MEN ARE FINALLY BACK (NOT IN A GOOD WAY)

Writing for Liberal Currents, Katherine Alejandra Cross offers an explanation for President Trump's enduring appeal to his fans:

There has never been a shortage of ... vile, open bigots among the ranks of conservatives and Republicans. What is Trump’s value-add? What is the true, necrotised heart of his appeal?

What he sells his legions of followers that no other Republican could was impunity.

Trump’s fans live vicariously through him, and it inspires imitation. They marvel at how he creates Content by never backing down, never apologising, always pushing the envelope with ever more offensive statements. He is the unbannable poster they aspire to be. For his wealthiest backers, the Epstein Class and lesser aspirants, he has been the surest guardian of the immunity they see as a birthright. In either case, Trump’s brand is impunity and the fans want some for themselves.

Some of this is gendered brutality. Cross cites the case of a pro-Trump Texas man who shot and killed his adult daughter during an argument about the president, as well as the murder of Renee Good:

Yes, he is indeed the Everything is Gender president, but that means nothing unless you can be a violent misogynist and also get away with it. One wonders if that thought lurked somewhere in Kris Harrison’s mind as he waved a gun at his mouthy daughter, or in the mind of Jonathan Ross as he fired four shots at a woman he called a “fucking bitch” as she lay dying. For them, Trumpism did not just put the gun in their hands: the promise of Trump’s immunity to accountability induced them to pull the trigger.

Trump and his underlings are also selling the fantasy that you can act like a young man with no responsibilities all the time and get away with it.

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) February 23, 2026 at 6:12 AM

(In addition to Robert Kennedy Jr. exercising with Kid Rock, Pete Hegseth letting out a war whoop in a gym, and Kash Patel partying with the gold-medal Olympic hockey team, we have Kristi Noem's totalitarian cosplay, which, on the surface, doesn't seem like a male fantasy. But she's trying to be the archetypal guy's girl, in the totalitarian version.)

Cross's essay made me think about a Peggy Noonan column published in 2001, a month after 9/11. Noonan wrote:

... men are back. A certain style of manliness is once again being honored and celebrated in our country since Sept. 11. You might say it suddenly emerged from the rubble of the past quarter century, and emerged when a certain kind of man came forth to get our great country out of the fix it was in.

I am speaking of masculine men, men who push things and pull things and haul things and build things, men who charge up the stairs in a hundred pounds of gear and tell everyone else where to go to be safe. Men who are welders, who do construction, men who are cops and firemen. They are all of them, one way or another, the men who put the fire out, the men who are digging the rubble out, and the men who will build whatever takes its place.

And their style is back in style. We are experiencing a new respect for their old-fashioned masculinity, a new respect for physical courage, for strength and for the willingness to use both for the good of others.

I don't think that's what "we" were experiencing at that moment, but if it was, it didn't last. Life stateside went more or less back to a pre-9/11 normal. The wars President Bush started became quagmires. And dick-swinging dudes in the world of finance crashed the economy in 2008.

Noonan had a peculiar view of masculinity:

... you know what follows manliness? The gentleman. The return of manliness will bring a return of gentlemanliness, for a simple reason: masculine men are almost by definition gentlemen. Example: If you’re a woman and you go to a faculty meeting at an Ivy League University you’ll have to fight with a male intellectual for a chair, but I assure you that if you go to a Knights of Columbus Hall, the men inside (cops, firemen, insurance agents) will rise to offer you a seat. Because they are manly men, and gentlemen.

In fact, as we learned on January 24, a cop will respond to a woman who's criticizing him by shoving her into a snowbank. A skinny, left-leaning male nurse will reach out his hand to help her up, the cop will shoot him, and then not allow the woman -- an EMT -- to come to his aid even as he's dying.

That's the kind of manliness Americans wanted -- or at least the Americans who live in red states and districts, the ones who control our politics even though they're a minority of the population. They wanted men who are immature, brutal, and completely unaccountable. Trump gave them what they wanted.

INTERNET ARGUMENT MODE IS HURTING THE LEFT

A few days ago, The Bulwark published a piece by Nicholas Grossman titled "Trump Can't Steal the Midterms." The headline is a categorical dismissal of worriers like me; the subhead -- "The case for being vigilant without panicking" -- is more nuanced.

The piece itself begins with a categorical dismissal of doom:

DONALD TRUMP WILL NOT BE ABLE to steal this November’s midterm elections. He and his allies will keep trying to manipulate the midterms in their favor, which Democrats, pro-democracy activists, and all Americans who care about our constitutional system should keep working to counter. But he won’t succeed: No matter how much Team Trump disregards norms and laws, there’s no mechanism for taking over state elections, reversing losses, or preventing newly elected members of Congress from sitting, especially if Republicans lose by substantial margins. Vigilance is warranted, but excessive fear plays into the authoritarians’ hands.

And then Grossman says this in the second paragraph:

This is not a call for complacency. Backsliding from democracy into authoritarianism is greased by people saying Calm down, it’ll be fine, the institutions will handle it, he doesn’t mean it, someone will stop him. I’m not doing that.

But Calm down, it’ll be fine, the institutions will handle it ... someone will stop him appears to be precisely what Grossman's headline and first paragraph are saying. In the rest of the essay, Grossman stresses "Vigilance is warranted" rather than "Trump can't." But he begins with what reads to me like an absolutist dismissal of concern.

I think it's because he's arguing like a person of the internet. Most of us are these days. It's not helpful.

Pure doomers argue that the system now allows Trump to do anything he wants and won't stop him if he cancels the midterms altogether, sends thugs to polling places, or demands that ballots in Democratic strongholds be thrown out. Then anti-doomers say that pure doomers are helping Trump, as Grossman does:

Authoritarianism is partially in our heads. The Trump regime’s desire for domination is bottomless, but its capacity is not. They rely on bluster and fear to make up the difference, to get people to “obey in advance,” doing things the government cannot force them to do. The more the regime cultivates a vibe of strength and inevitability, the more room it has to operate. The more people think the regime is weak and failing, the more likely they are to say no, drag their feet, refuse demands, and resist.

But while the Trump regime is not all-powerful, neither is it "weak and failing." Why does that have to be the choice? Why can't we acknowledge that Trump is beatable -- a leader who has sometimes been rebuffed by the general public, the lower courts, and (on rare occasions) even Congress or the Supreme Court -- but is also a very powerful leader who has abused his power in ways that are unprecedented in U.S. history, and continues to do so? Why do we have to divide our side into the evil worriers and the virtuous believers in Trump's profound weakness? Why can't we say Trump has significant strengths and we need to continue fighting him?

The internet discourages nuance and rewards fist-pumping absolutism. I see this in other intramural battles on the left: for instance, between the people who are already angry about Gavin Newsom's likely 2028 presidential candidacy and those of us who are prepared to vote for him if he's the nominee. In this online battle, Newsom is already effectively the nominee, and everyone who would vote for him in the general election is evil -- and, on the other side, everyone who won't "vote blue no matter who" is evil. Can we just have the primaries, please? We can hash all this out. But we'd rather pre-divide ourselves -- which, to me, is doing the Republicans' work for them.

And I worry about mini-versions of this rift in the Maine, Texas, and Michigan Senate races this year. I hope supporters of the primary losers will unite around the winning candidates in these states. But I fear that so much animosity has been stirred up that they might not.

Let's stop fighting this way. It's not helpful.

I DON'T BELONG TO AN ORGANIZED RESISTANCE -- I'M A DEMOCRAT

President Trump will deliver his State of the Union address next week. As The New York Times reported a few days ago, the Democratic response a year ago was scattered and occasionally laughable:

Democrats knew in real time last year that they had bungled their response to President Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, making themselves a distraction rather than offering a cohesive message of resistance to his policies.

Representative Al Green, a liberal septuagenarian from Texas, was ejected from the chamber (and later censured) after disrupting the speech with a cane-waving tirade.

Actually, Green's protest was one of the first signs of life from a Democratic member of Congress in the second Trump presidency, and a lot of us were happy to see it.

The paddles that some Democrats waved with short messages on them — “Save Medicaid,” “Musk Steals” and one that just read “False” — were widely panned as a hokey and incoherent response.

Yes, that was just sad.

As Stephen Colbert said in response to the paddles:

“That is how you save democracy. By quietly dissenting — or bidding on an antique tea set, it was hard to tell what was going on.”

And some Democratic women protested by wearing pink. So it was kind of a mess -- a little rage, a lot of gentility. Surely Democrats will have a tighter, more coordinated response this year, right?

Nahhh. Last week, Axios reported:

In a meeting of House Democrats' whip team ... [House Minority Leader Hakeem] Jeffries said there were "two options" for how to approach the State of the Union....

The first option: Lawmakers can boycott the event....

The second: They can sit in "silent defiance," which was Democratic leadership's preferred tactic for last year's speech.

And Jeffries is such a strong, firm leader that everyone has agreed to this approach, right? Again, nahhh:

Some House Democrats say they plan to defy instructions from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) not to protest President Trump during his State of the Union address on Feb. 24....

[Some] said they may walk out mid-speech, with Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) telling Axios: "The only question for me is which of his disgusting lines prompts me to get up and leave, because at some point I will."

Some of the boycotters will be attending a competing event:

A counterrally, dubbed the “People’s State of the Union,” will be held at 8:30 p.m. on the National Mall.... The rally, which will feature “everyday Americans most impacted by Trump’s dangerous agenda,” is hosted by liberal group MoveOn Civic Action, progressive media company MeidasTouch and other coalition partners.

Speakers at the event include Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), as well as Reps. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), Becca Balint (D-Vt.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), according to a press release.

And there's an alternate alternate event as well:

Another counterprogramming event, billed as the “State of the Swamp,” is planned at the National Press Club. The event will be hosted by Defiance.org, a website launched by Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official and fervent Trump critic.

Among the attendees at that event will be Senator Ron Wyden and Representatives Eric Swalwell, Jason Crow, Seth Moulton, and Dan Goldman.

So: not exactly cohesive.

Will the two rallies get lost because they're overlapping with the actual Trump speech, as well as each other? Or am I misunderstanding how the press and social media work now? Is the point that there'll be lots of clips for people to watch the next day, from multiple sources, and it doesn't matter what people see in real time? Or maybe people are expected to be watching multiple screens simultaneously?

In any case, it seems as if it will be just as messy and incoherent as last year, though it will be a lot angrier (which is good).

Oh, and:

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger will deliver the official Democratic response to President Donald Trump's State of the Union address on Feb. 24.

And:

... Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., will be giving the Spanish-language response to Trump’s speech.

Spanberger -- a moderate, and not exactly a dynamic speaker -- was apparently chosen (by Jeffries and his nebbish counterpart in the Senate, Chuck Schumer) because she won't rile anyone up:

In a statement Thursday, Jeffries said Spanberger "stands in stark contrast to Donald Trump, who will lie, deflect and blame everyone but himself for his failed presidency on Tuesday evening."

... A person familiar with the decision emphasized that Spanberger’s 2018 victory from red to blue in addition to her relentless focus on affordability in flipping the Virginia governor's mansion serve as a playbook to success that Democrats hope to emulate in 2026.

"Focus on affordability"! That sound you hear is me banging my head on my laptop repeatedly.

If Democrats wanted to put on a united front against Trump, they could have had Spanberger delivering her rebuttal at the rally on the National Mall immediately after Trump's speech ends. One of the reasons State of the Union rebuttals tend to get poor grades is that they're usually delivered in a silent room with no audience, following a speech delivered to an audience that's half full of pumped-up presidential loyalists. The president gets multiple standing ovations. The rebutter gets silence. Why not change it up?

Or, instead of having the traditional speech by a rising party star, why not announce that the rebuttal will be given by the “everyday Americans most impacted by Trump’s dangerous agenda” who'll be speaking at the rally -- a group that, as the Times says, includes "people who have been negatively affected by Mr. Trump’s economic and health care policies, as well as federal workers who lost their jobs and immigrants who have been targeted by the Trump administration"?

A few weeks ago, I watched this clip of an interview with Kaden Rummler, a 21-year-old Californian who was permanently blinded in one eye by a "less lethal" ICE projectile during a protest following the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis. Rummler is interviewed by Chris Wolfe of KTLA.

The Trump-Vance administration just used your taxes to pay for an ICE agent to do this to a 21-year-old kid, who was only protesting because another ICE agent killed a mother of three, who was only there because ICE agents are kidnapping your neighbors

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— Prem Thakker ツ (@premthakker.bsky.social) January 15, 2026 at 3:23 PM

WOLFE: What can you tell us about your injuries now and the prognosis? Will you be blind in that eye for life?

RUMMLER: From what I've heard the doctors say, and everyone else, yes, I will be blind for life. They said my globe[?] was ruptured. I had, like -- my lower lid was, like, cut up, and they had to take skin from my temple to fix it. Um, there's a lot to it. I don't remember all the things that they said. I have fractures in my skull that they can't fix, and I can't sneeze or cough 'cause it's dangerous, too. Um, I remember also when they shot, there was pepper in it, and I had pepper down my throat. It made it hard to breathe for a long time. They pulled a piece of plastic the size of a nickel out of my eye. They said I had shards of metal, glass, and plastic all throughout my eye, and behind my eye, and in my skull. They also said that I had a piece of shrapnel metal about -- a few millimeters away from my carotid artery, and they said it was a miracle I survived, 'cause if it got any closer, if it hit the-- I would have died that night.

WOLFE: So are we blind right now?

RUMMLER: Yeah.

WOLFE: You see nothing out the eye?

RUMMLER: Nothing out of this eye. It's, uh, it's black.

It occurred to me then that the best State of the Union rebuttal might be a series of clips like this, perhaps introduced by a Democratic elected official. But rebutting Trump with ordinary people's speeches at the Mall rally might have been even better.

ON WAR, TARIFFS, AND TRUMP'S BRAIN

It looks as if President Trump is about to start a war with Iran, or at least launch a limited strike accompanied by a threat of more if Iran doesn't bend the knee, as The Wall Street Journal reports:

President Trump is weighing an initial limited military strike on Iran to force it to meet his demands for a nuclear deal, a first step that would be designed to pressure Tehran into an agreement but fall short of a full-scale attack that could inspire a major retaliation.

The opening assault, which if authorized could come within days, would target a few military or government sites, people familiar with the matter said. If Iran still refused to comply with Trump’s directive to end its nuclear enrichment, the U.S. would respond with a broad campaign against regime facilities—potentially aimed at toppling the Tehran regime.

As the Financial Times notes, this might not motivate Iran to make a deal:

The litmus test for Tehran is that talks and any subsequent deal must guarantee Iran will not be attacked; that the US will abide by the deal and lift sanctions...

(Imagine being stupid enough to think that Trump will abide by any deal. The Iranians have to be smarter than that.)

... and that it will not insist that Iran give up the right to civilian uranium enrichment. Yet none of these compromises seem to have been on offer in the last two rounds of talks. Instead, the US is demanding that Iran surrender not only its nuclear programme but also its missiles and regional proxies.

... There is an emerging consensus in Tehran that Iran will not win anything at the negotiating table. It will instead have to accept war, prepare to manage it, and hope that conflict eventually leads to the change it is seeking — by exhausting the US to the point that it abandons the pursuit of future aggression and agrees to a more favourable nuclear deal.

... even if the US launches a massive strike and succeeds in impeding Iran’s ability to retaliate against US forces or Israel, Tehran may still retain the ability to use its regional proxies, and target oil facilities and energy supply routes. It could even decide to launch much of its arsenal against the US and its allies before the US is able to destroy it, thus quickly escalating the war.

So this could get ugly.

Nick Catoggio of The Dispatch can't understand why this is happening now:

And so here we are, on the precipice of the largest war that the United States will have waged in nearly 25 years without any clear objective for the mission. “President Trump hasn’t decided ... whether the aim would be to halt Iran’s already-battered nuclear program, wipe out its missile force, or try to topple the regime,” the Journal noted surreally in its report on America’s military build-up. War as Mad Libs: We must attack Iran because [casus belli TBD].

Michelle Goldberg knows why:

... I assume Trump is driven by the same self-aggrandizing impulse that made him slap his name on the Kennedy Center. He wants to put his stamp on the world, to be the president who rid the globe of three regimes that bedeviled his predecessors: Venezuela, Iran and Cuba, which he’s subjecting to a devastating fuel blockade. “He is now enamored with the idea that he will be the president on whose watch a number of regimes that have been viscerally anti-American for a long time will no longer be,” said [Rob] Malley [President Biden’s special envoy for Iran].

That's an explanation for Trump's wars, his building spree, and even the tariffs -- which I don't believe are going away even though the Supreme Court struck them down today:

The Supreme Court blocked President Donald Trump’s signature economic and foreign policy Friday morning in a fractured 6-3 split decision.

Trump cannot use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to override Congress’s power of the purse, using the emergency declaration to levy widespread global tariffs, the majority held.

Trump believes he's right about tariffs and all sensible people are wrong. He wants to impose them as part of his legacy. They're the economic equivalent of his ballroom and his arch (and his wars).

That's why, as I've said many times, he'll just impose whatever tariffs he can through alternate pathways. As The New York Times notes today:

But even while battling in court, the president began to explore alternatives to the 1977 law. Mr. Trump’s top trade negotiator Jamieson Greer said last month that the administration would move quickly to replace any emergency tariffs invalidated by the court with other levies. The president has already used other statutes to set tariffs, including national security-related ones on some specific goods and industries.

In November, the Times listed a few of those statutes:

... the administration could use Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act to put in place a 15 percent global tariff for 150 days.... That law says a president can impose tariffs to deal with “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits....

In the meantime, the administration could start multiple trade investigations under a legal provision known as Section 301.... Section 301 allows the president to issue broad tariffs in response to unfair trading practices, after first conducting an investigation....

Another alternative is Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows the president to impose tariffs on national security grounds.

On that last one, we're told:

Those levies typically require investigations that can take several months to carry out, a period that would prevent the president from arbitrarily raising and lowering tariffs, as he has done with IEEPA.

LOL -- imagine Trump refraining from using this authority because a painstaking investigation hasn't been carried out.

As I've said a few times, I think all of this is happening not just because Trump is a megalomaniac, but because he had a health scare last year that led him to believe he could die soon. I wrote this last month:

After all of Trump's talk about "heaven" in 2025, and his recent Wall Street Journal interview about his health, I assume he's afraid of death (though that doesn't mean he's actually dying) and is trying to go out with a bang -- he wants to die knowing he was the most consequential person on earth, if not the most consequential person of all time. Hence the renaming and building and redecorating. He's trying to preen and bomb his way to a legacy.

He also wants to make sure he doesn't die before punishing all his enemies and hoovering up all the cash he possibly can -- Whoever dies with the most toys wins, amirite? And that's how policy is decided when you elect an ignorant, corrupt narcissist to the presidency and the other two branches of government defer to him 99% of the time.

NO ELITE ACCOUNTABILITY = AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Here are some of today's headlines:

* Former Prince Andrew Arrested in Britain Over Epstein Ties

* Epstein files hand French prosecutors trove of new leads

* South Korea’s former president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

* Epstein’s Files of ‘Shame’ Blast Through Europe and Beyond, Scorching Politicians, Royals and Other Elites

From that last story:

... former British Ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson ... was fired last year after it came to light that he maintained a friendly relationship with Epstein for years after the financier’s 2008 prison term for sexual offenses involving a minor. Now, police are investigating whether he passed on sensitive government financial information – including some documents meant for the prime minister only – to Epstein during the financial crisis, while he was the UK’s Secretary of State for Business. If charged and found guilty, Mandelson could face a life sentence....

Across the English Channel, French officials have launched a tax fraud and money laundering investigation into Jack Lang, a former French culture minister, and his daughter, Caroline.

There are legal investigations in quite a few other countries. But in America? No one in Washington is stepping down. No one in politics is in legal jeopardy. Prominent figures in business, law, and academia have left positions in disgrace, but no one appears to be under criminal investigation.

(And, of course, our president was never held accountable for his attempt to subvert democracy in 2021, unlike the former presidents of South Korea and Brazil.)

I think it's only a matter of time before American pundits begin arguing that America's utter lack of legal accountability for elites is a good thing, actually.

They'll say that instead of succumbing to moral panics, "wokeness," and guilt by association, American law enforcement is right not to define dynamic, capable, accomplished people by their worst moments. We should be pleased! Societies with a culture of shame are weaker! We don't want to be like (insert retching sounds) Europe, do we? Stodgy, hidebound, politically correct, past-its-prime Europe? Who wants that?

Maybe we'll hear this from the Atlantic writer who told us that the recently releases Epstein files "bolster the case that although terrible crimes were committed, there never was a larger conspiracy to begin with," or maybe we'll hear it from the folks, mostly on the right, who keep calling the Epstein matter a "moral panic." Right-wingers already believe that Donald Trump shouldn't have been held accountable for the attempted coup he inspired. Why wouldn't they say the failure to launch investigations of bigwigs in the Epstein files is a good thing, too?

YES, UNDER PRESIDENT VANCE, AMERICA REALLY MIGHT MAKE BEING TRANS ILLEGAL FOR ADULTS

On Monday, I wrote a post questioning whether we can maintain a united front against the Republican Party in 2028. I wrote the following about Gavin Newsom, a flawed politician who really might be the Democratic presidential nominee that year:

I don't intend to vote for Newsom in the primaries. I understand why people don't like his stance on trans rights and other issues....

Yes, I could imagine Newsom signing legislation that banned trans youth from competing in school sports nationwide, just as Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. But Gavin Newsom won't support a complete ban on transitioning. I think a Republican 48th president might do that. I think we could live to see the criminalization of trans people under continued Republican rule. We won't see that even with a bad Democratic president.

Well, here you go: Yesterday, Erin Reed, a trans journalist, reported this:

On Tuesday, the president of the billionaire-backed Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, appeared on the influential far-right PBD podcast to discuss gender-affirming care.... the conversation turned towards what the Heritage Foundation was working on when it comes to the future of transgender people. It was during this shift that Roberts darkly announced that his solution to being transgender was simple: "You outlaw it," and that the organization was working to ban gender-affirming care at all ages....

... when asked if transgender adults should have their medication taken away, Roberts endorsed the idea, stating, "We like that idea, too. One of the reasons is that we not only work in coalitions, but we often work toward an ultimate goal via incremental steps—sometimes people will call us radical incrementalists. We're willing to take a quarter of the enchilada if we can keep working there. So if that's the kind of thing that policymakers can agree on left and right, Heritage would be fully supportive of that, knowing that ultimately we have an ideal position that would be much stronger than that."

If you know what happened to abortion rights in the decades after Roe v. Wade, you can see where this is going. Maybe receiving trans medical care as an adult won't be made illegal in the next Republican presidency. But that's what the right wants to do, and they won't stop fighting until they get what they want, unless we stop them.

No Democrat wants this. Soon, the overwhelming majority of Republicans will demand this.

But we don't just need to vote for Democrats, even bad or disappointing Democrats, to prevent this and other erosions of rights and decency. We need to push back on anti-trans messaging from the right and the left-center.

This week, the influential left-centrist online magazine The Argument published results of a poll on trans issues under the headline "The Trans Rights Backlash Is Real." The Argument's pollster, Lakshya Jain, cites numbers like this:

... 52% of voters now support legislation requiring trans people to use bathrooms corresponding with their biological sex, while just 33% oppose such a bill.

This is a sharp and dramatic change from the way things stood at the beginning of the Trump era, when Americans consistently rejected the concept of bathroom restrictions for trans people. In a Pew Research Center poll from September 2016, 51% of Americans said that trans people should be allowed to use public restrooms of the gender they identify as. Months later, the Public Religion Research Institute released a similar finding showing 53% of Americans were opposed to laws that would require trans people to use bathrooms corresponding to their birth sex.

Both Jain and The Argument's editor, Jerusalem Demsas, say they're not recommending that liberals beat a full retreat on trans issues. They note that nearly two thirds of respondents in their poll "want to ban discrimination against transgender people in hiring and housing. Not a single subgroup–including Trump 2024 voters—opposes such legislation."

So they call for a partial retreat, defending what the public supports and not defending what the public opposes. Demsas writes:

If you care about building durable protections, you have to build them in the world as it actually exists, not the world you wish you could rhetorically enforce into being.

But as G. Elliott Morris said in a different context last fall:

Public opinion is not static.... It changes over time and it’s unpredictable what it will be in the future. You don’t want to base all of your political strategy over what the polls say today, because there’s no election today. The election is going to be a year and a half from now. Or I guess, in our case, a year and two months from now. You want to base all of your political calculus on what you think opinion will be a year and two months from now. Or also maybe on your values, beliefs.

(Emphasis added.)

Morris was discussing immigration -- another issue on which Democrats were urged to meekly accept the right-wing backlash and meet the public where they were:

In March, a lot of this backlash I was referencing against Democrats talking about immigration, especially [Kilmar] Abrego Garcia, was predicated on this idea that Trump was doing well in his immigration net approval. So don’t talk about that. You don’t want to raise this issue of immigration because he does well on it. The counter argument was like, look, you’re never going to change how people feel about the president if you don’t engage with him.

if you don’t fight him on this. And as soon as we saw Democratic representatives and senators start fighting him on Abrego Garcia, on deportations in general, especially after the events in LA in, gosh, June, I believe, you saw his immigration numbers fall.

And then the Trump administration started the War on Minneapolis. Here's what's happened to Trump's approval on immigration:

So I'll argue in favor of supporting a candidate who's bad on trans issues if that candidate wins the primaries -- but we also need to try pushing publc opinion back to where it was before the massive right-wing (and centrist) anti-trans campaign began. Demsas writes that "the path to civil rights has never run through making disagreement illegal" -- as if we live in a world where "the woke mob" is silencing anti-trans voices -- but there's a lot of ground between this imagined "You must comply" pro-trans regime and complete acquiescence whenever polling on an aspect of trans rights become more than 50% anti-.

We need to emphasize the humanity of trans people, and counter the right's stereotyping of them as sick, violent monsters. The alternative in an America in which they'll soon literally be illegal. And maybe we could even push Gavin Newsom a bit further to the left in the process.

RANDY FINE MIGHT BE THE FUTURE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

People who should know better believe that the Republican Party might moderate after Donald Trump leaves office, but here's a story about a Republican who's been in Congress for less than a year and is already an emerging superstar hatemonger:

Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., prompted calls for his resignation from Democrats and a major Islamic civil rights group after suggesting in a social media post that he'd choose dogs over Muslims.

"If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one," Fine posted to the social media platform X on Sunday.

Shortly afterward, he added a photo of a post from Nerdeen Kiswani, the co-founder of the pro-Palestinian group "Within Our Lifetime," in which she called dogs "unclean" and said that "NYC is coming to Islam." Kiswani later told NBC News in an email she made the comment satirically.

Fine wrote in the follow-up post, "For context, this is the leader of one of the key mainstream Muslim groups that supported Mamdani," referring to Zohran Mamdani, New York City's new mayor.

Here's a little background: On January 25, New York City had its biggest snowstorm in five years. Parts of the city received nearly 15 inches of snow. Temperatures were well below freezing for a week after the storm, and only briefly cracked 32F for another week. So the snow has lingered, which is unusual here. It's finally begun to melt in the past few days.

There's an unpleasant amount of scattered trash and dog poop on top of the snow piles. This isn't pleasant, but I've lived here nearly fifty years -- it always happens here when snow lingers for a while. The New York Post -- which hates our new mayor and wants to blame him for this -- has fixated on this problem. Here's a story the Post ran on February 11 (cover your eyes if you're sensitive to the sight of dog waste):

The next day, Kiswani posted these tweets:

Congressman Fine knows how to ring the Pavlovian bell that makes right-wing rageoholics drool: He not only attacked Kiswani, he linked her to Mayor Mamdani:

For context, this is the leader of one of the key mainstream Muslim groups that supported Mamdani. pic.twitter.com/zcIs4tVyly

— Congressman Randy Fine (@RepFine) February 15, 2026

(Kiswani, in fact, has been critical of Mamdani since he was inaugurated.)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez weighed in:

This is genuinely one of the most disgusting statements I have ever seen issued by an American official.

It should not stop shocking us that the Republican Party openly embraces this. Fine should be censured & stripped of committees. To ignore this is to accept and normalize it. https://t.co/OPHd5jtM2b

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 17, 2026

Fine took her on as well:

Rep. Randy Fine: "People should know Democrats like AOC are saying 'we are going to get rid of your dogs.' Americans need to keep that in mind when they go and vote in November."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 17, 2026 at 8:09 AM

Fine hits every pleasure center in GOP rageoholics' brains:

Look, here's my view: It's not enough for Democrats to think anyone who wants to come here illegally should be able to do that. They also think they should be able to get whatever free stuff they want. Now they're demanding that we change our values and how we live as Americans.

My post was in response to a major Muslim leader saying dogs should be forbidden from New York City because to some Muslims it bothers them. Well, if they're going to make us choose between our dogs and them going home, the choice is easy, and people should know Democrats like AOC are saying, "We are going to get rid of your dogs."

You mean this AOC?

(That's Deco, AOC's French bulldog.)

Apart from the bigotry and the Democrat-bashing, this plays on GOP voters' misunderstanding of how diverse communities work. Kiswani wasn't really saying dogs should be banned in the city, but even if that had been her point, and even if she were a top Mamdani adviser, it wouldn't matter. New York is a very dog-friendly city. We wouldn't tolerate a ban on dogs -- some of were angry in 1978 when a law went into effect requiring dog owners to clean up after their pets. But we can tolerate unpopular opinions -- we don't expect everyone to think the same way, just as we don't expect everyone to have the same set of religious beliefs or the same dietary habits or the same dress code. We know some of our neighbors eat halal (or kosher), but we know they don't expect us to. Do some Muslims or some Jews (or the Amish men who come up from Pennsylvania to sell produce) dress according to their customs? Fine, but there's no pressure on us to do the same.

I think many Republican voters can't understand this. The places they live are monocultures. They'd like to impose their monocultural values on the rest of America. They assume that our Muslim mayor wants to impose what they consider a bad monoculture on us, but he doesn't, and we wouldn't allow him to (and wouldn't have elected him if we thought that's what he wanted).

Fine, meanwhile, seems like a rising GOP star. He's Jewish and wears a yarmulke, which might limit his stardom, but he's a hardcore hater:

... he privately wrote “Go blow yourself up!” to a Florida Muslim after they challenged his social media posts, calling on an Islamophobic trope that Muslims are prone to violence or suicide bombings.

In December 2023, as Palestinians awaited much-needed humanitarian aid, Fine mocked them, posting on his X account, “Stop the trucks. Let them eat rockets. There are plenty of those. #BombsAway.”

... In November 2024, Fine warned Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) that they should “consider leaving before [he] gets there,” followed by “#BombsAway,” an open threat against two Muslim members of Congress....

In May 2025, Fine suggested on national television that the United States should use nuclear weapons against Gaza, invoking the atomic bombings of Japan as a model for dealing with Palestinians. When asked to explain this genocidal rhetoric, he doubled down with a racist and dehumanizing response, claiming that half of Gaza’s population is “married to their cousins” and has “mental defects,” and that “you’ve got to have a mental defect to interpret the comment that way.”

I could see him winning the Senate seat of the aging Rick Scott in 2030. I could see him running for president and being a credible candidate in the GOP primaries. And if he doesn't have a successful career in electoral politics, I expect to see him topping the podcast charts someday. He's a star on the rise.