A thread for Democrats Only
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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Donald Trump is president of a United States, but it is too much to say that he is president of the United States
By Jamelle Bouie | Feb. 4, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/opinion/trump-presidential-power-co
mments.html
A hallmark of the president’s language since he stepped onto the national political stage is that some Americans are more American than others, and that this is a function of race and allegiance to Trump.
Trump deployed this idea against Barack Obama when he questioned the former president’s political legitimacy and demanded that he prove his citizenship with the public release of his “long-form” birth certificate. He wielded it during his first campaign for the White House, dismissing critics and opponents as un-American and illegitimate on the basis of their race, nationality and partisan identity. Recall his condemnation of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who, Trump insisted, could not be impartial because he was “Mexican.” And this vision of the supposedly true American public was a rhetorical mainstay of his first term in office. “The Democrats,” Trump said, in a typical formulation during a 2018 rally for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, “have launched an assault on the sovereignty of our country.”
Now, obviously, Trump did not pioneer this distinction between the people who happen to live in a nation and the quasi-mystical, fully legitimate People of the Nation. This construct is a mainstay of right-wing populism. You saw it in the 2008 presidential election, when Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska told audiences that there was a “real” America that truly represented the country. “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, pro-America areas of this great nation,” she said.
You saw it at the 1992 Republican National Convention, when Pat Buchanan, the Nixon speechwriter and political operative turned conservative intellectual and proto-Trumpian provocateur, deployed this herrenvolk notion of the American nation in his infamous (and influential) jeremiad against American liberalism.
“There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America,” Buchanan declared. “We must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.” And you cannot understand the nativist “Americanism” of the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1910s and ’20s without reference to a similarly narrow conception of the American people, one tied to sharp anxieties around race, class, religion and masculinity. The Klan “stood for patriotism, ‘old-time religion’ and conventional morality, and pledged to fend off challenges from any quarter to the rights and privileges of men from the stock of the nation’s founders,” the historian Nancy MacLean explains in “Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan.”
What Trump has done is turn this rhetorical distinction into something like the governing philosophy of the federal government. To start, the White House has made clear that a state’s access to either federal aid or federal benefits is a function of its partisan allegiance. During last year’s government shutdown, for example, the administration canceled $8 billion in federal funding for clean energy, affecting 16 states — all of which voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Trump also withheld billions for transit projects in New York and New Jersey. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want,” the president said, commenting on what he thought was the upside of a shutdown, “and they’d be Democrat things.”
It is similarly clear that the president slated the worst of his deportation program for Democratic-led states and cities. Neither Chicago nor Los Angeles nor Washington stands out as particularly dangerous compared with the typical major Ame
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Quote:We Are Witnessing the Imperial Presidency on Steroids
New START Treaty expires, freeing Trump from nuclear arms restrictions
"If it expires, it expires," U.S. President Donald Trump said in his interview with The New York Times when asked about his intentions to extend the New START treaty that officially ended on Feb. 5.
https://kyivindependent.com/new-start-expires-releases-us-russia-from-
decades-of-nuclear-arms-restrictions/
The founders wouldn’t recognize the executive branch’s monstrous powers
by Dan Carlin | February 5, 2026
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-presi
dential-power-nixon-steroids-1235511366/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/we-are-witnessing-the-imperial-
presidency-on-steroids/ar-AA1VKrjv
While the Watergate scandal was raging, Richard Nixon allegedly told several U.S. representatives that he could get on the telephone, issue an order, and soon after millions of people would be killed. It wasn't hyperbole. There are very few people in human history that have ever had that kind of power, and most have been American presidents. But how does one individual with this sort of authority exist in a system of government designed with a triad of co-equal branches set up specifically to thwart concentrated executive power, a system where starting a war wasn't even an executive-branch power in the constitutional design?
The question of what in our system could have prevented Nixon from causing a nuclear holocaust if he wanted to has been left unanswered. There have been rumors that Cabinet secretaries at the time were telling aides to ignore such a presidential order if it were issued, but that's a stop-gap measure, not a constitutional check. The designers of our republican system never intended their chief executive to have this sort of authority. The fact that presidents do today is the root cause of many of our national problems.
Americans are living though a historic moment right now, one that would be fascinating to watch were it not so insanely important. There is a disaster looming that is becoming more clear every day. The cause is that the office of the president of the United States has far too much power and very few constraints. This combination invites authoritarianism. All it needs to become manifest is someone in the White House who desires such an outcome. It seems we have someone like that now.
While it's both tempting and normal to see current conditions as the result of recent events, the 21st-century American political situation is the culmination of decades of trends involving the ever-increasing power of the presidency. None of this is hidden, and scholars have been writing about it for decades (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s famous book The Imperial Presidency was published in 1973). And while the aggregation of presidential power is often cloaked in rationales and justifications, from anti-communism to anti-drugs, war powers, anti-terrorism, et cetera, sometimes it's simply how things developed and evolved (the nature and challenges associated with nuclear weapons is an example). But there is no denying at this point that we have created a systemic monster that the constitutional framers wouldn't recognize - and one they would fear. The founders believed in diffused power and oversight. They believed in a strong and active legislative branch to counter autocratic mission creep. We have none of those things at the moment. Are any of them recoverable? Is constitutional erosion a one-way street, or can it be reversed with some sort of renaissance? Must we go the way of Rome's Republic?
To rebalance our constitutional portfolio first requires us to want a less powerful executive. This is somewhat counterintuitive. Americans are accustomed to electing leaders who promise to push for outcomes, foster positive change, fix things, and help people. The voters expect the president to use the power of the office to achieve what the people want. The pressure from the winning
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Trump's push to rename Dulles and Penn Station after himself
Feb 6, 2026
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/06/schumer-trump-penn-station-dulles-gat
eway
President Trump last month offered to drop his hold on billions of dollars for a major infrastructure project in New York, but only if Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed to rename New York's Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles International Airport after Trump.
• Schumer (D-N.Y.) rejected the offer, a source familiar with the talks told Axios, prolonging the standoff over funding for the Gateway Tunnel Project connecting New York to New Jersey.
Why it matters: Trump, whose allies renamed the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute of Peace after him, is continuing his efforts to reshape American institutions in his image.
• The offer did not come up in an Oval Office meeting between Trump and Schumer last month, the source said. Instead, the offer was made to Schumer in subsequent conversations with the administration about the Gateway project.
• The $16 billion project is set to shut down indefinitely on Friday, without the funding from the federal government.
• The offer from Trump was first reported by Punchbowl News.
The big picture: Trump and Schumer have cut high stakes deals for government funding over the last year. They remain at a stalemate over a project critical for Schumer's state.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Widdle dick Second is just jealous that it's not his name that's up on every building.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Renaming monuments after himself is proof that Trump isn't performing his duties. Same with his self-enrichment schemes. Not paying his income taxes, same. Spending $3,000,000 to fly down to Florida for a weekend round of golf, same old thing.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Widdle dick Second is just jealous that it's not his name that's up on every building.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How selfish are we? We cooperate to survive, but if no one is looking, we compete.
An age-old debate about human nature is being energised with new findings on the tightrope of cooperation and competition
By Jonathan R Goodman | 6 February 2026
Goodman is a social scientist based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World (2025).
Free download from https://annas-archive.li/search?q=Goodman+Invisible+Rivals
On first acquaintance, Iago could not be more supportive, loyal, and helpful to Othello. But as Shakespeare reveals, Iago is hiding behind outward signs of devotion to pursue his own personal ambitions and destroy Othello. And it is not just fictional men. There also are fictional women: Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is a model of niceness while unscrupulously pursuing her own goals. Literature is replete with such characters: two more are Edmund in King Lear or Uriah Heep in David Copperfield. The list is endless.
And not, of course, just in literature — in the real world, men and women pursue their own selfish goals while hiding under a cloak of cooperation. These are what Jonathan Goodman calls invisible rivals. They are not necessarily the extremes of Iago, but the day-to-day way in which the twin threads of human behavior — selfish competitiveness and altruistic cooperation are intertwined as strongly as a DNA helix.
https://aeon.co/essays/we-cooperate-to-survive-but-if-no-ones-looking-
we-compete
Reading classic works in evolutionary biology is unlikely to make you optimistic about human nature. From Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) onwards, there is a fundamental understanding among biologists that organisms, especially humans, evolved to maximise self-interest. We act to promote our own success or that of our family. Niceness, by contrast, is just a mirage, and morality more broadly is just an illusion. Sociobiology – the infamous movement of the second half of the 20th century – forced us to confront the cold, calculated nature of having evolved biologically.
More recently, however, anthropologists and psychologists have pushed back against this pessimistic view. Dozens of books over the past decade have focused on human cooperation, promoting it as the secret ingredient to our conquest of the planet. We work together, using our intelligence, language and a diverse skillset to build on complex cultures, develop technologies, and solve problems in our societies and environments. We learn at a young age what the rules of our groups are, and those rules, imprinted on us culturally, govern the safe, cohesive units that allowed us to conquer inhospitable parts of the world and out-compete unfriendly groups of people who don’t work well together.
This narrative saves us the embarrassment of accepting that biological selfishness – acting only to maximise our Darwinian success – is the foundation of all behaviour. It also matches some claims by anthropologists that ancient humans were egalitarian, living in small groups with little permanent rank, where leaders (if any) had limited authority and people collectively pushed back against anyone trying to dominate.
Yet, as with sociobiology, it is only half true. Instead, our collective predilection for exploitation, deceit and competition is equally important to cooperation in the story of human evolution. We evolved not to cooperate or compete, but with the capacity for both – and with the intelligence to hide competition when it suits us, or to cheat when we’re likely to get away with it. Cooperation is consequently something we need to promote, not presume.
The modern dispute about whether humans are fundamentally cooperative or competitive dates back to the publication of Mutual Aid (1902) by Pyotr Kropotkin, an anarchist who took his views about human nature from observing animals helping each other in the unhospitable wilds of Siberia. Kropotkin believed that it’s only through interdependence that any
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Quote:If Jeff Bezos, very:
Originally posted by second:
How selfish are we?
Bezos lets Democracy Die in Broad Daylight
By David Remnick | February 8, 2026
https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/the-daily/democracy-dies-in-broad
-daylight
It’s truly impossible to keep up, isn’t it?
Last week—after the Wall Street Journal broke more news about the Trump family’s dodgy crypto-business dealings and before the President shared a racist video of the Obamas depicted as dancing apes—the Amazon entrepreneur Jeff Bezos decided that one of his smaller properties, the Washington Post, has proved such a drag on his two-hundred-and-thirty-billion-dollar fortune that prudence required that he obliterate much of its newsroom.
Early in his proprietorship, Bezos endorsed a new motto for the paper: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” It turns out that one of democracy’s most celebrated media institutions can be strangled in broad daylight. On Wednesday, Bezos and the paper’s leadership fired a third of the staff. They shuttered or vastly reduced an array of sections. Lizzie Johnson, one of the Post’s leading foreign correspondents, received her digital pink slip while working in the war zone of Ukraine. Bezos did not offer his staff the decency of a public explanation, much less a gesture of generosity or regret. The publisher and C.E.O. Will Lewis did not appear on the “webinar” at which the cuts were explained to the staff. He did, however, manage to head off to the Super Bowl festivities. By Saturday evening, Lewis had resigned. His work was done. He will be succeeded by the paper’s chief financial officer, Jeff D’Onofrio, who has held posts at Tumblr, Google, and Yahoo.
As someone who worked happily at the Post for a decade a long time ago, and as an ardent reader of the paper, I am sick about all this. I feel like someone forced to watch an arsonist torch the house he grew up in. I cannot imagine how it must feel for the current staff and the hundreds forced to leave. If that is sentimentality or worse, well, then guilty as charged. The loss is terrible, the behavior is beyond heedless. The reporters and editors who remain at the Post will undoubtedly go on doing honorable work, but they must now do so for a proprietor who shows them no respect. And that is no way to live. (Ruth Marcus, a writer and editor at the paper for more than forty years, brings home superbly the anger and the sadness of the situation.)
Over the years, in these pages, I’ve written about both the former owner Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee, the paper’s Watergate-era editor; for all their complexities, these were figures who built a great newspaper out of a mediocre one, who developed an institution that worked not only in the interest of financial gain but of democratic vitality. That standard of quality endured, but, by 2013, Don Graham, a decent man and a devoted publisher who inherited the leadership of the company from his mother, came to realize that the revolutions in technology and the declines in advertising were so severe that he no longer had the capacity to invest effectively in the paper. After a long search, he sold the Post to Bezos, a vastly wealthier owner who promised to be an effective custodian.
For a while that worked; under Marty Baron, the paper was fiercely competitive, and thrived during Trump’s first term in office. Bezos was a decidedly detached owner, but he gave the newsroom what it needed and invested in both journalism and the technological support it requires. But during the Biden years, readership declined and, by 2024, as Trump headed toward a second election victory, Bezos clearly reassessed his interests and his sense of risk. His timidity prevailed. He quashed the paper’s impending endorsement of Kamala Harris. He sat in Oligarch Row at the Inauguration. He instructed the Opinion section to set a new, more conservative course. These were his prerogatives, many argued, but they were hardly wise. With every move, more subscribers fled—surely one of the worst own goals in the history of the n
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Renaming monuments after himself is proof that Trump
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Widdle dick Second is just jealous that it's not his name that's up on every building.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Whatever you say, widdle dick.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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How one country stopped a Trump-style authoritarian in his tracks
What Brazil got right that America got wrong.
By Zack Beauchamp | Feb 18, 2026, 8:55 AM CST
https://www.vox.com/authors/zack-beauchamp
https://www.vox.com/politics/479290/brazil-democracy-trump-bolsonaro-m
ultiparty
• In 2018, Brazil elected a president named Jair Bolsonaro who attempted the sort of authoritarian power grabs that President Donald Trump is currently doing in the United States. Except the key word is attempted: Unlike in America, Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court worked to constrain the president and severely limit his ability to act like an elected dictator.
• The important difference was that, in Brazil, the incentives for public officials looked radically different. The combination of a multiparty system and a culture of legislative self-dealing, even outright corruption, prevented the emergence of US-style extreme partisanship — producing a legislature and judiciary primed to protect their powers against an aggressive executive.
• This gives us some real insight about how to fix American democracy going forward: to pass reforms that alter the incentives for legislators in particular, giving them good self-interested reasons to prefer systemic stability over partisan loyalty.
BRASÍLIA, Brazil — André Borges’s aunt was pregnant when they took her.
Borges, now 50, grew up under Brazil’s military dictatorship. In power from 1964–1985, the regime was violently censorial — banning any speech it deemed subversive or leftist. Borges’s aunt was arrested simply for owning a book by a Marxist author. Unlike many others, her detention was brief; her father knew someone with pull in the regime, who made a phone call and got her released within a day.
Sitting in a left-wing bookshop in the capital city of Brasília, Borges tells me this story to underscore the fragility of Brazilian democracy. A political scientist who studies polarization and the Latin American right, he does not believe that Brazil has truly exorcised the demons of the past. The military is still uncomfortably involved in political life; as memory of the dictatorship recedes, citizens are increasingly oblivious to the danger.
But I had not come to Brazil to discuss its democracy’s vulnerabilities. Quite the opposite; I wanted Borges, and others like him, to help me understand why the Brazilian system proved far more capable than its American cousin at a paramount task: protecting democracy from a civilian president who wished to be dictator.
In 2018, Brazilian voters elected Jair Bolsonaro — a former military captain and congressional backbencher — to the presidency. An open admirer of the military regime, Bolsonaro ran as an outsider against a political class that Brazilians widely (and correctly) regard as deeply corrupt. Once in office, he pushed aggressively to consolidate power in his own hands.
But while Bolsonaro’s efforts resembled what Donald Trump has done in his second term in the United States, the response from other branches was markedly different.
While the US Congress and the Supreme Court have helped Trump build an imperial presidency, their Brazilian equivalents held the line. Center-right parties in Congress refused to rubber-stamp Bolsonaro’s power grabs. Brazil’s Supreme Court repeatedly blocked the president’s authoritarian moves, and led aggressive probes into crimes against democracy.
Unable to accrue power through legal channels, Bolsonaro turned to the military, convening top generals in 2022 to discuss a coup. Yet the heads of the Air Force and the Army rebuffed him. When Bolsonaro’s hardcore supporters attempted a putsch on January 8, 2023 — an insurrection in Brasília deeply influenced by January 6, 2021 — the military did not join the uprising. After an extensive inquiry and trial, Bolsonaro and several key allies were sentenced to lengthy prison stints for the coup plot and subsequent riot.
On the Right
On paper, the outcomes in the United States and Brazil should have been reversed
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