A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
VIEWED: 755368
PAGE 725 of 725
Trump’s Constitutional Dictatorship
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s inside account of the Trump administration portrays a president with a vast appetite for power but who repeatedly backs down when the costs of his actions become too high.
By Mark Danner | August 20, 2026 issue
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/08/20/trumps-constitutional-dict
atorship-regime-change-haberman-swan/
Reviewed:
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Simon and Schuster, 464 pp., $34.00
Download from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Maggie+Haberman+Jonathan+Swan&ch
eck=1
or from https://z-lib.gl/s/Maggie%20Haberman%20Jonathan%20Swan
Amid the tumult and the bluster and the noise, what exactly makes our singular president tick? After revisiting in minute detail the innumerable outrages and atrocities of Donald Trump’s second term we come upon, in the epilogue to Regime Change, the purported answer. The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, having mostly completed their epic chronicle, arrive at the now-gilded Oval Office for their “fact-checking” interview. The president, in an expansive mood, greets them and guides them to their seats in front of the Resolute Desk. “No other president,” he had recently declared with his customary eloquence, “could do some of the shit I’m doing.”
Exactly what shit might he have had in mind? Sending masked ICE agents to seize and deport hundreds of thousands of largely law-abiding people and imprison 60,000 more? Overturning the eighty-year-old world trade system by imposing arbitrary tariffs? Launching a war of choice against Iran with nary a word to Congress or the American people? Firing hundreds of thousands of government workers and gutting USAID, PBS, and the Kennedy Center? Attacking law firms and universities and television networks?
One could go on, but the president wishes to make a broader point. A loyal-unto-death aide, Natalie Harp—known to her colleagues as “the human printer”—is dispatched to fetch a document, and the president begins to read from it,
reciting the names of some of history’s most powerful figures, explaining how each fell short of his own power as US President. Alexander the Great, the Caesars, William the Conqueror—“They didn’t have airplanes, right? You couldn’t travel around.” Genghis Khan. Attila the Hun. Tamerlane. “Napoleon,” he said with relish. “Hitler. Mao. Stalin.”
These leaders “maintained power through fear,” he said. “Who would ever do a thing like that? Right?”
Trump lingered on the document’s central argument: that each leader, however fearsome in his day, had no global reach. Their power was local. But his was not.
“I never thought of it in terms of that,” Trump said. “It’s very interesting, the power.” Then he added: “But when I read it, I said, ‘He’s right.’”
And the “he” in question? The “historian” whose name had slipped the president’s mind, Harp later texts them, was actually the golfer Gary Player’s longtime caddy. No matter. “What was revealing,” they write,
was not really that Trump agreed with the thesis but the way he inhabited it: the evident pleasure he took in the company of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin, masters of state control through murder, torture, and detention, and Napoleon—and the untroubled ease with which he accepted a place among men who had reshaped the world through conquest and fear. He drew no distinction between those who built and those who destroyed.
The scene is irresistible: the president of the United States sitting at the Resolute Desk and comparing himself blithely to Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. Still, what does it tell us? That a tireless and amoral will to power is deeply embedded in Donald Trump’s narcissism and vanity is not exactly a revelation: anyone who has watched him perform a ninety-minute stand-up routine before a crowd of supporters—drinking in, with almost erotic delight, the fervent worship of thousands—cannot have failed to notice. And after the undermining of
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
There is a new book on Trump.
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan | Jun 23, 2026
Simon and Schuster, 464 pp., $34.00
Download for free from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Maggie+Haberman+Jonathan+Swan&ch
eck=1
or from https://z-lib.gl/s/Maggie%20Haberman%20Jonathan%20Swan
From the Introduction
History is full of ironies. For Democrats, there could be no irony more painful than the realization it was their own success in removing Donald Trump from the White House in the 2020 election—and their subsequent determination to ensure he would never return—that has made him the most consequential and feared President of our lifetimes.
Had Trump eked out a victory over Joe Biden in that election, he would have begun his second term in a sorry state. The pandemic was still raging in early 2021, still killing Americans by the thousands, warping the economy, and disrupting global trade. Inflation would soon arrive, as it did across major economies worldwide, dragging down the approval ratings of incumbent leaders in nearly every liberal democracy and fueling the rise of right-wing populists. There is no reason to think Trump would have been the exception. He has insisted that inflation would never have happened on his watch, but that claim, while impossible to disprove, was equally impossible to take seriously. That spring, Trump was set to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan. He had wanted to move much faster than that, and it had required a concerted effort by his military leaders and national security advisor to stop him from initiating a wildly precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the Middle East and Africa before he left office on January 20, 2021. Who knows whether Trump’s withdrawal from Afghanistan would have been smoother, more competent, than Biden’s disastrous exit, but the withdrawal was never going to be easy and would have added yet another burden to a consecutive term.
Where Trump envisaged success in a second term, it is not hard to instead imagine him hobbling through those four years, reacting to the pressures that would soon pile up, throwing him off balance and preventing him from ever taking full command of the presidency. Trump had felt stymied for much of his first term, starting with the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, then impeachment, and then Covid. By the end of Trump’s first term he was deeply unpopular, with his approval rating in the thirties. And given the trajectory he was on, it was certainly feasible that he might have finished a consecutive term with an even lower approval—which would have made him an historically unpopular President. Had that happened, Trump’s MAGA movement would have been greatly weakened. And the old-line Republican establishment would have had a fighting chance to yank the party away from the populism that Trump had channeled and fueled so masterfully.
All those what-ifs.
Instead, Joe Biden won the 2020 election—a fact Trump would never concede. When, in early 2021, Trump’s aides sent out a press release from the office of the “former” President, he made sure it never happened again. For months, he inhabited a fantasy world where, encouraged by oddballs and diehards, he would insist that what he portrayed as the greatest crime in American history—the supposed theft of the 2020 election—would soon decisively be proved and he would return to office as early as August of 2021. To admit he had lost—not to mention that he had lost to an aging politician who struggled on the stairs—would have been psychologically impossible for this New York developer and reality TV star who had spent his life trying to avoid humiliation, trying to brand himself as the world’s greatest “winner.”
Another irony: Some Trump aides eventually would concede, though only privately, that it was precisely because of Trump’s unique pathologies—especially a delusional capacity that they thought at the time was entirely self-destructive—that he pulled off the improbable fe
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects
By Matt Kristoffersen | August 13, 2026
https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/universal-health-coverage-could-sav
e-one-trillion-dollars-and-114000-lives-every-year/
A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace, according to a new preprint study led by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health.
For the study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, the researchers modeled what would happen if the United States adopted a national public insurance program like the one proposed in the Medicare for All Act. Using 2024 spending, insurance coverage, and mortality data, they estimate that the universal coverage would reduce annual health expenditures by $1.04 trillion, or nearly 20% — even after accounting for the additional care that uninsured and underinsured people would receive. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.07.22.26358689
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Hidden Cuts to Health Care
By Heather Cox Richardson | Aug 21, 2026
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/hidden-cuts-to-health-care
Richardson reads aloud the following article to you:
***************
August 20, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson | Aug 21, 2026
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-20-2026
On Saturday, August 15, the New York Times editorial board published an op-ed noting that the Republicans are trying to hide the cuts they have made to health care in the U.S.
The editorial board called the expansion of affordable health care to millions of Americans one of the great achievements of the federal government in this century. Before the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 without a single Republican vote, about 18% of Americans under 65 had no health insurance. With the passage and later expansion of the ACA, also known as Obamacare, the number of uninsured had fallen below 10%.
But now, the journalists note, Trump and the Republicans are working to uproot that achievement. While they extended Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations in their July 2025 budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” passed without a single Democratic vote—they refused to extend subsidies that enabled people to afford healthcare insurance in the ACA marketplaces.
The Democrats shut down the government last fall to try to force Republicans to restore those cuts, foreseeing that higher prices for premiums would drive healthier people out of the markets and out of healthcare insurance, while the loss of those healthier people from risk pools would drive up premiums for those remaining.
They were unsuccessful, and as they warned, without the subsidies, people dropped their health insurance. A report from the Department of Health and Human Services in late June 2026 showed that at least 5 million people lost health insurance in the first six months of the year, a drop of about 13%. For those remaining, premiums have spiked: the editorial board notes that a middle-income, middle-aged couple with two children could pay an additional $3,500 a year, more than doubling their premium from before the cuts. Deductibles also jumped this year by about $1,000 a person as people chose cheaper policies that offered less coverage.
Democrats shut down the government also because they wanted to restore the cuts of about $1 trillion over the next ten years Republicans had made in funding for Medicaid. In their budget reconciliation bill, Republicans placed what they called a “work requirement” on enrollees, requiring them to prove they have a job or a valid exemption.
But, as the editorial board notes, the “work requirement” is really a “paperwork requirement” that will throw people eligible for the program off it because they have not filed the right paperwork. As the board reports, Elizabeth Zhang and Gideon Lukens of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that about two of the three people who will lose Medicaid because of the new requirement are legally entitled to it.
They estimated that up to 15 million people are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage. That, in turn, will force hospitals, especially rural hospitals, to cut back services or close. Although still legally required to provide services to everyone, they will not be reimbursed for the cost of such care and will drop labor and delivery services, for example. Those closures will not just mean poorer health care, they will mean lost jobs.
As the New York Times editorial board noted, Republicans deliberately put off the implementation of most of the Medicaid cuts until after the 2026 midterms.
New York Times reader KAM from Marin County, California, noted in a comment on the story that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defines onerous paperwork differently than Republicans in Congress. Bessent recently announced the Treasury will no longer require shell companies to disclose even the name, address, and identification of people who own an interest
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Red states are getting hit the hardest. Let's hope they wakeup in time.
T
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Rebellion - How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again [2024]
By Robert Kagan
Download the free book from https://z-lib.gl/s/Robert%20Kagan%20Rebellion
Introduction
Virtue will slumber. The wicked will be continually watching: Consequently you will be undone.
—Patrick Henry, Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 9, 1788
The institutions that America’s founders created to safeguard liberal democratic government cannot survive when half the country does not believe in the core principles that undergird the American system of government. The presidential election of 2024, therefore, will not be the usual contest between Republicans and Democrats. It is a referendum on whether the liberal democracy born out of the Revolution should continue. Today, tens of millions of Americans have risen in rebellion against that system. They have embraced Donald Trump as their leader because they believe he can deliver them from what they regard as the liberal oppression of American politics and society. If he wins, they will support whatever he does, including violating the Constitution to go after his enemies and political opponents, which he has promised to do. If he loses, they will reject the results and refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the federal government, just as the South did in 1860. Either way, the American liberal political and social order will fracture, perhaps irrecoverably.
Although this crisis seems unprecedented, the struggle that is tearing the nation apart today is as old as the republic. The American Revolution did not just produce a new system of government dedicated to the protection of the rights of all individuals against government and community, the first of its kind in history. It also produced a reaction against those very liberal principles, by slaveholders and their white supporters, by religious movements, by those many Americans who have sought to preserve ancient, traditional hierarchies of peoples and beliefs against the leveling force of liberalism. This struggle between liberalism and antiliberalism has shaped international politics for the last two centuries and dominates the international scene today. But the same struggle has also been fought within the American system since the time of the Revolution.
The idea that all Americans share a commitment to the nation’s founding principles has always been a pleasing myth, or perhaps a noble lie. We prefer to believe we all share the same fundamental goals and only disagree on the means of achieving them. But, in fact, large numbers of Americans have always rejected the founders’ claim that all men are created equal, with “unalienable” rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and they have persistently struggled against the imposition of those liberal values on their lives. Great numbers of Americans, from the time of the Revolution onward, have wished to see America in ethnoreligious terms, as fundamentally a white, Protestant nation whose character is an outgrowth of white, Christian, European civilization. Their goal has been to preserve a white, Christian supremacy, contrary to the founders’ vision, and they have tolerated the founders’ liberalism, and the workings of the democratic system, only when it has not undermined that cause. When it has, they have repeatedly rebelled against it.
A straight line runs from the slaveholding South in the early to mid-nineteenth century to the post-Reconstruction South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the second Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, to the Dixiecrats of the 1940s and ’50s, to Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society of the 1950s and ’60s, to the burgeoning Christian nationalist movement of recent decades, to the New Right of the Reagan Era, to the Republican Party of today. The issues change—from fluoridated water in the 1960s to vaccines today, from allegedly communist-inspired Girl Scout handbooks in the 1950s to elementary-school curricula today. The circumstances have varied—these movements ha
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
lol
I didn't miss ANY of this bullshit while I was gone.
You're a couple of fucking worthless losers.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
What the Third Reich Can Teach Us About America Today
In “53 Days,” the historian Timothy W. Ryback shows how the Nazis used democratic means to destroy German democracy.
By Sam Adler-Bell
Sam Adler-Bell is a co-host of the podcast “Know Your Enemy.” He is at work on a history of Jewish New York.
Sept. 1, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/books/review/53-days-timothy-ryback
.html
Review of 53 DAYS: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy, by Timothy W. Ryback
Download Ryback’s books from https://z-lib.gl/s/?q=Timothy+W.+Ryback
We tend to remember fascism in its flourishing, at the height of its power: societies marked by dictatorship, a total war machine and the absence of individual rights. But it is an irreducible feature of fascism that it begins as a democratic phenomenon.
“The big joke on democracy,” the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in May 1928, “is that it provides its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction.” The Harvard historian Peter E. Gordon agrees. Fascism’s “trademark,” he recently observed, is to deploy “democratic procedure even as it seeks to destroy the substantive values of democracy from within.”
In the 21st century, as liberal societies teeter, journalists and scholars have taken an interest in earlier moments of democratic sabotage. Two years ago, the historian Timothy W. Ryback published “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power,” an account — in minute and often thrilling detail — of the six months leading up to Adolf Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship of Germany in January 1933.
His book focused especially on the hubris of two of Hitler’s enablers: Gen. Kurt von Schleicher, the former chancellor and conservative institutionalist who hoped Hitler’s brownshirts would crush the left on his behalf; and Alfred Hugenberg, the media magnate who published Hitler’s propaganda and eventually joined his cabinet. Both men hoped to contain and usurp Hitler’s movement, assuming it would be them and their patrician ilk, not a common thug like Hitler, who would reap the rewards of the Nazi assault on democracy.
These themes and characters return in Ryback’s “53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy.” The new book serves as something of a coda to “Takeover,” extending the timeline to Hitler’s first seven weeks in office — providing, as Ryback writes, “a step-by-step account of how Hitler disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time.”
In “53 Days,” we see Hitler’s war on the press, his purging of the civil service, his elimination of civil liberties and his crushing of resistance by the federated German states. It all culminates on March 23, 1933, with the Reichstag’s approval of the aptly named “Enabling Act,” which suspended the Weimar Constitution and handed Hitler unfettered power. As a pat New York Times headline reported the next day: “Quick Action in the Reichstag: Vote Dictatorship for Hitler Regime.”
To a remarkable degree, Ryback’s brisk narrative titrates the exact proportion of detail and context to enliven these moments and never dawdles over any single standoff; the book, which is a short 244 pages, really moves. While Ryback’s prose is mostly taut and interesting, he does sometimes indulge in needless adverbs: Hitler is “fiercely anti-democratic, belligerently nationalistic and viciously racist”; Goebbels, “fiercely, possessively, viciously loyal”; and the Nazi Party, “belligerently” nationalistic and “assertively” socialist.
These occasional tics are less distracting, however, than Ryback’s frequent, at times gratuitous, winks at the Trumpian present. To be clear, Ryback rarely if ever compares Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler explicitly. Instead, he summons and summarizes details from the Nazi past that unmistakably rhyme with the present, leaving it to his discerning readers to make the connection.
Between “Takeover” and “53 Days,” Ryback has made something of a hobby out of these allusions in articles he’s written for The Atlantic, the first of which, titl
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME