IT'S TIME TO PLAY RIGHT-WING RUMPLESTILTSKIN AGAIN

Jake Lang, a pardoned January 6 insurrectionist who threatened to burn a Qur'an in Minneapolis earlier this year, tried to stir up trouble on Saturday at Gracie Mansion in Manhattan, where the mayor of New York lives. His intent was to stage another anti-Islam demonstration -- he brought a roast pig, a live goat (with which he feigned copulation after a similar provocation a day earlier), and a couple dozen ideological soul mates.

I was there, hoping for a peaceful counterprotest, but things looked ugly -- as in Minneapolis, Lang and his crew were outnumbered by young anti-fascists who wanted to rough him up. The scrum seemed like a bad place for your elderly correspondent, and I left.

Then a bomb was thrown.

A device thrown outside Gracie Mansion on Saturday during dueling protests in New York City was confirmed to be an improvised explosive device, according to police.

Two men, described by police as an 18-year-old and a 19-year-old, were taken into custody after at least one of two devices was ignited....

Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch described the devices Saturday as being smaller than a football and said they appeared to be jars wrapped in black tape with nuts, bolts, screws and a hobby fuse....

A test of the explosive compound found in a container thrown by one of the men has preliminarily come back as triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, a notoriously volatile and dangerous type of homemade explosive....

The two men arrested said they were inspired by ISIS, as the police commissioner noted.

“The defendants were inspired by ISIS to carry out their attack,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Monday during a briefing outlining the five-count federal indictment against Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi. “There should be no confusion about what ISIS constitutes. It is a designated foreign terrorist organization responsible for deadly terrorist attacks across the globe, and has taken credit for mass casualty attacks in Europe, the Middle East and right here in the United States.”

But the right-wing language police told us they were outraged by what the mayor said, or didn't say. The New York Post reported:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday repeatedly refused to condemn the pair of alleged bomb throwers as ISIS-loving radical Islamists....

Really? What did he say, or fail to say?

“They are suspected of coming here to commit an act of terrorism,” Hizzoner said during a press conference outside Grace Mansion....

Yeah? What else?

On Sunday, Mamdani issued a mealy-mouthed statement denouncing the organizer of a right-wing anti-Muslim rally — but not directly commenting on the alleged bomb tossers.

“Yesterday, white supremacist Jake Lang organized a protest outside Gracie Mansion rooted in bigotry and racism. Such hate has no place in New York City. It is an affront to our city’s values and the unity that defines who we are,” the statement said.

“What followed was even more disturbing. Violence at a protest is never acceptable. The attempt to use an explosive device and hurt others is not only criminal, it is reprehensible and the antithesis of who we are.”

"Criminal" and "reprehensible" seem like negative words to me. What else?

He again stopped short of condemning radical Islam in a statement following the unsealing of the criminal complaint.

“Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi have been charged with committing a heinous act of terrorism and proclaiming their allegiance to ISIS,” he said in a statement. “They should be held fully accountable for their actions.”

Saying that they were inspired by ISIS and committed "a heinous act of terrorism" isn't enough? I guess not. Mamdani didn't say the secret phrase -- "radical Islam"!

In the past, I've called this "wingnut Rumplestiltskin." Steve Benen has invoked "Beetlejuice." The Republican argument is that Democrats have to utter a particular phrase or the terrorists have won. The phrase keeps changing, but it usually includes some form of the word "Islam" or "Muslim."

So at the 2008 Republican convention, Rudy Giuliani attacked Democrats because they refrained from using the phrase "Islamic terrorism." In 2010, after a failed terror bombing in Times Square, The Weekly Standard chided President Obama for, among other things, refusing to use the phrase "Islamic extremism." In 2013, after the Boston Marathon bombing, Charles Krauthammer wagged a finger at Obama for refusing to use the words "jihadist" and "Islamicist." In 2015, after the Charlie Hebdo bombing in Paris, Ralph Peters of Fox News said that Obama's response was inadequate "because it has to say 'Islamist terror,'" adding, "This administration is just soft on radical Islam."

And then, after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Marco Rubio said, "What we're involved in now is a civilizational conflict with radical Islam." Shortly afterward, in a presidential debate, Hillary Clinton refrained from using the phrase "radical Islam," but said this:

We need to have a resolve that will bring the world together, to root out the kind of radical, jihadist ideology that motivates organizations like ISIS, a barbaric, ruthless, violent, jihadist, terrorist group.

Rubio went on to criticize that statement as not strong enough.

There was a reason that Obama and Clinton, his first secretary of state, avoided the words Republicans demanded that they use. After Obama left office, Richard Stengel, who worked in his administration, explained:

To defeat radical Islamic extremism, we needed our Islamic allies — the Jordanians, the Emiratis, the Egyptians, the Saudis — and they believed that term unfairly vilified a whole religion.

They also told us that they did not consider the Islamic State to be Islamic, and its grotesque violence against Muslims proved it. We took a lot of care to describe the Islamic State as a terrorist group that acted in the name of Islam. Sure, behind the scenes, our allies understood better than anyone that the Islamic State was a radical perversion of Islam, that it held a dark appeal to a minority of Sunni Muslims, but it didn’t help to call them radical Islamic terrorists.

Obama ordered the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Obama began the process of weakening ISIS that continued in the first Donald Trump presidency. Obama didn't shrink from fighting the violence represented by those words.

Similarly, Mamdani has denounced Saturday's failed bomb attack, and his police force arrested the perpetrators. But for Republicans, deeds are irrelevant. Mamdani and all other Democrats are supposed to use words that make Muslims seem evil. If they refuse to do so, Republicans say, they clearly love evil.

NO, ISRAEL HASN'T LOST THE UNITED STATES

New York magazine's Ross Barkan writes:

Years from now, February 28, 2026, might be remembered as the day Israel finally lost the American public.

The Iran war, launched by the U.S. on that date and executed in direct coordination with Israel, is predictably a catastrophe....

It's not going well, but the usual 40 or so percent of Americans support the war, as they support everything Donald Trump does. In a recent NPR poll, the public opposes the war, but only by a 56%-44% margin, with 84% of Republicans in favor.

Barkan writes that Americans believe the U.S. is "fighting Israel’s war" in Iran, and they're not happy about that:

The fiercest supporters of Israel in the United States do not quite understand that there is no going back. Gavin Newsom, California’s governor and a 2028 presidential front-runner, now calls Israel an “apartheid” state. A few years ago, this would have been unfathomable — a mainstream Democrat who spoke like this would have been ridiculed and censured, driven to the margins of the party.

That's a sign that the Overton window is moving, but Newsom isn't rejecting Israel outright. He's trying to thread the needle.

Gavin Newsom to Ben Shapiro, January 15, 2026:

"I don't share that opinion as it relates to genocide [in Gaza]. I do not agree with that notion. I'm also crystal clear on my love for Israel." https://t.co/RiblgJdiVO pic.twitter.com/Sup5z2eMcn

— lindsay 🙈🏳️‍🌈 (@virtueemoir29) March 4, 2026

Barkan argues that Israel is losing America because anti-Israel critics on the left -- including mainstream liberals -- are being joined by anti-Israel critics (and anti-Semites) on the right:

We are in a new era, and it’s going to be a permanent one: Poll after poll shows that Americans under 40 take a startlingly dim view of Israel.

For a while, Israel hawks could dismiss these polls because they showed only the left-wing youth turning on the Jewish State. They were the radicals who could be, perhaps, nudged off the political stage. Now young people on the right, the MAGA youth, are coming to a similar place, if for different reasons: They view the special relationship between the two countries as a violation of America First. Some of this might be antisemitism; some of it, though, is genuine skepticism of an arrangement that doesn’t make sense to most Americans.

On the right, I think a lot of it is anti-Semitism -- maybe all of it. There's anti-Semitism on the left, but I think it's the dominant reason for Israel skepticism on the right.

But I don't agree that the U.S. and Israel are headed for a divorce, for two reasons: (1) the prominence of Bible-bashers in the GOP and (2) Cleek's Law.

Barkan writes:

The Iran war could be what decisively breaks the United States from Israel. Not yet — certainly not now, with Trump in the White House. But there will be presidents after Trump. A future Democrat will have no incentive to cater to the whims of a warmongering Israel. A Republican not explicitly bound to pro-Israel, right-wing Evangelicals might not care a great deal about Israel, either. Why should he?

Working backward: Does Barkan seriously believe there can be a leader of the GOP who's "not explicitly bound to pro-Israel, right-wing Evangelicals"? I'm reminded of a statistic cited by David French, a product of the Christian right who's become disaffected with the movement:

I’ve shared this statistic before, but if you look at 2024 exit polling, you’ll see that Trump won white evangelical and born-again voters by a 65-point margin, 82 percent to 17 percent. He lost everyone else by 18 points, 58 percent to 40 percent.

There is no GOP without these people. They're not going away. Even a guy like J.D. Vance, who's clearly unfazed by right-wing anti-Semitism, will have to stay on their good side if he wants to be the next president.

But the main reason the GOP won't turn against Israel is Cleek's Law:

Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily.

Despite the anti-Israel remarks of thought leaders like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes, and despite the increasing anti-Semitism among young rightists, the GOP will continue to back Israel because Democrats will increasingly reject Israel. Whatever we hate is what Republicans want.

It's an easy fit, of course: Prime Minister for Life Benjamin Netanyahu doles out cruelty to Muslims, whom even the vilest anti-Semites hate more than they hate Jews. (Hatred of Muslims is all but universal on the right.) If you agreed with Adam Serwer that "the cruelty is the point" of GOP policy in most areas, then it's easy to recognize that Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is cruel in a way that's extraordinarily satisfying to the U.S. right. And I agree with Barkan that "even if a more moderate politician replaces Netanyahu, religious zealots and anti-Arab fanatics will continue to hold sway" in Israel -- to the delight of Rpublican voters in America.

Republicans were generally pro-war from roughly the Nixon years through sometime in the Obama presidency, because they thought the Democratic Party was full of peaceniks. Donald Trump was able to sell skepticism about war to the GOP largely because Barack Obama killed Osama bin Laden and deployed drones against Islamicists. Joe Biden finished the job of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, and was criticized for the execution of that withdrawal, which gave Trump an opening to be a neocon again. It's always Cleek's Law.

So Republicans won't turn against Israel unless Democrats rush to its defense. They'll attack any Democrat who questions Israel's goodness, even if they're extending a welcome to anti-Semites themselves. All of this will prevent a thorough rethinking of U.S. policy toward Israel.

IF THE ECONOMY WERE EVERYTHING, TRUMP'S POLL NUMBERS WOULD BE LOWER

NBC News has just released a new poll. It was conducted from February 27 -- the day before the Iran war started -- through March 3. The topline number is bad for President Trump, but not awful:

NBC's survey hasn't been one of Trump's really terrible polls -- we're told,

Trump’s job approval rating is at 44% — essentially stable since the NBC News poll conducted in October, when it was 43% among registered voters.

But Trump's overall job approval rating is much higher than his rating on the economy:

Across five issues tested, voters give the president their lowest marks on the economy, with 62% disapproving of Trump’s handling of inflation and the cost of living and 36% approving. It’s an issue Democrats are trying to capitalize on heading into the midterms, after the party’s candidates found success on the issue in 2025....

Many Democratic politicians and candidates behave as if the economy is the one and only issue they should talk about -- even when other issues are in the headlines. Here's Senator Mark Kelly, a likely 2028 presidential candidate:

Why do this? Why not criticize Trump's handling of the war by ... criticize Trump's handling of the war? The war is unpopular. Americans think Trump should be prioritizing their needs and not foreign adventurism. They think the war will make Americans less safe. Why not talk about that?

Democrats who broke out of the "talk only about the economy" straitjacket have helped drive Trump's poll numbers down on immigration (with an assist, of course, from brutal and incompetent Trump subordinates like Kristi Noem). They need to keep pushing on every issue, and offer real plans of their own that differ from what Republicans are doing. Voters still think Republicans have better ideas on too many issues:

And after all the Democrats' talk about the economy, they're merely even with the GOP on who'd do a better job managing it, probably because they mostly say, "I'm laser-focused on affordability," which is not a better idea, or an idea at all. (To be fair, cutting the gas tax is an idea, though it's a Republican-style idea.)

Sometimes you do want to pivot to the economy -- I recently wrote that Democrats should focus on the skyrocketing cost of this war. But Democrats should also talk about the war as a bad idea, one that's depleting our military resources, putting lives at risk, and highly unlikely to make the world safer or more stable.

Trump has thoughts about everything -- ignorant thoughts, but they're thoughts. They impress approximately 40% of the country. Democrats could try having well-thought-out responses to every issue. The public won't fully trust the party, especially with the White House, until it seems ready to handle every issue the country faces.

MAYBE CHAOS IS THE POINT

The Atlantic's Tom Nichols sees Donald Trump's war in Iran as one of "Operational Excellence [and] Strategic Incompetence."

The war in Iran has reaffirmed two truths. One is that the United States is blessed with the most professional and effective military in the world.... The other truth is that the Trump administration, when it comes to strategy, is incompetent.

... The president and his team ... have not enunciated an overarching goal for this war—or, more accurately, they have presented multiple goals and chosen among them almost randomly, depending on the day or the hour. This means that highly effective military operations are taking place in a strategic vacuum.

... Operational competence ... cannot answer the question of national purpose. What is the war about, and when will America know it’s done?

I'm thinking about this in the context of a piece by David Sanger that ran in The New York Times a couple of days ago under the headline "Trump Follows His Gut. His National Security Advisers Try to Keep Up."

On a range of issues, from the goals of the Iran strike to Mr. Trump’s objectives in Venezuela or even in threatening Greenland, there are a blitz of answers. Inconsistency is sometimes celebrated by the administration as wily strategic deception, rather than as a failure to think several chess moves ahead.

... A top Arab diplomat said this week that his government has no real insight into the administration’s planning for a transition of government in Iran — or even whether it wants to play a role, given Mr. Hegseth’s repeated statements that “nation building” was not on the Pentagon’s list of tasks.

When I look at this war, and when I look at the ever-changing tariffs, I start to think that -- apart from the obvious motivations (self-aggrandizement, self-enrichment) -- the chaos is the point for Trump. He spent much of his life wanting to be the most important person in his world -- the biggest builder in New York, the richest, and the most admired -- but he could never pull it off. Other people with less chaotic and more strategic brains were better at building, made more money, and easily avoided the bankruptcies that plagued Trump. The adrenalized fizziness of Trump's brain made him bad at planning, bad at passing up whatever seemed immediately gratifying. He overpaid for what he wanted. He experienced failure.

He's no better at being president -- but what he can do, now that he has a 100% loyal Cabinet, Congress, and Supreme Court, is try to drag the world down to his level. He doesn't know what he's doing (on trade, in geopolitics), but that's fine if no one else knows what he's doing either. Global destabilization is the point. It makes smarter people struggle to react. It makes the world as jittery as Trump's brain.

TRUMP SHRUGS AND SAYS SHIT HAPPENS BECAUSE HE THINKS SHIT HAPPENING WOULD BE FINE FOR HIM

This passage from Time magazine's cover story on President Trump and the war in Iran is getting a lot of attention:

Asked whether Americans should be worried about retaliatory attacks at home, Trump acknowledges the possibility. “I guess,” he says. “But I think they’re worried about that all the time. We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die."

First, I want to draw your attention to "But I think [Americans are] worried about that all the time." I live in Manhattan. I lived here on 9/11. The vast majority of my fellow New Yorkers aren't "worried about that all the time." We know the risks, and we know they haven't gone away. We know, for instance, that an ISIS-inspired terrorist drove a pickup truck into cylists and runners back in 2017, killing eight of them. Terrorism happens, and we know our city is a much more likely target than the outer-ring suburbs and rural communities where Trump supporters tend to live. But we get on with our lives. We're not perpetually fearful. It's Trumpers who are obsessed with terrorism fears and the fear of "sleeper cells."

🚨 THIS IS INSANE: Democrats have ONCE AGAIN voted to KEEP DHS CLOSED, despite the highly elevated terror threat by Iranian sleeper cells in the United States

Democrats DO NOT CARE about the safety of you and your family.

It’s ALL about political power.

STOP VOTING DEMOCRAT! pic.twitter.com/LFU5HrsSVy

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) March 5, 2026

🚨 BREAKING: US Senate REJECTS effort to reopen the Department of Homeland Security in a 51-45 vote, despite an ACTIVE threat of terrorist sleeper cells amid conflict with Iran

John Fetterman joined Republicans voting YEA

Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are TRAITORS and must… pic.twitter.com/g6lEnSyXeJ

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 5, 2026

Which gets us to the calculation Trump has made. We know he's a narcissist who doesn't care about other people's deaths unless he thinks he can leverage them for his own purposes. So his administration has waved Charlie Kirk's bloody shirt ever since the bigoted podcaster was killed -- but if you're a servicemember who's a casualty of this war, Trump doesn't want to talk about you.

I don't know whether he'll want to talk about any victims of terrorism on U.S. soil. Other Republicans obviously will -- they'll want to blame the casualties on Democrats, even if Homeland Security funding has been restored. But Trump might just want to shrug the deaths off the way he's shrugging them off here, and the way he's shrugging off the deaths of servicemembers now.

But in any case, he thinks he can avoid blame, either by persuading us (or at least the Republican voter base) that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, shit happens, or by leveraging the deaths to stir up outrage. It's certainly worked for Republican presidents in the past.

The Republican voter base will be enthusiastically on Trump's side if there's a terror attack here. I don't think he should assume that the rest of America will feel the same. Most Americans despise the war, according to nearly all polling on the subject.

Many politicians make cynical calculations about life-and-death issues, but I think Trump cares less than any other president we've had about the lives lost as the result of his actions. He's gambling that civilian deaths won't lower his poll numbers. That's pretty much all he cares about.

STOP CEDING "CULTURALLY NORMAL" TO THE PARTY OF NAZIS

The Wall Street Journal has just published the latest in a series of nearly identical mainstream-media puff pieces about Rahm Emanuel. These stories always focus on Emanuel's scolding remarks aimed at fellow Democrats, which are portrayed as exactly what the party needs:

Rahm Emanuel is delivering the Democratic Party a dose of tough medicine—in his usual blunt style—as the party enters a critical midterm primary season.

Asked at a recent fundraiser in this affluent Detroit suburb how Democrats might be able to win back the working-class voters who have defected to President Trump, Emanuel faulted his party in 2024 for being too focused on things such as transgender rights and not enough on pocketbook issues.
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“We weren’t very good in this last election at the kitchen table. We weren’t very good in the family room,” said the former congressman, mayor and U.S. ambassador to Japan. “The only room we occupied in the house was the bathroom—and it’s the smallest room in the house.”

Democrats weren't talking about transgender issues on the campaign trail in 2024, of course, and Emanuel knows this. Remarks from Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign were used against her in 2024, though it's doubtful that they were the reason she lost. Republicans tried playing the trans card in the 2025 Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races and had their heads handed to them.

The Journal story quotes other scoldy Democrats:

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear implores Democrats to talk more like “normal human beings” and avoid “advocacy speak” ...

Even California Gov. Gavin Newsom ... recently said Democrats need to be “culturally normal.”

If I were an undeclared Democratic candidate for president like these guys, you know who I'd be denouncing as not culturally normal? Republicans -- specifically, racist, misogynist, Nazi-loving anti-Semite Republicans like these folks:

The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party started a group chat primarily for conservative students last fall — and within three weeks it was filled with racist slurs, someone wrote dozens of ways of violently killing Black people and the chat was renamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven.”

In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as “whores,” used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics....

The conversations included some of the campus’ top conservative leaders: the county GOP secretary, FIU’s Turning Point USA chapter president and the former College Republicans recruitment chair....

... William Bejerano — who tried to start a pro-life group at Miami Dade College — was the primary user of the n-word in the group. At one point, he posted a block of text calling for dozens of acts of extreme violence against Black people, who he referred to using the n-word, including crucifying, beheading and dissecting people....

The group chat members — which included some women — also frequently discussed sex, sometimes describing women as “whores” and at one point using the k-word, a slur for Jewish people, to describe women they avoid.

[Dariel] Gonzalez [the College Republicans’ recruitment chairman at the time] said, “You can f–k all the [k-word] you want. Just don’t marry them and procreate.” Ian Valdes, the Turning Point USA chapter president, responded, “I would def not marry a Jew.”

If you think you've read this story before, you might be thinking of a story about a different racist, sexist young Republican chat group, from last fall:

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

I know this is a wild, crazy, out-of-the-box idea, but maybe, instead of attacking his own party every time he talks to a journalist or makes a public appearance, Rahm Emanuel could try attacking the opposition party -- y'know, as a change of pace. Maybe he and Beshear and Newsom and Josh Shapiro and James Carville could portray Republicans as extremist freaks and weirdos once in a while. It's a crazy idea, but it might work!

The Florida bigots in this chat -- and, apparently, a lot of other young Republicans in the state -- appear to have a favorite politician: a young insurgent candidate who's challenging Byron Donalds, a Black congressman who's been endorsed by President Trump, in the Florida gubernatorial primary.

... James Fishback — a relative political unknown who has used racist and white nationalist rhetoric throughout his campaign — is highlighting the generational divide around extremism on the right in Florida.

Rhetoric such as ...?

“His undisguised racist comments describing a Black candidate’s vision as ‘Section 8 ghetto’ and referring to Byron Donalds as ‘By’rone’ and a ‘slave’ are deliberate, offensive, and beneath this state,” Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly said....

Also:

He says that the only “systemic racism” that exists in the United States is against white Christian men. He’s also proposed burning abortion clinics.

And:

At a recent campus campaign stop, Florida GOP gubernatorial candidate James Fishback dropped some unusual verbiage while inveighing against junk food in school cafeterias.

“I’m not saying that the test scores are the result of the Pop-Tarts,” Fishback told a crowd at the University of Central Florida, in remarks boosting locally grown produce over convenience foods. “But if you wanted kids to fail, if you wanted to set our kids up for failure, you would feed them the absolute goyslop in our cafeterias.”

Goyslop?!

As an Instagram user explains:

In this context, it reflects an antisemitic concept suggesting that “goyim” (non‑Jewish people) are fed this “slop” by supposed Jewish elites to keep them unhealthy.

More:

The term is making the rounds among the largest white nationalist and antisemitic influencers. Clavicular, a popular manosphere influencer recently seen dancing and singing to Ye’s “Heil Hitler” at a Miami nightclub, appeared on a recent livestream with white nationalist Nick Fuentes to lament how “the entire grocery store is filled with goyslop.”

This isn't doing much for Fishback's campaign -- except among young Republican voters:

According to a February poll from the University of North Florida, Florida Representative Byron Donalds leads in the general electorate at 31%, compared to Fishback’s 6%. Half of voters are still undecided.

But Donalds’ 5 to 1 lead completely flips among young voters, where Fishback leads 4 to 1. He is backed by 32% of 18-to-34-year-olds, while just 8% support Donalds.

Instead of incessantly accusing Democrats of being out of step with normal, decent people, why don't more Democrats talk about the edgelord bigotry of an increasing number of Republicans? Why not portray them as the party of abnormal freaks?

The Wall Street Journal might not breathlessly transcribe every word these Democrats say, but they'd at least be attacking their political opponents, which you'd think would be Politics 101.

THE NUTJOB WHO SUPPRESSED SOME DEMOCRATIC VOTES IN TEXAS, INCOMPETENTLY

There was chaos in Dallas County, Texas, in yesterday's primary, and it's understandable that many people think it was part of a targeted long-term effort to prevent Democratic victories in November. But I don't think that's what happened.

We know what happened. First,

Confusion over new voting rules in Texas’s Dallas and Williamson counties caused Democratic voters to be turned away from polling sites Tuesday as the state’s primary election unfolded.

The confusion prompted a judge in Dallas to extend poll hours for the Democratic primary — but that judge’s order was quickly put on hold by the Texas Supreme Court following a request from Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

And we know why it happened:

According to Texas procedure, if a county’s primary is not held jointly — meaning, if Republicans and Democrats do not agree to hold the election together — then the county’s residents are required to vote in their assigned precincts. Last year, Republicans in Dallas County said they would not hold their primary jointly with Democrats. But many voters, accustomed to joint primaries, assumed they could vote at alternate voting sites and were turned away.

The standard procedure is that voters can vote in any precinct in their county. They could do this during early voting -- but not yesterday in those two counties.

Dallas County is a stronghold for Jasmine Crockett, who was trailing last night and said she wouldn't accept the results until provisional ballots cast in those counties were counted. She has since conceded the race because there don't appear to be enough outstanding ballots for her to make up James Talarico's statewide lead, which currently exceeds 150,000 votes.

One alarmed Substacker writes:

This Was the Point

I need you to think about why you’d do this in a Democratic primary.

You don’t suppress votes in a primary to win the primary. Republicans aren’t on the Democratic ballot....

But here’s what you do gain: you weaken whoever comes out of it. You damage the eventual nominee. You shape the field. You get a test run for your playbook.

But why would Republicans want to "shape the field" this way? The conventional wisdom is that Talarico -- white, religious, and genial -- is a stronger general election candidate than Crockett, a Black woman who's an outspoken progressive. Why would Republicans want to suppress her votes if they think he's a stronger candidate?

There's another explanation for what happened that makes more sense:

In Dallas County, propelled by election conspiracy theories about the security of ballot-counting machines, Republicans made the change in hope of hand-counting their ballots — a process that election experts want can lead to errors and delayed results. Dallas Republicans ultimately abandoned their plans to count ballots by hand because of the high costs. But the plan for people to vote at the precinct level went forward.

Maybe Republicans wanted to sow chaos, particularly among Black voters, in the hope that those voters would resent Talarico and refuse to rally around him in the general election. But that seems like a risky move when some polling suggested that Crockett might win the primary, and when the GOP assumed that she'd be easier to beat. Also, it was clear that this was done by Texas Republicans, not Talarico. (In his victory speech last night, Talarico called for all the votes to be counted and described what took place as "voter suppression.")

The person responsible for the decision to separate the primaries in Dallas County was the chair of the county Republican Party, Allen West. I used to write about him frequently. He's been a nutjob culture warrior longer than Donald Trump.

West had a checkered military career:

West served in the U.S. Army but was “stripped of his command” in 2003 after he pleaded “guilty to assaulting an Iraqi detainee during interrogation,” according to The Boston Globe. Gen. James Mattis, President Donald Trump’s former secretary of defense, reportedly criticized West as a “commander who has lost his moral balance or has watched too many Hollywood movies.”

West became a right-wing commentator, then won a House seat in Florida in 2010, as part of the Tea Party backlash to Barack Obama's presidency. He served one term. He became much better known for his rhetoric:

West ... became a YouTube sensation by criticizing “this tyrannical government” and crying out: “if you’re here to stand up to get your musket, to fix your bayonet, and to charge into the ranks, you are my brother and sister in this fight.” He said that the country was engaging in “class warfare” between “a producing class and an entitlement class,” which is composed of Obama supporters....

West encouraged his supporters to use violence in suppressing the votes of opponents, saying, “You've got to make the fellow scared to come out of his house.”

He maintains that it is “unfortunate” that gays and lesbians are serving in the military, and compares homosexuality to adultery....

On immigration, he claims that ... Muslim terrorists are coming through the border with Mexico. West’s first decision as Representative-elect was to choose as his chief of staff right-wing radio talk show host Joyce Kaufman, who called for illegal immigrants to be “hung on the central square.”

KIaufman also said:

I am convinced that the most important thing the Founding Fathers did to ensure me my First Amendment rights was they gave me a Second Amendment.

And if ballots don't work, bullets will.

She stepped aside before West was sworn in.

More:

West ... called President Barack Obama an “Islamist” and “disgusting racist"; said the “Democrat Party is an anti-Semitic party”; and falsely accused dozens of congressional Democrats of being “members of the Communist Party.” He claimed that Islam “is not a religion” and “we need to have individuals stand up and say that,” and his Facebook page posted (and later removed) an image that claimed [President Donald] Trump had chosen [General James] Mattis as his defense secretary to “exterminate Muslims.” He also questioned the “loyalties” of Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), a Purple Heart recipient, and said feminists are “neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness.”

And there was this in 2013:

In a June 5 fundraising email, West claimed that Attorney General Holder was a “bigger threat to our Republic” than terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, a former deputy of Osama bin Laden, who took control of al Qaeda after bin Laden's death. West also used a quote from the ancient philosopher Cicero to imply that Holder was guilty of treason.

The June 7 edition of Fox & Friends gave West a platform to expand on his smear. West answered co-host Brian Kilmeade's question about why he claimed Holder was as dangerous as al-Zawahiri by pointing to Cicero's claim that a nation “cannot survive treason from within” and "[a] murderer is less to fear, the traitor is the plague." West charged Holder with having “the arrogance of officialdom,” and claimed that “When the rule makers are not adhering to the rule of law, then the very foundations of this great nation will start to crumble.”

So, yeah, that paranoid nutjob made the decision in Dallas County. It might have been a carefully designed ratfuck, but to me it just seems like chaos born of paranoia.

THE IRAN WAR IS A MONEY SUCK AND DEMOCRATS SHOULD NEVER STOP TALKING ABOUT THAT

Greg Sargent has a strong opinion about what Democrats should be doing right now:

While some Democrats have gotten this right, more of them need to say forthrightly that this war is patently illegal and that Trump’s chief stated rationale for it—that Iran posed “imminent threats” to the United States—is utter nonsense.

“Democrats need to strongly make the point that there was no imminent threat and that this war is a violation of the Constitution—and illegal,” Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told me. “Absent congressional approval, this is an illegal war.”

I think it's worth saying that the war is illegal, but I don't think it changes very many minds. It's a message that reinforces the anger of educated liberals who understand how our government works and what a president can or can't lawfully do, but the vast majority of Americans don't understand the legal constraints on a president and don't care. When asked, they'll tell pollsters that, yes, Congress should be consulted on war, but a refusal to consult Congress won't become a top issue for most of them.

I think this is a stronger Democratic argument:

That's from iran-cost-ticker.com. I don't know who's behind it. I don't know if it's accurate. But it's an effort to provide a running total of the cost of the war, in the manner of the National Debt Clock. The dollar cost escalates rapidly.

Paul Krugman has more data:

On Sunday, according to the U.S. military, Kuwaiti forces shot down three U.S. F-15s in a “friendly fire” incident.

... A new F-15 costs U.S. taxpayers $97 million. So that’s almost $300 million lost in seconds. And we should think about what could have been done with that money other than launch a war without a clear plan or an exit strategy....

One of the reasons to be disturbed by this war is the extraordinary amount of money the U.S. government is either laying out now or will have to lay out in the future to replace the spent munitions....

Linda Bilmes of Harvard’s Kennedy School estimates that Trump’s largely unsuccessful bombing campaign last year against the Iran-backed Islamist Houthis in Yemen — a far softer target than Iran itself — cost between $2.76 billion and $4.95 billion. Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump’s one-day strike against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities, cost between $2.04 billion and $2.26 billion....

The current war is being waged not only with massive bombing but also with the use of large numbers of expensive interceptors to defend U.S. bases and U.S. allies against Iranian drones and missiles. So in just a few days we have surely incurred billions of dollars in cost. And if this war continues for an extended period, the costs could easily rise to the twenty to thirty billion dollar range.

... if we compare the cost of this war to what we spend to help needy Americans, then it’s clear that this war is extremely expensive compared with other ways we could have spent the funds. Put it this way: SNAP — the Supplemental Nutritional Food Assistance Program, formerly food stamps — spends an average of about $2,400 a year per recipient. CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program administered under Medicaid, provides comprehensive health care for about $3,000 per child.

So just replacing those three jets shot down over Kuwait — each of them, remember, with a price tag of $97 million — will cost about as much as providing 125,000 Americans with crucial food aid or providing healthcare to 100,000 American children. And the war might very well end up costing 100 times as much as the price of those jets.

I'm not sure Democrats should get into the weeds the way Krugman does. Reciting a string of numbers and per-capita costs isn't compelling rhetoric. If I were a Democratic officeholder or candidate, I'd just start with the topline number -- trhe cost of the war so far -- and say, "What are we getting for this? How does this help you in your day-to-day lives? What else could be done with this tax money taken from your pocket?"

Democrats have a rare opportunity. Ordinarily, it's easy to score political points by complaining about the high cost of whatever the government does, except in matters of defense and policing. As a rule, normies don't even bother comparing those huge costs to the often much lower costs of programs that serve other human needs, because they accept the premise that we need to spend whatever it takes to keep ourselves safe.

But this is an exception to the rule. It's a war that, unlike most U.S. wars, is unpopular at the outset. Apart from Republicans, no one wants this war. No one knows why it's being fought. Most Americans think it will make America less safe.

So Democrats should bring up the cost of this pointless war at every possible opportunity. Bring up the total cost. Bring up the daily cost. Ask how all that expense is making America safer. Ask how much we're all going to shell out before it's all over, if that day ever comes.

WHY LOOK AT REALITY WHEN YOU HAVE VIBES? (updated)

The New York Times has posted an unusually bad story under the headline "6 Voters React to Attacks on Iran Ahead of the Texas Primaries." Here's the subhead:

President Trump has said the attacks were necessary for the security of the United States and to free the Iranian people from oppression. Do voters agree?

But we don't learn whether voters agree with Trump, we learn whether six Texas voters agree with him -- and not one of them reports ever having voted for a Democrat.

I can understand focusing on Texas -- tomorrow is the state's primary election day, with early voting underway, and it's not clear who'll win Senate primaries in both major parties. But this is not a representative sample of Texas voters:

* "Nate McHale, 24, has voted for President Trump twice, a product of his conservative leanings. He supports the decision to strike Iran."

* "Craig Wallace is not a fan of President Trump’s style, but he supports his policies on the economy and immigration and has voted consistently for him since 2016. He supports the strikes in Iran as well...."

* "Tex Peterson has voted for President Trump in every presidential election. He supports the president’s policies generally, he said, and that goes for the strikes on Iran, too."

* "Matt Lutz is a libertarian and skeptical about foreign conflict. He voted for Gary Johnson, not President Trump, in 2016. But he said he supported the president’s approach to Iran, on balance...."

* "Angela Gschwend, a stalwart Trump supporter, ... said her Persian friends cried tears of joy upon learning of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran over the weekend....

"'I’m a Christian. I believe in peace and love,' Ms. Gschwend said. 'But sometimes you have to fight when you’re attacked. They want to kill because they hate, and that’s the opposite of my worldview.'"

There's one Iran-attack skeptic, and even he was a Trump voter:

* "Gael Ramirez, a student who describes himself as an independent, voted for President Trump for the first time in the 2024 election....

"He is skeptical that the nation will be helped by the strikes on Iran."

Six people, no Clinton, Biden, or Harris voters, five people on board with Trump's attacks.

You'll say that the Times loves Republicans and therefore we shouldn't be surprised at this. But the paper's editorial board called the attack on Iran "reckless," and the paper has published deeply skeptical columns by Nicholas Kristof, David French, Ben Rhodes, and others.

Previous roundups of ordinary voters' opinions haven't been quite so biased. A piece titled "11 Voters on Trump’s First Year," published on December 29, included four people identified as Harris voters and five identified as Trump voters. An October story called "7 Voters Weigh In on Trump’s New Ballroom" had a similar mix.

I think the Texas panel is skewed Republican because the Times has fallen for Texas vibes. It's true that Republicans win every statewide race there, and have throughout this century. But it's not a blood-red state like West Virginia or Idaho, where Democrats struggle to reach 30% of the vote.

Donald Trump won Texas comfortably in 2024, by a 56%-42% margin. But Trump's Texas victory margin in 2020 was 52%-46%. Biden won 5,259,126 votes in Texas in 2020; Harris won 4,835,250 in 2024. The Times couldn't find any of these people, or any of the 3,877,868 Texans who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016?

Just as the myth of Trump's near-universal appeal in the heartland survives his abysmal polling, the myth of Texas as a state made up exclusively of pickup-driving Republican cowboys survives its actual recent voting history. So the Times prints the vibes.

*****

UPDATE: The headline has been changed to "6 Conservative Voters React to Attacks on Iran Ahead of the Texas Primaries." But you can see the original headline here.

TRUMP SHOULD HAVE GONE TO CONGRESS, FOR ALL THE GOOD THAT EVER DOES

We're at war with Iran, and all the right-thinking people in our political culture are saying the same thing: The president should have gone to Congress. Here's Hakeem Jeffries:

Overnight, Donald Trump announced the start of massive and ongoing military operations against Iran. The framers of the United States Constitution gave Congress the sole power to declare war as the branch of government closest to the American people.

Iran is a bad actor and must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism and the threat it poses to our allies like Israel and Jordan in the region. However, absent exigent circumstances, the Trump administration must seek authorization for the preemptive use of military force that constitutes an act of war.

That constitutional requirement has been degraded for decades. The Constitution says flatly, "The Congress shall have Power ... To declare War," but we haven't had a formal congressional declaration of war since World War II. What we've had are congressional authorizations of military force, or military actions authorized by the UN Security Council and funded by Congress.

I think presidents should go to Congress before taking America to war, though the process doesn't accomplish much. David French writes:

... the constitutional structure, when followed, ... helps provide accountability. To make the case to Congress, a president doesn’t just outline the reasons for war; he also outlines the objectives of the conflict. This provides an opportunity to investigate the weaknesses of the case for the conflict, along with the possibility of success and the risks of failure.

But that always leads to the same outcome: the president gets to do what he wants. It's valuable because at least there's a public discussion of what we all know the president is going to do anyway. It's also valuable because we retain the notion that we have multiple branches of government and we aren't a dictatorship.

In effect, our Republican Congress actually has authorized this and other Trump acts of military adventurism, just as it has authorized the rest of his dictatorial moves -- it has authorized them by using silence as assent. The unstated but obvious message this Congress has sent since January of last year has been: Unless we say otherwise, you can do whatever the hell you want, Mr. President. You're our Daddy. Daddy can do as he pleases.

Without announcing it, campaigning on it, or consulting with the rest of us, congressional Republicans have replaced our system of government with Christian-right male "headship." Republicans already believed that Democrats have no legitimate place in government, and they've since decided that Republicanism is embodied in one man, so he gets to decide more or less everything, as they believe the man should in the family. It's a system that works out nicely for Republicans because the base loves Trump and agrees that he should be allowed to do whatever he pleases, and most Republican candidates don't need anything but a strong turnout from the base to win elections.

The public, when asked by pollsters, says Congress should be involved in decisions to go to war, but Americans have such a vague understanding of how our government is supposed to work that there isn't across-the-board outrage at Trump's unilateralism. So I imagine all future Republican presidents will operate this way if they have Republican congressional majorities.

WAR WITH IRAN: FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BAD BETTER

As Dave Weigel reminds us, this was the Donald Trump campaign's messaging on the subject of peace and war in 2024:

You may think the Trump base is against war with Iran -- polling earlier this year said that only a minority of Republicans wanted this war. In a Quinnipiac poll in January, 35% of Republicans wanted to go to war with Iran, while 53% opposed war. A University of Maryland poll early this month also said that war with Iran had 35% GOP support (but opposition was only 25%).

As Trump has made it clear that being a good Republican means being in favor of whatever cockamamie war he wants to fight, GOP support for war with Iran has risen -- it's 58% in YouGov polling earlier this week.

Republican support for this will only increase now that it's underway. But overall support in that YouGov poll was only 27% (with opposition at 49%).

Because gerrymandering, the rural skew of the Senate, and a 2024 vote against the status quo have given Republicans more power than their numbers in the population would justify, once again we're doing something that's supported by the pro-Trump minority of the country and only the pro-Trump minority. (This is why Republicans in Congress will stand aside, as usual, and let Trump usurp their powers.)

Pro-war propagandists have their memes lined up. On X, the usually pro-Trump Andrew Tate declared opposition to the war:

NOBODY WANTS THIS WAR.

— Andrew Tate (@Cobratate) February 28, 2026

In his replies, this meme shows up more than once:

pic.twitter.com/ABPbbKccK0

— ngn (@Neginkzn) February 28, 2026

Tate is told that Iranians are exultant:

Iranians sure seem happy about this. pic.twitter.com/mbS97xYOnt

— wanzie (@moistmeatlicker) February 28, 2026

And that this is a noble cause:

Yes we do 🙏🏽🇮🇷🇮🇱🇺🇸❤️🥳 pic.twitter.com/yLaY68MqLR

— DrNushin (@DrNushin77) February 28, 2026

And here come the Trump-is-a-badass memes:

X's algorithm places these comments near the top, right under British racist Tommy Robinson's take:

I want it . Fuck that Islamic regime G

— Tommy Robinson 🇬🇧 (@TRobinsonNewEra) February 28, 2026

You need to scroll down to see anti-war responses to Tate, and many of them are, unsurprisingly, anti-Semitic:

I know a few who might pic.twitter.com/cJXIl3Re87

— RightTakeHQ (@RightTakeHQ) February 28, 2026

If any minds are being changed right now, or vague leanings reinforced, it's probably happening on social media. Musk's site will sell you right-wing propaganda one way or another. But it seems to be telling us that pro-Trump = pro-war, and 2024's MAGA principles have been replaced by the exact opposite, which are the new MAGA principles.

None of this should be surprising. Here's a Trump campaign ad that was released in 2023:

New Trump 2024 ad pic.twitter.com/7eWlDMhZa1

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) April 27, 2023

When it appeared, I wrote:

Yes, it attacks "the global elitists" who "send your kids to war." But it also stirs up anger at perceived foreign enemies. Eight seconds in, we see Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, China's Xi Jinping, a Mao poster, and people we're expected to read as jihadists. The narrator says:

Enemies and tyrants on opposite sides of the globe laugh at us.

At 1:16, we see a clip of Trump from his presidency; he's walking with a military escort. At 1:24, we see him saluting against a blue sky while military helicopters hover in formation overhead. A caption reads: DON'T MESS WITH US.

This is not Ron Paul-style isolationism. Trump's ad-makers know that the base doesn't want that.

I added:

... GOP voters were extremely pro-adventurism twenty years ago and are ready to embrace adventurism again, if it's sold by a president they like and if the enemy is someone they hate (or are carefully trained to hate).

I don't know if a reelected Trump would really get us into a war -- but if he does, his "isolationist" fan base will be 100% behind him. Maybe Tucker Carlson will be critical of the war on his podcast. It won't matter. Right-wing voters hate non-white foreigners too much to completely abandon militarism, just the way they did when the Bushes fought wars they unquestioningly supported. They want to believe Trump can give them "peace through strength" -- an America so intimidating that no one challenges us. But if that fails and there's war, they'll be there for it.

And here we are.

*****

And no, I don't believe this is meant as a distraction from Epstein.

This is not a distraction. Trump wants to be the most consequential person who ever lived, and he thinks he's within reach of that status.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) February 28, 2026 at 7:24 AM

This is the foreign policy equivalent of the ballroom or the arch. So what if it destabilizes the world and gets a lot of innocent people killed? It makes Trump feel special.

WE'LL NOW HAVE ANOTHER MEDIA OUTLET THAT'S STATE-RUN -- AND RUN BADLY

I keep thinking about a social media post that's making the rounds now:

The richest man owns X. The second and third richest men control Google. The fourth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The fifth richest man owns The Washington Post. And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros. See the problem here?

[image or embed]

— Robert Reich (@rbreich.bsky.social) February 26, 2026 at 6:40 PM

Of course it's bad that the mega-rich have this kind of control over media platforms. But I see something else going on. X is a mess -- a sinkhole of Nazism and AI-generated porn. Google, which once seemed like a technological miracle, now forces users to swim through a cesspool of AI slop and ad-generated misdirection before it reluctantly offers up useful search results. Facebook, which used to be the world's town square, is now strictly for grandparents and slop producers. The Washington Post's owner has destroyed the credibility of its opinion section and has now eviscerated its news side. And Paramount is a struggling second-tier studio.

So while it's obviously bad news that Paramount Skydance -- bankrolled by tech multi-billionaire Larry Ellison and run by his son David, both of whom are Donald Trump allies -- has won the bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery, I wonder whether it will lead to the Orbanesque nightmare for civil society that the Ellisons and Trump clearly want.

The deal will give David Ellison control of CNN, and Bari Weiss says he's promised to hand over to her. That's bad. Or is it? A couple of months ago, Ellison handed CBS News to Weiss with the understanding that she would fascify it, but she's not doing a very good job. She's earned negative headlines for holding up stories critical of the Trump administration -- stories that eventually aired. She drove Anderson Cooper to quit 60 Minutes -- and hasn't replaced him with a famous name from right-wing media. Her genius programming moves include a poorly received town hall with Charlie Kirk's much-mocked widow and the elevation of the lightweight Tony Dokoupil to the job of CBS Evening News anchor, where he's mired in third place in the ratings, well behind ABC and NBC. Meanwhile, CBS continues to run some decent stories, including stories that don't make Trump and Republicans look good.

I would be very worried if David Ellison were about to hand CNN over to an ideologue who was also a seasoned television pro, the way Rupert Murdoch brought in Roger Ailes to run Fox News thirty years ago. But he's about to hand it to Bari Weiss, who's skilled at buttering up rich people in order to line her own pockets, but not much else.

Obviously, the Trump regime is running a play from the Viktor Orban playbook. But if Bari Weiss is by far the most important figure in this pro-regime media consolidation, it won't go very well.

THEY THINK THE PEOPLE THEY HATE ARE EVIL. MAKING THEM CRIMINALS CONFIRMS THEIR BELIEF.

SB 244, a bill that recently became law in Kansas when the Republican-dominated legislature overturned Democratic governor Laura Kelly's veto, prohibits trans people's use of bathrooms conforming to their gender, with a cruel mechanism of enforcement. Erin Reed tells us:

... the law bans transgender people from using bathrooms matching their gender identity in public buildings and creates a bathroom bounty hunter system allowing citizens to sue transgender people they encounter in restrooms for at least $1,000 in damages, including potentially in private restrooms.

But it also makes transgender Kansans' driver's licenses invalid -- immediately:

... transgender people across Kansas are reporting receiving letters from the Kansas Division of Vehicles stating that they must surrender their driver's licenses and that their current credentials will be considered invalid upon the law's publication in the Kansas Register on Thursday. Should any transgender person be caught driving without a valid license, they could face a class B misdemeanor carrying up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine....

The letter ... warns that upon the law's publication in the Kansas Register on Thursday, February 26, current credentials for affected individuals "will no longer be valid." The Legislature, the letter notes, "did not include a grace period for updating credentials," and anyone operating a vehicle without a valid credential "may be subject to additional penalties." Those whose gender marker does not match their sex assigned at birth are directed to surrender their current credential to the Division of Vehicles for reissuance.

This law could have had a grace period -- "The bill takes effect immediately upon publication in the Kansas Register rather than the standard July 1 effective date," Reed writes -- but sadistic Kansas Republicans clearly didn't want that. Republicans hate their political and cultural enemies and believe they're evil and demonic. They like to demonstrate that by suddenly criminalizing lawful behavior on the part of the people they don't like, then making it difficult or impossible for these formerly law-abiding people to remain in compliance with the law.

What Republicans in Kansas did to trans drivers reminds me of the way the Trump administration has withdrawn Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants, who are then instantly recast as "illegal aliens" subject to arrest, incarceration, and deportation.

I also see this thinking in the SAVE America Act, which will disenfranchise legal voters who lack the correct documentation, and criminalizes what is now lawful behavior:

It establishes criminal penalties for officials who register an applicant who fails to present documentary proof of citizenship, even if that applicant is in fact a U.S. citizen. The bill also authorizes private individuals to sue election officials under the same circumstances.

And, like the Kansas law, it's meant to be implemented suddenly:

Despite the administrative difficulty of implementation, the SAVE America Act prioritizes expediency over precision. The act becomes effective on the date of enactment, giving states no time to adjust processes.... Further, the SAVE America Act offers no funding to states to assist with implementation costs.

They're trying to turn law-abiding voters and election officials into criminals.

I think we'll see something similar if, as I've long predicted, the Supreme Court sides with the Trump administration and ends birthright citizenship. If the Court rules that birth in the United States doesn't confer citizenship on certain categories of babies (e.g., those born to undocumented immigrants or asylum seekers), the ruling will come while Donald Trump is president and Stephen Miller is effectively prime minister -- do you think anything will prevent them from trying to apply it retroactively? If SCOTUS sides with Trump, I expect the regime to begin the denaturalizations swiftly -- maybe before the midterms. It will be chaos, but it will help Republicans at the polls and redefine a large class of people as less than American simply because of the circumstances of their birth in America. To GOP voters, this will reinforce the belief that these Americans are evil.

TRUMP'S BASE WANTS HATE, NOT POLICY

The media was surprised last night when President Trump delivered a State of the Union address of record length but highlighted very few policy proposals. Katie Rogers of The New York Times wrote:

In his State of the Union address, President Trump didn’t bother to introduce a raft of new policies — unusual in a midterm election year with control of Congress on the line.

NPR's Domenico Montanaro told us:

There was no legislative agenda.

State of the Union addresses can sometimes descend into laundry lists of things the president wants Congress to accomplish.

Not this speech.

There were only about half a dozen specific things Trump asked Congress to do....

Punchbowl News said:

... overall, Trump’s speech was notably devoid of policy heft. Compare this to a State of the Union from Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, and you find a truly stunning difference.

But that's because the speech was aimed exclusively at the Trump/GOP voter base. That base -- the last people in America who still admire and respect Trump -- doesn't want the president and Congress to pass a bunch of laws. The people in the base want Trump to make them feel good, partly through simple-mided flag-waving patriotism, but mostly through endless Democrat-bashing. Like the rest of us, they've stopped expecting the political system to improve our lives. But they're content if Trump hurts the people they want to see hurt, demeans the people they want to see demeaned, and declares that America is strictly Republican.

That's why the same polling outfit that recently told us Trump has a 36% job approval rating and a 63% disapproval rating found that his speech went over well with the audience that watched it, which was disproportionately Republican:

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address drew largely positive marks from a heavily Republican audience, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS....

Nearly two-thirds of speech-watchers said they had at least a somewhat positive reaction to Trump’s speech, with a smaller 38% offering a very positive response....

Good marks from speech-watchers are typical for presidential addresses to Congress, which tend to attract generally friendly audiences that disproportionately align with presidents’ own parties....

The pool of people who watched Trump speak on Tuesday was about 13 percentage points more Republican than the general public.

Trump began the speech with Power of Positive Thinking wishcasting:

Our country is winning again. In fact, we're winning so much that we really don't know what to do about it. People are asking me, please, please, please, Mr. President, we're winning too much. We can't take it anymore. We're not used to winning in our country until you came along, we're just always losing. But now we're winning too much. And I say, no, no, no, you're going to win again. You're going to win big. You're going to win bigger than ever.

This was addressed to Republican voters, the only people who actually find it plausible.

Trump segued to the awards-dinner part of the speech -- the U.S. Olympic men's hockey team, a couple of newly minted Medal of Honor recipients. And then the rest of the speech was Democrat-bashing interleaved with culture-war sob stories, which Trump recounted with lip-licking relish.

really remarkable how trump seems to relish sharing this lurid stories about the terrible pain people have experienced, and he does it exclusively to score some partisan points

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) February 24, 2026 at 10:21 PM

That's what Republican voters think his job is. That's what they think his job should be: inducing "liberal tears" while they and others are encouraged to hate Democrats even more. And that's what they'll expect J.D. Vance's job to be when they nominate him in 2028. (If he wins, he'll give them what they want. He likes hating and he likes stirring up hate. That's why he's leading in the GOP primary polls by nearly 30 points.)

Legislation? Who needs it? Republicans want a president who talks like this:

... these people are crazy. I'm telling them they're crazy.

Amazing. Boy oh boy.

We're lucky we have a country. With people like this - Democrats are destroying our country. But we've stopped it just in the nick of time, didn't we?

They want him to talk like that about Democrats and they want him to brutalize (or at least repress) people they associate with Democrats, particularly immigrants and people who protest on their behalf. They want his stories to make them even angrier at the people they hate, which is why they're not interested in anyone's fact-checks. They want Trump's stories to strain credulity, because their level of hatred requires enemies of superhuman monstrousness. Last night Trump said:

Under Biden and his corrupt partners in Congress and beyond, it reached a breaking point with the Green New Scam, open borders for everyone — they poured in by the millions and millions from prisons, from mental institutions, they were murderers — 11,888 murders — they came into our country, you allowed that to happen.

They don't want to be told that the truth about the 11,888 (or 13,000 or whichever number Trump is using on a given day):

... those statistics are about noncitizens who entered the country under any administration, including Trump’s; were convicted of a crime at some point, usually in the US after their arrival; and are now living in the US while being listed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket” — where some have been listed for years, including while Trump was president [in his first term], because their country of citizenship won’t let the US deport them back there. Second, that ICE “non-detained” list includes people who are still serving jail and prison sentences for their crimes; they are on the list because they are not being held in immigration detention in particular.

They want Trump to tell them that the brutality of the people they hate is unspeakable, just the way they want Kristi Noem to tell them the people they've detained include at least one cannibal:

Kristi Noem lied about an immigrant being a cannibal. Of course it was all made up nonsense. Normal people didn’t believe it, just like we didn’t believe Haitians were eating pets. This is part of dehumanization of immigrants playbook. Fear and hate is the point.

[image or embed]

— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) February 24, 2026 at 11:02 AM

This is what they want government to do. They want the sheer pleasure of hating and they want to believe that the people thay hate are being hurt. Affordability can wait. Anything that's not related to hate is of secondary importance.