolving the tension created by incommensurate values, but that we need to recalibrate it to make people "more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community" and to provide rigorous moral education to the next generation (which sounds a lot like the coercion he condemned earlier in his argument).

Why Is Brooks Wrong?

I don't think this rings true, and find better answers in psychology and economics than in philosophy, which I've always considered something of a dead end and historical curiosity that recalls long since superseded proto-science, than something of real value today as anything more than intellectual history.

In my view, Trump, a psychopath rich in "dark triad" traits, is an archetypical figure familiar to observers of politics and public affairs and history since classical times, if not earlier, who is a constant threat to every organization from families to empires. There is nothing novel or surprising about him, himself. 

Demagogues were something that the Founders of the United States, at the pinnacle of the Enlightenment, worried about. Democracy and the Bill of Rights were their answer to the narcissistic mad kings and equally dark leaders of established religions with whom they were very familiar, both from the 18th century world and from the history that they knew from the classical era through the Middle Ages. The Founders were familiar with Roman Emperor Nero. Machiavelli in "The Prince" wrote about how dark triad tactics might be advisable to a leader seeking to gain power for his people. They were intimately familiar with the tyrants of British history, right up through King George. The believed that people whose rights were guarded by law would not vote for such scoundrels. Lest we forget, George R. R. Martin, in his Game of Thrones series, a fantasy series that draws heavily on the War of the Roses, history that was much more fresh in the minds of the Founders, reminds us of what that was like and why it is best avoided.

It wasn't a bad plan. 

The Constitution adopted in 1789 lasted without an insurmountable constitutional crisis for 72 years, when Civil War broke out. After the crisis over slavery that manifested in the Civil War was overcome in 4 years of brutal deadly fighting (that still leave the nation deeply divided) was over, followed a 12 year Reconstruction period, and in turn followed by 77 years or so of de jure segregation but a fragile peace. We then went on to have another 70 years or so of the constitution working more or less as intended. 

We are in the midst of another constitutional crisis now, which their plan may or may not be good enough to overcome. 

The United States of America, including its 13 years before the current constitution was adopted, is 249 years old, making it the oldest fully non-hereditary democratic governmental regimes still in existence on the scale of a large nation. But the Founders, as one of the first countries to have a full fledged democratic Republic at a large national scale, lacked the historical experience or foresight to plan for every potential eventuality and their plan is now clearly not the optimal design, although it may be that our Republic's woes are such that no formal constitution would have been sufficient to prevent them.

The times and places in history where tyrants arose also doesn't match up. MacIntyre's framework suggests that we should have seen a breakdown in a sense of duty and morality in the Enlightenment. But we didn't see this happen across the board. Yes, the moral divide in the U.S. may be traceable to the moral fight over slavery that emerged in the Enlightenment. But, this was not a general, individualized loss of community norms, it was a divide that arose between two coherent and vital cultures, that of the slaveholding South on one side, and of the abolitionist North on the other, sustained, as much as anything, by the perceived economic needs of each region, with clergy serving of cheerleaders of each side and framing these economic imperatives with moral justifications.

Why did we get Hitler in Weimar Germany, and Lenin in Russia, while France, England, and the United States were not similarly afflicted?

Hitler is the clearest example. Germany's defeat in World War I, the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, and economic collapse, radicalized many Germans, making them crave an authoritarian strong man to save them, and causing them to abandon the luxuries of caring for their fellow man whom they saw as their competitors, or as a drag on their society's ability to overcome the malaise that they faced.

Similar economic forces drive American politics today. After a couple of decades of remarkable shared prosperity, economic growth, which make the liberalism and the care for their fellow man of the Civil Rights movement possible, ceased to be shared starting sometime around the early 1970s. Since then, mostly educated, urban elites have captured almost all of the economy's economic growth for a half century, while less educated folk in rural areas and small towns have seen their economic prospects stagnate. The Civil Rights movement improved the economic lot of non-whites and women. New immigration laws welcomed foreigners. Free trade allowed manufacturing to be offshored to markets with lower wages, fewer labor protections, and weaker environmental laws. The U.S. de-industrialized and the Rust Belt came into being. Free trade rules, environmental rules, protections for unions, automation, birth control and abortion have, in their view, destroyed an economy fueled by domestic manufacturing and fossil fuels, in which men received good pay that made them heads of their families.

Half a century later, counties that vote blue have more than double the per capita GDP of those that vote red. Red America has captured almost none of the economic growth of the last half century, while Blue America is more prosperous than almost any other place on Earth. Prosperous Blue America extended its inclusive shared affluence mindset to allow the LGBT community to live publicly and in dignity, and to make it safe to be openly secular. 

Straight white Christian men in Red America without much education have seen every other demographic but them improve their lot in the last fifty years, while they have seen almost no improvement in their real wages, increased unemployment, and an inability to maintain stable and solid marriages and families. In relative terms, they seem themselves, and the rural and small town communities that they live in, as the losers, and see the economy as a zero sum game in which non-whites, foreigners, and women have taken what was theirs, and in which atheists and gays have ripped apart the moral framework that held their parents and grandparents families together. They want to throw out everything that they see as having driven their half century of eroded status with no end in sight, and return to the days when their relative status was vastly greater, no matter how unfair that may seem to everyone else. 

They are so frustrated over this sustained defeat that they are willing to turn to an indiscriminate authoritarian who breaks the rules that they see as having held them back, and are even willing to resort to violence, to get it. Their concerns about good character and process values and fair play have dissolved in the face of falling life expectancies, deaths of despair, regular unemployment, disability from the manual work that they are qualified to do with the economy doesn't need anymore to same extent, and their inability to hold onto wives and children that really arises not from an immoral society but from their own failures of economic providers. Faced with their conditions, they want to burn the system down and start over from new foundations that elevate their relative socio-economic standing.

Not everyone who votes for Trump has experienced this, and not everyone in red counties and red states has supported him. Some have supported Republicans simply out of thoughtless, long ingrained habit, or because they think that they are among the rich who will benefit from tax cuts. But peer pressure from enough people who matter in their little small town and rural communities, and in the working class underworld of Blue America, have made their political views (stripped of any reasoning behind them) normative in their communities, won over their wives, and caused religious congregation to which these men have been drawn because they are saying what these men want to hear to thrive and reinforce these men's views.

What we see today is more a product of capitalism, appropriately regulated but with only modest redistribution, doing what it does naturally: increasing GDP as fast as it can, while leaving the productive better off than the less productive who are worse off. But capitalism has done its thing to an extent greater than the political system is willing to bear, bringing us to a breaking point. 

It's worse in the U.S. because we have done less to cushion the blow for those who are less productive either by finding them places in the new economy or redistributing wealth and creating a stronger social safety net (in part, because racism has left the U.S. with a weaker sense of solidarity). But the same pressures are present in Europe, with somewhat different targets to fit local changes over the last half century, and are strongest in the places that are economically struggling.

Democrats Are Predominantly More Correct Than Republicans

The main sin that the Democrats have committed is not taking seriously enough the grievances of the working class, especially working class white Christian men, who have not shared in the improvement in relative or absolute prosperity that much of the rest of the nation has enjoyed, and who are lashing out at people they see as competitors or as people undermining morality, when neither of these things is the real problem. 

Despite adopting many policies that substantively benefit Red America more than their own base, they didn't go quite far enough, and left this constituency economically struggling, and equally importantly, feeling like they didn't matter and were neglected.

Progressives gets this and have tried to secure radical economic reforms to address this problem, so they don't have to resort to the injustices towards innocents that Trump has inflamed his supporters to think they want. But progressives do not make up a majority of the American public, and the bigger tent necessary to secure the majorities needed to reach a position of power where change can be enacted, and a constitutional framework and political system that tends to create gridlock and too strongly defends the status quo, has thwarted their efforts to secure more than incremental change, which has not been enough. Sometimes the frustration of progressives over their insufficient clout and numbers to achieve the full measure of their goals in a system that already makes it too hard to do so, when they rightfully believe that their proposals are urgently needed to keep far right tendencies at bay and secure economic justice, even boil over into claims that Democrats are no different than Republicans, since both are controlled by big business, despite the fact that this just undermines their own cause.

Contrary to Brooks' assertion, Democrats wouldn't fall for a Trump. They aren't desperate in the way that the MAGA Republican base is, and so they are happy to purge people like him from their ranks when they are caught. The Democratic Party isn't full of criminals, and is much less corrupt than the Republican Party which has had vastly more criminals and is now openly corrupt. 

Democrats and progressives are right that a manufacturing based fossil fuel economy isn't coming back, and that even if manufacturing did come back that 21st century manufacturing is so automated and skill intensive for most jobs, and so unproductive and low paying for others, that it wouldn't restore the economy and related societal consequences that flowed from it anyway.

Democrats are right that the rich aren't taxed enough, although they are mistaken that unions are a leading cause of the shared prosperity benefits that came from a tight labor market, rather than a symptom of that tight labor market that more efficiently utilized economic power that workers already had.

The Democratic effort to create working class clean economy jobs was the right idea, but was too little, too late.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that putting the Ten Commandments in schools, embracing religion, restricting abortion and birth control, making it legally harder to divorce, and squashing gay rights and transgender rights will restore morality and strengthen working class families.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that economics is a zero sum game, in which gains for non-whites, women, educated people, and immigrants, and imports leave white native born men without higher education, their communities, and the U.S. economy, generally, worse off.

Republicans are wrong in thinking that taxes and government spending are bad for the economy or bad for them. They are particularly wrong in thinking that reducing social safety net spending which disproportionately benefits them, will leave them better off, or that tax cuts for the wealthy, big businesses, and people with high incomes weaken the economy or leave them worse off. They have also forgotten (or never knew) that the era they seek to return to "when America was great" was characterized by high taxes and lots of government spending (as well as a very militant union movement).

Republicans are wrong in thinking that they don't benefit from the world order that foreign aid spending and our historical military alliances supported, and are a waste of money, and in thinking about military strength purely in terms of U.S. military might standing alone when wars are almost always won by the side with the most allies and "soft power."

But It Takes More Than Facts And Logic To Change Minds

Of course, as we've learned very painfully, mere facts and logic are enough enough to change political views, and in particular, are not enough to change the political views of a base that holds those views precisely because it has not prospered in an economy based upon knowledge and intellectual ability, and has had wealthy, amoral elites manipulate the information that has been imparted to them.

People's political identities are fundamentally social and are deeply shaped by economics and the information, however untrue it may be, that they have chosen to listen to when forming their world views (something that is itself influenced by their economic circumstances, as well as their ancestral culture).

You have to quash fountains of disinformation and fact resistance that have been gradually taking hold for decades. You have to either get people to admit that they have been conned, or find a way for people to change their political views that allows them to deny that this has happened. You have to make their views uncomfortable for them to hold in their own personal lives, but must do so in circumstances where converting from them is less painful than retreating into their denial with likeminded victims of the con. You have to be able to show them in terms that they understand and believe that your proposals are better than MAGA's and to back that up with an ability to produce tangible results for them. You have to address their needs and hardships, and not merely show that the other side is worse.

Those are tall orders, and it isn't clear that Democrats are up to the challenge. 

Democrats best hope is really that the Republicans, at a time when they are undeniably in complete control, are making the lives of the MAGA base tangibly worse, or convince the MAGA base that this is imminently about to happen, and to undermine any hope that they have that burning everything down will lead to a future that leaves them better off in relative terms, if not in absolute terms. Trump and his allies, as they attempt to govern in a purely ideological manner, are their own worst enemies here.

The GOP's hold on Congress is tenuous. In 2026, flipping 4 seats out of a 53 GOP seats would flip the Senate, and flipping 3 seats out of 220 GOP seats in the House (and reclaiming three currently vacant democratic seats in vacancy elections) would flip the House. Trump is the least popular President since Trump, and many of his particular policies, including his recently passed budget, are wildly unpopular with voters. The public is no fan of Congress and a lot of Republicans in Congress have voted for measures that are unpopular with the people who elected them (even though the final budget bill retreated from many of Trump's demands) and will actively hurt the people who elected them. Some of the gerrymandering that influenced the results of the 2024 election will also be remedied in 2026. Elon Musk's proposal to create a new "American Party", even if it wasn't terribly successful, would split the conservative vote in a way that could benefit Democrats immensely. The U.S. Supreme Court has also never had less popular support in the history of modern polling, and conservative voters no longer need to support Trump and the GOP to keep in that way (or to have their tax cuts for corporations and the rich made permanent).

It is unlikely that Republicans will hold both Houses of Congress in the 2026 election. They will probably lose control of the House and at least lose ground in the Senate, barring a major escalation in the steps that Trump has tried to take to erode democracy in the last sixteen months, with lukewarm but significant support from the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority which has significantly impaired the ability of other federal courts to restrain Trump.

Time will tell how it turns out in the midst of the constant political chaos and societal unrest that Trump have actively stoked.

Left leaning forces don't have to keep MAGA's dictatorial power grab at bay forever. The MAGA base is in demographic decline. The Democratic base is growing. If the left can endure this crisis and thwart full on totalitarianism until Trump is dead and his MAGA agenda has been discredited by its own failures severely enough, for enough years, the crisis will be overcome and the Republic can be saved. It may be bruised, battered, and irrevocably harmed in many ways, but it would not be beyond all saving. 

But history is also not without precedents, like Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea, where progress is dramatically reversed when totalitarians succeed, and this backward state continues for forty years or more with minimal progress. And, unlike the case of people subject to the Axis regimes in World War II, no other country or alliance will be coming to rescue us, because we are too big and too militarily mighty. Another civil war might save us if that happens, but that would be a horrible price to pay.

Facts About Donald Trump And His Administration

Some of the major themes of Trump 2.0's agenda are quite simply contrary to the law and Trump is just such as bad President and bad person.

* Opposition to the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians is not antisemitic.

* The U.S. Supreme Court has specifically held for decades that antisemitic speech is protected the First Amendment. National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43 (1977).

* Equity and inclusion have been legally required in employment, at least since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and in public education since Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

* Diversity achieved by breaking down barriers to employment and education for women, people of diverse sexual orientation, minorities, and people with disabilities is legal, and arguably mandated by U.S. Civil Rights laws.

* Diversity achieved by favorable treatment of women, people of diverse sexual orientation, minorities, and people with disabilities, relative to a meritocratic standard is legal to overcome past discrimination.

* No U.S. law is a valid basis for removing books and websites that laud the achievements of historical women, people of diverse sexual orientation, minorities, and people with disabilities, or depict these individuals in fiction. Indeed, multiple court cases applying existing U.S. law have held that this kind of censorship in public libraries is illegal, such as a recent case involving the Elizabeth school district in Colorado.

* None of the Trump 2.0's political appointments have been remotely meritocratic, contrary to his claim that he wants to end affirmative action.

* There is no legal basis for the U.S. federal government to prohibit educational institutions, public or private, at any legal, from teaching critical race theory.

* Discrimination against white, straight men in employment and education is modest at best, and mostly, non-existent.

* Discrimination against Christians in the U.S. is basically non-existent, and, instead, for the most part, the U.S. sees significant discrimination against non-Christians.

* Christian religious freedom is not a valid basis for discrimination against homosexuals and transgender people by organizations that are not religious organizations.

* All levels of government in the United States are strictly forbidden from supporting any particular religion, or religion at all, by the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

* It has been illegal since the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 for the President to refuse to spend Congressionally appropriated funds.

* Generally applicable rules and regulations of the Executive Branch of government in the United States can only be adopted after notice and hearing according to the procedures of the Administrative Procedure Act.

* Speech, legislative lobbying, and legal action against President Trump are protected by the First Amendment and it is illegal for President Trump to retaliate against law firms and individual for doing so.

* Federal employees who are not political employees or lawyers cannot legally be fired by the President without good cause.

* The President has no constitutional authority over employees of Congress or the judicial branch or employees of non-profit corporations formed by the U.S. government, and has only the authority granted to him by federal statutes to do so.

* The President has absolutely no legal authority to defy a court order, even if the legal basis for issuing that order was incorrect and it is later overturned on appeal. Despite this, President Trump has intentionally defied court orders more than once in his first four months in office.

* The U.S. Constitution requires the directors of federal agencies to be nominated by the President and approved by the U.S. Senate, or, when a Congressionally approved law provides otherwise, by a federal judge or a U.S. Senate approved officer of the United States.

* It is illegal for the President to use his office to promote a private business in his official capacity.

* The U.S. Constitution expressly prohibits federal employees, including the President, from receiving gifts or other private benefits from holding a public office without Congressional approval on a case by case basis.

* The international war crime of "aggression" prohibits the U.S. from invading Canada, Greenland, or Panama at this time.

* White South Africans are not facing genocide in South Africa and do not meet the legal criteria to be classified as refugees. The claims that White South Africans are been systemically murdered on account of their identity in South Africa are not true, and the most compelling pieces of evidence the President Trump presented in support of that claim in a White House meeting with the President of South Africa were actually evidence of mass killings of black women in the Democratic Republic of Congo and evidence of symbolic political protests in South Africa in which no one was physically harmed.

* Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador, is not a gang members and evidence relied upon by President Trump to support that claim was photoshopped onto a picture of Mr. Garcia.

* The Alien Enemies Act relied upon President Trump for man deportations is not a valid legal basis to deport anyone because the U.S. is not experiencing an invasion within the meaning of the act as President Trump claims, as multiple judges, some appointed by President Trump himself have held, and as an investigation by U.S. government intelligence agencies that he commissioned established.

* The Alien Enemies Act does not legally authorize deportation without due process.

* Only Congress may authorize the suspension of the right to seek a writ of habeas corpus, and only in places where the federal courts are unable to operate. See Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 2 (1866).

* A core principle of federal law is that every person, whether or not that person is a U.S. citizen, and whether or not that person is a criminal or terrorist, is entitled to due process before being detained or deported.

* It is a core principle of U.S. constitutional law that every person born in a U.S. state, who does not have diplomatic immunity at the time, is a U.S. citizen. This includes the children of illegal immigrants. No U.S. court has ever ruled to the contrary since the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave rise to this right, was adopted.

* It is illegal for the President to fire members of an independent agency board without cause. Humphrey's Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935), was a decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that ruled that the U.S. Constitution allows the U.S. Congress to enact laws limiting the ability of the President of the United States to fire the executive officials of an independent agency that is quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial in nature.

* The President's authority to unilaterally impose tariffs without an act of Congress doing so is very doubtful, and mere trade deficits with a country are not a valid legal basis for doing so.

* The President has a legal duty to faithfully execute the U.S. Constitution and the laws of the United States.

* Every public official in the United States has a sworn duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution.

* The fact that the President has been held to have immunity from criminal and civil liability for his official acts does not mean that the President is legally entitled to violate the law, it just limited the legal remedies that are available when he does.

* The fact that the President has been held to have immunity from criminal and civil liability for his official acts does not mean that the President's subordinates charged with carrying out the President's orders also have immunity from criminal and civil liability for their official acts, if they are not judges or prosecutors and the claims are related to their participation in the legal process.

* Trump admitted on TV shortly after he announced tariffs to helping his billionaire friends engaged in insider trading on his tariff news. Many members of his administration and many Republicans in Congress have engaged in insider trading.

* Trump has sold access to the White House to mostly foreign investors in a meme coin he introduced after taking office for a second time. The coin has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump, enriched rich foreign investors, and produces big losses for almost all ordinary investors in the meme coin.

* Trump had basically a commercial for Tesla cars on the White House lawn after Elon Musk's political involvement (an advisor of the President so close that he has been called the co-President) with Trump and Nazi and far right, and Trump has quashed about a dozen federal investigations of Musk's companies, awarded Musk's companies many billions of dollars of government contracts without the usual government bidding process, and has insisted that countries do business with Musk's companies in trade negotiations.

* Members of Congress have an express legal right to inspect immigration detention facilities without notice even if the President orders the officials there not to allow them to do so.

* The President does not have the legal authority to revoke a non-profit organization's tax exemption without good cause, and may not do so for legally authorized good cause specific to eligibility to receive non-profit status for reasons not specific to eligibility for non-profit status under the Internal Revenue Code.

* The President does not have the legal authority to deny a higher educational institution the right to admit and teach international students entitled to student visas under the Immigration And Nationality Act without good cause specifically set forth in the Immigration and Nationality Act that is specific to eligibility to do so under the INA.

* The President does not have the legal authority to revoke a student visa, or any other person's immigration status, based upon the lawful free speech.

* It is a crime for IRS officials to share confidential tax information with the government to enforce non-criminal laws.

* It is a crime to use military personnel to enforce the laws within the United States. The law that says so is called the Posse Comitatus Act.

* The President does not have the legal right to blacklist a news reporting agency because he doesn't agree with the views expressed by that agency.

* Donald Trump is a convicted felon.

* Donald Trump is a legally adjudicated rapist.

* Donald Trump has been found repeatedly by the courts to have engaged in fraud, defamatory conduct, and illegal racial discrimination.

* Donald Trump is wealthy in large part because he inherited a large sum of money from his father.

* Six companies, including casinos, that Trump has owned have filed for bankruptcy.

* Trump's University had to settle a civil case against it for fraud for a large sum of money for fraud that Trump personally participated in.

* Trump's main business organization and one of its main executives were criminally convicted of tax fraud in New York during the most recent Presidential campaign.

* Trump and organizations he is affiliated with are notorious for not paying their bills when due. He is also notorious for not paying his lawyer's bills.

* Donald Trump has multiple multi-million dollar money judgments from courts that are currently enforceable outstanding against him.

* Donald Trump and his current wife have both acted in pornographic films. His current wife's primary employment prior to meeting Donald Trump was as an actress in pornographic films and her visa was obtained in the "genius" category despite the fact that she had no other meaningful professional or educational expertise, and she was not even a particularly success porn star.

* While they are not legally separated, Trump is de facto mostly separated from his wife and is notorious for subtly disrespecting her in public settings.

* Donald Trump paid $100,000 in hush money in an attempt to silence a prostitute he hired and then misreported it on financial statements.

* Donald Trump has repeatedly engaged in adultery during each of his many marriages.

* Donald Trump has publicly stated that he doesn't know if he has a legal duty to obey the U.S. Constitution despite twice swearing oaths to uphold it as President of the United States.

* Donald Trump is legally prohibited from operating any business or charity in the State of New York as a result of separate business and charitable fraud cases.

* Donald Trump was legally found by a Colorado trial court, in a decision whose factual determinations were affirmed by the Colorado Supreme Court, and which were not found to be incorrect on the merits by the U.S. Supreme Court, to have engaged in an insurrection against the United States that would bar him from holding federal office. The U.S. Supreme Court overruled the decision of the Colorado Supreme Court only on the ground that the provision of the 14th Amendment which bars people who have engaged in insurrections against the United States from holding federal office is not self-executing and must occur in Congressionally authorized legal proceeding (contrary to strong arguments from the language of the U.S. Constitution, the legislative history of the 14th Amendment, and past precedents applying that constitutional provision).

* There is no legal or constitutional way that President Trump can hold the office of President for a third-term.

* There was no credible evidence that President Trump won the Presidential election in 2020, many attorneys who brought claims challenging that election where sanctioned or disbarred for bringing groundless and frivolous claims, and at least one elections official in Colorado was convicted of multiple state election law crimes in an effort to create that impression. Fox News paid more than $800 million to settle defamation claims to that effect in a lawsuit filed by a voting machine maker on the brink of trial in connection with those claims and another very strong defamation claim against it from another voting machine maker is currently pending.

* In President Trump's first four months in office, approximately four dozen court rulings have held that one or more of his Executive Orders is illegal. No President in U.S. history has issued Executive Orders at such a high rate, or had such a large percentage of his Executive Orders held to be illegal.

* Trump has, in a conspiracy with his physicians, repeated made grossly false statements about his height and weight.

* Trump dodged the draft multiple times during the Vietnam War by procuring a false medical excuse claiming that he had "bone spurs" from a doctor that conspired with him to do so.

* Trump was a transfer student to Wharton Business school whose admission was obtained with donations to the college from his father. It is know for certain that he was not a top student as he has sometimes claimed as he was never on the honor roll. He has jealously kept his academic records from Wharton secret but one of his past professors there characterized him as one of the least academically competent students that he ever had.

* Trump's father was a Ku Klux Klan member and a Nazi supporter.

* Despite Trump's America First trade stance, almost all of the merchandise he sells in his various businesses and for his political campaigns is made outside the United States, mostly in China.

* Many members of Trump's family and some of Trump's businesses have been greatly enriched personally in one-sides transactions meant to curry political favor with him.

* Trump was a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein, a famous procurer of child prostitutes for the rich and famous including British Prince Andrew, who died in prison after being convicted of related crimes, and Trump was a repeat visitor to Epstein's "sex island" and is shown in pictures surrounded by child prostitutes.

* Trump bragged in a recorded interview of sexually assaulting women.

* Trump has made sexually suggestive comments about his own daughters and was known to have abused his authority as a sponsor of beauty contests for minor girls to watch them undressed in the changing rooms associated with those contests.

* Trump on the campaign trail has mocked a disabled man for being disabled, denigrated veterans and prisoners of war (including Republican Senator John McCain) for being losers, and has encouraged people at his campaign rallies to use violence against hecklers at his rallies.

* Trump went out of his way, prior to being formally involved in politics, to denigrate five teenager who were wrongfully convicted of assault and rape of a jogger in a case occurring in Central Park in New York City in 1989, who were later exonerated by DNA evidence after serving prison terms (New York City later settled the civil case arising from the wrongful convictions for $41 million), and Trump stood by his actions (which may have contributed to their wrongful convictions) after the men were unequivocally exonerated.

* Despite being particularly popular with the Christian right to the point of being viewed as a messiah or saint by some, promoting bible sales to raise funds, and appointing an Evangelical Christian advisor, Trump is not at all religious and knows almost nothing about the Bible or Christian doctrine.

* Both Trump's FBI director and his attorney general in his current term were on the payroll of the Qatari government receiving large amounts of compensation from the Arab oil monarchy shortly before taking their current offices. The Qatari government recently gave Trump a $400 million jet liner for his personal use which his attorney general claimed did not violate constitutional or federal law limitations on receiving personal gifts from foreign governments. Trump's company has been pursuing a multi-billion dollar resort development project in Qatar at the time of this gift.

* No politician in U.S. history has ever publicly made false statements of fact at a rate as high as that of President Trump. Indeed, no one else even comes close.

* Vaccines do not cause autism.

* The measles vaccine is safe, effective, and the most effective way to prevent death or serious long term negative effects from measles.

* Trump's actions since he took office have significantly reduced the number of federal employees available to carry out air traffic control.

* Trump's actions since he took office have significantly reduced the number of federal employees and resources to predict the weather and response to weather related emergencies.

* No President in U.S. history has declined to provide emergency relief authorized by U.S. law to natural disaster victims at the rate that President Trump has in his second term.

* Trump has essentially dismantled federal enforcement of federal laws protecting the civil rights of women, racial minorities, homosexuals, and transgender individuals.

* No President in the history of the United States has made as many absurdly wrong statements of historical fact as Donald Trump (e.g., that there were air based during the American Revolution, or that the U.S. was an ally of the Roman Emperor, or that Mattel is a country).

* In his 2024 Presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly made knowingly false claims that Haitian refugees in Ohio were stealing and eating cats and dogs, that that public schools were providing free sex change surgeries to transgender children at those schools.

* Many of the pardons issued by Trump have been to people who contributed to his political campaigns.

* Many of the people whom Trump pardoned for January 6, 2021 capitol riot charges have subsequently committed crimes in the four months since he pardoned them.

* President Trump has nominated a convicted felon, who is the father-in-law of one of his children, to be the U.S. ambassador to France.

* No President has had more subordinates and affiliates convicted of crimes than Donald Trump.

* No one other than Donald Trump has been impeached two separate times by the U.S. House of Representatives although neither of those impeachments were upheld by the required two-thirds majority of the U.S. Senate (in both cases the vote was largely on party lines, although a number of Republican Senators joined Democrats to convict in the second impeachment trial). In the second impeachment of Donald Trump, 57% of Senators voted to convict, the highest percentage other than the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson in 1868 which failed to convict in the face of 35-19 votes to do so in the U.S. Senate when 36 voters were required to convict.

* Trump, in both his first and second terms, was the least popular President in the history of modern polling.

* Trump's anti-vaccination rhetoric, and pseudo-scientific medical claims about COVID-19, and his downplaying of the severity of the COVID-19 led to hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID-19 deaths in the U.S., primarily among elderly Republicans.

* Trump was indicted in four criminal cases which were still being tried during his 2024 Presidential campaign: a federal case arising from his involvement in the January 6, 2021 capitol riot, a federal case arising from his refusal to return top secret nuclear weapons information to the government that he was storing in a bathroom in his Florida resort, a Georgia case involving his illegal attempts to cause election officials there to engage in election fraud to elect him, and a New York State fraud case in which he was convicted of 34 felonies (but given no substantive criminal sentence in a sentencing hearing conducted after he was elected). The confidential records case was presided over by a federal judge he personally appointed in Florida, and dismissed on the legally dubious grounds that the special prosecutor statute was unconstitutional, with the case dismissed because Justice Department policy prohibits pressing criminal charges against a sitting President. The January 6 case was appealed on the grounds that he had absolute immunity from criminal charges for his official acts, which lower courts unanimously denied but the U.S. Supreme Court with had three justices he personally appointed who did not recuse themselves made the unprecedented decision over a strongly worded dissent that the President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecutions for his official acts. The charges in that cases were revised on remand to limit the case to Trump's unofficial acts (with considerable damning evidence revealed in a final report from the case) and then this federal case was dismissed because Trump was elected President and Justice Department policy is to not prosecute a sitting President.

* Trump routinely dresses inappropriately for state funerals and fell asleep in public during the funeral for Pope Francis.

Anti-DEI v. Meritocracy

One very inclusive way that conservatives could have pressed their agenda in opposition to "woke" culture in the American establishment could have been to push meritocracy and race blindness in opposition to racially sensitive affirmative action in areas like employment and higher education admissions.

But, they didn't. Donald Trump's MAGA movement has instead taken an "anti-DEI" and nearly synonymous "anti-DEI" (DEI is an acronym meaning "diversity, equality, and inclusion" and many institutions have bureaucrats charged with advancing these ends in order to comply with civil rights laws), even though MAGA can claim (not very credibly given his actions) that this is what it is doing.

Some of the actions that make this not credible are the administration's installation of large numbers of manifestly unqualified political appointees, the way it has tried to freeze and defund scientific and academic research and high education (and even K-12 education), and its purge of references to minorities or women or non-straight people to the point where even "female" was on a list of banned words in government websites and sponsored grants, and references to the "Enola Gay" (the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb) was removed from government websites because it had the word "gay" in it.

Basically, rather than arguing rhetorically for color blind, meritocratic neutrality, the anti-DEI push has been a declaration of war on everyone who isn't a white, non-disabled, straight, Christian male, and on cultural recognition of people who don't fit that mold. It is seeking to activate and legitimatize racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia, rather than to take the much more moderate stance of trying to tame excess discouragement and penalization of white, non-disabled, straight, Christian men. It is seeking to accentuate tribalism rather than seeking to end it, and to undo the entire civil rights movement. 

The fact that Trump's movement is overtly pro-racist makes it particularly problematic that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to apply Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to allow states like Colorado to disqualify him from the Presidential ballot, contrary to its clear language and the structure and history of the U.S. Constitution and 14th Amendment jurisprudence in particular.

This tactic is probably a good one for mobilizing an aggrieved base that feels persecuted politically. But it profoundly undermines the popularity of the administration's actions with the larger population and the legal system, which have deeply internalized the important of meritocracy in lieu of on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex (including subjective gender), nationality, religion, or sexual orientation. Crossing those lines comes across to a large swath of voters and judges as unAmerican.