The first relates to the president’s declining popularity.
We learned, at the start of the week, that Donald Trump had sunk to new lows with most Americans. According to The Times’s poll with Siena College, Trump had dropped to 42 percent approval. A CNN poll shows Trump at 41 percent and both The Associated Press and The Washington Post have Trump at 39. His much-vaunted performance with Asians, Hispanics and Black Americans is also evaporated, as they shift back toward Democrats in response to the president’s poor performance. No president, not even this president in his first term, has become as unpopular as quickly as this iteration of Donald Trump.
And it’s not as if he has the ability to shift course. He is stubbornly committed to his tariffs, almost taunting anyone who might be worried about higher prices. He is committed to his unpopular cuts to federal agencies, his unpopular attacks on the federal judiciary and his increasingly unpopular immigration policies. Given his attitudes and the likelihood of an economic downturn, Trump is more likely to crater than he is to rise with the public.
All of this was basically predictable. It was predictable that Trump would pursue a ruinous set of policies — he campaigned on them. It was predictable that he would choose people ill-equipped to run the government; he did it the last time he was president. It was obvious that he would be surrounded by permissive advisers more interested in their own narrow ideological projects than in the well-being of the American people.
It did not take a clairvoyant to see how this second term would unfold. And yet it’s clear that there are plenty of people of influence who were caught off-guard by the reckless behavior of the second Trump administration. Their initial response to Trump was to accommodate him as the legitimate president (he won a free and fair election, after all); to pare back the most strident opposition and to acknowledge those areas where he was in line with the public. Even now, in the face of everything we’ve seen, there are voices who think the right approach is a quiet one.
But to my mind, the reality of Trump’s standing — of his rapidly declining political fortunes — is evidence that the best approach was the strident opposition that marked the president’s first term. As cringe-worthy as it might have been to some observers, that posture helped undermine the administration and worked successfully to contain Trump’s worst impulses.
The good news is that there is still plenty of time to embrace a more aggressive form of resistance. In doing so, people of influence — Democratic politicians, figures of industry and prominent media institutions — would be meeting the broad public where it already is. Among the polls released last week was one conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, which found that a majority of Americans, 52 percent, believe that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.”
Can’t get any clearer than that.
My second thought, speaking of the public, is about diversity, equity and inclusion.
To read some prominent commentators is to get the impression that of all the things the administration is doing, the public is most receptive to its attacks on D.E.I. But there’s no real evidence to say this is the case. In fact, D.E.I. holds majority support among American adults, and when asked whether they approve or disapprove of the president’s attacks on diversity programs, 53 percent say they disapprove.
This might be because most Americans perceive something that these prominent commentators do not, which is that the administration’s attack on D.E.I. is less about fairness than it is recreating systems of domination and subordination. Consider this line of thought from Richard Kahlenberg of the Progressive Policy Institute, a curiously named group founded as the primary think tank of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council in 1989. According to Kahlenberg, observations that the Trump administration is not interested in fairness as such are “over the top.” To him, the president simply wants the government to “treat different racial groups the same.”
This is hard to take seriously. So far, in this apparent effort to spread racial equality, the White House has removed, without apparent cause or real justification, a number of Black Americans from senior positions in the military, removed the work of Black, women and Jewish authors from the Naval Academy (while leaving books such as “Mein Kampf”), criticized the Smithsonian, particularly its Museum of African American History, for spreading supposedly “improper ideology,” pushed the National Park Service to rewrite its history of the Underground Railroad, gutted the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, rescinded executive orders mandating desegregation in federal contracting, revoked a decades-old school desegregation order, and fired dozens of women and minorities from the boards that review science and research at the National Institutes of Health.
At the same time, the White House has elevated — to positions of great influence — a set of disastrously unprepared loyalists whose main qualifications seem to be the way they look. There is no question that Donald Trump chose Pete Hegseth — formerly a weekend Fox News host — to lead the Department of Defense because he looked straight out of “central casting.”
It takes nothing more than simple observation to conclude that the administration’s war on D.E.I. is a conscious effort to undermine recognition of Black Americans, women and other groups as well as stigmatize their presence in positions of authority. Frankly, one has to be willfully blind to the substance of the administration’s war on D.E.I. to think that it has anything to do with equal treatment.
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And yet, quite a few people seem to have deliberately pulled blinders over their eyes. First, so that they can pretend that the White House isn’t possessed of neosegregationist attitudes toward people who fall outside of a distinct set of racial and gender identities, and second, so that they can ignore the extent to which the president and his allies are obsessed with race, when race can be used to dominate and subordinate others.
Message From the Russian Military: ‘We Lost Your Son’
Russia lacks any formal, organized effort to account for legions of missing soldiers. That often leaves relatives in limbo, fending for themselves with scant government information.
By Neil MacFarquhar and Milana Mazaeva – May 3, 2025
Russian conscripts departing for their garrisons in Bataysk, Russia, last month. Credit…Sergey Pivovarov/Reuters
For months, Elvira Kaipova had not heard from her son Rafael, a Russian soldier deployed in Ukraine.
Military officials responded to her repeated questions about his whereabouts by saying he was on active duty and therefore incommunicado. Then, late last November, two days after they again made that assertion, she learned that he had gone missing on Nov. 1 — from a Telegram channel that helps military families.
“We lost your son,” Aleksandr Sokolov, the officer in Rafael’s unit in charge of family liaison, told her when she traveled to its headquarters in western Russia.
“Lost him how?” she says she responded, alarmed and angry, especially when the officer explained that after Rafael had failed to check in by radio, a search had proved impossible. “How do we search for him?” she says the officer told her.
Variations on that grim scenario have been repeated countless times since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian Ministry of Defense lacks any formal, organized effort to track down legions of missing soldiers, according to bereaved families, private organizations that try to assist them and military analysts. Relatives, stuck in limbo, fend for themselves with scant government information.
The ministry itself declined to comment for this article. Mr. Sokolov, the liaison officer, said in a text message: “You do realize that I can’t comment on anything.”
Even if Russia and Ukraine reach a peace agreement, the hunt for missing soldiers is expected to endure for years, if not decades.
Rafael Kaipov, from Tyumen, Russia, has been missing since Nov. 1, according to his mother, Elvira Kaipova.
The Defense Ministry has not published any statistics about the number of missing, which military analysts and families say is because it does not know the number. Estimates run to the tens of thousands.
Anna Tsivilyova, a deputy minister of defense and a cousin of President Vladimir V. Putin, told the State Duma last November that 48,000 relatives of the missing had submitted DNA samples in hope of identifying remains, although that included some duplicate requests from the same family.
In Ukraine, “Want to Find,” a government project to help locate Russian servicemen captured or killed there, said it had received more than 88,000 requests for information, with over 9,000 in April alone. It noted that the overall number of missing is still unknown.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which tries to locate missing from both sides, whether civilians or military, has 110,000 cases submitted.
The family of Isakhanov Ravazan, a 25-year-old soldier, last received a brief voice message from him on Nov. 9. During a battle soon afterward, his aunt said, he radioed his commander that he could not stanch the bleeding from a bad wound. He has not been heard from since.
“No one saw him dead,” said his aunt, who, like several people in this article, did not want to be named for fear of falling afoul of laws against detailing battlefield losses. “Maybe he saved himself, maybe someone found him, we are still holding onto hope that he is alive,” she said. “There is no peace for the soul. I cannot sleep at night, and neither can his parents.”
Most missing soldiers most likely died fighting and were abandoned on the battlefield, experts said. There are not enough teams to collect bodies, and the constant deployment of drones makes retrieval too dangerous.
A military dog tag found with the body of a Russian soldier near Koroviy Yar, Ukraine, in 2023.Credit…Nicole Tung for The New York Times
Commanders have enough trouble delivering food and ammunition, and that is the priority, said a military analyst with the Conflict Intelligence Team, an independent organization in exile that tracks the conflict. The analyst, who declined to use his name to avoid jeopardizing relatives still in Russia, said only families of the soldiers care if bodies are collected, “and there is no punishment for alienating relatives.”
A Ukrainian man from the occupied city of Luhansk, who was dragooned into service as a battlefield medic and who also declined to be identified, said of his experience: “Hundreds of people were left lying out there. Every day, dozens were wounded or killed.”
Even when bodies are retrieved, identification is problematic. Often, remains can be removed only after the battle lines shift markedly so that attack drones fly elsewhere, and that could take months or even years.
The military morgue in the western city of Rostov, officially known as the Center for the Reception, Processing and Dispatch of the Deceased, is the main clearing center.
When she learned that her son was missing, Ms. Kaipova, who is married and has one other son, flew there first. “Everything is overcrowded,” she said, arriving at 7 a.m. to submit a DNA sample and leaving at 10 p.m. “Wives, mothers, fathers — all crying, sobbing, waiting.”
Investigators there told her and others that they face a backlog of around 15,000 unidentified servicemen. The sluggish pace, the constant referrals to different government agencies and the lack of basic information has families of the missing on a slow boil. Anger overflows from numerous online chat rooms where relatives seek help.
Ukrainian volunteers who collect the bodies of people killed in combat and try to identify the remains of Russian soldiers, in eastern Ukraine in February.Credit…Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
In one comment on the Vkontakte social network, a participant named Polina Medvedeva lambasted military commanders as “irresponsible.” Some of her husband’s comrades told her that he had died heroically, she wrote, but the military has not confirmed his death and there is no body.
“Where are the specifics?” she wrote. “Why is the command ignoring us, avoiding answers, throwing us from one number to another? My heart breaks with pain and anger for what they have done to our family.”
Some families go even more public.
Relatives of missing soldiers from the 25th Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade from the Leningrad region have made repeated appeals to Mr. Putin.
“Everywhere we encounter indifference!” they said in a video last month showing pictures of the missing. Every family receives exactly the same form letter and is just told, repeatedly, to wait, they said, “Help us! We are tired of living in ignorance for months and years!”
The Kremlin established the Defenders of the Fatherland State Foundation, ostensibly to help soldiers, veterans and their families. But it has no inside track on details about the missing, analysts said.
There is “no system of liaison with the soldiers’ families,” said Sergei Krivenko, the director of a human rights organization formed to help soldiers. He called the Fatherland Foundation a “fake structure,” designed to deflect blame from the defense ministry and “to give a semblance of action.”
The Fatherland Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Kaipova has written to numerous officials starting with Mr. Putin, visited his administrative office and searched through multiple hospitals, including some amid the fighting in eastern Ukraine. “I run in circles,” she said.
President Vladimir V. Putin meeting with the Defenders of the Fatherland State Foundation in Moscow, in March, in a photograph released by Russian state media.Credit…Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik
Her quest took a not uncommon turn when she thought she recognized Rafael with a grievous head wound in a short video clip filmed aboard an evacuation helicopter. She is convinced he is lying in a hospital somewhere afflicted with amnesia.
The administrator of one chat group where she posted the video said at least 20 other people identified the same man as their missing soldier.
“Everyone is so desperate that they see their loved ones in any face,” Ms. Kaipova conceded, but she dismissed any suggestion that this might be the case for her, as well. Her son’s unit said its medics had no record of evacuating him.
Rafael was a reluctant soldier. Raised in the central city of Tyumen, he seriously injured another man who tried to take his car. Officials presented him with a common choice in Russian criminal cases: Go to jail or to the front. His mother begged him to chose jail, but he recoiled. “He was in agony, pacing,” she said. “He did not want war or prison.”
He deployed last Aug. 1, his 20th birthday. She never heard from him again. A hospitalized soldier from his unit once called to tell her that Rafael had cried out for his mother in fear at the start of his first battle.
She learned from Form 1421, the terse military record of his disappearance, that he served with an intelligence unit. Rafael was among a group of soldiers carrying out “special tasks” in a Donetsk Province village, it said, when they came under fire from artillery and drones. “The group, which included Rafael Kaipov, lost contact after this engagement.”
Under new laws, commanding officers can go to court just six months after the last contact with a soldier to have him declared missing, allowing them to halt his combat pay.
The families themselves have to file an additional case to have the missing soldier declared dead, which releases hefty benefits. Some shun such a definitive step.
“I cry constantly, morning and night,” Ms. Kaipova said. “My biggest fear is that I will exhaust every lead and have no one left to turn to.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.
Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.
Milana Mazaeva is a reporter and researcher, helping to cover Russian society.
The New Deal Is a Stinging Rebuke to Trump and Trumpism
Jamelle Bouie – April 30, 2025
Credit…Nathan Howard/Reuters
There is no question that Donald Trump’s ambition in the first 100 days of his return to the Oval Office was to set a new standard for presidential accomplishment. To rival, even surpass, the scope of Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts nearly a century ago, when he moved so quickly — and so decisively — that he established the first 100 days as a yardstick for executive action.
But as consequential as they have been, and as exhausting as they’ve felt to many Americans, these first months of Trump’s second term fall far short of what Roosevelt accomplished. Yes, Trump has wreaked havoc throughout the federal government and destroyed our relationships abroad, but his main goal — the total subordination of American democracy to his will — remains unfulfilled. You could even say it is slipping away, as he sabotages his administration with a ruinous trade war, deals with the stiff opposition of a large part of civil society and plummets in his standing with most Americans.
If measured by his ultimate aims, Trump’s first 100 days are a failure. To understand why he failed, we must do a bit of compare-and-contrast. First, let’s look at the details of Trump’s opening gambit. And second, let’s measure his efforts against the man who set the terms in the first place: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. To do so is to see that the first 100 days of Trump’s second term aren’t what we think they are. More important, it is to see that the ends of a political project cannot be separated from the means that are used to bring it into this world.
Trump began his second term with a shock-and-awe campaign of executive actions. He, or rather the people around him, devised more than 100 executive orders, all part of a program to repeal the better part of the 20th century — from the New Deal onward — as well as fundamentally transform the relationship between the federal government and the American people.
His ultimate aim is to turn a constitutional republic centered on limited government and the rule of law into a personalist autocracy centered on the rule of one man, Donald J. Trump, and his unlimited authority. Trump’s vision for the United States, put differently, has more in common with foreign dictatorships than it does with almost anything you might find in America’s tradition of republican self-government.
To that end, the president’s executive orders are meant to act as royal decrees — demands that the country bend to his will. In one, among the more than four dozen issued in his first weeks in office, Trump purports to purge the nation’s primary and secondary schools of supposed “radical indoctrination” and promote a program of “patriotic education” instead. In another, signed in the flurry of executive activity that marked his first afternoon back in the Oval Office, Trump asserts the power to define “biological” sex and “gender identity” themselves, in an attempt to end official recognition of trans and other gender nonconforming people.
In Trump’s America, diversity, equity and inclusion programs aren’t just frowned upon; they’re grounds for purges in the public sector and investigations in the private sector. Scientific and medical research must align with his ideological agenda; anything that doesn’t — no matter how promising or useful — is on the chopping block. Any institutions that assert independent authority, like law firms and universities, must be brought to heel with the force of the state itself. Everything in American society must align with the president’s agenda. Those who disagree might find themselves at the mercy of his Department of Justice or worse, his deportation forces.
Trump claims sovereign authority. He claims the right to dismantle entire federal agencies, regardless of the law. He claims the right to spend taxpayer dollars as he sees fit, regardless of what Congress has appropriated. He even claims the right to banish American citizens from the country and send them to rot in a foreign prison.
Trump has deployed autocratic means toward authoritarian ends. And the results, while sweeping, rest on a shaky foundation of unlawful actions and potentially illegal executive actions.
Now, let’s consider Roosevelt.
It’s from Roosevelt, of course, that we get the idea that the 100th day is a milestone worth marking.
Roosevelt took office at a time of deprivation and desperation. The Great Depression had reached its depths during the winter of his inauguration in March 1933. Total estimated national income had dropped by half, and the financial economy had all but shut down, with banks closed and markets frozen. About one-quarter of the nation’s work force — or close to 15 million people — was out of work. Countless businesses had failed. What little relief was available, from either public or private sources, was painfully inadequate.
“Now is the winter of our discontent the chilliest,” Merle Thorpe, the editor of Nation’s Business — then the national magazine of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — wrote in an editorial that captured the mood of the country on the eve of Roosevelt’s inauguration. “Fear, bordering on panic, loss of faith in everything, our fellow-man, our institutions, private and government. Worst of all, no faith in ourselves, or the future. Almost everyone ready to scuttle the ship, and not even ‘women and children first.’”
It was this pall of despair that led Roosevelt to tell the nation in his Inaugural Address that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Despite the real calls for someone to seize dictatorial power in the face of crisis, Roosevelt’s goal — more, possibly, than anything else — was to rescue and rejuvenate American democracy: to rebuild it as a force that could tame the destructive force of unregulated capitalism.
As such, the new president insisted, the country “must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline.” His means would fit his ends. He would use democracy to save democracy. He would go to the people’s representatives with an ambitious plan of action. “These measures,” he said, “or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.”
What followed was a blitz of action meant to ameliorate the worst of the crisis. “On his very first night in office,” the historian William E. Leuchtenburg (who died three months ago) recounted in his seminal volume, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940,” Roosevelt “directed secretary of the Treasury William Woodin to draft an emergency banking bill, and gave him less than five days to get it ready.”
Five days later, on March 9, 1933, Congress convened a special session during which it approved the president’s banking bill with by acclamation in the House and a nearly unanimous vote in the Senate. Soon after, Roosevelt urged the legislature to pass an unemployment relief measure. By the end of the month, on March 31, Congress had created the Civilian Conservation Corps.
This was just the beginning of a burst of legislative and executive activity. On May 12 alone, Roosevelt signed the Federal Emergency Relief Act — establishing the precursor to the Works Progress Administration — the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act. He signed the bill creating the Tennessee Valley Authority less than a week later, on May 18, and the Securities Act regulating the offer and sale of securities on May 27. On June 16, Roosevelt signed Glass-Steagall, a law regulating the banking system, and the National Industrial Recovery Act, an omnibus business and labor relations bill with a public works component. With that, and 100 days after it began, Congress went out of session.
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The legislature, Leuchtenburg wrote,
had written into the laws of the land the most extraordinary series of reforms in the nation’s history. It had committed the country to an unprecedented program of government-industry cooperation; promised to distribute stupendous sums to millions of staple farmers; accepted responsibility for the welfare of millions of unemployed; agreed to engage in far-reaching experimentation in regional planning; pledged billions of dollars to save homes and farms from foreclosure; undertaken huge public works spending; guaranteed the small bank deposits of the country; and had, for the first time, established federal regulation of Wall Street.
And Roosevelt, Leuchtenburg continued, “had directed the entire operation like a seasoned field general.” The president even coined the “hundred days” phrasing, using it in a July 24, 1933, fireside chat on his recovery program, describing it as a period “devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.”
The frantic movement of Roosevelt’s first months set a high standard for all future presidents; all fell short. “The first 100 days make him look like a minor league statesman,” said one journalist of Roosevelt’s successor Harry S. Truman. The Times described the first 100 days of the Eisenhower administration as a “slow start.” And after John F. Kennedy’s first 100 days yielded few significant accomplishments, the young president let the occasion pass without remark.
There is much to be said about why Roosevelt was able to do so much in such a short window of time. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the crisis of the Depression. “The country was in such a state of confused desperation that it would have followed almost any leader anywhere he chose to go,” observed the renowned columnist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann. It also helped that there was no meaningful political opposition to either Roosevelt or the Democratic Party — the president took power with overwhelming majorities in the House and the Senate. The Great Depression had made the Republicans a rump party, unable to mount an effective opposition to the early stages of the New Deal.
This note on Congress is key. Beyond the particular context of Roosevelt’s moment, both the expectation and the myth of Roosevelt’s 100 days miss the extent to which it was a legislative accomplishment as much as an executive one. Roosevelt did not transform the United States with a series of executive orders; he did so with a series of laws.
Roosevelt was chief legislator as much as he was chief executive. “He wrote letters to committee chairmen or members of Congress to urge passage of his proposals, summoned the congressional leadership to White House conferences on legislation … and appeared in person before Congress,” Leuchtenburg wrote in an essay arguing that Roosevelt was “the first modern president”:
He made even the hitherto mundane business of bill signing an occasion for political theater; it was he who initiated the custom of giving a presidential pen to a congressional sponsor of legislation as a memento.
Or as the journalist Raymond Clapper wrote of Roosevelt at the end of his first term: “It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the president, although not a member of Congress, has become almost the equivalent of the prime minister of the British system, because he’s both executive and the guiding hand of the legislative branch.”
Laws are never fixed in place. But neither are they easily moved. It’s for this reason that any president who hopes to make a lasting mark on the United States must eventually turn to legislation. It is in lawmaking that presidents secure their legacy for the long haul.
This brings us back to Trump, whose desire to be a strongman has led him to rule like a strongman under the belief that he can impose an authoritarian system on the United States through sheer force of will.
His White House doesn’t just rely on executive orders; it revolves around them. They are the primary means through which the administration takes action (he has signed only five bills into law), under a radical assertion of executive power: the unitary executive taken to its most extreme form. And for Trump himself, they seem to define his vision of the presidency. He holds his ceremonies — always televised, of course — where subordinates present his orders as he gushes over them.
But while we have no choice but to recognize the significance of the president’s use of executive power, we also can’t believe the hype. Just because Trump desires to transform the American system of government doesn’t mean that he will. Autocratic intent does not translate automatically into autocratic success.
Remember, an executive order isn’t law. It is, as Philip J. Cooper explained in “By Order of the President: The Use and Abuse of Executive Direct Action,” a directive “issued by the president to officers of the executive branch, requiring them to take an action, stop a certain type of activity, alter policy, change management practices, or accept a delegation of authority under which they will henceforth be responsible for the implementation of law.” When devised carefully and within the scope of the president’s lawful authority, an executive order can have the force of law (provided the underlying statute was passed within the constitutional authority of Congress), but it does not carry any inherent authority. An executive order is not law simply because the president says it is.
Even though Trump seems to think he is issuing decrees, the truth is that his directives are provisional and subject to the judgment of the courts as well as future administrations. And if there is a major story to tell about Trump’s second term so far, it is the extent to which many of the president’s most sweeping executive actions have been tied up in the federal judiciary. The White House, while loath to admit it, has even had to back down in the face of hostile rulings.
The president might want to be a king, but despite the best efforts of his allies on the Supreme Court, the American system is not one of executive supremacy. Congress has all the power it needs to reverse the president’s orders and thwart his ambitions. Yes, the national legislature is held by the president’s party right now. But that won’t be a permanent state of affairs, especially given the president’s unpopularity.
MAGA propaganda notwithstanding, Trump is not some grand impresario skillfully playing American politics to his precise tune. He may want to bend the nation to his will, but he does not have the capacity to do the kind of work that would make this possible, as well as permanent — or as close to permanent as lawmaking allows. If Roosevelt’s legislative skill was a demonstration of his strength, then Trump’s reliance on executive orders is a sign of his weakness.
None of this is to discount the real damage that he has inflicted on the country. It is precisely because Republicans in Congress have abdicated their duty to the Constitution that Trump has the capacity to act in catastrophically disastrous ways.
But the overarching project of the second Trump administration — to put the United States on the path toward a consolidated authoritarian state — has stalled out. And it has done so because Trump lacks what Roosevelt had in spades: a commitment to governance and a deep understanding of the system in which he operated.
Roosevelt could orchestrate the transformative program of his 100 days because he tied his plan to American government as it existed, even as he worked to remake it. Trump has pursued his by treating the American government as he wants it to be. It is very difficult to close the gap between those two things, and it will become all the more difficult as the bottom falls out of Trump’s standing with the public.
Do not take this as succor. Do not think it means that the United States is in the clear. American democracy is still as fragile and as vulnerable as it has ever been, and Trump is still motivated to make his vision a reality. He may even lash out as it becomes clear that he has lost whatever initiative he had to begin with. This makes his first 100 days less a triumph for him than a warning to the rest of us. The unthinkable, an American dictatorship, is possible.
But Trump may not have the skills to effect the permanent transformation of his despotic dreams. Despite the chaos of the moment, it is possible that freedom-loving Americans have gotten the luck of the draw. Our most serious would-be tyrant is also among our least capable presidents, and he has surrounded himself with people as fundamentally flawed as he is.
On Inauguration Day, Donald Trump seemed to be on top of the world. One hundred days later, he’s all but a lame duck. He can rage and he can bluster — and he will do a lot more damage — but the fact of the matter is that he can be beaten. Now the task is to deliver him his defeat.
I think it’s obvious that neither President Trump nor his coterie of agents and apparatchiks has any practical interest in governing the nation. It’s one reason (among many) they are so eager to destroy the federal bureaucracy; in their minds, you don’t have to worry about something, like monitoring the nation’s dairy supply for disease and infection, if the capacity for doing so no longer exists.
But there is another, less obvious way in which this observation is true. American governance is a collaborative venture. At minimum, to successfully govern the United States, a president must work with Congress, heed the courts and respect the authority of the states, whose Constitutions are also imbued with the sovereignty of the people. And in this arrangement, the president can’t claim rank. He’s not the boss of Congress or the courts or the states; he’s an equal.
The president is also not the boss of the American people. He cannot order them to embrace his priorities, nor is he supposed to punish them for disagreement with him. His powers are largely rhetorical, and even the most skilled presidents cannot shape an unwilling public.
Trump rejects all of this. He rejects the equal status of Congress and the courts. He rejects the authority of the states. He does not see himself as a representative working with others to lead the nation; he sees himself as a boss, whose will ought to be law. And in turn, he sees the American people as employees, each of us obligated to obey his commands.
Trump is not interested in governing a republic of equal citizens. To the extent that he’s even dimly aware of the traditions of American democracy, he holds them in contempt. What Trump wants is to lord over a country whose people have no choice but to show fealty and pledge allegiance not to the nation but to him.
What was it Trump said about Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator, during his first term in office? “Hey, he’s the head of a country. And I mean he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different,” Trump said in 2018. “He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”
One Way to Keep Trump’s Authoritarian Fantasy From Becoming Our Reality
Jamelle Bouie – April 23,2025
Credit…Daniele Volpe for The New York Times
The American constitutional system is built on the theory that the self-interest of lawmakers can be as much of a defense against tyranny as any given law or institution.
As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, “The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” Our Constitution is nothing more than a “parchment barrier” if not backed by the self-interest and ambition of those tasked with leading the nation.
One of the most striking dynamics in these first months of the second Trump administration was the extent to which so many politicians seemed to lack the ambition to directly challenge the president. There was a sense that the smart path was to embrace the apparent vibe shift of the 2024 presidential election and accommodate oneself to the new order.
But events have moved the vibe in the other direction. Ambition is making a comeback.
Last week Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland traveled to El Salvador, where he met with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a victim of the Trump administration’s removal program under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.
Under its reading of the law, which allows the president to summarily detain or expel foreign nationals from the United States, the Trump administration has sent hundreds of people accused of being gang members, most of Venezuelan origin, to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
Abrego Garcia is one of the men trapped in this black zone. Despite his protected legal status, he was arrested, detained, accused of gang activity and removed from the United States. At no point did the government prove its case against Abrego Garcia, who has been moved to a lower-security prison, nor did he have a chance to defend himself in a court of law or before an immigration judge. As one of his representatives in the U.S. Senate, Van Hollen met with him both to confirm his safety and to highlight the injustice of his removal.
“This case is not just about one man,” Van Hollen said at a news conference after his visit. “It’s about protecting the constitutional rights of everybody who resides in the United States of America. If you deny the constitutional rights of one man, you threaten the constitutional rights and due process for everyone else in America.”
Later, in an interview with CNN, Van Hollen accused the Trump administration of ignoring the Supreme Court, which this month told the White House to comply with a district court order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return: “‘Facilitate’ does not mean you do nothing.” As for the president’s claim that Abrego Garcia is a dangerous gang member and so he wasn’t removed in error (as the administration acknowledged in a court filing), “What Donald Trump is trying to do here is change the subject,” Van Hollen said. “The subject at hand is that he and his administration are defying a court order to give Abrego Garcia his due process rights.”
The goal of Van Hollen’s journey to El Salvador — during which he was stopped by Salvadoran soldiers and turned away from the prison — was to bring attention to Abrego Garcia and invite greater scrutiny of the administration’s removal program and its disregard for due process. It was a success. And that success has inspired other Democrats to make the same trip, in hopes of turning more attention to the administration’s removal program and putting more pressure on the White House to obey the law.
Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey is reportedly organizing a trip to El Salvador, and a group of House Democrats led by Representative Robert Garcia of California arrived on Monday. “While Donald Trump continues to defy the Supreme Court, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being held illegally in El Salvador after being wrongfully deported,” Representative Garcia said in a statement. “That is why we’re here, to remind the American people that kidnapping immigrants and deporting them without due process is not how we do things in America.”
“We are demanding the Trump administration abide by the Supreme Court decision and give Kilmar and the other migrants mistakenly sent to El Salvador due process in the United States,” Garcia added.
All of this negative attention has had an effect. It’s not just that the president’s overall approval rating has dipped into the low 40s — although it has — but that he’s losing his strong advantage on immigration as well. Fifty percent of Americans said they disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration, according to a recent poll from Quinnipiac University, and a new Reuters poll showed Trump slightly underwater on the issue, with a 45 percent approval to 46 percent disapproval.
Americans were even negative on the specifics of the president’s handling of immigration. Most people responding to a March Reuters/Ipsos poll, 82 percent, said the president should follow federal court rulings even when he disagrees with them. A smaller but still significant majority said the president should stop deporting people in defiance of court orders. And Americans were broadly opposed to the deportation of undocumented immigrants who have lived in America for a long time or who have children who are U.S. citizens or who are law-abiding except for breaking immigration law.
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Americans might have liked to hear the president talk tough on immigration, but when it came to real actions affecting real people, they are much less supportive. And in traveling to El Salvador, dramatizing the plight of Abrego Garcia and attacking Trump on the most unpopular aspect of his immigration policies, Democrats like Van Hollen are creating the kinds of negative attention for Trump that could turn more Americans against the president’s immigration policies.
These Democrats are also highlighting the vital importance of political leadership after months in which it seemed to have vanished from liberal politics in the United States. Despite a narrow victory with one of the smallest popular vote margins on record, there was a real sense — as Trump began his second term — that his vision had won America over. The United States was Trump country, and the best anyone could do was to adjust to the new reality.
Many elites and institutions that took a posture of opposition to Trump in his first term looked to cooperate — and in the case of Silicon Valley, even assisted — in his second. Likewise, powerful Democrats abandoned resistance in favor of a more measured, supposedly realistic approach. “It’s just accepting the reality that Trump won. And us just saying he’s a chaotic guy goes nowhere. That’s just baked into people’s consciousness,” Senator Peter Welch of Vermont said in January. “The fact is, people want change. So that means we have to be willing to change as well.” Or, as one unnamed Democratic adviser told Politico just after Trump’s inauguration, “The path to prominence is not in endless resistance headlines.”
Democrats would, in the words of a former administration, lead from behind. They would follow the public’s outrage if and when it materialized. Otherwise, they would work with the administration when it made sense. They might even hand him a little bipartisan success. As Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania put it in a January interview with ABC News, “The Republicans are going to drive the agenda, and I’m going to find a way to work together along on all of those kinds of priorities.”
This approach would make some kind of sense if Trump were a normal president in pursuit of a normal, albeit conservative, political agenda.
But Trump is not a normal president. And it’s hard to say that he aspires to be a president at all, if by “president” we mean an executive officer, bound by the law, who serves ultimately at the pleasure of the American people. No, Trump wants to be a strongman. The undisputed leader of a personalist autocracy where no other institution — no other power — can meaningfully oppose him or his designs. Recall his promise to be “a dictator on Day 1.” Perhaps he means Day 100 and beyond, too.
Cooperation with a leader of this ilk is little more than appeasement. It is little more than a license for him to go faster and push further — to sprint toward the consolidated authoritarian government of Trump’s dreams (and those, especially, of his most reactionary allies and advisers, with their eyes on Hungary, Turkey and even Russia and China).
The individuals and institutions inclined to work with Trump thought they would stabilize the political situation. Instead, the main effect of going along to get along was to do the opposite: to give the White House the space it needed to pursue its maximalist aims.
But all the while, there was real weakness. There were the tens of millions of Americans who voted against Trump, still opposed him and remained dismayed by his lawless cruelty. There was the clear disorganization of the Trump administration, the fact that it was split among rival power centers and that Trump did not, in the four years between his first and second terms, become more able or adept at managing the executive branch. He looked exclusively for loyalty, and the result — after his initial blitz of executive orders — was haphazard incompetence across a number of fronts.
For as much as Trump has tried to project himself as an unstoppable force, the truth is that he is as vulnerable as he’s ever been. All it took was real political leadership to demonstrate the extent to which the Trump White House was more of a paper tiger than it might have looked at first glance.
It helped that the White House overplayed its hand again and again. When institutions like Columbia University effectively surrendered to the administration, they did not buy themselves grace so much as they were forced into Trump’s service as agents of his will. There would be no bargaining. There was no deal you could cut to save your Cloud City. You could either submit or resist.
It is in the past two months that we have finally begun to see resistance. Ordinary people began boycotts and took to the streets in large protests. Lawyers challenged the administration on virtually every one of the president’s illegal and unconstitutional executive orders. And Democrats began to tap into and amplify grass-roots anti-Trump energy, from the anti-oligarchy rallies of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Booker’s record-breaking speech on the Senate floor. The courts have clearly taken note of the shift in public sentiment, delivering major defeats and decrying the president’s attacks on cherished American liberties.
The Trump administration is still pushing to realize its vision — and high-profile prisoners like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk still face deportation — but the administration is no longer on a glide path to success. It could even careen toward failure. By exercising political leadership, by acting like an opposition, both lawmakers and ordinary citizens have turned smooth sailing into rough waters for the administration. And while there is still much to do (Abrego Garcia has not been released, there are reports that the administration has sent at least one detainee to Rwanda, and there is also at least one person who is missing from all records), it’s also true that Trump and his people are not an unstoppable force.
Trump wants us to be demoralized. He wants his despotic plans to be a fait accompli. They will be if no one stands in the way. But every time we — and especially those with power and authority — make ourselves into obstacles, we also make it a little less likely that the administration’s authoritarian fantasy becomes our reality.
DOGE loses its biggest advocate as Musk exits Washington
Sophia Cai, Rachael Bade and Paul McLeary – April 23, 2025
Elon Musk’s claim that his job in Washington is “mostly done” may calm Tesla shareholders — but his departure could sap the Department of Government Efficiency of its disruptive energy even as it continues to make major cuts to the federal workforce.
In an effort to reassure rattled Tesla shareholders after a bruising first-quarter earnings call, Musk told investors this week that his around-the-clock involvement in DOGE will soon be scaled back to just a day or two per week.
The message to the markets was clear: Musk is refocusing on his companies. But his public exit from Washington also leaves DOGE without a clear driver, potentially defanging a group that spent the first 100 days of Trump’s second term tearing through agencies with nearly unlimited momentum. Without Musk’s constant hovering around President Donald Trump, DOGE may not have the same firepower it once did and agency heads could now have more authority to run their agencies and implement cost-cutting efforts at their own speed.
For months, Musk’s physical presence at the White House and attendance at Cabinet meetings served as both sword and shield — giving cover to DOGE staffers, intimidating holdouts, and demanding that the operation move forward at a breakneck speed. “It is rare to have a Cabinet-level secretary pushing for you operationally and politically,” said a Trump official, who, like others in this report, was granted anonymity to speak freely.
And for a long time, a lot of people in the White House weren’t sure how to talk to Musk when DOGE took drastic actions like demanding the “five things” emails from federal employees justifying their jobs or moving to make cuts so deep that they could hurt Trump politically, such as reductions to the Social Security Administration’s operations or firing veterans. White House officials felt that only Trump could say no to Musk.
“How do you tell the world’s richest man to stop and get in line?” a different White House official said last month.
But when Musk takes a step back, the same reluctance to counter the billionaire tech mogul will not extend to DOGE staff, many of whom are now embedded across agencies and serve at the pleasure of agency heads. Already, senior White House officials have taken steps to curb DOGE’s reach, leading the charge to get Musk to drop his goal of cutting $1 trillion to only $150 billion for fear of cutting too close to the bone.
In terms of day to day operations, insiders say Musk’s reduced involvement won’t dramatically alter how DOGE operates at least on paper. “This won’t be a big change from the current situation,” one senior Trump administration official close to the effort said, “because Musk is doing a lot already and [DOGE staff] already try to catch him at specific times.”
The operation that Musk has built has now burrowed into nearly every corner of the executive branch, with most DOGE staffers serving at agencies as political appointees without a time limit on their employment. Others are based out of the General Services Administration, now a DOGE nerve center led by software entrepreneur and Musk ally Stephen Ehikian, continuing a quiet but steady purge of small, independent agencies. (Just this week, it began shutting down the 300-person Millenium Challenge Corporation.)
Musk’s lieutenants, Antonio Gracias and Steve Davis, remain involved in leading the initiative, giving pointers to DOGE staff embedded across agencies as they continue to help execute the reductions in force, an ongoing months-long process.
DOGE’s original mandate — reduce waste and fraud — has since extended far beyond simply cost-cutting. DOGE has been heavily involved in other Trump administration priorities, like immigration data collection for mass deportation planning, Trump’s shipbuilding agenda, and even the implementation of $5 million per piece “Gold Card” visas, according to five people familiar with DOGE’s movements.
Still, Musk’s public pullback will come as relief to some Cabinet officials who have had tensions with the billionaire and DOGE around the personnel cuts.
Indeed, senior administration officials were not surprised by Musk’s announcement on the Tesla call. One, who is a big fan of Musk, said it’s become increasingly clear in recent days that the tech tycoon is souring on Washington. His frustration with the lack of control is palpable, the person said — as he’s used to getting his way and making the final calls with his businesses.
Instead, Musk has seen his influence waning and has been brought to heel by other Cabinet secretaries and people in the White House in recent months, as the insistence on coordinating their efforts has slowed his break-neck speed.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wrangled control back from DOGE last week by firing DOGE staffer Gavin Kliger and installing a new IRS commissioner last week. IRS firings which were expected to begin last week and go out on a biweekly basis still have not materialized.
That most recent run-in with Bessent in the White House, first reported by Axios, has only seemed to make him more Washington wary, the senior officials mentioned above added.
At the Department of Defense, Secretary Pete Hegseth has publicly praised DOGE’s work but expressed unease privately about early plans to potentially cut tens of thousands of civilian personnel, one person familiar with the private conversations said. DOGE staffers have been in the building for weeks and have set up shop in the Navy’s offices, where they’re taking a new look at the service’s troubled shipbuilding efforts and preparing recommendations for what new programs the service should cut and which it should keep developing, according to a second official.
When asked to respond, a senior defense official said that Hegseth is “leading several initiatives to meet the president’s intent, to include removing DEI from the department and reviewing fitness and training standards across the services,” among other things.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy struck a defiant tone earlier this month during a visit to the FAA Tech Center in New Jersey: “When I think of DOGE cutting things, I don’t know about that elsewhere, but we actually build things here,” he said. “You can’t cut your way to a new road. You can’t cut your way to a new bridge. You can’t cut your way into a new air traffic control system.”
Even as Musk promises to scale back his involvement, there are no signs that he’ll completely disengage. Far from it — White House officials say he and Trump have such a strong personal friendship that he’s expected to be in Washington at least once a week.
At his other companies, he had a habit of requesting and attending weekly meetings for ongoing projects, weighing in with his ideas and granular feedback. He attended weekly brainstorming sessions for Tesla’s Optimus robot and received weekly updates on America PAC’s voter contact metrics during the presidential campaign.
“I think I’ll continue to spend a day or two per week on government matters for as long as the president would like me to do and as long as it is useful,” Musk said on the earnings call.
Make Russia Medieval Again! How Putin is seeking to remold society, with a little help from Ivan the Terrible
Dina Khapaeva, Georgia Institute of Technology – April 22, 2025
Russian President Vladimir Putin has draped himself in old-fashioned, medieval conceptions of Russian history to add symbolic weight to his authoritarian government. AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko
Published in March 2025, the textbook’s co-author Nina Ostanina, chair of the State Duma Committee for the Protection of the Family, claims that it will teach students “traditional moral values” that will improve “the demographic situation in the country” as part of a “Family Studies” course that was rolled out in the 2024-2025 school year.
But some of those lessons for modern living come from a less-than-modern source. Among the materials borrowed from in “My Family” is the 16th century “Domostroi” – a collection of rules for maintaining patriarchal domestic order. It was written, supposedly, by Sylvester, a monk-tutor of czar Ivan the Terrible.
Unsurprisingly, some teachings from “Domostroi” seem out-of-keeping with today’s sensibilities. For example, it states that it is the right of a father to coerce, if needed by force, his household – at the time, this would refer to both relatives and slaves – in accordance with Orthodox dogmas.
“Husbands should teach their wives with love and exemplary instruction,” reads one of the Domostroi quotations repeated in the textbook.
“Wives ask their husbands about strict order, how to save their souls, please God and their husbands, arrange their home well, and submit to their husbands in all matters; and what the husband orders, they should agree with love and carry out according to his commands,” reads another extract
The use of “Domostroi” in the textbook both references the past while evoking the current government’s politics of decriminalizing family violence. A 2017 law, for example, removed nonaggravated “battery of close persons” from the list of criminal offenses.
It also fits a wider pattern. As a scholar of historical memory, I have observed that references to the Russian Middle Ages are part of the Kremlin’s broader politics of using the medieval past to justify current agendas, something I have termed “political neomedievalism.”
Indeed, President Vladimir Putin’s government is actively prioritizing initiatives that use medieval Russia as a model for the country’s future. In doing so, the Kremlin unites a long-nurtured dream of the Russian far right with a broader quest for the fulfillment of Russian imperial ambitions.
But the group’s name evokes the first reign of brutal state terror in Russian history. The Oprichnina was a state policy unleashed by Ivan the Terrible from 1565 to 1572 to establish his unrestrained power over the country. The oprichniks were Ivan’s personal guard, who attached a dog’s head and a broom to their saddles to show that they were the czar’s “dogs” who swept treason away.
Chroniclers and foreign travelers left accounts of the sadistic tortures and mass executions that were conducted with Ivan’s participation. The oprichniks raped and dismembered women, flayed or boiled men alive and burned children. In this frenzy of violence, they slaughtered many thousands of innocent people.
Ivan’s reign led to a period known as the “Time of Troubles,” marked by famine and military defeat. Some scholars estimate that by its end, Russia lost nearly two-thirds of its population.
Ivan IV, czar of Russia from 1547 to 1584, known as Ivan the Terrible. Rischgitz/Getty Images
Throughout Russian history, Ivan the Terrible – who among his other crimes murdered his eldest son and had the head of Russian Orthodox Church strangled for dissent – was remembered as a repulsive tyrant.
However, since the mid-2000s, when the Russian government under Putin took an increasingly authoritarian turn, Ivan and his terror have undergone a state-driven process of reevalution.
The Kremlin and its far-right proxies now paint Ivan as a great statesman and devout Russian Orthodox Christian who laid the foundations of the Russian Empire.
Prior to that alteration of Russian historical memory, only one other Russian head of state had held Ivan in such high esteem: Josef Stalin.
Even so, no public monuments to Ivan existed until 2016, when Putin’s officials unveiled the first of three bronze statues dedicated to the terrible czar. Yet, the cinematic propaganda outmatched the commemorations of Ivan in stone. By my count, from 2009 to 2022, 12 state-sponsored films and TV series paying tribute to Ivan the Terrible and his rule aired in prime time on Russian TV channels.
Russian revisionism
The post-Soviet rehabilitation of Ivan the Terrible goes back to the writings of Ivan Snychov, the metropolitan, or high ranking bishop, of Saint Petersburg and Ladoga. His book, “The Autocracy of the Spirit,” published in 1994, gave rise to a fundamentalist sect known as “Tsarebozhie,” or neo-Oprichnina. Tsarebozhie calls for a return to an autocratic monarchy, a society of orders and the canonization of all Russian czars. The belief that Russian state power is “sacred” – a central dogma of the sect – was reaffirmed on April 18, 2025, by Alexander Kharichev, an official in Putin’s Presidential Administration, in an article that has been likened to an instruction manual for the “builder of Putinism.”
The canonization of Ivan the Terrible specifically is a top priority for members of this sect. And while the Russian Orthodox Church has yet to canonize Ivan, Tsarebozhie have garnered significant support from Russian priests, politicians and laypersons alike. Their efforts sit alongside Putin’s yearslong push to give public support for Ivan. Not by chance, Putin’s minister of foreign affairs, Sergei Lavrov, reportedly named Ivan the Terrible among one of Putin’s three “most trusted advisers.”
In Snychov’s worldview, Russians are a messianic people, part of an imperial nation that is uniquely responsible for preventing Satan’s domination of the world. In his explicitly antisemitic pseudo-history of Russia, the Oprichnina is described as a “saintly monastic order” led by a “pious tsar.”
Since the 1930s, when Stalin used Ivan to justify his own repressions, Ivan and Stalin – the Oprichnina and Stalinism – became historical doubles. The whitewashing of Ivan by the Kremlin goes hand in hand with Putin’s rehabilitation of Stalin as commander in chief of the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II.
Promoting the cult of the “Great Patriotic War” – as the Second World War has officially been called since the Soviet period – has been central to Putin’s militarization of Russian society and part of the propaganda effort to foster support for the invasion of Ukraine. The remorse for the loss of empire and desire to restore it underlies Moscow’s discourse over the past two decades.
Putin’s neomedieval politics have adopted the Russian far-right belief that the country should return to the traditions of medieval Rus, as it existed before the Westernization reforms undertaken by Peter the Great in the early 18th century.
Over the past 15 years, Russian TV viewers have received an average of two state-funded movies per month, advertising the benefits of Russian medieval society and praising Russian medieval warlords.
This use of Russian historical memory has allowed Putin to normalize his use of state violence abroad and at home and mobilize support for his suppression of the opposition. The major goal of political neomedievalism is to legitimize huge social and economic inequalities in post-Soviet society as a part of Russia’s national heritage.
To serve the purpose of undermining the rule of law and democratic freedoms, as my research demonstrates, the Kremlin and its proxies have promoted the Russian Middle Ages – with its theocratic monarchy, society of estates, slavery, serfdom and repression – as a state-sponsored alternative to democracy.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Dina Khapaeva, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dina Khapaeva does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The SAVE Act would require anyone registering to vote in federal elections to first “provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship” in person, like a passport or birth certificate.
The House already passed an identical bill in July 2024, also along partisan lines, with the GOP largely supporting the legislation. At that time, the Senate killed the bill. With a now GOP-controlled Senate, and a Republican in the White House, the SAVE Act could become law before 2025 ends.
Voting rights experts and advocacy organizations have detailed how the legislationcould suppress voting. In part, they say it would particularly create barriers in low-income and minority communities. People in such communities often lack the forms of ID acceptable under the SAVE Act for a variety of reasons, including socioeconomic factors.
As of now, at least 9% of voting-age American citizens – approximately 21 million people – do not even have driver’s licenses, let alone proof of citizenship. In spite of this, many legislators support the bill as a means of eliminating noncitizen voting in elections.
As a legal scholar who studies, among other things, foreign interferencein elections, I find considerations about the potential effects of the SAVE Act important, especially given how rare it is that a noncitizen actually votes in federal elections.
Yet, it is equally crucial to consider a more fundamental question: is the SAVE Act even constitutional?
The SAVE Act would forbid state election officials from registering an individual to vote in federal elections unless this person “provides documentary proof of United States citizenship.”
So, should the SAVE Act become law, if a person turns 18 or moves between states and wishes to register to vote in federal elections in their new home, they would likely be turned away if they do not have any such documents readily available. At best, they could still fill out a registration form, but would need to mail in acceptable proof of citizenship.
For married people with changed last names, among others, questions remain about whether birth certificates could even count as acceptable proof of citizenship for them.
The Constitution says little about voting rights
Despite the national conversation the SAVE Act has sparked, it is unclear whether Congress even has the power to enact it. This is the key constitutional question.
The U.S. Constitution imposes no citizenship requirement when it comes to voting. The original text of the Constitution, in fact, said very little about the right to vote. It was not until legislators passed subsequent amendments, starting after the Civil War up through the 1970s, that the Constitution even explicitly prohibited voting laws that discriminate on account of race, sex or age.
Who, then, gets to decide whether someone is qualified to vote? No matter the election, the answer is always the same – the states.
Indeed, by constitutional design, the states are tasked with setting voter-eligibility requirements – a product of our federalist system. For state and local elections, the 10th Amendment grants states the power to regulate their internal elections as they see fit.
States also get to decide who may vote in federal elections, which include both presidential and congressional elections.
When it comes to presidential elections, for instance, states have – as I have previously written – exclusive power under the Constitution’s Electors Clause to decide how to conduct presidential elections within their borders, including who gets to vote in them.
The states wield similar authority for congressional elections. Namely, according to Article I of the Constitution and the Constitution’s 17th Amendment, if someone can vote in their state’s legislative elections, they are entitled to vote in its congressional elections, too.
Conversely, the Constitution provides Congress zero authority to govern voter-eligibility requirements in federal elections. Indeed, in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling on the Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council case, the court asserted that nothing in the Constitution “lends itself to the view that voting qualifications in federal elections are to be set by Congress.”
Is the SAVE Act constitutional?
The SAVE Act presents a constitutional dilemma. By requiring individuals to show documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register for federal elections, the SAVE Act is implicitly saying that someone must be a U.S. citizen to vote in federal elections.
In other words, Congress would be instituting a qualification to vote, a power that the Constitution leaves exclusively to the states.
Indeed, while all states currently limit voting rights to citizens, legal noncitizen voting is not without precedent. As multiplescholarshave noted, at least 19 states extended voting rights to free male “inhabitants,” including noncitizens, starting from our country’s founding up to and throughout the 19th century.
Today, over 20 municipalities across the country, as well as the District of Columbia, allow permanent noncitizen residents to vote in local elections.
Any state these days could similarly extend the right to vote in state and federal elections to permanent noncitizen residents. This is within their constitutional prerogative. And if this were to happen, there could be a conflict between that state’s voter-eligibility laws and the SAVE Act.
Yet, in this instance, where Congress has no actual authority to implement voter qualifications, the SAVE Act would seem to have no constitutional leg on which to stand.
When it comes to the constitutionality of the SAVE Act, though, proponents simply assert that Congress is acting within its purview.
Specifically, many proponents have cited the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate the “Times, Places and Manner” of congressional elections, as support for that assertion. Sen. Mike Lee, for example, explicitly referenced the Elections Clause when defending the SAVE Act earlier in 2025.
But the Elections Clause only grants Congress authority to regulate election procedures, not voter qualifications. The Supreme Court explicitly stated this in the Inter Tribal Council ruling.
Congress can, for instance, require states to adopt a uniform federal voter registration form, and even include a citizenship question on said form. What it cannot do, however, is implement a non-negotiable mandate that effectively tells the states they can never allow any noncitizen to vote in a federal election.
For now, the SAVE Act is simply legislation. Should the Senate pass it, President Donald Trump will almost assuredly sign it into law, given, among other factors, his March 2025 executive order that says prospective voters need to show proof of citizenship before they register to vote in federal elections. Once that happens, the courts will have to reckon with the SAVE Act’s legitimacy within the country’s constitutional design.
DOGE isn’t saving much money. So what is Elon Musk really up to?
Adam Rogers – April 21, 2025
If Elon Musk’s effort to remake the federal government was ever really about “waste, fraud, and abuse,” those DOGE days are over. His quasi-agency has made huge and unprecedented changes to what the federal government does. But ask an economist, historian, or political scientist why, or what it all means, and you’ll get a sad-sounding laugh in response.
One thing is clear: There were never many savings to be found. Last year, Musk predicted he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. (That was always going to be tough, mathematically, given that the government’s entire discretionary budget is $1.7 trillion.) In January, Musk revised his estimate down to $1 trillion. Earlier this month, he revised the revision down to $150 billion.
On the other hand, DOGE has been very good at reducing the number of people who work for the government — as many as 216,000 federal employees and contractors are already out, with more dismissals in the works. Musk has gutted or eliminated agencies that prevent disease, protect us from pandemics, provide aid to our allies, ensure the safety of our food and medicines, and safeguard Americans against toxic chemicals. Every one of those efforts is a proven multiplier of our tax money — every dollar we spend on them redounds to the US economy. Which means that even if Musk succeeds at slashing government spending, he’ll actually be adding to the federal deficit: DOGE cuts to the Internal Revenue Service alone are estimated to cost America some $500 billion in lost tax revenue every year.
So if DOGE isn’t saving us money, what’s the reason for all the cuts? It can’t be motivated by the cliché that “government should be run like a business.” No successful business runs on the kind of bedlam being sown by Musk. What, in short, is going on here?
Here are four possible explanations for what DOGE is actually up to. Maybe none of them are right. Or perhaps they’re all accurate, to varying degrees. But one thing is certain: Each of them provides a more plausible insight into what DOGE is doing than the official explanation of saving taxpayers money.
(1) It’s an “exit” plan
For the past decade and a half, rich guys in Silicon Valley have been trying to leave it all behind — government regulation, wokeist diversity efforts, naysaying journalists, even the Earth itself. Broadly speaking, they call this idea “exit.” In a 2009 blog post, the influential investor Peter Thiel declared that it was time for tech entrepreneurs to abandon the concept of democracy and start their own city-states. A companion piece to that post — written by Patri Friedman, grandchild of the free-market economist Milton Friedman — peddled the idea of “seasteads,” floating cities in the ocean, beyond the jurisdiction of any nation. Musk, meanwhile, launched a company devoted to taking a select sliver of humanity to Mars, and the Exit crowd went all in on cryptocurrencies — money without a pesky state attached.
In a book published in 2022, the venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan laid out a blueprint for Exit. “Technology has enabled us to start new companies, new communities, and new currencies,” his website declared. “But can we use it to start new cities, or even new countries? This book explains how to build the successor to the nation state, a concept we call the network state.”
In a sense, DOGE is serving as a sort of advance guard for Exit. It’s cutting away every government function that isn’t useful to a future network state (stuff that protects the vulnerable and supports the needy) while retaining the resources needed to found Exit-style cities (the blockchain, census data, border control). Casey Lynch, a geographer at the University of Girona who studies Exit politics, says that’s in line with how Exiteers think: “The only things the government should be doing are administrative functions necessary to maintain the market. And the only kinds of government services that are necessary are those related to things like upholding financial transactions, fighting identity theft, and protecting property rights.”
This, in essence, is the new Exit: Don’t secede from the government — absorb the government, digest it, and excrete a new one. A few groups have even met with the Trump administration to get his support for launching what they’re calling “Freedom Cities.” Like a Thiel-backed prototype in Honduras, these enclaves would be economically autonomous zones, free from government limits on Exit passion projects like longevity treatments or nuclear fusion research. Srinivasan has proposed making the area around Musk’s SpaceX facility in Texas into one, and other folks have proposed building one in Greenland — after it’s acquired by the United States, of course. The move is supported by Ken Howery, a college pal of Thiel’s who is Trump’s nominee to serve as ambassador to Denmark.
(2) It’s techno-libertarianism for all
Traditional libertarians believe that people and markets function just fine — better, even — with minimal government oversight. That’s what Ronald Reagan’s cowboy-inflected individualism was all about: shrinking government and letting the markets do as they wanted. But Reagan was careful to leave untouched two cornerstones of federal governance: Social Security, to protect against dissent from within, and a hefty nuclear arsenal, to guard against threats from without.
Silicon Valley libertarianism scraps the social safety net and the nukes. It’s closer to the venture investor Mark Andreessen’s vision of “techno-optimism,” where digital technologies and unfettered markets solve every human problem. It’s not just having Amazon replace the post office, or bitcoin taking the place of banks — it’s “deleting” regulations across all of government, no matter how critical they are to America’s health and safety and financial well-being.
In this explanation, DOGE is attempting to turn back the clock to the regulation-free excesses of the Gilded Age. In the 1910s and 1920s, America was dominated by industrial oligarchs, plagued by race and class struggles, and free from laws that kept food safe and the air and water clean. It took a spectacular market crash, and a Great Depression, to usher in the modern age of federal oversight.
DOGE effectively wants to return America to the days before the New Deal, when industrialists could do as they pleased. Musk, in fact, has called for a “wholesale, spring cleaning” of all federal regulation. “If it’s not possible now, it’ll never be possible,” he said during a midnight call in February. “This is our shot. This is the best hand of cards we’re ever going to have. And if we don’t take advantage of this best hand of cards, it’s never going to happen, so we’re going to do it.”
Perhaps that techno-libertarian vision — of a digitized world without government — is the entire point of DOGE. “You strip government down to remove all the parts of it that are resisting you,” says David Lewis, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, “and rebuild it in a way that makes it, in your view, more efficient and responsive to you.” That’s actually more authoritarian than libertarian. But it does make government smaller — and weaker. And the weaker government is, the more the powerful can call the shots.
(3) It’s a heist
Tyler Cowen, a leading thinker on the right, has criticized what he calls “the libertarian vice.” Libertarians love it, he says, when the state fails — even if the private sector can’t or won’t step in to fix things.
But what if Musk’s libertarian vice is actually plain old greed? Consider some of the specific agencies DOGE has slashed. Why cut NASA, a broadly popular and relatively inexpensive operation? Well, without NASA to launch rockets, it would be left to private companies like SpaceX to get stuff into outer space. The same is true of DOGE’s cuts to the Office of Vehicle Automation Safety, which has ordered dozens of Tesla recalls and delayed the rollout of self-driving software. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have collected a dozen examples of DOGE targeting agencies that are trying to regulate Musk. One thing DOGE hasn’t gone after? SpaceX’s contracts for military space launches — jobs worth $5.9 billion to the world’s richest man.
DOGE is a Tech-ish Chainsaw Massacre. But with the very real pain comes no perceivable gain.Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Musk isn’t the only Silicon Valley beneficiary of DOGE’s assault. The IRS is turning to Palantir, the security and data company cofounded by Peter Thiel, to assemble all its data into one giant, easily surveilled bucket. The company is also handling the data back end for ICE’s planned mass deportations. The Justice Department, meanwhile, is disbanding its team of lawyers responsible for going after cryptocurrency crime. So maybe DOGE is just an inside job — a case of technologists using their access to Donald Trump to loot the Treasury and line their own pockets.
(4) It’s a confederacy of dunces
Maybe DOGE is just really, really bad at its job. I mean, why would anyone cause this much chaos for so little demonstrable gain?
“It is tempting to think there is some strategy behind it,” says Zachary Liscow, a Yale professor who served as chief economist of the Office of Management and Budget during the Biden administration. “But these are just not competent people. They often don’t have a plan, or it’s often not well thought out.”
There’s certainly a lot of evidence that DOGE is incompetent. It’s staffed by a bunch of kids from Musk’s world who bring virtually no experience in either government or business to the job. Its reports on the cuts it’s making have been hysterically inaccurate. It has cut things it didn’t know it was cutting — like the agency responsible for making sure nuclear reactors don’t melt down — and then scrambled to restore them after the fact. And by grinding away at the government’s ability to do anything, it’s introduced a crippling level of turmoil and uncertainty to America, both at home and abroad. “It’s definitely making us less effective,” says Liscow.
And that’s the bottom line, really, when it comes to DOGE. At a basic level, Musk’s assault on the federal government represents a rejection of modernity itself. “You can’t do modern life without modern regulation,” says Lewis, the political scientist. “Transportation systems, energy systems, waste systems, internet systems — all of those things require government interventions and monitoring to work effectively.” If Musk makes good on his promise to pull the plug on every regulation in sight, the world as we know it would effectively shut down.
I said this sounded like the Gilded Age, but in some ways DOGE is turning the clock back even further. Before the Civil War, the federal government was far weaker and more diffuse than it is today. Individual states competed over tariffs and railroads and lots of other stuff we now think of as national functions. Companies could employ children at starvation wages, dump whatever they wanted into America’s streams and rivers, and sell quack remedies that were more likely to kill you than cure you. That’s roughly where a DOGE-denuded federal government puts us. Forget 1920 — think 1850.
Musk seems to think America’s administrative infrastructure is bureaucratic frippery. To him, just having it is wasteful. “There are more federal agencies than there are years since the establishment of the United States,” Musk observed during an interview with Tucker Carlson. “Which means that we’ve created more than one federal agency per year, on average. That seems crazy.” Carlson responded by pulling his “That’s insane!” face for the camera, as if Musk had just invented arithmetic.
But that math is not math. Times, as they say, change. Look at all the things we depend on today that weren’t even fathomable at the nation’s founding: cars and planes and polystyrene and aspirin and the internet and high fructose corn syrup and phones and recorded music and electricity. We’ve created way more technological marvels than federal agencies. A National Transportation Safety Board is a small price to pay for the wonders of intercontinental flight.
And it isn’t just that the world is more complicated than it was in 1776 or 1850 or 1920. It’s that most of the advances we enjoy today were, in one way or another, created because of government, not in spite of it. An enduring and reliable state — one that invests in innovation, ensures economic stability, and makes sure everyone plays by the rules — is literally what makes technological progress possible. Musk can’t take the government all the way back to the 18th century, even if he’d like to. But if he makes good on his promises with DOGE, America’s future may end up looking a lot more like its past.
The Pentagon’s newly resigned spokesperson predicts Trump will fire Pete Hegseth after a ‘full-blown meltdown’ of a month
Matthew Loh – April 21, 2025
The Pentagon’s former top spokesperson says Pete Hegseth likely won’t last long in his role.
John Ullyot wrote that the Pentagon has been distracted by a month of “endless drama” after Signalgate.
Ullyot said he supports Hegseth, but that Trump “deserves better” from his Cabinet.
John Ullyot, who until recently was a top Pentagon spokesperson, says Pete Hegseth’s time as defense secretary is likely running out.
In a scathing opinion piece published by Politico on Sunday evening, Ullyot suggested that President Donald Trump may consider dismissing Hegseth as the Pentagon grapples with a string of public affairs crises.
“President Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account. Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer,” Ullyot wrote.
Ullyot has vocally backed Hegseth, writing in another piece in December that the veteran and former Fox News host was “well qualified for the job” of leading the Defense Department. Even when he stepped down from the Pentagon earlier this week, Ullyot said he supported his old boss.
He continued to praise Hegseth in his op-ed. “I value his friendship and am grateful for his giving me the opportunity to serve,” Ullyot wrote.
“Yet even strong backers of the secretary like me must admit: The last month has been a full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon — and it’s becoming a real problem for the administration,” he added.
A ‘Month From Hell’
Ullyot’s criticism comes after his tenure leading Defense Department public affairs at the start of the Trump administration. He oversaw the Pentagon’s mandate to remove DEI images and its reassignment of its media office spaces, booting outlets such as The New York Times and NBC in favor of right-leaning outlets like Breitbart.
However, in February, Ullyot’s role as chief spokesperson was taken over by Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s current press secretary. Ullyot eventually resigned on Wednesday, saying he told Hegseth when he was hired that he “was not interested in being number two to anyone in public affairs.”
In his op-ed days later, he described the Pentagon’s recent struggles as a “Month from Hell” that began with Signalgate — The Atlantic’s bombshell report in March that its chief editor was mistakenly added to a Signal group discussing US strikes.
Ullyot wrote that Hegseth’s initial response was a disaster.
“Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that,” Hegseth had told reporters. The Atlantic followed up by publishing details of F/A-18 strikes Hegseth sent to the chat.
“This was a violation of PR rule number one — get the bad news out right away,” Ullyot wrote of Hegseth’s comment to the press.
Other, separate reports soon piled on top of Signalgate, and Ullyot wrote that it’s likely more will continue to emerge.
“Unfortunately, after a terrible month, the Pentagon focus is no longer on warfighting, but on endless drama,” Ullyot wrote.
These included reports that Hegseth had brought his wife to sensitive meetings with foreign counterparts and that the Pentagon was set to give Elon Musk a top-secret briefing. Three of Hegseth’s top aides were also reportedly fired this week amid an investigation into leaks, while the secretary’s chief of staff has resigned.
On Sunday, The New York Times reported that Hegseth had also put sensitive information about US strikes in a second Signal chat that included his wife and brother. The Times’ report was based on four anonymous sources.
The Times reported that Jennifer Rauchet, Pete Hegseth’s wife, was among the people in a Signal chat that contained details of F/A-18 strikes.ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
In a statement to Business Insider, Parnell, the Pentagon’s current spokesperson, called the report “garbage” and praised Hegseth’s office as becoming more efficient. “There was no classified information in any Signal chat, no matter how many ways they try to write the story,” he said.
Still, Ullyot wrote that all of these crises combined mean Hegseth would likely lose his job.
“In short, the building is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership,” Ullyot wrote.
He wrote that Trump had previously dismissed other Cabinet members whom Ullyot respected, including Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson, and Mark Esper.
The former Pentagon spokesperson ended his opinion piece by suggesting that a similar firing of Hegseth would benefit Trump.
“The president deserves better than the current mishegoss at the Pentagon,” he wrote. “Given his record of holding prior Cabinet leaders accountable, many in the secretary’s own inner circle will applaud quietly if Trump chooses to do the same in short order at the top of the Defense Department.”
